Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity (Envisioning Cuba)

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

Envisioning Cuba Louis A. Pérez Jr., editor

Edna M. RodríguezMangual

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rodríguez-Mangual, Edna M. Lydia Cabrera and the construction of an Afro-Cuban cultural identity /

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Edna M. Rodríguez-Mangual. p. cm.—(Envisioning Cuba) Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Cuban ethnology. 2. Cuba—Civilization— African influences. 3. Blacks—Cultural assimilation—Cuba. 4. Blacks—Cuba— Ethnic identity. 5. Blacks—Cuba— Folklore. I. Title. II. Series.

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Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1

1 The Point of Departure: Fernando Ortiz and Afro-Cuban

Contents

Studies 25

2 A Disarticulation of the Gaze: Exploring Modes of Authority and Representation in the Rhetoric of El monte 59

3 The Death of the King: Between Anthropology and Fiction 99

4 The Anthropologist’s Exile: Nation and Simulacrum 133 Notes 169 Bibliography 175 Index 195

Lydia Cabrera in the 1980s 6 Lydia Cabrera in La Quinta

Illustrations

San José, ca. 1944 9 Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, María Herrera de Ortiz, and María Teresa Rojas in Vienna, 1952 63 Lydia Cabrera with an informant at the Central Cuba, Matanzas, Cuba, 1940s 96 Lydia Cabrera with informants at the Central Cuba, Matanzas, Cuba, 1940s 105

Acknowledgments

When the credits roll at the end of a film, if one has the patience to sit still and read all the names that made the production possible, one can then understand the collective work, effort, and energy that go into such a production. A book is not a film, yet many start with a grateful author listing a series of names that made it possible for her words to make it into print. This work is no different. I am completely indebted to a community of people who have offered me, and this project, their best talents. So the credits roll. The idea for this book emerged a long time ago and far away from Cuba and the Caribbean, during the dark winter days of Glasgow. That year I had the opportunity to read with pleasure—and no deadlines—the short stories of Lydia Cabrera, as well as a lot of postcolonial theory and cultural studies. I was able to chat freely about my ideas with many friends, including Dr. Simon Halliday. I want to thank him for the long hours of conversations on postcolonialism and globalization. After I came back from Scotland, I received much support from my colleagues and professors at Emory University, where this

book incubated as a dissertation. I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee for the good remarks that I was able to incorporate here. I am especially grateful to my adviser, Carlos J. Alonso, for his insights, criticisms, comments, and suggestions. Just when I would think I had everything figured out, everything done, he would open another Pandora’s box that would take me back to my desk. He is still there when I need him. I will always be indebted to him. At the beginning, this project was also deepened as a result of my conversations with Marzena Grzegorczyk, for which I thank her. The Internationalization Dissertation Research Grant at Emory University provided the initial research support that took me to Cuba for the first time, a dream I had always held deeply. I was not aware of what this trip might reveal. The pains and difficulties are still in my memory. However, I would never have understood Cabrera without getting to know the culture about which she wrote, without smelling the sweat, and sweating myself, to the rhythm of the drums during a Toque de tambor. And, as someone once wrote, Cuba is addictive. I have been there many times since then, and every time I find it harder to leave. I want to express my gratitude to all the people in the island who helped my research by feeding me, guiding me, lending me books, and serving as informants. But among all the good people I encountered, I particularly want to thank Doña Henrietta Price at the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, for her advice and connections; Lisia Prieto at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, who led the way into the never-ending bibliography; and, more recently, Marcelo Fajardo, for taking me everywhere, even into a camello bus ride. I also thank Natalia Bolívar for taking time out of her busy schedule to see me. Thanks to Santero Eugenio Colás Ramos for all the information and to José Millet for standing next to me when I didn’t understand what was going on. My dear colleague and friend Justin Crumbaugh is responsible for the translation of the Spanish draft of my dissertation into the English version that I then reviewed and turned into this manuscript. His prose became part of my prose. I simply cannot express how much I owe him. x

Acknowledgments

Friends and colleagues who read different versions of the manuscript at different stages provided me many key insights; they have helped me develop a better work. I especially thank Darren Middleton, Bonnie Frederick, Betsy Flowers, Lee Daniels, and S. Brent Plate. Néstor and Sylvia Figueroa have always been there for me, as have other now long-distance friends. Special friends who inspired me to keep going and shared so many cups of coffee when I needed it include Luis Vivanco and Peggy O’Neill, Caroline Beer and Mike Ballard, Chas Gay, Julie Sexeny, Alberto Egea, Victoria Pericot, Anna Martín, and Héctor Sáez. This book was four years in the making, and life does not stop; many things have happened. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Vermont and, more recently, to those at Texas Christian University for their generosity and encouragement. Texas Christian University also supported this project by making me the recipient of the Research and Creative Activities Grant, which allowed for another important trip to Havana. Thank you to Elaine Maisner, my editor, for her hard work and support for this project, as well as to Louis A. Pérez. Production staff members at the University of North Carolina Press have been enormously helpful. My appreciation also goes to my friend Tracy Brandenburg for helping me acquire the images for the book, and to María Estorino at the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami. The section “Hybridity as a Textual Space” in Chapter 4 is a muchrevised version of the short essay that appeared as “Sueño y deseo de una nación en Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba, de Lydia Cabrera,” La Habana Elegante, Fall 1999. I am the kind of person who leaves her favorite bite of food for the end in order to keep the best taste and sensation lasting longer. This book is dedicated to my parents, Miriam Mangual Matos and Eugenio Rodríguez Suárez, two extraordinary human beings who have taught me important lessons hard to find in books. I am very fortunate to have them in my life. My family—all of them, including my uncle Damián and Naomi—is an important and constant presence; family members all took care of me at many levels when I thought I Acknowledgments

xi

was not going to make it. My siblings, Carlos and Wanda, have been a source of inspiration and motivation; I look forward to growing older with them. Finally, I want to let my life-companion, S. Brent Plate, know in print that he means the world to me. His daily hug is what keeps me grounded. Brent, thank you for holding my hand when I got scared and for being the editor of my life.

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Acknowledgments

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

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There are no facts, only interpretations. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Introduction

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Lisandra Otero quite rightly states, “Cuba is a small country destined to play a role out of proportion for its size” (Fornet 18). The Cuban Revolution of 1959 not only radically affected the culture and politics of the island but also affected international politics. The Revolution converted the small island into a real foe of the ideological apparatus of North American capitalism, altering U.S. policy for many years, while Cuba became a paradigm for leftist political groups in Latin America. It also became a utopian model for the leftist intelligentsia in academia throughout Europe and the Americas. Today, Cuba is still situated in an international arena, especially now that the borders are once again open to tourism and global capital investments. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of socialism is still alive, and few Cubans, even if they want to see the end of Castro’s reign, wish to embrace free market capitalism. And while the popular consciousness of North America and Europe still imagines Cuba as a land of cigars, nightclubs, and 1950s Fords, other more critical and imaginative studies have strategically defined Cuba and contributed to the multiple perspectives that create a plural national identity. In this book I explore the possibilities and contradictions of some of these multiple ways of imagining Cuba. This book is about the diverse writings of the Cuban intellectual Lydia Cabrera (1900–1991), whose body of work spans the decades before and after the Revolution. In a unique way, Cabrera struggled to redefine the identity of the otherwise marginalized Afro-Cubans and to reinsert their story into the broader understanding of Cuban identity. In so doing, she also rewrote the narration of the nation. My investigation begins with basic questions about how discourses of power intertwine with discourses of individual and national identity. Such questions take on a striking resonance in the context of contemporary Cuba, where a mixture of ethnic identities meets a mixture of political identities. In relation to modern and contemporary Cuba we might ask: How can Cuban national identity be defined after four decades of the Revolution and a massive emigration that has divided the nation? How was that identity defined before the Revolution and by whom? Who wrote, and who is presently writing, the culture? Introduction

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Social scientific approaches to Cuban cultural and national identity since the late nineteenth century have predominantly understood white Creoles to constitute Cuban identity. Within this framework, Afro-Cubans have been studied, but only from the presupposition that they are “other” to the social-symbolic order maintained by white Creoles. Yet, to talk about cubanía—Cuban culture and identity, or “Cubanness”—one must remain open to the ethnic complexities and pluralities that exist on the island. Ethnically speaking, Cuba is made up of Europeans, Africans, indigenous peoples, Asians, and others, who have lived together and mixed together to varying degrees. Cuban culture, as many writers have noted, is a deeply hybridized one. However, the ethnic-cultural complexities of Cuba have not been manifested in the rhetorical writings of many intellectuals presuming to take an objective view of culture in Cuba. Simplistic renderings of white and black are not adequate to Cuban cultural analysis. But then again, how is the story of someone else told without appropriating them into their own framework? How does one do ethnography when the tools of ethnography are created by and for a particular ethnic group?

Framing Cabrera’s Journey These cultural complexities underlie my investigation into the works of Lydia Cabrera. She was a creative writer who sought to retell the history of Cuba and its culture through imaginative means, thereby questioning the empirical truth of anthropology. Yet, she also wrote ethnographies, and her “fiction” is supposedly based on the oral stories she heard from Afro-Cubans. I particularly focus on the blurry line she invokes between fact and fiction, between anthropology and literature. This volume probes the reasons why her books are considered to be the “bible” of Afro-Cuban folklore and religion. In the end, I argue that her writings offer an alternative discourse to the standard, homogenous interpretations of Cuban identity. 4

Introduction

My personal interest in Cabrera’s work began the first time I saw a photograph of her and discovered with surprise that this woman was white. Until then, I had read only a few stories from Cuentos negros de Cuba, and in my ignorance I thought they were written by a black Afro-Cuban author. There was something in her style and subject matter that had me convinced she could not be a detached observer “outside” the Afro-Cuban culture about which she was writing. Instead, I perceived her as an insider. Thus, my interest was piqued when I saw that she was white. Everyone who studies Latin American or Caribbean literature will come upon Cabrera’s name, and yet she is often overlooked by critics. As Ada Ortúzar-Young proposes, most of the studies about Cabrera center on her first three collections of short stories, but there is a need for a thorough analysis of the rest of her work, a need for a revisionist approach that perhaps would take into account issues of race, class, and gender (114).1 I remember studying one of her short stories in a Caribbean literature class while I was still an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, but we did not discuss the fact that she was white; we did not discuss problems of racial representation; we never looked at the biography of this author; we did not talk about her sexuality; we did not do a close reading of the story. The discussion focused only on decoding what the story was saying, as if it were written in a foreign language that one must translate. Now I realize I did not understand anything about what Cabrera was doing with her writing, and probably none of my peers did either. As if echoing Cabrera’s reinvention of Cuban identity, my attempt to say something about her life is bestowing on her an almost invented identity. For such an invention, we might begin with her birth date. According to Cabrera herself, she was born on May 20, 1900, in Havana. Her passport and other official documents, however, state that she was born in 1899. Other sources affirm that New York was the place of birth, not Havana (for example, the Diccionario de Literatura Cubana, published in Cuba, indicates that she was born in New Introduction

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Lydia Cabrera in the 1980s. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

York). In other words, there are several different versions of who Lydia Cabrera was, some real, some imagined, but all the versions are bound up with how identities are created through stories. She had died (in 1991) by the time I started studying her work, so like any such enterprise of knowledge pursued through archives, one must put pieces together and arrive at one’s own conclusions. When people ask me about her I always reply that she was a Cuban writer who was born in 1900. I think Cabrera would have been satisfied with this quick and concentrated response to her identity, although if the interested party wants to hear more about her, I then go into the details of her disputed birth year and place of origin, her interesting journey through life, and her most argued sexuality. Lydia Cabrera was the youngest child of eight siblings. Her mother, Elisa Marcaida Casanova, was the typical señora of the times for a family of social and economic prestige. Her father, Raimundo Cabrera Bosch, was the owner and editor of the Cuban journal Cuba y América and was involved in politics—he fought for Cuba’s independence from Spain. He was a lawyer, jurist, writer, and president and member of La sociedad económica de amigos del país, the first Cuban corporation founded in the eighteenth century. Cuba y sus jueces, published in 1887, was among his best-known books, and he became a very important figure in Cuban society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lydia Cabrera undoubtedly benefited from her father’s status. Cabrera was the anonymous author of the column “Nena en sociedad,” first published in her father’s newspaper in 1913, when Cabrera was only thirteen years old (using the 1900 birth date). The column appeared for three years and was dedicated to announcements of such usual social information as births, marriages, dances, and deaths. Even in these first writings Cabrera shows a taste for satiric comments and political complaints about the current government (Castellanos 19–21). Like any good señorita of that time, Lydia Cabrera’s education was mainly provided by private tutors in her home. She did, however, attend the prestigious private school of María Luisa Dolz, but only for a short period of time. She ultimately completed her secondary Introduction

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school studies on her own, since it was not customary at the time for women to pursue a high school diploma. Interested in painting, Cabrera studied for a few months in the San Alejandro Art Academy without the consent of her father. She exhibited her paintings in 1922 and received good critical reviews. Despite the positive press, however, she did not become a professional painter as everyone expected. Cabrera wanted to have money of her own and saved to go to Paris. To earn money, between 1922 and 1927, the year she left for Europe, she ran an antique store called Casa Alyds and was an avid advocate for the preservation of local antique furniture in Cuba. Quinta San José, where she lived with her lifelong companion, María Teresa Rojas, from the beginning of the 1940s until 1960, is a good example of her passion for antiques: both women worked to restore this eighteenth-century mansion to its original colonial appearance, filling it with national treasures of antique furniture, art, and crafts of historical value. This house-museum was dismantled by the Cuban government when Cabrera left the country after the Revolution of 1959. In 1927, Cabrera went to Paris, lived in Montmartre, studied oriental art at L’Ecole du Louvre, and attended courses at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts. There, she reestablished her friendship with the Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra, whom she had met in Havana a few years earlier. To entertain de la Parra while she was ill with tuberculosis in Leysin, Switzerland, Cabrera began writing the stories that would become Cuentos negros de Cuba. De la Parra died on April 4, 1936, a month after the first publication of Cuentos negros. As the story goes, Francis de Miomandre read and enjoyed the stories written by Cabrera, translated them, and gave them to Paul Morand from Gallimard Press, who published the book in French (Contes negres de Cuba) in March 1936. The Spanish version was not published until 1940. Cabrera had been interested in Afro-Cuban culture since she was young. As an upper-class child her first contact with the Afro-Cuban world was very personal: her black nanny, Tata Tula, and the seamstress Teresa (Omí Tomí) sparked her interest. Through newspaper archives we know that in 1923 Cabrera attended the inauguration of 8

Introduction

Lydia Cabrera in La Quinta San José, ca. 1944. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

the Sociedad del Folk-Lore Cubano, directed by Fernando Ortiz, Cabrera’s brother-in-law.2 Also, in a critical newspaper essay in which he praises Cabrera for her first published book, Alejo Carpentier recounts seeing her in a Ñáñigo celebration that took place in Marianao in 1927 (“Cuentos negros” 40). In 1937, having just returned to Cuba from Europe, Cabrera reconnected with the Afro-Cuban informants she had met during previous visits to the island, especially in 1930. She lived in La Quinta San José, Marianao, which was very convenient because the barrio Pogolotti, where she conducted most of her research, was nearby. Critics gave Cabrera a warm reception when she returned to Cuba owing to the recent publication of her book of short stories in France, which also explains the publication of the Spanish version a short time later. According to Isabel Castellanos in the introduction to Páginas sueltas, three fundamental factors stirred Cabrera’s interest in studying Afro-Cubans, all of which were bound up with her years in Paris. First, her studies of oriental art in Paris made her reflect on how much Cuban national identity was influenced by African culture. Second, her stay in Europe occurred when African influences became prominent in the art scene. This probably made her realize that she did not have to go far to find such exoticism, that all this time it had been right there at home in Cuba. And, third, her friendship with Teresa de la Parra, who also was interested in the popular culture of her own country and in the written medium of literature, provided Cabrera with not only an interlocutor but also someone with whom to share her interest in a time when studying blacks in Cuba was not a common thing to do—especially for a white woman such as Cabrera who also came from a wealthy family. In a lecture given by Cabrera and published in Páginas sueltas, she explains how the discovery of African art and culture opened new horizons for European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century, seen especially in the work and publications of Leo Frobenius on the Dahomey (present-day Benin), the Ivory Coast, and other parts of Africa. Such painters as Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Modigliani, to mention just a few, were influenced by this discovery. Also in liter10

Introduction

ature, Apollinaire and the surrealist André Breton were touched by the African cultures that were invading Europe at the time (543). Cabrera lived in the middle of this new art tendency, and as Cabrera herself once mentioned, it was ironically on the Seine where she discovered Cuba. Other direct influences on Cabrera’s writings were the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, with whom Cabrera had a prolonged friendship, and the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire; in 1943 Cabrera worked with Lam on a Spanish edition of Césaire’s poems. They were all touched in some way by the Paris environment of the 1920s and 1930s and the developing avant-garde movements. Like the infinite threads of a web, one could go on listing all the famous artists who could have influenced Cabrera in one way or another—for example, Nicolás Guillén, who brought the negritude movement to the island; Alejo Carpentier, who was also working with Afro-Cuban influence in his famous book Ecue-Yamba-Ó (1933); or any of the Mexican muralists who were also exploring national popular culture and identity in their artistic expressions during those years in Paris. But there is nothing concrete on which to base these observations. It is interesting that Castellanos does not mention Fernando Ortiz as a fundamental or determining factor for Cabrera’s interest in the Afro-Cubans, and I certainly agree with this. In an interview Cabrera herself underlines that she did not like to read books of anthropology in which the reader is always confined to the dominant voice of the anthropologist writer, for example, in the books written by Fernando Ortiz (Anhalt 37). Even so, Ortiz was part of Cabrera’s family—he was married to Esther, Cabrera’s sister—and he had been publishing work about blacks in Cuba since 1906. Indeed, Cabrera is often thought of as a disciple of Ortiz, and many scholars assume she is simply continuing the project and themes that Ortiz started: specifically, Afro-Cuban studies and the concept of “transculturation.” Even Rosario Hiriart, an important scholar of Cabrera, affirms that Cabrera followed the work of Ortiz (“En torno al mundo negro” 439). In this book I debunk this lineage and propose that Cabrera’s Introduction

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work displays an alternative to Ortiz’s hegemonic national project. Throughout the book I try not only to display the significant discontinuities between Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s writings but further to show how Cabrera actually influenced Ortiz and caused a marked shift in his work. Ortiz has become known to many scholars of cultural studies in the English-speaking world because of his coinage of the term “transculturation,” yet it is in Cabrera’s writings, I argue, that we find a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of this concept. Cabrera’s notion of transculturation becomes a key theoretical anchor for my study. Between 1937 and 1948, when her second book of short stories, Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba, came out, Cabrera was working incessantly, taking notes, attending religious rituals, interviewing her confidants, and sometimes even sharing meals with them. Cabrera never had formal professional anthropological training; however, she quickly learned how to be a participant among her Afro-Cuban informers rather than the “white” person who just wanted information. Much of the research at this time culminated in the 1954 publication of her best-known work, El monte, published by a press established by Cabrera and her partner, María Teresa Rojas: Ediciones C.R. It is hard to give a definite translation of the title of this enormous ethnographic contribution to an understanding of Afro-Cuban religions and culture. Monte can be translated as “mountain,” but also as “wilderness,” “jungle,” or “woods”; in the context of the Afro-Cuban religion it is a sacred or magical place where the divine is found. After publishing El monte, Cabrera continued to research and write on Afro-Cubans, publishing Refranes de negros viejos (1955), Anagó, vocabulario Lucumí (1957), and a collection of which she was particularly proud, La Sociedad Secreta Abakuá (1958). Being a secret and highly hermetic society, the Abakuás were reluctant to talk about their religion and, most important, did not accept women as members, so it was a particularly key accomplishment for Cabrera to be the first person to recollect and publish material about the origins of the group, to talk about the myth of Sikanekue (the original myth of how the society 12

Introduction

was formed) and the hierarchy and functions of the members. She also compiled an extant vocabulary of Congo, which was published later in Miami as Vocabulario Congo: El Bantú que se habla en Cuba (1984). Also of significance was the fact that Cabrera was able to photograph the Ekue, which is the Abakuás’s sacred drum, supposed to remain hidden always. While I was in Santiago doing research on Cabrera, someone suggested during an interview that the real reason why Cabrera left Cuba was not because of the Revolution but because some Abakuás were looking for her to kill her because she made public their sacred secrets. I am fascinated by these sorts of stories and interpretations, for one cannot find them in any book and nobody dares to talk about them. However, to believe such a thing would prove what Cabrera was trying to dismantle in her book about the Ñáñigos and the Abakuás: that they were a dangerous and violent clan. La Sociedad Secreta Abakuá was the last book Cabrera published in Cuba. She left the country in 1960, shortly after the Revolution, and never returned. Cabrera was clearly against the Revolution of 1959, the Castro movement, and socialist-Marxist ideology. Accompanied by María Teresa Rojas, Cabrera left Cuba to live in Miami. She was silent for the first ten years of exile, in part because she lacked access to the resources to publish but also because of the pain of her new reality as an exile. I mentioned earlier the friendship between Wilfredo Lam and Cabrera, and her exile is one of the reasons why these two friends lost contact. They met when Lam left France owing to the Second World War and arrived in Cuba in the early forties. Cabrera and María Teresa Rojas helped Lam and his companion, Helena Holzer, to establish themselves in Havana after his long absence (Lam had left Cuba in 1923). Lam, accustomed to being treated as an equal by other intellectuals and artists in Paris, returned to a hostile environment in Cuba that isolated him. Because he was a poor black man living with a white woman outside of legal marriage, Lam was not accepted on the island. Cabrera and Lam had the common experience of “exile” in Paris that was ended by the outbreak of war. They reIntroduction

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turned to a Cuban society that was full of prejudices. And although Cabrera did not experience the racial conflicts, she must have felt excluded given her sexual orientation and the nature of her research. Although exotic in Paris, this type of activity was unacceptable in Havana for a woman of her class. But whatever the reasons, these two intellectuals developed a tight friendship that was suspended because of exile and the ideological and political differences that developed between them. Lam defended the Revolution, with its promise of a better life for people like him who had always been situated at the outskirts of society. Cabrera, on the other side of the spectrum, did not. Once Cabrera left Cuba, they never talked again; nonetheless, Cabrera kept Lam’s work displayed in her house in a foreign country. In 1982, before dying, Lam decided to say good-bye to his old friend, sending Cabrera a drawing dedicated to her; it reads: “Para mi amiga Lydia Cabrera, París 9-1982, Wilfredo Lam” (Cabrera, “Páginas sueltas” 49). In Miami, Cabrera reedited El Monte, publishing it in 1968, but not until 1970 did she publish her first book written while in exile, Otán Iyebiyé: Las piedras preciosas. In 1971, her third collection of short stories came out, Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea, composed of nineteen stories in which the main character is the mischievous mythical turtle Jicotea. In 1972, Cabrera spent time in Madrid, writing three books during her stay. The first one was La laguna sagrada de San Joaquín (1973), a long and nostalgic ethnographic essay about her last research trip to Matanzas; the second was titled Yemayá y Ochún (1974), dedicated to these two famous goddesses of the Yoruba pantheon; and the third was Anaforuana: Ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la Sociedad Secreta Abakuá (1975), which, according to Robert Thompson, is a landmark study in the history of black Atlantic writing systems—Cabrera documents approximately 512 signs (299). Significantly, in each of the books written in exile, she relied on the ethnographic notes she had collected before leaving Cuba. In 1974, Cabrera returned to Miami, spending the next decade publishing books and articles, collaborating on various projects, and participating in conferences. Among the books published in this de14

Introduction

cade are Francisco y Francisca: Chascarrillos de negros viejos (1976), Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba (1977), La regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje (1977), Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte, Mayombe (1979), and Koeko Iyawó. Aprende novicia: Pequeño tratado de regla Lucumí (1980). In 1976, Reinaldo Sánchez and José A. Madrigal organized a conference sponsored by Florida International University that paid homage to Cabrera. The proceedings were published as Homenaje a Lydia Cabrera, which some consider the best collection of critical studies about Cabrera’s work. Soon after, she received honoris causa doctorates from the University of Miami, Denison University, and Manhattan College. Whereas the 1970s represented the high point in Cabrera’s professional life, the 1980s were hard years for Cabrera. She started losing her sight little by little, and in 1985, María Teresa Rojas, who had been her companion for almost fifty years, died. Cabrera herself became very sick but survived for another five years. And with the help of others, she managed to keep publishing: Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales (1983), La medicina popular de Cuba (1984), the already mentioned Vocabulario Congo (1984), Supersticiones y buenos consejos (1987), La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos (1988), and Los animales en el folklore y la magia de Cuba (1988). Although Lydia Cabrera died on September 19, 1991, her work is still being published. Isabel Castellanos published the collection Páginas sueltas as a homage in 1994; as the title suggests, it contains both previously published and unedited writings by Cabrera. It is an interesting collection that includes her early and later work, and it offers scholars relevant biographical information from someone who knew her personally.

Trajectory of Afro-Cubans in Anthropology and in Cuban History Books such as Componentes africanos en el etnos cubano, written by Rafael López Valdés (1985) and published in the island, give an insider’s perspective; the author contends that Cuban history is divided into three periods: the Spanish colonial period, the “neocolonial” period, and the “true history” written after the Revolution. In these accounts, Introduction

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a clear animosity exists toward the neocolonial period, since it was the time when Cuba was economically dependent on the United States, its main enemy after the Revolution. Among other things, such books claim the neocolonial system intensified the ostracism of blacks (López 232) and that United States influence caused the proliferation of “whites only” signs in public establishments. These claims do not take into account that prior to this period, blacks were slaves and, as such, were not allowed to participate in social events or to frequent white establishments. When blacks began to have more social mobility after their emancipation, the hegemonic white class was obliged to redefine limits and demarcate public space in order to maintain its position of privilege. However, official rhetoric and dozens of historical and sociological publications explain racism in Cuba through a scientific Marxist framework. In their view, the foreign and exploitative presence of the United States is to blame for postslavery racism, which “intensifies” and then “ends” along with the neocolonial period. These studies tend to neglect the difference in the status of blacks between the colonial and neocolonial periods. Afro-Cubans have been the object par excellence of anthropological studies in Cuba. Slaves were first brought to the island in the sixteenth century, primarily from West Africa—from the Gulf of Guinea down to the south of Angola—and from the start they were considered to be the cultural Other. The influence of African cultures on Cuba’s economy, music, literature, and, above all, religion, and the syncretism born of its mix with Catholicism, have all been carefully studied. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the research agenda of AfroCuban studies began. The term afrocubano was coined in 1847 by Antonio Veitía, but it was Fernando Ortiz’s book Los negros brujos (1906) that made its use common. The nineteenth century saw the production of important literary works that paid close attention to the alternative cultural space of slaves; according to José Juan Arrom, the influence of black writers dates back to the seventeenth century, but it was not until two centuries later that a substantial body of work by and about them emerged. Among the more important of these texts 16

Introduction

are Autobiografía de un esclavo, by Juan Francisco Manzano (1839); Sab, by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1841); El negro Francisco, by Antonio Zambrana (1875); Cecilia Valdés, by Cirilo Villaverde (1882); and Romualdo, uno de tantos, by Francisco Calcagno (1891). In 1868, Calcagno also published the first anthology of Afro-Cuban poetry, Poetas de color, which included works by black and mulatto poets. But the field of Afro-Cuban studies, as does the study of Afro-Cubans, really begins with Fernando Ortiz in the early twentieth century. Ortiz began his cultural profiles of blacks in Cuba with his research on criminal ethnography. In 1924, he helped found the Association of Cuban Folklore and began to publish Archivos del Folklore Cubano, a journal dedicated to what were then considered Afro-Cuban “subcultures.” Still, the “boom” of Afro-Cuban studies did not begin until several decades later, during the sixties and seventies. It is alleged that during the “neocolonial” period (the term commonly used to designate the years of the Republic of Cuba, 1902–59) there was an attempt to “de-Africanize” Cuban culture. According to current historians inside the island, it was the Cuban Revolution that opened up a space for the search for African ethnic roots in Cuba. The rhetoric of the Revolution incorporates black history and its contribution as an important stratum of Cuban identity. Clearly, the contemporary rhetorical identification with blacks is part of a strategy to define a distinctively postcolonial identity for postrevolutionary Cuba. López Valdés cites the constitution of the republic and the words of Fidel Castro in order to authorize such rhetoric: “We are the heirs and proponents of the creations, traditions of combativeness, firmness, heroism, and sacrifice forged by our ancestors. . . . Among them are the slaves who constantly rebelled against their bosses and thus contributed decisively to the struggles of the Cuban people against Spanish colonization” (5).3 Remarks such as these rhetorically incorporate blacks into the revolutionary process and thereby lend credence to claims that the Revolution put an end to racism in Cuba. Thus, as Fernando Ortiz’s work would later prove, this kind of rhetoric, in keeping with that of the revolutionary project, would beIntroduction

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come a paradigm of the process of racial integration. Nonetheless, the first stage of Ortiz’s work is full of prejudices that seem to contradict the author’s supposedly “scientific” project (see especially the early works: Los negros brujos [1906], Los negros esclavos [1916], and Los negros curros, a collection of works that he began writing in 1909 but was never published as a book until after his death). In these studies Ortiz analyzed Afro-Cubans from a positivistic methodology, providing explanations as to why blacks are more prone to commit crimes than whites when placed in similar situations. He concludes that the presence of blacks in the island’s society is the reason for crime in Cuba. Ortiz himself seems to have recognized his own bias, and in the 1940s, in his famous speech “Por la integración cubana de blancos y negros,” he apologized for his former criteria as a positivist criminologist, asserting a new integrationalist stance on Cuban identity that would transcend racial differences. This is the same stance the Revolution took regarding the issue of racism in Cuba. In the 1950s, Ortiz published La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba and Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba, both of which underscore the black’s contribution to Cuban culture. Even so, Afro-Cubans, under Ortiz’s pen, are still relegated to a lower status within the Cuban culture as a whole and remain figured as Other. I will offer further details of this in Chapter 1. After Ortiz’s death in 1969, the Editorial de Ciencias Sociales of the University of Havana took up the task of republishing his texts in an attempt to promote him as the father of Afro-Cuban studies within Cuba. This republication project demonstrates once again the Revolution’s effort to accommodate blacks within the new antiracist Cuban society. In the 1990s, the works of Rómulo Lachatañeré (another pioneer of Afro-Cuban studies) were also republished, and in 1993 a new edition of El monte, an officially prohibited book in Cuba since the triumph of the Revolution, was published. However, Cabrera’s books written in exile are still not circulated on the island. Today, the dominant ideology in Cuba stresses the erasure of the dividing line between races and the need to speak simply of “Cubans” 18

Introduction

and not of race, just as Ortiz did in his aforementioned speech. On the one hand, the issue of race was suppressed after 1959 because it causes internal divisions and supposedly diverts attention toward a “minor” problem when there are more important national problems to attend to. In his book Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, Carlos Moore cites Carlos Franqui, a confidant of Castro and one of his biographers until his exile in 1969: “There was no discussion within the July 26 Movement on the issue of the situation of Blacks in Cuba. There was a purely formal condemnation of racial discrimination, but no more. In practical terms, Fidel was quite opposed to a clear definition of a position on such problems. He always said that one should not limit the scope of the struggle” (7). On the other hand, official denial of the very existence of racism has made it impossible for the Afro-Cuban subject to stake out a space of resistance. Such a space might allow blacks and mulattoes to fight for equality within the framework of the Revolution. One might argue that the official suppression of the issue of racism has contributed to its perpetuation. As a result of the rhetorical denial of racial difference and the simultaneous practice of racism, Cuban culture has often been stifled in its development. In a North American context, bell hooks proposes that one must recognize and accept difference: “a construction of political solidarity that is rooted in a narrative of shared victimization not only acts to recenter whites, it risks obscuring the particular ways racist domination impacts on the lives of marginalized groups” (Black Looks 13). In Cuban revolutionary rhetoric, the shared narrative of political victimization has displaced the struggle for equality of exploited groups, particularly blacks.

Constituting Identity Clearly, Cabrera’s work stands as a fundamental reference for the study of Afro-Cuban culture. Many critics have stressed Cabrera’s contribution as a “translator” of Cuban folklore and have recognized her numerous analyses of religions and other African cultural influIntroduction

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ences and their connection to the supposed “original culture.” Yet, she is more than a translator of Afro-Cuban culture. Isabel Castellanos maintains that Cabrera’s stories have often been misinterpreted by critics, who have systematically read them as mere “tales of folklore” rather than praise Cabrera’s creative imagination: “The objective of Lydia Cabrera’s ethnographic work, we insist, is the faithful and detailed study of Afro-Cuban religious transculturation. Her stories, on the other hand, are pure literary fiction, although they are sometimes based to some extent on genuine patakí myths” (Cabrera, Páginas sueltas 61). The division Castellanos emphasizes plays into an ideology that presupposes the transparency with which the anthropologist—a textual configuration of authorship/authority—represents culture, versus the autoreferentiality or artifice of the literary text. In this book, I shall first draw on recent theoretical reflections on the study of culture in order to call into question the division between ethnographic research and literary works. However, I am conscious that in analyzing how Cabrera blurs the separation between categories, I have kept them myself and in the process have created a dialectic of sorts. In my view, Cabrera’s work constitutes an escape valve for Cuba’s official national discourse precisely because it lays out an alternative view of the Cuban nation that in turn destabilizes traditional anthropological discourse itself. In this way, Cabrera’s writings cannot be viewed as a prolongation of Ortiz’s work or as part of the larger body of studies produced within the mainstream of Cuban cultural studies, all of which define blacks and mulattoes as the Other. Her work instantiates a rhetorical dynamic that moves in the opposite direction from that of Ortiz. In other words, Cabrera prefers to move from the periphery to the center. The tropological and polyphonic nature of her writings destabilizes the black/white dichotomy that forms the basis of traditional studies of Cuban culture. In her texts, Cabrera creates the fiction that the subjects which define the essence of Cuban culture are Afro-Cubans and mulattoes or mestizos, not white Creoles. In this sense, the black cosmogony re-created in her work becomes a place of enunciation of an alternative national identity that exposes the limits of official discourse. 20

Introduction

In the first chapter I analyze the work of Ortiz, which constitutes the canon or paradigm of research on Cuban culture from which Cabrera distances herself. Fernando Ortiz works as a point of departure for my thesis. He was a pioneer in studying the complexities of Cuban identity—the extensive bibliography of his work demonstrates his contribution. Nonetheless, his work on the sociocultural signification of this entangled phenomenon is clearly located within the same exclusive elite of white Creoles who have defined and determined the canon of Cubanness.4 At the beginning of this chapter I study Ortiz’s first writings by focusing on Los negros brujos. Then, I examine the process of metamorphosis that occurs in his work from the 1940s onward and the supposed disparity between the two periods, using Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba (1951) as an example of Ortiz’s second phase. In his traditional ethnological approach, Ortiz seeks to articulate the order of culture by means of a monological discourse. He conceives anthropology as a cultural territorialization in which the ethnic and the national are confused without ever fully fusing together, despite his own definition of culture as a “melting pot.” Ortiz understands blacks as Cuba’s cultural Others who must be recovered in order to reach a fair definition of Cubanness. Yet blacks constitute a component of Cuba by occupying a space that Ortiz paradoxically places on another continent (Africa) in his national imaginary. I conclude that Ortiz’s reformulation of the Cuban national agenda in his second period, which critics have understood as a landmark transformation in the treatment of blacks in Ortiz’s work, does not constitute a significant change in his rhetoric. Ortiz’s work, ultimately, remains within the dominant discourse of conventional anthropology. Chapter 2 is a detailed study of the anthropological work of Cabrera. It takes as a fulcrum the way in which Cabrera’s creative anthropology differs from mainstream anthropology. Cabrera destabilizes the gaze of the ethnographer by generating a fictitious space in which Afro-Cubans act as speaking subjects. I explore Cabrera’s rejection of established models, a deviation that allows her to undertake a strategic experimentation that goes beyond normative discurIntroduction

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sive boundaries. The chapter focuses mainly on El monte and the tropological maneuvers Cabrera uses to dismantle the discourse of anthropology. Among other things, she questions the authenticity of ethnographic representation, testimony, sight, and medicine. I ultimately propose that in El monte, Cabrera practices a form of “postmodern anthropology,” at least from the perspective of contemporary theoretical guidelines. The third chapter is an analysis of Cabrera’s literary production written in Cuba, particularly through Cuentos negros de Cuba (1940) and Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba (1948). I study the way in which Cabrera’s literary discourse takes anthropology as a referent, a rhetorical maneuver that in turn undermines the empirical pretensions of modern Western science. I also examine the constructions of ethnic groups, race, and gender in Cabrera’s work. Her rewriting of these categories deviates from a long tradition of defining the “center” in terms of a cultural elite in power, in order to forge an alternative national identity. By presenting the Afro-Cuban as a speaking subject and whites as the Other, Cabrera’s rhetoric establishes a positive ontology of the Afro-Cuban cosmos. Finally, in Chapter 4 I address the issue of Cuban identity in exile: the way in which it is redefined owing to geographic displacement. From this perspective, I analyze Cabrera’s texts written outside Cuba, noting the tension between the works she wrote before and after leaving her homeland. Otán Iyebiyé (1970) serves as an example of her anthropological work, while the books of stories Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea (1971) and Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales (1983) are paradigmatic of her literary production. My aim is to understand in full the process by which Cabrera reclaims cultural identity in the form of a simulacrum of Cuba. Her simulated nation oscillates between a modern understanding of nationhood and one we might call “postmodern,” for lack of a better term. The chapter ends with an analysis of Itinerarios del insomnio (1977), a text that articulates a “third space” of discursivity that unites diverse narrative possibilities and, consequently, resists all categorization. In the pages that follow, I hope to address, and at the same time to 22

Introduction

problematize, why some consider Cabrera’s writings to be an “original” Afro-Cuban contribution and her prose to be “faithful” to the original voices of her confidants. I want to reiterate that the alternative project that I see in Cabrera’s work does not make any claims of authenticity or authentic authorship. On the contrary, I am inclined to the “fabulation” aspect of all her work, to the reappropriation that goes along with the impossible task of being the “transcriber” of an important cultural legacy.

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An important feature of colonial discourse is its

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dependence on the concept of “fixity” in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/ historical/racial difference in

The Point of Departure

the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Homi K. Bhabha,

Fernando Ortiz and Afro-Cuban Studies

The Location of Culture The distancing of ethnographic subject from native object was essential to an older model of ethnography, for how else could we be the impersonal authoritative voice empowered to represent the Other? If we were too much like them, if both we and they had active voices, then the distinction between the ethnographer as theorizing being and the informant as passive data would dissolve. Edward M. Bruner, Anthropology and Literature

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The Opposing Gaze Between 27th and L streets, on the border between Centro Habana and Vedado, stands the Fernando Ortiz Foundation. It is a large yellow house, stately in appearance, with a balcony supported by Doric pillars; it was Ortiz’s residence until his death in 1969. In 1994, the house was opened to the public as a cultural institution dedicated to the study and dissemination of Fernando Ortiz’s life and work. The foundation is currently directed by the well-known Cuban author Miguel Barnet. Throughout Ortiz’s many publications on diverse topics and in various disciplines and approaches, one can trace a common thread: the search for national identity, a working definition of that which is “Cuban.” Interestingly, the only presence that reminds the visitor of the Afro-Cuban legacy to which Ortiz dedicated most of his writings is the secretary, a beautiful and unique woman, Doña Henrietta. This fact of the present becomes an allegory of Ortiz’s own work in the past, such that, while he brought Afro-Cuban studies to light, I argue, he nonetheless relegated AfroCubans to a supporting role in the history of the island. In this chapter I will review Ortiz’s work, setting the stage for discussion of Lydia Cabrera’s approach to the concept of transculturation and Afro-Cuban studies. I begin by providing a close reading of Ortiz’s first work on Afro-Cubans, Los negros brujos (1906), after which I will consider Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba (1951), which is a much later work, written after Ortiz apologized for the racist position he took in his early years. Ortiz’s bibliography is very extensive and prolific, and I discuss these two texts as paradigmatic works of very different periods in Ortiz’s career, proving that despite changes in his views about Afro-Cubans, his prose remained mired in the ethnocentrism that characterized anthropological discourses of his time.

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Ortiz and Transculturation After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Ortiz publicly professed that he would never leave his homeland. This decision afforded him a privileged place in contemporary Cuban letters and in Afro-Cuban studies, which he had pioneered. In Cuba, he is known as the “third discoverer” of Cuba, dubbed such by Juan Marinello, for his groundbreaking writings exploring issues of national politics and culture. Of particular importance is Ortiz’s use of the term “transculturation,” a concept considered revolutionary at the time (1940) and one that marked a new direction in the study of culture through an epistemologically oriented approach: With the reader’s permission, especially if he happens to be interested in ethnographic and sociological questions, I am going to take the liberty of employing for the first time the term transculturation, fully aware of the fact that it is a neologism. And I venture to suggest that it might be adopted in sociological terminology, to a great extent at least, as a substitute for the term acculturation, whose use is now spreading. . . . The real history of Cuba is the history of its intermeshed transculturations. (Cuban Counterpoint 129)1 Transculturation is a process of cultural exchange in which members of two different societies assimilate cultural patterns from each other, instead of one group imposing its cultural patterns on another, which would be “acculturation.” This approach has become one of Ortiz’s greatest contributions to the later field of cultural studies, and versions of it are found throughout his writings. But it is crucial to work through some of the ways this term has not always been as benign as it seems. As with any process of “translation,” transculturation always changes the “thing” itself, and Ortiz’s concepts cannot be divorced from his work in Afro-Cuban studies. Ortiz first turned his attention toward the Afro-Cuban population as a result of his interest in scientific ethnography (a field derived 28

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from a positivist brand of criminal anthropology), which he learned from one of his teachers, César Lombroso. The Lombroso school of thought was characterized by a social Darwinism that considered popular culture to be savage, archaic, and disassociated from the scientific and social progress that defined the educated sector of society. In this early period, Ortiz focused on the idea that there are superior and inferior races (white Europeans and blacks, respectively). He maintained that the inferior races have a natural inclination toward crime. Ortiz’s writings relate primitive humans with delinquency. According to him, the “civilized” world does not allow as much possibility for deviant behavior or delinquency, as opposed to the “barbaric” world, where conditions are ideal for the proliferation of crime. He also insisted on the psychic inferiority of both savages and primitive humans. A few decades later, Ortiz publicly expressed regret for these early, overly racist statements and through numerous studies continually tried to incorporate Afro-Cuban cultural components into the mainstream concept of Cuban culture. He instead changed his focus from the category of “race” to that of “cultures” while maintaining the opposite categories that he tried to underscore by creating the term “transculturation” and discarding acculturation. In his essay “Ethnography as Narrative,” Edward M. Bruner argues that the production of ethnographies functions as a constructed discourse through which a story is told. He claims that there is an implicit narrative structure corresponding to a sequence organized in the past, present, and future. Such a structure gives the present a meaning through a mutually constitutive relationship with a past and a future: “The past, the present, and future are not only constructed but connected in a lineal sequence that is defined by systematic if not causal relations. How we depict any one segment of the sequence is related to our conception of the whole, which I choose to think of as a story” (141). He adds that “different narratives are foregrounded in the discourse of different historical eras” (145). Bruner analyzes how the dominant ethnographic story of Native Americans has changed over the years. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Point of Departure

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dominant discourse advocated assimilation into mainstream culture. Today, it is a story constructed on the contemporary motif of resistance. These transformations reflect the change occurring in the social context, which generates the production of new narrative models: “In structural change a new narrative is seen, as in the change from assimilation to resistance, because the old narrative can no longer be stretched to encompass the new events. The key to structural change is a radical shift in the social context” (151). Yet at the same time, Bruner claims that both discourses on U.S. Native Americans are in a sense mutually dependent: the discourse of assimilation generates resistance because of the pressure to change in the same way that the discourse of resistance produces a rapid assimilation insofar as it affords a greater security to the cultural identity in question. One can identify a similar case of initial assimilation and subsequent resistance in Afro-Cuban studies, particularly in twentieth-century studies of Afro-Cuban religions in Cuba.

Los negros brujos: The First Period Ortiz began to study Afro-Cubans in order to explain the cause of crime in Cuba. Until the 1920s, he maintained an ideological stance that cast blacks as primitive and incapable of grasping the subtleties of Western civilization. Ortiz argued that uneducated blacks and their religiones brujas, or “religion of witchcraft,” constituted the primitivism and savagery at the root of all violence and immorality in Cuban society. He thus perpetuated the Western paradigm that positions blacks as the Other, the negative shadow of whites and their culture. The construction of an Other is essential in defining Cuban national identity, since it provides the basis for domination and subjugation. His first book to expound such arguments was Los negros brujos, and the first edition contains a prefatory letter written by César Lombroso. In it, Ortiz studies blacks’ origins in different regions of Africa, their customs, celebrations, music, and, above all, religion. 30

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Los negros brujos is an attempt to catalogue the “barbarism” of the Africans living in Cuba. The goal was to rehabilitate them and thus build a better society, as explained in the prologue: Take the observations contained in this book in the real and objective sensibility that inspired them, rectify them if they are mistaken, complete their deficiencies, for all intellectual contributions to the scientific knowledge of the Afro-Cuban underworld must be part of a collaborative effort to sanitize their specimens, regenerate their parasites, promote the moral progress of our society, and welcome the advent of those ideals, no less noble for their lack of definition, housed in every honorable and objective mind. We must strive toward the correction of our bereaved humanity, so that selfishness can be held in check and rechanneled, and selflessness might thrive, so that the natural evolution can run its natural course free of ethnic prejudices and aberrant, artificial factors. May the forces of nature continue to flow in harmony with feelings of love and universal cooperation, which are still not as typically human as our species would like to believe. For the human species remains deluded by the anthropocentric ideas that have cradled it for so many centuries. (5–6; emphasis added) In Ortiz’s view, religion had a historical evolutionary character that would disappear when scientific knowledge matured. Los negros brujos was written in an attempt to cleanse—“sanitize”—Cuban society. Ortiz was convinced that the way to advance socially, to effect the changes he proposed, was by questioning society through analytic scientific instruments. Ortiz alerts the reader to the displeasure she or he might experience in facing what he calls the “ulcers of our country.” He also warns that his book contains “scenes that are repugnant due to the moral misery of their subject matter” and descends into “the observation of the wretched, savage bottom of our social subsoil” (4). In the prologue, Ortiz argues that observation is the scientific method to follow. When the book was republished in 1917, it contained a second Point of Departure

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warning: “And the author feels it is also important to spread more and more the knowledge of the religious atavism that slows the progress of Cuba’s black population, which is worthy of any and all efforts to achieve its true freedom: mental freedom” (6). In the prologue to the first edition, Ortiz points to the behavior of blacks, whereas in the second he comments on their beliefs: to change blacks’ unacceptable criminal behavior, he argues, their manner of thinking and superstitious religious system must be changed. He comes to the conclusion that the way to improve the “social subsoil” of the Cuban people is by de-Africanizing it.2 The specificity of Cubans’ mala vida, or “dark side,” is explained by the particularly Cuban racial mixture. According to Ortiz, the ethnic factor is crucial in describing this phenomenon, since the mixture brings together thugs of each race who blend to form a common substratum (14). He wants to demonstrate how ethnicity determines behavior more than any other factor, including economic factors. Cuban society is comprised of three races: whites, blacks, and yellow people. He divides the white race into two parts, Cubans and Spaniards: “In general, the energy of the white native, and particularly the intellectual, outside the strict practice of his profession, was hindered by the Spanish authorities” (12). White natives could succumb to bad habits as a result of their surroundings—oftentimes because they did not find sophisticated pastimes. The white Spaniard, in turn, practiced administrative corruption with no punishment. As a result, Spaniards exercised a despotic supremacy (12). In opposition to whites was the black race, which had arrived in a foreign country and faced an alien social condition. Ortiz contrasts each group’s experience of displacement: it impaired blacks, whereas it benefited Spanish whites. The opposition between the native white and the black immigrant constitutes a discursive construction by which the native is held to be natural, central, original, and authentic, in contrast to the new, artificial, foreign, inauthentic blacks. The third component is the “yellow race” from China, which Ortiz all but dismisses, arguing that its members are concentrated in isolated pockets and do not influence the psychology of Cuban soci32

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ety. More recent studies (see Guanche) point to the important role in contemporary Cuban society of this migratory group, which has existed in Cuba since the end of the nineteenth century. Ortiz makes no mention of indigenous peoples in this ethnography, although he later dedicates an entire book to them, titled Las cuatro culturas indias de Cuba (1943). Such a relation between ethnicity, cultural identity, and territory has been of interest to a number of anthropologists. In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson discuss the way in which anthropological discourse approaches the intersection between place and culture. The authors propose that these associations are historical and social creations that should be studied as such, rather than taken as indisputable facts: “Too often . . . anthropological approaches to the relation between ‘the local’ and something that lies beyond it . . . have taken the local as given, without asking how perceptions of locality and community are discursively and historically constructed” (6). They also stress the importance of the place from which subjectivity is generated: “To be a part of a community is to be positioned as a particular kind of subject, similar to others within the community in some crucial respects and different from those who are excluded from it. . . . These identities are not ‘freely’ chosen but overdetermined by structural location and their durability and stability are not to be taken for granted but open to dispute and reformulation” (17–18). When that place is lost, along with it goes the territoriality where identity is defined. Thus, in the case of blacks in Cuba, their displacement is the agent of loss of their identity. Nonetheless, according to Ortiz’s Los negros brujos, a similar displacement does not seem to affect whites. Their identity is not lost in the transatlantic journey, given that they are the ones who bring the dominant culture. What Ortiz does not take into account in his explanation are the imperialist motives that shape the spaces of subjectivity. Instead, he presents his own rhetorical construction of whiteness as something natural. In addition to displacement, another factor affects blacks: their “compressed brutal impulsiveness toward a race of superior civilizaPoint of Departure

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tion,” which is their enemy and master (Ortiz, Negros brujos 12). Ortiz claims impulsiveness is a negative characteristic of the black race, one that contributes to his profile of black inferiority in relation to other races, which are superior owing to their restraint. In practice, the white race did (and continues to) dominate the black race in Cuba, and Ortiz’s discourse explains in a “logical” manner the “nature” of this domination. According to Ortiz, when the economic differences between racial groups are minimized in relation to ethnic differences, the latter take on greater importance in the development of the black underworld. Because of the African psyche, the black race is clearly the one that contributes the most to Cubans’ “dark side”: “The black race is the one that in many ways has been at the forefront of Cuba’s dark side by introducing its superstitions, its organizations, its languages, its dances, etc., and witchcraft and Santeria, so treasured in Cuba’s underworld, are its direct descendants” (16). In Cuba, an entire race feeds the collective “dark side,” which makes for greater delinquency (16). Repetition and reaffirmation are two of the many discursive strategies used in the book to emphasize the idea of the inferiority and superiority of the races in question. At the same time that he founds Cuban uniqueness on the fusion of different races and ethnicities, Ortiz contradicts himself by breaking apart this fusion through separate characterizations of its constitutive groups. In the essay “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” (1940), Ortiz states: “The Cuban melting pot was boiling and cooking on a high flame or on hot ashes. . . . There, at the bottom of the pot, [is] a new concoction ready to serve, made of elements that disintegrated in the boiling of history and have become the sediment of one of its most tenacious essences. It is a rich and delicious mixture that already has a distinct character” (Suárez, Fernando Ortiz y la cubanidad 11). If the ajiaco, or “melting pot,” is his preferred metaphor for the Cuban people, what happens when the ingredients contained within it are separated and the stew is spoiled? The different contributors—black and white and even Chinese—are catalogued by race, and in Ortiz’s dated rhetoric there is nothing that points to a fusion. 34

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In his later work, when he sheds the blatant racism of his first publications, Ortiz advocates a Cuban specificity that is also based on the mixing of cultures. However, he does not take into consideration the other Caribbean islands or other aspects of the multiethnic cultural experience. His concept of ethics, as well as the definitions of what is “bad” or “dark” as opposed to “good,” places Ortiz clearly within the hegemonic discourse of his time, that is, Cuba’s political and economic elite. At a discursive level, he forms part of the postindependent rhetoric of nationhood. Who are the Cubans? How will Cuban society be organized once slavery is abolished and colonialism is eradicated? What will one do with this new sector of the Cuban population who also fought for independence but who until now constituted little more than their own exchange value within the Cuban economy? How can they be defined? In this crucial period of nation construction, Ortiz represents the voice of hegemony, relegating the black population to the nation’s periphery, to the lowest levels of the newly emergent society. Ortiz disapproves of all the aspects of blacks’ social and private lives, preferring to create (or follow) a stereotype that still exists in the minds of contemporary Cubans: When blacks arrived, they all entered into Cuba’s dark side. They did not descend from a superior plane but rather proved incapable, at least at the time, of reaching our level. Their sexual and family relations, their religion, their politics, their moral norms were, in short, so deficient that they could not measure up to even the most dissolute whites. At least the white derelicts had ties to the honorable majority. . . . Blacks were extremely lascivious in their love relations, their marriages reached the point of polygamy, they gladly accepted prostitution, their families lacked cohesion, their religion led them to carry out human sacrifices, to grave robbing, cannibalism, and the most brutal of superstitions. They had little respect for human life and gained little respect from others. (Negros brujos 17) Point of Departure

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In this passage, Ortiz not only portrays blacks within a paradigmatic white value system but also simultaneously constructs the category of “whites” through a comparison with “blacks” that corroborates white supremacy. In Los negros brujos, the reader can witness the creation of a subjectivity through difference, manifested in writing; it is the product and the process of its own making. The naturalization of this fiction-as-fact is problematic and stems from a monographic ethnographic study in which the hegemonic voice of the author/anthropologist presents a social generalization as if it were a cognitive order. Or perhaps the process unfolds in the opposite direction. That is, because a hegemonic voice constructs it as a cognitive fact, the generalization is popularized: “The white race . . . has been less criminal than the black race when placed in the same or analogous social conditions, that is, the position of free blacks” (62). The verb tense used throughout the first part of Los negros brujos’s first chapter is the past preterit. Ortiz has been analyzing the arrival of African blacks in Cuba and their adaptation (or the impossibility of adaptation) to an alien system of civilization. What happens after several centuries of contact between the two ethnic groups? On the one hand, he had already elaborated the idea of racial fusion and how it defines the Cuban experience. On the other, when Ortiz begins to use the present tense, he states: “Currently, when several generations of colored people have lived in civilized circles, one still finds a significant black underbelly, which demonstrates an imbalance in their psychological evolution. Even those who are relatively civilized in intellectual terms still retain traits of their African morality, which drives them to commit crimes” (17). According to Ortiz’s evaluation of the Cuban black experience, when they arrived in Cuba, blacks brought with them all their inherent primitivism, and as they were acculturated to the new society, they gradually started to lose that primitive nature. However, they still need to continue to evolve in order to reach the pinnacle of society—they need to change even more. 36

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Ortiz reasserts throughout the text that the blacks who came from Africa had an inferior culture, given that, up until their arrival in Cuba, they had not been exposed to a civilized society that could smooth over the “rough edges of their African psyche” (19). Ortiz elaborates on the “facts” in a distinctly scientific style; he does not draw on observation, despite his declarations to this effect in the prologue. He writes in the third person. At times, he refers to himself as the “ethnographer”; other times he uses the first person: “I have not been able to acquire scientific evidence regarding the origins of the shipments of ebony” (23). He cites historical sources that provide him with tables and statistics and makes a list of the African regions from which slaves were taken. Immediately following this data, however, he remarks: “Yet the psychology of blacks is so primitive, particularly among the peoples subjected to the slave market, it is so simple, that the differences between blacks cannot be of great importance as far as this study is concerned” (26). Thus, Ortiz undermines his own scientific pretension of cataloguing the origins of black slaves in Cuba. In keeping with his tendency toward positivist thought, Ortiz states that Yoruba superstitions have predominated with respect to other belief systems, arguing that the Yoruba are more civilized than other groups of blacks brought to America. The idea that underlies this theory is that civilized groups are always stronger and their culture ends up imposing itself on less-civilized groups; the superior levels of civilizations impose a homogenous psychology over the rest. The Yoruba, despite belonging to the black race, were a superior ethnicity vis-à-vis others of this race. When Ortiz begins to speak of slavery on Cuban plantations, he not only denounces its atrocities but also places part of the blame for blacks’ undesirable behavior on slavery itself as a social and economic configuration. In regard to ladinos, the Spanish-speaking blacks, he explains that they are “more” civilized and therefore able to win their master’s affection, perform domestic duties, and enjoy some of the benefits field slaves were denied. This higher level of civPoint of Departure

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ilization is the result of the ladino’s mastery of the Spanish language, the colonizer’s primary system of codes. In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss explains that the savage has historically been defined as, among other things, he or she who does not master the same system of signs as the colonizer, particularly written language. He asserts that “of all criteria by which people habitually distinguish civilization from barbarism, this should be the one most worth retaining: that certain people write and others do not” (291). Significantly, although Levi-Strauss privileges writing, he also defines it as a system of power and subjugation: “The primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (292). When disserting on the life of free blacks, one of the main reasons, according to Ortiz, why this group did not have the same possibilities of social mobility as whites was their incapacity to function in the capitalist world. Ortiz compares a white immigrant’s insertion into the Cuban economy with that of a free black. In his analysis, Ortiz presents a real economic condition to explain why blacks were unable to make social progress within the elitist framework of latenineteenth-century Cuban capitalism. However, Ortiz explains this limitation through a positivist-style argument by which racial-ethnic inheritance is what ultimately prevents them from fully participating in capitalist society. In this sense, Ortiz’s explanations of blacks’ disadvantages are reduced to the same binary scheme he himself creates in his writing. In the section where Ortiz addresses the law, the family, and sexuality, along with how these spaces are negotiated in the Afro-Cuban community, he speaks from the perspective of an outsider and once again in relation to the white paradigm. He criticizes blacks for having a sex life outside legal parameters and engaging with concubines. He argues that the blacks who came to Cuba were not familiar with “marital ties based on strong mutual affection, nor did they have high regard for the concept of family” (Negros brujos 42). Ortiz indirectly reconstructs the concept of the patriarchal white European family by fixating on the lack of Western values and struc38

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tures within black communities. This lack results primarily because the black “family” was sustained by ties that were not recognized, much less instituted, by the “legality” of which Ortiz speaks. In Ortiz’s view, blacks’ supposed tendency toward concubinage is a sign of their promiscuity and spontaneous erotic character. Yet this construction of blackness subtly contributes to the creation of its declared opposite: a whiteness characterized by discipline and chastity. Ortiz moves from this negative assessment of blacks’ sexual relations to a commentary on black dances, which, for him, reflect the “erotic” nature of the race. Ortiz’s narrative voice shows itself to be seduced by this eroticism, even as he condemns it and despite the fact that Ortiz’s avowed goal in studying blacks is to transform them. The author contrasts blacks’ sensual dancing to the calm steps of the waltz, a typical dance among educated whites, assuring the reader that even though blacks are natural-born dancers, their spontaneity “prevents them from being able to lead their partner in the turns of a waltz” (43); their art is too primitive. But the reader can also perceive a certain fascination on Ortiz’s part when he describes black dances: “The black dance reveals to us the first steps in the evolution of dancing. It is sensual, hectic; it enacts the chase and conquest of the woman, an ending sometimes represented in full force, when the sweaty bodies, their nerves aroused by violent movements, alcohol, and seminaked contact with the opposite sex, conclude the dance in an unbridled orgy” (44). Despite his disdain toward these dances (“at times, the Afro-Cuban dance is hideously lascivious from the start” [46]), there is an uneasiness in the prose when describing them and a perverse pleasure in the detailed narration of the bodily movements: “The female dancers’ ability to move their hips in a voluptuous and rhythmic way, holding the rest of their body almost completely still, except to take short steps to the beat of the drums and allow a subtle vibration in their arched arms” (44). This is one of the few instances in which Ortiz creates the fiction of a direct gaze rather than using other sources to back his findings. Again, Ortiz observes this element of black culture from an external perspective, in a voyeuristic manner, without participating in the Point of Departure

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dance or the music. He speaks from the distance of a scientific experiment but with the hidden pleasure of he who leers at the Other without being seen. As bell hooks has indicated, the encounter with otherness is perceived as something arousing, dangerous, which results in intense pleasure. In regard to the idea of pleasure, hooks asserts the following, drawing on Foucault: “It is . . . that longing for the pleasure that has led the white West to sustain a romantic fantasy of the ‘primitive’ and the concrete search for a real primitive paradise, whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or dark flesh, perceived as the perfect embodiment of that possibility” (Black Looks 27). Paralleling Picasso and the entire European avantgarde’s use of African exoticism at the time, Ortiz locates in blacks the combination of danger and pleasure. All the excess that he condemns—the voluptuous hips, vibrating arms, seminaked bodies, sexual contact, unbridled orgies—is not only what seduces him but also what enables him to consume the otherness. It is the same otherness to which he can only gain excess through voyeuristic means and through his own text, by writing it. The festivities in which blacks perform such dances are the next issue addressed in the book. Ortiz tells of blacks’ celebrations in Cuba in colonial times and how they were oftentimes religiously motivated, as is the case of the Día de Reyes or the funerary vigils Ortiz so bitterly criticizes: “The celebration consisted of sumptuously satisfying gluttony, as well as the eroticism and rowdiness typical of Africans” (54). He continues to describe the event as if it were a morbid, primitive cult ritual in which African fetishes and witches appear, both of which Ortiz analyzes later in relation to religion (57). The act of writing his book, which records and commemorates such rituals, contradicts Ortiz’s own optimistic assertion that they have disappeared. His book is a gesture of “imperialist nostalgia” as defined by Renato Rosaldo in Culture and Truth: it is the desire for what one has destroyed, a form of mystification (68–69). Ortiz wants to put an end to all such primitivism, but at the same time, he dedicates his life to its thorough retrieval. 40

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Ortiz and Afro-Cuban Religion in Los negros brujos Ortiz’s approach to the issue of religion is divided into a previous Cuban history of slavery and primitivism, versus the present circumstances of the Afro-Cuban’s emancipation and assimilation, as Bruner points out when explaining how the ethnographic production functions as an organized sequence of past, present, and future. Thus far, I have mapped how hegemonic discourse shaped black history through the category of the primitive. In the book’s present the primary discourse is one of assimilation, which in turn points toward a future when these religious expressions, still predominant in Cuba, will disappear. Shortly after Ortiz elaborated his discourse of assimilation, other discourses on Afro-Cuban religions appeared that presented a form of resistance (for instance, the work of Cabrera and Lachatañeré). Ortiz was forced to change his discourse owing to the sociohistorical, national, and international context. Hence, he apologized for his previous racism and began a new narrative trajectory, which, as I will discuss later, continued to slip into certain notions of acculturation. In Los negros brujos, Ortiz cites Epicures, who established that the unknown is the origin of gods (65). In Western society, which Ortiz argues is the model to follow, doctors, physicists, and philosophers explain the supernatural, whereas in “backward” societies priests and wizards carry out this task. The Afro-Cuban priest also acts as a sort of “witch doctor” who, Ortiz explains, is in charge of religion, medicine, and fortune-telling—all of which are tasks undertaken by scientists in modern civilizations. He claims that fetishism is the most primitive form of religion in Cuba, and he advocates its replacement with science (64). All the same, to eradicate it, one must understand it, define it, and become familiar with it. This is why Ortiz takes up the arduous task of presenting the aspects of AfroCuban religions in an attempt to harness the ills suffered by the ignorant people who believe in fetishism. Once again, the reader is Point of Departure

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confronted with the same inconsistency of wanting to extinguish something through its textual proliferation. Because the slave trade impaired the de-Africanization of blacks and slavery no longer existed, the survival of these superstitions puzzles Ortiz, and he wants to find a different interpretive scheme (66). Ortiz argues that, for various reasons, it is not easy to gain full knowledge of the characteristics of these religions. One inconvenience in studying them is that their dogmas have been hidden from those who do not practice them. The imposition of Christianity drove the religions brought by slaves from Africa into a highly private, even secret, sphere. This was the beginning of the later syncretic practices of Santeria: blacks were forced to participate publicly in the Christian religious system while they also secretly maintained their ancestors’ beliefs. At the same time, secrecy gave credence to the mystery, for “the revelation [of the secret] would mean the unknown would lose its prestige” (67). Although maintaining these religious rites in secret makes them more appealing, the secret is also a way to create an isolated community and thus an exclusive space where whites cannot enter. Such secrecy afforded blacks a source of power vis-à-vis whites. The lack of easy access to the codes underlying these religions, together with the fact that they had syncretized, has created further research obstacles, namely, a perceived lack of legitimacy and originality concerning the object of study. According to Ortiz, “There was a time, until the end of the [slave] trade, in which religious cults had to be preserved more or less in their original African form. However, after this period, all the cults were slackened. . . . All the practices of primitive African religions are today jumbled and bastardized, and the confusion is greater due to the fact that they are all similar to each other” (67). He points to originality and legitimacy as positive traits, opposed to the “bastardization” of Afro-Cuban rituals and beliefs, which was in many instances directly caused by contact with Catholicism. Despite his avowed acceptance of the difficulty in gaining knowledge of Afro-Cuban religious cults, the narrator purports to reveal to the reader the contents and foundations of their rituals. Ortiz’s tacit assumption is that he does have 42

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access not only to the “secret” but also to the original dogmas and legitimate foundations on which these religions are based. Without revealing his sources, Ortiz starts at the beginning—or what he understands to be the beginning—that is, with Olorun, the lord of the sky in the Yoruba pantheon. Ortiz notes that the Yoruba were an imperialistic culture in Africa and that the high numbers of Yoruba slaves made it a dominant culture among blacks in Cuba. All this provides further evidence of the Yoruba’s superiority: “Out of the struggle amongst African religions in Cuba arose the religion of the Yoruba or Nagos. This was due to the greater progress of their theology vis-à-vis the other groups, the Yorubas’ intense expansive force, the density of their population, and the dissemination of their language” (67).3 Ortiz has little information on the god Olorun because, according to him, no Santeria priest understands Olorun. Nonetheless, Olorun somehow enables Ortiz to create a hierarchy with the rest of the orishas, with Olorun at the apex. Here, for the first time, the ethnographer makes reference to Afro-Cuban priests as a source of his research. However, no priest is directly cited, and the allusion to the source quickly vanishes. Meanwhile, Ortiz establishes a comparison with blacks of other areas of America through references to different written sources, which indicates his research is based more on bibliography than fieldwork. Leaving behind all possible unknown sources, the ethnographer returns to assert authoritatively that orishas are divided into three ranks, the first of which includes the most powerful orishas, such as Obatalá, Shangó, and Ifá. He then offers a brief synopsis of these divinities, their story of the origins of life, or what are known in Santeria as patakís, or “hagiographies,” of the orishas. Ortiz does not use the term “patakí” as a member of Santeria would in this situation. Instead, his prose is that of an ethnographer who investigates from a distance without being affected or contaminated by the culture he studies. The second rank, he continues, includes the less powerful orishas, among them Yemayá, Oggún, Osho-oshí, Ololú, and Babayú-ayé. The third rank consists of fetishes, charms, and unnamed, generally insignificant orishas (68). Later studies certainly suggest that Ortiz’s hierarchy is Point of Departure

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debatable, given the great disparity among the different sects and the regional differences within a given sect. Ortiz omits the diversity of beliefs by silencing the voice of the believers and practitioners themselves, the Afro-Cuban voice. One must therefore ask, where does Ortiz’s “secret” information come from? The author’s sources—at least those cited in the book— are anthropological treatises (many of which were published in French) on African religions both in Cuba and in other places, such as Bahia, Brazil. Moreover, Ortiz only questions his sources through a linguistic comparison that shows how some gods are confused with others in different hagiographic identifications: In Cuba people worship Ogún, another orisha born of Yemayá— according to A. B. Ellis—Shangó’s brother—as Bowen would have it—and the Yorubas’ Mars. He is sometimes confused with Eshú and Oshúñ, and is also known as Osunda. Ogún, god of war and fighting, is easily confused with Eshú, a malevolent divinity. The conflation with Eshú is also undoubtedly a result of a phonetic similarity. Nina Rodrigues accidentally echoes the supposed identity of Eshú and Ogún when he claims that Eshú is summoned by the name Eshú-Ogún. This appears to be a contradiction, since Ogún, I repeat, is the brother of the great orisha Shangó—according to Bowen—and therefore a benevolent divinity, even if his warlike character at times resembles that of Eshú. One black man told Nina Rodrigues himself: Ogún is the one who makes way for Eshú, which also demonstrates that Ogún and Eshú are two different orishas. Moreover, Ogún is represented by iron fetishes, just like Eshú, which generates a confusion that appears to exist in Cuba as well. (71) The three sources Ortiz cites in this paragraph are A. B. Ellis, author of The Land of Fetish (1883) and The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (1894); a missionary named T. J. Bowen, who appears in the bibliography with a book titled Grammar and Dictionary of the Yoruba Language (1858); and Nina Rodrigues, whom Ortiz cites constantly in both his chapters on Santeria and who wrote L’Animisme 44

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fetichiste de negres de Bahia (1900). The possible confusion between Oggún and Eshú is because both are gods of war represented by metal objects. The confusion between Oggún and Oshúñ (sometimes written Oshún) is the result of a phonetic similarity. Yet where does Ortiz locate the confusion? Is the contradiction in Rodrigues’s statement claiming that Eshú is summoned as Eshún-Oggún and then citing a black informant? Ortiz suggests that this confusion also exists in Cuba without offering evidence to substantiate his claim. When he does not find references in written sources, Ortiz presents evidence in the following way: “Some people adore a saint they call Orúmbila. I have never seen such a divinity’s name cited in any book. It was probably derived from the Yoruba orisha called Orúñ, which means sun. . . . The Santeria priests Catholicized it by equating it to San Francisco without any apparent reason for relating the heliolatric fetish with the saint of Assis” (72). That Ortiz does not find a written reference throws the saint’s origins into doubt, for unlike the rest of the deities and ceremonies Ortiz mentions, this one cannot be equated with the divinities in Bahia: “In Bahia, Obatalá is worshipped every Friday. In Cuba, the same thing happens” (69). And after this statement follows a footnote citing A. B. Ellis’s book The Yoruba Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, published in London in 1894. Neither black Santeria priests nor blacks in general are given credit as sources of information in the presentation of their beliefs. Ortiz takes the explanations from other writers; for instance, in regard to the representation of two identical twins, he writes: “I have not been able to decipher their meaning. Bowen does not mention them in his study of Yoruba religion but the dictionary, when explaining the yabedzí voice, says . . .” (75). Ortiz’s only way of citing an oral informant is indirect—“As a Santeria priest once said” (71)— without giving a name or reference and without including the black informant’s voice in direct citation; moreover, the information offered by this source is presented as unreliable. Ortiz gives a similar warning in the case of a quotation from a newspaper: “The following paragraph is transcribed from a brief literary description of a priest’s Point of Departure

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room, published years ago in a Havana newspaper” (73). Ortiz omits the name of the newspaper, as well as the date and page of the publication, despite his otherwise strict bibliographic methodology with the aforementioned anthropological treatises or with data comparisons. In this sense, Ortiz privileges scientific texts over oral evidence and informant testimony, which would have been easy to find in Havana. In the book’s conclusion, Ortiz advocates the seclusion and isolation of Santeria priests, arguing that this is the only effective strategy for the national struggle against black religions (193). Ortiz ends with a proposal for an immunization project throughout the entire republic via the intense dissemination of “solid scientific notions” (197). His conclusion becomes a diatribe for Cuban societal improvement through progress and modernization. Finally, he ends the book with a foundational gesture, a “patriotic” speech that invokes citizen action against ignorance: “And one must have hope in the culture and conscientiousness of the authorities that guide the newborn country’s plan of action. They should get things right more often than they have thus far against the bulwark of ignorance, which takes advantage of the rest in order to live in stagnation and numbs us, which means our actions as a free people are still unsure and childlike” (201). In this foundational gesture, Ortiz structures the “newborn nation’s” social classes and simultaneously takes control of the hegemonic discourse that defines the nation. His discourse is founded on redundancy and repetition, structural characteristics of the authority of his argument. In this period, when the discourse of identity is mandatory, Ortiz argues for a concept of “race” as a central piece in the construction of Cubanness by which blacks are de-Africanized in order to become more Cuban: “All the original differences among blacks grow more and more pale due to the influx of the superior civilization that surrounds them, absorbs them, and continues to file down all the rough edges of their complex psyche” (27). Between the publication of Los negros brujos and that of Los negros esclavos three years later, one can see a change in Ortiz’s rhetoric. In46

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stead of identifying Cuban blacks’ African savagery as the cause of all this sector’s ills, Los negros esclavos blames the legacy of slavery for blacks’ difficulty in attaining superior levels of society. All the same, the evidence Ortiz presents in both cases contributes to a common goal. He ultimately purports to elaborate a positivist psychological theory that posits an African essence which is diametrically opposed to the essence of civilized whites. In this project, blacks are not seen as individuals but as a collective subject. By defining whiteness vis-àvis blackness, Ortiz also limits the space of hegemonic white identity and thus reveals the same racist mentality that denies individuality. In his early works, Ortiz writes ethnological treatises with the clear goal of theorizing about human behavior in accordance with the definitions of ethnographic description versus ethnology.4 Moreover, he excludes participant observation, which would theoretically lead him to establish some kind of relationship with the group selected for his study. Whereas Ortiz constructs an ontological reading of black culture, his text nonetheless reflects a lack of contact between a discursively constituted authoritative science and its object of study. The result is the elimination of the Afro-Cuban subject’s agency.

Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba: The Second Period As an ethnologist, Ortiz continues to adopt the position of the distant observer who does not participate in the culture he studies. Edward M. Bruner states: “[The concept of behavior] implies an outside observer describing someone else’s actions, as if one were an audience to an event; it also implies a standardized routine that one simply goes through” (5). Bruner’s description aptly applies to Ortiz’s arguments, even in the second period. After his first publications, Ortiz pressed on with the publication of “La fiesta afrocubana del Día de Reyes” and “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” both of which were first published in Revista Bimestre Point of Departure

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Cubana in 1920 and 1921, respectively. Later, they were published together in Ortiz’s book Los cabildos y la fiesta afrocubana del Día de Reyes. In both essays, Ortiz continues to address race from a positivist perspective, regarding some races as superior and others as inferior. In “Los cabildos afrocubanos” he contrasts the black Cuban race with the Gypsies of southern Spain and with whites. He also refers to the “primitive and almost always African psyche” of Afro-Cuban festivities (Los cabildos 20). From the early 1920s until the 1930s, Ortiz devoted himself to political activism. This is the beginning of what some have seen as his “second period” and is marked by a shift in his understanding of race. In 1930 he founded the journal Surco, which lasted only one year, and in 1931 he founded the journal Ultra in conjunction with the Hispano-Cuban Institute of Culture. In 1937, he established the Society of Afro-Cuban Studies in Havana. During this period, Ortiz’s discourse shifts toward a new understanding of the Afro-Cuban subject. It is this “second Ortiz” that contemporary critics have retrieved and dubbed the “third discoverer,” since his views from this point on coincide with the notions of race promoted within the politics of the Revolution. In his lecture “Por la integración cubana de blancos y negros,” delivered December 12, 1942, he states: “Upon returning from my years abroad in foreign universities, I began to scrutinize Cuban life, and blacks immediately came to mind. It was a natural thing to happen. Without blacks, Cuba would not be Cuba” (23). Here, Ortiz gives blacks both a physical and a cultural locus of belonging. They have ceased to pertain to Africa in order to be located geographically on Cuban national soil. Their presence now reflects a transculturation rather than the acculturation or de-Africanization Ortiz had previously endorsed. By placing them physically in Cuba, Ortiz now confers on blacks a subjectivity he had theretofore denied them. In El engaño de las razas (1945), the year marking the end of World War II, Ortiz demystifies the very concept of a “pure race” promoted by discriminatory discourses—a concept which he himself had previously defended and which resembled Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric. In this book, Ortiz analyzes the term 48

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“race” from a qualitative scientific perspective, arguing that race is an arbitrary category. The 1940 publication Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar is where Ortiz first used the term “transculturation.” Following that, he published Martí y las razas (1942), El huracán: Su mitología y sus símbolos (1947), Historia de una pelea cubana contra los demonios (1959), and several significant anthropological studies on Afro-Cuban culture, all of which have received more attention from contemporary critics. These studies reclaim the Afro-Cuban presence as an enriching element in Cuban culture. This period also included the publication of La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba (1950), Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba (1951), and Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana, a work consisting of five volumes that Ortiz began to publish in 1952. Martín Lienhard has questioned Ortiz’s motives for changing his views on African culture. Arguing just the opposite of the general understanding in Cuba that United States influence heightened Cuban racism during the so-called neocolonial period, Lienhard focuses on the U.S. civil rights movement as one of the international forces that caused a change in the representation of blacks as social subjects around the world. Since the beginning of the century, U.S. blacks’ political and cultural rights movements, followed by the African and Caribbean push for decolonization, forced the world to take note of the presence of blacks. It is a presence that impacted the historical changes of the 1910s and 1920s and, in a more incisive way, the political-literary groups linked to blackness. They contributed in turn to the internationalization of black rights. In Latin America the interest in “blackness” was later put in the service of cultural nationalism. (25) The avant-garde movements of the initial decades of the twentieth century not only renovated artistic modalities but also brought about political and social change. The revolutions in Mexico and Russia, as well as World War I, are the most notable examples of the internaPoint of Departure

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tional events that affected the mind-set of the times. Cubist painting, Futurism, and later Dadaism and Surrealism all marked the birth of an expressive sensibility that heralded new possibilities. Latin American vanguard movements sought inspiration not only in the European “isms” but also in indigenous myths and Afro-Caribbean (and African) rituals, according to Alfredi Bosi in his prologue to Jorge Schwartz’s Las vanguardias latinoamericanas. Even though the movement known as negrismo began as an aesthetic interest created by a white elite, poets such as Luis Palés Matos, Jean Price Mars, Aimé Césaire, and Nicolás Guillén managed to give the project an ideological dimension. They sought to portray blacks in an integral form that would go beyond their representation as exotic objects.5 On the other hand, Rómulo Lachatañeré’s writings (the first of which came out in 1938), as well as those of Lydia Cabrera (whose first book dates to 1936), also reformulate the epistemological foundations of AfroCuban studies. Yet despite the aforementioned transformations and Ortiz’s attempt to distance his later work from his own previous racism, his ethnological texts from this second period are still constructed in opposition to the same racial Other. Rather than integrate the epistemological spaces of black and white, Ortiz in his discourse continued to point toward their disassociation. Whereas in Los negros brujos Ortiz ends by advocating the prohibition of African dances and use of drums (200), in Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba, published forty-five years later, he takes up the task of studying black music and dance in order to emphasize their artistic value. The same is true of the five volumes of Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana. In the prologue to Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba, Ortiz inserts a disclaimer explaining why he uses the term “folklore” to designate Afro-Cuban music. He stresses the fact that the category of folkloric music implies an ethnological and national concept, not the “primitive” (21). Citing the postulates of Walter Wiora, who defines the term “folk” as “the most basic stratum of a human society,” Ortiz states: “In this sense, Afro-Cuban music, although it reflects an unquestionable 50

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ethnological characterization, is at the same time unequivocally folkloric. The ‘Afro-’ in Cuba has been and continues to be, in the social gradation, a fundamental condition” (21). This statement places Afro-Cuban music in a foundational social stratum. Even though the entire introduction is devoted to defining “folklore” so as not to skew its use, there is a clear proliferation of contradictory definitions throughout the text. Ortiz explains how the use of this term does not imply a lower social class, since “even in the highest level of society one finds folkloric music” (22). When he later distinguishes the folkloric from the popular, however, he explains the following: “The concepts of folk and people are not always equivalent. When the term people means the people of the inferior levels in the social pyramid, both folkloric music and popular music refer to the same thing; but the concept of the popular is generally broader than the extra typographic foundation of a given society, which is where folk and the folkloric lie” (23). Here Ortiz argues that the folkloric is a stratum situated at the bottom of the social pyramid. He then adds that not all folkloric music is equivalent to vulgar everydayness. If the folkloric corresponds to the most basic and primitive side of society— Ortiz again cites Wiora: “In primitive societies folk includes the whole population” (23)—then Afro-Cuban music does as well, given that Ortiz defines it as folkloric. Nonetheless, the folkloric, according to Ortiz, can also be quite complex and even artistic: “[Black music is not] mere cacophony of sounds, as the blind obstinacy of racism would have it. Rather, it consists of highly original and complex aesthetic combinations of sounds, tones, timbres, rhythms, melodies, harmonies, songs, and dances with universal or universalizable values” (21). Thus, the text itself presents rhetorical twists and turns that break down the hermeneutic process of the retrieval of the folkloric. In the first chapter of Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba, Ortiz explains the gregarious nature of the black African and how music and its artistic manifestations reflect the need to express everything collectively. This situation of permanent “dialogue” in which blacks relate to their peers constitutes the essence of their Point of Departure

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music. Yet to describe the collective character of black music, Ortiz resorts to a comparison with white music. “It is true that black music is an emotive aesthetic, as is the rest of music in general, but it is also inspired by an inherently ‘intellectual’ spirit, a ‘utilitarian’ reason for being, a desperation of purpose that in modern white music is rarely found in such a definite and unequivocal way” (29). Here, Ortiz reverts to the same rhetorical strategy he used in his first period, that is, a strategy founded on a positivist diagnosis of society: “If the incipient experimental culture of the African goes astray, thinking that by dancing it can provoke rain, make crops flourish for a good harvest, or incite animals to breed, that does not rule out a certain intentional utilitarianism in its purpose. It does not reflect any aberration of ‘paralogical’ mentality . . . but rather a mere false syllogism caused by the error of the premises. It is just like whites and blondes who plea for rain by lighting a candle for Saint Barbara” (29). In this quotation, one perceives a tremendous anxiety in the way Ortiz treats blacks with great care so as not to make a racist statement. Black music is “emotive,” but this trait is later found to have some “utility.” What was previously characterized negatively as “erotic and spontaneous” (Negros brujos 43) is now positively emotive. Still, emotiveness is not reason enough for a rationalist scientist to redeem black culture. What was previously a negative “superstition” is now explained as an erroneous interpretation and not as a trait of the primitive psyche. All the same, black culture must be compared to white culture in order to legitimize it: whites can also be superstitious, and what is underscored by this omission is precisely the assumption that “whites are not primitive.” Thus in this book one can trace Ortiz’s same patterns and strategy of comparison as in earlier work, patterns that suggest a racial hierarchy. The sources Ortiz uses to authorize this study are once again anthropological (Los bailes 36). Even though he mentions phrases and songs used by the Babalaos in Lucumí ceremonies, speaks of the Ñáñigos, makes allusion to the dialogism of these songs, and references Afro-spiritist ritual practices in Cuba’s Oriente region, he never leaves an explicit trace of a source or an informant. Ortiz’s strategy of 52

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presenting information on Afro-Cubans is by way of a monologue of white anthropological discourse. This contrasts with the dialogism of the blacks Ortiz himself references. Yet this very reference paradoxically serves to displace those blacks and their dialogism. Even though he gives examples of African poetry, liturgies, and different rituals, the dialogic voice of the Afro-Cuban remains lost: Let us give some examples of African poetry taken from various cultures. Mainly, we will draw from the most elementary poetry, that which is inspired by the most orthodox African religious, magic, or telluric rituals practiced in Cuba. The examples could have been very numerous and we have limited ourselves to just a few. . . . Let us begin with a series of Congo verses. This is a Congo prayer. . . . In order to understand well those liturgical lines, we will explain the Congo voices heard in them. (40–41) Ortiz weaves the Congo voice into two paragraphs, which interrupt his own prose. He later provides various paragraphs of linguistic analysis as a means of translation. His analysis, however, clearly reflects his own need to rationalize the dialogue of the Other in a monological way. The inclusion of the Congo prayer does not produce the effect of a textual dialogism. Rather, it forms part of Ortiz’s pretensions of objectivity as an ethnologist explaining Afro-Cuban culture. Another element that Ortiz highlights is the oral nature of African songs, which are of popular origin: “They preserve in their songs historical traditions, mythological fables, parables and their precedents of experience and teaching. Their songs are frequently like editorials, chronicles, and commentaries of a press that does not exist among them. They resemble the functions of broadcast journalism, which is expanding so rapidly throughout the white world” (82). But the oral aspect is lost in the written transcription of the text, and there is no attempt to save it. Ortiz’s hermeneutical process leaves behind the meaning the rituals have for those who practice them and is instead oriented toward the reader who is Spanish speaking, Catholic, and white. For inPoint of Departure

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stance, Ortiz presents ceremonial rituals such as consecrating oneself to a saint, summoning a spirit, and the magical preparation of a temple: “In short, the ritual practices of the African religions and magic surviving in Cuba teach us that the most sacred and intimate expression is simply spoken in traditional and cryptic African language, which can only be heard by the supernatural entity it addresses. It is poetry. In an emotional moment of great concentration, much like the poetic ritual of the Christian preacher in mass” (124). This cryptic language—the poetry nobody understands—is what the ethnologist seeks to decipher. And for Ortiz, African language must be translated into Spanish to make it intelligible: “The patio of the temple is called ibán-baló, derived from the two Yoruba words: ibá, which means ‘public meeting or gathering,’ and ibaló, which means ‘company or crowd’ (from ibá [‘meeting’] and lob [‘outdoors’])” (123). Ortiz here assumes his readers will need these various translations. Another way to structure this translation is through a comparison with Catholicism, that is, by relating it to what the average white upper-class Cuban reader is familiar with. The rhetorical apparatus of the book is constituted by a constant comparison between white and black, African religion and Catholicism, that, curiously enough, contrasts sharply with the very concept of transculturation for which Ortiz is so well known. In Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba, Ortiz once again ignores his definition of Cuban culture as the indissoluble mixture of races, the aforementioned “ajiaco,” or melting pot. The text is full of statements premised on not mixing or melting, such as the following: “They will be better understood if one recalls that African dances are fundamentally mimetic, the opposite of the typical choreography of whites” (186). Each group’s dances are different, the music is different, and the beliefs are different. Despite assembling a rhetorical apparatus that advocates the synthesis of the two cultures, Ortiz writes several passages in which the possibility of synthesis seems impossible: 54

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This ethnic background of popular dances in Cuba, and all the more so when there is greater proximity to the African source, means that the dances are psychologically mulattoes, in every sense of the term mulatismo. . . . Perhaps it is excessive to say in Cuba that all which is Cuban is mixed (mestizo), . . . but a dense skin pigmentation seems undeniable among those sectors of national culture most impregnated by African heritage, such as music, dance, songs, and religion; and, to varying extents, in other aspects of everyday life. (187) Ortiz suggests that mulattoes are the sector of Cuba most influenced by the African cultures he mentions, which leads one to conclude that most whites have not been “contaminated.” The African traits are at the base—in the lower stratum—of the social hierarchy. Thus, they are defined as folkloric. Yet, although Ortiz’s argument is based on Cuba’s African “roots,” the text includes examples of syncretism in the Yoruba and Congo populations, as well as among members of the Secret Society of Abakuás living in Cuba in the present day. The result is a temporal and spatial fissure within the text. Here and there, then and now, are confused. On occasion, Ortiz seems to want finally to apply the concept of transculturation; for instance, in regard to the tradition of black minstrels who sang stories of their ancestors for a living, he comments: “Traveling black singers of this type, who are very insistent, have not disappeared in Cuba, not even in Havana. Nowadays their songs are white influenced (blanconazos) but have not lost their black core” (440). In his anxiousness to distinguish what is essentially black from what has been “whitened” as a result of transculturation, the very concept of transculturation itself loses its meaning. Furthermore, Ortiz implicitly assumes that there is a white sector of the Cuban population that has not been contaminated in terms of either skin pigmentation or cultural traditions. Ortiz places himself within that white (that is, nonmulatto) sector and defines Cuban culture and nationhood from that privileged position. The voice of the narrator addresses the subject from a scientific perspective, osPoint of Departure

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tensibly providing data in an objective manner without taking sides. Nevertheless, the implied reader does not form part of a black cosmogony. Rather, the text constructs a reader who is located outside black language, rituals, and dances and who therefore needs definitions and analogies. Hence, the ethnographer includes himself in intimate proximity to that decidedly non-Africanized part of Cuban society: In Cuba, because of our historical evolution, we still retain a rich stock of folklore that must be explored for our national artistic advancement. Yet many deny it due to ignorance or vehement prejudice, which is itself nothing more than another form of ignorance. If the most civilized whites in Africa believe they should work to rescue the values of black music for world art and the reinvigoration of the nationalist spirit of the natives, can we not think the same in regard to Cuba? . . . Music is undergoing a revolution, and it is clear that the future will lead to the blending of all the music values of all peoples, to a progressive pan-mix of art, pigment, and culture. To a symphony of universal meaning, like that portended by the great Beethoven, of whom someone once said, due to his dark ancestors, that he was part mulatto. (442–43) Is Ortiz placing himself as part of the “most civilized whites” who should rescue the values of black music for the invigoration of a national understanding of identity? Ortiz’s work follows conventional anthropological methods and suffers from what Clifford Geertz calls the “cognitive fallacy,” which Geertz defines as the idea that a culture can be analyzed through formal methods such as mathematics or logic (Interpretation 12). Ortiz assumes that blacks in Cuba are “ethnological.” Geertz, to the contrary, defines anthropology as a way to interpret culture, which is why it should be “actor oriented”: “What it means is that descriptions of Berber, Jewish or French culture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers, Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define what happens to them. What it does not mean is that such descriptions are 56

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themselves Berber, Jewish or French” (Interpretation 15). Ortiz’s work does not allow such agency in his own scientific interpretation of Afro-Cuban culture, for he does not open up a discursive space for informants themselves—the actors—to dialogue about their own culture and those who invent the means of its representation. This seems all the more striking when one takes into consideration that Ortiz’s representation does not address a foreign culture. Rather, it portrays an “Other within” through which Ortiz attempts to construct a definition of Cubanness. Despite the obvious changes in his later work, Ortiz’s ethnological texts consistently show a cultural nationalism based on the idea of race and ethnicity. This is not to contradict that he is an indispensable pillar in the proliferation of Afro-Cuban studies. Cuban uniqueness lies in the contact zone between the main cultural groups. Ortiz’s books contain an inner space where the presence of otherness appears far off in the distance. They constitute a metaphorical journey toward the different places that make up the Cuban nation. If Ortiz is indeed the “third discoverer” and if within the rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution it is blacks who define the postcolonial identity par excellence, there needs to be a space of resistance that allows Afro-Cubans their own agency and subjectivity.

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Once cultures are no longer prefigured visually—

2

as objects, theaters, texts— it becomes possible to think of a cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances.

A Disarticulation of the Gaze

James Clifford, Writing Culture Whose interpretation, then, of the sense and experience of a religion is to be preferred in the name of

Exploring Modes

science: that of the one who has been touched and

of Authority and Representation in the Rhetoric of El monte

psychologically transformed by the rites, or that of the one who has not? . . . The poet and the artist are better qualified both by the temperament and by training to intuit and interpret the sense of a mythological figure than the universitytrained empiricist. Joseph Campbell, Divine Horsemen

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In the context of postcolonial theory, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks whether the subaltern can speak, if a space could in some way be opened to give the marginalized subject a voice. One sector of critical thought has attempted to discard this possibility by pointing out the contradictions of reclaiming such a space from the privileged standpoint of the academic. The crisis of representation in the social sciences—with respect to culture and power structures intrinsically related to knowledge—questions the distinctive interpretations that advocate agency and subjectivity. One might ask in this situation whether there exists the possibility of a space of resistance and, if so, where it might be localized. The field of anthropology has problematized the ethical and ideological issues surrounding the notion of a realistic scientific ethnography. Ethnography has in turn acquired a consciousness of the epistemological and rhetorical problems faced in transcribing the encounter with the Other. These changes are nonetheless quite recent. In the previous chapter I considered the work of Fernando Ortiz and how it is centered on the monological discourse of authoritarian power, which is in turn based on the anthropological knowledge that prevailed during the imperialist period of the twentieth century. Racially oriented positivist ideas gained institutional authority through the discourse of stereotypes and generalizations launched in the name of objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality. However, as Renato Rosaldo has pointed out in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, “[t]he truth of objectivism—absolute, universal, and timeless—has lost its monopoly status” (21). Anthropology has been subject to major revisions in the latter half of the twentieth century in ways that are deeply relevant to my subject here. As James Clifford describes, “[E]thnography in the service of anthropology once looked out at clearly defined others, defined as primitive, or tribal, or non-Western, or pre-literate, or non historical. . . . Now ethnography encounters others in relation to itself, while seeing itself as other” (Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture 23). The work of Lydia Cabrera is a step forward in giving Afro-Cuban identity a much greater voice; it allows for the kind of reversal Clifford is talking about. Cabrera’s narrative texts break with traditional Disarticulation of the Gaze

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anthropological methods, such as those of Ortiz, to inscribe them in that “now” proposed by Clifford in which the ethnographer relates to the Other through a consciousness of himself or herself as other. Cabrera’s writings anticipate the conceptual shift Clifford mentions thirty years earlier. Yet how was Cabrera able to foresee this development? One response is that postmodern ethnography and the new conceptual shift it proposes is perhaps not so new or radical as one might think. This in turn leads one to question the relativity of the history of critical thought. Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera shared the same critical time and space in Cuban society, even though Cabrera was younger and her intellectual development begins several decades later. Fernando Ortiz was born in 1881, studied at the University of Barcelona, where he earned a degree in law, and received a Ph.D. in law from the University of Madrid. He studied criminology in Italy and collaborated with César Lombroso on his journal Archivi di Antropologia Criminale. In 1905 he returned to Cuba. In 1907 he joined the Economic Society of Countrymen (for men only), of which Raimundo Cabrera (Lydia Cabrera’s father) was the current president. Ortiz was as active in literature as he was in Cuban politics. He died in Havana in 1969. As stated in the introduction, Cabrera was born in Havana in 1900 (nineteen years after Ortiz); she studied at home with tutors. From 1922 to 1939, Cabrera lived in Paris, where she was strongly influenced by surrealism and other avant-garde movements. Ortiz and Cabrera had a close relationship, as Ortiz married Cabrera’s sister Esther in 1908. There is no proof that Ortiz tutored Cabrera, although that has always been rumored. Cabrera left the country in 1960 and died in Miami in 1991. Many critics have perceived Cabrera’s work as a continuation of Ortiz’s culturological project. As I will argue, however, Cabrera’s anthropological work dismantles the hegemonic discourse of Cuban culture, as articulated by Ortiz and others, and her discursive practice lays the foundations of a contested and contesting culture. Her distinctive interpretation—and representation—of the Afro-Cuban 62

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From left to right, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, María Herrera de Ortiz (Ortiz’s second wife), and María Teresa Rojas in Vienna, 1952. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

subject enables an alternative national agenda. She at least creates the fiction of a space of resistance for the marginal subject through the narrative devices that anchor her discourse. An analysis of the book El monte: Igbo finda, ewe orisha, vititinfinda (Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba) (1954) provides a good example of this emergent alternative.1

The Rhetoric of El monte The first challenge presented by El monte is of an ontological and hermeneutical variety: What kind of text is it? How can it be classified? The answers to these questions vary, depending on interpretation and how the text is used. The first clue lies in the title itself; rather than clarify, the title confuses the reader: the note in parenthesis indicates that the reader is dealing with a religious book, but also one that addresses magic and superstition. Religion, magic, and superstition imply three different forms of knowledge: Can these categories be compared on the same level? At the same time, the book is about black Creole folklore, but it also includes the people of Cuba as a whole. Does religion belong to blacks alone or to all Cuban people? Are “black” and “Cuban people” separate categories? Is the word “people” (pueblo) being used in the sense of the “popular” classes (a connotation suggested more strongly in Spanish than in English), or is it used as a common national denominator? Does this title point to a traditional ethnographic investigation and therefore suggest that the author is an ethnographer who spent time with “the people of Cuba” and its “blacks” in order to write this text? The critic José A. Madrigal calls El monte “the Santeria bible” (Sánchez and Madrigal 35), and it is also commonly referred to as the bible of Afro-Cuban religions. Some of the santeros and santeras (Santeria priests) whom I interviewed for this study in Havana and Santiago in September 1998 admitted to using the book as a guide for certain rituals, for the preparation of ngangas, and for the offering of herbs to the different saints or orishas. Among these priests were 64

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Yolanda López and Eugenio Colás Ramos (Santiago de Cuba). In an interview with Cabrera, Nedda G. de Anhalt, who also speaks of the book as a bible of Cuban Santeria, states that “in El monte you have everything” and that the rest of Cabrera’s books are extensions, variations, and commentaries on this original book (39). The critic Mario Campaña describes the book as “an exhibition of 564 pages of text and 25 pages of photographs on the beliefs and religious practices of African origin, and on the botanical knowledge linked to such practices in Cuba” (65). All three descriptions point to the religious character of the book’s contents, as well as its totalizing aspects. In Afro-Cuban culture, it is difficult to separate religion from culture because religious beliefs shape a way of life and being in the world. El monte is commonly catalogued with Cabrera’s anthropological work. More specifically, it is an ethnographic study insofar as it is a tantalizing experience of a non-European culture—that is, if one follows Elzbieta Sklodowska’s definition of ethnography in her book Testimonio hispanoamericano (109). Moreover, El monte centers around two subjects heavily studied in ethnography: religion and Afro-Cuban myths. However, the typology of an ethnographic study versus a testimonial novel or any work of fiction has been problematized in contemporary criticism, not only by Sklodowska and the criticism of testimonial narrative—which draws on ethnography—but also by anthropologists concerned with the interpretation and representation of culture. What is the difference between a literary text and an ethnographic one? What, in the final analysis, is the difference between Cabrera’s narrations in El monte—an anthropological text— and those in Cuentos negros de Cuba—a text anchored in fiction—in terms of her discursive practices, rhetorical and figurative use of language, and handling of the information presented? Both ethnography itself and the criticism of the testimonial novel focus on the authenticity and empirical verifiability of the narrated facts, whether recounted by an ethnographer or a witness. This preoccupation is rooted in Western scientific or philosophical discourse, which seeks empirical truth. In Myth and Archive: A Theory of Disarticulation of the Gaze

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Latin American Narrative, Roberto González Echevarría proposes that novels in general turn to a hegemonic discourse to gain legitimacy. However, Cabrera challenges representations of otherness, questioning the notion of “truth” through the accumulation of interpretive possibilities and relative truths. In any case, the issue always returns to the difference between literary fiction and the ethnographic text: one is based on the fictitious versus the factual and the other on reality. But how is reality represented? The question itself is an oxymoron. The testimonial genre lies in a liminal space between the fields of literature and ethnography.2 In the world of Latin American literature, testimonial narrative has caused a commotion among critics. In the essay “Historias paralelas/historias ejemplares: La historia y la voz del otro,” Hugo Achugar argues that Latin American testimonial discourse was institutionalized from the 1960s onward, particularly after the Cuban Revolution, and he claims that this institutionalization “only comes to recognize that testimonial narrative occupied a legitimate space in the power struggle within the public sphere” (51). Along these same lines, some critics have defended it for its truthful documentation, while others focus on the contradictions and ambivalences that it presents as a genre. For those who believe in its representational transparency, testimonial narrative serves as a political weapon. For instance, in her essay “¿Qué es, y cómo se hace un testimonio?,” Margaret Randall explains that history can now be written for the first time, because the ones writing it are not the dominant classes who have done it in the past but rather the proletariat (23). She also claims that testimonial narrative is “the possibility of reconstructing the truth” (27). Furthermore, in her guide on how to make a testimonial narrative, she includes a section on transcription and editing in which she states: “It is better to make the decisions on what we will or will not use with all the material at hand. . . . Options are then taken up in the editing stage” (35). Lastly, she describes editing as “a moment of great creative richness, great inventiveness” (40), which points to the inventive character—the fabrication—of 66

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truth, thereby disarticulating her own postulate of authentic historicity. For her part, Sklodowska criticizes those who claim that “in testimonial narrative the ideological component gains a special intensity due to the transparency of the ‘message,’” since the mechanisms of its discursive configuration result in “a more or less conscious novelization” (4). There is no easy answer to this debate. On the one hand, testimonial narrative refutes dominant ideology and opens up a marginal space, but on the other, the problem of representational authenticity always emerges: “The focus on the relationships between the real and the imaginary is in fact the common denominator of the majority of studies on testimonial narrative” (Sklodowska 69). John Beverly proposes a way out of the truth/fiction dichotomy even though he does not solve the conflict: “The important thing about testimonial narrative is that it produces, if not the real, at least a sense of experience of the real, and that this produces certain effects on the reader that are different from those of the documentary or more realist fiction” (“Margin at the Center” 22). He later adds that “testimonial narrative is and is not an ‘authentic’ form of subaltern culture; it is and is not an ‘oral narrative’; it is and is not ‘documentary’ . . . it affirms and deconstructs the category of the ‘subject’” (“La voz del otro” 10).3 Finally, testimonial narrative situates itself in the ambivalence of writing; it cannot escape the mechanisms that also exist in other discourses. To discern the discipline to which El monte belongs, one must first study its content. Structurally, it is composed of ten chapters (half of the book) and a botanical glossary (organized in alphabetical order like a dictionary) that functions as a herbarium of medicinal (or magic) plants and constitutes the second half. In the book’s front matter there is also a prologue signed by the author, titled “To the Reader,” and some endnotes follow the close of various chapters. The book ends with some twenty-five pages of photographs that include images of saints (or orishas), objects (or fetishes), and, above all, images of the informants (or witnesses) that comprise the narration. The ten chapters are divided up in the following way: The first is Disarticulation of the Gaze

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titled “El monte”; in it the importance of this concept in the AfroCuban tradition is discussed. The second, “Bilongo,” deals with illnesses, their causes, and ways to avoid them, but it also includes a genealogy of some of the orishas and their characteristics, among other things. Bilongo means “harm” or the “evil eye,” and in the worldview of the Afro-Cuban it translates also as “illness.” The third chapter, “Oluwa ewé: El dueño del monte,” is dedicated to the orisha Osain and the different Elegguás, their stories, their importance in mythology, and their herbs and rituals. The forth is “El tributo al dueño del monte,” which, as its title indicates, explains the tribute or payment that is made to the woods—to a plant or tree—when something is taken, either for a ritual or to prepare a nganga. Nganga is a caldron that is either to be offered to an orisha as a place to dwell, to direct a bilongo toward someone, or to counteract a bilongo already placed. This definition cannot be specified, since the term is used with different meanings throughout the book; this is also the case with other terms, as I will show later. The fifth chapter is titled “Cómo se prepara una nganga.” The sixth, “El tesoro mágico y medicinal de Osain y tata Nfindo,” functions as a brief introduction to the following chapters and consists of two pages that explain the importance of the knowledge of plants. (Note that Osain is the saint of the woods and the plants and that the term Nfindo is often used in the text to refer to a plant or herb.) The seventh is titled “La ceiba” and serves as a description of the sacred tree’s importance for the Lucumí and Congo practices. The ninth chapter, “The Royal Palm,” parallels the seventh, but instead of referring to the silk-cotton tree, it deals with the role of the palm tree. Chapters 8 and 10 also address the silkcotton tree and the palm tree, respectively, but in terms of their importance and use in the Abakuás Secret Society. The eighth chapter is titled “Ukano Becosí” and narrates the genealogy of this supposedly secret society, and the tenth is titled “Ukano Mambre.” The index of plants, which fills 257 pages in total, begins with the letter A (the first plant listed is aba) and ends with Z (the last being zarzaparrilla). The index does not follow a structuring methodology, apart from the alphabetical order. Some plants are accompanied by 68

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their Latin name, and others are not. Some are translated into Lucumí and Congo, or to one of the two, whereas others do not contain further references. Some list the lord (or saint) to which they belong, but not always. In some cases a medicinal use is mentioned, and in others, a superstitious or religious use. Sometimes there is a combination of all three, other times only two, and still other times none at all. Thus, the title of the book begins to take form: religion, magic, and superstition. Let us consider the following example: Galán de Noche Cestrum nocturnum L[Lucumí] Orufirin. Elubé. C [Congo] Dondoki Lords: Obatalá and Orúnla Herbal baths. Very recommended for widows who want to remarry. With knowledge of the root, great flexibility and resistance is obtained in the muscles of the legs and foot. Tightrope walkers, dancers, and athletes will benefit from these Galán’s baths. It is said that their virtues for treating nervousness, and even epilepsy, are no less precious. (408) Note that the medicinal quality is not supported by science but rather by popular knowledge, by that which “is said.” On other occasions, as with güira (420), for instance, seven and a half pages of explanations and anecdotes (many mutually contradictory), mostly quotations and dialogues, are offered in place of the narrator’s voice. With this description in mind, one can return to the beginning of the book and start with an analysis of the prologue. In her book on testimonial narrative, Sklodowska proposes that prologues are directed readings that structure the original material and, besides acting as guides, lay out the construction of the book from the authorial position of the writer: “The urgency of selfexplanation that unites texts on the margin of the testimonial corpus (warnings, prologues, introductions) is due first of all to the selfconsciousness of their own discursive heresy” (22). She also adds that prologues function as an aphorism insofar as they condition the reception of the text: “The expectations of the reader are not molded Disarticulation of the Gaze

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by the preexisting notions about the genre but, more than anything, by the prologues and warnings that accompany concrete texts” (22). Whereas it is true that Sklodowska analyzes what is known as the testimonial novel, as I have pointed out, the typological division between testimonial narrative and ethnography is anything but clear. Sklodowska investigates the possible bifurcations and encounters between the ethnographic text and the testimonial novel, using the texts Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (Rigoberta Menchú) and Biografía de un cimarrón (Miguel Barnet). On the one hand, she arrives at the conclusion that neither text is ethnographic, even though they both draw on this discipline. On the other, in her analysis she does not draw the line that divides one field from the other or the division that grounds her categorization. She states that in the case of these two texts, one cannot speak of field research in the strict sense, given that neither invokes the parameters of “being there” (a concept she borrows from Geertz), a fundamental aspect of ethnographic research (114–15). In this respect, she seems to affirm that the difference between an ethnographic text and a testimonial novel is the experience of traveling, the physical presence of the ethnographer in the territory of the Other as opposed to the lack of that firsthand experience in the case of the writer. This affirmation is in turn reduced to the same search for authenticity and truth that Sklodowska herself disarticulates throughout the book. Nonetheless, the methodological proposals for analyzing testimonial narratives presented in her book are extremely useful to my work here. In El monte’s prologue, Cabrera shows the characteristics discussed by Sklodowska: she addresses and informs the reader as to what kind of text will follow, expresses writing purpose, and defines her authorial position. But Cabrera renounces this authorial figure when she insists that the true authors are the black people she has interviewed—the witnesses. The use of the word “blacks” to designate both women and men was common at the time Cabrera wrote the book. Even so, Cabrera explains in the prologue, “I would like to make clear that by principle I don’t write or use the word black in the pejorative sense that the demagogic and interested mainstream 70

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would have it, intent on erasing it from language and from statistics in order to humiliate people of color” (13). This first tension presented in the prologue is not easily resolved, given that, as I will demonstrate later, the narrator alternates her own voice with other voices, a strategy that provokes a constant hermeneutical defiance. Cabrera also points out in the prologue that her notes have no scientific pretensions and that it is impossible to speak of a unified methodology in her study. As she indicates, the informants’ explanations, with their digressions and even their unintelligible comments, provide the book with its organization (11). She declares that the distancing from scientific rigor means that her book is not scientific. By rejecting the description of “scientific” for her book, Cabrera plays into what Josefina Ludmer has called the “tricks of the weak” in her analysis of Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Repuesta a Sor Filotea.” Two essential movements that sustain the tricks, as Ludmer shows, are “the separation of the field of knowing from that of saying” and “the reorganizations of the field of knowing in accordance with the field of not saying” (87). Cabrera separates herself from science, the field of knowing, and she claims that she remains silent, since it is the voices of others that she is transcribing. This is her tactic of resistance, which suggests a negation of traditional ethnographic methodology—the one Ortiz follows, for instance. The disarticulation of rigorous scientific work is illustrated through the presentation of the different languages and dialects that appear in the book. Cabrera admits that she has limited her study to what she has heard (as she claims to ignore transcribed languages) and that she does not rely on dictionaries and reference works (13). In this respect, she places herself outside her informants’ linguistic code, which she only deals with in order to carry out phonetic transcriptions. The vocabulary belongs to different dialects, and she transcribes them according to their sound and with all the possible linguistic variants she has heard: “Some Lucumís call trees iki; others iggi; the divinities are orisha or orissá; herbs are ewe, éggüe, égbe, igbé, korikó . . . among the Congos: . . . wizard is nganga, fumo, musambo, imbanda, muyoli, sudika, mambi, mambi mambi” Disarticulation of the Gaze

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(13). Not only does she offer all the possible styles of a word, but she also uses them indiscriminately without justification, or so it appears. For instance, when she explains the notion of the evil eye and says “¡Nganga against nganga!” (26), the word “nganga” is used in the sense of witchery, that is, witchery against witchery. But other meanings can be found as well: “For a man to be a real wizard, he has to go to the woods and to the cemetery: he has to be the lord of a nganga” (119). Here, the word means the construction of a caldron to be prepared for the orisha. All these thorough analyses give way to a certain arbitrariness that antagonizes the rigor of scientific methodology. What authorizes the validity of the book, according to Cabrera, is the loyalty to the voice of the witness (the Afro-Cuban subject) and not the author’s own position as a scientific researcher. One should keep in mind that the poetics of testimonial narrative is based on the same discursive maneuvers as ethnography in order to establish its authority. Both testimonial narrative and ethnography operate according to similar principles: the compiler’s control (how the witness is selected), the intentionality that shapes that subject, the metonymy of a sociopolitical vision that goes beyond individuality, the reality of an event versus the fabulation (writing) of the subject, and the editorial manipulation (Sklodowska 50–52). El monte evidences many similarities between the two traditions. However, an internal friction is revealed whose axis refutes its own categories. Cabrera explains: “The notes that comprise the first volume . . . are the product of several years of patient dedication. I wanted these elders that I have met . . . to be heard without mediation, exactly as they spoke to me, without changing their funny and peculiar modes of expression. . . . The only value this book has . . . consists only of the direct role of the black people themselves in it. They are the true authors” (11–13). The voices of the witnesses do not speak in unison and for this reason cannot be considered a metonymy of a single group with a unified sociopolitical vision. For instance, El monte includes at least eight different ways of translating “wizard” (brujo) in the syncretic forms that still exist in Cuba. The editor/narrator of the prologue acts as the bridge between orality—the voice of the Afro72

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Cuban subject (to which she concedes authority/authorship)—and writing (the patriarchal power). The resulting text draws on the ethnographic model but still aims to present an oral performance. This performance is one transcribed through the writer’s literary power, which aligns it more with the testimonial genre. Her hybrid text does not conform to any specific category and thus questions all existing categories. Up to here I have traced how Cabrera follows the same discursive practices as the prologues of testimonial narratives and of contemporary ethnographic texts: a researcher who goes to the “field,” meets people, conducts interviews, takes notes, transcribes facts in an “objective” manner, attempting to intervene as little as possible so that the material may remain “authentic,” and writes a report. Following Sklodowska’s guidelines regarding the necessity to “be there,” one can see both situations in Cabrera’s work. On the one hand, one of the most heavily cited informants is an Afro-Cuban woman who worked in the house where Cabrera was raised (Teresa M., also referred to as Omí-Tomí). Therefore, in this case the informant comes to her (as Menchú goes to Burgos). On the other hand, Cabrera also spent a long period of time in Matanzas, assisted in rituals, and visited the woods—she “was there.” By promising “voices,” however, she disarticulates from the outset ethnography’s traditional basis of authority—observation—thereby dismantling the paradigm of Cuban culturological studies, namely, the voice and methodology of a kind of writing like that of Ortiz. Cabrera wrote her book in the 1950s, when it was very uncommon to use these kinds of discursive practices in ethnography. They were, in fact, completely nonexistent in Cuba. Such metadiscursive comments in the prologue point to the problems of representation that are taken into consideration first in the 1960s and later during the 1980s, both in the field of anthropology and in criticism on Latin American testimonial narrative.4 Besides creating the fiction that her authorial function was simply to gather and transcribe a collection of testimonial narratives, Cabrera goes beyond what the prologue promises. For instance, in the Disarticulation of the Gaze

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prologue Cabrera states that the book will annotate the religious affiliation of the Lucumís and the Congos. Yet the text also includes the Ararás, and she dedicates two chapters to the Abakuás. One might add that even though in the prologue the editor positions herself in the first person (the others are “them”)—a common structure in ethnography—this perspective soon changes. The narration does not ground itself between an “I” and a “they”; rather, “they” soon turns into “us” and then the pronoun is changed back again. In this sense, the position of “gatherer of testimonial narratives” in relation to “them—the true authors”—becomes a deeply entangled mesh. The narrator changes from the objective third person to the involved first person and also blends the singular and plural first person of the direct dialogue and indirect citations. For instance, the first chapter begins with the voice of the anthropologist who positions herself outside the universe she describes: “In the black Cuban there persists with surprising tenacity the belief in the spirituality of the woods” (17). A paragraph later, she writes: “Creator of life, we are children of the woods because life began there; the saints are born of the woods, and our religion is also born of the woods” (17; emphasis added). Further along, one realizes that this second enunciation that uses the first person plural is a quotation from direct dialogue: “my old herbalist Sandoval tells me” (17), in which the narrator has abandoned the impersonal narration in order to adopt the first-person singular. Cabrera continues to change her discursive position in citations of dialogues, indirect citations, and impersonal narration throughout various pages, only to create further confusion when she states: “A palo-musi or inkunia nfinda, a spirit attacks us, and with others the wizard defends us” (21; emphasis added). Not only does she use the same first-person plural that refers to “the black Cuban that believes in the spirituality of the woods,” but her prose also begins to be contaminated by Afro-Cuban phraseology. In these instances Cabrera’s narration undermines the convention whereby the editor, who supposedly does not intervene in the construction of the testimonial narrative, becomes visible only in the front and back matter—the prologues, endnotes—without meddling in the text. 74

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This is not the only example in the book in which something becomes its opposite without warning. As I mentioned earlier, magic, religion, and superstition are categories that are confused as the book progresses. Tension also exists between Western thought and an Afro-Cuban cosmological view: on the one hand, the value of the truth sought by the Western subject who studies these magical superstitious religions from an anthropological perspective, and on the other, the Afro-Cuban outlook that assumes the supernatural is an unquestionable fact. Cabrera’s writing presents itself in the form of a pendulum that goes from one side to the other. This back-andforth style would explain the detailed analyses, the changes in voice, the sometimes imperceptible transitions between the citations of the informants and the narrator’s own voice. Moreover, the book enacts a syncretization of diverse categories, for instance, the numerous voices—like the allegory of a national image constructed through the hypothetical deliberations of different phenomenological interpretations. In its hermeneutical play, the text allows the reader to identify with practically anything, as if the text were an all-inclusive community. The text will grant all who believe, all who adopt the Afro-Cuban cosmological view, all the elements of a tradition that had never before been gathered in writing. It also offers the possibility of recognizing oneself in the “we” of the na(rra)tion. For the reader who seeks truth, the text also provides the possibility of doubting and of belonging outside the cosmos represented, an optional exclusion. In the first chapter, the narrator puts herself in the place of the white person outside the blacks’ religion and magic. But this position is soon destabilized: “All seemingly natural things exceed the misleading limits of nature; everything is supernatural. It is a truth we whites typically ignore, or have forgotten over time” (18). Her book will therefore help the narrator to remember the truth—that everything is supernatural. On the one hand, the narrator—a white woman—states that blacks are the ones who possess an extraordinary predisposition for autosuggestion (18). Yet what is first described as the “autosuggestion” to which blacks are inclined is later referred to as the very “truth” that organizes knowledge. The narraDisarticulation of the Gaze

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tor goes from ignoring (or forgetting in this first chapter) to knowing, remembering, and believing as the text unfolds. She comes to believe in that very knowledge to which blacks, by virtue of their autosuggestive character, have exclusive access. Our blacks are convinced that we live surrounded by spirits and that all the good and bad events of their lives are a result of their influence. Hence, they hardly accept purely scientific explanations of the illness that afflicts them or its natural cause. (25) On more than one occasion, in the Pogolotti neighborhood, where one used to gather with various elderly black men and women at Omí-Tomí’s home, I once saw a saint descend violently upon one man and “shake him hard” many times because the conversation had carelessly dwelled on a given episode or on the saint’s character. This was why Changó, in one of these unforgettable gatherings, took possession of Calazán and revealed to us something the old man had kept hidden from me. He revealed that his horse Bangoché—in reference to Calazán—was profane, “as evil as the devil himself,” and he ordered us to tell him “that the horse was very tired due to all his shameless behavior” and that he was going to make him eat dirt before sending him to the “Ilé Yansa,” the cemetery. (34; emphasis added) In the first quotation the black people are “they,” the ones who believe in spirits and do not accept the scientific understanding of illness. The narrator throws into doubt the existence of the spirits and their possible role in illness. For her there exists a “natural” cause or a scientific explanation for it. In the second quotation, however, she not only accepts that saints come down to possess people but also assures the reader that if Calazán does not behave, Changó might punish him by death. The narrator thus accepts that Changó exists, that he possesses individuals and is capable of causing them death. Consider the twists of verbal persons used. First, “one used to gather” is in the third person when it would have been more logical to use the first-person plural, since from there the narrator goes on 76

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to state “I saw” in the first-person singular, only to change again to “Changó . . . revealed to us” in the plural. Moreover, the textual quotations consist of Changó’s voice, and both the words for cemetery are used: “Ilé Yansa,” as Changó would say, and “cemetery,” to clarify the meaning for the less informed reader. This practice contradicts the statements made in the prologue: “I have strictly limited myself to consign, with absolute objectivity and without prejudice, what I have heard and seen” (13). The use of anecdotes of a testimonial character is repeated in the text, but they are generally presented as quotations of other voices. Still, there exist such instances as this one in which it is the narrator who becomes the eyewitness of the event. Even though the objective ethnographic observation, as in Ortiz, does not abound in this text, the gaze still continues to be one of the reliable sources that form the basis of plausibility and one of the ways in which facts are authorized. Sight is used as a sense that confirms the known reality of those who seek truth. At the same time, it is not used here to objectify the Afro-Cuban subject. When the narrator uses vision, she does so to attest to facts of a supernatural order, facts that would seem implausible if not corroborated through sight. According to Cabrera’s portrayal, Afro-Cubans also possess vision and use it in the same manner, to attest to something unbelievable: “I saw, I swear to God—my dear teacher José de Calazán Herrera will corroborate my story—a big black man’s head, hairy like a spider, whose feet came out of his ears, strung up by his leg on a branch” (18). At this point José de Calazán Herrera becomes an agent. In regard to the previous quotation, however, the narrator points out that some forms of sight are the product of an illusion, an “extraordinary predisposition for suggestion” (18). After declaring the exceptional imaginative abilities that exist among Cuban people, she resumes the story of how spirits exert a natural domination over things, since her most reliable informants have seen it “with their own eyes” (18), a gesture that seems paradoxical. The text is, in this sense, woven by means of the debate between believing and not beDisarticulation of the Gaze

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lieving. In one sense, “to see” is a way of authorizing the information presented and giving meaning to that which is testified within the Afro-Cuban cosmos. Yet the perception that mediates the relation between a physiological standpoint and the interpretation of things seen is constantly thrown into doubt. The (authoritarian) narrative voice leaps from one side to the other, from one paragraph to the next. The narrator recounts that once, upon leaving a drum ritual, she had to wait for a saint to descend upon Omí-Tomí, as she, along with all her friends who were dancing, were in a trance (29). At this point in the narration she makes a parenthetical clarification: The reader unfamiliar with Cuba should know that for a saint to rise up into someone or descend upon somebody or to be carrying a saint, to be stricken by a saint, or to have a saint come into one’s head, are all names used here for these phenomena. They are as old as humanity, known throughout all time and all peoples, and they occur incessantly amid us and consist of a spirit or a divinity taking possession of someone’s body and behaving as if it was its true owner throughout the duration of its stay in the body. (30–31) In this quotation the narrator demystifies the occurrence, presenting it as a common practice. Furthermore, at the same time that the occurrence is characterized as exclusive to superstitious blacks, the phenomenon is also presented as something common to all Cuban people. The quotation even goes on to universalize what it describes as something that has always happened to all people throughout history. Even though the faith in these occurrences is superstitious, the book nonetheless sets out to present them through a series of eyewitness testimonies. Even the narrator at times takes seriously what she at other points dismisses as superstition. The definition given for “a saint rising into someone” is complemented with the story of the first time she witnessed this phenomenon: I was filled with awe; I must admit it: fear. When the drums rang out in honor of Changó, a black woman suddenly leapt an incred78

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ible distance and fell stiff upon the cement floor. She suffered a severe blow to the back of the head that I naïvely thought would prove fatal. In an instant I imagined all the unpleasant complications my presence there exposed me to on account of the death of that monumental woman. . . . None of the others present showed the fright my companion read in my eyes when she grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t worry, child. It’s a real saint.” In an attack of convulsions, the woman snorted and banged her head, which I assumed to be smashed to pieces. . . . I couldn’t understand the agility of that woman, who anybody would have thought to be crippled by her excessive fatness . . . much less the fact that, despite logic, she had not already cracked her head open. But logic, thank goodness, doesn’t have faith. (39) The narrator’s companion states that the saint is real, whereas the narrator admits to her own naïveté in this seemingly implausible situation. But she saw the incident and now testifies to it. As this was the first time, there is certain incredulousness on her part. Through repetition and experience, what seems implausible becomes real. Nevertheless, her testimony is not privileged over that of the others: “Being possessed is so common in Cuba—whether it be self-induced, provoked, or frankly faked—that whoever wants to observe it will have more than enough opportunities” (33). This statement destabilizes not only the book’s testimonial narratives, including the narrator’s, but also the relation between seeing and believing. To see is not enough; it presupposes faith. Faith itself, not the gaze, is what makes the testimonies believable. Hence, any observation-based scientific method is thrown irrevocably into question. In the final analysis, the decision as to what constitutes a real fact versus a misinterpreted perception is given to the reader. Among the many stories that appear in the book, one tells of how a deceased “scoundrel” won the thirty Gregorian masses he needed (66). A woman, who lived in a place called the Aparecidos, where ghosts were spotted, once heard a dead man requesting masses in exchange for money. The woman took the money but then did not perform the Disarticulation of the Gaze

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masses as she had agreed. The dead man did not leave her alone until she fulfilled her promise. Before the story itself begins, there is a deliberation between the people present as to the credibility of the storyteller: “The source of this story doesn’t deserve to be trusted” (66). However, the narrator, before the storyteller begins to speak, claims: “I at least pretended not to doubt the story’s truthfulness” (67). After the story is finished, she states: “The reader, knowing the source of the story, is free, as always, to believe whatever she or he pleases. I myself am inclined to accept it as true, as I have borne witness to other events that must seem at least as implausible” (67). The book includes a metadiscourse on the problems of perception, truth, and faith. Meanwhile, the narrator shows the self-consciousness inherent in addressing the potentially skeptical reader who nonetheless has been influenced by the testimony’s “truthfulness.” Perhaps the reader should trust the witnesses’ honesty, or at least “pretend,” like her, in order to continue reading. The narrator, in other words, at once plays the role of defense attorney and prosecuting attorney. And the reader is handed the task of hermeneutics along with the responsibility of deciding what is and is not authentic—just as a jury is presented with testimonies in a court of law.5 Knowledge and power always go hand in hand, as Foucault repeatedly documented. What Cabrera ends up doing is to question power by consistently destabilizing empirical knowledge. As I have demonstrated so far, Cabrera draws on several resources in order to represent otherness, namely, testimonial narrative, the voices of her informants, direct and indirect citations, and changes in grammatical person. Even though her book precedes criticism on testimonial narrative and its canonization as a genre, her use of testimonial narrative enacts textually the theorizations later made about the philosophical and social role of testimonial novels. Cabrera demonstrates how testimonial narrative destabilizes not only categorization as scientific ethnography in El monte but also the rigid notions of both anthropology and fiction. Furthermore, her discourse helps to create the possibility of the Afro-Cuban subject as an agent of history. 80

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The methodology of the use of testimonials in El monte is anything but consistent. On many occasions, as I have indicated above, direct citations are used, whereas other times citations are indirect. To clarify the difference between a direct versus an indirect citation, I draw on Bakhtin’s definitions in “Reported Speech” on direct and indirect reports (Estética 149–50). Direct citations are those subordinated syntactically to the context in which they are enunciated. It is the voice of a recognized Other that enters into dialogue in the narration: “a message belonging to someone else” (149). For instance, the narrator says, “I will let Gabino Sandoval take over now” (El monte 18), and then she begins to cite Sandoval in quotation marks. Indirect citations are those subordinated syntactically to the context of the narrator but are derived from other voices not directly recognized. On many occasions the use of quotation marks is what indicates the invocation of another voice: “There are always two paths: good and bad. ‘We take whichever we chose’” (22). The first words are enunciated by the narrator and immediately afterward another sentence in quotation marks intervenes as if it were a citation, but without recognizing the speaker of the utterance. Sometimes Cabrera uses dialogue without presenting it as such. Some citations include the source’s name, others only the initials, and often one can distinguish one voice from another only through careful attention to the quotation marks that divide the enunciations. Some quotations come to fill several pages of the text. Unlike other testimonial texts, El monte does not present the voice of one single witness but rather a multitude of voices. Among all the cited informants, however, there is the repetition of a series of subjects that allows the reader to trace in broad strokes the personal narrative of each one. Some of them are named in the prologue, along with an acknowledgment of their help. Others become familiar over the course of the book. Among the most cited are José de Calazán Herrera, J. S. Baró, Calixta Morales (most often referred to by her Lucumí name, Oddeddei), Enriqueta Herrera, Nino de Cárdenas, Dolores y Petrona Ibáñez, and, of course, Teresa M. (OmíTomí). The testimonies of these subjects suggest more authenticity Disarticulation of the Gaze

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than in the case of the unidentified witnesses. The presence of a name, along with the relationship the narrator professes to have maintained with each one, gives the impression of verifiable information. Moreover, the proper name confers on them the status of subjects in the narration. In his discussion of alternative discursive practices that can be used in ethnography, James Clifford refers to direct dialogue between informants and the idea of polyphonic discourse, taken from Bakhtin. Nonetheless, he states that “some use of indirect style is inevitable, unless the novel or ethnography is composed entirely of citations, something that is theoretically possible but seldom attempted” (Predicament 47). Cabrera reflects such an attempt to compose a book for the most part made up of the cited discourse of other voices, a book in which the narrative voice, when it does not disappear altogether, is diluted by direct and indirect citations. This becomes apparent if one studies the number of citations per chapter. The first chapter consists of eight pages containing eight direct citations of identified voices, not to mention the indirect citations. Some citations in this chapter are just one sentence, while others fill more than two-thirds of the page. In the second chapter there are thirty direct quotations; in the third, eighteen; in the fourth, four; in the fifth, twenty-four; in the sixth, three; in the seventh, twentyseven; in the eighth, nine; in the ninth, twenty; and in the tenth, four. In quantitative terms the vast majority of the enunciations belong to voices other than the main narrator’s. The botanical appendix includes 549 plant descriptions, of which 277 have direct and indirect citations. The manner in which these entries are presented suggests that the entire text is being copied from an oral source and that the narrator is merely the instrument that transcribes dictated knowledge. For instance, under the “Maloja” plant the only thing that appears is the following: “L. Ewe Echin. Lord: Elegguá. ‘Can you believe I don’t know of anything that can be done with this herb?’” (457; L. designates the name in Lucumí). By placing this comment in quotation marks—cited from another voice—the narrator transmits the fact that the source of the botanical 82

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knowledge lies outside herself, that her informants are, as indicated in the prologue, the “true” sources of knowledge. One could argue that in such instances as this the text articulates a space for the Other, and the Afro-Cuban subject appears to be telling his or her own story, even if it is always mediated by the transcriber who gathers it. Clifford also argues that in the process of assuming the ethnographer’s authority as a narrator or interpreter, that same authority is hampered when incorporated into dialogue, even though dialogue is itself a textual representation (Predicament 43). In his analysis of the work of ethnographer Vincent Crapanzano, Clifford states that Crapanzano can only assume the identity of being the writer of a dialogue, because his authority is “undermined by an inconclusive narrative of encounter, rupture and confusion” (43). One can add that dialogue doubles the possible levels of interpretation. In El monte the dialogues also create breakages and confusion. They are not limited to what the witnesses tell the narrator; rather, their testimonies cite other dialogues. For instance, an unidentified witness tells how Yemayá called to a girl, and the textual representation of the story includes the cited voice of the witness, the voice of the girl Carmelina, as well as that of her mother, Rosa: “Carmelina, Rosa’s daughter, suddenly tells her mother: ‘Mom, listen to the drum!’ ‘What drum, daughter?’ ‘Can’t you hear it? Mom! Take me over there, they’re calling me! Oh, they’re calling me and I have to go!’ Rosa was washing rice. ‘But Carmelina, nobody is playing the drum!’” (34). This dialogue registers four different voices, that is, if the reader adds the voice of El monte’s own narrator, who re-creates it all textually. The interpretation of the event depicted will depend on the voice the reader identifies with. Whoever chooses to hear the drums will also hear the fifth voice of Yemayá calling to the girl. Through the evocation of the fragmentary participation of the different testimonies, the narrative strays away from the sense of sight in order to designate hearing as the primary register. Sound—the voices—is privileged in the methodology of observation. For example, Chapters 2 and 5 begin with citations; the words that open the Disarticulation of the Gaze

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text do not belong to the narrator. By citing, the narrator enters into dialogue with the other voices. Consider the second chapter, in which there are three consecutive citations before any direct enunciation. It is as if Cabrera wanted to pass over language itself so as to give a voice to the Other and reassert her rejection of authorship. This process of textual composition coincides with Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. In his study of the novel, Bakhtin refers to two terms in order to define his plural concept of truth: the monological as a conception of a singular truth, and the dialogical that expresses a plural truth. In the essay “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and Other Human Sciences,” he explains: “The monologue as a discourse is not directed to anybody and does not presuppose an answer. . . . Dialogical relations are relations (of meaning) among all types of enunciations in discursive communication. Any two enunciations that confront each other in the field of meaning . . . establish a dialogical relation” (Estética 309). Bakhtin draws on Socrates as an initial model, namely, his idea that what is important is not to retain truth but rather to seek it, which postulates knowledge as a process. For Bakhtin, the novel is a literary space that permits dialogism: “The dialogic orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness) creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse” (Dialogic Imagination 275). The dialogical implies a subject that speaks to another, but not merely in the form of a dialogue. Rather, one’s discourse incorporates the discourse of the Other or Others. He states that theater is not dialogic, for instance, even though it uses dialogue, because the voices in the play are headed toward a truth. The expressive form can be a dialogue, but its conception is monological. The concept of polyphony highlights the plurality of discourses in the novel and points to the consciousness of the discourse of the Other in one’s own discourse. This discourse is predicated on the relativity of truth. In light of these theories, El monte can be considered a polyphonic text, even if it is not a novel. As I emphasized above, truth is not a given. Instead, the narration finds itself in a process of searching, 84

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and the alternating narrative voices do not provide authority in order to certify a unified truth. The use of the changes in the grammatical person creates a distance between the first-person narrator (the “I”), the witnesses in contact with the “I” narrator who creates a separate discourse, and the objective narrator who uses the third person, creating another text as a framework. This separation between narrations makes the meaning of truth and authenticity relative and produces a variety of styles that establish dialogic relations among themselves. The author’s drive to represent heterogeneity among her subjects results in bivocalism. The witnesses are of different ages, sexes, communities, and experiences, and they adhere to different norms. Given that even their ethnicities vary, the only thing they have in common are their African roots and Cuban nationality (if the white narrator is not counted as part of the corpus of testimonial narratives). The text not only creates plurality but also an excess of stories and myths that contradict each other, although, as Bakhtin indicates, it is not contradiction or disagreement that defines dialogism (Estética 317). For instance, the myths themselves are sometimes recounted according to Ocha (Lucumí) sects, other times according to Congo sects. The same thing happens with the vocabulary and the different dialects portrayed; even the alignment between saints and orishas is not always the same according to each of the norms, and the narrator offers the different possibilities to the reader. The dialogic relation does not arise in the contradictions between the stories. Yet the stories draw attention to the proliferation and the representation of different subjectivities. The enunciation of different voices constitutes the plurality proposed by Bakhtin. Osain (“fortune-teller lord of the herbs and the woods”) is San Antonio Abad for some, San Silvestre for some, and San Ramón Nonato for others (El monte 73). All the different versions of this saint agree (more or less) that he has only his right foot, his left arm, one eye, and one ear, which is disproportionately large. Some paleros (practitioners of Palo Monte) believe in the existence of two different Osains: the good Osain Alábbio and the evil Osain Okini Gwáwó Eléyo (74). After a dispute between the two over a woman, the evil Disarticulation of the Gaze

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brother spends fourteen days in the woods creating a spell against the other. There, he stumbles across his brother’s Elegguá, and while fighting with him, he loses the one eye he had (each person has an Elegguá who functions like a guardian angel; Elegguá is also a protective benefactor to the believer). However, this version has been challenged. For many, “there is only one” Osain, and he has no brothers (74); “Osain Okini Gwáwó Eléyo is not the name of the orisha, nor is it Lucumí. It is an invention” (74), declares the narrator. Domingo Hernández, a named witness, says that Osain also does not have a wife and never desires to have one because he is a pure saint (74). This discussion is followed by different stories that explain why Osain is one eyed, one handed, disabled, and half deaf. According to one of the stories, Changó “destroyed” him by pelting him with stones during a squabble (75). In this story, Oyá wanted to rob Osain of his güiro (an African musical instrument), so she played him a song and gave him a mug of moonshine and tobacco. Osain then tried to possess her, and Changó came to her defense. (Changó, syncretized with Santa Barbara, is the warrior orisha who possesses drums and fire. Oyá is associated with death, as she was found at the cemetery gates, and is also linked to storms and winds. She is syncretized with the Virgin of Candelaria.) Yet, as one of the informants had previously explained, Osain is not a womanizer. It is therefore not surprising that there exists another story that claims Osain waged war (that is, cast spells) on Orula. Orula had to consult with Changó because he was not sure who was harming him. Orula (who halfway through the story is also referred to as Orúmila; for the reader who does not know they are the same orisha, it is impossible to make sense of the story) completes the spell Changó ordered with twelve swabs of burning cotton and twelve lightning stones. When she begins the invocation and lights the cotton, a lightning bolt hits the woods where Osain was located. Thus, he finds himself between two fires. This is how he lost the body parts he is missing, including his eye (75). Fables are also given in various versions; the narrator even makes 86

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light of the profusion of anecdotes about the same event. In one story a woman buys an inexpensive baby chicken. When she arrives home she scorns it for being too small and thin. The baby chicken grows up and becomes a hen, lays eggs, and has its own babies. When the woman sees the hen grown and having multiplied, she wants to take possession of it once again. But the hen refuses to be tamed. This story is a parable which demonstrates that in the Afro-Cuban cosmos an animal should never be discarded, because, much like plants, animals carry great importance. At the end of the last citation of the voice that tells this story, Cabrera intervenes, indicating there is an intervention by the narrator that signals “another version of this story” (56), at which point a separate voice is cited that begins with a man who buys a baby chicken. The explanations become confusing. With the citation of all the different versions of one common belief, there emerges a dialogism that incorporates all the possibilities, even that what is recounted as truthful is sometimes fiction. One need only consider, for example, all the citations offered, one after another, in regard to the ontological character of the silk-cotton tree. The first voice states, “The silkcotton tree is a saint: Iroko.” The second voice continues, “[The silkcotton tree] is the dwelling place of Iroko, who is there present.” And a third states, “[The silk-cotton tree] is the dwelling place of Purísima Concepción, ‘who comes to the silk-cotton tree’ and has her home there.” Others assure that “Iroko is the silk-cotton tree itself.” Still others claim that “the silk-cotton tree belongs to Oggún and Orichaoko,” or “Iroko will be called when the tree is consecrated” (150). Through the agglomeration of citations a constitutive moment of a relative heterology is articulated which promotes the specificity of the subaltern as a subject of history. This instance is repeated throughout the book with the different deities and is also extended to the stories presented in the botanical appendix. According to the narrator, all these digressions result from blacks’ lack of confidence in her as a white woman: “Thus, the white person who wants knowledge, without ‘being sworn in’ in a temple or ever getting involved in anything, has to ask many questions, pry out all Disarticulation of the Gaze

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the answers, consult all the authorities, which in turn prove very reserved, and walk the long mile in order to be able to put together, piece by piece, the truth, which is strewn about everywhere” (138). In this sense the text is constituted as a faithful portrayal of others’ dialogue, which makes finding homogeneity impossible. To respond to this hermeneutical challenge, the reader would have to reconstruct the order that the narrator has apparently been unable to reproduce. At the same time, this structural disorganization echoes the AfroCuban imaginary, and the lack of chronological and thematic order suggests a dismantling of the Western notion of historical temporality. These long fragments in which the voice of the Other is given priority, and where plurality and disorder are promoted in the name of an alternative mode of belonging, can be explained in relation to a more general rejection of authority. Both contribute to a state of ontological confusion. Plurality is transferred from the various representations of the world of mythology and fables to a mimetic intention in the linguistic order. Moreover, other kinds of glossing are included, such as botany and religious prayers. The fragments and words are cited in different dialects—Arará, Congo, and Lucumí. Some translations consist of a single word: “The holy remedy and providential salvation are indisputably still in the woods: in ileigi, igbó, yukó, obóyuro, ngüei, aráoco, eggó, or nínfei, as the descendants of the Lucumís call it; musito, miangu, dituto, nfindo, finda, kunfinda, or anabuttu, [according to] the Congo descendants” (24). Other translations can be an entire sentence: “When lángo-lango mámba Samiánpungo, Mayimbe guari-guari . . . that is to say, when God rains, Mayimbe grumbles and feels bad” (153). These words eventually begin to contaminate the objectified narrator’s own discourse: “El ewe de Babalú Ayé-amasí por ewe, the Ararás say, cannot be mixed with those of any other saint” (110). The “ewe” are the plants offered to the saint. The narrator assumes that the reader knows what “ewe” means, and she even provides the Arará variant. Another example is the following: “A mundele’s kiyumba” (133), which means a white person’s (mundele) cranium (kiyumba). The words “ewe,” “mundele,” “nganga,” and 88

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“bilonga” produce the effect of having penetrated the cosmology represented in the text, at the same time that they shatter all pretensions of objectivity. Remember that in the prologue the author had established that she did not understand her informants’ referential codes. Yet these moments of mixing seem to shrink the gap between the represented Other and the reader. Through repetition, the narration arrives at a point where prose in the other dialect becomes intelligible, and both the narrator and the reader enter into the same discursive universe. The appearance of prayers in another register, however, interrupts this identification: “‘Alá le elé cupaché agó meco’ is a reverential formula often used to praise [Elegguá] or spread his name, as the santeras say” (94). The only informed reader who might be able to understand all the different registers would be a specialist who knows not only Spanish, of course, but also the Cuban syncretism of Lucumí, Congo, Arará, and the Ñáñigos forms. Some religious prayers fill long paragraphs. They are citations of other voices, in another language, where oftentimes the language is not identified and no Spanish translation is included: “Agó Elegguá Baba guara agó Elegguá abacu macu ofónfo tube abebénillo aluna la mu batá omó marata omó cuamá du acheré omó acheré arikú Babaguá déde wanto lo kun. Elegguá had almost laroyé here bollú Baba” (94). Another way of glossing incorporated in the text is the inclusion of syncretic chants; for example, on page 127 one of the chants is used as a password to let someone into the house when there was a reunion. The untranslated prose has the power to exclude the less informed reader and place him or her in a position of otherness. According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of interrelations (Dialogic Imagination 263). The heteroglossia mobilized in Cabrera’s text in its attempt to represent multiple subjects and discourses resists the supposed homogenous totality of culture. At the same time that the text begins to work its way into the ethnographic and testimonial traditions through which narrations are constituted as a metonymy of the represented group (“The Aura of Testimonio” in Moreiras 197), the conDisarticulation of the Gaze

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tamination by that other voice and the inability to locate a fixed “I” demonstrate a resistance to totalization. In the first chapter the narration foregrounds a metonymic interpretation of the Afro-Cuban cultural space: “Our black people—and perhaps we should say our people, who for the most part are physically and spiritually mixed (mestizo)—generally have great knowledge” (El monte 21). However, the text reveals an internal friction that subverts the authorial voice that struggles to represent the reality of the Other. The orthodoxy of a national allegory presented in testimonial novels is also destabilized in El monte, given the heterodoxy of its discourses and the relativity of interpretive power it suggests. In addition to what I have pointed out thus far with respect to the proliferation of testimonies and of discursive forms, the presentation of the religious cosmos opens up a space in which to dialogue about issues of marginality, such as the status of gays and lesbians and incestuous practices. The subject of gays and lesbians in Santeria is controversial and ambiguous. The narrator explains that within Lucumí sects, homosexual practice is more common than it is within Congo sects, which are less tolerant: “Currently, the percentage of pedophiles in Ocha— as opposed to the sects that call themselves Congos, in which pedophilia is profoundly despised and in which all violators are expelled—appears to be higher, causing the old santeros and devout souls constant indignation” (58) (I am aware of the linguistic and behavioral differences between the terms “homosexuality” and “pedophilia,” but I want to point out that in the text the two seem to be equated). Both gays and lesbians are referred to as “reversed,” and the text offers the words used to designate them in the other dialects: “Addóddis, Obini-Toyo, Obini-Ñaña or Erón Kibá, Wassicúndi or Diánkune, as the Abakuás or Ñáñigos call them, and alacuattás and oremi” (59–60). It also includes the voices of witnesses who tell of homosexual practices and state that many of Yemayá and Ochún’s sons are effeminate: “There is a mystery in this part of the Addodis . . . because Yemayá had something to do with one of them. . . . She fell in love and lived with one of them. It was in a Laddo country, 90

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where all the inhabitants were like that—sissies” (58). In the book Yemayá y Ochún, Cabrera clarifies this reference to Yemayá’s love for an addodis (a reversed man): Yemayá was madly in love with an androgyny, the beautiful Inle. In order to satisfy her passion for the young god, she kidnapped him, carried him to the bottom of the sea, and there she had him until, having satiated her appetite, she grew bored of her lover and desired to return to the world, back to the company of the other orishas and men. Inle had seen what no other divine or human creature had. The indescribable mystery of the sea, what lies in its depths. And Yemayá, so that Inle could not tell anyone what had transpired, before setting off on her return trip cut off his tongue. Note that it is Yemayá who talks with Inle in the Dilogún. (45) This love is secret. The metaphor of the hidden is analogous to the homosexual conditions within the practice of Santeria that are kept hidden. Cabrera pays close attention to Yemayá. Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui states in Los orishas de Cuba that Cabrera was the direct daughter of Yemayá (15). Also, it is this orisha who falls in love with Inle; because she cut off his tongue to silence him, Yemayá must speak for him. Yemayá y Ochún also characterizes Orula as an addodi, as he left Yemayá for Oggún, and tells that Obatalá had a love affair with another “Adó and lived with him in the shadow of a cotton plant” (45). In the book Anagó, vocabulario Lucumí: El yoruba que se habla en Cuba, Cabrera offers the following definition: “Adó (adodi): reversed. ‘Of adó earth,’ where according to some, Obatalá-Oduaremu, and according to others, Yemayá, had a love affair with a reversed man or with an androgyny” (31). Much like the silenced Inle, the criticism dedicated to Cabrera has excluded any consideration of her sexual identity. In her essay “Disappearing Acts: Reading Lesbian in Teresa de la Parra,” Sylvia Molloy analyzes the correspondence between Teresa de la Parra and Lydia Cabrera. She proposes an epistolary lesbian reading based on de la Parra’s letters, as Cabrera’s have never been found (Bergmann and Disarticulation of the Gaze

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Smith). More recently, José Quiroga in “Queer Desires in Lydia Cabrera” (in Tropics of Desire) offers a reading of El monte as a queer book. But there has been little critical attention given to the inscription of homosexuality in Cabrera’s texts. That Cabrera evokes this myth of Inle is above all a rhetorical gesture signaling a search for identity. In regard to lesbianism, Cabrera states in El monte that “lesbians also abound in Ocha . . . where yesteryear the patron saint was Inle. . . . Just as powerful and delicate as Yewa, perhaps he demanded the same of his santeras, who abstained from maintaining sexual relations with men” (59–60). Cabrera is the only author to point out that Inle is the saint of lesbians. For instance, in Los orishas en Cuba, a detailed text on all the orishas of the Ocha order, Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui seems to want to keep the secret of the relationship between Yemayá and Inle. In her study of these two divinities, she excludes not only this story but also all connections between Inle and homosexuality (186–90). In his book about these religions, Cultos afrocubanos, Miguel Barnet also overlooks these connections. Both characterize Inle as a minor and forgotten god syncretized with San Rafael, the doctor (Barnet, Cultos afrocubanos 66). In Cuba this popular belief seems to be disappearing on account of the repression of homosexuality carried out during the first decades of the Revolution. Still, I did not find in other works published outside Cuba any reference to Inle as a saint of lesbians, even though some texts do depict his relationship with Yemayá.6 In any case, the important thing here is not to discover whether Inle is or is not the saint of lesbians but that he constitutes a textual maneuver to legitimate the existence of the lesbian relationship that without a “historization” would be nothing more than a myth. The subject of incest also highlights an emergent mode of alterity. “My elders do not like to talk about the taboo subject of incest among orishas and almost all of them evade it. However, . . . Gabino . . . one day, in order to rehabilitate Changó or out of respect for the truth, spontaneously addressed it” (El monte 230). There are different stories that tell of what happened between the brothers Changó and Oggún and the relationship with their mother, Iyémmu. Cabrera 92

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presents two stories in which Changó seduces his mother and has sexual relations with her. According to Gabino’s testimony, it was Oggún who had sexual relations with his mother, not Changó. In both cases, Olofi, the father, catches them. Both incest and homosexuality among orishas and the believers of each order constitute spaces that defy national allegory and the metonymical representability of culture in the text. Unlike in Ortiz—who condemns heterodox practices as primitive or simply avoids such subjects (note that Ortiz does not speak of either incest or homosexual practices)—El monte overflows with possibilities of subverting the established order. The heteroglossia of the text, the polyphony of voices, the testimonial narratives of the “Others”—all point to the loss of a central subject, the authoritarian voice. However, through citation the narration always returns to the same voice—the one who cites—which becomes the written word, thereby displacing the orality of the citation itself (de Certeau 156). The voice of one author imposes itself, but in this book the narrator’s voice turns into a collection of all the different narrative voices, and the result is a nonhomogenous text. El monte creates the sense that the other voices are the author so as to move toward the notion of a subject that lies behind all the stories. By presenting these social “taboos” in a dialogism of found voices, the narrator in one sense rejects authorial responsibility. But this presentation of “taboos” in the voice of others also makes legitimate these transgressive practices in the different social groups reconstructed in the text. The most unique quality of Cabrera’s project is that the reinterpretation of the subjects she represents provides an alternative to the hegemonic (scientifically authorized) projects of Cuban culture. The result is the construction of a space for otherness. Perhaps it would be too much to claim that El monte inscribes itself in postmodern ethnography or in the postmodern strands of testimonial discourse. Bearing in mind the debate between those who write postmodern ethnography and the criticism of them effected by feminist theorists such as Frances Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen in the essay “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective,” I propose in Disarticulation of the Gaze

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this book the possibility of reading Cabrera’s work as postmodern ethnography. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen allege that the “radical” aspect of what George E. Marcus, Michael M. J. Fischer, and James Clifford propose has for years been a topic of research in feminist criticism: the idea that culture is comprised of codes of contestatory meanings; that language and power are inseparable; and that the construction of the Other gives rise to power relations. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen take issue with the attempt to grasp more adequately the Other’s subjectivity through the aesthetic trend of postmodernism, rather than through a political agenda such as feminism. On the one hand, they explain that the postulates of postmodernism, created by Western white men, question the basis of truth at a convenient moment when these same men are the ones losing the privilege of defining truth. In other words, it seems suspicious that precisely now, when non-Western subjects and women have begun to speak, theorists have decided that language no longer corresponds to reality (Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 15). They also insist on the danger of preserving the same dominant colonial and neocolonial relations through an ideology that continues to sustain the position of the white Western man, even as this ideology ostensibly aims to overcome colonialism. This reaction directly attacks Clifford, Marcus, and Fischer for discarding feminism as a theoretical option for the new ethnography they are developing. On the other hand, the limitation of this critique is its claim that feminism is somehow a more legitimate framework for representing “otherness” simply because of its opposition to the power of the white Western man. Cabrera’s discourse conceives of difference outside of the system of binary oppositions, and it escapes the paradox of seeking a more exact truth by questioning beliefs regarding knowledge and language and by using dialogue, multivocalism, and plurality. I, in turn, disregard the possibility that Cabrera be conceived as a more faithful representative of “otherness” simply by virtue of being a woman and that this in itself authorizes her to understand and interpret the reality of the Other, as Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen have suggested. 94

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Nevertheless, according to Stephen A. Tyler in “Post-modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,” there are various parallels between postmodern ethnographic practices and Cabrera’s own methodology in El monte. Tyler indicates: “We better understand the ethnographic context as one of cooperative story making that, in one of its ideal forms, would result in a polyphonic text, none of whose participants would have the final word in the form of a framing story or encompassing synthesis—a discourse on the discourse” (126). At the end of his discussion, Tyler proposes the Bible as a model of a postmodern ethnographic text, using a reference to Werner Kelber’s book The Oral and Written Gospel. This alternate proposal to traditional ethnography states that the text should evoke rather than represent. Evocation is defined as a process, not a way to fill an absence, as is the case with representation. Similarly, Cabrera’s text is a re-creation of an evoked orality that dismantles the scientific scrutiny of data and evidence at the same time as it reinvents a cultural space through a revision of conventional social codes. Moreover, Cabrera’s interpretation of Afro-Cuban culture is conceived as a process. El monte is an enigmatic and paradoxical text that presents its ethnographic “truth” as partial and incomplete, thereby inscribing itself in the very impossibility of achieving solvency in the debate over Cuban identity. Drawing on the Neil Larsen’s postulates, Sklodowska contends that it is possible to consider testimonial narrative as a style of postmodern discourse. Besides its hybridity, a distinctive sign of postmodernity, the genre reaffirms alterity and heterogeneity: “Testimonial discourse is fragmentary, local, defiant of hierarchies and homogenous forms” (88). She also refers to the discrepancies between postmodern discourse and testimonial narrative. First, the latter’s longing for verification does not uphold postmodern premises. And, second, it does not take up “the project of rewriting historiography,” although this could be debatable (89). Cabrera opens her own discursive space by drawing on the methodology of testimonial discourse, which fuses together characteristics of the ethnographic text with figurative aspects of literary discourse and which at the Disarticulation of the Gaze

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Lydia Cabrera with an informant at the Central Cuba, Matanzas, Cuba, 1940s. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

same time presents the equivalent discrepancies referenced by Sklodowska in order to define testimonial narrative as postmodern. The discursive form employed in El monte makes clear just how paradoxical and contradictory it is to conceive of truth in the text. The twenty-five pages of photographs at the end of El monte appear to certify the authenticity of the text—the same authenticity that has been challenged in the five hundred previous pages. They also appear to form part of the tradition of anthropological observation. By including images of the witnesses, however, the text disarticulates the ethnographic gaze. José de Calazán Herrera, Calixta Morales, Manuela Mariate, Francisquilla, and all the rest are subjects who gaze back at us. They are people who look into our eyes: The face is signification, and signification without context. I mean the Other, in the rectitude of his face, is not a character within a context. . . . The face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not “seen.” Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par excellence absorbs being. . . . The face is what one cannot kill. . . . Face and discourse are tied. The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse. I have just refused the notion of vision to describe the authentic relationship with the Other; it is discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility, which is this authentic relationship. (Levinas, Ethics and Infinity 86–88) Levinas evokes an ethical relationship of responsibility to the face of the Other. In addition to suggesting that the face itself provokes discourse, he annuls vision as an authentic form of relating to the Other. He postulates the face as a discourse of signification, not as an object to be possessed through the gaze. In this sense the faces photographed in Cabrera’s text further problematize the relationship with the Other. El monte’s most fundamental textual characteristics—ambiguity, subjectivity, speculation, and vocal polyphony, among others—are inherent to literary discourse. Consequently, the book’s internal friction between the ethnographic and the literary suggests that both Disarticulation of the Gaze

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categories are unstable. Yet critics insist on determining where to draw the line between fiction and reality (even Sklodowska’s project is based on a search for truth). In the end what must be emphasized is the fictitious, “constructed” character of the literature known as testimonial narrative. Such a viewpoint carries within it the need to dismantle the idea that any testimony project is transparent, truthful, and void of literary artifice. In the essay “El testimonio, ¿crónica, autobiografía o género picaresco?,” Yvonne Jehenson calls attention to the result of what is witnessed, rather than focus on the impossibility of capturing the testimonial reality in narrative language (81). This shift in focus evokes John Beverly’s previously quoted statement regarding “what [testimonial narrative] produces in the reader,” that is, the product of reading as opposed to the text’s immanence. To focus on the result is to consider the effect as the primary issue. This at once distances us from notions of the “cause” and the “truth” and draws us closer to considerations of the “effect” and of the result foreseen by Jean Baudrillard. This shift does not mean giving up on truth but rather the abandonment of the traditional ways in which history has been constituted as a way of exercising knowledge. Representations of otherness will always be artificial in the sense of making “art.” It is impossible to provide an answer to Spivak’s question. Still, as Tyler suggests, one possible solution is to advocate a kind of polyphonic text that assumes the responsibility of the Other so that it may be “fair” in its representation of cultural otherness. One can argue that in the narration of El monte, Cabrera not only heralds the considerations of current criticism but also parodies them through her fictionalized anecdotes. Thus, she dismantles the rigid categories of anthropology, the testimonial novel, and fiction in general. By means of her gallery of voices, she manages to open a space of representation for the Other, thereby echoing the voices of the Afro-Cuban subjects who tell their stories with a name and a face. Lastly, this collection also creates an alternative national imaginary to the hegemonic Cuban cultural narrative of the time. 98

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The gap between a familiar “we” and an exotic “they”

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is a major obstacle to a meaningful understanding of the Other, an obstacle that can only be overcome through some form of

The Death of the King Between Anthropology and Fiction

participation in the world of the Other. Loring Danforth, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece

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In his preface to the book Anthropology and Literature, Paul Benson begins by affirming that “the fusion of anthropology and literature is one in which the language of science employs the aesthetics of art” (xi). Yet the common ground between science and poetics should not be taken for granted. It is after realizing that writing is a political act that ethnographers assume responsibility for the narratives they construct. Moreover, only recently has there been a place for analyses of the figurative in the supposedly objective discourse of the sciences. The discipline of cultural studies has even carried out epistemological investigations of natural sciences as a social construction. I have already discussed the liminal space of the testimonial novel, which is located in the overlap of anthropology and fiction. This fusion, however, has not always been accepted. In the field of ethnography, to write about personal experience at the research site, researchers have traditionally separated their own persona from the narration of the Other, as any other style was considered inappropriate. Edward M. Bruner states that “the split between the ethnographic self and the personal self was also a split between anthropology and poetics” (4). This split was only logical under the premise that scientific discourse revealed an objective knowledge exempt of values. To that end, the anthropologist had to divorce his or her narrative “I” from objective discourse in order to reclaim authority and present all findings as scientific truth. The result was the publication of scientific treatises written with counterparts of a more personal style, which were sometimes signed with a different name. One could consider the work of anthropologist Laura Bohannan, for instance, whose personal story appears under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen. Others have used the same name for both types of publications, but whereas some are classified as ethnography, others appear under the rubric of memoirs or confessions.1 There have been cases of married anthropologists who have carried out their research together and the man—by virtue of traditionally being the authority figure—publishes the scientific study while the woman does her own literary or personal work; a good example is the work of Edith and Victor Turner. Death of the King

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In the field of literature the opposite occurs; when the language of science is used, the result is not a loss of authority. In his book Myth and Archive, Roberto González Echevarría has taken up the task of showing how Spanish American literature has drawn on other discourses—for example, law and anthropology—to legitimize itself. What happens, however, when this textual maneuver threatens the hegemonic discourse it imitates? Authors such as Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera, for instance, published anthropological and fictional books simultaneously, and both problematized these categories by dismantling the generic separation between textual processes and products long before cultural studies came into being. In the previous chapter I posed the question of what differentiates El monte from Cuentos negros de Cuba. The answer would be obvious if one categorized El monte as a book of anthropology based on the “truth” of research and the premise that it is a textual copy of informants’ voices, and if Cuentos negros de Cuba were in turn considered to be simply “stories,” as the title announces. I have already considered how Cabrera undermines the elements that differentiate one discourse from another in her so-called anthropological work. In this chapter I will analyze her literary work in order to demonstrate that through an anthropological contamination, her fiction crystallizes the current crisis of representation and questions the discourses of power anchored in scientific knowledge. I will continue to focus on the tense relationship between the ethnographic versus the literary text, by examining the books Cuentos negros de Cuba and Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba. The discussion will hinge on three aspects that constitute the organization of the chapter. The first subdivision, “The Pantheon of the Orishas,” considers the presentation of Afro-Cuban religions in the stories. In the sections titled “Positive Ontology” and “Genealogies,” I examine the use of an Afro-Cuban cosmovision in relation to a rhetorical project that is an attempt to articulate a foundational Cuban identity. In the final section of the chapter, “The Space of Women,” I explore the place inaugurated for the female gender in such stories as “Bregantino Bregantin,” which also hints at the themes to be addressed in the next chapter. 102

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As I have indicated, Cabrera utilizes discursive strategies that impregnate her ethnography with literature and vice versa, thereby fusing the two together. The inclusion or omission of her personal “I,” the characterizing of the narrator’s own voice as just another informant, the changes in grammatical person, the way in which informants are used and presented, the authority they are given or denied, the way in which the “narrator” mimics the informants’ discourse, onomatopoeias, metaphors, the codes Cabrera uses, heteroglossia, textual organization—all these aspects of the supposedly ethnographic text’s montage are aesthetic and of a formal nature. By the same token, Cabrera’s fiction incorporates the referentiality of scientific discourse: it eliminates the presence of the informant and the invocation of a narrative voice and invents the anthropologist’s utopic space in which scientific research itself becomes dramatic in the absence of a mediator. Unlike traditional ethnographers who divide their texts into scientific versus fictitious works (so as not to lose authority as researchers and even going to the extreme of changing names), Cabrera imbricates the two and in this way deconstructs the very authority that traditional ethnography attempted to secure. “Obatalá must always be kept wrapped in cotton—oú—covered in a kind of impeccable whiteness,” reads one of Cabrera’s texts. Another states: “And the glory of dressing Obatalá, who is at once one and sixteen, fell upon the cotton plant, Oú, by virtue of the softness and whiteness of its hair.” Can any substantial difference be noticed between the two statements? Both suggest that Obatalá dresses in white and that cotton belongs to him. Can the reader decide which quotation corresponds to the ethnographic text and which to fiction? On both occasions the narrator explains Obatalá: a saint of the Lucumí sect syncretized with the Virgin of Mercy and the most important deity of the Yoruba pantheon after Olorum (the god of infinity). He is the god of creation, since Olorum disappears and leaves Obatalá in charge of the world. The only technical difference between the two quotations is the use of the verb: in the first the verb is conjugated in the present, whereas in the second the past tense is used. The first quotation is taken from El monte (57) and refers to the Death of the King

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eternal condition of Obatalá, whereas the second comes from the story “El algodón ciega a los pájaros” (68), which appears in the collection of stories Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba. Here the reader is told how, in the beginning, cotton came to be Obatalá’s plant. Cabrera distances herself from other scientific and anthropological studies of Afro-Cubans in her unique way of addressing their world. She creates a space that blurs the dividing lines between the researcher and the object of study, between the voice of white people and that of blacks, which has the effect of placing the reader in the midst of an Afro-Cuban cosmogony, black or mestizo. My purpose here is not to prove whether this cosmovision is a faithful and truthful representation. Other studies exist that discuss the legitimacy of Cabrera’s work by comparing it with myths found in Africa. What is being considered here is the elaboration of an alternate space with respect to Cuban cultural hegemony, which is dominated by white men who expound a Western discourse, and where the white anthropologist has the power to define and immobilize the culture of the Other. In its prologue, Fernando Ortiz himself calls Cuentos negros de Cuba “folkloric literature of Cuba [that] is black-and-white” (10). He thus legitimizes Cabrera’s entrance into the privileged intellectual circles from which this folkloric literature had been narrated. In the history of Cuban culture, the narrators of this folkloric literature have generally been white, as is Cabrera. Still, when considering this statement, one must take into account the reception of these stories and Cabrera’s reasons for writing them. When bell hooks analyzes the presentation of Zora Neale Hurston’s stories, for instance, she is quick to point out that the author never declares for whom cultural legacy is preserved: “Yet she never directly states for whom she wished to preserve the culture, whether for black folks, that we may be ever mindful of the rich imaginative folkways that are our tradition and legacy, or for white folks, that they may laugh at the quaint dialect and amusing stories as they voyeuristically peep into the private inner world of poor Southern black people” (Yearning 136). Similarly, one might ask, for whom does Cabrera write her texts? Let’s first consider the locus from which her writings emerge. 104

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Lydia Cabrera with informants at the Central Cuba, Matanzas, Cuba, 1940s. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

The first edition of Cuentos negros de Cuba includes a prologue by Ortiz, who states that Cabrera penetrates into Afro-Cuban folklore “first out of curiosity and then out of pleasure” (7). The curiosity and pleasure surrounding the exotic are currently two of the most scrutinized aspects in cultural studies–oriented considerations of representation. As hooks reminds us: “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling . . . ethnicity becomes spicy . . . imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other” (Black Looks 25). Furthermore, Ortiz calls Cabrera the white translator of black folklore. Yet despite Ortiz’s efforts to patent the study of Afro-Cubans, why would blacks in Cuba need a white translator if it were not for the absence of their own voice? These concerns refer back to the idea of “legitimation,” according to Jean-François Lyotard. He proposes that modernity privileged scientific knowledge using discursive strategies that enabled the authorization of its own truths. This entails hierarchical processes of legitimation and verification (Condición 22). He adds to this the ethical dilemma presented in La diferencia, that moment when language attempts to silence the Other in order to instate its hegemony. Ortiz is part of this scientific discourse that legitimizes its own truth by means of an authorized hierarchy, as I discussed in the first chapter, and in his prologue to Cabrera’s book he resorts to the same authority. However, Cabrera does not ever claim to be “the translator” from blacks to whites, as Ortiz would have it. What she does propose in some of her prologues is to be a transcriber of other voices—and those other voices are installed in a black universe that she creates. Indeed, this self-consciousness in regard to the process of textual creation is precisely what differentiates Cabrera from Ortiz. Hence the importance of emphasizing that Cabrera’s representation of the Afro-Cuban inaugurates a space situated between Cuban cul106

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tural hegemony and the margins of the silenced voice of the Other: the “in-between” space, as described by Homi Bhabha when he relates the articulation of cultural difference to the process by which the excess of the community is relegated to a marginal space and collectively transformed (Location of Culture 1–2). The Cuban hegemonic intelligentsia have established a supremacy through the violent gesture of drawing power from the impossibility of expressing otherness, while the marginalized Afro-Cuban subject is not able to express herself or himself owing to a deprivation of means with which to argue. Even today, for the most part, white researchers are the ones who occupy the highest positions in the foundations and institutions in charge of the studies of Afro-Cuban culture in Cuba. Michel Foucault, in his analysis of the relationship between knowledge and power, suggests that there is neither a singular discourse of power nor a singular one opposing it but rather that different discourses exist within the same structures of power which everyone inevitably represents: “There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements of blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy” (History of Sexuality 101–2). Although it is a conceptual impossibility to speak from a space outside the discourse of power, according to Foucault, Cabrera does manage to articulate a voice of resistance from within the discourse of power. What is important is that her mode of resistance constructs an identity for a subject historically destitute of his or her own identity. And this gesture simultaneously foreshadows an agenda that ultimately leads to the proposition of an alternative national identity. Cabrera commented on various occasions that she had written this first book of stories to entertain Teresa de la Parra, to whom the book is dedicated, while she lay dying. But Cabrera also admitted that she learned the anecdotes as a child and that she integrated Death of the King

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them into her life as if they were her own. By affirming that the stories are part of her childhood, Cabrera makes a claim of belonging— a slightly problematic belonging, given that the stories represent an Afro-Cuban cosmos that she re-creates. But her first book has no prologue other than the one written by Ortiz, and Cabrera’s opinions in that regard only become known through interviews with her conducted years later. Her second book of stories does not contain any pretext. In the prologue to the third book, written in exile, Cabrera claims to recuperate the oral tradition of Afro-Cubans who recounted the anecdotes appearing in the book. In an article on Cabrera’s stories, Esperanza Figueroa (who wrote the prologue of the fourth and last of Cabrera’s books of stories) writes that “the stories express the collective memory of the island of Cuba” (91). On the one hand, Cabrera confesses in an interview on her first book of stories: “Permit me to tell you the truth (because we should be honest, right?): the vast majority are invented and I had fun writing them” (35). On the other, to claim legitimacy or to scrutinize the origin is not relevant to this book; on the contrary, what concerns me is to discern that moment when these “invented” stories became the collective memory of a culture: Which narrations are recovered, and what kind of national subjectivities do they construct? The narrations of Cabrera’s first two books, Cuentos negros de Cuba and Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba, are immersed in a world where the black and the Afro-Cuban are the norm, and the white is inverted as the Other. What I propose is not that Cabrera should concede the narrative voice to the Afro-Cuban subject but that she does create the fiction of doing just that, granting the Afro-Cuban subject agency through a discourse that creates a cultural space organized according to an Afro-Cuban ontology. It is a rhetorical project of re-creating an anthropological utopia and of simultaneously deconstructing it.

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The Pantheon of the Orishas One of the most popular themes in ethnography is the study of religion. If Afro-Cubans are the subject of Cuban anthropology par excellence, the religious syncretization that they practice is the most studied aspect both in and outside Cuba. The anecdotes about their beliefs recounted by informants in El monte appear dramatized in Cabrera’s stories. However, Cuentos negros de Cuba is published for the first time in Paris in 1936, and the research carried out to write El monte begins after her return to the island. This book of stories therefore precedes the ethnographic information later gathered by Cabrera and thus evidences the popular character of the knowledge of orishas and Afro-Cuban religions in the Cuban popular imaginary. For instance, Ochún, Changó, and Yemayá are all among the most popular orishas in the mainstream of the population. Cabrera’s presentation of the mythological universe remains strikingly similar both in her stories and her work categorized as anthropological. One might compare the following paragraphs: Oshún-Yeyé-Cari . . . with her delicate gold bracelets . . . is the quintessence of flirtatiousness, of poise, of insinuating and captivating flattery; mirror of the thoroughbred “castiza” woman, the totally Cuban mulatta with style, the inspirer, a haughty and revered mulatta of colonial times, the refined mulatta, forgotten predecessor of some surely first-rate families, or the secret grandmother of so many nouveau riche tycoons. Oshún-Yeyé-Cari, idealization of the black beauty, typically short, happy, and charming but with the arrogance, extravagance, and conceit of proud royalty . . . her power has no limits. (El monte 38–39) Ochún, the one who lives in hearts, Ochún Yeyé-Kari, the flirty party girl, the one who makes everything bright and lovely when she smiles, is happy knowing how good-looking she is. . . . The jingling of her twenty-five gold bracelets fills the air with happiDeath of the King

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ness. Ochún wraps herself in her large yellow robe. Thick drops of coral and amber adorn her throat. . . . When Ochún Yeyé-Kari heads toward Bembé, there is not a woman in heaven, superhuman beauty, black or white, that moves like her, struts so gracefully, or fans herself with more elegance. (Por qué 46–47) The most striking difference at first sight is the spelling of Oshún instead of Ochún and Cari versus Kari, as the variations suggest a direct transcription of an oral source. Both paragraphs show the personification of the orisha as a flirtatious mulatta woman of great beauty and cheerfulness. Both descriptions include a summary of the information presented in a conventional patakí: her color, yellow; her attribute, the fan; her tools, twenty-five gold bracelets mounted on a crown; her necklaces, made of coral and amber; the clothing, a yellow robe. Oshún (Ochún) is syncretized with the Charity of Copper (La virgen de la Caridad del Cobre), the patron saint of Cuba. A careful reading reveals that the first quotation evokes Oshún’s national characterization. Her description in El monte is taken as a metonymy of the mulatta Cuban woman. It also points to the black ancestry that, supposedly, all Cubans carry in their blood, even those who come from high lineage and deny any African heritage. Oshún reclaims the thoroughbred “castiza” woman in her alter ego. The mulatta is the living body that reflects the “castiza.” Oshún, the African root of Cuban culture—that of colonial times, the grandmother—is represented as that which is truly Cuban; moreover, the narration makes an appeal to history that goes beyond any objective ethnographic description. The quotation from the story grants Ochún supremacy in beauty among the entire Yoruba pantheon, the mixed mulatta above white and black women, without claiming a Cuban origin. The description of her attributes is narrated with greater distance in the fictional narration. Therefore, the ethnographic text suggests a greater subjectivization. The story “Se hace Ebbó” in Por qué is a compendium that summarizes and clarifies the entelechy that organizes the Afro-Cuban 110

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cosmos (Ebbó refers to the sacrifice or gift given to an orisha to gain the orisha’s protection; through it, the orisha promises to satisfy the person who gave the offering). The story also illustrates how literary discourse makes reference to anthropological discourse in Cabrera’s stories. It begins with a foundational myth about the power priests exert over the unknown. Orula (or Ifá, syncretized with Saint Francis) is the orisha lord of divination, as he sees everything. The babalawos are Orula’s children and therefore the priests of divination. They are the ones who offer advice and consultation to people with problems. To exercise their powers they use a metal chain, whether it is gold, copper, or silver. For their part, babalochas and iyalochas (priests and priestesses) also have the gift of divination, but they perform it through the use of snails. In particularly grave cases, they consult a babalawo directly, since his ability is superior to theirs. As Cabrera mentions in El monte, the influence constantly exerted by wizards and magic over the lives of Afro-Cubans is the result of their supernatural perception of their surroundings. Due to the sense of immediacy Cubans have of their surrounding reality, they do not use divination for the purpose of knowing the future such as in fortune-telling, for instance, but instead to solve current problems affecting their lives. In an interview I conducted in Santiago de Cuba in September 1998, santera Yolanda stated that the difference between Cubans and Europeans (tourists) that consult her lies in the type of information sought. Whereas the foreigners are preoccupied with the distant future—if they will receive a raise at work, if they will have a lot of money, if they will meet the man or woman of their dreams, what will happen to their children when they grow up—the local population is more concerned with the present: how to survive current unemployment, how to bring down their son’s fever, how to resolve a conflict they’re having with a colleague, what to do to scare off a person of whom they are jealous. In the first chapter of El monte, Cabrera explains the principles that organize this doctrine and how blacks draw on magic mainly to preserve their health and well-being, to protect themselves from adverse forces at the same time as they attack adversity (19). In the mythical organization of these norms, Death of the King

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death, personified by Ikú, and illness always go together. Illness is death’s servant. The references to “illness” are sometimes personified and sometimes not in Cabrera’s texts. “Se hace Ebbó” begins when Ikú, feeling very hungry, awakens an illness that has been lying dormant for some time: “Death will never manage to fill its stomach” (197), and due to its hunger it continues to take people away from the earth. Ikú and illness decide to visit a town on the coast and contaminate its inhabitants with a plague in order to satisfy their appetites. But in this particular town there lives a babalawo who, as is customary, every morning greets the sky, the dead people, his angel, and all twenty-six orishas. Then he consults his divination chart and discovers Ikú and illness discussing their plans. And so he warns the entire town. Nine babalawos and nine iyalochas meet with him, because nine is Oyá’s number (the lord of the cemetery), and they have to earn his protection through prayer, chants, and offerings. The story turns into a description of a veritable parade of mamalochas (women priests) and the saints they belong to, representing some parts of the patakís of each orisha. Note that it is women who participate in the festive event, leaving out the men: “There go the mamalochas to Babalawo’s house: roasted, pretentious, sparkling, strutting, and emphatically fluttering their fans made of guano and decorated with the symbolic colors of their orishas” (209). Obatalá’s daughters head the list of mamalochas; they are described as immaculate, dressed in white suits and handkerchiefs (remember that Obatalá is the god who dresses in cotton), adorned with pearl and opal necklaces, the jewels being the sign of their “master,” as they call the orishas. The second group consists of the daughters of Ochún, who is known as the “whore saint” (210). Her daughters are dressed in yellow and wear amber and gold adornments. That Ochún is characterized as a whore does not indicate any lack of respect. She is the woman who governs the world and men with her beauty, and for her followers this is Ochún’s pride. Then comes a description of the daughters of Yemayá-Olókun, who is said to be Ochún’s daughter. The story reminds the reader that Yemayá, god112

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dess of the sea, gave Ochún the rivers and protects her. Her daughters are dressed in blue and white with blue pearls and silver jewels. Next, Changó’s daughters are mentioned. They “are arrogant like their father the Fire” (210) and thus are dressed in red and coral. Oyá is the goddess of burials, and her daughters wear suits of all shapes and colors, given that Oyá is typically represented with the colors of the rainbow. Elegguá, the lord of the roads, has daughters dressed in black and without jewels; in El monte an entire chapter is dedicated to the different Elegguás, above all Osain, who is syncretized with Saint Anthony Abad and is the god of the woods and herbs. Oggún, god of iron and lord of the metals, whose spirit dwells in the machete, has daughters dressed in the color of purple wine. The narration tells of how Oggún opened pathways, thereby making the world inhabitable. His body is made of iron, and his head, of stone. Ochosi’s daughters walk alongside Oggún, because the two orishas are always together. Ochosi is the god of the forest and of wild animals. The next group is of special interest, given that they are the daughters of Inle, the divine doctor. The narration explains: “Mysterious saint that rarely comes down to possess people anymore, the patron saint of women who love each other, they have to dress in light red” (210). This description is the same one found in El monte in a shortened form. However, it is important to point out the one appearing in this episode, since the orisha is not well known, as noted in the text. Inle rarely appears and is almost never portrayed. He is syncretized with the archangel Saint Rafael: “Divine doctor, patron saint of doctors and surgeons” (Cabrera, La medicina popular 24). In the previous chapter I indicated that Inle is considered a forgotten god in the texts of others who take note of the orishas of the Ocha sect. Of the eleven orishas that Cabrera decides to represent here, Inle is the least common, but she chooses him over other orishas who are more popular and higher in the hierarchy. This maneuver can be read as a subtle insistence to include lesbianism in the text. After Inle’s lesbian daughters, the Nanachúchas that adorn the Ibelles (Yemayá’s twin grandchildren) follow. Their adherents are dressed in orange and white because the twins are Changó’s sons. Death of the King

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The last ones in the parade are the daughters of Babaluayé, the leprous old lord of grains, corn, and smallpox. The daughters, much like their saint, walk with crutches. The text names the orishas and their qualities in the same manner as an ethnographic narration but with a fictitious story, thus intermingling both styles. These two pages at the beginning of the story offer a rather complete summary of the information disseminated throughout El monte. “Se hace Ebbó” centers on the description of santera women who are walking toward Babalawo’s house, and thus the Yoruba pantheon is presented. The narration suggests a celebration of Santeria: “That was a memorable day for Santeria” (210). It then proceeds with the description of the gifts offered forth to Oyá in exchange for her protection. All the townspeople purify themselves and hang the gifts from their necks in order to stave off death. (“Death,” like illness in the stories, fluctuates between personification and death in general. I retain the ambiguity by leaving it lowercased in all references.) One son of Oggún’s (the orisha of pathways) carries the “colossal basket” (211) that holds an ebbó (gift) to be placed on all four roads so as to throw Ikú and the illness off the track when they come. When the illness arrives it discovers the ebbó and, upon uncovering it, finds a chicken, a bunch of bananas, and other delicacies; since she is hungry, she begins to eat until she is stuffed and then goes to sleep. Ikú awakens the illness, asking why it has not arrived at the town, and the illness shows her the treat she has saved to share with her: “Here it is, misuama [master], your food is ready. . . . Ikú, ravenous, curls up next to the basket” (213), and both rest together. At dawn—the omniscient narrator explains—the roads had been switched, and without realizing it, Ikú and the illness unwittingly venture further away from the town. The story ends when they both leave. The ebbó works, and thanks to the babalawo’s divination and the santeras’ preparation, death and illness never arrive. In the middle of this story that exemplifies the orishas’ and other religious practices, one discovers how the babalawo obtains his powers of divination: “Babalawo has the ability to free men from death in accordance with a pact, which in some remote past Orula 114

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made with her in person” (204). The main narration includes this foundational myth. Obatalá writes what is going to happen each day and each moment. In the beginning of the world Orula could read what the will of this god would write—destiny. Out of envy his friends set Ikú against him. And thus it was that she, death, went looking for him one day. At the designated time, rather than hide, Orula went to wait for her. But Orula painted himself white, and when Ikú arrived she could not recognize him: “Does Orula live here, that boastful black man who claims to understand the language of destiny?” “No,” responded Orula sternly, “that man named Orula does not live here.” (205) The narration indicates that Ikú went all around town without finding Orula, until she returned to the house to make sure it was the right place. Meanwhile, Orula had finished preparing the table, and when Ikú returns to the house enraged, he offers her the feast he had prepared. Here there is a reduction of the same story within the main narration insofar as death, again distracted by food and this time drunk as well, forgets that she has come to take Orula and falls asleep. Orula takes her knife—the “scythe”—that she never typically unhanded: “Without this Ikú would consider herself lost. She would be useless. . . . Like venom to the scorpion, logs to fire, bullets to the gun, is the scythe to death” (207). The women of Orula spread the word that he has defeated death. When death awakens, Orula refuses to give back the scythe so as to humiliate her: “Miserable Ikú. . . . I sure do reduce you to misery by taking away your scythe! How will you reap the stems of life? Orula cripples you forever. . . . Everyone will laugh at you. Poor Ikú! . . . I am starting to feel sorry for you” (208). So, Orula proposes a pact. Death must swear never to take anybody away without his knowing: “Swear you will never take anyone who carries my sign, unless it’s someone I personally turn in to you” (209). Orula then returns the scythe. From that moment on, Orula knows when death is announced. The orisha then passed on to his Death of the King

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children the virtue of Ifá—divination. Much like Orula, his followers can delay death when they see it coming by deceiving it. This anthropological documentation of the myth of Orula’s power and that of the babalawos echoes Cabrera’s gesture of incorporating one discourse within another. Just as in Cabrera’s anthropological texts, in her stories everything points to a cosmogony entirely founded on Afro-Cuban elements. The conflict between Orula and Ikú occurs outside this world, but when it is later placed in the story of the town, the parallel story has no definite place. At first illness sleeps in the swamp; the town she is approaching is located on the coast, “over there in the fertile area of sugar cane plantations” (200). These are the only clues given as to the setting. The time is not demarcated either. Other stories transpire specifically in Africa or in Cuba, and there are references to the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but rather than a fixed context, these referents point to the universality of the myth, which transcends space and time. Moreover, “Se hace Ebbó” does not include any white characters, with the ironic exception of Orula when he paints himself white to trick Ikú. The story’s information appears to be taken from an ethnographic document. El monte is full of foundational anecdotes that explain the Afro-Cuban religious system, and they are the same ones that appear in the stories. In the anthropological text, these narrations are voiced by informants whose account reproduces the disorganized orality of speaking and thinking at the same time. In the stories those same foundational myths are ruled over by a third-person omniscient voice that disappears without a trace of a literary “I,” much less a scientific narrator. The story “Se hace Ebbó” creates the effect of intimacy, thereby displacing the separation between the informant and the narrator-anthropologist positioned outside the narrated world. Terms such as “writing culture,” proposed by Clifford and Marcus, take on new meaning when these narrations are considered as anthropological stories. Despite the aesthetic differences between one text and the other, the result is a disarticulation of the exclusive categories of literature and anthropology. 116

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In El monte Cabrera explains that the interaction between human beings and deities is a fundamental element in the Afro-Cuban cosmos. These relationships constitute an essential part of the stories, as I have already emphasized. For a member of a sect (the Ocha, Mayombe, Arará, and so forth), life is a constant struggle against death, the evil eye (bilongo), the evil gods, enemies, and envy. The deities protect people from the evil of others and help them with their feelings of uncertainty. To gain this assistance, believers must devote themselves to the deities, respect them, and present them offerings. In the story “Tatabisaco” (from Cuentos negros de Cuba) a woman loses her son because she does not have the necessary words with which to offer him to the deity—the father of the lagoon—who takes care of him while she is working. The woman lacks knowledge of the necessary signs, and as a result the deity takes away her son. In her book El cosmos de Lydia Cabrera: Dioses, animales y hombres, Mariela Gutiérrez determines which stories are “stories of African themes”—which she defines as those that incorporate real myths and legends from Africa—versus the “stories of imagination”—black fairy tales. Gutiérrez includes the story “Tatabisaco” among those considered to be of imagination, since “in the true myths and legends of Africa the character Tatabisaco does not exist per se; naturally, it does exist as a spirit that resembles him, but that spirit merely provides the archetype for the character created by the author” (36). In her ethnographic texts Cabrera explains that in this cosmogony, sorcery works to defend oneself or to take revenge and the orishas are there to help their children. For instance, in the story “Los compadres,” the wife of the godfather falls victim to an evil eye: The santera, the wash lady who lived with Canpiche, died of astonishment. The truth is that she died of a “job” that a mayombero [a santero of the Mayombe sect] did to her. Nobody dies a natural death! She had many enemies in Santeria. Some of them were grave. When they warned her that they had heard her name mentioned above the “garment,” she already had the “bilongo” Death of the King

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deep inside of her and the “protective measures” she took could no longer help her. . . . They had gotten ahead of her. Thus is sorcery: a constant war of ambushes. A nail taking out another nail, but if the damage ripens and it comes from a wizard who knows his trade, it is very difficult to escape, very difficult. (Cuentos negros 76–77) The story provides information similar to that of the ethnographic text: what a bilongo is and how it works. A garment is offered to an orisha, along with the name of the person one wishes to harm, to protect, or to cure. The protective measure is taken to counteract the effect of a bilongo. As explained, however, if it is not done in time, or if the santero or santera who carries out the command is inexperienced, the protective measure may or may not work. Another element of this theological universe profiled in the stories is the way of representing the characters according to the peculiarities of their saint. The characteristics of a saint are reflected in the person devoted to that saint. Dolé, the female main character of “Los compadres,” is Oshún’s daughter, and like a good daughter, she also is flirtatious like her orisha: “No, Dolé wasn’t evil, but she wasn’t faithful. All the men looked good to her, and the one she liked the least was her own” (69). Dolé personifies all the characteristics of Oshún. Thus, she hides her lover under the bed when her husband arrives. One day the husband catches Dolé with her lover and wants to kill him, but the Civil Guard arrives on time. The husband swears that if he ever catches Dolé again with another man, he will not forgive her. But Capinche, the godfather of Dolé’s husband, also falls in love with Dolé when his own wife dies (she is the one who dies of the bilongo), and so Capinche places a bilongo on his godchild—Dolé’s husband—so that he will die, leaving Dolé to him. Once the husband dies, Capinche attempts to have sexual relations with her. However, according to Afro-Cuban beliefs the dead exist amid the living, hence the dead husband returns to take Dolé with him to the afterlife, just as he had promised to do were she unfaithful. Capinche also dies during Dolé’s wake, but of desire, because he will never possess her. 118

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Wakes are another aspect of Afro-Cuban tradition represented in Cabrera’s stories in a way similar to those in her ethnographic text. During the wake of Dolé’s husband, many stories are told. Then, people play the drums and dance: Black people of Royal Congo gathering came cautiously, ceremoniously; others from the Pueblo Nuevo gathering, from that of Santa Barbara; friends from the tobacco industry . . . friends of friends, acquaintances of the deceased or of nobody at all. . . . They began with their laborious ritual. . . . Then, the deceased rises, moving as if he were rowing a canoe . . . and the deceased rises, oh, does he rise! With his white handkerchief closing his jaws, he strikes the drum three times, like any living person. The Creoles, frightened, run away. Not the Africans; they keep dancing with the deceased. (83) Just as El monte indicates, the Creoles run away in fear when they see the deceased rise because they do not belong to this world; that the black people are not affected shows their familiarity with the belief. The story is narrated in a humorous tone because of the traditional themes of infidelity and the lover forced to hide under the bed. Death, the presence of the dead among the living, and the intervention of saints in people’s lives, in contrast, are presented as natural occurrences, as part of daily life. Thus, Cabrera highlights the fact that the Afro-Cuban understanding of metaphysics is inscribed in an alternate world independent of the empirical data of the West. This alternate worldview permeates all Cabrera’s narrations, both in El monte and the stories. In her stories, in accordance with the Afro-Cuban cosmovision described in Cabrera’s ethnographic work, the unreal is inserted in daily life. Hence, people turn into animals and vice versa. The narrations are populated with these transformations, and the orishas intervene directly in their followers’ lives. The stories circumscribe religion, which in turn permeates everything, since for Afro-Cubans the coexistence of multiple belief systems is a way of life. Another element that creates the illusion that Cabrera constructs Death of the King

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her fictional discourse from the marginal space of the Afro-Cuban is the representation of sexuality. It is quite frank and does not reflect the inhibitions characteristic of Christian beliefs, as Mariela Gutiérrez indicates. Sexual encounters, explains Gutiérrez, are created in sensorial harmony accompanied by musicality and sensuality (El cosmos de Lydia Cabrera 32). In the essay “Black Aesthetics,” Pio Zirimu states that sexuality is a positive and indispensable characteristic in black aesthetics (Zirimu and Gurr). The sexual characterization of the orishas in the stories add to their personalities even in the case of excessive sexualities, just as in Cabrera’s ethnographic text. In the different denominations Changó is masculine and a womanizer, and as I already noted, Ochún is lascivious. Changó is in love with Ochún, and it is said that he has had sexual relations with her mother. In Cabrera’s stories he makes all women fall in love with him. In “Los compadres” the narration begins with a description of how Ochún and Changó begin a love affair: “He conquered her while dancing, she immediately consented, and they lived together” (Cuentos negros 65). Ochún tells Yemayá, her protector, that she has met a black man: “If you saw the black man I have, your teeth would grow!” (65). Yemayá, out of curiosity, wants to meet him. Changó wins her love as well, and she lets him. When she has him in her arms, she remembers the prediction about the old man who always follows Changó and takes care of him: “When you find Changó, call him Lubbeo. He is your son” (68). Realizing, then, that he is her son, she exclaims, “Lubbeo . . . and she lets him drink from her breast” (68). It is indeed an ambiguous moment, as it evokes at once maternity and incest. Just as in “Se hace Ebbó,” in “Los compadres” one encounters an echoing of the saints’ life stories in those of the human characters. The latter function as doubles of the orishas—they fictionalize their patakís. Furthermore, the stories reproduce perfectly the Afro-Cuban cosmogonic belief that what happens on earth has already occurred in a mythic time. In “Los compadres,” sexual relations are celebrated, whether they be between two orishas in love, as in the case of Changó and Ochún, or incestuous, such as the example of Yemayá. And if Ochún is taken 120

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to be Yemayá’s sister, as many hagiographies do, then the relationship between her and Changó is also incestuous, given that he would be her nephew. Another example that breaks from traditional inhibitions is the story “Sokuando!,” which depicts an “honest concubinage” (140). Infidelity and excess sexual relations in and outside of marriage are two of the recurrent themes—the case of Dolé in “Los compadres” is typical. In other stories sex and seduction are explicit and are represented through musical language. Music and seduction combine to reproduce the black aesthetic. In “Suandende,” for instance, there is the following exchange between a married woman and a man who seduce each other: “Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! I’m gonna come in Can I come in?” The woman answers: “Yes, sir, Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón You can come in . . .” “Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Can I watch? . . .” “Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! You can watch . . .” “Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Can I touch? . . .” “Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! You can touch . . .” “Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Can I kiss? . . .” The woman offers him her mouth. “Oh, yes! Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Can I embrace? . . .” “Yes, sir, yáyabómbo, ayáyabón! Yes, you can kiss . . .” (133–34)2 In this reproduction of the couple’s conversation, the rhythm is particularly striking, as it creates a choirlike repetition of the phrase Death of the King

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“Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón,” which subtly changes in relation to the gradual arousal of the characters. It is also onomatopoeia of the sound of a drum. Note that the transcription imitates orality of the spoken enunciation in a written form. This passage thus gives priority to the aesthetic value at the root of African rhythms, reminiscent of the cadence (the “son”) of Nicolás Guillén’s poems. This dialogue of seduction dramatizes that African rhythm—a musical motif—incorporated by Guillén in his poetry and recuperated by Cabrera in her articulation of the Afro-Cuban cosmos. Guillén published Motivos de son in 1930 and Sóngoro cosongo: Poemas mulatos in 1931; Cabrera’s book appears for the first time in 1936, during the peak of the “negrista” movement.

Positive Ontology Contemporary cultural theorists study the relationships between modes of representation and the ways in which power is constituted. Whites’ construction of black racial identity has often been totalizing. Frantz Fanon helped rethink the categories of black and white in the context of Cuba through a detailed study of the colonial experience of black Caribbeans. In his analysis he denounces the expropriation of culture suffered by the latter under the power of the dominant culture, which has throughout history positioned black culture as the Other. In the book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon exposes black men’s internalization of the dominant discourse of the hegemonic class that enslaved them and made them mute and invisible for so many years. He states that blacks undergo a division of the ego as a consequence of colonial subjugation (17). Taking into consideration that the category of “white” is also a construction, bell hooks has explored the control white rule exercises over African American forms of representation. She proposes that to change the image of blacks in a world in which whites have controlled the ways of seeing, thinking, and being, it is necessary to destroy the category of whiteness itself in order to begin to wish for 122

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what she calls “blackness” (Black Looks 2). She adds that the position of resistance should focus on constructions of the subject and an identity that would break away from structures of domination such as racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In her stories Cabrera postulates a positive ontology in the representation of blackness by placing whiteness in the space of otherness, just as she does in her anthropological writings. This rhetorical maneuver promotes an ideology constituted as African that includes a constant mythological return to the beginning of the world, displaying exaggerated germination and the symbiosis of sexuality and music mentioned above. This Afro-Cuban mythologizing can be seen across several stories. “No se resucita” (Por qué) is a story in which the action takes place in the middle of the earth and is inhabited exclusively by animals and orishas; the story “La gallina de Guinea clama: ¡Pascual, Pascual!” transpires in a land where a bird arrives and is not recognized because it is white. “Taita Hicotea, Taita Tigre” begins with a description of the creation of the world according to an Afro-Cuban version of Genesis: “When the earth was young, . . . in the beginning everything was green” (Cuentos negros 41). The action begins in a moment of chaos after the genesis of things: “A bit of order was lacking; fish sucked on the flowers, birds hung their nests from the crests of waves” (41). Little by little things begin to become organized and clearly defined. The reason there are blacks and whites is explained in the following way: “A man rose to the sky on a rope of light. The Sun warned him: ‘Do not come too close, for I burn.’ This man did not pay attention: he moved closer, got toasted, turned black from head to toe. . . . He was the first black man, the Father of all blacks. (Happiness belongs to black people.) Another man went to the Moon. . . . The Moon is cold. Coldness is white. The man who went to the Moon turned white. He was the first white man, Father of all whites. They are sad. . . . It explains everything” (42–43). This foundational myth of the different races is a celebration of black character, and it functions as a revindication of the invisibility mentioned by Fanon. Death of the King

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The story “Hay hombres blancos, pardos y negros” depicts another genesis of the races, adding the element of racial mixing. The first man was black: “He who created the world made all men the same color. And he thought it wise to make them black with the mud of the first pond that was made on earth by the first rain” (Por qué 11). The creator mixes the earth and the water to give color to the first inhabitants. In these early times the earth was a paradise in which the creator was present: “He who created the world then wandered frequently around the new world” (11). His presence in the created universe relieved all existing things: he gratified his creatures, taught them trades, consoled them, and resolved their problems. On one occasion, however, he finds himself with three brothers, and one of them, the youngest, says that he wants to be white like the day. This wish parallels the forbidden apple of the Garden of Eden. Olofi, the creator, tells him of a puddle where he can bathe and become white, and thus he does. The second brother wanted to try as well, but since the water already contained the color of his brother, he emerged as a mulatto. For the eldest there was no water left. The youngest, seeing that he is white, thought himself to be superior to his brothers and said: “You will be my slaves” (12). The second brother was not happy with the result: “Humiliated, suffocated by fear and despair, he felt an impeccable hatred, a secret envy that was expressed in a spiteful yet limitless admiration for his white brother. He then looked down upon his black brother” (13). The black brother “was happy to say: I was black and I am black. My name is Erú” (13). Consequently, the white brother sent his brothers to the field to do hard labor, and he treated them like animals: the end of paradise. The story ends when Olofi realizes that he had made a mistake and leaves the world forever (14). In the story the act of becoming white is presented as a mistake, the reason there is slavery and for the creator’s departure from the world. Thus, that which puts an end to the harmony of the earthly paradise is the difference between races. In the story the white man is the one who causes the black man’s alienation and constructs the structure of domination based on race, which in turn institutes the separation of social classes. 124

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Genealogies In the essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall analyzes how culture is articulated in two ways. On the one hand, it is presented as a common experience: culture is something shared. For this effect, Africa is the term that unites black people in a common past and a cultural identity that affords them meaning and cohesion. On the other hand, asserting the differences in the experience of each group also constitutes cultural identity. Not only looking back on the past but also looking at the present and toward the future creates a sense of identity, since identity is a process in constant transformation. And it is precisely through a break from the past—from Africa—that the trauma of colonial experience begins, stripping away the collective black cultural identity. Many of the Cabrera’s narrations attempt to recover that lost past by grounding themselves in a “return home.” As I mentioned before, the setting of Cabrera’s stories is an important element in the construction of an Afro-Cuban identity. Some of the stories suggest that the setting is Africa, as in “Tatabisaco” and “Chéggue” (Cuentos negros), for instance. Both allude to themes such as the jungle, the hunter, and the tribe. Others are clearly set in Cuba through direct references to the island; for instance, in the story “El caballo de Hicotea,” set in the countryside, Hicotea reads “La Habana Ilustrada,” and “La prodigiosa gallina de Guinea” takes place in Havana. Cuba also appears as the place where history began. Regardless of whether it is Africa or Cuba that serves as the point of origin in the stories, that so many stories start with the beginning of the world must be considered highly significant. In Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba alone there are nine stories that tell of this beginning and eight that relate some kind of foundational act. “Se hace Ebbó” narrates the origin of the babalawos’ powers of divination; “El cangrejo no tiene cabeza” explains the reason behind the cangrejo’s physiognomy, at the same time that it elaborates different versions of the genealogy of the world. Death of the King

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Cabrera’s stories add to the myth of origin the return to the beginning of history, characterized as a present with the ability to renew itself. This return to the beginning asserts the ancestral origin incorporated into the Afro-Cuban cosmovision as constructed by Cabrera. The wood is the locus of this genealogy. In the stories, the woods, the jungle, and the forest are places that act as a matrix for the AfroCuban subject. In Cabrera’s collections of stories, that which is Cuban is conflated with the African precisely because it is located in the woods, in a space “outside,” out in the open. The woods represent the sacred place that is constantly reborn. In the essay on El monte, “La función del monte en la obra de Lydia Cabrera,” Hortensia Ruiz del Vivo comments on the process of creation and rebirth that comes “from the perennial germination of the woods” (Sánchez and Madrigal, Homenaje 74). In the story “Eyá” (Cuentos negros), which means “fish” in Lucumí, there is a metaphor of exaggerated germination. The main character is a fisherman who fishes for Eyá. He and his wife, after eating it, plant its gills, and after three days the woman gives birth to three boys, their bitch gives birth to three male pups, and the mare, three colts. Eyá is recovered, and history begins anew. “The beginning” is located in the woods and is always at hand, since, as Cabrera frequently mentions, the woods can be found in any plot of land where plants grow. The genealogies depicted in the stories mimic the ability and the necessity of Afro-Cuban mythology to return to that beginning. The story “La tierra le presta al hombre y, éste tarde o temprano, le paga lo que le debe” (Por qué) presents the myth of how in the beginning a human and the earth agreed that in life humans would feed on the earth’s products, and in exchange, upon dying, they would feed the earth with their bodies. “El tiempo combate con el sol, y la luna consuela a la tierra” (Por qué) explains the myth of the eternal struggle between the sun and the time for the earth, since the earth gives birth to the sun’s children, but the time inevitably wins and the sun sets each day. The moon then appears in order to console the earth and moisten its sleeping children so that they do not wilt. The circularity of this struggle explains the temporal cycle of day and night, which in turn illustrates the eternal return 126

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to the beginning. The story “Kanakaná, el aura tiñosa, es sagrada e Iroko, la ceiba, es divina” narrates how the earth and the sky—who were brothers—came to be separated. All these narratives represent African cosmogony, thereby creating a foundational fiction for the Afro-Cuban. Jorge Ruffinelli comments in reference to black identity on how Africa becomes a matrix for blacks detached from their roots in the New World. There is a need to create myths in order for blacks to establish a paradigm of the Africa that then enables them to recover a lost identity. This need, according to Ruffinelli, responds to “a historical, not a metaphysical, dissatisfaction . . . that propels this return and elaborates the ideology of a Mother Africa that gave origin to all blacks.” This incessant need “stems from a rejection motivated by racism, exploitation and the colonial situation” (23). As discussed in the story “Hay hombres blancos, pardos y negros,” that the rhetoric of exploitation and racism is incorporated in Cabrera’s narrations contributes to the construction of a fundamentally distinct vision of black Cuban history. The portrayal of this universe produces an alternate perception of Afro-Cuban subjectivity.

The Space of Women In the different Afro-Cuban religious denominations (sects), or reglas, women can carry out the role of priestess, unlike Catholicism, which predominates in the Cuban hegemonic class. Moreover, the Ocha sect in particular includes the practice of lesbianism, as I noted in the discussion of El monte. In Santeria women have almost the same powers as men, and as iyalochas they practice the same liturgical ceremonies. The sole exception is those rituals that only babalawos can perform. These include the sacrifice of four-legged animals, the preparation of some elegguás and osains, and divination through the use of okuelé (a rosary of sorts with eight pieces of metal; iyalochas practice divination through the use of snails). Because she is a woman, Yemayá is not authorized by Olofi to predict through the use Death of the King

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of an okuelé, but she reads them as well as Orula, as Cabrera explains in the book Yemayá y Ochún (44). However, insists Cabrera, Yemayá saves Olofi from trouble and dares to annul his evil deeds, which means that although she is a woman, she does the work of a man. On one occasion, in clear defiance of the hierarchy, Yemayá hides Orula’s até (a babalawo’s wooden plate), and he is forced to spend some time unable to practice divination (45). The story “Bregantino Bregantin” deals with all the subjects discussed thus far: the pantheon of the orishas, the positive ontology of the Afro-Cuban universe, and its genealogy. It also dismantles masculine authority—indeed, that of anthropology—and gives women the power to participate in the foundation of the imaginary of the nation. The story transpires in “an unknown year” (Cuentos negros 11), and the place of the action is mythical: the Cocozumba kingdom. This name is not arbitrary, as it suggests the throwing of coconuts— Ifá’s divination. Its main characters, the king and queen, descend from the first elephant, which founded the kingdom through wisdom, not strength, according to the queen (12). In this way, history is rooted in a myth of foundation. The narrative begins when a black princess, Dingadingá, expresses desire for the first time: she wishes to marry. From the outset the power relations of the white patriarchal power structure are inverted, as the daughter, not the king, is the one who decides the time has come to get married. Naturally, her father wants to marry her to the strongest and most strapping man of the kingdom: “a strong man who hits very hard” (12). However, her mother—the hidden power behind the throne—after consulting the babalawos, decides to marry her to the best musician. A contest is announced whereby all the inhabitants owning a musical instrument are to play for the king and queen, and the one to make the queen dance, despite her stiff knee, would win the princess’s hand. The king accepts, for his wife always imposes her will and leaves him no choice (12). Of all the suitors, the Earthworm is the one who best plays the drums and thus wins the privilege of marrying the princess and inheriting the throne. The drum and the music are symbols of the 128

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African heritage in Cuba and important signs of cultural identity.3 The Earthworm, worthy of ruling over Cocozumba owing to his music and not his physical appearance, marries the princess and rules in harmony. But this harmony is altered when after three years of marriage the Earthworm decides to return to the depths of the earth because he cannot live outside it. So, the Earthworm arranges to have the Bull take his place, since he has been a loyal server for many years; the Earthworm tells him: “I can only be happy underground. . . . As a reward for your services, I leave you my wife, my belongings, my drum; I leave you everything without any conditions. May you be the king of Cocozumba” (16). Both the princess Dingadingá and her parents are pleased with the change, as the Earthworm left an “admirable” successor “of exceptional gifts” (16). In any case, they had never been happy that the Earthworm—“a filthy creature” (16)—had won the contest. But the price of this arrogance of wanting a son-in-law of top lineage is high, since appearances can be very deceiving. As soon as the Earthworm disappears, the Bull kills the king and encloses the queen in the dungeon, starving her until she begins to eat herself. The Bull takes the crown and begins to govern like a tyrant, declaring that all the women of Cocozumba belong to him by law. After some protests, he has all the men of the kingdom killed, including his own sons. Henceforth, each time one of his women—any woman—gave birth to a male child, the Bull, like Herod, punished her severely and murdered the baby: “The Bull king slit the throat of thousands of infants, and he made a habit of following the sun at daybreak up a hill that looked over the valleys, and in a display of arrogance way up high, screaming out into the air this cry of glory: ‘Me, me, me, me, me, me! There is no other man in the world except me, me, me, me!’” (18). The thousands of infants born and killed suggest the perpetual germination mentioned above. The Bull implements an autocratic system of sexist exploitation that alludes to the treatment suffered by Africans during slavery. This fable of the patriarchal dictator bull constitutes a sociocultural space that portrays the subjugation of slavery, at the same time that it paradoxically disarticulates its own Death of the King

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violence. Moreover, the pretension of being the only man in the kingdom is a parody of masculinity: Nothing changed in Cocozumba. . . . The only innovation after a certain period consisted of eliminating the masculine gender from common language as well, that is, when it did not refer to the Bull himself. For instance, everyone would have said that one drove nails with a martilla [as opposed to the masculine martillo], cooked with a fogona [as opposed to the masculine fogón], and chopped with a macheta [instead of the masculine machete]. A foot [un pie (m.)] was una pie; likewise, la pela [hair], la oja [eye], la cuella or pescueza [both mean “neck”], the ten fingers of the mana [hand]. . . . Even the most asexual objects were feminized. (25) If the bull’s domination is the root of the annulment of the masculine, the result is a space that by the reversal of gender re-creates a linguistic universe ruled by a feminine ontology. The leadership of the resistance against the Bull is assumed by a black woman who changes the reality of this exploitation. Sanune, a rebellious woman, stubborn, strong, and disobedient, plants the seed of liberation through the pleas and offerings she makes to the orishas. She had six sons who had been killed at birth, leaving her hurt by the loss of her sons and defiant toward the system. When she discovers that she is going to have a seventh child, she keeps her pregnancy a secret and, faking a toothache, asks permission to search for a cure for her pain. Thus she enters the woods, where the orishas appear. At this point the text returns to the ethnographic testimonial narrative that tells of the religious system of Santeria. Sanune, with the copper chain placed on her ankle by her mother and directed by her spirit, goes in search of Oggún and Ochosi, the saints of iron that her mother had adored while she was alive. The reader already knows from the story “Se hace Ebbó” and from El monte that Oggún and Ochosi are always together and that Oggún, saint of the machete, is the one who opens pathways. The narration becomes the story of some of the patakís of these orishas and the place they inhabit is the 130

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jungle. It tells how Oggún became the saint of the chains and of iron by following Ochún, who, upon seeing him alone in the jungle and knowing that he is still a virgin, fell in love with him. Ochún seduces him with chants and honey until Oggún follows her, carrying behind him the jungle. She leads him to the house of Babá, who ties him up for a time with an iron chain anointed with oil and honey (21). Similarly, it is recounted that Ochosi did not know his mother and grew up enclosed by the jungle; there he learned to make use of iron. He is the saint that staves off evil and bad thoughts. He is also the protector of women, even though he loves Yemayá more than any other (21). This interruption in the story refers the reader directly to the anthropological information gathered in Cabrera’s work. Sanune finds two “arrogant, beautiful” black men who, she deduces, are Oggún and Ochosi (22), and they help her by responding to the pleas of her mother’s spirit. She loses consciousness upon seeing them, but when she awakens she finds herself in a dark room with an old woman who counts snails and, as Sanune departs, gives her “a bunch of goods of various colors” (22). The day of the birth draws near, and Sanune begins the offering a week in advance. Each day she offers one of the orishas a cloth of his or her favorite color, placing it in the designated spot for that orisha. For instance, the first is red, which Sanune places on a poplar tree for Changó. The second day she goes to the seashore and throws in seven copper coins along with a blue cloth as an offering to Yemayá. The third day she goes to the river to make an offering to Ochún, and so on. Five pages are devoted to a detailed description of these rites of Santeria (19–24). Sanune gives birth to a boy, whom one of the executioners kills immediately by plunging a knife in his neck (24). Sanune acts docile and simply walks away. But when the Bull and the old woman have left, Sanune returns to recover the body of her dead son, then taking him to the woods. Ochosi resuscitates the child and tells the mother to return to town, promising that her son will grow strong and that in twenty years his voice will be heard around the world. Sanune is found dead shortly thereafter, and everyone is baffled by the smile on her face. Death of the King

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One day Bregantino Bregantin, the Bull king, is up on the peak proclaiming once again to be the only man in the world, when he hears another bull, a fierce, young, imposing bull who responds: “Me, me, me, me. Me, me, me, me. I am Solid Mountain, Solid Mountain” (27). In a fight, Sanune’s son kills the Bull father and restores freedom to the women of Cocozumba, which was no longer a kingdom. Here, although the young bull is the liberating agent that demolishes the dictatorship, it is Sanune who rebels with fury in order to destroy the sociopolitical system by giving birth to a son and guaranteeing his survival. The story emphasizes that only with the protection of the orishas is it possible to restore harmony. But the ideology that underlies the story is the agency of the black woman, who manages to liberate other women from the cruel power of men. The death of the king reestablishes the natural order, and once again boys can be raised in Cocozumba. This story proposes that it is the woman who saves the nation, an honor traditionally permitted only to men. It presents a positive ontology by which black people not only inhabit the earth but also are the only residents. In this narrative there is no representation of the white universe. The orishas and the spirit of the deceased (Sanune’s mother), who coinhabit the earth with other beings, intervene in the lives of their followers and protect them from within the space of the woods. The exclusivity of the African in the stories comes to constitute an alternative epistemology. “Bregantino Bregantin” is another example of the rhetorical constructions of Cabrera’s work in which literature and anthropology are fused together. The conflation of the two categories is the result of their common textual nature. The same fictional writing that proposes a black and female world as the norm is contaminated by an ethnographic discourse founded in scientific referentiality. When the poetics of the narration converge with the referent of ethnographic discourse, the presumed separation from anthropology is destabilized and the figurative organization at the base of anthropological discourse is revealed. In this way, Cabrera is able to question the supposed domination of scientific knowledge. 132

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The simulacrum is not simply a false copy. . . . It

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places in question the very notions of copy and model. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

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It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

Nation and Simulacrum

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In 1960 Lydia Cabrera left Cuba. Although critics (both in the United States and in Cuba) consider her to be a Cuban writer, fifteen of the twenty-one books she wrote were published in exile. What happened when Cabrera left behind the Cuban island and with it a familiar national framework? Can the reader detect a cultural discontinuity in her narrations written after her departure? Is her writing affected by this move—which is both physical and social—or does her overarching project remain intact? This chapter addresses such questions. I have thus far considered the way in which Cabrera anticipates the changes occurring in contemporary cultural studies by revealing the constructedness and artificiality of anthropological texts and by questioning the authority of scientific discourse in all her narrations. I have also proposed that the result of this is an alternative representation of the Afro-Cuban. Cabrera does not attempt to solidify cultural codes but rather presents them as mutually contestatory, at the same time as she breaks away from the paradigm of traditional Cuban cultural studies. Central to Cabrera’s project is a reworking of Ortiz’s notion of transculturation. As I described in Chapter 1, Ortiz was aware of the hybrid nature of Cuban culture, yet this awareness never affected his prose, and he continued to write from a position of authority, gazing at the Afro-Cuban Other. Cabrera’s transculturation, by contrast, recreates the voice of the Other, thereby claiming a more radical subjectivity for the Afro-Cuban than Ortiz ever could. Cabrera’s transculturation affects not just the content but also the form and style of writing. What I will discuss in this chapter is the way her form and style must shift once more as she begins to write from yet another culture. This chapter, divided into five sections, explores how the representation of the subject and that of the nation are conflated and interlaced in Cabrera’s work written after leaving Cuba. In the first part, I will summarize some of the theories concerning the matter of identity in exile. Then I turn to address different formulations of the concept of the simulacrum, which will enable me to analyze the desire to recuperate the lost nation presented by Cabrera in her narraAnthropologist's Exile

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tions, as well as how she (re)constructs the national community through her work produced in Miami. In the third section, I study her first anthropological text written while in exile, Otán Iyebiyé: Las piedras preciosas, in order to illustrate the differences between what Cabrera had written on the island versus her anthropological production outside Cuba. Then, I continue to carry out the same type of comparative analysis in relation to her literary writings through an interpretation of her texts Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea and Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales. In the last section, I propose that in the book Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba, Cabrera attempts to create a hybrid discursive space that resists all attempts at categorization. It is this noncategorizable, hybrid mode of writing that allows Cabrera to construct her “home” and her identity.

The Dialectic of Cuban Identity Lydia Cabrera always wrote in Spanish and always wrote about Cuba. After she left her country, her name was erased from Cuban literary anthologies, and her books became impossible to find in libraries and bookstores. Recently, Cabrera’s work has reappeared in the public sphere in Cuba, and the books she wrote before leaving the island have been reedited there. Still, critics in the United States consider her to be “essentially Cuban” (Sánchez and Madrigal 9). Yet, what does it mean to be “essentially Cuban” when the definition of what is Cuban has been in constant dispute since the waves of immigrants came pouring into the United States after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution of 1959? One of the fundamental problems of the dialectic of contemporary Cuban identity lies in the categories of origin and language. Cuba still remains politically and economically out of the United States’ reach, even when the current rhetoric of globalization insists that borders between countries are gradually vanishing. As a result of the lack of relations between the two countries, Cuba continues to be something exotic in the U.S. popular imaginary. When Havana is mentioned in the United States, people 136

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think of sensual women, “Latin lovers”—the stereotype of Ricky Ricardo—music, nightclubs, dancing, and fun. Selling or buying Cuban cigars is contraband, which makes them difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. Therefore, authenticity and origin continue to be essential categories in the construction of Cuban identity, especially for those who emigrate from the island to the United States. This question of identity becomes especially acute if one considers literary production in exile, some of which is even written in English, as part of Cuban cultural activity. Is a literary work “Cuban” even if written outside Cuba and outside Spanish? Many do claim such “outside” work to be Cuban; others reject it as such. So, who decides? Until the 1990s the connections between these separate spaces of Cuban culture—those who lived on the island and those who resided abroad—had been scant. More recently, various publications have appeared that attempt to create ties between the Cuban cultural space within the island and the Cuban exile community. For instance, the book Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women (1998), edited by Mirta Yáñez, includes authors from both shores of the “great blue lake,” as she calls the space between Miami and Havana in reference to Hemingway. Her project is to unify these two sides of the culture instead of separating them. In her introduction Yáñez underscores the common elements that attempt to create new notions of identity. Her sense of inclusion means that the works gathered in the anthology are Cuban, regardless of where they were written. Yáñez claims that the simple recognition and defense of Cuban identity itself constitutes the unifying element of the volume. Yet the attempt to unify all the contributions necessarily neutralizes all the differences the anthology sets forth. Ruth Behar, known for her important edited volume titled Bridges to Cuba (1995), authors the prologue of Cubana and asks: from where and how can one begin to define the island, that which is Cuban? Are the ones who stayed the only real Cubans, or are the ones who left real Cubans as well? The answer has been the effort to create a bridge between the two groups, an in-between space that would include rather than exclude. Anthropologist's Exile

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From within the island, the young writer Antonio José Ponte is a good example of these unifying manifestations. In his essay “Las comidas profundas” he cancels the geographic differences by creating bridges of connection and articulating a national identity that centers on communication with the outside. In an interview Ponte suggests: For me, thinking in Cuba today is a trapdoor. On the one hand, there is the trap where it is assumed that the country ends at the shores of the island and that the one who leaves those shores stops being Cuban. . . . On the other hand, there is another trap supported by the exile community that believes Cuba ends in 1959. I am opposed to both. I think that in this historical moment, the country has to be in transit both ways. Circumscribed to the borders, you have to go inside, toward the inner, but you also have to go outside. (181) Jesús Díaz edited the magazine Encuentro de la cultura cubana in Madrid, which constituted a shared space for the Cubans on the island and those abroad. As the first issue from 1996 indicates, the primary goal is to restore the union of Cuban culture, which has been divided and fragmented because between 15 and 20 percent of Cubans live in exile (Iván de la Nuez 139). The trimestral Cuban electronic journal La Habana elegante, whose founder lives in Dallas, Texas, also demonstrates this attempt at reconnection. The journal was revived in honor of the literary establishment that disseminated Modernismo, published under the same title in 1883. The publication’s purpose is stated on the first page: “It is about fulfilling a long-cherished dream: to give back to Havana a piece of itself and, also, return it to ourselves, to the Havanans and Cubans all around the world, wherever each one of us is inventing or rewriting the city.”1 This attempt to integrate the different manifestations of Cuban culture is a project that began in the 1990s and opens up more questions about the role of technology in the maintenance of identity. In another twist on identity construction, Gustavo Pérez Firmat 138

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has proposed a generational division in the Cuban diaspora in the United States: the Cuban exiles of the first generation who could not pass as Americans even if they tried (and who generally do not wish to), and those of the second generation who maintain the hyphen (Cuban-Americans) but lost the Spanish accent from their English (Life on the Hyphen 157). Note that these categories are based on the uses and preferences of one language over another and point to degrees of resistance to assimilation. Pérez Firmat states that for the first generation, “Cuba is not a point of departure but a constant frame of reference” (158), which means that the entire generation lives in an eternal state of melancholy, always looking back to the time when they belonged to the homeland and it belonged to them. They spend their lives waiting to return to the point of departure. In contrast, the second generation is more concerned with the AngloSaxon world that surrounds them. In each of these accounts the question is, how can the exile find a space in a new land which might encompass the identity that defined them in their native country but which also includes the new experiences of exile? (Gloria Anzaldúa’s answer to the question is to live in the interstice.)2 The novel Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García brings the problem of Cuban identity in exile to the fore. The effects of the Revolution and exile are personified in Celia, Lourdes, and Pilar. Celia, the oldest and the one who stayed in Cuba, places a photograph of Castro beside her bed and glorifies the Revolution. Her daughter Lourdes left Cuba, hates anything related to her past in Cuba, and has found a new way of life in New York totally divorced from her past. Lourdes’s daughter Pilar lives in the interstice and represents the next generation that wants to unify the two spaces. She is devoted to the Anglo-Saxon world in which she participates, at the same time that she dreams of Cuba. She lives on the hyphen of Cuban-American, and her character points to a new consciousness of diaspora. Lydia Cabrera belongs to the first generation of exiles—those who contemplate the past. She was already a writer when she left Cuba, and her vocation is rooted in that national context. Nonetheless, I Anthropologist's Exile

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propose that the reconstruction of an alternative national agenda presented in her work serves as a reference point for those who live in displacement. After leaving Cuba, Cabrera observed a publishing silence of ten years, until she found the way to re-create her country from a position of exile. Maintaining the Afro-Cuban subject and culture as main characters in her fiction and her anthropological work became a way of creating a simulacrum of the lost nation.

Nation and Simulacrum In “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” Gilles Deleuze studies the dialectical process proposed in the Platonic model between appearance and true essence (Logic of Sense). Platonic thought, states Deleuze, seeks to distinguish the pure from the impure, the authentic from the inauthentic, the original from the copy, and the model from the simulacrum. However, in the Sophist Dialogues, Plato’s persona is confused with that of Socrates to such a point that it is impossible to distinguish who is who, which is the original voice and which is the copy. This maneuver proves to be ironic since the purpose of the text is precisely to distinguish between the copy and the original. Although the simulacrum dissolves the difference between the two (to distinguish the copy there must be a disparity), Deleuze states: “If the simulacrum still has a model, it is another model, a model of the Other from which there flows an internalized dissemblance” (258). Yet the copy also defines the model, the real. One often can only come to know the original through the copy. Baudrillard proposes that in the present there has been a liquidation of all referentiality and that imitation has substituted the real with the referent: “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’” (5). Representation is dialectical; on the one hand, it is both a visible and an intelligible mediation of the real, but on the other, it has the capacity to murder the real, because by revealing itself it ceases to “dissimulate” that there is something real behind the represented image (10). To arrive at these 140

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explanations, Baudrillard elaborates the successive phases of the image: first it is a reflection of a basic reality, then it unmasks the absence of that basic reality, and lastly it has no relationship whatsoever with reality—it is pure simulacrum (11). To which he adds: “The transition from signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point” (12). The rise of the simulacrum, the imitation, occurs at this transition point. It is then that what he calls the “hyperreal” is produced. Here, the real is created from a matrix that operates like a memory bank which can reproduce itself infinitely and which situates itself in an unreal space (2–3). Deleuze’s and Baudrillard’s discussions of representational models and how they have the power to select and exclude are useful for understanding the process by which the sense of belonging to a culture, nation, or community is (re)created in Lydia Cabrera’s later work. In his preface to El monte (found only in the versions published by Editorial Letras Cubanas in Havana), Raimundo Respall Fina underlines: “Her arrival in the United States . . . meant a brutal rupture with that milieu that had constituted the foundation of her literary production. . . . Lydia Cabrera reinvented herself in Miami” (9–10). Respall Fina calls attention to the fact that upon leaving Cuba, Cabrera lost contact with the Afro-Cuban subject, the source of her research. The works she published later are for him a reorganization of research carried out in Cuba. Respall Fina even states that what Cabrera does in Miami is “plagiarize herself” (10). To this he adds: “Miami had little or nothing to offer her, as it is the place where a superficial transposition has been created of a culture that lost its structural base because its reference was intrinsically connected to its bourgeois world. On the other side of the Caribbean one can find the same climate, street names and establishments carried across from Old Havana, and domino games, but it is only a reproductional illusion, a mere mirage” (10). The author reclaims the difference between the original (Havana) and the copy (Miami), between the model and the simulacrum. Respall Fina solidifies the difference in the supposedly real proletariat world of the revolutionary Marxist Cuban space located in Havana, which he contrasts with the “miAnthropologist's Exile

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rage” in Miami, a bourgeois reproduction. Note how the claim of originality is not based on a physical cultural space—the dialectic of space is posited as a result. Rather, the claim is based on the economic structure that defines each reality. It is significant that the notion of a simulacrum as indicated by Fina’s remarks is inscribed in the Platonic search for a means to distinguish the original from the copy. I will look at Cabrera’s work written outside Cuba as a simulacrum the anthropologist in exile has to reinvent because of the impossibility of contact with the subject matter—the source—of her textual production. However, I will also use the concept as formulated by Baudrillard whereby the representation itself is the real. Upon leaving Cuba, Cabrera distances herself not only from her homeland but also from the place that fed her research. Nonetheless, Afro-Cuban religions, given their proliferation of icons and shrines, are a transportable topic that reproduces and imitates the reality left behind.

The Anthropologist in Exile The first book published by Cabrera after her ten-year exile is Otán Iyebiyé: Las piedras preciosas (1970), in which she documents the use of precious stones in Afro-Cuban tradition: their nature, the protection they offer to believers, and their curing powers. The text begins with the simulation of a dialogue between the first-person narrator and the Oluko (teacher) Bamboché: “Bamboché, what did the Lucumís call stars?” “Irawó, and the big star my mother had the custom of greeting, when she greeted the Moon, which in Lucumí is called the Ochupá or Ochú—not to be confused with Ochún, Ochú as a sneeze—she called Awalá.” (1) Bamboché is presented as a teacher, a wise bestower of knowledge, whereas the narrator assumes the position of the apprentice. In this 142

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re-created dialogue, the narrator asks if Ochún (Oshún) is also the planet Venus, and the teacher responds, “No!,” a resounding “no” underlined in the note card she is reading (2). The information revealed throughout the first-person narration comes from her Lucumí teacher, and she transmits it like a good apprentice. The reader soon realizes that this conversation is a memory of the narrator, who is Cabrera herself. In the narration Cabrera explains that each time she checks her note cards, her teacher and their conversations leap out at her; the next paragraph contains biographical information from Cabrera’s life. From the outset, the book asserts that the information offered is legitimate because it is taken from her note box, which contains everything her informants told her when she was in Cuba. Here, Cabrera, unlike in the anthropological texts she had written in Cuba, maintains the voice of the first-person narrator throughout the entire text. This literary device legitimizes the story and compensates for the physical distance between the subject of her study and the condition of exile. It is as if she needed to authorize herself, as if she needed to convince the reader of the reliability of her source so that the text might lose the stigma of a copy. To establish her position as an apprentice, the narrator presents her thoughts like a novice who connects the system of beliefs under study with other cultural traditions, such as that of the Mesopotamians in Babylon and Assyria. She quickly arrives at the conclusion that the moon is not an orisha; neither are the sun or the stars: “The sky is Olodumare’s” (2). Demonstrating the learning process is another way of authorizing herself as a receptacle of this knowledge. In the section that begins by explaining “the ashé of precious stones,” Cabrera notes that none of the genuine santeros whom she met in Cuba knew who Plato was—they were unaware that he “attributed the origin of gems to star spirits who turned the most stellar materials into precious stones” (7). However, they recognized that fine stones possess virtues and believed in their mystic and therapeutic properties. Cabrera ties Afro-Cuban beliefs to other traditions, such as the Greek tradition, to maintain that the Afro-Cuban cosmovision is Anthropologist's Exile

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unique and essential, even if one finds analogies to other cultures. She had made this connection only once before in her writing career, in La Sociedad Secreta Abakuá, first published in Cuba in 1958. At that time, she was trying to break with the common belief that the Ñáñigos (members of the Abakuá denomination) were a sect of criminals, an idea popularized in such books as Los negros brujos by Ortiz and La brujería y el Ñañiguismo en Cuba desde el punto de vista médico social by Israel Castellanos (1916), among others. In La Sociedad Secreta Abakuá, Cabrera opens a space for the Ñáñigos to reveal the “secret” of their fraternity, thus offering a counterpoint to their negative image. In the prologue of the book Cabrera connects the Ñáñigos’ practices with other Western cultural practices, to demystify them, to make them look “normal.” In Otán Iyebiyé she does the contrary by underlining the exotic uniqueness of the Afro-Cuban religious beliefs. The emphasis on the “genuine” is consistent throughout the text. Not only are the santeros genuine, but she also met them in Cuba. In the prose one can observe her interest in showing the exclusivity of her knowledge and in replacing the sense of absence. Despite being outside Cuba, she can continue being a part of Cuban culture. However, Cabrera’s objective in the book does not show any desire for controlling the studied culture as exercises in traditional anthropology, nor does she pretend to produce totalizing schemes. Her writings from both before and after her exile maintain the participant-observer position, a position in which one seeks to refrain from imposing one’s own values on another culture. One of the similarities between Otán Iyebiyé and the texts written in Cuba is that to establish her authority in the field, Cabrera does not resort to scientific discourse: “Before proceeding, it is worth mentioning that these notes will be of interest only to those who believe in the Nine Choirs of the heavenly hierarchy and, particularly, to Santeria and its believers. The orishas, protecting the one who fled Cuba and went into exile, make an honest living here by favoring those who seek their aid” (6). First, this quotation asserts that the book professes a dogma, that what it contains is religiosity, and that it is a text written for believers. It is not directed to the scientists and 144

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anthropologists who study these manifestations. Second, it proclaims that the orishas are also currently in exile and that they continue to help their followers regardless of their location. The transportation of the orishas not only shows the mobile nature of Afro-Cuban religious identity and of Cubans in general but also permits that identity to extend into the exile community. Cabrera reappropriates this aspect of Cuban culture in exile.3 Afro-Cuban identity becomes a home to which one can belong—a first order of reality—even when it is a simulated home. Once her authority is established through the dialogue with the teacher, Cabrera explains how and for what purposes precious stones are used in the Ocha sect: “by means of a jewel, the Santero can protect, [can] empower fortune, happiness, health, and can also cause death” (10). From that point onward, the book’s information is organized in four parts. First, the narrator mentions the symbolic colors of the orishas and explains how each one acts on a stone according to its color. For instance, sapphires belong to Yemayá: “The powerful goddess of the sea, she is naturally lord of the color blue. All the blue gems, aquamarines, lapis lazuli, very blue turquoises, belong to her” (15). Second, Cabrera offers brief histories on the tradition of the mentioned stones, such as pearls, diamonds, sapphires, rubies, garnets, hyacinth, amethyst, coral, and so forth (29– 83). She describes the stones and discusses their use in the tradition of world literature (for example, the pearl in a poem by Quevedo) and finally their use in Cuban sorcery (for example, diamonds for counteracting bad luck). Here, as in each of her books produced in exile, she begins with the general and the global—Mesopotamia, Greece, Spain—in order to arrive at the particular and the local—the possible meanings in the Afro-Cuban cosmos. This general organization also functions chronologically, as she discusses the significance of a particular stone in previous times, such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or what it meant for certain famous people—Napoléon used to wear a diamond because he was very superstitious—so as to arrive at its meaning in the cultural-religious context of Cuba. The island ceases Anthropologist's Exile

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to be the sole container of Afro-Cuban culture. Instead, owing to her exile, the distance between Cabrera and the location where this system of belief is found produces in her prose a need to branch out to other places and other times. Cuba is no longer enough. The author’s displacement causes her narrative horizon to broaden as well. The third section catalogues stones according to their curing attributes and their medicinal qualities. For example: Emerald: Preserves and restores sight and memory. It sparks the appetite, cures jaundice and other diseases of the liver, activates its functions, cures dysentery, epilepsy, hemorrhages, especially of the mouth. Calms anxiety and unhealthy terrors. It is recommended in childbirth, as it gives strength to women in that phase. It is also a contraceptive. Paracelso, who is compared to Hypocrites and said that all the universities combined knew less than their beards, recommended emeralds as a cure-all for diseases in women. (93) This quotation demonstrates the condensation of rigorous knowledge but is recited in a popular mode. The information is equivalent to that provided in the inventory of medicinal plants in El monte. But the format differs in that the citations of other voices are not specified. The narrator controls this universe. Here it is the narrator who facilitates the documentation, as she has received knowledge that she herself brought from her homeland and that she herself inherited from her teacher. Before beginning the catalogue, she warns: “Take note, young Iyalochas” (92). The narrator therefore goes from being an apprentice to taking on the position of teacher. The fourth section is the shortest, consisting of ten pages, and it is dedicated to metals, cataloguing them in a way similar to that used in other sections of the book: the catalogue is univocal. Besides the information provided on precious stones and metals, there are also sections that imitate a historical discourse insofar as a value judgment is interjected in favor of Afro-Cubans and against the European scientific tradition. In the beginning, in the midst of introducing the “precious stones,” Cabrera relates: “Many valuable jewels 146

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of the colony were ‘worked’ by the black slaves who enjoyed the trust of their masters, those who protected with their magic and helped in their projects, and, when they got sick, cured them with their herbs behind the doctor’s back, whose science, in general, left much to be desired” (8). The positive ontology of Afro-Cuban culture resurges through the narrator’s privileging of its curative practices over those scientific practices of the traditional doctor. The narrator adds dated information and commentaries of a sociopolitical and economic sort, such as: “The Chinese in Cuba are people who cannot be erased from the memory of Cuban life. . . . In 1847 they were taken to Cuba to fill the lack of hands in agricultural work, and since then we have had them on the island” (78). In this way, Cabrera incorporates the contribution of another marginal group to the popular beliefs. In Otán Iyebiyé, Cabrera recollects anthropological information, as has been indicated, even while the text itself resists being tagged as “anthropology.” Instead, what Cabrera subversively achieves is the recuperation of a displaced community identity. By stating that “nothing will seem more logical to the devout . . . who cured in Cuba and now in exile, drawing on a supernatural principle . . . than the fact that gems cure” (90), the narrator legitimizes the move of the national soul to the new space that the exiled Cuban subject now occupies. Ostensibly a book about stones, Cabrera turns the scientific discourse into a discourse on identity. The fundamental difference between Cabrera’s anthropological texts written before exile and those written after is the need to authorize herself, to prove that she still belongs to the greater community, that she still has firsthand information. Yet, she keeps intact her rhetorical project of re-creating the Afro-Cuban cosmos through a positive ontology in which whiteness continues to be perceived as otherness. Even while suppressing the vocal polyphony, she nullifies once again the ethnographic gaze, since her discourse is anchored in a subjectivity that does not admit scientific empiricism. Or if she does allow an empirical approach, it is only to be utilized as a tool to get to a greater meaning beyond. The first-person narrative voice Anthropologist's Exile

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functions as a memory deposit, and it positions itself on the periphery. She speaks to the reader from the community situated on the margins.

From Belief to Creation: The Stories of Exile Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea was published in 1971, a year after the publication of Cabrera’s first book of anthropology in exile. By following her “anthropological” work with a collection of short stories, she again indicates the fluctuation between fact and fiction. Only here, as one might expect by now, the “fictional” quality of these cuentos comes undone. This literary undoing continues through to her final work of fiction, Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales (1983). In this section I will look at each of these collections. In Ayapá, Cabrera evokes a form of humoristic resistance known in Cuba as choteo, an irreverent humor that does not refer to typically comic situations but mocks at a situation that is not funny.4 In the text Cabrera gathers stories of animals, but rather than suggest a moral of the story, she aims to reestablish the authority of the oral tradition through a humorous character—Jicotea—who personifies all that is Cuban. This recuperation of orality works at different levels. Jicotea is a small turtle found only in sweet waters of the Caribbean. In Cabrera’s short stories, Jicotea refers to the turtle, the animal, but is also the proper name of one central character. Turtles are very important in African folklore, and they are traditionally a versatile, cunning character. In the syncretism of Afro-Cuban religions, Jicotea becomes the trickster turtle. In the essay “Dios, animal, hombre o mujer: Jicotea, un personaje de Lydia Cabrera,” Raquel Romeu states that “Jicotea is a new, original, and independent transcultural phenomenon” (35). Jicotea represents a mixture of Africa and Cuba. In Ayapá, Jicotea is presented first as a symbol of the nation, as an element of Cuban tradition. Yet, this is an ambiguous national symbol given that Jicotea is “mischievous, a scoundrel, a liar, crafty, uncouth” (9), not a very positive symbol. She is also a mysterious being, 148

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as she knows how to harness secret forces—much like santeros— which means she is classified as a genie or a goblin, according to the narrator’s indications in the prologue. Also in the prologue, however, the narrator alludes to the physical inferiority of turtles, a common source of jokes in Afro-Cuban oral culture. The stories play out such characteristics of Jicotea, but they also privilege her status as a wise being. Jicotea’s personification even states that she is capable of inflicting harm for pure pleasure, just like human beings. She is thus a character full of parody. The allegorical nature of Jicotea’s character as a stand-in for Cuba is openly declared in the prologue, a pretext that tells the reader how to interpret the stories. Cabrera directly addresses the reader here, expressing the book’s purpose and defining her authorial position. Thus, she once again interjects an investigative pose into the literary. Although Ayapá is a book of fiction, Cabrera attempts to suppress the hermeneutical freedom of the reader, precisely the opposite of what one finds in El monte. In the prologue, the narrator instructs the reader to associate Jicotea with Afro-Cubans by comparing the animal with black slaves’ condition of marginality: “Africans, sold to the white man by other Africans, and oftentimes by their own relatives, by arriving to the New World as beasts, were not situated in the most prestigious place on the social scale but rather on the margins of society. What Jicotea was in the concert of animals, the black slave was” (10). The analogy is extended to the island: “Presently Jicotea personifies the new slave of our communist island” (3). There is also an identification between the author and Jicotea as marginal beings. However, the marginalization of Jicotea suggested by Cabrera is questionable in the stories themselves, given that Jicotea always triumphs owing to her intelligence and is the one who directs betrayal and evil toward others. Thus there exists a tension between the victimized Cuba initially represented by Jicotea and the evil being she becomes by the end of each story. In the first story of the series, “Vida o muerte,” Jicotea is the first to speak of death at the beginning of the world, when death still did Anthropologist's Exile

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not exist. It was she who one day told the dog that all that begins comes to an end (21). The dog grew terrified at this thought, and so both decided to visit Sambia (“god” in Congo). The first one to arrive would be able to request a wish: Jicotea would request death, and the dog, eternal life. The dog moved faster than the turtle, but Jicotea, wise to the end, gathered all the other turtles of the area, and they agreed to alert the turtles closer to Sambia to the plan, for they were always willing to help one another. Together, the different Jicoteas devised a plan to trick the dog so that when he came to Sambia, a Jicotea was already there waiting. The dog arrives exhausted and dies at Sambia’s feet. The narration ends when Jicotea says: “It is clear. Now I understand. Now I know what death is, for I have just learned what life is” (23). Sambia thought that this animal knew more than she should, and so while holding her prisoner under a rock, Sambia traced something on her shell that nobody has been able to decipher. And since it was a long time ago, perhaps Sambia has now forgotten what he wrote, which confers greater knowledge to Jicotea than to the divinity. The identification I have suggested between the author and Jicotea is valid if one considers the turtle’s rebellion as a metaphor for Cabrera’s writing, which also alters the established order. The mode of allegorical representation is repeated over and over. Jicotea is portrayed as more evil at some times than at others, but she always uses her craftiness to get her way. For instance, in the story “Jicotea, una noche fresca,” she begins to play the drums without the king’s consent, and she gets all the animals to participate in the bembé. The story is a chain of calamities that begins with the disobedience of Jicotea herself: If Jicotea does not ask Insegua [a fly] to play the Chimueñe mueñe drum, Chondi [jutía] does not shake the branch, the branch does not fall off and it does not break the horn of Ngombe [the bull], Ngombe does not run and does not step on the eggs of Mother Ñioka [boas]; Mother Ñioka does not go to look for Bansa [fire] so that it gives her a bud of its fire, fire does not spread to the 150

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Woods, the foot of Meme [the ram] does not burn, Meme would not have gone to the river, Meme would not have injured the eye of Bambi Afuamutu [the crocodile], who had it at the surface of the water. (137)5 Because of the disaster, all the animals have to go before the king’s supreme court. But while they all argue over who is to blame, Jicotea makes friends with the queen by flattering her. The queen hides her under her robe, takes her out to the patio, and sets her free. Jicotea’s cunningness and wisdom are celebrated at the end of each story. Jicotea’s association with Cuba is articulated in the oral tradition recuperated in Cabrera’s text—the stated intention from the outset. Cabrera explains the importance of orality for slaves taken to Cuba: it entertained them with wit and reminded them of Africa (13). Similarly, her own text voices an origin, and by reproducing in her own exile the stories recounted to her by Afro-Cubans, she assuages the condition of displacement. As I indicated in reference to the anthropological texts, the need to authorize herself in exile is one of the elements that differentiates Cabrera’s works of fiction written in Cuba from those written in exile. By evoking the best black storytellers, she consolidates her authority to narrate these oral narratives that would otherwise be lost. However, as I traced in Otán Iyebiyé, there are also similarities between her fiction and her anthropology. Many of the stories in Ayapá point to a foundational moment par excellence, the beginning of the world. Moreover, they represent an Afro-Cuban world articulated through diverse elements: the use of fable as a narrative form, the importance attributed to animals, and the linguistic devices incorporated (such as designating god as “Sambia,” the word “bansa” for fire, and so forth). The transpositions of orality to written discourse demonstrate a reclaiming of a thoroughly popular knowledge. The use of allegory restores a sense of identity and thus gives the narrator historical agency. Finally, the linguistic register that she uses results in a nuanced move to a more transcultural prose. The last collection of stories published by Cabrera, Cuentos para Anthropologist's Exile

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adultos niños y retrasados mentales, assaults the reader, even with its title. The phrase “adultos niños” (child adults) leaves unclear which is the adjective and which the noun. And the phrase “para retrasados mentales” (for the mentally impaired) is a hermeneutical dare. The stories go on to suggest a knowledge, which cannot be easily accessed, even though the title announces the stories’ simplicity. In the book it is explained that this knowledge is not public because of officialdom’s regulation—those who have the power are the ones who write and define culture. Cabrera offers a secret knowledge that is seemingly available only to the initiated. For instance, the story “Historia verdadera de un viejo pordiosero que decía llamarse Mampurias” begins by explaining: “There are occurrences that are not included in written history, they escape people’s knowledge for one reason or another, because they were intentionally erased, or they were not contemplated or understood, or they occurred in a time outside of time itself, and the true reality, in all its un-reality, disappears after closer and more obvious realities” (72). Those who write history privilege certain facts and pass over other information. Cabrera’s text questions the discourse of official history because it is neither thorough nor reliable. Central to this is official history’s emphasis on written words and ignorance of oral words. The notion of “true reality” is also problematized, not least by the modified “un-reality” that follows it, annulling its meaning. The title of the story announces that it is “true,” a claim which suggests that some stories are not true. At the beginning of the story, the narrator also accuses the “sparing contemporary press” of covering certain kinds of news and not others. For instance, the case of Mampurias recounted here did not appear in newspapers, whereas the press paid more attention to “black men, black women, and black children for rent” or the “black young man with a hoe and a machete available for four hundred pesos or who was exchanged for cows or gelded horses” (72). The story immediately criticizes the economic discourse that reduced the Afro-Cuban subject to a mere exchange value. The spokesperson function carried out by the narrator through the telling of this story is nuance when she states: “Since we are lack152

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ing written history . . . we must trust and make due with the oral tradition, which is much richer and more surprising than historical documentation” (74). Again, the oral tradition is privileged over the written source that had already been placed in doubt. The aim of the story—and of the book, since this theme is recurrent in the different stories of the collection—is to rescue a mode of knowledge that will surely disappear if not written. For instance, “Fuerza y astucia” begins: “This is a story that everyone has forgotten. The main character . . . Who remembers him? Nobody. Not a single one of his descendants” (124). Here the stories of the forgotten are told. And again it is Cabrera, despite her situation in exile, who has the ability to remember and to turn this orality into text. These concepts of the discursive universe and the relationship between the oral and the written are reminiscent of El monte. In “Historia verdadera de un viejo pordiosero que decía llamarse Mampurias,” Cabrera points out the oral nature of the story. Yet even though she is legitimizing this story by writing it (and thereby transforming it), one should still doubt its veracity, given that her writing destabilizes the concept of truth itself. In Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales, Cabrera returns to her project of dismantling the epistemological premises of the West by reclaiming a knowledge beyond the reach of written history. The book alternates between a modernist agenda of invoking a displaced identity that the author wishes to recover in exile, and a more postmodern agenda of proposing that all categories of knowledge are fictitious, that history (and stories) only inhabits the textual world created by her. The narrative voice of the book mimics orality through an intimacy and complicity with the reader: “Remember what happened at the Tejas plantation, where the African workers were very numerous” (166). The narrator places herself in the middle of a group of people who are able to remember the stories of the past thanks to her. The narration makes the reader forget the physical element of writing, due to the presence of an oral moderator. Similar images appear in various stories: “It is thus how at dusk or at night, in those Anthropologist's Exile

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meetings of empty chairs in the deserted hall of some old house, you cannot see those who used to settle in there—they’re still there, mind you—nor can the dialogues of their now silent shadows be heard” (72). This quotation presents the fundamental contradiction that spans the entire book: although it is recognized that these meetings are part of a lost past, the evoked absence affirms the presence of those who still continue to meet, even if they cannot be seen. The narrative functions as a reconstruction—a simulacrum—of one concrete place and provides the context for the dialogues to be heard once again. This story is situated in the nineteenth century but also in “a time outside of time” (72). Like all the stories of this collection, the reader can perceive a double movement to recuperate the past while time is suspended in a continual written present that destabilizes metaphysical notions of time and space. Much like El monte and the other books of stories that I have examined, Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales presents a mythical and unreal space which is a continuation of the space of concrete and physical reality and which also echoes the Afro-Cuban cosmovision insofar as magic lives in harmony with the real. However, despite their coexistence, in this text these two spaces are not juxtaposed as they are in the charming myths of Cabrera’s earlier books, since here there is an explicit violence in the passage from one place to another. In Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales many of the stories reveal a painful truth in an aggressive manner: hence, an entire section of the book is dedicated to stories “de diablos y brujas” who are sinister and cruel, a section that could easily be catalogued as horror stories. This section begins with “Más diablo que el Diablo,” which narrates how, through the fault of a malevolent black slave, devils were on the verge of going extinct. Like the other stories, this one begins with a wise voice that exhibits knowledge not accessible to the public: “There are things that not everybody knows” (54). The protagonist deceives the devils and thus manages to destroy them: “They fell asleep in a deep sleep and that’s how they melted, because the black man doused the floor with alcohol, spread out the firewood, the dry 154

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leaves, set fire and the flames rose up everywhere” (61). In this story, as in others, the sinister invokes the dichotomy between good and evil. In the story “Pasión infernal,” a married woman named Sengue falls in love with another man, named Tondá. In the beginning, she, her husband, and their son were very poor. However, as her infidelity grows under the influence of the devil, the family’s economic situation begins to improve. Making her husband believe that she goes every day to praise the saint who had helped them economically, she enters the booth built by her husband as the saint’s altar. Instead of praising the saint, she meets Tondá. Her son, jealous of the time and the effort that the mother supposedly devotes to the saint, follows her and discovers her secret. The husband and the son then go to the booth where Tondá is hiding and kill him. The description of this death is very violent: “He (the husband) kills him in one stab. He frantically cuts him into pieces. The boy helps to pick them up in a basket, and both throw him into a cesspool” (92). When the woman returns, what she finds is also described joltingly: “Sengue does not see anything but pools of blood and, amidst them, pieces of Tondá’s chubby, idle hands” (93). In a crazed frenzy she goes to look for him in the land of ghosts, but the doorman states that Tondá has not yet passed through there and tells her that her suffering will be eternal. The story ends when the darkness becomes more profound and, in the abyss, “[a] claw takes hold of her neck and, slowly, eternally, strangles her” (94). The last line is spoken by the narrator who warns that adultery is a mortal sin. Most of the stories hold a moral message, but unlike the stories of Jicotea in which the tone is comical, the lesson is presented here with cruelty. Oftentimes the protagonists’ life or soul is sacrificed. In another story, old Mampurias has to defend himself from a witch who eats her guests. Mampurias manages to kill her, but when he returns to the house, the witch is there once again, alive. He kills her repeatedly, but each time she returns. To kill her once and for all, he has to burn her body, which he does, and finally he is able to be rid of the witch. Mampurias then, out of curiosity, opens the door to the Anthropologist's Exile

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room where she dwelled: “Immersed in darkness, impregnated with a strong smell of herbs, tobacco, sperm, and armpit, it was cluttered with human skulls and bones, with closed, empty flasks piled up to the ceiling” (81). Despite having killed the witch, Mampurias has to suffer for a long time the punishment that she had inflicted on him of being an old beggar by day and a dapper young man by night, until one day he finds a deer antler with great power that changes his fate. At the end of the story, the daughter of the city’s captain general finds him one night and falls in love with him. When the two get married, the spell is broken, and Mampurias turns back into the dapper young man. However, he does not stay black, as the deer antler “whitens” his skin (87). What is also seen in these narrations is the way they alternate between two economies, one material and one emotional. They criticize the real economy of money, the low salary of the slave (72). Mampurias sends the captain general and his daughter “gifts . . . on golden trays . . . necklaces, rings, earrings, bracelets, brooches of incalculable value” (87). It is a gesture of gratitude for having accepted him as a ragged old man (before he turned into a young white man). The text ironically comments on this materialistic way of understanding the world and the relationships between the characters. The representation of race (whether one is black or white) is as important emotionally as it is economically. Relatedly, “Pasión infernal” comments on the economic situation of the family. The black people are poor and fight to escape from an economic situation that maintains them at the bottom of the social ladder. At the same time that it critiques an economy based on race and the division of classes, it also ferociously satirizes the same society that it appears to be recuperating. In the section titled “Cosas olvidadas y otras vistas u oídas,” the story “Recorte de la prensa habanera del siglo XIX” ridicules a news story that could have appeared in the society section of any newspaper of the period. At first the story appears to be copying a newspaper clip: “Lovely was last Saturday’s soiree at the Liceo Artístico y Literario. Among the refined and distinguished crowd we send a greeting 156

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to . . .” (216). But soon the reader notices the satirical element: “The young Rubistan Rubiroso, who possesses a beautiful tenor voice, conceded to sing us bits of La Traviata, whose lyrics he has translated entirely into Spanish. Traviata, raise my leg. And furtively show me your . . . thigh” (217). The name Rubistan Rubiroso suggests that the young man has blond hair (in Spanish, rubio) and perhaps a certain robust stature. It also has an aristocratic ring to it that, combined with the physical connotations, signals a deliberate silliness consistent with the story’s satirical aim. Also mentioned in the story is that some maidens recited poetry by Espronceda, Campoamor, and Zorilla. These are three canonical Spanish poets of Romanticism. All three published their work primarily around the mid-nineteenth century. Their appearance here points to the upper class’s alignment with Spanish colonial rule. To finish off the parody, it is stated that the Marquis of Trasmuela concluded the festivities with a smile, addressing the audience: He who speaks first swallows a turd as big as the tower of San Simeón. It was another unforgettable soiree, like all the soirees at the Liceo Artístico y Literario. (218) The name Trasmuela could be roughly translated as the molar farthest back in the mouth. It has diverse connotations in Spanish; for instance, it evokes the word trasmano, which means “underhanded,” as well as the expression como sacar muelas (“like pulling teeth”), a possible allusion to the tenacity of the Cuban upper class of the nineteenth century and the difficulty in removing them from power. All the names are laughable. Cabrera ridicules the nineteenth-century aristocratic society of Cuba and these social events, so common among the Cuban hegemonic class defining the country’s cultural norms. Unlike the other collections of stories, in this book the stories transpire in Cuba, for the most part in Havana. “Bailaron . . .” takes Anthropologist's Exile

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place in the Cabildos de San Cristóbal in Havana; “El insomnio de un marinero” deals with a Havana native who, upon returning to the capital port, must go to the town of Regla, on the other side of the bay, to cure his insomnia; and “El milagro de la siempre viva” includes the exact address of the setting: “Extramuros, Calzada de San Lázaro, number 330” (177). The narrative voice pretends to be there by giving precise details of the place. Rather than reflect the displacement of exile, the way in which the place is evoked transmits presence. The story “La antecesora” takes place in Trinidad, Cuba, and is enunciated by the dialogue between a professor and the narrator: “There, one morning, strolling with the wise professor Titunius through that picturesque valley, we stopped to observe them [the swallows] in the large house in ruins” (112). The swallows’ destiny is to be always emigrating, which means they cannot remain on the island, unlike Cubans, who, according to the narrator, do not have this calling: “If . . . they did . . . we would not hear them lamenting their fate” (122). The narrator situates herself there, on the island, even though at the beginning of the story the island is named as if the action occurred in a distant past: “Every spring . . . the swallows appeared in the radiant sky of an island still called Cuba” (122). Again, there is the double movement of evoking the past from an eternal present from which the narrative voice speaks. The (de)unification of two different worlds—spatial and temporal, oral and written, real and unreal—echoes the physical space of exile, the imaginary space of the nation in exile, and the struggle to build unity between these dialectic forces. On the one hand, a concrete vision of Havana itself appears with street names, and on the other, the stories present lands of ogres and devils, mermaids and sea monsters. On the one hand, the concrete and thoroughgoing details of reality are foregrounded, and on the other, all possibility of the real disintegrates, and referentiality is liquidated. This dual perspective is disarticulated textually through the impossibility of maintaining symmetry. The dichotomies at the foundations of the stories—good and evil, the spiritual and the economic— 158

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collapse, and unable to remain intact, mutilation and fragmentation take over. The horror established in the stories is a result of the inability to maintain the imago—the image of a unified subject. The pools of blood, the pieces of bones in flasks, the worms that eat the remains of Fidel Castro, and the madness that permeates the text are all in response to the fantasy of a united identity in exile revealed in Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales. It is impossible to restore the imago in a situation of displacement: history and knowledge are only partial fictions, images in the mirror.

Hybridity as a Textual Space Itinerarios del insomnio, published in 1977, is the only book in which Cabrera constructs the image of her persona in exile. This time she distances herself from the Afro-Cuban subject and moves toward a discourse filled with metaphors of loss, distance, and nostalgia. In her book Black Sun, Julia Kristeva proposes that the act of “metaphorizing cures melancholy” (36), while melancholy arises from a lost object. Metaphorizing takes on an especially pertinent meaning here when one considers the etymological roots of metaphor as a kind of “carrying across.” Thus metaphors serve as a bridge, a way to be transported from one place to another. Using the metaphor of travel, Cabrera evokes a return to an imagined community, which she constructs through the narrative re-creation of a town, its people, and its tradition. It is a therapeutic rhetorical strategy. The text is framed by dusk and dawn, and the action occurs while everyone is asleep. It is a story of insomnia characterized by a backward dialogue that impedes sleep, and it deals with the exile’s desire to return home. Cabrera cannot sleep because her subjectivity has been dislodged from its home. Itinerarios del insomnio is the literary space she creates so as to represent this separation. This is the memorable space where the narrator installs identity, if one understands “memorable” according to de Certeau’s definition: the possibility of dreaming of a place and structuring existence through absence (121). Anthropologist's Exile

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The book begins with a severe critique of the “wonderful American way of life” (2). Cabrera claims that insomnia not only affects the exile community but the entire country, the result of excessive work and an appetite for money (1). However, Cabrera distinguishes between the condition of the exile and the rest of the people: Americans cannot sleep owing to their material preoccupations; Cuban exiles cannot fall asleep because of the dislocation they have suffered, because they are far from their country and their culture. The narrator feels alienated, complaining that she has been robbed of her country of origin and that she cannot find happiness in her present circumstances. The only way to come to terms with the loss is returning to the past, to the foundational moment when Cuba was a “paradise,” and rescuing the notion of belonging. In this sense, the invented journey—simulated—is anchored in the desire for the original. Meanwhile, this journey departs from another simulated space (Miami), simulated because the Cuban exilic community tried to reproduce Cuba: they called it Little Havana. But both this simulated starting place and the simulated journey contain meaning in and of themselves. The copy is its own reality. Exile has been a recurrent theme in contemporary theoretical debates, since living in the era of globalization and postmodernism is synonymous with living in a perpetual state of displacement and exile. Local communities continue to lose their specificity, and globalization keeps taking the place of nationalisms. Furthermore, contemporary theorists question the myth of nationalism and its foundational epic narratives. To live in the diaspora, according to them, does not mean living on the margins; rather, it is a generalized experience. In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Aijaz Ahmad contends that exile and professional preference have become synonymous. He notes that the intellectuals in the diaspora who have emigrated and opted for exile have done so for personal benefit and have not suffered the pain of “true exile,” which is involuntary (85). In Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Caren Kaplan interprets Ahmad’s contention as a “simplistic taxonomy” (108). She proposes different definitions of “journey” and “displacement” as modern and 160

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postmodern discourses linked to economic and political practices. Kaplan emphasizes the binary oppositions that have been constructed in relation to the notions of exile versus immigration. She maintains that while immigrants are associated with the labor force and therefore cannot be recovered in terms of cultural production, the exile is associated with a romanticized representation of a spiritual and creative nature, rooted in the articulation of an aesthetic principle: [What] separates the exile/expatriate from the immigrant in many contemporary discourses of displacement is the commonplace belief that immigrants intend to assimilate: they leave their homes without reluctance and they face a new situation with an eagerness to become as much a part of the nation or community as possible. . . . Immigrants are associated with the financial or material gain rather than aesthetic gain; in moving to improve their material circumstances, immigrants do not offer a romantic alternative to the exile, who may be seen to be displaced for spiritual, political, or aesthetic survival alone. (110) Cuban Americans have always distinguished themselves from other migratory groups in the United States, based on their unique political situation, which has allowed them to construct their identity as political exiles and not as immigrants. In the rhetoric of exile they retain strong ties with their past and their land of origin. They also maintain the hope of returning once the political situation changes. By maintaining their status as exiles rather than immigrants, Cuban Americans have differentiated themselves from other Latinos living in the United States. This perspective on the country of origin has complicated the definition of what could constitute Cuban identity after the Revolution. According to the modernist definition of the discourse of displacement offered by Kaplan, Cabrera’s narration in Itinerarios del insomnio would appear to be trapped in the nostalgic desire to return to the lost origin. In the attempt to return to that origin, Cabrera reconstructs a narrative of the unified nation characterized by the hope of Anthropologist's Exile

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return. But the attempt to return to the origin creates a “copy” of the nation that, at the same time as it substitutes for the real, is conflated with the simulation, so that it is impossible to distinguish between dream and reality. The invention becomes reality, the dream a journey, and the simulacrum the model. Along these lines, Itinerarios del insomnio alternates between a modern and a postmodern discourse, as was the case with Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales. What is going to make possible this text’s ambition is that the narration creates a hybrid space that is neither fiction nor anthropology, where such simplistic dualities have no place. In Itinerarios del insomnio Cabrera presents exile as the soul’s condition. The implicit readers are other Cuban exiles, friends, to whom the narrator gives advice on how to survive the distance from the native country and how to reinvent the idea of a home during the painful hours of the night when it is impossible to fall asleep. It would seem that Cabrera repeats the division mentioned by Kaplan between exile—a condition of the soul—and immigration—a condition of the body, which is part of conventional modernist discourse. The imaginary journey on which the narrator embarks is spiritual and one in which she leaves her body behind. Yet the self-consciousness of the text continually disrupts this imagined journey, returning the reader to a simultaneous rhetorical project of demystification. At one point, the narration leads the interlocutor to a moment of anticipation as the narrator finds herself in the train that passes through Matanzas before arriving at Trinidad. The arrival, which takes place at dusk, is presented in a mystified form. The narrator casts Trinidad as a place full of perfume, and the image is an intact one, as it was in her memory—with its legends, its musicality, its ghost. The romantic vision is accentuated by the light of the moon and the lanterns, contrasted with the neon lights that fill her room in Miami (7). In this search for origins, Trinidad represents the glory of the past, filled with an architecture that sends the viewer centuries back; the city obviously works as a synecdoche for all Cuba. Miami, Cabrera’s present foreign space, becomes out of focus—disappears— as Trinidad emerges tridimensionally. 162

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Cabrera’s text contains many stories, and in each one the reader learns of someone’s life and death. The line that demarcates the temporal distance between the dead and the living is gradually erased as the narration advances. This is another textual trademark used in Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales. Once the narrator arrives in Trinidad, the text becomes a collection of stories of love, hate, revenge, and death. The idea of community is generated through the accumulation of these stories in the text. The narrative voice keeps her memories of Cuba alive in language, through the telling and retelling of stories and through the voices of others who also tell their stories. From the ruins of a palace constructed in the period of Ferdinand VII to the ingenious sugar basin of Buena Vista, Trinidad’s is a timeless story without a beginning or an end. Everyone in the town appears to be floating in eternity, in a space created outside of linear time. In the introduction to Tropics of History: Cuba Imagined, Alan West-Durán argues that memory explores the past through constructed images that liberate us from the enclosure between the past and the present. He adds that images are not only a representation, an effect, but also the generative force of memory itself (5). By bracketing the teleological character of historical narration, Cabrera articulates a collective reality that enables the reconstruction of an imagined community. The journey to Trinidad is interrupted by the announcement of a return to the textual dimension of language. This interruption directed to the narrator’s interlocutor appears to reaffirm the artificial nature of the ideas of home and the homeland: “Through the magic of words, through a continual evoking, everything is recreated. . . . One believes she or he can see what no longer exists” (34). In this sense Cabrera asserts that the mythical discourse of the foundation of the community is possible only through textual construction. Although the narrator visits other places in Cuba on her journey, she maintains that this dream always returns to Trinidad because it is the place in Cuba where the most memories are held. Trinidad personifies a ghostly past—a place of departure and return. Returning in spirit to Trinidad during the night while the rest of the world Anthropologist's Exile

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sleeps, Cabrera seeks a way to understand the Cuban exile’s identity. In her sleepy search, the narrator escapes her melancholic exile by opening a literary space for her memories of Cuba. Cabrera authorizes the simulated homeland—the simulacrum—and the reconstruction of referentiality through language. When the narration returns to the story line, it presents the reader with a panoramic view of Trinidad. The description recalls the towers of Iznaga and their bell, the Becker Palace, the theater, the hospital, the military base, the church of the San Francisco convent, and the park (where black people were not allowed to enter) (34–35). Memory is organized as space. It is an almost photographic description of the place, so that the self-conscious imitation may substitute for the real. Cabrera’s fascination with Trinidad shows the search for an origin. The search is anchored in traditional modernist discourse in that the origin acts as a conceptual and structural center. The way in which she represents her condition as an exilic subject—through a conventional narration linked to dreams and desire—therefore points to a rhetorical movement that at once seeks the center and positions itself in that center. In Itinerarios del insomnio the displacement is not one-directional, since, as the book states, there is also a movement away from that center into exile. Cabrera dismantles the conventionality of modernist discourse inasmuch as this simulation of the “homeland” re-created by her is not the nation of the protagonists of history—hers is not the historically “centered” nation. It is a nation disseminated and dispersed in others’ narrations. In this text, multivocality resurfaces to disarticulate the imaginary journey and show the structural foundations of the unifying project itself. Yet, why is the journey to the past displaced to Trinidad from Cabrera’s native Havana? Havana is the center of Cuba, perhaps not geographically but certainly politically and culturally. According to Cabrera, Trinidad is one of the oldest cities in Cuba. If age serves as a mark of authenticity, it also represents that which is forgotten. Thus, to localize history in Trinidad is to displace it from its center. At the same time, Cabrera’s Trinidad is not populated by guajiros, which would mean falling into the modernist trap of nationalist 164

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recuperation. Rather, it is full of ghosts and murderers, of AfroCubans who were slaves and now tell their stories of slavery and life in the streets. The heroes of the nation are nowhere to be found. Different narrators tell the majority of the stories in Itinerarios del insomnio. The initial first-person narrator is diluted into other voices as the text progresses, and at the end it returns in a game of appearance and disappearance. The women’s voices at times sing traditional songs, perhaps offer a recipe for a typical regional dish, or perhaps repeat the divinations with which they used to entertain themselves at wakes. The narration also includes folkloric stories, such as the well-known tales of Juan Bobo, Gangá, Trinidad’s best chef, and María Cosita, who was always hungry (25). The reader also finds Don Nicasio, who always borrowed but never returned things, and Doña Juana Garrido, who always carried a chicken on her chest to keep it warm. In this re-creation of Trinidadian society, special attention is paid to the division of feminine versus masculine spaces and to social classes. The Afro-Cubans’ voices blend with the rest: they tell of what happened to Miguelito, a slave who died from a whipping, unjustly punished for not removing his hat before an authority figure. José de la Cruz, another former slave, narrates the story of two sisters who arrive in Cuba on two different slave boats, find each other in Trinidad, and recognize each other after a long separation. There is the anonymous murderer who walks with crutches and who killed his wife when he discovered she was unfaithful. Now he simply circumambulates the town. Other characters are referred to only by their initials so as not to compromise anybody—for instance, Mr. L. B. or Doña M. C. (21). The names of the people who used to bet in the casino are remembered, as is the story of Ignacia, the woman who used to beg on the streets of Trinidad. It is a ghost town, and in it the dead wander the streets along with the living. Cabrera explains that the living keep the dead alive by constantly naming them. It is therefore language itself that gives them permanence. But the dead are not manifested through words and sounds alone; they also come to life through images. The living see Anthropologist's Exile

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the dead: “Right on Desengaño Street Carlos Lucena’s ghost used to appear” (16). I have already discussed the idea that the dead coexist with the living in Afro-Cuban beliefs. Through the rewriting of collective stories and histories, Cabrera manages to portray the image of the nation in the form of the pueblo, a word that means both “people” and “town” in Spanish, much in the manner described by Homi Bhabha when he states that “a shift in perspective emerges from an acknowledgement of the nation’s interrupted address articulated in the tension between signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narratives, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign” (Location of Culture 147). In Cabrera’s national and narrational agenda, the popular figure of Juan Bobo is as heroic as the soldier who dies fighting for Cuban independence. Heroes and marginal subjects are made equal in this remembrance of an imagined community. Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba presents another one of Cabrera’s hermeneutical problematizations. It is not a novel, even while it is a travel narration. It is a fictional journey, but it cannot be classified among Cabrera’s books of fiction. It is not an ethnographic text either, even though Afro-Cubans play a part in its cultural conglomerate. And although it resembles an autobiography, the narrator’s “I” is lost among the voices of the others. Itinerarios del insomnio manifests a tension between the experience of cultural displacement and the construction of an alternative cultural identity. This tension creates a hybrid textual space, a “third space” (to borrow Bhabha’s term), and takes the dual struggle to another level. The book opens up a place of resistance by proposing a reconfiguration of Cuban culture through a mix of past and present, black and white, anthropology and literature, modern and postmodern. The condition of exile enables Cabrera to create a simulacrum of the nation, yet her nation is not a copy of an original. Even if the desire to trap the past appears to align her work with modernist aims, Cabrera understands that the only way to articulate the imago is through the disseminating instrument of writing. 166

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While Cabrera maintains the same overall writing project in exile, there are subtle changes in her narrative. Afro-Cubans and their culture remain as the subject of her studies, and the transcultural elements in her writing persist. But because of her departure from the Cuban geographic context and the re-creation of a national subjectivity from exile, Cabrera’s later writings articulate the need for her own authorization and legitimation, a concern that is not present in her texts written in Cuba. So there is, for example, the addition of prologues to the two collections of short stories in her exilic writings. In these prologues, the author indicates to the reader how to interpret the stories, as do the prologues of ethnographic studies and testimonial novels. They direct the reading, act as guides, and lay out the writer’s authorial position. In this sense, the blur between literature and ethnographic discourse is taken even further. In addition, there is the constant interest in recuperating the oral Afro-Cuban tradition. Although in the prologue of El monte the reader is reminded that the real authors are Cabrera’s informants and that all she has done is to put into writing what she heard—therefore negating her own position as an author—in her writings during exile the role of Cabrera is no longer as a mere transcriber. In her new authorial role, she is the one who can preserve what others have forgotten. If she does not put the stories of Afro-Cuban folklore in writing, they will be wasted because nobody else will or can. Perhaps it is Cabrera’s own identity that is at stake here. Perhaps she is the one who needs to be remembered. Perhaps this white woman who dedicated her entire career as a writer to the Afro-Cuban culture, found in it a space for resistance, and by creating the rhetorical illusion of subjectivity for the Other, she gained subjectivity as well.

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Notes Introduction 1 Among the books published on Cabrera are Hilda Perera’s Idapo: El sincretismo en los cuentos negros de Lydia Cabrera (1971), in which Perera studies the syncretic elements in the short stories; Lo ancestral africano en la narrativa de Lydia Cabrera (1974), by Rosa Valdéz-Cruz, who also published several articles that strive to determine which African myths are transposed in Cabrera’s stories; Ayapá y otras Otán Iyebiyé de Lydia Cabrera (1976), by Josefina Inclán; three books on Cabrera’s stories by Mariela Gutiérrez: Los cuentos negros de Lydia Cabrera (1986), in which Gutiérrez makes a morphological analysis, El cosmos de Lydia Cabrera: Dioses, animales y hombres (1991), where the author analyzes the African factors that structure some of Cabrera’s short stories, and Lydia Cabrera: Aproximaciones mítico-simbólicas a su cuentista (1997), which deals with myth and symbolism in her four volumes of short stories (Gutiérrez has also published twenty articles that focus on Cabrera’s opus); Magia e historia en los “Cuentos Negros,” “Por qué” y “Ayapá” (1988), by Sara Soto, another publication dedicated to Cabrera’s first three short story collections. In 1978, Rosario Hiriart, one of the most published authors on Cabrera’s work (mainly articles), wrote Lydia Cabrera: Vida hecha arte, with an annotated biography and a bibliography, conversations with Cabrera, and useful insights on Cabrera’s life, as well as an analysis of some of Cabrera’s short stories. Homenaje a Lydia Cabrera (1978), edited by Reinaldo Sánchez and José A. Madrigal, is an edited collection of essays on Cabrera’s work. As this list shows, almost all the Cabrera studies published in book form are basically dedicated to her first three books of short stories. 2 Diario de la Marina, January 11, 1923. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish-language books are my own. 4 Although he was pioneer, Ortiz is not the only one to dedicate his career to the study of the different ethnic components of Cuban culture. Rómulo Lachatañeré, Argeliers León, Isaac Barreal Fernández, Juan Pérez de la

Riva, Leyda Oquendo Barrios, Rogelio Martínez Furé, and Lydia Cabrera, among others, have carried out significant research, even though they have been unable to break away from the rubric used within the scholarship directly generated by Ortiz’s work.

Chapter One 1 Translated from the Spanish by Harriet De Onís. All the English quotes from Cuban Counterpoint come from De Onís’s translation. The quotes from Los negros brujos and from Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba are my own translations. 2 The edition of Los negros brujos I have used includes the prefatory letter written by Lombroso, Ortiz’s first prologue, and the second addition to the first prologue written in 1917. 3 Journalist Lázara Rodríguez Alemán stated in a 1998 interview in Havana that the understanding of the Yoruba religion as superior, even to this day, is due to discrimination and racism. The Yoruba culture has been retrieved instead of other African ethnicities because it was able, through warfare, to expand throughout all of Mahombe in Africa. This culture has been positioned as superior within the popular imaginary by appealing to its powerful ancestors, warriors who belonged to a more highly developed culture. This is achieved at the expense of the Congo/Bantu people, who have been cast as ignorant murderers to be feared. Notice how this contemporary popular belief corresponds to the way Ortiz presents the different African ethnicities. 4 Sociocultural anthropology is divided into two fields defined in relation to the scientist who practices them: ethnography and ethnology. In general terms, the ethnologist constructs the theory of human behavior and studies the culture in which such behavior is manifested (Garbarino 3). The ethnographer’s job is to describe societies around the world. The ethnographer usually participates in the culture she or he observes, a methodology known as “participant observation.” A fundamental component of participant observation is immersion in the culture of the Other (Garbarino 2–3). For his part, Clifford Geertz states, “From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on” (Interpretation 6). 5 The term “negrismo” is used here according to Schwartz’s definition in Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: as a literary manifestation. He contrasts the term with “negritud,” which he defines as “the term that encompasses 170

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the black rights movements of the 1930s” (616). Schwartz also stresses Guillén’s important role as a journalist publishing articles “without euphemisms, with frankness” on the problems faced by Cuban blacks (627).

Chapter Two 1 This was the original title of the book when it was first published in Cuba. In this book I used the 1993 edition by Letras Cubanas, which omits the complete title and publishes the book simply as El monte. Henceforth, I will refer to the book by this title. 2 Here, “testimonial genre” refers to all the styles that use this discursive model, from autobiographies to pseudotestimonial novels and immediate testimonial texts. For a more extensive typology of testimonial narratives, see Francisco Theodosíadis’s Literatura testimonial: Análisis de un discurso periférico; Testimonio y literatura, edited by René Jara and Hernán Vidal; The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger; and Elzbieta Sklodowska’s Testimonio hispanoamericano. 3 Beverly, “La voz del otro,” introduction to the monographic issue on testimonial narrative of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. 4 Cabrera’s work parallels that of Zora Neale Hurston. The difference lies in Hurston’s academic training as an anthropologist. Moreover, Zora Neale Hurston sharply divides her scientific work from her fictional work. Her anthropological work published in academic journals follows the traditional understanding of the field. However, books such as Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God (both published in the thirties) have been studied as a mix of fiction and ethnographic research. I have not found any reference indicating that Cabrera was familiar with Hurston’s work. 5 In regard to testimonial narrative, John Beverly proposes that “the ‘legal’ connotation implicit in its convention implies a pledge of honesty on the part of the narrator, which the listener/reader is bound to respect” (“Margin at the Center” 27). 6 Among the works consulted are Cultura afrocubana, a four-volume encyclopedia by Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos; El santo (La ocha): Secretos de la religión Lucumí and Patakí: Leyendas y misterios de orishas africanos, by Julio García Cortez; Walking with the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of Santeria, by Raúl Cañizares; and Los secretos de la santería, by Agún Efundé.

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Chapter Three 1 See the publications of ethnographers such as Paul Rabinow or Jean-Paul Dumont as examples. Also, in the essay “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography,” Barbara Tedlock offers an extensive bibliography of anthropologists who have also published outside of the field of science—for the most part works of fiction. 2 The musicality is lost in the translation. Find here the quote in Spanish: —¡Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Yo va pasá ¿Se pué pasá? La mujer contesta: —Sí señó, Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón Uté pué pasá . . . —¡Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! ¿Se pué mirá? . . . —¡Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Uté pué mirá . . . —¡Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! ¿Se pué tocá? —¡Ayáyabómbo, Ayáyabón! Uté pué tocá . . . —¡Ay, yáyabómbo, ayáyabón! ¿Si se pué besá? La mujer le ofreció su boca —¡Ay, ay! ¡Ayábómbo, yáyabón! ¿Se pué abrazá? . . . —¡Sí señó, yáyabómbo, ayáyabón! Uté sí pué abrazá . . . (133–34) 3 The playing of drums is present in many Afro-Cuban celebrations and is also an offering garnered to the orishas.

Chapter Four 1 This quotation can be found at ‹http://habanaelegante.com› (accessed January 5, 2003). 2 In Borderlands/La frontera, Anzaldúa tries to solve the problem faced by U.S. 172

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Latinos of living between two worlds. She proposes a new form of mestizaje situated in the midst of a border consciousness that would permit the positive and enriching experience of belonging to many communities and having multiple identities. 3 The population that left Cuba in the 1960s, immediately after the Revolution, belonged to the upper class. The Afro-Cubans, for the most part poor, remained in the country. It is not until 1980, with the departure of the Marielitos, that there is a massive emigration of the underprivileged social classes. 4 For more information on choteo, see Jorge Mañach, Indagación del choteo. 5 Jutía, peculiar to Cuba, is an animal that looks like a cross between a squirrel with a rat’s tail and a rabbit.

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Index Abakuás, 12, 13, 68, 74, 144 Achugar, Hugo, 66 Afro-Cubans, 4, 15–19, 27, 28, 53, 62, 68, 73, 74–75, 77, 87, 106, 108–9, 116, 119–20, 127, 135, 146, 149, 151, 165–67; religion of, 4, 12, 20, 64, 102, 109, 116, 127, 142, 144, 145, 148; folklore of, 4, 106, 167; culture of, 5, 8, 12, 19, 20, 29, 49, 57, 65, 76, 90, 95, 107, 146, 147, 149, 167; studies of, 10, 11, 15–19, 27–30, 48, 50, 57, 104, 106; identity of, 33, 61, 125, 145; community of, 38; and religion in Los negros brujos, 41–47; voices of, 44, 53, 165; as subjects, 47, 48, 72, 77, 80, 83, 98, 107, 108, 126, 127, 135, 140–41, 152, 159; music of, 50–52; mythology of, 65, 123, 126; and tradition, 68, 119, 142, 167; cosmological views of, 75, 78, 87, 102, 104, 108, 110–11, 117, 119, 120, 122, 126–28, 143, 145, 147, 151, 154; beliefs of, 118, 143–44, 166 Ahmad, Aijaz, 160 Ajiaco, 34, 54 Anaforuana: Ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la Sociedad Secreta Abakuá, 14 Anagó, vocabulario Lucumí: El Yoruba que se habla en Cuba, 12, 91

Anhalt, Nedda G. de, 65 Animales en el folklore y la magia de Cuba, Los, 15 Anthropology, 4, 11, 15, 21–22, 27, 29, 33, 36, 44, 46, 49, 52–53, 56, 61, 62, 65, 73–75, 97, 98, 103, 128, 135, 144–45, 147, 151 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 139, 162 (n. 2) Ararás, 74, 88, 89, 117 Archivos del Folklore Cubano, 17 Arrom, José Juan, 16 Avant-garde movements, 11, 40, 49–50 Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea, 14, 22, 136, 148–59 passim Babalú Ayé (Babayú-ayé), 43, 88 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89 Barnet, Miguel, 27, 92 Baudrillard, Jean, 98, 133, 140–42 Benson, Paul, 101 Beverly, John, 67, 98, 171 (n. 5) Bhabha, Homi K., 25, 107, 166 Bolívar, Aróstegui Natalia, 91, 92 Bruner, Edward M., 25, 29–30, 41, 47, 101 Cabrera, Esther, 11 Cabrera, Lydia: Cuentos negros de Cuba, 5, 8, 22, 65, 99–132 passim; biography, 5–15 passim;

“Nena en Sociedad,” 7; Páginas sueltas, 10, 15, 20; Refranes de negros viejos, 12; La Sociedad Secreta Abakuá, 12, 13, 144; El Monte, 12, 14, 18, 22, 59, 64–98 passim, 102, 103, 109–11, 113–14, 116–17, 119, 126–27, 130, 141, 146, 149, 153, 154, 167; Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba, 12, 22, 99–132 passim; Anagó, vocabulario Lucumí: El Yoruba que se habla en Cuba, 12, 91; Vocabulario Congo: El bantú que se habla en Cuba, 13, 15; Anaforuana: Ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la Sociedad Secreta Abakuá, 14; Francisco y Francisca: Chascarrillos de negros viejos, 14; La laguna sagrada de San Joaquín, 14; Otán Iyebiyé: Las piedras preciosas, 14, 22, 136, 142–48; Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea, 14, 22, 136, 148–59 passim; Yemayá y Ochún, 14, 91, 128; Los animales en el folklore y la magia de Cuba, 15; Koeko Iyawó. Aprende novicia: Pequeño tratado de regla Lucumí, 15; La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, 15; La regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, 15; Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte, Mayombe, 15; Supersticiones y buenos consejos, 15; Itinerarios del Insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba, 15, 22, 136, 159–67; Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales, 15, 22, 148–59, 162, 163; La medicina popular en Cuba, 15, 113 Cabrera Bosch, Raimundo, 7, 62 Calazán Herrera, José, 76, 77, 81, 97 Campaña, Mario, 65 196

Index

Campbell, Joseph, 59 Carpentier, Alejo, 10, 11; EcueYamba-Ó, 11 Casanova, Elisa Marcaida, 7 Castellanos, Isabel, 10, 15, 20 Castro, Fidel, 17, 19, 139, 159 Césaire, Aimé, 11, 50 Changó (Shangó) (Santa Barbara, Saint Bárbara), 43, 44, 52, 76, 77, 78, 86, 92, 93, 109, 113, 120–21, 131 Choteo, 148, 173 (n. 4) Christianity, 42, 54, 120 Clifford, James, 59, 61–62, 82, 83, 94, 116 Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, 93–94 Congos, 13, 53, 55, 69, 71, 74, 88, 89, 119, 150; sect, 85, 90 Crapanzano, Vincent, 83 Cubans: identity of, 4, 5, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 34, 61, 95, 102, 126, 136–39, 148, 161; culture of, 4, 17, 18, 19, 20, 29, 49, 54, 55, 62, 73, 93, 98, 104, 106, 110, 135, 137, 138, 144, 145, 166; history of, 15, 127; nationality of, 85. See also Cubanía; Identity: Cuban national Cubanía (Cubanness), 4, 21, 46, 57; in culture, 4. See also Identity Cuban revolution, 3, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 28, 48, 57, 66, 136, 161; rhetoric of, 19 Cuba y América, 7 Cuba y sus jueces, 7 Cuentos negros de Cuba, 5, 8, 22, 65, 99–132 passim Cuentos para adultos niños y retrasados mentales, 15, 22, 148–59, 162, 163

Danforth, Loring, 99 De Certeau, Michel, 93, 159 Deleuze, Gilles, 133, 140–41 Elegguá, 82, 86, 89, 113, 127 El Monte, 12, 14, 18, 22, 59, 64–98 passim, 102, 103, 109–11, 113–14, 116–17, 119, 126–27, 130, 141, 146, 149, 153, 154, 167 Ethnography/ethnographers, 4, 12, 17, 20, 21–22, 37, 43, 56, 61–62, 64–66, 70–74, 77, 80, 82, 83, 89, 93–95, 97, 100, 101–3, 109–10, 114, 116–20, 130, 132, 134, 147, 166–67 Ethnology, 21, 56, 57 Exile, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22, 108, 133, 135–40, 142–67 passim Fanon, Frantz, 122–23 Feminism, 94 Ferguson, James, 33 Figueroa, Esperanza, 108 Fischer, Michael M. J., 94 Foucault, Michel, 40, 80, 107 Francisco y Francisca: Chascarrillos de negros viejos, 14 Franqui, Carlos, 19 García, Cristina, 139 Gays and lesbians, 90–92, 113, 127. See also Gender; Homosexuality Geertz, Clifford, 56, 70 Gender, 5, 22, 102, 130. See also Gays and lesbians González Echevarría, Roberto, 66, 102 Guillén, Nicolás, 11, 50, 122, 171 (n. 5)

Gupta, Akhil, 33 Gutiérrez, Mariela, 117, 120 Hall, Stuart, 125 Homenaje a Lydia Cabrera, 15, 64 Homosexuality, 90–93. See also Gays and lesbians hooks, bell, 40, 104, 106, 122 Hurston, Zora Neale, 102, 104, 171 (n. 4) Identity, 3, 5, 7, 11, 17, 19, 33, 44, 46–47, 57, 83, 91, 107, 122–23, 125, 127, 136–39, 145, 147, 151, 153, 159, 161, 164, 167; Cuban national, 3, 4, 10, 20, 22, 27, 30, 33, 56, 85, 107, 136–40, 147; sexual, 14, 91–92; cultural, 22, 33, 37, 125, 129, 166. See also Cubans: identity of Ifá, 43, 111, 116, 128 Ikú, 112, 114–16 Inle (San Rafael), 91, 92, 113 Itinerarios del Insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba, 15, 22, 136, 159–67 Jehenson, Ivonne, 98 Kaplan, Karen, 160–61, 162 Koeko Iyawó. Aprende novicia: Pequeño tratado de regla Lucumí, 15 Kristeva, Julia, 159 Lachatañeré, Rómulo, 18, 41, 50 Laguna sagrada de San Joaquín, La, 14 Lam, Wilfredo, 11, 13, 14 Larsen, Neil, 95 Lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, La, 15 Levinas, Emmanuel, 97 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 38 Index

197

Lienhard, Martín, 49 Lombroso, César, 29, 30, 62 López Valdés, Rafael, 15, 17 Lucumís, 52, 68, 69, 71, 74, 81, 82, 86, 88, 89, 91, 126, 142, 143. See also Ocha sect Ludmer, Josefina, 71 Lyotard, Jean-François, 106 Madrigal, José A., 15, 64, 136 Marcus, George E., 94, 116 Mascia-Lees, Frances, 93–94 Matos Palés, Luis, 50 Medicina popular en Cuba, La, 15, 113 Moore, Carlos, 19 Morales, Calixta (Oddeddei), 81, 97 Ñáñigos, 13, 52, 89, 90, 144 Nationalism, 22, 35, 46, 50, 55–57, 64, 75, 90, 93, 98, 110, 128, 132, 133, 135–36, 139–42, 147–48, 158, 160–62, 164–67; cultural, 28, 49, 79; Cuban, 48. See also Identity: Cuban national Negrismo (negritude), 11, 50, 170–71 (n. 5) Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 Obatalá (Virgin of Mercy), 43, 45, 69, 91, 103–4, 112, 115 Ocha sect, 85, 90, 92, 103, 113, 117, 127, 145. See also Lucumís Ochosi, 113, 130–31 Ochún (Oshún), 45, 90, 109–10, 112–13, 118, 120, 131, 142, 143 Oggún, 43–45, 87, 91, 92, 93, 113, 114, 130–31 Olofi, 93, 124, 127–28 198

Index

Olorun (Olorum) (Santísimo Sacramento), 43, 103 Ortiz, Fernando, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25–57 passim, 61, 62, 71, 73, 77, 93, 104, 106, 108, 135, 144; Los negros brujos, 16, 18, 21, 27, 30–47 passim, 50, 52, 144; Los negros curros, 18; Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba, 18, 21, 27, 47–56; Los negros esclavos, 18, 46–47; La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba, 18, 49; Las cuatro culturas indias de Cuba, 33; Los cabildos y la fiesta afrocubana del día de reyes, 47–48; El engaño de las razas, 48; Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, 49; Historia de una pelea cubana contra los demonios, 49; El huracán: Su mitología y sus símbolos, 49; Martí y las razas, 49; Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana, 49, 50 Ortúzar-Young, Ada, 5 Orula (Orúmila), 86, 91, 111, 114–16, 128 Osain, 68, 85–86, 113, 127 Otán Iyebiyé: Las piedras preciosas, 14, 22, 136, 142–48 Otero, Lisandra, 3 Otherness/Other, 4, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 30, 40, 50, 53, 57, 61–62, 65, 70, 80, 83, 84, 88, 89, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 106–8, 122, 123, 125, 135, 140, 147, 166–67 Oyá (Virgin of Candelaria), 86, 112–14 Páginas sueltas, 10, 15, 20 Parra, Teresa de la, 8, 10, 91, 107 Patakís, 43, 112, 120, 130

Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 138–39 Por qué . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba, 12, 22, 99–132 passim Postmodernism, 22, 93, 94–95, 97, 153, 160–62, 166; and ethnography, 62, 93–95

Social class, 5, 46, 51, 123, 124, 157, 165, 168 Sociedad Secreta Abakuá, La, 12, 13, 144 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 61, 98 Supersticiones y buenos consejos, 15

Quiroga, José, 92 Race, 5, 18–19, 22, 29, 32, 34, 36–37, 39, 46, 48–49, 54, 57, 123, 124, 156 Racism, 16, 17, 18–19, 35, 41, 49, 50, 51, 123, 127 Randall, Margaret, 66 Refranes de negros viejos, 12 Regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, La, 15 Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte, Mayombe, 15 Respall Fina, Raimundo, 141–42 Rojas, María Teresa, 8, 12, 13, 15 Romeu, Raquel, 148 Rosaldo, Renato, 40, 61 Ruffinelli, Jorge, 127 Ruiz del Vivo, Hortensia, 126

Teresa M. (Omí-Tomí), 8, 73, 76, 78, 81 Testimonial narrative, 65–67, 69, 70, 72–74, 79–81, 93, 95, 97–98, 171 (n. 2); in novels, 65, 70, 80, 90, 98, 101, 167; as genre, 66, 73, 171 (n. 2); in discourse, 66, 93, 95 Thompson, Robert, 14 Transculturation, 11, 12, 20, 27–30, 48, 49, 54, 55, 135, 151 Turner, Victor, 101 Tyler, Stephen A., 95, 98 Veitía, Antonio, 16 Vocabulario Congo: El bantú que se habla en Cuba, 13, 15 West-Durán, Alan, 163

Sánchez, Reinaldo, 15, 136 Sandoval, Gabino, 81, 92, 93 Santeria, 34, 43–46, 64, 65, 90, 91, 114, 117, 127, 130, 131, 144; priest, 45, 46, 65 Schwartz, Jorge, 50 Secret Society of Abakuá, 55 Sexual orientation, 13 Sharpe, Patricia, 93–94 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 95, 97, 98

Yáñez, Mirta, 137 Yemayá (Virgen de Regla), 43, 44, 83, 90, 91, 92, 109, 112, 115, 120–21, 127, 128, 131 Yemayá y Ochún, 14, 91, 128 Yorubas, 37, 43, 54, 55, 91; pantheon of, 14, 43, 45, 103, 110, 114; religion of, 45 Zirimu, Pio, 120

Index

199