The History of Literature in the Caribbean series: A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions: 1 [1] 9781556196010

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A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S SPONSORED BY T H E INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE L I T E R A T U R E ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE C O M P A R É E DES LITTÉRATURES D E L A N G U E S EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES D E L'ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL D E L I T T É R A T U R E COMPARÉE VOLUME I EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY PHENOMENON (ED. ULRICH WEISSTEIN) VOLUME II THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES (ED. ANNA BALAKIAN) VOLUME III LE TOURNANT DU SIÈCLE DES LUMIÈRES 1760-1820 LES GENRES EN VERS DES LUMIÈRES AU ROMANTISME (DIR. GYÖRGY M. VAJDA) VOLUME IV LES AVANT-GARDES LITTÉRAIRES AU XXe SIÈCLE: HISTOIRE (DIR. JEAN WEISGERBER) VOLUME V LES AVANT-GARDES LITTÉRAIRES AU XXe SIÈCLE: THÉORIE (DIR. JEAN WEISGERBER) VOLUME VI EUROPEAN-LANGUAGE WRITING IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA (ED. ALBERT GÉRARD) VOLUME VII L'ÉPOQUE DE LA RENAISSANCE (1400-1600) I. L'AVÈNEMENT DE L'ESPRIT NOUVEAU (1400-1480) (DIR. TIBOR KLANICZAY, EVA KUSHNER, ANDRÉ STEGMANN) VOLUME VIII ROMANTIC IRONY (ED. FREDERICK GARBER) VOLUME IX ROMANTIC DRAMA (ED. GERALD GILLESPIE) VOLUME X A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN (ED. A. JAMES ARNOLD)

A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN VOLUME 1 HISPANIC AND FRANCOPHONE REGIONS Edited by A. JAMES ARNOLD Subeditors JULIO RODRIGUEZ-LUIS J. MICHAEL DASH At-Large Editors JOSEPHINE V. ARNOLD MARIE A. HERTZLER NATALIE M. HOUSTON

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l'Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 1992-95 Honorary Members/Membres d'honneur Henry H.H. Remak, György M. Vajda, Jacques Voisine, Jean Weisgerber President/Président Mario J. Valdés Vice-President/Vice-Président Mihâly Szegedy-Maszák Secretary/Secrétaire Daniel F. Chamberlain Treasurer/Trésorier Djelal Kadir Members/Membres assesseurs A. James Arnold, Anna Balakian, Jean Paul Bier, Francis H. Claudon, Theo L. D'haen, Wlad Godzich, Manfred Gsteiger, Linda Hutcheon, Giselle Matheau-Castellani, Virgil Nemoianu, Józef Pál, Jürgen Wertheimer Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the financial assistance of UNESCO

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A history of literature in the Caribbean / edited by A. James Arnold, with Julio RodriguezLuis, Michael Dash. v. cm. ~ (A Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. Hispanic and francophone regions. 1. Caribbean literature-History and criticism. I. Arnold, A. James (Albert James), 1939II. Rodriguez-Luis, Julio. III. Dash, J. Michael. IV. Series: Comparative history of literatures in European languages ; v. 10. PN849.C3H57 1994 809'.89729-dc20 94-3353 ISBN 90 272 3442 6 (Eur.) / 1-55619-601-6 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © Copyright 1994 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA

GENERAL PREFACE

This is one of a series of volumes in "Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages" (hereafter "Comparative Literary History") sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association. The series is under the supervision of a coordinating editorial committee consisting of sixteen scholars from various countries. The committee appoints the directors of the particular research projects, issues general guidelines to them, monitors the genesis of the manuscript, and gives final approval before publication. The "Comparative Literary History" series was launched by the International Comparative Literature Association in 1967. It is based on two fundamental premises: one, that the writing of literary history confined to specific nations, peoples, or languages must be complemented by the writing of literary history that coordinates related or comparable phenomena from an international point of view; two, that it is almost impossible for individual scholars to write such comprehensive histories and that we must now rely on structured teamwork drawing collaborators from different nations. Within these principles and criteria, the scholars entrusted with each project are given the latitude needed to put together the best possible volume. Writing a comparative literary history by way of international teamwork is a revolutionary procedure in literary historiography. Few scholars can claim ability to cover the entire range of literature relevant to the phenomenon under study. Hence the need for partial syntheses, upon which more and more truly international syntheses will be built as our series progresses. The "Comparative Literary History" series consists of volumes composed in either French or English. Most contributions will be originally written in these two languages, some will be translated into them from other languages. But we emphasize that the decision to write our volumes in English or French does not reflect a hierarchy of values. The literary specificities of every nation or cultural entity, large or small, acclaimed or neglected, will be valued. As a matter of fact, no discipline is as apt to do justice to the literatures of smaller diffusion as Comparative Literature.

The volumes in this series are collaborative projects of many scholars from different countries, cultures and procedures, but volume editors and the Coordinating Committee have worked to produce well defined historiographic systems of explanation that give literary scholarship a broader and more accurate assessment of the cultural past. As the current President of the Coordinating Committee I have been entrusted with the responsibility of continuing and expanding the series of "Comparative Literary History" launched by Professor Jacques Voisine of the University of Paris III, and continued by Professor Henry Remak of Indiana University and brought up to its present level of achievement by Professor Jean Weisgerber of the Free University of Brussels. Literary scholarship is indebted to the project directors for their scholarship, undaunted courage, patience and faith in the international community of scholars. Mario J. Valdés President, Coordinating Committee

Acknowledgments

This project has been made possible by the generous assistance of several institutions and not a few individuals. First among the institutions for consistent support is the University of Virginia, which graciously hosted the Editorial Colloquium from which this three-volume History emerged in October 1986. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies of the University of Virginia has faithfully provided logistical and technical support since that time. Gail H. Moore, Director of the Word Processing Center of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, solved our numerous problems of electronic document conversion and printed the final draft. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Raymond J. Nelson, provided the Editor with an assistant in 1991-92 who made timely completion of this first volume possible. The National Humanities Center offered the Editor a quiet haven and collegial support in 198990 in the form of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Much of the work on this first volume, and the planning for the two subsequent volumes, was completed there. Translation of articles from Spanish was arranged by Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Director of the Center for Research in Translation of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Department of Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras organized its eleventh Encuentro Caribeno around our project. The final outline for the History was worked out there in an editorial meeting in March 1988. The New World Studies Program of the University of Virginia, which sponsored the UNESCO conference on the General History of the Caribbean in March 1991, also made possible a third meeting of the majority of the editorial team at that time. The International Comparative Literature Association provided the Editor with a small grant to cover costs that could not be absorbed by these universities and research centers. The International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM) successfully applied to UNESCO for a grant of five thousand dollars to underwrite the publication of volume one. Many colleagues and employees of our respective institutions have given loyal and unfailing support to efforts that have, at this writing, taken over seven years from the inception of the project to the completion of volume one. May they all be assured of the genuine gratitude of the editorial team. A. James Arnold, Editor November 1992

Contents Editor: A. James Arnold

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region A. James Arnold

xiii

HISPANIC LITERATURE Subeditor: Julio Rodríguez-Luis Introduction Julio Rodriguez-Luis

3

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions The History of Literary Language Humberto López Morales

9

Popular and Literate Cultures Education in the Hispanic Antilles Julio Rodriguez-Luis

27

Listening to the Reader: The Working-Class Cultural Project in Cuba and Puerto Rico Maria Elena Rodriguez Castro

35

Islands and Territories Dominican Literature and Its Criticism: Anatomy of a Troubled Identity Silvio Torres-Saillant

49

Colombian Literature Seymour Menton

65

West Indian Writing in Central America Ian I. Smart North of the Caribbean: An Outline for a History of SpanishCaribbean Literature in the United States Efrain Barradas

75

Afterword Julio Rodriguez-Luis

85

95

A History of Literature in the Caribbean

X

Literary Genres Introduction Julio Rodriguez-Luis

101

The Colonial Period to the Early Nineteenth Century (All Genres) Colonial Voices of the Hispanic Caribbean Raquel Chang-Rodriguez

111

From Romanticism Through Modernismo and Naturalism Fiction Carlos J. Alonso

141

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Dominican Republic in the Nineteenth Century Ivan A. Schulman

155

The Twentieth Century The Novel William L. Siemens

177

The Short Story in the Hispanic Antilles William Luis

191

The Caribbean's Contribution to the Boom Gustavo Pellón

209

Poetry Emilio Bejel

221

The Theater Sandra M. Cypess

239

The Essay Peter Earle

263

Literature and Politics in the Cuban Revolution: The Historical Image Adriana Méndez Rodenas

283

Conclusions Julio Rodriguez-Luis

295

Contents

xi FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE Subeditor: J. Michael Dash

Introduction J. Michael Dash

309

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions The Formation and Evolution of a Literary Discourse: One, Two, or Three Literatures? Ulrich Fleischmann

317

Popular and Literate Cultures Literature and Folklore in the Francophone Caribbean Maximilien Laroche

341

The Caribbean in Metropolitan French Writing Régis Antoine

349

Islands and Territories Haitian Sensibility Léon-François Hoffmann

365

Martinique and Guadeloupe: Time and Space Randolph Hezekiah

379

French Guiana Bridget Jones

389

Conclusions J. Michael Dash

399

Literary Genres Introduction J. Michael Dash

407

The Novel Novels of Social and Political Protest to the 1950s Frederick Ivor Case

415

A New Cry: From the 1960s to the 1980s

427

Marie-Denise Shelton Realism Redefined: The Subjective Vision Beverley Ormerod

435

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Exile and Recent Literature J. Michael Dash

451

Poetry Poetry Before Negritude Jack Corzani

465

Negritude: Then and Now A. James Arnold

479

New Voices Anthea Morrison

485

Theater Marronnage and the Canon: Theater to the Negritude Era Juris Silenieks

507

Toward créolité: Postnegritude Developments Juris Silenieks

517

Essay Before and Beyond Negritude J. Michael Dash

529

Colonialism as Neurosis: Frantz Fanon Were Knight

547

The Essay and / in History A. James Arnold

559

Index to Names

567

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region

The History of Literature in the Caribbean breaks new ground in several respects. It is the first comprehensive attempt to chart the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean rimlands as one literary region. Heretofore all literary histories covering the Caribbean have focused on one linguistic and cultural region in relation to its former colonial metropole. In the case of the Netherlands Antilles no literary history existed even in Dutch prior to our undertaking. Book-length studies of the anglophone region date from Kenneth Ramchand's The West Indian Novel and Its Background, 1970. The francophone region was not examined thoroughly in its historical context until nearly a decade later, when Régis Antoine's Les écrivains français et les Antilles (French writers and the Antilles) and Jack Corzani's six-volume La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises (Literature of the French Antilles and Guiana) were published in the same year, 1978. The Hispanic Antilles have by far the best-known literature in the region, as well as the oldest, which includes an established critical tradition. Even there, however, the continental margin had not previously been studied in relation to its Antillean center, except for one brief monograph by Ian Smart, Central American Writers of West Indian Origin: A New Hispanic Literature, 1984. Indeed, the literature of the Hispanic Antilles has generally been subsumed under the history of LatinAmerican literature, rendering its associations and connections with the other Antillean literatures quite problematical. These are all facts that faced the editorial team of the History when it was organized in 1985 at the behest of the International Comparative Literature Organization. At its triennial meeting in Paris that year the ICLA named an editor and four subeditors whose task would be to constitute the teams of scholars charged with preparing a history of the Caribbean literatures written in Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and the Creoles related to them. The ICLA further authorized the editor to establish a center at the University of Virginia to organize and prepare a three-volume history of literature in the Caribbean, of which this is the first volume. The following year an editorial colloquium was held at the University of Virginia to study the structure and organization of the History. The position papers delivered by the subeditors and discussed at that colloquium were published in the journal Callaloo in 1988 under the general title "Caribbean Literary Historiography." Our 1986 colloquium demonstrated the extent to which the critical and scholarly habits and practices of literary Caribbeanists derive from those same colonial traditions that have divided the literatures of the region to the present. In these circumstances we deemed it impossible to impose a critical perspective or a single theoretical position upon the contributors, since such a decision would have limited our choice of participating scholars in the extreme. The overriding imperative for the editors was to bring together the most distinguished team of literary Caribbeanists possible, regardless of individual preferences as to method. We realized that differences in point of view between individual contributors were unavoidable and resolved to smooth them out in the introductions and conclusions to the various sections of the History, which have been written by the respective subeditors. The synoptic aspect of the History was to be found in its comprehensiveness and its range, rather than in its method.

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A second colloquium held at the Puerto Rican universities of Río Piedras and San Germán in March 1988 around the theme of unity and diversity in Caribbean literatures permitted the subeditors to agree upon the principles of organization of the four parallel histories that constitute our first two volumes. We reached the decision to organize our work so that the first section of each linguistic division would reveal the social, economic, and political conditions in which literatures emerged in the several island and continental areas of the Hispanic and francophone Caribbean (volume one) and the anglophone and Dutch- and Papiamentu-speaking areas (volume two). Several of the papers presented at the Puerto Rican colloquium were edited by Susan Homar and published in the journal of the University of Puerto Rico, La Torre, in 1989. The first section of each linguistic division, devoted to the institution of literature under the heading Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions, was the hardest to organize, precisely because it represented the greatest departure from current practice among literary historians. Assessing the extent to which European languages have been creolized in the Caribbean region and have given rise to a literature that is linguistically and culturally distinct from the metropolitan literature has been a particularly arduous task. Readers of volumes one and two will see that both the degree of distinctiveness and the rate of linguistic change vary widely across the region. Our goal from the earliest stages of preparation has been to create a history of Caribbean literature that could be read across the linguistic divisions both for commonalities and for regional cultural differences. We hoped thereby to present a contrastive view of how literature emerged as a social institution in the several areas of the Caribbean region. For instance, a reader interested in the development of printing with respect to the evolution of literature can expect to find the indispensable information under the same subhead of Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions in each of the four linguistic divisions. To our knowledge there has been no prior attempt to collect and analyze such information on a pan-Caribbean scale. The ways in which folk elements and forms have been used and interpreted in Caribbean literatures written in European languages differ greatly, whether we read these cultural phenomena diachronically (within one linguistic division) or synchronically (across linguistic divisions). One of the first discoveries we made is that within the four major language divisions specific literatures have been neglected. In this respect the literature of the Dominican Republic stands out in the Hispanic division of volume one, as does the literature of French Guiana in the francophone division. Furthermore, the literature of the Dominican Republic has historically been treated in isolation from the literature of Haiti, although Dominican and Haitian cultures, residing side by side on the island of Hispaniola, have been intimately intertwined from the colonial period to the present. We find in this phenomenon more than the usual linguistic legacy of colonialism. The history of racism in the Caribbean region is indissociable from the phenomenon of Dominican literature refusing to recognize that the black Other (Haiti) is also present in its own national identity and in its history. (See Marquez [1989], 302-03 for a significant exception to this neglect.) The literature of French Guiana has suffered from a different error in perspective. Sparsely populated, compared to the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, French Guiana has also been passed over precisely because its literature does not fit the island model. French Guiana belongs to the continental rimland; it has a vast hinterland and major rivers, as well as indigenous Amerindian peoples and long-established communities descended from escaped slaves. French Guiana can thus stand as an example of the necessity to reassess literary cultures with respect to their neighbors who

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region

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speak other languages, rather than to continue viewing them exclusively within the cultural orbit of the islands that share both a major European language and Creole. Our working definition of the Caribbean rimland as potentially distinct from the Antilles has led to stimulating results in the essays on French Guiana, Guyana, Colombia, and Suriname, as well as the one on Central American writing by descendants of anglophone West Indians. We originally planned an essay on coastal Venezuela as well but could find no scholar able to undertake it at this time. Recent studies of the literary representation of the absent indigenous peoples of the Greater and Lesser Antilles have likewise focused on individual language areas. Our concern has been to draw out these elements in such a way that users of the History will be able to read across linguistic divisions to interpret phenomena that may appear identical or very similar in literary form but that represent responses to different historical forces. Surely the best-known aspect of Caribbean literature among the general public has been the "discovery" in the first half of this century of Afro-Caribbean culture and its recuperation by literary movements across the region. We have been attentive to the various political, economic, and ethnic contexts in which these literary movements were born and evolved, so as to present a more historically informed view of their respective significance. Likewise, the articles that treat the political exile, the regional concentration, or the economic diaspora of writers of color have the net effect of producing a richer, more complex, and more thorough literary-historical account of the Afro-diaspora originating in the Antilles. Some unavoidable omissions from the Hispanic division should be noted here. The scholar who was to have written on Central American literature left the U.S., spent a few years in Nicaragua and, when last we had news of her, was in Havana where she no longer answered letters concerning the project. An eminent Cuban colleague, the editor of Anales del Caribe in Havana, agreed in 1989 to write an important essay on literature and the oral tradition in the Hispanic Caribbean, but since 1990 we have lost contact with him. We had exactly the same experience with an editor of Del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba who agreed to write an essay on religion and literature for volume three. We have had no news of him in two years. These sad facts are noted here without acrimony, merely to illustrate the point that a Cold War that is considered to be over elsewhere still obstructs international scholarship concerning the Caribbean region. In selecting genre as the organizing principle of the second section of each of the four linguistic divisions in this History, we were cognizant of the theoretical research that denies the pertinence, or even the possibility, of generic definitions in literature. However, it was incumbent upon us to give an accurate representation of the emergence of Caribbean literatures as they have been seen in history, while laying the groundwork for new research in the future. The reader will find articles that are largely expository side by side with contributions having a decidedly theoretical slant. We have in fact resisted the temptation to minimize the differences that must result from marked divergences in approach and in at least one case we have highlighted them, attempting thereby to accurately represent the tensions that characterize research on central issues of Caribbean literature. To cite only the most widely discussed phenomenon, studies of the negritude movement in the francophone Antilles have been generally overdetermined by ideological considerations. The heroic vision of negritude has led to assessments of the literature of the region that are male-centered, aggressive, and characterized by a revolutionary discourse. R. Hezekiah's presentation of the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the section on Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

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is informed by just such a vision, which Marie-Denise Shelton, writing about the novel as a genre, modulates in her assessment of the emergence of important women writers in the area during the 1960s and 1970s. Claiming that the negritude movement in poetry was posited on a gendered vision of literature and society, the editor, in his articles on "Negritude: Then and Now" and "The Essay and / in History," shows that negritude as a concept has been demystified by the best research carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, with the result that early (and still popular) assessments of its significance must be entirely rethought. In this respect these articles on the francophone novel, poetry, and the essay open up a necessary new dialogue on the historiography of literature. One literature stands out in the genre division because of its much longer history and its abundant production. In order to respect our uniform outline and, at the same time, demonstrate the distinctiveness of Hispanic Caribbean literature, the editors decided early on to include in the Hispanic division a substantial essay on early colonial literature and two on the nineteenth century. The other three literatures of the region, to the extent that they can be called indigenous, are essentially twentieth-century phenomena. Thus, the twentieth-century grouping of essays on Hispanic Caribbean literary genres is meant to be read in parallel with the genre divisions of the other literatures, where there was no need to establish century divisions. The ample treatment given to the major literary genres also permitted us to remedy lacunae in the section on Language, Popular and Literature Cultures, Regions. The reader interested in the specificity of the literatures of Cuba and Puerto Rico will find them treated extensively in the Genres section, although they are absent from the Regions grouping. A few of the essays devoted to literary genres are resolutely positivistic in conception and recognize no theory of literary change other than a succession of dates. The limitations of such work were as clear to the editors as they will be to many of our readers. We have included those essays in the interests of providing information necessary to any future comparative study of literary genres in the region. We expect quibbles over the boundaries of specific genres as well. The essay genre is no doubt most open to question. It was very important in the Caribbean region in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, during a period when a literature of ideas was often more compelling than the nascent novel. In the contribution on the Hispanic Caribbean essay, for instance, the editors decided to resist the temptations of theoretical purity in favor of an approach that, by throwing its net very wide, undoubtedly took in a somewhat disparate catch. The editor is not exempt from this objection, having included in "The Essay and / in History" in the francophone division a recent work that most scholars have treated as a poem, Frankétienne's Ultramarine. Here as elsewhere, our principal aim has been to assure that the wealth of comparative information provided in these volumes will counterbalance the unavoidable theoretical inconsistencies. Every effort has been made to provide editorial consistency throughout the three volumes; but of course, in a work as complex as this History, carried out by scholars who work in quite different traditions and in several languages, slips are bound to occur. To minimize them the decision was taken at an early date to use the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, as the authority in matters of syntax, style, notation, and bibliography. Webster's IIId New International Dictionary (unabridged), 1981, was similarly adopted as the final authority on spelling and on the italicizing of terms. Some terms peculiar to the Caribbean have proved especially slippery as we have moved from one critical tradition to another. The most obvious example is Creole. We have retained the capital letter only for the proper nouns designating a specific language or referring to people born in the region. All

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region

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other uses have been lower-cased and printed in roman except, of course, in quoted passages. Another troublesome example is modernismo, the Hispanic Caribbean movement that has more affinities with Parnassianism than with international modernism. We have italicized modernismo to highlight its regional specificity and to differentiate it from modernism. Like other literary movements it is lower-cased according to the preference of the Chicago Manual of Style. The question of where to put the dates of writers was a vexing one. Good reasons exist for placing them in each essay as they occur; but, given the repetition of many names throughout volumes, and from one volume to another, we felt the repetition would be intolerable. Therefore the decision was taken to group them in an Index to Names, which will be placed in the back matter of each volume. Since the inception of our project, a number of books have appeared which, taken together, point toward a growing recognition of the need to reconceptualize the literary history of the region. Between the years 1990 and 1992 three volumes published in the United States testify to this need. Gustavo Pérez Firmat edited a collection of thirteen essays under the title Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Pérez Firmat [1990]). Caribbean authors are treated in theoretical or literarycritical pairings with others from the Western hemisphere (frequently U.S. writers) in its thirteen chapters. Pérez Firmat's project overlaps with one of the focal points of our Cross-Cultural Studies (volume three). The following year Earl E. Fitz published a monograph entitled Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context that, nowhere in its ten chapters, allows for any Caribbean literary specificity in the Americas. However, in the year of the quincentenary of the Columbian Encounter, an English-language edition of Antonio Benítez Rojo's La isla que se repite (The repeating island), 1989, proposed to fill the glaring lacuna left by Fitz. Benítez Rojo sees Caribbean literature as "an island bridge connecting, in 'another way,' North and South America" (Benîtez Rojo [1992], 2). Antonio Benîtez Rojo has also brought the theoretical vision that informs his monograph to the essay on "Caribbean Culture: A Carnivalesque Approach," which he contributed to our volume of Cross-Cultural Studies. J. Michael Dash's work in progress, The Other America, which will be published by the University Press of Virginia in its New World Studies series at about the same time our first volume appears, will synthesize the best features of these three books. Literary scholarship devoted to the Caribbean has clearly begun to work toward the ideal Roberto Marquez articulated in 1975: "what I would . . . like to see - and believe we desperately need-is nothing less than a comprehensive literary history of perhaps encyclopedic scope. A work that, taking the entire archipelago as its legitimate province, will combine [an] all-embracing theoretical ambition . . ., the dialectical rigor and dynamic appreciation of complex economic and social forces . . ., and an equally keen regard for the peculiar integrity and materiality of esthetic conceptions and cultural production. . . ." (Marquez [1983], 103). Seven years of teamwork have shown the editors of the present History that a perfect marriage of theoretical rigor with a concern for aesthetic integrity can exist only in Utopia. We expect the theoretical rigor to be supplied in a second stage of scholarship that will build upon the foundation we hope our work will provide. A. James Arnold, Editor Charlottes ville-B rus sels, June 1992

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Bibliography Antoine, Régis. 1978. Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers Pères Blancs aux surréalistes noirs. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Arnold, A. James and Josephine, eds. 1988. Caribbean Literary Historiography. Callaloo. 11.1:93-185. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham: Duke University Press. Corzani, Jack. 1978. La littérature des Antilles Guyane françaises. 6 vols. Fort-de-France, Paris: Désormeaux. Fitz, Earl E. 1991. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Homar, Susan, ed. 1989. XI Encuentro caribeno. Special issue of La Torre, n.s. III.11:457-563. Marquez, Roberto. 1983. Towards a Theory of Caribbean Culture and a Holistic View of the Antilles. Process of Unity in Caribbean Society: Ideologies and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. —. 1989. Nationalism, Nation, and Ideology: Trends in the Emergence of a Caribbean Literature. The Modern Caribbean. Ed. by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, ed. 1990. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Durham: Duke University Press. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1970. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. New York: Barnes & Noble. Zavala, Iris. 1992. Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

HISPANIC LITERATURE Subeditor: Julio Rodríguez-Luis

Introduction

JULIO RODRÍGUEZ-LUIS

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

The heart of the Hispanic Caribbean is made up of three island nations, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. They occupy the largest, the second largest, and the smallest island, respectively, of the Greater Antilles. (The name Antilles is reserved for the islands; the term Caribbean refers to the basin filled by the Caribbean sea, and includes the continental coastal zones washed by it.) The Cuban and Puerto Rican nations are coextensive with the islands they occupy; the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with a creolophone nation, Haiti. The cultural similarities between Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo (as the Dominican Republic was called during colonial times and is still very often called) require that we define them as a particular area within the Caribbean. These three islands were inhabited prior to the arrival of the Spaniards by peoples varying in degree of development from the very primitive Guanajatabeyes of the Western tip of Cuba to the much more advanced Taínos of Puerto Rico, who were originally from the Orinoco basin region. Considerable numbers of these peoples were exterminated during the conquest of the islands by the Spaniards. Even more of them perished afterward due to heavy work, punishments, epidemics, and the starvation caused by the abandonment of crops. By the middle of the sixteenth century the indigenous population of the three islands had been practically extinguished and the survivors gradually disappeared as a distinctive ethnic element through their integration within the European and African populations, a process that was completed by the middle of the nineteenth century. The enslavement of the natives was supplemented from the very beginning of the colonization process, and eventually replaced by, that of Africans. African slaves and their descendants attained a majority of the total population in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a period between the end of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. While in Cuba the whites eventually surpassed in number the blacks and mulattos, due to the increase of immigrants from Spain, the mixture of black and white predominates in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. The white population of the three islands is basically of Spanish origin, although since the end of the eighteenth century other European immigrants have settled in them as well. The Africans came principally from the area around the Gulf of Guinea, but also from Angola and the Congo. Because of the relative proximity of the northern Antilles to the Canary Islands, commercial relations linked the archipelagos during the first centuries of the colonial period. The canario contribution to the population, especially to the peasant population of the Hispanic Antilles, is noteworthy. During the nineteenth century (and in Cuba well into the twentieth) the influx of Spaniards to Cuba and Puerto Rico increased. They came from all the regions of the country, but especially from its periphery: Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Vizcaya, Andalucía, Cataluna. The Catalan and

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Mallorcan immigration was quite considerable in the case of Puerto Rico, as was also the immigration from Corsica. After 1815 the Spanish government embarked on a policy of attracting white immigrants in fear that the blacks would revolt if they became the dominant component of the population. The recent example of Haiti stood behind this policy. From 1847 onward sizable numbers of Chinese were brought to Cuba to work in the sugar industry; many remained and more came in the next century. Jamaicans and Haitians also emigrated to Cuba in the twentieth century in order to work in the sugar mills. There was some immigration from the Middle East to the three islands. Many thousands of Jews from central and northern Europe settled there in the period between the two world wars. Because of its larger size and greater prosperity, Cuba was the nation of the Hispanic Antilles that received the most immigrants during the twentieth century. The Spanish language of the white, black, and mulatto populations of the region has responded largely to the same influences and has evolved in very similar ways, showing in the contemporary period a considerable influence from English, especially in Puerto Rico. The culture of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico - like the language - is essentially of Spanish origin with an important African influence. The patterns of cultural evolution over the course of four centuries of intermittent Spanish rule run parallel to the linguistic patterns, although Santo Domingo presents a special case. Among the new cultural influences, the U.S. influence has been dominant in the three island nations since the second half of the nineteenth century. Venezuela, the Caribbean region of Colombia, Mexico, and the Central American nations (except for Guatemala and El Salvador), share the same sea with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. Some of these countries and the Yucatan coast of Mexico share other characteristics with the Hispanic Antilles: large populations of African origin in northern Colombia, Venezuela, and even more so in Panama; similar linguistic traits in Caribbean Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama; and what might be called a distinctive Caribbean culture (a concept whose problematics will be treated in volume three of the History). The Central American Hispanic nations share with the Hispanic Antilles a direct and oppressive dependence upon the United States (or, conversely, a militant opposition to that dependence, as in Cuba and in Nicaragua under the Sandinista government). Notwithstanding all these factors, the differences between the Hispanic nations of the Antilles and those of Central and South America are more striking than their similarities. There are large indigenous populations in most of the countries of the second group and in some of them Amerindians contribute a very important presence to the country's overall cultural personality. The linguistic evolution of Mexico and the Central American nations has been different from that of the Hispanic Antillean islands. The population of African origin is rather small in most Central American countries. And, most importantly perhaps, dependence upon Spain was severed in the case of México, Central, and South America close to a century before this happened in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Because both Venezuela and Colombia endured a long and bloody fight in order to attain their independence, a national consciousness developed there rather early. Caribbean Colombia, although possessing very definite charactistics of its own, is not independent of the nation's continental cultural personality. It must be noted, however, that the Caribbean area of Colombia, Venezuela - especially in the last decades, as Caracas and the coastal zone have outweighed the influence of the Andean and the plains regions in the process of national definition - and some regions of Central America claim a Caribbean identity. Belize and the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua, for instance, are very definitely

Introduction

5

Caribbean, but their cultural identity falls within the anglophone Caribbean orbit. This situation calls for an exploration of the literature produced in these regions with a view to identifying its Caribbeanness (i.e., what it has in common with the literature of linguistic and cultural regions that underwent quite different historical processes). The reader of the History will be able to examine both differences and similarities by reading across the literary history of the four major European languages of the Caribbean that are treated in volumes one and two. In the particular case of the Hispanic Antilles, the major synthesizing factor that contributed to the strong similarities between the three nations' evolution is their long colonial dependence, first upon Spain - until 1898 for Cuba and Puerto Rico - and, since the end of the nineteenth century, upon the United States. Santo Domingo's dependence upon Spain ceased initially in 1821. However, the country was immediately occupied by Haiti, a situation that lasted two decades. Soon after regaining its independence from Haiti, Santo Domingo again became a Spanish colony. Not long after that dependence ended, Santo Domingo fell under the sway of the United States. Puerto Rico is the only Spanish-American country that is still a colony. The Dominican Republic, after having endured one of the bloodiest and longest dictatorships in the history of Latin America, in 1965 experienced an armed intervention by the United States that was prompted by Washington's determination to preserve the Dominican Republic's client state status. Until 1959 Cuba was, for all practical purposes, an American protectorate. The abrupt termination of that situation has greatly harmed the country's development because of the former master's permanent hostility toward Cuba and because of the U.S. blockade of trade with the island. Thus, in an entirely negative way, Cuba continues to be dependent, to some extent, on the United States. The prolongation of their colonial or semicolonial status probably provides the strongest link betwen the Hispanic and the non-Hispanic Antilles. It points to these nations' common heritage as plantation colonies and suggests that that past, together with the African presence in them, continues to unite them in the present. Whereas the non-Hispanic islands seem to still depend in several ways upon their former or continuing metropolises, in fact they also (or mainly) depend upon the United States: witness the recent invasion of Granada. The area that we call the Caribbean has been identified by the United States as its mare nostrum since at least the end of the nineteenth century. That the U.S. is determined to maintain it as such was demonstrated most recently by its military intervention in Panama. The history of colonial dependence is essential to understanding present-day literary production in the Hispanic Antilles because the literature of the region is deeply marked by its writers' reaction, manifest or implicit, to that humiliating situation and their nations' concomitant underdevelopment. They reject both in various forms ranging from angry protest to the characteristically HispanicCaribbean form of mockery called choteo. In other words, the colonial or semicolonial status of the Hispanic Antilles permeates not only the themes of its literature in explicit ways but is the main force shaping its voice, the tone of that voice, its way of projecting itself, and the aims it proposes for itself. The critic who does not search for the mark of the political in the literatures of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico is more likely to end up with an impoverished interpretation than would be the case of other Latin-American literatures. Furthermore, the risk of misinterpretation is as great as the risk of impoverishment. It could be argued that the fact that Cuba severed its political dependence upon the United States has also freed its literature from expressing that depen-

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dence. This dependence, however, surely continues to manifest itself in the work of many of the older Cuban writers, including those who left soon after the revolution, whereas, on the other hand, Cuba's cultural dependence on the United States is far from over. Finally, the country's thirty-year dependence on the Soviet Union may yet make itself felt in its literature. Not all the literary texts produced in the three Hispanic Antillean nations are politically oriented or even politically aware and many, in fact, eschew all overt political connotations. This is not an argument in favor of reading the literature of the Hispanic Antilles exclusively to search out its political context. The methodological approach we would propose here seeks rather to develop an awareness of historical conditions that could facilitate understanding the ideological patterns that shape the production of literature. If literary history is to be the discourse that organizes literary production for understanding, disseminating, and teaching it, then literary history cannot limit itself to narrating the canon (i.e., to describing in chronological order those works that traditional aesthetic criteria have selected and consecrated as a particular country's literary thesaurus). On the contrary, literary history has to be permanently aware of the interaction between the canon and the society that has contributed directly to elevating it to its present position. When examined closely and in relation to the historical process, the social fabric of a particular country may, for instance, deny the dominant position of certain texts by pointing to currents where they do not fit, and to other, "rebellious" texts. To be useful beyond the ordering of data, literary history should then aim at incorporating into its own discourse the full experience of a people that is reproduced in various explicit and implicit ways in literature. In order to accomplish this, literary history must point constantly to the link between historical and literary processes. Literary history has to be based on general historical criteria if it is to be able not only to assess the actual importance of literary movements, of individual writers and their texts, but also to recover the experience of a people as it is expressed in literature. A literary history oriented toward this goal becomes a social history of literature: it would look into literature, beyond and beneath the specifically literary values that its first duty is to analyze, for the reproduction in the literary text of the political and socioeconomic processes that affect literature. This process provides, in fact, a dialectical perspective on the study of literature inasmuch as it assumes a dialogue between the investigation of the evolution of the social fabric and that of the development of literature considered as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

The History of Literary Language

HUMBERTO LÓPEZ MORALES

University of Puerto Rico

We witness nowadays a rejection by current theoreticians - explicitly or implicitly - of the concept of deviation from the linguistic norm used to characterize literary language. The weight of this legacy from the old rhetoric is, however, such that even contemporary approaches to the study of literature that cannot be considered traditional in any form continue to employ it as their base concept. We thus see many critics trying, not always successfully, to avoid the concept of deviation from the linguistic norm, after they have developed the appropriate theories to define literature. Instead of treating the literary language as an independent entity, contemporary theory forces upon literature and those who study it a hateful dependence on linguistics. This may be a reason why the concept of deviation has lost its prestige. The truth is that, although literary language is independent, as has been claimed lately, it cannot be totally independent from so-called everyday language. What makes literary language different has been a matter of debate for scholars since the time of Aristotle; so far none of them has been able to produce valid and objective parameters that can be universally accepted. Fortunately the nature of this literary history does not require me to go into such intricate details, although it does invite the scholar to consider the existence of a literary language characteristic of a specific area, in this case, the Hispanic Antilles. This forces me to solve an apparent paradox: in order to talk about the literary language of the Antilles, we need to highlight those linguistic resources that writers take from their dialectal environment (i.e., the elements they take from everyday language in order to create literary discourse). This imitatio (imitation) seems to run counter to the intimate desire of the artist to escape from everyday language; this is not at all the case, however. The artist weaving the fabric of his/her work chooses only those linguistic elements - or the elements which he/she believes to be so - which best serve his/her aesthetic and expressive purposes. This will always be a creative act, no matter how much local identity and flavor (if any) the author tries to give to the text. The writer's task is not to transliterate communicative acts, but to create communication which is his/her own, even if in order to do that he/she has to discriminately resort to linguistic elements that are entirely part of the community. In this case the repertoire of options available to Antillean writers to create a "regional" literary language has been very limited. It is obvious that the creation of poetic language (in its broadest sense) does not require such intricacies; although, in that event, Antillean characteristics would be revealed in other aspects of the work and not in its language. The literary language of the Antilles is only relatively independent, especially if by entity we mean the utilization of features of island dialectology. The most characteristic features concern the non-patrimonial lexicon - indigenous, Afro-Cuban, and to a lesser extent, Creole terms - and the re-

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sults of some phonetic processes that very early started to differentiate Caribbean Spanish from that of great areas of New Spain and of other territories. The number of lexical items of Spanish origin is overwhelming, in opposition to the morphosyntaxis of Caribbean varieties that even today exhibits only slightly distinctive features. All those "peculiar" lexical items totally disappear amidst the common lexical inventory. This is a story that repeats itself: through constant language change many of these terms are forgotten (see Lopez Morales [1979], 51-59 and [1971] 50-61; Vaquero [1986], 93-126, 127-48; and Alba [1976], 71-100 about the minimal number of indigenous terms left in the Antillean lexicon after the sixteenth century: 97 in Cuba, 107 in the Dominican Republic, 100 in Puerto Rico). It is true that in the case of indigenous languages there is still a strong toponomy and a weak anthroponomy, even though both belong to the fossil vocabulary of any speech community. It is also true that there is an archaeological lexicon, which is of great importance when dealing with topics in pre-Columbian cultures from a historical point of view, that is very much determined by discourse argumentation. The situation worsens when this desire to characterize Antillean aspects linguistically faces the fact that the indigenous lexicon spread diatopically to other lands as they were being conquered for the crown of Castille. Even Spain itself could not stay free of this influence. The history of the so-called Afro-Cuban terms is still more modest, in spite of what some dictionaries seem to imply (el Glosario [Lexicon] by Fernando Ortiz is the work of an amateur: many of the lexical items he includes are actually indigenous; the African etymologies mentioned for others are questionable); terms in Creole, very often used by writers with no dialectal awareness, constitute an oddity up until the nineteenth century. All in all, however, the lexicon is the linguistic aspect that writers resort to most frequently. On the contrary, phonetic features are difficult to imitate. Except for folkloric, caricatural or humorous texts, phonetic features are not found in the written language; if they are, they consist mostly of poor imitations and, in most cases, reveal prejudiced, arbitrary, and unscientific views, like the silly imitations of black speech of a great part of "black" literature.

Indigenist Experiments In 1608, in a small Cuban village called Puerto Principe, a native of Gran Canaria, Silvestre de Balboa Troya y Quesada, wrote Espejo de paciencia (Mirror of patience). This epic work (described in greater detail by R. Chang-Rodriguez in the Genre Section, below) recounts the events surrounding the kidnapping and release of bishop Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano. Espejo is preceded by six eulogistic sonnets written by six different poets. It has been proved that at least four of these poets were natives of the eastern part of the country. This has led some historians to believe in the existence of a poetic, educated, lively cénacle that provided an otherwise insignificant village with some intellectual relevance. This hypothesis, developed by José Maria Chacón y Calvo under a strong dose of optimism, makes us believe in the existence of a larger body of works of which the available texts constitute only a small sample. Be that as it may, it is this sample that we have and that tells us about the origin of literary language in the Greater Antilles. Balboa was fifty-five when he started to write his octaves; we do not know how old he was when he first arrived in Cuba. In any case, the linguistic influence exerted by his surroundings on

The History of Literary Language

11

his work was not important and it was restricted to the Spanish lexicon. Balboa writes Espejo according to Renaissance norms for epic poetry, and therefore uses many rhetorical devices established under this code (invocation to the muses, count of warriors, emotional harangues, divine intervention, etc.). His language follows Pan-Hispanic syntactic patterns, which were very much determined (as is to be expected) by prosody and rhyme. A great percentage of his vocabulary is patrimonial, but he also includes enough native lexical items to add some local flavor to the poem. This is the case in the first canto where, after the bishop is released, a mythological crowd gathers to welcome him (satyrs, fauns and sylvans, wood nymphs, hamadryads, goddesses, naiads, ephydridae, lymnaeidae, centaurs, and wild sagittaries) who, instead of the typical fruit (apples, pears, grapes, etc.), offer him local products of the earth and the rivers. Among the first are: guanábanas, gegiras, caimitos, mehí, tabaco, mameyes, tunas, aguacates, mamones, tomates, siguapas and macaguas, pitajayas, virijí, and jaguas, an interesting combination of terms from Taino, Arawak, continental Caribbean, and even from Nahuatl. Among the terms referring to fauna are: jaguará, dajao, viajacas, guabinas, hicoteas, iguanas, and jutías with some Antillean words of unclear origin. To these we must add las bateas (trays), in which wood nymphs offer navaco flowers, and lexical items from Creole such as pinas and plátanos, along with patrimonial terms like Usa, camarones, and patos. Scholars who have studied the sources of Espejo point in several and often opposite directions, not as regards theme, but in relation to versification, style, and linguistic usage. On this last subject, Carolina Poncet points out that Balboa shows "linguistic continuity" with Juan de Castellanos, whose Elegias de varones ilustres en Indias (Elegies of illustrious men from the Indies) must have been one of Balboa's sources. Balboa may have known the first part of Castellanos's work, entitled Elegías y elogios (Elegies and eulogies), since it was published in Madrid in 1589, but not the other three that were not published until the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Castellanos throws into this work all his twenty years of American experience in the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba but also in Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. In the peaceful environment of Tunja, he reminisces and writes about daily events. This helps to explain how his poetry overflows with Americanisms, especially lexical ones. Manuel Alvar has studied them in detail in one of his books. The contact of Balboa with Elegias, at least in this matter, seems to be a very flimsy idea: the octaves of Castellanos overflow with American linguistic elements, a result of his living among the native cultures; whereas Balboa decorates his poem with exotic elements from extinct languages. It is certainly true that there are some indigenous terms in both texts, but Balboa did not need to read them in Elegias or in any of the other texts mentioned so far - mostly in an uncritical manner - nor in the neat octaves by Ercilla who, in his brief stay in America, had no time to really experience it. Convention is what best explains Balboa's use of indigenous lexical terms that are sometimes exaggerated, and that sometimes make him produce shocking verses like "They came down from the trees in petticoats, the pretty, beautiful hamadryads"1 Balboa resorts to a few indigenous terms - at times distorting the semantics of the text - to embellish his verses. These lexical items had been established in the general Spanish of the Antilles and the greater part of the continental areas sometime before this. It had been almost a century since the first conquistadores arrived in Cuba; Spanish influence had achieved not only the spread of the language of the crown of Castille, but also of a 1

Bajaron de los árboles en naguas/las

hellas hamandríades hermosas (Balboa [1960], 489-90).

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series of indigenous terms that had been firmly incorporated since the inital contacts among conquistadores and natives. The first and longest relationships were established in Hispaniola; Taino, the foremost language in the eastern Greater Antilles, was the native language that benefited most from it. Cuba, however, had only experienced the Taino invasion at its eastern end. When the conquistadores arrived, the most important language in the Greater Antilles was Siboney, of obscure origins; in the West end there was also a primitive and ancient culture, about to become extinct, called Guanatahabibe, a veritable ethnolinguistic mystery. The Siboney people were the true settlers of the island; for several centuries they came in droves and occupied its entirety except for some remote areas in the western end. The fate of the Siboney culture was to fall under Taino domination. The Taino, a people of a slightly superior culture, had already subjected to serfdom the previous settlers of the eastern part. It is believed that the so-called Taino invasions date from only a few years before Columbus's arrival in the New World. It is probably for this reason that archaeologists have not been able to locate any remains beyond the eastern section. The issue of the Caribs is still a matter of debate, even though the latest research considers the influence of Carib peoples in the Greater Antilles as superficial; had the Spaniards not arrived in the islands, the Caribs would have invaded and subdued the Greater Antilles as they did the smaller islands. Therefore, at the time of the discovery, there were in Cuba three indigenous cultures, although only the Taino (newly arrived in the island) has been identified by archaeologists with any degree of certainty. The name has its source in a widely accepted proposal by S. Loven in 1935; it is a linguistic variety of the Arawakan family. It is not worth discussing whether the Siboney people also spoke a variety of the Arawakan family of languages. Opinion, old and new, is divided concerning this issue; but no matter what the situation was really like, Spanish gained ground easily; according to Las Casas the disappearance of Taino (i.e., of Antillean languages) was complete around 1540. Ten years earlier the surviving Indians already spoke Spanish and therefore there was no need, he says, to learn Taino. There is no doubt that Las Casas is exaggerating as usual (but not by much) when he says that these varieties have completely disappeared before the end of the first half of the sixteenth century. It is very likely that by this time a bilingual situation was established among the aborigines; Spanish being the dominant language in the public sectors, and the native indigenous languages being the languages reserved for the home. If these hypotheses are right, as all evidence seems to indicate, the period of linguistic contact between Spanish and indigenous languages must have been somewhat shorter than forty years, since the colonization of Cuba does not start until 1515 (and then, in a very timid way) with the trip of Diego Velázquez. A possible linguistic diversity and a brief period of contact are the factors that contributed to the fact that the indigenous terms borrowed into the lexicon of Antillean Spanish, and sometimes into general sixteenth-century Spanish, were mostly loans from Taino or from other languages of the eastern Caribbean islands incorporated into Taino, languages which the settlers learned in Hispaniola and improved in Puerto Rico and perhaps in Jamaica. When in 1608 Balboa uses indigenous terms, he is not typically referring to the pre-Columbian period of the island (at least, not always), but to a conventional Antillean repertoire containing some

The History of Literary Language

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Nahuatlan terms, with a very strong Taino substratum, which very quickly became familiar to the Spanish spoken in the northern continental areas. These were lexical items in use at the time when he writes Espejo; therefore, the poet's intention is explicit. It is for this reason that Balboa's work is a somewhat unique literary piece. Poets from the Antilles or based in the Antilles will not turn to their surroundings, not even for a few local decorations, until almost two centuries later. This is the case of Manuel de Zequeira y Arango and his "Oda a la piña" (Ode to the pineapple) and La batalla naval de Cortés en la laguna (Cortés's naval battle in the lagoon) and of Manuel Justo Rubalcava, who is believed to be the author of a poem about the competition between American and European fruit. This long excursus concerning Espejo de paciencia is justified in that the resource used by the author to create in his poetry a somewhat Americanistic atmosphere, particularly Antillean (in spite of aguacate, tunas y tomates), will be a constant resource later on, at a time characterized by a desire to return to the native elements (i.e., the indigenous period), which, in fact, was totally alien to these authors. The use of indigenous lexical items - there are no other linguistic elements left signs of a past more distant in time and culture, will be a distinctive characteristic of the work of these poets. The best example is the Cuban literary school called Siboneyismo (Siboney school), which starts around the middle of the nineteenth century. It was brief and intense and we only have half a dozen books left from it. José Fornaris was the founder with Cantos del siboney (Songs of the Siboney), an unprecedented editorial success (five editions in just a few years), which did not correspond with the literary quality of the poems, with titles like "Los últimos siboneyes" (The last siboneys), "Muerte de Doreya" (The death of Doreya), "La canoa" (The canoe), "La canción del cacique" (The cacique's song), "El cacique del [sic] Camagüey" (Camagüey's cacique), "Hatuey," etc. Joaquin Lorenzo Luaces, who was also a poet and a friend of Fornaris, joined the Siboney school; together they founded the short-lived magazine La piragua (The pirogue), which was to be the officical organ of the movement. Some of his poems, like "La bayamesa" (Female native of Bayamo, Cuba) became very famous when they were turned into lyrics for songs. No other poet showed such aesthetic mediocrity as Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo, better known as El cucalambé. His only book, Rumores del hórmigo (Rumors from the hórmigo) of 1856, includes poems such as "Huatey y Guarina" (Huatey and Guarina), "Al cacique de Maniabón" (To the cacique of Maniabón), "El behique de yariguá" (Yariguá's behique [Taino priest and doctor]), "Caonaba," and other similar pieces. All these popular poets have one thing in common: frequent use of indigenous Antillean terms, although none were of Siboney origin, as they naively believed at first. These writers were unknowingly competing against the lexical repertoire of Cuban terms started by Esteban Pichardo in 1836, the author who gave new life to a great number of totally forgotten indigenous terms. In any case, this was only a bookish restoration that had nothing or little to do with the language spoken in the country. Some brief attempts to return to the Puerto Rican and Dominican indigenous past represent a different type of literature. This movement was started in Puerto Rico by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera with the legend "La palma del cacique" (The cacique's palm), published in Madrid in 1852; the opera Guarionex was based on this text. In Hispaniola, repossessed by Spain in 1861, Francisco Javier Angulo Gurudi was to be a pioneer in the history of theater in his country. His is a manifestly

Humberto López Morales

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political search for the indigenous past in order to exalt it while depicting the unequal combat of the aborigenes against the abuses of the Spanish settlers. Several indigenous legends become dramas, among them, the most famous is Iguaniona. However, besides proper names - Iguaniona, Guarionex, and others - there are no indigenous lexical terms in his work, except for some terms that are common to everyday language. His expression is delicate, with an elaborate tendency to the refined, which he cannot always attain. There is only one other writer who deserves mention for this kind of Indianist literature in Quisqueya, José Joaquin Pérez; his book Fantasias indigenas (Indigenous fantasies), 1877, contains episodes and legends of the time of discovery, conquest, and settlement, although nothing except his themes reminds us of the past he evokes.

The Afro-American Environment The only other source that could characterize the literary language of the Antilles is the Afro-Antillean element. This is in fact the case. It is important to distinguish two trends: one is based on caricature, humorous and trivial; the other one is more artistic. The first trend is the so-called buffo theater, a group of comical pieces in which black characters, assuming a variety of roles, are the center of all humor, along with the two other characters that make up the famous triad: a mulatto woman and a Galician man. All studies about buffo theater agree that its most distinctive characteristic is its language, "one of the most amazing lexical experiences in American Spanish."2 As a matter of fact, in these plays, as in folk songs with similar satirical purposes, there are black bozales (born in Africa), black Creoles, mulattos, and whites. Writers, especially the master of the genre, Creto Gangá (pseudonym of Bartolomé Crespo Borbón, of Galician origin), try to distinguish them linguistically; this is done mainly through phonetics, although some important features are used arbitrarily. In this sense, we can say that this is a true literary creation. Phonetically, black speech is characterized by the substitution of "s" for "z" ("seseo") (grandesa), a well-spread type of neutralization, especially in the Caribbean and American area; the substitution of "y" for "11" ("yeísmo") (yubia, yano); deletion of /s, r, ål in syllable final or word final positions (uté, bûquese, bebé, pagâ); neutralizations and vocalizations of /r, 1/ (tamboi, vei, poique); omission of intervocalic /d/ when preceded by a stressed vowel (asustao, cansao); several metatheses (suidadano, probesa); and variations in vowel quality (oté "usted," cubra "cobre," etc.). To this we must add the use of archaic lexical items (entodavía, semos, dende, dispierte, rompido, mesmo, vide, vinio, escuro, asina, dentre, etc.) and the lack of morphological endings in verbs and nouns. Additionally, there are occasional deformations of several types, especially non-etymological repositioning of phonological segments (especially /s/) in the language of negros catedrâticos (professor-sounding blacks) and a repertoire of lexical items from ñáñigos pidgins (belonging to a secret society), Chinese, and several peninsular dialects (Galician, Asturian, Andalusian, Catalonian), all serving the purpose of easy laughter. Evidence found in some old documents proves that this is an artificial, affected language that uses some linguistic features of the speech of the bozales but that has been distorted for humorous 2

Una de las experiencias léxicas más fascinantes del español de América (Montes Huidobro [1986], 1031-41).

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purposes. Pichardo writes in 1836: "a loose and confused language is heard every day everywhere in the entire island, among black 'bozales' or African natives . . .; this language is common to all blacks, regardless of their origin; they keep it forever, unless they came here when they were children: this is a deformed, sloppy kind of Spanish, with no concordance in gender or number, no declensions or conjugations, no strong r, no final s or d; frequent substitution of // for ñ, e for i, g for v. . . ."3 Notice that these phonetic features are characteristic of black speakers who came in contact with Spanish for the first time when they arrived in the island. This contact situation continued for over two centuries, although these phonetic processes, which are the result of the process of acquisition of Spanish, not of the creation of a Creole, as many argue, disappeared with the first generation of black Creoles. (Concerning the ongoing debate over the existence of a Cuban Creole language, see Granda [1971], 481-91 and López Morales [1980], 85-116. [J.R.-L.]) Pichardo himself distinguishes those who came as children and easily adopted the language of their owners from the speakers of that "loose and confused language." "Black Creoles," he says, "speak like the whites in the country (i.e., region) where they were born or in their neighborhood."4 According to Pichardo, it is also clear that the neutralization of 1/r in Cuba and in the other Antilles was not a phenomenon exclusive to black speech; talking about some general characteristics of Cuban Spanish he says: "In Havana we often hear final r being replaced with /, amal instead of amar, and vice versa, sordado instead of soldado."5 The substitutions of "s" for "z" and of "y" for "11" were well distributed among black and white Creoles. Pichardo says: "in Cuba there is not a soul who can properly pronounce ce, ci, and z: the same goes for // and y, v and b; all is s and b. . . ."6 Pichardo says that the vocalization of 1, r is common among black curros; but for this lexicographer curro means "of affected movements and Andalusian pronunciation,"7 which seems to indicate that Pichardo does not attribute a black origin to these vocalizations. Bachiller y Morales also mentions this phenomenon and explains that "most settlers were from Andalusia . . . they left traces that are starting to disappear," and he adds that "other than that, it must be admitted that most of their changes [those of black Creoles] are initiated by the bulk of common people, especially country folks."8 All the phonetic processes observed in black Creoles in this type of literature have a wellknown history and geographic location in the Hispanic world. Neutralizations of /l, r/ have existed in Andalusia since the fifteenth century. Evidence for the substitution of "s" for "z" can be traced in America as far back as the first quarter of the sixteenth century and there is evidence for the substitution of "y" for "11" in the peninsula since the fifteenth century, as well as the aspiration of /-s/ and 3 Un lenguaje relajado y confuso se oye diariamente en toda la isla, por donde quiera, entre los negros bozales o naturales de Africa . . .; este lenguaje es comün e idéntico en los negros, sean de la nación que fuesen, y que conservan eternamente, a menos que hayan venido mui (sic) niños: es un castellano desfigurado, chapurrado, sin concordancia, numero, declinación ni conjugación, sin r fuerte, s ni d final; frecuentemente trocadas la // por la n, la e por la i, la j por la v. . . (Pichardo [1849], Iiii). 4 Lenguaje relajado y confuso. . . . Los negros criollos . . . hablan como los blancos del país (léase región) de su nacimiento o vecindad (Pichardo [1849], liii). 5 En La Habana se oye con frecuencia pronunciar con / las voces terminadas en r, amal por amar, y viceversa, sordado por soldado (Pichardo [1849], liv). 6 en la isla de Cuba no hay persona de su suelo que pronuncie ce, ci y la z como se debe: lo mismo sucede con la ll y la y, con la v y la b; todo es s y b . . . (Pichardo [1849], liv). 7 de movimientos afectados y de pronunciación andaluza (Pichardo [1849], liv). 8 Fueron andaluces los más de los pobladores . . . que dejaron huellas que van desapareciendo; por lo demâs tiene que confesarse que una gran parte de sus alteraciones [la de los negros criollos] las inicia la generalidad de la gente del pueblo, con especialidad la del campo (Bachiller y Morales [1883], 97-104).

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the omission of /-d/. Only the vocalizations of /1, r/ - almost nonexistent in Antillean Spanish, except for the Dominican area of Cibao - seem recent. Nonetheless, the testimony of Pichardo and Bachiller y Morales and the the fact that these vocalizations are currently found in southern areas of the peninsula and in the Canary islands, and among the oldest people, lead us to believe that this is an earlier process, probably of peninsular origin as well. The use of black speech (in the manner of Creto Gangá) in satirical dramatic literature appears also in Puerto Rico, especially in the work of the Venezuelan Ramón C. F. Caballero, who wrote short plays that mix peasant and black speech (see his La juega de gallos [The cockfight] or El negro bozal [The African]). This dramatic dialogue is very different from the language of the so-called "black poetry." "Black poetry" is generally considered to have begun in Puerto Rico in 1926 with Palés Matos. There were, however, some odd precedents, such as an 1830 song in Papiamentu and Spanish (see Alvarez Nazario [1970], 1-4). In Cuba Nicolás Guillén and Emilio Ballagas, among others, developed Afro-Cuban poetry. This poetry uses elevated and artistically elaborate language; it contains Afro-Cuban lexical items, as one would expect, but no phonetic deformation or other caricatural devices. Instead, there are onomatopoeic effects and some universal rhythmic devices, such as alliteration, used with particular emotion. Literary critics have not always seen things so clearly. In 1934 Armando Guerra (pseudonym of Francisco Martin Llorente), writes about the ninteenth-century poet Cabrera Paz: "As far as we know, no one has ever written, in a responsible way, in African jargon."9 Max Jiménez, talking about Güirao's work, writes: "Cuba has poets, but it does not have any international poets, that is to say, poets of the Castilian language. Its best poets are regional, from Cuba and Africa."10 Giiirao himself talks about bilingual poetry (1938), but I suspect this to be a metaphorical use because elsewhere he writes: "In our case, the primitive naïveté of the black follows the safe course of Spanish elements, to become, so to say, locally universal."11 Emilio Ballagas, without going into details, writes that: "Black poetry has unique linguistic features consisting of nasal consonants and last syllable stress on o, a, e, and u generally in last names or names of Afro-Cuban dances, such as arará, gangá, bongo [sic] tombuetü."12 After reading these statements made by contemporary poets and critics, it is not surprising to find major inaccuracies in the work of modern scholars: José J. Arrom talks about a black dialect and mentions what he considers to be "the most common morphological processes of the language of black Cubans."13 Dorothy F. Hart claims that linguistic innovation is one of the distinctive characteristics of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén, and immediately points out that Guillén uses a dialect typical of The Antilles [sic] and several areas of South America. Her confusion increases when she holds that Guillén imbues his poetry with popular flavor, "in an imitative way, through phonological changes."14 Contradictions are such that they cannot even be explained by the fact that these authors use linguistic terminology in a loose fashion.

9

Nadie antes - que sepamos - escribió, con firma responsable, en jerga africana (Guerra [1934], n.p.). Cuba tiene poetas, pero no de carácter internacional, es decir, de hablar castellano. Sus mejores poetas son regionales, Cuba y Africa (Guerra [1934], 6). 11 En nuestro caso, la ingenuidad primitiva del negro utiliza el cauce seguro de lo español para hacerse, por así decir, localmente universal (Giiirao [1938], xxiv). 12 La poesía negra posee un material lingüístico inconfundible a base de sonidos consonantes nasales y de terminaciones agudas en o, en a, en e, y en u, generalmente de gentilicios o nombres de bailes afrocubanos, como arará, gangá, bongó [sic] tombuetü (Ballagas [1946], 11-12). 13 Más comunes cambios morfológicos [sic] del lenguaje del negro cubano (Arrom [1941-42], 379-411). 14 De una manera imitativa . . . por medio de cambios fonológicos (Hart [1956], 801). 10

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Black issues, always fascinating, have caused other illusions. Many see this poetry as a stylistic novelty born out of the mysterious and exotic aspects of this race. It is important, however, not to lose ourselves in naîve ethnoliterary confusion. The individuality of style of many good poets is not dependent on an exact representation of black dialect, because there isn't such a thing; its greatness, if it exists, comes from the artistry with which these poets are able to handle certain expressive resources provided by the linguistic system - onomatopoeia, alliteration - that evoke an imaginary Afro-Antillean environment.

Rural Experiments Rural language makes its first appearance in the literary world at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The anonymous Copias del jibaro (Songs of the jivaro) circulated in manuscript form in 1812, the year of the reinstitution of the Spanish Constitution, which is also the topic of the songs. A critical and mocking tone runs through these verses spoken in a peasant's words: Let us go citizens / to the village today / 'cause Uncle Juan Congo / is playing the drums // Look, cousin Sica / take care of my pig / so I can go to see / the Constitution. // If my friend Cirilio / stops by / tell him to go / to the village of jilo // Tell him that the Constitution / has been ratified / and that there is going to be / a great show.15 These songs are the beginning of a traditional creole literature of manners that uses dialectal features of the jivaro idiom of Puerto Rican peasants. This kind of text will continue to be produced during the following decades, mostly in newspapers. But it was not until 1849, date of the first edition of El jibaro (The jivaro) by Manuel Alonso that this literary trend was definitively established. (This work was so successful that it was in part transmitted orally.) A new edition, much larger, appeared in 1882-83. Although contemporary critics prefer not to pay much attention to Alonso's learned poetry, they praise his rural romances, which display his intention to bring out the local flavor of the Puerto Rican fields. There is no parallel to this situation either in Cuba or in the Dominican Republic. Cuban literature of manners is also satirical - especially at the beginning, in the portrayals published in Papel Periódico, rather like the Copias in Puerto Rico; but even in the portrayal of guajiros (peasants) and hunters there is no linguistic characterization. Gastón Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros (pen name El lugareno [The native]) depicts the speech of the wise yet simpleminded guajiro, but with remarkable moderation in the treatment of dialectal features. Between 1878 and 1882 the jivaro romances are one of the sources of Ramón Méndez Quinones, who also writes poems in this fashion and introduces the jivaro and his peculiar language into drama. Thus in the nineteenth century there is remarkable variety in the objectives, purpose, and linguistic approaches of the texts belonging to this group: from mocking satire to serious presentation of daily life in the country and of the true self of the jivaro. At first, writers of the period use only phonetic features, although very distinctive ones, in their poetic creations. Although these features will not be absent from the writings of the second half of the nineteenth century, the poems also contain lexical elements - generally rural archaisms - and

15 Vamos suidadanos / jasta el pueblo hoy / poique tío Juan Congo / tocará ei tamboi // Mire prima Sica / müdeme ei lichón / que yo voy a vei / la Costitusión. // Si viene poaquí / mi compai Cirilio / ígale se vaya / ai pueblo de jilo. // Que ha salío cieita / la Costitusión / y van a jasei / una gran funsión (Rivera de Alvarez [1983], 103-04).

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above all an intense repertoire of proverbs with an obvious country flavor. A quick reading of Un jibaro como hay pocos (No other jivaro like this one), a play written by Méndez Quinones in 1878, suffices to verify the wealth of refrains and proverbs from the jivaro world. The phonetic phenomena used in the portrayal of rural literary language are seseo (sibillation): examples are suidadanos, costitusión, funsión, ensapataos (with some exceptions: cirilio, cieita); yeismo (substitution of the y): cabayo, yeban; strong aspiration of initial /h/: jasta, jasei; elision of intervocalic /d/ after a stressed vowel: toas, ensapataos, toos; some cases of elision of initial /d/: ígale; and occasional metathesis: presonas. All these phonological processes are still common today in Antillean rural dialect. There is also an impressive number of vocalizations of syllable-final /r, 1/; these symbols reveal a very systematic pronunciation. In the text of the anonymous Copias provided earlier, there is a 100% vocalization: poique, ei (twice); tamboi, vei, compai (completely lexicalized today); ai, cieita and jasei. Although they did not do so as frequently, later texts also contain abundant examples of vocalization of /1, r/; Manuel Alonso's verses contain ey, mejoy, cuay, aygunos, and many others. In contrast with other linguistic phenomena, vocalization has almost disappeared from the Antillean dialects (except for the Dominican area of Cibao, where it is still preserved; and even though it is not representative of the speech of the area it is, however, rather common). Thus, it has become a receding phenomenon. Besides literary texts, there is further evidence of the existence of vocalization of /r, 1/ in the three greater Antilles in the 19th century; vocalization was one of the possible realizations of these phonemes; and it was not just a rural feature, but it could also be found in urban low class speech. Today there is only a vague memory of this (with the exception of Cibao), due to the imposition (in the case of /r/) - besides standard weakening (fricatives; total elision, only rarely) - of assimilation, aspiration, and, in Puerto Rico, lateralization; the latter is the only one of these phenomena to which modern authors have resorted in their writings (see the novel Rosa mistica [Mystic rose] by Carlos Varo): velde, talde, cornel, in order to portray the speech of Puerto Rican characters. In the vowel system, always more conservative in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the only phenomenon that deserves mention is the opening of the mid front vowel e>i : lichón, dispués, etc. Phonetics, lexical archaisms (dir [ir, to go] aburrición, "boredom," andancio, "tiredness," alferecóa, balconear, and many more), some idioms and proverbs (Mono sabe palo que trepa, "The monkey knows the tree it climbs," for example) are part of the inventory of linguistic characteristics of the speech of these fictional characters of rural literature. As the message of the work becomes more serious in the first half of the twentieth century - rural problems, social injustice, etc. - these features become less frequent and henceforth will appear only occasionally in literary language. There is, therefore, a remarkable correlation between the folkloristic nature of some literature and the abundance - usually unreal - of the so-called rural linguistic features. The sober expressiveness of the Cuban creole poetry written between 1830 and 1860 developed along the same lines. A quick glance at the stanzas of El trovador cubano [The Cuban troubadour] by Francisco Poveda shows a lack of rural linguistic features. Other authors like the famous Placido use them only occasionally. The same could be said about Leonela by Nicolas Heredia, a required text for those who want to know the authentic language spoken in Cuba in this period, although it does not portray guajiro speech in a quaint manner.

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The Success of Urban Speech In the last thirty years Antillean literature, especially the narrative, has come to play a major role. After Cabrera Infante and his Tres tristes tigres (Three trapped tigers), things were never to be the same again for literary language. The introduction of Havana's night life slang, its secrets and mystery, its gaiety, its liveliness, its relajo or choteo (a mocking tone) permeates everything; in order to create this, the author uses a peculiar lexicon: festive creations, jocular metaphors, popular terms, and characteristic Antillean - particularly western Cuban - grammar. After him, came many others, more or less successfully, but always within a communicative framework in which urban speech, sometimes the most popular, was in the forefront. The Dominican Republic has not joined this unique and successful movement, but Puerto Rico has in Luis Rafael Sánchez - especially with La guaracha del Macho Camacho - its most distinguished representative. In a few occasions, Cabrera Infante has stated that he is particularly interested in language and that it is this interest that makes him want to reflect language with as much authenticity as possible. It is surprising that an artist should pay so much attention to what he hears around him. "The book is written in Cuban," says the author himself, "that is, it is writtten in a Cuban Spanish dialect and the writing is only an attempt to put down on paper the fleeting human voice, so to speak. Different varieties of Cuban Spanish seem to be integrated into one literary language. However, the Havana dialect and particularly, its night-life slang, which, as in all big cities, tends to be a secret language, are predominant here. Reconstruction was not easy and some pages sound better than they read; it would not be a bad idea to read them out loud."16 This authorial purpose affects all linguistic levels: phonetics, syntax, and the lexicon. Phonetics is not an accurate term, since a phonetic transcription could never be done in a text printed with regular fonts. We can only mention a few examples here: elision of final /s/ (ademâ, atrata, vamono, etc.), syllable elision {pa, "para, " to, "todo") occasional seseo, even in the speeches of a single character (dise, hasiendo, etc.), and very little else. As far as the lexicon is concerned, Cabrera Infante is in control. Besides Cuban Creole terms (embullar, "to swallow," comemierda, "loser," paragüero, bañadera, modelar, and many lexical items that appear repeatedly in his texts), he also uses derivational resources of this dialectal area: complicadera, habladera, escogedora, conversadera, bobera (alternating with bobería); trusica, muchachita/junticos, aumentico, mulatico; mismitico, chiquitica, etc. At the level of syntax the novel faithfully reflects, probably unintentionally, Cuban and Antillean standards. It retains masculine gender for radio, llamado, manito and singular number of gente (in phrases like es buena gente, "he's a nice guy"). The pronominal system is characteristic of several Hispanic areas in the Caribbean: frequent usage of the second person singular pronoun, tu, less frequent use of yo, and of the interrogative qué along with the noun cosa (¿Qué cosa es esta? / ¿Qué es esto?).

16 El libro está en cubano; es decir escrito en los diferentes dialectos del espanol de Cuba y la escritura no es más que un intento de atrapar la voz humana al vuelo, como aquel que dice. Las distintas formas del cubano se funden en un solo lenguaje literario. Sin embargo, predomina como un acento el habla de los habaneros y en particular la jurga nocturna que, como en todas las grandes ciudades, tiende a ser un idioma secreto. La reconstrucción no fue fácil y algunas paginas se deben oir mejor que se leen, y no seria mala idea leerlas en voz alta (Cabrera Infante [1968], 9).

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The existence of pronominal forms has been explained - in the case of tu - as a compensatory process to solve the subject ambiguity caused by /-s/ elision: ¿Qué tú dice? / ¿Qué dices?, which are imperceptible on the printed page. However, recent empirical analyses have shown that the absence of /-s/ and the presence of tú are not in complementary distribution, and that along these same lines, there is also redundancy (¿Qué tu dices?). This has made some linguists believe that a phonological explanation is not completely correct, leading them to propose an alternate - or additional - hypothesis: Caribbean Spanish tends to make explicit the order subject-verb-object in the surface structure; this (in the case of pronominal subjects) cannot be done in any other way but by keeping them in spite of being redundant (yo digo, tú dices, etc.). This cannot be attributed to the influence of African languages or English, an idea frequently proposed. In the verbal system, we can mention the usage of dejar, as a modal (déjame decirte), verse plus adjective in the sense of "looks" (se veía encantada), metaphorical uses of comer (comerse una mujer), etc.; there is also a series of interesting phenomena, grouped under the heading of "expressive syntax": ven acá, "oye, mira," óyeme, "atiende," the expressive filler jvaya!, an imperative with no modal sense but with the function of concluding a subject, the vocatives chico, chica and a series of expressions of great local flavor: ¿qué es lo tuyo? "¿qué pasa?'," /mira tu pa eso!, ahi mismo, "ya está," /un tiro! "maravilloso," /qué paquete!, !que mentira!, etc. The world of the novels of Luis Rafael Sánchez - especially that of La guaracha - is mostly the world of the marginalized and the poor. That is why prostitution, mendicity, and homosexuality are recurrent themes in his works, always within the framework ofthe Caribbean relajo, which in Puerto Rico is called guachafita. Sánchez also pays careful attention to language; that is why his texts have been the object of study by linguists and dialectologists. La guaracha could very well be the main source for a dictionary of present day Puerto Rican terms. Maria Vaquero, in the inventory she offers in her paper on terms that might be difficult to understand for a reader not acquainted with Puerto Rican Spanish, lists: ajoración "prisa," amapuchar "encubrir," batata mameya "prebenda," bembetes "habladuría," candungo "calabacm, marimbo," cachipa (lo que queda del coco, de cualquier fruto rallado, "what is left of coconuts, or any other shredded fruit") and many others up to a total of fifty lexemes. But it is not only the lexicon that Luis Rafael Sánchez uses with loving care. There are also idioms (Hola, hola Pepsi-cola, feliz como una lombriz y fabulosa - an adjective very dear to this author - como una lechuza) which he takes even to electoral campaigns (Vicente es decente y buena gente) in which he also uses rhyming alliteration. The use of adjectives is exuberant and impressive; his description of the music of the guaracha: "jacarandosa y pimentosa, . . . laxante y edificante, . . . profilâctica y didâctica, . . . filosófica y pagajosófica . . .," and of a woman's waist, "cimbreante y cimbrosa, guarachosa y triunfadora" speak for themselves. It is through the adjectives that the author creates and recreates words to his pleasure in an authentic demostration of expressive craftsmanship: multitud autosa, carrosa, encochetada (Sánchez [1976], 68) (from auto, carro, and coche). Vaquero points to some adjectives that make the sentences in which they occur unique: trópicos tristes, agitación soberana, prolegómenos viudo-maternales, grave encaje, cursileria galopante, etc. The author resorts to Latin, English, and French loan words and to anything that comes to mind in order to come up with the right and precise words - words that may carry mockery, sarcasm, the pain of having to accept an unwanted reality, and the humorous capsule that conceals it.

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Sánchez makes use of a lively language to serve his purpose, which is not, of course, to offer data for linguistic analysis, but to portray events that are hardly ever in that great mirror of Puerto Rico that is La guaracha.

Conclusion Language, as a protagonist of literature, has come a long way in the Hispanic Caribbean. It timidly showed itself for the first time - and even clumsily - in the first literary piece of this area, Espejo de paciencia (Mirror of patience), an epic poem written by the Gran Canaria native Silvestre de Balboa (1608). His octaves, affectedly elegant, opened the way to some indigenous terms that give its local linguistic flavor to the poem. The role of Espejo within the indigenous trend of the nineteenth century was not any more fortunate. The poets of the day were cheap versifiers who threw into their poems words presumably from indigenous languages they never learned. Together with those lexical devices, a great many Afro-Antillean writers - especially the folklorists - also resorted to phonetics to depict a stereotype that goes hand in hand with the jivaro and guajiro. During this period real language enters the literary scene as an addition, decoration, tropical flavor, and little else. Today, on the contrary, language has taken control over literary works, especially in fiction. It is no longer a superficial cover, but the very essence and purpose of the work. Antillean writers take in their hands a rich repertoire - that which surrounds them daily - and project it into their discourse. They have learned that their language - the language that is spoken in the streets - is part of their cultural legacy and they are not willing to give it up. They caress it, shape it, make it a slave of their expressive desires; and in that way they find themselves and create an authentic Antillean world. Translated by Sonia Colina, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bibliography Alba, Orlando. 1990. Variatión fonética y diversidad social en el espanol dominicano de Santiago. Santiago de los Caballeros: Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. —. 1976. Indigenismos en el espanol hablado en Santiago [de los Caballeros]. Anuario de letras. 14:71-100. Alvar, Manuel. 1972. Juan de Castellanos. Traditión espanola y realidad americana. Bogota: Institute Caro y Cuervo. Alvarez Nazario, Manuel. [1961]. 1974. El elemento afronegroide en el espanol de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Institute de Cultura Puertorriquena. —. 1970. Un texte literario del papiamento documentado en Puerto Rico en 1830. Revista del instituto de cultura puertorriquena. 13:1-4. —. 1990. El habla campesina del pais. Origenes y desarrollo del espanol en Puerto Rico. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Antuna, Maria Luisa and Josefina Garcia Carranza. 1975. Bibliografia de Nicolas Guillen. Havana: Instituto cubano del libro-Biblioteca nacional José Marti.

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Arrigoitia, Luis M. 1978. Una novela escrita en puertorriqueno: La guaracha del Macho Camacho de Luis Rafael Sanchez. Revista de estudios hispánicos. 5:71-90. Arrom, José J. 1941-42. La poesia afrocubana. Revista iberoamericana. 4:379-411. Bachiller y Morales, Antonio. 1883. Desfiguración a que esta expuesto el idioma castellano al contacto y mezcla de las razas. Revista de Cuba. 14:97-104. Balboa, Silvestre. 1960. Espejo de paciencia. Ed. by Cintio Vitier. Colección Textos Cubanos. Las Villas: Universidad Central de Las Villas. Ballagas, Emilio. 1946. Mapa de la poesia negra americana. Buenos Aires: Pleamar. Bergen, J. 1976. The Explored and Unexplored Facets of Questions such as "¿Qué tu tienes?" Hispania. 59:93-99. Cartey, W[ilfrid]. G. O. 1959. Some aspects of the language of Luis Paiés Matos. La Voz. (March):8-9. Chacón y Calvo, José Maria. 1913. Los origenes de la poesia en Cuba. Havana: Siglo XX. (Rpt. in his 1922 Ensayos de literatura cubana. Madrid: Saturnino Calleja.) Davis, J. C. 1971. Tu, ¿qué tu tienes? Hispania. 54:331-33. Granda, Germán de. 1971. Algunos datos sobre la pervivencia del criollo en Cuba. Boletin de la real academia espanola. 51:481-91. Guerra, Armando. 1934. Poetas negros y mestizos de la epoca esclavista. Antologia. Bohemia. (26 August): N.p. Güirao, Ramón. 1938. Orbita de la poesia afrocubana, 1928-1937. Antologia. Havana: Ucar. Gutiérrez Araus, M. Luz. 1986. Rasgos gramaticales del espanol de Cuba en la novela Tres tristes tigres de Cabrera Infante. Actas del I congreso internacional sobre el espanol de América. Ed. by H. López Morales and M. Vaquera. San Juan: Academia Puertorriquena de la Lengua Espanola. 997-1008. Hart, Dorothy Feldman. 1956. La poesia afrocubana, sus raíces e influencias. In Miscelânea de estudios dedicados a Fernando Ortiz. Vol. 2. Havana: N.p. Kauy, Charles. 1951. 2d ed. American Spanish Syntax. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. López Baralt, Luce. 1976. La prosa de Luis Rafael Sanchez, escrita en puertorriqueno. Insula. 356-357:9. López Morales, Humberto. 1971. Contribución a la historia de la lexicografia en Cuba: observaciones pre-pichardianas. In his Estudios sobre el espanol de Cuba. New York: Las Americas. 88-106. —. 1971. Indigenismos en el espanol de Cuba. In his Estudios sobre el espanol de Cuba. New York: Las Americas. 50-61. —. 1979. Indigenismos en los textos cronísticos de Puerto Rico: indices de frecuencia y densidad. In his Dialectologia y Sociolinguistica. Temas puertorriqueños. Madrid: Hispanova. —. 1980. Sobre la pretendida existencia y pervivencia del criollo en Cuba. Anuario de Letras. 18:85-116. —. 1988. Indices de mortandad léxica en Puerto Rico: afronegrismos. Nueva Revista de filologia hispánica. 36.2:179-96. Rpt. in his Investigaciones léxicas . . . —. 1991. Lexicografia puertorriquena en el siglo XX: triunfos y fracasos. In his Investigaciones léxicas sobre el espanol antillano. Santiago de los Caballeros: Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. 107-24. —. 1991. Penetración de indigenismos antillanos en el espanol del siglo XVI. In his Investigaciones léxicas sobre el espanol antillano. Santiago de los Caballeros: Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. 13-26. —. [In press.] Los primeros indigenismos léxicos de la literatura cubana. In Homenaje al profesor Eugenio de Bustos Tovar. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Malaret, Augusto. 1937. Vocabulario de Puerto Rico. San Juan: N.p. Merrim, Stephanie. 1980. A Secret Idiom: The Grammar and Role of Language in Tres tristes tigres. Latin American Literary Review. 8.16:96-116. Miliares Carlo, Agustín. 1956. 2d ed. Ensayo de una bibliografia de escritores naturales de las Islas Canarias. Vol. 2. Las Palmas: Excmo. Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria. Montes Huidobro, Matias. 1986. Lenguaje y literatura en el teatro bufo cubano. Actas del I congreso internacional sobre el espanol de América. Ed. by H. López Morales and M. Vaquero. San Juan: Academia Puertorriquena de la Lengua Espanola. 1031-41. Morales, Amparo. 1980. La expresión del sujeto pronominal de primera persona en el espanol de Puerto Rico. Boletin de la academia puertorriquena de la lengua espanola. 8:91-102.

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Mormigo, Marcos A. 1964. La penetración de los indigenismos en el espanol. In Presente y futuro de la lengua espanola. Vol. 2. Madrid: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica. 217-26. Navarro Tomas, Tomas. 1951. 2d ed. El espanol de Puerto Rico. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Ortiz, Fernando. 1922. Los afronegrismos en nuestro lenguaje. Revista bimestre cubana. 17:321-36. —. 1923. La cocina afrocubana. Notas lexicográficas. Revista bimestre cubana. 18:401-23. —. 1924. Glosario de afronegrismos. Havana: Siglo XX. —. 1924. Vocablos de la economía politica afrocubana. Cuba contemporánea. 35:136-46. Pichardo, Esteban. [1836]. 1849. 2d ed. Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas. Havana: M. Soler. Poncet, Carolina. [1914]. 1972. 2d ed. El romance en Cuba. Havana: Siglo XX. Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1983. Literatura puertorriqueña. Su proceso en el tiempo. Madrid: Partenón. Rosa, Nicolas. 1970. Cabrera Infante: una patologia del lenguaje. In Critica y significación. Buenos Aires: Galerna. Rosario, Rubén del. 1965. Vocabulario puertorriqueho. Sharon, CT.: Troutman Press. Sanchez Boudy, José. 1978. Diccionario de cubanismos más usuales. Miami: Ediciones Universal. Schraibman, José. 1970. Cabrera Infante: tras la büsqueda del lenguaje. Insula. 286:15. Vaquero, Maria. 1978. Interpretación de un código lingüístico: La guaracha del Macho Camacho. Revista de estudios hispánicos. 5:27-69. —. 1986. La lengua en seis textos cronísticos de Puerto Rico. Contribución al estudio del antillano insular. In Léxico marinero de Puerto Rico y otros estudios. Madrid: Playor. —. 1986. El léxico indígena en el espanol hablado de Puerto Rico. In his Léxico marinero de Puerto Rico . . . 127-48. Vicente Maura, Gabriel. 1984. Diccionario de voces coloquiales de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Editorial Zemí.

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

Popular and Literate Cultures

Education in the Hispanic Antilles JULIO RODRÍGUEZ-LUIS

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

This essay will review briefly how mass education developed in the three Hispanic Antillean nations under colonial rule, so as to indicate the historical background to, and the public for, their literary activity.

Puerto Rico Because of Puerto Rico's sparse population and the scarce attention it received from the crown, one finds no consistent efforts at disseminating and improving education there until the nineteenth century, when the educational program in the colony resulted from the introduction of modern ideas in Spain. (There are records of a teacher being attached to the cathedral of Puerto Rico - as the capital of the island was called before it exchanged names with the country itself - as early as 1582; of the Dominican friars having a school in their convent from 1645; and of the existence of two schools in the island by the 1760s - to which have to be added the ones functioning in convents and in private homes.) In 1834 the Gaceta Oficial (Spanish state bulletin) published a royal decree ordering that primary schools in Puerto Rico be governed by the same rules as those in Spain. Those rules did not begin to be implemented until 1838, however. Ten years later the bishop's office was still granting the title of teacher of first letters, as it had been doing all along. In 1850 a new governor finally created the mechanism for awarding teachers their posts based on the results of a state examination. He also divided the island schools into three classes, depending on the importance of the towns where they were located, and established what the teachers' salaries should be and how to promote them. The same governor founded an academy whose members were charged with reporting to him on the needs and the functioning of primary schools in their own towns. The framework for these efforts was the 1844 School Plan for Cuba and Puerto Rico, which was intended to guarantee that education in the Antillean colonies should proceed along exactly the same lines established in the metropolis. It should be noted that although the primary schools under consideration were state-supported, enrollment in them was not free except for poor children, and the maximum number of these which each type of school could admit was also regulated. The government created rural schools in 1856, in view of the fact that most peasant parents did not send their children to town schools because of their lack of economic resources and/or because of the great distance to be covered. Only boys attended these schools. The official establishment of

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schools for girls, where they would be taught sewing, embroidery, reading, and the catechism, also dates from 1856. According to the 1860 census, Puerto Rico, with a total population of 583,308 inhabitants, had 454 teachers of all kinds, ninety-nine of them in the capital. Among white inhabitants, 17.50% of men and 12.13% of women knew how to read and write; among blacks, less than 3% in both categories had any education. There were in 1860 some 122 public schools and twenty-five private ones, attended by 2,396 boys and 1,092 girls. These figures continued to increase, so that by 1867 there were 10,081 students. The year 1866 saw new dispositions concerning the schools: all the important towns were to have one escuela superior, a second category of towns, an escuela elemental de primera clase each; and the rest of the towns, one escuela elemental de segunda clase. There were, in addition to these, many "incomplete" schools, and a few night schools and nursery schools; a total of 283 schools in the island. A newly created Inspección general de instrucción pública was to supervise the running of the schools and the application to them of state regulations, including the prohibition to use physical punishment. By 1874 the government insists that education is obligatory, as stipulated by an 1865 decree. Meanwhile, the head of that same government, fearful of the spread of separatist ideas (the TenYear War, or first war of independence, was still under way in Cuba) fired many local teachers appointed by the town councils acting independently - as they had been allowed to do - and replaced them with Spaniards. He justified this by enforcing the requirement that teachers have a degree from an Escuela Normal (Teachers College), which Puerto Rico did not have yet. This situation changed in 1876, when a new governor reinstated some teachers and made provisions to grant titles of teachers to those criollos who passed the appropriate examination. In 1878 the teaching career in Puerto Rico was unified with that of Spain, granting to the local maestros the same duties and rights enjoyed by those of Spain. In 1880 the schools were reorganized. By then there were 122 additional schools, and 16,759 children were being educated. Seventeen years later, when Puerto Rico was granted autonomous status, there were schools, including the so-called auxiliary schools, in practically all the towns of the island. There were also several private schools, including one run by protestants, in the island of Vieques, since 1870. The history of secondary and higher education in Puerto Rico expresses the efforts of the local bourgeoisie to extend to their country the benefits of higher education to which they felt entitled, and also to avoid having to travel to Santo Domingo, Caracas, Havana, or Spain in order to obtain secondary school and university diplomas. Since at least 1812 some cátedras or chairs devoted to advanced subjects were functioning in the convents of the Dominicans and the Franciscans - where Latin had been taught all along during the eighteenth century - and also under the sponsorship of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (Economics society of friends of the nation). These associations for the promotion of agriculture, industry, trade, and culture played a crucial role in the development of Puerto Rico and Cuba - in Cuba from the eighteenth century, when the aforementioned Sociedad was founded. In 1821 a liberal government in Madrid ordered the convents closed. The running of higher education was then taken over by the bishop at the Seminario de San Ildefonso, which combined the preparation for the priesthood with the teaching of secondary school (bachillerato) and even university subjects. The need to bring higher education to Puerto Rico was dramatized by the political turmoil on

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the continent (wars of independence) and in Santo Domingo, which prevented Puerto Ricans from attending the universities of Caracas and Santo Domingo. The Seminario continued to add cátedras, and in 1832 was officially opened for the instruction of the country's youth. It provided twelve scholarships for poor students, and took in thirty-three boarders. Between 1858 and 1878 the institution was run by the Jesuits. The diploma it granted to 221 bachilleres in that twenty-year period allowed its holders to continue their studies at any Spanish university, although the Colegio-Seminario was incorporated into the University of Havana. Needless to say only white boys of old Christian stock and born of legitimate marriages could be admitted to the Seminario. In 1873, during the period of the short-lived Spanish First Republic, an Instituto Civil de Segunda Ensenanza, i.e., a state-run and nominally lay secondary school (although at least initially the curriculum was to include the teaching of the Roman Catholic religion), was created in San Juan. Abolished the next year, for fear that it might breed separatist ideas, it was not reinstated until 1882. Some 432 students were enrolled. The second and third largest cities in the island, Ponce and Mayagüez, respectively, where some sort of secondary schools already existed, created schools affiliated with the Instituto, and other towns followed their example. By 1886 a total of 1,098 students appear in documents as enrolled in public and private secondary schools. Meanwhile the island had acquired a business school and some technical schools. A Teachers College was finally created in 1890. Since 1876 the Ateneo (a type of society devoted to the promotion of literature, the arts, and literary studies common throughout the Hispanic world) had been offering courses on certain university-level subjects. The students could then be examined in Havana and obtain their degrees from that university. Puerto Rico's wish to have its own university, which goes back to at least 1770, seemed by 1894 close to becoming a reality. The occupation of Puerto Rico by the United States meant the abrupt replacement of the Spanish school system by the American system. The post of Commissioner of Education was created in 1901. The commissioner was appointed directly by the President of the United States to supervise every aspect of the school system. The new education commission had the declared goal, as President McKinley stated to Commissioner Brumbaugh, of "putting the conscience of the American people in the islands of the sea" (Negrón [1971], 37). Not only were Puerto Rican schools to adopt the same plan used in American schools, including curriculum and text books, but the commissioners engaged in a consistent effort at Americanizing the school children, and their teachers as well, through the introduction of U.S. holidays and institutions and through study trips to the United States. In some instances, teachers who showed some resistance to this process were fired. An annual English examination was made mandatory, and teachers were ranked according to the grade they obtained in it. The key to the success of the Americanization of Puerto Rican schools - the means by which the whole island would eventually be thoroughly Americanized - was the use of English in the schools. To guarantee that this would happen it was mandated that each town having a grade school employ a native speaker of English as a teacher and that English become the language of instruction. Initially many young men who had gone to Puerto Rico with the army were employed as teachers; then others came looking for adventure. It was only later that professional teachers were hired, and at a higher salary than local teachers. For several decades the language problem - as the U.S. administration saw it - was to preoccupy Puerto Ricans, beginning, of course, with the

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teachers, who repeatedly complained about the effects of such an obtuse policy. The various political parties also participated in the struggle to impose or reject English, their position regarding independence or statehood affecting the orientation of the struggle. Meanwhile, the absurdity of trying to have the entire school curriculum taught in English by teachers who knew that language badly, to children who were only beginning to learn it and who spoke Spanish at home and among themselves, produced constant changes in policy. The first commissioner allowed Spanish in the elementary school, with English as a separate subject. In 1904 English was made the sole medium of instruction, except that Spanish was allowed in the first grade. In 1907 teaching in English was extended to the first grade and to rural schools; in 1913 it was ordered that a few subjects be taught in Spanish up to the fourth grade; the number of those subjects was increased in 1915 and extended to physiology in the fifth grade and to the teaching of Spanish. It was also recommended that oral and not written English be taught in the first grade. These changes in the policy were aimed at making the schools bilingual. The next commissioner (Huyke, 1921-30) emphasized the teaching of English in primary schools and pushed ruthlessly for Americanization at all levels. The commissioner who followed Huyke, José Padín, the first Puerto Rican to hold the position, made Spanish the language of instruction in the elementary school. But Padm was fired in 1937 and his policy was suspended as a reaction to the growing nationalist agitation. New and erratic changes regarding the use of English in the schools follow until 1946. In that year the island's legislature passed a law making Spanish the language of instruction at all levels. The law was vetoed by the President of the United States, but in 1948 the Puerto Rican Department of Education (the island was being granted progressively more autonomy by its metropolis) ordered that it be implemented. (It was not until 1991 that the country's parliament passed a law making Spanish Puerto Rico's official language.) English remained a subject to be taught from the first to the twelfth grade. The official acceptance of Spanish as the language of instruction in the schools gave new impulse to the changes in the curricula that had already been taking place since at least 1925, so as to make it reflect the national reality rather than that of the metropolis. It should be noted that private schools were allowed to use English as the medium of instruction, and that many do it, thus catering to the wishes of the bourgeoisie to have their children become bilingual. The American occupation translated itself also into a dramatic increase in the number of schools. In 1899 there were a total of 24,392 children enrolled in the island's schools (8,952 of them girls). This meant that only nine percent of the school-age population (ages 5 to 18) attended school. That percentage had grown to fifteen by 1901, and to thirty-one by 1910. By 1914, 207,101 children were enrolled in schools, or fifty percent of the school-age population (the percentages are much higher for the compulsory school-age population: aged 8 to 14). Although progress was enormous in relation to the state of public education in 1898, there were still many problems facing the extension of education, such as the lack of buildings and a huge student-teacher ratio, all of which affected the quality of the instruction. By 1946 the percentage of school-age children in school had increased only to fifty-four, while thirty-five percent of the population older than 25 had never attended school, and only 14.3 percent had gone beyond the eighth grade. Twenty-five percent of the population was illiterate in 1946. The state by then owned 1,644 buildings used for schools, and rented 980. The total number of junior high schools was ninety-two; they enrolled 56,000 students; another 20,000 were enrolled in forty-three senior high schools. There were also many private

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schools (fifty-nine in 1946). In 1952 Puerto Rico was devoting close to one-third of its budget to running the school system; the percentage of school-age children attending school was then sixtyseven percent, one of the highest in Latin America. However, the same problems mentioned above continued to affect public education, which could hardly keep pace with the growth of the population. In 1903 the Teachers College was transformed into the University of Puerto Rico, whose growth from a small institution with a few academic departments designed to train people for the most-needed professions, into a multi-purpose university with many campuses spread throughout the island has been phenomenal.

Cuba Education developed in Cuba in very much the same way as in Puerto Rico. The only differences between the two processes are due to Cuba's larger population and more prosperous economic situation. Until practically the nineteenth century the spread of public education depended exclusively on private initiative, whether by convents or by generous individuals who would found a school or hire a teacher for awhile. Some teaching orders established schools in Havana already in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1816 the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País was put in charge of supervising public education. The capital then had nine schools within the city walls, and nineteen outside them, attended by 1,689 white children and 112 blacks. The whole country counted 192 schools and 6,920 students enrolled in them. Twenty years later eighty-seven percent of the population was still without education. Some efforts were made in the ensuing years to improve the situation, including the requirement that teachers be properly trained. The fact that many schools - called de amigas - were run by black women who had been slaves, resulted in blacks being officially forbidden to teach since the authorities thought that white children should not be taught by blacks. Meanwhile private schools, most of them run by religious orders, proliferated. There were 210 for whites and twelve for blacks in the island in 1830; of the 5,089 children who attended them, 1,144 did not pay tuition, and 2,554 were supported by the Sociedad with the monies - three percent of their budget - that municipalities had to contribute to education. One out of every thousand children received some education by 1837. Worried about the increasing importance of the role that the Sociedad played in Cuban society and how this could help to spread separatist ideas, Spain took a direct role in the supervision of education with the 1844 plan already mentioned, which was followed by another one in 1863. The number of schools had grown to 286 by 1847. Of a total of 11,033 pupils, 7,351 paid some tuition. Several very prestigious lay private schools were operating in Havana and other cities by the 1850s, when the practice of sending their children to school in the United States began to spread among wealthy Cubans of liberal ideas. An Escuela Normal or Normal School was created in 1857 and then closed in 1868, when the first war of independence began. In 1864 three schools de instrucción primaria superior (a sort of junior high school) were created in Havana. The 1863 plan stipulated that the state was responsible for running public education and supervising private schools. It also gave the city councils a great deal of responsibility in the running of the schools. Finally, the plan

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included the creation of four state secondary schools in Havana, Matanzas, Puerto Principe, and Santiago de Cuba. Their curriculum was the same as that of the Spanish institutes, except that they were supposed to also provide training for careers in business and in agriculture and chemistry (in relation to the sugar industry). By 1895 there were six state secondary schools, one in each provincial capital, attended by 1,186 students. The 1880 plan had been, like the one in 1863, only partially enacted. It mandated the creation of provincial and municipal councils to supervise education, as well as the creation of teachers colleges in each of the six provincial capitals. It was not until 1890, the same year that Puerto Rico acquired its Escuela Normal, that two were established, or rather reestablished, both in Havana. In 1893 there were 898 public schools, attended by 35,000 children. At the end of Spanish rule there were only six escuelas superiores or high schools in the whole island. The illiteracy rate was, according to the 1899 census, 63.9 percent of the population, although it was probably higher. The figure seems less shocking when one considers that in 1861 Spain, with a population of fifteen million people, had twelve million illiterates, i.e., four out of every five persons did not know how to read and write. The U.S. interim administration gave a tremendous push to the spread of basic education. This was continued by the Cuban republic, especially during the first decades of its existence. A good part of the thrust of the educational effort was to replace the Spanish model by one thoroughly responsive to the reality and the needs of the new country, and that would also emphasize science and the role of experience. By 1958 Cuba had a total of 7,567 public primary schools attended by 17,355 children, and 665 private primary schools attended by 120,000 children. Close to three-quarters of the population had attended at least some years of primary school, making Cuba, with an illiteracy rate of 23.6 percent, one of the Latin-American countries where education was most widespread (only Argentina and Uruguay were more advanced). From 1959 onward the revolutionary government was to engage in a gigantic effort to extend education to the rural areas and to adults as well as to eliminate illiteracy. Only in 1728 did Cuba acquire the university it had been asking for since 1688. It was run by Dominican friars and organized, at least in principle - since in reality it lacked teachers - like the University of Alcalá and other Spanish universities, to give instruction in philosophy, morals, theology, law, medicine, and rhetoric. Meanwhile the secondary school founded by the Jesuits in 1724 evolved into an institution with university status, the Seminario de San Carlos y San Ambrosio (Seminary of St. Charles and St. Ambrose) or Conciliar (Counciliary). Because it did not employ the scholastic method used at the university, it had lay teachers and was more aware of new developments in the humanities and in the sciences, making it Cuba's best institution of higher learning until well into the nineteenth century. In the 1820s the University of Havana was secularized and some scientific methodology was introduced into its curriculum. The various educational plans promulgated by the Spanish government paid proportionally more attention to higher than to primary education. At the end of Spanish rule the University, which was authorized to award licenciaturas (Masters) and doctoral degrees in several disciplines, had a total of 107 professors and 381 students, most of them enrolled in the schools of law and medicine, with but a handful in the schools of sciences and of humanities. Since the early part of the century Cuba also had some vocational schools, including a school of design.

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Dominican Republic The history of education in Santo Domingo is not very different from the ones that we have just reviewed, except for the fact that it began earlier, due to Santo Domingo's having been the first Spanish colony in the New World and a viceroyalty for some time. Moreover, educational progress was thwarted when Spanish rule was interrupted by the cession of Santo Domingo to France. Soon after Santo Domingo became independent in 1821, the new nation was occupied by its neighbor to the West, Haiti. The Franciscan friars had a primary school in their convent as early as 1502, and the bishop created a public school in 1530. Santo Domingo was, in 1538, the first colony to obtain permission to have a university. The school run by the Dominicans became the Universidad de Santo Tomas de Aquino, with the same privileges enjoyed by the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá. Soon thereafter the school founded by the bishop, which had been endowed by a rich planter, also became a university. The Universidad de Santiago de la Paz did not lead an independent existence beyond the sixteenth century, and was, during the eighteenth, absorbed by the Jesuit college, which became a university as well. This third institution of higher learning functioned between 1747 and 1767, when the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and its colonies. The Universidad de Santo Tomas had the traditional four schools or faculties (theology, medicine, law, and arts), although the records show that the teaching of medicine had stopped for some time, and was only reinstated at the end of the seventeenth century. The university had a fine reputation and was attended by students from Cuba and Venezuela even after Havana and Caracas had their own universities, whose first rectores came from the faculty of the university in Santo Domingo. Since 1754 the university faculty included lay teachers; in 1786 it had fifty professors and approximately two hundred students. The university ceased to function during the French occupation (1801-08), reopened in 1815, and closed its doors again when the Haitian invaders forced all the young men into military service. In 1914 the Institute Profesional de Santo Domingo, which had been founded in 1866, closed in 1891, and reinstated in 1895, became the Universidad de Santo Domingo. The first attempts by the Dominican Republic at structuring the educational system are roughly contemporary with those of Spain regarding the schools of Cuba and Puerto Rico: they are gathered in the organic law of education of 1845. In 1853 the first institute or state-run secondary school was founded; in 1880, the Puerto Rican thinker Eugenio Maria de Hostos founded the Escuela Normal, whose curriculum was attacked by the Roman Catholic Church and the conservatives because of its positivistic philosophy. A preparatory school and a secondary school for women were created around the same time. Meanwhile, primary-school education continued to be largely neglected. It was not until 1918, under the U.S. occupation, that a comprehensive law regulating all the levels of the educational system was issued and enforced. It attempted to orient university education, in accordance with U.S. pragmatism, toward the sciences and utilitarian concerns. To this effect it eliminated several subjects from the curriculum and eliminated the School of Philosophy and Letters from the university as well. According to the 1970 census, nearly one-third of the population was illiterate.

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Bibliography Carnoy, Martin and Jorge Werthein. 1980. Cuba: cambio económico y reforma educativa (1955-1978). Mexico City: Nueva Imagen. Coll y Toste, Cayetano. 1970. Historia de la instrucción pública en Puerto Rico hasta el año de 1898. Bilbao: Editorial Vasco Americana. Fernandez Vanga, Epifanio. 1931. [1975]. El idioma de Puerto Rico y el idioma escolar de Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican Experience. New York: Arno Press. Granda, German de. 1972. Transculturación e interferencia lingüistica en el Puerto Rico contemporáneo. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Edil. Guerra y Sanchez, Ramiro, ed. 1952. Historia de la nación cubana. Vols. 2, 3, 4, 7, 10. Havana: Editorial Historia de la Nación Cubana. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. 1960. Vida intelectual de Santo Domingo, De mi patria; Las universidades, La cultura y las letras coloniales en Santo Domingo; in Obra critica. Ed. by Emma Susana Speratti Pinero. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Hoepelman, Vigilio. 1976. Historia cultural y politica de Santo Domingo. Vol. 1. N.p.: Publicaciones América. Marino Hernandez, Frank. 1975. El sistema educativo dominicano: Organización, comportamiento, resultados. Santo Domingo: Taller. Mendoza, Antonio C. 1937. [1974]. Historia de la educación en Puerto Rico (1512-1826). New York: AMS. Negrón de Montilla, Aida. 1971. Americanization in Puerto Rico and the Public-School System 1900-1930. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Edil. Osuna, Juan José. 1949. [1975]. A History of Education in Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican Experience. New York: Arno Press.

Listening to the Reader The Working-Class Cultural Project in Cuba and Puerto Rico MARÍA ELENA RODRÍGUEZ CASTRO Universidad de Puerto Rico

To the memory of Lisa Rodríguez In 1977, César Andreu Iglesias, a writer closely linked to the independence movement in Puerto Rico, edited an unusual manuscript: Memorias de Bernardo Vega (Memoirs of Bernardo Vega). Memorias was a rare survivor of the political and cultural tradition that, like its author, had been shaped during the first decades of this century by the labor struggles in the cigar-making workshop. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the Puerto Rican working class was struggling to maintain its own cultural institutions in the face of the agendas put forth by the dominant social class of Puerto Rico, the landowners and professionals tied to the new regime. Each class sought for itself the right to cultural representation, a notion closely associated with that of national representation. But one sector of the working class - composed of specialized craftspeople who sometimes had their own shops - was distinguished by a quality that would assure its members a voice in the debate over the future shape of society and culture: the access not only to the oral tradition characteristic of the popular culture, but also to written works, and this at a time when literacy was almost a privilege. In fact, the educated minority of the working class would end up bridging the gap between the oral and written traditions. This eventually resulted in a uniquely working-class ethos. By 1920, skilled workers such as tailors, typesetters, and cigar makers were beginning to demand a more active participation in the life of Puerto Rico. In this regard, the working class began to develop alternative political and social institutions for itself and the island. In fact, a working-class project had started to take shape as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. Although predominantly political, this project included among its central concerns the island's culture in both the broad and narrow senses of the word. By the 1930s, the outlines of this project were clearly defined. By the end of that same decade, however, it was already on the road to oblivion. Memorias records the project's decline, linking it with the weakening of the labor-union movement and the disappearance of the craftsperson class, which were occasioned by the advent of large, modern factories: "The truth is that the age of the cigar workers . . . was coming to an end."1 Another cause contributing to the rapid decline of working-class institutions was the cultural hegemony of the proprietary class and the rapid transfor-

1

Lo cierto es que la era de los tabaqueros ... estaba tocando a su fin (Vega [1977], 160).

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mation of that class's cultural ideology into cultural memory, i.e., the collective image formulated and spread by its intelligentsia through the elimination of texts considered improper and the canonization of texts designated appropriate. This does not mean, however, that the gaps left in cultural memory by the exclusion of texts go unfilled, that the excluded texts are completely wiped out; on the contrary, they persist on the margins of the canon, ready to become the nexus of new positions. Certain prestigious and widely read texts - for example, Antonio S. Pedreira's Insularismo (Insularism), 1934, and Tomas Blanco's Prontuario histórico de Puerto Rico (Historical compendium of Puerto Rico), 1935, in Puerto Rico; and Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez's Azucar y población en las Antillas (Sugar and population in the Antilles), 1935, and Jorge Manach's La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba (The crisis of high culture in Cuba), 1925 - clearly expressed the criollo view of the nation and its cultural manifestations. These essays, like other national metanarratives that appeared around that time in urban centers throughout Latin America, were attempts to provide an integrating and legitimizing reading of a certain concept of the nation; each essay tried to define the autochthonous for its respective country. The authors of these historical narratives also favored consensus as a rhetorical strategy and sought to erase or minimize any sign of disagreement or dissension. Memorias de Bernardo Vega thus caught the attention of those intellectuals who - like César Andreu Iglesias - were among the dissenters in the ranks of the Puerto Rican intelligentsia of the 1970s. Taken up by these dissenters, Memorias was a text - or a pretext - that contributed greatly to the rescue and redemption of the working-class experience. In these memoirs of an old cigar roller who had immigrated to New York, certain critical and radicalized readers of the 1970s and 1980s with a vested interest in the working-class agenda were provided with an alternative version of national identity, with a new historical narrative that could serve as a sort of antitext to the dominant cultural memory. While the canonical texts evoked the bygone days of a liberal aristocracy, Memorias - strongly influenced, like its new readers, by the urgent necessities of its time - found its origins in a past of conspiracy and smuggling. And while the more privileged discourse presented the criollo vision of a harmonious nation - one founded on the recovery and reimplementation of traditional values such as Hispanicism, Catholicism, the purity of language, and the social hierarchy - Memorias proposed a heterogeneous vision of the world. Memorias belongs to that broad group of works that have frequently been denied the honorific title of literature and pigeonholed into other specialized disciplines such as history and sociology. Interposed between high culture and popular culture, they have been accorded the dubious distinction of being called minor texts. In both Cuba and Puerto Rico, there were also other texts in which the voice of the working class could be heard. Among these were announcements, newspaper articles, essays, and short plays, often buried in kitchen-table press publications with limited distribution. From their position on the far periphery of canonical literature, working-class texts, like the testimonial literature they so closely resemble, claimed the right of access to the written word and with it recognition, which promised to alter both the structure of the literary establishment and its hierarchies. Thus, for example, the Cuban craftspeople's weekly, La Aurora - a newspaper founded in a cigar factory by Saturnio Martinez, a worker who had taught himself to read and write - editorializes in its first number: "Today we join our brothers, the working-class intelligentsia, who show such enthusiasm

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for the advancement of science and literature and for the spread of enlightenment among the masses."2 As the quotation above demonstrates, an admiration for education and the desire to possess it, combined with the wish to be part of the progress of society, legitimize the intentions of the working-class project and are the foundation of its writings. The positivist influences apparent in these writings, which are similar to those seen in nineteenth-century liberal criollo thought, point to a fundamental aspect of the working-class cultural project: it combines both popular culture (the center of which is the spoken word) and high culture (the center of which is the written word). According to Angel Rama: "The written word appeared to be a tool for social advancement, for public respectability, and for a person's incorporation into the centers of power."3 In the case of the working-class culture, this process of advancement can be traced to the social origins of the craftsperson class and to that branch of it that was its vanguard: the cigar makers. The experience of these urban tobacco workers was unique. According to Ortiz, even into the middle of the nineteenth century tobacco was rolled at home or in small cigar-rolling workshops called chinchales. In Puerto Rico, Quintero Rivera has studied how the material activity of tobacco production and the political consciousness of the cigar workers developed around the low-production economy that prevailed in urban centers. As producers of merchandise and services, the cigar makers constituted a culture different from both of the prevailing economies in the countryside: the subsistence economy of the poor tobacco farmer and the paternalistic economy of the sugar planters. In the small urban centers the cigar workers inhabited, they developed social structures, social hierarchies, and modes of behavior that reflected both the specific interests and necessities of their class and the independent nature of their work. To the paternalism and the patronizing attitudes of the proprietary classes they opposed another tradition: parejería, a conduct that, even in its mimicry of the prevailing patterns of behavior, denoted an "irreverence for the social hierarchy and the placement of oneself, through one's social conduct, in a class reserved by the dominant culture for higher social strata."4 One relatively unexplored aspect of the Caribbean craftsperson class is its multiethnic composition. This aspect seems to constitute yet another difference between urban tobacco workers and members of other classes. In Cuba, according to Ortiz: "At first the work in tobacco and cigar shops was in the hands of people of color, freedmen and Chinese."5 Later, they were joined by (white) criollos who were forbidden to own tobacco plantations or to hold the expanding industry's betterpaying jobs (Rivero Mufiiz [1964-65], 2:326). Thus we see that racial, social, and ideological differences divided the Cuban and Puerto Rican cigar maker, and the craftsperson class as a whole, from the rural farmer as well as from the dominant criollo and peninsular classes. While the campesinos were considered a passive, politically indifferent mass, the craftsperson class aspired to literacy, and this ambition drew its members closer to the literate, cultured way of life of the dominant class than to the oral tradition of the campesinos. 2 Venimos a hermanarnos a ese grupo de obreres de la inteligencia que tanto afân manifiesta por el adelanto de las ciencias y de la literatura y por la difusión de las luces entre las masas de la sociedad (quoted in Portuondo [1961], 25). 3 La letra apareció como la palanca del ascenso social, de la respetabilidad publica y de la incorporación de los centros de poder (Rama [1984], 74). 4 Irreverencia a la jerarquía social y el colocarse en la interacción social en nivelés asignados por la cultura dominante para estratos sociales superiores (Quintero Rivera [1978], 108). 5 Al principio el laboreo de tabaquerías y cigarrerías estuvo en manos de la gente de color, de los libertos y de los chinos (Ortiz [1978], 78).

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But the craftsperson class's own experiences and cultural institutions fell somewhere between these extremes, and it was out of these experiences and cultural institutions that the working-class cultural project grew. La Aurora, whose establishment in 1865 represented the creation of proletarian journalism, contained news, proclamations, editorials, and various kinds of articles, many of which urged social reforms such as the creation of schools for working men and women, the admittance of working men and women to the reading rooms of the Biblioteca de la Sociedad Económica del País, and above all, the encouragement of reading aloud in the nation's cigar factories. In Puerto Rico, the working-class press was founded in 1874, with El Artesano, at a time when considerable sympathy, fostered by Spain's First Republic, existed between the artisan and working classes and the criollo liberals. In both countries a reform-oriented press had been established in which, in Cuba at least, "the vanguard of the emerging proletariat, the principal ideologues of the sugar aristocracy, and numerous petit bourgeois intellectuals"6 were working together. It was not until the end of the century that this press formulated its own social and cultural agenda in opposition to the dominant criollo model, precisely at a time when that model was undergoing radical revision. In 1897, one year before the U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean, the newspaper Ensayo Obrero called for "the union of all salaried workers regardless of race, creed, or color, with no homeland but the Factory and no religion but Work."7 This quotation shows how far the working people's rhetoric diverged from the nationalist rhetoric that was already beginning to spread through Latin America and to demand, among other things, organic, harmonious nations in which the real conflicts of race, society, and economics would be obliterated. Along with the independent press, other organizations helped to form the working-class voice and to secure it a wider hearing. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, mutual benefit societies had been active in the major Cuban and Puerto Rican urban centers. They took the specific forms of brotherhoods, artisans' casinos and guilds, trade unions, and relief societies, all of which fostered the organization of the incipient proletariat and shaped themselves to its cultural as well as material needs. For example, these organizations translated concern for the cultural and educational level of the workers into lectures, literary contests, night schools, and libraries. In Puerto Rico, the first of these libraries was established in the Casino in San Juan, in 1880 (Campos Orta [1974], 8-10; Garcia and Quintero [1982], 20-21). Initially what was done in these cultural centers reflected the customs and prejudices of high culture, but soon the nature and dynamics of these working-class institutions began to spin differences out of the similarities. The culmination of this process can be observed in Memorias, the narrative style of which internalizes the differentiating impulse through the appropriation of privileged topoi from the literature of the dominant culture. This, in fact, produces parody. The most obvious appropriation/ transgression lies in the choice of genre: in the autobiographical form itself. Vega begins the story of his life by warning the reader that "I shall have nothing to say about my private life, which is of very little account."8 That refusal erases all traces of his individual life and with them the memories

6 La vanguardia del naciente proletariado, los principales ideólogos de la sacarocracia y numerosos intelectuales pequenos burgueses (Fornet [1975], 25). 7 La unión de todos los productores asalariados sin distinción de razas, creencias y colores, sin más patria que el Taller y sin más religión que el Trabajo (quoted in Dávila [1988], 28). 8 De mi vida intima no diré nada, que eso poco importa (Vega [1977], 37).

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of childhood and adolescence that are usually privileged in conventional autobiographical narratives. Vega opts instead to socialize his persona; to tell the stories of others, namely, the first Puerto Rican immigrants to New York; and thereby to subordinate the private self (the I) to a public self (the we). This posture is dramatically emphasized by his further refusal to use the first-person pronoun - a pattern "corrected" by his editor. By adopting this socialized persona, Vega can postulate origins and genealogies for himself that are more in tune with his version of history. He can then leave these images as a legacy to his contemporaries and to future generations, who "are ignorant of' the past he has constructed. It is precisely through Bernardo Vega's insistence on merging himself into that line of honorable, hardworking artisans and laborers that he is legitimized as its amanuensis, its chronicler. The text is presented, then, as the repository for the memories of a man who functions, first and foremost, as the representative of a group - a man both narrator of and actor in that collective series of events. The choice of genre is, moreover, an indication of the conflict that existed between the working-class culture and high culture. Until recently, with the emergence of what has been called testimonial narrative, autobiography was traditionally a mode of discourse reserved for members of the intellectual elite. From the point of view of the dominant cultural tradition, the silence of other social groups was simply one of their natural characteristics. This is another reason Memorias, which tells the story of a life contemporary with the rise of the criollo project for Puerto Rican culture, is an important text. The use of the autobiographical form allowed the working class access to a region in which it had previously been forbidden to trespass: the presentation and interpretation of its own history. One last element must be added to the picture: the ideologies that influenced the working-class institutions and sociocultural practices, which would leave their mark on texts such as Memorias. Rationalism, universalism, the cult of progress, and the idea of the transformation of nature as the basis of human advancement were ideologies that linked the working class to the most progressive currents of European and American thought and to one important branch of criollo liberalism in the nineteenth century (Campos Orta [1974], 16-21; Quintero Rivera [1978], 117-25). But the term is linked, not made identical to. Atheism, woman's rights, and libertarian socialism, for example, were marginal components of the general ideology of progress, but they were central to the working-class project.

*** . . . when one saw the order and sobriety of the workmen and the silence in which they listen to the reading. (La Aurora, Cuba, 1866) The cigar makers' most memorable institution was the lector, who read to them in the workshop. La Aurora indicates that the first instance of reading aloud in a Caribbean cigar factory was around 1865, in the Havana workshop called El Figaro. In this shop, there would be "one [worker] who would read the chosen texts aloud while the others worked, and each roller would contribute his

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share to make up the pay lost by the reader during the time given to reading . . . getting so familiar with the books that they became best friends and favorite diversions."9 According to Fernando Ortiz, the model for this reading was derived from two very different sources: the galleys of prisoners set to cigar making during the mid-nineteenth century in the prison called the Arsenal, and the public reading rooms in vogue at the time in the United States, which were to become an index of the democratizing, civilizing ethos of the U.S. bourgeoisie. Both of these models represented a threat to the agenda of the dominant criollo and peninsular classes. Because the cigar rollers loved to hear the lector read aloud, an editorial in El Siglo, an organ of the Cuban reform-oriented sugar aristocracy, accuses them of challenging the traditional division between manual and intellectual labor. The accusation was made despite the facts that the owners of the shops initially reserved the right to choose or approve the texts read and that the practice fit in with the program advanced by the reform ideologues, who saw, in the crisis of the slave system and in the emergence of the proletariat, the need for mass education as a deterrent against explosive racial or social conflicts. In 1866, the governor of Havana outlawed reading in the cigar workshops, in response to a campaign waged by the conservative Diario de la Marina, a newspaper that faithfully reflected the opinions of the Spanish merchants. In the governor's edict, the public was alerted to the fact that: "With the tolerance of public readings, the congregation of men working at their craft becomes a political caucus, and this simple, humble, and hardworking class of our society - which lacks the education to prepare it to distinguish between false theories and those that are useful, licit, and just is easily shaken and deceived by the exaggerated interpretations of the doctrines it hears."10 The attempts to control the readings, as well as their prohibition, were but one aspect of the general struggle for control of information that was being waged in the mid-nineteenth century by the dominant classes in Cuba, for whom society was changing rapidly. Thus the initial attitude of encouragement became censure and even outright censorship. In both Cuba and Puerto Rico, reading was now prohibited; the education of the masses was to be neither initiated nor carried out by the masses themselves. The future of reading in the workshop would be erratic from this point on. In Cuba, it would be reinstated in 1880 and prohibited again in 1896. In Puerto Rico the owner of one of the largest workshops of the time, La Ultramarina, tried without success to eliminate reading in 1897; in this way, the status of the practice in Puerto Rico began to mirror the Cuban pattern of prohibitions and reinstatements. It is also important to keep in mind that in the canonical cultural histories of the West Indies written in this era, this epic working-class struggle did not occupy a single line. Because of this official silence, which is closely linked to the censorship described above, it is necessary to rediscover not only the history of this love of listening to the readings, but the list of what was read, as well. Early on, in 1865, we find, among scientific tracts and biographies of edifying lives, such classics of liberal political and economic thought as Curso de economia politica (Course in political 9 Uno que en alta voz lea obras escogidas en tanto que los demás trabajan, para cuyo efecto cada operario contribuye con su correspondiente cuota a fin de resarcir el jornal que el lector deja de utilizar durante el tiempo que emplea en la lectura . . . familiarizândose con los libros de tal modo que serán sus mejores amigos y su mejor divertimiento (Portuondo [1961], 35). 10 Con la tolerancia de las lecturas públicas, vienen a convertirse en círculos políticos las reuniones de los artesanos y esta clase de la sociedad sencilla y laboriosa, que carece de instrucción preparatoria para poder distinguir y apreciar las falsas teorías de lo que es util, lícito y justo, deslumbra y alucina fácilmente con la exagerada interpretación de las doctrinas que escucha (quoted in Portuondo [1961], 39).

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economy) by Alvaro Florez y Estrada, 1828, La honra y el trabajo (Honor and work), 1867, an uplifting moral and philosophical novel by Manuel Fernández y Gonzalez, and several histories of the United States, Spain, and the French Revolution (Fornet [1975]; Portuondo [1961]; Vega [1977]). But by 1884, with the rise of anarchist propaganda, the material chosen for reading signaled a decided turn away from reformism, to include texts by the Catalonian José Llunás and later, by Proudhon and Bakunin. For the masses, education had become synonymous with political radicalization. This phenomenon was strengthened by the emigration of cigar workers first to Tampa and Key West and later to cities on the east coast of the United States. This wave of emigration was caused by the closing of Cuban cigar factories due to the trade and tariff measures passed in 1868 by the United States, and it also coincided with the flight from Cuba of many combatants in the Ten Years' War. In exile, former runaway slaves and cigar workers made common cause, and the working-class ideology was nationalized. In 1891, on a visit to Tampa, the Cuban patriot José Marti called cigar workers "graduates of the workshop, [who have combined the] generous leaves of the tobacco [with the] fundamental leaves of the book."11 In a very literal sense, a text would, in fact, emerge from this combination: the order calling for the insurrection of 1895 was wrapped in a tobacco leaf by the cigar roller Fernando Figueredo. In their final phase, during the first decades of the twentieth century, readings in the cigar factory had become distinctly hybrid, a fusion of national texts and literature from the European avant-garde, of realist or naturalist novels and European social doctrine. By the end of the 1930s, the cigar workshop had given way to the tobacco-industry factory that produced both cigars and cigarettes. The love of listening to the readings disappeared due to this changed environment and to the general collapse of the working-class cultural project in the wake of populism. That love would remain in the oral accounts of many of the survivors and it was inscribed in a handful of texts - mostly by immigrants - but the practice itself died out.

*** In the factory, the cigar roller sits as he performs his labor, and he enjoys the pleasures and benefits of talking and listening. (Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar) In 1961 Jesus Colón published a collection of vignettes entitled A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. Like Bernardo Vega, Colón was one of many immigrants who had worked at the cigar-rolling tables of Cuba and Puerto Rico and who had, as socialists, taken an active part in the culture and politics of their countries. These immigrants had settled in New York just before World War I, when the cigar workshops had already begun to fail. The progress and technology so admired by the craftsperson class had led, paradoxically, to the disappearance of the world in which that class had always lived. In the cases of Vega and Colón, therefore, we are presented with two texts noncontemporary with the formation of the working-class social and cultural project. These texts, written for the new 11

Graduados del taller, . . . la hoja generosa del tabaco . . . hoja fundadora del libro (quoted in Jorge [1937], 121).

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waves of immigration, which the authors perceive to be diffuse and heterogeneous, offer the possibility of a past whose center is not the criollo estate of the nineteenth century, as the dominant culture's texts posited, but rather the harmony and order of the chinchal. The first recollection in Colón's book returns him to that setting: "When I was a boy in Cayey, my hometown in Puerto Rico, we lived in a house in back of which was a big cigar factory. Every morning, starting around ten, a clear, strong voice coming from the big factory came through my window. It had a tinge of the oratorical about it. . . . Later, upon inquiring, I came to know that the man up on the platform was responsible for the clear, strong voice. He was called 'The Reader.' . . . Some of these readers became very famous throughout the cigar-manufacturing towns of Puerto Rico. There was one who, at the very end of the day's work, used to close the book he was reading and continue to 'read' from memory to the workers. Some of the cigar makers had taken the trouble to bring a copy of the book to work in order to follow the reader from his close [sic] book just to see if he left something out" (Colón [1982], 11). This vignette is particularly revealing when we compare the rhetorical practices in the workshop with the rhetoric of the culturalist discourse that the criollo intelligentsia used in composing their own national metanarratives. This comparison is central, in fact, to one of our main themes: the dialogical relationship between high culture and the development of alternative forms of cultural expression. One of the main differences between the dominant rhetoric and the practice of reading aloud in the tobacco factory lies in the role, in the former, of what has been called "the voice of the masters," a figure whose function González Echeverría has claimed: "is to plumb the depths of language and history in order to render the voice of culture articulate and apt for dissemination." In short, to turn this voice - pure, autochthonous - into a source of authority (Gonzalez Echeverria [1985], 14). The tone of this voice is suitable for monologues or lectures but not for dialogues or readings; it is authoritarian rather than responsive to the desires of its auditors. The strategy of this master's voice had gained prestige with the publication of Rodó's Ariel and had spread throughout the Hispanic Caribbean in texts such as Pedreira's Insularismo and Manach's La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba. The use of this voice gives rise to a narrative situation of false orality: it appears at first glance that the operational distance of the written word has been abolished and the immediacy of the spoken word has been instituted in its place. However, the portrayal of a reading chamber in which a teacher and his students are assembled reveals the voice's true nature. Literate culture speaks through the "enduring vibration" of this master's voice, and the knowledge imparted becomes doctrine, to be disseminated by his entranced disciples. The reader in the tobacco workshop, on the other hand, became the intermediary between two cultural systems that reflected two opposing forms of social discourse: the written word, which governed the culture of the dominant classes, and the spoken word of the subordinate class. The reader also interacted with his audience - who participated constantly in the reading process thereby becoming an intermediary between the orderly, canonical, and systematic archives of culture and the particular needs and interests of his audience as well. "He dedicated the morning shift to telegraph information, the news of the day, and articles on current events. In the afternoon he read more substantial works, both political and literary . . . the subjects of which would alternate: after a work on a philosophical, political, or scientific subject would come a novel. He would select

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from among novels by Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, José Maria Vargas Vila, Pérez Galdós, Palacio Valdés, Dostoyevski, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy. . . . All of these authors were well known by the cigar makers of the time. At first the reader of the factory would choose the books on his own. Readings for pure entertainment tended to be the rule then. . . . But as the workers developed their own political opinions, they began to take an active part in the selection. The preference for social doctrines became very pronounced among them. They would listen to [readings of] Gustave Le Bon, Ludwig Büchner, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Bakunin. . .. And not a single cigar maker would fall asleep during the reading."12 Within this new context of a subordinate culture listening to someone reading, the texts were "misread," that is, their original meaning was replaced by a new reading. We are not in the presence, therefore, of that process of learning traditionally associated with creative and imaginative leisure, which has been canonized by high culture: in the factory, reader, text, and audience joined harmoniously to create the world of labor. "When we got excited about some passage, we would show our approval by banging our knives on the rolling table. This unique way of applauding would echo from one end of the factory to the other, like a symphony."13 The texts were read and savored - and applauded - in the crowded setting of the cigar workshop. And the audience listened while they worked, thus nullifying the bourgeois dichotomy between manual and intellectual labor. Knowledge is an inseparable part of everyday life, and in the workshop it became a freely circulating property for the consumption of all. Workers educated themselves, and they did so, not through private and solitary reading, but through public, shared knowledge, subject to constant reinterpretation. And so, in their socially assigned setting, texts, topics, and techniques of high culture changed in both meaning and function. Listening to the reader transformed the workers' cultural system into a field where they could appropriate new, previously forbidden experiences, and could even change the meaning of those experiences, establishing new boundaries of ownership and belonging. There is one last aspect left to discuss. During the process of initial mimesis and appropriation of, and progressive differentiation from, the dominant cultural paradigms, the working class never completely cut itself off from the dominant culture. As we have seen, the working class appropriated the dominant culture's signs, and even parodied them. It challenged the exclusivity of the written word as an index of social standing and democratized the word through the voice of its readers. It oralized the written word through the rhetoric of its agitators and through the marked oral inflections of its texts, many of which are collages of other voices and testimonies. These texts - Memorias, for example - seem disorganized at first glance, because they do not distinguish between high and low, between great events and personal stories, between the big guys and the little people; they

12 El turno de la manana lo dedicaba a la información cablegráfica, las noticias del día y artículos de actualidad. El turno de la tarde para obras de enjundia, tanto políticas como literarias . . . se alternaban los temas, a una obra de asunto filosófico, politico o científico le sucedía una novela. Esta se seleccionaba entre las obras de Emilio Zola, Alejandro Dumas, Victor Hugo, Gustavo Flaubert, Julio Verne, Pierre Loti, José Maria Vargas Vila, Pérez Galdós, Palacio Valdés, Dostoievsky, Gogol, Gorki, Tolstoy. . . . Todos estos autores eran bien conocidos por los tabaqueros de su tiempo. Al principio el lector de la fábrica, por su cuenta, escogía las obras. Predominaba, entonces, la lectura de puro entretenimiento. . . . Pero con el desarrollo politico de los tabaqueros, éstos comenzaron a intervenir en la selección. Se impuso la preferencia por las doctrinas sociales. Se leia a Gustavo Le Bon, Luis Büchner, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Bakunin. . . . Conste que ningún tabaquero se dormía (Vega [1977], 59). 13 Cuando nos entusiasmâbamos con algún pasaje, se demostraba la aprobación tocando repetidamente con las chavetas sobre la tabla de hacer cigarros. Esta particular forma de aplaudir resonaba como una sinfonia de un extremo a otro del taller (Vega [1977], 60).

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are largely grab bags of information from diverse sources and of widely different origins. The class of workers that we are dealing with ignored the specializations of modern bourgeois knowledge, preferring that its knowledge be without boundaries and even, to a certain extent, asystematic. The workers wrote and rewrote their texts in the dizzying whirl of experiences they gained in the working-class struggles of those decades. But they did not conceal their admiration for the systems and institutions of the bourgeois intellectual culture. They aspired, rather, to convert that culture into their own, working-class culture, to cut it to fit new frames. And so, since the university was the favored institution of propertied Latin Americans - representing the road to progress and modernity as well as the setting in which that class's texts could be spread and their plan for the nation propagated - we find Bernardo Vega, the old cigar roller, ending his memoirs by endowing the chinchal with the grandeur of a working-class university, the cigar workers being its officiants: "With workers of such caliber, the cigar factory might have been a university."14

Translated by Andrew Hurley, Lisa Rodriguez, and Carlos Rodriguez.

Bibliography Campos Orta, Ricardo. 1974. Apuntes sobre la expresión cultural obrera en Puerto Rico. Universidad de Puerto Rico: Colegio de Ciencias Sociales. Mimeo. (This is probably the first comprehensive essay on workingclass cultural expression and its evolution from mimesis of high culture to the point where it had an independent status.) Colón, Jesus. [1961]. 1982. A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. New York: International Publishers. (This collection of vignettes deals with the experiences of a black Puerto Rican socialist immigrant to New York in the first decades of this century.) Dávila, Rubén. 1985. Teatro obrero en Puerto Rico (1900-1920). Rio Piedras: Edil. (This annotated anthology of proletarian theater is organized into sections that deal with themes such as the struggle for emancipation and art and protest.) —. 1988. El derribo de las murallas. Río Piedras: Cultural. (This work uncovers the intellectual origins of Puerto Rican socialism in the working-class periodicals and institutions of the first decades of this century.) Fornet, Ambrosio. 1975. La lectura: Proletariado y cultura nacional. Casa de las Américas. 16.93:22-32. (This text explores the emergence, impact, and radicalism of the social literature of the nineteenth-century Cuban working class and the relationship of this discourse to national culture.) Garcia, Gervasio, and Angel Quintero. 1982. Desafío y solidaridad. Río Piedras: Huracán. (This brief history follows the Puerto Rican proletarian movement from its trade-union identity in the nineteenth century to its present form.) González Echeverría, Roberto. 1985. The Voice of the Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press. (This is an important study of the role and authority of intellectuals in modern Latin America.) Jorge, Gaspar. 1937. Influencia del tabaquero en la trayectoria revolucionaria de Cuba. Revista Bimestre Cubana. 39. (first semester): 100-21. (This is an essay on the history of the tobacco workers and their struggles.) Ortiz, Fernando. [1940]. 1978. Contrapunteo del tabaco y del azucar. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. (This work is a social, economic, and cultural interpretation of Cuban nationality.) Pedreira, Antonio S. [1934]. 1970. Insularismo. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena. (This text has become the canonized version of the Puerto Rican national ethos.) 14

Con trabajadores de ese calibre, la fâbrica de cigarros parecía una universidad (Vega [1977], 59).

Listening to the Reader:

The Working-Class

Cultural Project in Cuba and Puerto Rico

45

Pérez, Erick. 1984. La lectura en los talleres de tabaco en Puerto Rico. La torre del viejo. 1.1:37-38. (This is a brief but well-documented essay on the readings in the tobacco factories.) Portuondo, José. 1961. La Aurora y los comienzos de la prensa y de la organizatión obrera en Cuba. Cuba: Imprenta Nacional de Cuba. (An extraordinary study of the first Cuban working-class publication, the weekly La Aurora, this work includes valuable excerpts.) Quintero Rivera, Angel. 1978. Socialista y tabaquero: La proletarización de los artesanos. Sin Nombre. 8.4:10137. (This sociological essay is one of the first and most comprehensive devoted to the study of the proletarianization of Puerto Rican peasants and craftsmen.) Rama, Angel. 1984. La ciudad letrada. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte. (This is a cultural history of the development of the urban-based Latin American intelligentsia and its relationship to power structures and discourses.) Ramos, Julio. 1992. Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Luisa Capetillo. Río Piedras: Huracân. (A critical study of the cultural ideologies of the Puerto Rican proletarian movement through the writings of one of its most prominent figures, the anarchist and tobacco reader Luisa Capetillo.) Rivero Muniz, José. 1965. Tabaco: Su historia en Cuba. 2 vols. Havana: Instituto de Historia, Comisión Nacional de la Academia de Ciencias de la República de Cuba. (This work deals with the history of tobacco in Cuba from 1492 to the present century; from tobacco planting to the tobacco industry.) Vega, Bernardo. 1977. Memorias de Bernardo Vega. Ed. by César Andreu Iglesias. Río Piedras: Huracân. (These memoirs of the immigrant socialist cigar maker have been read as the sociological and the literary narrative of his own life as well as that of the Puerto Rican community in New York.)

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

Islands and Territories

Dominican Literature and Its Criticism Anatomy of a Troubled Identity SILVIO TORRES-SAILLANT Hostos Community College New York City

I was followed by a crowd of sorrows, as if a Trans-Siberian track ran past these Dominican palms, and women rubbed one felt boot against the other, lined up for bread under Columbus's bronze stare. (Yevgeny Yevtushenko [1991], 577) Preamble The Dominican Republic shares with Haiti the island of Santo Domingo, the epicenter of Caribbean historical experience. The first settlement of Europeans, the first genocide of aborigines, and the first cohort of African slaves in the archipelago began here. Santo Domingo initiated racial mixture, religious syncretism, linguistic nativization, and the overall creolizing process that characterizes Caribbean culture. Original testing ground for the plantation, it inaugurated the economic institution around which Caribbean colonial life revolved. The island served as arena for the first aboriginal revolt, the first uprising of disinherited Europeans, and the first black slave insurrection, thus begetting the tradition of political resistance that has marked the lives of Antilleans so dramatically. As a cultural and political entity, then, the Caribbean started here, on the geographical locale that houses both Dominicans and Haitians. Dominican literature, however, has generally suffered exclusion from Caribbean overviews in a way that Haitian literature has not. The explanation of that exclusion may reside in the fact that the surveys prepared by Dominican scholars rarely link Dominican texts with the cultural forms, the thematic proclivities, and the stylistic choices that give the likes of Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Ana Lydia Vega, Nicolas Guillén, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and George Lamming their distinct regional accent. Elsewhere we have proposed an explanation for the meager place occupied by Dominican letters internationally. As a Caribbean corpus, this literature shares the disdain with which Latin-American literary scholars have generally viewed Antillean writing (Torres-Saillant [1990], 136-37). But the little regard enjoyed by Dominican texts even within the Caribbean itself has to do primarily with the reticence of Dominican intellectuals to assert their country's cultural link and affinity with the rest of the region (Torres-Saillant [1991], 172-79). The disdainful attitude of foreign critics, I would venture to say, derives necessarily from that local reticence. For practical reasons, scholars writing from the outside normally depend on opinions prevalent in the individual

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countries to produce their surveys or construct their panoramic views (Torres-Saillant [1989], 84). If local critics disdain the country's texts so will foreign critics. But this essay will attempt to show that the scholars have not spoken accurately of Dominican texts. The argument here is that Dominican texts, when examined without the obstructive interference of the established critical discourse, can yield their unmistakable Caribbeanness, their distinct kinship with the general corpus of the region. The following pages will try to shed light on the historical dynamics which give rise to the bifurcation of Dominican literature and its criticism. I will pursue this analysis by first discussing the concepts of Dominican race, culture, and class orientation as understood by the intellectuals who have forged the standard discourse on Dominican literature. After testing their assumptions against the evidence yielded by the texts themselves, I will venture to suggest an approach to Dominican literature that may bring it into a more harmonious dialogue with its criticism. In addition to doing greater justice to this literature, we may hope to show how the local corpus can be understood in terms of the larger Caribbean literary tradition.

The Problem of Chronology Dominican literary critics and historians have normally assessed the literary production of their country without regard for its cultural specificity. They have shown little concern as to whether Dominican writing might draw aesthetically on autochthonous expressions. As a result, they have scarcely shown any curiosity regarding the socioaesthetic kinship of Dominican letters with the literary tradition of the Antillean archipelago. For, as we argue here, the two are inextricably related. The closer we get to Dominican cultural authenticity, the more obvious the connection with the cultural heritage of the Caribbean region. Yet, critics have been satisfied to look at the country's texts through the prism of values derived from Western literature and its continental Latin-American tributary. Even at this time, when Caribbean intellectuals have unabashedly embraced postures of cultural self-affirmation and adamantly launched the quest for creole values, Dominican literary criticism has remained attached to Eurocentric schemes of thought. A now classic study by Carlos Federico Pérez traces the development of Dominican verse almost exclusively in terms of successive stages corresponding to the intellectual and aesthetic currents prevalent in the West. He studies Salomé Ureña in the context of Neoclassicism, José Joaquin Pérez through Romanticism, Gastón Deligne through post-Romanticism, with other major figures falling under Realism, Rationalism, Modernismo, and post-Modernismo (Pérez [1987], 129, 145, 171). He does not feel the need to ask himself whether the evolution of Dominican poetry might in any way obey compulsions outside the procession of Western isms. Commentators on Dominican letters have also generally ignored a serious question of chronology. They beg the question of identity: at what point can the residents of Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo be called Dominicans? Settled by Spaniards in 1492, Santo Domingo passed to the colonial possession of England, briefly, of France, for a significant time, and was unified under Haitian rule twice. As Abelardo Vicioso has intimated, one can gather from the following lines, written by a priest named Juan Vázquez from Santiago de Los Caballeros in the early nineteenth century, a sense of confused nationality as a result of the multiple changes in colonial authority: "Spanish I was born yesterday / in the afternoon I became French / Ethiopian I was in the night / today English I am,

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they say. / My Lord, what in the end will I be?."1 The little poem reveals an intuitive awareness of a sense of national identity, but the speaker has not yet articulated it with any precision. In El gran incendio (The great fire), 1969, Pedro Mir has traced the earliest vestiges of the Dominican people to the seventeenth century. Early in that century, the Spanish colonial authorities failed to contain illegal commerce between their subjects and the merchant ships of Spain's European rivals. At a loss for an effective deterrent, they decided to burn down the pertinent areas. The space vacated by the flames eventually became the seat of a French colony, Saint Domingue, contiguous to the remainder of the Spanish colony, Santo Domingo. This territorial bifurcation in time would lead to the birth of the Republic of Haiti (1804) in the West and the Dominican Republic (1844) in the East. It appears, then, that the limits of chronology do not sanction the view that equates the history of the island of Santo Domingo with the history of the Dominican Republic, an equation that seems evident in the works of literary critics and historians at home and abroad. Assuming that Dominican nationality began the very day Christopher Columbus set foot on the island, the prevailing wisdom concurs with Joaquin Balaguer in saying that "the history of Dominican literature starts with the name of Columbus."2 Only recently has a literary scholar seen fit to challenge the traditional assumption and to offer an alternative model regarding the chronology of Dominican nationality as it pertains to the development of the country's literary production. Vicioso concludes that one cannot adequately speak of a national literature in colonial times "because the historical forces which would give rise to the Dominican nation had not yet come into place and, therefore, there did not exist a national consciousness that would express itself in literature."3

Colonial Nostalgia and Decay Ignoring the problem of chronology has led Dominican literary scholars into a trap. They have fallen prey to a historiographical model that draws a descending line of greatness from a golden age dated in the early days of the colony through successive periods of mournful decay. This vision nostalgically evokes the glorious beginnings of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, relishing the memory that the likes of Bartolomé de Las Casas, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Fray Antón de Montesinos, and Tirso de Molina left of their sojourn on this "land that Columbus loved best" (Garcia Godoy [1916]; Henrfquez Ureña [1917]; Tejera [1922]). Américo Lugo, author of the first extant twentieth-century account of Dominican literature, began his overview by recalling the fluorescence of intellectual life in early Santo Domingo, which earned the colony the epithet "the Athens of the New World," and by paying tribute to the motherland, Spain, "because she weaned us on her breast, and in her arms she lulled us to sleep."4 Their ardent love for Spain and their nostalgic languor for the early colonial days sprinkles the discourse of traditional Dominican critics with plaints and lamentations. An increasing grief sets in when they recount the epochs during which the colony grew distant from Spain or Spain from it.

1 Ayer espanol nací / a la tarde fui francés, / a la noche etíope fui, / hoy dicen que soy inglés: / !no sé que sera de mi! (Vicioso [1983], 57-58). 2 La historia de la literatura dominicana se inicia con el nombre de Colón (Balaguer [1974], 9). 3 debido a que no se habían conjugado todavía las fuerzas históricas que habrían de crear la nación dominicana y, por tanto, no existía una conciencia nacional expresable en la literatura (Vicioso [1979], 341). 4 porque nos lactó de su seno y nos durmió en su regazo (Lugo [1906], 94-95).

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When the vast mineral riches of Mexico and South America became apparent, Santo Domingo lost its charm in the eyes of the European master, to the chagrin of Garcia Godoy, who recalled the separation with sadness. He mournfully told of the 1795 Treaty of Basel whereby Spain ceded the colony to the French "despite the deeply rooted loyalty of Dominicans."5 He celebrated the Battle of Palo Hincado, an armed rebellion led by Juan Sánchez Ramirez against the French to bring the colony again under Spanish jurisdiction, which Spain graciously declined. He praised the "patriotism" of José Nunez de Cáceres, who in 1821 declared the independence of Santo Domingo and conceived "the generous idea" of annexing the new country to Great Colombia, whose ruler, the Liberator Simón Bolivar, did not welcome it (Garcia Godoy [1916], 73). He told of all the sorrowful events that followed: the unification of the island under Haiti, the founding of the Republic, the subsequent annexation of the nation to Spain, and the war of restoration that ensued. The woeful historical picture he created, the vision of a country where literature, learning, and culture have never recovered from the loss of the greatness enjoyed by the colony at the beginning, profoundly marked his assessment of the literature produced by Dominicans in the modern period. Before Garcia Godoy, the renowned Spanish scholar Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo had already presented the Dominican land as a place definable by its losses more than by the achievements of its people. His celebrated Antologia de la poesîa hispano-americana (Anthology of Spanish-American poetry), 1892, had already judged Dominican literature worthy of "only a very few pages in the literary history of the New World."6 He then eulogized this literature not because of any artistic value but because in his mind it symbolized the enduring legacy of European civilization, the white race, and the cultural heritage of Spain. Here he saw "a fistful of people with Spanish blood," who, having struggled against "exotic languages" and influences which are inimical to any European race and civilization, managed to survive the onslaught of "rapacious pirates, free booters, and blacks," with the impressive result that they "continued to speak Castilian and eventually produced poets."7 One hundred years have not eradicated ideas such as those of Menéndez y Pelayo regarding the achievement of Dominicans in the field of literature. Some of the seminal texts on Dominican literature still preserve them. Even twentieth-century Dominican critics and historians of the country's letters have persisted in the views contained in the Spanish humanist's words about the race, culture, and class origins of the Dominican people. The persistence has to do, no doubt, with the fact that the official definers in Dominican society, the architects designing the image of Dominicanness that informs the dominant discourse on literature and culture, have for the most part come from a light-skinned upper class and a Europeanized intellectual elite. In that respect, they have scarcely differed from Menéndez y Pelayo in orientation and world view. Their way of looking at the world, as a result, impairs their ability to converse with Dominican writing on its own terms. Their lack of rapport with the country's texts, in short, lies in their upholding a set of tenets about Dominican race, culture, and class that corresponds more closely to the ideal type concocted by them than to the observable characteristics of the Dominican people.

5

no obstante la acrisolada lealtad del dominicano (Garcia Godoy [1916], 70). no puede ocupar sino muy pocas paginas en la historia literaria del Nuevo Mundo (Menéndez y Pelayo [1948], 287). un punado de gente de sangre española . . . entregados a la rapacidad de piratas, de filibusteros y de negros han seguido hablando en castellano . . . y tarde o temprano han tenido poetas (Menéndez y Pelayo [1948], 308). 6

7

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European High Culture Through the plaints about the former cultural greatness of the island disseminated by distinguished men of letters, it becomes clear that they normally take culture in only one of its possible meanings, namely, "a body of actual artistic and intellectual work," which restricts the concept significantly (Williams [1967], 274). Culture thus understood privileges high culture, the productions of artists and humanists oriented by Western forms of knowing. Lugo had nothing else in mind when in a 1915 letter to Theodore Draper reporting on the current state of Dominican culture, he circumscribed his brief summary to citing the work of historians, literary authors, and plastic artists (Lugo [1978], 199-200). When discussing the decay undergone by the island following its venerated golden age, Pedro Henríquez Ureña referred to the impoverishment suffered by "the institutions of culture," and his equally eminent brother Max bewailed the exodus of the distinguished families who represented "the cultural traditions that made the colony proud."8 Clearly, the understanding of culture informing the ideas of these respectable men of letters makes no provision for considering the legacy of Tainos or the survival of African expressions in art and other ways of communicating the human experience. Their view ignores the fusion of different cultural forms that took place during the colonial transaction, the hybridizing process that generated the people of the Caribbean. Novelist and anthropologist Marcio Veloz Maggiolo has said that "culture is the definition of a people" and that "in the extent to which a people finds itself obligated to discover, create or modify its resources for adaptation, precisely in that extent it tends to define and enrich its own cultural process."9 The conceptual model to which Veloz Maggiolo appeals to discuss Dominican culture would seem to yield more realistic results than the one informing the critics cited above. But a glance at a voluminous, more recent work by Mariano Lebrón Savinón, Historia de la cultura dominicana (History of Dominican culture), 1982, makes it clear that the less realistic model has prevailed in the discourse of the elite.

The Caucasian Ideal Garcia Godoy traced the ethnic origin of Dominicans to the white race, to which he attributed "evident intellectual superiority" with respect to the Indian and the superstitious, feverish, and fetishistic "savage Ethiopian," who in his mind contributed considerably less to the physiognomy of the Dominican.10 Lugo emphatically asserted his view of the racial homogeneity of the Dominican Republic and the rest of the Hispanic New World. For him the "natural excellences" of the white race prevailed over the "lesser virtues" of the Negro and the Indian. In a 1919 text he affirmed that in the area only one people exists, "a Spanish people, on account of race, language, history, religion, character, lifestyle."11 One might venture to argue that empirical observation alone, that is, a swift 8 todo se empobreció; hasta las instituciones de la cultura padecieron (P. Henrfquez Ureña [1984], 146); depositarias y continuadoras de las tradiciones de cultura de que podfa enorgullecerse la colonia (M. Henrfquez Urefia [1945], 66). 9 La cultura es la definición de un pueblo . . . en la medida en que un pueblo se ve obligado a descubrir, crear o modificar sus recursos de adaptación, en ese mismo sentido tiende a definir y enriquecer su propio proceso cultural (Veloz Maggiolo [1977], 31, 39). 10 el etfope salvaje, pleno de las supersticiones febricitantes y fetishistas de sus selvas africanas . . . El blanco por . . . condiciones intrfnsecas y por evidente superioridad intelectual (Garcfa Godoy [1916], 63). 11 las excelencias de la raza blanca . . . preponderaron sobre las virtudes menos fuertes del negro y del indio . . . pueblo espanol por la raza, el idioma, la historia, la religión, el carácter, las costumbres (Lugo [1978-a], 116).

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glance at any Dominican crowd, should suffice to discredit the presumption of Dominican whiteness advanced by elite intellectuals. But their ideas, which have always predominated in the school curriculum, have sought to teach Dominicans to see themselves as "a Spanish nation, white and of ancient lineage."12 Despite the fact that the Dominican population consists of an overwhelming majority of blacks and mulattos, eighty-five percent according to the Encyclopedia Britannica (15th ed. 1979), the venerable Don Emilio Rodriguez Demorizi could open his book on the early nineteenth-century Haitian occupations with an epigraph that announces great danger for the future of the Hispanic New World "should a race that is not the Spanish race" prevail on Dominican territory.13 Convinced that Dominicans are (or should be) white, traditional literary scholars have made a link between moments of decay in the colonial past and a reduction in the number of white families living in Santo Domingo. Literary historian Abigail Mejía, author of a book that became an official textbook and went through successive reprintings, dolefully recounts a period of Haitian occupation which presumably brought about the impoverishment of literary writing on the island. The resulting emigration depleted the island of its better blood, and no longer were there "white and learned people walking through the convents and streets as in the old days."14 The extent to which literary scholars succeeded in internationalizing their racialist understanding of literary development can be gathered from an overview of Latin-American literature published abroad which in its Dominican section established a link between "the emigration of white families" and "the degree of decay" suffered by the literature written on the island.15 The view of the scholars, as these observations show, does not differ in essence from Menéndez y Pelayo's notion of the Dominican people as coming from a fistful of people with Spanish blood. In fact, quite recently Joaquin Balaguer's book La isla al revés (The upside-down island), 1983, has urged Dominicans to "recover the purity of their original traits" and thus "improve their anthropological features."16

Race and the Haitian Question Different schools of thought disagree concerning whether or not nineteenth-century Haitian leaders were justified in their occupations of Santo Domingo on grounds of safeguarding their national sovereignty from European invaders coming through the eastern side. But the fact is that the Dominican Republic as a juridical entity came into being in 1844 as a separation from Haitian rule. In that respect it is plainly true that "the coming into being of the Dominican nation is inseparable from Haiti as a historical phenomenon."17 That historical context has given Dominican ruling classes occasion to construct a nation-building ideology based primarily on self-differentiation from Haiti, including the area of racial identification. The intellectuals have exploited the potential polarity by erecting an ideological system that construes the two peoples sharing the island as insurmountably dichoto12

una natión hispana, blanca y de rancio abolengo (Lizardo [1979], 23). territorio de una raza distinta de la espanola! (Rodriguez Demorizi [1955], 5). !Ya no habia gente . . . docta y blanca discurriendo por conventos y calles como antaño (Mejía [1943], 47). 15 la emigratión de familias blancas . . . el grado de decadencia que alcanzaría por entonces la literatura espanola (Ayala Duarte [1945], 112). 16 mejorará gradualmente sus caracteres antropológicos y volverá a recuperar la pureza de sus rasgos originarios (Balaguer [1984], 98). 17 l'apparition de la nation dominicaine est inséparable du fait historique haïtien (Pierre-Charles [1972], 37). 13

14

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mous. Their discourse has fostered an equation whereby anti-Haitianism becomes a form of Dominican patriotism (Despradel [1972], 82). And insofar as Haitians are seen as homogeneously black, anti-Haitianism manifests itself also as a declared contempt for blackness. The dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who ruled the country for thirty years, knew as few others did how to exact political capital out of anti-Haitianism and how to enlist the talent of the country's intellectuals in such a scheme. During Trujillo's regime, called the Trujillato, antiHaitianism served a two-fold purpose: to furnish a nationalistic ambience that would stimulate unquestioning patriotism and to provide an international concern around which the Dominican people could be induced to rally so as to quell the forces of potential domestic dissent. During the Trujillato intellectual production flourished as it never has before or since in the Dominican Republic. Literary and cultural journals such as La Poesia Sorprendida (Surprised poetry), and Cuadernos Dominicanos de Cultura (Dominican culture notebooks) emerged with governmental support. The government's own publishing house put out the voluminous Antologia de la literatura dominicana (Anthology of Dominican literature), 1943. Historiography boomed with a vigorous team of researchers working under the auspices of the state. Whole breeds of poets, such as the poetic generation of 1948, came into view as a result of the publication opportunities made available by the regime. No longer was there a scarcity of libraries, scholarship, reference works, and materials such as Samuel Montefiore Waxman - a Boston University professor who had visited the country before the Trujillato - had witnessed (Waxman [1931], viii-ix). Trujillo, as a poetic anthology gathering texts in praise of him by virtually all poets then active in the country expressed it, became without a doubt the "magnanimous protector of Dominican letters."18 A pivotal moment in the development of anti-Haitian ideology under the dictatorship occurred in 1937, the year when over 15,000 Haitian immigrants who lived near the border met their death at the hands of Trujillo's militia. The need to repel international reproach engaged the intellectual machinery of the state in a blatant racial, cultural, and moral defamation of Haitians so as to render this genocidal act acceptable as a gesture of patriotic self-protection. The essayist Manuel Arturo Pena Batlle, an author still hailed in a recent history of Dominican letters as "one of the deepest Dominican thinkers," was at the forefront of this intellectual campaign.19 He reduced the Haitian experience to that of a nation which, having been founded by ignorant slaves, began without history, tradition, spiritual roots, a civilized language, and a civilized form of worship (Pena Batlle [1989], 160). Therefore, he praised "Generalfsimo Trujillo" for wisely detecting "the ancestral deficiencies, the primitivism without possible evolution" characterizing the Haitian immigrants near the border and for taking appropriate measures to extirpate their "old and negative customs" from the Dominican soil.20 Balaguer, for his part, denounced the use of the term "massacre" to refer to the mass killing of Haitians, calling it instead a patriotic upheaval of Dominican peasants reacting against four centuries of depredation by wayward Haitians near the border. He refers not only to the violence and theft of Haitians but also to their infecting Dominican communities with the worship of voudou, "a sort of African animism of the worst extraction."21 In his book-length exposition of this view, a text 18 19 20

magnánimo protector de las Letras (sic) dominicanas (Ateneo Dominicano [1957], 5). uno de los mas profundos pensadores dominicanos (Contín Aybar [1986], 118). las taras ancestrales, el primitivismo sin evolución posible . . . viejas y negativas costumbres (Peña Batlle [1985],

500). 21

especie de animismo africano de la peor extracción (Balaguer [1985], 504-05).

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that appeared in English translation in 1949, Balaguer attributed to the proximity of Haiti "the problem of the Africanization of the race" among Dominicans and argued that the country "must strengthen the somatic differences which distinguish it from Haiti" (Balaguer [1949], 12, 135). Since in his mind we have here "two antagonistic races, one of Spanish origin and the other of Ethiopian blood," and given the extraordinary speed with which the Negro, "carried on by his instincts," tends to multiply, he warns that the race of the Haitians "might eventually absorb the Dominican population and assimilate it into its own" (Balaguer [1949], 25, 135). Balaguer here ascribes to Haitians a conspiracy to pollute Dominican blood and thus destroy this nation, just as Adolf Hitler had imputed to the Jews the evil scheme to "bring Negroes into the Rhineland" and ruin the "white race" by the "resulting bastardization" (Hitler [1971], 324). Perhaps Balaguer derived his inspiration from a passage in which Gobineau, en passant, cites the case of the island of Santo Domingo to illustrate his theory of the inequality of human races. In 1853 Gobineau had looked at the human potential of the Dominican Republic and of Haiti and had assigned a greater possibility for progress to the former due to the proportionately greater share of European blood in the veins of its inhabitants (Gobineau [1853], 78-84). But wherever they came from, Balaguer's ideas on the race of Dominicans have lived on. As current president of the Dominican Republic, he ordered the immediate deportation of thousands of Haitian immigrants in June 1991, triggering the resurgence of anti-Haitianism as a nationalist ideology. This can be gathered from the columnist who, in defending the deportations, attributed Haitian poverty to "their race, backward by nature and lack of culture."22 Balaguer's ideas matter for the present essay above all because of his centrality in contemporary thought in the Dominican Republic and because of his influence on the official discourse on literature. His own overview of Dominican literature is still deemed current, its seventh edition appearing in 1988. Also, when a committee of academics two years ago undertook to select an author who would receive a major national award for life achievement in literature, they could not decide between Juan Bosch and Balaguer and had to split the honor. Moreover, his ideas have reappeared in the works of younger writers such as Manuel Nunez, a talented essayist who studied in Paris under Henri Meschonnic. Núnez's writings on Dominican nationality differ from those of Balaguer only in that the younger writer draws substantially from the lexicon and phraseology of contemporary schools of Western critical theory. Like the elder statesman, he adheres to the theory of Dominican culture endorsed by intellectuals during the Trujillato and attributes to Haitian immigrants near the border the power and intention to denationalize the Dominican people by destroying, through the infiltration of their backward culture and exotic customs, "the physiognomy of what we are."23

Divergent Class Identities On the whole, Dominican texts do not reflect the one-sided notion of Dominican culture, race, and anti-Haitianism advocated by the ruling classes and their scribes, the intellectual elite. An anonymous poem from the period of unification under Haitian rule offers this statement of ethnic self-af22 23

su raza, atrasada por naturaleza e 'incultura' (Borda Objío [1991], 12). el rostro de lo que somos (Nunez [1990], 238, 311).

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firmation: "Didn't your lordship say / that I was ugly? / Then I'm splittin' / Go get yourself another Negress / to do your cleanin'."24 The speaker, clearly a black woman of humble social station, vaunts her self-worth and her potential power over those whom she serves. In another text of the same period the black female speaker refuses to rise and make coffee for her master, arguing that times have changed and challenging the authority of a former system of social stratification: "these are not the times / of his majesty."25 The similarly anonymous "Romance de las invasiones haitianas" (Romance of the Haitian invasions), circa 1830, treats the matter of the invasions in terms that avoid racialist discourse and categorical anti-Haitianism, concluding instead with a tribute to Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer (Rodriguez Demorizi [1943], 65). The poem's Dominican speaker uses only one ethnic designation, "the whites," to identify the French during their occupation of Santo Domingo, which suggests that for the Creole speaker whiteness as a racial distinction denotes primarily a foreign element. Likewise, a poem written to celebrate the victory of Dominicans over the Spanish, who had occupied the country following the 1861 annexation, speaks of the defeated forces thus: "The whites have already left / from Yamasá. What a beating they got! / The Spanish have already left / with their flag on the head."26 The poem "Himno de Capotillo" (Capotillo's hymn) by Manuel Rodriguez Objío refers to both Dominicans and Haitians as "Haiti's offspring" who in their quest for freedom had to fight respectively the Spanish and the French (Mota and Rodriguez Demorizi [1963], 50). In these references we see a vision of the Dominican people that differs radically from the national image espoused by the scribes of the upper classes. Creole self-identification pervades Dominican texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. Nor do the texts, when viewed outside the taxonomies and tabulations produced by traditional Dominican critics, support any exclusively Western view of the country's culture. They do not corroborate the construction of Dominicans as racially and culturally dichotomous with Haitians. A systematic survey would show that when the dichotomy does appear in the literary texts, it comes invariably from the pen of authors, such as Gastón Fernando Deligne, César Nicolas Penson, and Juan Antonio Alix, working under the spell of the ideology of the state mostly through class affiliation or identification. The essence of the disparity between the texts and the critics lies in their dependence on varying frames of reference. The texts reproduce the peculiar history, the complexity of social layers, the cultural and racial mixture witnessed by this land. The critics, on the other hand, have tended to imagine an ideal type that is racially white, culturally European, and of upper-class social extraction. To say that traditional Dominican literary scholars and critics have little understood the country's texts would not be an exaggeration. Because of their own class bias, Dominican intellectuals have tended to trace the origins of the Dominican people specifically to the local ruling classes in colonial times. A passage in a book that until quite recently served as official history textbook in the school system should suffice to illustrate this claim. In narrating the uprising of a group of slaves against their masters in colonial Santo Domingo, the historian manages to glorify the leader who crushed the insurrection, the courageous "don Juan Barón, heir to the legendary valor of the Castilian race which, through times and harsh 24

53).

25

So mercé no dice / que yo soy fea? / pué yo me bá / y buque otra negra / pa trabajá (Rodriguez Demorizi [1979],

levántese uté / que estos no son los tiempos / de su mercé (Rodriguez Demorizi [1979], 53). Ya se fueron los blancos / de Yamasâ, jay palisâ! / Ya se fueron los espanoles / con su banderita en popa (Rodriguez Demorizi [1979], 89). 26

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hindrances, we Dominicans, their descendants, preserve with pride."27 According to the logic of this historian's mindset, Dominicans should identify with the efforts of a local ruling class to cling to power rather than with the legacy of resistance bequeathed by the popular classes who, like the insurgent slaves crushed by Juan Barón, lived in a contingent relationship vis-à-vis the power structure. The literary texts, however, have not obeyed such a directive.

Longing for the Emigrants Their fixation on the upper classes has caused critics and scholars to write negatively about Dominican literature. They have placed excessive emphasis on the intellectual losses suffered by colonial Santo Domingo as a result of the various emigrations of upper-class families. The cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795 and the subsequent Haitian incursions brought about the exodus of many "distinguished families and cultivated men," which, Pedro Henríquez Urena tells us, "reduced pitifully" the level of intellectual life.28 The scholars grieve the fact that by depriving Santo Domingo of "many of its principal families" (Contm Aybar [1982], 1:233), the emigrations had "virtually catastrophic results for the cultural development of the Dominican people."29 The extent to which this focus on the losses has become a standard approach to Dominican letters can be gathered from the Dominican chapters in Raimundo Lazo's popular surveys of Spanish-American literature. He concentrates on the "uncertainties and historic crisis" that beset the literature of the early period in the country and on the "unique and sorrowful hindrances" that marked its development in the nineteenth century, not without emphasis on the emigration of "writers and poets."30 We learn that the distinguished emigrants went on to make meaningful contributions in Cuba, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. The likes of José Maria Heredia, Domingo Del Monte y Aponte, Narciso Foxâ y Lecanda, and Rafael Maria Baralt, children of the Santo Domingo emigrants, excelled as men of letters in these lands. Literary historians in the Dominican Republic normally pastoralize about the difference that the emigrants might have made for the country's literature if they had stayed. In so doing, one could venture to say, they exhibit a pernicious apathy toward the actual cultural legacy of the Dominican people. Their cultural, racial, and class biases make them blind to the concrete results of the experience of the Dominican people on the island that gave birth to Caribbean culture. For only obstinacy would cause one to seek the Dominican people in what might have been. Bosch has convincingly explained that one needs to look for the origins of the Dominican people in the masses who could not afford to abandon the country when the bad times came but had to put up with hunger, external aggression, epidemics or whatever other ill the land suffered. In short, "that mass formed the foundation of nationality; without it there would not be a Dominican people today."31 27 pero fueron sometidos por el bizarro don Juan Barón heredero del valor legendario de la raza castellana que, al través de los tiempos y de cruentas vicisitudes, conservamos con orgullo sus descendientes, nosotros los dominicanos (Pichardo [1930], 57). 28 un nutrido núcleo de familias distinguidas y de hombres cultos; ahora la emigración lo redujo lastimosamente (P. Henrfquez Urena [1917], 289). 29 muchas de sus principales familias (Contín Aybar [1982], 1:233); resultados casi catastróficos para el desenvolvimiento cultural del pueblo dominicano (Balaguer [1988], 79). 30 incertidumbres y crisis históricas (Lazo [1974], 331); peculiares y calamitosas vicisitudes (Lazo [1970], 284). 31 En realidad, esa masa formó la raíz de la nacionalidad, sin ella no habría hoy pueblo dominicano (Bosch [1986], 189-90).

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Toward a Dominicanized Reading To tell the story of Dominican literature one must focus on the concrete verbal artifacts of the people who remained, whose culture and race underwent a process of creolization comparable to the experience of people in the rest of the Caribbean. One must also recognize contributions coming from diverse social strata, with people in the lower ranks, whose numbers are far larger, yielding probably the most enduring symbols of national identity. The human experience as it has taken place in this specific part of the Caribbean should provide the cultural and intellectual keys to make Dominican texts release their meaning. Dominican critics and historians of literature should cease to emulate the ways of nineteenth-century annexationist politicians. They should, when dealing with Dominican texts, refrain from seeking authentification in the historical realities of others. Dominican intellectuals normally quote the German and the French when substantiating their conceptualization of Dominican culture and society. German and French intellectuals, however, cite their own sources of knowledge to legitimize their claims about culture and society in the whole world. The latter, that is, see themselves as the center of the world. The former do not. The challenge now for Dominicans is to change that. When they do, they will overcome their somewhat adversarial relationship with Dominican texts, especially those texts that do not fit smoothly into the Western aesthetic models informing the world view of the critics, and will move beyond the negativist discourse characterizing their commentaries. The young and prolific scholar José Alcántara Almânzar, for instance, sees Dominican literature as "lagging behind" foreign literatures (Alcántara Almânzar [1972], 25). This probably explains his uneasy approach to the works of Manuel del Cabrai whom critics abroad have declared the equal of César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda, elevating him to a position of prominence in the vanguard of modern poetry in Spanish (Martins [1958], 1). Alcántara Almânzar feels compelled to begin his study on Cabrai by establishing precisely why the Dominican poet cannot be granted the poetic importance of the other greats of Hispanic America (Alcántara Almânzar [1979], 153). Likewise Diógenes Céspedes, also young and prolific, in his studies on Cabrai, Mir, and Bosch, the Dominican writers enjoying the most international renown, has invariably sought to reduce or at least question the greatness of their contribution (Céspedes [1985]). Still younger than these, Pedro Peix has surveyed Dominican prose fiction of the twentieth century to conclude that the country's literary corpus needs to be brought up to date, having been afflicted by retardation with respect to intellectual and artistic currents in Latin America and the Old World (Peix [1987], 23, 36). These three critics, who are themselves practicing literary artists, find Dominican writing lacking in some of the virtues they have learned to appreciate in their Western-oriented training. The very notion of backwardness denotes their willingness to allow foreign movements and traditions to determine the direction in which Dominican literature should move. Dominican texts presumably ought to follow a chronology put in motion by the literatures of Western capitals. If it fails to keep the pace, it is taxed with anachronism. Many creative writers today, influenced by the perception that construes Dominican literature as anachronistic, reveal a serious anxiety about the perceived need to keep up with the advances of modernity. A group of young poets have lately championed a movement that aims to draw on the tradition of Western speculative thought, mostly German and French, to arrive at what they call poesia filosófica (philosophical poetry). Another group has undertaken to explore the possibility of

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a diction that abandons the rhetorical devices characteristic of poetry and the resources of traditional prosody to achieve something they call metapoesia (meta-poetry). In either case, it appears, they aspire to express universal values and the drama of modern man. In pursuing that goal, they take it upon themselves to avoid reference to their immediate historical reality for fear that they might make their message too provincial, convinced as they are that the universal exists elsewhere, not in their home culture. The attitude implicit in their pursuit, which we might forgivably interpret as a form of self-negation, reflects the pernicious influence of the dominant intellectual discourse, which historically has lacked the ability to imagine Dominican culture on its own terms or to see the discrete experience of the Dominican people as a legitimate source of value and a valid container of meaning.

The Way to Authenticity The requisite conditions now exist that should permit us to transcend this traditional critical discourse on Dominican writing. For one thing, the class structure that fostered it has progressively lost credibility. The chronic economic crisis has virtually brought the country to utter ruin. In less than a decade the cost of living has multiplied one hundred times. The population lacks the guarantee of such basic services as electric power and running water. Emigration has become the most common option for Dominicans to secure their well-being. The ruling classes, therefore, have all too vividly shown their inefficiency. They have failed to keep the country from bankruptcy or from an economic dependence so extreme that questions arise about its ability to retain national sovereignty. One should think that their loss of credibility must lead to the discredit of the ideologies they have thus far espoused. The intellectuals in all likelihood will fail to command respect when voicing the theories of Dominican culture, race, and class origins produced under the auspices of the already discredited ruling classes. The emergence of an authentic Dominican discourse and a genuine appreciation for Dominican letters will probably appear in the critical arena. On a more positive note, the emergence of a more authentic reading of Dominican texts is now more plausible also as a result of the gradual self-discovery of Dominicans as members of the Antillean family, as partakers of the discrete historical experience of the region, and as agents of the area's unique culture. Between the opposing arguments of Caribbean disunity due to its "multiracial, multicultural, multilingual characteristics" (Moya Pons [1978], 2 English original) and of Caribbean commonality due to the region's "historia común" (common history) as Bernardo Vega says (Vega [1978], 10, 1), the latter argument has increasingly gained adepts in the Dominican Republic. More scholars today than ever before acknowledge the Caribbean texture of Dominican culture, which by association means that a greater number of intellectuals than ever before seem concerned about establishing the identity of Dominicans in terms of autochthonous qualities. Mir's La notión de periodo en la historia dominicana (The idea of periods in Dominican history), 1981-83, ambitiously undertakes to track down the origins of the Dominican people outside the realm of upper-class colonial society. The author challenges the historiographical tradition that circumscribes its search for the elements with which to define the Dominican people to the ideas of planters, landowners, slaveholders, and colonial scribes. Similarly, in a two-volume survey of creative writing in Santo Domingo from precolonial times to the modern period, Vicioso has launched a

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search along the lines suggested by Mir. He has sought to determine at what precise point the literature produced by people living in this Spanish-speaking Antillean nation developed an identity of its own. The search for a true Dominican identity acquires gender self-consciousness in the work of feminist critic Daisy Cocco de Filippis who has shed meaningful light on the extent to which Dominican women authors have historically managed to subvert the dominant cultural model that imagined them to be "white, submissive, and virginal."32 She has sought to show that from the nineteenth-century poet Salomé Ureña to young contemporary poets like Sherezada Vicioso, the constant impulse characterizing the diction of women's writing in the country has been aimed at "the demythification of woman."33 Cocco de Filippis illustrates this claim convincingly through ample reference to Aida Cartagena Portalatm, the most prominent Dominican female author living today, who in addition to redefining the moral and political "boundaries of the female world" challenges the official terms of definition for Dominican race and culture by vaunting "her own racially mixed background" (Cocco de F. [1988-b], 15-16 English original). As a result of the foregoing developments, a more complete and complex picture of Dominican letters has begun to come into view. Should these developments continue, literary critics will soon find it impossible to discuss Dominican texts without attention to the discrete sociohistorical experience and the native culture that provide the elements of their significance. Soon they will accede to Dominicanize their reading of the local corpus, and, in so doing, will become aware of this literature as a component of the larger Caribbean literary tradition. They will learn to recognize the aesthetic kinship of Bosch, Cabrai, and Mir, for instance, with the likes of Alejo Carpentier, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, and René Depestre. Dominican critics literally will learn to see their country's texts. Thus they will see the highly complex lives of the people inhabiting Dominican letters. Maroons, gavilleros, and monteros along with generals and aristocrats emerge here and thus enact the drama of resistance that has marked Caribbean life through the ages. The recurring model of resistance, attesting to the indomitability of the Dominican people, their ability to survive depredation and aggression from home and abroad, and the recognition of their inevitably multiple ancestry, reveal the multifaceted story of Caribbean creolization. The knowledge that Bosch, Cabrai, and Mir, the three living Dominican authors who enjoy the most international renown, are also individuals whose texts profoundly explore the creole experience of Dominicans and unmistakably show signs of kinship with typical Caribbean authors, should give Dominican critics a clue as to the desirability of brandishing autochthonous forms. Dominicans have excelled through self-affirmation more often than they have through self-negation. This realization should suffice to suggest to Dominican critics and scholars the direction in which their literary explorations should go for the sake of Dominican texts and for their own sake. Truly their discourse will matter only if they present themselves convincingly as spokespersons for a literary corpus that matters.

32 33

tiene tres características: es blanca, sumisa y virginal (Cocco de F. [1988-a], 15). Con Cartagena Portalatm comienza la desmitificación de la mujer (Cocco de F. [1988-a], 28).

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Torres-Saillant

Bibliography Alcantara Almánzar, José, ed. 1972. Antologia de la literatura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editera Cultural Dominicana. (Useful anthology covering various genres.) —. 1979. Estudios de poesia dominicana. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega. (Contains studies of fifteen Dominican poets ranging from the nineteenth-century to the generation of 1948.) Ateneo Dominicano. 1957. Album simbólico. Ciudad Trujillo [Santo Domingo]: Publicaciones del Ateneo Dominicano. (Collection of poems in honor of Trujillo on the occasion of his twenty-fifth year in power.) Ayala Duarte, Crispin. 1945. Resumen histórico critico de la literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid: Editorial Saeta. (Standard survey of Spanish-American letters originally published in 1927.) Balaguer, Joaquin. 1949. Dominican Reality: Biographical Sketch of a Country and a Regime. Trans. Mary Gilland. Mexico: n.p. (The original, Realidad dominicana, is said to have appeared in print in 1947.) —. 1974. Colón, precursor literario. 2d.ed. Santo Domingo: Fuentes Impresores. (Collection of essays on the first men of letters active in the early years of the Santo Domingo colony, first published in 1958.) —. [1983]. 1984. La isla al revés. 2d ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio. (First published in 1983, the book is basically a reprint of Dominican Reality. The author makes no acknowledgment of this, however.) —. 1985. Cartas de Joaquin Balaguer a intelectuales colombianos. Documentos del conflicto dominico-haitiano de 1937. Ed. by José Israel Cuello. Santo Domingo: Editera Taller. 503-08. (Written in the forties while the author held diplomatic posts in South America.) —. [1956]. 1988. Historia de la literatura dominicana. 7th ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio. (The original edition won the national book award for pedagogical texts.) Borda Objío, Alberto E. 1990. Repatriación ¿fin de un negocio o respuesta pragmâtica? La Noticia (11 July): 12. (Argues in favor of the deportation of Haitians from the Dominican Republic.) Bosch, Juan. 1986. Composición social dominicana. 5th ed. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega. (Seminal text on Dominican social history.) Céspedes, Diógenes. 1985. Lenguaje y poesia en Santo Domingo en el Siglo XX. Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria UASD. (Studies the ideas of most of the prominent Dominican writers and thinkers in the twentiethcentury in light of contemporary French thought.) Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, ed. 1988-a. Sin otro profeta que su canto: Antologia de poesia escrita por dominicanas. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. (Unprecedented collection of poems by Dominican women poets with a most illuminating introductory essay by the editor.) —, ed. 1988-b. Del desconsuelo al compromiso/From Desolation to Compromise: Bilingual Anthology of the Poetry of Aida Cartagena Portalatin. Trans. Emma Jane Robinett. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. (Contains useful introductory comments by both the editor and the translator.) Contín Aybar, Nestor. 1982. Historia de la literatura dominicana. 4 vols. San Pedro de Macorís: Universidad Central del Este. (Particularly useful for data on the authors of the early colony.) Despradel, Lil. 1972. Les étapes de l'anti-haïtianisme en République Dominicaine: le rôle des historiens. Nouvelle Optique. 8:65-92. Dominican Republic. 1979. Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. Micropaedia. (Gives demographic table.) Garcia Godoy, Federico. 1916. La literatura dominicana. Revue Hispanique. 37:61-104. (Fairly inclusive early overview of Dominican writing.) Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur. 1853-55. Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines. 4 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot. (The first volume briefly discusses Haiti and the Dominican Republic.) Henríquez Urena, Max. 1945. Panorama histórico de la literatura dominicana. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Brasileira de Artes Gráficas. (Still a very useful source.) Henríques Urena, Pedro. 1917. Literatura dominicana. Revue Hispanique. 40:273-94. (Written to supplement the 1916 essay by Godoy with emphasis on the early colony.) —. 1984. La cultura y las letras coloniales en Santo Domingo. In Pedro Henrfquez Urena. Antologia. 2d ed. Ed. by Max Henrfquez Urena. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. (Excerpted from the 1936 book of the same title by the eminent scholar.)

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Literature

and Its Criticism: Anatomy

of a Troubled

Identity

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Hitler, Adolf. 1971. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lazo, Raimundo. 1974. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. El periodo colonial (1492-1780). 3d ed. Mexico: Editorial Porrua. —. 1970. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. El siglo XIX (1780-1914). 2d ed. Mexico: Editorial Porrua. Lebrón Savinón, Mariano. 1982. Historia de la cultura dominicana. 4 vols. Santo Domingo: Universidad National Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Lizardo, Fradique. 1979. Cultura africana en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. Lugo, Américo. 1906. Bibliografia. Santo Domingo: Imprenta La Cuna de América. (Seven essays, mostly on Dominican authors. The last one attempts to trace the development of Dominican writing until the turn of the century.) —. 1978-a. Notas sobre cultura. Antologia de Américo Lugo. Vol. 3. Ed. by Julio Jaime Julia. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. 199-200. (Text of a letter dated 1951.) —. 1978-b. Discurso sobre la raza. Antologia de Américo Lugo. Vol. 1. Ed. by Julio Jaime Julia. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. (A typical statement on race written in 1919.) Martins, Heitor. 1958. Manuel del Cabrai: hóspede do mondo. Revista do Livro. 3.9:207-13. (A highly laudatory reading of Cabrai.) Mejía, Abigail. 1943. Historia de la literatura dominicana. Santiago: Editorial El Diario. (A standard overview published for the first time in 1929.) Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. 1948. Historia de la poesia hispanoamericana. Vol. 1. Santander: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones. (Originally a series of introductory studies to the selections in his Antologia, published in 1893 under the auspices of the Real Academia Espanola to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Spanish settlement of the New World.) Mir, Pedro. [1969]. 1974. El gran incendio: los balbuceos americanos del capitalismo mundial. 2d ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. —. 1981-83. La noción de periodo en la historia dominicana. 3 vols. Santo Domingo: Editora de la UASD. (Explores the possibility for a people's history of the Dominican Republic.) Mota, F. A. and E. Rodriguez Demorizi, eds. 1963. Cancionero de la Restauración. Santo Domingo: Editora del Caribe. (Anthology of Dominican patriotic poems; generally anti-Spanish.) Moya Pons, Frank. 1978. Caribbean Consciousness: What the Caribbean is not. Estudios y Documentación del Caribe. 1:1-8. (Paper from a conference series. Argues against Caribbean unity.) Nunez, Manuel. 1990. El ocaso de la nación dominicana. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega. (An impassioned attack against the historiography of the Left.) Peix, Pedro, ed. 1987. La narrativa yugulada. 2d ed. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega. (The most inclusive anthology of Dominican short fiction to date.) Pena Batlle, Manuel Arturo. [1942]. 1985. El sentido de una politica. Documentos del conflicto dominico-haitiano de 1937. Ed. by José Israel Cuello. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. 499-503. (Published originally in 1942, this article argues in favor of Trujillo's actions against Haitian immigrants near the border.) —. 1989. Obras. Vol. 1. Ensayos históricos. Santo Domingo: Fundación Pena Batlle/Taller. (Part of a publication effort spearheaded by relatives of the author. The effort has already contributed to a renewed interest in his ideas.) Pérez, Carlos Federico. [1956]. 1987. Evolución poética dominicana. 2d ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller. (A highly regarded survey of the development of Dominican poetry in modern times, originally published in 1956.) Pierre-Charles, Gérard. 1972. Genèse des nations haïtienne et dominicaine. Nouvelle Optique. 8:17-44. Pichardo, Bernardo. 1930. Resumen de historia patria. Barcelona: Altés, Impresor. (A traditional rendition of the Dominican past destined for use in the schools.) Rodriguez Demorizi, Emilio, ed. 1955. Invasiones haitianas de 1801, 1805 y 1822. Ciudad Trujillo [Santo Domingo]: Editora del Caribe. (Invaluable compilation of documents related to the Haitian occupations of Santo Domingo.)

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ed. 1943. Del romancero dominicano. Santiago: Editorial El Diario. (Important collection of poetic texts. The illustrations portray Haitian soldiers as exceedingly monstrous, not in keeping with the prevailing message of the texts.) —, ed. [1938]. 1979. Poeséa popular dominicana. 3d ed. Santiago: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (Published originally in 1938, it is still the most valuable resource for the study of folk poetry in the Dominican Republic.) Tejera, Apolinar. 1922. Literatura dominicana: Comentarios crítico-históricos. Santo Domingo: N.p. (Work unfinished at the author's death. Purposing to correct errors he attributes to Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the author here focuses primarily on the early colony.) Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 1989. La cuentística boschiana: Nexo dominicano con la poëtica caribena. Aproximaciones a la narrativa de Juan Bosch. Ed. by Franklin Gutiírrez. New York: Ediciones Alcance. 81-107. —. 1990. Caribbean Literature and Latin Americanists. Caribbean Studies. 23.3-4:131-38. —. Caribbean Poetics: Aesthetics of Marginality in West Indian Literature. Diss.: New York University, 1991. UMI.#9134700. Vega, Bernardo. 1978. El Caribe de ayer y hoy. Estudios y Documentación del Caribe. 2:2-10. (Paper from a conference series. Argues in favor of Caribbean unity.) Veloz Maggiolo, Marcio. 1977. Sobre cultura dominicana y otras culturas. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega. (Essays exploring the elements of a Creole Dominican culture.) Vicioso, Abelardo. 1979. Santo Domingo en las letras coloniales (1492-1800). Santo Domingo: Editora de la UASD. (Surveys writing in the colony from pre-colonial expressions to late eighteenth-century literary production.) —. 1983. El freno hatero en la literatura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editora UASD. (Seeks to trace the emergence of a national conscience in nineteenth-century texts.) Waxman, Samuel Montefiore. 1931. Bibliography of the Belles-Lettres of Santo Domingo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. (Compiled during a trip to Santo Domingo in the late 1920s.) Williams, Raymond. 1967. Culture and Civilization. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vols. 1-2. Ed. by Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan/The Free Press. 273-76. (An informative overview of the concept of culture.) Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. 1991. The Collected Poems: 1952-1990. Ed. by Albert C. Todd, the author, and James Ragan. Trans. Albert C. Todd et al. New York: Henry Holt and Company. (Includes excerpts from "Fuku: A Poem," a text inspired by the poet's visit to the Dominican Republic.)

Colombian Literature

SEYMOUR MENTON

University of California - Irvine

Colombia's northern or Caribbean coast is geographically part of what John Augelli calls the "rimland" (Augelli and West [1966], 11-12) of the Caribbean. As such, it is quite distinct from the rest of Colombia. By the same token, the literature produced on that coast has developed in its own idiosyncratic manner, both because the region is part of the Caribbean and because of the geographical isolation of the coast from the country's other regions. The isolation factor led, by the middle of the twentieth century, to the development of four distinct and almost equally large urban centers, each with its own literary traditions: Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla. Probably the most characteristic feature of Colombian Caribbean literature - as opposed to the literature of other Caribbean regions - is the existence of two cultural centers: Cartagena and Barranquilla. In different historical eras, each of these two cities played different roles in the region's literature and culture. Today Barranquilla is the larger of the two cities, and it is credited with having stimulated Gabriel Garcia Marquez's literary talent. Until the beginning of World War I, however, it had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants and was nicknamed La Arenosa (Sandtown) because of its unpaved streets (Vargas [1977], 9). Cartagena, on the other hand, was the center of Spain's South American slave trade and the chief port of northern South America up until the war of independence, which began in 1810. It figured prominently in Colombian literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is inscribed in many texts from that period. Thereafter, however, the city inspired very few works and, by the same token, it produced a rather limited number of outstanding literati. Cartagena plays an important role in Colombia's two most famous colonial works, which are also two of the most famous colonial works of the Hispanic Caribbean: Elegias de varones ilustres de Indias y Conquista del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Elegies of illustrious men of the Indies and the conquest of the New Kingdom of Granada), 1589, by Juan de Castellanos and El carnero (The ram), 1638, by Juan Rodriguez Freyle. Born in Seville, Juan de Castellanos arrived in the Indies as a youth, worked as a pearl diver, led an adventurous life in the coastal town of Riohacha, participated as a soldier in the Conquest, and was ordained a priest in Cartagena. His epic poem presents the history of Cartagena as well as that of other regions of the Nuevo Reino de Granada. Juan Rodriguez Freyle was born in Santa Fe de Bogota. In El carnero, he recreates colonial life in that city in a manner that anticipates Ricardo Palma's nineteenth-century Tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian traditions), but at least part of the action of several of Rodriguez Freyle's stories occurs in Cartagena and in another Colombian Caribbean city, Santa Marta. Two other colonial authors born in Santa Fe de Bogotá also wrote about Cartagena. The baroque poet Hernando Domínguez Camargo was one of

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the first poets to sing the praises of that coastal city; El desierto prodigioso y prodigio del desierto (The prodigious desert and the prodigy of the desert), c.1650 - a baroque novel by Pedro de Solís y Valenzuela - is also set there. By the 1840s both the population and the commercial importance of Cartagena were decreasing, and this process continued until 1918. Cartagena's decline was due largely to the frequent civil wars between 1840 and 1862 and to the culmination of those smaller altercations in the Thousand Days War of 1899-1902. In the entire nineteenth century, the only relatively prominent literati produced by Cartagena - or by Colombia's Caribbean coast in general - were José Fernandez Madrid, a popular poet; Candelario Obeso, who was an important influence on later Afro-Caribbean poetry; and Rafael Nunez, who wrote the national anthem but was better known for his role in politics: he was president on four different occasions, representing first the Liberal party and then the Conservative party. One of Colombia's first novels, Yngermina o la hija de Calamar (Yngermina, or the daughter of Calamar), 1844, by Juan José Nieto, deals with the customs of an Indian settlement near Cartagena, but relatively few nineteenth-century historical novels are set in that city. This is particularly surprising considering the wealth of material on Cartagena that we see in twentieth-century novels such as the Venezuelan Mariano Pícon-Salas's San Pedro Clover (Saint Peter Claver), 1950, and Germán Espinosa's Los cortejos del diablo (The devil's escapades), 1970, and La tejedora de coronas (The weaver of crowns), 1982. Nonetheless, the only nineteenth-century work in which Cartagena figures prominently is Los piratas en Cartagena (The Cartagena pirates), 1886, by the prolific Soledad Acosta de Samper. This text is not a novel, however, but a collection of accounts of five pirate attacks on Cartagena from 1544 to Admiral Vernon's famous siege in 1738. Nor does costumbrismo - a popular style in which the customs of many of Colombia's different geographic regions are realistically portrayed in the nineteenth century - include any references to the Caribbean coast. Thus, it could be said that although Colombian Caribbean literature appears very early in the colonial period, it is not until the second half of the twentieth century - with the international acclaim accorded to Gabriel Garcia Marquez - that it really flourishes. It is important to recognize, however, that modern literature in this region did not start with the fenómeno macondino (the phenomenon of Macondo), as Garcia Marquez is sometimes called. Instead, it began to emerge early in the twentieth century. In 1906, Luis Carlos López, one of Colombia's best-known poets, published his first volume, De mi villorrio (From my village). López uses Cartagena, his birthplace, as the principal theme of his poetry; the poet evokes the city's colonial past and portrays the daily life of its present. His sonnet "A mi ciudad nativa" (To my native city) - which closes with a comparison between his affection for Cartagena and his affection for an old pair of shoes - has been immortalized by the Zapatos Viejos (Old shoes) monument in Cartagena and through its inclusion in many anthologies of twentieth-century poetry, beginning with Federico de Onís's Antologia de la poesîa espanola e hispanoamericana (1882-1932) (Anthology of Spanish and Spanish-American poetry), 1934. López's poetry constitutes not only one of the first reactions against the modernista tendency that predominated at the beginning of the twentieth century but also one of the earliest manifestations of the conversational antipoetry typical of postvanguardistas such as Nicanor Parra and Ernesto Cardenal. According to Germán Arciniegas, "by stopping modernismo's penchant for ornamentation, it

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[López's poetry] pointed to a new path for literature beyond poetry's strict limits."1 Some of López's poems were published in Voces, a literary journal founded in Barranquilla in 1917 by Garcia Marquez's sabio catalan (Catalonian sage), Ramón Vinyes. At that time Vinyes was also the proprietor of a bookstore that was the favorite meeting place for local writers and artists. Between 1917 and 1920, sixty issues of Voces were published, and its circulation extended far beyond Barranquilla to Bogotá, Venezuela, Central America, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. The goal of the journal, according to Germán Vargas, was to challenge the self-satisfied Colombian literary establishment and the idyllic literature produced by established writers through the introduction of new Colombian, Latin American, and European authors. For example, issue number 42 was devoted exclusively to avant-garde European poetry; in it Vinyes translated the work of French and Italian postfuturists and presurrealists. One of Colombia's first avant-garde novelists, José Félix Fuenmayor, was also associated with Voces. He edited the Barranquilla daily El Liberal for many years, and in 1928 he published two novels: Una triste aventura de catorce sabios (A sad adventure of fourteen sages), which is science fiction, and Cosme, which recounts the story of a weak, timid, lethargic character condemned to failure. This character is reminiscent of the protagonists in Rafael Arévalo Martinez's early novels Una vida (A life), 1914, and Manuel Aldano, 1914, and he is similar also to characters in later works by the Uruguayans Felisberto Hernández and Juan Carlos Onetti and the Mexican Josefina Vicens. Fuenmayor's short stories were published posthumously in 1967 under the title La muerte en la calle (Murder in the street) and again in 1972 under the title Con el doctor afuera (With the doctor outside). His reputation has grown in recent years because of his son Alfonso's connection with Garcia Marquez during the 1950s. It was not until the publication of Cien años de soledad (One hundred years of solitude) in 1967 that Colombian Caribbean literature finally became respected both nationally and internationally. The Garcia Marquez phenomenon should not be equated, however, with the Rubén Dario phenomenon in Nicaragua or the Augusto Roa Bastos phenomenon in Paraguay. Unlike these two authors, Garcia Marquez is not a unique superstar who emerged unexpectedly from a country or a region with a relatively sparse literary tradition. Although the Caribbean coast had participated very little in the production of novels before the 1960s, the publication of Manuel Zapata Olivella's Tierra mojada (Moist earth), 1947; Arnoldo Palacios's Las estrellas son negras (The stars are black), 1949; and Garcia Márquez's La hojarasca (Leaf storm), 1955, signaled the coastal region's novelistic awakening. Between 1920 and 1945, at least eleven novelists were born in different parts of the Caribbean coastal area: Manuel Zapata Olivella (Lorica, 1920), Héctor Rojas Herazo (Tolü, 1921), Arnoldo Palacios (Certegui, Chocó, 1924), Alvaro Cepeda Samudio (Barranquilla, 1926), José Stevenson (Santa Marta, 1932), Germán Espinosa (Cartagena, 1938), Fanny Buitrago (Barranquilla, 1940), Oscar Collazos (Bahia Solano, Chocó, 1942), José Manuel Crespo (Ciénaga, 1942), Alberto Duque López (Barranquilla, 1943), and David Sánchez Juliao (Lorica, 1945). Many of these authors began publishing novels in the 1960s, and some of them were undoubtedly inspired by the literary and commercial success of Cien años de soledad. It is important to point out, however, that Rojas Herazo's Respirando el verano (Breathing the summer), 1962, Cepeda Samudio's La casa grande (The big house), 1962, and Buitrago's El hostigante verano de 1 Al parar en seco las exquisiteces del modernismo, señaló un nuevo rumbo en la literatura más alla de los limites estrictos de la poesía (Arciniegas [1977]).

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los dioses (The stifling summer of the gods), 1963, were published before Garcia Marquez's masterpiece and that Respirando el verano directly influenced it (Menton [1978], 249-80). Of all the factors we will discuss in the subsequent pages that contributed to the transformation of Colombia's Caribbean coast from a novelistic desert to the nation's most fertile region, Barranquilla's modernization and its successful challenge to Cartagena's standing as the only cultural center on the coast was one of the most important. This event was, in fact, a necessary precedent to many of the other causes that contributed to the ascendancy of the Colombian Caribbean novel. We have already touched on some of the earliest significant cultural offerings Barranquilla produced. With regard to Barranquilla's modernization, although the growth and development of that city was the most dramatic, it went hand in hand, in some cases, with the modernization of Cartagena and of the nation in general. Before the twentieth century, the coastal region - even Cartagena, which is its capital - was quite isolated from the political and cultural centers of the highlands. The trip from the coast to Bogotá - involving travel by train, riverboat, and mule - took weeks. Journeys of this type are described in detail by Garcia Marquez both in Cien años de soledad and in El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the time of cholera), 1985. In the former, Marquez depicts the travels of Fernanda del Carpio and her wayward daughter, Meme: their long train ride through the banana plantations, their slow trip on a riverboat, and, finally, their "arduous muleback crossing of the hallucinating plateau" (Garcia Marquez [1970], 301).2 In the less hyperbolic El amor en los tiempos del cólera, the eight-day riverboat journey is described on two separate occasions and plays a more significant role in the novel. By the end of World War II, however, the coastal region was quite transformed. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 contributed to the development of the entire Caribbean basin but more specifically to that of Colombia's northern coast. The United Fruit Company banana plantations were first established in Colombia in 1899 and six years later the Tropical Oil Company drilled its first oil wells. In 1903, the railroad between Barranquilla and Bogotá was completed. It was the inauguration of air service between Bogotá and the coast, however, that was the big breakthrough. The construction of the Barranquilla airport in 1919 coincided with the formation of an airmail service called the Sociedad Colombiana de Transportes Aéreos (SCADTA) by a group of German pilots who had participated in World War I. Avianca was actually the first national airline in all of Spanish America. Between 1925 and 1935, Barranquilla's modern harbor was constructed by dredging the twelve miles of sandbars that separated that city from the mouth of the Magdalena River. The completion of a pipeline in 1926 made Cartagena Colombia's chief oil port and contributed to that city's steady growth from that time on. Coffee, however, was exported from Barranquilla, and that product was much more important commercially. From the 1920s on, the radio and the telegraph also contributed to improved communication between the coast and the rest of the country. Once the infrastructure was established, Barranquilla grew more than threefold in twenty years from 65,000 inhabitants in 1930 to 225,000 in 1950. The growth experienced by the coastal cities and by Barranquilla in particular was also due to the greater economic and cultural opportunities provided or stimulated by the progressive government of President Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934-38). His so-called Revolución en marcha (Revolution on the march) introduced changes in Colombia that were comparable to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States. The establishment of a system of free and compulsory 2

Penosa travesía a lomo de mula por el páramo alucinante (Garcia Marquez [1967], 251).

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public education during the López Pumarejo administration followed in the 1940s by the educational reforms carried out under Minister of Education Germán Arciniegas provided new opportunities for the youngsters of the Caribbean coast. One of the most important changes in the curriculum was the replacement of the study of Latin with English and French, which facilitated access to the French and North American novelists of the era. While modernization and greater communication with the rest of the country made international literature in general more easily available to Barranquillans as well as other Colombian Caribbeans, works by North American authors were especially accessible and popular. This was due in part to a long-standing tradition - among certain classes of Colombian Caribbeans - of knowing English. As far back as the early days of Colombia's independence, the children of wealthy coastal families had been sent to Jamaica to learn that language. The first private school for boys in Barranquilla was founded by North American Protestants at the end of the nineteenth century. While he was a student there in later years, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio was instrumental in introducing his friends to the works of Faulkner, Hemingway, William Saroyan, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer. The 1928 banana strike - immortalized in La casa grande, den anos de soledad, and several other literary works - made many people aware of U.S. imperialism and fearful of it. Shortly thereafter, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy and the racist threat of nazism created a favorable climate for greater cultural penetration by the United States. Between 1935 and 1960 - the years during which Garcia Marquez and his contemporaries were developing as writers - baseball became a very popular sport on the Caribbean coast of Colombia as well as in other parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua; Caribbean players and spectators alike followed the exploits of Joe DiMaggio and other North American heroes of the period. Caribbeans also identified with the black boxer Joe Louis, who was then a world champion. Around 1950, Cepeda Samudio became Colombia's coastal reporter for the Sporting News, a publication based in St. Louis, Missouri. Even more significant than sports in terms of cultural penetration by the United States was the popularity of U.S. movies throughout the Caribbean. After World War II, a consciousness of the essential unity of the Caribbean basin began to develop. A group of U.S.-backed democratic reformers - Governor Muñoz Marin of Puerto Rico and Presidents Figueres of Costa Rica, Grau San Martin of Cuba, and Arévalo of Guatemala joined forces with political exiles Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic and Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela in an unsuccessful campaign to overthrow dictators Somoza of Nicaragua and Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. This same regional consciousness was also manifested by Germán Arciniegas in his La biografia del Caribe (The biography of the Caribbean), 1945. By the end of 1946, Garcia Marquez had graduated from his public high school in Zipaquirá, and shortly thereafter he left that cold, drizzly highland town to enroll in the National University in Bogotá. During this same period, a group of somewhat older coastal writers were living in Bogotá, and they would gather together from time to time to talk about literature. This group included Néstor Madrid Malo, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Eduardo Pachón Padilla, and Alfonso Fuenmayor writers who felt less tied to academic, traditional literature than did their highland counterparts. When the university was closed down in the spring of 1948 because of the bogotazo - the street riots that followed the assassination of the charismatic Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitân -

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Garcia Marquez returned to the Caribbean coast. There Manuel Zapata Olivella helped him launch his journalistic career by getting him a job at El Universal in Cartagena (Gilard [1981], 1:8). During more or less the same period, the so-called Barranquilla group was formed; it consisted of Alfonso Fuenmayor, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas, artists Alejandro Obregón and Enrique Grau, and Ramón Vinyes - who returned to Barcelona in 1950, shortly after Garcia Marquez himself joined the group. In 1956, Germán Vargas wrote that the members of this circle could converse with equal interest about such diverse subjects as "James Joyce's Ulysses, Cole Porter's music, the playing styles of Alfredo Di Stéffano [soccer] or Willy Mays [baseball], Enrique Grau's painting."3 Garcia Marquez remained in Barranquilla until 1953, collaborating with Fuenmayor, Vargas, and Cepeda Samudio on the literary and sports weekly Crónica, founded in April 1950. During eight months of that magazine's existence, a foreign short story was published in each issue along with original stories by Garcia Marquez and Cepeda Samudio. While Garcia Marquez was associated with Crónica, he and Cepeda Samudio wrote columns for the daily El Heraldo: Garcia Marquez's was entitled "La jirafa" (The giraffe) and Cepeda Samudio's was called "La brújula de la cultura" (The compass of culture). Garcia Marquez devoted his 4 March 1950 column to the then-little-known Truman Capote, and he signed it Septimus, the name of a character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The following year Cepeda Samudio wrote a positive review of the first volume of short stories by Julio Cortázar - who was also almost unknown at that time - only five months after it was published. Although the Barranquilla group is said to have met in a bar called La Cueva, two bookstores were probably more important in their literary development: the Librería Mundo and the Libreria Nacional - the latter being one of the best bookstores in the country. Between 1949 and 1952, the literary advisor to the Libreria Nacional was Néstor Madrid Malo. In this capacity he provided the budding literati with a good variety of the world's classics and with the most important new books, the majority of which had been published in Argentina by Losada, Sudamericana, and Emecé three publishing houses founded around 1938 by refugees from the Spanish civil war. It was during almost these very same years that two Caribbean novelists produced groundbreaking works that heralded the transition from the social-protest novels of the 1930s to the more sophisticated boom novels of the 1960s: the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias published El señor Presidente (Mr. president), 1946, and Hombres de maíz (Men of corn), 1949, and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world), 1949, and Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps), 1953. Hombres de maíz and El reino de este mundo in particular capture the mythological world view of the Guatemalan Indians and Caribbean blacks, respectively. Barranquilla and the Caribbean coastal area in general suffered relatively little as a result of the Violencia, a violent upheaval in Colombia that lasted from 1946 to 1965. During that period the regions devastated by the Violencia decreased in population, but Barranquilla grew significantly. Since coastal families were not uprooted, they were better able to preserve their oral tradition. Included in that tradition were stories about the Thousand Days War, some of which would appear in Cien años de soledad. At the same time, the national significance of the Violencia led the coastal writers to place their local anecdotes within a larger national context. This new national consciousness only reinforced the writers' identification with their Caribbean neighbors, and during this 3 El Ulysses de James Joyce, la música de Cole Porter, la técnica de Alfredo Di Stéffano o de Willy Mays, la pintura de Enrique Grau (Vargas [1985], 129).

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period Colombian Caribbean writers also became more politicized on the international level by the 1954 intervention of the United States in Guatemala and by the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution. Thus, given the literary and the political influences that have been at work for most of this century, it is no wonder that Colombia's Caribbean coastal region has produced two generations of novelists - the generations of 1957 and 1972 - whose works combine a high degree of structural and linguistic experimentation with a panoramic and critical view of Colombian reality. These characteristics are made more attractive at times by the use of Rabelaisian humor, which is apparent not only in works by Garcia Marquez, but also in those by Germán Espinosa, David Sánchez Juliao, and Manuel Zapata Olivella, who wrote Changó, el gran putas (Changó, the baddest SOB), 1983. In January 1986 Changó was awarded a Brazilian prize of a million cruzeiros, a sum whose real value reflects the magic-realist world view of many of Manuel Zapata Olivella's Caribbean contemporaries. No essay on the literature of Colombia's Caribbean coast would be complete if it did not include some specific comments on literature produced by black coastal writers. Because there is a higher percentage of blacks and mulattos in Cuba than in many other parts of the Caribbean, the terms Afro-Cuban culture and Afro-Cuban literature are frequently used. There are no comparable terms commonly used to describe black literature and culture in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and the Central American countries - let alone black literature and culture on Colombia's Caribbean coast, where a black population even smaller than that of these nations is concentrated largely in Cartagena. It is ironic, then, that so many members of the relatively small group of Afro-Caribbean writers are Colombian. Manuel and Juan Zapata Olivella, Arnoldo Palacios, and Jorge Artel, who is both a poet and a novelist, are all black writers. Of these authors, Manuel Zapata Olivella is clearly the most prolific and the most important. Although his first novel, Tierra mojada, is an anachronistic example of the social protest literature of the 1930s - in this work, he pits a messianic Communist teacher against a ruthless cacique (political boss) and an unscrupulous priest - his last two novels indicate a greater interest in negritude, African mythology, and structural and stylistic experimentation. These later works do not abandon the call for social justice, but in them that goal is dissociated from Communist ideology. Changó is perhaps the most ambitious black novel ever written, in that it attempts to capture the entirety of the black experience: starting with the cosmological origins of that experience in Africa, the novel traverses the centuries and the seas with the Portuguese slave trade; the godly work of Saint Peter Claver in seventeenthcentury Cartagena; the Brazilian sculptor O Aleijadinho; the Haitian uprisings of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries; independence heroes such as the Colombian Caribbean admiral José Prudencio Padilla and the Mexican José Maria Morelos; and finally the history of blacks in the United States from Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X, from southern lynchings to the Watts riot of 1965, and from Paul Robeson to Louis Armstrong. Zapata Olivella's most recent novel, El fusilamiento del diablo (The execution of the devil), 1986, resembles his earlier work in that it has a much more limited scope: it deals with the exploitation of the black gold miners of Chocó and with the 1907 execution of the rebellious Saturio. Formally, however, this text is more sophisticated than the earlier ones because of its chronological and spatial fragmentation. Juan Zapata Olivella, Manuel's brother, is a practicing pediatrician who campaigned actively, albeit symbolically, for the presidency in 1975 and 1976 and served as ambassador to Haiti in the

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1980s. His artistically unpretentious novel Historia de un joven negro (Story of a young black man), 1983, portrays an idealized black naval cadet and his successful struggle against upper-class racial discrimination. The novel ends with his accidental death at sea, which providentially resolves the problem of his impending interracial marriage to the beauty queen Miss Valle. Arnoldo Palacios's one novel, Las estrellas son negras (The stars are black), 1949, is set in a Chocó river town. The novel, which takes place within a period of twenty-four hours, combines social protest with a touch of the bildungsroman: it presents an expressionistic vision of poverty through the portrayal of hunger, deplorable housing and health conditions, and abandoned women trying to raise several children; it also depicts the coming of age of the protagonist, Israel. The outcome of the novel is ambiguous with regard to both of these aspects. For Irra - as Israel is nicknamed - sexual initiation is a positive experience; he rejects the homosexual advances of a Syrian storekeeper as well as a friend's invitation to visit the local prostitutes and makes love for the first time with his girlfriend. Later, because he is determined to overcome his environment, Irra makes arrangements to move to Cartagena and takes leave of his girlfriend, his mother, and his siblings. Without explanation, however, his girlfriend dies, and he misses his boat. Nonetheless, on the final page, Irra faces the future full of confidence as he contemplates some young blacks swimming and playing in the river. The most blatantly political of the novels written by Colombian blacks is Jorge Artel's No es la muerte, es el morir . . . (It's not death, it's the dying . . .), which was published in 1979, many years after it was written. The meaning of the title is that the guerrillas in the novel are not afraid of death per se as much as they are of dying and being unable to continue the struggle against capitalism or to achieve their goal of establishing socialist republics in the Caribbean. These guerrillas are identified as belonging to the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Army of National Liberation), and the references to Padre Camilo Torres place the action in the 1960s. The protagonist's revolutionary zeal is intensified by the revelation that his parents had been brutally murdered by a group of Laureano Gómez's supporters in the late 1940s or early 1950s, at the height of the Violencia. Although the dramatic nature of many of the scenes and the occasional short poetic descriptions reminiscent of Aguilera Malta's Don Goyo make for interesting reading, the novel is marred by the insertion of an excessive number of doctrinaire political statements, including two misappropriations of Mexican history: Guadalupe Victoria was not a revolutionary colonial priest nor were Francisco Madero's goals as a revolutionary leader consistent with those of Colombia's Marxist guerrillas. Although Jorge Artel's political ideology is also occasionally present in the seven volumes of poetry he published between 1940 and 1986, it rarely interferes with his artistic creativity there. Praised by Federico de Onís for expressing the American ethos in a fresh and novel way, Jorge Artel - who was born in Cartagena - is the Colombian counterpart of the Cuban Nicolás Guillén and the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos. Artel's favorite themes are Afro-Caribbean culture and the sea. Unlike Guillén, however, Artel very rarely has to resort to reproducing dialect phonetically in order to capture the rhythms of Afro-Caribbean speech. Artel is not as well known throughout Latin America as Guillén and Palés Matos, but this may well be due to the fact that black culture is not considered to be as important a part of the national culture in Colombia as it is in Cuba or Puerto Rico. It was not until the 1970s that some Colombians - principally Manuel, Juan, and Delia Zapata Olivella - made a conscious effort to promote a national understanding and appreciation of black culture. The first international symposium on black culture in the Americas was held in Cali on 24-

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28 August 1977. It is ironic that although Garcia Marquez's novels contain very few black characters, the unprecedented international fame accorded those works has attracted the attention of national and international critics to Colombia's Caribbean coast and has thereby contributed to the discovery, analysis, and appreciation of early works by black Colombians as well as to the creation of new texts, such as Manuel Zapata Olivella's Changé, el gran putas. Historically, the residents of Colombia's different geographic regions - and of the dominant cities in those regions - have not shared common national character traits. Colombians often speak of the typical cachaco (inhabitant of Bogota), paisa (inhabitant of the Department of Antioquia), or costeno (inhabitant of the Caribbean coast), but they rarely, if ever, speak of the typical colombiano. On the other hand, residents of Colombia's Caribbean coast do possess many of the characteristics usually ascribed to other inhabitants of the Caribbean rimland. As we have seen, it is the coast's distinctiveness from any other part of the country - and particularly its strong affinity to other Caribbean regions - that has formed the basis for the development of that region's unique literature.

Bibliography Arciniegas, Germán. 1977. Letter to Author, 1 September. Artel, Jorge. 1986. Antologia poéûca. Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia. (Artel is Colombia's most representative and best-known black poet.) Augelli, John, and Robert C. West. 1966. Middle America: Its Peoples. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. (This is the definitive geography of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.) Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. 1967. Cien anos de soledad. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. —. 1970. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper and Row. Gilard, Jacques, ed. 1981. Obra periodistica de Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 4 vols. Barcelona: Bruguera. (The newspaper columns written by Garcia Márquez in Cartagena and Barranquilla between 1948 and 1960 are collected here.) Menton, Seymour. 1978. La novela colombiana: Planetas y satélites. Bogota: Plaza y Janés. (This thorough, illuminating, and original study deals with the best-known Colombian novels up to 1977 [J.R.-L.].) Vargas, Germán. 1977. Introduction. Voces, 1917-1920. Bogotá: Institute Colombiano de Cultura. (This is a good introduction to a volume of articles from the important Barranquilla journal founded and edited by Ramón Vinyes, the model for the Catalonian book dealer in Cien años de soledad.) —. 1985. El grupo de Barranquilla. Sobre literatura Colombiana. Bogota: Fundación Simón y Lola Guberek. (This work collects newspaper articles by Vargas about a variety of Colombian authors, which were originally published between 1949 and 1983.)

West Indian Writing in Central America

IAN I. SMART Howard University

The Central American writers studied in this chapter are all of African ancestry. Since under normal circumstances the individual's race still largely determines his culture, these writers are black or neo-African. Whereas this circumstance puts them outside the cultural mainstream in the Hispanic Caribbean, according to the prevailing perspective of this volume, when taken in the context of the entire Caribbean area they become part of the overwhelming majority. The British-born G. R. Coulthard, one of the earliest of a long line of famed Caribbeanists, cautiously but poignantly evokes the essential Africanness of the Caribbean as "not so much a way of life as a feeling of life" (Coulthard [1962], 79). Coulthard's insights are still valid today, and, in fact, have been elaborated with much more assertive scholarship by such writers as Wilfred Cartey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Franklin Knight, and this author, among many others. In a real sense, then, the writers we shall consider in this chapter represent a strain of Caribbeanness that is most representative, most "authentic."

The Language Question Panamanians, with the brusque but charming candor that is their wont, distinguish between negros coloniales (colonial blacks) and negros antillanos (West Indian blacks.) The distinction speaks eloquently to the question of language in Central America. The coloniales are those African-ancestored Panamanians whose presence in the area dates back to the colonial period. Since they are exclusively hispanophone, this historical reality is reflected in their names - names such as Gaspar Octavio Hernández, Rogelio Sinán, Joaquin Beleño, etc. The other neo-African Panamanians are those whose immediate roots go back to the mostly British colonies established in the Caribbean islands. This circumstance is reflected in their English surnames - such as, for example, (Gerardo) Maloney, (Alberto) Smith (Fernández), (Buena) Dawkins, (Carlos) Russell, etc. For the most part neither of the groups evinces in either language or name any overt ties to the common West African past, the Yoruba, Ashanti, Wolof, Ibo, Mande, etc., cultures/religions. According to the most credible historical accounts, the first basically anglophone Africans came to Central America from the islands at the very end of the eighteenth century. It is signifant that this group was one of black Caribs: "in the main descendants of African Negroes brought to the West Indies as slaves, but who escaped from their European masters and took refuge among the Island Carib in Saint Vincent, subsequently adopting the latter's language and, to a considerable extent, culture" (Taylor [1951], 15). These quintessentially Caribbean people established themselves

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principally in Belize but in isolated settlements along the Caribbean coastline of Central America as well. Whereas their impact on Belize is unequivocal and generally accepted, they appear also to have contributed significantly to the cultural development of such locales as the officially Colombian anglophone neo-African islands of San Andrés and Providencia, situated off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua; to the enclaves of anglophone neo-African population in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica; and to the Panamanian province of Bocas del Toro. However, in most cases the black Carib impact is generally assumed to have been preempted by that of the later and better known population movements. The first of these took place in the 1850s, when African workers newly emanicipated from chattel slavery in the British colonies were lured away to effect the construction of Panama's transisthmian railroad. The second wave of laborers went to Costa Rica in 1872 (Duncan and Meléndez [1978], 68-82). When work on the British-run and -financed railroad project for which they were originally contracted slowed down, these largely Jamaican workers were used by United States capitalists to inaugurate the notorious banana plantation enterprises that would dominate the economy of many Central and South American countries - the so-called "banana republics." The French attempted a sea-level canal through Panama in the 1880s, importing again a significant labor force from the islands, and this time the francophone territories were included in the labor pool. When the United States - after having arranged for Panamanian independence from Colombia in 1903 so that it could acquire the necessary "rights" - began in 1904 the construction of the Panama Canal, it naturally sought in the anglophone West Indies the labor force sufficiently prepared for the monumental feat. Now it was the turn of little Barbados to be coopted once more into a mighty enterprise that would significantly advance modern Western civilization - after all, it was on this tiny island that England laid the foundations for the magic formula of the Triangular Trade that would establish Europe's world hegemony for the first time in the 200,000-year-history of the human race. The immigrant anglophone neo-Africans did not mix well with the host populations, as the existence of Belize, Bluefields in Nicaragua, Limón in Costa Rica and the negros antillanos in Panama amply demonstrates. An equally significant demonstration is constituted by the very life and works of the writers under consideration in this essay: Eulalia Bernard and Quince Duncan from Limón Province in Costa Rica, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Gerardo Maloney, and Melvin Brown, all from Panama; and to some extent David McField and Carlos Rigby from Nicaragua. Their grandparents typically came from either Barbados or Jamaica, with a smug sense of superiority as holders of British passports, prime examples of what have been called "Afro-Saxons." Their parents went to English schools and continued to look down on the paña (members of the host, hispanophone, and mostly mestizo population) people with their "bird speech," their "lower standards" of personal hygiene, and their "underdeveloped" gastronomy. But, by the childhood of the generation to which these writers belong - the third - the bubble of the mythical return to the islands had burst, the tortured integration process was in place. Spanish replaced English as the language of prestige in the West Indian group, for it was the only language of education, except for the lucky few who could live on the Canal Zone. This was a strip of land ten miles wide that literally cleaved the nation in twain. Here, the United States exercised unadulterated hegemony won "in perpetuity" through the original 1903 Hays-Bunau Varilla Treaty, and consequently the West Indians who lived on the Zone were quasi-Americans. For all the others, English became exclusively a home language

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and, most importantly, this English was a nonprestige dialect heavily influenced by the African linguistic substrata. The literature created by these writers is clearly "a new Hispanic literature," but with the strong impact of the natural home English Creole. I have elsewhere reduced the process to two basic elements: the use of "mascon" terms (those that carry with them a massive concentration of emotional energy), and an artistic bilingualism (Smart [1984], 35-50). The literature is very much in the flux of robust aliveness, and further considerations germane to this question have arisen. Quince Duncan, who by reason of the sheer proportions of his artistic productivity is the senior member of the group, has indicated to me a visceral need to write in English (during the course of personal interviews on the occasion of his visit to Howard University in April 1985). In fact, he affirmed that any verses he has attempted have come out in English. Gerardo Maloney, on the other hand, makes it quite clear that his English is merely an imperfect tool for communicating at home with the older folks. The newest of these Central Americans, Melvin Brown, whose first book of verses, Legados/ Heritage, a slim bilingual volume, appeared in 1988, has evinced a dogged determination to express himself in English, a language that he uses only to communicate with people of his parents' generation and older. The stark reality is that Central Americans of anglophone Caribbean background who are of the generation of the Maloneys, the Duncans, the Melvin Browns and younger speak only a nonprestige dialect of English, in fact, an English Creole. Furthermore, their skills are exclusively audiolingual, with, of course, the reading ability that any literate person would have in a foreign language of which he had mastered at least the rudiments. The situation in Panama is complicated by the existence of the Canal Zone. However, apart from the small percentage of West Indian Central Americans who were Zonians, a phenomenon that came to an end in 1979 with the Carter-Torrijos Treaty initiating the first step of the process to restore Panamanian sovereignty to the Canal Zone by the year 2000, the group by the third generation has opted for Spanish as its first language, certainly as the language of reading and writing. Although Melvin Brown felt the need to make his first work a bilingual volume, he has indicated (in a personal interview) an intention of "targeting the Latin American market" in his future works. Gerardo Maloney, Eulalia Bernard, and Quince Duncan are citizens of their respective Panama and Costa Rica; and they are fundamentally Latin-American authors. In fact, Duncan is perhaps second only to the white/mestizo Joaquin Gutiérrez in acclaim as a writer in contemporary Costa Rica. The work of the Nicaraguans Carlos Rigby and David McField - their social background and their very names notwithstanding - "was not clearly identifiable as West Indian according to the criteria and the line of analysis that we have demarcated" (Smart [1984], 116). The fundamentally Caribbean option of, as Derek Walcott would put it, "getting off the rock" metaphorically in this case - has been exercised by many West Indian Central Americans. Flight, or advancement to the metropolitan country, the United States, generally leads to the choice of English over Spanish as in the case of Carlos E. Russell, a very active Panamanian intellectual who lives in New York and whose first volume of extremely nostalgic Panamanian poetry - Miss Anna's Son Remembers (1976) - is written in English. In marked contrast Carlos Guillermo Wilson, a Panamanian college professor who, like Russell, emigrated to the United States after completing high school in his native country, published his first book of short stories, Cuentos del negro Cubena (Stories by the Negro Cubena), just one year later in 1977, but in Spanish.

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The weight of demography, sociology, and just plain common sense determines that Spanish will continue to be the language of choice of those Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and even Guatemalans of anglophone Caribbean background who do not emigrate to the new metropolitan center. Whereas in Panama this group constitutes approximately ten percent of the country's total population, in Costa Rica they are only two percent (Duncan [1976], 87) and in the other countries they are merely a trace.

Education Central American West Indians are as fervently committed to education as are their counterparts in the islands. Speaking for his group, Duncan declares: "The black Limoneuse [native of Limón province] gave and continues to give enormous importance to education."1 The fiercely devoted schoolmaster, armed with his instrument of flagellation, or the equally equipped and even more intense mother "taking up" the daily lesson have certainly haunted all West Indian children of the generation of Duncan, Maloney, Bernard, etc. This sociological reality has not as yet metamorphosed into fiction with the poignancy of so many pages in the English and French novels emanating from the islands. The powerful images of the M'man Tine grandmother character in Joseph Zobel's La rue cases-nègres (Black shack alley), or Miss Mando in Michael Thelwell's The Harder They Come, or the mother in George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin have not been matched in Central American writings. Carlos Guillermo Wilson's Papa James and Nenen are perhaps the closest equivalents, but their portrayals suffer from the endemic sketchiness of Wilson's art. As is frequent with Wilson/Cubena, these characters cross the boundary between real life and fiction; they are the persons to whom his books are dedicated and they also appear as protagonists in, for example, the short story "Honeymoon" (Wilson [1987], 47-60). It has been said with folksy wisdom that Harvard and Yale have spoiled more good "niggers" than women, dope, and alcohol. Colorfully simplistic, even outlandish, this declaration carries, embedded in it, a bitter kernel of truth. Education has been the most effective arm in the colonizers' arsenal. The uprooted blacks who had suffered the incredible brutality of slavery and the slave trade came to Central America from the islands singing the cultural praises of their erstwhile tormentors, clinging passionately to their borrowed British civilization and education. For two entire generations they maintained their separateness through the institution of their privately maintained English schools, a mere extension of the British primary school system established in the islands to prepare ex-slaves to be efficient wage earners (see Duncan [1976], 127-30). The Panamanian government used the educational system as the instrument par excellence for bringing into line the "unpatriotic" West Indians, by stamping out their use of English. Ironically, at the same time the Latino ruling class sought to furnish itself and its children with a thorough knowledge of that very language. Whereas the English schools died a natural death by the 1950s in Costa Rica, they were deliberately snuffed out a little earlier in Panama. In contrast, on the Canal Zone, English was the medium of instruction, and those who fell within its pale became educated speakers of English, who for the most part were de facto monolingual. This situation has always been the 1

El negro limonense le daba y aún le da una importancia enorme a la educación (Duncan [1976], 128).

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exception, and for the present and into the future the educational needs of West Indians as with the rest of the population will be met by the state. It is clearly established in the literature under discussion that education is the necessary and perhaps the sufficient condition for upward mobility. In the first instance the authors are educators in the fullest sense of the term. Quince Duncan gave up his position on the faculty of the University of Costa Rica to become the principal of a prestigious secondary school. Maloney is one of the very small group of African-ancestored Panamanians who hold a chair (of sociology, in his case) in the National University. Carlos Guillermo Wilson teaches Spanish at the college level in the United States. Eulalia Bernard has been herself an educator, and Melvin Brown was, when this chapter was written, a law student. In Wilson's works the fierce determination to vault out of disadvantage on the pole of education is evoked with resounding intensity. Since in this literature the real author, the implied author, the various narrators, and even the characters are so frequently and patently one and the same person, the author's intent is easily discerned. After establishing his literary persona as Cubena, Wilson proceeded in heavy-handed fashion to give the same name to his "super-Negro" intellectual characters in such short stories as "The Degenerate Woman" (Wilson [1987], 75-78) and "The Party" (Wilson [1987], 83-85). His novel Chombo continues in the same vein. The protagonist, Litó, a thinly disguised form of "Carlitos" (from "Carlos"), by dint of the superhuman effort and dogged determination and sacrifice of his mother and her generation "makes it" by becoming a famous intellectual in the United States. His two siblings become a doctor and nurse respectively and thus achieve significant upward mobility without having to emigrate to the metropolitan center. Duncan demonstrates the power of education in a more subtly artistic manner. His literature is an eloquent manifestation of that profound awareness attained by the most truly learned. As is the case with every "native intellectual" in Fanon's sense of the term, the tools provided by an educational system designed to subjugate have been used to liberate, although not necessarily in strict accordance with the three-phase process that Fanon envisaged (see Fanon [1967], 178-79). Duncan has produced one of the most progressive literary expressions of black consciousness to emanate from the Americas, his novel La paz del pueblo (Peace to the people), 1978. In the stylistic tradition of the contemporary Latin-American narrative, one heavily influenced by Faulkner, it tells the story of Pedro Dull, a liberator. Dull is of mixed ancestry, being the son of a West Indian woman and a Latino father. Like the classic romantic hero, his earlier life is shrouded in mystery, he effects a dramatic return to the West Indian enclave of Limón to lead the people - the working class Costa Ricans - to a higher consciousness. Pedro Dull's role as leader/ liberator is clearly generated by his special relationship to the deity Cuminá, by whom he is possessed or "ridden" in the course of the religious rituals. Curnina is appropriately a New World addition to the pantheon, for he is derived from the name of the dance, ceremony, and religion peculiar to certain neo-Africans from Jamaica (Barrett [1977], 17). Since Pedro Dull is also presented as a messianic figure in simulated Biblical language - the very title of the novel providing an excellent sample - Duncan has built a character using one of the most important cultural processes in AfroAmerica, religious syncretism. Duncan's novel has not as yet received the attention it deserves. It is one of the most outstanding pieces of fiction to emerge from the area. Until the publication of Manuel Zapata Olivella's Changó, el gran putas (Changó, the baddest SOB) in 1983 (see Smart [1984], 31-32), it could easily have been considered the most significant Afro-Hispanic novel of all time.

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Maloney's single volume of poetry published at the end of 1984 reaffirms the intelligent black consciousness of these Caribbean Central American writers. This is precisely the burden of a recently published article, "Popular Black Intellectualism in Gerardo Maloney's Juega vivo" (Smart [1986], 43-47). The poet, in both his real life persona and as the implied author, evokes a fascinating confluence of traditions and influences, those that have combined to make Caribbean societies uniquely American (in the full and proper sense of the term). He is very much a West Indian man, with roots in Barbados - little England. But at the same time he is a full-fledged Panamanian, indistinguishable to the casual observer from the negros coloniales. Finally Maloney, except for his language, could be a perfect neo-African North American. This African-ancestored man for all seasons is, as well, a fully Latin-American poet. He received the finest education Panama could offer, having attended the prestigious Instituto Nacional (the premiere lycée). Then he went to Mexico, to the National Autonomous University of Mexico for his undergraduate and graduate work in sociology. This training was rounded off with a scholarship to the very renowned FLACSO in Quito, Ecuador, a thoroughly Latin-American center for advanced research. Like scores, perhaps hundreds of West Indian Central American intellectuals who serve at some of the finest intellectual centers in the United States, Maloney has transcended the prevailing Latin-American educational system, in exactly analagous fashion to the Edward Kamau Brathwaites, the Edouard Glissants, the Frantz Fanons and countless others from the islands.

The Audience The complaint is unceasingly made that Europe divided the black world in order to better conquer it. However, by a perverse and pervasive dynamic that Blaise Pascal rightly termed a "flip-flop," the renversement du pour au contre, a dynamic tantalizingly reminiscent of the prime law of the critical strategy of deconstructionism, that very act of division unites. In the first instance the new languages imposed by Europe's brutal hegemony are significantly fewer than the native languages replaced. Most importantly, the vicious oppression has generated a new Pan-African consciousness. In the Caribbean this consciousness is posited in part on the profoundly similar syntactic underpinnings of the various Creole languages spoken by the African masses, the new natives. The day of a common Caribbean Creole forged through the demonstrably similar general West African syntax shared by the existent English, French, Spanish, and Dutch Creoles is still a long way off. In the meantime the linguistic reality of the area is still relatively manageable, just the first three of the abovementioned European languages serve as linguae francae. The perspective undergirding the preceding paragraph is the most workable one for approaching the question of the audience for Central American and all other Caribbean literatures. It is helpful in this context to remember that Marcus Mosiah Garvey once lived in Costa Rica, and that the only original building of his once powerful and truly Pan-African UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) still standing is precisely the one in Limón. (Costa Ricans are justifiably proud of this mark of distinction and very recently a Limón Cultural Mission underwritten by the national government was established to give national and international lustre to this aspect of the nation's cultural heritage.) One of the four founders of Rastafarianism was Joseph N. Hibbert, who "was born [in Jamaica] in 1894. At age 17 he migrated to Costa Rica where he lived for twenty years.

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While in Costa Rica he became a member of the Ancient Order of Ethiopia, a Masonic Lodge, and returned to Jamaica in 1931" (Barrett [1977], 82). Central America clearly served as a kind of "mini metropolis" through which countless thousands of island folks realized their colonial dream of "getting off the rock." The Hispanic Caribbean has always been the main source of Afro-Hispanic literature and clearly Maloney, Wilson, Bernard, Duncan, Brown and the others are some of the major voices of this literature. This is an expanding field, for there are millions of African-ancestored Latin Americans. Consider, for example, that Nicolás Guillén, the mulatto National Poet of Cuba, by virtue of his spectacular biological longevity was for many years the greatest living Latin-American poet. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, certainly one of the world's best known writers, is very much a Caribbean man, a product of the Colombian costeno (coastal) culture where the African element is of singular importance. A cogent argument can, then, be made for including the works of these two Caribbean literary giants in the corpus of Afro-Hispanic literature. Brazil is second only to Nigeria in the size of its African-ancestored population, and its national language, Portuguese, is closely related to Spanish. The question of the potential readers and publishers of works by the writers under consideration - Afro-Hispanic works - is, then, easily answered. Then, too, there is the other eminently Caribbean question of interlingual dissemination. Eric Williams, one of the great West Indian minds of the 20th century, proposed a Spanish-FrenchEnglish multilingualism as a realizable goal for Caribbean scholars (see Williams [1952], 9). Thanks, too, to the hegemonic presence of the United States, translation into English of these writers is also achievable. The Afro-Hispanic Institute, founded in 1981 by a group of scholars at universities throughout the United States and having its base in Washington, D.C., has initiated this process with the publication of Wilson's Short Stories by Cubena. Much more needs to be done and much more is contemplated. All of these factors have a significant impact on the creativity of the writers from the area. Quince Duncan's verses, for example, "come out" in English, his "home" language. The young poet Melvin Brown thought it necessary to make his first book of poems bilingual, but plans to focus on an exclusively Hispanic "market" in the future. Carlos Guillermo Wilson, although now a citizen of the United States and a confirmed Losangelino, writes exclusively in Spanish, and apparently does not trust his artistic abilities in English - since he has had others translate his works. Carlos E. Russell, in marked contrast, is more comfortable working in English. Every one of the peculiar life situations presented in the preceding paragraph can be viewed as prototypically Caribbean. Just as the problems they present were created by the area's special historical process, the solution is also a product of the same historical forces. The fact is that there is a much larger market for the works of Duncan, Brown, Wilson, Russell, or Maloney, Bernard, etc in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Miami, etc. than in either Panama or Costa Rica. Since Spanish competes respectably with English in the major cities as in countless other urban and rural centers of the neighbor/colossus to the north, the author's choice of language is of minor marketing significance. It would take just as aggressive an advertising campaign to expose Quince Duncan's potential English-language works to the general public as his existing body of literature in Spanish. In either language there is a huge potential pool of readers of the literature by the Central American West Indians. Since these works spring from the peculiar experience of a bilingual minority group, their potential audience in the increasingly bilingual society of the new metropolitan

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center is twice as large as that of the works emanating from the exclusively hispanophone, or anglophone, or francophone Caribbean countries. Central American West Indians are the most progressive Caribbean group because they are the richest in influences. Each of the writers we have discussed is demonstrably a product of this particular historical confluence of shaping cultural elements. Gerardo Maloney is, to my mind, the most outstanding example, and, himself a sociologist, can serve as the most apt subject for a case study of Caribbean socialization. He is a West Indian man who in the privacy of his very West Indian style dwelling in a West Indian barrio of Panama City, a dwelling that is located just opposite a very Central American West Indian Episcopal church - "Episcopal" and not "Anglican," since it is integrated into the U.S. bishopric and not the English as is the "Anglican" church in the islands - communicates with his mother in the same language with which a George Lamming would communicate with his mother. On the street Maloney speaks the language of the West Indian Panamanians, a Spanish pregnant with the influence of Caribbean English Creole that has evolved from the nonprestige garbled "Spanglish" of Joaquín Beleno's West Indian characters - Leiquí, for example, in his first novel, Curundú, written between 1943 and 1946 - to the trendy, universally Panamanian argot of, for example, Rafael Pernett y Morales's 1973 novel, Loma ardiente y vestida de sol (The parched and sun-drenched hill). In his home he might entertain his friends and academic colleagues who might be hispanophone Panamanian intellectuals of the purest mainstream. In this case, he would speak his elegant standard Spanish which has a distinct flavor of Mexican Spanish, and thus is somewhat distinct from the prevailing standard Caribbean Spanish twang that one hears in the universities from Havana to Caracas. Or, when Maloney boards a gaudily decorated bus on Avenida Central just two blocks from his mother's house, his ears will be assailed or regaled - depending on many factors - by music from every part of the known African world: kaisos (calypsos) from Trinidad, reggaes from Jamaica, soul and rhythm and blues from the United States, salsa (especially merengue) from the Hispanic Caribbean, bossa nova and samba from Brazil, even an occasional high life or a Congolese tune from the continent of Africa. A more complete Caribbean cultural experience would be hard to find. West Indian writing from Central America is still very new, but pregnant with powerful potential.

Bibliography Barrett, Leonard. 1977. The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissidence. Boston: Beacon. (This is one of the early works on Rastafarianism by a sensitive, thorough Caribbean scholar. This kind of scholarship is unfortunately still too rare.) Beleno C , Joaquin. 1963. Curundú. Panamá: Ministerio de Educación. (Beleno's first novel; it was, however, the third published. It is one of the handful of creative works written by non-West Indian Central Americans dealing with the experience of West Indians in Panama.) Bernard, Eulalia. 1982. Ritmohéroe. San José: Editorial Costa Rica. (A very slim volume is Spanish; her only book.) Brathwaite, Edward. 1974. The African Presence in Caribbean Literature. Daedalus. 103.2:73-109. (A fundamental article.) Brown, Melvin. 1988. Heritage/Legados. Panamá: n.p. (A bilingual volume with exquisite illustrations by the author.)

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Cartey, Wilfred G. 1970. Black Images. New York: Teachers College Press. (An early work of Pan-Caribbean literary criticism, it is now rather dated.) Coulthard, George R. 1962. Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature. London: Oxford University Press. (A pioneering work, superseded by many others.) Duncan, Quince. 1978. La paz del pueblo. San José: Editorial Costa Rica. (Possibly his finest novel; unavailable in English.) Duncan, Quince and Carlos Meléndez. 1978. El negro en Costa Rica. 5th ed. San José: Editorial Costa Rica. (A most important contribution to our understanding of the African experience in Costa Rica.) Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. by Constance Farrington. Suffolk: Penguin. (A classic work in Third World studies.) Knight, Franklin W. 1978. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. (A fine example of Pan-Caribbean scholarship.) Lamming, George. 1970. In the Castle of My Skin. London: Longman. (The first novel of one of the best-known writers from the contemporay Caribbean; originally published in 1953.) Maloney, Gerardo. 1984. Juega vivo. Panamá: Ed. Formato Dieciséis. (A promising poet's first published collection.) Pernett y Morales, Rafael. 1977. Loma ardiente y vestida de sol. Panama: Ediciones INAC. (A highly regarded first novel by a young Panamanian of the cultural mainstream.) Russell, Carlos E. 1976. Miss Anna's Son Remembers. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Bayano. (Russell's first book of poems.) Smart, Ian I. 1984. Central American Writers of West Indian Origin: A New Hispanic Literature. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents. (The first and still the most complete book-length study on the precise subject of West Indian writings from Central America. —. 1984. [Review of] Changó, el gran putas by Manuel Zapata Olivella. Afro-Hispanic Review. 3.2:31-32. (One of the earliest reviews of a significant Colombian novel.) —. 1986. Popular Black Intellectualism in Gerardo Maloney's Juega vivo. Afro-Hispanic Review. 5.1-3:4346. (An Afrocentric analysis of Maloney's poetry.) Taylor, Douglas MacRae. 1951. The Black Carib of British Honduras. New York: Wenner-Green Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. (Now a rare book, it can be consulted at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Considered reliable.) Thelwell, Michael. 1980. The Harder They Come. New York: Grove Press. (The novel was based on a popular Jamaican movie.) Williams, Eric. 1952. Four Poets of the Greater Antilles. Caribbean Quarterly. 2.4:8-15. (A refreshing socio-literary essay by an eminent Caribbean politician and scholar.) Wilson, Carlos G. 1981. Chombo. Miami: Universal. (Wilson's first novel, published in Spanish.) —. 1987. Short Stories by Cubena. Trans., intro., and notes by Ian I. Smart. Washington, D.C: Afro-Hispanic Institute. (Makes Wilson's work available to the English-speaking public.) Zobel, Joseph. 1980. Black Shack Alley. Trans. by Keith Q. Warner. Washington, D.C: Three Continents Press. (A fine English version of Zobel's 1950 classic.)

North of the Caribbean An Outline for a History of Spanish-Caribbean Literature in the United States* EFRAÍN BARRADAS University of Massachusetts Boston Harbor Campus

Much More than Erudite Facts As so many scholars have proved, it is very difficult to define the parameters of the Caribbean as a cultural entity. Geographical parameters or boundaries cease to be valid when we attempt to transfer them to the sphere of culture, because of the historical and social realities of the Caribbean. When the majority of historians and social scientists attempt to reduce to a minimum the factors that define the entire Caribbean cultural realm, they offer the term plantation as the common denominator. But that common denominator, as well as other essential elements of Caribbean culture, can also be found in areas outside of the geographic Caribbean. Northeastern Brazil and the southern United States are two commonly offered examples of places where Caribbean social and economic circumstances are duplicated, thereby producing cultural patterns similar to those we find in the geographic Caribbean. That is why in a recent study, Antonio Benitez Rojo postulates that any accurate rendering of the Caribbean cultural sphere would encompass New York City within its parameters (Benitez Rojo [1989], xxxii); this city has already been affected by the presence of a great number of Caribbeans who have lived there for generations. Benitez Rojo's suggestion is not absurd in the least. What at first might seem to be merely an intellectual game of elusive definitions - i.e., trying to define the boundaries of the Caribbean cultural sphere - becomes a trail of useful clues in the exploration of an important aspect of this culture: the presence since the nineteenth century of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican writers in the United States. The implications of this presence transcend insignificant historical fact or an interest in accumulating a stack of erudite note cards for a history of Spanish-Caribbean literature, particularly when one considers the work these writers have produced in the last twenty years. In many cases, in fact, this body of work presents yet another problem for the definition of Spanish-Caribbean literature and culture. For example, the scholar of Spanish-Caribbean literature has to ask himself or herself if the narratives of Piri Thomas, the poetry of Pedro Pietri, or the plays of Dolores Prida - most of which are written in English - form an integral part of this literature or whether they are marginal works that will never enter into their respective national literary canons. But if we pay even a minimum of attention to the work of these Caribbean writers in the United States, we immediately realize that theirs is not a body of work that * I thank Julio Rodriguez-Louis for his comments, advice, and patience, and Debra Kendall for her help translating this essay.

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can be discarded, that it is not a mere erudite nicety to take their writing into account when compiling a history of the Spanish Caribbean. The quantity of texts alone - some written in Spanish, some in English, and some in a mixture of the two languages by Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans who have lived all or most of their lives in the United States - demonstrates the necessity of analyzing this body of work and of depicting it as an important element in Spanish-Caribbean literature, not as a mere historical curiosity.

At the Beginning There Was History The first problem that we confront upon attempting such a study is the absence of comprehensive historical research on the presence of Caribbean emigrants in the United States. In spite of studies by Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Glenn Hendricks, and Virginia E. Sanchez Korrol, among others, too many gaps remain for us to have a full understanding of the Caribbean emigration to the United States since the nineteenth century. Most existing studies focus either on a limited period or on only one of the three groups, which, in turn, emphasizes the marked differences between the Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban emigrations. Investigators also have to face a great lack of documentation, in general, on this historical phenomenon. The very factors that make the study of this emigration a difficult field of research, however, make it a high priority on the agenda of scholars of the Spanish Caribbean. The problems become even worse when we try to study the cultural production of these émigrés. We know very little about this aspect of the emigration, because detailed study has only begun in recent times. Studies on particular aspects of the emigrants' cultural production - such as the one that Nicolás Kanellos has done on theater - have just started to sketch out a broad area of study. Other studies, however, such as those by Juan Flores, have begun to demonstrate the depth of the problems that this cultural production by emigrants, in its most recent manifestations, presupposes for the formulation of a broad definition of the Caribbean as a cultural entity. Given the recent and tentative character of these studies, as well as their lack of any totalizing vision, we have to depend greatly on historical scholarship in order to begin to understand the literature produced by these émigrés. But above all, it is the character of that literature itself - motivated primarily by the emigrants' needs to understand themselves and to explain their circumstances - that leads us back to the aforementioned incomplete historical context. For all these reasons, this essay is organized into sections around dates that mark milestones in the history of the Caribbean emigration to the United States and that, at the same time, delimit and define the literature of this emigration. This essay seeks only to provide a historical outline of the literature written by Spanish-Caribbean emigrants - periodizing this literature and discussing the work of one or more authors representative of the era treated in each section - in order to help future researchers.

Business Comes First: 1800-68 Although the Antilleans, particularly the Cubans and Puerto Ricans, had already established commercial contacts with the British colonies in North America during the eighteenth century, in the

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nineteenth century they made the United States their favorite market. Historians of relations between the Caribbean and the United States at that time, such as Arturo Morales Carrión, have demonstrated how trade between these last remaining Spanish colonies in America and the new North American republic grew at an accelerated pace until they nearly reached the point of economic dependence at the end of the past century. We have sufficient evidence to speak of the presence of U.S. merchants and diplomats in Cuba and Puerto Rico in that century, a presence that presupposes that there were also Antilleans in the United States. This is another area, however, that historians still have not studied in the detail it deserves. The commercial contacts favored cultural ones. John T. Reid and especially José de Onís have studied Spanish-American intellectuals' first contacts with North Americans as well as the first contact among Spanish-American intellectuals of different nations. When discussing the Spanish-Caribbean literature of that era it is necessary to point out the presence of José María Heredia in the United States. He had to flee there in 1823, and he remained there - in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia - until 1825. Heredia was an exception to the rule in that era because his presence in New York was motivated by politics and not, as with the majority of Cuban and Puerto Rican emigrants of that time, by economics. In spite of that, however, his account and his vision of North American life and culture opened a new field for Caribbean literature in general. That is why his commentaries on the United States - more than the poetry he wrote there, such as his famous "Oda al Niagara" (Ode to Niagara) - are of interest and serve as forerunners and even models for literature by later Caribbean emigrants. The element that stands out the most in his Cartas sobre los Estados Unidos (Letters on the United States), 1826, is the author's amazement. This amazement leads him to draw an explicit and implicit comparison with the Cuban world, and, as a result, he presents certain aspects of North American culture as possible sociopolitical models for the Cubans, who are fighting for the independence of their island, still a Spanish colony.

After the Gritos: 1868-98 In 1868, without mutual knowledge of their respective plans, groups of Cubans and Puerto Ricans declared wars of independence against Spain. These declarations of war, referred to as the Grito de Lares (23 September) and the Grito de Yara (10 October), mark the beginning of a new period in the history of Puerto Rico and Cuba, and, concurrently and as a result, in that of the Hispanic-Caribbean emigration to the United States. If in the first half of the nineteenth century the principal motivation for such a move had been economic, it was now, in the majority of cases, political. In order to fully understand the increase in Caribbean emigration during this period, however, it is necessary to speak of both motivations - the political and the economic. Thousands of Cubans and Puerto Ricans emigrated to urban centers on the east coast of the United States. From Tampa to Boston, small colonies of emigrants appeared, composed both of political refugees and of people seeking to better their economic situation. These two motivations were intimately related, because the political struggle can be seen as the result of the economic hardships imposed by Spain on its last American colonies. Many of the Caribbean emigrants of this period were tabaqueros (cigar makers), another fact that gives this new wave of emigration a different character from the previous one: first, in spite of the large number of intellectuals and political leaders who found themselves

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obliged to emigrate, this group was composed, to a much greater extent, of the masses; second, the presence of so many tabaqueros radicalized the political perspective of the new emigrants. Unlike the Puerto Ricans and the Cubans, the Dominicans didn't emigrate to the United States in large numbers until after the nineteenth century. We know that certain politicians - Luperón is the most important case - passed through that country. Herman Hoetink establishes, however, that Dominicans generally felt they should respect the culture of the Old World, while expressing - almost grudgingly - a lesser degree of admiration for North American political and intellectual figures (Hoetink [1971], 269). For these reasons, we will not consider the presence of Dominicans in the United States during this period or the next, since it was almost nonexistent. The Puerto Rican and Cuban émigrés were concentrated in New York, although there were Cuban nuclei of extreme importance in Florida and even in Louisiana. The documentation of this emigration is much more abundant than that of the previous period, and, more importantly, we have concrete evidence that these emigrants made important cultural contributions. The names of writers, politicians, and intellectuals abound: Martin Morúa Delgado, José Marti, Luisa Capetillo. These and other cultural figures - among whom there were as many Cubans as there were Puerto Ricans often left accounts of their vision of the United States and of the Caribbean community that was being formed in certain cities on that country's east coast. But there is no room for doubt that among all of these writers, Marti is the most important and the most representative. No Caribbean or Hispanic-American author of the twentieth century understood the United States better than Marti. This does not imply that his wide-ranging presentation of this country does not contain certain myths and misreadings, but these only help us to understand Martí's own mentality and his intellectual situation as a Caribbean writer. The articles he published between 1881 and 1894 made him the "epic chronicler of the United States in the eighties" (Gonzalez [1953]), as Manuel Pedro González calls him in the subtitle of his classic book. Whereas Heredia' s writings on the United States - and even those of many of the Caribbean intellectuals who lived in this country in the second half of the nineteenth century - were dominated by a tone of amazement and by fleeting impressions, in Martí's writings a marked interest in knowing U.S. society in depth and in detail predominates. For that reason his articles have widely varied subjects, ranging from the political maneuverings of President Garfield to the poetry of Walt Whitman, from Buffalo Bill's show to the adventures of Jesse James, from Emerson to Coney Island. With these pieces Martí constructs a portrait of the United States that will be of great importance for all twentieth-century Hispanic Americans. For the most part, however, it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that the Caribbean writers who live in the United States have rediscovered his work and rescued the inheritance it offers. Thus, for more than half a century, the part of Marti's immense body of work that gives his interpretation of the United States remained isolated and without any successors among the writings of Caribbean émigrés.

The Formation of a Community: 1898-1960 The war of Cuban independence and its immediate result, the so-called Spanish-American War, marked a radical change in the colonies of Cubans and Puerto Ricans on the east coast of the United States. Many of these émigrés had been directly or indirectly involved in the fighting. At the end of

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the war many of them returned to their countries of origin but soon discovered that the political situation was not what they had dreamt. Cuba, although free, was politically tied to the United States by the Platt Amendment, while Puerto Rico had gone from being a Spanish colony to being a North American one. The imposition of U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans in 1917 facilitated their entry into this country. The Puerto Rican government itself fomented the massive emigration, especially after the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans arrived in the United States. From that era onward, New York was not the only Puerto Rican center in the country: Chicago, Boston, and almost the entire state of New Jersey became centers of large Puerto Rican populations. Until the 1960s, Puerto Ricans were the most numerous group of Spanish-Caribbean immigrants in the United States, a fact that explains the predominance of Puerto Rican writers during the first seven decades of the twentieth century. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, certain areas of the U.S. east coast had greater concentrations of Cubans, but the Puerto Rican population continued to be numerically greater. The Dominican emigration was relatively small in comparison with that of the other two Caribbean groups, and its effects were only beginning to be felt in the 1970s. Although Virginia E. Sanchez Korrol's book, From Colonia to Community, 1983, deals only with the Puerto Rican emigration, its title describes the very process through which all three Spanish-Caribbean groups are living. It must be stressed that the first seven decades of the twentieth century are not very important to the study of the literature of Caribbean emigrants if these decades are evaluated merely in terms of the number of works produced. It must also be pointed out that the predominance of Puerto Rican writers during those decades reflects the fact that they then comprised the majority of Caribbean emigrants to the United States. In spite of the relatively weak panorama of literature by Caribbean emigrants during that period, some extremely interesting cases, which anticipated important cultural phenomena in more recent years, may be found. There are four such cases that I want to point out. The first is perhaps the most important: the assimilation of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg into African-American culture. Schomburg was a black Puerto Rican cigar maker with a socialist background who emigrated to New York in 1891 and immediately joined the political struggle directed by Marti. After the Spanish-American War he dedicated himself to studying the contributions of black people to universal culture. He compiled what was, at that time, the most important bibliography of this material and wrote studies on the subject that served as intellectual guides for the many young American Negroes (in the language of that time) who would later be part of the socalled Harlem Renaissance. This process transformed Arturo Alfonso Schomburg into the Arthur A. Schomburg who appears in anthologies of African-American writing such as those edited by Alain Locke and V. F. Calverton. For years Schomburg was lost to Puerto Rican culture and became one of the intellectual heroes of black Americans. That entry - or that assimilation - into the culture of U.S. blacks represented the road that many other Caribbean emigrants would see, much later, as a solution to the identity crisis with which they were confronted in the United States. The case of Julia de Burgos is also of great interest. Although Burgos lived for over a decade in the United States, the literature of her country of origin served as a frame of reference for her work. In this, Burgos's work was like that of all Spanish-Caribbean emigrant writers of the nineteenth century and of this period of the twentieth century; the emigrant authors of these periods wrote in exile,

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but they still did so with Cuban, Dominican, or Puerto Rican readers in mind. Thus, they always wrote in Spanish except in the rare cases when they were addressing North American readers and attempting, for the most part, to explain to them the problems and objectives peculiar to the emigrant community. At the end of her life, however, Julia de Burgos wrote two poems in English ("Farewell in Welfare Island" and "The Sun in Welfare Island") that do not appear to be directed at any group of readers in particular. These poems show the poet's need to write in a language that distanced her from herself in a moment of personal crisis, but they are also important antecedents to a much larger body of literature in English by Spanish-Caribbean emigrants. This incipient use of English as a medium of creation, not of communication - as in the case of the essays of nineteenthcentury emigrant Caribbean writers - represents this era's second important landmark in the development of the literature of Spanish-Caribbean emigrants. The third instance in which this era's literature anticipated later cultural production was the work of a few authors who were trying to explain the emigrant community, not to their compatriots on the islands, but to the members of that community themselves. In general, the quality of these works is low, but their mere existence already pointed to a new cultural phenomenon that would gain importance in a few years. Guillermo Cotto-Thorner and Pedro Juan Labarthe are two of the novelists of that period whom it is necessary to reevaluate when they are seen in this new ideological context. Their work, which up till now has been studied almost exclusively within the framework of insular Puerto Rican literature, would take on more meaning if it were seen as a precursor of contemporary Caribbean literature in the United States. Finally, even though music is not our main area of study, it is necessary to point out that when one is speaking of the formation of a new cultural product by Caribbean émigrés during the first part of the twentieth century, one must speak of popular music. In the popular music of this era, a fusion of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Spanish-American elements is achieved. This constituted a new form of expression that would later influence the music of the emigrants' countries of origin, and even North American music itself. Thus, despite the paucity of literature during this era, there was an important cultural ferment in the Caribbean community that was then being formed; given the economic and social origins of these émigrés it is natural that this cultural ferment was not principally manifested in literary terms. That is why, in spite of the studies already in existence, such as the one by Rondón, it will be necessary to study the music produced by Caribbean emigrants in these decades in a broader cultural context.

A Problem of Identity: 1960-89 Those who are unacquainted with the true history of Caribbean emigration to the United States appear to believe that it is only after 1945 that Puerto Ricans began to arrive in the United States, specifically in New York, and it is only after 1960 that Cubans arrived, and then only in Miami. From that same ignorant and prejudiced perspective, the Dominicans in the United States are still a people without a history and, thus, have no cultural milestones comparable to those of other Caribbeans. All of these perceptions about the Spanish-Caribbean émigrés to the United States are essentially false, although they are based on historical facts. But as we have already seen, the massive emigrations of the twentieth century have their roots in the smaller ones of the nineteenth century,

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and, as historians such as Virginia E. Sánchez Korrol and Gerald E. Poyo have proved, there is a continuity between the two. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans did not arrive in the United States starting in 1945, 1960, and 1970, respectively; instead they consolidated, from these dates on, the communities established a century earlier. These population increases - along with a new consciousness, within the communities of Spanish-Caribbean emigrants, of this historical continuity - serve as the basis for the growth and intensification of the literary production in these communities. It is not, however, just the increase in the volume of work that is important; during this era there were also some new approaches to the nature and character of the work itself. Starting around 1960, Spanish-Caribbean literature in the United States would have its own identity crisis as one of its central themes. In this period, the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans - some of whom began to call themselves by other names in order to emphasize their independence from the populations of their native islands - would ask themselves what they were and how they had come to be what they were. But these three groups would confront those essential questions in slightly different fashions because of the marked social and historical differences in their processes of emigration. The pivotal text in this search for an identity is Down These Mean Streets, 1967, by Piri Thomas, an autobiographical novel that falls, by genre, more within an African-American tradition than a Puerto Rican one. The obvious model for Thomas's novel is Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, which appeared two years earlier. But more than its derivative nature - and even the fact that it models itself on Brown's text is revealing - what is important about Down These Mean Streets is that it sets forth a feeling of cultural independence that separates it from all the Puerto Rican emigrant literature written before it. In the first place, now it is not two poems - as in the case of Julia de Burgos - but an entire book that is written in English. More importantly, however, a language other than Spanish is used because that other language is the one in which the author is most fluent and the one he chooses to use in order to reveal his intimate identity. Thomas was not the first Caribbean author in the United States to write an entire book in English. Pedro Juan Labarthe had already written a novel in English with some autobiographical elements: Mary Smith, 1958. But Labarthe's book did not attempt to define a collective identity, nor did it have the repercussions of Thomas's book, which, for many, came to be the book of the new Puerto Rican emigration and the text that defined the literature of that emigration. Down These Mean Streets is also the first text to put forth, in an effective way, the cultural identity that would later be called Neorican. In the novel, Thomas describes his infancy and adolescence in El barrio in Manhattan and the brief period his family spent on suburban Long Island, where his father took them in an attempt to assimilate into the dominant culture. The whole novel can be read as the narrator-protagonist's paradigm of his quest to create his own world, different from that of his father - who continues, throughout the text, to be associated with cultural assimilation - and that of his mother, who is associated with the return to Puerto Rico. Because of this quest, at the end of the period spent in the suburbs the narrator-protagonist tells his mother: "This Long Island ain't nuttin' like Harlem, and with all your green trees it ain't nuttin' like your Puerto Rico" (Thomas [1968], 95). These words - written in the black English that had been adopted by Puerto Ricans who were born (or at least raised) in the United States, and who, for that reason, had not mastered Spanish as a native language - unleashed a new body of literature: it was written entirely in English in many cases, in a mixture of

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English and Spanish in most cases. That new literature would come back to this problem: What is the identity of the Puerto Rican emigrants who neither feel part of their parents' island nor feel part of the dominant culture of the United States? The names of Lourdes Casal, Victor Hernandez Cruz, and Chiqui Vicioso can be added to Thomas's, as can the names of the other Spanish-Caribbean writers in the United States who search, through their literary work, for a new identity, distinct from everything Cuban, everything Puerto Rican, and everything Dominican. In general, these writers set forth their problem of conflicting identities in existential and even existentialist terms. The anguish of not knowing themselves to be part of either a "here" or a "there" is a central concern in their work. This is what motivated the Cuban writer Lourdes Casal to end her best-known poem, "Para Ana Veldford" (For Ana Veldford), by offering a synthesis of the pain caused by her lack of identity: "Therefore I will always be at the borders, / I will be a stranger among the stones, / . . . / I will be too much a Havanian to be a New Yorker, / and too much a New Yorker to be / - even to be once more - / any other thing."1 Other authors, however, were able to transcend this conflict and proclaim a new identity. The prototypical case is that of the Puerto Rican emigrants who already consider themselves to be different from their island compatriots and therefore call themselves Neoricans. The Dominican and Cuban emigrants have not formulated comparable new names for themselves. Maybe this is because these two groups have not lived through the process of transculturation, as the Puerto Ricans have. The Cubans' greater degree of integration into the North American middle class is another factor that has kept them from attempting to create a new identity. But the fact that the Puerto Rican émigrés have already created their own name - a name that has negative connotations in Puerto Rico itself - and that the same has not occurred among the Cubans and the Dominicans, reveals more profound differences among the three groups. The Cuban émigrés have suggested only that they be known as Cuban-Americans, but this term, as in the case of Mexican-American versus the liberating Chicano, has assimilationist connotations. The term Dominicanyork is used among the insular Dominicans to refer to the émigrés, but this term is always used pejoratively and has not been adopted by those émigrés to refer to themselves. Thus, our exploration of questions surrounding nomenclature points to the different levels on which the problem of identity manifests itself for Spanish-Caribbean emigrants. But not all of this literature has the definition of the collective identity as its central or sole theme. Much of it also denounces the economic and social situation of the émigrés. This is especially true in texts by Neorican authors. Cuban-American writers do not tend to make such denouncements because of their more advantageous social positions (Duany, Burunat, and Garcia). Recently, this literature of protest has acquired absurdist or surrealist tones, as can be observed in the poetry, theater, and narrative of the Puerto Rican Pedro Pietri and in the poetry of the Dominican Guillermo Francisco Gutiérrez. But the norm is a direct denouncement of the émigrés' economic situation. Works by members of all three groups have nostalgia for their ancestral islands as one of their central themes. There is a marked tendency to mythicize that distant world. This tendency is seen most clearly in literature by Cuban-Americans - such as the poetry of Uva Clavijo - since their motives for emigration lend themselves more to this type of idealization. On the other hand, the Dominicans and Neoricans tend to be critical even within their own myths. Among the Neoricans, 1 Por eso siempre permaneceré al margen, / una extrana entre las piedras, / . . . / demasiado habanera para ser newyorkina, / demasiado newyorkina para ser, / - aun volver a ser - / cualquier otra cosa (Lourdes Casal [1981], 61).

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the case of Miguel Algarin is the most dramatic; in his Mongo Affair, 1978, he arrives at the postulation that the Neorican will save the Puerto Ricans on the island. According to Algarin, it will be the Neorican who is transformed into a sort of new Puerto Rican, that is, a new person in the utopian sense used by some socialists. Among the Dominicans as well, the contrast between the émigrés and those on the island is marked, although it still has not reached the stage at which a distinct new cultural identity for the émigrés has been proposed. The poetry of Julia Alvarez - particularly her book Homecoming, 1984 - presents the beginnings of a vision of the new Dominican, a Dominican born of the experience of emigration, who can be considered different from the insular Dominican, and who now, at least, presents a bitter, critical vision of his or her native country.

A Plan for the Future The Dominicans in the United States, as well as the Cuban-Americans and the Neoricans, constantly ask themselves in their texts what the future of their work will be. Their question represents much more than the varying degree of certainty each individual author has about the survival of his or her work. These artists have to ask themselves what will happen to their work as part of a whole, as part of a literature that defines not just them but their work as well. The Cuban-American case is perhaps the most problematic in this sense. Cuban-American writers do not know if their work will be seen, in the long run, as part of the body of island literature or as a historical curiosity within North American literature, which tends to ignore any work that is not written in English. In that regard, the case of Chicano literature - a literature that does not appear to belong to any literary canon because it is not part of Mexican literature, not part of North American literature, and, in the eyes of some, not a separate body of work - is the specter that terrorizes not only the Cuban-American authors but the other Spanish-Caribbean emigrant writers as well. Dominican authors in the United States have still not raised this question of the future of their work to as great an extent. The problem appears to have been solved among the Puerto Rican emigrants, at least temporarily, by the postulation of the Neorican identity. Although the differences among the branches of Spanish-Caribbean literature written by the three different groups of emigrants are marked, some very evident similarities should also be noted. On one hand, we have the thematic similarities, and on the other hand, the formal ones. For instance, poetry is the predominant means of expression for all three groups: poetry of an oral character in the case of the Neoricans and poetry in a more traditional written form among the Dominicans and, especially, the Cubans. Theater is perhaps the second most important genre. Much of it has not been preserved because it is improvisational street theater with a propagandistic aim. Novels do not abound, since they presuppose a body of readers and a market that none of these three groups has yet been able to create. The abundance of works with an autobiographical tone is not surprising considering the interest among these authors in explaining themselves through the definition of a collective identity for their community, a trait that may be the result of North American influence. It is difficult to appraise these works. Like the creative work of all marginalized minorities, literature by Spanish-Caribbean émigrés to the United States does not fit within the framework or canons established to evaluate the literature of the dominant culture. In addition, the recent genesis of literature by Spanish-Caribbean emigrants - if this recent literature is not viewed as a direct con-

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tinuation of the body of literature produced by nineteenth-century emigrants - makes its evaluation more difficult than the evaluation of literature produced by African Americans and Chicanos. This is, at its heart, a literature that is searching for a historical frame of reference. To survive, it requires a system of editorial support more than scholarly analyses or predictions by critics about its future.

Bibliography Benítez Rojo, Antonio. 1989. La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte. Buranat, Silvia, and Ofelia Garcia, eds. 1988. Weinte anos de literatura cubanoamericana: Antologia. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe. Casai, Lourdes. 1981. Palabras juntan revolución. Havana: Casa de las Américas. Duany, Jorge. 1989. Hispanics in the United States: Cultural Diversity and Identity. Caribbean Studies. 22.1-2:135. Flores, Juan. 1985. Que assimilated, brother, yo soy asimilao: La estructura de la identidad puertorriquena en los Estados Unidos. Casa de las Américas. 26.152:54-63. Gonzalez, Manuel Pedro. 1953. José Marti: Epic Chronicler of the United States in the Eighties. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hendricks, Glenn. 1974. The Dominican Diaspora: Erom the Dominican Republic to New York: Villagers in Transition. New York: Teachers College Press. Hoetink, Herman. 1971. El pueblo dominicano: 1850-1900 (Apuntes para su sociologia histórica). Santo Domingo: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. Kanellos, Nicolas, ed. 1984. Hispanic Theater in the United States. Houston: Arte Público Press. Morales Carrión, Arturo. 1974. Puerto Rico and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean: A Study in the Decline of Spanish Exclusivism. San Juan: University of Puerto Rico. Onís, José de. 1952. The United States as Seen by Spanish-American Writers. New York: The Hispanic Institute in the United States. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. 1988. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press. Poyo, Gerald E. 1984. Cuban Communities in the United States: Toward an Overview of the Nineteenth Century Experience. Cubans in the United States. Ed. by Miren Uriarte-Gastón and Jorge Cañas Martinez. Boston: Center for the Study of the Cuban Community. 44-64. Reid, John T. 1977. Spanish American Images of the United States, 1790-1960. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Rondón, César Miguel. 1980. Salsa: Crónica de la música del Caribe urbano. Caracas: Oscar Todtmann Editores, C.A. Sanchez Korrol, Virginia E. 1983. From Colonia to Community: The History of the Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917-1948. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Thomas, Piri. [1967]. 1968. Down These Mean Streets. Signet Books. New York: New American Library.

Afterword

JULIO RODRÍGUEZ-LUIS

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

The preceding essays were designed to conform to a model devised by the editorial team of the History during the first year of our collaborative effort. After a short introduction by the subeditor on his approach to the section for which he has primary responsibility, the first part of the Hispanic Caribbean division begins with an essay by the noted linguist Humberto Lopez Morales on the Caribbean transformations of Spanish - or, more appropriately, Castilian, since of the several languages spoken in Spain it was the language of Castille, the kingdom that initially financed and controlled the discovery and colonization enterprise, that was exported to the New World. No indigenous or Creole languages (in the sense that term has elsewhere in the Caribbean) came out of the Spanish used in the region. This is to a great extent due to the fact that the plantation economy characteristic of the Caribbean as a whole did not, in the case of the Hispanic islands, involve a plantation-type regime, a point that will be taken up later. The strong and deep ties to the metropolis that existed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo were reflected in the educational systems developed in those islands under colonial rule. This educational model had important implications for the development of literary activity as a social institution. The essay by Rodriguez Castro investigates with lucidity a phenomenon characteristic of the Hispanic Antilles, and more specifically of Cuba and Puerto Rico: the attempt by the proletarian culture of the two islands to become a cultura letrada or literate culture (which made it, in the process, as authoritarian as the culture it was imitating). The specific example studied by Rodriguez Castro is paradigmatic of the cultural fabric that had evolved in the Hispanic Antilles during the second half of the nineteenth century out of the interaction of the metropolitan official culture with local conditions. Readers of the History can usefully contrast it with the essay by Maximilien Laroche in the francophone section of this volume. The Laroche essay is devoted to the appropriation of popular culture by literature. This reverse process is especially interesting as regards Haiti, which shares a geographical rather than a cultural space with the Dominican Republic. The appropriation of folklore and the popular language by Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican literatures has been studied by many and is touched upon in some of the essays in the Hispanic division. Gathering the essays grouped under the heading Islands and Territories proved to be as difficult as obtaining the collaboration of Cuban critics. In the latter case the slowness and complications of the mail service between Cuba and the United States, where the subeditor works, was a primary cause. In the former case we discovered that few scholars are knowledgeable about the peripheral areas of Hispanic Caribbean literature. In those areas of the rimland where the Caribbeanness of the region - specifically in Venezuela and Central America - is rather elusive, no specialist we could identify was willing to try to define it. We continue to feel that this question deserves sustained

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attention and it is our hope that the present History will contribute to the creation of conditions that will render such an investigation possible in the future. The primary purpose of the essays on Islands and Territories is to study the literary production of those regions that are considered to be marginal in relation to a Caribbean center - be it Hispanic, Dutch, anglophone or francophone - and to define their Caribbeanness. This section was also intended to deal with special problems; in our case this involved, notably, the reasons for and the implications of the critical neglect of Dominican literature. This is the subject of the provocative essay by Torres-Saillant. The contributions by Smart, Menton, and Barradas explore with great insight relatively unknown chapters of Caribbean writing in Colombia, Central America (by writers of nonHispanic descent), and the United States. The subeditor is especially proud of the contribution of this group of essays. Part two of the Hispanic division of the History was organized according to a basically traditional model of literary historiography. This was mandated by the nature of literary production in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. Having begun as early as the sixteenth century in Santo Domingo, the seat of the first colonial administration in the New World, literary production proceeded in those countries in the course of the following centuries at a pace rather close to the pace of the same process in Spain, notwithstanding the differences in the volume of literary production that are to be expected in a colonial environment. We have thus in the Hispanic Caribbean a large body of literature that extends over at least four centuries, is spread among all the genres, and features common tendencies that express (with the peculiarities due to local conditions) the various currents and movements that also dominated metropolitan literature around the same period. It was felt by the editorial team of the three-volume History that this historiographical model could best highlight, by contrast and implication, the different type and rate of development of literary activity in the other three linguistic and cultural zones of the region. The division of literary production by genres and by centuries followed from this editorial policy that governed the assignment, collection, and editing of our work. Since, however, the publication of books and periodicals, as well as theatrical activity was rather modest in the three islands until the beginning of the nineteenth century, it seemed appropriate to devote only one essay to examining literary production in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Cuba from the early stages of colonization to the end of the eighteenth century. Chang-Rodriguez's essay on this subject includes new insights into little-known works. Her essay will also provide illuminating contrasts to the state of literary and theatrical activity in the francophone Caribbean, which began appreciably later and developed along different lines. Although there was theatrical activity in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo before the twentieth century, we did not think that, given the limitations of space, that activity warranted an extensive essay. Cypess's essay which, like Chang-Rodriguez's, is full of original research, concentrates on the twentieth century, but informs the reader about the earlier background to contemporary theatrical production. Peter Earle's piece on the essay, a characteristically modern genre, traces its nineteenth-century background as it explores in highly original ways the role of the essay in the definition of a national identity. The chapter by William Luis on the short story, an even more markedly twentieth-century genre, illuminates its development in the Hispanic Antilles. The privileged position held by the novel over other genres in our day, owing to its capacity to reach a wider audience, suggested that we pay additional attention to it by covering, in two essays,

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the contribution of its Antillean manifestation to the so-called boom of Latin-American literature in the 1960s (the subject of Pellón's superb essay), and the course it has followed in Cuba since the 1959 revolution. In her often controversial essay (which touches on other literary genres), Méndez Rodenas studies this subject in some depth, which is of particular interest because of the minimal dissemination of Cuban books outside the island. The essays by Alonso and Siemens survey with great thoroughness and insight novelistic production in Cuba during, respectively, the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The same is done with regard to poetry, with as much success, by Schulman and Bejel. The essay by the latter is particularly impressive for the amount of information that it offers its readers; Schulman's masterful contribution is a model of concision. All the contributions are exemplary in the thoroughness with which they have dealt with their often vast subjects. The critical insight with which they illuminate their subjects is particularly commendable in view of the need to synthesize in a few pages the examination of many decades of literary production of very different kinds in three nations. Our hope is that the essays commissioned for parts one and two of the first volume of the History will help Latin-Americanists, as well as comparative Caribbeanists and students of literature in general, in their future research on the Caribbean.

Literary Genres

Introduction

JULIO RODRÍGUEZ-LUIS

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

A brief general history of the region will prove useful as an introduction to the essays on the development of literary genres in the Hispanic Caribbean from the beginning of colonization through the contemporary period. The evolution of the three Hispanic Antillean nations throughout the first three centuries of Spanish rule is very similar and is characterized by the adverse circumstances under which it occurred. Spain kept these colonies in relative neglect, even Santo Domingo which, as the original Spanish settlement in the New World, had been the first viceroyalty in the Indies. This neglect was due to the shift of the colonizing effort, after 1520, to the newly discovered and much larger territories of Middle and South America, which were also richer in precious metals. Sparse populations, isolation with regard to each other, to the rest of the Spanish colonies, and to Spain, as well as frequent attacks by pirates, are the main factors affecting the early historical process in these countries. By the end of the eighteenth century Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo were slowly emerging from their stagnation and giving signs of entering an era of relative prosperity. This was especially true of Cuba which, being the largest of the three islands, also had a larger population and more economic resources at its disposal. Cuba had received more attention from Spain as well, mainly because of its military importance as the meeting place for the fleet that took the gold and the merchandise of the Indies to Cadiz. In 1795, as part of the treaty that ended its war with France, Spain ceded Santo Domingo. This treaty marked the culmination of a process that had begun nearly two centuries earlier. Toward the beginning of the seventeenth century the towns of the northern coast of the island had been razed by Spanish royal decree in order to put a stop to the trade that those towns engaged in, mainly with Dutch ships. The northern towns could not in fact have sold their products any other way, since the only port on the island authorized to carry on international trade - i.e., with the metropolis - was Santo Domingo, on the southern coast. Taking advantage of the depopulation of the northern coast, adventurers and buccaneers of several nations settled in the island of Tortuga, which later passed into French hands. When the French were forced to leave Tortuga, they settled in the western part of Hispaniola. By 1680 there was already an official border, confirmed in 1776, between French SaintDomingue and Spanish Santo Domingo. From the time of its transfer to France by treaty, the evolution of Santo Domingo followed a path different from that pursued by its two Antillean sisters. The historical process in Santo Domingo was to be dominated during the nineteenth century by fear of absorption by Haiti, which would also mean the end of the white oligarchy's dominant position. National consciousness in Santo Domingo thus developed in opposition to Haiti. In 1809, when Haiti was already an indepen-

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dent nation, the Dominicans reconquered their part of the island for Spain. This situation soon proved to work against the progress of the colony and Santo Domingo declared its independence in 1821. In order to guarantee the survival of that independence, which had been gained peacefully, the country asked to be confederated with Gran Colombia (Venezuela and Colombia). That nation, however, could not accept a political union that meant commitments it could not attend to as it was still fighting with Spain for its own independence. Thus Haiti, taking advantage of the new republic's weakness, and being itself more powerful (it had almost a million inhabitants whereas Santo Domingo had only sixty thousand, fewer than Puerto Rico in 1776), invaded the eastern part of the island, which it ruled until 1844. In the ensuing period the various invasions, attempted or successful, from Haiti convinced some Dominican leaders that it would be impossible for their country to survive without placing itself under the protection of a powerful state. Offers were therefore made to France, Spain, and the United States to annex Santo Domingo. This maneuver can be seen as consistent with the project under which the republic had originally been proclaimed as a protectorate of Gran Colombia. The move for annexation, which was combatted by the true patriots, parallels the so-called anexionismo of those Cubans and Puerto Ricans who throughout the nineteenth century proposed and tried to negotiate the union of their nations with the United States of America. It should be noted, nevertheless, that Santo Domingo's independence was born and maintained under conditions of peculiar uncertainty that increased the instability caused by the fights between rival political factions. In 1861 the republic ceased to exist and rejoined its former metropolis. In 1865, in view of the increasing opposition in Santo Domingo to the country's new status, and the imminent victory of the armed movement for restauratión or restoration of independence, Spain left the island a second time. It is in this period that a true national project is born, as popular participation in the guerrilla war against Spain suggests. From 1865 until the beginning of the U.S. occupation in 1916, the political history of Santo Domingo consists of a succession of dictatorships (some rather long, like that of Herreux, from 1886 to 1899), "revolutions," counter-revolutions, coups d'état, and military uprisings - between 1876 and 1899 the country had seven presidents; between 1865 and 1883 there was not a single legal transfer of power) - with very brief periods of civilian government. This political turmoil took place against a background of increasing corruption in the handling of public funds by the politicians, and an equally increasing dependence on foreign loans (which eventually caused customs houses to be placed in the hands of foreign governemts so as to guarantee the repayment of the loans). Meanwhile the efforts to join the United States, and/or to sell or cede to it the Samana peninsula, continued. In fact, direct control of Santo Domingo by the United States began in 1905, when the latter took charge of all the country's customs houses (it already controlled some) in order to assure the repayment of Santo Domingo's external debt to its various creditors. This move was followed by the imposition upon the government of the services of a financial expert provided by the United States and, finally, under the pretext that political instability continued, by the military occupation of Santo Domingo. The military occupation was rather harsh and lasted from 1916 until 1922; the U.S. occupation of Haiti had begun the previous year and was to last a decade longer. The second U.S. occupation of Cuba had ended in 1909; its occupation of Puerto Rico dated from 1898. The end of the military occupation of Santo Domingo did not mean, of course, the end of U.S. control over the country. After a brief period of peace and some economic progress followed by

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new "revolutions," a general trained by the Americans to serve their interests in the best possible manner, Trujillo, inaugurated a dictatorship that would last from 1930 until 1961, when new directions in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America suggested replacing dictators by liberal governments. In 1965 the marines went back to Santo Domingo in order to assure that the progressive party headed by the writer Juan Bosch, who had been elected president in 1963 and who had been deposed the same year by the army, did not regain power. The Dominican political process resulted in greatly retarding the formation of a national bourgeoisie. In Santo Domingo the national bourgeoisie evolved under conditions of great insecurity that rendered it unable to play the role it should have played in fostering the development of the country's economy (the production of sugar on a grand scale began only during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, thanks in part to the contribution of Cubans fleeing the effects of the first war of independence). It was after the First World War, initially under the U.S. occupation, and later under the Trujillo dictatorship, that the middle sectors of Dominican society acquired some strength due to the relative prosperity of those years and the upsurge in commercial and financial activity. These combined conditions fostered social mobility. Finally free to pursue its own goals after the demise of Trujillo (who had also considerably weakened the power of the old cattle-raising oligarchy), the Dominican bourgeoisie, not having developed a national project, adapted itself without objections to U.S. interests. The formation of a Dominican working class with some consciousness of itself is an even more recent phenomenon than that of the bourgeoisie. Compared to the history of Santo Domingo, the histories of Cuba and Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century seem like models of stability. Although in Cuba there was early agitation for independence, it did not gain the support of the Cuban bourgeoisie and landowner classes (actually very much the same class) until past the middle of the century. This situation, together with the rigid control under which Spain maintained the island, determined as it was not to lose its last important colony, delayed the beginning of an armed movement for independence until 1868. The first war of independence lasted ten years but it did not touch the capital or the larger cities, and between its conclusion and the beginning of a new war in 1895 the country enjoyed relative peace. In Puerto Rico, only the brief uprising of 1868 in favor of independence disturbed political tranquility more than superficially. We thus have a situation in which the prolongation of colonial status in Cuba and Puerto Rico facilitated an orderly and rapid evolution of their societies as well as of the means of economic and cultural production. Even in Puerto Rico, whose economic resources were much poorer than Cuba's, the local bourgeoisie had a definite voice of its own by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a period when a workers' movement also appeared. Puerto Rico's economy was, however, adversely affected by a lack of credit and money as well as by the heavy taxes imposed by Spain on the export and import trade with the United States, which was rapidly becoming the main trading partner of Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spain in 1875 granted to Puerto Rico the status of a Spanish province, which facilitated the development of political parties in conditions of relative stability. Over against the innumerable obstacles placed in their path by the government and the conservatives - this group was composed mainly of Spanish businessmen, dead set against losing the privileges they enjoyed - first the Partido Liberal Reformista (Liberal Reform Party), and later the Partido Autonomista (Autonomist Party) promoted political activity that culminated in the creation of an autonomous regime at the

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end of 1897, and the formation of a local parliament in which the autonomistas were a majority, on the eve of the American invasion. The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation are comparable to the occupation of the newly independent Santo Domingo by Haiti nearly a century earlier inasmuch as the dominant class of Puerto Rico suddenly lost out when it became apparent that the United States was annexing the island as a colony and not in order for it to become a state. Suddenly that class saw obliterated what had taken it so long to achieve: the recognition of its existence by Spain as well as its right to participate in the administration of the country. In the twentieth century the class of criollo landowners, professionals, and businessmen which had favored either independence, union with the United States (which a majority of them preferred) or autonomy with respect to Spain - simply disappeared. With the modernization of the country, new social elements were to make their presence felt in the political and cultural fabric. Basically these elements are: a high bourgeoisie that favors full incorporation into the United States; a professional and business bourgeoisie that tends to favor the status quo (Puerto Rico, officially called Estado Libre Asociado or Associate Free State is a colony with limited autonomy); and a working class, in its great majority of peasant extraction, which favors either the status quo or statehood. The unabashed Americanization of the new urban working class has developed parallel to its liberation - thanks to the economic opportunites offered over the years by the new regime from its former subordination to the old criollo oligarchy. Given this state of affairs, the proindependence minority that continues to be Puerto Rico's intellectual avant-garde has had to adopt new tactics for carrying on its political and cultural activities. The British occupation of Havana in 1762 introduced the free trade that many in the island were already asking for to replace the Spanish colonial system of state monopolies and state-controlled trade. From that moment until the end of Spanish rule in 1898, the economic and, by extension, the political history of Cuba, too, was to be that of the struggle of the local bourgeoisie for free trade with other countries. The metropolis, in turn, partially granted freedom of trade, took it back, then granted it again but together with a rise in taxes. Sugar production gained ground from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onward, soon becoming the main source of income for the island's economy. Prosperity based on the production of sugar reached its zenith in the 1860s, when there were more than 1,300 sugar mills in Cuba and the island provided close to forty percent of the sugar consumed worldwide. It is worth noting that in spite of the fact that the production of sugar is dependent upon the existence of plantations, Cuba did not have haciendas with large peasant populations. The sugarcane plantations were at first relatively small. The growth in importance of the sugar industry caused the elimination of the legal difficulties that the system of indivisible entailed estates presented to the acquisition of vast farms generally devoted until then to cattle raising, and consequently inhabited by but a handful of peasants - by those eager and able to invest in the sugar industry. These were mostly businessmen from Havana and other important towns, who generally did not reside with any degree of permanence on their plantations, which they saw primarily as the seat of an industrial production and secondarily as summer residences. The quasi-totality of the workers in plantations as well as in mills were slaves and were thus considered to be chattels rather than human beings. This fact, combined with the frequent absence of the landowners from their plantations, prevented the creation of relations of a feudal type that

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custom established in the large haciendas of Mexico, the Andean region, Chile, and Argentina, between the landowners who resided on their farms and the Indian and mestizo peasants who worked those lands. With the passage of time, and in order to facilitate the full dedication of the sugar industry to its purpose (the production of sugar for the export trade) there developed a system of small farms devoted to growing sugarcane to be sold to the nearest sugar mill. With the abolition of slavery in the 1880s, the black workers of both ingenios (sugar mills) and colonias (the farms dedicated to growing sugarcane) became a rural proletariat, just like the landless white peasants. The ten-year first war of independence brought about the ruin of a great many plantations and sugar mills. In the hands of their creditors, these plantations were fused into real latifundia owned by Spaniards (the businessmen on whom many sugar mill owners still depended for credit), by banks or by U.S. corporations, all of which were, of course, absentee landlords. As a consequence and although in Cuba, because of the almost exclusive dedication of the economy to the production of sugar, there existed some of the conditions necessary for the development of a semi-feudal regime of landowning, this did not come about. In Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico the large-scale sugar industry dates from the end of the nineteenth century and from the period after 1900, respectively. (In Puerto Rico the initial boom in sugar production during the first half of the nineteenth century ended with the drastic reduction around 1860 of the world demand for the dark Puerto Rican sugar.) Sugar production naturally developed in conditions similar to those existing in Cuba after 1878. During the nineteenth century both of these countries featured plenty of small- and medium-size farms alongside haciendas of moderate size; and although the landless peasant was exploited, he labored, in principle, as a salaried worker. The end result is the absence in the literatures of the Hispanic Antilles of the character of the landowner who is seen in continental Latin-American literature as an almost archetypal figure charged with a prestige that legitimizes his role in society while serving to idealize labor relations in the countryside (as happens in Doña Bárbara [1929], by Venezuela's Rómulo Gallegos, or in Don Segundo Sombra [1926], by Argentina's Ricardo Güiraldes). From a strictly economic point of view, the plantation model of society only applies comfortably to Cuba, since large-scale sugar production developed in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico after slavery had been abolished. The utilization of the land that is called "plantation" implies, in the political and judicial spheres, a type of settlement - also identified with the factoría or trading post that best characterizes that regime - destined almost exclusively to the economic exploitation of the colony and tied loosely to administration by the metropolis. Obviously Spain exploited without any restraints the resources of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, which also suffered from a lack of constitutional liberties and guarantees, and from the arbitrary behavior of their governors. However, the Spanish colonial project was, from the very beginning - witness the Leyes de Indias - a comprehensive one, implying a complex, in fact overbearing, administrative structure. That project was bent - notwithstanding the fact that during the sixteenth century Cuba was used mostly as a port of call, and that Puerto Rico was largely ignored until the eighteenth century (Santo Domingo kept some of the remnants of its former importance as the seat of the first viceroyalty in the Indies throughout the seventeenth century) - on making each colony an integral part of the metropolitan territory. As a consequence the society that developed in those countries was a more complex one than the type found in most non-Hispanic colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America. Like Puerto Rico's, Cuba's political relations with Spain, from the moment when the notion of a distinctive national identity appears, consist of a series of demands for reform designed to give the

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criollo bourgeoisie some measure of control over the country's administration. By the 1830s a national consciousness is firmly established. However, most of those same Cubans who thought of themselves as already constituting a nation, did not favor independence - or at least not immediately and through an armed struggle - since this would endanger the country's wealth. The interests of the plantation owners - the sacarocracia - dominated political thinking for a long time. Their interests converged with the fear that, given the size of the slave population, a revolution would convert the island into another Haiti. Spain's refusal to liberalize its handling of the island resulted in the bourgeoisie's embracing, with increasing boldness, various political projects destined to sever or at least loosen its ties with the metropolis through union with the United States, independence, or autonomy. Finally, in 1868, there began a war for independence initiated by the sugar mill and cattle owners (hacendados) of the eastern region. These were the property owners most affected by Spanish monopolistic policies and by high taxes. This was especially so in the case of the sugar mill owners: the small size of their plantations, whose mills had not yet been mechanized, made them increasingly less profitable. The war relied upon the financial support of the great landowners of the western region, many of whom continued to consider joining the United States a better solution than independence and made their backing of the war effort conditional on respect of their ownership of the sugar mills and plantations. The war lasted ten years and was fought mainly by peasants, white and black (the revolutionaries having abolished slavery in the territories under their control), but also had the support of the working and artisan classes (made up mostly of mulattos), of the petty bourgeoisie, and of the professional class. The peace of 1878 was more of a truce than anything else, since the patriots began immediately to conspire to begin a new war, which broke out in 1895. This war was organized very differently from the first one. It was basically paid for by the contributions of middle-class people and of workers (mostly those tobacco workers who had emigrated to the U.S.A. when the Cuban tobacco industry went into a crisis due to a rise in import taxes by its principal customer, the United States). Spain responded to the war with measures against the civilian population such as the reconcentración of peasants in resettlement camps in the towns to prevent their helping the guerrillas. These measures caused the death of many thousands of people (about 50,000 - half of the reconcentrados - in the province of Havana alone by the end of 1897). Spain sent almost two hundred thousand regular soldiers to Cuba over a three-year period, 54,000 of whom died in the course of the war, mainly of yellow fever and other diseases. It finally granted Cuba autonomous status, which was refused by the revolutionaries. The war would most certainly have concluded with the full victory of the Cubans had not the United States intervened when it judged that the long-awaited opportunity to grab Cuba and Puerto Rico, plus the Philippines, at minimal cost, had finally arrived. The Cuban revolutionaries were excluded as much as possible from the process of the brief war against Spain, from the peace treaty, and from the subsequent reorganization of the country. When the United States finally allowed the creation of a republic in Cuba - most likely counting on its soon becoming a new state, as had been the case with Texas in 1845 - it was only under the condition that the new counry give away a portion of its territory and accept United States supervision in internal and external affairs. Nevertheless, or in spite of those restrictions on its sovereignty, and of a nearly total economic dependence on the United States, Cuba was from 1902 onward a nation with a certain degree of

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independence. There was some prosperity (with a very definite American stamp to it), especially for the bourgeoisie, and practically uninterrupted civil peace until 1930. Meanwhile, the Cuban high bourgeoisie continued the process it had begun after being ruined by the first war of independence, by becoming a managerial class for U.S. industrial, financial, and business interests, a process in which the middle class participated to the extent of its possibilities. These political, economic, and social conditions greatly impeded the radicalization and even the mere politicization of the middle class, from whose ranks come most intellectuals. These same conditions militated against the politicization of the workers. It was only in opposition to the increasing corruption of politicians and the administration and against the latter's abuses and dictatorial behavior that the Cuban middle class developed an organized effort at self-definition, beginning in the 1930s. By 1933 the Gerardo Machado regime had degenerated into a bloody dictatorship that provoked a short-lived revolution. This was a nationalist revolution with a socialist orientation, in many respects the continuation of the one frustrated in 1898; it was thus directed to a great extent against Cuba's dependence on the United States, which once more intervened to put a stop to the effort. (The hatred against Spain was beginning to be forgotten by this time, but it was still strong enough to prevent the creation in Cuba of the myth of an uninterrupted link to Spain such as the one fostered by the nacionalistas in Puerto Rico after 1898.) A period of stability and economic prosperity under increasingly corrupt democratic regimes was followed by the dictatorship of Batista, the same general who had destroyed the 1933 revolution on behalf of American interests. (Like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Batista was a creation of the American control of those countries, and his career and political role served as a model for the use of Latin-American armies by the United States.) In spite of the relative prosperity that the country continued to enjoy, a strong opposition movement, at first supported by the middle class, was organized against the Batista regime. That movement evolved into the revolution that from 1959 on was to radically restructure Cuban society according to the socialist model, and was to sever its dependence on the United States.

Literary Genres

The Colonial Period to the Early Nineteenth Century (All Genres)

Colonial Voices of the Hispanic Caribbean

RAQUEL

CHANG-RODRIGUEZ

The City College-Graduate School City University of New York

The Sixteenth Century: Inscribing the Other Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Antilles in 1492 initiated a process of acculturation that would soon affect many aspects of Caribbean life. The literature of the Caribbean, particularly in its representation of the Other, manifests this process. In the early writings of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico one can trace common and divergent characteristics of this depiction. Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, was founded in 1496, and became the center of European expansion during the Antillean period of colonization. The first schools and juridical institutions were established in Santo Domingo, as was the first university in the area, Saint Thomas Aquinas, founded in 1538. The expeditions that began the conquest and colonization of Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba set out from Santo Domingo. The first repartimientos (distributions of the Indian population) took place in Hispaniola, and the encomienda system (official grants of land and Indians) was put into effect. The earliest slaves brought to America also arrived there. Once the period of gold mining came to an end around 1515, the cultivation of sugarcane was introduced in Hispaniola, and the first sugar plantations operated with slave labor were established. However, the preeminence of Santo Domingo would not last. After the conquest of Mexico and Peru, many colonists abandoned Hispaniola in search of greater riches on the continent. By the time the flota system (fleet system) was instituted in the middle of the century, Spanish ships no longer called at the poorly defended port of Santo Domingo, and it was later captured by Francis Drake in 1586. Diego Velázquez directed the conquest of Cuba in 1510 and became its first governor. Once its gold deposits were depleted, the island served as a point of departure for expeditions to the mainland. In 1519 Hernán Cortés set out from Cuba to conquer Mexico, and in 1539 Hernando de Soto left the island to explore Florida. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Cuba was a trading post in which slave labor predominated. There were between 600 and 700 free persons and 700 African slaves; of the Indian population, estimated at approximately 100,000 in 1510, only 5,000 remained (Fernández Retamar [1968], 16). Havana, the capital of Cuba founded in 1515, benefited from the

* I am grateful to Franklin Gutiérrez and Nita Renfrew who during the different stages of the preparation of this study helped me in many ways. Special thanks to José J. Arrom who read the first version of the manuscript and generously shared his vast knowledge of the topic by making many valuable suggestions, and to Luis Rafael Sánchez for providing bibliographic information and much encouragement.

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calls of the fleet and from the construction of fortresses, both of which brought in money and slaves. During this early period Cuba developed a strong contraband trade. The island known as Borinquén to its inhabitants was discovered during Columbus's second trip in 1493, and was named San Juan Bautista by him. In 1508, Juan Ponce de León got permission from the authorities in Santo Domingo to colonize it. Once there, he allied himself with the cacique (Indian lord) Agüeibanâ and settled around San-Juan harbor (Puerto Rico). When this cacique died in 1511, the Indians rebelled and fought unsuccessfully for three months against the colonizers. As in Hispaniola and Cuba, the native population suffered a severe reduction so that less than a hundred years after the conquest it had almost ceased to exist. This can be ascribed to a number of factors, including the prevalence of the repartimientos and encomiendas, the effect of diseases brought in from Europe, and the exodus to the not yet colonized islands of Barlovento. Consequently beginning in 1513, African slaves were imported and, as in the other Spanish Antilles, the economy began to revolve around smuggling. During the latter part of the sixteenth century there were some one thousand inhabitants left on the island. The violence of the Spanish conquest and colonization, the decimation of the indigenous population, the contraband economy, the attacks by corsairs and pirates, the importation of African slaves, and the emergence of an incipient sugar industry, especially in Hispaniola, shaped the first century of colonial life in the Spanish islands.

The Representation of the Caribbean The European explorers and colonists felt the need to describe the American lands and their inhabitants in order to satisfy the curiosity of the West. Often they exaggerated their own participation in the conquest and colonization so as to obtain privileges and favors previously denied them because of their humble origins. These Europeans wrote letters, reports, chronicles, and histories, today known by the broad heading of "Chronicles of the Indies." Such personal accounts, as much a product of the medieval mind as of Renaissance thought, conjure up a world where classical myths and American reality coexist and clash. Caribbean texts of this period, the first writings describing this New World "discovered" and colonized by Spain, show clearly the contradictions and peculiarities of these chronicles, which both reconstruct the unknown territory and express the complex feelings of their authors. Christopher Columbus was the first European to describe the Caribbean. He wrote numerous letters, reports, and a Diario de navegación (Ship's log). This Diario was preserved thanks to Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican theologian and defender of the Indians, who published an abstract of the log in one of his books. Among the Columbian documents, the "Letter of Discovery," 1493, directed to Luis de Santangel, scribe to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, is notable, as it gives an account of Columbus's first trip to the New World. This letter, which was soon translated into Latin, Italian, and German, contains several discourses: the economic, the religious, and the geographic. The Caribbean islands visited by the Admiral are seen as a land of promise with an abundance of food and metals. They are inhabited by beautiful and fearful people who can easily be converted to Christianity and exploited. The beauty of Hispaniola's landscape and its climate, in a

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phrase later repeated with reference to other lands, is incomparable. Thus the document brings together in a peculiar combination the landscape rhetoric of the Renaissance, the complex Caribbean reality, and the Admiral's own ambitions. In this first written representation, the Caribbean Indian is described as an attractive and docile object that can be easily used by the colonizers. Moreover, the letter establishes the image of America that Europeans will long have. It forecasts the road to wealth - gold and Indians - that will characterize the Antillean period of Spain's venture in America and becomes the model to be followed in other parts of the continent. Bartolomé de las Casas is the most controversial figure of the sixteenth century because of his constant defense of the native population, both in the colonies and at court. He questioned the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest, and proposed to restore the lands and wealth to their rightful owners - the original inhabitants. After entering the Dominican order in 1523, Las Casas dedicated himself to studying legal, philosophical, and theological treatises in order to lay the foundation for his arguments in favor of the native population. Initially, Las Casas proposed importing slave labor to substitute for that of the natives, but later rejected this idea, considering the exploitation of any ethnic group unworthy and reprehensible (Pérez Fernández [1989], 36-48). In the Dominican cloisters of Hispaniola he began writing two of his most important works, Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies) and Apologética historia sumaria (Summary apologetical history), both of which circulated in manuscript form and were not published until centuries later. The Historia is a survey of the conquest and colonization from 1492 to 1520, and the Apologética historia is a treatise written to prove the full rational capacity and abilities of the Indians. In both, Las Casas proposed to attract the native inhabitants and convert them to Christianity by peaceful means, as opposed to other theologians who viewed conquest by force as a means to evangelization. Worth mentioning among the many episodes of the colonial period collected in Historia de las Indias is the biography of Enriquillo, a young Indian educated by missionaries who turned into a rebel because of the abuses of his Spanish masters. Several centuries later, and for very different reasons, the Dominican writer Manuel de Jesus Galván made this cacique the hero of his historical novel, Enriquillo (complete edition in 1882). Bartolomé de las Casas's most controversial work is, however, Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (The devastation of the Indies: a brief account), 1552. Translated into several European languages, and published ten years after the failure of the New Laws (1542) suppressing the encomiendas, slavery, and other forms of forced Indian labor, this treatise exposed the abuses of the conquistadors. It helped to create the "Black Legend," which criticized Spanish cruelties in America and was fostered with great pleasure by Spain's Protestant enemies. In the Brevisima, the Dominican friar combined theological and philosophical arguments with graphic descriptions of killings and abuses. He used a rhetorical inversion in which the supposedly savage, pagan, Indians behave like gentle lambs, while the civilized, Christian, Europeans act like ferocious wolves. Thus, in contrast to Columbus's vision of the Indian, Las Casas describes him as the noble savage living in harmony with his environment, a metaphor that was later popularized by writers of the Enlightenment. Although many disputes were provoked by the Brevisima because of the author's exaggerations, recognized by both admirers and detractors, the message of Las Casas's work is still valid today. It points up problems not yet resolved in Spanish America: the integration of the Indian into national life and the creation of a truly multicultural society. Thus the fiery pages of the Dominican monk open up in Caribbean and Spanish-American literature a field of combat

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and commitment from which to demand a more equitable society. Las Casas's writings are a precursor of the polemic prose and of the indigenista (in defense of the Indians) literature written later on the continent. The other face of indigenismo - anti-slavery literature - would subsequently emerge in the Caribbean with the near extinction of the native population and the increase of the African slave trade. When Charles V of Spain instituted the position of Official Chronicler of the Indies in 1532, it was assigned to the peripatetic Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. He traveled to the New World for the first time in 1514, held positions of varied importance at different times and locations, and was finally appointed alcaide (governor) of the Fort of Santo Domingo in 1533. His writings include Claribalte, 1519, a novel of adventure, and Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (Summary of the natural history of the West Indies), 1526, the first history of America printed in Spain. However, Oviedo's most important work, to which he devoted more than thirty-five years, is Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y Tierra Firme del mar Océano (General history of the West Indies, islands and continent of the ocean sea), the first part of which appeared in Seville in 1535. In contrast to his archenemy Bartolomé de las Casas, Oviedo, as the first official Chronicler of the Indies, supported the imperial point of view, justifying the Spanish conquest, and championing the messianic role of the Spanish monarchy in America. Patiently compiling many varied facts, he frequently reaffirmed his condition as an eyewitness to lend authority to his account. He described the New World as an observer surprised by the variety and vastness of its nature and cultures, and in search of uses for its flora and fauna. However, for this Renaissance gentleman, the Indian's place the place of the Other - is always determined by the imperial order he praised in his works. From this stems Oviedo's justification of the conquest and of the encomienda system. His Historia includes descriptions of the Caribbean areitos (dancing and singing rituals) and of other customs common to the inhabitants of the Greater Antilles, as well as an account of Ponce de León's death, and a large collection of Taino words. The essential as well as curious facts in Oviedo's work draw the attention of the reader toward the heterogeneous world that so fascinated its author. Several lesser known works are also important for an understanding of cultural developments during this period of colonization: (1) the 1493 letter of Diego Alvarez de Chanca, a Sevillian doctor who accompanied Columbus on his second trip; (2) the accounts and letters of Juan Ponce de León, conqueror of Puerto Rico and discoverer of Florida; (3) the so called Memoria de Melgarejo (Melgarejo's Report), 1582, written at the request of the governor of Puerto Rico, Juan López de Melgarejo, by Juan Ponce de León Troche and Antonio de Santa Clara; and (4) the curious compendium, Discursos medicinales (Discourses on medicine), 1607, by the poet and doctor Juan Méndez Nieto. This last work, written in Cartagena de Indias (present-day Colombia) at the beginning of the seventeenth century, is of particular interest because its author describes different aspects of life in Santo Domingo, where he lived for eight years. Discursos also contains a collection of the works of Hispaniola's local poets. More significant to the development of prose fiction, however, are two accounts in which the author narrates how he cured a woman and a black slave in Santo Domingo. The first details the illness of a widow for whom Méndez Nieto prescribed marriage as a remedy (Méndez Nieto [1957], Discurso XIII); in the second, the physician cures a black slave who pretends to have epilepsy to avoid being separated from his lover (Méndez Nieto [1957], Discurso XIV). Both narrations have been studied by José J. Arrom, who links them to a rich medieval tradition of humorous tales (Arrom [1985], 10-11, 15). In addition, Arrom points out that the slave of the

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second tale is one of the first known black protagonists of Spanish-American literature, making Méndez Nieto's story a forerunner of negrista literature (Arrom [1985], 15). Early letters, chronicles, accounts, and histories of the New World began to shape an image of the Caribbean as a place of beauty and horror. These documents are representative of the first frontier of acculturation, where different races, tongues, and cultures intermingle to constitute a complex historical entity.

From Santo Domingo to Burgos: The Controversy about the Indian Long before Bartolomé de las Casas began to champion the Indian cause, the Dominican order of Hispaniola raised its voice in defense of the native population, initiating a debate in which the most noted theologians, jurists, and men of letters of the period participated. This debate disputed the philosophical assumptions that justified the conquest of America and laid the foundations of the principles of international law later upheld by the great professor Francisco de Vitoria of the University of Salamanca. The controversy was provoked by the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos with his sermon delivered in Santo Domingo in 1511. This sermon, authorized by the entire Dominican congregation and its vicar, Pedro de Córdoba, had as its theme the biblical verse: "Ego vox clamantis in deserto" (I am the voice that cries out in the desert). The desert was equated with the sterile consciences of the conquistadors who were indifferent to the suffering they imposed on the native population and who were, therefore, in danger of being condemned to the fires of hell. Las Casas, who included this part of the controversy in his Historia de las Indias, characterized it as follows: "the novelty was the affirmation that to kill these people [the Indians] was a greater sin than to kill bedbugs."1 Despite the warnings of the colonial authorities, Montesinos repeated his sermon on the following Sunday. The encomenderos (owners of encomiendas), with the support of Viceroy Diego Colon, were quick to send a representative to the Spanish court with their complaints. The Dominicans did so as well. After a long wait and several refusals to receive him, Montesinos was able to explain to the king the true situation of the Indians in Hispaniola. The result of these and later efforts is evident in the Laws of Burgos, 1513, in favor of the native population, and in the Papal Bull of 2 June 1537, affirming the rationality of the Indians. Nevertheless, despite the Laws of Burgos, the papal bull, and the New Laws of 1542, the mistreatment of the native population continued and the rationality of the Indians was still disputed. In fact, in 1550, the Consejo de Indias (Council of the Indies), at the request of Charles V, called a meeting in Valladolid of jurists, theologians, and men of letters to determine how the evangelization should proceed. Las Casas argued for peaceful means, while Juan Ginés de Sepülveda proposed that the Indians were slaves by nature, and that therefore war against them was justified. The deliberations continued until 1551, and although no specific conclusions were reached, subsequent legislation carried the imprint of Las Casas's argumentation. However, the debate initiated in Santo Domingo in 1511 continued throughout the colonial period. In many cases the laws favored the native population, but as the New World was far from 1 la novedad no era otra sino afirmar que matar estas gentes [los indios] era mas pecado que matar chinches (Las Casas [1965], 2:440).

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Spain, and the economic pressures to find cheap labor were many, justice was frequently sold to the highest bidder. The overseas subjects of the Spanish Crown scoffed at its Castillian legislation or took refuge in the phrase Obedezco, pero no cumplo (I obey but do not comply).

Prelude to Poetry The first verses written in Hispaniola were by the Italian humanist and bishop of Santo Domingo, Alejandro Geraldini, who composed two odes in Latin. One was dedicated to the cathedral still under construction, and the other detailed the author's transatlantic voyage and arrival in Santo Domingo. These compositions appear in his Itinerario por las regiones situadas bajo el equinoccio (Itinerary through the regions located below the equinox), published in Rome in 1631 (Contín Aybar [1982], 1:113-15). However, the first work of poetry known to have been written in Spanish in the capital of Hispaniola is Las Quinquagenas de los generosos e illustres e no menos famosos reyes . . . e personas notables de Espana (The Quinquagenas of the generous and illustrious and not less famous kings . . . and notable persons of Spain), 1556, by the chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. Las Quinquagenas is composed in arte menor (usually verses of six or eight syllables), and each part is divided into fifty stanzas embellished with commentaries in prose. This work is of greater interest as cultural history than as literature (Menéndez Pelayo [1948], 1:199200). The soldier and churchman Juan de Castellanos dedicates the entire first part of his Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (Elegy of the illustrious men of the Indies), 1589, to the discovery and colonization of the Caribbean. The Elegias, one of the longest poems ever written in Spanish, narrates the history of the discovery and conquest of America, emphasizing the feats of the most valiant men of Spain. Sections one to four describe Columbus's arrival in the New World and events in Hispaniola; section six exalts Juan Ponce de León in his conquest and colonization of Puerto Rico and his subsequent search for the fountain of youth; section seven treats the conquest and colonization of Cuba, and the remaining sections (VIII, X, XIII and XIV) deal respectively with Jamaica, Trinidad, Cubagua, and Margarita. Castellanos mentions the names of captains, soldiers, rivers, and places, often painting an idealized picture of the region and of the deeds of its conquerors. Lázaro Bejarano and Eugenio Salazar de Alarcón were among the Spaniards with a taste for poetry living in Santo Domingo in the first part of the sixteenth century. Bejarano moved to Hispaniola around 1534, married, became a widower, and inherited the governorship of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire from his wife. Later, in 1549, he was accused of following Erasmian doctrines and was prosecuted by the Church Council. Bejarano is known to be the author of a lost work, Diálogo apologetic o (Apologetic dialogue), in which he defends the native population and supports Las Casas's ideas. Several religious and satirical compositions from his poetic works can be found in the Discursos medicinales by Juan Méndez Nieto. These compositions show that Bejarano used traditional Spanish meters such as the romance (lyrical ballad of various metrical patterns) and the copia (a stanza that varies from three to five lines of eight to twelve syllables each). From "Purgatorio del amor" (Purgatory of love), a satirical poem in which he criticizes the authorities in Hispaniola, the only remaining stanza is about Alonso de Maldonado, President of the Royal Audiencia, a

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well known don Juan who was fond of banquets and bullfights: "I also saw Maldonado / Lawyer and President, in the shade of a fountain / Neglectful of the care / Of the people which the King entrusted to him."2 This type of criticism illustrates the easy and licentious living of the colonial authorities. Both at the time and in later centuries, when the economic and political differences between the criollos (American-born offspring of Spaniards) and the Spaniards became more acute, this life-style caused great resentment. More important, however, is Eugenio Salazar de Alarcón, a native of Madrid, who became oidor (judge) in Santo Domingo (1574-80), rector of the University of Mexico (1592-98), and member of the Council of the Indies (1600-02). He wrote a poem honoring Santo Domingo, capital of Hispaniola, and a sonnet that tells the story of the curious fate of a Dominican astrologer. Of particular significance to the study of early Spanish-American lyric poetry is his Silva de poesía (Miscellany of poetry), 1585-95, in the second part of which Salazar makes reference to poets from Santo Domingo and Mexico (Roggiano [1988], 72-73). This volume confirms the acceptance in the New World of Italian verse forms centered on the hendecasyllable and Petrarchist rhetoric; it mentions the names of three Dominican poets - Francisco Tostado de la Pena, Elvira de Mendoza, and Leonor de Ovando - and includes poems by two of them. Tostado de la Peña's poem welcoming Salazar to Santo Domingo is the earliest sonnet written by a native of the island, and its importance stems from this historical fact and not from its literary value. It is worth noting that the other two Dominican poets mentioned by Salazar are women. None of Elvira de Mendoza's work has been preserved despite the fact that Salazar dedicates a sonnet of praise to her. Leonor de Ovando, a nun in the convent of Regina Angelorum, is the first known woman poet in America. Five of Ovando's sonnets written between 1574 and 1580 in answer to others by Salazar have been preserved (Menéndez Pelayo [1948], 1:292-94). The participation of Mendoza and Ovando in the Dominican literary milieu is evidence of a receptive atmosphere, at least in the early years, for women interested in practicing literature in the New World. As these examples show, the origins of poetry in the Spanish Caribbean already manifested a polyphony that would later be enriched with voices of diverse ethnic origins.

Reclaiming Taino Time Although some chroniclers included in their works descriptions of the customs of native cultures in the Caribbean islands, these were done without knowledge of the native tongues. Thus the importance of the Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (An account of the ancient times of the Indians), 1498, written in Hispaniola by Brother Ramón Pané, the first missionary to learn the Taino language and to dedicate himself to studying and making known the beliefs of that ethnic group. The travels of colonial documents like the Relación illustrate the peripatetic lives of their authors and the process of decolonization that occurred as the New World strove to make itself understood through the most obvious symbol of Western culture - writing using the Latin alphabet. On his third trip Columbus took Pané's Relación to Spain, where Peter Martyr de Anghiera tran2 También vide a Maldonado, / Licenciado y Presidente, A la sombra de una fuente / Descuidado del cuidado / Que el rey le dio de su gente . . . (Balaguer [1968], 57).

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slated into Latin those portions that he found interesting. At the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas summarized the document, and included it in several chapters (CXX, CLXVI, CLXVII) of his Apologética historia sumaria (Arrom [1974], 11-12). The Historia del almirante Cristóbal Colón por su hijo Fernando (History of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son Ferdinand), the original Spanish version of which has been lost, collects all of Pané's writings. This biography of Columbus was translated into Italian by Alfonso de Ulloa and printed in Venice in 1571 (Arrom [1974], 1112). The modern reconstruction of Pané's work is credited to José J. Arrom, who uses the sources cited and applies rigorous philological and literary interpretations to recover the Relación written by the Spanish missionary. Basing his argument on the Arahuac as spoken in South America, Arrom proposes new etymologies for the Taino words included in Pané's text. A work of double authorship, inasmuch as different cultural attitudes form two texts - the narration of Taino beliefs and the commentaries by the friar on the world he observed - (López Baralt [1985], 133), the Relación relates several myths: of origin, of the acquisition of cultural traits, and of life after death. In contrast to the Mayans who were created by their gods, the Tainos came out of caves or from the earth itself, and carried out their activities by night (Pané [1974], 22-23). In another more advanced period, they acquired cassava; a new humanity emerged (Pané [1974], 30-31), and women were created by means of a woodpecker who perforated the anatomy of elusive asexual beings (Pané [1974], 27-28). The Tainos also paid homage to different gods, which they called cemíes (Pané [1974], 21). By night the dead came out to dance, to eat guavas, and to cohabit with the living (Pané [1974], 32-33). Archaeologists and anthropologists have connected many of these Taino myths with those of the Arahuacs (or Arawaks) in the Northwest of South America (López Baralt [1985], 15-21), thus confirming the continental origin of these Antillean people who were already organized under various caciques when Columbus arrived in 1492. Seen in this light, the brief account written by the Spanish friar takes on unusual importance: Pané's work recovers and illuminates a period of hemispheric history, knowledge of which is indispensable in order to reconstruct the American cultural personality and to accelerate the process of decolonization.

From the Antillean Areito to European Theater The chroniclers of the Caribbean frequently mention in their writings the areitos. They were dancing and singing rituals through which the ancient Antilleans preserved the memory of the past, and also reconstructed hunting and fishing episodes or domestic events. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias describes them as follows: "These people [the Tainos] had a good and genteel manner of remembering past events, and this was in their songs and dances which they called areyto which is what we call singing while dancing. . . ."3 From the Taino word aririn, which means to rehearse or recite, the areito mixed different expressions of native culture, such as singing, dancing, poetry, choreography, music, makeup, and pantomime, to preserve the local rulers' deeds and community events probably associated with agricultural rituals

3 Tenían estas gentes una buena e gentil manera de memorar las cosas pasadas e antiguas; y esto era en sus cantares e bailes, que ellos llaman areito que es lo mismo que nosotros llamamos cantar bailando (Oviedo [1951], Vol. V, chapter I, 113).

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(Leal [1980], 10-11). In this ceremony, in which the entire group participated, the tequina, or teacher, directed the chorus in order to establish a dialogue with the dancers, whose steps followed symbolic models, the meaning of which is unknown today. Masks were not used; the participants danced to the accompaniment of a wooden drum, sea shells used as trumpets, maracas, small flutes, and conch shells that sounded like little bells. The combination of dancing and singing, by glorifying the past and reaffirming the cultural roots of the group (Leal [1980], 11-12), was probably viewed as potentially dangerous by the colonial Spanish regime. All that remains of these early rituals are general and unreliable descriptions collected by the chroniclers. The end of the areitos was brought about by the decimation of the native population in the wars of conquest, the encomiendas, the illnesses, the mass suicides, and the process of acculturation. As in the Old World, the origin of European theater in the Spanish Caribbean is linked to religious holidays, especially the celebration of Corpus Christi. There is evidence that this holiday was celebrated as early as 1525 in Santiago de Cuba, just a few years after the Spaniards arrived. In Havana, records of subsequent commemorations mention dances and "inventions," and in 1570 the name of the first actor, Pedro Castilla, appears (Leal [1975], 40-46). Later, toward the end of the sixteenth century, more farsantes or actors and musicians who performed in entremeses (interludes) and lengthy comedias arrived. From seventeenth-century laws that prohibited dramatic representations in churches and participation in them by the clergy, we learn that farces and inventions were also performed in Puerto Rico (Pasarell [1951], 1-7). These spectacles mixed religious and secular elements, and with time the profane became predominant. In addition, the development of theater in the Caribbean is related to the conversion of the Indians. Special pieces or autos integrating native elements and biblical teachings were written and performed for the purpose of evangelization; sometimes native actors played the leading roles in these representations. Despite the fact that early Caribbean theater was closely associated with religion, its first noteworthy piece - a short satirical interlude by the Dominican-born Cristóbal de Llerena - is more political than religious. It was performed in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in 1588 during the feast of Corpus Christi by students from the University of Santiago de la Paz and from the University of Gorjón. Shortly after its performance, local authorities brought charges against Llerena and banished him to the mainland without benefit of a trial. The entremés was preserved as an appendix to the letter written to Philip II by Archbishop Don Alonso de Avila defending Llerena and protesting his banishment. After a year Llerena returned to Hispaniola to resume his post at the University of Gorjón. In Llerena's satirical interlude several characters from the Spanish theatrical tradition comment on the discontent of the people in Santo Domingo. According to the plot, the problems stem from the fact that the fool Cordellate has given birth to a monster with the head of a woman, the neck of a horse, the body of a bird, and the tail of a fish. However, in the second act, one of the characters explains that problems arise because the city is plagued with immoral women, governed by corrupt authorities, filled with lawyers, and exploited by ship captains. Clothed in the Greco-Latin tradition, the piece ironically alludes to the crisis of Hispaniola, the unfavorable trade concessions imposed by the metropolis, the opportunities for smuggling, the devaluation of the currency, the increase of piracy, and the corrupt administration (Johnson [1988], 41-42). This piece, written in Santo Domingo, illustrates the early link between literature and society in the Hispanic Caribbean. Llerena, a colonial writer, exceeded the literary models he attempted to imitate by drawing attention

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to Dominican problems and demanding their immediate solution. Clearly, challenge and protest are found at the very core of Spanish-American literary origins.

The Seventeenth Century: Contraband and Literature Spain's intervention in the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) had grave consequences for its Caribbean colonies. Encouraged by commercial interests that took advantage of this conflict, Dutch, English and French pirates, filibusters, and corsairs attacked the Spanish ships and ports in the area. Very soon these other Europeans began to establish themselves on the small islands of the Caribbean. Tortuga, an islet off the northeast coast of Hispaniola, became the center of operations for these adventurers. In 1641 Tortuga fell to the English; then the French moved to the unpopulated northern coast of Hispaniola, and established Port Margot. Shortly after, when they had defeated the English on Tortuga, the French founded the colony of Saint-Domingue, which, because of its sugar industry, became the richest in the Caribbean. Later, in the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), Spain recognized the French claims to this portion of Hispaniola. Enemy incursions into the different Spanish Caribbean ports accelerated the construction of fortifications, built with slave labor. The urgency of this enterprise is evident: between 1595 and 1703, Puerto Rico, for example, was attacked on more than eight occasions by the English, French, and Dutch. Additionally, isolated ships that sailed the Caribbean seas and even the guarded Spanish fleets endured these assaults. The depopulation of the zone continued, owing to the depletion of the gold mines and the colonists' greater interest in settling in Peru and Mexico. At the same time, illegal commerce grew and became a productive source of income because of the monopolistic restrictions imposed by Spain on its colonies, and because of the ease afforded to contraband activities by Caribbean geography. In one of the cruelest attempts to eliminate the smuggling of goods and the contact with heretics, pirates, and bandits, the Crown ordered the relocation of the settlers of the northern portion of Hispaniola. Some of them, in a pilgrimage that would be repeated in future centuries, fled toward the eastern zone of the neighboring island of Cuba. This episode, which contributed greatly to economic ruin and cultural rupture in Hispaniola, has been recorded by history as the devastations of 1605 and 1606. Due to its disastrous impact, the authorities had to reduce the number of soldiers assigned to Santo Domingo, and had to resort to the situado, a cash subsidy sent from Mexico, to support the Dominican colonial bureaucracy. The violence of the authorities, pirates, and corsairs, the Spanish commercial restrictions and subsequent dependence on the situado, and the construction of fortifications, resulted in the arbitrary and peculiar distortion of the economic development of the Spanish Caribbean.

Polemic and Descriptive Prose The causes and consequences of the devastations were debated in extensive histories, legal briefs, and letters that offer divergent perspectives of these events. These writings, along with those of Las Casas, can be considered precursors of the polemic essay, which reached its high point in Spanish America in the nineteenth century. At the same time, they shape a colonial discourse made up of a multitude of voices, frequently alien to strict literary form.

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In Hispaniola in the second half of the seventeenth century, this style is represented by the Spanish priest Fernando Carvajal y Rivera, Bishop of Santo Domingo (1690-98), who protested, in sorrowful and accusing letters, the abandonment in which the first Spanish colony in America found itself. Luis Jerónimo de Alcócer, a native of Santo Domingo, is the author of Relación sumaria del estado presente de la Isla Espanola . . . hasta el año de 1650 (Summary account of the present situation of the island of Hispaniola .. . until the year 1650), a treatise (not published until 1942) in which these historical events are also analyzed. Although more descriptive than polemic, the Relación shows the consequences of the devastations through which "the wealth, the style and splendor, not only of this city of Santo Domingo, but of all the island, have come to an end."4 Alcócer, like other contemporary chroniclers, embellishes his text with narrations of miracles and curious incidents. Notable among them are the origin of the devotion to Our Lady of Altagracia, later named Protectress of the Dominican Republic (Alcócer [1942], 213-15), and the tale about a nobleman who abandons both bed and bride on his wedding night and enters a monastery (Alcócer [1942], 247). Several interesting narratives are preserved in Puerto Rico, of which three are important. The first, Relación de la entrada y cerco del enemigo Boudoyno Henrico, general de la armada del principe de Orange en la ciudad de Puerto Rico de las Indias (Account of the entry and siege by the enemy Boudoyno Henrico, general in the army of the prince of Orange in the city of Puerto Rico of the West Indies), 1625, written by Diego de Larrasa, narrates the story of a Dutch attack on the island. The second is a letter in which Bishop Damián López de Haro relates his trip from Madrid to Puerto Rico and gives his impressions of the island. He observes with irony how the inhabitants exalt their lineage, claiming to be related to the Hapsburgs, the Dauphin of France, and Charlemagne, a frequent theme in colonial Spanish-American literature. Likewise, he notes that the women do not go out, even to mass, because of their poor clothing, and that the Puerto Rican people are not very eager to work (López de Haro [1917], 83-85). But the most intriguing thing in this letter is a sonnet in which an anonymous poet, perhaps Lopez de Haro himself, answers a lady in Santo Domingo who is interested in learning about life in San Juan. Because of its ironic tone and pejorative opinions, this composition is considered the first manifestation of satirical verse in Puerto Rico (Rivera de Alvarez [1983], 35). The third and most important of the three narratives, Descripción de la Isla y Ciudad de Puerto Rico, y de su vecindad y poblaciones, presidio, gobernadores y obispos; frutos y minerales (Description of the island and city of Puerto Rico, and of its neighbors and villages, fortress, governors and bishops; fruits and minerals), 1647, was written by the Puerto Rican canon Diego de Torres Vargas, to comply with an official request. In contrast to López de Haro's letter, it offers a very different view of that island. Torres Vargas expresses great pride in his native land, and praises the physical and moral qualities of the Puerto Ricans. This writer continues the tradition initiated by Columbus in his "Letter of Discovery" by praising nature: he describes the agreeable climate, the beautiful valleys, and the delicious fruits of Puerto Rico. The island "in temperament and qualities is far more advanced than all the islands of Barlovento, because it enjoys eternal spring, and neither heat nor cold upsets or disturbs nature."5 He judges Puerto Rican women to be "the most beautiful 4 Se ha acabado la riqueza, el trato y lustre, no sólo de esta ciudad de Santo Domingo, sino de toda la isla (Alcócer [1942], 210-11). 5 en el temperamento y calidades se adelanta mucho a todas las Islas de Barlovento, porque goza de una perpetua primavera sin que el calor ni el frío llegue a sentirse de manera que aflija ni descomponga la naturaleza . . . (Tapia y Rivera [1945], 458).

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in all the West Indies, honest, virtuous, and very hardworking and so clever that . . . all prudent men must come to Puerto Rico to marry."6 In line with literary tradition demanding that the author show erudition in his work, Torres Vargas intersperses quotes from key authors in his Descriptión, and embellishes his account with references to amusing and exemplary cases and miracles. Because of the love and pride with which Torres Vargas describes his native land, his Descriptión has been viewed by literary critics as the first known expression of regionalist feeling in Puerto Rican literature (Rivera de Alvarez [1983], 35).

Celebrated Visitors and Occasional Verses An account of literary activities in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century would be incomplete without the mention of the Golden Age playwright Tirso de Molina, and of Bernardo de Balbuena, author of Grandeza Mexicana (Mexican Greatness), 1604. Tirso de Molina arrived in Santo Domingo in 1615 with a group of monks and remained there until 1618. There is no evidence, however, that his works were performed in Santo Domingo, nor that he began to write his best known play, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The love rogue), published in 1630, while in Hispaniola. In 1616, Molina participated in a poetry contest in honor of Our Lady of Mercy, contributing several compositions that he included in his book Deleitar aprovechando (To amuse while teaching), which was published in Madrid in 1635 (Menéndez Pelayo [1948], 1:296-98). Bernardo de Balbuena was named Bishop of Puerto Rico in 1619, and arrived on that island to assume his post in 1623. When Dutch pirates sacked and burned San Juan in 1625 (see Larrosa's Relatión), the bishop lost his voluminous library and his unpublished manuscripts. Lope de Vega, another giant of the Spanish Golden Age, recorded this incident in his Laurel de Apolo (Apollo's Laurel), 1630. During the years that Balbuena remained on the island, he published an epic poem, El Bernardo, o Victoria de Roncesvalles (Bernard, or the victory of Roncesvalles), 1624, and wrote several letters to different authorities. In one of these, addressed to the Spanish sovereigns in 1623, he praises Puerto Rico and its inhabitants. The first known Puerto Rican poet is Francisco de Ayerra Santa Maria, whose writings are generally associated with Mexico, where he lived and died. Ayerra wrote in Latin and Spanish, following the style of Luis de Góngora, one of the most admired baroque writers of this period. Some of Ayerra's compositions won prizes, and were collected by his friend, the Mexican savant Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, in Triunfo Parténico (Parthian triumph), 1683. This volume contained the proceedings of two poetry contests (1682 and 1683) held in the capital of New Spain in honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Ayerra also wrote a sonnet - considered by some critics to be the best of his works - in memory of the acclaimed Mexican writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This poem was included in Fama y obras póstumas (Fame and posthumous works), a volume honoring Sor Juana, published in Madrid in 1700. The poetry contest in which Tirso de Molina participated is evidence that Hispaniola had poets eager to receive the recognition of the colonial public. Antiaxiomas morales, médicos, filosóficos y politicos o impugnaciones varias en estas materias, de algunas sentencias admitidas comunmente 6 las mas hermosas de todas las Indias, honestas, virtuosas y muy trabajadoras y de tan lindo juicio que . . . todos los hombres prudentes se habían de venir a casar a Puerto Rico (Tapia y Rivera [1945], 488).

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por verdaderas (Moral, medical, philosophical and political antiaxioms or challenges on these subjects of some opinions commonly admitted as true), 1682, by the Sevillian doctor Fernando Díez de Leiva, who lived in Santo Domingo for many years, includes twelve compositions written in Spanish and Latin by local poets praising Leiva and his work. Although these poems are of little literary value, it is important to mention the names and functions of some of the local writers: Brother Diego Martinez, instructor of Arts at the Imperial Convent of Santo Domingo; Francisco Melgarejo Ponce de León, schoolmaster of the metropolitan church of Santo Domingo; Captains Rodrigo Claudio Maldonado, Alonso y Garcia de Carvajal Campofrío and Miguel Martinez Mosquera; José Clavijo, schoolteacher; and Dona Tomasina de Leiva y Mosquera, daughter of the author of Antiaxiomas. The number of poems and the variety of authors reveal the literary interests of the impoverished colony. One can only speculate about how different the literary development of Hispaniola might have been had it not been adversely affected by the devastations of 1605 and 1606.

Poetry and Piracy In 1604, the Bishop of Cuba, Juan de las Cabezas de Altamirano, was kidnapped near Manzanillo by the French pirate Gilberto Girón and rescued by a militia composed of Spaniards, criollos, Indians, blacks, and mestizos. One of them, the black slave Salvador, killed and decapitated the French pirate, whose head was taken in triumph to Bayamo. Espejo de paciencia (Mirror of patience), 1608, by the Canary Islander Silvestre de Balboa, tells this story in two cantos written in royal octaves. These cantos conform to the model introduced on the continent by Alonso de Ercilla in his La Araucana (The Araucaniad) (1st part, 1569; 2nd part, 1578; 3rd part, 1589), an epic poem that describes the conquest of Chile. In addition, Balboa's Espejo includes six praise poems that may have been written by an incipient literary group in Puerto Príncipe (today's city of Camagüey), where the author resided, as well as a motet, probably the oldest poetical composition written in Cuba (M. Henríquez Ureña [1978], 1:52). Espejo was included by another bishop, Agustín Morell de Santa Cruz, in his Historia de la Isla y Catedral de Cuba (History of the island and cathedral of Cuba), 1760. Before the entire manuscript was destroyed by the ravages of time, the Cuban historian José Antonio Echeverría copied it in its entirety in 1837. Thus, the first complete edition of Espejo de paciencia, published in 1929, is based on Echeverria's copy, which is now lost (M. Henriquez Urefia [1978], 1:47). Despite Espejo's limited literary merits, some critics have judged it a seminal work for its descriptions of the flora and fauna of the island, and for the inclusion of the diverse ethnic components of Cuban society. Espejo has also fascinated modern writers like Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, either because of its exemplary characters or because of its suggestive title. In fact, in Carpentier's novel Concierto barroco (Baroque concert), 1974, one of the characters, Filomeno, is presented as a descendant of the slave who decapitated the French pirate. Recent critics have seen in Espejo the exoticism and accumulation of detail characteristic of the baroque style, rather than an attempt to represent Cuban landscape, especially in the many descriptions of fruits, the words of Taino origin, and the mythological deities mentioned (González Echevarría [1986], 118-19). Also, the antihegemonic character of the work is evident in the subject matter of the poem - the rescue of a bishop and not an event of the conquest - , and in the selection of

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the protagonist, an ecclesiastical authority who defends those accused of contraband (Schulman [1988], 404-06). Espejo de paciencia is important for discussions of the origin of Cuban letters, the Latin American baroque, the relationship between history and literature, the ex-centric nature of colonial works, and the creation of a national culture.

The Eighteenth Century: Plotting the Insular Personality The independence of the thirteen English colonies in 1776 opened a new market for Caribbean products and created an incentive for commerce between the poor new nation and the rich Spanish islands. However, the most important event of the eighteenth century in the Antilles took place in Saint-Domingue, where slavery was abolished in 1793, and where, in 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Haiti. The bloody battles for liberty in the western part of Hispaniola, Spain's surrender of the entire island to France by the Treaty of Basle (1795), and the occupation of Santo Domingo (1790) by Toussaint Louverture's army horrified the European and creole oligarchy, whose members abandoned both colonies and left for Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. These refugees contributed to the expansion of agriculture, especially the cultivation of coffee and sugarcane, and were rapidly integrated into the dominant and lettered class. With the ruin of the sugar industry in Haiti, large scale production of this commodity was left mainly to Cuba, indelibly marking its historical destiny. During the eighteenth century, Puerto Rico experienced a commercial boom due to the reforms sponsored by the Bourbons in Spain, and to the increase in contraband. Changes in land ownership (1759), and the introduction of the cultivation of coffee established the financial bases for the landowning class, heralding a period of relative prosperity. The immediate consequences were an increase in the population and the creation of new urban centers (González [1976], 47-48). From a political perspective, the eighteenth century in Cuba was marked by several events: the rebellion of the vegueros, or tobacco plantation owners, against the royal monopoly of tobacco (1717); the occupation of Havana by the English (1762) and their eleven-month government, which opened that port to international commerce; and the first sugar boom (1792), which caused an increase in the slave trade and the predominance of the sugar barons in the politics of the island (Moreno Fraginals [1978], 1:94-102). In the same century, the printing press was introduced (the oldest known pamphlet is from 1723), and the university was founded by a royal decree of 1728; the first theater was inaugurated in 1776, and the first newspaper, the Gaceta de la Habana, appeared in 1764. Later the Papel Periódico de La Habana, established in 1790, began to publish brief literary pieces in addition to news items.

Caribbean Reality in Historiographic Prose The eighteenth-century literature of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico is characterized by an interest in recapitulating the past, and in examining the history and peculiarities of each island. The principal sources of this historiographical interest are found in Las Casas, Oviedo, Castellanos, the Inca Garcilaso, Herrera, and Acosta, whose works are partly summarized by the new historians.

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These writers also integrate into their work the ideas of contemporary thinkers such as Feijoo, Montesquieu, and Raynal. Histories written in the eighteenth century reveal a desire to order events: they frequently offer descriptive lists of colonial officials and ecclesiastical authorities, highlight the influence of climate on the character of the individual, and debate the theme of the intellectual superiority of those born in Spain over the criollos of America. Among the works of a historiographic nature written in Cuba during this period were: Historia de la isla y catedral de Cuba (History of the island and cathedral of Cuba), 1760, by Bishop Pedro Agustm Morell de Santa Cruz; Llave del Nuevo Mundo. Antemural de las Indias Occidentales (Key to the New World. Preview of the West Indies), 1761, by the councilman José Martin Félix de Arrate of Havana; Teatro histórico, politico y militar de la Isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital, La Habana (Historical, political and military theater of the island of Fernandina of Cuba and principally of its capital, Havana), 1787, by the lawyer Ignacio José Urrutia y Montoya; and Historia de la isla de Cuba y en especial de La Habana (History of the island of Cuba and especially of Havana), 1811, by the self-taught Antonio José Valdés. Because of their content and scope, the two most important works in this group are those of Morell and Arrate. Pedro Agustm Morell de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Cuba, Louisiana, and the Floridas, and Abbott of Jamaica, was born in Santiago de los Caballeros (Hispaniola). From there he went to Cuba, where he had a distinguished career in the church. He made a name for himself in the resistance against the English authorities, causing him to be exiled to Florida. In his most important work, Historia de la isla y catedral de Cuba, finished in 1760 but not published until 1929, Morell relates the history of his adoptive country before 1663, and includes in his work the oldest poem in Cuban literature, Espejo de paciencia, by Silvestre de Balboa. Morell's Historia is divided into three books, or sections. The first deals with the discovery, conquest, and settling of Cuba; the second and third are structured around the governors and bishops, and emphasize the quarrels between Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, and Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, as well as notable religious and secular events. Although, as Max Henrfquez Urena notes, the most obvious source for the discovery and conquest section is the Histoire de l'Isle Espagnole de Saint-Domingue (History of the Spanish island of Santo Domingo), 1730, by the French Jesuit, Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, book two is patterned on the Relación histórica de los primitivos obispos y gobernadores de Cuba (Historical account of the primitive bishops and governors of Cuba), c.1750, an early text written by Morell, published for the first time in 1841 (M. Henrfquez Urena [1978], 1:74). In the Historia de la isla y catedral de Cuba, Morell praises Christopher Columbus's skills and generosity (Morell [1929], 20, 49), and speaks of the Indians as barbarians (Morell [1929], 56). He exalts the figure of Bartolomé de las Casas (Morell [1929], 65), and emphasizes the bravery of Pánfilo de Narváez (Morell [1929], 60). In Cortés's quarrel with Velázquez over the rights to the conquest of Mexico (Morell [1929], 129), Morell favors the former. Although the Historia ignores the African presence in Cuba, it dwells on minute aspects of life in the incipient Spanish colony. This detailed account shapes and expands the larger narration of the conquest and colonization of Cuba. For example, Morell states that the Spaniards in the town of Carachate consumed ten thousand parrots in two weeks. To commemorate these banquets the name of the town was changed to Casaharta or house of gluttony (Morell [1929], 67). This fact reinforces the indigenous perception of the Spanish army, both in the Caribbean and on the continent, as a plague that would soon finish off all food supplies. Morell's rendition of colonial life includes many anecdotes and little-known episodes

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that provide a fuller picture of the period. Among them are the stories of the unyielding resistance of the chieftain Hatuey (Morell [1929], 58); of the Spaniard who after four years in captivity becomes an Indian (Morell [1929], 68); and of Mariana de Nava, Santiago de Cuba's first doctor (Morell [1929], 195). Morell also describes the spread of contraband, the cruelty with which it was suppressed at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Morell [1929], 184), and the rivalries among church and colonial officials (Morell [1929], 208-09). In terse prose the bishop and author offers an ordered but incomplete picture of the development of colonial life on the island of Cuba. Both the minor events mentioned by Morell and his important omissions, such as the African presence, are indispensable for a true picture of Cuban history and culture. Llave del Nuevo Mundo, first published in 1830, is dedicated to Havana's town council by one of its members, José Martin Félix de Arrate. Arrate's work deals with different aspects of colonial life, specifically in Havana, that can be grouped into five categories: (1) a description of the geography and nature; (2) the economic picture; (3) a review of the colonial authorities and their functions; (4) a civil and ecclesiastical chronology; and (5) a cultural chronicle (Le Riverend [1949], xiv). Arrate's position in the debate over the superiority of the Spaniards with respect to the criollos is of special interest in the history of ideas. This polemic flared with the publication of the threevolume Epistolarum libri XII (Madrid, 1738) by Manuel Marti Zaragoza, dean of the Cathedral of Alicante. One of these letters was intended for a young man whom the dean attempts to dissuade from travelling to Spanish America by alluding to the general backwardness of the continent. As was to be expected, Arrate defends the Spanish Americans by enumerating and praising many talented people of his country. He also expresses his pride at being a native of Havana (Arrate [1949], 139-40), and compares the beauties of his country (Arrate [1949], 84) with the paradisiacal Hesperides (Arrate [1949], 17). Arrate's view of the Indians' condition and of African slavery is of greater importance. He explains that the Indians are superior to the Africans (Arrate [1949], 38) because they are living in their own native environment. He also presents an economic argument favoring indigenous over African labor, although he recognizes the superiority of the latter for mining. Paradoxically, Arrate criticizes African slavery, basing his assertions on a hypothetical situation, since, when he was writing, the indigenous population of Cuba had disappeared. For the Havana councilman the only virtue of slavery was the possibility of attracting Africans to the Catholic faith. Although Arrate was not an abolitionist, he recognizes, from a purely economic perspective, and from the high social position he held, the failings of slavery, and presents them in his writings (Arrate [1949], 35-40). Another point of interest is his recognition of the role played by mulattos and blacks in the defense of Havana against attacks by foreigners (Arrate [1949], 68-72). His description of the customs and dress of the city's inhabitants gives his account a costumbrista flavor (Arrate [1949], 92-95). In Llave del Nuevo Mundo the author takes a proud look at eighteenth-century Havana, and at the same time orders the historical facts and expounds his ideas on key issues of Cuban society. Max Henriquez Urena has indicated how important it is, when studying the prose of the period, to mention Buenaventura Pascual Ferrer of Havana and his Viaje a la isla de Cuba (Trip to the island of Cuba), 1797 (M. Henríquez Ureña [1978], 1:94-95). This work, consisting of eight letters, was published in Madrid in volume twenty of El Viajero Universal o Noticias del Mundo Antiguo y Moderno (The universal traveler or news from the ancient and modern world), 1795-1801. It is one of the first examples of costumbrismo, or the literature of local customs and manners in Cuba.

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The printing press arrived in Hispaniola at the end of the eighteenth century (c.1782), and was used mainly to publish official documents. The political instability and cultural clashes caused by the changing ownership of the island are evident in this quintilla, or five-line stanza, by Juan Vázquez, a priest from Santiago de los Caballeros: "Yesterday, I was born Spanish, / by the afternoon, I was French, / in the evening I was Ethiopian, / today they say I am English; / I don't know what will become of me."7 Among the Dominican writers of the period, those who stand out are: Pedro Agustín Morell de Santa Cruz; Luis José Peguero, the self-taught cattle dealer whose Historia de la conquista de la isla Espanola de Santo Domingo trasumptada el año de 1762 (History of the conquest of the island of Hispaniola of Santo Domingo copied in the year 1762), 1975, is preserved, along with others of his prose and verse writings, in the National Library of Madrid; and Antonio Sánchez Valverde, the prebendary of the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, author, among other works, of an important treatise, Idea del valor de la Isla Espanola y utilidades que de ella puede sacar su monarquía (Idea of the worth of the island of Hispaniola and of the benefits that the monarchy can obtain from it), 1785. First published in Madrid, Sánchez Valverde's work is notable for its detailed descriptions of the geography, flora, and fauna, as well as of the agricultural, cattle ranching, and mining wealth of his country. His description of the monteros (cowboys) of Hispaniola has a costumbrista flavor. Sánchez Valverde writes to awaken the conscience and the interest of the Spanish authorities to restore this first American colony to its former splendor. The tone of this treatise alternates between the pride of the criollo who praises his native land, and the grief of the colonial subject relegated to oblivion by the metropolis. It is strange, however, that Sánchez Valverde never condemns the king or his administrators, even justifying the seventeenth-century devastations in the northern portion of the island with an apologetic attitude toward the monarchy (Sánchez Valverde [1947], 109). His work also establishes a dialogue with French historians and philosophers - Abbott Raynal, Weuves, de Pauw, Charlevoix, Moreau de Saint-Méry - insofar as it denies the superiority of France and Saint-Domingue by explaining that one of the principal reasons for the riches of that colony is the abundance of slaves. Sánchez Valverde maintains that for his country to progress it is essential to increase the slave labor force, and, like other authors of the period, he defends the institution of slavery by citing its advantages (Sánchez Valverde [1947], 158-59, 168). Also, in Idea del valor, Sánchez Valverde defends those born in America, refuting with ample arguments the critics who advocate the inferiority of the criollos compared with the Spaniards (Sánchez Valverde [1947], 16263). Sanchez Valverde's treatise was translated into French and much quoted during the nineteenth century by both Dominican and foreign historians. Idea del valor offers a review of the historical causes for the decline of Hispaniola. But the work ignores the political and economic reasons for this decline, and always absolves the king and other authorities of any responsibility. Sánchez Valverde's attitudes toward slavery and the metropolis, as well as his proposals for the progress of his country, are representative of the views of one sector within the criollo lettered group. This group, afraid of change, was eager to reaffirm its ties to the fatherland. The history of Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century can be found in: (1) the anonymous Relación veridica en la que se da noticia de lo acaecido en la Isla de Puerto Rico a fines del año 46 7 Ayer espanol nací, / a la tarde fui francés, / a la noche etíope fui, / hoy dicen que soy inglés; / No sé qué sera de mí (Menéndez Pelayo [1948], 1:298).

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y principios del 47 ... (True account of what happened in the island of Puerto Rico toward the end of year 46 and the beginning of 47), 1747, written to lament King Philip V's death and to celebrate the coronation of Ferdinand VI. The second part of this Relatión is also known as Noticia cierta de las fiestas que se hicieron en esta Ciudad e Isla de Puerto Rico . . . (True account of the celebrations held in this city and island of Puerto Rico . . .); (2) the Relation circunstanciada del actual estado de la poblacion, frutos y proporciones para fomento que tiene la Isla de San Juan de Puerto Rico (Account of the present state of the inhabitants, fruits, and areas for growth available in the island of San Juan de Puerto Rico), 1765, a work directed to King Charles III by the field marshal Alejandro O'Reilly; (3) the Noticias particulares de la Isla y Plaza de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (Specific news of the island and city of Saint John the Baptist of Puerto Rico), 1775, by a Cuban, Fernando Miyares González; and (4) the Historia geogrâfica, civil y politica de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (Geographic, civil and political history of the island of Saint John the Baptist of Puerto Rico), 1775, written by the Spanish priest Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra. Because of the keenness of his observations, the clarity of exposition, the attention to particulars, and the multiplicity of details on the life of the island, the work of Abbad y Lasierra is considered one of the most eloquent contributions of the Spanish Caribbean to eighteenth-century historiography. Abbad y Lasierra arrived in Puerto Rico in 1772 as the secretary and confessor of Bishop Manuel Jiménez Pérez. During his eleven-year residence he visited many of its regions and collected data later used in his work. The Historia, consisting of forty chapters and closing with the customary lists of bishops and governors, was written at the request of the powerful Count of Floridablanca and published in Madrid in 1788. As was frequent in the eighteenth century, the first chapters deal with the discovery, the geography, and the first decades of the colonization of Puerto Rico. They bring together data that had been dispersed until then and they point out errors in previous accounts, due in many cases to the scarcity of available sources. The later chapters, in which the author deals with Puerto Rican reality as he knew it during the years he lived there, are more interesting because of his observations about the character, the ethnic composition, and the customs of the Puerto Rican people. Abbad y Lasierra observes how the racial mixture produces different temperaments in Puerto Ricans, to whom he nevertheless attributes certain common traits: "the warmth of the climate makes them indolent and lazy; the fertility of the country, which gives them the means to feed themselves, makes them unselfish and hospitable toward foreigners; the solitude in which they live in their country homes accustoms them to silence and reflection; the delicate organization of their bodies contributes to the vividness of their imaginations, which carries them to extremes; the same delicate quality of the organs which makes them timid, causes them to look with disdain upon all dangers and even death; the different classes to be found among them fill some with vanity and pride, and others with depression and a desire for emulation."8 The writer also emphasizes the preferences of the people, such as their passion for dancing, cock fights, and horse races (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 185-93); he admires the beauty of the open country and the coquetry of the Puerto Rican women who, lacking jewels, would adorn themselves by putting luminous insects in their hair and on their hats (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 187). 8 . . . el calor del clima los hace indolentes y desidiosos; la fertilidad del país que les facilita los medios de alimentarse, los hace desinteresados y hospitalarios con los forasteros; la soledad en que viven en sus casas de campo, los acostumbra al silencio y cavilación; la organización delicada de su cuerpo auxilia la viveza de su imaginación que los arrebata a los extremos; la misma delicadeza de órganos que los hace tímidos, los hace mirar con desprecio todos los peligros y aun la misma muerte; las diferentes clases que hay entre ellos infunden vanidad y orgullo en unos, abatimiento y emulación en otros (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 183-84).

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A fundamental concept that runs through Abbad y Lasierra's Historia is that of geographical determinism, a set of ideas systematized in the eighteenth century by Montesquieu in his De l'esprit des lois (1748). Thus, for this author, the geographical environment marks the character of those born in Puerto Rico, and explains the changes of character undergone by the Spaniards settled in that colony (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 71, 121, 137, 160). However, he does not reject the possibility that arte, or cleverness, can conquer the limitations imposed by the physical environment (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 198). As for slavery, Abbad y Lasierra laments the mistreatment of the slaves and observes how this institution is harmful to the slave owners, whom he makes responsible for their behavior (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 183). Despite these criticisms, he views slavery as necessary to develop the economy of the island, especially the sugar industry. He opposed those who idealized the Indian and portrayed him as the noble savage (Abbad y Lasierra [1979], 20). Without reservations he condemns the indigenous rebellions and exalts the feats of the conquest. In short, Abbad y Lasierra views Puerto Rico and its inhabitants from the characteristic perspective of the European colonizer.

Theatrical Representations The ceremonies lamenting the deaths of sovereigns and other authorities, or celebrating the coronation of princes and the elevation to high posts of colonial officials, generally followed a set pattern. This is why the anonymous Relación veridica (Anon. [1918], 148-93) written in Puerto Rico in 1746, is an important source of information about cultural developments on that island and in the Spanish Caribbean. According to the Relación veridica, during such festivities it was customary to perform secular comedies. The second part of the Relación tells of theatrical activity on the island and enumerates the plays performed by different groups to commemorate the coronation of Ferdinand de Borbón and Maria Barbara de Braganza. They were El conde Lucanor (Count Lucanor) by Calderón de la Barca, Los espanoles en Chile (The Spaniards in Chile) by Francisco Gonzalez de Bustos, El villano del Danubio y el buen juez no tiene patria (The peasant from the Danube and the good judge has no country) by Juan de la Hoz y Mota, and Primero es la honra (Honor comes first) by Agustín Moreto. In addition, this anonymous Relación describes the type of stage sets used in the performances, and also provides the name of the first scenic director, Lorenzo de Angulo. The dancing devils, or begigantes, as well as Don Quixote and his lady Dulcinea reciting amusing lines were also part of these representations (Anon. [1918], 177-78). Theatrical activity associated with religious or secular celebrations had the same degree of continuity in the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean as on the continent. Similarly, the Spanish-American public in the eighteenth century maintained its preference for Spanish baroque playwrights, a fact that did not encourage the creation of dramatic works by local writers. For the celebrations detailed in Relación veridica, each social group took it upon itself to put on one play. The merchants, the free mulattos, the churchmen, and the military participated. Significantly, the play chosen by the mulattos, El villano, includes a protest against slavery registered before the Roman Senate by a German peasant (Anon. [1918], 173); a century later, performance of this play was prohibited in Havana because of its subversive message (Pasarell [1951], 1:10-11). In Cuba, both the slaves and free blacks participated individually or through the cabildos (communal associations of slaves) in religious ceremonies, especially the festivities of Corpus Christi

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and Three Kings Day (the Feast of the Epiphany, on 6 January). In this latter celebration, the slaves as well as free Afro-Cubans disguised themselves as prominent personalities, sang, and danced. During the processions, décimas (ten-line stanzas) and relaciones, dramatic scenes traditionally linked to Spanish theater, were improvised. In the relaciones a key speech from a famous work was recited or well-known characters were portrayed in satirical verse. In their Cuban form, however, black male actors played female roles and the performance included animals and witches in original creations or in their versions of serious or comic works (Leal [1975], 76-78). Even though these relaciones, so popular in nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, have not been preserved (Leal [1975], 77-78), it can be assumed that the songs, dances, and religious rituals of the Africans marked, although indirectly, the development of Caribbean theater. This African influence reveals the importance of the different ethnic groups that arrived in the Antilles, and of the endurance of each group's rich cultural heritage. The most notable theatrical composition of the colonial Spanish Caribbean is El príncipe jardinero y fingido Cloridano (The gardener prince and false Cloridano) by Havana-born Captain Santiago Pita. Printed in Seville between 1730 and 1733, this comedy was performed in Havana on 28 April, 1791 (Arrom [1967], 103-04). It is not known how the author acquired the necessary preparation to write a work that shows a familiarity with several literatures and with set design. The love intrigue in El principe revolves around Fadrique, Prince of Athens, and Aurora, Infanta of Tracia, with whom the Prince has fallen in love through a portrait. Since he cannot court her, having killed her brother in a duel, Fadrique disguises himself as a gardener, assumes the name of Cloridano, and leaves his country to win her love. The suitor conquers the princess's heart, and after a series of predicaments similar to those in cloak and dagger plays, the opposing powers make peace and the play ends with the classical wedding that restores order. Despite the strong influence of Spanish Golden Age theater in theme and structure, this Cuban work belongs to the eighteenth century. It expresses attitudes different from those of earlier dramatic schools: maidenhood is seen as a torment; honor is reduced to its diminutive honrilla (Pita [1963], 3:98); and the protagonists confess their love shamelessly (Pita [1963], 2:58-63). Even more interesting is Aurora, who defies social conventions and paternal authority in order to follow the gardener prince. Noteworthy is the behavior of the servant Lamparón and the maids who make fun of everyone with an irreverence that erases social distinctions (Arrom [1944], 33-35; Arrom [1977], 100-01; Leal [1975], 116). Perhaps this disrespectful posture, which, as Arrom has pointed out, indicates a change of style and attitude, also anticipates the ability to mock that will become the hallmark of Caribbean culture, later crystallizing into the Cuban choteo, the Puerto Rican guachafita, and the Dominican relajo.

The Poetization of the Surroundings As in other parts of Spanish America, Caribbean poetry of the eighteenth century is marked by two general tendencies. One consists of written compositions that celebrate national and religious holidays and the arrival or departure of colonial officials, or comment on local happenings. The majority of these poems are minor works, more interesting from a cultural than a literary perspective. The other tendency, important because it contributes to the development of nationalistic sentiment, consists of poems that describe nature and emphasize its beauty and usefulness. The compositions

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reflect the interests of the scientific expeditions of the time and the analytical fervor of neoclassicism. In addition, it is worth noting that the very few examples of popular poetry that have been preserved show, as one might expect, a preoccupation with political events, often satirized in humorous rhymes. The anonymous Puerto Rican Relación veridica not only provides information on the state of the theater but also of the public's interest in it as well as their taste in poetry. Although the poems collected in this and similar documents are of minor importance, it is worth pointing out that the Relación veridica includes verses attributed to women (Anon. [1918], 185-86), and also shows the skill of local rhymesters in the use of different meters. This work can be studied as a document which represents the transition from the baroque to neoclassicism. In fact, those poems written for special occasions round out our vision of the development of Puerto Rican literature and underline the cultural importance of official ceremonies in Colonial Spanish America. There is little poetry written in Hispaniola during the eighteenth century because of the unstable political situation. Nevertheless, an anonymous poem and the verses of Meso Mónica are worthy of mention. In the first, entitled "Lamento de la isla Espanola de Santo Domingo" (Lamentation of the island of Hispaniola of Santo Domingo) the poet mourns the ceding of his country to France and reveals the pathetic situation of this colony. Some verses of Meso Monica, son of freed slaves, have been transmitted orally and preserved (M. Henríquez Ureña [1945], 90-100). The poetic tendency to describe nature is personified by the Cuban Manuel de Zequeira y Arango. His ode "A la piña" (To the pineapple), is his best known and most quoted poem. In it he describes the life cycle of that fruit, from its birth until its arrival in Olympus to be praised by the gods. In his tribute to the pineapple and the soil where it is grown, Zequeira expresses his love for Cuba. However, in poems like "Batalla naval de Cortés en la laguna de México" (Cortés's naval battle in the lagoon of Mexico) and "Dos de mayo" (Second of May), Zequeira displays his loyalty to Spain. The work of Zequeira, along with that of his compatriots, Manuel Justo de Rubalcava and Manuel Maria Pérez y Ramirez, foreshadows the transition from neoclassical to romantic tastes, and at the same time points discreetly toward the nationalistic tendencies that would mark the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. In summary, the literature of the Hispanic Caribbean begins with the telling by the native population of their deeds and beliefs, using diverse verbal arts, and by the appropriation of their culture in colonial writing. The singing and dancing ritual called areito, which the Taino people used to represent reality and preserve their collective past, is the most widely known of these genres. Upon their arrival in the region, the Europeans wrote letters, chronicles, and relaciones. These were later incorporated into the Spanish-American literary canon because of the importance of the land, the people, and the deeds they described. Accounts such as Pané's Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios examined the traditions and verbal arts of the indigenous people. However, this discourse is colored by the intention of the authors. They were eager to make their European readers understand the strange complexities of the Americas and the greatness of their own accomplishments. The representation of the New World and its inhabitants, and the debate about the rationality of the indigenous people initiated in Hispaniola, constitute fundamental aspects of Caribbean colonial discourse. It should be emphasized that when the European writers inform and reveal, they incorporate the "new" world into their mental horizon. By so doing, these newly minted scribes start to mold this world according to their own hopes and ambitions. Beauty and horror, harmony and

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polemic, the bizarre and the commonplace, mark the writings that begin to represent and reconfigure the Caribbean as a cultural entity. The complexities and risks of this effort soon become apparent in the interlude of the criollo Cristóbal de Llerena. It is paradoxical that he uses the European model but changes it dramatically to expose colonial administrators and to point up the tragic consequences of their actions in Hispaniola. Caribbean economic history, frequently marked by piracy and contraband, influences in unusual ways the literature of the area. The long poem Espejo de paciencia, which describes the kidnap and rescue of a Cuban bishop from French pirates, is a prime example. The poem caught the attention of many critics for its hybrid nature. In Espejo the nymphs wear native attire, and the satyrs dance to the sound of Indian marugas. Furthermore, the bishop appears to support contraband commerce, and he is not saved by daring gentlemen but by a multiethnic militia whose most prominent hero is an African slave. The admixture of these elements, together with a profusion of details that are also evident in other works of the period, points to a discourse that in theme and language increasingly projects the reader toward the Caribbean otherness. The urge to describe and distinguish, to name and classify, becomes more apparent in Caribbean historiography of the eighteenth century. In its most representative works one can find, in addition to a review of past events, detailed descriptions of customs and mores that anticipate the literature of manners. It is not surprising to learn that some of the historiographic works written by Spaniards during this period are tinted by pejorative comments about the criollos, and that in the histories composed by those born in America there are negative opinions about the indigenous and African populations. Works like Idea del valor de la isla Espanola show the influence of Enlightenment thought as well as the dilemma of some of the native oligarchy, torn between loyalty to Spain and the struggle for independence. At the same time, dramas like El principe jardinero y fingido Cloridano and poems like "A la piña," indicate how the European literary model is reshaped by a tone and a language that progressively point to the rise of a national literature. In the Caribbean, as on the continent, this literature includes native and foreign elements, the contributions of the center, the periphery, and of the diverse ethnic groups that by choice or by force have lived in the area - the Indians, the Europeans, the Africans, the Asians. Since colonial times, the combination of these different voices and cultural traditions has given the literature of the Hispanic Caribbean its distinctiveness.

Bibliography Abbad y Lasierra, Fr. Iñigo. [1788]. 1979. Historia geográfica civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico. Intro. by Isabel Gutiérrez de Arroyo. San Juan: Universitaria. (One of the most important evaluations of the development and characteristics of Puerto Rico written in the colonial period.) Alcócer, Luis Jerónimo. [c. 1650]. 1942. Relación sumaria del estado presente de la Isla Espanola en las Indias Occidentales y cosas notables que hay en ella . . ., Relaciones históricas de Santo Domingo. Ed. and notes by Emilio Rodriguez Demorizi. Vol. 1. Ciudad Trujillo: Montalvo. 197-289. (A description of several aspects of Hispaniola's history, with emphasis on the development of the Church and the deeds of notable men.) Anonymous. [1747]. 1918. Relación verídica . . . y Noticia cierta . . . Ed. by Cayetano Coll y Toste. Boletin Histórico de Puerto Rico. 5:148-93. (An account of two celebrations in San Juan with a collection of poetry composed especially for these events.)

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Arocena, Luis A. 1989. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Latin American Writers. Ed. by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 11-15. (A general review of Oviedo's life and works with a selected bibliography.) Arrate y Acosta, José Martin Félix. [1761.] 1949. Llave del Nuevo Mundo. Antemural de las Indias Occidentales. Pref. and notes by Julio L. Le Riverend Brusone. México: FCE. Facsimile ed. 1964. Havana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO. (A historical overview of Cuban history offering glimpses of eighteenthcentury mores in Havana.) Arrom, José Juan. 1944. Historia de la literatura dramâtica cubana. New Haven: Yale University Press. (A classic study of the development of Cuban theatre.) —. 1967. Historia del teatro hispanoamericano (época colonial). México: De Andrea. (A documented overview of the development of colonial theatre with ample bibliographic information.) —. 1971. (2d ed.) Criollo: definición y matices de un concepto. Certidumbre de América. Madrid: Gredos. 11-35. (An examination of the origin and variety of uses of the term "criollo" in colonial Spanish America.) —. 1974. Introduction. Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios. By Ramón Pané. México: Siglo XXI. 1-20. (A framework for Pané's work with emphasis on the importance of its contribution to various disciplines.) —. 1975-a. Cuba, polaridades de su imagen poética. Acta Litterana Academiae Scientiatum Hungaricae. 18: 3-41. (Cuba's image as seen in several poems from the colonial period to the present.) —. 1975-b. Mitología y artes prehispánicas de las Antilias. México: Siglo XXI. (A masterful interpretation of Taino ancient beliefs with photo illustrations of original pieces from various museums.) —. 1978. Cambiantes imágenes de la mujer en el teatro de la América virreinal. Latin American Theatre Review. (Fall):5-15. (An explanation of the changing image of women in colonial drama.) —. 1979-80. La otra hazana de Colón o la epifania de América. Boletin de la ANLE. 4-5:35-50. (A sensitive analysis of Columbus's contributions to the literature of the New World.) —. 1983. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, relator de episodios y narrador de naufragios. Ideologies and Literatures. 17:133-45. (Studies some of Oviedo's misinterpretations of various Taino customs.) —. 1985. Traslado al Nuevo Mundo del cuento humorístico medieval. Thesaurus. 40.1:1-16. (Underscores the literary and linguistic importance of Discursos medicinales.) —. 1986. Fray Ramón Pané o el rescate de un mundo mítico. Revista del Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe. 3:2-8. (A review of the importance of the Taino myths outlined by Pané.) Balaguer, Joaquin. 1968. (Fourth ed.) Historia de la literatura dominicana. Rev. ed. Santo Domingo: Julio D. Postigo & Hijos. (A traditional literary history.) Balboa, Silvestre de. [1608]. 1962. Espejo de paciencia. Ed. by Cintio Vitier. La Habana: Comisión Nacional de la UNESCO. (A critical edition of the Cuban epic including a facsimile of the poem.) Bataillon, Marcel. 1976. Estudios sobre Bartolomé de las Casas. Barcelona: Peninsular. (A collection of studies about different aspects of Las Casas's life and works.) Castellanos, Juan de. [1589-1601]. 1955. Elegias de varones ilustres de Indias. Ed. and pref. by Miguel Antonio Caro. 4 vols. Bogota: ABC. (The standard edition of Castellanos's long poem.) Chanca, Diego Alvarez. [1493]. 1966. Diego Alvarez Chanca: Estudio biográfico. Ed. and biography by Aurelio Tió. San Juan: Institute de Cultura Puertorriquena. (A biographical study with the annotated letter of Dr. Chanca and various appendixes.) Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel. 1989. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Latin American Writers. Ed. by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 71-77. (An overview of the life and works of the Mexican savant.) —. [Forthcoming.] Apuntes sobre historiografía e ideologia en la prosa antillana del siglo XVIII. In Hornenaje a Giuseppe Bellini. Ed. by Silvana Serafin et al. Venice: n.p. (Examines the principal ideas that inform the writings of three Caribbean authors from the eighteenth century, Morell de Santa Cruz, Arrate, and Abbad y Lasierra.) Colón, Cristóbal. 1982. Textos y documentos completos. Relaciones de viajes, cartas y memoriales. Ed., pref., and notes by Consuelo Varela. Madrid: Alianza. (A well-documented edition of Columbus's writings, with an

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informative and useful introduction.) Contín Aybar, Néstor. 1982. Historia de la literatura dominicana. Vol. 1. San Pedro de Macorís: Universidad Central del Este. (Factual information about colonial authors organized by centuries and under various subheadings such as author's name and country of birth compiled in the first volume of a four-volume history of Dominican literature.) Cook, Noble David. 1993. Disease and Depopulation in Hispaniola. Colonial Latin America Review. 2:213-45. (A reconsideration of how European diseases affected the native inhabitants of Hispaniola.) Dellepiane, Angela B. 1968. Presencia de América en la obra de Tirso de Molina. Madrid: Revista Estudios. (A review of the impact of the New World on Tirso's writings.) Díez de Leiva, Fernando. 1682. Antiaxiomas morales, médicos, filosóficos, y politicos o impugnaciones varias en estas materias, de algunas sentencias admitidas comunmente por verdaderas. Madrid: Julián de Paredes. (A collection of poems written in Latin and Spanish by local rhymesters as well as some complex refutations of popular wisdom.) Fernández Méndez, E., ed. 1957. Crónicas de Puerto Rico (1493-1797). Vol. 1. Antologia de autores puertorriquenos. San Juan. (An anthology of colonial Puerto Rican prose containing among others, the relaciones by Larrasa, López de Haro and Torres Varga.) Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo. [1851-55]. 1959. Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Océano. Intro. and ed. by Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso. 5 vols. Madrid: BAE. (The standard edition of Oviedo's Historia with a general introduction to his life and works.) Fernández Retamar, Roberto. 1968. Introducción a Cuba. La historia. La Habana: Instituto del Libro. (A brief survey of Cuban history.) Gerbi, Antonello. [1975]. 1978. La naturaleza de las Indias nuevas. De Cristóbal Colon a Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. Trans. by Antonio Alatorre. México: FCE. (An authoritative analysis of how Oviedo viewed the flora and fauna of the New World.) Gonzalez, José Luis. 1976 Literatura y sociedad en Puerto Rico. De los cronistas de Indias a la generación del 98. México: FCE. (A general overview of the relationship between literature and society in Puerto Rico.) González Echevarría, Roberto. 1976. José Arrom, autor de la Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (picaresca e historia). Relecturas: estudios de literatura cubana. Caracas: Monte Avila. 17-35. (An analysis of the importance of Pané's Relación from several perspectives and discussion of the significance of Arrom's edition of this text.) —. 1986. Reflections on the Espejo de paciencia. Cuban Studies. 6:101-21. (A review of Espejo as a foundational text by Cuban critics and its place within the Baroque tradition.) Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1989. Dios o el oro en las Indias. Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas. (Examines why Las Casas condemned the actions of the conquistadors from a theological perspective.) —. 1992. En busca de los pobres de Jesucristo. El pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas. Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas and CEP. (One of the foremost theoreticians of liberation theology examines Las Casas's thought.) Gutiérrez de Arroyo, Isabel. 1979. Introduction. Historia geográfica civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico. By Fr. Iñigo Abbad y LaSierra. San Juan: Editorial Universitaria. xix-lxxix. (An informative introduction to Abbad y LaSierra's work.) Hanke, Lewis. 1965. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Boston: Little, Brown. (A classic study of Las Casas's participation in the controversy about the Indians of the New World.) —. 1950. Aristotle and the American Indians. A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (A study of the origins of the conflicting views about the Indians prevalent in sixteenth-century Europe.) Henige, David. 1991. In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (A revealing analysis and critique of Columbus's Diario or ship's log.) Henríquez Ureña, Max. 1945. Panorama histórico de la literatura dominicana. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Brasileira de Artes Gráficas. (A collection of a series of lectures given in Brazil and, in the first part, a review of various aspects of colonial literary developments in Santo Domingo.)

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[1962]. 1978. Panorama histórico de la literatura cubana. Intro. by Angel Augier. 2 vols. La Habana: Arte y Literatura. (A general history of Cuban literature until the late 1950s.) Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. [1936]. 1960. La cultura y las letras coloniales en Santo Domingo. Obra critica. Ed., bibliography, and index to names by Emma Susana Speratti Piñero. Intro. by Jorge Luis Borges. México: FCE. 335-444. (The first review of colonial culture in Hispaniola written by its most famous humanist. Includes notes as important as the text itself, and an anthology of early poetry written on the island.) Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. New York: Methuen. (Challenging analysis of the "encounter" as represented in texts of different centuries.) Icaza, Francisco A. de. 1921. Cristóbal de Llerena y los orígenes del teatro en la América española. Revista de Filologia Espafiola. 8.2:121-30. (The first publication and study of Lierena's interlude.) Johnson, Julie Greer. 1988. Cristóbal de Llerena and his Satiric Entremés. Latin American Theatre Review. (Fall): 39-45. (Emphasizes the satirical aspects of this interlude.) —. 1993. Satire in Colonial Spanish America: Turning the World Upside Down. Austin: University of Texas Press. (The second chapter analyzes Cristóbal de Lierena's interlude within the development of satire in the New World.) Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Studies the rhetoric of biblical prophecy and its influence on Columbus's writing and colonial discourse.) Knight, Franklin W. 1978. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. (Views the area as a cultural entity with various chapters dedicated to the colonial period of both the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Caribbean.) Las Casas, Bartolomé de. [c. 1559]. 1965. Historia de las Indias. Ed. by Agustín Miliares Carlo. Intro. by Lewis Hanke. 3 vols. México: FCE. (First printed in 1875, it is perhaps the most important work written by the Dominican priest; it provides a summary of historical developments in the New World from 1492 to 1520.) —. [1951]. 1967. Apologética historia sumaria. Ed. and intro, by Edmundo O'Gorman. 2 vols. México: FCE. (A treatise to prove the rationality of the American Indians that shows Las Casas's command of theology and philosophy.) —. [1552]. 1984. Brevisima relación de la destruición de las Indias. Ed. and intro. by André Saint-Lu. Madrid: Cátedra. (A controversial document critical of Spanish colonization in the New World.) Leal, Rine. 1975. La selva oscura. La Habana: Arte y Literatura. (A history of Cuban theatre until the end of the nineteenth century. It includes illustrations, bibliography, chronology, and indexes.) —. 1980. Breve historia del teatro cubano. La Habana: Letras Cubanas. (A brief survey of Cuban theatre including the postrevolutionary period.) Le Riverend Brusone, Julio L. 1949. Introduction. Llave del Nuevo Mundo. Antemural de las Indias Occidentales. By José Martin Arrate y Acosta. México: FCE. vii-xxxviii. (An informative introduction to Arrate's work.) Llerena, Cristóbal de. [1588]. 1972. Entremés. Teatro hispanoamericano. Antologia critica (Epoca colonial). Ed. by Carlos Ripoll and Andrés Valdespino. New York: Anaya Book Co., Inc. 33-40. (The complete version of Llerena's entremés with a brief introduction and bibliography.) Lockhart, James and Stuart B. Schwartz. 1984. Early Latin America. A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A comprehensive history of the area with useful maps, diagrams, and bibliography.) López Baralt, Mercedes. [1976]. 1985. El mito taino: Levi-Strauss en las Antillas. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Huracán. (A study linking Taino mythology to that of the Arahuac people in South America.) López de Haro, Damiân. [1644]. 1917. Carta . . . a don Juan Díaz de la Calle. Boletin Histórico de Puerto Rico. 4:81-87. (A harsh description of the island and its people.) Malagón, Javier. 1988. Bartolomé de las Casas. Latin American Writers. Ed. by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1:1-9. (A general introduction to Las Casas's biography and writings.)

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Méndez Nieto, Juan. [1607]. 1957. Discursos medicinales. Documentos inéditos para la historia de Espana. Vol. 13. Madrid: Imprenta Góngora. (Descriptions of life in Hispaniola in the sixteenth century; it includes poems written there.) Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. [1911]. 1948. Historia de la poesía Hispano-Americana. 2 vols. Madrid: CSIC. (A general overview of poetic developments in the New World; it shows the author's prejudices but serves as a useful and important book.) Merrim, Stephanie. 1989. The Apprehension of the New in Nature and Culture: Fernández de Oviedo's Sumario. In 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Ed. and intro. by René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini. Minneapolis: The Prisma Institute. 165-99. (A perceptive analysis of key aspects of Oviedo's Sumario.) Milhou, Alain. 1983. Colón y su mentalidad mesiânica. Valladolid: Seminario Americanista de la Universidad de Valladolid. (Situates Columbus and his voyages within the religious currents of his time.) Morell de Santa Cruz, Pedro Agustín. [1760]. 1929. Historia de la isla y catedral de Cuba. Pref. by Francisco de Paula Coronado. La Habana: Cuba Intelectual. (The first edition of Morell's history.) Morillas, José Maria. 1945-46. Racionero Licenciado don Antonio Sanchez Valverde. CLIO. (Ciudad Trujillo) 68.13:103-11. (A review of Sanchez Valverde's biography also reprinted in Morillas's Siete hiografias dominicanas [1946].) Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1955. Christopher Columbus, Mariner. Maps by Erwin Raisz. Boston: Little, Brown. (An abridged version of Morison's classic book on Columbus.) Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1978. El ingenio. 3 vols. La Habana: Ciencias Sociales. (A masterful study of the origin, development, and impact of the sugar industry on Cuba.) Moya Pons, Frank. 1977. Historia colonial de Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: UCMM. (A review of colonial Dominican history stressing the development of events.) —. 1987. Después de Colon. Trabajo, sociedad y politica en la economia del oro. Madrid: Alianza. (A wellargued historical explanation of how Hispaniola's economy shifted from gold to sugar.) Ortiz, Fernando. 1951. Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba. La Habana: Ministerio de Educación. (Overview of dance and theatre showing the richness and influence of African culture.) Pané, Fray Ramón. [c.1498]. 1974. Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios. Intro. and ed. by José J. Arrom. México: Siglo XXI. (An excellent edition of a key document to our understanding of Taino culture; more recent editions are available.) Pasarell, Emilio J. 1951. Origenes y desarrollo de la afición teatral en Puerto Rico. 2 vols. San Juan: Universidad de Puerto Rico. (A panorama of theatrical developments in Puerto Rico.) Peguero, Luis Joseph. [1762]. 1975. Historia de la conquista de la Isla Espanola de Santo Domingo. Ed., intro., and notes by Pedro J. Santiago. 2 vols. Santo Domingo: Publicaciones del Museo de las Casas Reales. (A description of the discovery and colonization of Hispaniola with the author's viewpoint about key events of the eighteenth century; it includes a useful introduction and notes.) Pérez Fernández, Isacio. 1989. Introduction. Brevisima relación de la destrucción de Africa. Preludio de la destrucción de Indias. By Bartolomé de las Casas. Salamanca-Lima: Editorial San Esteban and Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas. 11-192. (A well-documented review of Las Casas's protests against the enslavement of the guanches - native inhabitants of the Canary Islands - and of Africans in the period of the Atlantic expansion of Europe.) Pita, Santiago de. [c. 1730]. 1963. El principe jardinero y fingido Cloridano. Intro., ed., and notes by José J. Arrom. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura. (The introduction and edition of Pita's drama place the author and his work in their proper perspective.) Ponce de León Troche, Juan y Antonio de Santa Clara. [1582]. 1914. Memoria de Melgarejo. Boletin Histórico de Puerto Rico. San Juan. 1:75-91. (An important document for our understanding of the history of Puerto Rico during the sixteenth century.) Rabasa, José. 1989. Bernardo de Balbuena. Latin American Writers. Ed. by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1:53-57. (A review of the life and contributions of Balbuena.)

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Rico-Availe, Carlos de. 1974. Vida y milagros de un pîcaro médico del siglo XVII: biografía del bachiller Juan Méndez Nieto. Madrid: Cultura Hispânica. (A biography of Méndez Nieto, the sixteenth century physician and author of Discursos medicinales.) Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1983. Literatura puertorriquena. Su proceso en el tiempo. Madrid: Partenón. (A well documented and insightful literary history.) Rivera-Rivera, Eloisa. 1965. La poesia en Puerto Rico antes de 1843. San Juan: Institute de Cultura Puertorriquena. (A general overview of poetic developments in Puerto Rico until 1843 providing extensive analysis of poems and bibliographical information.) Roggiano, Alfredo A. 1988. Poesia renacentista en la Nueva Espana. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana. 28:69-83. (An appraisal of Eugenio Salazar de Alarcón's Silva de poesia with a study of several of his poems.) Rosa Nieves, Cesáreo. 1948. Francisco de Ayerra Santa Maria: poeta puertorriqueño, 1630-1708. Río Piedras. (An exhaustive study of the life and works of Ayerra.) Salazar de Alarcón, Eugenio. 1866. Cartas de Eugenio Salazar, vecino y natural de Madrid escritas a muy particulares amigos suyos. Biography of the author by Pascual de Gayangos. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Espafioles. (A reproduction of a part of Salazar's Silva.) Sainz, Enrique. 1983. La literatura cubana de 1700 a 1790. La Habana: Letras Cubanas. (A review of eighteenth-century Cuban literature.) Sánchez, Juan Francisco. 1956. El pensamiento filosófico en Santo Domingo (siglo XVIII): Antonio Sanchez Valverde. Ciudad Trujillo: Arte y Cine. (A discussion of philosophical trends focusing on Sánchez Valverde's ideas.) Sánchez Valverde, Antonio. [1785]. 1947. Idea del valor de la isla Espanola. Intro. and notes by Fr. Cipriano de Utrera. Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo. (A detailed description of Hispaniola and the historical causes that contributed to its demise, from the perspective of an eighteenth century loyalist.) Schulman, Ivan A. 1988. Espejo / Speculum: El espejo de paciencia de Silvestre de Balboa. Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispânica. 36.1:391-406. (An analysis of Espejo as an antihegemonic text.) Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos. [1683]. 1945. Triunfo Parténico. México: Xochitl. (Proceedings of two Mexican poetry contests of 1682 and 1683 containing poems by Ayerra Santa Maria and others.) Smith, Octavio. 1978. Para una vida de Santiago de Pita. La Habana: Letras Cubanas. (A biographical study of Pita based on new documentary evidence.) Stevens-Arroyo, Antonio M. 1988. Cave of the Jaguar: The Mythological World of the Tainos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. (An analysis of Taino mythology based on Lévi-Strauss's structural approach and C. G. Jung's archetypes.) Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro. [1854]. 1945. Biblioteca histórica de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Instituto de Literatura Puertorriquena. (Collects hard to find historical documents from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.) Varela, Consuelo. 1992. Cristóbal Colón: Retrato de un hombre. Madrid: Alianza. (An informative biography of Columbus by one of the authorities on his life and writings.) Vicioso, Abelardo. 1979. Santo Domingo en las letras coloniales (1492-1800). Santo Domingo: UNASD. (A general review of colonial letters in Hispaniola from a sociohistorical perspective.) Wagner, Henry R. and Helen Rand Parish. 1967. The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press. (An important addition to our understanding of Las Casas's biography and works.) Zamora, Margarita. 1989. "Todas son palabras formales del Almirante": Las Casas y el Diario de Colón. Hispanic Review. 57.1:25-41. (A discussion of the problems of authorship presented by Columbus's ship's log as copied by Las Casas.) —. 1993. Reading Columbus. Los Angeles: University of California Press. (An analysis of the textual problems and ideological implications of Columbus's writings.) Zequeira y Arango, Manuel. 1964. Poesias. La Habana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO. (A collection of Zequeira's poetry and some of Rubalcava's.)

Literary Genres

From Romanticism Through Modernismo and Naturalism

Fiction

CARLOS J. ALONSO

Emory University

The absence of a strong native bourgeoisie, idiosyncratic historical development (particularly in the case of the Dominican Republic), and geographical circumstance prevented the Hispanic islands of the Caribbean from participating in the general insurrection against Spanish hegemony that occurred during the first third of the nineteenth century. As a result, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only possessions left to Spain in the New World after the 1810-25 revolutionary period. The revolt against Spanish rule also sent a large number of sympathizers of the monarchy to the two islands that were still solidly within the metropolitan sphere. This constituted yet another migratory swell that followed the ones that occurred in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and the ceding of the Spanish side of Hispaniola to the French in 1795. These successive waves of conservative immigrants have been judged by some as having contributed to the weakening and damping of separatist stirrings in the island colonies. Furthermore, the restoration of the despotic Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne resulted in a tightening of metropolitan control over the life of the colonies; the loss of its former empire in the New World brought with it a recrudescence in the tactics used by Spain to enforce loyalty in its only remaining possessions. Witness, for instance, the infamous practice of the compontes, arbitrary punitive measures that were inflicted on Puerto Rican and Cuban citizenry by Spanish police agents as late as 1887. To this idiosyncratic political development one must add the equally important economic fact that the intensification of agricultural work and the concomitant slave exploitation only began toward the latter part of the eighteenth century in Cuba, and to a lesser degree in the rest of the Hispanic Caribbean. This was in marked contrast to the waning of the institution of slavery that had taken place both in the rest of the Caribbean and in Spanish America as a whole. Taken together, these variegated circumstances determined two very important facts: (1) the islands' exposure to a Spanish influence that continued unabated while in the rest of Spanish America other European political and cultural influences were being felt; (2) the presence of slavery as a concrete economic and social system after it had effectively disappeared in all of the former Spanish colonies and in the other islands of the basin (it was not until 1873 that slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico; slaves had to wait until 1886 to be freed in Cuba). Both of these conditions left their profound imprint in the period of literary production that concerns us. Another element that played an increasingly important role as the century advanced was the islands' proximity to the United States. Regardless of the resentment occasioned by its intensified show of power throughout the region, the United States was fascinating not only for Caribbean writers and intellectuals, but also for their Latin-American counterparts. During the second half of the century the United States turned into a new icon of modernity for Latin America, replacing Europe in that significant role. Even in the ranks of the growing Caribbean movement that

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attempted to separate the remaining colonies from the Spanish metropolis, the idea of permanent assimilation to the United States was often raised and discussed. The concept was also favored by the powerful sugar producers, who were captivated by the possibility of encountering no barriers in their trade with the United States market. In any event, the growing prominence of the northern neighbor had its culmination in the last years of the century and the beginning of the next: in 1898 Cuba and Puerto Rico fell under United States control as a result of the treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War, and in 1907 the United States began to administer directly the Dominican customs house in order to guarantee timely debt payments. This period as a whole would permanently alter not only the relationship between the United States and the islands of the Hispanic Caribbean, but also the relations of both to the rest of Latin America.

Cuba The continuity of cultural life during the nineteenth century in Cuba was affected by the large number of writers who were forced to abandon the country for political reasons. Their works, published outside the island, are sometimes perceived to be more influential in the retrospective gaze of literary history than they actually were in the Cuban cultural milieu at the time of their publication. A precise case in point is that of José Martí, who never published a book in Cuba during his lifetime, but who is rightly regarded as a paramount figure not only in Cuban but in Hispanic letters in general as well. This phenomenon should be kept in mind in order to temper the necessarily sequential dimension of the ensuing account. The inception of what would eventually become a highly sophisticated and continued creation of prose fiction in the nineteenth century in Cuba can undoubtedly be identified in the intense cultivation of the cuadro or articulo de costumbres - scenes of local color - that is observed in the first thirty years of the century. The production of articulos de costumbres was encouraged by the large number of journals and other publications that began appearing from the latter years of the eighteenth century on, of which the Papel Periódico de La Habana (1790; later called Diario de La Habana) is a paradigmatic example. This phenomenon was part of the more general cultural ferment that accompanied the island's transformation from a secondary commercial outpost into a flourishing colonial enclave, a period that has come to be identified with the liberal tenure of Governor Luis de las Casas. In its European context the cuadro had two different forms that evinced their separate (and to some degree antagonistic) origins in the Enlightenment and in romanticism. The first of these was a result of the reformist and critical thrust of eighteenth-century European developments. It accounts for the moralizing and pedagogical intention that can be gleaned from one variant of the cuadro. The other, the form that is steeped in romanticism, seeks to identify the types and customs that are representative of an autochthonous essence and tradition. But regardless of their dissimilar wellsprings, Cuba's particular political and social circumstances determined that both of these tendencies of the cuadro should manifest themselves with parallel intensity throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, one could argue that they became complementary instruments in the developing nationalist project: the critical version of the cuadro became a useful medium to emphasize the iniquities entailed and the incongruities generated by the colonial predicament; by the same token, the more

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folklorizing version served as a vehicle for the formulation of a concept of nationality that could simultaneously be invoked by the unfolding separatist agenda. This conjunction accounts for the survival of the genre throughout virtually the entire century: for instance a book entitled Tipos y costumbres de la Isla de Cuba (Characters and customs of the island of Cuba) was published as late as 1881 in the island's capital. The importance and wide readership of the articulos in Cuba can be gauged by the large number of writers who are more commonly known as novelists and poets but who nevertheless also wrote them (e.g., Cirilo Villaverde and José J. Milanés). Eventually, anthologies of cuadros were compiled and published in book form, such as El paseo pintoresco por la isla de Cuba (A picturesque tour of the island of Cuba), 1841, and Los cubanos pintados por si mismos (Cubans as depicted by themselves), 1852. Other authors devoted themselves exclusively to the genre: Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros (pseudonym El Lugareno) wrote twenty-six of his escenas cotidianas (scenes of daily life) between 1838 and 1840 on the traditions and habits of his native province of Camagüey; José Maria de Cárdenas (pseudonym Jeremias de Docaranza) wrote a number of pieces that were gathered in a Colección de articulos that was published in 1847; José Victoriano Betancourt began publishing his articles in 1838. As the struggle against Spain heightened in intensity the articulos took on a more decidedly critical air. An example of this is the work of Luis Victoriano Betancourt from about 1863, in which the social evils depicted are ultimately ascribed to the metropolitan Spanish hegemony over the island's affairs. This pattern of divergences and coincidences between neoclassic critical intention and romantic expression was also felt in the midst of what is arguably the most influential cultural association of the century: the group of artists and intellectuals that gathered around the figure of Domingo del Monte, an accomplished writer and polymath, during the years between 1830 and 1840. Del Monte was a man steeped in the classics and in Spanish cultural tradition. His own literary production reveals the respect for the propriety of artistic diction that was intrinsic to his neoclassic conception of literary art. This aspect of his literary ideology accounts for his repeated challenging of the romantic influences that were sweeping through the island's cultural sphere at the time. And yet, some of the most important figures associated with romanticism in Cuba were involved to some degree with the literary society that had del Monte as its intellectual leader. This apparent contradiction can begin to be clarified if we consider the prominent role that the institution of slavery had in the cultural enterprise of the island colony; for in slavery neoclassicists as well as romantics found a social, economic, and political topic that could be addressed from their widely differing aesthetic perspectives. Del Monte perceived slavery as an anachronistic and inhumane social system that only served to retard the island's participation in the modern. His was the view of the reformer who understood his task as that of exposing the ills that characterized his social milieu through the vehicle of a literary creation. This also explains why his specifically literary production is dwarfed by his more extensive and immediate essayistic works critical of the island's situation. On the other side, the romantics' interest in slavery had its source in a number of typically romantic conceits that the "peculiar institution" fulfilled as if by design. Paramount among these was the abiding fascination with an exotic Other, but one can also include the tragic inevitability of interracial sentimental liaisons, anagnorisis, and notions of personal and collective freedom. By reason of this commonality of interests in the same social topic, del Monte's association was able to focus attention on slavery and transcend the seemingly irreconcilable literary ideologies that the group encompassed. That the

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romantics found in slavery a topic that lent itself ideally to literary treatment from their perspective is amply corroborated by works such as Sab, 1841, by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The author left her native land when she was a child; hence her novel about slavery does not represent a response to a direct contact with slavery, and its composition is not primarily determined by a desire for vindication of the slaves. Rather the text appears to be trying to exploit to the fullest the way in which slavery appealed to a number of preoccupations and themes that are characteristic of romanticism. Three novels must be mentioned in the cultural context just described, since two of them are directly related to the activities of del Monte's group: Francisco (written in 1838; published as a complete text only in 1880) by Anselmo Suârez y Romero; Autobiografia de un esclavo (Autobiography of a slave), 1839, by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Cecilia Valdés - first part published 1839, second part 1882 - by Cirilo Villaverde. Suârez y Romero's and Manzano's texts were written, at del Monte's behest, to be included in a collection of works that were to be delivered to Richard Madden, a British official who was preparing an antislavery tract. The plot of Suârez's novel, in which the love affair between the slaves Francisco and Dorotea is violently opposed by their jealous young owner, reveals its romantic forging. After the couple suffers the master's ill-treatment, Dorotea surrenders herself sexually to him, seeking to assuage his anger against Francisco; the latter kills himself upon finding out the truth and Dorotea, heartbroken, dies soon after that. Manzano's narrative is of a different sort. The author was a former slave whose freedom had been bought through funds raised within del Monte's group. Here the depiction of the evils and sufferings of slavery is vouched for by the shudder of lived experience. And yet, it is also clear that Manzano uses all the literary resources he has accumulated in his haphazard aesthetic education to describe the process of the coming into being of a subjectivity, a process that appears to be clearly understood by the author to be the cumulative effect of a series of rhetorical conventions. This aspect gives Manzano's work a novelistic dimension that belies the strictly documentary intention leading to its composition and, moreover, constitutes the filter through which it is most frequently read. In turn, Cecilia Valdés is structured around the incestuous relationship between a brother and his mulatto half-sister, a secret link that is not revealed to the protagonists until shortly before events reach their tragic conclusion: Cecilia's actions precipitate the murder of her lover/halfbrother Leonardo after he has just married a woman of his race and class. In the prologue to his novel Villaverde admits to being a disciple of Manzoni and Walter Scott; one would imagine that this influence would explain the setting of the novel some twenty years previous to the writing. But it may also be understood as an attempt to circumvent the colonial censor's suspicions by placing the action in a past that is avowedly removed from the concerns of the day. This last comment may help us to understand at least one of the drives behind the specifically Cuban manifestation of a type of narrative that is generally associated with romantic literary production: the historical novel or tale. This genre was cultivated by many of the most noted writers of the period, sometimes taking the form of a leyenda or legend, and in other instances assuming novelistic dimensions. For instance, Gómez de Avellaneda wrote Guatimozín, 1846, a novel that takes place at the time of the conquest of Mexico, and El cacique de Turmeque (The Indian chief of Turmeque), 1860, set in Colombia, and whose main character is the son of a Spaniard and an Indian princess. She also wrote a number of leyendas, such as La ondina del lago azul (The undine of the

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blue lake), La dama de Amboto (The lady of Amboto), and El aura blanca (The white aura). The preferred setting for historical tales such as these was the period of the Spanish conquest of the island. This fact can be attributed to a number of reasons: first, the encounter between two such distinct cultures brought with it the certainty of tragic events (sentimental and otherwise); second, the putative origins of a Cuban national identity could arguably be found in the historical moment under scrutiny; and thirdly, political circumstances at the time of the writing could be projected onto the past in order to comment on them in an indirect fashion. Thus it would be very easy to see in the encounter between the cruel conquistador and the defenseless Indian a situation emblematic of contemporary Spanish hegemony over the island colony. Ramón de Palma's short novel Matanzas y el Yumuri (Matanzas and the Yumurf), 1837, is an excellent example of this tendency. Here the passionate love affair between the brave Ornofay and the Indian princess Guarina ends with the death of Guarina at the hands of a Spanish officer. The mystified depiction of the Indian that characterizes works such as Palma's led to the appearance of a more militant literary movement that came to be known as siboneysmo. This movement, primarily a poetic phenomenon, engaged in an idealized description of the Arawakan Indian inhabitants of the island and of their organic relationship with nature, a world that would be destroyed by the invasion of a powerful and cruel enemy: the Carib Indians. But the political implications of the movement with respect to the Spanish presence in the island were not lost on one of the military governors of the time: he had José Fornaris - one of the leading exponents of siboneysmo - brought before him, and told him in a now famous exchange: "We are all Spaniards here, not Indians. . . understood? . . . All Spaniards."1 Cuban cultural production during the second half of the nineteenth century was mediated in all of its manifestations by two important and related factors: the deterioration of the island's colonial situation and the decided transformation of the pro-independence program into an armed struggle. The year 1868 marks the beginning of a ten-year campaign by Cuban separatist forces that has come to be known as the First War for Independence (1868-78). A second outburst of military activity ensued in 1895; the aftermath of this conflict was the end of Spanish rule and the imposition of United States hegemony over the island. Between these two dates narrative prose in Cuba is fundamentally concerned with the depiction of a colonial reality that is examined with a highly critical eye, particularly because of the sense of betrayal that was felt over Spain's reneging on the terms of the Pacto del Zanjón (The treaty of the Zanjón) that had put an end to the first war. This is why in a large number of the works written during this period it is possible to identify an undercurrent of satire and denunciation that at times surfaces with irrepressible force, regardless of the always threatening political repercussions. But by the same token there are works, sometimes written by the same authors and cast in a realistic mold, that nonetheless do not abandon completely the costumbrista impulses intrinsic to the earlier literature. Two figures could be taken as representative of this moment: Nicolás Heredia and Ramón Meza. Meza's Mi tio el empleado (My uncle the bureaucrat), 1887, and Don Aniceto el tendero (Don Aniceto the shopkeeper), 1889, are indictments of the materialistic mindset fostered by the mercantile realities of the colonial regime. Mi tio el empleado in particular is a satirical look at the colonial bureaucracy and the riches that it can engender through graft, iniquity, and deceit. The novel begins with the arrival in Havana of a Spanish peasant who, by means of the avenues available to him in a corrupt system, eventually becomes a titled personage. While following Vicente Cuevas's ascent, the reader is treated to a gallery of rogues who operate at 1

Aquí somos expanoles y no indios, ¿estâ usted?, todos expanoles (Bueno [1963], 217).

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all levels of the established order. The result is a darkly sarcastic depiction of the island's colonial situation. Heredia published Un hombre de negocios (A man of affairs) in 1883, and what is widely regarded as his most significant work, Leonela, in 1893. The latter novel is an attempt to develop a portrait of provincial life by narrating the story of twin sisters, Leonela and Clara, who fall in love with the same man. This essential plot line is decorated with cameo descriptions of provincial types and habits that give the novel a distinct folklorizing air reminiscent of costumbrista literary production. Due to the evergrowing number of reviews and journals, the short story achieved a noticeable increase in production and circulation. Within this surge one can discern a number of discrete currents exemplified by the following authors: Manuel de la Cruz, who wrote "nativist" stories that take as their setting the island's traditions and country legends; Esteban Borrero Echevarrfa, who produced a series of philosophical and moral allegories in short story form; and Tristán de Medina, author of short fictional texts that are characterized by sentimentality and fantasy. Two novels that were published outside Cuba during this period must also be referred to since they figure prominently in most outlines of literary history: José Marti's Amistad funesta (The ill-fated friendship), New York, 1885, is important as a clear antecedent of modernista prose. El negro Francisco (The Negro Francisco), Chile, 1873, by Antonio Zambrana, modeled on Suárez y Romero's Francisco, shows the extent to which slavery continued to be a burning social and literary issue in Cuba well into the century. In this last regard one could also mention the novel La campana del ingenio (The sugarmiU's bell), 1883, by Julio Rosas (pseudonym of Francisco Puig), an abolitionist tract. That the continued influence of Spain was a significant factor in the island's literary development can be gleaned from the fact that, just as it was in Spain, naturalism in the Caribbean was but a faint echo of its French models (an assertion that could also apply to naturalism in Spanish America as a whole). In 1882-83, the Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazân had reviewed in La cuestión palpitante (The burning issue) the polemics that surrounded the spreading of naturalist formulations in the Spanish cultural context. What seemed objectionable to Pardo Bazán in this new aesthetic was the emphasis on scientific determinism and the utilitarian understanding of the novel's role. In fact, as a general rule, in the Hispanic world naturalism meant ultimately a final abandonment of romanticism and a resolute embracing of a version of realism that was fascinated with the sordid and stark. In this fashion, naturalist writing became the vehicle for a more penetrating and socially conscious novelistic eye. In Cuba the author who has been most identified with naturalism is Martin Morúa Delgado, referred to by some as "the black Zola." His aim was to produce an entire cycle of novels that revolved around the effects of slavery and discrimination. Of these he wrote only two: Sofia, 1891, and a sequel entitled La familia Unzúazu (The Unzúazu family), in 1901. Other works that are inspired by naturalist tenets are En el cafetal (At the coffee plantation), 1890, by Domingo Malpica la Barca and El separatista (The separatist), an experimental novel written by Eduardo López Bago, a Spaniard who resided in Cuba, subtitled novela médico-social. Given the island's political and economic upheavals during its fin-de-siècle, it is not surprising to find clear echoes of naturalism in novels written well into the first third of the twentieth century, such as Carlos Loveira's major work, Juan Criollo, published in 1928. Because of this very revolutionary unsettledness, modernismo's presence is not fully felt in the island until the first decade of the twentieth century, and then mostly as a poetic influence. Never-

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theless, both Martí and Julian del Casai wrote a number of short stories that anticipated in many respects the concerns of that literary movement. Casal's stories - with suggestive titles such as "La última ilusión" (The last illusion) and "El amante de las torturas" (The lover of tortures) - appeared in diverse publications of the time, and Martí included his in a magazine that he wrote specifically for children, La Edad de Oro (The golden age), 1889. Some of the very few later examples of modernista prose are owing to Jesus Castellanos, who wrote two novels that are typical of the genre: La conjura (The Conspiracy), 1908, and La manigua sentimental (The sentimental jungle), 1909, stylish and morose examinations of a protagonist's spiritual struggle with a fallen world.

Puerto Rico The outlining of any period of cultural production in Puerto Rico is made difficult by two conditions: the institutional framework necessary for the official (re)construction of that history has had a very short life; and its mere existence has been the subject of debate. The historical thwarting of the Puerto Rican nationalist project has prevented the full-scale deployment of a state-sponsored enterprise of cultural and historical self-definition; the result is that the traditional academic accounts of the period in question are filled with serious lacunae that render it more like a recitation of disconnected highlights than an integrated narrative of cultural life. This fact becomes evident when we compare the supportive critical apparatus that has been produced by the institutions of the other two Hispanic islands of the Caribbean to its equivalent in Puerto Rico. Particularly in the case of Cuba, there is a richness and depth that is still missing in Puerto Rican historiographic discourse, regardless of the renewed impetus that historical study has experienced in the island during the last twenty years. Nationalism may be a disparaged category today, but the institutional programs that it sets in motion are also the creators of the chronicle of autochthonous literature that we are about to review. Puerto Rico's long-standing status as a secondary military garrison determined the relatively late arrival of the printing press, in 1806. La Gaceta de Puerto Rico begins its existence around that time as an official newsletter, opening the way for similar publications that served as vehicles for the incipient literary enterprise. The majority of these compositions were occasional and unsigned, however, and their impact was ephemeral. The Aguinaldo puertorriqueho (The Puerto Rican Christmas gift) of 1843, the Album puertorriqueño, Barcelona, 1844, the Cancionero de Borinquen, 1846, and other collections of poems and short prose descriptions written mostly by students paved the way for the appearance in 1849 of a work that is generally regarded as the beginning of prose fiction in Puerto Rico: El gibaro (The peasant), published in 1882 by Manuel Alonso with a sequel in 1889. It is a work constructed through the concatenation of cuadros de costumbres. The book is divided into escenas or scenes, following the pattern already established in Spain by Mesonero Romanos in his Escenas matritenses (Scenes of Madrid) and by Estébanez Calderón in his Escenas andaluzas (Andalusian scenes). The scenes documented belong to the world of the Puerto Rican peasant or jíbaro: a cockfight, a rural wedding, folkloric dances, and a popular celebration of Carnival. Herein lies, however, a difference of emphasis between the Caribbean avatar of the cuadro de costumbres and the Spanish version of the genre. In one of its metropolitan manifestations, the cuadro was an urban phenomenon; it sought to portray the different tipos (types) that were part of the polychromatic landscape of the modernizing

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city. In the Caribbean the cuadro concentrated almost exclusively on the rural environment instead, except in the case of Cuba, where sugar had created a burgeoning urban life that supported a variegated collection of stock figures. The cuadro's main purpose was to detail the colorful customs of a rustic world that was considered more essential and more genuinely native. El gibaro, written as it was after Alonso's seven-year absence from the island, possesses an element of nostalgia and identification with its subject matter that largely removes the objectifying distance that is typical of the observer persona of the cuadro. Alonso published a second volume of his work many years later, a collection of memoirs, critiques, and social allegories that have very little to do with the substance of his earlier tome, and in which the author assumes the role of social reformer and critic. Just as was the case in Cuba, the nativist tendency represented by El gibaro persists throughout the century and into the next. One has only to point to the existence of volumes such as Costumbres y tradiciones (Customs and traditions), 1883, and Cuentos y narraciones (Tales and stories), 1926, by Manuel Fernández Juncos to illustrate this phenomenon. The nineteenth-century Puerto Rican author who is most attuned to romantic interests and sensibilities is doubtless Alejandro Tapia y Rivera. The literary and discursive forms he cultivated - the historical drama, the philosophical poem, the allegorical novel, and a treatise on aesthetics - amply substantiate this claim. Tapia's importance on the literary horizon of his times cannot be disputed: his Mis memorias (My memoirs) - published only in 1928 - are an essential document for the study of intellectual life in Puerto Rico during the second half of the nineteenth century. In his leyendas and novels the subjects oscillate between his interest in the exotic on the one hand, and the exploitation of possibilities offered by native materials. These two tendencies are tightly interwoven throughout Tapia's oeuvre. For instance, in the leyenda entitled La palma del cacique (The Indian chief's palm tree), 1852, Tapia created a work whose setting is the time of the Spanish conquest of the island. La leyenda de los veinte anos (The legend of the twenties), 1874, is a novella about the emotional life of a male protagonist in which Tapia, in typical romantic fashion, uses the autochthonous landscape as a resonant chamber for the character's mood. And finally Cofresí, 1876, is a historical novel that revolves around the exploits of the Puerto Rican pirate by the same name. Here the figure of the outcast/rebel buccaneer serves as a perfect medium for the display of romantic conceits. On the other hand, in his 1862 anthology entitled El bardo de Guamani (The minstrel of Guamanf), Tapia included La antigua sirena (The old siren), a narrative set in medieval Venice in which the plot revolves around the figure of a femme fatale obsessed with the idea of achieving power. Tapia also wrote a series of novels where the Orientalist fascination with metempsychosis is the fundamental structuring principle. Examples of this type are Enardo y Rosael, 1880, and Póstumo el transmigrado (Póstumo the reincarnated soul), 1872, which the literary historian Francisco Manrique Cabrera considered his most original novel ([1973], 119). Eugenio Maria de Hostos's La peregrinación de Bayoân (Bayoân's pilgrimage), 1863, is an allegorical novelization of the author's thoughts regarding the relationship between Spain and its Caribbean colonies. The novel's first printing in Madrid was confiscated by the Spanish authorities; its effective appearance had to wait until a second edition in Chile ten years later, in 1873. The novel resorts to symbols derived from the Spanish conquest in order to produce an interpretation of the contemporary national and Caribbean predicament. In this respect it represents another example of the romantic use of the Indian past in order to fulfill both political and aesthetic designs. But

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Peregrinación is not a historical novel such as the ones that have been surveyed to this point. It is rather a poetic prose composition that seeks to promote Hostos's dream of an Antillean confederation through a literary instrument. As its title suggests, the work employs the romantic topos of the pilgrimage through which an emotionally overwrought protagonist embarks on a sentimental education. The three Hispanic islands of the Caribbean: Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, are symbolically represented, respectively, by characters named after the Arawak chieftain Guarionex; Marién, a geographical region in Cuba; and Bayoân, the first Indian in Puerto Rico who doubted the immortality of the Spanish invaders. Bayoân's wanderings allow for a consideration of the brutal acts that have accompanied the Spanish presence in the New World. In the end, Hostos makes a conciliatory gesture to the Spanish motherland by inviting it to participate in the projected Caribbean confederation, thereby allowing Spain an opportunity to redeem itself from its sorrowful past deeds. After this early work (the author was twenty-four when he composed it) Hostos's exposure to positivist beliefs led him to retreat from literary creation and to devote his pen to immediate political and social concerns. Peregrinación was not only his first, but his last novel as well. The remarkable longevity of romantic influences and interests well into the second half of the nineteenth century in Puerto Rico accounts for the fact that there hardly seems to have been a transitional stage between it and the first manifestations of naturalist writing. This is apparent, for instance, in the literary trajectory of the island's most important naturalist author, Manuel Zeno Gandía. Zeno's first fictional texts, Rosa de mármol (Marble rose), 1889, and Piccola, 1890, are steeped in romantic imagery and sensibility. Nonetheless, all his subsequent novels are produced from within a literary horizon defined to a large extent by naturalist methods and assumptions. The Puerto Rican version of naturalism was, as has been noted in the case of Cuba, essentially a hyper-critical version of realism. But its nature and procedures become more jarring when seen against the background of the very different literature that immediately preceded it. The movement's influence was both widespread and long-lived: almost every novel written between 1885 and 1930 in Puerto Rico has some naturalist tint to it, however idiosyncratic its interpretation of that school's tenets may be. Two conditions can be adduced as explanations for this: first, the island's generally depressed socioeconomic situation at the end of the century, and the vast upheaval in the country's social order caused by the change to American hegemony as a result of the Spanish-American War. Given this context, naturalism seemed to offer an ideal analytical instrument for the rigorous description and discussion of the island's many ills. The pessimistic, lurid novels written in Puerto Rico well into the twentieth century are clearly a continuation of the island's naturalist production. It may very well be that collectively these works are a negative equivalent, a bleak counterpart to the novela de la tierra or novel of national affirmation that Puerto Rico was not able to generate, given its ongoing colonial predicament. Already from 1882 to 1885 the newspaper El Buscapié (The firecracker), founded in 1877, included in its pages reviews of some of the works of Emile Zola. The ensuing debate regarding the "naturalist question" that took place in the island's literary circles can be traced in a number of journals until 1889 and 1890 (Cabrera [1973], 180). This explains the signs of the movement's influence that can be detected in authors who are nevertheless not usually included under that rubric. Two examples of the foregoing are Salvador Brau and Francisco del Valle Atiles. Although better known as a dramatist and social historian, Brau wrote two short novels that have obvious naturalist

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undertones: La pecadora (The sinner), which is subtitled estudio del natural (A study from nature), 1887, and Lejanías (1912). Del Valle's Inocencia (Innocence), 1884, is an examination of a "pathological case," a favorite subject of naturalist writing. Manuel Zeno Gandia is the foremost exponent of naturalism in Puerto Rico. In typical naturalist fashion he envisioned a cycle of novels that would constitute a "Crónica de un mundo enfermo" (Chronicle of a wasted world). Garduna, published in 1896 although finished somewhat earlier, has as its setting the corrupt and degraded world that revolves around a sugar mill. Zeno's best known novel is La charca (The stagnant pond), 1894, which takes a coffee plantation as its backdrop. The novel has salient naturalist qualities, but these are attenuated by a persistent poetization of narrative description. Zeno appears to be intent on showing that the determinism naturalism ascribed to natural processes is in fact the outcome of a man-made social order of things. The stagnant pond to which the title alludes is a metaphor for the corrupt system formed by landowners, property, and peasants that systematically destroys everything and everybody that it touches. Summarizing the novel's plot is rather difficult, since the author weaves together a number of separate narrative threads in his attempt to portray the entire social environment that concerns him. One could propose that in its critical appropriation of naturalist aesthetics, La charca compares well with the most original novels published in the nineteenth century in Latin America. After a lull in his novelistic production, Zeno Gandia published El negocio (The business), 1922, and Redentores (The redeemers), 1925, the final works in the intended chronicle, in which the mercantile world of the cities is examined. Another writer whose oeuvre must be mentioned in this survey is Matias Gonzalez Garcia. He wrote a considerable number of novels using a naturalist approach: Cosas (Things), 1893, Ernesto, 1895, Carmela, 1903, and Gestación (Gestation), 1905. His works depict the hard lot of workers in an almost exclusively rural environment. In this regard he contrasts with Zeno Gandía's works, which gravitate in his later phase toward the urban milieu. The island's interior is also the setting for Miguel Meléndez Munoz's Yuyo, 1913, a novel with discernible naturalist undertones. Puerto Rico's colonial travails at the end of the century explain why, as in Cuba, modernismo is felt much later than in the rest of Spanish America, and also why its manifestations are mostly poetical. The few instances of modernista prose are belated and frankly derivative. See, for example, Mi voluntad se ha muerto (My will is dead), 1921, by Nemesio Canales, and La Venus del patio (The native Venus), 1934, by Manuel Martinez Dávila.

The Dominican Republic The first half of the Dominican nineteenth century was a convulsed period that left an enduring imprint on the country's cultural evolution. The century begins effectively, if not chronologically, with Spain's relinquishing of the island to France as a result of the Treaty of Basel in 1795. One of the outcomes of this event was a massive exodus to other Spanish possessions undertaken by the class that would have been the standard-bearer of a national cultural tradition. Simply to convey an example: both the families of Domingo del Monte and the poet José Maria de Heredia arrived eventually in Cuba as a result of this incident. Spain recovered the Eastern part of Saint Domingue in 1809, ushering in a ten-year interlude that is regarded as an intellectual renaissance of sorts. During

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this period the Universidad de Santo Tomas (the oldest university in the New World) was reopened (1815), and the first newspapers began to appear in 1821. The accompanying political ferment led to the declaration of independence from Spain in the same year. But the flourishing was to be shortlived: in 1822 Haitian forces invaded the Spanish side of the island and remained as an occupation force for twenty-two years, until 1844. Yet another wave of immigrants left the country, the university was closed again, newspapers ceased publication, and the French language and civilization were promoted by the cultural organs instituted by the newcomers. An open rebellion against Haitian forces started in 1844 with a second declaration of independence; but the definitive achievement of national sovereignty had to wait until 1865, preceded by a brief return of Spanish hegemony in 1861. The consequences of all these events, which together account for the first two-thirds of the century, were far-reaching in the realm of cultural production; for it was not until that late date that the social and institutional framework necessary for sustaining a consistent cultural undertaking had a chance to obtain. To this day Dominican literary historians routinely claim as part of their national cultural patrimony works written by Dominicans whose families left the island during the many turbulent times faced by their country, even if the subject matter and aesthetic concerns of those texts place them squarely within a foreign literary tradition. In the aftermath of the definitive independence, a number of leyendas and short novels were published in the newspapers and reviews of the time. The majority of them develop tales from Indian lore or from the natives' tragic encounter with the Spanish, such as La ciguapa (The ciguapa tree), 1868, and La fantasma de Higüey (The phantom of Higiiey), 1869, by Javier Angulo Guridi. But the foremost work in this vein, and perhaps of the Dominican nineteenth century as a whole, is Enriquillo (first part, 1877; published as a complete text, 1882), by Manuel de Jesus Galvân. It narrates the affair between a pair of young lovers - the Indian Enriquillo and Mencfa, daughter of a Spanish conquistador and an Indian woman - that encounters a seemingly insurmountable series of difficulties. Mencfa is almost raped by the couple's encomendero (master), whereupon Enriquillo flees to the mountains and begins a thirteen-year rebellion against the Spaniards. In the end, the matter reaches a happy conclusion through the royal intervention of Charles V. The novel is a romance that attempts to depict the forging of a national community and a collective spirit by going back to the putative origin of that entity, that is, the moment of struggle between Spaniards and Arawaks during the Spanish conquest of the island. Galván saw the synthesis of these two ethnic and cultural groups as producing the essence of the Dominican national spirit. In this respect Enriquillo repeats a gesture already seen in the literature of the other two islands surveyed, the recourse to the Indian past in order to address a contemporary desire for national definition. But in this specific instance the strategy could be read as an ideological rewriting of history that would seek to exclude the black presence in Dominican cultural and ethnic life. This presence had become increasingly problematic during the nineteenth century as a result of the permanent threat to the Spanish side of the island represented by the black neighboring country of Haiti. In this way the national soul would then be conceived as a mestizo as opposed to a mulatto essence, thereby effectively eliding all black contributions to Dominican history and cultural life (Sommer [1983], 55-58). This exclusion represents simply a more extreme and overt instance of the general treatment of black life in nineteenth-century Hispanic-Caribbean literature, a treatment that oscillated constantly between the equally pernicious poles of mystification and outright indifference. Francisco G. Billini's Engracia y Antonita, 1892, is a typical novela de costumbres. It displays an emphasis on the description of the natural environment and the local mores of a provincial town.

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It is the story of two very different women who fall in love with the same despicable man. The story is interrupted time and again by what seem to be contrived opportunities to incorporate scenes of local color in the narrative. Still, Bellini in Engracia y Antonita can be regarded as the foremost exponent of costumbrista prose in Dominican letters. In 1904, Miguel Billini, a distant relative of Francisco, published Estela, 1904, a novel that also takes place in the Peravia valley. Although published in the early twentieth century, this last work is representative of the most rigorous LatinAmerican romanticism. Its principal interest is the protagonist's emotional identification with nature. What is perhaps most interesting about these two very traditional works is that they are produced at a time when naturalism and the accompanying polemics were in full swing in the other Hispanic islands and in Spanish America in general. In fact the absence of a defined naturalist movement in the Dominican Republic during the late nineteenth century is a subject for careful examination in the future. The island's novel seems to have passed from an extended romantic and costumbrista phase to the autochthonous narrative of the twenties and thirties. A notable exception is Tulio M. Cestero, in whose oeuvre one can follow the passage from an original exotic, decadentist modernista stage to the nativist preoccupation that by and large was to dominate Dominican literature during the first half of this century. In his literary trajectory the refined and ethereal language that characterizes El jardin de los suenos (The garden of dreams), 1904, Citerea (Cytherea), 1907, and Sangre de primavera (Spring blood), 1908, ultimately yields to the autochthonous note of Ciudad romántica (Romantic city), 1911, and La sangre (Blood), 1914. This last is a historical novel widely esteemed as a major text in the unfolding of Dominican literature. The literary reexamination of the nation's past exemplified by La sangre became a popular enterprise at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps the best known instance of this trend is Federico Garcia Godoy's historical trilogy of Rufinito, 1908, Alma dominicana (Dominican soul), 1911, and Guanuma, 1914. In conclusion, the literary development of the three Hispanic islands of the Caribbean during the nineteenth century evinces an underlying uniformity that derives ultimately from the political and economic conditions that they experienced in common. As the process of national self-fashioning advances in the twentieth century (even in the case of Puerto Rico), clear divergences will begin to manifest themselves as a result of the creation of putatively "national," idiosyncratic literary traditions.

Bibliography Balaguer, Joaquin. 1958. Historia de la literatura dominicana. Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial Librería Dominicana. (An indispensable source for the study of Dominican literature.) Bueno, Salvador. 1963. Historia de la literatura cubana. Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. (For many years the touchstone history of Cuban literature.) Cabrera, Francisco Manrique. 1973. Historia de la literatura puertoriquena. San Juan: Editorial Cultural. (Long the standard textbook on Puerto Rican literature.) Gómez Tejera, Carmen. 1947. La novela en Puerto Rico. Río Piedras: Universidad de Puerto Rico. (Includes a very competent survey of nineteenth-century prose fiction in the island.) Hernández de Norman, Isabel. 1977. La novela criolla en las Antillas. Madrid: Plus Ultra. (A good survey of costumbrista novels of the nineteenth century in the three Hispanic islands.)

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Lazo, Raimundo. 1974. Historia de la literatura cubana. Mexico: Dirección General de Publicaciones. (A very complete, comprehensive overview of the field.) Luis, William. 1990. Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press. (An important examination of the theme of slavery in Cuban letters.) Pereira, Teresinka. 1985. La literatura antillana. Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio (Costa Rica): Editorial Universidad Centroamericana. (An introduction to Caribbean literature, with emphasis on the literary production of the Hispanic islands.) [Collective authorship]. 1983. Perfil histórico de las letras cubanas desde los orígenes hasta 1898. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. (A good sociological survey of the island's literature until the end of the colonial period.) Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1983. Literatura puertorriquena: su proceso en el tiempo. Madrid: Ediciones Partenón. (A sweeping and thorough account of the subject.) Sommer, Doris. 1983. One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels. Lanham, M.D.: University Press of America. (A provocative ideological reading of the Dominican novel as populist romance.)

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the Nineteenth Century IVAN A. SCHULMAN

University of Illinois

In Search of a New World Discourse Toward the end of the 1800s José Marti, one of the two major Hispanic Antillean poets of the century, pointed with pride to a growing generation of new writers whose production reflected an awareness of the nature of New World culture and its ties to hemispheric sociopolitical problems.1 The conceptual framework of his remarks was conditioned by questions - some still unresolved today - of political hegemony, cultural identity, and literary authenticity, especially the myriad ways in which writers and intellectuals perceived (or even ignored) linkages between social and literary production. When Marti wrote his perceptive analyses of the past, present, and future of Latin-American societies and cultures, Cuba and Puerto Rico were still Spanish colonies. The Dominican Republic, separated from France and freed from Haitian rule (1844), had become a political pawn of its own leaders who returned the country to the dismembered Spanish Empire (1861 to 1865). In the face of these realities, Marti's perspective, first and foremost Caribbean- and Latin-American-centered, was molded by what he viewed as a continuing, exasperating, chronic colonialism in the Spanish Antilles. His observations, marked by foreboding and hope, embraced colonial and postcolonial societies and their relationship with the increasingly dominant mercantilistic and capitalist presence in the New World; his view, in today's terms, was both first-world and third-world; both LatinAmerican and Antillean. His sociocultural and historical commentaries on colonialism and postcolonialism were predicated on the notion that literature and ideology in Latin America remained tied to patterns of colonialism in spite of the fact that independence, at least in name, had brought freedom from political bondage in some of the new nation-states. Throughout the nineteenth century, colonialism's hold on the periphery was evident, not merely in the persistent conscious or unconscious appropriation of European literary, cultural, and political models, and in the various "national quests for cultural self-ratification . . . [which replicated] imperial cognitive processes, reinvoking their values and practices in an attempted constitution of an independent identity" (Tiffin [1987], 21). The self-conscious, self-reflexive arguments of the time on issues of independence, separatism, freedom, national identity, or criollismo vs. españo1 In his article "Julián del Casal." The pertinent section reads in Spanish: "Y es que en América esta ya en flor la gente nueva, que pide peso a la prosa y condición al verso, y quiere trabajo y realidad en la politica y en la literatura" (Marti [1963], 5:222). (All translations in the text are mine.)

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lismo were legion; they were not exclusively Marti's, nor was he the first to expound upon the existence of colonial codes, nor to propose the empowering of New World discourses, as in his seminal essay "Poema del Niágara" (The poem, Niágara) (Marti [1963], 7:223-38). More than half a century before, Simón Bolivar, reading with visionary anticipation the historical experience of the nations then seeking their independence from Spain, declared: "We [Latin Americans] are neither Indian or European but a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of this country and the Spanish usurpers."2 Within the context of the pull of these two political centers, the cultural and historical experience of the greater Spanish Antilles - Cuba, Puerto, Rico, the Dominican Republic - suffered an unusually prolonged colonial experience in contrast with other hemispheric nations. Hence it is not surprising to find that in the ties between poetry, politics, and culture in these countries there is a persistent, encoded "colonial" discourse often intertwined at the beginning of the century with a veiled critical voice whose registers constitute an anticipation of modernity. Exceptions to this forward-looking, anti-hegemonic posture are found in early Puerto Rican poets such as Maria Bibiana Benftez and Juan Rodriguez Calderón, both of whom sing the praises of the Spanish monarch, though the latter balanced his admiration with a creole discourse in Petrarchan stanzas that proudly enumerate the virtues of Puerto Rico [("Canto en justo elogio de la isla de Puerto Rico" (Canto in just praise of the island of Puerto Rico)]. Curiously, ties to the "mother country" are prolonged and more evident in Puerto Rican verse as compared to that of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In mid-century there are notable exceptions such as Manuel A. Alonso y Pacheco, who in his volume of prose and poetry, El jibaro (The peasant), sings of liberty, and is anti-European; although in "Seguidillas" (Seguidillas), when comparing Madrid with Puerto Rico, he recognizes good and bad in both places. The codes of a more consistent independent political stance appear later in the century in Salvador Brau y Asencio, more openly in Ramirez de Arrellano, and most vigorously in José de Diego. The first stirrings of a movement toward cultural and social liberation are to be found in the linguistic codes, especially in consciously manipulated native lexical items. For the most part these were awkwardly employed early on, and frequently interwoven with European, decolonialized codes. That is, European discourses were "creolized" so to speak, and transformed into a vehicle for the expression of patriotic sentiments, separatist ideals, or resentment at political oppression as well as, in more traditional renderings, the passions of the heart. Thus neoclassicism and romanticism, the prevailing European styles of writing, became New World forms of expression, both colonial and anticolonial. "In the process of articulating a language to express a faintly perceived national identity, these literatures [of the New World] enter[ed] into a complicated relationship with those of the centers of power; they . . . [strove] to differentiate themselves from the ideologies that assert[ed] power over them, but also need[ed] to use the terms of those ideologies in order to make themselves understood, even to themselves" (Wasserman [1984], 99). Nineteenth-century poetry was responsive to three European-centered styles of writing (ordered according to their chronological appearance in European literatures): neoclassicism, romanticism, parnassianism. In the Antilles, however, and in Latin America in general, these styles, unlike their 2 In his 1815 "Carta de Jamaica" (Letter from Jamaica): . . . no somos indios, ni europeos, sino una especie media entre los legitimos propietarios del país, y los usurpadores espanoles. . . (Bolivar [1972], 160).

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 157 European counterparts, were freely combined in arrhythmic chronological schemas which fused New World preoccupations (nativism, indigenism), and patriotic or amorous discourses. Early in the century the adherence to the codes of both neoclassic and romantic expression was common. Of the two discourses, the romantic, frequently sentimental in the extreme, was the most pervasive. It often yielded rhetorical verses devoid of consequence for our contemporary world, such as Carlos Cabrera's "Serenata" (Serenade): "Because she is / my flower / my ambrosia / and my heaven and my deity, / and the enchantress / who wards off / the bitterness / of my harsh adversity."3 The admixture of codes and discourses sometimes produced verses whose style, as in the case of José Maria Monge (Justo Derecho), included neoclassic, Greco-Roman (especially Horatian), romantic, parnassian, and nativistic elements (flora, fauna), plus a thin varnish of positivistic thought (science, progress), all rolled into a single corpus. But by the end of the century a more sophisticated, self-conscious creole form of poetic expression grew up that, nevertheless, perpetuated the ongoing process of borrowing and refashioning literary styles emanating from European and/or American centers of power. Termed modernism (modernismo) in the Antilles, it developed, especially in Cuba, into a major late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century poetic style and signalled the coming of age of Latin American literature. It should be noted, however, that because of the characteristic arrhythmic chronological patterns of Latin-American poetic development, styles of writing associated with incipient modernity appear in different time frames in the Caribbean. Modernismo, one of the earliest authentically selfrepresentational styles of literary expression, belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba. In the Dominican Republic it developed somewhat later, while in Puerto Rico, with the possible exception of José de Diego, it is an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon. The poets who initiate it in Puerto Rico are Arístedes Moll and Jesus María Lago, in volumes of verse which run from 1904 forward. In modernist poetry, as in earlier forms of Antillean verse, an undercurrent of critical expression was frequently imbedded. The process of modernization, especially in its incipient phases, was not necessarily equated with postcolonial poetics nor with anticolonial discourses. A mosaic of conflicting patterns and aspirations that reflected the lingering conservative (Spanish) and liberal (creole) alliances of these new societies created a rich discursive counterpoint. Power, both cultural and political, forged styles of poetic expression that, though faithful to either neoclassical or romantic models (or both), were at the same time clearly distinguishable from their European-generated counterparts. In other words, a process of transculturation metamorphosed exocentric conventions and, in some instances, synthesized the metropole's (Spain's) antirationalism with the prerationalization of rural peasant and indigenous cultures (Larsen [1990], xxxvi).

Literary Models and Dominant Discourses The struggle for political freedom early in the century unleashed a corresponding search for a new poetry that, in its initial stages, represented a "dis/mantling of European codes, a postcolonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses" (Tiffin [1987], 17). At the begin3 porque es ella / la flor mía / mi ambrosia / y mi cielo y mi deidad / y la maga / que conjura /la amargura / de mi adversidad (Rosa-Nieves [1971], 1:55).

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ning of the nineteenth century poetry was influenced, if not molded, by neoclassic codes already familiar to Latin-American writers in the late eighteenth century. However, very early in the 1800s - between 1820 and 1825 - romantic style was introduced, hybridized for the most part with lingering forms of neoclassic rhetoric. Folded into this stylistic amalgam were varying forms of native, indigenous culture - prototypically, landscape readings; detailed, static, descriptions of nature's objects; or the evocation of nature as a projection of self. The lexicon (nouns especially) was frequently regional; natural objects and/or moods tended to be more important than human shapes. Blacks were noticeably missing in the poetry of the emerging creole bourgeoisie, in spite of the Cuban Silvestre de Balboa's early, trailblazing black hero in Espejo de paciencia (The mirror of patience), 1608. Slavery, the question of abolition, and the role of blacks in society, occupied the center of political debate, censorship or repression permitting. But blacks were seldom incorporated as personae in nineteenth-century verse, not even in the work of most black poets. There were exceptions such as the Cuban Bartolomé José Crespo's (Creto Gangá's) verses, which prefigure twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean discourse (see Vitier and Garcia Marruz [1978]). There were also ritual songs - recently collected - written by anonymous poets for accompaniment by percussion instruments. But, by and large, the marginalized peoples in nineteenth-century verse were idealized Indians or white peasants rather than blacks. Of the two, rural, creole, white inhabitants (i.e., jibaros or guajiros), were the "safer" subjects. When Indians appeared, their culture and geography were falsely portrayed, largely to satisfy a cultural void (the expression of an anticolonial self), and represent an unfulfilled desire for a local or New World identification (the authentification of a cultural collectivity). For the Cuban siboneista poets the Indian, evoked in encoded verses, symbolized a political ideal: the creole bourgeoisie's desire for political and economic freedom. A wide range of these and similar social aspirations were stated in verses whose "nativistic" discourse took the form of a cataloguing of local flora and fauna, descriptions of tropical weather (typically, sunsets and storms), or the evocation of patriotic statements and/or events. The latter were often inserted in narrations produced in exile in which the view of the homeland was one of paradise lost. Of the three major centers of poetic production in the Spanish Antilles, Cuba was the most fertile. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries - the period usually referred to in LatinAmerican literature as "colonial" - like Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic), the island of Cuba became an important center of culture and higher education. Its profile of literary activity prior to the nineteenth century was not distinguished, but, as Cuba's sugar and tobacco industry expanded and prospered under slavery, and Santo Domingo's declined, Cuba's literary production flourished. Symbolic of this economic, intellectual, and cultural surge was the fact that prior to the end of the century Cuba had to its credit four major poets: two at the beginning of the century (José Maria Heredia and Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda), and two at the close (José Martí and Julián del Casal). The poets of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, though traditionally studied in isolation from each other, will be examined in this essay as one single entity. First of all, because the poets shared similar period codes; secondly, because in some cases, they spent considerable time on each other's islands and enriched each other's intellectual and political ideas. For example, the Dominican poets Francisco Munoz del Monte and Javier Angulo Guridi lived major portions of their lives on the island of Cuba, interacted with Cuban poets, and, in the case of Munoz del Monte

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 159 suffered political persecution in Madrid for espousing Cuban independence. On hearing of the death of Heredia, Munoz del Monte wrote one of his major compositions, "A la muerte de mi amigo y condiscípulo Don José Maria Heredia" (On the death of my friend and fellow student Don José Maria Heredia), in which he summed up in four verses Heredia's significance as a poet and spectator of the evolution of the Caribbean world of his time: "Bard of the modern world / of angry Niagara / you became the profound / poet of the heart. . . ."4 It is significant that Munoz del Monte placed Heredia's role as a "bard of the modern world" first, a notion that in del Monte's time escaped the notice of Heredia's commentators, and that only today has begun to acquire substance in relation to the exploration of the concept of Latin-American modernity.

The Faces of Nature The poetics of freedom alluded to above in describing some of the general characteristics of nineteenth-century Antillean poetry frequently assumed violent rhythms, not simply in imitation of the codes of the dominant romantic discourse. Needless to say, liberation was expressed not merely in encoded descriptions of nature, but in more direct, passionate, civic poems as well. In the poetry of Felix María del Monte, frequently called the "father" of Dominican poetry, there are patriotic verses which ardently exhort his countrymen (to whom he refers as "Spaniards"!) to fight against the invading Haitians, as in "Canción dominicana" (A Dominican song). In later compositions he laments, with equal emotion, his homeland's loss of independence in "exile poetry" penned in Puerto Rico (1803): "A mi patria" (To my country). However, more creative effects result from the use of the stormy, uncontrollable forces of the physical world that externalized a sub-text of individual or collective opposition to the status quo, a seething, though frequently disguised antagonism to the political forces that limited and constrained individuals of noble ideals such as Cuba's José Maria Heredia. "En una tempestad" (In a storm), a much-cited Heredia composition, contains a line: "The hurricane and I are alone," which illustrates the romantic discursive model of Nature's brute forces that matched the poet's internalized sense of fury.5 The metaphorization of the forces and objects of nature also served to represent it as the gateway to the upper spheres, i.e., to eternity and the divine spirit. And in such spatial movement a moral note surfaced, one that was characteristic, early in the century, of both neoclassic and romantic discourse: the material world was portrayed as vile and objectionable when contrasted with universal spiritual values or nature's physical attractions. The latter, when counterposed with the moral debasement of human society, its "Fatal picture of crimes and errors!"6 were envisioned in "Placeres de la melancolía" (Melancholy pleasures) as superior by Heredia, who lamented humankind's social shortcomings (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:45). In this way, the poet expressed his frustration with the world as it was, both in an abstract sense and in a very specific political, anticolonial sense. Ideologically, Heredia represented the ideals of the enlightened Cuban bourgeoisie that prepared and mounted the island's 1868 war of independence. 4 Cantor del moderno mundo / y del Niagara iracundo, / te convertiste en profundo / poeta del corazón. . . . (Pena [1944], 1:18). 5 El huracán y yo solos estamos (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:52). 6 !Cuadro fatal de crimenes y errores! (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:52).

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Equally sociopolitical in their implications - though perhaps not at first glance - were the Arcadian, innocent, serene forces of nature borrowed by Antillean poets from the neoclassic tradition. These bucolic evocations of nature and the laments of shepherds' and shepherdesses' frustrated or bygone loves were exploited in a major way early in the century and even later by the Cuban siboneísta poets. In the Dominican Republic, in a parallel form of poetic expression, Nicolás Ureña de Mendoza and Felix María del Monte introduced costumbrista poetry: a form of indigenist poetry that included descriptions of nature extolling the local flora and fauna as well as the social customs of the Dominicans. In Nicolás Urena's verse costumbrismo is suffused with bucolic, idealized visions of the poet's region (comarca) and of the republic at large, "Un guajiro predilecto" (A favorite peasant). Comparable Puerto Rican counterparts are found in the poetry of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera and Santiago Vidarte (José Santiago Rodriguez), whose poetry, in addition to native scenes (Indian and jíbaro), incorporates a rising sense of national pride in the island, referred to by Vidarte as "el americano Edén" (the Latin-American Eden). Nature in its subdued, serene moments was associated with the evocation of a paradise lost, that of the "missing" or "absent" homeland. In Heredia's "Niagara" (Niagara), for example, written in the United States, the vision is dual: the description of the thundering falls on the one hand, and, on the other, the remembrance of idyllic tropical scenes of the poet's native Cuba. When Heredia turned his heart's eye to his island, the memory of its palms made them "delicious"; the breath of the tropical ocean breezes perfumed the anguished recollection of the poet's vision of a distant Cuba viewed from the cool heights of Mexico City, or from the frigid urban bustle of New York. The violent force of the falls is contrasted with the idealized note of his island's natural surroundings, producing a pattern of oppositions typical of romantic discourse while at the same time expressive of experienced individual and collective sentiments. Equally typical of the romantic style, yet strikingly original in formulation, are the Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda' s metaphorizations of her passion, by means of whose power she proposed to transform the universe and alter nature. In the process, the individual in "Amor y orgullo" (Love and pride) becomes the seat of power; subjectivity is enthroned and objective reality recedes in the face of personal will: "The exercise of my power alone / will change the path of the light wind / and make cold marble burn!"7 Her life, divided between Spain and Cuba, created a poetic expression of unresolved tensions, some cultural, others gender-based. But these never marred her idyllic vision of the absent homeland, a paradise unfulfilled, "a beloved Eden," as she put it in "Al partir" (Upon leaving). In the early part of the century, when the metaphors of nature are an admixture of neoclassic and romantic practice, some of the major poets such as Heredia and Avellaneda nevertheless freed themselves from the weight of classical metaphor. Others, such as the Cuban Joaquin Lorenzo Luaces encapsulated the themes of love in carefully wrought verses, classical in imagery but lacking, for example, the inspired, fluid, and graceful discourse of Avellaneda. Luaces saw love from a distance, framed in neoclassic models of nature: "Dione flew from the heavenly regions, / when her practice was forgotten / and the nacre conch has been lost / broken into tiny portions."8 Or in a different vein in Domingo del Monte's Romances cubanos (Cuban ballads) the bucolic notes of the 7

!Con mi solo poder haré, si quiero, / mudar de rumbo al céfiro ligero / y arder el mármol frío (Lezama Lima [1965],

2:88). 8

Voló Dione del cielo a las regiones, / cuando su culto se entregó al olvido, / y la concha de nâcar se ha perdido / partida en menudísimas porciones (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:111).

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 161 late eighteenth-century Salmantino (neoclassic) Spanish school are transferred to Cuban scenes, linking the mythic Phoebus with the native jagiiey (wild fig tree) in a story of love, passion, and revenge in "El montero de la sabana" (The cowhand on the plain). In del Monte's verse there is a conscious intent to "Cubanize" European discourse, melding nature's images with clearly identified social and political themes, creating critical stances vis a vis some of the major privately debated issues of his time such as the slave trade. The curious and startling combinations of early attempts at "freed" self-expression inserted in the codes of European discourse are evident in José Joaquin Luaces's early evocations of the siboneyes. In "La Piragua" (The canoe), illustrative of this nativist interest, Luaces experiments with form, using short verses and several different meters to suggest the movement of the boat over the waters, an early metrical innovation that later became a constant in modernist verse as poets strove to enlarge the expressive capacity of traditional poetics via the media of music or the plastic arts. Luaces also used Caribbean lexical items - the nouns of nativism - such as piragua, guincho (hawk), guanana (goose) to describe his island's natural surroundings. However, as previously noted in connection with the work of other poets, the local vocabulary still alternated with classical allusions, sometimes in isolation - "Cupid hides his beautiful wings"9 - at other times, intertwined with traditional patterns, as when Pomona oversees the abundant growth of fruits unknown to the classical poetic lexicon: bananas, corn, and pineapple. Luaces was not the only poet of this period to exploit the figure of the Siboney Indian. He was joined by other Cuban poets such as Ignacio Valdés Machuca, Placido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés) and José Jacinto Milanés. But it was José Fornaris who turned to the portrait of the Indian in a major way, founding the so-called Siboney school whose objective in Cantos del siboney (Songs of the Siboneys), 1855, was to reconstruct the idyllic (lost) nature and the (unremembered) traditions of the Siboneys in a creolized, Cuban discourse. The overarching theme of this poetry, which marks a jump from nativismo and costumbrismo to indigenismo, is the cruelty of the Spanish conquerors in contrast with the simple life of the Indians and their myths. In "La musa y el poeta" (The muse and the poet) Fornaris sings of the physical beauties of Cuba's nature but, in the same breath, he cautions against intoning servile paeans to despots. The Cubanization of nature and the evocation of a tribe of Indians who disappeared with the conquest constituted a sufficiently threatening political statement to the colonial authorities for General José de la Concha to summon Fornaris to the government palace where he received the following admonition: "I've called to warn you - said the General to Fornaris - that if you wish to continue writing about Siboney Indians you should go to the United States. Here [in Cuba] we are Spaniards, not Indians. Do you understand me? We are all Spaniards."10 The extinct Siboney Indians whose presence on the island at the time of the conquest had vanished from the memory of Cuba's nineteenth-century inhabitants, acquired the status of a symbol through Fornaris's verse. Their rediscovery, however false their depiction, was equated with the oppressed, colonial Cubans of the nineteenth century. One of the followers of the Siboney movement, Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo, known in Cuban literary historiography as "El Cucalambé," cultivated a poetic discourse that proved the authorities' political fears were not unfounded. His verse was a repertory of encoded revolutionary

9

Cupido oculta las alas bellas (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:125). Lo he mandado llamar a Ud. para advertirle que si desea continuar escribiendo sobre siboneyes vaya a hacerlo a los Estados Unidos. Aquí somos espanoles y no indios; ¿está usted? todos espanoles (Vitier ([1970], 159-160). 10

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ideals; in it nature was "localized" and externalized in a Cuban lexicon: ponasi, siguarayas, yamaquëy, caguama, etc. A related indigenous discourse is found in José Joaquin Pérez's Dominican poetry, particularly in his parallel depictions of the "new native" of his Fantasias indígenas (Indigenous fantasies). Pedro Henríquez Urena compares this volume of verse with the indigenous cult of Latin-American writers at the time: Juan León Mera (Ecuador), Manuel de Jesus Galván (Dominican Republic), and Juan Zorrilla de San Martin (Uruguay) (Henrfquez Urena [1954], 153). Other poets, including some of the siboneistas, used the metaphors of a multifaceted nature to externalize the internal landscapes of different romantic discourses. In the case of Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, melancholy images match her life of grief and major family losses. Soul and metaphor fuse in "La vuelta al bosque" (Return to the forest) to express the loss of her husband: "When the inert soul returns to the light, / the earth, the mountain, the sea, the sky, / were nothing more than death's shroud."11 The moon is ever-present in her verse, creating a pure, ethereal environment, white and death-like. Nature's objects match the poet's subjective moods; or, alternatively, they become part of a melancholy dialogue with the narrator in Julia Pérez y Montes de Oca's poetry. In still other representations nature is praised, alluded to, rather than described in detail, as in José Jacinto Milanés's "La madrugada" (Dawn), and "El mar" (The sea), or in the poetry of Rafael Maria de Mendive. Two groups of mid-century Cuban poets took their name from major anthologies in which their works appeared: El laud del desterrado (The lute in exile), 1858, and Arpas amigas (Harmonious harps), 1872, both heavily influenced by romantic rhetoric. The laud group, though it published poems by Heredia, consisted mainly of the works of later poets, Juan Clemente Zenea, Miguel Teurbe Tolón y de la Guardia, José Agustín Quintero, Pedro Santacilla, and Leopoldo Turla y Denis. Of these, only the work of Juan Clemente Zenea is in any way distinguished. Nature in his verse is perceived through a vague, dream-like, idealized vision. His fundamentally elegiac spirit is coupled with corporeal manifestations of nature's objects - breezes, sun, palms, birds, clouds, etc. In the tradition of Heredia, for Zenea nature was also the stepping-stone to an intermediate world, one leading to death whose presence the anguished poet found everywhere. In the Arpas amigas group, consisting of Enrique José Varona, Francisco and Antonio Seilén, Esteban Borrero Echeverrfa, Diego Vicente Tejera, José Varela Zequeira, and Luis Victoriano Betancourt, a later form of romanticism prevailed, a discourse belonging to a "new era" as Varona designated the late romantic writing of the group. However, in terms of the representations of nature, there is not much that is innovative. Varona, best known for his prose, wrote love poems, Odas anacreónticas, (Anacreontic odes), 1868, in the pastoral mode with colonial settings. Francisco Seilén, by way of contrast, composed in the prototypic minor, melancholy romantic registers. Notable in this poet, whose long life allowed him to incorporate diverse styles, is his use of symbols, especially the symbol of the palm, which for him, rather than a representation of Cuba, was a "Symbol of suffering / Image of misfortune."12 As the century drew to a close, the modernist poets appeared on the scene and painted (or sculpted) in the parnassian tradition some entirely new faces of nature. The Cuban modernists were Julián del Casal, Juana Borrero, Carlos Pío Uhrbach, Federico Uhrbach, Mercedes Matamoros,

11 Cuando volvió a la luz el alma inerte, / la tierra, la montana, el mar, el cielo, / no eran mas que el sudario de la muerte (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:188). 12 Símbolo del sufrimiento / Imagen de la desgracia (Lezama Lima [1965], 3:365).

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 163 Bonifacio Byrne, and José Marti, who provided new vistas and forms of expression that were to leave their mark on twentieth-century poetry. One of the lesser known modernists, Juana Borrero, unjustly neglected in the critical literature, straddles romantic and modernist styles and, in a sense, is typical of many modernists in whose work traces of romantic discourse endure. A precocious, tormented writer who began to write at age 12 and died at 19, Borrero's prose and verse show extraordinary maturity. In her poetry, as in much of Casal's, there is a pervasive glacial nature - a symbolic anticipation of death, and, in life, a perception of the wasteland of existence. In her poetry, as in that of the modernists generally, the external trappings of nativism, the exotic Cuban lexicon, and the early nineteenth-century exploitation of tropical vignettes gave way to a process of internalization that had its origins in romantic discourse. Among the modernists, however, its embodiments reached a high note of metaphoric innovation that prefigured twentiethcentury "closed" imagistic systems. An alternate route to the expression of self through visions of nature is found in the work of Bonifacio Byrne. Like José Asunción Silva, a Colombian modernist, Byrne was entranced by the secret voices of objects and their past history. His was a manifestation of a fairly generalized search for meaning beyond the surface, a quest pursued with perfection by Casal in the sonnets of his "Museo ideal" (Ideal museum). Casal never succeeded in coming to terms with the social realities of his time. Yet it is not true, as many critics have supposed, that he was unaware of them. To supplant the real world, including the decadent colonial society he described in his prose, he invented alternate forms of experience: painted cameo-like natural scenes, frigid, white representations of nature; he recast in verse Gustave Moreau's paintings (in his "Ideal Museum"). His tropical enamels showed the influence of French paranassian codes in poems like "En el mar" (At sea), yet they created Cuban visions of uncommon painterly achievement: "The sun, like a luminescent shield, / appears midst nacred clouds, / and the fish, beneath calm waves, like a silver spear swiftly flies."13 Casal's nature is an internalized landscape, carefully molded and colored. Lush, green tropical nature offended his sensibilities, as did the idyllic view of nature characteristic of the neoclassics and romantics. He wrote in "En el campo" (In the countryside) that he was "a victim of the impure love of the cities, / and to this sun which illuminates the ages /I prefer the gaslight."14 For many, José Martí's writing represents the antithesis of Casal's. Yet, upon closer study the parallels in perception, both aesthetic and sociopolitical, are impressive. Both were responsive to modernism's linguistic and aesthetic program, which proposed a revolutionizing of Hispanic literary expression through experimental forms of writing; both incorporated turn-of-the-century European discursive patterns in their works, yet both retained many traditional Hispanic forms of expression. Both, in different but frequently parallel ways, contributed to the modernization of writing in Latin America. Both Cubans cultivated a discourse of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and criticism in the face of the sociopolitical realities of colonialism and the materialistic (bourgeois) forces of economic transformation. Martí's reservations are expressed in his Escenas norteamericanas (NorthAmerican scenes) as well as in his poetry, especially his Versos libres (Free verses), a volume that 13 El sol, como lumínica rodela, / aparece entre nubes nacaradas, / y el pez, bajo las ondas sosegadas, / como flecha de plata raudo vuela (Casal [1945], 108). 14 Tengo el impuro amor de las ciudades, / y a este sol que ilumina las edades / prefiero yo del gas las claridades (Schulman and Garfield [1986], 124).

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contains poems of existential alienation and horror. Casal's sociopolitical reservations are expressed mainly in his prose, especially in the biting, critical essays dealing with the stagnant, pretentious colonial institutions and personalities of Havana. In his verse there are subtexts and subdiscourses that also point to a rejection of social reality, particularly in the sonnets of his "Ideal Museum" in which the narrator scans horizons searching for an alternate reality or in the more open discourse contained in poems such as "Horridum somnium" (Nightmare) or "Mi ensueno" (My fantasy); in such compositions there are negative allusions to customs, practices, and ideas of the poet's time. Overall, however, Marti's grasp of the realities of the modern world were more encompassing, certainly deeper than Casal's. His role as a revolutionary in Cuban and Antillean history provided him with a vision that the marginalized, brooding Casal lacked. Similarly, his view of nature went far beyond Casal's painterly predilections that centered on externals such as mass, color, and shape through which he attempted to decipher the meaning of modern man's existence. In contrast, Martí's view was homocentric; his aspirations were moral, social, and political. He saw interrelationships between man and nature, understood the transcendent, moral values of nature (much like Emerson whose essays he read and admired). And, finally, he described the constant metamorphic movements of the universe, reading in them what for him were its carefully orchestrated signs in order to better understand man and his place in the modern world. In commentary on his Versos sencillos (Simple verses), critics have called attention to Martí' s innovative use of popular verse forms - modernity's selective incorporation of the past - and to the volume's relationship with romantic discourse, especially that of the Spanish nineteenth-century poet, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. However, Martí's internalization of nature goes beyond early and mid-century romantic styles; his symbolic structuring of an expressionistically perceived universe is coupled with a subjective visionary view of man and nature. His verses are frequently impressionistic or expressionistic; nature is reordered to express and support his anguished search for meaning and sense in the modern world. His goal was the formulation of harmonious, natural laws: "Everything is beautiful and constant / Everything is music and reason, / And everything, like the diamond, / Is carbon before it shines."15 Internalization turns oneiric in Martí's less crystalline volumes of verses, Ismaelillo, 1882, dedicated to his absent son, and Versos libres (Free verses), published posthumously in 1913. In both collections, the work of a moralist and visionary is evident. Nature's landscapes acquire touches of surrealism: in "Aguila blanca" (White eagle) a hangman watches over the poet every day while his "unhappy eagle, my white eagle / Which every night is reborn in my soul / Spreads its wings with the universal dawn."16 More intensely than Casal, Martî was capable of reaching beyond appearances to decipher human and natural designs in his quest for a more perfect world, for Cuba, the Antilles, and Latin America.

Forms of Modernity The road toward modernity, the social, political, economic, and cultural modernization of the newly freed colonial societies of Latin America, was fraught with problems born of political inexperience, 15 Todo es hermoso y constante, / Todo es música y razón, / Y todo, como el diamante, / Antes que luz es carbón (Marti [1982], 181). 16 Y mi âguila infeliz, mi águila blanca / Que cada noche en mi alma se renueva, / Al alba universal las alas tiende (Schulman and Garfield [1986], 83).

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 165 inadequate educational systems, and primitive economic structures. With the term "modernity" we refer to the "socio-historical perceptions shared by the nineteenth-century writers who faced the turn-of-the-century 'revolución del pensamiento,' revolution of thought, with its anguished and dramatic social upheavals." The modernist writers, who were the first truly modern writers of the continent, "sensed the shadows and mysteries of their volatile age which created restless, precarious concepts of time, a feeling of being 'modern'. . ., 'ancient'. . ., and at the same time, 'very eighteenth-century'. . . . These multiple temporal dimensions evidence the hybrid nature of and the unstable character of modern man's being and existence. They also signal a pattern that surfaces with Spanish American modernism (c. 1875), coincides with the dawn of Spanish American cultural modernity, and grows with the expansion of the socio-political modernisation of the continent" (Schulman [1986], 153). In the colonial societies of the Spanish Antilles the search for modernity was equally intense, but more closely tied to political freedom and self-realization than in the nominally "independent" nations. But in both political systems, writers and intellectuals ultimately challenged traditional structures as they sought to comprehend the world and reorder its foundations in the light of unfettered, subjectively formulated notions of the individual and his/her relationship to the collectivity. For example, toward the end of the century, poets such as José de Diego placed their production at the service of a political cause: independence, in José de Diego's case. In the development of his social verse nativistic themes and local fauna (e.g., the pitirre - a small, but vicious, sparrow-like bird - symbol of insurrection), were woven into politically inspired compositions. Though the need to rethink social and cultural institutions had its roots early in the century, liberation from colonial discourses and hegemonic ideological patterns was slow to evolve. Its major developmental impetus was felt after the halfway mark of the 1800s when the process of modernization commenced in some of the Latin-American nations as they moved from agrarian to commercial economies, broadening their international contacts, both European and American, commercial as well as cultural. Economic modernization ushered in the paradoxes of cultural modernity: writers continued to seek enrichment in hegemonic literatures whose more "advanced" discourses inspired new forms of expression; but these foreign models perpetuated the existing pattern of dependency upon exocentric codes. The expanded ties with other nations, their cultures and literatures (especially the non-Hispanic, first and foremost the French) ultimately resulted in revolutionary shifts in writing without entirely abandoning colonial discourses. But more frequently than not, the latter were turned inside out to fashion a literature of criticism, both sociopolitical and aesthetic. The modernist search for an authentic self-expression was not school- or movement-centered, nor was it broadly based on societal or aesthetic paradigms, but rather on the vagaries of individual codes. Those of romanticism, parnassianism, symbolism, expressionism and impressionism were freely "ransacked," as were the texts and traditions of Greece, Rome, the Orient, the Middle Ages, and the Spanish Golden Age. Experimental musical and pictorial techniques, new visual and rhythmic techniques, became the stock in trade of this new metamorphic literature and culture. It was, in short, a period of intense subjective activity whose roots, once well established, were to nourish many of the vanguard movements of the twentieth century. Modernism's myriad structures thus constituted a first stage in Latin America's movement toward modernity and the long-standing process of the modernization of its culture and literature from about 1875 forward. Early in the century in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic these socially generated critical stances surfaced in connection with concepts of political liberation and the search for mean-

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ing, social and personal. The images that conveyed these early stirrings were often encoded, at times forcibly veiled, to escape colonial censors, while at other times they were stated symbolically in response to the shared conventions of colonial discourses. With the advent of modernism, however, the break with traditional codes, with sacrosanct social and literary conventions, or with social custom, intensified, and the voices of criticism were expressed more freely. But at the same time a process of internalization made poetic styles more complex as nonsystematic thought and discourse became the norm. In literature the divisions between prose and poetry blurred; the prose poem appeared on the scene; neologisms abounded; the Spanish Academy of the Language's standards were ignored or ridiculed; traditional concepts of beauty were sacrificed in favor of the bizarre, decadent, or prosaic; new metrics were employed; the poets looked to the past, borrowed from it freely and melded it with their anguished present. They yearned to be free from any ties to a canon; they questioned organized religion; replaced Catholicism with secular philosophies and/or Oriental cults. They portrayed the individual as liberated but cut off from traditional, idealized systems; they lamented being marginalized in industrializing societies, and they felt the burden of social anxiety and personal incertitude resulting from individual liberation. These modernizing and, for their time, revolutionary notions did not develop quickly nor immediately with Independence; and certainly not easily in the colonies of the Antilles. In terms of political ideology, one of the forms of opposition that manifested itself fairly early - though timidly - was a critical stance with regard to the institution of slavery. For example, Heredia wrote from exile in "A Emilia" (To Emily) that he felt relieved his ear was "not wearied by the insolent noise / of the infamous tyrant or the cries / Of the unfortunate slave / nor the execrable crack of the whip, / which poison the atmosphere of Cuba."17 Writing on the island, Domingo del Monte's defiant reference to the same theme in "La patria" (Homeland) of his Romances cubanos (Cuban ballads) earned him the anger of the royal censor who struck the following verses: "I never could hear / Without feeling my soul flare up / The barbarous, atrocious lash / Of the whip on slave flesh."18 Two other Cuban poets, Juan Francisco Manzano and Mercedes Matamoros also wrote poems that touched upon slavery. In a general sense, the metaphor of the slave was intertwined with the concept of selfdetermination and liberation from bondage of the individual, for blacks and whites alike. The paradoxes of modernity referred to earlier are evident not merely in the sociopolitical arena but in the conundrums and anguished speculations of poets in relationship to the individual and his/ her destiny, and the role of self in connection with society in a de-centered world. This angst is most evident in the modernist writers, but among the early romantics it is associated in incipient forms with a growing sense that the universe needs to be read in new ways. For example, the Dominican Manuel Rodriguez Obijo, late in the romantic period, in "Acto de fe" (Act of faith), insisted: "There is beyond life / something which is not understood / . . . Places unknown. . . ,"19 Like so many other poets, earlier and later, who were unable to fathom these mysteries, he rationalized his confusion by affirming: "I believe in the science of God!"20 - an affirmation that placed his metaphysical

17 pero al menos / No lo fatiga del tirano infame / El clamor insolente, ni el gemido / Del esclavo infeliz ni del azote / El crujir execrable, / que emponzonan la atmósfera de Cuba (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:24). 18 Que nunca escuchar yo pude / Sin que hirviese en ira el alma / El bárbaro atroz chasquido / Del lâtigo en carne esclava (Henríquez Ureña [1963], 1:156). 19 Hay más alla de la vida / algo que no se comprende, /. . . Parajes desconocidos. . . (Peña [1944], 1:97). 20 jcreo en la ciencia de Dios! (Peña [1944, 1:98).

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 167 concepts at the boundaries between positivist science and spiritual and/or secular beliefs. A similar synchretistic blend is found in Francisco Alvarez Marrero's verses "Meditación nocturna" (Nocturnal meditation) and "Soneto" (Sonnet). In the former he refers to "numbed sepulchres of my lost faith" and to the question of materialism, and the possible inexistence of God: "And if after death the firmament contains naught. . . ."21 The role of positivism in opening up new ideological and aesthetic vistas in connection with modernism and the rise of modernity has been documented (Schulman [1969], 32-33). In Puerto Rico its influence among the poets was more pronounced than in Cuba or in the Dominican Republic. It is evident, for example, in the work of José Maria Monge, Francisco Alvarez Marrero, and José Gautier Benítez, especially in his poem "Dios" (God), and later, in the compositions of Enrique Zorrilla. The Cuban poet Heredia felt somewhat earlier an overwhelming need to define his existence within the confines of a reorganized society. There is in his "Himno al sol" (Hymn to the sun) a search for self in the context of the world: "If I, ignoble being, do not know myself / How can I explain [the universe's] existence?"22 The poet searched for harmony within disorder, for the neoclassic chain of being, but without success as in "En el teocalli de Cholula" (At the teocalli of Cholula). On a more metaphysical note, Avellaneda in "Contemplación" (Contemplation) strove for sense in the face of non/sense: "Why does my anxious mind seek to comprehend / the future of the exalted mystery / Paternal Providence placed a veil / which our mind cannot draw apart."23 The search for meaning, so fundamental to the modernists, is similarly anticipated in Luisa Pérez de Zambrana's "jMar de tinieblas!" (¡Sea of shadows!), a poem in which she queries: "what is man / in this unhappy steppe? / where is he going, his sight covered, / with a black bandage?"24 Or, in José Joaquin Pérez, the inconstancy of the modern world, its incessant metamorphoses, is coupled in "Retonos" (Sprouts), as it will be later in Marti's verse, with a vague pantheism: "Providence! I admire your eternal endeavor / in the leaves of the tree which resuscitate / in the children of man who is transformed."25 In the work of two Cuban poets, Casal and Juana Borrero, the metaphor of the frigid and solitary steppe suggests feelings of anxiety and immanence. For Cintio Vitier the "cold" images of their verses represent the sterility of a country lacking destiny (Vitier [1970], 309), and, in the final analysis, constitute an illustration of the critical discourse fundamental to the spirit of modernity. Casal's references to Baudelairean spleens and his sense of lethargy signal the modern poet's general quandary in "Tras una enfermedad" (After an illness): "Oh, God, may my eyes no longer see / the horrible Reality which saddens me / . . . hide forever from my sight / the nakedness of human misery."26

21 sepulcros ateridos de mi perdida fe! (Rosa-Nieves [1971], 1:215); jy si tras de la muerte el cielo es nada. . . . (Rosa-Nieves [1971], 1:217). 22 Si yo mismo jmezquino! me ignoro, / ¿cómo puedo su esencia explicar? (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:60). 23 ¿Por qué del porvenir el alto arcano / mi mente ansiosa comprender quisiera? / Paternal Providencia puso el velo / que nuestra mente a descorrer no alcanza (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:85). 24 ¿qué es el hombre / en esta triste estepa? / ¿a dónde va, cubierta la mirada, / con una venda negra?" (Lezama Lima [1965], 2:206). 25 [Providencia! ¡Yo admiro tu eterna obra / en las hojas del ârbol que resucita, / en los hijos del hombre que se transforma! (Pena [1944], 133). 26 haz ¡oh Dios! que no vean ya mis ojos / la horrible Realidad que me contrista / . . . oculte para siempre ante mi vista / la desnudez de la miseria humana (Schulman and Garfield [1986], 118).

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Marti' s universe is equally modern but, instead of withdrawing from the world to find an alternative poetic space, he engaged material reality and made the decision to sacrifice himself for its amelioration. He is, however, like Casal, horrified by the aspects of modern experience that he sometimes expressed in oneiric visions (especially in Versos libres). In his introduction to Ismaelillo, the earliest of his books of poetry, he writes to his absent son that he is "frightened by everything";27 or in "Amor de ciudad grande" (Love in the metropolis) he writes: "This is the age of dry lips! / Of nights without sleep. Of life / Crushed before its time . . . ."28 There are in his verses, as in Casal's, moments of "escape" from the horrors created by the universe's "new era." "I'd like to surrender to those spaces / Where one lives in peace, and with a mantle / Of light. . ." he writes in "A los espacios" (To the spaces).29 He suffered both physically and emotionally but his revolutionary spirit never slackened; martyrdom shaped his verse and his political action. His vision of the disjoining of the universe was both collective and subjective. His was a perspective that embraced the entire breakdown of the world as it moved through the disruptive stages of socioeconomic modernization. In a prototypic view of the immanent side of this social upheaval, the poet of "No, música tenaz!" (No, insistent music!) dialogued in expressionistic verses with his dismembered self: "Destroyed, I am transformed into shards on fire / I pick myself up from the ground: I lift and amass / My own remains. . . ."30 Humanity as agonist is victimized and fragmented in much the same way as the chaotic, irrational world in which Marti lived. The modernists severed ties with traditional metrics, experimented with non-Hispanic verse forms, used free or mono-rhymed verse forms. Beyond metrics, they brought to Latin-American poetry new images, chromatics, symbols, internal landscapes, and the use of mythology as a discourse socially counterposed to the marginalized world of the late nineteenth century. Sometimes the modernists created exotic spaces - Scandinavia, the Orient - using escapist codes which, if appropriately decoded, suggest critical social and cultural concepts. Escapism for them was in essence a search for self-definition in an environment hostile to their aesthetic and political ideals. The social poetry of the period followed the general stylistic evolution characteristic of modernity: internalization yielded less expository, more symbolic discourses. The lexicon expanded to include scientific, technical, psychological, and even, in some cases, medical terms. Neologisms and foreign borrowings - more often than not un-hispanized - abounded. And, finally, the poetic process itself became the subject of poetic composition.

The Pivotal Role of the Antilles The Spanish Antilles played a major role in the development of modern Latin-American writing. Poets such as Heredia, Avellaneda, Casal and Marti set the standard for writing. Of the four, José Marti stands as a towering figure whose literary and political activity exemplified the age of modernity that he helped shape. A visionary in both literature and politics, in 1894 he described the

27 28

127).

29

Espantado de todo (Marti [1982], 65). ¡La edad es ésta de los labios secos! / De las noches sin sueño. De la vida / Estrujada en agraz. . . (Marti [1982],

A los espacios entregarme quiero / Donde se vive en paz y con un manto / De luz. . . . (Marti [1982], 138). Roto vuelvo en pedazos encendidos! / Me recojo del suelo: alzo y amaso / Los restos de mí mismo. . . . (Marti [1982], 159). 30

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 169 unique centrality of the Antilles to hemispheric power: "At the pivot of America are the Antilles."31 Its poetic production blossomed in the nineteenth century and provided the fertile ground for its twentieth-century development. Today, as Latin America joins the mainstream of a modern/postmodern culture, Martí's nineteenth-century vision of the Antilles constitutes both a prophecy and a challenge.

Bibliography Bolivar, Simón. 1972. Carta de Jamaica. Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la Repüblica. Casal, Julián del. 1945. Poesias completas. Havana: Dirección de Cultura. Henriquez Urena, Max. 1963. Panorama histórico de la literatura cubana; (1492-1952). Puerto Rico: Ediciones Mirador. 2 vols. (An outstanding overview, meticulously organized, and exceptionally complete.) Henríquez Urena, Pedro. 1954. Las corrientes literarias en la América Hispánica. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. (An overview of the culture, history, and literature of Latin America written with extreme care and erudition.) Larsen, Neil. 1990. Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (An original Marxist critical work dealing with modernism and modernity; it includes a chapter on Latin America.) Lezama Lima, José. 1965. Antologia de la poesia cubana. Havana: Editora del Consejo Nacional de Cultura. Vols. 2, 3. Martí, José. 1963. Obras completas. 28 vols. Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. Vols. 5, 7. (The most recent complete works available - 28 volumes. Two volumes of a new critical edition, currently being prepared in Havana, have been printed to date.) —. 1982. Ismaelillo, Versos libres, Versos sencillos. Ed. by I. A. Schulman. Madrid: Cátedra. Pena Batlle, Manuel Arturo. 1944. Antologia de la literatura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Edición del Gobierno Dominicano. Vol. 1. Rosa-Nieves, Cesáreo. 1971. Aguinaldo de la poesia puertorriqueña. Río Piedras: Editorial Edil. Vol. 1. Schulman, Ivan. A. 1969. El modernismo hispanoamericano. Buenos Aires: Centra Editor de América Latina. (A brief overview of the evolution of Spanish-American modernism, taking into account early revisionist ideas.) —. 1986. Void and Renewal: José Martí's Modernity. José Marti, Revolutionary Democrat. Ed. by C. Abel and N. Torents. London: Athlone Press. 153-75. (A contemporary selection of essays on major aspects of Marti's works, prose and poetry.) Schulman, Ivan A. and Evelyn Picon Garfield. 1986. Poesia modernista hispanoamericana y espanola. Madrid: Taurus. Tiffin, Helen. 1987. Post-Colonial Literature and Counter-Discourse. Kunapipi. 9.3:17-34. (An imaginative study of colonial discourses in anglophone Caribbean literature.) Vitier, Cintio. 1970. Lo cubano en la poesia. Havana: Instituto del Libro. (The most imaginative, suggestive study of Cuban poetry from its origins to mid-twentieth century.) Vitier, Cintio and Fina Garcia Marruz. 1978. Flor oculta de poesia cubana (siglos XVIII y XIX). Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura. (A non-traditional collection based on newspaper and magazine research.) Wasserman, Renata Mautner. 1984. Pregiiiça and power: Mario de Andrade's Mucanaima. huso Brazilian Review. xxi:99-116. (A comparative study of colonial discourses, power and prejudice.) Zavala, Iris M. 1992. Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Published after this essay was completed.)

31

En el fiel de América estän las Antilias

(Marti [1963], 3:142).

Ivan A. Schulman

170 Appendix

In this section the reader will find an alphabetically organized listing of the major nineteenthcentury poets of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, including all of the poets named in our essay. Dates of birth and death are provided, as well as the title and year of publication of the volumes of verse they published during their lifetime. In the nineteenth century collections of verse by individual poets were relatively scarce in the Antilles. Much of the poetry was published in magazines or Sunday literary supplements of major newspapers. Within national or regional boundaries some of the poetry was transmitted orally through readings at literary circles.

Cuba Poet

Dates

Work(s)

Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de

1814-73

Poesías 1841

Betancourt, Luis Victoriano

1843-85

Uncollected

Borrero, Esteban de Jesus

1820-77

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Borrero, Juana

1877-96

Rimas 1895

Byrne, Bonifacio

1861-1936

Excéntricas 1893; Efigies. Sonetos patrióticos 1897

Casal, Julian del

1863-93

Hojas al viento 1890; Nieve 1892; Bustos y rimas 1893

Fornaris, José

1827-90

Obras 1862-63

Heredia, José Maria

1803-39

Poesias 1825

Luaces, Joaquín Lorenzo

1826-67

Poesias 1857

Manzano, Juan Francisco

1797-1857

Poesias liricas. Cantos a Lesbia 1821; Flores pasageras 1830

Marti, José

1853-95

Ismaelillo 1882; Versos sencillos 1891; Versos libres (posthumously)

Matamoros, Mercedes

1851-1906

Poesias completas 1892

Mendive, Rafael Maria de

1821-86

Poesias 1860

Milanés, José Jacinto

1814-63

Poesias liricas 1846; Obras completas 1846

Monte, Domingo del

1804-53

Poetry uncollected

Nâpoles Fajardo, Juan Cristóbal (El Cucalambé)

1829-62?

Rumores del Hórmigo 1857

Palma, Ramón de

1812-60

Aves de paso 1841; Melodias poéticas 1843

Pérez de Zambrana, Luisa

1837-1922

Poesias 1856

Pérez y Montes de Oca, Julia

1839-75

Poesias 1885

Poveda y Armenteros, Francisco

1796-1881

La guirnalda habanera 1829; Las rosas de amor 1831; Poesias 1863

Quintero y Woodville, José Agustín

1829-85

Uncollected until the twentieth century

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 171 Santacilia, Pedro

1826-1910

El arpa del proscrito 1856

Seilén, Antonio

1839-89

Poesias 1864

Seilén, Francisco

1838-1907

Libro intimo 1865

Tejera, Diego V.

1848-1903

Poesías completas 1879

Teurbe Tolón y de la Guardia, Miguel

1820-57

Los preludios 1841; Flores i espinas 1857

Turla y Denis, Leopoldo

1818?-77

Râfagas del trópico 1842

Uhrbach, Carlos Pío

1872-97

Uncollected Poetry

Uhrbach, Federico

1873-1932

Uncollected until the twentieth century; together with Carlos, Gemelas 1894

Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción (Placido)

1809-44

Poesias 1836

Valdés Machuca, Ignacio

1792-1851

Ocios poéticos 1819; Poesias constitucionales 1820; Certámen poético 1820?

Varona, Enrique José

1849-1933

Odas anacreónticas 1868; Poesias 1878; Paisajes cubanos 1879

Zenea, Juan Clemente

1832-71

Cantos de la tarde 1860

The Dominican Republic Angulo Guridi, Francisco Javier de

1816-84

Ensayos poéticos 1843; represented in Lira de Quisqueya 1874*

Bermúdez, Federico

1884-1921

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Dávila Fernandez de Castro, Felipe

1803-79

Uncollected

Deligne, Gastón F.

1861-1913

Soledad 1887

Fiallo, Fabio

1866-1942

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Henríquez, Enrique

1859-1940

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Monte, Félix Maria del

1819-99

Las vírgenes de Galindo 1885; L

Mota, Félix

1822-61

Uncollected; L

Muñoz del Monte, Francisco

1800-65

Poesias 1880

Ortea, Juan Isidro

1849-81

L

Ortea, Virginia E.

1866-1903

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Pellerano Castro, Arturo

1865-1916

La última cruzada 1888

Peña y Reinoso, Manuel de J. de

1834-1915

L

Perdomo, Apolinar

1882-1918

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Perdomo y Heredia, Josefa A.

1834-96

Poesias 1885; L

Pérez, José Joaquin

1845-1900

Fantasias indigenas 1877; L

* For other Dominican poets we will use the symbol L to indicate they are represented in this anthology.

Ivan A. Schulman

172 Pichardo, José Francisco

1837-71

L

Prud'homme y Maduro, Emilio

1856-1932

Uncollected

Rodriguez Obijo, Manuel

1838-71

Poesias 1888; L

Urena de Henríquez, Salomé

1850-97

Poesias de Salomé Urena de Henriquez 1880; L

Urena de Mendoza, Nicolas

1822-75

Uncollected until the twentieth century

Puerto Rico Alonso y Pacheco, Manuel A.

1822-89

El jíbaro 1849

Alvarez Marrero, Francisco

1847-81

Obras literarias 1882

Benítez, Maria Bibiana

1783-1873

Uncollected

Benítez y de Arce de Gautier, Alejandrina

1819-79

Uncollected until the twentieth century; represented in Aguinaldo puertorriqueño 1843**

Brau y Asencio, Salvador

1842-1912

¡Patria! 1889

Cabrera, Carlos

?-?

A

Cardona de Quinones, Ursula (Angélica)

1836-75

Uncollected

Coll y Toste, Cayetano

1850-1930

Uncollected

Diego, José de

1866-1918

Los grandes infames 1885; Sor Ana 1887; A Laura y /Patria! 1888?

Domínguez, José de Jesus (Gerardo Alcides)

1843-98

Poesias de Gerardo Alcides 1879; Las huries blancas 1886; Odas elegiacas 1883

Echeverría, Juan Manuel

1813?-66?

La victoria del Morro. Sitio de los holandeses 1854; Novena de la más fragante rosa del Paraiso María Santisima del Rosario 1858

Fernandez Juncos, Manuel

1846-1928

Epistola satirica contra vicios y malas costumbres actuales 1893

Gautier Benítez, José

1851-80

Poesias 1880

Guasp Cervera, Ignacio

1810?-74

Uncollected; editor of Aguinaldo puertorriqueno

Marin, Francisco Gonzalo

1863-97

Romances 1892; En la arena 1898

Menéndez Quinones, Ramón Avelino

1847-89

Un jíbaro como hay pocos 1881; Una jíbara 1881; Los jibaros progresistas 1882; La vuelta de la feria 1882

Monge, José Maria (Justo Derecho)

1840-91

Poesía y prosa 1883; Poesias 1885

Padilla, José Gualberto (El Caribe)

1829-96

Zoopoligrafia 1885; Para un palacio, un Caribe 1874

Pastrana, Francisco

1823?-81?

A

Rodriguez Calderón, Juan

1778-1839?

Ocios de la juventud 1806; Canto en justo elogio de la isla de Puerto Rico 1825

** This anthology included both prose and poetry. In subsequent entries, poets who contributed to it will be noted with the letter A.

The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and The Dominican Republic in the 19th Century 173 Rodriguez de Tío, Lola

1843-1924

Mis cantares 1876; Claros y nieblas 1885; Mi libro de Cuba 1893

Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro

1826-82

La sataniada 1878

Travieso, Martin J.

1820-?

A

Valle Rodriguez, Rafael del

1846-1917

Poesías 1884

Vidarte, Santiago (José Santiago Rodríguez)

1828-48

A; Poesías Vidarte 1849

Zeno Gandía, Manuel

1855-1930

Abismos 1885; La senora duquesa 1888

Literary Genres

The Twentieth Century

The Novel

WILLIAM L. SIEMENS

Houghton College

Among the manifestations of pluralism that characterize the twentieth century is a crazy quilt of literary tendencies. Yet, when dealing with the Caribbean region, one must take into account the prominence of certain types of political systems that represent quite the opposite of pluralism. Cuba passed through two bloody dictatorships, the second of which led to the present Castro government. The Dominican Republic, too, has suffered from dictatorship, as well as occupation by the United States. Puerto Rico has experienced the imposition of a set of cultural values from outside in its status as a United States territory. Out of the resultant encounter of sociopolitical circumstances and literary tendencies there has arisen a confusing mixture of currents, in which, for example, the essentially escapist modernista style is made to serve the aims of social protest. One of the more fascinating features of the epoch we are dealing with is the merger of naturalist tendencies with social realism. Naturalism is particularly well suited to the depiction of the circumstances in which the majority of Caribbean people lived at the time it held sway, given as it is to dwelling upon the grotesque and cruel. At a later time, Alejo Carpentier stated that the most outlandish scenes contained in his El recurso del método (Reasons of state), 1974, were on record as historical facts. Naturalism and social realism do share a mechanistic world view. Nevertheless, at least one element in naturalism is inimical to effective social protest, which ultimately calls on the reader to overthrow a malevolent system. Naturalism held to a genetic and environmental determinism and used extreme cases to demonstrate these concepts. In perhaps the most influential novel of the type in the Hispanic Caribbean, Carlos Loveira's Juan Criollo, 1927, the protagonist is unable to overcome his predestined fate as a malefactor in spite of being raised in a middle-class family. It was felt, too, that a prostitute was predisposed to such an occupation by her genetic makeup. Within the literary scheme, typically the only way out is through religious conversion, which is hardly the solution of choice for the social realists. Whereas naturalist concepts were useful for making the reader painfully aware of the outrages being suffered by the common people, some major modification had to be introduced in order to provoke action of the sort that might transform entire societies. The late Chilean critic Ivan Droguett subsumed the whole of Spanish-American literature of the first half of this century under the heading, "the costumbrista attitude of the narrator" (lecture, U. of Kansas, 1968), or, perhaps more accurately, the costumbrista attitude of the implied author. Droguett meant that, until the socially committed literature of the 1920s and 1930s fully gave way to experimental trends common in the rest of the world, writers for the most part felt constrained to portray their characters in settings steeped in local color. Throughout this entire era in the Caribbean region, writers stressed the dress and daily customs of their characters' lives. There is simply more

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interest devoted to the setting in which their lives are worked out than to their interior development, to say nothing of the inner workings of language itself. However, costumbrismo properly so called, which tends to deal in superficial descriptions more or less for their own sake, did develop into what has variously been called criollismo or regionalism, the latter term accenting the limited, extra-territorial scope of the writing. It was only natural that these writers should focus on their characters' circumstances, following the increasing awareness of the suffering of the oppressed that characterized the period. Eventually, however, the typical Latin-American focus on the individual was linked to the need to take control of one's own destiny, and a novel of psychological analysis emerged. Consequent to that development, writers tended to place less emphasis on what was being said than on how it was said. Novels became more poetic in style as their language began to examine itself rather than serve as a mere vehicle for the representation of a subject. Still, the desire to communicate the agony of modern humanity in an often intolerable situation is abundantly evident. Before he finally managed to escape Castro's Cuba with the Marielitos (the boat people who fled to the United States in 1980), Reinaldo Arenas produced a novel in the form of a modern tragedy, La Vieja Rosa (Old Rosa), first published in the volume Con los ojos cerrados (With closed eyes) in Montevideo, 1972. It is the extremely well crafted story of a Cuban matriarch whose hubris lies in her own ambition to control her territory, her destiny, and the lives of her family members. As the revolution proceeds, one son reveals himself to be homosexual, the other joins the revolution, and the daughter marries a black man. Rather than surrender her land holdings, Rosa half-deliberately sets fire to her house and immolates herself in a crazed frenzy. In today's Caribbean novel in Spanish, the setting may be a university campus and the focus the kaleidoscopic operations of language, but the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of maintaining one's humanity is unmistakable.

Cuba One result of the persistent criollista tendencies in the Caribbean, in combination with the focus on the proletariat growing out of the Russian and Mexican revolutions, was an increasing interest in probing more deeply into the belief systems of the peoples of African descent in the region. Their culture began to be perceived as a strong and resistant one, and eminently worthy of study. Early in the century in Cuba, the ethnographer Fernando Ortiz combined the relatively new field of anthropology with the study of history and music; he produced a series of highly influential works on the Afro-Cuban culture: Los negros brujos (The black sorcerers), 1905, Los negros esclavos (The black slaves), 1916, and others. These works focus on the mythology, dance, music, and theater of the black population. The work of Ortiz and those with similar concerns led Cuba into the so-called return to origins movement. In 1932 Lino Novas Calvo published a number of stories of this type in the influential Revista de Occidente. The following year, Alejo Carpentier produced ¡Écue-Yamba-O!, an attempt to portray the deepest mysteries of the Afro-Cuban experience. The novel has to do with the initiation of a young black Cuban into a secret society. Later, Carpentier came to realize that the very secretiveness he thought he had portrayed had led the group's practitioners to deceive him about it, and he renounced the book. Nevertheless, it had the effect of stirring

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even more interest in such themes, as did the poetic works of Nicolás Guillén in Cuba and Luis Palés Matos in Puerto Rico. Lino Novas Calvo's work continued to be a determining influence in the development of Cuban prose fiction to mid-century. His novel El negrero: Vida novelesca de Pedro Blanco Fernández de Trava (The slave trader: the novelistic life of Pedro Blanco Fernández de Trava), 1933, traces the career of a slave trader during the colonial period. The subtitle is significant in that it anticipates the self-referentiality that characterizes Cuban literature of the time; this is a novel about a historical figure whose life was fantastic enough to appear fictional. Novas Calvo's short stories La luna nona y otros cuentos (The ninth moon and other stories), 1942, Cayo Canas (Palm Key), 1946, and El otro cayo (The other key), 1959 - have been more influential. He was a pioneer in the use of the language of the common people to characterize their living reality, anticipating the emphasis on language for its own sake that has become a staple of the best Cuban novels. Novas Calvo was the first Cuban writer of the period to gain international recognition in the Hispanic world. Nevertheless, most novels of note were in the criollista or regionalist vein. Dora Alonso won the Cuban National Literary Prize in 1944 for her Tierra adentro (Inland), with its description of the lives and socioeconomic problems of the peasants who inhabit rural Cuba. As late as 1961, she produced Tierra inerme (Defenseless land), which relates the story of a guajiro or peasant whose own effort to overcome his circumstances eventually leads him to a better life. Several Cuban types appear in the text, including a mulatto who attempts to better himself by joining his oppressors. Similarly, Alcides Arturo Iznaga Hernández's Los Valedontes (The Valedontes family), 1953, protests the political, economic, and social oppression experienced by the Cuban people before the revolution. It focuses on a community frustrated in its attempts at improvement and the attainment of social justice. In the work of the best known writers there remained some traces of the vanguardist tendencies of the twenties. In 1923 they founded El grupo minorista (The retailers group). It had no formal organization or well-defined orientation, but was international and cosmopolitan in a general sense, examining and adopting any current that interested its members. In 1927 the group published a declaration of its attitudes concerning literature, which was signed by Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Mañach, Enrique Serpa, and others. Their attitude had nearly died out by the 1930s, as social realism came to dominate the field. A notable example of how resoundingly the minoristas' generation rejected the vanguardist techniques that the minoristas promoted may be seen in the work of Carlos Enríquez. As the first and only true expressionist painter of Cuba, he might be expected to combine vanguardist techniques with his social concerns. His Tilin Garcia, 1939, takes great pains to depict the lives of Cuban peasants in the countryside while denouncing the latifundio system and the unjust laws used by the masters to exploit the workers. The novel is, however, characterized by an exaggerated picturesqueness and a romantic slant. Far from being polished and innovative, its style is not even a careful one. In fact, Enriquez's La feria de Guaicanamâ (The Guaicanamá fair), published posthumously in 1960 - which deals with a character living comfortably on his farm while fervently preaching socialism - is rather unrealistic and incoherent. Another painter, Marcelo Pogolotti, did produce novels in which experimental techniques came into play; even the title of La ventana de mármol (The marble window), 1941, suggests the play of light and texture. One long-standing habit of Spanish-American novelists is the incorporation of essayistic material into their fiction. The Peruvian author Clorinda Matto de Turner, for instance, states in the pro-

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logue to her novel Aves sin nido (Birds without a nest), 1889, that her goal is to put an end to certain unjust practices. In Cuba, José Antonio Ramos was unapologetically a thesis writer, far more interested in successfully selling his revisionist social theories than in the aesthetic shape of his works. At times he looks back to the older positivism of the turn of the century; at other times he is more in tune with the emphasis his generation placed on economic concerns. In Las impurezas de la realidad (The impurities within reality), 1929, he deals with racial and social problems, whereas the focus of his Caniquí, 1936, is more general in its treatment of Cuban history. Among the most original novelists of the generation was Enrique Labrador Ruiz. His works lack a traditional plot; he prefers instead to present the reader with an oneiric atmosphere and a conception of reality based in the human subconscious. As early as 1936 he produced Cresival, a novel rich in imagery that anticipates the neobaroque style of Cuban prose fiction after 1960. Labrador Ruiz used the neologism "gasiform" to characterize his works, thereby indicating that he meant to abandon the sort of novelistic technique that pretended to provide the reader with an abundance of concrete details concerning the situation of the characters. Much was left to the imagination of the reader, who must attempt to make some sense of the fragments. The first gasiform novel was El laberinto de si mismo (The labyrinth of oneself), 1933, which was followed by Cresival, 1936, Anteo, 1940, Carne de quimera (Chimera flesh), 1947, and, undoubtedly his best known work, La sangre hambrienta (Hungry blood), 1950. In La sangre hambrienta Labrador Ruiz stresses the novel's structure rather than the physical setting, which is Cuba before the fall of the dictator Machado in 1933. A total of one hundred fiftyfour characters passes through its pages, and none of them is very well developed. The book's title has to do with the narrator's insatiable desire to learn all about these characters and their interrelationships as he grows through adolescence. The most important aspect of the work, however, may be its constant attention to language and its functions. The narrator often finds himself musing over someone's manner of expressing himself, whereas he remains unconcerned with what the expression may mean. A tendency of the Cuban novel destined to attain some prominence was the choteo tradition, which has been described as the irresistible urge to mock everything, especially everything pertaining to authority. The tradition of attacking authority may have something to do with the rejection of a consistent plot line and of characterization by the most radical Cuban novels. Miguel de Marcos y Suárez was already writing in the choteo vein in Papaito Mayarí (Daddy Mayarí), which was published in 1947. Although the novel reveals the author's deep preoccupation with Cuban problems, these are treated with an impressive display of humor. Calling his personal comic style pantuflar (slippering), Marcos never abandons the choteo in his writing. In a work of fiction such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres (Three trapped tigers), 1967, not only is humor the most prominent feature on the surface, but his readers are sometimes mocked as the author lures them into accepting certain "facts" about a given character, only to provide contradictory information later in the text. Combining the Cuban tradition of humor with the darker outlook of Franz Kafka and certain existentialist writers, Virgilio Piñera is best known for his short stories full of black humor. His novel La carne de René (René's flesh), 1952, also presents the reader with a satirical, grotesque vision of reality. Pequenas maniobras (Petty maneuvers), 1963, has a narrator who moves through modern Cuba in a picaresque manner, commenting wryly on the foibles of his countrymen. In

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Piñera, Cuban satire reaches its full extension. Another author known primarily as a short story writer was Calvert Casey, whose works typically deal with the anguish of living in contemporary Cuba. Casey did produce a short novel, Notas de un simulador (Notes of an imposter), which was first published with some of Casey's short stories in El regreso (The return), 1962, which is his best known work. Because of its involvement in one of the rare true revolutions in Latin-American history, Cuba has never completely abandoned the novel of social commitment. During the latter years of the Batista dictatorship, writers such as Alcides Iznaga protested the political, economic, and social conditions in the country. In Los Valedontes Iznaga portrays a community frustrated in its attempts at self-improvement and social justice. As the focus of resistance became centered in the universities, novelists began writing about student life. Gregorio Ortega Suárez's Una de cal y otra de arena (One of lime, the other of sand), 1957, deals with political conflicts. In it, rebellious, nonconformist youth confront a world of complacency where economic power is in the wrong hands. So strong is the author's desire to communicate his message that here again technique plays a subordinate role. Ortega employs a journalistic style, producing a documentary or reportage effect rather than a novelistic texture. The same is true of his Reportaje de las visperas (Vespers report), 1967, which deals, in fact, with the world of journalism, smuggling, and general corruption in a nation struggling against Batista's regime. The authors who remained in Cuba after the revolution and those who went into exile diverge markedly in style. Most of those who remained continued to write of the miseries of prerevolutionary Cuba, while those outside concentrated on creativity in language. It should be stressed, however, that notable exceptions apply. One of the most radical novels of the 1960s was José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, 1966; and Alejo Carpentier produced Concierto barroco (Baroque concert), his contribution to the neobaroque style, while working with the Castro government. The Cuban neobaroque style of writers such as Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, Sarduy, and Arenas involves a stress on what Jacques Derrida terms the free play of signifiers upon the page, since all signifieds are called into question. This is in marked contrast to the Spanish baroque style of the seventeenth century, which consisted largely of linguistic elaborations of set ideological structures. Carpentier did a great deal to set the new novel of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in motion. His short story "Viaje a la semilla" (Journey to the seed), 1958, called attention to the possibilities of playing with time, specifically its reversal. His Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps), 1953, depicts a voyage in space that leads the traveler to believe he has also returned to the beginnings of time. Carpentier brought the term lo real maravilloso (marvelous reality) into Spanish usage (from le merveilleux in French). Several of his novels deal with the circularity of revolution. El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world), 1949, has to do with the reign of King Henry Christophe in Haiti. The work centers upon a poor black man whose life remains static as one upheaval after another runs its cyclical course. El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a cathedral), 1962, also deals with the betrayal of a promising revolution, signaled by the importation of a guillotine as the French export their revolution to Haiti during the so-called Age of Enlightment. In El recurso del método Carpentier presents a dramatic scene in which a dictator and a young rebel confront each other. In the rebel, the dictator thinks he sees himself as he was a few years before, and the rebel realizes that he will one day become the one he is confronting. In the end they save each other's life. Lezama Lima, preeminent as a poet in the Hispanic Caribbean, paradoxically presented his ars poetica in the form of the novel Paradiso, writing, like Carpentier, in a heavy, neobaroque style. It

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is significant that the theme of the work seems to be the birth of a poet that is also the birth of poetry. Severo Sarduy writes in the neobaroque style as well, often employing exaggerated poetic imagery to convey what turns out to be an ambivalent impression. In works such as De donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a song), 1967, and Cobra, 1972, he illustrates his oft-repeated concern with the "empty center" of the universe and the concept that each new text is born only to be inserted into a greater space that is the space of textuality itself. Reinaldo Arenas produced a work loosely based on the life of a somewhat picaresque Mexican priest of the colonial era, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier. In El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations), 1969, reality is hallucinatory, and the style by which it is represented is equally so. Arenas's versatility is such that his short novel La Vieja Rosa, 1972, is quite different in tone. It evokes a Cuban Dona Bárbara - the protagonist of the Rómulo Gallegos novel - destroyed as much by her own egomaniacal tendencies as by the revolution. Carrying both the choteo tradition and the Cuban stress on the inner workings of language itself to the extreme, Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres is among a few select works that can be said to have determined the course of the Spanish-American novel. Cabrera Infante's rejection of the revolution is signified in the destruction of univocal meanings within the text. At its best, fiction writing in Cuba today is excellent, as it concentrates on the creative process rather than on service to the state. At its worst, it represents the obligation to write in the social realist vein in order to avoid persecution or exile.

The Dominican Republic The novel in this nation, too, has been shaped more by internal crises than by influences from abroad. Specifically, two crucial moments in Dominican history of the twentieth century have determined its course until recent times. The first is the occupation by the United States from 1916 to 1924, which led to Trujillo's dictatorship (1930-61). The second major crisis involves the period of uncertainty that followed the assassination of Trujillo, including the intervention by the United States in 1965. As the nation regained its self-confidence and a measure of stability, authors began to concentrate more on technique than on their subject matter. When naturalism gave way to other tendencies, the Dominican novel, like its Cuban counterpart, maintained a strong criollista, or regionalist, cast; the occupation, for example, was portrayed in typically regionalist terms. Rafael Damirón produced a novel using that intervention as a backdrop. The primary influence on La cacica (The chief-woman), 1944, is nonetheless the Venezuelan regionalist novel Doña Bárbara, 1929. There have been sporadic returns to a preoccupation with the Indian question, such as Enrique Aguiar's Don Cristóbal, 1939, and Virginia de Pena de Bordas's Toeya, 1931, the latter being notable for a more accurate reflection of indigenous life than is generally seen in novels of this category. It is also notable for its poetic undercurrents. Another novel that departs from the slavish dependence on mere description is Un blason colonial (A colonial coat of arms), 1947, by Gustavo Adolfo Mejía, which tempers its historical evocations with a predominance of fantasy. In its attempt to provide a more faithful portrayal of the reality being lived by the peasant - or whatever group is

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represented - Mejía's work presents the reader with a chief who attains a human dimension more real than any seen up to that time in the Dominican novel, thereby transcending the merely folkloric dimension. The most popular Dominican novel is La manosa (The wily one), 1936, by Juan Bosch, who was to become president of the republic. (His presidency in fact precipitated the intervention by the United States in 1965.) The costumbrista attitude of the narrator, mentioned in connection with the Cuban novel, is so powerful a force in this work that the title chosen by the author is the name of a donkey belonging to a rural family caught up in the last so-called civil war, which was fought shortly before the first intervention by the United States. Reflected in the text is the tension between petit bourgeois paternalism and disaffected skepticism. However, La manosa reveals a strong strain of modernismo. This is evident, for example, in the image of a night "perforated by stars" with which the text begins. The technique is ill-suited to the stressful tale of people caught up in the passions of a war involving their closest friends. This style tends to reappear throughout the text whenever the narrator sets aside the story and concentrates on description. However, Bosch's modernista style is accompanied by the beginnings of a new stress on language. Among the circumstances that have influenced the Dominican novel is the fact that the nation shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, whose creolophone and francophone linguistic and cultural background have made it a very different kind of nation. Those differences were made evident in 1943 in Trementina, clerén y bongó (Turpentine, booze, and drums), by Julio González Herrera. Another novel dealing with the unique problems faced by a people confronted on their western border by the poorest nation in the hemisphere is Freddy Prestol Castillo's El masacre se pasa a pie (You can wade over the massacre), which was written not long after the events it portrays, but published only in 1973. The novel deals with Trujillo's 1937 massacre of Haitian workers on the northwest border of the Dominican Republic, and has enjoyed immense popularity within the country. Prestol, who was a dissident but still occupied a position as magistrate, was sent to the border to witness the massacre. His indignation was aroused not only by the unconscionable slaughter he was forced to watch, but by the attitude of the landholders in the region, who lamented what had happened because it resulted in their loss of cheap Haitian labor. El masacre se pasa a pie is so essayistic that its status as a novel is questionable, even though its author had also begun to incorporate modern, poetic techniques into his language. The second best known Dominican novel is also closely tied to the history of the republic in the 1930s. It is Over, 1939, by Ramón Marrero Aristy, who was assassinated while serving as a minister of Trujillo. This work, too, is based on United States domination of the Dominican Republic; the title is a term used by plantation workers for the extra profit North American-owned sugar companies made by engaging in practices such as supplying less food than the workers had paid for. One reason for the novel's popularity is its having appeared at just the opportune moment, when Trujillo was mounting a propaganda campaign to "nationalize" the sugar industry. The novel thereby served as a focus for the conversion of despair into protest. The plot of Over concerns a spoiled youth evicted from a traditional paradise because of his own indigence. He attempts to overcome his alienation by selling his labor to a North American sugar company and by marrying. Neither strategy is successful, and the rest of the novel deals largely with his increasing awareness of why this is the case. Spanish-American authors of this period

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generally had a difficult time resisting the temptation to include essayistic sections in their novels, as other examples have shown, and Over is no exception. For the Dominican critic Manuel Valldeperes, the work also represents an attempt by the author to break free from purely narrative concerns ([1967], 316). Several novels treat fundamental problems associated with the cultivation of sugar cane and the exploitation of the Dominican worker. Notable among them is Francisco Moscoso Puello's Carias y bueyes (Cane and oxen), 1936. In its effort to present the worker's condition in as direct a manner as possible, Carias y bueyes is more a chronicle than a novel. In this respect it shares an important characteristic of the period with other Dominican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican novels. A measure of the interrelations of social realist fiction and politics is offered by the career of Andrés Francisco Requena, who was assassinated in New York by agents of Trujillo in retaliation for his novel Cementerio sin cruces (Cemetery without crosses), 1949. Cementerio sin cruces deals with the horrors and humiliations suffered by those who were conspiring against the dictator in the 1940s. Requena's major novel, however, is the earlier Los enemigos de la tierra (Enemies of the land), 1942. Its plot is circular, dealing with a peasant who goes to the capital in search of selfimprovement. After spending time in the sugar mills, he returns to the place where he began. Dominican fiction made some excursions into the various manifestations of existential thought at mid-century. The influence of Jean-Paul Sartre's La nausée (Nausea), 1938, is notable in En su niebla (Within his mist), 1950, by Ramon Lacay Polanco, to the extent that the protagonist's reactions, and even his words, are often nearly identical to those of Sartre's protagonist. Like Sartre's first novel, however, En su niebla is preexistentialist in that the protagonist does not finally embrace a course of positive action, which is a fundamental tenet of postwar Sartrean existentialism. By the time El hombre de piedra (Man of stone), appeared in 1960, Lacay Polanco had abandoned existentialism. Among those involved in the evolution from a novel of customs to one of more creative vitality was J. M. Sanz-Lajara, whose Caonex, 1949, and Viv, 1961, deal with direct testimonies. By 1949 the primary emphasis is on the lives of individuals rather than on the masses as such. In Caonex, the problems of a person coming to terms with the city are the major concern. The protagonist is in fact drawn to both the city and the country. Sanz-Lajara is known for his in-depth character studies, and Viv is perhaps his most human and gripping work of this type. The main characters reject the norms that others attempt to impose upon them, choosing to live in evident disorder and paradox. In both novels, however, the will of the principal characters is ultimately overcome by their destiny. Eventually, the city has come to prevail over the countryside as the setting for the Dominican novel, as it has done in Cuba and Puerto Rico as well. Carlos Federico Pérez published Juan, mientras la ciudad crecía (Juan, while the city grew) in 1960. His characters find themselves caught between conservative and revolutionary forces. Almost without realizing it, they bring about the transformation of the city in which they live, while themselves evolving within it. At present, the novel has definitively abandoned costumbrista concerns and attempts to deal with moral and psychological problems, although it continues its quest for a definition of the Dominican personality. Horacio Read's Cerca de la noche (Near the night), 1965, presents the case of several persons apparently of no consequence, each seemingly representing a fragment of life. As such, his characters attempt to act by their own will, but are overwhelmed by their environment.

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The atmosphere might be described in terms of what Paul Tillich, in The Courage to Be, 1952, called "the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness" (p. 46). In several of the novels of the 1960s, young people are seen attempting to live for the moment in search of whatever scraps of value life may offer them. Eurídice Canaán's Los depravados (The depraved), 1964, presents just such a case; her protagonist is a veritable personification of doubt, living the paradox of being a rebel while surrendering to life as it is. The novel suggests, however, that life still holds some promise. Another novel by a woman writer notable for her innovative technique is Aida Cartagena Portalatín's Escalera para Electra (Stairway for Electra), 1970, an attempt to represent the U.S. intervention of 1965 in terms of Greek tragedy. Continuing the theme of religious belief as a resolution of plot, there appeared a series of novels on biblical topics. In Esteban Deive's Magdalena, 1964, divine grace saves a fallen woman by means of her faith. A slightly different emphasis is evident in Ramón Emilio Reyes's El testimonio (The testimony), 1961, which concentrates on the metaphysical problem of human freedom. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo is notable for having brought universal themes into the Dominican narrative, and with them a significant emphasis on language. He chose biblical settings for the two novels that appeared in El buen ladrón (The good thief), 1960, the title work and Judas. Within his country, Veloz Maggiolo has been considered the key figure in bringing the Dominican narrative into the mainstream of the new Latin-American novel. He produced three contributions to the novel of dictatorship, El prófugo (The fugitive), 1963, De abril en adelante (From April on), 1975, and La biografia difusa de Sombra Castaheda (The rambling biography of Sombra Castañeda), 1980. In the second of them, the only choices for the young intellectuals of the final years of the Trujillo period seem to be, on the one hand, violent reaction, and on the other, madness or death. In these novels the dictator - whether Trujillo or another - is viewed as an authoritative voice. Since the word is the source of power, Veloz insists on the necessity of creating a new language for the people. In Sombra Castañeda, he presents a magical world, saturated with Afro-Haitian and Taíno beliefs. There have been other significant attempts to come to terms with the Trujillato, among them Virgilio Díaz Grullón's Los algarrobos también sueñan (Carob trees also dream), 1976. Another figure of considerable importance in this same context is Pedro Mir, whose Cuando amaban las tierras comuneras (When the communal lands were loved), 1978, is considered to have pointed the way for his country's novel of the 1980s. As Rei Berroa has noted, Mir understands that the form of a work should be determined by the subject matter, rather than chosen randomly by the author ([1988], 41). Pedro Vergés is arguably the most promising writer of the present day. His novel Sólo cenizas hallarás (bolero) (You'll find only ashes: a bolero), 1980, is a fragmented vision of the nation between the fall of Trujillo in May 1961 and the victory of the Dominican Revolutionary Party in December 1962. The characters find themselves caught in the tension between a harsh sociopolitical reality and the fantasy world of popular music and Hollywood films. The recent Dominican novel has ceased to concern itself primarily with the external - things, time, and physical space - in order to deal with itself as a literary creation and with the language that defines the national being. It is now characterized by an epistemological inquiry of the human spirit.

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Puerto Rico As a Caribbean island that was a Spanish colony before becoming a territory of the United States, Puerto Rico has never known independence. For that reason much of its literature has been devoted to defining the island's identity. The naturalist Manuel Zeno Gandía, who had been considered the major figure in the Puerto Rican novel, died in 1930; at about the same time there sprang up a Generation of 1930. As skillful as Zeno Gandia had been in the manipulation of his naturalistic style, the younger writers were eager to begin the renovation of prose fiction. Central to their concerns was a search for the personality of their nation. Just as the thinking of an entire generation of Latin-American intellectuals had been formed by José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, 1900, the wave of literature with Puerto Rico itself as a subject was largely provoked by the publication of one book, Insularismo (Insularism), 1934, by the journalist and academic Antonio S. Pedreira. The novel this generation produced was consistent with the currents of the times and tended to stress rural themes; its tone was one of protest against social, economic, and political injustices. Pedro Juvenal Rosa published his Las masas mandan (The masses rule) in 1936. As the title indicates, his protagonist is collective, the proletariat, and he is credited with introducing social revolutionary themes into Puerto Rican literature. Although he is agile in his handling of language, there are vestiges of the past in the text. The leading character, for example, dies a typical romantic death. At the same time, Manuel Méndez Ballester's Isla cerrera (Untamed island), 1937, is one of the few historical novels that attempt to come to terms with the island's colonial beginnings, and thereby to define the nation's identity. Taking Zeno Gandía's place as the preeminent novelist of the time was Enrique A. Laguerre, who many feel laid the foundations of the modern Puerto Rican novel. His works are marked by a predominance of sociological features. In addition, however, he is prone to bring psychological factors into play, especially as they bear on the issue of the individual's quest for a Puerto Rican identity. La llamarada (The flare-up), 1935, has been called the Puerto Rican sister of the three great novels of the land in Latin America, Dona Bárbara, La vorágine (The whirlpool), and Don Segundo Sombra. Laguerre's fictional work is actually a combination of the nineteenth-century novel of intrigue and the more modern psychological novel, but more significantly, it is not another weak copy of European models. Predictably, La llamarada deals with problems endemic to the sugar industry: the latifundio system, owner absenteeism, the one-crop economy, and the misery in which the workers lived. Laguerre's Solar Montoya (Montoya Place), 1941, completes his portrayal of the agricultural zones. Its focus is life in the decadent haciendas of the west-central area of the island. The peasants' struggles with serious problems ranging from hurricanes to low prices are presented along with the boredom of everyday life. With La resaca (Undertow), 1949, Laguerre initiated a cycle of novels dealing with the development of Puerto Rican society between the last third of the past century and the time of writing. La resaca is concerned with the anguish produced by colonialist oppression, but persists in using a costumbrista style. Los dedos de la mono (The fingers of a hand), 1951, however, represents an attempt on the author's part to delve more deeply into his characters' psychology, even though social concerns still predominate.

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The best example of Laguerre's mature style can be seen in La ceiba en el tiesto (The bombax in the flowerpot), 1956, which exhibits interior monologue, cinematographic techniques, and flashbacks. These are stylistic techniques that entered with the so-called Generation of '45. Of the novel's three major themes, that of Puerto Rican nationalism is predictable. The other two, however, represent some newer currents in the literature, namely the problems of mixed blood and of emigration to New York. El laberinto (The labyrinth), 1959, also deals with New York, along with a LatinAmerican dictatorship. More modern yet is El fuego y su aire (The fire and its air), 1970. True to his desire to incorporate contemporary experimental styles into his work, Laguerre offers the reader two "first parts," and reading may begin with either of them. The novel deals with the emptiness of contemporary life that results from the loss of spiritual values. Things prevail over persons. Los amos benévolos (Benevolent masters), 1977, was Laguerre's tenth novel. It attempts to come to terms with the island's values, specifically the rampant materialism and lust for power that the author felt were sweeping everything before them. The protagonist, who is an exploiter, has a tapeworm in his belly that causes an insatiable appetite which is, of course, symbolic of his lust for wealth and power. The novel suffers from a melodramatic tone, owing, no doubt, to the depth of the author's feelings on these issues. The exploiter, for example, has plans to destroy his great-aunt's garden to erect condominiums; the struggle is viewed as one between "limitless materialism" and "pure idealism." The North Americans, including a certain Mr. Junk, are described as "Gullivers," and one of the heroes is Quete Banderas (flags), a detail that recalls one of those regionalist novels mentioned above, specifically Doña Bárbara, with its Santos Luzardo and Mr. Danger. Among those working alongside Laguerre and employing older forms while still attempting to incorporate modern techniques was Tomas Blanco Géigel. His short novel Los vates: Embeleco fantastic o para niños mayores de edad (The prophets: a fantastic deception for grownup children), 1949, has a costumbrista flavor and is full of essayistic material, but at the same time it deals with the problem of literary creation experienced by a pair of writers. Among those who had gained some considerable prestige abroad before the advent of the more recent crop of novelists was José Agustín Balseiro y Ramos, who was known mainly as an essayist. The most discussed and ambitious of his novels is the melodramatic En vela mientras el mundo duerme (On watch while the world sleeps), 1953, which is a romantic rendering of the question of Puerto Rican independence versus permanent union with the United States. One of the most fascinating novels dealing with the problem of Puerto Rico's status is Usmail, 1959, by Pedro Juan Soto. The action takes place between 1930 and 1950, as the U.S. Marines occupied the island of Vieques and began using it for target practice. The protagonist is born of a black Puerto Rican mother by a white U.S. official, who abandons them soon after the boy's birth. The mother never ceases to wait for a letter from the father, and even names her son Usmail (U.S. Mail). When he comes of age and learns of his origins, he murders an American and declares that his name is Negro. The work is in part a reaction against the alleged docility of the Puerto Rican character and represents a major advance in the expression of the racial theme in Puerto Rican letters. In 1961 Soto dealt with another problem of mounting proportions in Ardiente suelo, fría estación (Burning ground, cold season), that of "reverse emigration," the return of Puerto Ricans from New York and other North American locations to the island. As New York had earlier represented a

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paradise of jobs and well-being, the new myth became one of a poor but friendly island paradise, anxious to welcome its separated children (much as a favorite song of the immigrant Irish had been "Come Back to Ireland"). Soto's novel, in fact, deals with both myths, and the combined effect is that the Puerto Rican is viewed as a person without a country. It is something of a bildungsroman, although the protagonist grows up into little that is positive. He refers to himself as "a Christ, really a Christ," alluding not to his virtues but to his status as a victim. In El francotirador (The sniper), 1969, Soto presents the case of a Cuban writer in exile, Tomas Saldivia, but only in the odd-numbered chapters. The even-numbered chapters develop the story of a counterrevolutionary sniper known only as T.S. Despite the theme, it is not a work of protest, but rather a metafictional work dealing with the play of creative and destructive forces within the same person. Far darker in its conception is Emilio Díaz Valcárcel's Eiguraciones en el mes de marzo (Figments in the month of March), 1972, with its fragmented vision of contemporary reality. More importantly, on account of its advanced stylistic techniques its publication constituted a breakthrough in the development of the modern Puerto Rican novel. The theme of black consciousness had been developed by the poet Luis Palés Matos, whose work, like that of the Cuban Nicolás Guillén, brought Afro-Antillean themes into the literatures of the region. Palés Matos also produced a curious autobiography in the form of a serial novel, Litoral: Reseña de una vida inútil (Seacoast: review of a useless life), which appeared in Universidad, the newspaper of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras between 1915 and 1952. As Puerto Rican writers became increasingly concerned with style as opposed to content, the major dramatist René Marqués produced two novels, La vispera del hombre (The eve of man), 1959, and La mirada (The glance), 1975. La mirada represents his attempt to write experimental fiction. Marqués is known for his use of innovative techniques in the theater, and his novels reflect the same orientation. Another innovator among Puerto Rican novelists is José Luis Gonzalez, whose short fiction and novels, among them Balada de otro tiempo (Ballad from another time), 1978, influenced an entire generation of writers. Social protest, as evidenced by the work of Cesáreo Rosa-Nieves, had not died out, however, as late as the 1960s. His trilogy, El mar bajó de la montana (The sea came down from the mountain), 1963, Mariana sera la esperanza: Peregrinaje por las veredas de sí mismo (Tomorrow will be hope: pilgrimage along the paths of oneself), 1964, and El sol pintó de oro los bohíos: La ingenua aventura de un hombre que le hizo el amor a un sueño rojo (The sun painted the shanties gold: the innocent adventure of a man who made love to a red dream), 1965, despite what the titles may seem to indicate, consists of works of accentuated realism, albeit with a marked poetic style. Between the appearance of the trilogy and his death, however, Rosa-Nieves began to deal more with aesthetic realities than social problems. One pronounced trend in Puerto Rican fiction has been toward the production of works whose content is clearly intended to put on display certain sociopolitical problems, but whose technique is experimental, in a situation analogous to that of the 1920s and 1930s, when works of social realism in Latin America often bore traces of modernista and vanguardist techniques. Notable among those working to achieve such a fusion is Carmelo Rodriguez Torres, who attempts to present the protagonist's point of view in such a way as to develop a new perspective on traditional themes. His Veinte siglos después del homocidio (Twenty centuries after the homicide), 1970, and La casa y la llama fiera (The house and the wild flame), 1982, involve race prejudice and the problems of colo-

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nialism. La casa y la llama fiera presents the question of sexual identity as well and reveals a major concern with the process of writing itself, specifically the relationship between writing and self-discovery. Rodriguez Torres's innovative handling of social concerns reminds the reader of what Luis Rafael Sánchez does in La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho's beat), 1976, which created a greater sensation abroad than had any other Puerto Rican novel, appearing on best seller lists in the United States. Built around a moment inhering in a guaracha entitled "La vida es una cosa fenomenal" (Life is a marvelous thing), the work incorporates into prose fiction techniques usually associated with poetry, as the novels of Lezama Lima and others had done in Cuba. Viewed at that moment, five characters are revealed through a stream of consciousness that reconstructs their past. At the conclusion they are all waiting for something. This, too, represents an examination of the Puerto Rican character, but in a more universal vein and involving a far more complex signifying process than was common in the past. In 1988 Sánchez published what he calls a fabulación (fabulation), La importancia de Ilamarse Daniel Santos (The importance of being named Daniel Santos). The work is based on the professional life of a singer of enormous popularity, and is written in the neobaroque style of the Hispanic Caribbean. It includes a fierce attack on Latin-American machismo, a theme that is becoming common in the fictional works produced in the region. Iris Zavala has likewise dealt with very traditional Puerto Rican themes while employing lyrical techniques. She has several collections of poems in print, and took a rather long time in composing her novel Kiliagonía (Chiliagony), which was written between 1970 and 1979 and published in 1980. The subject is Puerto Rico in 1898, when the island was passing from the possession of Spain to that of the United States. The novel reconstructs that historical moment in the city of Ponce. The principal characters are four sisters, all of whom live in a world of fantasy. They are comparable to the three sisters under siege in Marqués's play Los soles truncos (The fanlights), which was published in 1958. The chiliagon of the title is a thousand-sided figure, which seems to imply that there are too many facets to the problem to allow it even to be conceptualized; appropriately, it also includes the Spanish word for agony (agonía). Luz María Umpierre feels that this is a "writerly text," marking another significant change in Puerto Rican narrative fiction (Harris [1985], 25). Puerto Rico's novelists had been trying hard to communicate a social consciousness to the reader. Here the evolution of their fiction into a literature of considerable aesthetic significance is also evident. The younger Puerto Rican novelists are producing a steady stream of important works. These are writers such as Edgardo Rodriguez Juliá, José Luis Vega, Magali Garcia Ramis, Rosario Ferré, and Mayra Montero, whose novels are attracting an increasing amount of attention among critics.

Conclusion All three of the island societies in question have suffered major upheavals in the twentieth century, ranging from economic disasters through foreign occupation to bloody dictatorships and revolution. The novel form tends to achieve maturity in societies in upheaval, as was the case in nineteenthcentury Russia, and the experience of the genre in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is no exception.

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In all cases writers have felt it necessary to raise the consciousness of their readers so that something decisive might eventually be done to correct the injustices to which the island societies have been subjected. Under the influence of the wave of materialistic radicalism of the 20s and 30s, they often deliberately abandoned any attempt to create artistically viable works, feeling that this would detract from the starkness of the message they wished to communicate; more recently this has been the case of Nicaraguan poetry. Gradually, however, the realization grew that the medium was all they had to work with, and that a more profound effect might be achieved through a concentration on technique. There is no less concern with social injustice, but at the present time the protest against it is couched in far more subtle terms.

Bibliography Berroa, Rei. 1988. Recordar para vivir: Historia, alegoría y dialéctica en la crónica de Pedro Mir. Revista Iberoamericana. 14.142:27-51. (This issue of RI is entirely devoted to twentieth-century Dominican literature and is of excellent quality.) Droguett, Ivan. 1968. Unpublished lecture. University of Kansas. Harris, Sara Dudley. 1985. Camuflaje de la voz narrativa en Kiliagonía de Iris Zavala. In "La técnica del 'narrador que desaparece' en la literatura del Caribe del siglo XX." Honors project; Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University (U.S.A.) Tillich, Paul. 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Valldeperes, Manuel. 1967. Evolución de la novela en la República Dominicana. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. 206:311-25. Provides evaluation as well as documentation.

The Short Story in the Hispanic Antilles

WILLIAM LUIS

Vanderbilt University

The renowned Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges considered the short story superior to the novel and more difficult to construct. The short-story form has long been used by writers in the Hispanic Antilles as well, even though every one of these writers has been interested in other literary genres. In the Dominican Republic, for example, poetry has achieved a higher status than either long or short narrative. Nevertheless, in the Caribbean, the short story is a popular form of expression. Authors like Lino Novas Calvo in Cuba, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, and Pedro Juan Soto in Puerto Rico have written novels but are better known for their short fiction. The short story has thrived in the Hispanic Antilles for several reasons. For economy of space, magazines and literary journals have always encouraged shorter compositions, thus favoring poets and short-story writers over novelists. This trend was especially evident in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cuba's Cirilo Villaverde published his early stories in magazines such as Miscelânea de Util y Agradable Recreo and El Album, and his well-known work Cecilia Voldes was originally published as a short story in the Siempreviva in 1839. In the twentieth century, magazines such as Revista de Avance, Social, Origenes, and Ciclón in Cuba; the Saturday literary supplement of El Mundo and the more selective Asomante in Puerto Rico; and the literary supplements of El Nacional, Listin Diario, El Caribe, and La Noticia in the Dominican Republic, have given both established and new writers the opportunity to publish and distribute literature in their respective countries even when very few other means of doing so existed. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the coming to power of the revolutionary government in Cuba and the creation of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress - both of which emphasized culture and education - that a significant number of publishing houses emerged in the Antilles and other parts of Hispanic America for the purpose of printing novels. Even with these publishing houses in place, however, the short-story form continues to be a popular one because - unlike the novel - the short story can be read in a brief period of time and can undergo many revisions to satisfy the reader's, as well as the author's, demands. Along with magazines and literary supplements, literary prizes have helped to promote the short story in the Caribbean. The short-story prize is a recent idea, however; it was first introduced in the 1940s in Cuba. The awards given in the Hernández Catá, the Luis Felipe Rodriguez, and the Casa de las Américas competitions in Cuba; in the Ateneo Puertorriqueno competition in Puerto Rico; and in the René del Risco, the Siboney, the La Máscara, and the Casa de Teatro competitions in the Dominican Republic have encouraged both new and established authors to write and publish short fiction. In the Dominican Republic, the existence of these and other awards helped to keep the short-story genre alive through the 1960s and 1970s. Many writers who placed first in the competi-

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tions, such as Onelio Jorge Cardoso, in Cuba; René Marqués, in Puerto Rico; and René del Risco, in the Dominican Republic - as well as those who have placed second and third - have become distinguished literary figures in their respective countries. Because Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic share a common history, geography, and language, there are many similarities between the short stories written in the different parts of the Hispanic Antilles. These similarities, in turn, suggest a sort of literary Antillean triangle. The metaphorical angles that the three countries represent, however, are not equal. Instead, because of their literary histories as well as their geographic positions, the three countries form a scalene triangle. Cuba has produced the greatest proportion of distinguished writers and works, followed by Puerto Rico and then the Dominican Republic. Although few Dominican writers are known outside that country, the Dominican Republic has still produced some authors of major status. Short-story writer Juan Bosch and essayist Pedro Henrfquez Urefia, for example, are among the best-known authors in Spanish-American literature. The short story in the Hispanic Antilles captures the essence of life and custom in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The authors make social and political comments about life in their respective countries, but they do so in styles that conform to one or more of the literary movements in vogue at the time of each work's composition. In the twentieth century, Antillean and mainland Spanish-American writers have been influenced by the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga, who made short fiction popular in Spanish America. In his "Decálogo del perfecto cuentista" (Decalogue of the perfect storyteller), 1925, and "El manual del perfecto cuentista" (The manual of the perfect storyteller), 1925, he enumerates strategies for constructing the perfect short story. A criollist writer, Quiroga did not so much react against a modernista literature as he favored American and native themes over exotic ones. Writers in the Caribbean were also drawn to European and North American authors and movements; Quiroga himself was influenced by Poe. In Cuba, Alfonso Hernandez Catá sought inspiration in the works of Maupassant, and Novas Calvo used techniques already seen in the works of Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. In Puerto Rico, the dramatist René Marqués became interested in short stories after reading playwrights who wrote fiction - such as Sartre, Camus, Chekhov, and Pirandello - but he was also inspired by Proust, Kafka, and Joyce. In the Dominican Republic, Bosch was attracted to the ideas of Leonidas Andreyev and Maxim Gorky but also read Kipling, Maupassant, and Wilde. As these Caribbean writers matured, their younger counterparts looked for models in their own respective countries, and some established writers, like Carpentier and Bosch, also had a wide appeal beyond their national boundaries. Like Quiroga's essays, Carpentier's "Lo real maravilloso" (Marvellous realism) and Bosch's "Apuntes sobre el arte de escribir cuentos" (Notes on the art of writing stories) have been a source of inspiration to Antillean and Spanish-American writers overall. The historical and political conditions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic also influenced the development of the short story in these three countries. A metahistorical reading shows that after these islands gained independence from Spain, the United States, because of its proximity, filled a power vacuum in the Hispanic Antilles; this event charted the course of subsequent historical and literary developments there. In Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the United States has supported ruthless dictators; the same superpower controls the Puerto Rican economy. In all three countries, groups or generations of writers have emerged concurrently with certain historical events: in Cuba during the Machado dictatorship (1927-33); in Puerto Rico after Operation

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Bootstrap - the U.S. attempt to industrialize the island - was put into effect (1945 to the late 1950s); and in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship (1930-61) and, more recently, after the 1965 U.S. invasion. Short-story writers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic refer to the historical and political processes in their respective countries. It would be inaccurate, however, to assume that the political climate and its effect on society is the only theme that concerns short-story writers in the Hispanic Antilles. Political and economic changes have also motivated writers to search for and define a national culture and identity. When we take into account both the political and the cultural themes seen in short fiction in these countries, however, it is clear that politics are an integral part of this national culture and identity.

Cuba The modern Cuban short story began with Jesus Castellanos, who wrote about local themes, but it was Alfonso Hernández Catâ who brought it international recognition. These two men were the first important short-story writers of their generation - and of the twentieth century - and in their works they demonstrated a variety of interests. Writing after the birth of the Cuban republic and the insertion of the Platt Amendment into its constitution, both Castellanos and Hernández Catá concerned themselves with Cuban nationality and with providing a commentary on many facets of Cuban life. Castellanos's first work of fiction, De tierra adentro (From the hinterland), 1906, contains stories about the Cuban countryside. In his "En las montanas" (In the mountains), he describes the region of Vuelta Abajo and its people, thus recalling Villaverde's Escursión a Vuelta Abajo (Excursion to Vuelta Abajo), a nineteenth-century travel story first published in two magazines in 1838 and 1842 but as a separate volume only in 1891. "En las montanas" also deals with the lives of black people, a theme made popular by the antislavery narratives that were written during the same period as Escursión a Vuelta Abajo and that attempted to recognize blacks as an integral part of Cuban literature and culture. "La agonía de 'La garza'" (The agony of the "Heron") conveys a sense of oral tradition as the story of the terrible occurrences one man has survived is passed from him to a bartender, and then to the narrator. The story that is told within "La agonia de 'La garza'" is a testimonial of sorts, and it takes place in the narrator's coastal village. The victims of its tragic events are black coal-workers whom the narrator knew. Castellanos's literary career, though important, was short; he wrote one collection of short stories and two novels before dying at an early age. Like Castellanos, Hernández Catâ also died prematurely (in an airplane accident), but he left behind a large body of work including plays, essays, and poetry. He was best known, however, for his stories and short novels. His themes included animals, in La casa de las fieras (The house of wild animals), 1922, psychology, in Manicomio (Insane asylum), 1931, and, most importantly, culture, in stories like "Los chinos" (The Chinese), 1923. "Los chinos" was the first story to inscribe Asians into Cuban literature and thereby to document their presence in and contribution to Cuban society and culture. The Chinese were brought to Cuba after 1847 to work in the sugarcane fields and were still employed in this capacity in the 1920s. The Chinese - as well as Haitians and Jamaicans - worked alongside Cuban blacks and mulattos. As was the case with blacks and other slaves, the Chinese were a source of cheap labor

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and were discriminated against and even massacred. Hernández Catá's "Don Cayetano el informal" (The unmannerly Don Cayetano), 1929, is critical of the U.S. presence in Cuba and affirms pride in Cuban nationality. Despite the contributions of Castellanos and Hernández Catâ, a well-defined group of writers did not emerge in Cuba until the period between the mid-1920s and early 1930s, an era of increasing U.S. influence on the island during which that country backed the dictator Machado. The corrupt politics of this historical period are depicted in the literature of the era, as is the people's frustration with this corruption. The intellectual and political fervor of the period was reflected in the Protesta de los Trece, and the Grupo Minorista but also in the pages of Social and the Revista de avance. In the Protesta de los Trece a group of thirteen writers, artists, and lawyers boycotted the Academy of Science to protest the corrupt administration of President Zayas. The Grupo Minorista was a small, elitist group of writers and artists interested in social, political, and cultural problems. Like Castellanos and Hernández Catâ, Luis Felipe Rodriguez also demonstrates a concern for culture and nationality and an opposition to the national state of affairs in his work, thereby providing another dissenting voice. His social and political thematics influenced many writers in succeeding generations. Written during the Machado dictatorship, Rodriguez's La pascua de la tierra natal (Christmas homeland), 1923, and especially his Relatos de Marcos Antilla (Tales of Marcos Antilla), 1932, describe life in the countryside and reveal Cuban reality by portraying the suffering of the farm workers, who were the victims of the socioeconomic and political systems. His stories record the customs and speech of the guajiro (peasant) and turn him into a national symbol. According to Rodriguez, the guajiro and Cuban nationalism are both victims of large landowners and North American companies. "La guardarraya" (Borderline), 1932, takes place in a sugarcane field, and Marcos Antilla witnesses the exploitation of characters similar to those we have seen in Castellanos's and Hernández Catâ's works. In depicting the sufferings of these characters, however, Rodriguez's intent is more political than that of the other two authors. In "La guardarraya," he criticizes Mr. Norton, a representative of the Cubanacán Sugar Company, for not allowing Cubans and Antillean workers to celebrate Christmas Eve. In "El despojo" (The dispossession), 1925, Ramón Iznaga, a veteran of the two wars of independence, is on the verge of being forced to abandon the farm his family had worked for generations when a conflict develops between those who work the land and those who hold deeds to the property. Faced with the possibility of this loss, Iznaga suffers a fatal heart attack and is buried in a public cemetery, which, symbolically, becomes his only plot of land. With Lino Novas Calvo and Alejo Carpentier, Cuban literature in general and the short story in particular reached a milestone. Both Novas Calvo and Carpentier began their literary careers during the Machado dictatorship and published in the Revista de Avance, of which Carpentier was a founding member. Carpentier also joined the Protesta de los Trece and participated in the Grupo Minorista. In 1927 he was imprisoned by Machado's henchmen. El acoso (Manhunt), 1956, is just one of the stories in which Carpentier refers to the Machado years; this story deals specifically with the type of betrayal that often occurs in a politically repressive society. Novas Calvo dealt with this same theme earlier, in "La noche de Ramón Yendfa" (The dark night of Ramón Yendia), 1933. One of Novas Calvo's best works, this story captures the tension of the day after the dictator fled the country. The narrator, Yendfa, who had once helped the revolutionaries, turns informer under police pressure. The narrative is set in what was then the present, and the narrator's flight mirrors that of

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Machado's cronies, who were also being hunted down. The story is ironic in that Yendia thinks himself guilty, but, after his pursuit and death, he is identified as a revolutionary hero. Thus, in "La noche de Ramón Yendía," Novas Calvo demonstrates the extent to which political chaos has become a part of Cuban nationality, and the closing moments of the story suggest both an end to and a continuation of the turmoil in that country. Subsequent events have proved this suggestion to be prophetic. Novas Calvo had already dealt with political themes in a lesser-known story he published in Revista de Occidente in 1932. "Aquella noche salieron los muertos" (That night the dead rose from the grave) is about Captain Amiana's control over a slave colony, his betrayal and death, and the freeing of the slaves. As Lorraine Roses has shown in her Voices of the Storyteller, 1986, the captain, his control over the island, and his death allude to Cuba and the Machado dictatorship. The method used to kill Amiana recalls a failed plot to assassinate Machado that was put into effect the same year the story was written and published. Novas Calvo's best stories were written before the coming to power of the Castro government and the author's subsequent exile. These stories have been compiled in La luna nona y otros cuentos (The ninth moon and other stories), 1942, No sé quien soy (I don't know who I am), 1945, Cayo canas (Palm Key), 1946, and En los traspatios (Between neighbors), 1946. Some of the narratives in these collections eschew the overtly political in order to explore the complexity of Cuban culture. As Hernández Catá had done in "Los chinos," Novas Calvo celebrated Chinese traditions in "La luna nona." In this story he describes the Chinese festival of the ninth moon and reproduces the dialects of this sector of the Cuban population. Like other short-story writers such as Carpentier, Lydia Cabrera, and Rómulo Lachataneré, however, Novas Calvo also had an interest in blacks and in Afro-Cuban culture and religion. This discourse, in general, paralleled an overall trend in the West at that time: the treatment of themes relating to black people and to the black image, as in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance in New York, negritude in Paris, and negrismo in the Hispanic Antilles. But Novas Calvo and the other Cuban writers were also drawing on a strong Cuban literary tradition that began with the nineteenth-century antislavery narrative and continued into the twentieth century with Fernando Ortiz's studies on blacks - such as Hampa afrocubana: Los negros esclavos (Afro-Cuban underworld: the black slaves), 1916 - and the Afro-Cuban poetry movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike the earlier writers, who had incorporated black characters into their works to denounce slavery, these twentieth-century authors wrote about black people within the context of Afro-Cuban culture. In 1931 Novas Calvo published "La cabeza pensante" (A thinking man) in Orbe. This story is about a mulatto woman who uses Afro-Cuban religion to control her husband. But his interest in the Afro-Cuban theme is most visible and best developed in "La luna de los nânigos" (The moon of the nânigos), 1932, a story that describes aspects of Afro-Cuban religion, rituals, and powers. The story depicts the neo-African secret society of the nânigos and shows how white people were attracted to it. The concept of race is transcended when Garrida, a white woman, joins the group and becomes indistinguishable from its members. (In a second version of this story, entitled "En las afueras" [The outskirts], 1942, the Afro-Cuban element is de-emphasized.) The moon in the title is a female symbol and therefore refers to Garrida. The author contrasts the white moon to the dark night, but he also implies that, just as the moon belongs to the night, Garrida belongs to the nânigos. He also draws a contrast between a black woman who kills herself for a white man and the white woman

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who wants to live her life as the Afro-Cubans do. Alejo Carpentier is the best-known and most-studied Cuban author. The collection Guerra del tiempo (War of time), 1958, contains Carpentier's most widely read stories: "El camino de Santiago" (The high road of Santiago), "Viaje a la semilla" (Journey back to the source), and "Semejante a la noche" (Like the night). Carpentier explored the theme of Cuban blacks, their rituals and culture in "El milagro de Anaquillé" (The miracle of Anaquillé), 1927, "La rebambaramba" (The commotion), 1928, "Histoire de lunes" (Tale of moons), 1933, "Viaje a la semilla," 1944, and "Los fugitivos" (The fugitives), 1946. "Viaje a la semilla" is Carpentier's best work of short fiction. In this story, Carpentier juxtaposes the black world to the white, African to European culture, and chronological to mythical time. For the author, the white world is destructive and the black is constructive. At the beginning of the story, white people demolish the house that belongs to Marcial, the Marqués de Capellanías. Later, an old black man - through some act of magic associated with Afro-Cuban religion - sets time marching backward and reconstructs the house and everything else that had been destroyed by time and by humankind. This journey to the source, to which the title refers, is an attempt to negate chronological time, to deny the present and to start anew. The story privileges a beginning over an end, mythical time over chronological time, and African religion and culture over Western culture. To deny the validity of chronological time is to eradicate not only the forces that produced the economic downfall of the Marqués and his and the Marquesa's deaths but also slavery and the colonization of the island. Thus, the journey to the source gives history another chance to redeem itself. Carpentier implies that the second time around, events will unfold differently and more justly: there will be harmony, for instance, between humankind and objects. He also implies, however, that within the context of Cuba and the Caribbean, the African and Western worlds and their religions will always be separate, though they are components of the same culture. In "Viaje a la semilla" and in "Los fugitivos," a story published two years later, there are interactions between human characters and dogs. The relationships between the child Marcial and Canelo, his dog, in the first story and between Cimarrón and Perro in the second (in which Marcial is also present) are, in fact, quite similar; this similarity reflects some overall connections between the two stories. Both of the human-animal pairs distance themselves from civilization and return to an origin: that is, to the natural world and thereby to a time before the presence of Western society. In "Viaje a la semilla," the origin is specifically identified as an Africa before history and the presence of contemporary culture. The two stories also reveal an identification of sorts between humans and animals. In the primitive world described in "Los fugitivos," Cimarrón regresses to an animal (doglike) state. In "Viaje a la semilla" Marcial returns to his childhood and also imitates and acts like his dog. There are many other Cuban short-story writers who merit attention. Of these, Lydia Cabrera is of particular importance. Cabrera was taught by Fernando Ortiz and also lived in Paris during the period when texts dealing with black themes were becoming prevalent. Her works include Cuentos negros de Cuba (Afro-Cuban stories), 1940 - three of which had been published in French translation in 1934 - and Por qué (Why), 1948. Yoruba legends and traditions are inscribed in her stories, which reveal her detailed knowledge of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. Three novelists contemporary with Cabrera also distinguished themselves as short-story writers: Enrique Serpa, Carlos Montenegro, and Enrique Labrador Ruiz. Serpa's works emphasize

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the social and the psychological and include Felisa y yo (Felisa and I), 1937, and Noche de fiesta (Party night), 1951. Montenegro's works focus on freedom and prison, anti-imperialism, and the war of independence. They include El renuevo y otros cuentos (The renewal and other stories), 1929, Dos barcos (Two ships), 1934, and Los héroes (Heroes), 1941. The works of Enrique Labrador Ruiz, the most experimental of the three, highlight aspects of culture and include El gallo en el espejo (The rooster in the mirror), 1953. The most recent event to have a significant effect on Cuban fiction was the Cuban revolution. In general, writers in the new Cuba continued a strong short-story tradition developed mainly by Carpentier and Novas Calvo. Among the first generation of writers to emerge after the revolution, some had already been published, but they received the recognition they deserved only after their works were reedited in the new Cuba. An exception to this rule was Virgilio Piñera, who had achieved literary prominence during the 1940s and 1950s. He had published his Cuentos frios (Cold stories) in 1956 but was better known as a poet and playwright. Other members of this generation include Onelio Jorge Cardoso, who wrote Taita, diga usted cómo (Grandfather, tell us how), 1945, and El cuentero (The storyteller), 1958; and Félix Pita Rodriguez, who wrote Cârcel de fuego (Jail of fire), 1948, and Tobias, 1955. Of the second generation of writers to emerge after the revolution, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Reinaldo Arenas, and Jesus Diaz should be noted. Cuban politics and culture continued to be reflected in the works of many of these writers.

Puerto Rico Puerto Rico has been producing modern short-story writers of note since the first half of the twentieth century, including Tomas Blanco and Emilio S. Beiaval, who wrote Cuentos para formentar el turismo (Stories to promote tourism), 1946. In this collection, Belaval explores the theme of the jíbaro (peasant). But it is after the effects of Operation Bootstrap began to be felt on the island, with the emergence of the Generación del Cuarenta (Generation of the Forties) - which Pedro Juan Soto prefers to call the Generación del Cincuenta (Generation of the Fifties) (Soto [1973]) - that Puerto Rican short narrative developed fully and gained importance. Operation Bootstrap upset the Puerto Rican agricultural economy and forced many people to leave the rural areas for what they hoped would be better-paying urban jobs. As these displaced farm workers migrated to San Juan and, later, to New York City, the Puerto Rican rags-to-riches dream turned into a nightmare as a large portion of the Puerto Rican population either became unemployed or had to assume the lowest-paying jobs. Many of the stories by Generación del Cuarenta writers are told from the perspective of characters who were adversely affected by the so-called Puerto Rican Miracle. The experiences of these characters are based on those of people from the lower socioeconomic levels of society - the poor, uneducated, and marginalized. The authors show how these people - who were supposed to benefit most from the economic changes - instead became victims of society, were destined to suffer. For these characters, pain and personal tragedies are commonplace. The most important work by this generation of writers is contained in Cuentos puertorriqueños de hoy (Today's Puerto Rican short stories), 1959, an anthology edited by René Marqués that gives much-deserved publicity to that generation's most distinguished members: José Luis González, Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, Edwin Figueroa, José Luis Vivas, Salvador M. de Jesus, Pedro Juan Soto, Emilio Díaz Valcárcel, and Marqués himself.

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José Luis Gonzalez is recognized as the pioneer of the Generatión del Cuarenta. His works provide a transition between his generation and the previous one. González published En la sombra (In the shadow) in 1943 and Cuentos de sangre (Blood stories) two years later, when he was still in his early twenties. The stories in these two books depict the suffering inflicted on the campesinos both by nature and by other people. In his later work, however, he abandons the country and describes life in the city, represented by San Juan and New York. His third book, El hombre en la calle (Man in the street), 1948, outlines the Puerto Rican tragedy and signals a new trend in the Puerto Rican short story, moving away from rural themes to urban ones. The title of this book refers to the city and to how "man" - or, more specifically, the marginalized urban dweller - is unprotected, alone, and often living in the streets. "La carta" (The letter), written in 1947 - that is, after Operation Bootstrap was put into effect - portrays the impact of the industrialization process in just a few paragraphs. The protagonist, Juan, has left the countryside for a better life in San Juan. Poorly educated, he writes a letter full of spelling mistakes in which he attempts to convince his mother of his success: according to the letter, he has found a well-paying job that compares favorably in salary to that of the administrator of the sugar mill in his native town. But in reality Juan is unemployed and, after writing the letter, he begs in the street for the money to buy a stamp. In En este lado (On this side), 1954, González continues to explore the theme of Puerto Rican displacement, and, in the process, shows a keener awareness of society and race both inside and outside Puerto Rico. "El pasaje" (The ticket) describes the life of a character named Juan who has emigrated from San Juan to New York. Perhaps he is the same Juan we have seen in "La carta." In "El pasaje," Juan has gotten a job in New York but longs to return to Puerto Rico and, in the meantime, seeks comfort in a bar called La Flor de Borinquen (Borinquen blossom). This name is a symbol of Puerto Rico, the mother, and the womb. Juan's friend Jesus, who does not have a job, is less patient than Juan and wants to return to the island immediately. Jesus robs a delicatessen worker at knife point and is shot to death. The story depicts the tension between a desperate man who wants to go home and the police, who represent law and order. The violence committed by Jesus is displaced to the policemen, who do not consider any options other than shooting him and then smile for a photographer like hunters with a trophy. The fact that this character is named Jesus suggests a religious subtext in which Jesus dies so that other Puerto Ricans - for instance, Juan - can learn from his sufferings. This subtext has further implications when we consider the fact that, in "La carta," Juan was not able to return to his native town for economic and emotional reasons. Ironically, for Jesus himself, Puerto Rico becomes a lost paradise to which there is absolutely no return. "En el fondo del caño hay un negrito" (There is a black boy at the bottom of the channel) is one of González's best stories. In it he describes the forced displacement of the poor from Isla Verde to the banks of the channel and the hunger and pain of one family that has already suffered but that is destined to suffer even more. Melodia, the black-child protagonist, finds relief from his hunger by looking at his own reflection in the water. Later, he attempts to join the reflection and drowns. The story contains some ironic juxtapositions: a caring father walks home to save bus fare but does not arrive in time to save his son; Melodia finds happiness and peace in a relationship with the reflection that results in his death; this peace, in turn, is in sharp contrast to the pain his parents will feel because of his death. If González is the pioneer of the Generatión del Cuarenta, René Marqués is its best-known writer. "El miedo" (Fear), 1948, and the collection Otro dia nuestro (Another one of our days),

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1955, pertain to the political situation of Puerto Rico and its people. Some of these stories are most notable, however, because they exemplify Marqués's fusion of political themes with existential ones. "Otro día nuestro" narrates a day in the life of Albizu Campos, who is under house arrest. Revered by those who oppose him as well as by his followers, Albizu attempts to escape his physical detainment by awaiting death. Marqués draws analogies between this political leader and Christ, comparing their followers, their missions, and their destinies. Marqués's fusion of the political and the existential is most evident in "La muerte" (Death), 1955, as the indecisive protagonist, who lives a stagnant existence, accidentally finds meaning in life when he participates in a student demonstration for the independence of Puerto Rico on Palm Sunday and gets shot after taking the banner from the dying flagbearer. The protagonist is not attracted so much by the political act as by the students' sense of purpose. Marqués juxtaposes the students to the physically stronger, armed police to show that the students are nonetheless superior by virtue of their ideals and their determination. The students and their political act allow the protagonist to undergo a conversion of sorts, one that gives meaning to his life but that is also the cause of his death. Other works by Marqués capture and question cultural values. "Pasión y huida de Juan Santos, Santero" (Passion and escape of Juan Santos, saint worshiper), describes the conflict between popular religion and the presence of a new order. "En la popa hay un cuerpo reclinado" (There is a body leaning on the stern) from En una ciudad llamada San Juan (In a city called San Juan), 1959, is one of his best stories. Here Marqués describes the cultural and sexual differences between a man, his mother, and his wife - that is, between the masculine and feminine worlds. The protagonist's existence is based on his sexual needs, while that of his mother and his wife are based on prestige and material goods. The man finally frees himself by poisoning his wife. A rowboat and its two oars symbolize his desire to control the two women and therefore his own destiny. Throughout the story, however, the protagonist's wife and his mother have castrated him symbolically; in the end, he literally castrates himself, revealing his inability to live independently from the two women. Of the writers of the Generación del Cuarenta, Pedro Juan Soto has been most preoccupied with the presence of Puerto Ricans in New York and has recorded the linguistic phenomenon that stems from the coming together of Spanish and English. Spiks, 1956, whose title is a pejorative term used to describe Puerto Ricans in the United States, contains Soto's best stories. These stories reflect the same migratory pattern to which Soto was exposed as a child, and they often contrast life on the mainland with life on the island. His "Los inocentes" (The innocent) and "La cautiva" (The captive) describe the conflict between old and new values that is a common feature of many immigrant communities. Unlike some other groups, however, Puerto Ricans are tragic figures in regard to their inability to respond effectively to these types of conflicts; for sociopolitical reasons, their integration into mainstream U.S. culture has been more difficult. "Los inocentes" depicts the clash between the traditional and the new values by telling the story of an argument between a mother and daughter over what to do about their mentally retarded brother and son, Pipe. The mother represents the old country, and she wants to care for him. The daughter is a symbol of the new values and prefers to institutionalize him; she is thinking more of herself than of her brother. Soto implies that in the old country the conflict would not have existed and that everyone would have accepted Pipe. In the new environment the old values are denied, and the daughter takes her brother to an institution. Meanwhile, none of the characters consider Pipe's own feelings; only the reader knows that he wants to liberate himself from his own body.

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In "La cautiva" emigration to New York becomes a means of escaping embarrassment when old and new values clash. After Fernanda has an illicit relationship with her brother-in-law, her mother decides to send her away. The tension heightens as Fernanda awaits her lover's farewell. As the plane prepares to depart, she understands that he, like her mother, is there, not to say good-bye, but to make sure she is leaving. The double standard is evident; both Fernanda and her brother-inlaw are guilty, but she is the only one punished. The mother is an accomplice; she will hide this extramarital affair from her other daughter, Inés, leaving her son-in-law free to engage in new romantic attachments. Fernanda, who represents a threat to the old values, is isolated from the family and the island. She has challenged the male-oriented culture that her mother and others are attempting to preserve. Certain U.S. political events and foreign-policy decisions had a profound effect on the work of another important writer, Emilio Díaz Varcârcel. In his short fiction, this author deals with the Puerto Rican participation in the Korean conflict, which proved disastrous for the Puerto Rican soldiers involved. A soldier himself, Díaz Valcárcel relives past experiences in his writings. In fact, the theme of war has been associated mainly with his work, although González writes about Puerto Ricans in Korea as well. In 1955 Díaz Varcárcel gathered previously published war stories in La sangre inutil (The useless blood). His best stories, however, are included in El asedio (The siege), 1958. "El sapo en el espejo" (The toad in the mirror), 1958, tells the story of a Puerto Rican war veteran who has lost his legs and is rejected by his wife. A conflict arises between the protagonist's self-concept and his altered physical appearance. Another conflict is apparent between the way the protagonist views himself and the way his wife has seen him since his injury: although he still considers himself a man, his wife treats him like an animal. In the end, he undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis and turns into a toad, a name his wife often called him. "El soldado Damiân Sanchez" (The soldier Damiân Sanchez), 1956, takes place on the battlefield and examines the isolation the protagonist feels among U.S. soldiers. Damiân experiences a type of double jeopardy: he has to deal both with the war and with the prejudice of his fellow soldiers. The latter affects him more intensely and provokes him to attack and injure his only friend, Kim Wan, a Korean American who has proven himself to Damiân and other Puerto Ricans by saving many of their lives. The war, but also the prejudice against him, pushes Damiân to the breaking point and he is faced with the possibility of being court martialed. The success of the writers of the Generación del Cuarenta opened the door for a younger generation of Puerto Rican writers, who felt a similar need to explore social and political themes. This group is represented in Apalabramiento (Verbal agreement) and Reunión de espejos (Gathering of mirrors), two anthologies published in 1983 and edited by Efraín Barradas and José Luis Vega, respectively. Luis Rafael Sánchez is the best-known writer of the boom period, which is analyzed by Gustavo Pellón in the article following this one. He was the initiator of this group of writers, providing a thematic link between the previous generation and the experimental techniques associated with his contemporaries. Sánchez wrote En cuerpo de camisa (In the body of a shirt), 1966, his only short-story collection, but is better known for his La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho's beat), 1976, one of the best Puerto Rican novels of this century; for his play Quintuples (Quintuplets), 1985; and for the novel La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (The importance of being named Daniel Santos), 1988. Like many Puerto Rican writers, Sánchez is concerned with political, cultural, and social themes. He uses contemporary techniques such as linguistic experi-

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mentation and the fragmenting of time and narrative to explore them, thereby capturing aspects of popular culture and language. In "Etc." Sánchez questions male culture and reveals the other side of the coin. The macho protagonist is on the street corner hunting women while his wife is sleeping with other men. Sánchez's story brings to mind the feminine and feminist themes explored by the group of women writers whose collective presence is the most significant aspect of this generation. These women writers are socially committed, but unlike the writers of the previous generation, their perspective is not directly associated with Operation Bootstrap. Their political awareness was brought about by the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, and by the civil rights and women's movements in the United States. It was further influenced by the Cuban revolution and its significance in the Caribbean and in the rest of Latin America. This group has already produced two important writers: Ana Lydia Vega and Rosario Ferré. The influence of the Cuban revolution is most evident in Vega's "Encancaranublado" (Cloud cover Caribbean), which won the Casa de las Américas short-story prize for 1982 as well as the P.E.N. Club of Puerto Rico award for 1983. Like some of Rodríguez's and Hernández Catá's stories, Vega's book includes characters from many Antillean countries; Haitians, Dominicans, and Jamaicans as well as Puerto Ricans and Cubans appear in this collection. "Encancaranublado" expresses an anti-imperialistic point of view and describes the hunger, poverty, and oppression suffered by Antillean people in general. Her most recent, "Kembé" (Kembé), 1983, manifests a similar pan-Caribbean awareness; it is based on the 1981 Haitian uprising in Puerto Rico against U.S. prison authorities. Another important characteristic of works by the contemporary women writers is their description of Puerto Rican culture from a female point of view. This perspective is an outgrowth of Puerto Rican contact with North American culture in general and the women's movement in North America in particular. In the women writers' stories, the ideas derived from this contact are appropriately applied to Puerto Rican society and used to challenge a male-dominated culture. Vega's "Letras para salsa y tres soneros por encargo" (Salsa words and three son singers by request), in Vírgenes y mârtires (Virgins and martyrs), 1981, demystifies and undermines the male and his ego. The unwavering Puerto Rican male, always looking for a woman, finds one who accepts his offer, and he finally meets his match. The story reveals that beneath the man's clichés lies a fragile individual who is incapable of performing sexually. In the end, he is more talk than action. By capturing the male language, Vega reveals its humor but also its emptiness. Ferré has been the most prolific woman writer of her generation, publishing Papeles de Pandora (Pandora papers), El medio pollito (One half chicken), and Siete cuentos infantiles (Seven childrens' stories), in 1976; La caja de cristal (The crystal box) in 1978; Sitio a Eros (A place for Eros) in 1980; Los cuentos de Juan Bobo (Stories of Juan Bobo) and La mona que le pisaron la cola (The monkey whose tail was stepped on) in 1981; and Fábulas de la garza desangrada (Fables of the bleeding heron) in 1982. A sometime writer of children's stories, Ferré's concerns are distinctly feminine and feminist. Her "Pico Rico Mandorico" (Pico Rico Mandorico), 1981, is about childhood and has a fablelike quality; it features twin sisters, a caballero with a long nose, a poison fruit, sickness, love, bravery, deception, salvation, a sisterly kiss, and rhymes. There is even a moral: the twin sisters promise to stay together always. Ferré's "El regalo" (The gift), 1981, which is not a children's story, is an overt critique of the social, educational, and religious values of society in the

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Hispanic Antilles and, more particularly, in Puerto Rico. The setting is the School of the Sacred Heart, a religious school for the children of the well-to-do. For economic reasons, the school opens its doors to the nouveau riche and thereby to outside influences. The control the nuns have over the students, which stifles individual expression, is challenged by Carlotta, a new student - both poor and mulata in an elitist environment - who has strong ties to the outside world. After she is selected to be the queen of the carnival, she is expelled from school. Mercedita, the richest and most prominent student, decides to leave with her, thus abandoning the awards and prizes she was to receive at graduation. For Mercedita, Carlotta represents friendship and, most importantly, a physical and spiritual liberation. The mango Carlotta gives Mercedita is a symbol of nature and beauty that, as it rots, represents the corrupting values of the school as well as the heart of the mother superior. The experimentation associated with the novel of the boom period, of which Sánchez's work is an important example, can also be seen in short stories by writers such as Manuel Ramos Otero and Tomas López Ramirez. The first collections by both authors came out in 1971: Ramos Otero published his Concierto de metal para un recuerdo y otras orgías de soledad (Remembrance of a metal concert and other lonely orgies) and López Ramirez published his Cordial magia enemiga (Cordial enemy magic). Both works distance themselves from the social concerns of Generación del Cuarenta writers and pay more attention to form and structure. The characteristics present in these earlier works are also evident in Ramos Otero's El cuento de la mujer del mar (The story of the sea woman), 1979, and Página en blanco y staccato (Blank and staccato page), 1987. A story typical of these collections is Ramos Otero's "Hollywood memorabilia" (in Concierto de metal [Metal concert]), 1971, the ending of which recalls Cortâzar's "Las babas del diablo" (Blowup), 1959, in the way it fuses image with reality when the projectionist is transformed into another image on the movie screen. In Ramos Otero's story, everything is an illusion: the screen, the projectionist's life, and even his death. Like the women writers, Ramos Otero is challenging the boundaries of Puerto Rican literature and culture by writing from an emerging perspective; he offers a homosexual point of view. His "Vida ejemplar del esclavo y el senor" (The model life of the slave and his master), 1975, is innovative in theme and language. Paragraphs containing a third-person narration are juxtaposed with those in the first person, and there is little regard for punctuation. Most importantly, the story explicitly describes a homosexual relationship between two men, raising questions of interdependence between slave and master and between the elements of reality and fiction present in the story. References to homosexuality also appear in Ramos Otero's "Pagina en blanco y staccato." The protagonist, Sam Fat, a detective, participates in homosexual acts. This story is also representative of the cultural blend contained in the works by authors of Antillean ancestry who were either born or raised in New York and who contribute to the body of island literature that is written in the United States. "Página en blanco y staccato," which mixes allusions to stories by Borges and Cortázar with references to Charlie Chan films, reflects important aspects of this literature. If the Caribbean itself was once a region characterized by migration between islands and by an overall fusion of many cultures, in recent decades New York City has become a new setting in which different Antillean cultures have come together. Sam Fat is himself an example of this cultural fusion; he is the son of a dark-skinned Puerto Rican woman and a Chinese exile from Shanghai. Fat is dark-skinned and a follower of Afro-Antillean religion. He was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and part of the story takes places there, but parts are also set in Chinatown and Puerto Rico.

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Given the presence of Sánchez, Ramos Otero, Lápez Ramirez, Vega, Ferré, and others, we can expect Puerto Rican writers to occupy an important place in Antillean and Spanish-American literatures in the 1990s. Indeed, Puerto Rican narrative has come into its own.

The Dominican Republic The 1916 U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic had a lasting effect on many Dominican intellectuals. And, as was the case with the Machado dictatorship in Cuba, events associated with Trujillo's rule had a strong impact on the themes developed in the Dominican short story. Immediately after Trujillo's death, a younger generation of writers emerged, whose principle concern was to document the opposition to the dictator. A few years later, politics continued to influence literature. In 1963 Juan Bosch was elected president of the republic, but was deposed the same year by the local oligarchy. This precipitated a civil war, followed in turn by the 1965 U.S. invasion. The presence of U.S. Marines in the Dominican Republic stimulated strong sentiments against the U.S. government and provided further material for Dominican short-story writers. Fabio Fiallo laid the foundation for the development of the Dominican short story with his Las manzanas del Mefisto y cuentos fragiles (Mephisto's apples and fragile stories), 1934, but Juan Bosch gave it international recognition. Bosch, in fact, is the best-known Dominican author. The course of Bosch's literary career was strongly influenced by the Trujillo dictatorship: he published his first collection of stories, Camino real (Royal path), in 1933, three years after Trujillo came to power, and in 1936 he was forced into exile. By his own admission, Bosch did not consider himself in control of the short-story form until "El río y su enemigo" (The river and its enemy), written in 1947, that is, eleven years after his exile. Bosch believed he gained maturity in exile and learned to make important transitions by substituting words for the asterisks he once placed in the text. In 1962 he published Cuentos escritos en el exilio (Stories written in exile); in 1964, Mas cuentos escritos en el exilio (More stories written in exile); in 1966, Otros cuentos escritos en el exilio (Other stories written in exile); and in 1974, Cuentos escritos antes del exilio (Stories written before exile). Not unlike some of the early twentieth-century Antillean writers discussed here, Bosch concentrated on rural culture and identity, that is, on nature and on the peasants' customs, dialects, problems, and values. In Bosch's work - as in that of the Puerto Rican Generación del Cuarenta writers - the country people are tragic figures, victims of circumstance. Bosch's "La desgracia" (The misfortune), 1962, best describes the harsh life in rural areas of the Dominican Republic, where, as in the Puerto Rico of Pedro Juan Soto's work, traditional values and pride are more important than family relationships. In this story, Magina's premonition is realized during a stormy day, when Nicasio, seeking shelter from the rain, discovers that his daughter is being unfaithful to her husband. His rejection of her and her subsequent death are less significant to him than the burden of knowing what his daughter has done. Thus, Bosch shows how male-dominated culture and society demands submission from all; it offers no escape from punishment for those who challenge its dictates, even if the person bound to mete out punishment is a member of the offender's own family. "La mujer" (The woman), 1933, is one of Bosch's most striking stories. In it nature conspires against humankind. Death is everywhere; ultimately the sun and the road conquer all. Nature is at

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its cruelest in Bosch's "Dos pesos de agua" (Two pesos worth of water), 1941, a story about poor people who live on hope and prayer. After experiencing a period of drought, Remigia buys two pesos worth of candles and prays for rain. The souls of the dead finally hear her prayer and send her two pesos worth of rain, which turns out to be enough to inundate the countryside. Prayer does not save Remigia; on the contrary, it provokes a disaster, proving that even nature plots against the poor. In "La bella alma de don Darnian" (Don Darnian's beautiful soul), 1955, Bosch abandons social themes and constructs a tale even more fantastic than "Dos pesos de agua." After Don Darnian dies, his spirit witnesses the reaction of those who claimed he had a beautiful soul but who really only wanted his money. They include his wife, who married him for money; the priest, who wanted money for his church; and even the doctor, who saved his life but knew he would be handsomely rewarded. In reality, Don Darnian has an ugly soul that resembles an octopus with one eye. He was a rich and merciless individual who took advantage of the less fortunate. His numerous tentacles represent his greed, a characteristic shared by those who are concerned about his death. Other writers of Bosch's generation have also played an important role in the development of Dominican narrative. For instance, Sócrates Nolasco is one of the main pillars of the Dominican short story. His important works include Cuentos del sur (Stories from the south), 1939, Cuentos cimarrones (Runaway slave stories), 1958, and El diablo ronda en los Guayacanes (The devil roams in the Guaiacols), 1967. Nolasco's stories are characterized by rural settings; they incorporate aspects of oral tradition. Like other Antillean literatures, Dominican narrative incorporates references to African culture. "Ma Paula se fue del mundo" (Ma Paula left the earth), 1967, is about the presence of Haitian and African cultures in the Dominican Republic. In this story, Nolasco recounts the folklore surrounding Ma Paula - who died at the age of 120 - including the events that took place before and after she was converted from African religion to Christianity. This narration of the events in one community's memory also allows for a depiction of the overall differences between Christians and Haitian and Dominican adherents of Afroantillean religion - differences that are somewhat reminiscent of the cultural and religious conflicts between Spaniards and Amerindians during the conquest or those between Christians and Moors during the reconquest of Spain. In spite of Bosch's exile status, he refrained from incorporating political messages into his stories, preferring to express these ideas in essays. This was not the case with the generation of Dominican writers that began publishing in the 1960s; its members were more directly affected by the political situation in their country. Some of these writers, like Miguel Alfonseca, were arrested and imprisoned during the Trujillo years. Because of the increased influence of politics on Dominican writers, during the period in which Alfonseca's generation emerged, an increasing number of authors, regardless of sex or age, used their work to reconstruct the struggle to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship. This is the case in the works of Hilma Contreras, the first contemporary Dominican woman writer, whose works include Doña Endrina de Calatayud (Dona Endrina of Calatayud), Cuatro cuentos (Four stories), 1953, and El ojo de Dios (God's eye), 1962. Her "Rebeldes" (Rebels), 1962, depicts a town's dissatisfaction with their present condition and, consequently, the slow but inevitable collaboration of all the townspeople - including peasants and children - with the guerrilla groups. The short story takes a different direction with writers such as Virgilio Diaz Grullón, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, and René del Risco. These authors continue to denounce the Trujillo dictatorship,

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but they do so by paying more attention to experimentation with form. Influenced by Bosch but also by contemporary Spanish-American writers of the boom period, their narratives are never told from just one point of view; instead they shift perspective and include first- , second- , and third-person narration so as to highlight the totality and complexity of the story being related. The use of multiple perspectives is exemplified in the work of Díaz Grullón, who has published Un día cualquiera (Any day), 1958, Crónica de Altocerro (Chronicle of Altocerro), 1966, Más allá del espejo (Beyond the mirror), 1975, and De ninos, hombres y fantasmas (Of boys, men, and ghosts), 1981. His "Crónica policial" (Police chronicle), 1981, describes a journalist's investigation of a murder, which he cannot resolve to his satisfaction. Everyone he interviews gives him a different interpretation of who is the guilty party. All the stories are credible, and, confused, he never writes his article. It appears that, in general, Díaz Grullón preferred fiction to essays or articles, a preference that may be explained by the fact that the last two forms are limited to expressing one point of view. Díaz Grullón's "A través del muro" (Through the wall), 1981, continues a concern for political themes in fiction as he explores the psyche of an antigovernment rebel who struggles with himself, not only to tame his thirst for water, but to resolve the conflict between political theory and practice. The wall between these last two entities is broken down, not by political ideology, but by human feelings. This aspect of humanity is undermined, however, when voices representing the military falsely accuse a woman of killing a child. Veloz Maggiolo, one of the most visible writers of his generation, has published four novels and two collections of stories, La vida no tiene nombre (Life has no name), 1963, and El coronel Buenrostro (Colonel Fineface), 1982. His "El coronel Buenrostro," a story with three narrators, deals with dissension in the ranks of the military. Captain Monsanto, a hero who has succeeded in defeating the guerillas, discovers some of the atrocities that have been committed by the army. As a consequence, Monsanto is first falsely accused of attempting to take power away from his colonel who, in reality, is a coward - and then is declared dead to cover up what he has discovered. René del Risco, who was jailed by Trujillo's henchmen, published Viento frío (Cold wind) and Del júbilo a la sangre (From joy to blood), both in 1967, and En el barrio no hay banderas (There aren't any flags in the neighborhood), 1974. In "La noche se pone grande, muy grande" (The night gets big, very big), 1981, he fuses two moments: as a youngster, the protagonist seeks revenge on an opponent stronger and heavier than he; later, as a guerrilla, the protagonist participates in another fight with a more difficult adversary, the military. One struggle recalls the other. In both, the protagonist becomes involved to show his courage: at the cost of pain in the first instance and at the cost of his life in the second. Certainly one of Del Risco's best stories, it is written in the second person, and it mixes past thoughts with present ones, a diary with a song. Del Risco's "Ahora que vuelvo, Ton" (Ton, now that I have returned), 1974, is less political and more existential. The interior monologue is initiated when the protagonist sees his friend, recalls their past, and notices that their lives have taken different paths: one (the protagonist) is a doctor who is married to an Italian and lives in Europe; the other is a shoe shiner who has remained at home. After his wife leaves, the doctor undergoes a romantic conversion. He wants his past and friends back, but he recognizes that he cannot return to his hometown and his past. He is alone with his thoughts, belonging to neither world. The events associated with the 1965 U.S. invasion have become a part of Dominican literature, particularly in the work of writers who began publishing after the Trujillo dictatorship. The writers

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of the 1960s, including René del Risco, Antonio Lockward Artiles, Miguel Alfonseca, and Enriquillo Sánchez, are coming into their own. One of the most moving accounts to come from this group of writers is contained in Miguel Alfonseca's "Los trajes blancos han vuelto" (The white suits have returned), 1969. In this story, Alfonseca employs stream-of-consciousness, second-person narration. The protagonist is a witness to the U.S. presence in his country, as it is represented by the white suits of the Marines. The present resembles the past; the protagonist recalls his participation in the movement against the Trujillo dictatorship and his subsequent torture, the events after the overthrow of President Bosch, and the Marine invasion. For the protagonist, looking forward is the same as looking back. Writers who started their careers in the late 1970s have had little impact outside the Dominican Republic. Some of these authors include Diógenes Valdez, Roberto Marcalle Abreu, and Pedro Peix. The political and economic disturbances in all three countries have, to some extent, produced an Antillean literature of exile. For example, Carpentier lived and wrote in Paris, and during the Batista dictatorship he lived in Venezuela. Younger Cuban writers such as Lisandro Otero, Pablo Armando Fernández, and Edmundo Desnoes began their literary careers abroad in the 1950s, prior to the Cuban revolution. After the revolutionary government came to power still others - like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, César Leante, and Antonio Benftez Rojo left Castro's Cuba in order to live and publish outside that country. The growing body of Cuban literature written in exile compares favorably to what is being written on the island. Similarly, during the Trujillo years poet and novelist Pedro Mir, as well as Juan Bosch, was forced to live and write outside the Dominican Republic. As we have seen, the impact of exile on Bosch extends even to the titles of his works. Other writers such as Díaz Grullón, René del Risco, Antonio Lockward Artiles, and Miguel Alfonseca openly opposed the Trujillo tyranny and, by being imprisoned, were forced into an internal exile of sorts. As opposition writers, they either disguised their characters and plots, remained silent, or wrote manuscripts that only surfaced after that dictator's death. Because he is a Marxist, José Luis Gonzalez has been denied entry to the United States and reentry to Puerto Rico for many years, and he still lives in Mexico. Other Puerto Rican writers, for reasons that may be largely economic, have chosen to live in self-imposed exile, making frequent trips to New York and other U.S. cities. In fact, given the political status of Puerto Rico, it is possible to claim that Puerto Ricans are foreigners in their own country and that this is also a kind of (internal) exile. Be that as it may, there exist two Puerto Rican literatures, one written on the island and the other written mainly in English in the United States. (See the essay by E. Barradas above.) Through their works, the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican short-story writers discussed here - and others that space did not permit us to consider - have provided insights on life in the Hispanic Antilles. These writers have helped further an understanding of the political, literary, and cultural processes at work in the three societies that constitute the angles of the Antillean triangle.

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Bibliography Barradas, Efraín, ed. 1983. Apalabramiento. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte. (This anthology of the most recent Puerto Rican short-story writers contains a useful introduction. Barradas includes stories by Luis Rafael Sánchez, Ana Lydia Vega, Tomas López Ramirez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Magali Garcia Ramís, Juan Antonio Ramos, Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz, Manuel Abreu Adorno, Rosario Ferré, and Carmen Lugo Filippi.) Berroa, Rei, ed. 1988. La literatura dominicana siglo veinte. Revista iberoamericana. 54.142. (This important special issue of Revista Iberoamericana centers on Dominican literature and offers essays on some of the most significant Dominican writers.) Bueno, Salvador. 1953. Antologia del cuento en Cuba: 1902-1952. Havana: Dirección de Cultura del Ministero de Educación. (Possibly the best anthology of Cuban short stories prior to the revolution. It includes all major writers and their representative works and provides a useful introduction and biobibliographies.) —, ed. 1963. Historia de la literatura cubana. Havana: Editorial del Ministerio de Educación. (This useful history discusses literature in Cuba from its inception to 1958.) —. 1977. Cuentos cubanos del siglo XX. Havana: Huracán. (This anthology offers a selection of Cuban short stories written prior to the revolution, but it omits works by Lino Novas Calvo.) Cartagena, Aida, ed. 1969. Narradores dominicanos: Antologia. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores. (A very good anthology of Dominican short fiction.) Colón Zayas, Eliseo, ed. 1984. Literatura del Caribe, antologia: siglos XIX y XX. Madrid: Editorial Playor. (This useful anthology of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican literature is divided by country and genre.) El cuento puertorriqueno en el siglo XX. 1963. Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria. (This collection includes essays on René Marqués, Enrique Laguerre, Tomas Blanco, and José Luis Vivas Maldonado.) González Echevarría, Roberto. 1977. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. (This study is one of the best works on this important Cuban writer.) Henriquez Urena, Max. 1966. Panorama histórico de la literatura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Colección Pensamiento Dominicano. (This is an important history of Dominican literature.) —. 1979. Panorama histórico de la literatura cubana. Vol. 2. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura. (This history of Cuban literature is divided into periods, themes, and authors.) Inchaústegui Cabrai, Hector. 1968. De literatura dominicana siglo veinte. Santo Domingo: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (Essays and letters by this important critic are collected here.) Lazo, Raimundo. 1965. La literatura cubana. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de México. (This literary history from the discovery to the early years of the Cuban revolution is divided into periods, themes, and authors.) Manrique Cabrera, Francisco. 1969. Historia de la literatura puertorriquena. Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural. (This work traces Puerto Rican literature from the fifteenth century to the 1950s and divides it into periods and genres.) Marqués, René, ed. 1968. Cuentos puertorriquenos de hoy. Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural. (This is the best collection of short stories by the Generación del Cuarenta. Marqués's introduction places these authors within the context of an overall Puerto Rican literary tradition.) Meléndez, Concha. 1961. El arte del cuento en Puerto Rico. New York: Las Américas. (This essential work traces the evolution of the short story in Puerto Rico.) Müller-Bergh, Klaus, ed. 1972. Asedios a Carpentier. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria. (This collection includes essays on many of Carpentier's short stories.) Nolasco, Sócrates, ed. 1957. El cuento en Santo Domingo: Selección antológica. Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic: Librería Dominicana. (This was one of the first collections of Dominican short stories.) Peterson, Vernon L. 1986. Idea y representación literaria en la narrativa de René Marqués. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos. (This book highlights Marqués's narratives.) Pina Contrera, Guillermo. 1982. Doce en la literatura dominicana. Santiago, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (This book contains interviews with twelve important Dominican writers of dif-

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ferent generations including Bosch, Mir, and Veloz Maggiolo. The introduction provides a chronology of Dominican literature with commentary.) Pupo-Walker, Enrique, ed. 1973. El cuento hispanoamericano ante la crítica. Madrid: Castalia. (Good essays on the short story.) Quiles de la Luz, Lillian. 1968. El cuento en la literatura puertorriqueña. Río Piedras: Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico. (This 1965 doctoral dissertation discusses the Puerto Rican short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It includes a bibliography of the short story from 1843 to 1963.) Roses, Lorraine Elena. 1986. Voices of the Storyteller: Cuba's Lino Novas Calvo. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. (This is the most recent work on Novas Calvo, but it excludes his El negrero.) Soto, Pedro Juan. 1973. A solas con Pedro Juan Soto. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto. (Soto interviews himself and discusses his experiences at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo as well as the presence of Puerto Ricans in the United States. He also provides useful information about his life and works.) Souza, Raymond. 1981. Lino Novas Calvo. Boston: Twayne Publishers. (This is a useful book on Novas Calvo's life and works.) Vega, José Luis. 1983. Reunión de espejos. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural. (To the writers included in Barradas's anthology, Vega adds Carmelo Rodriguez Torres, Angel M. Encarnación, and Mayra Montero.)

The Caribbean's Contribution to the Boom

GUSTAVO PELLÓN

University of Virginia

The Boom At no time since the period of the discovery and colonization of the Americas has the Caribbean played as important a political and cultural role as it did in the decade of the 1960s. In politics and in literature Latin America finally seemed to have come of age. In politics this coming of age was signalled by the Cuban revolution of 1959, while in literature it was demonstrated by the decadelong flourishing of experimental narrative that became known as the boom of the Latin-American novel. Just as the Cuban revolution held out the promise of a political break with the past and the possibility of writing a new history for the Americas, the writers of the boom: Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), Julio Cortázar (Argentina), José Donoso (Chile), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Colombia), José Lezama Lima (Cuba), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), and Severe Sarduy (Cuba) sought to arrive at a new definition of Latin-American identity by exploring cultural and historical myths. Their fresh vision and innovative use of language and narrative techniques shifted the literature of Latin America from a peripheral position to the center of world literature. Furthermore, in a very real sense the boom is the movement that actually founds Latin-American literature as such. José Donoso, himself a boom writer, has explained that before the boom there was no true Latin-American literature because works were rarely distributed and read outside the individual countries. Writers and readers thought primarily in terms of Argentine, Mexican, or Cuban literature, but seldom in terms of Latin America. As Donoso points out, this was as much due to an attitude as to the lack of communication caused by the limitations of national publishers. It was far easier to obtain the works of European or North American writers than those written and published in another Latin-American country (Donoso [1984], 18-37). The fact that the aesthetic and sociohistorical program of the writers of the boom had European and North American models seems to indicate more of a continuation of cultural dependence (along the lines of Rubén Darío and the modernistas) than any true break with past cultural relations. However, the predominant influence of two writers, James Joyce and William Faulkner, reveals an important new tendency. The writers of the boom were attracted to the work of Joyce and Faulkner not only because of the dazzling prestige of their narrative sophistication, but also because of shared sociohistorical concerns. Joyce's attempt to express his Irishness in the language of the English oppressor, and Faulkner's attempt to come to grips with a history of racial hatred, civil war, defeat, and moral decay in the South spoke to many of the issues the writers of the boom wanted to address in their works. Thus although they learned from all the prestigious modernist writers of Europe and

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the United States, it is significant that they accorded a privileged position to two writers who were initially marginal to the cultures that eventually came to lionize them.

Political and Cultural Importance of the Caribbean to the Boom Although the boom is anything but a regional literary movement, the Caribbean for several reasons played a crucial role in its development. In terms of authors, the Caribbean contributes the novelist no one would leave out of a list of boom writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although a Colombian, Garcia Marquez is from the Caribbean coast and his work is consciously grounded in Caribbean history and culture. Despite the fact that important novels appear in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic during the 1960s and early 1970s (for a discussion of the Puerto Rican novel see Rodriguez-Luis, for a discussion of the Dominican novel see Rosario Candelier), none gain much readership beyond their own countries nor are their authors considered part of the boom. Puerto Rico, however, joins the ranks of the Post-boom with Luis Rafael Sánchez. The rest of the Caribbean's contribution to the movement comes from Cuba. Two important pre-boom Cuban authors, Carpentier and Lezama Lima, are subsequently absorbed by the boom (as happened with the Argentine Borges and the Mexican Rulfo) and Cabrera Infante and Sarduy make important contributions. Cuba also contributes a historical, political, and cultural event that has major ideological and practical repercussions on the development and eventually on the dissolution of the boom, the Cuban revolution. The Cuban revolution and the hope that other Latin-American countries might soon join this "first free territory of America" (as the revolution's slogan put it) was an important contributor of ideological cohesion for the writers of the boom. Through the founding of the cultural agency Casa de las Américas, its journal the Revista de la Casa de las Américas, book awards, and publishing efforts directed at Latin America at large, Cuba made a strong bid for the cultural leadership of Latin America. The ideological solidarity of a majority of Latin-American intellectuals was further strengthened by the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs (1961) and the Missile Crisis (1962), before it was splintered by Cuba's endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), and by the increased repression of dissidents. That repression by the Cuban regime became a matter of record with the forced public "confession" of the poet Heberto Padilla (1971).

Alejo Carpentier and the "marvellous real" Aside from narrative experimentation, the concept most associated with the boom is "magical realism." What that term usually denotes in the context of Latin-American literature is the very influential definition of Latin-American reality expressed by Alejo Carpentier in his prologue to El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world), 1949. Although Carpentier's term for this singular Latin-American perception of reality lo real maravilloso (the marvellous real) is nowadays used interchangeably with "magical realism," the latter is a less specific term that denotes the presence of magic or the supernatural in an otherwise realistic narrative, as in Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Carpentier's "marvellous real" is specifically tied to a non-European, primitive perception of reality

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grounded in an Afro-American and Amerindian acceptance of magic and the supernatural as part of human experience. One critic has argued that actually both techniques appear in Carpentier's work, one "of attributing 'marvelousness' to certain aspects of the real," and another that "incorporates a genuine element of fantasy," (Shaw [1985], 22). In Carpentier's original formulation lo real maravilloso was seen as a natural expression of what the surrealist project sought to recreate artificially. This discovery had enormous personal significance for Carpentier and is a milestone in his lifelong tug-of-war between the allure of the European avant-garde and the constant rediscovery that, after all, the answers were always to be found at home in American culture and history. This counterpoint, which underlies a great part of Carpentier's literary production, is clearly seen in Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps), 1953, where the weary Latin-American world traveller encounters three young Latin-American artists trying to make their way to Europe in order to learn the art that (only after many years of travel, work, and disappointment) they will realize was always and really only at home. The counterpoint reappears in El recurs o del método (Reasons of state), 1974, with the pleasure-seeking dictator always divided by wanting to be "here" (Paris) and needing to be "there" (his Latin-American country), usually to put down an uprising. Last of all, La consagración de la primavera (The rite of spring), 1978, repeats and corrects the frustrating experience of Los pasos perdidos. The narrator of Los pasos perdidos finally finds the inspiration needed to compose his unfinished piece based on Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" in a native threnody heard in the South American jungle where there is no paper to write it and no one to perform it. He leaves the jungle with the intention of settling the affairs of his former life in New York and returning with adequate supplies to compose the masterpiece that will justify his existence, only to discover that he cannot find his way back to the utopian village. La consagración de la primavera in a sense rewrites the pessimistic and alienated Los pasos perdidos. The apolitical Russian émigré ballet dancer Vera, after being out of step with history all her life (because she flees from the truth of revolution), does find her lost steps. The inspiration for an authentic choreography of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," which has been haunting and eluding her for a lifetime, finally comes to her in the truly primitive power of Afro-Cuban dance. Again, as in Los pasos perdidos, only America offers the means to fulfill a European project. The European choreography of Nijinsky, according to Vera, is literally out of step with Stravinsky's primeval score, which attempts to present the elemental in man. By coming to Cuba, Vera is able to retrace the lost steps of European civilization and gain access to the creativity of primeval culture. Unlike the socially and artistically alienated narrator of Los pasos perdidos, Vera finds both artistic inspiration and human and political solidarity in the Cuban revolution, and the novel ends with plans being made for a performance of her Afro-Cuban choreography of "The Rite of Spring" in the aftermath of the victory at the Bay of Pigs. The counterpoint between European culture, rich but decadent and unable to restore its connection to the primal sources of creation, and Latin-American culture, still undeveloped but in touch with the primal essence of mankind, is at the heart of Carpentier's lo real maravilloso. Grounded as it is in a lifelong meditation of European-American cultural relations, Carpentier's is a less fuzzy concept than "magical realism." The ease with which "magical realism" can be applied to works as disparate as those of a school of German Romantic painters, Kafka, Miguel Angel Asturias, Borges, Carpentier, and Garcia Marquez should be enough to rouse suspicion. Nevertheless the term "magical realism" (at best expanded to include Carpentier's lo real maravilloso and at worst a catch-all label mindlessly used to market Latin-American novels) has stuck and has been promoted as characteristic of the Latin-American Weltanschauung.

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As explanations of Caribbean and more broadly of Latin-American reality neither term can escape a central paradox. They are definitions of Latin-Americanness that cater to a long-established Western taste and need for exoticism. Furthermore, as González Echevarría has pointed out, Carpentier's discovery of lo real maravilloso necessarily entails his inability to participate in that American outlook since it is only by virtue of his European vision (and lack of faith in magic) that he can describe this cultural difference (González Echevarría [1977], 125-26). Carpentier cannot experience "the American marvellous real" firsthand precisely because he perceives it as "marvellous" rather than simply "real." This distinction becomes very clear if one thinks of the way someone like Esteban Montejo, the ex-slave interviewed by Miguel Barnet for his Biografia de un cimarrón (Autobiography of a runaway slave), 1966, talks about what we call magic. His allusions to what for us is the supernatural are disconcerting because of the stark banality with which he reports them, and doubly disconcerting because, unlike their representation in Carpentier or Garcia Marquez, there is no trace of either artistic intent, distance, or humor. After El reino de este mundo the marvellous real does not play much of a role in Carpentier's works. It may very well be that, aware of the paradox of his European-American double vision, he realized the limitations of lo real maravilloso as a mode of writing. Instead he chose the more authentic (and more autobiographical) voice of a Latin American trained to see things as a European who rediscovers an American way of looking at things. Carpentier cannot be Ti Noel or Mackandal in El reino de este mundo but he can be the existentialist protagonist of Los pasos perdidos and Enrique and Vera in La consagración de la primavera. Ultimately lo real maravilloso in his work becomes a stepping-stone to establish a cultural symbiosis between America and Europe. As the case of Vera illustrates, the authentic choreography of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" can only develop in the counterpoint between the primitive knowledge and energy of the Afro-Cuban dancers and Vera's classical ballet training and the discipline she imposes on these "natural" dancers. Carpentier's message is clear: artistic authenticity can come to fruition only through the personal and political authenticity made available to Vera by the Cuban revolution. Regardless of the fate of the "marvellous real" and "magical realism" in Carpentier's own novels, the concepts (usually under the term "magical realism") acquire a life of their own during the boom.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Caribbean Becomes the World Cien años de soledad (One hundred years of solitude), 1967, is the best-selling novel that gave resonance to the boom beyond the international academic and literary set. Synonymous with the movement, this novel is paradoxically devoid of the Joycean and Faulknerian narrative experimentation (and difficulty) that is the hallmark of the other great boom novels: Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch), 1963, Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The death of Artemio Cruz), 1962, Lezama's Paradiso (Paradiso), 1966, and Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (The green house), 1966. It is also the paradigmatic novel of "magical realism." Narrated in a limpid prose that has made it accessible to a wider public than any other boom novel, it has elicited equally the admiration of novelists and critics. The novel's "magical realism," which has its roots in oral narrative traditions of the Colombian Caribbean coast, covers practically

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every phenomenon usually grouped under that label. According to Garcia Marquez, the tone for writing Cien años de soledad comes from his grandmother's practice of telling the most incredible stories with a totally straight face and the confirmation comes from Kafka's "Metamorphosis," which proved that this could be done in literature (Mendoza-García Marquez [1982], 41). In part, therefore, Garcia Marquez's "magical realism" is the result of a systematized use and refinement of the technique of the mamador de gallo (the teller of tall tales) but it also embraces the empirically demonstrable exuberance of nature in the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as the recounting of true historical episodes that defy belief: the "banana fever" of the first decade of the twentieth century, the massacre of the striking banana workers in the railway station of Ciénaga (1928), the "War of the Thousand Days" (1899-1902). To the familiar two categories of magical realism, Garcia Marquez brilliantly adds a third in Cien años de soledad: the recounting of something banal as if it were wonderful: the first encounter of José Arcadio Buendfa and his sons with a block of ice at the very end of the novel's first chapter. This particular example is more significant than it may appear at first sight since it inverts the previous pattern seen in Carpentier where American phenomena seem marvellous to European or Europeanized eyes. Here a phenomenon that is banal in the developed countries (in most of which ice exists in a natural form anyway) is marvellous, exotic, and alien given the Caribbean climate and the absence of ice-making technology in Macondo. Cien anos de soledad also demonstrates that Garcia Marquez was a boom reader before he became a boom writer. The novel is full of allusions to Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (a pre-boom work adopted as a model by many of the movement's writers), to Carpentier (José Arcadio dredges up with magnets the suit of armor still containing the skeleton of a Spanish soldier that also appears in Los pasos perdidos; Victor Hugues from El siglo de las luces is mentioned by a character in Cien anos), to Cortázar (the autobiographical character Gabriel who wins a trip to Paris and lives in the room where Rocamadour would die many years later in Rayuela), Fuentes (Colonel Lorenzo Gavilán, who we are told had fought in the Mexican revolution with his compadre Artemio Cruz, helps to organize the banana workers' strike and dies in the massacre). Even if taken simply as instances of Garcia Marquez's humor, the fact remains that humor is consciously directed at a certain group of writers and readers who can share the inside joke. In a sense those jokes already presuppose (and by the way contribute to) the phenomenon of the boom. At one level Cien anos de soledad has been read as an allegory with the saga of the Buendfa family representing the history of Latin America from discovery to colonization and neocolonialism, and many elements of the novel permit this reading. Although the country is not named (either to encourage the allegorical reading or because of the author's awareness of a Latin-American readership), the historical, geographical, and agricultural allusions point distinctly to Colombia and more specifically to the Caribbean coast. In Cien anos de soledad the Caribbean seems to stand metonymically (perhaps literally for some readers) for all of Latin America, and even for the world, as the third sentence of the novel implies: "The world was so new, that many things didn't have names." In a very real sense Cien anos de soledad did much to end the isolation of Latin-American and Caribbean letters. Starting with his next novel El otono del patriarca (The autumn of the patriarch), 1975, the Caribbean, which was partially repressed in Cien años de soledad, is foregrounded in the work of Garcia Marquez. In this respect his comment regarding El otoño del patriarca is revealing: "It's a rabidly Caribbean, coastal, book, a luxury that the author of Cien años de soledad allows himself

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when he decides finally to write what he wants to" (Mendoza-García Marquez [1982], 126). If Cien años de soledad takes place in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, as Garcia Marquez explains, all of the Caribbean basin contributes something to El otono del patriarcal "The dictator's country is undoubtedly in the Caribbean. But this Caribbean is a blend of the Spanish Caribbean and the English Caribbean. You know that I know the Caribbean island by island, city by city. And I have put it all there. My things first of all. The brothel where I lived in Barranquilla, the Cartagena of my student days, the port bars where I used to eat when I left the paper at four in the morning, even the schooners that left at dawn for Aruba and Curaçao with a load of whores. There are streets that look like Panama's Calle Comercio, corners from La Habana Vieja, from San Juan or La Guaira. But there are also places that belong to the British West Indies, with their Hindus, their Chinese and Dutch" (Mendoza-Garcia Marquez [1982], 123-24). Furthermore, the novel reveals a Pan-Caribbeanism that continues to be very evident in subsequent works where there is a particular stress on the mixing of races and cultures. In the earlier long short story "La increíble y triste historia de la Candida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada" (Innocent Eréndira), 1972, and in Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a death foretold), 1981, the male protagonists are rather exotic mestizos. In "Eréndira" Ulises is the son of a beautiful Guajiran Indian woman and a Dutch orange farmer. In Crónica both of the handsome rivals are of mixed blood: Bayardo San Roman is the son of a Colombian general and Alberta Simonds a mulata from Curaçao who in her youth had been declared the most beautiful among the two hundred most beautiful women of the Caribbean, while Santiago Nasar's mother comes from the landholding class and his father is an Arab immigrant. The brief sociological account of the migration of Catholic Arabs to the Caribbean inserted in as short a novel as Crónica attests to Garcia Marquez's interest in portraying the ethnic makeup of the Caribbean. El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the time of cholera), 1985, contributes to the PanCaribbean trend with several characters: the escaped convict from Cayenne Jeremiah de SaintAmour, the German immigrant and telegrapher Lotario Thugut, and that irresistible doctor of theology, the Jamaican mulata Barbara Lynch. With El general en su laberinto (The general in his labyrinth), 1989, Garcia Marquez enters fully into Latin-American history and geography. The novel that chronicles Bolivar's journey away from power and to the ultimate solitude of death even includes a map and a chronology of Bolivar's life as appendices. The Bolivar who appears in the novel is beyond a doubt historically authentic, as Garcia Marquez's ostentatious research into the details of the General's domestic life and routine constantly remind us, but he is thoroughly demythified by the valet's-eye view employed. In terms of Garcia Marquez's own work, however, it is easy to recognize the general (always in lower-case in the novel and only in one instance called by his name), as the literary descendant of those military men lost in the solitude of the labyrinth of power, the equally unnamed "general" of El otoño del patriarca and Colonel Aureliano Buendía of Cien años de soledad. The novel, however, also contains another story. The story of how a Caribbean criollo rose to become the Libertador of the Americas, failed in his attempt to unite them in a confederation and, as the map of his last itinerary graphically demonstrates, left the cold and hostility of Bogotá (always despised in Garcia Marquez's work), and died close to home near the Caribbean. Throughout the novel Garcia Marquez makes references to Bolivar's Caribbean origin, and as in other novels he highlights the motif of racial mix. The most explicit instance is the description of portraits painted

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throughout Bolivar's life where the early ones accurately reflect his mixed Spanish and African heritage and the later ones "idealize him, wash his blood, mythify him" (Garcia Marquez [1989], 184). Thus the leitmotif of the novel persistently reminds us of the Caribbean roots of the most illustrious Latin American, and "Caribbean" for Garcia Marquez (in the tradition of Nicolás Guillén's "La canción del bongo" [The bongo song]) means mulatto, whether almiprieto (dark-souled) or cueripardo (dark-skinned). Garcia Marquez's trajectory from an implicit to an explicit use of (largely Caribbean) geography, history, and sociology clearly bears out his declaration that his practice of "magical realism" has nothing to do with "fantasy" (which he detests) but is based on the imaginative processing of reality (Mendoza-Garcfa Marquez [1982], 42). It is the reality of the Caribbean itself, according to Garcia Marquez, that fires his imagination: "I think that the Caribbean taught me to see reality in a different way, to accept supernatural elements as part of our daily life. The Caribbean is a different world whose first work of magical literature is The Diary of Christopher Columbus, a book that talks of fabulous plants and mythological worlds. Yes, the history of the Caribbean is full of magic, a magic brought by the black slaves from Africa, but also by Swedish, Dutch, and English pirates, who could set up an opera house in New Orleans and fill women's teeth with diamonds. The human synthesis and the contrasts found in the Caribbean cannot be seen anywhere else in the world. I know all its islands: mulatto women the color of honey, with green eyes and golden scarfs on their heads; Chinese with Indian blood who wash clothes and sell amulets; green Hindus who walk out of their ivory stores and defecate in the middle of the street; dusty burning towns whose houses are wrecked by hurricanes, and on the other hand skyscrapers with solar glass and a seven-colored sea. Well if I start talking about the Caribbean there's no way to stop. Not only is it the world that taught me to write, but also the only place where I don't feel like a stranger" (Mendoza-Garcia Marquez [1982], 74-75).

José Lezama Lima: The Baroque as the Expression of America If Carpentier and Garcia Marquez see the "marvellous real" and "magical realism" as the defining characteristics of Latin-American experience, José Lezama Lima feels that the baroque is the most characteristic form of American expression. By "baroque" Lezama means chiefly three things: the persistence in Latin-American culture of the traditions of the Spanish Golden Age, an exuberant practice of cultural consumption uninhibited by allegiance to any particular tradition, and a densely metaphorical, hermetic, and epiphanic style of writing that owes much to Góngora, Joyce, and surrealism. Like Carpentier who had already established an international reputation before he was adopted by the boom, Lezama through his poetry, essays, and the publication of the influential journal Orígenes had become the leading figure of his generation in Cuban literature and was known in LatinAmerican literary circles. The 1966 publication of Paradiso, a novel he had been working on for years, brought him world fame and notoriety during the last decade of his life. Always suspicious of his Catholicism, uncomfortable with sexually explicit episodes of Paradiso and a style of writing that seemed the antithesis of the socialist realism that was already beginning to become the government-imposed norm for literature in revolutionary Cuba, the government never allowed Lezama to

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travel abroad to the many literary meetings to which he was invited. Nevertheless, by publishing Paradiso and serving as a magnet that drew the interest and frequent visits of the writers of the boom, the Cuban revolution played a cardinal role in the development of Lezama's international reputation. Even the controversy over the sexual passages and the brief withdrawal of the first edition of Paradiso from bookstores in Cuba turned to Lezama's ultimate benefit because none other than Julio Cortázar came to champion the cause of a novel he considered truly revolutionary in its daring and originality. Other leading figures of the boom like Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes added their voices in defense of a work whose radical use of language left them breathless. Speaking of the boom's rediscovery of the richness of language, Fuentes wrote: "The indiscriminate verbal torrent (but guided by a total intelligence) of Lezama Lima in Paradiso is, with Cortázar's Rayuela, the maximum example of this move toward discourse" (Fuentes [1969], 30). In the history of the boom Paradiso holds the exact opposite place to Cien años de soledad. Although even before Lezama's death it had been translated into several European languages and had captured the admiration of novelists and critics, it never was (and it is safe to say that it never will be) a favorite of the general reading public. But Paradiso (even if read by few) will always hold a unique place in the movement as the novel that marked a new boundary in terms of discourse and its encyclopedic embrace of world culture from a Latin-American point of view. The challenge of Paradiso inspired the younger Cuban writers Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas and perhaps even Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra. To put it in terms of European modernist literature, before Paradiso the Latin-American novel had gone as far as Joyce had in Ulysses; it was Lezama who crossed the boundary of Finnegan's Wake.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Parody, Puns, and the City What Dublin was to Joyce, Havana is to Cabrera Infante, and it was Tres tristes tigres (Three trapped tigers), 1967, his novel about Havana's night life on the eve of the triumph of the revolution, that marked Cuba's (and the Caribbean's) entry into the boom. An earlier version of the novel entitled Vista del amanecer en el trópico (View of dawn in the Tropics), which never saw print, was awarded the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1964, the same prize won by Vargas Llosa's La ciudad y los perros (The time and the hero) two years earlier. That version of the novel allegedly gave a more politically critical view of pre-revolutionary Havana life. Tres tristes tigres is, as the author himself warns in a "Notice" that prefaces the book, a novel written in Cuban. Cabrera Infante's desire to capture Cuban voices, particularly the voices of people, who, like himself, came from the countryside to Havana and are trying to make it is a major impetus. The rural experiences of several of its characters haunt many of the pages of this urban novel. Cabrera Infante's interest in language as a socioeconomic marker in Cuban society is only part of a larger and all-consuming obsession with language. Quintessentially Cuban, as this novel certainly is, it is also, like other boom novels, very cosmopolitan, and Cabrera Infante's reading and assimilation of Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Lewis Carroll, and Laurence Sterne are evident. The composition of the novel by different narrating voices is Faulknerian, as are the interest and care in presenting dialects. Lewis Carroll, Joyce, and Sterne are present in the constant wordplay, puns, and

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parodies. Cabrera Infante practices a poetics of verbal excess, but in a different vein than Lezama, concentrating precisely on the Joycean punning that Lezama does not develop. Despite the easily documented allusions that proclaim Cabrera Infante's cosmopolitan literary genealogy, it is true that this affinity for humorous wordplay and parody is also recognizably autochthonous. While the main characters of Tres tristes tigres constantly practice choteo (the irreverent response to authority, pomposity, and those who take themselves too seriously), Bustrófedon Cabrera Infante's major contribution to the hall of fame of boom characters - systematically cultivates it and raises it to dizzying heights. The climax of Bustrófedon's art is in the parodies included in the section entitled "The Death of Trotsky, Narrated by Various Cuban Writers, Years After - or Before." These parricidal and parodical pastiches of the pantheon of Cuban literature (among them particularly cruel caricatures of Carpentier and Lezama) are allegedly captured on an illicit copy of a tape-recording whose original Bustrófedon destroyed. These parodies are doubly parricidal if we consider the choice of the subject matter (the assassination of Trotsky at Stalin's orders) in the light of Cabrera Infante's parents' strict adhesion to the Stalinist party line throughout his childhood and adolescence. Not all is joke and game in Cabrera Infante's nocturnal circumnavigation of Havana. The latter part of the novel is haunted by the image of a small manta ray Cue and Silvestre have seen in a bar desperately circling its small aquarium. As the novel winds down, an existential malaise (reminiscent of Los pasos perdidos or Rayuela, though less cerebral) clings stubbornly to the characters despite their increasingly feeble attempts to dispel it with choteo. Tres tristes tigres gave readers a first taste of the virtuosity with language that in three different keys (Cabrera Infante, Lezama, and Sarduy) would become a hallmark of the Cuban contribution to the boom.

Severo Sarduy: Latin-American New Novelist and Structuralist A self-described disciple of Lezama, Severo Sarduy makes a unique contribution to the movement. Leaving Cuba for Paris in 1959, Sarduy is drawn both to the circle of Latin-American boom writers living in Paris and to the Tel Quel group. Writing for both the Tel Quel journal and Emir Rodriguez Monegal's Mundo Nuevo (which played a key role in the development of the boom), he becomes a participant in the two most important literary phenomena of his time: the Latin-American boom and French structuralism. Gestos (Gestures), 1963, his first novel, employs the technique of the French nouveau roman to portray the day of an urban guerrilla in the last moments of Batista's dictatorship. However, it is his next two novels De donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a song), 1967, and Cobra (Cobra), 1972, that show the impact of structuralist theory on his writing and its fundamental difference from that of other novelists of the boom like Donoso, Fuentes, and Garcia Marquez who still believe "in the notion of literature as mimesis and as an act of interpretation of Spanish-American reality" (González Echevarría [1987], 42). Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes and Cobra reveal a synthesis whereby Lezama's poetics are radicalized through the structuralist critique of the sign. Whereas in Lezama it is still possible (albeit with some difficulty) to establish a connection between signifier, signified and referent (roughly: word, concept, and thing represented), Sarduy's poetics are based on a belief that signifiers only refer to signifiers. Consequently, there are no permanent

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characters in these two novels because they are subjected to a constant metamorphosis of race, sex, and country. Despite the difficulties this presents for his readers, they are richly rewarded by an imagination without bounds and by his expert use of choteo to vaccinate his novels from any seriousness or dogmatism.

Luis Rafael Sánchez: Puerto Rico's Contribution to the Post-boom With the publication of La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho's beat) in 1976, Luis Rafael Sánchez became the first Puerto Rican novelist to reach an international readership. Sánchez is now generally regarded as an important contributor to the post-boom novel, a type of novel that is characterized by its interest in mass culture, a sophisticated political commitment, and a penchant for parody. La guaracha is a multi-faceted text that represents the voices or viewpoints of different segments of Puerto Rican society from a senator to a retarded child in a slum. Its two unifying devices are the guaracha itself, the hit song that has swept the island, and a spectacular traffic jam that serves as a symbol for Puerto Rico's stunted historical process. In the tradition of the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, Cabrera Infante, and Sarduy (in dubious homage the psychiatrist who treats the senator's wife in La guaracha is called Dr. Severo Severino) Sánchez captures the different sociolinguistic registers of Puerto Rican speech from the thoughts of the senator's mistress as she waits for him to the automotive-sexual phantasies of his eighteen-yearold son whose major frustration is that the island is not large enough to race his Ferrari. Throughout, these voices are interrupted by the ironic and encyclopedic commentary of a narrator whose consciousness is awash with all the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary high and popular culture from the Italian film "The Garden of the Finzi-Contini" to Alka Seltzer, Bartolomé de las Casas, the classics of Spanish literature, the French new novel, Sears and Roebuck, Givenchy, and Walt Disney - a cultural equivalent of the traffic jam that touches the life of all the characters. In La guaracha Sánchez has given Caribbean and Latin-American literature a sample of Puerto Rico's blend of postmodern culture and underdevelopment that is as bitter to swallow as the lyrics of the ubiquitous guaracha: "Life is a phenomenal thing / for those up front as well as for those behind."

Conclusion The Caribbean thus has given the Latin-American version of modernism called the boom the concepts of the "marvellous real" and "magical realism." It has contributed its greatest virtuosos in the use of poetic and street language. It has put forth a vision of the Latin-American writer as the euphoric and uninhibited consumer of world culture. The Caribbean has also helped to define the development of contemporary Latin-American literature by providing the boom with both its bestselling and its most inaccessible novelists and the post-boom with one of its most imaginative satirists. Finally the Cuban revolution, a political event of the greatest significance in the history of the Caribbean, made an important early contribution to the development of the movement. Paradoxically the changing policies of that same revolution stifled native contributions to the boom and brought about a split between those writers of the boom who continued to support Cuba unconditionally and those who would not.

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Bibliography Donoso, José. 1984. Historia personal del 'boom'. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana / Planeta. (The evolution and significance of the boom as described by one of its leading novelists.) Fuentes, Carlos. 1969. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz. (A collection of important essays on novelists of the movement by a boom novelist.) González Echevarría, Roberto. 1977. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. (Detailed discussion of Carpentier's oeuvre. A new edition [U of Texas P, 1990] adds a chapter on Carpentier's last works.) —. 1987. La ruta de Severn Sarduy. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte. (Detailed discussion of Sarduy's oeuvre. Discusses the importance of Sarduy as a transitional figure between the boom and the post-boom.) Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo and Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. 1982. El olor de la guayaba. Barcelona: Bruguera. (Interviews of the author with an old friend about his evolution as a writer.) Rodriguez-Luis, Julio. 1984. La literatura hispanoamericana entre compromiso y experimento. Madrid: Fundamentes. (Puerto Rican novelists José Luis González, Emilio Díaz Valcarcel, Pedro Juan Soto, and Luis Rafael Sánchez are discussed, pp. 153-78.) Rosario Candelier, Bruno. 1988. Tendencias de la novela dominicana. Santiago, Dominican Republic: Departamento de Publicaciones de la Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (Covers the development of the Dominican novel since colonial times and links the slower rate of development of the Dominican novel to that of Dominican society.) Shaw, Donald L. 1985. Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne. (Provides a useful distinction between two approaches to the real maravilloso.) Weisgerber, Jean. 1982. Le réalisme magique: la locution et le concept. Revista di letterature moderne e comparate. 35.1:27-53. (Traces "magic realism" to its origins in Germanic literatures: German, Dutch, Flemish; finds the introduction of the term into Latin-American literary discourse in an article by Angel Flores on Borges, Hispania [May 1955]. A rich bibliographical source.)

Poetry

EMILIO BEJEL

University of Colorado

Cuba The year 1898 marked the end of Cuba's war of independence against Spain as well as the beginning of a U.S. military and political intervention that continued after the country attained its independence in 1902. As might be expected, the profound cultural and political discontinuity of this period had an unsettling effect on Cuban poetic tradition, an effect aggravated by the deaths, a few years before, of Julián del Casal and José Marti. The chaotic social and economic situation of the Republic's first three decades prompted Cuban writers to clearly define the central themes of contemporary Cuban literature. It was the poets who responded most quickly and directly to the necessity of change. This directness and immediacy may perhaps have been drawn from poetry's long history in Cuban letters. With the deaths of Casal and Marti, the two great figures of Cuban modernismo, most poets in the early years of the republic were often lacking in artistic merit. Among this group, there were those who followed the familiar path of Casal, others who devoted themselves to a rhetorical patriotic expression, and still others who composed lyrical landscapes of no lasting value. Cuban critics refer to these poets as the first generation of the republic. The most notable patriotic poet was Bonifacio Byrne, best known for his popular poem "Mi bandera." Byrne wrote this poem upon his return to Cuba in 1899. As regards landscape poems, the best are found among the works of Francisco Javier Pichardo, Agustín Acosta, and Felipe Pichardo Moya. These three poets address not only the cane fields, but also the social problems brought about by the sugar industry. Beginning with "La zafra," Acosta's career spans more than fifty years. He is always perceptive, if not always an accomplished lyricist. In Caminos de hierro (Iron paths), 1963, Acosta improves upon his previous style in a collection of poems that deals masterfully with the individual and the social. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Cuban poetry begins to reassert itself, in particular with Arabescos mentales (Mental arabesques), 1913, by Regino Boti, Ala (Wing), 1915, by Agustfn Acosta, and Versos precursores (Precursory verses), 1917, by José Manuel Poveda. In these collections, Boti and Poveda, both followers of Casal, continue the aesthetic of modernismo. Later, they would evolve toward a so-called "pure poetry" which aspired to completely distance the poetic from the prosaic. Boti's Kodak-Ensueno (Kodak-daydream), 1929, was an important step that involved him with the beginnings of Cuba's poetic vanguard. Along with the evolution of formal elements in his poetry, his work is permeated with the pessimism that characterizes Cuban poetry during this period.

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In the political arena, the late 1920s and early 1930s were years of increasing opposition to the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925-33). This situation coincided with the publication of several significant poetic works. Between 1928 and 1931, Boti published a number of important collections, as did Brull, Ballagas, Florit, and Guillén, the latter three now known as the Generation of the 30s or the second generation of the republic. It should be noted that any discussion of the poetic vanguard in Cuba begins with Mariano Brull and his collection Verdehalago, poemas en menguante (Flattering-green, ebb tide poems), published in 1928. That same year, Navarro Luna published Surco (Groove), followed by Boti's Kodak-Ensueño in 1929. But it was Brull's poetry that had the greatest impact. Though La casa del silencio (The house of silence), 1916, had defined him as a modernista, his greatest contribution was as a leader of the poetic vanguard. He has also been considered part of the "pure poetry" movement. Early on, he created his famous jitanjáforas, words which do not mean anything but suggest, by a combination of sounds and phonemes, something that does. The term was coined by Alfonso Reyes. Among important Cuban poets who appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s, three merit special attention: Emilio Ballagas, Eugenio Florit, and Nicolás Guillén. Emilio Ballagas was a poet of great sophistication with a profound knowledge of Spanish, French, and English literature. His first book, Júbilo y fuga (Joy and flight), was published in 1931 and was the first demonstration of his particular mastery of delicate metaphor and uncanny prosody. Ballagas's poetry, excepting his brief, experimental "black" period, is marked by a profound religiosity. Among his more accomplished books are Sabor eterno (Eternal touch), 1939, and Cielo en rehenes (The hostage sky), 1951. His "black" poetry is found, for the most part, in Cuadernos de poesîa negra (Notebooks on black poetry), 1934. Although Eugenio Florit was born in Spain, his poems deal with Cuban themes and forms, including décimas (stanzas of ten eight-syllable lines) on the landscapes and customs of the island. His first collection of note was Trópico (Tropics), 1930. This was followed by a number of publications, the best among them being Doble acento (Double accent), 1937, and Poema mío (My poem), 1947. At first Florit wrote as a modernista, then he evolved toward a kind of "pure poetry" along the lines of Juan Ramón Jiménez. His later poetry has been characterized by extreme simplicity. Nicolás Guillén is the most famous Cuban poet of the twentieth century. His works are read and studied worldwide. He has enjoyed both critical acclaim and popular success in many countries. Apart from this extraordinary level of acceptance, he was also named National Poet in socialist Cuba. His first book, Motivos de son (Son motifs), 1930, was an immediate poetic event. The poems incorporate the musical rhythms of the Cuban son, and assimilate black culture into a poetry full of grace and expressive force. Guillén followed Motivos de son with an almost uninterrupted flow of poetry: Sóngoro cosongo, 1931, West Indies, Ltd, 1934, Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (Songs for soldiers and rhythms for tourists), 1937, Elegias (Elegies), 1958, Tengo (I have), 1964. Critical studies on Guillén have noted the interesting relationships between his work and that of the Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos and the Dominican Manuel del Cabrai. Two other poets who began to publish around this time were José Zacarfas Tallet and Rubén Martinez Villena. In 1951, Tallet collected many of his early poems and published them as La semilla estéril (The barren seed). As a poet, Martinez Villena is known only through his posthumous collection La pupila insomne (The sleepless pupil), 1936. Both Tallet and Martinez Villena

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are social poets, but while Tallet's work is characterized by what has been called prosaic poetry, Martinez Villena expresses his social concerns in a neoromantic vein. A study of the social poetry of this period would include the work of Manuel Navarro Luna, Regino Pedroso, and Félix Pita Rodríguez. Many of the poets who first appeared during the Machado era continued to publish after 1933. Nevertheless, the work of the so-called Orígenes group characterizes Cuban poetry of the 1940s and much of the 1950s and was centered around José Lezama Lima's magazine Origenes, 1944-56. These poets are sometimes referred to as the Generation of the 40s or the third generation of the republic. Their common interest was a transcendental view of the world. There are interesting technical, aesthetic, and ideological similarities between the poets of Origenes, the Dominican sorprendidos (surprised poets), and the Puerto Rican transcendentalists and hermeticists. These similarities are particularly apparent as regards the poems of José Lezama Lima (Cuba), Franklin Mieses Burgos (Dominican Republic), Félix Franco Oppenheimer (Puerto Rico), and Francisco Matos Paoli (Puerto Rico). Among the important poets of Origenes were José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, Fina Garcia Marruz, Angel Gaztelu, Octavio Smith, Lorenzo Garcia Vega, and Gastón Baquero. Other poets were soon to join the group, including Eliseo Diego. Then there was Virgilio Piñera who, though publishing some works in Origenes, was quick to find fault with the group and soon became an opponent. José Rodriguez-Feo, co-director of Origenes, provided the financial backing for the magazine. There is no doubt that the most important poet of this period is José Lezama Lima. His work is very difficult for the uninitiated, drawing its resources from the most complex instances of Mallarmean symbolism. Lezama's first significant work is Muerte de Narciso (Death of Narcissus), 1937. His poetic strategy was to explore the relationship he conceived between metaphor and the image. For Lezama, the image is the creative force that originates as a response to a lack of natural order. Metaphor is the medium through which a fragment of this image is fixed in time. This image is the source of poetry. Lezama's work falls within what he calls a "poetic system of the world." The encompassing nature of this system provides a positive statement in the face of the desperation and contradictions of the times. It is thus wrong to accuse Lezama's work of evasionism. Other notable collections of his poetry are Enemigo rumor (Rumor, the enemy), 1941, and Aventuras sigilosas (Hidden ventures), 1945. Another important poet of the Origenes group is Cintio Vitier, whose work demonstrates a profound knowledge of technique. Vitier is the most influential critic of Cuban poetry in this century and his critical studies and insights have yet to be superceded. His more outstanding collections include: Extraneza de estar (The wonder of being), 1944, Visperas (Vespers), 1953, and Canto llano (Plain song), 1956. The best of his critical studies are Cincuenta años de poesia cubana, 19021952 (Fifty years of Cuban poetry, 1902-1952) and his influential book Lo cubano en la poesia (The Cuban element in poetry), 1958. In much the same way, Fina Garcia Marruz has been recognized as much for her critical studies of Marti as for her own poetry. Her collections of poetry include Transfiguración de Jesus en el monte (The transfiguration of Jesus at Calvary), 1947, and Las miradas perdidas (The lost glances), 1951. Her poetry is characterized by a religious tone and images of great beauty. Religious overtones are also found in the poetry of Angel Gaztelu, who is adept with the accents of delicacy and nostalgia. Gaztelu has published only two collections,

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Poemas (Poems), 1940, and Gradual de laudes (Gradual of lauds), 1955. The poetry of Gastón Baquero has a deep sense of mystery and explores the constant change of worldly forms and the processes of eternal transformation. As regards Eliseo Diego, his work has been very influential on the poets of the Generation of the 50s, as well as younger poets. His best known work is En la Calzada de Jesus del Monte (On the avenue of Jesus of the Calvary), 1944, but he has published many collections notable for their great poetic beauty, i.e., En las oscuras manos del olvido (In the obscure hands of oblivion), 1946, Nombrar las cosas (To name things), 1973, and Los dias de tu vida (The days of your life), 1977. In each of his works, Diego presents a sensitive view of the human and the familiar. With his grasp of the common and familiar, Diego is on a different plane from Lezama. On an equally different plane, but in the other direction, is Virgilio Pinera, who, unlike Diego, broke radically with Lezama. The poetry of Pinera is often iconoclastic, at times tending toward the antipoetic. Still, his is one of the most insightful artistic expressions of the period. One of his works, La isla en peso (The suspended island), 1943, has had a remarkable impact upon younger poets. Pinera's poetry is the opposite of Lezama's in every way: anecdotal, concerned with the familiar, and aggressively antireligious. Ongenes was succeeded by the magazine Ciclón, under the direction of José Rodríguez-Feo. Ciclón brought together several of those poets and writers who were, for the most part, iconoclasts and who were often opposed to the poetics of Lezama. This conflict is particularly apparent in the work of Virgilio Pinera, Anton Arrufat, Nivaria Tejera, César López, and Rolando Escardó. But two poets, Pedro de Oráa and Fayad Jamís, also participated in Ciclón without totally rejecting the aesthetics of the Ongenes group. Several of the poets who appeared in Ciclón comprise what later came to be called the Generation of the 50s. They are also known as the fourth generation of the republic or the first generation of the revolution. Almost all these poets were born around 1930. The first works of these poets began to appear in the late 1940s: Las rosas audaces (The daring roses), 1948, by Heberto Padilla, and Brujulas (Compasses), 1949, by Fayad Jamis for example. This generation's works continued to appear throughout the 1950s. They were identified as a group soon after the revolution of 1959. In fact, it was this same year that Roberto Fernández Retamar and Fayad Jamis published an anthology, Poesía joven de Cuba (Young poetry of Cuba), which included works by the majority of the poets of this generation: Rolando Escardó, Cleva Solís, Luis Marré, Nivaria Tejera, Pablo Armando Fernández, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Fayad Jamis, Pedro de Oráa, and José Alvarez Baragano. Also belonging to this generation are César López, and Roberto Branly. A common characteristic of the Generation of the 50s is the poets' desire to make their poetry more human and accessible, without sacrificing the achievements of earlier poetic expression. Most of these poets distance themselves from the transcendentalism and extreme figurative language of Lezama. Due to this tendency much of their poetry is marked by a deliberate conversational quality. They also emphasize the prosaic, the sentimental, and social preoccupations. The poetry of César Vallejo is an important influence for many of them. Critics in Cuba insist that the common thread running throughout this body of work is the positive view of the socialist revolution. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in certain cases, such as that of Heberto Padilla, there are instances of a complete rejection of the revolution. In 1950, Fernández Retamar published Elegia como un himno (Elegy like a hymn), a work

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addressing social concerns. Then, in Patrias (Homelands), 1952, Retamar presents two fundamental themes: Cuba and poetry, which place him in the tradition of Martí. Retamar practices an intense neoromanticism within the context of a conversational style. In contrast, José Alvarez Baragano is concerned with the existential, cast in vivid images that approach the surreal. Like Baragano, Roberto Branly follows this surrealistic bent. The influence of Piñera's La isla en peso is apparent in Branly's El cisne (The swan), 1956, where the poet deals with the topography of Cuba in a manner similar to that of Pifiera. Yet, Pablo Armando Fernández, in Salterio y lamentatión (Salterio and laments), 1953, is clearly influenced by the Origenes group, as well as by Eliot and Pound. His Nuevos poemas (New poems), published in New York, is a continuation of Salterio. Finally, in 1964 Fernández published Libro de los héroes (Book of heroes), a book more concerned with an epic view of Cuban society. Fayad Jamfs startled the Cuban poetic world with his second book Los pârpados y el polvo (Eyelids and dust), published by Origenes in 1954. Later collections of his work include Vagabundo del alba (Wanderer at dawn), 1959; La pedrada (The stoning), 1954, 1962; and Los puentes (The bridges), 1956-57, 1962. Although Jamfs never completely abandoned certain poetic strategies derived from the Origenes group, his work differs from theirs in its emphasis upon the familiar. He is one of the most important poets of his generation. César López first published poems in Ciclón marked by a strong existentialist tone. At the same time, he incorporated social elements. His first collection, Silencio en voz de muerte (Silence in a deadly voice), written in Spain around 1958 and published in 1963, shows the influence of Spanish poetry, especially that of the Generation of 1927. Among his works are found: Primer libro de la ciudad (First book of the city), 1967, Segundo libro de la ciudad (Second book of the city), 1971, and Queda de perfection (Curfew of perfection), 1983. In his last poems one finds a number of interesting rereadings of Lezama. Heberto Padilla is one of the better-known contemporary Cuban poets. Even though his fame is primarily due to his political views, his poems merit attention for their artistic value. His most famous collection is Fuera del juego (Out of the game), 1966, which provoked considerable controversy. After years without publishing any collection of poetry, Padilla published El hombre junto al mar (The man beside the sea), 1981, in Barcelona. Contrary to expectations, the book is not at all a political document, but a series of poems concerned with the sea, the tropics, and other natural, as well as literary, themes. The poets of the Generation of the 50s are also known as the first generation of the revolution because it was under its influence that they acquired a generational consciousness, despite the fact that these poets began publishing before 1959. It is the next generation of poets who began to publish after the coming to power of the revolution. These poets comprise the so-called second generation of the revolution, or the Generation of the 60s. Cuba's Generation of the 60s corresponds to the group in Puerto Rico called the Generation of 62 or Guajana group, and to the Dominican Republic's Generation of 65 or poets of the 1965 revolution. Most of the poets of Cuba's Generation of the 60s were born in the 1940s. Specifically, in the mid-1960s these poets began to develop an awareness of themselves as a group. From the perspective of literary history, the publication of Miguel Barnet's La piedrafina y el pavorreal (The precious stone and the peacock), 1963, is one of the first indications of the quality of this generation's work. However, their identification as a group was sparked by a 1966 debate between contributors to the literary publication El caimán barbudo and the directors of Ediciones El Puente.

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El caimán's manifesto, entitled "We Speak Out," attacked the publications of Ediciones El Puente for promoting "hermeticism," "extreme subjectivism," "the hackneyed," and, perhaps most unpardonable, "ignoring the aesthetic of revolutionary poetry." From among the poets of El caimán, Guillermo Rodriguez Rivera became the theorist of his generation. His first collection, published in 1966, was entitled Cambio de impresiones (Exchange of impressions). Miguel Barnet had demonstrated his interest in Afro-Cuban and Afro-Antillean myths and folklore in his book La piedrafina y el pavorreal. He continued along these lines with Isla de güijes (The island of gravel), 1964, and La sagrada familia (The holy family), 1967. However, in his collection Carta de noche (Night letter), 1982, the primary themes are personal experience, intimacy and love. His poetry experiments with a variety of forms and themes. Victor Casaus published his first collection Todos los días del mundo (Every day of the world) in 1966. His two later works are Entre nosotros (Among us), 1977, and Amar sin papeles (To love without papers), 1981. His most frequent themes are childhood, life under the revolution, and the complexities of love. His style is almost always conversational and his lexicon basic and direct. Luis Rogelio Nogueras (1944-1985) published three important works: Cabeza de zanahoria (Carrot head), 1967, Las quince mil vidas del caminante (The fifteen thousand lives of the traveler), 1977, and Imitación de la vida (Imitation of life), 1981. Nogueras's poetry is always accomplished, his conversational style often opening into an intense lyricism. His favorite themes are events connected with the revolution, and, of course, love. Yet he also includes literature itself as a prominent concern. Also among the Generation of the 60s is Nancy Morejón. Her first book, Mutismo (Voiceless), appeared in 1962. Some of the poems in Mutismo are highly metaphorical, but her later poems take another direction, less metaphorical and more concerned with social issues. In her second book, Amor, ciudad atribuida (Love, a given city), 1964, Morejón creates an impressive image of the "city." Her most successful book, both critically and among the public, is Richard trajo su flauta (Richard brought his flute), 1967, a penetrating vision of the family and popular culture. Raul Rivero is the author of two important works: Papel de hombre (Man's role), 1969, and Poesia sobre la tierra (Poetry about the earth), 1972. His poetry, although presented in the conversational style, is among the most lyrical of his group. He is also noted for the specific manner in which he ends each poem. Osvaldo Navarro, since his first book De regreso a la tierra (Returning to land), 1973, has established himself as a landscape poet with a special interest in the rural. He has also published Los dias y los hombres (Days and men), a collection of décimas. Rafael Hernández, in Versos del soldado (Soldier's verses), 1973, emphasizes patriotism and the revolution. He is noted for his use of the alexandrine sonnet form. Raul Hernández Novas has published a number of collections, among which can be found: Da capo, 1983, Enigma de las aguas (The enigma of the waters), 1983, Embajador en el horizonte (Ambassador on the horizon), 1984, and Animal civil (Civil animal), 1985. His poetry is among the richest and most elaborate in contemporary Cuban poetry. Belkis Cusa Malé also writes within the conversational style. Her themes frequently include the motives of women in Cuban society. Finally, José Mario, one of the former directors of Ediciones El Puente, has published the following: No hablemos más de la desesperación (No more talk about desperation), 1970, Falso T (False T), 1978, and Karma, 1979. In the Cuba of the 1980s, a number of young poets have begun to appear. Their aesthetic and thematic concerns set them apart from the Generation of the 60s, yet are similar enough among themselves to warrant their consideration as a group, or "generation," apart. They might be called

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the third generation of the revolution. The majority of these poets were born in the 1950s and began to appear in print in the 1980s. Their poetry is characterized by a much less revolutionary rhetoric. Their favored themes are the familiar, the intimate, a concern with the overall destiny of humanity, ecology, etc. They are more concerned with ethics than epics. The most interesting is Reina Maria Rodriguez, who has published two collections: Cuando una mujer no duerme (When a woman can't sleep), 1980, and Para un cordero bianco (For a white lamb), 1984. Her last work is La arena de Padua (The sand of Padua), 1989. Her poetry is highly expressive and organic. Her poems deal with urban themes and often have a mysterious undertone. For some years now, various studies have appeared concerning those writers who left Cuba after the revolution of 1959 came to power. These studies have been published for the most part in the United States, but also in Spain, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and France. Among those poets of the first generation of exile (those who left Cuba in the 1960s but had already established themselves with significant work), particular mention should be made of those who, while in Cuba, were identified with specific literary groups. The most notable examples include Agustin Acosta and Eugenio Florit. Also, Ana Rosa Nunez merits attention, not only for the numerous collections she has published, but also for her editorial work on the first anthology of Cuban exile poetry, Poesia en éxodo (Poetry in exodus), 1970. Another important poet of this group is Pura del Prado. Those poets of the second generation of exile (who left Cuba in their teens and early twenties) are best characterized as poets in transition from several perspectives: linguistically they still write principally in Spanish, but show some influence of English; literarily they are generally wellinformed about the Cuban poetic tradition, but are often not familiar with present-day Cuban poetry; and ideologically, although many continue to be radically opposed to Cuba's socialism, some of them have tempered their political views. This is why they may appropriately be called exile poets of transition. With some exceptions, these poets were born in the 1940s. The following publish frequently and are generally included in anthologies and bibliographies: Mireya Robles, Rita Geada, Lourdes Casai, Juana Rosa Pita, José Kozer, Eliana Ri vero, Emilio Bejel, Uva A. Clavijo, Rafael Catala, Enrique Sacerio-Garf, Maya Islas, Maricel Mayor, and Lourdes Gil. Among Cuban-American poets (those born in either Cuba or the United States, who have chosen English or Spanglish as their poetic language), some have published poems of social, linguistic, and literary merit. These works should not only be considered as the cultural expression of a Hispanic minority, but also as an interesting extension of Cuban poetic tradition. The 1980s have seen various studies of the Mariel poets, a specific designation for those who sailed from the port of Mariel, but also including other poets who left Cuba around 1980. Among these, one of the best known is Roberto Valero. His poems first appeared in the United States. For that matter, Heberto Padilla, Belkis Cusa Male, and Armando Valladares, though none came to the United States via Mariel, can be included in this group because they left Cuba around 1980. As regards those poets in exile who have lived in Spain, Puerto Rico, France, or any country other than the United States, careful studies and specific classifications are necessary. This group includes Severo Sarduy in France, and Gaston Baquero and Armando Alvarez Bravo in Spain (the latter presently residing in the United States).

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Puerto Rico Like Cuba, Puerto Rico was profoundly affected by the U.S. occupation of 1898. Between 1898 and 1930, the economy changed drastically from a semifeudal society to one dominated by U.S. corporations. Insistence upon Puerto Rico's Spanish heritage surfaced quickly in the literature of this period, a direct consequence of the deep social changes taking place at the time. For the most part, Puerto Rican intellectuals were nationalistic. For example, both José de Diego and Luis Lloréns Torres give a great deal of attention to this issue. De Diego, of the Puerto Rican upper class, became an advocate for Puerto Rican independence and indigenous culture. However, he oversimplified the issue by defining it as a conflict between the "white" Hispanic heritage and the new values imposed upon the country by the United States. Puerto Rican modernismo had no time to indulge itself in the exotic or the highly refined. Almost immediately, it addressed social and political concerns, within either the context of nationalism or the pan-Hispanic perspective. Modernismo arrived late in Puerto Rico, not coming into vogue until the second decade of the century when Revista de las Antillas, founded by Lloréns Torres in 1913, began to influence literary culture. The great modernista poets of Puerto Rico, José de Diego and, especially, Luis Lloréns Torres, are basically twentieth-century writers who adapted the rhetoric of modernismo to the theme of national identity. Lloréns Torres began his poetic career with Al pie de la Alhambra (At the foot of the Alhambra), 1899, a modernista collection. Then, in his Visiones de mi musa (Visions of my muse), 1913, he rejected modernismo yet still insisted that poetry will take the place of science and philosophy. Lloréns Torres also developed free verse and irregularity in his prosody. In 1913, Lloréns Torres introduced an aesthetic theory that he called pancalismo (from the Greek: pan=all, and kanlos=beauty), which declares that everything is beautiful. He then expanded his theory by introducing panedismo (again from the Greek: pan=all, and edus=verse), meaning that everything is verse, and prose does not exist. Of course, many of these ideas are found in the modernismo of Rubén Darío. Lloréns Torres also concerned himself with Caribbean and Spanish-American themes that, in many ways, identify him with the modernismo of José Marti. In his criollo poems, Voces de la campana mayor (Voices of the great bell), 1935, and Alturas de América (Heights of America), 1940, Lloréns Torres develops the image of the jibaro (the white Puerto Rican peasant) as a basic cultural symbol. Lloréns Torres, as well as his most distinguished follower Virgilio Dávila, felt that the archetypal Puerto Rican was white, poor, and from the countryside. From a sociological perspective the idea of the jibaro does not take into account their exploitation by coffee and sugar plantation owners, or, for that matter, the extensive population of blacks and mulattos in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, the avant-garde writers are best known by the general term experimentalists. The term includes a number of vanguard movements that evolved during the 1920s and 1930s. Puerto Rican experimentalism began in 1921 when José I. de Diego Padró and Luis Palés Matos created Diepalismo (a term derived by combining their names). Diepalismo had much in common with the ultraist movement in Spain, especially in its rejection of sentimental rhetoric and the deliberately aesthetic tropes of modernismo. Despite its timeliness, Diepalismo was a short-lived movement, although it had significant influence upon the onomatopoeic techniques found in the "black" poetry of Palés Matos. In 1924, Evaristo Ribera Chevremont returned to Puerto Rico from Spain and soon began a literary career that was to place him among the greatest of Puerto Rican poets. Although Ribera

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Chevremont was first allied with postmodernismo, he was influenced by ultraism and brought many of its achievements to Puerto Rico, the most important among them being free verse. His groundbreaking work El hondero lanzó la piedra (The slinger threw the stone), 1921, created a literary stir. It is also through Ribera Chevremont that the ideas of Vicente Huidobro were disseminated throughout Puerto Rico. Among Ribera Chevremont's most notable works are Pajarera (Bird cage), 1929, Tu, mar, y yo y ella (You, sea, and I and she), published in 1946 but containing poems written as early as 1924, Barro (Clay), 1945, and El semblante (The countenance), 1964. Of all the experimental movements that surfaced in Puerto Rico, only one, atalayismo, had any lasting consequence. Atalayismo was developed by Fernando González Alberty, Clemente Soto Vélez, Alfredo Margenat, and Graciany Miranda Archilla. Other writers were to join this group later. The movement was successful for several reasons: thematic innovation, new ideological perspectives, and radical changes in form and content. Atalayismo insisted upon constant experimentation and deliberately rebelled against the remains of modernista and transcendental rhetoric. One of the poets who best represents atalayismo is Clemente Soto Vélez. In Abrazo interno (Internal embrace), 1954, his poetry is characterized by a surrealist aesthetic. Soto Vélez's work also emphasizes radical social protest, a direct consequence of his active involvement in politics and the revolution led by Albizu Campos. Soto Vélez refuses to see Puerto Rican culture from the perspective of either the jibaro or the Afroantillean but insists upon a socioeconomic point of view that is derived from the needs and values of both the peasant and the oppressed worker. Among his many works are Arboles (Trees), 1955, and Caballo de palo (Wooden horse), 1959. The term social poets encompasses poets of diverse aesthetic tendencies. In addition, the social poets, as well as the so-called "black" poets, adopted experimentalist techniques. For example, Luis Palés Matos can occupy a place in Puerto Rican poetry as an experimentalist, a social poet, and a "black" poet. He used experimentalist techniques to express social concerns. As a social poet, Palés Matos proposed a notion of Puerto Rican culture based upon the inclusion and acceptance of black culture into Puerto Rican society, even though Palés's ideas on this issue are based upon a stylized definition of black culture. Nevertheless, in his Tuntún de pasa y grifería (The tuntun of nigs and nappy hair), 1937, Palés countered the cultural ideals of the established Puerto Rican intellectuals by insisting that Antillean culture was fundamentally a mulatto culture. Another of his works that merits special attention is Condones de la vida media (Songs of common life), 1925. Among the greatest of the social poets in Puerto Rico is Juan Antonio Corretjer, distinguished by his radically combative political attitude. Corretjer integrated the formal achievements of the experimentalists with the most advanced social concerns of his time and evolved a poetry best called neocriollista. Among his most important works are Agiieibana, 1932, Amor de Puerto Rico (Love of Puerto Rico), 1937, El leñero (The woodcutter), 1944, and Alabanza en la Torre de dales (Praise in the Tower of Ciales), 1953. In Corretjer's work, the jibaro is no longer an idealized figure and we find something closer to the actual condition of peasant suffering and exploitation. Mention must be made of Francisco Manrique Cabrera as belonging to the group of poets who have continued neocriollismo. His first collection, Poemas de mi tierra tierra (Poems of my land land), 1936, was influenced by Garcia Lorca. He then published Huella-Sombra y Cantar (Footstepshadow and song), 1943, in which he brought together his best poems written since 1930. Puerto Rican poets who have distinguished themselves in intimism or neoromanticism include Clara Lair, Carmen Alicia Cadilla, Julia de Burgos, and Violeta López Suria. It would be wrong to

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consider these poets solely as intimists since many of their poems are very much involved with social issues, particularly in reference to women in Latin-American society. Clara Lair frequently expresses a pessimistic view of women in Puerto Rican society. These views are expressed in the modernista style. Among her most important works are Arras de cristal (Crystal dowry), 1937, Trópico amargo (Bitter tropics), 1950, and Más alla del poniente (Beyond the sunset), 1950. Carmen Alicia Cadilla's first collection, Los silencios diáfanos (Diaphanous silences), 1931, has religious overtones, but in Lo que tú y yo sentimos (What you and I felt), 1933, her poetry became clearly neoromantic. Her next book was Canciones de flauta blanca (White flute songs), 1934, in which is found a spirit of lyric optimism and hope. Of all the Puerto Rican women poets of the twentieth century, the most important is Julia de Burgos. Her work, affected by a profound reading of Neruda, is highly original and possesses striking expressive power. Her poetry is a wonderful combination of metaphorical intensity, personal passion, and social awareness. Her recurring themes are the sorrow of lost love, terror in the face of death, love for her native land, and anger at the place women hold in Latin-American society. Her principal works are: Poemas en veinte surcos (Poems in twenty grooves), 1938, Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the simple truth), 1939, and El mar y tú (The sea and you), published posthumously in 1954. During the 1940s, other poetic movements appeared, among them integralism, transcendentalism, and hermeticism. The poets of integralism sought both a national and a pan-Hispanic aesthetic. They believed that art and poetry were a kind of religion of Latin America. In the early 1940s, the integralists enthusiastically received the Dominican poet Domingo Moreno Jimenes, whose ideas were notably similar to theirs. The most important Puerto Rican integralist is Luis Hernández Aquino, whose collection Isla para la angustia (Island of anguish) was published in 1943. In 1948, the magazine Alma Latina published the transcendentalist manifesto. This movement was founded by Félix Franco Oppenheimer, Eugenio Rentas Lucas, Jorge Luis Morales, and Francisco Lluch Mora. Though the transcendentalists were not part of the experimental trend, they used several experimental techniques as a tool for poetic creativity. Their transcendentalism was an answer to the negativity and rampant demoralization of the times. Furthermore, they were critical of the bourgeoisie and the sterile cults of scientific materialism and art for art's sake. It is because of those concerns that their poetry can best be defined as transcendent. While hermeticism did not prove attractive to many Puerto Rican poets, the few who practiced it published works of high quality. An excellent example is Francisco Matos Paoli. Matos Paoli believed that the source of creativity lay beneath mere appearances. His work was a constant exploration of the unknown, the occult, and the mysterious. He readily assimilated many images from the antipositivist and antiscientific intellectual currents. Matos Paoli began as a neoromantic and a neocriollista. The two books by which he is best known, Habitante del eco (The occupant of the echo), 1944, and Teoria del olvido (A theory of forgetfulness), 1944, situate him within the aesthetic of hermeticism. These collections demonstrate the metaphoric overdetermination (escritura polisemantica) of the works that were known as origenistas and sorprendidos, respectively, in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. These latter movements also have strong similarities to the Puerto Rican transcendentalists. Among those poets who served as a transition between the transcendentalists and the university poets of the 1950s, three warrant special attention: Jorge Luis Morales, Juan Martinez Capó, and

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Violeta López Suria. These three, though of an older generation, produced interesting works throughout the decade of the 1950s. They cultivated an intimate poetry still very much influenced by the transcendentalists. Morales, in La ventana y yo (The window and I), 1960, produced his most original poetry. Martinez Capó, in his first collection, Viaje (Journey), 1961, demonstrated a sophisticated, unsentimental poetic expression. Finally, Lopez Suria, in those poems she has published in Asomante since 1966, writes a colloquial poetry concerned with social issues, an evolution from the sentimental lyricism of her earlier poems. For Puerto Rico, the 1950s were years of great social and economic change. The government of Luis Muñoz Marin attempted to industrialize the country by inviting U.S. investors into the island's economy. Culturally, there was an emphasis upon the urban aspects of Puerto Rican society at the expense of the rural. There was also an impressive increase in the number of Puerto Ricans attending universities and the number of literary publications. These factors influenced the university poets of the 1950s. Most of these poets had been born in the late 1930s, and their age, aesthetic and social concerns are similar to the Generation of 1948 in the Dominican Republic, as well as the Generation of the 50s in Cuba. According to Luis A. Rosario Quiles, in his book Poesia nueva puertorriqueña (New Puerto Rican poetry), 1971, the university poets of the 1950s should be divided into two chronological stages: the first stage includes those poets who were in the university by 1955; the second stage consists of those poets in the university by 1963. Our preference, however, is to identify those poets of the first stage as university poets, and to consider the rest as part of yet another group who began to publish in the 1960s. The most prominent of the university poets are Hugo Margenat, Jaime Carrero, José María Lima, Jaime Vélez Estrada, Ramón Felipe Medina, Anagilda Garrastegui, Manuel Fermin Arraiza, Reinaldo Silvestri, Edilberto Irizarry, Jaime Luis Rodriguez Veláquez, and Luis A. Rosario Quiles. There is also a subgroup whose work tends decidedly toward intimate lyricism and metaphysical meditations: Arraiza, Vélez Estrada, Medina and Garrastegui. These poets make frequent use of classical forms. Medina indicates his religious vocation in El ruisenor bajo el cielo (The nightingale under the sky), 1956. His poems aspire to discover the mystical in the everyday. Garrastegui published Desnudez (Nakedness) in 1956, Siete poemas a Hugo Margenat (Seven poems for Hugo Margenat) in 1957, and Abril en mi sangre (April in my blood) in 1969. All these collections are marked by a profound lyricism expressed in classical forms. Vélez Estrada is the most classical and metaphysical of the group. Those among the university poets more inclined to social poetry were Hugo Margenat, Jaime Carrero, José Maria Lima, and Luis A. Rosario Quiles. For them, the poet has a social mission that must not be ignored. The best among these is Hugo Margenat, who, despite his early death, had a powerful influence upon his contemporaries as well as later generations, in particular the poets of the Guajana group in the 1960s. His four collections are Lampara apagada (The lamp's out), 1954, Intemperie (Unsheltered), 1955, Mundo abierto (Open world), and Ventana hacia lo último (Window onto the ultimate), published posthumously in 1958 and 1961 respectively. Margenat's poetry, especially Mundo abierto, was the first expression of what was to become the dominant vision in Puerto Rican poetry over the past three decades. The founding of the magazine Guajana in 1962 marked the beginning of a poetry characterized by radical, militant politics and a popular lexicon. The poets of this group are openly revolutionary

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and denounce all metaphysical and aesthetic considerations as bourgeois. The Guajana group was influenced by Hugo Margenat' s posthumous collection Mundo abierto, but it was the reality of the Cuban revolution that shaped the ideology in their poems. Notable among the poets of the Guajana group are Vicente Rodriguez Nietzsche, Marcos Rodriguez Frese, Andrés Castro Ríbs, Angela Maria Dávila, Edwin Reyes, Ulises Cadilla, and José Luis Vega. Interestingly, their enthusiasm affected the poetry of older militants, especially Soto Vélez and Corretjer. Though Guajana set the tone of the poetry of the 1960s and has enjoyed more than twenty years of continuous publication, there have been other poetic voices in Puerto Rico during the past thirty years. In 1967, two magazines, Mester and Palestra, appeared. Both adopted a less radical political stance and emphasized the aesthetic. The best-known poet of Mester is Ivan Silén. His poetry is characterized by innovative forms and themes. Ventana also originated as a counterpoint to Guajana in 1972. The objectives of Ventana are "to open a window onto the world" and to avoid the sterility of any one school. Ventana's editorial policy encourages a plurality of forms and themes. Puerto Rican poetry in the 1970s offered great variety, with the best examples found among the following: El juicio de Victor Campolo (The trial of Victor Campolo), 1970, and Ea movida de Victor Campolo (The transfer of Victor Campolo), 1972, by Luis A. Rosario Quiles; El pájaro loco (The crazy bird), 1971, and Eos poemas de Fili-Melé (Filí-Melé's poems), 1976, by Ivan Silén; and 100 X 35, 1973, by Jacobo Morales. The better poets of the 1970s and 1980s are Joseramón Melendes, Lilliam Ramos Collado, Aurea Maria Sotomayor, Jan Martinez, Manuel Ramos Otero, José Luis Vega, Rosario Ferré, and Manuel Martinez Maldonado. Critics in Puerto Rico are generally indifferent to Puerto Rican poets in the United States. Still, their indifference is not the same as the Cuban critics' rejection of their poets in exile. Writing published by Puerto Ricans living in the United States has been called nuyorrican, neorrican, or neorriqueña. As might be expected, several of the neorrican poets publish in English, others in Spanish, and yet others in Spanglish. Regardless of what we call them, their work should be studied as an important branch of Puerto Rican poetry. One of the first important contributions to neorrican poetry of the 1960s was Jet neorriqueño (Neorrican jet), 1965, by Jaime Carrero. This work contributed to the development of a literature that prides itself in being Puerto Rican, but also declares itself as a distinct literary phenomenon, a hybrid of sorts between being Puerto Rican and North American. Among the neorricans who were born, for the most part, in the 1940s and have produced work worthy of attention are Carlos Rodriguez Matos, Victor Fernández Fragoso, Pedro Pietri, Ivan Silén, Sandra Maria Esteves, José Angel Figueroa, Victor Hernández Cruz, Tato Laviera, Miguel Piñero, Louis Reyes Rivera, and Luz Maria Umpierre. In the introduction to Herejes y mitificadores (Heretics and mythmakers), an anthology of Puerto Rican poetry from the United States, edited by Rafael Rodriguez and Efraín Barradas, the latter presents a study of the characteristics of this poetry. Barradas calls attention to the diversity of poetic perspectives in the works of Sandra Maria Esteves, Victor Fernández Fragoso, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Julio Marzán, Louis Reyes Rivera, and others. However, Barradas feels that, despite the variety, this poetry is accurately defined within the parameters of herejes (those who reject myths and established values) and mitificadores (those who recreate and reinterpret Puerto Rican myths or myths from other cultures).

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Carlos Rodriguez Matos, a neorrican poet himself, has published insightful essays on Puerto Rican poetry written in the United States. Rodríguez Matos determines that humor and homosexuality are the two themes that distinguish neorrican poetry. Humor is almost always couched in either ironic or sarcastic terms. And homosexuality, though certainly not a new theme in world literature, is the explicit subject of entire collections, such as Poemas de un homosexual revolucionario (Poems of a revolutionary homosexual) by Rafael Rodriguez, and The Margarita Poems by Luz Maria Umpierre.

Dominican Republic During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Dominican Republic suffered a severe political crisis. Apart from continuous social instability, this island, like Cuba and Puerto Rico, was an unwilling victim of U.S. intervention. The crisis was aggravated by the death of President Heureaux in 1899, initiating en epoch of civil strife that culminated in the assassination of President Ramón Cáceres in 1911 and an armed occupation by the United States in 1916. This first U.S. occupation lasted until 1924. In the face of these circumstances, it is not surprising that Dominican literature at the turn of the century was preoccupied with national themes. In addition, there was a constant evolution, a rupture with past forms, throughout the literature of the period. Modernismo had reached the limits of its formal and metaphorical possibilities and had begun to repeat itself. On the other hand, powerful experimental currents were beginning to appear all over Spanish America, especially toward the close of the second decade of the century. To these general political and literary factors must be added a specific event that relates directly to the poetry of the republic: the so-called major poets died within a few years of one another - Salomé Ureña in 1897, José Joaquin Pérez in 1900, and Gastón Fernando Deligne in 1913. The Dominican Republic was the first of the Afro-Hispanic islands of the Caribbean to receive the new wave of experimentalism. This movement took on a nationalistic accent and was called Vedrinismo, after Jules Vedrines, a French pilot who distinguished himself in the First World War by his spectacular aerial tactics against the enemy. The best known of the Vedrinistas was Otilio Vigil Díaz. He had previously been allied with postmodernismo, but in his collection Galeras de pafos (Pafo's galleys), 1921, he published the Vedrinist manifesto. Vedrinismo was defined as the heir to the tradition of Baudelaire and avoided the rhymed verse and traditional forms of modernismo. But despite the efforts of Vigil Díaz, Vedrinismo was never widely accepted nor did it produce outstanding works. The general attitude toward experimentalism was far less enthusiastic in the Dominican Republic than in Cuba or Puerto Rico. It is with postumismo that Dominican poetry of the twentieth century begins to show originality and expressive force. Postumismo was a poetic movement that not only emphasized national culture, but created a school of poets who reached beyond the work of the school's founder, Domingo Moreno Jimenes. Among his followers should be mentioned Andrés Avelino and Rafael Augusto Zorrilla. Much of the success of postumismo might be attributed to its expression of extreme nationalism during a time of U.S. occupation. In fact, both the best and the worst of this movement can be credited to its nationalistic and iconoclastic bent. Moreno Jimenes began as a modernist, but soon moved to the field of Dominican popular linguistic and ideological expression. His poems re-

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turned again and again to the Dominican landscape, the small villages of the interior, and the way of life among the poor. His insistence upon the indigenous was a major contribution to the development of a national literature. Often his poetry seems filled with optimism and messianic concerns, yet, at other times, it conveys a profound sadness, especially in his meditations upon death. His formal contribution was to develop the possibilities of free verse, following the lead provided by Vigil Díaz. Postumismo dominated the poetry of the Dominican Republic for a number of years. But during the 1940s several poets appeared who have been called the independents of the 40s. The most important of these are Tomas Hernandez Franco, Manuel del Cabrai, Héctor Inchâustegui Cabrai, and Pedro Mir. In their distinct manner, each of these poets searched for the Dominican national identity. Still, they also provide a link between Dominican nationalism and a continental perspective. Tomas Hernandez Franco is the author of Yelidá, 1944, considered to be the most important poem of this period. Yelidâ deals with the life of a mulatto girl whose father is European and whose mother is African. The poem's subject becomes a symbol of Dominican national identity from a racial, ethnic, and anthropological viewpoint. The poem subverts the idea of the Indian as the Dominican national symbol. Hernández Franco's poetry is an intriguing mix of experimentalist techniques and neoromantic sentimentality. As regards Manuel del Cabrai it can be said that he is one of the internationally famous writers from the Dominican Republic. He is one of the most outstanding poets of the hemispheric movement called negrismo. His poetry explores politics, metaphysics, love, and the erotic. Among his important collections are Trópico negro (Black tropics), 1941, Compadre Mon (My pal Mon), 1943, Chinchina busca el tiempo (Chinchina looks for time), 1945, and Sangre mayor (Best blood), 1945. Del Cabrai achieves not only a diversity of thematic concerns but a variety of forms as well. From Héctor Incháustegui Cabrai's first book, Poemas de una sola angustia (Poems of a single anguish), 1940, until Diario de la guerra y los dioses ametrallados (Diary of war and the gunneddown gods), 1967, featuring two extensive poems integrated into one volume, he was noted for his vehement rejection of bourgeois values. Rather than protest directly against the dictatorship of Leónidas Trujillo, he chose to attack the basis of the ideological power of the national bourgeoisie. His radical attitude invites comparison with that of Moreno Jimenes. Both make extensive use of free verse and colloquial language, and both are engaged in a profound search for what is authentically Dominican. Pedro Mir's long poem entitled "Hay un país en el mundo" (There is a country in the world) is one of the most famous in Dominican letters, securing his place in Dominican literary history. His poetry is concerned with political and socio-historical issues. This is not to say that his poems are pamphleteering, since Mir works carefully to achieve great artistic intensity. In "Hay un pais en el mundo," Mir traces the history of a mythical country from the perspective of the oppression and exploitation that the Dominican Republic has suffered. Others of his important poems are "Contracanto a Walt Whitman" (Counter-song to Walt Whitman), "Poema del Llanto Trigueño" (Poem of the Dark Cry), and "El Huracán Neruda" (Neruda, the Hurricane). Dominican poetry in the 1930s was similar to the poetry appearing in Cuba and Puerto Rico. There were, of course, many important differences, but, as regards "black" Poetry and the variety of sociopolitical poems, it is the similarities that are of particular importance. For that matter, a com-

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parison of the poetry of these three countries throughout the 1940s reveals a continuing interrelationship in thematic as well as aesthetic concerns. The similarities are especially pronounced among those poets of a transcendentalist bent who are called the sorprendidos (surprised poets) in the Dominican Republic, the origenis tas (poets involved with the literary journal Origenes) in Cuba, and transcendentalists and hermeticists in Puerto Rico. These schools shared a tendency toward the transcendental, the religious, and the full spectrum of figurative language. Yet these poets were also concerned with the search for national and continental identity. The social context fostered these various movements: the sorprendidos developing during Trujillo's dictatorship (1930-61); the origenistas between the failed revolution of 1930 and the coming to power of Fulgencio Batista in 1952; and the transcendentalists and hermeticists in the disillusioning social crises that followed the failure of independence forces in the 1930s and 1950s. Along with Franklin Mieses Burgos, sorprendidos who merit attention are Freddy Gatón Arce, Aida Cartagena Portalatin, and Manuel Rueda. Each has demonstrated creativity and sophistication and has found a place in Dominican literary history. Since Salomé Urena in the nineteenth century, Dominican poetry written by women has seen nothing like the poems of Aida Cartagena Portalatin. Her work, like that of Urena, avoids the stereotypes of feminine poetry. Beginning as a sorprendida, Cartagena Portalatin soon developed the poetic concerns that place her with those poets whose work denounces social injustice. Her most important collections include Víspera del sueno (Dream's eve), 1944, Una mujer está sola (A woman is alone), 1955, and La voz desatada (The unleashed voice), 1962. Freddy Gatón Arce began as a surrealist interested in automatic writing. His association with the sorprendidos prompted a preference for the transcendental and the metaphysical, as well as the development of a complex imagery. Still later, his poetry emphasized the social and the political, although he never abandoned its characteristic religious overtones. Among his better known poems (usually published as separate works) are La leyenda de la muchacha (The legend of the girl), 1962, Poblana (Townswoman), 1965, and Magino Quezada, 1966. Manuel Rueda is among the most versatile artists (poet, dramatist, narrator, anthologist, essayist, and pianist) in the Dominican Republic. His work is equal to that of many better-known Hispanic writers. His most important work includes Las noches (The nights), 1949, La criatura terrestre (The earthly creature), 1963, Con el tambor de las islas, Pluralemas (With the island's drum, pluralemas), 1975, and Por los mares de la dama. Poesía 1970-1975 (Through the lady's seas. Poetry 1970-1975), 1976. Although Rueda collaborated with the sorprendidos, his work is unique and best measured against itself. One of his poems, "Canto de la frontera" (Song of the borders), considers the historical division and incompatibility that exist between the Haitian and the Dominican. He also founded pluralism, a poetic movement begun in 1974. The quality, quantity, and variety of Dominican poetry was never greater than in the 1940s. Work from every perspective and ideology appeared regularly. Hernández Franco, Del Cabrai, Incháustegui Cabrai, Mieses Burgos, Cartagena Portalatin, Gatón Arce, Rueda, and many others published significant poems. Then, in the 1950s, the Generation of 48 began to publish. These were younger poets, born in the early 1930s. Their impact was greatest from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, and their better known members include Lupo Hernández Rueda, Abelardo Vicioso, Máximo Avilés Blonda, and Abel Fernández Mejía. Like the sorprendidos and the independents before them, the poets of the Generation of 48 suffered the censorship of Trujillo. They were briefly encouraged by the temporary change in attitude

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of the dictatorship immediately following World War II; in 1946 Trujillo lifted censorship for a short while. However, the consequences were such that it was reimposed almost immediately. This group of poets is identified as the Generation of 48 since it was in that year that they jointly published "Colaboración escolar," a literary supplement of the newspaper El Caribe. Their work was relatively unknown until after Trujillo's death in 1961. The Generation of 48 is defined as much by diversity as by similarity. They are similar in that they evolved from the poetic concerns of the sorprendidos and the independents, yet are widely diverse in the manner by which each poet achieved this evolution. What they have in common is the attempt to harmonize the metaphysical slant of the sorprendidos with the social and political emphasis found in poetry of the independents. The result is a poetry of great technical sophistication that concerns itself with the human and the social. Owing perhaps to their diversity of perspective, it was not until 1954 that they began to identify themselves as a group or a generation with common concerns, in particular the social problems of the Republic. To this end, Abelardo Vicioso and Victor Villegas dedicated most of their work. In the poetry of Lupo Hernández Rueda these same concerns evolved into a denunciation of the injustices perpetrated by Dominican society, especially as regards the working classes. A common theme among poets of this generation was the revival of antiimperialist attitudes, though this revival did not peak until it was taken up by the younger poets of the Generation of 65. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the appearance of a number of younger poets, born for the most part in the 1940s. The catalyst that brought them together was the revolution of 1965 (actually more a civil war than a revolution), which was ended by the armed intervention of U.S. marines in that same year. These poets shared an equal interest in national and hemispheric issues. As their work evolved, their concern with the civil war lost much of its intensity and they began to experiment with a variety of thematic and stylistic issues. Despite this shift in emphasis, their work is marked by a deep awareness of the social and political. Many critics refer to this group as the Generation of 60. Others, notably Andrés Mateo, call them postwar poets, and their poetry the "young" poetry. Alberto Baeza Flores calls them the Generation of 65, referring to the political and social events of that year. Notable among these poets are Miguel Alfonseca, Juan José Ayuso, Antonio Lockward Artiles, Jeannette Miller, Andrés Mateo, Mateo Morrison, Enrique Eusebio, Luis Manuel Ledesma, Soledad Alvarez, and Alexis Gómez. Several (especially Manuel Ledesma, Apolinar Nunez, and Alexis Gómez) participated in Manuel Rueda's pluralism during the 1970s. Mention should also be made of Cayo Claudio Espinal, whose work of late shows the influence of pluralism. As with Cuban and Puerto Rican poetry written in the United States, the Dominican poets who live and work there are generally ignored by the poets, critics, and readers of the Dominican Republic. However, their poetry is beginning to attract the attention of a few critics. Daisy Cocco de Filippis is especially interested in their work and has published, along with Emma Jane Robinett, Poemas del exilio y de otras inquietudes (Poems of exile and other anxieties), 1988, a bilingual edition of poems by six Dominican poets who then lived in New York City. Included are Chiqui Vicioso, now living in the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez, Franklin Gutiérrez, Tomas Rivera Martinez, Héctor Rivera, and Guillermo Francisco Gutiérrez. The Puerto Rican poet and critic Carlos Rodriguez Matos has suggested, correctly, that the anthology might also have included Norberto James, one of the best known Dominican poets of the

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1970s, who now lives in Boston. Further, he notes the omission of Alexis Gómez, a poet well known in both the United States and the Dominican Republic. Finally, he notes the absence of José Carvajal. Despite these critical reservations, the anthology edited by Cocco de Filippis and Robinett is an important publication, both for the quality of its translations and as an example of a new frontier in Dominican literature.

Bibliography Alcantara Almânzar, José. 1979. Estudios de poesia dominicana. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editora Alfa y Omega. (One of the most insightful and careful studies on the major Dominican poets.) Baeza Flores, Alberto. 1977. La poesia dominicana en el siglo XX. Vols. 1 and 2. Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (An extensive and informed study on Dominican poetry of the twentieth century.) —. 1985. Los poetas dominicanos del 1965. Una generación importante y distinta. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editora Montalvo. (An indispensable and informed study on the Dominican poets of the Generation of 65.) Barradas, Efraín and Rafael Rodriguez, eds. 1980. Herejes y mitificadores: muestra de poesia puertorriquena en los Estados Unidos. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán. (A good anthology of Puerto Rican poets in the U.S., with an interesting introduction by Barradas.) Burunat, Silvia and Ofelia Garcia, eds. 1988. Veinte años de literatura cubanoamericana. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press. (An anthology of representative Cuban authors residing in the United States who have concerned themselves with the theme of Cuba and the exile experience.) Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, ed. 1988. Sin otro projeta que su canto. Antologia de poesia escrita por dominicanas. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Ediciones Taller. (An anthology, with a good introduction, of Dominican poetry written by women.) Cocco de Filippis, Daisy and Emma Jane Robinett, eds. 1988. Poemas del exilio y de otras inquietudes. Una selección bilingüe de la poesia escrita por dominicanos en los Estados Unidos. New York: Ediciones Alcance. (A bilingual anthology of six Dominican poets who live in New York City.) Fernández, José B. and Roberto G. Fernández. 1983. Indice bibliográfico de autores cubanos (Diaspora 19591979). Miami: Ediciones Universal. (The most complete bibliographical index of Cuban authors residing outside of Cuba.) Fernández, Teresa J. 1987. Revolución, poesia del ser. Havana: Ediciones Union. (The most thorough study of the Generation of the 50s.) Fernández Retamar, Roberto. 1954. La poesia contemporânea en Cuba (1927-1953). Havana: Ediciones Orígenes. (An insightful study of contemporary Cuban poetry from 1927 to 1953.) Fernández Retamar, Roberto and Fayad Jamis, eds. 1959. Poesia joven de Cuba. Colección Biblioteca Bâsica de Cultura Cubana. Lima: Editora Popular de Cuba. (The first anthology, with a good introduction, of Cuban poets of the Generation of the 50s.) González, José Emilio. 1972. La poesia contemporânea de Puerto Rico (1930-1960). San Juan, Puerto Rico: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena. (An important sociological study on contemporary Puerto Rican poetry.) Gonzalez, Rubén. 1986. La poesia de los setenta en Puerto Rico. Cuadernos de Poética. (Santo Domingo, D.R.) 9.3:55-64. (A good article on the Puerto Rican poetry of the 1970s.) Henríquez Urena, Max. 1963. Panorama histórico de la literatura cubana. Vol. 2. New York: Las Américas Publishing Company. (An important history of Cuban literature up to the 1950s.) Hernández Aquino, Luis. 1966. Nuestra aventura literaria (los ismos en la poesia puertorriquena) 1913-1948. San Juan: Ediciones de La Torre, Universidad de Puerto Rico. (A useful work that emphasizes the basic information about Puerto Rican literary movements from 1913 to 1948.)

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Hernandez Rueda, Lupo. 1981. La generatión del 48 en la literatura dominicana. Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (An important study of the Dominican authors of the Generation of 48.) Hernández Rueda, Lupo and Manuel Rueda, eds. 1972. Antologia panorâmica de la poesia dominicana contemporánea. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editora del Caribe. (A good anthology of contemporary Dominican poets.) Incháustegui Cabrai, Héctor. 1968. De literatura dominicana. Siglo XX. Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. (A good history and study of twentieth-century Dominican literature.) Lazo, Raimundo. 1967. Historia de la literatura cubana. Havana: Editora Universitaria. (A useful and well-organized history of Cuban literature up to the 1960s that uses the generational method.) López, César. 1967. En torno a la poesía cubana actual. Revista Unión. 4. (An insightful article on the poetry of the Generation of the 50s by one of its members.) Mateo, Andrés L. 1981. Poesia de postguerra / Joven poesia dominicana. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editora Alfa y Omega. (An indispensable anthology of the poets of the Generation of 65.) Núnez, Ana Rosa, ed. 1970. Poesia en éxodo (El exilio cubano en su poesia, 1959-1969). Miami: Ediciones Universal. (The first major anthology of Cuban poetry in exile from 1959 to 1969.) Peix, Pedro and Tony Raful, eds. 1986. El Sindrome de Penélope en la Poesia Dominicana. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editorial Santo Domingo. (An anthology, with introduction, of contemporary Dominican poets, especially those of the Generation of 65.) Portuondo, José Antonio. 1984. Bosquejo histórico de las letras cubanas. Havana: Ediciones Letras Cubanas. (A panoramic history of Cuban literature that uses the generational method.) Puebla, Manuel de la. 1981. Poesia joven en Puerto Rico. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Mairena. (A good work on contemporary Puerto Rican poetry.) Puebla, Manuel de la and Marcos Reyes Dávila, eds. 1983. Poesia universitaria 1982-1983. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Mairena. (The best anthology of the university poets of Puerto Rico.) Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1970. Diccionario de literatura puertorriquena. 2nd ed. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena. (An extensive and informative dictionary on Puerto Rican literature.) Rodriguez Matos, Carlos A. 1987. Apuntes para un acercamiento a la poesia puertorriquena: 1962-1986. Cuadernos de Poética. (Santo Domingo, D.R.) 12.4(May-August): 15-35. (An interesting approach to contemporary Puerto Rican poetry that includes the works of poets living outside the island.) Rodriguez Rivera, Guillermo. 1978. En torno a la joven poesia cubana. Revista Unión. 2.17(June):63-80. (One of the most informed articles on Cuban poetry of the 1960s and 1970s.) Rosario Quiles, Luis A. 1971. Poesia Nueva Puertorriquena. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Producciones Bondo. (A good anthology, with an interesting introduction, of contemporary Puerto Rican poets, especially the university poets.) Umpierre, Luz Maria. 1984. De la protesta a la creación - Una nueva visión de la mujer puertorriquena en la poesia. Plural. (University of Puerto Rico) 3:119-25. (An interesting article on the significance of Puerto Rican poetry written by women.) Vitier, Cintio. 1970. Lo cubano en la poesia. 2nd ed. Havana: Instituto del Libro. (The most complete and helpful study of Cuban poetry. Here Vitier traces Cuban poetry up to the 1950s from the perspective of the search for national identity.)

The Theater

SANDRA M. CYPESS

State University of New York - Binghamton

The Caribbean was the first area of the Americas to be explored by the Spanish; it is also the area with the longest theatrical history of works written in Spanish. Before the arrival of the Europeans, however, the Amerindians had developed their areítos, or performances that combined dance, music, and drama (Arrom [1967]). The African slaves imported by the Spaniards also brought with them examples of dramatic expression. Because the Spanish military conquest also implied acculturation, the church fathers used the dramatic form as a way to instruct both the indigenous and African populations in the Christian religion. The churchmen made use of both indigenous and African elements with European forms to reach the new populations they were trying to convert with the aid of drama. Although within a different sociopolitical context, this early combination of three diverse cultures marks twentieth-century Caribbean drama, as noted in the works of Francisco Arriví and Zora Moreno of Puerto Rico, José Triana of Cuba, and Haffe Serulle in the Dominican Republic, among others. Puerto Rico and Cuba especially have enjoyed a sustained tradition of theatrical productions from the colonial period onward. Yet it was in the Dominican Republic that secular theatrical presentations in Spanish began. The first known criollo playwright was Cristóbal de Llerena de Rueda. His entremés, a one-act comical playlet, was presented in 1588. Llerena used realistic motifs, traditional Spanish figures like the Bobo (the fool), and classical references to satirize the sociopolitical problems of Santo Domingo. Because his play depicted a society in crisis and was critical of Spanish policy in the New World, Llerena was soon deported by the authorities. Since that time, theatrical activity has been hampered by the same difficult sociopolitical conditions, censorship, and economic instability. Although these constants have marked the nature of cultural expressions in general, political oppression and economic uncertainties are especially inimical for the theater. A narrative or poem can be passed surreptitiously from reader to reader, but a theatrical production by nature is a social event that requires the cooperation of a number of people. A performance is more readily open to interference and inhibited by political pressures. Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic have suffered dictatorial systems of government and cultural imperialism that have interfered with dramatic expressions, yet despite these major sociopolitical problems, both Puerto Rico and Cuba have managed to produce a dynamic theatrical tradition, while in the Dominican Republic, the drama has been the most unstable genre, only recently being revitalized.

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Puerto Rico Early twentieth-century plays in Puerto Rico often had historical themes that reflected the particular problems of the island. For example, El grito de Lares (The cry of Lares), written in 1914 by the poet Luis Llorens Torres, resembles other plays of that time period in the way it relates an important event in Puerto Rican history by using a style and language that reflect Spanish theatrical traditions. The Lares Rebellion of 1868, which was an attempt to establish Puerto Rican independence from Spain, will be a recurring theme on the Puerto Rican stage in the island's nationalist phase. Not until 1938, however, does a sustained tradition of dramatic activity emphasizing Puerto Rican language, themes, structures, and imagery, and written by Puerto Ricans, begin. From the events of that year to the present day, a lively, mostly thesis-oriented theater has flourished. In general, Puerto Rican theater reflects the same obsession with the themes of national identity and colonialism found in other genres (Sánchez [1979], 120). In 1938 the Ateneo of Puerto Rico, a local literary association, initiated a dramatic contest in which three plays were given prizes, a stimulus to artistic activity soon followed by the formation in 1940 of the Sociedad Dramática del Teatro Popular Areyto, by Emilio Beiaval, the founding father of Puerto Rican national theater. Belaval used the term areyto, a word of indigenous origin referring to an Amerindian form of dramatic expression, to symbolize the group's mission to create a national theater with roots in the island's past. Themes, stage settings, ideas, aesthetics, as well as actors and playwrights would reflect typical Puerto Rican elements. While Areyto as a group dissolved in 1942, its brief appearance provided a motivational force for many other groups and for theatrical activity in general. Belaval can be credited with a variety of efforts to stimulate national productions. He also wrote an essay, "Lo que podría ser un teatro puertorriqueno" (What a Puerto Rican theater might be like), that served as a manifesto for the national theater, and created a number of plays using various forms and themes that attempted to dramatize his beliefs. The writers associated with Belaval followed his example and formed theatrical groups in addition to creating original plays that expressed their ideals. Manuel Méndez Ballester is an important figure in this first promotion of national theater, with El clamor de los surcos (The cry of the furrows), 1938 and Tiempo muerto (The dead season), 1940, exemplifying his early contribution of plays using realistic techniques to present social issues and problems of Puerto Rican national identity. Among the contemporary themes found in the plays of this early period are the problems of emigration, unemployment for the Hispanic male, and the changing role of the Hispanic female, all found in Fernando Sierra Berdecía's Esta noche juega el jóker (Tonight the joker plays), presented in 1938. Luis Rechani Agrait's Mi senoria (Your lordship), 1940, introduces another popular theme as well as a genre that will also prove conducive to creativity. Written as a farce that caricatures Puerto Rican politics, the work contrasts with the somber naturalism of Méndez Ballester's plays in its use of humor to attack social problems. The satirized politicians of Mi senoria may be the precursors of Luis Rafael Sánchez's Senator Vicente Reinosa, found in his famous novel, La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho's beat), 1976. The use of satire rather than social realism as a way to focus on national problems became increasingly important, as such writers as Méndez Ballester also contributed plays like Bienvenido,

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Don Goyito (Welcome, Don Goyito), produced during the Eighth Festival of Theater in 1965, and Los cocorocos (The big shots), 1975, both satires that illustrate a second important vein in Puerto Rican theater, the humorous treatment of social issues. Despite the humor in Bienvenido, Don Goyito, Méndez Ballester examines the serious issue of the Puerto Ricans who accept political domination and actively collaborate with the colonialists; the characters Johnny and Carlos in Don Goyito, like Rogelio in Marqués's Mariana, o el alba (Mariana or the dawn) or the Mary, Willie, and Rosita in his Carnaval afuera, carnaval adentro (Carnival outside, carnival inside) form a paradigm of behavior that will reappear on the Puerto Rican stage. In 1958, twenty years after the first Ateneo productions, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena established the Festival de Teatro Puertorriqueno. An annual event, the theater festival can be credited with stimulating national productions, especially since the Instituto also agreed to publish the prize-winning plays after they were produced on stage at the Tapia theater in San Juan. Some of the extra-literary problems of playwrights in other Hispanic countries have been avoided in Puerto Rico because of the ready ability to publish plays. The plays selected for production in the first Festival honored the four men considered the most outstanding in the formation of contemporary Puerto Rican theater: Belaval, Méndez Ballester, René Marqués, and Francisco Arriví. Each play also presents an important aspect of Puerto Rican life. In Belaval's La hacienda de los cuatro vientos (The plantation of the four winds), the historical battle between Spaniard and Creole is reenacted in the play. Méndez Ballester's Encrucijada (Crossroads) brings his Puerto Rican protagonists to Spanish Harlem; using naturalistic techniques, he explores the devastating effects of the city on the unsophisticated family, which finds its moral values and ways of life attacked and destroyed by the alienating forces in the city. The theme of emigration is an important one on the Puerto Rican stage and, as mentioned above, was first treated in 1938 by Sierra Berdecfa in his Esta noche juega el jóker. The two younger playwrights of this first foursome introduced not only new themes but innovative dramatic techniques as well. Both Arriví's Vejigantes (an untranslatable title referring to a Puerto Rican folk festival of African origin), which introduces the problem of racial discrimination, and Marqués's Los soles truncos (The fanlights), a play combining psychological and political themes, are aesthetically viable works whose stylistic and structural contributions will be discussed in a more detailed analysis of these important playwrights. Although all four of the playwrights honored at the first Festival are men, contemporary Puerto Rican theater has been enriched also by the artistic expressions of its women, a phenomenon that began in the nineteenth century (Cypess [1979]). Even Belaval's Areyto in 1940 included the work of the poet Martha Lomar, pseudonym of Maria López de Victoria de Reus, whose play, He vuelto a buscarla (I've searched for her again) was produced but never published. However, because of the policy changes brought about by the Instituto, when the plays of two women were selected for the 1960 Festival, their works were not only produced but also published and circulated. De tanto caminar (After so much traveling) by Piri Fernandez and El cristal roto (The broken glass) by Myrna Casas signal the achievements of women who have made varied contributions to Puerto Rican theater. With the theater of René Marqués and Arriví, further development of the national stage takes place as they introduce expressionistic techniques that emphasize nonverbal codes like lighting and sound to develop mood; there is an interest also in experimentation with time, so that psychological

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time is presented on stage. While the themes of these two writers are clearly nationalistic, their technical concerns show the greater sophistication of Puerto Rican theater. Francisco Arriví's first play Club de solteros (Bachelor's club), 1940, is a farce that focuses on the war between the sexes; its imaginative staging and irony leads Frank Dauster to consider it "close to theater of the Absurd" ([1973], 111). With Maria Soledad, 1947, Arrivi creates a complex drama that has the legend of the Sleeping Beauty as a subtext for an exploration of the theme of purity. His most famous play is Vejigantes, 1958, part of the trilogy Máscara puertorriquena (Puerto Rican masque) that deals with the serious topic of racial discrimination and its psychological implications in a multiracial society. In theme, setting, and style, Vejigantes is another example of Puerto Rican nationalism on stage. Through the presentation of three generations of women in one family, Arrivi reflects the macrocosm of Puerto Rican attitudes towards race, and also points the way for the resolution to the problem. The title is an autochthonous word, whose meaning and purpose is explained in the first act. Arrivi presents the dance festival for which Loíza Aldea, a village populated by Puerto Ricans of African origin, is famous, in which two groups wearing masks act out a rivalry. The group of caballeros represent the forces of good while the vejigantes are the forces of evil. Marta, the daughter of the black Mamá Tofia, acts like a vejigante, the masked force of evil, in the way she wishes to hide her racial identity; she covers her hair with a turban in an attempt to hide her black characteristics. Because her daughter Clarita, as her name implies, has light skin and a white look, Marta attempts to pass in white society and induce her child to continue living a masquerade by denying her African heritage. Marta's wish is that her daughter escape the racial diversity of Puerto Rico and live in the United States. Clarita refuses to carry on the negative tradition of the vejigante, the masked life, and admits to Billy, her American fiance, that she is of black ancestry. "I want to free my heart from the mask of the vejigante,"1 she declares in the final scene. Arrivi uses elements of black popular folklore, masks, dance, and magic, a phantasmagoric world of music and witchcraft that is also a real part of island life. The women show their solidarity by dancing La Bamba in their apartment in the fashionable neighborhood of El Condado. With the dance, Arrivi creates a concrete image on stage of the integration of culture that he wishes for his country. Arrivi continues to be important for the Puerto Rican theater into the 1980s not only for his creative productions, but also for his role as a theater historian, as evidenced by his book Areyto mayor, 1966, and his many other essays. René Marqués worked in various genres in which he expressed his lifelong concern with the problematics of Puerto Rico's political and cultural status in relation to the United States. With more than a dozen plays, Marqués was recognized at the time of his death in 1979 as one of Puerto Rico's most prominent writers, not only for his thematic ideas, but also for his technical skills, his symbolic use of lighting and auditory details, and his manipulation of shifting levels of time. All of his skills can be seen in Los soles truncos, 1958, which initiates Marqués's mature dramatic period in its integration of theme and technique, joining nationalism and psychological exploration. On one level, the story deals with three sisters who live tied to their memories of the past, isolated from the economic progress of the island, creating an insular environment in their home. Like La carreta (The oxcart), 1952, perhaps his most popular work with audiences both on the 1 Quiero librar mi corazón del disfraz de vejigante, (Arrivi [1965], 173). (This and all other translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.)

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island and in the United States, Los soles truncos explores the cultural conflicts between traditional values and materialistic progress introduced by foreign influences. La carreta employed a realistic frame and recreated the typical phonetic patterns of the Puerto Rican popular speech of the play's protagonists. In Los soles truncos, his technique changes; the expressionistic use of light and sound creates an impressive dramatic spectacle. It has been singled out as a major work, although some critics consider Un nino azul para esa sombra (A blue child for that shadow), 1958, to be one of Marqués's best plays; both represent his dramatic techniques, thematic preoccupations, and his modus operandi, being based on previously written short stories. Un niño azul was produced at the Third Theatre Festival in 1960 and is a political allegory about the status of Puerto Rico, like so many of Marqués's other works. His imaginative use of stage space and visual and auditory elements, carefully described in extensive stage directions and refined in the pantomime Juan Bobo y la dama de Occidente (Juan Bobo [the fool] and the lady of the West), 1955, point out again how well Marqués understood the importance of the nonverbal aspects of the drama. As in Mariana o el alba, 1965, his version of the Lares rebellion of 1868, in Un nino azul Marqués uses the image of a child to represent Puerto Rican efforts to gain independence. He uses the actions of the individuals as a synecdoche for the sociopolitical situation of the island, translating Puerto Rico's search for identity into a family crisis in which each parent represents conflicting patterns of behavior that affect the upbringing of the offspring. The dissolution of the marriage is symbolic as well of the future destruction of the offspring of such a couple, or Puerto Rican society as it is currently constituted. The child Michelin chooses suicide rather than live in a society that compromises his cultural identity. Bonnie Reynolds's careful reading of the temporal and physical illusion of entrapment created by Marqués describes how in the imagery of time and space Marqués implies that no future progression, no future movement, is possible (Reynolds [1983]). Economy of dramatic detail can be seen in the imaginative way Marqués uses color and light. The color blue alluded to in the title, a recurring color in his dramatic world, is an important sign for Marqués. In the Hispanic-American world that Marqués idealizes and sets apart from North American influences, blue as a signifier was developed by Rubén Dario to represent idealism and artistic expression. Marqués places blue ribbons on the young women in Mariana o el alba as signs of their pure revolutionary fervor, and in La muerte no entrarâ en palacio (Death will not enter the palace), 1956, another clear political allegory, a blue light shines over Casandra to accentuate her relationship to the revolutionary values approved by Marqués, a function as well for blue light in El apartamiento (The apartment), 1964. Perhaps Los soles truncos shows best his mastery of lighting codes, for along with the blue light of idealism, Marqués develops additional lighting signs as means of conveying information in a complex play that destroys traditional concepts of chronology and character development. The blue child of Un nino azul, then, is the ideal of Puerto Rican independence that has been cast into the shadows by the imperialist body politic. The social problems of Puerto Rico remained the major focus of his thematic concerns, but the existential predicaments of the twentieth century also find dramatic expression in plays like La casa sin reloj (The house without a clock) and El apartamiento. The latter play clearly belongs to a universal dramatic world and reflects the influences of Beckett, Sartre, Pinter, and Ionesco - playwrights who helped to transform the dramatic idiom and structure for most writers in the mid-twentieth century.

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Despite the ease with which one can apprehend his message, Marqués nevertheless is a successful dramatist because of his ability to make use of the plurality of codes inherent in the genre, a complex system of linguistic and paralinguistic signs sometimes ignored by writers with a strong thesis to convey. Ponderous symbolism and a melodramatic tone are characteristics of some of Marqués's dramatic expression, but in his more successful plays these features are tempered by his ability to create physical images of lasting impression. Just as Marqués dominated his generation, Luis Rafael Sánchez took center stage after Marqués died. His plays show a development from the early poetic allegories of La espera: juego del amor y del tiempo (The wait: game of love and time), 1958 and Cuento de Cucarachita Viudita (The story of the widowed li'l cockroach), 1959, based on a popular folk legend, to the Puerto Rican version of Antigone, La pasión segûn Antigona Pérez (The passion according to Antigona Perez), 1968, and the postmodernist experiment Quintuples (Quintuplets), 1984. Like the works of Arrivi and Marqués written in the late fifties, Sánchez's first plays use a Puerto Rican idiom and show people alienated from a society whose technology has passed them by. Sánchez expressed these ideas through the interplay of love relationships, a motif also used in La farsa del amor compradito (The farce of bought love), 1960. In that play, his use of the figures of Colombina, Arlequin, and Pulcinello recalls the traditions of popular theater, especially the commedia dell' arte, but always within a Puerto Rican context. The use of farce links Sánchez to a growing trend in Puerto Rico to see in that form the appropriate expression of the distorted social environment of colonialism that marks Puerto Rican existence. Always experimenting, Sánchez followed the grotesque humor of La farsa with the serious tone of the suite Sol 13, interior (Sun Street 13 [apartment without exterior view]), composed of Los ángeles se han fatigado (The angels have grown tired) and La hiel nuestra de cada dia (Our daily drop of bitterness). The two are united by the residence of their protagonists, a humble apartment building on Sol street, an ironic location since their lives take place in the shade of poverty and anguish. The language and psychology of the characters, the motif of the lottery in La hiel, all provide the national context that is typical for other playwrights in this period. In 1968 Sánchez produced La pasión según Antigona Pérez, the one among his plays that has to date received the most critical attention. While clearly replete with metaphysical overtones about the conflict of the individual and the state, the "Pérez" of the title is also reflected in the text, from the location of the play in a Latin-American country "Molina," to posters on the walls that disclose aspects of the political life of Latin America in general (the signs that proclaim "Bosch for President," "26 of July," "Yankis Go Home," etc.) and the contemporary language of a consumeroriented society. Sánchez's Antigona is a Latin-American heroine who fights the dictator Creón Molina and his self-imposed tyranny. By presenting the theme through Brechtian techniques - most notably the use of visual aids, popular music, and distancing effects - Sánchez hopes to provoke his audience into the appropriate judgmental state to evaluate the characters and their actions. While the Antigone theme has proven popular in world theater, and the use of mythic subtexts in general is a characteristic of a number of important plays in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, in Puerto Rico the treatment of the classical myth has been rare, and Méndez Ballester's Hilarión, 1943, is one of the few other examples. Sánchez's play provides interest more because of its dramatic use of popular music, lighting techniques and staging devices than for its text and characters. When La guaracha del Macho Camacho came out in 1976, the overwhelming success of the novel seemed to indicate that Sánchez would leave the theater and continue to write fiction, but in

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1979 he produced Parábola del Andarin (Parable of the traveler). The text shows Sánchez's versatility as a creator of linguistic games, a reflection of the novelistic enterprise, but he continues his dramatic tradition of using folkloric subtexts. Popular music and the language of commercials recreate the culture of the masses that Sánchez utilizes in order to explore the theme of exploitation by the sociopolitical system. The direction of his theater for the eighties appears to point to continued linguistic experimentation, with a politically committed message. Always the innovator, despite his apparent interest in dramatic traditions, the play of the new wave is Quintuples, 1984, a postmodernist experiment, as will be discussed below. Along with Luis Rafael Sánchez, Myrna Casas is considered another active member of the sixties generation, sharing a thematic interest in issues of Puerto Rican national identity and the exploration of innovative techniques. In addition, she adds a concern for the role of women in Puerto Rican society, combining the more general problems of colonialism with feminism. The theme of women's rights, however, cannot be considered new in Puerto Rican theater, for even in the nineteenth century the well-known Alejandro Tapia addressed the topic, and in the early part of the century, Luisa Capetillo wrote works that supported feminist issues: Influencia de las ideas modernas (Influence of modern ideas), 1916, is the collective name for plays whose individual titles show their thesis: Matrimonio sin amor, consecuencia el adulterio (Matrimony without love, adultery the consequence) provides a salient example. Casas is an active participant in the theatrical life of the island, having been an actress, director, producer, and dramatist, as well as a professor of drama at the University of Puerto Rico. In the form of a well-made play, her Eugenia Victoria Herrera explores the role of women in patriarchal families, while on the other structural pole, Absurdos en soledad (Absurdities in solitude), 1963, continues the study of women using an absurdist form that shows fragmented scenes, no chronological development, and dialogue that reflects the themes of fragmentation and alienation characteristic of today's world. Aside from Eugenia Victoria Herrera, Casas's work fits the definition of theater of the vanguard, as her own anthology of theatrical pieces of Latin-American authors is called (Casas [1975]). In addition to including the innovations Marqués brought to Puerto Rican theater, Casas's work also shows the influence of Artaud, Ionesco, and Beckett, as well as the social ideas and multimedia techniques of Brecht. Like many Latin-American works that show the influence of the theater of the absurd, including Marqués's El apartamiento, the Cuban José Triana (La noche de los asesinos [The criminals]) and the Argentine Griselda Gambaro (Los siameses [The siamese twins]), Casas's Absurdos en soledad is not purely absurdist, since it has an intentional level of social criticism as it attempts to redefine the position of women in Puerto Rico. The reader/audience who questions signs in the theater is asked to carry that critical pose over into social problems. In 1968 the collective El Tajo del Alacrán (The scorpion's slash) was formed, an event considered by Roberto Ramos-Perea to be the initiation of the Nueva Dramaturgia Puertorriquena (NDP) (The New Puerto Rican Dramaturgy) ([1985], 11). Lydia Milagros Gonzalez has been called the most important writer of the first cycle of the NDP by the critic Jorge Rodriguez ([1984]). Like Casas, Gonzalez has been involved in every aspect of dramatic production. González actively participated in the political and cultural movements of the sixties and seventies, as evidenced by the plays she produced with El Tajo del Alacrân, which broke out of the traditional theatrical space symbolized by the Teatro Tapia and the official festivals of the Instituto by going out into the street

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in order to raise the consciousness of the average people to whom the plays were directed. The language of the plays reflects the speech of the masses and the themes deal with the socioeconomic difficulties of the poor people to whom the plays are directed. The titles themselves often reflected the didactic aim of the plays. La historia del hombre que dijo que no (The story of the man who said no), 1966, revised 1977, centers on a black man who is happy working the land. When he encounters a number of representatives of the destructive powers in the country, he shows his strength by refusing to let them manipulate him. El drama de la A.M.A o como es que el pueblo se vuelve contra el pueblo (The drama of the AMA or how it is that the people rebel against the people), 1967, revised 1977, shows the importance of group solidarity. While the topics were serious, the tone was often humorous, satirical humor being one of the best ways to analyze reality, criticize oppressive institutions, affirm a people's sense of worth, and point to structural changes, some of the goals of the Tajo del Alacrán. Zora Moreno also represents the latest tendencies in Puerto Rican theater. Like many of her predecessors, she is a versatile figure, not only a dramatist, but an actress, director, and founder of a theater group, Producciones Flor de Cahillo. Thematically she focuses on social injustice, and technically she follows an approach that could be called part of epic theater, for she tries to raise the consciousness of her audience so they can bring about change. She uses popular music and humor, with ordinary people speaking their own dialects as they try to work out the problems of everyday life. In some ways La carreta of René Marqués and Máscara puertorriquena of Arriví are the antecedents of her work in its use of Puerto Rican dialect and the presentation of themes involving racial tensions and acculturation. Like Casas before her, Moreno adds special attention to the female characters and feminist themes in general. Her preoccupation with popular traditions and the conflicts produced by industrial changes on the lives of the Puerto Rican family is seen in Coqui coriundo vira el mundo o Anastasia (The story of Anastasia), 1981, produced by Flor de Cahillo during the first Spring Theater Festival organized by the Ateneo Puertorriqueno. The plot is based on a true account of the tragic events surrounding Adolfina Villanueva, assassinated by police while attempting to defend her family against eviction. The three acts of the drama depict typical Caribbean habits, music and dance, not for costumbristic effect, but to show the national roots of the family who will be uprooted from their land in the name of progress. Her characters are not passive; like Anastasia, the mother, they fight vigorously to defend their rights. The female figure is a valiant spokesperson for the rights of the poor, offering a positive image of women in Puerto Rico despite the tragic ending for Anastasia-Adolfina. A version of the play as Anastasia was published by the Mexican theater journal Tramoya in the second issue of its new cycle in 1985, a number devoted to the New Puerto Rican Dramaturgy. Also, at the Twenty-Eighth Annual Festival of Puerto Rican Theater in 1986, the work was selected for presentation along with three others that reflect the latest tendencies on the national theater scene. Another example of popular theater is the Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América directed by Pedro Santaliz. Santaliz, along with Moreno and Moncho Conde, have been called "la santa trinidad del teatro popular de Segundo Ciclo de la NDP" (the Holy Trinity of the Second cycle of popular theater of the New Puerto Rican Dramaturgy) (Ramos-Perea [1985], 12). His work is not as politically determined as that of the other groups of popular theater like Anamú, founded in part by Rosa Luisa Marquez, Moriviví, and Teatro de Guerrilla, which functioned in connection with Federation de Universitarios Pro Independencia (FUPI, Federation of University People Pro-Independence) of

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the University of Puerto Rico. Santaliz chooses works that do not have a necessarily didactic function, but use the language of the people to reach them to talk abut their dreams, fantasies, superstitions. Cadencia en el pais de las Maravillas (Cadence in the land of marvels), 1973, is an example of his work. Because of the political upheavals occasioned by the war in Vietnam, Anamü and Moriviví, formed by members of the first group, would go out into the neighborhoods and communities, learning about them first, then presenting works that reflect the social problems of the area, in a similar way to the modus operandi of Teatro Escambray of Cuba. They incorporate the suggestions of the spectators, improvising and altering the scripts in an ongoing process that reflects the role of the public in the work, a creación colectiva that includes such titles as El Super show de la Hora Cero (The super show of zero hour), El oráculo (The oracle), Basta (Enough), Los Migrantes (The migrants). While Anamü also adapted well-known plays by other Latin Americans, like the Historias para ser contadas (Stories to be told) of Osvaldo Dragún of Argentina, it chose plays by national authors of a certain political consciousness. Pipo subway no sabe reir (Pipo Subway doesn't know how to laugh), 1973, and Flag Inside by Jaime Carrero, one of the new young playwrights, offer a critique of Puerto Rico's position as a colonial state. Bahia sucia, Bahia negra (Dirty bay, black bay), 1972, is a commentary on an oil spill that dirtied the southwest coastal line of the island. Anamú represents one of the more successful groups of popular theater that uses the form to comment on political and social problems. The works of the NDP have introduced new themes and situations that were not considered or were treated gingerly by earlier generations. The theme of homosexuality is treated openly in all the works of Abniel Marat, as well as in Doce paredes negras (Twelve black walls), 1973, by Juan Gonzalez, La santa noche del sábado (Saintly Saturday night), 1975, by Luis Torres Nadal, Sin principio ni f in (Without beginning or end), 1981, by Carlos Escalera, Arcos de sangre (Chests of blood), 1983, by Joey Rivas. Even the venerable Instituto offerings of the Festival reflected an openness to vanguardist thematic and technical experiments when in 1986 it presented 1996 by Walter Rodriguez, about the AIDS epidemic; Coqui coriundo vira el mundo, the populist play by Zora Moreno; Federico Córtame la sombra (Federico, cut the shade for me) by Luis Rojas and Nadia Benabid, who deal with the theme of homosexuality; and Malasangre (Bad blood) by Roberto Ramos-Perea, which also contrasts old values with new attitudes. Ramos-Perea is one of the young playwrights whose work as a critic has focused on NDP. He is the founder of the Sociedad Nacional de Autores Dramáticos (SONAD) and one of the critics most actively involved in promoting la Nueva Dramaturgia Puertorriquena. In his theater he is chiefly concerned with national themes presented within a realistic frame, as shown in the trilogy Revoluciones: Revolución en el infierno, Revolución en el Purgatorio, and Revolución en el Paraiso (Revolution in hell, Revolution in purgatory and Revolution in paradise). In Malasangre, presented at the Twenty-Eighth Festival of Puerto Rican theater in 1986, Ramos-Perea offers an interesting technique of presenting a stylized setting with a realistic development of plot and characterization. Luna represents the new Puerto Rican woman, intelligent, selfassured; as an engineer, she hopes to be able to combine marriage and a career, while her husband Mario is the humanist. Ironically, here it is not the woman who represents nationhood, as it has been in Puerto Rico since the Romantics, but the male figure. Just as the theme of emigration was important to the first generation of nationalist dramatists, in Malasangre Ramos-Perea deals with its new

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manifestation as the "brain drain" of the best talent leaving the island as an easy way out of the real problems of the country. The dependentista (dependency status) mentality, the materialism of the younger generation, the conflicts among latinos in the United States - these are some of the topics Ramos-Perea skillfully and theatrically blends together to offer an entertaining and thought-provoking drama. The Puerto Rican theater scene is definitely alive with a steady increase in works by young authors who are interested in creating Puerto Rican scenes on stage and in reaching people with a social agenda. At the same time, the play, Quintuples, presented in 1984 by Luis Rafael Sánchez, also leads the Puerto Rican theater into new directions. Two actors play the parts of the Morrison quintuplets and the father, the Great Divo Papa Morrison; despite the presence of six characters divided between two actors, each scene is the monologue of one of the players. No central action takes place, no interaction is posited; rather, each comes on stage to improvise. Unlike the earlier plays of Sánchez and the Puerto Rican theater tradition from which his work emanates, Quintuples is an example of postmodernism in the theater, eschewing the sociopolitical commentary of the Brechtian mode, the nihilism of the Absurdists, the neorealism of the nationalists. Since no specific ideological project is presented, the text becomes a coherence only in its mode of function and reception, as a theatrical enunciation. The rhythmic, vocal, intonational, choreographic schema are its reason for being, not plot, characterization, or theme. Its focus on theatricality is unquestionably established in the final moments as each actor steps out of character on stage, each removes the makeup that is one of the signs of the theatrical code and, as if to deconstruct the improvisational motif of the previous text, both emphasize the artifice and the premeditation of art. Quintuples marks a real point of departure for Caribbean theater.

Cuba Discussion of contemporary Cuban theater is generally initiated within a chronological field that is also political - the works are located either before or after the revolution of 1959. While there were political upheavals before Castro, nevertheless the Castro period radically altered the theatrical situation, both by its economic patronage and its concomitant insistence on an ideological basis for theatrical pieces. Internal and external political situations have always affected the Cuban dramatic scene. Early in the twentieth century, despite the Wars of Independence and the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Cuban artistic world conserved its Spanish traditions, being one of the countries which had the most visits of Spanish theatrical companies (Saz [1963], I, 266). The Spanish zarzuela, for example, was quite popular and performances a well-attended social event as late as 1958 (Saz [1963], I, 273). One Spaniard who became a naturalized Cuban citizen and whose contributions are remembered in many ways is José Antonio Ramos. His name was given both to a playhouse and to an important dramatic prize. In his plays, Ramos presents problems and characters that are typically Cuban, with Tembladera (Quicksand), 1916, about land exploitation, considered his most successful play. The first generation of Cuban dramatists who tried to establish a modern national theater in Cuba were born at the time of the declaration of independence from Spain, but they grew up in a

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country virtually tied to the policies of the United States and in which the internal politics were marred by dictatorship, violence, economic dependency, and instability. As they came to maturity in the forties and fifties, their ability to develop a national theater was hampered by the economic and political upheaval of the country. The theater was a privileged space for the elite whose tastes dictated commercial success and therefore the content of the works that could be staged. Unlike the writers in Puerto Rico, the Cuban attempts to develop theatrical expressions seemed based on European modes, with Teatro La Cueva an example. Headed by Luis A. Baralt, one of the principal figures of the early twentieth century Cuban stage, La Cueva presented the works of dramatists from many countries, the universality of the theatrical expression being the consideration. His own plays evince a social agenda dealing with nationalist and indigenist themes, as in such works as La luna en el pantano (The moon in the marsh), 1936, Junto al río (Next to the river), 1938, which also referred to the Machado dictatorship; La mariposa blanca (The white butterfly), 1948, and Tragedia Indiana (Native tragedy), 1952, can be considered historical dramas that deal with the indigenous past and the European conquest, the first about the Incas and Peru, and the second about the Antilles. Similar to Puerto Rican efforts like Ateneo and Areyto, the Academia de Artes Dramâticas (ADAD), (the Academy of Dramatic Arts) and the Seminario de Artes Dramâticas (the Seminary of Dramatic Arts) of the University of Havana, both formed in 1941, tried to stimulate dramatic activity. Teatro Popular (Popular Theater), formed in 1942 in connection with the Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos (Confederation of Cuban Workers) had a marked political orientation and worked to widen the theater-going audience by going out into the poor neighborhoods, a project that would be fully developed in postrevolutionary Cuba with such groups as Teatro El Escambray. In the thirties and forties Cuban theater was also enriched because of the external political situation, notably the arrival of Spanish exiles of the Civil War. The attempt to create a renovation of Cuban theater that would incorporate European experimentation and techniques such as surrealism and the so-called Pirandellian experiments with interior duplication or metatheater also motivated the dramatists of the late forties and fifties. Individual groups, like Teatro Popular with its desire to incorporate the masses into the theatrical enterprise, and some playwrights, like Virgilio Piñera, who attempted to assimilate the new dramatic techniques developed by foreign authors and direct these to the development of native themes, represent tendencies in Cuban theater that would find fulfillment only after the revolution of 1959. The dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, 1952-59, hampered conditions for the development of a national theater that produced plays by native playwrights about national topics. Between 1954 and 1958 political disturbances almost extinguished theater in Cuba, as Frank Dauster notes ([1973], 24). By 1958, only six professional theater companies could be counted in Cuba, and the plays largely catered to the international tastes of the elite and the foreign tourists while the few serious national artists worked without government support. The first decade of postrevolutionary Cuba created a cultural revolution with unprecedented impact on all the arts, but most notably for the theater, which went through a renaissance. Artist unions on the one hand, and festivals, competitions, and journals on the other, stimulated artistic activity. In 1959 the Teatro Nacional was established to prepare dramatists and actors; soon after, in 1961, the Teatro Infantil was followed by Teatro Experimental, and regional Councils of Culture were founded to promote dramatic activities. The Casa de las Américas prize in drama was estab-

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lished as a coveted award for all Latin-American writers, and the journal Conjunto, dedicated to theater arts, soon became an internationally respected forum for work on many aspects of theatrical expression, publishing play scripts as well as critical articles and reviews. In addition, a Festival de Teatro Obrero-Campesino (Festival of worker's theater) was created along with several other theatrical contests, including one for rural theater. By 1969 over thirty professional theater groups existed and audiences could be found in all regions of the island. A caveat is important here, however, for despite the numbers of plays written and produced in this postrevolutionary period, many are marred by their didactic political theses which overweigh their aesthetic development. Nevertheless, a number of the playwrights who began their careers in the difficult times before the revolution have continued to contribute significant works. The Cuban playwrights who were best known internationally before the revolution are Virgilio Pinera and José Triana. After the revolution they continued to dominate the stage, but new dramatists also came on the scene, including Abelardo Estorino, José Brene, and Nicolas Dorr. Unlike Puerto Rico, women dramatists have not made the same impact in Cuba as have women poets. A small number of Cuban women have followed in the footsteps of the illustrious nineteenthcentury writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and are contributing to the stage, including Maria Alvarez Ríos (La victima [The victim], 1959), Yolanda Aguirre (La muneca negra [The black doll], 1967), Nora Badfa (Mariana es una palabra [Tomorrow is a word], 1963). The theme of feminism, however, does appear on stage, especially in the groups of teatro popular (popular theater). After studying over seventy-four plays, Terry Palls suggests that the plays of the first period of postrevolutionary Cuba seem to fall into two major modes - realistic and nonrealistic, both of which relate to the revolution by either justifying its necessity or explaining its goals, and only in rare instances offering a critical perspective (Palls [1980]). The plays that intend to justify the revolution generally focus on the previous period and show its faults, recreating a Cuban society characterized by racial and social discrimination, political and moral corruption, and exploitation and oppression. Some of the plays that belong to the group that are realistic justifications of the revolution include the work of Abelardo Estorino El robo del cochino (The theft of the pig), 1961; La taza de café (The cup of coffee), 1963, of Rolando Ferrer; La muerte del Neque (The death of the boogeyman), 1964, by José Triana; and Contigo pan y cebolla (With you, bread and onions), 1965, by Héctor Quintero. Plays that explain the revolution are generally situated in the present. They use Cuban dialogue and music, and attempt to create a positive Cuban identity and favor the values of the new socialist society by illustrating situations in which socialist behavior triumphs. The new heroes are the previous victims of Batista who now support the revolutionary system. La palangana (The basin) of Raul Cárdenas, La casa vieja (The old house) of Estorino and El premio flaco (The meager prize) of Quintero are examples. Virgilio Piñera exemplifies an author who attempted to write serious theater before the revolution and then adapted his work to the needs of postrevolutionary Cuban society. In Electra Garrigó, 1948, the classical myth is the subtext for an exploration of violence in Cuban life, while in Jesus, 1950, the religious parable is used to explore the problems of a protagonist who risks tragedy in order to be faithful to his ideals. In Falsa alarma (False alarm), 1948, Pinera explored the problems of passivity, alienation and lack of communication that afflict the twentieth-century human condition before these topics were considered characteristics of the theater of the absurd. It certainly is a precursor to Dos viejos pánicos (Two panicky old people), 1968, for which he was awarded the Casa de las Américas prize.

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Dos viejos pânicos and Aire frío (Cold air), 1959, are Pinera's most famous plays and show his versatility. The latter portrays the socioeconomic problems of life in prerevolutionary Cuba using a realistic manner. In the award-winning Dos viejos pânicos Pinera appears to have broadened his depiction of the confined, stagnant existence of man by his use of absurdist techniques instead of the realistic mode preferred by socialist Cuba (Palls, [1980], 67). Like Pinera, Antón Arrufat is another dramatist interested in the stylistic and structural innovations associated with the absurdist mode and existential philosophy. Before his play Los siete contra Tebas (Seven against Thebes) embroiled him in 1968 in a political controversy, Arrufat wrote a number of original pieces that made him one of the leading playwrights of the nonrealistic mode. In his work he combines the Cuban teatro bufo (a popular theater form like musical comedy) with contemporary innovations. The bufo humor reflects Arrufat's definition of Cubanness as illogical, witty, ironic; his use of stock comic characters and the oscillation between comedy and seriousness are also bufo contributions to his dramatic expression. Some critics consider Todos los domingos (Every Sunday), 1964, to be Arrufat's best work. Like La zona cero (Zone zero), 1959, it deals with the corrosive effects of time, and uses games and rituals to criticize the emptiness of decadent social structures. His thematic interest in the absurd conditions of life finally caused a clash with official government policy. When La siete contra Tebas won the Premio de Teatro José Antonio Ramos of UNEAC in 1968, at the same time that Heberto Padilla's Fuera del juego (Not in the game) was selected for the UNEAC poetry prize, the two writers were described as being counterrevolutionary. Although the works were published, disclaimers clearly expressed the dissatisfaction of a minority of the jury with the play's ideological content. The play itself is Arrufat's rendition of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes. (Arrufat's play in turn was parodied by José Brene in Tebas contra los siete [Thebes against the seven]). Arrufat presents national reality in a classical style, unlike the pattern set by Pinera and Triana, who present classical themes in a popular idiom (Woodyard [1979], 45). Despite the classical setting, he includes a reference to the Bay of Pigs and to the political reality of Cuban exiles of the revolution, seemingly the elements leading to his being judged counterrevolutionary. Nevertheless, Arrufat's play does seem to indicate that the revolution was the necessary path to a better society. Game playing in place of genuine human contact as a dramatic motif repeats in the work of José Triana. Many of his plays can be seen as an indictment of the sociopolitical problems of prerevolutionary society despite the often absurdist form and structure of the work. In his first play, El Mayor General hablará de teogonía (The Major General will talk about theogony), the patriarchal figure of the Major General could well be a reference to Machado, the dictator of Cuba who ruled from 1926 to 1933, and the house of the General a synecdoche for Cuban society. In addition to the use of political allegory, other characteristics of the play will also be repeated in his subsequent works. Triana's next play, Medea en el espejo (Medea in the mirror), 1960, like Pinera's Electra Garrigó, is a reexamination of the classical myth in terms of Cuban life, with a popular chorus and a parodic tone adding to its special Cuban flavor. The first of his three-act plays, it displays Triana's interest in the racial diversity of Cuban society that will be developed further in La muerte del Neque, 1963. La noche de los asesinos, written in 1964, shows the ritualization of contemporary life, a preoccupation of Arrufat in Todos los domingos, and La repetición (The repetition), 1963, that here

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reaches its full development. This play continues to be an international success and the object of much critical discussion (De la Campa [1979]; Taylor [1989]). Returning to the confined spatial world and the allegorical approach of El Mayor General, the two acts take place in the one room of the home of a typical Cuban family. Using the technique of a play within a play, the three children undertake the roles of their parents, neighbors, the police, the judge, in order to bring to the stage their perspective of these various institutions and people who affect their lives. The children criticize the stagnant world of their parents, a theme repeated in many plays that recreate prerevolutionary Cuban society, but in La noche, the universal tone does not localize the work in a particular historical moment. Cuban readers have identified specific historical references and lexical items (De la Campa [1979]), but Triana was able to create a play that transcends politics, national concerns, historical realities. Because of its polysemous nature, the play offers many diverse readings. It is a political allegory as well as an exploration of the generation gap, of psychological states, and a metatheatrical exercise about the nature of writing. The plays of Abelardo Estorino exemplify the productions of the first phase of theater in postrevolutionary Cuba. In El robo del cochino (The theft of the pig), 1961, and La casa vieja (The old house), 1964, Estorino works out political ideas through a plot of generational conflict that dramatizes the moment of confrontation between the old way of life and the new, revolutionary ideals that need to be implemented if Cuban society is to be humanitarian and just. In Robo the older generation could not accept the new system that the young eagerly supported, but in La casa vieja, Estorino turns his attention to the members of the current generation who are opportunists or false revolutionaries. While this play has important didactic ends, it does not show any further development of Estorino's dramatic techniques. Although his work generally serves the ideals of the revolution in a positive manner, Estorino's Los mangos de Cain (Cain's mangoes), 1967, is critical in a negative way, but was not officially antirevolutionary as was Arrufat' s Los siete contra Tebas. It is an allegorical play whose subtext is Genesis. In Estorino's innovative version, Cain kills Abel in order to bring about social changes; he becomes the hero as the man who searches for a better world with the courage to defy the system. Estorino shows his development with regard to technical and structural elements in Ni un sí ni un no (Not a yes and not a no), 1982. Unlike his other plays, there is a lack of realistic motifs to set the play in any specific area or time. There is a revolving stage to handle the three couples and their actions, each representing a different life-style. Though the play deals with life in a revolutionary society, Estorino suggests that there are still behavior patterns to criticize. Nicolás Dorr offers another interesting case of Cuban theatrical life. Dorr was only fourteen when his first play premiered in 1961, at a time when Cuban dramatists were eager to show their adherence to the new political philosophy of the Castro Era. His work stands in contrast to such plays as Rolando Ferrer's La taza de café, which describes class struggles. Las pericas (The little parrots) focuses on a revolution based not on ideology, but on words, characterized by a tour-de-force of verbal distortions that mark the peculiar manner of speech of the family presented. From the personal idiom of Las pericas, Dorr changed to a theme that reflected the historical moment in Cuba (the "Padilla Affair") and a more appropriate revolutionary attitude. El agitado pleito entre el Autor y el Angel (The agitated dispute between the author and the angel) received the Premio José Antonio Ramos in 1972, a mark of its accepted ideological base. The play presents via the polarities of the characters Autor and Angel what Dorr as spokesperson for official revolutionary policy considers appropriate: an aesthetic that is committed to the revolution's political and social agenda.

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José Brene is one of the playwrights who flourished in the postrevolutionary atmosphere. Manuel Galich has called the premiere of Brene's Santa Camila de la Habana vieja (Saint Camille of Old Havana) an event equivalent to the opening of M'hijo el dotor (My son the doctor) of Florencio Sánchez in the Buenos Aires of 1903 (Galich [1982], 6), for both became instant hits and brought their playwrights to prominent positions in the dramatic world. Although Santa Camila de la Habana vieja, set in 1959 and performed in 1962, is overtly political, with a clear anti-American tone and prorevolutionary stance, it became a very popular play because of its use of typically Cuban characters and language, Afro-Cuban motifs, and the presence of popular music. Brene has since written more than twenty plays, which Galich has divided into four different categories, depending on their different thematic concerns (Galich [1982], 5-20). Brene is known for his focused attention to Cuban language, history, and even in Fray Sabino (Brother Sabino), and El camarada don Quijote, el de Guasabacuta Arriba y su fiel companero Sancho, el de Guasabacuta Abajo (Comrade Don Quijote, from Upper Guasabacuta and his faithful companion Sancho, from Lower Guasabacuta), which leave the strictly Cuban world for a larger setting, he never gives up a peculiarly Cuban idiom. The principal contribution of the revolutionary reforms to theatrical expression in Cuba has been the increase in forms of popular theater, especially the collective creation. From researching the background material, drafting the scripts, organizing the technical aspects of the performance to the actual production on stage, the work is performed in the socialist spirit of group cooperation. Even the audience participates in the performance, making the concept of popular theater function at all instances of the dynamic experience of the theatrical presentation. Often the content chosen for the play relates to particular problems of the region or to the country as a whole, marking the works with a strong ideological position that sometimes hampers the aesthetic expression and universality of the work. The Conjunto Dramático de Oriente (The dramatic group of Oriente Province), formed in 1961 in Santiago de Cuba, is one of the well-established groups with its own theater. Although they have produced foreign plays, from Brecht to Dragún and Lizarraga, they also have developed their own works, which include Machuka, Amerindas, and Del teatro se trata (About the theater), the latter a historical review of Cuban theater. The CDO sees itself as being related to the Cuban phenomenon of teatro de relaciones, a dramatic form developed in colonial times by the oppressed classes which survived until the 1950s. With its varied repertory, open-air presentations, emphasis on music, deemphasis on costuming and set design, an acting style based on the Cuban choteo (satiric and comical teasing) and the presence of male actors for all parts, this theater searched for a connection with its roots, according to Carlos Padrón, one of the directors (Padrón [1975]). One of Cuba's most famous popular theater groups is the Grupo Teatro Escambray (GTE, Theater Group of Escambray), founded in 1968 with Sergio Corrieri as its director. Named after the region in which the group has its origin, it no longer can be considered a purely local phenomenon, for it presents its works throughout Cuba and abroad. Although the GTE's repertory and techniques are representative of other popular theater groups, and their scripts have a didactic and ideological purpose as well as entertainment value, Corrieri does not consider their work to be an example of collective creation because one person always writes the scripts; it is an example of popular theater, however, because of its approach to the audience. Ideas for a presentation are developed with the input of the troupe and interested local people who are encouraged to contribute suggestions in order

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to feel a responsibility to the play. GTE developed new techniques and theatrical language because they had to learn to communicate with an audience untutored in cultural events like theater. They incorporated the special Cuban choteo form of humor, music and customs of the region into the theatrical spectacle in order to facilitate identity between the theater and the community and integrate the spectator into the spectacle itself. Their goal is not entertainment alone, but to change old behavior patterns and institute the new socialist perspective. Ramona is an example of the modus operandi of the GTE. The play begins by breaking down the fourth wall between actors and audience. There is no signal to the beginning of the action, but a mature man strolls on stage and addresses the people assembled, asking for their selection for the region's outstanding worker award. A grandmotherly figure from the audience calls out the name of Ramona, who then is called upon to speak. Ramona is also a member of the audience, a middleaged woman in work boots and slacks. When she voices her desire to be considered for the awards, members of the audience begin to take sides in support or in opposition to her candidacy. The characters of the play then move onstage and a dramatic enactment of key episodes in Ramona' s life takes place. Music is used to key the audience to the time period of the action. When the coming of the revolution is enacted, spectators are encouraged to join the cast in expressions of excitement over the triumph of Fidel. Although the play uses nonrealistic techniques, the real sociopolitical messages are clear and expressed by means of concrete physical images. A minimum of props and sets not only stresses the role of GTE as popular artists - of the people - but also enables the troupe to travel from place to place, presenting their work in the remotest regions. The economic problems that frequently plague theatrical undertakings have virtually been eliminated in Cuba because of state support of the artist and theatrical activities. Nevertheless, the negative side of the strong governmental role in the arts is the conflict that inevitably arises between artistic commitment and political ideology, as has already been documented in the "Arrufat affair" of 1968, parallelling the more famous Padilla case. Although some dramatists have left Cuba, those who continue to live on the island agree on a number of thematic concerns. Whether using a realistic or nonrealistic mode, whether in a popular vein or absurdist, using classical subtexts or a contemporary external frame of reference, Cuban playwrights condemn the violence and irrational elements of prerevolutionary Cuban life, the social stagnancy, blind religiosity, political corruption and family decay that led to the need for revolt.

Dominican Republic The effect of a totalitarian regime on the theater can be seen most clearly in the Dominican Republic. Individual playwrights wrote, but no theater movements as such were able to develop as they did in poetry, the genre for which Dominicans are perhaps most known, followed by the narrative. There has been no equivalent to the phenomena in poetry of Postumismo (Posthumism), La poesía sorprendida (Surprised poetry), or Pluralismo (Pluralism), groupings from the aesthetic perspective, nor is it possible to consider generational denominations in the same vein as the "poets of 1965." Like Puerto Rico and Cuba, literary activity in the Dominican Republic was also affected by military invasions and internal dictatorships, most notably that of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who was assassinated in 1961 after being in power for thirty years. Although Trujillo created the School of

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Fine Arts and an official theater company, the government-sponsored agencies presented works that belonged to a classical or commercially pleasing repertory and none that directly reflected the political or economic oppression that marked the reality of the country. Although attempts to produce a national theater did occur even during the era of Trujillo, it was not until after his overthrow in 1960 that any sustained Dominican national theater movement could form. Franklin Dominguez is an important figure in the Dominican theatrical scene both for his plays and for his efforts to found experimental theater on the island. From 1952, the year of his first play, El vuelo de la paloma (The flight of the dove), to the present, he has written over forty dramatic works, yet, like the other figures of the Dominican theater, he is not as yet well-known or often studied beyond the borders of his country. Along with Domínguez, Máximo Avilés Blonda, Hector Inchâustegui Cabrai, and Manuel Rueda constitute a group who merit further attention, not only for their attempts to create a theatrical movement, but for the quality of their work. In general, unlike many Latin-American plays of the period, theirs do not reflect the influence of theater of the absurd or Artaud's theater of cruelty, and only little of the Brechtian multi-media technical experiments. Rather, Pirandello and O'Neill serve as models of inspiration for psychological studies of family relations that, in some instances, can be interpreted as political allegories that allude to the real problems of the country. The use of classical myths as subtexts and metatheatrical techniques are also very popular in the Dominican Republic, especially to disguise political commentary. Younger playwrights like Ivan Garcia and Haffe Serulle, working after the fall of Trujillo, have been more influenced by the theater of the absurd and the political stance of Brechtian epic theater. Espigas maduras (Ripe ears of corn), one of Franklin Dominguez's best known works, was written in 1958 and produced in 1960 by the Comedia del Arte theatrical group under the direction of the author. Like Triana's La noche de los asesinos, Espigas maduras is also a study of the generation gap in which the children struggle to rebel against parents whom they view as despotic and whose values they no longer find meaningful. In contrast to the expressionist mode of La noche, however, the Dominican play appears as a realistic recreation of a family situation. The play elaborates the various evils of the despotic father and presents a feasible solution to his children's anger with actions that circumvent violence. Since their father has become the enemy who is destroying their humanity, the children decide they have no other choice but to annihilate him. Although they are ready to take the fatal step of patricide, they decide to relent. Rather than killing him, they abandon the paternal home in order to enjoy the independence and freedom they have struggled to achieve. The despot remains alone on stage, broken in spirit, calling out the names of his liberated children, now free of his tyranny. Notwithstanding the realistic depiction of the family conflict and the lack of realistic motifs, the symbolic level of the play suggests a critique of the patriarchal social structure. Other plays by Dominguez also treat seriously the problems of family life, skillfully blending psychological observations with a realistic setting, as in Los actores (The actors), another example of his use of metatheatrical techniques. In the one-act El encuentro (The encounter), written in 1965, the inner play is brought center stage as it dramatizes the memories of the female protagonist Alina, who recreates in a dream her lost beloved, Manuel. Her daily imaginative reconstruction of her encounter with Manuel is more real to her than the family life of obligations and social duties, the role she has been forced to play in the theater of life. Her psychic accomplishment provides the action of the play and proves that the invention of fictions is necessary for survival in a social order

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that lives by falsehood and misrepresentation. El encuentro appears to be a reworking of the psychological and social problems explored in the earlier one-act monologue, El último instante (The final moment). That play was chosen by Carlos Solórzano for inclusion in his anthology of El teatro hispanoamericano contemporáneo (Contemporary Latin-American theater), although for some critics it shows a dramatic weakness in its excessive length and consequent lack of focus. The female protagonist Noemí is another frustrated and tormented soul, alienated from an uncaring universe, but she functions in a Dominican society, as attested by the references to the presence of American Marines and the importance of English in Dominican society. Dommguez has also used classical myths and plays of the classical theater as subtexts. His Antigona-Humor and Lisistrata odia la politica (Lysistrata hates politics), for which he won the Premio Nacional de Teatro Cristóbal de Llerena prize in 1980, are examples of his ability to create entertaining plays that also show his comic style. While the myths are the source of inspiration, his plays are not faithful renditions but humorous responses to some of the traditional themes. In contrast, the serious use of classical subtexts is an important characteristic of the work of Hector Inchâustegui Cabrai, a noted poet. Three of his works that were chosen for publication in the series sponsored by the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores Dramáticos in 1968, show by their titles the classical myths upon which they are founded, namely Prometeo, Eiloctetes and Hipólito. In addition, the plays are cast in poetic verse, but all have references to material objects and properties that indicate the contemporary time period. The classical subtexts are important for suggesting archetypal situations that have relevance for contemporary Dominicans. It is also significant that in a society long used to living in a dictatorship in control of the free expression of ideas, rebellion against figures of authority is an important theme in each play. The transformations made by Inchâustegui Cabrai are best highlighted in his Filoctetes. Although the realistic details differ greatly from the Sophoclean text upon which it is based, the theme of the conflict between patriotism and conscience remains. Like his Greek namesake, the Dominican protagonist has to face the agony of choice between doing good for many or satisfying personal revenge. In contrast to the Greek hero, Filoctetus refuses to help his country when he recognizes that both the military and civilian administrators are as mean-spirited as the leader they represent, and care nothing for the real suffering of the people. Filoctetus dies rather than help the despotic ruler of his land, just as Incháustegui's hero in Prometeo dies after the failure of his attempt to rebel against a despotic and cruel father. In Hipólito, too, the son dies because his father is quick to misjudge him. These plays dramatize the failures in thinking, the hasty judgments, the lack of communication in a society ruled by a despotic leader. Inchâustegui Cabrai does not offer innovative structural techniques, but his original handling of Greek themes is a way to make statements about a Dominican society caught in the grips of a violent and cruel tyranny. Manuel Rueda does not use classical subtexts, but he also creates dual levels of meaning. Famous as the originator of the literary movement of Pluralismo, Rueda is, furthermore, a multitalented figure, winning prizes for his poetry and prose as well as for his plays. He is also an accomplished musician with an international reputation. Rueda's talent for creating poetic drama is in evidence in the title and in the manner in which his characters express themselves in La trinitaria blanca (The white forget-me-not), 1957, his first play. Here he pays homage of sorts to the dramatic tradition in his country, for the trinitaria is not only the Dominican flower that serves as an important image in the play; La Trinitaria was also the

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name of a group of patriots that from 1838 to 1844 had as its goal the presentation of theatrical works as a way to awaken patriotic fervor among the Dominicans, at the time under the political control of Haiti (Vallejo de Paredes [1981], 7). The frustrated Miguelina, main character of La trinitaria blanca, is similar to Alina and Noemí of Dommguez's dramatic world. Miguelina also escapes into a dream world that represents her need to overcome the disappointments and failures of the life she has been forced to lead as a single woman in a patriarchal society. Like La trinitaria blanca, La tía Beatriz hace un milagro (Aunt Beatriz performs a miracle) and Vacaciones en el cielo (Vacations in heaven) also can be read as studies of people frustrated by the lack of freedom and the arbitrary uses of power. The latter two plays show the wit and humor with which Rueda can express even the serious themes of authority and intellectual freedom. In 1966 with the production of Entre alambradas (Inside the barbed wire fence), a more openly political play with realistic motifs, Rueda voiced his response to the Dominican revolution and the North American invasion of 1965. In 1979 he tried his hand at writing theater for children and the effort, El rey Clinejas (King Clinejas), won the National Cristóbal de Llerena Theater Prize. Máximo Avilés Blonda, founder and director of the Teatro Universitario, seems most influenced by the techniques of Bertolt Brecht. Like other Dominican writers, he first published poetry before turning to the stage. With Yo, Bertolt Brecht (I, Bertolt Brecht), 1966, his third play, Blonda presents one of the first vanguardist plays on the Dominican stage. By incorporating scenes from Brecht's plays and poems with his own work, he creates a dramatic collage that hopes to stimulate his audience to think and attempt to modify society, as Brecht would want. Using Brechtian techniques, Blonda explores the particular problems of the island of Hispaniola, and the barriers between Haitians and Dominicans in Piramide 179. The title refers to the barrier at the border between the two countries. By using actors as his characters and creating a play-within-a play, Blonda successfully broadens his survey of the boundaries that divide people. All hierarchical structures are criticized, from the marriage bond to the body politic. He creates a striking dramatic image in the use of a pyramid on stage, because its very configuration provides a concrete sign of the hierarchical structure of power relations that his play examines. The theater of Ivan Garcia clearly shows development of a vanguardist style, as noted in his published one act plays: Más allá de la búsqueda (Beyond the search), Don Quijote de Todo el Mundo (Don Quijote of the whole world), Un héroe más para la mitología (One more hero for mythology), Los hijos del Fénix (The children of the Phoenix), and La fábula de los cinco caminantes (The fable of the five travelers). Like Incháustegui Cabrai, his is a theater of ideas that makes use of classical subtexts and allegory. In Mâs allá, a Dominican Prometheus engages in a dialogue with Pandora as a way to explore existential questions of human suffering and freedom of actions. The more dramatic Don Quijote de Todo el Mundo presents a Dominican Alonso Quijano, called Alonso Quezada, who is also misunderstood and mistreated by the public he hopes to defend from injustice. Garcia's mastery of dramatic irony is evident in Un héroe mâs, a cynical exploration of the graft and corruption of politicians who struggle to maintain power. Garcia also alludes to the particular Dominican problem of strife with its neighbor Haiti. The same theme of political strife and dubious patriotism is treated without the pessimistic tone in the farces Los hijos del Fénix and Los cinco caminantes. Despite abstract characters with such comic names as Pa, Pe, Pi, Po {Los hijos) and Fórtido, Mfnimo, etc., {Cinco caminantes) the topics are serious: political freedom and

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patriotism. The presence of multi-media techniques, macabre humor, stylized characters, and metatheatrical elements to present a political allegory places Garcia's work in the vanguardist mode of his Caribbean compatriots in Puerto Rico and Cuba. The use of metatheatrical techniques indicates to the audience that the events on stage also take place in the real world of the spectator, a message that was needed in the fifties but was possible on stage only after the fall of Trujillo. Even after the removal of the dictator Trujillo, the political situation of the country remained unstable in the sixties, with the writer-politician Juan Bosch coming to the presidency in 1963 only to be overthrown with the help of outside forces; in 1965, there was direct intervention again by US troops. The dramatist, critic, and director Haffe Serulle, in an essay on Teatro dominicano: Sangre y Opresión (Dominican theater: blood and oppression) selects 1965 as the date "when the Dominican theater began to follow a path it had not trod before . . . the young people began to realize that through the theater they could awaken the consciousness of and have an effect on the oppressed sectors. They began, thus, to create theater groups in the poor neighborhoods, in the villages, and even in the countryside, an activity that didn't last very long."2 The traditional playwrights also responded thematically to the new political atmosphere, as can be noted in a play like Rueda's Entre alambradas, which was written in reaction to the US Marines' 1965 invasion of the island. While Rueda's play is not a simplified propagandist anti-American tract, he does express the negative feelings of Dominicans in response to the intervention. Jimmy, his young Marine sergeant, is shown to be as victimized as the Dominicans, like any people living under an oppressive system. The political instability of the sixties was not favorable to the promotion of the new popular theater groups and many were forced to disband. When these groups reappeared in the nineteen seventies they had a more combative spirit, performing in the streets and plazas and poor neighborhoods. The artistic movement that was directed by these young artists was a popular movement, but they did not always have sufficient instruction or experience in theater to carry off aims and goals that were cultural as well as aesthetic. For Serulle, the Dominican theater that will be representative of a national consciousness is now in the process of being developed, and will not imitate older European and Greek models, but will instead reflect a Dominican history, tradition, and manner of being - a popular theater that Serulle reminds us also gave rise to what we call today classical Greek theater. The difficulty for the historian or critic of that type of theatrical expression is that very often the works presented exist only in the performance mode and do not have published scripts that can be studied and transmitted to others. Serulle has been able to publish a number of his plays, but they are not easily available. Some of his titles include La danza de Mingó (The dance of Mingó), Bianto y su senor (Bianto and his master), Duarte, Prostitutión en la casa de Dios (Prostitution in the house of God), La Tierra del fuego, El horno de la talega (The oven of the money bag), and El asalto de la sangre (Assault of blood), subtitled testimonio de la matanza de abril 1984 (Testimony of the massacre of 1984). In his creation of El horno de la Talega, 1986, we see an illustration of his dramatic philosophy; the play is an example of popular theater, Dominican style. It has its roots in the medieval morality plays, in that it dramatizes a moral allegory about the evils of the usury system and the capitalist marketplace. Its Brechtian techniques create a different spectacle from that of Bianto y su 2 . . . cuando el teatro dominicano comenzó a coger un camino que antes no había trillado . . . la juventud comenzó a darse cuenta de que por medio del teatro podia despertar conciencia e incidir en los sectores oprimidos. Comenzaron, pues, a crearse grupos de teatro en los barrios, en los pueblos y hasta en los campos, actividad que no duró mucho tiempo (Serulle [1987], 4).

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senor, a traditional allegory about power relations that was written in 1969 and not published until 1984. El homo is lively, fast-moving, with choral groups to represent the different people affected by the economic system. The play dramatizes the conflict between the capitalist impulse and the socialist, and shows the advantages for the people when they work together to overcome oppression. Serulle does not present a naive morality play, however, as he shows in the finale. The efforts of the people have caused the death of the oppressor, Aníbal Vicente, but a phantom figure appears to announce that Vicente was merely one of his minions, responsible to him, so that their debts have not been removed, merely passed on to him. The international implications of the ending are clear, and have import for all the debtor nations of the Third World. For Serulle not only shows the nature of the debt cycle, but suggests an appropriate response to the never-ending presence of an outstretched hand. The final words belong to those who vanquished Vicente, the chorus of many, who say that they will stand up to the monstruo implacable (the implacable monster) - the oppressive system, for they have learned to join together and work for their common interests. El horno de la talega illustrates the kind of plays Serulle wanted to produce in his capacity as director of the Teatro Universitario of the University of Santo Domingo: theatrical works that reflect the economic and social reality of the country and that could be seen and understood by all the people. In addition to the popular theater movement, another important development for the growth of national theater is related to the creation of Casa de Teatro, founded in 1974, a Dominican expression of the efforts in Cuba and Puerto Rico to "dominicanize theatrical activity."3 Casa de Teatro organized both a theater competition and a Festival de Teatro; one of the outstanding plays which won the 1983 competition and was published in 1985 is Cordón umbilical (Umbilical cord) by Arturo Rodriguez Fernández. It follows earlier interest in Pirandello and O'Neill and makes excellent use of metatheatrical devices, confusing the audience at times regarding which level of the play is being presented. The umbilical cord of the title functions as icon, symbol, and structuring device. The family of four siblings is bereft when the mother dies, and in the same way that she had kept as a souvenir the original umbilical cords that tied each child to her, so, too, psychologically, each grown child still feels irrevocably tied to the parent. Just as it is a family whose ties are bonded tightly, so, too, subtexts are recalled from other Caribbean works which create bonds of affinity with Cordón umbilical: the children seem as cowed as the siblings of Domínguez's Espigas maduras; sibling rivalry is as intense as in Los soles truncos by Marqués; as in Cien años de soledad, incest is a theme; and finally, patricide is admitted instead of only imagined, as in Triana's La noche de los asesinos. That patricide is accomplished here may be significant for the theater in the sense that with this play, Dominican theater extirpates the past by ingesting it, absorbing all of its lessons. Thus, for all its twists and turns of plot, the play is not derivative, but a powerful stage presentation of psychological sickness in a claustrophobic society. On an aesthetic level, it is a mature expression of dramatic technique. For the Dominican Republic, the future path of the theater is being directed by the fruitful efforts of such younger playwrights as Ivan Garcia, Haffe Serulle, Arturo Rodriguez Fernández, and Reynaldo Disla, whose play Bolo Francisco was awarded the Casa de las Américas prize in 1985. Disla writes in the Dominican idiom with its popular expressions and makes use of the music which is so important a part of Dominican life - the merengues, boleros, tonadillas, etc. Like Ivan Garcia's farces, his one-act play explores the national situation of socioeconomic and political exploitation, 3

[para que] la actividad teatral se dominicanice (Ginebra [1985], 5).

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but it also serves as a synecdoche for the problems in many Latin-American countries: land conflicts, class struggle, electoral farces, government corruption. The social decomposition finds concrete dramatic exposition in the presence of Bolo Francisco as a revenant. Brutally murdered for his defense of the poor, Bolo returns to the scenes of his past. The recognition of Bolo Francisco by the Casa de las Américas prize underscores its political content, but the play is also exemplary of the greater freedom of expression now possible in the Dominican Republic. The use of Dominican language, gestures, sounds, and motifs, too, is a sign of the development of a national theater that has found its own discourse and no longer needs to masquerade in the signs of other cultures.

Bibliography Abel, Lionel. 1963. Metatheatre. New York: Hill and Wang. Arriví, Francisco. 1965. Vejigantes. Teatro hispanoamericano. Ed. by Frank Dauster. New York: Harcourt, Brace. —. 1966. Areyto mayor. San Juan: Institute de Cultura Puertorriquena. Arrom, José Juan. [1956]. 1967; 2d ed. Historia del teatro hispanoamericana (época colonial). Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea. Ben-Ur, Lorraine Elena. 1975. Myth Montage in a Contemporary Puerto Rican Tragedy. Latin American Literary Review. 4.7:15-21. Capetillo, Luisa. 1916. Influencia de las ideas modernas. San Juan: Negrón Flores. Casas, Myrna. 1975. Teatro de la Vanguardia. Boston: D.C. Health. Colectivo nacional de teatro de Puerto Rico. 1975. El teatro puertorriqueno dentro del nuevo teatro latinoamericano. Conjunto. 26:62-68. Cypess, Sandra Messinger. 1979. Women Dramatists of Puerto Rico. Revista/Review Interamericana. 9.1:24-41. Dauster, Frank. 1973. 2d ed. Historia del teatro hispanoamericano, Siglos XIX y XX. Mexico: Ediciones de Andrea. —. 1976. The Theatre of Anton Arrufat. Dramatists in Revolt. Ed. by Leon F. Lyday and George Woodyard. Austin: University of Texas Press. 3-18. De la Campa, Roman. 1979. José Triana: Ritualización de la sociedad cubana. Madrid: Ediciones Catedra. Domínguez, Franklin. 1968. Teatro: Espigas maduras. Antigona-Humor. Los actores. El encuentro. Santo Domingo: Ediciones de la Sociedad de Autores y Compositores Dramâticos. Galich, Manuel, ed. 1982. Teatro de José Brene. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Ginebra, Danilo, ed. 1985. Concurso de teatro de Casa de Teatro, 1983. Santo Domingo: Casa de Teatro. Gonzalez, Lydia Milagros. 1980. Libretos para Teatro del Tajo del Alacrán. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena. Luzuriaga, Gerardo. 1983. El teatro como reflexión colectiva: Conversación con Sergio Corrieri. Latin American Theatre Review. 51-59. Molinaza, José. 1984. Historia critica del teatro dominicano. Santo Domingo: Editora Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Montes Huidobro, Matias. 1986. Persona: vida y mascara en el teatro puertorriqueno. San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe. (Ateneo Puertorriqueno, Universidad Interamericana, y Tinglado Puertorriqueno.) Padrón, Carlos. 1975. Teatro de relaciones en Santiago de Cuba: El 23 se rompe el corojo. Conjunto. 23. Palis, Terry. 1978. El teatro del absurdo en Cuba: El compromiso artístico frente al compromiso politico. LATR. 11.2:25-32. —. 1980. El carâcter del teatro cubano contemporâneo. LATR. 13(Summer):51-58.

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Ramos-Perea, Roberto. 1985. De cómo y por qué la Nueva Dramaturgia Puertorriquena es una revolutión. Intermedia de Puerto Rico. Revista de Teatro. 1.1:11-16. Reynolds, Bonnie H. 1983. Coetaneity: A Sign of Crisis in Un niño azul para esa sombra. LATR. 17.1:37-45. Rodriguez, Jorge. 1984. Los nuevos dramaturgos: Optimismo y desano. El reportero. San Juan: 11 February. Sáez, Antonia. El teatro en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Editorial Universitaria. Sanchez, Luis Rafael. 1979. Cinco problemas al escritor puertorriqueno. Vórtice. 2.2-3:117-21. Saz, Agustin del. 1963. Teatro hispanoamericano. Vol. 2. Barcelona: Editorial Vergara. Serulle, Haffe. 1987. Teatro dominicano: sangre y opresión. (Unpublished essay.) —. 1985. Teatro universitario en la República Dominicana. Intermedio de Puerto Rico. 1.1:24-25. Skinner, Eugene R. 1974. Research Guide to Post-Revolutionary Cuban Drama. LATR. 59-68. Solórzano, Carlos. 1964. Teatro latinoamericano en el siglo XX. Mexico: Pormaca. Taylor, Diana, ed. 1989. En busca de una imagen: Ensayos sobre el teatro de Griseida Gambaro y José Triana. Ottawa: GIROL. Vallejo de Paredes, Margarita, ed. 1981. Antologia literaria dominicana III El teatro. Santo Domingo: Instituto tecnológico de Santo Domingo. Woodyard, George. 1979. Perspectives on Cuban Theater. Revista/Review Interamericana. 9.1:42-49.

Essay

PETER G. EARLE

University of Pennsylvania

An island, wherever it may be, is suggestive of several things in cultural history: isolation, political and economic dependence, exoticism, emigration, and nostalgia. Literature in the Caribbean island-born and island-raised - was predestined to elaborate and expand on these topics. From the viewpoint of islands, history is harder to measure; origins harder to determine; the future a more persistent question mark. Many well-known Hispano-Caribbean writers, from José Marti to the present, have moved (involuntarily in some cases) to one of the mainlands or to another island. In so doing they have found that distant residence stimulates a new sense of time and space; for most displaced writers memory and vision from the outside offer the opportunity for a clearer vision of their heritage and identity. Space and time form the axis of every written work and of all literatures. Immanuel Kant, in Part I of his Critique of Pure Reason, explained that space and time are both empirically real, as the inevitable condition and framework of human experience, and transcendentally ideal, because the human mind ceaselessly imposes these two most fundamental concepts (time and space) on everything it perceives. The sense of timed-space and spaced-time that pervades much of Latin-American literature, for example, Euclides da Cunha, Os sertóes (Rebellion in the backlands); Ricardo Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra; Pablo Neruda, Canto general (General song); Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps); Clarice Lispector, Amaçã no escuro (The apple in the dark); Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien años de soledad (One hundred years of solitude); Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra and Aura, is especially strong in Caribbean literature. Between the Florida Keys and Trinidad, historical time and geographic space underwent a monumental expansion at the turn of the fifteenth century. Europe's discovery and first scrutiny of the world it chose to call new took place there, in the Caribbean. History and literature are analogous in that each enacts the double function of recording and discovering; the sequence, in that order, is particularly important. Recording: one takes notice of the unfamiliar, the surprising and the unforeseen; first impressions are the raw material informally circulated by word of mouth, or registered in diaries, letters and chronicles; the act of recording is a candid prologue that posterity - from generation to generation or maybe more often - will constantly modify. The writing of history, and, by extension, literature, subsequent to their first phase (recording), could be defined as the process of modification through successive discovery. Discovering: the process extends into decades, lifetimes and centuries, because, like language itself, discovery is never free of imaginative elaboration nor of its persistent counter-force, concealment. Discovery is also revision; in the entangled context of literature the three processes of record-

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ing, discovering, and concealing become one. Thus the basic concepts of history (as discovery) and myth (as revision and modification) tend to converge rather than separate in the minds of the most lucid modern writers. As if in anticipation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo, New World explorers of the 1490s pointed out things that they thought lacked names, identified them as well as they could, and left to subsequent generations the never-ending work of intermittent discovery. Macondo (an island community amidst an expansive swamp that, in turn, merged with the sea) is the creation of a Spanishspeaking author who, like many Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican writers, grew up on a shore of the Caribbean, living in its light and breathing its air. His Historia de un naufragio (Testimony of a shipwrecked sailor), 1970, "Who Was Adrift Ten Days on a Raft with Nothing to Eat or Drink, Who Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Wealthy by Publicity, then Loathed by the Government and Forever Forgotten," is a reconstruction of events experienced by Luis Alejandro Velasco, survivor of a storm in the southern Caribbean in 1955 in which Velasco and seven other sailors were washed overboard from the deck of a Colombian destroyer overloaded with a secret cargo of refrigerators and other contraband goods en route from Mobile, Alabama, to Cartagena. From the standpoint of the essay, the most interesting part of this work is Garcia Marquez's introduction, "La historia de esta historia" (The story behind this story), in which the circumstances of the events and the government's attempts to cover up its embarrassing role in them are briskly brought to light. Much of the nature and fate of the Caribbean islands is included in the account of Luis Alejandro Velasco's aberrant voyage: the will to survive, the conflict of motives, the absurdity of the voyage's outcome, the dependency of the innocent on the designs of the malicious, and the compelling need to tell what really happened. The significance of these irrepressible elements in the Hispano-Caribbean essay is self-evident: they form the core of José Martí's prophetic legacy of idealistic hope versus real obstacles; of Eugenio Maria de Hostos's educational aspirations; and of Pedro Henrfquez Urena's visions of an autonomous Latin-American culture. In this discussion of the Hispano-Caribbean essay, obvious focal points are the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo (the latter uneasily shared with Haiti). But reading essays in Spanish written in or about the Caribbean region opens up a broader landscape: an extended, mythical but also very real archipelago that one can mentally traverse: a slender triangle, the base of which extends from the western tip of Cuba to the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, and which comes to a point 1,600 miles to the north, in the island of Manhattan. One could then add, although they are not islands in the strict geological sense, Miami, Jersey City, northwest Chicago, and a section of North Philadelphia. Each of these islands and population pockets forms a part of today's Hispano-Caribbean world. In that regard Antonio S. Pedreira's Insularismo (Insularity), 1934, has become obsolete; the massive emigration from the Puerto Rican island to New York had not yet begun when he wrote it, and the cultural isolation he perceives and criticizes was still the dominant feature of Puerto Rican life. More prophetically, Pedreira observed "the existence of a Puerto Rican soul, disintegrated, dispersed, awaiting fulfillment, luminously fragmented, like a perplexing jigsaw puzzle that has never been put together";1 those unassembled pieces continue their orbit in much of contemporary Puerto 1 existe el alma puertorriquena disgregada, dispersa, en potencia, luminosamente fragmentada como un rompecabezas doloroso que no ha gozado nunca de su integralidad (Pedreira [1969], 133).

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Rican literature - most notably and with tragicomic effect, through Luis Rafael Sánchez's novel, La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho's beat), 1976. The soul's dispersal noted by Pedreira and elaborated by Sánchez is not restricted to literary imagery. Dispersal has been an important motif in all Latin-American literature and a major factor of Latin-American history. The potential America that Martí called Nuestra, the nightmare comedy of Macondo, José Vasconcelos's meta-Amazonian utopia (Universópolis) in La raza cósmica (The cosmic race), and the secret abode of José Enrique Rodó's deadpan hospitable king in Ariel are variations on a continental theme: the frequent, semi-conscious attempt - often serious and just as often ironic - to stop the disintegrating force of Latin-American history, which includes the earthquake, the volcano, the jungle, domestic and foreign exploitation, the patriarch who has sired 5,000 bastards, El siglo del viento (The hurricane century), 1986, that Eduardo Galeano decided to end - for his three-volume book of chronicles - in the Orwellian year 1984, and, last but not least, the exiled, the displaced, and the disappeared persons that the vortex of organized violence continues to engulf and cast out. The Caribbean essay in the modern sense begins with Hostos and Marti in the 1860s and 1870s. Both were exiles and completed their university studies in Spain; both were driven by the ideal of political independence; both developed a concept of education based on democratic freedoms; both scorned literature as entertainment for the elite. In "Nuestra América" (Our America), 1891, Marti wrote "to think is to serve," by which he meant that the writer's first obligation is to help and enlighten his fellow human beings: children, the indigenous, the needy, the oppressed; those of any group that had been denied liberty and justice. Hostos believed so intensely in the ideal of thought as service that in his Moral social (Social morality), 1888, he attacked the novel, all novels, as "necessarily injurious to one's health" and doubly so: "first, for those who write them; second, for those who read them" (Textos, 7). For Hostos the danger that lurked in the novel was not ideological but something more like a hallucinatory drug that disposed the reader to accept reality in a much deformed state and thereby lose all sense of responsibility. The consequences alleged were that the reader - especially the young reader - would acquire no notion of civic virtues and the American republics then in their infancy (like Santo Domingo) or still in a fetal state (like Cuba and Puerto Rico), would inevitably succumb to oppressive oligarchies. Thus, Hostos's literary prejudice became an instrument of higher motives, part of a revolutionary program in education that would inspire younger generations to view with the eyes of a philosophical pragmatist (and cool-headed essayist) the Caribbean archipelago's central dilemma, namely the loss of history. For his part, Marti - the fascinated and at the same time disillusioned resident of New York made literature of the profound dichotomy he discerned between educational philosophy and professionalism in North American life. In June of 1886 he attended the graduation ceremony at Harvard University and a few days later recorded these impressions: "All those professorial niceties, all that luxury of equipment and instruction, all that valiant effort on the part of educators to model what they teach on the period and environment in which the young will have to live seem to have evaporated in an atmosphere too heavy for souls that slowly perish in this mad race for financial gain, that are extinguished in the common contempt that is felt for sweaty, painstaking careers by the indoctrinated sons of men with a blank and insecure expression on their faces, who admire with religious intensity, more than humanity or their country, the ability to make quickly a stupendous

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fortune."2 The Hispano-Caribbean essayist's impetus comes from three sources: (1) the cultural incompatibility between North Americans and Latin Americans to which Marti constantly alluded; (2) Latin America's relatively late start in modern history, as illustrated by the great Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes: "Having arrived late at the banquet of European civilization, Latin America has lived skipping whole eras, always quickening its pace and scurrying from one form of existence to the next, never leaving time for the preceding form to develop";3 and (3) Latin America's consciousness of its political and economic dependence. The apparent precariousness of political life in the Antilles brings to mind Eduardo Galeano's historical symbol, the hurricane, always a latent feature of the Caribbean's physical climate. In the tradition of Hostos and Marti, several outstanding Hispano-Caribbean essays were first given as speeches. A recent example is Luis Rafael Sánchez's "Fortunas y adversidades del escritor latino-americano" (Vicissitudes and adverities of the Latin-American writer), his address at a meeting of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana in New York on 12 June 1987, in the published version of which he declares: "Our historical handicap and continuing weakness is inscribed in the faces - emaciated by frustration - of Latin-American victims. Indian faces of arrested Mexicans with wet backs and dry hearts. Faces of Haitians who flail at the sharks menacing their safe passage to America the Opulent. Faces of Puerto Ricans who became 'spics' in English and 'neorricanos' in Spanish: two distinct words for a single contempt. Illegal aliens' faces. Faces of the undocumented. Paraguayan faces contorted by non-conformity with Señor Stroessner's thirty-five year rule. Cuban faces contorted by non-conformity with Sefior Castro's thirty-year rule. Chilean faces contorted by non-conformity with Sefior Pinochet's sixteen-year rule."4 Is adversity the true foundation of hope? Sánchez, a Puerto Rican, seems to have corroborated the Cuban Marti's call to solidarity in Nuestra América and the Dominican Pedro Henrfquez Urena's spiritual utopianism in "El descontento y la promesa" (Our discontent and our promise), 1926, both of which - like "Fortunas y adversidades . . . " - were given as speeches before publication, and use Latin America's perennial misfortune as their point of departure for an encouraging vision of the future. In Latin-American and Caribbean history, adversity has been perceived in literature primarily as an unwanted social and political dependence and as unwanted cultural imperialism. Accordingly, essayists in Latin America and the Caribbean from the mid-nineteenth century to the present have made intensive use of nonliterary preoccupations within literary works. One thinks, for example, of the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Civilizatión y barbarie: La via de Juan Facundo 2 Todas esas finezas de cátedra, todo ese lujo de materias y maestros, todo ese glorioso empeño de los educadores por ir conformando las cosas de ensefianza a los tiempos en que han de vivir los que se crían en ellas, como que se van evaporando en este aire pesado para las almas, como que perecen por falta de estímulo en esta loca contienda por la simple riqueza pecuniaria, como que se extinguen en el desprecio en que tienen a las carreras sudorosas, las carreras limpias de producto lento, los hijos ademenatados de estos hombres de mirada gris e insegura, que sólo veneran siceramente, por sobre humanidad y sobre patria, la capacidad de acumular súbitamente una masa estupenda de fortuna (Marti [1980], 41). 3 Llegada tarde al banquete de la civilización europea, América vive saltando etapas, apresurando el paso y corriendo de una forma en otra, sin haber dado tiempo a que madure del todo la forma precedente (Reyes [1960], 82-83). 4 Nuestro retraso histórico, nuestra debilidad sin término, se anclan en los rostros acribillados por la insatisfacción de los vencidos latinoamericanos. Rostros indios de mexicanos arrestados con las espaldas mojadas y el corazón seco. Rostros de haitianos que repelen a manotazos los tiburones que muerden su transporte a la América opulenta. Rostros de puertorriqueños que pasaron a ser spiks en inglés y neorrricanos en espanol: dos voces distintas para un solo desprecio. Rostros de ilegales. Rostros de indocumentados. Rostros paraguayos desencajados por la inconformidad con los treinta y cinco afios del sefior Stroessner. Rostros cubanos desencajados por la inconformidad con los treinta anos en el mando del sefior Castro. Rostros chilenos desencajados por la inconformidad con los dieciseis años en el mando del señor Pinochet (Sanchez [1989], 33).

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Quiroga (Civilization and barbarism: the life of Juan Facundo Quiroga), 1845; of the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, 1900; and of the Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar's controversial response to Rodó's essay in Calibán, 1971. These works were written in response to historical moments experienced during a period of political transformation. The sense of historical urgency in these works is complemented by a feeling of predestined permanence, of a collective existence circumstantially fixed: a late historical beginning; political dependence; and cultural imperialism, first from Spain, then from Europe and the United States. The sociologist and economist Fernando Ortiz pointedly chose two characters from Juan Ruiz's El arcipreste de Hita (The archpriest of Hita), as an allegorical foundation for Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azücar (Cuban counterpoint: tobacco and sugar), 1940: Ortiz sees Don Carnal of Ruiz's medieval work as a prefiguration of tobacco in all the latter's Cuban connotations: physical pleasure, the primitive life, masculine whim, native values, spontaneity: carnival. By contrast, as a personification of sugar, Dona Cuaresma is used to symbolize industry (in the double sense of diligence and big business), order, authority, matriarchal control: Lent. Europe had exploited and used sugar long before Columbus's voyages, and Spain, Europe, and the United States would continue exploiting it, in the context of an imposed, directed economy, long afterward. Ortiz writes that tobacco in the Caribbean tradition suggests "dreamlike and individualistic audacity to the point of anarchy. Sugar is pragmatically prudent and socially integrative. Tobacco defies like a blasphemy; sugar is humble like a prayer."5 On the next page he speculates on psychological aspects of the two universally coveted plants: "Psychologists probably think that sugar has an objective, presentminded and extroverted spirit, and that tobacco is subjective, extremist and introverted. Perhaps Nietzsche thought of sugar as Dionysian and tobacco as Apollonian. The former is mother of liquors that dispel a holy euphoria. In tobacco's smoky spirals lie the beauties and inspirations of poetry. Possibly Freud as an old man reached the conclusion that sugar is narcissistic and tobacco erotic."6 At the conclusion of his essay Ortiz imagines a metaphorical marriage between Don Tabaco and Dona Azúcar, who will give birth to Alcohol. Alcohol from the cane fields, "conceived by the machinations and grace and spirit of Satan, Tobacco's true father, in Sugar's notoriously impure womb. The Cuban trinity: tobacco, sugar and alcohol."7 The Caribbean essay reaches maturity between the historic years of 1898 (the death and transfiguration of the Spanish Empire) and 1959 (the Cuban revolution and its international reverberations), although in that period historical perspective is particularly difficult; generally speaking, the prophets fare better than the revisionists of the past. Over those six decades Borges, Neruda, Carpentier, Paz, Cortázar, Fuentes and Garcia Marquez are born and become internationally known six decades in which major Latin-American poets, novelists, and essayists achieve real literary independence.

5 El tabaco es audacia sonadora e individualista hasta la anarquía. El azücar es prudencia pragmâtica e socialmente integrativa. El tabaco es atrevido como una blasfemia; el azúcar es humilde como una oración (Ortiz [1940], 21). 6 Los psicólogos pensarân que el azûcar tiene alma objetiva, actualista y extraversa y que la del tabaco es subjetiva, ultraísta e intraversa. Quizâs Nietzsche pensó que el azücar es dionisíaca y el tabaco apolíneo. Aquélla es madré de alcoholes que dan la sacra euforia. En los humosos espirales del tabaco hay ilusivas bellezas e inspiraciones de poema. Quizâs el viejo Freud llegó a pensar si el azücar es narcísico y el tabaco erótico (Ortiz [1940], 22). 7 del alcohol, concebido por obra y gracia del espíritu satânico, que es el mismo padre del tabaco, en la dulce entrana de la impurisima azücar. Trinidad cubana: tabaco, azücar y alcohol (Ortiz [1940], 131).

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But the essay develops at a pace different from that of poetry and the novel. In the HispanoCaribbean countries the essay falls into a nearly dormant state at the turn of the century and is slow to redevelop: Marti dies in 1895; Hostos in 1903; in the first decade only Pedro Henriquez Urena publishes pieces of some importance: those collected in Ensayos criticos (Critical essays), 1905, and Horas de estudio (Studious hours), 1910. The essay's reawakening comes in the mid-1920s when the young Cuban writer Juan Marinello reminds his generation (Carpentier, Ortiz, Jorge Mañach) of the power and timeliness of Martí's prose. Carpentier recalls that "Marinello had already fixed his attention on Martí's work - known by few in those years and scarcely published - of which we had taken into account the superficially poetic aspects. He opened our eyes to the depth and universality of that spirit, without doubt one of the greatest and most authentic in Latin America."8 During the 1920s Martí's premonitions about U.S. power and influence in the Western Hemisphere significantly materialize. Given the political instability in that decade of Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, - together with Juan Vicente Gómez's truculent dictatorship in Venezuela - Marti's call for Latin-American unity and solidarity in "Nuestra América" is again relevant. In an essay published in 1925, "Patria de la justicia" (Nation of justice), and which begins with the words "Nuestra América," Henriquez Ureña reiterates Martí's principle of justice being the keystone of culture, together with Simon Bolivar's and Martí's ideal of a magna patria of Latin America: "If our America is to be something more than an extension of Europe, if all we do is offer new territory for man's exploitation of man (and unfortunately that has been up to now our only fate), if we don't make it clear that this is to be the promised land for a humanity tired of seeking it in every clime, we will have failed: . . . Our America will justify itself before the tribunal of humanity when, transformed into a Magna Patria and strengthened and enriched by nature and the diligence of her citizens, she exemplifies the society in which the emancipation of the body and the mind is fulfilled."9 "Patria de la justicia" is the ethical model for the best Latin-American essays of the twentieth century. A natural sequel to "Patria de la justicia" is "El descontento y la promesa," which summarizes the problems and opportunities exemplified by Latin-American literature: its recovery from the effects of a prolonged romantic immersion; the new inter-American consciousness that Martí, Dario, and Rodó articulated within the aesthetic enthusiasm of the modernista movement; and the extent to which New World themes and motifs should counteract the Europeanizing vogue. A concluding preoccupation, that "art and literature in our time [the 1920s] scarcely recall their basic transcendental function" and that "game-playing is all that's left for us" does not weaken Henriquez Ureña's faith in future excellence.10 Henriquez Ureña's ethical enthusiasm is the nucleus not only of his meditations on LatinAmerican literature, but also of his work on Latin-American and Caribbean history. This is reflected 8 Ya Juan Marinello había vuelto los ojos hacia la obra martiana, muy mal conocida en aquella época, apenas editada, de la que recordábamos más bien el aspecto meramente poético, abriéndonos los ojos sobre la eminencia y la universalidad de ese espíritu, que se cuenta indudalemente entre los más grandes y auténticos que se hayan producido en América Latina (Carpentier [1981], 94-95). 9 Si nuestra América no ha de ser sino una prolongación de Europa, si lo único que hacemos es ofrecer suelo nuevo a la explotación del hombre por el hombre (y por desgracia, ésa es hasta ahora nuestra unica realidad), si no nos decidimos a que ésta sea la tierra de promisión para la humanidad cansada de buscarla en todos los climas, no tenemos justificación: . . . Nuestra América se justificarâ ante la humanidad del futuro cuando, constituida en Magna Patria, fuerte y próspera por los dones de la naturaleza y por el trabajo de sus hijos, dé el ejemplo de la sociedad donde se cumple 'la emancipación del brazo y de la inteligencia' (Henriquez Urena [1978], 11). 10 El arte y la literatura de nuestros días apenas recuerdan ya su antigua función trascendental; sólo nos va quedando el juego (Henriquez Urena [1978], 44).

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in "Paisajes y retratos" (Landscapes and portraits) (Henrfquez Urena [1978], 90-95) as well as in his remarks on Christopher Columbus's quite hallucinatory Caribbean Diary and Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas's often hyperbolic History of the Indies; "Casa de los apóstoles" (House of the apostles) in which Henrfquez Urena praises the Dominicans' missionary role, beginning on his native island of Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) in 1510 (Henríquez Urena [1978], 96-100); and in "Cosas de las Indias" (Aspects of the Indies), on European and colonial writers' tendency to misrepresent or distort the origin of New World flora and fauna (Henrfquez Urena [1978], 106-10). Perhaps it is symbolic, ironic, and appropriate that Henrfquez Urena, born on the lost isle in history variously identified as Hispaniola, Isla Espanola, Guanahaní, Santo Domingo, and - after 1844 - República Dominicana, should spend his whole adult life elsewhere: Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and - mostly - Argentina. Exile and the view from outside seem to have been the circumstance of several prominent island essayists, with the result in most cases of a productive transition from the local to the continental viewpoint. The more lucid observers of Hispano-Caribbean life have seen Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic as cultural provinces in the still too fragmented Latin-American continent. The paradox of shared impoverishment unites these islands (notwithstanding a splendor of tropical colors and a musicality of literature that reflect a generally distinct rhythm of life) with South America, Central America, and Mexico: a paradox in the sense that the failing or scarcity and sometimes total absence of material benefits, public education, and governmental legitimacy have been a perennial incitation for all Latin-American literature. The essayist - whether from Cuba, Argentina, Peru, or Mexico - frequently defines the essence of his or her culture with the dual terms of a lack complemented by a quest. The disadvantages embodied in that lack and quest bring together indiscriminately Victoria Ocampo, who in her prestigious journal Sur and the series of her Testimonios (Testimonies), discretely savors the tea biscuits of non-Hispanic enlightenment; Sebastian Salazar Bondy, who in Lima la horrible (Lima the horrible), mercilessly derides all forms of cultural colonialism; and José Luis González, whose El pais de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (Fourstory house: notes for a definition of Puerto Rican culture), 1979, is a metaphor for class-based historical frustrations that have long afflicted Puerto Rico. The Latin-American writer, in other words, lives between utopia and specific hard places. The ideal state decrees: share the wealth. Reality insists: share the burden. The world turns a deaf ear to both of these mandates. The dichotomy is permanent and inescapable. Other writers in the displaced or exiled category are the Cubans Jorge Manach, whose last exile was in Puerto Rico; Alejo Carpentier, better known as a novelist, but also an active producer of chronicles and testimonies, who between 1928 and 1959 lived mostly in France and Venezuela; Carlos Alberto Montaner who has lived in Spain since 1970 and who, like Manach, defected from Fidel Castro's regime; and the Puerto Rican José Luis Gonzalez who began his literary career in New York City in the late 1940s and is now a Mexican citizen. With regard to Cuba, there are two very different points of view: that which assumes that Cuba and other Caribbean entities are basically incapable of governing themselves; and that which finds social experimentation and revolution to be the only practical path to full independence. For example, Carlos Alberto Montaner' s Cuba: claves para una conciencia en crisis (Cuba: keys to a conscience in crisis), 1982, reveals a victimization of essentially democratic institutions by autocratic or corrupt or Marxist leaders. Roberto Fernández Retamar, on the other hand, in Calibán:

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Apuntes sobre la cultura en Nuestra América (Caliban: notes on culture in our America), 1971, calls for a radical movement toward socialism, arguing that the institutional systems formerly in place in Cuba, and still operative in most of Latin America, are constitutively flawed and have failed. Montaner's book contains an interesting chronology of the relations between the United States and Cuba until 1959 - including the historical anachronism that those relations begin in the seventeenth century. For all his reiterative pessimism, Montaner claims that despite everything "Cuba is viable" and that "Cuba's viability as a prosperous and just nation depends only on the will and initiatives of Cubans."11 But the concluding essay, "Idea de la antillidad" (The notion of Antillism), is openly skeptical and more disdainful in tone. He draws a curious analogy between the Canary Islands (annexed by Spain in 1496) and the Antilles because of their similar experiences with smugglers and British pirates, their common recognition of the fact that they exist on the margin of much larger mainlands, and their awareness of continuing economic and political dependence (Montaner [1982], 141-43). In his dirge for the fate of the Caribbean, Montaner intensifies his underlying conviction that it is historically condemned and incapable of revival: "The Antilles lost their intrinsic value when they became a bridge to the American continent."12 "The beautiful Indiophile myth may have spread all over the Continent, but in the Caribbean it could only end in a shipwreck. Pachacamac, a great walker, never learned how to swim."13 "One man [Marti] could have become our islands' unifying factor, but he died in 1895, and history isn't written in the subjunctive."14 His final words are more devastating still: "The Antillean essence - that is, particular ways of appearing before the eyes of America, an interrelated way of confronting history - is in crisis. It always has been. Its substance is bad raw material for the foundation of nations."15 Is one to assume from this that Marti and Hostos, with their persistent formulas for Latin-American solidarity, were simply deluding their readers and themselves? If Marti - who in Montaner's judgment was the islands' only possible "unifying factor" - died so long ago, and if the Spanish-speaking Caribbeans' image of themselves as integral parts of a cultural whole is so pitiful from the outset, what purpose is served by defining and redefining the historical meaning of the word "crisis"? Although he has minor importance as a writer, Montaner's pejorative view of his own culture is a significant symptom of what other Antilleans have been writing against for over a century. A more encouraging work, at least for the Puerto Ricans to whom it is addressed, is Teoria de la frontera (Frontier theory), 1970, by the Cuban author Jorge Mafiach. When Manach exiled himself in late 1960 from Cuba and took up residence in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he wrote a series of lectures to be delivered at the university in Río Piedras. He had completed a rough draft when he died a few months later; then they were prepared for publication by the Puerto Rican critic and essayist Concha Meléndez, who added an illuminating introduction, "Jorge Manach en su ultima frontera"

11 Cuba es viable. . . . La viabilidad de Cuba como nación próspera y justa sólo depende de la voluntad de rectificación de los cubanos (Montaner [1982], 96, 98). 12 Las Antillas perdieron su valor per se cuando se convirtieron en puente al continente americano (Montaner [1982], 144). 13 La hermosa ficción indiófila podia volar sobre el continente, pero naufragaba inexorablemente en el Caribe. Pachacamac, gran caminante, no aprendió a nadar (Montaner [1982], 146). 14 Un hombre pudo ser el factor aglutinante de la islas, pero murió en 1895 y la historia no se escribe en subjuntivo (Montaner [1982], 153). 15 La antillanidad, esto es, unas formas peculiares de aparecer ante América, una manera vinculante de enfrentar la historia, esta en crisis. Lo ha estado siempre. Su sustancia es mala sustancia para fundar pueblos (Montaner [1982], 154).

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(Jorge Manach at his last frontier). The Teoria de la frontera lectures are a Cuban intellectual elder statesman's historical reflections, gracefully written in an Arielist tone for young Puerto Ricans. In the first of his five essays Manach reminds us that island frontiers are entirely shorelines and that the surrounding oceanic buffer zones are an inevitable handicap. "For example, if Cuba was so much later than the mainland colonies in gaining independence the main reason for it was undoubtedly its insular condition."16 In the second essay the author deplores two extremes of LatinAmerican reaction to outside political, ideological, and economic pressures: "one, a kind of coarse antagonism, resentful of foreign power and of one's own impotence; another, the contrary and still worse attitude: weak submission, which sometimes becomes active through consent; in political jargon it's called entreguismo (surrender)."17 The third essay is particularly valuable for its psychological insights into North-American and Latin-American life, and for the prophetic contrast drawn between two historical processes: "While the north's colonial situation, although dispersed at the beginning, moved toward unity in a common effort of expanding the frontier; the south, however, initially unified, at least in spirit, later declined into separateness. That was the seed of the 'Disunited States of America'."18 In the last two essays, Manach distinguishes between a culture of action (the United States) and a culture of sensibility (Latin America) and ventures a possible synthesis, one in which the intuitive south and the pragmatic north would each try to emulate the positive qualities of the other (Manach [1970], 126-27). Thus the cultural frontier or barrier could stop being an obstacle. Emulation would temper the persistent struggle between excessive "self-esteem and the urge to imitate."19 Further on the author misinterprets a trend, assuming that "from the second Roosevelt to now [1960] the United States' policy for our America has been progressively more responsible and understanding."20 That is, in view of the scope and variety of U.S. intervention since 1960, Manach has turned out to be a flawed prophet. Manach's best known work, Indagación del choteo (Inquiry into "el choteo"), 1928, uses an alleged Cuban tradition, the popular philosophy of "not taking anything seriously" (Manach [1940], 17) to undertake a quite serious analysis of national character. In the positive vein, choteo reveals a persistent will to independence. The essayist defines it basically as "an itch for independence that shows itself in a mockery of any non-explicit form of authority."21 But that independent spirit is born of an evasiveness comparable to the kind on which Octavio Paz bases his theory of masks (el disimulo) as applied to Mexicans in El laberinto de la soledad (The labyrinth of solitude). Manach praises the burlesque aspects of choteo as a healthy sign of his compatriots' "internal youthfulness" and "rich vitality"; at the same time he detects in those who exercise the wiles of choteo as an

16 Por ejemplo, si Cuba tardó tanto mas en independizarse que las colonias espanolas de la tierra firme, no hay duda que en buena parte se debió a su condición insular (Manach [1970], 46). 17 La una, cierto antagonismo hosco, resentido del poder ajeno y de la propia impotencia; otra, la actitud contraria y todavia peor: una sumisión blandergue, que a veces llega a hacerse consentidoramente activa y que la jerga politica se suele llamar 'entreguismo' (Manach [1970], 76). 18 De modo que mientras el hecho colonial del Norte, al principio disperso, progresó hacia la unidad en el común esfuerzo de adelantar la frontera, el del Sur, inicialmente unitario al menos en su espíritu, declinó después hacia la pluralidad formal. Era ya el germen de los futuros 'Estados Desunidos de América' (Manach [1970], 102). 19 el exceso de amor propio . . . [y] la imitación (Manach [1970], 142). 20 desde el segundo Roosevelt para acá la politica norteamericana hacia nuestra América, se ha ido haciendo mas considerada y comprensiva (Manach [1970], 155). 21 El choteo es un prurito de independencia que se exterioriza en una burla de toda forma no imperativa de autoridad (Manach [1940], 41).

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ethical system a "pernicious" reduction of values, a kind of "dog-in-the-manger" resentment against those who are more willing to carry out tasks "methodically, with discipline and long, sustained effort."22 It has often been noted that Puerto Rico's historical and cultural status is the most ambiguous in all Latin America: an island that is no longer a colony, nor yet an autonomous nation, nor a fullfledged state in the United States. Furthermore, it is the only former Spanish colony in the Western Hemisphere that has still not achieved formal independence. Puerto Rican identity has been a perennial project for definition. Pedreira's Insularismo specifies "three supreme moments" in Puerto Rican history that, more accurately, should be called phases: (1) the passive colonial era; (2) the nineteenth-century awakening; and (3) the twentieth century, or "the indecisiveness and transition in which we find ourselves."23 This trajectory leads to a quandary (a transition to what?), although the author does hold before the reader a minimal hope of future integration: "We sincerely believe in the existence of a Puerto Rican soul: disintegrated, dispersed, awaiting fulfillment, luminously fragmented, like a perplexing jigsaw puzzle that has never been put together."24 On balance, Pedreira draws a very skeptical picture of the Puerto Rican situation. Like Mañach's Indagación del choteo and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada's Radiografia de la pampa (X-ray of the pampa), 1933, Insularismo is a characterological approach to problems of national identity. These authors try to explain in historical terms the materialization in concrete circumstances and environments of illusions and disillusionment, extraversion and introversion, guilt feelings and defense mechanisms. Pedreira finds a persistent form of indolence (aplatanamiento) in the Puerto Rican psyche: "Being indolent in our country is a form of inhibition, a mental lethargy and lack of initiative."25 "Our rebelliousness is momentary; our docility, permanent."26 Pedreira's theory of indolence is strongly tinged with racism, and Insularismo has received from Juan Flores the lucid critique it fully deserves: "Pedreira could have noticed, had he taken into account the ideological currents on which Hitler rose to power during the same period he [Pedreira] was writing in, that typologies based on racial premises had been transformed into the weapon of the most reactionary and imperialistic thinkers of his time. Significant and ironic in the context of Puerto Rican history is the fact that he used that same ideology in order to justify the U.S. occupation of the Caribbean."27 Flores reminds us that Pedreira, as an attentive reader of José Ortega y Gasset, was strongly impressed by Ortega's elitist enthusiasm in La rebelión de las masas (The revolt of the masses) (Flores [1979], 89). Pedreira even declares that "if Ortega y Gasset had been a Puerto Rican, he'd have written The revolt of the masses twenty-five years earlier."28 In other words, fearful as Pedreira was of disruptive democratic manifestations among the uneducated and of all the potential 22

el método, la disciplina, el largo y sostenido esfuerzo (Manach [1940], 71). [la] indecisión y transición en que estamos (Pedreira [1969], 27). 24 Nosotros creemos, honradamente, que existe el alma puertorriqueña disgregada, dispersa, en potencia, luminosamente fragmentada como un rompecabezas doloroso que no ha gozado nunca de su integralidad (Pedreira [1969], 133). 25 Aplatanarse, en nuestro país, es una forma de inhibición, de modorra mental y de ausencia de acometividad (Pedreira [1969], 44). 26 Nuestras rebeldias son momentâneas; nuestra docilidad, permanente (Pedreira [1969], 36). 27 Pedreira habría podido advertir, si hubiera prestado atención a las corrientes ideológicas que apoyaron el ascenso de Hitler en los mismos años en que él escribía, que las tipologías basadas en consideraciones raciales se habían convertido en el instrumento de los pensadores más reaccionarios e imperialistas de su tiempo. Irónico y significativo para la historia de Puerto Rico es que se recurrió a la misma ideologia para justificar la ocupación del Caribe por Estados Unidos (Flores [1979], 71). 28 Si Ortega y Gasset fuera puertorriqueno, hubiese escrito su libro sobre La Rebelión de las Masas, veinticinco anos atrás (Pedreira [1969], 90). 23

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excesses of egalitarianism, he believed that already in 1905 (Ortega's book was published in 1930), Puerto Rico needed to be protected against a disrespectful domination by the mediocre (Pedreira [1969], 89). In view of his illiberal elitist sentiments the reader can only conclude that in principle Pedreira opposed democratization on his island and, presumably, in any other state, colony, or country where social neglect and political despotism had become a tradition. He had an ingrained Spenglerian fear of Puerto Rico's passage from authentic culture to sterile civilization: "today [1933-34] we are more civilized, but yesterday we were more cultured."29 Possibly the most elitist writer of the Caribbean is the Cuban novelist, poet, and essayist Severo Sarduy who, like Carlos Alberto Montaner, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Reinaldo Arenas, lives in exile. His latest short book of essays, Nueva inestabilidad (The return to instability), 1987, is abundantly complemented by quotations and footnotes (yet, with all its scientific and philosophical allusions it is as creative as it is academic) and a concluding poem, the last stanza of which is a good clue to the general theme of the work: "Material / that whirls: / propellor of light / about itself / that flies / far past the edges / that will fall / on the other side / of space."30 Sarduy is attracted to the imaginary aspects of science, the ways in which people have speculated, from Parmenides to Einstein and Trinh Xuan Thuan, on the nature, shape and expanse of the universe. Any model (maqueta) of the universe is necessarily no more than a metaphor: "Who can imagine, after all - or 'visualize' - the present radius of the universe, between some three thousand and some six thousand megaparsecs; that is, picture that expanse without forgetting the dimension of those units of measure? One parsec equals 3.26 light years; the megaparsec contains a million parsecs."31 Accordingly, literature, the arts, the sciences, and cosmology coincide in their common mission of making the unknown familiar - in a strange, figurative way. All the arts and sciences, to Sarduy's abstract delight, are forms of the imaginary (Sarduy [1987], 11). "Tell me how you imagine the world and I'll tell you in what order you include yourself and what meaning you belong to."32 These forms, which we could call instruments of quest, include everything from the first manifestations of the baroque in architecture and literature to the latest theories in astronomy and Jacques Lacan's linguistic speculations on the Other. Sarduy is a lucid speculative thinker and probably the most artful of contemporary Latin-American novelists. After referring to the baroque as "a symbolic loss of the axis" or as instability in its original artistic formulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author centers his concept of a "twentieth-century baroque" on "Big Bang theory and its recent developments, which constitute its perfect retombée." Sarduy explains his use of the French word as follows: "I used retombée, for want of a better term in Spanish, for any causality out of time: the cause and effect of a given phenomenon may not actually form a sequence in time but, rather, coexist; indeed, the effect may even precede its cause; they can be shuffled, as in a card game."33 This new baroque is described as "neither a basic scripture - since its

29

hoy somos mas civilizados, pero ayer éramos más cultos (Pedreira [1969], 87). Materia / que gira: / Hélice de luz / sobre sí misma / que huye / mas allá de los bordes / que va a caer / del otro lado / del espacio (Sarduy [1987], 69). 31 Quién puede figurarse, en efecto, o 'visualizar' el radio actual del universo, entre unos tres mil y unos seis mil megaparsecs, es decir representarse ese espacio sin olvidar la dimensión de esas unidades de medida? Un parsec equivale a 3.26 años luz; el megaparsec contiene un millón de parsecs (Sarduy [1987], 39). 32 Dime cómo imaginas el mundo y te diré en qué orden te incluyes, a que sentido perteneces (Sarduy [1987], 12). 33 Llamé retombée, a falta de un mejor término en castellano, a toda causalidad acrónica: la causa y la consecuencia de un fenómeno dado pueden no sucederse en el tiempo, sino coexistir; la 'consecuencia' incluso, puede preceder la 'causa'; ambas pueden barajarse, como en un juego de naipes (Sarduy [1987], 54, note 1). 30

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origin is simultaneously confirmed and lost, both present (like a fossil light) and extinguished - nor the intelligible segment of a form that could clarify its external irregularities."34 He goes on to say that the inquisitive spectator of the baroque today moves toward the retombée, that "the beginning is almost [sic] a certainty, but the forms that succeeded it - an inconceivable gap - are almost [sic] an aberration."35 Sarduy's language is full of escape valves ("instability," "loss of axis," and "almost" in two particularly crucial philosophical - or cosmological - contexts) and Gallicisms {pulsion, retombée, mise en abime, crêpe; he is a voracious reader of Barthes, Lacan, and the journal Tel Quel and feeds zestfully on their jargon). In an earlier essay, Barroco (Baroque), 1974, he speaks of repression psychologically considered and in relation to the unconscious - as the source of baroque language, which, in itself, is presented as the source of life. What he calls a cosmology in Nueva inestabilidad is metaphorically restricted in Barroco to a rhetoric, which in the same sentence he calls language, the autonomous and tautological code. Not content with making language autonomous, Sarduy then banishes the subject, the writer, or the creative I from the text (Sarduy [1974], 51). Roberto Gonzalez Echevama, who has written extensively on Sarduy, observes: "Barroco makes a formal effort to integrate the annihilation of the subject in the process that constitutes the essay itself: the opening of the book, which follows a numerical scheme, is a zero, 'the echo chamber.' That 'echo chamber' is the authorial I at the beginning of writing: its essence is absence, whiteness encircled by the blackness of the graphic figure - whiteness of the beginning, of snow, of cocaine that expands consciousness - the invisible wall from which voice bounces back as voices: the whiteness of death. White means death in Afro-Cuban cosmology" (González Echevama [1987], 444-45). González Echevama's symbolic analysis fits Sarduy's form and style quite neatly; it also shows one of the ways (esoterically indirect as it is) in which Sarduy incorporates Cuban culture into his writing. But it seems that Sarduy's main interest is in writing about writing itself. Pedro Henriquez Urena's complaint in 1926 about literary game playing (quoted earlier in this essay) may be more applicable to Sarduy's fiction and nonfiction than to the vanguard experiments of the 1920s referred to by "El descontento y la promesa." One is tempted to think that the symbolic displacements of time and space in Sarduy's essays are a form of aesthetic deliverance from the prickly realities of life in the Caribbean and the rest of the real world. In his novels, De donde son los cantantes (Where the singers are from), 1967, and Colibri (Hummingbird man), 1985, Cuba's presence is seen and felt in his imagery, but only in the strange, reflective, retombée manner that informs his exasperating Nueva inestabilidad. Sarduy's theory of the universe - with the beginning "almost a certainty" and everything that followed the Big Bang "almost an aberration," - may be his metaphor for a contemporary world in hopeless disarray - the one in which most of us live. Aside from Pedro Henriquez Urena's measured hopefulness, the essayists discussed thus far have tended toward political caution or complacency, and toward cultural accommodation with Europe and the United States. The political skepticism of Mañach, Montaner, Pedreira, and Sarduy could be attributed, in part at least, to their mutual distrust of liberal and revolutionary motives. Their cultural affinity to non-Hispanic trends and fashions in Europe and the United States seems to be rooted in a general lack of confidence in Caribbeans' and Latin Americans' ability to take care of 34 ni escritura de la fundación - ya que el origen esta a la vez confirmado y perdido, presente (como rayo fósil) y borrado - ni despliegue coherente de la forma capaz de elucidar las irregularidades manifiestas (Sarduy [1987], 52). 35 el origen es casi una certeza pero las formas que lo sucedieron un hiato inconcebible, casi una aberración (Sarduy [1987], 52).

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themselves. A broader treatment of the Hispano-Caribbean essay would have to include a writer who strongly influenced Sarduy: the great poet and novelist José Lezama Lima, whose essays include La expresión americana (Latin-American modes) (lectures given in 1957 and published in 1969) and Tratados en la Habana (Meditations in Havana), 1968. The former book contains "Romanticism and American Reality," with its lucid reflections on Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Simón Rodriguez, Francisco de Miranda, and José Marti as New World cultural heroes; the latter is a mixture of esoteric literary and art criticism with over a hundred pages of thoughts and impressions on Havana life. Among the motivated essayists are those who express a consistent note of commitment. One of the bluntest is René Marqués, generally recognized as Puerto Rico's leading dramatist of the twentieth century. In one of the pieces collected in "El puertorriqueno dócil" y otros ensayos (19531971) (The docile Puerto Rican and other essays [1953-1971]) he baldly states that "Puerto Rico was a colony for centuries and remains one today" and that freedom, the most treasured and elusive of Puerto Rican values, is the basic theme of all the island's writers.36 Like his compatriot José Luis González, he believes that the Puerto Rican writer is almost by definition a nationalist, a rebel, and a socialist. "El puertorriqueno dócil" (1960, and with the addition of two appendices, 1965-66) is a sixty-page classic. It could be read as a contradictory sequel to Insularismo, unanticipated, of course, by Pedreira. It is also a response to the prestigious North-American critic Alfred Kazin's article, "A Critical View of Puerto Rico." Kazin later admitted to Marqués that he was unaware of the existence of Puerto Rican literature; without having read Insularismo or having heard of its author, he reached strikingly similar conclusions about Puerto Rican "docility" as a continuing cultural disease. In his response "El sonido y la furia de los críticos del Senor Kazin" (The sound and fury of Mr. Kazin's critics) Marqués recognizes the validity of Kazin's diagnosis, but only as a point of departure, not as a conclusion: "And so we're docile. If we weren't, Puerto Rico would have acquired national sovereignty in the nineteenth century. If we weren't the Puerto Rican masses would have become nationalists and have supported Pedro Albizu Campos in the 1930s, when Albizu's nationalism was clearly our only dignified and worthy option to the colonial dead end. So why didn't they? Was it because the masses were 'objective,' 'logicist,'' 'scientific,' 'pragmatic,' etc., in their political evaluation? No. It was only because they were what Governor Munoz Marín calls 'pacific' and Mr. Kazin, 'docile'."37 "The Docile Puerto Rican" is a relentless accusation in which Marqués characterizes the extremes of the annexionists (favoring U.S. statehood) and nationalist terrorists (committing violence in the name of independence) as twin spirits in a single suicidal trend. The former readily sacrifice "their own Puerto Rican essence" because they are morally and culturally inert; the latter sacrifice themselves in useless spectacles, as in the Blair House incident in Washington, D.C. in 1951 (Marqués [1977], 165-66). But the author saves plenty of scorn for the third (and largest and most passive) category of Puerto Ricans: the estado-libristas, or supporters of the status quo of an associated free state and apologists for an authoritarian pattern, i.e., "authoritarianism de facto dis36

Puerto Rico ha sido por siglos y sigue siendo una colonia (Marqués [1977], 226). Y bien, somos dóciles. Si no lo fuéramos, Puerto Rico habría obtenido su soberanía nacional en el siglo XIX. Si no lo fuéramos, las masas puertorriquenas se habrían tornado Nacionalistas y habrian apoyado a Don Pedro Albizu Campos en la década del treinta, cuando el Nacionalismo albizuista parecía claramente la unica salida decorosa y digna a la encerrona colonial. Por qué no lo hicieron? Quizá porque esas masas eran 'objetivas', 'logicistas', 'científicas', 'pragmâticas', etc., en su evaluación de la situación politica? No. Sencillamente porque eran lo que el Gobernador Munoz Marin llama 'pacíficas' y el Sr. Kazin 'dociles' (Marqués [1977], 122-23). 37

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guised by democracy in principle."38 The estado-libristas, he alleges, practice a "masked annexionism." Other targets are the social imposition of the English language in education and other civic functions, and the largely inhibited relationship between superior or condescending North Americans and inferior or obsequious Puerto Ricans (Marqués [1977], 183-86), two themes later to be sharply reflected in the fiction of Luis Rafael Sánchez and Rosario Ferré; and a new but recalcitrant party, the Partido Acción Cristiana. Last but not least, Marqués deplores the influx of "thousands of Cuban exiles" in Puerto Rico: "Unconditional partisans of the United States and cynically colonialist, they have allied themselves with the most obviously retrograde and anti-Puerto Rican forces of colonial society."39 Nevertheless, the author is encouraged by the emerging generation of Puerto Rican writers (c.1960) who - unlike their beat generation contemporaries in the United States and the British angry young men group - directly aspire to improving society. "They fight against it and on behalf of it from within it."40 José Luis Gonzalez, who had begun writing in New York in the late 1940s, was the first practitioner of la mala palabra, or the literary art of referring to things by their true names, and in banishing the traditional euphemism from the island's fiction and non-fiction. However, it was not in literature but in everyday speech that Marqués found the most glaring evidence (euphemisms, circumlocutions, value judgments wrapped in clichés, etc.) of the collective docility he was striving to correct. The intensity of its diatribe notwithstanding, René Marqués's essay is in no sense fatalistic, as Pedreira's of 1934 clearly was. His method is to grasp his compatriots by the shoulders, shake them, and shout in their ears, telling them they will gain the freedom and self-esteem he advocates only if they organize and systematically work for it. An outspoken critic of both Marqués and Pedreira is Juan Angel Silén, who in Hacia una visión positiva del puertorriqueno (Toward a positive vision of the Puerto Rican), 1970, accepts no single "interpretive constant" - between the absolutes of colonialism and independentismo - for an adequate explanation of Puerto Rico's problems. In Silén's opinion "Marqués's ideology is pessimistic. It is the expression of a writer defeated by colonial ideology."41 He is convinced that the concept of the docile Puerto Rican is basically colonialist and deterministic (Silén [1970], 72). Given the strong rebelliousness of Marqués's critique quoted above it is difficult to justify Silén's portrayal of that writer as one more fatalistic excuse-maker for Puerto Rico's cultural and political dilemma. Like Marqués shortly before him, and like Marti in the 1880s and 1890s, José Luis Gonzalez sees reality in the terms of dominant and dominated social classes - the only viewpoint through which they believe Caribbean history can be accurately explained. El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos uses as its epigraph an excerpt from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, in which Gramsci distinguishes between a rhetorical culture that distrusts the people and a people's culture that reflects and expresses the people's needs. González, of course, is a Caribbean spokesman for the latter category. He presents Puerto Rican history in the symbol of a collapsed four-story house. The first floor (a mixed culture composed of the forgotten indigenous Tainos, the Spaniards, and the

38

autoritarismo de hecho enmascarado bajo una democracia de derecho (Marqués [1977], 174). Incondicionales de los Estados Unidos, cínicamente colonialistas, se alían a su llegada con las fuerzas más obviamente retrogradas y antipuertorriquenas de la sociedad colonial (Marqués [1977], 208). 40 Luchan contra ella y por ella, desde ella (Marqués [1977], 196). 41 La ideologia de Marqués es pesimista. Representa al escritor que ha sido vencido por la ideologia colonial (Silén [1970], 71). 39

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imported African slaves) is crushed by the second (the immigrant population of the 19th century: middle- and upper-class refugees from Spain's rebelling mainland colonies, upper-class Spanish landowners, and a minority of other Europeans). González emphasizes that the island was sharply divided between the mostly white landowners and the mostly black and mulatto servants and laborers when the third floor (symbolizing the North-American invasion of 1898) fell in on the second; a new era then began, of which González says: "The so-called cultural North-Americanization of Puerto Rico has had two dialectically linked aspects. On the one hand it has obeyed an imperialist policy from the outside, designed to adapt Puerto Rican society - contingent on its dependency, of course - to North America's capitalistic system. Yet, on the other hand, it has responded from within to the Puerto Rican masses' struggle against the propertied class's hegemony."42 Finally, the fourth floor (an alliance of latter-day North-American capitalism and opportunistic Puerto Rican populism starting in the 1940s) is - three decades later - itself in a spectacular and irreparable state of disintegration (González [1980], 40-41). In short, Puerto Rico in all four phases of its history has been consistently unworkable. González's solution is radical change: "A democratic, pluralistic, and independent socialism."43 José Luis González's most personal essay is La luna no era de queso: Memoria de infancia (The moon wasn't made of cheese: Childhood memories), 1988. The author was born in Santo Domingo, of a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother, and spent most of his childhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico. When Rafael Leónidas Trujillo came to power in 1930, José Luis's father decided to move with his family back to San Juan. His social and intellectual growing pains are skillfully interspersed in this book with Puerto Rico's precarious history of the 1930s and the curious cultural and linguistic differences he found between his mother's adoptive island and Santo Domingo. From the viewpoint of his father's business difficulties (José Sr. was a traveling salesman on the island for the Arrow shirt company and also had a small enterprise making and selling mosquito nets - the prosperity of which diminished as air-conditioning became available) José Luis experienced the problems embodied in Puerto Rico's always deficient relationship with the continental United States and the island's always dependent economy. Among the most vivid memories commented on are his first kiss, when he was ten, the incensed discussions he heard at that age on the beginning of the Spanish civil war, and the tutelage of Juan Bosch as José Luis in early adolescence began writing short stories. In the context of his much later experience as a mature writer and professor of literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he makes the following critical observation: "Some of my university colleagues contend that literary study is inseparable from linguistics. In principle I admit they're right, as literature is never made with anything but the words that constitute a language. Competent linguists are of course aware that the function of words in literature is different from that of language in science. . . . 'Water' to a chemist can only mean the combination of two parts of hydrogen with one of oxygen; for a poet, on the other hand, its meanings are unlimited, as unlimited as the imagination of all poets together. I've never known a linguist who didn't recognize this elemental truth; but I've encountered more than one who

42 La llamada 'norteamericanización' cultural de Puerto Rico ha tenido dos aspectos dialécticamente vinculados entre sí. Por un lado, ha obedecido desde fuera a una politica imperialista encaminada a integrar a la sociedad puertorriquena claro está que en condiciones de dependencia - al sistema capitalista norteamericano; pero, por otro lado, ha respondido desde adentro a la lucha de las masas puertorriquenas contra la hegemonia de la clase propietaria (Gonzalez [1980], 34). 43 un socialismo democrático, pluralista y independiente (Gonzalez [1980], 42).

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approaches a literary text as a chemist does with H 2 0 when he's not thirsty."44 Other writers of socialist persuasion include three supporters of Fidel Castro's revolution and subsequent regime: Roberto Fernández Retamar - also a poet and director of the journal Casa de las Américas, Juan Marinello, and José Antonio Portuondo. Better known as Marxist literary critics than as essayists, they believe that literature in any form has primarily an instrumental function as an adjunct of political or social action. Well in advance of the Cuban revolution Portuondo wrote in El contenido social de la literatura cubana (The social element of Cuban literature), 1944, that pure literature is only "the solitary pleasure of virtuosi who aspire to avoid political responsibility."45 A sense of social and political commitment is the basis of these writers' intense interest in Martí's essays, in the sense that Marti's concept of a united Latin America is made to coincide with their idea of a Latin-American socialist revolution. Fernández Retamar sees all countries in the area as fragments of a great Latin-American totality, and the Cuban revolution as a chapter of the continental revolution (Fernández Retamar [1977], 165). Marinello refers to Latin America as a "discovered" entity; that is, both discovered and uncovered, or permanently unprotected: "a world subordinated from its inception, born to serve its discoverer. Therein lies the source of our nations' perpetual challenge: how to break off our dependence on a foreign power."46 Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura en Nuestra América is Fernández Retamar's critique and, at the same time, reworking of José Enrique Rodó's Ariel. But Calibán is also considerably more than that. Mainly, it is an allegation in favor of an autonomous, popular-based culture (Fernández Retamar is consistently antielitist in his cultural and literary definitions) that would always reflect and express the interests of the masses. For Rodó, Shakespeare's ethereal Ariel (in The Tempest) and Ernest Renan's uncouth Caliban (Caliban, suite de "La Tempête" [Caliban, sequel to "The Tempest"]), 1878, presented the opportune historical contrast he wanted to exploit in 1898. The brief Spanish-American War of 1898 was a Latin-American turning point, especially for Cuba and Puerto Rico, which underwent an abrupt change of political and cultural overlords. Rodó's Ariel was the symbol of classical Greek, Hispanic, and Mediterranean values that he defined as spirit, whereas unspiritual Caliban represented the energetic but excessively utilitarian United States. Thus, Rodó's idealism was more nostalgic than utopian: the youthful spirit that was Greece, the traditional gentility that was Europe and Spain. As a Latin-American socialist, Fernández Retamar is the spokesman for what has never been; culture for him is defined as unachieved aspirations, as that of which the underprivileged and the oppressed have always been deprived. Uncompromising in his Marxist-Leninist convictions, Fernández Retamar strikes at a broad spectrum of ideological enemies - mostly Latin Americans of the twentieth century - for their varying degrees of acceptance of North-American influence. He reiterates Marinello's resurrection of 44 Dicen algunos de mis colegas de universidad que los estudios literarios son inseparables de los linguísticos. En principio les concedo la razón porque la literatura nunca se ha hecho con otra cosa que no sean las palabras que constituyen una lengua. Los buenos linguistas saben, desde luego, que la función de las palabras en la literatura no es idéntica a la que tienen, pongamos por caso, en el lenguage de la ciencia. . . . 'Agua', para un químico, no puede ser otra cosa que la combinación de dos partes de hidrógeno con una de oxígeno; para un poeta, en cambio, sus significados son ilimitados, tan ilimitados como la imaginación de todos los poetas juntos. No he conocido a ningun linguista que ignore esta verdad elemental; pero sí he topado con más de uno que se acerca a un texto literario como un quimico al H 2 0 cuando no tiene sed (Gonzalez [1988], 175-76). 45 El purismo es placer solitario de virtuosos que pretenden evadir el deber politico (Portuondo [1944], 12). 46 un mundo subordinado en su almbramiento, nacido para servir al descubridor. De ahí parte que a lo largo del tiempo tengan nuestros pueblos una cuestión central a ventilar: la de quebrar su dependencia a un poder exterior (Marinello [1973], 206).

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Martí, who had written in "Nuestra América" that the European university has to give way to the American university, and whose defense of all that was natural in Hispanic America he sets against Domingo F. Sarmiento's quite different concept of civilization: "In advocating civilization, which he found archetypically embodied in the United States, [Sarmiento] supported the extermination of natives, in the fierce Yankee pattern, and worshipped the growing northern Republic which, however, at mid-century had not yet shown the shortcomings that Marti would be quick to discover."47 As for his own contemporaries, Fernández Retamar attacks Jorge Luis Borges as a significant representative of bourgeois elitism; Carlos Fuentes for his reservations (c.1971) about the Cuban revolution; Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante for having defected from the revolution; and the intellectual journal Mundo Nuevo for its alleged acceptance of funds from the C.I. A. His motivation in writing Calibán appears to have been two-fold: (1) an ideological, extra-literary synthesis of José Martí's concept of an autochthonous American culture with Karl Marx's historical predeterminism (the progressive elimination of the Western world's class structure) and (2) an ethical redefinition of Latin-American literature in the line of Martí's phrase, pensar es servir (to think is to serve). Fernandez Retamar criticizes several major representatives of the new narrative, accusing them of collaborating with U.S. imperialism and of serving upper-class interests against the people's welfare. His point of departure for this ethical redefinition is the role and symbolism of Shakespeare's (and Michel de Montaigne's and Ernest Renan's) Caliban. With abundant critical and historical references he develops a close linguistic relationship between the words caribe, canibal, and its literary metathesis, Calibán. The three syllables in Shakespeare's brutish character's name denote "cannibal" and imply "Caribbean." "Caribbean," in turn, derives from Quarive, identified in a March 1493 letter of Christopher Columbus and quoted by Fernández Retamar as the island "populated by a race reputed on all the islands to be very fierce and to consume human flesh."48 The derogatory image, writes Fernández Retamar, has persisted right through the twentieth century and is still a pretext for oppression: "It's the characteristically degraded version that the colonizer offers to portray the man he colonizes. That we ourselves have believed that version for some time is in itself proof of the extent to which we are infected by the enemy's ideology."49 Culture and history in Latin America, then, are an uphill struggle waged by Caliban - unenlightened but seeking light - against a real and symbolic ethnocide conducted by foreigners in collaboration with the worst elements of Latin-American society. Among Caliban's historical allies, Fernandez Retamar includes Tupac Amaru, Simón Bolivar, Rubén Dario, Augusto César Sandino, Carlos Gardel, Alejo Carpentier, and Fidel Castro (Fernández Retamar [1982], 96). Significantly, Castro (who in 1961 declared "within the Revolution, everything [is permissible]; against the Revolution, nothing") and Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Argentine corevolutionary and Cuban by adoption, are the representative men of Fernández Retamar's last chapter ("And Ariel, Today?"), because he believes that they are true spokesmen for a "Latin-Americanization" of culture and education (Fer-

47 Como postuló la civilization, que encontró arquetipicamente encarnada en los Estados Unidos, [Sarmiento] abogó por el exterminio de los aborigenes, segün el feroz modelo yanqui, y adoró a la creciente Repüblica del norte, la cual, por otra parte, a mediados del siglo no había mostrado aún tan claramente las faltas que le descubriría luego Marti (Fernández Retamar [1982], 110). 48 poblada de una gente que tienen en todas las islas por muy feroces, los cuales comen carne humana (Fernández Retamar [1982], 84). 49 Se trata de la característica versión degradada que ofrece el colonizador del hombre al que coloniza. Que nosotros mismos hayamos creído durante un tiempo en esa versión sólo prueba hasta qué punto estamos inficionados con la ideologia del enemigo (Fernández Retamar [1982], 85).

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nândez Retamar [1982], 132-41). The extent to which Fernández Retamar's socialist theorization coincides - or fails to coincide - with individual and collective reality in the New World is likely to be the subject of debate for a long time; but there is no doubt that as an essayist he has asked crucial Latin-American questions to which no one has yet provided practical answers. The skeptics, I observed earlier, have written their essays in an attitude of political aloofness and with a desire for cultural accommodation with Europe and the United States. Manach, Montaner, Pedreira, and Sarduy - like Alcides Arguedas, Borges, Vasconcelos, and Carlos Rangel on the Hispanic-American mainland - have had notoriously little confidence in Latin-American writers' (or Latin-American leaders') ability to find solutions to Latin-American problems. In contrast, René Marqués, José Luis Gonzalez, and Roberto Fernandez Retamar - like José Martí, Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Alfonso Reyes before them - felt that the gravity of Latin America's dilemma had become their inevitable central theme; "decolonization is still our priority" could have been their collective motto. They tell us that only Latin Americans and Caribbeans should decide what Latin Americans and Caribbeans need to do about Latin-American and Caribbean affairs.

Bibliography Carpentier, Alejo. 1981. La novela latinoamericana en visperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. [1971]. 1982. Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura en Nuestra América. Ariel and Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura en Nuestra América. Ed. by Abelardo Villegas. Mexico: S.E.P.-U.N.A.M. 77-141. —. 1977. 2d ed. Apuntes sobre revolución y literatura en Cuba. Para una teoria de la literatura hispanoamericana. Mexico City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo. Flores, Juan. 1979. Insularismo e ideologia burguesa (Nueva lectura de A. S. Pedreira). Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel and Luis Alejandro Velasco. 1968. Historia de un naufragio. Barcelona: Tusquets. Gonzalez, José Luis. [1979]. 1980; revised ed. El pais de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos. Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracân. —. 1988. La luna no era de queso: Memoria de infancia. Harrisonburg, VA: Editorial Cultural. Gonzalez Echevarría, Roberto. 1987. Plain Song: Sarduy's Cobra. Contemporary Literature. 28.4:437-59. Henriquez Urena, Pedro. 1978. La utopia de América. Ed. by Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot y Angel Rama. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Hostos, Eugenio Maria de. 1982. Textos: Una antologia general. Ed. by José Luis González. Mexico: S.E.P.U.N.A.M. Kazin, Alfred. 1960. A Critical View of Puerto Rico. The San Juan Star. 19-20(Feb.) (Rpt. of Commentary article.) Lezama Lima, José. [1968]. 1969-a. Tratados en la Habana. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor. —. 1969-b. La expresión americana. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Manach, Jorge. 1928. (1940; 2d ed.) Indagación del choteo. Havana: Imprenta la Verónica. —. Teoria de la frontera. 1970. Intro, by Concha Meléndez. Barcelona: Editorial Universitaria (Univ. de Puerto Rico). Marinello, Juan. 1973. Literatura y revolución. Una meditación en dos tiempos. Creación y revolución. Havana: Contemporâneos. 203-16. Marqués, René. 1977. 3d ed. "El puertorriqueno dócil" y otros ensayos (1953-1971). San Juan: Editorial Antillana.

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Marti, José. [1886]. 1980. Correspondencia for El Partido Liberal (Mexico), 26 June 1886. Nuevas cartas de Nueva York. Ed. by Ernesto Mejía Sanchez. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. 38-43. Montaner, Carlos Alberto. 1982. Cuba: claves para una conciencia en crisis. Madrid: Editorial Playor. Ortiz, Fernando. 1940. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar. Pref. by Herminio Portell Vila. Intro. by Bronislaw Malinowski. Havana: Jesus Montero, Editor. Pedreira, Antonio S. 1934. (1969). Insularismo. Ensayo de interpretación puertorriqueña. Rio Piedras: Editorial Edil. Portuondo, José Antonio. 1944. El contenido social de la literatura cubana. Jornadas, no. 21. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico. Reyes, Alfonso. 1960. Notas para la inteligencia americana. Obras completas. Vol. 9. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 82-90. Rodó, José Enrique. [1900]. 1982. Ariel. Ariel and Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura en Nuestra América. Ed. by Abelardo Villegas. Mexico: S.E.P.-U.N.A.M. 11-76. Sánchez, Luis Rafael. 1989. Fortunas y adversidades del escritor latino-americano. La historia en la literatura iberoamericana. Ed. by Raquel Chang-Rodriguez and Gabriella de Beer. New York and Hanover, N.H.: C.U.N.Y. and Ediciones del Norte. 23-37. Sarduy, Severo. 1974. Barroco. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. —. 1987. Nueva inestabilidad. Mexico: Vuelta. Silén, Juan Angel. 1970. Hacia una visión positiva del puertorriqueño. Río Piedras: Editorial Edil. Velasco, Luis Alejandro. (See Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

Literature and Politics in the Cuban Revolution The Historical Image ADRIANA MÉNDEZ RODENAS University of Iowa

Para Erick Due to the social upheaval caused by the revolution, the year 1959 is viewed as a moment of epiphany and rupture in Cuban history. The transition to socialism was seen as the start of a new history, a radical break with the old order, the beginnings of a more just society. This conception of history as a messianic present had important consequences in the literary sphere, particularly since it echoed the Western view of literature as a constant renewal of previous tradition (González Echevarría [1980], 251). Hence the literature of the Cuban revolution had to respond not only to the historical break of 1959 but also to its own past: criollismo, or nativistic literature, and the tradition of modernity in Cuban letters ushered in by José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier. Postrevolutionary Cuban literature was consciously written as a response to the radical questioning of Cuban reality provoked by the coming to power of the Sierra Maestra rebels. Writers and artists became obsessed with the riddle of national identity, the meaning of Cubanness, and the role the intellectual was destined to play in the creation of a new Cuba. Hence many aspiring writers scattered throughout Europe and the United States who saw in the revolution the affirmation of all their hopes for national renewal returned to Havana in or after 1959, including Alejo Carpentier, who had established himself as a major Latin-American novelist with Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps), 1953, and El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world), 1949. Carpentier became a model for emerging Cuban writers in that he represented the efforts of the Revista de avance (1927-30) generation in joining political commitment with literary expertise. As part of the task of rebuilding the country, the intellectuals of the transition period attempted to make literature truly reflect the rapid social process taking place before their eyes, yet they were also in search of their own generational style (Fernández Retamar [1967], 6). As Lisandro Otero put it, "We are obliged to leave an image of our epic for the historical record. But we want to leave it in a contemporary language, in a language that will remain valid over time."1 Yet they were pulled in the opposite direction, as the revolution's cultural policy demanded ideological rigor and a simpler language that would make literature and culture available to the masses. The development of Cuban literature after the revolution can best be understood, then, as a tension between the realist aesthetic proclaimed by cultural policy, and the modernist bent of Cuban 1 Estamos obligados a dejar para la historia una imagen de nuestra epopeya. Pero queremos dejarla en un lenguaje contemporâneo, que subsista con validez en el tiempo (Otero [1976], 142).

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writers influenced by the avant-garde, including North American film and pop culture, French existentialism, and nonrepresentative pictorial art (as in the Salón de Mayo exhibit of 1961). In the cultural arena, these tensions resulted in the first debate over the nature of revolutionary art and the role of the intellectual, the famous "Conversations in the Library" held in June, 1961 that led to the demise of Lunes de Revolutión, the literary supplement of Carlos Franqui's leading daily which gathered the most innovative writers of the "new" Cuba (Luis [1990] 498-99). The members of Lunes's editorial board - Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Pablo Armando Fernández, Heberto Padilla, Virgilio Piñera, César Leante, among others - struck a daring note, turning Lunes into a vehicle of national and international culture. Lunes thus marked that moment of plenitude during the early years of the revolution that opened Cuba to the world and made it a model for the rest of Latin America. After the defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961 and the declaration of the socialist character of the Cuban revolution, Cuban writers were subject to political criteria and all artistic creation was judged according "to the Revolution's prevailing social, political and artistic parameters" (Dopico Black [1979], 19:108). Within this context, the literature of the revolution set out to rewrite Cuban history from the perspective offered by the break of 1959. Indeed, postrevolutionary literature "has delved into the opened archives of Cuban memory in search of records to assemble them for the first time" (Gonzalez Echevarría [1985], 169). The archeology of the past has followed two different methods of historical inquiry, offered by Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, respectively. Carpentier's El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a cathedral), 1962, established a model for historical fiction characterized by the epic treatment of revolutionary episodes and the vast sweep of a period. Works written in the wake of Carpentier expose the problem of how to fictionalize history, focusing either on the writer/protagonist or on the temporal structure of the novel. Perhaps more indirectly, but certainly more powerfully, the figure of José Lezama Lima looms large over all of postrevolutionary narrative, for his theory of writing sees the poetic image as a synthesis of historical time, both the index of historical potentiality and of the "absolute necessity of the historical."2 In Lezama's poetics, the image is conceived as the condensation of a utopian impulse as well as its concrete materialization. These theories, aimed at founding an "insular theology," sustain a fiction that imaginatively recreates history through the fusion of the poetic symbol with concrete historical data. Because the revolution has polarized Cuban culture into two seemingly irreconcilable camps - inside and outside the island - the development of historical fiction often appears as a split between realism and modernity. The break between fatherland and exile has conditioned two dissenting visions of Cuban reality, each with its corresponding literary form. Writers in Cuba, subject to the strictures of cultural policy, account for the realist side of the formula, whereas exiled writers have, for the most part, experimented with narrative form and hence fall under the modernist rubric; witness the success of Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante in the Latin-American literary scene. If the revolution is indeed an experience that has touched the lives of every Cuban, then a chapter of Cuban literary history needs to be written with a unitary concept of national culture, one that embraces the two sides of the dichotomy and legitimizes the writings of Cubans in exile as part of a mutual historical condition. In these pages, we will trace the historical image in postrevolutionary literature as a continuum between realism and modernity; in other words, not as fixed types but as 2

[A]bsoluta necesidad de lo histórico (Lezama Lima [1974], 29-30).

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narrative trends that deflect the crucial collective and individual experience of the Cuban people. Though, indeed, literature after the revolution presents "a political history of Cuban culture" (Gonzalez Echevarría [1985], 170), it also reveals a series of gaps and tensions: on the one hand, the silencing of controversial topics within Cuba due to the pressures of cultural policy; on the other hand, the discontinuities of the exiled condition. In its early stages, postrevolutionary Cuban literature depicted the insurrectional phase of the revolution (1953-58) as well as the dramatic changes that occurred in Cuban society between 1959 and 1961; for example, the effect of the Agrarian Reform law and key events such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of April, 1961. Popular until approximately 1965, documentary realism in Cuban fiction displayed fundamentally two narrative types: novels about the dictatorship which focused primarily on Batista's coup d'état in March of 1953, an event seen as the catalyst for the resistance movement (Lisandro Otero's La situación [The situation] 1963, is emblematic of this group, followed by José Soler Puig's Bertillón 166, 1960, Edmundo Desnoes's No hay problema [No problem!] 1961, and José Lorenzo Fuentes's El sol ese enemigo [The sun, that enemy] 1962); and novels about the rebel army's take-over, which deal specifically with the urban clandestine movement, referred to as el llano (the plain). This last group of novels, which includes José Lorenzo Fuentes's Viento de enero (January wind) 1968, José Soler Puig's El derrumbe (The collapse) 1964, Edmundo Desnoes's El cataclismo (The catastrophe) 1965, and Lisandro Otero's En ciudad semejante (In a certain city) 1970, does not fulfill the proposed objective of expressing the revolutionary motif in a complex literary form. Quite the contrary, these novels depict a manicheistic scheme in their treatment of history, as if the lack of temporal perspective or the whirlwind of the revolution itself prevented a more lucid critical vision. Read as a series, the works repeat fundamentally the same narrative scheme: a man of middle-class origins, lured by the hero mystique, feels torn between his desire to participate in the revolutionary struggle and his more natural bent toward contemplative activity and writing, thus evoking Cervantes's dichotomy between the man of action and the man of letters, with unquestionable Sartrean overtones. José Rodriguez Feo has aptly characterized these early novels as "literature of exorcism," a term also used by Menton in his periodization of Cuban prose fiction (Menton [1975], 10-11). The modern variant of this early period is Severo Sarduy's Gestos (Gestures), 1963, a work styled after Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes (Tropisms), 1938. Indeed, Sarduy's first novel, written under the influence of the nouveau roman, reads as a parody of the documentary novels set in the Batista years. The steretotypical male protagonist is transformed into an anonymous yet vital black woman, a singer of proletarian origins who earns her living by washing clothes, like many others of her class during the prerevolutionary years. The singer participates in the rebel struggle with a single act of sabotage, the explosion of a bomb in Havana's electrical plant, but, unlike the male characters of the classic postrevolutionary novel, she performs this act out of love, and not out of revolutionary consciousness. At the end of the novel the singer is transformed into Antigone, a theatrical allusion that subverts the positivistic notion of history as forward movement toward a final teleologicai point. Likewise, the infinite combinations of the Chinese charade suggest a Borgesian labyrinth as the metaphor for historical change. Subsequent stages in postrevolutionary Cuban narrative deal, though not thoroughly, with the conflicts and contradictions that result from the transition to a socialist system, the stage which Lukâcs has classified as critical realism (Lukâcs [1971], 97-99, 103-07). Two related topics have

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emerged: first and foremost is that of the intellectual marginalized by the revolutionary process, and the second topic deals with the destiny of the old middle and upper classes who have tried to survive amidst the ruins of a vanishing world. Edmundo Desnoes's Memorias del subdesarrollo (Inconsolable memories), 1967, candidly depicts the drama of a middle-class writer who attempts to adapt to the grey realities of socialist living. Written as a fictional autobiography, Memorias del subdesarrollo follows the path of a protagonist who, like Desnoes, was a journalist for the magazine Visión. Malabre has remained in Cuba even after the flight of his ex-wife, parents, and friends to Miami, and is caught in the dilemma of trying to give meaning to his existence in a context that every day seems to snuff out his basic values. The character of Eddy, a hack writer whom the narrator tries to imitate in his attempt to rewrite some forgotten stories, refers - like Malabre - to Desnoes himself ("Who has seen you Eddy and who sees you, Edmundo Desnoes!").3 This duplicity turns into a powerful rhetorical strategy, for "[t]he name 'Edmundo Desnoes' designates the editor who has assembled Malabre's texts as a 'specimen case' in cultural underdevelopment" (Santi [1981], 55). Both the fictional autobiography plus Malabre's stories appendixed at the end of the text can serve as cultural bridges that leave behind the legacy of underdevelopment while embracing the positive side of the formula (Méndez Rodenas [1986], 333). Yet Malabre's failure as a writer, even after imitating both Ernest Hemingway and Alejo Carpentier, seems to foreclose the possibility of transcending the underdeveloped condition. When the protagonist finally declares "I don't want to have an inconsolable memory,"4 he falls into the trap of writing, which cannot record the events of the past without submitting them to the constant discontinuities of the present (González Echevarrfa [1980], 253-54). Malabre's personal crisis at the end of the novel finds its political parallel in the threat of nuclear annihilation brought about by the 1962 missile crisis. In spite of the ambiguity regarding the protagonist's final destiny, Memorias del subdesarrollo remains the most emblematic text of Cuban narrative after the revolution, for it reveals not only the writer's inner division, but also the problematics of how to fictionalize history. Like the intellectual, but without his lucidly agonistic conscience, the bourgeois families who chose to remain in Cuba also hang suspended in a limbo between the past and the present. Nowhere is this dilemma more beautifully depicted than in Antonio Benítez Rojo's magic realist stories, now gathered in Estatuas sepultadas y otros relatos (Buried statues and other tales), 1984. In the title piece, a family from the old aristocracy takes refuge within the walls of their mansion by the Almendares river. They create a kind of secret society, untouched by outside forces and strengthened by their own laws and decrees. Within the rarified atmosphere of the house, the only interruption from the everyday tedium is the game of hunting butterflies, which translates as a metaphor for the world that threatens to destroy the inner fortress. As the adolescent narrator, Lucila, explains: "We spent that summer hunting butterflies. They came from the river flying over the grass and the flowers. . . . It bothered me that they should come from the outside and - like mother - I thought that it was a secret weapon that we still didn't understand; perhaps that is why I enjoyed hunting them" (Menton [1975], 186).5 Indeed, at the end of the story a giant golden butterfly attacks Lucila, an image superimposed over that of the young Cecilia, the intruder who flees with Lucila's cousin 3

¡Quién te ha visto, Eddy, y quién te ve, Edmundo Desnoes! (Desnoes [1975], 70). No quiero tener una memoria inconsolable (Desnoes [1975], 125). El caso es que aquel verano cazábamos mariposas. Venían del río volando sobre la hierba florida . . . a mí me inquietaba que vinieran de afuera y, como marna, opinaba que eran un arma secreta que aún no comprendríamos, quizá por eso gustaba de cazarlas (Benítez Rojo [1984], 6). 4

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Aurelio to the other side of the river (Benftez Rojo [1984], 10-11). Once the natural barrier that isolated the house is broken, the story concludes with a sudden turning out of the lights, a perfect symbol for the end of history. If Desnoes's and Benftez Rojo's fiction exposes the early years of socialist transition up to the missile crisis of 1962, during the decade of the sixties Cuban culture undergoes important transformations as a consequence of the changes occurring in the political arena. A new political restructuring follows the dissolution of the old Communist Party in 1964; shortly after this, the (in)famous UMAP (Unidad Militar de Ayuda a la Producción) or military camps are set up for the "rehabilitation" of homosexuals and dissident intellectuals. In this stridently militant atmosphere two theatrical works courageously dared to question through allegorical and mythological language the absolutist tendencies of both family and state: José Triana's La noche de los asesinos (The night of the assassins), 1965, and Antón Arrufat's Los siete contra Tebas (Seven against Thebes), 1968. Closely related to these plays is Heberto Padilla's Fuera del juego (Out of the game), 1968, a collection of poetry that stirred great controversy for its portrayal of Cuban poets unable to dream because of the pressure to march with the revolution. Triana's play earned the Casa de las Américas prize for 1965, yet Arrufat and Padilla's works, though also awarded prizes in the UNEAC literary contests (National Union of Writers and Artists), were published with recriminating prologues regarding their "counterrevolutionary" content. The years 1968 to 1971 mark a turning point in Cuban culture toward greater state control and ideological rigor demanded of the writer, a context that led to the incarceration of the poet Heberto Padilla and to his subsequent retraction in a manner reminiscent of the Stalinist purges. With the declarations of the First Congress of Education and Culture in 1971 that art was a "weapon of the revolution," the stage was set for a crackdown in the cultural sphere known as la ofensiva burocrática which led to the marginalization, censorship or exile of many talented writers (Dopico Black [1979], 111). Likewise, the rigid cultural climate of the seventies responds to the failure of an economic venture: the massive mobilization for the "Ten Million Ton" sugar harvest of 1970, after which Castro took the conventional course of state bureaucracy modelled on the pre-perestroika Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. This context conditions a series of novels that take up the theme of the marginalized intellectual from a far different perspective than Desnoes's earlier work. Heberto Padilla's En mi jardin pastan los héroes (Heroes are grazing in my garden), 1981, and Reinaldo Arenas's Otra vez el mar (Farewell to the sea), 1982, are anti-utopian novels that belie the faith in history postulated by Carpentier's theories of lo real maravilloso (the marvellous American reality). Hence they move beyond Benftez Rojo's bittersweet sense of closure to a pessimistic historical awareness caused by the fact that the socialist system supposedly geared to the improvement of mankind has turned, rather, into its parodic reversal. Both novels exemplify the effect of censorship in Cuban literary life, since they were rewritten from memory upon the confiscation of the originals by state security police. Otra vez el mar opens up new dimensions in postrevolutionary narrative since its formal dichotomy - the division into two parts which read as mirror images of each other (Olivares [1990], 118) - becomes a poignant symbol of a divided Cuban consciousness after the Castro experience. In the first part, the psychic strata of the Cuban family are presented through the development of an unusual love triangle between a mother and her adolescent son and a married couple who share adjacent cabins by the beach. Héctor's unfortunate wife, who functions as the narrator of the first part of the novel, not only discovers her husband's secret yearning for the youth next door but comes to

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understand her own sexual annihilation within the marriage. This passionate drama is followed by a second half composed of "Cantos," a series of poetic diatribes against Cuba's political system which replays scenes of the main story and which emphazise the asphyxia of life in postrevolutionary Cuba, including the ever-present political slogans, long food lines, and fantasies of homosexual possession (Arenas [1982]. Perhaps the most tragic scene in contemporary Cuban literature is the ending of Otra vez el mar, where Héctor, driving through the tunnel that takes him back to Havana, suddenly hurls himself into the sea in an epiphany of self-destruction/liberation (Valero [1990], 108). In the final analysis, the sea's embrace erases all distances and even the gap of gender difference, since the only narrator turns out to be Héctor (Olivares [1990], 121). This surprise ending turns Otra vez el mar into "an inexistent text - an absence," the most eloquent symbol of "the precarious and equally contradictory existence of the Cuban artist" today.6 Notwithstanding its importance as both a psychological novel and a novel of resistance, Otra vez el mar reveals Arenas's unmistakable misogyny, an attitude that springs from an unresolved Oedipal conflict with the mother depicted repeatedly in his literary works. Given the restrictions imposed on artistic activity, Cuban narrative has sidestepped the crucial questions involved in the construction of socialism on an island still poor and far away from the geographic orbit of the socialist block. An idealized and hence false view of this process is depicted in Manuel Cofiño López's La última mujer y el próximo combate (The last woman and the next fight), 1971, a work that exemplifies the kind of ideologically charged literature promoted by the state (Dopico Black [1989], 113, 115). A prime example of the manichean vision of Cuban-style socialist realism, La última mujer y el próximo combate portrays Bruno, the director of an agricultural cooperative, as a "new man" of socialism incapable of wrong-doing or of erotic excess, in contrast to the counterrevolutionary characters who embody evil and who at the end eliminate Bruno. True to the rose-colored projections of a socialist future that this brand of literature prescribes, "the microplan survives," thus continuing the work of the revolution (Dopico Black [1989], 115). Another version of the lucha contra bandidos - the revolutionary offensive carried out in the hills of the Escambray against antigovernment guerrillas between 1961 and 1966 - is depicted in both fictional and testimonial style in Norberto Fuentes's Condenados de Condado (The condemned from Condado), 1968, and Cazabandido (Rebel hunt), 1970. Despite his representation of two opposing political perspectives, Fuentes's work still conveys the military cult of machismo as a distinctive trait of revolutionary fervor. In his introduction to Cazabandido, Fuentes consciously transmits to later generations a heritage of violence. In holding up these times as "the best epoch," Fuentes displays blatant disregard as to whether any of his descendants will survive to hear his message: "May our grandchildren be vexed, and may they hear of lunch served next to cadavers, and of weapons fired at any shadow. . . . And of how we liked to be in the midst of that killing, to which no one could foretell an ending."7 From within Cuba today, the only questioning of the values inculcated by the revolution manly valor, ideological adherence, the sacrifice of individual wants to collective needs - surfaces in Jesus Diaz's short story collection, Los años duros (The hard years), 1966, and again in his first novel, Las iniciales de la tierra (The initials of the earth), published in 1987. Not only does Diaz 6 [U]n texto inexistente - una ausencia[;] la precaria e igualmente contradictoria existencia del artista cubano (Olivares [1990], 121). 7 Que los nietos se fastidien, y oigan del almuerzo servido al lado de los cadáveres disparados por cualquier sombra. . . . Y a nosotros nos gustaba andar en aquella matazón, a la que nadie le predecía un final (Fuentes [1970], 7).

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include in his novel the failure of the 1970 economic venture, but, even more boldly, he makes its central theme what is by far the sharpest contradiction in Cuban social and political life: the distance between ideological conviction and the crude realities of political praxis. Continuing the temporal pattern of previous postrevolutionary novels, the stages of Carlos's life neatly articulate the turning points of the revolution itself (Padura [1987], 154): an early conversion to Marxism-Leninism; his "test of manhood" as a member of a militia; an unsuccessful attempt at student leadership; his combative spirit and sense of sacrifice in the Bay of Pigs invasion; finally, his Sisiphean struggle to overcome economic underdevelopment during the Zafra de los Diez Millones (Ten million ton sugar harvest). In each of these events, Carlos tries to live up to the ideal of the buen revolucionario (good revolutionary), exhibiting both the ideological excess and innocence characteristic of a youth enamoured of the revolution's mythical image. Gradually, the novel unveils the protagonist's progressive deheroization as he faces a series of personal and political trials, provoked, in part, by his comrades' jealousy and pointed criticism but also by the contradictions of the process itself. The novel closes with a trial that is vaguely reminiscent of Kafka's masterpiece, for Carlos appears before an assembly that will determine whether he qualifies for membership in the Communist Party. The pages we read constitute a secret text, what has transpired during that "lapse of reflection, evocation and agony" in Carlos's mind the night before the political assembly.8 Though critics in Cuba claim that it is the reader who, in the last analysis, must "give a vote - either in favor or against" the protagonist,9 the truth is that the hero of Las iniciales de la tierra is left hanging in the void of an uncertain future. Like the protagonist in Desnoes's Memorias del subdesarrollo, Diaz's anti-hero is caught in a paradox created by the revolution itself, for he faces either political suicide should the assembly not grant him Party status or a precarious rehabilitation as an ordinary citizen. In a way similar to Otra vez el mar, Las iniciales shows that the only symbolic space where the individual can maintain his integrity within the perpetual paranoia of forced ideologization is in the clandestine novel shared by Carlos and the reader (Fornet [1988], 151). Like Otra vez el mar, Las iniciales de la tierra marks a turning point in postrevolutionary narrative, not only because of its implicit critique of the system's values, but also because of its modernist thrust, evidenced in the use of multiple literary codes (Fornet [1988], 153-54). Although many novels have emphasized the prehistory and development of the socialist experiment up to 1970, perhaps the most fertile ground for postrevolutionary Cuban narrative remains the past. The novel becomes the privileged vehicle for a reinterpretation of Cuban history from the perspective offered by previous revolutionary movements, starting with nineteenth-century slave rebellions, the wars of independence, and the failed 1933 revolt against Machado. A series of novels emerges that illuminate undocumented stages, lost in the density of time and personified by historical actors who lacked access to the written word. The fugitive slave, the woman during the early republic, the Spanish emigrant, and the campesino (farmer) forced to emigrate to New York for economic reasons during the 1940s and 1950s find their voices in Miguel Barnet's testimonial narrative, beginning with Biografia de un cimarrón (The autobiography of a runaway slave), 1966, and continuing in Canción de Rachel (Rachel's song), 1969, Gallego (The gallician), 1981, and La vida real (True life), 1984. To this day, Biografia de un cimarrón is the most enduring of Barnet's works; the fusion of voices between the master-author and former slave Esteban Montejo evokes a 8 9

[E]se lapso de reflexión, evocatión y agonía (Fornet [1988], 151). [V]ote también - a favor o en contra (Padura [1987], 154).

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collective memory that recreates the trauma of slavery and the experience of being black in Cuba (Gonzalez Echevarría [1980], 261-62; Luis [1989], 480-82, 491). If in Biografia de un cimarrón the author yields his voice to the informant, thus granting Montejo the same degree of narrative authority, in Canción de Rachel the female protagonist, a famous vedette in the Alhambra Theater in Havana, never acquires full discursive status. On the contrary, Rachel's monologue is ideologically censored by a chorus of masculine voices and even by the author himself, who appears in the guise of moral agent to condemn her frivolity. In Canción de Rachel, Barnet repeats a commonplace in Marxist historiography, that the singer's life is a symbol of the decadence and corruption of the early Cuban republic. He even goes so far as to accuse Rachel of being a prostitute because of her frank and open discussion of her intimate affairs and clear enjoyment of her sexuality. Thus Barnet's censorship seems due more to the repression of female sexuality in a machista society than to revolutionary values, and proves that literature in the postrevolutionary period does not escape the confines of patriarchal discourse. The slanted representation of woman characters, added to the palpable scarcity of works written by women, bespeaks the fact that literature is still a masculine domain in Cuba. The notable exception is, of course, Nancy Morejón, whose notoriety has been achieved by poems that express the drama of the black woman. Within this context, the only author who assumes a critical position vis-a-vis machismo is Reynaldo González in La fiesta de los tiburones (The feast of sharks), 1978, a testimonial novel based on the accounts of sugar mill workers during the Presidency of José Miguel Gómez, who was humorously nicknamed el tiburón (the shark). Copying Dos Passos's collage technique, González's novel displays machismo as a vital attitude and, regrettably, as a foundational discourse of Cubanness. The work also participates in the discourse of resistance to sugar, which, since the nineteenth century, has critiqued the hegemony of sugar and its negative impact in shaping Cuban culture (Benítez Rojo [1986], 14-17, 28-29). The vision of sugar as a bitter burden on Cuban history presented in La fiesta de los tiburones contrasts with Pablo Armando Fernández's idealized view in Los ninos se despiden (The children say good-bye), 1968, a family saga set in the Delicias sugar mill in Oriente province. From today's vantage point, the graphic scenes of the sugar harvest masterfully narrated in Diaz's Las iniciales de la tierra, depicting the duress and sheer exhaustion of the sugarcane workers, the monotony and noise of the grinding process, and the faulty production at the "Latin America" sugar mill due to ineffective machinery, have by far surpassed the benevolent images of Los ninos se despiden, as has Reinaldo Arenas's El central (The sugar mill), 1981, a moving poem that relates sugar production to the history of oppression in the island. Yet another kind of memory - the literary - appears in postrevolutionary narrative. Cintio Vitier's De Pena Pobre - Memoria y novela (Concerning Pena Pobre - memoir and novel), 1978, is the first in a trilogy composed also of Los papeles de Jacinto Finalé (Jacinto Finalé's papers), 1984, and Rajando la leña está (Cutting firewood), 1986. A roman à clef about José Lezama Lima and the Origenes group, De Peña Pobre offers a generational view of history, as within a given family the actors of the war of independence are interlaced with the combatientes of 1959. Named after a street in Old Havana where the Origenes group used to meet, De Pena Pobre reads as a veiled autobiographical account of the author's own conversion to the secular religion of Marxism. The novel of the Cuban revolution goes beyond the island's borders by encompassing a broader historical field; mainly, transitional moments in Latin American history such as the continent's entry into modernity. Faithful to Lezama Lima's method of poetical analogy, Reinaldo

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Arenas's El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations), 1968, retells the life of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a leader of Mexican independence, thereby establishing an allegorical counterpoint between the failure of the Independence wars as a true revolutionary movement and the predicament of post1959 Cuba. An extraordinary and tenacious monk, Fray Servando appears as an alterego of Arenas himself: the poet as rebel whose sharp criticism threatens the arbitrary and absolute exercise of power that dominates Latin-American political life. Fray Servando's journey from Mexico to Spain as a spokesman against colonial authority and ecclesiastical dogma is narrated from multiple points of view, a technique inherited from Carlos Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The death of Artemio Cruz), 1962. By far one of the most enduring historical novels written in Cuba, Arenas's El mundo alucinante shares the same time frame as Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a cathedral) - the transition to the modern era at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - and its combination of poetic impulse and historical breadth. Whereas Arenas concludes El mundo alucinante with a clever parody of Carpentier' s baroque style, Lisandro Otero's Temporada de ângeles (The time of angels), 1983, strictly follows Carpentier's model of historical fiction. The novel depicts "the fight for political power in England from 1639, when the resistance against the dictatorship of Charles I began to mount, until 1649, the year when the king was decapitated and Oliver Cromwell takes over the government."10 A more modern appropriation of Carpentier's verbal architecture, set this time in a Caribbean context, is Antonio Benftez Rojo's El mar de las lentejas (Sea of lentils), 1979. By means of alternating tableaux that interweave both real and fictional characters, El mar de las lentejas underscores the economic motive behind European colonization, showing the link between the slave trade and the demise of the Spanish empire under Phillip II. In recent years, Cuban literature has seemed to exhaust the paradigm of vast historical epics and is returning to simpler narrative forms; mainly, the depiction of rural life in a style reminiscent of the criollista (local color) tradition, a genre that dates back to the nineteenth century and was popularized during the 1930s and 1940s. A variant of Garcia Marquez's magic realism, José Lorenzo Fuentes's Brigida pudo sonar (Brígida could dream), 1987, alternates the story of a legendary female character with the superstitions of the inhabitants of El Toro, an archetypal village of the Cuban countryside. Proof that the disastrous effects of censorship are still operative in Cuba is the fact that Brigida pudo sonar was published only after news leaked out that human rights activist Ricardo Bofill had pirated it and published it in Madrid under the title El tiempo es el diablo (The devil's time), 1985. Acclaimed in Cuba as the most promising of the recent generation of writers, Senel Paz in Un rey en el jardin (A king in the garden),1983, offers a child's vision of rural poverty during the late 1950s, precisely the theme of Reinaldo Arenas's Celestino antes del alba (Celestino before the dawn), 1967. Despite Paz's blatant imitation of Arenas's poetic style, Un rey en el jardin falls short of its model. Lastly, Francisco López Sacha's El cumpleaños del fuego (The birth of fire), 1986, attempts a narrative experiment by personifying a country house as narrator-witness to the lives of a campesino couple. All three novels repeat the same threadbare narrative scheme: the conditions of poverty, ignorance, and injustice prevailing in the Cuban countryside under Batista vanish in one fell swoop with the triumph of the rebel army on the eve of 1959. One wonders if such a

10 [L]a lucha por el poder politico en Inglaterra desde 1639, cuando se incrementa la resistencia en contra de la dictadura de Carlos I, hasta 1649, afio en que el rey es decapitado y Oliver Cromwell asume el gobierno. (Rodriguez Coronel [1984], 160).

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mystification is consciously belabored to guarantee the work's publication, as a means to avoid the more controversial themes of the present, or both. In conclusion, the restructuring of society along militaristic lines added to the unrelenting political vigilance that permeates creative activity in Cuba have resulted in a series of tropes or patterns repeated in varying degrees throughout the last thirty years, and even in officially proclaimed genres such as the novel of political espionage (novela policial). Miguel Mej ides, a member of the most recent crop of Cuban writers, assesses the state of postrevolutionary literature in this way: "in Cuba one cannot yet speak of a novelistic tradition. . . . We, the writers, are lily-white virginal nuns when it comes to dealing with our own reality. . . . Indeed, very few of our latest novels will pass the test of time. The novel today does not represent in a daring manner the spiritual problems involved in the edification of man's [sic] socialist [consciousness]; of man at the threshold of the twenty-first century."11 Though searching for a genuine expression, even the younger writers limit their creative potential to topics and themes already surpassed by contemporary Latin-American narrative, a fact that can only be seen as emblematic of the isolation of Cuban national life. If officially acclaimed novels depict symbols of closure - most notably, the underground oven in José Soler Puig's El pan dormido (The unleavened bread), 1975 - perhaps the return to that hope-filled moment of 1959 signals a wish for change, a move toward national reconciliation and a desire to awaken from the present bureaucratic malaise. The Castro brothers have recently declared that "before abandoning Marxism-Leninism, [they] will see their nation at the bottom of the Atlantic" (Kramer [1990], 22). It is telling that this (a)historical prophecy contradicts exactly the vision of exiled writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Vista del amanecer en el trópico (View of dawn in the tropics), where, at the end of its turbulent history, Cuba "will always be there. As someone once said, that long, sad, unfortunate island will be there after the last Indian and after the last Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and after the last of the Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed over by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal" (Cabrera Infante [1978], 141).12 Our hope is that the unrelenting nature of this dream will absolve the present nightmare of history. Translated by Kristen G. Brookes, Suny-Binghamton, and the author.

11 [E]n Cuba no se puede hablar de una novelística. . . . [N]osotros, los novelistas, somos unas virginales monjitas en el tratamiento de nuestra realidad. Estamos llenos de libros superficiales, que ilustran verdades a medias, verdades que la vida ha conquistado y que nosotros una y otra vez repetimos. Casi ninguna de nuestras últimas novelas resiste el paso del tiempo. La novela actual no plantea con audacia los problemas espirituales del hombre en la construcción socialista, del hombre en los umbrales del siglo XXI (Miguel Mejides in Cámara [1988], 41). 12 Y ahí estará. Como dijo alguien, esa triste, infeliz y larga isla estará ahí después del ultimo indio y después del ultimo espanol y después del ultimo africano y después del último americano y después del ultimo de los cubanos, sobreviviendo a todos los naufragios y eternamente bañada por la corriente del golfo: bella y verde, imperecedera, eterna (Cabrera Infante [1974], 233).

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and Politics in the Cuban Revolution:

The Historical

Image

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Bibliography Arenas, Reinaldo. 1982. Otra vez el mar. Barcelona: Ed. Argos Vergara. (A novel confiscated by state authorities for its critical view of Cuban socialism and for exposing the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba and the psychic entanglement of erotic relations.) Benítez Rojo, Antonio. 1984. Estatuas sepultadas y otros relatos. Hanover, New Hampshire: Ediciones del Norte. (A collection of short stories depicting the fate of the bourgeoisie who stayed in Cuba after the Revolution as well as the sociocultural history of the Caribbean; see prologue by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría.) —. 1986. Power/Sugar/Literature: Toward a Reinterpretation of Cubanness. Special number dedicated to "The Emergence of Cuban National Identity." Ed. by Enrico Mario Santf. Cuban Studies. 6:9-32. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. (A ground-breaking essay that sees the emergence of a national literature in Cuba as the result of a "discourse of resistance" to the hegemony of sugar in Caribbean culture.) Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. 1974. Vista del amanecer en el trópico. Barcelona: Ed. Seix Barral. (A series of literary vignettes that depicts the history of Cuba from the colony to the revolution as a history of violence.) —. 1978. View of Dawn in the Tropics. Trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Harper & Row. Cámara, Madeline. 1988. Dialogos al pie de la letra. Havana: Letras cubanas. (A series of interviews with contemporary Cuban authors in which their search for new literary forms is held in tension by the need to conform to the realistic norm imposed by state cultural policy.) Dopico Black, Georgina. 1979. The Limits of Expression: Intellectual Freedom in Revolutionary Cuba. Cuban Studies. 19:107-42. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. (A penetrating analysis of the impact of state cultural policy on Cuban literature after 1959, with special attention to the repression of intellectuals and the promotion of literary works for political purposes.) Desnoes, Edmundo. 1975. Memorias del subdesarrollo. Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz. (A moving portrayal of the fate of the intellectual within the Cuban revolution, the tensions between individual and collective memory, and the nostalgia for literature.) Fernández Retamar, Roberto. 1967. Hacia una intelectualidad revolucionaria en Cuba. Casa de las Américas. 7:418. (One of the first attempts to define the literature of the revolution according to the generational scheme traditionally used in Cuban literary history.) —. 1977. Apuntes sobre revolución y literatura en Cuba. Para una teoria de la literatura hispanoamericana. 2d ed. Mexico City: Nuestro Tiempo. 159-76. (Further notes on the relationship between literature and the revolutionary process in Cuba which stresses the need for flexible literary categories.) Fornet, Ambrosio. 1987. A propósito de Las iniciales de la tierra. Casa de las Américas. 28:148-53. (A review of Jesus Diaz's novel within the context of Cuban narrative of the revolution and its emphasis on the epic treatment of history.) —. 1988. Simplificando. Casa de las Américas. 28:150-58. (A rebuttal of Leonardo Padura's review of Jesus Diaz's Las iniciales de la tierra justifying the novel for its modernist bent and its faithfulness to collective experience.) Fuentes, Norberto. 1970. Cazabandido. Montevideo: Libros de la Pupila. (A testimonial account of the counterinsurgency movement in the Escambray mountains during the early sixties.) González Echevarria, Roberto. 1980. Biografia de un cimarrón and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution. Novel. 13:249-63. (A reading of Barnet's masterpiece within the context of Cuban literary history; Cimarrón appears as the text which reverses the Latin-American encounter between colonizer and colonized.) —. 1985. Criticism and Literature in Revolutionary Cuba. Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution, 19591984. Ed. by Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk. New York: Praeger. 154-73. (An assessment of the role of literary criticism in postrevolutionary Cuba, its rediscovery of the Cuban tradition and its thrust toward historical interpretation.) Guevara, Ernesto. 1970. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. Obras 1957-1967. 2:367-84. Havana: Casa de las Américas. (A classic essay in Latin-American Marxist thought which proposes the avant-garde over outdated notions of socialist realism.)

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Rodenas

Kramer, Michael. 1990. Searching for Cuba Libre. Time. (June) 18:22. (An account of the recent perestroika movement and its impact on U.S./Cuba relations; the role of the Cuban-American community in negotiating a possible rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba.) Lezama Lima, José. 1974. La cantidad hechizada. Madrid: Júcar. 29-30. (A collection of essays outlining Lezama's theories of the poetic image as a condensation of the past and a vehicle for historical prophecy.) Luis, William. 1989. The Politics of Memory and Miguel Barnet's The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. MLN. 104:475-91. (An analysis of Barnet's depiction of the black slave and his authorial intervention in the rewriting of history.) —. 1990. Lunes de Revolución. Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Cuban Literature. Ed. by Julio A. Martinez. New York: Greenwood Press. 498-501. (An overview of the role played by the literary supplement Lunes de Revolución in the early years of the revolution.) Lukács, Georg. 1971. Realism in Our Time - Literature and the Class Struggle. New York: Harper & Row. (A classic of Marxist criticism that defines the realist genres occurring after the transition to socialism.) Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. 1986. Escritura, identidad, espejismo en Memorias del subdesarrollo de Edmundo Desnoes. Identidad cultural de Iberoamérica en su literatura. Ed. by Saúl Yurkiévich. Madrid: Alhambra. 333-40. (A reading of Desnoes's novel from the perspective of how it refashions the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism in Latin America in terms of economic and cultural underdevelopment.) Menton, Seymour. 1975. Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press. (A comprehensive view of the novel and short story produced in Cuba from 1959 to 1971, ordered into four chronological periods.) Olivares, Jorge. 1990. Autorreferencialidad en Otra vez el mar. Reinaldo Arenas: Alucinaciones, fantasias y realidad. Ed. by Julio Hernândez-Miyares and Perla Rozencvaig. Glenview, Il.: Scott, Foresman/Montesinos. 115-25. (A reading of Arenas's Farewell to the Sea as a self-referential novel depicting the fate of the intellectual in Cuba today.) Otero, Lisandro. 1976. Literatura y revolución. Trazado. Havana: UNEAC Contemporâneos. 127-44. (An early attempt to define the literature of the revolution as both aesthetically and politically avant-garde.) Padura, Leonardo. 1987. Las iniciales de la tierra: a favor o en contra. Casa de las Américas. 28:154-56. (A reading of Jesus Diaz's novel that points out its reliance on the historical scheme of most postrevolutionary novels and also its departure from this model.) Portuondo, José Antonio. 1972. Una novela revolucionaria. Casa de las Américas. 12:105-06. (The official reading of Manuel Cofino López's La última mujer y el próximo combate, praising the novel as an example of socialist art.) Rodriguez Coronel, Rogelio. 1984. Controversia de ângeles. Casa de las Américas. 24:159-62. (A review of Lisandro Otero's Temporada de ângeles within Carpentier's tradition of historical narrative.) Santi, Enrico Mario. 1981. Edmundo Desnoes: The Novel from Under. Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos. 11: 4964. (A reading of Memories of Underdevelopment in relation to Desnoes's essays and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.) Valero, Roberto. 1990. Otra vez Arenas y el mar. Reinaldo Arenas: Alucinaciones, fantasias, y realidad. Ed. by Julio Hernândez-Miyares and Perla Rozencvaig. Glenview, Il.: Scott, Foresman/Montesinos. 104-14. (A reading stressing the thematic/structural significance of the sea in Arenas's Otra vez el mar). Vitier, Cintio. 1958. Lo cubano en la poesía. Las Villas: Universidad Central de Las Villas. (A classic work tracing the emergence of a national sentiment in Cuban poetry.)

Conclusions* JULIO RODRÍGUEZ-LUIS

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Literature, being one of many possible social practices, expresses the aspirations of certain social groups that are, in turn, undergoing a constant transformation. In the Hispanic Caribbean the literature produced by those groups is shaped by the ongoing interaction between the African heritage (which plays in the area a role similar to that of the absent native tradition), the popular criollo culture that evolved basically from the culture of the colonizers, the learned Spanish culture, and a variety of foreign elements. It is a dialogue between transplanted elements and those created in the region. As a first step in the development of a critical framework for the study of the literatures of the Hispanic Antilles and for comparing them to those of the rest of the Caribbean, I propose for the periodization of literary production in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, Jean Franco's periodization model for Latin America. This model, which ignores the chronological arrangement followed by most literary histories, links literary production to social transformations in order to determine how these have affected the cultural system that reproduces them. Franco's model has the added advantage of facilitating the study of and eventual incorporation into the literary system of its excentric products, which is of crucial importance for a history of Latin-American literature given the cultural heterogeneity of the continent. The model is based on the theory of underdevelopment, a critical theory to which Latin America has made a substantial contribution. By keeping in mind that underdevelopment is the result of the development of the dominant areas on which the marginal regions depend as part of a world system that includes the dissemination if not the actual production of culture, "the dependency model suggests the possibility of regarding American and European cultures as a relationship, as an 'intertextuality' of a very special kind. Instead of taking Latin American literature as an isolated anachronism whose practitioners have simply arrived late at the banquet of civilization . . . or as a few isolated masterpieces . . . which have magically entered the divine order, it becomes

* These conclusions, as well as some sections of the introductions to Parts One and Two, in their original form constituted a position paper on literary production in the Hispanic Caribbean that I wrote to clarify my own ideas on the subject and in preparation for editing the Hispanic division of the History. The paper was first circulated to the potential contributors; then a substantial portion of it was read during the symposium on literary historiography of the Caribbean organized by the general editor at the University of Virginia in October 1986. The second half of that talk was published as an article in a special section that the journal Callaloo devoted to the Virginia symposium on Caribbean literature. I wish to express my gratitude to Doris Sommer and Ivan Schulman who, with the general editor, A. James Arnold, took the time to read my paper and make some corrections on what was said as well as to make suggestions regarding my arguments. Many of their comments, and in particular Schulman's very extensive ones, are incorporated in the pages that follow.

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possible to consider the very aberrations of that culture as devices which lay bare the hidden ideological assumptions which are seen as natural and normative in the metropolis" (Franco [1975], 67). Franco divides the development of Latin-American literature into three major periods: the colonial period, tied to the mercantilist phase of the international system; the time of independence from the colonial powers and of the creation of a new dependency upon the European and American financial and industrial powers. And finally, a contemporary period beginning after the end of World War II and dominated by the multinational corporations that use the cheap labor of the underdeveloped countries while helping to foster a new and massive consumerism, aided by the development of the communications industry and of technology in general. The social changes that each period brought with it are not only reflected and reproduced in literary production, but affect that production "at a fundamental level, influencing the range of what can and cannot be said, the development of genres and the transmission of certain forms of representation" (Franco [1975], 68). Franco further characterizes literary production in Latin America during these three periods, as follows: 1. Colonial literature ignores the popular and the indigenous cultures (which maintained, of course, a life of their own), seeing itself basically as excess or ornament, even as a basic emptiness. It should be added that the growth in importance of satirical literature in the eighteenth century is the direct consequence of the deterioration of the legitimacy of the colonial power's domination, a phenomenon that aided the development of an autochthonous outlook. 2. After independence, and just as the fortunes of the entrepreneurial class were becoming tied to those of its foreign customers and lenders, as well as to the ups and downs of world markets, the writer produces with his eyes turned toward cultural markets within which, nevertheless, he remained basically unknown until relatively recently. "For a Latin American writer to enter this privileged group meant the shedding of his 'excentricity' in order to become the producer of a literature that enshrined universal values. Movements like Modernism in Spanish America, Brazilian 'modernismo,' Argentine 'ultraísmo' - the very names are significant - are wedded to the project of placing the Latin-American writer on the same plane as the metropolitan writer. That is why these movements all aspired to membership of a brotherhood of poets transcending nationality and social class" (Franco [1975], 73). Meanwhile, the awareness of the huge gap that existed between the high ideals of the intellectuals and the reality of the societies from which they came and where the majority of the population was illiterate, suggested to a few writers that they might turn the icons and the most basic assumptions of European culture upside down, or else subtly question them through the use of humor and other estranging techniques. 3. The changes resulting from the post-World War II technological revolution coincided with the awareness "that certain options would never be possible in Latin America as long as it were part of the dependent world" (Franco [1975], 76), a situation that was not likely to end, as liberalism had argued it would. Whereas the mass media - controlled in the long or the short run by the foreign interests on which Latin America continues to be dependent - try to persuade "viewers that dependent and dominant nations alike form part of a single happy technological family" (Franco [1975], 78), a truly new Latin-American literature seems possible for the first time. This literature takes advantage of the creation, thanks to a substantial increase of the educated middle class, of a "potential readership which by no means passively accepts their environment as eternally given" (Franco [1975], 78). Franco argues that the "open text" that many a writer aims for in order to overcome

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"the elitism of the author/reader relationship" is in fact the "least effective in counteracting metropolitan ideology, for the degree zero of writing in a dependency situation reproduces the convenient neutrality of technology and comes closest to the depoliticized desiderata of the dominant society" (Franco [1975], 78). She argues instead for reading also the texts that, because they cannot be easily depoliticized, are the least assimilable. Dependency theory can thus provide "a framework that foregrounds the technology of domination and the forms of resistance, thereby allowing us to separate the ideological facets of culture from its potentiality as a mode of cognition" (Franco [1975], 79). This model for the study of Latin-American literature is valid for the literatures of the Hispanic Antilles. When applied to them, it reveals how and in what ways they differ from the literatures of the continent; it highlights the very conditions that define their essence. The literatures of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico did not have to ignore an indigenous tradition that was eradicated from the islands together with the population that was its source very early during the conquest process. As Chang-Rodriguez's essay shows it was only in Santo Domingo that there was a relatively active literary life during the first two centuries of colonial rule. In the absence of a rich pre-nineteenth-century literature the three islands of the Hispanic Antilles are not, however, very different from other areas of Latin America less poor than they, such as Venezuela, Chile or Argentina. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the culture of the African slaves begins to constitute a body with the same weight in the country's life as that of the indigenous culture in other areas of Latin America. This was especially so in Cuba, where the economy was devoted by then to the production of sugar, which required a dramatic increase in the slave population. But the slave culture was also ignored, and even more deliberately than Indian cultures, since the cultural and racial prejudices through which the Africans and Afroamericans were seen were even more negative than those that applied to the Indians. Strictly speaking, the colonial period lasted for Cuban literature until 1898, and continues into the present for Puerto Rican literature under different premises. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the nineteenth-century contribution to the literatures of those two nations differs drastically, because of their colonial status, from the same period of the literatures of their Spanish-American sisters. Or, by the same token, to assume that Dominican literature, since Santo Domingo achieved its independence early in the nineteenth century, has more in common with those of the continent than with the literatures of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The fact is that Cuban and Puerto Rican societies developed under Spanish colonial rule which provided a social stability that was often absent from the rest of Spanish America - very much the same way as did those of their sister nations. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, and notwithstanding the continuation of its colonial status, Cuba's overall cultural situation, due to the effect of material conditions on the development of ideas and on intellectual production, was not intrinsically different from the situation prevailing in the most advanced of the independent Spanish-American countries. (Havana had at the termination of Spanish rule a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants, which made it the third largest city in Spanish America.) This is easily confirmed by comparing the cultural output of Cuba from approximately 1830 onward with that of Venezuela, Colombia or Peru, and even - at least until the last quarter of the century - with that of Mexico, Argentina or Chile, which were richer and more advanced than the countries previously mentioned. In Cuba, and to a lesser extent in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as well, there had taken place during the nineteenth century a type of restructuring of the society similar to the one

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that occurred in Mexico and in South America after the liquidation of Spanish rule. The bourgeoisies of the Hispanic Antillean nations also asserted their power, as they became more sure of themselves, and they made explicit their will to control their countries' administration under various projects: independence, autonomy, or annexation to the United States. These projects, although unsuccessful in the case of Cuba and Puerto Rico, served nevertheless to give cohesion to those countries' dominant classes. Meanwhile, the effect of Cuba's relative prosperity on its cultural production initially created an advance of perhaps two decades in relation to Puerto Rico. But by 1870, if not earlier, Puerto Rico was fully into the stage of development characteristic of the postcolonial period in Spanish America. Ironically, and due to the conditions mentioned in the introduction (pages 101-07), the Dominican Republic, although independent since 1821, only reached that stage of development toward the last decade of the century. It should be noted, furthermore, that just as the new Spanish-American republics were in actuality dependent on foreign markets and capitals, and through these on the corresponding foreign states, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico became increasingly dependent in the course of the nineteenth century on the U.S. market and on American capital. Naturally, the literatures of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico were Europeanoriented: i.e., writers modelled themselves after their European counterparts and followed European currents. Several peculiar factors have, nevertheles, to be taken into consideration in this regard. There is, first of all, the strong ties that the literatures of the three countries maintained with Spanish literature, for obvious reasons (educational systems that, being basically Spanish, privileged the metropolis's literary canon, easy accessibility of Spanish books, and frequent trips to Spain by the intellectuals). Although other European and, by the end of the century, U.S. influences, too, were felt in these literatures, they remained closer to the metropolitan literature than other SpanishAmerican literatures, where the French influence displaces the Spanish in importance after 1850. One current of Spanish literature that had a long-lasting presence in Cuban and Puerto Rican literatures was costumbrismo, the description of the customs of a particular rural or urban society. As Carlos Alonso explains in his essay, the cuadro de costumbres had a double origin in the reformist and critical thrust of the Enlightenment (particularly evident in the Spaniard Mariano José de Larra's cuadros, but also in the moralizing purpose of the cuadros and escenas of some Cuban writers, like Victoriano Betancourt) and in the romantic desire to identify a certain Volksgeist. The two tendencies, Alonso goes on to say, joined forces to develop a nationalist project designed to call attention to the injustice of the colonial status and to formulate a concept of nationality that could serve the separatists' agenda. This dual function explains the survival of the genre throughout the entire century. The costumbrista trend had an impact on the Dominican novel, too. By including in the representation of local customs popular types and their way of living and even of speaking, costumbrismo absorbed to some extent the popular and oral cultures that the learned literature ignored. The continuation of colonial status in Cuba and Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in patriotic preoccupations. As a consequence, the search for the essence of nationality becomes a distinctive current rather than a mere theme, as is the case regarding that quest in other Hispanic-American literatures. Santo Domingo gained its independence from Haiti in 1844, but the political instability created by the wars with its neighbor and by the agitation for annexation to the United States or to Spain produced effects very much like the ones that colonial status had on the emotions of intellectuals and of the population at large in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

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We can thus see that in the poetry of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico a preoccupation for rescuing and defining nationality is apparent from the beginning of the nineteenth century and grows in intensity and number of manifestations, reflecting both countries' evolution toward independence (Rivero [1983]). This was only natural, since colonial societies, as a first step in the process of attaining self-awareness, have to distinguish their own identity from that of the metropolis that pretends to include them within itself. It is natural that the urgent need to define the fatherland's identity should be expressed primarily in poetry, and that the poetic expression of that identity should so often be more effective than the effort to achieve it in the essay, the novel, and the journalistic article. This is so because what we are dealing with here is a feeling, and one so difficult to express in words, so ineffable in the long run, that it finds its ideal vehicle in poetry. The persistence of slavery in Puerto Rico (until 1873) and Cuba (the complete, instead of selective or gradual, abolition did not happen until 1886) produced antislavery works such as Anselmo Suárez y Romero's novel Francisco, 1839. In it the idealization of the slave was pursued according to the intellectual project of the group to which the novelist belonged (a mixture of Christian ethics, Victor Cousin's eclecticism, and their own economic interests); it reproduces in a different form the idealization of the native carried on by the indianista novel in other Spanish-American literatures. In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, the indianista novel Enriquillo, 1882, transforms the typical ignorance about the real Indian that characterized other indianista works into a strategy through which the blacks and mulattos that constitute the majority of the country's population are transformed into the Indians that the Spanish in fact exterminated, and their relationship to the conquerors is likewise idealized: the Spanish king accepts as just Enriquillo's rebellion and grants him a privileged status. The project expressed in Enriquillo served also the need of a bourgeoisie in the process of consolidating itself through entering the U.S. orbit (the author of the novel, Galván, was a high-ranking Dominican diplomat in Washington) to justify that transition, which called even more urgently for rejecting the blacks (Sommer [1986]). There is a widespread tendency among Dominicans to deny their African ancestry by calling themselves Indians. This also helps to distinguish them from the much feared, as well as despised, Haitians. We can conclude then that Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico developed distinctly national literatures during the nineteenth century. Those literatures, while sharing many of the features that characterize the literatures of the other Spanish-American countries during the same period, emphasize the expression of the national identity. This comes from the opposition of the writers to colonial rule and to political and social evils, many of which resulted directly from that status. The Hispanic Antilles played a crucial role in the push toward modernity of Spanish-American literature. The first protagonist of that thrust was the Cuban José Martí, whose writings are basic to the development of the stylistic innovations that launched modernismo. Although modernismo imitated, especially through Rubén Dario, Parnassianism and decadence, it developed its own voice, becoming Spanish America's first autochthonous literary movement, the one marking the inception of Spanish-American literature - even though this took place largely through a marginalized literature, the Spanish - in world literature. It is not then a mere coincidence that the founder of modernismo was, as the architect of the second movement for Cuba's independence, the leader of an unsuccessful attempt to free the Hispanic Antilles from all foreign powers including the United States, which in the 1890s was about to transform its economic grip into a political one. Marti tried also to create a pan-American consciousness.

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Since the literatures of the countries of the Hispanic Antilles are, notwithstanding the historical and social conditions affecting them (which encouraged, especially during the nineteenth century, the expression of the national identity), subjected to the influence of currents originating elsewhere, poetry as well as narrative prose must evolve, in the end, according to patterns independent from although not necessarily exclusive of - patriotic preoccupations. Modernismo transformed poetry into a true profession requiring not only specialized knowledge but a dedication that stressed the poet's exclusive involvement with aesthetic concerns. This approach differed radically from that of romanticism, a movement open by definition to all kinds of affective expression, including, of course, the patriotic. (This was in fact an integral part of romanticism's original wish to give expression to the national soul.) Thus, after the triumph of modernismo, which takes place in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico at different moments and in accord with their different historical development, poetry becomes primarily intimist and tends to exclude patriotic preoccupations in spite of the persistence of colonial rule and political turmoil in all three countries. Naturally, the exclusion of nationalist and social concerns from poetry is not a universal phenomenon that affects equally and to the same extent the work of all the poets of the Hispanic Antilles, but it can be said that after the changes in artistic perspective brought about by modernismo took root, political and social poetry occur but exceptionally among the best poets. By the best poets we mean here those whose control of the tools through which their inspiration finds expression has the potential for making them acceptable to the norms established by the hegemonic cultural centers, which remain unaffected by patriotic preoccupations. Those norms will accept the presence of sociopolitical concerns in poetry, which they define primarily as a subjective expression, only as partial, indirect, occasional manifestations. The same applies, within its own parameters, to narrative. Since the poet and the fiction writer of the Caribbean (and of the Third World in general) does not produce his work independently from the dominant cultural norm, he will accept, more or less deliberately, that norm, together with everything that it implies, as he struggles to conquer his own space within world literature. The situation that I have just described is the direct consequence of the modernization of a country's literature. Literary modernization, which is grossly synonymous with the adoption of the international modernist movement, does not follow immediately in Spanish America upon the victory of modernismo, since other currents such as regionalism and indigenismo had to run their full course before modernism could make its presence felt in full. It is a fact, however, that modernismo paved the way for the eventual adoption of international modernism. The modernization period falls within the third stage of Alejandro Losada's alternative model for the study of Latin-American literature, the stage characterized by the overwhelming presence of the modern metropolis into which the colonial enclaves and the capitals of the semi-independent countries had evolved. Those cities, the capitals or the largest cities of countries that were dependent economically, and to a variable degree dependent politically as well, upon the U.S. capitalist system, had developed a cultural infrastructure capable of supporting the existence of professionals who were able to devote themselves nearly full-time to their writing (a full-time career as a writer would become possible only after the boom of Latin-American literature), capable as well of supporting a relatively scientific critical practice. This stage in fact spans Franco's second and third periods, since it comprises both the creation of literatures mirrored after European models and the challenges characteristic of the contemporary period.

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It is obvious that, within the Hispanic Antilles, it was in Cuba - and more specifically in its capital, Havana, which, like most Spanish-American capitals, dominated the life of the nation in all its aspects - that the kind of cultural process Losada describes as the third stage of his model first manifested itself. The continuation of the relatively prosperous conditions achieved under the semiindependent republican regime facilitated Cuba's rapid advance on the road to a modernization that is basically apolitical. The Revista de Avance (1927-30) had already represented that trend. In the 1950s Orígenes (1944-56) and Ciclón (1955-57) would be the flagships of an ahistorical modernism and even of an incipient postmodernism. The attitude - elitist regarding the social environment, and experimental as far as literature is concerned - that characterized the writers grouped around these reviews is similar to that of the River Plate intellectual who, in Losada's description, escapes a reality dominated by masses foreign to his cultural concerns by engaging in cerebral games or in the exploration of the unconscious. The attitude of Cuban intellectuals who in the 1950s devoted themselves to fantasy, to formal experimentation, to speculations of a philosophical nature, or to pursuing transcendence resembled closely that of their Argentinean colleagues, in spite of the fact that the Cuban milieu was more underdeveloped than theirs. The situation was different in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, where the continuation of colonial status in the former, and the active presence of the United States in the case of the latter, favored a concern in Puerto Rican literary works with the national identity (whereas national identity was something that Cubans took for granted by then) and with the representation of social reality in the case of both countries. The harsh economic conditions prevailing in the Dominican Republic and in Puerto Rico meanwhile rendered very difficult the development of the institutional network and the critical mass needed for the development of strong national literatures that would make full use of the two countries' cultural inheritance. Consequently, Dominican and Puerto Rican literatures embrace international modernism later than Cuban literature did, and are also slower in renouncing the expression of preoccupations born of an embattled concept of nationhood. On one occasion, around 1930, the literatures of the three countries coincide in the creation of a voice that expresses the link between their identities. This is the movement variously known as poesia negra, negrista, or afroantillana, which has been rightly defined as the Caribbean equivalent of the Andean and Mexican indigenismo, being also a literary movement of populist inspiration (Portuondo [I960]). In Cuba during the nineteenth century the ciboneyismo movement had aimed at recreating poetically the indigenous inhabitant. The Puerto Rican version of costumbrismo was bent on elaborating the image of an idealized peasant conceived as the purest expression of the national soul. These literary strategies for creating a national identity are similar (as was also the idealization of the slave) to the indianis ta movement of the romantic literature of nations with large Indian populations. The peasant functions as a substitute for the absent indígena that indianismo idealized in order to avenge its oppression. With the advent of realism the peasant could no longer be idealized, but rather his exploitation was exposed. In poesia negra the black Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican assumes a role similar to the one that the Indian and the peasant had as the only member of the country's population capable of expressing an authenticity understood to come from his more or less direct contact with nature. The fact that the black had been enslaved, like the Indian, and that, like the peasant, he continued to be marginalized and oppressed, made him the natural subject of a socially committed poetry.

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Not all "black poetry" is of that kind, and in fact a good part of it echoes indianismo in its romanticizing of its subject - to make amends for the exploitation of the blacks - or else it tends toward exoticism. One characteristic, however, is common to all of poesia negra's various tendencies: because the negrista is basically a mimetic type of poetry, it avoids the intimism and the exalted subjectivism that dominated Hispanic Antillean poetry at the time. By focusing on a local population and its customs, poesia negra rejected cosmopolitanism; it also rejected modernism's ahistoricity when it became socially committed. Of the poets who cultivated the black theme more consistently (the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos, the Dominican Manuel del Cabrai, and the Cubans Emilio Ballagas and Nicolás Guillén), it is in Palés that heightened social consciousness reaches a definitely Antillean dimension. Palés moves from evoking the African spirit and environment that survives in the Caribbean to singing the unity that such a past creates among all the Caribbean islands, and even suggests here and there the revolutionary awakening of the black man. In his critical writings Palés defines Caribbeanness as the expression of the peculiar spirit and way of being that has evolved in the archipelago. It must be noted that of all the practitioners of poesia negra, Guillén and Palés are the ones who manage to evoke more consistently the characteristic rhythm - the son - of Afroantillean culture. Guillen's poetry in particular is primarily musical, and by being so it accomplishes the fullest possible identification with a culture that tends to favor music as an expression of its inner being (Phaf). From that initial identification with the son, a peculiarly Afrocuban rhythm, Guillén, who had also cultivated the superficial portrait of the pleasure-seeking black, moves to a political level which is ultimately independent of the black man and of Afroantillean culture {West Indies Ltd., 1934). Of the three principal practitioners of poesia negra (Ballagas, Guillén, and Palés), Guillén is also the only one descended from African slaves. Among the adherents of poesia negra, Palés comes closest to the aspirations of the francophone Antillean negritude movement, which sought access to the black soul via a leap into the irrational as a way to achieve a sense of nationhood (Arnold [1981]). Although some poems by Ballagas and Guillén include very moving and convincing appropriations of the spirit of Afroantillean culture, Palés attempts more consistently to recover the Africanness of black people in the Hispanic Antilles. He accomplishes this, moreover, in a Spanish as close to the metropolitan norm as is Césaire's French. The African-sounding words and sounds that give the poems of Tuntún de pasa y griferia their rhythm do not interfere with the poet's voice, for instance, a feature one can find in Césaire as well. Almost all of the Caribbean islands in which the population of African origin is the dominant one were - as Puerto Rico still is - colonies at the time Palés was writing his "black" poems. This historical fact may be presumed to have helped Palés to express, through his consciousness of a shared political status, the cultural affinity of the other islands with the Hispanic Caribbean. If we turn this proposition around, we see that poesia negra, like negritude, is the expression of ethnic dependence within a more general state of colonial dependence and that it is inconceivable outside that dual dependence. In the final account, however, the Caribbean's Africanness can only play a positive role in the Hispanic Antilles insofar as it helps to define the general culture of the area as mestiza. Any other definition of that blackness would be both divisive and inaccurate as far as the region's cultural and political liberation are concerned. Insofar as the black theme or subject matter continues to appear in the poetry and in the general literature of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, as well

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as in the areas of the Caribbean rimland with large populations of African origin, it does so as an affirmation of mestizaje. To conclude this review with a final parallel between the Hispanic and the francophone Antilles, we see that the poetry, novels, theater, and essays of Edouard Glissant of Martinique - who propounds a theory of Caribbeanness or antillanité - agrees with the Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar concerning the historical necessity of mestizaje. Virgilio Piñera, Lezama Lima, Carpentier, Cabrera Infante, Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban writers who have contributed more effectively, from inside the island or from abroad, to Latin American literature's boom, are the product of the rapid modernization of Cuban literature during the 1950s. Cuban fiction's subsequent course after the revolution suggests a backward movement in relation to that former modernization, to judge by the work of authors who, although often employing the techniques of the post-Joycean novel, place themselves within the confines of social realism to write thesis novels and short stories that fail to satisfy the sophisticated reader used to the plurality of meanings, the in-depth exploration of consciousness, and the joyful experimentation with language and narrative structure characteristic of modernism. It is clear that the road to follow for Cuban narrative has to be a different one, perhaps that of a free or open realism (this is how Angel Rama described the work of Norberto Fuentes) instead of a simplifying one. Cuban literature thus finds itself at a crossroads. While the country has successfully severed its former dependency upon the United States, its literature has not succeeded in challenging, from the perspective of the new social order, and in ways capable of renovating it, the modernity that it had already achieved prior to the revolution. Instead, it continues to repeat either modernism's formulas, or those of a social commitment whose goals the society seems to have already achieved. It is, at the same time, extremely difficult to judge the literature produced in a socialist country, since we tend to apply to it criteria tied to the cultural circumstances typical of the hegemonicai capitalist countries. It might be that since poetry was the first genre to modernize itself in Latin-American literature (following the chronicles that poets like Marti and Gutiérrez Najera wrote), it is also the one in which the dilemma between the self-referentiality demanded by modernism, and engagement can best be overcome: witness the example of Corretjer, Guillén, Fernández Retamar. In Puerto Rican literature, political preoccupation reached a crisis in the late 1960s, as is evidenced by René Marqués's precipitous fall from the influential position he had enjoyed until then. This writer's pro-independence stand, expressed in a monotonous voice with an existentialist tone, and his thoroughly pessimistic attitude regarding Puerto Rico, were no longer adequate to express the country's new reality. They were as ineffectual in this respect as was the political attitude of the nationalists (which they mirrored) who, while mourning the sudden collapse of the autonomist and annexionist projects of the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie due to the conversion of Puerto Rico into a U.S. colony after 1898, engaged in an idealization of Spanish domination in order to oppose it to the present American domination. By so doing, they failed to face the present with a view toward effectively influencing the future. Largely thanks to the example of José Luis Gonzalez, whose political commitment expresses itself through an open type of realism, the Puerto Rican novel of the 1970s has joined the mainstream of the modern Latin-American novel without abandoning its social and political concerns, which it has learned instead to communicate via an ironic and plural approach. In other words, at a certain stage in its development, Puerto Rican literature, being ready to absorb the lessons of modernity, rejected as outmoded the pre-modern discourse through which it had expressed its political preoccu-

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pations; it also applied itself to relating the intellectual's unavoidable concern with Puerto Rico's colonial situation to the new circumstances operating in the country. Puerto Rican literature learned how to recode that preoccupation into a discourse that makes full use of popular culture. Such an appropriation includes as one of its main components the linguistic one; in fact, the recovering by literature of the popular idiom is a constant of contemporary Puerto Rican literature. (Recent Cuban literature, on the other hand, does not feature the same interest in appropriating popular language and culture, perhaps because the revolutionary government prefers to see them fit into a centrally directed culture.) The historical and political vocation of contemporary Puerto Rican narrative suggests, inasmuch as that vocation constitutes the inner face of its modernization, that Puerto Rican literature may be closer now than Cuban literature was in 1960 to the stage that Mariâtegui called "national" (i.e., the stage in which a nation's personality finally achieves an adequate and well-tuned literary expression). Mariâtegui's national stage needs the preceding one, the "cosmopolitan" (which corresponds to Franco's second stage), during which, and after a period of almost total subordination to the metropolitan literature, the new country's literature indiscriminately absorbs all the elements at hand from foreign cultures. It is at that point that the future national literature modernizes itself. This process begins for the literatures of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico with modernismo, has its culmination in Cuba during the second half of the 1950s, continuing its existence in the work of some writers outside the island; blooms in Puerto Rico in the 1970s and, as the essay by William Siemens shows, seems to be taking place in Dominican fiction at present. The cosmopolitan or modernization period does not imply the rejection of political and social concerns, which depend on historical circumstances that affect the artist as much as the rest of his compatriots. This period does demand, however, that non-aesthetic preoccupations not take priority in the production of literature over the writer's free experimentation with available models coming from the former or present metropolis, from other European and American literatures, and from the more "advanced" writers of his same literature. Without the mediation of a full modernization (that is to say, until the literature of a particular country reaches the level at which the hegemonic literatures are operating), any artistic expression of what is perceived as the national identity seems unlikely to outlive the artistic current that embodied or fostered its manifestation. It is only at that point that expressions of the national identity or consciousness acquire their full force and are universally recognized as such. (Pedro Pâramo [1953], by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, is paradigmatic of this kind of achievement.) It is also at that point that a literature can with any kind of lasting effect challenge the legitimacy of the hegemonic models. The modernization of the literatures of the Hispanic Antilles includes the contact of some eventually influential writers of those literatures with their European counterparts among the progressive intelligentsia. That contact helped and continues to help the modernization process as it facilitates the insertion of a writer and by extension of the literature that he represents into a universal context. The thrust toward modernization and the process that is set in motion by it are, however, mainly the result of the efforts of the local writers carried out in their local spaces through their obviously limited access to world literature. Although it may be achieved in interaction with the politicization of the writer under the impact of certain historical conditions (as I have suggested happened in Puerto Rican literature), modern-

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ization is not the result of nor is it tied to political awareness, even in the case of literatures produced in colonial or semi-colonial societies. Where a solidly grounded political consciousness may be more effective, as Losada has suggested, is in directing the writer's attention to the foundations of his own national culture, and more specifically to popular culture, which remains still largely ignored in Spanish America, in spite of what the various regionalist movements did to publicize it. The artistic appropriations of the traditional components of a culture advance the decolonization process at every level. When well tuned to contemporary artistic movements and currents, that type of appropriation contributes to the modernization process by opening new avenues to the literary discourse. I am thinking in particular of the use of the oral voice, which has been very effective in recent Puerto Rican and Dominican literature. (The oral discourse is the basis upon which testimonios rest; they are a type of narrative in which postrevolutionary Cuban literature is very rich. The impact of testimonial "fiction" in contemporary literature is only beginning to be assessed.) It seems that orality helps to open the hidden sources of a culture and to make them come alive. This takes places through the process that Rama rebaptized transculturación. In it the subdued culture (for the Hispanic Antilles this means the African heritage but also the popular criollo culture) revives and even modernizes itself by appropriating and transforming the dominant literate culture. The appropriation by literature of that characteristically oral discourse through which the popular culture expresses itself contributes as well to the weakening of the convention that has so far tended to privilege the position of literature among all other social practices of similar purpose. It facilitates, instead, the application of the same aesthetic norms to the analysis of all literary manifestations independently of their social origin (Eagleton [1983]). It is as politically aware literatures that have gone through the sieve of modernization, that the literatures of the Hispanic Antilles can become fully national literatures. Only as such can they successfully challenge the pressures of contemporary internationalism.

Bibliography Arnold, A. James. 1981. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. (A thorough, balanced, and up-to-date study of negritude.) Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. (A lucid and insightful review of contemporary critical practice.) Franco, Jean. 1975. Dependency Theory and Literary History: The Case of Latin America. The Minnesota Review. 55(Fall):65-80. (An original and far-reaching overview of the evolution of Latin American literature.) Gil Díaz, Oscar. 1977. La naturaleza histórica de la sociedad dominicana. 2 vols. Santo Domingo: Publicaciones América. (A detailed study of the evolution of the country's society from a political perspective.) Gimbernard, Jacinto. [n.d.: 1971?] Historia de Santo Domingo, n.p. 3d ed. (A good survey of its subject.) González, José Luis. 1981. El pais de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos. Río Piedras (Puerto Rico): Huracân. (A lucid and controversial analysis of Puerto Rican society.) Guerra, Ramiro et al. 1958. A History of the Cuban Nation. Havana: Editorial Historia de la Nación Cubana. Vols. I-IV. (A thorough and well-researched work.) Gombrecht, Hans Ulrich. 1982. For a History of Spanish Literature 'Against the Grain." New Literary History. 12.2:277-302. (Contains important propositions on the writing of literary histories.) Historia de Cuba 1971. Havana: Dirección Politica de las F.A.R. [Revolutionary Armed Forces]. 3d ed. (A revisionist history that makes some important points.)

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Losada, Alejandro. 1983. El desarrollo literario del Caribe en el contexto de América Latina; La internacionalización de la literatura del Caribe en las metrópolis complejas. La literatura latinoamericana en el Caribe. Ed. by A. Losada. Berlin: Lateinamerika-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin. —. 1985. La historia social de la literatura latinoamericana. Actas. Hacia una historia social de la literatura latinoamericana. Ed. by Thomas Bremer and Alejandro Losada. Giessen: AELSAL (Asociación de Estudios de Literaturas y Sociedades de América Latina). 59-79. —. 1985. La contribución de Angel Rama a la historia social de la literatura latinoamericana. Casa de las Américas. 25.150:44-57. (These are all thought-provoking overviews of the interaction between literary production and its social basis.) Mariâtegui, José Carlos. 1928. (1976). El proceso de la literatura. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Barcelona: Critica. (A classic for the interpretation of Latin-American culture.) Moya Pons, Frank. 1980. Manual de historia de Santo Domingo. Santiago, Repüblica Dominicana: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. —. 1977. Historia colonial de Santo Domingo. Santiago, Repüblica Dominicana: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. Phaf, Ineke. 1983-85. A la búsqueda de una metrópoli nacional del Caribe. Anâlisis de la obra de Nicolas Guillén, Manuel del Cabrai y Luis Paiés Matos. Identitätskrise versus Nationalbewusstsein in Kuba, der Dominikanischen Republik und Puerto Rico. Vol. 2. Berlin: Lateinamerika-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin. —. 1984-85. Identidad afrocaribena versus conciencia nacional en la poesía del Caribe espanol de 1918 a 1940. Homines. 8(June/Jan.):295-302. (Well-researched studies of poesia negra that pay due attention to its Caribbean context.) Picó, Fernando. 1986. Historia general de Puerto Rico. Río Piedras (Puerto Rico): Huracán. (A concise, well documented and balanced survey.) Portuondo, José Antonio. 1960. Bosquejo histórico de las letras cubanas. Havana: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Departamento de asuntos Culturales. (A well-documented and intelligent survey of Cuban literature.) Portell Vila, Herminio. 1969. Historia de Cuba en sus relaciones con los Estados Unidos y Espana. Vol. 3. Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Co. (The best reference work on the subject.) Rama, Angel. 1980. Littérature et révolution. Littérature latino-américaine d'aujourd'hui. Colloque de Cerisy. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions. —. 1982-a. La novela latinoamericana, 1920-1980. Bogota: Procultura/Colcultura. —. 1982-b. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Mexico: Siglo XXI. (Very important work by the most influential Latin-American critic of the last thirty years.) Rivero, Eliana. 1983. Patria y nacionalidad en la poesia antillana del siglo XIX. Casa de las Américas. 24.141: 124-32. (An important contribution to the study of the literary elaboration of a national identity in the Hispanic Caribbean.) Rodriguez-Luis, Julio. 1988. Literary Production in the Hispanic Caribbean. Callaloo. 11.1:132-46. Sommer, Doris. 1986. One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. (Essential for understanding the process of Dominican literature.) Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper. (Contains a wealth of information and invaluable insights on Cuban history before 1959.)

FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE Subeditor: J. Michael Dash

Introduction

J. MICHAEL DASH

University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica

All history is essentially contemporary history, according to revisionist theory. This is true to the extent that our view of the past is inevitably conditioned by the present, by the preoccupations, intellectual fashions and crises of our own times. Literary history is no different. It has never been an innocent activity nor an objectively scientific process. It is invariably as revealing of the concerns of the here and now as it is of those of the distant past. If this proposition is valid in general terms, it is even more true of literary history in the francophone Caribbean. Part of the problem stems from the fact that we are dealing with less than two centuries of writing that could properly be called Caribbean. It is, consequently, difficult to have a clear sense of what are great moments of this literature, what are its periods of creative expression, and what kind of public exists for it. These questions are even further complicated by the fact that we are not dealing with a homogeneous corpus of literary works. The term "francophone Caribbean" itself needs explanation. It refers to France's sphere of influence in the Caribbean but the political status of these former French colonies is extremely diverse. On one hand, the term includes Haiti, formerly the French colony of St. Domingue, which became independent in 1804 after a protracted war with France and shares the island of Hispaniola with the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. It also refers to France's Overseas Departments in the Caribbean. There are the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as the lesser dependencies of Saint Barthélemy and half of the tiny island of St. Martin. The third Overseas Department is French Guiana, which is located on the Atlantic coast of the South American mainland. These communities are as different from the rest of the linguistically diverse Caribbean as they are from each other. Their specific character is shaped by the space they physically occupy, the nature and history of their settlement, and their relationship to the outside world. Even the one common denominator that normally unifies the Caribbean and sets it apart from the American continents does not apply to the francophone Caribbean. This is the question of the extermination of the autochthonous populations by the Spaniards after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World in the fifteenth century. Certainly the former were eliminated from Hispaniola, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. However, faint traces of pre-Columbian cultures have survived in Haiti and have been proposed by some as part of that country's national heritage. French Guiana, because of the nature of its jungle terrain and its haphazard development, still has a number of surviving Amerindian communities. The sense of a lack of uniformity increases when we examine the modern development of these societies. From its beginnings, Haiti has retained a fierce sense of independence and national pride

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as a consequence of violent and successful slave revolts. This early nationalism created from the outset a desire to assert the literary achievements of the new society and to do so in a fresh and original way. These ambitions persisted despite the growing instability in Haiti and the divisions between black and mulatto. The U.S. occupation of Haiti during and after the first world war only reinforced the need to assert Haitian nationalism. However, it now took the form of black nationalism or noirisme. Even after the occupation, Haiti drifted from one political crisis to another, yet this in no way hindered the intense literary activity of the 1930s and 1940s. Literary modernism, Marxism, and surrealism all helped focus the self-confidence of Haitian writing. Indeed, Haiti was by the 1940s one of the most sophisticated literary cultures in the Caribbean. Duvalierism did much to change all that. The oppressive conditions under Papa Doc in the 1960s created a literary diaspora of fleeing intellectuals. Today, Haiti is a unique case in the Caribbean in that there is a firmly entrenched literature written in exile in Paris, West Africa, New York, and Montreal as well as one created within the country. This level of literary production is all the more startling in the face of the chronic political instability and the illiteracy of the majority of the population. Haiti may also be unique in the Caribbean because it has, since the 1987 constitution, two official languages, French and Creole. In contrast to the other francophone territories in the Caribbean, where Creole is becoming increasingly endangered, it has been estimated that 90 percent of the Haitian population are monolingual Creole speakers. The French Departments on the other hand have a more or less unbroken relationship with the metropolis that goes back to the seventeenth century. Slavery came to an end in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century (August 1793), but emancipation did not come to the French colonies until 1848. Nineteenth-century writing has been generally dismissed as unimportant but it must be recognized that these islands were essentially valued for their ability to produce sugar and had few libraries and printeries. For a very long time writing about the French colonies was restricted to travellers' or missionaries' accounts. Writing by absentee landowners could hardly constitute the beginning of a literary tradition. The defence of creole interests in the nineteenth century and criticism of France after the French revolution can be considered, somewhat ironically, as literary origins. The case is well argued by Jacques Corzani in his essay on writing before the negritude movement. As he also points out, literary production would long be unduly dominated by a pervasive and uniform regionalism that delayed the emergence of original and authentic voices. Prolonged dependency and inertia are by no means propitious signs for the emergence of literary expression. It is not surprising, therefore, that even some of the major writers from Martinique, for example, doubt the existence of literary traditions. Aimé Césaire has never claimed local literary ancestors and sees himself rather in terms of the traditions of European modernism, as A. James Arnold points out in his essay on "The Essay and / in History." Edouard Glissant has often argued that there may be individual Martinican writers but there is no Martinican literature and no literary audience. Dependency would only grow in the twentieth century with departmentalization in 1946. Now that these islands are fully integrated into the French educational and cultural system, there is little that can be done to prevent the overwhelming penetration of metropolitan culture into these communities. As Auguste Viatte states, these islands have been French since 1635, even before Lille and Besançon and therefore what results is a literary symbiosis (Viatte [1954], 483). This is, mercifully, not the whole truth. The threat of cultural extinction has produced a fierce response against assimilation by writers from these Departments ever since the first stirrings of negritude in the early 1930s.

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If France's relationship with the densely populated Departments of the Eastern Caribbean is destructively attentive, by contrast French Guiana seems to suffer from benign indifference. Less developed than its island counterparts, French Guiana began as a prison colony - indeed, many foreigners have never dissociated Devil's Island from the colony at large - and has never been settled in a systematic or coordinated way. Largely ignored by literary historians, this mainland Department contains a heterogeneous population of immigrants from the other Guyanas and the Caribbean, Amerindian communities, bush Negroes, metropolitan technicians who launch rockets from Kourou, resettled Indochinese refugees, and a coastal community which, if we are to believe the poet Léon Damas, clings desperately to its French credentials. As Bridget Jones points out in her essay on French Guiana, this outpost of French colonialism has scarcely produced a literature of its own. Talented artists from this society have a tendency to work and create elsewhere. No one epitomizes this better than Léon Damas, whose life was marked by unceasing vagabondage, who sought his identity in the black diaspora and died in Washington D.C. Unstable, creolized Haiti, vulnerable assimilé island Departments and neglected, mysterious Guiana: all present difficult conditions for the evolution of a literary discouse. Paradoxically, it is their origins as postplantation societies - shaped to a greater or lesser extent by French notions of literary and intellectual achievement - that made possible the emergence of a literature. French colonization in the Caribbean may have been characterized by plantation slavery and justified by a postulated black inferiority. Yet, within the brutal hierarchy of the plantation system, the process of cultural assimilation inexorably created an elite that was differentiated from the masses by its cultural achievement. Caribbean literature is for better or for worse the creation of this elite. It is this much vilified class, variously described as degenerate, philistine or refined, and urbane, that forms a context within which literary production occurs. Writers react as much against the excesses and failings of this group as they are unconsciously shaped by its highminded notions of culture. Salons, manifestoes, movements and, maîtres à penser proliferate in the francophone Caribbean in contrast to the rest of the region. Ironically, the intensity and sophistication of literary activity in France's former colonies come from a class that was groomed to serve France's colonial mission in Africa. It has used its articulateness to support the most reactionary regimes and policies. Ulrich Fleischmann correctly focuses on this group in order to analyze the emergence of a literary discourse. As privileged interlocutors for their community, they established their authority through the book and, in the case of Haiti, they used their literary achievements to defend themselves against charges of incompetence and barbarism. Dodouisme (the saccharine vision of the langorous, sensual Antilles), nationalism, noirisme, and so on are all creations of this elite. As Fleischmann concludes, these societies are marked by a cleavage between "national folk cultures and an elite culture of universal orientation." However, it would be misleading to characterize the educated classes in Haiti and the French Departments as hopelessly alienated. This simplifying stereotype has persisted for far too long. Even today the image of the Haitian poet Edmond Laforest, who committed suicide by drowning himself with a Larousse dictionary tied to his neck, is retailed as an illustration of his "overwhelming indenture" to the French language (Gates [1986], 13). The fact that this dramatic act of self-immolation took place in 1915 and as a form of protest against the presence of American marines on Haitian soil seems to be overlooked by those insistent on social caricature. One must bear in mind the fact that cultural continuum is a far more plausible model for social organization than rigid plurality. Inevitably, the literate minority was shaped as much by the outside world as they were

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influenced by internal society. Neither did this class remain static; it has undergone transformation from the nineteenth century to the present. The aloof francophile mulatto elite of early Haitian history, which saw Haiti as an outpost of French culture in the New World, is not the same one that was to defend Haiti against United States imperialism in the 1920s. For instance, the choice of Departmentalization in the French colonies in 1946 was primarily a strategy to use the metropolis to break the stranglehold of white Creole (béké) control. It would be equally wrong to see the elites as a mere extension of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. The economic forces in the Caribbean are significantly different and the devotion to the book and idealization of the writer are certainly an area of significant difference. From the early nineteenth century, literary achievement, often without benefit of audience, publishing houses or libraries, becomes a form of self-defense and a way of countering charges of barbarism made by foreigners. The preoccupation with creating a literary culture as a mark of legitimacy or as a means of establishing credentials is special to the Caribbean elites. Consequently, their writing was almost certain to be more complex than blind imitation. A literary history of the region could conceivably be constructed around a literary tradition that attempts to write itself free of myths imposed from abroad. The process of mythification that created "cannibalistic Haiti," "the happy Antilles," "the green hell of French Guiana" prompted francophone Caribbean writers to give their version of the truth of these societies. Anticolonial rhetoric, the celebration of local flora and fauna, the strong autobiographical tendencies of prose fiction and the demonstration of the strength of creole culture (even if this meant translating La Fontaine into Creole rather than seeing the worthiness of local folktales) are all manifestations of the demystifying thrust of Caribbean writing. Literature in francophone Caribbean societies is serious business. Perhaps it is in recognition of this phenomenon that the Duvalier regime set out to eliminate writers and intellectuals from Haiti in the 1960s. His policy was a perverse compliment to the achievements of Haiti's writers. The present effort is by no means the first attempt to write a literary history of this heterogeneous corpus of works. Histories compiled in the past, however, have proven less than helpful because they were invariably reductionist in their objectives. As Jacques Corzani in his discussion of the Caribbean observes "it is with the greatest care that the researcher must approach the few works at his disposal. He will be aware thay many have been written with 'ideological spectacles'."1 Examples of ideologically blinkered literary histories of the region abound. One of the best-known and still frequently cited histories of French writing in the New World is Auguste Viatte's Histoire littéraire de l'Amérique française: des origines à 1950 (A Literary History of French America from the origins to 1950), published in 1954. Despite its thoroughness, Viatte's history is often little more than an inventory of writing outside the metropolis. In its own way, Lilyan Kesteloot's influential Les écrivains noirs de langue française, naissance d'une littérature (Black writers in French, the birth of a literature) published in 1961, is no less tendentious. Its very title reveals how much Kesteloot's hypothesis depended on the rhetoric of the 1932 manifesto Légitime Défense and the rejection of all writing before the 1930s as blindly imitative. Despite the fact that the literary traditions of Haiti are older and more visible than those of the French Departments, its literary histories are no more reliable. Since the Haitian elite is notoriously divided by color and ideology, literary histories can often be partisan and triumphalist readings of 1 C'est avec la plus grande prudence que le chercheur en histoire littéraire devra aborder les rares travaux qu'il aura à sa disposition. Il ne perdra pas de vue que beaucoup de textes ont été écrits avec des "lunettes idéologiques" (Corzani [1985], 58).

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Haitian works that demonstrate the achievements of a specific sector of Haitian society. For instance, literary scholarship written during the heyday of the Indigenist movement (noirisme) in the 1930s reflects the ideological preoccupations of these times. This is equally true of similar works compiled by apologists for French culture in Haiti such as Dantès Bellegarde. A problem that further complicates the compilation of literary histories is created by the oppressiveness of contemporary politics. For instance, no literary history published under the Duvalier regime could fully or objectively assess the contribution of Marxist writers to modern Haitian literature. In particular, treatment of the work of Jacques Stephen Alexis, the novelist killed by Duvalier's police in 1961, is predictably evasive. This new literary history will attempt to redress past injustices and remedy past omissions. It is certainly freer to circumvent some of the difficulties faced by previous literary historians who had to contend with class ideologies, political pressures, and various critical inadequacies. Efforts have been made to reexamine and, in some cases, rehabilitate undeservedly ignored talents and unduly vilified literary movements. Surely nineteenth-century writing as a whole needs to be reassessed. The reputation of the late-nineteenth-century poets of La Ronde could benefit greatly from this reevaluation. In the French Departments, the vexed issue of the importance of St. John Perse to their literary history needs some objective and disinterested clarification. In general, the need exists to resist the temptation of seeing the francophone Caribbean as simply an extension of global francophonie or of the Neo-African diaspora. There is certainly an increasing call by writers from Haiti and the Overseas Departments to have their works interpreted within a Caribbean and New World context. Edouard Glissant is foremost among the latter; but the same idea is echoed by René Depestre in Paris and by Anthony Phelps in Montreal. Corzani in his essay on literary history in the Caribbean makes a plea for what he calls recentrage (recentering) (Corzani [1985], 60). This would mean evolving new perspectives and methodologies based on local and regional conditions. This call is not unique to Corzani but he certainly attempts to practice what he advocates. Edouard Glissant has proposed a complex but exciting notion of Caribbean poetics that involves the community, the individual talent, and the outside world. "Three phases are involved in the literary work. The extent to which it is a group impulse: community; the extent to which it is tied to individual will: intention; the extent to which it is the product of a human drama which is being played out here: inter-relating."2 Glissant proposes the text as a crossroads, a point of intersection between cosmopolitan forces and the structuring pressures of the community. Even though his model is not adhered to in a strict fashion, his insistence on the authorizing power of the community is the general perspective that shaped the present section, which deals with the evolution of literature as a social institution. Conditions of literary creation, publishing houses, the educational system, the reading public have an equal role to play along with the shaping forces of environment and landscape. Indeed, as far as the latter is concerned, more attention needs to be paid to the yearning for a spectacular wilderness among Caribbean writers and to the influence of forest, sea, hill, and plain on the literary sensibility. Essays on the specific mentality of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana attempt to do just this. The conception of the work as a point of intersection between native and metropolitan, creole and cosmopolitan cultures is also the basis of the attempt to assess the value of

2 Trois fois l'oeuvre concerne. En ce qu'elle est pulsion d'un groupe d'hommes: communauté; en ce qu'elle se noue au voeu d'un homme: intention; en ce qu'elle est ouvrage et drame d'humanité qui continue ici: relation (Glissant [1969], 24).

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popular models by Maximilien Laroche. Similarly, even though feminist perspectives are very tentatively sketched in some of the essays, it is certainly important not to overlook the question of gender in the creation of certain literary ideals. The négre fondamental of the negritude movement, the ideal of the maroon or runaway all tend to incarnate masculine, as opposed to feminine, values. In fact, the repressive potential of the mother figure as representative of the mère patrie is as true of Léon Damas as it is of Joseph Zobel. A more comprehensive and disinterested approach to literary history has also been facilitated by modern critical theory. In the diverting of attention away from the notion of the author as originating center toward what texts have in common, what conventions are shared, and what enabling conditions permit the emergence of a literary discourse, modern theory has given a new lease on life to literary history. Equally important to this process is the new democratic aesthetic that pervades modern criticism, giving equal attention to all forms of expression whatever their social origin and artistic manifestation. Literary history can only feed on current skepticism concerning the author as unique talent and about literature itself. The mythification of literary expression by an embattled Caribbean elite as a privileged cultural code also needs to be examined. The promotion of the book in this regard as the one valid form of cultural expression has led to the obscuring of the importance of other imaginative activities as sometimes less compromised forms of expression of the community's deepest concerns. Naturally, there is a clear limit as to how far a literary history can go in this direction. However, it would be either naîve or misleading to put together a literary history which did little more than celebrate literary achievement. In beginning with the analysis of literature as an institution we have the opportunity to steer clear of problems of periodization, literary ideologies, and aesthetic issues that have ensnared more traditional histories. These problems will concern us after we have had a chance to see the shaping forces that make literary expression possible. The text as a relay for ideas, the writer as a consumer of other texts, the problematic relationship to community, on the inside and outside, will preoccupy us in this section. Literature's synergistic relationship to the social and cultural whole forms the framework within which these essays were conceived. In seeing the text as a symbolic act we would be attempting an anthropology of the francophone Caribbean imagination. This would be vital to any full understanding of what constitutes a Caribbean sensibility. It is, however, beyond the scope of this part of our literary history.

Bibliography Corzani, Jacques. 1985. Problèmes méthodologiques d'une "histoire littéraire" des Caraibes. Komparatistische Hefte. 2:49-67. (A thoughtful reflection on the problems of writing a Caribbean literary history and a plea for centering such a history on the region itself.) Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1986. Race, Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Gates's introductory essay examines the importance of the book to the question of race.) Glissant, Edouard. 1969. L'intention poétique. Paris: Seuil. (An original meditation on the problems of the writer and tradition, community, landscape, and history.) Kesteloot, Lilyan. 1961. Les écrivains noirs de langue française, naissance d'une littérature. Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles. Viatte, Auguste. 1954. Histoire littéraire de l'Amérique française: des origines à 1950. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (A paternalistic survey of what is termed "our French literature" in francophone communities of the Americas.)

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

The Formation and Evolution of a Literary Discourse One, Two, or Three Literatures? ULRICH FLEISCHMANN Freie Universität Berlin

In recent years it has become customary to speak of two Caribbean literatures, particularly when considering islands with a French tradition, i.e., Haiti and the French Overseas Departments (DOM) of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana. This terminology reflects a change in political as well as epistemological orientation as it takes into account the existence of two cultures and cultural institutions characteristic of all Caribbean islands, if not of all postcolonial societies. For historical and ideological reasons this cleavage is more apparent in colonial societies with a French history, for France fostered a particularly great distance between national folk cultures and an elite culture of universal orientation. The latter aspect is already present in quite early concepts of France's mission of universal civilization, and reached a new peak in the cultural ideology of the French Revolution of 1789, which opposed enlightened French culture and the "superstitious" folk cultures linked to feudalism. Subsequently the French colonial empire interpreted its civilizing mission as representing the universal achievement of the human mind. This attitude resulted in a cultural policy characterized by two traits: first, French cultural domination is not seen as part of colonial policy, but as a generous gift (francophony is offered as an entry ticket into the great human collectivity of France, to paraphrase a comment made by Pierre Messmer in 1971); second, the inherent elitist connotations of this attitude resulted in a qualitative concept of acculturation instead of a quantitative one, as in British colonial policy. The gap between those few who by virtue of their education are marked by a French universal culture and the large number of those who depend on creole culture in their daily life was never filled by a continuum of intermediate forms characterizing daily culture, as was the case in the former British possessions, where different varieties of West Indian English resulted. Thus the particular French concept of culture increases and emphasizes a cultural division that is rather common, particularly in postcolonial societies, but also in others. At the level of language this division is described by the term diglossia, which we shall define as the coexistence of French and Creole. The current meaning of diglossia was developed partially on the basis of the Haitian linguistic situation. Athough the implications and concrete application of the term are still debated, it serves as a valuable tool in order to conceptualize the respective domains of the Creole and French languages, which represent different and conflicting patterns of culture but are, at the same time, symbiotic and complementary. In order to understand the coexistence of French and Creole we have to keep in mind some of the pecularities of usage.

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First, each member of the society participates, to a certain degree, in both sets of culture, which, if we adopt the Ferguson terminology (Ferguson [1959]), appear to be the "high" and the "low variation" of the same cultural system. Poor rural communities depending largely on a subsistence economy and isolated from the mainstream of modernization would, however, appear to be "more creole" than the relatively wealthy urban middle class. This graduation is also valid when we compare all francophone island societies: Haiti, where about eighty percent of the population live in isolated rural communities, would generally appear to be "more creole" than Martinique or Guadeloupe, where the heavy impact of French financial and technological resources has created a relatively large middle class. Second, creole culture differs from indigenous cultures insofar as it is of colonial origin and, thus, directly related to French culture itself. It has no independent precolonial history of its own. Cut off from the colonial culture - as happened within some maroon societies that evolved in continental areas providing a protected hinterland - it may develop autonomy, but the characteristic creole settings are islands that have very limited space. The creole way of life developed within the limits of the plantations and maintains a dialectical relationship to the dominant culture. This dependent status of creole culture does not have exclusively negative connotations. It was a necessary counterpart to a highly coercive system. The freedom of Creole still offers an escape valve today, especially as a possible means of violating rules in order to relieve the unbearable stress imposed by obeying the demands of French culture. Even from the perspective of progressive writers, Creole's lack of formality and elevation makes it an inadequate tool for the creation of literature beyond popular and oral genres. A significant argument to explain the inadequacy of Creole for literary purposes has been offered by Aimé Césaire quite frequently in interviews: Creole language, like creole society, seems to be characterized by the absence of history, a concept that he understands as the processes of cultivation and refinement that other languages have experienced in the course of centuries (Césaire [1979]). It should be noted that he uses the term history in a very traditional sense: as a succession of meaningful events or developments that are interrelated in such a way as to indicate a linear and consistent evolution. History is French; Creole has no separate history but is linked to French dialectally, as a form of resistance to French evolution. The traditionally conceived history of literature, which determines the relative position and value of canonized literary objects, necessarily belongs to the French line of thought. Though the new concept of two literatures stipulates - implicitly or explicitly - the history of literature in Creole, there is a general uneasiness about how such a nonevolutive history is to be conceived. History or even national history are concepts alien to creole cultures, which would not identify themselves in relation to single and unprecedented events. Whenever a possible history of literature written in Creole is evoked, it always seems linked in some way to literature in the French language: 1. Discourse in the Creole language appears as an object of French national discourse, for instance, when Creole appears within a French text for specific purposes related to its discourse, such as the literary tradition of local color or the reproduction of presumably authentic direct speech. 2. Creole discourse is seen as an implicit or a hidden part of French discourse because the writer - no matter what efforts he or she may make to present a text as French - belongs to the creole culture and cannot hide it.

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3. Discourse in the Creole language is seen as a possible or necessary continuation of French discourse on the level of a linguistic substitution. This relatively new and politically motivated attitude underlies the tedious discussion of whether Creole can be used in place of French, i.e., whether literature written in Creole can enter into an already established literary discourse. The apologetic nature of a literary discourse in Creole brings up quite a number of epistemological problems, which will be discussed more extensively in the appropriate section. The question of history, however, is not the only problem of literary discourse within a diglossic setting. Problems also occur when we consider the social aspect of the production and consumption of literature, which can differ greatly depending on whether the texts are produced in oral or in written form. Though it is relatively easy to identify the social context of orality within the respective societies, the same does not hold true for literacy and its social context, the intellectual middle class, whose orientation, as in most postcolonial societies, is more international than local. The creation of a discourse of national literature is a rather ambiguous development - not only in the French Antilles, where literature always tended to be integrated into the French mainstream, but also in Haiti, where the tradition of exile, which is stronger than ever, tends to produce an expatriate literature. [The subject of the novel of exile is treated in detail by J. Michael Dash in the Genre section, below. The analysis of the corresponding phenomenon in the Hispanic Caribbean is treated by Efrafn Barradas above. (A.J.A.)] It is not always easy to differentiate an international literary discourse from a national one, but the growing strength of the former, compounded by the scarcity of readers within the island societies themselves as well as the current boom in the market for Third World literature, makes it necessary to consider the possibility of a third strain generated by the taste and the expectations of the international readership. Thus, we shall discuss in what follows three relatively distinct levels of discourse, which, of course, are not equally present or dominant at all times and in all societies considered: (1) the discourse of a national literature, which is most clearly expressed in Haiti; (2) the dependent discourses on and of literature in Creole; (3) the internationalist discourse, which is an important frame of reference for French Antillean writing and for recent Haitian literature.

The Discourse of a National Literature The history of literature has been, since its beginnings, a history of national literature; the concept of literary history does not appear in a systematic way before the age of romanticism, when literature was first perceived to be a collective expression of the national genius. In this sense, not only the term national literature, but even the writing of this history itself may be problematic when we consider postcolonial societies that achieved statehood relatively late or even, as in the case of the French Antilles, not at all. Moreover, it is questionable whether some of the essential attributes of a national literature, such as a distinct language and literary tradition, are even present in that region. We have to ask, therefore, what national literature means in the Antillean context, especially in view of the fact that no descriptive histories appeared until the 1950s. Particularly within the Caribbean context we have to beware of confusing real national literature with the general discourse that generates this classification. The history of literature does not need to exist as such; its establishment is already part of an ideological framework implying the

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conception of history as a succession of singular events, which, through a process of selection and interpretation, are seen as part of the evolution of a social group: the nation. Though both terms, evolution and nation, refer to a historical reality, they have to be understood, above all, as parts of a "myth." This myth may, however, create its own "reality." Historically, the nation has not been the basis for interactions and institutions; but, as the example of France and other European nations shows, it evolved in this direction and formed certain institutions - such as a common language, a unified legislation, and a characteristic form of government - that are seen as elements of a successful nationhood. In order to understand the Caribbean situation, it is essential to grasp the difference between nationalism as a general political discourse and its realization within concrete social and economic structures. In the Caribbean, the nation-building process was influenced by very unfavorable conditions: social fragmentation, economic dependence, cultural heterogeneity, and what will interest us particularly, a weak middle class. National independence, economic and technological modernization, and intellectual Enlightenment were the ideals of colonial emancipation. The fact that these concepts proved to be inapplicable to the Caribbean and ineffective for the solution of its problems did not really diminish their importance, but they remained confined to the level of verbal expression, without influence on the actual context. The particular conditions of Caribbean writing are, therefore, determined by contradictions between an ideological framework at the level of discourse and the institutional context in which the writing takes place. Both are, with some modifications, linked to developments during the Enlightenment in Europe, where, from the eighteenth century onward, the production and consumption of literature was seen as part of a general scheme to educate and cultivate entire nations. Under this scheme, writers and the public are bound together by their intent to propagate reason, good taste, sensitivity, and appropriate bourgeois values. This social bond is then cemented by a number of intermediate institutions such as publishing houses, specialized reviews, bookshops, theaters, critics, and literary circles that constitute the rather amorphous compound sometimes called the literary society. Quite a number of more or less questionable terms have been used to encompass this complex social body: art as institution, literary public, or, as above, literary society. This social compound, however, does not just serve its idealistic goal of establishing national middle-class values; it also becomes the main agent in the commercialization of literature. The necessity of selling their writings forces authors to make concessions to the public taste; thus, the idealistic purpose of literature becomes diluted. On the other hand, the literary society, by following the capitalist principle of continuous expansion, is prevented from enclosing itself within the ivory tower of a completely elite institution. Barthes's concept of the double character of literature, which he sees as resisting history even as it signifies history, cannot be discussed here in detail; it offers, however, some keys to understanding the particular problems of literature within the Caribbean. Obviously, the literary society did not develop along the same lines in the Caribbean as in Europe. The very nature of colonialism, which in Europe increased the wealth, power, and expansion of the middle class, prevented its emergence in the colonies. Plantation colonies in particular, with their clear-cut division of labor and privileges, suffered from a notorious lack of money, thwarting the development of handicrafts, trade, and services at a local level. Because the planta-

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tions were nearly self-contained units of production and consumption, there was no notable development of urban life. The planters themselves, afraid of new ideas from Enlightenment Europe, were traditionally hostile to any kind of education. In short, the colonies did not offer any basis for the institutionalization of a local literary society. The few béké (local white) writers who were still able to gain some degree of recognition were either disappointed members of the planter caste or marginal members of the colonial society who had discovered in Chateaubriand's very popular René a convenient role for themselves: writing texts set in an exotic landscape about happy Negroes, sad Indians, or vigorous Creoles allowed them to maintain their hostile attitude toward the modernizing French society and still produce profitable merchandise for a French readership with a taste for what it considered exotic. Does the sale on the French market of a fictionalized Martinique - seemingly authenticated by the author's origin - constitute the beginning of a national (or, in this case, regional) Antillean literature? It is quite instructive to look at the contradictions between different written histories of (French) Caribbean literature. Such historians as Viatte and Corzani include all writers, whatever their origin, provided they spent some time on the islands and wrote about them. But Viatte remains generally doubtful about his own classifications: "Can we speak of 'Antillean writers,' if we do not all call Flaubert a 'Norman novelist' or Lamartine a 'Burgundian poet'?" 1 The same author has no doubts, however, when defining the parameters of Haitian literature. It can be considered a truly national literature starting in 1804, the Declaration of Independence being the first piece of this national literature. In other words, writers only had to have Haitian citizenship; the subject on which they wrote was not of primary importance. This contrast leads us to the question: What does national independence mean in relation to the evolution of literature? Or, to put the question more specifically: Is there any basic difference between the discourse of the French Antilles and that of Haiti? As far as the development of literary institutions or of a national book market are concerned, Haiti certainly had no considerable head start over Martinique or Guadeloupe. The Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, which in 1860 still had fewer than 30,000 inhabitants, was certainly not a more cultivated or cosmopolitan town than the Martinican "capital" Saint-Pierre; even literacy was not more widespread in Haiti than in the French Antilles. Nevertheless, from independence onward, Haitian literary production attained a quantity and consistency that would be not be found in the dependent French territories until a hundred years later. What difference did Haiti's independence make in the development of its literary discourse? The double character of literature, as we have already mentioned, took on a particular shape with the reshaping of European societies during the Enlightenment: the book, which was supposed to propagate authentic bourgeois values, was simultaneously degraded to a piece of merchandise on the bourgeois market. In Haiti, however, this commercialization of literature never took place because the book market within the country never acquired commercial dimensions. Nevertheless, the creation of the Haitian state, which was closely associated with the French Revolution, was a product of the Enlightenment in Europe: Haiti intended to continue the revolution that, from a Haitian perspective, had been perverted by Napoleon. The new mulatto ruling class that had abolished the feudal planter caste saw itself legitimized by education and Enlightenment ideals. In their view, the creation of literature was one of the most important means of furthering modernity, a 1 Mais peut-on faire des "écrivains antillais," à moins de baptiser Flaubert "romancier normand" ou Lamartine "poète bourguignon"? (Viatte [1954], 490).

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civic spirit, and the evolution of good taste and sensitivity, and thereby of countering the prejudices against the new "black" country that were circulating in Europe and the rest of the world. All nineteenth-century Haitian literature is, in some way, related to that idealistic pattern, though its concrete literary expression varies according to the differing historical circumstances found within that century. We will briefly characterize three of the most prominent subdiscourses. 1. The first one is highly affirmative and tends to justify or defend the creation of the new state according to the tenets of Enlightenment philosophy and the subsequent development of positivism from Auguste Comte to Gobineau. Its original form of literary expression was highly rhetorical patriotic poetry, which has to be understood as a positive attempt to overcome the basic dissensions that threatened the new republic from the first days of its existence. The sociocultural background to this preoccupation was the opposition between the formerly enslaved blacks and the formerly slaveowning people of color. What at first seems to be a conflict based purely on race and class has a very important ideological aspect. That is, the conflict over whether Haiti's historical destiny was to be interpreted according to the concept of individual natural rights or according to the concept of human evolution: Does the basic right to personal freedom justify a revolution that (in European Enlightenment literature as well as in this discourse) is increasingly described as a succession of barbarous acts of savagery and of the destruction of bourgeois property? Or is freedom the result of human evolution toward Enlightenment ideals, an evolution that would presuppose civilization? Because of the nature of this discussion the essay was one of the favorite genres of early Haitian literature, as J. Michael Dash makes clear in his piece on the essay genre below. The first half of the nineteenth century was characterized by an extensive historiography implicitly aimed at evaluating the revolutionary events and, subsequently, the meaning of Haitian statehood. The early black perspective of an unconditional right to liberty, of which Juste Chanlatte's Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue (History of the catastrophe of Santo Domingo), 1824, offers a good example, is rapidly replaced by a voluminous mulatto historiography that, as in Beaubrun Ardouin's Etudes sur l'histoire d'Haïti (Studies on Haitian history), 1853, emphasizes the universal moral lessons to be learned from history. The condemnation of "black savagery" in favor of "mulatto chivalry" and "civilization" - typical of the time - led inevitably to an evolutionist view of history. The allegorical novel Stella by Eméric Bergeaud puts that view very crudely when it excuses the atrocities of the Santo Domingo war as the savagery of those who still represented a primitive, savage state in the evolution of humankind (Bergeaud [1859], 298). But he also provides a typical consolation: "Time rolls on for all races; civilization will not wait for any of them."2 Toward the end of the century the racist aspect of evolutionism definitely got the better of Haitian intellectuals and forced them to take part in the debate on race. Simultaneously with this historiographical argument, and directly linked to it, there appeared a large body of writing that has been described as "Haitian anthropology" (Hurbon [1984]) appeared. The overall thesis is that the mere existence of Haiti demonstrates the evolutionary capacity of the black race, an argument that forces the writers to reject any critical attitude toward the country at the same time as it compels them to highlight any evidence of civilization. This necessarily results in an indirect form of racial self-discrimination; the first sentence of the best known of these texts, Anténor Firmin's De l'égalité des races humaines (On the equality of the races of humanity), 1884, illustrates this paradox: "I am black. On the other hand, I have always considered the cult of science the only true one, the only 2

Les temps avancent pour toutes les races; la civilisation ne reculera pour aucune d'elles (Bergeaud [1859], xi).

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one worthy of constant attention."3 2. Almost simultaneously with this abundant apologetic literature, a rather consistent group of novels appeared (usually classified as the roman national [national novel]), which, at first glance, seems entirely opposed to positivist optimism. They depict, in a bitter, satirical, and pessimistic way, a country where each attempt to run public affairs in a rational and modern way is immediately absorbed by a general chaos of corruption, incompetence, and violence. In fact, the second half of the nineteenth century is characterized by continuous civil wars and their corollaries of arson and mass executions; in this, the roman national seems to be more realistic than the apologetic essay. Nevertheless, the ideological background is the same: the leading class of corrupt and incompetent politicians is denounced by a very small elite whose members proclaim the ideal of the Enlightenment intellectual. Nearly all of these novels end in disaster because the positive characters are removed from public office and even suffer persecution. Very often these tragic heroes are also presented as sensitive poets; their failure reflects what we have mentioned above: the dissociation of discourse from reality. 3. The most significant part of this Enlightenment-influenced discourse concerns the importance of books in general and of literature in particular. This is already apparent in the quotation from Firmin, above, and the point also appears in the anthropological essay, where the authors, in order to illustrate Haitian civilization, enumerate the names and deeds of poets. The extraordinary value attributed to literature explains why, throughout the nineteenth century, didactic literature was accompanied by a large amount of romantic poetry that later developed into movements corresponding to symbolism and Parnassianism. The high valuation of literature is indirectly related to the civilization project because the appreciation of literature is supposed to confirm the Haitians' capacity for noble sentiments and aesthetics as well as making the younger generation better educated or at least the few of them who have access to written material. The exaltation of books and reading is a commonplace in Haitian literary discourse; each of the major social and political crises of the country led to an increase in writing and publishing. Thus, indigenism was, first and foremost, yet another attempt to provide a literary answer to a national crisis - in this case the crisis that brought about the U.S. occupation of 1915. As the most prolific exponent of the movement, Jean PriceMars, put it in 1917, reading should be the means to create "better" Haitians and to "escape, sometimes, the harsh reality of our life."4 Together with other indigenist writers, he complains repeatedly of the scarcity of bookshops and public libraries in that country. According to Price-Mars, the absence of a national book market suffocates Haitian writers, who are never able to live off their writing (Price-Mars [1939], 120). This brings us back to our initial reflections on the relationship between the Enlightenmentderived valuation of literature and the commercial necessity for continuous expansion. Haiti had inherited the Enlightenment concept of the importance of literature, but, being a poor postcolonial society, it lacked the socioeconomic room to expand on this concept. In a case like this, the mechanisms of commercialization - publishing houses, book reviews, etc. - become pseudoinstitutions. The literary society is reduced to a small circle of writers and readers who know one another personally; the publication of a book acquires a mainly symbolic value as an entry ticket into that

3 Je suis noir. D'autre part, j'ai toujours considéré le culte de la science comme le seul vrai, le seul digne de la constante attention (Firmin [1884], xii). 4 Lisez pour fuir quelquefois les réalités mauvaises de notre vie (Témoignages . . . [1956], 85).

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circle, which - in pure positivist tradition - lays claim to all political functions. The roman national exemplifies the ritual complaint about the country creating its own disaster by not honoring its most capable persons, the writers. But, as Léon-François Hoffmann says: "We should not believe, however, that the life of the Haitian novelist is nothing but a long torture and that he is a defenseless victim of public malice. Belonging to a small and closed society has its good points. The publication of a book or a simple booklet of verses is an event; despite the absence of commercial publicity, it assures the celebrity of the author."5 Politics and literature are closely linked, as is shown by the careers of most Haitian writers; publishing books becomes a key factor in the attainment of the attractive but rare middle-class status that is the indirect reward for the author's work. This pattern allows for the development of a modern national literature on a premodern socioeconomic base; it induces the authors to provide personal money for their own publication, money that will almost certainly be lost because most of the copies have to be distributed free of charge within the small circle of writers and readers. By these unique mechanisms of reproduction a relatively small and stagnant bourgeois group was able to maintain a socially progressive discourse on national literature. Its obvious failure to change Haitian reality did not invalidate it but provoked a further dissociation of the elite group from its own country until the whole artificial structure collapsed under the impact of U.S. occupation. However precarious Haitian independence was, it constituted a powerful element of the national discourse that was absent in the French Antilles, where the formation of a national middle class started only after the abolition of slavery in 1848. The gradual rise of this class was entirely dependent on the tutelage of French authorities, who hoped the evolution of a mulatto elite would balance the power of the conservative planter caste. Further milestones were the establishment of a public school system in 1870 and the consolidation of the French African colonial empire, which enhanced the position of the older colonies. But colonial structures continued to dominate and, as late as 1941, still aroused André Breton's indignation when he visited the island. The number of preferred social positions available did not grow at the same rate as the mulatto middle class, which had to emigrate and was largely used in the colonial administration of Africa. This forced mobility was the main reason why the new Antillean elite saw its home not so much in the small islands of its childhood, whose limitations Aimé Césaire describes woefully, but in an international "French" elite and more generally among black readers throughout the world. Negritude, the first consistent literary ideology of the French Antilles, evolved into the wider African and Afro-American realms, and the anticolonialism proclaimed by the Antilleans was more closely related to the black race in general and Africa in particular than to their home islands. The latter served, as the cases of Aimé Césaire or Frantz Fanon show, for the diagnosis of the colonial evil, but not for its cure. Actually, none of the Antillean writers advocated total independence for the French Antilles. Their cautiousness was due to several factors. First, the size of the islands, their extreme dependence on France, and, above all, their conservative socioeconomic structure made independence neither conceivable nor desirable; second, the generation of Antillean writers, intellectuals, and politicians born on the eve of World War I were, by virtue of their education and their ideals, more 5 Il ne faudrait toutefois pas croire que la vie du romancier haïtien n'est qu'un long martyre, et qu'il est la victime sans défense de la malveillance publique. Appartenir à une petite société fermée a ses bons côtés. La parution en Haïti d'un livre ou d'une simple plaquette de vers est un événement; malgré l'absence de publicité commerciale, elle assure la célébrité de l'auteur (Hoffmann [1982], 56).

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closely related to France than to Martinique and Guadeloupe; their readers were the members of the Parisian counterelites whose values they shared. Home was a dreadful place for a poet, as Aimé Césaire explains bluntly: "No town. No art. No poetry. Not a germ. Not a sprout. Or only the hideous harp of imitations. In truth, a barren and mute country."6 Césaire's vision was not one of decolonization but of the social and political transformation of France. When a left-wing government came to power in 1936, this prospect seemed to many to be at hand. The brief but heady enthusiasm for a new socialist France after the second world war encouraged Aimé Césaire, then a fledgling politician, to advocate the departmentalization of Martinique within "la FRANCE-OUVRIÈRE" (WORKING-CLASS France) (quoted in Darsières [1974], 139). The project of progress, modernity, and Enlightenment was able to expand, not within the island society, but only within a larger context of French Enlightenment. Negritude is, therefore, deeply embedded in French countercultures: regionalism, surrealism, ethnography, and, above all, in an overall search for new values that would help to overcome the general uneasiness between the two world wars. The experience of the misuse of progress that led to new and more effective killing machines had produced new fears of civilization and heightened a longing for what was considered the primitive, a tendency that had been exploited more consistently by Senghor than by Césaire. Césaire did use exoticized images, such as that of the noble savage within an exuberant tropical nature, but for him these remained tools in a more general and deeply engaged quest for the progress of France and humanity. In this respect, the discourse of negritude is very different from Haitian indigenism, although they tend to be considered almost the same thing by quite a few authors. Certainly they are linked by their reference to parallel European discourses, particularly that of ethnography. Nevertheless, Haitian indigenism - which in fact appeared a few years before negritude - was, particularly in its formative years, an immediate reaction to a local event, the U.S. occupation; moreover, it was dialectically bound to the earlier development of Haitian literature as characterized above. Seen from today's perspective, Haitian literature before 1915 is generally judged to be alienated, and it is to Michael Dash's credit that he showed how such a view simplifies the real process (Dash [1981], 1-23). In addition, romantic literature in Haiti was more than a mere imitation of French models: it was also, as we have shown, the expression of real contradictions within Haitian society. On the other hand, most literary movements choose to stress works that call attention to their own most revolutionary aspects rather than other works that would show how a new movement appeared gradually. In Haiti, the monument of indigenist revolution has been Ainsi parla l'oncle (Thus spoke the uncle), 1928, by Jean Price-Mars. Strangely enough, this work has little or nothing to do with literature, but is a collection of essays on Haitian peasant folklore, with a preface in which Price-Mars admonishes the traditional elite, that "insofar as we try to perceive ourselves as 'colored Frenchmen' we forget to be simply Haitians, i.e., men born into specific historical conditions."7 Later he stresses "That we [the Haitians] also have something to offer to the world that is not faked or imitated."8 The real Haiti was now discovered in the peasant class, which had been

6 Point de ville. Point d'art. Point de poésie. Pas un germe. Pas une pousse. Ou bien la lyre hideuse des contre-façons. En vérité, terre stérile et muette (Tropiques 1, Introduction). 7 Au fur et à mesure que nous nous efforcions de nous croire des Français "colorés," nous désapprenions à être des Haïtiens tout court, c'est-à-dire des hommes nés en des conditions historiques déterminées (Price-Mars [1954], iii). 8 Que nous avons, nous aussi, quelque chose à offrir au monde qui ne soit pas une matière frelatée ou un produit d'imitation (Price-Mars [1939], 145).

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despised up to that time and even persecuted. Indigenism first produced a few shortlived literary journals (Les Griots, La Revue Indigène) and a relatively large and consistent group of peasant novels. The bases of the discourse are the first meticulous and lengthy descriptions of the peasants' life and lore, particularly the voudou religion, based on poorly developed and simply structured plots (for example, the first novels of Cinéas and S avain). Later, indigenism transcends this limited ethnographic framework and develops two characteristics: first, a marvellous realism where voudou becomes an occult force connected to dreadful events that gratify the interest in the exotic of the local (and potentially international) readership (Milo Rigaud, Thoby-Marcelin, and even the early Jacques Roumain); second, the portrayal of the peasants' misery and of their persecution by town elites (Saint-Amand, Roumain, and, in some ways, Jacques Stephen Alexis), thus anticipating the socialist novel. The reconsideration of a (lost) traditional Africa that characterized early negritude was limited in Haitian indigenism to a particular branch of poetry presenting stereotyped images of naked, happy savages dancing around baobab trees. The vocation of the Haitian movement was almost exclusively directed toward the description and rehabilitation of local culture, particularly of voudou, which had developed during the previous century into the central symbol for Haitian backwardness. In some ways the entire evolution of the national discourse is here condensed into the discussion of the popular religion: during the nineteenth century the mulatto authors went out of their way to prove its nonexistence, particularly since a very discriminatory - and correspondingly popular - report by a prejudiced British diplomat had associated voudou with cannibalism (St. John [1884]). Indigenism brought not only a number of more or less scientific explanations of voudou phenomena but open acceptance by intellectuals who considered it to be the true Haitian religion. The extensive descriptions of ceremonies that were mandatory for all indigenist novels developed into a voudou mysticism destined to attract middle-class readers inside and outside of Haiti. The turning point is illustrated by Jacques Roumain's famous Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew), 1944. Although the novel still contains a voudou ceremony, the hero, a sugarcane cutter named Manuel who has returned to his starving village, declares that he accepts voudou only as part of an African heritage but does not believe in it. Another author whose work is very representative of later socialist fiction, Jacques Stephen Alexis, uses an entire novel, Les arbres musiciens (The musician trees), 1957, in order to bring to an end the literary discussion of voudou. He describes a traditional village where the local voudou priest is a positive leader and a good father figure to the villagers. But times change, and the collective efforts of the Catholic church and U.S. business interests lead to the destruction of the voudou temple. At the end of the novel, a new type of man, the proletarian hombre total, opens a new age of scientific socialism, where traditional magic is no longer necessary. This novel is the last critical document of Haitian indigenism, for the interest of Haitian writers had already turned toward the rapidly emerging city, the new center of Haitian misery. In some ways the socialist realism of Jacques Stephen Alexis constitutes the final and most extreme formulation of Haitian thinking derived from Enlightenment philosophy; it also represents in a tragic way the end of the national history of Haitian literature. The year 1958 brought the Duvalier dictatorship to power and one of its first victims was Alexis; most of the mulatto elite, including all the then-important writers, emigrated, and they will probably never return to Haiti. The strong stream of Haitian literature has become a small trickle, dried up by persistent poverty. Present-day

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Haitian writing has become dispersed in many countries. Its readership includes the hundreds of thousands of Haitian emigrants who make up nearly the entire intellectual elite of the country.

Discourses on and of Literature in Creole The appearance of literature in vernacular Creole goes far back into colonial times. Most Caribbean critics would consider it to be mainly and even solely an oral literature that, in the course of time, has established a number of characteristic genres, or rather traditions: 1. The tale in Creole, which includes a number of subtraditions, such as the marvellous tale (which is relatively close to the fairy tale) or an ironic version of the aetiological tale that explains the particular fate of the black race. Best known is the wide range of animal tales that have two opposing protagonists such as conpè tig and conpè lapin (Brer Tiger and Brer Rabbit in the anglophone Caribbean) or the elephant, the hyena, and other animals often unknown in the New World. 2. The various types of songs in Creole, which may have themes of work, love, or certain social and political circumstances. The social and political themes appear in the chanson-pointe: such songs offer obliquely ironic comment on current events; upon becoming popular they often anticipated and accelerated the fall of governments in Haiti. A modified continuation of this is the modern hit song in Creole, which also may be very critical. 3. The bottomless well of proverbs in Creole, which are very creatively adapted in order to comment ambiguously on subjects that cannot be mentioned openly, may also be considered part of oral literature. 4. Riddles in Creole, which are very traditional insofar as they have to be solved by memory and not by reasoning. It is significant that the first three genres - the tales, the songs, and the proverbs - are seen as being in opposition to the dominant culture. They are the expression of an oral counterculture (Jardel [1977], 21), which may be valued very differently from diverse perspectives. From the perspective of the progressive and enlightened citizen, the oral counterculture may seem to reflect a fatalistic attitude toward life, characterized by irrational expectations of supernatural aid or the fear of magic forces. Even dedicated Haitian folklorists like Emmanuel C. Paul will, more or less directly, express the hope that some of this folklore will disappear with the progress of modernity, particularly in urban areas (Paul [1962], 16ff.). Usually, even Caribbean intellectuals ignore the fact that works of literature written in the Creole language existed, even before 1950, the date that marks (at least in Haiti) the official recognition of literature in Creole. Students of the national literature retain only a few of them: the poems Lisette quitté la plaine (Lisette, leave the lowlands), 1757, written by a white Creole, Duvivier de la Mahautière; Adieu foulards, adieu madras (Good-bye head ties, good-bye scarves), 1769, by the French governor of Guadeloupe, Bouillé; Choucoune (Yellow bird), 1884, by Oswald Durand; Haïti chérie (Beloved Haiti), by Othello Bayard. Besides these early works, literature in Creole before 1950 was represented by various translations of La Fontaine's fables (1826, by François Marbot, Martinique; 1901, by Georges Sylvain, Haiti). Only in the 1980s did the rising interest in literature in Creole lead to the discovery of more early literary documents written in Creole and hidden in archives; these include a full-scale novel from French Guiana (Atipa by Alfred Parépou, 1885) and a

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collection of Idylles et chansons, ou essais de poésie créole (Idyls and songs, or attempts at Creole poetry), published in 1811 in Philadelphia. As Maximilien Laroche suggested in 1981, there may be a considerable number still waiting to be discovered. One may surmise that these include material that could usefully contextualize extant Creole works which, being transgressions of the rules of writing in French, contain a whole discourse on the relationship between Creole and French in Haiti. If this hypothesis should prove accurate, new relations between oral and written works in the Caribbean may emerge in future. Literature written in Creole before 1950 was characterized by certain limitations that are part of the corresponding discourse: 1. It consists of isolated and incoherent documents that do not make up an independent history, but are only the tip of the iceberg compared to a larger underlying discourse; they are somehow dependent on the French discourse of which they are a part. 2. It is significantly limited to certain genres: a type of poetry that is very close to folk songs, popular comedy ("vaudeville"), and writing that bears a resemblance to La Fontaine's fables. The particularities of these genres are quite obvious. First, they entail a certain necessity for oral performance; the poems we mentioned have, in fact, been put to music; the vaudeville texts are only written down after a number of improvised performances; the fables are intended to be the written record of oral performances and are supposed to be read aloud to an illiterate audience. Second, these texts constitute a less serious variety of a larger genre - for instance, poetry or theater - where the diglossic division is evident. Tragedy had to be written in French, and most of it is unbearably artificial. Comedy, however, is a highly esteemed fête de famille (family entertainment), a popular event in settings in which social rules do not sanction the free use of Creole (Morisseau-Leroy [1954], 4950). Thus, diglossia was not overcome by the few pieces of literature in Creole; on the contrary, it was included in literature. The application of the term diglossia, therefore, goes far beyond the strictly linguistic sense. It reflects a partition of the world into two halves that carry distinctive, even exaggerated traits. The language of daily parlance represents freedom and familiarity, but also disorder and imperfection. Former minister of education Dantès Bellegarde expresses his differential view of language functions perfectly when he describes speech in Creole as: "Unstable, subject to continuous variations in its vocabulary, in its pronunciation, and in its syntax, it has not at all the character of a determined language and can only be preserved by daily use."9 The language of literature has to be clearly distinct from reality; it is different from Creole, because it has a history (as Césaire pointed out), strict rules, and stability. Furthermore, the language of literature presents the elevation above reality that the neoclassical ideal of a literary society seeks. Since 1950 the discourse on literature in Creole has taken very different directions in Haiti and the French Antilles. In the latter, the administrative integration of the islands into the French metropole has increased French literacy up to the standard of the French mainland; since Creole was, therefore, no longer strictly necessary, the written use of Creole became a political issue. Haiti, on the other hand, appears to have lost the battle for francophony: large segments of the intellectual elite have left the country; the schooling situation is worse than ever; Creole is gaining entry into 9 Instable, soumis à de continuelles variations dans son vocabulaire, dans sa prononciation et sa syntaxe, il n'a point les caractères d'une langue fixée et ne peut se conserver que par l'usage (Bellegarde [1949], 39).

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the media; and a standardized orthography of Creole, the object of continuous disputes since 1940, is now widely accepted. The use of written Creole, though still abhorred by the Frenchified upper class, has become a reality. As Albert Valdman (1984) has pointed out, diglossia between French and Creole is disappearing as a linguistic fact; it continues, however, as a mental frame of reference. But, paradoxically, it seems that prejudices against the vernacular are more pronounced in Haiti because the linguistic revolution of the last few years appears to have been imposed by poverty; in the French Antilles, the question of the linguistic future is more academic, as all possible alternatives depend on the future role of regional languages in a decentralized French state. In the 1980s some progress was made in France on the official recognition of regional languages like Breton and Corsican. Nevertheless, emotions ran high when the classification of Creole as a regional language (which implied the possibility of its use in the schools) was suggested in 1981, because many Martinicans feared that this might be a first step toward secession from France. In the French Antilles, the traditional argument concerning the literary inadequacy of Creole is still very much alive, but it has become more sophisticated. Creole authors are blamed for reducing the language to its lowest common denominator, whereas the task of a responsible writer is taken to be the imposition of his or her own idiom. This argument could be used in favor of Creole but is not. The linguistic deviation that Aimé Césaire advocates in an Antillean literary style can already be found, he thinks, within the range of registers of French, although he may present his manner of subverting the language as a form of resistance to colonial linguistic domination: "I have fabricated a language for myself. . . . Why? Because I am conscious that the French language has not been invented for me. It has not been invented in order to express the ideas, the thoughts of a Negro and an Antillean. . . . Let us say that, having been colonized by the French, I wanted to colonize French language."10 With this form of linguistic self-liberation, Césaire delineates and accepts a problem that is characteristic of many of the successful writers of the French Antilles: he is not a Caribbean author in the sense that he is read by the islanders, who - wavering between daily Creole and school French - find it difficult to unravel his complex idiom. In fact, Césaire is known in Martinique as a politician, but many would be surprised to learn that he is a world-renowned writer as well. Even though he writes about Martinique, he must be conscious of the fact that his readers are to be found, not on the island, but within the international readership of French or black literature, a phenomenon that we will take up once more in the final section. He cannot be blamed for where his audience lies. The poor reception locally awarded to the few publications in Creole - mostly poems and popular theater - illustrates the vicious circle caused by literary diglossia. Publications in Creole are a priori suspected to be of inferior quality and they provoke fears of getting trapped in an easy folklorism that would play into the outside world's racial prejudices. This constant fear of being misunderstood by the international public has surrounded the discourse at least since the writings of the negritude period. As early as 1955, the ethnologist Michel Leiris warned writers not to play the Antillean by using Creole (Leiris [1955], 111). Frantz Fanon, who devotes a whole chapter ("Le noir et le langage" [Blacks and language]) of Peau noire, masques blancs (Black skin, white masks), 1952, to the problem of linguistic alienation, is equally

10 Je me suis fabriqué une langue. . . . Pourquoi? Mais parce que je me rends bien compte que la langue française n'a pas été inventée pour moi. Elle n'a pas été inventée pour exprimer les idées, les pensées d'un Nègre et d'un Antillais. . .. Disons: j'ai été colonisé par les Français, j'ai voulu coloniser la langue française (interview with Aimé Césaire [1976]).

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afraid that the acceptance of Creole may confirm the stereotype of the Y-a-bon banania Negro, a French stereotype equivalent to the smiling black face on Cream of Wheat boxes marketed in the United States (Fanon [1952], 21). Therefore he advocated the definitive adoption of the French language by the Antillean people. In the same way, the novels and essays of Edouard Glissant constitute the most complete attempt to get beyond the linguistic trap. The expansion of the French language in the French Antilles shows that the islands are, like most parts of the world, on the way to general multilingualism, which constitutes a new form of individual liberation from submission to any kind of linguistic coercion (Glissant [1981-a], 325). The overall "crisis of the written text" will, according to Glissant, lead to the gradual disappearance of the divisions between écriture and oraliture (literature and oraliture). Linguistic norms are forms of separation that will be replaced by contact, communication, and, ultimately, by what Glissant calls relation, which does not require institutionalized codes but only the identity and autonomy of the locutors. In order to acquire this relation, colonized people have to recreate, beyond all linguistic norms, the original significance and value of the word. This process is described paradigmatically in one of Glissant's novels, La case du commandeur (The foreman's cabin), 1981. In this work, the hero penetrates the jungle (of the Martinican mountains, but also of his mind) and encounters an old sorcerer. Together they redefine the meaning of (French) words so that they make sense in their own world (Glissant [1981-b], 77ff.). While the French Antilles proceed toward a greater linguistic complexity, Haiti is moving in the opposite direction. As mentioned above, the Haitian intelligentsia in 1950 still adhered to the Enlightenment ideal of a national literature, though the collapse of that ideal was imminent: attempts at such a literature had not succeeded in establishing the national audience that would have assured its commercial and ideological survival. The various literacy campaigns in Creole seemed to some to provide a solution: "Most Haitian writers who write in Creole will or will not discover that they do so in order to get rid of an anxiety that has befallen them, even if they do not completely know where these new experiences will lead them. This anxiety originates from a feeling of personal as well as national failure."11 The first result of the literacy campaigns was an ever-increasing number of small and inexpensive booklets written in Creole, which provided instructions on agricultural techniques or health care or offered simple, didactically conceived stories. They were published by the various literacy campaigns, particularly by religious institutions. Their poor quality challenged other authors to break down the barriers of literary diglossia. Significantly, the first serious attempts were the translations of classical and neoclassical tragedies: Antigone and, later, Le Cid (The Cid), by Corneille, the performances of which were followed by printed editions. The translator explains that his experience should "make us discover a secret unknown to many. When somebody knows Creole in all its depth, he can tell all kinds of truth that will resound in the hearts of men throughout the whole world."12 The 1970s brought a general breakthrough in the further use of the Creole language: it was now used without restriction in local television and other broadcasting; the first scientific articles and 11 La plupart des écrivains haïtiens qui écrivent en créole découvrent ou ne découvrent pas qu'ils écrivent en créole pour tenter de sortir de l'angoisse qui s'empare d'eux sans trop savoir jusqu'où peut les conduire l'expérience. Cette angoisse vient d'un sentiment d'échec personnel et d'échec national (Morisseau-Leroy [1954], 51). 12 Fè nou dékouvri yon sékrè anpil moun pat konnin. Lè nèg ki konn kréyòl la nan ras-in palé, li fè li di tout kalité vérité kap konsonnin nan tout kè tout moun sou latè béni (Numa [1975], v).

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books were written in that language or translated into it; poetry - the genre that integrated Creole most rapidly - was already so rich that Lambert-Félix Prudent published a large international anthology, the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie créole (Anthology of new Creole poetry), in 1984; Creole theater experienced successes French theater in Haiti would never have dreamt of; the first full-scale novels were published, amongst them one that rapidly achieved local and also a measure of international success: Dézafi (Challenge), 1975, by Frankétienne. To understand the significance of that novel, one has to know that the author had already achieved some fame for writing in French, particularly for his interest in form and style. Writing in Creole was a challenge for him, first, because "people were waiting for the composition and publication of a work in Creole that would have a greater impact than the usual poems, fables, stories, or tales."13 On the other hand, he was never engaged in the political struggle surrounding the Creole language. His viewpoint was considered to be that of an artist objectively appraising the value of his linguistic tool, and Creole was, as he said, fresh, unused, and above all - due to its intrinsic ambiguity - very apt to reproduce Haitian reality. The success and general acceptance of this novel points to the future development of the Creole language. The creation of its own literary register will carry the phenomenon of diglossia to the Creole language itself when it produces a new cultivated and literary style opposing the traditional peasants' language.

The Abysses of the Internationalist Discourse One of the main arguments against Creole has always been the danger that it would isolate Haiti from the rest of the world and that Haitian literature would no longer be accessible to foreigners. As early as the nineteenth century, gaining the recognition of the world was seen as an important task of the national literature, because this achievement was expected to be accompanied by the moral, political, and economic evolution of the nation. More than half of this early literature was printed in Paris, but not because the authors hoped to sell it abroad; instead, the place of publication was meant to increase the prestige of their work at home. The Haitian discourse on a national literature has oscillated between two extremes: whether to be a literature written in French, which is designed for a foreign market, or to be a literature written in Creole, which would necessarily be local. The failure of the Enlightenment discourse of Haitian literature, which was international by virtue of its language and local in its aspirations, became evident with the persistent and increasing poverty and with the Duvalier dictatorship; these conditions forced traditional Haitian literature to dry up to a small and insignificant trickle that, in spite of the creation of a French literary prize, has produced hardly any work worth mentioning since the late 1950s. The Haitian national literature has broken off into its two separate halves: local literary production in Creole, which has to deal with the burden of a nonexistent market and literary society, and a rather large branch of exile literature published in Paris and Montreal. French Antillean literature has always had to rely on a foreign market; a periodization suggested in 1982 by Roger Toumson divides French Antillean literature into three major currents, all 13 On s'attendait à l'élaboration, à la publication d'une oeuvre en créole de plus grande envergure que des poèmes, des fables, des historiettes ou des contes (Fleischmann [1977], 17).

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of which were determined less by internal evolution than by a change in the taste of the Paris audience: the first trend was an exotic one, doudouisme (sweetheart exoticism), which lasted until 1930; the second trend resulted from the French and international interest in black literature; the third, initiated by the works of Frantz Fanon at the end of the fifties, which developed into the movement of antillanité, merits a closer look because it advocated a form of cultural therapy that could transcend the historical and linguistic isolation of the islands by positing a trans-Caribbean affinity. This plea for a regionalization of French Caribbean literature seems to be just another alternative in the search for a larger literary scope in a society that, despite widespread literacy, has not succeeded in creating its own literary institutions and, therefore, has always been marginalized. The doudouisme of the past century was not only an unproductive niche within the French discourse; it implicitly confirmed white supremacy. Negritude was very popular amongst white French counterelites from its beginning; it was rapidly able to create its own institutions of art and literature in Paris: a number of reviews and a publishing house (Présence Africaine) that offered an organizational and commercial alternative for Caribbean writers. Though Aimé Césaire was considered one of the founders of the negritude movement, none of its various phases really coincided with problems specific to the Caribbean. The mysticism of the Senghorian revaluation of black culture was based mainly on the African cultural heritage. It had already been refuted by Aimé Césaire in his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), 1939. Anticolonialist negritude was of no direct relevance to an independent Haiti or to French islands that had already decided upon their political future in 1946; a search for a socialist negritude was the natural result of the political orientations of both Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain. Both authors, however, came up against the incompatibility of racial movements with social ones, and this brought the search to an end. The numerous literary histories and anthologies of the period extending from 1945 to 1980 tended to group the Antillean authors with black or even African literature and denied them a specific discourse: "A novel from Senegal will be nearer to Gouverneurs de la rosée, published ten years earlier and on the other side of the Atlantic, than a work closer in time and space. There are no geographic borders to the states of the soul!"14 From 1960 onward, when the African colonies had become independent and when their literature began to reflect their own, new political problems, critics became very unfriendly toward the negritude doctrine, which was considered to be a form of counterracism betraying self-exoticization - as Sartre had already argued as early as 1948 - dependent on a dialectical relationship to white culture. But this was not the only ideological basis for the new antillanité movement. Decentralization and regional socioeconomic recovery had become the new passwords of postindustrial Europe. This was particularly true in France, which was characterized by a new era of centralized capitalism after the end of the Algerian war and was torn by civil strife between the peripheral (and ethnically different) provinces, such as Corsica or Brittany, and the central state. The urban insurrections in May 1968 showed how these contradictions between periphery and center became the focus of a new anticolonial movement directed against interior colonization, that is, against the overwhelming

14 Un roman sénégalais se trouvera plus proche de Gouverneurs de la rosée, publié une dizaine d'années auparavant et de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique, qu'une oeuvre voisine dans le temps et l'espace: il n'existe pas de frontières géographiques pour les états d'âme! (Achiriga [1973], 15).

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power of the centralized state and of multinational corporations, both of which were perceived to be responsible for the progressive destruction of the individual. This movement offered a new perspective for Antillean intellectuals torn between the economic advantages of French citizenship and its alienating effects. Before and beyond antillanité a number of individualistic novels appeared that reflected the loneliness and psychic troubles of the nonwhite French citizens forced to live within an alien and hostile society. Mental illness and suicide - of the authors as well as the literary heroes - were subjects of this literary discourse. In a characteristic passage of Cajou, 1961, Michèle Lacrosil explains why her heroine drowns herself while proclaiming aloud her lack of identity. Another woman author, Jacqueline Manicom, committed suicide four years after the publication of a remarkable but desperate novel with the suggestive title Mon examen de blanc (My whiteness test), 1972. Maryse Condé has her heroines travel to Africa in search of their real identities, but these trips are failures, which, in Une saison à Rihata (A season in Rihata), 1981, leads to mental problems for the heroine. Research was conducted on the high incidence of mental illness in the French Overseas Departments, and Edouard Glissant's antillanité - in novels as well as in theoretical studies - also originates in the perception and analysis of the individual's mental disorders. La case du commandeur, a very paradigmatic novel, shows how the individual crisis is linked to a form of collective insanity: the heroine, Mycéa, is a lucid person who is aware of her loss of the concepts of time and space, but her successful attempts to recover them make her unable to survive in the alienated society of the French Caribbean, and she ends up in a mental institution. Glissant's message is also part of a postmodern discourse where political questions - such as the problem of autonomy or even of independence - are secondary. He advocates a future where the state no longer interferes with the cultural, the linguistic, the economic, or any other form of individual self-determination but instead tolerates and even furthers multiculturalism at the individual and local levels. It is, however, part of the problem that the understanding and the solution of the Antillean crisis are always bound to the larger international discourse; Glissant and all other important authors are published and read in Paris, from where - as always - salvation is expected. The recent internationalization of Haitian literature has a different context, and it also produces different results. It had already begun in the 1940s and 1950s with the international success of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée, followed in the late 1950s by the Parisian publication of Alexis's novels, which are currently witnessing a renaissance. An important factor in this internationalization is unique to Haiti; it results from the exile of authors who were persecuted for political reasons. This exile became the collective fate of Haitian intellectuals when Duvalier came to power. It is quite instructive to look at the structure of the huge Haitian community in Quebec: their assimilation was difficult for racial reasons, but not on the socioeconomic level, because a very high percentage were well-educated professionals. Today nearly all important Haitian authors live and publish abroad: Gérard Etienne, Emile Ollivier, Liliane Dévieux, and Anthony Phelps reside in Canada; Cauvin Paul and Roger Pradel, in the United States; Jean Claude Charles, René Depestre, and Jean Métellus, in France; Roger Dorsinville and Gérard Chenet, in Africa. It is quite surprising that despite this literary diaspora, a certain institutional unity has developed and is maintained, even when many members of the expatriate community have acquired the citizenship of their host countries and will probably never return to live in Haiti. They have created their own reviews {Nouvelle Optique, Haïti Observateur, and, in Creole, Sèl); they have their own literary critics (Maximilien Laroche, Jean Jonassaint); and they are usually described as a group.

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Their socioeconomic profile is rather homogeneous: most are successful professionals, often university professors, and the primary reason for their careers as writers has been their desire to use literature for the settlement of accounts with Duvalier's Haiti. Their first novels at least seem to be a sort of continuation of former Haitian literary discourse: a very negative and critical image of the country where political violence, corruption, and incompetence abound. Some of the novels do this by taking up the tradition of the roman national, chronicling the destruction of the country and its middle class. This literary Haiti is often, however, far away. The characteristic perspective is that of a child or an adolescent who remembers it sometimes as a paradise, sometimes as a place of horror. In either case, Haiti is portrayed as a place that determined the course of the now-liberated author's life: "in the Americas the worst of all miseries was to be born in Haiti."15 Physically removed from the island's life, the authors have gradually tended to stop using Haiti as the setting for their works. In Un ambassadeur macoute à Montréal (A Duvalier ambassador to Montreal), 1973, Gérard Etienne creates a fantastic setting to symbolize the destruction of his native island. Haitian horror moves to Montreal and, by summoning up the latent evil of its inhabitants, nearly succeeds in upsetting the peaceful Canadian society. Other authors, such as Jean Métellus, show how emigration is finally completed at the literary level: having quenched their thirst for literary revenge on Haiti, they ultimately write novels that no longer bear any relationship to their home country. The disappearance of Haiti as a literary theme reaches its apex in texts by the younger generation, whose memories of Haiti are increasingly vague. They no longer need to demonstrate their rejection of Haiti. Haiti simply ceases to exist because another problem is more urgent: the difficulty of settling in the large metropolitan centers of the Western industrialized world. A curious example of this trend is the recent literary success of Dany Laferrière, who left Haiti as a child in 1978 and started his literary career in the Haitian diaspora, writing for the New Yorkbased Haïti Observateur. In his novel Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (How to make love with a Negro without getting tired), 1989, Laferrière does not mention Haiti once. The narrator's vague identification with Africa is part of a discourse that he, ironically, rejects: "It is true, the Occident has plundered Africa, but this Negro is reading."16 What is even more interesting, the book is largely an autobiographical novel about reading and writing, written in a technique that, since André Gide's Faux-monnayeurs (The counterfeiters), 1926, has been called construction en abyme (abyss construction). This technique fictionalizes the process of its own creation, which means it does not describe any reality, but instead describes, in a theoretically unlimited chain, the relationship between the author and reality. All that remains is the fact that a black man writes a book about a black man who writes a book about a black man who writes a book, and so on. Thus, Laferrière purposely avoids any determination of his position in the world. We only learn that the world portrayed is not his own. Two "Negroes" spend their days in their beds in a dirty Montreal room, sleeping, listening to jazz, reading piles of books, making love to healthy and sophisticated anglophone women, and, occasionally, writing down their experiences. Their reading list includes the Koran (which is quoted on every other page), a number of black authors, but also, very conspicuously, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowsky - i.e., authors who deal with the survival of a bohemian subculture in large Western industrialized cities. In the end, the nar15 16

Dans les Amériques, le pire des malheurs était de naître en Haïti (Depestre [1973], 10). C'est vrai, l'Occident a pillé l'Afrique mais ce Nègre est en train de lire (Laferrière [1989], 47).

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rator imagines that his novel becomes a success, that he is called upon to read from it, and that it is characterized as "the first real image of Montreal provided by a black writer."17 It is no longer his relationship to Haiti or the Caribbean that determines his position as a writer but the fact that he is part of a racial minority within a white country. The literary work no longer represents any particular island or country, but universal interracial problems. This could be negritude, but, in the final analysis, it is nothing but an abyss where black movements, as well as white benevolence, are parts of an overwhelming network of stereotypes. The imaginary writer imagines situations in which imaginary white readers imagine answering imaginary black authors: "And me, I saw the girl shake her head, ecstatic as she was in front of a real one, a primitive man, a Negro like in National Geographic, Rousseau and Company. I know this guy very well, and I know that he is not from the bush, but from Abidjan, one of the big towns in Africa, that he has lived in Denmark and Holland before he established himself in Montreal. He is a Western town dweller. But he would never admit this in front of a white girl, since Africa has to serve him as something like a supernumerary sexual organ."18 Haiti has disappeared from Laferrière's text, but it remains a part of the implicit contradictions that characterize the new Antillean writer in exile: he is black, but makes love exclusively to white women; he only reads books written in English, but writes in French (and probably speaks Creole); he has cut himself off from the tree of Haitian literature, but quotes Émile Ollivier: '"Here we are, the Metropolitan Negroes'." 19 By continually constructing abysses, masking his own position, and refusing to make any political commitment, Laferrière has written a novel that represents the absolute negation of everything that the Enlightenment discourse of Haitian literature stood for. The idealism of a literature with neither a public nor a market has come to an end; the anticipated success of the book has become the only reason for writing, and the book's success is measured by how well it solves the author's personal problems, as we see in the very last lines of the work: "The novel seems to stare at me, there, on the table, beside the old Remington, in a big red folder. My novel is stout as a bulldog. My only chance. GO." 20 The final switch to postmodernism is, however, not just an accommodation to market expectations. The title of Laferrière's last chapter proclaims that one is not born black, one becomes black. Entangled in the web of successive and conflicting discourses, the author, finally, is no longer able to identify his reality. Paradoxically, the final motivation for writing is its own negation: the desperate conjuration of the abysses that threaten to devour not only the writer but also the Antillean communities and, finally, the islands themselves. According to Edouard Glissant, Caribbean literature is in a continuous and desperate fight against a predominant fear of annihilation, but the very fact of its creation already presupposes its destruction by alien and imposed discourse: "But the writing is sliced apart, trying to record from a

17

Le premier véritable portrait de Montréal venant d'un écrivain noir (Laferrière [1989], 175). Et moi, je voyais la fille hocher la tête, en extase devant un vrai de vrai, l'homme primitif, le Nègre selon National Geographic, Rousseau et Cie. Je connais très bien ce type et je sais qu'il vient, non pas de la brousse mais d'Abidjan, l'une des grandes villes d'Afrique, qu'il a vécu au Danemark et en Hollande avant de venir s'établir à Montréal. C'est un urbain et un Occidental. Mais cela, il ne l'admettra devant aucune Blanche, l'Afrique doit lui servir en quelque sorte de sexe surnuméraire (Laferrière [1989], 176-77). 19 Nous voici, Nègres Métropolitains (title of a chapter in Laferrière [1989], 97). 20 Le roman me regarde, là, sur la table, à côté de la vieille Remington, dans un gros classeur rouge. Il est dodu comme un dogue, mon roman. Ma seule chance. VA (Laferrière [1989], 185). 18

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distance what there (and here) is always dissolving. It seems that every day the rounds of erasure accelerate for us Martinicans. Victims of the friction between different worlds, we are continuously disappearing. Piled along a line where volcanos emerge. Banal example of liquidation by the absurd, horrorless horribleness of successful colonization. What can writing do? It never catches up."21

Bibliography Achiriga, Jingiri J. 1973. La révolte des romanciers noirs. Ottawa: Naaman. (This study contains a number of individual analyses of novels and authors that have as a common point that they are "in revolt," though their connections in time and space are not always obvious.) Alexis, Jacques Stephen. 1957. Les arbres musiciens. Paris: Gallimard. (This is the author's second novel, which deals with the expropriation of the Haitian peasants and the antivoudou campaign during the Second World War. It occupies an important place within Haitian literature, as it marks the definitive end of indigenism in favor of a scientific socialism.) Ardouin, Beaubrun. [1853]. 1958 Etudes sur l'histoire d'Haïti. 11 vols. Port-au-Prince: Chez l'éditeur [Dr. François Dalencourt]. (The best known and most voluminous history of the Haitian Revolution, this work stands, as do the many historical essays of this period, within a romantic tradition - for which the work of the famous French historian Augustin Thierry served as model - and offers a mulatto view of the Haitian war of independence.) Bellegarde, Dantès. 1949. La langue française et le créole haïtien. Conjonction. 19:39-43. (Bellegarde, a former minister of education, is, in his numerous essays and books, a typical representative of the French-educated, light-skinned Haitian upper class, which strongly rejects the Creole language.) Bergeaud, Eméric. 1859. Stella. Paris: Dentu. (Considered to be the first Haitian novel, the book offers an allegorically disguised account of the Haitian war of independence containing a severe criticism of the warfare of the "uncivilized" black rebels. The author's attitude is to be understood partially as a disguised attack on the dictatorship of the black emperor Soulouque, who was in power when the book was published.) Césaire, Aimé. 1979. La Martinique telle qu'elle est. French Review. 53.2:183-89. Chanlatte, Juste. 1824. Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Peytieux. (The author, who was an officer with Christophe's troops and later secretary to Dessalines, provides a relatively short account of the war of Santo Domingo, preceded by a highly rhetorical description of slavery, which is meant to justify the actions of the slaves during the revolution.) Corzani, Jack. 1971. Prosateurs des Antilles et de la Guyane françaises. Fort-de-France: Désormeaux. (This representative anthology of prose texts includes early chroniclers such as Pères Labat and Dutertre. The introductions present data on the lives of the authors, circumstances surrounding publication, and a short evaluation of their work.) Darsières, Camille. 1974. Les origines de la nation martiniquaise. Point-à-Pitre: Désormeaux. (The title of the book is deceptive because the author, a leading member of Césaire's independent socialist party in Martinique, mainly gives an insider's account of the political evolution of that party, thereby highlighting Césaire's role in local politics.) Dash, J. Michael. 1981. Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915-1961. London: Macmillan. (This text deals with the social and ideological foundations of Haitian indigenism and is particularly valuable for its insights on poetry.)

21 Mais l'écriture s'émince, à marquer de loin ce qui là (ici) se défait sans répit. Il semble que de jour en jour le tour d'effacement pour nous Martiniquais s'accelère. Nous n'en finissons pas de disparaître, victimes d'un frottement de mondes. Tassés sur la ligne d'émergence des volcans. Exemple banal de liquidation par l'absurde, dans l'horrible sans horreurs d'une colonisation réussie. Qu'y peut l'écriture? Elle ne rattrape jamais (Glissant [1981-a], 15).

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Depestre, René. 1973. Alléluja pour une femme-jardin. Montréal: Leméac. (Later editions [Paris: 1981, 1986] offer considerable changes from the initial text. This is a remarkably apolitical collection of short stories coming from a Haitian author who, in his poetry, had professed a militant faith in communism and had lived for more than twenty years in Castro's Cuba.) Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire masques blanc. Paris: Seuil. (Fanon, a Martinican psychologist, has written here the most important examination of the collective alienation caused by colonization and racism, which, as a call for a violent self-liberation, also had a considerable political impact.) Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. Diglossia. Word. 15.2:325-40. (Ferguson here uses the term for the first time to describe the coexistence of hierarchically and functionally differentiated language variants within one speech community, using Haiti as one of his five examples. Since then the term has been considerably elaborated and now belongs to the basic terminology of sociolinguistics.) Firmin, Anténor. 1884. De l'égalité des races humaines. Paris: Cotillon. (A direct reply to Gobineau's theory of racial superiority by one of the most distinguished Haitians of his day.) Fleischmann, Ulrich. 1977. Entrevue avec Frankétienne sur son roman Dézafi. Dérives (Montreal). 7:17-25. (These are probably the only published comments by Frankétienne himself on his controversial novel.) Frankétienne. 1975. Dézafi. Port-au-Prince: Fardin. (The first major novel in Creole, this is an allegorical accusation of political oppression in Duvalier's Haiti: a voudou priest reigns over a crew of zombies. One of them falls in love with the priest's daughter, who gives him, and the other zombies, drugged soup. They regain their consciousness and, in a furious upheaval, sweep away the priest and his assistants. The novel excels by the diligent utilization of the complexity and ambiguity of the Creole language; the French translation, which the author provided some years later, loses much of this quality.) Glissant, Edouard. 1981-a. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. (Probably the most important philosophical-theoretical work by an Antillean author, this is a collection of essays and lectures. Despite an effort to organize and systematize, Glissant's thought still seems chaotic and sometimes redundant, an effect that also demonstrates the author's intent to oppose linear and positivist European thought. In a further attempt to do this, he uses a "baroque" language, which is sometimes obscure, or, as he calls it, "opaque.") —. 1981-b. La case du commandeur. Paris: Seuil. (One of his most important novels in which the author tries to put into practice his conception of literature as he has outlined it in Le discours antillais [Glissant (1981a)].) Hoffmann, Léon-François. 1982. Le roman haïtien: Idéologie et structure. Sherbrooke: Naaman. (This very useful analysis is the most complete examination of the Haitian novel and its sociocultural context.) Hurbon, Laennec. 1984. Sur l'anthropologie haïtienne au XIXe siècle. Histoire de l'anthropologie. Ed. by RuppEidenreich. Paris: Klincksieck. 273-88. (This is a good analysis of the late nineteenth-century Haitian essay, which deals largely, and in a contradictory manner, with race and racism.) Jardel, Jean-Pierre. 1977. Le conte créole. Fonds St. Jacques (Martinique): Centre de Recherches de la Caraïbe. (This is a short but useful and inspiring analysis of folk tales in French Creole.) Laferrière, Dany. [1985]. 1989; 2d ed. Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. Paris: Belfond. (1st ed., Montréal: VLB editeurs.) (The author, of Haitian origin, describes, in a largely autobiographical novel, how he wrote it.) Leiris, Michel. 1955. Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe. Paris: UNESCO/Gallimard. (The first French-language contribution to Caribbean studies; characterized by the structuralist methodology of Lévi-Strauss.) Lima, Wilson. 1970. Recherche de l'Antillanité. Présence Africaine. 76:43-62. Morisseau-Leroy, Félix. 1954. Pourquoi ils écrivent en créole. Optique. 22:48-58. (The author, a well-known Haitian poet, was the most prominent defender of writing in Creole in the 1950s. In his view, a true Haitian literature written in the Creole language already exists in secrecy, hidden away in drawers of all important writers, who do not yet dare to publish it.) Numa, Nono. 1975. Jénéral Rodrig. 1975. Pòtoprins [Port-au-Prince]: Bon Nouvel. (Numa uses a translation and adaptation of Corneille' s Cid in order to refute the prejudice that Creole is not elaborate enough to convey classical culture.)

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Paul, Emmanuel C. 1962. Panorama du folklore haïtien. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. (One of many discussions of Haitian folklore, this book is more systematic than Price-Mars [1928], but follows his example.) Price-Mars, Jean. [1928]. 1954. Ainsi parla l'oncle. Compiègne: Bibliothèque haïtienne; rpt. New York: Parapsychology Foundation. (This work is considered to be the bible of Haitian indigenism, though it is mainly a collection of ethnographic essays. The most important programmatic parts are to be found in the Introduction and in the last chapter, which deals with literature.) —. 1939. Formation ethnique, folk-lore, et culture du peuple haïtien. Port-au-Prince: Valcin. (This is one of the later works of Price-Mars, which, though less known, provides a more elaborate insight into the ideological formation of Haitian indigenism.) Prudent, Lambert-Félix, ed. 1984. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie créole. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. (A rather voluminous collection of Creole poetry from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean with short essays on the poets and the evolution of the literature. Roumain, Jacques. 1944. Gouverneurs de la rosée. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. (This is the first edition, but there have been many subsequent editions and translations. Still the best-known Haitian novel, it tells in an epic style how two lovers save a village stricken with drought and internal divisions. The novel is generally considered to be a masterpiece of Haitian indigenism, though the author's leftist orientation is quite apparent and overruns indigenist considerations: it is not voudou that changes the misery of Haitian peasants, but the self-sacrifice of the hero.) St. John, Sir Spenser. 1884. Hayti, the black republic. London: Smith & Elder. (Lord St. John had been a British diplomat in Haiti for many years; the book, published after his return home, gave a gloomy picture of Haitian affairs. It was a tremendous success, because it contained two large chapters on voudou and cannibalism. Though most of his gruesome stories relied on anonymous witnesses of doubtful credibility, he had offended Haitian intellectuals for decades to come, and all later writings on voudou are related - positively or negatively - to St. John's account.) Témoignages sur la vie et l'oeuvre du Dr. Jean Price-Mars (1876-1956). 1956. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. Toumson, Roger. 1982. La littérature antillaise d'expression française. Présence Africaine. 121-22:130-34. (Though very short, the article offers a relatively good attempt at a periodization of Antillean literature that is different from a periodization of French literature.) Tropiques. 1941-45. (This was the first review of the young negritude movement, founded by Aimé Césaire. Under difficult political circumstances [which forced the review to disguise political messages as cultural ones (folklore)] it survived for four years and fifteen issues, becoming a stepping-stone for quite a number of young negritude writers.) Valdman, Albert. 1984. The Linguistic Situation in Haiti. In Haiti - Today and Tomorrow. Ed. by Charles Forster and Albert Valdman. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. 77-100. (The most current and authoritative assessment of the question.) Viatte, Auguste. 1954. Histoire littéraire de l'Amérique française des origines à 1950. Laval/Paris: Presses Universitaires. (This work represents the first comprehensive literary history of the subject, including literature from French Canada, Louisiana, and former French possessions such as Dominica and Saint Lucia [texts in French only]. It is incomparably rich in details on texts that are not easily accessible. The criteria for inclusion are sometimes doubtful; the literary criticism is very conservative and sometimes vague. The author's concept of francophony is more clearly established in his later publications such as La francophonie [Francophony], 1969, or the more recent Histoire comparée des litteratures francophones [Comparative history of francophone literatures], 1980.)

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

Popular and Literate Cultures

Literature and Folklore in the Francophone Caribbean MAXIMILIEN LAROCHE

Laval University - Quebec

Stereotypes and Caricatures The term folklore can be understood in three senses. Its most superficial meaning is synonymous with that which is stereotyped and caricatured. In this sense we speak of folkloric literature, meaning a text that presents a shallow, soulless world. Such a text can also be called exotic since reality is represented from the perspective of an outsider. The phenomenon of exoticism is dealt with by R. Antoine in the article following this one, and by J. Corzani, in his contribution on early poetry. The first duty of a francophone Caribbean writer is to break free from the folkloric vision of the world as represented in early writing. In this literature created from a colonial viewpoint, the "folklorizing" of reality does not correspond to a Caribbean vision of things but to a nostalgia for a bygone order.

From Indigenism to Creolity It is this escapist writing that the Haitian indigenists in 1928 and the negritude poets a decade later wished to jettison. One may therefore argue that the main feature of francophone Caribbean literature is the rejection of a certain kind of exoticism, that its essential thrust is antifolkloric in this caricatural sense. Rejecting a stereotypical view of one's world creates the potential for a better understanding of one's own reality. The move from the Other's folklore to one's own, to go from what they claim to know about us to what we know about ourselves, becomes all the more reliable since it is shared by the entire community. Folklore as people's wisdom, a shared understanding of one's own truth, thus replaces the folkloric caricature of the past. Nicole Belmont has offered this more technical definition of our subject: "the very content of folklore is mythic in nature, not that it constitutes an organized mythology, but rather, mythical components with which diverse forms with multiple functions can be created."1 Belmont later concludes, using the approach of Roman Jakobson, that folklore can be seen as a kind of language, a shared convention that is larger than any individual. This last comment is vital, for if folklore is like a language, then it performs like a language, like a literary act. We can then take folklore in the sense of oral and popular traditions that inspire writers, those traditions that are used as models for

1 le contenu même du folklore est de nature mythique, non qu'il constitue une mythologie organisée en système, mais plutôt un matériau mythique avec lequel on peut créer des formes diverses à fonctions multiples (Belmont [1989], 601).

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their own work and that are epitomized by the folktale. Indeed, the tale is not only a microcosm of the realm of tradition but goes further to represent it in a language form, that of narrative discourse. Thus, as it became clear that one needed to move from another's world view to one's own, that one needed to narrate in the way that stories were told, that one needed to write the way one spoke even if different languages were used for writing and speaking - it also became evident that the issue would then be how to integrate popular, oral, creole traditions into writing in French: how, ultimately, to retell one's story in the form of the tale. This awareness developed in three stages, marked by changing attitudes to content, form, and language. In the first phase, the publication of Jean Price-Mars's Ainsi parla l'oncle (So spoke the uncle) in 1928 and the magazine publication of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land) in 1939 dealt with the transition from one form of knowledge to another. Is the Haitian fundamentally a peasant and a Voudou worshipper? Jean Price-Mars and his indigenist followers, the novelists of the land, seemed to be asking this question. Is the French West Indian fundamentally black and if so, what does this blackness mean? Césaire, Ménil, Damas, and their African colleagues wanted to know. The answers are well known. Price-Mars in the first lines of the preface of his famous work asserts: "We have nourished for a long time the ambition of restoring the value of Haitian folklore in the eyes of the people. This entire book is an attempt to integrate popular Haitian thought into the discipline of traditional ethnography."2 Césaire later declares: "The old negritude / progressively cadavers itself / the horizon breaks, recoils and expands."3 It did not take long before they realized that form and content were inextricably bound together. Césaire was one of the first to recognize this: "Not the contained stuffed into a container, but using the same image, the contained giving shape to its container, more precisely to its contours."4 In 1956, the year of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Césaire's declarations established his position in the debate on national poetry that was featured in the pages of Présence Africaine. This debate on poetry, which was followed by another one on the novel, crystallized, at the time of the Congress, concerns or preoccupations that the issue could not be limited to questions of form and content. An artist must be concerned equally with problems of form and expression of the world or of the world view that he set out to convey. Price-Mars, once more ahead of his time, in the penultimate chapter of Ainsi parla l'oncle entitled "Folklore and Literature" said that "nothing can prevent tales, legends, songs come from afar or transformed, created by us, from being a part of ourselves revealed to ourselves, as an externalization of our collective ego. . . . They constitute in a surprising and remarkable way the fundamentals of our spiritual unity. Where, therefore, can one find a more authentic image of our society?"5

2 Nous avons longtemps nourri l'ambition de relever aux yeux du peuple haïtien la valeur de son folklore. Toute la matière de ce livre n'est qu'une tentative d'intégrer la pensée populaire haïtienne dans la discipline de l'ethnographie traditionnelle (Price-Mars [1973], 43). 3 La vieille négritude / progressivement se cadavérise / l'horizon se défait, recule et s'élargit (Césaire [1983], 78). 4 Non pas un contenu fourré dans un contenant, mais si on tient à ces mots, un contenu qui détermine son contenant, un contenu ouvrier de son contenant, plus exactement de son contour (Césaire [1956], 6). 5 rien ne saura empêcher que, contes, légendes, chansons venus de loin ou créés, transformés par nous, soient une partie de nous-mêmes à nous-mêmes révélée, comme une extériorisation de notre moi collectif. . . . Ils constituent d'une façon inattendue et ahurissante les matériaux de notre unité spirituelle. Où donc pourrait-on trouver une image plus sincère de notre communauté? (Price-Mars [1973], 255).

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This question would not go unanswered. The older generation, as we have seen in Césaire's declarations, had already put the question to their successors. The young postnegritude and postindigenist writers did not hesitate to get involved, and this is precisely what Jacques Stephen Alexis stated in his manifesto on the marvelous realism of Haitians published in the proceedings of the First Congress of Black Writers: "We have a rich inheritance that we must promote for it can reflect, in the area of form as well as content, the true face of our people, their problems, their hopes and their struggles."6 The following year, as a sequel to the debate on national poetry, Alexis further elaborated his ideas on the source of artistic forms available to Caribbean novelists in his essay "Où va le roman" (Whither the novel): "The beautiful artistic forms spontaneously created by the mass of the population in our countries are remarkably original molds that we must perfect in order to attain a universal and durable beauty."7 From the period of heroic indigenism of Price-Mars and Césaire to the year 1957, the debate had made a significant leap forward, shifting from the issue of the choice of a world view to the question of forms of knowledge of the folk. In this process, writing had moved from poetry to the novel. If the major voices of indigenism and of negritude had been poets, their successors were novelists. Moreover, the novel of the land, which expresses indigenism, had been the most important form of expression in Haiti's new literary orientation. The success of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew), 1946, would remain the best illustration of an indigenist aesthetic. In the French overseas departments (DOM) of Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Martinique the postwar generation would turn singlemindedly toward the novel. Indeed, the novel, more than poetry, exposed the problem of the conflict of language and selfexpression as the Martinican Edouard Glissant articulated it. For if the spoken language was the Creole of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana, the written language was French. And already, through the example of his bilingual narrative, Jacques Roumain had demonstrated how Caribbean reality could be transformed into fiction. Alexis had not been unaware of the conflict of languages. He had even written what would be in many ways prophetic words on the question of Creole in Haiti: "Creole is at the stage where French was in relation to Latin during the Middle Ages. . . . It is not some intermediate language that will triumph in Haiti, but either French or Creole, and furthermore, in the distant future, the one that triumphs will reflect the nature of our relations with other Caribbean and Latin-American states."8 And indeed, the prevailing conditions in Haiti twenty years later, revealed the truth of his premonitions. But it is really Glissant, in his investigation of Caribbeanness, who has made the greatest contribution to the problematics of a Caribbean aesthetic in the context of the language conflict in the region. The main thrust of Glissant's conclusion is that the same Caribbean self-expression is

6 nous sommes héritiers de tout un trésor que nous devons pousser plus avant pour qu'il reflète, sur le plan de la forme comme sur celui du contenu, le vrai visage de notre peuple, ses problèmes, ses espérances et ses luttes (Alexis [1956], 26). 7 Les belles formes artistiques spontanément créées par les masses populaires de nos pays sont des moules premiers d'une grande originalité que nous devons perfectionner pour atteindre à l'universel et à la beauté durable (Alexis [1957], 89). 8 Pour nous le créole est au stade où était le français par rapport au latin au cours du Moyen-Age. . . . Ce n'est pas une langue mitoyenne qui triomphera en Haïti, c'est soit le français, soit le créole, et encore, dans l'avenir lointain, cette langue victorieuse sera fonction de nos rapports avec les autres états antillais et latino-américains proches (Alexis [1956], 269-70).

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manifest in various imposed languages. This, therefore, leads to the proposition that the Other's fictional narrative should be adapted to the Caribbean folktale. From the First Congress of Black Writers and the debates on poetry and the novel to the 1980s, Edouard Glissant has linked his creative writing with the theoretical reflection that has been collected in Le discours antillais (Caribbean discourse), 1981. He returns in it to earlier questions but with an originality and idiosyncrasy that create surprisingly new possibilities for Caribbean literature. Thus, in his essay "Natural and Forced Poetics," which is a sustained critical meditation on creole folktale, Glissant focuses our attention on an overlooked relationship between poetics and politics. In his view, when writing comes up against spoken language, the beauty of what the writer wishes to create is called into question, as is the freedom to create it. In Glissant's words: "an ethnopoetics, at some time or another, implies a politics . . . for us it will be a question of transforming a scream (which we once uttered) into a speech that grows from it, discovering in the process the expression, perhaps in an intellectual way, of a finally liberated poetics."9 If Glissant's articulated wish to have the scream evolve into language is then related to his criticism of the inadequacies of the folktale in Creole, we can conclude that it is an invitation to extend the tale into narrative fiction, and to manage a transition from rural to urban and from traditional to modern within the specifics of the Caribbean reality. However, this transition must never involve forgetting specific areas of "opacity," a term dear to Glissant, nor falling into the trap of reductionist universal humanism. This awareness that literary creation brings together linguistic research and political action allows the word folklore its ultimate meaning, that of the folktale. For what Glissant is advocating is nothing less than the creation of a History; the invention of a true retelling, a narrative of the true story that the Caribbean people are living, the narrative of the Caribbean's recreation of itself. The transition from yesterday's indigenism and negritude to today's creolity (créolité) has been managed by Alexis and Glissant. Redirecting the focus from content to form and then toward expression, they have made today's artist sensitive to accepting the job before him or her: that of creating, or rather recreating, both content and form for the Caribbean world view. It is no longer a matter of imitating others or even of imitating other Caribbean writers since Glissant has pointed to the fissures in traditional Caribbean narratives. It is necessary to recreate the Caribbean self, to create that self autonomously, based on the fragments that have been salvaged. It is this progressive and now overt orientation that the authors of L'éloge de la créolité (In praise of creolity), 1989, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, have ultimately confirmed and reinforced. In advocating the direction of interior vision and self-acceptance, they mount a fierce attack on the imitativeness of those they call zombies. Instead, they favor being rooted in orality: "orality is our form of intelligence, it is how we read the world, a still blind groping toward our complexity."10 Among the writers of the francophone Caribbean a common and persistent vision, evident from the various declarations so far cited, has existed since the 1930s. With L'éloge de la créolité, this 9 toute ethnopoétique, à un moment ou à un autre, confronte le politique . . . pour nous il s'agira plutôt de développer un cri (que nous avons poussé) en parole qui le continue, découvrant ainsi la pratique, peut-être intellectuelle, d'une poétique enfin libérée (Glissant [1981], 245). 10 l'oralité est notre intelligence, elle est notre lecture de ce monde, le tâtonnement, aveugle encore, de notre complexité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant [1989], 34).

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poetic intention finds a formulation that unambiguously asserts its aesthetic and linguistic options and can henceforth shed light on the poetics of those genres used by Caribbean writers.

Narrative Voices and Collective Voices Folklore is a kind of language. Consequently, narrative inspired by the folktale does not simply repeat themes or adopt traditional narrative techniques. The use of a model derived from the oral tale in Creole is evidence of an attempt to regain the spirit of the tale by having the written text speak the way the oral tale would, and by transmitting the voice of the storyteller through that of the narrator of the written text. Both written and spoken narrative voices come together so that the collective voice makes itself heard through the writer's craft. (This process may well be essential to modern nation-building. The romantic movement in Europe had already used it extensively. For the francophone world the romantic novel that most clearly highlights these same concerns is George Sand's François le champi [François the foundling], 1850. AJA) The technical process of using the themes, language, and style of the oral tale, therefore, also has ideological implications (a countercultural impulse to avoid alienation through imitation) as well as an aesthetic strategy. For is it not, ultimately, a question of bringing to light (for oneself initially) some hitherto unknown beauty? But we need to remember that all language, perhaps creole languages more than others, is based on the art of ellipsis whose secret is contained in the function of the narrator of the story. For example, Georges Sylvain haitianized the fables of La Fontaine and Marbot by inventing an old Haitian mountain dweller as narrator. It is in mastering the functions of the narrator that the writer ensures the full deployment of the potential of the language (or languages) being used. Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Solibo magnifique (Solibo the magnificent), 1988, demonstrates this by the complex way in which the narrative is structured around the tale. The oral tale in Creole is fashioned like a funnel into which are poured, on one hand, the voices of a supernarrator and a narrator (two roles united in the figure of the narrator), and, on the other, the voices of a superlistener and a listener (a double role played by the storyteller's audience). This framing of the tale by the external voices of supernarrator and superlistener is done in the introductory formula that seeks permission from the audience for the storyteller to tell his tale and at the conclusion when the narrator claims that he was chosen to recount the story. (These same formal features can be found in George Sand's François le champi. AJA) The following examples illustrate the framing technique in a Martinican tale collected by Ina Césaire. "Krik? Krak!" is an introductory expression common to oral literatures in Creole. Likewise, the concluding formula is the same throughout the creolophone Caribbean: "I was under the table sucking a small bone. Foolish John sees me: the fellow is so stupid that he let fly a kick that brought me all the way here to tell you this story."11 Through these introductory and concluding formulae, the tale can be seen as a framed narrative in which the narrator's words echo a double language since therein are located both the voice (or the will) of the supernarrator and that of the superlistener. The individual language of the storyteller 11 Man té anba tab-la, ka sizé a ti zo. Jan-li-sot we mwin: boug la tèlman sot i ba mwin an kout pié voyé mwin jis isiya pou man rakonté sa ba zot! (Ina Césaire [1989], 84-85).

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then appears as the duplicate of a collective language. Several languages are poured into the story to be funneled together and ultimately fused in the narrator's discourse. In Chamoiseau's novel, the title, uttered by the voice of the narrator, should not be confused with that of the author, even if the fact of reading his name just before the title seems to identify him as the speaker of the title. Many permutations can be created from this juxtaposition and confrontation: author, character; writer, teller; novel, tale. After Chamoiseau's title come in succession a dedication to Hector Bianciotti; three epigraphs taken from Edouard Glissant, Althierry Dorval, and Italo Calvino; and, finally, still as an epigraph, a brief dialogue between an ethnographer and a storyteller. Only after all this does the story begin. It is made up of four parts preceded, however, by a foreword, which is a chapter called "Before the word - the writing of disaster" and followed by an afterword, which is a chapter entitled "After the word - the writing of memory." This is a perfect example of the framed tale. First of all, the spatial boundaries established by the tale are these various interlocutors from Argentina, Martinique, Haiti, and Italy, which constitute immediate points of reference. These literary voices duplicate by anticipation the voice of the narrator. Temporal boundaries are formed by the situation of the narrative itself between a "before" of disaster and an "after" of memory. The text of this narrative, identified as word with a before and an after, is presented as a voice framed by other voices; the individual voice echoing a collective voice; the word unfolding. This unfolding of a text that creates external perspectives on itself demonstrates yet another unfolding, both paradoxical and easily missed, if one is not careful. Foreword and Afterword is how it is put. Yet we are dealing with a written text, a novel edited, published, and distributed. Could the written then be a duplication of the spoken? And, in the concluding chapter, is it indeed the sayings of Solibo that are reported? Supposedly the narrator must have recounted the narrative of Solibo in order to have us hear him. (This could have transformed the narrative into theater since in giving his character the floor, the narrator retreats like a puppeteer whose doll begins to speak.) It is particularly interesting that he made his voice into an anticipated echo of that of his character. His novel then becomes the duplicate of the tales told by Solibo. But did Solibo really exist? It is enough that he did in the author's imagination. The personal fiction of the narrator of Solibo magnifique offers one guarantee, a reference within its discourse through this unfolding of Solibo as a narrated character, then as a theatrical figure. And this reference is only verifiable within the context of the collective imagination in which the individual narrator's imagination operates. To the same extent that it is a framing and an unfolding, the tale or the novel, as in Chamoiseau's Solibo magnifique, is a turning inside out. The Caribbean tale begins by asking the question "Krik?" and concludes in the same way only after a sudden movement to and fro between "over there" where the storyteller was kicked and "here" where he speaks. The imaginary trajectory, the fictional journey of the storyteller's discourse is that of a toing and froing from here to over there then back to here. It is a circular course that brings us back to the point of departure only after an inventory, an inquiry leading to a discovery, and the clearing up of a mystery. This is precisely what happens at the end of Solibo magnifique when the narrator returns to the police station where it all began. Here the dossier of the investigation is filed away in the archives. As the authors of L'éloge de la créolité recommended, evaluation and reappraisal of both oral and written works are neces-

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sary. But this revaluation is interrelated; the confrontations of oral and written unequivocally call each other into question. This process of confrontation, both of content and form, began with Price-Mars and evolved on the theoretical and experimental levels with Alexis and Glissant. The 1980s generation of writers perfects this development with their narratives, which they identify as folk-fictions rather than arguing over possible thematic distinctions. One of the texts that anticipated this not new but complex narrative form is Alexis's Romancero aux étoiles (Romances to the stars), 1960, a collection of tales written after three significant works of fiction. It is as if Alexis, in order to achieve a technical breakthrough, felt the need to return to the first narrative model that had inspired him. In the 1920s Price-Mars wondered what Caribbean writers could do with their collective folktales. At the close of the century Patrick Chamoiseau makes novels from them. The knowledge of the folk is no longer merely fiction but a shaping force in francophone Caribbean discourse. These writers prefer to see folklore - the knowledge of the folk - as their shared world view and find in it knowledge to be shared for the benefit of everyone. As the authors of L'éloge de la créolité assert, "we know that cultures never attain a perfect state but remain in a condition of constant dynamism seeking out unexplored areas and possibilities, a dynamism that does not involve dominating but relating, that does not pillage but exchanges."12 Both the humility of the indigenists and the revolt of the negritude writers were necessary to gain acceptance for this truth. Having been betrayed by those who repeated their lessons like parrots, intellectuals felt the need to locate a new source of knowledge and of the word. Their attentiveness to the wisdom of folklore is a refreshing sign of humility. It was, perhaps, the necessary condition for giving francophone Caribbean history a new start and for retelling it. Translated by J. Michael Dash.

Bibliography Alexis, Jacques Stephen. 1956. Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens. Présence Africaine. 8-10:245-71. (A seminal essay on the folk imagination in Haiti.) —. 1957. Où va le roman? Présence Africaine. 13:81-101. (After the debate on national poetry, Alexis oriented the discussion toward the novel with this essay.) Belmont, Nicole. 1989. Folklore. Encyclopaedia Universalis. Vol. 9. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis. 601-08. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1989. L'éloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard. (Manifesto of the new Creolist movement from Martinique.) Césaire, Aimé. [1947]. 1983. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Trans. by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (A bilingual edition of this classic of the negritude movement. The magazine publication of the poem dates from 1939.) —. 1956. Sur la poésie nationale. Optique. 25:6-8. (Césaire's final response to the debate with René Depestre on poetry.) Césaire, Ina. 1989. Contes de nuits et de jours aux Antilles. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. (An important study of the Caribbean folktale by a specialist in the field and a playwright.)

12 nous savons que chaque culture n'est jamais un achèvement mais une dynamique constante chercheuse de questions inédites, de possibilités neuves, qui ne domine pas mais qui entre en relation, qui ne pille pas mais qui échange (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant [1989], 54).

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Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1988. Solibo magnifique. Paris: Gallimard. (Important novel from the Creolist movement.) Glissant, Edouard. 1981. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. Price-Mars, Jean. [1928]. 1973. Ainsi parla l'oncle. Ottawa: Editions Leméac. (The theoretical text that launched Haitian indigenism in 1928.)

The Caribbean in Metropolitan French Writing RÉGIS ANTOINE

Université de Nantes

From 1635, that is to say after the Spanish, and in approximately the same years as the English and the Dutch, the French settled in a dozen islands in the Caribbean, and in particular, on Saint Christopher (later St. Kitts), Guadeloupe, and Martinique. This colonization was to result in a body of writing in various genres including the chronicles of missionaries, travellers, residents, and eventually, in France itself, writers and essayists who, without ever having gone to the Caribbean, would nevertheless use Caribbean motifs in their work. Thus over three hundred years an image of the islands has grown and developed according to the twofold movement of metropolitan and Caribbean societies. Changes in relations with the "old colonies" would go as far as breaking ties with France, temporarily in the case of Martinique during the French Revolution, absolutely in the case of Saint Domingue, which became Haiti during the same period. Change and continuity: climate, ethnic composition, demographic disproportion between France and the French Caribbean (approximately one hundred to one), colonial and neocolonial structures remain constant, whereas the distance (7000 kilometers) seems to grow less and less because of the implacable growth of transatlantic links. This unique situation provides the explanation for a double phenomenon: 1. The durability of an exoticism forever reactivated in the face of situations and peoples very different from those of the metropole. 2. A sense of responsibility, sometimes merely latent, on the part of the perceiving subject, whether the latter stayed in Europe (as in the case of more than two hundred authors), whether he recorded impressions of his travels (seventy-five travel writers up to the eve of the second world war), or whether he resided there for a certain number of years (as is the case of fifty or so writers up to the same date). Some facts need to be stated clearly. Responsibility is total in the extermination of "France's" autochthonous Amerindian population, and France is the cause - tragic or dramatic - of the present existence of various peoples: settlements of European, African, and Indian origin, in atrocious conditions of hired labor, slavery, or indentureship, respectively. And today France must take into account the existence of hundreds of thousands of men and women who possess a specific collective identity and whom she eventually decided to make into full French citizens. So metropolitan literature that deals with the Caribbean must be measured against Creole writing, whatever the origin of its representatives: if from 1722 to 1848 we have a total of 200 metropolitan texts as opposed to 60 local works, from the abolition of slavery, in 1848, the propor-

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tion is reversed with, up to 1932, 80 metropolitan texts as against 110 local ones. The last fifty years, up to the present, have only intensified this reversal. This confrontation, and sometimes this dialogue, between two literatures is made more complex because the indigenous works are created from very diverse intentions and attitudes: whether they are written in imitation of successive models from the metropolis, or on the contrary in opposition so as to affirm an Afro-Caribbean or simply Caribbean culture; or whether written from the metropole by someone who is Caribbean, as in the case of Nicolas Léonard in the eighteenth century, or Alexis Leger (Saint-John Perse) and Daniel Maximin in the twentieth. Such are the various instances that determine the metropolitan view of the islands in permutations whose components are continuously being altered. The first century of French occupation quite naturally produces very few texts. Based on the accounts of about thirty travellers and more particularly, about fifteen temporary residents, knowledge of the Caribbean is created in France in the fields of anthropology, natural sciences, and historiography. The next sequence, up to emancipation in 1848, covers the great period of slave labor and the plantation economy. It witnesses the decreasing importance of travellers' and residents' accounts and the growth of metropolitan texts deeply concerned with the debate on the situation of the black man, a debate that marks the essay, the short novel, the elegy, plays, and articles in Diderot's Encyclopedia. From 1848 onward, when a colonial society not based on slavery is established, the number of residents, travellers, and authors residing in the metropole diminishes. We see that the element of dramatization is no longer favored by non-Caribbean writers who think that the islands are henceforth trouble free. The exotic image of the French Caribbean is less the creation of brutal contrasts or dramatic contact - as was the case for the colonies of Africa or Asia - than the product of a varied environment to which both sensibility and emotions were responsive and capable of producing dreams, lyrical writing, and mythologizing. This phenomenon is nothing but the fallout from a preexisting notion, since the literary view of the Caribbean is itself a creation of a European myth, that of the paradise isles, situated to the West of the old continent. Even before settlement, Ronsard in his Amours referred to the "Iles Fortunées" and it is through the cultural stereotype of the island Eden that the first French accounts of the Caribbean will be filtered. The situation of the new arrivals is sometimes satisfactory, sometimes trying. Whatever their experience, almost all their writings contain the words "paradise," "marvellous," "wonders" when nature in the Caribbean is described. Enthusiasm pervades the flights of lyricism celebrating the rhythms of a yet primitive tropical island world, the flights of frigate birds and parakeets, the rushing flow of waterfalls. Still, a myth would need to be supported by concrete reality. In this regard, these first French writers learned to decipher the Caribbean according to the codes of the Spanish writers who preceded them. The Histories and Descriptions of Oviedo, Gomara, Las Casas, Acosta, Herrera furnished descriptive models for establishing botanical and zoological information that would be available for years to French readers in general dictionaries dealing in particular with plants and animals from all over the Americas.

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While describing the resources and the unique features of the islands, French chroniclers and authors revealed their personal preferences. In turn Mathias Du Puis, Maurille de Saint-Michel, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Charles de Rochefort, Raymond Breton celebrated progress brought by colonization. They would praise "French facilities" meaning penal institutions, then "frequented areas" meaning the land first cleared, then the "dwellings" meaning the plantation ". . . which provides one of the most beautiful and perfect views in the world. . . . The windows are arranged in a tasteful order . . . to enhance against the rich background of the mountain, the sheer gracefulness of this palace."1 Plantations contrasted with "the terrifying loneliness" of the mountains. Other writers preferred to daydream along the banks of rivers. However, fantasy is characterized by certain very significant features: the hummingbird with the colors "of dawn, rosy with burgeoning green,"2 fireflies as "brilliant flies," mother of pearl and sea shells are "interwoven with a hundred thousand diverse forms, . . . a network of lakes, varieties of orchards, unusual contours, cones, peaks, obelisks, hanging guttae, bell shapes, pyramids . . . " 3 This marks the emergence in the seventeenth century of a Caribbean exoticism characterized by the baroque style, to be followed by other ways of seeing and writing, identified with great moments in France's literary history: - A classical exoticism, whose chief exponents were Moreau de Saint-Méry, a Creole from Saint Domingue, Pierre Malouet, a colonial administrator for a short while, and Nicolas Germain Léonard, a Caribbean exile in the metropole. - A romantic exoticism, highlighting the anguished nature of mountainous terrain, ravines, shadowy forests, as easily illustrated by Victor Hugo, author of Bug Jargal, 1826, as by Eugene Sue's Morne au Diable (Devil's hill), 1842. - A symbolist exoticism, whose chief exponent was Francis Jammes. - A modernist exoticism of the first third of the twentieth century that includes travel books that attempt to refine their own variations on this theme. Whatever the period under consideration, descriptive passages draw their strength and their effectiveness from reading, whether it is the simple pleasure "of being there, hands joined with the sweetness of the world around you"4 or a slight or intense emotional shudder. More precisely, whether the writing is inspired by a stopover or a long stay, nostalgic enthusiasm or amorous passion in "an island that seemed made for two lovers"5 reading makes it possible to write with great fervor about the images of trees, distant shores, "the Caribbean night." Stendhal never visited the Caribbean, yet he attests to the extent to which hedonism of Caribbean origin was widespread in France, and in his Mémoires d'un touriste (A tourist's memoirs), 1838, he shares in fantasies of Creole writers when he celebrates the worldly pleasures of physical well-being and of being free from care. Francis Jammes never got to the islands, but his fantasy Caribbean represents the weight of exoticism: the soothing effect of a motionless world, young girls surrounded by flowers, muslin, pastel shades in which the supreme blue is mixed with a more believable color range: "in the blue 1 d'où l'on a une vue des plus belles et des plus accomplies du monde. . . . Les fenêtres sont disposées en bel ordre . . . pour relever par le riche fond que la montagne présente la grâce et les perfections de ce palais (Rochefort [1658], 3637). 2 aurore, incarnadin, vert naissant (Coppier [1644], 84). 3 diversifiées de cent mille grotesques . . . des lacs entrelacés, des espèces de fruitages, des saillies hors-d'oeuvre, des culs-de-lampe, des pointes, des aiguilles, des gouttes pendantes, des cloches, des pyramides . . . (Rochefort [1658] 1:112). 4 d'être là, mêlé des mains à la facilité du jour (Saint-John Perse [1960], 38). 5 une île délicieuse qui semble avoir été destinée pour deux amants (Léonard [1774], 100).

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Caribbean, where roses bloom / in the distance the ocean shimmers like glass / black as the undergrowth and green like the night."6 All in all we have a vision of enchanted shores and happy islands, evident in a number of titles that speak for themselves: Eugène Revert, La magie antillaise (Caribbean magic), 1951; Les Antilles heureuses (The happy Caribbean), 1945, by Jean Loize; Belles et fières Antilles (Beautiful and proud Caribbean), 1937, by Marius and Ary Leblond; Le paradis sur terre (Paradise on earth), 1930, by Henriette Célarié; Le paradis des Antilles françaises (French Caribbean paradise), 1931, by Paul Reboux. Naturally, a totally different view could have emerged. After all, the cane-growing plains of Martinique and Guadeloupe and the countryside in Saint-Domingue have been cultivated at the cost of terrible suffering to the black community; and only the owners of the wonderful valleys savor the delights of a spring with no winter or summer, as Raynal put it. It would require writers other than travellers and metropolitan residents in order to see on the hillsides, on the slopes covered with undergrowth, and on the open beaches, places haunted by massacred Indians, a world of nightmares for the African slave and manhunts for the runaway, places where living is difficult for all of mixed race. And it was not until 1965 that a French woman, Eve Dessare, could give her work the title Cauchemar antillais (Caribbean nightmare). For three centuries this idyllic vision required the presence of a creature of fantasy who would be supplied by the Caribbean woman. Not the black Isis, celebrated by none other than Michelet; not so much the white Creole female, praised by her fellow béké writers, but the female of mixed blood, the mulattress, created by the pleasure of slave masters and promoted to the level of symbol of the islands. Part of this blissful world, the figure of the young colored Caribbean female was decked in gleaming finery and described in a sentimental rather than crudely erotic manner that would guarantee her a literary reputation not to be surpassed in French literature by those of the Tahitian woman, the little Asiatic or beautiful African girls, the Malabar girl from the Indian Ocean, just to take a few examples of female stereotypes coming from different parts of the French colonial empire. Initially, in the seventeenth century, this colored female was the victim of racist prejudices from travel writers and ecclesiastical authorities, who considered her in theory as an aberration of nature. However, in the years immediately preceding the revolution of 1789, there is a shift in images and a focus on the unequalled power of seduction exclusive to beautiful mulatto females. "They combine with fiery passions an irrepressible desire that makes them recklessly pursue, attain, and consume pleasure, the way flames consume what feeds them."7 "Their one aim is to charm all the senses, expose them to the most delightful ecstasy, suspend them with the most seductive pleasures."8 This impetuous and erotic nature yields, we are told, willingly to more sentimental values. So in the short novel of manners, in song, the figure of the doudou would appear and she would further strengthen the references to heartbreaks as well as to a languishing sensibility. But the doudou would in turn create a collective image of the islands, by metonymic association. Now it would be the islands themselves that would be seen in terms of a totally mystifying

6 dans les Antilles bleues, fleuries de tabacs roses / là-bas où l'océan comme une vitre luit / noir comme le feuillage et vert comme la nuit (Jammes [1906], 155). 7 Elles joignent à l'inflammabilité du salpêtre une pétulance de désirs qui, au mépris de toute considération, leur fait poursuivre, atteindre, dévorer le plaisir, comme la flamme d'incendie dévore son aliment (Wimpfen [1797], 76). 8 Charmer tous les sens, les livrer aux plus délicieuses extases, les suspendre par les plus séduisants ravissements, voilà leur unique étude (Moreau [1796], 92).

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feminization and subordination. The song "Adieu foulards, adieu madras" (Good-bye head ties, good-bye scarves) is very revealing and indicative of this process, but it also corresponds to the general impression given in many a "colonialist" article. In comparison with this pervasive feminization, one is tempted to say that other categories of Caribbean people also exposed to exotic mythification were a little less in the forefront. This would explain why the original peoples, the Arawaks and especially the Caribs, have inspired only a limited number of texts, and this was before they became extinct through extermination in 1660. These texts are almost all produced by missionaries: Père Pelleprat, Père du Tertre, Père Breton, and Père Philippe de Beaumont. The discourse on the native peoples is not improvised. It follows the rules of eyewitness accounts shaped by a perspective that is both colonialist and ethnocentric. Eyewitness accounts: before his complete disappearance, the Indian represented the enemy, the Other who inspired fear in the new conquerors. He also emerged as the pagan who resisted all attempts at Christianization. But in the short period when he peacefully coexisted with the invader, he was seen to be of little value in secular or spiritual terms. His huts were built in the immediate vicinity of the fortifications and the first plantations of the French, but he remained out of reach intellectually. Also, whether writers emphasized the peculiarities or the points of similarity, their viewpoint was strictly pragmatic. The Indian was considered cowardly, lazy, dissolute. His language was "inadequate," as were his social structures: "they have neither faith, nor law, nor king";9 "they have neither law nor judiciary."10 The same negativity marked the description of most of the Amerindian's psychological features: "Misanthropic, alien, and perverted minds";11 "neither vice nor virtue, neither sin nor God's mercy."12 Why then should such an unattractive image provide in the following century the favored source for the philosophical vision of the free and happy "noble savage"? The fact is that, in Europe and in France especially, a demand existed: the primitivist perspective or the alternative civilizing approach needed concrete accounts, coming directly from across the seas. But some aspects of this primitivist theory, developed in Europe, had already influenced narratives by missionaries actually on the spot, which were expected to function as "true" accounts. In the most famous example, Rousseau's ideology of the noble savage in his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité (A discourse upon the origin and foundation of the inequality among mankind), 1754, owes much to a passage - the only one - in the Histoire générale des Antilles (General history of the Antilles), 1667-71, by Du Tertre, in which the author unreservedly celebrates primitive man: "although our savages are not really savages except in name, just like plants and fruits that nature produces naturally in forests and deserts. These, in spite of being called savage, possess however true virtues and attributes in their strength and complete force, and quite often we corrupt them with our artificial demands and change much when we plant them in our gardens . . . The savages of these islands are the most content, the most happy, the least depraved, the least deformed and the least tormented by disease in all the nations of the world."13 However, this passage was not inspired by the sight of the Caribs, 9

ils n'ont ni foi, ni loi, ni roi (Maurile de Saint-Michel [1652], 137). ils n'ont ni loi ni magistrat (Pelleprat [1655], ch. 6). Esprits misanthropes, antipodes et renversés (Coppier [1644], 21). 12 ni vice, ni vertu, ni péché, ni grâce (Breton [1644], preface). 13 quoiqu'en vérité nos sauvages ne soient sauvages que de nom, ainsi que les plantes et les fruits que la nature produit sans aucune culture dans les forêts et dans les déserts, lesquelles, quoique nous les appelions sauvages, possèdent pourtant les vraies vertus et propriétés dans leur force et leur entière vigueur, que bien souvent nous corrompons par nos artifices et 10

11

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with whom Du Tertre had only superficial contact, but by a page of Montaigne's Essais (Essays), excerpted from the chapter on "Cannibals," whose style and main arguments had been repeated by the missionary. If, in the eighteenth century, the poor Carib, victim of genocide, emerges in the writing of the French philosophes, it is not because of a concern with anthropology, but as a point of reference used paradoxically in debates on the industriousness of people, on the diverse forms of government, atheism, private property, the status of natural man, and the relativity of moral values. Thus reduced to a mere illustration for controversies, the Indian in the Caribbean will survive as little more than an undefined character in minor exotic novels. The Caribbean adventure was also played out on the seas, and from the year 1686 we have available a seminal work: the Histoire des aventuriers (The buccaneers of America), by Alexandre Olivier Oexmelin. The author, a French Huguenot, was a surgeon to buccaneers and the portraits he presents of the latter are a mixture of personal memories and tales heard at sea or in Caribbean ports. They deal with sixteen captains or buccaneers whose feats of military or maritime daring are recounted. Despite a certain lack of eloquence and disregard for stylistic effects, Oexmelin gives an adequate sense of the psychological and social peculiarities of his characters: daring, fierceness, life on the inside of communities that were half-communist, half-anarchist, and always subject to change. His book was published first in Dutch, in 1678, then in English and Spanish, as well as French. It thus influenced all the major literary traditions in the colonial Caribbean. The author is known variously as Exquemelin (in Spanish and Dutch) and John Esquemeling (in English). The writers who follow Oexmelin - and there have been many - will to this day have only to elaborate on this text, on this singular source of invaluable episodes for a certain kind of fiction. At the other extreme both morally and geographically from the life of buccaneers, the existence of white Creoles, or békés - to use the Martinican term - whether they are planters or businessmen, occasionally provided a source of exotic curiosity, without metropolitan authors ever dreaming of competing with the prolific writing of the Creoles, who produced at all periods clearly narcissistic self-portraits. First there was Father Labat in his Nouveaux voyages aux îles des Amériques (New relations of voyages in the American islands) of 1722, which managed to paint a living picture of a colonial community in the process of being formed. Labat gives a graphic and picturesque account of the customs, sensual yet not unrestrained, that accompany the determined effort of each colonist to carve out the most advantageous place for himself under the Caribbean sun. Their non-conformity as opposed to the order established in the metropolis by Louis XIV, the enormous difference in relation to French society at the time, make these pages exceptionally fascinating. And three hundred years later, the metropolitan writer Salvat Etchart - who was an overseer after the second world war in Martinique, with which he claimed to be madly in love - could differentiate between the different strata of white population in the islands. On one hand the planters, fully enjoying past and present privileges: "Békés! and dressed in white, they blow slowly over their coffee, stirring the

[continuation] altérons beaucoup lorsque nous les plantons dans nos jardins . . . Les sauvages de ces îles sont les plus contents, les plus heureux, les moins vicieux, les moins contrefaits et les moins tourmentés de maladies de toutes les nations du monde (Du Tertre [1667-71], 2:356).

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sugar in their teacups, their eyes vacant, butter and honey on their toast."14 On the other hand the insignificant French fresh from the ship and eager to integrate themselves in a society that could earn them a fortune: "it is cash that the churlish new arrival wants, to rake in cash, to make cash."15 Finally, as far as the vast majority of the population of the Caribbean is concerned, meaning the inhabitants of African origin, the exotic vision is more complex since it involves all the contradictions of a situation of dependence that is perpetuated through the successive stages of colonialism, neocolonialism or departmentalization. A "pure" exotic perspective, to the extent that it exists, would presume a gratuitous point of view, a disinterested style, even a certain distancing of the perceiving subject. In this regard the pages Labat devotes to blacks tend to be written in this manner despite the author's total involvement. The liveliness of his narrative makes one forget that Labat personally owned slaves, that he was a moderately cruel master. One forgets that Labat was associated ideologically with the colonizing process and the colonial system, that he had as his special duty the Christianizing, voluntarily or by force, of individuals of diverse African origin, either born on the continent or born of parents already enslaved in the Caribbean. One forgets because Labat demonstrates a great curiosity about men and women of color: ". . . wonderfully beautiful. They have extremely smooth skins and velvet is not softer."16 This aesthetic appreciation is quite exceptional for the period, as is the almost completely unprejudiced interest with which Labat observes the slaves dancing: "While you look on, they seem to be beating their stomachs, although it is their thighs that are beaten. They withdraw briefly, pirouette, and recommence the same movement with completely sensual gestures, as often as the drum gives the signal which it often does, several times in succession. From time to time they link arms and make two or three turns beating their thighs and kissing each other."17 Labat even got to the brink of reciprocal acculturation, adopting the pragmatic wisdom of the blacks: "Only a wretched person swears like a white man, gets drunk like a white man, steals like a white"18 and sharing, he a Catholic priest, some of the animistic beliefs imported from Africa. Unfortunately, Father Labat's narrative with its lively banter was to provide damaging archetypes for future depictions of Caribbean blacks. This optimistic and condescending vision would serve as a refusal to take seriously the real problems of an entire community. Only the revolution in Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 will bring about less carefree images of slaves. Furthermore, after Labat, the colored person in the two islands remaining French would no longer be the subject of a particularly large body of writing. It is only when the social conflicts of cane cutters begin to rage in the French Caribbean after 1920 that metropolitan writers will inveigh against these unexpected disturbances in the islands that had been declared categorically to be without any history whatsoever. They will be scandalized by the "trumpeting" of the "Internationale," the socialist

14 Békés! et vêtus de clair, ils soufflent sur leur café d'un air lent, remuant le sucre de leur tasse de thé, les yeux vagues, beurre et miel sur les toasts (Etchart [1964], 18). 15 c'est le fric et racler le fric, et faire du fric qu'il veut le débarqué rustaud (Etchart [1964], 28). 16 beaux à merveille. Ils ont la peau extrêmement fine, et le velours n'est pas plus doux (Labat [1722], 3:488). 17 A les voir il semble que ce soient des coups de ventre qu'ils se donnent, quoi qu'il n'y ait cependant que les cuisses qui supportent ces coups. Ils se retirent un moment en pirouettant pour recommencer le même mouvement avec des gestes tout à fait lascifs, autant de fois que le tambour en donne le signal, ce qu'il fait souvent plusieurs fois de suite. De temps en temps ils s'entrelacent les bras, et font deux ou trois tours en se frappant les cuisses et se baisant (Labat [1722], 3:488). 18 C'est un misérable qui jure comme un blanc, qui s'enivre comme un blanc, qui est voleur comme un blanc (Labat [1722], 4:6).

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anthem, or by a Guadeloupean leader "putting on airs" in Moscow "on the ancient Romanoff throne." Travel writers - Paul Morand in Magie noire (Black magic), 1930, Louis Chadourne in Le pot au noir (The blackened pot), 1922 - decry the "Congolese ancestry" of a race "possessed by demons," a people who were "puerile and deceitful, violent and cowardly, boastful and voluble"19 yet one that has the good fortune to live in a perfectly beautiful place: "Golden huts nestled in the verdure on loosely placed stones . . . the grandeur of the vegetation overwhelms. . . ."20 To this day, a certain racist outlook that values its own lack of restraint continues to denounce as a kind of joke the supposed tradition of Caribbean shiftlessness: the white Creole living in his hammock, the laziness of the blacks, the dissolute runaway slaves. The very basis for such a vision is unsound since from the beginning French writers were in a position of responsibility with respect to various aspects of colonial authority: direct responsibility on the part of the first missionaries who were chosen to record the process of settlement; responsibility to the Secretary of State for the Navy on the part of the Jesuit Charlevoix, whose Histoire de l'île espagnole de Saint-Domingue (History of the Spanish island of Saint-Domingue), 1730, functioned for some time as a relay to transmit the authoritative view; responsibility with respect to the repatriated planters on the part of Victor Hugo, the author of Bug Jargal. This is to say that one cannot understand the perception of the Caribbean black by metropolitan writers without taking into account the great debate on slavery that took hold of French intellectuals for a century, from 1748 to 1848. For it was a literary event that would give the first impetus to the abolitionist view: Montesquieu, close to the business sector of Bordeaux, published his De l'esprit des lois (The spirit of laws) in 1748, in which the negrophile mind would sense the irony of the following passage: "Sugar would be too expensive, if one did not use slaves to cultivate the plant that produces it. Those in question are black from head to foot and their noses are so flat that it is almost impossible to feel pity for them. One could not imagine that God, who is such a good being, could have put a soul, especially a good soul, in a totally black body."21 From then on there were to be numerous descriptions of slave sales, denunciations of forms of punishment imposed, in particular the cruel lashes of the whip and the screams of the unfortunate whose bodies are torn to shreds (Chastellux [1786], 11, 144). Emphasis is placed on dramatic episodes in the lives of runaway slaves: "Sometimes deprived of necessary food, they are forced to become criminals and are deadly. They ultimately end their lives shot like wild boars or captured and broken like murderers."22 Economic assessments related to the human cost occur along with cautious solutions - gradual and individual forms of freedom - bizarre ones: "Sexual pleasure must be put within reach of all blacks."23 The contradiction between reality, the spirit of Christianity - "my brother you are my slave" - and the humanism of the age of enlightenment, appears in the work of all the French philosophes of the eighteenth century. 19

puéril et sournois, violent et peureux, hâbleur et discoureur (Chadourne [1922], 151). Cabanes dorées, tapies dans les feuillages sur des pierres mal jointes . . . la somptuosité de la végétation vous recouvre . . . (Beurnier [1934], 122). 21 Le sucre serait trop cher, si l'on ne faisait travailler la plante qui le produit par des esclaves. Ceux dont il s'agit sont noirs depuis les pieds jusqu'à la tête, et ils ont le nez si écrasé qu'il est presque impossible de les plaindre. On ne peut se mettre dans l'idée que Dieu, qui est un être si bon, ait mis une âme, surtout une âme bonne, dans un corps tout noir (Montesquieu [1748], I, bk. xv, ch. 5:389). 22 Quelquefois dépourvus d'aliments nécessaires, ils sont obligés de devenir brigands et sont meurtriers. Ils terminent enfin leurs tristes jours tirés comme des sangliers, ou pris et roués comme des assassins (Mailhol [1764], 81). 23 Il faut mettre les plaisirs de l'amour à la portée de tous les noirs (Raynal [1780], VI, bk. xi, ch. 24:193). 20

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There is discussion of the "blackness of blacks": is its origin Biblical, resulting from the curse placed on the descendants of Ham? Is it chemical, originating from a mixture of mercury and sulphur? Their degree of intelligence is evaluated by several writers, either in order to deny it and speak of the lowest level of brutishness (Abbé Prévost) or in order to say that one can be a colored Caribbean person and "manage to be an excellent man in all senses."24 More generally such writers as Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and Victor Hugo are more or less directly tied to the interests of a part of the landowning bourgeoisie in the islands, or of commercial and industrial activity among the Creoles. Others - Diderot, Lamartine, Stendhal - have acquaintances and relatives linked to the administrative and military staff in the Caribbean. And once revolutionary disturbances break out, hundreds of publications devoted to slavery in the Caribbean appear: works by dispossessed planters or politicians directly concerned with the war of independence in Saint-Domingue, with the temporary loss of Martinique, with the semi-autonomous status of Guadeloupe. The war in Saint-Domingue was to transform the enslaved community from resignation or individual escapes to various levels of mobilization, forms of insurrection and politicization. Everywhere the destruction of property and atrocities committed against individuals were a daily reality ". . . unprecedented acts of vengeance and atrocities, every manifestation of twisted values, slaves slaughtering their masters for freedom, and masters slaughtering slaves for servitude, seas covered with exiles, rocks tainted with blood and murder, cities razed, contagious diseases, the richest fields of the West Indies in ruins and ashes, and turned into the grave of two great armies."25 Black and mulatto leaders were to rise up, strategically and tactically organized, and their men would, with the help of an epidemic, conquer Bonaparte's best troops. Also, this spirit of initiative and daring could not but shake the existing stereotypes: the black as nothing but a tool, or brutish beast, or loyal to his good master. We should note, first of all, one aspect of social and economic thinking that began to argue in terms of relations of power: "Things were so organized in the colonies that power remained in the hands of the weakest . . ."26 The same observation, thirty years later, on the blacks of Martinique and Guadeloupe, not yet emancipated: "I am surprised at only one thing, it is that they do not use their superior numbers to crush us."27 Two literary works in particular would treat this revolution in Saint-Domingue in terms of a reversal of roles. J. B. Picquenard wrote from "the inside" of a revolution that he actually witnessed. His two novels Adonis ou le bon nègre (Adonis or the good Negro), 1798, and Zoflora ou la bonne nègresse (Zoflora or the good Negress), 1801-02, focus on this reversal: whites escaping into the woods like runaways; white women forced to disguise themselves as black. Military initiative and literary focus now belong to the rebels. A quarter of a century later Hugo's Bug Jargal is a kind slave who has become leader of the rebels but he still clings to the old order of things because of the love he devotes to a young Creole 24

parvenir à être un excellent homme en tous sens (Le Pers, Ms. B.N., n.a.f. 8990, f.71). . . . des vengeances et des atrocités sans exemple, toute espèce de vertu empoisonnée, des esclaves égorgeant leurs maîtres pour la liberté, et des maîtres égorgeant leurs esclaves pour la servitude, les mers couvertes d'exilés, les rochers souillés de sang et de meurtre, des villes incendiées, des maladies contagieuses, les plus riches campagnes de l'Inde occidentale en ruine et en cendres, et devenues le tombeau de deux grandes armées (Vincent [1829], 619). 26 Les choses ont donc été établies aux colonies de manière à ce que le pouvoir fût dans les mains des plus faibles . . . (Pradt [1817], 260). 27 Je ne suis surpris que d'une chose, c'est qu'ils ne profitent pas de leur nombre pour nous écraser (Schoelcher [1842], 113). 25

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woman. Two contradictory forces operate in the young writer's work: on one hand a number of attitudes marked by racism and a heightened sense of colonialism's role, on the other the justified perception of a black ideology and a nation taking shape, realized in literary terms through what the characters say, and the depiction of scenes of conflict or cultural spectacle. With Picquenard and Hugo, historical truth, as far as the fictional text can produce it, is attained. Previously a certain anti-slavery tendency in literature, made up of sensitive poems and novels, and produced by commiseration with the "poor blacks" - generosity, love conquering racial prejudice, the triumph of abstract reason - tried to conjure up the reality of the French revolution in the islands. But after 1791, what predominates in the metropolitan literature on the Caribbean is a feeling of horror, which is expressed, notably, in the short novel by Madame de Duras, Ourika, whose black heroine cries out: "Until now I was tormented by belonging to an ostracized race; now I am ashamed to belong to a race of savages and murderers."28 And this deeply felt or affected sense of horror would fill the literary narrative with images of Caribbean satanism and frenzy, serving to heighten the atrocities of war, to provide lurid backgrounds for such fiction, to transform the geography of the islands into places of horror. These images are typical of the landscape of thrillers. Some of the fiction of the young Balzac is afflicted with this deviant anthropology: "A great, ugly specter black as ebony, fixing his bloodshot eye on her, stares with a hideous smile and drags her into a deep grotto."29 Mérimée's black hero Tamango does not fail to sink his bloodied teeth into the throat of a slave trader, and Eugène Sue in his novels stands accused of having painted black characters with "hearts blacker than their faces." There are, however, exceptions: certain of the revolutionary black leaders of Haiti escaped this generalized discredit. Twenty years before the outbreak of the insurrection, the black avenger had been glorified in Ziméo by Saint-Lambert, published in 1769. And then one could read in L'histoire des deux Indes (A history of the two Indies) by Abbé Raynal, partly written by Diderot: "The blacks lack only a leader courageous enough to lead them to vengeance and carnage. . . . He will appear. There is no doubt. He will show himself and raise the sacred flag of freedom."30 History fulfilled this prophecy as predicted in literature. Toussaint Louverture, whose stature as strategist and head of state was recognized by essayists of the time, was one of the few to attract the sympathy of writers. Balzac wrote of Toussaint in the novel Zébédée Marcas, 1840, and Lamartine in the play Toussaint-Louverture, 1850, presents him as the leader of a people and the genius behind black independence. Lamartine would make Toussaint Louverture represent his own sensibility and his own personal views on nonviolence. It is evident that whenever Caribbean subjects are concerned, metropolitan texts are rarely the product of a disinterested literary activity. Among the writers who never went there, works that were clearly politically committed represented as much as forty percent (47 works out of a total of 118 titles, from 1722 to 1932). This percentage needs to be taken into account in a history of French sensibility and mentality up to Malraux's Antimémoires (1967).

28 Jusqu'ici je m'étais affligée d'appartenir à une race proscrite; maintenant j'avais honte d'appartenir à une race de barbares et d'assassins (Duras [1824], 137). 29 un grand vilain génie noir comme l'ébène, fixant sur elle une prunelle sanglante, la regarde avec un sourire affreux et l'entraîne dans une grotte profonde (Balzac [1824], 354). 30 Il ne manque aux nègres qu'un chef assez courageux pour les conduire à la vengeance et au carnage. . . . Il paraîtra, n'en doutons pas, il se montrera, il lèvera l'étendard sacré de la liberté (Raynal [1780], VI, bk. xi, ch. 24:232).

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In the last decades of the twentieth century, the nature of the metropolitan discourse on the islands and the response of readers have been considerably modified. On one hand one could observe a relative exhaustion of the theme and the mentality of exoticism. One also notes a greater independence of thought, in comparison with previous periods; and as far as some writers are concerned, a posture or language sufficiently ambiguous for one to wonder whether they can be identified as metropolitan writers or whether, on the contrary, one cannot classify them among new voices from the Caribbean. Exhaustion of an exotic discourse and emergence of authenticity: in the mind of the average reader, the Caribbean of Alexis Leger (the future Saint-John Perse) eclipsed the blue Caribbean of "chocolate and jasmin" of Francis Jammes. But one must remember the landscape of André Breton's Martinique charmeuse de serpents (Snakecharmer Martinique): "it is difficult not to succumb in a setting like this one, where the eye follows the winding contours, evoking these young girls with garlands of flowers swimming ahead of the boats."31 Breton, conscious of the social drama that Martinique was undergoing, nevertheless revived the tired motif of the feminization of the islands that remained French. However, in Haiti where he witnessed the rebellion of 1945-46, political and revolutionary declarations inspired in him a surrealist vision: "At night in Haiti, a succession of black, magical creatures carry, seven centimeters above their eyes, the pirogues of the Zambezi, the synchronous fires on the hills, the steeples surmounted by cockfights and dreams of Eden. . . . Flight of egrets on the brow of the lake where myths of today bloom . . ."32 In comparison with the writing of Jammes and Breton, the text of Eloges by Alexis Leger benefits from a particularly intimate knowledge of landscapes and population. Did Leger not spend his childhood in Guadeloupe, where he was born? Should he not be seen in terms of his original Caribbeanness? Let us say that being born there is not enough to make Leger a strictly indigenous author. Leger managed to see and to make his island visible through a cultural and literary prism that was completely metropolitan, and, to a large extent, through the influence of the Orient. Indeed, his writings yield a precious, personal geography of the island through its poetic gamble and not through the illusion of realism. And it is a wonderful process of sensuous appropriation that finds value even in the slime and the stink, integrating the radiance of the sun in a synaesthesia of total harmony: "Meanwhile the wisdom of day takes the shape of a fine tree / and the swaying tree, / loosing a pinch of birds, / scales off in the lagoons of the sky a green so beautiful, there is nothing that is greener except the water-bug."33 However, Leger writes from the outside: "Caribbean people could think . . . that they have around them more that is Oceanian, Asiatic or African or anything else other than Caribbean."34 His perception of the Caribbean is quite nostalgic, steeped in the awareness of his exile, while a feeling for the Orient informs some of his most beautiful images: "And the sea before midday is a 31 On se défend mal, dans un cadre comme celui-là, où le regard décrit la ligne serpentine, d'évoquer ces jeunes filles couronnées de fleurs qui partaient à la nage au-devant des bateaux (Breton [1972], 25). 32 La nuit en Haïti les fées noires successives portent à sept centimètres au-dessus des yeux les pirogues du Zambèze, les yeux synchrones des mornes, les clochers surmontés d'un combat de coqs et les rêves d'éden. . . . [E]nvol d'aigrettes au front de l'étang où s'élabore le mythe d'aujourd'hui. . . (Breton [1967], 88). 33 Cependant la sagesse du jour prend forme d'un bel arbre / et l'arbre balancé / qui perd une pincée d'oiseaux / aux lagunes du ciel écaille un vert si beau qu'il n'y a de plus vert que la punaise d'eau (Saint-John Perse [1960], 58). 34 Des Antillais pourraient penser . . . qu'il y a là plus d'océanien ou d'asiatique, ou d'africain, ou de toute autre chose encore que d'antillais (Saint-John Perse [1972], 793).

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Sunday where sleep takes the form of a god bending his knees."35 This indecisive situation seems to be spreading today. So Salvat Etchart, author of Les nègres servent d'exemple (Blacks are an example to us), 1964, has been assimilated into the tradition of Caribbean writing and Jeanne Hyvrard, author of Mère la mort (Mother death), 1976, and Les prunes de Cythere (Plums of Cythera), 1975, has been categorized, without attempts at verification by critics, among indigenous writers. Constant movement of the population between the metropole and the French Caribbean explains such errors in classification, which will only increase. If the identity of the Caribbean writer is thereby undermined, it is a completely unprecedented opportunity for the French writer to risk self-identity in a new situation. Translated by J. M. Dash.

Bibliography Antoine, Régis. 1978. Les écrivains français et les Antilles. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. (A history of the period 1635-1932.) —. 1992. La littérature franco-antillaise: Haiti, Guadeloupe et Martinique. Paris: Karthala. (A general study of all the island literatures of the francophone region.) Balzac, Honoré de (Under the pseudonym Cloteaux, Aurore). 1824. Le mulâtre. Paris: Carpentier Méricourt. Beaumont, Philippe de. 1664. Lettre . . . où il est parlé des grands services rendus aux Français habitants des isles Antilles par les sauvages caraïbes et insulaires de la Dominique. Poitiers. Beurnier, Rose. 1934. Antilles, roman créole. Paris: Crès. Breton, André. [1946]. 1967. La nuit en Haïti. Signe ascendant. Paris: Gallimard. —. [1948]. 1972. Le dialogue créole. Martinique charmeuse de serpents. 10/18. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions. Breton, Raymond. 1664. Petit catéchisme, ou sommaire des trois premières parties de la doctrine chrétienne. Auxerre. —. 1666. Dictionnaire français. Auxerre. —. 1667. Grammaire caraïbe. Auxerre. Célarié, Henriette. 1930. Le paradis sur terre. Paris: Hachette. Chadourne, Louis. 1922. Le pot au noir. Paris: Mornay. Charlevoix, Pierre-François Xavier. 1730. Histoire de l'île espagnole de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Didot. Chastellux, François. 1786. Voyage de M. le marquis de Chastellux dans l'Amérique septentrionale. Paris. Coppier, Guillaume. 1644. Histoire et voyages des Indes occidentales et de plusieurs régions maritimes et éloignées. Lyon. Corzani, Jack. 1978. La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises. 6 vols. Paris, Fort-de-France: Désormeaux. (A fundamental study of the literary region.) Dessare, Eve. 1965. Cauchemar antillais. Paris: Maspero. Duchet, Michèle. 1971. Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières. Paris: Maspéro. (An important study of anticolonialism in the eighteenth century.)

35 Et la mer avant midi est un dimanche où le sommeil a pris le corps d'un dieu pliant ses jambes (Saint-John Perse [1972], 29).

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Du Puis, Mathias. 1652. Relation de l'établissement d'une colonie française dans la Guadeloupe, isle de l'Amérique. Caen. Duras, Claire de Durfort, duchesse de. 1824. Ourika. Paris: Ladvocat. Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste. 1667-71. Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français. Paris: Thomas Jolly. Etchart, Salvat. 1964. Les nègres servent d'exemple. Paris: Julliard. Hoffmann, Léon-François. 1973. Le nègre romantique. Paris: Payot. (A remarkable study of the romantics' vision of blacks.) Hugo, Victor. 1826. Bug Jargal. Paris: Canel. Hyvrard, Jeanne. 1975. Les prunes de Cythère. Paris: Minuit. —. 1976. Mère la mort. Paris: Minuit. Jammes, Francis. 1906. L'église habillée de feuilles. Paris: Mercure de France. Labat, Jean-Baptiste. 1722. Nouveaux voyages aux îles de l'Amérique. Paris: Guillaume Cavelier. Lamartine, Alphonse de. 1850. Toussaint-Louverture. Paris. Leblond, Marius and Ary. 1937. Belles et fières Antilles. Paris: Crès. Leger, Alexis Saint-Leger. See Saint-John Perse. Léonard, Nicolas Germain. 1774. La nouvelle Clémentine, ou Lettres de Henriette de Berville. The Hague and Paris: Monory. —. 1798. Oeuvres. Paris: Didot Jeune. Le Pers, Jean-Baptiste. [n.d.] Mémoires pour l'histoire de Saint Domingue. Bibliothèque Nationale Ms. n.a.f. 8990, folio 71. Loize, Jean. 1945. Les Antilles heureuses. Paris: Dumoulin. Mailhol, Gabriel. 1764. Le philosophe nègre. London. Malouet, Pierre. 1868. Mémoires. Paris: Didier. Mérimée, Prosper. 1833. Tamango. In Mosaïque. Paris. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de. 1748. De l'esprit des lois. Vol. 1, book 15. Geneva: Barillot. Morand, Paul. 1930. Magie noire. Paris: Ferenczi. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric. 1796. Description . . . de la partie française de l'île Saint-Domingue. Philadelphia. Oexmelin, Alexandre Olivier. 1686. L'histoire des aventuriers. Paris: J. Le Febvre. Pelleprat, Pierre, R.P. 1655. Relations des missions des R. P. de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les îles et à la terre ferme de l'Amérique méridionale. Paris. Picquenard, Jean Baptiste. 1798. Adonis, ou le bon nègre. Paris: Didot. —. An VIII [1798-99]. Zoflora, ou la bonne négresse. Paris: Didot. Pradt, Dominique de. [1801-02]. 1817. Des colonies, et de la Révolution actuelle de l'Amérique. 2 vols. Paris: Giguet. Raynal, Guillaume Thomas. 1780. Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. 10 vols. Geneva: J. L. Pellet. Reboux, Paul. 1931. Le paradis des Antilles françaises. Paris: Rodier. Revert, Eugène. 1951. La magie antillaise. Paris: Balland. Rochefort, Charles de. 1658. Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l'Amérique. Rotterdam. Saint-John Perse. [1911]. 1960. Eloges. Oeuvre poétique. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1972. Oeuvres complètes. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard. Saint-Lambert, Jean. [1769]. 1814. Ziméo. Oeuvres complètes. Clermont: Laudriot. Saint-Michel, Maurile de. 1652. Voyage des îles Camercanes en l'Amérique qui font partie des Indes Occidentales. Paris. Schoelcher, Victor. 1842. Des colonies françaises, abolition immédiate de l'esclavage. Paris: Pagnerre. Stendhal (Henri Beyle). [1838]. 1940. (rpt. of 1914 ed.). Mémoires d'un touriste. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Champion. Sue, Eugène. 1831. Atar Gull. Paris: Vimont. —. 1842. Le morne au diable. Paris: Gosselin.

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—. 1842-43. Les mystères de Paris. Paris: Gosselin. Vincent, Général. 1829. Un voyage dans la partie orientale de l'île de Saint-Domingue en l'an VIL Bulletin de géographie. Wimpfen, Alexandre, baron de. 1797. Voyage à Saint-Domingue pendant les années 1788, 1789 et 1790. Paris: Cocheris.

Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions

Islands and Territories

Haitian Sensibility LÉON-FRANÇOIS HOFFMANN

Princeton University

Haïti est une nation ambigüe . . . (Ghislain Gouraige) That every human being possesses a distinctive, unique sensibility is self-evident; that the same holds true for any given social group is less obvious. Can we legitimately postulate a proletarian, a Catholic, a teen-age, a professorial mentality - or, more to the point, a national one - since that is what concerns us here? We probably can and should, since, vague and unsatisfactory as the concept may be, the members of all national groups invariably proclaim its existence, indeed consider it one of the mainstays of their collective identity. Haitians are no different: they have always affirmed their national sensibility, and observers of Haiti have been unanimous in accepting and reinforcing this claim. As we shall be concerned here with the written word only, non-literary manifestations of sensibility, such as music and dance, religious beliefs and practices, arts and crafts, painting, sculpture, and others will only be taken into account as they are reflected in literature. Our analysis will consequently focus on the small literate Haitian ruling class, which likes to refer to itself as the elite. It will concern peasant and working-class sensibility - about which precious little is known in any event - as it is perceived and reflected by this small intellectual elite. It should further be specified that Haitian society has, in the last few decades, been undergoing profound and violent upheavals. The catastrophic ecological situation and resulting mass pauperization and emigration, the rise of new political power groups, the rapid Americanization of large segments of the elite cannot fail to affect the mentality of Haitians. Limitations of space prohibit consideration of these recent developments here, and it is in any case doubtful that meaningful conclusions can be reached before the chaotic events that have been shaking the republic abate somewhat. While an individual's sensibility is probably determined by nature as well as by culture, by genes and chromosomes as well as by education and experience, such is manifestly not the case for national sensibility: there are no Guatemalan genes or Hungarian chromosomes. National sensibilities have been and are continually being shaped by history, and few peoples are as conscious as the Haitians of the degree to which history has forged their sensibility along with their nationhood. The very existence of Haiti as an independent country is considered by both foreigners and Haitians as a historical anomaly, if not a miraculous event. A historical anomaly because, of the many recorded in the annals of human struggle, never before and never since the Saint-Domingue revolt did a slave uprising succeed. Further, no other plantation island of the Caribbean was to attain independence unaided, after defeating the oppressor and his modern armies. And a miraculous event

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in that by no reasonable reckoning could the insurgents have been expected to annihilate, as they did, the forty thousand soldiers sent by Bonaparte to restore the status quo. The first generation of Haitian writers celebrated the birth of their nation almost obsessively and with near mystical fervor. Practically every succeeding issue of the first Haitian periodicals contains, couched in pompous neo-classical French verse, an ode to Freedom, a sonnet to Dessalines or Toussaint, a denunciation of Bonaparte or a dithyramb to the fallen heroes. Playwrights like Pierre Faubert evoke Ogé ou Le préjugé de couleur (Ogé or color prejudice), 1856, or, like Charles Moravia, the battle of La Crête-à-Pierrot, 1908. The first novel published by a Haitian, Emeric Bergeaud's Stella, 1859, is little more than a detailed and occasionally fictionalized account of Haitian history from the 1791 revolt to the 1804 declaration of independence. Bergeaud writes of his subject: "This Revolution was greater than any other. Today, the nation to which it gave freedom can glory in it."1 Until quite recently, the Haitians made no secret of their feeling of superiority toward their Caribbean neighbors who, under European tutelage, were pleading for autonomy or independence instead of wresting it by force. The exaltation of the liberators' virtues was a natural reaction; it was also a conscious response to political imperatives: when independence was declared, approximately half of the population of Haiti was African-born, and belonged to ethnic groups that shared few, if any linguistic, religious, social or artistic traditions. To create a sense of national identity and pride among people whose main common bond was to have suffered at the hand of white oppressors was an urgent task for the new ruling elite. Patriotic self-glorification, the almost ritual evocation of national heroism, will abate only slightly with succeeding generations. Some poets dedicate whole collections to the celebration of past glories: Emmanuel Edouard, with his Panthéon haïtien (Haitian pantheon), 1885, for example, or Massillon Coicou, with his Poésies nationales (National poems), 1892. Contemporary poets follow the tradition: one of the most popular poems in Félix Morissseau-Leroy's collection in Creole Diacoute, 1953, begins: "Thank you, Dessalines / Dessalines, Sir, thank you / Every time I realize who I am / Every time I hear a colonized person speak / A person who is not free yet / I say: Dessalines, thank you."2 In Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien (A rainbow for the Christian West), 1967, René Depestre celebrates the principal gods of the vodun pantheon, but also Makandal, the precursor of the slave revolt, and Toussaint Louverture, and Dessalines. Haitians have always been conscious of living in "a small, poor country that can only take pride in its glorious history";3 to be descended from heroes whose exploits once astounded the whole world is no doubt a source of comfort and self-esteem. Further, as the problems of the nation inexorably seem to become more and more unmanageable, the national sensibility seeks escape from the harsh realities of the present. The celebration of the glories of the Haitian past has by now become institutionalized, and corrupt leaders have never hesitated to use it as a collective palliative. Thus in a 1976 state of the nation speech President Jean-Claude Duvalier asserts that foreign critics of Haiti's government "cannot prevent us from being the Continent's second independent state and, 1 Cette révolution fut aussi grande que pas une. Le peuple qu'elle émancipa peut aujourd'hui s'en glorifier (Bergeaud [1859], 322). 2 Mèsi, Desalin / Papa Desalin, mèsi / Chak fwa m-santi sa m-ye / Chak fwa m-tande yon nèg koloni / Nèg ki poko lib pale /M-di: Dasalin, mèsi (Morisseau-Leroy [1983], 24). 3 un pauvre petit pays qui ne peut s'enorgueillir que de sa glorieuse histoire (Paul [1948]).

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as such, from having flown the flag of freedom over the insurgent lands of Latin America."4 This preoccupation - one might say this obsession - with the outside world's opinion is a fundamental trait of the Haitian sensibility. Ever since independence, Haiti has been the butt of racist denigrations and unfair scoffing on the part of foreigners. Haitians are conscious of the distorted and unflattering image of their country held abroad, and have always felt it their duty to correct it, by celebrating her virtues and explaining her failings. Yet Haitian history is not only a source of pride but also a source of shame. All literate Haitians are aware that their history since independence has been one of factious strife, of political instability and recurrent despotism. As each succeeding clique in power enriches itself at the expense of the nation, social and ecological degradation worsens steadily. The stature of the founding fathers - Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Pétion, Christophe - who in their time provoked the world's fear and admiration, seems all the more formidable when measured against the stature of their successors, who all too often provoke disgust or contempt. In his novel La vengeance de la terre (Revenge of the earth), Jean-Baptiste Cinéas laments: "The Heroes are dead. Their sons prove unworthy of their great memory. . . . We have regressed, we are regressing every day."5 Rodolphe Charmant put it even more categorically in 1946: "The history of Haiti, the one we are rightly proud of (for it is the most beautiful in the world), came to an end on January First 1804."6 Even Jean Price-Mars, that tireless fighter for Haitian dignity and self-respect, occasionally gives voice to his discouragement. After comparing the ancestors to valiant knights, he sighs: "But what have we turned this glorious inheritance into, except a series of abominations, a monstrous harvest of iniquities?"7 As these quotes show, the mission of improving the negative image of Haiti held by foreigners has never prevented Haitian intellectuals from denouncing the country's failings with uncompromising vigor. At the same time as they serve as advocates before world opinion, they act as accusers and prosecutors before their own compatriots. The landing of U.S. Marines and the subsequent occupation of Haiti by white masters seemed another divine intervention in the affairs of Haiti. This time, however, the goddess History had come to chastize, not to uplift: "Who knows whether the insult inflicted upon the country in 1915 was not the just punishment Providence exacted on this nation for having trampled under foot the conquests of its heroic ancestors!"8 Not surprisingly, the founding fathers of Haitian independence are seen by their descendants as mythical figures and story-book heroes, like Vercingetorix and Joan of Arc for the French or Miles Standish and George Washington for the Americans. But they are at the same time, in a very special way, relevant and alive in the public imagination. This is because the inner tensions in which these eighteenth-century men were caught are still operative in modern Haiti. Tensions, to be precise, between a privileged minority and a destitute majority, between blacks and mulattos, and between two

4 n'empêcheront pas que nous sommes le second état indépendant du Continent et qu'à ce titre nous avons promené le drapeau de la liberté sur les terres révoltées de l'Amérique Latine (Duvalier [1976]). 5 Les Héros sont morts. Leurs fils se révèlent indignes de leur grande mémoire. . . . Nous avons régressé, nous régressons tous les jours (Cinéas [1933], 100). 6 L'histoire d'Haïti, celle dont nous avons raison d'être fiers (car c'est la plus belle qu'il y ait dans le monde), s'arrête au premier janvier 1804 (Charmant [1946], 13). 7 Mais qu'avons-nous fait de cet héritage glorieux si ce n'est qu'une suite d'abominations, une monstrueuse moisson d'iniquités? (Price-Mars [1964], 390). 8 Qui sait si cette injure faite au Pays en 1915 n'a pas été un juste châtiment infligé par la Providence à ce peuple qui a foulé sous ses pieds les conquêtes de ses héroïques aïeux! (Fouché [1926], 80).

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opposing ideologies concerning the form of government best suited to the country. The black slave leader Makandal, for example, is celebrated in history textbooks. But at the time that he was conducting what we today would call terrorist activities against slave owners at least one-third of the slaves belonged to mulatto planters, who were no doubt as relieved as their white colleagues when the rebel was caught and burned at the stake. Jean-Baptiste Chavannes and Vincent Ogé, agitators broken on the wheel by the colonial authorities in early 1791, are also textbook heroes, but in point of fact only for the mulatto elite: they died for the rights of the freedmen of color, not for those of the black slaves, who they explicitly declared should be kept in bondage. Even after the abolition of slavery, Toussaint had to fight a ferocious war for supremacy against the mulatto freedmen commanded by Rigaud. After independence, to be sure, black and mulatto leaders joined in assassinating Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whom they suspected of wanting to protect the downtrodden peasantry against the depradations of the new ruling class. But the country was then partitioned for almost fifteen years into the Kingdom of Haiti, ruled by King Christophe, a black man, and the Republic of Haiti, under the mulatto president Alexandre Pétion. These two leaders had very different ideas regarding the form of government that Haiti should adopt. Christophe believed in an authoritarian, centralized form of government; Pétion favored a parliamentary system and laisserfaire economics. The tensions between the older mulatto elite, who tended to perpetuate the ideology of Pétion, and the black middle class, who favored Christophe's, have survived down to the present. "Black" and "mulatto" governments succeed each other and political rivalries add to the generally unspoken undercurrent of mistrust and resentment that separates the two ethnic groups. Under the rule of militant black presidents, such as Salomon (1879-89), Estimé (1946-50) or François Duvalier (195771), mulattos were persectued or discriminated against, and the celebration of Dessalines and Christophe, who in their time had also proclaimed a noiriste ideology (even though the latter had conspired to assassinate the former), took on special relevance. Conversely, when mulattos come to power, during the presidency of Elie Lescot (1941-46) for example, special honor is paid to the memory of Ogé and Pétion. The founding fathers are thus at the same time undifferentiated national heroes, remote mythical pillars propping up national pride, and familiar points of reference in the daily game of domestic politics and color discrimination. This double vision explains the weaknesses of Haitian historical writings about the origins of the country: they are either blatantly partisan (especially in the case of the first mulatto historians, Beaubrun Ardouin and Thomas Madiou), or indiscriminately hagiographic. Haitians are quite conscious of this: Antoine Pierre-Paul laments "the partiality of our historians who, in most cases, relate facts not as historians but as adversaries or partisans. Politics and all the passions it engenders have unfortunately influenced their works."9 Indeed, Leslie Manigat's attempts a few years ago to reassess favorably the presidency of President Salomon and to criticize Pétion's agrarian policy were widely interpreted as noiriste declarations of faith (as the author may very well have intended). Haitian historians have also been accused of mistaking timidity for impartiality: "Never, or almost never, do they allow themselves to criticize and to comment."10 At any rate, Haitian history of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century cannot yet be examined with 9 la partialité de nos historiens qui, le plus souvent, nous rapportent les faits non comme historiens mais comme adversaires ou comme partisans. La politique et toutes les passions qu'elle engendre ont malheureusement influencé leurs oeuvres (Pierre-Paul [1911], 8-9). 10 Jamais ou presque jamais ils ne se sont permis de juger et de commenter (Liautaud [1925], 66).

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the serenity that the passage of time should have brought, and the same is of course even truer of more recent events. As early as 1908 an anonymous reviewer pointed out that the only period of Haitian history that is written about at all is the saga of liberation. "When less timid writers dare to glance at a more recent past. . . they tremble before historical truth."11 It is interesting to note that historical scenes are a favorite source of inspiration for Haitian "naïve" or "popular" painting, which achieved world-wide recognition after World War II. Yet only those historical events of which Haitians can feel proud, to wit the war of independence and the peasant resistance against the American occupation of 1915-34 are depicted. Colorful as they surely were, neither the reign of Faustin Soulouque, nor the caco wars of the end of the nineteenth century, nor the grotesque Duvalier regime have been deemed worthy of artistic celebration. The ambiguity of a history that is both a reservoir of national pride and a source of national shame is paralleled by the ambiguity of racialism. On the one hand, all Haitians, whatever their phenotype, have always asserted and celebrated their African ancestry. On the other, they have internalized white contempt for Africa, and white color prejudice and standards of human beauty. Since Dessalines massacred the surviving Europeans immediately after the defeat of the French, and since - in contradistinction to what happened in the rest of the Caribbean - white and Asian immigration has never become statistically relevant, Haiti is truly the self-proclaimed Black Republic. Not only demographically but also ideologically: according to article XII of its first constitution - still in force under a modified form - "No white man, whatever his nation, will set foot on this territory as master or owner, nor will be allowed in the future to acquire any portion of it."12 The constitution of 1889 goes further in its stipulations about Haitian citizenship, which it defines as the birthright of: "Any individual born in Haiti of a foreign father or, if he is not recognized by his father, of a foreign mother, so long as he is descended from the African race."13 Not only was proof of African or Native American descent a necessary condition of citizenship, according to the Constitution of 1886, it was practically a sufficient one (something like Jewish ancestry for today's Israeli citizens): "All Africans, Indians, and all those of their blood, whether born in colonies or foreign countries, who come to reside in the Republic will be recognized as Haitians, but will only enjoy the rights of citizenship after a one-year residency."14 Haitians, then, even those few Haitians who could easily pass for Europeans, sincerely consider themselves of the African race, and claim their bonds of brotherhood with all their race brothers. Indeed, an important component of their patriotic pride rests on self-identification as the leaders and inspirers of black folk everywhere. As the mulatto historian Beauvais Lespinasse put it in his Histoire des affranchis de Saint-Domingue (History of the Saint Domingue freedmen): "Haiti, Africa's eldest daughter, considers her history and her civilization as the first page in the history of the rehabilitation of her race."15 And Hannibal Price waxes rhapsodic when he boasts: "I am from Haiti, the 11 Quand des écrivains moins timides se hasardent à jeter un coup d'oeil sur un passé plus récent . . . ils tremblent devant la vérité historique (Anon. [1908]). 12 Aucun Blanc, quelle que soit sa nation, ne mettra le pied sur ce territoire à titre de maître ou de propriétaire et ne pourra à l'avenir y acquérir aucune propriété (Ardouin [1856], 32). 13 Tout individu né en Haïti de père étranger, ou, s'il n'est pas reconnu par son père, de mère étrangère, pourvu qu'il descende de la race africaine. (Constitution [1889], Titre II, chapitre 1er, article 3). 14 Tout Africain, Indien et ceux issus de leur sang, nés dans les colonies ou en pays étrangers, qui viendraient résider dans la République seront reconnus Haïtiens, mais ne jouiront des droits de citoyen qu'après une année de résidence (Janvier [1886], 117). 15 Haïti, fille aînée de l'Afrique, considère son histoire et sa civilisation comme la première page de l'histoire de la réhabilitation de sa race (Lespinasse [1882], 19).

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Mecca, the Judea of the Black race, the country . . . where any man who has African blood in his veins must go on pilgrimage at least once in his life; for it is there that the Negro became a man."16 A sentiment later echoed by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire for whom Haïti is the country where "negritude rose for the first time and stated that it believed in its humanity."17 It is significant that Price writes of the Rehabilitation of the Black Race, just as Lespinasse had: Haitians saw themselves as those chosen blacks who had proved that the sons of Africa had the bravery and skill to defeat the white world's finest troops, and who were destined to show that they were also capable of making significant contributions to civilization. Thus would they give the lie to anti-black prejudice and "rehabilitate" the race in the eyes of the world. As Camille Borno put it: "Our very origins make it our duty to prove, by incontrovertible actions, that the Negro is, to the same degree as the White man, created intelligent."18 Not that Haitians were early proponents of negritude: how could they have been? The slave trade was ended and therefore all contact with Africa interrupted as early as 1791; their scant knowledge of their ancestral land was derived from French publications and, until shortly before World War II, neither the French nor anyone else conceived that such a thing as civilization could have arisen in sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, the Haitians always considered themselves the spokesmen and advocates of their fellow blacks, in the colonized Motherland or elsewhere: They never hesitated to support the efforts of the international abolitionist movement; they collected huge sums for John Brown's widow; lynchings in the American South and abuses in the colonies were denounced; derogatory depictions of blacks in literature, art, and films were protested; at the Society of Nations, and later at the United Nations, the Haitian delegation invariably defended the interests of their fellow blacks. Haitians were arguing not that hypothetical African values should be recognized, but that the widely postulated intellectual inferiority of the Negro was a myth, and that given the opportunity blacks could excel in the sciences as well as in the arts, in medecine as well as in jurisprudence, in commerce as well as in technology. The very existence of the Republic of Haiti, and its survival against overwhelming odds, was advanced as proof that blacks were indeed capable of self-government. Every success achieved by a Haitian on the world stage, whether an eloquent speech at an international meeting, or a novel well received by Parisian critics, or a successfully marketed coffee crop was seen as a victory not only for the nation but in the struggle for the rehabilitation of the race as well. When in 1942 the brothers Marcelin's novel Canapé vert received the second Latin-American novel prize from the Pan American Union, a Port-au-Prince critic didn't hesitate to proclaim that: "The brothers Marcelin have just proved the aptitude of Negro brains to culture . . . their success is the affirmation of the perfectibility of the Negro brain, its power of access to all the disciplines of the mind and to all the realms of universal knowledge."19 Conversely, every setback on the road to Western-style development, every revelation of social abuses and political corruption was

16 Je suis d'Haïti, la Mecque, la Judée de la race noire, le pays . . . où doit aller en pélerinage au moins une fois dans sa vie tout homme ayant du sang africain dans les artères; car c'est là que le nègre s'est fait homme (Price [1900], vii). 17 Haïti où la négritude se mit debout pour la première fois et dit qu'elle croyait à son humanité . . . (Césaire [1983], 46). 18 Notre origine même nous fait un devoir de prouver, par des faits irrévocables, que le noir est, à l'égal du blanc, créé intelligent (Borno [1861]). 19 Les frères Marcelin viennent de prouver l'aptitude du cerveau nègre à la culture . . . leur succès affirme la perfectibilité du cerveau nègre, sa puissance d'accession à toutes les disciplines de l'esprit et à tous les secteurs du savoir universel (Séide [1943]).

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seen as a setback for blacks everywhere: In 1893, at a moment when the country seemed about to plunge into anarchy, an editorialist writes: "What must others think of our Republic? If foreigners knew our political history, don't you think that the friends of our race would shrug their shoulders and sigh hopelessly?"20 Progressive Haitians have pointed out, tirelessly but without appreciable results, that only when the roughly 90 percent of their countrymen who are illiterate come to be educated will the Black Republic have a chance to contribute impressively to Western civilization. The elite seems to consider that its own achievements suffice for the purpose, and that educating the masses would only lead to social unrest. Such colonialist attitudes are present in other countries as well, but probably nowhere as blatantly as in Haiti, a fact of which literate Haitians are quite aware. Haitians, then, have traditionally asserted that belonging to the black race is an integral part of being Haitian. Yet in a way this has always been an ideological position rather than an affective conviction. In point of fact, educated Haitians shared to a large extent the European's paternalistic disparagement of things African. Haiti was for them the vanguard of Africa, to be sure, but a vanguard positioned very far ahead of the bulk of the troops. In Le mal d'Haïti (The disease of Haiti), Dr. Léon Audain's evaluation of the state of Africa, 1908, reads like a European propaganda pamphlet justifying colonization: "Up to now, Africa has remained steeped in such a state of ignorance that it has, for all intents and purposes, no conception of moral life. Brutal force is the only effective law. Woe to the weak! Niger nigro lupus! Between individuals, continuous war is waged, each seeking to plunder and enslave the other. . . . The only concerns of our unhappy African brothers is to find food and either to escape by stealth from their numerous enemies or to overwhelm them by sheer violence."21 Not only did Haitians consider themselves intellectually superior to their African cousins, they judged themselves more pleasing aesthetically. According to Louis-Joseph Janvier, once the blacks were deported to Haiti "an improvement, then a genuine intellectual transformation occurred and, further, a very notable physical selection."22 This allowed Alcius Charmant to assert that "We hardly resemble those primitive tribes of Africa either in physical beauty, in energy or in intelligence."23 Haitian women, in particular, have nothing to fear: in no way do they resemble the grotesque depictions of African females that amuse white folk. Of the heroine of his short story "Flavie," A. Lavaud writes: "It is in Haiti, it is in our country where sixty years of independence and freedom have improved and transformed the black woman that she should be observed. . . . Fatma was truly black and truly beautiful . .. her face was the purest oval, her nose straight and Grecian, her lips thin and sweetly purple."24 20 Que doit-on penser de notre République? Si l'étranger connaissait notre histoire intérieure, ne croyez-vous pas que les amis de notre race hausseraient les épaules en poussant des soupirs désespérés? (Sentinelle [1893]). 21 Jusqu'à présent, l'Afrique est plongée dans un tel état d'ignorance que la vie morale y est pour ainsi dire inconnue. La force brutale est la seule loi devant laquelle on s'incline. Malheur aux faibles! Niger nigro lupus! C'est la guerre continue entre les individus pour la suprématie qui assure de grossières jouissances matérielles, c'est la guerre continue entre les tribus et les peuplades, c'est le pillage, c'est l'esclavage des uns par les autres. . . . Les seules préoccupations de nos malheureux congénères d'Afrique sont de pourvoir à leur nourriture, d'échapper par la ruse ou de terrasser par la force leurs nombreux ennemis (Audain [1908], 47). 22 il s'est produit . . . une amélioration, puis une véritable transformation intellectuelle et, de plus, une très notable sélection physique (Janvier [1884], 29). 23 Nous ressemblons fort peu à ces peuplades primitives de l'Afrique, tant en beauté physique, en vigueur, qu'en intelligence (Charmant [1905], 8). 24 C'est à Haïti, c'est dans notre pays où soixante années d'indépendance et de liberté ont amélioré et transformé la négresse qu'il faut l'étudier. . . . Fatma était réellement noire et réellement belle . . . son visage était du plus pur ovale, le nez droit et taillé à la grecque, les lèvres minces et d'un doux violet (Lavaud [1881]).

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Whether consciously or not, the Haitian elite were satisfied by what they perceived as their country's adoption of Western intellectual and aesthetic norms and its progressive distancing from its African origins. This attitude might be understandable coming from the mulatto members of the elite, who were after all merely favoring one of their ethnic components over the other. But it proved more problematic for the black middle classes who, while having to a large degree internalized white and mulatto attitudes, could claim no biological links to Europe, and resented being discriminated against by those who did. The majority of the important positions in government, public administration and diplomacy tended to be monopolized by the light-skinned Haitians whose social clubs refused admission to compatriots of undesirable pigmentation. Marriage partners were valued in exact relation to their phenotype, the ideal being to "marry lighter" than oneself and thereby "improve the race" {améliorer la race). Mulatto girls were thus encouraged to marry foreign whites, and only if they belonged to rich or powerful families could young black women aspire to a mulatto husband. While this internalization of anti-black racialism is far from unknown in the rest of the Caribbean, it is especially shocking and paradoxical in the country which has always defined itself as the Black Republic. Writers and moralists never hesitated to denounce this aberration. Stéphen Alexis, in a novel significantly entitled Le nègre masqué (The masked Negro), did so with particular vehemence: "Despite White prejudice, which lumps us all together, from the lightest octoroon to the darkest Negro, as objects of contempt, you still establish wretched epidermic differences among yourselves. Don't complain about American prejudices [Alexis was writing under the American occupation]: the attitude of many among you justifies it."25 As could be expected, the question of color prejudice is only discussed in Haiti with great circumspection: "It has never been," according to René A. Saint-Louis, "raised openly and objectively, which makes it difficult to solve. It is a taboo mentioned only within the family circle or between close friends, never with outsiders, be they black or white."26 This might by and large be true as regards everyday social intercourse, but not as far as writing is concerned. Much to the contrary, the problem of color discrimination is obsessively present in the manifestations of Haitian sensibility. Erotic relations between Haitians and white foreigners have often been depicted and analyzed in such works of fiction as Magloire Saint-Aude's Parias (Pariahs), 1949, and Marie Chauvet's Amour (Love), 1968. More generally known under its English title Yellow Bird, the most famous Haitian song ever composed, Mauléar Monton's "Choucounne," with lyrics in Creole by Haiti's national poet Oswald Durand, is the sad story of the poet's desertion by Choucounne, his marabout (i.e., dark-skinned and silky-haired) mistress, who is seduced away by a visiting petit Blanc (a foreign "poor white"). Love and marriage between blacks and mulattos are a leitmotif of Haitian fiction. Hénock Trouillot's unambiguously entitled novel Chair, sang et trahison (Flesh, blood and treason), 1947, for example, recounts the martyrdom of a black girl whom a mulatto aristocrat marries for her money. His dark-skinned wife being a constant reminder of his social regression, he berates and abuses her until she is driven to suicide. Haitians, then, are acutely conscious that while risking discrimination abroad because of their color, they exercise the same discrimination - or are its victims - in their own country. 25 Malgré le préjugé blanc, qui nous confond tous dans le même dédain, depuis l'octavon le plus clair, jusqu'au nègre le plus noir, vous en êtes encore, entre vous, à de misérables distinctions d'épidemie! Ne vous plaignez pas du préjugé américain; l'attitude de beaucoup d'entre vous le légitime (Alexis [1933], 13). 26 [La question du préjugé de couleur] n'a jamais été soulevée ouvertement et objectivement, d'où la difficulté à y porter remède. Elle demeure un sujet tabou dont on parle en famille ou entre intimes, jamais avec des étrangers qu'ils soient Noirs ou Blancs (Saint-Louis [1970], 114).

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The existence of vodun, its influence on the daily life of the country, the extent to which it pervades the mentality of the common people and, possibly, contaminates that of the elite has always preoccupied Haitian intellectuals. An image of the folk religion which has little to do with reality has been popularized by foreign journalists, novelists, and cineasts. By conjuring up titillating scenes of orgiastic cannibalism or terrifying sorcery, they contribute significantly to Haiti's unflattering image abroad. In his review of Kenneth Roberts's best selling 1947 novel Lydia Bailey, Perceval Thoby notes that: "Like every American author writing about Haiti, Kenneth Roberts has dedicated more than twenty pages to Voodoo. . . . In this novel, Haiti becomes the receptacle of all primitive and African superstitions."27 No wonder, then, that Haitians have tried to counter racist accusations of superstitious savagery by playing down the extent of vodun practices in the country, or even denying their very existence. In a book specifically aimed at foreign readers, Sténio Vincent (who was to serve as president of Haiti between 1930 and 1941) wrote: "Under the onslaught of schools, churches, railroads, and rationally organized work, these traces of African superstition will eventually fade before victorious civilization."28 But in fact Haitians know very well how pervasive vodun remains in the countryside and among the urban poor. Like every manifestation of folk culture, it is despised by the ruling class and, of course, defended by subversive intellectuals who argue that it should be respected as being authentically Haitian. It is also accused of responsibility for many of the country's ills: the poor, supposedly, are poor because they squander so much of their income on sacrifices to vodun spirits; they are in ill health because they expend too much vital energy dancing and drinking during vodun ceremonies; fear and superstition are instilled in them by the legerdemain of unscrupulous witch doctors. Still today many well-to-do Haitians would agree with J. B., the chronicler who wrote, in Le Réveil of 26 October 1893: "The first achievement that we should wish for the nation is not, as one might think, the creation of railroads, of telegraphs, of telephones, of paved roads, but the cessation of the papaloi's [vodun priest's] influence, his total disappearance from the country."29 And yet, while claiming to despise and deplore vodun, elite Haitians fear the supposed malefic powers of its initiates, and respect their knowledge of esoteric remedies. They also freely admit that some (or perhaps many) of their class are secret practitioners. And that even those who aren't have often had the seeds of superstition and belief in irrational phenomena planted in their minds by the maids who cared for them as children. Thus: "the majority of Haitians, tormented by certain uncontrolled apprehensions, constantly dominated by the presence of the supernatural, remain hypersensitive types. Despite their education, they still look to hungans [i.e., vodun priests] to unravel the complexity of their dreams."30 Whether or not this is an exaggerated assessment of the influence of vodun on elite sensibility, the fact remains that the mysteries of the folk religion fascinate the Haitian reader just as much as his foreign counterpart. The first piece of prose fiction published by a Haitian, Ignace Nau's 1836 Idalina, deals with vodun and many of the Haitian novels written since 27 Comme tout auteur américain écrivant sur Haïti, Kenneth Roberts a accordé plus d'une vingtaine de pages au Vaudou. . . . Haïti se trouve, dans ce roman, le réceptacle de toutes les superstitions primitives et africaines (Thoby [1952]). 28 Ces restes de superstitions africaines, investis par l'école, la chapelle ou le temple, le chemin de fer, le travail organisé, disparaîtront facilement devant la civilisation victorieuse (Vincent [1910], 284). 29 Le premier progrès à souhaiter pour le pays, ce n'est certes pas, comme on se l'imagine, la création de chemins de fer, de Télégraphes, de Téléphones, de routes macadamisées, mais, bien plutôt, la cessation d'influence du papaloi, sa disparition complète du pays (J. B. [1893]). 30 La majorité des Haïtiens, tourmentés par certaines appréhensions non contrôlées, dominés constamment par la présence du surnaturel, demeurent des types hypersensibles, s'adressant encore, en dépit de leur éducation, aux Patriarches, aux houngans, aux connaisseurs pour dénouer la complexité de leurs rêves (Hyppolite [1965], 70).

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then have taken it as a secondary - if not as a primary - theme. Paradoxically, while protesting foreign sensationalization of vodun, Haitians treat it with the same mixture of ignorance and fascinated repulsion. "Haiti is an ambiguous nation," writes Ghislain Gouraige, adding: "and the ambivalence of her language is the foremost proof of this."31 Much has been written, by Haitians as well as by foreigners, about the uniqueness and complexity of Haiti's linguistic situation. As is well known, all Haitians without exception are fluent in Creole. Only about 15 percent of the population has any degree of competence in French, the official language, which less than one percent of Haitians speak as if it were their mother tongue. French has always been used as a barrier to upward social mobility: while knowledge of the official language is indispensable, the overwhelming majority of school-age children are denied the opportunity to learn it. Even those Haitians competent in French live in dread of committing a barbarism or a creolism which would immediately identify them as "uneducated" and therefore unworthy of elite social privileges. As Frantz Lofficial put it: "French is the language of fine speech and solemn circumstances. It functions as an external sign permitting the identification of the speaker's social status. . . ,"32 In point of fact, the repressive mechanism functions at every level of society: French linguistic expression is denied to peasants and workers, stingily measured to the lower middle classes, granted at their own risk to the middle classes, and preserved as the privilege of the elite. But of course the Haitian intellectual's attitude toward the French language is much less cynical than that. Belonging to the francophone world has always been a cause for pride, and many have sincerely considered it as fundamental to Haitianness. We have seen that Haitians assume the responsibility of being the spokesmen for black folk everywhere; they have at the same time assumed another responsibility: "In this Spanish and English America, our glorious destiny is to maintain French traditions and the French language."33 Most Haitians see the French language as: "The clearest, most concise of languages, the most supple and intelligent handmaiden of thought that humanity has known. . . ,"34 Once again we are faced with a paradox: When it expresses itself in French, Haitian sensibility uses a language deeply loved but nevertheless full of snares that imperil the speaker's self-image and social standing. Thus, for many Haitians, expressing themselves in the official language is akin to a virtuoso performance and, at the same time, something of an oral examination. In Haiti, French is the language of ceremony, in which intellectual speculation and abstract reasoning are couched. But of course Creole is the language of everyday life, of intimate conversation, of erotic expression, of friendly bantering. The trouble is that the attitude of most Haitians toward their national language is quite contradictory. On the one hand, few Haitians deny the complexity, richness, pungency and ribald incisiveness of Creole; all are deeply fond of "this delicious popular speech which we have inherited from our mothers' lips. . . . It will continue to charm us through the most pleasant emotions and the most touching memories."35 Yet at the same time, most 31

Haïti est une nation ambigüe et l'ambivalence de la langue en est la première preuve (Gouraige [1974], 137). Le français est la langue des beaux discours et des grandes circonstances. Il fonctionne comme signe extérieur permettant la reconnaissance du statut social du locuteur . . . (Lofficial [1979], 38). 33 Dans cette Amérique espagnole et anglaise, nous avons la glorieuse destinée de maintenir les traditions et la langue française (Sylvain [1927], 5). 34 une langue, la plus claire, la plus sobre, la servante la plus souple et la plus intelligente de la pensée que le monde ait connue .. . (Auguste [1909], 252-53). 35 Cette délicieuse langue du peuple que nous avons recueillie sur les lèvres de nos mères. . . . Elle continuera à nous séduire par les plus agréables émotions et les plus touchants souvenirs (Duplessis [1876]). 32

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Haitians have fiercely resisted efforts to dignify Creole by extending its use, by transcribing it so that it might acquire the status of a written language or by using it in schools. Here again, for two complementary reasons. First, because Creole is viewed as the language of the common people, and the elite has always thought that its privileges could only be maintained by systematically deprecating all forms of popular expression. When Jean-Joseph Vilaire claims that: "this dialect, spoken by the common people is unfit to express elevated ideas, noble sentiments and consequently is entirely unsuited for Haitians,"36 he is reacting to progressive thinkers such as Félix Morisseau-Leroy, for whom: "Without the Creole language the Haitian masses will never be transformed into communities aware of agricultural techniques, of the benefits of hygiene, of the advantages of cooperatives, of the citizen's rights and duties, etc. . . . Without the Creole language we shall never bring about freedom of expression in Haitian children and adults so that an articulate national community can participate in the debates in which the fate of the masses is decided."37 Second, even many of those who do not think that the extension of Creole would inexorably lead to some sort of populist revolution, fear that it would entail a decline in familiarity with French, with dire consequences for the nation: "A local idiom, spoken and understood by a small number of individuals, [Creole] would condemn us to isolation, if we decided to adopt it as our sole language, not only to political and commercial, but also to intellectual isolation."38 Yet even when speaking French, Haitians find it difficult not to inject pungent expressions in Creole for emphasis or to make sure their meaning is clear. As the proverb succinctly puts it: "Kreyol pale, kreyol konprann" ("Speak Creole and you are sure to be understood correctly"). Thus Jean-Claude Duvalier, whose official speeches were of course always in highly rhetorical French, didn't hesitate to quote a Creole saying as a warning to his opponents that he could be as ruthless as his father Papa Doc: "Pitit tig se tig," he declared, "the son of a tiger is also a tiger." Haitian wags have pointed out that "il est difficile de commencer une phrase en français sank ou pa fini-1 an kreyol." ("It is difficult to begin a sentence in French without ending it in Creole.") To the outsider especially, this intimate melding of two languages signals the originality of Haitian expression; it is the best vehicle for Haitian sensibility. To be sure, pure Creole is being used in a constantly increasing number of communication situations; political and other writings are being published in Creole, and French is in decline under the growing influence of English caused by the Americanization of the country and the enormous migration of Haitians to the United States. But after all, if Haitian sensibility is characterized by a kaleidoscope of ambiguities and paradoxes, its originality will surely continue to find its own way of expression, be it Creole, French, English or, more probably, an amalgam of all three.

36

Ce dialecte parlé par le peuple n'est pas propre à traduire les idées d'une certaine élévation, des sentiments nobles, et par conséquent ne convient nullement à l'Haïtien (Vilaire [1974], 57). 37 Jamais sans le créole on ne parviendra à transformer les masses haïtiennes en communautés conscientes des besoins de l'agriculture, des bienfaits de l'hygiène, des avantages de la coopérative, des droits et des devoirs du citoyen, etc. . . . Jamais sans le créole on ne réalisera la libération de l'expression chez l'enfant et l'adulte haïtiens en vue d'une communauté nationale articulée, participant aux débats qui décident du sort des masses (Morisseau-Leroy [1956]). 38 Idiome local, parlé et compris par un petit nombre d'individus, [le créole] nous condamnerait à l'isolement si nous devions en faire notre langue exclusive, isolement non seulement politique et commercial, mais encore intellectuel (Bellegarde [1925], 4).

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Bibliography Alexis, Stéphen. 1933. Le nègre masqué. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. (A novel whose influence introduced the expression "masked Negro" [nègre masqué] into everyday Haitian speech.) Anonymous. 1908. Le nouveau manuel d'Histoire d'Haïti de W.[ilson] Bellegarde. Le Soir. Port-au-Prince, 24 February. (An influential review of the Manuel d'histoire à l'usage des écoles de la République by a prolific historian of Haiti.) Ardouin, Beaubrun. 1856. Etudes sur l'histoire d'Haïti. Vol. 7. Paris: Imprimerie de Moquet. (Part of the monumental eleven-volume history of Haiti published between 1853 and 1860. Ardouin was a friend of Jules Michelet, who admired his work.) Audain, Dr. Léon. 1908. Le mal d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Verrollot. (A violent denunciation of the Haitian mentality by a distinguished Haitian specialist in tropical diseases.) Auguste, Nemours. 1909. Sur le choix d'une discipline, l'anglo-saxonne ou la française. Cap-Haïtien: Imprimerie La Conscience. (A francophile contribution to the national debate over the type of educational model Haiti should adopt.) Bellegarde, Marie. 1925. La langue française en Haïti. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Chéraquit. (An influential treatise by the niece of Wilson B. and the daughter of Dantès B., who incorporated passages from her book verbatim in a 1949 article in the magazine Conjonction.) Bergeaud, Emeric. 1859. Stella. Paris: Dentu. (The first novel written by a Haitian, Stella recounts the war of independence, portraying the allegorical warring brothers Romulus and Remus, one a mulatto, the other a black.) Borno, Camille. 1861. A propos de l'article 7. La feuille du commerce. Port-au-Prince, 22 June. (On the constitution of Haiti.) Césaire, Aimé. [1947]. 1983. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. In The Collected Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (The key text of the negritude movement in the best English translation.) Charmant, Alcius. 1905. Haïti vivra-telle? Le Havre: Imprimerie Leroy. (Attacks race prejudice in Haiti, the Monroe Doctrine, and the mulattos' role in Haitian history since Pétion.) Charmant, Rodolphe. 1946. La vie incroyable d'Alcius. Port-au-Prince: Société d'édition et de librairie. (The biography of Alcius Charmant, written by his son in the same ideological vein as Haiti vivra-t-elle?) Chauvet, Marie. 1968. Amour. Paris: Gallimard. (A novel combining the themes of Duvalierist oppression, color prejudice, and sexual repression by one of Haiti's best writers of fiction.) Cinéas, Jean-Baptiste. 1933. La vengeance de la terre. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie du collège de Vertières. (One of several novels of peasant life by this author.) Coicou, Massillon. 1892. Poésies nationales. Paris: Imprimerie Victor Goupy et Jourdan. (Poetry considered sufficiently subversive by then president Nord Alexis that he had this writer, teacher, and theater director executed without a trial.) Constitution de la République d'Haïti. 1889. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Nationale. (Promulgated under president Hippolyte, this constitution replaced the one written in 1888; it remained in force until the occupation of Haiti by the U.S. Marines. The occupation forces imposed a new constitution in 1918.) Depestre, René. 1967. Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien. Paris: Présence Africaine. (A poetry collection by one of contemporary Haiti's most famous writers, who received the French Renaudot prize for his novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves in 1989.) Duplessis, F[énelon?]. 1876. Qu'est-ce que notre créole? Le Travail. 9 November. (Fénelon D. was a poet whose Chants et pleurs (Songs and tears) were published posthumously in 1908). Duvalier, Jean-Claude. 1976. Discours. Le Nouveau Monde. Port-au-Prince, 21-22 June. (An official pronouncement by Baby Doc.) Edouard, Emmanuel. 1885. Le panthéon haïtien. Paris: Auguste Ghio. (Haitian highlights by the republic's official representative at Victor Hugo's funeral.)

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Faubert, Pierre. 1856. Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur. Paris: Imprimerie de Moquet. (The play, produced in February 1841, treats the life of a representative of St. Domingue's free men of color at the French National Assembly during the revolution. On his return, Ogé was broken on the wheel and executed by the French colonists.) Fouché, Zachée. 1926. Considérations sur l'état moral de la population haïtienne. Paris: J. J. Téqui. (The only published work by this author.) Gouraige, Ghislain. 1974. La diaspora d'Haïti et l'Afrique. Sherbrooke, Quebec: Naaman. (By the author of a good Histoire de la littérature haïtienne [Port-au-Prince, 1960].) Hyppolite, Michelson Paul. 1965. La mentalité haïtienne et le domaine du rêve. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. (Analyzes subconscious manifestations of tensions and frustrations that the author finds characteristic of the collective Haitian psyche. The author is also a Creole linguist.) Janvier, Louis-Joseph. 1884. L'égalité des races. Paris: Rougier. (An eloquent refutation of race prejudice by a renowned political scientist and intellectual.) —. 1886. Les constitutions d'Haïti. Paris: Marpon and Flammarion. (Official texts of Haiti's constitutions to 1886.) J. B. 1893. Le Papaloi, roi de sa secte. Le Réveil. Port-au-Prince, 26 October. Lavaud, A. 1881. Flavie. L'Oeil. Port-au-Prince, 15 October. Lespinasse, Beauvais. 1882. Histoire des affranchis de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Imprimerie Joseph Kugelmann. (A history of colonial and postcolonial Haiti showing mulattos in a more favorable light than blacks.) Liautaud, André. 1925. Pourquoi nos générations s'ignorent. La Nouvelle Ronde, Port-au-Prince, 1.4 (1 September):65-68. (By the author of a textbook on Haitian geography.) Lofficial, Frantz. 1979. Créole-français: une fausse querelle. Montréal: Collectif Paroles. (Stakes out a position between radical francophile and creolophile partisans, arguing for the peaceful coexistence of the two languages.) Magloire Saint-Aude, Clément. 1949. Parias. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. (The novel excels in its pungent evocation of life in Port-au-Prince, while giving a jaundiced view of interracial love; by a writer known primarily as a surrealist poet.) Manigat, Leslie F. 1957. Un fait historique: l'avènement à la présidence d'Haïti du Général Salomon. Port-auPrince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. (In January 1988 the author was enthroned by the army as president of Haiti, only to be deposed and sent into exile five months later.) —. 1962. La politique agraire du gouvernement d'Alexandre Pétion (1807-1818). Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie La Phalange. Moravia, Charles. 1908. La Crête-à-Pierrot. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie J. Verrollot. (The author was a prominent symbolist poet and author of patriotic verse plays.) Morisseau-Leroy, Félix. 1953. Diacoute. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Deschamps. (By the foremost proponent of Creole as a literary language, who adapted Sophocles's Antigone as Antigone en créole (1953). —. 1956. Dans la galerie des académiciens haïtiens. Le Nouvelliste. Port-au-Prince, 3 August. —. 1983. Diakout 1, 2, 3 ak twa lòt poèm. Miami: Jaden Kreyol. (The Creole version of [1953].) Nicholls, David. 1974. A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past, 1847-1867. Journal of lnteramerican Studies and World Affairs. 16.1:15-38. (Excellent examination of Haitian historiography.) Paul, Emmanuel C. 1948. Pour notre littérature. Haiti-Journal. Port-au-Prince, 24 November. (Argues for authenticity in Haitian literature and art.) Pierre-Paul, Antoine. 1911. Henri Christophe. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie C. Magloire. (Celebrates Christophe, whereas most Haitian historians have considered him a tyrant.) Price, Hannibal. 1900. De la réhabilitation de la race noire par la République d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie J. Verrollot. (Haiti should eradicate its African past and abolish vodun.) Price-Mars, Jean. 1964? Anténor Firmin. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie du Séminaire Adventiste. (The author is considered by Haitians to be the father of the negritude movement.) Roberts, Kenneth. 1947. Lydia Bailey. New York: Doubleday & Co. (A popular historical potboiler set, in part, in Haiti in the early nineteenth century.)

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Saint-Louis, René A. 1970. La présociologie haïtienne. Montréal: Leméac. (A study of the formation and evolution of social classes in St. Domingue and postcolonial Haiti.) Séide, Marc. 1943. Le succès du Canapé vert. Haïti-Journal. Port-au-Prince, 13 May. (The international success of the novel by the brothers Marcelin, published the previous year, vindicates Negro brains.) Sentinelle. 1893. Haïtiens, de grâce, écoutez-moi. L'Opinion Nationale. Port-au-Prince, 4 February. Sylvain, Normil. 1927. Chronique-Programme. La Revue Indigène. Port-au-Prince, July: 1-10. (Sylvain, poet and critic, published only in periodicals; a close collaborator of J. Roumain.) Thoby, Perceval. 1952. Le roman Lydia Bailey. L'Action. Port-au-Prince, 15 May. (A review of Roberts [1947].) Trouillot, Hénock. 1947. Chair, sang et trahison. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Pierre-Noël. (The only novel by an indefatigable writer on Haitian history, literature, and sociology.) Vilaire, Jean-Joseph. 1974. 4 causeries. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Adventiste. (Talks by an ardent admirer of French culture.) Vincent, Sténio. 1910. La République d'Haïti telle qu'elle est. Bruxelles: Société Anon. Belge d'Imprimerie. (A detailed introduction to Haiti, by a future president of the republic, intended to counter the unfavorable opinion of Haiti abroad.)

Martinique and Guadeloupe Time and Space RANDOLPH HEZEKIAH

University of the West Indies St. Augustine, Trinidad

Of all the various elements that normally combine to give shape and definition to any literature, the historical experience of slavery and the current political status of Martinique and Guadeloupe are key factors that have greatly influenced the nature and direction of the literature. Long after the abolition of slavery by the French in 1848, the descendants of African slaves, uprooted from their homeland and deprived of their religion and language, continue a desperate search for selfhood. They are torn between the nostalgia for a lost paradise and the harsh economic realities of daily existence, and are trapped in the cul-de-sac created by their political status. By the law of 19 March 1946, the French government decreed that its colonial possessions in the Caribbean (Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe) should move from the status of colonies to that of overseas departments (DOM), entitled, in theory, to the same privileges and bound by the same obligations as any other department in metropolitan France. In practice, a new system of exploitation was put in place whereby the DOM became increasingly dependent on France for basic commodities (food and clothing, for example) at prices far in excess of French prices; this tended to discourage local entrepreneurship. French Caribbean intellectuals have not been insensitive to the realities of the true relationship between metropolitan France and its Caribbean territories, and it is the Caribbean writer's perception of this relationship, reaction to it, and attempts to come to terms with it that inform their writing. The terrible effects of the slave trade linger and reverberate through the pages of French West Indian literature, and the drama of the master-slave relationship has left a scar on the West Indian psyche that only the artist seems qualified to heal. In any process of devaluation or dismissal of the imaginative writing of Martinique and Guadeloupe that predates Césaire's work, critics have for some time concluded that the literature really comes of age and achieves its independence, so to speak, with the new awareness that illuminates the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), which was published in a Paris magazine in August 1939. Césaire's work, they argue, offered French West Indians a vision of themselves and their world that colonialism and the process of assimilation had denied them. It sought to eliminate the Negro's feeling of inferiority and restlessness, that sense of inadequacy stemming from the use of a metropolitan language unsuited to the expression of Antillean reality. It aimed at the blacks' total liberation and the restoration of their self-esteem. For a generation now, it has been assumed that this poem, together with the works of the Guianese Léon Damas and the Senegalese, Léopold Senghor, launched the negritude movement that continues, in one way or another, to influence critical writing on black literature.

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Creative writing in Martinique and Guadeloupe before 1930 speaks of the exotic beauty of the white plantocracy, and of the ambivalence shared by Negro and mulatto alike, torn between feelings of inferiority and the desire to be accepted by the European master. Such writing is best understood against the background of a society whose accepted standards (both literary and moral) were those imposed by the European overlord. The writers of that period saw themselves and their country as the Other saw them. It is only with the publication of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal that the territories concerned begin to find a valid, authentic means of expression and a different perception of self. The spiritual return undertaken by Césaire involves an honest and penetrating examination and acceptance of the harsh realities of existence in his homeland, as well as a recognition of the importance that such a journey has for the recovery and integration of the disparate elements of his personality. During this process of rehabilitation, the poet relies heavily on memory and on powerful concrete imagery in order to situate himself in time and space. Indeed, Césaire can be said to have contributed to the establishment of the tradition of the folk epic in French Caribbean literature, in the sense that his work seeks to stimulate the creation of firm native traditions, ideals, and characteristics. The poem is a rejection of European civilization and values as well as the affirmation of a black identity: it refuses the profound alienation generated by three centuries of enslavement and attempts to give new meaning and value to the blacks' situation in the world by referring to their African origins as a natural and instinctive link to their present surroundings. In the absence of unbiased records and an authentic image of black people's presence in the New World, the poet assumes the responsibility of self-definition through the power of the word: "At the end of the dawn these countries without steles, these paths without memories, these winds without tablets. What does it matter? We shall tell. Sing. Shout. Open voice, large voice, you will be ours, our spearhead" (Césaire [1971-a], 70).1 Of special interest here is the suggestion that the living, authentic history of the people is to be found in the land and the elements, so that the process of self-discovery will inevitably involve not only a conscious and deliberate shift to time past, but also a close identification with the earth and the elements in a pantheistic relationship reminiscent of the French romantic poets. In this context, Césaire's naming the various elements must be seen as a kind of magical incantation through which he will transcend the limits of space and time and gain access to his authentic self by the sheer power of the word: "I should discover once again the secret of great communications and of great combustions. I should say storm. I should say river. I should say tornado. I should say leaf. I should say tree" (Césaire [1971-a], 58).2 The elements of nature named tend to surpass their ordinary, superficial meaning and take on a deep symbolic significance. The tree, for example, with its feet planted firmly in the ground, will become a symbol of hope for an uprooted and alienated people: "who and what are we? Excellent question! From looking at trees I have become a tree and my long tree-feet have dug in the ground long serpent holes . . . " (Césaire [1971-a], 74).3 Certain symbols serve as a potentially liberating force for the collective unconscious of the

1 Au bout du petit matin ces pays sans stèle, ces chemins sans mémoire, ces vents sans tablette. // Qu'importe? // Nous dirions. Chanterions. Hurlerions. //Voix pleine, voix large, tu serais notre bien, notre pointe en avant (Césaire [1971-a], 71). 2 Je retrouverais le secret des grandes communications et des grandes combustions. Je dirais orage. Je dirais fleuve. Je dirais tornade. Je dirais feuille. Je dirais arbre (Césaire [1971-a], 59). 3 Qui et quels nous sommes? / Admirable question! // A force de regarder les arbres je suis devenu un arbre et mes longs pieds d'arbre ont creusé dans le sol de larges sacs à venin (Césaire [1971-a], 75).

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people. The tree symbol has the added dimension of strength and verticality signifying control of one's destiny, as opposed to the horizontal position of submis sivenes s and degradation expressed in "And my soul grovels like this city in the filth and mud" (Césaire [1971-a], 104).4 The horizontal position suggests, in my view, not only weakness but castration, so that the tree can be seen as a phallic symbol of male virility and regeneration in much the same way that the poet's reclaimed land rises up, erect, to meet the sun, universal source of power and energy: "I have words vast enough to contain you and you, earth, tense, drunken earth, great sex raised to the sun, great delirium of the phallus of God . . ." (Césaire [1971-a], 58, 60).5 For Césaire, the violence inflicted on a colonial society calls for a radical response. The violence of certain images in his poem is an expression of the urgent need to create a new life-force able to transform the poet's decaying world through the cataclysmic forces contained in the volcano, the hurricane, and the earthquake: "And now suddenly that force and life assail me like a bull, and the wave of life encircles the papilla of the hill . . . and the enormous lung of the breathing cyclones, and the hoarded fire of volcanoes and the gigantic seismic pulse which beats the measure of a living body in my firm embrace" (Césaire [1971-a], 136, 138).6 The image of the volcano is particularly striking, not only because it immediately brings to mind the devastation of St. Pierre by the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelée, but also because it is invested with the antithetical powers of destruction and regeneration (as seen in the fertility of volcanic earth). Its powers of transformation are clearly illustrated by the fact that it is the point at which the four basic elements of air, fire, water, and earth descend into the bowels of the earth and are mixed and transformed. Above all, the long period of containment and dormancy followed by a sudden violent eruption is analogous to the long period of suffering and oppression experienced by a colonized people and the revolt that may follow. The hurricane contains the three elements of air, water, and fire (in the form of lightning) and ravages the fourth - earth. The eye of the hurricane may be taken to symbolize the hole or void through which one may move from the world of space and time into spacelessness and timelessness. The earthquake represents a sudden and dramatic change in the life process and is believed on occasion to promote fertility. It is therefore quite clear that the natural forces of Césaire's environment, transformed by the poetic imagination, become his allies in the fight for liberation. In an interview with René Depestre translated by Lloyd King, Césaire acknowledges his debt to surrealism "as an aid to mutual intent" and as a "liberating factor" (Césaire [1971-b], 72). He argues thus: "If I apply the Surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can call up the forces of the unconscious . . . if one descends to the depths, one can discover the fundamental Negro" (Césaire [1971-b], 73). Césaire seeks to apply his poetic imagination to an interpretation of his environment in such a way that it will release the hidden meanings of his universe through symbols designed to assist him in the "de-alienating process" (Césaire [1971-b], 73). This recourse to the landscape as part of the process of decolonization and self-affirmation has become a fairly common feature of Caribbean literature. The St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, believes that the New World poets have a vision of the New World that is Adamic, and that the poet's responsibility is to identify and give

4

Et mon âme est couchée. Comme cette ville dans la crasse et dans la boue couchée (Césaire [1971-a], 105). j'aurais des mots assez vastes pour vous contenir et toi terre tendue terre saoule / terre grand sexe levé vers le soleil / terre grand délire de la mentule de Dieu (Césaire [1971-a], 59, 61). 6 Et voici soudain que force et vie m'assaillent comme un taureau et l'onde de vie circonvient la papille du morne . . . l'énorme poumon des cyclones qui respire et le feu thésaurisé des volcans et le gigantesque pouls sismique qui bat maintenant la mesure d'un corps vivant en mon ferme embrasement (Césaire [1971-a], 137, 139). 5

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meaning to his own world: "We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world with Adam's task of giving things their names . . ." (Walcott [1973], 152). After his group's collaboration in an election victory, Thaël, one of the major characters in the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant's first novel, La Lézarde (The ripening), is moved to express a feeling of satisfaction and triumph at the deep self-awareness that has come to him and to his friends through their close association with the landscape. The link between political liberation of the people and the liberation of the people's consciousness is clearly expressed here: "And with the river, I discovered the land, the red hills, the fertile lands, the sand. Good. As friends, we all came to know this country. We knew little to begin with, but we soon learnt to use our eyes. And finally we managed to become fully aware and to name our world" (Glissant [1985], 185).7 It is interesting to note the extent to which the Caribbean writer's process of self-discovery involves a journey in space and time to the moment of self-realization, the dawn of consciousness (Césaire's incantatory "at the end of the dawn"), when the mind will finally apprehend the full authenticity of the world's inner resonances. It is in much the same way that the narrator-protagonist in Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (The lost steps), 1953, makes his Orphic descent into the primeval forest in order to reconcile within himself the conflicting forces of the Old and the New World. This is also why Derek Walcott considers the New World poet's vision of man to be "elemental, a being inhabited by presences, not a creature chained to his past" (Walcott [1974-b], 2). The "presences" inhabit the landscape and come to life in the consciousness of the people through poetic symbols charged with a meaning that has remained buried beneath the superficial logic of ordinary language and lost in the mists of time. The particular spaces explored by Martinican and Guadeloupean writers are water, land, and air; it is these areas that are invested with the secret potential of organizing a new set of values for an alienated people. For at the root of such an exploration lies the feeling of spatiotemporal dislocation experienced by a people transplanted from a vast and distant continent to the confinement of a small island and subjected to an alien culture. The positive attempts by the postnegritude generation of Caribbean writers to create a new order and establish new beginnings are in direct contrast to Césaire's negative protests and rejection of European culture. Césaire's vision of the Negro in the Cahier would appear to be an acceptance of the image imposed by the white man: "Eia for those who invented nothing / for those who have never discovered / for those who have never conquered" (Césaire [1971-a], 116).8 The Caribbean perception of Negroes as the helpless victims of historical circumstances doomed to protest their innocence is one that does not permit blacks to assume a dynamic role in the shaping of their destiny. For the new breed of Caribbean writers, what is of paramount importance is the redefinition of their own history in accordance with their own needs and peculiar sensibility. Such a view is expressed by Glissant in his essay L'intention poétique (Poetic intent), 1969: "We must take charge of our own history completely, live it out in its entirety in order perhaps to transcend it (like the sea) for a second time."9

7 Et puis la Lézarde, depuis la source jusqu'à la mer. Et avec la Lézarde j'ai connu la terre, les mornes rouges, la terre grasse, les sables. Bon. Nous ne savions rien, mais nous avons regardé à la fin. Et à la fin nous avons pu le nommer, en toute connaissance (Glissant [1958], 239). 8 Eia pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien inventé / pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien exploré / pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien dompté (Césaire [1971-a], 117). 9 Il faut assumer l'histoire à fond (la vivre ensemble) afin peut-être de la dépasser (comme la mer) une nouvelle fois (Glissant [1969], 18).

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Any such attempt by the Caribbean artist/intellectual to establish a new philosophy of history is destined to encounter certain problems. In the first place, exposure to the European system of education has conditioned the artist/intellectual to see history in terms of a logical sequence (cause and effect) of facts and dates. The other major problem encountered is the stigma of being without a history: a non-person. "There are no people there in the true sense of the word with a character and purpose of their own" writes J. A. Froude in The English in the West Indies, 1887. The quotation appears as an epigraph to Naipaul's Middle Passage, and the contemptuous view is echoed by Naipaul himself in the same text: "History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies" (Naipaul [1962], 20). The most appropriate of Caribbean responses to the dilemma of this confrontation with history involves the use of the creative imagination to construct in the collective consciousness a living experience drawn from folklore and legend. It is a deliberate effort to correct what Walcott terms the "amnesia of the races" (Walcott [1974-a], 6). In the course of a debate on the novel in the Americas, Glissant argues that "it is quite impossible to erase from the Cambodian's memory his own history because there exist vestiges of a cultural, civilizational, linguistic, and religious nature."10 This is not the case of the West Indian. In his second novel, Le quatrième siècle (The fourth century), 1964, Glissant elucidates the problem through the relationship between the descendants of two slave families: papa Longoué, a maroon and quimboiseur, or sorcerer, and young Mathieu Béluse, who anxiously questions papa Longoué about the nature of the past. By assigning papa Longoué the role of griot or storyteller in this chronicle of two slave families, Glissant achieves a fascinating manipulation of time and space that creates a new vision of the world. Papa Longoué's perception of time is not chronological or based on facts and dates, as is the case with the more educated Mathieu. For the old man, time is to be measured in terms of the lived experiences of blacks in the New World: "The sea that you cross is a century. And the coast where you disembark, blinded, without soul or voice, is a century . . . And the forest, preserving its power till the day you became a maroon . . . is a century. And the earth, flattened little by little, made bare at the point where those who came down from the hills and those who waited patiently in the plain met to begin weeding together is a century."11 Therein lies the solution to the mathematical mystery of the novel's title. Papa Longoué embarks with Mathieu on a long, leisurely meditation on the past that is characterized by a similar fusion of time and space. It is an unhurried journey, full of detours and repetitions, during which both characters allow themselves to be guided by their instincts in responding across time to the vibrations of their environment that hold the key to their history: "The entire story will become clear in this very land, reflected in the changing appearances of the land with the passage of time. Papa Longoué knew that. He shuddered lightly, thinking that Mathieu should at least learn by himself how to look at an outcrop of forest rolling down toward a patchwork of ploughed land, and learn all by himself how to sense the quivering of that past madness, in that very spot where men's madness now set its hard and patient greed . . . He stretched his hands out toward the plain: toward that other ocean rising up between this country and the mountain of the

10 on ne peut raturer la mémoire historique des Cambodgiens, ce n'est pas possible, il y a des vestiges culturels, civilisationnels, linguistiques, religieux (Glissant [1973], 37). 11 La mer qu' on traverse, c'est un siècle . . . Et la côte où tu débarques, aveuglé, sans âme ni voix, est un siècle. Et la forêt, entretenue dans sa force jusqu'à ce jour de ton marronnage . . . est un siècle. Et la terre, peu à peu aplatie, dénudée, où celui qui descendait des hauts et celui qui patientait dans les fonds se rencontrèrent pour un même sarclage, est un siècle (Glissant [1964], 268-69).

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past."12 Glissant's concept of time, which permits free movement between past, present and future, is highlighted by the fairly substantial role played by papa Longoué in La Lézarde, which precedes Le quatrième siècle in time of publication, but whose action is situated after the events related in the later novel. The quimboiseur's appearances in the later novels - Malemort (Evildeath), 1975, La case du commandeur (The driver's cabin), 1981, and Mahagony (Mahagony), 1987 - are evidence of Glissant's successful creation of a legendary folk hero who transcends the limits of time and space, thereby establishing in the imagination and consciousness of the people a powerful, reassuring myth. Glissant' s theory of cyclic time uniting past, present, and future is quite evident here. There seems to be a certain similarity between Longoué and Télumée Miracle in Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. Her miraculous recovery is like a rebirth, and like Longoué, she belongs to a line of ancestors whose spiritual strength elevated them to the status of living legends. At the very start of the novel, Télumée says of her grandmother, Toussine: "My mother's reverence for Toussine was such that I came to regard her as some mythical being not of this world, so that for me she was legendary even while still alive" (Schwarz-Bart [1982], 2).13 She too inhabits the morne and is trapped in a vicious circle of suffering, unable to escape the vortex of time. One aspect of the system of ancestral beliefs that accords transcendental powers to especially gifted individuals has survived almost intact the ravages of time and colonial oppression throughout the diaspora: the slight distance separating the world of legend from the world of psychic experience. In Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Man [Grandma] Cia's healing powers and her ability to transform herself into an animal place her in the same category as papa Longoué. They both exist outside of society in a special world of primeval truth; it is to this world that those who seek knowledge and enlightenment come. The theme of the journey in Caribbean literature is a fairly common one. The voyage is not merely one of adventure but one that symbolizes the desire for self-fulfillment or self-identification in the context of a society that is itself unfulfilled and unsure of its identity. In Joseph Zobel's La rue Cases-Nègres (Black shack alley), 1950, José Hassam's movement from the canefields to Fortde-France is motivated essentially by the need to escape the dehumanizing existence of black shack alley through education. Although his quest is personal and his commitment is to himself and to his family, José's awareness of the suffering experienced by his grandmother, Tine, and Médouze as caneworkers is so acute that his memory of their degradation establishes the land (when not owned by black folks) as the symbol of a destructive force. On Grandma Tine's death, it is her hands that express her utter degradation: "Her black hands, swollen, hardened, cracked at every joint, and every crack encrusted with a sort of indelible mud. Cramped fingers, bent in all directions, their ends all worn and reinforced with nails thicker, harder and more shapeless than the hooves of God knows what animal that had galloped on rocks, in scrap iron, in a dung heap, in mud . . . they had seen so many blemishes, drawn and raised so many loads. And every day squeezed, scratched and 12 Toute l'histoire s'éclaire dans la terre que voici: selon les changeantes apparences de la terre au long du temps. Papa Longoué savait cela. Il tremblait doucement, pensant que Mathieu devrait au moins apprendre seul à regarder une saillie de bois coulant vers un tamis de labours, et apprendre tout seul à sentir le frémissement de l'ancienne folie, là où la folie des hommes posait maintenant sa rigide et patiente cupidité . . . Il étendit les mains vers la plaine: vers cet autre océan surgi entre le pays d'ici et la montagne du passé (Glissant [1964], 47). 13 Ma mère la vénérait tant que j'en étais venue à considérer Toussine, ma grand-mère, comme un être mythique, habitant ailleurs que sur terre, si bien que toute vivante elle était entrée, pour moi, dans la légende (Schwartz-Bart [1972], 11).

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clinging to the handle of the hoe, an easy prey to the fierce cuts inflicted by the cane leaves to create Route Didier" (Zobel [1980], 181).14 In Maryse Condé's La vie scélérate (The tree of life) 1987, Albert Louis's father, Mano, suffers a fate similar to that of Grandma Tine. Albert abandons his job in the canefields of his native Guadeloupe to work in Panama (on the construction of the canal), in San Francisco, and in New York. He makes a full circle, returning to set himself up in the import/ export business (an area normally controlled by the békés, the powerful white creole families), and he exploits his own people. Albert's quest, like that of his daughter Thécla, does not produce a sense of fulfillment or commitment. It is perhaps because of his total commitment to a sociopolitical ideal that Thaël's voyage from the hills to the plains of Lambriane in La Lézarde assumes a deeper significance for himself, his friends, and for Caribbean society. Like Longoué, Thaël is a descendant of the maroons and has chosen to live in the forested hills that represent in the novel the freedom associated with the ancient past, as opposed to the plains whose canefields and factories symbolize degradation, exploitation, and modernity. Thaël's initial descent to the plains was prompted by an instinctive urge for enlightenment. When he later follows the course of the Lézarde River down to the sea, it is with the intention of murdering Garin, a government official considered by certain progressive elements to be an obstacle to the transformation of the society. Both voyages provide the opportunity not only for a reflection on the landscape and on his place in it but also for a global vision of the country. The election campaign activities of Thaël and his friends, who crisscross the country, suggest the unity so important to an otherwise fragmented Caribbean society. This unity is precisely what the river symbolizes in its flow from the source (or past), embracing the town (or the present), and emptying into the sea (the future). Télumée Miracle remains isolated in the hills, and comes close to death. Thaël descends from his mountain retreat and awakens to life. The river symbolizes the movement in time and space from the mysterious hidden beginnings through the bustle of daily life to the future freedom and enlightenment of the open sea: "I do not yet know that from the legends of mountain where this river rose to the grey, clear-cut realities of the plains there are no breaks . . . nor do I know that this irreversible flow leads to the delta of our fantasies, to the dawn of a true and painful knowing" (Glissant [1985], 33).15 The river dominates the novel and seems to shape the destiny of the people. Indeed, other elements of the landscape seem to possess this quality of shaping and guiding man's destiny. The silk-cotton tree, the hog plum tree, and the flame tree all define certain boundaries. The silk-cotton tree is responsible for the death of an unfaithful woman and the flame tree seems to draw Valérie to her death. The flame tree not only symbolizes the spirit of freedom and maroon resistance but it also brings the light of reason to the darkness of the past. There are frequent examples throughout the novel of images depicting the juxtaposition or link between darkness and light, the message being one of reconciliation between conflicting forces in a drive toward unity. In the introduction to his translation of La Lézarde, Michael Dash refers to the image of the 14 Ses mains noires, gonflées, durcies, craquelées à chaque repli, et chaque craquelure incrustée d'une boue indélible. Des doigts encroûtés, déviés en tous sens; aux bouts usés et renfoncés par des ongles plus épais, plus durs et informes que des sabots de je ne sais quelle bête ayant galopé sur des rochers, dans de la ferraille, du fumier, de la vase . . . elles avaient essuyé tant de macules, tiré et soulevé tant de fardeaux. Et quotidiennement pincées, éraflées, et cramponnées au manche de la houe, en proie aux morsures féroces des feuilles de canne, pour créer la Route Didier (Zobel [1974], 239). 15 Je ne sais pas encore que des légendes de la montagne où cette eau a grandi jusqu'aux réalités grises, précises, de la plaine, le chemin n'a pas de haltes . . . ni que ce flot sans retour mène au delta de nos magies, qui est l'aube de la vraie et douloureuse science (Glissant [1958], 32).

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banyan tree as one that "transcends normally opposed categories of experience - past and present, growth and decline, upward and downward. It fuses time and space in its projection of a cyclic return of past, present, and future, and symbolizes fidelity and a constant unfolding in its network of down-growing branches . . . winding about the sea" (Glissant [1985], 16). The novel goes beyond the narrow confines of the Martinican experience and is an invitation to share Glissant's ideal of antillanité or Caribbeanness that seems to be the dream of the policeman Alphonse Tigamba at the end of the novel: "Sometimes I dream of islands, all the islands around us . . . it seems absurd that they should have separate existences, similar islands in the same sea. They ought to be joined together" (Glissant [1985], 152).16 Of all the journeys in the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe, that of the hero in SchwarzBart's Ti Jean l'Horizon (Little John horizon), 1979, is undoubtedly the most complex, for the simple reason that it takes place on superimposed levels of reality and fantasy. At the level of reality, Schwarz-Bart reveals a Guadeloupe that presents characteristics similar to those encountered in other novels: the conflict of identity as well as the conflict between mountain dwellers and the inhabitants of the plains. The level of fantasy is introduced when Ti Jean is swallowed by a beast, journeys to Africa (in a manifestly allegorical search for his roots), and eventually returns to Guadeloupe. The fantastic journey in the entrails of the beast is reminiscent of the one made by Donne and his crew in Wilson Harris's The Palace of the Peacock involving a spiritual death and rebirth. The journey Ti Jean makes outside the limits of time and space is clearly an attempt at self-discovery. In Africa, he comes to understand that he does not belong there so that his return to Guadeloupe takes on added significance. He recognizes that if one is to find one's identity one must begin at home: "But he realized now, our dear fellow, that this end would only be a beginning; the beginning of something which awaited him there, among these clusters of broken-down shacks, these huts, these make-shift shelters beneath which whispered stories were exchanged and people were already dreaming of reinventing their lives, feverishly, by the light of torches simply planted in the earth."17 When we consider that a number of the English-speaking territories in the Caribbean have been politically independent for almost twenty years and are still a long way from psychological independence, the case of Martinique and Guadeloupe is a little disturbing. There are several imperatives in the equation. The first is full political and economic independence. The next is some form of unity within the fragmented Caribbean across all language barriers, the basis for which already exists: "the unity is submarine" says Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Brathwaite [1975], 1). Capitalists have strenuously and continuously opposed the realization of the first two objectives. The responsibility therefore lies partly with the writer/intellectual. During the discussion period at the 1973 Montreal conference on the novel of the Americas, Edouard Glissant argued: "As writers, it is therefore our duty to signify things, to create a reading public, to keep the matter under constant review . . . in other words, we are living out what I call a problematic, and that is our common ground, that is why I called it a model of living experience."18 16 Parfois je rêve, je vois des îles, toutes ces îles autour de nous, je me dis: on ne peut pas, toutes ces îles pareilles, dans les mêmes deux mers. Il faudrait les réunir (Glissant [1958], 196). 17 Mais il voyait maintenant, nostr'homme, que cette fin ne serait qu'un commencement; le commencement d'une chose qui l'attendait là, parmi ces groupes de cases éboulées, ces huttes, ces abris de fortune sous lesquels on se racontait à voix basse et l'on rêvait, déjà, ou réinventait la vie, fiévreusement, à la lueur de torches simplement plantées dans la terre . . . (Schwartz-Bart [1979], 286). 18 Donc nous sommes obligés, nous écrivains, de signifier la chose, créer la personne qui va lire, mettre ou remettre en question la chose . . . c'est dire que nous vivons ce que j'appelle une problématique, et c'est par là que nous nous rencontrons, c'est pour ça que j'ai appelé ça un modèle vécu (Glissant [1973], 44).

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Bibliographyy Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1975. Caribbean Man in Space and Time. Savacou. ll/12(Sept):l-ll. (A number of interesting ideas put forward.) Carpentier, Alejo. 1953. Los pasos perdidos. Mexico City: E.P.I.A.P.S.A. Césaire, Aimé. 1971-a. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Trans. by Emile Snyder. Introduction by André Breton. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971. (Bilingual edition.) Césaire, Aimé. 1971-b. Truer than Biography: Aimé Césaire interviewed by René Depestre. Trans. by Lloyd King. Savacou. 5(June):71-80. Condé, Maryse. 1987. La vie scélérate. Paris: Editions Seghers. Glissant, Edouard. 1958. La Lézarde. Paris: Seuil. —. 1985. The Ripening. Trans. and intro. by Michael Dash. London: Heinemann. (Excellent translation and introduction of La Lézarde.) —. 1964. Le quatrième siècle. Paris: Seuil. —. 1969. L'intention poétique. Paris: Seuil. —. 1973. Rencontre internationale des écrivains à Montréal, 6-13 Sept. Thème: Le roman des Amériques. Liberté. Vol. XV. (Extremely valuable document containing key ideas relating to the problems of New World writers.) Naipaul, V. S. 1962. The Middle Passage. London: Deutsch. (Travel writing; interesting for Naipaul's early views on the Caribbean.) Schwarz-Bart, Simone. 1972. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. Paris: Seuil. —. 1982. The Bridge of Beyond. Trans. [of Pluie et vent] by Barbara Bray. Intro. by Bridget Simone Jones. London: Heinemann. (Good translation. Fine introduction.) —. 1979. Ti Jean l'Horizon. Paris: Seuil. Walcott, Derek. 1973. Another Life. London; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —. 1974-a. The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry. Journal of American Studies. 16(Feb):6. (Excellent article.) —. 1974-b. The Muse of History. Is Massa Day Dead?. Ed. by Orde Coombs. New York. (Penetrating and wide-ranging.) Zobel, Joseph. [1950]. 1974. La rue Cases-Nègres. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1980. Black Shack Alley. Trans. and intro, by Keith Q. Warner. Pref. by Christian Filostrat. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press.

French Guiana

BRIDGET JONES

Roehampton Institute

French Guiana and its writers occupy a distinctive space on the map of Caribbean literature. This is the outer edge of what can be termed Caribbean, being the smallest and least developed of the Guyanas and the only outpost of French rule, influence, and culture on the South-American continent. Though often linked for administrative convenience to the island Départements d'Outre-Mer, this land of rivers and deep forest has a very different style and temper. French Guiana has always been perceived as a blank on the map. Approaching by sea, Europeans mapped the coasts, but the interior remained an empty space upon which they could project their fantasies: yearnings for the fabled riches of El Dorado, for a fertile garden of paradise, or conversely, nightmare visions of torment, a green hell of forced exile, confinement, disease, and death. Faced with such persistent sensationalism it has proved particularly arduous for local writers to find a language for their own reality in which to identify and share their desires and dreams. Many of the most gifted - Félix Eboué, René Maran, Léon Damas, Bertène Juminer - have worked elsewhere, leaving the parochial dimensions of Cayenne for a wider stage. Creating an identity for French Guiana through a local literature remains even today an enterprise scarcely begun. The Antilles are crisply outlined by island shores, but French Guiana only slowly takes shape in the mind. The southern border long remained a hypothetical artistic blur, and only in 1900 was the contested eastern frontier set at the Oyapock by the cession of vast tracts of the Amapa to Brazil. For much of their history, Amerindian clans and maroon noirs réfugiés (bush Negroes) have ignored colonial frontiers, disappearing discreetly if conscription or taxation threatened. Even today the frontiers prove difficult to police, permeable to migrants from neighboring regions, and to Haitians desperate for security and the chance of a job. Civil strife in Suriname since 1986 has brought thousands of refugees across the Maroni River to St. Laurent. In a new, far more complex mosaic of cultures, the Creoles, the mainly black and brown citizens established in Cayenne, no longer radiate the same self-confidence as a normative group. Both the need to define a center - the absorbing debates on the nature of this we (Chalifoux [1987], Doriac [1990]) - and the difficulty of determining a cultural identity (Contout [1987], 3) are frequently expressed. The myth of an empty land is not unfounded: "a thousand million creeks perhaps / but only a few thousand men."1 Whereas the islands are rich in human resources but constrained by a limited natural habitat, French Guiana has only recently attained a total of one inhabitant per square kilometer (INSEE population figure of 114,808 for 1990) with a heavy concentration on Cayenne. An isolated commune like Saül had only forty registered electors for the 1988 presidential election. The 1

Un milliard de criques peut-être, / mais seulement quelques milliers d'hommes (Rézaire [1987], 5).

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revealing concept of an île de Cayenne speaks of a mentality turned outward to the ocean and away from the natural hinterland, resulting in few local initiatives to develop the empty lands. Only during the gold rush was the interior peopled to any extent. External perceptions of the region have had a determinant influence on its history, shaping not only the policies of the French administration but even the way many Guianese perceive themselves. In the initial period of European exploration and settlement, life was certainly harsh and perilous and thus was recorded without much rhetorical inflation (Hurault [1972], 84). It was the Kourou expedition of 1763-64, aided by Ange Pitou's graphic pen, that conclusively dramatized French Guiana as a graveyard for Europeans. An early spectacular example of the attempts to "create French Guiana without the aid of its inhabitants,"2 this scheme was concocted in Paris by the Duc de Choiseul to compensate for the loss of Quebec. Some 10,000 settlers were recruited, but the vast majority perished not far from where they had landed. Even if the project had received unqualified local support, its scale was delirious for the existing resources. Cayenne had thus already acquired a sinister ring when it was proposed as a place of deportation. The fatal delusion of condemning political opponents to develop a colony is evident in these words to the Assembly in 1792: "We have a country that belongs to France and needs labor. I demand ships fitted out to bear these priests to French Guiana (enthusiastic applause)."3 With the deportation of the Fructidor royalists to Sinnamary the most painfully distinctive feature of the heritage of French Guiana began: the penal colony. One raises this whole subject with considerable reluctance, open to charges of pandering to the same morbid sensationalism as the long line of convict memoirs that flourished as recently as Henri Charrière's Papillon. The question is very deliberately underplayed by the present generation of historians, and many would demolish the massive architectural survivals that still offer a frisson to the tourist. It is true that the penal administration constituted in many ways a closed world, but until the postwar repatriation of the last detainees, it was a dominant presence {Atlas [1979], Plate 19). Typical Caribbean stereotypes of race and color were modified here by the presence of white chain gangs and houseboys. However, as Damas bitterly observed, for the French his country "was the penal colony and the inhabitants sons of convicts, with the odd Negro thrown in to supply an exotic touch."4 Metaphors used by opponents of the bagne (penal settlement) stressed filth and contagion: cesspool of empire, moral leprosy, stinking morass. Despite the legal complexities and different categories of detainee, simple, powerful images invested the whole of this Caribbean fatal shore (Hughes [1987]). In the official mind, as in the popular imagination in France, French Guiana itself was a prime instrument of control. Beyond the first circle of shackles, bars and whips, offenders were to be constrained by the isolation and perils of the place itself. Hence there developed in the discourse concerning the penal colony not only images of white oppressing white more powerful than the images of plantation slavery, but also a negative version of the local habitat. In the green hell the ground was a treacherous swamp engulfing the unwary, vegetation advanced, and creeks teemed with alligators, anacondas, and piranhas, as did the sea with sharks. Equatorial insect life swarmed in the fevered imagination, bearing the still more insidious 2

Pensez-vous qu'il soit possible de faire la Guyane sans les Guyanais? (Juminer [1961], 108). Nous avons un pays qui appartient à la France, et qui manque de bras. Je demande qu'il soit armé des vaisseaux pour porter ces prêtres à la Guyane française (vifs applaudissements) (Devèze [1965], 30). 4 c'est le bagne et les Guyanais des fils de bagnards, avec toutefois, quelques nègres pour l'exotisme (Damas [1938], 10). 3

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perils of disease. For the fugitive struggling to survive, the forest peoples enjoyed a mysterious superiority; they were equipped with silent weapons, tracking skills, and mastery over rapids. At times portrayed as cannibals, they epitomized the menace of an alien environment seen as pure threat. This luxuriant mythology owes much of its extension to the commercial instincts of authors and to the abolitionist propaganda of prison doctors, evangelists, or crusading journalists like Albert Londres. Yet, undeniably, French Guiana was forced to exist for almost a century in the shadow of a monstrous machine of human humiliation; some 70,000 men were shipped from France, but at most 5,000 survived to return (Devèze [1965], 277). A ghastly pallid popote (ex-convict) still surfaces occasionally in the local imagination, and repression of the whole ugly truth leaves a blank space on the psychic map. René Jadfard sets only one of his novels in French Guiana and views the forest and its peoples much as an outsider does. It is almost as if the relation between the individual and this landscape has forfeited its innocence. The paradigmatic journey into the interior of self-discovery, initiation, and repossession of national space, as treated elsewhere by Caribbean writers Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant, remains to be written. In contrast to the infernal visions of torment there is another similarly potent myth: the dream of El Dorado permeating the Guyanas. Long after Raleigh's tantalizing references to the great and golden city of Manoa in 1596, Voltaire's Candide set out northwards for Cayenne and found a land where pebbles were jewels and the mud was gold. Early exploration upriver was essentially driven by the quest for fabulous wealth, though it was not until 1855 that creeks on the Approuague yielded gold and launched a fever of prospecting (Petot [1986]). Dreams of gold faded more quickly than that other lovely vision perceptible in the earliest engravings and continued through the 1974 Plan vert to the tourist brochures of today: that of an earthly paradise. The curiosity of early travelers, especially the scientific enthusiasms of the eighteenth century, created a rich literature on the flora and fauna of French Guiana. Jesuits and doctors, cartographers and botanists shared their interest in the abundant natural life: "this whole land would be excellent if only it were cultivated. It abounds in food - crops like maize, cassava. . ."5 Préfontaine produced La maison rustique (The rustic house), his idyllic manual for settlers, and Victor Hugues referred to "a land where ten days of work are enough to feed a family for a year."6 Even the life of the field slave was seen in a rosy light, perhaps due to Lafayette's experiment at La Gabrielle, where liberated slaves "happily" tended the clove trees and cattle (Willens [1986], 353). Travelers often included notes on the indigenous populations, admiring their social organization and self-sufficiency. From 1777 Boni maroon communities were also to be found east of the Maroni River. The graphic evidence is eloquent, stressing fertility in botanical illustrations, as well as promising the life of ease by featuring the hammock, and offering native women in comely nakedness. The appeal to the colonizer's lust for conquest and possession is scarcely masked. It is easy to comprehend a process by which nos primitifs (our primitives), more radically Other to the European, came to occupy the foreground, displacing in the official mind the majority group of citizens on the coast. When an administrator writes of a population "wedded to age-old, change-resisting, dated and inadequate techniques,"7 or quips about France's "botanical garden" (Schwarzbeck 5 tout ce pays seroit excellent, s'il étoit cultivé. Il abonde en vivres, comme Mays, Maniok, et plusieurs fruicts propres pour la nourriture des Originaires (Barrère [1743], 7). 6 un pays où dix journées de travail suffisent pour nourrir une famille pendant un an (Thésée [1970], 486). 7 ancrée dans des pratiques séculaires, souvent misonéistes, désuètes et inadéquates (Dupont-Gonin [1970], 259).

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[1982], 8), this dismissive paternalism is seen in action. Creole tales transmit a different vision of cultivating where magical fertility is a dangerous lure; it is only by a pact with the devil that crops bear abundantly. The one extravagant dream that has been fulfilled is the European space center located at Kourou, an investment of such magnitude that it may well have preempted political change for the foreseeable future. It has created a concentration of French technical personnel and engineers launching satellites into outer space who contrast outrageously with the Wayana still adept with bow and arrow. It is hard to conceive of any textual dimension in which both figures might play a part. As witnesses to this plural society and beset by extravagant images generated elsewhere, writers of French Guiana have responded in three main ways. Some have chosen to assimilate, embracing French forms and values, and thereby provoking a vigorous counter-reaction, especially associated with Léon Damas and the values of negritude. A third more complex project goes beyond both of these, seeking to reconcile a multiethnic, multilingual reality in new constructs by drawing on performance arts and linguistic experiments. This pattern is to some extent characteristic of many ex-colonial literatures, and of the Caribbean in general, but perhaps the very small scale of French Guiana's literary production by "a dozen authors" (Rouch and Clavreuil [1986], 219) exerts particular pressures. The isolation and fragility of the colony, its slow and, even at times, negative growth, fostered psychological dependency on France. Many assimilationists would be scarcely conscious of making a cultural choice: the French republic appearing as the best bulwark against absorption by Brazil, and French citizenship, French education, and French language the only means powerful enough to reconcile ethnic divisions. Economically, the viability of an independent literature must remain uncertain, given the modest local readership. There can be no local writers feeding a family by the products of their pen. Literature is still nothing more than a hobbyhorse - violon d'Ingres or "crazy violin" - as Serge Patient punned,8 for a number of doctors, teachers, civil servants, and in particular colonial administrators of the older generation, whose careers carried them around the world. For them, writing serves a double function by creating a comforting space where nostalgia for home can coexist with loyalty to a French cultural community in which conservative literary and political choices commonly coincide. Writing as recently as 1985, Raoul-Philippe Danaho divided French Guianese poets into those influenced by negritude, and a group "undoubtedly the more important, that remains within a French literary tradition. Following the example of René Maran, poets in this vein feel completely at ease in Western culture."9 Danaho gives a painstaking account of fellow bards and their slim volumes of verse published (perhaps at author's expense) but invaluable as badges of "civilization." The reader feels caught in a time warp: that Cayenne world evoked by Michel Lohier in the early years of the century, when Les Amis du Livre improvised a bookshelf for "Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, their school prizes, and an old dictionary."10 The musical evenings, the amateur theatricals, the concern for refinement and respectability (Cherubini [1988], 88, 94): it is as easy to comprehend 8

mon violon dingue (Patient [1980], 77). Le second courant, sans doute le plus important, ne s'écarte pas de la tradition littéraire française. A l'instar de René Maran, les poètes de ce sillon se sentent parfaitement à l'aise dans la culture occidentale (Danaho [1985], 46). 10 Sur une étagère faite de vieilles planches, s'étalaient quelques classiques: Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, leurs livres de prix et un vieux dictionnaire (Lohier [1972], 192). 9

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the impulse as to approve of Damas's rejection of all it stood for. A similar concern for status no doubt explains the ingratiating ring of such titles as Maran's Un homme pareil aux autres (A man like any other), 1947, and Whily-Tell's Je suis un civilisé (I am a civilized being), 1953. Much verse in the assimilationist vein shows in its very texture the willed integration with France: the struggle to domesticate within an alexandrine distant place-names and realities, as in the nostalgic sonnet "I have not forgotten the capricious coasts," which rhymes hamac with monts Tumuc-Humac.11 Metaphors of kinship abound: French Guiana as eldest daughter of France, and fervent embraces across the ocean (Munian [1953]). However, if this rhetoric seems stale, it is partly for the same reason that much Haitian verse is limited to a respectable mediocrity: the presence of a more vigorous alternative expression in Creole for the same producers. Unlike the situation in Guadeloupe or Martinique, the defense of Creole in French Guiana is not linked to any specific political option. Many pride themselves on their bilingualism, and Creole language and traditions have been documented since the last century (SaintQuentin, Parépou, Fauquenoy). In a small but sociable population, French was reserved for a limited range of formal functions, and most exchanges, most spoken virtuosity used the medium of Creole. Lohier as schoolmaster in Iracoubou passed on Creole tales and legends; Maurice Saba, composer of patriotic songs like "Pour la France" dedicated to the conscripts of 1914, was equally proficient in traditional dance rhythms. Régine Horth is not an isolated figure in her confident affirmation of a double identity: Creole and black French (Horth [1973], 229). Her repertoire of cuisine and folklore proposes drinking a Cabernet d'Anjou with atipa (a local fish), a juxtaposition of cultures that one also finds in Pierre Servin's hymn to the sea as it is declaimed in Creole to music by Debussy. Most evidence for a cultural synthesis can be found in creole traditions: Amerindian legends filtering down with African humor into creole tales; work-songs for tree-felling and grating cassava; carnival figures of neg-marrons (escaped slaves) and roped chains of zombies; and dances reinterpreted by groups like the Dahlias and the Lauriers Roses. However, much Creole expression looks back to a rural subsistence economy, while French reinforces its grip on technical progress and modern power by further investment in the Kourou space program and new hydroelectric schemes. When promoted by assimilationists who aspire to no more than a niche in the regional diversity of the French nation, creole culture risks being reduced to a largely nostalgic and ornamental role. The major poet of negritude, Léon Damas, needs no introduction here, though his poetry and folktales are more widely known than the lucid pamphlet in which he attacked assimilation, Retour de Guyane (Back from French Guiana), 1938. In the context of Cayenne between the wars, Damas's audacity in choosing himself as nègre becomes all the more remarkable. He summed up his attitude of refusal in the poem "Et caetera" in Pigments, 1937, calling a halt to the patati et patata (blabla) of undying loyalty to France (Damas [1962], 78). Situating himself in relation to Claude McKay, Langsten Hughes, and Jean Price-Mars, he stepped right out of the Cayenne frame. As a major link in the developing networks of consciously black writers, he was so far ahead of the sensibility of most of his compatriots that his work, when known at all, was not taken seriously. His political career was brief; he replaced Jadfard as socialist deputy in the full tide of support for Monnerville and départementalisation in 1946. Perhaps only in 1978 when his ashes were returned to his own monument under a heavy escort of men in suits, was Damas read and received in his homeland. Though Juminer and Patient in particular absorbed his influence as students in France in the 1950s, 11

Je n'ai pas oublié les fantaisies côtières (Blasse [1978], 40).

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it is in the pages of La Torche, the magazine of the Association des Amis de Léon Damas, that we see most clearly how younger writers are reinvesting the heritage of negritude. With a cover image of a maroon hero lighting a path through the forest, La Torche began with a collective homage to the memory of Damas. Its second number put emphasis on Caribbean connections, for example a fraternal poem by A. J. Seymour, and links with the black diaspora in general. Nearer home was a dramatic account of the achievements of the maroon leader Boni, and the tone of one or two other items implied a militant negritude. However, any discussion of black authenticity in French Guiana needs to come to terms both with the prior claims of the Amerindian, and with the often controversial presence of real maroons. La Torche met with criticism of racial bias for publishing in French when the true local tradition of resistance was oral and Creole. Subsequently there has been more emphasis on performance, for example in the poetic montage "Tendé jenesse pei-a, tendé," and something of a retreat has also been apparent from a predominantly African conception of identity. The work by Damas that has been most often dramatized in recent years is Black Label, a less concentrated indictment of assimilation than Pigments, containing nostalgic sequences on his childhood. He wrote there of the "three rivers flowing in [his] veins,"12 an image of intercultural complexity close to the concerns of many early contributors to La Torche. Some adopt a mood of gloomy lyricism: "I stand at the deserted crossing / of the Four Races,"13 "I've never really known to whom I might belong, what language would clear my voice."14 Arsène Bouyer looks forward with cynical wit to an independent French Guiana using ethnic minorities as scapegoats, while a generous humanism informs "Rétrospectives" by Andrée Guéril and Monique Dorcy. Comments in issue number five (1984) confirm the impression of fragmentation and a will to find richness in diversity, but difficulty in achieving the minimal consensus needed to keep French Guiana's first literary magazine in production. A judicious assessment of Damas by Bertène Juminer appeared in the first number of La Torche, and his perspective was undoubtedly influenced by negritude. All of his novels have been published in Paris by Présence Africaine, and his first, strongly autobiographical novel, Les bâtards (The bastards), 1961, makes a point of the rediscovery of the neglected African dimension in Guianese experience. Juminer returned from study in France in 1956 to work as a doctor in St. Laurent, strongly committed to improving conditions. The frustrations of this work are channeled into Les bâtards, where the fictional form gives the freedom to express several viewpoints: the character Cambier discovers the psychic damage effected by racial prejudice in his family and acts to reinstate symbolically the black grandmother whose heritage had been despised. The other major character, Chambord, aims to create a future out of all the disparate human resources available, seen, for example, in his dispensary as "the primitive and the indigent" who wait patiently for medical attention (Juminer [1961], 169). The title image of French Guiana as a neglected bastard child with an African mother sums up Juminer's angry critique of French administration and its local allies. His subsequent novels are set elsewhere, but they revolve essentially around issues of black liberation and race relations. Like Damas, Juminer returned to French Guiana and denounced what he saw, incurring such a hostile reaction that his talents were for long lost to his compatriots.

12

trois fleuves coulent / trois fleuves coulent dans mes veines (Damas [1956], 9). Je suis au croisement désert / des Quatre Races (Linguet [1978], 30). 14 Je n'ai jamais su vraiment à qui j'appartiendrais, quel langage rendrait ma voix plus claire (Grouf [1978], 31). 13

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It is in the work of two writers who have remained within French Guiana that we find the most sustained and complex attempt to create the basis for a local literature. Serge Patient is somewhat younger than Juminer, with strong roots in the rural communes like Mana. His writing is not extensive. For example, his lifelong interest in local history has so far only resulted in a somewhat Stendhalian nouvelle (short story) set in the time of Victor Hugues, Le nègre du gouverneur (The governor's negro), 1972. Patient's poetry, mainly collected into Guyane pour tout dire (French Guiana says it all), 1980, often deals with local issues, as in the sequence protesting against the expropriation of land for the Kourou base, or in a later, reflectively autobiographical piece incorporating a kaleidoscope of Cayenne settings and memories. Patient avoids dogmatism (he is also a very pragmatic local politician), is able to see the ambiguities of carnival, and is ironic on divergent views of French education. Most of all he has the authentic poet's delight in wordstuff, punning, and permutating between French and Creole, or layering lines to create an internal dialogue between the victimized je (I) and the brutalizing colonial on (they) (Patient [1980], 77). An early article on fellow poet Gilles Sirder traced the direction his own work would take: a pulsating fermentation of language that cannibalizes French and reconstructs local idioms to create a new autonomous poetic space (Patient [1958], 50). It is perhaps a measure of the fragility of literary activity in French Guiana that Patient has not written more. Elie Stephenson, by contrast, has achieved an impressive output of poetry, plays, and song lyrics, as well as his academic work in economics. More cogently than any of his predecessors, he can quantify the underdevelopment of French Guiana, especially as he can situate himself in relation to the other Guyanas and the wider Caribbean. Stephenson has given priority to reaching the local public by creating a musical group, Les neg'marrons, working extensively in the theater, and devoting particular attention to writing for children. A representative work is the play O mayouri (mayouri=coumbite, day of cooperative labor), composed in the early 1970s and recently published with extensive linguistic and literary commentary. It is based on Jacques Roumain's Haitian classic, Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew), but unlike the faithful adaptations by the Zairean Lisembé (Philippe) Elébé or Jules-Rosette, it involves a dynamic rethinking of the original. With certain significant exceptions, the dialogue is in Creole, dispensing with the artificial, albeit attractive, discourse created by Roumain for his peasants. More crucially, Stephenson highlights not family feuds but a contemporary power struggle. His hero returns from the Algerian war, and his attempts to organize a village cooperative threaten the political and economical dominance of the mayor, a trader in imported foodstuffs. The mayor's henchman is also a jealous rival for the love of Fanni who strikes down the hero just as the mayouri has set the seal on a new solidarity. In a telling final moment, the hero's friend turns toward the audience, confronting them with collective responsibility for a crime of ignorance and divisive spite (Stephenson [1988-b], 114). Stephenson worked with the Martinican Daniel Boukman and the Mauritanian Med Hondo in Paris, but though his early play "Un rien de pays" (A nothing of a country) uses satirical silhouettes, he develops by close observation a talent for pinning down local attitudes, as in the economical sketches of migrating passengers at Rochambeau airport ("Les voyageurs" [The travelers]). His plays use traditional drum rhythms, songs, and sayings to underline his message and enhance their appeal, and he is steadily creating a repertoire based on local heroes, legends, and tales. One of his

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best-known poems in French uses the mobilizing beat of a digging song: "plant my children / plant. / Plant dasheen / plant cassava . . . plant your navel string in this earth."15 His most recent volume, Comme des gouttes de sang (Like drops of blood), 1988, has some of the bitter gnomic quality of the Creole dolo (proverb). Even the love poetry in French is permeated by a sensibility that situates itself in a distinctive national space. Stephenson is undoubtedly right in seeking to influence the next generation through shared activities like songs and drama. With admirable coherence he tackles economic, sociopolitical, and psychological problems, striving to create a more active and productive sense of common purpose, opposing the sterile unity achieved by a mindless submission to the values imported, like almost everything else, from France. As a brief postscript one might point to the fiction of Micheline Hermine, who is a French woman married to a Guianese. Her novel, Les iguanes du temps (Time's iguanas), 1988, adopts the narrative viewpoint of a completely marginal outsider, a clandestine traveler, sheltering in a seaside cabin. Into his visual field move various figures: restless young girls, a fisherman, and a poor Haitian. There is a car crash, carnival, and an expedition to a Saramaca maroon village; obliquely a whole society is evoked, but as soon as the observer becomes involved, fatal violence is unleashed. Hermine has borrowed a form that renders the marginality - the displaced relationship to their own destiny, their own space - a feature of the writers of French Guiana. In a baroque finale, her narrator is conscious of his own body rendering down organically to fuse with the land, an ultimate desperate act of identification, of "going to ground" found also in Patient's earthworm image, and Stephenson's poetic calvary for Gowatéria/Guiana. In the unsettled climate of the late 1980s, as migration and rapid population growth create unprecedented strains, French Guiana poses an urgent challenge. Damas could not have foreseen new "rivers" of immigrants (the displaced Hmong from Vietnam, Brazilians, Haitians) and Amerindians pressing ancestral claims. There are warning signs that even carnival - where tension should explode in misrule and burn with the symbolic mask of Vaval - cannot contain the diversity. Still lagging behind the islands in higher education and weak in the infrastructure of literary activity (presses, launchings, chatter, etc.), Cayenne has, however, seen much factual writing of high quality in the last decade, especially by the CEGER group of social scientists and historians who find an outlet in the journal Equinoxe directed by André Calmont. Searching the past and quantifying the present are activities well under way, but Stephenson picks up, more than twenty years later, this agonized interrogation framed by Patient: "What flower might open / what love might bloom / and what happy peace take root / on this poisoned mud."16 The writer's quest continues.

Bibliography Atlas des Départements d'Outremer. 1979. Vol. 4. La Guyane. Bordeaux-Aix: CNRS-ORSTOM. (The realities of French Guiana are lucidly set forth in this admirable collaborative work.) Barrère, Pierre. 1743. Nouvelle relation de la France Equinoxiale. Blasse, Edouard. 1978. O Guyane! Poètes de notre temps, 425. Monte Carlo: n.p.

15 mes enfants plantez / plantez. // Plantez dachines / plantez maniocs .. . Plantez sagous / plantez bananes / votre nombril dans cette terre (Stephenson [1975], 56-57). 16 Quelle fleur pourrait s'épanouir / quel amour pourrait fleurir / et quelle paix heureuse demeurer sur cette vase empoisonnée (Stephenson [1988-a], 11, citing Patient [1980], 57).

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Chalifoux, J.-J. 1987. L'identité ethnique: Questions pour la Guyane. Cayenne: Exposés-débats CRESTIG. Cherubini, Bernard. 1988. Cayenne: Ville créole et polyethnique. Paris: Karthala-CENADDOM. (This is a fascinating and detailed exercise in the urban geography of a section of Cayenne.) Contout, Auxence. 1987. Langues et cultures guyanaises. Cayenne: Imprimerie Trimarg. (A rich but incoherent repertoire.) Coudreau, Henri. 1893. Chez nos Indiens: Quatre années dans la Guyane française. Paris: Hachette. Crevaux, Jules Nicolas. 1880. De Cayenne aux Indes. Le Tour du Monde: Nouveau Journal des Voyages. 40-41: 33-176. (Note especially the illustrations.) (Republished in 1987 by D'ailleurs/Phébus, Paris, as Le mendiant de l'Eldorado, with a preface by Jacques Meunier.) Damas, Léon. [1937]. 1962. Pigments. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1938. Retour de Guyane. Paris: J. Corti. —. 1956. Black-Label. Paris: NRF. Danaho, Raoul-Philippe. 1985. Regards sur la poésie guyanaise. Lettres et Cultures de Langue Française. 7:44-60. (This is a methodical account, giving prominence to minor figures working in France.) Devèze, Michel. 1965. Cayenne: Déportés et bagnards. Coll. Archives. Paris: Julliard. —. 1968. Les Guyanes. Que sais-je? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (Reference works predating recent historical research by local scholars.) Doriac, Fabrice. 1990. Identité ou sur-identité? Special issue: "Les lianes d'Ariane." Phréatique. 14.53:5-8. Doriac, Neuville. 1985. Esclavage, assimilation et guyanité. Paris: Anthropos. (The author studies dehumanizing attitudes toward slaves and Amerindians using historical texts as well as a perspective influenced by Frantz Fanon.) Dupont-Gonin, Pierre. 1970. La Guyane française. Geneva: Droz. (An administrative study concerned with development economics.) Elébé, Lisembé. 1973. Chant de la terre, chant de l'eau. Théâtre africain 24. Paris: P. J. Oswald. (A theatrical adaptation in eighteen scenes of J. Roumain's novel Gouverneurs de la rosée.) Equinoxe. 1976-88. Cayenne. (A quarterly journal of the social sciences edited by André Calmont.) Fauquenoy, Marguerite. 1966. Bibliographie sur les Guyanes et les territoires avoisinantes. Paris: ORSTOM. —. 1972. Analyse structurale du créole guyanais. Paris: Klincksieck. —. 1980. Attitudes des jeunes guyanais bilingues de l'île de Cayenne face au français et au créole. Etudes Créoles. 3.2: 87-99. —. 1988. Aspects du bilinguisme guyanais-français. Espace Créole. 6:7-42. (These are essential works on Creole and language issues.) Grenand, Pierre. 1980. Ainsi parlaient nos ancêtres: Essai d'ethnohistoire wayampi. Paris: ORSTOM. (Pierre and Françoise Grenand base their work on extensive research in the Upper Oyapock.) Grouf, Gérard. 1978. Rumeurs noires. La Torche. 1:31. Hermine, Micheline. 1988. Les iguanes du temps. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. Horth, Régine. 1973. En direct avec la Guyane: Cuisine et folklore. Cayenne: CCPR. Hughes, Robert. 1987. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868. London: Collins Harvill/Pan. (This history shows parallel experiences of penal colonization.) Hurault, Jean. 1970. Africains de Guyane: La vie matérielle et l'art des noirs réfugiés de Guyane. Paris, The Hague: Mouton. —. 1972. Français et Indiens de Guyane. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions. (Essential sources on forest and river peoples by a distinguished conservationist.) Jadfard, René. 1946. Nuits de Cachiri. Paris: Fasquelle. Jolivet, Marie-José. 1982. La question créole. Paris: ORSTOM. Juminer, Bertène. 1961. Les bâtards. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1963. Au seuil d'un nouveau cri. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1968. La revanche de Bozambo. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1979. Les héritiers de la presqu'île. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1990. La fraction de seconde. Paris: Editions Caribéennes.

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Linguet, Jules. 1978. Crucifixion [poem]. La Torche. 1:29-30. Lohier, Michel. 1960. Légendes et contes folkloriques guyanais. Cayenne: Imprimerie Laporte. —. 1972. Les mémoires de Michel. Clamécy: Imprimerie Laballery. Londres, Albert. 1923. Au bagne. Paris: Albin Michel. Mam-Lam-Fouck, Serge. 1980. Histoire de la société guyanaise: Les années cruciales: 1848-1946. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. (A well documented and readable social history.) Maran, René. 1921. Batouala. Paris: Albin Michel. (Won the 1921 Goncourt Prize.) —. 1947. Un homme pareil aux autres. Paris: Albin Michel. Munian, Ernest. 1953. D'une rive à une autre [poem]. Parallèle. 5:16. Parépou, Alfred. [1885]. 1987. Atipa: Premier roman en créole. Ed. by M. Fauquenoy. Paris: L'Harmattan. (This is a landmark work as it represents the first novel written in Creole.) Patient, Serge. 1958. Avec G. B. L. Sirder: Sur les voies d'une poésie guyanaise. Présence Africaine. 20:44-51. —. 1972. Le nègre du gouverneur. Honfleur: P. J. Oswald. —. 1980. Guyane pour tout dire. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. (This work incorporates Le Mal du pays, first published in 1967.) Petot, Jean. 1986. L'or de Guyane. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. Pitou, Louis-Ange. 1805. Voyage à Cayenne, dans les deux Amériques et chez les anthropophages. Paris. Préfontaine, Brûletout de. 1763. La maison rustique. Paris: Bauche. Rézaire, Eugénie. 1987. Pirogue pour des temps à venir. Cayenne: Imprimerie Les Amandiers. Rouch, Alain et Gérard Clavreuil. 1986. Littératures nationales d'écriture française. Paris: Bordas. Saint-Quentin, Auguste. 1872. Notice grammaticale et philologique sur le créole de Cayenne. In Introduction à l'histoire de Cayenne. Ed. by Alfred Saint-Quentin. Antibes: J. Marchand. Schwarzbeck, Frank. 1982. La Guyane: Un département français comme les autres? Equinoxe. 15:1-17. (Written from the standpoint of political science by the perceptive author of a doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Hamburg, 1981.) Stephenson, Elie. 1975. Une flèche pour le pays à l'encan. Honfleur: P.J. Oswald. —. 1976. Un rien de pays. (Unpublished typescript.) —. 1977. Les voyageurs. (Unpublished typescript.) —. 1978. Poèmes négro-indiens aux enfants de Guyane. Cayenne: Année de l'enfant. —. 1979. Catacombes de soleil. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. —. 1984-a. Terres mêlées. Paris: Akpagnon. —. 1984-b. [4 poems and an interview.] In Koute pou tann!: Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie. Ed. by L.-F. Prudent. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. —. 1988-a. Comme des gouttes de sang. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1988-b. O mayouri! Ed. by M. Fauquenoy. Paris: L'Harmattan. (Contains useful critical apparatus.) —. 1990. Les placers. (Unpublished typescript.) Survival International. 1988. La question amérindienne en Guyane française. Ethnies: Droits de l'Homme et Peuples Autochtones. 1-2. Thésée, Françoise. 1970. Un mémoire inédit de Victor Hugues sur la Guyane. Revue Française d'Histoire d'OutreMer. 209:469-502. La Torche. 1978-. Cayenne: Association des Amis de Léon Damas. Whily-Tell, A. E. 1953. Je suis un civilisé. Paris: Société d'Imprimerie de Lancry. Willens, Liliane. 1986. Lafayette's emancipation experiment in French Guiana, 1786-1792. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 242. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation.

Conclusions

J. MICHAEL DASH

University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica

The foregoing essays all have one thing in common. In their various ways they all attempt to examine the ways in which a non-indigenous community comes to terms with or takes possession of space that has been encountered in a painful or, at the very least, a problematic manner. This space represented by the Caribbean was never virgin territory or a blank canvas as European myths once proclaimed. Rather, it presented daunting and, in some cases, still unresolved problems of self-definition and self-invention for societies whose existence was invariably precarious. The fact is that the Caribbean not only has been distorted by myth, it no longer has any essential meaning to the transplanted, deported or immigrant groups who have found themselves in the region over time. The people for whom the land had an aboriginal meaning were either exterminated or relegated to a marginal status. The act of repopulation left in its wake a heterogeneous community that then had to devise new relationships with a land scraped clean of its original significance and its original peoples. In the francophone Caribbean, these transplanted communities are marked by indeterminacy. Haiti declared itself a nation in 1804 but seems incapable of becoming a homogeneous society. Martinique and Guadeloupe are both resentful yet complacent about their status as non-countries. French Guiana, a "bastard" world of "poisonous mud" remains an isolated French outpost in South America. Given these social and historical features, each essay grapples with the capacity of the imagination - in particular the literary imagination - to produce new definitions of history, cultures, landscape, and so on. Indeed the basic impulse in all this literature is to respond to the void of the past. Hence, a longing for origins and ancestors preoccupies these communities and is expressed in the self-defining journeys upriver, into the interior or childhood memory that proliferate in Caribbean literature. The essays were designed to survey and examine the structuring forces in the francophone Caribbean imagination. These could be social evolution, popular culture, and language as well as the peculiarities of landscape and history. Because these shaping forces were not exclusively internal, attention was paid to how the francophone Caribbean was treated in metropolitan literature. This aspect of the literary representation of the Caribbean has played and continues to play an important role in influencing the internal response to the region. Régis Antoine provides a meticulous and informed survey of the treatment of the Caribbean by French writers. His analysis of exoticism - from romantic to modernist - reveals how persistent the discourse of exoticism can be. It also shows the extent to which the most avant-garde of writers can perpetuate images of dependency and

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doudouisme. André Breton's Martinique charmeuse de serpents revived, as Antoine correctly points out, "the tired motif of the feminization" of the French island colony. The stereotype of Haiti in terms of black savagery and French Guiana in terms of the white man's grave are the only departures from this definition of the Caribbean within cultural difference and racial otherness. This fascination with the Other is one of the more pervasive and least studied features of modern French literature. It is as evident in Baudelaire and Rimbaud as it is in Claudel and Leiris, without even taking into account such inveterate practitioners of exoticism as Pierre Loti. The movement out of Europe and the recognition of cultural diversity and fragmentation among French writers were not overlooked by their Caribbean counterparts. What this section lacks is an essay on the impact of French literary models on the francophone Caribbean writer. Caribbean literature did not slowly evolve over time but emerged within the traditions of European modernism. The major issues of European modernism have been present in the Caribbean from the early years. The status of the writer, the nature of literary language, and the view of all language as a manipulated code can be found in nineteenth-century Haitian literary criticism as well as among the negritude writers of the 1930s. It was in the 1930s and 1940s that the impact of modernism was most widespread. André Breton's journey through the francophone Caribbean in 1941, en route to exile, demonstrates the extent to which the high priest of surrealism felt at home among Martinican and Haitian intellectuals. In Fort-de-France he discovered the review Tropiques, put out by a group of local intellectuals led by Aimé Césaire. This journal dealt as much with the need for the political and cultural emancipation of Martinique as it introduced writers such as Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Mallarmé. In Port-auPrince a few years later in 1945, Breton was ethusiastically received by another group of intellectuals who valued the ideals of surrealism as a revolutionary principle. They too ran a literary and political paper, La Ruche, and were led by René Depestre and Jacques Stephen Alexis. In the following year in Haiti, the government of President Elie Lescot was overthrown in the name of surrealism and Marxism. It is the only generalized crise de conscience for which Breton's movement could justifiably claim credit. The defamiliarizing ideals of surrealism and its insistence on the primacy of the imagination had clearly found fallow ground in the Caribbean where the convulsive and the marvellous seemed to naturally occur. Even if one single synthesizing treatment of this question is absent, references to this process can be found in various contributions on poetry, the novel, and the essay. The fact is that modernism had a powerful liberating effect on the region's writers. Wifredo Lam, Alejo Carpentier, Césaire himself did for surrealist ideas in the Caribbean what Breton was incapable of achieving in the metropolis. The craving for ideas, which is as deep in Etzer Vilaire as it is in Jacques Roumain, lies at the heart of a fear of isolation and parochialism that is widespread in the francophone Caribbean imagination. It is not then surprising that Césaire should declare his revolution in the name of "air and poetry" or that Depestre should ecstatically recall the liberating presence of Lam, Carpentier, and Breton on postwar Port-au-Prince. The sociolinguistic process that shapes the Caribbean sensibility has been well documented in this section. Essays by Ulrich Fleischmann and Maximilien Laroche give full and interesting coverage to the importance of popular or creole forces to the literary process. If the Caribbean literary imagination is at a crossroads, the outside forces meet and interact with those on the inside. On the inside is a non-literary, non-intellectual world that had a powerful hold on even those who sought to

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deny it. It is present in imaginative literature in the figures of the storyteller and the quimboiseur (healer) as well as in the use of the Creole language or the literary adaptation of forms derived from popular culture. Laroche seems to identify three phases in the use of popular traditions by Caribbean writers. There was the first folkloric use of creole culture, which was a part of early regionalism. It was the rejection of this caricature of popular traditions that distinguished the work of Price-Mars in Haiti and the negritude writers in Paris. As a result Creole found a kind of legitimacy in the protest poetry of Morisseau-Leroy even as it fed the linguistic complexity of Haiti's best known novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew) by Jacques Roumain. A third phase in the literary treatment of popular culture has recently emerged, under the direct influence of Edouard Glissant and to a lesser extent Jacques Stephen Alexis. The former's interest in the figure of the storyteller, in the content of the folktale, and in the interaction between written and spoken. The current movement in favor of créolité owes much to Glissant and represents a renewed interest by writers in popular traditions. In this Laroche sees Alexis as an important Haitian precursor, especially given his interest in the folktale that emerges in the last work published before his death. As Fleischmann points out in his essay, it would be a simplification to speak simply of two Caribbean literatures, in French and Creole. The recent situation of Haitian writers in exile has added a new dimension. The Caribbean writer in New York or Montreal no longer is exclusively shaped by local and internal pressures. Indeed the term "writer in exile" may no longer be applicable to those who, even after the fall of Duvalierism, have no wish to return home. René Depestre and Anthony Phelps no longer deal with their original homeland in terms of tearful nostalgia. This tendency has been associated with a new postmodern disponibilité or availability in the writing by Haitians outside the Caribbean. However, it must also be realized that, especially in the case of Haiti, the reaction against the racialist and nationalist mystification of Duvalierism has produced a skepticism among younger writers about the question of identity. Dany Laferrière's provoking chapter heading "On ne naît pas nègre, on le devient" (You are not born a nigger, you become one) does not signify an end to preoccupation with race and nationality but a reevaluation of these issues. Haitian writing, at present more prolific outside Haiti than inside, is more likely to see the Haitian condition in the context of the global displacement of peoples and the efforts to create more just societies on the ruins of old dictatorships in this hemisphere. The capacity of this "home" community to influence those who have had prolonged exposure to its myths, values, and ideals forms the subject of the essays on Haiti, French Guiana, and the island Departments by Hoffmann, Jones, and Hezekiah. These essays are unique within this history of Caribbean literature since they focus on individual communities and are not comparative in any sense. The need was felt to commission this kind of essay because of the disparate nature of the francophone communities involved in this comparative endeavor. We also needed to take into account the centripetal forces that created powerful local concerns for the literary artist. The mapping of the islands, for instance, in terms of volcano, sea, and canefields is surely part of an anguished concern with land in territories where the land has always belonged to someone else and consequently becomes the terrain on which the struggle for self-discovery and self-possession is fought. These issues are far less pertinent to Haitian writers who share a singular concern with their legendary past, with founding myths and violent scenarios for beginning again. These imaginative reenactments of the spirit of 1804 find no echo in French Guiana whose beginnings are at the very

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least inauspicious and whose landscape is recalled in terms of poisonous growths, whether monuments to the war dead or flowers of an evil past. Léon-François Hoffmann provides a fine socioliterary survey of the way in which race, history, religion, and language impinge on the Haitian literary sensibility. Unlike many who have sought to explain sensibility genetically or racially, Hoffmann sees it as the product of historical conditioning. Hoffmann takes care to avoid a simple glorification of Haitian writers. He dispassionately examines the ambiguities in this society. The divisiveness that has notoriously fragmented the Haitian ruling classes since independence is evident in their creative writing. The mulatto version of history contrasts with that of the black elite. Similar fragmentation is visible in the treatment of vodun, of race, and of the vexed question of the Creole language. He ends with what must be another startling feature of this nation that was from its inception a marvellous anomaly. Haiti is gradually being shaped by the presence of the United States and its culture. As the old francophone elite has now become almost extinct, the staunchest defenders of Haiti's French heritage are absent. Increasingly English is apparent in street signs and in the naming of slum areas. The only constant in all this is that because of Haiti's special experience, cultural and linguistic ambiguities can only grow. If Haiti's ambiguities are blatant and dramatic, French Guiana's desperate and fragile literary culture is one of the most concealed and least understood in the region. Few scholars work on this French Department and most anthologies and histories simply ignore the existence of this French outpost. Bridget Jones situates the beginnings of this community in terms of the dual mystification of the colony seen as penal establishment (reduced in popular imagery to Devil's Island) and, contradictorily, as El Dorado. What we have here is a society still in the process of taking shape. Because of economic limitations imposed by the environment, the population remains tiny and the influx of immigrants and refugees adds to its heterogeneous nature. In this complex and isolated society the mask of nègre defiantly worn as a mark of an antiassimilationist posture is not entirely appropriate. No vision of a Guianese identity can exclude the Amerindian population or perhaps even the white descendants of Cayenne's original prison population. The literary contribution to the process of self-definition has, however, so far been slim. Except for Serge Patient, all of Guiana's major writers live abroad. The tradition of vagabondage and rootlessness was set by René Maran and is as evident in the late Léon Damas, as it is in Bertène Juminer and Elie Stephenson. The fact is that French Guiana's French status cannot be easily shed because it does represent common ground between very diverse groups. It also may well be the only guarantee of some measure of independence for this outpost of French culture perched on the back of massive Brazil. Despite the fragmented nature of this society, there is little chance of it being absorbed by the metropolis. This is not the case of the island Departments. The desperation that characterizes much of their writing is provoked by the increasing fear that the lack of hinterland, of any self-sustaining productivity, of creole traditions will make these islands nothing more than terres de passage. Randolph Hezekiah's essay treats the themes that are produced from this concern with social and cultural survivial. Perhaps this survey of the Martinican and Guadeloupean sensibility should have begun much earlier than 1930. Fortunately the significance of this period is filled in by Jacques Corzani in his essay on pre-Negritude writing in the second section of the history. Hezekiah points to the high quality of the writing in the twentieth century in an attempt to respond to urgent issues of survival. Martinique has produced in Césaire, Fanon, and Glissant three major writers in the

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Caribbean and Guadeloupe has in Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart two outstanding female writers. What Hezekiah lacks in his conservative chronology and traditional reading of Césaire's imagery he compensates for in pointing to the similarity between Martinique's extreme case and other such concerns with the problem of self-formation across the Caribbean. Hezekiah stops short of the contemporary solution put forward by Martinicans in particular as an answer to their plight as an empty, consumer society. The ideals of antillanité and créolité suggest that salvation might well lie in the region's multicultural heritage. In choosing the region as a center over France or Africa, modern francophone Caribbean writers have begun a new and promising integration of their endangered communities into the "submarine unity" of the Caribbean.

Literary Genres

Introduction

J. MICHAEL DASH

University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica

Literary history essentially concerns itself with the genesis of ideas and forms, the evolution of discourse, and the question of literary influence between succeeding generations. It would, therefore, be practically impossible to compile a literary history without tackling the difficult issue of periodization. The most obvious problem posed by attempting to establish a chronological sequence between literary works or a linear arrangement of texts is that literature does not quite work in this fashion. A simple cause and effect relationship would distort the way in which the creative work is both produced and consumed. The best literary works transcend chronological periods and spawn multiple readings over time. Our agreed definition of the literary value of any work of art is, after all, closely related to its timelessness. The problems inherent in establishing any periodization of literature has been further complicated by the fact that modern literary theory is essentially ahistorical in approach. The formalist bent of every movement in modern critical theory since structuralism calls into question any attempt to classify literature according to time, event, nationality or ideology. However, despite the merits of the formalist critique of the historical approach, at least in established literatures it has an agreed or generally accepted sense of the development of writing over time, which can be attacked. For instance, Western European literature has been traditionally classified by centuries and reigns or wars. This can be attacked as a false coherence imposed on literary production. In the Caribbean, however, there is no clear sense of periodization and writing seems to be more characterized by absences and ruptures than by continuities and a slow evolution over time. For example, narrative fiction is crucial to contemporary concerns in the francophone Caribbean but this certainly was not the case in the 1930s when poetry dominated literary production. Therefore, periodization still has the important task of mapping the development of writing even if it means, as much as anything else, pointing to gaps and absences in literary development. Any effort at a periodization of francophone Caribbean writing must face head on the received ideas that have become entrenched about the origins of "authentic" or "true" Caribbean writing. The movements of the 1930s saw themselves as the beginning of Caribbean writing and vigorously discredited all previous literary production. The nineteenth century bore the brunt of these attacks and it was described, in the polemics of the 1930s, as the time of cultural alienation or literary estrangement. A new periodization should at least attempt to set the record straight, beginning with a dispassionate focus on all attempts to write about the Caribbean from the inside. It might then be demonstrated that a literary tradition depends less on the compatibility of all literary ideologies and more

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on the fact that various writers at various times gave perhaps different solutions to the same basic issues. The answers in the nineteenth century may have been different but they were designed, quite often, to solve problems that echo throughout francophone Caribbean literature and arguably across languages within the regions. The preoccupation with self-definition was certainly not exclusive to the militant 1930s. The decision to divide this section according to genre was a logical one since a classification by century was out of the question. If Caribbean writing has a date that marks its beginning it must be 1804 and the declaration of independence in Haiti. This would mean that the longest tradition of writing in the regions is not even two centuries old. The generic approach to the question of periodization is also complicated by the massive head start that Haiti has over the other territories in the francophone Caribbean. In every genre, the first period is dominated by Haitian literature. The first poems, novels, plays, and essays of any real value in the francophone Caribbean were first done by Haitians in the nineteenth century. The defense of the Haitian revolution by Haitian essayists and pamphleteers soon after 1804 must constitute the first articulation of a national and regional selfconsciousness in the region. Even if this is consistently the case in the emergence of each genre, the twentieth century sees the other territories making up for lost time. By the 1930s it is possible to read synchronically, across the francophone Caribbean, texts in all the genres that are of great value and tackle very similar issues. As far as a synchronic reading across genres is concerned, an admittedly rough pattern becomes apparent in the evolution of ideas in each genre. Three phases can be identified. Every exercise in periodization is Procrustean in that some amount of mutilation must be inflicted upon writing if a clear demarcation is to be established between periods. The one thing that can be avoided is excessive simplification in identifying literary periods. The essays in each genre have been broadly arranged according to a general pattern in the ideological orientation of literary production. This pattern also has implications for the various genres since certain forms of writing are predominant in, or better served by, one literary ideology than another. The general pattern is as follows. The notion of self-definition is the central hub to which each succeeding ideological phase is related. The first general ideological orientation is apparent in the nineteenth-century Caribbean and in particular in the polemics of early Haitian nationalist writing. It could be described as self-definition in universal terms. This is a direct reaction to the belief in racial difference and cultural hierarchy that underpins slavery and colonialism. The early defenders of Haitian independence did so by insisting that there was no such thing as racial essence and that all peoples were equally able to attain the ultimate in intellectual and technological achievement. The dream of the early essayists was a modern state, not a return to African traditions or a maroon village in the northern Caribbean. Hence, their reaction against racist theories in France, such as those of Gobineau, was dramatic and profuse. Black consciousness in early Haitian writing ironically meant entering the mainstream. The form most favored at that time was the essay. Not only was it the best suited to the contemporary debate on race and culture, it was also the natural choice of the nineteenth-century intellectual or man of letters. It meant the assertion of one's voice in a medium that allowed this voice and no other to dominate. The elitism implicit in this genre and the rhetoric of this form is perhaps too obvious to deserve fuller elucidation here. This phenomenon is not peculiar to Haiti or to the francophone Caribbean. Roberto González Echevarría in The Voice of the Masters provides a thought-provoking analysis of a similar tendency, which he calls "the seductive power of [the essay's] tropo-

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logical structure" (Gonzalez Echevarría [1985], 8-32). The succeeding phase could be described as self-definition in terms of cultural difference. This was the general ideological orientation of Parisian negritude and Haitian indigenism in the 1920s and 1930s. Universal values were rejected in favor of racial specificity. The racist implications of this thinking are mentioned in Arnold's treatment of the negritude poets. At this time it was lyrical poetry or the dramatic monologue that became fashionable. There was a need to give expression to l'âme noire, to ventilate the tragic duality of the self torn between cultures. The urgency of the plea for decolonization made poetry the genre of choice at this time. Afro-Cubanism would be the hispanophone equivalent to this movement. This would mean that the essayists in nineteenth-century Haiti were not simply precursors to the activism of the 1930s. Indeed the latter sought a repudiation of the ideal of cultural universality. By the 1950s their racialist theories were being seen as hopelessly reductionist by a new generation of writers. The postwar period in the francophone Caribbean witnesses a general shift away from the literary ideology of negritude. Edouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, René Depestre, and Jacques Stephen Alexis all have in common this desire to reorient Caribbean writing. Antillanité, marvellous realism, and the adoption of Marxism all suggest this new shared orientation. At this time one could speak of self-definition in terms of cultural relativity and cultural encounter. The mask of nègre fondamental is dropped in favor of notions of cultural interaction and of the Caribbean as a crossroads in a global cultural encounter. Thought is heavily centered on the Caribbean region at this time and links are made to the writing of South America and the post-plantation U.S. South. The generally predominant form would at this time be narrative fiction. Within this medium the complexities of the collective experience could be more fully explored. It is not that poetry disappeared, but the lyrical wail of negritude gave way to an epic verse and to the long poem, which signified a more patient exploration of history and landscape. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that despite the predominance of narrative in this epistemological break with the 1930s, there is a noticeable slippage between genres and a mixing of genres. Expository and imaginative discourses seem to coexist among writers and sometimes within the same oeuvre. With this general pattern of development in mind, each genre was divided into periods that more or less correspond with the ideological pattern identified above. As has been argued, the various genres are unevenly represented in these periods. One of the problems posed by this division is that it is not easy to find contributors who have the critical competence to range across countries, across genres, and individual writers. It is forests that matter more than individual trees in this organization of the study of the practice of literature. Individual essays on Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire or Edouard Glissant were impossible if we were to stick to our critical approach. The only exception to this rule is the essay on Frantz Fanon in the treatment of the evolution of the essay. Fanon is a special case because the essay represents his only contribution to Caribbean thought and because of his special conception of the form. Most scholars tend to have knowledge of individual writers or territories but have some difficulty extending themselves across three or four different zones of writing. Because of the complexities involved in the evolution of each genre and the implications of each ideological period, it was felt that no one genre could be assigned in its entirety to a single contributor. First of all, identifying such a scholar would have posed a problem. Also what might have been gained in the logic and comprehensiveness of a single essay by one contributor would have been lost in the possible tendency to minimize the importance of a given period or a particular

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author. Indeed, one would have required the contributor to provide a small monograph on writing in a particular genre from 1804 to the present across four territories that are markedly divergent from each other. Consequently, the essays were attributed in terms of individual competence to scholars who would then simply treat one period of the development of a given genre. It was far easier to find a scholar to write on negritude poetry or on recent development of the genre. The one exception is that of Juris Silenieks who kindly agreed to undertake both parts of the study of francophone Caribbean theater. Even there we must keep in mind that the literary terrain that he is surveying is not as extensive as that of other genres and he could easily deal with the early period in a few pages. The various genres were narrowed down to fiction, poetry, theater, and the essay. Other minor written forms such as memoirs, chronicles, and folktales were subsumed under these headings. The two dominant forms among the four that were identified are fiction and poetry. Poetry dates back to the lyrical celebration of independence by Haitian poets and fiction has its roots in realist peasant novels and social satire in the late nineteenth century. In each genre the focus was not on the impact of European literary movements on local writing. It is not a matter of locating Haitian romantics or Parnassianism in Martinique. Rather the focus was on internal coherence and evolution. The novel was divided into four essays. The ones that treat the main issues raised by this particular literary form are those devoted to realism. Frederick Case examines the beginnings of the novel form in Haiti and concentrates on the question of social commentary and the political agenda of the turn of the century novelists of Haiti. He rightly points to the reemergence of these tendencies in the fiction of the 1940s and the peasant novel. Even though he is not preoccupied with form, the suggestion is that the originality of this genre may lie in its ability to appropriate a more popular discourse. The linguistic experiment of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew) is a dramatic example of this but it exists in other areas as well. Beverley Ormerod's excellent survey of a difficult group of contemporary novelists complements and extends Case's work. The question of realism is reconsidered by later writers who need to find new creative ways at looking at history, landscape, and the collective consciousness. There is a gap in the evolution of the novel; it is due to the remarkable shift of creative energies to poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. There are also omissions of female writers who are not a part of mainstream negritude and seem to prefer the novel form. Marie-Denise Shelton looks at this group of writers, some of whom reject the idealization of Africa by the negritude movement and other, less aggressively virile, forms of resistance in the Caribbean. More inward and anguished forms are visible among these writers who seem to be more inspired by the more private discourse of the diary or the personal memoir than the audibility and eloquence of the novel of disclosure, of voiced protest. The final essay in this section tackles a new and very recent phenomenon in the evolution of the essay, the question of exile. The production of essays by Haiti's massive community in North America is a new orientation to francophone Caribbean literature. Indeed the question of a reevaluation of the notion of exile has implications for all the genres. The discussion of francophone Caribbean poetry is similarly organized. Jacques Corzani, A. James Arnold, and Anthea Morrison write on prenegritude, negritude, and postnegritude poetry respectively. In the first essay, Corzani lucidly points to the difficult beginnings of poetry in the French colonies and the metropolitan hostility to the formation of an intellectual elite there. He meticulously surveys early writing by white creoles, anti-slavery sentiments, and early regionalism

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in the nineteenth century and the notorious stereotyping of the colonies in the image of the alluringly submissive doudous. He ends by pointing out that even before Légitime Défense in 1932, writers in Martinique and Guadeloupe were beginning to project a less idealized view of their relations with France. In this attempt at "recentering" a poetic tradition within the Caribbean, Corzani avoids the usual tendency to see these writers as mere imitators of French literary trends. The poetry of Haiti is perhaps even more illustrative of a vigorous local tradition. Nineteenth-century Haitian poetry develops as a dynamic assertion of Haitianness and the values of the revolution. It can be seen as a lyrical and expressive extension of the polemics of the century. Almost all the major issues in francophone Caribbean literatures are raised and debated at this time. The emergence of an early indigenist school of writers in the 1830s is early evidence of the awareness of the need to find an original voice. Similarly, the realization of the pitfalls of an excessive regionalism and a strident political rhetoric is clear in the ideas of the poetic movement called La Ronde at the end of the century, which also witnessed the first attempt to write poetry successfully in Creole in Oswald Durand's "Choucoune." Again it must be pointed out that it is this tradition of literary expression that makes possible the major works that would emerge in the twentieth century and gain international recognition. Negritude is given a brisk and probing treatment in Arnold's essay. All the current questioning of the claims of that movement are apparent in this essay. The whole legend of black revolution as proposed by the negritude poets has come increasingly under fire and questions concerning its reactionary and chauvinistic nature are reflected here. Unfortunately, Haiti also gets short shrift in this treatment of negritude poetry, since the definition used to define the movement excluded the Haitian experience. The poetry of Carl Brouard, Emile Roumer, and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin is important in its attempt to deal with the preoccupations of a community that had been occupied by a foreign, white power. The neocolonial nature of the U.S. occupation (1915-34) meant a resurgence of poetic expression in Haiti. As has been pointed out (Dash [1981]), this experience meant a shift away from parochialism toward an interest in modernism, Marxism, and surrealism that were to make the acknowledged achievements in twentieth-century Haitian prose and poetry possible. Anthea Morrison brings the survey of poetry up to date by demonstrating the attempts of francophone Caribbean writers to free themselves from the poetics of negritude. Negritude tended to become a paralyzing force in a younger generation that tried to imitate Césaire, Senghor, and Damas. Names like those of Sonny Rupaire and Alfred Melon-Degras who have important local reputations appear alongside those of Glissant and Depestre who have achieved international fame. The contemporary realities of Departmentalized Martinique and Guadeloupe and the Duvalierist dictatorship in Haiti weigh heavily on this writing. As Morrison concludes, the time for the retour aux sources is over and there is an increasing attempt to seek "salvation within rather than beyond the native land." As the pieties of negritude fade, poetry faces a new challenge to provide answers to the search of self-definition. The answers are suggested here but it is in the contemporary novel that they find their fullest expression. Juris Silenieks undertakes the daunting task of dealing with all francophone Caribbean theater. This is a particularly difficult proposition because one is forced to respond to the question: why is drama the least developed of the literary genres? Silenieks's response usefully draws on Glissant's Discours antillais (Caribbean discourse), 1981, in which the latter asserts that there is no theater without a nation. The drama is therefore seen as a collective enterprise. The problem is that these territories have not, for one reason or another, acquired this kind of internal coherence. This is even

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true of Haiti where theater is essentially a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Generally drama is divided into two kinds and two periods. There is the first manifestation of a literary theater in the 1960s with Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint and Césaire's La tragédie du roi Christophe (The tragedy of king Christophe). These are essentially epic plays by poets that revealingly concentrate on Haitian history. Yet the main concern of both writers is not the theater. The tradition of agitprop drama is not given much attention and it is a minor tendency best exemplified by the plays of Daniel Boukman's Orphée nègre (Black Orpheus), 1962, and Les négriers (The slavers), 1971. This kind of political drama is arguably more interesting in the early plays of Maryse Condé because she avoids propaganda by concentrating on the ironies of human relationships in the context of political ambiguities. Her Mort d'Oluwémi d'Ajumako (Death of Oluwémi of Ajumako), 1973, may be her best work of this kind. The essay ends with the exciting new work of Patrick Chamoiseau and Ina Césaire. In both cases the use of folklore and local situations is evident. This not only demonstrates the impact of the movement of créolité but shows a new confidence in folk traditions. The capacity to use popular tradition to convey urgent political issues is what Glissant means by the need to transcend the collective unconscious in folklore and make a community conscious of its shared destiny. In contrast, the tradition of the polemical or the literary essay is a strong and sustained one in the francophone Caribbean. Haiti takes the lead in this regard. Haitian pamphleteers and publicists have been vocal and prolific on the question of national sovereignty. Theories of development, nationhood, and race are present from the early years of the nineteenth century in the work of Henry Christophe's secretary, Baron de Vastey. There is no equivalent production of essays anywhere else in the Caribbean. It is only decades later that, as Gordon Lewis states, "after Haiti, the torch of Antillean nationalism passed to the Hispanic Antilles" (Lewis [1983], 264). The importance of Frantz Fanon as an essayist within a Caribbean tradition is discussed by Vere Knight. Fanon's reaction against the essentialist thrust of negritude and his view of the revolutionary potential of popular tradition makes Fanon a major postnegritude thinker. The rediscovery of Fanon today in the context of postcolonial theories makes this essay quite pertinent. A. James Arnold brings this section to a close by pointing to new developments as the essay becomes increasingly shaped by the views of Glissant on both the substance and the form of the genre. In Glissant the essay is no longer a rational exposition but a combination of prose poem and critical discourse. These contributions take us through definitions of the Caribbean that are linguistically based, racially derived, and ultimately of a regional nature. The cross-cultural model that is the dominant contemporary mode is the perspective from which many of these essays are written. It represents the best model for a regional comparative treatment of Caribbean writing.

Bibliography Dash, J. Michael. 1981. Literature and Ideology in Haiti 1915-1961. London: Macmillan. (Gives a particularly acute analysis of the importance for twentieth-century Haitian culture of the U.S. occupation.) González Echevarría, Roberto. 1985. The Voice of the Masters. Austin: University of Texas. (A critique of the author as a figure of authority in Latin-American literature that has implications for the Caribbean also.) Lewis, Gordon. 1983. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (A detailed study of the development of ideas in the Caribbean that unfortunately stops at the end of the nineteenth century.)

Literary Genres

The Novel

Novels of Social and Political Protest to the 1950s

FREDERICK IVOR CASE

Principal, New College University of Toronto

The purpose of this essay is to identify some of the most significant Caribbean novels produced between the turn of the century and 1950. The selection of works is based on the following criteria: innovation in the choice of themes; innovation in the presentation of the social and ideological message; and defiance of the contemporary regime or mode of thought. The diverse sociopolitical situations of the various countries of the region will determine the manifestations of protest and revolt in novels produced by Caribbean authors. However, there are several common characteristics that run very deep and give a distinctive Caribbean identity to the literature we are studying. The common experience of slavery has produced a clearly stratified society throughout the Caribbean. Almost the entire region has been subject to the plantation culture with its distinctive socioeconomic structures. Although the social stratifications are not identical, there are sufficient similarities for us to consider the evidence of this particular phenomenon in Caribbean literature. A distinction must nonetheless be made between the racial/color/shade stratification and class stratification. It is particularly in the latter case that we see a remarkable consistency in the literature of the region. Our consideration of the literary and social importance of the Caribbean novel to 1950 must give a prominent place to Justin Lhérisson's Zoune chez sa ninnaine (Zoune at her godmother's). Published in 1906, this Haitian novel focuses on a subject that remains sensitive to this day: sexual child abuse that in this particular case borders on incest. There is also the suggestion, albeit unfounded, of lesbianism. The thematic process and the aesthetic structure of the novel are based on Cadet Jacques's sexual harassment of Zoune, but it is the class difference between the mature man, Cadet Jacques, and the young girl, Zoune, that is the determining factor. The political and military power of the man and the abject powerlessness of the girl are represented by her distance from her povertystricken parents, their eventual death, and her total dependence on Mme Boyote, who has considerable economic power. The very title of the novel indicates a relationship of power: on the one hand the godchild (Zoune), on the other the godmother (Mme Boyote dissimulated behind the term ninnaine); the same set of oppositions is at play in the proper name Zoune, which itself is a deformation of Zétrenne (étrenne: a New Year's present) and in the religious/economic function of godmother. The "adoption" of Zoune by Mme Boyote is not a purely humanitarian move. We read that "In her exasperation, this very sensitive woman also condemned the State. She declared that the

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Authorities should have shown a truly paternal interest in the fate of the mass of peasants who, through a lack of education, do not even realize that they have duties to fulfill toward themselves and their children."1 However, Mme Boyote, Cadet Jacques, and Zoune constitute the closest approximation to the family unit that the young girl will experience once she has left her parents. It is true that Mme Boyote undertakes Zoune's general education, feeding and clothing her adequately; but it must also be pointed out that she uses Zoune as a maid and general helper in the shop. The "family" unit is therefore an exploitative one. At a very early age Zoune becomes indispensable to Mme Boyote's growing prosperity and there is no doubt that the adolescent assumes an economic value through her labor and energy. In the elaboration of Zoune's drama Lhérisson attacks one of the most insidious forms of economic oppression: productive labor carried out as a moral obligation to a tutor. The idea of Zoune being remunerated for her work is never even hinted at. When Mme Boyote eventually finds money hidden among Zoune's clothing we are told that the older woman is "stupefied." Zoune works to be kept in food and clothing so that she may continue to work. It is clear that after only a short while Zoune has no alternative but to remain with her godmother. She has no professional mobility, she is too young, she is female, and she has no money. She is unable to take any initiative that would alter her situation in a positive manner. Lhérisson clearly identified the relationship of economic power as the essential factor of differentiation that structures the text and even determines the language register used: Creole adapted to French. It is also significant that, whereas the narrative voice frequently presents the psychological insights of the two adults, the descriptions of Zoune remain primarily external and we have very little indication of how she thinks and how she views her situation. Zoune is the object of intentions, initiatives, and actions, and is unable to determine her own situation. Furthermore, the narration of the novel is undertaken under the guise of a converstation between two friends, and Lhérisson has thus created a series of narrative and psychological barriers between the reader and the protagonist. Thematically, the persistent sexual pressures that Zoune suffers within the home and in the general community further objectify her and there is an inevitability about the humiliating public expulsion that awaits her. Although Zoune resists attempts at seduction outside the home and fights off Cadet Jacques's physical attacks, she is still incapable of determining the conditions under which her own sexuality will develop. Cadet Jacques's sexual harassment and attempted rapes are complemented by the beatings Mme Boyote administers. Zoune is beaten and expelled by Mme Boyote because the latter's male companion is sexually interested in the adolescent and has attempted to rape her. The victim is fully blamed by her spiritual and moral guardian who is also her economic and social mistress. Zoune's body is violated and she has to be expelled from "decent" society because her presence has disrupted the order of things. She is a non-person who has dared to fight for her own human dignity and she has therefore set in motion a series of countermeasures by those around her. It is ironic that during her expulsion the envy and venom of the crowd of poor people are turned against her as they join in blaming this hapless victim of abuse. The literary structure of the novel emphasizes Zoune's voicelessness and her lack of social power in contrast to the motivations and reasoning of Cadet Jacques and Mme Boyote, which are

1 Dans son exaspération, cette femme au coeur sensible prit aussi l'État à partie. Elle déclara que les Autorités auraient dû s'intéresser d'une façon toute paternelle au sort de cette masse de paysans qui, faute d'instruction, ne savent même pas qu'ils ont des devoirs à remplir envers eux-mêmes et envers leurs enfants (Lhérisson [1906], 18).

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made clear to the reader. But the motivations and reasoning of the novel are also crystal clear, since the narrator explicitly criticizes the prevailing social order and political regime. The novel strongly suggests that the degeneracy of the regime engenders the moral depravity of which Zoune is but an exemplary victim. In many ways La famille des Pitite-Caille (The Pitite-Caille family), published in 1905, can be seen as the direct literary and ideological preparation for Zoune chez sa ninnaine. In the earlier novel there is a very clear preoccupation with the internal dynamics of a family. Structurally the two novels are very different, but Lhérisson's preoccupation with the prevailing social and political order is evident in both. In La famille des Pitite-Caille the novelist exposes a number of his country's ills. He emphasizes the question of the repression and manipulation of the press and the superior treatment given to white foreigners. However, the fundamental opposition inheres in the relationship of power between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. The fortunes and misfortunes of the Pitite-Caille family contrast with the social and economic privileges enjoyed by those who have not worked for them. This ideological perspective is further explored in J.-B. Cinéas's Le choc en retour (The backlash), 1948, a novel that marks an important stage in the evolution of Haitian literature. Cinéas reveals the vulgar callousness of a bourgeoisie that has no regard for the suffering of the common people. Le choc en retour is a fine example of Haitian literary realism. Cinéas explores relationships between individuals, between institutions, and also between individuals and institutions. Cinéas further treats the faceless mass of the people, and the realism of the author appears in his treatment of this essential but consistently exploited element of society. However, such realism is not to be confused with verisimilitude. In this context realism is the analysis, through literary means, of the social and moral contradictions that are determined by the established economic and political order (Case [1985], 11-29). This particular type of realism produces a careful development of the social and psychological motivations of the protagonist(s). In Le choc en retour there is a precision and economy of style, a social intensity to the writing that highlight the novel's psychological and ideological analyses of the protagonist. As readers, we see Catullus Alcibiade Pernier in a variety of social positions of power and powerlessness. For example, in a significant scene in the novel, Pernier smiles and waves to what he considers to be an adoring crowd. He does not realize the degree of hatred and envy on the lips of the poor as they watch him on his way to a ball. The crowd cries its anger, its hunger, its unemployment, and its despair; but all the protagonist hears is popular applause and support. Just as the president of the republic and the other ministers are unable to read the signs of discontent around them, Pernier - by an irony of the author Minister of the Interior - does not understand the anger of the people he oppresses. Eventually, the common people make their anger known even to those who seek to ignore it. Cinéas describes the mob, hungry for revenge and change, as they invade the parliamentary building, hoping for the fall of the regime: "In the courtyard one could see the faces of wild beasts ready to devour. There they were, from the districts of Saline, Bel-Air and Morne-à-Tuf, all the hungry people whose only hope is in the fall of a regime. There they were dirty, in rags, bitter, ferocious-looking and exhaling the strong odor of billy goat - the characteristic odor of the crowd that hardly cares about hygiene. There they were shouting, screaming, milling around. There they

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were waiting for the eternal miracle."2 But these dirty, ragged, and foul-smelling people are the ones on whom the elite depends for its wealth and comfort. Even when Pernier lives in exile in Paris, where he changes his name to Charles Alcy, he fails to understand the true significance of the events in his country. Through a series of meetings with a Haitian diplomat and two Frenchmen, Pernier begins to learn the extent of his ignorance and the extent of the neglect in his own country. But it is the Russian revolutionary, Prochkew Mikailovitch, who provides a precise ideological analysis of Pernier's situation and that of Haiti. Cinéas devotes almost ten pages to this analysis, apparently attaching great importance to a revolutionary reevaluation of the Haitian situation (Cinéas [1948], 184-93). The Russian revolutionary does not spare his criticism of the Haitian elite in general and of Pernier in particular. He makes a precise analysis of the lack of collective consciousness and the lack of will to nationhood that characterize the Haitian bourgeoisie. Pernier learns his lesson and eventually returns to Haiti; but political intrigues threaten to engulf him as he makes his way closer to home. He feels the abjection of exile within his own country, which he still does not understand at his death. Both Cinéas and Lhérisson are highly critical of the Haitian elite and Le choc en retour sets out to demonstrate the inevitability of the American occupation (Dash [1981], 43). Both authors indicate that the educated professional classes and those who have political power seemed to have abandoned all sense of responsibility. This is also the principal theme of Jean Price-Mars's collection of lectures and essays entitled La vocation de l'élite (The vocation of the elite), which he published under the American occupation in 1919. In this volume Price-Mars deplores the presence of the Americans just as one of Jacques Roumain's peasant characters in La montagne ensorcelée (The bewitched mountain), 1931, expresses his anger over the return of white rule in Haiti. It is within this larger context of the occupation that Roumain shows us an isolated village with its hunger, jealousies, and insane search for vengeance. In his preface to La montagne ensorcelée Jean Price-Mars makes allusion to the primitive nature of the peasant and to "his passive submission to what he believes to be inevitable, his dumb resignation to what seems to be inexorable."3 But Price-Mars's remarks deal more with the peasants' religion than with Roumain's novel. In La montagne ensorcelée the character Balletroy suggests that a series of deaths in the village is due to intestinal problems and he says to the others: "I know what is wrong with you. Greed is eating your hearts like a cancer. You are looking for someone to blame because the harvest is bad, because you, Baptiste, you lost your horse and you, Dorilas, because your bull died."4 When these misfortunes are added to the tragic deaths of two children, the community is ready to believe the nonsensical stories of Désilus, and all attention is turned toward the unfortunate Placinette. Roumain clearly shows that religion becomes the appropriate channel through which the frustrations and anger of a people might pass in order to isolate a scapegoat and expiatory victim. But this is a degenerate religious belief that has become crass superstition. It is through superstitious

2 Dans la cour, des visages de bêtes fauves prêtes à dévorer. Ils étaient là, tous les meurt-de-faim, ceux de la Saline, ceux de Bel-Air, ceux de Morne-à-Tuf qui n'ont d'espoir que dans l'écroulement d'un régime. Ils étaient là, sales, en guenilles, aigris, l'air féroce, exhalant l'odeur forte de bouc, l'odeur sui generis de la foule - peu soucieuse de l'hygiène. Ils étaient là, criant, hurlant, gesticulant, grouillant. Ils étaient là dans l'attente de l'éternel miracle (Cinéas [1948], 88-89). 3 sa soumission passive à ce qu'il croit être inévitable, c'est sa résignation muette à ce qui lui semble être l'inexorable (Roumain [1931], 10). 4 Oh, je sais ce que vous avez: l'avarice vous ronge le coeur comme un chancre; vous voulez découvrir un responsable, parce que la récolte est mauvaise, parce que toi, Baptiste, tu as perdu ton cheval, toi, Dorilas, parce que ton taureau a crevé (Roumain [1931], 80).

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belief that a justification is found to stone and kill Placinette. Even though the characters in the novel voice no explicit accusations concerning her daughter, Grâce, they kill her, too, because as an extension of the mother she becomes a suitable candidate for sacrifice. In any case two children of the village have died and the villagers in their turn kill two persons who are as poor, as dispossessed, and as miserable as they all are. In this novel Roumain appears to be exposing the negative and degrading aspects of religious belief. In his later novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew), 1944, voudou is only mildly criticized as a body of religious beliefs, since its belief system conveys the symbolic structure of the novel. Gouverneurs de la rosée reveals more clearly PriceMars's influence in the context of indigénisme with its stress on voudou as the African heritage of the Haitian people. Cinéas also explored the ambiguities of religious belief in his novel L'héritage sacré (The sacred inheritance), 1945. Here the protagonist bears a double burden: his peasant origin and his destiny to become a houngan, or voudou priest. Cinéas's attempt to make an individual drama of a question that is being dealt with simultaneously as a general religious problem is hampered by a cumbersome narrative technique. The drama unfolds as a Haitian and an American pursue their studies of the Haitian peasant. Their intrusions in the text are too frequent and at times condescending and without relevant textual interest. One suspects that Cinéas needed to create this great distance between himself and the subject of his novel so as not to be accused of too sympathetic a treatment of the protagonist, Aiza Cédieu. It is certain, however, that Cinéas and Roumain attempt to create respect for voudou and for those who practice it. Insofar as voudou is the religion of the overwhelming majority of the Haitian people, and sustains their lifestyle, their culture and their language, Price-Mars's Ainsi parla l'oncle (So spoke the uncle), 1928, is often correctly cited as having a major influence on the younger generation of Haitian writers. Sufficient emphasis has not, however, been placed on the importance of La vocation de l'élite. Apart from the question of the abdication of responsibility, in this latter work Price-Mars is careful to reiterate the importance of four basic themes: the land, labor, education, and the social condition of women. These aspects of economic life and political awareness have undoubtedly become the central focus of Caribbean literature. It would be simplistic to say that the influence of La vocation de l'élite spread throughout the region. It is more likely that the economic and political conjuncture the international economic pressures on the region stemming from the growing hegemony of U.S. capitalism - produced a series of similar literary phenomena. Roumain's La montagne ensorcelée can be seen as a prelude to his masterpiece Gouverneurs de la rosée, which is a crystallization of the Caribbean situation. One can identify in this novel the major themes of La vocation de l'élite. The protagonist, Manuel, has had to emigrate to Cuba to work on a plantation owned by an American. It is there that he learns the moral and economic value of worker solidarity. He successfully attempts to introduce his revolutionary optimism to his home hamlet in Haiti. His patient education of his fellow villagers, his complete attachment to work and the land, and the essential role played by the young woman Annaïse further illustrate the literary preoccupation with the basic themes outlined above. Diab'-là (The devil), 1946, by Joseph Zobel (Guiana) is structurally very similar to Gouverneurs de la rosée, although it expands the theme of solidarity by focusing on the collaboration between peasant farmer and fisherfolk. It further extends the theme of interdependence even though it is set in the closed world of a fishing hamlet that appears to have little connection with the world

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beyond (Case [1985], 12-18). Indeed, the isolation of the community is such that there is no overt presence of the colonial masters, and this absence is of itself a successful literary device. However, Diab'là has little ideological depth or consistency, although in its emphasis on worker solidarity it is clearly a statement of opposition to French colonalism. What is lacking in Diab 'là is a sense of ideological purpose. Worker solidarity appears to be a nice thing to indulge in but there is no structure to sustain it. Furthermore, the protagonist Diab'là's attitude toward Fidéline - and her very name - indicate male domination rather than equal participation in the restructuring of society. Nonetheless, the prevailing theme of this novel is undoubtedly the dignity of work. In a similar manner Gouverneurs de la rosée and Le choc en retour have as their thematic and ideological focus the need to return to work on the land and to fight against the corruption of those who have power. The question is a frequent element of Caribbean literature, because the prevailing socioeconomic order does not permit self-realization through labor. Colonialism and capitalism have dehumanized labor in the name of ethical and economic superiority. The pervasiveness of such reasoning is clearly seen in Batouala, 1921, by René Maran, who was born in Martinique. Throughout this novel Maran's explicit and implicit statements ridicule the idea of European superiority. The Africans of Batouala are as concerned that the French should leave as are the Haitians of La montagne ensorcelée to see the Americans return home. But in both novels the authors proceed to the exorcism of indigenous evils. Roumain and Maran examine systems of belief that maintain power relationships that are advantageous to some and of definite harm to others. In Roumain's novel the analysis is very thorough and the results quite brutal as hunger, disease, and ignorance lead a community to seek out an expiatory victim. Similarly, Maran depicts a society dominated by older males, and a protagonist characterized by drunkenness and a fundamental impotence. Roumain and Maran are not concerned with the affirmation of African values, nor are they producing a culturally bankrupt negritude. Their preoccupation is with the social disintegration, economic marginality, psychological disorders, and cultural alienation within communities that have been subjected to long periods of oppression. But underlying these destructive tendencies is the attitude toward work. Maran describes Batouala's attitude to work in the following manner: "Therefore work could not frighten him. It was only that in the language of the whites this word took on an astonishing meaning. It meant fatigue without an immediate or tangible result, worries, sadness, pain, harm to health, and the pursuit of ephemeral designs."5 This is the type of work that Roumain's Manuel had experienced in Cuba, the type of labor Cinéas explicitly condemned in the narration of Le choc en retour, it is manifest in all of the novels we have so far discussed. Maran's brief description contains the elements necessary to explain the alienation of the African worker who, in any case, is often engaged in forced labor. Neither the outcry in France against Batouala nor the Goncourt prize it received in Paris makes it a significant novel. Its significance results rather from the ideological implications of the novel as a social and psychological phenomenon (Ojo-Ade [1984], 47-106). By all standards René Maran was a successful Frenchman. He had grown up in France, attended school there, and had served in the colonial administration of his country (Ojo-Ade [1984], 13-26). In his article "Misère noire" (Black misery), published nineteen years after Batouala, Léon-Gontran Damas of Guiana discusses

5 Le travail ne pouvait donc l'effrayer. Seulement, dans la langue des hommes blancs, ce mot revêtait un sens étonnant, signifiait fatigue sans résultat immédiat ou tangible, soucis, chagrins, douleur, usure de santé, poursuite de desseins chimériques (Maran [1921], 21).

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the token blacks who occupy posts of importance in France. He also describes the attitude of Caribbean blacks who serve in Africa as colonial administrators. A careful reading of this article reveals the extent to which Maran's ideological position in Batouala is indeed a revolutionary stance. This is no mere polemical denunciation of colonialism, for through Maran's use of subtle literary devices it becomes a far-reaching and detailed attack on political and psychological attitudes of superiority. In his third-person narration the author permits insights into the minds and motivations of his literary characters. The fact that the objects of the colonial process become the pitiless observers of and commentators on the morality of their oppressors marks a major break with the European literary and ethnographic tradition to which Maran is heir. The Haitian novels we have discussed present a consistent analysis of the destructive elements of a particular society. They are marked by an absence of gratuitous sentimentality, although great emphasis is placed on the positive potential of the peasant workers. The courage of the Haitian writers lies in their criticism of the elite to which they belong, and of the regime that could eliminate them in one way or another. But they nonetheless enjoyed the comfort of knowing that there were others before them, with them, and that there would doubtless be others after them. Maran's courage lies in the fact that his was a single black voice against a vast, oppressive, and hypocritical empire. Batouala is not a noble African personage: he is a drunken, lecherous, and autocratic individual whose power resides in being a big fish in a very, very small pond. Yet Maran succeeds in pitting his image against that of the colonial masters and in so doing he demonstrates the relativity of the moral, social, and cultural condemnations of peoples colonized by the French. Batouala is not simply a novel of protest; it is a novel of revolt because it was written at a time when Europeans were convinced of their natural superiority over Africans. It was published in France at a time when that view was upheld by all economic, social, and political institutions, and went unchallenged by French-educated blacks. Maran's success lies in the fact that he was able to show that such views are merely relative and that it is naïve to believe that the colonial subjects do not have their own views of the conquerors and their enterprise. It is useful to mention in passing two other novels written by Maran. Le coeur serré (The heavy heart), 1931, and Un homme pareil aux autres (A man like other men), 1947, can be considered largely autobiographical. They are distinctive, however, because they reveal the deep anguish of the immigrant who belongs to a racial minority and who is also classified in the minds of the majority as a colonial subject. These are profoundly troubling novels because they meticulously reveal the extent of the suffering of their respective protagonists in search of themselves and of their place in society. The power of the look of the Other, the power of the presumed thought of the Other, the condemnation of a lucid observer of the social environment underline the fact that France is not the supremely civilized and humanitarian society that it is often said to be. Just as Batouala presents, from an African point of view, a clear moral revulsion against the French and their colonial enterprise, Le coeur serré and Un homme pareil aux autres reveal the social ills of France from the point of view of a black Frenchman. The author shows the extent of the social and psychological alienation to which a member of a racial minority can be subjected. Maran's use of irony, his mastery of style, and his biting sarcasm are the hallmarks of his careful and deliberate writing. The extent of the application of conventional literary devices in his work demonstrates that the socially committed novel can also be of considerable aesthetic merit. In many ways the Martinican Joseph Zobel's La rue Cases-Nègres (Black shack alley), 1950, is of similar literary importance. Zobel has produced a novel deeply committed to the people of the

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Caribbean. The social devastation of the cane-cutting family, the relentless cycle of poverty that threatens to engulf the rural workers, and various forms of economic oppression are all described within this novel that is narrated by a young boy. The narrative voice is particularly effective because it is young, authentic, and entirely credible. The reader does not have to evaluate the perceptions and bias of the narration. José presents the view of the ultimate victim in any process of class and racial repression: the child, who is usually voiceless. It is significant that his principal interlocutor is his old grandmother, M'man Tine. They form a powerful literary couple. Even though M'man Tine dies, her work continues through José, who has managed to escape from the cane fields as a result of his grandmother's determination to break the cycle of colonial poverty. Since the publication of La rue Cases-Nègres in 1950 there have been several Caribbean novels dealing with the family in a plantation society. Zobel's novel, however, is situated in the 1930s and provides us with interesting considerations of temporality. Although the narrator's voice is that of a child, we know that the narration does not coincide with the age of the child. Since the novel progresses over a period of years and since the literary style is as sophisticated at the beginning as it is at the end, we realize that the narrator is no longer a child. However, we accept the principles on which the narration is based and the fact that we are also expected to appreciate the return to the 1930s. Before José begins to attend school the narrative time is not chronological time. Every day is a dramatic tableau that is not seen in relation to a greater agenda. Each day conveys its own intensity of cultural, social, economic, and environmental factors. It is precisely this childlike suspension of chronological time that creates the intensity of the socioeconomic conditions of the community in which José and M'man Tine live. Once the young boy begins to travel away from the community to attend school, the chronological process begins its relentless march. For in fact the suspended chronological time of the plantation is the time that has been misappropriated and manipulated by the owner. This is not a falsification of reality. There are significant temporal markers within the home community: the old and the young, the age differences among the children, and the death of old Médouze. But the rhythm of life is measured by the production of sugar and rum. The suspension of time is the residue of the closed cycle produced by the planters in the accumulation of their wealth. The adult plantation workers are exploited by an inhuman system that is the major legacy of slavery. They are well aware of time but only in its oppressive aspect. M'man Tine abandons the community and the restrictions of temporality in order to free her grandson, but eventually she dies in the community of her origin. This is no sentimental return to the source of communal strength; it is instead a deeply pessimistic statement concerning the futility of her attempt to escape. In death, M'man Tine rejoins Médouze and the countless others who did not progress beyond the vast graveyard of the Caribbean plantation. Her death also means that there is no longer a place for José in the plantation community. He permanently joins the rural exodus like so many others of Martinique and the entire Caribbean region. The social, racial, and economic stratification we have discussed earlier is particularly pronounced in this novel. Even when José moves to Fort-de-France the lines of demarcation are clearly drawn. But even if La rue Cases-Nègres does not provide us with a vision of urban life equal to that produced by C. L. R. James's Trinidadian novel Minty Alley, 1936, Zobel makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the economic pressures that force the people to abandon the land and the exploitation associated with it. James's novel portrays the economic and psychological pressures on social groups as they compete for space within a restrictive setting.

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The distinctive innovation in Zobel's work is the fact that he moves beyond the individual introspection of earlier novels to lucid reflection on the condition of an entire class. José and M'man Tine are Caribbean people of Martinique as well as of Cuba, of Jamaica as well as of Trinidad. When Sam Selvon produces A Brighter Sun in 1952 and in subsequent years Ways of Sunlight and Turn Again Tiger, we see Indo-Trinidadian families in their struggle against an economic system that threatens to stifle them in their stagnation. Very close parallels can be seen between the situation of José and that of the protagonist of the short story "Bitter Cane" (Selvon [1957]), who is also forced to abandon his rural plantation community in order to receive adequate education. Despite the difference of race, island, and colonial masters, the economic pressures, the cultural alienation, and the social stratification are identical. Zobel fails to acknowledge the presence of Indo-Martinicans in his fictional world and of itself this is indicative of a particular manifestation of Caribbean social alienation. However, La rue Cases-Nègres stands beside Batouala and Gouverneurs de la rosée as a distinctive contribution to literature. Zobel's novel eventually won international recognition through the cinematographic adaptation by Euzhan Palcy. Whereas Batouala threatened the sense of self of the imperial masters in the security of their homes, it did not even begin to shake the edifice of colonial domination. When Batouala was published, very few Africans could read it or even afford to buy it. Therefore the prestigious awards and general acclaim by progressive French intellectuals posed no threat to the structures of empire. At the time of its publication La rue Cases-Nègres was readily available to a Caribbean population that had a relatively high level of literacy, but it remained virtually unknown until Euzhan Palcy's film version appeared in 1983. Under a socialist government in France, in a world that is increasingly conscious of the international dimensions of systemic colonial oppression, the film was assured of success and several prizes. The questions of the distribution of literary works and of their reception by those in political power are seldom mentioned in literary histories. However, these factors are important to any evaluation of the success or social impact of a given novel. When one considers the social and historical importance of Zoune chez sa ninnaine, it is ironic that this novel is rarely mentioned in histories of Haitian literature even though its very bold thematic focus calls into question the conduct and moral attitudes of an entire nation. Yet, as I have pointed out, the novel deals with real social ills that were and still are often hidden from the reading public. To this day, it remains almost unique in Caribbean literature in its exposure of the systematic exploitation of young girls. There is no doubt that the particular issues brought to the fore in this novel published in 1906 continue to exist, but even now few male writers would have the courage to devote an entire work to this very serious problem. Whereas Gouverneurs de la rosée appeared at a period when it could be fully exploited on an international scale, Lhérisson's novel was published long before national or international consciousness was prepared to contend with the fictional treatment of sexual harassment. The common characteristic of the novels discussed in this essay is opposition to a political regime. The human dramas that unfold within the texts describe the sufferings of victims and perpetrators. Although a decidedly bourgeois, drawing room literature flourished in Haiti and in Martinique, the authors we have studied were more concerned with the progressive development of the political, social, and economic institutions than with the perpetuation of European middle-class values. These authors have seen the necessity of exposing the ills of their societies in an effort to

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bring about significant change. Only two of the novels, Gouverneurs de la rosée and Diab'là, suggest ways of overcoming the human condition that weighs so heavily on the characters. Significantly, Roumain's novel can be seen as the outcome of the American occupation of Haiti, and Zobel's was published not long after the occupation of Martinique by the thousands of French sailors and marines blockaded there during the second world war. The utopian thinking that underlies these two works could also be seen as a response to the turmoil that gripped the world between 1939 and 1945. The racism and inhumanity unleashed during that period could not but evoke a powerful response among those who were anything but indifferent bystanders. It is therefore important to note that Gouverneurs de la rosée became an instant international bestseller when it was translated into several European and other languages. Similarly, the film version of La rue Cases-Nègres has become an international success because it touches fundamental human concerns of a universal nature. One of the major characteristics of the literature we have discussed is precisely its universal appeal. With few exceptions, the novels of protest and revolt transcend their Caribbean setting and the Caribbean origins of their authors. To characterize certain literatures as regional and limited in their scope is a negation of the societies that produce those literatures. Every body of literature has a particular topographical setting and is expressed through a specific symbolic discourse. It could also be argued that every literature deals with aspects of the human condition and is therefore of potential thematic interest to any reader. Literary discourse is taken here to be essentially ideological, and since the aesthetic aspects of a work are determined by this ideology and also by the society from which the literary work emanates, these elements vary from one nation to another, from one regional or language group to another. The Caribbean has been the meeting point of many diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and language groups subjected to similar social and economic forces, and for this reason it is expected that the common denominators to be found in artistic expression will be varied but will tend toward the elaboration of a truly universal discourse. This is not to say that the Caribbean is the only region of the world in which this type of artistic manifestation is to be found. What is distinctive in the Caribbean is that every major group has at some time and in some manner been subjected to the dehumanizing effects of the plantation system. Although Caribbean peoples have a long history of protest and revolt against their condition, they have always tended to look elsewhere for answers to their problems. The novels we have studied in this essay are distinctive in that, with few exceptions, they indicate that solutions are to be found within the Caribbean.

Bibliography Case, Frederick Ivor. 1985. The Crisis of Identity: Studies in the Guadeloupean and Martiniquan Novel. Sherbrooke, Quebec: Naaman. Cinéas, Jean-Baptiste. 1945. L'héritage sacré. Port-au-Prince: Deschamps. —. 1948. Le choc en retour. Port-au-Prince: Deschamps. Damas, Léon-Gontran. 1939. Misère noire. Esprit. 7.81:333-54. Dash, J. Michael. 1981. Literature and Ideology in Haiti: 1915-1961. London: MacMillan. James, C. L. R. 1936. Minty Alley. London: Secker & Warburg. Lhérisson, Justin. 1905. La famille des Pitite-Caille. Port-au-Prince: Aug. A. Héraux. —. 1906. Zoune chez sa ninnaine. Port-au-Prince: Aug. A. Héraux. Maran, René. 1921. Batouala. Paris: Albin Michel. —. 1931. Le coeur serré. Paris: Albin Michel.

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—. 1947. Un homme pareil aux autres. Paris: Albin Michel. Ojo-Ade, Femi. 1984. René Maran The Black Frenchman: A Bio-Critical Study. Washington: Three Continents Press. Price-Mars, Jean. 1919. La vocation de l'élite. Port-au-Prince: Edmond Chenet. —. 1928. Ainsi parla l'oncle. Compiègne: Bibliothèque Haïtienne. Roumain, Jacques. 1931. La montagne ensorcelée. Port-au-Prince: E. Chassaing. —. 1944. Gouverneurs de la rosée. Paris: Editeurs Français Réunis. Selvon, Samuel. 1952. A Brighter Sun. London: Wingate. —. 1957. Ways of Sunlight. London: MacGibbon & Kee. —. 1958. Turn again Tiger. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Zobel, Joseph. 1946. Diab'là. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines. —. 1950. La rue Cases-Nègres. Paris: J. Froissart.

A New Cry From the 1960s to the 1980s

MARIE-DENISE SHELTON Claremont McKenna

College

Emporter lentement, progressivement, la langue dans le désert. Se servir de la syntaxe pour crier, donner au cri une syntaxe. (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure.)

In the beginning there was silence, "an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules, the awful futility of our raison d'être" (Césaire [1983], 35).1 Then came negritude. Its uncontainable, sometimes violent voice resounded with the great black cry that intended to shake the foundation of the world. The decade following the end of World War II was the Césairean era, a dramatic one, in which the cry - scream, wail or howl - exploded, blasting away centuries of mutism and abjection. Césaire exclaims: "a man screaming is not a dancing bear" (Césaire [1983], 45).2 It was a period in which the poetics of self-repossession, nationalist and racial affirmation went hand in hand with an emphasis on the themes of virility, potency, verticality, and legitimacy. (On this point, see also R. Hezekiah's essay on Martinique and Guadeloupe above.) It was an era when the black race, redeemed by the passion of the poet, was summoned to stand upright. Negritude crystallizes in Caribbean history a moment of faith in the power of the Word and of belief in the inexorable transformation of reality. This optimism coincided with the hope raised by the word départementalisation (departmentalization, or passage from colonial to overseas department status), which materialized in 1946 in the Assimilation Law passed by the French legislature. It is also connected to the rediscovery of Africa as matrix by the Caribbean. No longer heimatlos - bereft of a homeland - Guadeloupeans, Martinicans, and Guianese greeted history with a primeval cry. The native land rebaptized by the spiritual communion with Africa on the one hand and the administrative rite of assimilation with France on the other was no longer just insignificant dust on the surface of the sea. It had become the place of the first breath of life. The cry of negritude resembles in a sense the cry of a newborn, emerging from its mother's womb. Reality, however, had retained its stubborn sameness. Assimilation, as Dany Bébel-Gisler explains, had merely reinforced the power of France over the Antilles (Bébel-Gisler [1981], 91). It is

1 2

un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes, l'affreuse inanité de notre raison d'être (Césaire [1983], 34). un homme qui crie n'est pas un ours qui danse . . . (Césaire [1983], 44).

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again Bébel-Gisler who tells us that "By 1948, the people in Guadeloupe sang: 'Before we sat on a donkey, now we are sitting on a mule'." 3 By 1961, the assimilationist dream had shattered, prompting Césaire to sound the alarm and announce that the time to revise expectations had arrived (Césaire [1961]). In literature the mood changed as well. Poetry, the dominant mode of literary expression of negritude, gave way to the novel. Writers and intellectuals appeared disenchanted with the present, doubtful of the future, and equivocal about the past. As the title of Bertène Juminer's novel so aptly has it, francophone Caribbean writing by 1960 had reached the seuil d'un nouveau cri (threshold of a new cry), with literature transposing, as it were, the historical dilemma in terms of degradation and guilt. After the affirmation of negritude, the dominant themes in the literature become illegitimacy, impotence, alienation, and madness. The organic sense of territory that the poet of negritude claimed was replaced by a feeling of utter estrangement and dispossession. Bertène Juminer's work illustrates this new mood. A raw anxiety also permeates the novels of such women writers as Michèle Lacrosil, Maryse Condé, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, who came on the scene to write their own story in the interstices of a man-dominated history, and to sound their own cry. Bertène Juminer's first novel, Les bâtards (The bastards), 1961, can help us map the road of despair and pessimism taken by a number of Caribbean writers. This work tells the story of Guianese students in France, a sort of lost generation who feel resolutely outside of everything, bereft of something they never had - their identity. An existential malaise overcomes them as they attempt to define who or what they are. They define themselves as the bastard offspring of a Frenchman and an African woman deported to the borders of Amazonia, condemned to resignation, capitulation, despair or escapism. Juminer's "bastards," keenly aware of the colonized status of Guiana where nothing belongs to them, are at times consumed by a revolutionary spirit. They somehow do not totally dismiss the possibility of reversing the course of history, even though they remain suspended in non-action. The revolutionary discourse in Les bâtards and in Juminer's next two works, Au seuil d'un nouveau cri (On the threshold of a new cry), 1963, and La revanche de Bozambo (Bozambo's revenge), 1968, is uneven and unconvincing. Advocated by hopeless, cranky or uninspired intellectuals, the ideal of revolution and nationalism in Juminer's universe remains for the most part a fanciful or ridiculous proposal. What dominates in Les bâtards is the depiction of the damaged ego of men who feel excruciatingly alienated. Their feeling of disorientation attains metaphysical resonance at times. Cambier, the protagonist of Les bâtards, sees his fate determined by malignant forces over which he has no control. His blackness, far from being a source of pride, becomes for him an uncomfortable garb that he wears with languor or anger. No reformers of life, perpetually uprooted, Juminer's characters are gloomy picaros. Their existence is consumed by the idea of their worthies sness and undermined by a destructive virus. Cambier's despondency is dramatized by his sexual impotence. Something of a colonized Werther, he is destined to remain unfulfilled, incapable as he is of making love to the white Charlotte he loves. Cambier is haunted by the specters of madness and leprosy, diseases that can be viewed as tropes for his morbid sense of exclusion. Au seuil d'un nouveau cri, Juminer's second novel, does not offer a way out of this existential dilemma despite its promising title. On the contrary, the two stories in this book, "Le cri" (The cry) and "L'écho" (The echo), form a diptych that raises more troubling questions. The narrative is in the 3

avant nou te asi bouket aprezan, nou asi mile (Bébel-Gisler [1981], 90).

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second person singular, the tu form, a symptomatic choice that places us in the realm of ambiguity and signifies the effacement or negation of the first-person subject. (Michel Butor in La modification [The modification], 1957, had created a stir with his introduction of the polite form of second-person narration, the vous form, just six years earlier.) "Le cri" is a more or less historical novelette about the strong yet puzzling love of a black slave, Modestin, for a white planter, Delangres, against the backdrop of a slave insurrection. Here, Juminer's hero finds it impossible to reconcile his commitment to the slave revolt and his affection for the white Delangres. The story is characteristically strewn with contradictions, with cries of revenge and hatred alternating with sentimental complaints and appeals to human love. Modestin is decidely alone, rejected both by blacks and whites. The former view him as a dangerous traitor who places friendship above responsibility. The latter despise him as a slave and a black man. Caught in the prison house of history, Modestin is doomed. In "L'écho," set in contemporary times, the protagonist's painful life experience is only commensurable with the oppressive negativity of society. We are once again presented with a wounded figure who roams alone in search of an ever-elusive happiness. He seeks refuge in dark places and in solitude. A certain horror overtakes him as he attempts to identify with his Afro-Caribbean heritage. His feeling of social estrangement reduces him to inaction. Love, the sole antidote to his spleen, becomes for him a complicated and unfulfilling ritual, hardly masking his powerlessness. The woman he loves is a remote Other, a divinity, who transfixed him by her whiteness. Juminer's narrative argument for redemption, both individual and collective, is based on a quite surprising proposition. He sees the alliance of the "emasculated" black man with the "virilized" white woman as the key to a transformed world. Here again the story written in the second person singular oscillates between contradictory poles: solidarity/individualism, revolt/resignation, racial pride/selfhatred. One finds in it echoes of the Senghorian concept of the civilisation de l'universel (civilization of the universal). Adopting a messianic tone, Juminer's troubled protagonist in "L'écho" transcends or erases all antinomies to declare himself a son of the universe. The nouveau cri as it is illustrated in Bertène Juminer's works is one of exasperating melancholy. His characters are inconsolable romantics whose cry of despair remains unheard by the world. They free themselves from reality and its contradictions by plunging into the abyss. In "Le cri" Modestin, in a quasi-delirious state, hurls himself off a cliff rather than submit to the judgment of a black tribunal that would accuse him of treason. His last words are for the beloved white planter, Delangres: "You had finally said something to him. Then you dived. And Delangres shouted. The first shout. Outside it was dusk once again."4 A most startling ending indeed. The new cry, we discover, becomes by a strange inversion a white cry, possible only after the complete destruction of the black protagonist. The black or Caribbean self in Juminer's universe of uncertainties vanishes in crepuscular obscurity. Thus, Juminer's fictional self is something that is not, that never was. The preoccupation with the inner self and with psychology in Juminer's fiction is also evident in the work of several women writers. This literary trend was no doubt legitimized or determined by the project of Frantz Fanon who, armed with his psychiatric knowledge, had undertaken an uncompromising autopsy of the Caribbean mind. In Peau noire, masques blancs (Black skin, white 4 Tu lui avais enfin dit quelque chose. Puis tu plongeas. Et Delangres poussa un cri. Le premier cri. Dehors c'était de nouveau le crépuscule (Juminer [1963], 160).

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masks), 1952, he exposes the network of complexes and obsessions that are deeply entrenched in the Antillean psyche. By identifying what can be called a crisis of the self, Fanon offered to writers a broad field of exploration. One of the pervasive themes in the novels written by Antillean women can be referred to as the problematic of feminine exclusion and dispossession. The first-person narrative by a female protagonist usually takes the form of a frustrated enunciation that affirms and denies, creates and dissolves the sense of self. These novels written in an autobiographical, almost monological, mode recount the endless drama of a woman whose identity is so severely compromised that she becomes engulfed in a web of neuroses and phantasms. The subject/narrator is the sole legislator of the order and content of the discourse, which no other voice interrupts. The self depicted in these works is enclosed in a stifling, confined space. Everything happens as if the narrative sought to experience the limits of opprobrium and self-destruction. Homeless or rejecting both home and country, the female protagonists are deported outside of their bodies, which they experience as alien, hateful. Michèle Lacrosil in her novels Sapotille et le serin d'argile (Sapotille and the clay canary), 1960, and Cajou, 1961, offers an unmediated view of the secret workings of alienation and selfhatred. In both narratives, presented in the form of personal diaries, Lacrosil discloses with disarming candor the malaise of her severely mutilated female figures. In Sapotille et le serin d'argile there is no storyline as such. The novel is in the form of an impressionistic journal in which Sapotille, the narrator, undertakes a journey to her past. She depicts a life filled with shame, humiliation, and self-doubt in the prejudice-ridden world of Guadeloupe. As a pupil at the Pensionnat SaintDenis, Sapotille craved solitude and invisibility. Under the humiliating gaze of her white teachers she felt irremediably ugly. Nothing could exorcize her fear of being seen. She found a strange enjoyment when confined alone in a dark cell like a wild animal in its den. In her adulthood Sapotille still dreams of fading from the world's sight. She sails away from the island aboard a ship, the Nausicaa, in search of a world where she will remain invisible. Historical knowledge aggravates Sapotille's malady as the discovery of her slave ancestry only serves to confirm her profound sense of racial inferiority. Cajou, the protagonist of Lacrosil's second novel, is likewise torn with anguish and consumed by an unbearable feeling of ugliness. She also yearns for total invisibility, unable as she is to bear the sight of herself. Trapped in the fortress of her skin and in her delusions, Cajou collapses into pathological despair and finally commits suicide. Lacrosil's depiction of these tragic female figures illustrates the ravages of a psychological condition that can appropriately be termed autophobia. This condition is rooted in the internal structure of shame as it has been characterized by the psychologist Erik Erikson: "Shame is an impulse to bury one's face or to sink, right then and there into the ground. But then i t . . . is essentially rage turned against the self. He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world" (Erikson [1963], 252). Both Cajou and Sapotille, in a desperate strategy of liberation, reject motherhood. The idea of giving birth to a child who might relive their agony is to them unbearable. They therefore transform their militant self-hatred into a theory of salvation based on the nonreproduction of life. This also constitutes a desperate attempt to abolish history. Michèle Lacrosil reproduces quite literally and not without a certain authorial complicity the language of her characters' despondency. The first-person narrative does indeed give her stories the autobiographical cast that Fanon took strong exception to in Peau noire, masques blancs. However, Lacrosil's novels should not be viewed as merely transcrib-

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ing female neuroses. Within the framework of Caribbean literary expression, they should be regarded as a counterdiscourse that actively criticizes the social reality that so oddly disorganizes woman's sense of self. In spite of the obsessively ego-centered narrative, these texts call into question a world view inherited form the slave/colonial era that equates Being with whiteness and Nothingness with blackness (to paraphrase Sartre). The illness of Cajou and Sapotille is rooted in the Antillean social structure that provides their phobia with its form and its content. Myriam Warner-Vieyra's female figures likewise seek refuge in madness or self-destruction. Zetou, the tragic character of Le quimboiseur l'avait dit. . . (The sorcerer had said it. . .), 1982, describes her slow disintegration from her small village of Karura to the psychiatric hospital in France where she has been committed. Uprooted, living in fear of imminent catastrophe, Zetou unleashes her insane rage against the irrational order of life as she experiences it. In Juletane, 1982, WarnerVieyra recounts the passion - in the sense of suffering and martyrdom - of a Caribbean woman in Africa. Juletane, the protagonist, is married to an African and must share conjugal life with her husband's two other wives. The novel is a dark tale of exile, solitude, and the despair of a woman for whom madness and murder become principles of liberation. A similar theme is explored in Maryse Condé's Une saison à Rihata (A season in Rihata), 1981, which offers yet another image of the deterioration of an Antillean woman in Africa. Marie-Hélène, the protagonist, craves acceptance in the African community but is condemned to the marginal and lonely existence of a foreigner, a stranger. The redemption that Véronica, the heroine of Condé's Hérémakhonon, 1976, seeks from her existential malaise leads to a deeper sense of dispossession. She leaves her native island of Guadeloupe in search of her identity, first in France then in Africa, only to find emptiness, disillusionment, and despondency. The return to the island is impossible. For Véronica, Guadeloupe is a prison island inhabited by contemptible people who have robbed her of identity and pride as a black woman. For MarieHélène, the protagonist of Une saison à Rihata, the island is a deserted womb. From the depths of their despair, Condé's characters see the native land as a remote spot of light that flickers as if in a hallucination. The relation to Africa, as presented in these novels, is problematic, giving rise to intense and paradoxical emotions. On one hand, Africa is viewed as a promised land in the quest for personal redemption and plenitude. On the other, Africa is experienced as an alien, even hostile place, where the dream of self-discovery gradually shrivels. Images of dark holes and bottomless pits, sensations of dampness and viscosity, as well as a feeling of total unbelonging, transform the return to the ancestral land into a nightmare, filled with pain and horror. There is a fatal resemblance among the female figures described in these stories of individual bankruptcy and pessimism. The characters who experience the world as threatening are drawn into a solipsistic existence in which there is no other reality but the self. This withdrawal into the self, however, far from bringing security, becomes the very modality of the neurotic episode. The problematic of exclusion and expatriation developed in these novels cannot be considered a mere literary formula. Given its persistence and centrality, its origin may well be found outside the text. These stories can be read as allegories of women's existence in Antillean society. Written in the same language of frustration, they describe a catastrophic situation. If the female protagonists adopt the same syntax, it is because they experience a similar psychosocial interment. These tales of alienation may in fact be the reenactment of the gesture that excludes women from the accepted realm of debate. To employ Luce Irigaray's terminology, one could say that the feminine logos in the Antilles is pro-

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duced "[o]utside this volume already circumscribed by the meaning that is articulated in (the father's) discourse . . . nothing is: the unwoman. Zone of silence."5 Theoretically then, it is possible to argue that the cri in Antillean women's writing is only the paradoxical externalization of a silence. A few works by Antillean women writers can be viewed as breaking the chain of silence and alienation to propose images of women who find a voice to claim a small share of power over reality and destiny. Such are the novels of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (The bridge of beyond), 1972, and Ti Jean l'Horizon, 1979, which uncover an uncharted domain for women and the francophone Antilles as a whole. Simone Schwarz-Bart affirms the forces of life against those of death and destruction. She articulates a poetics of presence and plenitude, against absence, fragmentation, and madness. With her, the notions of an Antillean self and an Antillean history become thinkable. Télumée, the heroine of her first novel, like the other women of the Lougandor family to which she belongs, expresses all that it is possible to express in spite of the adverse conditions that threaten her resolve to live. Schwarz-Bart has elaborated a system of liberating myths to celebrate the regenerating power of love and the possibility of conquering what in the brutal logic of realism seems unattainable: freedom. To the reality of the plantation - of oppression and dispersion - the novelist opposes the indomitable spirit of women who refuse to submit. Télumée draws her energy from the language and culture of the island, which mediates her entrance into the world of identity, presence, and continuity. Télumée is not extradited outside of her body whose beauty she offers to her lover, Elie. She feels right at home in the island. Ti Jean l'Horizon is one of the most accomplished Antillean literary compositions. In this daring epic, history converges with the marvellous, playful notes alternate with grave tones; a vivacious spirit blends quite naturally with an introspective mood. It is a polyphonic construct in which the author harmonizes different voices to tell a tale of indestructible love, the love of Ti-Jean for Egée, whom he calls his "Little Guadeloupe." It is also the fantastic tale of the hero's search for the sun - symbol of freedom - which has disappeared, swallowed up by a monstrous beast from "elsewhere." At the end of his long journey through the present and the past, the realms of reality and surreality, Ti-Jean feels as old as the mountains but convinced that everything is intact. SchwarzBart in her fiction brings to fruition the creative force illustrated in the remarkable works of Jacques Roumain, Jacques S. Alexis or Edouard Glissant. Like these male writers, she concretizes through a conscious aesthetic practice a Weltanschauung that asserts the urgency and necessity of collective liberation. The island in Schwarz-Bart's fiction is neither a place one must flee nor a prison where one slowly dies. It is the locus of self-realization. Schwarz-Bart articulates a poetics of space, in the sense that Gaston Bachelard gave to this term. There is a certain solemnity in her reappropriation of the Antillean territory. She introduces her own creolized language to take possession of the landscape. She names familiar sites, trees, flowers, and plants as if the legitimate occupation of the soil depended on the act of naming. Time is reconquered as Antillean life is replaced in its historical continuum. The constantly operative quest for the African origin is central in Schwarz-Bart's reconstruction of history. Other dimensions are conquered as the author undertakes a bold exploration of the magical realm that lies beyond empirical reality. In this hazardous enterprise, Schwarz-Bart 5 En dehors de ce volume déjà circonscrit par la signification articulé dans le discours (du père) rien n'est: l'afemme. Zone de silence (Irigaray [1977], 111).

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never succumbs to a sterile or obscurantist world view. The point of departure and the point of arrival of her narrative is always human experience. The trend represented by Simone Schwarz-Bart indicates a will to transcend paralysis based on a dynamic knowledge of history and a belief in the liberating power of imagination.

Bibliography Bébel-Gisler, Dany. 1981. La langue créole, force jugulée. Paris: L'Harmattan. Césaire, Aimé. [1947]. 1983. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Trans, by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —. 1961. Crise dans les Départements d'Outremer ou crise de la départementalisation. Le Monde. 29 March. Condé, Maryse. 1976. Hérémakhonon. La voix des autres. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions. —. Rev. ed. 1988. En attendant le bonheur. Paris: Seghers. —. 1981. Une saison à Rihata. Paris: Robert Laffont. Cudjoe, Selwyn R., ed. 1990. Caribbean Women Writers. Wellesly, MA: Calaloux. (An early version of part of the present article was published in this volume.) Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1975. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit. Erikson, Erik. 1963. Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton. Irigaray, Luce. 1977. Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Minuit. Juminer, Bertène. 1961. Les bâtards. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1963. Au seuil d'un nouveau cri. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1968. La revanche de Bozambo. Paris: Présence Africaine. Lacrosil, Michèle. 1960. Sapotille et le serin d'argile. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1961. Cajou. Paris: Gallimard. Warner-Vieyra, Miriam. 1980. Le Quimboiseur l'avait dit. . . Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1982. Juletane. Paris: Présence Africaine.

Realism Redefined The Subjective Vision

BEVERLEY ORMEROD University of Western Australia

Realism in European literature is conventionally assumed to offer an objective portrayal of everyday life, avoiding the romantic, the aristocratic, the fantastic or the heroic, and emphasizing the relationship between protagonists and their milieu. The subbranch of socialist realism, focusing on proletarian rather than bourgeois characters, goes further in highlighting class conflicts, economic oppression, and the alienating effects of hostile social conditions. Contemporary French Caribbean writers, adapting these traditions to the portrayal of colonial and postcolonial West Indian society, have typically been concerned with the presentation of social inequalities. Alongside this moral preoccupation, there is a manifest desire to find ways of describing the Caribbean environment and recording attitudes and traditions that are felt to be both distinctive and imperiled. Redefinitions of realism are to be found in the theory or practice of many modern writers from Jacques Stephen Alexis onwards. This essay will consider the idiosyncratic types of realism established by Alexis and his near-contemporary, Edouard Glissant, and will examine their influence upon later writers in the region. Alexis's novels, all published between 1955 and his early death in 1961, are inspired by socialist realism and dominated by an ardent commitment to the Haitian working class. His personal tone is vehement and emotional: passionate indignation, passionate enthusiasms pervade his writing. Didactic points are made, and moral attitudes expressed, in an explicit manner. But along with his Marxist vision of Haitian society there is a strong element of romance and spiritual yearning deriving from a mystical view of Haiti's racial and cultural heritage. Lush descriptions of country landscapes, or the lovingly delineated faces of the poor, serve to convey a deeply felt response to the beauty, dignity, and ancient wisdom of the Haitian people. His concern for the underprivileged masses is accompanied by a fascination with individual destiny, and it is the latter that he generally uses to embody the class struggle which lies at the heart of his fiction. Glissant's work spans a period of thirty years. Between his first novel in 1958 and his latest in 1987, successive volumes of poetry, fiction, theater, and essays have built up a sustained body of thought concerned with Martinique's present and past: the loss of black history through the depersonalizing processes of slavery and colonialism, and the insidious sapping of pride and self-reliance through the habit of dependence upon a paternalistic administration. In Glissant's work, as in Alexis's, there is an element of magic and mystery; but there is a sharp difference in these authors' characteristic tones. Glissant is a master of the ironic understatement, choosing to express even the most painful concerns with a dry restraint. Where Alexis prefers direct denunciations, beneath the

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surface of a Glissant text there are generally satirical implications and countermeanings. The use of conversation is selective and allusive: it is not employed in a traditional imitation of life. And although Glissant's characters are mainly drawn from the ranks of the urban or rural poor, he does not attempt to portray the masses through one striking individual destiny; he seeks rather to create a novel that will express, through many voices, a collective destiny. Perhaps more than any other modern Caribbean writer, Alexis owes a debt to the first great realists of French, North- and Latin-American fiction, whose creative vision he praises (Alexis [1957-a], 99-100) even while stressing the claims of nationalism upon a writer. His own ideal is "a realism, sometimes ingenuous, sometimes naturalistic, sometimes mystic, sometimes humanist, often dynamic, national and social . . . [a] popular realism" (Alexis [1956], 264). This sweeping concept includes a specifically Haitian ingredient: "marvellous realism." Seen as a necessary response to cultural imperialism, the exaltation of Haitian art, with its combination of the fantastic and the sensual, the popular and the symbolic, the melodious and the violent, is proposed with revolutionary fervor as a means of promoting the diverse cultural heritage of the country, fusing Amerindian, African, and French elements in "an art human in its content, but resolutely national in its form" (Alexis [1956], 271). Of equal importance to Alexis's work is his commitment to Marxism, which explains his interest in the novel's potential not merely to describe man, but to contribute to his transformation (Alexis [1957-a], 95). His concept of social justice is made plain through many traditional realist devices such as plot manipulation, weighted symbolism, and direct authorial comment. Alexis's first and third novels, Compère Général Soleil (Comrade General Sun), 1955, and L'espace d'un cillement (In the twinkling of an eye), 1959, are thematically linked in that in each case the lot of an exceptional individual is made to represent the sufferings or triumphs of an entire oppressed social class. The hero of the first novel, Hilarion Hilarius, moves between the worlds of the urban proletariat and the peasantry, initially appearing as a starving, desperate slum youth in trouble with the police, and later joining the flock of Haitian peasants working as canecutters in the adjacent Dominican Republic. The heroine of the other, La Nina Estrellita, begins life as a country child who learns to sell her body in exchange for food, and ends up as a disenchanted young prostitute in a Port-au-Prince brothel. Each of these protagonists comes into contact with highly politicized mentors who encourage them to break away from their exploited condition. In each case, the ostensibly realist text is transformed by magical, romantic motifs. The process is most evident in the case of La Nina, who in an unexpected, unlikely reunion with her childhood sweetheart finds the man whose patience, tenderness, and militant belief in social justice will set her free from the trap of joyless prostitution. The tawdry and restricted milieu of the brothel, like the heroine's amnesia concerning her own past, comes to symbolize the truncated life she leads, while the girl herself is invested with a kind of naïve grace that dignifies her spiritual destitution. Her very nickname of La Nina (child, little one) generates a sense of persistent, paradoxical innocence. At the same time, her position as a prostitute - by definition exploited by brothel-keeper and customers - is used by Alexis to bring her into the honorable company of all the working class: "A whore is, after all, a proletarian."1 This remark reflects the ideal of moral revaluation that accompanies Alexis's belief in the novel's reforming function. To some extent, all the

1

Une putain, c'est malgré tout une prolétaire (Alexis [1959], 56).

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brothel girls are idealized, while the author's moral disapproval is directed at the hypocritical bourgeoisie and at all oppressors of the disadvantaged. El Caucho, the mechanic and trade unionist who becomes La Nina' s lover, is a figure frequent in early realist fiction: the man of the people, sturdy, proud, dignified, symbolizing the force of fraternal love that will save the girl from further degradation. He embodies Alexis's faith in a common Caribbean personality and destiny. His self-taught wisdom comes from his half-Haitian, halfCuban mother, from the West Indians of many origins with whom he worked in his native Cuba, and also from the illiterate Haitian peasants who have taught him true culture, true humanism, through their smiling acceptance of life's inevitable blows. An impressive, if oversimplified, figure, this rough diamond believes in the importance of work, personal integrity and responsibility, and the struggle for individual freedom. The novel shows the prostitute's gradual internalizing of these concepts and her ultimate rejection of the brothel. The theme of her spiritual rebirth is played out against the backdrop of Easter week and Christ's resurrection, which enhances the motifs of magical coincidence and mystical transformation. But religion is entirely secularized in Alexis's writing, and one of the author's frequent interjections in this novel asserts that the individual is alone in a world without gods, and must make his own solitary effort to guide his destiny. Seen from an optimistic, humanist standpoint, this effort is said to be justified by "the greatness of mankind's adventure, the miracle of the universe and of life."2 Compère Général Soleil, a much more sprawling novel where the milieu shifts from shantytown to affluent suburb, from town to country, and from Haiti to the Dominican Republic, expounds in greater detail Alexis's views on class antagonism and oppression. While political sympathy transcends the barriers between Hilarion and his bourgeois mentors, the working-class population at large is totally cut off from the elite and condemned to a life of hunger and petty crime, driven by the overriding need for sheer survival. The class dimensions of the book encompass the great and minor overlords of society, but linger on those who come into direct contact with the poor: small business managers who tyrannize their workers, employers who take sexual advantage of domestic staff, sadistic policemen and brutal prison warders, corrupt priests, and rich women who mistreat their child servants. Instinctively aware of the surrounding injustice, Hilarion struggles to make sense of it through the Marxist analyses to which his intellectual friends introduce him. But his political awakening is emotional and intuitive, rather than cerebral: he associates it with the physical suffering of his renegade bourgeois friend, Pierre Roumel, in solitary confinement, and with the slaughter of his militant comrade, the canecutter Paco Torres, whose wound - a final focal point for the solar symbolism of the novel (Ormerod [1985], 90, 101) - is transformed into a red sun lighting the path to communism. Here, as elsewhere, Alexis depicts the Haitian government in extremely unflattering terms: self-interested, rapacious, indifferent to the suffering of the poor, and lost to all sense of the nation's dignity. Seeking always to convey a political, as well as a social, truth, Alexis sets the conflict of national interests in an international context. In his eyes, the ties between U.S. capital and Haiti's own elite are a prolongation of the American occupation, an episode of Haiti's history about which the novelist felt an enduring sense of shame and resentment. In Compère Général Soleil, President Vincent depends on American gunboats to prop up his shaky regime; in Les arbres musiciens (The musical trees), 1957, President Lescot accepts American money for allowing a U.S. development 2

La grandeur de l'aventure de notre espèce, la merveille de l'univers et de la vie (Alexis [1959], 290).

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company to produce rubber on land appropriated from Haitian peasants. In the microcosmic world of L'espace d'un cillement, U.S. sailors visiting the brothel incarnate the race prejudice, blatant economic power, and sheer overall crassness that in Alexis's view have set the Haitian heritage at risk. Only in the fantasyland of "Le sous-lieutenant enchanté" (The bewitched lieutenant) in Romancéro aux étoiles (Ballads to the stars), 1960, does Alexis show a reversal of this corrupting process. In this short story, marvellous realism accounts for the apparition of a goddess incorporating both Amerindian and African strains, whose compelling power forces an American intruder into recognition of the beauty, value, and mystery of Haitian culture. Marvellous realism is not central to Compère Général Soleil, though a sense of wonder is created by the ascent of Hilarion from destitution and loneliness at the outset, through a series of momentous encounters, toward emotional fulfilment and political illumination. In Les arbres musiciens, however, the mystery and diversity of the Haitian background are highlighted by the threat that government and church interests pose to traditional beliefs. The Osmin brothers (themselves of peasant stock, but altered by worldly or spiritual ambition due to contact with alien influences) attempt in various ways to destroy deeply cherished elements of country life: Edgard, the lieutenant, enforces the political decision that small cultivators should give up their land to the U.S. development company, while Diogène, the priest, carries out the plan of his white church superiors to destroy the voudou temples. Symbolically, one loses his life, the other his wits in these fanatically pursued campaigns. For the peasants, the land is lost; but the temples will return. Amid the multiplicity of plots and subplots, the figure of a spiritual savior emerges. The adolescent Gonaïbo, child of three races (the Amerindian, the African, and the European), who has grown up in wild innocence and knows no gods, is entrusted by the dying Bois-d'Orme, most venerable of the voudou priests, with the ritual temple objects that have been rescued from Diogène's zeal. Alexis's attitude to voudou is ambivalent in this novel. To Marxist writers, religion of any sort is ideologically undesirable. But both Alexis, and Jacques Roumain before him, try to strike a balance between their goal of political reform, which superstition may impede, and their nationalism, which exacts respect for all manifestations of African tradition and folk belief. While Gonaïbo's reaction to the gift of Boisd'Orme's chain of office may be interpreted as a rejection (Dash [1981], 186), the temple objects' survival despite Diogène's campaign would seem to represent a triumph of African-based popular culture over the animosity of an alien, imposed religion. Social commentary is present in the scheming of politicians and church dignitaries, the snobbishness of town hostesses, and the readiness of educated men to abandon their peasant mistresses once the latter become pregnant. More emphasis, however, is placed on the description of the country folk, their honesty and loyalty, their broad unaffected laughter, and the long graceful stride of the girls smelling of mellow fruit and crushed leaves, their pearly teeth showing in mouths like ripe guavas. The American ambassador's lunch party, a wonderful set piece, uses a ravishingly spicy tropical menu to suggest the vibrant warmth and zest for life of the Haitian people. Alongside these realistic passages, the account of the strange, archaic youth Gonaïbo, nourished by a cosmic dream and incarnating the elemental forces of the landscape, conveys a sense of the magical that is eventually fused with the real, sociopolitical level of the story when his outrage at the rape of the land by alien machinery leads him to set fire to the American installations. Gonaïbo's first sighting of the American invaders, a group of motorcyclists careering wildly over the hitherto untouched land, is presented as a stark loss of innocence, the crisis that turns the

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remote boy toward identification with the peasantry and human struggle. It elicits one of Alexis's strongest statements about the sacred nature of Haitian soil, repository of a treasured past: "Before his eyes, this one, endless body was going to be the victim of a deadly rape. This was malemort, the engulfing of a past that had not finished enduring, the denial of a perpetuity that sang in every blade of grass."3 The medieval word malemort, meaning a cruel and tragic death, conveys the sense of disaster and bereavement that permeates Alexis's contemplation of Haiti's foreign relations and their consequences for the country's interior. His mourning over the rape of the land is to be echoed, for different reasons, in Glissant's 1975 novel entitled Malemort. But whereas with Glissant there is a strong sense of human failure, through ignorance and indifference, to protect the countryside from depredation, Alexis invokes a supernatural dimension to convey optimism about the future. The rubber trees, mutilated gods, still sing as they bleed their gum. The young god Gonaïbo shares their capacity for strength and survival. In a sense, all of Glissant's novels may be seen as a paradoxical refutation of his own concept of malemort. While lamenting the disappearance of Martinique's folk history, he has used the medium of fiction to reconstruct that opaque, resistant past. Five interrelated narratives - La Lézarde (The ripening), 1958; Le quatrième siècle (The fourth century), 1964; Malemort (1975); La case du commandeur (The driver's hut), 1981; Mahagony (1987) - evoke the imagined world of a handful of ancestral slaves and maroons, and the increasingly fragmented lives of their descendants. From novel to novel, a network of cross-references links places, people, and events, showing the repetition of tragic patterns in the shaping of Martinican society. What initially seems to be the relating of two family histories, the Longoué and the Béluse, expands backwards into the era of eighteenth-century slavery and moves forward to the perceived failure of the French West Indian islands' relationship with metropolitan France. Martinique's eager exchange of colonial status for that of Overseas Department (DOM), regarded in 1946 as a major step forward, has, in Glissant's view, merely replaced the old, overt subservience by a more subtle and insidious dependence on France. In the charting of his disillusionment, the names of Mathieu Béluse and Marie Celat provide familiar landmarks along the way, but they are not so much standard protagonists as representatives of aspects of Martinican experience: in particular of the yearning and frustration associated with the quest for past history and present meaning. In Glissant's unusual fictions, stylistic techniques vary; time schemes are interwoven and blurred; only the second work bears any resemblance to a traditional historical novel, and the third describes the proletariat of Fort-de-France with such obliqueness of style and structure that one critic has excluded it altogether from the category of social realism (Case [1985], 27-28). But this literary experimentation is part of a deliberate evolution away from accepted notions of realism. From Malemort onwards, events are suggested in flashes of reminiscence, rather than related in a logical sequence. More space is devoted to the twentieth century than to other eras, yet such is the weight of the tantalizing, incompletely known past that an obsession with history dominates many of Glissant's modern characters, and their very inability to recapture the past comes to replace the realist novelist's traditional omniscient stance. Indeed, in Mahagony Mathieu becomes an autonomous character, refusing to be the creature of an inept chronicler and casting doubt on what has

3 Ce corps un et innombrable, allait, sous ses yeux, être la proie d'un viol funèbre. C'était la malemort, l'engloutissement d'un passé qui n'avait pas fini de durer, la négation de la pérennité que chantait chaque brin d'herbe (Alexis [1957-b], 83).

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been said about him in earlier volumes. Another character who has foreknowledge of the future is yet portrayed as unable to see the past. Many of Glissant's characters are seers, distant heirs to the African magician with his power of healing and spiritual guidance. Their vision, however, is incomplete, their power unpredictable; their mysterious magic goes hand in hand with human frailty, reflecting the loss of a once intact body of knowledge. Through this willed aura of imperfection and uncertainty, this "vertigo of time" (Glissant [1981-a], 435), the texts acquire grandeur, like a saga or romance of which only portions survive. In counterpoint, the flawed collective memory of Martinique underpins the narratives with the everpresent sadness of reality. Literary and social theory are closely linked in Glissant's thought. He considers the importance of history in New World fiction (Garcia Marquez, Carpentier, Faulkner) to be due to a sense of historic lack - a passionate response to absence of information, an expression of yearning, in which the questioning, the journeying back in time, matter more than the problematic arrival (Glissant [1981a], 147-50). In his own writing, nonetheless, he suggests some answers. Landscape is the key to the hidden past, the physical repository of lost ancestral tracks and once vital folkways. In his theoretical work Le discours antillais (Caribbean discourse), he sees "American" literature, by which he means primarily that of the West Indies and South America, as containing the very voice of landscape, rough in texture, mobile in structure, like the teeming, proliferating tropical forest. This landscape is emblematic of a quest for duration and continuity; the giant tree - mahogany, ebony, cotton, or poinciana - is its supreme symbol of mystery and endurance. This is the zone within which the novelist strives to create a synthesis of natural speech rhythms and the acquired art of writing, between social man and solitary scribe. In an era when autochthonous Martinican culture is slowly being eroded by sociocultural pressures from metropolitan France, Glissant finds inappropriate to the West Indies the emphasis of French literary theory upon the demythification and "objectivization" of the text. Throughout slavery and the colonial period, Martinicans were systematically viewed as object; he believes that they should now take the central place in the creative process. The writer may well be demythified, but in the positive sense that he should be integrated into the "we," the collective Caribbean identity that must become the true generator and subject of the text (Glissant [1981-a], 254-58). As Alexis saw Haiti threatened by the cultural imperialism of the United States, so does Glissant fear for Martinique's sense of identity in the face of the technological and economic dominance of France. This has led to his promotion of antillanité (Caribbeanness), an ideal of West Indian solidarity that transcends geographical and linguistic barriers between the islands, and that Glissant contrasts with the negative, quasi-colonial bond that exists between France and her Overseas Departments. The ruined, sterile landscapes of Malemort are part of a sequence of images revealing metropolitan disregard of the island's unspoiled beauty, and symbolically contrasting the energy and enterprise of the forgotten maroons with the spiritual emptiness of their dispossessed descendants (Ormerod [1985], 36-39). Modern Martinique is depicted as a land of nonproductive consumers, eager for imported goods, uninterested in self-sufficiency, and totally lacking in national spirit. But their shortcomings are also linked to external factors: the absence of agrarian reform, the brutal suppression of strikes, the long habit of economic dependence. In La case du commandeur, the alienation of the people is reflected in their reluctance to seek out the "pit of past time" and confront their own image through the mixed knowledge of ancestral shame and heroism. Deep-seated feelings of self-doubt, fear, or frustration underlie most moments of confrontation and self-confron-

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tation, and often culminate in violence: the drowning of Garin, the killing of Liberté Longoué, the smothering of the unwanted slave infant, the betrayal and torture of Odono, the shooting of the child maroon Gani. Only rarely, as in the case of Marie Celat, does self-confrontation become initiation into past time and the source of emotional healing. Glissant's commitment to the goal of national solidarity for Martinique finds literary expression in his emphasis on collective destiny. In Le discours antillais he speaks of the challenge of writing "the novel of the involvement of the I with the We, of the I with the Other, of the We with the We . . . They tell me that the novel of the We is impossible to write, that one will always have to include the embodiment of individual destinies. It's a fine risk to run."4 While the destinies of particular characters are at times singled out for brief portrayal, it is from the overall panorama created by a multiplicity of destinies that the author weaves the dense fabric of an imagined past, recreating a way of life unrecorded by colonial archivists, retracing the family trees of maroons, field slaves, and house slaves over the two and a half centuries that have erased all memories of the first African ancestors. The bitter, bleak despair of the condition of slavery finds its veiled echoes in present-day alienation. Distant treachery and loyalty, pain, defiance, and survival are slowly hauled from the ambivalent depths of memory by a we that strives to reassemble the disjointed I's of a divided society. That we is profoundly tragic in conception: "We who were perhaps never never to form at long last that single body whereby we might begin to enter into possession of our span of land . . . [D]esperately trying to contain within this difficult obscurity of the We the restless portion of each separate body."5 Yet its presence as the favored narrative voice indicates Glissant's moral certainty of the possibilities latent in Caribbean folk culture, the strength of which could serve to launch the society toward a united and creative future. Frank Etienne's novel in Creole, Dézafi, 1975, and its later French counterpart, Les affres d'un défi (Defiance and dread), 1979, adopt the stylistic device that Glissant was independently developing at much the same time: the use of a collective we as the principal narrative voice. In Etienne's work, as in Glissant's, this composite we represents a peasantry/proletariat; few individuals within it are identified, but it is at the same time quite specific in nature. We are primarily the cultivators in a small rural Haitian community, starving and fearful, overpowered by a sense of failure of will. Through the use of parallel images, this we (sometimes uncertain of its own identity) is slowly enlarged to include other beings that are or have been exposed to an even greater suffering: fighting cocks betrayed and mutilated in the pit; zombies held in thrall by magic and violence; ancestors who were caught, branded, and "zombified" by the crushing mechanism of slavery. The situation of the novel is as firmly rooted in rural Haiti as is much of Alexis's writing, yet it is also far from realistic in any conventional sense. Just outside two impoverished villages whose plight is attributed to a malevolent outside agency (they), the voudou priest Saintil holds court in his temple, where he has absolute control over his daughter and mistress Sultana, his henchman Zofer, and a herd of the living dead - his zombi laborers. These he has acquired by opening up fresh graves at the local graveyard and reanimating bodies, apparent corpses that are really the victims of

4 Le roman de l'implication du Je au Nous, du Je à l'Autre, du Nous au Nous . . . On me dit que le roman du Nous est impossible à faire, qu'il y faudra toujours l'incarnation des devenirs particuliers. C'est un beau risque à courir (Glissant [1981-a], 153). 5 Nous qui ne devions peut-être jamais jamais former, final de compte, ce corps unique par quoi nous commencerions d'entrer dans notre empan de terre . . . [A]charnés à contenir la part inquiète de chaque corps dans cette obscurité difficile de nous (Glissant [1981-b], 15, 239).

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a poison-induced coma. Toward the end of the story, Sultana gives salt to Clodonis, a zombi with whom she has fallen in love; in accordance with traditional belief, the salt restores his memory and strength; he feeds it to the other captives, and they rush out in search of vengeance. As Saintil turns out to be behind most of the peasants' misfortunes, the latter join forces with the former zombies to confront and destroy their common enemy. For much of the novel, the group set up in opposition to the we is a largely anonymous they. This group, sometimes characterized as "our enemies," has a shifting identity: now the local authorities who exploit the peasants and allow the illegal diversion of water from their lands, now the distant political police whose methods of interrogation echo the torturing of the zombies. But the word they ultimately comes to signify Saintil, the corrupt houngan (voudou priest) whose power and ferocity reach out to affect the entire community. The zombies' hideously mutilated bodies and dark, airless cells echo the physical brutality and narrowed horizons of life in a dictatorship. Accompanying the prudent veil of allegory, occasional overtly political scenes, such as the beating up of a young prisoner charged with anarchy and communism, would seem to point clearly to the sinister realities of the Duvalier era (see Dash [1981], 207). The incidents which bring the we and the they into confrontation are not treated like the plot of a conventional novel, since the author is less concerned with physical events than with the gradual unfolding of a static situation. In its most extreme form, this situation is represented by the zombies' mental immobility and the absolute restrictions on their physical movement: "The zombies with twisted legs toil backbreakingly in the swamp mud stammering oui ouan same scene same centering of the image oui ouan spaced out groans oui ouan."6 Later, by transferring to the discourse of the collective we the zombies' characteristic groan, the author focuses attention on the parallel between the subhuman existence of the zombies and the misery of the trapped peasants: "Same scene oui ouan same frontiers oui ouan same line of the crest separating the two slopes of the mountain oui ouan the endless chain of hunger and the mastication of emptiness oui ouan rotting corpses of animals in godforsaken villages . . . oui ouan we are swimming in the insipidity of stagnant waters."7 Whipped and tortured like the slaves of Haitian history, the zombies are the externalization of the nightmare that grips every inhabitant of the region. The prevailing atmosphere of horror is reinforced at other levels of the text. The forbidden introduction of fierce hybrid birds into the cockpit (later to be traced to Saintil) results in carnage similar to that among the zombies: the maimed, fluttering cocks in their convulsive death throes suggest the jerky, mindless movements of the living dead. The natural environment brings violent destructive winds, sudden floods and fires, wreaking havoc upon the land and its occupants, until in a sudden transition from reality to metaphor, the wild mob of liberated zombies becomes a hurricane descending upon Saintil to rip his body to pieces. Etienne's theory of spiralism recommends that fiction should represent reality not as a slice of life, but as a series of interlocking ellipses, each containing a separate type of human situation (Lamarre [1980], 139-40). Perhaps because of this striving after breadth, perhaps because of the facelessness of his zombies and the lack of individualized human characters, his novel is striking 6 Les zombis aux jambes tordues s'échinent dans la boue des marécages en bégayant oui ouan même décor même cadrage oui ouan gémissements espacés oui ouan (Etienne [1979], 145). 7 Même décor oui ouan mêmes frontières oui ouan même ligne de crête séparant les deux versants de la montagne oui ouan l'engrenage de la faim et la mastication du vide oui ouan pourrissement de cadavres d'animaux dans les bleds miteux . . . oui ouan nous nageons dans l'insipidité des eaux stagnantes (Etienne [1979], 148-49).

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mainly for its bold use of the supernatural as a vital element in Haitian folk life. The power of voudou is universally taken for granted. Unlike Alexis (or Roumain before him), Etienne does not adopt a didactic stance against voudou, nor does he imply that religious or superstitious beliefs present a barrier to progress. It is true that the endnotes to the novel suggest a certain cynicism on the author's part about the average houngan's affluence, his political influence, and the likelihood of his being an informer. However, these moral implications are not explored within the work. Instead, Saintil's activities are part of the mythical rendering of an extraordinary national disaster. Implausible in outline, and surrealistic in tone and phrasing, the narrative nonetheless creates the sustained illusion of a reality in which the human being and the zombi become one in their terror, their torment, and their mutual recognition of a shared foe. Pierre Clitandre's Cathédrale du mois d'août (Cathedral of the August heat), 1982, represents a further step in the Haitian literary endeavor to portray the desperate plight of the starving and dispossessed. Clitandre's realism is reminiscent of Alexis's in the profusion of factual detail about the circumstances of the poor, but his tone is more matter-of-fact, and in his selection of details he emphasizes the more sordid and degrading aspects of slum life. Where Alexis tends to idealize and ennoble the proletariat, Clitandre maintains a certain distance from emotional involvement: the dignity he confers on some characters is not trivial, but it is sober and unglamorous. It is the tough, bitter, consciously absurd defiance of people who must endure, yet who know they are fundamentally helpless in the scheme of things: "Gwine tek rockstone full up de sea."8 At the heart of Cathédrale du mois d'août are the same wretched truths that ultimately inspire all Haitian realism: the grinding effort at subsistence living in a landscape of dried riverbeds, stunted grass, denuded fields; the forlorn attempts to escape, whether to cut cane illegally in the feudal hell of the Dominican Republic, or to scuffle in the shantytown clinging to the fringes of Port-au-Prince, with its dust and its smells, its open drains that regularly swallow people up during flood rains, its vulnerability to disease, to police raids, and to the big companies that come to raze the shacks and take over the squatters' land. Loosely connecting the narrative are the figures of John, the minibus driver, and his ten-year-old son Raphael, who was born in the slum and dies there, still a child, in a confrontation with the security forces. Raphael's death is only one in a long chain of fatalities resulting from brutal reprisals carried out by the authorities, which may be provoked by anything from the shantytown's refusal to listen to a government speaker extolling birth control, to the disappearance of an army officer's slum-bred mistress, to the singing of a forbidden song, to the killing of a watchman whose company had been demolishing shacks. The death of Raphael has particular importance only because it crystallizes John's vague sense of social injustice and prods him to seek out the company of militants within the ghetto. The novel is not, however, the story of his heroism: at the end, although his wife Passiona is aggressively perched up on the cathedral scaffolding with the leaders of the slum revolt, John is only implicitly nearby. The narrative perspective, which had never been exclusively his, becomes that of all the dispossessed, about to force their way into the hated factory sheds that symbolize every act of official repression from which they and their children have suffered. Like the foreign development companies attacked by Alexis and sardonically observed by Glissant, Clitandre's HASCO (Haitian American Sugar Company) represents simultaneously the damaging function of an alien usurper, and the treacherous folly of government officials who sell out local interests for a pro8

N'ap broté roch pou'n konblé lan mè ho (Clitandre [1982], 54). English version from Clitandre [1987], 38).

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fit that will benefit only the rich within the country. There is an echo of Alexis in the incident where the HASCO tractors uncover and indifferently rebury Arawak artefacts. More importantly for the living, HASCO means the constant threat of being uprooted by bulldozers as the factory grounds steadily encroach upon the slums, and the recurrent likelihood of physical brutality when the thuggish company guards descend upon the shantytown. Interwoven with the narrative and lightening its somber circumstances, there is a vein of fantasy that is partially reminiscent of Alexis's marvellous realism. It does not, however, depend on the notion of Haiti's mystic Amerindian heritage, nor is voudou a major element in it. Dreams are of importance: not the nightmares of Etienne's terrorized population, but dreams that are mysteriously prophetic, or which prolong the activity of the day with a magical heightening of normal powers. Their fantasy element overlaps with the imaginary world of the slum storyteller's folktales, which, springing from African and West Indian oral tradition, are a favorite form of evening entertainment in the communal life of the ghetto. The main leitmotif of tales and dreams, which becomes a recurrent motif in the "real" events of the narrative, is the story of the beautiful brown girl who steals the magic comb of the Rivermaid or Siren (a figure associated with Erzulie, the voudou goddess of love). The tale may be read as a sort of rite of passage myth: at the moment of puberty, the girl has seized a divine talisman of beauty and power that enables her to perform amazing deeds: arrest the frenzy of a crowd and the fire of the militia; become the adored mistress of the colonel in charge of the troops; on overhead electric wires, sleepwalk her way back toward the squalid huts of the shantytown. The victim of her theft follows a contrary path: perpetually weeping and bleeding, she lurks by fountains, begging the girl for the return of her comb; her youth and beauty stolen, she becomes the Wanderer, an archetypal figure evoking the slum's unrest; linked thematically to Walkbout Woman with her mad hope of harvesting the moon, she is finally identified with Old Hag, the scapegoat of the poor, and is stoned to death as a witch. While this haggard figure, accelerated into old age, is being reduced to a pile of desecrated bones, the beautiful girl is the focus of the slum's luminous dreams, the obsession that seems to melt away its sufferings. On the day of Old Hag's death, a fantastic vision is seen in the cathedral square: the girl, sitting in her favorite little wicker chair, sinks slowly into the ground. All that can be snatched back of her is her magic comb, which is "broken into a thousand pieces in the hands of these poor people, these workers and peasants."9 A breaking of power, or a sharing of it? The novel ends on this note of somewhat enigmatic celebration. But the day is the Feast of the Assumption. Religious ecstasy, a miraculous shower of roses, and the passage of a thousand doves through a sky for the first time revealed as blue; the killing of the scapegoat, the ascent of the Virgin, and the descent of the girl beneath the earth (toward the location, incidentally, of the voudou paradise), all combine to create a sense of precarious optimism as the slumdwellers dare to occupy the factory yard and cry out their hope of power for the people. The continuously chaotic political events in Haiti since independence in 1804 have caused the memory of slavery to recede to some extent into the background of the literature. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, however, slavery did not end until 1848, and the limited independence of Departmental status was not conferred until 1946. The somber colonial past still haunts the writers of these islands, and its evocation manifests a need not only to recapture the centuries of servitude, but to 9

brisé en mille morceaux dans ces mains pauvres, ouvrières et paysannes (Clitandre [1982], 200).

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work through them, almost to rework them. This imperative, so evident in Glissant's work, becomes a guiding principle with the next generation. The Guadeloupean writer Daniel Maximin, in his first novel, L'isolé soleil (Lone sun), 1981, creates a number of characters driven by the desire to record the past, whether through private diaries, the exchange of letters, or through the medium of fiction a fiction identical with truth: "You will open the drawers of our confiscated history, the drawers of heroism and cowardice, of hunger, fear and love; you will refresh the memory held in pieces of evidence and stories, you will place truth in the service of imagination."10 By means of a variety of narrative voices from the past and the present, all loosely grouped around the central figures of young Marie-Gabriel and Adrien, Maximin recreates successive stages in the struggle for Guadeloupean independence. Three moments are highlighted in the growth of political awareness. The first is the period in 1802 when French regiments arrived in the island to enforce Napoleon's decision to reestablish slavery, which had been officially abolished in 1794 as a result of the French Revolution. Louis Delgrès, the mulatto army officer who led the fierce revolt of black soldiers and peasants against the French troops, is the charismatic figure who here incarnates the resistance movement. But Delgrès's heroic, suicidal gesture at Fort Matouba is not presented in isolation: the savage vengeance taken not only on the remnants of his forces, but on the whole black population, and the following years of secret rebellion, are given equal weight in the long contest between masters and slaves. This notion of group struggle is again illustrated during World War II, when the Vichy Government controlled the French West Indies and dissidence could safely be expressed only behind the veil of carnival satire. Finally, the decade of the sixties is presented as a time of trauma, when the Boeing crash on the Soufrière volcano killed the leaders of the Guadeloupe independence movement, and when the Black Power movement from the U.S. provided a rethinking of the issues of race, cultural integration, and political freedom. Like Glissant, Maximim has a strong sense of affinity with the islands beyond the francophone Caribbean. The final generation in the novel emerges from adolescence as the English-speaking islands are gaining independence; the previous generation had formed close ties of friendship with black American, Cuban, and other West Indian musicians; and the novelist expresses the conviction that all West Indians belong to one civilization, share the same joy, sorrow, passion, and revolt. Despite Maximin's use of specifically local material, such as folktales or snatches of untranslated Creole, he is firm about the existence of common Caribbean ground. There is no conflict between, on the one hand, the statement that Guadeloupe is not a nation in the process of being shaped, but a nation already shaped; and, on the other, the belief that Guadeloupe participates in "the history of an archipelago, attentive to our four races, our seven languages, and our dozens of bloods."11 In the sociopolitical musing that forms part of the book, he reflects upon today's need to put aside suicidal heroism, to be reconciled with one's own landscape (another Glissant theme), and to replace the past "fragments of synthesis" by a new, balanced, harmonious synthesis of the many races and classes that live together in every island. This aim is seen as synonymous with the Caribbean striving after freedom and solidarity.

10 Tu ouvriras les tiroirs de notre histoire confisquée, ceux d'héroïsme et de lâcheté, ceux de la faim, de la peur et de l'amour; tu rafraîchiras la mémoire des témoignages et des récits, tu mettras la vérité au service de l'imaginaire (Maximim [1981], 17). 11 une histoire d'archipel, attentive à nos quatre races, nos sept langues et nos douzaines de sangs (Maximim [1981], 7).

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By its very title, Maximim's second novel, Soufrières, 1987, is a prolongation of the theme of a shared heritage. Soufrière, in the singular, denotes the still active volcano which was expected to erupt in Guadeloupe in 1976. In the plural, by one of those plays on word-sounds of which Maximin is fond, it is used to suggest a fusion of sisters and brothers {soeurs/frères), as well as their individual, solitary suffering. In the plural, the title also has a geographic resonance, in view of the proximity of St. Vincent's Soufrière and indeed of the whole chain of volcanic islands rising out of the Caribbean Sea. And as the volcanoes represent the most youthful stage in the physical formation of the islands, so the name Soufrières is associated with the fire and energy of the young protagonists of the novel, some of whom are familiar from L'isolé soleil: Adrien, Gerty and above all MarieGabriel, the girl who lives at the foot of the volcanic slopes. This reappearance of familiar characters seems to indicate that Maximim, like Glissant, proposes to set about the gradual reconstruction of a lost portion of history. Soufrières, however, is oriented toward the present rather than the past. Music, for instance, the Caribbean's earliest echo of an African art form, which in L'isolé soleil was a bonding factor among the young black and colored population of Paris, is equally important here; but the thirties jazz is replaced by the music of Dollar Brand and the protest songs of Soweto. There is a serene resolution of the differences between age and youth, past and present, in the decision of Adrienne, the old woman who has come all the way back from France to rescue her son's ashes - lovingly preserved in a leather-covered box and a glass-fronted cabinet - from the threatened volcanic eruption. Adrienne's son died during a protest riot in the Vichy phase of Guadeloupe's history; his death, a crippling memory, is finally transcended when his mother chooses not to keep his ashes, but to throw them into the ash of Soufrière. The title of Patrick Chamoiseau's first novel, Chronique des sept misères (Chronicle of the seven misfortunes), 1986, signals the writer's conscious use of fiction as historical record, stemming from Glissant's position that the novelist is the archivist of the Caribbean past. This is made plain in the epigraph, a passage from Le discours antillais stating that personal histories run like cracks through History itself. Chamoiseau sets out to preserve a particular time in Martinique's past, the pre-World War II era that coincided with the heyday of the Fort-de-France market, and the years after the war that saw the decline of the market as the island was saturated with subsidized goods flown out from France, against which local producers could not compete. A small group of djobeurs - freelance porters who used to scuffle for work among the heavily-laden marketwomen - is loosely identified with the collective narrator who explores the dozens of personal stories associated with the market. The linking theme is the life of their leader, Pipi, whose ancestry is traced (along with that of everyone with whom he ever had any connection at all) through a profusion of anecdotes, rumors, conjecture, and snatches of actual public events. Beyond the market itself, evoked in all its noisy, seething, fragrant disorder, lies the changing town, where carts and horses, dirt sidewalks, and old wooden houses slowly sink beneath the invading asphalt as the day approaches when the djobeurs with their barrows will become extinct. In an appendix, Chamoiseau lovingly lists the porters' traditional cries and reproduces a newspaper article about the old market which the municipal authorities have decided not to restore. A wry comment shows where the author's loyalties lie: "Only the ethnographer mourns insignificant ethnocides." The influence of folktales (of which Chamoiseau is also a writer) is evident in the strong oral quality of this narrative, which frequently addresses itself to the reader in order to compel attention

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or invite laughter. This effect of direct speech is enhanced by an innovatory use of Creole, first in occasional complete sentences for which a French translation is provided in brackets immediately after, and then - as if trusting the non-Martinican reader to have got the grasp of the language through the regular introduction of isolated, untranslated words. The use of Creole, which is of course a basic reality of French Caribbean life, presents a practical difficulty to any writer who wishes his works to be accessible to the maximum number of readers. In addition, the situation in Haiti, where Creole is an everyday fact of life, differs from that in the French Caribbean Departments where the promotion of Creole has assumed political dimensions among intellectuals. In these circumstances, Chamoiseau's linguistic experiment is of particular interest. The tradition of the orally recounted folktale may also be at work in the ready shifts of tone from the comic to the tragic, from the satirical to the supernatural. The relative lightheartedness of the pre-Departmental period, where a spirit of initiative, crazy but harmless, enlivens the market scene and is summed up by Pipi's triumphantly winning the race to be the porter of an impossibly gigantic yam, turns sour with the wartime years and the gradual demoralization of the market. Pipi's fortunes reflect this decline: his unrequited passion for a woman hopelessly in love with someone else, his spectacular rise and fall as a market gardener, his obsession with the buried treasure guarded by the ghost of a murdered slave, seem to lead inevitably to the moment when he is lured to his death by the she-devil, Man Zabyme. Despite the favorable introduction of benign charms and efficacious folk medicine, magic is a sinister undercurrent throughout most of the narrative, from Pipi's unnatural conception by a succubus gravedigger, to his final destruction at the hand of the traditional fatal enchantress. The borderline between bad luck, unkind destiny, and the ruin brought about by occult agency is never clearly defined by the collective narrator, but all events are related with the same air of verisimilitude - as in the amazing case of Madame Odibert, the pepper-seller who hears her own death announced on the radio and dissolves into thin air beside the market fountain - though they sometimes have tongue-in-cheek codas: the 1,500 witch doctors who come to town to get bottles of the fountain water lay so great a strain on the municipal budget that the mayor has to shut off the water supply. The political content of Chronique des sept misères lies in the implicit commentary upon the effects of Departmental status, and in the equally ironic reflections upon the role played by local politicians. In the porters' milieu, magic and superstition form a part of everyday reality and are interwoven with a more traditional type of literary realism that acquaints the reader with the hard facts of life: social hierarchies and exploitative sexual attitudes, food shortages and petty crime in the Vichy years, the gulf between social workers and their clients, the rise of the Syrian shopkeeper class, the arrival of the Rastas in Martinique. Few institutions escape the collective narrator's sarcastic tongue. Martinican television, habitually oriented toward France, symbolizes the indifference to local interests of those in power. Student demonstrators can never quite fit the complexities of market relationships into their simplified view of social justice, and the workers remain aloof from them. No political party seems effective even in understanding, much less dealing with the problems of the poor. The autonomists and supporters of independence who try to turn Pipi's strange conversations with the ghost of the slave Afoukal into a symbol of the degradation of the colonized West Indian find their chosen martyr totally uncooperative. Later, when his fame as a cultivator reaches town, the same people claim that he has proved the viability of independence. The municipal council pays a ceremonial visit to his plot of land, and Césaire himself declares Pipi a "fundamental Mar-

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tinican" - but the Mayor's speeches are later dismissively referred to as high-flown vocalizing, and the black scientists who get regional grants to study Pipi's agricultural methods succeed only in wrecking his unscientific, but formerly successful, vegetable patch. The vision of Martinican life that emerges from the novel is, although often amusingly sardonic, at times deeply disturbing. The ghost Afoukal's perceptions regarding present-day conditions in the island force Pipi to consider things he has never given a thought to: the divisiveness inherent in Martinique's two languages, the troubled coexistence of several races, the futility of the back-toAfrica solution, the disquieting fact that Pipi himself spends all his time prostrate on the ground where he thinks buried treasure lies hidden. The collective narrator comes to see the life of the poor as a kind of "natural death" (Chamoiseau [1986], 155). The determination to struggle against a contrary fate, exemplified in the first half of the novel by stout-hearted women such as Pipi's paternal grandmother who, deserted by her husband, "said she was going to catch hold of destiny by a different end,"12 seems to die out in the apathy of the postwar years. The discourse of the we moves increasingly toward resignation and a sense of helplessness. Toward the end of the book, this pessimistic mood surfaces unmistakably in the aftermath of a riot provoked by the death of a youth whose mother was connected with the market. He has been clubbed to death by French security police while taking part in a political demonstration. The workers of Fort-de-France, the market porters among them, hurl broken bottles bravely throughout the night; but the images chosen to describe the furious crowd - a crazy swarm of butterflies, a group of weaklings braying with childish laughter - announce an inevitable retreat. The riot dissolves at daybreak when the sight of the army boots, helicopters, and jeeps brings back old fears and causes a placid relapse into the habit of powerlessness. The old Fort-de-France is lost, its folkways disintegrated, its former inhabitants rushing to emigrate as Pipi once rushed to dig up the fabled gold in Afoukal's grave. Against this background of social abdication, the group of djobeurs, unable to find work, are finally forced out of the market, hoping, with a faint echo of their former cheeky self-assurance, that they will be assumed to have joined the exodus toward the legendary riches of France. The nature of Caribbean reality is significantly different from that of Europe, where the concept of realism originated. It is not surprising that the novelists discussed here should have modified some of the principles of European realism, and ignored others altogether. The conventional glumness and pathos that fiction attributes to the European working classes are transmuted into more radical emotions: a heritage of violence, suffering, and injustice is shown to be tragically selfperpetuating, yet often accompanied by the loud release of laughter and the stubborn will to endure. The heroic and the fantastic, which lie outside the scope of traditional realism, are both of extreme importance in societies where the exceptional and the mysterious represent an escape from the daily oppressiveness of poverty; where the tragic heroes of the past were so often unsung, and where, as with the folk hero Anansi, the magic spider, survival itself has come to be perceived as a form of heroism.

12

Elle allait saisir, disait-elle, le destin par un bout différent (Chamoiseau [1986], 26).

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Bibliography Alexis, Jacques Stephen. 1956. Prolegomena to a Manifesto on the Marvellous Realism of the Haitians. Présence Africaine. 8-10:251-75 (special issue, English edition). (A paper presented by Alexis at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists [Paris, September 1956], arguing for the uniqueness of Haitian culture.) —. 1957-a. Où va le roman? Présence Africaine. 13: 81-101. (A discussion of the Haitian novelist's cultural and social goals.) —. 1957-b. Les arbres musiciens. Paris: Gallimard. (Alexis's second novel, in which the concept of "marvellous realism" is most strongly developed. His other fictional works referred to here are also published by Gallimard.) —. 1959. L'espace d'un cillement. Paris: Gallimard. (Alexis's last novel, a political allegory about Haiti during the American Occupation.) Case, Frederick Ivor. 1985. The Crisis of Identity. Sherbrooke, Quebec: Naaman. (A study of alienation, cultural identity, and literary method in novels from Guadeloupe and Martinique.) Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1986. Chronique des sept misères. Paris: Gallimard. (Chamoiseau's first novel, an affectionate evocation of the now defunct Fort-de-France market and an ironic study of social change in Martinique. His later novels, Solibo magnifique, 1988, and Texaco, 1992, also published by Gallimard, further demonstrate his interest in linguistic experimentation and his commitment to the promotion of Creole folk culture. Texaco won the 1992 Goncourt prize.) Clitandre, Pierre. 1982. Cathédrale du mois d'août. Paris: Editions Syros. (By a Haitian writer in exile, this novel depicts the desperate struggle for survival of a group of slum dwellers on the fringe of Port-au-Prince.) —. 1987. Cathedral of the August Heat. Trans. by Bridget Jones. London: Readers International. (The English translation of the preceding.) Dash, J. Michael. 1981. Literature and Ideology in Haiti: 1915-1961. London: Macmillan. (A study of the interaction of literature and politics in the cultural life of 19th- and 20th-century Haiti.) Etienne, Frank. 1979. Les affres d'un défi. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps. (A satirical novel in which the exploitation of a group of zombies by a corrupt voudou priest becomes an image of the political oppression of an entire nation. The original version of this novel, Dézafi [1975], written in Creole, was published by Fardin in Port-au-Prince.) Glissant, Edouard. 1981-a. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. (The English-language edition of this essay on West Indian cultural identity, Caribbean Discourse, translated by J. Michael Dash, was published by CARAF Books at the University Press of Virginia in 1989.) —. 1981-b. La case du commandeur. Paris: Seuil. (Glissant's fourth novel, which attempts to retrace the lost ancestral memories of the Martinican people. Glissant's other novels mentioned in this essay are also published by Editions du Seuil.) Lamarre, Joseph M. 1980. Dézafi, le premier roman créole de la littérature haïtienne. Présence Francophone. 21: 137-54. (A comparative study of the Creole and French versions of Etienne's novel Les affres d'un défi) Maximin, Daniel. 1981. L'isolé soleil. Paris: Seuil. (The translation, Lone Sun, was published by CARAF Books at the University Press of Virginia in 1989. Soufrières, 1987, Maximim's second novel about the rediscovery of the Caribbean heritage, is also published by Editions du Seuil.) Ormerod, Beverley. 1985. An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel. London: Heinemann. (A study of six major novelists from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, based on the common themes of paradise and fall.)

Exile and Recent Literature

J. MICHAEL DASH

University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica

Two of the major, interrelated themes of francophone Caribbean literature are exile and return, déracinement and enracinement. Indeed, it could be argued that the existential experience of exile and the essentialist temptation of home are inscribed more generally within a thematics of the quest for identity in all Caribbean writing. Writers as diverse as Cuba's Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Barbados's George Lamming, one of the first to reflect seriously on these themes in his Pleasures of Exile, 1960, have built their entire oeuvre around these concerns. The "classics" of francophone Caribbean literature are equally marked by these motifs of flight and return. Two obvious and wellknown examples are Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), 1947, and Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew), 1946. In the former, the journey back home is evident in the title. In the latter, the transformation of the home community by the protagonist's return is evoked in Roumain's poetic formulation. The dialectical relationship between the disorientation of exile and the plenitude of belonging can be seen as a mediative exercise, a means of imaginatively negotiating the trauma of Caribbean history. Exile and the lure of home, fall, and redemption enable the individual to confront the insecurities left in the wake of slavery, colonization, assimilation, and in more recent times, totalitarian politics. This reflex is still so powerful that a Caribbean writer's credentials have usually depended on his ability to be "authentic." It has always been a stock theme in the discourse of the region's political demagogues. Similarly, in the field of literary criticism, only the "insider" was considered capable of providing authoritative explanations. The persistent power of these constructs in the Caribbean imagination points to the neoromantic roots of writing in the region. The ideal of a fixed identity, of the writer housed in his native culture, of the individual organically related to the collectivity finds its ultimate rationale in the poetics of European romanticism. In describing the same phenomenon among Latin-American writers, equally haunted by the need to belong to a distinct community, Roberto González Echevarrfa persuasively asserts that ". . . the individual character of national literatures is a notion derived from romantic thought, one that has enjoyed a long life in the history of Latin-American thought because the birth of Latin America as a discrete political entity coincided with the crest of romanticism" (González Echevarrfa [1985], 36). González Echevarrfa's hypothesis is a provocative one if applied to Caribbean writing as a whole but it seems to be particularly pertinent to the francophone Caribbean. Haiti, for instance, became independent in 1804 and early patriotic writing is permeated by the need to assert a distinct identity. A case can also be made for the emergence of a local "voice" in Martinique, Guadeloupe,

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and French Guiana as a result of the wave of nationalism and regionalism provoked by the French revolution in 1789. Given such literary beginnings, it is easy to explain the pervasiveness of the discourse of French romanticism in the francophone Caribbean. This pattern would be as evident in the treatment of landscape, of the individual self, of history as in the examination of the relationship between individual and group. The individual talent was seen to embody the Volksgeist, the essence of the collectivity. From such a perspective, exile would inevitably be an experience of alienation. Belonging then became the only ideal state, a longed-for salutary wholeness. However, in actual fact, it has always been difficult to apply these fictions to the lived reality of the Caribbean. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that there is no single, unified community in the francophone Caribbean to which the writer could belong. The particularly divided nature of societies in the postcolonial francophone Caribbean accounts for this sense of alienation. On one hand, a literate, urban, francophile elite and on the other, a rural community whose world view and culture were considered unworthy. Even though the process of creolization inevitably altered both groups, the writer, whether elitist or populist, never really belonged to a stable community. This loss, it may be argued, made the need for the myth of home even stronger. The truth of the Caribbean situation was that it was impossible to realize a perfect coordination of individual creativity and the Geist of any community. Indeed, rootlessness may be the special condition of Caribbean writing. The other reason why the notion of belonging is so problematic is that literature in the Caribbean is fundamentally "modern." The feature of the "modern" that is so apparent in the Caribbean is the multicultural and multilingual nature of the literary imagination. As George Steiner argues in Extraterritorial, we live in the age of the writer as refugee, no longer housed within specific cultures. The case Steiner makes for Beckett, Nabokov or Borges can also be made for the majority of francophone Caribbean writers. The ideology of contestation may have necessitated the creation of concepts of "home" in a racial, political or cultural context, for instance the monolithic notion of race proposed by negritude. However, exile has always been a troubling reality at the center of the Caribbean imagination. It is only recently that writers have been willing to face the full implications of this condition. If we were to consider Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée and Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal in terms of the problematics of exile, we would see that neither text simplifies the meaning of exile and return. Both texts are distinguished by an uneasy lucidity about the nature of exile. In the former, Roumain's protagonist leaves a confining world for an "elsewhere" that provides him with painfully gained knowledge. The transformations wrought in the peasant community by the hero's return at the very least imply the positive nature of his experience. Roumain's vision of return is utopian. Césaire's is riddled with skepticism. Like Roumain, he insists on the relationship between being and belonging. However, for Césaire return is a complex and precarious process. Return is only possible when all illusion, all received ideas are jettisoned. When this moment of climax is achieved in the poem it is not a vision of individual absorbed into community. Rather, it seems to be a discovery of a new consciousness that unites opposites and suggests unceasing metamorphosis. The end of Césaire's journey is not "home" in the conventional sense but a new self-consciousness. What makes these texts "classics" is their skepticism with regard to the question of legitimacy, to the myth of authenticity. They stand out because the majority of francophone Caribbean texts

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confine themselves to a conventional, sentimental rendition of the themes of home and exile. For instance, Joseph Zobel's novel La rue Cases-Nègres (Black shack alley), 1950, is dominated by the neoromantic ideal of cultural authenticity and the horror of déracinement. Zobel goes out of his way to depict childhood memory in terms of a primal community, an organic world where nature is benevolent and men emerge as nude centaurs. The city by contrast is an "espace invivable" or unlivable space peopled by the repressed and the hypocritical. French institutions are shown to be essentially destructive. Zobel's novel is simply one of the many works that insist on the authority of the individual's community. Perhaps the one group of writers who consistently deviate from this treatment of "home" are the female writers in the francophone Caribbean. The female literary imagination seems to turn on the crisis of belonging and the consoling power of exile. The themes that seem to emerge invariably in women's fiction are the importance of exile for self-discovery, the difficulty of establishing an identity, of belonging, and a treatment of nature that does not emphasize maternal benevolence. Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Telumée Miracle (The bridge of beyond), 1972, portrays a fatalistic heroine whose salvation is physical and psychic retreat. The novels of Michèle Lacrosil present an alienated protagonist confined within a community vastly different from the organic wholeness of Zobel's world. The same is true of the marginalized heroine of Marie Chauvet's novella "Amour." Arguably, the most skeptical and ironic voice in this tradition is that of Maryse Condé. From the outset her novels focused on thwarted returns, on protagonists who futilely pursued the illusion of "home." Her more recent epic fiction Ségou (Segu), 1984, is not a Caribbean Roots. Unlike Alex Haley's novel, Condé's work explores the positive and inevitable process of dispersion and inexorable metamorphosis. The strength of women writers may well lie in the refusal to accept blindly the myth of the authenticating community. It is all captured in the ironic thrust of the title of Condé's first novel Heremakhonon, which means "Welcome Home." In the works of Edouard Glissant this deflating and ironic mode in francophone Caribbean writing gets its fullest expression. Glissant gives creative release to a demystifying potential latent in some Caribbean writing. Glissant calls into question all the received ideas of the Caribbean literary tradition - identity, language, nature, self and very significantly for our purposes, the notion of "home." Glissant's imagination is constructed around an unstable conception of time and space. Home, security, sanctuary, even though longed for by the characters in his novels, are always unattainable. On the other hand departure, exile, "detour" are seen as important thresholds of self-discovery, a kind of salutary disorientation. Indeed, Glissant chooses not to use the term "exile" and prefers errance to evoke the necessary wandering that opens the individual to fertile encounters with the "other." His is an aesthetic of diversity, as he says in Le discours antillais (Caribbean discourse), 1981, "this poetics of remoteness and restlessness [errance] exposes the poet to the movement of the world. He knows that today and tomorrow he must spread his language."1 Glissant's ideal of a cross-cultural poetics is based upon this creative redefinition of "exile." His poétique de la relation requires contact and transformation, not wholeness and authenticity. The poetics and the politics of the unique self, the native language and the sovereign community are radically subverted in Glissant's novels. Glissant's poetics can be seen as a critical response to negritude's ideal of the return of the prodigal. For instance, Glissant's first novel La Lézarde (The 1 Cette poétique de l'écart et de l'errance ouvre le poète au mouvement du monde. Il sait qu'il faut aujourd'hui et demain étendre la parole (Glissant [1981], 432).

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ripening), 1958, opens with one of the main characters leaving home. It ends with the futile effort of this same character, Thaël, to return to his lost paradise, which has now become a blood-spattered nightmare. For Glissant, not only is return impossible but man must turn his back on paradise. If in the "French" Caribbean - Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Martinique - exile is part of an increasing desire to subvert the pieties of negritude, it has a more poignant and pervasive resonance in Haitian literature. There the problem of exile is made more concrete and immediate because of the nature of Haitian politics. Exile, often an intellectual issue for many Caribbean writers, manifests itself more dramatically in Haiti in terms of physical banishment for political reasons. Writers scattered throughout Haitian literary history have this experience in common. Anténor Firmin, Jacques Roumain, and René Depestre immediately come to mind. Today, with the exception of Cuba, Haiti has the largest number of intellectuals who have been forced into exile since the 1960s for political reasons. Even without this political dimension to the experience of exile, the thematic s of home and exile has had a profound impact on the Haitian literary imagination since 1804. In postcolonial Haiti the need for recognition, for self-definition was acute and constant. Given the hostility of the outside world and the fragmented nature of the local population, the need to define "home," to conceive of a "housed" collectivity was an integral part of early nationalism. Early Haitian writing is preoccupied with demonstrating the uniqueness of Haitian history, local flora and fauna, a special Haitian ethos. To be cut off from this mythified native land was seen as a humiliating and alienating experience. For instance in 1838 the poet Ignace Nau contrasted the grey, cold world of France with the "sky of my homeland, so vast and so blue!" in the poem "Basses-Pyrénées." The first reactions against the excesses of this neoromantic aesthetic came only at the end of the nineteenth century with the generation of La Ronde. For this the latter were predictably dismissed as escapist and unpatriotic mulatto intellectuals. The generation of La Ronde, however, may well have been among the first in the Caribbean to question the closed discourse of "home." Their ultimate aim was to free poetic language from its strictly referential function, which was its function in earlier nature poetry and declamatory verse. In so doing, they could both shut out the painful political realities of the time, as instability had dramatically increased, and put an end to the obsession with naming that haunted earlier writing. They dreamed of a poetic exile, an "elsewhere" within language that transcended material, external, and national boundaries. Etzer Vilaire, Edmond Laforest, Georges Sylvain all sought to create a new poetic language that could be free from the mystifications of cultural nationalism. In this they were clearly influenced by the Mallarméan ideal of eliminating the object from poetic discourse. It would, however, be a simplification to simply dismiss them as tropical symbolists. They were, as much as anything else, reacting against their century's blind faith in the writer as incarnation of the ethos of a community, against the automatic correlation between good writing and ostentatious belonging. The complexities of La Ronde's literary position would be quickly forgotten in the early twentieth century. Nineteen years of U.S. occupation (1915-34) would revive old nationalist ideals. To this extent, the occupation can be described as the revenge of the political referent since the harsh, pseudocolonial nature of the occupation would make a nonreferential aesthetic seem absurd in the militant 1920s and 1930s. Poetic experimentation for La Ronde would either cease or, as in the case of Laforest, a permanent "elsewhere" would be sought in suicide. The poetics of contestation in postoccupation Haiti led to the renewal of indigenism and the creation of the noiriste movement.

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These were two obvious manifestations of the need to assert an authentic race, language, space, and even religion. The need to define the Haitian soul, to believe in the totality of "home" finds a neat parallel in contemporary France in the writings of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. Indigenism and noirisme did indeed share with other movements at the time the mystique of belonging. This was a discourse shared by militant iconoclasts as well as the staid bourgeoisie. They would define their authentic world differently, whether as rustic eden or high-minded urban culture, but they insisted equally on an ideology of "difference," that their Haiti was unique and the only worthy one. Exile meant loss and the destruction of creativity. Yanick Lahens, in a recent article on the theme of exile, perceptively points out the extent to which ideologies in postoccupation Haiti were shaped by the notion of the Haitian soul as a timeless and unchanging entity: "from the indigenous movement onward, it has not been possible to undertake research or to create freely because the commonly held notion of identity gave rise to structures and models that could not be transcended. Later Haitian Marxism (all too willing to continue this pattern) held out the promise of an internationalism still not yet achieved."2 Consequently, the opposing notions of home and exile, authentic inside and alienating outside were to dominate ideological discourse in Haiti until the mid-1940s. Roumain's novel Gouverneurs de la rosée is situated on that important threshold which divides the generation of the 1940s from the preceding ones. This novel is important because, among other things, it reveals the slow mutation of the ideology of cultural authenticity. What made postwar literature distinctive in Haiti is the impact of the surrealist movement. The modern with its radical insistence on the relativist view of culture was implanted in Haiti through the influence of surrealism. As James Clifford argues, surrealism is central to the notion of the modern. What surrealism did was to dislocate the belief in a stable, unchanging, and familiar world. By its method of radical juxtapositions, it demonstrated the familiarity of the strange and the otherness of the everyday. Clifford situates the impact of this phenomenon in the field of anthropology: "anthropological humanism begins with the different and renders it . . . comprehensible. It familiarizes. An ethnographic surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the eruption of otherness - the unexpected. This process - a permanent ironic play of similarity and difference, the familiar and the strange, the here and the elsewhere - is characteristic of global modernity" (Clifford [1988], 145-46). For the young, iconoclastic Haitian avant-garde in the 1940s, surrealism meant an epistemological break with post-occupation ideologies. The forty years from the revolution of 1946 to the fall of the Duvaliers in 1986 would mean the rethinking of the discourse of authenticity and a revaluation of the fixed ideas of otherness, elsewhere, and exile. The need to rethink the question of exile has become one of the more apparent features of the contemporary literary scene in Haiti. The following observation by Lahens is characteristic: "Now that neither external nor internal exile can be considered in terms of political fate . . . it indeed seems to us possible and necessary on the eve of the twenty-first century to rethink the question of identity, nationality, and origins so as to emerge from the choice of alternatives - inside or outside."3 The conception of such a radical revaluation, however, was made possible by the atmosphere

2 à partir de l'indigénisme, il n'a plus été possible d'engager librement la recherche ou la création puisque le discours identitaire proposait des schémas et des modèles indépassables. Le marxisme haïtien plus tard (prendra d'autant plus facilement le relais) promettait un internationalisme qui n'a pas encore vu le jour (Lahens [1989], 168). 3 Aujourd'hui que ni l'exil extérieur, ni l'exil intérieur ne peuvent plus être considérés comme une fatalité politique . . . il nous paraît en effet possible et urgent à la veille du 21e siècle de repenser la question de l'identité, de la nationalité et de l'origine, de manière à sortir de l'alternative dedans / dehors (Lahens [1983], 183).

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of postwar Haiti. This atmosphere was the creation of a special set of conditions. Pierre Mabille, for instance, officially representing the French government, invited André Breton to Haiti. Aimé Césaire and Alejo Carpentier also visited Haiti in the mid-1940s. Jacques Roumain, recently returned from exile, brought with him Nicolás Guillén and other avant-garde artists from the Caribbean and Latin America. René Depestre, who was profoundly changed because of this exposure to some of the leading promoters and practitioners of the modern in the arts, had this to say about this period of effervescence in the 1940s. "Before the war, Haiti was shut in on its own misery. You could never imagine how isolated we were culturally . . . Men like Guillén, Carpentier, Césaire, Langsten Hughes, Pierre Mabille, Louis Jouvet, Wifredo Lam, André Breton, really who could, better than they, provide wonderful new perspectives for our youthful imaginations?"4 The profound impact of this radical modernism on Haiti was immediate. In 1946 a revolution declared in the name of surrealism by student leaders such as Depestre and Jacques Stephen Alexis overthrew the government of Elie Lescot. Nor is it surprising that this generation of Haitian writers was among the first to object to the monolithic cultural claims of negritude at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956. The shift away from the ideology of cultural authenticity is as apparent in Alexis's manifesto for a Haitian Marvellous Realism in 1957 as in the collection of essays by Depestre entitled Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Hello and good-bye to negritude), published in 1980. The revolution of 1946 may have failed politically but ideologically it meant a transition from the neoromantic discourse that had dominated in most of the nineteenth century and was revived in postoccupation Haiti, to the ideal of a new literary radicalism based on the notion of the modern. If there were any doubts about the sinister potential of the ideology of authenticity, these were quickly dispelled by the tragic excesses of the Duvalier regime. Depestre became one of the first of a generation of intellectuals and artists who sought, or were banished into, exile. Except for a brief period in 1958, Depestre has spent his entire adult life outside of Haiti. One of his major preoccupations has predictably been how to confront his almost permanent condition of exile. Simple nostalgia for his homeland was not enough. From the 1960s onward there emerges a new persona, visibly different from the enfant terrible of his youthful verse. It is perhaps most evident in the title of the 1964 collection of poetry Journal d'un animal marin (Diary of a marine animal), which suggests a fragile sea creature coming to terms with a massive sea-change. In a recent essay he has explicitly referred to the question of exile and the need to reconceptualize the problematics of elsewhere, of alienation. Like Glissant he, too, uses the word errance in order to suggest a positive revaluation of the writer's nomadic state. "This life of errancy leads me to seek original answers to the problems posed by exile for writers. I need to go beyond the view of exile that our age still shares with antiquity, the Renaissance, the Romantic age. In these three periods the notion of exile really referred to an individual torn from his native land . . . In 1985, how does one find a new way of interpreting the historic conditions of exile . . . As I have been Brazilian in Sao Paulo, Czech in Prague, French in Paris, Italian in Milan, Cuban in Havana, Haitian at every human crossroads of tenderness and freedom, each succeeding self will have created my identity now that the world faces cultural interrela4 Avant la guerre, Haïti vivait repliée sur ses plaies. Vous ne pouvez pas imaginer à quel point on était une île sur le plan culturel .. . Des hommes comme Guillén, Carpentier, Césaire, Langston Hughes, Pierre Mabille, Louis Jouvet, Wifredo Lam, André Breton, qui pouvait alors mieux qu'eux, donner des fenêtres joyeuses à notre jeune imagination? (Despestre [1976], 28).

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tionship."5 Identity was now to be unstable and composite. Exile would offer, arguably, the best conditions for its evolution. In the same way that Depestre's generation was formed by Roumain, Depestre would have a shaping impact on those who followed him in Haiti. One of the few literary movements to emerge, albeit in a shortlived way, under Duvalier was the magazine Haïti Littéraire. In its authors' pronouncements we see not only further evidence of a radical shift away from conventional notions of identity but also what the Haitian critic Ghislain Gouraige would call "la phobie de la solitude" (the deep fear of isolation) in 1974 with reference to this period of Haitian writing. Two prominent members of Haïti Littéraire, Anthony Phelps and René Philoctète, demanded in the 1960s a break from the smugness of indigenism and a new universal poetic identity. "Our writers have not understood that literature must not be made exclusively for local consumption. The written work must be able to travel, to impose itself on and find a worthy place among other works. Local color is of little importance, what counts is the human color of the work."6 His contemporary René Philoctète made very similar claims. "We refuse to do like the rest, to confine ourselves within a narrow poetic regionalism . . . We want Haitian literature to take its place among other literatures."7 As Haiti became more isolated politically, its literature manifested a new, desperate universality. The need to create work with a "human color" is everywhere evident in the early verse of Phelps. His Eté (Summer), 1960, is a hymn to a luminous world of human solidarity. It would, however, prove impossible to sustain this faith in the poetic vision and in the ideal of mankind under a regime that reduced people to the less than human. The broad humanist ideals of Haïti Littéraire seemed abstract and utopian in the face of the paranoid and authoritarian Duvalier regime. The lesson of Duvalierism was a bitter one for Haiti's writers. Perhaps its only positive effect was to provoke a whole process of literary demythification. The movement called Spiralisme begun by Franck Etienne in the 1970s was an attempt to respond to the crisis of the Haitian writer. The open-ended model of the spiral was opposed to the closed discourse of Duvalierism. It is precisely this open-endedness that kept alive the ideal of the "modern" in Haitian writing. Spiralisme meant the demythification of writer, of text, of reader and, most important for our purposes, of the notion of authenticity. The writer within Haiti was as alienated as the writer outside of Haiti. Consequently, Etienne internally exiled could write the play Pèlin-tèt (Head Traps), 1975, which has turned out to be the best literary treatment of the Haitian exile in North America. The paradox is that it was written by someone who was refused a passport to leave Haiti. A similar irony is apparent in the case of Jean Métellus, who has lived for many years in France. His novel La parole prisonnière (The imprisoned word), 1986, indirectly refers to the question of literary self-expression within Haiti. Curiously enough, Métellus may have touched, in the neurotic stutter of his French

5 Cette errance de toute une vie me conduit à chercher des réponses originales aux problèmes que l'exil pose aux écrivains. Il me faut dépasser la vision de l'exil que notre temps partage encore avec l'antiquité, la renaissance, l'âge romantique. A ces trois époques, en effet, la notion d'exil évoque un être arraché à son pays natal . . . En 1985, comment avoir des yeux neufs pour interpréter les conditions historiques de l'exil . . . Pour avoir été Brésilien à Sao Paulo, Tchèque à Prague, Français à Paris, Italien à Milan, Cubain à la Havane, Haïtien de tous les carrefours humains de la tendresse et de la liberté, mes moi successifs auront préparé mon identité à l'heure de l'ubiquité culturelle de la plantète (Depestre [1985], 52). 6 Nos écrivains n'ont pas compris que la littérature ne doit pas être faite uniquement pour une consommation locale. L'oeuvre écrite doit pouvoir s'expatrier, s'imposer, figurer dignement parmi d'autres. La couleur locale importe peu, ce qui compte c'est la couleur humaine de l'oeuvre (Phelps [1963], 24). 7 Refus de faire comme les autres, de nous enfermer dans un régionalisme poétique étroit . . . Nous voulons que les oeuvres haïtiennes fassent figure parmi d'autres (Philoctète [1963], 26-27).

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protagonist, a Haitian problem that makes this novel more "Haitian" than his stories situated in Haiti. Naturally not all writing stemming from exile, whether internal or external, focused creatively on the question of identity and alienation. There were the inevitable sentimental works produced by overwhelming nostalgia for the lost homeland. For instance, Métellus's Au pipirite chantant (In the early morn), 1973, is self-indulgent verse written in this tradition. Nostalgia and guilt are important to the novel Mère-Solitude (Mother-solitude), 1983, written by Emile Olivier. The journey back to Haiti by the protagonist, revealingly called Narcès, is symbolic of a larger quest for identity that turns out to be futile. Marie Thérèse Colimon's Le chant des sirènes (The Sirens' song), 1979, is also about desertion. Mother Haiti is deserted by her sons and daughters who have fallen victim to enchanted voices that have lured them to destruction. One has an impression of an entire nation "in transit" as the airport lobby becomes the focal point for everyone's fears and hopes. The recurring motifs in all these stories is the fascination with "pays l'aut'bo" (land over there), namely the United States and the inevitable abandonment of the "mère-patrie" (literally, "mother-fatherland") by those who succumb to the materialistic temptations of America. In these works the dialectic between home and exile, inside and outside remains intact. Predictably, much writing done outside of Haiti was politically motivated and aimed at denouncing the Duvalier regime. It is interesting that Haitian novelists never managed to produce outstanding treatments of political dictatorship. This subgenre produced far more accomplished novels in Spanish, as we see in the work of Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Miguel Angel Asturias. The problem with the Haitian novel of dictatorship may have been its narrow political focus as well as its stridency. Joseph Ferdinand observes in an article on recent fiction written in exile that "hyperbole is the rule" (Ferdinand [1984], 130). Typical of this writing are such novels as Le nègre crucifié (The crucified black man), 1974, by Gérard Etienne and Mémoire en Colin-Maillard (Blindman's bluff memoir), 1976, by Anthony Phelps. Both were published by the Nouvelle Optique group in Montreal which also put out a largely political journal by the same name between 1971 and 1974. These novels can be seen as attempts to exorcise painful personal memories of the Duvalier regime. Singleminded and didactic, this littérature de circonstance could be seen as one of the weaker expressions of Haitian social realism begun at the turn of the century. This subgenre of the novel needed Duvalierism in order to justify itself, in order to survive. With the fall of the Duvaliers in 1986, it has come to an abrupt and predictable end. Far more interesting are those works that try to confront imaginatively the condition of exile. Some of this is suggested in the title of the journal Dérives edited by Jean Jonassaint in Montreal as the displaced Haitian tries to face both the collapse of old neoromantic notions of identity and come to terms with his new composite self. Two of Haiti's most interesting writers from this point of view are Jean-Claude Charles and Anthony Phelps. The latter has caused much consternation by publicly stating that he refuses to be considered a black poet. Rather, he has aligned himself with René Depestre and Edouard Glissant in situating himself as a poet of the Americas. At the very least, this is a strategy that attempts to make sense of Phelps's experience of exile in the West. JeanClaude Charles may have been even more provoking in his pronouncement on the state of exile. "Contrary to many others, I consider exile my good fortune: the condition of exile can perfectly well be a productive one . . . I want it to continue. And I very much hope to remain an exile to the

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end."8 Whereas Phelps's prose is conventionally political, his poetry tackles the subject of errance in its various manifestations - cultural, linguistic, and ideological. For instance, Phelps finds it difficult to return to a dated fluency, an outmoded rhetoric. As he confesses in La bélière caraïbe (Caribbean Bellwether), 1980: "I will return / my words no longer halting syllables / but fluent and magical / . . . But these echoless words / always come back to me like a boomerang / laden sometimes however with silent answers."9 The challenge of continuing to write lies for Phelps in inventing a new poetics. This would be derived from those intense moments or states of feeling that Phelps has always privileged in his work. The states of intense sensation associated with words like "été," "Midi," "seuil" and "milieu" are imaginatively exploited by Phelps. His poetic persona must shed illusory and misleading identities in order to rediscover self in these moments of extreme feeling. "I do not feel that I am Africa's son / even less so Cartesian Europe's / And I have no memory of the depths of any ship's hold."10 His poetic enterprise is built, as he declares, around "honoring his share of wandering" {errance). It is through this special notion of errance that Phelps discovers the meaning of the Caribbean. It becomes the geographical location for those longed-for states of extreme feeling that are moments of poetic revelation for him. The Caribbean is a cultural bellwether. It is a zone of intense encounter, of multiple unstable identities, of constant change. Exile has, as in the case of Césaire, Roumain, Depestre, and Glissant, allowed Phelps to understand the true meaning of "home." The provocative redefinition of home as enabling rather than the opposite of exile is expressed by Phelps as "Land pretext where the rebellious bread of exile is constantly kneaded / and is shaped a writing like bees' stings."11 Such a notion of exile, such a redefinition of "home" make the ideology of cultural authenticity that has dominated Haitian society since the nineteenth century seem now irrelevant. Another writer who has been nourished by the "bread of exile" is Jean-Claude Charles. Charles's work can be construed as a relentless rejection of reductionist notions of the self. The witty and often tragic eccentricities of his work Le corps noir (The black body), 1980, survey the defining discourse of those, both black and white, who seek to define the black body in order to control it. "White masters tell me: We have total power over your body; we are its creator, we write it, describe it, display it, turn it around; we provide its discourse; we give it its soul. Black masters tell me: We share the same body; we are the same in being different; we share the same soul; we are the same in our identity . . . They all define my black body, in terms of the faults and the virtues of my black soul, impoverished or enriched according to my heredity, since the curse of Noah' s black son: Ham."12 The subject's entrapment in Otherness is a constant theme in Charles's work. In one

8 Contrairement à beaucoup d'autres, je considère l'exil comme une chance: la situation d'exil peut parfaitement être une situation productrice . . . je souhaite qu'il se maintienne. Et j'espère bien rester exilé jusqu'au bout (Charles [1986], 196). 9 je reviendrai / la parole non plus en syllabes boiteuses / mais fluide et magique . . . Mais ces mots sans écho / me reviennent toujours en boomerang / chargés pourtant parfois de muette réponse (Phelps [1980], 80-81). 10 je ne me ressens point fils de l'Afrique / encore moins de l'Europe cartésienne / Et je n'ai point mémoire de fond de cale (Phelps [1980], 25). 11 Terre prétexte où se pétrit sans cesse le pain rebelle de l'exil / et se façonne une écriture en dards d'abeille (Phelps [1980], 93). 12 Les maîtres blancs me disent: Nous avons plein pouvoir sur ton corps; nous sommes son auteur, nous l'écrivons, le décrivons, le déployons, le retournons; nous sommes les pourvoyeurs de sa narration; nous lui donnons son âme. Les maîtres noirs me disent: nous partageons le même corps; nous sommes le même dans notre différence; nous partageons la même

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text after another he devises strategies to escape being fixed in this way. What might be termed an aesthetic of elusiveness in Charles's writing is evident in his use of multiple narrative voices, abrupt changes in register, fragmented forms, and a range of literary and non-literary genres. Exile, therefore, becomes a state that facilitates anonymity and literary elusiveness. He refers constantly to the welcome, liberating darkness of exile. In many ways, Charles is more pathological and less ecstatic than either Depestre or Phelps " . . . a wandering black, I advance as it were always in the dark but from this dark rushes the wildest hope for me . . . if I must belong to some race I am of the race of wordless travellers . . ."13 If Le corps noir is about the fixing gaze of the Other, whether black or white, Charles's other works are about the consoling dark. Sainte dérive des cochons (Holy drift of pigs), 1977, de si jolies petites plages (such pretty little beaches), 1982, and Manhattan Blues, 1985, are testimonies to the experience of exile, both personally and in terms of the Haitian diaspora. The world is conceived as a sinister global village that has no room for a poet who is also black and Haitian. This rejection is extended to the political plane. The Haitian boat people in Florida are treated in de si jolies petites plages as a gruesome extension of racial stereotyping into official American policy. These observations provoke from Charles some of his most ironic and lucid comments. "Exile, permanent mobility, ceaseless migration - including writing, language - beyond their being painfully inflicted from the outside, are an advantage to me. In any case, the prison of the world, because of its essential inhumanity, makes us pay for the crime of being born. In the space opened by wandering, the pain is less harsh, perhaps."14 There is, consequently, no essential self worth discovering for Charles, no authentic "home" to return to. The only hope is constant mobility, a repeated invention of self, of narrative form in order to escape the deforming contours of the black body, as it is fashioned by the Other's gaze. In tracing the evolution of the notion of exile and the attendant associations of home, self, and identity, we are witnessing the slow transformation of the francophone Caribbean consciousness of self. The initial invention of an essential self, of a black soul fundamental to early neoromantic discourse was an inevitable response to the defining power of the Other's look in postcolonial society. The advent of the "modern" has meant an undermining of the authority of that look. It has allowed the subject in the francophone Caribbean to encounter itself in a freer way. Errance has opened a space, in the words of Jean-Claude Charles, that allows for a more sophisticated and daring understanding of self and community in the region, and is the most recent francophone Caribbean challenge to what Edward Said calls "fixed ideas of settled identity" and "identitarian thought" (Said [1989], 225).

[continuation] âme; nous sommes le même dans notre identité . . . Tous définissent mon corps noir, à la mesure des défauts ou des vertus de mon âme noire, appauvrie ou enrichie au fil de l'hérédité, depuis la malédiction du fils nègre de Noé: Cham (Charles [1980], 32-33). 13 nègre errant j'avance autrement dit toujours dans le noir mais de ce noir qui jaillit pour moi la plus folle espérance . . . s'il faut appartenir à quelque race je suis de la race des voyageurs sans mots (Charles [1980], 181). 14 L'exil, la permanente mobilité, l'incessante migration - y compris de langue, d'écriture - au-delà de leur détermination extérieure, douloureuse, me sont un bienfait. De toute façon, la prison du monde, par son essentielle inhumanité, nous fait payer la faute d'être nés. En l'espace ouvert par l'errance, la peine est simplement plus douce, peut-être (Charles [1982], 192-93).

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Bibliography Charles, Jean-Claude. 1980. Le corps noir. Paris: Hachette. (An illustrated survey of racial stereotypes.) —. 1982. de si jolies petites plages. Paris: Stock. (A personal account of the fate of Haiti's boat people in Florida.) —. 1986. Ecrire pour exister [Interview with Jean Jonassaint]. In Le pouvoir des mots, les maux du pouvoir. 161-80. Montréal: Arcantère; Presses Universitaires de Montréal. (Views on writing in exile.) Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. (A critical history of anthropology arguing for a cross-cultural perspective.) Depestre, René. 1976. La révolution de 1946 est pour demain . . . In Trente ans de pouvoir noir en Haiti. 21-61. Québec: Collectif Paroles. (Important interview on ideology of 1946 insurrection.) —. 1980. Bonjour et adieu à la négritude. Paris: Laffont. (Critical views of the negritude movement.) —. 1985. La littérature et l'exil. Magazine Littéraire. 221:51-52. (A candid reflection on the experience of exile.) Ferdinand, Joseph. 1984. The New Political Statement in Haitian Fiction. In Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ed. by William Luis. Westport, CT: Greenwood. (A general essay on politics in recent Haitian fiction.) Glissant, Edouard. 1981. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. (A profound analysis of the notion of errance and a cross-cultural aesthetic, among other things.) González Echevarría, Roberto. 1985. The Voice of the Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press. (A thoughtful, deconstructive look at major themes in Latin-American writing.) Gouraige, Ghislain. 1974. La diaspora d'Haïti et l'Afrique. Sherbrooke, Québec: Naaman. (Contains useful essays on recent Haitian writers.) Lahens, Yanick. 1989. L'exil - entre écrire et habiter. In Chemins Critiques. 1.3:168-83. (A perceptive essay on the issues facing writers in Haiti and in the diaspora.) Phelps, Anthony. 1963. [Interview]. Rond Point. 12. (First admissions of Haiti Littéraire's, rejection of negritude.) —. 1980. La bélière caraïbe. Montréal: Nouvelle Optique. (A major work on the meaning of exile and the significance of the Caribbean.) Philoctète, René. 1963. [Interview]. Rond Point. 12. (A statement of position by another member of Haïti Littéraire.) Said, Edward. 1989. Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors. In Critical Inquiry. 15.2:205-25. (Critical treatment of the notion of cultural difference in anthropology and the recognition of Césaire's challenge to the discourse of otherness.) Steiner, George. 1971. Extraterritorial. New York: Atheneum. (Contains valuable observations on the unhoused nature of modern literary culture.)

Literary Genres

Poetry

Poetry Before Negritude

JACK CORZANI

Université de Bordeaux-Ill

For a long time we have underestimated the value of the literature, and in particular the poetry, of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana that preceded the great black cry of negritude. The conclusion that it was mediocre and even insignificant was hastily reached because the earlier poetry was considered not regionalist enough (Viatte [1954], 483) or because it did not adequately speak of black people (Kesteloot [1963], 37), as if the value of a poem were exclusively determined by its theme. This was clearly an error of judgment created by the European point of view of most of the critics for whom a literature ought to be original in order to exist. (But what is more "exotic" than negritude?) The same Europeans required at least a few colonial authors to satisfy their own elitist concerns (in this case, Aimé Césaire and, to a lesser extent, Léon-Gontran Damas). The time of such complacent disregard has passed and it is fitting to look more closely at poetic activity that, with some difficulty, was carried on by creole writers. It is time we studied them without an a priori application of a prejudiced European perspective but by adopting a more indigenous viewpoint. The small village church has greater meaning for its community than the cathedral in the far-off town. It speaks to people of their world, their daily life, their dead, their marriages, their births. The same is true for many literary works that appear to be unimportant to the outsider and yet are important for those who have nothing else. It is true that, measured in absolute terms and relative to world literature, the works of the francophone islands seem for the most part (with the exception of Saint-John Perse and Césaire) quite frail. But this very frailty is telling: it sheds light on the history of emergent communities, not yet stable and lacking cohesion. Colonization was begun in 1635. However, the struggle with nature and disease, on the one hand, and fighting with the indigenous Caribs and European rivals delayed the emergence of a viable colonial system until the eighteenth century. The introduction of sugarcane cultivation based on slavery provided the necessary conditions and launched a period of impressive growth. For a long while the plantation economy excluded all people of color from the literate culture. Their oraliture was revealed belatedly by French translations of Lafcadio Hearn's Contes des tropiques (Tales of the tropics), 1926, and Trois fois bel conte (ch. 7-14 of Martinique Sketches; part of his Two Years in the French West Indies), 1939. François Marbot's Les bambous (The bamboos), 1846, cannot be regarded as popular writing since it contains but the fantasies of a white Creole pretending to use the local patois. Another consequence was to a large extent the insulation of the white minority in power. Without going so far as to say, like the Guadeloupean historian Oruno Lara, that all whites were crass and ignorant (the research of other historians such as Léo Elisabeth has shown that some were very

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cultivated and managed to surround themselves with well-stocked libraries), one can accept the conclusion of those who, like Parny, argued in the eighteenth century that many whites, victims of the lack of social models, behaved very much like their slaves. Colonial dependence added its own perniciousness to the harmful effects of slavery. Various ministerial circulars prove that the constant concern of the central government was to avoid the formation in the French islands of a creole intellectual elite. Such an elite might, on one hand, lose interest in its primary mission, which was to produce goods indispensable to the metropole and, on the other, succumb to the temptation of a desire for autonomy. Therefore it was a deliberate policy to limit cultural development (education restricted to the primary level, refusal to create high schools, indifference to the establishment of basic cultural institutions: libraries, printshops, etc.). Other factors that account for the difficulties attending the emergence of local literatures were: the limited size of the islands and of the potential readership; the tropical climate; the aristocratic pretensions of white colonists who were more preoccupied with ostentatious display than with intellectual pursuits; and the literate community's sense of inferiority in the face of the metropolitan model. In any case, despite the gradual appearance of an intermediary group that by the beginning of the nineteenth century would imperceptibly gain social importance and become educated - the mulattos, whose best representative is the chabin (blond, fair-skinned) Privat d'Anglemont - it was only the whites who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could produce writers. The first nonwhite poet, aside from Privat who will be dealt with later, was Eugène Agricole in the second half of the nineteenth century. And it is common knowledge that one would have to wait a few decades to see the appearance of mulattos and blacks in the local literature. In the light of such an observation, one could reasonably be tempted to organize the study of the literature of Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Martinique in terms of the racial origins of the writers. These origins determine more or less their ideological orientation, their "writing" in the sense given by Roland Barthes to this word {écriture). This would inevitably create misleading simplifications and risk our not realizing that ideology could be shared by people of different color (especially in a regionalist context) or divide people of the same race (especially on the issues of slavery or the colonial situation). It would also mean neglecting an essential aspect that can help to explain the progression from literary activity to a "literature," to determine how indigenous the works are, their formal and thematic Caribbeanness, the extent of their role in the life of a creole community. Indeed a rapid survey of the works preceding negritude reveals in the poets (and in the novelists as well) three attitudes that, more or less determined by historic evolution, followed each other chronologically, even if in a given period different individual choices could coexist: indifference, militant commitment, and conformity. Indifference to local conditions characterizes almost all the poetry produced by white Creoles during the entire eighteenth century. This poetry is mostly linked to emigration. It is known that for most of the grands blancs (the great white families), as they were known at the time, their island hardly meant anything. They were absentee owners who preferred to live in France and particularly at the court in Versailles. They would only return to the islands when, having nearly exhausted their resources or having been ruined by some special circumstances (the bankruptcy of John Law, for instance), they had to get back on their feet again by forcing their slaves to work harder. For them,

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the Caribbean island was nothing but the site of their plantation, source of wealth that they self-indulgently squandered in the capital. This is why those who had literary proclivities remained in the metropole and published works that were generally unrelated to their island origins. One must resort to the indiscretions of biographers to be persuaded that Pierre de Bologne, for instance, was Martinican. Neither his Poésies diverses (Divers poems), 1746, with their neoclassical style, nor his Voltairean witticisms collected in Les amusements d'un septuagénaire (A septuagenarian's entertainments), 1786, hint at this. The same is true for the dramatist Etienne-Joseph Delrieu, of Guadeloupean origin, who perpetrated some rather mediocre verses during the revolution and a few plays in verse like his Artaxercès (Ataxerxes), 1808. The list can be extended to include Vincent Campenon (from Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe, author of preromantic fantasies and especially of a parable in verse form, L'enfant prodigue (The prodigal son), which earned him a place in the French Academy; Auguste d'Orgemont's Le mal et le bien (The evil and the good), 1803, or Ernest de Poyen's Hirondelles (Swallows), 1850, could also be added to the list. And if one were tempted, on the basis of the title of "poetic Creole" that Raphaël Barquisseau conferred upon him, to make an exception for Nicolas-Germain Léonard, an analysis of his work would quickly change one's mind. Even if he did produce in his Lettre sur un voyage aux Antilles (Letter on a voyage to the Antilles), 1787, a kind of description in prose of Guadeloupe (the result of occasional visits), nothing in his poetry and especially in his Idylles morales (Moral idylls), 1766, refers to the Antilles. This attitude is widespread in the eighteenth century and continues even into the nineteenth. It affects not only the white Creoles but also the few free mulattos who, enjoying a position of social privilege, have money and the benefits of a sometimes quite solid education in the metropole. The work of Privat d'Anglemont, a chabin from Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe, reveals the same amnesia with regard to the Antilles. Privat was well known for his unconventional ways in Parisian circles; he was the friend of famous writers. He seems to have been the author of certain sonnets attributed to Baudelaire and perhaps of a few works signed by Eugène Sue, for whom he may have worked as a nègre or ghost writer. In short, he was passionately involved with Paris and he was completely scornful of his island. Demonstrating the same indifference as the white Creoles, he returned home only once in order to claim his part of the inheritance at the death of his father and stayed only a few hours. Consequently the lack of concern for the Antilles in his work is hardly surprising. His Paris anecdote, 1860, and Paris inconnu (Unknown Paris), 1875, are of as great interest to historians as to historians of French literature. They do not contain the slightest reference to Guadeloupe. Complete amnesia or slight references are attitudes perpetuated by the environment of the émigré well after some writers through force of circumstance asserted their creole origins and got involved during the first half of the nineteenth century in debates over the question of colonial society. Les vaines tristesses (Empty sadness), 1901, or Les prières (Prayers), 1938, by Maurice Boyer give no hint of his Antillean (more precisely Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe) origins, as is also the case of Préludes, 1918, by Danyl-Helm, in which only a reference to Saint-Pierre in Martinique might alert one's interest. As for Hélène Lemery's sensual and mystical works La voie passionnée (The impassioned path), 1925, and La fenêtre d'Ostie (The Ostia window), 1928, which readily bring to mind the kind of effete aloofness produced by the myth of the happy islands, they are similarly situated in France. The relationship of these authors and their works to the history, or at least the prehistory, of francophone Caribbean poetry is open to question. Without attributing to them an underserved importance, demonstrating their general tendency may not be entirely beside the point,

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as it helps to define the originality of the poets whose militancy will signal the beginning of a truly indigenous literature. This sense of indigenous identity, evident in poetry but also and especially in the novel and the essay, is created by the problems that affect colonial society. Gradually in the course of the eighteenth century slavery gave rise to increasing criticism: humanitarian, political or economic in nature. The French revolution even led to short-lived emancipatory measures in 1794 in Guadeloupe, followed by a period of freedom and then a reimposition of slavery by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, and finally a bloody repression. The philanthropic propaganda from the metropole, reinforced by the arguments of economists and by pressure from sugar planters, was echoed in Martinique and Guadeloupe by the impatience of the slaves and sometimes by their acts of rebellion and defiance. The planters' fear of being abandoned by the French government, of being left at the mercy of their slaves, of "African barbarity," provided inspiration to a number of writers who described their fear of a repetition of the Haitian revolution that would deprive them of their ancestral privileges. Novels and poems were used to discuss these burning issues, with a view to reassuring the local planter community, of convincing them of the rightness of their cause, and especially of calling on the metropole (on public opinion as well as the government) not to expose the islands to carnage because of decisions taken lightly. Such novels as Prévost de Traversay's Les amours de Zémédare et Carina (The loves of Zemedare and Carina), 1806, or Louis Maynard de Queilhe's Outre-mer (Ultramarine), 1835, are clear examples of this tendency. While they contain the first references to Caribbean landscape, local customs, sometimes even to the Creole language, they also reveal the real motives behind this regionalism and this love for the native land: the need to preserve it and to keep control over it. In poetry it is a grand blanc from Guadeloupe, one of the few to escape the slaughter of the revolution and the guillotine of Victor Hugues (the official who imposed emancipation on Guadeloupe during the repercussions of the revolution of 1789), who raised his strident voice. Poirié Saint-Aurèle presumed to write a poem praising the system of slavery, "La parole de Jéhovah" (The word of Jehovah), that he had published in the local press in 1836 - two years after emancipation in the neighboring English islands - and in which he invoked biblical authority and the curse of Ham to claim that blacks would be slaves forever: "This word of Jehovah, protecting our families / stands guard over the archipelago of our beautiful Caribbean."1 His disarmingly honest collections of poetry, Les veillées françaises (French evenings), 1826, Cyprès et palmistes (Cypresses and palms), 1833, and Les veillées du Tropique (Tropical evenings), 1850, are of the same ideological bent: they defend the creole patriarchy, they offer frightening and pejorative images of blacks; they extol the civilizing mission of the white man, a potential martyr to his divine mission; they prophesy doom, etc. What is most interesting is the contempt shown by Poirié for contemporary France - regicidal, atheistic, bourgeois, and ungodly - the France of philanthropists, the Sodom-and-Gomorrah France of abolitionists. His fiercely reactionary mentality makes him turn to his native Guadeloupe as a (temporary?) refuge for eternal values. Hence his staunch regionalism, his descriptions of landscape, customs, historical references (in "Mussambé"), the eye-witness accounts that made him the first French Antillean poet to celebrate his small motherland and even, ultimately, prefer it to the larger one. 1

Ce mot de Jéhovah, protégeant nos familles / Veille sur l'archipel de nos belles Antilles (Vauchelet [1894], 118).

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Saint-Aurèle could possibly have turned to romantic, local-color regionalism. His reactionary tendencies are not unrelated to the romanticism that was close to king and church at the beginning of the century. But it is essentially the urgency of the situation in which he found himself, the determination to take a stand in the internal affairs of his country, the almost divine mission that he felt was his, which account for his creolized perspective. His love for his homeland developed only because he felt it threatened; this is, moreover, characteristic of all forms of romantic love. The results are patent: for the first time poems celebrate Guadeloupean landscape, describe plantations, sugar factories, the grinding process, daily activities without the remoteness and the reification of exoticism, without the affectations that were later to characterize so-called "regionalist" authors. It is not a saccharine, local-color doudouiste poetry, if only because the moral ethics of Saint-Aurèle - not to mention his puritanical nature - prevented him from praising to excess the allure of black and mulatto women, but especially because people of color are never relegated to the level of unimportant island fauna. The white master sees blacks as lower creatures whose inferiority is ordained by divine will, but whom it is his duty to protect even though when they are carried away by their innate "barbarity" they become enemies to be combatted, even slaughtered. He never glosses them over or blends them into the background like the native tourist poets who, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, celebrated the charm of the Antilles, the range of creole pastimes. He does not hesitate to refer to their acts of rebellion (which justify his warnings to the state), their heroes the maroons, their culture, their oral tradition (which, be it noted in passing, he enjoyed as a child), and so on. The blacks automatically become enemies when they do not submit to the white man's laws but they always deserve to be taken seriously. In any case, he clings to the Guadeloupe he knows, the home of his ancestors: "For just one of these peaks rising majestically over my island / My heart would give both the city of Paris / And the king's twelve castles."2 Since the same circumstances produce similar results, other poets display this tough-minded regionalism without defending to the same extent a proslavery ideology. Octave Giraud, for instance, in his Fleurs des Antilles (Flowers of the Antilles), 1862, writing after the abolition and admittedly helped by the convulsions of history, defends what he sees as the equality of races and, far from referring to some atavistic savagery, voices his confidence in the virtues of the black race. Influenced by the social liberalism of the romantic movement and a great admirer of Victor Hugo, he focuses on his Guadeloupean homeland with a kind of generosity tinged sometimes by the land but also and above all by his sympathy for the black population, its psychology and its culture, which he tries to understand from the inside. His condemnation of the racism of the planter class and his entire poetic work are directly linked to the reality of the Antilles. The beauty of beaches, forest, unbounded streams does not gloss over the horrors of an often inhuman history, as was to be the case with his followers. It simply anticipates the only possible beauty, that of the happiness gained from an acceptance of the multiracial character of creole society, from a feeling of brotherhood. And the poet dreams of the future ". . . When the voice of the slave will have ceased to complain / With all firmly on the path toward human progress."3 Some years later, the same pressures of Caribbean history were to influence Alexis Saint-Leger Leger - whose nom de plume was Saint-John Perse - a native of Pointe-à-Pitre, who was forced to 2 Pour un seul de ces pics qui couronnent mon île / Mon coeur donnerait et Paris la grand'ville / Et les douze châteaux du roi (Saint-Aurèle [1850], 273.) 3 Où la voix de l'esclave aur[a] cessé sa plainte / Vers le progrès humain tous marchant à grand pas (Giraud [1862], 135).

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return to the metropole by changes in the local economy that ruined his family's fortune (as it did that of most of the other white Creoles). While noting that his original ideological orientation naturally shaped by his birth in and his belonging to a particular social caste - would change in time, it is well to remember that the poet's first collection, Eloges (Praises), 1911, which proclaimed his poetic vocation, is essentially a song of praise to Guadeloupe mixed with a farewell that looked very much like resentment, the resentment of the master deprived of ancestral privileges. As for Anabase (Anabasis), 1924, it is difficult, even if the general inspiration is not Caribbean, not to see it as a homage to discoverers and creators of empire and primarily, to the poet's ancestors, to the conquistadors who "made" the Caribbean and the Americas. It is this deep sense of inevitability, this urgency dictated by events - perceived as painful by the poet, even if they were to benefit creole society as a whole - that would give his work both its power and persuasiveness. Eloges is not a series of Antillean vignettes like those of Chambertrand, Thomarel or Auguste Joyau. It is a cry of love sharpened by a sense of loss, as was the case with Poirié, and his fears are an unrepentant homage to the lost paradise of a creole aristocracy; it is associated with the contempt toward Europe that was already apparent in Saint-Aurèle: "O Despoiled! / You wept to remember the surf in the moonlight; the whistlings of the more distant shores; the strange music that is born and is muffled under the folded wing of the night . . . // And you dream of the pure clouds over your island, when green dawn grows clear on the breast of the mysterious waters."4 The term "committed" can appear to have pejorative connotations. It may nevertheless be apt for these poems, which are primarily a poet's response to the guilt implicit in his forced exile. Simply images provoked by the nostalgia of childhood? Eloges can be viewed as a concatenation of images; but it would be difficult, short of total blindness, not to see in it an explicit defence of and a feeling of regret for the traditions of a creole world inherited from slavery, the same world whose disappearance was previously lamented by Rosemond de Beauvallon in Hier! Aujourd'hui! Demain! ou les agonies créoles (Yesterday! Today! Tomorrow!; or, Creole agonies), 1885. "Ecrit sur la porte" (Written on the door) is not his only singleminded homage to the white planters: "My pride is that my daughter should be very-beautiful when she gives orders to the black women, / my joy, that she should have a very-white arm among her black hens."5 His Images à Crusoë (Pictures for Crusoe), likewise published in Eloges, summons up the virtues of patriarchal slavery as well, especially in its evocation of Friday : "Laughter in the sun, / ivory! timid kneelings, and your hands on the things of the earth . . . / Friday! how green was the leaf, and your shadow how new . . ."6 These poems are Antillean precisely because of the hidden strands that tie them to the real, vibrant world of the Antilles and its human drama. They are not Antillean because of a few images of palm trees in the poems (has the absence of stupidly exotic coconut palms in Saint-John Perse been noted?) or a few hummingbirds and bougainvilleas. And this is so because the Antilles will remain the poet's secret resource, certainly the place of his birth but especially of his poetic birth; and they will be subtly present in his work after the exorcism of Eloges, if only because of the everpresent sea and the dynamic thrust of his poetry, because of the feeling that it is worthwhile, not to 4 O Dépouillé! / Tu pleurais de songer aux brisants sous la lune; / aux sifflements de rives plus lointaines; aux musiques / étranges qui naissent et s'assourdissent sous l'aile close / de la nuit. . . // Et tu songes aux nuées pures sur ton île, quand / l'aube verte s'élucide au sein des eaux mystérieuses (Saint-John Perse [1972], 63, 64). 5 Mon orgueil est que ma fille soit très-belle quand elle commande aux femmes noires, / ma joie, qu'elle découvre un bras très-blanc parmi ses poules noires (Saint-John Perse [1972], 7). 6 Rires dans du soleil / Ivoire! agenouillements timides, les mains aux choses de la terre . . . / Vendredi! que la feuille était verte, et ton ombre nouvelle . . . (Saint-John Perse [1972], 15).

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dream of a past that is gone forever, but to construct and to live according to the very laws of creation. As late as 1942 he wrote in Exil (Exile): "Those who were at the crossroads of the great / Atlantic Indies, those who catch the scent of a new vision in / the soothing draught from the depths, those who sound / the horn at the threshold of the future / know that on the sands of exile hiss the heights of passion / lurking under the whiplike flash of lightning."7 In any case, we should keep in mind that the Caribbean in Eloges is in no way exotic in the usual meaning of the word. Saint-John Perse rejects idealization and chooses instead a realism that combines the most repulsive sensations with an objective beauty. The echoes of lived experience in its banality authenticate it: "the evening smoke and the three black stones under the smell of pepper."8 His poetry does not appeal to the outsider's gaze and makes no concessions to the clichés of the myth of the Tropics. More than merely "regionalist," it is profoundly rooted in local reality. Saint-John Perse was aware of the passing of the world of his fathers. He refused to cling to it in defiance of the course of history and, preferring to transcend it by keeping in step with the world's progress, Saint-John Perse pretended to forget the Antilles. Other white Creoles, like Fernand Thaly whose posthumously published works - Le poème des îles (Poem of the islands), 1964, and La leçon des îles (Lesson of the islands), 1976 - were written between 1910 and 1945, did not take this broad view. They persisted in fighting for values they refused to see as outdated, thus hoping to slow down the changes taking place around them. Their writing celebrates the pioneering spirit: "I celebrate the planters and their experience / in the space widened and shaped by their advance";9 it praises colonial conquests (supposedly) for the greater good of the colored population; its vision is shaped by a longing for the creole world that once existed and the paternalistic relations between whites and blacks (such as Lafcadio Hearn had described in Youma, 1891); they gracelessly condemn blackness in the name of a French and Latin heritage. Their work is committed to reacting fiercely, even crudely, to the changes experienced by the French West Indies between the two world wars. One may not agree with the ideology that motivates it, but one must admit that there is a sense of belonging produced by their reactionary militancy. At the time when he was writing, however, Fernand Thaly seemed something of a latter-day Don Quixote in island societies where, gradually, after the disturbances that followed the abolition of slavery and the rear-guard resistance of a few white Creoles, a stage had been reached where problems were hidden rather than exhibited for all to see. Literary regionalism at the end of the nineteenth century - inspired by the regionalism of the metropolitan félibrige movement, which had proclaimed the separate cultural identity of Provence and Occitania - appears to be the expression of a social and political conformity, of prudence bordering on blindness, if not on mystification. The fact is that a multiracial society had been born. But this tendency was far from being homogeneous and free of tensions. Racial and social tensions tend to overlap. The literary world pretends that all problems are resolved and insists on presenting an idyllic image of "tiny overseas replicas of France." White, mulatto, and black poets, united by their shared bourgeois status (it is not the cane cutters who pen sonnets) gradually come together in this celebration, in this construction of a myth using a clichéd language and imagery. 7 Ceux-là qui furent se croiser aux grandes / Indes atlantiques, ceux-là qui flairent l'idée neuve aux fraîcheurs de l'abîme, ceux-là qui soufflent dans les cornes aux portes du futur / Savent qu'aux sables de l'exil sifflent les hautes passions lovées sous le fouet de l'éclair (Saint-John Perse [1972], 137). 8 la fumée du soir et les trois pierres noires sous l'odeur du piment (Saint-John Perse [1972], 14). 9 Je chante les colons et leur expérience / dans l'espace élargi par les proues écarté (F. Thaly [1964], 6).

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Initially, the white Creoles are the ones to continue writing and, in comparison with SaintAurèle's, their feelings are more veiled and less provocative. In literature as in politics, there is a need to show consideration for the sensitivities of the colored population. This explains the ambiguous works of one E. Lemerle - Loisirs d'un aveugle (Pastimes of a blindman), 1865 - or the harmless romantic verse of Xavier Eyma (whose novels, however, do reveal a sense of unease) during the second empire and, later, the works of the great exponents of regionalism, in particular Daniel Thaly, Marcel Achard, Gilbert de Chambertrand, Marraud de Sigalony, Antoine de Gentile, and Auguste Joyau. As for the mulattos, they had just managed to obtain their rights as citizens and their intellectuals were more concerned with politics than poetry. Their major poet, Eugène Agricole, had a political career and his poetry, amateurish versions of Victor Hugo, was hardly affected by his preoccupations as mayor and member of the Conseil Général (general council). Others would follow him, in particular Victor Duquesnay, Virgile Savane (Salavina), Irmine Romanette, and André Thomarel. This regionalist movement, bringing together whites and mulattos, with both groups pretending to keep their origins hidden, flowered around 1900. In that year René Bonneville (a white liberal sympathetic to the mulattos) compiles his anthology Fleurs des Antilles (Antillean flowers), to commemorate the Universal Exposition. It contains poems by Manuel Rosal, Eleuthère Saint-Prix Roné, Armand Sédécias, and Bonneville himself. All the selections, because of themes drawn from universal humanism and a neutral lyricism, set out to demonstrate the "Frenchness" of Martinique and to this extent are quite transparent. Many of the poets mentioned were to perish in the catastrophe of St. Pierre in 1902, but others who survived would produce work of greater importance: in particular Daniel Thaly (the most gifted among them), Salavina, the author of Tropicales, 1921, and Victor Duquesnay, the author of Martiniquaises (Martinican women), 1903, and La chanson des "isles" (Song of the "islands"), 1926. In Guadeloupe, another staunch regionalist - whose works do not, unfortunately, hold up to his principles and declarations - Oruno Lara, published in his journal, La Guadeloupe Littéraire, poets who were all equally concerned with celebrating their country as a region of France: Emmanuel Souriant, Augereau Lara, René Duverger, Emile Arsonneau, Agathe Réache, Emile Vauchelet, Louis Tigrane, Gilbert de Chambertrand, and especially Dominique Guesde, the author of a few chapbooks: Le Tray (The tea tray), 1897, Sonnets, 1898, and Guadeloupe, 1906, which are interesting for their local color. Among these writers there were simple "men of letters," as they were all too willing to call themselves, just good enough to throw together a few bad sonnets. There were also talented and sensitive poets. However, even the latter seem to lack personality and give the impression of never having done their best or of having nothing to say. Their work seems gratuitous, unnecessary. This is the case because these writers, all of bourgeois origin, more or less wished to deny the reality of colonialism or at least to hide it. The whites were sensitive to their racial origins and especially to their ideological orientation, and the blacks were anxious to be accepted and, therefore, to be discreet, anxious not to emphasize color and its inevitable complications. The talent they were blessed with could only sink into the mediocrity of a conscious or, even worse, unconscious selfcensorship. Before the psychological freedom offered by negritude all Antillean regionalist literature of the first half of the twentieth century is undistinguished, bland, and monotonous, reflecting a widespread conformity. The most flagrant example is certainly that of Oruno Lara, who on one hand was proud of his color, labored as a historian to rehabilitate the black race, and paid homage to his slave ancestors

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and their acts of revolt and defiance. Yet, on the other hand, he produced verse marked by an insipid exoticism. Oruno Lara seems to have pushed problems into the past, assuming perhaps that the achievement of a homogeneous, racially mixed society was insufficiently real or established to impinge on his poetic imagination. Nonetheless, his short polemical novel Question de coleurs (A question of colors), 1923, did address the question of a multiracial nation. Social origins were a crucial factor in his ideological perspective. The mulatto middle class knew deep down that to raise the question of color meant at that time to focus on the economic and social situation which the grands blancs were the first to take advantage of but from which the middle class derived its own privileged status. The result was a mythical image of the overseas paradise, which lacked variety of individual style. One has the impression of reading the same author and the same work in these collections of poetry published between 1900 and the eve of the second world war: Daniel Thaly's Lucioles et cantharides (Fireflies and soldier beetles), 1900, La clarté du sud (Brightness of the South), 1905, Le jardin des Tropiques (The garden of the Tropics), 1911, Chansons de mer et d'outre-mer (Sea songs and overseas songs), 1911, Nostalgies françaises (French nostalgias), 1913, L'île et le voyage (The island and the voyage), 1923, Chants de l'Atlantique et sous le ciel des Antilles (Songs of the Atlantic and beneath Antillean skies), 1928, Héliotrope ou les amants inconnus (Heliotrope or the unknown lovers), 1932; Marcel Achard's La muse pérégrine (The peregrine muse), 1924, La cendre empourprée (Purple ash), 1927; Emmanuel Flavia-Léopold's La clarté des jours (The brightness of days), 1924, Le ciel dans mon âme (Heaven in my soul), 1927, Adieu foulards, adieu madras (Good-bye head ties, good-bye scarves), 1948; Gilbert de Chambertrand's Images guadeloupéennes (Guadeloupean images), 1939; André Thomarel's Parfums et saveurs des Antilles (Scents and flavors of the Antilles), 1935; Joseph Marraud de Sigalony's Rêve et idéal (Dream and ideal), 1918, Madinina, 1919, Les Antillaises (Women of the Antilles), 1937; Antoine de Gentile's Silhouettes et fantômes (Silhouettes and phantoms); not to mention those by Duquesnay and Salavina. All have the same decor: the wonderful landscape of a tropical Eden. They outdo one another in finding the image best able to convey the sublime extasy that is supposed to be produced by beaches, forests, serene heavens (no one refers to the destructive hurricanes): "Western isles under cloudless skies / Open their harbors to the limp sails of ships";10 "My island, cluster of green on the velvety sea / How I love your soothing sea breezes";11 "In the warm light of the faraway islands / Divine oasis, emeralds of the seas."12 In these bejewelled islands there is, of course, no question of following the path of ill-matched lovers, either too aggressively colored or too rural. The lovers depicted, like Thaly's in Héliotrope .. ., are preferably white, at worst colorless, with no indication of racial origin, the words creole or brown being used with subtle ambiguity. The example of the protagonists in Thomarel's rhythmic prose idyll Sous le ciel des Antilles is even more revealing since the author himself was far from being white. People of color and blacks especially are condemned to oblivion or to being an insignificant part of the decor. At best they provide the little extra touch of exoticism like the palm and coconut trees. However, here and there a few references (very rare in poetry, more frequent in

10 En l'azur violent dont ruissellent leurs plages / -Etoiles de la mer dans le saphir des eaux- / Les îles du couchant sous des ciels sans nuages / Ouvrent leur rade aux voiles souples des vaisseaux (D. Thaly [1911], 13). 11 Mon île, vert bouquet sur le velours des mers, / Que j'aime la douceur de tes brises marines (Achard [1924], 41). 12 Dans la chaude clarté des Antilles lointaines / Divines oasis, émeraudes des mers (Sigalony [1937], 8).

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prose) can be found to plantation workers: "black workers in the throbbing factory / You dig the earth with a strong and able hand / I could listen to your joyful song until dawn / Your steel machetes cutting the golden cane."13 One does not have to be a great thinker to see how the lyric transforms sweat and misery into gold, thus glossing over the crucial issue of colonialism. From Thaly to Duquesnay it is always the same magic wand waved in the name of bourgeois self-satisfaction dressed up as poetry. This poetry, in the finest tradition of the neoclassical aesthetic, is capable of treating only elevated subjects. One may object that the doudous (sweethearts), presumably the best qualified representatives of the colored population, are present even if the laboring masses are not. Their presence is discreet in Thaly, who clearly prefers the pale European look to theirs: "I compare you to the beautiful white fir that stands / Under the winter moon, on northern plains / A h ! for this white fir so pure and slender / There is on a hill in the Caribbean in the golden evening / A palm tree shudders with unceasing passion."14 They are more attractive to someone like Duquesnay who appreciates the diversity in shade and bearing of mulattos, Indians or Chinese, câpresses (daughters of a black man and a mulatto woman or of a mulatto man and a black woman), quadroons or chabines, like Achard whose colonial career taught him to appreciate the charm of stopovers in the tropics, like Thomarel: "Beautiful sea maidens whether you are white or pink like a shell, or the light amber of fresh nutmeg, whether your complexion brings to mind the sapodilla or the warm suggestion of a ripe orange, whether you are daughters of the Cape, shining black like starapples, you all have the same eyes."15 In all this writing, whether tastefully done or not, a dehumanizing process is at work. The doudous, reduced to their physical allure, to their birdlike twittering or to their erotic potential, are subtly animalized: "Your hands are soothing like tropical breezes / So rich in the perfumes of a majestic rapture / Your hands with nails pink like pure coral."16 In this way the entire community of color is dehumanized. This literature never really deals with the culture, the internal or intellectual life of black people. The folklore that is sometimes included to gratify the need of the foreign reader for the picturesque, the exotic, is a folklore without soul, without authenticity. When Thaly uses Antillean tales, it is to demonstrate their relationship with European tales: "In the islands we know Bluebeard and Fairy tales / And I love on the slopes of old mount Pitaut / Cinderella, told by a cane cutter."17 When Gilbert de Chambertrand mentions Creole, he reduces it to patois, to French deformed by overgrown children and neglects its African origin. Fed by stereotypes and omissions that ensure a trite and meaningless imagery, regionalist literature is nothing but a series of postcards (sonnets in which clichés could be freely used were favored), which showed the most pleasing features of the islands. An impression of monotonous repetition is left by these collections, even those whose technical success is undeniable such as Auguste Joyau's Les conques de cristal (Crystal

13 noirs travailleurs de l'usine sonore / Vous qui fouillez le sol d'un bras habile et fort / J'entendrais votre chant joyeux jusqu'à l'aurore / Vos coutelas d'acier coupant les cannes d'or (D. Thaly [1911], 109). 14 Je te compare au beau sapin blanc qui se dresse / Sous les lunes d'hiver, dans les plaines du Nord / Ah! pour ce blanc sapin si pur en sa sveltesse / Il est sur un piton d'une Antille au soir d'or / Un palmiste exalté qui frissonne sans cesse (D. Thaly [1932], 23). 15 Belles Marinoises, que vous soyez blanches ou roses comme un coquillage, couleur d'ambre clair comme une muscade fraîche, que votre teint rappelle la sapotille ou la chaude nuance de l'orange mûre, que vous soyez, filles du Cap, brillantes et noires comme caïmite, vous avez toutes les mêmes yeux (Thomarel [1936], 16). 16 Vos mains ont la douceur des brises tropicales / Si riches de parfums aux ivresses royales: Vos mains à l'ongle rose ainsi qu'un pur corail (Achard [1924], 81). 17 Aux 'îles' on connaît Barbe-bleue et Peau d'Ane / Et j'aime, sur les flancs du vieux morne Pitaut / Cendrillon, raconté par un coupeur de cannes (D. Thaly [1928], 93).

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conches), 1928, and L'empire des roses (The empire of roses), 1939; Valentine Estoup's La danse des images (The dance of images), 1929; and Maryse Elot's Le carnaval des muses (The carnival of the muses), 1933, and L'encens des crépuscules (Incense of twilight), 1934. These collections also leave an impression of wasted talent because of the poets' inability to understand that true poetry should not be based on surface appearance. True exoticism, as Victor Ségalen had demonstrated, should not be based on abstractions but must be authentically indigenous and draw its power from the life and culture of peoples. A few poetic works published prior to 1940 do have a real authenticity and offer a genuine creole world view. Drasta Houël's Vies légères (Frivolous lives), 1916, celebrates in an impressionistic and poetic prose the landscape and the lifestyle of white creoles with a candor that, within limits, brings to mind the innocence of Saint-John Perse in Eloges. Vies légères displays a refined tropical eroticism in which a sense of everpresent death, that tropical morbidness so wonderfully captured by Lafcadio Hearn, and a passionate sensuality. Houël's sensuality dares even to legitimize and praise the beauty of the black lover and to use the language and oraliture of Creole. Her work was sufficiently bold and unrestrained to escape the stereotypes of regionalism. She chose a poetic prose instead of yielding to the descriptive Parnassian poem. This was for her a sign of independence that her provocative glorification of mixed-race love would only confirm: "I, too, know a woman, faithful to her love, unwavering in it. In vain they say to her: 'He is black like the devil! The other one is blond as the day.' Each time she replies, tirelessly: 'He is beautiful as the night! His lips, when he smiles, are bronze gateways, which part slowly, to reveal a marble garden, and when he appears, at the end of a lighted walkway, you would say it was Apollo, emerging from the ebony dark!'" 18 The same originality can be found in the works of Léon Talboom, who wrote a quite undefinable work that was at the same time novel, documentary, and poem, Karukéra, 1921. His world view is unique. Using pictorial and musical elements, he creates flamboyant lyricism shaped by his pansexual vision of the universe. Moreover, keenly interested as he is in black people, in their communal way of life (which somewhat later was to be vaunted as an authentic black value by the fathers of negritude) linked to the forces of nature, he allows himself to be swept away by his admiration: "One could conclude that Heaven made them black so that they could not be confused with gods . . ,"19 Naturally one can criticize the ideology marked by mysticism and irrationality that dominates the text; one can sense more or less its precious and ornate features, produced by a symbolist and even decadent aesthetic. It is nonetheless true this is an original work reaching beyond conventional exoticism and preparing in one way or another, because of its intuitions and its lyricism, a complete reevaluation of the creole world, especially through its rehabilitation (not without some exaggeration) of the black man in a world where he was scorned as nothing but a clown. Outside of these works, which are exceptional in form and inspiration, we can observe the critical evolution of a regionalist literature. Regionalism tends to set itself apart from exoticism as the nonwhite population becomes emancipated, as mentalities change partly under the influence of the shocks to the colonial system on the eve of the second world war, but also under the influence of the 18 Je sais aussi une femme, fidèle à son amour, en lui inébranlable. On a beau lui redire: 'Il est noir comme le diable! L'autre est blond comme le jour!' Elle répond chaque fois, et inlassablement: 'Il est beau comme la nuit! Ses lèvres, quand il sourit, sont des portes de bronze, qui s'entr'ouvrent lentement, sur un jardin de marbre, et quand il apparaît, au fond de l'allée claire, on dirait Apollon, sortant d'un sombre ébène!' (Houël [1916], 61). 19 C'est à croire que le Ciel les fit noirs pour ne point les confondre avec les dieux (Talboom [1921], 37).

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Harlem Renaissance in the United States, of Indigenism in Haiti, and of communism all over the world and most particularly in the colonial world. Even before 1932, and with due consideration for the rigid position adopted by the authors of the Légitime Défense (Self-Defense) manifesto, writers managed to present a less idealized picture of their world. In any case, in the 1930s, with the relative awareness created by the celebrations of the third centenary of attachment to France (1935), with the increasingly clear view of the archaic nature of the socioeconomic structures of the French West Indies, a critical sensibility becomes sharper in prose and in poetry. Regionalism is no longer synonymous with a self-serving blindness, with mystification. To that extent the "great black cry" of Aimé Césaire will resound with the violence and boldness of its challenge, to be sure, but it will take place in the context of a more moderate movement of contestation of colonial reality in the Antilles, and of affirmation of the dignity of black people. But the significance of Damas and Césaire, which would not be recognized until much later, primarily by the international community, would not displace for all that the conformist brand of regionalism, the mode of exoticism and neoromantic lyricism traditionally practiced by Antillean poets, who would continue unperturbed. On the other hand, the critical realism that emerged in the 1930s was to inspire the likes of Edouard Marsolle, Florette Morand, and Pierre Osenat, whose work is expressive of the tradition of political liberalism embodied in the memory of Victor Schoelcher. This scrutiny of the poetry produced before the 1940s, besides providing the pleasure of rediscovering great works like those of Saint-John Perse and of surveying a literature still often roughhewn but generally moving because of its human resonances, allows us to understand better the atmosphere in the French Antilles that prepared the way for negritude. The reactionary nostalgia of white creoles, the bourgeois mystification pretending to believe in the island paradise, all that existed in the face of social tensions and injustice that were becoming so acute that some regionalists were forced to respond. Circumstances were right to provoke the anger of poets of the temperament of Damas or Césaire. And one would misunderstand their work, like that of the next generation (Paul Niger, Guy Tirolien, Georges Desportes, Edouard Glissant) if one disregarded the subtle play of intertextuality, the allusive dialogue the latter works establish with those that precede them. Translated by J. Michael Dash.

Bibliography Achard, Marcel. 1924. La muse pérégrine. Toulouse: Guitard. Corzani, Jack. 1978. La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises. 6 vols. Paris; Fort-de-France: Désormeaux. Giraud, Octave. 1862. Fleurs des Antilles. Paris: Poulet-Malassis. Hearn, Lafcadio. 1891. Two Years in the French West Indies. New York: Harper's. (Hearn sojourned in Martinique between 1887 and 1889. Nearly forty years would pass before his collection of folktales entered the francophone Antillean literary tradition.) —. 1926. Contes des tropiques. Paris: Mercure de France. —. 1939. Trois fois bel conte. Paris: Mercure de France. Houël, Drasta. 1916. Les vies légères, évocations antillaises. Paris: Les Oeuvres Nouvelles.

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Kesteloot, Lilyan. [1961]. 1963. Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature. Brussels: Institut de Sociologie de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles. Léonard, Nicolas-Germain. 1766. Idylles morales. n.p. Saint-Aurèle, Poirié. 1850. Les veillées du tropique. Paris: Perrottin. Saint-John Perse. 1972. Oeuvres complètes. Pléiade collection. Paris: Gallimard. Sigalony, Joseph Marraud de. 1937. Les Antillaises. Paris: Debresse. Talboom, Léon. 1921. Karukéra. Paris: Imprimerie de Vaugirard. Thaly, Daniel. 1911. Le jardin des tropiques. Paris: Editions du Beffroi. —. 1928. Chants de l'Atlantique et sous le ciel des Antilles. Paris: Garnier. —. 1932. Héliotrope ou Les amants inconnus. Paris: Le Divan. Thaly, Fernand. 1964. Le poème des îles. Pontvallain: Les Amis de l'auteur. Thomarel, André. 1936. Sous le ciel des Antilles; regrets et tendresses. Châlons: Imprimerie de l'Union républicaine. Vauchelet, Emile. 1894. La Guadeloupe, ses enfants célèbres. Paris: Challamel. Viatte, Auguste. 1954. Histoire littéraire de l'Amérique française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Negritude Then and Now

A. JAMES ARNOLD University of Virginia

The history of the negritude movement in poetry has become inseparable from the history of its criticism. If one considers that the significance of a movement dates from the time when it is perceived as such, then negritude does not date from 1937, the publication date of Léon-Gontran Damas's first volume of poetry, Pigments, or 1939, the date of the magazine publication of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), but rather from the immediate postwar period, with the publication of the Cahier as a book and of the two anthologies that brought the movement to the public eye. Poètes d'expression française, Afrique noire, Madagascar, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Indochine, Guyane: 1900-1945 (French-language poets from black Africa, Madagascar, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Indochina, and Guiana: 1900-1945), edited by the Guianese poet Damas was the first of these (Damas [1947]). It was quickly eclipsed by Léopold Sédar Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of new black and Malagasy francophone poetry) (Senghor [1948]), doubtless because of the prefatory essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, "Orphée noir" (Black Orpheus), which rapidly gained fame and determined the direction the debate over negritude would take for a generation. From the period of early public debate over negritude to the end of the 1970s one largely unquestioned premise was dominant: negritude is the poetic expression of ethnicity by Africans or people of African descent. From this ideologically determined premise, which posited an essential ethnic difference with respect to European literature, critics argued for or, more frequently, merely supposed an undifferentiated Africanness that could be attributed to writers of African ancestry anywhere in the world. On these grounds discussions of negritude rapidly became circular arguments, affirming at the outset that which was never demonstrated: the existence of a principle of negritude that the critic sees exemplified in carefully selected citations of passages heavily freighted with an ideological message. The fact that both Senghor and Césaire often lent themselves to such an operation in their verse, and even more so in their essays and interviews, certainly explains why otherwise intelligent critics could fail to see fundamental differences between the Senegalese poet and his Martinican confrere. Lilyan Kesteloot's doctoral dissertation in literary sociology at the Free University of Brussels in 1961, Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature (Black writers in French: a literary history of negritude) (Kesteloot [1961]), established the benchmark for writing on negritude by academics throughout the early period of reception. In the francophone world the first

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serious challenge to Kesteloot's thesis of a unified negritude movement dating from the publication of the University of Paris student newspaper L'Etudiant Noir (The black student) in 1935 had to await the early 1980s and the public defense at the Université de Paris HI-Sorbonne Nouvelle of Martin Steins's state doctoral dissertation on "Genèse et critique de la négritude senghorienne" (Genesis and criticism of Senghor's negritude) (Steins [1981]) and, the following year, at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne of Joseph Costisella's doctoral dissertation "Genèse et évolution de la négritude" (Genesis and evolution of negritude) (Costisella [1982]). Senghor himself was on the jury of Steins's defense, which became a lively and sometimes heated exchange on the ideological implications of some of Senghor's earliest publications from the late 1930s. Steins pointed out that among Senghor's ideological sympathizers in 1937 were contributors to France's extreme rightwing Action Française newspaper (Steins [1981], 3:893-905), who shared his refusal of cultural assimilation, albeit for diametrically opposed racist reasons. Costisella, for his part, indulged in some rhetorical excess by affirming that Kesteloot invented the negritude movement as such in her own doctoral dissertation, but he had a point. A coherent anticolonialist discourse in which the negritude poets of necessity adopted a political stance in the name of their Africanness can in fact be traced to Kesteloot's dissertation. Michel Hausser had already demonstrated in his state doctoral dissertation of 1978, "Essai sur la poétique de la négritude," that on stylistic and aesthetic grounds alone the negritude movement was never unified (Hausser [1986]). Hausser argued that the negritude movement arose from the colonial situation in the French West Indies and that the different history of the Antillean poets and writers provided a fundamentally different grasp of time and space from that found in traditional African societies (Hausser [1986], 1:350). But Hausser's work was not readily available through a commercial publisher until 1986 and Costisella's still must be consulted in its original form. A paradox of negritude poetry that was not noticed for a surprisingly long time is that, at precisely the moment when African poets were writing in the context of their future decolonization, Antillean negritude poets found themselves tied ever more tightly to France by the 1946 departmentalization law sponsored by a first-term legislator, Aimé Césaire. The anticolonialist world view that provided a measure of unity among African and Antillean poets up to the Second World War and immediately thereafter, and which the first generation of critics attributed to their ethnicity, was in fact owing to their shared experience of colonialism. Even that experience was shared only to a point, however, since the Antillean scholarship students who were educated in France were intended to be sent to Africa as colonial administrators or members of the liberal professions, as was the case of two of Césaire's own siblings, a judge and a professor of pharmacology. Far from constituting the discourse of political liberation, then, Antillean negritude originated as the last phase of revolt by black colonial intellectuals whose life and work were to be transformed by their experience of departmentalization, which represented a direct passage from colonial to neocolonial status. The effective dates during which negritude poetry expressed a collective black Antillean experience articulated in the lyric are approximately 1946, the date of the departmentalization law, to 1960, the date on which a substantial number of francophone African states acceded to independence. Already in the years leading up to 1960 Césaire's poetic voice had become more markedly elegiac (Arnold [1981], 272-79). The elegiac mode introduced a note of nostalgia and reflection into the thematics of opposition and revolt that had dominated the first decade of Antillean negritude poetry.

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The year 1946 was also marked by the publication of Césaire's first collection of poetry, Les armes miraculeuses (Miraculous weapons), which the first generation of his critics read as revolutionary, turned toward political action. More recent research has revealed, both in the composition of the collection and in the structure of individual poems, the representation of an agonistic heroic self modeled on Nietzsche's concept of the tragic hero (Arnold [1981], chapter 4). Indeed, the tragic hero of negritude has a mythic, rather than a historical, status (Taylor [1989], 164-74). He is ultimately turned inward toward spiritual values rather than outward to the political arena. (The relationship of the negritude movement to historical thought is discussed below in the final contribution on the essay genre.) The dates of publication of Damas's collections of poetry parallel Césaire's and confirm on empirical grounds the dates during which negritude was an efficacious movement. The strongest counterargument for placing the negritude movement at the eve of the Second World War, rather than in the immediate postwar period, is the French government's move to seize and suppress Damas's Pigments in 1939 as a threat to state security (atteinte à la sûreté de l'Etat). The last poem in the collection, "Et cætera," invited the African veterans of World War I not to look to the impending war with Hitler's Germany but to invade the French colony of Senegal instead (Damas [1937], 80). Césaire's Cahier, however, which the critics were to settle on as the classic statement of negritude poetry, went completely unnoticed at the same date. The crucial literary-historical question is what the meaning of the negritude movement in poetry is in retrospect and how that meaning is constituted. The constitution of literary-historical meaning is a social phenomenon and therefore implicates the social and political conditions in which the poetry was written as well as those in which it is read. On these grounds alone it is possible to affirm that the negritude movement in the Caribbean is specific to the French Antilles and Guiana as they prepare their transformation from colonial to overseas departmental status. However dependent Haiti may have been on the United States during this same period, the indigénisme (indigenist) movement that arose out of the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-34) built upon a century of nominal independence during which Haitian society, or at least its elite, had forged a coherent discourse on national identity. From Jean Price-Mars to Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis literature in Haiti engaged itself in a political and social debate and drew on both a creole culture and the Creole language. All these positive aspects of indigénisme were lacking in the French Antillean negritude movement, which arose precisely from a lack, to use a Sartrean term. (Ulrich Fleischmann has accurately laid out the quite different problematics of creating a national discourse in Haiti and in the French West Indies, respectively. The reader should refer directly to the section of his essay, above, entitled "The Discourse of a National Literature.") Further proof that the negritude movement as such grew out of the experience of the Second World War can be found in the pages of Tropiques, the magazine of Martinican literature and culture that Aimé Césaire, his wife Suzanne, René Ménil, and a group of fellow lycée teachers published in Fort-de-France from 1941 to 1945. I have given elsewhere an extended analysis of the importance of this magazine (Arnold [1981], chapter 3). Suffice it to say here that the combined racism and political repression exercised by the Vichy government under Admiral Robert through 1943 galvanized the black population of Martinique in a way that the more benign and familiar creole racism of the colony had never done. The results were very similar in type to those that came out of the U.S. military's presence in Trinidad or Curaçao during the same period. The intellectuals and writers

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who forged the indigénisme movement in Haiti during and after the First World War reacted to similar pressures but from a position of relative privilege as members of the mulatto elite. In all these cases an Antillean consciousness based on a combination of race and class emerged, but with quite different results. At the end of the Second World War two figures emerge in Haiti who, by contrast, testify to the essentially French West Indian character of the negritude movement in poetry. René Depestre, whose first collection of poetry, Etincelles (Sparks), 1945, was published by private subscription, was to become the preeminent Haitian poet of his generation. From 1946 until the present, Depestre has lived almost all his adult life in enforced exile outside Haiti. His Marxist politics, which eventually took him to Cuba, ran afoul of the anti-Communism of successive Haitian governments. More important from the standpoint of this essay, Dr. François (Papa Doc) Duvalier came to power in Haiti in September 1957 on a platform that can only be called a fascist politics based on negritude (which he himself called noirisme). Two years earlier Césaire, who had prefaced Depestre's Végétation de clarté (Vegetation of brightness) in 1951, took the younger Haitian writer to task for abandoning negritude in favor of the socialist-realist aesthetic propounded by Louis Aragon (then a member of the executive committee of the French Communist Party). Their public debate, which was conducted in the literary press, highlights the essential contradictions between a Marxist aesthetic - Césaire was to leave the French Communist Party in 1956 - and negritude (Arnold [1981], chapter 6). Carroll F. Coates has given an accurate appraisal of Depestre's relations with Duvalier in his introduction to Depestre's novel satirizing the Duvalier regime Le mât de cocagne (The festival of the greasy pole), 1975 (Coates [1990], xxiii-xlvii). Some of the principal axioms of negritude as an ideology (the coincidence of caste, color, and class, in particular) in Haiti fueled a reactionary, benighted, and thuggish dictatorship, whereas the foremost poets in Haiti during the period 1946 to 1960 and beyond largely foreswore allegiance to racialist principles. Within the Antillean negritude movement itself, the virile rhetoric and the reliance on a surrealist theory of poetic metaphor as revelation of unconscious truth that characterize Césaire's poetics well into the 1950s are counterbalanced by the very different stance of Damas, whose poetic reputation has suffered much from the preeminence that critics have accorded to Césaire. Damas's poetry reveals a quite different temperament that expresses the situation of a mulatto writer who chose his blackness rather than having to acknowledge it, as was Césaire's case. From Pigments to Black Label (which plays on the connotations of a prestigious brand of Scotch whisky as well as a North American beer), Damas wrote poetry in which the thematics of negritude (largely shared with Césaire) are expressed in an ironic voice that appeals both to the ordinary reader and to more cultivated connoisseurs of poetry. Whereas Césaire's irony tends to be a bit heavy-handed and rhetorical, relying on erudite words and intertextual associations, Damas's is more accessible and even playful in a serious way. Thus, in the poem "Et cætera," which closes the collection Pigments, Damas exhorts the "Senegalese" units of the French Army to "foutre aux Boches la paix" (leave the Krauts alone) (Damas [1937], 80). The poem expresses a very common antiwar sentiment with a sharply anticolonialist message in everyday language marked by slang and an intentionally broken rhythm. Damas uses a syncopated or off-beat rhythm far more than does Césaire. In this respect Damas is much closer to other New World black poets such as Langston Hughes. Damas's poetry will certainly benefit from a thorough reassessment. The ongoing revision of the negritude movement provides the necessary scholarly base, and a heightened awareness of his affinities with other New World poets, as well as French predecessors such as Apollinaire, will prove invaluable.

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Then and Now

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At the present time it is possible to say that the old shibboleths concerning negritude have been largely discredited. Reassessments of the antecedents of negritude, such as the one by Jack Corzani above, and of its successors, such as the one by Anthea Morrisson below, will provide the necessary literary-historical context. A further question remains unanswered, however. All the negritude writers were men. Aside from Suzanne Césaire's important contribution to Tropiques from 1941 to 1945, no women poets, playwrights, or novelists contributed to the movement in the francophone Antilles or Guiana. Yet we know that Antillean women had written significant fiction before the war; and many would maintain that the most important Antillean novelists (but not the poets) of the past two decades have been women. The question needs to be asked whether negritude was not a specifically male response to the pressures of colonialism from a clearly gendered perspective. Indeed the reader of Randolph Hezekiah's assessment of Césaire's Cahier (above) may well conclude that in some quarters the significance of negritude even today is to be understood as a francophone variety of Antillean machismo. To the extent that the hypothesis of a gender-specific movement may prove to be accurate, another history of the same period will need to be written. What were the women doing while the men were writing their phallogocentric poetry in opposition to colonial power?

Bibliography Arnold, A. James. 1981. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. (The first book to examine thoroughly Césaire's poetic corpus through 1976 in the context of his thought.) Césaire, Aimé. [1939]. 1983. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. [Text established and publishing history of the poem by Daniel Maximin.] Paris: Présence Africaine. (The date 1939 is regularly given as the original publication of the Cahier. It is in fact the date of an incomplete, significantly less surrealist text in the magazine Volontés 20[August]:23-51. That text had no bearing on the public literary history of the poem, which begins in 1947 with the New York and Paris editions.) —. 1983. Collected Poetry. Trans., intro. and notes by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. (This is a bilingual edition of the 1976 Désormeaux edition of Césaire's Poèmes. It is the most trustworthy text of the poems, in French or English.) —. 1990. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. Trans. and notes by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith; introduction by A. James Arnold. Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia. (This is a bilingual edition of moi, laminaire . . ., 1982, with the first English translation of Et les chiens se taisaient [And the dogs were silent].) Coates, Carroll F. 1990. Introduction. The Festival of the Greasy Pole. By René Depestre. Trans. by Carroll F. Coates. CARAF Books. Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia. Confiant, Raphaël. 1993. Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle. Paris: Stock. (A polemical attack on the "revolutionary" reading of Césaire's poetry in the context of his political activity.) Costisella, Joseph. 1982. Genèse et évolution de la négritude. French State Doctoral Thesis, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. (Makes good use of files French police kept on African and Antillean students in France in the 1930s. The files show no awareness of the existence of a negritude movement before the war.) Damas, L.[éon]-G.[ontran]. [1937]. 1972. Pigments; Névralgies. Paris: Presence Africaine. (The original publisher of Pigments was Guy Levis-Mano, who also published several surrealists. Présence Africaine published the definitive edition of Pigments in 1962.)

484 —.

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Arnold

1947. Poètes d'expression française, Afrique noire, Madagascar, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Indochine, Guyane: 1900-1945. Paris: Seuil. (The first anthology to reveal the negritude poets as a group or movement.) —. 1948. Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains. Paris: G[uy] L[évis-]M[ano]. —. 1952. Graffiti. Collection P.S. Paris: Seghers. —. 1956. Black Label. Collection Blanche. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1966. Névralgies. Paris: Présence Africaine. (Reprinted, with the definitive edition of Pigments, by Présence Africaine in 1972.) Delas, Daniel. 1991. Aimé Césaire. Portraits Littéraires. Paris: Hachette. (The best researched, most up-to-date book on Césaire in French.) Depestre, René. 1945. Etincelles. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. —. 1951. Végétation de clarté. Preface by Aimé Césaire. Paris: Seghers. Hausser, Michel. [1978]. 1986. Pour une poétique de la négritude. 2 vols. Paris: Silex. (This is a pared-down version of the state doctoral dissertation that the author defended in 1978 at the Université de Paris VII-Jussieu.) Kesteloot, Lilyan. [1961]. 3d ed. 1965. Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature. Brussels: Institut de Sociologie de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles. (The now legendary foundational work that positioned negritude as a militant anticolonialist movement.) —. 1974. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Trans. by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. (The U.S. edition of her pioneering work.) Michael, Colette V. 1988. Negritude: An Annotated Bibliography. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press. (Some 500 annotated items culled from the critical literature on the negritude movement, with some 400 other items presented without annotation. Contains indexes to journals and book titles.) Senghor, Léopold Sédar. [1948]. 1972. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (Sartre's preface has kept this anthology in print since its original publication.) Steins, Martin. 1979. Littérature engagée. Oeuvres et critiques. III.2-IV.1:181-95. (Pointed out the ideological overdetermination and the methodological weaknesses of Kesteloot [1961]. Kesteloot replied in a spirited exchange: 197-202.) —. 1981. "Les antécédents et la genèse de la négritude senghorienne." Doctorat d'état, Université de Paris IIISorbonne Nouvelle. vol. 1:1-433; vol. 2:435-891; vol. 3:893-1355. (Includes an index to names and an analytical table of contents. Deposited in the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia; available through the Center for Research Libraries.) Taylor, Patrick. 1989. The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. (A wide-ranging view of contemporary Caribbean culture containing a critique of négritude from Fanon's perspective.)

New Voices

A N T H E A M. M O R R I S O N

University of the West Indies Cave Hill, Barbados

"When I recognize passages reminiscent of Damas, Césaire or Senghor in the poems sent to me by young black francophone writers, I have difficulty resisting the urge to yawn."1 This remark by Léopold Sédar Senghor highlights the lasting and sometimes overwhelming influence of the poets of negritude on subsequent generations. Contemporary writers are faced with the formidable challenge of moving out of the shadow of their celebrated predecessors. Despite strident rejections of negritude by many younger writers, who often fail to acknowledge an inevitable indebtedness to those who established definitively that it is "beautiful-good-and-legitimate-to-be-a-nigger" (Césaire [1983], 83),2 Caribbean poetry of recent decades nonetheless often echoes several of the concerns associated with the pioneer movement. Such echoes are hardly surprising in view of the survival in the region of problems originating in the colonial era, and particularly of the continuing preoccupation with the question of identity. The present study attempts to indicate new directions in the poetry of the francophone Caribbean. While Edouard Glissant (Martinique) and René Depestre (Haiti) are clearly the outstanding voices of the period under review, the abundance of the poetic production of the region reflects a creative energy that has hardly faltered since the 1930s. It is difficult, however, to identify any literary movement as cohesive as that of negritude. Diversity rather than consensus has tended to prevail as younger generations have felt the need to move beyond an affirmation of racial identity to reflect contemporary dilemmas in a changing Caribbean, a Caribbean that has not lived up to Césaire's dreams of triumphant sovereignty. The concerns emerging from the literature discussed in this paper are to a large extent fashioned by the social and political realities of the last few decades. In the case of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, the political transformation embodied in the law making the former colonies Départements d'Outre-Mer has had far-reaching repercussions on the collective psyche. Whereas the long-awaited reform was enthusiastically greeted in 1946 as the logical conclusion of the colonial policy of assimilation, the 1950s saw a growing dissatisfaction with a status soon considered to be artificial. The question of cultural identity assumed a new urgency, reflected,

1 Quand, dans les poèmes à lire que m'envoient de jeunes écrivains noirs de langue française, je reconnais des réminiscences de Damas, de Césaire ou de Senghor, je résiste difficilement à l'envie de bâiller (Senghor [1971], 16). 2 [il-est]-beau-et-bon-et-légitime-d'être-nègre (Césaire [1983], 82). All quotations from Césaire's work are taken from Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. All other translations are my own.

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for example, in the increasing use of Creole as a means of affirming a unique personality threatened by what appeared to many to be a colonial regime. On the political front, outstanding developments of the 1960s and 1970s included a new concern with the issue of independence. Several widely publicized political trials such as those of the organizers of the O.J.A.M. (Organisation Anticolonialiste de la Jeunesse Martiniquaise) in 1963 and the G.O.N.G. (Groupe d'Organisation Nationale de la Guadeloupe) in 1968, as well as a series of demonstrations and revolts, suggested a growing popular malaise. At a time when the West African colonies had recently been liberated and when their Caribbean neighbors had also achieved independence, French West Indian intellectuals were finding their ties with France more and more stifling. Many became involved in the sort of militant activity that caused the young Edouard Glissant to find himself, in the early 1960s, under surveillance in France and unable to return to Martinique until 1965. However, despite the superficial agitation of recent decades, very little has changed in these neocolonial societies. It is this impression that explains the striking image of "pre-digested volcanism"3 chosen by the Guadeloupean novelist Daniel Maximin to describe the spasmodic manifestations of popular discontent. The political context provides some insight into the causes of the pessimism that seems to plague many contemporary writers, a pessimism reflected in the frequent references to the overseas departments as "morbid," "moribund," or "neurotic" societies. The case of Haiti is, of course, unique: the continuing cycle of oppression of the impoverished masses by corrupt governments and, specifically, the atmosphere of fear and suspicion resulting from the terror of the Duvalier regime are certainly cause enough for pessimism. The tragic death of the novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis in 1961 after a failed attempt to organize peasant resistance to Duvalier is an indication of the price outspoken individuals have had to pay for their political commitment. An important literature of exile that reflects a wounded patriotism has grown out of this situation. My analysis is of necessity limited: constraints of space have made it impossible to attempt a comprehensive study of the poetry of the past few decades. I shall focus instead on a selection of writers whose work seems, from an aesthetic point of view, to be of lasting significance and who are in some way representative of the changing orientations of the postnegritude generation. A second limitation is related to the not inconsiderable problem of periodization, which involves a historiography that is open to debate. I have included writers whose first volumes were published during a thirty-year period beginning in 1945 - the year that marked the literary debut of René Depestre with the publication of Etincelles (Sparks). Although chronology serves as a useful reference point in the interest of coherence, the adoption of a strictly chronological approach is not without its disadvantages, since shifts in literary movements and trends do not necessarily correspond to a rigid temporal framework. This difficulty is illustrated by the case of Guy Tirolien, whose work has been omitted from this study, although his first volume of poetry, Balles d'or (Golden balls), only appeared in 1961. Not only is Tirolien a contemporary of Césaire's, but his choice of themes also tends to support his exclusion from an analysis of postnegritude poetry. Despite these limitations, this essay provides evidence of the constant renewal of literary activity in the francophone Caribbean, a renewal that seems to confirm that, in poetry as in life, "the map of spring is always to be drawn again" (Césaire [1983], 67).4 3 4

volcanisme prédigéré (Maximin [1981], 298). la carte du printemps est toujours à refaire (Césaire [1983], 66).

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Martinique ". . . the men who had come so far had been stirred up by the sea and . . . the land to which they came had fortified them with a new sap. And the red soil had mingled with the black . . . to give birth, in the calabash battered by the waters, to a new cry, a new echo."5 These words from Edouard Glissant's Le quatrième siècle (The fourth century) reflect a dynamic vision of the Caribbean experience that is fundamental to the concept of antillanité (Caribbeanness) often associated with the Martinician poet and novelist. Born in 1928, Glissant is of a generation younger than that of the negritude poets - among his teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France was the young Aimé Césaire, recently returned from Europe - a generation that therefore enjoyed the advantage of a heroic literary example. After the necessary prise de conscience or awakening associated with the negritude movement, the literature of the francophone Caribbean would give voice to new concerns, concerns such as that expressed by Daniel Maximin, who emphasizes that out of the tragic past there have emerged creative possibilities that should not be ignored: "A society has come into being in the West Indies (and even from New Orleans to the north of Brazil) as a result of European oppression of this deported population, under the plantation system. A synthesis was achieved, even if it was against a background of noise, rage, and bloodshed, and we have internalized it. A synthesis that is difficult to live with and even to acknowledge. But it presents us, at this moment in our history, with an extraordinary challenge."6 Maximin's words provide an interesting echo of a remark by Glissant in the 1956 essay Soleil de la conscience (Sun of consciousness) on the nature of creole culture: "In the West Indies, the region where I was born, it can be said that a people is engaged in the positive process of creating itself . . . what we have here is a synthesis of races, customs, knowledge, moving toward a form of unity."7 The impulse toward unity and the concern with the creative potential of Caribbean people are central to the work of Edouard Glissant, whose writings reflect an attempt to reconcile the diverse elements of the Caribbean heritage, to achieve harmony out of historical tension. It would be simplistic to see Glissant's antillanité as a rejection of negritude; rather, it is a concept born of the need to utter the "new cry" of the descendants of the transplanted slaves, to reconcile the loss of African roots with the sometimes fragile sense of belonging to a unique and fertile world. It should be noted, however, that the concern with present and future that informs the notion of antillanité does not preclude an overwhelming need to understand and to reinterpret the history of the Caribbean, for "what is the past but the knowledge that stiffens you in the earth and propels you in a crowd toward tomorrow?"8 The historical trauma of deportation, a theme to which the poet will return in his later writings, 5 la mer avait brassé les hommes venus de si loin et . . . la terre d'arrivage les avait fortifiés d'une autre sève. Et les terres rouges s'étaient mélangées aux terres noires . . . pour enfanter dans la calebasse cabossée sur les eaux un nouveau cri d'homme, et un écho neuf' (Glissant [1964], 285). 6 Une société s'est créée aux Antilles (et même depuis la Nouvelle Orléans jusqu'au nord du Brésil) à partir de l'oppression européenne sur cette population déportée, et dans le cadre du système de plantation. Une synthèse s'est faite, même si c'est dans le bruit, la fureur et le sang, et nous l'avons intériorisée. Synthèse difficile à vivre et même à reconnaître. Mais elle nous confie en notre monde actuel, un défi exemplaire (Maximin [1982], 6). 7 Or aux Antilles, d'où je viens, on peut dire qu'un peuple positivement se construit . . . voici une synthèse de races, de moeurs, de savoirs, mais qui tend vers son unité propre (Glissant [1956], 15). 8 Qu'est le passé sinon la connaissance qui te roidit dans la terre et te pousse en foule dans demain? (Glissant [1964], 280).

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is explored in detail in one of Glissant's earliest and most memorable works, the epic poem Les Indes (The Indies), 1956. It is significant that the saga begins not in Gorée - the island off the coast of Senegal from which the captured Africans were deported - but in Genoa. Glissant recaptures both the excitement of the future conquistadores and the anxieties of the voyage into the unknown: "What use to us are these Indies where no one knows if grass grows for our mouths."9 It is important to note that, despite the clear parallel between Les Indes and the poetry of the Guadeloupeanborn Saint-John Perse, Glissant's vision differs sharply from that of Perse in his condemnation, in subsequent verses, of the crimes perpetrated by the explorers: the plundering of the land, the extermination of the indigenous Indians, and the final and decisive atrocity of the slave trade: "A people was nailed to the tall ships, its flesh was sold, hired, bartered . . . There is no more mystery, no more audacity: the Indies are a death market."10 Roger Toumson sees Les Indes as a deliberate attempt to rectify Saint-John Perse's version of the European arrival in the New World, a version inevitably colored by the poet's background as a white Creole. Toumson rightly points out the wealth of difference in two approaches to a single historical reality: "Perse celebrates, Glissant deplores."11 Although Glissant's journey across time and space ends on a note of reconciliation, although he views Caribbean history in terms of growth and fertility as well as of death and destruction, the poet is clearly haunted by the sufferings of the faceless dead, of the ancestors who crossed a sea forever marked by the horror of the Middle Passage: "The Slave Trade. Which will never be wiped from the face of the sea."12 Yet it is important to note that the poem traces a clear, though gradual, change in the relationship between the descendants of the new arrivals and the initially alien land, a relationship begun in bloodshed and bitterness and evoked by sexual imagery suggesting violation and exploitation. At the outset, the Africans were portrayed as abusers of the land: "A people, oh woman, that will possess you all night long, with pain and with pleasure."13 But the gradual bonding between man and land is the basis for a cautious optimism appearing in the fifth canto of Les Indes, in which the poet brings to light the "obscure epic" (Glissant [1965], 147) of all the unknown rebels in his past, as well as the documented feats of Toussaint, Dessalines, and Delgrès, acknowledged heroes of the struggle against slavery. It is in the final canto that the poet brings together past and present, using images suggestive of the wealth of possibilities offered to the descendants of the African slaves in a "new" world which they, and he, can finally call their own: "These forests, these virgin suns, this foam / Are one single flowering! Our Indies are, / Beyond all rage and all acclamation abandoned on the bank / The dawn.. . ."14 Glissant clearly experiences something of the wonder felt by the young Derek Walcott, "blest with a virginal, unpainted world" (Walcott [1981], 68). Glissant concludes Les Indes by evoking future possibilities of growth and creativity, saluting "the dawn unfolding on an unknown poem and a desire."15 The poet is keenly aware of the dangers 9

Que nous valent ces Indes où nul ne sait si l'herbe pousse pour nos bouches (Glissant [1965], 101). On a cloué un peuple aux bateaux de haut bord, on a vendu, loué, troqué la chair . . . Il n'est plus de mystère ni d'audace: les Indes sont marché de mort (Glissant [1965], 143). 11 Perse célèbre, Glissant déplore (Toumson [1980], 123). 12 La Traite. Ce qu'on n'effacera jamais de la face de la mer (Glissant [1965], 135). 13 Un peuple, ô femme, qui t'aura toute la nuit pour sa douleur et son plaisir (Glissant [1965], 134). 14 Ces forêts, ces soleils vierges, ces écumes / Font une seule et meme floraison! Nos Indes sont, / Par delà toute rage et toute acclamation sur le rivage délaissées, / L'aurore. . . . (Glissant [1965], 171). 15 l'aube naissant sur un poème non connu et un désir (Glissant [1965], 166). 10

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of what is referred to in Le quatrième siècle as "the bedazzlement of the past,"16 and his later work develops the same essential progression from past to present and future outlined in Les Indes. This is evident, for example, in his attitude to Africa, portrayed in the 1960 volume Le sel noir (Black salt) not so much as the lost motherland, but rather as a symbol of freedom for the dispossessed peoples of the diaspora: "Look, the net is bare, here on the sand is the African / and she takes the salt in her hair: beautiful jay beautiful fruit, / And perhaps at last we all shall pick it oh perhaps."17 These lines offer an example of the images of vitality and fruitfufness that are central to Glissant's vision of his land and his people. The land, frequently personified as woman, is an essential theme in a poetry that is fashioned by the physical contours of the island on which the writer was born. As Glissant indicates in L'intention poétique (Poetic intention), it is part of the act of poetry to "experience the landscape passionately."18 His sensibility is shaped by the contrast between the mountains and plains of his native Martinique, by the luxuriant vegetation that is a constant reminder of the possibility of renewal, and above all by the sea. In Les Indes the poet implicitly links the original transatlantic voyage with the later journey of Toussaint Louverture on a French ship that would take him to imprisonment and eventual death in the cold mountains of the Jura: "For he went on the sea, in the opposite direction / Going to discover the land of the conqueror . . . And history closed, on the betrayed warrior, the forgetful trap door of winter."19 Yet at the end of the poem Glissant is able to transcend the past, exploiting the duality of the symbolism of the sea in order to accept the potentially hostile waters surrounding the islands as an essential part of the landscape and as a powerful symbol of historical continuity and fertility. Like the land, which has preserved its integrity despite the assaults documented in Les Indes, "the sea is eternal."20 Although, like Césaire, Glissant was to turn to other areas of literary creation, particularly during the 1960s, his novels hardly represent a change in direction, since they develop the concerns first explored in the poetry, reflecting the overwhelming obsession with land and people, coupled with an ongoing search for an original mode of expression. The tone of his poetry from the late 1970s is more somber. Glissant, who had advocated a genuine independence for Martinique at a time when many favored the partial solution of autonomie, could hardly but be disillusioned by the frenetic modernization and increasing dependence on the metropolis of recent decades. In a 1977 article in Le Monde Diplomatique he refers to Martinique as a "morbid society" (Glissant [1977], 16), and a growing melancholy is translated in the images of a parched, barren land that dominate the 1979 volume Boises (Shackles). That the aspirations expressed in Les Indes have not been fulfilled is clearly not a deterrent to artistic production, however. In a long and fertile literary career Glissant has remained faithful not only to a commitment to his native land but also to a concern with forging an original language. What survives, then, is the poetic word, "the dawn unfolding on an unknown poem," whose possibilities are as vast as the potential for renewal and creativity that Glissant sees as inherent in the Caribbean experience.

16

l'éblouissement du passé (Glissant [1964], 273). Voici, la nasse est nue, voici au sable l'Africaine / Et elle prend le sel dans ses cheveux: beau geai beau fruit, / Et peut-être enfin le cueillerons-nous tous ô peut-être (Glissant [1960], 68). 18 Passionnément vivre le paysage (Glissant [1969], 245). 19 Car il fut sur la mer, à rebours du commencement / Allant connaître ce pays des conquérants . . . Et l'histoire ferma, sur ce guerrier trahi, la trappe oublieuse d'un hiver (Glissant [1965], 155). 20 La mer est éternelle (Glissant [1965], 163). 17

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Alfred Melon-Degras describes himself in his third volume of poetry Avec des si, avec des mais (With ifs, with buts) as a "franc-tireur outside all chapels / and therefore beyond salvation."21 These words provide an interesting insight into the condition of exile that is an important theme in the work of this Martinican poet, and also into a more fundamental rootlessness which has little to do with physical separation from homeland. For Melon-Degras is essentially an outsider, and the unifying obsession underlying all his work is a fundamental dissatisfaction not only with the neocolonial situation of his native land, not only with the Western society in which he has sought refuge, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with the human condition. The range of concerns reflected in any one volume of poetry by Melon-Degras is striking in the context of a literature that has tended to focus, with the intensity of obsession, on the situation of the pays natal. Perhaps for reasons of temperament, Melon-Degras is much less of a public poet than Glissant. One is also tempted to advance the hypothesis that his willingness to explore his private anxieties in a body of work that includes, but goes beyond, the concerns of the black Martinican, is related to the personal circumstances of the writer. As an academic who has chosen to spend much of his adult life in Europe, he is inevitably detached from the problems of his native Martinique. This distant homeland remains, however, a haunting presence. In "O mon pays" (O my country), for example, the poet remembers with bitterness a childhood that coincided with the repressive period of the Vichy regime during the Second World War, a "childhood of marches, fascist salutes, alerts, first prizes, first communions, silent rages."22 And the "silent rages" of those early years sometimes spill over into the present, as the poet contemplates the spectacle of a people crippled by apathy and resignation: "Since you implore, on your knees, / on four paws, / forgiveness from the god of condemnation / for imaginary original sins . . . What can I say to you / oh my sunshine friend, but the wounding insolent words / of a rebellious son?"23 The poem "L'île aliénée" (Alienated island) from which these lines are taken is dominated by a sense of failure and loss, reinforced by the central metaphor of silence. This somber vision of Caribbean reality is only slightly relieved by the poet's sense of belonging to the vast Latin-American continent, which is infinitely more appealing to the frustrated Martinican rebel because of its size and grandeur than is his own diminutive island. Melon-Degras's poetry suggests that the size of Martinique is evocative of historical insignificance. In a poem dedicated to Che Guevara, Melon-Degras clearly revels in the sonorous place-names of the continent, expressing a New World preoccupation with reclaiming and naming what was originally an alien land: "We have the poetry of names that sing: Potosi, Aconcagua, Sierra Maestra, / that sing of continental splendor."24 Despite this redeeming sense of his Américanité, however, and despite occasional cries of revolt that seem to negate the overriding feeling of impotence, Melon-Degras's picture of the contemporary Caribbean is essentially a bleak one. This is particularly evident in the poem "Attendre" (Waiting), in which the motif of waiting suggests the emotional exhaustion of one who is losing faith in the future: "But if we wait too long / the cutlasses will be put away, rusty; / the 21

Franc-tireur hors de toute chapelle / hors donc de tout salut (Melon-Degras [1976], 10). enfance de défilés, de saluts fascistes, / d'alertes, de premiers prix, de premières communions, / de colères sourdes (Melon-Degras [1974], 54). 23 puisque tu implores à genoux, / à quatre pattes, / pour d'imaginaires péchés originels / le pardon du dieu de vindicte . . . qu'ai-je à te dire, / ô mon amie de soleil, / sinon les mots insolents, / qui te blessent, / de fils insoumis? (Melon-Degras [1975], 79-80). 24 Nous avons la poésie des noms qui chantent: / Potosi, Aconcagua, Sierra Maestra, / qui chantent la splendeur continentale (Melon-Degras [1974], 107). 22

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leaves of the trees will have shrivelled / and the birds exhausted their song . . . smiles will be bereft of their original meaning, / as the world falls asleep, / a world dormant, / its days counted."25 In the final stanza of this poem dominated by images of cold, silence, and decay, there is an interesting echo of "Hors des jours étrangers" (Out of alien days), in which the mature Césaire had expressed his disenchantment in this rhetorical question addressed to his people: "[So] when will you cease to be the dark toy / in the carnival of others" (Cesáire [1983], 349).26 Melon-Degras asks of the same people: "When will you / at last master of the world / decide that the world should give you something more than that base place which good masters bestow on their good slaves?"27 The poem "Attendre" is dated February 1968, the month in which eighteen Guadeloupeans appeared before the Cour de Sûreté de l'Etat (State security court) for suspicion of complicity in the massive popular demonstration in Pointe-à-Pitre in May 1967 that led to the death of thirty or more civilians during a bloody crackdown by the government (Anon. [1969], 12-13). The poems inspired by Melon-Degras's Parisian exile are hardly more optimistic in tone, although they are marked by an ambivalence and a self-criticism that make them ultimately more interesting. The ambiguity of the situation of the West Indian resident in "metropolitan" France is evoked with biting irony in "Les Nègres" (The blacks), in which the voice of the "tolerant" European alternates with that of the newly arrived migrant whose illusions are lost in the course of a frustrating search for lodgings. His manifest sympathy for the homeless migrant, this "French foreigner without lodgings,"28 is tempered by Melon-Degras's lucidity about the fact that his own experience of exile has been that of a privileged, apparently assimilated intellectual. Hence the selfmockery evident in several poems that concern his life in Europe, and particularly in "Quelle est ta route?" (What is your road?) in Battre le rappel (Call to arms), in which he expresses the frustration of the academic remembering the rebellious impulse of his youth, gripped by a sense that real life is elsewhere: "And you, my poor Alfred / you are the worm / under piles of paper . . . your poems, carefully dressed / have put on their fine tie / and the monocle of the academic."29 The prolonged separation from one's homeland is a painful reminder of the loss of idealism and illusion that is perhaps an inevitable concomitant of the passage of time: "And so our youth goes up in smoke / and our illusion is scalded alive to the clamor of hoarse sirens."30 The illusion referred to here is not only the utopian vision of the Caribbean rebel who had dreamt of sovereignty for his homeland, but also the idealism of one who had espoused the cause of the student protesters in the French movement of May 1968. (Melon-Degras alludes to this time of upheaval in several of the poems of his first volume, L'habit d'Arlequin [Harlequin's costume], published in 1974.) The poet's identification with the concerns of the generation of May 1968 is informed by his own sense of marginalization in a society he considers to be self-satisfied and indifferent to the needs of its own dispossessed people, as well as to the struggles of the Third World. 25 Mais à trop attendre / les coutelas seront rangés, rouillés; / les arbres auront séché leurs feuilles / les oiseaux tari leurs chants . . . en deuil de leur sens premier les sourires, / s'endormant le monde, / endormi le monde, / comptés ses jours (Melon-Degras [1974], 52). 26 quand donc cesseras-tu d'être le jouet sombre / au carnaval des autres (Césaire [1983], 348). 27 Quand voudras-tu que le monde / enfin maître du monde / te fasse une autre place que la place immonde / qu'octroient les bons maîtres / à leurs bons esclaves? (Melon-Degras [1974], 53). 28 Français étranger sans logis (Melon-Degras [1975], 85). 29 Et toi, mon pauvre Alfred, / tu es le vermisseau / sous les monceaux / de papier . . . Tes poèmes, apprêtés, / ont mis leur belle cravate et leur monocle / d'universitaire (Melon-Degras [1976], 61). 30 Voici s'envolant en fumée notre jeunesse, / voici écorchée vive aux clameurs des sirènes époumonées / notre illusion (Melon-Degras [1975], 30).

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Silence is a motif in several of the poems inspired by his life in Europe; it is frequently a metaphor for the indifference of city-dwellers increasingly out of touch with their fellows, cloistered in the "absorbed solitude of well-fed turkeys."31 The poet's vision of a society that has lost its humanity explains the virulence of "Les Salauds" (The bastards), which contains a bitter indictment of those whose consciences are permanently clear. Melon-Degras's use of colloquialism serves to distance him from an establishment that he despises: "The bastards are well shaven, / vote for freedom, / or for anything at all . . . They know that men are dying of cold and hunger / but that's not their problem. / They pray that God will forgive us / in the meanwhile. / In the meanwhile. / They preserve necessary silences."32 The same mordant irony is observed in a poem parodying the outrage of society's "solid citizens" faced with the slogans painted on the wall by the rebellious students of May 1968: "What a thought, comrade / what a thought / To be twenty, to not yet be old enough / to squander grandfather's hoard of experience . . . What a thought to make the dead walls speak."33 The resolute nonconformism expressed in such lines explains the importance in these poems of exile of the theme of solitude, the solitude of one whose sense of isolation and alienation would hardly be eased by a return to his native land. Indeed, a parallel may be drawn between the obsession with silence and solitude that dominates much of Melon-Degras's work (his second volume is entitled Le silence) and the mood prevailing in the love poems. Many of these betray a disenchantment with the dream of a satisfying and complete intimacy, a dream that nevertheless continues to haunt him, in the person of the elusive "invented Eurydice" to whom Avec des si, avec des mais is dedicated. At the core of these poems is the dream of an ideal union, a yearning never to be satisfied and yet endlessly compelling. The paradox inherent in the pursuit of a goal acknowledged to be inaccessible - a paradox essential to the human condition - is admirably expressed by several contradictory images in the poem "Prélude," suggesting on the one hand a protective intimacy, on the other a frustrating distance: "you / the abstract source of your absent hands; / you, / the unconceived promise; / you, / the warm cathedral of your heart, / the entrenched camp of your heart."34 In Avec des si, avec des mais Melon-Degras returns to the theme of exclusion from a state of grace with the poignant image of a child permanently cut off from a world of privilege and yet endlessly fascinated by the "provocative show-window" that is a reminder of all that he is missing: "you will be to me / like the impossible toy to the poor child . . . such a small nose glued sheepish / to the provocative show-window."35 The poet is clearly haunted by the spectre of separation and loss. The ultimate expression of the obsession with solitude and silence that marks Melon-Degras's love poetry is found in several poems reflecting a preoccupation with death, viewed as an inevitable absurdity, never to be accepted. Yet it is a passionate commitment to life that emerges from Melon-

31

solitude absorbée de dindons repus (Melon-Degras [1974], 94). Les salauds sont bien rasés, / votent pour la liberté, / ou pour n'importe quoi . . . Ils savent que l'on meurt de froid et de faim / mais ils n'y sont pour rien. / Ils prient pour que dieu nous pardonne / en attendant. / En attendant. / Ils ont des silences nécessaires (Melon-Degras [1975], 47). 33 A-t-on idée, camarade, / a-t-on idée, / d'avoir vingt ans, de n'être pas encore assez vieux, / de dilapider le patrimoine de l'expérience de grand-papa? . . . A-t-on idée d'insinuer la parole aux murs morts? (Melon-Degras [1974], 91). 34 toi, / la source abstraite de tes mains absentes; / toi, / la promesse inconçue; / toi, / la chaude cathédrale de ton coeur, / le camp retranché de ton coeur (Melon-Degras [1974], 16). 35 tu me seras / comme le jouet impossible à l'enfant pauvre . . . si menu nez collant penaud / à la provocante vitrine (Melon-Degras [1976], 61). 32

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Degras's several collections, despite an acute and sometimes despairing consciousness of the futility of so many efforts and ideals, both political and personal. This commitment - in the broadest sense of the word - is best expressed in the poems in which Melon-Degras articulates his concept of the poetic word. Whereas he shares with many of his contemporaries - and with the pioneers of the first generation - a need to highlight the flaws of an imperfect world, he seems less inclined to project a Utopian vision of the future. It is with characteristic understatement and a refusal to take himself too seriously that he indicates, in the poem "Avec des si, avec des mais," what he conceives his role as poet to be: "With ifs / with buts / black Orpheus / mad cupbearer in the desert / guardian of the keys to hell / frees the prisoners from silence . . . With ifs / my friend / with buts / you could remake the world / one never knows!" 36

Guadeloupe Sonny Rupaire's . . . cette igname brisée qu'est ma terre natale (. . . this broken yam that is my native land), the single volume on which his reputation is built, contains poems written over a period of ten years in both Creole and French that reveal a marked variation in tone and mood. Whereas Rupaire articulates in several poems a vision of réenracinement (rerooting), the negation of the fragmentation alluded to in the title, the collection hardly reflects a facile optimism: the numerous and sometimes strident cries of outrage are consonant with the political intransigence of the rebellious young man who deserted the French army because of his refusal to fight on the side of the colonizer in the bloody conflict that preceded the independence of Algeria. In many of his poems, the tone is deliberately provocative, reflecting the virulent anticolonialism of a generation who as young children - Rupaire was born in 1940 - saw the law transforming the West Indian possessions of France into Départements d'Outre-Mer as an aberration. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a poem dedicated to his father, written in 1962 at a time when the poet was resident in Algeria and caught up in the heady task of building a nation: "Conscious / we shall burst with our fists the long-dead slave cloud / anchored with impunity in the face of our sun."37 Yet this exuberant certainty is sometimes tempered by the painful awareness of the abdication of a people seduced by material advantages, more interested in survival than in revolution. In "Recuerdo" (I recall), written in Trinidad, Rupaire moves beyond mere nostalgia - which sometimes brings with it a tendency toward self-indulgence - to an admission of the complicity of the colonized: "I think as I stand before this window . . . of you / merchandise / offering itself to the first bidder / bent over in the fields / in search of a chimerical El Dorado."38 Such moments of despondency are rare in the poetry of Rupaire, however, perhaps because of his passionate belief in the creative possibilities of the future. It is the dynamic potential of Caribbean history that commands the poet's attention in "Matouba," inspired by the legendary exploit of Louis Delgrès, who chose to blow himself up with his three hundred comrades at Matouba, Guade36 Avec des si / avec des mais / Orphée noir / le fol échanson du désert / gardien des clefs d'enfer / libère les prisonniers du silence . . . Avec des si / mon bon ami / avec des mais / tu referas le monde / sait-on jamais! (Melon-Degras [1976],

17).

37 Conscients / nous crèverons du poing le long deuil de la nue négrière / impunément ancrée face à notre soleil (Rupaire [1973], 58). 38 Je pense devant cette vitre . . . à toi / cette marchandise / qui se donne au premier enchérisseur / pliée dans les sillons / à la recherche d'un chimérique El Dorado (Rupaire [1973], 28).

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loupe, in 1802 rather than accept a return to slavery: "and these naked bodies dying at the fingertips of the waves / Matouba / and blood in the sea and blood on the earth / Matouba / and three hundred bloods splashing in the face of your sky / Matouba."39 One notes the association of the image of blood - evocative of martyrdom and sacrifice - with a Césairean concept of vertical, liberating movement, suggesting the defiant posture of a man erect. Rupaire's poetry shares with Daniel Maximin's first novel L'isolé soleil (Lone sun) - which also focuses on the Matouba episode in 1802 - a concern with rewriting a truncated history. More important to Rupaire, however, is the need to invent an exemplary future, a need that is closely linked to the poet's concept of the power of the word. It is significant that he should describe himself, in the introductory poem of . . . cette igname brisée qu'est ma terre natale, entitled simply "Poésie," as "the mango preparing the way for the season of orgies."40 This succulent seasonal fruit, so widely appreciated by Caribbean palates, is clearly a symbol of abundance and fulfillment, and the poet sees himself as forerunner, prophet, prefiguring a long-awaited time of plenty. "Poésie" contains several other images of natural and human fertility, suggesting the importance of rebirth and regeneration, and ends with a triumphant vision of sovereignty in which the "broken yam" of the collection's title puts down new roots: "The night has incrusted my forehead with foetuses / two stars hatching this broken yam, / my native land . . . In the depths of the Atlantic / my broken yam / will anchor its roots."41 The image of the yam is an expression of the poet's concept of separation and fragmentation as an essential aspect of the Caribbean past. In another poem, the contours of his native Guadeloupe again provide a metaphor for the experience of its people. In "De quelle Amazone" (Of what Amazon) the vulnerability of these island "specks on the ocean," as they appeared to General de Gaulle, is suggested by an image of fragmentation inspired by the legend of the Amazons. In Rupaire's vision, the island becomes a "breast" that has been amputated from the continental body: "My island this breast of some unknown Amazon / fringed with sea or foam or milk."42 Whereas it is a sense of futility that dominates in "De quelle Amazone," in "Poésie" Rupaire is able to transcend the mutilations of the past, having finally made his peace with the memories of separation and loss. It is interesting that he should envisage a connection not simply with the soil of the new homeland, but also with a sea that has complex associations for the island peoples of the Caribbean, who cannot help but be fascinated by the dream of crossing the ocean. In "Ultramarine," the final poem of the French section of. . . cette igname brisée qu 'est ma terre natale, the poet returns to the motif of the sea and its significance for Caribbean folk. In contrast to the earlier "Poésie," this poem constitutes a subtler, more elliptical statement of his hopes for the future; one feels that with increasing maturity Rupaire is overcoming a tendency to didacticism and oversimplification that marred some of his early work. After an initial reference to the infamous Triangular Trade of the slave epoch and to the more recent phenomenon of institutionalized migration from the Departments to France, he moves on to focus on the peoples of the archipelago, linked by the shared sea: "I am from overseas: / from the sea of desperation / where from Caracas to Guantánamo wave / tirelessly on the waters / 39 et ces corps nus mourant au bout des doigts des vagues / Matouba / et le sang dans la mer et le sang dans la terre / Matouba / et trois cents sangs giclés vers ton ciel / Matouba (Rupaire [1973], 42). 40 la mangue qui prépare à la saison des orgies (Rupaire [1973], 15). 41 La nuit a incrusté mon front de foetus / deux étoiles couvant cette igname brisée / qu'est ma terre natale . . . Au sein de l'Atlantique / mon igname brisée / ancrera ses racines (Rupaire [1973], 15-16). 42 Mon île ce sein de je ne sais quelle Amazone / frangé de mer ou d'écume ou de lait (Rupaire [1973], 32).

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the green hands of a shipwrecked humanity. / I am overseas: from Santo Domingo to Trinidad / green parenthesis of American islands / so rich in their destitution / and so poor in their richness. / And I brave the violence of the waves reaching out to the sun / to the sun / to the sun."43 These lines are not without bitterness, reflecting the ambiguous situation of the Caribbean Departments of France, marginalized by their very association with the former metropolis - one notices the irony contained in "I am from overseas." Yet what is important in "Ultramarine" is the poet's assumption of his Américanité or Americanness - in the sense Latin Americans give to the term - his feeling of kinship with all those whose shores are washed by the waves, which are evocative of hardships past and present. Finally - the lines quoted above represent the last stanza of "Ultramarine" - Rupaire is able to move away from the wounds of the past to affirm his faith in renewal: the image of "green hands" waving on the islands is evocative of the majestic and luxuriant trees that are a defiant sign of life and hope in a region frequently threatened and sometimes battered by devastating winds. Similarly, a muted optimism is reflected in the image of the persona immersed in the sea, symbol of purification and regeneration, an image that confirms that Caribbean man is now finally in his element, surrounded by waters no longer viewed as hostile. That the vision of renewal and survival communicated in "Ultramarine" is central to Rupaire's thought is confirmed by the poem's position at the end of the section in French. The remaining poems are written in Creole, reflecting a decision taken by Rupaire in 1968 to write exclusively in the language that is the real "mother tongue" of all his compatriots. Although one may regret that Rupaire's voice was no longer to be heard by a non-Creole-speaking public, one can hardly contest the validity of his choice, and it may be appropriate at this point to consider the implications of such an orientation in the wider context of francophone Caribbean literature. The emergence of an original literature in Creole in the Overseas Departments since the late 1960s is undoubtedly related to the general impulse toward sovereignty and authenticity resulting from increasing dissatisfaction with a status considered to be artificial. The interest of this recent emphasis on Creole becomes clearer when one considers the relative marginality of the long-repressed vernacular language in the development of an authentic literary tradition. Aimé Césaire, in extending the limits of the French language to write a "black French," was not tempted by a language considered at the time of the emergence of the literature of negritude to be exclusively the medium of oral expression. Yet the recent success in the Departments of poets such as Joby Bernabé and Monchoachi confirms the potential of Creole as a vehicle of literary expression. One should not overstate the numerical importance of this phenomenon in relation to the volume of poetry produced in French, but it is important to acknowledge its significance. Dany Bébel-Gisler rightly points out that Creole represents the "symbolical archives of the Caribbean people."44 Although it would be premature to make any definitive assertions in this regard, the existence in Haiti of a strong tradition of Creole poetry would seem to suggest that the impulse to write in one's mother tongue, which is linked to a more general concern in the Departments with the affirmation of a disputed identity, is a fundamental one in these societies, which have experienced the trauma of cultural domination.

43 Je suis d'outre-mer: / de la mer de désespérance / où de Caracas à Guantânamo s'agitent / sur les flots inlassablement / les mains vertes d'une humanité naufragée. / Je suis outre-mer: / de Saint-Domingue à Trinidad / parenthèse verte d'îles américaines / si riches de leur dénuement / et si pauvres dans leur richesse. / Et je brave à pleins bras la violence des flots vers le soleil / vers le soleil / vers le soleil (Rupaire [1973], 63). 44 archive symbolique du peuple dans la Caraïbe (Bébel-Gisler [1976] 208).

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Haiti René Depestre, the most celebrated Haitian poet of the contemporary period, has spent most of his adult life in political exile. For Depestre, as for many other Haitian intellectuals, exile has been a painful necessity rather than an option. The enfant terrible who participated at the age of twenty in the protests leading to the downfall of the Lescot regime in 1946 could hardly remain silent when faced, on his return to Haiti in 1958 after an eleven-year absence, with the excesses of the Duvalier government. Subjected to constant scrutiny and confined to Port-au-Prince, Depestre chose exile in Cuba, which was to be his adopted home until 1978 when he moved to France. Despite this enforced absence from Haiti and despite the passion with which he embraced the cause of the Cuban revolution, Depestre remains essentially a Haitian poet, identifying with the continuing anguish of his countrymen, exploiting the mythology of his heritage, and returning frequently to his roots. Jacmel, the small town in which he was born in 1926, is inextricably linked, in the mind of this "sea animal," to the nearby sea, a sea whose capriciousness reflected the moods of the impatient adolescent who would become the angry young man: "I am also the sea of Jacmel / I foam, I rage, I'm a bitch of a sea / A sea without a single benevolent wave."45 Though undoubtedly tinged with nostalgia, the childhood memories associated with Jacmel are, however, far from idyllic, and include the harsh reality of hunger. A tribute to the poet's mother in "Complainte des mères malheureuses" (Lament of the unhappy mothers) is also an indictment of an implacable poverty: "You lost it all the gold flowing in your heart / A machine stole it a sewing machine / A machine for mending the rents that hunger like a nail / kept making in the silk of our days."46 The image of the exemplary, self-sacrificing mother is certainly a familiar one in Caribbean literature; parallels spring to mind in Césaire's Cahier, in which the sewing machine also appeared as a tyrannical presence, as well as in a poem by the Jamaican Lorna Goodison, who honored, in Tamarind Season, a mother who "breast-fed / my brother while she sewed; and she taught us to read while she sewed and / she sat in judgment over all our disputes as she sewed. / She could work miracles" (Goodison [1980], 62). Depestre's mother is less of a miracle worker, however, and her valiant attempts to "mend the rents" in the fabric of their lives seem futile. His evocation of his own mother and his childhood cannot be dissociated from a larger and somber vision of a deprived Haiti: "Oh homeland in rags with a starry band / On your beautiful eyes a ball and chain on your feet."47 Yet the stanza from which these lines are taken ends with the image of "a summer rain / Falling with passion on your naked body,"48 revealing the complexity of the poet's attitude toward his country; implicit in this image is a sense of the intimate bond between Haitians and their land. In the title poem of the same volume, however, the female imagery is above all evocative of exploitation and violation: "How many pirates have explored with their arms / the dark depths of your flesh."49 And the pain associated with the poet's obsessive memories of his homeland is palpable in two poems "for my chained country," the first from the early Minerai noir (Black ore), the second from Poète à Cuba (Poet in Cuba), published in 1976. In the early poem, Haiti is personified as a 45 Je suis aussi la mer de Jacmel: / J'écume j'enrage je suis une putain de mer / Une mer sans une vague de bonne volonté (Depestre [1976], 38). 46 Tu le perdis tout l'or qui coulait dans ton coeur / Une machine le vola une machine à coudre / A repriser les accrocs que la faim tel un clou / Ne cessait de faire dans la soie de nos jours (Depestre [1956], 27). 47 Oh Patrie en haillons avec sur tes beaux yeux / Le bandeau étoilé un boulet à tes pieds (Depestre [1956], 35). 48 une pluie / D'été tombant avec passion sur ton corps nu (Depestre [1956], 35). 49 Combien de pirates ont exploré de leurs armes / Les profondeurs obscures de ta chair (Depestre [1956], 10).

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helpless captive, cut off from the light: "Here you are with your lights tied behind your back . . . And the fetters of hunger on the weary ankles of your dances."50 One notes the fusion of the image of captivity with that of darkness, a frequently used metaphor in Depestre's work - and in that of many of his countrymen - for the tragic years of the Duvalier regime. The later poem, entitled "Nouveau poème de ma patrie enchaînée" (New poem on my country in chains), returns to the somber political realities of Haiti, with a difference in intensity apparent in its harsh images evocative of torture. The poet is obsessed by a nightmarish vision of the "eyes" of his country "piled up / Like oysters in a basket."51 The dedication of the poem to Jacques Stephen Alexis, tortured and murdered by Duvalier's henchmen in 1961, is illuminating. The use of the word enchaîné in the title of both poems is also instructive. Depestre is clearly playing on the meaning of this word for a Creole speaker, who would see in it an allusion to the zombi, an essential figure in the poet's concept of Haitian dispossession. Passionately committed to the "dezombification" of his people, Depestre describes himself in Poète à Cuba as "a great thief of sea salt,"52 an image which once again suggests that of the zombi, since in Haitian mythology it is by eating salt that the zombi can free himself from bondage and regain his humanity and creativity. It is this commitment to the restoration of the lost dignity of his countrymen - and of all the oppressed peoples of the world - that explains the provocative tone of many poems and the bitterness and rage with which Depestre relates a tale of exploitation reaching far beyond the shores of Haiti. This bitterness marks the title poem of Minerai noir as Depestre offers a deliberately shocking vision of the chosification (reduction to an object) of the black man: "And the chemists just barely missed coming up with / the means of obtaining some precious alloy / With black metal and ladies could / almost have dreamt of kitchen utensils / Made of Senegalese nigger."53 It also emerges from the many references to the condition of the black American, and from the portrayal of a white Southern family in Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian West), 1967. It should also be noted in this regard that although Depestre, among the poets discussed here, is closest in spirit to the negritude generation, his solidarity with those of his race is not born of a belief in a mystical, unchangeable black essence. Nor does his evocation of the ancestral homeland stem from a wish to return to the past. In the early poem "Afrique," he calls on Africa to summon up a cosmic energy to free herself (the poem is written before the independence of the African colonies), using imagery that is clearly menacing: "Africa more dazzling than a vegetation of knife blades / carve out your peoples in a sudden bolt of lightning / put your cyclones in their blood like bullets in a gun."54 The poet, who frequently describes himself as a "volcano," is evidently espousing the Césairean concept of a necessary, purifying, creative violence. Yet these and many other such lines in Depestre's poetry should not be allowed to obscure another extremely important facet of his work - the yearning for tenderness and harmony. Perhaps it is the love poetry that best illustrates this fundamental longing for unity and concord. Far from being a parenthesis in the work of the committed Marxist, these poems are an integral part of his lit50 Te voici avec tes lumières liées derrière le dos . . . Et les fers de la faim aux chevilles fatiguées de tes danses (Depestre [1956], 11). 51 entassés / Comme des huîtres dans un panier (Depestre [1976], 64). 52 un grand voleur de sel marin (Depestre [1976], 37). 53 Et tout juste si des chimistes ne pensèrent / Aux moyens d'obtenir quelque alliage précieux / Avec le métal noir tout juste si des dames ne / Rêvèrent d'une batterie de cuisine / En nègre du Sénégal. . . . (Depestre [1956], 9). 54 Afrique plus aveuglante qu'une végétation de lames de couteaux / taille tes peuples dans l'avènement d'un coup soudain d'éclair / mets tes cyclones dans leur sang comme une rangée de balles au canon d'un fusil (Depestre [1956], 51).

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erary expression, ranging in mood from the light-hearted evocation of the transience of first love in "Sous les ponts de l'amour" (Beneath the bridges of love) in Minerai noir through the joyous celebration of sensuality of "Blason du corps féminin" (Blazon of the feminine body) in Journal d'un animal marin (Journal of a marine animal), 1964, to the somber farewell to love in "La dernière hirondelle" (The last swallow) in that same collection. In "Autoportrait d'un volcan à Paris" (Self-portrait of a volcano in Paris), from Poète à Cuba, the metaphor of the volcano loses its political resonance, illustrating Depestre's ability to change his emotional register without warning, as the poet evokes, with puckish humor, a youthful lasciviousness barely held in check. In a more serious vein, the poems inspired by his first wife Edith document the transition from youthful optimism to disillusionment and loss. In "Au large d'Edith" (Off shore from Edith), Depestre associates with his beloved "Dito" several images that usually, in his work, evoke happiness and fertility, particularly that of the tree reaching exultantly for the sky: "For me your dress rises like a star . . . And here I am a tree sparkling with larks / here I am taking possession of a sky full of blue."55 In the later Journal d'un animal marin, however, Dito has become a nostalgic memory, evoked with poignancy in "L'autre face de la lune" (The other side of the moon), in which the poet recalls a rare affinity: ". . . tell her / That we were from the same root. / That her innocence was sister to mine, / That my sadness flowed from hers."56 In the moving "La dernière hirondelle," subtitled "Poème de fin d'amour" (Poem of love's end), Depestre looks back, perhaps through the rose-colored glasses of memory, at their "fertile follies," using natural imagery that suggests the interplay of light and darkness and the reconciliation of opposites: "I wanted you to be / the mysterious night / And the lyrical wind moving through my trees / And the glistening of the moon / On the destiny of my black waters."57 Other love poems, less personal in tone, exalt passion and sensuality. Depestre harks back to a Renaissance tradition in the erotic "Blason du corps féminin," for example, depicting the woman's body as vital, essential, a source of life and regeneration: "The throne of sea salt, the element / In which our innocence is awakened / To cover us with glory!"58 In "Magie verte," Depestre associates with the "Caribbean fairy" to whom the poem is dedicated two images essential to his sensibility, images that convey the fragile optimism characteristic of his later work: "There are in your young woman's night / Fruit trees which never sleep . . . Your stars are all I have in this world / to guide me through the night of others."59 Perhaps the importance of woman in Depestre's poetry is that she alone can ease the pain of exile and the loss of the youthful idealism that had marked the early volumes as well as the revolutionary newspaper La Ruche. The forty-odd years since the publication of Etincelles have brought their portion of disappointment, a disappointment hinted at in Poète à Cuba, in which Depestre sees himself as victim of "the

55 Pour moi ta robe se lève comme une etoile . . . et me voici un arbre étincelant d'alouettes / me voici qui prends en charge tout le bleu du ciel (Depestre [1956], 39). 56 dis-lui / Que nous étions de la même racine, / Que son innocence était soeur de la mienne, / Que ma tristesse était un affluent de sa tristesse (Depestre [1964], 25). 57 Je voulais que tu sois / La nuit mystérieuse / Et le vent lyrique dans mes arbres / Et le scintillement de la lune / Sur le destin de mes eaux noires (Depestre [1964], 83). 58 Le trône du sel marin, l'élement / Où se réveille notre innocence / Pour nous couvrir de gloire! (Depestre [1964], 53). 59 Il y a dans ta nuit de jeune femme / Des arbres fruitiers qui ne dorment jamais . . . Je n'ai au monde que tes étoiles / Pour me guider dans la nuit des autres (Depestre [1964], 79, 81).

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lack of tenderness / Which holds our age by the throat."60 Yet in "Un chant pour Aimé Césaire" (A song for Aimé Césaire), which Claude Couffon published in his 1986 presentation of Depestre's work, it is clear that a keen awareness of the harsh realities of the human condition has not prevented him from reaching for the skies, like the branches of the trees that he frequently invokes: "Césaire more glorious tom-tom than ever, / master of the satellite to which we entrust / the journeys of our best breadfruit trees."61 The pain of exile already highlighted in the work of René Depestre was to find wider expression in the poetry of a younger generation of writers marked by the long night of the Duvalier regime. It is significant that almost all of the writers who were responsible for the short-lived but important journal Haïti Littéraire were to leave Haiti in the course of the 1960s. One of the concerns shared by the young writers who began to publish their work in the early 1960s was the need to distance themselves from some of the preoccupations of an earlier generation, and particularly from those associated with negritude and socialist realism. Anthony Phelps, an outstanding representative of the Haïti-Littéraire group, describes the lost African past as "impossible roots" in his 1980 collection La bélière caraïbe (The Caribbean sheep's bell): "What need is there to have impossible roots / while our Caribbean humus is weighed down with mulatto manure riddled with cries with tears with blood."62 He further denies any filial ties either with Africa or with Europe: "I do not feel myself to be a son of Africa / even less so of Cartesian Europe / And I have no memory of the bottom of a ship's hold nor of conquering galleons."63 Yet Phelps is in no doubt about his identity, and his sense of belonging to the Caribbean is reminiscent of Glissant's antillanité, with the difference that he does not share the Martinican poet's concept of the importance of memory. However, the affirmation of the validity of a creole culture hardly diminishes the pain implicit in his portrayal of his fellow Haitians exiled in Northern cities as rootless, homeless people. Phelps, arrested in 1963 and forced to leave Haiti in 1964 after a period of imprisonment, speaks of a separation more immediate than that remembered by the poets of the negritude generation, of a loss more poignant than that shared by all the descendants of the transplanted Africans. The predicament of the Haitians of the "new diaspora" is movingly evoked in the long poem "La nuit des invertébrés" (The night of the invertebrates) in Motifs pour le temps saisonnier (Motifs for seasonal weather). Phelps addresses his "Brothers in exile / companions with powdered feet. . . All we have now are gestures of smoke / to tell of the season when the guinep trees are in blossom."64 The image of the guinep tree is striking; the fruit that it bears, unlike the better-known mango, for example, which is easily found in any area with a large West Indian population, is intimately associated with the lost homeland of these "transplanted blacks / sitting in the shade of skyscrapers / where there is no echo from the Country of yesterday."65 The tree is for many Caribbean

60

le manque de tendresse / Qui serre notre époque au gosier (Depestre [1976], 33). Césaire plus glorieux tam-tam que jamais, / maître du satellite auquel nous confions / les voyages de nos meilleurs arbres à pain (Couffon [1986], 188). 62 Quel besoin d'avoir des racines impossibles / alors que notre humus caraïbe possède son pesant de fumier métis pourri de cris de larmes et de sang (Phelps [1980], 89). 63 je ne me ressens point fils de l'Afrique / encore moins de l'Europe cartésienne / Et je n'ai point mémoire de fond de cale ni souvenance de gallions conquérants (Phelps [1980], 90). 64 Frères d'exil / compagnons aux pieds poudrés . . . Nous n'avons plus que gestes de fumée / pour conter le temps des kénépiers en fleurs (Phelps [1976], 41). 65 nègres transplantés / assis à l'ombre des gratte-ciel / où le Pays d'hier est sans echo (Phelps [1976], 42). 61

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poets a sort of New World totem suggestive of continuity and belonging. Further, the tree has mystical associations for the Haitian because of its role in the voudou religion. The absence of trees on the bare sidewalks of large cities is therefore an effective metaphor for the tragic homelessness of these migrants condemned to live by memory in an imaginary homeland. The vague melancholy evident in Phelps's evocation of what he calls, in a poem significantly entitled "Attente" (Waiting), "this life in parentheses"66 takes on more definite shape as he writes of the death of a friend assassinated in Haiti because of his opposition to the regime. The murder in July 1969 of Raymond Jean-François brings to a brutal end an exchange of letters that had constituted a tenuous link with Phelps's homeland: "Comrade petrified under the hibiscus / Now nothing more than the scent of boxwood / breath / North wind / You too you've lost the sesame / Disintegrated Ali Baba."67 The sardonic reference to the magical password "Open Sesame" is an allusion to the obscurantist Griot ideology of the 1930s, based on the assumption of black mysticism. Given the continuing humiliation of the Haitian people both at home and abroad, it is difficult for Haitian writers to avoid pessimism and even despair. Yet in a poem dedicated to René Depestre, Phelps clearly wavers between discouragement and a stubborn confidence in the ability of Caribbean peoples - and Caribbean poets - to join together in creating a new world. The poem plays on the titles of several of Depestre's best-known volumes, and it is clear that Phelps is inspired and heartened by the example of his brother "of noble ore." But the younger writer seems to lack the sense of purpose that is reflected in much of Depestre's work, and he fears that one day even the poetic word will lose its meaning: "If I say carnival / you reply socialism / and your voice from the open sea takes on its Shango tone / streaking the Caribbean night with spark-words / The time of the Christian West / gives way to the reign of Caliban / In the algebra of exile / I can only play / at words which do not make sentences / oh difficult cry of writing . . . the master words / become jumbled."68 Yet Phelps, who differs from Depestre in his refusal to use poetry as a vehicle for his politics, continues to search for "the master words," and Haitian poetry remains alive in the work of other writers in exile, writers such as Davertige, Serge Legagneur and Jean-Claude Charles, as well as in the work of those few who have chosen to confront in their homeland the formidable problem of writing in an atmosphere of extraordinary repression. Frankétienne is the foremost writer in this latter group. His work is taken up by A. J. Arnold in his contribution to the essay genre (below). In concluding this discussion of the poetry of the past few decades, it is useful to consider briefly the question of engagement or commitment, a tradition in Caribbean literature to which most contemporary writers remain faithful. The presence in so many works of a landscape that is obviously much more than a backdrop is often a reflection of the writer's passionate involvement with his people, and the conviction that urgent tasks await all men of good faith has caused writers like Sonny Rupaire to relegate personal concerns to the background. An excess of militancy can, of course, cause poetry to degenerate into forgettable prose. Even a writer of the stature of René 66

Cette vie entre parenthèses (Phelps [1976], 52). Camarade pétrifié sous l'hibiscus / Tu n'es plus que parfum de buis / souffle / vent du Nord / Toi aussi tu l'as perdu le sésame / Ali Baba désintégré (Phelps [1976], 44). 68 Si j'avance carnival / tu réponds socialisme / et ta voix du grand large prend son air de Shango / striant la nuit caraïbe de paroles-étincelles / Le temps de l'Occident chrétien / cède sa place alors au règne de Caliban / Dans l'algèbre de l'exil / moi je ne peux que jouer / aux mots qui ne font pas de phrases / ô difficile cri de l'écriture . . . les maîtres-mots / se télescopent (Phelps [1976], 58). 67

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Depestre does not always avoid banality and a tendency to prosaic statement (one notices, for example, a regrettable lack of originality in some of the poems in Poète à Cuba that reflect Depestre's ideological commitment). Yet engagement does not imply a suspension of aesthetic considerations, nor does the continuing focus on a few dominant themes necessarily suggest an impoverishment of francophone Caribbean literature. Perhaps it is Edouard Glissant who best illustrates this point, constantly exploiting to the fullest the rich suggestive potential of language. It is evident, however, that several writers are tempted by the urge to explore private obsessions and anxieties, and the future may well see a further widening of the thematic range of Caribbean poetry. Such a movement can be tentatively traced in the work of Alfred Melon-Degras, for example, while René Depestre stands out in his ability to reach beyond the stereotype of the "strong" Caribbean woman to convincingly celebrate human sensuality and passion. One can hardly predict the relative importance of such concerns in the years ahead. It is clear, however, that West Indian poets are not likely to turn their backs on the urgent problems and aspirations of their young peoples. Although the perils of literary mimétisme or mimicry are real, it is an oversimplification to suggest that echoes of some of the themes of negritude in contemporary writing reflect a lack of originality. The wish expressed by Césaire in the Cahier to be "the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth" (Césaire [1983], 45)69 is implicit in the words of Joseph Polius as he promises his people to send forth their unspoken message: "For you / morning and evening I shall sharpen against the silence / bags of migratory birds."70 Although an overwhelming concern with the pays natal has survived in the contemporary period, the time of the nostalgic retour aux sources is clearly over. The past is not forgotten: the frequent references to the heroes of black resistance in the Caribbean - legendary figures such as Toussaint, Dessalines, Delgrès, and Makandal - reflect a continuing desire to understand and to rewrite history. But the image of Africa has lost the powerful emotional charge it had in the poetry of the first generation, and there is little of the lingering nostalgia for a distant past that one associates with a poet like Damas. Third World concerns, as well as a sense of belonging to a particular region and a particular nation, have tended to replace the preoccupation with race. What has emerged in the last few decades is an understanding of creole culture and of the existence of a common Caribbean sensibility. It is against this background that métissage, or creolization, is frequently viewed not as a racial phenomenon but as a metaphor for the diversity out of which an original culture has grown. Glissant and Phelps share the perception of cultural métissage as potentially enriching: in the words of the Haitian poet, the land itself is "Mulatto cast in magical molasses."71 Seeking their salvation within rather than beyond the native land, many writers express a desire for enracinement (rooting), a desire that has also stirred anglophone poets such as Derek Walcott and Dennis Scott. In "Homecoming," the latter urges his fellow Jamaicans to turn their eyes away from glittering Northern cities: "It is time to plant / feet in our earth. The heart's metronome / insists on this arc of islands / as home" (Scott [1973], 7). Perhaps it is the frequent use of tree imagery that best conveys an increasing sense of rootedness in francophone Caribbean poetry. But other natural images also suggest an intimate bond with the land, images such as Rupaire's "broken yam," and the dachines replantés (replanted dasheens) evoked in the following lines from Joseph

69 70 71

la bouche des malheurs qui n'ont point de bouche (Césaire [1983], 44). Pour toi / matin et soir j'aiguiserai contre le silence / des sacs d'oiseaux migrateurs (Polius [1977], 14). Métisse coulée en mélasse magique (Phelps [1980], 93).

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Polius's Martinique debout (On your feet, Martinique), which affirm the survival of a core of integrity in a people surrounded by the corrupting influences of the consumer society: "under the neon of the prisunics / my land reconquered / in the ocean / replanted dasheens."72 Polius's choice of image is felicitous, since crops such as dasheen and yam can be seen as symbols of resistance to the allpowerful sugarcane, which usually has negative connotations in Caribbean literature. A shared New World sensibility is reflected in various images that have a special meaning for the writers of the region. The importance generally accorded to the familiar landscape that is an integral part of the Caribbean experience may be seen as evidence of the claiming of one's island as permanent homeland. Hence the resonance of the image of the sea, hence the now generally accepted symbolism of the volcano. The vitality of contemporary francophone West Indian poetry hardly needs emphasis; indeed, it can be seen as a reflection of the general effervescence characteristic of peoples in the process of self-discovery and self-creation. In concluding this essay, which has focused on some of the new poetic voices in the region, it is perhaps fitting to go back to the point of departure, to Aimé Césaire, who returned to poetry in 1982 with moi, laminaire. . . (i, laminaria . . .), justifying the tribute paid him by fellow poet René Depestre, whose summary of Césaire's contribution to Caribbean literature is illuminating: "I sing of Césaire, I laugh, I dance with joy / at this man, obstinately obsessed with roots and justice / I sing of the amazed force of the poet / who escorts the sap to the top of the cotton tree."73 And Césaire himself confirms his fidelity to his literary roots in an interview with Daniel Maximin in which he states that poetry, for him, is "the essential word," asserting that "peoples are born with poetry."74 An analysis of the literature of recent decades suggests that, whereas the obsession with "roots and justice" persists, not all of the younger writers share a Césairean belief in the ability of the poet to propel "the sap to the top of the cotton tree." Some of the excitement born of the historical moment of negritude has been dissipated in the intervening years, and literary creation may often appear to be a compensatory phenomenon. It is therefore with a certain caution that Anthony Phelps suggests, in La bélière caraïbe, what may be an explanation of the survival of the poetic word even in the unusual Haitian context: "Poem domain of the possible dictated by the invisible / When I draw a boat on the wall / do not be surprised / if I climb on board and head for sea. One frequently has the feeling that contemporary Caribbean poetry reflects a devastating collective loss of innocence. Jack Corzani's comment on the mood of the literature as a whole is worthy of note, although it is perhaps less applicable to the poetry than to the novel: "the overall impression is that of an unfathomable despair."76 The frequent use of silence as a metaphor for apathy and abdication is revealing. The Martinican Georges Desportes expresses a frightening sense of impotence in the following lines from Cette île qui est la nôtre (This island of ours): "We have to cry in silence. And the words are dumb, the sentences dead. The very cry is buried in the throat."77

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sous le néon des prisunics / ma terre reconquise / dans l'océan / des dachines replantés (Polius [1977], 5). Je chante Césaire, je ris, je danse de joie / pour l'homme entêté de racines et de justice, / je chante la force émerveillée du poète / qui convoie la sève à la cime du fromager (Couffon [1986], 188). 74 les peuples naissent avec la poésie (Maximin [1982], 7). 75 Poème lieu du possible dictée de l'invisible / Quand je dessinerai un bateau sur le mur / ne t'étonne point / si je monte à bord et prends le large (Phelps [1980], 123). 76 l'impression globale est bien celle d'un insondable désespoir (Corzani [1978], 6:194). 77 Il nous faut crier en silence. Et les mots sont muets, les phrases mortes. Le cri lui-même s'enfonce dans la gorge (Desportes [1973], 19). 73

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Voices

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It was in speaking of French Guiana that Aimé Césaire first used the emotive expression "genocide by substitution" to describe the institutionalized migration that began in the 1960s. And a disquieting melancholy pervades the work of the Guianese Elie Stephenson, who presents a chilling vision of a dying creole society: "We move forward looking behind us / To see at what point nothingness begins / but the emptiness is inside us / statues of burnt silt / that the crows will disdain."78 These terrifying images hardly represent the spirit of the literature as a whole, however, a literature that defies the sort of definition that the literary historian might wish to establish. Contradiction and ambivalence are inherent in the Caribbean experience, and the ability to dream and to project a vision of future fulfillment is still an important aspect of the poetic impulse. Perhaps it is Sonny Rupaire who best sums up a concept of poetry shared by many of his fellow writers: "Around a bend in my silences /I have come upon an eternity. /I am the mango preparing the way / for the season of orgies."79

Bibliography Anon. 1969. Le procès des Guadeloupéens: dix-huit patriotes devant la Cour de Sûreté de l'Etat français. n.p.: CO.GA.SO.D. Bébel-Gisler, Dany. 1976. La langue créole, force jugulée. Paris: L'Harmattan. Césaire, Aimé. 1982. moi, laminaire . . . Paris: Seuil. —. 1983. Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Trans. with intro. and notes by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Corzani, Jack. 1978. La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises. 6 vols. Paris; Fort-de-France: Désormeaux. Couffon, Claude. 1986. René Depestre. Poètes d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Seghers. Depestre, René. 1945. Etincelles. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat. —. 1956. Minerai noir. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1964. Journal d'un animal marin. Paris: Seghers. —. 1967. Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1976. Poète à Cuba. Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald. Desportes, Georges. 1973. Cette île qui est la nôtre. Ottawa: Leméac. Frankétienne. 1972. Ultravocal (Spirale). Port-au-Prince: Serge L. Gaston. Glissant, Edouard. 1956. Les Indes. Paris: Seuil. —. 1956. Soleil de la conscience. Paris: Seuil. —. 1960. Le sel noir. Paris: Seuil. —. 1964. Le quatrième siècle. Paris: Seuil. —. 1965. Poèmes. Paris: Seuil. —. 1969. L'intention poétique. Paris: Seuil. —. 1977. La Martinique: une société morbide et ses pulsions. Le Monde Diplomatique. June: 16-18. —. 1979. Boises: histoire naturelle d'une aridité. Paris; Angers: Acoma. Goodison, Lorna. 1980. Tamarind Season. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica. Maximin, Daniel. 1981. L'isolé soleil. Paris: Seuil. —. 1982. Interview. Alizés. (July-October):6. —. 1983. Aimé Césaire: la poésie, parole essentielle. Présence Africaine. 126:7-23.

78 nous avançons en regardant derrière / pour voir en quel point le néant prend sa source / mais le vide c'est nous / statues de vase brûlée / que les corbeaux dédaigneront (Stephenson [1975], 85). 79 Au détour de mes silences /j'ai trouve une éternité. / Je suis la mangue qui prépare / à la saison des orgies (Rupaire [1973], 15).

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Morrison

Melon-Degras, Alfred. 1974. L'habit d'Arlequin. Paris: Editions Saint-Germain-des-prés. —. 1975. Le silence. Paris: Editions Saint-Germain-des-prés. —. 1976. Avec des si, avec des mais. Paris: Editions Saint-Germain-des-prés. —. 1976. Battre le rappel. Paris: Editions Saint-Germain-des-prés. Morrison, Anthea. 1993. "Américanité" or "Antillanité"? Changing Perspectives on Identity in Post-Négritude Francophone Caribbean Poetry. New West Indian Guide. 67.1-2:33-45. Phelps, Anthony. 1976. Motifs pour le temps saisonnier. Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald. —. 1980. La bélière caraïbe. Montreal: Nouvelle Optique. Polius, Joseph. 1977. Martinique debout. Paris: L'Harmattan. Rupaire, Sonny. 1973.. . . cette igname brisée qu'est ma terre natale. Paris: Parabole. Scott, Dennis. 1973. Uncle Time. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1971. Problématique de la Négritude. Présence Africaine. 78:3-26. Stephenson, Elie. 1975. Une flèche pour le pays à l'encan. Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald. Tirolien, Guy. 1961. Balles d'or. Paris: Présence Africaine. Toumson, Roger. 1980. Les écrivains afro-antillais et la ré-écriture. Europe. 58.612:115-27. Walcott, Derek. 1981. Selected Poetry. London: Heinemann.

Literary Genres

Theater

Marronnage

and the Canon

Theater to the Negritude Era JURIS SILENIEKS Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA

Definitions of theater, particularly in the francophone region of the Caribbean, will vary according to one's notions of theater's functions. The créolistes, intellectuals and writers mainly from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, are among the most vocal revisionists of Caribbean literary efforts. They would insist that the true beginnings of autochthonous Caribbean theater are to be found in the soirées, the evening gatherings that slaves and later their descendants held on the plantations for their entertainment and spiritual sustenance. This was a kind of one-man show by the storyteller, a consummate actor, who talked, sang, mimed, and danced, always making the audience participate in the story. The story, directly or indirectly, would address the most profound aspirations of the audience: freedom and dignity. The storyteller, as some would insist, was a kind of maroon, a fugitive slave, an escapee from his servitude, who refused the system of enslavement and asserted his inalienable right to be free. The language was that of the people, Creole. This form of theater belonged to the oral arts, and it was not part of the culture of the ruling class. The soirées were a sort of spiritual marronnage, not simply the running away from authority, but an assertive nonacceptance of the imposed canon. The Caribbean storyteller has his parentage. He is closely related to the African griot and embodies many African oral traditions. Furthermore, although there are many significant divergences, it would not be too farfetched to point out how these theatrical forms and expressions of humanity's basic concerns about one's place in society parallel the beginnings of theater in ancient Greece and many other societies. There are of course those who maintain that the true beginnings of Caribbean theater go back to the early days of the colonial period. Here we see the extension of the postmedieval concept of theater as it was developing in Europe, particularly among the urban middle classes. In the francophone Caribbean and elsewhere in the region during the colonial period, theater performances were part of the cultural life among the white colonizers, popularly called békés in Martinique (zoreilles in Guadeloupe), and wealthy mulattos, the plantation owners and the upper middle classes in the more prosperous cities of Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. By and large, however, this theater was an artificial transplant, detached from the insular geographic and sociopolitical realities, imported from the metropolis or from Italy, made according to the established canons of prevailing aesthetics. It fulfilled the needs of its audiences who came to the theater to be entertained. And as such it served as an escape from the everpresent menace of violent slave rebellions and not less violent climatic catastrophes, hurricanes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions that visit the islands and transform this "potential Eden" into infernal sites.

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In Haiti, during the turbulent times that led to Haitian independence in 1804 and the subsequent internal political struggles, the theater arts survived very well, but manifested little originality. Melodramas and vaudevilles were popular as well as patriotic historical plays dealing with the glorious past but without much historical authenticity, concocted according to well-tested formulas for the elites to entertain, to facilitate good digestion. The authors, for the most part, lacked education and craftsmanship as well as talent. In a way, this theater of conformity and integration could be considered the opposite of the performance of the storyteller, the spiritual maroon, whose aim was to assert his resistance to authority. But among the undistinguished plays there are some noteworthy efforts by some serious commentators of the sociopolitical scene who in retrospect appear as harbingers of negritude, maroons of a sort. Juste Chanlatte, King Christophe's court poet, who figures in Aimé Césaire's play, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The tragedy of King Christophe), 1963, is one of the earliest champions of racial equality. His plays, sometimes commissioned by the court, magnify the exploits of the king, but not without some subtle critical commentary on the iniquities of royal ministrations. Massillon Coicou, whose literary fame as poet, playwright, and novelist was augmented by his political martyrdom at the hands of Haiti's president General Nord Alexis, who had him executed in 1908 for showing too much independent thought, was well received not only in his homeland but also in Paris. He called for patriotic sacrifices and honesty and he protested the plight of the black population. He served as the director of the unofficial Haitian National Theater and thus was highly influential in promoting Haitian theater arts. Yet apart from some individual achievements, Haitian theater in general did not develop a genuine national theatrical idiom. French poets and playwrights like Lamartine, Rostand, Banville held sway over the Haitian genius and stifled originality. The greatest ambition for most Haitian writers was to be read and appreciated in Paris. And this awarenes of the potential Parisian audiences made the Haitian playwright feign a sensibility that was not his. He did not ignore his audience, the Haitian elite, but as Jean Price-Mars, the celebrated Haitian ethnologist and writer, put it: "Our literary production will always remain cramped, thin, almost boneless, because it addresses an elite, cramped, thin and boneless."1 Haiti was but a spiritual province of France. The American occupation of Haiti (1915-34) not only spawned political resistance to a large extent precipitated by the occupiers' racism and arrogance but also gave a new amplitude to Haitian letters. Interest in Haitian folklore and voudou and in African sources gave rise to the Indigéniste movement. The anthropological studies of Jacques Roumain and Jean Price-Mars inspired authors like Jean Fernand Brierre, Carl Brouard, and Dominique Hippolyte. Poetry, however, remained the preferred genre among Haitian men of letters. Theater in the francophone Caribbean colonies, most notably in Martinique and Guadeloupe, followed similar patterns. Here, instead of the Haitian francophile elite, the békés represented the influential cultural factor. In Martinique, before the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902, Saint Pierre was the cultural capital of the island. Still today, among the ruins of the city, the theater occupies a central place, testifying to its importance prior to the catastrophe. But not unlike the theatrical situation in Haiti, in the two French colonies, theater was imitative and servile, catering to the prejudices and preferences of the white upper classes. The literary mood that flourished, particularly during the 1 notre production littéraire . . . restera toujours étriquée, maigre, désossée presque parce qu'elle s'adresse à une élite étriquée, maigre et désossée (Price-Mars [1959], 105).

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last half of the nineteenth century, is sometimes referred to derogatorily as doudouisme, an expression derived from the French adjective doux, meaning sweet, mild, soft. These adjectives are often used to describe, in imitation of the Parnassian school, the beauties of the Caribbean landscape, especially its flora, whose lushness and colorfulness catered to the exotic tastes of the French readers. Again, this literature, concocted according to well-tested metropolitan recipes, did not show much authenticity or originality. The literary scene changed with the advent of negritude, when a new generation of maroons, who defied the canon and the code, came to the forefront. The word négritude was coined by Aimé Césaire and quickly made its fortune among black intellectuals. The movement's ideology was articulated primarily by three black students at the Sorbonne in the 1930s: Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, Léon Gontran Damas from Guiana, and Aimé Césaire from Martinique. The movement, much bandied about throughout the world since the Second World War, has been variously described and defined, lauded and denounced, but its basic feature remains the thrust to heighten black consciousness. Senghor tended to emphasize the commonality of the black race through certain biological characteristics, by positing notions like black beauty, black soul, for which he has been severely critized. Césaire stressed the common historical fate of the black race: colonialism in Africa, colonialism and slavery in the New World. Since Sartre, it has often been said that colonialism presents an essentially dialectical world view, yet theater was not the preferred genre of negritude writers. One notable exception is Aimé Césaire whose achievements in drama may very well equal his poetic efforts. And he must be considered as the foremost playwright of the negritude movement. Césaire has written four plays: Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs were silent), 1956, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The tragedy of King Christophe), 1963, Une saison au Congo (A season in the Congo), 1966, Une tempête (A tempest), 1969. They all deal in some form or other with the process of decolonization. Et les chiens se taisaient is a dramatic poem, not dissimilar, both in theme and even texture, to his famous poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), 1947, which launched his recognition as a poet of his people and a critic of Western culture. In the play there are characters and dialogue, but no causally progressive plot in the traditional sense. The dramatic form permits the author to heighten the confrontational tensions through dialogue, yet without the imposition of traditional dramatic requirements like characterization and concatenated plot. In a way, the play contains all the thematic strands that are to weave the fabric of Césaire's subsequent dramatic works, articulating most of the programmatic points of negritude. In typical Césairean fashion, the dramatic situation and locus are suspended between nonspecificity and concrete geopolitical realities, shuttling freely between the present and the past. The conflicts develop between the personal concerns of the hero and his responsibilities as a rebel leader of his people. The surrealistic texture permits a free association of scenes and images, without any attempt to impose a chronological and causal order. The plot deals with the fate of a rebellious youth who is awaiting his death in prison. The present in the prison cell is invaded by images of traumatic events in the history of the Antilleans: the arrival of the conquerors, the bishops, the merchants, the promoters, who came to subdue, to evangelize, to civilize the native rebel, who will be called Caliban in a later play. Violence and brutalization are the concomitants of colonization. Unable to recognize the validity of what lies outside his sphere of vision and experience, enclosed in his arrogance as a superior being, knowing himself the font of culture and truth, the colonizer denies the native's humanity since the native is not made in the image of the colonizer and is cul-

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turally different from him. In this dichotomous world, where upside down can be the right side up a state often exploited by later generations of playwrights to symbolize colonialism - insanity is undistinguishable from rationality and can lead to salvation, to understanding. Thus, in the play there are characters who are designated as insane, but their insanity endows them with insights the rational mind cannot fathom. The rebel, the maroon who cannot accept the imposed order, is struggling with inner contradictions. He cannot fully deny the colonizer's point of view, yet the humiliations grate on his sense of pride and inner worth. The personal tragedy of the lover who causes much suffering to his beloved, and of the son who denies his mother happiness, is entangled in a web of allegiances that pit his duty as a leader against his family. The Christ image, variously modulated, looms large in this colonial situation. The rebel is of course a direct descendant of the Caribbean maroon, the naysayer with a vision of the future. Other Biblical figures and African images intersect, the comic and the tragic intertwine. The colonizer, imagining himself crucified by his white man's burden to bring civilization and faith to the savages, cuts a comic figure, which contrasts in the tragic mode with the rebel's irreconcilable inner contradictions that cannot be solved without sacrificing a duty or an inclination of the heart. The play is cast well outside the conventions of stage realism in an ambiance that may suggest nightmare or insanity. Hence violent scenes like whipping and murder alternate in rapid succession with images of natural catastrophic events like cyclones and the nightmarish appearance of wild beasts. The absence of "well-rounded characters" and a plot imbedded in chronology and causality are meant to reinforce the images of colonization from the point of view of the colonized who refuses to accord the posturing interloper historical necessity and cultural mission. With his next plays, cast in a more stageable theatricality, Césaire moves to more specific settings. Césaire's intention has often been reported as recording the destinies of the black race throughout the world. His first installment treats the period of Haiti's struggle for independence, taking for its hero the colorful King Christophe, who has inspired a number of other literary efforts, such as Jean Fernand Brierre's dramatic poem "Au coeur de la Citadelle," and plays: Vergniaud Leconte's Le roi Christophe (King Christophe), René Philoctète's Monsieur de Vastey, and Jean-Baptiste Romane's La mort de Christophe (The death of Christophe), among others. Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones also borrows elements from the Christophe legend. Césaire's La tragédie du roi Christophe can be considered as a construct of multiple layers of inspiration. To some extent, it is a personal tragedy of a leader who has to invent his own scale of values when obligations collide: those of his public life and the demands of his private life. This theme occasionally surfaces but really does not constitute his tragedy. There is the Molieresque aspect of the bourgeois gentilhomme in the king, a bit comic at times but surely universal in the projection of a man vainglorious and naïve. More prominently, however, the play deals with the process of decolonization, and though set in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the play can be construed as a sort of manual for twentieth-century nation-builders in the wake of crumbling colonial empires. With the last French troops evicted from Haiti and Dessalines, the first emperor, assassinated soon afterward, Christophe, a coachman transformed into a general during the independence wars, established his kingdom in the north, while the southern regions of Haiti became a republic under the mulatto leader Pétion. Devastated by war, the country must start everything from scratch, but the most formidable task for Christophe, a latter-day Peter the Great, is the transformation of the brutal-

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ized former slaves into responsible, productive subjects. Ironically, to achieve his goals, to instill the work ethic, Christophe has to resort to many of the same cruel measures that the slavery system was famous for. As a symbol of his aspirations, he has his famous Citadel built on top of a rock overlooking the sea. He exacts suffering and effort worthy of the Egyptian pharaohs. In the process, human dignity becomes a luxury that the kingdom cannot yet afford. The play of course exceeds its historical geopolitical boundaries. It deals with the questions of human destiny and timeless human conditions, hence reaching out for the dimensions of tragedy. Christophe, the bourgeois gentilhomme, pompous and vain, acquires Promethean contours. In vain does Mme Christophe warn him against the excesses of his ambitions to attack nature and history. When he is felled by a stroke, his body is buried in quicklime in the Citadel, where chained to his rock he is to recognize the futility of his vast ambitions. Christophe's contemporary, Napoleon, suffers a similar fate on the barren rock of Saint Helena. Human history cannot be accelerated, and the human being, the material that Christophe vowed to recast in a different mold, is not malleable. Beyond the horizons, however, there is Mother Africa, whose embrace, it is vaguely suggested, could have made the difference. The play is cast in a mixture of theatrical modes to extend its reach for universality. There are prologues and intermezzi that suspend the plot to give pause for distantiation and reflection. People from various social strata, peasants, raftsmen, soldiers, offer comments from their perspective, which remains hidden from the royal view. Negritude is embedded in the destinies of the human race. Christophe, Christ, Prometheus, and Napoleon, each in his own way, have endowed humanity with a vision of perfectibility. The next installment in the sequence of Césaire's plays, Une saison au Congo, deals with the contemporary political scene in Africa during the decolonization period when the colonial powers were reluctantly leaving their possessions. The plot retraces a very complex web of events surrounding the Congo's struggle for independence. Patrice Lumumba, the constitutionally elected head of the Congolese government, is desperately trying to disengage his country from the grip of European politicians, bankers, and industrialists who refuse to relinquish their colonial power. To their intrigues are added the plots the United Nations, the United States, and unscrupulous Congolese are hatching to promote their own interests. Popular with the people, Lumumba succumbs to the treachery of his enemies and is ignominiously killed to be later declared a national hero by those who plotted his death. In spite of the morally unidimensional plot pitting the just against the interlopers, the play extends into a labyrinth of value systems. Patrice Lumumba is a typical Césairean hero, the leader of his people, impatient with the slow pace of history, impetuous and intransigent, not always wise, but instinctively driven to goodness, faithful and sincere, but not always diplomatic. It is inevitable that his enemies and some of those whom he trusted as his friends snare him in their schemes. Neocolonialism, African style, only incipient at the time when Césaire wrote the play, but soon to become the political plague of Africa, is in full evidence. Tribalism and racial prejudice, corruption by those who rule, greed and ambition unchecked, all doom the freedom regained from the colonial powers. Although some of the references to world politics, like the diplomacy of the ex-Soviet Union, may appear now a bit naïve, the play's relevance has not faded much. Despite its setting in a specific locale in a particular time period, the problems and questions the play raises are timeless and enhance the play's relevance far beyond the specificity of the ex-Belgian Congo. This relevance is further extended by the theatrical techniques Césaire employs.

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The play eschews any suggestion of stage realism. There are commentators and choric characters of various kinds, outside the plot, to provide a distanciation of the events. A comic touch, perhaps of Brechtian inspiration, is created when the Belgian bankers, while hatching their schemes to rule over the new state, speak in verse. Personification of abstract ideas drives home a particular point. A simultaneous stage showing the unfolding of two separate events in a kind of cinematographic fashion enlarges the spectator's perspective. If in La tragédie du roi Christophe a kind of Shakespearean afflatus can be noted, in Une saison au Congo Césaire's dramaturgy borrows from various theatrical modes, most notably perhaps from some of the Brechtian ideas concerning the epic theater, which, reshaped to fit the dramatic situation and to reach the desired effect, are sometimes supplemented with elements from African oral arts. Césaire's last play to date is a free adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Keeping the general outlines of the plot, Césaire has intensified the master/servant conflict and has added to the sociopolitical confrontation a dimension of cultural irreconcilables. Prospero, the bearer of the arrogant Western culture, the imperialistic interloper-colonizer, is challenged by Caliban, the illiterate native who, taught in the arts of literacy, has nevertheless refused to succumb to European authority. He refutes the European world view and Europe's values and proposes his own cultural point of view, a cosmology that has linguistic and folkloric elements of African, African-American, and African-Caribbean traditions. As in his other plays, here Césaire demythologizes certain European notions about its role in the shaping of the world and the "white man's burden" vis-à-vis the Third World. Notwithstanding the negative comments of some Western critics, the success of the play in many parts of the world including Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, testifies to Césaire's almost universal appeal. Césaire's prestige as a statesman, poet, and playwright of great originality and a founder of negritude inspired many followers, some of whom were unable to rise above sheer imitation of the master. There were, however, some significant contributions to Caribbean letters, but again the theater arts thrived to a lesser extent than poetry and prose fiction. Thus, for example, Edouard Glissant, an early student of Césaire, is at the very forefront not only among Martinican writers, but in the region in general and even outside it. Yet his contributions to the theater, in comparison to the novel, essay, and poetry, are slight. His play, Monsieur Toussaint, though performed on several occasions and translated into English, is his only dramatic work, not counting adaptations and dramatic collages. The play deals with the rule of the Haitian general and freedom fighter Toussaint Louverture, his capture and abduction to France where, imprisoned in the dungeons of Fort Joux, he dies of hunger and cold. The plot is quite complex, using three different sets: the present in Toussaint's prison cell, the past in Santo Domingo, and the realm of the dead who crowd Toussaint's memories. Among the dead, representing various facets of the Caribbean experience, a maroon leader, a voudou priestess, Toussaint's former overseer, a native general executed by Toussaint. Toussaint, the principal character, is built on a complex and often contradictory personality whose relations with his family, his former masters, his comrades in arms, soldiers, and diplomats are shifty and often ambiguous. Glissant points to many parallels in modern times as he shows Toussaint bypassed by the events he precipitated. Unwilling to proclaim total independence for the former colony, preferring the old social order to insure stability and thus prosperity, Toussaint loses contact with the people and their new leaders and finally lets himself be trapped by the French. The entire range of problems facing the nation-builder today and yesterday unfolds with the inevitability of a tragedy.

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Significantly enough, in the preface to the stage version of the play, which differs from the original mainly by the inclusion of passages in Creole spoken mostly by the voudou priestess, Glissant acknowledges his joy to hear again the familiar tonalities of the language of the people. Much has been said about the fact that, to quote a recent restatement, "there are two languages, two cultures, two societies in the Caribbean. There is a complete dichotomy between the way the majority of people speak and think and the official language attached to a dominant metropolitan power. To write in the Caribbean involves the writer in a dilemma Derek Walcott was quick to recognize: to write at all was to put a 'gulf' in between himself and the 'mass man,' to find himself . . . in a state of 'exile'" (Dayan [1990], 86). Most negritude writers never attempted to bridge the linguistic "gulf and wrote either in French or Creole. Glissant was the first to use quite extensively not only Creole words and expressions but also a kind of Creole syntax in his novels, which some purists consider not to have been written in French. The subsequent generation of créolistes was determined to do away with this dichotomy. Their success will need to be evaluated. Most of Glissant's coevals were preoccupied mainly with ideological battles. Overshadowed by the stature of Césaire, they are generally more direct in conveying their anger and revolutionary zeal to change the intolerable situation of the colonized. Unfortunately, in so many cases, their ideological ardor is not matched by adequate craftsmanship and ingenuity. There are of course exceptions. Félix Morisseau-Leroy, a Haitian politician and scholar who spent many years in Senegal, has authored plays in both Creole and French. Influenced by the ideas of socialist utopians such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, he has sought to promote human fraternity, addressing all the oppressed peoples in the world. To reach his own illiterate compatriots, he uses Creole and simple theatrical forms. Having spent five years on a UNESCO mission in Ghana, he sought to introduce new concepts of theater for African purposes based on African traditions. In a way, stressing the African roots of his people, Morisseau-Leroy combines aspects of both indigenism and negritude. Among the generation of playwrights who came in the wake of negritude, Gérard Chenet, a militant Haitian writer who has spent many years in Africa, has written several plays among which El Hadj Omar, 1968, is probably the most significant. Subtitled, "A chronicle of the holy war," it recounts the story of the Islamic reformer El Hadj Omar who is trying to unify his people under one religion. Fundamentally a pacifist, Omar must resort to violence; dedicated to justice, he sometimes rules with an unjust hand. The colonialist conquest of Africa interrupts the realization of his grandiose plans, and Omar dies on top of a mountain. A griot comments on Omar's destiny: "[Omar] surpassed the dimensions of man, and people will remember what it costs to depart from the ways of men."2 Maryse Condé, better recognized perhaps for her novels, which deal with the ambiguities of the African-Caribbean sociocultural connection and the feminine condition in Africa, has written several plays. Dieu nous Va donné (God gave it to us), 1972, is a play that develops a situation frequently encountered in postcolonial literature: the confrontation of traditional values with liberal ideas imported from abroad by a professional educated in a different culture. The main character is a doctor who has been educated in France and upon his return to Guadeloupe attempts to reform the old system. The bureaucratic structures, however, are too entrenched, and the doctor is killed.

2 Il dépassait les dimensions de l'homme . . . ils [les hommes] se souviendront de ce qu'il coûte de s'écarter des voies de l'homme (Chenet [1968], 132).

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Mort d'Oluwémi d'Ajumako (The death of Oluwémi of Ajumako), 1973, is perhaps Condé's most successful play, tightly structured, with only four characters embroiled in emotional struggles, pitting a deposed king, Oluwémi, against his European educated son, Ange. Ange is in love with the king's wife, Séfira, who had to renounce her love for him and was forced to marry the king. A shady character called the Stranger, a cynical man of action, takes advantage of every exploitable situation, signaling the emergence of a new type of African. The characters thus become invested with symbols, representing the waning of the old political order, whose replacement with the advent of unscrupulous adventurers and nonchalant youth detached from African values does not bode well for the future of Africa. These themes find a more amplified treatment in Condé's novels and critical essays. But her plays are part and parcel of the fiery generation of negritude writers who, maroons of a sort, impatient with the ideology of their elders, demanded immediate revolutionary changes in their society. Daniel Boukman's political drama, Chants pour hâter la mort du temps des Orphée ou Madinina île esclave (Songs to hasten the death of the time of Orpheuses, or Madinina, the slave island), 1967, a good specimen of the revolutionary spirit in the Caribbean, is dedicated to the victims of colonial repression. It is a series of three plays in verse. La voix des sirènes (The voice of the sirens), the first play, calls for the overthrow of French rule in Madinina, the Carib name of Martinique, meaning Isle of Flowers. Orphée nègre (Black Orpheus), the second play, is an indictment of negritude leaders, more specifically Aimé Césaire and Léopold S. Senghor, accusing the first for his accommodating attitude toward the colonizers and Senghor, the philosopher, for celebrating the beauties of the black world: the bard never noticed the sugarcane cutter, the suffering children. "Orpheus has betrayed you."3 The third play bears some similarity to Césaire's Et les chiens se taisaient. It is a prison scene, showing a Martinican condemned to death for having thrown a bomb into a police station. He could save his life if he admitted that he, the ungrateful son, has tried to kill his benefactors. The play also invokes the evils of American imperialism and at the end expresses the hope that the future will see the free people of the Americas deyankeefied. Boukman has written other plays of similar tone and texture, inveighing, for example, against the Zionist/imperialist conspiracy that has suppressed the just aspirations of the Palestinians. To emphasize the inhumanity of the oppressors, the author occasionally employs masks, mannequins, marionettes for the evil characters, not unlike Brecht. Boukman's straightforward fanaticism leaves little room for humanity. His messages, though garbed in sometimes exquisite lyrical tones, are too direct to be used outside the preacher's pulpit or the orator's platform. Hence, his theater, though endowed with new ideological perspectives, will remain a document of interest for literary historians. Marronnage has its limitations too. Auguste Macouba belongs to the same category of the brave, brash revolutionaries whose relevance, tied to a particular political situation, is not likely to survive the generations they addressed. Auguste Macouba, a political activist from Martinique, where for a while he was not permitted to reside, is perhaps better known for his sociopolitical essays. His play Eïa! Man-maille là (The children of the Land), 1968, commemorates the popular uprising of 1959 in Fort-de-France. It retraces the tragedy of the local events, but it aspires to be more than a mere chronicle with many characters. Cast in powerful poetic imagery, with the help of an ancient chorus of sorts, the play offers a lot of reflection on the state of the world. Beyond the indictment of the colonial system, the brutality of 3

Orphée vous a trahis (Boukman [1970], 86).

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the police, the Yankee menace, it also touches on the metaphysics of violence and the psychology of the colonized, and is thus reminiscent of Frantz Fanon: "Violence is the affirmation of one's self before nothingness."4 This generation of political activists, some of whom are political maroons whose literary effort became too psittacistic to be relevant, counts also names that are not likely to disappear. Among them, at the forefront is René Depestre, who is best known for his prose and poetry. Some of his poems from the collection Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien (A rainbow for the Christian West) have been adapted for stage production. It is a celebration of voudou gods and saints, an invocation of their spirits to help humans settle their affairs. Having embarked upon a kind of scorch-the-Yankee-land mission, the spirits invade Alabama to punish American racism, to poke fun at American ambivalence and hypocrisy. At the end, however, there is a note of reconciliation expressing the hope that good will among humans will prevail and will bring about an era of universal fraternity. This generation of negritude playwrights soon seemed to have exhausted their initial energies. As an ideological movement, negritude had its detractors who rejected some of the basic assumptions, particularly those of Senghor, as unworkable for the improvement of the lot of the black race. For so many Caribbeans, negritude did not address the region's problems of ethnic identity and multiculturalism. As an instrument of sociopolitical change, the theater remained quite marginal, being considered as too intellectual, and with its insistence on French, too closely linked to the French colonial superstructure. The theater in Creole could record only a limited success. In 1981 a group of Antillean intellectuals published a volume of essays and interviews significantly entitled Les Antilles dans l'impasse? (Are the French Antilles at a dead end?) The tenor of the volume implies an affirmative answer. Although never universally accepted as a unifying ideology, negritude inspired new inquiries and debates, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s it had lost its initial appeal. The geopolitical events in Africa suggested that independence gave rise to a neocolonialism that demonstrated little improvement over the preceding regime. The maroons became the canonists. The sociocultural and linguistic dichotomies in the Caribbean remained generally untouched and unresolved by the negritude writers. The present generation of créolistes, however, building upon negritude achievements, is likely to bring about an era of renewed sociocultural effervescence in the region.

Bibliography Antoine, Régis. 1978. Les écrivains français et les Antilles. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Boukman, Daniel. [1967]. 1970. Chants pour hâter la mort du temps des Orphée ou Madinina île esclave. Paris: Oswald. Brossat, Alain et Daniel Maragnès. 1981. Les Antilles dans l'impasse? Paris: Editions Caribéennes. Césaire, Aimé. 1956. Et les chiens se taisaient. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1963. La tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine. Rev. ed. 1970. —. 1966. Une saison au Congo. Paris: Seuil. Rev. ed. 1973. —. 1969. Une tempête. Paris: Seuil. Chenet, Gérard. 1968. El Hadj Omar. Paris: Oswald. 4

La violence, c'est l'affirmation de soi devant le néant (Macouba [1968], 68).

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Condé, Maryse. 1972. Dieu nous Va donné. Honfleur: Oswald. —. 1973. Mort d'Oluwémi d'Ajumako. Honfleur: Oswald. Cornevin, Robert. 1973. Le théâtre haïtien, des origines à nos jours. Montréal: Leméac. Dayan, Joan. 1990. Literature and Society in Haiti: Crossing the Great Divide. Cimarrón. 2.3:84-97. Glissant, Edouard. 1961. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris: Seuil. Macouba, Auguste. 1968. Eïa! Man-maille là! Paris: Oswald. Price-Mars, Jean. 1959. De Saint-Domingue à Haïti. Paris: Présence Africaine. Waters, Harold. 1978. Black Theater in French. Sherbrook, Quebec: Naaman.

Silenieks

Toward créolité Postnegritude Developments

JURIS SILENIEKS

Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA

It is often argued that the colonial situation is essentially a dramatic one of binary, conflictual oppositions, and that theater is the genre par excellence to convey the experience of the colonized. Somewhat paradoxically, however, drama in Caribbean as well as African literatures of the decolonization period do not reach the prominence of the novel and poetry. As Albert Memmi pointed out some twenty years ago, the greatest crime committed by colonizers is the obliteration of collective history as part of the effort to assimilate the colonized into the imposed culture. More recently, Edouard Glissant in a chapter of his seminal opus Le discours antillais (Caribbean discourse), 1981, entitled "Theater, Consciousness of the People," analyzes the Antillean sociocultural scene with some penetrating observations on theater. For Glissant, theater is a collective enterprise linked to the birth of a nation and, concomitantly, to collective consciousness. Theater is the means by which collective consciousness can actualize itself. "Theater is the act through which the collective consciousness sees itself and consequently moves forward. . . . Theater involves moving beyond lived experience (dramatic time takes us out of the ordinary so that we can better understand the ordinary and the everyday). The ability to move beyond can only be exercised by the collective consciousness. There is no theater without a nation at its source" (Glissant [1989], 196).1 Theatrical expression flourishes when the collective consciousness is in the process of forming, since it permits a collectivity to distance itself from its history to become aware of it, to deny it. "The collective impulse is experienced in all its urgency, not simply lived as a given" (Glissant [1989], 197).2 Elaborating his argument further, Glissant maintains that theatrical expression proceeds from a common folkloric base, folklore being the expression of the collective unconscious. "Theatrical expression is structured from the forms of common folkloric background, which then ceases to be lived in order to be represented, that is, thought through" (Glissant [1989], 197).3 "What the theater expresses in its early stages is not the psychology of a people, it is its shared destiny" (Glissant [1989], 199).4 This difficult passage from experience to its representation is the principle of tragedy 1 Le théâtre est l'acte par lequel la conscience collective se voit, et par conséquent se dépasse. . . . Le théâtre suppose le dépassement du vécu (le temps théâtral nous sort de l'ordinaire pour mieux faire comprendre l'ordinaire, le quotidien). Ce dépassement ne peut être pratiqué que par la conscience collective. A sa source, il n'est pas de théâtre sans nation (Glissant [1981], 396). 2 La pulsion collective est ressentie comme nécessité, non seulement vécue comme donnée (Glissant [1981], 397). 3 L'expression théâtrale se fixe à partir de l'expression d'un fond folklorique commun, qui cesse alors d'être vécu pour être représenté, c'est-à-dire pensé (Glissant [1981], 397). 4 Ce que le théâtre à ses débuts exprime, ce n'est pas la psychologie d'un peuple, c'est son destin commun (Glissant [1981], 398).

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(Glissant [1989], 201). Furthermore, in this process the masses must be assisted by an elite: "it is an elite that reveals and shares (is forced to share) the elitist force of tradition" (Glissant [1989], 201).5 But the Martinican elite is not a true elite, as Glissant repeatedly argues. It is culturally inauthentic, assimilated into the colonizer's culture. The elite has not facilitated the "transition from lived folklore to the representation of knowledge" (Glissant [1989], 200).6 Glissant's assessment of the role of the intelligentsia is, as always, negative. "The elite, which has never assisted in the positive evolution of folklore, will assist in paralyzing it" (Glissant [1989], 208).7 Glissant's concluding remarks are quite discouraging. "All of this eludes us: an impulse, a representation, an elite dialectically linked to the people, an internal possibility of criticism and transcendence: a freedom. .. . One could ultimately conclude that we cannot produce a 'theater' because we do not (yet) act collectively" (Glissant [1989], 201, 203).8 In a way, one could say that Glissant's statement, taken at face value, contradicts facts, since theatrical activity in the francophone region has manifestly not been lacking. Robert Cornevin in his Le théâtre haïtien (Haitian theater), 1973, lists some 233 plays written between 1804 and the 1930s. But in his Essays on Haitian Literature, 1984, Léon-François Hoffmann states that, in his view, "the Haitian theater did not achieve originality before the second half of the twentieth century" (Hoffmann [1984], 26). Glissant's observations on the role of the elite are well corroborated by Hoffmann who maintains that "there is a long and honorable tradition of French-language theater . . . of interest mostly to historians and sociologists, [since it is the expression of] a privileged minority, . . . [outside] the country's living reality" (Hoffmann [1984], 26). In search of relevance and audiences, many playwrights turned to Creole and achieved significant popular success, e.g., Félix Morisseau-Leroy, Frankétienne in Haiti; Placoly, Chamoiseau in Martinique, among others. Negritude spawned a considerable amount of dramatic writing in the francophone region. Most plays of the period (c. 1960-75) feature a spirit of confrontational combativeness and a commitment to intervene in the burning sociopolitical issues of the day. There is a tone of stridency, an attitude of self-righteousness, born from the intolerable feeling of repression and unfairness. Sometimes very programmatic and messianic, these plays have the allure of the Brechtian Lehrstücke, whose function is to educate audiences ideologically, arouse their indignation, and incite them to revolutionary action. Quite often these dramatic works are meant to be something like acts of accusation to condemn particular instances of colonial repression. Thus, two Martinicans, Daniel Boukman and Auguste Macouba, have dedicated two of their plays {Chants pour hâter la mort du temps des Orphée [Songs to hasten the death of the time of Orpheuses], 1971, and Eïa! Man-maille là [The children of the land], 1968, respectively) to the memory of the victims of a popular uprising in Fortde-France in 1959 during which three young men were killed by the police. In his other plays Boukman proclaims Antillean solidarity with the Palestinian cause (Et jusqu 'à la dernière pulsation [And even to the last beat of the pulse], 1976), or attacks the conservative leaders of Martinique (Les négriers [The slavers], 1971). The principal intent of this committed theater is to announce that "the Time of the Orpheuses is dead!"9 But of course with the death of Orpheuses dies a good deal of 5

c'est une élite qui dévoile et partage (est obligée de partager) la force élitique de la tradition (Glissant [1981], 399). passage harmonieux des croyances à la conscience (Glissant [1981], 404). L'élite, qui n'a pas servi au dépassement fécond du folklore, va servir à son figement (Glissant [1981], 404). 8 Tout cela nous manque: une pulsion, une représentation, une élite dialectiquement liée à un peuple, une possibilité interne de critique et de dépassement: une liberté. . . . A la limite on affirmerait que nous sommes incapables de 'théâtre' parce que nous n'agissons pas (encore) collectivement (Glissant [1981], 399, 401). 9 le Temps des Orphée est mort! (Boukman [1967], 99). 6

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writing that refuses to be propagandistic. Aimé Césaire, one of the initiators of the negritude movement, gave a new meaning to the theater of commitment. But his commitment goes beyond the militancy and angularities of his ardent coevals. His first dramatic work, Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs were silent), [1946], 1956, was not really conceived for stage production and represents a kind of transition from poetry to theater. It is known that he originally projected a triptych of plays encompassing black history in three regions of the world: Africa, the Caribbean, and the American diaspora. Instead of an original play, for the last panel Césaire made an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. All three plays, though set in different historical periods, are directly informed by the struggle for decolonization. Une saison au Congo (A season in the Congo), 1966, treats the tragedy of Lumumba in his efforts to establish a modern African nation, pitted against the manipulations of the waning colonial powers. Une tempête (A tempest), 1969, transforms the original Shakespearean plot into a contestation of wills between the enslaved autochthonous Caliban asserting his right to his own way of life and the interloper who is set on monopolizing the riches of the New World and imposing its cultural values. La tragédie du roi Christophe (The tragedy of king Christophe), [1963], 1970, is inspired by the postcolonial struggles in Haiti, again involving the external conflicts, the aspirations, the mad dreams, and the inner contradictions a nation-builder faces in his effort to accelerate the slow pace of history. A recent assessment by a group of writers who call themselves créolistes takes a critical view of the ideological and aesthetic tenets of negritude. Their conclusion is that negritude produced a "writing truly suspended, outside the land, the people, without a readership, or any authenticity."10 According to them, negritude was marked by exteriority and anteriority, the offspring of "two tutelary monsters, Europeanness and Africanness,"11 with visions of a certain type of universality that reduced its relevance in the Caribbean context. By emphasizing Mother Africa as the true topos of the black race, by positing the concept of the black soul as universally shared by all blacks, the negritude movement ignored Caribbean specificity. "If in this Negrist revolt we contested French colonization, it was always in the name of universal generalities conceived in the occidental fashion and without any reference to our cultural reality."12 The créolistes conclude that Antillean writing, gone astray with negritude, is to be restarted almost from scratch, without traditions or precedent, since Césaire - although "we are forever Aimé Césaire's sons,"13 - can only be a precursor. And the theater, as Glissant has noted, is to be created from this nothing, the collective consciousness yet to be born. For the créolistes, one of the most important tasks is what Glissant calls "historical reinsertion," the rejection of Hegelian notions subsequently elaborated by other Eurocentric historians and propagated as part of French colonial policies - that dismiss black history as essentially unworthy of serious attention. Thus, it would be only natural to see many writers of the region using various folkloric materials to deal with the authentic Antillean hero, the maroon, the fugitive slave, and to turn to the period of the Haitian revolution and struggle for independence to implement the "historical reinsertion." Among contem-

10 une écriture véritablement en suspension, hors sol, hors peuple, hors lectorat, hors toute authenticité (Bernabé [1989], 21). 11 deux monstres tutélaires: l'Européanité et l'Africanité (Bernabé [1989], 18). 12 Si, dans cette révolte négriste nous contestions la colonisation française, ce fut toujours au nom de généralités universelles pensées à l'occidentale et sans nul arc-boutement à notre réalité culturelle (Bernabé [1989], 21). 13 Nous sommes à jamais fils d'Aimé Césaire (Bernabé [1989], 18).

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porary plays on the Haitian revolution are Césaire's La tragédie du roi Christophe, Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint, 1961, and, more recently, Placoly's Dessalines, 1983. Césaire's Christophe is a figure of ambiguities, tragic and carnivalesque, both Peter the Great and bourgeois gentilhomme, combining the grandeur of his aspirations and the banality of his base cruelty, a pathetic nationbuilder who betrays the trust of his people, partially because he was awed by European models of political struggles and ideology. Glissant's Toussaint is more firmly rooted in the native soil. The play is built on a tripartite spatiotemporal configuration: the present is the dungeon in Fort Joux, in the desolate Jura mountains, where Toussaint is left to die from cold and hunger; the past evokes the heroic struggles Toussaint undertakes to win dignity and prosperity for his people, not yet a nation; timeless facets of the human condition and the historical specificity of Haiti are represented by the dead who surround Toussaint in his agony and infuse doubts and regrets about his efforts. The linguistic referent is French, which Glissant punctuates with accents of Creole. Without departing substantially from historically authenticated facts, Placoly refocuses the image of Dessalines, who is remembered in historical chronicles as a savage despot whose assassination was only an act of justice. To ward off the rapacity of interlopers, Dessalines closed off Haiti from the outside world. Placoly's Dessalines dreams of alliances with the Americas and likens himself to the great mythical figures and tragic heroes. "We have put on the tragic cothurnus."14 Not unlike their coevals, the leaders of the French Revolution, the Haitian revolutionaries, too, feel the weight of responsibility that comes from the awareness that the world is watching their momentous struggles. "We never sleep, being hitched to the plow of history."15 "We are humanity entire."16 The sense of tragic destiny is pervasive. "Destiny chose me,"17 Dessalines remarks as he evokes the mythical struggles of the Titans. He sees himself in the role of a new Prometheus: "I, Prometheus, the bearer of the torch of humanity in the new world."18 His self-aggrandizement knows no bounds: "I, Prometheus, thank you, creator, my brother."19 His hubris incurs the wrath of the gods; but, as in classical tragedy, fate resides in his own actions and personality. Just like so many leaders before him, setting his sights on posterity and the human race, victorious over his external enemies, he is oblivious of those who surround him and eventually become his executioners. Like a true tragic hero, Dessalines accepts his destiny and thus, in a way, is bigger than his fate. Another angle of vision is provided by those who represent the people - the soldiers, the servants - those who lack sophistication and knowledge but never lose their sense of reality and measure, deflating the pretensions of the mighty, uncovering the hypocrisies of the ambitious. The canteen-keeper - not another Mother Courage who follows the armies, driven by greed for her own profit - is the very exemplar of the Antillean mother, and being also a priestess and a prophetess, represents a superhuman folkloric/mythological figure. The lofty visions of Dessalines are tempered by the reflexions of Coquille, who, in his double role as a court poet and jester, is forced to earn his living by pleasing those in power, always in danger of betraying his sense of values and aesthetic ideas. Coquille's assignment is to write a glorious account of Haitian history as it unfolds before his eyes. But he cannot be at the same time in it and outside it. Always on the horns of the dilemma be-

14

Nous avons chaussé les cothurnes de la tragédie (Placoly [1983], 69). Nous ne dormons jamais attelés à la charrue de l'histoire (Placoly [1983], 68). Nous sommes toute l'humanité (Placoly [1983], 17). 17 Le destin m'a choisi (Placoly [1983], 53). 18 Moi, Prométhée, porteur du flambeau de l'humanité du nouveau monde (Placoly [1983], 85). 19 Moi, Prométhée, merci, créateur, mon frère (Placoly [1983], 89). 15 16

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tween innovation and tradition, the canon and the fluidity of freedom, wanting to be with the ruled while serving the ruler, the poet is constantly skirting the ambiguous zone of meaning and meaning denied. In many ways, the play exemplifies aspects of the aesthetics of créolité. French and Creole coexist and complement each other, as discourse flows naturally from one linguistic medium into the other, just as the various linguistic codes cohabit in the region. The poetics of the insular space/time configuration is immersed in the Haitian sociocultural specificity, yet the play's relevance extends outward to encompass human destinies, in their historical and mythological reaches. Ina Césaire's play L'enfant des passages ou la geste de Ti-Jean (The child of passages, or the epic of Ti-Jean), 1987, is another exemplar of créolité. In its hybrid form, which combines features of European dramaturgy and Antillean storytelling art, this play by Aimé Césaire's daughter presents a synthesis of several stories that deal with the adventures of the popular Antillean hero, TiJean. As in a typical fable, the hero undertakes a voyage that takes him from the real world of men to an imaginary world where the distinctions among human beings, animals, and things are blurred and their characteristics are exchanged: animals are humanized, trees dance, forests sing, the wind hails lost souls. In his wanderings, Ti-Jean encounters various types taken from hierarchical Antillean society: the béké, the mulatto, the peasant, sometimes under allegorical animal disguise. The eagle has a noble bearing and is generally good, though sometimes unpredictable. The tiger has the attributes of an Antillean peasant, honest, generous, a bit obtuse, dominated by his wife, who is a true harridan, stingy and suspicious. Other characters have philosophical or metaphysical underpinnings, such as the Immortal Man, symbolizing the eternal repetition of time and the boredom of eternity, or the Beast with seven heads, symbolizing oppression and tyranny, imports from other lands. Thus, the cast of characters extends beyond a cross section of Antillean society to reflect human types and attitudes. As in a bildungsroman, at the outset Ti-Jean, a mean adolescent bent on crime and cruelty, is virtually stripped of everything: his mother is dead and his home burns down, leaving him with an older brother, who is a drunkard, inefficient and weak-willed. Ti-Jean, however, is the resourceful entrepreneur, a product of a society where socioeconomic hierarchies are not built on conventional moral values. Ti-Jean traverses many regions and discovers "these parallel worlds that abound here."20 There is the upside-down world where people sleep on their heads during broad daylight and wash their faces with sand. But among other reversed orders, there is one thing shared with the other worlds: people want to live without working. By climbing down a giant mahogony tree, Ti-Jean reaches the top, which, however, might be the bottom, depending on one's way of looking at the world. He arrives in the land of eternal night where the Beast with seven heads reigns supreme, favored by those who prefer order in the darkness. Ti-Jean slays the Beast in a titanic struggle, saves the country, outwits the thief who tries to steal the victory from him, and in the end marries the princess. The play ends with a wedding dance, which is abruptly stopped, and it is not known whether the royal couple will live happily thereafter. The play exemplifies some of the tenets of créolistes who insist that the regional culture arising from the plantation system is rooted in orality: "Orality is our intelligence, it is our reading of the world."21 Whereas in other cultures bards, griots, troubadours served as links with clerks who 20 21

ces mondes parallèles qui foisonnent par ici (Ina Césaire [1987], 113). L'oralité est notre intelligence, elle est notre lecture de ce monde (Bernabé [1989], 34).

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mediated the transition from orality to literacy, "here it was rupture, gap, the deep ravine between a written expression that wanted to be universal-modern and traditional Creole orality where a good part of our being still slumbers."22 By using folkloric materials and forms taken from the oral arts, by reflecting the regional diglossia of French and Creole, the play points to the linguistic and cultural richness and diversity of the region, which may be the microcosm par excellence that contains the macrocosm revealed in its multiplicity and paradoxes. Going beyond the confines of a local folk story, the play extends its relevance as a sort of philosophical tale of universal dimensions, showing the heterogeneity and relativity of cultures, impossible to hierarchize. Another play by Ina Césaire, Mémoires d'isles (Memories of islands), 1985, exemplifies other facets of créolité. It is a chronicle of individual and collective memories, in the form of a dialogue between two elderly women. The two grandmothers are guests of honor at, but not participants in, a wedding party. They sit on a veranda and take in the serene ambiance of the Antillean sunset, reminisce about their own lives and the destinies of the people. They are of different backgrounds and experiences. Aure is a mulatto woman, a former teacher from the south of Martinique; Hermance, the urban proletarian who was born in the wild north at the foot of Mount Pelée, is uneducated yet endowed with sharp intelligence. Their lives are filled with traumatic events deeply ingrained in their collective memories and with dramatic personal vignettes that weave tragedy and carnival into the rich tapestry of regional history. There is the hurricane of 1928, when the world seemed to have been abandoned to total darkness and destruction. They remember the years during the Second World War that were spent in an isolation marked by dissidence under Admiral Robert's despotic rule. The revolts and the killings during political upheavals intertwine with the personal joys and sorrows that came with their school years, marriage, childbirth, the death of a child, a husband's faithlessness, and widowhood. Not far behind these collective and personal memories lie intimations of the dark years of slavery, of rape and humiliation, where the figure of the maroon rebel looms large, uncovering deep layers of the Antillean collective consciousness. The two grandmothers, "women outside time,"23 are quintessential bearers of womanhood and humanity, both Antillean and universal. Behind the petty meanness and healthy distrust, there is much disarming goodness, subtended by a profound sense of duty and an indomitable will not to give up. The play lies outside the narrow bounds of psychological stage realism. The Prologue introduces the two grandmothers as carnival figures, two she-devils that sport in games sacred and profane, adding a dimension of that marvelous realism that characterizes so much of recent Caribbean and LatinAmerican letters. The Guadeloupean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart, who is best known for her novels, produced a simple playlet in 1987 entitled Ton beau capitaine (Your handsome captain). It has classical terseness but no dramatic plot worth mentioning. Wilnor Baptiste, a Haitian immigrant agricultural worker in Guadeloupe, plays the audio cassette recordings that his wife has been sending him from Haiti. Since husband and wife are presumably illiterate, the cassette tapes take the place of letters. As Wilnor keeps listening to the tapes, the pathetic fate of the immigrant worker slowly unfolds. Ambitious and anxious to gain material stability, the worker had come to Guadeloupe in search of

22 Ici, ce fut la rupture, le fossé, la ravine profonde entre une expression écrite qui se voulait universalo-moderne et l'oralité créole traditionnelle où sommeille une belle part de notre être (Bernabé [1989], 35). 23 femmes hors du temps (Ina Césaire [1985], 13).

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gainful employment, expecting to come home wealthy and respected and to realize his life's dream of possessing a patch of land and a cow. In the meantime, his wife, lonely and in need of emotional contacts at home, falls prey to insistent males who come to visit her with messages and money from her husband. The wife slowly confesses that in her longing for her husband she had yielded to the advances of a friend who bears a resemblance to her husband. Wilnor, for his part, admits that he had not been sending all his money to her, and in a moment of rage, upon learning of her infidelity, his dreams shattered, he starts to burn the money he had kept for himself. The playlet evokes the misery of the Haitian people, the tragedies of refugees drowned in their attempts to reach the U.S., the exploitation of the destitute. But beyond the socioeconomic conditions that victimize the impoverished workers, there is still a measure of responsibility that rests with the victimized. Greed and excessive ambition account, at least in part, for the tragedy they experience, and ambiguity precludes any ready-made moral judgment. Much meaning and feeling are imbedded in the inarticulate eloquence of these uneducated human beings who sense the preciousness of words and the weight of silence, the complementarity of what is disclosed and what remains unnamed. Haitian music, songs, and dance supplement the verbal discourse and provide another means of expression that the main character has at his disposal, creating a distinct imaginary space. The playlet is another illustration of the multidimensionality and polyvalence of the insular sociocultural setting, reaching out to encompass humanity. The Martinican novelist and playwright Patrick Chamoiseau's dramatized fairy tale, Manman Dlo contre la fée Carabosse (Water mama versus the fairy Carabosse), 1982, is in its own way a reworking of the Tempest story with a different modulation. The fairy Carabosse, a certified sorceress of Greco-Latin culture, has just arrived in the New World, accompanied by her technical assistant, the broom. Her mission is to colonize the land. To expedite her assignment, she rewrites laws to fit the needs of the colonizing process. She redefines humanity to make sure that slavery is sanctioned according to law and to the "universal" Cartesian principles of the operations of the human mind. Arriving in the New World, she intones a chant about the beauties and harmonies of the exotic landscape, a parody of the nineteenth-century Antillean doudouiste (sweetheart-style) writing, which took for its models the European romantic and Parnassian aesthetics. In due course, the fairy prepares to conquer nature in order to exploit the riches of the land. Pollution and degradation of the environment, destruction of ecological systems - the concomitants of industrialization - inevitably ensue. The good deeds of Manman Dlo, an aquatic divinity, who helps the fish and makes the rain fall, and of other members of the pantheon of the land of marvels, are destroyed. Papa Zombi - the director of the world of marvels - engages in a titanic battle with Carabosse. Papa Zombi is subdued through treachery, and the intruders declare themselves masters of the world. In the end, however, Manman Dlo evokes her powers over the waters and the wind, which, like a huge natural disaster, descend on the land, and the interloper, in spite of the technological assistance she can muster, is swept away. The land is left to those who rightfully inherit it. In this allegorical tale, the evils of colonization, including the imposition of a culture alien to that of the inhabitants, the arrogance and the intolerance of the colonizer, are denounced. This is, once again, a work rooted in the traditions of an oral culture utilizing folkloric materials. The form is hybrid, a cross between European stagecraft and an indigenous storytelling tradition. The traditional narrator himself has undergone some contamination, having "abandoned the world of the

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vocal arts and storytelling evenings in order to WRITE his stories."24 As the note on the play's cast of characters explains, somewhat facetiously, this case of high treason is under investigation by a grand jury who will decide the fate of the defendant. The case of the storyteller can very well serve as a metaphor for what is presently taking place in francophone Caribbean dramaturgy. First, as the créolistes have noted, Caribbean writing must proceed from its very roots, which are in orality. Orality is the vehicle of all preliterate forms of expression, fables, proverbs, stories, which arose from the plantation system. The concomitant results of the success of colonization and cultural assimilation have been the denial of this preliterate form of the past and the non-integration of oral traditions in the literary tradition. Therein lies a fundamental dimension of francophone Antillean cultural alienation. Authentic regional literature is to proceed from this distortion, this absence, from the "original chaos,"25 which came with the Middle Passage and slavery, to become an inalienable part of all creative effort, as Glissant and the créolistes insist. But this original chaos, this vision turned inward, offers the writer special advantages. "It situates us in a permanant questioning, in doubt and ambiguity. It also liberates us from anticolonialist literary militantism."26 "Créolité is the world diffracted, but recomposed."27 This recomposition is to take into account the diversity and complexity of the Caribbean condition. Thus, the Caribbean writer's task is to create a literature, partaking both of literacy and orality, susceptible of meeting the needs of modern writing while reflecting its oral traditions. Another dimension of this recreative effort is the recognition of Antillean diglossia. To write only in Creole would signify a withdrawal from the realities of the Caribbean, where diverse systems have coexisted and will have to coexist. In this enterprise, the writer must create on the threshold of order and adventure, to quote Apollinaire, at the interstices of French and Creole. In this adventure, "we challenge the religion of the French language, which has run rampant throughout the region since the abolition of slavery."28 Not unlike Chinua Achebe's challenge to anglophone purists, who consider English as a language definitively codified, hence inviolable, the créolistes insist that they have earned the right to ply French to their needs: "We have conquered it, this French language."29 "Our literature must bear witness of this conquest."30 In the assessment of the créolistes, Glissant, with his novel Malemort, was the first writer who "achieved a remarkable unveiling of Antillean reality,"31 coming forth exclusively from an "internal vision." Yet he addressed mainly readers elsewhere, for whom he had to offer explanations of Creole terms, remarking that his local readership does not yet exist. The créolistes conclude that the time has come to recognize that their readers exist here and now. The créolistes insist that créolité is not a regional geopolitical phenomenon, but a condition shared by all humanity, "a state of intermediary humanity,"32 signifying change and diversity, a negation of that false universality and purity that the French profess. The modern francophone 24

abandonné son monde du vocal et des veillées pour ECRIRE ses contes (Chamoiseau [1982], 5). originel chaos (Bernabé [1989], 39). [la vision intérieure] nous verse alors dans la question permanente, dans le doute, et dans l'ambiguïté. Elle nous libère aussi du militantisme littéraire anticolonialiste (Bernabé [1989], 39). 27 La Créolité, c'est le monde diffracté, mais recomposé (Bernabé) [1989], 27). 28 Nous récusons donc la religion de la langue française qui sévit dans nos pays depuis l'abolition de l'esclavage (Bernabé [1989], 47). 29 Nous l'avons conquise, cette langue française (Bernabé [1989], 46). 30 Notre littérature devra témoigner de cette conquête (Bernabé [1989], 47). 31 opéra le singulier dévoilement du réel antillais (Bernabé [1989], 23). 32 un état d'humanité intermédiaire (Bernabé [1989], 64). 25

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Caribbean writer "bears witness to both créolité and the human condition."33 Thus, rather than being an inward movement, as the term at first sight may suggest, créolité reaches out to connect with the world, to encompass all humanity, pleading for a pluralistic society and culture. The playwrights discussed here exemplify, in some form or other, the tenets of créolité and attest to the new departures in francophone Antillean dramaturgy whose significance is not likely to be soon forgotten.

Bibliography Bernabé, Jean et al. 1989. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard/Presses Universitaires Créoles. Boukman, Daniel. 1971-a. Chants pour hâter la mort des Orphée. Honfleur: Oswald. —. 1971-b. Les négriers. Honfleur: Oswald. —. 1976. Et jusqu'à la dernière pulsation. Paris: L'Harmattan. Césaire, Aimé. 1956. Et les chiens se taisaient: arrangement théâtral. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1963. La tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1966. Une saison au Congo. Paris: Seuil. —. 1969. Une tempête. Paris: Seuil. Césaire, Ina. 1985. Mémoires d'isles. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. —. 1987. L'enfant des passages ou la geste de Ti-Jean. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1982. Manman Dlo contre la fée Carabosse. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. Cornevin, Robert. 1973. Le théâtre haïtien des origines à nos jours. Ottawa: Editions Leméac. Glissant, Edouard. 1961. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris: Seuil. —. 1981. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. —. 1989. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. and intro. by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Hoffmann, L[éon]. F[rançois]. 1984. Essays on Haitian Literature. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. Macouba, Auguste Eia! Man-maille là! Paris; Honfleur: Oswald. Memmi, Albert. 1967. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Preface by J.-P. Sartre. Trans. H. Greenfield. Boston: Beacon Press. Placoly, Vincent. 1983. Dessalines ou la passion de l'indépendance. Havana: Casa de las Américas. Schwarz-Bart, Simone. 1987. Ton beau capitaine. Paris: Seuil.

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témoigne à la fois de la Créolité et de l'humaine condition (Bernabé [1989], 41).

Literary Genres

Essay

Before and Beyond Negritude J. MICHAEL DASH

University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica

We tend to accept uncritically the view that writing in the Caribbean before the 1930s can be dismissed as a pale imitation of metropolitan literary movements. As one of the main proponents of this judgment, Frantz Fanon, stridently proclaimed: "Until 1939 the West Indian lived, thought, dreamed . . . composed poems, wrote novels exactly as a white man would have done" (Fanon [1970], 36). Authentic Caribbean Literature, apparently, could only be envisaged after the militant poetics of negritude. The argument was first raised by the French West Indian magazine Légitime Défense, which published one issue in Paris in 1932, and was later echoed with great conviction by critics such as Lilyan Kesteloot (Les écrivains noirs de langue française [Black writers in French: a literary history of négritude], 1963) and Janheinz Jahn (Neo-African Literature, 1966). This consensus on the alienated nature of Caribbean writing focused critically on the creative writer and the poet or "Bard of the Antilles" in the nineteenth century. Exoticism and regionalism with their uncreative repetition of pastoral tranquility, feminine submissiveness, and the tropical idyll, provided easy targets for those who insisted in the 1930s on the need for a moral imperative as well as a sense of lived reality in Caribbean literature. The one literary form invariably left out of account in this crusade against assimilationism and cultural decalcomania (mechanical transfer) is that of the essay. Strictly speaking the essay should, perhaps, not be considered as a literary genre since it seems to fall somewhere between the imaginative or the performed and the reflective or ideological. However, perhaps the real explanation of the omission of the essay form from the polemics of negritude is that it complicates the picture of unrelenting alienation imposed on the Caribbean. There are instances in the nineteenth century where the essay reveals an inventiveness, a sense of moral purpose, an openness to new ideas and a level of political awareness that makes it almost modern in its concerns and raises the difficult issue of its paradoxical coexistence with the sterile, cliché-ridden lyric poetry of the same period. A crucial issue raised from the outset in Caribbean writing is the discourse of representation. It seems that the failings and inadequacies of tone and rhetoric apparent in the performed or imaginative writing are not always evident in the conceptual discourse of the essay. Indeed, the essay at times can even be viewed as a strategy of resistance and recuperation that does not always extend to imaginative literature because of the former's didactic and demystifying thrust. Since the essay's form and content are likely to be dictated by its didactic mission, it is potentially less prone to the imitative techniques of verse. Less constrained than his artistic contemporary or his lyrical self to impress the metropole with his ability to manage borrowed forms, the essayist could concentrate on

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the need to address his community, to focus on lived experience, and to establish meaning in a society that was emergent and quite often politically and racially embattled. The polished and closed discourse of verse forms, in particular the Sonnet, would be used to demonstrate that the black intellectual was as capable of civilization as his European colleague. One of Haiti's foremost intellectuals in the nineteenth century, Anténor Firmin, makes the following comment about a contemporary poet: "In reading the poetry in which this Caribbean bard has used all the notes in his lyre . . . there is nothing, absolutely nothing to distinguish him from a French poet of the purest French stock."1 The ideal of a literary elite is related to the belief that it was through the literary word that cultural and racial achievement would be judged. Hippolyte Taine's notion of the "community of blood and intellect" meant that racial destiny was ultimately related to intellectual capacity and the written word. Consequently, since the literary text could be seen as the most polished form of the written and the highest manifestation of sensibility, it acquired an almost fetish-like quality among the educated black and mulatto minority in nineteenth-century Caribbean society. The essay form could not be totally untainted by this attitude to the written word and the published text. However, by its very nature it allowed for a greater directness in addressing issues and more insight into attitudes prevalent in various groups and generations in early Caribbean societies. The polemical thrust of the essay or manifesto, whether on the subject of racial or national identity or literary orientation or the failings of the local community, provides a sense of the complex beginning of Caribbean societies. The essay also represents an intellectual continuum that made later theoretical and artistic sophistication possible. The essay certainly undermines the image of the nineteenth-century intellectual as hopelessly out of touch with the world in which he lived. It also at times makes the polemics of the 1930s less startlingly original than was first made out. In Haiti, it could be argued that in the beginning was not the word but the deed of independence. Perhaps, in the case of the other French colonies, one could say it was a case of the deed deferred. In Haiti, the word followed the deed and writing could be seen as an attempt to reorder the world in the wake of the revolution. In the early nineteenth century there emerged a figure who used words with extraordinary skill and intelligence. Curiously enough, he was not a poet but one whose polemical essays make him a unique individual in his time. He was the baron de Vastey. He is important to us because he was Henry Christophe's chief advisor and the official apologist for Haiti's first black king. Baron de Vastey was obsessed with the idea of national survival. The titles of his various works indicate his major preoccupations: Le système colonial dévoilé (The colonial system unveiled), 1814; Réflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français concernant Haïti (Political reflections on some French books and newspapers concerning Haiti), 1817; Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d'Haïti (An essay on the causes of the revolution and the civil wars in Haiti), 1819. His work represents an unrelenting attack on the colonial system. He revealed a clear understanding of the forces that maintained such a system. For instance, he is acutely aware of the prejudice in France regarding the first black republic. He is also aware of the role of the Church in undermining protest against the injustices of colonialism. He saw the Catholic Church's message of submissiveness as part of the larger political strategy to keep a pernicious sys1 Qu'on lise ces poésies où le chantre des Antilles a mis toutes les notes de sa lyre . . . il n'y a rien, mais rien, qui le distingue d'un poète français issu du plus pur sang gaulois (Firmin [1901], 9).

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tem in place. Also, in preaching the idea of white superiority, the Catholic clergy were simply the purveyors of racist propaganda. Vastey's stature is further enhanced when we remember that this period produced only blindly imitative neoclassical verse. As Christophe's chief ideologue, the baron de Vastey argued passionately for racial pride and against the decadence of the white world. Haiti is seen by him as the country of black self-assertion. Haiti's achievement would undermine the image of black barbarism and ignorance. He shared with many of his time a belief in the need for a black aristocracy and for stability at all costs. He, like the king he served, admired England and felt it was necessary for English industrial progress to be brought to Africa - as in the case of the creation of Sierra Leone. Yet not all colonial policy was enlightened and Vastey lamented the extermination of Haiti's autochthonous peoples by the Spaniards. The former were described as "victims of Europe's barbarism" in Le système colonial dévoilé and the lesson derived from this experience is that Haitians must defend their independence by military means or suffer the same fate. Vastey may have been conservative on the question of democracy and may have tended to judge cultural achievement in European terms. However, he set the tone for many intellectuals in the nineteenth century who saw in Haiti a symbol of racial pride and black self-assertion. If the poets of this early period failed in their attempt to re-present their world because of the constraints imposed by literary convention, essayists like Vastey were far more successful in their efforts to re-mythologize the Haitian state and people. Vastey's essays attempt total explanations for the social and political phenomena of postcolonial Haiti. Haiti's capacity to rehabilitate the black world, the degenerate nature of colonial Europe, and the championing of Haiti's autochthonous people were some of the themes launched by Vastey that would be echoed by those who followed him. The process could be seen as twofold; on one hand, an attempt to de-mythify Haiti and the black race by attacking those who criticized nation and race abroad; on the other, a desire to locate Haitian identity within a New World continuum. Therefore, what is fascinating about these early prose works is not the predictable attack on the former metropole, France, and the celebration of man's need for freedom. It is rather the treatment of national identity. The Caribbean's preoccupation with origins, with history, is clear in Haiti's earliest essayists. The need to invent self and community is of paramount importance to someone like Vastey. Like many others in the nineteenth century he was ambivalent about Africa. He could recognize the past glories of Egypt but felt that certain parts of Africa had slipped into backwardness {Le système colonial dévoilé [1814], 18) and could benefit from modernization. His ideal, like that of his King, was that of the scientifically advanced modern state not the creation of a maroon culture based on the African village. He had uppermost in his mind a sense of Haiti's uniqueness because of the revolution. However, he saw in Haiti's Amerindian population the source of a civilization that was Haiti's patrimony. His reference to precolumbian artefacts in Le système colonial dévoilé is telling as he is aware of their artistic achievement. Despite their limitations, Haiti's early essayists did try imaginatively to conceive of their country as a unique community in the Caribbean. The effect of French romanticism would, at least intellectually, further stimulate this quest for unique national origins. This need for an ideologically unified Haiti may also have become more acute because of the increasing evidence of the fragmentation of Haiti along lines of color and class as the nineteenth century progressed. Boyer's presidency (1820-43) was a period of protracted tranquility but it meant the intensification of devisiveness in Haitian society as the mulatto elite consoli-

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dated itself politically and socially. Vastey had been killed when Christophe's kingdom fell. Boyer's regime encouraged the creation of the mulatto legend as official historians such as Joseph Rémy rewrote Haitian history in order to discredit black leaders and praise the mulatto elite as the only capable rulers. Not all intellectuals rationalized this concentration of power in mulatto hands, however. One must turn to the critics of Boyer's regime in order to trace the evolution of the question of national identity as it was posed by baron de Vastey. In the pages of the newspapers L'Union and Le Républicain a group calling itself the "generation of 1836" found an outlet for its ideas. Emile Nau was the leader of this group and they concentrated on the questions of culture and literature. Like Vastey, they saw Haiti as a symbol of black achievement and envisaged its destiny in terms of racial redemption. As one member of this generation, the historian Beauvais Lespinasse, speculated, the black race would be saved by "Africa's oldest daughter." Their nationalism was equally apparent in their rejection of an imitative attitude toward France and its culture. As a consequence of their criticism of the francophile nature of their contemporaries, these writers, who saw themselves as an embattled and marginal avant-garde, had an acute sense of Haiti's distinctiveness. They refer to Haiti's role in the future of the Caribbean, to the fate of the black race in the Americas. They felt that because of Haiti's cultural and historical uniqueness, it should take the initiative in literary, cultural, and political matters as far as the question of racial advancement was concerned. Such ideas stood in strong contrast to the aloof francophone poise of Boyer's regime. It is, therefore, not surprising that both newspapers were shortlived and were forced to cease publication after a few years because of political censure. As advocates of cultural autonomy, the generation of 1836 was ahead of its time and is just another example of the tragic distance between authoritarian state and progressive intellectuals that would be repeated throughout Haitian history. Interestingly, they saw Haiti's identity in terms of a cross-cultural fusion. It was the phenomenon of racial and cultural creolization that intrigued their leader Emile Nau. As assertively nationalistic as his predecessor Vastey, Nau was similarly interested in Haiti's precolumbian population. His Histoire des Caciques d'Haïti (A history of the caciques of Haiti), 1854, tells of Spanish brutishness and treachery and sees the Indians of Xaragua as part of a civilizing continuum in Haiti. This vision of Haiti as neither African nor French but a fusion with its own New World origins dominated Nau's cultural and literary theorizing. In the pages of L'Union Nau deplored the uninspired and slavishly imitative neoclassical verse prevalent in Haiti. He advocated a new eclecticism in art, an attitude of equal alertness and irreverence to all literary movements. In terms of language, sensibility, and perception of the world, Nau saw Haiti as enjoying the advantage of being a unique cultural hybrid. In comparing Haiti to the United States he concluded: "We, quite like the American, are tranplanted and stripped of traditions, but there is in the fusion of the European and African cultures that constitutes our national character, something that makes us less French than the American is English. This advantage is a real one."2 This polemic is too far in advance of the actual artistic achievements of the 1830s. Nau prized literature as the only way to demonstrate Haiti's intellectual sophistication. Unfortunately Haitian romanticism would not yield a number of impressive literary works. By 1843, with the fall of Boyer, Haiti would once more be catapulted into another period of instability. 2 Nous sommes tout ainsi que l'Américain, transplantés et dénués de traditions, mais il y a dans cette fusion du génie européen et du génie africain que constitue le caractère de notre peuple, quelque chose qui nous fait moins Français que l'Américain n'est Anglais. Cet avantage est réel (Nau [L'Union, 1 Oct. 1838], n.p.).

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Colonialism in Haiti and the other islands of the Caribbean was characterized by the plantation system, which was designed to export various crops to the metropolis. Run on slave labor, justified by notions of black inferiority, the colony was not expected to produce an intellectual or literary culture. It is, consequently, startling to see the range and sophistication of theoretical works produced in the first forty years of independence in Haiti. The early theoreticians were idealists and were unique in their concerns since slavery was still very much the order of the day in the Caribbean. The latter half of the nineteenth century put even greater pressure on Haiti's intellectuals as they desperately attempted to cling to the dream of Haiti's redemptive mission. During the latter half of the nineteenth century Haiti came under increasingly fierce attacks from those who supported the view that blacks were incapable of self-rule and would revert to barbarism if granted independence. The denigration of Haiti by foreign critics became especially acute in the 1840s and 1850s during the reign of Soulouque who crowned himself Emperor Faustin I in 1849 and during whose ten-year reign Voudou was openly practiced. For instance, Spenser St. John's notorious Hayti or the Black Republic, 1884, set out to use Haiti's political discord and the stereotype of black savagery to argue that "the black man . . . is incapable of the art of government." Also in 1853 Arthur de Gobineau had published his Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of human races), which attempted to prove the hypothesis that races were fundamently different from each other and that the black race, at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, was "incapable of civilization." Despite internal divisiveness, Haiti's essayists in this period were determined to defend the notion of racial equality in the face of this wave of racist theorizing. The titles of the polemical works published by Haitian writers in the nineteenth century speak for themselves: De la réhabilitation de la race noire (On the rehabilitation of the black race) by Louis Janvier, 1884, and De l'égalité des races humaines (On the equality of human races) by Anténor Firmin. Rémy Bastien very ably describes this emergence of outstanding essayists despite the increasing precariousness of the Haitian state and the hostility from abroad: "The intellectual, whatever his colour and class, has always been prompt to answer his country's enemies in proud and effective terms. Anténor Firmin, Jacques Nicolas Léger, Louis Joseph Janvier, and Dantès Bellegarde are good examples. Firmin, showing an extraordinary grasp of the anthropological concepts of his times, wrote on the Equality of Human Races, an answer to Gobineau's attacks against the Negro" (Bastien [1960], 844-45). It is important to note from the outset the continuities between Haiti's early theoreticians and these intellectuals of the turn of the century. The two themes that they have in common are the ideal of black regeneration and the concept of Haiti as a creole hybrid. Because of the latter theme in particular, it was difficult to see these writers as precursors of the negritude movement. Their nationalism and their sense of the importance of the cross-cultural process make them very different from the theorists of negritude who were not as interested in refuting Gobineau's theory of racial essences as in reversing it and placing the black race at the top of the ladder. In launching their polemical attack on Haiti's detractors these essayists are uncompromisingly nationalistic. Price, for instance, declares that "I am from Haiti, the Mecca, the Judea of the black race."3 Along with this nationalism, there is a clear rejection of the psuedo-scientific anthropology of the times, which insisted on racial difference. The prominence given to the racial factor in European scholarship was attacked by Haiti's writers who sought to vindicate the ideal of racial equality. 3

Je suis d'Haïti, la Mecque, la Judée de la race noire . . . (Price [1900], vii).

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Firmin put it persuasively in his De l'égalité des races humaines that all races were equal. They were "all capable of achieving the noblest intellectual development," as they were of "falling into the most complete degradation."4 Like baron de Vastey, Firmin saw racist theorizing as the ultimate rationale for the colonial system and slavery. Firmin conceded that the great civilizations of Africa may have declined in the present time. This observation, however, only allowed him to make with great passion the point, so dear to nineteenth-century essayists, that it was now the turn of Africa in the Americas, of Haiti, to show the black race's capacity for civilization. His Lettres de St Thomas (Letters from St. Thomas), 1910, written in exile, address the issue of political and economic unification of the Caribbean even though these ideas on a pan-Caribbean federation were well in advance of their time. It was precisely on this question of the criteria for judging civilization that Firmin and his contemporaries proved to be inadequate. Rémy Bastien points out that: "The Haitian intellectual of sixty years ago, when he criticized Vodun, for instance, labelling it a superstition and denying its importance, was at the same time piously defending his country against pitiless attacks from European and American writers. Anthropology had not yet taught tolerance . . . " (Bastien [1960], 845). The objective of the polemical essays by Firmin and his contemporaries was to demonstrate the potential of any race for arriving at certain abstract notions of culture and civilization. However, these ideals were uncompromisingly European. Consequently, African survivals in Haiti's peasantry, whether in religion, language or behavior, were a source of embarrassment. Firmin's praise of the French language in his Lettres de St Thomas as "the one best suited to Haiti's intellectual and moral development" indicates precisely how francophile this generation was in its assessment of cultural achievement. Those who saw in their passionate nationalism the first stirrings of the negritude movement are quite mistaken. To these intellectuals Haiti was a Christian and francophone country and to think otherwise was to relegate Haiti to backwardness. Their fear of the primitive is diametrically opposed to the celebration of the primitive by negritude writers. In the late nineteenth century the essay had achieved a high level of sophistication both in terms of literary achievement as well as in its capacity to master theoretical and scientific concepts. Firmin's prose demonstrates this range of accomplishment both in terms of his grasp of anthropological theory and in his ability to write a descriptive prose of high quality, particularly evident in his writings in exile. What was also becoming clear is the elitist element in the essay genre. It was becoming a way of demonstrating intellectual achievement, a way of having dialogue with cultural counterparts abroad. This dimension is particularly evident among some mulatto intellectuals at the turn of the century who felt the tide of barbarism rising, given the growing political instability in Haiti. Perhaps this tendency should be seen in broader terms as an intellectual trend in the Caribbean and South America at the turn of the century. It is precisely at this time that the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó published his vigorous defence of intellectual refinement Ar iel, 1900. The idea is not all that different from W. E. B. Du Bois's dream of the "Talented Tenth" or an intellectual elite that would win respect for the race as a whole. In another few decades iconoclastic Caliban would take center stage. For the moment, it was high-minded Ariel who dreamt of a haven of gentility and refinement and so shut out the more unnerving aspects of the societies in which they lived.

4 Toutes capables de s'élever aux plus nobles vertus, au plus haut développement intellectuel, comme de tomber dans la plus complète dégénération (Finnin [1885], 662).

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In Haiti, this defence of elitism was articulated by the intellectuals who collaborated in the movement called La Ronde. For example, Etzer Vilaire, one of the foremost poets and theoreticians of the group, clearly describes his dream as "the arrival of a Haitian elite in the literary history of France, the production of strong and lasting works that can demand attention from our intellectual metropole."5 There is an interesting similarity between La Ronde's wish to have their original talents consecrated by France and the ideas put forward by Oruno Lara who founded in Pointe-àPitre La Guadeloupe littéraire et artistique in 1908. In his essay "La Guadeloupe littéraire" written in 1912 he makes the following appeal. "How do we impose ourselves, have our genius recognized, when we are expected to fade into French culture. How then can we, in this assimilation of our very being into French civilization, retain our own personality?"6 There is in this concern to be French yet original a noticeable shift away from the ideal of racial redemption. The national identity was Afro-Latin or Afro-French and the sense of rehabilitating the black race seems a thing of the past. Certainly in Haiti, this emphasis on a francophone orientation went along with a contempt for material and technological progress and a pride in a fastidious and elegant inaccessibility. The element of escapism, of isolating self in private fantasy is influenced by French Symbolism and the latter's ideal of poetic disdain and artistic hermeticism. An early editorial in La Ronde argues that art must be "independent; nothing must inhibit its free expression. Its only morality is in its capacity to broaden and purify our sensibility . . . taking us into a world of the imagination, filled with fantasy and dreams, where life is more noble and more pure."7 The intellectual at the turn of the century sounded like a New World Quixote, clinging to codes of refinement and nobility in a world on the verge of anarchy. It is this attitude that would make the members of La Ronde vulnerable to attack from the militant indigenists of the 1930s. This elitism also encouraged a predictable superciliousness about others. The myth of modernity, of racial regeneration, of creolization was now replaced by the view of Haiti as a French or at least European enclave in the Americas. The ideal of national integrity and the symbolic value of Haitian independence had become derailed by the beginning of the twentieth century. Intellectuals sought models for national development in France and in Britain. The debate as to whether Haiti's orientation should be Latin or Anglo-Saxon was carried on with great vigor during the presidency of Nord Alexis (1902-08). In this debate within the elite as to the importance of Latin values over the pragmatism of Britain and the United States (see Nicholls [1979], 137-38), the culture of Haiti's peasant majority was left out of account. A cosmopolitan pose was highly valued by Haiti's elite who had abandoned the rural sector and become the consumers of, as well as the brokers for, foreign culture. These attitudes are clearly related to the composition of Haiti's commercial sector at the time. As Brenda Plummer observes: "Cosmopolitanism in Haiti derived in part from the multinational character of its trading community, the enclave character of mercantile commerce and the trader's considerable independence from local traditions" (Plummer [1988], 40). The way was inadvertently being prepared for the erosion of national independence and for increased foreign intervention in Haitian affairs. (See Plummer's Haiti and the Great Powers, [1902-15].) 5 l'avènement d'une élite haïtienne dans l'histoire littéraire de la France; la production d'oeuvres fortes et durables qui puissent s'imposer à l'attention de notre métropole intellectuelle (Vilaire [1907], xxxiii). 6 Comment nous imposer, affirmer notre personnalité, quand il nous faut nous fondre dans l'esprit français. Comment, dans cette assimilation de notre être dans la civilisation française, conserver notre caractère propre? (Lara [1912], n.p.). 7 l'art est indépendant; rien ne doit entraver la libre manifestation. Toute sa moralité consiste dans l'élargissement et la purification de notre âme . . . en nous transportant dans un monde imaginaire, peuplé de chimères et de rêves, où la vie est plus noble et plus pure (La Ronde [1899], 152).

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The refusal of the Haitian elite, both black and mulatto, to abandon an idealistic view of Europe, is evident in the essays written at this time. Haiti's spiritual affinity with France is revealed through what is seen by Frédéric Marcelin in 1896 as the latter's "moral grandeur and generosity of spirit." Demesvar Delorme corroborates this view by declaring that Europe "does not harbor stupid and shameful racial prejudice . . . Europe . . . accepts only intellectual aptitude and moral virtue as differences between men."8 The United States is stereotyped as the land of philistine ostentation and grasping materialism. Delorme refers, for instance, to the United States as the country where "civilization means the dollar. It is simply a matter of making money at all costs."9 One of the more unfortunate aspects of this nostalgic clinging to a European identity is the attitude toward American blacks that seems quite prevalent at the time. There is no sense of solidarity with the black diaspora. The same intellectuals who fiercely defended Haiti against the stereotypes of barbarism are guilty of doing precisely the same thing when they refer to the black American as inferior. Frédéric Marcelin smugly declares: "The Haitian type is more refined . . . the black American has his head lowered and his eyes constantly fixed on the ground."10 Demesvar Delorme in his essays entitled Réflexions diverses sur Haïti (Diverse reflections on Haiti), 1873, laments the lot of blacks in the United States because of Jim Crow racism. He declares that the most humble Haitian would not have submitted to such treatment by whites. Haitian independence was no longer seen as something to be maintained because of its importance to the black race. It had become the source of feelings of superiority over the less fortunate members of their race. The superciliousness would change radically by 1915 when the contradictions of the turn of the century make American intervention in Haiti possible. The ideas expressed in the essay at the turn of the century and the very function of this medium were to change radically by the 1920s. The worst consequences imaginable had resulted from the cosmopolitanism of the turn of the century. Haiti found itself once more under white foreign domination after more than a century of independence. Some members of the elite felt they had nothing to gain from chronic political instability. The Americans, however, proved to be less than sensitive conquerors. They managed to placate the mulatto elite for a while by restoring political power to the elite through the choice of Sudre Dartiguenave as a pliant president. However, racial antagonism soon emerged because of the enthnocentric attitudes of American officials. The Haitian mulatto elite found itself exposed to Jim Crow segregation. The elite organized their resistance against the Americans by forming groups such as La Société d'Histoire et de Géographie d'Haïti (The Haitian historical and geographical society) and L'Union Patriotique (The patriotic union). Other attempts to mobilize the literate elite were the use of journalism and the polemical essay. In this regard the role of the newspaper La Patrie, 1915, and the activism of the turn of the century intellectual Georges Sylvain are outstanding. Because of the shock of the U.S. occupation (1915-34), this generation was no longer content to cultivate their garden. They were now willing to address the larger Haitian political and social landscape. For a younger generation of writers, however, this was too little too late. The older generation was dismissed as eurocentric and bookish in a widespread repudiation of the intellectual culture of 8 L'Europe ne connaît pas, elle, ces stupides et honteuses proscriptions de races . .. L'Europe . . . n'admet de différence entre les hommes que celle que créent les aptitudes intellectuelles et virtus (Delorme [1873], 126-27). 9 . . . civilisation signifie dollar. Il s'agit uniquement de faire l'argent; coûte que coûte (Delorme [1873], 128). 10 Le type haïtien est plus affiné . . . Le noir américain baisse la tête et ses yeux semblent toujours regarder le sol (Marcelin [1913], 82).

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the French Caribbean. La Revue Indigène in Haiti was no different in this regard from its French West Indian counterpart Légitime Défense. As Rémy Bastien put it: "the past was put in the dock and found guilty without appeal. In the Haiti of 1928 the trial took an unprecedented turn: The country was in misery because its responsible elite had rejected its intrinsic personality . . . Only by returning to its cultural sources could Haiti regenerate itself and regain its pride" (Bastien [1966], 54). The student contributors to Légitime Défense in Paris took an equally irreverent attitude to the generation that preceded them. In 1932 Etienne Léro would characterize all writing before the 1930s as a lack of "originality or profundity, the vivid and sensual imagination of the black man, any response to the hatred and aspirations of an oppressed people."11 Expressions such as "intrinsic personality" and the "imagination of the black man" point to notions of authenticity that were tied to racial difference. The 1920s and 1930s meant the celebration of otherness, of racial essence in contrast to the homogenizing thrust of the theories of race and culture in the nineteenth century. At the time, little attention was paid to the relationship between this cult of racial authenticity and the European counterculture of the period. Haitian intellectuals in Port-au-Prince and French West Indians in Paris were earnestly discovering themselves through models provided by white anthropologists such as Delafosse and Lévy-Bruhl. These models were the product of Europe's fascination with racial difference and cultural otherness. Otherness became the stimulus for the French Caribbean imagination in the 1920s. Intellectual activity was dominated by the young dropout, resentful of his staid upper-class parents and longing for a Utopian order believed to be freer and less encumbered than the world of their forebears. Haiti's radicals sought authenticity in the slums of Port-au-Prince, in wild voudou rituals and, imaginatively, in the primeval bush, presumably remote from the encroachments of bourgeois respectability. A worthy successor to eminent essayists and theoreticians in the nineteenth century was found in Jean Price-Mars who saw Haiti as a dangerously fragmented society with neither leadership nor any binding cohesive force. In his analysis, Price-Mars put the blame squarely on the elite: "The fact is that the elite has failed in its social responsibility, that ultimately it has shown itself unworthy of its mission of representation and leadership."12 The answer lay in legitimizing the culture of the majority, the peasantry. It was through enthnology that Price-Mars set out to discouver Haiti's "national soul." This interest in racial authenticity in the 1930s was influenced by certain tendencies in French thought at the time as well as by European ethnology. Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès in France popularized the belief that genuine national identity could only be derived from the untainted culture of rural France. The mystical concept of racial genius and the view of culture as organic rather than conditioned left an indelible mark on Haitian nationalism and the anti-assimilationist attitudes of the 1930s. Price-Mars led the ethnological movement in its assault on the attitudes of the elite and its idealization of Haiti's African heritage. In his now famous formulation he accused the elite of "bovarysme collectif," of seeing themselves as French and denying their African heritage. Ainsi parla l'oncle (So spoke the uncle), 1928, was perhaps the most important theoretical work written during the occupation and its influence lasted for decades after the Americans 11 ... un accent original ou profond, l'imagination sensuelle et colorée du noir, l'écho des haines et des aspirations d'un peuple opprimé (Léro [1932], 10). 12 C'est que l'élite a failli à sa vocation sociale, c'est enfin que l'élite s'est rendue indigne de sa mission de représentation et de leadership (Price-Mars [1919], 73).

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withdrew. More than being simply a critique of Haiti's assimilationist elite, Price-Mars's ideas had as their point of departure the notion of a racial mystique. His work glosses over the desperate poverty of rural Haiti and speculated instead about "the psychological substratum from which a black mystique is derived." Ainsi parla l'oncle is as much a defence of Africa's achievement as an illustration of Haiti's folklore, of voudou and the Creole language. Price-Mars's lectures that formed the basis for Ainsi parla l'oncle were the first unequivocal defence of African culture by a Haitian writer and his revaluation of Haitian peasant culture was both timely and necessary. However, Price-Mars was laying the foundations for noiriste dogma that would produce the griot movement and later manifest itself politically in Duvalierism. Other essayists contributed to the influence of Price-Mars's ideals. The most respected of these was J. C. Dorsainvil. His study of voudou, Vodou et névrose (Voudou and neurosis), 1913, actually precedes Price-Mars's work. His work was a little more cautious than that of Price-Mars but the main hypothesis remains the same. Haiti's soul was African. Dorsainvil's essays are studded with expressions such as "métaphysique raciale," "habitus nerveux racial," and references to the people's "Guinean soul." Another defender of this position, and a much more extreme one, was Dr. Arthur Holly. His Daimons du culte voudo (Spirits of the voudou cult), 1918, describes the Haitian people as AfroLatin and insists that the Latin element was just on the surface but that deep down the mysterious powers of the African past were dominant. Theoretical writing in the Caribbean on the subject of the distinctive essence and personality of the black race was not restricted to Haiti. The negritude movement in Paris is strikingly similar in its preoccupations. The negritude movement was formulated intellectually in the 1930s by Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. It was Senghor who plunged most singlemindedly into the racial theorizing that has come to characterize negritude as a movement. All three founders of negritude were interested in race but in varying degrees. This focus is essentially what separates them from their predecessors in Légitime Défense. As Césaire admitted in an interview with René Depestre in 1967: "At that time I criticized the communists for forgetting our Negro characteristics .. . We are Negroes with a great number of historical peculiarities. I suppose I must have been influenced by Senghor in this" (Césaire [1972]). Indeed, the only essay produced by the negritude movement that speculates about racial essences and affinities is Senghor's "Ce que l'homme noir apporte" (What the black man brings), which was published in 1939. Césaire produced no major theoretical essay before the creation of the journal Tropiques in the 1940s. Damas, however, published his passionate indictment of French colonial policy in Retour de Guyane (Return from Guiana), 1938. This work is more sociopolitical in intent than Senghor's theorizing on the question of racial essences. Damas's work is as much a detailed, factual report on the reality of French colonization in Guiana as an emotional rejection of the French policy of assimilation that predates Césaire's Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism), 1950, by more than a decade. It is unlike Césaire's polemic, which often reads like blank verse. The latter, in its response to Mannoni's theory of the psychology of dependence in La psychologie de la colonisation (Prospero and Caliban), 1950, could well be compared with the polemical essays of Price and Firmin in the latter's efforts to respond to Gobineau's theories of racial inequality in the nineteenth century. Damas gives us the background to the colonization of French Guiana, examples of French incomprehension in developing the country and, most importantly, an account of the sombre effects of the prison colony

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on the local society. The bagnard from the prison colony is usually forced to stay on after he has served his sentence and is a corrupting and degrading influence, leaving the local community in a state of insecurity. This reportage comes to a strident close with a rejection of the high-minded intention behind French assimilation: "No, not at all, French policy as regards its colonies is not an admirable thing in the eyes of the civilized world . . . No." 13 The values of negritude are polyvalent. The ethnological dimension that was pronounced in Haiti was echoed by Senghor in Paris but did not have a parallel in the French Caribbean. The full ideological impact would have to await the postwar period with the heyday of Présence Africaine in the 1950s. Damas lapses into silence after war is declared. Senghor is taken prisoner by the Germans. Césaire returns to Martinique. The ideas of noirisme are kept alive in Haiti through the journal Les Griots (1938-40) and the racial theorizing about psychology and culture by Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier. They kept Price-Mars's ideological legacy alive. The main purpose of the griots movement is described in their own words as "La valorisation du facteur raciologique" (the valuation of the raciological factor). Race was the point of departure for their pseudoscientific writings, whether the subject was the education system, history, sociology or literary criticism. Some of their more important theoretical essays are collected in Les tendances d'une génération (Attitudes of a generation), 1934. As Rémy Bastien, speculating about the evolution of noiriste ideology in the 1940s observed: "What about Price-Mars and his young black disciples? They continued studying folklore, talking about folklore, and writing about folklore, but they were only biding their time" (Bastien [1966], 54). Duvalier's election as president of Haiti in 1957 and the activism of Présence Africaine would put noirisme on center stage in the 1950s. In the meantime, theoretical writing in the French Caribbean was at its most articulate and innovative in the work of Césaire and the Tropiques group in Martinique and in the polemical essays of Jacques Roumain in Haiti. In Haiti, as the "Authentics" continued with their dangerously reductionist notions of noirisme and their pursuit of the ideal of black nationalism, an equally dangerous mystification was articulated by essayists from the mulatto elite at the time. In the name of mulatto liberalism and a defence of Haiti's French patrimony, writers such as Dantès Bellegarde and Sténio Vincent attacked noirisme and offered as a substitute Haiti's French heritage. Fiercely anti-communist and antinoiriste, Bellegarde, who had a successful career as a government minister and diplomat in the postoccupation period, declares: "We have no intention of denying our African origins. But we cannot either renounce our French culture. We cannot and have no desire to . . . We belong to Africa by blood . . . This is the coupling that produces our national genius. To reject this 'spirit' would be to sever off half of ourselves. Our choice is clear: it is in the direction of French civilization - in its original and pure form - that we wish to walk."14 Bellegarde's style is as gratuitously ornate as the griots are spuriously pseudo-scientific. The metaphor of the dichotomy between blood and mind, flesh and spirit is pervasive in the writing of both mulatto liberals and noiriste "Authentics." For Bellegarde, the world of blood and 13 Non et non. La politique de la France en matière coloniale ne fait pas l'admiration de l'univers civilisé . . . Non (Damas [1938], 168). 14 Nous n'entendons pas renier nos origines africaines. Mais nous ne pouvons pas non plus renoncer à notre culture française. Nous ne le pouvons ni le voulons . . . Nous appartenons à l'Afrique par le sang, à la France par l'esprit et aussi dans une notable proportion - par le sang. C'est cette alliance qui fait notre personnalité nationale. Renoncer à cet "esprit", ce serait nous amputer de la moitié de nous-mêmes. Notre choix est fait: c'est dans les voies de la civilisation française conçue dans sa première pureté - que nous voulons marcher (Bellegarde [1943], 17).

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flesh was held in contempt. Into this category fell Creole, voudou, and the traditions of the Haitian masses. His views were diametrically opposed to those of Price-Mars. In his view, Haiti, "an intellectual province of France," and all those who celebrated Haiti's African heritage were destined to be a mere cultural oddity for the tourist trade. Haiti would become, if the noiristes had their way, ". . . in the middle of the Americas, a Dahomean island, with a Bantu culture and a Congolese religion, for the amusement of Yankee tourists."15 These were the official views of the mulatto establishment of the 1940s. President Sténio Vincent echoed the sentiments of his class at that time when he scathingly described the whole noiriste movement as empty posturing: "Paris was their headquarters. And who among them had ever thought of making a small expedition in some area of the Sudan or the Congo in order to have a little contact with the souls of our distant ancestors."16 This was the official attitude toward noirisme until the fall of Elie Lescot in 1946. Time would show that the theoreticians of mulatto liberalism failed to understand the growing appeal of notions of racial mystification within Haiti and certainly underestimated the political implications of black nationalism. The late 1930s and the 1940s in Haiti are a period of great intellectual effervescence. It was also a period dominated by the reductionist polemics of mulatto and black intellectuals, by the closed rhetoric of the essay, and the lure of dictatorship. One individual who seems to have been constrained neither by class nor by the intellectual horizons of this period is Jacques Roumain. It comes as no surprise that, given his intellectual stature, he incurred the hostility of both noiristes and the mulatto establishment at the time. It is Roumain's attachment to Marxism from the early 1930s that allows him to avoid the myth-making of mulatto intellectuals as well as the griot promotion of a legendary view of Haitian history and society. The theorizing of black "Authentics" and mulatto francophiles represents an inbred and historically determined continuity with class and color tensions of the Haitian past. Each apologist sought to justify the right of his class to dominate Haiti politically. Roumain's essays, however, are characterized by a systematic attempt at revaluation. Roumain was primarily a poet. Indeed, it could be said that before being a thinker and theorist, Roumain's field of vision was essentially poetic. His sense of his own marginality, his social conscience, a persistent restlessness are everpresent in his early mood poems and later exercise some influence on his prose writings. However, an exploration of this relationship between imagination and ideology is beyond the scope of the present essay. Perhaps Roumain was the first Haitian author to take on the role of the modern writer as cultural and political exile. Long before entering the phase of creative vagabondage, Roumain's ideas are characterized by an openness to new ideas and a perception of Haiti within larger ideological and cultural contexts. Unlike many of his contemporaries who tended to cling desperately to the mystifications of race, the mysteries of voudou or the mystique of the Creole language, Roumain seems to have had a sense of the inevitable and dynamic evolution of cultures and, certainly, of the manifold potential of Haitian culture. The point of departure for Roumain's theories on Haiti's social evolution is stated in his first major essay L'analyse schématique (The schematic analysis), 1934. Roumain is struck by the tragic stagnation of Haitian society. In this Marxist analysis of Haitian society in the 1930s, Roumain 15 . . . au centre des Amériques, un îlot dahoméen, avec une culture bantoue et une religion congolaise, pour l'amusement des touristes yankees (Bellegarde [1943], 17). 16 Paris était leur quartier général. Mais qui donc, parmi eux avaient jamais pensé à faire un petit tour dans quelque région du Soudan et du Congo pour aller communier avec l'âme de nos lointains ancêtres (Vincent [1939], 153-54).

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analyzes problems raised in his early creative writing - the feudal nature of peasant society and the sterile nature of the mulatto. Predictably, given his Marxist approach, Roumain dismisses racial antagonism as "the sentimental expression of the class struggle." The American occupation for Roumain has simply thrown into sharp relief the rigid class stratification of Haitian society that had been inherited from colonialism: "the parallel between the class structure of St. Domingue and the present Republic of Haiti is quite striking. French Colonists and American Imperialists; affranchis and the present-day elite; slaves and the Haitian proletariat."17 Consequently, neither the emergent black elite nor the traditional mulatto elite would provide a solution to Haiti's crisis. Domination by either group would in no way change Haiti's traditional social structure. He could already foresee how the nationalist movement during the occupation was being used by both black and mulatto elite to gain political control of Haiti. The mulattoes proclaimed themselves nationalists but after the Americans left, they would revert to class allegiance. The "Authentics" were glorifying peasant culture because of racial mystification and not out of any genuine concern with the desperate material conditions of the peasantry. Roumain himself could be accused of romanticizing the peasant because of his too ready identification of Haiti's peasantry with the communist notion of a global, urban proletariat. This was to be a source of naiveté among Haiti's, and perhaps the Caribbean's, Marxists and was ultimately responsible for the tragic risks taken by Haitian revolutionary intellectuals such as Jacques Stephen Alexis. However, this belief in an international proletarian front was popular at the time and was the source of the Communist party's attractiveness to many black writers and intellectuals. Even if this idealistic view of the peasantry was an area of weakness in Roumain's analysis, he is accurate on the question of bourgeois machinations. Roumain was prophetic in his warning about the dangers of noiriste dogma: "The duty of the P.C.H. . . . is to alert the proletariat, the poor petite bourgeoisie, and intellectuals to the danger of black middle-class politicians who would like to exploit for their own ends the former's justified anger."18 Roumain's sense of the dangers of creating racial myths grew more acute during the Second World War. Sent into exile because of his Communist activities, Roumain saw German and Italian Fascism as part of the same obsession with authenticity. His next important essay, Les griefs de l'homme noir (The black man's grievance), 1939, examined the racial antagonisms of the American South. Just as race was used in Haiti to camouflage economic exploitation and the class struggle, so in the South it was used to divert attention from the explosive social tensions within a stagnant society. Roumain saw lynching and the myth of white superiority as a means of dividing the Southern proletariat of blacks and poor whites. As he observed: ". . . the lyncher is himself a victim of the act of lynching. These packs of men unleashed in pursuit of human prey are largely composed of poor whites who live under conditions that are hardly better than those of the blacks."19 Because Marxism refuses to accept absolutes and sees all phenomena in relative terms and as the external

17 Le parallèle est saisissant entre les rapports de classe à St. Dominique et dans l'actuelle République d'Haïti. Colons français et Impérialistes américains; affranchis et bourgeoisie contemporaine; esclaves et prolétariat haïtien (Roumain [1934], n.p.). 18 Mais le devoir du P.C.H. . . . est de mettre en garde le prolétariat, la petite bourgeoisie pauvre et les travailleurs intellectuels noirs contre les politiciens bourgeois noirs qui voudraient exploiter à leurs profits leurs colères justifiées (Roumain [1934], v-vi). 19 . . . le lyncheur est lui-même victime de lynchage. Les meutes d'hommes déchaînés à la poursuite d'un gibier humain se composent en grande partie de blancs pauvres dont les conditions de vie sont de peu meilleures que celles faites aux nègres (Roumain [1939], 221-22).

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manifestation of underlying economic conditions, Roumain's essays display unprecedented clarity and objectivity in their analysis of race in the 1930s. The same is true of his analysis of religion. Probably Roumain's most influential polemical writings are his articles on the anti-superstition campaign which appeared in the press in 1941-42. The campaign's explicit aim was to convert vaudouisants to Catholicism and was waged by the Catholic church with the support of the state and Haiti's mulatto elite. The covert purpose behind this was to continue mulatto hegemony after the American occupation and to give the state greater control over the peasantry through the church. Roumain's argument against the Catholic church's campaign is that there is little to be gained by replacing belief in voudou by the belief in Catholic dogma. Voudou was to a large extent a product of the economic conditions of peasant life. Religion of whatever kind was the opium of the peasantry, a destructive form of "false consciousness." As Roumain proposed, what was needed was not an "anti-superstition campaign" but a campaign against misery: "If we wish to change the archaic religious mentality of our peasantry, they must be educated. And one cannot educate them without transforming at the same time their material conditions."20 Roumain's early death in 1944 meant that noiristes and their mulatto adversaries would vie for control of Haiti politically and ideologically. It is not that Roumain did not leave behind an important legacy. The revolution of 1946 was led by young men who had been deeply influenced by Roumain, in particular Jacques Stephen Alexis and René Depestre. The anti-negritude polemics of Roumain, his view of Haiti as part of the Americas, his incarnation of a blend of militant ideologue and man of letters left an indelible mark on this generation. René Depestre reminiscing about the 1940s commented: "One morning in 1942, we saw Nicolás Guillén enter our classroom in the Lycée Pétion, in the company of Jacques Roumain. A new world was born before our very eyes."21 Another member of this generation reacting to Roumain's death entitles his poem "Nous garderons le dieu" (We will guard the god) in the face of the death of man. Marxism in Haiti did not die with Roumain, and Haiti's major essayists in recent times have drawn heavily on Roumain's ideas. Depestre and Alexis not only declared an overt attachment to Roumain and his ideals, but reenacted in the mid-1950s the confrontation Roumain had with the noiriste ideologues in the 1930s. The promotion of negritude by the Présence Africaine group in the 1950s as a homogeneous black cultural monolith provoked a response from both Alexis and Depestre that showed the strength of their attachment to Roumain's concept of culture as something dynamic and ever-changing. Alexis's anti-essentialist approach to culture was articulated in 1956 when he declared at the First Congress of Negro Writers in Paris: "We must say that all these glosses and all this gloating over an alleged Negroness are dangerous in this sense, that they conceal the reality and cultural autonomy of the Haitian people."22 René Depestre in an early essay on the need for a new nationalist aesthetic in Haitian arts echoed Roumain's views: "Negritude denies the evidence of the diversity of the material conditions of evolution (and) considers the creative sensibility of blacks as a homogeneous bloc without any borders."23 The notions of "cultural autonomy" 20 Si l'on veut changer la mentalité religieuse archaïque de notre paysan, il faut l'éduquer. Et l'on ne peut l'éduquer sans transformer en même temps sa condition matérielle (Roumain [1942], 11). 21 Une fois, un matin de 1942, nous vîmes entrer Nicolas Guillén dans notre classe du lycée Pétion, en compagnie de Jacques Roumain. Un monde nouveau naissait sous nos yeux (Depestre [1976], 28). 22 Nous devons dire que toutes les gloses et toutes les gorges chaudes en faveur d'une prétendue "négritude" sont dangereuses dans ce sens qu'elles cachent la réalité de l'autonomie culturelle du peuple haïtien (Alexis [1956], 260). 23 La négritude nie l'évidence de la diversité des conditions matérielles d'évolution (et) considère la sensibilité créatrice des noirs comme un bloc culturel homogène, sans frontières (Depestre [1956], 10).

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and "creative sensibility" are extensions of Roumain's refusal to see culture as static. It is a view that would put Haitian intellectuals in the forefront of the reaction against the excesses of negritude. With the election of François Duvalier in 1957, a new era began for the Haitian intellectual. Like Plato, Duvalier banished intellectuals from his republic. He saw himself as the ultimate intellectual and others as a threat. As an indication of his sense of his own preeminence in the field of ideas he entitled his collected essays Oeuvres essentielles, thereby associating the magisterial discourse of the essay with authoritarian politics. He then proceeded to coopt, scatter, or eliminate Haiti's intellectuals. The intellectual and, as a consequence, the essay form have not yet recovered from Duvalier's use of state terrorism. A pervasive feeling of the depleted importance of the intellectual as well as a sense of the gratuitious nature of the written word in the face of the brutality of an authoritarian regime emerged. The relationship between intellectual and community, between essay form and the need for a didactic, demystifying impulse in literature may have changed irrevocably. Left in its wake is a feeling of vulnerability and self-consciousness that marks at least a temporary shift in emphasis away from privileged interlocutors and individual word to collective action. Jacques Roumain cast a long intellectual shadow in Haiti. Aimé Césaire had a similar effect in the French West Indies in the 1940s. Between 1941 and 1945 Césaire edited the journal Tropiques. In Tropiques Césaire hoped, like the militants of the Indigenist movement in Haiti, to continue the process of demystification and to create a collective prise de conscience among French West Indians during World War II. Like Roumain, Césaire was a Marxist in the 1940s. However, he did not see his journal in politically activist terms as would have been the case with Roumain. Granted that Tropiques could not have taken an overt political stance because of the censorship imposed by the Vichy regime, Césaire's focus always seems to have been more on poetics than politics, more on imaginative revolution than on political transformation. This makes him vastly different from Roumain who valued activism highly and once dismissed surrealism as anarchistic and self-indulgent. The confrontation between Roumain's approach and Césaire actually surfaced in the quarrel between Césaire and René Depestre in 1955 in which Césaire cautioned Depestre about the impoverishment of poetic creativity through a blind devotion to revolutionary politics. Marxism was to Haiti, and because of Roumain, as Surrealism was to the French West Indies in the 1940s because of Césaire. The difference between the two positions can be easily seized in Césaire's declaration in Tropiques in 1944: "The Martinican revolution will be made in the name of bread, certainly; but also in the name of air and poetry (which amounts to the same thing)."24 (See Arnold [1981], 17384 for a fuller discussion.) The essays in Tropiques were consequently more cultural and poetic in focus than political. Césaire and his collaborators invited his reading public to embrace their own culture - from folktales to flora and fauna. Tropiques was meant to combat the assimilationist policy of the French government and to give the French West Indian a new kind of cultural orientation. However, the writing in Tropiques is difficult and clearly meant for fellow intellectuals. The references are erudite and highminded and invoke such names as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud. Therefore, whereas Césaire was genuine in his invitation to the "Martinican Narcissus" to gaze into

24 La Révolution Martiniquaise se fera au nom du pain, bien sûr; mais aussi au nom de l'air et de la poésie (ce qui revient au même) (Césaire [1944], 9).

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tales, legends, songs to find himself inscribed in them, there is a limit to how far this message would reach. Ultimately, Césaire and Tropiques would not have the effect on the French Caribbean that a Price-Mars or a Roumain would have in Haiti. In many ways the Haitian problem, at least from the cultural perspective, was simpler. Haiti's massive peasantry and spectacular hinterland could easily provide an avenue for national cultural renewal. Martinique was very different. Creole, folklore, folk religion would have a more fragile presence. Tropiques did attempt a mapping of the Caribbean in geographical, botanical, and imaginative terms but the task was a desperate and complex one. Ultimately, it is in the use of surrealist technique to fashion an authentic, individual identity that Tropiques has its greatest impact. In 1945, Césaire published his essay "Poésie et connaissance" (Poetry and knowledge) in the pages of Tropiques. It is a celebration of revolution at the level of the imagination and of poetry as a weapon for transforming the individual and collective consciousness. There is, revealingly, no reference to Marx in this major essay. Césaire's heroes are Freud, Breton, Jung, and Baudelaire. Césaire located revolution in the radical poetics of surrealism. It was the only instrument for undermining the submis sivenes s and inertia inculcated by colonialism and assimilation. The irony of all this is that when it came to making political choices, Césaire opted for the departmentalization law in 1946 that has resulted in the intensification of France's cultural stranglehold over her Caribbean departments. Tropiques could be seen as the heroic phase of the French West Indian intellectual and the plea for cultural renewal. It would be succeeded by no major intellectual renaissance and indeed, as in Haiti, because of its failings it could be seen as significantly altering the relation between intellectual and public in recent times. The essay form in the Caribbean has been largely neglected by literary critics because it is regarded as the source of objective, critical reflection rather than as a literary construct to be reflected on. This omission is an unfortunate one since the discourse of the essay form has allowed a level of clarity and insight to emerge that has been stifled in artistic expression at times. It is also clear that essayists are as capable of self-delusion as anyone else and can equally be misguided purveyors of myths of class and racial identity. What makes this issue even more acute is that many essays are tied in a benign or sinister way to official policy. From Vastey to Duvalier, from Firmin to Roumain, the essayist puts on the mask of the maître, of authority, and perhaps even of the authoritarian leader in reacting to the crisis of a particular time and society. In this body of writing, we find all the major themes that animate Caribbean literature: the quest for identity, the need for cultural authenticity, the question of self with respect to the collectivity. Because of the role of the essayist and the nature of the medium, the essay also provides a vital link between social and political framework and the act of writing. Yet the confidence in self, in language, and in knowledge itself may well be a thing of the past as a new skepticism pervades the intellectual and literary culture of the region.

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Bibliography Alexis, Jacques Stephen. 1956. Of the Marvellous Realism of Haitians. In Présence Africaine. 8-10(JuneNov.):245-71. (A major essay that both breaks with negritude and outlines new possibilities for the Haitian novel.) Arnold, A. James. 1981. Modernism and Negritude. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. (An invaluable guide to Césaire's ideas.) Bastien, Rémy. 1960. The Role of the Intellectual in Haitian Plural Society. In Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 83 (January): 843-49. —. 1966. Vodun and Politics in Haiti. In Religion and Politics in Haiti. 39-68. Washington D.C.: Institute for Cross Cultural Research. (A perceptive, scholarly treatment of the Haitian intellectual.) Bellegarde, Dantès. 1943. Haïti et ses problèmes. Montreal: Valiquette. (A collection of essays by an unrepentant partisan of mulatto elitism.) Césaire, Aimé. 1944. Poésie et connaissance. In Aimé Césaire, l'homme et l'oeuvre. Ed. by Kesteloot and Kotchy. 112-26. Paris: Présence Africaine. English version: Poetry and Knowledge. Trans. and ed. by A. James Arnold. xlii-lvi. In his Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. CARAF Books. Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990. (Césaire's fullest treatment of his poetics.) —. [1950]. 1955. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. (Césaire's major political essay.) —. 1972. Interview with René Depestre. In his Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. (An important review of the negritude question.) Damas, Léon Gontran. 1938. Retour de Guyane. Paris: José Corti. (Both a polemical and factual treatment of French colonialism in Guiana.) Delorme, Demesvar. 1873. Réflexions diverses sur Haïti. Paris: F. Dentu. (A plea to modernize Haiti, yet resolutely anti-materialist.) Depestre, René. 1956. Introduction à un art poétique haïtien. Optique. 24(Feb.). (In response to Césaire, an attack on negritude and a defense of a national aesthetic.) —. 1976. La révolution de 1946 est pour demain . . . In Trente ans de pouvoir noir en Haïti. 21-61. Québec: Collectif Paroles. Dorsainvil, J. C. 1913. Vodou et névrose. First published in Haïti Médicale. Reprint: Port-au-Prince: Imp. La Presse. (A defense of voudou in terms of Haiti's African soul.) Duvalier, Denis, Bonhomme. 1934. Les tendances d'une génération. Port-au-Prince: Collection des griots. (Main ideas of noiriste group.) Fanon, Frantz. 1970. Toward the African Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Orig. ed.: Paris: Maspéro, 1964. Cahiers Libres 53-54. (A collection of essays on revolutionary politics.) Firmin, Anténor. 1885. De l'égalité des races humaines. Paris: F. Pichon. (A significant response to Gobineau's theories of racial inequality.) —. 1901. Preface to Paul Lochard, Feuilles de chêne. Paris: Ateliers Haïtiens. (Argument for seeing Haiti as civilized because of its literary culture.) —. 1910. Lettres de Saint Thomas. Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière. (Essays written in exile on Haiti's problems.) Holly, Arthur. 1918. Les daimons du culte voudo. Port-au-Prince: Edouard Chenet. (Another noiriste essay relating voudou to Haiti's African soul.) Jahn, Janheinz. 1966. Neo-African Literature, A History of Black Writing. London: Faber and Faber. (Classic negritude treatment of Caribbean literature.) Kesteloot, Lilyan. [1961]. 1963. Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature. Brussels: L'Université Libre de Bruxelles. Am. ed.: Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Négritude. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1974. (Most influential book on the subject until the 1980s; now outdated.)

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Lara, Oruno. 1912. La Guadeloupe Littéraire. (Journal devoted to promoting regionalism in the "French islands in the Americas.") Léro, Etienne. 1932. Misère d'une poésie. In Légitime Défense. 1:10-12. (A fierce criticism of nineteenth-century writing in the francophone Caribbean.) Marcelin, Frédéric. 1913. Au gré du souvenir. Paris: A. Challanel. (Reminiscences by a nationalistic man of letters from the turn of the century in Haiti.) Nau, Emile. 1854. Histoire des caciques d'Haïti. Paris: Bouchereau. (An emotional account of Haiti's preColumbian past.) Nicholls, David. 1979. From Dessalines to Duvalier. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (A thorough treatment of the problems of race and color in Haitian history.) Plummer, Brenda. 1988. Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902-15. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. (A detailed account of the political instability of Haiti at the turn of the century.) Price, Hannibal. 1900. De la réhabilitation de la race noire par la République d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince: J. Verrollot. (Argues that Haiti is the living proof that Africans and their descendants are in no way inferior.) Price-Mars, Jean. 1919. La vocation de l'élite. Port-au-Prince: Chenet. (Polemical essay aimed against Haiti's traditional elite.) —. 1928. Ainsi parla l'oncle. Paris: Imp. de Compiègne. (A timely but one-sided account of Haitian peasant culture and religion.) Roumain, Jacques. 1934. L'analyse schématique. Port-au-Prince: Imp. V. Valcin. (The first Marxist analysis of Haitian society.) —. 1939. Les griefs de l'homme noir. In L'homme de couleur. Paris: Librairie Plon. (A Marxist analysis of racism in the southern United States.) —. 1942. A propos de la campagne anti-superstitieuse. Port-au-Prince: Imp. de L'Etat. (A polemical essay on the misguided actions of the Catholic Church in Haiti.) Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1939. Ce que l'homme noir apporte. In L'homme de couleur. Paris: Librairie Plon. (Negritude orthodoxy outlined by one of the ideologues of the movement.) St. John, Spenser. 1884. Hayti or the Black Republic. London: Smith and Elder. (Lurid tales of black magic in Haiti.) Vastey, baron de. 1814. Le système colonial dévoilé. Cap Henry: Imp. du roi. (Probably the first serious critique ever written of French colonialism.) Vilaire, Etzer. 1907. Notice autobiographique. In Poèmes de la mort. Paris: Librairie Fishbacher. (An argument for an elitist literature in Haiti.) Vincent, Sténio. 1939. En posant les jalons. Port-au-Prince: Imp. de L'Etat. (A collection of speeches by a Haitian president who was an unrepentant francophile.)

Colonialism as Neurosis Frantz Fanon VERE KNIGHT University of the West Indies St. Augustine, Trinidad

Indépendamment de quelques ratés apparus en milieu clos, nous pouvons dire que toute névrose, tout comportement anormal, tout éréthisme affectif chez un Antillais, est la résultante de la situation culturelle. (Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs.)

Peter Geismar in his biography of Fanon makes the observation that all of Fanon's most original ideas were the result of his action and that the value of action lay in its potential for restructuring human consciousness. Axiomatic though it may seem, this observation provides a good starting point for an examination of the work of Fanon since it helps to explain certain changes in attitudes, certain ambiguities and apparent contradictions that occur at various stages in the development of his thinking and writing. The Fanon of Les damnés de la terre (The wretched of the earth), 1961, is not quite the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs (Black skin, white masks), 1952, although the issues with which he grapples in both works are fundamentally the same. The objectives of disalienation and decolonization remain unchanged, although his views on the methods of achieving these objectives have undergone some change. While reading Peau noire, masques blancs, it helps to bear in mind three characteristic features of Fanon at the time of his writing the book: his youth (he was barely twenty-five) and the influence that certain individuals and ideologies had on his thought, his training as a psychiatrist, and his situation as a colonized individual of the kind whose portrait emerges from the pages of the book. The first two features help determine the method used by Fanon while at the same time providing raw material for the study and explaining some of the numerous references occurring in the work; the third seems especially relevant for the raw material that provides the substance of the study. The book mixes personal experience with observations, professional and otherwise, reactions to the writings of others - fictional and nonfictional - flights of rhetoric on the part of the author, and an overarching analytical perspective that ties all these elements together. Fanon's originality does not lie in his being a pioneer in his treatment of the problems of colonialism. Negritude writing, from its beginning, had been fueled by the colonial experience and situation. Fanon, however, brings to the treatment of the problems caused by colonialism a peculiar perspective compounded of those three features earlier mentioned. Are the problems treated by Fanon general to all forms of colonial-

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ism or was there something peculiar to the French form practiced in the Caribbean that gave the problems faced by those subjected to it a special quality? What difference, if any, can be discerned between the effects of colonialism without enslavement and colonialism compounded by slavery? The influence of that added element is implied rather than clearly stated in much of Fanon's analysis. Memmi seems to feel that the French form of colonization contained its own peculiarly pernicious elements: "On the other hand, benefiting from colonization by proxy only, the Italians [in Tunisia] are much less removed from the colonized people than are the French. They do not have that stilted, formal relationship with them, that tone that always smacks of a master addressing his slave, which the French cannot quite shed" (Memmi [1965], 14-15). That Fanon, while fully conscious of the political and economic dimensions of the problems created by colonialism, chooses first to deal with the sociopsychological aspect, might be explained not simply by his professional interests but by the peculiar nature of French colonialism, which sought not merely political and economic domination, but, in the most active of fashions, cultural domination as well. This objective, pursued with great zeal through the policy of assimilation, found Antilleans especially vulnerable because they lacked the support systems available to other colonized people - for example, in Africa - since they had been uprooted from their original homeland and had been brought, in a condition of slavery, to the Caribbean. What Roberts refers to as the "psychological dry-rot" was aggravated when slavery was combined with colonialism, but even then the Caribbean situation has its own peculiar features as Roberts again observes in this comparison between the Caribbean and the island of Réunion: ". . . There away in the Indian Ocean (Réunion), although the economic conditions of the Antilles were exactly reproduced, the slave system was not accompanied by oppression and hatred; and the slaves, when freed, settled down amicably by the side of their former masters to maintain development" (Roberts, [1963], 504). That hatred and oppression should exist where the policy of assimilation was actively pursued presents a strange paradox. Assimilation contained elements that appealed to the French national psyche in so strong a manner that it was attached to the masthead of the colonizing enterprise from quite early. Based on the notion of equality but also on the conviction of the superiority of French civilization, it suggested that there were no cultural differences that education could not overcome. By implication, at least, it condemned other cultures coming into contact with French culture. The report of the French Colonial Congress of 1889 stated that all the efforts of colonization must tend to propagate among the natives the French language, French methods of work, and gradually the spirit of French civilization. It is to proclamations such as this that Fanon refers when he says in "Racisme et Culture" (Racism and culture): ". . . This event commonly referred to as alienation is very important. In official texts it appears under the name of assimilation . . . The group made to feel inferior had accepted, because of the implacable force of the argument, that the misfortunes stemmed directly from its racial and cultural characteristics."1 A few years earlier than Fanon, Césaire had identified assimilation, and its inevitable consequence, alienation, as the most psychologically harmful of the features of colonialism. The Caribbean provided an especially fertile condition for the implantation and growth of these features since the region contained those elements identified by Mannoni as particularly favorable: "Assimilation can succeed if the personality of the

1 Cet événement désigné communément aliénation est naturellement très important. On le trouve dans les textes officiels sous le nom d'assimilation . . . Le groupe infériorisé avait admis, la force de raisonnement étant implacable, que ses malheurs procédaient directement de ses caractéristiques raciales et culturelles (Fanon [1956], 46).

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native is first destroyed through uprooting, enslavement, and the collapse of the social structure, and this is, in fact, what happened - with debatable success - however, in the 'older' colonies" (Mannoni [1956], 27).2 Although Fanon's medical training added to his analysis of the problems of colonialism a dimension not open to Césaire, they share almost the same views, but then medical training apart, they had much in common: origins, background, early intellectual formation. Césaire's equation in the Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism): COLONIALISM = REIFICATION = DEPERSONALIZATION = DISEQUILIBRIUM can be seen as a bare-bones formulation paralleling Fanon's conclusions concerning the problems of colonialism. Can the process of reification be linked to the fact that slaves in the Caribbean were not conquered enemies (in which case they are at least human) nor yet slaves by virtue of religious or philosophical dogma (a moral basis thereby being provided for the condition), but rather mere objects of trade to be bought, sold, and used? Césaire writes expressively of this condition in the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), 1947, when he points out: "that we are walking compost hideously promising tender cane and silky cotton and they would brand us with red-hot irons and we would sleep in our excrement and they would sell us on the town square and an ell of English cloth and salted meat from Ireland cost less than we did . . ." (Césaire [1983], 61).3 In the introduction to Peau noire, masques blancs Fanon makes a quite clear statement about his purpose; but after reading the body of the work one might conclude that he had not held firmly to that purpose. Insofar as substance is concerned, he remains generally true to his promise, but the same cannot be said in respect of the method. In the first of a number of ambiguities, obvious or implied, he claims that he will not follow fashion and set out a method before proceeding with the study but at the same time he rejects emotionalism and terms the work a clinical study. As he confesses in his conclusion, Fanon does not always achieve the scientific objectivity he desired because of the closeness of the issue to him as a colonized person: "Scientific objectivity was barred to me for the alienated, the neurotic was my brother, my sister, my father."4 And he might have added "was myself." The introduction to Peau noire, masques blancs can be seen as a statement of intent, the expression of an objective to be attained, whereas the conclusion contains a post hoc assessment of what has been achieved in the intervening pages. Whence the optimism of many of the assertions found in the opening pages, where Fanon declares his confidence that only a psychoanalytic method can lay bare the affective anomalies responsible for the structure of the neuroses of the colonized. He further hoped that by analyzing the psychoexistential complex separating the white and black races he might be able to destroy it. This early optimism is replaced at the end of the study by a note of frustration and defeatism heard in the following: "I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to reason or

2 L'assimilation peut réussir si la personnalité de l'indigène est d'abord annihilée par le déracinement, l'écrasement des structures sociales, l'esclavage. C'est ce qui s'est produit, avec un succès d'ailleurs discutable, pour les "vieilles colonies" (Mannoni [1984], 36). 3 que nous sommes un fumier ambulant hideusement prometteur de cannes tendres et de coton soyeux et l'on nous marquait au fer rouge et nous dormions dans nos excréments et l'on nous vendait sur les places et l'aune de drap anglais et la viande salée d'Irlande coûtaient moins cher que nous . . . (Césaire [1983], 60). 4 L'objectivité scientifique m'était interdite, car l'aliéné le névrosé, était mon frère, était ma soeur, était mon père (Fanon [1971], 182).

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to respect for human dignity can alter reality."5 Between these points moves the thought of Fanon, seeking to impose order on the chaos of experience, his own and that of others, seeking rational ground on what is essentially a quicksand of emotion and unreason. In this exercise he is helped by his training as a psychiatrist, at one time helped and hindered by his experience and situation as a colonized individual, and, therefore, as an alienated individual. Language might seem a logical starting point for Fanon's examination of the problem because of the obvious importance of its role in relationships generally and, more particularly, because of the role it has played in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. His treatment of language generally remains at the descriptive level, however, an indication of the existence of a neurosis without serious analysis of what might have given rise to the condition. It might be argued that since alienation could be attributed to the process of cultural assimilation and that since education was the most obvious practical arm of the policy of assimilation, a good starting point might have been a look at the practice and influence of education. The reference to Nietzsche in the introduction - "Man's tragedy . . . is that he was once a child"6 - indicated Fanon's awareness of the importance of that period on the neurosis he is examining. In his chapter on "Le nègre et la psychopathologie" (The Negro and psychopathology) he makes reference to the formation of the child: "The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about 'our ancestors, the Gauls' identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to the savages, an all-white truth. There is identification, that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man's attitude."7 Generally speaking, however, Fanon seems more interested in the finished product of the process of assimilation than in the details that went into the production. It is perhaps a tribute to the power of poetry that there emerges from two of the poems of Léon Damas - "Hoquet" (Hiccup) and "J'ai l'impression" (I have the feeling . . .) - perhaps the most striking images of the details and the effects of assimilation on the psyche of middle-class black youth in the French Antilles. The alienation referred to by Fanon was not alienation in the Marxist sense but rather "intellectual alienation," also middle-class, the product of education and not of physical exploitation as in the case of the workers - the coupeur de cannes (sugarcane cutter) or the docker noir (the black dock worker). This explains the difference in response envisaged by Fanon: on the one hand, rational analysis and argument; on the other, physical violence. Les damnés de la terre, following the experience of the Algerian revolution, shows Fanon abandoning the rationalist approach and giving the lead to the workers who saw violence as the most effective, if not the only means of dealing with the problems of colonialist exploitation. The will-o'-the-wisp problems of assimilation, the concerns of the educated bourgeoisie, were subsumed under the more general problems created by colonialism. For it was the promise of assimilation - being French regardless of skin color - always held out but never realized, which created the neurosis in the black colonial educated class. In his treatment of attitudes toward language, Fanon mixes two methods implied in the introduction and generally present throughout the book: the descriptive and the normative. The phrase found more than once in the work - "I hope by analyzing it to destroy it" - translates a fundamental 5 Nous ne poussons pas la naïveté jusqu'à croire que les appels à la raison ou au respect de l'homme puissent changer le réel (Fanon [1971], 181). 6 Le malheur de l'homme, disait Nietzsche, est d'avoir été enfant (Fanon [1971], 8). 7 Aux Antilles, le jeune Noir, qui à l'école ne cesse de répéter 'nos pères, les Gaulois', s'identifie à l'explorateur, au civilisateur, au Blanc qui apporte la vérité aux sauvages, une vérité toute blanche. Il y a identification, c'est-à-dire que le jeune Noir adopte subjectivedment une attitude de Blanc (Fanon [1971], 120).

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belief of Fanon especially if "analyzing" can be replaced by "describing." To define the problem clearly is to point the way to its solution: the normative is implied in the perspective that characterizes the descriptive. Much of what Fanon has to say about the relationship between language and culture has obvious validity without being strikingly original. Fanon does better to point to the ambiguity in the promises of assimilation when confronted by the reality of the experience of the colonized individual locked into a stereotype illustrated by the use of petit nègre (broken French). To do this he puts on his existentialist guise, perhaps better suited to the occasion than the psychiatrist's. Attitudes to language shown by the adoption of surrealist techniques, as in the cases of Césaire and Damas, have more complex sources that Fanon does not explore. In his treatment of interpersonal relationships - black women and white men / black men and white women - Fanon relies heavily on novels that he himself qualifies as bad and that have, for the most part, happily passed into the realm of oblivion. His approach might be qualified by the expression "literature as case study." His analysis of two second-rate novels "prônant un comportement malsain" (depicting unhealthy behavior in a favorable manner) shows him to be a better psychiatrist than a literary critic and the practice of interpreting a work of fiction as literal rather than literary truth raises many questions. Mayotte Capécia's Je suis Martiniquaise (I am a Martinican woman) does not deal convincingly with the problems of black/white relationships and leaves the reader with mixed feelings of disappointment and disgust although it may have suited Fanon's purpose because of its lack of complexity. Fanon himself expresses regret that she did not say anything about her dreams, which might have provided him with greater insight into her character. The concluding words save the chapter because Fanon draws conclusions not narrowly relevant to the novels he has been discussing but to the more general issue of black/white relationships: "The [Negro's] behavior makes him akin to an obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situational neurosis."8 In the chapter "L'homme de couleur et la Blanche" (The Negro and the white woman) Capécia is replaced by René Maran, author of Un homme pareil aux autres (A man like all others), 1947, but the approach remains the same: the hero, Jean Veneuse, is seen by Fanon as an illustration of a type of neurotic dealt with in a study by Germaine Guex, La névrose d'abandon (The neurosis of abandonment). One might have expected greater reliance on direct experience than on the work, fictional and nonfictional, of others. This tendency to gloss the work of others detracts from the general originality of Fanon's study. In the end, Fanon comes close to contradicting the fundamental thesis of his study by playing down the importance of color as the most important element in the development of neuroses in the colonial situation when he states: "I contend that Jean Veneuse represents not an example of black-white relations but a certain mode of behavior by a neurotic who by coincidence is black."9 He is no doubt led to this point by his obvious movement away from the real to the hypothetical, from the descriptive to the normative. The starting point for the discussion in "Du prétendu complexe de dépendance du colonisé" (The so-called dependency complex of colonized peoples) is again the work of another author, Octave Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation (Psychology of colonization), 1950. Important differences exist between the Madagascan experience on which Mannoni's book is based and the 8 Le nègre dans son comportement s'apparente à un type névrotique obsessionnel ou, si l'on préfère, il se place en pleine névrose situationnelle (Fanon [1971], 48). 9 Et nous disons que Jean Veneuse ne représente pas une expérience des rapports noir-blanc, mais une certaine façon pour un névrosé, accidentellement noir, de se comporter (Fanon [1971], 64).

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Caribbean experience, most noticeably the fact that Madagascans were colonized in their own homeland whereas West Indians were uprooted and enslaved. Fanon relies on medical imagery to refute Mannoni's notion that elements within the folk culture and the psyche of a people suggest that they were waiting to be, indeed needed to be, colonized. [Fanon's ample references to Sartre, Jeanson, and their magazine Les Temps Modernes place his refutation squarely in the existentialist camp of antiracist argument. His citation of Césaire's Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism), published just two years earlier, shows a remarkable coincidence of views on the connection between racism and colonialism in the early 1950s. (A.J.A.)] In the remaining chapters of Peau noire, masques blancs Fanon comments somewhat less on the work of others and attempts to examine the problem from perspectives given to him by his professional training or by thinkers who have influenced him. He also draws more heavily on direct experience as evidenced by the more frequent use of the first-person singular pronoun, although he seems at times to be aiming for a collective first-person effect. In "L'expérience vécue du nègre" (The lived experience of blackness), Fanon gives the problem a psychoexistentialist treatment, openly acknowledging his debt to the Jean-Paul Sartre of Réflexions sur la question juive (Reflections on the Jewish question), 1946. The existentialist approach is peculiarly appropriate since it derives a certain concreteness from the context in which it is being applied. The chapter gives its most pertinent application to the title of the study because it looks at the Negro presence in the white world, a point in the process of assimilation at which promise comes face to face with reality. Fanon looks at the various stereotypical attitudes of the whites toward Negroes and the attempts of the latter to resist the process of "objectification." Here he is able to draw on Césaire and Senghor whose early writings made a virtue of the purported irrationality of the Negro. Beneath the surface one senses the frustration felt by the Negro as every move he makes is countered by the whites: "The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish circle, he explodes."10 Just so the violence that Fanon purported to eschew in his introduction (l'enthousiasme) surfaces when he tries to deal with lived experiences (l'expérience vécue), which draws more subjectively on his situation as a colonized individual. The longest chapter in the study, "Le nègre et la psychopathologie" (The Negro and psychopathology) best reveals Fanon as a psychiatrist and comes closest to treating the problem as a neurosis. He attempts to apply the conclusions of Freud and Adler to the condition of black people but does not restrict himself to those two analysts. He also draws on the work of Sartre and in lesser measure on Jung, Georges Mounin, Dermenghem, Jacques Howlett, and Michel Salomon. He concludes, significantly, that Freud may not be directly applicable to the condition of the Negro, although he serves to explain the attitudes of whites toward Negroes. Fanon focuses to good effect on the relationship between the child and the family and the adult and society: "Psychoanalysis . . . sets as its task the understanding of given behaviour patterns - within the specific group represented by the family. When the problem is a neurosis experienced by an adult, the analyst's task is to uncover in the new psychic structure an analogy with certain infantile elements. . . . Here, however, the evidence is going to be particularly complicated."11 10

Le nègre est un jouet entre les mains du Blanc; alors, pour rompre ce cercle infernal, il explose (Fanon [1971], 113). La psychanalyse . . . se propose de comprendre des comportements donnés - au sein du groupe spécifique que représente la famille. Et quand il s'agit d'une névrose vécue par un adulte, la tâche de l'analyste est de retrouver, dans la nouvelle structure psychique, une analogie avec de tels éléments infantiles. . . . Ici, toutefois, les phénomènes vont se compliquer singulièrement (Fanon [1971], 115). 11

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Using the idea of collective catharsis and the example of glossy magazines, he shows how the black Antillean child gradually grows to identify with the white colonizer, in some cases, against his own interests: "Subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean conducts himself like a white man. But he is a Negro. That he will learn once he goes to Europe . . ."12 At this point the dangers of the process of assimilation and the education system that feeds it become apparent. Far from preparing the young black Antillean for adult life in French society they act as traumatizing factors. Although Fanon in his introduction speaks of addressing himself to two sides (deux camps), he generally deals with the side more familiar to him, the black side. Relying on his medical background, he attempts to explain some of the reactions and attitudes of the white side, which he regards as made up of the mystifiers and the mystified. Fanon's professional qualifications notwithstanding, some of the assertions seem somewhat farfetched, such as: "That is because the negrophobic woman is in fact a putative sexual partner - just as the negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual."13 He relies on stereotypical images and attitudes: the black athlete, the white prostitute who looks for black men, the black doctor who refuses to do vaginal examinations; but he tries to put them in useful perspective by linking them to their source in the subconscious. Freud provides him with the authoritative discourse he uses in his analysis of the white problem: ". . . Every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potency."14 Thus whites invest the blacks with qualities that for them characterized a past period of greater sexual and physical freedom. Fanon substantiates his assertions with statistical information. His conclusion that blacks represent exclusively genital and biological determinants results from interviews of up to five hundred white subjects over a period of several years. The interviews included free association and were conducted not only by himself but with the help of white colleagues. Conscious of his use of anecdote and apocryphal story, he excuses his procedure on the grounds that it nevertheless provides pertinent insights. He further cites Karl Jaspers in support of his argument. The frequent association of the color black with evil and ugliness allows him to point up fundamental ambiguities in attitudes toward self found in West Indians: "The Antillean partakes of the same collective unconscious as the European."15 Thus it is normal for the Antillean to be negrophobic. The collective unconscious of the Antillean has taken over all the archetypes belonging to the European. Self-hatred is demonstrated to be the natural outcome of the cultural impositions of colonialism (assimilation): "The Negro is in every sense of the word a victim of white civilization . . . To come back to psycho-pathology, let us say that the Negro lives an ambiguity that is extra-ordinarily neurotic."16 The self-indulgence that elsewhere marks Fanon's work is generally lacking in the analysis at this point and, where he introduces personal episodes such as that involving a friend of mixed Italian-Martinican parentage, they serve to illustrate some point of general significance. His reactions to the work of Michel Salomon, however, lead him farther than he had probably planned to go and elicit from him the following outburst: "The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the 12 Subjectivement, intellectuellement, l'Antillais se comporte comme un Blanc. Or, c'est un nègre. Cela, il s'en apercevra une fois en Europe . . . (Fanon [1971], 120-21). 13 C'est que la négrophobe n'est en réalité qu'une partenaire sexuelle putative, - tout comme le négrophobe est un homosexuel refoulé (Fanon [1971], 127). 14 Toute acquisition intellectuelle réclame une perte du potentiel sexuel (Fanon [1971], 133). 15 Un Antillais est blanc par l'inconscient collectif. .. (Fanon [1971], 156). 16 Le nègre est, dans toute l'acception du terme, une victime de la civilisation blanche . . . Pour revenir à la psychopathologie, disons que le nègre vit une ambiguïté qui est extraordinairement névrotique (Fanon [1971], 155).

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problem of Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes, exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that is accidentally white."17 Here the reader senses that not only the author's emotion but the political aspects of the problem that Fanon has sought to suppress again come to the fore and threaten the balance of the analysis. This shift in tenor and style of argumentation point to the treatment Fanon will give the same problem in Les damnés de la terre. The volume Pour la révolution africaine (Toward the African revolution), 1964, is a collection of contributions to journals, presentations at conferences, and occasional pieces that Fanon published between 1952 and 1961. It can be seen as bridging the gap between Peau noire, masques blancs and Les damnés de la terre. Fanon's rejection of the doctrine of negritude at the end of the first work provides some indication of the direction in which he is moving, although the universalism he promotes hardly differs from that expressed by Césaire at the end of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Articles such as "Le syndrome nord-africain" (The North African syndrome), written in 1952, and "Antillais et Africains" point to a shift in geographical and ideological perspective. Fanon's political analysis in these articles has already progressed beyond the perspective of the bourgeois psychiatrist analyzing the syndrome as it manifests itself in the assimilated Caribbean intellectual. He is preparing himself to apply different solutions to the problem. The responsibility for liberation no longer rests with the Guadeloupean medical doctor (a transparent displacement of his own situation) but has been given to the sugarcane worker in the Robert Commune and the dock worker in Abidjan. The change from a call to reason to a call to violent action has rendered unnecessary the cooperation of the white camp in the attempt to free the colonized individual from the neuroses caused by the colonial experience. The articles originally written for El Moudjahid, the newspaper Fanon edited for the Algerian resistance movement, and which make up a substantial part of Pour la révolution africaine, often read like journalistic propaganda. This is not surprising since Fanon at the time was actively committed to the struggle to liberate Algeria from France. He sought to publicize the conflict and attract sympathetic attention, especially that of other African countries, to the Algerian cause. The change to journalism brought a change in style, a more restrained form of expression from which most of the bombast and enthusiasm have disappeared. The difficulties so often created for the reader by passionate outbursts, the terminology of existentialism, and the technical jargon of psychiatry appear less often. Occasionally Fanon goes outside the Algerian conflict to discuss other situations because his subject is colonialism wherever it is seen to exist - in Algeria, in Africa in general, in the Caribbean or in Indochina. In L'an V de la révolution algérienne (A dying colonialism), 1959, the focus is almost exclusively on the Algerian situation. The book condemns colonialism and the tenacity of the colonizers who refuse to give up in spite of the length and severity of the struggle. It also seeks to reassure the Algerians of the Tightness of their cause, although it acknowledges the errors committed by some of Fanon's colleagues. In his preface Fanon enunciates the thesis that is further elaborated in Les damnés de la terre: people change at the same time that they change the world. Never has this been so manifest as it was in Fanon's day in Algeria. The trial of strength not only remodels the consciousness that humanity has of itself and of former dominators, or of the world, which is at last

17 Le problème noir ne se résout pas en celui des Noirs vivant parmi les Blancs, mais bien des Noirs exploités, esclavagisés, méprisés par une société capitaliste, colonialiste, accidentellement blanche (Fanon [1971], 163).

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within reach. This struggle at different levels renews the symbols, the myths, the beliefs, the emotional responsiveness of the people. L'an V. . . examines the effects the current struggle is having on Algerian society, forcing it, for example, to adapt traditional features, such as the veil, for use in the revolutionary situation. Fanon, however, does not remain at the descriptive level; he goes on to suggest how female dress might be put to more widespread use as a cover for transporting weapons in similar types of situation. This points to a tendency easily noticed in Les damnés . . . : to generalize the Algerian revolution, not only describing aspects of it but pointing to their possible applications elsewhere. The conclusion reiterates the thesis set out in the preface and developed exclusively in Les damnés . .. At the same time that the colonized brace themselves to reject oppression, a radical transformation takes place within which any attempt to maintain the colonial system is seen as both impossible and shocking. Although the statement that every Arab is a hypochondriac (Fanon [1964], 15) may seem to be an ironic repetition of a belief commonly held by European doctors, the fact of the matter is that colonialism had given rise to neuroses in the Algerian. Fanon's life in Algeria provided him with a different method of dealing with the neuroses from that which he employed in Peau noire, masques blancs. Where reasoned argument had brought little change in the situation, either at the individual or collective level, Fanon now felt that violent action could succeed. Peau noire, masques blancs mixed the descriptive with the normative; Les damnés de la terre mixed the descriptive with the prescriptive. This change derives, in large measure, from the fact that the white world is no longer being addressed: it has been replaced by the Third World. The pleading voice of Peau noire . . . has given way to a didactic voice that seeks to draw to the attention of colonized peoples the possibilities demonstrated by the Algerian struggle for liberation. In that lesson they might find examples for the conduct of their own struggles. Little wonder then that the work has enjoyed such popularity among those who saw themselves as being in colonized situations whether de facto as in the Third World or, de jure, as in certain First World countries. Fanon the psychiatrist returns somewhat self-consciously in the chapter on "Médecine et colonialisme" (Colonial war and mental disorders), half apologizing for including case histories that show the effects of colonialism on individuals. This tactic, however, brings back the notion of colonialism as neurosis. The individual case histories are intended by Fanon to elucidate and to serve as a means for demystifying such beliefs as the inherent criminality and mental puerility of the Algerian. Fanon links these behaviors in direct fashion to colonialism and records how in the current struggle these supposed inherent characteristics tended to disappear. Fanon shares the belief in the usefulness of violence to restructure consciousness and create a new humanity with a number of other writers from the francophone Antilles, most notably Aimé Césaire from whose Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs were silent), 1956, he quotes in the chapter "De la violence" (Concerning violence). His participation in the Algerian war of independence took him from the realm of speculation into the realm of certainty. He became convinced that violence had an effect both at the individual and the collective level. It took on values that were therapeutic as well as destructive (of colonial structures) and constructive (of national consciousness). Fanon's treatment of the subject of violence has obviously disconcerted a number of critics from different areas of the political spectrum. He was accused by Nguyen Nghe of ambiguity for equating "armed struggle" with "violence" and therefore moving, without clearly indicating the steps of the move, from the "political or historical domain to the existential" and of consequently

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remaining l'intellectuel individualiste (an individualistic intellectual). Given the experience out of which Fanon was writing, many will find these distinctions spurious and will agree with Fanon that participation in violent armed struggle can change the individual and the system at one and the same time. Zolberg refers to Fanon's espousal of violence as an attachment to a frightful myth, an attempt to recreate a utopia believed by Fanon to have existed before the arrival of the colonizers. However, those who have lived under colonial regimes know only too well that violence is not so much a frightful myth as a harsh reality. Franz Duhamel also seems to misunderstand the source, nature, and potential revolutionary usefulness of the violence Fanon is talking about when he likens it to the struggle for understanding in Hegelian theory. The theme of violence runs through the literature of the francophone Antilles. Jacques Roumain calls it rage in Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the dew), 1946, and shows in La montagne ensorcelée (The bewitched mountain), 1931, how self-destructive it can be. It shows up in the form of suppressed rage and threat in the poetry of Léon Damas. The quality of controlled rage, shot through with occasional flashes of violent cosmic upheaval, gives Césaire's poetry much of its dynamism and power. Bertène Juminer in La revanche de Bozambo (Bozambo's revenge), 1968, reverses the colonial situation and has the former colonized people vent their spleen on the former colonizers. In Juminer's Au seuil d'un nouveau cri (On the threshold of a new cry), 1963, the leader of the runaway slaves sentences Modestin to death for having spared the life of his former master. Violence has in fact seemed to increase wherever the colonial situation was compounded by slavery. Fanon imposes a post hoc analysis on a situation that he may be said to have stumbled upon. He attempts to show the dynamics of a situation that he holds up as illustrative and then attempts to generalize from. Although he suggests violence as a means of revolutionary change, he recognizes the need for that violence to be directed. He may assert that the acts of torture and oppression of the colonial authorities generated reciprocal acts of terrorism, but he does not condone violence as revenge. He sees the need for it to work toward nation-building and that involves the simultaneous creation of a new humanity. This ambiguous attitude toward violence may be attributed to Fanon's enthusiasm over the revolutionary experience in which he was involved. The demands of journalism had curtailed the exuberance of Fanon's style, the use of words, as he had earlier stated, for emotional and sensual effect. Those qualities of enthusiasm and verbal exuberance reappear in Les damnés de la terre: "[Violence] transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's flood-lights upon them."18 All this is evocative of a confraternity, a church, and a mystical body of belief at one and the same time (Fanon [1961], 106). Extravagant metaphor translates passionate commitment and optimism, but then Fanon believed that he had found in Algeria the formula for solving the problem of decolonization and a cure for the neuroses created by colonialism.

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[E]lle transforme des spectateurs écrasés d'inessentialité en acteurs privilégiés, saisis de façon quasi grandiose par le faisceau de l'Histoire (Fanon [1961], 30).

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Bibliography Caute, David. 1970. Fanon. London: Fontana/Collins. (Good introduction to Fanon's work, quite detailed and sensitive.) Césaire, Aimé. [1950]. 1955. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. —. 1956. Culture et colonisation. Présence Africaine. 8-10(June-Nov.): 190-205. (The text of his resounding anticolonialist keynote address to the first congress of Negro writers and artists, held at the Sorbonne that summer.) —. [1947]. 1983. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. In The Collected Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (The single most important text of the negritude movement in the Caribbean.) Fanon, Frantz. [1952]. 1971. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. (This is still Fanon's best-known book. The translation is by Charles Lam Markmann, Black Skin, White Masks. London: McGibbon & Kee, 1968.) —. 1956. Racisme et culture. Présence Africaine. 8-10(June-Nov.): 122-31. (Fanon's contribution to the first congress of Negro writers and artists. It was reprinted in Pour la révolution africaine. 37-51.) —. [1959]. 1960. L'an V de la révolution algérienne. Paris: Maspéro. (An inside view of the Algerian war of independence.) —. 1961. Les damnés de la terre. Cahiers Libres, 27-28. Paris: Maspéro. (The preface by Sartre gave this book a considerable boost. The English translation is by Constance Farrington, The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.) —. 1964. Pour la révolution africaine. Cahiers Libres, 53-54. Paris: Maspéro. (Fanon's political writings from 1952 through 1961.) Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1991. Critical Fanonism. Critical Inquiry. 17.3:457-70. (Demonstrates how far removed the deconstructionists' Fanon is from the conditions in which he wrote Peau noire, masques blancs; by the preeminent Afro-American literary critic and theorist.) Geismar, Peter. 1971. Fanon. New York: Dial Press. (Biographical study, good on details of life, weak on analysis.) La Guerre, John. 1984. Enemies of Empire. St. Augustine, Trinidad: U.W.I. Extra-Mural Unit. (Study of Blaise Diagne, Aimé Césaire, and Fanon from a sociopolitical perspective.) Leiris, Michel. 1955. Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe. Paris: Gallimard/UNESCO. (Landmark study, a little dated nowadays.) Mannoni, Octave. [1950]. 1984. Les jeux de l'inconscient. Prospero et Caliban: Psychologie de la colonisation. Paris: Editions Universitaires. (First published in 1950 by Seuil in the collection Esprit - with the lead title and second title reversed - this book became a locus of debate over the possibility and desirability of decolonization. It was attacked by Césaire in the year of its publication. [A.J.A.]) —. 1956. Prospero and Caliban. Trans. by Pamela Powesland and with a foreword by Philip Mason. London; New York: Praeger. (The foreword rendered explicit the apologia for colonialism that was implied in the Paris ed. of 1950. The 1984 Paris ed. incorporates a French translation of Mason's foreword. [A.J.A.]) Memmi, Albeit. 1966. Portrait du colonisé. Preface by J.-P. Sartre. Paris: Pauvert. (This book does for colonized North Africa what Fanon did for the Caribbean in Peau noire, masques blancs. Translated as The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press, 1965.) Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Stephen Henry. [1929]. 1963. History of French Colonial Policy. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. (A historical presentation and comparative analysis of the theory and practice of French colonial practice.) Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1954. Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Gallimard. (With Portrait d'un antisémite, Sartre's major contribution to the debate over racism. Trans. by George J. Becker as Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schocken.)

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Taylor, Patrick. 1989. The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (By far the best book on Fanon in a comparative and theoretical perspective.) Zahar, Renate. 1970. L'oeuvre de Frantz Fanon. Paris: Maspéro. (Written from a radical, North African perspective.)

The Essay and / in History A. JAMES ARNOLD

University of Virginia

Michael Dash and Vere Knight, in the articles preceding this one, have laid out the early history of the essay in the francophone Caribbean and the major contributions of Frantz Fanon, who is by far the region's best-known essayist internationally. It remains for the present article to establish the interrelations between the essay as a genre and efforts to rethink writing about history in the francophone Caribbean since the second world war. In the main, francophone Caribbean essayists have charted courses that parallel the evolution of the discourse of modernism and, more recently, postmodernism, even as they strive to put in place a specifically Antillean or Caribbean discourse. The first text of note in this regard remains relatively unknown; it is Césaire's "Poésie et connaissance" (Poetry and knowledge), 1944, which he published in Tropiques, the magazine he edited in Martinique during the war years. It is worth mentioning in passing that "Poésie et connaissance" was first presented as a lecture in Haiti at a meeting of philosophers. In "Poésie et connaissance" Césaire staked out a position that coincided nicely with the surrealists' attitudes toward the imagination as the primary human faculty. He argued against fundamental Aristotelian postulates such as the principle of non-contradiction, and he promoted recourse to the unconscious as a necessary technique for destroying the prison house made by Cartesian reason and the scientific method (Césaire [1990], li-lv). His conclusion is that ultimately myth is superior to science. The thread that runs through this essay is literary and it differs only in a few details from that woven by Marcel Raymond in his De Baudelaire au surréalisme (From Baudelaire to surrealism), 1933, which was cutting-edge scholarship at the time. The one genuinely new point on which Césaire sought to establish a basic difference and on which he hoped to ground the specificity of negritude was the collective unconscious, which he did not envisage quite as either Freud or Jung did in their various interpretations of this murky notion. Despite a reference to Jung, whose theory of universal archetypes was not then well known in France, Césaire was obliged by his ideology of negritude to posit a collective unconscious that could transmit the acquired experience of the black race, of les nègres, or all people of African descent. Nowhere in "Poésie et connaissance" does he articulate this notion at all clearly, but it can be inferred from claims he makes elsewhere for the unconscious mind (Arnold [1981], 60-63; Delas [1991], 23). Later Césaire was to repudiate such racialist thinking, claiming repeatedly that his conception of negritude had always been historical rather than biological; but in 1944 and earlier, in the references to blood in the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), there remain traces of an attempt to shortcircuit historical thinking by way of a facile genetic theory. At all events, Césaire's notions of the unconscious during the war years were intended to provide a means to sidestep a confrontation with the pressures of history, just as myth (in its modernist acceptation) was to permit colonized Africans

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and descendants of Africans to avoid the trap of modern science and technology that would tie them irretrievably to the industrialized world and to their colonial masters. The problems Césaire raised for himself by this recourse to a racial memory are considerable. Aside from being unscientific, it would have obliged Césaire to consider all descendants of Africans, including the mulatto bourgeoisie in the French West Indies, to share (at least to the degree that they were descended from Africans) in the same negritude. But Césaire was never able to make common cause with lighter-hued people of color in the Antilles for reasons that are historical in nature. (Vere Knight's treatment of assimilation and alienation in the French West Indies in his article on Fanon, above, is apposite here.) Patrick Taylor has lucidly described the limitations of the mythic approach to liberation in the prologue to his book The Narrative of Liberation: "Negritude expresses both a romantic longing for a one-dimensional, utopian society and a vibrant encounter with the tragedy of colonial endurance" (Taylor [1989], 4). This observation applies directly to the contradictory ways in which Césaire's essays have been read. Readers of Césaire have long been divided into two groups: admirers of the lyric and dramatic poet who provided the negritude movement with a tragic vision, most notably in the lyric oratorio Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs were silent), 1946, on the one hand; and partisans of the anticolonialist essayist who peppered his texts with Marxist references, on the other. Both sets of texts are contemporaneous and belong to the same writer, but they express in a heightened form his unresolved contradictions regarding the conceptualizing of history and poetry. Rather than the well-known Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism), 1950, Césaire's representation of the Haitian revolution in the historical essay Toussaint Louverture, 1961, is the best text in which to observe his melding of negritude and Marxism at work. Césaire conceptualized the revolution as an ostensibly Marxist dialectic in three parts: "La fronde des grands blancs" (The Fronde of the white planters), "La révolte mulâtre" (The mulatto revolt), and "La révolution nègre" (The black revolution). Color is invested with value - and, to the extent that the argument is Marxist, with historical necessity - as the essay works its way from white (thesis), to brown (antithesis), to black (synthesis). Bowing to the sad sequel to these auspicious beginnings of Haitian history, Césaire concludes his essay with this sentence: "An insufficient synthesis, no doubt, but one that set the process of Haitian history definitively in motion. That is why the Intercessor fully merits the name his compatriots give him today: the Predecessor."1 Césaire understood especially well the tragic significance of Toussaint's end, as a prisoner of Bonaparte in the Fort de Joux in the French mountains, which the Cahier had, from the presurrealist 1939 version, depicted as a white death. And, of course, the historical Toussaint played a role in the creation of the archetypal hero of negritude, Le Rebelle (The Rebel), in Et les chiens se taisaient, which is essentially a tragic myth. In point of fact, Césaire's career in the theater also begins with his reflection on the meaning of Haitian history, which led to his best play, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The tragedy of King Christophe), 1963. Essay, poetry, and theater are intimately linked in his work. Césaire's historical essay on Toussaint Louverture is also contemporaneous with Frantz Fanon's most influential essays. The contrast between them is stark. Césaire begins and ends with color. Fanon sees the value color comes to have, both in the eyes of the colonized and in the eyes of the colonizer, as a function of the colonial dialectic, thus refusing any ultimate primacy to the ques1 Insuffisante synthèse sans doute, mais qui donnait le branle décisif à l'histoire haïtienne. C'est pourquoi l'Intercesseur mérite bien le nom que lui donnent ses compatriotes d'aujourd'hui: le Précurseur (Césaire [1961], 310).

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tion of ethnicity. In the theater, Daniel Boukman's opposition to Césairean negritude parallels Fanon's. Juris Silenieks addresses this issue in the first of two essays on the theater, above. If we set the debate between Césaire and Fanon in a broader Caribbean context, it now appears to be specific to the francophone Antilles and Guiana. During this same period in Haiti the poet, novelist, and essayist René Depestre and the novelist and essayist Jacques Stephen Alexis, both mulattos, proudly affirmed their Haitianness while pursuing a Marxist project in their writing. They did not, and indeed could not, affirm their "blackness" in anything like the same way that Césaire had done in Martinique. This is so even on linguistic grounds because the term on which identity hinges for Césaire, nègre {nigger in 1930s Martinique), does not carry any pejorative connotation in Haitian Creole but "is frequently employed as a synonym for mounn - i.e., 'person' or 'human' - without specific reference to race, color, nationality, or, in many cases, sex" (Woodson [1990], 220 n.2). To a Haitian speaker of Creole a nèg is simply a person, whereas a visiting black tourist from the United States will be referred to as a blan noua (a black foreigner, literally black "white"), since "[a]ll non-Haitians, regardless of race or color, are generally called blan" (Woodson [1990], 227). Since being Haitian is a transparent concept among local Creole speakers, nèg will have the connotation of person to them. Speakers of Guadeloupean and Martinican Creole benefitted from no such social transparency, nèg having been so marked as to identify the historically dispossessed class whose phenotype is usually closest to an African norm. This linguistic substrate surely conditioned the process by which Césaire and, to a lesser extent, Damas, arrived at an ethnographic version of identity, whereas the Haitians focused on culture. The First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, held in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1956, produced an important confrontation of these two positions. Césaire articulated the negritude position in "Culture et colonisation" (Culture and colonization), offending the delegation of middle-class Negroes (blacks became current only after 1968) from the United States (Arnold [1986], 67-68). Alexis replied in "Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens" (On the marvellous realism of the Haitians): "We have to say that all the explanations . . . in favor of a supposed négritude are dangerous in the sense that they obscure the reality of the cultural autonomy of the Haitian people and the necessity of solidarity with all humankind, with peoples of African (nègre) origin, too, that goes without saying."2 Two decades later Michael Dash was to declare Alexis's position "the way out of negritude," which had come to represent a dead end (Dash [1975], 35). Commenting on Dash's positive appreciation of Alexis's réalisme merveilleux, Maximilien Laroche points to the utopian aspect of attempting to change both Haitian society and its culture (Laroche [1987], 50-51). What Alexis actually meant by the term remains a vexed question, no doubt because his early death in 1961 - presumably during a botched invasion of Duvalier's Haiti - cut short the probable evolution of the concept in his work as a writer of fiction. The linguistic proximity of Alexis's le réalisme merveilleux to Alejo Carpentier's lo real maravilloso suggests an affinity with the Cuban writer's concept, which has had a strong influence on Hispanic Caribbean literature since its formulation in the introduction to his novel El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world) in 1949. Carpentier had coined his term to express the vision of a creolized (mestizo) spiritual principle he had found to be active and efficacious in voudou during

2 Nous devons dire aussi que toutes les gloses et toutes les gorges chaudes en faveur d'une prétendue "négritude" sont dangereuses dans ce sens qu'elles cachent la réalité de l'autonomie culturelle du peuple haïtien et la nécessité d'une solidarité avec tous les hommes, avec les peuples d'origine nègre également, cela va de soi (Alexis [1956], 256).

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his 1943 visit to Haiti. (Concerning his later renunciation of this vision, see Alfred Mac Adam in volume 3.) In the 1950s both Carpentier and Alexis were committed to socialist solutions to Antillean problems and both sought to ground a socialist revolution in the authentic experience of the folk culture as it grew out of specifically Antillean historical conditions tied to slavery, miscegenation, and the plantation economy. The fundamental difference with respect to the negritude vision of the Antilles is to be found in both writers' acceptance and advancement of the principle of métissage (mestizaje in Spanish), which expresses both cultural creolization and the historical result of miscegenation in the islands. Françoise Lionnet has concluded that métissage is a concept fundamental to the displacement of dead-end theories of unitary origin such as negritude: "A politics of solidarity thus implies the acceptance of métissage as the only racial ground on which liberation struggles can be fought. . . . [T]he possibility of emancipation is indeed linked to an implicit understanding of métissage as a concept of solidarity which demystifies all essentialist glorifications of unitary origins . . ." (Lionnet [1989], 8-9). It may well be that in métissage or mestizaje the Antilles have furnished a concept that can be the key to resolving ethnic conflict both in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world. This is certainly the view Edouard Glissant has taken in his essays written over a forty-year period beginning in the mid-1950s. In Soleil de la conscience (Sun of consciousness), 1956, he offered a tentative statement of what would become his life's work: "[I]n the Antilles, where I come from, it is possible to say that a people is actually constructing itself. Born out of a broth of cultures in this laboratory where each table is an island, there is a synthesis of races, of mores, of ways of knowing, but all tending toward unity."3 A decade later Glissant came back to this theme with specific reference to Carpentier's El reino de este mundo, speaking of the opposition "between the modern architecture of the tropical city and the thrust of Nature, which works its roots into the thickest walls; between the marvellous, the magic, the timelessness of this America in painful gestation and the exigencies of modern life. But it is in understanding these irreconciliable elements that a synthesis, a future are made possible."4 Whereas Alexis and Carpentier had assumed the existence of some natural harmony between their affirmation of marvellous reality and their socialist politics, and had thereby condemned themselves to the self-contradictions of a romantic socialism rooted in Nature, Glissant has thought through the implications of his position. In Le discours antillais (Caribbean discourse), 1981, he commented lucidly on the dilemma that tragic humanism causes in colonized and neocolonial societies with its myth of individual and collective sacrifice (Glissant [1981], 136-42; 413-14). Although he prefers not to mention Césaire's name if he can avoid it, Glissant surely had in mind negritude when he described the sacrificial myth, which Césaire had given form to in Et les chiens se taisaient. Michael Dash has written the most probing analysis of Glissant's contribution to historiography, noting that: "his work marks a significant departure from the Caribbean's fixation with prelapsarian innocence, an origin before the Fall of the New World" (Glissant [1989], xii). In that "pre3 [A]ux Antilles, d'où je viens, on peut dire qu'un peuple positivement se construit. Né d'un bouillon de cultures, dans ce laboratoire où chaque table est une île, voici une synthèse de races, de moeurs, de savoirs, mais qui tend vers son unité propre (Glissant [1960], 15). 4 entre les architectures modernes de la ville tropicale et les poussées de la Nature qui vient écarteler de ses racines les murs les plus épais, entre le merveilleux, la magie, l'intemporalité de cette Amérique en douloureuse gestation, et les exigences des temps modernes. Mais c'est dans la connaissance de ces inconciliables que sont rendus possibles la synthèse, l'avenir . .. (Glissant [1969], 141).

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lapsarian innocence" one recognizes the yearning to escape from History that Césaire located in negritude and that both Carpentier and Alexis expressed in their reliance upon marvellous realism. For Glissant, the key term in constructing a usable history of the Antilles is relation, which, he has been at pains to point out, cannot be translated by the English word relationship (Glissant [1990], 39-40). He means to express a connection or a connectedness that is multiple and not in any way hierarchical. With reference to attempts to find a single origin, or root, of identity, Glissant insists that any search for an origin is misplaced and that rhizomes, rather than roots, are a more apposite metaphor for the multiplicity of New World cultures (Glissant [1990], 17, 28-31). In an interesting literary-historical development of these concepts Glissant demonstrates how the paradigm Center (dominant) and Periphery or Margin (subordinate) has been replaced - in the best of cases - by a creative wandering {errance), which he sees as a circle spiraling through time, whereas the old paradigm insisted on an arrow directed from point A (Center) to point B (Margin) or the reverse. A poétique de la relation (poetics of connectedness) would thus be constituted by such a positive nomadism. He gives as examples of this poetics such writers as Kateb Yacine (Algeria), Cheik Anta Diop (Senegal), and Léon Gontran Damas (Guiana). His own work as an essayist has provided the enabling discourse for the recent novels of Daniel Maximin (Guadeloupe), Anthony Phelps and Jean-Claude Charles (Haiti), and Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), some of whom Beverley Ormerod has treated in her essay on the novel, above. The younger generation of Martinican writers has turned Glissant himself into a culture hero in a manifesto entitled Eloge de la créolité (In praise of creoleness), 1989. The authors, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant have boiled down the dense, elliptical, and ultimately philosophical historiography of Glissant into an enthusiastic endorsement of Creole as the panacea for the social ills of the French Overseas Departments (DOM) of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana. Perfectly aware of the limitations of negritude, the authors of Eloge de la créolité find their salvation in a vision of creoleness (antillanité), first articulated by Glissant. Juris Silenieks in his history of recent theater in the region, above, finds the message of this manifesto essentially positive. One may wonder if the authors of the manifesto have a sufficiently Caribbean perspective, however. They seem unaware of the history of the major Creole literature of the region, the Papiamentu literature of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. At this early stage of assessment of their work it is impossible to know whether the authors of Eloge de la créolité, rather than presenting a solution to a societal problem, may not merely have given voice to an epiphenomenon, the cultural struggle against the near-total assimilation of the DOM to the French metropole in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Glissant is not alone in choosing the spiral as the figure that best represents Antillean culture in time and space. The Haitian writer Frankétienne (until 1972, Frank Etienne) also chose it to express his complex notion of a poetics that could account for the history of culture in the Caribbean. In Ultravocal (Spirale) Frankétienne's visionary, tormented style - which defies the notion of genre and is perhaps best considered, for purposes of discussion, a lyrical essay - tries to work out in the guts of his Haitianized French the tortured existence of his nation under the Duvalier regime. Here the complicated play of postmodernism displaces, under a newer and far more brutal dictatorship, the modernist play of surrealist metaphor employed by Césaire under the conditions of censorship imposed by the Vichy government in the early 1940s in Martinique. Frankétienne may well prove to be, in retrospect, the only major Haitian writer not to emigrate during the years of the father-son Duvalier dictatorship, 1957-86, nor to have been imprisoned for his literary activities. Jean Jonas-

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saint, in the double issue of his journal Dérives devoted to Frankétienne, considered him: "on a par with Dos Passos, Césaire, Carpentier or Naipaul . . . one of the giants who have left. . . their mark on the literatures of the Americas."5 A full assessment of Frankétienne's significance to our subject remains to be written, however. The negritude writers largely ignored the Creole language, working out their cultural neurosis (in Fanon's terminology) in hypercorrect French. Since Glissant, who is of Fanon's generation, the status of Creole in essays focusing on Antillean history has become a, if not the, key to understanding creativity in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana. Well before the authors of Eloge de la créolité, Dany Bébel-Gisler, a Guadeloupean sociologist whose speciality is slavery and its aftermath in the French West Indies, wrote in La langue créole, force jugulée (The Creole language, a strangled force), 1976, that Creole is "a dimension of French economic, political, social, and cultural domination."6 She has linked this thesis to the history of her island in the first testimonio (testimonial narrative) produced in the French West Indies, Léonora: l'histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe (Leonora, the buried history of Guadeloupe), 1985, in which an old, uneducated woman speaks in her own name about the past. Creole plays a much more important role in the text of Léonora than in literary works written essentially for a French audience in which Creole words, when they appeared at all, were usually glossed or footnoted. For Dany Bébel-Gisler the rehabilitation of Creole is tied to a political program of seeking independence from France. Maryse Condé, whose work as novelist and playwright has reached an important international audience, agrees with Dany Bébel-Gisler on the status of Creole and until recently she favored independence for Guadeloupe. In an essay on popular culture in the francophone Antilles before and after emancipation, entitled La civilisation du bossale, 1978, Maryse Condé studied both the animal and human characters of Creole oral tradition in a theoretical framework that is consistent with Bébel-Gisler's. Both these essayists practice a type of cultural historiography that has taken on considerable importance since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and then Natalie Zemon Davis brought the words of medieval French peasants to life in their histories. Maryse Condé has also examined the historical-cultural significance of early women novelists of the francophone Antilles in La parole des femmes: essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française (Women's words: An essay on women novelists of the francophone Antilles), 1979, which has the net effect of rehabilitating the experience of French West Indian women who were pushed into the background by the virilized "national" identity propounded by negritude. Fanon's frontal attack on Mayotte Capécia's novel Je suis Martiniquaise (I am a Martinican), 1948, in Peau noire, masques blancs effectively accused Martinican women of selling out their people to white lovers. The harshness of the attack and its strongly gendered perspective required rectification, which Maryse Condé provides in La parole des femmes: "One understands readily that, proud of her 'white grandmother' and despising her black ancestry, she [the protagonist of Je suis Martiniquaise] might create a thousand reasons to hate the direct symbol of that ancestry."7 There is nothing rare about Negrophobia among Antilleans, as Condé points out. Mayotte Capécia's realistic

5 à l'égal des Dos Passos, des Césaire, des Carpentier, des Naipaul . . . un de ces géants qui ont marqué . . . les littératures américaines (Jonassaint [1987], 6-7). 6 le langage n'est qu'une dimension de la domination économique, politique, sociale, culturelle française (Bébel-Gisler in Condé [1978], 8). 7 On conçoit aisément que tellement fière de sa 'grand-mère blanche' et détestant son ascendance nègre, elle puisse se forger mille raisons de haïr le symbole direct de cette ascendance (Condé [1979], 38).

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representation of this unfortunate legacy of slavery calls for a thoughtful and scholarly study of the representation of gender in Antillean culture that will take into account the threatened masculinity of writers like Césaire and Fanon, the creators of the virile model of the culture hero who was to wrest the meaning of "his" history from the grasp of white European males.

Bibliography Alexis, Jacques Stephen. 1961. Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens. Présence Africaine. 8-10 (June-November):245-71. Arnold, A. James. 1986. Les Afro-Américains et Césaire: un exemple de transculturation double. L'Amérique et l'Europe: Réalités et représentations. Vol. 2. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence (Publications / Diffusion). 63-74. (Reviews the troubled relations between the Afro-American elite in the United States and the ideology of negritude.) Bébel-Gisler, Dany. 1976. La langue créole, force jugulée. Paris: L'Harmattan. —. 1985. Léonora: L'histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe. Mémoire vive. Paris: Seghers. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. 1989. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard. Carpentier, Alejo. [1949]. 1978. El reino de este mundo. Intro. by Florinda Friedman de Goldberg. Vol. 9: Crónicas 2. Obras completas. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. (A useful edition containing the text of the original preface [1949] plus the material the author added later to transform the manifesto into a travel essay.) Césaire, Aimé. [1961]. 1962. Toussaint Louverture: La révolution française et le problème colonial. Paris: Présence Africaine. Condé, Maryse. 1978. La civilisation du bossale. Paris: L'Harmattan. —. 1979. La parole des femmes. Paris: L'Harmattan. Dash, J. Michael. 1975. Jacques Stephen Alexis. Toronto: Black Images. Fanon, Frantz. [1952]. 1971. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. —. 1961. Les damnés de la terre. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Cahiers Libres. 27-28. Paris: Maspéro. Glissant, Edouard. [1956]. 1960. Soleil de la conscience. Paris: Seuil. —. 1969. L'intention poétique. Paris: Seuil. —. 1981. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. —. 1989. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. with an introduction by J. Michael Dash. CARAF Books. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. —. 1990. Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard. Jonassaint, Jean. 1987. Frankétienne, écrivain haïtien. Dérives. 53-54:5-12. Laroche, Maximilien. 1987. Contributions à l'étude du réalisme merveilleux. Essais, 2. Quebec City: GRELCA; Université Laval. Lionnet, Françoise. 1989. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Reading Women Writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (Contains an important theoretical essay on métissage and the politics of liberation.) Taylor, Patrick. 1989. The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (The most important study of the historical significance of Fanon for the Antilles.) Woodson, Drexel G. 1990. Tout Mounn Se Mounn, Men Tout Mounn Pa Menm [All People Are People, But All People Are Not the Same]: Microlevel Sociocultural Aspects of Land Tenure in a Northern Haitian Locality. Vol. 1. Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. (Contains a valuable, sophisticated analysis of the vocabulary of ethnicity and class in rural Haiti.)

Index to Names of Writers and Significant Historical Figures*

Abbad y Lasierra, Iñigo (1745-1813): 128-29 Achard, Marcel (fl. 1924): 472-74 Acosta, Agustín (1886-1979): 221, 227 Acosta, Joseph (fl. 1600): 350 Acosta de Samper, Soledad (1833-1913): 66 Aguiar, Enrique (1887-1947): 182 Agricole, Eugène (fl. late 1800s): 466, 472 Aguirre, Yolanda (fl. 1967): 250 Alcántara Almânzar, José (1946- ): 59 Alcocer, Luis Jerónimo de (1598-1665): 121 Alexis, Jacques Stephen (1922-61): 313, 326, 333, 343.44, 347, 400-01, 409, 435-39, 444, 456, 481,486,497,541,561-63 Alexis, Stéphen (1889-1962): 372 Alfonseca, Miguel (1942- ): 204, 206, 236 Algarín, Miguel (1941- ): 93 Alonso, Dora (1910- ): 179 Alonso, Manuel (1822-89): 17-18, 147-48 Alonso y Pacheco, Manuel A. (1822-89): 156 Alvarez, Julia (1951- ): 93, 236 Alvarez, Soledad (1950- ): 236 Alvarez Baragano, José (1932-62): 224-25 Alvarez Bravo, Armando (1938- ): 227 Alvarez Marrero, Francisco (1847-81): 167 Alvarez Ríos, Maria (1919- ): 250 Alvarez de Chanca, Diego (See Chanca Alvarez) Andreu Iglesias, César (1915-76): 35-36 Andreyev, Leonidas N. (1871-1919): 192 Anghiera, Peter Martyr de (1459-1526): 117 Angulo Guridi, Francisco Javier (1816-84): 14, 151, 158 Antonio Alix, Juan (1833-1918): 57 Apollinaire, Guillaume de Kostrowitsky (18801918): 482, 524 Aragon, Louis (1897-1982): 482 Archilla, Graciany Miranda (1910- ): 229 Arciniegas, German (1900- ): 67-69

Ardouin, Beaubrun (1796-1865): 322, 368 Arenas, Reinaldo (1943-90): 178, 181-82, 197, 206, 216,273,287-91,303 Arévalo Martinez, Rafael (1884-1975): 67 Armstrong, Louis (1900-71): 71 Arrate, José Martin Félix de (1701-65): 125-26 Arriví, Francisco (1915- ): 239, 241-42, 244 Arrufat, Antón (1935- ): 223, 251, 254, 287 Arsonneau, Emile (fl. early 1900s): 472 Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948): 245 Artel, Jorge (1905- ): 71-72 Artiles, Antonio Lockward (1942- ): 206, 236 Asturias, Miguel Angel (1899-1974): 70, 211, 458 Asunción Silva, José (See Silva, José Asunción) Audain, Dr. Léon (1863-1930): 371 Avelino, Andrés (1900-74): 233 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de (1814-73): 14445, 158, 160, 168, 250 Avilés Blonda, Máximo (See Blonda Acosta, Máximo Avilés) Ayerra Santa Maria, Francisco de (1630-1708): 122 Ayuso, Juan José (1940- ): 236

Bachiller y Morales, Antonio (1812-89): 15-16 Badía, Nora (1921- ): 250 Bakunin, Michail (1814-76): 41, 43 Balaguer, Joaquin (1907- ): 51, 54-56 Balboa Troya y Quesada, Silvestre de (15631647?): 10-13, 21, 123-25, 132, 158 Balbuena, Bernardo de (1568-1627): 122 Ballagas, Emilio (1910-54): 16, 222, 302 Balseiro y Ramos, José Agustin (1900- ): 187 Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850): 358 Baquero, Gastón (1916- ): 223-24, 227 Baralt, Luis A. (1892-1969): 249 Baralt, Rafael Maria (1810-60): 58

* Complete birth and death dates have been provided where possible. Where both dates are not available we have used b. to designate the date of birth and d. to indicate the death date. Occasionally question marks have been necessary to indicate that available dates may be unreliable. The conventional abbreviation ca. has been used where a date is approximate. In some cases we have used the abbreviation fl. to indicate the period of the author's most significant activity. The editor would like to express his appreciation for the efforts of Ann Marie Davis in providing dates for the index.

568 Barnet, Miguel (1940- ): 212, 225-26, 289-90 Barrès, Maurice (1862-1923): 455, 537 Barthes, Roland (1915-81): 274, 466 Batista y Zaldívar, Fulgencio (1901-73): 107, 181, 206, 217, 235, 249-50, 285 Baudelaire, Charles (1821-67): 167, 233, 400, 467, 544 Beaumont, Philippe de (fl. 1668): 353 Beauvallon, Rosemond de (1819-1903): 470 Bébel-Gisler, Dany (fl. 1975-85): 427-28, 495, 564 Beckett, Samuel (1906-89): 243, 245, 452 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo (1836-70): 164 Bejarano, Lázaro (ca. 1500-ca. 1560): 116-17 Bejel, Emilio (1944- ): 227 Beiaval, Emilio S. (1903-72): 197, 240-41 Beleno, Joaquín (1922-88): 75, 82 Bellegarde, Dantès (1877-1966): 313, 328, 533, 539-40 Benabid, Nadia (fl. 1980s): 247 Benítez, Maria Bibiana (1783-1873): 156 Benítez Rojo, Antonio (1931- ): 85, 197, 206, 28687, 290-91 Bergeaud, Emeric (1818-1858): 322, 366 Bergson, Henri (1859-1941): 543 Bernabé, Jean (1942- ): 344, 519, 521-22, 524, 563 Bernabé, Joby (fl. 1980): 495 Bernard, Eulalia (fl. 1982): 76-79, 81 Betancourt, Rómulo (1908-81): 69 Betancourt, José Victoriano (1813-75): 143, 298 Betancourt, Luis Victoriano (1843-85): 162 Betancourt Cisneros, Gaston Gaspar [pseud. El Lugareno] (1803-66): 17, 143 Beyle, Henri [pseud. Stendhal] (1783-1842): 351, 357, 395 Billini, Francisco G. (1844-98): 152 Billini, Miguel (1859-1907): 152 Blanco Géigel, Tomas (1897-1975): 36, 187, 197 Blonda (Acosta), Máximo Avilés (1931-88): 235, 255, 257 Bolivar Simón (1783-1830): 156, 214-15, 268, 279 Bologne, Pierre de (fl. 1746): 467 Bonaparte, Napoleon, Emperor Napoleon I (17691821): 321, 357, 366, 445, 468, 511, 560 Bonneville, René (??-1902): 472 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986): 192, 202, 210-11, 267, 279-80, 285, 452 Borno, Camille (fl. 1860): 370 Borrero, Juana (1877-96): 162-63, 167 Borrero Echeverría, Esteban (1849-1906): 146, 162 Bosch, Juan (1909- ): 56, 59, 61, 69, 103, 183, 191-

Hispanic and Francophone

Literature

92, 203-06, 244, 258, 277 Boti y Barreiro, Regino Eladio (1878-1958): 221-22 Bouillé, François Claude Amour, marquis de (17391800): 327 Boukman, Daniel (1936- ): 395, 412, 514, 518-19, 561 Bouyer, Arsène (1928- ): 394 Boyer, Jean-Pierre (ca. 1776-1850): 57, 531-32 Boyer, Maurice (fl. 1938): 467 Branly, Roberto (1930-80): 224-25 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau (1930- ): 49, 75, 80, 386 Brau y Asencio, Salvador (1842-1912): 150, 156 Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956): 244-45, 248, 253, 255, 257,512,514,518 Brene, José (1927- ): 250-51, 253 Breton, André (1896-1966): 324, 359, 399-400, 456, 544 Breton, Raymond (1609-79): 351, 353 Brierre, Jean Fernand (1909; fl. 1933-61): 508, 510 Brouard, Carl (1902-65): 411, 508 Brown, Claude (1937- ): 91 Brown, Melvin (1955- ): 76-77, 79, 81 Brull, Mariano (1891-1956): 222 Büchner, Ludwig (1824-99): 43 Buitrago, Fanny (1940- ): 67-68 Burgos, Julia de (1914-53): 89-91, 229-30 Burunat, Silvia (fl. 1980): 92 Butor, Michel (1926- ): 429 Byrne, Bonifacio (1861-1936): 163, 221

Caballero, Ramón C. F. (fl. 1885): 16 Cabrai, Manuel del (1912- ): 59, 61, 222, 234-35, 302 Cabrera, Carlos (18??-??): 157 Cabrera, Francisco Manrique (1908-78): 148, 229 Cabrera, Lydia (1899-1991): 195-96 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (1929- ): 19, 180-82, 197, 206, 209-10, 216-18, 273, 279, 284, 292, 303,451 Cadilla, Carmen Alicia (1908- ): 229-30 Cadilla, Ulises (fl. 1960s): 232 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600-81): 129 Campenon, François Nicolas Vincent (1772-1843): 467 Canaán, Eurídice (1934- ): 185 Canales, Nemesio (1878-1923): 150 Capécia, Mayotte (1928-53): 551, 564-65 Capetillo, Luisa (1879-1922): 88, 245

Index to Names Capote, Truman (1924-84): 69-70 Cardenal, Ernesto (1925- ): 67 Cárdenas, José Maria de [pseud. Jeremias de Docaranza] (1812-82): 143 Cárdenas, Raul (1935- ): 250 Cardoso, Onelio Jorge (1914- ): 192, 197 Carpentier, Alejo (1904-80): 61, 70, 123, 177-79, 181, 192, 194, 196-97, 206, 209-13, 215, 263, 267-69, 279, 283-84, 286, 291, 303, 382, 400, 440, 456, 458, 561-64 Carrero, Jaime (1931- ): 231-32, 247 Carroll, Lewis (See Dodgson, Charles L.) Cartagena Portalatín, Aída (1918- ): 61, 185, 235 Cartey, Wilfred (1931- ): 75 Carvajal y Rivera, Fernando (1633-1701): 121 Casal, Julián del (1863-93): 147, 155, 158, 162-64, 167-68,221 Casal, Lourdes (1938-81): 92, 227 Casas, Myrna (1934- ): 241, 245-46 Casaus, Victor (1944- ): 226 Casey, Calvert (1923-69): 181 Castellanos, Jesus (1879-1912): 147, 193-94 Castellanos, Juan de (1522-1606): 11, 65, 116, 124 Castro, Fidel (1927- ): 178, 278-79, 287, 292 Castro Ríos, Andrés (1942- ): 232 Catala, Rafael (1944- ): 227 Célarié, Henriette (fl. 1930): 352 Cepeda Samudio, Alvaro (1926-72): 67-70 Césaire, Aimé (1913- ): 49, 310, 318, 324-25, 32829, 332, 342-43, 370, 379-82, 400, 402-03, 409, 411-12, 427-28, 447-48, 451-52, 456, 459, 465, 476, 479-83, 485-87, 491, 495-97, 499, 501-03, 508-14, 519-21, 538-39, 543-44, 549,551-52,554-56,559-65 Césaire, Ina (1942- ): 345-46, 412, 521-22 Césaire, Suzanne (fl. 1941-45): 481, 483 Céspedes, Diógenes (1941- ): 59 Cestero, Tulio M. (1877-1955): 152 Chadourne, Louis (1890-1925): 356 Chambertrand, Gilbert de (1890-1973?): 470, 47274 Chamoiseau, Patrick (1953- ): 344-47, 412, 44648,518,523-24,563 Chanca Alvarez, Diego (fl. 1514): 114 Chanlatte, Juste (1766-1828): 322, 508 Charles, Jean-Claude (1949- ): 333, 458-60, 500, 563 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de (1682-1761): 125, 127, 356 Charmant, Alcius (1856-1936): 371

569 Charmant, Rodolphe (1884-1969?): 367 Charrière, Henri (1906-73): 390 Chastellux, François (1734-88): 356 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de (17681848): 321, 357 Chauvet, Marie Vieux (1917-75): 372, 453 Chenet, Gérard (1929- ): 333, 513 Christophe, Henri, Emperor Henry I (1767-1820): 367-68, 412, 510-11, 530-32, 560 Cinéas, Jean-Baptiste (1895-1958): 326, 367, 41720 Claudel, Paul (1868-1955): 400 Clavijo, Uva A. (1944- ): 92, 227 Clitandre, Pierre (1954- ): 443-44 Cocco de Filippis, Daisy (1949- ): 61, 236 Cofiño López, Manuel (1936- ): 288 Coicou, Massillon (1867-1908): 366, 508 Colimon, Marie-Thérèse (1918- ): 458 Collazos, Oscar (1942- ): 67 Colón, Jesus (1901-74): 41-42 Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506): 112-13, 118, 125,215,269 Comte, Auguste (1798-1857): 322 Condé, Maryse (1936- ): 49, 333, 402, 412, 428, 431,453,513-14,564 Conde, Moncho (fl. 1970s): 246 Confiant, Raphaël (1951- ): 344, 347, 563 Contín Aybar, Nestor (1938- ): 58, 116 Contreras, Hilma (1913- ): 204 Corneille, Pierre (1606-84): 330 Corretjer, Juan Antonio (1908-85): 229, 232, 303 Corrieri, Sergio (fl. 1978): 253-54 Cortâzar, Julio (1914-84): 70, 202, 209, 212-13, 216, 267 Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo (1916- ): 90 Crespo, José Manuel (1942- ): 67 Crespo y Borbón, Bartolomé José [pseud. Creto Gangâ] (1811-71): 14,16,158 Cruz, Manuel de la (1861-96): 146 Cubena (See Wilson, Carlos Guillermo) Cucalambé, El (See Nâpoles Fajardo, J. C.) Cunha, Euclides da (1866-1909): 263

Damas, Léon Gontran (1912-78): 311, 314, 342, 379, 389-90, 392-94, 396, 402, 411, 420-21, 465, 476, 479, 481-82, 485, 501, 509, 538-39, 550-51,556,561,563 Damirón, Rafael (1882-1956): 182 Danaho, Raoul-Philippe (1926- ): 392

570 Danyl-Helm [unidentified pseud.] (fl. 1918): 467 Dario, Rubén (1867-1916): 67, 209, 228, 243, 268, 279, 299 Darwin, Charles (1809-82): 43 Dávila, Angela Maria (1944- ): 232 Dawkins, Buena (1950- ): 75 Deive, Esteban (1935- ): 185 Delgrès, Louis (1772-1802): 445, 488, 493-94, 501 Deligne, Gastón Fernando (1861-1913): 50, 57, 233 Del Monte y Aponte, Domingo (1804-53): 58, 14344, 150, 160-61, 166 Delorme, Deniesvar (1831-1901): 536 Delrieu, Etienne-Joseph (fl. 1808): 467 Del Risco Bermudez, René (1937-72): 191-92, 20406 Del Valle Atiles, Francisco (1847-1917): 150 De Pauw, Corneille (1739-99): 127 Depestre, René (1926- ): 61, 333, 366, 381, 40001, 409, 411, 454, 456-60, 482, 485-86, 496502,515,538,542-43,561 Derecho, Justo (See Monge, J. M.) Derrida, Jacques (1930- ): 181 Desnoes, Edmundo (1930- ): 206, 285-87 Desportes, Georges (1921- ): 476, 502 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques (1758-1806): 124, 366-69, 488, 501, 510, 520 Dessare, Eve (fl. 1965): 352 Dévieux-Dehoux, Liliane (1942- ): 333 Díaz Alfaro, Abelardo (1919- ): 197 Díaz Grullón, Virgilio (1924- ): 185, 204-06 Díaz Rodriguez, Jesus (1941- ): 197, 288-90 Díaz Valcárcel, Emilio (1929- ): 188, 197, 200 Diderot, Denis (1713-84): 357-58 Diego, Eliseo (1920- ): 223-24 Diego, José de (1866-1918): 156-57, 165, 228 Diego Padró, José I. de (1891-1974): 228 Díez de Leyva, Fernando (16??-1708): 123 Disla, Reynaldo (1956- ): 259-60 Docaranza, Jeremias de (See Cárdenas, J. M. de) Dodgson, Charles L. [pseud. Lewis Carroll] (183298): 216 Domínguez, Franklin (1931- ): 255-57, 259 Dominguez Alba, Bernardo [pseuds. Enrique Serpa, Rogelio Sinân] (1904- ): 76, 179, 196-97 Dominguez Camargo, Hernando (1606-59): 66 Donoso, José (1924- ): 209, 217 Dorr, Nicolás (1947- ): 250, 252 Dorsainvil, J. C. (1880-1942): 538 Dorsinville, Roger (1911; fl. 1946-80): 333 Dos Passos, John (1896-1970): 290

Hispanic and Francophone

Literature

Dostoyevski, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821-81): 43 Dragún, Osvaldo (1929- ): 247, 253 Draper, Theodore (1912- ): 53 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (1868-1963): 534 Ducasse, Isidore [pseud. comte de Lautréamont] (1846-70): 400 Dumas, Alexandre (1802-70): 43 Duncan, Quince (1940- ): 76-79, 81 Duplessis, Jean-François Fénelon (1826-1904): 374 Du Puis, Mathias (fl. 1650): 351 Duque López, Alberto (1943- ): 67 Duquesnay, Victor (fl. 1903-26): 472-74 Durand, Oswald (1840-1906): 327, 372, 411 Duras, Claire de Durfort, duchesse de (ca. 17791828): 358 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste (1610-87): 351, 353-54 Duvalier, François (1907-71): 310, 312-13, 327, 331, 333-34, 369, 375, 442, 456-58, 482, 486, 496-97, 499, 538-39, 543-44, 563 Duvalier, Jean-Claude (1952- ): 366-67, 375, 401, 411,442,458,563 Duverger, René (fl. early 1900s): 472 Duvivier de la Mahautière (fl. 1757): 327

Eboué, Félix (1884-1944): 389 Edouard, Emmanuel (1858-95): 366 Elébé, Philippe Lisembé (1937- ): 395 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965): 225 Elot, Maryse (fl. 1933): 474-75 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82): 88 Engels, Friedrich (1820-95): 43 Enríquez, Carlos (1901-57): 179 Ercilla, Alonso de (1533-94): 123 Escalera, Carlos (fl. 1980s): 247 Escardó, Rolando (1925- ): 224 Espinal, Cayo Claudio (1955- ): 236 Espinosa, German (1938- ): 66-67, 71 Esquemeling, John (See Oexmelin, A. O.) Estébanez Calderón, Serafin (1799-1867): 147 Esteves, Sandra Maria (1948- ): 232 Estorino, Abelardo (1925- ): 250, 252 Estoup, Valentine (fl. 1929): 474 Etchart, Salvat (ca. 1932- ): 354-55, 360 Etienne, Frank [pseud. Frankétienne] (1936- ): xvi, 331, 441-43, 457, 500, 518, 563-64 Etienne, Gérard (1936- ): 333-34, 458 Eusebio, Enrique (1948- ): 236 Eyma, Xavier (1816-76): 472

Index to Names Fanon, Frantz (1925-61): 79-80, 324, 329-30, 332, 402, 409, 412, 429-30, 515, 529, 547-56, 55961,564-65 Faubert, Pierre (1806-68): 366 Faulkner, William (1897-1962): 69, 79, 209-10, 212,216,440 Fermín Arraiza, Manuel (1937- ): 231 Fernandez, Alberto Smith (fl. 1976): 75 Fernández, Pablo Armando (1930- ): 206, 224-25, 284, 290 Fernandez Deligne, Gastón (See Deligne, Gastón Fernando) Fernandez Fragoso, Victor (1944-83): 232 Fernandez Juncos, Manuel (1846-1928): 148 Fernandez Madrid, José (1789-1830): 66 Fernandez Mejía, Abel (See Mejía de Fernandez, Abigail) Fernandez Retamar, Roberto (1930- ): 111, 224-25, 267, 278-80, 283, 303 Fernandez de Lewis, Carmen Pilar (Piri) (1925- ): 241 Fernandez de Oviedo, Gonzalo (1478-1557): 51, 114, 116,118, 124 Fernandez y Gonzalez, Manuel (1821-88): 41 Ferré, Rosario (1942- ): 189, 201-03, 232, 276 Ferrer, Buenaventura Pascual (1772-1851): 126 Ferrer, Rolando (1925- ): 250, 252 Fiallo, Fabio (1865-1942): 203 Figueroa, Edwin (1925- ): 197 Figueroa, José Angel (1946- ): 232 Firmin, Anténor (1850-1911): 322-23, 454, 530, 533-34, 538, 544 Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80): 43, 321 Flavia-Léopold, Emmanuel (fl. 1924-48): 473 Flórez Estrada, Alvaro (1766-1854): 41 Florit, Eugenio (1903- ): 222, 227 Fornaris, José (1827-90): 13, 161 Foxâ y Lecanda, Narciso (1822-83): 58 Franco Oppenheimer, Félix (1912- ): 223, 230 Frankétienne (See Etienne, Frank) Franqui, Carlos (1921- ): 284 Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939): 543-44, 552-53, 559 Fuenmayor, Alfonso (1917- ): 69-70 Fuenmayor, José Félix (1885-1966): 67 Fuentes, Carlos (1928- ): 209, 212-13, 216-17, 263, 267, 279, 291 Fuentes, José Lorenzo (See Lorenzo Fuentes, José) Fuentes, Norberte (1943- ): 288, 303

571 Gaitân, Jorge Eliécer (1903-48): 70 Galeano, Eduardo (1940- ): 265-66 Gallegos, Rómulo (1884-1969): 105, 182 Galvân, Manuel de Jesus (1834-1910): 113, 151, 162,299 Gambaro, Griseida (1928- ): 245 Gangâ, Creto (See Crespo y Borbón, Bartolomé José) Garcia, Iván (1938- ): 255, 257-59 Garcia Godoy, Federico (1857-1924): 51-53, 152 Garcia Lorca, Federico (1899-1936): 229 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (1928- ): 65-71, 73, 81, 209-15, 217, 263-65, 267, 291, 440, 458 Garcia Marruz, Fina (1923- ): 223 García Ramis, Magali (1946- ): 189 Garcia Vega, Lorenzo (1926- ): 223 Garcilaso de la Vega [pseud. El Inca] (1539?-1616): 124 Garrastegui, Anagilda (1932- ): 231 Garvey, Marcus (Moziah) Aurelius (1887-1940): 80 Gatón Arce, Freddy (1920- ): 235 Gautier Benítez, José (1851-80): 167 Gaztelu, Angel (1914- ): 223 Geada, Rita (1937- ): 227 Gentile, Antoine de (fl. early 1900s): 472-73 Geraldini, Alejandro (1455?-1524): 116 Gide, André (1869-1951): 334 Gil, Lourdes (1953- ): 227 Giraud, Octave (fl. 1862): 469 Glissant, Edouard (1928- ): 61, 80, 303, 310, 313, 330, 333, 335-36, 343-44, 382-86, 391, 40102, 409, 411-12, 435-36, 439-41, 443, 445-46, 453-54, 456, 458-59, 476, 485-89, 499, 501, 512-13,517-20,524,562-64 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, comte de (1816-82): 56, 322, 533, 538 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich (1809-52): 43 Gómez, Alexis (1950- ): 236-37 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis (See Avellaneda, G. Gómez de) Góngora, Luis de (1561-1627): 122, 215 Gonzalez, José Luis (1926- ): 188, 197-98, 200, 206, 269, 275-78, 280, 303 Gonzalez, Juan Manuel (1924- ): 247 Gonzalez, Lydia Milagros (1942- ): 245 Gonzalez, Reynaldo (1940- ): 290 González Alberty, Fernando (1908- ): 229 Gonzalez Garcia, Matias (1866-1938): 150 Gonzalez Herrera, Julio (1902-61): 183 Gonzalez de Bustos, Francisco (fl. 1665): 129

572 Goodison, Lorna (1947- ): 496 Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936): 43, 192 Gouraige, Ghislain (1925-78): 365, 374, 457 Gramsci, Antonio (1891-1937): 276 Grau, Enrique (1920- ): 70 Grouf, Gérard (1946- ): 394, 397 Guerra, Armando {See Llorente, Francisco Martin) Guerra y Sanchez, Ramiro (1880-1970): 36 Guesde, Dominique (fl. 1900): 472 Guevara, Ernesto (alias Che) (1928-67): 279, 490 Guillén, Nicolás (1902-89): 16-17, 49, 72, 81, 179, 188, 215, 222, 302-03, 456, 542 Güiraldes, Ricardo (1886-1927): 105, 263 Güirao, Ramón (1908-49): 16 Gutiérrez, Franklin (1951- ): 236 Gutiérrez, Guillermo Francisco (1958- ): 92, 236 Gutiérrez, Joaquin (1918- ): 77

Haley, Alex Palmer (1921-92): 453 Harris, Wilson (1921- ): 61, 386, 391 Hearn, Lafcadio (1850-1904): 465, 471, 475 Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961): 69, 216, 286 Henrfquez Urena, Max (1885-1968): 53, 125-26, 131 Henrfquez Urena, Pedro (1884-1946): 51, 53, 58, 162, 192, 264, 266, 268-69, 274, 280 Heredia, José Maria de (1803-39): 58, 87-88, 150, 158-60, 162, 166-68 Heredia, Nicolás (1852-1901): 19, 145-46 Hermine, Micheline (fl. 1988): 396 Hernandez, Felisberto (1902-63): 67 Hernandez, Gaspar Octavio (1893-1918): 75 Hernandez Aquino, Luis (1907- ): 230 Hernandez Catá, Alfonso (1885-1940): 191, 19395, 201 Hernandez Cruz, Victor (1949- ): 92, 232 Hernandez Franco, Tomas (1904-52): 234-35 Hernandez Novas, Raul (1948- ): 226 Hernandez Rodriguez, Rafael (1948- ): 226 Hernandez Rueda, Lupo (1930- ): 235-36 Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de (fl. 1620): 350 Hippolyte, Dominique (1889-1967): 508 Holly, Arthur (fl. 1918): 538 Horth, Régine (fl. 1970): 393 Hostos, Eugenio Maria de (1839-1903): 33, 148-49, 264-66, 268 Houël, Drasta (fl. 1916): 475 Hughes, James Langsten (1902-67): 393, 456 Huidobro, Vicente (1893-1948): 59, 229

Hispanic and Francophone

Literature

Hugues, Victor (1770-1826): 213, 391, 395, 468 Hugo, Victor (1802-85): 43, 351, 356-58, 392, 469, 472 Hyppolite, Michelson Paul (1921- ): 373, 377 Hyvrard, Jeanne (fl. 1975): 360

Iglesias, César Andreu {See Andreu Iglesias, C.) Inchâustegui Cabrai, Héctor (1912-79): 234-35, 255-57 Ionesco, Eugène (1912-94): 243, 245 Irizarry, Edilberto (1938- ): 231 Islas, Maya (1947- ): 227 Iznaga Hernandez, Alcides Arturo (1910- ): 179, 181

Jadfard, René (1901-47): 391, 393 James, Cyril Lionel Robert (1901- ): 422 James, Norberte (1945- ): 236-37 Jamís, Fayad (1931-88): 224-25 Jammes, Francis (1868-1938): 351-52, 359 Janvier, Louis-Joseph (1855-1911): 371, 533 Jaspers, Karl (1883-1969): 553 Jésus, Salvador M. de (fl. 1959): 197 Jiménez, Juan Ramón (1881-1958): 222 Jiménez, Max (1900-47): 16 Jouvet, Louis (1887-1951): 456 Joyau, Auguste (b. 1903; fl. 1950-77): 470, 472, 474 Joyce, James (1882-1941): 209-10, 212, 215-16 Juminer, Bertène (1927- ): 389-90, 393-94, 402, 428-29, 556 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961): 544, 552, 559

Kafka, Franz (1882-1941): 180, 192, 210-11, 213, 289 Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804): 263 Kazin, Alfred (1915- ): 275 Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936): 192 Kozer, José (1940- ): 227

La Barca, Calderón de (1600-81): 129 Labarthe, Pedro Juan (1906-66): 90-91 Labat, Jean-Baptiste (1663-1738): 354-55 Labrador Ruiz, Enrique (1902- ): 180, 196-97 Lacan, Jacques (1901-81): 273-74 Lacay Polanco, Ramón (1925- ): 184

Index to Names Lacrosil, Michèle (fl. 1960-67): 333, 428-31, 453 La Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de (1651-95): 122 Laferrière, Dany (fl. 1987): 334-35, 401 Lafontaine, Jean de (1621-95): 327-28, 345 Laforest, Edmond (1876-1915): 311, 454 Lago, José Maria (fl. early 1900s): 157 Laguerre, Enrique A. (1906- ): 186 La Hoz y Mota, Juan Claudio de la Cruz (fl. 1653d. after 1709): 129 Lair, Clara (1895-1974): 229-30 Lam, Wifredo (1902-82): 400, 456 Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869): 321, 357-58, 392, 508 Lamming, George (1927- ): 49, 61, 78, 82, 451 Lara, Augereau (fl. early 1900s): 472, 535 Lara, Oruno (1879-??): 465, 472-73 Larrasa, Diego de (fl. 1625): 121 Las Casas, Bartolomé de (1484-1566): 12, 51, 11315, 118, 120, 124-25, 218, 269, 350 Lautréamont, comte de (See Ducasse, Isidore) Lavaud, A. (fl. 1880): 371 Laviera,Tato (1951-): 232 Lazo, Raimundo(1904- ): 58 Leante, César (1928- ): 206, 284 Leblond, Ary (1880-1958): 352 Leblond, Marius (1877-1953): 352 Le Bon, Gustave (1841-1931): 43 Lebrón Savinón, Mariano (1922- ): 53 Leconte, Vergniaud (1866-1932): 510 Ledesma, Luis Manuel (1949- ): 236 Leger, Alexis Saint-Leger [pseud. Saint-John Perse] (1887-1975): 313, 350, 359-60, 465, 469-71, 475-76, 488 Leiris, Michel (1901-90): 329, 400 Leyva (or Leiva), Fernando Díez de (See Díez de Leyva, F.) Lemerle, E. (fl. 1865): 472 Lemery, Hélène (fl. 1925): 467 Léonard, Nicolas Germain (1744-93): 350-51, 467 Léro, Etienne (1909-39): 537 Lescot, Elie (b. 1883; fl. 1941-46): 400, 456, 496, 540 Lespinasse, Beauvais (1811-63): 369-70, 532 Lezama Lima, José (1910-76): 123, 181-82, 189, 209-10, 212, 215-17, 223-25, 275, 283-84, 290, 303 Lhérisson, Justin (1873-1907): 415-18, 423 Lima, José Maria (1934- ): 231 Linguet, Jules (1939- ): 394 Lisembé, Elébé (See Elébé, P. L.)

573 Lispector, Clarice (1924-77): 263 Llerena de Rueda, Cristóbal de (1540-1627): 11920, 132,239 Lloréns Torres, Luis (1878-1944): 228, 240 Llorente, Francisco Martin [pseud. Armando Guerra] (fl. 1934): 16 Lluch Mora, Francisco (1924- ): 230 Lofficial, Frantz (1943- ): 374 Lohier, Michel (1891-1973): 392-93 Loize, Jean (fl. 1945): 352 Lomar, Martha (See López de Victoria de Reus, M.) Londres, Albert (1884-1932): 391 López, César (1933- ): 224-25 López, Luis Carlos (1879-1950): 66-67 López Bago, Eduardo (1855?-1931): 146 López Pumarejo, Alfonso (1886-1959): 68-69 López Ramirez, Tomas (1946- ): 202-03 López Sacha, Francisco (fl. 1961): 291-92 López Suria, Violeta (1926- ): 229, 231 López de Gomara, Francisco (fl. 1560): 350 López de Haro, Bishop Damian (1581-1648): 121 López de Melgarejo, Juan (fl. 1582): 114 López de Victoria de Reus, Maria [pseud. Martha Lomar] (1893-19??; fl. 1940): 241 Lorenzo Fuentes, José (1928- ): 285, 291 Loti, Pierre (See Viaud, Julien) Loveira, Carlos (1882-1928): 146, 177 Luaces, Joaquin Lorenzo (1826-67): 13, 160-61 Lugareno, El (See Betancourt Cisneros, G. G.) Lugo, Américo (1870-1952): 51, 53 Luis Gonzalez, José (1926- ): 188, 206, 219, 275, 280 Lukács, György (1885-1971): 285 Lumumba, Patrice (1925-61): 511, 519

Mabille, Pierre (fl. 1940-45): 456 Machado, Gerardo (1871-1939): 192, 194-95, 203, 222-23, 249, 251 Macouba, Auguste (1939- ): 514-15, 518 McField, David R. (1938- ): 76-77 McKay, Claude (1889-1948): 393 Madrid Malo, Néstor (1918- ): 69-70 Magloire Saint-Aude, Clément (1912-71): 372 Mailer, Norman (1923- ): 69 Mailhol, Gabriel (1724-95): 356, 361 Malé, Belkis Cusa (1942- ): 226-27 Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842-98): 223, 400, 454, 543 Maloney, Gerardo (1945- ): 75-82 Malouet, Pierre (1740-1819): 351, 361

574

Hispanic

Malpica la Barca, Domingo (1836-1909): 146 Malta, Alguilera (1909-81): 72 Mañach, Jorge (1898-1961): 36, 42, 179, 268-72, 274, 280 Manicom, Jacqueline (1938-76): 333 Manigat, Leslie F. (1937- ): 368 Mannoni, Octave (fl. 1950): 538, 548-49, 551-52 Manzano, Juan Francisco (1797-1854): 144, 166 Maran, René (1887-1960): 389, 392, 402, 420-21, 551 Marat, Abniel(1958- ): 247 Marbot, François Achille (1817-66): 327, 345, 465 Marcalle Abreu, Roberto (1945- ): 206 Marcelin brothers (See Thoby-Marcelin, Pierre and Philippe) Marcelin, Frédéric (1848-1917): 536 Marcos y Suárez, Miguel de (1894-1954): 180 Margenat, Alfredo (1907- ): 229 Margenat, Hugo (1933-57): 231-32 Mariátegui, José Carlos (1894-1930): 304 Marinello, Juan (1899-1977): 268, 278 Mario, José (1940- ): 226 Marqués, René (1919-79): 188-89, 192, 197-99, 241-46, 275-76, 280, 303 Marquez, Rosa Luisa (fl. 1970): 246 Marré, Luis (1929- ): 224 Marrero Aristy, Ramón (1913-59): 183 Mars, Jean Price {See Price-Mars, Jean) Marsolle, Edouard (fl. 1930s): 476 Martí, José (1853-95): 41, 88-89, 142, 146-47, 15556, 158, 163-64, 168, 221, 223, 228, 263-66, 268, 270, 275-76, 278-80, 299, 303 Martí Zaragoza, Manuel (1663-1737?): 126 Martinez, Jan (1954- ): 232 Martinez Capó, Juan (1923- ): 230 Martinez Dávila, Manuel (1883-1934): 150 Martinez Estrada, Ezequiel (1895-1964): 272 Martínez-Maldonado, Manuel (1937- ): 232 Martinez Villena, Rubén (1899-1934): 222-23 Martinez y Martinez, Saturnio (1840-1905): 36 Marx, Karl (1818-83): 43, 279, 290, 292, 544 Marzán, Julio (1946- ): 232 Matamoros, Mercedes (1851-1906): 162, 166 Mateo, Andrés (1930- ): 236 Matos Paoli, Francisco (1915- ): 223, 230-31 Matto de Turner, Clorinda (1854-1909): 179-80 Maupassant, Guy de (1850-93): 192 Maurras, Charles (1868-1952): 455, 537 Maximin, Daniel (1947- ): 350, 445-46, 486-87, 494, 502, 563

and Francophone

Literature

Mayor, Maricel (1952- ): 227 Medina, Ramón Felipe (1933- ): 231 Medina, Tristán de (1833-86): 146 Mejía, Gustavo Adolfo (1891-1962): 182-83 Mejía de Fernandez, Abigail (1895-1940): 54, 235 Mej ides, Miguel (1950- ): 292 Melendes, Joseramón (1952- ): 232 Meléndez Munoz, Miguel (1884-1966): 150 Melon-Degras, Alfred (fl. 1975): 411, 490-93 Memmi, Albert (1920- ): 517, 548 Méndez Ballester, Manuel (1909- ): 186, 240-41, 244 Méndez Nieto, Juan (1530-1611): 114-16 Méndez Quinones, Ramón (1847-89): 17-18 Mendive, Rafael María de (1821-86): 162 Mendoza, Elvira de (fl. pre-1585): 117 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino (1856-1912): 53, 54,116-17 Ménil, René (1902- ): 342, 481 Mera, Juan Léon (1832-94): 162 Mérimée, Prosper (1805-70): 358 Meschonnic, Henri (1932- ): 56 Meso Mónica (1751?-??): 131 Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de (1802-82): 147 Métellus, Jean (1937- ): 333-34, 457-58 Météran, Pierre Félix Athénodore [pseud. Alfred Parépou] (1841-89): 327, 393 Meza, Ramón (1861-1911): 145-46 Michelet, Jules (1798-1874): 352, 376 Mieses Burgos, Franklin (1907-76): 223, 235 Milanés, José Jacinto (1814-63): 143, 161-62 Miller, Jeannette (1944- ): 236 Mir, Pedro (1913- ): 51, 59-61, 185, 206, 234 Miranda, Francisco de (1750-1816): 275 Miyares González, Fernando (1749-1818): 128 Molina, Tirso de (See Tellez, Gabriel) Moll Boscana, Arístides (1885-1964): 157 Monge, José Maria (1840-91): 157, 167 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92): 279, 354 Montaner, Carlos Alberto (1943- ): 269-70, 27374, 280 Monte, Félix Maria del (1819-99): 159-60 Montenegro, Carlos (1900-1981): 196-97 Montera, Mayra (1952- ): 189 Montesinos, Antón de [also known as Montesino, Antonio] (1495?-1545): 51, 115 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de (1689-1755): 125, 129, 356 Morales, Jacobo (fl. 1973-81): 232 Morales, Jorge Luis (1930- ): 230-31

Index to Names Morand, Florette (fl. 1956): 476 Morand, Paul (1888-1976): 356 Moravia, Charles (1876-1938): 366 Moreau, Gustave (1826-98): 163 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric (1750-1819): 127, 351 Morejón, Nancy (1944- ): 226, 290 Morell de Santa Cruz, Pedro Agustín (1694-1768): 123, 125, 127 Morelos, José Maria (1765-1815): 71 Moreno, Zora (1951- ): 239, 246-47 Moreno Jimenes, Domingo (1894-1986): 230, 23334 Moreto, Agustin (1618-69): 129 Morisseau-Leroy, Félix [Moriso-Lewa] (1912- ): 366,375,401,513,518 Morrison, Mateo (1944- ): 236 Morüa Delgado, Martin (1859-1909): 88, 146 Moscoso Puello, Francisco (1885-1959): 184 Munoz del Monte, Francisco (1800-65): 158-59 Munoz Marin, Luis (1898- ): 69, 231, 275

Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad (1932- ): 383, 564 Nápoles, Fajardo, Juan Cristóbal [pseud. El Cucalambé] (1829-62): 13, 161-62 Nau, Emile (1812-60): 532 Nau, Ignace (1808-45): 373-74, 454 Navarro, Osvaldo (1946- ): 226 Navarro Luna, Manuel (1894-1966): 222-23 Neruda, Pablo (1904-73): 59, 263, 267 Nieto, Juan José (1804-66): 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900): 481, 543, 550 Niger, Paul (1915-62): 476 Nogueras, Luis Rogelio (1944-85): 226 Nolasco, Sócrates (1884-1970): 204 Novas Calvo, Lino (1905-76): 178-79, 191, 194-95 Nunez, Apolinar (1946- ): 236 Nünez, Ana Rosa (1926- ): 227 Núñez, Manuel (1957- ): 56 Núñez, Rafael (1825-94): 66 Núñez de Câceres, Jose (1772-1846): 52

Obeso, Calendario (1840-84): 66 Obregón, Alejandro (1920- ): 70 Ocampo, Victoria (1890-1979): 269 Oexmelin, Alexandre Olivier (ca. 1645-ca. 1710): 354 (Also known as Esquemeling, John) Olivier, Emile (1940- ): 458

575 Ollivier, Emile (1940- ): 333, 335 O'Neill, Eugene (1888-1953): 255, 259 Onetti, Juan Carlos (1909-94): 67 Oráa, Pedro de (1932- ): 224 O'Reilly, Alejandro (1725-94): 128 Orgemont, Auguste d' (fl. 1803): 467 Osenat, Pierre (fl. 1930s): 476 Ortega Suârez, Gregorio (1926- ): 181 Ortega y Gasset, José (1883-1955): 272-73 Otero, Lisandro (1932- ): 206, 283, 285, 291 Ortiz, Fernando (1897-1963): 10, 37, 40-41, 178, 267-68 Ovando, Leonor de (fl. 1575; d. 1615?): 117 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernandez (See Fernandez de Oviedo, G.)

Pachón Padilla, Eduardo (1920- ): 69 Padilla, Heberto (1932- ): 210, 224-25, 227, 252, 254, 284, 287 Palacio Valdés, Armando (1853-1938): 43 Palacios, Arnoldo (1924- ): 67, 71-72 Palcy, Euzhan (fl. 1984): 423 Paiés Matos, Luis (1898-1959): 16, 61, 72, 179, 188,222,228-29,302 Palma, Ramón de (1812-60): 145 Palma, Ricardo (1833-1919): 65 Pané, Ramón (fl. 1495; d. 1571): 117-18, 131 Pardo Bazân, Emilia (1851-1920): 146 Parépou, Alfred (See Météran, P. F. A.) Parra, Nicanor (1914- ): 66 Patient, Serge (1934- ): 392-93, 395-96, 402 Paul, Cauvin (1938- ): 333 Paul, Emmanuel C. (1914-67): 327 Paz, Cabrera (18??-??): 16 Paz, Octavio (1914- ): 267, 271 Paz, Senel (1950- ): 291 Pedreira, Antonio S. (1898-1939): 36, 42, 186, 26465, 272-74, 276, 280 Pedroso, Regino (1898-1983): 223 Peguero, Luis José (1732-92): 127 Peix, Pedro (1952- ): 59 Pelleprat, Pierre Ignace (1606?-67): 353 Pena Batlle, Manuel Arturo (1902-54): 55 Peña de Bordas, Virginia de (1930- ): 182 Penson, César Nicolás (1855-1901): 57 Pérez, José Joaquin (1845-1900): 14, 50, 162, 167, 233 Pérez Galdós, Benito (1845-1920): 43 Pérez de Zambrana, Luisa (1837-1922): 167

576 Pérez y Pérez, Carlos Federico (1913-65): 50, 184 Pérez y Ramirez, Manuel Maria (1781-1853): 131 Pernett y Morales, Rafael (1949- ): 82 Perse, Saint-John (See Leger, Alexis Saint-Leger) Pétion, A.-A. S. (1770-1818): 367-68 Phelps, Anthony (1928- ): 313, 333, 401, 457-60, 499-502, 563 Philoctète, René (1932- ): 457, 510 Pichardo, Bernardo (1877-1924): 63 Pichardo, Francisco Javier (1873-1941): 221 Pichardo Moya, Felipe (1892-1957): 221 Pichardo y Tapia, Esteban (1799-1879): 13, 15-16 Pícon-Salas, Mariano (1901-65): 66 Picquenard, Jean Baptiste (fl. 1800; d. 1826): 357 Pierre-Paul, Antoine (fl. 1910): 368 Pietri, Pedro (1944- ): 85, 92, 232 Pinera, Virgilio (1912-79): 180-81, 197, 223-25, 249-51,284,303 Pinero, Miguel (1946- ): 232 Pinter, Harold (1930- ):243 Pirandello, Luigi (1867-1936): 249, 255, 259 Pita, Juana Rosa (1939- ): 227 Pita, Santiago, Captain (fl. 1730; d. 1755): 130 Pita Rodriguez, Félix (1909- ): 197, 223 Pitou, Louis-Ange (1767-1846): 390 Placido {See Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción) Placoly, Vincent (1946- ): 518, 520-21 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49): 192 Pogolotti, Marcelo (1902-79): 179 Polius, Joseph (fl. 1968-77): 501-02 Ponce de León, Juan (1460-1521): 112, 114, 116 Ponce de León Troche, Juan (ca. 1525-90): 114 Portuondo, José Antonio (1911- ): 278 Pound, Ezra (1885-1972): 225 Poveda, José Manuel (1888-1926): 221 Poveda y Armenteros, Francisco (1796-1879?): 19 Poyen, Ernest de (fl. 1850): 467 Pradt, Dominique de (1759-1837): 357, 361 Prestol Castillo, Freddy (1913-80): 183 Prévost de Sansac de Traversay, Jean-Baptiste (fl. 1806): 468 Prévost d'Exiles, abbé (1697-1763): 357 Price, Hannibal (1841-93): 369-70, 533, 538 Price-Mars, Jean (1876-1969): 323, 325, 342-43, 347, 367, 393, 401, 418-19, 481, 508, 537-40, 544 Prida, Dolores (1943- ): 85 Privat d'Anglemont, Alexandre (1815-59): 466-67 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-65): 41

Hispanic and Francophone

Literature

Prudent, Lambert-Félix (fl. 1980): 331 Puig, Francisco [pseud. Julio Rosas] (1839-1917): 146 Puig, Manuel (1933- ): 218

Queilhe, Louis Maynard de (fl. 1835): 468 Quintero, Héctor (1942- ): 250 Quintero y Woodville, José Agustín (1829-85): 162 Quiroga, Horacio (1878-1937): 192

Ramirez de Arrellano, Clemente (1868-1945): 156 Ramos, José Antonio (1885-1946): 180, 248 Ramos Collado, Lilliam (1954- ): 232 Ramos Otero, Manuel (1948- ): 202-03, 232 Ramos-Perea, Roberto Orlando (1959- ): 247-48 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas de (1713-96): 125, 127, 356, 358 Réache, Agathe (fl. early 1900s): 472 Read, Horacio (1899-19??): 184-85 Reboux, Paul (fl. 1930): 352 Rechani, Agrait, Luis (1902- ): 240 Renan, Ernest (1823-92): 278-79 Rentas Lucas, Eugenio (1910- ): 230 Requena, Andrés Francisco (1908-52): 184 Revert, Eugène (fl. 1950): 352 Reyes, Edwin (1944- ): 232 Reyes, Ramón Emilio (fl. 1961): 185 Reyes Rivera, Louis (1945- ): 232 Rézaire, Eugénie (1950- ): 389 Ribera Chevremont, Evaristo (1896-1976): 228-29 Rigaud, Milo (1904- ): 326 Rigby, Carlos (1945- ): 76-77 Rimbaud, Arthur (1854-91): 400, 543 Rivas, Joey (fl. 1983): 247 Rivera, Héctor (1957- ): 236 Rivera Martinez, Tomas (1956- ): 236 Rivero, Eliana (1942- ): 227 Rivero, Raul (1945- ): 226 Roa Bastos, Augusto (1918- ): 67 Roberts, Kenneth L. (1885-1957): 373 Robeson, Paul (1898-1976): 71 Robles, Mireya (1934- ): 227 Rochefort, Charles de (1605-83): 351 Rodó, José Enrique (1872-1917): 42, 186, 265, 26768, 278 Rodriguez, José Santiago (See Vidarte, Santiago) Rodriguez, Luis Felipe (1884-1947): 191, 194, 201 Rodriguez, Rafael (1939-89): 233

Index to Names Rodriguez, Reina Maria (1952- ): 227 Rodriguez, Simón (1771-1854): 275 Rodriguez, Walter (1948- ): 247 Rodriguez Calderón, Juan (1778-1839?): 156 Rodriguez Demorizi, Emilio (1908- ): 54, 57 Rodriguez Feo, José (1920- ): 223-24 Rodriguez Fernández, Arturo (1948- ): 259 Rodriguez Frese, Marcos (1941- ): 232 Rodriguez Freyle, Juan (1566-1630): 65 Rodriguez Julia, Edgardo (1947- ): 189 Rodriguez Matos, Carlos (1949- ): 232-33, 236 Rodriguez Nietzsche, Vicente (1942- ): 232 Rodriguez Objío, Manuel Nemesio (1838-71): 57, 166 Rodriguez Rivera, Guillermo (1943- ): 226 Rodriguez Torres, Carmelo (1941- ): 188-89 Rodriguez Vasquez, Jaime Luis (fl. 1950): 231 Rojas, Luis (fl. 1980s): 247 Rojas Herazo, Héctor (1921- ): 67 Romane, Jean-Baptiste (1807-58): 510 Romanette, Irmine (fl. 1932-51): 472 Roné, Eleuthère Saint-Prix (fl. 1900; d. 1902): 472 Ronsard, Pierre de (1524-85): 350 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945): 68-69, 271 Rosa, Pedro Juvenal (1897-??): 186 Rosa Nieves, Cesáreo ( 1901-74): 188 Rosal, Manuel (fl. 1900): 472 Rosario Quiles, Luis A. (1936- ): 231-32 Rosas, Julio {See Puig, Francesco) Rostand, Edmond (1868-1918): 508 Roumain, Jacques (1907-44): 326, 332-33, 343, 395, 400-01, 409-10, 418-20, 423-24, 438, 443, 451-52, 454-57, 459, 481, 508, 539-44, 556 Roumer, Emile (1903- ): 411 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78): 353 Rubalcava, Manuel Justo de (1769-1805): 13, 131 Rueda, Manuel (1921- ): 235-36, 255-58 Ruiz, Juan (fl. 1343): 267 Rulfo, Juan (1918-86): 210, 213, 304 Rupaire, Sonny (1940-91): 411, 493-95, 500-01, 503 Russell, Carlos (fl. 1976): 75, 77, 81

Saba, Maurice (fl. 1914): 393 Sacerio-Garí, Enrique (1945- ): 227 Saint-Amand, Edris (1918; fl. 1952): 326 Saint-Aurèle, Poirié (fl. 1826-50): 468-70, 472

577 Saint-Lambert, Jean (1717-1803): 358 Saint-Louis, René A. (fl. 1970): 372 Saint-Michel, Maurille de (fl. 1652): 351 Saint-Quentin, Alfred de (1810-75): 398 Salazar Bondy, Sebastián (1924-65): 269 Salazar de Alarcón, Eugenio (1530-1602): 116-17 Sanchez, Enriquillo (1947- ): 206 Sanchez, Florencio (1875-1910): 253 Sanchez, Luis Rafael (1936- ): 19-21, 189, 200-03, 210, 218, 240, 244-45, 248, 265-66, 276 Sanchez Juliao, David (1945- ): 67, 71 Sanchez Ramirez, Juan (1762-1811): 52 Sanchez Valverde, Antonio (1729-90): 127 Sand, George (1804-76): 345 Santacilla, Pedro (1826-1910): 162 Santa Clara, Antonio de (fl. 1582): 114 Santaliz, Pedro (fl. 1970s): 246-47 Sanz-Lajara, J. M. (1917-63): 184 Sarduy, Severo (1937- ): 181-82, 206, 209-10, 21618, 227, 273-74, 279-80, 284-85, 303 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino (1811-88): 266-67, 279 Saroyan, William (1908-81): 69 Sarraute, Nathalie (1900- ): 285 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80): 184, 243, 332, 431, 479,481,552 Savain, Pétion (1906- ): 326 Savane, Virgile [pseud. Salavina] (fl. 1921): 472-73 Schoelcher, Victor (1804-93): 476 Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso (Arthur A.) (18741938): 89 Schwarz-Bart, Simone (1938- ): 384-86, 402, 43233, 453, 522-23 Scott, Dennis Courtney (1939- ): 501 Sédécias, Armand (fl. 1900): 472 Ségalen, Victor (1878-1919): 475 Seilén, Antonio (1839-89): 162 Seilén, Francisco (1838-1907): 162 Selvon, Samuel (1923- ): 423 Senghor, Léopold Sédar (1906- ): 325, 332, 379, 411, 479-80, 485, 509, 514-15, 538-39, 552 Serpa, Enrique (See Domínguez Alba, Bernardo) Serulle, Haffe (1947- ): 239, 255, 258-59 Seymour, Arthur J. (1914- ): 394 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616): 279, 512, 519 Sierra Berdecía, Fernando (1903-62): 240-41 Sigalony, Joseph Marraud de (fl. 1918-37): 472-73 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de (1645-1700): 122 Silén, Iván (1944- ): 232 Silén, Juan Angel (fl. 1970): 276

578 Silva, José Asunción (1865-96): 163 Silvestri, Reinaldo (1935- ): 231 Sinán, Rogelio (See Domínguez Alba, Bernardo) Smith, Octavio (1921-87): 223 Soler Puig, José (1916- ): 285, 292 Solís, Cleva (1926- ): 224 Solís y Valenzuela, Pedro de (1624-1711 ): 66 Somoza, Anastasio (1896-1956): 69 Soto, Pedro Juan (1928- ): 187-88, 191, 197, 199, 203 Sotomayor, Aurea Maria (1951- ): 232 Soto Vélez, Clemente (1905- ): 229, 232 Soulouque, Faustin (1782-1867): 533 Souriant, Emmanuel (fl. early 1900s): 472 Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936): 273 Staël, Germaine Necker, baronne de (1766-1817): 357 Stalin, Joseph (1879-1953): 217 Stendhal (See Beyle, Henri) Stephenson, Elie (1944- ): 395-96, 402, 503 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68): 216 Stevenson, José (1932- ): 67 Stravinsky, Igor F. (1882-1971): 211-12 Suârez y Romero, Anselmo (1818-78): 144, 146, 299 Sue, Eugène (1804-57): 351, 358, 467 Sylvain, Georges (1866-1925): 327, 345, 454, 536

Taine, Hippolyte (1828-93): 530 Talboom, Léon (fl. 1921): 475 Tallet, José Zacarías (1893-1989): 222-23 Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro (1826-82): 13, 148, 160, 245 Tejera, Apolinar (1855-1922): 51 Tejera, Diego Vicente (1848-1903): 162 Tejera, Nivaria (1930- ): 224 Tellez, Gabriel [pseud. Tirso de Molina] (15831648): 51, 122 Teresa de Mier, Servando, Fray (1765-1827): 182, 275, 291 Teurbe Tolón y de la Guardia, Miguel (1820-57): 162 Thaly, Daniel (fl. 1900-32): 472-74 Thaly, Fernand (fl. 1910-45): 471 Thelwell, Michael (fl. 1980): 78 Thoby, Perceval (fl. 1947): 373 Thoby-Marcelin, Philippe (1904-75): 326, 370, 411 Thoby Marcelin, Pierre (b. 1908; fl. 1944): 370

Hispanic

and Francophone

Literature

Thomarel, André (b. 1893; fl. 1936): 470, 472-74 Thomas, Piri (1928- ): 85, 91 Tigrane, Louis (fl. early 1900s): 472 Tillich, Paul (1886-1965): 185 Tirolien, Guy (1917- ): 476, 486 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaievich, count (1828-1910): 43 Torres, Camilo, padre (1929-66): 72 Torres Nadal, Luis (fl. 1975): 247 Torres Vargas, Diego (de) (1590-1649): 121-22 Tostado de La Peña, Francisco (1535-86): 117 Toussaint Louverture, Pierre Dominique (17431803): 358, 366-67, 488-89, 501, 512, 520, 560 Triana, José (1931- ): 239, 245, 250-52, 255, 259, 287 Trotsky, Lev D. (1879-1940): 217 Trouillot, Hénock (1923- ): 372 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas (1891-1961): 55, 69, 103, 107, 182-84, 193, 203-06, 235-36, 254-55, 258, 277 Turla y Denis, Leopoldo (1818?-77): 162

Umpierre, Luz Maria (1947- ): 189, 232-33 Urbach, Carlos Pío (1872-97): 162 Urbach, Federico (1873-1932): 162 Ureña, Salomé (1850-97): 50, 61, 233, 235 Ureña de Mendoza, Nicolas (1822-75): 160 Urrutia y Montoya, Ignacio José (1735-95): 125

Valdés, Antonio José (1780-ca. 1830): 125 Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción [pseud. Placido] (1809-44): 19, 161 Valdés Machuca, Ignacio (1792-1851): 161 Valdez, Diógenes (1941- ): 206 Valero, Roberto (1955- ): 227 Valladares Pérez, Armando (1937- ): 227 Vallejo, César (1892-1938): 59, 224 Vargas, German (1919- ): 67, 70 Vargas Llosa, Mario (1936- ): 209, 212, 216 Vargas Vilà, José Maria (1860-1933): 43 Varo, Carlos (fl. 1970): 18 Varona, Enrique José (1849-1933): 162 Vasconcelos, José (1881-1959): 265, 280 Vastey, Pompée V., baron de (1735-1820): 412, 530-32, 534, 544 Vauchelet, Emile (fl. early 1900s): 472 Vazquez, José [pseud. Juan] (1764-1804): 50, 127 Vega, Ana Lydia (1946- ): 49, 201, 203

Index to Names Vega, Bernardo (1938- ): 35-36, 38-39, 41, 43-44, 60 Vega, José Luis (1948- ): 189, 232 Vélez Estrada, Jaime (1936- ): 231 Veloz Maggiolo, Marcio (1936- ): 53, 185, 204-05 Vergés, Pedro (1945- ): 185 Verne, Jules (1828-1905): 43 Viaud, Julien [pseud. Pierre Loti] (1850-1923): 43, 400 Vicens, Josefina (1915- ): 67 Vicioso, Abelardo (1930- ): 50-51, 60, 235-36 Vicioso, Chiqui(1948- ): 92, 236 Vicioso, Sherezada (1948- ): 61 Vidarte, Santiago [pseud. José Santiago Rodríguez] (1828-48): 160 Vigil Díaz, Otilio (1880-1961): 233-34 Vilaire, Etzer (1872-1951): 400, 454, 535 Vilaire, Jean-Joseph (1881-1967): 375 Villaverde, Cirilo (1812-94): 143-44, 191 Villegas, Victor (1924- ): 236 Vincent, Sténio (1874-1959): 373, 437, 539-40 Vinyes, Ramón (1885-1952): 67, 70 Vitier, Cintio (1921- ): 167, 223, 290 Vivás Maldonado, José Luis (1926- ): 197 Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet, known as] (16941778): 357, 391

Walcott, Derek (1930- ): 77, 381-83, 488, 501, 513 Warner-Vieyra, Miriam (fl. 1980s): 428, 431

579 Washington, Booker T. (1856-1915): 71 Whily-Tell, A. E. (fl. 1953): 393 Whitman, Walt (1819-92): 88 Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900): 192 Williams, Eric (1911-81): 81, 83 Williams, Raymond (1921-88): 53, 64 Wilson, Carlos Guillermo [pseud. Cubena] (1941- ): 76-79, 81 Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941): 70

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny (1933- ): 49

Zambrana, Antonio (1846-1922): 146 Zapata Olivella, Delia (fl. 1970s): 72 Zapata Olivella, Juan (1927- ): 71-72 Zapata Olivella, Manuel (1920- ): 67, 69-73, 79 Zavala, Iris (1936- ): 189 Zenea, Juan demente (1832-71): 162 Zeno Gandía, Manuel (1855-1930): 149-50, 186 Zequeira, José Varela (fl. 1872): 162 Zequeira y Arango, Manuel de (1764-1846): 13, 131-32 Zobel, Joseph (1915- ): 78, 314, 384-85, 419-24, 452-53 Zola, Emile (1840-1902): 43, 146, 149 Zorrilla, Enrique (fl. late 1800s): 167 Zorrilla de San Martin, Juan (1855-1931): 162