Narrative Mutations: Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY

Edited by William E.Cain Wellesley CollegeA ROUTLEDGE SERIES

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor REVISED LIVES Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship William Pannapacker THE REAL NEGRO The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature Shelly Eversley LABOR PAINS Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question Carolyn R.Maibor NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Jennifer Cognard-Black FICTIONAL FEMINISM How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women’s Equality Kim Loudermilk THE COLONIZER ABROAD Island Representations in American Prose from Melville to London Christopher McBride THE METANARRATIVE OF SUSPICION IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA Sandra Baringer PROTEST AND THE BODY IN MELVILLE, Dos PASSOS, AND HURSTON Tom McGlamery THE ARCHITECTURE OF ADDRESS The Monument and Public Speech In American Poetry Jake Adam York THE SLAVE IN THE SWAMP Disrupting the Plantation Narrative William Tynes Cowan READING THE TEXT THAT ISN’T THERE Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel Mike Davis RACIAL BLASPHEMIES Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature

iii

Michael L.Cobb ETHICAL DIVERSIONS The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman Katalin Orbán POSTMODERN COUNTERNARRATIVES Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don Delillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O’Brien Christopher Donovan THE END OF THE MIND The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück DeSales Harrison AUTHORING THE SELF Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth Scott Hess NARRATIVE MUTATIONS Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature Rudyard J.Alcocer

NARRATIVE MUTATIONS Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature

Rudyard J.Alcocer

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alcocer, Rudyard J. Narrative mutations: discourses of heredity and Caribbean literature/Rudyard J. Alcocer. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97115-2 (alk. paper) 1. Caribbean fiction (Spanish)—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean fiction—History and criticism. 3. Heredity in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ7361.A43 2005 863.009′9729–dc22 2005019685

ISBN 0-203-50352-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58089-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

A la memoria de mi padre Rolando Alcocer Cetina, M.D. 1925–2002

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

Chapter One

Heredity and Discursivity: From Pre-History to the Plantation

16

Chapter Two

Misce-gene-nation: Heredity and the Rise of Pluralism in Caribbean Narrative

40

Talking Flowers and Flowering People: Narrative, Plant Genetics, and Caribbean Identity

70

Chapter Four

Bound Bodies: The Struggle in Caribbean Narrative Against Biological Determinism

98

Chapter Five

Hybridity and Its Mysteries: Heredity, Intertextuality, and Cultural Identity in the Caribbean

132

Heredity, Narrative, and the Caribbean Diaspora

164

Notes

168

Bibliography

192

Index

201

Chapter Three

Afterword

Acknowledgments

I could not have brought Narrative Mutations to this point without the untiring and invaluable aid of the following people, each of whom deserves here at least several paragraphs of commentary: Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Daniel Balderston, Susan Lawrence, Mary Lou Emery, Timothy J.Reiss, Scott Westrem, Sean Meehan, Prasenjit Gupta, Kelly Alcocer, and Jeanine Alcocer. Thank you all for your keen intellectual insights and editorial suggestions! The University of Iowa, particularly its Graduate College and its Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, has been a generous source of support, as has Luther College, particularly its Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its interdisciplinary program in the Humanities: Paideia. My hope is that I have been at least half as beneficial to my colleagues and students at these institutions as they have been to me. In the last few years, I have done my best to maintain a life outside of my teaching and scholarship. Several individuals have played important roles in this “life,” and have given Jeanine and me their love and friendship, including Randal Affolder, Sean and Mary Meehan, Karen and Thomas Rietz, Joyce Berg. Lastly, in this study I have written—at times obliquely—about the family. I will write a bit more: I can’t say enough about how supportive Jeanine’s side of the family has been; fortunately we have been able to spend enough time in New York, Virginia, and Florida during the last few years for family to still feel like family. Needless to say, I send muchos besitos to my side of the family, especially Mami, Loli, Rudolph, Rolando, Isabel, and Kelly: the covers of this book could not contain the joy they bring. Last, though certainly not least (except perhaps in size), I would like to thank my baby daughter Carmen, whose first 3 months have been the most exciting in my life.

Introduction

In “Otra maldad de Pateco,”1 a remarkable short story by the Puerto Rican writer Ana Lydia Vega, the protagonist, José Clemente, is born with a black head and a white body. His body is divided, quite literally, into two clearly different pigmentations, which represent in their turn—in highly dichotomous fashion— the two major social poles on this island and—as it happens—in the remainder of the Caribbean: Blacks, who purportedly identify with an African ancestry and cultural traditions, and Whites, who identify with people and things European. Much has been written about Vega’s story, but little about the strange transformation that lies at its heart. A figure with a black head on a white body? The image might strike some readers of the story as the stuff of fantasy, not unlike the satyrs and minotaurs of Greek mythology whose bodies were also divided in some unusual, even supernatural way. As was the case with his half-human, halfanimal predecessors, José Clemente and the story of how he eventually arrived at a single color (“which color will it be and how is this significant?,” one might ask) are in many ways perplexing: certainly babies do not ever really appear thus complexioned, right? Furthermore, Puerto Rican (and Caribbean) society is not really so easily divided in half along color lines: its population is predominantly a product of generations of intermixing between people of European (mostly Spanish), African, and—to a lesser degree—indigenous descent, a process that was already well underway even during the colonial era during which “Otra maldad de Pateco” is set. What I find most compelling about this story and many others like it from the Caribbean is not necessarily whether they are “right” or “wrong,” scientifically or historically accurate or not, in terms of the curious mutations or other physical attributes their characters may display upon birth, but rather that these stories are interested in or somehow informed by processes and ideas of heredity in the first place. Given the welcomed shift throughout the academy away from essentialist and biologically fixed understandings of “race,” it is indeed a curiosity worth exploring that so many sophisticated (and even politically radical) narratives remain thus informed and interested. My aim in the pages that follow is to trace heredity as a guiding trope throughout much of Caribbean literature—particularly its fictional narratives—and to some extent throughout much of the Caribbean cultural arena. Although my focus is in

2 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

the Hispanic Caribbean (especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico), I also consider important fictional narratives from elsewhere in the Caribbean, particularly Dominica and Guadéloupe. Why establish a link between heredity2 and Caribbean narrative? In an entirely different (and distant) context, George Mallory famously justified his desire to climb Mt. Everest with the dictum, “Because it’s there.” As tempting as this path may be (his expeditions tragic failure notwithstanding), one cannot use Mallory’s words as justification for the enterprise of this study. Is this so-called “link” between heredity and Caribbean narrative even “there” in the first place? If so, to what degree? Even if heredity does somehow seem to pervade this body of literature, even if the link can be made with some success, to what end do we make it? Broadly stated, exploring this relationship sheds light on many of the most pressing issues pertinent to Caribbean and literary studies. In terms of postcolonial theory (inasmuch as the Caribbean is sometimes described as a post- or neo-colonial region), for example, one might ask if the relationship between the once-colonized and the colonizer is similar to that between a child and a parent. Is the first ever free of the second or are the two inexorably linked? What does it take to render them asunder? In terms of narrative studies, the question becomes “How do narratives register and/or negotiate these tensions?” More broadly, what forces determine the paths narratives may take and how are these forces linked to other discourses in a given society? This study offers at least partial answers to these questions by way of arguing for the importance of discourses of heredity in Caribbean narrative. My basic contention is that Caribbean narratives are bound by many of the same processes that characterize these discourses, which are sometimes quite “fictional” themselves. Similarly, much of Caribbean narrative reveals a struggle on the part of writers to resist or overcome these binds. A fundamental concern of this study is to place Caribbean narratives within their cultural and historical contexts. This, however, should entail more than establishing a chronology but also analyzing these contexts in terms of the discourses and ideas that play dominant roles. Discourses related to heredity, including those on race but also, in some respects, those on agriculture, have received substantial attention in studies on the Caribbean,3 yet discourses of heredity (or hereditarian discourses)4 have received inadequate attention. This is particularly striking in that this narrative tradition is replete with both direct and indirect references to such discourses—references that are closely tied to the way Caribbean narratives negotiate and shape meaning. In fact, by focusing on discourses of heredity in Caribbean narrative, we gain additional insight not only into the roles of agriculture (especially the sugar plantation) and race throughout Caribbean narrative, but also into other issues that are central to the region and of no small importance elsewhere. While I argue for the importance of discourses of heredity in the Caribbean, my intention is not to suggest that these discourses exist only in Caribbean culture and that they are a final determinant of meaning here; rather, they are a set of discourses that Caribbean writers have used, and they are

INTRODUCTION 3

ones with which or through which other discourses, including fictional narrative, can be read. What do we make, for instance, of the frequency with which Caribbean narratives bestow human characteristics on plants, plant characteristics on humans, not to mention narratives in which both plants and humans seem entangled in a process that foregrounds intergenerational dynamics?5 By intergenerational dynamics I mean occurrences predicated on the relations between parents/ancestors and offspring/descendants, whether these terms function literally or figuratively in the narratives. Furthermore, I argue that, within a hereditarian paradigm, the above intergenerational processes in narratives include relationships involving (in varying combinations) plants, human bodies, human communities, narratives, even cultural theories—all of which involve the cultural elements most crucial to studies of the Caribbean. These elements include the plantation,6 race, history, and—given the transmissions on which hereditarian processes are premised—gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Lastly, I would like to make it explicit now that while I focus on discourses of heredity in Caribbean narrative, I do not mean to suggest that such discourses (particularly as manifested in the dubious uses to which genetic science has sometimes been put) may provide a desirable praxis or paradigm to impose on cultures and writings or through which to interpret and order every culture and writing, especially those from as unique a region as the Caribbean. I wish instead to show how, in a society influenced by the plantation, hereditarian thinking or ideology has infiltrated the most unlikely of arenas. In revealing writers’ (at times, perhaps, unintentional) recourse to such thinking (or, as I will often phrase it: a “hereditarian” imagination), I work under the assumption that to move beyond this kind of potentially hierarchical and deterministic mentality we have to be aware of its often subtle existence. A general aim in this study is to carry out this exposition of hereditarian discourses in Caribbean narrative and in doing so to explore the complicated, dynamic region where art (i.e., Caribbean narrative) meets its raw materials (which include hereditarian discourses). OVERVIEW Although throughout this study I intend to construct a multi-faceted account of or definition for hereditarian discourses, we can begin with the following provisional statement: discourses of heredity encompass ways in which writers in the Caribbean use language or organize knowledge or experience in such a way as to indicate or suggest a perception of determinism, as well as a search for kinship, biological origins and/or racial purity. Conversely, these writers some-times also employ hereditarian discourses in the opposite direction to follow the results of different kinship, biological and/or ethnic crosses. In addition, I employ the term more broadly in order to encompass what I consider a hereditarian imagination on the part of Caribbean writers; with such an imagination or sensibility in mind,

4 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

we can see that relationships of heredity and dependence pervade areas not commonly associated with these relationships. A challenge to this study lies in that it is not always apparent where to locate something as potentially nebulous as hereditarian discourses. In some respects it is easier to locate them implicitly through their “footprints,” although often—as I hope to demonstrate—there can be little doubt as to their “presence” (always a complex one) in the Caribbean discursive field. Although I will seldom find it apt to make a point-by-point, strict (or mechanical) approximation between scientifically-based hereditarian language and narratives by Caribbean writers (e.g., “this particular character’s personality could be an example of the author’s attempt to illustrate a recessive inheritance” etc.), I do intend to make less rigid approximations. If nothing else, in making such approximations I hope to demonstrate the prevalence and problematics of hereditarian discourses in Caribbean writings. The ideological range within which we can locate the works of various writers is a wide one: with respect to the associations between heredity and the political implications involving constructions of race, we shall see that some writings opposed racism during the era of slavery, some continued to do so well after the abolition of slavery, while others are more oblique and seem more preoccupied with issues that seem to have little bearing on race. Meanwhile, references to agriculture or even race in Caribbean narrative do not necessarily mean that an important hereditarian element is also at play As such, when I refer to agriculture or race in Caribbean narrative, I do so mainly with an eye to how these discourses can be read in terms of the shape of narratives and also in terms of how they define narrative possibilities and limitations. How is it, exactly, that literary narrative, a discourse or set of discourses so often associated with freedom, resistance, and sometimes even with the “highest” of human faculties, could also be intimately tied with discourses as potentially deterministic as those involving heredity? Sciences interested in heredity (especially genetics), for example, can be used to combat illnesses and to improve agricultural yields, but they have also been associated (most notoriously in Nazi Germany) with nefarious concepts and practices like racism and eugenics.7 In fact, my contention is that hereditarian discourses encompass several themes prevalent in Caribbean narrative that might otherwise seem unrelated. In so doing, new possibilities arise with regard to ways of reading Caribbean narratives and comprehending several complex issues surrounding the region. Stated differently, when many narratives (particularly those I analyze in this project) explore what it means to be Caribbean, they are often also coming to terms with (or debunking) the concept and the weight of heredity—at times indirectly but occasionally in quite evident ways—and the entire legacy of colonialism that this term evokes. Interestingly, even as some narratives or cultural theories try to distance themselves from a constricting hereditarian language, in doing so they may invoke this language. Ultimately, hereditarian discourses serve as a guiding trope in much of Caribbean narrative, perhaps due to the region’s complex history of ethnic mixing. Implicitly at stake,

INTRODUCTION 5

perhaps, with the question of heredity is the very status of the Caribbean as a sovereign region, not only politically and economically but also with respect to cultural unity or identity. By way of providing a historical “answer” to the question of heredity in the Caribbean, this study traces a shift that took hold during the twentieth century in Caribbean attitudes toward both hereditarian discourses and the region’s former colonizers: rather than protesting the prevalence of inherited, ethnic “contamination” within the Caribbean, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, progressively-minded writers in this region began publishing narratives that turned the tables on the onus of heredity by emphasizing ethnic heterogeneity as a distinguishing feature of the Caribbean and as a crucial element in visions of the regions future. We shall see, however, that this shift away from biological determinism and toward ethnic heterogeneity has not been historically uniform. In any case, I agree with writers (for instance Cirilo Villaverde and José Martí in a Cuban context) exemplifying the later trend in their desire for a Caribbean free of racial distinctions and/or hierarchies, both of which deploy a certain model of heredity. This wrestling by Caribbean writers with discourses associated with heredity is the focus of this study and in my opinion adds a layer of complexity and richness to a fascinating literary tradition, one, no less, that has turned a critical eye on race relations and constructions of race for over a century and a half. NARRATIVE THEORIES AND THE CARIBBEAN Although in essence it offers a theory of Caribbean narrative and of its singularity, this study might also engage anyone interested in narrative studies in general, in how literary and scientific discourses interact in a culture, and especially those interested in issues of representation. In many respects I intend to combine analyses of representation in Caribbean literature (of which important contributions have already been made) with a new analysis of narration and narrative techniques in this literature. Needless to say, these “dualities” (representation and narration) are in fact two faces of the same coin and Narrative Mutations is based on this premise. Too often, however, we overlook the fact that narratives are narrated and do not “represent” automatically. Accordingly, I hope to show that in the Caribbean, hereditarian discourses (which comprise an overlooked representational force) are intertwined with narrational concerns, i.e., concerns regarding the construction of stories. With regard to narrative theories, few of the more prominent “general” theories in the context of the North American academy make any mention of Caribbean narratives; the presumption in this silence is that Caribbean narratives are the same as those from other regions and that what is applicable else-where is also applicable in the Caribbean. Part of my ambition for this project is to add to the growing corpus of Caribbean narrative theory8 by taking into consideration important scientific trends (and their cultural implications) both within and without the Caribbean.

6 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

In some regards, a study on hereditarian discourses in the Caribbean is particularly useful in elucidating complex race relations and constructions of race. Many important studies have analyzed race and literature in the Caribbean (e.g., Coulthard 1962, Luis 1990, C.Williams 2000); further-more, agriculture and the plantation in the Caribbean have been fruitfully correlated with cultural production (Mintz 1966, Benítez Rojo 1988 and 1992). In my view, however, heredity as a concept serves as a crucial link among numerous discourses with in the Caribbean and it is also one from which they seem to draw their strength: heredity is a temporal, process-driven concept, and this may account in part for the discursive power it wields in the personal and group identities narrative fictions construct. By linking hereditarian discourses and narrative in the Caribbean, I draw on the work of cultural critics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mary Louise Pratt, and Sander Gilman, each of whom has productively analyzed how racial discourses operate within cultures and writings. Lastly, the term heredity is linked not only with genetics, but also with a concept controversial in contemporary cultural theory, hybridity: a concept that studies on the Caribbean have not treated extensively, perhaps because of their emphases on the more prevalent and influential concept of transculturation, as formulated by Ortiz in his Contrapunteo cubano. Although hybridity has received some indirect treatment in the Caribbean, part of my ambition in this project—particularly here in the introduction—is to examine some of the reasons for this lacuna. AIR AND BLOOD: CULTURAL THEORY, HEREDITY, AND THE CARIBBEAN How does heredity (a concept that is at once nebulous as well as associated with visceral, sanguine processes) relate to Caribbean and non-Caribbean cultural theories (which can themselves be quite “airy” while potentially having very real consequences)? Before outlining the various chapters of this project and the texts that I will analyze, a few observations are in order regarding the nexus between cultural theory and concepts associated with heredity. Any attempt to speak of the Caribbean in theoretically abstract or holistic terms is potentially a risky project because each of the islands in the region has—among a plethora of possible distinguishing characteristics—a distinct history, ethnic make-up and economy; although several islands share the same language, Caribbeans speak numerous languages and dialects.9 Nonetheless, scholars of varying political persuasions have found in the Caribbean several unifying factors, including a common history dominated by mercantilist colonization and a common social structure dominated by the plantation. According to Michael Dash, technological advances during the twentieth century facilitated communication among Caribbean islands; this process, in turn, has been instrumental in the Caribbean conceptualizing itself as a region, rather than as an assortment of small nations. He adds that “the very heterogeneity of the region, which, as…has [been] suggested, is an obstacle to theorizing about it as a whole, has become the

INTRODUCTION 7

methodological ground that facilitates recent attempts to establish theoretical models of the Caribbean.”10 The challenge, in my view, lies in identifying unifying factors and building theoretical models without simultaneously invoking divisive hereditarian language. Paul Gilroy, for example, locates the Caribbean in a space he labels the “Black Atlantic,” and offers the ship as a metaphor to characterize the region (Gilroy 1993). The motions of this ship symbolically connect Africa, England, and North America, with the Caribbean serving as a focal point. In his postmodern reading of the region and its literature, Benítez Rojo has argued that, despite apparent chaotic discontinuities, a deep structure—based on the historical influence of the plantation throughout the Caribbean—links its various islands (The Repeating Island 1992). Other theories about the Caribbean, however, have more complex relationships with hereditarian discourses. Dash provides an intellectual and historical context to Pan-Caribbean theories in currency during the late nineteenth century. These theories, he argues, also asserted a hemispheric, Pan-Americanism: In an attempt to define a new space outside of the colonial system of relations, whether aesthetic or political, [Hispanic] Caribbean intellectuals began to theorize new interdiscursive notions such as criollismo, antillanismo, or a new American identity. Hemispheric mappings at this time were based on the belief in the uniquely mestizo nature of Caribbean society. (59–60) Eventually, however, due to the “inequality of economic development and the expansion of North American capitalism,” this Pan-Caribbean impulse yielded to pessimism and more sectarian visions of the region (60). Caribbean theorists of the 1920’s developed another sense of spatial representation—one that was not intertextual and open-ended but that theorized a Caribbean ‘heterocosm.’ An original presence outside the reach of both encroaching imperialism or any dialogic relationship…. This Rousseauesque idealism would be at the heart of much of the nationalist, indigenist, Marxist, and noiriste politics of the next few decades. (60) Of the noiriste political movements Dash mentions, the most prominent in the Caribbean—especially a mid-century Francophone Caribbean—was négritude, a term coined by Aimé Céaire in his poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (1939). According to Nick Nesbitt, négritude refers to a collective identity of the African diaspora born of a common historico-cultural experience of subjugation…. Both the term and the subsequent literary and cultural movement that developed equally

8 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

emphasized the possible negation of that subjugation via concerted actions of racial affirmation, of which the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is the prototype. In succeeding decades the term became a focus for ideological disputes among the black intelligentsia of a Francophone world in the process of decolonization.11 Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the leading voices in the négritude movement, offered in 1970 the following as a definition of the term: Negritude [sic] is nothing more or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the African personality…it is…the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe.12 Could négritude, however, carry theoretical and cultural weight in the Caribbean without falling into the trap of a biological essentialism rooted in hereditarian discourses? Nesbitt does not think so: Unlike Césaire’s earlier historicizing use of the term ‘Négritude,’ [his] articles such as ‘What Does Africa Mean to Us?’ argued for a biologicallybased notion of black identity inherited from Frobenius [German 1873– 1938], in which a black ‘biological reality’ is invoked to account for black identity…both Césaire’s and Senghor’s uncritical reliance upon a sanguinary ideology of African ‘blood’ resonates disturbingly with fascist doctrine of the era. (1406) A more recent theory of Caribbean culture is creolization, popularized by the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant. “The idea of creolization,” he explains, demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify ‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs. In Western tradition, genealogical descent guarantees racial exclusivity, just as Genesis legitimizes genealogy. To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of ‘creolized’ that is considered as halfway between the two ‘pure’ extremes.13 Glissant’s mission with the concept of creolization is an admirable one in that he seeks to disrupt the unfortunately associated binaries of good/bad and pure/mixed. In deconstructing notions of racial purity and valorizing creolization, however, he and other proponents of the concept nonetheless operate within the basic discursive framework of the human body and its reproduction. This is the case not so much with respect to how the term is generally used (creolization designates a cultural process rather than a specific racial type; in fact it rejects and mocks genealogy), but rather with its etymology: according to the OED, the French créole

INTRODUCTION 9

stems from the Spanish criollo (a child, particularly of Europeans, who is born in the New World), a word that is a derivative of criar (to raise, to grow, or to breed), which in turn is derived from the Latin creare (to create). In a sense, a concept that rejects the notion of genesis is rooted etymologically in that very concept. On the one hand, the strength of creolization as a concept may lie in the process of rhetorical inversion the term itself suggests. On the other hand, however, Glissant acknowledges the tensions in the term. For example, a Caribbean poet he does not identify once challenged Glissant with regard to the term creolization: “I understand the reality,” he told Glissant, “I just do not like the word” (Glissant 141). Furthermore, Glissant warns that creolization, rather than deconstructing fixed genealogical categories, can fall prey to reification14 and begin designating a fixed intermediary position between two supposedly “pure” extremes. The question remains: Is it possible to carry forth Glissant’s social vision without invoking or simply inverting undesirable concepts rooted in a hereditarian imagination? “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” (1940), an influential essay by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz, illustrates this very tension, albeit in very subtle ways. It is in “Los factores” that, while trying to arrive at the basic qualities of cubanidad, he likens Cuban culture to an ajiaco, the pre-Columbian name for a popular stew made from “varias especies de legumbres…y de trozos de carnes diversas; todo lo cual se cocina con agua en hervor hasta producirse un caldo muy grueso y suculento y se sazona con el cubanísimo ají que le da el nombre”15 (“various kinds of vegetables…and chunks of various kinds of meats; all of which is cooked with boiling water until a very thick and succulent broth is produced, which is in turn seasoned with the very Cuban ají whence the name ajiaco”). The ajiaco stands as a metaphor for the “mestizaje de cocinas, mestizaje de razas, mestizaje de culturas. Caldo denso de civilización que borbollea en el fogón del Caribe” (169) (“mestizaje of cuisines, the mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures. Dense broth of civilization that bubbles in the kettle of the Caribbean”). The process of mestizaje, however, is not as simple or as linear as one might suspect, despite the optimistic tones of his last observation. Elsewhere, for example, he advises against thinking “que la cubanidad haya que buscarla en esa salsa de nueva y sintéica suculencia formada por la fusión de los linajes humanos desleídos en Cuba” (169, my italics) (“that la cubanidad should be sought in that salsa of new and synthetic succulence formed by the fusion of the human lineages seen in Cuba”). According to Ortiz, being Cuban is not simply contingent upon heredity but hinges on other factors that underscore the importance of cultural— as opposed to biological—processes. In other words, Cuba is in a continuous process of formation that is not dependent on heredity. Avoiding mention of this hereditary dependence is not always easy, however. Early in the essay, for example, he argues that “la cubanidad para el individuo no está en la sangre, ni en el papel ni en la habitación” (165) (“la cubanidad in terms of the individual is not in the blood, nor in one’s role nor in where one lives”). Being Cuban is more than just these accidental things. In fact, Ortiz asserts that

10 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

there are people who live in Cuba who are not really Cuban while there are true Cubans who do not reside on the island. Of particular importance is his claim that la cubanidad is not in the blood, but is rather a “condición del alma” (165) (“a condition of the soul”). What interests me, however, is how this claim compares with the language he uses in other parts of the essay: Pero pocos países habrá como el cubano donde…se hayan cruzado razas más dispares y donde sus abrazos amorosos hayan sido más frecuentes, más complejos, más tolerados y más augurales de una paz universal de las sangres; no de una llamada ‘raza cósmica,’16 que es pura paradoja, sino de una posible, deseable y futura desracialización de la humanidad. (170) But there must be few other nations like Cuba where…there has been so much intermixture between such dissimilar races and where their amorous embraces have been so frequent, so complicated, so tolerant, and so indicative of a universal peace between the different blood types; not between a so-called ‘cosmic race,’ [see n. 16] which is pure paradox, but between a possible, desirable, and future de-racialization of humanity. Race, then, has played a role in the formation of Cuban society and will continue doing so; until, that is, humanity achieves its “future de-racialization.” It is unclear, however, whether this de-racialization means that over time the races will have become so genetically intermingled that there will in effect only be one race (or no race) or that there will be a change in attitude toward actually existing “races.” Despite his earlier claim regarding the relationship between blood and la cubanidad, Ortiz’s vision of the latter relies heavily on discourse that invokes genetics. Blood ties and the existence of different races is a particularly problematic subject for Ortiz, given that he argues both that Cuban culture does (in terms of its unique past) and does not (in terms of its future) depend on heredity. Later in the essay, for instance, he makes the following point with regard to Cuba’s unique racial history: Parece fácil clasificar los elementos humanos cruzados en Cuba por sus razas: cobrizos indios, blancos europeos, negros africanos y amarillos asiáticos. Las cuatro grandes razas vulgares se han abrazado, cruzado y recruzado en nuestra tierra en cría de generaciones. Cuba es uno de los pueblos más mezclados, mestizos de todas las progenituras. (171) It seems easy to classify the human elements combined in Cuba by their races: coppery Indians, white Europeans, black Africans and yellow Asians. The four great races have embraced, mixed and mixed again on our land across generations. Cuba is one of the most mixed, mestizo nations in existence. One of the central paradoxes that Ortiz’s comments suggest is that it seems quite a challenge closing the Pandora’s box of hereditarian discourse once it has been

INTRODUCTION 11

opened. There is little doubt in my mind, for example, that Ortiz envisioned a more egalitarian Cuban society that had moved beyond “race”; how easily could it do so, however, when with his next breath he praised Cuba on account of the unique contributions the “four great races” had made there? This is what I meant when I stated earlier that several Caribbean writers have “struggled” (sometimes implicitly and at other times explicitly) with hereditarian concepts. Ortiz gave the specific type of heterogeneity he found in Cuba the name “transculturation,” a term that expresses los variadísimos fenómenos que se originan en Cuba por las complejísimas transmutaciones de culturas que aquí se verifican, sin conocer las cuales es imposible entender la evolución del pueblo cubano, así en lo económico como en lo institucional, jurídico, ético, religioso, artístico, lingüístico, psicológico, sexual y en los demás aspectos de su vida.17 the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, and other aspects of its life.18 Transculturation was meant to stand in contrast to two other terms that carried a significant amount of currency within an anthropological project articulated most convincingly at the time by the work of Bronislaw Malinowski: these terms are acculturation and deculturation. Unlike these two, transculturation signaled a balance between the “original” culture and the resulting one: Africans in Cuba did not lose their African heritage while assimilating a Spanish heritage that was thrust on them. Rather, they gained a new, transculturated Cuban identity. Although the term transculturation avoids potentially negative hereditarian connotations more successfully than other theories (in that it makes no direct reference to body types or miscegenation), Ortiz’s concept registers heredity in other ways. In Chapter 3 I analyze the unique comparison-and-contrast counterpoint Ortiz uses to illustrate his views on transculturation: a counterpoint fascinating in the way it uses two agricultural products (ones often directly involved in genetic manipulation) to account for broader human processes. Now we come to hybridity, a term (used to describe the results of interactions between presumably non-hybrid or pre-hybrid human populations) that is clearly part of the lexicon of scientific and agricultural investigations on heredity, and one that has been as absent in conceptualizations of Caribbean identity as it has been present in other postcolonial arenas.19 Stated more precisely, the term actually predates the science of genetics: The genealogy of the term is…more accurately associated with the development of the natural sciences and in particular botany and zoology,

12 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

where it referred to the outcome of a cross between two separate species of plant or animal. In the eighteenth century, when classification of the natural world and its material products became a veritable obsession, the concept of the hybrid was expanded to incorporate humans.20 In the Caribbean, hybridity may lack viability as a cultural model for the postcolonial relation insofar as it re gisters numerous racial discourses. With respect to a possible hereditarian framework, part of the problem lies in a split between the hereditarian associations of the term hybridity and the implied ideology of theories of hybridity, an ideology that disavows purities and fixed essences. According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects.21 Bhabha seeks to show how, within the context of the British colonial presence in India during the nineteenth century, dominant discourses (i.e., those of the British) bolstered their authority through a process that always invoked the agency of the dominated. Consequently, even the discourses of those in power are not purely or absolutely dominant: they are hybrid discourses. On the one hand, the term hybrid as it is employed here is functional and heuristic in that it succeeds in indicating those dominant discourses’ lack of fixity and absoluteness. Coombes and Brah, for instance, argue that, beyond its uses in the natural sciences, at a certain level “‘hybridity’ signals the threat of ‘contamination’ to those who espouse an essentialist notion of pure and authentic origins. This lends the term a potentially transgressive power which might seem to endorse the celebration of its traces as transgressive per se” (1). On the other hand, however (and as Coombes and Brah’s compilation also shows), hybridity as a term is problematic in that (in the best of scenarios) it suggests that the cultures and societies in which post-colonial studies are most interested are fundamentally derivative and thereby lesser. Furthermore, we shall see that hybridity can also evoke eugenicist and racist dogmas. In any case, hybridity is—as Robert Young indicates within the context of British colonial expansion in Asia—a concept that registers (even if inaccurately) a variety of discourses, including sexual ones (whether homosexual or heterosexual): On the face of it, therefore, hybridity must always be a resolutely heterosexual category. In fact, in historical terms, concern about racial amalgamation tended if anything to encourage same-sex sex (playing the imperial game was, after all, already an implicitly homo-erotic practice).22

INTRODUCTION 13

Although hereditarian discourses have—as we shall see—at a certain level undoubtedly informed theoretical polemics about the Caribbean, hybridity is hardly a term commonly used to describe the Caribbean, its cultures, and its narratives. Why this lacuna? The Caribbean, first of all, is by virtually any definition of the term a “hybrid” region: it is the offspring (by most historical accounts) of unlike parents.23 It has, in particular, come to be identified as an area of mixture and cross-cultural contact. Nonetheless, theorists of the region have resisted the derivative undertones of hybridity in describing the Caribbean. In a region that has experienced centuries of miscegenation, the current abstract understanding of hybridity post-colonial studies offers may never have had a chance given the racial associations that may surround the term in the Caribbean. TEXTS AND CONTEXTS In arguing that hereditarian discourses pervade Caribbean writings—and, consequently, that attention to these discourses may amount to a productive reading strategy for these writings—my basic premise is that any literature is a register of multifarious and sometimes conflicting discourses in a culture. As such, texts and contexts are inextricably linked and any knowledge about the one could also shed light on the other. As concerns hereditarian discourses, it is difficult to separate these from other discourses in the Caribbean. For instance, when fictional narratives in the Caribbean refer to agriculture, racial discourse, and colonialism, they also invoke a set of hereditarian concepts whose logos or logical mechanisms resemble those of the first three terms. Given my earlier contention that Caribbean writers have struggled with notions of heredity as they seek to achieve an egalitarian, heterogeneous society, I use a historical narrative to structure this study. Although this narrative may at times move backward as well as forward, and reveal gaps and tensions, I will often return to it in order to clarify the stakes and circumstances surrounding any given invocation of heredity in Caribbean narrative. Furthermore, since I see hereditarian discourses collectively as a prominent theme in Caribbean narrative, this study contains a substructure, with each chapter casting a slightly different conceptual light on the relationship between hereditarian discourses and Caribbean narrative. In chapter one my main goal is to establish and historicize the presence of a hereditarian imagination and to outline the ways it exerts a discursive or metaphorical force in the Caribbean, particularly insofar as it is inextricably linked in this region to a social and economic system based on agriculture: a set of practices most forcefully exemplified in the Caribbean by the sugar plantation. In advancing my argument, a basic objective of mine is to provide some cultural and scientific background to heredity as a concept, both before and after Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics was re-discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in prior scholarship that argues for the discursivity of heredity24 and concepts linked to it, as well as for the existence of a hereditarian imagination well before Mendel conducted his landmark

14 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

experiments. Of specific importance also is the position of discourses of heredity with respect to taxonomy, as well as the currency each of these has beyond “purely” scientific arenas, e.g., their agency in demarcating not only the foreign and autochthonous, but also class distinctions (which, as we shall see in Zeno Gandía’s La charca—a prominent novel published in Puerto Rico in the 1890’s— can be determined by assumptions regarding hereditable racial distinctions), as well as the role discourses of heredity play in the production of gender continuums. The fact that science is not gender neutral is especially significant insofar as heredity itself—not unlike hybridity—is premised on the distinction between the male and the female, as well as on the function each of these has in reproduction. chapter one culminates with a survey of discourses on the plantation because, unlike any other entity in the Caribbean, the plantation encompasses the problematic of scientific discourses on heredity and it also is a force in cultural production, including fictional narrative. In subsequent chapters I treat narratives that register different moments in a historical continuum that moves roughly from a greater to a lesser sense of hereditarian determinism, and that also correspond to different modes of hereditarian discourse. chapter two addresses the subject of Caribbean communities and the way hereditarian discourses inform issues that are central to the ways communities in fictional narratives are formed and defined, including miscegenation, incest, parenthood, and—on the whole—the colonial social system prevalent within a plantation economy, especially during the mid-nineteenth century: a period characterized by abolitionist fervor and disagreements regarding the desired fate of the Caribbean. In setting forth my argument I use two early abolitionist Cuban novels: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga’s Sab (1841) and Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882, but begun over forty years earlier), both of which critics consider foundational Cuban “romances,” set the basic parameters for this chapter insofar as they illustrate the oftentimes strained relationships between members of different cultural and economic groups. Furthermore, both Sab and Cecilia Valdés are guided by a fatalism or determinism (involving racial constructions and other issues of heredity, particularly the inheritance of property) to which their characters eventually succumb. In the wake of the previous chapters’ discussions of the plantation and discourses of heredity, chapter three examines later narratives centered upon plant imagery and the reproduction of plants (as we shall see, the distinction between plants and non-plants is not always a clear one). I start my analysis with prominent mid-twentieth-century fictional and anthropological texts written by Cubans, including Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint (1939) and Dulce María Loynaz’s Jardín (1951). I will focus, however, on Alejo Carpentier’s short story, “Viaje a la semilla” (1958), and especially his novel El recurso del método (1974). Each of these narratives, oftentimes in very subtle, ironic ways, uses botanical images and processes related to heredity in advancing broader arguments regarding Caribbean society. El recurso del método, in particular, provides a sophisticated interpretation of modern Caribbean/Latin American political and social history.

INTRODUCTION 15

Significantly, this interpretation often hinges on a conflation between plants and people—the kind of conflation possible when plants and people are treated similarly within the hereditarian paradigm offered by the plantation. In chapter four my attention shifts to the trope of the body, including the human body, in Caribbean narrative. Although my analysis begins with an introductory overview of polemics regarding the body (especially discourses on race during the 1920’s and 1930’s), central to this chapter are an in-depth commentary on “Otra maldad de Pateco” and the Cuban25 Mayra Montero’s novel Tú, la oscuridad (1995). In these texts, animal and human bodies, body parts, the reproduction (and its sometimes unexpected results) of bodies, and their racial categorization play a principal thematic and structural role. My basic contention in this chapter is that the body registers many of the fundamental tensions surrounding the Caribbean and its cultural identity. The most poignant tension may be the one involving the precarious dichotomy “modernity/tradition”: this “dichotomy” rises to the surface in narratives like Vega’s and Montero’s, in which supernatural forces associated with animism from the African diaspora trump the deterministic “laws” of heredity. The first four chapters make repeated reference to colonialism and its legacy in the Caribbean. Both Sab and Cecilia Valdés register, for instance, the British influence within the world of the Spanish Caribbean plantation. Meanwhile, El recurso del método makes numerous references to the Spanish legacy in the New World, just as Tú, la oscuridad rehearses the exploratory zeal of the first scientists sent to the Americas by colonial empires. The legacy of colonialism is related in a very curious way to an important issue in the narrative from many islands in the region: an issue that strikes me as interwoven with the discourse on heredity, namely, the way later Caribbean narratives incorporate elements of other narrative traditions. Do these traditions coexist among other discourses in the Caribbean and serve as a clay through which Caribbean narrators express their vision of the region? In short, can narratives be bound by other narratives, and if so, how might these relationships register hereditarian paradigms? These are the questions chapter five confronts, with particular emphasis on Caribbean narratives that revisit novels by the Brontë sisters; these narratives include Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by the Dominican Jean Rhys, Vega’s “El baúl de Miss Florence” (1991), and Windward Heights (1998) by Guadéloupe’s Maryse Condé. Significantly, themes associated with heredity figure prominently in each of these novels, including cases of congenital illness and malice, children of unexpected pigmentation, and behavior patterns based on antiquated racial classifications. A central point of my argument in this chapter is that foreign influences (by the British in the case of the Brontë texts) manifest themselves in unusual ways in Caribbean narratives: ways that register the weight of hereditarian discourses in the region. Another argument I advance is that hereditarian relations (i.e., these cases of congenital illness and malice, unexpected pigmentation, etc.) are crucial in questions of verisimilitude and the way a (theoretical) readers expectations for the narrative are fulfilled or frustrated.

Chapter One Heredity and Discursivity: From Pre-History to the Plantation

On the ideal Caribbean City: above all, it would be so racially various that the cultures of the world—the Asiatic, the Mediterranean, the European, the African—would be represented in it, its humane variety more exciting than Joyce’s Dublin. Its citizens would intermarry as they chose, from instinct, not tradition, until their children find it increasingly futile to trace that genealogy. —Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel Lecture Caribbean writings often confront the idea of heredity, and when they do, it can be in unexpected ways. The pervasiveness of heredity as a theme in Caribbean letters is such that, like the air we breathe, it can be indistinguishable from its immediate context. Although eventually the Caribbean peoples may realize Walcott’s hopes for the region, i.e., a region that has transcended an interest in heredity or genealogy (or that at least finds such an interest futile), discourses of heredity remain instrumental in how writers from the region articulate their views. In this chapter, I attempt to bring these discourses into relief in terms of both Caribbean narrative and a broader historical overview on hereditarian discourses themselves. Rather than offering the discursivity of heredity as a given, my general intention here is to show the ways in which this concept has functioned as a cultural discourse, both in and out of the Caribbean. This initial step provides a necessary theoretical backdrop as I, in subsequent chapters, sketch this discursivity in a variety of narrative writings from the region. Of particular importance in making this sketch will be the Caribbean’s relations with both foreign and autochthonous scientific discourses. The underlying target that orients the various steps my argument will take in this chapter is the sugar plantation: an entity that commodified both plants and people. We know, based on the work of Antonio Benítez Rojo (1988 and 1992), that the plantation is a discursive force in Caribbean culture and writing (just as, according to Roberto González Echevarría, Golden Age Spanish court documents exert a discursive force over the Latin American novel1). Indeed, it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the plantation to the history and culture of the Caribbean. By

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 17

linking the plantation to hereditarian processes and ideas, I hope to round out my assertion that heredity, too, exerts a type of discursivity in the Caribbean. Hereditarian discourses appear in other narrative traditions, particularly those related to plantation societies. Narrative from the Southern United States comes to mind on account of the dual legacy of sugar/cotton manufacture and slavery. Undoubtedly, however, there exist important differences with respect to the South’s history of colonialism, not to mention any differences in the historical and societal place of narrative there. One possible (and very important) difference is popular attitudes toward “racial mixing” in the South and in the Caribbean: it would be necessary to carry out detailed readings of Southern writers and to embark on a much longer discussion to argue the following point, but in contrast, for example, to common assessments of Faulkner’s South, racial mixing and interethnic romance in Caribbean narrative, as we shall see, is often (not always) a strong impulse/desire among characters; it is a combination of state, colonial and plantation authorities that frustrates this desire. It is also possible to trace hereditarian discourse elsewhere in Latin American arts and letters. For example, in Gioconda Belli’s novel La mujer habitada (1990), a tree with a memory serves as the common denominator in the lives of two women from different historical periods. The paintings of Frida Kahlo also occasionally blend, in a decidedly graphic way, humans with trees or plants. Kahlo and other Mexican artists were familiar with Jay Hambidge’s (U.S., 1867–1924) writings during the 1920’s regarding the structural similarities between plants and great works of art and architecture (Rodríguez 249; Hambidge’s principal texts are Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists, 1923, and Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, 1932). Recently, Magali Carrera has productively explored lineage in paintings from Mexico’s colonial era (Imagining Identity in New Spain, 2003). Notwithstanding the debatable power discourses of heredity (including genetics and the Human Genome Project2) hold over our lives, I do not believe that heredity is a sort of mysterious code underpinning all fictional narrative, Caribbean or not.3 Instead, I hope merely to show in this chapter that it is possible that hereditarian principles can be a discursive force, that they have informed numerous dimensions of Caribbean narrative, and that these principles may compose an identifiable theme in this corpus of writing. We shall begin with general considerations of scientific, and philosophical discourses of heredity (including genetics and genealogy) in the cultural arena. HEREDITY, SCIENCE, AND THE CULTURAL ARENA The branch of science most interested in—and most commonly associated with— heredity is genetics. The Oxford English Dictionary lists numerous definitions of this term, but all of them pertain to the notion of establishing an origin (as in the Greek-based term Genesis, which means origin or creation). Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject, explains that “genetics [is]

18 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

the study of heritable differences” as well as, consequently, heritable sameness.4 Meanwhile, the term can be associated with the process of establishing kinship or other relations of proximity—a process that is potentially useful in attempts to prove or disprove claims to purity. Before delving into Caribbean narratives to see how they interact with genetics and other hereditarian discourses, it should be noted that there have been earlier (even if scientifically ill-conceived) commentaries on the status of genetics as a cultural force beyond (but also in some ways predating) its scientific currency starting in the early twentieth century. Although it is impossible to ascertain when and where people developed an interest in the basic principles of heredity that eventually resulted in the science of genetics (a desire for such knowledge is, perhaps, an impulse as old as human society),5 it was not until the first few years of the twentieth century that the term genetics assumed one of its current meanings: the institutionalized, scientific practice of mapping heredity, which in turn is a process involving the transmission of genes (or hereditary information) through chromosomes. This transition came as a direct result of the reactivation of Gregor Mendel’s writings, which formulated the operative principles underlying genetics.6 This does not mean, however, that genetic principles (even when based in pseudo-science) did not exert power in the social imagination (both inside and outside of the Caribbean) prior to this. In his engaging but by today’s standards scientifically problematic (Cf. n. 5) study, History of Genetics: From Prehistoric Times to the Rediscovery of Mendel’s Laws (1965; English translation 1972), Hans Stubbe speculates on the development of a “genetic” sensibility (although “hereditary” sensibility would be, in scientific terms, a more accurate description): “The cultivation of the date palm [as early as the 9th century B.C.E.) therefore gave the first indication of the fact that plants, like animals, have two different sexes and that one could cultivate them by bringing together plants of different sexes in a special way” (6–7). Even though Stubbe does not prove that this presumed early interest in heredity was in any way also interested in (or at all aware of) the processes that took place at the molecular level, or for that matter, that agriculturalists even fathomed the variable sexuality of plants three thousand years ago, he leaves little doubt that they were indeed interested in hereditarian processes, however differently they may have been viewed with respect to genetic science. These agriculturalists (and, indeed, many others) would also probably have been keenly interested in another facet of heredity pertinent to an agricultural society: the inheritance of land and other property. Moving forward along the Mediterranean historical record, Emanuel Rádl, a scientist writing soon after Mendel’s theories were rediscovered argues that the notion of original sin in Christian philosophy, the chastisements with which the Jewish God pursued his people into the third and fourth generation, the fate which led Aeschylus’s heroes to their ruin, St. Augustine’s doctrine of the predestination of man for a happy or eternally unhappy life—these are, for Rádl, “the first theories of heredity…. The belief in the transmigration of souls, the caste system, and hereditary privileges were other expressions of the same conviction.”7 With regard

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 19

to hereditary caste systems, Stubbe posits that these “are based on the idea that favorable characteristics are inherited in subsequent generations. It is for this reason that the priesthood was hereditary among the Jews of the tribe of Levi, as was the gift of prophecy in Homer’s time. The practice of medicine was a hereditary privilege in the family of Asclepiades” (10). Even as ancient Greek philosophy, particularly its Platonic varieties, asserted the primacy of a timeless world of ideas, it was nonetheless informed by a hereditary imagination or sensibility. Stubbe singles out a passage in The Republic in which, drawing upon a Phoenician myth, Plato makes the following observation in a casual but speciously deterministic tone (whose dangerous hierarchical implications Stubbe does not pursue): But the god who fashioned you added gold in the composition of those of you who are to become rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other artisans. As you are all of the same stock, children will mostly resemble their parents. Occasionally, however, a silver child may be born of golden parents, or a bronze child of silver parents, and so forth.8 Others have also seen the correlation between philosophy and hereditarian processes. In her Hacia una crítica de la razón patriarcal, Celia Amorós argues that Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, may have been the first to employ a “genealogical” philosophical method in that he sought to legitimate his own views in the philosophies that preceded his own.9 Meanwhile, much more recently, Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method aims “to show how the particular interpretations of life that created the moral values of Christianity came about…. Such ‘facts’ are the products of earlier, accepted, and therefore unacknowledged interpretations.”10 With respect to a discussion on Linnean taxonomy coming later in this chapter, Nietzsche was remarkably prescient. Sarah Kofman explains, for instance, that “for Nietzsche the essence of things is enigmatic, so genera and species are themselves but human, all-too-human metaphors.”11 Foucault’s critical approach shares Nietzsche’s emphasis on the genealogical reversal of accepted facts or “truths.” According to Mark Poster, genealogy is for Foucault a diachronic method, one that attempts to reconstruct the origins and development of discourses by showing their rootedness in a field of forces. Genealogy is a Nietzschean effort to develop a critical method that undermines all absolute grounds, that demonstrates the origins of things only in relation to and in contest with other things. Genealogy disallows pure beginnings, those historical formations that deny their historicity by naturalizing themselves, absolutizing themselves, grounding themselves in some transcendent principle.12 In his essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault himself argues that a genealogy

20 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

will never confuse itself with a quest for their “origins,” will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other…. The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul. He must be able to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats—the basis of all beginnings, atavisms, and heredities. 13 If genealogy—an endeavor informed by hereditarian principles—can be used as a liberating mechanism, i.e., as one that challenges and undermines claims to purity and superiority, there is another side to this coin: writers of a different ideological bent can use genealogy to reify such claims. This tension or ambiguity is best captured in the irony of Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s genealogical project: one that invokes the language and mechanisms of genetic studies in order to show that a given, transmitted truth (including any assertion regarding racial superiority) lacks a pure or sublime “origin.” Important questions concerning historiography inform Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogical methods: since the narratives history can provide may not necessarily be accurate and value-free, not only is it fair to ask, “What is history?” and “What happened in the past?,” but one should also ask, “Where is history and how does historical knowledge get disseminated?” The latter questions concern Laura Otis in her study, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries, in which she traces the development of a notion (since discredited by the scientific community) of “organic memory,” whereby individuals physically inherit the memories of their ancestors. Although our studies differ given my interest in the Caribbean and in how heredity informs narration,14 her survey of (mostly nineteenthcentury) theorists of organic memory is of relevance to my discussion of discourses of heredity. Among the most prominent of these theorists were Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), each of whom advanced what were, in effect, theories of evolution. The former believed “that an organism evolved by responding to its environment; the body changed as use of its parts increased or decreased.”15 As such, an organism could “acquire a new trait within one generation and pass this trait on to its offspring” (Otis 6). Meanwhile, in his biogenetic law, Haeckel states that the series of forms through which the Individual Organism passes during its progress from the egg cell to its fully developed state, is a brief, compressed reproduction of the long series of forms through which the animal ancestors of that organism (or the ancestral forms of its species) have

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 21

passed from the earliest periods of so-called organic creation down to the present time.16 Implicit in this “law” is the idea that “the present organism contained its past within it, and that one could thus read phylogeny, or ancestral development, by observing ontogeny, or individual development, if one could only read the individual in the right way (Otis 7–8). Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection initially coexisted with theories like Lamarck’s and Haeckel’s, and only much later gained greater acceptance in the scientific community.17 Despite their eventual decline, Otis shows that these theories nonetheless inspired numerous literary fictions premised on the “wish to read history from the body” (8). Such a wish, however, is but one of the permutations that discourses of heredity may take. In his Drawing Blood, Keith Wailoo examines the often slippery line between eugenics18 and the misapplication of genetic science: he traces, specifically, the medical and social history of sickle cell anemia, a disease commonly associated in the United States with African Americans. During the 1920’s, about a decade after the disease was first diagnosed, a researcher argued “that the disease passed from one generation to the next according to the Mendelian laws regulating a dominant trait.”19 Until scientists developed newer technologies during the middle of the twentieth century,20 this view had become prevalent in the North American medical community. According to Wailoo, For those concerned with racial relations in the United States during the 1920’s, the Mendelian dominant thesis meant that interracial marriages would probably spread the blood disease outward from the Negro population into negligent whites…. The concept of blood was a convenient catchall, collapsing within it ideas about heredity, kin, clan, and community in the same way that the term genes does today. (134–35) The result in the United States between the 1910’s and 1940’s was the development of a scientific pretext for racial segregation, including (particularly in the South) the occasional prohibition of interracial marriage (137). As Wailoo’s discussion makes clear, the direct and indirect societal force of hereditarian discourses (regardless of their scientific accuracy) cannot be underestimated: in effect, it is difficult to know exactly where the body ends and where scientific (albeit not necessarily neutral or accurate) knowledge about the body begins. In this regard, Deborah Steinberg has recently shown how a popular 1991 BBC lecture series on genetics registers the complexities and dangers of what might otherwise be considered a neutral, objective discourse. Rather than serving to deconstruct facile understandings of race and nation by constructing “value-free” genetic maps, geneticists have instead reified such understandings. To make her point, she quotes excerpts from Steve Jones’s “expert lecture,” of which the following statements are examples: “We, the British, contain more hunting genes than do, say, the Greeks, who had rolled over the earlier economy and absorbed

22 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

its genes long before.” And “throughout modern Europe, we can see patches of genes which reflect the successes and failures of nations and economies long gone…today’s southern Italians and Sicilians are still genetically distinct from their compatriots in the North.”21 Furthermore, rather than being a liberating discourse, genetics, according to Steinberg, also upholds a disparity between the literate and the illiterate, given that only geneticists can “read” the stories our genes supposedly contain: “When Jones tells us what he reads of genes…he does not confer upon us the ability to read them ourselves” (143). At issue amid the polemics we see in Steinberg’s account of the BBC lectures is, on the one hand, a pressing, indeed disturbing, question: nature or nurture? On the other hand, the social function of (often scientific) discourses of heredity is also contested. It is within such polemics that we can locate much of Caribbean narrative. We can proceed now in a direction based on the second term in this dyad: narrative. HEREDITY, “LITERATURE,” AND LITERARY STUDIES Narrative and, more broadly, literature, are of pertinence within this discussion of heredity and culture. For much of the twentieth century it was common to apply hereditary or genetic principles to the study of literature in order to distinguish between various genres and how these evolved, the most notable example of this perhaps being Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). A similar practice included establishing various types of lineage between otherwise different writings, regardless of the difference: authors or texts with certain similarities, despite differences of historical period or geographical area, as well as subtle similarities despite apparent sharp contrasts between two works by the same author, etc. Beginning in the 1920’s, for instance, critics began using a so-called “genetic approach”: this approach attempted “to analyze the [historical? political? literary precedence? It is unclear] processes by which a work comes into existence or is ‘engendered.’ Such an endeavour…was indeed rejected by the Russian Formalist Tynianov, on the grounds that the notion of ‘genesis’ belongs to a system of references outside the text.”22 Eventually, however, critics like Lucien Goldmann and Tzvetan Todorov briefly revitalized genetic criticism in France.23 Not surprisingly, genetics (as understood in a pseudoscientific sense of the term), or—more precisely—eugenics, has been a popular theme in science fiction. Leonard Isaacs states, for example, that H.G.Wells advocated “the policy of preventative eugenics in his prescription for A Modern Utopia” and adds that in “Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon gave considerable thought to eugenic practices.”24 Also with respect to science fiction, Helen Parker observes that “many science-fiction writers eagerly explore the possibilities for species growth offered by laws of genetics and the principles of selective breeding and natural selection.”25 According to her, genetic science fiction, “as a thematic emphasis, examines serious deviations from the natural or expected evolutionary pattern and the effect of those deviations on man and his society.”26 It has been only in recent

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 23

years that literary studies have turned their focus on genetics itself as a scientific discourse of relevance to the cultural sphere beyond science, an example being Jon Turney’s Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture,27 a study that uses the Frankenstein myth as a barometer of popular attitudes toward the biological sciences. Turney, however, does not link hereditarian discourses with writers’ narrational and rhetorical concerns, perhaps because the focus of his study is popular perceptions of science. One essay on literary matters is extraordinary in the way it uses a discourse of heredity—more specifically, genealogy—in discussing one writer’s narrational and rhetorical concerns: David Chioni Moore’s “Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy.”28 This essay, published nearly two decades after Roots first appeared in 1976, seeks to reposition the novel within the most important current debates in cultural theory. Here is a powerful segment from Moore’s essay —a segment in which he attempts to provide a theoretical or conceptual context to Haley’s identity-founding mission in writing Roots. Few are the people in the world who have no interest in who they are, and for most of them that means where they are from, or, more specifically, where their ‘people’ or ancestors were from. And most people—at least most of the diverse people I’ve ever met—believe further that in knowing their roots, in tracing back to their most-distant source, they will therefore also find out who their current extended community of cousins and more extended relatives today are. They will, in recovering the root, symbolically join with it. Such rooted thinking is not limited to individuals, either, for few indeed are also the societies that do not themselves have some founding myth, an originary narrative that traces an entire people back to a single and absolute source. The model of rooted identity is perhaps most familiar to us from introductory textbooks or popular representations of evolutionary biology…. The image at hand is drawn from biology, but in our minds’ eyes one may readily substitute many other things—for example, either languages or civilizations—in these root-and-branch models. IndoEuropean languages, to choose one example, are commonly held to have begun with but a single tongue in the ancient trans-Caucasus region, and branched into Germanic, Latinate, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Iranian, and Sanskritic subfamilies, which themselves branched again. Or, on the philosophical front, an originary Greek thought has been held to have produced derivatives first in Rome, and then in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. (11) Moore then sounds a caurionary note regarding Haley’s project: “There are of course risks, in this analysis and elsewhere, in placing too much emphasis on biology, because the notions and metaphors for identity that are drawn from biology interact in complex ways with other dimensions of identity, the historical, religious, political, and so forth” (14). In other words, Moore is questioning the

24 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

very process by which Haley seeks first to establish the identity of his last Africanborn ancestor and second to draw a genealogical progression that will connect him to this ancestor. According to Moore, such an endeavor, when carried out in the human as opposed, for example, to the more abstract or detached realm of biological science, is necessarily a social construct motivated by subjective concerns: a construct that could just as easily have traced a genealogy in a different direction: As is evident, of the numerous paths Alex Haley could have traced on this chart, he chose—or, more accurately, he was forced by a combination of coincidence, iron social regulation, and, most importantly, historical crime —to focus on but one As a matter of pure theory or strict blood-line genealogy, Alex Haley could have identified any of these non-African ancestors as his root, but as a matter of practice and American social mandate, that is hard to imagine…. As a matter of day-to-day reality in the United States, the general dynamic of ethnic choice is divided strictly by color. Though many ‘mixed’ whites…can choose to identify either as, say, Belgian or Italian or Lithuanian or Scots-Irish, for the most part the so-called ‘onedrop’ rule identifies all Americans of any visible Africanness as Black…. This weighted’ and oddly binary system was long-codified in many states’ laws and is now reinforced by broad social practice. (15) As compelling as I find Moore’s argument, I take some issue with it: while I agree with the distinction he draws between (for lack of better terms) imagined and scientific genealogies, I believe he simplifies the thrust of Haley’s project and misses its point, perhaps in what is to my mind a hurried attempt to reach a point in society when we no longer need to look for “roots”: The recovery of a root…serves an especially important function when a major chunk of the tangle of one’s identity has been either erased or systematically denigrated, or, in the case of Haley and his primary intended readers, both. Yet once that origin is recovered, that nobility restored, the next important, and, I would argue, moral task is to recognize that purities can only ever be tentative. (21) He concludes his essay by asserting that the “metaphor for human culture should be more the mangrove than the tree” (21). In principle this assertion has appeal, but as any reader of Roots will know—or anyone slightly familiar with this saga’s cultural and historical context—a genealogical endeavor like Haley’s holds crucial implications in terms of its personal and social objectives, many of which have probably not been met completely (otherwise Moore probably would not have bothered writing his essay). Moore’s basic contention is a strong one: a search for roots is a social construct that sets unnecessary boundaries between groups of people. Simply

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 25

stated, however (and as Moore is well aware), family lineages and, consequently, the paths for genealogies (not to mention the groups to which we belong) are sometimes imposed from without. Ultimately, perhaps Walcott’s vision of a society that can afford to lose interest in genealogy is more desirable (and more likely) than one that is asked to stop this interest on theoretical grounds. The intricacies of the Roots debate notwithstanding, hereditarian discourses, including genealogy, are—in some form or fashion—recurring themes in Caribbean writings. This is particularly the case due to the Caribbean’s unique and varied racial dynamics; in Cuba, for instance, given centuries of racial mixing and the strength of nationalist discourses, it is futile to demarcate ethnic minority groups with any precision. Despite his insistence—one based on moral precepts with which I concur—that genealogy is in most respects a chapter in human history that we should close, Moore’s initial interest in genealogy is indeed worth pursuing; it is, in a sense, a book worth examining—particularly insofar as genealogy and hereditarian discourses pervade writings on Caribbean identity in a number of important ways he does not consider in his essay. More germane to the field of Caribbean letters is Juan Gelpí’s Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico, which seeks to historicize Puerto Rican literature within the framework of markedly hereditarian relationships of paternalism. According to him, a “brotherhood” of male Puerto Rican writers began during the late nineteenth century (especially as a response to the growing North American threat and, later, to North American domination)—and well into the first few decades of the twentieth centuries—to erect a literary canon that comprised the works of Manuel Zeno Gandía as well as “Generación del 30” writers Antonio S.Pedreira and René Marqués. This brotherhood has had a paternalist relationship with later, especially women, Puerto Rican writers, given the following definition of paternalist: Es paternalista quien se ve como padre y coloca a otros miembros de la sociedad en una posición inferior de niños figurados. La retórica del paternalismo a menudo remite a las relaciones familiares, y su metáfora fundamental consiste en equiparar a la nación con una gran familia.29 He is paternalist who sees himself as a father and places other members of the society in the inferior position of figurative children. The rhetoric of paternalism often invokes familial relationships, and its fundamental metaphor consists in likening the nation to a large family. Gelpí is right to signal the metaphorical importance of heredity (in the case of Puerto Rican writing it involves a generational gap or struggle over the literary canon that has taken place during the last sixty years, approximately), although we shall see throughout this project that heredity has been a multidimensional trope throughout Caribbean writing in ways Literatura y paternalismo does not pursue.

26 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Before I provide a more thoroughly historicized account of hereditarian discourses in the Caribbean within their scientific contexts, it is worth acknowledging an affinity between Gelpí’s text and an earlier work of literary theory that addresses similar issues of paternalism and the struggles between different generations of writers: I am thinking specifically of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence,30 in which the great poets of one generation must—in finding their voice—of necessity incorporate and then subvert the writings of the great poets of previous generations. While Bloom’s study and my own share an interest in intergenerational relationships, there are—needless to say—several issues of high pertinence to the Caribbean that fall outside his particular focus and that I wish to explore: issues like racial discourses, the historical legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, the plantation, and—with specific respect to the pages immediately to follow—how these Issues are imbricated in a very influential scientific tradition both within and with regard to the Caribbean. SCIENTIFIC ANTECEDENTS TO DISCOURSES OF HEREDITY IN THE CARIBBEAN Luis Palés Matos, Puerto Rico’s best known poet, made a controversial observation in 1927 that registers many of the issues surrounding the remainder of this chapter, several of which had arisen in the Caribbean intellectual arena more than a century earlier: The aesthetic sense of the white race has reached a stage of dangerous cerebralisation…. I do not believe in a monumental art of purely cerebral representation: I only believe in an art which identifies itself with the thing and fuses with the essence of the thing. An art which is as little art as possible, that is, where the aptitude for creation is subjected to the urge of the blood and instinct, which is always the right urge, because it carries with it the thousands of years of experience of the species.31 On the one hand, Palés seeks an art that is free from the constraints of European philosophical, systematic thought—the kind of thought often associated with science. On the other hand, Palé’s alternative to these constraints—a retreat to “the urge of the blood and instinct” rooted in heredity—is no more free from associations with European scientific and philosophical paradigms, particularly Haeckel’s biogenetic law. It is worth mentioning here that I do not believe Palés is calling for a retreat to racial purity; rather, he is stressing the need not to overlook the Caribbean people’s physical history. Europeans, seemingly, had become detached from more authentic cultural practices—an accusation that Martin Heidegger was also making about his fellow Europeans. On the philosophical front, the primary influence underlying Palés’s commentary is the German Oswald Spengler,32 whose The Decline of the West33 offered a vision of history radically different than Hegel’s totalizing, Euro-centric

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 27

model. In some respects (and this was perhaps the element in his writing that appealed most to thinkers outside of Europe), his philosophy was an antiphilosophy, disavowing positivism and challenging any assertions of Europe’s superiority based on its propensity toward philosophical abstraction. This kind of thought, according to Spengler, was indicative of a people (which he calls a “race”) in a period of decline (a “civilization), as opposed to a less self-reflective, more “rooted” or authentic people (a “culture”). Spengler’s use of the term race merits some commentary: he was not a racist, i.e., he did not assert the inherent superiority of certain ethnic groups over others. Instead, he believed that landscape played a more central role in determining the “soul” of a people than did the possible hereditary transmission of physical and character traits. The cyclical tendency Spengler identified in his interpretation of history must have contributed to his works appeal in Latin America and the Caribbean. What I find most interesting about The Decline of the West, however, is the way Spengler describes heredity in metaphorical terms. Spengler’s views on the organic, cyclical nature of history and the role of human actors in shaping that history are greatly saturated with a language informed by hereditarian imagery. Early in the second volume of The Decline of the West he he draws an initial distinction between plants and animals—a distinction, no less, that recalls Haeckel’s biogenetic law as it anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness: “only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something more besides” (3). Immediately, however, he provides descriptive analogies in claiming that the line between the two realms is not rigid: “A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God—all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness” (3). In his overly sweeping (but at the time influential) remarks about the predictable trajectory of Europe and North America, he relies further on hereditary images. This is particularly so in that for him the fruit never falls far from the tree, and much depends on where the tree is located to begin with: A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its ‘home,’ but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in everchanging landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of

28 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them—generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated. (119) Aníbal González, in his insightful study on Spengler’s influence on Palés, argues that, for the former, culture is “el producto de una conversión radical que ejerce el paisaje sobre la conciencia del hombre” (“a product of a radical conversion that the landscape exerts over the consciousness of men”).34 With respect to the Caribbean, Palés (and the Cuban José Antonio Saco in the previous century) thought that populations of African descent were better suited to the region because it resembled Africa’s landscape more closely than it resembled Europe’s.35 It is within this intellectual exchange between Europe and the Caribbean that we must —to a significant degree—place Palé’s poetry, in which Africa and its linguistic rhythms figure prominently. According to González, Palés’s interest in Spengler amounts to an irrationalism36; more important to my argument, however, is the intimacy Palés found between people and their landscape or environment. Now that we have seen some of the philosophical context of Palés’s observation, we can turn to its (perhaps more complex) scientific context, although, needless to say, these contexts are interrelated and at times indistinguishable. In fact, scientific discourses (including genetics, the branch of science dedicated to studying how the blood transmits, in Palés’s words, “thousands of years of experience” or physical traits) have played, taken collectively, an important role in the Caribbean, well before Palés. These discourses have been, and continue to be, a controversial agent in the Caribbean. In a book published in 1988, for example, Judith Reay and John Steward argue that one general weakness of science teaching in the Caribbean, as elsewhere, has been the divorce of science from technology or, to put it in another way, the separation of the philosophy and methodology of science from its application. Science thus comes to be viewed as a set of arid concepts and classroom activities which seem to have little bearing on everyday occurrences or experiences, and no obvious relation to the technical achievements and developments which influence the lives of individuals and affect the progress of nations.37 They add optimistically that “the potential of science and technology is such that many of the problems confronting Caribbean societies could be solved if science and technology were systematically applied to them” (vii). With respect to the scientific and social currency of genetics in Cuba, José López Sánchez argues (albeit, granted, within the framework of a self-promoting dictatorial regime) that it has been only recently that Mendel’s vision has been widely disseminated: “Conocido en nuestro país desde hace muchas décadas por lo que se ha dado en

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 29

llamar las leyes de Mendel, no es, sin embargo hasta ahora, que se aplica y enriquece su concepción con la investigación y el trabajo práctico aplicado que se llevan a cabo en las instituciones especializadas de nuestro país.”38 Scientific discourses are additionally “controversia” in the related sense that historically it has been unclear if these discourses have been primarily imposed from without or if they are able to carry the stamp of autochthony. Their controversial elements may be related to uncertainties regarding the political and cultural status of the Caribbean region itself. Sidney Mintz, for instance, an anthropologist who conducted an influential study of the Caribbean, explored what he recognized as a tenuous distinction between Western and non-Western in attempting to define the region. Despite strong African and pre-Columbian elements, Caribbean societies are, he argued, “among the most Westernized of the modern world.”39 Although it is unclear what he means by “westernized” (more than likely European and industrialized), his basic contention is a strong one: the Caribbean is both European and not European, industrialized and agrarian, scientific in the modern sense and traditional. Narrative and science are not unrelated in the Caribbean. In Myth and Archive, González Echevarría argues that, almost as a rule, novels interact with whichever discourses wield the most authority in a specific society—this is how they gain their mimetic force. He argues that during the nineteenth century, a discourse hegemonic like no other (e.g., abolitionist, religious, mercantilist discourses) was science, particularly as manifested by European naturalists—including Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, Charles-Marie de la Condamine, and Captain Richard Burton—who traveled to the New World. “If the first discoverers and settlers appropriated Latin America40 by means of legal discourse,” González Echevarría states, “these new conquistadors did so with the aid of scientific discourse, which allowed them to name again (as if for the first time) the flora and fauna of the New World” (96). He adds, in turn, that during the twentieth century, an anthropological discourse informed by the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss (13), Bronislaw Malinowski (151) and Clifford Geertz (151) prevailed as the means through which Latin American narratives staked a foothold in “reality.” Although I believe it is possible to group these two hegemonic discourses (naturalism and anthropology) under a similar, broad category of “science” (particularly in that twentieth century anthropology often aspired to the “objectivity” of science), this does not detract from the suggestive power of González Echevarría’s contention. Following his commentaries, however, I propose that hereditarian principles encompass both discourses he identifies as hegemonic in Latin America, in that discourses of heredity are related to much of what was considered scientific discourse in nineteenth-century Latin America. González Echevarría contends that when a (usually male) traveler visited Latin America during the nineteenth century, if he wished to write for a European public, scientific or otherwise, [he] had to remain European, had to persevere in his identity in spite of the lures of the wild.

30 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

His discourse demanded it. The rhetorical strategy that kept this distance was the constant expression of wonder, of surprise, achieved through repeated comparisons between the European and the colonial world. But distance was created mostly by the practice of classification and taxonomy (for which Linnaeus had provided a whole new language). The other world, or the world of the Other, is classifiable, apt to become the object of a taxonomy. (108) González Echevarría’s reference to the Swede Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is an interesting one (and one that—as we shall see—holds many implications for the role of science in the Caribbean) in that the latter developed his method of differentiating, classifying, and naming living beings in an era when botany was still a branch of medicine.41 According to Londa Schiebinger, it has been said “that God created nature and Linnaeus gave it order.”42 Although his system of genera, orders, classes, etc., was inspired by a devout religiosity and a literal interpretation of the Bible, Linnaeus “argued that at least some present-day plant species were the result of earlier hybridizations…. In later life, he wavered on this question of botanic hybrids, at times even positing them as the key principle of natural diversity”. 43 In many respects, the gray areas between “species” challenge Linnaeus’s categorizations and suggest that his system has a dubious relationship with the world of nature. He knew that his system was an artificial, pragmatic one, and that it did not mirror any “language” of nature. With regard to the genera of his sexual system for plants, for example, Lisbet Koerner argues that he knew that [these genera] were not always natural kinds (although he wavered on the question of what natural kinds might be). Despite its moments of contradiction and inexactitude, however, his sexual system made the ordering of floral collections less daunting both to the learned and to amateurs. (15) Nonetheless, this system has survived the Darwinian revolution and was “hailed in the twentieth century as the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature.”44 Schiebinger aptly observes that Linnaeus’s system of classification is further complicated in that its nomenclature was not immune to highly politicized cultural values and stereotypes—it was not and could not be “pure” science. She focuses on the zoological class of which humans are a species, namely, Mammalia. Linnaeus could have chosen from a number of other indicators 45 in naming this class, but instead emphasized “the presence of milkproducing mammae…but one characteristic of mammals…‘functional’ in only half of this group of animals” (137). One of Schiebinger’s conclusions is that Linnaeus’s term Mammalia links us to the “lower” species in the class via a female function, whereas reason, traditionally a distinguishing male function, identifies our species, Homo sapiens (137). For the purposes of the present study,

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 31

Schiebinger’s essay is especially useful insofar as it reveals how cultural values are never absent from scientific discourse. This point is worth remembering even more when scientists turn their gaze upon members of their own species. According to Robert Young, the same kinds of debates that plagued Linnaeus concerning the mutability or rigidity of species concerned those who focused primarily on the human arena.46 Typically, these scientists made claims regarding the unity (one species) or diversity (several species) of humanity. Although he could have chosen from a number of nineteenthcentury exponents of racialist thought, including Francis Galton, Gustave Le Bon and Arthur de Gobineau, Young focuses on the English Robert Knox, who claims, notoriously, that “the products of inter-racial unions are either infertile, or if fertile, after a few generations will revert ‘to one or other of the species from which they sprang.’”47 Before analyzing discourses on race and hybridity, I would like to underline that during the nineteenth-century, in European (and Caribbean) scientific circles, “race” was understood in a language similar to the kind used in botany. González Echevarría provides an apt—albeit general—observation that suggests how a number of often sharply different fields of inquiry provided a homogenized body of “information”: “Modern imperial powers, through institutions charged with acquiring and organizing knowledge (scientific institutes, jardins des plantes, museums of natural history, Tiergarten), commission individuals possessing the scientific competence to travel to their colonies or potential colonies to gather information…. [I]n short, everything that could be known by nineteenth-century science” (Myth and Archive 101–02). The most prominent of these scientists was Alexander von Humboldt, a botanist and minerologist steeped in Linnean taxonomy who—along with Aimé Bonpland, a fellow botanist—visited Cuba in the late 1700’s and published The Island of Cuba in 1826. While his training was in botany and mineralogy, his description of Cuba extends to matters far beyond these realms, including also Cuba’s geography, climate, government, and social mores. In several instances, Humboldt concerns himself with topics that might be considered essentially “scientific” (and for this reason he may be the protypical “Scientist of the Americas”): “The hills of Regla and Guanabacoa,” he argues, “present to the botanist, at the end of royal palms, Xatrofa panduraefolia; X. integerrima Jacq; X. fragrans; Petiveria alliacia; Pisonia loranthoides; Lantana involucrata” and seventeen other plant species that were new to Humboldt.48 He focuses elsewhere, however, on societal matters indicative of Havana’s racial climate: “At the present time, the whites receive but little increase through immigration from Europe, the Canary Islands, the Antilles, or the Continent; this class multiplies within itself, for patents of white blood are seldom granted by the tribunals to persons of light yellow color”49 (203). Significantly, in both of the preceding quotations, Humboldt reveals an interest in issues of classification. Although there is a world of difference between Xatrofa panduraefolia and “persons of light yellow color,” they are linked within Humboldt’s panorama of life in Cuba; this link is informed by hereditarian

32 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

principles insofar as it is concerned with taxonomic and seemingly hereditary distinctions between groups. The Caribbean was not a site where only foreigners carried out their scientific observations and experiments; there was (and is) an autochthonous tradition of researchers carrying on the categorizing work Linnaeus in particular had begun overseas. A case in point is the Cuban Felipe Poey (1799–1891) who was born the year Humboldt arrived on the island and was responsible for adding multitudes of local species to the increasingly vaster Linnean taxonomy. He was particularly renowned for his inventory of lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) on the island of Cuba.50 Poey’s categorizing zeal was influential in scientific and literary writings both in Cuba and elsewhere in the region, particularly those writings associated with the movement of naturalism.51 A representative literary text in this movement is Manuel Zeno Gandía’s (1855– 1930) La charca (1896), a novel about the miserable conditions Puerto Rican peasants endured during the latter half of the nineteenth century and also commonly regarded as Puerto Rico’s first major fictional narrative. In the manner of Emile Zola, the leading exponent of naturalism in literature, Zeno Gandía’s characters are identifiable pathological types, all doomed to succumb to the evil forces of nature, and in particular to their own internal natures. La charca follows the inter-related lives of a group of rural Puerto Rican folk, ranging from field hands to country doctors and shop keepers. The most prominent character is Silvina, a teenage girl who falls prey to (and later participates in) various kinds of evils and corruptions, and ultimately “Tembló sobre la muerte, abandonada a sí misma, detenida por carnalidad o empujada por el fatalismo”52 (While experiencing an epileptic seizure and either “detained by carnality or propelled by fatalism” she falls into a deep ravine and dies). Given, in particular, La charca’s emphasis on delineating character types, both Linnaeus and Poey might have been pleased with Zeno Gandía’s methodology in crafting his fiction (influenced to a considerable extent by his training as a doctor and scientific researcher), including his choice of a title: in Spanish, La charca means the (stagnant) pond, a prime location for identifying different zoological specimen and observing their interactions. In fact, La charca is one of a quartet of novels that Zeno Gandía called his “chronicles of a sick world.”53 In the respect that La charca is a novel written by a physician who was a prominent member of Puerto Rico’s scientific community, the novel “has rightly [if perhaps simplistically] been viewed, especially in recent studies,” according to Juan Flores, as “a rather elitist work, saturated with the prejudices and apologetics of a frustrated colonial ruling class.”54 Flores adds that Puerto Rico’s problems are not with this ruling class given that “through a familiar ideological transfer, of course, it is the servile masses who bear the brunt of this historical frustration” (Flores 24). La charca seems to suggest, in effect, that these masses are ill and need to be cured because they are incapable of curing themselves. Silvina, for example, barely knew her siblings, each of whom were “Hijos de distintos padres, cada cual seguía su destino.” (“children of different fathers, each following his or her

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 33

destiny”).55 Later, after being raped by her mother’s common-law husband, the latter sells her to a business partner, “Gaspar, de cincuenta años, facciones repulsivas, mala catadura, pelo enmarañado y aliento aguardentoso, no era un marido manso”(10–11) (Gaspar, at “fifty years old, awkward and repulsive looking, with tangled hair and drunken breath, was not a gentle mate” 39). Meanwhile, Juan del Salto, the wealthy rancher who owns much of the area’s land, from atop his horse pessimistically surveys his belongings and those who work there. Although it may be impossible to completely and mechanically equate Del Salto’s viewpoint with that of Zeno Gandía’s, the two are similar at least insofar as they assume an authorial, philosophical stance as concerns their society’s ills. I will quote at length the narrator’s account of Del Salto’s reflections: Los viajes y el estudio le habían enseñado a pensar, y su cultivada inteligencia le había elevado sobre el montón social que veía en torno…. ¿Las gentes que veía agrupadas en las estribaciones del monte eran seres humanos o jirones de vida lanzados al acaso? …¿Qué les movía? ¿Adónde iban? …El pasado, el presente, lo porvenir del suelo nativo; las generaciones venideras, engendradas en los remolinos del presente; la lucha de una raza inerme, impotente para levantar la cabeza y respirar ambientes de cultura, teniendo que hundirla en el pantano, bajo la pesadumbre infinita de la ignorancia y de la enfermedad; y sobre la balumba de inmensas desventuras, la ley natural empujando brutalmente el conjunto y amasando con lágrimas, para esa raza, un porvenir enfermizo y una degeneración más honda todavía…. Se daba cuenta exacta de la situación que aquellas clases ocupaban en la colonia. Las veía descender por línea recta de mezclas étnicas cuyo producto nacía contaminado de morbosa debilidad, de una debilidad que, apoderándose de la especie, le había dejado exangüe las arterias. (24) His travels and studies had taught him to think, and his cultivated mind had lifted him above the society around him…. Were those poor people clustered on the spurs of the mountains human beings, or merely shreds of life launched forth by chance? …. What moved them? Where were they going? He probed the past, present and future of his native soil; the generations to come, begotten in the maelstrom of the present; the struggle of a helpless people, powerless to lift its head and inhale the fresh air of culture, forced to submerge itself in a swamp, weighted down by the infinite burden of ignorance and disease; and added to the bulk of their immense misfortune were the laws of nature, brutally shoving them, kneading them with tears a sickly future and an even deeper de-generation for their race…. He was well acquainted with the life these people led in the colony. He saw them descend in a straight line of ethnic mixtures whose end product was contaminated with a deadly, invincible weakness, leaving its arteries anemic. (50–1)

34 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

In effect, the population constructed in La charca suffers from the weight of ethnic and social degeneration, seemingly a result of ill-advised sexual unions. Although it seems hard to deny—given the recurrence throughout the novel of observations similar to the passage above—that this narrative to some extent emphasizes social dynamics involving the inheritance of physical traits, Flores argues differently: “La charca may be most appropriately considered a work of critical realism, since the forces impinging on the course of events are overwhelmingly social and not biological or ecological. The role of race, heredity and climate—which prevail in strict naturalist terms—is marginal when compared with the decisive weight of lived social experience” (29). I agree with Flores that La charca is a complex work and that its ideological orientation is open to interpretation, particularly insofar as it is difficult to identify Zeno Gandía’s politics within the work’s complexity. I am unconvinced, however, that race and heredity are “marginal” constructs in La charca. Instead, as the citations from the novel suggest, they serve as the very weight atop the fatalism of the lived social experience in the novel. Josefina Ludmer, in her study on Juan Carlos Onetti, comes close to providing a general assessment of the link between naturalism and discourses on heredity: “El médico [naturalista] exhibe, además, otros privilegios: conoce los antecedentes familiares y puede hacer brillar la verdad en la herencia”56 (“the physician displays other privileges: he knows the familial background and can summon the truth through heredity”). The naturalism and positivism of Zeno Gandía and his counterparts in the sciences—for instance Esponda, and Céspedes (see n. 51)—are informed by a theory that had taken the Caribbean scientific community (and much of the scientific world in general) by storm in the latter half of the nineteenth century: Darwinism, a theory intensely concerned with tracking hereditarian processes over variable time-spans. In the next section, we will see how Darwinism set the limits that Mendelian genetics would later surpass. DISCOURSES OF HEREDITY IN THE CARIBBEAN: DARWINISM AND BEYOND In his essay, “Significación histórico-científica de Mendel y el Mendelismo,” José López Sánchez, with reference to Cuba, argues that the island was fertile ground for Darwinian ideas on account of what he perceives as the assimilationist tendencies of its scientific community:57 En Cuba…aparecen fuertemente vinculadas estas concepciones, lo que se justifica por ser nuestra cultura científica una cultura de asimilación, es decir, que se ha estructurado con la incorporación de hechos e ideas provenientes de culturas más avanzadas y por ende sólidamente desarrolladas.58 In Cuba…there appear strongly bound these [Darwinian] conceptions, which are accounted for by our scientific culture being a culture of

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 35

assimilation, that is, one that has been structured with the incorporation of facts and ideas emanating from more advanced and therefore more solidly developed cultures. In effect, for López Sánchez at least, scientific thought in Cuba during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century consisted in a close alignment to some version of Darwinism (López Sánchez 49). The scientific community in Cuba, however, not unlike those in other parts of the Caribbean and beyond, was at this time at a loss to explain the mechanism that facilitated Darwinian natural selection: during the decades that followed the publication of On the Origin of Species, consensus regarding the applicability of Darwin’s theory developed gradually; Darwin and his followers were unable, however, to explain biologically how it is, exactly, that certain traits (and not others) are passed down to later generations.59 Both Nancy Stepan and Robert Young have argued, for example, that without an understanding of genetics, the role of hybridization in evolution was too big a hurdle for Darwin to overcome (Young 12). The mystery was solved upon the re-discovery of Mendel’s work by Hugo de Vries in 1900, sixteen years after Mendel’s death and eighteen years after Darwin’s. Nonetheless, it took several more years for Mendel’s theory to gain acceptance in the Caribbean and for this genetic theory of inheritance thereby to become common scientific knowledge in the region. Cuba’s scientific community became acquainted with Mendel’s ideas in 1912, during a session of the Havana Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences. At this session, Dr. Antón Lutz presented a paper entitled “Sobre algunos árboles genealógicos y la aplicación de las Reglas de Mendel en la Oftalmología” (“Regarding Genealogical Trees and the Application in Ophthalmology of Mendel’s Rules”). The Academy considered the papers subject matter (which consisted in a study of the deleterious effects of inbreeding) of “great interest” and recognized “the usefulness that comes from this type of investigation.”60 It was a matter of only a few years before Cuban researchers began applying Mendelian genetics in broader ways. Arístides Mestre’s Las Leyes de la Herencia y la Biología aplicada (1918) (The Laws of Inheritance and Biology Applied) provided a historical summary of “las principales adquisiciones logradas en Genética y valora correctamente la importancia de la contribución mendeliana para la agricultura, la medicina y la biología” (López Sanchez 52) (“the principal gains achieved in genetics and accurately appraises the importance of the potential Mendelian contribution to agriculture, medicine, and biology”). With respect in particular to the sugar plantation, scientific discourse had for a long time been interested in cataloguing and enhancing the many varieties of sugar cane. Humboldt, for instance, wrote that “in Cuba there are four qualities of sugar, according to its purity or degree of purging. Of each loaf, or cone with the base uppermost, the upper part gives white sugar, the middle gives brown, and the lower, or point of the cone gives cucurucho [a Cubanismo: low quality sugar” (Humboldt 258). Humboldt and others interested in the sugar industry were

36 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

unable, however, to find ways of arriving at improved, predictable hybridizations of the sugar cane. It was not until 1918, the same year in which Mestre’s essay praising Mendelian genetics appeared, that researchers began applying Mendel’s theories to agriculture in Cuba. It was then that the Agricultural Congress of Santiago de las Vega’s was held, in which Dr. Mario Calvino read his essay entitled “Nuevas ideas sobre la selección de las plantas” (“New Ideas Regarding Crop Selection”)—an essay that, according to López Sánchez, inaugurated plant genetics in Cuba (López Sánchez 52). It is important to note that it is not as if some conception of plant genetics did not exist in Cuba before Calvino and Mendel: Francisco Díaz Barreiro echoes the discussion by Hans Stubbe we saw earlier by arguing that “el mejoramiento de las variedades de la caña de azúcar, mediante selección entre variantes que se producen en la naturaleza, es de tan remoto conocimiento como su cultivo”61 (“the improvement of sugar cane varieties through selections that occur naturally has been known about as long as the crop has been cultivated.”), i.e., for millennia. Approximately a century and a half earlier, Humboldt observed: in the same manner, to improve the technical manipulations on the sugar plantations, we must begin on several of those in Cuba, with an analysis by a chemist acquainted with the present state of vegetable chemistry, of small portions of juice taken from the several kinds of cane, in different soils, and at various seasons of the year. Without this preliminary labor, undertaken by some person from one of the most celebrated laboratories, and possessing a complete knowledge of the operations of sugar-making from beet-root, we may obtain some partial improvement, but the manufacture of sugar will always continue to be what it is now, that is to say, the result of experiments more or less satisfactory, but which are made in the dark. (Humboldt 258– 259, my italics) According to Díaz Barreiro, “la eficacia de los métodos en los cmzamientos de plantas fueron posibles después del redescubrimiento, en 1900, de la formulación de Mendel del concepto de la herencia particularizada” (80) (“The efficiency of cross-breeding methods in plants was possible after the rediscovery, in 1900, of Mendel’s formulation of the concept of particularized heredity”). Meanwhile, Calvino’s essay is significant insofar as it broaches “el tema de la producción de nuevas variedades de caña por medio de la reproducción sexual y asegura que ‘con los conocimientos actuales relativos a la herencia, a las leyes de Mendel, la labor para la obtención de una variedad de caña que satisfaga determinadas condiciones, sólo se puede lograr con la fecundación artificial de plantas elegidas.’” (López Sánchez 52) (“the theme of the production of new varieties of sugar cane by means of sexual reproduction and ensures that ‘with current knowledge pertaining to heredity, to the laws of Mendel, efforts to attain a variety of sugar cane that meets determined criteria will only be achieved with the artificial insemination of selected plants’”).

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 37

It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of the association between genetic discourses of heredity and agriculture62—the sugar industry in particular —for this industry is, according to a number of Caribbean scholars, a hegemonic, paradigmatic discourse throughout the Caribbean. Flores, for instance, in commenting on La charca, which is—as we have seen—a novel set in rural Puerto Rico, is perplexed by its omission of the sugar industry. The novel focuses, instead, on the world of coffee. This “isolation of the world of coffee, its virtual disconnection from other forces comprising the totality, indicates an ideological distortion of some magnitude. There are no slaves, no sprawling canefields or sugar mills” (22). In effect, sugar is conspicuous in its absence from La charca. According to Benítez Rojo, it is the sugar plantation that has established the basic parameters in Cuba for political, economic, and artistic expression. Benítez Rojo identifies one late eighteenth-century text as being particularly responsible for normalizing the sway the plantation would have over the rest of Cuban affairs: Francisco de Arango y Parreño’s Discurso sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y medios de fomentarla,63 published in 1792. This treatise appeared at a pivotal time for the world sugar industry: in the wake of the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue (Haiti) that left a sugar production void that would inevitably be filled elsewhere. The urgent question at the time was which of the Caribbean islands would fill the void left by Saint Domingue, until then the worlds leading supplier of sugar. Barbados, which shone in the sugar industry during the sixteenth century, was too small and its lands had become less fertile. The lands in Jamaica had also been mistreated. This left a precious opening for Cuba, whose lands had been used primarily for cattle grazing and the small-scale production of tobacco, coffee, and food crops. Arango’s text was a plea to Havana’s landowners to prioritize sugar production and to the Spanish monarchy to grant special privileges to these landowners in the areas of manufacture and trade; Arango astutely saw these privileges as a means of securing the landowners’ success. Benítez Rojo emphasizes that the influence of Arango’s text came partly as a result of its perfect timing and not entirely on account of its “form and content,” both of which were nothing new in Cuban letters in 1792.64 What this suggests, is that a discourse informed by the plantations interests was already in place; Arango’s genius was in manipulating this discourse at just the right time and in just the right way: En realidad la ‘obra’ de Arango ya estaba ahí, fuera de Arango; esto en el sentido de que no es él quien estrictamente la precede. El rol de Arango consistió en manipular este discurso de plantación en términos exclusivos de azúcar; piénsese que podía haberlo hecho en términos de café o en términos de una diversificación agrícola. De esta manera su Discurso no es en rigor un discurso, sino un texto que se inserta en un discurso pre-existente de economía de plantación con la finalidad de limitarlo y regularlo. La función de Arango es afín a la del editor, pues consiste en seleccionar, excluir, anotar, subrayar, aquello que es contenido de discurso. Ahora bien,

38 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

el hecho de ser el primero que manipulara en Cuba la nueva situación, le permitió definir a largo plazo el campo de analogías y diferencias que le darían especificidad al discurso económico cubano.65 Actually, the work of Arango was already there, outside of Arango. That is, the role of Arango consisted in the manipulation of this plantation discourse in terms of sugar exclusively. He could have done the same, in other words, on behalf of coffee interests or agricultural diversification. In this way Arango’s Discurso is not a ‘discourse’. proper, but rather a text inserted into an already existing plantation economy discourse in order to limit or regulate it. Arango’s function is akin to an editor’s, since it consists in selecting, excluding, annotating, underlining all that is contained in such a discourse. The fact that Arango was the first to manipulate the new situation in Cuba allowed him to define, in long-range terms, the specific differences and analogies characterizing Cuban economic discourse. (Benítez Rojo “Sugar/Power/Literatur” 12) If the sugar plantation constitutes a dominant discourse in Cuban science and culture, can the same be said about other parts of the Caribbean? There are arguments on both sides of this question. According to Manuel Moreno Fraginals, for instance, the situation in Cuba se presenta como una excepción. Al contrario de las colonias inglesas, francesas u holandesas, donde el desarrollo azucarero provenía de una política estatal consciente, el azúcar cubano crecía desde el siglo XVII sobre la base de un esfuerzo autóctono de los propios colonos. Es la propia oligarquía criolla, desplazada del tabaco por el monopolio, la que encuentra en el azúcar un nuevo camino de reconquista económica.66 is an exception. Unlike the English, French or Dutch colonies, where the development of the sugar industry stemmed from a concerted state initiative, the sugar industry in Cuba grew starting in the seventeenth century based on the autochthonous effort of Cuban colonists. It is the creole oligarchy, removed from tobacco cultivation by its monopolization, that finds in the sugar industry a new road to economic resurgence. Benítez Rojo, alongside Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez and Eric Williams—two other scholars on the Caribbean—offer a vision of the spread of the Caribbean plantation in which events in Cuba are taken as part of a regional trend. Benítez Rojo dedicates his study, The Repeating Island, to tracing the unifying role of the sugar plantation across Caribbean time and space. The influence of the plantation is such that many differences between the various Caribbean islands can be accounted for by the historical moment in which the plantation reached full force on a given island: according to Benítez Rojo, we can speak “of a Caribbean machine as important or more so than the fleet machine. This machine, this extraordinary machine, exists today, that is, it repeats itself continuously. It’s called: the

HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 39

plantation.”67 Given the often stifling and overwhelming force with which it operated—a force imposed most brutally on slaves—the Caribbean plantation became the principal unifying entity in a region that might otherwise be seen as a chaos of difference. In other words, the plantation is the dominant political and cultural agent through which subordinate agents are defined. In some respects, Benítez Rojo’s argument is able to encompass the differences Moreno Fraginals described. Meanwhile, Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, as early as 1927, argued that in the Caribbean “islands, men and sugar were long ago drawn into remarkably patterned relationships, and that all of these relationships have developed along some parallel course or trajectory.” 68 Finally, Eric Williams’s history of the Caribbean focuses on the unparalleled importance of the sugar industry, which he calls “King Sugar.” According to him, during the course of three centuries, King Sugar “spread from Hispaniola to Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Its development was gradual but steady. 69 What about the relationship between the sugar plantation and hereditarian discourses? If the former is a hegemonic discourse in the Caribbean, can the latter display a similar agency in the region? The short answer is “yes,” although the two sets of discourses interact in numerous ways: sometimes in unison, sometimes in opposition. In subsequent chapters, as I examine the role of hereditarian discourses in Caribbean narrative, part of my task will be to provide a longer answer to the above question, i.e., to trace the uneasy rapport between hereditarian discourses and the plantation, and show how the former also informs the region’s narratives. It does so, moreover, in ways that an emphasis exclusively on the sugar plantation per se does not reveal. Ultimately, what I hope is clear at this point is that “heredity” has a long, complex history as a discourse—a history that in the Caribbean must be considered in light of Linnaeus, Poey, Darwin, and the plantation. Indeed, for every appeal in the Caribbean to transcend and forget a hereditarian imagination, e.g., Walcott’s in this chapter’s epigraph, there are instances of heredity manifesting its discursivity. The next chapter continues our discussion of the relationship between discourses of heredity and Caribbean plantation societies, with particular regard to how communities in fictional narratives are formed and defined within the context of abolitionism and nationalism in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba.

Chapter Two Misce-gene-nation: Heredity and the Rise of Pluralism in Caribbean Narrative

On Cecilia Valdés’s aspirations: creía y esperaba Cecilia ascender siempre, salir de la humilde esfera en que había nacido, si no ella, sus hijos. Casada con un mulato, descendería en su propia estimación y en la de sus iguales; porque tales son las aberraciones de toda sociedad constituida como la cubana. —Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdtés Cecilia hoped always to rise, leave the humble sphere in which she had been born. She would rise herself, if possible, but if not, her children would. Had she married a coloured man she would have lowered herself in her own esteem and in that of her equals; for such are the erroneous notions of all societies constituted like the Cuban. —Cecilia Valdés Sab is mulatto; his body bears witness to miscegenation. —Catherine Davies, “Introduction” to Sab This chapter is concerned primarily with how concepts (or conceptions) of heredity served as a locus of contestation with regard, on a political level, to a burgeoning nationalist movement, particularly in Cuba. On a different but necessarily related level these concepts also informed factors involving the composition of communities (including—to name only a few of these factors—gender roles, demographics, and the inheritance of property) in a slave-holding plantation system erected by what was at mid-nineteenth century, in effect, a weakening Spanish colonial empire. Although it is tempting to think of heredity exclusively in physical or biological terms, part of this concept’s power lies in its reach into the sphere of metaphor or the imagination, including how we imagine communities. M.G.Smith provides an early but useful comparison and contrast of biological and cultural heredity or inheritance in the Caribbean, a process that has played a role in the development of Caribbean communities: “A heritage is something inherited, handed down… Presumably the idea of an African heritage refers to that which is handed down

MISCE-GENE-NATION 41

and is African in origin. Such a heritage has three major aspects: the biological, the social, and the cultural… In multiracial societies, especially with relation to their internal differentiation and classification, we are not merely confronted by differences of a biological character, but are faced with conflicting interpretations based on other non-genetic dimensions, predominantly, of course, on social and cultural practice.” 1Although he simplifies biological inheritance, his observations regarding the complexities of inheritance are to the point: “With biological and social inheritance we are dealing with accessible and clearly determinate conditions. Biological characters tend to be highly constant and history provides a fair record of the continuity or change of social position and conditions. But cultural inheritance is not so easily definable” (39). While this chapter may stop short of actually defining cultural inheritance, it does outline the ways two Caribbean novels of the colonial period sketch hereditarian transactions at the level of the community. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga’s novel Sab (1841) and Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (a novel that appeared in its final form in 1882 although an early version was published in 1839) are both often considered “foundational” Cuban romances in that each in its own way articulates a path out of a colonial, racially stratified society, and toward one characterized not only by sovereignty, but by a racial heterogeneity that would lose its preoccupation with an intricate code of presumably (“presumably” because biological heredity is but one of several factors involved in constructions of racial difference) inherited racial traits. The novels share an additional similarity in that in neither case is this path toward a new, independent Cuba a smooth one: in fact, even as they articulate this desired path, the events in both narratives end tragically with the principal characters seemingly unable to surpass restrictive societal mores that allow some and prohibit other sexual or marital relationships. The title of this chapter, “MisceGeneNation,” is designed to call attention to the sense of genetic determinism that seems simultaneously to ensure these narratives’ unfortunate endings while lending pathos to their beckoning for a new and better Cuba, one in which miscegenation (from the Latin miscere and genus: a mixture of “races”) would be accepted2 as an ongoing, commonplace, and heuristic process constitutive of Cuban culture, as opposed to being an unwanted process requiring policing on the part of the dominant but paranoid colonial state. I will begin with Sab because of its earlier definitive date of publication and its closer proximity to a romantic narrative style (Cecilia Valdés, in contrast, is more similar in style to the naturalism that governed the works of many late nineteenth-century writers, including Manuel Zeno Gandía) that registers a set of slightly different historical concerns. In order to illustrate in condensed form the complex issues of heredity, community, and national identity that structure this chapter, I will turn briefly to a different Caribbean island and to a much more recent communication medium:3 in a November 30, 2000 online discussion forum titled “Who is Puerto Rican?,” a forum participant, Concienciall, replied to another participant in the hurried (I

42 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

will quote the passage letter for letter) but engaging manner typical of online chats. The hurriedness and informality, however, express ideas and convictions that are nothing if not profound. “Nacionalista,” concienciall begins her/his reply, I seen those same examples in Tony Croatto (Argentinean with Italian ancestry) and Eddie Palmery [sic] (Jew [sic] American) and Rafael Jose (Born in Puerto Rico with Dominican Parents) all of these personalities claim to love, adore PR and to be either PR pure o at heart. On the other hand there are a minority that do refuse to be call Puerto Rican even if legally born witnin the Puertorican International borders, I will not even mention them since it is not worth to do so. Another twist to this is from the Native puerto [sic] Rican which when asked were they are from, immediately will response and claim being from Spain because they are third, fourth and even fifth generation. I personally veiw it as a “vende patria [nation seller/traitor] o ashame [sic] of saying where they are from.”4 With this passionate observation, Concienciall positions her/himself as an authentic Puerto Rican, in clear contrast to the several types s/he enumerated in the reply (i.e., immigrants to Puerto Rico, and those who affiliate themselves with other nationalities despite being born in Puerto Rico: significantly, very much the same polemics dominates Gómez de Avellaneda’s and Villaverde’s texts, although with these, distinctions in degrees of authentic nationality involve a triad that is not dissimilar; namely, Cuban-born creole/Spaniard/European Other, the last of which is often British). The online discussion regarding Puerto Rican identity is conducted, interestingly enough, in English. Furthermore, although Concienciall indicates that s/he is writing in the United States, with digital technology, he/she could just as easily be in San Juan or Paris and still contribute to the forum. What I find most striking, however, are Concienciall’s comments on “Native” Puerto Ricans who insist they are Spaniards, even after several generations. This intergenerational continuum—in a figurative sense an appeal to the force or weight of heredity—plays a prominent role in other areas of Caribbean culture. We can go yet deeper with our analysis: of the three people Concienciall mentions, Croatto is the one I know best (Rafael José is a singer best known as co-host of Univision’s “Despierta América,” and the pianist Eddie Palmieri is the leader of a well-known salsa orchestra). A song Croatto popularized, “Nuestra sangre,”5 addresses the very issues the forum participants discuss: Puerto Rican identity and the passing of generations. In brief, “Nuestra sangre” is a song (consisting primarily in Croatto’s voice, a drumbeat, a driving staccato Spanish guitar, and a chorus) about the creation of the Puerto Rico people and their cultural identity, beginning with the “war-prone” pre-Columbian (“Indio de raza guerrida”), and continuing through the arrival of Spaniards and Africans. The references to heredity in “Nuestra sangre” are—unlike those in the online forum on identity—more than just figurative. We have early in the song explicit

MISCE-GENE-NATION 43

references to sexual reproduction involving an idealized pair, each of whom represents, respectively, conqueror and conquered: La mujer de tez curtida de las tribus borinqueñas con su mirar, halagüeña, al hombre blanco seduce empezando con sus cruces la raza puertorriqueña. The woman of the tanned face from the borinque [the island’s prior name] tribes with her flattering gaze she seduces the white man beginning with these crosses the Puerto Rican race. Violence is not a part of this initial encounter. Although she is ultimately “ruined” by the European man, it was the Indoamerican woman who set the wheels of miscegenation in motion and, in a sense, conquered her man: in the song, it is she who seduces the European, and not the latter who rapes, enslaves, and ultimately eliminates the former. If the Indoamerican woman survived at all, it was through the genetic inheritance she left her descendants. Significantly, even though this initial encounter is a non-violent, erotic one, it nonetheless foregrounds the process of racial “crosses” initiated by the proverbial Indoamerican woman and the Spanish man and continued later after the arrival of slaves, most of whom were African. Furthermore, these “crosses” also register the Spaniard’s religion, which he upheld in his drive to impose his will over the indigenous population. Indeed, behind the birth of the Puerto Rican “race” or people in “Nuestra sangre” is a symbolic sexual union. As the song advances, however, not only does it continually refer to this founding encounter between the Indoamerican woman and the European man, it also dwells on it (and its results) in greater detail. Not surprisingly, “Nuestra sangre” references the sexual transmission of characteristics that recall genetic forebears: de ellos nació el mestizo con ascendencia latina. from them was born the mestizo with Latin ancestry. From the union between the Indoamerican woman and the European man was born7 the mestizo, a person with “Latin ancestry.” Significantly, there is no verse to counter that particular ancestry with its Indoamerican (Taíno, for example) counterpart. After all, in genetic terms at least, is not the mestizo as much Indoamerican as European?

44 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

One might, perhaps, argue that part of the tension in “Nuestra sangre” with respect to the half of the Puerto Rican ancestry it foregrounds can be explained in terms of the rhythmic and structural demands of the song, particularly its rhyme scheme: “ascendencia latina” rhymes with “ruina,” the final word in an earlier verse (“ruina,” if we remember is where the European ultimately led the Indoamerican woman). However, that the song reminds us of the mestizo’s European past rather than an Indoamerican one reinforces the observation David Chioni Moore makes regarding the constructedness (and in many regards, the arbitrariness) of genealogical undertakings (Cf. Chapter 1). Furthermore, in representational terms, the songs reference to the mestizo’s Latin heritage is striking given our knowledge that the indigenous population of Puerto Rico (and that of much of the Caribbean) was almost entirely decimated within a few decades of the arrival of the Europeans during the sixteenth century. As such, while on the one hand it mentions (and purports to valorize) the Indoamerican contribution to the raza puertorriqueña, on the other it suggests (by mentioning only a European heritage) the inferior status of this contribution. The European contribution to the raza puertorriqueña, meanwhile, amounts historically primarily to an Iberian contribution. Nonetheless, such a contribution is linked in the song to a “Latin” ancestry. In a sense, not only is the Indoamerican contribution to Puerto Rican mestizaje forgotten, but the Iberian contribution is further associated (and perhaps weighted) with a remote Latin past. Faithful to chronological order, a later verse in the song then describes the birth of the mulatto: Con la negra [el blanco] fue mezquino y contra la ley divina él la hizo su concubina… y entonces nació el trigueño con mezcla de sangre fina. He was wicked with the negra and against the divine law he made her his concubine… and then the person of dark skin was born With a mixture of fine blood. Once again, a founding moment in the history of the Puerto Rican people is expressed in terms of the Inheritance of physical traits: to be precise, a mixture of different blood types. There is an interesting ambiguity in the verse “y contra la ley divina”: is the transgression against a “divine” law to make a woman one’s concubine, or does the Spaniard’s transgression lie in his victim being of African heritage? Meanwhile, the word trigueño to denote mulatto is an interesting one: trigueño and puertorriqueño share a suffix, a coincidence that may be emblematic of what is by all accounts a complex Puerto Rican society: the prefix “tri,” moreover, makes subtle reference to the island’s genetic forebears, i.e., the

MISCE-GENE-NATION 45

indigenous population, the Spaniards, and the Africans. Not unlike “Nuestra sangre,” matters involving heredity are paramount in Sab and its account of an unrequited love that is obliquely symbolic of 1830’s Cuba. SABOTAGING SLAVERY: SAB, ABOLITIONISM, AND NATION As much as any nineteenth-century Caribbean novel, Sab registers a highly complex, culturally and ethnically diverse society, a society whose codes and mores closely coincide with the deterministic limits the novel itself seems to impose on its characters. Simply stated, the purpose of the novel is to critique these limits and in so doing provide a rhetorical roadmap toward Cuban independence. What characterized this complex, diverse plantation society? Sidney Mintz’s study provides a useful point of entry into this question: according to him, in the plantation society of the Caribbean as a whole (although this description holds particularly well in the case of Sab), “national class groupings usually took on a bipolar form, sustained by overseas domination, sharply differentiated access to land, wealth, and political power, and the use of physical differences as status markers.”6 The polarity in the Cuba Sab depicts amounts principally to a division between masters and slaves (there is, however, a feminist undercurrent in the narrative whereby the plight of women is likened to that of slaves). The overseas dominators, meanwhile, are the Spanish (who would rule over Cuba until 1898) and, tangentially but increasingly, the English. Mintz continues his description of the colonial plantation system in the Caribbean: Especially characteristic of these unusual socio-cultural adjustments to the plantation system was a sexual code that had to take into account the greater proportions of male to female slaves in most cases, the relative lack of free European women, and the sexual defencelessness of the slave female before the master class. Concubinage, informal unions between free Europeans and slave women, and the stabilization of a ‘mistress pattern’ in many Caribbean societies inevitably led to the growth of a group intermediate in physical appearance and, in many cases, in social status as well. Only rarely, however, did this group serve to cement the topmost and bottommost ranks of the social order; much more commonly, the socially intermediate category tended to affiliate itself as best it could with those in power. (Mintz 923) While Sab does not delve into specifics regarding the proportions of male and female slaves, the relative lack of free (or perhaps unmarried) European women, etc., it does narrate the story of an eponymous “noble” slave who, being a mulatto, represents the intermediate group Mintz describes. Furthermore, in accordance with Mintz, Sab does affiliate more with the white landowners, although we shall see that his privileges do not stem from ambitions for upward mobility: he is, we

46 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

are told, a being pure and sublime in spirit trapped in a non-white body deemed inferior by his society. In many respects, Sab’s ills stem from hereditarian conceptions of the body, in which—as Mintz argues—status derives from a complex and often murky assessment on the part of plantation society regarding one’s ethnicity and those of ones forebears. What makes Sab an even more remarkable novel, however, is the way in which—on a variety of registers besides ethnicity—heredity informs the narrative. In doing so, we gain a different perspective on mid-nineteenth-century Cuba and the fatalism erected by slavery that abolitionists were beginning to challenge. Briefly, Sab is a tale of romantic passion and the forces that frustrate it: Sab, the protagonist, is infatuated with Carlota de B______, the heiress of a prominent but declining landowning family in central Cuba, a region removed from the sugardriven economy of western Cuba (especially Havana). Gómez de Avellaneda, perhaps in an effort to lend her narrative a realistic, historical urgency, does not provide the family’s last name; conversely, it is possible that the initial “B” was meant to establish for a contemponeous readership “in the know” a connection or similarity to an actual Cuban family. Sab and Carlota have known each other since her birth (he’s six years older) because he is a house slave and quite possibly the illegitimate son of Carlota’s uncle.7 At a basic level, the novel addresses issues of heredity and determinism from the beginning, given that the consensus among the characters is that both Sab and Carlota are, to the exclusion of others (most notably Carlota’s suitor, Enrique Otway), “noble” spirits, whose unique nature makes them capable of feeling the broadest range of emotion.8 It might seem that Sab and Carlota would make a perfect match, given their kindred spirits. She, unfortunately, falls for Enrique, the son of a British merchant. Even though he has several opportunities to “sabotage” the relationship between Carlota and Enrique, Sab’s benevolent nature inevitably paves the way for this relationship. In fact, he dies, literally of a ruptured heart, after racing to tell Enrique that Carlota’s dowry was intact (and thereby sufficient to justify marrying her). Carlota lives out her life unhappily married to Enrique and making regular visits to her cousin Teresa, who—upon Sab’s death—joined a convent. Teresa, in her own right, was infatuated with Sab, but such are the mysteries of the heart that, when she made amorous advances toward him, he remained resolute in his doomed affection for Carlota. Enrique’s economic interests in marriage notwithstanding, for the other three principal characters, amorous desire serves as the engine that propels each of them toward suffering. With regard to some historical context during the time of Sab’s publication, perhaps the salient feature of mid-nineteenth-century Cuba’s political, economic, and social climate is the prevailing attitude toward race among the dominant classes. This attitude was closely linked to the fear in some sectors of white Cuban society that the island risked, on the one hand, the fate of Saint Domingue, a colony that had recently been overthrown by slaves and renamed Haiti; or, on the other hand, possible cession to the United States or—to a lesser extent—Great Britain.

MISCE-GENE-NATION 47

In the last two scenarios, Cuba would have become either “another slave state in the Union,” or an “‘africanized’ republic under British rule.”9 The problem at hand for Cuba’s intellectual class lay in articulating a strategy for maintaining the planters’ profits and productivity without allowing the island’s slave population to grow beyond control. According to Eric Williams, a racial balance propitious to whites in a slaveholding economy was initially ensured by the sharp rates of mortality slaves faced. In stating his case, Williams registers the degree to which questions of sexual reproduction (or the lack thereof) informed the planters’ economic strategies: “The planters openly asserted that it was cheaper to work the slave to death and replace him by another than to keep up the population by breeding.”10 The growing abolitionist fervor, however (a fervor led—with varying degrees of sincerity—by Great Britain), made it increasingly difficult during the 1830’s and 1840’s for the plantocracy to maintain its policy of working its slaves to death and then replacing them inexpensively via the slave trade. British involvement in the Caribbean merits a closer look: the British wielded a heavy hand over Caribbean society, even in regions where they were not the primary colonizer. The Caribbean was known to the British as the Sugar Islands for several centuries following the Conquest, and they had vast sugar operations as early as the seventeenth century (Barbados). For two hundred years they yielded to Spanish mercantile dominance in the Caribbean, but in 1762, they sacked Havana and returned it11 to Spain only after the latter agreed to move toward free commerce in the region.12 In non-British parts of the Caribbean they were further linked with the sugar industry through their efforts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to introduce steam-powered sugar production,13 not to mention the intermittent role they served as middlemen throughout much of the colonial history of the Caribbean. Although most British were fervent abolitionists during this interval, in earlier periods they were active participants in the slave trade. Luis Martínez-Fernández comments on the intricacies of British involvement in the Caribbean: Due to a complex web of mutually reinforced reasons ranging from humanitarianism, to the desire to protect British colonial agriculturalists, to seeking to make Cuba less attractive to United States expansionists, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and eventually the end of slavery itself became central goals of Britain’s Caribbean policy beginning in the 1810’s.14 Consequently, British visitors to Cuba during the mid-nineteenth century were seldom welcomed enthusiastically, as Martínez-Fernández observes: During the convulsed middle decades of the nineteenth century, marked by slave insurrection scares and by filibuster invasions or threats of invasion, Havana reached one of its peaks of inhospitality. North Americans and

48 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Britons, in particular, were perceived by Spanish authorities as undesirable guests, unwelcome bearers of the contagious germs of abolitionism, republicanism, and Protestantism. It was not uncommon for colonial officials and other Habaneros to scorn the most inoffensive Londoner or New Yorker as a filibustero. (66–7) A lapse in Cuban hospitality notwithstanding, any history of the Caribbean (and, perhaps, the rest of Latin America) indicates that the British perceived the region as one meant solely to enhance Britain’s mercantilist practices, as opposed to one —as was the case with Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean—where settlement and the creation of an autochthonous society had any priority. Granted, in some parts of the Americas, i.e., where other European nations (especially Spain) governed, it would have been perilous for the British to attempt any kind of lasting settlement. In places where they did gain a foothold, however, such as Barbados and Jamaica, the British were concerned primarily with productivity and profit. In Spanish-ruled areas, the concerns of the British remained consistent: In 1824, after Spain had failed in its last attempts to reconquer its American colonies from creole rebels, the British foreign minister decided to recognize several independent states in Spanish America, thereby sealing the fate of the Spanish empire and preparing the way for British economic hegemony. Announcing that Britain intended to establish treaties of commerce with three of the new republics which had achieved their independence from Spain, Canning asserted that ‘Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English.’ (McFarlane 304–05) At stake amid the skirmishes (both literal and rhetorical) between Great Britain and Spain were the prospects of slaves and slavery in Cuba, among other Caribbean islands. Francisco Arango y Parreño, who played a pivotal role in transferring the plantocracy’s center of power from Saint Domingue to Cuba following the collapse of the former, was by 1816 critical of the transformations large-scale, slave-driven sugar production had caused in Cuba. In his essay, “Ideas sobre los medios de establecer el libre comercio de Cuba y de realizar un empréstito de 20 millones de pesos,” Arango y Parreño observes, [Q]uiero por lo menos, que por sabios artífices se trace al instante, el plan que debe seguirse para blanquear nuestros negros, o sea, para identificar en América a los descendientes de África con los descendientes de Europa. Quiero que, al propio tiempo que con prudencia se piense en destruir la esclavitud, (para lo cual no hay poco hecho), se trate de lo que no se ha pensado, que es borrar su memoria. La Naturaleza misma nos indica el más fácil y más seguro rumbo que hay que seguir en esto. Ella nos muestra que el color negro cede al blanco, y que desaparece, si se repiten las mezclas de

MISCE-GENE-NATION 49

ambas razas; y entonces también observamos la inclinación decidida que los frutos de esas mezclas tienen a la gente blanca.15 I want to see [qualified people] discussing the timing and the plan that we must follow to whiten our negroes; that is, to identify in America the descendants of Africa with the descendants of Europe. I want, likewise, to start thinking with prudence about the destruction of slavery (to which end much has been done already), by discussing something that has not been contemplated, the erasure of its memory. Nature itself points to the easiest and most certain direction to follow. She shows that the color black yields to the white, and that it disappears if the mixtures of both races are repeated; and then we can also observe the decided inclination that the fruits of such mixtures have for white people.16 According to Antonio Benítez Rojo, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, and Ireland, i.e., Catholic societies, were to supply the workers necessary to keep the plantations viable after the restrictions imposed by Great Britain on the slave trade began to take hold: “These men would marry black women and Cuba would be gradually ‘whitened’ by a policy of continuous interracial marriage” (20). The future of Cuban society, then, is seen to rest on official policies regarding sexual reproduction, particularly with respect to which sectors in Cuba were to be privileged in (re)producing this society. Arango y Parreño’s preoccupation with issues of heredity and reproduction is not lost on Benigno Sánchez-Eppler. According to him, Arango y Parreño marshals a simple genetic argument. All that has to happen to maximize whiteness is to inhibit any woman’s potential to engender children darker than herself. This kind of reasoning, together with everything else that made it repugnant in the eyes of a slave-holding society for black males to engage in sexual coupling with white women—or with any woman capable of birthing a whitened child—forms the basis for what could be seen as the ideological inhibition of the black male’s capacity to reproduce.17 It is difficult to understand the dense historical context in which the authors of both Sab and Cecilia Valdés seek to position their texts without some consideration of these color-conscious policies. Such policies, moreover, simultaneously involve gender distinctions. In effect, if one were to follow the observations by Sánchez-Eppler (by using constructions of reproductive value rather than economic or political power as criteria…if it were possible to achieve such distinctions), at the top of the Cuban social scale were white women, followed by white men, then by women of African heritage, and lastly by men of African heritage. As late as 1832, statesmen like José Antonio Saco were still invoking lineage and heredity in their assessments of the dangers the unrestrained importation of African slaves held for Cuban society:

50 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Si todos nuestros hacendados se pudieran penetrar de la importancia de esas ideas, entonces los veríamos dedicados a promover la introducción de hombres blancos, y a impedir la de africanos… Nosotros cedemos a consideraciones de un linaje muy elevado; y honrando la noble misión de escritores no nos cansaremos de repetir, que salvemos a la patria, salvemos a la patria.18 If all our plantation owners could grasp the importance of these ideas, we would then find them dedicated to promoting the introduction of white men, and of impeding that of Africans… We yield with regard to considerations of exalted lineage, and honoring the noble mission of writers we shall not tire of repeating, save our country, save our country. Eventually, when shipments of slaves became fewer and farther between, and white men willing to work in the fields also proved scarce, Chinese and East Indian indentured laborers provided a necessary alternative to keep the plantation functional. This second wave of immigration, however, at least lessened the likelihood of another uprising like the one in Saint Domingue. Gómez de Avellaneda wrote Sab in the midst of these polemics regarding slavery, abolition, and the prospects for a Cuban nation. She was a contemporary of the Del Monte group, a circle of abolitionists with literary interests who met frequently in the city of Matanzas to further ideals that challenged the plantocracy. They met in the home of Domingo Del Monte, in whose estimation “slavery held back Cuba’s progress into the modern era” France and Great Britain (both of which had abolished slavery in their territories) had already entered (Luis 30). According to Nina Scott, Del Monte’s influence over his followers was enormous: “He shared his extensive library of contemporary European authors and was in active contact with English abolitionists like Richard Madden, once British consul in Havana and still a judge on the Mixed Court, the arbitration tribunal of the slave trade.”19 Gómez de Avellaneda, however, was for a number of reasons, influenced by the Del Monte group at most only from afar: Avellaneda was not part of the Del Monte group for a variety of reasons: her youth, her gender, and the fact that she came from central Cuba, which was a fair distance from Havana and whose principal industry was cattle, not sugar…. But the principal reason why Avellaneda had no contact with the Del Monte group was that she left for Spain in 1836, only one year after it had relocated to Havana. (Scott xx–xxi) Given, however, Gómez de Avellaneda’s potential interest in the Del Monte group, and the affinity between this group and British representatives in Cuba, it would seem likely that Gómez de Avellaneda would have represented the British favorably in Sab. Significantly, the novel does not support such a reading. Doris Sommer argues that Gómez de Avellaneda was, in fact, opposed to the Del Monte group due to the latter’s apparent infatuation with England. In this regard, England

MISCE-GENE-NATION 51

was a threat and potentially as much an impediment to Cuban independence as Spain: “She evidently held out some hope that Cuba could gain freedom without ‘selling herself’ to England…. The English, as much as the Spanish slave traders and merchants, are using Cuba for their own purposes.”20 With respect to reconstructing Sab’s literary context, Scott argues that Gómez de Avellaneda had been specifically influenced by Chateaubriand’s novel, Atala, which featured “a pair of star-crossed” Native American lovers (xxi). Davies adds a second novel by Chateaubriand (René) as well as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (another novel about star-crossed lovers) as among the “novels she read and rewrote to suit the imperatives of her particular context” (15). For a number of reasons (at least in part due to her residency in Spain, a country that eventually claimed her as its own as much as her native Cuba21), Gómez de Avellaneda published Sab in Madrid in 1841.22 Another reason that delayed Sab’s publication in Cuba stemmed from the colonial authorities’ banning of the novel following an assessment of its politics: a royal decree in the Cuban National Archives accused Sab of containing “doctrines subversive to the system of slavery on this Island and contrary to moral and good habits.”23 The novel’s challenge to the plantocracy was such, however, that abolitionists smuggled copies of the novel into the island and circulated them secretly among their sympathizers (Scott xxiii). What were these “subversive doctrines” and how were they “contrary to moral and good habits”? Recent criticism24 has focused on these questions. According to Sommer, it is Sab’s “racial indefiniteness [strangers had difficulty determining Sab’s ethnicity], this new shade of social meaning, that may be among the most radical features of the novel” (118). Sommer contends that this indefiniteness, coupled with his desire for a white woman, contributed to banning the novel in Cuba: “This evidently scandalized or terrified the Spanish authorities in Cuba, as well as powerful groups of merchants and planters who dominated the sugar economy of the island, since the book was banned almost immediately” (Sommer 126). This radical aspect of the novel notwithstanding, Davies suggests that even with respect to Sab’s bold ethnic indefiniteness, Gómez de Avellaneda nevertheless had to tone down (no pun intended) Sab’s color: “The black had to be ‘whitened’ for sentimental consumption and presented as a mulatto employed in the house rather than a field slave” (19). The novel’s complexity and power does not end there, however. Adriana Méndez Rodenas, for example, identifies an autobiographical dimension in the novel, whereby Gómez de Avellaneda’s marginal status as a woman (despite the advantages accorded to her by her family’s privileged social standing) manifests itself through Sab’s status as a slave: “Más allá de una transferencia afectiva, la estrecha identificación entre autora y personaje parece surgir de la radical soledad de la escritora, quien encuentra una manera de representarse a través de la situación trágica del esclavo, ya que ambos ocupan una zona limite”25 (“Beyond an affective transference, the close identification between author and character seems to stem from the radical solitude of the author, who finds a way of representing herself via the slave’s tragic situation, since both occupy a marginalized space”). Indeed, just as Sab registers

52 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

a proto-feminist Cuban discourse of the late 1830’s, it also registers other dimensions of what amounts to, borrowing Fredric Jameson’s term, the “political unconscious” of a nascent Cuban nation, an implicit realm that traces a nexus between the individual and the nation (as well as points in between, including the family): By focusing on one family and one marriage, the novel records a plausibly realistic example of how foreign commercial interests take control of the Cuban economy. These economic developments, of crucial national and international importance, are shown to function at the level of the family and involve the feelings and emotions of individual men and women. (Davies 8) At every level of this Cuban “community” structure, the necessity or supremacy of heredity over numerous aspects of characters’ lives is in dispute. At this historical moment, in fact, the Cuban plantation society is rigid to such a point that the weight of heredity is greatly responsible for the fatalistic tone in Sab, despite the subversiveness the colonial authorities detected in the narrative. Sab’s first allusion to heredity comes prior to Gómez de Avellaneda’s own first words in the novel: as an epigraph to the opening chapter, she cites the following passage by José de Cañizares, a Spanish dramatist of the early eighteenth century: —Las influencias tiranas de mi estrella, me formaron monstruo de especies tan raras, que gozo de heroica estirpe allá en las dotes del alma siendo el desprecio del mundo (38) The tyrannical influences/of my guiding star formed me/into a monster of such rare quality/that while I am of heroic lineage/in the endowments of my soul,/I am also the scorn of the world (27) These lines (which not only influenced Gómez de Avellaneda but also in some respects pre-figure Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, from the 1818 novel of the same name: a deeply sensitive but physically egregious being) effectively set the parameters for the events in the narrative, in which discrepancies between lineage and fate are also at issue. The narrative commences with an unidentified man riding on horse-back across the Cuban countryside. Although this man’s identity remains in suspense for some time, the third-person narrator nonetheless calls attention to his physical features, which likely reveal the part of the world from which he hails (and where, consequently, he would have the most relatives):

MISCE-GENE-NATION 53

A la verdad, era harto probable que sus repetidas detenciones sólo tuvieran por objeto admirar más a su sabor los campos fertilísimos de aquel país privilegiado, y que debían tener mayor atractivo para él si como lo indicaban su tez blanca y sonrosada, sus ojos azules, y su cabello de oro había venido al mundo en una región del Norte. (39) Quite possibly his repeated stops had as their sole object the fuller savoring of the richly fertile earth of that privileged country, which most likely attracted him all the more if—as his fair, rosy skin, blue eyes, and golden hair seemed to indicate—he had been born in some northern region. (27) Eventually, we learn that the unidentified man is Enrique Otway,26 a British expatriate on his way to visit Carlota, his fiancée. When he first appears in the story, meanwhile, Sab inspires similar musings on the part of the narrator: no parecía un criollo blanco, tampoco era negro ni podía creérsele descendiente de los primeros habitadores de las Antillas. Su rostro presentaba un compuesto singular en que se descubría el cruzamiento de dos razas diversas, y en que se amalgamaban, por decirlo así, los rasgos de la casta africana con los de la europea, sin ser no obstante un mulato perfecto. Era su color de un blanco amarillento con cierto fondo oscuro; su ancha frente se veía medio cubierta con mechones desiguales de un pelo negro y lustroso como las a las del cuervo; su nariz era aguileña pero sus labios gruesos y amoratados denotaban su procedencia africana. (40) Sab did not appear to be a white criollo; neither was he black nor could one take him for a descendant of the indigenous inhabitants of the Antilles. His face was a singular composite which revealed the mingling of two distinct races, an amalgam, it could be said, of the features of the African and the European yet without being a perfect mulatto. His coloring was of a yellowish white with a certain dark undertone; his broad forehead was halfhidden under irregular locks of hair as lustrous and black as the wings of the raven; his nose was aquiline, but his thick, purplish lips revealed his African heritage. (28) Without even saying a word, Sab—or at the very least his appearance—seems to inspire questions about heritage and genealogy, questions that may have gained urgency due to the racial “indefiniteness” Sommer described. Whether or not Gómez de Avellaneda’s contemporaries found Sab’s specific pigmentation shocking or radical, the “destiny” of all the characters in the novel hinges on how they collectively interpret or come to terms with Sab’s appearance and the implications it holds with regard to his ancestry. Sab, however, is not the only character whose ethnicity and lineage come into question. Martina, an old, withering peasant with a dying grandson, is also a provocative character: provocative not only to potential readers, but also to the

54 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

other characters in the novel. When Carlota and her entire family visit the countryside before her wedding so that Don Carlos can show Enrique his possessions, they encounter Martina, who lives on the family property. Since Don Carlos had not returned to visit these particular properties in some time, before arriving there he inquired about Martina and remembered that she “pretende ser descendiente de la raza india y aparenta un aire ridículamente majestuoso” (100) (claims “to be a descendant of the Indian race and puts on ridiculously majestic airs” 72). Her appearance, however, did not substantiate this lineage: “Este color, empero…era todo lo que podía alegar a favor de sus pretensiones de india, pues ninguno de los rasgos de su fisonomía parecía corresponder a su pretendido origen” (108) (“This skin color…was all that supported her pretensions of being Indian, for none of her facial features appeared to match her alleged origin” 78). Méndez Rodenas signals Martina’s importance to the narrative insofar as with her, “la visión de Gómez de Avellaneda parece fundamentarse en el rescate de la presencia indígena, sistemáticamente anulada por la Conquista” (174) (“Gómez de Avellaneda’s vision seems to ground itself in salvaging the indigenous presence, which was systematically annulled by the Conquest”). Martina certainly raises concerns (which we shall soon address) regarding the future of Cuba, particularly with regard to the relationship between the Black slaves who inhabited the island when Gómez de Avellaneda was writing and the vanished preColumbian population. Similarly, however, she also punctuates a discrepancy— one that occurs with some of the characters in the novel—between the kind of behavior physical or biological heredity would seem to dictate, and a character’s actual behavior or temperament. Sab and Martina are, in this respect, exceptional: their actual temperament and the temperament society expects them to have do not concur. Sab, apparently to everyone’s surprise, is a noble spirit, while Martina considers herself Taíno royalty and acts with the appropriate sense of majesty despite her incongruous appearances. In either scenario, heredity and its importance are fore-grounded in the novel, whether in occasions when heredity is somehow flouted (resulting in apparent discrepancies involving heredity, for instance Martina acting—but not looking—like a Taína princess), or insofar as it sometimes unexpectedly transmits certain traits (for instance, a “temperament”) across the generations. Constructions of “temperament” also merit further consideration, particularly insofar as hereditarian principles inform such constructions. Simply stated, several —sometimes marginal—characters in the novel are described by the narrator as being victimized by congenital behavioral dispositions of one sort or another. Carlota’s cousin Teresa, for instance: Hija natural de un pariente lejano de la esposa de D.Carlos, perdió a su madre al nacer, y había vivido con su padre, hombre libertino que la abandonó enteramente al orgullo y la dureza de una madrastra que la aborrecía…. Su altivez natural, constantemente herida por su nacimiento, y escasa fortuna

MISCE-GENE-NATION 55

que la constituía en una eterna dependencia, habían agriado insensiblemente su alma. (52) The illegitimate daughter of a distant relative of Don Carlos’s wife, Teresa had lost her mother at birth and had lived with her father, a libertine who abandoned her utterly to the pride and harshness of a stepmother who loathed her…. Her inborn pride, continually lacerated by the stigma of her birth as well as by the lack of a fortune which placed her in a position of eternal dependence, had unconsciously embittered her spirit. (36) Although Teresa’s “inborn pride” may have been adversely affected by events since her birth, the narrator nonetheless maneuvers within conceptions of heredity, the first of which in the preceding passage involves questions of legitimate or illegitimate birth. Colonial Cuba’s rigid hierarchical social structure, the topmost sector (whites, whether criollos or European born) was further differentiated between children born into legally and religiously sanctioned couples, and children who, like Teresa (and, for that matter, Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés), were not. At stake, obviously, is maintaining this social structure via limitations on the inheritance of the landowners’ property, and preventing the dilution of this property. Significantly, throughout the first half of the novel, the narrator focuses on Carlota’s marriage prospects, as opposed to Teresa’s. Perhaps more interesting, however, is how questions of legitimacy and inheritance seep into matters of “inborn” temperament and personality: seemingly taking their cue based on how they differ from each other with respect to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their respective births, Carlota and Teresa seldom lose consciousness of what separates them. Carlota, not unlike others who knew Teresa, makes assumptions (even if they are ultimately proven wrong) with regard to the immutable capacities and limitations of the latter’s personality: the former había concluido por creer, como todos, que su amiga era uno de aquellos seres buenos y pacíficos, fríos y apáticos, incapaces de crímenes como de grandes virtudes, y a los cuales no debe pedírseles más de aquello que dan, porque es escaso el tesoro de su corazón. (52) as indeed everyone else, had come to believe that her friend was one of those good and serene human beings, so cold and apathetic as to be incapable either of criminal acts or of great virtues, of whom no more should be asked than that which they can give, because the capacity of their hearts is limited. (36) One of the challenges Sab presents its readers is determining when the narrator is being ironic. In the case of Teresa, for instance, we eventually learn that Carlota is wrong in how she assesses her cousins temperament: Teresa, in fact, is in the end more capable than Carlota of “great virtues” because it is she (and not Carlota) who offers her intimacy to Sab. Needless to say, however, the matter is not entirely so simple given that Teresa (at least not to the degree of Carlota) is not encumbered

56 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

(and, perhaps, blinded) by the stern demands of legitimacy, family and property. These demands apparently have also taken their toll on Carlota’s father, Don Carlos. When Enrique first announces his intentions with Carlota, Don Carlos is initially reluctant, primarily because Enrique is Protestant and Carlota’s involvement with a Protestant would oppose the wishes of the extended family. The narrator describes Don Carlos’s decision-making—and his temperament in general—in congenital, hereditary terms: “Inactivo por temperamento, dócil por carácter y por el convencimiento de su inercia, se opuso al amor de su hija sólo por contemporizar con sus hermanos” (59) (“Inactive by temperament, docile by character and the habit of inertia, Don Carlos opposed his daughter’s love only to appease his siblings” 41). Don Carlos, in effect, is caught in the middle of a number of competing discourses: his own apparent docility and aversion to committing himself, his daughter’s infatuation with Enrique (whom, she thought, was her equal in no bility of spirit), Enrique’s possible ulterior motives as a foreigner (a British Protestant, moreover), and his own relationship with his brothers.27 His brothers’ interest in his affairs is noteworthy in terms of the importance of family dynamics in the shaping of events that have both more limited, personal ramifications (e.g., Carlota’s impending marriage to Enrique), as well as broader, societal implications (the prospects for Cuban nationhood given the threat of continued foreign meddling). The brothers’ own meddling, however, underscores a concern to which I have already made some reference, but which I would now like to explore in greater detail: the inheritance of wealth or property. We learn, for instance, that Don Carlos’s brothers were so concerned with his affairs because he había heredado como sus hermanos un caudal considerable, y aunque se casó con una mujer de escasos bienes la suerte había favorecido a ésta últimamente, recayendo en ella una herencia cuantiosa e inesperada, con la cual la casa ya algo decaída de D.Carlos se hizo nuevamente una de las opulentas de Puerto Príncipe…. Eugenio, hijo segundo y único varón, que se educaba en un colegio de la Habana, había nacido con una con-stitución débil y enfermiza y acaso Jorge [Otway, el padre de Enrique] no dejó de especular con ella, presagiando de la delicada salud del niño un heredero menos a don Carlos. (56–7) had inherited a considerable fortune, and though he married a woman without means, luck had lately favored his wife: she came into a large and unexpected inheritance, thanks to which Don Carlos’s’s house, which had fallen into some disrepair, became once again one of the most prosperous in Puerto Príncipe…. Eugenio, the second child and only son, who was being educated in Havana, was of a frail and sickly constitution, and most likely George [Otway, Enrique’s father] did not fail to note this fact, foreseeing in the delicate health of the young man one heir less. (39)

MISCE-GENE-NATION 57

Señora de B_____, the woman without means who comes upon an unexpected inheritance, is not the only character in the novel to chance upon an inheritance: Sab, in what could be considered an act of deus ex machina, chances upon the lottery number that he could use to purchase his freedom. Instead, he gives the number to Teresa, hoping that Enrique will suddenly become enamoured of her. To Sab’s chagrin, however, Teresa gives Carlota the winning number and thereby ensures her marriage to Enrique. It is worth noting that Sab’s victory in the lottery amounts to the only kind of inheritance he could have hoped for. Meanwhile, upon hearing the news that Carlota was to marry Enrique, Don Carlos’s brother “hizo un testamento a favor de los hijos de otro hermano para quitar a Carlota toda esperanza de su sucesión” (60) (“drew up a will in favor of the children of another brother in order to take away from Carlota all hope of her inheritance” 42). Carlota is disinherited by Don Carlos’s family and, as a result, Don Carlos quickly consents to her marriage with Enrique because the latters wealth (if not his nationality and religion) had suddenly become much more appealing: “Alegróse entonces interiormente de tener asegurada la suerte de Carlota, y no vio en Enrique al hijo del buhonero sino al único heredero de una casa fuerte del país” (61) (“At this point he rejoiced inwardly at having Carlota’s fortune assured and no longer saw in Enrique the son of the peddler but the sole heir to one of the country’s most prosperous firms” 42). After learning about Carlota’s disinheritance, however, Jorge Otway just as quickly changes his opinion on his son’s marriage. Not surprisingly, he too is conscientious of numerous factors that would affect Carlota (and in turn his son and, ultimately, him) and her prospects for a sizeable inheritance: Todo lo contrario sucedió a Jorge. Carlota, privada de la herencia de su tío, y de los bienes de su madre que la pérdida del pleito le había quitado, Carlota con cinco hermanos que debían partir con ella el desmembrado caudal que pudiera heredar de su padre (joven todavía y prometiendo una larga vida), no era ya la mujer que deseaba Jorge para su hijo. (61) It was quite the opposite with George. Carlota, deprived of her uncle’s bequest and of the maternal inheritance which the suit had effected, Carlota, with her five siblings who would share with her the diminished property they might inherit from their father (who was still young and promised to live a long life), was no longer the woman George wanted for his son. (42–43) Later, thinking he has secured his daughter’s betrothal to Enrique, he expresses his contentment by signaling a different kind of inheritance involving Carlota: “‘Pronto será la esposa del hombre que ama: Enrique es bueno y cariñoso, y la hará feliz. Feliz como yo hice a su madre cuya hermosura y ternura ha heredado’” (75) (“‘Enrique is good and kind and will make her happy, as happy as I made her mother, whose beauty and tenderness she has inherited’” 53). One need not be rich, however, to worry about one’s legacy: Martina, despite (or perhaps because of) the airs of grandeur she may have aspired to at one point,

58 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

is—not unlike the feeble-spirited Don Carlos and the conniving Jorge—concerned about the likelihood that she may be the last of her royal lineage. In this regard, she complains to Sab about her grandson Luis: ‘¡Es mi nieto!, ¡mi único nieto!… Nada más me queda en el mundo… Mi hijo, mi nuera, mis dos nietecitos, tan lindos y tan robustos…¡todos han muerto! Esta pobre criatura raquítica es lo único que me queda…es la última hoja marchita que se desprenderá de este viejo tronco.’ (110) ‘That is my grandson! My only grandson! I have no one else left in the world…my son, my daughter-in-law, my two grandsons, so handsome and robust—all have died! This poor sickly creature is the only one remaining… the last withered leaf that will fall from this old trunk.’ (79) Sab is more than receptive to Martina’s plight. In fact, he offers—even if only in a symbolic sense—to solidify the genealogical continuum between Martina and her descendants, a continuum that Luis’s impending death threatened: “‘yo soy también huérfano como Luis, sed mi madre, admitidme por vuestro hijo’” (112) (“‘I, too, am an orphan like Luis; be my mother, take me for your son’” 81). Sab’s declaration and request recall Méndez Rodenas’s claim that Martina personifies the link between Cuba’s pre-Columbian past and its mulatto present (Méndez Rodenas 1997, 174). Sab’s words, moreover, underscore the importance of hereditarian dynamics of one sort or another (which, in this case, involve a symbolic maternal relationship) in crafting the vision of Cuban cultural identity Méndez Rodenas identifies. Martina, in fact, is very clear about the symbolic (or pragmatic) hereditary implications in the battle for mastery over Cuba. Sab recalls, for example, Martina’s pledge that “la tierra que fue regada con sangre una vez lo será aún otra: los descendientes de los opresores serán oprimidos, y los hombres negros serán los terribles vengadores de los hombres cobrizos” (101) (“The earth which once was drenched in blood will be so again: the descendants of the oppressors will be themselves oppressed, and black men will be the terrible avengers of those of copper color” 73). Without hesitation, Martina agrees to Sab’s plea and accepts him as her son. Gaining Martina as his mother, however, does little to improve Sab’s prospects of gaining Carlota as his wife. In a conversation with Teresa, Sab describes his limited prospects in terms that indicate his view of the pre-determined lives of people who live under his set of circumstances: “‘¿veis esta frente, señora? ¿qué os dice ella? ¿no notáis este color opaco y siniestro?… es la marca de mi raza maldecida… Es el sello del oprobio y del infortunio’” (144) (“‘Do you see this face, Señora? What does it tell you? Don’t you see this sinister, opaque color? It is the mark of my accursed race. It is the seal of shame and misfortune” 106). In Sab’s estimation, his misfortunes as a slave would not end with him, but would continue to any children he may father: “‘Esclavo envilecido, legará por herencia a sus hijos esclavitud y envilecimiento, y esos hijos desgraciados pedirán en vano la vida selvática de sus padres’” (145) (“‘A vile slave, he passes on to his children

MISCE-GENE-NATION 59

an inheritance of slavery and degradation, and these unfortunate children will plead in vain for the sylvan life of their fathers’” 107). Sab’s words reveal his despondence with respect to his (and his descendants’) prospects in a slaveholding society: prospects that, if anything, will deteriorate for later generations. Furthermore, this despondence reveals an irony in the novel in addition to the irony we saw previously (irony with regard to character assessments): there is a tension between Sab’s seeming hereditary hopelessness and Gómez de Avellaneda’s act of narrative subversion, an act that critiques this sense of hopelessness and determinism in a slave society. In some regards, then, Sab’s fatalistic observations carry not only a descriptive intent (“such are the horrors of Cuba’s plantation society”) but also a prescriptive one (“we need to change this society”). Stated otherwise, although Sab may have been—as Sommer suggests— a transgressive character for Gómez de Avellaneda’s contemporaries, a less metatextual reading indicates that Sab was (despite his ideas for harming Enrique) self-effacing, benign, and ultimately pessimistic about fulfilling any of his desires. As Sab and the other characters race toward their fates, both he and the narrator invoke hereditarian discourses in expressing—often in philosophical ways— opinions on specific characters or on life in general within the plantation. The narrator, for instance, at a certain level sees hereditarian motivations underlying Enrique’s greed: ¡Oh! Ambos son igualmente insensatos, el que acumula oro para comprar un sepulcro, y el que sacrifica su juventud a un porvenir que no alcanza, y expira con la esperanza de que su nombre pasando de año en año y de siglo en siglo, llegue a perderse más tarde que él en el insondable abismo del eterno olvido. (156) Oh! Both are equally vain: the man who accumulates gold in order to buy a tomb and he who sacrifices his youth to a future he never attains and dies with the hope that his name, transmitted from year to year and century to century, might last longer than he himself in the unfathomable abyss of eternal oblivion. (115–16) Sab, meanwhile, in a letter to Teresa, questions why he, as a slave, has been victimized by a society that equates talent and moral character with heritable biological traits. His questions may very well be the central ones Gómez de Avellaneda intends to explore in the novel: ¿Saben ellos lo que pude haber sido? …¿Por qué han inventado estos asesinatos morales aquellos que castigan con severas penas al que quita a otro hombre la vida?, ¿por qué establecen grandezas y prerrogativas hereditarias?, ¿tienen ellos el poder de hacer hereditarias las virtudes y los talentos? (193) Do they know what I might have been? Why have they, who severely punish those who take another man’s life, invented this moral death? Why

60 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

do they establish hereditary greatness and prerogatives? Do they have the power to make virtues and abilities hereditary? (144) In the same letter, however, Sab refers to the Old Testament in suggesting that salvation for Cuba’s oppressed classes may lie in the very hereditarian forces that have until now contributed to the structure of plantation society. Simply stated, even if Sab and his generation do not live to see the end of slavery, it is worth knowing that future generations may do so: “Dios hizo esperar a su pueblo 40 años la tierra prometida, y los que dudaron de ella fueron castigados con no pisarla jamás: pero sus hijos la vieron” (194–95) (“God made His chosen people wait forty years for the promised land, and those who doubted were punished by never setting foot therein; but their children saw it” 145). The potential benefits to the descendants of slaves justify, in effect, the present struggles: both scenarios (current oppression and potential abolition) rest on different conceptions of the deterministic force of heredity and its possible subversion. THE PERSISTENCE OF HEREDITY: CECILIA VALDÉS AND LATE COLONIALISM Cirilo Villaverde published an initial, brief version of Cecilia Valdés in 1839. It took another 43 years and several upheavals in both his personal life and on the island of Cuba before Villaverde published the definitive version.28 Given that this novel, like Sab, narrates events that take place in Cuba during the first third of the nineteenth century,29 critics have established fruitful comparisons between the two texts. Méndez Rodenas, for instance, argues that Sab “anticipa la invención de Cirilo Villaverde en Cecilia Valdés (1882) que convierte a la mulata en símbolo de Cuba, sólo que invirtiendo el género de la protagonista” (172) (“anticipates the invention of Cirilo Villaverde in Cecilia Valdés (1882), which converts the mulatta into a symbol of Cuba, except with the gender of the protagonist becoming inverted”). Indeed, Cecilia Valdés—to a degree greater than Sab—has come to be regarded as “as a national novel, associated with Cuba’s identity and struggle for freedom.” 30 The novels popularity with the Cuban public has been such that, over the years, it has been adapted as an operetta as well as into several film versions. On a different level, both Cecilia Valdés and Sab are considered abolitionist texts: William Luis observes, for example, that Cecilia Valdés is the last antislavery novel written before the emancipation of Cuban slaves in 1886.31 Despite (or perhaps because of) their abolitionist aims, both novels are written in a fatalistic key, as if a tragic ending is somehow inevitable. In terms of the social circles with whom they associated, while Gómez de Avellaneda might have been somewhat influenced by the Del Monte literary group, Villaverde was in fact an active participant in it (Schade 846). Lastly, Cecilia Valdés—like Sab—is apparently (in that she does not know her parents and consequently is not aware they are still alive) also an orphan.

MISCE-GENE-NATION 61

The texts, however, differ in several important respects: first, Villaverde, having been more strongly influenced by the Del Monte group, wrote in a less Romanticist, more realist (or naturalist) style than Gómez de Avellaneda. According to George D.Schade, Del Monte and his followers “astutely fore-saw that changing the literary focus was a possible way of changing society in Cuba, especially aspects dealing with slavery” (846). Furthermore, in Villaverde’s text, we move from the central Cuban region of Puerto Príncipe (Camagüey) primarily to bustling colonial Havana. As such, even though crucial moments in the narrative do take place at or near sugar plantations, the protagonists are urbanites: they meet and court each other in Havana (the novel’s subtitle, for example—”La loma del ángel,” or “Angel’s Hill”—refers to a district in Havana near Old Havana and the Cathedral). The urban setting is of additional importance with respect to some of the ways a city like Havana differed during the early nineteenth century from the outlying sugar producing areas: in the latter, the division between slaves and their masters was much more rigid than in the former. Slaves did live in Havana, a city by no means free of social hierarchies, but they shared it (even if inequitably) with Cuban creoles, foreigners, as well as with freed slaves and their children. These children, due in some respect to demographic reasons, were often mulatto. Martinez-Alier argues that due to the proportionately low number of adult white men compared to adult white women in nineteenth-century Cuba, white men often found sexual partners among free colored women, who in turn outnumbered free colored men (57). One such child is Cecilia, whose great-grandmother was apparently of direct African descent. Cecilia, meanwhile, is the product of an adulterous affair: her father is Don Cándido Gamboa, a wealthy and ambitious Spanish merchant whose marriage would have been undermined (if not destroyed) had his wife learned about the illegitimate Cecilia. Consequently, he arranges for Cecilia’s separation from her mother (Charito Alarcón) and anonymously supports her throughout her youth. For Méndez Rodenas, Don Cándido’s affair with a mulata and his subsequent abandonment of Cecilia reinscribe “the central figure underlying Cuban antislavery narrative: the elision of the paternal function (among white masters) and the denial of the maternal instinct (among the black female slaves).”32 Cecilia falls in love with Leonardo Gamboa, Don Cándido’s legitimate (and spoiled, at least by his mother) son, but the young couple meet with tragedy in their efforts to make their relationship survive in a racially divided society. Just as Cecilia Valdés’s cultural reception has been profound and wideranging, criticism on the novel is also varied. Luis, for instance, finds historical significance in the year 1812, the year in which both the fictional Cecilia and Villaverde were born (the two, probably not by accident, also share initials), and also the year in which the Aponte slave conspiracy was crushed, dealing a blow to the abolitionist movement in Cuba at that time (191). Other critics have debated the extent to which Villaverde’s novel (and to a certain extent, the author himself) not only register but also reinscribe the racist attitudes of Cuba’s upper classes. In signaling the narrative’s detailed attention to ethnicity, Claudette Williams argues that—

62 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

even though his ostensible aim is to critique and eliminate slavery in Cuba—at “the heart of Villaverde’s fixation with the mulata is his anxiety to safeguard white racial purity. He places meticulous emphasis on the physical traits that betray the nonwhiteness of his near-white mulatas—curly hair, full lips, and less-than-white skin.”33 Sommer, quite similarly, makes the following charge: “Hardly anyone in Cecilia Valdés escapes the charge of racism, not the mulatta or her white lover, and certainly not the white narrator” (127), a charge to which Schade retorts, Villaverde, who spent most of his life battling against the Spanish tyranny in Cuba and protesting vigorously at the treatment of blacks by the whites, would doubtless agree with the first part of this indictment alluding to Cecilia and Leonardo, the lovers, but would most likely be puzzled or indignant at the inclusion of the white narrator/author, i.e., himself, in this racist charge. (847) Although Williams and Sommer’s allegations would be hard to defend, within the framework of the novel’s historical context Schade’s observation is compelling, particularly in that the relationship between Cecilia (a mulata) and Leonardo (a white criollo) would be potentially subversive not only to the plantocracy but also to the Spanish colonial government in Cuba. Although Cecilia is light enough in complexion to “pass” for white, the provocative miscegenetic premise of her relationship with Leonardo is only one facet of this relationship that has attracted critical attention: another facet, also pertaining to ties of heredity, involves the unknowing incest between the two characters. César Leante interprets this incest in terms symbolic of the identity of the Cuban nation: “The brotherhood between white and black Cubans is a fact and, consequently, the social and ethnic coupling that unites them has to be an incest, understood as a symbolic category.”34 In referring to the tragic outcome of the relationship between the youth, Sommer argues that this outcome “isn’t caused by interracial romance but by the secrecy that obscures the slipperiness of racial categories” (129). While there is credence in her claim that the slipperiness of racial categories contributes to the relationship, it seems difficult to deny or suppress the very apparent romance between Leonardo and Cecilia. With regard to this romance, Méndez Rodenas centers her analysis on the split in this society as concerns sexual bonds and desire: “At the top, marriage among whites enjoys the privilege of the law, yet is often not blessed by natural desire; at the bottom, and inversely, union among slaves is founded on natural impulse but is not legally sanctioned unless approved by the masters” (“Identity and Incest” 87). This is very much the case in Villaverde’s novel in that the passion between Cecilia and Leonardo seems to exist in inverse relation to the passion (or lack thereof) between his parents. In comparing, for example, Cecilia with Isabel (a young woman who was, according to his parents, a more socially suitable match for him) Leonardo remarks:

MISCE-GENE-NATION 63

‘Aquélla es toda pasión y fuego, es mi tentadora, un diablito en figura de mujer; la Venus de las mujeres, la… ¿Quién es bastante fuerte para resistírsele? ¿Quién puede acercársele sin quemarse? ¿Quién al verla no más, no siente hervirle la sangre en las venas?’35 ‘The girl in Havana is full of fire and passion, she’s my temptress, a little demon in the guise of a woman, the Venus of womankind, the—who has the strength to resist her? Who can approach her without getting burnt? Who at the sight of her does not feel the blood boil in his veins?’36 Furthermore, in line with Martinez-Alier’s observation regarding relationships in colonial Cuba between white men and black women (“black or, as they were also called, coloured, women were the prey of white men in sexual liaisons that were very rarely legitimated through marriage” xiv), Leonardo eventually marries Isabel and keeps Cecilia as his mistress. Leonardo’s mention of the blood “boiling” in his veins is one avenue we can take toward other crucial issues of heredity. Méndez Rodenas, for instance, reads the symbolic role of blood in the novel in terms of her analysis of the division of sexual desire in Cuba during the colonial period: The double kinship system, real and figurative, converge in a common denominator, the slave man and woman, so that from this ‘potencia de sangre’ (blood power) and fount of milk spring the filial bonds among all three races, the three families combined in one common genealogy, the ‘hervor de la sangre’ (blood boiling) of creoles, blacks and mulattos. (“Identity and Incest” 91) With regard to the differing levels of desire or passion that distinguish conjugal relationships between whites from those between whites and slaves (or their descendants), Méndez Rodenas hypothesizes that, for Villaverde, “the hidden line of kinship derived from the slave family is stronger than the white, regardless of the latters social legitimacy” (Ibid 93). Martinez-Alier makes broader claims about the role of kinship and inheritance throughout nineteenth-century Cuban society: I thus Interpreted nineteenth-century Cuba as a class society whose mechanisms of socio-political reproduction were informed by an ideological conflation of heredity and inheritance, that is, of the genetic transmission of racial purity and the legal and economic perpetuation of social privilege and rank. (xiii) With the preceding readings of Cecilia Valdés and its historical context in mind, the following reading should demonstrate that discourses of heredity inform this novel in several additional ways: ways that resemble the way such discourses inform Sab. They differ, however, in that in Villaverde’s text, the protagonists eventually consummate their sexual desires.

64 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

From the beginning, the narrative focuses on issues involving heredity. The omniscient, third-person narrator, for example, describes Cecilia’s grandmother, Chepilla, not only in racial terms, but with specific interest in the lineage combination that would have resulted in her physical appearance. Chepilla has, according to the narrator, buenos ojos, la expresión amorosa de la boca y la redondez del cuello, de los hombros y de los brazos. Tenía el color cetrino que resulta de la mezcla de hembra negra y varón indio; pero lo crespo del pelo y el óvalo del rostro no admitían la probabilidad de semejante maridaje, sino el de madre negra y padre blanco. (3) fine eyes, a pleasing mouth, and an attractive roundness of throat, shoulders and arms. A greenish-yellow tint in her skin suggested that she might have been the offspring of a Negro mother and an Indian father; but the curly hair and oval face, the latter being a peculiarity of the white race, made the conclusion inevitable that she had been born of a black mother and a white father. (22) Her daughter (Charito) and grand-daughter (Cecilia), are similarly described, although each successive generation of characters becomes lighter in complexion.37 In Charito’s case, “…se destacaba el rostro ovalado, pálido de la enferma, con la barba aguda, la frente cuadrada y alta, la boca pequeña, los labios bellos, y la nariz bastante bien hecha, para mujer de raza mezclada, como sin duda era aquélla de que ahora se trata” (4) (“It was an oval face and had the pallour of wax; the chin was pointed, the forehead square and high, the mouth was small, the lips pretty and the nose well-shaped, for a person of mixed race, which the girl undoubtedly was” 24). Finally, we reach Cecilia, whose complexion podía pasar por saludable, la encarnación viva, hablando en el sentido en que los pintores toman esta palabra, aunque a poco que se fijaba la atención, se advertía en el color del rostro, que sin dejar de ser sanguíneo, había demasiado ocre en su composición, y no resultaba diáfano ni libre. ¿A qué raza, pues, pertenecía esta muchacha? Difícil es decirlo. Sin embargo, a un ojo conocedor no podía esconderse, que sus labios rojos tenían un borde o filete oscuro y que la iluminación del rostro terminaba en una especie de penumbra hacia el nacimiento del cabello. Su sangre no era pura y bien podía asegurarse que allá en la tercera o cuarta generación estaba mezclada con la etíope. Pero de cualquier manera, tales eran su belleza peregrina, su alegría y vivacidad, que la revestían de una especie de encanto no dejando al ánimo vagar sino para admirarla y pasar de largo por las faltas o por las obras de su progenie. (7) might have passed for healthy; the colouring was vivid or alive, in the sense that painters use the word. But if one examined it carefully, he would detect, notwithstanding its ruddy glow, the presence of too much ochre in

MISCE-GENE-NATION 65

its composition, thus detracting from its free and clear quality. To what race, then, did the little girl belong? A difficult question. But the knowing eye easily detected the dark band or border of the red lips and observed that the brightness of the child’s face ended in a sort of shadow at the hairline. Her blood was not pure, and it was a certainty that back in the third or fourth generation there had been an African ancestor. Be that as it may, her striking beauty, her vivacity and charm, cast a halo about her and refused to allow the mind, lost in admiration, to contemplate the slightest defect either in her or in her probable forebears. (29) Passages like the preceding undoubtedly provide Sommer and Claudette Williams ammunition in making their claims about Villaverde’s racist views (even though these critics are less vocal about his abolitionism). A more fruitful line of inquiry, however, would be to examine how these passages interact with other passages suggestive of hereditarian ideas with social currency in Cuba during the midnineteenth century. This allows us to realize the extent to which such ideas serve Villaverde (although we can only conjecture as to the degree to which he was aware of these matters) in painting a panorama of Cuban society. A tension that begins early in Cecilia Valdés and ultimately leads her into a relationship with Leonardo involves the mixed signals Chepilla (her grandmother) gives Cecilia with respect to her station in Cuban society and the corresponding aspirations she could have in life. When Chepilla learns that Cecilia has been staying out late with her friends and associating with Leonardo (Chepilla knows he is Cecilia’s half-brother), she warns her granddaughter about mixing with the wrong crowds: ‘¿Y tú te quieres comparar con la hija del señó Pimienta que es una pardita andrajosa, callejera, y mal criada? …Tú eres mejor nacida que ella. Tu padre es un caballero blanco, y algún día has de ser rica y andar en carruaje. ¿Quién sabe? Pero Nemesia no será nunca más de lo que es. Se casará, si se casa, con un mulato como ella, porque su padre tiene más de negro que de otra cosa. Tú al contrario, eres casi blanca y puedes aspirar a casarte con un blanco.’ (14) ‘And you want to compare yourself with Señó Pimienta’s daughter, a little brown ragamuffin with no upbringing whatever? …You have better blood than she. Your father was a white gentleman and some day you are going to be rich and ride in a carriage. Who knows? But Nemesia will never be anything more than she is today. If she ever marries, it will be to a mulatto like herself, because her father is more coloured than anything else. But you, on the other hand, are nearly white and may well aspire to marry a white man.’ (41–42) This is precisely Cecilia’s aspiration and possibly why she befriended Leonardo. Later in the narrative, in a desperate effort to keep the young couple apart, Chepilla

66 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

implores Cecilia not to pursue a relationship with Leonardo because he is white (138, 265). Leonardo, however—as a white Cuban—in her estimation offered her more promise of material wellbeing than mulattoes or blacks. Blacks, apparently, could offer her only their (heritable) biological gifts: sin vergüenza ni reparo a menudo manifestaba sus preferencias por los hombres de la raza blanca y superior, como que de ellos es de quienes podía esperar distinción y goces, con cuyo motivo solía decir a boca llena, que en verbo de mulato sólo quería las mantas de seda, de negro sólo los ojos y el cabello. (24) she often showed a preference for men of the white and dominant race, for it was from them that she could expect privileges and pleasures, for which reason she used to say, quite openly, that all one could expect from a mulatto was a silk shawl and, from a Negro, eyes and hair. (61) Lest one conclude that Cecilia’s preferences may reveal a certain selfcenteredness, this is far from the case, for in pursuing someone like Leonardo, she also had her (or their) potential progeny in mind: creía y esperaba Cecilia ascender siempre, salir de la humilde esfera en que había nacido, si no ella, sus hijos. Casada con un mulato, descendería en su propia estimación y en la de sus iguales; porque tales son las aber-raciones de toda sociedad constituida como la cubana. (52) Cecilia hoped always to rise, leave the humble sphere in which she had been born. She would rise herself, if possible, but if not, her children would. Had she married a coloured man she would have lowered herself in her own esteem and in that of her equals; for such are the erroneous notions of all societies constituted like the Cuban.38 We might inquire as to which erroneous notions the narrator refers and as to how, exactly, Cuban society is constituted. Unlike Sommer and Claudette Williams, I believe that the narrator (and, perhaps, the author) is not plotting to keep Cecilia oppressed by criticizing any descendant of slaves who has so cial ambitions. Instead, the narrator is criticizing a slave-holding society that encourages racism, hatred (oftentimes self-hatred), and hypocrisy at every level of its hierarchy, especially in the class occupied by Don Cándido and his wife, Doña Rosa. The former, we know, had fathered an illegitimate child and furtively torn her away from her mother in order to keep his reputation intact. Doña Rosa, however, is by no means impeccable in moral fiber: as indulgent as she is with Leonardo, she is ruthless in handling the family’s financial interests. At one point in the story, for example, she explains why she felt no remorse in betraying a slave on the family plantation: “‘¿Y qué importa el quedar mal con el negro en la apariencia? Nadie tampoco guardó lealtad con los desleales a nativitate’” (209) (“‘And what difference does it make, if you don’t seem to be in the good graces of the Negro?

MISCE-GENE-NATION 67

No one keeps faith with those who are disloyal from birth’” 392). This association between a congenital temperament (disloyalty in the preceding example) and ones ethnicity or social status is worth pursuing. Martinez-Alier astutely identifies the symbolic, intergenerational burden of slavery, in particular, in nineteenth-century Cuba: “Slavery was regarded as a stain that contaminated a slave’s descendants, regardless of their actual physical appearance” (16). Similarly, heredity in Cecilia Valdés involves more than the transmission of physical traits, but encompasses as well several other dimensions of the term, all of which reveal not only its societal importance but also its social constructedness: just as Chepilla worries about her grand-daughter (who is, in most respects, her de facto daughter), Don Cándido is constantly frustrated with his son’s tracklessness. Eric Williams provides a historical context through which to read the generation gap between Don Cándido and Leonardo: Whilst the Spanish Government did not object to intermarriage in the early period, from the very beginning purity of blood was an essential prerequisite of the exercise of all public functions. Thus originated the familiar saying, that a Spaniard [e.g., Don Cándido] could do anything in Cuba except have a Spanish son. The children were creoles, with a presumption—frequently not unwarranted—of mixed blood. (57) Leonardo was far from the ideal son. The irony, however, is that in his recklessness, he mirrored his father’s past. Whereas Don Cándido was preoccupied with solidifying the family name, Leonardo scoffed at such pretension, especially at his father’s effort to secure a title of nobility by constructing an unblemished “genealogical tree”: se reía a carcajadas, cuando en son de broma se decía entre la familia…que su padre hacía construir en España, con el fin de titular, un árbol genealógico, en que no había de verse ni una gota de sangre de judío ni de moro. (62) He also made fun of his fathers efforts to secure a title in Spain by means of a family tree which was being prepared, and in which not a drop of Jewish or Moorish blood was to be found. (128) This document, then, is an attempt to seal the purity of at least the Gamboa side of Leonardo’s lineage. Interestingly (the English translation elides this important detail), the family—not just Leonardo—laughs at Don Cándido’s efforts to secure once and for all the family name.39 Meanwhile, the fact that Doña Rosa was born in Cuba casts doubt on her side of the family. Leonardo, however, is not too concerned about this. During a discussion with a law school friend with regard to miscegenation, he asserts: “No paro yo en eso la atención ni creo que hace bulto ni peso la sangre mezclada. Lo que puedo decir es, que no sé si porque tengo algo de mulato, me gustan un puñado las mulatas” (38) (“It’s too trivial to bother about. I don’t think mixed blood has any particular importance or significance, one way

68 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

or the other. But I will say, and I don’t know whether it’s because I may have a little coloured blood myself, I do have have a weakness for mulatto girls’” 85– 86). It is difficult if not impossible to determine which comes first: his interest in mulatto women as rationale for his flippancy regarding his lineage, or an initial flippancy that shapes his taste in women. In either case, matters like these— involving heredity in some way—both punctuate the narrative and propel it toward its tragic outcome. As Leonardo’s involvement with Cecilia grows, so does Don Cándido’s frustration. Nearing the end of his patience, Don Cándido proposes a telling strategy designed to regain control over his son: “‘Le desnuco, le meto en un buque de guerra como me llamo Cándido, y hago que le den chicote, a ver si suelta alguna de la sangre criolla que tiene en las venas. No es hijo mío, no” (130) (“I’ll put him aboard a warship, as sure as my names Cándido, and let him feel the end of a rope and see if they can’t get rid of some of that Creole blood he’s got in his veins. He’s no son of mine, not he’” 250). Don Cándido’s remarks merit a closer look in that they articulate complicated hereditarian notions: first, the reference he makes to his own name even as he plans his son’s punishment suggests the importance of names in paternal relations in particular and, perhaps, their importance in defining hereditary relations in general. In his next breath comes his hope that a rigorous life at sea would rid his son of his wildness: a wildness expressed in terms of his blood type; the blood, after all, is the substance that transmits physical traits and, in Don Cándido’s estimation, behavioral traits as well. As I noted previously, however, Don Cándido’s anger at his son’s unconformity is hypocritical in that he, too, was at one point more than just slightly attracted to mulatto women. In effect, his anger at his son is an anger at himself and at his own mistakes. Nonetheless, at the end of his tirade he denies his paternal, hereditary relationship with Leonardo, even if in his denial he is accurate in an oblique way: in some respects, rather than differing from Don Cándido as a child tends to differ from a parent, Leonardo imitates his father too closely. A friend of Leonardo’s tells him as much about Cecilia, whose mother is rumored to have lost her mind. For this reason, Diego—the friend—warns Leonardo not to expect his relationship with Cecilia to succeed: “‘No te fíes, sin embargo. Cosa sabida es que hijo de gato, ratón caza, y que por donde salta la madre, salta la hija’” (183) (“I shouldn’t be overconfident, if I were you. Everybody knows that hijo de gato ratón caza (the cat’s son chases the rat), and por donde salta la madre, salta la hija (where the mother leads, the daughter follows’” 346). Even though Cecilia and Leonardo have a child out of wedlock (the daughter, as the living product of this incestuous relationship, may be even more emblematic of Cuban identity than her mother), Leonardo in the end decides to marry for status rather than love. Just after his wedding ceremony, however, José Dolores (a mulatto infatuated with Cecilia and willing to do anything on her behalf, particularly if doing so would bring him closer to her) stabs and kills Leonardo, even though she had instructed him to kill Isabel, the bride. In dying, Leonardo brings an end to this narrative about the hopeless but irresistible attraction between

MISCE-GENE-NATION 69

him and Cecilia, and the respective efforts by each of their families to keep them apart. In this respect, Cecilia Valdés is a novel that registers and articulates the multi-faceted power of hereditarian discourses in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba: it is this power that lends the novel a deterministic tone and propels the tragedy, even if—in contradistinction to Sab, for example—the socially egregious, miscegenetic relationship between the protagonists does reach consummation, which in turn results in an offspring. The complex invocations of heredity in Cecilia Valdés suggest the extent to which Villaverde was opposed to slavery and the nefarious hereditarian conception of the person such a system fosters. In one of the few “asides” in the novel, the narrator asks rhetorically: “¿Habría dicha, tranquilidad de espíritu para quienes a sabiendad cristalizaban el jugo de la caña-miel con la sangre de millares de esclavos?” (188) (“Could there be any happiness, any peace of mind, for those who knowingly crystallized the juice of the sugar cane with the blood of thousands of slaves?” 356). Obviously, during the mid-eighteen-hundreds, the answer to this question may not have always been so self-evident. Looking closely at the narrator’s question, however, we find an image that we will pursue in greater detail: the dynamics involving hereditarian discourses, and the entity that houses the thousands of slaves and crystallizes the “juice” of the sugar cane: the plantation. This is particularly so inasmuch as Caribbean narratives treat in unusual, often highly metaphorical ways, the relationship between plants and people.

Chapter Three Talking Flowers and Flowering People: Narrative, Plant Genetics, and Caribbean Identity

the inhabitants of the country were in fact divided into three categories: Blacks, Mulattoes, Whites (not to mention the subdivisions); that the first—by far the most numerous—were the cheap, common lot, like wild fruits, tasty, but too willingly doing without care; the second set could be considered as a grafted species; and the others, although ignorant, or uncouth for the most part, constituted the rare, precious species. —Joseph Zobel, Black Shack Alley tierras madereras eran éstas, donde, sobre cabos, júcaros, cedros y quebrachos, y especies tantas y tan raras que desconcertaban las clasificaciones tradicionales—ya habían desconcertado, incluso, las del propio Humboldt. —Alejo Carpentier, El recurso del método some superb rain forests, where [lay] the mahogany trees, júcaros, cedars and quebrachos, and species so numerous and so rare as to confound traditional classifications—they had even confounded Humboldt himself. —Carpentier, Reasons of State In this chapter I plan to pursue more intensively the theme of heredity in Caribbean discourse on the plantation, agriculture, and, broadly stated, plants. I am specifically interested in those narratives that a) metaphorize heredity by conflating or dissolving the categories of plants and people (both of which, unfortunately, have functioned as tools of the plantation) and that b) express in hereditarian terms the relationships within either category. As for the relationship between discourses of heredity and agriculture, the two are associated in the most basic sense, given that the latter—via genetic principles— aims to attain the highest yield from selected parental combinations, a process which in turn—over a long enough time period—can lead to progeny noticeably unlike earlier generations; conversely, agriculturalists sometimes use these

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 71

principles to ensure that later generations deviate as little as possible from earlier ones. Since Caribbean society, despite its diversity in other arenas, has been and remains an agricultural one, recent (Benítez Rojo 1992) and not as recent (Ortiz 1939, Mintz 1966, 1985) Caribbean studies have homed in on the pivotal role of agriculture throughout the Caribbean.1 Part of my intention in showing how narratives conflate plants and people is to supplement earlier studies on the plantation by forging a closer link between agricultural or plant processes and narrative style. In other words, I hope in this chapter to show how hereditarian processes provide a language or matrix for narratives that depict the world described by Ortiz, Mintz, and Benítez Rojo. Agriculture is but one aspect of the “vegetable” link between hereditarian and narrative discourses in the Caribbean: plants as a whole (i.e., not necessarily with reference to their cultivation) serve as metaphors for the Caribbean and for the characters in their literary texts. In different texts plants may include roots, fruit, branches, trunks, etc., all of which can, in whole or in part, represent people. In effect, the differences between (in Linnean language) the human species and species within the plant kingdom become blurry in much of Caribbean literature. This blurriness stems, at least in part, from the ordering force hereditarian discourses exert on both plants and people, particularly in light of the plantation’s dominance.2 A few preliminary questions: first, why do plants and plant processes have such a crucial role in the Caribbean imagination? Which plants and/or fruits are most often equated with the Caribbean and its people? By way of addressing these questions, my first task in this chapter is to provide a historical survey of approximations in the Caribbean between plants, agriculture, and people. I am particularly interested in prominent Caribbean texts that give plants an agency that one usually associates with representatives from other zoological kingdoms. Roberto González Echevarría provides insight into the tendency of Caribbean literature from the 1920’s and 30’s, at least, to endow inanimate objects with human qualities, and vice versa. According to him, this tendency pertains to the Futurism in vogue at the time. He makes the following observation with respect to Alejo Carpentier’s 1930’s novel, !Ecue-Yamba-O!, a novel in which the sugar mill features prominently: The very first sentence of the book establishes the tone: ‘Angular, of simple lines like the diagram of a theorem, the block of the San Lucio sugar mill rose up in the middle of a wide valley, bordered by a crest of blue hills’ (p. 7). This sort of description, insisting on angles, lines, cylinders, and planes, prevails, but the most striking and now dated topoi are those derived from the Futurists, in which inanimate objects are given animal characteristics, or vice versa. Oxen let out steam ‘like overheated engines’ (p. 15), a phonograph ‘ejaculates love songs’ (p. 12)…etc.3

72 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Caribbean cosmologies of African origin also provide a possible avenue toward understanding how writers in the region use plants in their narratives. Lydia Cabrera, whose El monte (1968) remains perhaps the definitive study on Cuban Santería religion, explains that plants and trees—because they may harbor gods— exert great power over peoples daily lives. The ceiba tree, for example, “como la palma real, es el árbol más característico de la Isla y el árbol sagrado por excelencia”4 (“like the royal palm, is the tree most characteristic of the island and the sacred tree par excellence”). Furthermore, “se sabe que de noche las ceibas conversan, andan y se trasladan de un lugar a otro” (Cabrera 154) (“it is known that at night ceibas converse, and move from one place to another”). I agree with González Echevarría’s basic contention regarding Futurism and Cabrera’s observations on Santería: these perspectives offer valuable ways of approaching the treatment of plants in Caribbean narratives. There is, however, another possibility: with the ordering forces in the Caribbean of hereditarian discourses, including those that inform botany and agriculture, there is, I believe, an additional way of understanding the prevalence in Caribbean narrative of animated vegetation. Before turning to both fictional and non-fictional narrative to explore how plants and heredity figure in formations of Caribbean cultural identity, a glance at poetry from the region will help in contextualizing the thematic role of plants and agriculture in Caribbean literature, particularly around the first quarter of the 19th century. ALIVE AND WELL IN THE “TORRID ZONE”: PLANTS, POETRY AND IDENTITY Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist who visited Cuba in 1799, trained his botanical eye in particular on Cuba’s palm trees: The royal palm, one of the most majestic of its species, gives a peculiar character to the country in the neighborhood of Havana. It is the Oreodoxia regia in my classification of American palms; its tall trunk, slightly swelling near the middle, is from sixty to eighty feet high; the upper portion being of a fresh, shining green color, forms the union and the extension of its pedicles, contrasts with the rest of the trunk, which is of a whitish-brown, and shrunken, forming, as it were, two columns, one supporting the other.5 A quarter century later, in his “Oda al Niágara,”6 José María Heredia—Cuba’s first Romantic poet—used the palm tree to contrast his native land with the northeastern United States. As he stood before the mighty Niagara Falls, he wondered: Mas ¿qué en ti busca mi anhelante vista con inútil afán? ¿Por qué no miro

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 73

alrededor de tu caverna inmensa las palmas ¡ay! las palmas deliciosas, que en las llanuras de mi ardiente patria nacen del sol a la sonrisa, y crecen, y al soplo de las brisas del Océano, bajo un cielo purísimo se mecen?7 But what does my yearning look seek in you with useless eagerness? why don’t I see surrounding your immense cavern the palms, oh! the delicious palms that in the plains of my ardent homeland are born from the sun to a smile, and grow, and with the blowing of the Ocean breezes, sway beneath the purest sky? Cintio Vitier provides two avenues by which we can understand poems like Heredia’s that thematize Caribbean flora from a removed geographical position. The first avenue involves expressions of differences regarding the Americas and Europe, particularly with respect to a nature/culture opposition: el barroquismo americano se liga siempre entrañablemente, con hiperbólica energía, a las fuerzas primigenias de la tierra. No es, como en Europa, artificio, retorcimiento de la forma, resultante cultural, sino la sobreabundancia de la expresión directamente vinculada con la abundancia de la naturaleza.8 the American baroque is always deeply linked, with hyperbolic energy, to the primeval forces of the earth. It is not, as in Europe, artifice, a twisting of the form, a cultural by-product, but the overabundance of the expression directly linked with the abundance of nature. The second involves the patriotic melancholy resulting from geographical distance, particularly as concerns Cuba: la distancia, la lejanía, que fue la atmósfera propia del mito de la isla, jugará siempre un papel decisivo en nuestra sensibilidad. Lo cubano, en una de sus dimensiones esenciales, se manifiesta siempre como lejanía. …Lo que no pueden configurar las enumeraciones exhaustivas de la flora y la fauna (la imagen de la patria), le da un suspiro y una visión nostálgica. (Vitier 73) the distance, the remoteness, that comprised the characteristic atmosphere of the myth of the island, will always play a decisive role in our sensibility. Lo cubano, in one of its essential dimensions, is always manifested as distance…. What the exhaustive enumerations of the flora and fauna (the image of the country) cannot account for is provided by a sigh and a nostalgic vision.

74 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Two years after Heredia’s “Oda al Niágara,” in 1826, Andrés Bello wrote that the “noble” palm nourished its domain on behalf of America’s children (“Para tus hijos la procera palma/su vario feudo cría”9). Bello (1781–1865), a Venezuelan writer and statesman whose legacy is claimed as much by the Hispanic Caribbean as it is by the rest of Spanish America, published his most famous poem within a few years of the first waves of American independence from Spain. This poem, “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” (1826; the English translation is titled “Georgic of the Tropics”), from which the above reference to the palm tree is taken, marks a shift away from the scientific perspective we find in Humboldt’s writings to a locally situated discourse that, while not blind to the scientific implications of American flora, treats palms and other plants in ways related to formations of cultural identity. This shift, however, is not a complete reversal insofar as Humboldt’s scientific writings were not (and perhaps could never be) “purely” scientific; as they describe the Cuban environment, they also invoke cultural values of an adjectival tendency: “the most majestic…,” “a peculiar character…,” etc. By the time Bello writes his “foundational” poem, science has—in the American cultural imaginary—yielded to a burgeoning poetic tradition initiated by Heredia. Concurrently, objects that—in writing, anyway—had previously fallen under a scientific gaze (plants, for example) begin to assume a “life” of their own. In many respects, Bello’s poem picks up the appeal to an autochthonous agricultural production at the rhetorical moment at which Francisco de Arango y Parreño had rested his argument sometime in the early 1790’s. Although Arango’s Discurso differs from Bello’s poem in several respects,10 they concord in their insistence that Spanish American agriculture be taken seriously as a key to prosperity, whether this prosperity be Cuba’s or Gran Colombia’s, respectively. Where they differ is, first, in that “La agricultura” is a poem; as such, Bello deploys numerous poetic symbols/devices. Second, Bello is interested not so much in enhancing Spain’s mercantilist economy but in establishing a post-independence American identity capable of putting the land to productive use. My interest in Bello’s poem resides in the way he animates specific products of the torrid zone’s agriculture. For Bello, in effect, Spanish America’s obstacles in the future stem mainly from its Spanish heritage, which has instilled a “lazy indolence” (123) (“indolente ociosidad,”) in its population, and not from the unrivaled fertility of its lands. The lands in the region (the American tropics) are the antithesis of lazy indolence and the speaker of the poem addresses this region directly in juxtaposing it with its inhabitants: “Mas ¡oh! ¡si cual no cede/el tuyo, fértil zona, a suelo alguno,/y como de natura esmero ha sido,/de tu indolente habitador lo fuera!” (64–67) (“O, if only as with thy gifted land,/fertile region, surpassing all others,/nature had turned its care/ to thine indolent dwellers!”).11 What follows amounts to a list of the regions’ most important agricultural products, including the royal palm, “golden wheat” (“granadas espigas” line 7), “graceful sugarcane” (“la caña hermosa” line 18), and tobacco (line 29). Some plants have better developed anthropomorphic characteristics. The cornstalk, for

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 75

example, is the “jefe altanero de la espigada tribu” (48–9) (“arrogant chief of the cereal tribe” 29). Later, the speaker shifts his attention from the anthropomorphized vegetable realm to its inhabitants: ¡Oh! ¡los que afortunados poseedores habéis nacido de la tierra hermosa en que reseña hacer de sus favores, como para ganaros y atraeros, quiso Naturaleza bondadosa! romped el duro encanto que os tiene entre murallas prisioneros. (133–39) O happy dwellers, born in a land of beauty where nature flagrantly displayed its plenty as if to lure and win you! Break this harsh spell that walls you in a prisoner. (30) This incantation inaugurates a process that reappears often in Caribbean letters— a poetic process whereby the distinction between plant and person becomes tenuous. Simply stated, agricultural processes and agriculturalists must become as one for newly independent America to stand a chance of survival. More specifically, Americans must encourage “la manzana y la pera/en la fresca montaña/olviden de su madre España.” 12 (“let the apple and pear grow in the mountain coolness,/forgetting the sky of their mother Spain,” my italics). It is the apples and pears that perform the forgetting, although in doing so they are substituting for the American peasantry—after all, the latter need to look toward an American future rather than backward toward Spain. In a sense, the apples and pears in the poem are challenged by the speaker to ignore their genealogy (unlike the genealogical voyage undertaken in Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos), given that the original transmission from parent (Spain) to offspring was an incomplete or unsuccessful one. Before continuing with other aspects of “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” it is worth making a few observations regarding images of fruits in Caribbean cultural discourse. In many regards it is not surprising that the speaker in Bello’s poem would give fruits such importance with regard to his regions future. As Eric Williams indicates, the cultivation of fruit was seen as instrumental to the development of other parts of the New World. According to him, the British West Indian Royal Commission of 1897 “recommended the growth locally [i.e., in the British Caribbean] of more of the food that was imported and greater attention to the fruit trade. It further recommended agricultural and industrial education, and a department of economic botany to assist the small proprietors,” who collectively had a significant bearing on broader economic affairs.13 Significantly, what Williams’s observation indicates as well is that agriculture and botany were

76 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

closely linked both to empire and/or nation formation in the Caribbean and to small-scale efforts to assist or resist this effort. This formation, in turn, is linked to (but not necessarily the determining factor of) a Caribbean autochthonous erotic imagination. G.R.Coulthard, for example, finds in Caribbean poetry by males what he calls “fruit imagery,” or a tendency “to compare various features of the black or mulatto woman with characteristic fruits of the tropics.”14 He argues that, unlike other literary traditions, (male) Caribbean poets make more use not only of fruits but also of vegetables: In the first place it is traditional for European lyricism to seek comparisons between the physical attributes of women and flowers (lily, rose, carnation etc.). The Caribbean poet has simply substituted for these traditional elements the names of local flowers and of local fruits. It would seem, however, that there is a significant change of emphasis in the attitude to the woman, for while flowers are appreciated for their beauty of shape and colour and in some cases their perfume, fruits and vegetables (and we have seen that the Haitians do not hesitate to use vegetal comparisons) are eaten. (Coulthard 89–90, my italics) This observation regarding fruits in the Caribbean fills in some of the context surrounding Bello’s poem, particularly insofar as fruits play an important role in the vital practice of agriculture. Fruits are not alone, however—other plants soon join them in a segment of Bello’s poem that sketches a vision of the pyramidal structure of power in the Caribbean: “aquí el vergel, allá la huerta ría …Ya dócil a tu voz, agricultura,/nodriza de las gentes” (222–24) (“Let flowers and vegetables/ toss their heads in glee” while the people obey “agriculture, wetnurse of the people,/in docile heeding” 32). At the top is agriculture; at its (or her) feet are plants and people. One could ask why Bello would mix people and plants, and give the latter animation and the former docility or stasis. From a rhetorical standpoint, I believe Bello was attempting to fashion a new and viable Spanish-American identity and the best available vehicle for doing so was through the richness and, more importantly, promise of local agriculture: Spain, for example, was terra non grata and the pre-Columbian cities were forgotten or in ruins. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker once again metaphorically collapses the languages of people and plants by pleading the following: “suelto el cuello de extranjero yugo,/erguiese al cielo el hombre americano, bendecida de ti se arraigue y medre/su libertad” (291–94) (“the men of America, rid of/the foreign yoke, may look towards heaven/ and with Thy blessing, their freedom take root and thrive” 33). Only after people have taken adequate “root” (arraigar: to take root; once again, the importance of roots as metaphors of the formation of cultural identity) in the Americas will they be able to fashion the kind of future that Bello—not only as a poet but as a statesman —saw as a possibility. As such, the people of the Americas—given their

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 77

metaphorical links to plants—are imbricated in a struggle that to some extent involves hereditarian language and processes. It is worth noting that important twentieth-century Caribbean poets also have used metaphors that combine plants and people. Nicolás Guillén, perhaps the Hispanic Caribbean’s best-known poet during the twentieth century, makes repeated references to the sugar mill and uses vegetable metaphors extensively in his verses. In “Dos niños,”15 a poem that appeared originally in his collection West Indies Ltd (1934), two children (one black and the other white) are described as being “ramas de un mismo árbol de miseria” (“branches of the same tree of misery”). Luis Palés Matos, whose Spenglerian inclinations we saw in the first chapter, organized his most famous collection of poems, Tuntún de pasa y grifería16(the poems were written between 1925–37), in a very revealing way. In her introduction to Palés’s collection, Mercedes López Baralt identifies the arboreal imagery of its main divisions: the first of these, for example, entitled Tronco or Trunk, contains poems that primarily refer to Puerto Rico’s African heritage; the second division is Rama or Branch, whose poems describe Puerto Rico’s mulatto society, which is in part a product of Black Africa; the final division of the collection is, not surprisingly, Flor or Flower, which describes Palés vision for a new Caribbean identity—an identity that recognizes, but is not bound by, its ethnic history. PLANTS, HEREDITY AND CARIBBEAN NARRATIVE: PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS We have seen that the Hispanic Caribbean’s poetic tradition has treated plants and plant processes very distinctively, i.e., as a marker of cultural identity. If we turn our attention to some of the better-known narratives in the Caribbean, we find that they lend themselves well to readings whereby they can be seen to metaphorize heredity. In the case of Cuban narrative, for instance, hereditarian discourse is so pervasive it is easy to overlook its presence. In Dulce María Loynaz’s fictional narrative Jardín (1951), the trope of the garden serves in part as a way of structuring the protagonist’s (Bárbara’s) reminiscences, as a way of suggesting her association to profound natural forces, and also to establish a link between her and an unspecified woman of an earlier generation (possibly her greatgrandmother). Throughout this novel (one of the few published by women in the pre-revolutionary period17), Bárbara’s remembrance of her youth and romances is tantamount to digging deeper into her garden and to retracing the past the way one might retrace the lineage of a variety of garden flower. Indeed, in an introduction, Loynaz herself explains—rhetorically perhaps—that her novel makes little sense18 beyond the fact that it is the architecture of a plant that structures the narrative: el doblar de las hojas que siguen sólo será, para el que quiera doblarlas, una sucesión inconexa y entrecortada, a veces, de árboles y de agua, de árboles

78 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

que se nos confunden con figuras humanas o figuras deshumanizadas que nos parecieron árboles y que se nos quedan atrás, que no distinguimos bien, como si las viéramos pasar fugazmente por la ventanilla de un tren en marcha. En algún momento la mujer se nos contagiará del antiguo misterio vegetal que aprisiona su vida; en otro, será el jardín el que abandone su rigidez leñosa, el que se vivifique a ese temblor de sístoles y diástoles que ella logra traspasarle a la honda raíz, al tallo tibio.19 the turning of the pages [or leaves, given that in the Spanish “hojas” can mean either of these] that follows will only be, for whoever wants to turn them, a disconnected and at times random succession of trees and water, of trees that we confuse with human figures or dehumanized figures that appeared to us as trees and that we leave behind, that we do not distinguish well, as if we saw them pass quickly through the window of a moving train. At a certain moment, the woman will infect us with the ancient vegetable mystery that imprisons her life; at another, it will be the garden that abandons its wooded rigidity, the one that becomes enlivened to that tremor of sistoles and diastoles that she is able to transmit to the deep root, the warm stem. The line between the human and vegetable realms becomes a blurry one as botanical processes are used to express human emotions. We can begin our discussion of Jardín with Ileana Rodríguez’s reading of the novel, in which she analyzes a possible metonymic relationship in the novel between garden and nation, particularly insofar as female20 involvement in the former illustrates their role in building the latter. According to Rodríguez, the garden in the novel serves to aid and reflect the protagonist’s psychological development: “Woman wants to discover her own sense of self, deposited in the middle of the garden. Garden is then a laboratory, a cabinet, a world, and Woman an experimenter, an explorer, an interpreter” (92). The garden, however, functions in additional ways, particularly in that it too possesses a considerable degree of human-like agency. Catherine Davies’s discussion of the novel, in which she shows the similarities between Loynaz’s novel and eighteenth-century gothic novels,21 brings us closer to the type of analysis of the novel I eventually want to pursue: according to Davies, the garden gradually “takes on a life of its own and, like a sleeping monster lurking outside her window…lures the heroine to walk its circular paths in springtime while continually threatening her with destruction” (71). In terms, however, of additional commentary with regard to the garden in the novel, Davies’s basic objective in her feminist study is to show how a “woman’s text need not refer directly to political events or historical time in order to be subversive [and that] the whole notion of time and space must be reconsidered” (66). As such, while I believe Davies accomplishes her objective while making occasional references to the garden and to matters pertinent to heredity, she does not pursue a more detailed analysis of a possible connection between the two.

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 79

Such an analysis, however, is possible. Early in the narrative, for instance, we read that between Bárbara’s house and her garden there is “una puerta que nunca puede abrirse por impedirlo el tronco de un almendro que arranca junto al mismo muro de la casa, afirmando en él, con presión lenta y creciente, sus nervudas ramas” (17) (“a door that can never be opened because of the trunk of an almond tree that grows next to the same wall of the house, affirming with slow and increasing pressure its sinewy branches”). Indeed, while it may stand on the one hand as a barometer of Bárbara’s and her ancestress’s growing levels of maturity, the garden, too, experiences its own growth: a growth the narrative frequently describes. To underscore the inter-generational tie between Bárbara and the ancestress, for example, later in the narrative we hearken back to a time when “aún no ha[bía] crecido [el] gran tronco de almendro” (22) (“the large almond trunk had not yet grown”). The ancestress, meanwhile, in her youth is “semejante a la brizna de yerba [en el jardín] que la tempestad no se detiene a aplastar” (33) (“similar to the string of weed [in the garden] that the tempest does not bother to crush”). As the garden grows so does the youthful ancestress, as does Bárbara’s bond to her. The youth is not only like the garden, she is the garden: “Jardín era la Niña…. Jardincillo pequeño, con trabazón de raíces en los pies y sombra de ramas sobre los ojos” (57) (“The Girl was a garden…a little garden, with an entanglement of roots at her foot and the shadow of branches over her eyes”). In many respects, the narrative revolves around Bárbara’s efforts to make her ancestress’s garden communicate the latter’s story, rather than being—as the story is initially—silent and static, like “plantas disecadas en las colecciones de los botánicos. Plantas raras en los cerrados muestrarios de cristal” (30) (“dried plants in botanical collections. Rare plants in closed display windows”). Although Barbara may seek to arrive at an understanding of plants that is not merely botanical, to do so she must first unite human life and plant life in their common mysteriousness. That she would want to transcend botany attests to its unstated influence over her world. The novels end is ambiguous, because it could suggest either the failure or success of her communion with plants: after tiring of Europe’s inauthentic modernity, she returns to her Cuban home, only to be crushed to death immediately by a wall surrounding the garden. Other prominent Cuban narratives suggest the emergence of a pattern in the agency they afford the vegetable world. Alejo Carpentier’s “Viaje a la semilla” (1958)22 is a short story with several qualities that also correlate well with botany and, more broadly, genetic discourse. This story rehearses the quest—quite common throughout literature in general and Latin American and Caribbean literature in particular—for an origin. Indeed, in the latter literary traditions, this quest for an origin is related to these regions’ efforts at self-definition and the formation of a coherent identity. In some cases, most notably with indigenista writings, pre-Columbian peoples and culture were seen as a new paradigm for Latin America. In the Caribbean, where few if any descendants of the original inhabitants survived the arrival of Europeans by more than a few decades, African

80 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

ethnicity and cultural elements were seen by Afro-Cuban and négritude writers as the Caribbean ideal (Coulthard). Barbara Webb argues that Carpentier’s particular historical interests unite him with writers from elsewhere in the Caribbean: In contrast to V.S.Naipaul’s vision of a barren, uncreative West Indian past, novelists such as Alejo Carpentier, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris recognize a capacity for creation and renewal in the myths, legends, and folktales that arose from the encounter of Amerindian, African, and European cultures in the Americas. For these writers, the folk or mythic imagination is the key to artistic vision and historical understanding.23 In Los pasos perdidos (1953), for example, a longer narrative by Carpentier, the protagonist delves deeply into Amazonian geography and mythology in order to rediscover a primal authenticity that modernity and European civilization have caused him to lose. For González Echevarría, this search by Carpentier for an authentic and pre-linguistic identity must be read in light of the latter’s exposure to Spengler’s philosophical writings: The Decline of the West provided Latin American intellectuals with a synthesis of nineteenth-century philosophy, mainly German, going back through Nietzsche to Romantic Volksgeist: a leap back over Positivism and Neo-Kantism to a Romantic subject-object philosophy that spoke directly to the Latin American’s wish to declare himself free from European tradition; a position, in short, that would allow him to bypass the reflexivity of European thought to reach a spontaneous culture grounded on the landscape—on the terra mater. (Alejo Carpentier 56) As we shall see, grounding a culture on the landscape can sometimes entail grounding it on objects that grow on that landscape. In “Viaje a la semilla,” we have a quest for an origin, but taken to an extreme. At issue is the origin of Don Marcial, the protagonist and a recently deceased member of Cuba’s colonial society (more specifically, its saccharocracy): as Marcial lies on his death bed, an old Black man who was witnessing the demolition of Don Marcial’s estate casts a magic spell that immediately (and mysteriously) sends the demolition process into reverse: the candles by Don Marcial grow rather than shrink, his visitors retrace their steps out the door, and Don Marcial himself “pulsó un teclado invisible y abrió los ojos.”24 (“fingered an invisible keyboard and opened his eyes”). This process continues until Don Marcial is an unborn baby, literally back in his mother’s womb and the world—at least insofar as he experiences it—has reverted to a primeval stage. It strikes me as significant that Carpentier chose the word “seed” as part of his title, thereby establishing a point of contact between human life and plant life. Inanimate objects also are akin to plants: during the demolition at the start of the

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 81

story, we learn, for example, that “contrariando sus apetencias, varios capiteles yacían entre las hierbas. Las hojas de acanto descubrían su condición vegetal” (78) (“contradicting their natural propensities, several capitals lay in the grass, their acanthus leaves asserting their vegetable status” 106). Whether the entity be animal or plant, dead or alive, it nevertheless partakes in this extraordinary process of retrogression. Furthermore, it is not as if this tale told in reverse lacks logic or causality; on the contrary, temporally later events (events that appear first in the narration) determine earlier ones (events narrated later).25 In its relentless pursuit of a “vegetable” origin or state, this alternative causality amounts to a genealogy. Stated differently, it is the language of heredity that structures existence in “Viaje a la semilla.” Other elements in the narrative suggest that perhaps there is no escape from the logic ordered by hereditarian discourse: the old Black man who set the entire process in motion is presumably a former worker whose days of heavy labor reside mainly in the past. Perhaps in part for this reason he has ample time to use special powers of African origin against Don Marcial who, as a member of Cuba’s plantation elite, embodies—even if indirectly—the reason why Africans were brought to the Caribbean. This is particularly so in Cuba toward the end of the 18th century (the approximate era in which the story takes place), when Cuba’s sugar production was taking flight following the uprising in Saint Domingue. It was slavery that drove Cuba’s then growing sugar industry, and the nameless Black man—a descendant of this oppressive system—wields in the story a tremendous, magical power over his surroundings, a power that he would have lacked (or that he would have needed to exercise furtively) as a subject of a plantation society. González Echevarría explains that Carpentier’s fictional representations are faithful to the analyses of Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez’s Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: All of the blacks in [Carpentier’s] fictions…are in a constant state of mobility, propelled by the socioeconomic forces described in Sugar and Society. And the whites are often, particularly in Carpentier’s stories in War of Time [i.e., Guerra del tiempo—the collection that contains “Viaje a la semilla], members of the nineteenth-century aristocracy created by the sugar boom following the Haitian revolution. In historical terms, Guerra provided Carpentier with the source of modern Cuban history—the point of origin of a new historical evolution and the structure of that evolution. (Alejo Carpentier 45–6) The strength of Carpentier’s writings—as González Echevarría and other critics have pointed out—lies in his ability to interweave fact with fiction. In his rebirth, meanwhile, Don Marcial falls victim to the old Black man’s desire to dismantle the vestiges of a decaying colonial infrastructure: as he grows progressively younger and less wealthy, Don Marcial returns “para el ingenio, en gran tren de calesas” (87) (“he returns to the sugar plantation in a long procession

82 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

of carriages” 113). By story’s end, not even the plantation exists for Don Marcial. It is as if only a genesis in reverse can undo (albeit in a figurative sense in this story) a society ordered by hereditarian discourse and the plantation. Eventually, all that remains of Don Marcial is his rumor in the conversation among the demolition workers. None of them are interested in this conversation, however, “porque el sol viajaba de oriente a occidente, y las horas que crecen a la derecha de los relojes deben alargarse por la pereza, ya que son las que más seguramente llevan a la muerte” (107) (“because the sun was traveling from east to west, and the hours growing on the right-hand side of the clock must be spun out by idleness—for they are the ones that inevitably lead to death” 131). In effect, the memory of Don Marcial has been eliminated now that time has begun to flow in its usual direction. Before embarking on a discussion of a different Carpentier text, it is well worth considering another classic in Caribbean letters: although not evident at first glance, genetic discourse is one of the many points of contact—an important yet overlooked one—between “Viaje a la semilla” and Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological study, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940). Both works are by Cubans writing in the mid twentieth century and each of these writers is interested in Caribbean cultural identity in general and that of Cuba in particular. The similarities do not end there, however. In Cuban Counterpoint, too, we find a narrative about Cuban history, a narrative that traces the historical dialectic between two other plants, tobacco and sugar. These, according to Ortiz, have become “los personajes más importantes de la historia de Cuba”26 (“the two most important figures in the history of Cuba”27). Indeed, the counterpoint between them reflects Cuba’s history “desde su misma formación étnica hasta su contextura social, sus peripecias políticas y sus relaciones internacionales” (12) (from its “very ethnological formation to its social structure, its political fortunes, and its international relations” 4–5). On the other hand, the two products could not be any more dissimilar: “Blanca es la una, moreno es el otro. Dulce y sin olor es el azúcar; amargo y con aroma es el tabaco” (14) (“The one is white, the other dark. Sugar is sweet and odorless; tobacco bitter and aromatic” 6). Furthermore, each product is surrounded by contrasting popular associations: sugar, which is described as having feminine qualities, was “obra de los dioses” (14) (“the gift of the gods” 6); tobacco, its masculine counterpart, was the gift “de los demonios” (14) (“of the devils” 6). Rather than being strictly commodities, tobacco and sugar are, for Ortiz, “highly complex metaphorical constructs that represent at once material things and human actors.”28 This explains the use of the term “counterpoint” in the title: a simple comparison of binaries implies two objects and a subject comparing them, whereas a counterpoint, as in music, implies two items that are at once different from and indispensable to each other. Furthermore, as Ortiz develops his narrative, it becomes apparent that the counterpoint between tobacco and sugar cannot be encapsulated within a single factor or cause and effect relationship. Each, for example, transcends in symbolic meaning the surface quality of color: tobacco is

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 83

more than dark and sugar is more than light. Significantly, however, the future of each is genetically determined: Ortiz explains that tobacco “no cambia de color, nace moreno y muere con el color de su raza. El azúcar…se encascarilla y refina para pasar por blanca, correr por todo el mundo…subiendo a las categorías dominantes de la escala social” (16) (“is born dark and dies the color of its race. Sugar…can pass for white, travel all over the world…climbing to the top of the social ladder” 9). Other associations surround the two plants: tobacco, for instance, es un tesoro legado por el indio, apreciado y recogido en seguida por el negro, pero cultivado y explotado por el blanco. Al tabaco ya los indios lo cultivaban en huertos como ‘muy sancta cosa.’ … Los blancos lo conocieron pero no lo estimaron en seguida, ni adquirieron pronto su hábito. (57) is an inheritance received from the Indian, which was immediately used and esteemed by the Negro, but cultivated and commercialized by the white man. The Indians [considered] it ‘a very holy thing.’ …the whites were familiar with it, but did not develop a taste for it at once. (57) In effect, Ortiz proposes tobacco and sugar as a metaphor for the process responsible for Cuban culture in particular and Caribbean culture in general: transculturation. Ortiz describes it as “cardinal y elementalmente indispensable para comprender la historia de Cuba y, por análogas razones, la de toda América en general” (97) (“fundamental and indispensable for an understanding of the history of Cuba, and, for analogous reasons, of that of America in general” (103). Despite Ortiz’s indication that tobacco and sugar maintain their respective identities and differences from each other, he makes it clear that the product of their “counterpoint,” rum, in its role as metaphor for Cuban culture, is associated with both but is a duplicate of neither. To this end, he argues that “en todo abrazo de culturas sucede lo que en la cópula genética de los individuos: la criatura siempre tiene algo de ambos progenitores, pero también es distinta de cada uno de los dos” (96–7) (“the result of every union of cultures is similar to that of the reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them” (103). Although his translator does not use the term genética, a concept associated with genetic processes is clearly behind Ortiz’s vision of Cuban national identity. Ultimately, neither acculturation (a theory whereby a culture develops by simply acquiring another one) nor deculturation (whereby a culture develops through the loss of an earlier) explain Cuba. Rather it is through, according to Ortiz, a complex transferral that is similar to a genetic transmission, whereby certain elements of the parents, tobacco and sugar and all the popular and scientific meanings associated with these plants, are transmitted to the offspring, Cuban society.

84 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

PLANTS, HEREDITY, AND CARIBBEAN NARRATIVE IN EL RECURSO DEL MÉTODO Perhaps the fullest and most surprising instance of a Caribbean narrative juxtaposing and collapsing plants with people is Carpentier’s El recurso del método (Reasons of State), a novel, like Ortiz’s anthropology and much of Carpentier’s other fiction, interested in finding in a Caribbean “impossible harmony” the “positive roots of a new cultural synthesis” (Webb 22). El recurso del método, which Carpentier wrote in Paris and published in 1974, tells of the exploits of a nameless (the narrative refers to him as either Jefe de Estado or Primer Magistrado) Latin American dictator in a nameless, paradigmatic Latin American nation. While writing this novel, Carpentier was the cultural attaché to the Cuban embassy in France, a position he held between 1966 and 1980. Carpentier had long been concerned with describing the distinctiveness of Caribbean and Latin American culture. This concern probably acquired greater urgency in the wake of the Castro revolution and his own role within the Castro regime. Although Carpentier’s basic political objective in the novel seems to be to paint an at times sordid and at other times satirical picture of the kind of despot that characterized twentieth-century Latin America, we find also that this objective is informed by telluric and oftentimes hereditarian dynamics29 in which the fate of Latin America culture is intertwined with ahistorical plant processes. David Chioni Moore astutely identifies the importance of El recurso del método to hereditarian or genealogical matters. In his essay on Alex Haley’s Roots, he argues that tidy genealogical searchings akin to those in Haley’s epic are in the end imaginary constructs with little basis in what amounts to an anything-but-tidy actual genealogy. “For we are all, as we have seen so often, distant cousins. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier knew this well.”30 Although he does not comment on El recurso del método extensively, Moore pinpoints the following passage in Carpentier’s novel as indicative of the pervasiveness but ultimate futility of genealogy: Ahora me enseña el Agente Consular una rara colección de raíes-esculturas, de esculturas-raíces, de raíes-formas, de raíes-objetos—raíces barrocas o severas en su lisura; enrevesadas, intrincadas, o noblemente geométricas; a veces danzantes, a veces estáticas, o totémicas, o sexuales, entre animal y teorema, juego de nudos, juego de asimetrías, ora vivas, ora fósiles—que dice el yanki haber recogido a lo largo de sus muchas andanzas por las costas del Continente. Raíces arrancadas de sus suelos remotos, arrastradas, subidas, trajinadas, por los ríos en creciente; raíes trabajadas por el agua, volcadas, revolcadas, bruñidas, patinadas, plateadas, desplateadas, que de tanto viajar, dando tumbos, chocando con las rocas, peleando con otros maderos acarreados, acababan por perder su morfología vegetal, desprendidas del árbol-madre, árbol genealógico, para cobrar redondeces de tetas, aristas de poliedro, cabezas de jabalíes o caras de ídolos, dentaduras,

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 85

garfios, tentáculos, falos y coronas, o amaridarse en obscenas imbricaciones, antes de encallar, al término de un viaje de siglos, en alguna playa olvidada por los mapas.31 Now the Consul is showing me a rare collection of root-sculptures, sculpture-roots, root-forms, root-objects—baroque roots or roots that are austere in their smoothness; complicated, intricate or nobly geometrical; at times dancing, at times static, or totemic, or sexual, something between an animal and a theorem, a play of knots, a play of asymmetry, now alive, now fossilized—which the Yankee tells me he has collected on numerous expeditions along the shores of the Continent. Roots torn up from remote soil, dragged along, cast up, and again transported by rivers in spate; roots sculptured by the water, hurled about, knocked over, polished, burnished, silvered, denuded of their silver, until from so many journeys, falls, collisions with rocks, battles with other pieces of wood on the move, they have finally lost their vegetable morphology, become separated from the tree-mother, the genealogical tree, and acquired breast-like roundnesses, polyhedric arms, boars’ heads or idols’ faces, teeth, claws, tentacles, penises and crowns, or are intimately connected in obscene imbrications, before being stranded, after a journey lasting centuries, on some beach forgotten by maps.32 While I agree that El recurso del método deploys roots, plants, and vegetable processes in constructing a history of Latin America, I also believe that the text’s position with respect to these processes is characterized by a greater ambiguity than Moore allows. Carpentier’s novel cannot be ideologically fixed in place as the renunciation of a genealogical imagination. In contrast, plant imagery as a trope for human activity pervades the novel to a degree that justifies a closer and longer look. In many respects El recurso del método does explore the ties that bind people together, but it also uses plants in its exploration of how people may feel bound to highly complex constructions of the past. Before embarking on this “look,” it is worth examining others’ comments on the novel. With regard to the title and the Cartesian citations that introduce each chapter, Carpentier himself made the following observation: It is Descartes’s Discourse on Method turned upside down, for I believe that Latin America is the least Cartesian continent imaginable. And so Le discours de la methode turns into Le recours de la, methode, El discurso del método/El recurso del método, for all the chapters—there are twenty-two— are linked in deadpan fashion, by Descartes’s reflections taken from the Discourse, the Philosophical Meditations, and the Treatise on Passions, which, in spite of the rigidity of their thought, are the justification for totally delirious acts.33

86 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

The counterpoint between Descartes and the events in the novel is very revealing of the Latin America Carpentier diagnoses: Descartes’s Discourse on Method is a treatise in which the author rejects all his pre-conceived notions and attempts to build his vision of the world on whatever he may find of which he can be incontrovertibly certain. The consequent philosophical structure, with the ego or individual as its starting point, is in poignantly un-delirious manner reminiscent of el Jefe’s own egocentrism and profound neglect of others’ views and liberties (except, of course, when he stands to benefit from those others). While El recurso del método may have philosophical, abstract underpinnings, the story it recounts is based on a collage of actual events in Latin American history. In terms of a timetable, Carpentier told Miguel Roa the following in an interview: The novel [Reasons of State] begins very precisely in the year 1913, but its action expands concretely by a synchronization of events and epochs until the year 1927, with allusions to various historical events. But later there is a period that takes my central character toward the thirties, forties, with a small epilogue of two pages that is titled ‘1972.’34 El jefe amounts to a composite of several dictators in twentieth-century Latin American history: Según [la] declaración [de Carpentier], el Primer Maglstrado de El recurso del método está construido con un 40% de Machado, el dictador cubano; un 10% de Guzmán Blanco, el venezolano; otro 10% lo constituye el venezolano Cipriano Castro; un 10% más Estrada Cabrera, el guatemalteco; 20% aporta Trujillo, el dominicano y un 10% el mexicano Porfirio Díaz, de quien Carpentier dice que es ‘el Tirano Ilustrado por excelencia.’ Además, habría en el personaje rasgos de Somoza y de Juan Vicente Gómez.35 According to [Carpentier’s] declaration, the Head of State [el Jefe] in Reasons of State consists 40% in Machado, the Cuban dictator; 10% in Guzmán Blanco, the Venezuelan; another 10% in the Venezuelan Cipriano Castro; 10% more in Estrada Cabrera, the Guatemalan; Trujillo, the Dominican, provides 20%, and the Mexican Porfirio Díaz, who Carpentier says is ‘the Enlightened Tyrant par excellence,’ another 10%. Also, there are traces in him of Somoza and Juan Vicente Gómez. Just as el Jefe is a composite of these dictators, his country is also both nowhere and everywhere in Latin America. Based on the landscape and agricultural products described, however, the country is definitely in the “torrid zone” and also has a Caribbean coastline. With respect to referential nuances involving politics, González Echevarría provides an additional comparative insight:

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 87

Carpentier’s dictator is a déspota ilustrado, as opposed to Asturias’s, who appears as the personification of latent telluric forces in the tradition of Sarmiento’s portrayal of Rosas or Carpentier’s own Henri Christophe (in El reino de este mundo). Whereas these are the result of mysterious natural or supernatural transmutations, the Head of State personifies the future of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—the product of the bourgeois revolution. (Alejo Carpentier 261) While I agree with González Echevarría’s basic contention, we shall see that El recurso del método, not unlike Carpentier’s earlier El reino de este mundo, describes numerous “mysterious” natural transmutations of its own. Indeed the “recourse” in the novel is not only to Descartes and the Enlightenment, but also to a different realm in which plants and people converge and coexist on the same plane. Like many of Carpentier’s novels, El recurso del método is preoccupied with American history and identity (America is interchangeable in this context with Latin America) and the ways in which these two terms interact. With respect to this interaction, an undercurrent throughout El recurso del método is the weight of history and the sense that America is somehow doomed to failure. El jefe, by far the focal character of the narrative (and an occasional narrator), takes pride early in the novel in his country’s apparent success at overcoming this cycle of failure: me jactaba—eso sí—de que, para mi país, tras de un siglo de bochinches y cuartelazos, se había cerrado el ciclo de las revoluciones—revoluciones que no pasaban de ser, en America, unas crisis de adolescencia, escarlatinas y sarampiones de pueblos jóvenes, impetuosos, apasionados, de sangre caliente, a los que era preciso, a veces, imponer una cierta disciplina. (26) I was proud—very proud—of the fact that, after a whole century of tumult and uprisings, my own country had brought the cycle of revolutions to an end—revolutions that in America were counted merely as adolescent crises, the scarlatinas [scarlet fever] and measles of young, impetuous, passionate hot-blooded races, who had to be subjected to discipline sometimes. (23) El jefe makes it clear that his country’s previous shortcomings were closely connected to the physical type of the country’s population. Also clear is the way he uses racial discourse to justify his dictatorship. In fact, race and ethnicity are also recurring motifs in the narrative. Of particular importance is the way in which the narrative emphasizes hereditary physical traits. El jefe has this to say about his daughter Ofelia: La verdad es que, con ese cutis mate de india adelantada, mi hija estaba bella. En nada había heredado la redondez de cara, el espesor de muslos, la

88 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

anchura de caderas, de su santa madre—mucho más lugareña en pinta y estampa. (27) The truth is that her smooth complexion, derived from her Indian ancestry, was a feature of my daughter’s beauty. She had inherited none of the roundness of face, thickness of thighs and width of hips of her sainted mother, who was much more of a peasant in complexion and figure. (24) Otherwise stated, Ofelia may have indigenous physical characteristics, but this does not keep her from being attractive in el Jefe’s estimation. Although any favorable value judgment conceals—sometimes well and sometimes not—its opposite, negative value judgment (i.e., el Jefe compliments his daughter by describing whom she is not like), the preceding commentary is relatively tame in comparison with some of el Jefe’s estimations of other family members. He is not, for example, especially fond of his youngest son, whom he considers a step or two backward in the family’s evolutionary continuum: Y allí, cojitranqueando en los cuadros de la rayuela, veía, de pantalones cortos, a Marco Antonio, su hijo menor, el evanescente, el invisible del clan, perdido como lo estaba en las ramazones de árboles que no eran de estas tierras, sino de una selva genealógica a donde había ido a parar—acaso por haber resultado el menos ‘adelantado’ de la familia, el más exótico en estampa, por el perfil y los ojos. (69) And there, limping among the hopscotch squares, he saw his youngest son, Marcus Antonius, in short pants, the most evasive and invisible of the clan, lost among the branches of trees which did not belong to this earth, but to some genealogical forest where he had taken refuge—perhaps because he was the least precocious of the family and the most exotic-looking both as to profile and eyes. (62) Marco Antonio is, to say the least, a source of shame for el Jefe:36 the former might as well be an ape swinging from a tree. In some respects, however, the reference to trees, branches, and forests is of additional interest in the manner by which they are linked to human development. Indeed, the political and philosophical concerns the novel prioritizes on one level increasingly take a back seat to descriptions of el Jefe’s inferiority complexes and to his (and others’) concerns about genetically advanced or regressive family members and, more broadly, peoples. “The Distinguished Academician,” a French scholar who associates with El Jefe in Paris (the latter spent more time in the comforts of his Parisian mansion than in his own country) interprets America’s backwardness as follows: Todo se explicaba—y volvía a Felipe II, al Duque de Alba, pasando ahora a la America de Cortés y Pizarro—por la sangre española, la herencia del temperamento español, la inquisición española, las corridas de toros, las

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 89

banderillas, la capa y el estoque, los caballos destripados entre lentejuelas y pasadobles.—’L’Afrique commence aux Pyrénées.’ Nosotros habíamos recibido esa sangre en las venas; era una fatalidad. (99) Everything could be explained (and he [the Distinguished Academician] returned to Philip II and the Duke of Alba, passing on to the America of Cortés and Pizarro) by Spanish blood, the inheritance of the Spanish temperament, the Spanish Inquisition, bull-fights, banderillas, cape and sword, horses being disemboweled among sequins and pasodobles. ‘L’Afrique commence aux Pyrénées.’ We had been born with that blood in our veins; it was fate. (88–9) It was Spain’s fault, after all! Although the Distinguished Academician’s facile explanation may be more indicative of the relations between France and Spain during the early twentieth century, the links he draws between blood types and national character could not be any more blatant. Later, el Jefe takes pride in the state-of-the-art national penitentiary he intends to build. Here, Carpentier’s irony is at its most pronounced: Había allí [en la prisión] un evidente y acaso ejemplar propósito de humanizar—el fin de la arquitectura está en ayudar el hombre a vivir—la vision conceptual y orgánica del establecimiento penitenciario, haciéndolo tolerable al delincuente que, en fin de cuentas—y así lo habían demostrado los psicólogos modernos—, es un enfermo, un ente insociable, por lo general, producto del medio, víctima de la heredad, torcido en su comportamiento por unas cosas que ahora empezaban a llamarse ‘complejos,’ ‘inhibiciones,’ etc., etc. (204) Here [in the prison] could be seen an evident and perhaps unique attempt to humanize—the aim of architecture being to help man to live—the conceptual and organic vision of a penitentiary establishment, thus making it tolerable to the delinquent who after all (as modern psychologists had shown) was a sick man, an antisocial being, usually the product of his environment and victim of heredity, whose behaviour had been distorted by certain things that were just beginning to be called ‘complexes,’ inhibitions, etc., etc. (184). The sickness of the delinquent is akin to the sicknesses diagnosed by Zeno Gandía and his fellow Zola-inspired naturalists. In the preceding quote, there is also perhaps a trace of Comtean positivism or cientificismo. What is most worth underlining, however, is the observation that these illnesses have long been genetically transmitted and, as such, pre-date modern psychology One more example illustrates the importance in El recurso del método of heredity, nation, and history. Late in the novel, when El Jefe is beginning to realize that the tide has turned and that his forces may no longer be able to suppress a popular uprising, the conflict is once again described by a nameless narrator (one, I believe, that

90 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Carpentier—albeit very subtly—is ridiculing) in terms of heredity and national character: Nada podían ya las autoridades de ciertas provincias contra gentes soliviantadas que—caso observado varias veces en la historia del país— despertaban de una mansedumbre, una modorra, una resignación de treinta años, para pasar repentinamente, cuando menos se esperaba, a una violencia que los sociólogos de acá tenían por ajena a la bondad congénita, característica del temperamento nacional. (247–8) The authorities of some provinces were powerless against the rebels, who —as had been observed more than once in the history of the country—awoke from their meek resigned slumber of thirty years’ duration, to pass suddenly, when least expected, to a violence thought by our sociologists to be foreign to the congenital good nature so characteristic of the national temperament. (221) The preceding passage contains an interesting tension, for even though the rebels had “more than once” risen against authoritarian regimes, they were nonetheless perceived as being of a “congenital” good nature. Rebellion among the oppressed classes is, in a sense, an aberration that does not warrant any sweeping reforms on the part of the government. The passage is also of interest in its illustration of how a social science (sociology) has made (often misguided) intergenerational or hereditary assumptions about groups of people. A related theme in El recurso del método is, broadly stated, the world of nature. This chapter’s epigraph provides some indication of the uniqueness and mysteriousness of the American landscape, one that had confounded Humboldt himself. This kind of description of the landscape is important for at least two reasons. First, it registers the double consciousness González Echevarría locates in Carpentier: “writers such as Carpentier and Asturias have felt the need to proclaim magic to be here, attempting to evade the alienation of the European for whom magic is always there. But in this attempt there is a double or metaalienation; it may very well be that magic is on this side, but we have to see it from the other side to see it as magic” (Alejo Carpentier 128). The narrating voice in the novel sees both sides—two sides that apparently are in constant oscillation: it is as if one were to proclaim paradoxically, “This is our unique America…just ask Humboldt.” The epigraph is of further importance because it links landscape with a historical imagination (one that remembers Humboldt’s travels) and also because it forms part of a series of passages in the novel in which the landscape is as active and alive as the humans who inhabit it. A peasant leader far removed from el Jefe’s modernizing initiatives is Miguel Estatua. Estatua (in a sense frozen in a less modern time, as his name suggests) was acutely aware of the landscape’s “humanity,” particular that of the plant species on the landscape:

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 91

El sabía, desde luego, que los árboles del monte son seres vivos, a los que puede hablarse, y que, cuando se les dice las palabras adecuadas, contestan con el crujido y el movimiento de sus ramas. (77) [Estatua] knew of course that the mountain trees are living creatures, to whom one can talk, and that when one says the appropriate words they answer by creaking and movements of their branches. (70) Estatua is in many respects reminiscent of characters in other Carpentierian novels, especially El reino de este mundo (1949), in which characters like Mackandal and Ti Noel have complete faith in the power of vodoun. Carpentier’s well-known estimation of America, in which the mundane and the magical coexist (a land which elicited a poetics he labeled lo real maravilloso, “Marvelous Realism”) further prevent El recurso del método from being categorized exclusively as a political novel. In many respects, through his concept of lo real maravilloso, Carpentier is concerned as much with the cultural and philosophical implications of an aesthetic stance as he is with the political implications. As González Echevarría explains above, Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso presupposes both a supernatural realm as well as the detachment necessary to recognize it as such. In his famed prologue to El reino de este mundo (“De lo real maravilloso americano”), Carpentier explains that Marvelous Realism is unlike surrealist magic: Pero es que muchos se olvidan, con disfrazarse de magos a poco costo, que lo maravilloso comienza a serlo de manera inequívoca cuando surge de una inesperada alteración de la realidad (el milagro), de una revelación privilegiada de la realidad, de una iluminación inhabitual o singular-mente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, de una ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltación del espíritu que lo conduce a un modo de ‘estado limite.’ Para empezar, la sensación de lo maravilloso presupone una fe.37 many of them disguise themselves cheaply as magicians, forgetting that the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state…. The phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith.38 Theorists have more recently also speculated on the differences between lo real maravilloso and Magical Realism, a concept with which Carpentier and other towering figures (including Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Elena Garro, and Isabel Allende) in Latin American narrative have been associated. Fredric Jameson, for example, argues that Carpentier’s brand of

92 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

realism posits “a reality which is already in and of itself magical or fantastic,” rather than one whose magic is revealed via the telling of the story (the latter being Borges’s position).39 In El recurso del método, the principal characters either endorse (Estatua) or oppose (el Jefe) Carpentier’s brand of realism. La Mayorala Elmira, for instance, despite being el Jefe’s personal assistant, shares Estatua’s views on the special power of plants: [La Mayorala Elmira], como hija de santero, mucho sabía de plantas y raíces, más eficientes, casi siempre, que ciertos potingues de alta farmacia, anunciados en la prensa con hermosas alegorías de Convalecencia y Salud Recobrada. (85) As the daughter of a herbalist40, [she] knew a lot about plants and roots, nearly always more effective than some of the concoctions of eminent chemists, advertised in the press by beautiful illustrations of Convalescence and Recovered Health. (77–8) Plants in the novel mark the separation between the modern and the traditional, as well as between the foreign and the domestic. A particularly interesting source of ambiguity is that el Jefe—who intended to force his country into modernity— would rely so strongly (la Mayorala was also his cook, maid, and lover) on a person with traditional knowledge. La Mayorala, moreover, is the daughter of a santero, which once again underscores the correlation between human parentage, inherited knowledge, and plants/roots. In many respects, however, references to plants in this novel do not simply involve a belief in a supernatural American world (which is, as we saw above, a central tenet of Marvelous Realism). These references, in fact, pervade even the most “mundane” instances in the novel. One of el Jefe’s many modernizing projects was the construction of a national capitol building. Progress on its construction was steady: Cada mañana parecía mayor—como esas plantas selviáticas que se alargan pasmosamente durante la noche, ascendiendo hacia un amanecer que les robaban las florestas de arriba. (167) Every morning she seemed larger, like those jungle plants that shoot up amazingly during the night, trying to reach a dawn hidden from them by the trees above. (150) This passage, like many in the novel, is of interest with respect to the tension it belies between modernity and tradition: the capitol, described with images of jungle plants, is in effect the kind of entity that would at least challenge and perhaps even prevent the plants’ possibilities of existence. In some respects, the looming battle between el Jefe and the rebels is a battle between modernizing projects and ahistorical vegetation.

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 93

Later, after significant progress in the capitol’s construction, another plantrelated event punctuates the narrative: Y, una tarde, las Palmas Reales entraron horizontalmente en la ciudad, acostadas sobre camiones y carromatos, con los penachos barriendo las aceras, levantando el polvo de las calzadas, para ser enraizadas en hoyos profundos, rellenos de tierra negra, granzón y abono. (168) And one afternoon the Royal Palms entered the city, lying horizontally on lorries and wagons with their leaves sweeping the pavements and raising dust from the streets, to be planted in deep pits filled with black earth, grit and manure. (150–51) Palms, as we have seen, are associated in the Caribbean imagination with a regional identity, especially a Cuban national identity. The palms that entered the city were not just any palms, however: they were royal palms. Given their royal status and their association with el Jefe, these palms stand in marked contrast to other forms of vegetation that have not been corrupted by the dictatorship or modified by modernization. El Jefe’s well-ordered palms, for instance, had less expressive capacity than trees elsewhere, even though the former are described in active terms (they “entered the city”). As the nearby volcano threatens to erupt, for example, el Jefe recalls trees before a famous volcanic eruption in Mexico: Los árboles de la región del Paricutín tuvieron miedo, se engrisaron en sus terrores silenciosos, muchas semanas antes de que hacia ellos avanzara, lenta, inexorable, una lava que ya les bullía sordamente bajo las raíces. (255) The trees in the Paricutín region were afraid, turned grey with silent terror, many weeks before the slow, inexorable advance of lava had bubbled with a dull sound round their roots. (228) While Carpentier may occasionally in his writings endow other inanimate objects with a certain degree of affect and agency, plants (especially wild ones) possess these qualities in an abundance paralleled only by humans. To this point I have focused primarily on plant references that are marginal (although not insignificant) to the more pivotal turns in the narrative. Before concluding this chapter with some considerations regarding El recurso del método and hereditarian discourses, I would like to explore how plants and references to them figure in the narratives crucial moments. Some of these references may appear trivial, if not humorous. However, although they may be the latter, they are certainly not the former. El Jefe gradually realizes that there is some substance behind the subversive popular movements. Earlier, however, he had dismissed these movements: ‘“Cosas de utopista vegetariano’—había dicho” (72) (“‘Utopian vegetarian notions,’ he had said” 66). Later, after his military forces brutally kill some of the subversive elements in the population and news of the brutality reach the European press (the only press to

94 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

which he was attentive), el Jefe is able to relax only after news reaches his country that the Great World War had begun: gracias a las expectaciones y entusiasmos promovidos por esta tremenda contienda, la atención de muchos se había desviado hacia sucesos anchos y ajenos. Sosiego y reposo hallaba, por fin, el Primer Magistrado, a la sombra de los cañones en flor. (146) thanks to the expectations and enthusiasms provoked by this amazing war, many people had had their attention diverted to remote events. The Head of State was at last enjoying peace and quiet in the shade of a flowering tree. (131) Indeed, el Jefe is always close (literally and/or figuratively) to some form of vegetation. His peace and quiet, however, is not lasting. While attending an opera, he learns that sugar—the country’s most important plant product—has taken a blow on account of the foreign war: el azúcar de la República había sufrido una pavorosa merma en los hules y pizarras de las Bolsas mundiales. A 23 centavos-libra se pagaba nuestro azúcar cuando Nicoletti-Korman, magnífico demonio, elevaba sus loas al Becerro de Oro. Con el himno norteamericano que suena en el primer acto de Madame Butterfly, descendía a 17.20. Se cotizaba a 11.35 con Thais —’Alejandría, terrible ciudad,’ cantaba Titta Rufo. (205) the sugar-supply of the Republic had suffered an alarming drop compared to rubber and slate in world markets. Our sugar was fetching 23 centavos a pound when Nicoletti-Korman, a magnificent devil, was sending up prayers to the Golden Calf. With the North American anthem in the first act of Madame Butterfly, it fell to 17.20. It was quoted at 11.35 during Thaïs —’Alexandria, terrible cité,’ sang Titta Ruffo. (185) Sugar, having been imported into the Americas, is closely linked historically to modernizing drives.41 As such, it comes as little surprise that this plant would, albeit indirectly, come under attack as the contest between modernity and tradition unfolds in the narrative. Just as plants can assume human characteristics, the process works in the novel in the opposite direction, as well. When el Jefe and el estudiante (a leader of the opposition) meet in the presidential palace, the former laments the youth’s political deviancy: ‘No sabes cuánto lo siento. Un joven tan valioso como tú. Lo peor es que te envidio: si yo tuviese tu edad, estaría con los tuyos. Pero tú no sabes lo que es gobernar estos países. No sabes lo que es arar con un material humano que… ‘La imagen del Primer Magistrado desapareció en un alud de cristales rotos. (243)

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 95

‘You don’t know how sorry I am. Such an estimable young man. The worst of it is that I envy you: if I were your age I should be with your lot. But you don’t know what it’s like governing these countries. You don’t know what it’s like cultivating the soil with human material that… ‘The Head of States reflection vanished in an avalanche of broken glass. (217) A bomb explodes just as el Jefe begins to assess what governing a country entails, in a sense suspending his last words before an explosion damages the palace (even though it does not kill him). Significantly, he sees himself as the order-giving, master planter of his country and his subjects as the fertile material necessary for nation formation. As has been the case with many Latin American tyrants, el Jefe’s reign begins to collapse with dramatic speed. Due to a money crisis, for example, all the public projects he initiated come to a standstill and are reclaimed by the original inhabitants on the land: Abandonadas por sus contratistas, unas edificaciones que no habían pasado de asomar los dientes de leche—incipientes paredes que no alcanzaban una estatura de hombre—eran ya, en todas partes, ruinas de lo no-nato, presencia de lo que no llegó a ser, recurrencia de lo empezado—salones sin techo, escaleras sin remate, columnas involuntariamente pompeyanas—en tanto que las vastas urbanizaciones, repartos, parcelamientos de las afueras, eran reconquistadas por las hierbas bajadas de la montaña: Hierbas que volvían a la Capital con su escolta de campánulas y festivos penachos; y, tras de las Hierbas, las Matas, y tras de las Matas los Palos, los Helechos Arborescentes, las criaturas vegetales del Pronto Andar y del Pronto Crecer, sombreando las menudas rocallas a a donde ya regresaban las Culebras Exiladas para desovar al fresco. (246–47) Abandoned by their contractors, buildings which had not passed the stage of their milk teeth (with incipient walls not yet as high as a man) were to be seen everywhere, ruins of the unborn, presences of what had never existed, permanent beginnings, with roofless drawing rooms, staircases leading nowhere, involuntarily Pompeian columns, while vast urbanizations and building-lots in the outskirts had been reconquered by the plants descending from the mountains—plants returning to the capital with their bells and festive plumes; and behind them shrubs, and behind the shrubs trees and tree ferns, all the seedling vegetation of Quick Advance and Quick Growth, shading the small stones among which exiled snakes were now returning to spawn. (220) What is worse for el Jefe, the sugar mills shut down and other vegetable entities that had previously been involved in modernizing activities begin a gradual reversal toward their natural states:

96 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Aquel año los ingenios azucareros habían suspendido las moliendas antes de tiempo. Dejados a su destino, los árboles caucheros cerraban sus heridas en las marañas de las selvas sureñas. (247) That year the sugar-mills had closed down earlier than usual. Left to their fate, the wounds in the trunks of the rubber trees in the southern jungles healed over. (220–21) Any doubts regarding the outcome of the battle between modernity and tradition are getting resolved: the local vegetation is once again gaining an upper hand. El Jefe, meanwhile, is beginning to suffer in a corresponding manner. According to the narrator, Todo esto iba confinando el Primer Magistrado en una isla, isla con atalayas, miradores, muchas rejas y simétrico adorno de palmas, que era el Palacio Presidencial. (248) All these events kept the Head of State confined within an island, an island with look-out posts and windows, many gates and a symmetrical arrangement of palm trees which was the Presidential Palace. (221) In a sense, perhaps American palms are resistant to ordering (i.e., European) forces. Similarly, despite certain “congenital” affiliations between the two, the America of El recurso del método is radically different than Europe, and social structures that may work in the latter are inappropriate in the former.42 There are many more examples of a convergence in the narrative between plants and people. Primarily through the preceding examples, however, I hope to have demonstrated that in El recurso del método, Latin American/Caribbean history is an epic story told with both human and plant actors to make a very specific argument regarding the relationship between America and Europe, and between the former and modernity. It is an epic not only in its panorama of epoch-making political events, but also in the temporal continuum it traces (both forward and backward) between the modern and the pre- (or a-) historical. People, like plants, are on this continuum and seem in the novel more alike than different. Furthermore, rather than repudiating a genealogical imagination based on hereditarian discourses, the novel treats the heredity motif to a degree that makes it difficult to make such claims. I will close with a remark by el Jefe that stands in revealing counterpoint to Bello’s poem, in which the speaker encouraged American fruits to forget their “mother Spain”: “Estamos perdiendo todo carácter,” he asserts in his fictional world, approximately a century after Bello’s “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” appeared. His reason? “[D]emasiado nos hemos alejado de la Madre España” (252) (“We’re losing our character: We’ve got too far away from our Mother Spain” 225). Whereas in the 1820’s (and, as we saw in Chapter 2, between the 1830’s and 1880’s, as well) the colonies perceived their relationship with Spain in bitter, resentful terms, by the 1920’s, a paradigmatic American tyrant saw in this weakened relationship a reason for his subjects’ tractlessness. Whether or not Carpentier, with his ironic and often satirical inclinations, agrees with el Jefe’s assessment is doubtful. What is less doubtful is

TALKING FLOWERS AND FLOWERING PEOPLE 97

that el Jefe’s attitude—in large part a construct of the intergenerational relations within both plants and people—pervades the novel he inhabits, and ultimately casts a shadow over the appropriateness of what are in effect brutal modernizing schemes. Carpentier uses another Cartesian quotation as an epigraph to the novel’s postscript—a post-script with a lone chapter entitled, quite simply, “1972.” The year in some respects links the events in the novel with the historical moment during which Carpentier wrote. The epigraph, which refers, perhaps, to the relationship between leaders and the masses, also refers (not surprisingly) to plants and heredity: “La enredadera no llega más arriba que los árboles que la sostienen. Descartes. Discurso del método” (340) (“The creeper grows no higher than the trees that support it. Descartes. Discourse on Method” 309). In the end, el Jefe is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery, entombed alongside a vase containing the “sacred soil” from the homeland. What no one knows but Ofelia the daughter, however, was that she had actually taken the dirt from the Parisian “Jardín de Luxemburgo,”43 the final three words in the novel. El Jefe was in the end, perhaps like an exiled transplant, ill-suited to both American and European soil. We have seen through a variety of Caribbean narratives that plants can figure as prominently as people when writers seek to describe (and construct) visions of the region’s history and culture. Although in some instances plants are used in juxtaposition to people in order to achieve a specific rhetorical effect, the fact that this juxtaposition exists in the first place and that elsewhere plants and people are conflated in various ways suggests that the two terms share certain qualities. Within the context of the dominant (although not unopposed) Caribbean plantation, both plants and people were often reduced to their profit-making potential. Furthermore, Caribbean scientific and fictional writings have described both plants and people—the latter sometimes ironically and sometimes maliciously or speciously—as points along a hereditarian continuum involving intergenerational relationships. This continuum, in turn, can have (depending on the author) varying degrees of malleability. Ultimately, it is my contention that the curious relationship between plants and people in Caribbean narrative should be read in light of Caribbean writers’ repeated efforts to describe and/or debunk the weight of hereditarian discourses on the region’s collective imaginary. Caribbean writers, however, do not need to involve plants when they are wrestling with the weight of these discourses: sometimes the human body suffices.

Chapter Four Bound Bodies: The Struggle in Caribbean Narrative Against Biological Determinism

Ese día se planteó cuál ha sido, es y será la política de la Revolución, una idea esencial y nuestra, y es que la obra de una revolución y la construcción del socialismo es tarea de hombres y mujeres absolutamente libres y absolutamente voluntarios (Aplausos). Quien no tenga genes revolucionarios, quien no tenga sangre revolucionaria, quien no tenga una mente que se adapte al esfuerzo y al heroísmo de una revolución, no los necesitamos en nuestro país. (Exclamaciones de: “¡que se vayan!”). —Fidel Castro1 We set forth the ideas of the revolution, including one of our basic concepts: that the work of a revolution and the building of socialism were tasks for free men and women acting completely voluntarily. (Applause) In our country, we don’t need those who don’t have revolutionary genes, revolutionary blood, minds adapted to the idea of a revolution, and hearts adapted to the effort and heroism of a revolution. (Shouts of ‘Good riddance!’). —“Speech to the Fighting People”2 Los hijos de Yoyotte son muy derechos. Los albinos siempre salen así: o muy derechos o muy torcidos, no hay término medio. —Thierry in Mayra Montero’s Tú, la oscuridad Yoyotte’s children are very upright. Albinos always turn out that way: either very upright or very twisted, there’s no middle ground. —Montero, In the Palm of Darkness My task now involves combining certain elements of the first three chapters in order to explore the interactions between hereditarian discourses and the body, especially (but not exclusively) the human body. My basic contention is that in the case of several narratives and other types of writings from the Caribbean, authors thematize both the perceived “weight” of biological, hereditary

BOUND BODIES 99

determinism, as well as autochthonous struggles by narrative artists and cultural theorists to resist and overcome this weight. As such, an emphasis on biological determinism in many respects amounts to the analysis of a specific, salient understanding on the body and its relationship—in particular its sexual or reproductive relationship—to other bodies: in a sense, bodies in many Caribbean texts are “discursive” insofar as they play prominent and sometimes unusual roles; they are additionally discursive in their being linked to several layers of meaning, one of which involves perceptions that these bodies are somehow reduced to their hereditary, intergenerational relationships with other bodies. That such an understanding on the body is the object of resistance on the part of Caribbean writers at the very least suggests that this understanding, one that may implicitly validate biological determinism, is an inadequate or erroneous one. As Judith Butler shows in Bodies that Matter (1993), we cannot divorce bodies from how we understand them, or more precisely, from how we articulate them in social contexts. Furthermore, such understandings and articulations necessarily invoke cultural values of one sort or another. To the extent that this chapter analyzes how Caribbean authors address a tendency to valorize certain kinds of bodies over others, I share Butler’s interest in the nexus between the body and discursivity (even if I am reluctant to proclaim the complete discursivity of bodies). Our projects differ, however, in that I am interested not so much in showing the necessary discursivity of bodies but in surveying how authors confront the possibility of the literal, non-discursive, physical existence of bodies: a hereditary, biological realm that is particularly threatening to human freedom and resistance inasmuch as it also wields the discursive agency of which Butler writes. Debates on corporal discursivity notwithstanding, the body carries unique meanings in a Caribbean context: meanings that can seem contradictory when taken collectively and that sometimes—as is the case in the Castro speech in this chapter’s epigraph—seem to clash within a single oration: these remarks, uttered in the wake of the 1980 Mariel boatlift in which Castro sent thousands of alleged Cuban escoria (“undesirables”: in effect those who opposed or seemed to oppose his regime) to Florida, register the curious tension between freedom and physical determinacy. After all, one cannot know from Castro’s speech if a revolutionary spirit is the mark of “free men and women” or if this spirit is really in the genes: given the speech’s rhetorical attempt to unify the populace, this spirit attests simultaneously to both freedom and determinism. And to neither one. It is to this type of discursive tension that the present chapter is dedicated. Of particular interest here are Ana Lydia Vega’s short story, “Otra maldad de Pateco” (1983), and Mayra Montero’s novel, Tú, la oscuridad (1995), both of which devote considerable textual space to bodies and matters that concern them. One of the more important matters that both Vega and Montero address is the discourse on “race.” This discourse invokes hereditarian language insofar as it uses the latters logic to arrive at its various reified categories of body types. These categories (based on a person’s percentage of PreColumbian, European, or African ancestry) have dominated Caribbean thought about the self, especially during the

100 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

era of slavery. If there was a Caribbean person, then there was almost always a racial category ascribed to that person within (as Claudette Williams has so effectively phrased it) the “pigmentocracy” that is the Caribbean.3 Racial classification during the colonial history of the Americas in general and the Caribbean in particular has been well documented and analyzed, and I will only cite a few passages that illustrate it. William Lawrence (1783–1867), for example, argued within the context of the island of Jamaica during the first quarter of the nineteenth century that Europeans and Tercerons produce Quarterons and Quadroons (ochavones, octavones, or alvinos [sic]), which are not to be distinguished from whites; but they are not entitled, in Jamaica at least, to the same legal privileges as the Europeans or the white Creoles, because there is still a contamination of dark blood, although no longer visible. It is said to betray itself sometimes in a relic of the peculiar smell of the great-grandmother.4 The preceding passage is disturbing, at least to the contemporary reader, for a couple of reasons: first, in the way it describes how the human body (particularly if far enough genealogically removed from being “white” or “European”) in a slave society is imagined in terms of a variable number of parts. Lawrence, in his capacity of lecturer to the British Royal College of Surgeons, uses language remarkably reminiscent of the taxonomic language that was capturing the scientific imagination both in Europe and in the Caribbean. The passage disturbs, however, for the additional reason that in it we see an example of an outlandish hereditary conception of the human body, given that—according to Lawrence— a certain kind of body is able to transmit something as ephemeral as its scent across the generations. More recently, Eric Williams has explained the surprising degree of categorizing detail imposed on “bodies” subject to the plantation: Such intelligent men as Père du Tertre in the seventeenth century and Moreau de Saint Méry in the eighteenth lent themselves to all the colonial absurdities of apartheid. The former asserted that mulattoes, like mules, could not reproduce their kind. The latter solemnly reproduced all the gradations of miscegenation which the planters produced from their game of ‘washing their blackamoors white’—that is the planter slept with his daughter and his granddaughter and so on, through all the grades of incest.5 In fact, Moreau de Saint-Méry—in order “to make himself clear to his readers,” divided the human body into 128 “parts,” each of which was more closely approximated to either to a “purely” white or “purely” black ancestor. For example, according to him (and to the racial discourse prevalent in the Caribbean during the late eighteenth century on which he bases his observations) a white mother and a black father (or black mother and white father) produce a mulatto,

BOUND BODIES 101

who has 64 “black” parts and an equal number of “white” parts.6 Other combinations are not nearly as symmetrical: a “sacatra” has between 8 and 16 parts of the white and a corresponding number of the black, while a “griffe” has between 23 and 39 parts of the white (Moreau 82). Taken collectively, perceptions of mulattoes and mestizaje during the colonial period were characterized by a curious tension, for while historians like Père du Tertre (1610–1687) asserted that mulattoes were infertile, others, like Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) argued that “no Negro race is seen as the initiator of a civilisation. Only when it is mixed with some other can it be initiated into one.”7 Which is it? Is mestizaje a path with no exit or is it the only true beginning? Indeed, finding the answer to the dilemma is as impossible as these hereditarian discourses are invalid (although no less influential in their time). The preceding discussion should make clear (perhaps Sommer is right after all) that there seems to be no end to what can be done discursively or taxonomically with the human body: during the colonial period in Hispanic America and in the Hispanic Caribbean there existed, according to Robert Young (who in turn counted the number of terms in Manuel Alvar’s Léxico del mestizaje en Hispanoamérica), at least 128 words in Spanish alone for different combinations of mixed races.8 Obviously, such lexicons in particular and racial discourse as a whole in the Caribbean, can be separated neither from the sugar plantation nor from European science and colonialism. It was, after all, European colonizers who introduced sugar to the region in the fifteenth century9 and it was also they (with the help of European scientific theories) who, in the interest of profit, constructed distinct racial categories to keep the labor pool intact and subjugated. In his history of Jamaica (1774) Edward Long (1734–1813)—like Lawrence—a British colonial in Jamaica, asked the following taxonomical question with regard to slaves on plantations: “When we reflect on the nature of these men, and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude, that they are of a different species of the same genus?”10 We can only guess as to whether or not Long actually thought he was practicing “pure” science in reaching his conclusion. In any event, as Eric Williams points out, “Long’s anthropological adumbrations were obviously not divorced from the substantial profits that he was making from his sugar plantations” (210). It is impossible to overestimate the force racial categorization had on the associations that surrounded the categorized person. These associations had—to list only a few—their legal and behavioristic implications. With respect to the differences between blacks and whites in a colonial Cuban context, for example, Verena Martinez-Alier contends that when assessments of “phenotypes,” i.e., appearances, were insufficient, “legal colour was resorted to instead.”11 Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Cuban literature often portrayed the “crimeprone” mulatta in peculiar ways: according to Vera Kutzinski, for example, the literary portrayals of the mulatta are “saliently contradictory’ given their “symbolic privileging of a socially underprivileged group defined by its mixed race or phenotype, its gender, and its imputed licentious sexuality. In the case of

102 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

the mulatta, high symbolic or cultural visibility contrasts sharply with social invisibility.”12 Not only is the literary mulatta a “woman of unbridled sexuality, of amoral behavior: lazy, a lover of disorder and excessive entertainment, ambitious and opportunistic,” in some cases she exhibits “a tendency to venereal or mental diseases—a product of her [supposed] inferior and impure racial condition.”13 Needless to say, questions of purity necessarily involve intergenerational views on the body, for it would be, presumably, after a given number of generations that a body would acquire a certain degree of “impurity.”14 We see such dynamics in a conversation between two “white” girls in a poem by the Barbadian Slade Hopkinson: “Besides, his grandfather’s coloured—Only last week I found out. I couldn’t tell Daddy. It’s shameful. But while you were away I met another fellow. —This ones pure.”15 While Hopkinson’s passage registers a concern on the part of white girls (or, perhaps, girls who conceived themselves as such) attempting to identify the ethnicity of potential mates—a process that for them also entails identifying the ethnicity of the latter’s ancestors—one by no means has to be white to struggle with concerns like those in Hopkinson’s passage. Furthermore, fiction is not the only vehicle for expressing such struggles. Frantz Fanon, for instance, a Francophone Martinican psychiatrist, wrote the following series of personal observations (like Hopkinson, also during the first half of the 1950’s) with regard to the eugenicist tendencies in the European social sciences of the mid-twentieth century: After much reluctance, the scientists had conceded that the Negro was a human being; in vivo and in vitro the Negro had been proved analogous to the white man: the same morphology, the same histology…. That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me…. In the abstract there was agreement: The Negro is a human being. That is to say, amended the less firmly convinced, that like us he has his heart on the left side. But on certain points the white man remained intractable. Under no conditions did he wish any intimacy between the races, for it is a truism that ‘crossings between widely different races can lower the physical and mental level… Until we have a more definite knowledge of the effect of race-crossings we shall certainly do best to avoid crossings between widely different races.’ …My chromosomes were supposed to have a few thicker or thinner genes representing cannibalism. In addition to sex-linked, the scholars had now discovered the racial-linked. What a shameful science!16 Indeed, calling eugenics (which, although based on genetic science, is nothing if not biased) a science is giving it too much credit.17 Fanon makes it clear through his reference to chromosomes that the human body operates at multiple levels within a scientific framework. In other words, the body is not just the body but, for a variety of signifying purposes, can be divided into component parts that are meaningful to scientific discourses much more recent than those deployed by Père

BOUND BODIES 103

du Tertre and Moreau de Saint Méry: namely chromosomes and—even smaller than chromosomes—genes, both of which flow in the blood. WRITTEN IN BLOOD: “OTRA MALDAD DE PATECO” AND OTHER CARIBBEAN TALES Indeed, it is worth noting that it is perhaps in their treatment of blood18 that Caribbean narratives have most poignantly registered hereditarian discourses and the power they exert in society.19 As such, in my view it is crucial to pay close attention to the flow of blood. By “flow of blood” I mean a number of things. First, in quite a literal sense, I mean bloodshed resulting from physical violence and/or injury. Admittedly, it is usually of little surprise when bloodshed marks a turning point in a narrative. A less obvious meaning of “flow of blood” but one that is at least as important as the first one is understanding this phrase in terms of its undertones of heredity and kinship, i.e., with respect to which ethnic groups are represented in conjugal relationships, or which couple or potential couple is met with some sort of opposition due to a socially unacceptable combination of ethnicities. Of additional importance to narratives is whether or not children from these unacceptable unions are acknowledged or unacknowledged by either or both parents. Lastly, the interactions between hereditarian and narrative discourses in the Caribbean govern the following occasional event in narratives: the birth of children who, rather than resembling the parents, resemble in pigmentation or demeanor more distant ancestors. We shall soon see that in the case “Otra maldad de Pateco,” the protagonist is unusual in that he seems to differ genetically from his ancestors. Although hereditarian discourses far from determine how Caribbean narratives will unfold, they can serve as an avenue toward a different understanding of why they unfold as they do and they suggest ways in which paths for the narrative may be limited. As is the case in a rigid plantation society, these limits serve as barriers that are not often transgressed. Some narratives—“Otra maldad de Pateco” being a prime example—transgress these barriers by flouting the “laws” of genetics. By the late sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers “adopted race distinctions based upon blood,”20 however rudimentary such distinctions may have been in comparison to contemporary scientific discourses that reject such distinctions. In the nineteenth century, Oswald Spengler made the following mystical remarks concerning the blood, which for him is the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and time…21

104 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Whereas Spengler’s views on blood—despite his opposition to the Nazis—must be understood within the racially charged context of Interwar Europe, blood became—for better or worse—emblematic of a Caribbean, and in particular, an Afro-Caribbean identity. Fanon once again provides a personal, existential account: I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I…. I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational. And how my voice vibrates! (Fanon 123) The irrational, Fanon proceeds to explain (or perhaps lament), is a language written in red ink—a language, no less, accessible seemingly only to those whose blood can be traced back to Africa: Eyah! the tom-tom chatters out the cosmic message. Only the Negro has the capacity to convey it, to decipher its meaning, its import…. Blood! Blood! … Birth! Ecstasy of becoming! Three-quarters engulfed in the confusions of the day, I feel myself redden with blood. The arteries of all the world, convulsed, torn away, uprooted, have turned toward me and fed me. (124– 25) Leon Damas, a French Guianan poet and one of the early exponents of the négritude movement, also uses the blood to describe feelings of inadequacy in a white-dominated society. The speaker in his “Solde” (1937; un solde is a balance), from his collection of poems entitled—appropriately enough—Pigments, puts the matter bluntly: J’ai l’impression d’être ridicule parmi eux complice parmi eux souteneur parmi eux égorgeur les mains effroyablement rouges du sang de leur ci-vi-li-sa-tion22 I feel I am ridiculous among them an accomplice among them a pimp, among them a murderer my hands terrifyingly red with the blood of their ci-vi-li-za-tion The blood on the speakers hands may not be his own, but it is blood nonetheless (or is at least described as such), and serves to establish his anxiety before a rigid,

BOUND BODIES 105

racially dichotomous society. Furthermore, “Solde,” like many contemporaneous Caribbean writings, suggests that underneath civilization and its manifold abstractions (regardless of whether these abstractions valorize or ridicule Black culture) flows human blood, a substance that can be both material and figurative. “Otra maldad de Pateco,”23 by the Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega, is a short story that addresses all of these issues. Vega’s short story is incredibly rich and complex in the many questions it poses regarding the function of heredity as a cultural symbol, particularly in terms of the roles of the blood, the body, and racial categorizations in constructions of personal identity; these questions, in turn, are germane not only to issues surrounding Puerto Rican identity, but—significantly —to those surrounding the identity of the Caribbean as a whole. The story opens with a couple of epigraphs. The first is (according to a brief indication provided by the author) a poem rooted in Puerto Rican folklore. Like many Caribbean writings, this poem tells of an inter-ethnic romance (one in which the color white is nowhere to be found): El negro José Clemente Perdidamente se enamoró En el río de la Plata De la mulata María Laó The black José Clemente/Fell madly in love/At the River de la Plata/With the mulatta María Laó As is the case with this epigraph, race and passion figure prominently in Vega’s story. In fact, she grounds “Otra maldad de Pateco” in the story of José Clemente’s infatuation for María Laó. Vega does, however, make some slight (but highly significant) alterations to the folktale: while María Laó remains a mulata in Vega’s story, José Clemente’s skin color is not as easily determined. In many respects, the story revolves around this Indeterminacy. The second epigraph is taken from Luis Palés Matos’s poem, “Falsa canción de Baquiné” (“False Wake for a Black Boy”):24 Papá Ogún, dios de la guerra Que tiene botas con betún Y cuando anda tiembla la tierra… Papá Ogún, god of war/Who has polished boots/And when he walks the earth shakes According to the glossary in Tuntún de pasa y grifería, a collection of which “Falsa canción de baquiné” is a part, Ogún belongs to the Haitian vodoun pantheon. This is significant for at least two reasons: first, it anticipates the important role magic (in particular Afro-Caribbean magic) and supernatural forces play in “Otra maldad

106 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

de Pateco.” Second, it reflects the influence Palés Matos’s poetry may have had on Vega’s narrative style. According to Aníbal González, “en todos los cuentos de Encancaranublado…hallamos de hecho un diálogo que a veces se torna en abierta polémica con ese patriarca de la poesía puertorriqueña y con su discurso patriarcal”25 (“In all the stories of Encancaranublado…we find a dialogue that at times becomes an open polemic with that patriarch of Puerto Rican poetry [Palés Matos] and with his patriarchal discourse”). The dialogue that González locates between the two writers must involve the affinity both have with African traditions in the Caribbean. The more polemical (or contestatory) interaction between the writers is more difficult to locate, because one must first identify the patriarchal aspects of Palés Matos’s poetry (discounting —momentarily, at least—the possibility that Palés Matos’s writing is patriarchal merely because he wrote during an era characterized by a dominant patriarchal social order). González very well may be referencing poems by Palés Matos like “Mulata Antilla,” in which the speaker likens the Caribbean to a mulatto woman and (in certain instances of the poem) her body: Todos los frutos ¡oh mulata! Tú me brindas en la clara bahía de tu cuerpo por soles del trópico bruñida…26 Every fruit, oh mulatta, you offer me, in that luminous bay your body burnished by tropic suns…27 Vega’s stories, then, can be seen as a response to writings like Páles Matos’s that, at one interpretative level, perhaps, idealize the Caribbean woman by objectifying her body or, more probably, personify the Caribbean as woman. How, we might ask, does Vega envision the human body? If “Otra maldad de Pateco” is any indication, the answer must be: in terms that challenge common notions of what having a body entails. We know from the Introduction that “Otra maldad de Pateco” is the story of a Puerto Rican child (José Clemente) who is born with a white body and a black head. This “mutation,” moreover, occurs in the context of a highly race-conscious colonial plantation system: José Clemente’s mother, for example, is a member of the Montero family, who in turn own a “próspero ingenio azucarero. Veinticinco esclavos negros se estostuzaban de sol a sol para cebarle la panza y el bolsillo a la familia” (Vega 107) (“prosperous sugar mill. Twenty-five black slaves toiled from sun to sun to fill the family’s bellies and pocket-book”). Before giving birth to José Clemente, however, Doña Amalia had no inkling as to what lay ahead: the trickster, Pateco Patadecabro, “siempre travieso y burlón, quiso jugarle una broma gorda a los Montero. Y con el sí de los dioses africanos, metió la pezuña delantera en tinta china, se la espolvoreó con harina de trigo y cantó desentonado” (107)

BOUND BODIES 107

(“Pateco Patadecabro, always mischievous and mocking, wanted to play a practical joke on the Montero. And with the approval of the African gods, he put his hoof into Chinese ink, sprinkled wheat flour on it, and sang off-key”). His incantation, in which the colors black and white switch back and forth, causes José Clemente to be born both black and white. Before moving toward an analysis of this birth and its consequences, the character of Pateco warrants a closer look. Augustus Puleo explains that the “Yoruba Eshu’s, or Elegbara’s, tricksterism and sexuality appear to have been taken on by the spirits Gede in Haiti and Pateco in Puerto Rico.”28 That an African deity would have been incorporated by various folklore traditions across the Caribbean is an observation that resonates closely with the similarities González finds between Vega and Palés Matos. Puleo adds that Pateco helps Vega express her Africa-based vision of the Caribbean: “As a spirit of both death and sexuality, Pateco connects Puerto Ricans to their extended family, reaching back to African ancestors and forward to future descendants” (22). Rafael Falcón provides additional insight into how Pateco functions in a Puerto Rican social context. His remarks are also useful because they shed light on why Pateco himself has an unusual body (Patadecabro, Pateco’s second name, translates roughly into “goat’s feet or goat’s legs): Pateco es un personaje del folklore boricua, el cual se asocia con la travesura y el ser víctima de una situación difícil. Por tal razón cuando alguien está en aprietos se escuchan las siguientes expresiones: ‘Se lo llevó Pateco’ y ‘Se lo comió Pateco.’ Indudablemente el personaje proviene de los sátiros, los semidioses de la mitología griega, quienes tenían cuerpo de ser humano y algunas características animalescas tales como cuernos, patas de cabra y largas orejas.29 Pateco is a character from Puerto Rican folklore who is associated with trickery and with people falling victim to difficult situations. For this reason when someone is in trouble one hears the following expressions: ‘Pateco took him’ and ‘Pateco ate him.’ Undoubtedly the character originates from satyrs, the demigods of Greek mythology, who had a human body and certain animal qualities like horns, goat legs and large ears. Falcon, however, does not comment on the implications Pateco’s body (or the story’s treatment of the body in general) has given its Caribbean context. Instead he focuses on Pateco’s origins in classical mythology (a path whose exploration could yield interesting results), even though Pateco was empowered by African, not Greek, gods. María Zielina, meanwhile, foregrounds the importance of location in the story, particularly insofar as Vega’s use of location effectively reflects the multiple cultural forces (her study emphasizes African influences) that converge in the Caribbean. Although Zielina does not make the link between Vega and Palés Matos, according to her, Vega’s use of language is crucial to her conception of cultural plurality in the Caribbean. The terms she uses, in fact, bring

108 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

to mind not Palés Matos, but Edouard Glissant and Fernando Ortiz. She argues that in the story, el eje cultural de la creolización se refuerza a través de la transculturación y de la estructura lingüística, esta última con el uso del lenguaje bozal y de las jitanjáforas. Son aparentes los ejemplos de esta estructura en la descripción de los esclavos, las referencias a la región, en la imagen de la creaci6n del mundo.30 the cultural axis of creolization is strengthened through transculturation and the linguistic structure, the latter with the use of creole language and of invented words with musical qualities. This structure is exemplified in the description of the slaves, references to the region, in the image of the creation of the world. Neither Zielina nor other commentators of “Otra maldad de Pateco,” however, has adequately examined the central role of the body in this story. After all, Pateco’s maldad or misdeed was to cause José Clemente to be born with a body that would ultimately shock his mother and thereby disrupt the continuity of the plantation system. In a sense, Vega’s story recounts a violation of the “laws” of genetics; furthermore, this violation has important implications for Caribbean cultural identity. At the moment of José Clemente’s birth, for instance, Doña Amalia exclaims, ‘¡Sáquenme ese monstruo de aquí!’… Y se puso más blanca que Blanca Nieves cuando la comadrona le aseguró que se trataba nada menos que de su legítimo y tan esperado primogénito, el cual, por esas trampas misteriosas de la vida, había nacido con el cuerpo blanco y la cabeza negra (108). ‘Take this monster out of me!’… And she became more pale than Snow White when the midwife assured her that this involved nothing less than that her legitimate and so highly-awaited first-born, due to the mysterious whims of life, had been born with a white body and a black head. Particularly captivating in this passage are the midwife’s assurances to Doña Amalia that the child’s “monstrous” body may nonetheless have been in keeping with some natural, albeit inexplicable, life occurrence, i.e., a “freak” of nature. Obviously, both characters are unaware of Pateco’s curse. In addition, these colonial-era characters would also have been unaware of scientific genetics, the field that attempts to unravel the mysteries behind the transmission of physical traits. A “hereditarian” imagination or sensibility has permeated even preMendelian scientific and pseudo-scientific, eugenicist thinking. In his Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle (1847–50), for instance, Prosper Lucas

BOUND BODIES 109

described what at the time were the four “types” of heredity, summarized recently by Laura Otis: (1) direct, causing the appearance of parents’ traits in the offspring; (2) indirect, causing the appearance of aunts’ and uncles’ traits in the offspring; (3) atavistic, causing the appearance of ancestors’ traits in the offspring; and (4) influential, causing the appearance of the mother’s former lovers’ traits in the offspring.31 Although only the first three types currently have any scientific validity, José Clemente’s particular case of physical inheritance (a result of a magical incantation rather than a genetic transmission) seems to have little to do with any of Lucas’s types. In this way, Pateco’s curse seems to ignore genetics (even loosely scientific and/or archaic definitions thereof) and override the presumed constraints of biological determinism. Doña Amalia’s shock upon the birth of José Clemente is of additional interest in its reference to a different kind of transmission: the transmission of economic and political power from one generation of plantation owners to the next. In this respect, José Clemente’s birth is of particular importance to the Montero family, given that he is legitimate (i.e., he is the result of a socially and/or religiously sanctioned reproductive act) and also, but just as importantly, a first-born son: José Clemente should have been the primary recipient of the family’s wealth; furthermore, it would have eventually fallen on his shoulders to ensure the Montero’s continued reproductive (and financial) viability. The baby, however— despite his apparent health and vitality—is rejected by the family. From Doña Amalia’s perspective, ¿Qué tenía que ver esta bestia bicolor con sus jinchísimas carnes, rubias melechas y azul sangre azul [sic] heredada de Castilla la Vieja? ¿Qué dirían las encopetadas damas y distinguidos caballeros criollos en el bautizo del exotiquísimo recién nacido? (108) What did this bi-color beast have to do with her fine flesh, blond hair, and blue blood inherited from old Castilla? What would the grand ladies and distinguished creole [in the sense of being born in the Americas of European parents] gentlemen say at the exotic newborn’s baptism? The answer to the first question is, quite obviously, a lot: José Clemente is Doña Amalia’s son, even if he does not share all her outward physical features and cannot —in superficial terms, anyway—claim her exact lineage of blood. The second question can be answered in two ways: first, in hypothetical terms, the ladies and gentlemen would—at the sight of José Clemente—more than likely have been as shocked as Doña Amalia. In terms of the narrated events of the story, however, the actual answer to the second question is a resounding “Nothing,” because there have no baptism or any other ceremony to introduce and legitimate the newborn

110 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

before the wealthy plantation society. Instead, they give him to Cristóbal, a slave, who is asked to take the baby and abandon him in the woods. Cristóbal, in turn, gives the baby to Mamá Ochú, a medicine woman well versed in African traditions. Throughout his youth, Mamá Ochú shelters José Clemente in her tiny house and the latter is almost entirely unaware of the world outside the walls of their house. For lack of a better way of addressing his skin color (“Mamá Ochú no supo cómo decirle la verdad” 109), she leads him to believe that he is entirely white. One day, however, he ventures away from home and sees María Laó: after she flees from him in fright, he sits next to a river to cry and grows even more disturbed when he sees that “no tenía ni los ojos azules ni el pelo amarillo” (110) (“he had neither blue eyes nor blond hair”). It is then that Ogún appears. When José Clemente asks Ogún to restore his skin color, the latter answers cryptically, “Entre los tuyos está” tu color: cuando seas uno ya no serás dos” (111) (“Among your own is your color: when you become one you will no longer be two”). José Clemente is at a loss on how to interpret the riddle until he has to decide which group to rescue first from a fire at the plantation: the wealthy landowners or the slaves in the barracks. He chooses the latter. The following morning Mamá Ochú found José Clemente with “machete en mano, seguido de su gente, con el cuerpo tan negro como la cabeza y una sonrisa cimarrona en los labios” (113) (“machete in hand, followed by his people, with his body as black as his head and the smile of a fugitive slave on his lips”). In many respects, the story of José Clemente’s rise to a position of leadership is also the story of a contest of bodies: after becoming “one” in color by becoming entirely Black, he finds himself a leader among the people who accepted him unconditionally, and the price to pay is the physical destruction of those who had initially rejected him for superficial reasons. It is in its recounting of José Clemente’s metamorphosis that “Otra maldad de Pateco” registers the importance of the body as a locus of discursivity in narratives, as well as ways in which bodies are valued in a plantation society, for a number of reasons sometimes involving the hereditary transmission of financial wealth and physical characteristics. Furthermore, Vega’s story invokes but ultimately defeats the constraints of biological determinism in that José Clemente—although born of white parents without, presumably, any African lineage—is for magical reasons at first partly and later completely “black.” Through this defeat, the story suggests (granted, in what could strike some readers as a transparent case of the rhetorical use of a racial or ethnic essentialism) that Puerto Rico should look to Africa and its traditions for its national identity, rather than toward a white-dominated plantation heritage. VODOUN VERSUS SCIENCE: DISCOURSES OF HEREDITY AND THE BODY’S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN TÚ, LA OSCURIDAD Like “Otra maldad de Pateco,” Mayra Montero’s Tú, la oscuridad (1995)—a novel in which the author provides her own interpretation of Haitian society and its

BOUND BODIES 111

interaction with the outside world—also addresses heredity and the role of the body in debates regarding Caribbean identity. Given that Montero was born in Cuba, spent her youth there, currently resides in Puerto Rico, while her novel is set mostly in Haiti, Tú, la oscuridad would seem to contain the basic “ingredients” for a broad, Pan-Caribbean perspective on the body and formulations of cultural identity. Briefly, Tú, la oscuridad is the story of a North American herpetologist (Victor Grigg) sent to Haiti by a senior member of his discipline in order to locate a specimen of a vanishing species of frog known in Haiti as the grenouille du sang (blood frog). Victor’s fictional mission parallels in several respects the kind of exploratory mission Alexander von Humboldt took in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century: Victor, like Humboldt, is intent on implementing the scientific method as he pursues the coveted frog, known in taxonomic terms as Eleutherodactylus sanguineus. At least two more “scientific” associations surround Victor as a fictional character type. First, he is from Indiana, a state that may recall the best-known scientific adventurer (in contemporary popular culture, at least), Indiana Jones: a researcher who braved any assignment, no matter the danger or exoticity of the locale. Furthermore, Victor is also the first name of Frankenstein, a man who—in the scientific tradition of which Victor Grigg is a part—embodies science gone awry. Significantly, both Victors are obsessed—each in his own way—with a kind of body. Victor Grigg’s personal assistant, Thierry Adrien, a Haitian national knowledgeable in both vodoun32 and modern science, had learned rudimentary research techniques from another foreigner who had visited the island earlier. These techniques include distinguir una rana de otra a partir de la voz, del color y del tamaño; de las líneas dorsales, o de las manchas en el vientre. Le mostró cómo atra-parlas sin machucarlas demasiado, cómo medirlas y averiguar si había membrana entre los dedos, si tenían lengua, o por casualidad cargaban con sus huevos.33 [to] tell one [frog] from the other according to voice, color, and size, their dorsal stripes or the spots on their bellies. He showed him how to trap the animals without bruising them too much, how to measure them and find out if there was a membrane between their toes, if they had a tongue, or happened to be carrying eggs.34 In passages like the preceding we can begin to gauge the degree to which discussions of bodies (in particular highly specific ways of understanding bodies) and body parts pervade the novel. The body in many respects is in Tú, la oscuridad a highly charged and contested battleground between two discourses usually considered mutually exclusive: modern science and vodoun. These discourses, however, coincide in some very revealing ways in the novel.

112 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Lacking in the available criticism on the novel is any intertextual reference to Palés Matos: a dearth that surprises me given this poet’s stature not only in Puerto Rico but elsewhere in the Caribbean. I am thinking, in particular, of his poems “Canción festiva para ser llorada” and “Falsa canción de baquiné,” both of which appear in his collection Tuntún de pasa y grifería; the latter poem, we saw, has a significant bearing on “Otra maldad de Pateco.” In “Canción festiva para ser llorada,” the speaker mentions distinguishing characteristics of several Caribbean islands. Haiti, for instance, Es el vodú. La tremenda hora del zombí y la rana Sobre los cañaverales Los espíritus trabajan. (Tuntún 122–23) [is] voodoo. The power hour of zombies and frogs. Over the cane fields spirits are at work.35 Indeed, frogs, zombies, and vodoun all figure prominently in Tú, la oscuridad. Meanwhile, in “Falsa canción de baquiné,” the speaker prays the following on behalf of a dead boy: Y a la Guinea su zombí vuelva… -Coquí, cocó, cucú, cacá- (Tuntún 130). And to Guinea may his zombie return…/-Coquí, cocó, cucú, cacáWith reference to the first line, the (perhaps accidental) intertextual relationship involves Thierry tracing his ancestry and traditions back to Guinea. Any connection involving the second line is more difficult to identify, particularly given that Palés Matos describes the words in this line as “voces onomatopéyicas negras” (Tuntún de pasa y grifería 219) (“black onomatopoeic voices”), which suggests that they were chosen by the author for their sound rather than for any referential qualities. It seems significant, however, that coquí is also the name for several varieties of a singing, inch-long tree-frog found only in Puerto Rico, and one that has become a popular emblem for the island and its islanders.36 The final term, cacá, resembles a Spanish slang word for feces, a substance that—as we shall see—also figures strongly in the novel. Notwithstanding the correlation between Tú, la oscuridad and Tuntún de pasa y grifería, Montero places her novel within a context informed by her dual interests in amphibians and Haiti. With respect to the latter, she explains: In the 80’s, my contact with the Haitian community in Puerto Rico—which was made up for the most part of university professors and researchers— opened my eyes to a world I knew nothing about; the voodoo religion.

BOUND BODIES 113

Because of my Cuban origins, I had experienced Afro-Caribbean religions, especially Santería, and I knew quite a bit about most of the orishas, or gods of the Yoruba tradition…. I became friendly with several anthropologists, traveled many times to the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and visited the huts of the Haitian laborers who work (and suffer), harvesting sugar cane in the Dominican Republic.37 Her interest in Haiti merges in Tú, la oscuridad with her interest in amphibians: A few years ago I read an article about the decline of amphibians and reptiles in the New York Times Magazine. I developed an interest in the subject and contacted several Puerto Rican herpetologists who confirmed, in fact, that several species of small frogs have disappeared from Puerto Rico. That’s how I got the idea for a novel about a North American herpetologist who goes to Haiti in search of a frog that is thought to be almost extinct. (Montero 2000, 90) Her combination in the novel of her interests in Haiti and in amphibians is a peculiar one that requires some commentary. We can surmise, however, that these two entities occupy narrative realms that are not always separate, particularly insofar as in the novel descriptions of amphibians in Haiti also involve accounts of other kinds of bodies that, like the grenouille du sang, face the threat of extinction. In “Silence, Voodoo, and Haiti in Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness” Ángel A.Rivera combines deconstruction and post-colonial discourse in arguing that Tú, la oscuridad is “based on the literary strategy denominated as rhetoric of silence. In Montero’s novel the strategy gives voice to the suppressed Other.”38 Rivera distinguishes between characters in the novel who speak mostly from a North American or European perspective (this list is headed by the herpetologist Victor) and those characters who speak from an Afro-Caribbean perspective (primarily Thierry). The latter, he claims, deploy a rhetoric of silence: a rhetoric that asserts that silence can be the loudest form of communication. Rivera argues, for example, that in the novel, Thierry “has the mission to incorporate in his personal narrative the voices of those who are in danger of being obliterated.” While I have several points of disagreement with Rivera’s reading (stemming primarily from his difficulties proving and exemplifying in the text something as slippery as a “rhetoric of silence,” as well as my disagreements with the basic divisions he draws between the silent and their supposed opposites), I agree with it on a certain level: in the novel, somebody, or indeed, some bodies are communicating meanings in unusual ways. Whereas Rivera focuses on the silence (a silence that is paradoxically not silent), my reading of Tú, la oscuridad emphasizes the meanings surrounding the several kinds of signifying bodies that are in fact present in the narrative. Only some of these bodies are human bodies, and not all of them function in the novel in their entirety as whole bodies:

114 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

sometimes body parts or body products assume what I consider a heightened significance. While some of the creatures in the novel do, as Rivera indicates, face the danger of extinction, a more comprehensive reading must, in my opinion, take into account not only the theme of the extinction of bodies, but also ways in which they are involved in the negotiation of meaning, not to mention dynamics of power involving bodies (i.e., who best controls bodies in the first place?). Rivera provides a fruitful account of the beginning of Tú, la oscuridad. He explains that the novel begins with Victor being invited by a Harvard herpetologist called Vaughn Patterson to search for the eleutherodactylus sanguineus. As in the novel written by Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, the white scientist receives the distinction and honor of being asked to conduct this search. There is, in fact, no mention of a connection between Patterson and Harvard: the narrative indicates repeatedly that he is Australian with a laboratory in Adelaide. Furthermore, although in certain respects it is “novelistic,” The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) is the “non-fictional” chronicle of a journey Davis actually undertook. Nonetheless, the two texts share basic similarities like the ones Rivera identifies: both scientists are North American, both receive their respective assignments in the United States, and both travel to Haiti where they must navigate through several layers of cultural barriers (involving, in both cases, vodoun) in order to accomplish their missions. Lastly, at one point in his investigation, Davis considers toads as a possible ingredient in the zombification potion. The differences between the two texts, however, are manifold, not the least of which being that Victor does not live to tell about his trip: instead, the narrative consists in his research notes (which are often of a personal nature), transcriptions of taped conversations he had with Thierry, and intermittent scientific—i.e., impersonal— accounts of declining frog populations. The narrative gives a substantial amount of textual space to descriptions of bodies, their parts, and their processes. The following reading will attempt to show that informing such descriptions is a contest over the body between science (personified mostly by Victor) and vodoun (personified in the novel by Haitian society as a whole and in some respects by Thierry; significantly, Thierry does not reject—and in fact participates in39—modern science). Each of these discourses has different ways of understanding the body and throughout the novel we gain glimpses of how these understandings differ. Above all, the novel leaves us with questions regarding which discourse is most masterful in its explanation of the body: for example, are the explanations of science and vodoun mutually exclusive? If so, which is right? Is it possible that neither is right? In the midst of these questions, there is—in some form or fashion—one constant throughout the novel: the body. The preceding clarification (“in some form…) is necessary because it is not always a human body that figures prominently in the

BOUND BODIES 115

narrative. At one point, for example, while Thierry and Victor quarrel, they are near kids who are playing with a squirrel they had nearly killed. Victor states: Pegué un manotazo en el volante y él [Thierry] comprendió que era una orden para que se alejara, salió disparado y masculló una especie de disculpa, o eso creí. Uno de los niños lanzó a la ardilla por los aires, la vi caer a pocos metros delante del auto y me propuse terminar con su agonía. Aceleré la máquina y sólo percibí el pequeño tirón de la rueda al aplastar el cuerpo. (69–70) I slammed my hand against the steering wheel and he [Thierry] understood that I was ordering him to go away; he bolted out of the car and muttered some kind of excuse, at least that’s what I thought it was. One of the children tossed the squirrel into the air. I saw it fall a few meters in front of the car and decided to put an end to its suffering. I accelerated and only felt a slight bump as the tire flattened the body. (48) At play here is cultural miscommunication (Thierry thinks he is being dismissed), and Victor’s imposition of his will over the young children (an imposition that could also be understood in terms of a colonizing dominance). The fate of the squirrel and what is in effect Victor’s emphasis on its body by virtue of an understatement (“…sólo percibí el pequeño tirón…”) is a pre-view to how bodies are treated elsewhere in the narrative. Later, Thierry recalls the physical decline of the foreign scientist (a man he affectionately called “Papá Crapaud”: “Papa Frog”) who had long ago taught him a methodology for handling and cataloguing frogs. He describes this decline in terms of the body of a frog, an animal into whose world—according to Thierry— Papá Crapaud had immersed himself to a dangerous degree: Así vino a parar un hombre de su ciencia, hundido en ese pozo, hablando solo por las noches. Las tripas de las ranas no pueden ilustrar a un hombre. Y él no tenía más mundo que sus ranas, por eso lo engañaron. (99) That’s how far a man of his learning fell, deep into that well, talking to himself at night. A frog’s guts can’t enlighten a man. Frogs were his whole world, that’s why they betrayed him. (71) A different way of articulating Thierry’s message is that the two bodies (those of humans and frogs) must be kept more separately. Furthermore, once more we find an emphasis placed on the body through a metonymic movement: it is not the frog that cannot enlighten a man; it is their guts; Thierry’s message could also be a critique of what he perceives as empirical science’s penchant for analysis and division into parts at the expense of a whole. Being a novel about vodoun, in Tú, la oscuridad there is no shortage of unusual references to fish. After all, according to modern scientific investigations (for example, the research by Davis that led to his writing The Serpent and the

116 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Rainbow) the puffer fish provides the toxin most necessary for zombification. At one point, Thierry recalls some fish soup he used to eat when he was younger: Todavía me acuerdo de aquella sopa, tenía sus buenos trozos de carne blanca y las cabezas en el fondo. Las cabezas de los pescados de la sopa siempre parece que se están riendo. (148) I still remember that soup, it had nice soft chunks, and the heads were on the bottom. Fish heads in soup always look like they’re laughing. (109) Later he describes a different memory of his youth, a memory involving a woman who inadvertently discovered the secret talking fish of his secret society. To punish her, the elders in the society killed her and put parts of her body in a basket that also contained the remains of the fish. In the end, the two cadavers mirror each other as Thierry likens the woman’s eyes to yet a third creature: Entonces decapitaron a Sikán, con sangre se adora y con sangre se despierta al mundo, metieron su cabeza dentro de la calabaza, sus ojos de pájaro fueron a mirarse allí con los ojos amarillos del pescado. (170) Then they cut off Sikán’s head, you worship with blood, with blood you waken the world, they put her head into the gourd, there her bird’s eyes and the yellow eyes of the fish could look at each other. (127) There are several ways of responding to Sikán’s fate: it demonstrates the extent to which physical violence is a tool for safeguarding the secrets of the society; it may also suggest the sharp gender divisions that characterize Haitian society. What I would like to underscore, however, is the horrible physicality of her fate: she is decapitated and her head is left to stare at another cadaver. Thierry explains that, as a member of his secret society, he attributed divine powers to a certain type of fish; accordingly, he had an intimate knowledge of this fish and the different parts of its body, each of which is worthy of its own name. After his initiation, Thierry [nació] de nuevo bajo la Voz de Tanze, Tanze es el nombre del Pez, pero a su cabeza se le dice Añuma; a sus escamas, Osarakuá; a sus dientes, Inikué; a su cola, Iriama; a su carne, Abianke, y sus excrementos Ajiñá. (170) [he] was reborn under the Voice of Tanze, Tanze is the name of the Fish, but his head is called Añuma; his scales, Osarakuá; his teeth, Inikué; his tail, Iriama; his flesh, Abianke; and his waste, Ajiñá. (128) If in the myth Sikán lost her life because she failed to recognize a sacred fish, confusion often shrouds the principal characters’ mundane efforts to identify bodies. Once, for example, Thierry had agreed to enter the forest to look for a missing foreigner. In fact, however, he deliberately misdiagnoses the first body he stumbles upon:

BOUND BODIES 117

me figuré que era una rana para no figurarme la verdad: eso que estaba yo tocando era un empeine, era la pata viva de un cristiano. Le clavé las uñas y prendí la linterna: la mujer estaba allí, desnuda, el cuerpo entero le chorreaba agua con sangre, agua de lluvia y sangre de quién sabe dónde. (51–52) I told myself it was a frog so I wouldn’t tell myself the truth: that the thing I touched was the instep of a foot, the living foot of a human being. I dug in my nails and turned on the flashlight: The woman stood there, naked, her whole body streaming water and blood, water from the rain and blood from who knows where. (31) One might ask how Thierry (even if deliberately) could mistake a woman for a frog; nonetheless, it is worth noting a couple of things: on the one hand, how once again bodies are compartmentalized (“the instep of a foot,” “I dug in my nails”); while on the other, humans at a basic level of physicality may indeed be like frogs. The novel emphasizes bodies in additional ways: sometimes—rather than having physical contact with bodies—the characters smell the scents these bodies project, as if in allusion to Lawrence’s remarks about the relics of “a peculiar smell” of the ancestor. Oftentimes it is Victor who notices a smell of decay, a phenomenon that could be explained in terms of his being in a setting unlike any he had known. Not long after he first meets Thierry in Port-au-Prince, for instance, he first detects an unusual smell—a smell, he believes, to which his own body contributes: Era noviembre y de la calle entraba un vaho indefinible, algo parecido al aire de mar, pero combinado con el tufo del sudor, el sudor de nadie en particular, el de los transeúntes, el de las mujeres que se acuclillaban en los alrededores tratando de vender su mercancía, casi siempre legumbres y sombreros, el sudor de los camareros y además el mío: en Haití el sudor se me había vuelto rancio, de una consistencia algo pastosa, que al secarse endurecía la camisa. Varias veces al día me sorprendía oliéndome debajo de los brazos, me intrigaba ese olor, mi propio olor desconocido como el olor de un sueño. (38–39) It was November, and an indefinable stench came from the street, something like sea air, but mixed with the stink of sweat, the sweat of nobody in particular, of passersby, of the women squatting everywhere trying to sell their wares, usually vegetables and hats, the sweat of the waiters as well as my own: In Haiti my perspiration had turned rank, almost thick, and when it dried, it stiffened my shirt. Several times a day I found my-self sniffing under my arms; I was intrigued by the odor, my own unfamiliar odor like the odor in a dream. (22) Throughout the novel, Victor (as if to stereotype the first-time visitor to the developing world) remains preoccupied with the smell of decay in Haiti and, in

118 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

particular, Port-au-Prince. The decay emanates sometimes from nowhere in particular and at other times from burning bodies of animals, which while they burn and begin to stink, display a remarkable amount of vivacity. While walking through the streets, Victor observes: Por una razón u otra, en las calles de Port-au-Prince siempre había humareda, cuando no quemaban montones de basura, quemaban muebles viejos o gomas de automóvil, a veces ardían cadáveres de animales. Esa tarde estaba ardiendo el de un burro, tuve la extraña sensación de que el animal agitaba las patas mientras se achicharraba. (86) For a variety of reasons there was always dense smoke on the streets of Port-au-Prince; if they weren’t burning piles of trash, they burned old furniture or tires, sometimes the bodies of dead animals were set on fire. That afternoon it was a burro, and I had the strange impression that the animal was moving its legs while it burned. (60) Thierry, however, also possesses a sensitive nose. At one point he recalls Papá Crapaud’s girlfriend Ganesha, a West Indian of East Indian descent and erstwhile frog figurine peddler whose customs and physical manner at first repelled Thierry (later they would become lovers). While conversing with Victor, he describes— in olfactory terms—the culture shock he first experiences upon meeting Ganesha: Ella tenía un olor malísimo, algo parecido al tufo del tulipe du mort, no sé si ha visto usted esa flor: tiene un capullo negro como de este gordo que cuando se pincha suelta un chorro hediondo. Pues así mismo olía. (55) She had an awful smell, something like the odor of the tulipe du mort, I don’t know if you’ve seen that flower: It has a black bloom about this size, and when you squeeze it, out spurts a stinking juice. Well, that’s just what she smelled like. (35) Eventually, as Victor’s pursuit of the grenouille du sang takes him perilously close to a forest dominated by a secret society hostile to Thierry’s, they learn of a peculiar tree: [El hermano de Thierry] vino a avisarle que había encontrado un árbol que en lugar de dar su fruta daba zapatos viejos…era verdad que había zapatos, asomaban las puntas negras por entre las ramas torcidas, pero a continuación había unas piernas y unos cuerpos destrozados. (151) [Thierry’s brother] told him he had found a tree that grew old shoes instead of fruit…it was true there were shoes, you could see the black tips through the twisted branches, but farther up there were legs and ruined bodies too. (110–11)

BOUND BODIES 119

Of particular interest to me is how the event is narrated: there are multiple levels of narration in the passage, with Thierry’s brother being the first conveyer of information (unless we also consider the killers who used the bodies in the first place to signal a warning to Victor and Thierry), Thierry the second, Victor the third, and Montero the fourth. Despite (or perhaps because of) this communicative richness, Thierry’s brother’s discovery is ultimately expressed as a complicated synecdoche of the body. The bodies in the trees, not surprisingly, have disfigured faces. The foregrounding of bodies does not end there: we have seen that the bodies of animals, plants, humans, and their various component parts appear frequently in the narrative. We have also seen that Victor, as he walked through Port-auPrince, becomes preoccupied with smells, including the stench of his own sweaty body. Sweat, however, is just one of the many body “products” that concern the characters throughout Tú, la oscuridad. After Victor apprehends the missing woman whom he had initially taken for a frog, he finds that having her in custody is not as simple as he had anticipated: cuando ya estábamos en camino vomitó, sentí un olor a sangre y mis zapatos se llenaron de aquel líquido caliente. Más tarde volvió a quejarse, y de vez en cuando, desde la garganta, le salía aquel hervor podrido de burbuja, algo medio parecido al canto de la rana. (57) when we were on our way she vomited, I smelled blood and my shoes were covered with hot liquid. Later she moaned again, and from time to time a putrid bubble boiled up from deep in her throat, it was like the song of the frog. (37) Not long afterward, after having delivered the woman to her husband, Thierry sits down to a bowl of soup. The woman, however, remains present to him. Better stated, vomit—a substance her body had produced earlier—makes a strange, abrupt resurgence through Thierry’s body before he could even taste the soup: me dio el olor [de la sopa] y miré mis zapatos, hasta entonces no me había acordado de que los traía manchados. Esa fue la señal para que todas mis tripas se revolvieran, me subió un nudo como de lombrices a la boca y apenas tuve tiempo de correr fuera de la casa y echarlo encima de la tierra, con tanta pena como si echara el propio corazón. (58) I got a whiff of [the soup] and looked at my shoes, I hadn’t remembered until then that they were dirty. That was the signal for my guts to turn over, a tangle of worms came up into my mouth and I hardly had time to run out of the house and spit it onto the ground, with as much difficulty and grief as if I was spitting out my own heart. (38) Her blood and vomit on his shoes, his vomiting giving him the sensation that his heart was about to exit him: in other words, more body parts and body substances.

120 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

There is, however, another body substance to add to the list. Before the rival secret society kill several villagers as a warning to Victor and Thierry, the pair is warned in a different way: El último ejemplar de Froglog, un boletín mensual de datos sobre la declinación de los anfibios, estaba encima de una piedra, cubierto por un montón de excrementos. (65–66) The most recent issue of Froglog, a monthly bulletin of data concerning the decline in amphibians, lay on a stone, covered with a pile of shit. (44) It was after they were slow to heed to this warning that the aggressors carry out the killings. Thierry’s father had, albeit a generation earlier, also been slow in responding to the warnings of a rival secret society. Consequently, they pursued him with the intention of killing him and were able to do so only after finding him in a compromising situation: according to Thierry, Lo sorprendieron lejos del campamento, dando de cuerpo en unos matorrales, ésa era otra de sus costumbres antiguas: mi padre nunca dejó que nadie lo viera ensuciar, decía que era el momento de mayor debilidad de un hombre y se alejaba de su gente para hacerlo. (79–80) They caught him far from camp, doing his business in some bushes—that was another of his old habits: My father never let anybody see him shit, he said it was the moment of greatest weakness for a man and he would go away from his people to do it. (55) In killing Thierry’s father, the rival society removed his skin, thereby stamping their specific signature on it. This, however, did not prevent him from being a spectacular presence at his wake: according to Thierry, his father’s lover lo lavó a pesar de todo, pero luego se quejó de que las manos se le quedaban pegadas a la carne viva, y de que las venitas de mi padre se le enredaban entre los dedos como lombrices. Un cuerpo sin su piel es repugnante, pero Frou-Frou supo ponerle la camisa. (80) Frou-Frou washed him anyway, but afterward she complained that her hands had stuck to his raw flesh, that my father’s little veins had wrapped around her fingers like worms. A body without its skin is disgusting, but even so, Frou-Frou dressed him in his shirt. (55) Thierry’s reference to veins is important because it is through them that flows the bodily substance with the most symbolic associations, blood: a substance that oftentimes also serves as a means of describing relationships between bodies. I will now comment on ways in which human bodies relate to each other in Tú, la oscuridad, particularly with respect to blood.

BOUND BODIES 121

One of the most obvious ways human bodies relate to each other is through contagious illnesses, and there is an abundance of references to these in Montero’s novel. For instance, whenever the pwazon rat—or zombie hunters—undertook a mission, they had to follow closely a series of complex procedures involving the male anatomy, particularly once they captured their prey. According to Thierry, lo más peligroso, más que cobrar la pieza y no saber cubrirla—que había que cubrir la cabeza—era salir a cazar con una herida abierta o con enfermedad cogida en vientre de mujer. Por eso, un rato antes de partir al campo, Divoine Joseph, que era el segundo al mando, los obligaba a desnudarse a todos, y los iba registrando uno por uno: les miraba la boca y les sacudía las orejas, les exprimía el capullo, les apartaba las nalgas y les tentaba por debajo el saco de los huevos. (77) the most dangerous thing, more dangerous than capturing the prey and not knowing how to cover it—you had to cover its head—was to go out hunting with an open wound or with a disease you had caught from a woman. That was why, before they left for the field, Divoine Joseph, who was secondin-command, would make them all undress, and he would examine them one by one: He looked into their mouths and pulled their ears, squeezed their foreskins, spread their cheeks, and felt under their balls. (52) Although Thierry does not report having caught any illnesses from zombies, he was not as lucky with Ganesha, who he believes infected him with a venereal disease (Tú, la oscuridad 101, In the Palm of Darkness 72). In addition, according to Thierry, Victor’s first research post in the Haitian mountains had been occupied by various secret societies ever since a woman of an unusual physical appearance established a children’s colony there after her arrival in Haiti: a Port-au-Prince llegó una bruja blanca, era muy pálida y la vieron vomitando sangre. Estoy seguro de que padecía hemofilia, pero se convirtió en loup garou, una especie de vampiro. (203) a white witch came to Port-au-Prince; she was very pale and was seen vomiting blood. I’m sure she was a hemophiliac, but they called her a loup garou, a kind of vampire. (153) A question that could be posed here is whether nearly every character we are told about in this novel is some kind of exceptional or unusual physical specimen, or if Thierry’s emphases on such specimens reflects a common tendency among people in general to recall those who fall outside a common mold. In any case, it is worth noting here that Thierry’s description of the woman is indicative of his intermediate position between a traditional, Haitian worldview and one informed by Western medicine. Throughout the novel he subtly fluctuates in allegiance between these two positions.

122 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

In Caribbean narratives—and Tú, la oscuridad is no exception in this respect— references to blood oftentimes also inform racial discourse, a discourse premised on how bodies relate (or compare) to other bodies. When he first meets Ganesha, for example, Thierry expresses dismay at the incongruous hereditary elements that must have been involved in creating her unique physical appearance. Apparently he was unaccustomed to people of East Indian descent: Se llamaba Ganesha y como entonces era joven, nunca había visto otra mujer igual. Después, de ese color y con los mismos ojos, llegué a ver muchas, todas torcidas. Hay algo en esa mezcla que no va con Dios. (97) Her name was Ganesha. I was still young then and I had never seen another woman like her. Later on I saw lots of them with that same color, those same eyes, all of them wicked. Something in the combination doesn’t go along with God. (68) This initial repulsion did not prevent him from being sexually attracted to her; it may have even piqued his sexual interest. Nonetheless, after realizing that he was one of several men with whom Ganesha had sexual relations, he blames her for his venereal disease and is quick to demonize her and (what he perceived as) her exotic qualities. Victor, too, is often preoccupied with skin color and expresses surprise when he first meets Boukaka, a doctor who dabbles in herpetology,40 perhaps due to his awareness of Haiti’s notorious, color-conscious social structure, one that historically has given mulattoes greater educational and political advantages.41 He brought such an awareness to his appointment with Boukaka, who—he anticipated —would be a “mulatto…: un mestizo alto, canoso de espejuelos, más desgarbado, menos rechoncho y tropical” (129) (“I had an image of him as a tall, gray-haired light-skinned man with spectacles, more self-conscious, less chubby and tropical than he actually was” 93). Boukaka, however, “era negro con ganas, de una negrura intensa, le brillaba la piel de los brazos como a los africanos de nación” (129) (he “was absolutely black, intensely black, the skin on his arms gleamed as if he had been born in Africa” 93). Unbeknownst to Victor, Boukaka is also a leader of Thierry’s secret society and its master of initiations: it is he who performs the ritual scarifications. As such, his interest in herpetology is closely associated with his profound knowledge of vodoun potions. Boukaka’s “intense” blackness, linked in Victor’s mind with Africa, could in some respects also be an oblique indication of the high degree to which the former has incorporated cultural practices originating in Africa. Thierry explains to Victor that it was after meeting Azelma and, especially, her husband Camerún that he was invited to the secret society He recalls that Azelma had a striking physical presence: she

BOUND BODIES 123

era una mulata clara de ojos dormidos, que andaba siempre con una iguana al hombro y hablaba como si tuviera la punta de la lengua cosida al cielo de la boca. (165) was a light-skinned mulatta with sleepy eyes who always carried an iguana on her shoulder and talked like her tongue was sewn to the roof of her mouth. (122) Camerún, meanwhile—like his name—was as reminiscent of Africa as Boukaka. He, too, had a striking physical presence and an intense relationship with flesh: Camerún se dedicaba a la carnicería. Tenía fama de ser buen matarife, celebraban competencias para ver quién era capaz de matar a la vaca, desollarla, trocearla y filetearla en menos tiempo. El ganaba casi siempre, tenía los brazos de un toro y unas manos peludas llenas de cicatrices. (165– 66) Cameroon was a butcher. He was known as a good slaughterer, they would hold contests to see who could kill a cow, skin it, cut it up, and filet it in the shortest time. He almost always won, he had arms like a bull and hairy hands covered with scars. (122–23) Camerún was unique for a couple of additional reasons, both of which involve the body: first, he had three testicles. Furthermore, with a different woman and through an unusual genetic occurrence, he fathered identical albino twins. According to Thierry, “no hay nada más sagrado en este mundo […que] los albinos que sembró Camerún” (172–73) (“there’s nothing more sacred in this world […than] the albinos fathered by Cameroon” 130–31).42 Later, as if to underscore the way various discourses on the body are interlinked, the narrative juxtaposes Thierry’s recollection of an incident involving Ganesha with Victor’s recollection of life on his fathers ostrich farm: ‘después de pisarla [a Ganesha], el albino [no era hijo de Camerún] la golpeó, la dejó tirada allí, sobre un charco de sangre. Yo fui quien la encontró mucho más tarde, ella no se podía mover, pero rezaba bajito.’ Luego mi padre argumentaba que se podía sacar provecho de la piel, como catorce pies cuadrados de piel por cada pájaro. (182) ‘after he fucked her the albino [not one of Cameroon’s sons] beat her, he left her lying there in a pool of blood. I was the one who found her, much later, she couldn’t move but she was praying in a whisper.’ Then my father argued that there was money to be made from the skin, something like fourteen square feet of skin from each bird. (137) Interestingly, the ostrich is as much a physical being (in both of these cases abused) as Ganesha, in much the same way that the frog and the foreign white woman

124 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Thierry recovers early in the narrative are alike for him with respect to their physicality. Robert Young asserts that hybridity—a term with strong racial undertones—is necessarily a term with sexual connotations.43 Similarly, discourse on race in Tú, la oscuridad also implicates discourses on sexuality—another way bodies relate to each other—and the ways in which the characters navigate through issues of gender. We saw, for instance, that Camerún both fathered albino twins and has quite distinctive genitalia. In addition, the white woman Thierry recovers captures his imagination not only on account of her color but also in terms of his assessment of the sexuality of her body: me preguntaba cómo era posible que algún hombre se afanara por encontrar a una mujer tan descocada como aquélla, una mujer que ni siquiera parecía mujer. La estuve mirando por curiosidad: nunca me gustaron las blancos, pero ésta era muy flaca y apenas tenía pechos, viéndola desnuda me parecía estar mirando a mi hermanito Paul, mi propio hermano en blanco y rubio, aunque tampoco podía decirse que ella tuviera mucho pelo. (52–53) I wondered how any man could go to so much trouble to hunt down a woman as homely as this one, a woman who didn’t even seem like a woman. I stared at her out of curiosity: I never did like white women, but this one was so skinny she hardly had any breasts, seeing her naked was like looking at my little brother Paul, my own brother in white and blonde, though you couldn’t really say she had much hair. (32) Thierry’s preoccupation with both race and sexuality extends to Ganesha, who is foreign to Thierry both in appearance and with respect to her insatiable sexual appetite: “A Ganesha no había que pedirle nada, por eso tantos la perseguían. Ella sabía lo que necesitaba cada cual” (100) (“You didn’t have to ask Ganesha for anything, that’s why so many men were after her. She knew what each man needed” 72). As if to suggest that certain bodies should inter-act sexually only with certain other bodies, Victor later expresses astonishment at the homosexuality of his father’s farmhand Vu Dinh (Tú, la oscuridad 157, In the Palm of Darkness 117), and gradually realizes that his wife is also involved in a lesbian relationship. Indeed, constructions and estimations of sexuality are always at issue in the novel, particularly given the sometimes male-dominated narrative perspectives embodied in Victor and especially Thierry (and our curiosity and uncertainty as to the female authors attitude toward these characters). Whereas Victor is initially oblivious to sexuality (in fact, the narrative makes no mention of him in any evident sexual activity or mindset), Thierry has sexual affairs with numerous women (including a mother and daughter). The only deterrent for his libido is a pregnant woman because she has become, according to him, a part of another man: “La tripa de una mujer ajena es siempre como un pedazo de otro” (139) (“The pregnant belly of someone else’s woman is always like a part of the other man” 99). Lastly, the quest for the grenouille du sang prompting Victor’s trip to Haiti may also be

BOUND BODIES 125

directly linked to sexuality, at least based on Thierry’s belief that an indication of the frog species’ numbers are drastically reduced and endangered is that all the remaining specimen are males (Tú, la oscuridad 160, In the Palm of Darkness 119). Given the various ways bodies interact in Tú, la oscuridad, there is no shortage of bodily fluids to smooth this interaction. As I mentioned previously, the most prominent of these is blood, and sometimes this substance flows as forcefully as the narrative itself. We saw, for instance, both the captured woman (consequently, Thierry as well) and, later, the decapitated woman, covered in their own blood. Needless to say, every drop of this blood originates in acts of violence and/or desperation, and the following fight between a mother and her son is no exception: Allí Frou-Frou se le fue encima, le arañaba y le machucaba el rostro, se lo machucó tanto que a ella se le tiñeron los puños de sangre, de la sangre de Julien. (147) And that was where Frou-Frou fell on him and scratched and pounded his face, she pounded him so much that her fists were covered in blood, Julien’s blood. (108) Indeed, one character’s blood often smears other characters or, at the very least, serves as a common denominator in an otherwise disparate scene. In the aftermath of the fight between Julien and Frou-Frou, only Julien and his half-brothers remained in the house. Thierry, one of the half-brothers describes the scene: nos quedamos los tres hombres en la casa, dos hermanos de sangre, que éramos Jean-Pierre y yo, y un medio hermano, su media sangre salpicando el suelo. (147–48) the three men were left in the house, two full-blood brothers, that was Jean Pierre and me, and a half brother whose half-blood was spattered on the floor. (108) Julien’s blood is on the floor but at the same time it flows partially through the bodies of his half-brothers, whose blood, in turn, presumably flows more fully through each other given that these two are “full” brothers. What strikes me most about the preceding sanguinary passages are their subtle references to family relations and issues—also sometimes quite subtly expressed —of inherited physical traits. Ganesha, we saw, was for Thierry an “ungodly” physical being, i.e., an inappropriate composite of traits that most “humans” do not combine. She, however, is not the only character whose genealogy is a source of concern. According to Thierry, Frou-Frou’s daughter, Carmelite, equivocates regarding her own daughter’s father: Carmelite siempre quiso a mi hermano Paul, luego parió a esa niña renacuajo y dijo que era de Jean Pierre [otro hermano de Thierry]. Dijo mentira. (171)

126 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Carmelite always loved my brother Paul, then she gave birth to that puny44 girl and said it was Jean Pierre’s [another of Thierry’s brothers]. She told a lie. (128) Later in the novel, a girlfriend of Thierry’s casts doubt on his relationship with Julien: “Suzy preguntó cómo era posible que siendo hijos del mismo padre nos pareciéramos tan poco” (190) (“Suzy asked how children of the same father could look so different” 142). Thierry, meanwhile, is apparently more talented than JeanPierre at prognosticating the transmission of physical traits: “Los hijos de Yoyotte son muy derechos. Los albinos siempre salen así: o muy derechos o muy torcidos, no hay término medio” (181) (“Yoyotte’s children are very upright. Albinos always turn out that way: either very upright or very twisted, there’s no middle ground” (135). Suzy’s inquiry regarding the physical incongruity between Thierry and his brother is, in some respects, justified. She is wrong, however, in assuming that children of the same father should look alike, for her assumption was that the two brothers had the same mother, which was not the case: Thierry’s mother was Claudine and Julien’s was Frou-Frou. As a passage I cited recently indicates, FrouFrou’s daughter was Carmelite. Interestingly enough, Thierry was involved in sexual relations with both Frou-Frou and Carmelite (although not at the same time). Furthermore (and some readers unfamiliar with the novel may have already made the connection), Thierry’s own father had much earlier been in an extramarital affair with Frou-Frou (thus Julien). There is a growing number of Hispanic and Caribbean novels 45 whose authors or editors provide readers with a character family “tree” or kinship map. Although the English translation does have a map of Haiti, neither it nor Tú, la oscuridad provides a family tree. Indeed, given that several of its characters are involved sexually with characters who in turn may be related but who are from different “generations,” if the novel were to provide a family tree, it would be characterized by genealogical lines that flow in a number of unusual directions. Given the presence of an oppressive plantation system in Haiti’s past, one could be tempted to read the sexual/familial relations in Tú, la oscuridad in light of, for example, Williams’s discussion of sexuality on the plantation (planters “washing their blackamoors white”). Remaining restricted to such a reading, however, would be a simplification of the novel: what matters most to Thierry (and his preferences seem significant given that he is the most prominent Haitian character in the novel), rather than keeping his family’s kinship structure “tidy” and organized, is observing and transmitting inherited (albeit patriarchal) customs and traditions, nearly all of which originate in African belief systems. He understands, for example, the body in terms of these customs and traditions, none of which seem concerned with nomenclature and other “taxonomical” sensibilities. Early in the narrative he explains:

BOUND BODIES 127

Mi padre nunca me llamó por mi nombre. Lo que se ama se respeta, decía, y no hace falta decir lo que se ama. Eso lo aprendió de su padre, que tampoco lo llamaba por su nombre a él. Era una costumbre antigua, algo que vino con el primer hombre, con el primer padre de un padre de mi padre que llegó a esta tierra desde la Guinea. Mi padre se llamaba Thierry, como yo. (25) My father never called me by name. What you love you respect, he said, and there is no need to name what you love. He learned this from his father, who did not call him by name either. It was an ancient custom, something that came with the first man, with the first father of a father of my father who came to this land from Guinea. (10) Later, after meeting Victor, he asks him if his father had also been a frog hunter (Tú, la oscuridad 65, In the Palm of Darkness 43). After all, both Thierry and his father were members of a secret society. Furthermore, Thierry called Papá (i.e., Papá Crapaud) the first person who taught him about herpetology. Sometimes Thierry understands this type of patrimony in terms that seem to conflate the body with the imagination. Once, for instance, he expresses his jealousy upon discovering that Frou-Frou had slept with men other than him and his father: sentí la rabia mía y la de mi padre muerto porque aquel haitiano de PortauPrince la pisó todo lo que quiso. (214) I felt my own rage and my dead fathers too because that Haitian from Port-au-Prince had fucked her as much as he pleased. (162) In contrast, Victor is concerned with observing a different kind of tradition: modern science in general and herpetology in particular. This does not prevent him, however, from orienting many of his observations in line with a casual hereditarian framework that may recall his (and Thierry’s) more rigorous analyses of the taxonomic relationships between various frogs. He remembers, for example, meeting his wife’s parents: “Martha tenía mucho de su madre, sobre todo en los ojos y en la manera de apretar la boca; a su padre no se parecía en nada, si acaso en el metal de voz” (106) (“Martha looked like her mother, especially around the eyes, and she had the same way of pursing her mouth; she didn’t resemble her father at all, except perhaps in the timbre of her voice” 75–76). Of additional relevance to Victor’s engagement with hereditarian concepts are his sexual appetite (which he quite noticeably lacks) and his growing interest in material prosperity, the last of which is also referred to in terms of inheritance: Nunca pensé en la posibilidad de que ese rancho, tarde o temprano, iba a ser mío. Fue Marta quien lo mencionó una noche: ya que era el único heredero, ¿me había enterado si era fácil vender un criadero de avestruces? (184)

128 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

I never thought about the possibility that sooner or later the ranch would be mine. It was Martha who mentioned it one night: Since I was the only heir, had I investigated how hard it would be to sell an ostrich nursery? (139) If Thierry understands the human body in terms of inherited customs and traditions, Victor understands it more in light of scientific doctrines. Interestingly, both views (e.g., Thierry with his names for the various parts of the sacred fish and Victor with his impeccable knowledge of a frog he had never even seen) allow for highly nuanced conceptions of animal bodies. Although the two men are friends and collaborators, the relationship between the two cosmologies each somehow embodies is less clear. Accordingly, there is an implicit question in Tú, la oscuridad, a question that the novel may or may not ultimately answer definitively. The question is, “Which is right as concerns the body: Thierry’s vodoun or Victor’s science?” In some respects, particularly in terms of Thierry’s participation in the scientific expedition, they both are right. His exposure to Victor’s and Papá Crapaud’s research methods, for instance, does not prevent him from recounting—with the tone of a believer—the zombie hunts he witnessed as a youth (Tú, la oscuridad 75, In the Palm of Darkness 50). Needless to say, in vodoun, conceptions of the body (particularly insofar as the line between life and death is concerned) are unlike those in modern science: after all, Thierry recalls that the pwazon rats hunted humans who were dead and roaming Haiti on foot. In addition, vodoun’s influence over the body extends in Tú, la oscuridad to the way its practitioners transmit messages through corporal mutilation. Once, for example, Victor and Thierry encounter such messages on a cadaver: Además de la mutilación del rostro, al cadáver le faltaba un dedo, el dedo índice de la mano izquierda. Thierry aseguró que aunque no lo dijeran por la radio, la falta de aquel dedo era como un mensaje. (156) In addition to the mutilation of his face, the body was missing a finger, the index finger of his left hand. Thierry asserted that even though they didn’t say so on the radio, the lack of that finger was like a message. (115) Victor remained incredulous amid all these threats. He reports feeling el deber de desconfiar; de negar aquel peligro que amenazaba con interponerse en mi trabajo…nada muy grave puede ocurrirle a un hombre que todo lo que busca, todo lo que quiere us una simple rana. (63) obliged to doubt, to deny the absurd danger that threatened to interfere with my work…. Nothing very serious can happen to a man when all he looks for, all he wants, is a harmless little frog. (41) It is not necessarily the case that Victor considers vodoun invalid; rather, he mistakenly assumes that his interests and those of vodoun’s practitioners can

BOUND BODIES 129

remain in separate spaces. Quickly, however, he realizes that vodoun poses a threat not only to his investigation but also to his person. The tension in the novel between vodoun and science also involves interpretations of the decline of the grenouille du sang. Victor, for one, interprets the decline as a scientific, epistemological puzzle (“Nadie sabe lo que pasa” 132, “Nobody knows what’s going on” 96). Rather than uncovering the reasons for the decline, his main objective in the story is to capture and preserve a specimen of the species before the last one vanishes. As such, the grenouille du sang is a creature that—in scientific terms, at least—is on the verge of losing a Darwinian battle for survival: its imminent extinction seems directly related to a decreasing habitat and its inability to transmit its genes to potential offspring. Furthermore, if modern science is a tool of colonialism, then it thereby indirectly contributed to Haiti’s underdevelopment and it too is partly responsible for the disappearance of the grenouille du sang. In this sense, Victor and his scientific approach embody at once both culprit and savior. Vodoun, however, suggests the possibility of a different, viable explanation for the frog’s decline. In some respects Thierry—despite helping with Victor’s investigation—suggests the primacy of vodoun over modern science. Not only does he remain a (in many respects, a Carpentierian) believer in vodoun, but openly expresses his general doubts regarding the efficacy of modern science, particularly when pitted against the “powders” of vodoun. He remembers, for instance, the events surrounding Papá Crapaud’s mysterious death: El médico se apareció y repitió la misma cosa que Ganesha: a Papá Crapaud se le había partido el corazón y probablemente lo había tenido enfermo durante muchos años. Eso también tienen los polvos, son invisibles a la ciencia, a la poca ciencia de los médicos, quiero decir. (120) The doctor came and said just what Ganesha had said: Papa Crapaud’s heart had broken, it probably had been sick for many years. That’s something else about the powders, they’re invisible to science, the little bit of science that doctors have, I mean. (85) Boukaka, the physician and herpetology buff who is also a vodoun priest, provides a more developed indictment of science. When Victor approaches him for help locating the grenouille du sang, Boukaka answers unexpectedly: Ya empezó la gran huida…. Ustedes se inventan excusas: la lluvia ácida, los herbicidas, la deforestación. Pero las ranas desaparecen de lugares donde no ha habido nada de eso. (132) The great flight has begun…. You people invent excuses: acid rain, herbicides, deforestation. But the frogs are disappearing from places where none of that has happened. (96)

130 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Boukaka also states that Haitian frogs once considered by science to be extinct have been known to reappear (Tú, la oscuridad 130–31, In the Palm of Darkness 95). In Boukaka’s Haiti, then, science is not in fact the final arbiter over the status of those beings over which it issues its purportedly canonical pronouncements: the laws that proclaim biological determinism and the inevitability of natural selection—laws often considered indisputable—yield in Boukaka’s and Thierry’s estimation to vodoun’s “lado oscuro, insumiso, seguramente atemporal de las declinaciones” (132) (“dark, recalcitrant, atemporal side” 96). Within the framework of this “dark side,” events and discourses involving the body, which are—as we have seen—prominent in Tú, la oscuridad,46 at a certain level remain mysterious except for those initiated in vodoun secret societies. On a different level, corporal discourses are inextricably linked to the transmission of cultural knowledge and traditions, as opposed to providing accounts of how genetic traits are transmitted from generation to generation: Camerún’s albino children, for instance, are understood in Haitian society as acts of providence rather than as an unusual genetic event. Although pursued by a hostile secret society, Thierry and Victor eventually find and capture a grenouille du sang. When he first spots it, Victor describes the frog (indeed, it was an adult male—the last of its kind according to Thierry) with abundant physical metaphors: “Inmóvil parecía una especie de capullo venenoso, una fruta, una pequeña víscera radiante” (227) (“Motionless, it looked like a kind of poisonous flower, a fruit, a small, shining piece of viscera” 171). Not long afterward, perhaps in terms of his age but also perhaps in terms of his belief in vodoun, Victor likens Thierry to the nearly extinct grenouille du sang: “Me di cuenta de que él mismo era una especie en agonía, un animal acorralado, un hombre demasiado solo” (233) (“I realized that he too was a dying species, a trapped animal, a man who was too solitary” 178). This is Victor’s assessment: Thierry and other practitioners of vodoun, however, insist on never underestimating a being considered endangered by science. On their way to Port-au-Prince, the boat sinks that carries Thierry, Victor, and the preserved frog: not a trace of their bodies remains (Tú, la oscuridad 241, In the Palm of Darkness 183). This tragedy raises some questions that I, at least, am unable to answer definitively: first, do Victor (despite his name) and science fail by not procuring the grenouille du sang for herpetology, or are his and the frog’s destruction indirectly a symptom of sciences and modernity’s overwhelming dominance? Similarly, is it possible that the tragedy should be understood in light of vodoun cosmology: is it a mysterious event comprehensible only to initiates of vodoun? If so, will the grenouille du sang—considered extinct by science after the shipwreck—make its return? Or, is neither Western science nor Haitian vodoun right? After all, the title of the novel originates in a prayer Thierry sees Ganesha making to the statue of a deity in the East Indian tradition: Mariamman, “la virgen de los muchos brazos” (119) (“the virgin with all those arms” 84). Ultimately, the only certainty is the importance of the body as a site of conflict between competing discourses in Haiti as well as the rest of the Caribbean. That

BOUND BODIES 131

the novel leaves several unresolved tensions raises questions regarding the region as a whole, a region considered both “Western” and “non-Western,”47 where (to name only two of the major forces) vodoun and science converge and at times compete. Are scientific discourses on heredity, for instance, inapplicable or of limited use in the Caribbean? Consequently, are biological determinism and the Darwinian struggle for survival scientific myths? If the answer to these questions is in the affirmative, how can Castro—the ruler of a Caribbean nation—invoke the legitimacy of genetic determinism before a crowd of over a million people? Does being Caribbean entail being able to feel at home with both scientific and spiritualist discourses. To a significant degree, at stake in observations like Castro’s is the debatable authority of hereditarian discourses in Caribbean culture.

Chapter Five Hybridity and Its Mysteries: Heredity, Intertextuality, and Cultural Identity in the Caribbean

Writers Signify upon each other’s texts by rewriting the received textual tradition. This can be accomplished by the revisions of tropes. This sort of Signifyin(g) revision serves, if successful, to create a space for the revising text. It also alters fundamentally the way we read the tradition, by defining the relation of the text at hand to the tradition. —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism Caribbean literature has become a mature artistic corpus precisely in the extent to which writers in the region have succeeded in emancipating their works from the hegemonic culture of the West by forging an alternative literary discourse which achieves ontological autonomy, even while it may regularly converse with inherited Western models. —Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have—your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience. —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre My task in this chapter is to explore the intertextual links between three Caribbean narratives and two canonical European (British, to be precise) narratives, particularly insofar as these intertextual links in many ways also metaphorize hereditarian processes. In some respects, the texts I focus on in this chapter (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Ana Lydia Vega’s “El baúl de Miss Florence,” and Maryse Condé’s La migration des coeurs) reveal—particularly in light of the approximately thirty years that separate the first and third of these texts—a subtle shift regarding the perceived weight or oppressiveness of discourses of heredity and, to some degree perhaps, a similar shift regarding visions on the unity or

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 133

coherence of Caribbean culture. If in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) differences in constructions of ethnicity and differences regarding a given character’s perspective with respect to a colonialist framework constitute an anxiety-riddled vision of Caribbean life, in La migration des coeurs (1995) (the English translation of the Condé novel, which appeared three years later, is titled Windward Heights) the focus narrows significantly—despite the novels intertextual interest in a British text—to life within what amounts to a quite different Caribbean, one in which heterogeneity and plurality are a normal, defining characteristic of the region. The intertextual links between the British and Caribbean texts are of further interest insofar as they beg the question: what is it about these British canonical narratives—namely Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights—that interests Caribbean writers, all of whom are female? More pointedly, how might the British texts have provided a matrix involving race and ethnicity that the Caribbean texts would re-interpret? In two of the Caribbean texts (Wide Sargasso Sea and Windward Heights), the intertextual connections with one of the two Brontë novels (Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively) are readily apparent; in the case of “El baúl de Miss Florence,” meanwhile, the qualities this novelón shares with Jane Eyre are more subtle and may constitute more of a “reminiscence” of this novel than an explicit adaptation. In any event, the similarities between the two texts are striking and sufficiently substantive that I also use Vega’s in advancing a very specific argument throughout the course of this chapter, i.e., that intertextuality in the Caribbean must be understood in light of the presence of hereditarian discourses in the region: simply stated, the practice in Caribbean writing of adapting or subverting canonical European texts can be productively correlated with tropes of heredity that have been in circulation in the region for at least two centuries. In a sense, heredity offers a different way of reading intertextual texts in the Caribbean as well as a different understanding of the critical debates that have surrounded the intertextual ties between Caribbean and European texts. To a certain degree, the intertextual connections I explore here are akin to those in Juan Gelpí’s Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico: in both contexts there is a metaphorical relationship of paternalism (although “maternalism” may be a more appropriate word within the parameters of this chapter) or—at the very least —parentage. In addition, my aims in this chapter share similarities with Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry in that in this text, as well, a metaphorical and intertextual relationship of parentage exists—if we accept Bloom’s theory—between writers of different generations or epochs: it is, according to Bloom, incumbent upon the younger writers (or, more specifically, poets) to first incorporate and then transcend the works of the older, earlier poets. This discussion of the metaphorical parentage between writers brings to mind Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s and—perhaps more precisely—Silvio TorresSaillant’s observations at the head of this chapter regarding the “revisions” or “conversations” that occur between Caribbean and European writings, even though each may possess in critical assessments an ontological autonomy. In some

134 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

respects, both Gelpí and Bloom are right, i.e., the offspring cannot exist without the parent (or at least without the parent’s prior existence), and in the case of Caribbean writings, a similar phenomenon often (it is more, I think, a tendency than a rule or maxim) occurs: these writings have re-interpreted important European texts, especially ones with either a direct or tangential interest in issues of relevance to the Caribbean and the Caribbean experience, and in so doing have articulated their cultural visions for the region and established an autochthonous writing tradition associated with but not dependent upon European traditions. Torres-Saillant’s observation is of further interest in his mention of “inherited” Western models. A metaphorical or symbolic inheritance is, in effect, the common metaphorical thread linking Gelpí’s and Bloom’s texts: a tradition of written literature was indeed imported into the Caribbean; in this respect, then, one might say that the Caribbean inherited at least certain elements of a Western—or perhaps West European—literary tradition. Torres-Saillant, moreover, seems to employ the term in its figurative sense without pursuing the associations it may have given the history of the Caribbean, particularly its social formation. In this respect, my focus in this chapter differs from those of Bloom’s and Gelpí’s texts in that I attempt to read the simultaneously intertextual and—to a certain extent— hereditarian relationships between Caribbean and British literary traditions in terms of other hereditarian dynamics and tropes prevalent in literary writings associated with a plantation-based society: hereditarian dynamics and tropes that implicate discourses on ethnicity and, more specifically, those on the body and its reproduction. In other words, when we consider notions of intertextual “heredity” or inheritance in Caribbean writings, we must at the same time consider the ways in which these intertextual transactions register other modes of heredity. Perhaps it will not come as a surprise that the three Caribbean texts on which I focus in this chapter register in many ways these “other” modes of heredity. Before beginning a discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea, it may prove profitable to take a brief look at Jane Eyre, particularly with regard to instances in the narrative (or in relation to its historical and cultural contexts) that may have weighed on writers who approach their work from a Caribbean vantage point. In terms of the historical and cultural contexts, the intertextual relationships between the Brontë novels and the Caribbean narratives should be understood in terms of the pronounced—but variable—British colonial influence throughout the Caribbean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This influence was multi-dimensional and encompassed economic, political, and interpersonal relations. According to Robert Young, the prevailing attitudes toward what we might consider “multiculturalism” on the part of representatives of the British Empire were seldom heuristic. He explains that these attitudes implicated complex linguistic and sexual dynamics: in the British Empire the historical links between language and sex were…fundamental. Both produced what were regarded as ‘hybrid’ forms (Creole, pidgin and miscegenated children), which were seen to embody threatening forms of

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 135

perversion and degeneration and became the basis for endless metaphoric extension in the racial discourse of social commentary.1 Jane Eyre is not blind to such racial discourse, nor for that matter is Wide Sargasso Sea: a novel written in response to it. It is worth noting, however, that no two Caribbean narratives confront the British colonial legacy in the same way or for the same reasons. After all, Great Britain meant something completely different for Rhys, who hailed from a British Caribbean colony (Dominica) and spent much of her life in England, than it might for Ana Lydia Vega, a Puerto Rican by birth and domicile (who received her doctorate at a French university), with less pronounced ties to Great Britain. In fact, in the case of Hispanic Caribbean narrative, French, Spanish, and African influences are more commonly identified. Yet, both of the aforementioned authors register in their works Jane Eyre. Alongside the racial discourses in circulation in areas associated with British colonial expansion,2 one must also consider that Jane Eyre (and Wuthering Heights for that matter) profited from a timely combination of colonial expansion and the rise of the novel as a genre. If Emily Dickinson’s line, “There is no frigate like a book,” provides a poetic image of these processes, Deidre Lynch and William Warner attempt to account for them in terms of technological advancements that began in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: “First, novels are the first literary genre to emerge into cultural centrality within the medium of print. Novels have accordingly a unique capacity for mobility.”3 The Caribbean, as Paul Gilroy rightly indi-cates in his Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), is predicated on such mobility and contact between Caribbean, European, and—to a significant degree—North American communities. In his study of a British family in mid-nineteenth century Havana, for instance, Luis Martínez-Fernández observes that in this city “there were… bookstores like B.May & Co., which specialized in the sale and publication of English-lan-guage books.”4 The power differentials implicated in this contact between the metropoles and their colonies are worth pursuing, particularly given the importance of such differentials in our reading of the intertextual relationships at question in this chapter. Lynch and Warner, for example, argue that novels whose readership transcends the metropolis and reaches the colony play (or, perhaps, should play) no role in increasing the prestige of the metropolis and in reinforcing hierarchical relationships: …novels serve as a nexus of transnational exchange. Emphasizing the success novels have met with as components of a global import-export trade does not entail subscribing to the colonial sequel that has been appended to many European literary histories. If these literary histories often tell how the novel as a new type of narrative is invented in seventeenth-century Spain or France, or eighteenth-century Britain, their sequel recounts how the novel then disseminates in form and idea outward to the peripheries of the

136 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

European empires, producing new inflections of the original paradigm. Such accounts of novelistic writing present the novel as a franchise, one whose export reaffirms the greatness and identity of its source. (Lynch and Warner 4–5) While Lynch and Warner are right in critiquing the common association between greatness and the country from which a literary text originates, they do not go as far as arguing that such associations have not existed in the past. Indeed, issues of literary prestige—particularly as concerns complicated dynamics involving capitalist and imperialist expansion—are of necessity related to issues of power. This is quite clear in the historical context surrounding the publication and international dissemination of Jane Eyre. Anthony McFarlane, for example, argues that in the decades immediately preceding this novel’s publication, much was changing in the regions of the Western Hemisphere that had previously been under Spanish control: By the 1820s, then, the wreck of the Iberian powers had enabled Britain gradually to engross the commerce of their American colonies and, when Brazil and the Spanish American territories became independent in the early 1820s, to achieve a goal to which her merchants and manufactur ers had long aspired; namely, to convert Latin America into a vast emporium for British goods.5 While a possible Latin American or Caribbean readership was more than likely far from Charlotte Brontë’s mind while writing Jane Eyre, the novel does hold several interesting implications for those regions. The first of these implications involves constructions of gender roles and female agency within the novel as a genre and, in particular, Jane Eyre. Nancy Armstrong argues that the novel became what it is today in large part because during the nineteenth century, a growing number of women were simultaneously sufficiently educated and sufficiently excluded from professional arenas that, in their spare time, they wrote publishable, successful works of fiction (Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, 1987). The history of the novel since before the time of Jane Eyre embodies, in effect, a juxtaposition between female social subordination and female agency in the fictional realm. In her Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Patsy Stoneman identifies such a juxtaposition or tension in Charlotte Brontë’s novel: Charlotte Brontë the author has thus reproduced in her heroine both the sense of domestic confinement and the daydream compensation which Florence Nightingale identified as characteristic of Victorian women. But as author Charlotte Brontë had the power to give her heroine slightly more room for

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 137

manoeuvre than she herself had, so that Jane Eyre represents both the constraint of her author and the freedom of daydream heroine.6 Jane Eyre’s readers have been receptive to the title character’s sense of freedom (even if for Jane this freedom—and the good fortune to which it ultimately led her —was not without its price): a freedom in some measure due to her profession of governess. Stoneman points, for example, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, “The Copper Beeches” (1892) in which a self-sufficient young woman who has been a governess is offered a suspiciously large sum of money to look after a little boy in the country. Her employer is also shrouded in mystery: a mystery involving an allegedly mad wife and a locked apartment with an unknown occupant. Stoneman also signals E.Nesbit’s The Secret of Kyriels (1899), in which the heroine—whose mother is supposed dead—is scared as a child by a ghost from a locked-up part of the ancient house in which she lives. She later learns that what she thought was a ghost is actually a woman who happens to be her mother’s sister and is considered of unsound mind. Stoneman also takes into consideration texts not often associated with Jane Eyre, of which Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is an example. Here, a young governess goes to live in a remote house in order to care for orphan children, her immediate contact is a housekeeper, and her employer is a single man who feels burdened by his guardianship of the children. Stoneman overlooks, however, a minor reference to Brontë’s novel in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, in which an English girl living in Cuba exclaims that the job prospects on the island are not so bad: “Like Jane Eyre I could be a governess.”7 While neither Greene’s Milly nor the several characters Stoneman identified are the only fictional characters in the Caribbean who gesture toward Jane Eyre, the latters freedom and good fortune are, quite significantly, not without their inverted counterpart in Brontë’s novel: namely, in the character of Antoinette/ Bertha.8 This dialectic involving Jane and Antoinette leads us not only to issues of gender, but also to those involving racial constructions, which comprise the second of the implications Jane Eyre holds for the Caribbean. According to Stoneman, the first prominent adaptation of Jane Eyre interested (even if obliquely) in the Caribbean9 was Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film, I Walked with a Zombie, a reworking of the Jane Eyre plot in a Caribbean setting including a voodoo background which means that the first, mad wife is unable to die because she is ‘possessed.’ In this film she is a modern femme fatale, blonde and beautiful in a sophisticated style contrasting with the more homely dark prettiness of the heroine. Despite its sensational elements, the plot is basically a triangle in which the first wife is an obstacle to the ‘natural’ love of ‘Rochester’ and ‘Jane,’ who in this version is the madwoman’s nurse. (108–09)

138 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

What I find interesting about Tourneur’s adaptation is that he inverts the color scheme present in Jane Eyre, in which Bertha is both darker and less attractive than Jane Eyre, however “homely” the latter may be. Indeed, even though Bertha may be of dark complexion (Jane describes her as being “purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eye-brows widely raised over the blood-shot eyes”10), there lies a degree of uncertainty regarding her racial classification: an uncertainty that leaves plenty of room for interpretation or speculation with regard to her origins. An editor’s footnote to the 1996 Penguin edition of Jane Eyre calls attention to Bertha’s indeterminate creole background and serves as a convenient means of shifting our focus to Wide Sargasso Sea, perhaps the best known adaptation of Brontë’s novel: in the footnote, Michael Mason scrutinizes the narrative’s use of the word creole in describing Bertha and states the “term could be applied to a native West Indian of any race” (522 n.1). Mason adds that in Wide Sargasso Sea… Rhys (who knew the West Indies in the early twentieth century) gives Bertha pure English ancestry. But it is probable that [Brontë] means something specific by the expression: that Bertha’s mother is of racially mixed origins, (523 n. 1) This may or may not be the case;11 what is less contestable in Jane Eyre is that Rochester, at least, attributes Bertha’s fallen state to an inter-generational dynamic: Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family;—idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!—as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points. (326–27) Jane Eyre, meanwhile—if we recall the narrative—could be a far less dutiful child initially, having been orphaned at a young age and sent out to an unknown and often inhospitable world. Eventually, however, she reconnects with her parents’ inheritance and weds Rochester, thereby embodying the potential transmission of her parents’ wealth and genetic characteristics. BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE: HEREDITY, COLOR, AND ORIGINALITY IN JEAN RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that explores and problematizes Antoinette (a character whose fortunes shift in inverse relation to Jane Eyre’s, even if Brontë is more attentive to the latter’s story12), is also interested in questions of race and— in ways that previous criticism on Rhys’s novel has not closely pursued—matters involving heredity and relationships between the different generations.

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 139

Furthermore, even though it offers a sharply different perspective on the relationship between Antoinette and Bertha and contextualizes it within the framework of Caribbean society, inasmuch as it is interested in heredity Wide Sargasso Sea in some respects reenacts a textual hereditary relationship between parent and offspring: a relationship perhaps not unlike the colonial relationship that existed between Britain and her Caribbean possessions, including Rhys’s Dominica. To varying degrees, commentaries on this colonial relationship have informed critical approaches to Wide Sargasso Sea and Rhys’s oeuvre in general. Mary Lou Emery, for example, argues that Rhys’s novels must be read in ways that account for her West Indian background, her exposure to European modernism, and her experiences as a female writer, without, however, centering on any part of this triad.13 Unlike Brontë’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea—particularly in light of its Caribbean setting—articulates “the complex interrelationship between the condition of oppressed races and cultures under European imperialism and masculine oppression and silencing of women within European society” (Emery 62). Despite their obvious differences, the close relationship between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea has inspired several critics variously to question and to assert the independence and integrity of Rhys’s novel. Not long after Wide Sargasso Sea first appeared, Walter Allen may have been the first to question the integrity of Rhys’s novel by describing it as “a triumph of atmosphere [which] does not exist in its own right, as Mr. Rochester is almost as shadowy as Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason.”14 Meanwhile, Sandra Drake’s observations on Wide Sargasso Sea attest to the ambiguities of the colonial project: on the one hand, she argues that “the novel stands on its own. It could have been written without the relationship of intertextual referentiality in Jane Eyre”15 Later, however, she acknowledges that Rhys’s novel is in some respects “deliberately derivative, an imitation, a copy. Its very existence derives from the English classical literary canon. It is a novelistic colony” (Drake 194). Others, however, read the intertextual relationship between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea more heuristically. Michael Thorpe, for instance, contends that a strength of Wide Sargasso Sea is the way it re-works Brontë’s novel; in this regard, the novel is equally interesting in its similarities with Jane Eyre as well as in its differences: “Though I have seen people ignorant of Jane Eyre respond to this novel as a self-sufficient work, it would be foolish to deny that many average readers come to it with some recollection of Jane Eyre and that Rhys relied in a general way on their doing so” (173). Ellen Friedman’s assessment is in line with Thorpe’s; she describes Rhys’s novel as an instance of “audacious grafting” through which “Bertha’s act in Jane Eyre becomes a willed act of desperation rather than a helpless act of lunacy.”16 Meanwhile, also with respect to the intertextual relationship between the two texts, Veronica Gregg argues that Rhys’s is creatively and “deliberately anachronistic,” particularly in light of the parallel social upheavals that were occurring in the Caribbean in the 1830’s (during which

140 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

time Wide Sargasso Sea takes place) and the 1950’s and 1960’s (when Rhys was completing her novel).17 Caroline Rody reads the intertextual relationship between the two texts as representative of that between a mother and a daughter: “In the model of influence suggested by Rhys’s revision, the daughter’s struggle preserves its matrix, the mother text it both ruptures and reengenders.”18 Lastly, Mona Fayad’s observation is reminiscent of Rody’s: “It is the recognition of [Bertha’s] effacement that prompts Jean Rhys to produce a ‘mother text’ for JaneEyre.”19 These issues of indebtedness and intertextuality surrounding Wide Sargasso Sea, particularly when they are cast by critics in terms of maternal relationships (agonistic or not), pertain in very curious ways to seemingly unrelated issues involving race and heredity; these issues not only coexist in the novel but also provide an additional vantage point from which to consider the critical debates on the intertextual dependence or independence of Rhys’s novel. In the following paragraphs I will argue that—in light of Wide Sargasso Sea’s specific ways of emphasizing heredity and race—heredity serves as a metaphor for the intertextual relations between this novel and its predecessor; it does so, moreover, in ways in addition to the maternal dynamics other critics have identified in the novel. Although within the framework of maternalism in general and heredity in particular, the existence of the offspring is premised on that of the parent, in neither case would this premise mean that the offspring must take the same path as the parent. In a sense—as Rody, Thorpe and others suggest—it is as if the presence of the parent (Jane Eyre) were useful to the offspring (Wide Sargasso Sea), particularly insofar as the latter punctuates the differences between the two. There are other ways, however, in which Wide Sargasso Sea registers discourses of heredity. In the first place, there can be little doubt of the ways in which this novel interrogates constructions of color, race and ethnic Identity, particularly insofar as such constructions are charged by an often hostile post-emancipatory political and social climate on the island of Jamaica, the island that provides the initial setting for the action. The Black locals, for instance, call Antoinette’s family “white cockroaches”20: despicable for being not only poor but for being poor and white; in this regard, according to Antoinette’s friend Tia, “old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger” (24). Elsewhere in the story, it is not uncommon for the narrator (whether it be Antoinette or Rochester) to pay close attention to a character’s skin color, particularly if this gives some cause for uncertainty. Antoinette, for instance, recalls a boy and a girl who hounded her as a child; the boy was of unusual appearance: he was about fourteen and tall and big for his age, he had a white skin, a dull ugly white covered with freckles, his mouth was a negro’s mouth and he had small eyes, like bits of green glass. He had the eyes of a dead fish. Worst, most horrible of all, his hair was crinkled, a negro’s hair, but bright red, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were red. (48–49)

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 141

If we give credence to this assessment, the boy—an albino—would probably have had ancestors on both sides of the black/white color “dichotomy.” As such, the boy—to Antoinette’s repulsion—embodies the visible, phenotypic characteristics of his forebears. Ironically, such repulsion foreshadows—if we think of Rhys’s novel as a prequel21 or reconstruction of the events leading up to Brontë’s novel —the kind of repulsion Jane Eyre experienced in her encounters with Bertha, not to mention Rochester’s own skepticism both in Jane Eyre and in Wide Sargasso Sea with regard to Antoinette’s lineage. Indeed, in the latter novel, lineage and estimations thereof are seldom far from characters’ minds. Such estimations need not always pertain directly to racial constructions: Mason, Antoinette’s stepfather, learns from his wife that she is anxious to leave for England because she feels uncomfortable and unwelcome by the community surrounding her Jamaican estate, and warns her: “‘Annette, be reasonable. You were the widow of a slave-owner, the daughter of a slaveowner.” (32). Although this quote may more directly address the professions with which Annette is associated either through birth or through marriage, there is, moreover, undoubtedly an indirect pertinence to racial divisions in this quote insofar as the slavery in which the Cosway family participated was premised on constructions and assessments of color. Furthermore, even though slavery had been abolished in Jamaica, Antoinette’s associations with slave ownership could be even stronger given the additional generation she represents, i.e., being both the daughter and granddaughter of slave owners; in fact, Rochester would later feel that Antoinette betrayed him by withholding from him this information about her family’s past. Emery argues that Antoinette “longs to be black when she is white” and that she and the novel as a whole amplify not only the opposition between black and white but also those between nature/civilization, female/male, inner/outer, and dream/reality; furthermore, even though she may fail in her marriage and in her attempt to reconcile these oppositions (e.g., she never finds a viable middle ground between black and white), Antoinette is transgressive insofar as she’s willing to explore the middle space between those oppositions (Emery 47). If we pursue, in particular, the black/white opposition (although pursuing the other oppositions could lead us in a similar direction), we find additional ways in which discourses of heredity surface in the narrative. In many respects, Wide Sargasso Sea presents a vision of Caribbean society in which characters may safely belong to either of the two poles of “black” and “white” racial identity; the “coloured”22 middle ground, however, harbors only those unfortunate enough to land there even as it simultaneously repels and attracts the characters in the novel. Unlike her cousin Sandi—even if Mr. Mason’s lectures had made her too shy to acknowledge such a kinship with her “coloured relatives” (50)—not to mention the red-headed boy Antoinette described with repulsion in the earlier citation, as well as Amélie, whom Rochester described as the “halfcaste servant” (65), Rhys’s Antoinette is a white West Indian.23 She lives, however, in a society that has abruptly dispensed with slavery: although she marries Rochester—the ambitious white foreigner—for financial reasons, the

142 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

narrative often reveals (as Emery argues) her inclinations toward the Black members of the community, especially her servant—the Obeah woman Christophine—and her childhood friend Tia: Antoinette and Tia, for example, at one point exchange clothes and later mirror each other in a powerful scene in which Tia throws a stone at Antoinette’s face. Even though they had once “eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river” (45), they now “stared at each other, blood on my [Antoinette’s] face, tears on hers [Tia’s]. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass” (ibid.). Even though they occupy the oppositional points of black and white, the two become parallel figures in what is fundamentally a scene of violence. In this regard, “black” is akin to “white” in the narrative:24 indeed, a man who participates in burning down the Cosway estate (and as such illustrates Black resistance and agency in the novel) rhetorically asks Antoinette’s aunt, “So black and white, they burn the same, eh?” (44). In contrast, the middle position between black and white—whether in terms of the color of a character’s skin or in terms of her/his sympathies—seems somehow subordinate to the other two. Antoinette, for instance, is not only transgressive but may also be doomed in the narrative on account of her interest in Black people: an interest that places her in the middle ground between the black/white opposition. Furthermore, Rochester learns from Amélie of a rumor to the effect that Antoinette was romantically involved with her “coloured” cousin Sandi; even if authentic, however, this affair could not have developed: “Miss Antoinette a white girl with a lot of money, she won’t marry with a coloured man even though he don’t look like a coloured man” (121). In effect, we have in Wide Sargasso Sea a complex tension involving this problematic middle ground between black and white: on the one hand, the tension centers mostly on Antoinette and her activities (whether these are narrated by her or someone else); on the other hand, however, the tension lacks a center insofar as her desires are seemingly contradictory (she both desires and does not desire Sandi and Rochester: in each case for the opposite reasons) and in the respect that attitudes in the novel toward this center are, ironically, very de-centered and inconsistent. Antoinette, for example, is—as we have seen—drawn toward this center through her interests in members of both the side opposite hers (e.g., Christophine and Tia, who are both Black) as well as in those who occupy the “coloured” middle ground, some of whom are related to her (e.g., Sandi). Given, however, that her family has been rejected by the Black community and is in a precarious financial state, Antoinette weds Rochester, who ostensibly would secure her membership in an affluent, white colonial society (even if this runs counter to her inclinations toward the Black community and her sexual desires). Rochester, meanwhile, has long been suspicious of her; if not, perhaps, on racial grounds, then certainly on cultural ones that are closely tied to physical characteristics or mannerisms: he “watched her critically,” he reports, and recalls her “long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (67). Even though for Antoinette her marriage to Rochester suggests an upward socioeconomic move (which is not to say that she did not develop strong

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 143

feelings for him), he dwells instead on her possibly unfavorable origins rather than on her apparent direction in life and her social aspirations. Rochester’s bitterness toward Antoinette stems in part from his conviction that she lied to him about her family’s slave-owning past (146) but also about the purity or integrity of her lineage, at least in terms of the presence therein of congenital mental illness. Antoinette’s coloured and disinherited cousin Daniel Cosway25 is instrumental in inspiring doubt in Rochester’s mind with regard to that lineage. For example, in a letter to Rochester, Daniel announces: “Then it seems to me that it is my Christian duty to warn the gentleman that she is no girl to marry with the bad blood she have from both sides.26 But they are white, I am coloured” (97). Eventually, Rochester rejects anything about Antoinette that would remind him of her lineage, including her name: “He never calls me Antoinette now. He has found out it was my mother’s name” (113). The name he opts for, “Bertha” (in Jane Eyre, the character’s first name: Bertha Antoinetta Mason) recalls—as Alexis Lykiard notes27—birth, i.e., the final stage of the reproductive process: a stage Antoinette was perhaps destined never to reach. In addition, Rochester becomes increasingly suspicious (and frustrated), if not of her racial background, then at least of her ties to “coloured” characters. As he continues to observe her, he notes the following: “She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned down in a questioning mocking way. For a moment she looked very much like Amélie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It’s possible, its even probable in this damned place” (127). Ironically, however, that “coloured” middle ground to which Rochester suspected Antoinette was associated, simultaneously had its appeals for him, particularly in the person of Amélie; during a quarrel in which he promises to rid the household of Christophine, Antoinette reveals her knowledge of the affair between Rochester and the character he had once called a “half-caste servant”: “I thought you liked the black people so much…but that’s just a lie like everything else. You like the light brown girls better, don’t you?” (146).28 Wide Sargasso Sea offers (and critiques) a Caribbean microcosm in which a central position lying precariously between the black and white poles both repels and attracts, but is never free of controversy. To some extent this central position is constructed along racial lines, with references in the narrative to relationships of kinship or heredity that result in varying degrees of physical “colouredness.” The “coloured” population, however, on the whole (there are exceptions, like Daniel’s brother Alexander, who did receive an inheritance) lacks the financial clout of white, landed Caribbean society; furthermore, they are said to lack the spiritual powers of characters who are more closely linked to African traditions: Christophine, who “was much blacker [than Jamaicans]—blue-black with a thin face and straight features,” is one such character (20). An additional factor surrounding this “coloured” middle ground is that it involves—as we have seen— all the characters in the story, whether through suspicion (e.g., Rochester’s doubts about Antoinette’s lineage) or through amorous/sexual affairs (Sandi and Antoinette, Rochester and Amélie).

144 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

The alternative to this dichotomous but unstable world is one that is “coloured” to the point where color no longer makes a difference (or as Derek Walcott remarked in his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a world—one, perhaps, that the Caribbean presently approximates best—in which “children find it increasingly futile to trace…genealog”). Wide Sargasso Sea makes subtle allusions to such a world through its use of colors other than black and white: Gregg, for instance, signals a passage in the narrative in which Antoinette describes herself (“We can colour the roses as we choose and mine are green, blue and purple. Underneath, I will write my name in fire red” 53) and contrasts it with a later passage in which Rochester gives his initial impression of the West Indies (“Everything is too much…. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red” 70). The colors Antoinette uses “to emblematize herself, to represent her identity (and to foretell and remember her fate),” are, according to Gregg, “the very same colors from which her husband will recoil” (Gregg 86). These colors, moreover, recall a craft project on which Antoinette’s Aunt Cora was working: “As she talked she was working at a patchwork counterpane. The diamond-shaped pieces of silk melted one into the other, red, blue, purple, green, yellow, all one shimmering colour. Hours and hours she had spent on it and it was nearly finished. Would I be lonely? she asked and I said ‘No,’ looking at the colours. Hours and hours and hours I thought” (56, emphasis added). Antoinette is transfixed by her aunt’s counterpane, which consists of many colors even though these shine as one; furthermore, she dwelled—for no stated reason—on the length of time her aunt dedicated to the project; the colors on the counterpane and the “hours and hours and hours” it took to fashion them could represent the time and toil involved in creating a multi-colored Caribbean society. Even though the society in Wide Sargasso Sea is multi-colored, it is still nonetheless racially polarized and subject to a colonial domination embodied most vividly in the narrative by Rochester. His banishment of Antoinette to an attic of his English estate has not only colonialist implications, but also implications with regard to gender relations. As we have seen, however, complex constructions involving class, color, ethnicity, and heredity are also at play in the narrative, particularly as concerns the highly charged position between black and white: a supposed derivative, “coloured” position from which some characters are suspected of originating, or to which they fear they (or their progeny) will head, even if they are also somehow attracted to this position. Interestingly, Rochester seemed to have no such fears during his affair with Amélie. His recklessness may suggest an additional way in which the issues at hand involve gender distinctions, given that he would have been more removed than Amélie from any parental duties that might have arisen from their liaison. The preceding matters resonate strongly in debates regarding the originality or authenticity of Wide Sargasso Sea, particularly given its intertextual relation to its predecessor. In my estimation, the most productive approach to these debates does not lie in proclaiming either the “independence” or “dependence” of Rhys’s novel from Jane Eyre. Rhys observed in a letter that “it might be possible to unhitch

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 145

the whole thing from Charlotte Brontë’s novel …I don’t want to do that.”29 As we have seen, several critics have been keen on recognizing the richness of this intertextual “hitch” or tie; we should also, however, weigh such debates in light of important dynamics of “race/color” and inheritance, both of which are present in Wide Sargasso Sea itself: the “coloured” product of reputed “pure” black and white parentage (or the fear of its possibility) may be met with uncertainty in a Caribbean society that has not completely thrown off its racist colonial yoke; Rhys’s novel is, too, the offspring of a parent that both resembles it and differs from it.30 The challenge Wide Sargasso Sea poses with respect to these debates is the ability and willingness on the part of its readers to be sensitive to its allusions to Jane Eyre without dispensing with its own right to exist meaningfully, without suspicions regarding its purity (a right that coloured people in Wide Sargasso Sea had not attained). These allusions to Jane Eyre poignantly reveal the racial, gender, and class-based colonial dynamics that Brontë’s novel alludes to, but in ways that are inadequately developed and unfair to the West Indian Antoinette. As other readers of both novels have argued, Wide Sargasso Sea needs Jane Eyre to advance its own vision of the Caribbean; it is, though, its own vision. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is not the only Caribbean text (or text in some way about the Caribbean) with an intertextual link to Jane Eyre: there have been others like Our Man in Havana and I Walked with a Zombie. Since Wide Sargasso Sea, however, only two other works from the Caribbean have tapped into the Jane Eyre myth: Ana Lydia Vega’s “El baúl de Miss Florence: fragmentos para un novelón romántico”31 and Maryse Condé’s La migration des coeurs.32 NOT YOUR AVERAGE JANE: INTERTEXTUALITIES, INTERCOLONIALISMS, AND THE BIRTH OF PUERTO RICAN CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ANA LYDIA VEGA’S “EL BAÚL DE MISS FLORENCE” More than one hundred years since the United States took control of Puerto Rico as a result of a cessation following the Spanish American War, we remain interested in how writers and cultural critics on the island grapple with and pursue —despite the questionable sovereignty of Puerto Rico—their national identity. Not unlike Wide Sargasso Sea, Ana Lydia Vega’s “El baúl de Miss Florence” also explores the problematics pertaining to British colonialism in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century, particularly the last few years of this century. 1898, in particular, recalls not Great Britain, but rather Puerto Rico’s dual colonial legacy, most recently with the United States and before then with Spain. Indeed, it is usually the dichotomy between an often feared Americanized future and an often revered, idealized Spanish past that punctuates the Puerto Rican quest for national identity. How does Britain’s presence in Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century figure into the debate? One could approach this question through a glance at accounts of the island’s history. Even though such accounts are not only sketchy but of

146 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

necessity a re-construction, an interpretation, they nonetheless aid in establishing a basic framework-for my analysis of “El baúl de Miss Florence.” In a study on mercantile relations between Puerto Rico and Great Britain between 1844 and 1898, Emma Dávila Cox argues that if there was one country besides Spain and the United States capable of exerting any influence over Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century, it was Great Britain. In fact, a common assumption is to think that by 1898 Puerto Rico was already a satellite of the United States. Dávila Cox argues that Puerto Rico’s status as an economic dependent of Great Britain was on a par with those of other Caribbean islands, including Cuba and islands besides Great Britain’s English-speaking possessions. “¿Por qué Puerto Rico habría de ser diferente?” (“Why should Puerto Rico have been any different?”),33 she asks rhetorically. It was, in some regard, not different. By 1869, after only a fifteenyear-long formal diplomatic relationship between Puerto Rico and Great Britain, Henry Augustus Cowper, the British consul to Puerto Rico, was moved to say (although undoubtedly at least in part informed by political motivations) that trade between Puerto Rico and his country was nothing short of immense.34 In “El baúl de Miss Florence,” however, there is no talk of broad of political tendencies or economic ties involving Rico and Great Britain. It offers no explicitly articulated overarching analysis of Puerto Rican society and its relationship with Great Britain; it consists, instead, in the fragments of this kind of analysis and in the subversion of the romantic novel, hence the subtitle (“Fragmentos para un novelón romántico”). It is our job as readers of this novelón to assemble its fragments in meaningful ways: the story begins on a personal note, with the title character re-opening a trunk in which she had kept her memoirs dating back to a period thirty-five years earlier, or approximately the mid 1850’s. The initial third-person narrative perspective then shifts to the first person (the protagonists perspective), as the action in the longest central segment of the story is revealed to the reader though a number of markers of “Englishness”; the most important of these may be the ones that at first sight are scarcely noticeable: namely, the embedded intertextual details that appear occasionally throughout the story. This intertext, which subtly but forcefully reveals the novelón’s stance toward the foreign colonial presences in Puerto Rico, points to none other than Jane Eyre. If Wide Sargasso Sea offers a vision of Caribbean cultural identity by “rewriting” Jane Eyre, “El baúl de Miss Florence” also revives Charlotte Brontë’s classic, but with sharply different results. The presence of Jane Eyre is, first of all, at times faintly suggested in Vega’s story and at other times quite explicit:35 for instance, the protagonist’s full name is Florence Jane;36 furthermore, she falls in love with a Mr. Edward Lind, she is an “ávida lectora de novelas” (5), including “la lectura refrescante de una novela de Charlotte Brontë” (27–28) (“the refreshing world of a Charlotte Brontë novel” 194), and—as if this were not enough, one night she even hears “las notas ascendentes de una loca carcajada” (26) (“the shrill, rising notes of mad laughter”37) coming from somewhere within the house. Not surprisingly, her occupation—which justifies her reasons for being in Puerto Rico

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 147

—is eerily reminiscent of Brontë’s novel: this Jane is also a governess, British of course, hired to look after the master’s ward. As was the case in much of Jane Eyre, here too Edward is often absent on mysterious trips. In addition, Vega’s Edward—like Brontë’s—”no es precisamente lo que se llamaría un hombre hermoso” (13) (“not what the world generally calls a handsome man” 176). He possesses, nonetheless, “cualidades capaces de impresionar a ciertas damas” (13) (“qualities capable of impressing certain women” 176), and occasionally reproaches Miss Florence her excessive timidity. Ultimately, her friends and acquaintances at the estate either leave the island or die—including her ward, Charlie Lind—forcing her, in another scene reminiscent of Jane Eyre, to place an ad in a New York City newspaper offering her services as governess to anyone with the requisite social and financial standing. In an interview that took place not long after the publication of “El baúl de Miss Florence,” Vega explains that she had very specific reasons for tapping into the Jane Eyre myth: I did not want to have a closed ending; I wanted an ambiguous ending where you wonder what’ll happen to Miss Florence, where you try to imagine an ending yourself. I wanted at the same time to parody and to break from the 19th century narrative model in women’s writing which one finds in writers like the Brontës. I wanted to alter the narrative by leaving it open. Those narratives always left everything resolved, everything was nicely tied up at the end. You knew exactly what would happen…. Not here. Here, you have all the options.38 How, exactly, might Vega’s interest in leaving the narrative “open” on the hand translate into the events in her story and on the other hand serve to distinguish it from a Brontean text? As is the case with any two texts this similar, their differences are oftentimes of most interest. The first difference is, obviously, that Vega’s novelón is set neither in Lowood nor in the British West Indies but in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico (Arroyo, to be exact), a part of the Caribbean not usually associated with British colonialism. Secondly, “El baúl de Miss Florence”—in keeping with Vega’s intentions—clearly does not have a happy or resolved ending for its protagonist. The ending, in fact, may reveal another of Vega’s intentions: to show the problematic nature and constructedness of histories; in “El baúl de Miss Florence,” this entails building a story around the mysterious deaths of some of the characters, many of whom are based on actual figures in the Puerto Rican historical record. This strategy links many of Vega’s efforts at storytelling and informs her practice of revising and embellishing well-known myths or histories of the island in order to produce counter myths and counter histories: for example, in a preface to the collection of which “El baúl de Miss Florence” is a part, Vega states that the events retold in her book “fueron inspirados por la historia, la leyenda y la tradición oral de los pueblos costeros del sur puertorriqueño” (1).39

148 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Keeping this strategy in mind, we can more easily consider the status of Miss Florence’s negotiation of her Brontean identity as she makes direct and indirect comments on the British presence in Puerto Rico and on the cultural identity of the latter. In terms of the British in Puerto Rico, Miss Florence acknowledges the privileges accorded to her by her nationality: she states that upon her arrival on the island, her “pasaporte británico—muy apreciado en estas latitudes—me ahorr [ó] cómodamente las formalidades de aduana” (6) (“my British passport [much respected in these latitudes] saved me the discomforts of the formalities of Customs” 167). Meanwhile, upon her arrival at the estate in Puerto Rico where she was to work as a governess, any misgivings she may have had about being in an environment utterly foreign to her are erased as soon as she sets foot in the beautiful and ostentatious palace that looks like it came straight out of Thornfield. In many respects, Vega’s Jane and Brontë’s Jane are parallel figures: they share many characteristics and undergo many of the same experiences, albeit with a crucial difference in setting. Significantly, although she is clearly positioned within the estate’s rigid hierarchy (a hierarchy based on numerous distinctions, including ones involving gender, nationality, and class), she nonetheless asserts a sense of superiority: “me siento, en cierta medida, yo también dueña de ese imperio de cañas sembradas a pérdida de vista en el Caribe” (8) (“I find that I too am mistress of this empire of sugar cane stretching as far as the eye can see toward the dark-blue Caribbean” 169). It is within this setting that Miss Florence participated in social activities while taking the appropriate measures not to commit “un desaire contra la comunidad británica” (17) (“an offense to the British community” 181). As I noted previously, Miss Florence is painfully shy; such a personality, however, allows her (as it did Jane Eyre) to “observar sin ser observada” (38) (“observe without being observed” 207). She is in this regard not just a marker of the British presence in Puerto Rico, but a marker (or observer) of the sociopolitical transformations that are occurring during the latter portion of the nineteenth century, both on the estate where she is a governess, but also in some measure on the entire island. This estate merits additional scrutiny, for the historical archives on which Vega bases the events in the novelón show that it was owned by Edward Lind, the Danish son-in-law of the American inventor Samuel Morse, a staunch anti-abolitionist. It seems important to Vega’s novelón that Morse died in 1872, a year before the abolition of slavery on the island. It is of further importance that the events of the story bridge the period in Puerto Rican history that saw the abolition of slavery. How, we might ask, does this information pertain to British colonialism and intertextuality? The British were clearly active in the Hispanic Caribbean during the latter half of the nineteenth century. So were, however, groups more prominent in the region, including Spaniards, Americans, Danes, the French, etc., and we see characters representing these nationalities in “El baúl de Miss Florence.” In this regard, Vega is—in highly sophisticated fashion—advancing a vision regarding Puerto Rican national identity: a vision that involves an activation of Jane Eyre

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 149

not unlike Rhys’s; whereas, however, Rhys focuses on Brontë’s portrayal of Antoinette in establishing an intertextual relationship with Jane Eyre, Vega focuses instead on this novels titular character. Vega explains that she related the Lind-Morse family tale from a foreigner’s viewpoint to illustrate the situation faced by an emerging Creole class in the 19th century, a time when an awareness of a distinctly Puerto Rican culture was just beginning to appear. In the southern region of the island, 3/4 of the landowners—the people with money—were foreigners. They weren’t even Spanish. There were very few Spaniards controlling the economy in this region. It was very international. There were British, Dutch, Danes. People from all over Europe as well as those who came via the Caribbean islands….There were North Americans, too. This world fascinated me, especially the town of Arroyo, an international emporium of great wealth based on the exploitation of sugar. I said to myself, ‘this world where everything is foreign, where everyone is foreign, must have created special difficulties for the emergence of the Creole, of Puerto Rican consciousness. (“Women and Writing in Puerto Rico” 820–21) Ultimately, Miss Florence’s nationality is most important insofar as it is not among the more prominent ones in Puerto Rico, or rather, it is only one of a number of prominent foreign groups on the island; her British passport affords her the freedom to travel throughout the region, to practice her profession of governess, and to move freely in the stratified society on the Lind family estate. Her nationality notwithstanding, Miss Florence is of further importance to the story in that she is one of the few important characters who does not the: in this regard, she is not only able to observe the community on and around the Lind estate, but —quite significantly—she is also in many respects a barometer for or reflector of the changes this community experienced. Her role of reader and observer is an important but ambiguous one; on the one hand, she is a reader of literature: not only does Miss Florence read a novel by Charlotte Brontë, but at various intervals throughout the narrative we find her reading works by mostly Anglo-American authors with feminist leanings (Brontë, Margaret Fuller, Mary Wollstonecraft). On the other hand, however, her bookish inclinations and timid, demure personality merely punctuate the changes that are occurring in the society in which she is increasingly a member: unlike Jane Eyre, who finds her Rochester and good fortune (despite—or because of—others’ misfortunes), Miss Florence in some ways remains a distant outsider but in other ways becomes entangled in the declining fortunes of her employers. After reading the news of the death of the last remaining member of the Lind family, Miss Florence in her despair burns all the diaries she had written during her stay in Puerto Rico; at story’s end, her famed trunk is empty and able to communicate only its void: in this regard, it could be both a testament to despair or to Miss Florence’s liberating distancing from her painful memories. In this respect, she,

150 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

and in some measure the Linds, embody both the possibility—inasmuch as they immigrated to Puerto Rico—of a cultural translation or communion between Puerto Rico and the rest of the North Atlantic, as well as the failure of this sort of communion. Vega leaves it to the reader to decide on the negative or positive implications of this ambiguity. In effect, Miss Florence illustrates both the possibility and limitations of intertextuality. She arrived in Puerto Rico with the optimism of her literary namesake but left amid a series of personal setbacks and societal transformations on the island: transformations that, quite significantly, involve discourses or processes involving heredity. What was happening in Puerto Rico? Vega’s earlier comments regarding the formation of a Creole class in Puerto Rico are a first clue: in many ways, Miss Florence and the other foreigners set in relief this emerging class and the obstacles it was facing in asserting its voice, particularly during the turbulent time surrounding the abolition of slavery and the transferral of power from one colonizer (Spain) to another (the United States). While Miss Florence and some of the other characters may have gone to great pains to keep their national identities intact—which in turn allows for a juxtaposition with the emerging Puerto Rican Creole identity—other characters, most notably the children of the expatriates, did not follow suit. This lack of continuity has, at the very least, often intertwined ethnic and linguistic implications, as well as implications with regard to ideas of cultural identity. In terms of ethnic discontinuities between first and second generation residents of Puerto Rico, experiences on the part of characters on the island are first of all often described in terms of blood. The ever-shy Miss Florence, for instance, describes her feelings after she had been named the winner of a talent show (even though she never competed): “Un golpe de sangre hirviente acudió violentamente a mi cabeza, comprometiendo el equilibrio de mis piernas” (20) (“A surge of boiling blood rushed to my head, and I thought for a moment my legs would fail me” 185). This is, in fact, one of several occasions when the blood raced to her head amid some trying or embarrassing scenario. Later, after she withstands a bout of yellow fever, Edward Lind announces: “‘Miss Florence Jane: la declaro sobreviviente de la fiebre amarilla. Tiene fibra de mujer africana, no pensaba que fuera usted tan fuerte.’ El piropo burlón me hizo venir la sangre al rostro” (28) (“‘Miss Florence Jane, I hereby declare you survivor of the yellow fever. You’ve the stuff of an African woman in you—I never thought you would turn out so strong.’ His mocking compliment brought the blood to my face” 194). Indeed, ethnicity as a concept—which in many respects amounts to a certain way of distinguishing people into separate groups (even if these distinctions are bogus)—is premised on perceived changes that occur over a number of generations. In this respect, “El baúl de Miss Florence” is more about her ward Charlie than it is about the title character;40 we can even take this argument a step further by stating that the story is not only about Charlie, but also about the group of people involved in determining the ethnic identity of Charlie’s son.

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 151

As much as Charlie’s parents tried to ensure that their son would uphold their colonial values, his Puerto Rican surroundings steered him in a different direction. Miss Florence indicates, for example, that the language he was learning was far from the “pure” Castilian students of his social class should learn, let alone the English language his family and Miss Florence spoke: she observes that Charlie “ha aprendido el español casi prodigiosamente y su acento, insólitamente desclasado, delata el origen africano de su escuela. Es en esa lengua que responde, a modo de malacrianza, cuando intento capturar su atención para alguna enseñanza” (8) (“The boy has learned Spanish like a prodigy, but his accent, in no way befitting a member of his class, betrays the African origins of his school. It is in Spanish that he replies, impudently, when I try to catch his attention for some lesson” 170). Evidently, even though Charlie would have been an elementary school student before the abolition of slavery on the island, there were enough students of African descent at his school to concern his parents and Miss Florence. Given that Edward was a Dane who spoke Spanish, while Charlie resisted English and spoke Spanish with his friends in Puerto Rico and French with his friends in Paris, even as Miss Florence spoke English but little Spanish and actually taught Charlie how to speak French, Vega’s novelón is heavy with linguistic implications (which is not surprising given the author’s own expertise in Francophone literature). In her essay, “Like English for Spanish: Meditaciones desde la frontera anglorriqueña,” Vicky Unruh provides a fruitful analysis of the importance of language to “El baúl de Miss Florence.” She argues that writers like Vega, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Rosario Ferré are providing a history of language in Puerto Rico that counters the Hispanocentric histories advanced in the 1930s by Puerto Rican writers like Antonio Pedreira, René Marqués, Vicente Géigel Polanco (the writers Gelpí identifies as founders of Puerto Rican literary paternalism), and—before them—Luis Lloréns Torres in the 1910’s. Géigel Polanco, for instance, “linked Puerto Rico to ‘el honor y la gloria de la raza hispana.’ The island’s tie to Spain, he argued, was simultaneously a ‘comunidad de sangre’ and a ‘comunidad del idioma.’”41 In this regard, Unruh argues that “one of the works recurrent unanswered questions is exactly what language the characters are supposed to be speaking in any given exchange. What becomes clear is that they are all frequently communicating in a ‘foreign’ language.”42 Although there was certainly linguistic plurality and, quite often, linguistic confusion and concerns, Vega leaves little doubt about the linguistic direction she identifies for the island. Particularly in light of the cultural polemics with regard to language that have spanned Puerto Rico’s history, in “El baúl de Miss Florence” questions with regard to language are not disconnected from broader concerns involving societal change. When Charlie strips in her presence and jumps into a pool of water, for instance, Miss Florence speculates that his African friends were corrupting more than just his language, but perhaps the sense of decorum and restraint that presumably should accompany any child of his social standing: “Supuse que había adquirido ésa y quién sabe cuántas otras malas costumbres en el trato con los niños africanos

152 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

que han sido sus compañeros de juegos” (10) (“I supposed that he had acquired this and who knew how many other questionable habits in his contact with the African children who have always been his playmates” 172). Not only was his contact with these children a factor in his acquisition of unbridled, risqué habits, but so is, apparently, the climate on the island: eventually Miss Florence reports that Charlie had entered “el camino irreversible de la pubertad. El calor equatorial, tengo entendido, favorece y acelera esos procesos” (17) (“the irreversible road to puberty. The equatorial heat, I understand, favors and accelerates that process” 180). Charlie’s parents were probably intent on preventing what seemed to them a slippery slope whereby his contact with the African children would inevitably result in anything but an attitude of superiority toward these children. After all, Mr. Lind, at least, is vocal about his feelings toward the slaves and their descendants, whose labor guaranteed his wealth. He is particularly critical of the second of these two groups, and would tell Miss Florence “que esta raza híbrida de las islas ha nacido sin alma?” (26) (“that this hybrid race in the islands has been born without a soul?” 192). However, his contempt does not prevent him from having affairs with the local women of color. Charlie is both like and unlike his father in this respect: “de tal palo. Tan diferentes en los pareceres y tan igualitos en los placeres” (72) (“like father, like son…. But how could two men be so alike in their pleasures and so different in every other way?” 247). Specifically, whereas Edward Lind would keep mistresses among the local women, Charlie eventually wants to marry one. For the former, the difference is crucial: “no era lo mismo llevar amores a escondidas con las negras que quererse casar con una mulata” (72) (“Marrying a mulatto woman was not the same as sowing some wild oats with the negro girls” 247). Whom does Charlie wish to marry? Before answering that question, it might be worth knowing first that her grandmother is Bela, a servant at the Lind estate: “una negra sin edad con ojos dulcemente caninos” (8) (“a negress of indeterminate age with sweetly canine eyes” 169). The young woman, Brunilda, eventually becomes pregnant with Charlie’s child; he kills himself when Edward Lind does not reconsider his position on such a marriage. Brunilda hardly resembles her grandmother: Bela explains that she era clara, más clara que Selenia43…y tenía la piel de aceituna como una misma gitana, los ojos grandes, color de miel y la nariz que parecía tallada de tan perfilada. Lo único que dejaba ver su cuna humilde eran los cabellos, que eran como los míos. (71–72) was light-skinned, lighter-skinned than Selenia, if you remember her, Miss Florence. Her skin was as olive-colored as a gypsy, and she had big eyes the color of honey, and a nose that looked like somebody had whittled it down, it was so fine and narrow. The only thing that gave away her birth was her hair, which was just like mine, kinky. (247)

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 153

After her absence from Puerto Rico and the Lind estate, Miss Florence is initially started upon encountering Andrés, Brunilda’s child with Charlie, particularly on account of his features. Gradually, however, this surprise subsides: “La sonrisa franca de aquel joven mulato, el insólito color [verde] de aquellos ojos que la observaban con una mezcla de curiosidad y compasión, desarmaron poco a poco su desconfianza” (68) (“The open smile of the young mulatto, however, the rare [green] color of those eyes observing her with a mixture of curiosity and compassion, little by little disarmed her mistrustfulness” 242). She is equally astounded to learn that Andrés and Bela are related: Cuando recobró la calma, Bela me presentó a Andrés, a quien se obstinaba en identificar como su nieto. Esto me extrañó sobremanera pues sabía que Bela no había tenido hijos y que cuando nuestras vidas se habían separado, era ya una mujer de unos cincuenta años. Huelga decir que la discreción selló mis labios y que acepté su afirmación como se acepta un misterio de fe. (69) When she recovered herself, Bella introduced me to Andrés, whom she insisted upon calling her grandson. This surprised me no end, as I knew that Bella had never had any children, and that when our lives diverged she had been a woman of some fifty years of age. Naturally I said nothing, accepting her statement as one accepts a mystery of faith. (244) The link between Bela and Andrés is indeed a surprising one for Miss Florence given the physical differences between the two characters: differences that underscore the complex role of hereditarian processes in a society that had until recently been a slaveholding one. It is worth noting that Andrés has been incorporated into Bela’s—as opposed to the Lind—side of the family; after all— according to Bela—if Miss Florence is surprised about Andrés, so much the greater would have been Samuel Morse’s surprise: “hasta los negros agregados bromeaban, pensando en los vuelcos que daría en la tumba Mr. Morse el día del nacimiento del bisnieto tiznado [Andrés]” (72) (“even the black sharecroppers made jokes about it, laughing over the way Mr. Morse would be spinning in his grave the day his dark-skinned great-grandson [Andrés] was born” 248). It is also worth noting that while Bela explains to Miss Florence all the transformations that occurred on the estate (Charlie’s death, Andrés’s birth) and in Puerto Rican society at-large (the abolition of slavery), Andrés “escuchaba, atento y sonreído, el monólogo que su desconocimiento del inglés le impedía comprender” (69) (“smiling, listened attentively to the monologue, though his ignorance of English kept him from understanding much of it” 244). In some respects, “El baúl de Miss Florence” had come a long way from Charlie’s European heritage (and his family’s efforts at monitoring his linguistic education) to the mulato Andrés, who is firmly entrenched in the Spanish tongue. In other respects, however, they serve to underscore not only the revolutionary transformations Puerto Rican society had experienced, but also a more gradual evolution involving linguistic and ethnic

154 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

transformations. The sum of all these transformations equal the culturally distinct, creole Puerto Rican society of the present day: a society with multiple origins and with an uncertain political status, but one that asserts a viable and distinct cultural identity. If Puerto Rico’s cultural identity emerges through an account (both fictional and factual) of the islands relationship to rest of world—a relationship, moreover, that registers ethnic relations informed by processes of heredity— we can draw interesting parallels with regard to the implied vision in “El baúl de Miss Florence” of the emergence of the islands autochthonous literary practice. In this regard, just as Puerto Rican creole society consists in its diverse national and ethnic origins, so too does its literature: although Vega’s novelón may be premised on its intertextual ties with European texts, the most prominent of which is Jane Eyre, it embodies the assertion of a viable and distinct Puerto Rican literary voice. Ultimately, Miss Florence clears her trunk and burns its documents (which might otherwise have constituted a traditional romantic novel), documents that result— in the final sentence of the novel—in a “humerada espesa [que] huye por la ventana abierta hacia un cielo atravesado por las primeras golondrinas de la primavera” (84) (“thick cloud of smoke [that] issues from the open window, up toward a sky traced by the first swallows of spring” 261). The Spring…and the emergence of a Puerto Rican society and literature. HYBRIDITY AND HYBRIDIZATION IN MARYSE CONDÉ’S LA MIGRATION DES COEURS Set in several islands of the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Cuba, and Dominica) and spanning the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (a period approximately a half century after the emancipation of slaves in much of the region), Maryse Condé’s La migration des coeurs (1995; Windward Heights 1998), too, raises important questions about the relationship of intertextuality to racial constructions, and also suggests an important Caribbean perspective on the post-colonial term, hybridity. I will conclude this segment by arguing that, in a sense, Condé’s novel articulates the shortcomings of this term. Je pense que la fascination que j’avais pour Brontë m’a amenée à écrire ce livre. Ce n’est pas une decision, comment dirais-je, intellectuellement nourrie. Ce n’est pas comme quand on a un sujet en tête et qu’on se dit bon je vais commencer à écrire…cela n’a pas été vraiment une decision. Je n’aurais jamais osé faire ça.44 I think that the fascination I held for Brontë led me to write this book. It was not a decision, how shall I say, intellectually stimulated. It was not the case that I had a subject in mind and told myself, fine, I shall begin to write… this was not really a decision. I would never dare do that.

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 155

With these words Condé lays the framework for a (sometimes heated) discussion on the intertextual relations between Windward Heights and Wuthering Heights. Her comments are suggestive particularly given the division she suggests between the demands of a passion and those of intellect. We shall see that a similar division characterizes her novel, which juxtaposes scientific hereditarian paradigms with the oppressive and whimsical nature of heredity in a lived social context. If Wide Sargasso Sea and “El baúl de Miss Florence” rewrite Jane Eyre, Windward Heights is clearly an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). This text, according to Stoneman, was not initially received as favorably as Jane Eyre and took four to five decades before gaining admittance into the British literary canon: “Wuthering Heights is not, like Jane Eyre, the kind of text which invites identification with its characters, and this is doubtless one reason why it was left for literary women to see the strength and audacity of Emily Brontë’s writing” (67). Of particular interest to Condé’s intertextual mission is the centrality of racial issues in Wuthering Heights. Condé’s protagonist, Razyé, for instance, is modeled after Heathcliff, whose adoptive father—in the opening pages of Brontë’s novel—describes their initial encounter: “I was never so beaten with anything in my life; but you must e’en take it as a gift of God, though its as dark almost as if it came from the devil.”45 We also learn that “not a soul knew to whom [Heathcliff] belonged” (40). In ways strongly reminiscent of Heathcliff, Razyé is a loner throughout Condé’s novel partly due to his uncertain family origins and a particularly dark skin color amid a highly color-conscious society. His repeated acts of physical and psychological cruelty also win him little sympathy from his family and acquaintances and serve to alienate him. Furthermore, both Heathcliff and Razyé first court a woman named Cathy but are abruptly repelled (and eventually haunted) by her; the bulk of the story consists in the revenge each character exacts on the societies whose values sometimes impede romantic relations between people of different skin colors and social strata. While critics have commented (sometimes unfavorably) on the intertextual projects of Wide Sargasso Sea and “El baúl de Miss Florence,” their comments seem mild in comparison with the critical reception of Condé’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Roger Little, for instance, observes that Condé’s intertextual project in Windward Heights is nothing new in Caribbean letters as a whole, and that this project is in fact consistent with the derivative tendencies in her own corpus of writing: “Traversée de la mangrove is structured on the same basis of polyphony around a coffin as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (with echoes of Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan); the Hester of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is revived in Moi Tituba, sorcière…Noire de Salem.”46 Brad Senning targets Windward Heights in particular with having failed in its intertextual project, a failure stemming, quite simply, from a lack of talent on the part of its author: Conde [sic] is more open [than Brontë] in addressing racial issues. Her characters spend more time talking and fighting about race than do those in

156 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

the original. Yet, the controversies, while more spectacular, are less complex…. Working with established stories has a kind of cachet in the work of postmodern artists, where the new and old build their houses together. So it is understandable that these artists try their hands at it. But the old architecture requires a nimble talent to be restructured. Conde and Parks, simply put, do not have it.47 Little goes further in his criticisms than Senning, however, by accusing Condé of more than just lacking originality: he states that while Calixthe Beyala (the Camerounaise novelist) “is condemned for copying passages from novelists writing in English, whereas at most she can be copying only their translators. … Condé is not condemned for lifting the very armature of some of her novels from other writers in English. Is that not the more fundamental ‘crime’?” (15). Perhaps not surprisingly, he offers little textual evidence to support his contention and does not detail how the intertextuality of Windward Heights differs from other, more palatable, instances of literary adaptation. Denning, meanwhile, in his review commits the mistake of positing Brontë’s text as a benchmark for the artistic merit of Condé’s. Windward Heights, however, is not in competition with its predecessor, but rather is in pursuit—within a Caribbean context—of certain avenues suggested by Brontë’s text. The benchmark for the success of Windward Heights seems to be, then, whether or not this pursuit is powerful and insightful in light of the story’s new geographic and cultural context. Theo D’haen offers a nuanced understanding of the intertextual meanings in Windward Heights. According to him, that the action in the novel takes place not only in Guadeloupe and Cuba but also in Dominica suggests that Condé’s novel not only adapts Wuthering Heights, but that it also consists in “a ‘lecture’ through the prism of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and even of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.”48 D’haen’s observation (despite some limitations we shall see later) facilitates the approach I take toward Condé’s novel: an approach that considers the novel’s intertextual premise through a reading of its complex racial and hereditarian discourses: discourses of relevance to well-known critical models of the region’s cultural composition. Indeed, passages describing the Cuban setting early in the novel cast a net wide enough to encompass allusions to Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation (Contrapunteo Cubano) and Antonio Benítez Rojo’s concept of super-syncretism (La isla que se repite). The narrative, for instance (which is, at this early point third-person and omniscient; later several different characters take turns narrating individual chapters), describes as follows a statue of Santa Bárbara in a Havana church: Par une étrange et tortueuse complicité, cette vierge, maigrichonne dans sa robe blanche et son manteau rouge, tenant a deux mains une lourde épée, était l’un des chemins qu’empruntait [ce] dieu pour manifester sa puissance. Aussi, son image était présente dans tous les temples de la santería. On la

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 157

représentait en jeune fille yoruba, le front auréolé de cheveux crépus, les pommettes striées de balafres, assise à dos de cheval et serrant contre sa poitrine un regime de plantains, qui étaient la nourriture favorite de Chango.49 By a strange twist of collusion, this frail virgin in her white dress and red cape, holding a heavy sword with both hands, was one of [this] god’s manifestations of power. In fact her image could be seen in every temple dedicated to santería, depicted as a young Yoruba girl, her forehead haloed in frizzy hair, her cheekbones scored with scars, seated on a horse, clutching against her breast a bunch of plantains, Chango’s favourite food.50 If this early scene offers a static (albeit complex) visual representation of what are actually dynamic sociocultural processes in the Caribbean, in many respects the remainder of Windward Heights attempts to account for these dynamic processes: processes in which the novels characters often dwell on matters involving heredity. This is the case particularly in light of their attempts throughout the narrative to uncover knowledge about their ancestors and, in so doing, recover lost origins of many varieties. In an interview, Condé accounts for this quest on the part of her characters in terms of the intertwined legacies of colonialism and slavery in the region: Je pense que tous les colonises ont ce besoin de chercher leurs aïeux. On vous a toujours menti sur votre histoire, on vous a toujours caché votre histoire ou travesti votre histoire, on ne vous a raconté que l’histoire officielle des vainqueurs, vous avez envie de chercher vos aïeux. (Condé 1999, 73) I think that all colonized have this need to seek their ancestors. You have always been lied to about your history, your history has always been hidden or misrepresented, you only hear the official history of the victors, you feel the need to seek your ancestors. More than anyone else in Windward Heights, Razyé is disconnected from any knowledge of his ancestors. When Hubert Gagneur found the young Razyé during a trip, the latter’s past and family origins were a virtual blank slate, one that would remain as much throughout his life: Personne ne pouvait dire à quel moment Razyé était arrive…ni l’en-droit d’où il sortait. On ne lui connassait que ce patronyme bizarre, comme si ses parents ne s’étaient pas occupés de lui donner un saint patron au jour de son baptême. (15) Nobody could say exactly when Razyé had arrived…nor where he had come from. They only knew him by this odd name, as if his parents had not bothered to give him a saint’s name on the day of his christening. (8)

158 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Since Gagneur had found him in the inhospitable heath of Guadeloupe’s rocky countryside, he named the boy Razyé. This name may be a corruption of the French rasé, a name that suggests a shaved or barren terrain. While names seem to play an important role throughout the novel (several names, for instance, are repeated in the multiple generations that comprise the epic nature of the novel, and sometimes boldly so, particularly when, for example, Razyé’s lover names their child after his principal rival), Razyé’s name is especially loaded with historical allusions: barren land is the result, after all, of the sugar plantations exploitative cultivation of the Caribbean countryside. The sugar plantation is also in many ways at the root of the exploitation in the Caribbean of dark-skinned people of African and East Indian extent; Razyé—not unlike Heathcliff, his fictional counterpart—is of noticeably dark skin: Sa peau aussi était noire, de ce noir brillant que l’on appelle ashanti, et ses cheveux entortillés en boucles comme ceux d’un bata-zindien. Personne ne pouvait soutenir le regard de ses yeux mourants qui charroyaient on ne sait quelle qualité de douleur et de solitude. (15) His skin too was black, that shiny black they call Ashanti, and his hair hung in curls like those of an Indian half-caste, the Bata-Zindien. Nobody could hold the gaze of his languishing eyes, where churned who knows what pain and solitude. (7) In fact, Razyé wishes he were white. In a conversation with a servant at the Gagneur estate, he exclaims: “Ah, qu’est-ce que j’aimerais être blanc! Blanc avec des yeux bleus! Blanc avec des cheveux blonds sur ma tête!” (36) (“Oh, how I wish I were white!…White with blue eyes in my face! White with blond hair on my head” 30). Nelly’s response, although given with the best intentions, does little to pacify him. She states, Vous croyez que vous n’êtes pas beau à votre façon avec cette peau d’un noir ashanti, ces bons cheveux cout bouclés et cout ces signes sur vos joues? Peut-être que vos ancêtres étaient des princes et des princesses? Qui sait ce qu’étaient nos parents avant d’être emmenés ici en esclavage? (36) You know you’re handsome in your own way, with that Ashanti black skin, that fine curly hair and all those marks on your cheeks. Perhaps your ancestors were princes and princesses? Who knows what our parents were before we were brought here as slaves! (30) The questioning, hypothetical nature of Nelly’s last two statements attest to how little Razyé actually does know about his past. His only clue to this past is inscribed in his skin color (which signals an African and—perhaps—East Indian ancestry). In this respect, his skin color amounts to an organic genealogy: constantly reminding him and those around him of his ancestral origins.

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 159

One character, in particular, is aware of the stakes involved in marrying Razyé: Cathy Gagneur. Despite the passion she feels for him (and despite, also, her own African ancestry), she sees marrying Razyé as a step in the wrong genealogical (and socioeconomic) direction: “Je ne pourrai jamais, jamais me marier avec Razyé. Ce serait trop dégradant. Ce serait recommencer a vivre comme nos ancêtres, les sauvages d’Afrique!” (20) (“I could never, never marry Razyé. It would be too degrading. It would be like starting to live again like our ancestors, the savages in Africa!” 13). Ultimately, her decision to marry the white Aymeric de Linsseuil was not a difficult one to make: “Je sortirai de ce trou à rats et à chauves-souris qu’est L’Engoulvent. J’aurai des robes en soie, des chapeaux capelines en paille d’Italie, des domestiques pour me servir. Mes enfants seront blancs et riches” (48) (“I’ll get out of l’Engoulvent that’s nothing but a hole full of rats and bats. I’ll have silk dresses, widebrimmed Italian straw hats and servants at my beck and call. My children will be white and rich” 41). At her wedding banquet, we see her dancing with the ghosts of the African ancestors she had forsaken: “Sous les chandeliers de cristal, elle valsait avec Aymeric sur un plancher que des générations d’esclaves, ses ancêtres, avaient poli” (56) (“Under the crystal chandeliers she waltzed with Aymeric over a floor that generations of slaves, her ancestors, had polished” 49–50). In keeping with the storyline of Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s marriage to Razyé’s rival was, due to her death, short-lived: long enough only to produce three children within a short span of time. However, a very interesting transformation occurred at her wake: “D’abord, la couleur de sa peau n’était pas assez blanche. On aurait dit que le sang nègre, qu elle ne pouvait plus contenir, prenait sa revanche. Victorieux, il l’envahissait” (89) “First of all the colour of her skin was not white. It was as if her black blood could no longer be contained and was taking its revenge. Victorious, it was flooding through her” (84). In effect, while genetic transmissions and the societal racial constructions with which they are associated serve as a backdrop to the events of the novel, these transmissions are often described in the narrative in ways that suggest the presence of other forces invisible to the radar of genetics and modern science: it is as if the hereditarian processes assume, in metaphorical ways, a life of their own. If in some respects the question underlying Windward Heights is which ancestors’ (those of Europeans or nonEuropeans) genes will be transmitted to future generations and with what socioeconomic motivations, it is difficult to separate this question from an equally pressing one in the narrative: to wit, are hereditarian relationships and transactions bound by inviolable genetic principles? Cathy’s daughter with Aymeric (Cathy II) suggests the possibility of a negative answer to this question. Cathy II “affichait qu elle n’avait rien à personne. À la difference de ses frères, un hâle déjà foncé l’obscurcissait, comme si elle était remontée dans le temps a la recherche d’une généalogie oubliée” (92) (“had nothing in common with the rest of the family. Unlike her brothers, her skin had already darkened, as if she had gone back in time in search of a lost family tree”

160 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

87). Mabo Sandrine, an old servant at the Gagneur estate observes the following with respect to Cathy II: C’est vrai que dans le fond de mon coeur sa couleur m’avait toujours étonnée. Mais je la mettais tout bonnement au compte de la famille de sa maman. Le sang africain est traître. Il est tenace. Il circule en cachette, puis il reparaît au grand jour au moment où personne ne l’attend plus. Un beau jour, l’aïeule bambara avait decide de se venger. (199–200) It’s true that deep down her colour had always surprised me. But I put it down quite simply to her mothers family. African blood is treacherous. It’s deep-rooted. It circulates in secret, then reappears one day at the moment when you least expect it. Out of the blue her Bambara ancestress had decided to take her revenge. (201) Razyé’s lover, Irmine—a white woman—describes a similar phenomenon involving their child, Razyé II: “le bébé était, en plus clair, le portrait tout craché de Razyé. Mêmes yeux brillants comme la braise, même front. On aurait dit que tout mon sang n’avait servi de rien” (105) (“The baby was the very image of Razyé, but a lighter-skinned version. The same fiery eyes, the same forehead. It was as if all my white blood had been to no avail” 101). In this and in many other instances throughout the novel, an African heritage (particularly as embodied in Razyé) wields a genetic power that seems to outweigh its European competition. It is important to note that Razyé’s power is not limited to cases in which he has been physically involved as a progenitor. Elsewhere, his power extends to a metaphorical realm, whereby he receives credit for parenting children that are not physically related to him. When Justin-Marie (son of the first Cathy’s brother) hears speculation that he might be Aymeric’s son, he retorts, “Couillonades! Ce n’est pas mon papa. [Aymeric] me soigne, il va me guérir, c’est cout. Tú sais qui c’est, mon vrai papa?… Razyé!” (169) (“Rubbish! [Aymeric’s] not my papa. He’s taking care of me, he’s going to cure me, that’s all. Do you know who my real papa is?… Razyé!” (167). Justin-Marie’s lie attests on a certain level to Razyé’s renown for having fathered countless children throughout the Caribbean; on a different level, however, the lie attests to Razyé’s ascendancy into a position of symbolic father to a perhaps even larger number of children. While the narrative occasionally suggests the possibility of Razyé’s literal paternity in cases where the identity of the father is dubious, readers of Windward Heights should not overlook the importance of metaphorical or symbolic paternity: a type of paternity that coexists in the novel with the literal kind. We see this vacillation in the servant Romaine’s description of Cathy II: C’étaient les mêmes yeux fiévreux, la même bouche un peu lourde, le même menton volontaire. Au bout de quelques instants, elle se ressaisit, de disant qu’elle perdait la tête. Qu’est-ce qu’elle alait chercher là? La fille d’Aymeric de Linsseul ressemblerait à Razyé?… C’était folie pure et simple. (250–51)

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 161

It was the same burning eyes, the same slightly heavy lips and the same willful chin. After a moment she took a grip on herself, telling herself she was losing her senses. Whatever could she be thinking of? Aymeric de Linsseuil’s daughter looking like Razyé? It was pure madness. (256) Even though Razyé has little affection for Cathy II and never acknowledged any physical role he played in her procreation, he nonetheless entertains the idea of claiming her as his own, if only so that “sa marcotte prendrait la place de la plante originelle” (251–52) (“[his] offshoot would replace the master stock” 257). The characters in Windward Heights, then, seem to encompass both literal and figurative hereditarian relationships. In his reading of the novel, D’haen emphasizes the former of these relationships. He argues, for example, that the offspring in the story “are of course hybrids—what could be finer proof of the ultimate victory of la créolité?” (210). Such a reading, which posits la créolité as the result of physical relationships, overlooks the tropaic elements of the concept and provides inadequate assessments of the characters in the novel. He states the following with regard to Cathy II: At the end of the novel, though, it seems more than likely that [Cathy II] is actually the daughter not of Cathy Gagneur and Aymeric de Linsseuil, but rather of the former and Razyé! This would make Cathy de Linsseuil and [Razyé II] half-sister and -brother. (210) Although this reading is suggestive and undoubtedly carries merit, accepting it entirely would entail overlooking the other types of symbolic—and to some extent supernatural—instances of hereditarian relationships in the narrative. Although she has been educated and born into wealth, while his background is sharply different, Cathy II and Razyé II share similarities that attracted them: first, they are both headed toward a life of poverty given that Razyé has disowned Razyé II and has committed enough vengeful acts to annihilate the wealth of Cathy II’s father Aymeric. Second, whether through Razyé’s literal or symbolic prowess as patriarch, the two youth have an uncanny resemblance. This proves no impediment toward their marriage: Le révérend Bishop était de ceux que sa ressemblance avec [Razyé II] ne dérangeait pas trop. C’est un fait, ils avaient les mêmes yeux fixes et réfléchis, les mêmes épais cheveux noirs, le même grand front tombé, le même sourire furtif sur ses dents irréguliéres. Mais si ses vingt années de Roseau lui avaient appris une chose, c’était que l’humus tropical sortaient des sociétés aux racines et aux branches tellement entrelacées, torsadées, amarrées les unes aux autres qu’on pouvait trés bien se surprendre à aimer d’amour et partager la couche d’un demi-frére ou d’un cousin germain inconnu. En outre, dans chacun des habitants des sangs semblables

162 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

d’Africain, d’Européen et de Zindien s’étaient mélangés en proportions à peu près égales. Aussi, rien ne pouvait surprendre. (303) Father Bishop was one of those who was not bothered by her resemblance to [Razyé II]. It was a fact that they had the same staring, wistful eyes, the same thick, black hair, the same domed forehead and the same furtive smile over an uneven set of teeth. But if his twenty years of living in Roseau had taught him one thing, it was that the tropical humus produced a society whose roots and branches were so intertwined, so twisted and interlocked that falling in love and sharing a bed with a half-brother or an unknown first cousin was no surprise. What’s more, African, European and Indian blood had mixed in almost equal proportions in every inhabitant. So nothing was really surprising. (312) In a sense, given the composition of the microcosm of Caribbean society this novel offers, there are so many surprises involving heredity that any shock value they may have had previously no longer exists. It is as if in Windward Heights the Caribbean is finally on its way to the vision Derek Walcott described for the region (Cf. epigraph to Chapter One), far from the oppressive society Cirilo Villaverde, for instance, decried in Cecilia Valdés, in which the characters felt the full force of divisions based on racial constructions grounded in conceptions of heredity. If Villaverde’s novel became emblematic of Cuban society during the nineteenth century, in some regard Windward Heights positions itself as a novel that recognizes and critiques the values and discourses that lead to social inequalities, while simultaneously suggesting the existence of highly symbolic forces (rooted in an African past) capable of subverting such values and discourses. Any reading of Condé’s novel that judges it according to its fidelity to Wuthering Heights or in comparison to Emily Brontë’s artistic merit does not take into full account the Caribbean-specific cultural project Windward Heights undertakes. As is the case with Rhys’s and Vega’s narratives, the intertextuality of Condé’s novel acknowledges a European heritage (both good and bad) in the Caribbean as it asserts the region’s polyphony and distinctiveness. At novel’s end, Cathy II dies while giving birth to a daughter Razyé II fathered. This daughter, Anthuria, suggests an additional factor we must consider with regard to Condé’s engagement with Brontë’s text. In an interview, Condé states that she had very strategic reasons for choosing a girl as the product of her parents’ matrimony: Je crois que j’ai voulu que ce soit une fille parce qu’on dit toujours que l’héritier doit être un homme pour prolonger le nom, pour prolonger la lignée. Là j’ai voulu que ce soit une fille pour montrer que c’est comme une fleur, on ne sait jamais ce qu’elle va donner. (1999, 76) I believe that I wanted it to be a girl because they always say that the inheritor should be a man in order to prolong the name, to prolong the

HYBRIDITY AND ITS MYSTERIES 163

lineage. There I wanted it to be a girl to show that it’s like a flower, you never know how it’ll turn out. At one point in Windward Heights, she uses (via Aymeric) a specific phrase to describe the capricious nature of hereditarian relationships. Aymeric, it seems, could not account for Cathy II’s skin color: “La couleur de leur fille, il la mettait au compte des errements de l’hybridation” (142) (“As for the colour of their daughter, he put it down to the mysteries of hybridization” 139). These “mysteries” of hybridization, resulting from the novel’s interweaving of literal and symbolic heredity, suggest the complicated (both physical and metaphoric) ways in which heredity is constructed and experienced in Caribbean narrative. Condé’s use of the term hybridization, moreover, stands in contrast to the more abstract notion of hybridity articulated in post-colonial theory: a notion with multiple genetic underpinnings that may be both inadequate and confusing within a Caribbean cultural context.

Afterword Heredity, Narrative, and the Caribbean Diaspora

While an in-depth analysis of this corpus of literature would fall outside the parameters of this study, I believe it worthwhile to comment here on how at least two novels from the Caribbean diaspora address issues involving heredity: Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cristina Garcia and How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991) by Julia Alvarez. The events in each novel occur in both the Caribbean and the United States (especially New York City); similarly, each novel depicts further divisions Caribbean-Americans encounter, including those involving gender and language, particularly insofar as the United States both resembles and differs from the Caribbean in terms of these divisions. Perhaps, however, no issues are as contested in these novels as those involving ethnicity, i.e., to which ethnic group do I and my family belong? Am I necessarily of the same ethnicity as my family? Can my ethnicity change? Does it equal my color? Does it equal my national origin? etc. These questions are particularly pressing for the characters in Garcia’s and Alvarez’s novels because not only are they first-generation immigrants in New York City (a city that may be unparalleled historically in its appeal to immigrants), these characters also hail from the Caribbean: a region that is at once racially dynamic and racially stratified. As they navigate toward their ethnic identities in New York City, the characters in these novels discover that their ethnicity is not immutable and is highly contingent on the views of others. Not surprisingly, characters in both novels are preoccupied with various discourses involving heredity, e.g., tracing genealogies, creating family and kinship trees, making observations regarding the transmission of biological and behavioral traits, etc. As such, this afterword addresses how Garcia’s and Alvarez’s novels explore heredity as a trope for ethnic identity and how for them answers to uncertainties about ethnicity may or may not lie in our genes and ancestry. In some respects it seems appropriate that both of these novels would have appeared in print just over ten years ago, i.e., around the time both Derek Walcott and Rigoberta Menchú—stemming from her advocacy for indigenous groups in Guatemala—received their Nobel Prizes. That year, 1992, was also, needless to say, the quincentennary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas: an anniversary that—unlike the one that preceded it a hundred years earlier (most notably

HEREDITY NARRATIVE, AND THE CARIBBEAN DIASPORA 165

expressed in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago)—was met with as much (if not more) skepticism and protest as it was with pride and celebration. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Dreaming in Cuban indirectly address many of the issues that surround the year of their initial publication: both were written in English by writers of Hispanic heritage and both titles underscore the importance of language in the Latino society of New York City, particularly insofar as languages are in these novels functions or tools characterized by flux: the García girls lost their accents, not just dreaming but dreaming in a geographically specific variant of a particular language. Intertwined with the importance of language in these novels are questions involving cultural identity in what amounts to the “new world” of New York City, especially given its historical appeal—for any of a number of possible reasons—to immigrants from numerous parts of the world. Beginning in the 1920’s and 30’s, the first large waves of immigrants from the Hispanic Caribbean entered New York City, first from Puerto Rico (where years of United States political intervention had yielded only mass poverty), and later from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, whose residents fled for a variety of socioeconomic and political reasons. Each novel juxtaposes the trauma characters experience in being new to this city with the elaborate ways they assert and/or create a past. This trauma seems to stem from a combination of the freedom characters have in creating a new identity in New York City with the linguistic and socioeconomic limitations they encounter as members of New York City’s Hispanic community. Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban is, briefly, the fictional tale of three generations of a Cuban family, with the 1959 revolution serving to measure how family members grow to resemble or differ from each other; these differences are largely contingent upon whether the characters have remained in Cuba or have fled to the United States. Pilar, the first grandchild, was born in Cuba but now lives in Brooklyn and writes to her grandmother—who still lives in Cuba—in a Spanish that is “no longer hers” (7). What is more, Pilar—being unhappy and disillusioned with life in the United States, wants to return to Cuba. “Our house,” she states, is on a cement plot near the East River. At night, especially in the summer when the sound carries, I hear the low whistles of ships as they leave New York harbor. They travel south past the Wall Street skyscrapers, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Bay Ridge Channel and under the Verrazano Bridge. Then they make a left at Coney Island and head out to the Atlantic. When I hear those whistles, I want to go with them. (30–31) Alongside Pilar’s contempt for life in the United States in general and New York City in particular is the narrative’s often subtle interest in relationships of heredity: Rogelio Ugarte, for example, a minor character, “like his father and his father before him, cannot keep his ungual hands to himself. It’s a genetic trait, like his

166 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

widows peak and his slow brown eyes and the job he inherited at the post office” (113). Meanwhile, one of Pilar’s relatives in Cuba keeps “her mother, La Muñeca, locked upstairs…[she] is as Indian as they come, from Costa Rica” (207). Indeed, in many respects Pilar has inherited not only her grandmother’s temperament but also her political ideology, in the process bypassing Lourdes, her mother: “Why did Pilar always have to go too far? Lourdes is convinced it is something pathological, something her daughter inherited from her Abuela Celia” (172). Neither is this genetic transaction lost on Pilar: “I wonder how Mom could be Abuela Celia’s daughter. And what I’m doing as my mother’s daughter. Something got horribly scrambled along the way” (178). That Pilar is baffled by the ways in which heredity seems to operate underscores how the concept of heredity is not entirely a deterministic force in the novel but rather one with a mysterious—even creative—logic: ideal for characters like Pilar who are trying to figure out who they are in an environment as challenging as New York City’s. Another way of phrasing this is that for Pilar, heredity is not a concept that divides people along racial lines, but rather one to which she can appeal in imagining her role in North American society. Meanwhile, Alvarez’s novel begins (as does Garcia’s) with a family tree/ genealogy: this genealogy charts the family’s descent from the conquistadores. The family tree is bifurcated, with the de la Torre line able to trace itself directly to the first Spaniards who arrived centuries ago, while the García line consists of generations of uncertainty. Not unlike Dreaming in Cuban, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents—which depicts the struggles a family encounters in New York City after being uprooted from a life of ease in the Dominican Republic—is also interested in subtle ways in heredity. Early in the novel, for example, Yolanda (who is back—as an adult—in the Dominican Republic trying to reconnect with her family’s past) notices an interesting contrast: She makes out the figure of [an] old woman in the black square of her doorway, waving goodbye. And above the picnic table on a near post, the Palmolive woman’s skin gleams a rich white; her head is still thrown back, her mouth still opened as if she is calling someone over a great distance. (23) Meanwhile, Yolanda’s father at one moment stands guard over his newborn grandson, who was given the name Carlos in honor of his grandfather: “‘Charles the Fifth; Charles Dickens; Prince Charles.’ He enumerated the names of famous Charleses in order to stir up genetic ambition in the boy” (26). Later in the novel, not long after Yolanda’s family has been exiled to New York City, they seek comfort and ethnic identity by appealing—just as we saw in Dreaming in Cuban—to imaginative notions of their hereditary past: Sandi (Yolanda’s sister) fortifies herself during an awkward situation after she has just witnessed an American woman trying to kiss her father by looking at herself in the mirror: “she was surprised to find a pretty girl looking back at her. It was a girl who could pass as American, with soft blue eyes and fair skin, looks that were

HEREDITY NARRATIVE, AND THE CARIBBEAN DIASPORA 167

traced back to a great-great grandmother from Sweden at every family gathering” (181). To briefly conclude, what I find fascinating about these two novels is the way they invoke traditional, even oppressive notions of heredity, all the while suggesting that the key to survival in their new American setting in New York City lies in characters being able to get creative and imaginative with their conceptions of heredity.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. In Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Antillana, 1983). 2. According to the OED, heredity is derived from the Latin hereditatem, which pertains to inheritance or heirship. Similarly, heir originates in the Latin heres. 3. For example, Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano (1940) and Sidney Mintz’s “The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area” (1966). 4. I will mostly use the adjective “hereditarian” discourses rather than “hereditary” discourses so as to avoid indicating that the discourses themselves have been inherited. Furthermore, I will often use the plural “discourses” to indicate their heterogeneity. 5. See chapter three for a full discussion of these and related phenomena. Ruth Hubbard’s commentary on the popular link between heredity and genetics may clarify some of the associations involving my use of the term intergenerational dynamics: “Since its beginnings, the science of genetics has been caught up in the dialectic between likeness and difference. When people think about heredity, what they hope scientists will explain is how it is that Johnny has Grandpa’s nose and Aunt Mary’s chin. But they also want to understand how come little Susie doesn’t look like anyone else in the family.” “Constructs of Hereditarian Difference: Race and Sex.” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics, edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 195. Although the terms heredity and genetics are not synonymous, the latter concerns itself with the former and, as such, is of interest to this project. 6. Michael Ruse explains that in the agricultural realm associated with modern genetics —a science interested in hereditary processes—“animal and plant breeders needed ways to improve their products, and they seized eagerly on the new science of genetics. They incorporated its ideas into their practices and supported further research in its methods and theories.” “Knowledge in Human Genetics: Some Epistemological Questions.” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics, edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 35.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 169

7. Ruse argues that “it is true that in the 1930s and thereafter, thanks especially to the rise of Hitler and his promulgation of vile and bogus racial doctrines, eugenics as traditionally conceived—especially eugenics done with an eye to the breeding of a superrace—has found little overt support. But under the guise of genetic counseling, many of the concerns of the eugenicists have lived on.” “Knowledge in Human Genetics: Some Epistemological Questions.” In Genes and Human SelfKnowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics, edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 35. 8. See, for example, Alejo Carpentier’s prologue (“De lo real maravilloso americano”) to El reino de este mundo (1949), Wilson Harris’s Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (1973), Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), and Silvio Torres-Saillant’s Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (1997). 9. See A.James Arnold’s account of this linguistic diversity in his essay, “Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, edited by A.James Arnold, xii–xviii. Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994). 10. J.Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998) 6–7. 11. Nick Nesbittt. “Négritude.” In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999) 1404. 12. Léopold Sédar Senghor. “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited and introduced by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 27–28. 13. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J.Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) 140. 14. Albeit not easily: Glissant argues that it “is only in those countries whose exploitation is barbaric (South Africa, for instance) that this intermediary category has been officially recognized” (140–41). 15. Fernando Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” Revista Bimestre Cubana 21 (1940):167. Translations throughout this study are my own unless otherwise indicated. 16. La raza cósmica is a “utopia, a kind of racial and spiritual ‘El Dorado’ located in the future,” conceived in the 1920’s by the Mexican José Vasconcelos. The concept envisions “the triumph of loving fecundity, and thus the elimination of considerations of racial purity.” Jerry Hoeg, Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2000) 73. 17. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Prologue by Julio Le Riverend (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987) 93. 18. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís, Introduction by Bronislaw Malinowski, Prologue by Herminio Portell Vilá, New Introduction by Fernando Coronil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 98. 19. According to Annie Coombes and Avtar Brah, hybridity “has now acquired the status of a common-sense term, not only in [North American] academia but also in the culture more generally. It has become a key concept in cultural criticism, in post-

170 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

colonial studies, in debates about cultural contestation and appropriation and in relation to the concept of the border and the ideal of the cosmopolitan.” “Introduction: The Conundrum of ‘Mixing.” In Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie E.Coombes (London, New York: Routledge, 2000) 1. Ibid, 3. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1994) 112. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybidity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, New York: Routledge, 1995) 26. The OED provides the following as the etymology of the term: “f.L.hybrida, more correctly hibrida (ibrida), offspring of a tame sow and wild boar; hence, of human parents of different races, half-breed.” I.e., signifying qualities that extend to realms of meaning seldom associated with heredity. Montero was born in Cuba in 1952 but has lived in Puerto Rico since 1972.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2. Robert Weir defends the Human Genome Project: “The long-term benefits of the knowledge to be gained through the HGP are several: an increased awareness of how we function as healthy human beings, greater knowledge of the biochemical basis of many of the approximately four thousand human genetic diseases, intensified efforts to diagnose and treat genetic diseases, a more complete knowledge regarding the relationship of genetic and environmental influences on individual human development, and an increased understanding of how humans compare at a genetic level with the members of other species.” “Preface.” In Genes and Human SelfKnowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) xi. 3. Positions have been taken, nonetheless, that are more or less in line with the view that heredity or genetics provides a deep code for cultural production: see, for example, William Schultz’s Genetic Codes of Culture? The Deconstruction of Tradition by Kuhn, Bloom, and Derrida (New York: Garland, 1994), a study that builds on the work of Thomas Sebeok, for whom the genetic code is “‘the most fundamental of all the semiotic networks, and therefore a prototype of all the other systems’—the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Sebeok’s idea would permit the extension of operations of the genetic code to cultural forms” (7). 4. Genes, Peoples, and Languages. Trans. by Mark Seielstad (New York: North Point Press, 2000) 16. With regard to discourses in any way associated with genetics, I will often—though not exclusively—use the adjective “genetic” in order to indicate a proximity (rather than an equality) with the scientific study and praxis of genetics. This distinction becomes particularly important with regard to the ways in which writings seem informed by hereditarian impulses, even when far removed from the specific science of genetics.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 171

5. Hans Stubbe has argued that “it is probable that the taming and domestication of the dog, ancestral form wolf (Canis lupus L.), in central and northern Europe was the first important step toward the observation of the inherited variations that caused prehistoric man to suspect—or even to know—that children resemble their parents and each other with respect to this or that characteristic.” Hans Stubbe, History of Genetics: From Prehistoric Times to the Rediscovery of Mendel’s Laws. Translated from the German by T.R.W.Waters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972) 2. Although much new information on genetic science and its complexity has come to light since Stubbe published his study, I find this study useful insofar as it argues for the metaphorical or symbolic hereditarian elements associated with genetic sciences. He is wrong, however, in linking the term genetics to discourses that have little to do with the specificities of this science, particularly inasmuch as it seeks to describe the sexual transmission of discrete units of inheritance, i.e., genes. In making his argument about the symbolic dimensions of genetics, he overlooks the fact that many of those interested in matters of heredity before genetics took hold believed (no doubt due, in part, to their less sophisticated scientific methods and apparati) that plant reproduction was an exclusively female process and/or that it involved the mixing of fluids and substances without regard to the possible role of discrete units in any way resembling what we now know are genes. Stubbe’s anachronism amounts to a confusion (or conflation) between genetics and its more versatile correlate: heredity. 6. Ruth Hubbard explains that “Mendel’s experiments, published in 1865, are the conventional way to date the origin of genetics. These experiments grew out of an interest in the breeding patterns of hybrids. The phenomena Mendel was trying to explain had to do with the fact that, for example, red-flowered pea plants, when crossed with each other, usually breed true, but that every so often they produce a plant with white flowers. Mendel’s so-called laws of heredity are formal ways to explain how this happens. Mendel did not concern himself with what went on inside his pea plants. He was describing patterns of transmission of visible ‘characters’ or ‘traits’ between successive generations.” “Constructs of Genetic Difference: Race and Sex.” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 195. 7. Emanuel Rádl, History of Biological Theories (1909), quoted in Stubbe 9–10. 8. Plato, The Republic, Vol. II, Book 3, p. 121, quoted in Stubbe, 16. 9. Hacia una crítica de la razón patriarcal (Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial del Hombre, 1991) 80. 10. Alexander Nehamas, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) 547. 11. Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. by Duncan Large (Great Britain: Stanford University Press, 1993) 15. 12. Mark Poster, “Michel Foucault,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) 278. 13. My italics. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, CounterMemory, Practice, Edited with an Introduction by Donald F.Bouchard, translated

172 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

from the French by Donald F.Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 144–145. Otis provides thorough readings of numerous literary texts, including several by Emile Zola, Pío Baroja, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Hardy. Her focus, however, centers on conceptions of history and historiography, particularly insofar as these are informed by “scientific” and “literary” discourses, each of which provides different (but not mutually exclusive) perspectives on how cultural information is transmitted. Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 5. Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man, N trans. 3rd ed. 2 vols (New York: Appleton, 1920) 6–7. Quoted in Otis 7. Haeckel, for example, was approximately twenty years younger than Darwin and helped popularize his theories (Otis 6); nonetheless, Haeckel “supported Lamarck’s teleological mechanism of heredity over Darwin’s harsher one, viewing evolution as a process in which an organism ‘progressed’ through a ‘series of forms’ (Otis 7). Wailoo’s use of this term approximates Diane B.Paul’s definition: she argues that “policies are characterized as eugenic if their intent is to further a social or public purpose, such as reducing costs or sparing future generations unnecessary suffering” (69). She adds that most commentators on eugenics “often add an additional criterion: there must be an element of coercion” (70). “Is Human Genetics Disguised Eugenics?” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994). Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 134. These technologies enabled geneticists to determine that sickle cell anemia depends “on the inheritance of recessive traits from both parents” (Wailoo 135). Both quotations found in Deborah Lynn Steinberg, “Reading Genes/Writing Nation: Reith, ‘Race’ and the Writings of Geneticist Steve Jones.” In Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie E.Coombes (London, New York: Routledge, 2000) 145. Camille Naish, A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) 13. See, for example, Goldmann’s “Genetic Structuralism and the History of Literature,” in Velocities of Change: Critical Essays from MLN, edited by Richard Macksey, 89– 102 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), Todorov’s Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1968), and the more recent Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust (Oxford: Legenda, 1998), by Marion Schmid. Broadly stated, Goldmann’s and Todorov’s genetic criticicism seeks to show how an individual writer’s texts reflect the ideologies of the socioeconomically-dominant social group. In “Genetic Texts—Genetic Editions—Genetic Criticism or, Towards Discoursing the Genetics of Writing,” in Problems of Editing, edited by Christa Jansohn, 59–78 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), Hans Walter Gabler applies the basic concerns of genetic criticism to scholarly editing, particularly with regard to determining “authorial” intent. Darwin to Double Helix: The Biological Theme in Science Fiction (London: Butterworths, 1977) 42.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 173

25. Helen Parker, Biological Themes in Modern Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984) 13. 26. Ibid, 35. Parker has compiled a list of science fiction novels that treat genetics as a principal theme (Parker 104). Here are some of them: 1) Beresford, J.D. The Hampdenshire Wonder. New York: Arno Press, 1975. 2) Boyd, John. The Doomsday Gene. New York: Weybright, 1973. 3) Clarke, Arthur C. Against the Fall of Night. New York: Gnome Press, 1953. 4) Delany, Samuel R. The Einstein Intersection. New York: Ace Books, 1967. 5) Dickson, Gordon. Mutants. New York: Collier Books, 1970. 6) Padgett, Lewis. Mutant. New York: Gnome Press, 1953. 7) Stapledon, Olaf. Odd John. New York: Dutton, 1964. 8) Wyndham, John. Re-Birth. New York: Ballantine Books, 1955. 27. Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998). 28. David Chioni Moore, “Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy,” Transition: International Review (64, 1994) 4–21. 29. Juan G.Gelpí, Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993) 2. 30. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 31. Luis Palés Matos, Poliedro, San Juan, 1927. Quoted in G.R.Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) 31. 32. With respect to Palés’s interest in Spengler, Aníbal González explains that the former “busca constituir una poesía antillana partiendo de los componentes que él estima característicos de la cultura de las Antillas, y de una noción de la cultura que debe mucho a las ideas de Oswald Spengler en La decadencia de Occidente” “La (sín) tesis de una poesía antillana: Palés y Spengler,” in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 451–52 (Jan.–Feb. 1988):60. (“Palés seeks to constitute an Antillean poetry based on the components that he considers characteristic of Antillean culture, and on a notion of culture that owes much to the ideas of Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West”). 33. The Decline of the West appeared in two volumes (1918–22). I will quote from the English translation of the second volume: Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2. Translated from the German by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1928. 34. “La (sín)tesis de una poesía antillana: Palés y Spengler” (63). 35. The above argument paraphrases this observation by González: “Palés arguye que en el caso del negro [en las Antillas] se dio una adecuación más perfecta entre el hombre y el paisaje (por venir el negro del trópico), y que por ende en la carrera para ver cuál de las dos razas se asentaba más prontamente en el paisaje, el negro fue el vencedor, y su cultura, enraizada más firmamente en el suelo antillano” (65). Caribbean climate—and the variable capacity for different peoples to adjust to it— is an undercurrent in later chapters of this study. 36. “Palés…ya compenetrado con la Lebensphilosophie spengleriana, sitúa su visión de la fusión cultural en el plano transcendental—e irracional—de la relación cuasimística entre el hombre y el paisaje” (66). (“Given Pales’s immersion in Spenglerian “life philosophy,” he situates his own vision of cultural fusion in the transcendental—and irrational—quasi-mystical realm between man and landscape.”

174 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

37. Judith Reay, and John Steward, eds. Science Applied in the Caribbean (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1988) v. 38. José López Sánchez, “Significación histórico-científica de Mendel y el Mendelismo,” in Gregorio Mendel 1822–1972, José López Sánchez and Vitezslav Orel, eds. Havana: Museo Histórico de las Ciencias “Carlos J.Finlay,” 1974, 25. Despite being “known in our country for many decades by what have become known as Mendel’s laws, it has not been until now that his vision has been applied and enriched with research and applied practical labor that are undertaken in the specialized institutions of our country.” 39. Sidney W.Mintz, “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale Vol. IX (1966):931. 40. The Caribbean resists facile categorizations: some areas are commonly considered Latin American (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) while others by no means fall within that label, particularly on account of the importance of the British and, to a lesser degree, French, Dutch, and Scandinavian colonial history. Despite these differences between the Caribbean and Latin America, I nonetheless find González Echevarría’s observations highly applicable in the former region as well. 41. Foucault is also interested in Linnaeus, particularly insofar as his taxonomy is a metalanguage. He discusses, for example, the “domain of validity of statements (the enunciation of structural characters was restricted in the period between Tournefort and Linnaeus…); the way in which one transfers a type of statement from one field of application to another (like the transference from vegetal characterization to animal taxonomy…).” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Translated from the French by A.M.Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) 59. 42. A quote taken from Broberg, Gunnar. Linnaeus: Progress and Prospects in Linnaean Research (Stockholm, 1980), 34; in Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” Feminism & Science, Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E.Longino, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 137. 43. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 122. 44. Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” Feminism & Science, Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E.Longino, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 137. 45. Other viable names included “Pilosa (the hairy ones—although the significance given hair, and especially bears, was also saturated with gender), for example, or Aurecaviga (the hollow-eared ones).” (Schiebinger 137). 46. This does not mean that Linnaeus had no interest in humans and human types; see for instance his Anthropomorpha (Linnaeus-Hoppius, 1760), in which he discusses creatures that, to the best of his knowledge, actually existed; these included the troglodyte, the tailed man, the satyr, and the pygmy. 47. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 15. 48. Alexander von Humboldt, The Island of Cuba, trans. J.S.Thrasher (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1855) 139.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 175

49. Ibid, 203. Humboldt’s assessment runs counter to Magali Carrera’s description of racial categorization in New Spain, which—based on documents from a late eighteenth-century trial concerning one woman’s racial status—she deems less interested in perceived physical characteristics. See Bibliography for full reference. 50. Aurelio Mitjans, Estudio sobre el movimiento científico y literario en Cuba (Habana: A. Alvarez y Compañía, 1890) 246. 51. Cuban scientific naturalists include Eduardo Esponda and Benjamín de Céspedes. For additional information on their writings, see Mitjan’s Estudio. Esponda and Céspedes deploy scientific language to decry the social (especially racial) degeneracy to which they saw Cuba falling. Both liken Cuba’s social ills to viruses and pathogens. José Antonio Saco makes similar arguments, albeit mostly in the political arena: with regard to Saco’s primarly scientific work, Mitjans states, “También Saco, aunque no fue médico, insertó en 1833 en la Revista Bimestre una muy extensa y erudita Carta sobre el cólera morbo asiático. Su ingerencia en campo ajeno al parecer a sus estudios, quedó justificada plenamente con su oportuno y utilísimo trabajo, escrito con verdadera competencia.” Ibid 246. “Saco, even though he was not a doctor, included in an 1833 issue of the Revista Bimestre Cubana [a journal Saco founded] an extensive and erudite Letter Regarding Morbid Asiatic Cholera. His entry, with respect to his studies, in a foreign field of research was fully justified with his opportune and useful study, written with true competence.” 52. The published English translation elides the quoted passage. Manuel Zeno Gandía, La charca (Madrid: M.Aguilar, 1954) 235. 53. Kal Wagenheim, translator’s introduction to La charca, English translation (Maplewood, NJ: Waterfront Press, 1982) 9. To link his writing with Zola’s, Zeno Gandía uses a passage in the latters Doctor Pascal as an epigraph to La charca: “To tell everything so as to know everything, so as to cure everything.” Juan Gelpí argues that Zeno Gandía’s commentators have dwelled on this writers medical training: “Es como si los críticos necesitaran apoyarse en el poder que se asocia con el médico para legitimar su proyecto cultural.” Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico) 13. (“It is as if critics needed to reinforce themselves in the power associated with doctors in order to legitimate [Zeno Gandía’s] cultural project”). 54. Juan Flores, Preface to Zeno Gandía, Manuel, La charca, English version. Translated and with an introduction by Kal Wagenheim (Maplewood, N.J.: Waterfront Press, 1982) 18. 55. Manuel Zeno Gandía, La charca (Madrid: M.Aguilar, 1954) 10. La charca, English version, translated and with an introduction by Kal Wagenheim (Maplewood, N.J.: Waterfront Press, 1982) 39. 56. Onetti. Los procesos de construcción del relato (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1979) 122–23. 57. It is worth noting that López Sánchez’s essay appeared in a book that compiled several essays presented at a symposium held in Havana in 1972 to commemorate the 150 years since Gregor Mendel’s birth. The conference was attended primarily by geneticists from Cuba and the former Czechoslovakia (Mendel spent most of his life in Brün, Austria, which is now part of the Czech Republic) geneticists. As such, López Sanchez’s description of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary scientific community as assimilationist has to be considered within the context of the symposium’s very specific historical and political context.

176 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

58. José López Sánchez, “Significación histórico-científica de Mendel y el Mendelismo,” Gregorio Mendel 1822–1972, José López Sánchez and Vitezslav Orel, eds. (Havana: Museo Histórico de las Ciencias “Carlos J.Finlay,” 1974) 45. 59. Michael Ruse argues that, unlike Mendel, Darwin—like “others of his day…may not have been thinking about heredity in a fruitful manner.” In other words, he was not as interested as Mendel in the molecular processes that guided the transmission of heritable traits. “Knowledge in Human Genetics: Some Epistemological Questions.” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 34. 60. López Sánchez 50. Spanish original: “La Academia calificó este asunto como de ‘gran interés’ y reconoció ‘lo útil que resulta cualquier investigación en este sentido.’” 61. Francisco Díaz Barreiro, “La hibridación de la caña de azúcar en Cuba,” Gregorio Mendel 1822–1972, José López Sánchez and Vitezslav Orel, eds. (La Habana: Museo Histórico de las Ciencias “Carlos J.Finlay,” 1974) 80. 62. Ruse explains that in the agricultural realm associated with modern genetic science, “animal and plant breeders needed ways to improve their products, and they seized eagerly on the new science of genetics. They incorporated its ideas into their practices and supported further research in its methods and theories.” “Knowledge in Human Genetics: Some Epistemological Questions.” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics, edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 35. 63. Translation of title into English: “Discourse regarding Agriculture in Havana and Means of Promoting It.” 64. Antonio Benítez Rojo, “Sugar/Power/Literature.” Cuban Studies 16 (1986): 10. 65. Antonio Benítez Rojo, Antonio, “Azúcar/poder/literatura.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos: Revista Mensual de Cultura Hispánica 451–452 (Jan–Feb. 1988): 197. 66. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio. 3 vols. (Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1978) 25. 67. Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992) 8. 68. Sidney Mintz, Foreword to Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture. Translated from the Spanish by Marjory M.Urquidi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964) xi. 69. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) 27.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. “The African Heritage in the Caribbean.” In Caribbean Studies: A Symposium (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960) 38. 2. In some regards, this turn whereby miscegenation is seen under a positive light echoes Evelyn Picon Garfield’s contention that miscegenation is a founding motif of Cuban national identity. See her Poder y sexualidad: el discurso de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 177

3. “Original Sin,” the 2001 film drama starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas seemed promising as a means of gaining access to the same issues, particularly given its provocative (if unoriginal) title (which is suggestive of the discursivity of heredity) and its setting in a late nineteenth-century Cuban plantation. Although there were scenes that drew my attention (e.g., when Jolie’s character meets with the following accusation: “You were born a whore and you will die a whore!”), the film as a whole seems disjointed and only tangentially relevant to this chapter. I later learned that the film’s intended title was “Dancing in the Dark,” which approximates the title (Waltz into Darkness) of Cornell Woolrich’s 1947 novel, on which the film is based. The producers chose the current title because a movie similarly titled (“Dancer in the Dark”) had just been released. 4. www.puertorico.com/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=2578 5. Composed by Flor, Morales, and Ramos. 6. Sidney W.Mintz, “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale Vol. IX (1966):915. 7. A minor character makes the following observation—one that functions within at least a couple of different understandings of heredity and lineage—with regard to Sab: “‘…sospecho que tiene ese mozo, con algún fundamento, la lisonjera presunción de ser de la misma sangre que sus amos.”’ Carlota replies, ‘Así lo pienso yo también porque mi padre le ha tratado siempre con particular distinción, y aun ha dejado traslucir a la familia que tiene motivos poderosos para creerle hijo de su difunto hermano D.Luis”’ Sab, edited with introduction, critical analysis, notes and vocabulary by Catherine Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) 63. “‘I suspect that this boy, with good reason, flatters himself by presuming that he is of the same blood as his masters’ ‘I think so, too, because my father has always treated him with special consideration and has let on to the family that he has compelling reasons to believe him the son of his late brother Don Luis’” Sab, English, with autobiography. Trans. and edited by Nina M.Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) 45. 8. Catherine Davies argues that this similarity between Sab and Carlota at the spiritual level is in consonance “with Rousseau’s view that an unnatural society divorces truth from appearance…in Sab physical appearance belies both biological and spiritual reality.” Introduction to Sab (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) 19. 9. Antonio Benítez Rojo, “Sugar/Power/Literature.” Cuban Studies 16 (1986) 19. 10. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) 273. By the 1810’s, William Wilberforce was spearheading the opposition to the practice Williams describes, calling instead for an abolition of the slave trade and a system of slavery based on reproduction (Ibid. 296). 11. Havana and Manila were returned to Spain in exchange for Florida. Anthony McFarlane, The British in the Americas, 1480–1815 (London and New York: Longman, 1994) 224. 12. Julio Rodríguez-Luis, “Introduction,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol. I (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994) 104. See also Eric Williams (From Columbus to Castro 92) and Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 95. 13. Moreno Fraginals, In his El ingenio, Manuel Moreno Fraginals observes that, “finalmente, en 1796, llega a Cuba la fuerza motriz de la gran industria: el vapor.

178 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

Es una máquina comprada en Londres con dinero del conde de Jaruco. Su instalación fue un suceso único rodeado de un clima de tensa expectación… El experimento no tuvo éxito, pero los sacarócratas no se desanimaron.” EL ingenio 3 vols. (Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1978) 87. (“Finally, in 1796, the driving force of heavy industry arrived: the steam engine: a machine bought in London with money furnished by the Count of Jaruco. Its installation was a unique success surrounded by a climate of tense anticipation… The experiment was unsuccessful, but the planters were not disheartened.”) Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana (London: M.E.Sharpe, 1998) 42. Eric Williams comments on Britain’s dubious abolitionist involvement in Cuba: “The Spanish and Cuban authorities replied with the countercharge that Britain’s scrupulous adherence to the treaties was motivated by hypocrisy and an ‘exaggerated philanthropy,’ which were a cloak for the real aim of destroying Cuba and saving the British West Indies” (312). William Luis’s observation similarly reveals the complexities of British interests in the Caribbean: “One year before, in 1834, the British had abolished slavery in their Caribbean possessions. As a result, British commerce became more costly than that of the Spanish colonies. For economic, moral, and religious reasons, British abolitionists pressed for an end to slavery and the slave trade in Cuba and other Spanish colonies” Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) 35. Francisco Arango y Parreño, Obras 2 (Havana, 1952) 307. Translation by Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in NineteenthCentury Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989) 35. Brackets by MartinezAlier. “‘Por causa mecánica’: The Coupling of Bodies and Machines and the Production and Reproduction of Whiteness in Cecilia Valdés and Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” In Thinking Bodies, edited by Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) 80. “Análisis por Don José Antonio Saco de una obra sobre el Brasil, intitulada, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, by Rev.R.Walsh, Author of A Journey from Constantinople, etc.” Eduardo Torres Cuevas, Arturo Soregui, eds, José Antonio Saco: Acerca de la esclavitud y su historia (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1982) 202, 204–5. Quoted in Benítez Rojo, 21–22. Introduction to Sab, English, with autobiography. Trans. and edited by Nina M. Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) xix. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 133–34. Scott xiv. Scott indicates that Sab “was finally published in Cuba in 1914, on the centennial of Avellaneda’s birth, in what is still the definitive edition of her complete works” (xxiii). Although this may have been its first appearance as a discrete publication, it had been published previously, in 1883 to be exact, in the review El Museo (Davies 10). “Documents: The Banning of Sab in Cuba.” Américas I (1949) 350. Quoted in Scott XV.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 179

24. Davies observes that there was a “lack of critical interest in the novel, certainly until the 1970’s” (1). 25. “Mujer, nación y otredad en Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.” In Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura: Siglos XVI al XIX, vol. 2 (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1997) 170. 26. There has been some criticism with regard to British interests in the Caribbean (which we have already to some extent surveyed) in terms, specifically, of the Otway personage; a brief consideration of this criticism sheds light on Avellaneda’s rhetorical intentions in Sab. Lorna Williams, for example, sees Otway as the embodiment of British capitalist expansion throughout the Caribbean: “Whether the connection between heroine and landscape is articulated by the narrator or by a character, it simultaneously presents the Englishman as an intrusive presence that disrupts the authentic link between the Cuban people and their land, for in Avellaneda’s text, Enrique’s materialistic desire to possess Carlota and her property represents a misappropriation of woman and land” The Representation of Slavery in Cuban Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994) 103. 27. One could add to this list of discourses perceptions on Don Carlos that circulated in the community. Interestingly, these perceptions involve his dire prospects for bequeathing a substantive fortune to his heirs: “‘Es bastante rico aún,’ decían en el pueblo, ‘para poder gozar mientras viva de todas las comodidades imaginables, y no le importa nada una pérdida que sólo perjudicará a sus hijos” (60) (“‘He is still sufficiently wealthy,’ they said in town, ‘to be able to enjoy all imaginable comforts while he is alive, and doesn’t care about a loss that only will harm his children (42). 28. Because of his nationalistic political views, Villaverde was forced to spend most of those 43 years exiled in the United States. 29. As opposed to the case in Sab, however, Villaverde asserts that his novel is based on actual residents of Havana (“Prologue,” Cecilia Valdés: A Novel of Cuban Customs, trans. Sidney G.Gest. New York: Vantage Press, 1962. 16) 30. George D.Schade, “Cirilo Villaverde 1812–1894.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, edited by Verity Smith (London & Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997) 846. 31. “Cecilia Valdés: el nacimiento de una novela antiesclavista.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 451–452 (Jan.–Feb. 1988) 193. 32. “Tropics of Deceit: Desire and the Double in Cuban Antislavery Narrative.” Cuban Studies 28 (1998) 92. 33. Charcoal & Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000) 30. 34. “Cecilia Valdés, espejo de la esclavitud.” In El espacio real (Havana: UNEAC Contemporáneos, 1975) 41. Quoted in Méndez Rodenas, “Identity and Incest in Cecilia Valdés: Villaverde and the Origin(s) of the Text.” Cuban Studies 24 (1994): 84. 35. Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1986) 183. 36. Cecilia Valdés: A Novel of Cuban Customs, trans. Sidney G.Gest (New York: Vantage Press, 1962) 346. 37. María de Regla, Cecilia’s wetnurse, later in the narrative summarizes this whitening process:“‘…Magdalena, negra como yo, tuvo con un blanco a seña Chepilla, parda; que seña Chepilla, tuvo con otro blanco, a señá Charito Alarcón, parda clara y que señá Charito tuvo con otro blanco a Cecilia Valdés, blanca’” (241) (“‘…Magdalena,

180 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

a Negress like myself, was the mother by a white man of Señá Chepilla, who was parda, brown. Señá Chepilla was the mother by a white man of Señá Charito Alarcón, parda clara, light brown, and Señá Charito, by another white man, had Cecilia Valdés, white’” 447). 38. Villaverde 110. In wooing someone like Leonardo and perhaps ultimately bearing his children, Cecilia perceived a certain risk: “‘No lo niego, mucho que sí me gustan más los blancos que los pardos. Se me caería la cara de vergüenza si me casara y tuviera un hijo saltoatrás’” (162) (“‘I do like white men ever so much better than mulattos. I’d die of shame, if I married and my child turned out to be a throwback to a coloured ancestor’” 311). 39. It is unclear if family refers to everyone in the family except Don Cándido, or just Leonardo and his sisters. The reason for this uncertainty is that later in the narrative, Doña Rosa attempts to explain her husband’s interest in the title of nobility in terms that might interest her son: “‘El título pasará a ti, mejor dicho, tú lo disfrutarás personalmente, como tu padre ha trabajado toda su vida” (226) (“‘The title will pass to you, or rather it will be you who will enjoy it. It is for you that he has asked for it” 421).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Although agriculture in the Caribbean is exemplified most strongly via the Plantation, Mintz has also identified, with respect to the Plantation, “the precedence, co-occurrence or subsequent development of classes of small-scale cultivators, who either accommodated their style of life to the existence of the plantation system, lived in open opposition to it, or occupied areas where the plantation had flourished, only to wither due to changes in the political or economic scene.” “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area.” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9 (1966):923. 2. I state in part because there are always additional explanatory reasons than the ones any particular study prioritizes. In advancing my argument I will try to be attentive to other arguments or potential arguments. 3. Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 71. 4. Lydia Cabrera, El monte: Igbo, Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda (Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba) (Miami: C.R., 1968) 149. 5. Alexander von Humboldt, The Island of Cuba, trans. J.S.Thrasher (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1855) 109. 6. Although Heredia may have known about Humboldt’s visit to Cuba (by 1820, Humboldt had published two volumes that broadly treated his American travels) it would have been chronologically impossible for him to have read The Island of Cuba (which was first published in 1828 in both German and English) before writing “Niágara.” As such, I am not arguing for a causal relationship between the two authors’s texts; palms were—for a number of reasons unrelated to Humboldt—a common motif in Cuban poetry (Vitier 61–2); furthermore, Heredia is a major Cuban poet and is by no means commonly linked to or dependent on Humboldt. What I would like to underscore, however, is the importance both authors gave in their

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 181

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

writings to the local flora, the palm in particular, which has become a national symbol of Cuba. Jose María Heredia, “Niágara,” Poesías completas (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1970) 165–166. Cintio Vitier. Lo cubano en la poesía (Havana: Ucar, García, 1958) 43. Andrés Bello, “La agricultura de la zona tórrida.” In Obras Completas, prologue by Fernando Paz Castillo (Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, 1952) 66, lines 37–8. Not the least of which being the specific historical circumstances surrounding each text: Arango’s Discurso, for instance appeared squarely within a colonial Cuban context (in 1792), whereas “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” appears in 1826, after Gran Colombia (including present-day Venezuela) had gained its independence. Furthermore, whereas Arango wrote from a position of authority within Havana’s creole elite, Bello wrote from a position of authority as well (as a Spanish-American diplomat in London), but for a nascent, precarious state. Andrés Bello, “Georgic of the Tropics.” Trans. Barbara D.Huntley and Pilar Liria. Anthology of Andrés Bello. Compiled by Pedro Grases, with a foreword by Rafael Caldera (Washington, D.C.: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1981) 29. “Agricultura” 215–7, “Georgic” 32. This segment of Bello’s poem is similar to an observation Fredrika Bremer made a couple of decades later with regard to Cuba: “The wild African apple-tree has, when transplanted into American soil, ennobled both its nature and its fruit” Bremer 2:327, quoted in Adriana Méndez Rodenas, “Bondage in Paradise: Fredrika Bremer’s Travels to Cuba and the Inscape of National Identity.” In Cuba, the Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity, edited by Damián J. Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000) 212. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) 342. G.R.Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) 89. Nicolás Guillén, “Dos niños,” Sóngoro Cosongo y otros poemas (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1991) 59. Luis Palés Matos, Tuntún de pasa y grifería, edited and with an introduction by Mercedes López Baralt (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993). Catherine Davies, A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba (London & New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd, 1997) 69. Davies adds that Jardín is also “certainly the most experimental” novel of this period (Ibid). Ileana Rodríguez argues that because of this novel’s “lack of normative narrative structures, it is impossible to make it fit the molds, tastes, manners, and beliefs of its times” House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Latin American Literatures by Women. Trans. Robert Carr and Ileana Rodríguez (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 91. Jardín may very well be avant garde, but it is nonetheless attached in many ways to its cultural and historical contexts. Dulce María Loynaz, Jardín (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1993) 10. More specifically, according to Rodríguez, “declassé nineteenth-century white women” in Cuba (90).

182 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

21. Davies contends that “Jardín is, above all, a ghost story, a tale of horror and suspense in which a young woman, enclosed in an ancient house surrounded by a menacing garden, finally meets her death” (69). 22. Alejo Carpentier, “Viaje a la semilla,” Guerra del tiempo (Mexico: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1968) 77–107. The standard English translation of the title is “Journey Back to the Source,” although a more literal translation would be, significantly, “Journey to the Seed.” 23. Barbara J.Webb, Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1992) 4. 24. Alejo Carpentier, “Viaje a la semilla.” In Guerra del tiempo (Mexico: Compañía General de Ediciones,1968) 82. English translation: “Journey Back to the Source,” In War of Time, Trans. Frances Partridge (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1970) 109. 25. For instance, as Don Marcial gets younger and younger to the point of becoming once again a newborn, we read: “El universo le entraba por todos los poros. Entonces cerró los ojos que sólo divisaban gigantes nebulosos y penetró en un cuerpo caliente, húmedo, lleno de tinieblas, que moría. El cuerpo, al sentirlo arrebozado con su propia sustancia, resbaló hacia la vida” (105) (“The universe penetrated him through his pores. Then he shut his eyes—they saw nothing but nebulous giants—and entered a warm, damp body full of shadows: a dying body. Clothed in this body’s substance, he slipped toward life” 129). The English translation is remiss: the dying body (and not he) slipped toward life. 26. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987) 12. 27. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 4. 28. Fernando Coronil, “Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition, Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint,” Cuban Counterpoint (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) xxvii. 29. Although Carpentier by no means shares their views, his characters and narrators in the novel, as we shall see, address issues of race and race relations in provocative ways. My reading of this language holds that it is designed to ridicule el Jefe and his ideals. 30. David Chioni Moore, “Alex Haley’s Roots and The Rhetoric of Genealogy.” Transition: International Review 64 (1994): 21. 31. Alejo Carpentier, El recurso del método: novela (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974) 285. 32. Alejo Carpentier, Reasons of State. Trans. Frances Partridge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) 257. 33. Miguel F.Roa. Interview, “Alejo Carpentier: el recurso a Descartes.” Cuba Internacional 59 (July 1974): 50. Quoted in Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 258. 34. Ibid, 48. Quoted in Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 263. 35. Jaime Labastida, “Alejo Carpentier: Realidad y conocimiento estético. (sobre El recurso del método).” Casa de las Américas 87 (1974):21–22. It is interesting to note that Trujillo’s successor in the Dominican Republic, Joaquín Balaguer, explains in his 1983 study on Dominican society, La isla al revés, that “the black, abandoned

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 183

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

to his instincts and without the brakes on reproductivity that a relatively high standard of living imposes on all countries, multiplies with a rapidity which is almost comparable to that of vegetable species.” Quoted in Mark Kurlansky, A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992) 50. A source of shame for el Jefe, although not necessarily for Carpentier; the latter’s ironic detachment serves to critique the former’s misplaced values. Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravilloso americano.” Prologue to El reino de este mundo (Mexico: E.D.I.A.P.S.A., 1949) 10–11. Alejo Carpentier, “Marvelous Real in America” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B.Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 85–6. Fredric Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986):311. Herbalist hardly accounts for all the meanings of the term santero: in the Yoruba traditions brought to the Caribbean, the latter term also encompasses a complex, dynamic religious cosmology. See my discussion of Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint earlier in this chapter. González Echevarría has focused on different aspects of Carpentier’s writings in making similar pronouncements regarding the differences between America and Europe. Cf. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, pp. 116–18. “Lo que acaso ignoran algunos es que Ofelia, pensando que la Tierra es una y que la tierra de la Tierra es tierra de la Tierra en todas partes—memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris—había recogido la sagrada tierra, perennemente custodiaba por los cuatro emblemáticos jaguares, en una platabanda del Jardín de Luxemburgo” (343). “What perhaps some people didn’t know was that Ofelia, thinking that the Earth is all one and that the earth of the Earth is earth of the Earth everywhere—memento homo, quia pulvis est et in pulverem reverteris—had collected this sacred earth, guarded in perpetuity by the four symbolic jaguars, from a flower-bed in the Luxembourg gardens” (311).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Speech given to Havana rally of 1.5 million people on May 1, 1980: “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Secretario del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba y Presidente del Consejo de Estado y del Consejo de Ministros de la República de Cuba, en el acto conmemorativo del Primero de Mayo, efectuado en la Plaza de la Revolución ‘José Martí’ el día primero de mayo de 1980, ‘Año del Segundo Congreso.’” Granma: Organo oficial del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba (La Habana, Sábado 3 de mayo de 1980, año 16, No. 110, 3a edición). 2. In Fidel Castro Speeches: Cuba’s Internationalist Foreign Policy 1975–80, trans. English-language Granma weekly review (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981) 276. 3. Claudette Williams, Charcoal & Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000) 17. 4. Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, Delivered to the Royal College of Surgeons [1819], 3rd ed. (London: Smith, 1823). Quoted in Robert

184 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 177. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) 187–88. David Nicholls, also with respect to Moreau’s categories, notes that in Haiti, “the nearer the person approached white the finer the distinction which was made” From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (London: Macmillan, 1996) 25. Meanwhile, in an earlier essay, Williams provides an illuminating—albeit simplistic—Marxist theory of the origins of racial categorization in the Caribbean: “The distinction between races in the Caribbean area has, for the most part, been a distinction between those who owned property, principally land, and those who did not; between those who lived off the land and those who worked on it…. The distinction in race or colour was only the superficial visible symbol of a distinction which in reality was based on the ownership of property.” “Race Relations in Caribbean Society.” In Caribbean Studies: A Symposium (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960) 54. I believe Williams is only partially correct: there are other factors that would have informed the way racial categories in the Caribbean were constructed during the colonial period, including variations in—to name only a few—linguistic, musical, and culinary traditions. “Who was doing the constructing?” is a question, however, that Williams’s oeuvre makes it difficult to overlook. M.L.E.Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint-Domingue, 1797–98 (New York: Readex Microprint, 1985) 71. Arthur de Gobineau, “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1853–55). In Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau, edited by Michael D.Biddiss, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970) 144. Léxico del mestizaje en Hispanoamérica (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica), from Colonial Desire (177). According to Eric Williams, Columbus brought the first sugar cane to Hispaniola as early as 1493 (25). The History of Jamaica or, General survey of the antient [sic] or modern state of the island: with reflections on its situation settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws, and government (London: T.Lowndes, 1774); quoted in Williams 210. Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989) 6. Constructions of legal color presumably navigated at the level of presumed genotypes. Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia) 7. Madeline Cámara Betancourt, “Between Myth and Stereotype: The Image of the Mulatta in Cuban Culture in the Nineteenth Century, a Truncated Symbol of Nationality.” In Cuba, the Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity, edited by Damián J.Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000) 107. Conversely, sometimes only after several generations could “purity” be recovered. With reference to a colonial Haitian context, Nicholls argues that it “was widely

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 185

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

believed, or at least asserted, that slavery had imprinted a ‘stain’ upon the black man which had been passed on to his successors, even when these were of mixed blood and born free” (From Dessalines to Duvalier 25). In an entirely different context (early twentieth century Great Britain) Forbes Phillips expressed a similar view through commentaries representative of the “organic memory” theory in vogue at the time: “I ask, is there no such thing as ancestral memory? That a child should present certain features of his father and mother, and reproduce certain well-known gestures and mannerisms of his grandfather, is looked upon as something very ordinary. Is it not possible that the child may inherit something of his ancestor’s memory? That these flashes of reminiscence are the sudden awakening, the calling into action of something we have in our blood; the discs, the records of an ancestor’s past life, which require but the essential adjustments and conditions to give up their secrets? If so, then we have in ancestral memory a natural answer to many of life’s puzzles.” “Ancestral Memory: A Suggestion.” Nineteenth Century 59 (1906): 977– 82. Quoted in Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 9–10. Slade Hopkinson, “The Four,” in The Four and other Poems, (Barbados 1954) 5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs). Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 119–20. The quotation in Fanon’s passage is taken from Jon Alfred Mjoen’s “Harmonic and Disharmonic Race-crossings,” The Second International Congress of Eugenics (1921). After all, science should help all people, rather than keeping them separated and spreading anxiety because of bogus understandings of the body and ethnicity. F.D. Ledley, a participant at the 1991 International Congress of Human Genetics asserted the following with respect to a distinction between genetics and eugenics: “Eugenics presumes the existence of significant social control over genetic and reproductive freedoms. Genetics does not require any special control over genetics or reproductive freedoms.” “Differentiating Genetics and Eugenics on the Basis of Fairness,” poster 1818, Eighth International Congress of Human Genetics, Washington, D.C., October 6–11, 1991. Quoted in Diane B.Paul, “Is Human Genetics Disguised Eugenics?” In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Edited by Robert F.Weir, Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994) 70. “Blood” understood both figuratively and literally; after all, the blood operates in variations on this dual capacity in both African/Animist and European/Christian religious traditions, which coexist in the Caribbean. In any case, the “flow” of blood features prominently elsewhere in narrative from the Americas. I am thinking, in particular, of the scene in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad in which José Arcadio’s blood flows across the city. Roberto González Fchevarría correctly considers this scene one in which “genealogy is literalized” (Myth and Archive 16). There are good arguments for considering García Márquez’s novel a “Caribbean” one. I do not believe, however, that this novel thematizes the body or Caribbean society to the degree of Vega’s and Montero’s narratives. González Echevarría offers an additional entry into the use of genealogy in Latin American narrative: “Genealogy, as we know, is very much an element in conventional novelistic tradition, and could even be either a remnant of the epic or something willfully copied from the epic by novelists attempting to give their works

186 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

an epic dimension. Be that as it may, genealogy is a fundamental element in modern Latin American fiction, not merely as a measure of time, nor as a reflection of myth, but also because the regionalist novel studies the family as a group, and how values are transmitted from generation to generation, as well as in social practices” (ibid 158). Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier 262, n. 73. Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1928) 2:5. Léon-Gontran Damas, Pigments/Névralgies (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972) 42. In Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Antillana, 1983). In Tuntún de pasa y grifería, edited and with an introduction by Mercedes López Baralt (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993) 129–31. “Ana Lydia Pluravega: Unidad y multiplicidad caribeñas en la obra de Ana Lydia Vega.” Revista Iberoamericana 162–163 (Jan–June 1993):290. See also my discussion in Chapters 1 and 5 of Juan Gelpí’s Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico. “Mulata-antilla.” In Tuntún de pasa y grifería 147. “Mulatta-Antille.” In Selected Poems—poesía selecta, trans. and with an introduction by Julio Marzán (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000) 85. “Ana Lydia Vega, the Caribbean Storyteller.” Afro-Hispanic Review 15 (Fall 1996) 22. Rafael Falcón, “Aleluya a la caribeñidad.” Afro-Hispanic Review 13 (Fall 1994):44, n. 7. María Carmen Zielina, La africanía en el cuento cubano y puertorriqueño (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1992) 158. Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 55. Nicholls provides a brief but useful definition of vodoun: a Haitian “amalgam of the various religious beliefs and practices of West Africa, which even incorporated certain Christian symbols” (From Dessalines to Duvalier 23). Mayra Montero, Tú, la oscuridad (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1995) 37. Mayra Montero, In the Palm of Darkness (Tú, la oscuridad) (Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Collins, 1997) 20. Luis Patés Matos, Selected Poems=poesía selecta, trans. and with an introduction by Julio Marzán (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000) 31. Although Tú, la oscuridad is primarily about the elusive Eleutherodactylus sanguineus, a frog Grigg pursues in Haiti, interspersed (in segments told by an unnamed narrator) throughout the novel are accounts of declines in frog populations elsewhere in the world, Puerto Rico being no exception: “Estudios realizados desde agosto de 1989 indican que tres especies de ranas de tipo Eleutherodactylus han desaparecido de los bosques tropicales de Puerto Rico. Eleutherodactylus jasperi (coquí dorado), Eleutherodactylus karlschmidti (coquí palmeado) y Eleutherodactylus eneidae (coquí de Eneida) se consideran extintas” (135). (“Studies carried out since August 1989 indicate that three species of frog of the type Eleutherodactylus, commonly called coquí, have disappeared from the rain forests of Puerto Rico. Eleutherodactylus jasperi (the golden coquí), Eleutherodactylus karlschmidt [sic] (the palmate coquí), and Eleutherodactylus eneidae (the Eneida

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 187

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

coquí) are considered extinct” (98). In the way the narrative juggles a story with these intermittent scientific descriptions, Tú, la oscuridad is reminiscent of Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña. Mayra Montero, Interview with José Manuel Prieto. Trans. Marina Harss. Bomb 70 (Winter 2000):89. This essay currently can be found at the following internet location: http:// www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v04/Rivera.html One could argue that his participation is economically driven, i.e., as an assistant to a foreign scientific research project he would probably earn more money than the average Haitian laborer. The branch of zoology devoted to the study of reptiles and amphibians; interestingly, the term shares its etymology with herpes, a venereal disease. The name Boukaka also merits some commentary: Bou is akin to the French boeuf or cattle, while kaka (as I mentioned previously) is akin to a Spanish slang word for feces. According to Nicholls, for example, in Haiti “the racial prejudice of the whites led to colour prejudice on the part of the mulattoes…a mulatto slave was generally regarded as being superior to a free black” (From Dessalines to Duvalier 26). Elsewhere in the same study he argues that Haitian mulattoes have, throughout postindependence Haitian history, sought “to legitimate the mulatto ascendancy in the social and economic field, and to lend weight to their claim to guide and control developments in the political sphere” (92). These twins were born when Thierry was younger. He indicates that they were not as fortunate as Camerún in terms of the color of their offspring: they “tienen sus propias familias…unos hijitos que no les salieron tan blancuzcos” (172–73) (“they have their own families…some younger sons who didn’t come out so white” 130). Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, New York: Routledge, 1995) 26. It is important, I think, to clarify that renacuajo translates into English literally as tadpole, rather than puny. I am thinking, for example, of Cien años de soledad (Madrid: Selecciones Austral, 1982), Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (New York: Ballantine, 1992), and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (New York: Plume, 1992). Please see the Afterword for further commentary on the latter two novels. The various editions of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha chronicle and Emile Zola’s “Rougon Macquart” series attest to the fact that Caribbean and Hispanic American novels do not have a monopoly on such family trees. Montero’s use of the term oscuridad (darkness) in the title comes into focus given the apparent “dark side” of vodoun. Sidney W.Mintz. “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale Vol. IX (1966):931.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 5. 2. Cf. Young above.

188 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

3. Deidre Lynch and William B.Warner, eds. Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 4. 4. Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana (London and Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 1998) 94. 5. Anthony McFarlane, The British in the Americas, 1480–1815 (London and New York: Longman, 1994) 305. 6. Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Prentice Hall, 1996) 17. 7. Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (New York: The Viking Press, 1958) 18. 8. I will use the name Bertha in referring to Brontë’s character and Antoinette for Rhys’s. 9. There had, in fact, been other adaptations, including versions for the stage (Cf. John Brougham’s 1856 Jane Eyre: A Drama in Five Acts and the screen (Christy Cabanne’s 1934 Jane Eyre). 10. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, edited and with an introduction by Michael Mason (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996) 317. 11. Stoneman, for example, is quite sure of the opposite: “Antoinette is inescapably an early nineteenth century Creole—a white West Indian of European descent—and this aspect of her identity, together with her wish to be black, and her close association with her black nurse, Christophine, and her black friend Tia, raises the question of colonial relationships in a new and insistent form. Wide Sargasso Sea forced readers to acknowledge the existence of a colonial woman within the text of Jane Eyre—a woman, who, though conceivably once articulate, is now denied access to the rational discourse which is Jane’s salvation from hysteria, and can only manifest her anger in ‘perverse ways’”(187). 12. In a letter, Brontë does, however suggest that “profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation as [Bertha’s], and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling.” Letter to W.S.Williams, 4th January, 1848: Clement Shorter, ed., The Brontës: Life and Letters, Vol. 1 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908). Quoted in Michael Thorpe, “‘The Other Side’: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999) 175. 13. Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) 7–8. 14. Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review, 18 June 1967, 5. 15. Sandra Drake, “Race and Caribbean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999) 194. 16. Ellen G.Friedman, “Breaking the Master Narrative: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea” In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, introduced and edited by Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 118. 17. Veronica Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 83. Gregg also observes that Rhys took liberties with the temporal relationship between her text and Brontë’s. In terms specifically of the relationship between her Antoinette and the latter’s Bertha, Rhys made the following remark to a friend: “You write, ‘Of course it will be a fictitious Mrs. Rochester.’ But, don’t you see, Charlotte Brontë’s Mrs. Rochester is also fiction” (quoted in Gregg 84).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 189

18. Caroline Rody, “Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999) 223 19. Mona Fayad, “Unquiet Ghosts: The Struggle for Representation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999) 230. 20. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 22). 21. Elizabeth Baer has described Wide Sargasso Sea as “post-dated prequel” to Jane Eyre. “The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway.” In The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1982) 132. 22. I use this term following Gregg’s definition: “People of mixed race (black and white) are sometimes referred to as ‘coloureds’ or ‘mulattoes’” (ix). The term creole is— as we saw above in Mason’s edition of Jane Eyre and as Edouard Glissant has acknowledged (Cf. Introduction)—problematic, and was initially more an indicator of birthplace rather than of ethnicity or color: “a descendant of European settlers born or living for an extended period in the West Indies or Central or South America” (Gregg ix). 23. Wallis Warfield Hamm Tinnie suggests that Antoinette may not be of “pure” European lineage: “the Caribbean reader knows immediately that Daniel Cosway’s reference to Antoinette’s pretty colour’ is a reference to her status as a member of the non-white group. For whites do not have ‘colour.’” “Miscegenation Discourse in Faulkner, Rhys and Toomer: Literary Texts and Legal Subtexts.” Dissertation May 1997, 262. It is unclear, however, who Tinnie understands as a “Caribbean” reader; furthermore, closer scrutiny of Rhys’s text reveals that Daniel was describing Antoinette in contradistinction to himself: “Pretty face, soft skin, pretty colour—not yellow like me” (Rhys 126). 24. Kamau Brathwaite has argued that “no matter what Jean Rhys might have made Antoinette think, Tia was historically separated from her” by her color and corresponding socioeconomic standing. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Kingston: University of the West Indies, 1974) 36. Brathwaite’s argument, however, suggests that the opposite of what might have been historically conceivable was occurring in the narrative. 25. His real name, according to Antoinette, is Daniel Boyd (128). 26. Later, Antoinette is unaware of the content of Daniel’s accusations: ‘“You saw him… I know what he told you. That my mother was mad and an infamous woman and that my little brother who died was born a cretin, an idiot, and that I am a mad girl too. That is what he told you, isn’t it?”’ Rochester does not try to hide: ‘Yes, that was his story, and is any of it true?’ I said, cold and calm” (128–29). 27. Alexis Lykiard, Jean Rhys Revisited (Exeter, England: Stride, 2000) 86. 28. Although he never answers this question, we do learn earlier that Rochester’s interest in Amélie changed dramatically the day after their sexual encounter, when suddenly she was not as light skinned as he had thought: “In the morning, of course, I felt differently. Another complication. Impossible. And her skin was darker, her lips thicker than I had thought” (140). 29. Jean Rhys, Letters 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: André Deutsch, 1984). Jean Rhys to Francis Wyndham, 29 March 1958, p. 153.

190 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

30. One could argue, perhaps, that Rhys positions Wide Sargasso Sea as parent to Jane Eyre inasmuch as it is a prequel to the events we read about in Brontë’s novel. 31. In Falsas crónicas del sur (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1991) 2–84. 32. La migration des coeurs (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1995). 33. Emma A.Dávila Cox, Este inmenso comercio: Las relaciones mercantiles entre Puerto Rico y Gran Bretaña 1844–1898 (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1996) xvi. 34. “Report by Mr. Consul Cowper on the Trade and Commerce of the Island of Porto Rico during the year 1868.” Parliamentary Papers 1868–69 215; quoted in Dávila Cox xvii. 35. Others, however have identified this intertextual link, including Seymour Menton, who sees Miss Florence as a “Jane Eyre-type American [sic] tutor.” “Review of Falsas crónicas del sur.” World Literature Today 67 (1993) no. 1, 159. Similarly, Carol Jean Wallace argues in her unpublished dissertation that “the most obvious literary antecedent to this novelón is the classic Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre.” “The Politics of Humor in the Stories of Ana Lydia Vega.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Iowa, 1999, 108. I do not entirely agree, however, with Wallace’s reading of “El baúl de Miss Florence” as being primarily a parody or satire (108); the story seems to me more about loss, pain, and the ordeals of a community. 36. There is some confusion with regard to her name throughout the narrative: one character remarks that her last name (Jane) “más parece un nombre” (15) (“Miss Jane—your last name sounds more like a Christian name” 179); in fact, some characters call her Miss Jane while others call her Miss Florence. 37. Ana Lydia Vega, “Miss Florence’s Trunk,” in True and False Romances, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1994) 192. 38. “Women and Writing in Puerto Rico: An Interview with Ana Lydia Vega,” by Elizabeth Hernández and Consuelo López Springfield, trans. and edited by López Springfield, Callaloo 17.3 (1994) 822. 39. The English translation excludes this passage. My translation: “The eight accounts that comprise this book were inspired by the history, legend, and oral tradition of the coastal towns of southern Puerto Rico.” 40. Vega explains that Charlie “seemed to be the ideal person through whom I could express this tragic sentiment of the Creoles in an environment dominated by foreigners. I thought to myself, ‘what better way to tell the tale than through the eyes of a foreign woman? This also allows me distance.’ If I had told it from Charles’s point of view—first, it was impossible because he committed suicide, and secondly Charles was part of the same problem: he was controlled by these terrible contradictions. He couldn’t reflect on them as one could who was more distanced from the situation” (“Woman and Writing in Puerto Rico” 821). 41. Vicente Géigel Polanco, “Cervantes y el idioma.” Indice 3.27 (June 1931):27. Quoted in Unruh 151. 42. Vicky Unruh, “Like English for Spanish: Meditaciones desde la frontera anglorriqueña.” Siglo XX/20th Century 15, 1–2 (1997):157. 43. Bela’s reference to Selenia is an interesting one, for it is possible—if not probable— that Brunilda is her daughter. Moreover, it is possible/probable that Brunilda’s father is Edward Lind, which would make Brunilda’s relationship with Charlie an incestuous one (a la Cecilia Valdés).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 191

44. Maria Anagnostopoulou-Hielscher, “Parcours identitaires de la femme antillaise: Un entretien avec Maryse Condé.” Etudes Francophones 14 (2) (1999) 75–76. 45. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1972) 39. 46. Roger Little, “Condé, Brontë, Duras, Beyala: Intertextuality or Plagiarism.” French Studies Bulletin: A Quarterly Supplement 72 (Autumn 1999):14. 47. Brad Senning, “Everything Old is New Again: In the Blood and Windward Heights Make Good Stories Bad.” The Village Voice 14 December, 1999:19. 48. Theo D’haen, “Caribbean Migrations: Maryse Condé on the Track of Emily Brontë.” In Histoire Jeu Science dans l’aire de la literature, edited by Sjef Houppermans, Paul J. Smith, and Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) 205. 49. Maryse Condé, La migration des coeurs: roman (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995) 14. 50. Maryse Condé, Windward Heights: A Novel, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Soho Press, 1998) 6.

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. Review of Wide Sargasso Sea. In New York Times Book Review, 18 June 1967, 5. Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1992. Amorós, Celia. Hacia una crítica de la razón patriarcal. Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial del Hombre, 1991. Anagnostopoulou-Hielscher, Maria. “Parcours identitaires de la femme antillaise: Un entretien avec Maryse Corudé.” Etudes Francophones 14(2) (1999):67–81. Arango y Parreño, Francisco. Obras 2. Havana: Dirección de Cultura, Ministerio de Educación, 1952. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Arnold, A.James. “Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, edited by A.James Arnold, xiii–xviii. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994. Balderston, Daniel. Sexualidad y nación. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana, University of Pittsburgh, 2000. Baer, Elizabeth R, “The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway.” In The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, 131–48. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1982. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bello, Andrés. “La agricultura de la zona tórrida.” In Obras Completas, prologue by Fernando Paz Castillo, 65–74. Vol. 1. Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, 1952. ——.“Georgic of the Tropics,” trans. Barbara D.Huntley and Pilar Liria. In Anthology of Andrés Bello, compiled by Pedro Grases, with a foreword by Rafael Caldera, 28–35. Washington, D.C.: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1981. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. “Azúcar/poder/literatura.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos: Revista Mensual de Cultura Hispánica. 451–452 (Jan–Feb. 1988): 195–215. ——.The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. ——.“Sugar/Power/Literature.” Cuban Studies 16 (1986): 9–31. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Kingston: University of the West Indies, 1974. ——.“Jazz and the West Indian Novel.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 327–331. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 193

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, edited and with an introduction by Michael Mason. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1972. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Cabrera, Lydia. El monte: Igbo, Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda (Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba). Miami: C.R., 1968. Cámara Betancourt, Madeline. “Between Myth and Stereotype: The Image of the Mulatta in Cuban Culture in the Nineteenth Century, a Truncated Symbol of Nationality.” In Cuba, the Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity, edited by Damián J.Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt, 100–115. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Carpentier, Alejo. “Journey Back to the Source.” In War of Time, trans. Frances Partridge, 105–31. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1970. ——.“Marvelous Real in America,” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B.Faris, 75–88. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. ——.“Prologue” (“De lo real maravilloso americano”). In El reino de este mundo: relato, 7–17. Mexico: E.D.I.A.P.S.A., 1949. ——.Reasons of State, Trans. by Frances Partridge. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1976. ——.El recurso del método: novela. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974. ——.“Viaje a la semilla.” In Guerra del tiempo, 77–107. Mexico: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1968. Carrera, Magali M. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Castro, Fidel. “Speech to the Fighting People.” In Fidel Castro Speeches:Cuba’s Internationalist Foreign Policy 1975–80, trans. English-language Granma weekly review, 271–90. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981). Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca. Genes, Peoples, and Languages. Trans. Mark Seielstad. New York: North Point Press, 2000. Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Condé, Maryse. La migration des coeurs: roman. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1995. ——.Windward Heights: A Novel. Trans. Richard Philcox. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Coombes, Annie E. and Avtar Brah. “Introduction: The Conundrum of Mixing.” In Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie E.Coombes, 1–16. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. Coronil, Fernando. “Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition, Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint.” In Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, ix–lvi. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Coulthard, G.R. Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Croatto, Tony. “Nuestra sangre.” By Flor, Morales, and Ramos. Damas, Léon-Gontran. “Solde.” In Pigments/Névralgies, 41–42. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1972. Dash, J.Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

194 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davies, Carole Boyce, and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Davies, Catherine. A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba. London & New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd, 1997. Dávila Cox, Emma A. Este inmenso comercio: Las relaciones mercantiles entre Puerto Rico y Gran Bretaña 1844–1898. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1996. D’haen, Theo. “Caribbean Migrations: Maryse Condé on the Track of Emily Brontë.” In Histoire Jeu Science dans l’aire de la literature, edited by Sjef Houppermans, Paul J.Smith, and Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau, 202–214 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). Díaz Barreiro, Francisco. “La hibridación de la caña de azúcar en Cuba.” In Gregorio Mendel 1822–1972, edited by José López Sánchez and Vitezslav Orel, 80–87. Havana: Museo Histórico de las Ciencias “Carlos J.Finlay,” 1974. Drake, Sandra. “Race and Caribbean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin, 193–206. New York: Norton, 1999. Emery, Mary Lou. Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Falcon, Rafael. “Aleluya a la caribeñidad.” Afro-Hispanic Review 13 (Fall 1994): 40–44. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fayad, Mona. “Unquiet Ghosts: The Struggle for Representation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin, 225–240. New York: Norton, 1999. Flores, Juan. “Preface.” In La charca, by Manuel Zeno Gandía, English version. Trans. and with an introduction by Kal Wagenheim, 13–30. Maplewood, N.J.: Waterfront Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M.Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. ——.“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited with an introduction by Donald F.Bouchard, trans. Donald F.Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 139–64. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Friedman, Ellen G. “Breaking the Master Narrative: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, introduced and edited by Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, 117–128. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban: A Novel. New York: Ballantine, 1992. García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L.Chiappari and Silvia L.López, foreword by Renato Rosaldo. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gelpí, Juan G. Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000. ——.The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 195

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J.Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Gobineau, Arthur de. “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1853–55). In Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau, edited by Michael D.Biddiss, trans. Adrian Collins, 37–176. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970. Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga, Gertrudis. Sab, edited with introduction, critical analysis, notes and vocabulary by Catherine Davies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. ——.Sab, English, with autobiography. Trans. and edited by Nina M.Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. González, Aníbal. “Ana Lydia Pluravega: Unidad y multiplicidad caribeñas en la obra de Ana Lydia Vega.” Revista Iberoamericana 162–163 (Jan–June 1993): 289–300. ——.“La (sín)tesis de una poesía antillana: Palés y Spengler.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 451–452 (Jan.–Feb. 1988): 59–72. González Eehevarría, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. ——.González Echevarría, Roberto, and Enrique Pupo Walker, eds. The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ——.Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana. New York: The Viking Press, 1958. Gregg, Veronica Marie. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Guerra y Sánchez, Ramiro. Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture. Trans. Marjory M.Urquidi. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Guillén, Nicolás. Sóngoro Cosongo y otros poemas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1991. Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon, 1973. ——.The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Heredia, José María. “Oda al Niágara.” In Poesías completas, 164–69. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1970. Hoeg, Jerry. Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2000. Hopkinson, Slade. The Four and other Poems. Barbados 1954. Humboldt, Alexander von. The Island of Cuba. Trans. J.S.Thrasher. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1855. Isaacs, Leonard. Darwin to Double Helix: The Biological Theme in Science Fiction. London: Butterworths, 1977. Jameson, Fredric. “On Magic Realism in Film,” in Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 301–325. Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Kofman, Sarah. Nietzsche and Metaphor. Trans. Duncan Large. Great Britain: Stanford University Press, 1993. Kurlansky, Mark. A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992.

196 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kutzinski, Vera. Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Labastida, Jaime. “Alejo Carpentier: Realidad y conocimiento estético. (Sobre El recurso del método)” Casa de las Américas 87 (1974): 21–31. Leante, César. “Cecilia Valdés, espejo de la esclavitud.” In EL espacio real. Havana: UNEAC Contemporáneos, 1975. Little, Roger. “Condé, Brontë, Duras, Beyala: Intertextuality or Plagiarism.” French Studies Bulletin: A Quarterly Supplement 72 (Autumn 1999): 13–15. López Sánchez, José. “Significación histórico-científica de Mendel y el Mendelismo.” In Gregorio Mendel 1822–1972, edited by José López Sánchez and Vitezslav Orel, 25–56. Havana: Museo Histórico de las Ciencias “Carlos J.Finlay,” 1974. Loynaz, Dulce María. Jardín. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., 1993. Ludmer, Josefina. Onetti. Los procesos de construcción del relato. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1979. Luis, William. “Cecilia Valdés: el nacimiento de una novela antiesclavista.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 451–452 (Jan.–Feb. 1988): 187–93. ——.Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Lykiard, Alexis. Jean Rhys Revisited. Exeter, England: Stride, 2000. Lynch, Deidre and William B.Warner, eds. Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Márquez, Roberto. “Towards a Theory of Caribbean Culture and a Holistic View of the Antilles.” In Process of Unity in Caribbean Society: Ideologies and Literature. Edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Marc Zimmerman, 96–107. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983. Martinez-Alier, Verena. Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989. Martínez-Fernández, Luis. Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana. London and Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 1998. McFarlane, Anthony. The British in the Americas,1480–1815. London and New York: Longman, 1994. Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. “Bondage in Paradise: Fredrika Bremer’s Travels to Cuba and the Inscape of National Identity.” In Cuba, the Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity, edited by Damián J.Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt, 200–223. Gainesville, 200–223: University Press of Florida, 2000. ——.Cuba en su imagen: historia e identidad en la literatura cubana. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2002. ——.Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa. Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlín. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. ——.“Identity and Incest in Cecilia Valdés: Villaverde and the Origin(s) of the Text.” Cuban Studies 24 (1994): 83–104. ——.“Mujer, nación y otredad en Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.” In Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura: Siglos XVI al XIX, vol. 2, 167–79. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1997. ——.“Tropics of Deceit: Desire and the Double in Cuban Antislavery Narrative.” Cuban Studies 28 (1998): 83–99.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 197

Menton, Seymour. “Review of Falsas crónicas dele sur.” World Literature Today 67, 1 (1993): 159 Mintz, Sidney W. “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area.” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9 (1966): 912–37. ——.Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. Mitjans, Aurelio. Estudio sobre el movimiento científico y literario en Cuba. Havana: A.Alvarez y Compañía, 1890. Montero, Mayra. In the Palm of Darkness. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. ——.Interview with José Manuel Prieto. Trans. Marina Harss. Bomb 70 (Winter 2000): 86–90. ——.Tú, la oscuridad. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1995. Moore, David Chioni. “Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy.” Transition: International Review 64 (1994): 4–21. Moreau de Saint-Mèry, M.L.E. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint-Dommgue, 1797–98. New York: Readex Microprint, 1985. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. El ingenio. 3 vols. Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1978. Naish, Camille. A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Nehamas, Alexander. “Friedrich Nietzsche.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 545–48. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Nesbitt, Nick. “Négritude.” In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1404–1408. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999. Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. London: Macmillan, 1996. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. “‘The Outsiders Voice’: White Creole Women Novelists in the Caribbean Literary Tradition.” In The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, edited by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 274–281. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar. Prologue by Julio Le Riverend. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987. ——.Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís, Introduction by Bronislaw Malinowski, Prologue by Herminio Portell Vilá, New Introduction by Fernando Coronil. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. ——.“Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” Revista Bimestre Cubana 21 (1940): 161–86. Otis, Laura. Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pales Matos, Luis. Selected Poems=poesía selecta, trans. and with an introduction by Julio Marzan. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000. ——.Tuntún de pasa y griferia, edited and with an introduction by Mercedes López Baralt. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993. Palumbo-Liu, David. “Theory and the Subject of Asian American Studies.” Amerasia Journal 21. 1–2 (1995): 55–65. Parker, Helen N. Biological Themes in Modern Science Fiction. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984.

198 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Picon Garfield, Evelyn. Poder y sexualidad: el discurso de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993. Poster, Mark. “Michel Foucault.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 277–80. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. PuertoRico.com “Discussion Forum” on race in Puerto Rico (chapter two) www.puertorico.com/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=2578; 4/8/02. Puleo, Augustus. “Ana Lydia Vega, the Caribbean Storyteller.” Afro-Hispanic Review 15 (Fall 1996): 21–25. Reay, Judith, and John Steward, eds. Science applied in the Caribbean. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1988. Reiss, Timothy J. Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Rhys, Jean. Letters 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. London: André Deutsch, 1984. ——.Wide Sargasso Sea. W.W.Norton, 1982. Rivera, Ángel A. “Silence, Voodoo, and Haiti in Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness” http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v04/Rivera.html. 4/8/02. Rodríguez, Antonio. A History of Mexican Mural Painting. Trans. Marina Corby. New York: Putnam, 1969. Rodríguez, Ileana. House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Latin American Literatures by Women. Trans. Robert Carr and Ileana Rodríguez. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Rody, Caroline. “Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin, 217–225. New York: Norton, 1999. Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno. “‘Por causa mecánica’: The Coupling of Bodies and Machines and the Production and Reproduction of Whiteness in Cecilia Valdés and NineteenthCentury Cuba.” In Thinking Bodies, edited by Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, 78–86. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Schade, George D. “Cirilo Villaverde 1812–1894.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, edited by Verity Smith, 845–47. London & Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. Schiebinger, Londa. “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in EighteenthCentury Natural History.” In Feminism & Science, edited by Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E.Longino, 137–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Schultz, William R. Genetic Codes of Culture? The Deconstruction of Tradition by Kuhn, Bloom, and Derrida. New York: Garland, 1994. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited and introduced by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 27–35. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Senning, Brad. “Everything Old is New Again: In the Blood and Windward Heights Make Good Stories Bad.” The Village Voice 14 December, 1999:19. Simon, Bruce. “Hybridity in the Americas: Reading Condé, Mukherjee, and Hawthorne.” In Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, 412–443. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 199

Smith, M.G. “The African Heritage in the Caribbean.” In Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, 34–46. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1928. Steinberg, Deborah Lynn. “Reading Genes/Writing Nation: Reith, ‘Race’ and the Writings of Geneticist Steve Jones.” In Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie E.Coombes, 137–153. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. Stoneman, Patsy. Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. London: Prentice Hall, 1996. Stubbe, Hans. History of Genetics: From Prehistoric Times to the Rediscovery of Mendel’s Laws. Trans. T.R.W.Waters. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972. Thorpe, Michael. “‘The Other Side’: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith L.Raiskin, 173–181. New York: Norton, 1999. Tinnie, Wallis Warfield Hamm. “Miscegenation Discourse in Faulkner, Rhys and Toomer: Literary Texts and Legal Subtexts.” Ph.D.diss., The University of Iowa, 1997. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Turney, Jon. Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Unruh, Vicky. “Like English for Spanish: Meditaciones desde la frontera anglorriqueña.” Siglo XX/20th Century 15, 1–2 (1997): 147–161. Vega, Ana Lydia. “El baúl de Miss Florence.” In Falsas crónicas del sur, 2–84. Río Piedras: Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1991. ——.“Miss Florence’s Trunk.” In True and False Romances, trans. Andrew Hurley, 163–261. New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1994. ——.“Otra maldad de Pateco.” In Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio, 107–113. Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Antillana, 1983. ——.“Women and Writing in Puerto Rico” (An interview with Elizabeth Hernández and Consuelo López Springfield, trans. and edited by Springfield. Callaloo 17.3 (1994) 816–825. Villaverde, Cirilo. Cecilia Valdés. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1986. ——.Cecilia Valdés: A Novel of Cuban Customs, trans. Sidney G.Gest. New York: Vantage Press, 1962. Vitier, Cintio. Lo cubano en la poesía. Havana: Ucar, García, 1958. Wailoo, Keith. Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Wallace, Carol Jean, “The Politics of Humor in the Stories of Ana Lydia Vega.” Ph.D.diss., The University of Iowa, 1999. Webb, Barbara J. Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Weir, Robert F., Susan C.Lawrence, and Evan Fales, eds. Genes and Human SelfKnowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Iowa City: University of owa Press, 1994. Williams, Claudette M. Charcoal & Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

200 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Williams, Eric. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. ——.“Race Relations in Caribbean Society.” In Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, 54–60. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960. Williams, Lorna Valerie. The Representation of Slavery in Cuban Fiction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Zeno Gandía, Manuel. La charca. Madrid: M.Aguilar, 1954. ——.La charca, English. Trans. Kal Wagenheim and with a preface by Juan Flores. Maplewood, N.J.: Waterfront Press, 1982. Zielina, María Carmen. La africanía en el cuento cubano y puertorriqueño. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1992. Zobel, Joseph. Black Shack Alley (La rue cases-négres). Trans. and with an introduction by Keith Q.Warner. London: Heinemann, 1980.

Index

A abolitionism 4, 16, 45, 70–71, 75, 200n10, 200n14 in Puerto Rico 169–72, 175 in Sab 52–69 acculturation 12, 96 Aeschylus 22 Allen, Walter 159 Allende, Isabel 104 Alvar, Manuel 116 Alvarez, Julia 187–90 Amorós, Celia 22–23 Arango y Parreño, Francisco de 42–43, 56– 57, 85 Aristotle 22–23 Armstrong, Nancy 156 Asclepiades 22

Brontë, Emily 17; Wuthering Heights 152, 177–78, 180– 81, 185 Burton, Captain Richard 34 Butler, Judith 114 C Cabrera, Lydia 83 Calvino, Mario 41–42 Cañizares, José de 60–61 Caribbean region; descriptions of 2, 7–14 Carpentier, Alejo 16, 81–82, 87; Carpentierian characters 147 Recurso del método (Reasons of State) 96–110 “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey Back to the Source”) 91–94 Carrera, Magali 20 Castro, Fidel 96, 113–14, 149 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi 21 Césaire, Aimé 8 Céspedes, Benjamín de 39 chromosome 21, 118 Comtean positivism 102 Condamine, Charles Marie de la 34 Condé, Maryse 17; Windward Heights (La migration des coeurs) 151–52, 166, 176–86 Coombes, Annie E. 13–14 Coulthard, G.R. 6, 87, 91 Cowper, Henry Augustus 167 creole 49, 70, 78, 157–58, 163, 171, 175–76 créolité 183 creolization 9–10

B Belli, Gioconda 20 Bello, Andrés 85–87, 110 Benítez Rojo, Antonio 6, 7, 20, 42–44, 57, 82, 178 Beyala, Calixthe 178 Bhabha, Homi 13 Biogenetic Law see Ernst Haeckel blood 11, 52, 73, 78, 102, 118–20, 126, 137, 138–39, 142–43, 171–72 Bloom, Harold 30, 152–53 Bonpland, Aimé 36 Borges, Jorge Luis 104–05 Brah, Avtar see Annie E.Coombes Brontë, Charlotte 17, 154; Jane Eyre 151–52, 154–161, 163, 165– 71, 177–78

201

202 INDEX

criollo 9, 64, 72 Croatto, Tony 50–52 D Damas, Léon-Gontran 120 Darwin, Charles 24, 34–35, 45 and Darwinism 39–40 and survival of the fittest 147, 149 Dash, J.Michael 7–8 Davies, Catherine 47, 59–60, 90 Dávila Cox, Emma 166–67 Davis, Wade 130–31 deculturation 12, 96 Del Monte, Domingo 58 and Del Monte group 58–59, 70 de Vries, Hugo 40 D’haen, Theo 178, 183 Diaspora to Caribbean 17 from Caribbean 187–90 Díaz Barreiro, Francisco 41–42 Dickinson, Emily 154 Doyle, Arthur Conan 156 Drake, Sandra 159 du Tertre, Père 116, 118 E Emery, Mary Lou 159, 161–62 Esponda, Eduardo 39 eugenics 5, 14, 25–26, 117–18, 125 F Falcón, Rafael 123 family tree, see genealogy Fanon, Frantz 117–19 Faulkner, William 20, 210 n45 Fayad, Mona 160 Ferré, Rosario 173 Flores, Juan 37–39, 42 Foucault, Michel 23–24 Friedman, Ellen G. 159 Frye, Northrop 26 Fuller, Margaret 171 G Galton, Francis 36 Garcia, Cristina 187–89

García Márquez, Gabriel 104, 208n19 Garro, Elena 104 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 6, 151, 153 Geertz, Clifford 34 Géigel Polanco, Vicente 173 Gelpí, Juan 29–30, 152–53, 173 gender 3, 15, 47, 57, 70, 117, 133, 141, 156– 57, 165, 169, 187 gene 21, 26, 114, 118, 147, 182, 187 genealogy 9, 19, 21, 23, 27–29, 62, 67, 77, 87, 93, 96–98, 115, 143–44, 181, 187, 189, 208n19; and genealogical categories 10 and genealogical imagination 110 and genealogical methods 21, 23–24, 51 “Generación del 30” 29 genetics: definition of 21 Gilman, Sander 6 Gilroy, Paul 7, 155 Glissant, Edouard 9–10, 124 Gobineau, Arthur de 36, 116 Goldmann, Lucien 26 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis 16, 70; Sab 48–49, 52–69 González, Aníbal 32, 121–22 González Echevarría, Roberto 20, 34, 36, 82–83, 92–93, 99, 103–104 Greene, Graham 157 Gregg, Veronica 159, 164 Guerra y Sánchez, Ramiro 44–45 Guillén, Nicolas 88 H Haeckel, Ernst 24, 31 Haley, Alex 27–29, 96 Hambidge, Jay 20 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 177 Hébert, Anne 177 Heidegger, Martin 31 Heredia, José María 84–85, 203n6 heredity definition of 187n2, 187n4 Homer 22 Hopkinson, Slade 117 Human Genome Project 20

INDEX 203

Humboldt, Alexander von 34, 36–37, 41, 83, 85, 103, 127 hybrid 13–14 and hybridization 35, 40–41, 185 hybridity 6–7, 14–15, 36, 141, 176, 186 definition of 13 I incest 16, 72, 79 intertextuality 128–29, 151–86 Isaacs, Leonard 26 J James, Henry 157 Jameson, Fredric 60, 105 Jones, Steve 25–26 José, Rafael 49–50 K Kahlo, Frida 20 Knox, Robert 36 Koerner, Lisbet 35 Kofman, Sarah 23 Kutzinski, Vera 117 L Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 24 Lawrence, William 115 Leante, César 72 Le Bon, Gustave 36 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 34 Linneaus, Carl 34–35, 37, 45, 197n41 and taxonomy 23, 36, 82 Little, Roger 177–78 López Baralt, Mercedes 88 López Sánchez, José 33, 40–42 Loynaz, Dulce María 16 Jardín 89–91 Lucas, Prosper 125 Ludmer, Josefina 39 Luis, William 70–71 Lutz, Antón 40–41 Lykiard, Alexis 163 Lynch, Deidre 154–55 M McFarlane, Anthony 56, 155

Madden, Richard 58 Malinowski, Bronislaw 12, 34 Marqués, René 29, 173 Martí, José 5 Martinez-Alier, Verena 70, 72–73, 77, Martínez-Fernández, Luis 55, 155 Mason, Michael 157–58 Menchú, Rigoberta 188 Mendel, Gregor 15, 21–22, 33, 40 and Mendelian genetics 39, 41, 125 Méndez Rodenas, Adriana 60, 62, 67, 69, 71–73 mestizaje 10, 51, 116 mestizo 51 Mestre, Arístides 41 Mintz, Sidney 6, 33, 52–53, 82 miscegenation 12, 14, 16, 48, 50, 78 Montero, Mayra 16–17, 115 Tú, la oscuridad 127–49 Moore, David Chioni 27–29, 51, 96–98 Moreau de Saint-Méry 115–16, 118 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel 44 Morse, Samuel 169, 175 mulatto (mulato) 52–53, 67, 70–71, 76, 78– 79,88, 116–17, 121–22, 140, 175 N nationalism 45, 47 négritude 8–9, 91, 120 Nesbitt, Nick 8–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 23–24 O Onetti, Juan Carlos 39 ontogeny 24 Ortiz, Fernando 7, 16, 82, 124, 178 Cuban Counterpoint 94–96; “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” 10–12 Otis, Laura 24, 125, 194n19 P Palés Matos, Luis 30–33, 88–89, 121–24, 128–29 Palmieri, Eddie 49–50 Parker, Helen 26 Pedreira, Antonio S. 29, 173

204 INDEX

phylogeny 24 plantocracy 55–56, 58–59, 72 Plato 22 Poey, Felipe 37, 45 117 post-colonial theory 2, 14, 130, 176, 186 Poster, Mark 23 Pratt, Mary Louise 6 Puleo, Augustus 123 R Rádl, Emanuel 22 Reay, Judith 33 Rhys, Jean 154, 170, 185 Wide Sargasso Sea 151, 158–166, 178 Rivera, Ángel 130–31 Roa, Miguel 98 Rodríguez, Ileana 90 Rody, Caroline 159–60 Rulfo, Juan 104 S Saco, José Antonio 32, 58, 198n51 St. Augustine 22 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin 59 Sánchez, Luis Rafael 173 Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno 57 Sartre, Jean-Paul 31 Schade, George 70–71 Schiebinger, Londa 35 science fiction 26–27 Scott, Nina M. 58–59 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 8–9 Senning, Brad 177–78 sexual reproduction 3, 9, 15–16, 24, 42, 50, 55, 57, 73, 153 Shelley, Mary 61 sickle cell anemia 25 Smith, M.G. 48 Sommer, Doris 59–60, 62, 68, 71–72, 75– 76, 116 Spengler, Oswald 31–32, 88, 92, 119 Stapledon, Olaf 26 Steinberg, Deborah 25–26 Stepan, Nancy Leys 40 Steward, John see Judith Reay Stoneman, Patsy 156–57, 177 Stubbe, Hans 21–22, 41, 193n5

T taxonomy see Linnaeus Thorpe, Michael 159–60 Todorov, Tzvetan 26 Torres-Saillant, Silvio 151, 153 Tourneur, Jacques 157 transculturation 7, 95, 178 definition of 12 Turney, Jon 27 U Unruh,Vicky 172–73 V Vega, Ana Lydia 1, 17, 115, 151–52, 154, 185 “El baúl de Miss Florence” 166–76 “Otra maldad de Pateco” 120–27 Villaverde, Cirilo 5, 16, 47–49, 64 Cecilia Valdés 69–79 Vitier, Cintio 84–85 W Wailoo, Keith 25 Walcott, Derek 19, 29, 45, 164, 185, 188 Warner, William B. see Deidre Lynch Webb, Barbara 91–92, 96 Wells, H.G. 26 Williams, Claudette 71, 75–76, 115 Williams, Eric 44–45, 54–55, 77, 87, 115, 117, 144 Wollstonecraft, Mary 171 Y Young, Robert 14, 35–36, 40, 116, 141,154 Z Zeno Gandía, Manuel 15, 29 La charca 37–39 Zielina, María 123–24 Zobel, Joseph 81 Zola, Emile 37, 102