Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America (Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia) 3030525708, 9783030525705

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Cultural and Literary Interactions Between Asia and Latin America
On the Contact Between the Two Worlds
Overview of Parts and Chapters Content
References
Part I: Asian Hybrid Identities and Latin American Transnational Narratives
Chapter 2: (Trans)National Narratives of Identity in Federico Jeanmarie’s Tacos Altos (2016)
References
Chapter 3: Identity and Poetic Memory in Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina
Introduction
Palestinian Diaspora in Chile
Antecedents to Becoming/Returning
Traveling Identities
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Hybrid Identities: Mexico and the Middle East in Memoria de Líbano by Carlos Martínez Assad and Casa Damasco by Maruan Soto Antaki
Theoretical Framework
Memoria de Líbano
Casa Damasco
References
Part II: Reception and Translations of Latin American Writers in Asia
Chapter 5: Shared Neoliberalisms: The Cultural Affects of the Contemporary Pacific
References
Chapter 6: Fragile Bridges: Translation Theory and Translation Practices in Contemporary Transpacific Literature
Fragile Metaphors
Absent Mothers
Multidirectional Tilt
Revised Architecture
References
Chapter 7: Reception of Chilean Literature and South Korean Intellectual Genealogy
Persistence of Memory
South Korean Readers’ Horizon of Expectation and the Chilean Coup
Neruda and a Genealogy of “Subversive” Intellectuals
Another Intellectual Genealogy and Latin America
References
Part III: Diffraction Worlds of Nikkei Identities
Chapter 8: Biopolitics, Orientalism, and the Asian Immigrant as Monster in Salazar’s La medianoche del japonés and Rodríguez’s Asesinato en una lavandería china
Japanese Monstrosity in Jorge Salazar’s La medianoche del japonés
Chinese Vampires in Asesinato en una lavandería china
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Militancy and Imperial Masculinity in Sugi Takeo’s “Revenge” and Vicente Amorim’s Dirty Hearts
References
Chapter 10: Quiet Revenges: The Infinite Intensity of the Silenced History of Japanese Peruvians in Carlos Yushimito del Valle’s “Ciudad de Cristal”
Introduction: Yushimito as a “Permanent Traveler”
The Nomadic “War Machine”: Between Liberation and Cooptation
Against the Main Plot of a Revenge Story in “Ciudad de Cristal”
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: The Sea and Poison: Shusaku Endo’s Prelude to Silence
References
Part IV: Crossroads of Asia-Latin American Narratives and Travel Writing
Chapter 12: The Peripheral Spanish World in the Antipodes: The Filipino T. H. Pardo de Tavera in the Centennial Argentina
Social and Urban Footprints
Remarks About the Argentine Socio-economic Model
A Radiant Future
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13: José Rizal and the Foundational Novels of Latin America
Literature and Nation-Building in the Philippines: The Ilustrados
Ninay as a Precedent of Noli Me Tangere
Latin American Fictions and Romantic Imagination
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: Is It Not So Easy to Go from West to East? A Political View of Cecília Meireles in India
Supporter of a “True Internationalism”?
Solving Problems in Its Own Way
Concluding Remarks: An Epistemology of the South?
References
Chapter 15: Orientalism Expanded? Latin American Travel Narratives Heading East
Leaving Home
The “Zero Chronotope”
Heading East
We and the “Others”
The Unspeakable, the Silent Other
And Back West
References
Author Index
Place Index

Citation preview

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND ASIA

Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America

Edited by Axel Gasquet · Gorica Majstorovic

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia Series Editors Ignacio López-Calvo University of California, Merced Merced, CA, USA Kathleen López Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

This series is devoted to the diversity of encounters between Latin America and Asia through multiple points of contact across time and space. It welcomes different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to define, describe, and explore the histories and cultural production of people of Asian descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also welcomes research on Hispano-Filipino history and cultural production. Themes may include Asian immigration and geopolitics, the influence and/or representation of the Hispanic world in Asian cultures, Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Hispanic world and Asia, and other transpacific and southsouth exchanges that disrupt the boundaries of traditional academic fields and singular notions of identity. The geographical scope of the series incorporates the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean region. We welcome single-author monographs and volumes of essays from experts in the field from different academic backgrounds. About the series editors: Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA and director of the UC Merced Center for the Humanities. He is author of several books on Latin American and US Latino literature. He is co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. She is author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) and a contributor to Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2015), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (2016), and Imagining Asia in the Americas (2016). Advisory Board: Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College, USA Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, USA Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh, USA Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University, USA Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Southeast Missouri State University, USA Shigeko Mato, Waseda University, Japan Zelideth María Rivas, Marshall University, USA Robert Chao Romero, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Lok Siu, University of California, Berkeley, USA Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, USA Laura Torres-Rodríguez, New York University, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15129

Axel Gasquet  •  Gorica Majstorovic Editors

Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America

Editors Axel Gasquet Department of Spanish Studies University of Clermont Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand, France

Gorica Majstorovic School of Arts and Humanities Stockton University Galloway, NJ, USA

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia ISBN 978-3-030-52570-5    ISBN 978-3-030-52571-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Cultural and Literary Interactions Between Asia and Latin America  1 Axel Gasquet and Gorica Majstorovic Part I Asian Hybrid Identities and Latin American Transnational Narratives  17 2 (Trans)National Narratives of Identity in Federico Jeanmarie’s Tacos Altos (2016) 19 María Montt Strabucchi 3 Identity and Poetic Memory in Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina 37 Lila McDowell Carlsen 4 Hybrid Identities: Mexico and the Middle East in Memoria de Líbano by Carlos Martínez Assad and Casa Damasco by Maruan Soto Antaki 53 Verónica Torres

v

vi 

Contents

Part II Reception and Translations of Latin American Writers in Asia  75 5 Shared Neoliberalisms: The Cultural Affects of the Contemporary Pacific 77 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado 6 Fragile Bridges: Translation Theory and Translation Practices in Contemporary Transpacific Literature 89 Puo-An Wu Fu 7 Reception of Chilean Literature and South Korean Intellectual Genealogy103 Woo Suk-kyun Part III Diffraction Worlds of Nikkei Identities 119 8 Biopolitics, Orientalism, and the Asian Immigrant as Monster in Salazar’s La medianoche del japonés and Rodríguez’s Asesinato en una lavandería china121 Ignacio López-Calvo 9 Militancy and Imperial Masculinity in Sugi Takeo’s “Revenge” and Vicente Amorim’s Dirty Hearts143 Seth Jacobowitz 10 Quiet Revenges: The Infinite Intensity of the Silenced History of Japanese Peruvians in Carlos Yushimito del Valle’s “Ciudad de Cristal”159 Shigeko Mato 11 The Sea and Poison: Shusaku Endo’s Prelude to Silence177 José I. Suárez

 Contents 

vii

Part IV Crossroads of Asia-Latin American Narratives and Travel Writing 185 12 The Peripheral Spanish World in the Antipodes: The Filipino T. H. Pardo de Tavera in the Centennial Argentina187 Axel Gasquet 13 José Rizal and the Foundational Novels of Latin America209 Jorge Mojarro 14 Is It Not So Easy to Go from West to East? A Political View of Cecília Meireles in India225 Everton V. Machado 15 Orientalism Expanded? Latin American Travel Narratives Heading East245 Estefanía Bournot Author Index263 Place Index271

Notes on Contributors

Estefanía  Bournot obtained her PhD from Potsdam Universität, Germany, and is a teaching assistant at Universität Innsbruck, Austria. Her research areas are spatial studies, contemporary Latin American art and literature, and cultural studies of the Global South. With the support of the German Forum for Art History (Deutsche Forum für Kunstgeschichte), Paris, and the Leibnitz University, Hannover, she is developing a research project on cultural networks between Africa and the Americas during the Cold War. Lila  McDowell  Carlsen  is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, USA.  She has published several articles and book chapters on contemporary Chilean and Mexican fiction. Her research focuses on utopia and dystopia, gender, and the intersections of Eastern and Western cultures in recent Hispanic literature. Prof. McDowell Carlsen is also Associate Provost of Pepperdine University. Axel Gasquet  is Professor of Latin American Literature at University of Clermont Auvergne, France, and principal researcher at Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM) of the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). His latest books are as follows: La cultura extraterritorial Argentina: Alberdi, Mansilla, Hudson, Quesada, Obligado (2020); El llamado de Oriente, historia cultural del orientalismo argentino 1900–1950 (2015); El cielo protector, la literatura de viajes (2015); Georges Bataille: una teoría del exceso (2014); Oriente al Sur, el orientalismo literario argentino de Esteban Echeverría a Roberto Arlt (2007); and Los escritores argentinos de París (2007, 2nd ed. 2020). He ix

x 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

has also edited numerous collected volumes and critical editions, the most recent of which are as follows: Literatura filipina en español: el impulso hacia la modernidad (with Rocío Ortuño Casanova, forthcoming); Benigno del Río, Cuentos Filipinos (forthcoming); and José Rizal, Noli me tangere (2019). Seth Jacobowitz  is Senior Research Associate at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at the City College of New York. He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan and the translator of The Edogawa Rampo Reader and Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts (Palgrave Macmillan). Ignacio  López-Calvo  is University of California, Merced Presidential Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Latin American Literature. He is the author of more than eighty articles and book chapters, editor of fourteen volumes and author of eight books on Latin American and US Latino literature and culture: Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei Cultural Production (2019); Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru (2014); The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013); Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety (2011); Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2007); “Trujillo and God”: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (2005); Religión y militarismo en la obra de Marcos Aguinis 1963–2000 (2002); and Written in Exile. Chilean Fiction from 1973–Present (2001). Everton V. Machado  received a PhD degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne/Paris IV in 2008. He is currently a principal researcher (equivalent to associate professor) at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (FLUL). He co-directed the CEC (2016–2019), where he also developed the exploratory research project “The Portuguese Representations of India: Power and Knowledge in a Peripheral Orientalism (19th and 20th centuries)”, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal (IF/01452/2013). Among his works are O Orientalismo Português e as Jornadas de Tomás Ribeiro: caracterização de um problema (2018), as well as a scientific edition of India’s first Portuguese-language novel, Os Brahamanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869) (Les Brahmanes, translated from Portuguese to French by L. de Claranges-Lucotte, 2012).

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xi

Gorica  Majstorovic is Professor of Spanish and Latin American & Caribbean Studies Coordinator at Stockton University. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Atlantic Studies, Iberoamericana, and Transmodernity, as well as several volumes and anthologies. She is the author of Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the AvantGarde in Latin America (2020). Shigeko Mato  is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary Japanese Peruvian literature in US, Peruvian, and Japanese journals. She is working on a book project related to Japanese migration to Peru and Japanese Peruvians’ reverse migration to Japan. Jorge  Mojarro  holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature from the University of Salamanca. He is a faculty member of the Department of Literature at the University of Santo Tomás (Manila). During the last ten years, he has been devoting his research to the area of Philippine colonial literature, history of the printing press in the Philippines, and Philippine literature in Spanish language. He has published annotated editions of Teodoro Kalaw’s Hacia la Tierra del Zar (2014) and Dominican Father Campa’s journeys to Mayoyao and Sierra Madre, Entre las Tribus del Luzón Central (2016). He has also edited two special issues on Philippine literature in Spanish for the peer-reviewed journals Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana (December 2018) and Unitas (May 2019). Ignacio  M.  Sánchez  Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology, and cultural institutions in Mexico, with a particular focus on literature and cinema. He is the author of El canon y sus formas: La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (2002), Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917–1959) (2009), Intermitencias americanistas: Ensayos académicos y literarios (2004–2009) (2012), Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988–2012 (2014), Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018), and Intermitencias alfonsinas: Estudios y otros textos (2004–2018) (2019). He

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

has published over one-hundred scholarly articles and has edited thirteen scholarly collections, the most recent of which are as follows: A History of Mexican Literature (2016), Mexican Literature in Theory (2018), and Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (2018). María  Montt  Strabucchi is an assistant professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a member of the Asian Studies Center at the same university. She received her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Manchester in 2017; her research examined representations of China in contemporary Latin American literature. She holds an undergraduate degree in History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research interests include Chinese-Latin American political and cultural relations and the representations of China in Chile and Latin America. José I. Suárez  is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. His doctorate degree in Romance Languages is from the University of New Mexico. He has published over forty scholarly articles in refereed journals and has published five books. Among his book-length publications on literature feature The Carnival Stage: Vicentine Comedy Within the Serio-Comic Mode, Gil Vicente’s The Play of Rubena, Mário de Andrade: The Creative Works, and Gómez Manrique: Manuscrito 1250 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real. Woo Suk-kyun  is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Seoul National University. His publications include Song of the Wind, Song of the Revolution (2005), Inca in the Andes (2008), and An Unfinished Letter (2017), along with the edited volumes such as Cuba, Who Lived the History (2018), and Decoding Latin America (2018), among others. His principal translations are Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker (1999); Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B.  Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (co-­ translation, 2001); Antonio Skármeta, The Postman (2004); Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons (2008); Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart (eds.), When Was Latin America Modern? (co-translation, 2008); Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile (2010) and The Savage Detectives (2012); Thomas E.  Skidmore, Peter H.  Smith, and James

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

N.  Green, Modern Latin America (co-translation, 2014); and J.  Patrice McSherry, Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s-1973 (forthcoming). Verónica  Torres  obtained her PhD from the Ohio State University in Latin American Literatures and Cultures. She is visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wittenberg University. Her work centers around the intercultural connections between the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. Particularly, her research focuses on the notions of national identity, Orientalism, gender, and race. Puo-An  Wu  Fu  is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Romance Language Studies of the Universität Potsdam, Germany. Based in Berlin, Germany, where she is a scientific staff member at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University Berlin, she is also an active professional translator for the languages Spanish, English, German, and Mandarin. Her research focuses on translation theory, pluralism in postcolonial societies, and autobiographical diasporic writing in the context of contemporary literary expressions of transpacific subjectivity authored by descendants of transpacific migrants in Central and South America.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Cultural and Literary Interactions Between Asia and Latin America Axel Gasquet and Gorica Majstorovic

The idea for this collection originated two years ago at the Tenth Conference on East-West Cross-Cultural Relations: East-West and Transpacific Studies: Reconfiguring Transnational Flows Across the Pacific. About two thirds of the volume’s contributors participated at this interdisciplinary conference, held at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in May 2018. The conference was jointly organized by Professors Ignacio López-Calvo, of the University of California, Merced, and Lidia Kos-Stanišić, of the University of Zagreb. Inspired by intellectual vigor and stimulating conversations over the two days of the conference, we subsequently embarked on assembling a

A. Gasquet Department of Spanish Studies, University of Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France e-mail: [email protected] G. Majstorovic (*) School of Arts and Humanities, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_1

1

2 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

collection of chapters that deal with the historical and cultural relations between Asia and Latin America. By closely examining their cultural and literary interactions, we realized that the overlap between these two regions is not a simple hypothesis or conjecture, but rather a long-­standing and tangible reality. This complex reality has its own historicity, which dates back to the Hispanic colonial past, when the American world communicated assiduously with Asia through the Philippines. More recently, it includes a contemporary cultural history that, through global Asian immigration (the Middle East and South and East Asia), has left notable literary and cultural traces in Latin America. These traces are exemplified in current literary production, as an exploration of the multiple cosmopolitan identities split between both worlds: Latin Americans who recompose their Asian ancestry and Asians who reinvent themselves in the Latin American cultural mosaic. The volume is divided into four parts that examine the following themes: (1) Asian hybrid identities and Latin American transnational narratives, (2) translations and reception of Latin American narratives in Asia, (3) diffracted worlds of Nikkei identities, and (4) interweaving of Asian and Latin American narratives and travel chronicles. The purpose of the fourteen chapters that comprise the present collection is to study a relevant portion of the complex Latin American cultural and literary production on Asia, as well as the reception and translation of Latin American narratives in Asian countries (Korea, China, and India). By focusing on different aspects of this multifaceted reality, we seek to illuminate major cultural events and literary spaces within a fruitful dialogue between these two fields that have often been seen as disconnected. Selected chapters are broadly representative of these intercultural links and dialogues: through the lens of modern globality, they inaugurate a perspective that, until recently, was neglected by Asian and Latin American cultural studies, while offering an incisive theoretical discussion and detailed analysis of specific literary texts and films. Overall, the chapters gathered here cover the most significant literary and cultural connections between representative countries of Asia and Latin America. Written by both highly recognized and junior scholars working in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, they represent new approaches as well as a wide range of institutions and academic positions from across the globe. The volume joins an emerging field of Asian-Latin American Studies that includes the work by noted scholars such as Robert Chao-­ Romero, Christina Civantos, Ottmar Ette, Axel Gasquet, Koichi

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

3

Hagimoto, Evelyn Hu-De Hart, Rosario Hubert, Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Ana Paulina Lee, Jeffrey Lesser, Kathy López, Ignacio López-Calvo, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Suzanne Klengel, Chisu Teresa Ko, Julia Kushigian, Gorica Majstorovic, Eugenio Matibag, Shigeko Mato, María Montt Strabucchi, Tahia Abdel Nasser, Silvia Negy-Zekmi, Alexandra Ortiz-Wallner, Paula Park, Moisés Park, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi, Zelideth Rivas, Lok Siu, Araceli Tinajero, Laura Torres-­ Rodríguez, Svetlana Tyutina, and Huei Lan Yen. The volume continues the critical trajectory that emerged with López-Calvo’s groundbreaking work in organizing the series of conferences on East-West Cross-Cultural Relations (which began in 2009), as well as the 2017 publication of Verge: Studies in Global Asia’s special issue “Remapping the Transpacific: Critical Approaches Between Asia and Latin America,” edited by Andrea Bachner and Pedro Erber.

On the Contact Between the Two Worlds The links and interactions between these two immense regions that are identified with the cultural geographies corresponding to Asia and Latin America are based on a complex history of more than five centuries. With a deep and lasting interaction initiated in Europe, the era of discoveries and conquests resonates with the first linkage of geographies, peoples, and cultures worldwide. This experience, intimately related to some vectors of our more contemporary modernity, constitutes the basis of the first globalization on a planetary scale and the first prefiguration of the subsequent modernity, which began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The initial impulse came from the two Iberian monarchies, the Portuguese and the Spanish, which competed in the fifteenth century for control of the exotic spice market. Their colonial enterprise broke the monopoly exercised in the Mediterranean area by Venetian merchants who controlled the traffic of goods from the East that converged in Constantinople before entering the Old World. From these commercial disputes in a post-Renaissance Europe, two very different strategies were derived. Portuguese and Spanish expansion opened the door to exploration and conquest in the modern era. The Portuguese began the exploration of the African coast along the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, until Bartolomé Díaz arrived at the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama continued with the exploration of the coast in the direction of India. This maritime exploration made him the first European to reach the Indian subcontinent by sea in 1498, having founded ports

4 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

and commercial offices in Africa and having been the first to circumnavigate this continent. On the other hand, the Castilian monarchy sponsored the intrepid exploratory mission conducted by Christopher Columbus, with the purpose of reaching the land of the spices by sailing across the Atlantic to the west. The Spanish crown thus had an incontestable supremacy in the exploration and conquest of the New World (limited only by the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed with its Portuguese neighbors in 1494). As part of this globalizing imperial project spearheaded by Spain and focused on the exploration and expansion of the New World, Núñez de Balboa soon sighted the Pacific Ocean (1513). After the circumnavigation trip of the globe by Magallanes and Elcano, the transpacific navigation that put America directly in contact with East Asia began, going from Mexico through the Philippines (Gruzinski 2004). Furthermore, the exploration of the southern seas and the Moluccas by Fernández de Quirós started from Lima (2000). From the sixteenth century on, the Iberian conquest aimed at Asia was configured for the entire colonial period: as a result, Spain strengthened the transpacific crossing and Portugal confirmed the African and Indian routes. During this extensive colonial enterprise, commercial, administrative, and evangelizing links were just one aspect of the interrelations produced in both directions. Indeed, these routes were also important sources of cultural exchange (Souza-Fuertes 2016). Colonizers of New Spain soon settled in Luzon (Bernal 1965: 109–10, 116–17); conversely, about sixty or seventy enslaved Filipino arrived annually in Mexico and the New World through the travels of the Manila Galleon (Braccio 2009: 69), and this slow migration continued after Mexican independence in 1821 and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Barrón Soto 1997). A notorious case is the enslaved woman from India, who upon traveling through Macao and Manila, arrived in New Spain and became the well-known “china poblana” of novohispano folklore. The silver coin minted in Mexico became a commercial currency in East Asia, while porcelain, ceramics, sculpted ivories, silk fabrics, and other Chinese and Japanese products were first scattered throughout America before reaching the imperial metropolis. Together with colonial, military, and religious civil servants circulating from America and the Iberian Peninsula, books, exotic spices, enslaved people, various artisans and sculptors (Braccio 2009), ornaments, and religious art also traveled across the Pacific (e.g., the Venerated virgin of Antipolo in the Philippines came from Mexico).

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

5

All of these interactions set into motion the prolonged intra-colonial connections between Asia, America, and Europe. With the arrival of Latin American independence, intercultural relations would be interrupted for several decades, following the collapse of the Acapulco-Manila sea route. When ties resumed, throughout the nineteenth century, trade relations were reduced until the end of the century to include the incipient arrival of regular migratory contingents from China and Japan. The main destinations for Chinese immigrants were Peru, Cuba, and, to a lesser extent, Mexico; Japanese would arrive first in Chiapas, Mexico, in massive waives in Peru and Brazil, and in a smaller number in other countries of the region. The arrival of Asian immigrants was encouraged by national governments for agricultural labor on island plantations (Cuba) and coastal areas or guaneras (Peru) to replace and/or supplement black labor prior to during or the abolition of slavery. The social conditions were extremely harsh, as Asians were treated in similar ways as former black slaves. In fact, collective contracts, of dubious legality, usually left little room for freedom for indentured workers. These collective contracts were established through Chinese or Japanese agencies that partially covered the cost of the sea passage. It was generally a one-way trip, with no possibility of return. Another route of arrival for Chinese laborers to Latin America was via the United States. Indeed, many Chinese contingents, impoverished by the debts of the Opium Wars (1836–1842 and 1856–1869), coupled with the terrible harvest and famine of 1852, had come to California following the call of the 1848 gold rush; others participated in the construction of the railroads on the west coast of the United States. Their numbers were considerable, but once the railroad work was completed, they were expelled from California after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed. The Chinese had become undesirable and could not opt for naturalization since the authorities prioritized white racial “purity.” The exclusion law stipulated a brake on all Asian immigration for a period of ten years. This exclusion law was reinforced in 1892 by the Geary Act, which restricted Chinese access to Californian territory until 1902. In fact, difficult access to naturalization for people of Chinese origin continued until 1943. Some 60,000 Chinese settlers in California arrived in Mexico through San Diego or Mexicali, settling in the northern states of Baja California (Velázquez Morales 2001), Sonora and Chihuahua, in addition to Mexico City, and the rest of the national territory (Romero 2010: 57–60). Latin Americans of that time, however, considered Asians a lesser racial category and a vehicle of “social perversion” that should be kept at

6 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

a distance: the “yellow race” was considered unassimilable with traditional Hispanic and Catholic values, as well as “degraded” from a moral point of view for their poor living conditions. For these reasons, Asian communities were integrated with great difficulty and would evolve excluded from larger society for a long time, exercising retail trade or craft-making. Although at the end of the nineteenth century, at the social and political level, Asian communities in Latin America were victims of ordinary racism (Sinophobia or Japanophobia, a feeling rooted in a racialist view of the world that advocated a biological difference between races of the human species and a hierarchy between them), the perception of the Latin American “Oriental” imaginary began to change with the modernista aesthetic movement, which enriched the arc of its poetic motives by adopting the chinerías and the arabesques (Tinajero 2003; Gasquet 2007: 205–10). Although the modernistas advocated an aesthetic orientalism away from any concrete social dimension, they had the merit of providing a first positive view of these cultural references. The modernistas put into effect the reading of The Thousand and One Nights as an exponent of the inescapable contribution of Eastern literature to the universal cultural legacy. The twentieth century introduced a new historical cycle with a strong cultural impact, as World War I (WWI) challenged the certainties of the Western technical civilization model. This was also verified in Latin America, where many intellectuals of the new century began to explore other philosophical references and other models of thought, often turning to the ancient Asian cultures of India, China, and Japan and advocating a return to the values of humanism (work previously initiated by theosophical circles, but which gained legitimacy in the wake of the world conflict). It is at this same time that the incipient Spanish-American publishing industry produced the first editions of classical Asian texts: the Bhagavad-­ Gita, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Ramayana of Valmiki, the Panchatantra, the One Hundred Poems of Kabir, the poems of Hafiz, Calila e Dimna [Kalila wa-Dimna], and the works of the Nobel laureate in literature Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to receive this award, in 1913 (Gasquet 2015: 39–50). The turbulent interwar years were marked by concentric forces of attraction and repulsion toward Asia in general. In the face of a strong orientalizing magnetism toward Asian issues observed in intellectual and cultural circles (growing interest in cosmogony, philosophies, and Asian arts), whose archetypal example was the Mexican José Vasconcelos (who, in his 1923 Estudios indostánicos [Indostanic Studies], predicted a

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

7

civilizing confluence of Latinity with the cultures of the Indian subcontinent), there was also a persistent repulsion of Asian communities in the popular imaginary. Indeed, China was seen as a colossus plunged into an endless civil war, and imperial Japan as an authoritarian and fascist threat whose expansionism led it to ravage the Asia-Pacific during the long 1931–1945 war period. Anti-Japanese sentiment reached its zenith during World War II (WWII): the three countries with the greatest Japanese presence in America (the United States, Brazil, and Peru) implemented an official State repression of Nikkei communities, sanctioning the confiscation of goods and the massive deportations to camps (except in Brazil). The subsequent triumph of the Maoist Revolution in mainland China only aroused feelings of solidarity between the progressive and/or socialist sectors, while most Latin Americans observed this political revolution with feelings of open hostility, condescension, or marked indifference. In another case, the independence of India in 1947 created a long wave of anti-­colonial sympathy, where the mosaic of peoples in the new nation was seen with benevolence due to the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and his peaceful resistance to British power (March of Salt in 1930, etc.). The benevolence toward India was reinforced by the fact that there was no notable presence of Indian communities in Latin America, unlike the Chinese and Japanese (while a strong Indo-Caribbean presence existed in British Guiana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica, as well as the former Dutch colony Surinam). Until the 1970s, Asian literature and cultures were only known to specialists (some Japanese writers, film productions, and musical composers) (Sakai 1968). Little to nothing of the popular culture of Asian countries came to Latin America, with few exceptions like in Cuba, Peru or Panama, where Chinese communities left remarkable traces in the national and popular culture of each country. We assume that the same was true in the reverse. In a world that was not as densely globalized as today, the perceptions of those countries in Latin America continued to spread under the legacy of orientalizing exoticism (at best) or through the mediation of social and political upheaval: Asia as a continent crossed by regional conflicts (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), by anti-colonial wars (French Indochina, Dutch Batavia, English Malaysia, and the Philippines under US guardianship), by international wars (Korea, Vietnam, etc.), or by civil conflicts and revolutions (China, Malaysia, and Indonesia). During the last several decades, the contemporary world has witnessed an unprecedented development of global economic networks and has also

8 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

seen the strengthening of commercial links between Latin America and Asia. This new commercial era began in the 1960s with the globalization of the Japanese industrialist complex, which for the first time included an Asian country within the group of the most developed economies on the planet. In the 1970s, a Japanese-like industrial revolution began to take place in countries of the so-called Asian tigers (South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan), followed in the subsequent decade by the so-­ called minor dragons (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines). In the late 1980s, the People’s Republic of China began the rapid development process by combining a state capitalist economy with foreign private investment, a model most recently followed by Vietnam. Today China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are key players in global industry and capitalism, with numerous multinationals. In parallel, during these decades, industrialization in Latin America followed a more sinuous and inconstant course than in Asian nations. The regional commercial dynamics saw the emergence of new blocks: Mexico was deeply integrated into the US economy with NAFTA, Brazil and Argentina consolidated as leaders of Mercosur, and Chile developed an independent integration strategy with almost all American and Asian countries. But essentially, in this global economy, Latin America continues to provide raw materials and agriculture to the new industrial centers in Asia, where this primary or extractive production was previously exported to Europe or the United States. The disparities of yesteryear are re-enrolled in a new international cycle, now catering to the new industrial poles of the planet. China in particular has been investing massively in Latin America in the last two decades, positioning itself as an unavoidable actor in the new global economy (and even disputing American hegemony in its own “backyard”). However, it is clear that knowledge and cultural links between Asia and Latin America—despite a growing dynamism—are not up to the current commercial exchange. The elites of both regions have an embryonic and unequal knowledge of the profound reality of one another’s countries or continents, which is barely greater among specialists. On both sides, the political leaders of this new global economy ignore almost everything in terms of idiosyncratic values, their local realities, and cultural specificities, often underestimating the weight of history for the exclusive benefit of macroeconomic reality (deficits, income, the balance of payments, debts, investments, etc.).

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

9

Overview of Parts and Chapters Content This volume aims to offer an in-depth exploration of some of the dialogues that are observed today—often in counterpart to the national political decision-makers—between the cultures of Asia and Latin America. This transpacific cultural production, which is defined by a growing interest in knowledge between both regions, is relevant today because of its utmost importance for the twenty-first century. It is also intertwined, to a large extent, with the history of previous migratory and cultural exchanges between the two regions that have been outlined here. The present volume examines some of the realities of this fruitful transpacific dialogue, in order to advance the knowledge of a cultural cartography that up until now has been understudied. For this purpose, we cover representative countries of both continents with contributions from Asian, American, South American, and European specialists. Therefore, we included not only specific studies of Latin American literary works on Asian subjects (China, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, India), but also studies on the peculiar conditions of reception and translation of Latin American literature in China and South Korea. The fourteen contributions are organized into four parts, defined around thematic axes. The first part, “Asian Hybrid Identities and Latin American Transnational Narratives,” consists of three chapters. The first, by María Montt Strabucchi, studies the work Tacos altos (2016) by the Argentine writer Federico Jeanmarie. Its protagonist is a young Sino-Argentine who, having grown up in southern Buenos Aires, now lives in Suzhou with her grandparents. She later returns to Argentina as an interpreter for a large Chinese company that seeks to sign a public works contract. Focusing on her transnational voyages and her coming-of-age process, this chapter explores how Tacos Altos questions fixed conceptualizations of identity and nation in a global context. Lila McDowell Carlsen’s chapter focuses on the Chilean writer Lina Meruane’s family history as profoundly marked by the Palestinian diaspora. This study analyzes the intricate evolution of this diasporic and multicultural identity through the travel chronicle, Volverse Palestina, that Meruane published in 2013 following a trip through Israel and the occupied territories. The chapter examines the complex ways in which Meruane uses the non-fiction genre of crónica to show life in the Israeli occupied territories and how she empathizes with others caught in the middle of the geopolitical conflict.

10 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

Verónica Torres analyzes two Mexican writers of the Arab diaspora: Carlos Martínez Assad and his work Memoria de Líbano (2003) and Maruan Soto Antaki and his text Casa Damasco (2013). This community has a large presence in Mexico and other Central and South American countries (Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil), but despite being well integrated, it is widely recognized through its “hybrid identity.” Martínez Assad elaborates a Mexican-Lebanese identity based on his childhood memories, while Soto Antaki constructs a Mexican-­ Syrian identity marked by displacement, state violence, and war in the aftermath of the Syrian Arab Spring. The second part of the volume, “Reception and Translations of Latin American Writers in Asia,” consists of three chapters that address the current conditions of transpacific intercultural dialogue. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado analyzes the interactions of global neoliberalism and its specific impacts on the hybrid culture that crosses—with interconnected stories— both continents in the era of global capitalism. He illustrates his study with cases of contemporary popular culture: the narrative La casa del dolor ajeno (2015) by the Mexican writer Julián Herbert and the film Happy Together (1997) by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. Herbert’s text narrates the 1911 massacre of 303 Cantonese Chinese in the city of Torreón, Coahuila, in northern Mexico. Sánchez-Prado subsequently addresses the question of imagination and sensorium in Wong Kar-wai’s film, or the way in which neoliberal aesthetics and affects connect across the Pacific. The author argues for the uncovering of the deep tensions that exist behind hybridity as a result of both racial intolerance and cosmopolitan desires underlying the South-South dialogue. The contribution by Puo-An Wu Fu is devoted to the study of the “fragile bridges” in which the identity of writers from the Asian diaspora in South America is built by highlighting the importance of translation as a translinguistic mental space: she analyzes the novel Mongolia (2015) by the Peruvian writer Julia Wong and the story “El testigo chino” from Catástrofes naturales (1997) by the American-Argentine writer Anna Kazumi Stahl. Wu Fu contends that these searches around identity are intersected by both linguistic and cultural translation, understood here as concomitant strategies of post-colonial resistance in the Global South. This section is completed with Woo Suk-kyun’s chapter on the reception of South American literature in South Korea, tracing the political and cultural coordinates that have facilitated and/or hindered its editorial dissemination (and public favor) since the 1960s. These conditions are

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

11

characteristic of contemporary Korea, divided after the war into two states with conflicting political regimes. It details the internal political evolution of South Korea, along with the rebel intellectuals who began this work of translation and dissemination of Latin American works. It deals especially with Chilean authors such as Pablo Neruda, Antonio Skármeta, José Donoso, and Roberto Bolaño, exposing how these authors assemble and dialogue with South Korean political reality and feed a subversive intellectual genealogy regarding the strong state power. The third part of the volume, “Diffraction Worlds of Nikkei Identities,” brings together four contributions focused on Nikkei identity in South America and the presence of Christian characters in Shusaku Endo’s novels. Ignacio López-Calvo’s chapter analyzes a work unattended by critics, the novel La medianoche del japonés (1991) by the Peruvian journalist and writer Jorge Salazar, and another novel of great critical impact that was adapted to the cinema, that of the Mexican writer Juan José Rodríguez, Asesinato en una lavandería china (1996). López-Calvo analyzes how the Latin American orientalist imaginary works in both cases by designating the Asian identity with a monstrous or defective identity. This dehumanization of Asians is part of a biopolitics that is established and exercised through anti-Japanese or Sinophobic affect. Salazar’s novel recreates real events of anti-Japanese racism in 1944, during the war, when the Japanese were persecuted by the Peruvian state, deported, and excluded from national life, fueling popular revenge. Rodriguez’s novel, a fictional account in turn, delineates instead the category of the monstrous through the figure of the “Chinese vampire.” López-Calvo argues that the literary monstrification of the Asian outsider in these novels is ultimately a symptom, or reification, of the disappointment in the failure of homogenizing national projects. Seth Jacobowitz, for his part, addresses the impact of anti-Japanese policies in Brazil during World War II.  By the onset of WWII, nearly 200,000 Japanese immigrants had permanently settled in the interior of Sao Paulo and neighboring states. By analyzing the persecution to which Japanese immigrants were subjected by the authorities and, also, by reading the different responses to state ostracism within the Japanese-Brazilian community, the chapter focuses on the story “Revenge” (1938) by immigrant writer Sugi Takeo and the film Corações Sujos (2011) by Vicente Amorim, examining how patriotism (exemplary or cowardly) operates within the rural Japanese communities in times of official social segregation. While taking into account the very different critical and historical

12 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

contexts of these texts, Jacobowitz argues for their portrayals of loyalty as the crucible of the Japanese immigrants’ transnational belonging in the era prior to the construction of a new, Japanese-Brazilian Nikkei identity. Shigeko Mato’s chapter is written about a story by the Peruvian writer Carlos Yushimito del Valle entitled “Ciudad de cristal.” This story, set in an internment camp for Japanese in Texas during WWII, is about a Japanese Peruvian boy, Pedro Hideo Komatsu, who plots a revenge using a poisonous spider, hoping to harm or kill his father’s former employee who slyly took over his father’s store after his deportation. Mato focuses on intertwined microhistories, which go through several narrative ruptures that complicate the multiple records in which this text can be interpreted as an echo of the silenced history of Japanese deportation and internment. The author aims to explore how and why Yushimito del Valle locates “Ciudad de Cristal” in a narrative space where the linearity of the protagonist’s revenge story is established, yet constantly disturbed by the reminders of the silenced history. More specifically, it looks into the clashes and negotiations between the established linearity and centrality of the revenge story and the disturbing forces of the silenced history in order to show the full range of implications of Pedro’s revenge. Finally, a chapter by José I. Suárez studies Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison (1958) as a prelude to better understanding his novel Silence (1966). This particular novel shows how Endo was able to introduce Christian characters into the plot (without having to label them) and how these may not be what one would expect from a Japanese Catholic writer. The Sea and Poison was inspired by the experiments in human vivisection on American prisoners of war (POWs) by Japanese authorities during WWII. In contrast to most critics of Endo’s work, who view it through a Christian lens, this chapter employs a non-religious perspective. The fourth part of the volume, “Crossroads of Asia-Latin American Narratives and Travel Writing,” is composed of four contributions focusing on the production of travel writers and their interconnected experiences in Asia and Latin America and on the strong links between the Filipino classic, José Rizal’s novel Noli me tangere (1867), and the Latin American foundational fictions. In the first chapter of this section, Axel Gasquet analyzes one of the rare stories of Filipino travel through Latin America, T.H. Pardo de Tavera’s visit to Argentina in 1914. He observes how at a time when the Filipino elites were fighting US neo-colonial guardians with uncertain determination (1901–1946), Tavera, inspired by the Philippine nationalist impulse, took as an example for the country the

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

13

economic achievements of the Argentine nation shortly after the Centenario. Jorge Mojarro analyzes the close ties of Noli me tangere (1887), the canonical novel by José Rizal, harbinger of Philippine independence, with the equivalent novels in Latin America. He first highlights Pedro Paterno’s Ninay (1885) as a precursor to Noli me tangere, and subsequently uses the term “foundational fictions” coined by Doris Sommer to compare Rizal’s novel with the Latin American foundational fictions of the nineteenth century: Amalia (1855) by the Argentine José Mármol, Martín Rivas (1862) by the Chilean Alberto Blest Gana, María (1867) by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs, Cumandá (1879) by the Ecuadorian Juan León Mera, and Cecilia Valdéz (1882) by the Cuban Cirilio Villaverde. Mojarro asserts that the aim of Rizal’s novel was to awaken the conscience of Filipinos and to show them the “social cancer” that afflicted them, while the project of national modernization is drawn through a love story beleaguered and hampered by surrounding political intrigues and circumstances beyond control. Everton V. Machado contributes to the volume with a study dedicated to the Indian testimony written by the acclaimed Brazilian poet Cecília Meireles. This work shows the deep ambiguities of her discourse during her visit to India in 1953, balanced between the internationalist solidarity that celebrated the end of British colonialism and a detailed analysis of her experiences, which at times uncritically reproduced the clichés of Western orientalism. Whereas the long tradition of Western representations of the East only made the “Other” more cognitively appropriate, this chapter asks if the Latin-American writer, who also came from the periphery of the modern world-system, attempted to break away from dangerous essentialisms and ideologies. Everton argues that Meireles oscillated between a pragmatic interpretation of the political world and a poetic and metaphysical interpretation. Closing the section and volume is the contribution by Estefanía Bournot, who analyzes a set of works from the Ibero-American mainstream publishing world usually associated with the aftermath of the McOndo generation or the Crack Manifesto. Bournot argues that the contemporary, twenty-first-century moment is animated by an obvious cosmopolitan desire that seeks to amplify the scenario of Latin American literature outside the continent. She notes that one of the market’s main concerns is to validate Latin American writers as global voices not attached to a specific territory. This newly acclaimed cosmopolitanism has encouraged some authors to set their stories outside of their countries of origin

14 

A. GASQUET AND G. MAJSTOROVIC

and search for an almost unexplored landscape amongst the Global South referents. Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince’s novel Oriente empieza en el Cairo (2001) and Brazilian Bernardo Carvalho’s novel Mongolia (2003) serve as examples of an exoticized rhetoric on the Orient that raises the question about the possibility of an alternative South-to-South epistemology that evades Western patterns of orientalism. In conclusion, the importance of deepening the study of the intercultural dialogues between Asia and Latin America lies in the de-­ compartmentalizing of the links—dynamic and pertinent—between these two immense multicultural regions, outside of an exclusive vision and story between America and Europe or between Asia and Europe. This eminently political and historiographic stimulus is essential, of course, in exerting a correlation in the cultural sphere. The task of deepening a genuine South-South dialogue, unprejudiced and far from the clichés, is an arduous and challenging collective project which can only be achieved in the long term through self-reflexive and persevering criticism. Not exhaustive in its scope, this volume is not a completed or enclosed project, but rather a series of cultural and literary dialogues pointing toward an open process and a will to promote these interactions outside the essentialisms and reducing tendencies, a critical journey that has only just begun.

References Barrón Soto, María Cristina E. 1997. La migración filipina en México. In Destino México, un estudio de las migraciones asiática a México, s. XIX y XX, ed. Ota Mishima and María Elena, 365–412. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Bernal, Rafael. 1965. México en Filipinas, estudio de una transculturación. México: Universidad Autónoma de México. Braccio, Gabriela. 2009. Esteban Sampzon, un escultor filipino en el Río de la Plata. Eadem Utraque Europa 8: 53–72. Fernández de Quirós, Pedro. 2000. In Descubrimiento de las regiones australes, ed. Roberto Ferrando Pérez. Madrid: Dastin Historia. Gasquet, Axel. 2007. Oriente al Sur, el orientalismo literario argentino de Esteban Echeverría a Roberto Arlt. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. [English edition forthcoming by Palgrave Macmillan as Argentine Literary Orientalism.] ———. 2015. El llamado de Oriente, historia cultural del orientalismo argentino 1900–1950. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Gruzinski, Serge. 2004. Les Quatre parties du monde, histoire d’une mondialisation. París: La Martinière.

1  INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL AND LITERARY INTERACTIONS… 

15

Romero, Robert Chao. 2010. The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Sakai, Kazuya. 1968. Japón: hacia una nueva literatura. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Souza-Fuertes, Lizbeth. 2016. Conflict of interest and transmission of culture among Iberian empires in the Far East. In Trans-Pacific encounters, Asia and the Hispanic world, ed. Koichi Hagimoto. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tinajero, Araceli. 2003. Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Vasconcelos, José. 1923. Estudios indostánicos. Madrid: Editorial Saturnino Calleja. Velázquez Morales, Catalina. 2001. Los inmigrantes chinos en Baja California 1920–1937. Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California.

PART I

Asian Hybrid Identities and Latin American Transnational Narratives

CHAPTER 2

(Trans)National Narratives of Identity in Federico Jeanmarie’s Tacos Altos (2016) María Montt Strabucchi

Since the 1980s, the presence of Chinese persons and themes in Latin American culture, and specifically literature, has grown at an advanced pace. Within a background characterized by an increasing disengagement and dislocation of people from “national, regional, and ethnic locations and identities […] [as well as] new concerns over borders, boundaries, identities, and locations” (Kaplan 1996: 101–102), we find texts written by Latin American authors about Chinese nationals living in Latin America. It is also possible to find texts written by Latin American travelers to China, as well as explorations of Chinese persons that travel to and from China to Latin America. Situated among the latter we find the novel Tacos Altos, published in 2016, written by the Argentine author Federico Jeanmarie, and which I analyze here. Focusing on the main protagonist, my analysis highlights the politics and subjectivities of her migrant and “Chinese” identity. Jeanmarie started publishing his books in the

M. Montt Strabucchi (*) Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_2

19

20 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

mid-1980s; Tacos Altos (2016) forms part of a group of Latin American novels published after 2007 which engage explicitly with Chinese communities in the region.1 Focusing on the transnational voyages between China and Latin America of the novel’s main character and her coming-of-age process, this chapter builds on ideas of displacement and Sara Ahmed’s notion of “strangeness” (2000) to explore how Tacos Altos questions fixed conceptualizations of identity and nation in a global context, ultimately revealing a preference for a Nancean understanding of community as “being with” (Nancy 2000). The book takes the form of a diary, hence a monologue, written by a 15-year-old Chinese girl. Subject and object of this text is Lin Su Nuam (from now Su Nuam), who writes about her arrival in China, and life with her grandparents, during the last five months. This girl has spent the first five years of her life in China, the following ten years in Argentina and, at the moment the novel begins, she faces returning to Argentina with a Chinese business delegation as an interpreter. The reader is faced with a story of the coming of age of a girl, within a transnational context. The realistic text is divided in two sections: Suzhou, the first section, a city west of Shanghai known for its canals, lakes, and classical gardens, and Glew, the second, a suburb of Buenos Aires named after an English immigrant, original owner of the land. In both places, they live in “monoblocks.” The reader becomes familiar with Su Nuam’s thoughts and feelings, about her father’s death, and about her mother and her return to China. Her return to China, the reader later learns, is the result of the death of her father in a violent and obscure incident when a local mob attacks and burns his shop with him inside. Her reflections on her identity permeate the book, written in Spanish, and marked by the question: “Am I really Chinese?”2 Chinese life, as she makes explicit, seem strange to her, as she questions her “Chinese” identity. Only five months back in China, she receives an offer from a Chinese company to travel to Buenos Aires as an interpreter. While she first hesitates, her grandfather insists; he wishes to visit the grave of his son and fulfill traditional funerary rites. Finally, both accept and 1  These novels are Un chino en bicicleta (2007) by Ariel Magnus, Ojos de Lagarto (2009) by Bernardo Fernández, El mármol (2011) by César Aira, Verde Shanghai (2011) by Cristina Rivera Garza, Chinardos (2014) by Fernando del Río, La casa del dolor ajeno (2015) by Julián Herbert, and Tacos Altos (2016) by Federico Jeanmarie. For more on this literature, please see the work of Fernández Bravo (2015) and Montt Strabucchi (2017a, b, 2018). 2  “¿Soy realmente china?” All translations, unless stated otherwise, are mine.

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

21

travel with the delegation. During the trip, she learns she is not expected to be the official translator, but to translate everything not included by official translators, a role which hints at her representation of the in-­ between. Once in Argentina, she visits Glew, where she used to live with her parents; her grandfather visits the cemetery while she visits her childhood friend Yamila. Yamila’s father tells Su Nuam about the possibility of avenging her father’s death: he and some neighbors can “help her with that.” Evoking a very personal account, emphasized in the first person and present tense throughout the text, the novel deals with the universal topics of identity, history, migration, loss, revenge, and intercultural clashes and exchange. At the same time, the intimate and straightforward style text contrasts with the experience the girl needs to face the situation of her father’s tragic death and its revenge, and her role as an interpreter of transnational (male) businesses. In order to explore the different dimensions available in the novel, Kaplan’s, Ahmed’s, and Nancy’s ideas on subjectivities and travel, strangeness and being-with, are especially useful. In the midst of the displacements of the last century, where “new concerns over borders, boundaries, identities, and locations arise” (1996: 102) in Kaplan’s words, “new subjectivities” produce “new relationships to space as well as time” (1996: 142). These new subjectivities thus offer us a specific angle to examine movement across borders as lived experience, as it allows for the examination of the links between location, nation, and identity. Ahmed’s notion of “strange encounters” is also particularly useful to explore these subjectivities in a transnational context. It allows us to address the question of how the meetings that produce the “stranger” are “determined, but not fully determined,” and to understand “how that figure is put to work, and made to work, in particular times and places” (Ahmed 2000: 11–17, her italics). Ahmed defines the “stranger” as “the one whom we have already identified in the event of being named as alien” (2000: 2). Following Ahmed, the other is a “stranger” because we define him or her as such—recognizing the stranger is an affective judgement (Ahmed 2014); the other is thus a “fetishized stranger” fixed as other. Because the novel ultimately challenges fetishized understandings of identity, the text can be seen to disavow “stranger fetishism.” Finally, in order to explore the novel’s portrayal of identity and belonging, I will also have recourse to Nancy’s concept of “singular plural” or “being-with,” where each singularity exists in relation to other singularities (2000). For Nancy, “the

22 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

singular plural means that there are singularities whose identity or selfhood can only be found in their ‘relation’ to other singularities” (Morin 2012: 2). Read in relation to Ahmed, Nancy’s preference for being-with demonstrates how the recognition of “strangers” is produced in the encounter, and that all encounters are informed by our relationship to others. In this sense, the novel not only shows the ways in which Chinese-Latin American engagement occurs, but also highlights the conditions under which this exchange occurs. The fears as well as the boldness of the young girl merge to reveal the complexities of the relationship, underlined by racism, violence, and complex senses of justice, simultaneously revealing the precarious conditions of migrants. When Su Nuam ultimately takes justice in her hands, the novel not only reveals the difficult decisions she must face, but also the precarious justice systems. Precariousness is also present in the power imbalance between the rich Chinese businessmen and her grandparents, where she acts as a sort of hinge between both groups. Power imbalance is also reflected upon in the novel as the girl travels First Class to Argentina, contrasting with her working-class background both in Argentina with her parents and in China with her grandparents. While power imbalance and situations of violence underlie the events of Tacos Altos, I focus here on the politics and subjectivities of the main character’s identity. The novel opens with the following words: The past is difficult for me. And the future is difficult for me too. I am Chinese, I always defend myself. But the Spanish teacher gets mad at me and then gives a grade to my test that is not good. Am I Chinese? I do not know. Now it does not matter. Either way, I suspect there is a moment in life when every man or woman describes who they are. They know. Suddenly. Facing a crucial instance or facing an insignificant fact, it does not matter.3 (2016: 11) 3  “Me cuesta el pasado. Y me cuesta el futuro, también. Soy china, me defiendo siempre. Pero la profesora de castellano se enoja igual conmigo y entonces le pone una calificación a mi prueba que no es buena. /¿Soy china? /No sé. /Ahora no importa. /De cualquier manera, sospecho que hay un momento de la vida en el que cada hombre o cada mujer describen quiénes son. Lo saben. De repente. Frente a una instancia crucial o frente a un hecho insignificante, da lo mismo (2016: 11).

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

23

Tongue in cheek, as it plays with learning the Spanish language, using past and future tenses as well as with the difficulties to deal with the past and the future, the novel opens with the existential question of Su Nuam (am I Chinese?). Explicitly concerned with her identity, her trip to Argentina allows her to explore her subjectivity from a different perspective. As Ahmed explains, transnational journeys and detachment from a particular home grant the nomadic subject an ability to see the world that becomes the basis for a new global identity and community. And yet, as Ahmed also explains, identity may develop as a fetish in such narratives as it becomes “detached from the particularity of places which allow for its formation as such” (2000: 86). There is thus no inevitable link between forms of travel and, Ahmed continues, the “transgression and destabilisation of identity [due to] migration can allow identity to become a fetish under the sign of globality” (2000: 86). And yet, as we shall now see, Su Nuam’s embracing of identity is indeed the negation of a fetishized understanding of identity. Su Nuam’s negation of a fetishized identity becomes clearer as the text advances. While in the beginning of the text she distinguishes her two different names (a Spanish and a Chinese one)—“My name is Su Nuam […]. But over there, in the past, in the surroundings of the square at Glew, the clients of the supermarket and my school mates call me Sonia” (2016: 23–24),4 she does not seem to use or care about this differentiation later. Indeed, while she presents these two identities in a sort of opposition, she simultaneously hints at the notion of mixture and non-binarial understandings of identity a few paragraphs later: I like to imagine that my writing in this notebook looks like a monotonous rumor: the imprecise mixture between the noise of the motor of the barges that cross the Grand Canal, here in Suzhou, and the absolute absence of noises from there, in the boring square of Glew. (2016: 27–28)5

4  “Me llamo Su Nuam. […] Aunque allá, en el pasado, por los alrededores de la plaza de Glew, los clientes del supermercado y los compañeros de la escuela me llaman Sonia” (2016: 23–24). 5  “Me gusta imaginar que mi escritura en este cuaderno se parece a un rumor monótono: la mezcla imprecisa entre el ruido del motor de los lanchones que surcan el Gran Canal, aquí en Suzhou, y la ausencia absoluta de ruidos de allá, en la aburrida plaza de Glew” (2016: 27–28).

24 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

This quote reveals the spaces she inhabits, while hinting at the affective connotation that these spaces have for her, and how she is unable to feel detached from one or the other. The “monotonous sound” she refers to is only attainable through a combination of the two spaces she has inhabited. On the level of the novel’s narrative, it is emphasized that Su Nuam is in search of her identity. As mentioned before, from the beginning Su Nuam asks herself whether she is “really Chinese” or not. For example, and regarding her own Chineseness, she continuously relates it to obedience, a “traditional” Chinese trait (2016, loc. 574, 708, 903). Specifically, female obedience is intended. And while she doubts about her real feelings of obedience, her actions do not seem to challenge her obedience. Even while she doubts, it is not a rebellious feeling that informs her hesitations, but rather the search for her own identity. As she writes, Am I Chinese? Am I really Chinese? I ask myself that afternoon in the Glew monoblock next to my mother’s cry, and I ask myself, again, right now, alone, tired of turning between the sheets, in the Suzhou monoblock. I do not know if I am Chinese. Not yet. (2016: 80)6

This question intersects with what she thinks is expected of her from her grandparents; as the grandfather replies that she is, indeed, Chinese; as many Chinese do not conform to the stereotypical (if traditional) descriptions of China she comments upon, her grandfather’s words emphasize the key question of agency: How are we the Chinese? Am I Chinese, grandfather? Of course, dear. All of us Chinese are Chinese. With some things in common and others not. In common we have, it seems to me, the memory of the dead, respect for the family, obedience to the elderly, voluntarism and being very practical.

6  “¿Soy china? /¿Realmente soy china? /Me lo pregunto aquella tarde en el monoblock de Glew junto al llanto de mi madre y me lo pregunto, otra vez, ahora mismo, sola, harta de dar vuelta entre las sábanas, en el monoblock de Suzhou. /No sé si soy china. /No todavía” (2016: 80).

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

25

I am sorry, but I do not know if I am entirely Chinese, An Bo. […] I do not always want to obey. Su Nuam, Su Nuam, that you do not always want to obey does not mean you do not obey. We all have doubts, even the Chinese, the fundamental thing is what we do, not what we think in the meantime. (2016: 160)7

In this way, her grandfather expresses to her the unfixed nature of identity, as he simultaneously argues that all people are equivalent. This conversation with him, leads to the impression of a preference for non-essentialist understandings of identity, while it simultaneously grants agency to any individual and its own understanding and practice of culture. What seems to be the definite change from a potentially essentialist view on identity and the embracing of an open one can be symbolized by Su Nuam’s use of “high heels.” Indeed, High Heels, the novel’s title, comes from the fact that, on the stopover in London on their way to Argentina, the businessmen buy an elegant suit, makeup, and high heels for Lin Su Nuam, to make her look grown up. Her embracing of an identity that does not deny other identities occurs during the trip, and mostly after she starts using her new shoes. While the novel’s title evokes an arguably (Western) symbol of sexuality and symbol of status (Small 2014; Guéguen 2015), this is then contrasted throughout the text with a seemingly innocent process of coming of age. In a study on women’s motivation to use high heels, Paul Morris and others state that there is a “strong contemporary association between high heels and female sexuality,” while testing their hypothesis about how the use of high heels artificially increase the femininity of gait (Morris et al. 2013). In this sense, the sole mention of high heels invokes a notion of femininity, sexuality, and, arguably, elegance and maturity. Through this contrast, the novel seems to hint at the uncertainties that coming of age can bring with it, on one level also extending and linking it to the daily violence people can be subject to, such as the racial violence Chinese communities can be victims of in Argentina. 7  “¿Cómo somos los chinos? /¿Yo lo soy, abuelo? /Por supuesto, querida. Todos los chinos somos chinos. Con algunas cosas en común y con otras que no. En común tenemos, me parece, el recuerdo de los muertos, el respeto por la familia, la obediencia a los mayores, el voluntarismo y el ser muy prácticos. /Lo lamento, pero no sé si soy del todo china, An Bo. […] No siempre quiero obedecer. /Su Nuam, Su Nuam, que no siempre quieras obedecer no significa que no obedezcas. Dudas tenemos todos, hasta los chinos, lo fundamental es lo que hacemos, no aquello que pensamos mientras tanto” (2016: 160).

26 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

From this perspective, the text itself seems to allow for a reflection on the contrast and contradiction between an “old-style” empowerment of women through “high heels.” Ironically, they are comparable to the old Chinese tradition of foot binding. In this sense, the novel allows the reader to question to what extent is the use of “high heels” symbolic of maturity, as well as symbolic of a multicultural society which continues to rely on essentialist understandings of identity and thus cannot embrace multiculturalism or diversity fully. And this seems to establish a trope in the novel: the idea of passage or growing up, as well as the tensions that this change may bring with it. The girls’ passage from teenager to adulthood, the passage from China to Argentina and back, and the passage in her relationship with her grandparents and parents changes throughout the text. Ultimately, this is presented in terms of progression, associated to acceptance and understanding, once justice has been fulfilled. In the words of Su Nuam: The order of the world returns to its place. Justice triumphs over justice. The smoke finally arrives, with desire, to the sky. I am not happy with the matter, I do not enjoy it. But, at least, I can communicate with the other world just like any other Chinese woman. I am at peace. It is me. And I still have five hundred dollars in my pocket to buy a nice pair of high heels when, within a few hours, the plane lands in London. (2016: 165–166)8

Through this quote, the novel seems to show a preference for the transnational, as in perfect Spanish she states that she is like any “Chinese woman” and illustrates her feelings with an expression linked to traditional Chinese culture, incense and smoke (Jeanmarie 2016: 165). Hinting at Lin Su Nuam’s globalized identity, this quote also hints at globalized dynamics of consumption, a trait present both in Argentina and in China. Her subjectivity is thus embedded in her transnational, unfixed identity. 8  “El orden del mundo vuelve a su sitio. La justicia triunfa por sobre la justicia. El humo llega por fin, con ganas, hasta el cielo. No estoy feliz con el asunto, no lo disfruto. Pero, al menos, puedo comunicarme con el más allá al igual que cualquier otra mujer china. /Estoy en paz. /Soy yo. /Y todavía tengo quinientos dólares en el bolsillo para comprarme un lindo par de zapatos de tacos bien altos cuando dentro de unas horas el avión aterrice en Londres” (2016: 165–166).

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

27

And yet, in contrast to her grandfather’s reassurance, and the girl’s ease in her high heels, the novel also points to other more somber aspects which also inform her understanding of identity. As with the contrast between the sexually symbolic role of high heels and the girl’s reaction to her using high heels as empowerment, the novel underlines the tensions embedded in encounters. This is illustrated, for example, when she goes to Glew with her grandfather. There, the neighbors responsible for the looting, and potentially murderers of her father, approach to ask them if they will return. “If you open the supermarket again, you will need to be more generous with the neighbors. They say this, and, on top of this, I hear them laugh out loud” (2016: 134–135).9 The persistence of violence by means of innuendo, jeering, and remarks behind one’s back reminds us of the conditions of migrants and discriminated groups today. On another level, Su Nuam’s racialization by Argentine negotiators can be observed in the following quote: I think I only have ears for what one of the minister’s assistants says: sweet, the chinita, and she speaks very well, she seems as if she were from here. I immediately remember my Spanish teacher. And I smile. Luckily, they cannot see me smile. Nor remember. (2016: 158)10

As seen by her, the racism (as they call her “chinita,” which, though on many occasions wrongly described as an act of tenderness, is infantilizing), and the fact that they comment behind her back thinking she will not understand, is revealing of the normalized racial violence of subjects in Argentina. It simultaneously exposes the construction of the “fetishized stranger” as it is defined as other because of how the stranger looks. Paradoxically, she does not define her identity in racial terms, as her questioning concerning being Chinese or not is linked to traits and attitudes rather than racial definitions, such as “infinite Chinese patience” (2016: 56).11 And yet, as can be seen above, she is also a part of this normalized violence through her smile and lack of a negative response to the commentary from the Argentine businessmen, simultaneously underlining 9  Si vuelven a abrir el super, van a tener que ser más generosos con la gente del barrio. Dicen eso y, más encima, los escucho reír a carcajadas’ (2016: 134–135). 10  “Creo que solo tengo oídos para lo que comenta alguno de los ayudantes del ministro: linda, la chinita, y habla muy bien, parece de acá. De inmediato, recuerdo a mi profesora de castellano. Y me sonrío. Ellos, por suerte, no pueden verme sonreír. Ni recordar” (2016: 158). 11  “La infinita paciencia china” (2016: 56).

28 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

power imbalance. Furthermore, and in relation to Su Nuam’s understanding of her own identity, there seems to be a paradox in the cultural exchange, which on the one hand allows for an unfixed understanding of identity as embodied by Su Nuam, while the text simultaneously reminds the reader of the essentialist notions of race and identity available in Argentina (Ko 2016; Aguiló 2018). Indeed, within these racially defined and violent atmospheres, her friendship with Yamila reminds the reader of the permeability and fictitiousness of racial borders. When they meet, Su Nuam writes: I like to meet with my best friend again. We have a lot of things to talk about. Yamila tells me about a boyfriend she has, and I tell her about the frogs, the toads and the snakes from China. (2016: 127)12

As is possible to see here, their (intercultural) exchange does not see difference as distinctive, but rather as part of their own subjectivities. Her happiness and relaxed attitude around Yamila seem to make her forget any possible differences between being Argentine and being Chinese. Simultaneously, this encounter also hints at the tensions that surround their encounter; such as the grim fact that Su Nuam left the country because of her father’s death leading the friends to be separated in the first place. In this sense, Su Nuam also finds spaces and objects which seem to grant her protection; her high heels and use of makeup are a case in point: they do not seem to interfere with the questioning of her identity, on the contrary, they give her strength and make her “a giant among difficult dwarves,” as can be observed in the following quote: I do not change my clothes for lunch, it is not worth it. I also do not take off my makeup or take off my high heels. I already handle them well. Even naturally, I think. I feel better with them on, safer: a giant in a world of difficult dwarves. (2016: 155)13

12  “Me gusta volver a encontrarme con mi mejor amiga. Tenemos un montón de asuntos de los que hablar. Yamila me cuenta de un novio que tiene y yo le cuento de las ranas, los sapos y las culebras de China” (2016: 127). 13  “No me cambio la ropa para almorzar, no vale la pena. Tampoco me quito el maquillaje ni me saco los zapatos de tacos altos. Ya los manejo bien. Hasta con naturalidad, creo. Me siento mejor con ellos puestos, más segura: una gigante en un mundo de enanos difíciles” (2016: 155).

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

29

Aware of the world’s difficulties, rather than thinking of them in terms of her own subjectivity, she finds herself able to move between these identities. The stature the high heels give her, allow her a broader perspective beyond racialized and essentialist views of identity and community. Transnational engagement thus emerges on two different levels: both as racial violence and as friendship, underlined by the economic engagement between China and Argentina, symbolized by the encounters between the different business groups. Economic engagement between China and Latin America is indeed one of the defining features of the relationships between both regions in the last decades. The novel portrays, through Su Nuam’s eyes, a group of highly prepared executives negotiating with what is presented as a slightly clumsy Argentine government, which, however, still manages to secure Chinese investment in the region. Su Nuam’s writing hints at the difficulties of negotiations, informed by mistrust, but whose potential of realization is not ultimately threatened. This can also be observed regarding the spaces where events occur. As the girl moves from central Buenos Aires to the suburb of Glew, the city’s spatial arrangement is revealed. The bland features of Glew contrast with the view of the river they have from the hotel, and the city landmarks (i.e. Puerto Madero) that the girl shows to her grandfather. The public space of the square (plaza) is also a central feature, as it suggests the contrast and similarities between Suzhou and Glew, both cities that are subsidiaries of bigger globally relevant cities, Shanghai and Buenos Aires. When in central Buenos Aires, she stays in a hotel, a space in which she feels protected from the violence she experienced in Glew. And yet, her experience of Glew is not totally negative, as is recalled through her friendship with Yamila. Overall, no place is better than any other; both are intrinsically connected in the thoughts of Su Nuam herself. And yet events themselves make the reader aware of the precarious quality of the exchanges. Su Nuam’s thoughts about the possibility of avenging her father’s death are persistent during the last part of the text. After a lengthy negotiation with Yamila’s father, and after a conversation with her grandfather who lessens the intensity of her own moral questioning by telling her that justice should always be pursued, she finally pays to punish the people that led to her father’s death. As foregrounded by the novel’s epigraph: “The sky and earth are shocked; the situation, confusing” (a quote from Mo Yan’s book Red Sorghum [Mo 2003]),14 the  “El cielo y la tierra están conmocionados; el escenario, confuso” (Mo 2003).

14

30 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

­ ovel’s implied author is aware of the context of confusion that the girl n feels immersed in. In this turbulent setting, and even though a victim of injustice and violence, she is arguably, as an avenger, on an equal standpoint with her father’s murderers. Using Ahmed’s approach to strangeness, this novel shows on one level, the ways through which international connections intersect, while at the same time establishing new notions of belonging. An engagement of Ahmed’s phenomenological approach via “orientation,” through which “‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ come to be lived by being associated with specific bodies as well as places” (2006: 112) sheds new light on how experiences with “strangers” (Chinese or Argentine) call for a notion of community not based on essentialist or ontological notions of the self. From this perspective, the novel can be seen to challenge any notion of alterity, questioning discourses that remain anchored in a national paradigm. This disavowal of an ontological definition of self and other can further be linked to Ahmed’s approach to notions of “strangerness.” In accepting her unfixed identity, Su Nuam challenges the “fetishized stranger,” simultaneously altering the self-other definition in national or racial terms. The text seems to reveal a preference for a Nancean “being-­ with,” where “the simultaneity of all presences are with regard to one another, where no one is for oneself without being for others” (Nancy 2000: 85). The novel seems to call for a notion of identity in which the relationship with others is not only unavoidable but intrinsically part of our identity, and relationships with others. In Su Nuam’s embracing of an unfixed identity and in her acceptance of the revelation of the limits of national identity, the notion of liminality appears as useful to understanding her experience between China and Argentina. As anthropologist and social scientist Bjorn Thomassen explains, liminality [c]oncerns the experience of standing at a threshold, forced to make choices, but with no background structures from where to do so. Liminality denotes a situation where human beings are removed from previous structures, identities and ontological certainties, pushed to the edge, with no easily defined certainties on the immediate horizon – a genuine limbo fuelled with anxiety but also a situation of pure potentiality, fostering creativity. (Thomassen 2016)

Building on Thomassen’s approach to liminality, I argue that Tacos Altos embraces the notion of liminality of no easily defined certainties,

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

31

exacerbating un-decidability, eluding any fixed understanding of identity. By displacing fixed borders, the novel suggests a redefinition from an indigenous/European identity to a transnational one. For example, although all other characters in the novel seem to speak either Spanish or Chinese, Su Nuam uses both fluently. Thomassen’s approach is especially interesting for my reading of the novel, as his emphasis on the potential and creative aspect of the liminal can shed light on the spaces and ways in which resistance and opposition to violence can be found, thus emphasizing the value that may be found in the exercise of resistance—even if it is through violence. Su Nuam’s experience of inbetweenness thus emphasizes the uncertainty of the novel’s outcome, pointing to a world of contingency, where the setting is (borrowing from Mo Yan’s words), confusing. From these sightlines, the novel can be seen as moving “beyond the framework of the national […] being molded instead by a critical, planetary consciousness […] and an open challenge to traditional Eurocentrism;” thus, forming part of world literature (López-Calvo 2018: 15). In the novel, for example, the presence of Europe is reduced to be a stopover for airplanes, the place of the possibility of shopping before arriving in Argentina, and yet revealing Europe as still functioning as a gateway or access point. Indeed, as Mariano Siskind argues, the differential affirmation of a disruptive cosmopolitan aesthetic identity must be read as a “strategic literary practice that forces its way into the realm of universality, denouncing both the hegemonic structures of Eurocentric forms of exclusion and nationalistic patterns of self-marginalization” (2014: 6). By exploring the links between Asia and Latin America, the novel softens the “purported rivalry between the Asian and Euro-American world-systems vying for literary hegemony in the twenty-first century” (López-Calvo 2018: 17). Su Nuam can be seen as negotiating “several national, transnational and cultural identities, but also strategically entering and leaving them according to the socio-political and economic circumstances” (López-Calvo 2018: 18), while she moves fluently from Spanish to Chinese languages. In this sense, Su Nuam’s positioning is thus relative to the global rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with which she engages as part of her negotiation of her own identity. From a cosmopolitan perspective, where the global and the local are to be conceived as reciprocally interpenetrating principles (Beck and Sznaider 2006: 18, 22), this novel reveals through Su Nuam the interconnected levels of the local, national, transnational, and global. Aware of voices which denounce cosmopolitanism’s Eurocentric and universalizing stance,

32 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

in which non-Western epistemologies continue to be marginalized (Leinius 2014: 39–65), an approach to cosmopolitanism from a transnational angle allows for a challenge of Western hegemony and Eurocentric worldviews (Bhambra 2011: 325). In this sense, the novel is a cosmopolitan narration as defined by Berthold Schoene (who builds on Nancy), in that Tacos Altos “assembles as many as possible of the countless segments of our being-in-­ common [or being-with] into a momentarily composite picture of the world […]” (2011: 27). Her friendship with Yamila, Yamila’s father’s offer, her experience of racial (and gender) violence, her role as translator and her traveling from China accompanying Chinese businessmen—suggestive of an exploration of femininity and masculinity via gendered professions, contrasting interpretation and commerce—depict the world as a community that is aware of power imbalance. Indeed, at a time when borders are becoming increasingly ingrained, this text seems to defy essentialist constructions of national identities, challenging the border between the local and the global (Bournot 2015), by positioning culture in relation to personal subjectivities, linked to the nation but not restricted by it. The novel thus sheds light on the multiple levels through which China has engaged with Latin America, beyond nation-to-nation exchange, revealing new ways of transpacific engagement. We can observe a migrant family, with links to China, trying to forge a future in Argentina. We also see a Chinese family with relatives in Latin America, helping them out when in need. We also find Chinese businessmen traveling to and investing in Latin America, underlined by the economic power of the PRC, accompanied by a young girl whose work experience is entangled with her Argentine past. The novel engages with racism and violence (linked to failed experiences of migration), as well as with power imbalance, intercultural communication, and fragmented understandings of identity. Through these multiple axes, the novel shows a preference for transnational narratives of identity, which remain unfixed. Not only does the novel present the multiple elements that form (and reform) identities, but the protagonist’s question “¿soy china?” remains in suspension. Through Su Nuam, the novel addresses the question of belonging, of international economic relations, of revenge and justice, of the role of women in today’s society, and of the conflict between progress and tradition; while simultaneously summoning the contradictory implications of Argentine orientalism (Gasquet 2007, 2015). Su Nuam demonstrates the ability to negotiate a place for herself in relation to her own expectations. By preventing “¿soy china?”—am I Chinese?—from finding an answer, the

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

33

novel converses with multiculturalism, and it exposes the fetishized stranger that Ahmed denounces, challenging any essentialist understanding of the other. Simultaneously, it reveals a preference for a community in which borders are not possible to define. Vengeance is taken exposing the blurred borders of allegiances and loyalties in a way that condemns racial violence, while not allowing a wishful idealized view of communal life— the neighbors are happy to take violent revenge (and money) in the name of “justice.” The novel interrupts discourses of homogeneity in Latin America, as it emphasizes heterogeneity and hybridity. Furthermore, it helps to show the changing demographics of Latin America, influenced by Chinese engagement in the city and growing internal migration (Denardi 2015, 2016), questioning fixed conceptualizations of identity and nation. In Su Nuam’s embracing of an unfixed identity, there is a Nancean understanding of community as “being with:” she is presented as a citizen of the world, as much Argentine as Chinese, and as much non-Argentine as non-­ Chinese. She ultimately seems to let the question go, embracing the fact that there is no straightforward answer. There is, in this exploration of the personal historical and cultural interconnection, a preference for openness and for a recognition of “strangerness” and its slippery definitions which ultimately challenge any closed definition of identity or nation. Acknowledgments  I would like to thank Julia Wong Kcomt for telling me about this book; I would also like to thank Estefanía Bournot, Yehua Chen, Puo-An Wu Fu, Lila McDowell Carlsen, and Verónica Torres for their insightful comments to this chapter. All shortcomings are my own.

References Aguiló, Ignacio. 2018. The darkening nation: Race, neoliberalism and crisis in Argentina. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. Making strangers. Feminist Killjoys (blog), April 8. http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/04/making-strangers/ Beck, Ulrich, and Natan Sznaider. 2006. Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: A research agenda. The British Journal of Sociology 57 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2006.00091.x.

34 

M. MONTT STRABUCCHI

Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2011. Cosmopolitanism and postcolonial critique. In The Ashgate research companion to cosmopolitanism, 313–328. Farnham: Ashgate. Bournot, Estefanía. 2015. Rutas y encrucijadas: Cronotopos de la narrativa contemporánea latinoamericana. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 44: 139–148. https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_ALHI.2015.v44.50706. del Río, Fernando. 2014. Chinardos, Kindle. Córdoba: Eduvim. Denardi, Luciana. 2015. Ser chino en Buenos Aires: Historia, moralidades y cambios en la diáspora china en Argentina. Horizontes Antropológicos 21 (43): 79–103. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-71832015000100004. ———. 2016. Casetes, redes y banquetes. Prácticas comerciales de chinos, taiwaneses y argentinos en Buenos Aires. Etnografías Contemporáneas 2 (2): 134–160. Fernández Bravo, Álvaro. 2015. Apropiaciones de la cultura china en la literatura sudamericana contemporánea: Contribución para un mapa tentativo a partir de obras de César Aira, Bernardo Carvalho y Siu Kam Wen. 452oF Revista de Teoría de la literatura y Literatura Comparada 13: 50–70. Gasquet, Axel. 2007. Oriente al sur: El orientalismo literario argentino de Esteban Echeverría a Roberto Arlt. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. ———. 2015. El llamado de Oriente: Historia cultural del orientalismo argentino (1900–1950). Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Guéguen, Nicolas. 2015. High heels increase women’s attractiveness. Archives of Sexual Behavior 44 (8): 2227–2235. Jeanmarie, Federico. 2016. Tacos altos. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama. Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of travel: Postmodern discourses of displacement. London: Duke University Press. Ko, Chisu Teresa. 2016. Between foreigners and heroes: Asian-Argentines in a multicultural nation. In Rethinking race in modern Argentina, ed. Eduardo Elena and Paulina L. Alberto, 268–288. New York: Cambridge University Press. Leinius, Johanna. 2014. Decolonizing Cosmopolitanism in Practice: From Universalizing Monologue to Intercultural Dialogue? In Cosmopolitanism and transnationalism: Visions, ethics and practices, 39–65. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2018. Worlding and decolonizing the literary world-­ system: Asian-Latin American literature as an alternative type of ‘Weltliterature. In Re-mapping world literature: Writing, book markets and epistemologies between Latin America and the global south / Escrituras, Mercados y Epistemologías Entre América Latina y El Sur Global, ed. Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, and Benjamin Loy, 15–31. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Mo, Yan. 2003. Red Sorghum. London: Arrow. Montt Strabucchi, Maria. 2017a. Imagining China in contemporary Latin American literature. Doctoral dissertation, The University of Manchester, Manchester.

2  (TRANS)NATIONAL NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY IN FEDERICO JEANMARIE’S… 

35

———. 2017b. Mexico City’s ‘chinos’ and ‘barrio chino’: Strangerness and Community in Cristina Rivera Garza’s ‘Verde Shanghai’ (2011). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3 (2): 144–168. https://doi.org/10.5749/ vergstudglobasia.3.2.0144. ———. 2018. Encuentros con la comunidad china en Buenos Aires: Un análisis de dos novelas. Working Paper Series (WPS) de REDCAEM 4: 1–26. Morin, Marie-Eve. 2012. Jean-Luc Nancy. Cambridge: Polity. Morris, Paul H., Jenny White, Edward R. Morrison, and Kayleigh Fisher. 2013. High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior 34 (3): 176–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.11.006. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being singular plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (second edition). London: Routledge. Schoene, Berthold. 2011. The cosmopolitan novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan desires: Global modernity and world literature in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Small, Lisa. 2014. Killer heels: The art of the high-heeled shoe. New York: Prestel. Thomassen, Bjørn. 2016. Liminality. In The 19th international conference on conceptual history.

CHAPTER 3

Identity and Poetic Memory in Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina Lila McDowell Carlsen

Introduction Lina Meruane is one of Chile’s most critically acclaimed emerging writers. Born in Santiago de Chile in 1970, she is the author of several novels and a volume of short stories, the recipient of the Cálamo Prize in 2016, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2012, as well as the Anna Seghers Prize in 2011. In addition to belonging to the youngest group of writers to emerge from Chile, known as the Generación del 2000, she also belongs to a group of Chilean writers descended from the Palestinian diaspora. Volverse Palestina (2012) traces her family history of emigration from Beit Jala to Santiago de Chile. She then travels to Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and various cities in the West Bank as a form of poetic memory.1 Meruane witnesses 1  I am using the term poetic memory as a function of self-narration and reflection that prioritizes one’s experiences as well as the interpretations, representations, and affect related

L. M. Carlsen (*) Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_3

37

38 

L. M. CARLSEN

what life is like in the Israeli-occupied territories, empathizes with others caught in the middle of the geopolitical conflict, and, in doing so, navigates a precarious intermediary position both politically and culturally in order to create a first-person account of diasporic identity. Using Edward Said’s, Stuart Hall’s, and Marianne Hirsch’s theories of identity and diaspora, this chapter analyzes how the author’s crónica develops a sense of interstitial identity. Meruane’s writing includes the volume of short stories Las infantas (1998) as well as the novels Póstuma (2000), Cercada (2000), Fruta podrida (2007 and 2016), and Sangre en el ojo (2012). Volverse Palestina is her first publication in the form of personal memoir, or crónica, as the author herself classifies it, although her publications cross conventional separations of the genres of novel, short story, and memoir, similar to that of her literary predecessor Diamela Eltit, who is also of the Palestinian diaspora, being of Syrian-Lebanese descent (Meruane 2012: 69).2 The term crónica, instead of memoir, signals for her a connection between the personal, historical, and political (Meruane 2012: 69). Nasser also notes that this choice contrasts with the Latin American genre of testimonio (also known as the documentary novel) that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, which generally involved a recorded oral narrative of a victim or survivor transcribed and interpreted by a writer for a literary audience (2017: 6). However, I argue that Volverse Palestina indeed functions as testimonio in the sense of bearing witness to the erasure of Palestinians from their territory on behalf of her parents and ancestors. In terms of writing from the perspective of Palestinian diaspora in Spanish, and specifically, Chilean authors, there is increasingly more scholarship on the subject. Ignacio López Calvo and Cristián Ricci’s volume Caminos para la paz: literatura israelí y árabe en castellano brings together writers in various genres juxtaposing them in a symbolic return to Al-Andalus, the Convivencia (co-existence) of Arab, Jews, and Christians to those experiences a way of constituting the self and identity. Charles Segal describes its cultural and representational function in this way: “When poetic memory works upon culture, it transforms the fragments of specific factual or historical material into an essential component of a systematically organized poetic discourse” (Segal 1986: 50). 2  Lina Meruane, Alejandra Costamagna, Nona Fernández, Andrea Maturana, all principal members of the Generation of 2000, were trained in the literary workshops held by Diamela Eltit, Pía Barros, and Antonio Skármeta since the final years of the dictatorship (Zheng 2017: 355). Meruane and Jeftanovic both began publishing while in Eltit’s workshop (Zheng 2017: 355).

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

39

on the Iberian Peninsula in a neutral space of creative and literary dialogue (López Calvo and Ricci 2007: 10). The volume includes the writings of two Chilean-Palestinians: Theodoro Elssaca Aboid and Andrés Gidi-­ Lueje. Rodrigo Cánovas also includes José Auil, Benedicto Chuaqui, Edith Chahín, Walter Garib, Jaime Hales, Alicia Jacob, and Roberto Sarah among Chile’s notable Palestinian writers (Cánovas 2011: 10). The writer and filmmaker Miguel Littín and the artist Alfredo Jaar are considered two of Chile’s most notable creators and intellectuals of the Palestinian diaspora. Cánovas describes the Chilean-Palestinian writing of diaspora: “One does not write to remember: one writes to install in the destination of the present (America), the indelible mark of the destination of the past, Greater Syria (that included until the end of the 19th century the territories of Palestine, Israel, Libia, Syria, and Jordan)” (Cánovas 2011: 196).3 Sergio Macías Brevis catalogues and reviews the works of many Chilean-­ Palestinian writers, including: Mahfud Massis (1916–1990), Andrés Sabella (1912–1989), Matías Rafide (1929–), Salvador Yanine Paulo (1910–), Farid Hidd Nassar (1952–), and Miguel Littin (1942–), Olga Lolas Nazrala (1920–), and Farid Metuaze (1929–) (Macías Brevis 2006, 154–176). According to Macías Brevis, many of these writers refer to the land that they, or their parents and grandparents left behind as well as the transcultural tensions they experienced (2006: 176). Most recently, Heba El Attar has written the most comprehensive review of the history of literary work by the Arab Diaspora in Chile (Hassan 2017: 590). Clearly, the creative work by Palestinians in Chile is a growing area of critical attention, and Lina Meruane holds a significant place among those artists as a prominent member of Chile’s youngest generation of writers. Among this group, her work is unique in its confluence of documentary style, poetic narrative approach, and exploration of complex intercultural identity. Meruane has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, primarily focusing on her transgressive narrative strategies as well as how cultures intersect in her writing. Tahia Abdel Nasser reviews Meruane’s crónica Volverse Palestina analyzing its connections between Palestine and Chile within a broader global context of connections between Latin American and the Arab world (Nasser 2017: 63 2018: 1). Nan Zheng 3  “No se escribe para recordar: se escribe para instalar en el destino del presente (América), la marca indeleble del destino del pasado, la Gran Siria (que incluía hacia fines del siglo XIX los territorios de Palestina, Israel, Libia, Siria y Jordania)” (Cánovas 2011: 196). All English translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

40 

L. M. CARLSEN

proposes that Meruane, along with other female writers of her generation, comprises a new literary generation for their focus on feminine experiences in intimate spaces against a neo-liberal post-dictatorial context (Zheng 2017: 355). Zheng contends that these authors reconstruct through their writing a connection between the intimate and the political (Zheng 2017, 353). In a corresponding interpretation, Juan Pablo Sutherland describes Meruane’s work as “biopolítica” (biopolitical), a stance that factors prominently into the Chilean author’s own experience of Palestine (Sutherland 2013: 253). In light of this recent criticism, this essay will elaborate from a theoretical standpoint on Meruane’s process of identity negotiation by linguistic, political, and interpersonal means.

Palestinian Diaspora in Chile Palestinians have engaged in identity negotiation since the first wave of Palestinian immigration to Chile, which occurred between 1885 and 1940 due to the persecution of Christians in the Ottoman Empire leading to widespread social conflict and famine (Guevara and Agar Corbinos 2012: 67; Macías Brevis 2006: 154). More than half a million people left Palestine, Lebanon, and what is present-day Syria during those years, and since then, another half-million emigrated (Macías Brevis 2006: 154). Palestinians formed large communities in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, but the largest group formed in Chile (Macías Brevis 2006: 154). Approximately seventy percent of these immigrants came from the cities of Beit Jala and Bethlehem. The rest came from Beit Sahour and Beit Safafa (Guevara and Agar Corbinos 2012: 65). A relatively small migration to Chile occurred after 1948 with the declaration of the State of Israel and the forced migration of Palestinians from their lands and again in 1967 with the Six Days War (Guevara and Agar Corbinos 2012: 67). Although many Palestinian immigrants began as farmers and merchants, the Chilean-­ Palestinian population is known as one of the most economically successful in the country, with members of their community holding major positions in the arts, politics, and in the financial sector (Macías Brevis 2006: 154). Palestinian immigrants have also been subjected to racism and xenophobia all over South America. They were initially referred to as “turcos” (Turks), because of the Turkish passports they held due to Ottoman occupation and lack of knowledge of Arab people in the Americas. Many writers and essayists have referred to this misnaming that results a in

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

41

pejorative connotation including Sergio Macías Brevis, Aycha Selman, Matías Rafide, and Eugenio Chauán (Macías Brevis 2006: 154). Palestinians around the world have been and continue to be the object of the Orientalist gaze. According to Edward Said, “the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism is also a struggle between presence and an interpretation. No matter how backward, uncivilized and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land. … Palestine was seen as the place to be possessed anew and reconstituted” (Said 1978: 4). Volverse Palestina seeks to reconstitute the idea of Palestine for the Chilean author. In other words, she seeks to become or return to Palestine, as the title suggests. Although Meruane visits her ancestral land, it keeps her at a distance geographically and epistemically. Both her own lack of information and the threat of violence prevent her from physically reaching the exact sites she desires. Additionally, despite her research and her family’s oral history, she learns very few concrete facts about her family. Therefore, in her crónica, the Chilean writer interprets her own identity in relation to Palestinians and Palestinian allies as well as by means of a personal, though incomplete, approximation to the dispossessed territories of her ancestors. On the issue of representations of Palestine, Said argues: Islam and Arabs cannot, and probably will never be perceived as “lived” experiences for the Westerner trying either to understand or come to terms with them. There is simply too long a history of Orientalist prejudice, and conversely (as Frantz Fanon was the first to show) an equally strong counter-­ history of “Oriental” perception of the colonizing West, for the interaction between Arabs and the West to be an equal, or friendly one in the near future. Two, is the plain fact that Zionism and liberalism literally depend for their identities on what they have traditionally excluded (the Palestinian as dark, repressed native “other”). What one should expect is more, rather than less Zionist-liberal resistance to the political idea (to say nothing of the political demands) of the Palestinian people. (1978: 11)

Based on this history of conflict and appropriation, representing Palestine and therefore Palestinian identity is always filtered through a dehumanizing Orientalist lens. Said also discusses the problem of interpreting Palestine in a broader sense. Said writes: “What we must now see is an issue involving representation, an issue always near the heart of the question of Palestine. Zionism undertakes to speak for Palestine and the Palestinians; this has always meant a blocking operation, by which the

42 

L. M. CARLSEN

Palestinian is silenced” (Said 1978: 9). Meruane’s text attempts to offer a counter-narrative to this hegemonic silence by interfacing with Palestinians as a Palestinian from Chile in order to examine and reconstitute her own sense of identity. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller discuss Palestinian diasporic identity in terms of poetic memory: For a Palestinian to say return to Palestine is also to come to grips with the expulsion that preceded it. … As in many autobiographical accounts of return to a geography one has inherited through familial memory as a “wounded identification”, the writer must grapple with two levels of return: her entrance into a world by way of another’s story and her own political views of that world’s history from another location and its politics. (Hirsch and Miller 2011: 12)

Meruane negotiates her own position as a Chilean intellectual living in New York, her Chilean family’s connection with Palestine, and her increasing sense of connection with and identification as a Palestinian herself. Hirsch and Miller, drawing on James Clifford, discuss the Palestinian diaspora as a sense of rootlessness: “In his landmark essays on the meanings of diaspora, James Clifford added the now familiar homonym routes to roots so as to emphasize the ways in which every form of rootedness and dwelling already presupposes travel, cultural exchange—routes. Opposed to colonialism and war, moreover, diaspora came to appear, in Clifford’s terms, as a ‘positive transnationalism,’ a fruitful paradigm capable of disrupting identity-based conflicts” (Hirsch and Miller 2011: 3). Volverse Palestina presents the author’s position as engaged with, yet not fully immersed in, the political and religious conflict of the region. Furthermore, as the text suggests, Meruane uses her own experience in and around the dispossessed territories as a way of building her own sense of ownership of her Palestinian roots, in line with Clifford’s “positive transnationalism.” According to Hirsch and Miller, “In the language of diaspora, originary homelands are not simply there to be recovered: … interconnected with other places, they are further transformed by the ravages of time, transfigured through the lenses of loss and nostalgia, constructed in the process of the search” (Hirsch and Miller 2011: 3). Although the text begins as a quest for information, it continues as an experience with the Other, and thereby constructs a relationship with Palestinian culture.

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

43

Stuart Hall’s description of diaspora and globalization also sheds light on Meruane’s process of becoming Palestinian: Diasporas, in my sense, are a metaphor for the discursive production of new interstitial spaces arising from the long processes of globalization in which actual physical movement and displacement are key elements of our current moment and also symptomatic of the wider consequences of global connectedness and disjuncture. (Hall et al. 2017: 163)

While term “interstitial space” is useful for thinking about the Israel-­ Palestinian conflict, it is even more productive when applied to the author’s negotiation of her own identity: unstable, in flux, unsettled. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones,” Hall states the following: “scenes of diaspora formation … different cultures not only intersect but are obliged to modify themselves in the face of one another. What situations like this call for is neither the refusal of difference nor its hardening and fixing, but its constant and ongoing negotiation” (Hall et al. 2017: 166). As this chapter will explain, Meruane’s experience with and within Palestine is narrated as if it were a mirage, always out of reach and leaving the seeker unsatisfied. In the text, the first overt references to Chilean-Palestinian identity are shown through the use of proper names that signal an in-between identity. The places mentioned create a sense of “interstitial spaces” as Hall puts it, not purely Chilean nor Palestinian in their contexts. Proper names indicate identity as an intersection of Chilean and Palestinian histories: “Palestine” (11), “Egypt” (11),” Cairo” (11), “Gaza,” “Beit Jala,” “the West Bank,” “the Six-Day War” (12), “Al Damir” (a Palestinian magazine in Chile, 13), “a school named Chile,” “a plaza named Chile,” (cultural landmarks in Beit Jala), “the Yarurs” and “the Hirmas” (influential Palestinian families in Chile, 15).4 The names she mentions disclose Meruane’s personal interest as a Palestinian with cultural ties to Chile as well as the broader exchange network between Palestine and Chile in terms of people and heritage. They also demarcate the relevance of language and linguistic difference as the means by which she interprets her process of identity construction. 4  “Palestina” (11), “Egipto” (11),” Cairo” (11), “Gaza,” “Beit Jala,” “Cisjordania,” “La Guerra de los Seis Días” (12), “Al Damir” (13), “Un colegio llamado Chile,” “Una plaza llamada Chile,” “los Yarur” y “los Hirmas” (15).

44 

L. M. CARLSEN

Antecedents to Becoming/Returning Part of the book’s project includes research into personal genealogy and family history. Meruane’s family’s experience, as part of the diaspora, aligns with Hall’s concept of “interstitial spaces” and the ongoing negotiation of identity between cultures. She explains: “Like the lives of so many Palestinians that could not or refused to return, that even forgot the word for return, that started to feel (just like my grandparents, my father says) regular Chileans” (12).5 Resignation permeates the text through the assimilation process that erases her cultural origins by way of exile. In contrast, the text characterizes true Palestinians as “some kids, real Palestinians” who are supported by Chilean humanitarian assistance. She immediately qualifies her characterization: “if it is true that Palestinian still exists” (emphasis mine, 13).6 Meruane keeps finding Palestine and her own Palestinian identity frustratingly out of reach. She seeks empirical facts: names, dates, births, deaths, and places to help her fill in the gaps in the history of from whom and from whence she came. Researching her own last name only leads to dead ends: it includes an African explorer from 1915 and a salt-water lake in Algeria (14). The narrative voice emphasizes the initial need to narrate the history of her family name, and the devastating irony of finding out through her great-aunt Maryam that her family name is not Meruane, but instead, based on indecipherable genealogical complexities, Saba (52). She realizes that memory and oral histories are unreliable and contradictory as she begins to learn more about her family’s Palestinian roots. As Meruane traces her grandparents’ immigration to Chile, exact years and concrete details are difficult to ascertain: “Neither is it clear if she [the author’s paternal grandmother] came with her widowed mother, … or if she was already in Chile with her older brothers and then he came later, with her uncles. The versions are contradictory” (21).7 Discussing a relative’s prospects for marriage, she explains: “The tribal norm (the word chosen by my father) puts in first place some of the many Sabajs who are 5  “Como la vida de tantos palestinos que ya no pudieron o no quisieron regresar, que olvidaron incluso la palabra del regreso, que llegaron al sentirse (al igual que mis abuelos, dice mi padre) chilenos comunes y corrientes” (12). 6  “unos niños, palestinos de verdad… si es verdad lo palestino todavía existe” (13). 7  “Tampoco es claro si se vino [la abuela paterna de la autora] con su madre viuda, … o si ella ya estaba en Chile con los hermanos mayores y entonces él vino más tarde, con sus tíos. Las versiones son contradictorias” (21).

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

45

neighbors in Chile” (18).8 Meruane displays awareness of her distance from, and perhaps judgement of, arranged marriages and other traditional practices among Palestinian family groups. She insists on attributing the adjective “tribal” to her father, who is more closely connected with traditional (authentic) Palestinian culture, from her perspective. The lack of details of her family’s experience of displacement echoes Hirsch and Miller’s concept of “wounded identification,” as Meruane’s family’s story is, to her, incomplete or lacking, and filtered through her contemporary perspective and cosmopolitan viewpoint. The text also echoes Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones” as the author retells her grandparents’ assimilation into Chilean culture. Meruane’s concept of language is dynamic and syncretic. As the family acquired the Spanish language and the Chilean accent, it did so to the detriment of their Arabic language: “We kept on in silence or in Castilian although there are more dormant languages in the network of our genealogy. Immigrants acquired Castilian while they lost their maternal language” (20).9 As the family went about the constant and ongoing negotiation of Chilean-Palestinian identity, Meruane seems to view her Arabic linguistic and cultural roots as magical and out of place: When the letters arrived from their family I would go to my dad so he would read them and answer, and I, who sometimes accompanied him in the store, would marvel seeing him write from right to left. It was no big deal to switch alphabets, invert the direction of writing, permutate the syntax, modulate the intonation until the Chilean accent was perfected; the sign of this linguistic bifurcation announced progress, and the Palestinians took that road. (21)10

8  “La norma tribal (es la palabra escogida por mi padre) ponía en primer lugar a alguno de los tantos Sabajs avecinados en Chile” (18). 9  “Avanzamos en silencio o en castellano aunque hay más lenguas dormidas en la red de nuestra genealogía. Los inmigrantes adquirieron el castellano a medida que perdían el idioma materno” (20). 10  “Cuando le llegaban cartas de su familia iba donde mi papá para que se las leyera y contestara, y yo, que a veces lo acompañaba en la tienda, me quedaba maravillada viéndolo escribir de derecha a izquierda. No fue entonces ninguna tragedia doblar los alfabetos, invertir la dirección de escritura, permutar la sintaxis, modular la entonación hasta perfeccionar el acento chileno: el cartel de esa bifurcación lingüística anunciaba progreso y los palestinos tomaron ese camino” (21).

46 

L. M. CARLSEN

Meruane’s family demonstrates Said’s description of the Orientalist view of Arab culture as antithetical to progress as the family considered the adoption of their new country’s tongue necessary for success in a modern society. She highlights the ease with which her father navigated the two cultures to adapt to Chilean culture as a sign of advancement toward a modern ideal and does not appear to mourn the loss of his first language and culture. The identification with Palestine begins to emerge as she acts as a cosmopolitan spokesperson on behalf of Chilean Palestinians in an interaction with a Palestinian taxi driver in New York City: “I tell him that in Chile lives the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab word. The first Palestinians immigrated from four Christian cities of Cisjordan. His people keep coming to Chile, but now they come as refugees… And I tell him that although the community is strong I was raised as a regular Chilean” (28).11 She speaks on behalf of the Palestinian community in Chile and clarifies that she is not one of the lower-class refugees who immigrated more recently against their will. Her dialogue is punctuated with the addition that she was raised in Chilean society and identifies as a regular Chilean. The taxi driver’s response jolts the author into a sense of identification with other Palestinians of the diaspora, in contrast with her self-­ identification as a spokesperson/outsider: “You are a Palestinian, you are an exile” (28).12 Meruane’s othering and distancing characterization of so-called real Palestinians shifts slowly toward a more nuanced and empathetic experience with Palestine. This shift is emphasized as she interacts with other Palestinians and encounters the dangers presented by the ongoing political and religious turmoil in the region. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is demonstrated first by textual violence. In email correspondence with an “escritor-en-Jaffa” (writer-in-Jaffa), whom she later calls Ankar, Volverse Palestina includes black redaction marks indicating censorship by Israel authorities. In the message, Ankar, who is half Jewish and half Palestinian, explains that he will not be able to collaborate with Meruane on a writing project due to his fear of being accused of treason. His Jewish ancestry allows him to live in Jaffa, and he 11  “Le cuento que en Chile vive la mayor comunidad palestina fuera del mundo árabe. Que. los primeros palestinos inmigraron desde cuatro ciudades cristianas de Cisjordania. Que. a Chile siguen llegando los suyos, sólo que ahora vienen en calidad de refugiados…. Y le digo además que aunque la comunidad es fuerte yo fui criada como una chilena común y corriente” (28). 12  “Usted es una palestina, usted es una exiliada” (28).

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

47

is married to a Muslim woman, raising suspicion among the Israeli security forces (31). The text presents Ankar as symbolic of the intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine. Ankar explains his own position as a writer in the midst of religious and political extremism that creates a vacuum of any nuanced discourse between Israelis and Palestinians: “What kept him from doing this text was that in recent years any intermediate discourse between the craziness of Hamas and the craziness of the Israeli ultra-right had less and less space (anyone who defends an intermediate discourse is inevitably classified as one of the two extreme poles and attacked by the other)” (33).13 On the idea of language and context, Stuart Hall writes: “Without its specific histories, identity would not have the symbolic resources with which to construct itself anew. Without its various languages, identity would be deprived of the capacity to enunciate--to speak and to act in the world. To locate oneself within a language is to take up its interdiscursive field of meanings” (Hall et al. 2017: 155). Ankar’s contradictory interstitial circumstance makes writing about his own identity impossible. In this portion of the text, the testimony (testimonio) on the part of Ankar, with Meruane functioning as the transcriber and interpreter. The text sympathizes and exposes the “wounded negotiation” of identity that Ankar represents and presents his situation on his behalf, filtering his experience through that of Meruane’s.

Traveling Identities Volverse Palestina attempts a nuanced portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that humanizes the Palestinian exiles. The text is not overtly anti-Israel, but her representations of the Israeli state are negative as she compares Israeli security forces with the Chilean military police of the Pinochet dictatorship: “Quickly I detect the Israeli security agents, they are identical to the police of the Chilean dictatorship. The same dark sunglasses with metal frames, the same military haircut, the same tense manner of walking” (39).14 In London, en route to Tel Aviv, she is 13  “Lo que impidió hacer este texto es que en los últimos años cualquier discurso intermedio entre las locuras de Hamas y las locuras de la ultra-derecha israelí tiene cada vez menos espacio (el que defienda un discurso intermedio inevitablemente es clasificado en uno de los dos polos extremos y atacado por el otro)” (33). 14  “Pronto detecto a los agentes de la seguridad israelí, son idénticos a los tiras de la dictadura chilena. Los mismos anteojos oscuros de marco metálico, el mismo corte de pelo mili-

48 

L. M. CARLSEN

i­nterrogated and searched in a tense and humiliating segment. The fact that she is Chilean associates her with the Palestinians, and the fact that she is going to visit a writer in Jaffa is cause for suspicion, and she is repeatedly questioned about her identity and purpose of travel. As a diabetic that travels with medication and an insulin pump, her medical equipment also requires the security officers to perform a thorough search of her person (44). Meruane is eventually allowed to proceed with her journey, but the episode triggers anxiety which she punctuates by referring to the airline El Al’s advertisement as her flight takes off: “A voice whispered, sweetly, its propaganda. ‘El Al. It’s not just an airline. It’s Israel’” (44).15 The first encounter with Israel on her journey, beginning in the West and officially labeled as a Palestinian for the first time, results in an othering and dehumanizing experience. As her physical self is inextricable from her identity as Palestinian, her undergoing the security search and interrogation warrants a “bio-political” interpretation, in terms that Sutherland uses to refer to it (2013: 253). She attempts to assuage her fear of the police by thinking of someone in a parallel situation to her own, again using interpersonal relationships to constitute identity: “Before anything, I think as I get closer: always keep calm and always tell the truth. Because the truth is revolutionary, Lenin said, although I hear this proclamation in the stubborn voice of Diamela Eltit; another writer descended from Beit Jala” (39).16 Drawing on her similarities in background to Eltit, Chilean-Palestinian, acclaimed author and mentor to Meruane, also frames the latter in an aspirational light. Eltit is recognized as one of the most important Chilean writers of the past several decades and is known for her activism and work on behalf of marginalized groups and victims of the Chilean dictatorship. Eltit, Meruane and other Chilean intellectuals signed an open letter in 2014 denouncing violence against Palestinians, extremism on both sides, and US and European nations’ complicity (Eltit et  al. 2014). While Eltit’s writings have not specifically taken on the subject of Palestine or Palestinian identity like Meruane’s, Eltit’s emphasis on the complex nature of identity, the questioning of language, and the imposition of official discourse and state tar, el mismo modo tieso al andar” (39). 15  “Una voz susurraba, dulcemente, su propaganda. ‘El Al. No es sólo una aerolínea. Es Israel’” (44). 16  “Ante todo, pienso mientras me acerco: no perder nunca la calma y decir siempre la verdad. Porque la verdad es revolucionaria, decía Lenin, aunque oigo esta proclama en la voz empecinada de Diamela Eltit; otra escritora chilena descendiente de Beit Jala” (39).

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

49

violence in the personal sphere can be seen in Meruane’s writing (Carlsen 2014: 35). In Jaffa, Meruane connects with Ankar’s wife, Zima, and through their dialogues, the Chilean writer gains a more nuanced understanding of the crisis in the region. She also begins to see herself as more Palestinian than before, as the narration creates a doppelganger effect between the two women: Zima says, but it is important to not forget that Palestine is the largest community of refugees in the world … they have been displaced for historical reason. What is important is to not lose the possibility of returning. If you decide to stay, for example. And she arranges a frizzy strand of hair behind her ear, Zima, and I arrange my own like in front of a mirror. I imagine saying the same words if I had by chance born in this violent corner of the world. Because my life could have been this one. With or without a headscarf. With or without children. With or without land, or weapons. (59)17

As the narrator sees their differences based on circumstances, not on anything innate in themselves, she cultivates a sense of deep empathy for Zima. The Palestinians mirror each other in an experience of the Other and the Self, as identity is continually reconstructed for Meruane. The most dramatic segment of the memoir can be classified as what Hirsch calls “dark tourism,” or purposefully visiting a site of significant historical trauma or violence in search of some sense of restoration (2012). Meruane attempts to visit Gaza, but the blockades and violence there are too intense. Instead she visits Hebrón with an activist group that works in favor of a peaceful two-state solution. She witnesses the concrete walls that separate Israel from the territories, the tunnels and buses only for Israeli settlers, and refugee camps for Palestinian Muslims (61). Part of the purpose of the visit is to raise awareness for the plight of the Palestinians, but the real fear experienced by the “pseudo-tourists” creates a deep sense of empathy and identification with the Palestinians. Meruane follows in the 17  “dice Zima, pero importa no olvidar que la palestina es la comunidad de refugiados más grande del mundo … han sido desplazados por circunstancias históricas. Lo que importa es no perder la posibilidad de regreso. Que. decidieras quedarte, por ejemplo. Y se arregla una mecha crespa detrás de la oreja, Zima, y yo me arreglo la mía como frente a un espejo. Me imagino diciendo la mismas palabras si me hubiera tocado nacer en esta esquina violentada del mundo. Porque mi vida pudo ser esta. Con o sin pañuelo. Con o sin hijos. Con o sin tierra, o armas” (59).

50 

L. M. CARLSEN

footsteps of the Palestinians and points out structures of division between Israeli settlers and Palestinians: “We make a turn and we start to go up a slope that the Palestinians use. Above, through the slippery gravel and broken stairs, us. Below is the paved street open to the settlers. By this part of the street one makes out the buildings protected by barbed wires, cameras, flags, and army” (63).18 She refers to outward signs of military occupation and identifies with the group that is othered by the Israeli state. In this segment, the plight of exiled Palestinians becomes a lived experience for Meruane, as she undergoes deterritorialization first-hand, not only by means of her interactions with others. The tour leader is a Jewish man named Alan from New York who works with the NGO. He was formerly a staunch Zionist. He explains his conversion to a position in favor of a two-state solution: “From afar those convictions were easy. But I came to Israel, and I saw what was happening, and then I woke up” (64).19 Also visiting from New York, she presents the tour guide as a convicted ally for the Palestinian humanitarian cause. Like her, he had to experience Palestine for himself to understand. Meruane’s dark tourism uses interpersonal experience as a means to interpret her Palestinian-ness and offer examples of others that sympathize with Palestinians. She walks immediately beside lands from which Palestinians are displaced, symbolic of the larger-scale deterritorialization. The gaps in the interstitial spaces in her family’s oral history are filled in with her own first-hand experience as a Palestinian, albeit by means of what appears as “dark tourism” (13).

Conclusion Meruane’s voice evolves throughout the text, from a detached but interested ally or spokesperson to a first-person experience as an exiled Palestinian. She references injustices inflicted on Palestinians through nuanced personal experiences that are implicitly political. Moreover, she attempts to bridge the religious and political divide between Israelis and Palestinians by highlighting individuals who, like her, occupy interstitial 18  “Damos vuelta y empezamos a subir por la ladera que usan los palestinos. Arriba, por la gravilla resbaladiza y escaleras rotas, nosotros. Abajo va quedando la calle pavimentada y abierta a los colonos. Es por esta parte del camino que se vislumbran los edificios protegidos por alambres, cámaras, banderas, y ejército” (63). 19  “desde lejos esas convicciones eran fáciles. Pero vine a Israel, y vi lo que estaba pasando, y entonces desperté” (64).

3  IDENTITY AND POETIC MEMORY IN LINA MERUANE’S VOLVERSE… 

51

cultures and spaces and avoid extreme or absolutist positions. Her family’s process of linguistic and cultural negotiation aligns with Hirsch and Miller’s “wounded negotiation” and poetic memory of displacement and loss, even as her family’s acculturation into Chilean society is considered a successful one (Hirsch 2012). Said argues that the filters of Western logic tint perceptions of Arab culture, and Meruane’s depiction of Palestine as unreachable, unwriteable, and unspeakable support those claims. However, her personal venture into the scarred cities of her homeland involve various encounters with the other, especially with Zima, Ankar, and Alan. At the end of her stay, Meruane is stuck on the contradictions that comprised her journey. She summarizes the process of negotiating interstitial identity and the incomplete process of becoming or returning to Palestine the following way: “I do not know if I have returned” (67).20 Unsure if she returned to a place she never visited before, and also unsure if she fulfilled her objective, Meruane’s search for Palestine is frustrated and derailed at every turn. Her conflicted interstitial experience adds facets to her own identity as a Palestinian and reflects on an individual level the larger political and humanitarian crisis in the region. The author leaves her crónica open ended, representative of her ongoing process of “wounded negotiation” of identity.

References Cánovas, Rodrigo. 2011. Literatura de inmigrantes árabes y judíos en Chile y México. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Carlsen, Lila McDowell. 2014. Inhospitable text: Critical dystopia in Los vigilantes by Diamela Eltit. Letras Femeninas 50 (2 Winter): 31–46. Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 302–338. Eltit, Diamela, et al. 2014. Académicas e intelectuales chilenas envían carta contra la masacre en Palestina. El Mostrador, July 31. Accessed 8 Feb 2019. Guevara, Nicole Saffie, and Lorenzo Agar Corbinos. 2012. A century of Palestinian immigration to Chile. In Latin Americans with Palestinian roots, ed. Viola Raheb Bethlehem. West Bank: Diyar Publisher. Hall, Stuart, Kobena Mercer, and Henry Louis Gates. 2017. The fateful triangle: Race, ethnicity, nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hassan, Waïl S. 2017. The Oxford handbook of Arab novelistic traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 “no sé si he vuelto” (67).

20

52 

L. M. CARLSEN

Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The generation of postmemory: visual culture after the holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, Marianne, and Nancy K. Miller. 2011. Rites of return: Diaspora poetics and the politics of memory. New York: Columbia University Press. López Calvo, Ignacio, and Cristián Ricci, eds. 2007. Caminos para la paz: literatura israelí y árabe en castellano. Buenos Aires: Corregidor. Macías Brevis, Sergio. 2006. Palestina y otras aproximaciones árabes en la literatura chilena. Awrāq 23: 153–175. Meruane, Lina. 2012. Volverse Palestina. México: Colección Dislocados. Nasser, Tahia Abdel. 2017. Arab and Latin American literature: Mourid Barghouti, Najla Said, and Lina Meruane in Palestine. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 39 (2): 63–76. ———. 2018. Palestine and Latin America: Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina and Nathalie Handal’s La Estrella Invisible. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (2): 239–253. Said, Edward. 1978. The idea of Palestine in the west. MERIP Reports (70): 3–11. Segal, Charles, ed. 1986. The rhetoric of imitation: Genre and poetic memory in Virgil and other Latin poets. Cornell University Press. Sutherland, Juan Pablo. 2013. Cuerpos y desplazamientos en Viajes virales: la crisis del contagio global en la escritura del Sida, de Lina Meruane. Nomadías 0 (17). Zheng, Nan. 2017. La intimidad transgresora en la ficción de Costamagna, Fernández, Jeftanovic, Maturana y Meruane. ¿Podemos hablar de una nueva generación literaria? Revista Chilena de Literatura. (96): 351–365.

CHAPTER 4

Hybrid Identities: Mexico and the Middle East in Memoria de Líbano by Carlos Martínez Assad and Casa Damasco by Maruan Soto Antaki Verónica Torres

In recent decades, a significant number of texts from Mexican-Arab writers have been published in Mexico. These texts, in some cases, showcase a different conception of Mexican identity and present a non-stereotyping representation of the Middle East. This chapter explores two texts that exemplify such trend: Memoria de Líbano (2003) by Carlos Martínez Assad (Mexican-Lebanese writer and researcher) and Casa Damasco (2013) by Maruan Soto Antaki (Mexican-Syrian writer). Assad’s memoir illustrates the impact of memory in identity formation and the emotional effects of displacement. His personal trips to Lebanon, to find his maternal relatives, become self-discovery journeys to understand his Lebanese ancestry and his family’s history. Meanwhile, Soto Antaki’s novel—in the

V. Torres (*) Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_4

53

54 

V. TORRES

context of the Arab Spring—depicts Wissam, a Mexican-Syrian woman whose mother immigrated to Mexico fleeing political persecution. Wissam’s trips to Syria also represent introspective journeys to reconcile an identity marked by violence and the trauma of the Syrian civil war. Therefore, Assad’s and Antaki’s literary works illustrate the complex process of understanding and reconciling a Mexican-Arab identity. On this matter, literary critics often oversimplify how Latin American writers of Middle Eastern descent construct their identities and sometimes affirm that the offspring of these immigrants simply integrated into Latin American culture. For instance, Rodrigo Canóvas (2011) argues that Lebanese migrants and their descendants assimilated into Mexican society, and texts like Memoria de Líbano (2003) represent an anomaly since they integrate the Levant as part of a Mexican identity. Others, like Enrique Iglesias, even affirm that Arab descendants in the hemisphere show “a perfect integration into the Latin American melting pot … [they are] a positive example of ecumenical coexistence and a tranquil way of life” (2009: 13). However, Assad’s and Antaki’s texts suggest that far from being an entirely harmonious or strange process, possessing a hybrid identity requires constant negotiation, involves contentions and uneasiness in conciliating two contrasting cultures while simultaneously seeking to understand and reconstruct a family’s past disrupted by immigration. Hence, this chapter problematizes and provides a different outlook regarding the conception and elaboration of Mexican-Arab identities. I argue that Memoria de Líbano (2003) by Carlos Martínez Assad and Casa Damasco (2013) by Maruan Soto Antaki construct a hybrid identity within a global and personal context as a consequence of transgenerational trauma. Both texts challenge the marginalization and homogenization of the Arab and/or Muslim world by rooting hybrid identities in history and cultural diversity. In this way, Assad and Antaki conceive Mexican-Arab identities as a consequence of displacement provoked by colonial projects, authoritarianism, and/or Western imperialism in the Middle East. At a personal level, these hybrid identities exemplify the tensions and conflicts of belonging to Mexican and Arab culture. In general, both texts intend to reconcile cultural fictions and affirm agency in a Mexican-Arab identity crossed and defined by political, social and cultural matters.

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

55

Theoretical Framework In recent years, theories of trauma have acquired significant relevance in cultural and literary studies. For the present work, “transgenerational trauma” theory is useful in analyzing the emergence of hybrid identities in Memoria de Líbano (2003) and Casa Damasco (2013), since both works construct Mexican-Arab identities as a result of this trauma. Based on her reading of Abraham and Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel (1994), clinical psychologist Clara Mucci proposes to consider “transgenerational trauma as a phantom” (2013: 131), as something hidden and buried deep down in a family’s collective memory. This trauma affects unconsciously the lives of those involved: the survivors and their descendants. Phantom in this context refers to the often/somewhat imperceptible repercussions of a family’s secret (the trauma) that are passed onto the offspring. Memory conceals this trauma in a “crypt” burying and covering the event in the depths of memory. On this regard, Gabriele Schwab proposes that inheritors of transgenerational trauma need to reconstruct a past they never lived with whatever means they have available: stories, pictures, letters and even emotional expressions like “silences, grief, rage, despair” (2010: 32–33). “Transgenerational trauma” is expressed differently in Assad’s and Antaki’s works but constitutes the foundation of hybrid identities. According to Smith and Leavy, hybrid identities express the blending of local and global influences where the local becomes the global and the global becomes local. Hybrid identities “[signify] the encounter, conflict, and/or blending of two ethnic or cultural categories which by no means pure and distinct in nature, tend to be understood and experienced as meaningful identity labels by members of these categories” (2008: 4). Hybrid identities then, express the intricacy, mixing, and cultural negotiations of those individuals who interact between different cultures and selectively create an identity that, may or may not, encompass all these different cultures. On the other hand, decolonial theory allows to understand and indicate how the authors challenge and transgress biased Western notions of identity formation based on the “coloniality of power.” As Anibal Quijano (2007) proposes, the current hegemonic system of global power rests on racial classification (whites are superior) and the epistemological classification of the world according to Western principles. Walter Mignolo expands on Quijano’s argument, indicating that in the present “modern/colonial

56 

V. TORRES

world system” (2000: 23) of power “border thinking” represents a form of resistance; Mignolo defines “border thinking” as “the moments in which the imaginary of the modern world system cracks” (2000: 23).1 “Border thinking in literary texts represents the instances where a text infringes on this binary division of the world and validates other knowledges and forms of identity. In this case, embracing a hybrid identity composed of two different peripheric cultures (Mexican-Arab) constitutes a locus of enunciation that expresses agency, and identity bordering and crossing these imaginary hegemonic constructions. This is what Mignolo denominates, ‘I am where I think’ [which] is one basic epistemic principle that legitimizes all ways of thinking and de-legitimizes the pretense of a singular and particular epistemology, geo-historical and bio-graphically located, to be universal” (2011: 81).2 In a way, hybrid identities in the present work dispute this universalizing, spatial-temporal, and epistemological Western conception, by showing how subjects with hybrid identities may enter and exit these fictitious frontiers at will and possess more than one perspective, including Western, to understand the world.

Memoria de Líbano Memoria de Líbano (2003) relates Carlos Martínez Assad’s search for his Lebanese family and his personal inquiry into his identity. The author belongs to second-generation Mexicans of Lebanese descent. The memoir can be divided according to the two trips Assad makes to Lebanon: the first one in 1975—which he abruptly ended due to the country’s civil war—and the second one in 1998 when he finally met his Lebanese family. The trips signify the double quest of find his family and discover his identity as a Mexican-Lebanese. Memory in the narrative constitutes a cohesive element to discover, grasp, and reconciliate the narrator’s familiar past with his present reality. The first- and third-person narrator acquire different functions in the memoir. The “narrating I,” the “I” that tells the personal story, highlights the conflicting emotions, doubts, obstacles, encounters, and negotiations of the “narrating I’s” multiple identities 1  For Mignolo (2000) the “modern/colonial world system” rests on the temporal, historical and geographical division of the world between modern/primitive, spatial-temporal categories that consolidated the Euro-American global hegemonic project (23–24). 2  For further consideration regarding the concept “I am where I think” as a resistance mechanism to hegemonic discourses see Walter Mignolo (2010), Chapter 2: “I am where I Do Remapping the Order of Knowing.”

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

57

delineated and crossed by two different cultures.3 Whilst, the third-person narrator revisits the history and politics of the region to consider the larger cultural, socio-political factors that influence and shape the identity of the “narrating I.” The author intertwines the narration in first and third person to exemplify how his identity is molded and contextualized by personal and political history. Memoria de Líbano (2003) relates the narrator’s physical and intellectual journey to embrace and understand his Lebanese heritage. As has been noted, the role of memory is fundamental in the narrative. The first-person narrator traces his inquisitiveness for his Lebanese identity to his childhood due to his mother’s and grandfather’s accounts of Lebanon. For this reason, it is important to specify memory’s role and significance in “life writing.”4 Smith and Watson (2010) propose that in “life writing,” memory represents the mechanism to access the past and situate it in the present time. Since remembering is a subjective process, memory constitutes the origin and acts as the validator and disrupter of “autobiographical acts.”5 However, remembering is not a passive process; the person who remembers “…actively creates meaning of the past in the act of remembering … Thus, narrated memory is an interpretation of the past that can never be fully recovered” (2010: 22). Memory is unstable; therefore, memories are interpretations of the past that at times may be unreliable or contain gaps and contradictions. In this respect, the section of the memoir “To My Mother” highlights the role of memory in the formation of the narrator’s identity, by indicating how his mother instilled Lebanon in his memories: [This memoir] [i]s … what I want to tell you to correspond if at all possible to those stories that, since I was a child, you filled of fantasies … In great part, it was your spirit that made me come to Bled (Lebanon), the land that I heard so much about, it was you who made me harbor all those sentiments 3  According to Smith and Watson, “the narrating ‘I’ is an effect composed of multiple and mobile subject positions, because the narrating ‘I’ is neither unified nor stable. It is split, fragmented, provisional, multiple, a subject always in the process of coming together and dispersing” (2010: 72, 75). 4  Smith and Watson refer to “life writing” as writing that takes someone’s life as “its subject” in fictional or non-fictional texts (2010: 14). 5  Smith and Watson observe that “[a]utobiographical acts” are personal examinations of a self-discovery process, a process constantly evolving and subject to time and cultural contexts (2010: 90).

58 

V. TORRES

that you entrusted to me … I was writing this memory when the years crashed down on you. (Martínez Assad 2003: 5, 9)6

First, the “narrating I” creates an intimate, personal setting that expresses how the very memory of his mother connects him to Lebanon. Since memory is subjective, reconstructive and at times, unreliable, the narrator categorizes these memories as “fantasies,” the stories a child recreated in his imagination. Second, the addressee (his mother) becomes the recipient of the story and discourse the author elaborates in the text and that has implications for the reader. As noted by Smith and Watson, analyzing the addressee allows the reader to detect how the “narrative intent” changes throughout the text. Moreover, “[t]he attention [on the addressee] also allows us to consider the kind of reader the text asks us to be as we respond to such rhetoric of intent” (2010: 90). By dedicating the memoir to his late mother, the author immerses the reader into his family’s past and history. This intimacy requires an engaged reader willing to participate in the emotions, discoveries, and misfortunes the narrator encounters and describes. However, the narrator’s need for telling and searching for his family’s story and traveling to Lebanon also arises from experiencing “transgenerational trauma.” This trauma is embedded in his mother’s pain of never returning to Lebanon, and the first-person narrator makes her misfortune a reason for writing, too: I was telling you this story, I wanted to find the sweetest words to take you to the land, that land that you always yearned for, to the history of that large yet small country of just ten thousand four hundred kilometers squared. While I sorted out my disorganized written notes in several travel diaries … the waiting slowed down for you. Your girlish big eyes questioned with amazement the answers that did not arrive. (Martínez Assad 2003: 9)7 6  “[Esta memoria] [e]s … lo que quiero relatarte para corresponder en lo posible a esas historias que desde niño poblaste de fantasias … Con mucho fue ese espíritu tuyo el que me hizo venir a Bled, la tierra que tanto escuché hablar, fuiste tú quien me hizo albergar todos los sentimientos que me confiaste. Escribía este recordatorio o memoria cuando de pronto los años se te vinieron encima” (2003: 5,9). 7  “Te estaba contando esta historia, quería encontrar las palabras más dulces que te llevaran a la tierra, esa tierra que añoraste siempre, a la historia de ese gran pequeño país de apenas diez mil cuatrocientos kilómetros cuadrados. Mientras ordenaba mis desordenadas notas escritas en varios cuadernos de viaje … La espera se te hizo más lenta. Tus ojos grandes de niña interrogaban con asombro las respuestas que no llegaban” (2003: 9).

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

59

The emotional pain of displacement stands out in this passage and implies how hybrid identities may arise as a result of “transgenerational trauma;” thus, the first-person narrator makes his mother’s desires and wishes his own, too. He feels compelled to finish the written story and attempts through embellished words to metaphorically take her to the land she misses and loves dearly. Therefore, the act of writing itself becomes a metaphor that suggests how the narrator must organize and reconstruct a past that is not his own. The poetic language denotes the agony of his mother, an agony of endless waiting and of dying without ever going back to her homeland. Now, the second part of the memoir shows how the first- and third-­ person narrator alternate to construct a hybrid identity that incorporates the history of the region with personal history to define the author’s identity. For instance, in the section titled “A Trip Back in Time” the third-­ person narrator dominates, providing a concise but complex history of the of the political, and socio-economic tensions in Lebanon since the Ottoman Empire until the publication of the memoir. In contrast, the section “From the Eclipse to the New Day,” the first-person narrator dominates, since the author is finally able to meet his Lebanese relatives. The “narrating I” shows the difficulties of belonging to two different cultures and his efforts to reconcile them. Last, the section “The Soul’s Exile” exemplifies how the first- and third-person narrator alternate to deliberate about the detrimental effects of Western intervention in the Arab world. The section “A Trip Back in Time” represents a hiatus before the first-­ person narrator resumes his account of his second trip to Lebanon in 1998. In this section, the third-person narrator dominates for the most part although in some instances, the first-person narrator intervenes to highlight how political events in the region impact his family’s history. A significant passage in this section is the reason why Assad’s grandfather immigrated to Mexico. According to the author, at the end of XIX, the Ottoman Empire was in decadence and ruled with incompetence, corruption and tyranny. In 1895, the situation become precarious, and his grandfather was forced to immigrate to Mexico due to poverty and repression against Christians like him: “Mother, it was in the outcome of that repression that gave the wave of migrants in which my grandfather and his brothers opted to abandon their land to seek on the other side of the sea better life conditions. In fact, they arrived to Mexico in 1903” (Martínez

60 

V. TORRES

Assad 2003: 147).8 In this manner, the first-person narrator intervenes in the historical narrative to address his mother and to make personal that part of Lebanon’s history, since it directly affected his family’s history. Additionally, by addressing his mother, the narrator seeks to also educate her regarding the different political circumstances that shape their respective identities. The impact of the region’s history in the conception of the narrator’s identity acquires a personal tone in the section “From the Eclipse to the New Day,” where the author highlights the personal and intellectual journey he undertook to define and situate his identity: What is my identity? Why did I come back to his country? But I know well what I’m looking for, the encounter with a past, with a history, with a part of me, that one that has taken me in the last years to study Arabic, to trying to understand the meaning of Islam, to find the readings of the Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the more different aspects of the culture and politics of the Middle East, combining my endeavors as a researcher from Mexico, with histories that excite me and give me goose bumps when I read Naguib Mahfouz or Amin Maalouf.9,10 (Martínez Assad 2003: 174)

Once again, the overall purpose of the narrator’s trips is to find his mother’s family and who he is. The phrase “What is my identity?” reveals the narrator’s internal conflict trying to understand a Lebanese heritage hidden in a past unknown to him. For this reason, and to better understand Lebanese culture, the narrator studies Arabic and Islam, for instance. This indicates how Assad places his personal identity in a much larger 8  “Madre, fue en la secuela de esa represión que se dio la oleada de emigrantes en que mi abuelo y sus hermanos optaron por abandonar su tierra para buscar al otro lado del mar mejores condiciones de vida … De hecho llegaron a México en 1903” (2003: 147). 9  “¿Cuál es mi identidad? ¿Por qué volvía a este país? Pero sé bien lo que busco, el encuentro con un pasado, con una historia, con una parte de mí, aquella que me ha llevado en los últimos años al estudio del árabe, a tratar de entender el significado del islam, a encontrar las lecturas del Egipto de los faraones y de los más diferentes aspectos de la cultura y política del Medio Oriente, combinando mis tareas como investigador de México, con historias que me emocionan y me recorren la piel cuando leo a Naguib Mahfouz o Amin Maalouf” (2003: 174). 10  Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was a famous Egyptian writer who in 1988 won the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first Arab writer to receive such recognition (www. britannica.com). Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut in 1949. He moved to Paris in 1976 due to the Lebanese civil war. Maalouf is a well-known writer, particularly in the Arab world and Europe (www.theguardian.com).

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

61

context that includes the languages, religious diversity, ancient history, politics, culture and literature of the Middle East. Given the complexity of being Mexican-Lebanese, the author conceives his identity as multiple. Based on the writings of Amin Maalouf, Assad emphasizes the coexistence of multiple identities that emerge in different scenarios: While visiting Maalouf in Paris, he was finishing his book Killer Identities in which he questions above all the different identities that [a human being] embodies … Maalouf considers himself the ensemble of various identities that coexist in his Lebanese, Arab, French and Christian being. Thus emerge varied identitary forms that converge in everyday life, at home, in the temple.11 (Martínez Assad 2003: 174)

Maalouf embodies the complexity of belonging to two different cultures positioned on different axis of the “modern/colonial world system” as conceived by Mignolo. As Maalouf himself explains, “what makes me who I am and no other … is that I’m on the borderline between two countries, between two or three languages, between several cultural traditions. That is my identity”12 (2016: 2). For this reason, Maalouf and Assad illustrate Mignolo’s term “border thinking” by blending Western and Arab cultural heritages into an identity difficult to specify. Assad and Maalouf assert multiple identities intersected by different languages and geographical locations challenging the “modern/colonial” binary division of the world. The authors express agency by incorporating different experiences in their identity’s definition. For instance, Maalouf’s affirmation of being “Lebanese, Arab, French and Christian” corresponds to what Mignolo denominates “I am where I think,” that is, an identity molded by different epistemological foundations and different geographical referents that provide meaning and identification for an individual. Finally, after long personal reflections and descriptions about modern Lebanon, the author arrives to his family’s hometown. When he arrives to 11  “al visitar a Maalouf en París terminaba la escritura de su libro Identidades asesinas, en el que interrogaba sobre todo … las diferentes identidades que [un ser humano] alberga … Maalouf se considera así mismo el conjunto de varias identidades que hacen convivir su ser libanés, árabe, francés y cristiano. Surgen así variadas formas identitarias que confluyen en la vida cotidiana, en la casa, en el templo” (2003: 174). 12  “[l]o que me hace ser yo mismo y no otro … es que estoy a caballo entre dos o tres lenguas, entre varias tradiciones culturales. Ésa es mi identidad” (2016: 2).

62 

V. TORRES

Baiqon, his grandfather’s home, the familial reunion exemplifies the encounter, conflict and blending of two cultures: “El Messic, el Messic” sounds like a murmur and immediately begin the memories, the bonds of identity, the family that spread out and travelled the Mediterranean and crossed the Atlantic, whose members kept sporadic contact. All this amidst a confusion because the communication varies from English, to French and Arabic, to continue hearing “el Messic, el Messic.”13 (Martínez Assad 2003: 221)

In Arabic, Mexico is pronounced as “El Messic.” In this context, “El Messic” is a cultural and geographical referent across space and time that reunites a family. “El Messic” implies how a single word is used to elaborate self-hood. In this case, Martínez Assad’s presence embodies “El Messic”; his presence, for his Lebanese relatives, recalls those family members that migrated and never returned. The reference to the multiplicity of languages being spoken indicates how the author’s identity intersects and belongs to different cultures. The multiple voices in this context also allude to the tensions and difficulties in reconciling a Lebanese identity forged only through memories and imagination. The language confusion serves as a metaphor for the narrator’s attempt to understand the significance of finding and finally meeting the family he never knew. Another conflicting moment in the story that captures the author’s attempts to grasp, conciliate and embrace his Lebanese heritage is his self-­ reflection on the significance of migration in his family’s history and finally unveiling the “fantasies” of his childhood: The emotions of this day only make me repeat why so many migrated, why they risked themselves in uncharted lands, unknown, where another language was spoken, and the customs were so different … In Baiqon, there is no running water and the electricity does not supply all in the very small town. It has been difficult to fall asleep, but today like never before, I felt the presence of my grandfather, of your ancestors, and everything spins in my

 “‘El Messic, el Messic,’ se oye como murmullo e inmediatamente comienzan los recuerdos, los lazos de identidad, la familia que se desparramó y recorrió el Mediterráneo y cruzó el Atlántico, con cuyos integrantes mantuvieron contactos esporádicos. Todo esto en medio de una confusión de lenguas porque la comunicación va del inglés al francés y el árabe, para continuar escuchando ‘el Messic, el Messic’” (2003: 221). 13

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

63

head searching for something that was lost at the beginning of time. Ultimately, I am part of a second generation, but the third and the fourth one has been born both in Mexico and Lebanon.14 (Martínez Assad 2003: 230–231)

The “narrating I” cannot grasp the idea of leaving the homeland and traveling to distant lands in search of better opportunities. Thus, the narrator examines how to harmonize his Lebanese family’s history with his own; what part does he play in a history that spans between two continents and got disrupted through the passage of time? At the end, he acknowledges that he is part of this history of migration and displacement with family ties that grew through time and space. Simultaneously, his struggle in reconciling broken family ties between generations exemplifies the root of “transgenerational trauma,” “something that was lost” is the “secret,” the trauma that Mucci (2013) and Schwab (2010) consider must be deciphered by the next generation. In Assad’s memoir, the transgenerational trauma emerges as a result of abandoning the homeland and relatives to never come back. This ever-lasting longing is passed onto the descendants who must now reconstruct the familiar past and incorporate it with their current realities to determine who they are. Once the narrator reflects on the importance of finding his Lebanese relatives and its impact on his personal identity, the memoir concludes with the section “The Soul’s Exile,” which is a final reflection on Lebanese politics and foreign intervention: Lebanon [is] maintained as a territory in pledge of international disputes … [and] there is again the perverse game of the various interests of the West that tries to impose a model as it has designed it, forgetting cultural features, the great ethnic and religious diversity, otherwise a rich history of the countries of the East […] as Edward Said has intelligently documented, an Arab

14  “Las emociones de este día solo me hacen repetir por qué emigraron tantos, por qué se arriesgaron en tierras ignotas, desconocidas, donde se hablaba otra lengua y las costumbres eran tan diferentes … En Baiqon no hay agua y la electricidad no cubre todo el por sí pequeñísimo poblado … Ha sido difícil conciliar el sueño … pero hoy como nunca, he sentido la presencia de mi abuelo, de tus antepasados y todo me da vueltas en la cabeza buscando algo que se perdió en el inicio de los tiempos. Al fin y al cabo, formo parte de una segunda generación, pero han nacido también la tercera y la cuarta tanto en México como en el Líbano” (2003: 230–231).

64 

V. TORRES

or an African will never be treated the same as a Saxon from any source.15 (Martínez Assad 2003: 247–249)

This strong anti-colonial statement condemns the “coloniality of power” that perpetuates de destabilization of the Middle East to protect Western interests in the region. Their failed attempt to impose a Western system incompatible with the Middle East’s history and cultural diversity only intensifies turmoil in the region. At the same time, the third-person narrator comments on the issue of race as a factor that perpetuates this “modern/colonial” system of power, as proposed by Anibal Quijano. Overall, Memoria de Líbano emphasizes the importance of memory in the formation of identity for an individual that interacts between Mexican and Arab culture. Assad’s memoir shows the difficulties immigrants’ offspring often face in defining their own identity as Mexican born individuals with Middle Eastern heritage, and moreover, his memoir indicates how the next generation may inherit the difficult task of alleviating in some way, the “transgeneration trauma” transmitted by their parents. Evidently, Mexicans of Middle Eastern descent do not simply assimilate to Mexican culture and erase or neglect their Arab heritage. The memoir shows the difficult task of integrating an imagined Lebanese identity with reality and learning about Arab culture first-hand.

Casa Damasco Another example of a Mexican-Arab identity as a result of transgenerational trauma appears in Casa Damasco (2003) by Maruan Soto Antaki. His novel shares some similarities with Memoria de Líbano, since both texts construct hybrid identities as a result of transgenerational trauma, political conflicts, and kinship ties to the Middle East within a personal and global referent. Casa Damasco narrates the story of Wissam—a Mexican-Syrian—who makes three trips to Syria that depict the tensions and discrepancies that shape a Mexican-Syrian identity. The first trip portrays Wissam as an adolescent who experiences cultural shock and the 15  “Líbano [es]mantenido como un territorio en prenda de las disputas internacionales … [y] allí está de nuevo el juego perverso de los diversos intereses de Occidente que trata de imponer un modelo tal como lo ha diseñado, olvidándose de los rasgos culturales, la gran diversidad étnica y religiosa, por lo demás una rica historia de los países de Oriente … como lo ha documentado con inteligencia Edward Said, nunca será tratado igual un árabe o un africano que un sajón de cualquier procedencia” (2003: 247–249).

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

65

rejection of a conservative Muslim society where sex remains taboo. In the second trip, amid the Arab Spring, Wissam is unable to claim her mother’s house, since according to Syrian law her uncle—Hassib—is the rightful owner. Ironically, the war’s violence causes Wissam to rethink her Syrian identity in a globalized world. During her last trip, Wissam reconciles with her own trauma as a war survivor by embracing her Syrian identity and roots; however, tragically, Wissam disappears in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war. One of the purposes of the novel is to humanize the Syrian war through Wissam’s character while educating the reader about the intricate nature of the war within global politics. In addition, the text comments on the difficulties of being Mexican of Syrian descent. Therefore, the novel constructs a hybrid Mexican-Syrian identity as a result of transgenerational trauma and the experience of war. Wissam’s character embodies the emotional trauma descendants of displacement (represented in the novel as political exile) face in the understanding of their parents’ past and culture to determine who they are. In this regard, Antaki inverts the Orientalist stereotype of the Arab “Other” and portrays Wissam as alien and exotic woman in Syria. Wissam’s initial rejection on her Syrian heritage diminishes as the Syrian war intensifies; the human devastation caused by the war connects and unites her to the country. In a larger context, the novel critiques the “coloniality of power” exercised by different foreign players that worsen the war and human suffering. Moreover, the novel points out how marginalized identities are viewed as disposable in the current system of global power. Casa Damasco portrays a Mexican-Syrian identity intersected by trauma, cultural differences, family bonds, and global politics. The novel’s structure plays a crucial role in the construction of Wissam’s identity. The novel alternates between a third-personal omniscient narrator and Wissam’s personal letters to create a close bond between the readers and the principal character—in a similar way to Memoria de Líbano. The epistolary format in the novel aims to foster an intimate relationship with the reader in order to present Wissam’s complex, ethnic-cultural identity. Janet Altman who writes about the importance of epistolary forms and purpose in literature, considers that letters operate as a medium, “a connector, between two distant points, as a bridge between sender and receiver, [and] the epistolary author can choose to emphasize either the distance or the bridge” (1982: 13). In this case, the letters create a bridge of sympathy between Wissam’s character and the audience, as the reader accompanies Wissam in her self-discovery and tumultuous journey.

66 

V. TORRES

The importance of the letters is emphasized when Wissam’s Jewish friend—Ethel—finds her letters in her apartment in Mexico after her disappearance, only one letter had an addressee. The lack of addressee, according to Altman, may indicate a “traumatized” writer who canalizes his or her “inner turmoil” through letters (1982: 57). In the novel, Wissam’s letters illustrate her increasing suffering and confusion as the armed conflict evolves, and also, the letters illustrate Wissam’s personal transformation in the narrative. At first, her letters appear to be diary entries of personal inner journey into her Syrian family’s traumatic history and Syria’s ultraconservative culture. Later on, as the civil war in Syria intensifies, the letters acquire a gloomy, pessimistic and even desperate tone that reflect a traumatized subject who begins to question her understanding of family and identity bonds. The absence of specific confidant in her letters turns the reader into one. The reader then, becomes the addressee of these letters address to no one and everyone at the same time. Gradually, thanks to Wissam’s letters, the reader sympathizes with her, as a survivor of war and as she attempts to grasp her family’s traumatic past and present. In a similar manner to Memoria de Líbano, Wissam’s character depicts the emergence of a hybrid identity as a consequence of politics and “transgenerational trauma.” Wissam is the daughter of Noura Halabi, a Greek Orthodox Christian forced to abandon Syria during the 1970s due to the Syrian State repression against suspected rebels and protesters. In the plot, Noura and her brother Hassib during the sixties and seventies demonstrated often in the streets against Hafez Al-Assad’ dictatorship (father of Bashar Al-Assad). However, Noura Halabi had to abandon Syria when her fiancé Faoruk, falsely accused of being a spy, is tortured and almost killed. Fearing the same treatment, Noura fled to Mexico. In the narrative, the trauma of displacement is repressed in Noura’s memory. Noura passes this trauma onto Wissam’s as a mystery: “During Wissam’s infancy there were a few times that Noura mentioned an event of that time, only an unforgettable memory managed to remain in those adolescent’s stories, a man named Farouk” (Soto Antaki 2013: 62).16 To reiterate, the secret, as Clara Mucci (2013) explains, refers to the psychological trauma hidden in the memory of survivors affecting their descendants. Wissam’s character 16  “[D]urante la infancia de Wissam fueron pocas las veces que Noura mencionó algún evento de esa época, solo un recuerdo logró permanecer en esos relatos de juventud, un hombre llamado Farouk” (2013: 62).

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

67

receives the transgenerational trauma, as a puzzle she must somehow solve or understand, since Wissam’s only reference to her mother’s traumatic past is a name—Faoruk. In this regard, Antaki further problematizes the issue of political exile and transgenerational trauma of other ethnicities. In the novel, when Wissam returns to Mexico due to the Syrian civil war, she befriends a Syrian Jew named Ethel: Ethel was second generation of two families that were expulsed from Aleppo and Damascus, the archetype that is never written in the books: Arab-Jews that speak the Caliphate, but that read in Hebrew their sacred books, that eat Kibbeh, reject pork, and circumcise their sons. Ethel and Wissam were not simply daughters of migrants, too many exiles counted before them, they were the remnants of destroyed cultures, the scraps that struggle to find their identity among the ruins, because of this, they are so alike and became great friends.17 (Soto Antaki 2013: 124)

Antaki’s reference to the cultural diversity of the region includes an ethnicity often ignored as part of the Arab world: Jews. The inclusion of their customs—circumcision and avoidance of pork—highlights the similar practices between the Jewish and the Muslim world; they also share culinary tastes and, in some cases, speak Arabic, too. Given these cultural affinities, the author identifies Wissam’s and Ethel’s characters as consequences of exile and as the symbol of destroyed cultures. Ethel and Wissam are heirs of “transgenerational trauma,” and as such they must elaborate an identity based on the destruction of their parents’ one. Therefore, exiled immigrants’ children, as the narrative suggests, must rescue their parents’ memories and shattered culture and harmonize it with their own. For this reason, during Wissam’s first two trips to Syria, the narrative portrays the difficulty of harmonizing Mexican and Syrian culture. During her first trip, Wissam as an adolescent learns that sexuality remains taboo in conservative Syrian society. She becomes an “Other” rejected and 17  “Ethel era segunda generación de dos familias que fueron expulsadas de Alepo y Damasco, el arquetipo del que nunca se escribe en los libros: judíos árabes que hablan el califato, pero que leen en hebreo sus libros sagrados, que comen kebe bola, rechazan el cerdo y circundan a sus hijos. Ethel y Wissam no eran simples hijas de migrantes, demasiados exilios se contaban atrás de ellas, eran los vestigios de culturas destruidas, las sobras que luchan por encontrar su identidad entre las ruinas, por eso tan parecidas, se hicieron grandes amigas” (2013: 124).

68 

V. TORRES

desired at the same time: “Showing off her arms … the foreign woman that, as all Doummar had learned, had sex with men, those youngsters that barely ceased to be boys and fantasized with the Latina, but would never had dared to put a hand on her shoulder” (Soto Antaki 2013: 68–69).18 Through her body Wissam is perceived as an alien, a “foreign woman,” to Syrian society’s culture and customs. She becomes a stranger rejected and desired in intimate fantasies that nobody dares to voice out loud, let alone act out. In this manner, the narrative positions Wissam’s character as “Other,” reversing the stereotypical discourse of the Arab as “Other” and, in this case, the “Other” emerges as a Mexican, Westernized woman in the eyes of Syrian youth. Given the cultural differences and the inability to comprehend her family’s past, Wissam initially despises her Syrian heritage. For instance, the house she inherited from her mother epitomizes her hesitation toward her Syrian roots. Wissam discovers that under Syrian law her mother’s testament is null, and the rightful owner becomes her uncle Hassib and not she. The house then, becomes a metaphor for accepting her Syrian ancestry. In her letters, Wissam expresses doubt toward this inheritance, a house that she does not really care for which is expressed in her attitude: “I don’t know what is going to happen with my mother’s house … Hassib is going to steal my mother’s house. My mother’s house matters to me as much as it can stop mattering to me. This family is falling apart at the same time that the country” (Soto Antaki 2013: 112).19 A house can acquire a multitude of meanings: it can represent a connection with a land, a place, a country, a culture and provide a sense of belonging. Wissam’s only conviction about her mother’s house is the wrongful dispossession by her uncle. Wissam’s conflicting emotions toward the house suggest that she vacillates toward fully embracing her Syrian identity. Wissam then, associates the dissolution of her family with the crumbling of the country during the war. Ironically, the incomprehensible violence of the civil war causes Wissam to reconsider the importance of her Syrian roots. The Arab Spring in Syria is a decisive factor through which Wissam’s character slowly discovers the bonds that unite her to the country beyond her mother’s memory. The reader, through Wissam’s letters, learns about war’s unfathomable and 18  “Luciendo sus brazos … la mujer extranjera que, como todo Doummar se había enterado ya, se acostaba con varones, esos jóvenes que apenas dejaban de ser niños y fantaseaban con la latina, pero jamás se habrían atrevido a ponerle una mano encima” (2013: 68–69). 19  “No sé que va a pasar con la casa de mi madre … Hassib me va a robar la casa de mi madre … La casa de mi madre me importa tanto como puede dejar de importarme. Esta familia se desmorona al mismo tiempo que el país. Son iguales” (2013: 112).

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

69

surreal aspect: “Violence scares more than it surprises … anger swells … everybody behaves like dogs that fight without control … I saw men alive that now are dead. How can I write that now they are dead? … But how could I write so calmly that those men are dead?” (Soto Antaki 2013: 56–57).20 Wissam’s letters give an intimate and personal recollection of the war. Wissam’s self-questioning reflects her struggle to make sense of the dreamlike moment she witnessed and cannot fully explain. Ann Kaplan suggests that there are three possible ways the brain may react when someone experiences trauma. In this case, Wissam’s character undergoes, what Kaplan calls, “dissociation and cognition,” since she views the traumatic event from the outside as if the scene before her eyes were a dream, but the trauma resides also in her memory and can remember it (2005: 38).21 For this reason, Wissam’s character feels amazement and fear at the ease of writing that people died because it gives a sense of reality to the atrocity she witnessed. As the civil war intensifies, Wissam decides to return to Mexico. Incongruously, war’s violence and the urgency to flee make Wissam realized her hybrid and marginalized identity in the current system of power where those at the margin are deemed expendable. For example, when Wissam checks-in at the airport in Syria: It was inevitable the humiliation at the moment of checking-in: woman, Mexican passport, Arab companion, and a walrus with a scarf that hindered the way of all the Europeans and North Americans … These desperate with money and valid passports all over the world behaved like the other poorer, forgetting that a home will welcome them, overlooking that they had a country to arrive. How misfortunes are bigger when they are personal; none of those Westerners had notice the dead toll from previous days.22 (Soto Antaki 2013: 119–120)  “La violencia asusta más de lo que sorprende … El enojo crece … todos se comportan como perros que pelean sin control …vi hombres vivos que ahora están muertos. ¿Cómo puedo escribir que ahora están muertos …? ¿Pero cómo pude escribir tan tranquila que esos hombres están muertos …?” (2013: 56–57) 21  For a detailed description of the three types of trauma Karen Kaplan (2005) identifies and theorizes, see first chapter “Why Trauma Now?” 22  “Fue inevitable la humillación al momento de registrarse: mujer, pasaporte mexicano, acompañante árabe y una morsa con bufanda que estorbaba el paso de todos los europeos y norteamericanos … Estos desesperados con dinero y pasaportes válidos en todo el mundo actuaban como los otros más pobres, olvidándose de que una casa los recibiría, pasando por alto que tenían un país al que llegar. Cómo se hacen grandes las desgracias cuando son propias; ninguno de esos occidentales había reparado en los muertos de los días anteriores” (2013: 119–120). 20

70 

V. TORRES

This passage contextualizes Wissam’s position within the current system of global power. In Mignolo’s terms, Wissam’s character is then, positioned at the margins and across different borders of the “modern/ colonial” global system of power, as a Mexican-Syrian, a woman with an Arab companion. Wissam’s persona illustrates how these imaginary borders are porous and permeable, but still determine whose lives are worth saving. The narrative suggests that race sustains this global hegemony; this position correlates with Assad’s memoir, since both texts make the same statement in different ways. For instance, the stuffed animal functions as a metaphor for Wissam’s bodily presence and identity within this “modern/ colonial” world system, as a strange, out of place inconvenience for those on the borders of the so-called first world, in this case, Europeans and Americans. Indeed, Wissam as a Mexican belongs to the Western world, but she occupies a peripheral position in the worldwide racialized system of power, as the novel suggests. However, concurrently, Wissam represents a contestation to the present system of power that relegates her to the margins. As Raab and Butler indicate, “political and collective” identities are continuously developing in relation to discourses of power; “active contestations, responses and proclamations,” present an opportunity for self-affirmation against hegemonic discourses that stigmatize and reject subjects (2008: 3). By calling the civil war her “misfortune,” Wissam now positions herself as a Mexican-Syrian, criticizing the lack of empathy of those “Westerners” unconcerned with the number of deaths and only preoccupied with saving their own lives. In this way, the novel unravels the different rationales on how lives are valued in the globalized world where those at the margin of its imaginary borders, people of color, and often woman, are seen as disposable. Furthermore, the novel places the Syrian war in the sphere of global politics. Casa Damasco, like Assad’s memoir, situates the armed conflict in the geopolitical fight for global power: Tehran and Moscow are implicated and became co-responsibles … The Americans do not want another Iraq but neither can pay the cost of having Bashar … The conflict now became religious … I do not want to get into a recount of events … also I cannot, in Damascus I have my family, my home, my memories and inheritance, the cold analysis tends to forget the name of the dead. (Soto Antaki 2013: 133)23 23  “Teherán y Moscú están implicados y se transformaron en corresponsables … Los americanos no quieren otro Irak pero tampoco pueden pagar el costo de tener a Bashar … El conflicto ya se hizo religioso … No quiero entrar en un recuento de hechos … además no

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

71

The novel offers a general perspective of a very intricate problem that transcends local/regional borders. Several foreign and regional powers dispute their economic and geopolitical interests in the region, exacerbating the bloodshed and violence in Syria.24 However, in the middle of this international conflict, as the novel implies, there is a human tragedy evolving and worsening every day in the country. For this reason, Wissam is unable to speak about the political situation; her silence illustrates her personal trauma and tragedy as a result of the war given her emotional and kinship ties to the country. Experiencing war has profound consequences in identity formation. Ann Kaplan argues that “catastrophes produce new subjectivities through the shocks, disruptions, and confusions that accompany them” (2005: 20). Living through the war transforms Wissam’s character: from the cultural shock of teenage girl for the first time in Syria; subsequently, a woman in denial of her Syrian heritage and finally a woman afflicted and transformed by the war, realizing her deep, emotional, and identity ties to Syria. For this reason, a final trip to Syria is necessary to close a personal history of displacements and truncated identities that she must reconcile. In the narrative, a year passed since her return to Mexico, and now that the war is over Wissam returns to Syria. Her last and final trip symbolizes the reclaiming of her Syrian roots. The novel envisions a Syria free of Bashar Al-Assad and in the process of reconstruction. Amid the chaos in the country, Wissam disappears in Syria. Her friend Ethel in Mexico finds her last and only letter with an addressee to her uncle Hasib: The West becomes immediate from having little in its memory and we cannot act as if we were a new world …. Someday when I become old and the winds of Damascus can be better breathed I will come back to have my own Koura. I will travel the legends that make heritage, like you never will be able to make and when you die … I will continue to be Halabi and I will be Syrian, of the Syria that one day was. I will look at what has been left behind and I will say goodbye to whom I couldn’t say farewell to choose the death that I want and not the one that is meant for me.25 (Soto Antaki 2013: 164) puedo, en Damasco están mi familia, mi casa, mis recuerdos y herencia, el análisis frío tiende a olvidar el nombre de los muertos” (2013: 133). 24  For an in-depth and critical analysis of the Syrian conflict see: “Tangled Web: the Syrian Civil War and Its implications” by Ted Carpenter (2013). 25  “Occidente se hace inmediato al tener poco en su memoria y nosotros no podemos comportarnos como si fuéramos un mundo Nuevo … Algún día cuando sea vieja y los vientos de Damasco se respiren mejor, regresaré para tener mi propia Koura … Recorreré las leyendas que hacen herencia, como tú nunca podrás hacerlo y cuando mueras … seguiré

72 

V. TORRES

This passage makes a powerful and poetic statement against the Syrian war. In a similar fashion to Assad’s memoir, the novel implies that by ignoring history, Western intervention perpetuates turmoil, destabilization, and mayhem in the Middle East. After this warning, the first-person narrator—Wissam—makes the civil war her own, personal matter. Thus, she promises to come back and have a Khoura—a house of her own. In a poetic manner, Wissam re-asserts agency by declaring that she will transcend death and will live in the memories of others, unlike her uncle, the usurper that denied her what was rightfully hers: her house. In this context, Hassib’s character could be interpreted as the figure of the dictator—Bashar Al-Assad—who exercises absolute control, refuses to negotiate and displaces and destroys people. Wissam asserts that her strength comes from her Syrian heritage, her family, reclaiming her memories and saying her own farewell in her own terms. With this metaphor, the novel implies that the Syrian spirit and resilience will prevail by keeping memory alive. The novel’s open ending—Wissam’s disappearance—represents a poetic tribute to the memory of those who have perished or disappeared in the conflict, and to those who still endure the horrors and the trauma of the war and remain inconsequential in the eyes of the world. Altogether, Memoria de Líbano and Casa Damasco present the emergence of Mexican-Arab identities molded and/or rooted by “transgenerational trauma.” The authors illustrate the challenges of belonging and navigating between two different cultures. This is not to imply that hybrid identities resolve the problem of possible prejudice against ethnic minorities, but they certainly, open new discursive spaces to elaborate different identities often stigmatized with negative stereotypes about Arab culture. For this reason, both authors employ first-person narration to create an emotional bridge between the discourse of the text and the reader. Moreover, these literary texts present an important critique of Western intervention in the Middle East, while elaborating a hybrid identity linked to the geopolitics of the region. Assad’s and Antaki’s works offer a glimpse regarding the history of migration from the Middle East to Mexico that contributes to the heterogeneity siendo Halabi y seré siria, de la Siria que fue algún día. Miraré lo que se ha dejado atrás me despediré de quién no haya podido decir adiós para escoger la muerte que yo quiero y no la que me toca” (2013: 164).

4  HYBRID IDENTITIES: MEXICO AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN MEMORIA… 

73

of Mexican society. Their works offer a different conception of the Arab world while presenting a hybrid identity that claims Arab heritage as part of a Mexican identity.

References A son of the road. 10 Oct 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2002/ nov/16/classicalmusicandopera.fiction Altman, J.G. 1982. Epistolarity: Approaches to a form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Canóvas, R. 2011. Literatura de immigrantes árabes y judíos en Chile y México. Frankfurt-Madrid: Vervuert. Carpenter, T.G. 2013. Tangled web: The Syrian civil war and its implications. Mediterranean Quarterly 24 (1). Iglesias, E. V. 2009. Preface. Contribuciones árabes a las identidades iberoamericanas. Madrid: Casa Árabe. Kaplan, A.E. 2005. Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. Maalouf, A., and F. Villaverde. 2016. Identidades Asesinas. Madrid: Alianza. Martínez Assad, C. 2003. Memorias de Líbano. México: Océano. Mignolo, W. 2000. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2011. The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Kindle ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Mucci, C. 2013. Beyond individual and collective trauma: Intergenerational transmission, psychoanalytic treatment, and the dynamics of forgiveness. Karnac Books. Naguib, Mahfouz. Egyptian writer. 9 June 2019. https://www.britannica.com/ biography/Naguib-Mahfouz Quijano, A. 2007. Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies 21. Raab, J., and M. Butler. 2008. Hybrid Americas: Contacts, contrasts, and confluences in new. World literatures and cultures. Münster: LIT. Schwab, G. 2010. Haunting legacies. Violent histories and transgenerational trauma. Columbia: University Press. Google edition. Smith, K.E., and P. Leavy, eds. 2008. Hybrid identities. Theoretical and empirical examinations. Boston: Brill. Smith, S., and J. Watson. 2010. Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soto Antaki, M. 2013. Casa Damasco. México: Alfaguara.

PART II

Reception and Translations of Latin American Writers in Asia

CHAPTER 5

Shared Neoliberalisms: The Cultural Affects of the Contemporary Pacific Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

In the realm of geopolitics, the Pacific is at the center of a new form of worldmaking. After many years of protracted negotiations and even after the withdrawal of the United States, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) was signed in March 2018 and became effective on December 30, 2018, creating a new geopolitical entity. The deal joins 11 nations, 3 from Latin America (Peru, Chile and Mexico) plus Canada, the 2 powers from Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), along with 5 Asian countries: Japan, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia.1 The deal was originally designed and led by the Obama administration to solidify the United States’ commercial presence in Latin America and Asia as a counter to the growing Chinese geopolitical 1  At the time of this writing, the deal has gone into force in seven countries (Mexico, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Vietnam) and is under ratification of the Chilean Senate. Peru, Brunei and Malaysia have yet to ratify.

I. M. Sánchez Prado (*) Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_5

77

78 

I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO

presence, providing an incentive to countries that want to remain competitive, like Japan, or that wish to have layers of resistance against regional Chinese expansion as is the case of Vietnam or Malaysia. Significantly, in the New York Times reporting there are considerable pieces of information about the way the deal proceeded after the Trump administration withdrew the United States. The deal gives signing countries significant leverage against pressures from the United States in the agricultural and meat sectors, as Australia and New Zealand come to compensate for it, while the tariff and free-trade system fosters manufacturing within the pact, something certainly addressed at weakening China’s export sector. The writing on the Pact has so many ramifications that even as the Trump administration engages in anti-trade policies, his economic advisors are quietly holding talks to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) at a later time, in a much less favorable position than the one envisioned by the Obama administration. Furthermore, the United States may become even smaller in the context of the deal, since the potential membership of South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand, all of them in talks, would counter the US contribution to the deal and basically leave China isolated from the largest economic deal of the region. Departing from the CPTPP, this article does not attempt a political analysis but rather a reading from the cultural studies field, which opens the possibility of reading the larger historical and cultural ramifications of this new, complex instance of worldmaking. Worldmaking through trade and empire has always fostered forms of cultural worldmaking both for and against the grain of economic winds. From the Silk Road, which China now seeks to reestablish to counter the CPTPP and the US presence in the Pacific, to the Columbian Exchange, which created the centrality of the Atlantic as the worldmaking circuit of Western modernity, commerce and culture engage in dialectical relationships that, in the long-­ run establish significant circuits not only of geopolitics, but also of world culture. That this new world is created by trade agreements is part of the intensification and realignment of capitalism that we call neoliberalism, a mode or stage that, among other things, has implied a significant alignment of culture, cognition and subjectivity to its imaginaries. In the following pages, my aim is to traverse through different scenarios of the connection between Asia and Latin America in cultural texts to reflect on the question of the nature and potential of the cultural worldmaking to come in the Pacific, through the question of “shared neoliberalisms.” By this, I mean the fact that even if the connections can sometimes

5  SHARED NEOLIBERALISMS: THE CULTURAL AFFECTS… 

79

be tenuous, Southeast and East Asia, Latin America and Oceania are joined together by a joint historical experience of the neoliberal condition that is not often reflected upon, but that will play a significant role in the new forms of global engagement beyond the Atlantic. The Pacific was a site of shared neoliberalism because of the simultaneity of the experiences of development and shock experience by Latin America and Southeast Asia since the 1980s. Let’s not forget that the cycle of development and crisis in early neoliberal years was strictly simultaneous, as the Mexican, Brazilian and Argentine economic miracles and collapses as the miracle and financial crisis of the so-called Asian Tigers of 1997. It is also true that Asian and Latin American countries are always read in parallel through the tools of development policy. A simple search of academic papers yields studies that compare Mexico and South Korea in areas such as the source characterization of aromatic hydrocarbons in pine needles, the influence of rural-urban migrations on fertility, the issue of wage share in manufacturing industries and the success of failure of student achievement, in all cases thinking of the idea that Mexico and Korea have similar metrics in the 1980s and in the end Mexico emerges as a failure and Korea as a success story in most cases (see, e.g., Minns 2006; Teichman 2012). Leaning on my fields of expertise—literary criticism and film studies—I will briefly discuss two particular scenarios of the shared imagination of neoliberalism, which will allow me to unfold different considerations regarding the Pacific. First, I will go to the question of history and the erasure of the Pacific and discuss the book La casa del dolor ajeno (The House of the Pain of Others; 2015) by Julián Herbert. The second scenario is the Latin American connection in the work of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, to speak of the question of imagination and sensorium, or the way in which neoliberal aesthetics and affects connect the Pacific. In doing this I seek to push back some on the centrality of the idea of Orientalism to deal with transpacific relations and rather note that the shared history and the contemporary nature of historical experience allows us to navigate the symbolic worlds of the Pacific beyond the trope of Otherness. Published in 2015 to great critical acclaim, Julián Herbert’s La casa del dolor ajeno is a hybrid essay-memoir-narrative in which Herbert explores a silenced event in Mexican history: the massacre of approximately 300 Chinese people in the city of Torreón, half of the Cantonese colony at the time, on May 13–15, 1911. The killing was done by the Maderista revolutionary troops (although many locals attribute it in their memory to the

80 

I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO

Villistas). Herbert’s exploration brings to the fore a series of reflections on Mexican modernity: the project of turning Torreón at the time into a vanguard industrial city (the reason Chinese migrants and capital were present), the role of Sinophobia in the formation of Mexico’s nationalist ideas of race and mestizaje, and the open and consistent acts of erasure of this past (for instance, the house of Walter Lim, one of the most prominent members of the Chinese community and a victim of the massacre is now the local Museum of the Mexican Revolution). The formal innovation of the book has been discussed in different terms. In a study I wrote on the book, I argued that one could read the book’s use of potential history, memory and form in relation to the consciousness of failed modernity in Mexico (Sánchez Prado 2017). From a different perspective, Nieves Marín Cobos (2017) argues that Herbert displaces the idea of writing a “historical novel” through devices of autofiction, hybridity and metafiction, thus refusing to establish a historical truth.2 Although Marín Cobos and I differ in the technicalities of Herbert’s work with form, the core idea of breaking with historicist accounts of the Revolution and the ethics of thinking through was of engaging the past beyond neoliberal historicity is shared. Herbert attributes the final impulse of the book to the forced disappearance of forty-three students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero in 2014, a case that galvanized attention to Mexican necropolitical logics. Rather than telling the story of the Chinese victims or creating a restitutive literary world, Herbert works here with the mnemonic performance of the spaces where violence takes place, the open engagement with an archive of fragments (which in this case includes significant academic historical work on the Chinese experience in Mexico) and even some Gonzo interludes in taxi cabs during his research. By visibilizing the historical trauma of present and past that informs the writing, the materiality of the research down to the transportation from one place to the next and the uncertainties and gaps in his information, Herbert does not write an alternative story or a literary world that fills with allegorical meaning the historical void, but rather brings to the necropolitical present the specter of another necropolitical modernization, in the cusp between the Porfirian and the Revolutionary eras. 2  I also recommend reading Torres-Rodríguez (2018b), published after the first version of this piece, for further dimensions of the Pacific debate in Herbert’s book. Another text of recent publication is Locane (2019), which offers relevant points about the “limits of cosmopolitanism” when thinking the relationship of China and Latin America via Herbert.

5  SHARED NEOLIBERALISMS: THE CULTURAL AFFECTS… 

81

In the context of the present argument, Laura Torres-Rodríguez (2018a) provides a brilliant reading of the work in the larger question of Orientalism and Mexico’s relationship to Asia.3 She notes that the Chinese theme is related to significant structures of Mexican capitalism. Torres-­ Rodríguez argues that “Orientalism is a liberal phenomenology” and, as such, what Herbert enacts is the way in which Orientalism can be countered through the study of “the history of migration and the experience of different diasporic groups in the Americas; the conceptualization of war; and the construction of external and internal borders.” (2018a: 23). Indeed, Torres-Rodríguez continues, the book takes our understanding of Orientalism beyond Said’s work—which generally has significant blind spots in reading East Asian diasporas in the Americas—to render visible “its connection to forms of accumulation and the organization of labor in nonimperial contexts” (2018a: 23). The fact that Herbert is building a history of the necropolitics of capitalism in relation to unthinkable stories from the Pacific migration circuit confronts a concrete form of contemporary neoliberal worldmaking developing at the same time, the Trans-­ Pacific Partnership. Following Torres-Rodríguez’s insights, one can see that La casa del dolor ajeno openly refuses to present an alternative utopian history of the Chinese community in Mexico or to imagine a literary world in which the richness of individual lives of the victims allows us to think history otherwise. Rather, the book tells us a story that is always already necropolitical and from which there is no alternative. Necrowriting, in this case, is a device through which the stories of those killed, and the literary platforms that bring them into the present, seek to undermine the politics and epistemics of the idea of the world as such. This is one of the moments where we can see the innovative nature of TPP worldmaking. Herbert’s work is the tip of the iceberg of a larger edifice of cultural and historical research pointing to the correlation between the erasure of Asia from the imaginary of Mexico and Latin America, enacted in a very literal way in the 1911 massacre, and the rise of the national-revolutionary, mestizo and populist forms of capitalism that became paradigmatic in the continent during the twentieth century.4 3  A larger discussion of her theses on Mexico’s “transpacific orientations” can be found in Torres-Rodríguez (2019). 4  A parallel work that would be worth discussing in these histories is Young-Ha Kim’s Black Flower (2012). A discussion of this novel in the context of Korea-Mexico labor histories can be found in Hennessy (2015).

82 

I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO

To move from the question of history to the experience of affect and contemporaneity, I now proceed to discussing the way in which Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai uses what I would call the “Latin American signifier” and the meaning that such uses have in the understanding of categories such as Orientalism, cultural studies and, more importantly, transpacific studies. Based on a sentimental register that constantly taps on melodrama, Wong Kar-Wai has created a poetics of cinema based upon a concept of nostalgia and loss. When articulating the Latin American signifier to this poetics, his key film is Happy Together, the story of a gay couple from Hong Kong stuck in Buenos Aires. I want to focus on three different problems, to explain the different consequences of Wong Kar-Wai’s invocation of Latin America. First, in terms of film language, the Latin American signifier is articulated into a very innovative form of conceiving cinema and melodrama, thus creating a short circuit with specific consequences in terms of cultural politics. Second, his films raise questions about the centrality of Europe and the United States as cultural referents and beckon the need to talk about how the use of the Latin American signifier challenges received notions of cultural contact. Finally, it is important to keep in mind the problem of cultural epistemologies to discuss how other Orientalisms emerge and the consequence of such process in the study of intercultural relations. Critics have agreed that one of the central elements in Wong Kar-Wai’s film is music and the atmospheres created by it. For instance, Peter Brunette (2005: 54) has suggested that, while Wong’s movies are edited in a fragmentary way, music provides consistency to the plots by moving the audience through specific emotions and by invoking previous movements of the film by merely reprising a musical piece. This strategy is crystal clear in 2046, where two boleros, Siboney and Perfidia, appear to emphasize moments of seduction and of arrogance, respectively. In turn, Happy Together invokes the music of Argentinian tango composer Astor Piazzolla in order to provide a metaphorical frame for the tango-like relationship of the two lovers: a confrontation that invokes some of the dance interpretations of Argentine music. The important point here is the way in which the affects built into the structure of Latin American music genres are translated by Wong into film language. The result of this particular operation of embedding the emotional language of a culture that is neither Chinese nor Euro-American into a film tradition is operating on grounds in which two non-Western traditions interpret each other and, more importantly, “orientalize” each other. Just like Wong Kar-Wai’s

5  SHARED NEOLIBERALISMS: THE CULTURAL AFFECTS… 

83

Chinese characters are simply out of place in Buenos Aires, Latin America is reduced by them to a specific form of emotional code that puts politics and history under erasure. This operation is particularly evident when one considers the other significant element of Wong Kar-Wai’s language: the fact that Buenos Aires is nothing but an empty signifier that always stands in for a nostalgic place never mentioned in the film. This way of reading Wong Kar-Wai’s films has already been suggested by critics such as Rey Chow (1999) and Jeremy Tambling (2003): the cities where Wong’s movies happen, such as Buenos Aires in Happy Together or Manila in Days of Being Wild stand in for a nostalgic idea of Hong Kong. Thus, Buenos Aires exists in a film as Happy Together only as an ephemeral emotional cartography, which stands for a long-lost home. Wong expresses this idea clearly when he explains his choice of Buenos Aires by describing it as “a land of zero degree, with neither East nor West, that has neither day nor night, which is neither cold nor warm” (cited in Teo 2005: 101). Precisely because his poetics is founded by such a conception of the city, his Latin American signifier can be completely devoid of any historical or political referent. In a way, one must say that Wong takes an old way of representing Latin America as the land of passions and pushes it to its most radical consequence: by being devoid of the epistemological investment that a colonial project carries, Latin America, the Other of the Other, ceases to be a historical entity. In sum, Wong Kar-Wai’s Latin American signifier, whether represented by the boleros and tangos in the soundtrack or by the fragmented geography of Buenos Aires, is structured around a very narrow cultural interpretation based on affect, whose consequence is the disappearance of any historical or political density of its referent. In this, Wong opens a space of potentiality by hollowing out the representational economy that subsumes Latin America and Asia to the Western imagination and creates a new signifier for a transpacific imagination to come. Wong has declared that his original intention was to adapt Manuel Puig’s novel The Buenos Aires Affair (Puig 2010), but, as Stephen Teo recounts, this project was abandoned in favor of a more general story of homosexuality set in Buenos Aires. Puig is perhaps one of the three most significant writers in Argentina in the seventies and eighties (the other two, of course, are Borges and Cortázar) and the fact that his work inspired Wong’s films tells us a series of things that will be the subject of the rest of this essay. Happy Together is the result of a form of cultural communication that directly challenges the debate of what is known as “World literature

84 

I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO

theory” as represented by the work of Pascale Casanova (2004) and Franco Moretti (2013).5 With its different variations, this theoretical approach is predicated upon the idea that the cultural networks that permit the circulation of literature (or film) necessarily pass through the cultural capitals of the world (Paris, NYC, etc.). One of the consequences of such a statement is that any contact between two so-called peripheral regions is necessarily mediated by the interpretation produced by the center. In this particular case, Wong’s interest in Puig not only speaks about the fact that cultural producers in the periphery read each other without the need of the Euro-American or Atlantic centers, but of the fact that the interpretations produced by such approaches belong to a completely different hermeneutic cycle. In the specific case of Happy Together, what we see is an attempt at constructing a poetics of everyday life with referents that escape the language of Chinese cinema. To briefly invoke a comparison suggested by Rey Chow, this is one of the factors that distinguish a very iconic filmmaker like Zhang Yimou from Wong. While Zhang constantly draws on Chinese referents, such as Yu Hua’s novels or the wuxia epic genre, Wong appropriates the Latin American signifier precisely in an effort to put the national referent under erasure. In other words, while a Euro-American filmmaker usually invokes Latin America as a contrastive element to analyze its own society, Wong invokes the Latin American signifier so that he does not have to talk about Hong Kong or China. This is the reason why the very popular comparison of Happy Together with The Kiss of the Spider Woman, another Manuel Puig (1979) novel, while tempting, is imprecise. Proposed mostly by English-language critics such as the aforementioned Teo and Tambling, this reference is based to the fact that Puig’s book became popular in the United States due to the English-language film adaptation starring Willian Hurt. Even though both texts share the gay theme and the reference to melodrama, it is their most fundamental difference that must be underscored: while Kiss of the Spider Woman is explicitly set in the political context of the Argentinian military dictatorship and offers an open political position vis-à-vis the national situation, Happy Together happens in a stage that performs an apolitical reality. It is not apolitical though; the coming integration of Hong Kong to China is a spectral presence, as the mention in passing of Deng Xiaoping’s death at the end of the movie, signals. Yet, Wong does 5  For another canonical account of this theory, see Damrosch (2003). Robert Stam (2019) has recently discussed the connections between cinema and this theoretical approach.

5  SHARED NEOLIBERALISMS: THE CULTURAL AFFECTS… 

85

not invest his Latin American signifier with this political meaning, but rather is emptied so the new affects of society and politic—from contemporary LGBTQ affect to the larger process of globalization—can exist in the space of potentiality. I will now sketch some conclusions about the ways in which we could study phenomena like Wong Kar-Wai’s Latin American signifier or Julián Herbert’s rendering of the Chinese legacy: 1. Happy Together is just a stop in a long, complex journey of Asia-­ Latin American relations. The focus on so-called Trans-Atlantic Studies, after the influence of people like Immanuel Wallerstein or Fernand Braudel, has left aside a significant history of transpacific contacts. Ever since the Manila Galleon was established as the main form of trade between China, the Philippines, New Spain and Spain, there has been a long history of commerce, migrations and representations. In contemporary theory, due to the focus on Atlantic topics, we simply lack the language and critical instruments to understand a history like this one in its own terms. 2. In consequence, notions like “Orientalism” need to be revised to break them away from their grounding in the epistemological practices of the European imperial enterprise. Whether China will become a colonial empire is yet to be seen, but the truth is that, even if that were the case, the politics of representation involved in the new transcultural instances is likely to be different in many substantial ways to the colonial-postcolonial epistemology that has ruled the 500-year-long predominance of Euro-American imperialism and capital. 3. From the perspective of Latin American studies, where conceptual systems are mostly based on issues related to colonialism and neocolonialism, the development of instruments to understand the past, current and future presence of China and other Asian nations in the continent is an urgent point in the critical agenda, giving the new stream of resulting cultural productions. If Happy Together is an instructive example of the new forms of cultural representation, Latin America must resist the new practices of erasure of its history and cultural politics, in order to establish a more appropriate relation with the emerging economic powers. 4. Finally, from the perspective of more global or worldly literary and cultural studies, it is crucial to develop instruments to more fully

86 

I. M. SÁNCHEZ PRADO

understand the history and nature of cultural exchanges that exist beyond the traditional routes of capital and Empire. In other words, we lack theoretical approaches for the understanding of phenomena like Wong’s interest in Latin America, the migration of Chinese and Korean populations into different Latin American countries or, even, the geopolitical and cultural effects of the major flows of capital from places like Singapore or Malaysia to the region in the past five years.

References Brunette, Peter. 2005. Wong Kar-Wai. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The world republic of letters. Trans. M.B.  Debevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chow, Rey. 1999. Nostalgia of the new wave. Structure in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together. Camera Obscura 14 (3 (42)): 30–49. Damrosch, David. 2003. What is world literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hennessy, Rosemary. 2015. Love in the Labyrinth. Mexico’s North-South Encuentros. In Red love across the Pacific. Political and sexual revolutions in the twentieth century, 163–179. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herbert, Julián. 2015. La casa del dolor ajeno. Mexico: Literatura Random House. English translation: The house of the pain of others. Trans. Christina McSweeney. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. Kim, Young-Ha. 2012. Black flower. Trans. Charles LaShure. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Locane, Jorge J. 2019. China en América Latina o los límites del cosmopolitismo (liberal). A propósito de La casa del dolor ajeno (2015). A contracorriente 16 (3): 302–316. Marín Cobos, Nieves. 2017. La autoficción como contrapunto a la ‘novela histórica’ de los vencedores. Hibridismo y metaficción en La casa del dolor ajeno (2015), de Julían Herbert. Impossibilia. Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios 14: 74–92. Minns, John. 2006. The politics of developmentalism. The Midas States in Mexico, Taiwan and South Korea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant reading. London: Verso. Puig, Manuel. 1979 [1976]. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New York: Knopf. ———. 2010 [1973]. The Buenos Aires Affair. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. Champaign: Dalkey Archive.

5  SHARED NEOLIBERALISMS: THE CULTURAL AFFECTS… 

87

Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2017. La casa del dolor ajeno de Julían Herbert. No-ficción, memoria e historicidad en el México contemporáneo. MLN 132 (2): 426–440. Stam, Robert. 2019. World literature, transnational cinema and global media. Towards a transartistic commons. London: Routledge. Tambling, Jeremy. 2003. Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Teichman, Judith A. 2012. Social forces and states. Poverty and distributional outcomes in South Korea, Chile and Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Teo, Stephen. 2005. Wong Kar-Wai. Auteur of time. London: British Film Institute. Torres-Rodríguez, Laura. 2018a. Into the ‘Oriental’ zone. Edward Said and Mexican literature. In Mexican literature in theory, ed. Ignacio M.  Sánchez Prado, 11–31. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2018b. ‘Esto es un Western’: el giro Norte Mexicano hacia el Pacífico en la literatura mexicana contemporánea. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 87: 89–111. ———. 2019. Orientaciones transpacíficas. La modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures.

CHAPTER 6

Fragile Bridges: Translation Theory and Translation Practices in Contemporary Transpacific Literature Puo-An Wu Fu

[L]a idea más arraigada sigue siendo la de que la equivalencia es algo a lo que los traductores deberían aspirar, para conseguir así reproducir el original con total exactitud y precisión, sin añadidos, omisiones o distorsiones. Esta perspectiva implica, claro está, que el traductor se convierta en invisible e inaudible, y así lo constatan las múltiples metáforas e imágenes del discurso más tradicional sobre la traducción (“The most persistent idea continues to be that translators should aspire towards equivalence in order to reproduce the original with total accuracy and precision, without adding, omitting or distorting. Clearly, this view involves turning the translator invisible and inaudible, which is supported by the many metaphors and images in the more traditional discourse on translation.” All translations are mine.). —M. Carmen África Vidal Claramonte, Traducción y asimetría, 2010: 14.

P.-A. Wu Fu (*) Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_6

89

90 

P.-A. WU FU

Fragile Metaphors In the excerpt above, Carmen África Vidal, translator, scholar, and Professor of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Salamanca, Spain, effectively articulates both the fundamental perception of translation that drives its practice today and the very problem that this perception presents. The invisibility of the translator stems from an established imperative to find absolute equivalency between languages, an imperative laden with anxiety at the prospect of betraying the original by changing it (África Vidal 2010: 16). The debate around equivalence in Translation Studies and among professional translators is indeed paramount to the practice, such that the problem of equivalence has taken various shapes and forms under the study of influential contemporary specialists. In the English-­ language discourse, theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Bandia, and Theo Hermans demonstrate the broad range of approaches to the issue of equivalence. Spivak has published extensively on translation as constitutive of the ethical subject, on translating as an intimate form of reading, and on the responsibility of translators of the Global South who translate into English—all of which rest upon the necessary impossibility of translation.1 Bandia, on his part, contends that translation practices in Euro-African literary writing and postcolonial texts in general test the limits of contemporary mainstream notions of translation, specifically equivalence and fluency.2 Finally, Hermans turns to translation in religious scripture—the Septuagint and the Book of Mormon—to illustrate how the illusion of absolute equivalence between the original and the translation, and therefore a change of status of the translation into the authoritative text, must lead to the death of the translator.3 Although their approaches differ, all three theorists, who also have successful careers as 1  For example, the essays “Translation as Culture” and “Translating into English” in Spivak (2013). 2  Bandia attributes the destabilization of these notions to postcolonial theory: “Postcolonial theory has had a significant impact on translation studies and has forced a rethinking of some commonly held views in translation theory by pointing out, for instance, that translation does not always take place between two stable concrete and well-defined entities, thus questioning the relevance of a relentless search for equivalence and fluency which has characterized mainstream translation theory for so long” (Bandia 2003: 140). 3  “And if equivalence spells the end of translation, it also spells the death of the translator. Strong equivalence is total: it posits congruence of meaning and singularity of intent, and leaves no room for differential voices, aberrant subject positions or interpretive margins” (Hermans 2003: 40).

6  FRAGILE BRIDGES: TRANSLATION THEORY AND TRANSLATION… 

91

professional translators, concern themselves with the same contradiction. If there were indeed perfect equivalents between two languages, translation would not be necessary; yet both translator and reader must assume there is perfect equivalence in order for a translation to have validity. The translator must be invisible for the translation to become the original. Spivak, Bandia, and Hermans show that the translator’s invisibility as a requirement for successful translations is no longer taken for granted in Translation Theory. Yet equivalence continues to function as the imperative in current practice. The most poignant of África Vidal’s observations is therefore the continued use of metaphors and images based on the illusion of equivalence in representations of translation, and the role they play in cementing the implication that the translator should neither be seen nor heard. These representations and their implications are the subject of this chapter. Equivalence is an illusion. Translation is not possible without the translator’s voice, and to translate is nothing less than to change the original. In the analysis that follows, two metaphors that are constitutive of representations of translation will be critically examined in the context of literary theory and creation: the mother tongue and the bridge. Both of these pervasive metaphors convey the translator’s ethical loyalty to the original and their resulting invisibility. By exploring the reaches and limitations of these metaphoric representations of translation, this chapter seeks to demonstrate a reading practice able to destabilize the notion of neutral equivalence. It might seem hardly necessary to state that translation is an indispensable tool to understand and interpret contemporary globalized reality, yet it bears saying that a change of perception of what translation is will inevitably change our understanding of the globalized world. Following this objective, the literary works examined in this chapter exemplify the particularities of transpacific reality, that is, I examine narratives that voice a transiting subjectivity between postcolonial Asia and the Americas,4 focusing on East Asia and South America, in particular. An analysis of two texts will show how the mother tongue and the bridge as metaphors of translation fail in the face of transpacific translingual practices. Furthermore, the criteria for the authors I selected include their Asian ancestry and the inextricable particularities of the Latin American context in their writing. This 4  For a more detailed definition and further examples of transpacific subjectivities, see Wu Fu (2018: 13).

92 

P.-A. WU FU

was a conscious choice to emphasize the crucial role of translation practices in literary world-making. A literary approach to translingual practices emphasizes individual and collective life experiences that constitute everyday realities, in this case, a transpacific reality. In other words, translation in these narratives functions as a strategy to understand and interpret the greater reality in which we live—something TransArea Studies scholar Ottmar Ette terms Lesbarkeit der Welt, readability of the world (2013). Ette’s concept is particularly apt to describe what the transpacific framing of translation theory seeks to accomplish. Lesbarkeit der Welt encompasses polylogical and polyphone literary representations of lived realities, tracing multiple vectors of movement between regions of the world (as opposed to national discourse, for example). Reading for Lesbarkeit der Welt renders translation more than a mere technical function. Rather, translation in literature in this framework gives structure to experience and coherence to reality. The first text is Mongolia, a novel written by Peruvian Tusán5 author Julia Wong. Wong was born in Chepén, Peru; she is a descendant of Hakka immigrants from her mother’s side and of Han ancestry from her father’s. During her childhood, she lived between Peru and Macau, later living in Germany in her formative years, as well as in Mexico and Argentina. This author often integrates Cantonese and German in her Castilian Spanish-­ language poetry and prose, a reflection of her own linguistic trajectory. The second analysis focuses on the short story “El testigo chino” by Anna Kazumi Stahl, who, in addition to writing prose, has spent over two decades as an active translator and educator in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Born in the United States, Kazumi is of Japanese and German ancestry. The Nikkei6 author has published short stories, a novel, and translations of Japanese literature in Argentinian Spanish. A selected aspect of Wong’s novel will provide examples to critically assess the viability of the mother tongue metaphor in postcolonial societies, whereas a close reading of Kazumi’s short story presents several models of intercultural bridges functioning simultaneously in a transpacific setting. Both cases show ­translation 5  Tusán can be translated as “born here” and refers to descendants of Chinese migrants born in the host country. For a definition by the Peruvian initiative Tusanaje see: http:// www.tusanaje.org/ser-tusan/. Interestingly enough, the organization’s logo is a bridge, and their mission statement claims to seek to build a bridge between Chinese and Peruvians. 6  In Latin America generally used to refer to descendants of Japanese migrants. For further references, see the website of the Asociación Panamericana Nikkei: http://apnorg.atwebpages.com

6  FRAGILE BRIDGES: TRANSLATION THEORY AND TRANSLATION… 

93

practices that reflect and respond to hierarchical relations in the national discourse of former colonies in the Americas, ultimately destabilizing the illusion of neutral equivalence.

Absent Mothers The metaphor of the mother tongue is arguably one of the most ubiquitous organizing principles that structure our lives and realities. The mother tongue gives us life, brings us into the world and raises us as her children; we are native speakers born of her. This metaphor operates by providing a narrative framework based on the first linguistic code that we learn. Consequently, the metaphorical narrative of the mother tongue and its children can ascribe feelings of intimacy, belonging, heritage, and loyalty to our relationship with a language. It is therefore not surprising that the translator’s mother tongue is set as the target language and never the source language, both in formal training and professional practice.7 This structure follows the metaphor’s logic in ascribing the speaker with infallible linguistic knowledge and abilities. The mother tongue ontologically designates each speaker with one language that belongs to them and to which they belong, by establishing this language as primordially constitutive of who they are. Put in the terms of the mother tongue metaphor, translators bring the foreign into the intimate, the outside that does not belong to them into the inside that is the core of their being. The native speaker cannot err in that which has shaped them from birth, according to this logic. Therefore, translation is always practiced in the inward direction, into the domain that intimately belongs to the translator, and never to the outward realm, which, intelligible and accessible as it may be, remains decidedly foreign. Linguistic ability is equated with possession and belonging; the native speaker’s unquestionable authority hinges on a border drawn between foreign and domestic. 7  Compare, for example, the Universität Heidelberg’s undergraduate translation program guidelines (https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/sued/imstudium/leitfaden_ubw_ juli2017.pdf) with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s translation program description (https://escolar1.unam.mx/planes/enallt/traduccion.pdf). Despite their linguistic and geographical distance, both universities structure their programs based on A, B, C languages, where the A language is described as the mother tongue and therefore the designated target language. It should be noted, however, that higher levels of education and certification often require proficiency in B-to-A translation, the purpose of which, along with the guidelines for foreign students, is intriguing but tangential to the subject at hand.

94 

P.-A. WU FU

The mother tongue metaphor quickly finds its limitations when set against language practices embedded in a national discourse with a colonial past. A clear instance of the mother tongue re-defined is the power asymmetry between indigenous and colonial languages in contemporary literature. In this vein, literary scholar Rodrigo Rojas’ adaptation of postcolonial approaches and decolonial thinking to examine translation as a strategy exemplifies the necessary groundwork to understand literature on postcolonial realities in national contexts. In “La lengua escorada,” Rojas examines the works of Chilean Mapuche poets Elicura Chihuailaf, Jaime Huenún, Leonel Lienlaf, and David Aniñir using the term “bilanguaging,” which he understands as an extension of Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga’s concept of “mentes biculturales” (bicultural minds). He also references the term as used by Argentinian theorist Walter Mignolo in “Local Histories/Global Designs.”8 Rojas applies both to articulate the relationship between literature and translation as a necessity sine qua non for these authors. He argues that they are forced to utilize translation as a kind of mutation in order to reach readers within the dominant national culture (Rojas 2009: 20). Translation, specifically “autotraducción cultural” (cultural self-translation), is their only method of articulation, a necessary strategy and a form of resistance to articulate their marginalized position in postcolonial society (Rojas 2009: 33–34). More to the point, Rojas refers to Dante Alighieri’s De vulgari eloquentia to contend that the language in which one is raised9 is the language of emotion, and therefore the best poised for rich poetic expression. However, in the case of two of the four Mapuche poets, who neither write nor translate their publications in Mapudungun, Rojas proposes that the mother tongue: In the case of Huenún and Aniñir, who do not write in Mapudungun nor publish translations of their texts in this language, their mother tongue is composed of words from both languages, dominant and dominated. The Mapuche tongue is the language of their grandparents and the tongue in which they were raised, since it is the tongue of their mothers. But […] they 8  Summarizing Mignolo’s contribution to the concept, Rojas defines bilanguaging as a way of living and of seeing the world from the margins of Western logic ingrained in the hegemonic language (Rojas 2009: 22). 9  In keeping with his argument that the language one’s mother speaks is one’s mother tongue, Rojas uses the verb “amamantar,” to nurse or to breast feed, to describe the role of the words—and not the language—in the speaker’s upbringing (2009: 18)

6  FRAGILE BRIDGES: TRANSLATION THEORY AND TRANSLATION… 

95

belong to a generation that did not inherit Tse or Mapudungun. Nevertheless, according to Dante, this remains the language of affect.10 (2009: 18f)

Hence, Rojas identifies a third element at work. Two of the four authors have not inherited Tse and Mapudungun as functional languages, such that their poetry articulates the awareness of an absent body (2009: 19). Thus, self-translation is both a strategy for the author to confront readers of the dominant colonial language, as well as to articulate the postcolonial condition of absent heritage. Since the languages involved in the practice of translation are not equal—the mother’s absence is a result of the persisting colonial dominance of Spanish in the form of national culture—the postcolonial mother tongue metaphor is adapted to carry an entirely different narrative on language and belonging. The absence of ancestral languages is not exclusive to the postcolonial realities of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Rojas’ approach—which he derives from the Chicana perspective—can be adapted to read the realities of other groups that are marginalized from dominant national culture. Descendants of the East Asian migrants, for one, have cemented their presence in Latin America since the indentured laborers of the nineteenth century, and their (often) absent mother tongues are the result of migration from a non-imperial power. Although the absence of mother tongues in indigenous realities originates from and must be read within the context of ongoing resistance movements in the face of oppression under postcolonial nation states, it is this very homogenizing oppressive mechanism that is also responsible for migrant absent mother tongues and transpacific bicultural minds. Such is the case of poet and novelist Julia Wong. In her novel Mongolia, Wong integrates various autobiographical elements into the novel’s fictional protagonist, Belinda. She employs multiperspectivity primarily in Castilian Spanish, but includes phrases, translations, and references in German, Portuguese, English, and Cantonese. Like Wong, Belinda is a Peruvian Tusán woman who inherits an apartment in Macau from her deceased father. The protagonist and her child, the result of a relationship with a German man she meets in Hong Kong, move into this 10  “está compuesta por palabras de ambos idiomas, dominante y dominado. La lengua mapuche es la de sus abuelos y la lengua en que fueron amamantados, ya que es la de sus madres, pero […] son ahora parte de una generación que no heredó el tse o el mapudungun. Sin embargo, según Dante, ésta permanece como la lengua de los afectos” (2009: 18f).

96 

P.-A. WU FU

apartment, where a traumatic experience leads Belinda to embark on a journey to Mongolia. Several anecdotes and internal reflections on Belinda’s intimate relationship with her father are scattered throughout the novel. The protagonist experiences an intense process of grief, which she often articulates through the absence of an ancestral tongue. Two particular passages exemplify the ancestral absence Belinda feels: I have a deviated eye, my left eye looks on its own […] But neither that nor the reflux problems were painful to me, nor did they make me feel inferior. Not speaking Chinese, yes, not being able to speak Chinese made me the unhappiest being on Earth.11 (Wong 2015: 44f) I barely remember my mother, I remember that her attempts to have me learn Chinese ceased the day my father said, “She understands me without saying much. All of you talk too much and say nothing.” Maybe if I spoke Chinese I would make irreparable mistakes that would take away his freedom to leave the place. Many persecuted expatriates were in anguish over the fact that others wanted to own a little of China. The Japanese have destroyed our homes; if she speaks Chinese, they will destroy her, too. I never found out exactly why my father was so overprotective of me.12 (47)

Wong’s protagonist does not inherit her parents’ language, which produces greater emotional and psychological suffering than her physical illnesses. In an attempt to guess her father’s motives in opposing her linguistic inheritance, Belinda considers that he may have been trying to protect her from the horrors of the Japanese invasion and occupation during the early-twentieth-century Sino-Japanese Wars. To him, she

 “Tengo un ojo desviado, mi ojo izquierdo mira solo. […] Pero ni eso, ni el reflujo significaron una dolencia o un sentimiento de inferioridad. No hablar chino, sí, no poder hablar chino, me hizo el ser más infeliz de la tierra” (2015: 44f) 12  “Recuerdo apenas a mi madre, recuerdo que sus intentos para que yo aprendiera chino claudicaron el día que mi padre le dijo, “ella me entiende sin hablar mucho. Ustedes hablan demasiado y no dicen nada.” Si hablara chino quizá cometería equivocaciones irreparables que no le permitirían su libertad y salir del territorio. Muchos expatriados perseguidos sufrían la angustia de que los otros quieren apoderarse un poco de China. Los japoneses han destruido nuestras casas; si ella habla chino la destruirán también. Nunca supe a ciencia cierta por qué mi padre quería sobreprotegerme” (2015: 47). 11

6  FRAGILE BRIDGES: TRANSLATION THEORY AND TRANSLATION… 

97

considers, the tongue one speaks might provoke the colonizer into violence; he does not wish his daughter to inherit subjugation and destruction. According to Belinda’s conjectures, instead of an ancestral mother tongue, she may have inherited the colonial dominance of Japanese over Chinese. Additionally, her mother ceasing her efforts to teach Belinda Chinese (whether she continued speaking it to Belinda is unclear) results in a total interruption of exposure to the language, as Chinese is marginalized by the dominance of Castilian Spanish, the national language of Peru and the language Belinda actually speaks. The mother tongue is thus replaced by two superimposed hegemonic colonial powers; Belinda is thus the heir of two postcolonies—one in East Asia and one in Latin America. Interestingly, Wong presents the reasoning behind interrupted language inheritance as a conjecture, as opposed to a fact. The point, perhaps, is that colonial violence is the closest reference her protagonist can use to understand absence, a violence amply present in Peruvian and Latin American history. Her reflections on the absence of her father’s language is in fact a narrative Belinda creates to make sense of her reality. The literal absence of the paternal body acts as a catalyzer in the novel, which illustrates the powerful emotional force that absence can generate. Taking into account the role of the absent mother tongues in narratives like Mongolia, one must ask if the translation practice of establishing A, B, and C languages based on one’s authority in the mother tongue might not be complicit in sustaining colonial hegemony in the name of national culture. If so, ontologically equating ability with belonging aids in supporting the structures of dominance that have led to the death of indigenous and migrant languages; imposing the mother tongue metaphor has been and is still used to racialize migrants on an essentialist basis of language ability and national belonging. Rojas’ theoretical work and Wong’s writing on paternal absence indicate that the relationship between language and belonging in postcolonial societies cannot be extricated from asymmetries of power.

Multidirectional Tilt This very inequality renders the second metaphor, the bridge, just as inadequate and dangerous. In a passage elaborating on the illusion of equivalence, Vidal ascertains that all metaphors along the lines of “bridge” or any kind of “in-between” that portray translation as a mere transfer “assume the process is neutral and objective from a Western perspective, and can be

98 

P.-A. WU FU

dangerously naïve”13 (África Vidal 2010: 32). The image of the bridge is particularly attractive because it implies parity between communicating parties. Yet the reality is that not all cultures are equal (if any can be equal), especially when it comes to communication. Hence, Vidal argues for a re-­ definition of translation practices able to counter the metaphor of the bridge and its illusory assumptions of “equal intercultural relations”14 (2010: 36). If translation were a bridge, it would be a tilted one. The premise of equality between cultures is put to question in Kazumi’s short story. In “El testigo chino,” an omniscient narrator recounts a brief scene in New Orleans, Kazumi’s home city, where the local police hires a Japanese-English interpreter named Michiko Yamashita to aid in questioning the eponymous witness, who has been a victim of a violent assault. Upon speaking to the witness, Yamashita immediately uncovers that he does not speak Japanese but Chinese. Despite explaining in no uncertain terms that she does not speak his language and therefore cannot perform her duties, the police officer leading the investigation insists that Yamashita continue the questioning: Well, then speak to him slowly, Miss. Chinese, Japanese, whatever. Otherwise we would not have brought you here, right?15 (Kazumi 1997: 158)

Thinking on her feet, Yamashita writes her question on a piece of paper and gives it to the witness, knowing that the young man would be able to understand the written message based on the similarities between Japanese Kanji and Mandarin Chinese script: ‘Forgive me for disturbing you. When and where did you receive these wounds?’ With the piece of paper in her hand, she moved closer to the wounded boy and showed it to him. He was scared, terrified, and with good reason. In this silent moment, she, the Japanese woman, won over his trust, and with great effort and pain he wrote: “Nine thirty at night, two blocks from dock B.” 13  “Asumen la neutralidad y objetividad del proceso desde una perspectiva occidental y favorece una peligrosa ingenuidad” (2010: 32). 14  “Relaciones interculturales de igualdad” (2010: 36). 15  “Bueno, entonces, háblele despacio, señora. Chino, japonés, da lo mismo. Si no, no la hubiéramos traído, ¿no le parece?” (1997: 158).

6  FRAGILE BRIDGES: TRANSLATION THEORY AND TRANSLATION… 

99

The interpreter took the piece of paper, and stooping towards the light she deciphered it. Then, facing the police officers, she reported out loud: “The wounds that are making him suffer greatly right now, were received at twenty-one thirty, two blocks from dock B.”16 (Kazumi 1997: 158f)

Kazumi creates a situation in which power relations between the languages and cultures involved are explicitly unequal. The reader finds two practices of translation: first, the racialization on the part of the monolingual police lieutenant regarding Asian languages; and second, the historical common ground between written Japanese and Chinese. Whereas the lieutenant, a speaker of the colonial dominant language (English), equates two completely different languages by racializing its speakers, the multilingual speakers of the dominated language (Japanese and Chinese) find common ground in script by being willing to trust each other. We as readers could identify three bridges in this scene. The first is the lieutenant’s bridge, connecting the dominant English with the dominated Japanese and Chinese (which, according to colonial logic of race, are one and the same). Evidently, there is not much traffic on this unidirectional bridge, nor is there much interest to change its conditions. The second bridge is between the interpreter and the witness, bridging two written languages that may not be identical but similar enough to allow for some communication. This is an imperfect and improvised yet practical bridge that is more or less horizontal, in the sense that both parties are under the hegemony of the dominant language and experience communication under the same limitations. These two bridges make up a larger third bridge, the one through which the lieutenant and the witness communicate. And here Kazumi makes a point of underlining the undeniable voice of the translator. The narrator tells us that the boy wrote “nueve y media de la noche” on the piece of paper, but the interpreter reports to the police “veintiuna treinta.” Even if both the original and the translation ultimately communicate the same time of day, not only does the interpreter add a descriptive preface to 16  “‘Perdóneme por incomodarlo. ¿Cuándo y dónde recibió las heridas?’ Con el papel en la mano, se acercó aún más al chico herido y se lo mostró. /[…] Estaba asustado, aterrorizado, y con razón. En ese instante silencioso, ella, la japonesa, ganó su confianza, y él escribió, con gran esfuerzo y dolor: ‘Nueve y media de la noche, a dos cuadras del muelle B’. /[…] La interprete tomó el papel e inclinándose hacia la luz de la lámpara, lo descifró. Después, enfrentando a los policías reportó en voz alta: ‘Las heridas que lo están haciendo sufrir tanto ahora, fueron recibidas a las veintiuna treinta a dos cuadras del muelle B’” (1997: 158f).

100 

P.-A. WU FU

the information needed by the police, the form the interpreter chooses to translate the original— “twenty-one thirty” for “nine thirty at night” in the English equivalents—is not exactly identical to the source. Thus, the extradiegetic narrator exposes the fallacy of the invisible and inaudible translator. The translator adds, omits, and distorts; to translate is to make choices and change the original. Furthermore, their labor is made visible in the story by the fact that the narration of a situation involving three languages is delivered in a fourth language: Spanish. In other words, the reader is able to see and hear the translator solely and entirely because all narration and dialogue takes place in Spanish, thus constituting a fourth multipronged, interdiegetic bridge. One might even conclude that, upon close inspection, translations are based on other translations based on other translations, and so on ad infinitum. Perhaps instead of a bridge, a mise en abyme of multidirectional tilted bridges might be a more adequate metaphorical representation of how translation is practiced. Given the undisputed dominance of English as a pivot language in the globalized publication industry,17 such a representation would be indeed be much more truthful. Kazumi thus weaves together a realistic portrayal of translation in its full complexity. The author successfully manages to illustrate not only the unequal intercultural relationships between languages and speakers, but also the absolute authority of the translator (and, in this case, interpreter) that, per the principle of equivalence, paradoxically renders them invisible. Just like the lieutenant, we readers dependent completely on the narrator’s Spanish translation of the scene in English, Japanese, and Chinese. As recipients of translation, we have no choice but to have blind faith in the absolute equivalence principle to access the intradiegetic plane, and in the naïve temptation to forget that the narrating, translating voice adds, omits, and distorts. Clearly, neither narration nor translation are neutral or objective, and as “El testigo chino” shows, intercultural equality is hardly a given.

17  Kazumi has held a TEDx Talk on this very subject, indicating that statistically, a great majority of translated books sold in Argentina are translations from English. Online source: https://youtu.be/kVuDBc5z880

6  FRAGILE BRIDGES: TRANSLATION THEORY AND TRANSLATION… 

101

Revised Architecture Equivalence is an illusion, but in some cases it is necessary to assume equivalence, impossible as it may be, in order to facilitate any kind of communication at all. Yet at the same time, blindly believing in equal standing can perpetuate egregious inequalities. To extricate ourselves from this impasse, we might ask: What else do these metaphors facilitate? Who stands to benefit? The transpacific realities that Julia Wong and Anna Kazumi bring to life in literary form demonstrate a conscious understanding of how languages and their speakers relate to one another. Beyond a representation of life and the postcolonial condition, Mongolia and “El testigo chino” demonstrate a profound reflection of transpacific language and belonging. Both use literary strategies to construct a readable world, where translation is indispensable yet painfully flawed. The principle of absolute equivalence and equal mother tongues erase bicultural minds and reinforce persisting colonial structures, their pervasiveness rendering these processes too deeply engrained in language to detect at first sight. A critical reading of these illusions is necessary to understand the faults in the structures—and metaphors—we so depend on. In their work, Wong and Kazumi drive the mother and the bridge metaphors to their limits by creating representations of real-life bilanguaging as a strategy to achieve Lesbarkeit der Welt. Further study is needed to gain a better understanding of translation and revise the metaphors we use to represent it and guide its practice. What of the father figure to the mother tongue? What part do gender roles play in creating language and belonging when postcolonial hegemonies overlap? How have colonial structures engrained themselves in contemporary ways of speaking, writing, and learning languages in national discourse? If the mother tongue and the bridge are no longer adequate principles of translation, what metaphors could enable us to communicate with one another in more truthful terms?

References África Vidal Claramonte, M.Carmen. 2010. Traducción y asimetría. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Bandia, Paul F. 2003. Postcolonialism and translation: The dialectic between theory and practice. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation

102 

P.-A. WU FU

Studies (2). https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/article/ view/81/36. Accessed 7 Nov 2019. Ette, Ottmar. 2013. Viellogische Philologie: Die Literaturen der Welt und das Beispiel einer transarealen peruanischen Literatur, 60–63. Berlin: Walter Frey Verlag. Hermans, Theo. 2003. Translation, equivalence and intertextuality. Wasafiri 18 (40): 39–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690050308589868. Kazumi Stahl, Anna. 1997. Catástrofes naturales, 156–116. Editorial Sudamericana: Buenos Aires. Rojas, Rodrigo. 2009. La lengua escorada: la traducción como estrategia de resistencia en cuatro poetas mapuche, 18–34. Santiago de Chile: Pehuén. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2013. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 241–274. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Wong, Julia. 2015. Mongolia. Lima: Animal de Invierno. Wu Fu, Puo-An. 2018. Transpacific subjectivities: ‘Chinese’-Latin American Literature after Empire. In Chinese America: History & perspectives  – The Journal of the Chinese Historical Society of America, This land is our land: Chinese pluralities through the Americas, 13–19. San Francisco: The Chinese Historical Society of America.

CHAPTER 7

Reception of Chilean Literature and South Korean Intellectual Genealogy Woo Suk-kyun

Persistence of Memory Recently, a local publisher asked me to translate Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s–1973 (2015) written by J. Patrice McSherry. I was surprised by the persistence of memory surrounding Pinochet’s coup, because, in South Korea, Chilean New Song has been remembered in relation to the death of Víctor Jara in that military uprising. This persistence also left a huge mark in the reception of Chilean literature, as can easily be confirmed through the list of Chilean novels translated into Korean. Therefore, I would say that a unique horizon of expectation for the Chilean coup exists among South Korean readers. The reason for the persistence is very clear. Like Pinochet, there was a military president who came into power through a military coup and maintained control for a long time, and another military president seized

W. Suk-kyun (*) Institute of Latin American Studies, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_7

103

104 

W. SUK-KYUN

power through a massacre. That is to say, the histories of the two countries have overlapped in the mentalities of South Koreans. But this argument may be too simplistic if you revise its intellectual history. Although South Korea formed a society almost perfectly cleared out of leftist ideology in the aftermath of the Korean War, a communist poet like Pablo Neruda began to receive attention in the late 1960s from a minority group that started looking for ways to overcome the division system of the Korean peninsula imposed by the Cold War. They had a kind of Third World consciousness and gradually began to have interests in Third World history and literature. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the perspective of Latin American literature as a mirror of Korean society emerged. It was at this time when a unique horizon of expectation in regard to Chilean literature appeared in which the military coup became a key factor.

South Korean Readers’ Horizon of Expectation and the Chilean Coup In South Korea, the reception of Latin American literature has been prominent consistently since the 1990s. It was the product of rapid university expansion in the previous decade thanks to various elements such as population growth, national income improvement, and populist policies by the authoritarian government catering to educational zeal. The number of departments related to Spain and Latin America increased from 1 to 11, the result of which was a consistent reception of Latin American literature in the 1990s. But its direction was essentially determined in the 1980s. Although there were few classes dedicated to Latin America due to the lack of professors, dependency theory and liberation theology made a considerable impact on the national academic field. Under these circumstances, the students began to read the boom novels, considered them to be a mirror that reflected the Korean reality, and those who became professors and teachers in the next decade frequently assumed this perspective consciously or unconsciously. It is not surprising that a horizon of expectation that a Chilean work should criticize the military coup and the dictatorship was formed. In this respect, I would like to put forward my experience. In 1996, I was looking for a publisher that could gain the copyright of The Postman

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

105

by Antonio Skármeta with its translation draft considerably advanced. I was so convinced that this novel would fascinate national readers. Besides its humorous episodes and style as well as successful combination of poetry and politics, it seemed that the tragic ending in which even the Nobel Prize winner, Neruda, became a victim of the coup provided an overwhelming catharsis. But my plan was shattered due to the release of the Italian movie The Postman in South Korea. A publisher had quickly gained the copyright and a translator. In any case, I had the opportunity to speak with the editor and was really disappointed by the experience. He regarded young women, especially high school and college students, as the implied reader, around which he was planning the cover, style, and illustration. In short, the love story between Mario and Beatriz was the most important factor to him. I suggested to him that the main reader of the novel might be those who knew the Chilean coup and Neruda or those who could identify with its tragic history. However, a few months later, the book was published according to his original plan. The book did not sell well, so when the contract ended, the publisher didn’t extend it. A few years later, another publisher, Minumsa, took an interest in The Postman, asked me to translate, didn’t make the same mistake, published it in 2004, and has continued to sell more than 2000 copies a year to this day. Considering the status of Latin American literature in the national literary field, it’s a steady seller. Of course, this success can’t be attributed entirely to the proper targeting of the implied reader. By that time, Minumsa was already one of the most powerful foreign literary publishers, and the novel was fortunately included in its representative series “Complete Works of World Literature.” In addition, the reaction of the readers showed that other elements intervened too. For example, phrases like “do you believe that the whole world is the metaphor of something?” (Skármeta 2004: 32) and “the poetry doesn’t belong to who writes it but to who uses it!” (Skármeta 2004: 85) were very resonant: the former as a question about the essence of poetry and the latter a manifestation for a kind of literary democratization. Nevertheless, I had an experience such that I couldn’t help but maintain the view that the Chilean coup and Neruda’s tragic death were important success factors. It was when I wrote Songs of Wind, Songs of Revolution (2005), a musical travel book that dealt mostly with Chilean and Argentine New Song, tango, and Andean music. The itinerary of the trip was Chile– Argentina–Bolivia–Peru. But the editor wanted to relocate the Chilean portion to become a part of the grand finale and to change the first title. I

106 

W. SUK-KYUN

was reluctant because of the co-marketing plan with a record label which was producing an Andean music CD. But the editor won. He argued that the Chilean coup and the New Song section were familiar to national readers. I had no cause for dissent because it was the same logic with which I had made a suggestion to the first editor of The Postman. Of course, some Chilean works, even with a Chilean coup factor, didn’t receive a good response. The case of José Donoso confirms it. His A House in the Country and Hell Has No Limits were translated respectively in 1998 and 2009, but there was no echo. Although the former was an allegorical work to Pinochet’s dictatorship, it didn’t make a difference with the latter. Perhaps both the publisher and translator’s lack of deep knowledge of the historical dimension of the work was a barrier. The limited resonance of Poli Délano’s work about the Chilean coup, In This Sacred Place, was due to his anonymity in the national academy more than anything. In contrast, Luis Sepúlveda is a very fortunate case, although he isn’t a writer of Chilean coup narratives or a writer known by the national literary critics. More than 15 works were translated thanks to the success of the Italian animation The Little Seagull and the Cat (1998), based on his novel The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly, to the inclusion of a part of this novel in the national elementary school textbook in 2015 and to Openbooks, a publisher with the policy of translating complete works of its chosen authors. With so many factors involved (author, work, publisher, translator, academic evaluation, popular culture, and school textbook), it is hard to judge objectively how much the Chilean coup factors intervenes into the publishers’ decision about translation and the sale. But considering the reception of other Chilean works, Sepúlveda is an exceptional case and the Chilean coup has been an important factor. For example, the destiny of Skármeta’s other two works, published by a same publisher, Munhakdongne, another strong force with respect to foreign literature, was divided: The Dancer and the Thief didn’t get a good response despite the success of The Postman and the consequent popularity of the author while The Composition, a book about the repressive situation of the military dictatorship that imposes secrets onto young boys, was well received. Minumsa’s “Complete Works of World Literature” shows the importance of the Chilean coup factor in the criterion of the publication. Released in 1998, this series achieved such a colossal commercial success that it prompted some ten publishers to jump into the world literature market again or for the first time (The Hankyoreah 2010). In 2019, it

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

107

surpassed number 400 with its cumulative sales hitting 17 million copies despite that fierce competition. Consequently, the publication of The Postman in its 104th volume was guaranteed to earn a good response. Moreover, because it was the first world literature series with a respectable proportion of Latin American novels, The Postman automatically won some representativeness in this field. Of course, Minumsa’s series, in comparison to its predecessors, has been led more by the publisher than the literary critics. The opinion even exists that the logic of the publishing industry was strongly involved for the first time in this type of collection (Cho Young-il 2010: 347–348). Therefore, the supposed representativeness is somewhat illusory. But, considering the meaning of a world literature series in the country, there is a great possibility that ordinary readers regard the included works as canon in world literature. For South Koreans who had a complex with respect to the West for a long time in the process of modernization, world literature series have been a channel for civilization, universality, culture, and classic works. This history dates back to 1927, that is to say, to the colonial era, when a world literature series released by a Japanese publisher, Shinchosa, achieved commercial success. After independence, the competition to publish world literature collections led by Jeongumsa and Eulyoo Publishing Company since the late 1950s was brought about by the same complex (Park Suk-ja 2014). In a way, a world literature series is a literary institutionalization of the “cosmopolitan desires” (Siskind 2014) in South Korea. Isabel Allende is one of the first Chilean writers included in Minumsa’s world literature collection. The House of the Spirits was translated in 2003, before The Postman. Other Latin American fictions included previously were Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Jorge Luis Borges was absent because Minumsa had already published five books between 1994 and 1997 before the release of the series. As Borges and García Márquez were already classic writers in the national literary field, the presence of The House of the Spirits and The Postman in the collection was very meaningful and showed the preference for the Chilean coup narrative in the criterion of the selection of Chilean literary works. Of course, Minumsa’s choices had more to do with the logic of the publishing industry, because both novels were cinematized works (same as Kiss of the Spider Woman). But it wasn’t a unique factor. Previously, Minumsa published Neruda’s anthology and Hwang Byeong-ha, who translated Borges for the publisher, praised also

108 

W. SUK-KYUN

Allende as a representative post-boom writer with some works about the Chilean coup (Hwang Byeong-ha 1992: 276–279) and recommended her. The reception of Roberto Bolaño is a decisive example that confirms the existence of a unique horizon of expectation in regard to the Chilean coup. Except for Nazi Literature in the Americas, all other works have been published by Openbooks since 2010. When my translation, By Night in Chile, was published, I was met with a review titled “Who is the writer that writes the script for MB’s speech?” (MB is Lee Myung-bak, the president at that time) that showed how the memory of the Chilean coup persisted among South Koreans. As the title suggests, its author, Jang Jeong-il, a writer, was clearly aware that the work wasn’t a novel about Pinochet but his intellectual collaborator. But he preferred to enumerate the names of South Korea’s all-time dictators or authoritarian rulers along with Pinochet (Jang Jeong-il 2019) to guide the readers. The reception of Bolaño has another particular aspect: the evaluation of the majors in Latin American literature and the market response were not concordant. When Minumsa, who also had the intention of translating him, asked for my opinion about his four works such as 2666, Distant Star, By Night in Chile, and The Savage Detectives, I recommended the last more strongly than the others because this work reminded me of Julio Cortázar on the one hand and gave me the impression of a globalized Mexican novel on the another hand.1 To put it differently, for me Bolaño’s strength isn’t the Chilean Identity. The national majors’ opinions are not much different. 2666 and The Savage Detectives are the works most mentioned and best qualified, so his nationality does not weigh much. But the publisher’s choice was By Night in Chile. Ultimately, these four novels were translated by Openbooks, which had committed to the publication of Bolaño’s complete works. And, according to this publisher, By Night in Chile is the leading work in the sales and was sold approximately twice as much as The Savage Detectives, the second best-selling work. That is to say, Minumsa’s choice was a more appropriate decision commercially. Finally, I would like to mention that the reception of Ariel Dorfman was also carried out in conjunction with the memory of the Chilean coup. His works related to this tragedy such as My House is on Fire, The Last 1  Later, when I encountered phrases such as “the best Mexican novel since Where the Air is Clear,” “the new Hopscotch,” (Herralde 2005: 16) and “The greatest Mexican modern novel written by a Chilean living in Catalonia,” (Herralde 2005: 24) I totally sympathized with these evaluations.

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

109

Waltz in Santiago, The Nanny and the Iceberg, Death and the Maiden, and Blake’s Therapy have been translated through Changbi Publishers in 1998 principally by the majors in Anglo American literature. It is thanks to Paik Nak-chung, leading figure of this publishing house, although he himself didn’t participate in the translation. Since his sabbatical in the United States in the 1990s, he has maintained a friendship with Dorfman and appreciated him. This continuous translation would undoubtedly enhance the special horizon of expectation with regard to the Chilean coup. Moreover, Changbi Publishers’ preference for Dorfman is meaningful because it played a special role in the reception of Neruda, as I will discuss in the next subchapter.

Neruda and a Genealogy of “Subversive” Intellectuals Neruda is the only Chilean writer known to South Korea meaningfully before the 1980s. Moreover, he is virtually the only author that gained popularity among Spanish-speaking poets. According to various foreign researchers in relation to Neruda, the first translation of his poetry into Korean was in 1951 (Kim Hyeon-kyun 2006: 211). But it is not clear whether that was in the North or South. Perhaps North Korea discovered him first. Lee Tae-jun, a left-wing writer, met with Neruda in a round-­ table talk on Asian literature held in Beijing in October 1951 and praised him as “a poet who has fought for the world peace despite the persecution of the USA and his country’s reactionary regime” (recit., Kim Jae-yong 2004: 391) in The Great New China (1952). Another North Korean writer, Lee Ki-young, also recalled his meeting at the festival for the centennial of the Gogol’s death, commemorated in the Soviet Union in 1952. For him, Neruda is “an anti-imperialist fighter and a revolutionary poet” (Kim Hong-kyun 2000: 91). These episodes illustrate that ideology was a decisive factor in North Korea’s reception of Neruda. In South Korea, it would be hard to dare to translate a communist poet at that time because the peninsula was in the middle of the Korean War (1950–1953), one of the representative hot wars during the era of the Cold War. The Picasso scandal proves how rigid South Korean society was ideologically. In 1951, Picasso presented Massacre in Korea about a civilian massacre, attributed by North Korea to American forces during the war. Upon hearing this news, South Korean writers and artists issued a

110 

W. SUK-KYUN

manifesto, “Separation with Picasso,” and even sent it to him. According to the manifesto, although there was a moment when they were fascinated with the Picasso of Guernica, they had no choice but to break with the Picasso of Massacre in Korea because of its distortion of Korean reality (Kim Byung-ki 1954: 91–2). Still in 1977, when a student with a major in Art received a book of paintings dedicated to Picasso from his father, he discovered Massacre in Korea with its title deleted (Chung Young-­ mok 2001). At any rate, in 1968, six poems of Neruda (“Cat’s Dream,” “Planet,” “Oh, What Bottomless Saturdays!” “Return to a City,” “Through a Closed Mouth the Flies Enter,” and “Horses”) were translated in the tenth issue of Changbi, a magazine produced by Changbi Publishers. The person in charge was Kim Soo-young, a prominent poet and translator, who selected them from among the 12 poems in Encounter (December issue, 1967), an American literary magazine. In a very brief presentation, he refers to Sartre’s praise that Neruda is a poet worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature (Neruda 1968: 183). So, it can be said that, leaning on the universal authority of Sartre and the Nobel Prize, Changbi and Kim dared to undertake a “subversive” attempt in the ideological geography of South Korea. The 12 poems of Neruda in Encounter apparently would not have been satisfactory to Kim because he was a fierce adherent to the literature of commitment, and the 12 poems of Encounter belonged to Extravagaria and Fully Empowered. Moreover, this magazine, funded secretly by the CIA (Franco 2002: 32), had been distributed by the United States Information Service (USIS) with the purpose of spreading American liberalism throughout South Korea (Park Ji-young 2012: 341). Although Kim was an old subscriber, after the April 19 Revolution2 he preferred national magazines (Kim Soo-young 2018b, “Rising tide,” 98) and Partisan Review, a more progressive foreign magazine, although it was likewise supplied by the USIS (Cho Hyun-il 2012: 313). 2  The April 19 Revolution (also called April Revolution or April 19 Movement) was civilian protests against Rhee Syng-man, the first president of Republic of Korea who was elected in 1948 and paved the way for long-term power through constitutional amendment in 1956. In 1960 he won easily the March 15 elections for the fourth time due to the sudden death of the main opposition candidate. However, there was widespread electoral fraud in the vice presidential elections whose winner would have succeeded the presidency if the 84-year-old president had any health problem. This triggered massive protests, peaked on April 19, and the president Rhee resigned a week later.

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

111

However, it is unlikely that Kim was completely disappointed. In the presentation of Neruda, he also mentions both his political activities and Canto General (Neruda 1968: 183). Furthermore, he had already known of the relation between him and Spanish Republican poets through the 1960 translation of “Since the Civil War: New Currents in Spanish Poetry,” written by J.  M. Cohen in Encounter one year before. Cohen indicates that Miguel Hernández, assisted by Neruda in order to improve his poetic style, had a strong influence on the new generation of Spanish poets at the end of the 1940s (Cohen 2020: 237–238). The fact that the Picasso of Guernica was known in Korea implies that there were people informed about the Spanish Civil War. Wuhan, in its defensive fight against Japan in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese War, was dubbed “East Asia’s Madrid,” and the future North Korean discoverers of Neruda were involved directly or indirectly in Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (KAPF), which considered Japanese imperialism to be a kind of fascism. However, a “subversive” Kim has nothing to do with the ideology of the left, because he was an anti-communist prisoner escaped from the North Korean army during the Korean War. So, his ideological position used to be interpreted as a radical liberalism. But this categorization doesn’t explain sufficiently his place of enunciation. During the April 19 Revolution he adds a truly “subversive” feature that cannot be admissible in any way in South Korean society. In a poem, “Get Out, Just Get Out,” written in 1960, he shows a critical reflection of the division system under the Cold War regime: “There is no specific reason… / Just get out, all of you, just get out. / All of you, Americans and Soviets, just get out without any delay,” (Kim Soo-young 2018a: 209). First of all, this claim was inadmissible because of its criticism of the United States. Also, its incipient Third World consciousness was problematic. This consciousness was revealed more explicitly in his adherence to Listen, Yankee. The author, Charles Wright Mills, was an American sociologist who had a very critical perspective in regard to the Cold War regime. Thanks to Robert Taber, a CBS correspondent who maintained friendly relations with some leaders of the revolutionary government of Cuba, he visited the island in August 1960 to interview revolutionaries (including Fidel Castro, intellectuals, officials, journalists, and professors). The result was Listen, Yankee. According to Rafael Rojas, Wright Mills was not a person well acquainted with Cuban affairs. However, in the late 1950s, through research on Puerto Rican immigrants in New York and

112 

W. SUK-KYUN

through Mexican intellectual friends such as Carlos Fuentes and Pablo González Casanova, among others, he became already a progressive intellectual regarding the US-Latin America relationship (Rojas 2014: 10–13). A part of Listen, Yankee was published in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine and the entire text followed in January 1961. The repercussion was immediate in South Korea, which was living a short period of freedom after the overthrow of Rhee Syng-man’s dictatorship. The former text appeared in The Korea Times divided in four units in January 1961 and the latter on April 14. Kim already mentioned Cuba and Castro in “When the Sky Is Open  – To Kim Byung-wuk,” which appeared in a newspaper, Minzokilbo, on May 9, maintaining the belief that a reunification would take place beyond the conflicts between the South and the North, the United States, and the Soviet Union. He said that because of this belief, he didn’t envy Castro or Cuba (Kim Soo-young 2018b: 244–247). A week later, a military coup took place that would make Korea a stronger, pro-US, anti-communist society. Still, he wrote a review about Listen, Yankee in June for Sasang-gye, a progressive magazine. To Wright Mills’ call for the United States to listen to the revolutionary cries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Wright Mills 1961: 7), Kim responded: “The less developed countries all over the world are placed under such a similar common fetters” (Kim Soo-young 2018b: 253). It was impossible that a book could shake up the ideological landscape of the country. However, this book was one of the elements that marked the origin of a “subversive” intellectual genealogy with a Third World consciousness that overlapped the history of Korea with that of Latin America. It was re-translated in various occasions: twice in the 1980s, once in the 1990s, and once in the 2000s; some versions were published anonymously or under a pseudonym to avoid oppression, and the 1985 version was on the list of censored books (Kim Bong-seok 2019: 118–122). Intellectuals such as Lee Man-yeol, Kim Soo-haeng, Kim Nam-ju, and Moon Bu-sik regarded it as one of the book of their lives, which showed that another intellectual genealogy was constituted.

Another Intellectual Genealogy and Latin America The first anthology of Neruda’s poetry in South Korea, The Lyrics of Neruda, appeared in 1971, two days before the announcement of Neruda’s Nobel Prize. The translator was Yim Jung-bin, a very combative literary critic who suffered political harassment twice in the late 1960s and early

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

113

1970s (Ko Myeong-cheol 2010: 193–194). This translation, with that of Kim Soo-young, gave decisive influences to Kim Nam-ju, a radical poet with the epithet, “Korean Che Guevara”. He memorized and could recite “Oh, What Bottomless Saturdays!” translated by Kim Soo-young (Kim Nam-ju 2015: 58), read Lim’s selection of Neruda’s poems repeatedly, and left behind various essays, including “Reading the Poems of Pablo Neruda,” that dealt with the life and the poetic world of Neruda. The climax is his collection of poems of Heine, Brecht, and Neruda, To Read in the Morning and in the Evening. It was published only in 1988, but the selection and translation began in prison in 1980. To translate to Neruda, he should rely principally on texts in English and Japanese because he didn’t know Spanish. Even with this incompetence, he also consistently consulted the English-Spanish dictionary to reduce translation errors (Kim Hyeon-kyun 2006: 215). During his years in university beginning in 1969, Kim Nam-ju read so-­ called ideological books, among which there were texts about the Russian Revolution and Spanish Civil War. In relation to Latin America, Listen, Yankee by Wright Mills and Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations (1936) by Leo Huberman were his favorite books. Through these readings, Kim confesses that he could “understand the world strategy of the imperialist countries including the USA and the true nature of freedom, equality, and philanthropy from the standpoint of the peoples of the Third World” (Kim Nam-ju 2015: 54). Although he came to have a more profound knowledge about Latin America and a more acute Third Word consciousness than Kim Soo-young, the former’s intellectual debt to the latter is evident, since Kim Nam-ju shares Neruda, the Spanish Civil War, and Listen, Yankee. A significant difference is Kim Nam-ju’s praise for the leftist ideology. His belief that “the issues of the nation can’t be solved without the liberation of the class” (Kang Dae-suk 2004: 161) is its indication. This aspect has to do with the beginning of the radicalization of South Korean society that peaked in the 1980s. Thus, Kim plays a bridging role between the era of formation of the “subversive” genealogy and that of its climax. And the 1980s is the moment when the overlap of Latin American history and Korean history occurs. Kim was falsely charged as a North Korean spy and imprisoned in 1979 under the Yushin Regime, established seven years before through the self-­ coup by the president, Park Chung-hee. But he became a symbolic poet of the Gwangju Democratization Movement despite being in prison. This

114 

W. SUK-KYUN

Movement broke out in May 1980 and ended with a massacre in which more than 600 civilians died.3 As the 1980s progresses, anti-government protests became more violent and persistent. Anti-American sentiment also spread noticeably, because American occupation forces in South Korea had the capacity to block the deployment of the national troops in Gwangju with their operational right handed over to them during the Korean War. The re-translations of Listen, Yankee were possible in this context, and its inclusion on the censorship list in the 1980s shows how this book was inscribed strongly in the South Korean mentality as an anti-­ American one (Lee Jae-bong 2018: 141–142). It was when an anti-­ communist state, a developmental dictatorship state justified under the pretext of the competition with North Korea, a pro-American state considering the United States as the Savior from communization, and a state that gladly sent troops to Vietnam (1964–1973) at the request of the United States began to disappear. In this context, Latin America begins to be considered a mirror of Korean society. Kim Nam-ju noted the whistle-blowing by Samuel Butler, a U.S. Marine ex-officer, described by American sociologist, Leo Huberman, in his Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations. Butler confessed what he should do in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras, and asserted that the United States had been carrying out the same operations in Asia and Africa (Kim Nam-ju 2015: 71–72). Kim’s conclusion was that the United States “established puppet regimes to get its material interests while dispatching and stationing troops in Asia, Africa and Latin America” and that “if the peoples of the Third World countries demanded national independence and autonomy, they [U.S. troops] chased them to the ends of the earth and trampled them.” (Kim Nam-ju 2015: 72). 3  The Gwangju Democratization Movement (also called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO or Gwangju Uprising) was a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, from May 18 to 27 in 1980. After the assassination of Park Chung-hee in October 1979, the Korean people’s desire for democratization was increasing. But new military forces led by Chun Doo-hwan began to prepared coup already in December, proclaimed martial law on 17 May 1980 and arrested prominent politicians. Among them, Kim Dae-Jung, who had received absolute support in the Jeolla Province where Gwangju City is located, was included, and the next day, the Gwangju Democratization Movement was triggered. This incident was the biggest tragedy in the history of the South Korean democratization movement, but it has fueled democratic spirit during decades. Even it became recently one of the references by the protesters of Hong Kong against China. Kim Dae-jung became President in 1998 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

115

In the 1970s, several books by the libertarian theologians, for example, Hélder Câmara and Gustavo Gutiérrez, were translated and the theory of dependency began to be referred to not only with respect to the Third World, but as a theory for overcoming the division system of Korea. Regarding literature, Changbi published a special issue (Fall 1979) with a section entitled, “The Literature and Reality of the Third World,” in which Latin American literature was also referred to as crucial. Thus, Latin American knowledge and literature were regarded as subversive by the authority. The books, in relation to the dependency theory and the liberation theology were, to some extent, possible to be published under the guise of academic discipline and religion respectively. But according to a research of the 1980s on the banned books, those on the Cuban Revolution were taboo. The canons of the radicalized students, such as Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, were also rightly on the list. But it is surprising that the list contains books such as the Bolivian theologian and guerrilla Néstor Paz Zamora’s Letters to Cecilia: Campaign Diary, Omar Cabezas’ Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, and Margaret Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters (Jeong Jong-hyun 2015: 85–88). That is to say, even the books of / about Bolivia and Nicaragua, almost unknown countries to the national people, were the objects of the reading to comprehend the Korean reality. The persistence of memory of the Chilean coup and the formation of a unique horizon of expectation in respect to Chilean literature had to do with this radicalization of the 1980s, with its origins dating back to the formation of the genealogy of “subversive” intellectuals or another genealogy in the 1960s. Therefore, the direction of the reception of Chilean literature was decided before Latin American literature majors had emerged in South Korea.

References Cho, Young-il. 2010. Can we really break out of the complete collections of world literature? Writer’s World 22 (2): 292–356. Cho, Hyun-il. 2012. The perspective of Kim Soo-young with respect to the modernity and Partisan Review. In Kim Soo-young Alive, ed. Kim Myung-in and Lim Hong-bae, 2nd reprint ed., 306–336. Paju: Changbi Publishers. Chung, Young-mok. 2001. Art and politics: A work of Picasso about Korean War and the Korean and Japanese abstract arts (1950–1960). http://s-space.snu. ac.kr/bitstream/10371/72304/3/01.pdf. Accessed Nov 2019.

116 

W. SUK-KYUN

Cohen, J. M. 2020. Since the civil war: New currents in Spanish poetry. Trans. Kim Soo-young. In The Base of the Poet, ed. Park Soo-yeon, 235–260. Seoul: B-Book. Franco, Jean. 2002. The decline and fall of the lettered city: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Herralde, Jorge. 2005. Para Roberto Bolaño. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora S. A. Hwang, Byeong-ha. 1992. Against realism. Seoul: Yeuleumsa. Jang, Jeong-il. 2019. Who is the writer that writes the script for MB’s speech? Pressian. http://www.pressian.com/news/article/?no=65861. Accessed Oct 2019. Jeong, Jong-hyun. 2015. Struggling youth, translated resistance a study on the translated narrative works read by the movement generations in the 1980s. The Journal of Korean Studies 36: 81–124. Kang, Dae-suk. 2004. A biography of Kim Nam-ju. Gwangju: Hanearl Media. Kim, Byung-ki. 1954. Separation with Picasso. Munhak Yesul 1: 90–96. Kim, Hong-kyun. 2000. The autobiographical essay of Minchon Lee Ki-young, Following the Sun. The Monthly Joongang, October, 80–96. Kim, Jae-yong. 2004. Lee Tae-jun in the era of Korean War. In Lee Tae-jun and modern history of the novel, ed. Sanghur Society, 381–398. Seoul: Kipeunsam. Kim, Hyeon-kyun. 2006. The reception of Pablo Neruda in Korea. Hispanic Studies 40 (2006): 207–225. Kim, Nam-ju. 2015. In Complete prose of Kim Nam-ju, ed. Maeng Moon-jae. Seoul: Prunsasang. Kim, Soo-young. 2018a. In Complete works of Kim Soo-young I: Poems, ed. Lee Young-jun, 3rd ed. Seoul: Minumsa. ———. 2018b. In Complete works of Kim Soo-young II: Prose, ed. Lee Young-jun, 3rd ed. Seoul: Minumsa. Kim, Bong-seok. 2019. The reception of the translated texts of C. Wright Mills and Peter L. Berger in South Korea. In Western sociology and de-occidentalism, ed. Korean Society for Social Theory, 117–146. Seoul: Korean Society for Social Theory. Ko, Myengo-cheol. 2010. Literature, the politics of radical resistance. Seoul: Kephoibooks. Lee, Jae-bong. 2018. Anti-Americanism in the literature and art. Paju: Neyip Clover. Neruda, Pablo. 1968. Six poems of Pablo Neruda. Trans. Kim Soo-young. Changbi 3 (2): 175–183. Park, Ji-young. 2012. Translation and the literature of Kim Soo-young. In Kim Soo-young Alive, ed. Kim Myung-in and Lim Hong-bae, 2nd reprint ed., 337–362. Paju: Changbi Publishers.

7  RECEPTION OF CHILEAN LITERATURE AND SOUTH KOREAN… 

117

Park, Suk-ja. 2014. One hundred of the world literature and its enemies. Korean Literary Theory and Criticism 52: 77–113. Paz, Octavio. 2019. En busca del presente. https://www.ersilias.com/discursode-octavio-paz-al-recoger-el-premio-nobel-del-1990/. Accessed Nov 2019. Rojas, Rafael. 2014. El aparato cultural del imperio. C. Wright Mills, la Revolución Cubana y la Nueva Izquierda. Perfiles Latinoamericanos 44 (2014): 7–31. Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan desires: Global modernity and world literature in Latin America. Evaston: Northwestern University Press. Skármeta, Antonio. 2004. The Postman. Trans. Woo Suk-kyun. Seoul: Minumsa. The Hankyoreah. 2010. Complete collections of world literature, the second heyday, January 12. http://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/world/world_general/16351. html. Accessed Sept 2019. Wright Mills, Charles. 1961. Listen, Yankee. Trans. Shin Il-cheol. Seoul: Jeonghangsa.

PART III

Diffraction Worlds of Nikkei Identities

CHAPTER 8

Biopolitics, Orientalism, and the Asian Immigrant as Monster in Salazar’s La medianoche del japonés and Rodríguez’s Asesinato en una lavandería china Ignacio López-Calvo

Fear of the Other and fear of the unknown are often reasons or excuses behind racism and xenophobia. This same uncertainty tends to fuel the vivid imagination of nativists, who envisage all sorts of aberrations committed by invading hordes of foreigners. It is at this moment that the monster appears as a sublimation of different types of angst and fear in contact zones. In this sense, Mabel Moraña notes that “areas occupied by social sectors that have been subalternized by dominant groups because of their ethnicity, culture, social class, sexual preferences, corporeality, etc., were and continue to be monstrified as residual spaces whose epistemologies—whose rationality—assume unrecognizable forms from perspectives that see themselves as centers or epistemic, ethical and hermeneutical

I. López-Calvo (*) University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_8

121

122 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

nuclei.” (Moraña 2017: 13)1 In other words, one of the ways in which the nation-state imposes its sovereignty is by resorting to images of monstrosity in order to erase minorities’ worldviews and ways of being in the world, all the while enforcing the dictums of hegemonic social groups. These exclusionist technologies of power are reflected at different levels in some Latin American narratives that turn ethnic conflict into a Manichaeistic confrontation between absolute good and evil. In this context, this chapter studies the biopolitical repercussions of monstrifying ethnic minorities by comparing a Peruvian novel in which a Japanese immigrant is described as a monster with a Mexican novel in which Chinese Mexican characters have actually become vampires: Jorge Salazar’s La medianoche del japonés (The Japanese’s Midnight, 1991) and Juan José Rodríguez’s Asesinato en una lavandería china (Murder in a Chinese Laundry, 1996), respectively. Turning the immigrant Other into a figurative monster in real life or into a literary monster may sometimes reflect hegemonic groups’ biopolitical administration and social control of bodies and local populations. Michel Foucault, in The Birth of Biopolitics, ambiguously defined the term “biopolitics” as “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race” (The Birth 317). It is, therefore, a way of designating sociopolitical power (often state power) over life, over the physical and political bodies of populations. From this perspective, as one more control apparatus or technology of power, culture, of which literature forms part, has a stake in biopower’s dehumanizing practices through (sometimes subliminal) representation. There are, of course, many literary precedents for these two 1990s works. One of them is the novel Carmela (1887) by Cuban author Ramón Meza (1861–1911),2 1  “Las zonas ocupadas por sectores sociales subalternizados por grupos dominantes en razón de su etnicidad, cultura, clase social, preferencias sexuales, corporeidad, etc., fueron y siguen siendo monstrificadas como espacios residuales, cuyas epistemologías—cuya racionalidad—asumen formas irreconocibles desde perspectivas que se piensan a sí mismas como centros o núcleos epistémicos, éticos y hermenéuticos” (13). 2  Meza’s full name was Ramón Meza y Suárez Inclán, but he often used the pseudonym R. E. Maz, an acronym of his name. He was also the author of the essay “El mercader chino,” two biographical studies on Julián del Casal and Eusebio Guiteras, the study Homero: La Iliada y la Odisea, the comedy Una sesión de hipnotismo, and the novels Flores y calabazas (1886), Últimas páginas (1891), En un pueblo de la Florida (1899), Mi tío el empleado (1960), El duelo de mi vecino (1961), and Don Aniceto el tendero (1889).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

123

where there is a scene, among other Sinophobic passages, in which the body of the main Chinese character, Cipriano Assam, is described as monstrous when his image is deformed in a concave mirror: How much laughter there was when Carmela asked Assam to look at himself in a mirror that was there! His face got flattened, his moustache was lengthened, his little eyes looked like a line, his shoulders became square, his legs were reduced to a fourth; he looked like the bronze lion that gulps down all the correspondence, under the arch of the Post Office, without gagging.3

The reflected deformity of Assam’s body becomes a source of amusement and laughter for the other characters, thus opening the door to the association of the trope of monstrosity with the Chinese foreigner. This scene must be contextualized by other Sinophobic passages in the novel, such as the one where a character named Doña María de Jesús praises Assam by informing her friends that he “was only Chinese in looks; in everything else he was a decent person.”4 In response, her friends note that the only thing missing “was having white skin and being Christian the way they themselves were.”5 Therefore, because of his good nature, Assam is presented as “almost white but not quite.” The trope of monstrosity of Asian characters is taken up to a higher echelon in the two novels considered in this chapter.

Japanese Monstrosity in Jorge Salazar’s La medianoche del japonés

The trope of monstrosity is associated with the Japanese in the detective and historical novel La medianoche del japonés (The Japanese Man’s Midnight, 1991; henceforth La medianoche), subtitled (Canta mierda, canta) ([Sing Shit, Sing]), by the journalist, historian of crime in Peru,

3  “¡Qué risas hubo cuando Carmela mandó a Assam que se mirara a un espejo que allí había! La cara se le acható, sus bigotes se le prolongaron, sus pequeños ojos semejaban una raya, sus hombros se cuadraron, sus piernas quedaron reducidas a una cuarta; se parecía al león de bronce que se engulle toda la correspondencia, bajo el arco de la casa de Correos, sin atragantarse por eso” (138). 4  “No era chino más que en la apariencia, que en todo lo demás era una persona decente” (134). 5  “Era tener blanco el color de la piel y ser cristiano como ellas” (138).

124 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

and author Jorge Salazar (1942–2008).6 The main Japanese character, Mamoru Shimizu, is at first presented as a cold-blooded murderer only to be humanized by the narrator later in the plot, when the first-person narrator discovers that the massacre was actually a settling of scores of a local Japanese sect or secret society called Ttsuku-Shima, in which Mamoru was apparently only involved as a messenger. The novel narrates the tragic story of this real-life Japanese immigrant from Hiroshima who was accused in 1944 of clubbing to death seven persons (including three children) from two different Japanese families in one single night. The massacre took place on November 2, 1944 in Chacra Colorada (Breña, at the time in the outskirts of Lima), in the context of the anti-Japanese racism and hysteria during World War II, the sacking of Japanese-owned businesses and homes in May 1940, and the kidnapping and deportation of 1771 of them to internment camps in New Mexico and Texas, during the 1940s. Guillermo Thorndike dedicates the third chapter of his study Los imperios del sol (The Empires of the Sun, 1996) to Mamoru Shimizu. Tellingly titled “El pobre monstruo Mamoru” (The poor monster Mamoru), it revisits the massacre and its aftermath: “After having been a nobody, Mamoru became a national celebrity. The wild animal, the beast Mamoru. Mamoru, the monster of Chacra Colorada. In the streets, they called the Japanese Little Mamorus. When it was time to play dice, one sang ¡mamoru! for number seven. People scared misbehaving children by telling them they would call Mamoru. Mamoru was a legend, a nightmare, a torment, a national scare.”7 Thorndike discloses that, at the time, most people disagreed with the reconstruction of the murders provided by the police and the judge, because it was almost impossible for such a small man to kill seven persons and drag them one hundred meters in such a short time. He also quotes Mamoru’s brief defense of his innocence before 6  Other works by Salazar are the following: Una visión del Perú (1969), Piensan que estamos muertos 1979), La ópera de los fantasmas (1980), Poggi: la verdad del caso (1987), Historia de la Noticia I: A sangre y tinta (1996), Once Historias de Fútbol (2000), Historia de la Noticia II: La guerra y el crimen (2001), Historia de la Noticia III: De matar y morir (2004), Crónicas gastronómicas (2004), Los papeles de Damasco (2006), El libro de Oro del Club Sporting Cristal (2007), Historia de la Noticia IV: La sangre derramada (2007), Charlas con Soledad (2008), and Coma y punto (2015). 7  “Después de haber sido nadie, Mamoru era una celebridad nacional. La fiera, la bestia Mamoru. Mamoru, el monstruo de Chacra Colorada. En la calle llamaban mamuritos a los japonesitos. A la hora de jugar dados, se cantaba ¡mamoru! si salía el siete. A los niños malcriados los asustaban con llamar a Mamoru. Mamoru era una leyenda, una pesadilla, un tormento, un espanto nacional” (100).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

125

Judge Napoleón Valdez: “Mamoru Shimizu wants to say that he has not killed. Four masked men in black are the murderers. Aiming with gun early that night. They killing all.”8 Thorndike’s book chapter demonstrates the symbolic importance of the massacre and how dramatically it damaged the image of the Japanese community in Peru. The narrator of La medianoche, a young autobiographical journalist named Ismael Ortega who became obsessed with the crime (Salazar himself investigated the case for a quarter of a century), describes the Ttsuku-­ Shima sect to which Mamoru belonged as a Japanese brotherhood born “during the days of the Portuguese-Christian invasion of Japan and whose symbol was a black dragon.”9 Their rebirth in Peru responded, according to the narrator, to the constant aggressions suffered by Japanese nationals within a climate of deep-seated anti-Asian racism at the time. In the end, the massacre is sensationalized by La Crónica, which offers Ismael unlimited pages and funding to investigate the crime, with the goal of outcompeting El Comercio, the rival newspaper. Ismael’s boss is interested in aggrandizing the tragedy by tying it to national security, since at the time Peru was at war with the Japanese Empire. As a result, Mamoru ends up being metonymically attached to the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during World War II. The story of the massacre is further manipulated by the Peruvian police in a book full of false information that they publish to hide their extortion of Japanese nationals and their use of their deportations to internment camps in the United States as a way to appropriate their possessions. The following is one of many samples of the fabricated story included in the fourth chapter of the novel, sarcastically titled “El monstruo japonés” (The Japanese Monster), where Salazar delves more intensely into Mamoru’s alleged monstrosity: The crime committed by Mamoru Shimizu has made it possible for Peruvian psychologists to study more in depth the type of subject of the Mikado. In the psychic appreciation of the criminal, they have been able to determine the type of soul that most children of Japan have. For this reason, considering this case, our psychology experts have been able to make sense of the atrocities committed by Hirohito’s soldiers, for whom the uniform is only a 8  “Mamoru Shimizu quiere decir que no ha matado. Cuatro enmascarados de negro son los asesinos. Apuntando con pistola temprano esa noche. Ellos matando a todos” (103). 9  “En los días de la invasión cristiano-portuguesa del Japón y cuyo símbolo era un dragón negro” (236).

126 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

costume to carry out criminal acts that are dormant in their subconscious, waiting for the proper occasion.10

The crime is therefore presented as the logical outcome of the nature of a people predisposed to commit monstrous atrocities. According to the police report, Mamoru has become a useful object of study that will allow Peruvian psychologists to make inroads into the (in their view) sociopathic, murderous national character of the Japanese. The police investigation is celebrated as cutting-edge scientific research, thus legitimizing a racist and essentialized notion of “The Japanese spirit.” Following Orientalist patterns, in the police’s view Western rationality and “civilization” have managed to prevail over Oriental, irrational fanaticism. On the other hand, the fact that contemporary Peruvians call the tragedy “The Japanese’s Crime,”11 without including the name of the alleged murderer, only adds to the essentializing scheme that turns his entire social group as a people innately and pathologically predisposed to murder. Moraña has studied this particular literary connection between monsters and foreigners: “the monster has been analyzed as a foreigner: marauder, captor, invader, alien, foreign entity that serves as a pretext for paranoid and xenophobic fears, as the scapegoat for the community’s internal conflicts or as a metaphor of exogenous threats” (29).12 Indeed, the fourth chapter of La medianoche animalizes the Japanese immigrant as a hyena with human figure, highlights his cold-blooded, criminal mind, and speculates about Mamoru’s potential inferiority complex with respect to his brother Tamotu. To emphasize Mamoru’s monstrous nature, the book written by the police insists on his coldness and serenity while perpetrating the premeditated and cowardly massacre, even though they never witness it.

10  “El crimen cometido por Mamoru Shimizu ha hecho posible para los psicólogos peruanos, estudiar más a fondo el tipo del súbdito del Mikado. En la apreciación psíquica del criminal, han podido fijar la clase de alma que tienen la mayoría de los hijos del Japón. Por eso, ante este caso, se han explicado nuestros doctos en psicología las atrocidades de que son capaces los soldados de Hirohito, para quienes el uniforme es sólo disfraz para llevar adelante sus actos criminales, que duermen en la subconsciencia esperando la ocasión propicia” (191). 11  “El crimen del japonés.” 12  “El monstruo ha sido analizado en su condición de extranjero: merodeador, captor, invasor, alien, entidad foránea que sirve de pretexto para miedos paranoicos y xenófobos, chivo expiatorio de conflictos internos de la comunidad o metáfora de amenazas exógenas” (29).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

127

We learn that after Mamoru Shimizu’s other brother, Susuma, received a letter summoning him to the police station, he decided to go into hiding in the Amazon jungle, fearing the same destiny as one of his brothers: deportation to the United States. Yet on the day of his escape, Susuma was arrested by the Brigade for International Affairs and was subsequently deported to an internment camp in California, as he had feared. He then came to the conclusion that his brother Tamotu and his associate Hiromo Tomayashi had betrayed him, as they had probably done to many other members of the Japanese community during the previous year: “This explained Tamotu’s security, his luxuries and, of course, the most ostensible good situation of a number of Peruvian government employees. The war was a pretext to become wealthy by seizing Nipponese goods.”13 In revenge for this betrayal, Susuma sent a note from his prison cell asking his other brother, Mamoru, to inform the Ttsuku-Shima sect. As a result, Tamotu and Hiromo Tomayashi were executed following a seventeenth-­ century tradition that called for assassination of traitors and their families. The story is narrated with numerous analepses and prolepses, mixing the personal life of the protagonist, the journalist Ismael Ortega, with the dialogue between Mamoru Shimizu and the judge, as well as the police interrogation and torture of the two Japanese suspects, Mamoru and Kie Naito, the family’s fifty-eight-year-old Japanese butler and a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). It also includes summaries of the main events of World War II, the scapegoating of the Japanese in aprista fliers and newspaper clips dealing with the assassination, as well as information about the history of Chinese and Japanese immigration in the context of anti-Asian racism in Peru. In the re-creation of the youthful days of Mamoru and his fiancée Sumiko Takeda in the Japan of 1937, Salazar incorporates aspects of the Japanese worldview, including arranged marriages; the ikebana (Japanese art of flower arrangement with special regard shown to balance, harmony, and form); the okeiko (practice, training, or lesson to enrich oneself in general. More traditionally, it can mean learning about the moral and reason through reading books about the traditions and customs of the past), the tea ceremony, the tanomoshi (rotating savings and credit association)

13  “Eso explicaba la seguridad de Tamotu, sus lujos y por supuesto la más ostensible buena situación de una serie de funcionarios peruanos. La guerra era un pretexto para enriquecerse apoderándose de los bienes nipones” (238).

128 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

brought to Peru by Sentei Yaki,14 Japanese legends and religious beliefs, the Bushidō code, and the giri (loyalty, sense of duty). While the concept of giri is initially introduced to explain the loyalty that a traditional Japanese wife owes to her husband, at novel’s end it turns out to be one of the keys to the mystery: the disloyalty to their relatives and ethnic group would cost the victims their life. The fact that Salazar decided to name his investigating journalist Ismael is probably not a coincidence. Derived from the Hebrew name Yishma’el, meaning “God will hear,” he is the character in charge of hearing the truth behind the massacre. Just as Salazar upon hearing about the crime as a child, Ismael is convinced of Mamoru’s innocence because he thinks that such a small man (the real-life Mamoru weighed fifty-four kilograms [118.8 pounds] and was one meter and fifty-seven centimeters [5.15 feet] tall) could have never killed seven persons with a club and then dragged them to a nearby ditch by himself: Well, all this is more a joke than a serious investigation. Only here will a deep drama full of vertigo transform overnight into vulgar matter. Can one do anything more ridiculous than this police report pointing at Mamoru as the individual author of the deed? Can you imagine, Mr. Corzo, a Japanese man, in the morning light, carrying naked bodies through the street? He takes them to the river, throws them there, and returns to get more dead bodies. And, of course, no one sees it. Ridiculous.15

In his exchanges with the police, Ismael realizes that, without any evidence, they have already made up their mind: theft was the motivation to commit the crime. Moreover, for them Mamoru’s two-year military experience in an interrogation unit of the Japanese imperial army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) is the definitive evidence of his 14  Sentei Yaki was born in Okinawa in 1884 and died in Lima in 1976. An Okinawan businessman, leader, and philanthropic man, he promoted the tanomoshi and created in 1910 the first Japanese association in Peru: the Asociación de Jóvenes Okinawenses (Okinawan Youth Association), today the Asociación Okinawense del Perú (Okinawan Association of Peru). 15  “-Bueno, todo esto es más una bufonada que una investigación seria. Solamente aquí un drama hondo y lleno de vértigos de la noche a la mañana se transforma en un asunto vulgar. ¿Se puede hacer algo más ridículo que ese parte policial que señala a Mamoru como autor individual del hecho? ¿Se imagina usted, señor Corzo, a un japonés, a la luz de la mañana, cargando desnudos cadáveres por la calle? Los lleva hasta el río, los arroja y vuelve por más muertos. Y claro: nadie lo ve. Ridículo” (115).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

129

guilt: “This guy is our man, sir. The key to everything: he served in the military and has been in the war. I’ve revised his antecedents: he fought in China for two years and must’ve killed many people.”16 Moreover, the derogative and racist language they use to refer to or address the Japanese further reveals their prejudice. It is as if the dehumanization of the prisoner (also evoked in the book cover by a drawing of tiger eyes) somehow made his brutal torture more palatable for the victimizers. Likewise, the torture of the butler Kie Naito, whose only reaction is to weep pitifully (even though he does have relevant information that he refuses to disclose) leaves no doubt about these policemen’s immorality and makes the reader wonder who the monster really is. Later in the plot, a guard named Vicente Gil Flores informs Ismael about the close friendship and frequent meetings between Tamotu Shimizu, one of the Japanese who was murdered, and Milla León, the chief of the Brigade of International Affairs. It turns out that it was thanks to his work as an informer betraying his coethnics that Tamotu was able to afford such a life of luxury. Under torture, Mamoru “confessed” to have assassinated all the victims by himself, but five months later he “retracted the statement and said that if he had declared himself guilty and the only author of the multiple homicide was for anguish and fear that his relatives—his wife and daughter—could be imprisoned. With respect to the reconstruction of the crime, he pointed out that the only thing he did was obeying the judge’s orders.”17 Yet the national media unquestionably accepted the police report. And like the police report, newspaper articles also monstrify the Japanese by demonizing kamikaze soldiers: “Thus the volunteers of death are presented before the world as fanaticized and inhuman beings. In the confusion people speak about drugs that turn the selected ones into robots… Deformed and soulless creatures, capable of obeying the most inhuman slogans. Flock of monstrous beings to which there is an obligation to destroy as soon as possible.”18 This is, in fact, the 16  “Este tipo es nuestro hombre, señor. La clave de todo: ha sido militar y ha estado en la guerra. He revisado sus antecedentes: ha peleado en China durante dos años y debe haber matado a mucha gente” (62–63). 17  “Cinco meses después, Mamoru Shimizu se retractó y dijo que si se había declarado culpable y único autor del múltiple homicidio, fue por miedo, angustia y temor de que sus familiares—su esposa y su hija—fuesen encarcelados. Respecto a la reconstrucción del crimen, señaló que no hizo más que ejecutar las órdenes del juez” (307). 18  “Así los voluntarios de la muerte son presentados ante el mundo como seres fanatizados e inhumanos. En el desconcierto se habla de drogas que robotizan a los elegidos… Criaturas

130 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

first time in the novel that the epithet “monstrous” is used. In the end, Mamoru was imprisoned with a twenty-five-year sentence in a penitentiary in Lima in November 1944 and died fifteen years later due to an injection. His brother Susuma ended up committing suicide through ritual seppuku after fleeing St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital. The novel was published thirty-two years after Mamoru’s death. Paradoxically, Salazar himself seems to fall into stereotypical descriptions of the Japanese, when he attaches to his characters the traditional attributes of the samurai or conceives of them as callous, secret veterans officers of conquering wars: “Naito’s naïve mysticism, now that he has become a ronin (server without a master), will be his only patrimony.”19 Along these lines, we learn that in the Itsuku-Shima sect, to which Mamoru and most male members of his family and their ancestors belong (except for Tamotu), “the concepts of strength and honor of the medieval samurai are mixed with the absolute obedience imposed during childhood by Hagakure education and the purest ideals of Zen Buddhism.”20 The narrator adds that the members of this fraternity are fearless warriors who see war and religion as one same thing. Although neither Mamoru, during the narrator’s interview with him in prison, nor his wife Sumiko Takeda provide any useful information about the massacre, Ismael’s chance meeting with Claude Eatherly will be key to disclosing the mystery. Eatherly, based on the namesake real-life US pilot of a weather reconnaissance aircraft that supported the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was interned in St. Elizabeth psychiatric hospital in Washington D.C., the same institution as Susuma Shimizu, Mamoru’s brother. The former pilot will reveal to Ismael the conversations he had with Mamoru, thus unveiling the secret motives of the massacre. Just as Salazar places the massacre against the background of anti-­ Japanese sentiment during World War II, it is useful to contextualize the publication of La medianoche with the victory of a Japanese Peruvian candidate in the 1990 presidential elections, which made Peruvian writers deformes y sin alma, capaces de obedecer las más inhumanas consignas. Rebaño de seres monstruosos a los cuales hay la obligación de destruir a la brevedad” (56–57). 19  “El ingenuo misticismo de Naíto, ahora que se ha convertido en ronin (servidor sin amo), será su único patrimonio” (82). 20  “Se entremezclan los conceptos de fuerza y honor del samurai de los tiempos medioevales, la obediencia absoluta que impone en la infancia la educación Hagakuré y los más puros ideales del budismo Zen” (93–94).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

131

reconsider the place of Japanese immigration in the national imaginary. Indeed, as evident in the following paragraph at the beginning of the story, Salazar is consciously writing during the Alberto Fujimori era and at a time when Japan had become an economic and geopolitical powerhouse: “Today, as everyone knows, a direct descendant of the unfortunate Japanese of yesteryear, is the President of the Republic of Peru.”21 In the closing paragraphs of the novel, Fujimori’s presidential victory resurfaces: “in the electoral contest a son of Japanese was elected President of Peru.”22 It is evident that the sociopolitical situation of the Japanese community in Peru has changed dramatically throughout the decades and this novel is a literary and historical exploration of that abrupt process. In fact, throughout the novel the first-person narrator, Ismael Ortega, presents an openly pro-Japanese disposition: “How could one think that the uncontrolled force of destiny would end up doing justice to those unfortunate Japanese farmers who, driven by hunger, unemployment and population density, were forced to emigrate from their islands and endure the sum of abuses, offenses and cruelties on the part of the ignorant and racist Peruvian society?”23 Often resorting to Greek mythology to evoke the story as a modern epopee, La medianoche further condemns racism by calling attention to the fact that while Japanese immigrants were often assumed to be spies during World War II, most Peruvians had no problem with Italian immigrants, even though they too were nationals of one of the Axis Powers: “Why were Italians rapidly integrated into the Peruvian imaginary while the Japanese were not? The narrator comes to the conclusion that it was due to Peruvian leaders’ ‘viscous racism’” (125).24 The novel blames president Manuel Prado’s government for accusing Japanese immigrants of being secret aides in a planned Japanese invasion of Peru, when in fact Peruvian leaders’ real motivation was the appropriation of Nikkei assets. It also includes samples of anti-Japanese propaganda by the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) encouraging Peruvians 21  “Hoy, como todo el mundo sabe, un descendiente directo de los desdichados japoneses de antaño, es el Presidente de la República del Perú” (38). 22  “En la contienda electoral salió elegido Presidente del Perú un hijo de japoneses” (242). 23  “¿Cómo se podría haber pensado que la incontrolada fuerza del destino terminaría por hacer justicia a aquellos infelices agricultores japoneses que empujados por el hambre, la falta de ocupación y la densidad poblacional se vieran obligados a emigrar de sus islas y soportar la suma de abusos, atropellos y crueldades por parte de la ignorante y racista sociedad peruana?” (38). 24  “Viscoso racismo.”

132 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

to boycott the Japanese community and accusing the latter of being a fifth column with thousands of officers and soldiers among its ranks who were secretly amassing weapons. In this context, the new editor of La Crónica conceives of the massacre as a tool for self-exploration and sees Nipponophobia during World War II as one of the keys to understand his own country: “In the midst of that chaos caused by my curiosity, another truth came up: my pathetic ignorance about that Peru that I called my homeland. It was alarming to be aware of my ignorance of the country, of my country.”25 Perhaps the fact that Ismael is former law student explains his inclination to seek justice. Along with the perspectives provided by the narrator, the press and the police, there is a fourth source of information in La medianoche. Lima residents’ penchant for gossip is presented as an alternative type of popular history that challenges the official history: “It is the Lima that speaks, the capital of tertulia [social gathering] and gossip … lay sisters’ gossip continues … gossip and comments are infallible chapters of the city’s history. And its soul. Rimac, the indigenous word that provides a name for the river that crosses it means ‘talker.’ That must be the reason for the city’s love of words.”26 Salazar underscores how in this case, the local inclination for rumor—a colonial tradition in his view—furthered the pervasive speculation about the real reason behind the massacre: theft; a vendetta between Japanese families; a secret society with “The black dragon” as its symbol; the Japanese Imperial’s army secret plans to annex Peru and other Pacific nations; anti-Japanese repression; and the almost infinite reach of Mamoru’s and, by extension, of the Japanese’s evil and cruelty. Salazar also looks back to colonial times in search of the origins of Peruvian racism: “During the viceroyalty the Spanish master fed the black slave with feelings of hatred towards the Indian, giving the African a certain kind of familiarity through tasks as a watchman or a domestic servant, through which the black, ignorant and confused, felt that he had to appropriate his employer’s manners, including, of course, the distance and

25  “En medio de ese caos provocado por mi curiosidad saltó otra verdad: mi patética ignorancia sobre ese Perú que yo denominaba mi patria. Fue alarmante tomar conciencia de mi desconocimiento del país, de mi país” (118). 26  “Es la Lima que habla, la capital de la tertulia y el chisme… sigue el chisme de las beatas… el chisme y el comentario es infalible capítulo de la historia de la urbe. Y su alma. Rímac, el vocablo indígena que da nombre al río que atraviesa significa ‘hablador.’ Por allí le debe venir a la ciudad ese gusto por la palabra” (124).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

133

contempt towards indigenous workers.”27 As often happens with literature by and about Asian migrations to Latin America, the defense of the Japanese is done here at the expense of people of African descent: “But the Japanese are not the unfortunate tribesmen from the shores of Gambia or Angola who, after being hunted like vermin, are sold according to their weight and stature in the flourishing colonial slave markets. No, the children of the Japanese archipelago feel bound, without distinction, to millennial divine traditions.”28 One of the main differences, according to Salazar’s novel, is that many of these Japanese immigrants were veterans of the Japanese Imperial Army. Once in Peru, they founded their own newspapers, protested their employers’ abuses, and fled the haciendas whenever there was a breach of contract. Salazar then reviews the history of the Chinese coolies who inherited slavery from Africans, all the way to the time of the Japanese immigrants, who themselves inherited the Yellow Peril myth from the Chinese: “Japanese emigrants, in a way, are part of that long chain of despised servants.”29 Once again, the author declares his sympathy for the Japanese community and exhibits his awareness of race relations in Peru, as well as of the abrupt path to social integration followed by the Japanese. Overall, even though apparently Mamoru only participated as a messenger in the massacre, he became a scapegoat: the abject foreign element within the body of the nation was disciplined by a nation-state at war with Japan and terrified, in part because of US wartime propaganda, by the possibility of a Japanese Imperial Army invasion. Yet his image in the popular mind continued to be marked by the stigma of a ferocious monstrosity.

27  “Durante el virreinato el amo español alimentó al esclavo negro con sentimientos de odio hacia el indio, dando al africano cierto tipo de familiaridad a través de tareas como vigilante o sirviente casero, con lo cual el negro, ignorante y confuso, sentía que tenía que hacer suyos los modales de su patrón, incluyendo, por supuesto, la distancia y el desprecio hacia los trabajadores indígenas” (75). 28  “Pero los japoneses no son los desgraciados tribeños de las costas de Gambia o Angola que cazados como alimañas, primero, son vendidos al peso y estatura en los florecientes mercados coloniales de esclavos. No, los hijos del archipiélago nipón se sienten ligados, sin distinción, a milenarias tradiciones divinas” (76). 29  “Los emigrantes japoneses, en cierta manera, forman parte de esa larga cadena de despreciados siervos” (76).

134 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

Chinese Vampires in Asesinato en una lavandería china

In the 1996 novel Asesinato en una lavandería china (henceforth Asesinato) by Mexican author Juan José Rodríguez (1970) the Chinese are not just figuratively called monsters, as in Salazar’s La medianoche; they literally are monsters, vampires.30 The protagonist and first-person narrator, Alejandro Medina (a surname that evokes Moorish Otherness in the medieval Iberian Peninsula), tells the story of how he met a family of Chinese Mexican vampires in Mazatlan, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa (the author’s native place), and fell in love with one of them. He describes this Chinese community in a positive light: “Those Chinese from the other side of the world had prospered in Mazatlan, without reaching an exaggerated wealth. Simple people, dedicated to honest crafts, grocery stores, tailor shops and vegetable gardens.”31 Yet, as is typical of Orientalist texts, their stereotypical smile evokes “inscrutability”: “with the smile that the Chinese have when talking about their harvest of cabbages or planning a murder.”32 It is part of the mysterious aura that surrounds the Chinese, the Chinese Mexicans, and the vampires in the novel. In fact, Chineseness adds even more mystery to the vampiric condition in the novel: at one point, the narrator learns, for instance, that the Chinese can tell the time by looking at the eyes of cats and the future by looking at the eyes of dead people. As in La medianoche, Asian characters in Asesinato are also associated with violence. Svetlana Tyutina suggests that the constant and routine presence of violence in the novel, including the tribal revenge-style murder of Alejandro’s relative or a massacre performed by the Tong gang members that aimed to instigate fear in the community, can be seen as a metaphor, a reflection of modern political processes 30  Rodríguez Ramos has also published the poetry collection Ven y mira (1988); the short story collection Con sabor a limonero (1988), and the novels El náufrago del mar amarillo, El gran invento del siglo XX, Mi nombre es Casablanca, and La casa de las lobas. Eduardo Rossoff’s 2012 Mexican film Reencarnación: una historia de amor is based on Asesinato en una lavandería china. 31  “Aquellos chinos llegados del otro lado del mundo habían prosperado en Mazatlán, sin alcanzar una riqueza exagerada. Gente sencilla, entregada a oficios honrados, tiendas de abarrotes, sastrerías y huertas de legumbres” (13). 32  “Con la sonrisa que tienen los chinos al hablar de su cosecha de repollos o planear un asesinato” (13–14).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

135

in Mexico. The violent manifestations of human nature in the novel echo the broader context of the tumultuous modern Mexican history and various social issues, including drug trafficking and traditional gender roles. (75)

According to Tyutina, therefore, this ethnic violence comes to represent contemporary Mexican tumultuous reality altogether. While it may well be the case, this conclusion still leaves unanswered the question as to why Rodríguez chose a Chinese ethnicity for his vampires. The plot explains what led some of the Chinese characters to resort to violence. We learn that in 1917 Wang Fong, an opium-smoking but honest Chinese man, saved the life of the narrator’s grandfather, a gambler of Arab and Spanish ancestry. Some time later, the latter befriended a Chinese Mexican vampire, Rafael Yeng, and together they moved to San Francisco, leaving his son Francisco Medina (the narrator’s father) behind to live among Mazatlan’s honest Chinese. In partnership with an American named Jack Sullivan in San Francisco, they made a living in human trafficking: helping the Chinese cross the US-Mexico border illegally after their forced exodus from Northwestern Mexico. Soon, however, Rafael Yeng and Jack Sullivan landed in trouble with a Chinese tong (secret society often tied to criminal activity) in San Francisco for violating their code and interacting with vampires. As a result, there is a massacre in the back room of a laundry room (hence the novel’s title), which the grandfather survives. Yet, the tong, following an ancient tradition—reminiscent of the Japanese secret society’s violent tradition in the previous novel—decides that a member of his family has to be assassinated: the innocent victim will be Wang Fong’s beautiful daughter, whom Francisco Medina had married. We are told that even though Francisco later married the narrator’s mother, he was never the same man again. Yolanda, the beautiful vampire who becomes the protagonist’s lover, has a violent brother (he beats her in one of the scenes) named Lisandro, who belongs to a vampire drug-dealing cartel. After confessing to Alejandro that he is indeed a vampire, he proceeds to demythicize all the traditional stereotypes and assumptions about vampires.33 He then asks 33  According to Lisandro, their vampiric condition is of genetic nature. They do not grow fangs or kill people by sucking all their blood, since they only need two ounces of blood once a month. They are not affected by garlic or sunlight, but they do sleep much less than humans. Vampires are not immortal but they live longer than humans, an average of 140 years. According to Lisandro, they are less interested in material things and have more patience than humans. They can also see their reflection in the mirror.

136 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

Alejandro to help him kill the pathologically evil Carlos Goldoni, another vampire who killed Lisandro’s mother and the narrator’s father’s Chinese wife in the drug-dealing vendetta: “Goldoni betrayed my grandfather, he took him to that trap in the clean laundry room, all to settle accounts with a rebellious vampire that hindered him: Rafael Yeng.”34 It turns out that Goldoni was also damaging the business of Rafael Yeng and the protagonist’s grandfather by denouncing unauthorized Chinese immigrants to Mexican authorities. In the end, Goldoni machine guns Lisandro and cuts Yolanda’s hand before she killed him. In a six-month prolepsis at novel’s end, we see Yolanda trying to cope with the deaths of her mother and brother, and living in peace with Alejandro. As seen, this vampire murder mystery contextualizes the plot against the background of historical events, such as anti-Chinese prejudice and persecution in 1920s northern Mexico: the Chinese are exiled from the Pacific coast by Mexican government’s decrees together with popular racism, Chinese businesses and orchards are burned down, and there are numerous Sinophobe demonstrations in the streets. The Comité Antichino Pro-Raza (Pro-Mexican People Anti-Chinese Committee) slanders Chinese immigrants through caricatures and publishes articles denigrating them. As a result, Chinese families end up being separated, their properties are sold at very low prices, and those who remain in Mexico become déclassé: Some flee. They hide in the worst areas, the slums, total misery, others go to the countryside. Those who have money bribe authorities, buy Mexican citizenship… Many stay, but there are more who are leaving and then, over the years, it appears little by little that the hatred has diminished, because they are not as many as before. Among them, Wang Fong, Rafael Yeng, Dolores Avicena Fong.35

How are we to interpret this association of violence and vampirism with Chineseness in the Asesinato? As Moraña explains, “Vampires are strangers 34  “Goldoni traicionó a mi abuelo, lo llevó a esa trampa en la nítida lavandería, todo para ajustar cuentas con un vampiro rebelde que le estorbaba: Rafael Yeng” (53). 35  “Algunos huyen. Se esconden en lo peor, los barrios bajos, la miseria total, otros se van a los campos. Los que tienen dinero sobornan autoridades, compran la ciudadanía mexicana… Muchos se quedan, pero son más los que se van y después, con los años, aparece poco a poco que el odio ha disminuido, porque ya no son tantos como antes. Entre ellos Wang Fong, Rafael Yeng, Dolores Avicena Fong” (57).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

137

inclined to carnality, they are unproductive and hedonistic.”36 Indeed, in the novel the protagonist, Francisco Medina, travels to a seedy neighborhood by the seaside in Mazatlan, where he meets Yolanda Avicena, a Chinese Mexican woman (only her mother was of Chinese ancestry) who is immediately exoticized and eroticized: “A beautiful girl in a floral dress that reveals her shoulders and the birth of her breasts… She looks at me… before asking a question or shaking her hair back in a feline attack gesture… with the same and enigmatic oriental features, the look of a dormant panther resting on the bank of the Yellow River.”37 In this first Orientalist description, she is twice compared to a feline, which evokes for the narrator the “enigmatic” mystery of the Orient (coincidentally, the book cover of La medianoche shows tiger eyes). From the beginning, therefore, Yolanda is described as a sensual seductress who does not hesitate to make love with a stranger who suddenly appears in to her neighborhood.38 In this particular case, the exacerbated sexuality of vampires is complemented by Orientalist assumptions about Asian women’s sexuality, exploited throughout the novel with sensual (sometimes even poetic) scenes in which Yolanda is often associated with different felines. As Moraña puts it, “The monstrosity of the vampire is expressed sublimated as a metaphor of an uncontrollable passion in which desire and abjection are inseparable.”39 Indeed, this simultaneous repressed desire and open abjection, along with the assumption of an uncanny (strangely familiar, incongruent, ominous, threatening) aura, can be equally applied, in my view, to vampires and Chinese characters in the novel. Moving the framework to the realm of the nation-state, this association of vampirism and Chineseness leads to the symbolic expression of repressed sentiments, desires, and impulses toward this ethnic minority in Mexico. 36  “Los vampiros son forasteros inclinados a la carnalidad, improductivos y hedonistas” (316). 37  “Una hermosa muchacha con un vestido floreado que deja al descubierto sus hombros y el nacimiento de sus senos… Ella me mira… antes de hacer una pregunta o agitar la cabellera hacia atrás en un gesto de felino ataque… con los mismos y enigmáticos rasgos orientales, la mirada de una adormecida pantera descansando a la orilla del río Amarillo” (10–11). 38  And the characters are not only Orientalized but also Mazatlan: “Mazatlan has many faces and those paths remind me of Morocco or Calcutta, of the unknown, the snake at the foot of the staircase” (“Mazatlán tiene muchos rostros y esos rumbos me remiten a Marruecos o Calcuta, a lo desconocido, la serpiente al pie de la escalera” [33]). The Oriental aura of the city seems to add to the atmosphere of secrecy and mystery. 39  “La monstruosidad del vampire se expresa sublimada como metáfora de una pasión incontrolable en la que el deseo y abyección resultan inseparables” (327).

138 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

Moraña adds that vampires are typically associated with the peripheral imaginary, as well as with migration, mestizaje, and identitarian politics. Vampires converge at times with racial otherness, racial discrimination, and fear of foreign penetration: “The monstrification of the Other is almost always carried out in the context of sociopolitical conflict and is particularly linked to the ethno-racial policies implemented by the populist and authoritarian state.”40 And because they can live beyond death (in Asesinato, however, they only live longer than humans), they become repositories of historical information. Undeniably, the trope of the vampire in this novel is directly associated with foreign alterity and the foreign condition. As stated, the exotic and otherworldly world of vampires is complemented with the supposedly mysterious—perhaps illegitimate— otherness of the Chinese Other within the body of the nation. Chinese Mexican characters are further marginalized by the history of Sinophobia in northern and Pacific Mexican states, which provoked the exodus of most of them. Their ancestors had hide in seedy neighborhoods, forced to live among vampires, some of them of their same ethnicity: “Those of us with Asian blood who had vampiric origin were few, but the rest of the Chinese accepted us well, they already knew our true nature and we also helped them with our work.”41 Therefore, at least in Asesinato there is a sociohistorical justification for the kind of people (or monsters) the Chinese in Mazatlan have become: drug dealers and vampires.

Conclusion In different ways, Salazar’s La medianoche and Rodríguez’s Asesinato echo, through images of monsters and vampires, the widespread fear of an Asian Other awkwardly integrated into the body of the nation, even though the authors and narrators are sympathetic to their Asian characters. The monstrification of Asian characters in both novels also suggests that, despite major differences in their respective historical circumstances, Japanese immigrants inherited the “yellow peril” myth from earlier Chinese immigrants, before it was transformed into the “model minority” 40  “La monstrificación del Otro se realiza casi siempre en el contexto del conflicto sociopolítico y está particularmente vinculado a las políticas etno-raciales implementadas por el estado populista y autoritario” (Moraña 322). 41  “Éramos pocos los de sangre asiática que teníamos origen vampírico, pero el resto de los chinos nos aceptaron bien, ellos ya conocían la verdadera naturaleza de nosotros y también les ayudábamos con nuestro trabajo” (47).

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

139

myth, the new version of a similar stereotype that essentializes entire ethnic groups.42 Sinophobic discourse, such as the one propagated by the Comité Antichino Pro-Raza mentioned in Asesinato and others disseminated by different xenophobic organizations during the first decades of the twentieth century, produced a number of stereotypical myths that would later be incorporated into Nipponophobia. In both novels, Asian immigrants are associated with extreme violence. They also go from a social position of relative wealth and socioeconomic stability to one of social marginalization. Whereas in the case of La medianoche the biopolitical disciplinary mechanisms applied to the foreign body are carried out through torture, imprisonment, and a questionable injection that turned out to be lethal, in Asesinato the Chinese are associated not only with violence but also with drug trafficking, a possible outgrowth of the traditional link between the Chinese and opium trafficking and consumption. Yet, in this novel, as Tyutina observes, “the Other becomes a victim of the circumstances, rather than the perpetrator of violence; forced to abandon the traditional jobs and flee into the inhabitable lands, Lisandro and his men find the only source of income accessible to them, the cocaine business” (81). It was, therefore, governmental and popular Sinophobia in Northern Mexico that pushed the Chinese community to their current marginal space. Social anxiety about the arrival of foreigners from an unknown, faraway land, with their “exotic” phenotypes and customs leads to their orientalist representation through monstrous imagery. In Moraña’s words, “The monster works as an identitarian counter-discourse and as a paradigm of menacing and recondite alterities.”43 The presence of Asian bodies within the body of the nation disturbs the conventional mestizo identities of Peru and Mexico. The discourse of mestizaje—which excludes the worldviews of non-whites and non-indigenous people, all the while favoring whiteness and European cultures under the guise of incorporating the indigenous 42  In many respects, Japanese were treated quite differently as a result of the Meiji government’s involvement in their overseas subjects’ protection and Japan’s improved reputation after recent military victories over China and Russia, as Jerry García explained in his Looking Like the Enemy (2014). García adds other reasons, such as the Japanese community’s higher level of social integration and intermarriage; a relatively small community that was not seen as an economic threat; the friendly relationship between the Mexican and Japanese governments. 43  “El monstruo sirve como contradiscurso identitario y como paradigma de alteridades amenazantes y recónditas” (31).

140 

I. LÓPEZ-CALVO

Other—renders Asian immigrants as abject bodies, as a disease that must be extricated. The literary monstrification of the Asian outsider could, therefore, be a symptom or reification of the disappointment for the failure of homogenizing national projects. The “Asian among us” is at once strangely familiar and abject, thus producing the subjective horror represented in the literary monster. In a way, the representation of the immigrant or Asian Other as a vampire or other type of monster helps differentiate between one’s own sense of (national) self and the threatening, repulsive, “foreign” Other, thus disrupting the aforementioned “strangely familiar” feeling: Asian immigrants and their descendants are forcefully cast outside the social order; they are seen as that which is not us, thus interrupting the doubling of the ego. Yet there is a significant difference between the two novels. Even though Salazar, in La medianoche, shows a high level of empathy for the Nikkei and their history in Peru, the protagonist and his ethnic group are still intrinsically associated with an Orientalist and stereotypical view of the Japanese man as a ruthless Samurai warrior or a kamikaze mindless robot. Likewise, Japanese women, embodied in the character of Mamoru’s wife, are equally associated with the stereotypically submissive and loyal geisha, always willing to please her husband. Moreover, Mamoru’s eventual imprisonment and final elimination by injection in prison seems to work as a sort of catharsis for Peruvian society: it is the cleansing of the contaminating element in society and the metonymical elimination of a threatening body (the Nikkei community) that instills fear. This symbolic purification of inner Otherness, of one’s darker side, brings restoration of the social order and renewal of the national (mestizo) project. By contrast, in Rodríguez’s Asesinato, even though the main Chinese Mexican characters are drug dealers and vampires, they are much more relatable. Moreover, as social beings they display higher levels of agency, particularly in Yolanda Avicena’s case. As Tyutina argues, in this last novel “the author invites his reader to overcome the fear of the ‘unknown’ in order to contemplate the possibility of a unified national character that is an amalgamation of the different identities present in Mexico during its historical development” (82–83). The Chinese and Chinese Mexicans in Asesinato, even if some of them have become vampires, are actually less monstrous and less foreign than the Japanese in La medianoche. Perhaps the main reason for these contrasts is that whereas the Nikkei in La medianoche are first-generation immigrants, the main Asian characters in Asesinato are third-generation Mexican American mestizos who display a

8  BIOPOLITICS, ORIENTALISM, AND THE ASIAN IMMIGRANT AS MONSTER… 

141

completely integrated and Mexicanized behavior, including a native command of the Spanish language. Furthermore, at the level of affect, whereas Mamoru in La medianoche inspires mostly repulsion in most of the other characters in the novel (except for the first-person narrator), the mestizo Chinese Mexican vampires produce a mixture of fear (Lisandro Avicena) and desire, as emblematized by the protagonist Alejandro Medina’s relationship with Yolanda Avicena. Their passionate romance, particularly in the scenes of peace and happiness in the novel’s denouement, announce ethnic reconciliation for the Mexican nation. Altogether, the presence of these assimilated Chinese Mexicans does not alter the status quo (theirs is certainly not the only drug-trafficking cartel) and they get along well with other Mexicans.

References Foucault, Michel. 2008. The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. Ed. Michel Senellart. New York: Picador. García, Jerry. 2014. Looking like the enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican state, and US hegemony, 1897–1945. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Meza, Ramón (Psedonym Maz, R.E.). 1978. Carmela. Havana: Arte y Literatura. Moraña, Mabel. 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Rodríguez, Juan José. 1996. Asesinato en una lavandería china. Mexico City: Conaculta. Salazar, Jorge. 1991. La medianoche del japonés. Lima: El Barranco. Thorndike, Guillermo, et al. 1996. Los imperios del sol: una historia de los japoneses en el Perú. Lima: Brasa. Tyutina, Svetlana V. 2018. The peripheral and the ephemeral: Power struggle, violence and fear in the depiction of chinos in Mexican literature and visual art. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 8 (3 Fall): 64–84.

CHAPTER 9

Militancy and Imperial Masculinity in Sugi Takeo’s “Revenge” and Vicente Amorim’s Dirty Hearts Seth Jacobowitz

The Japanese Brazilian community has never been a monolithic entity, least of all during the traumatic era of World War II (WWII) that effected a permanent epistemological rupture in its midst. No single historical period challenges our understanding of the ideological conflict forced upon Japanese immigrants as individuals or as a collective than that bracketed by Japan’s actions in World War II, from its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to the Shō wa Emperor’s “Jewel Voice” radio broadcast announcing Japan’s defeat on August 15, 1945. Of course, the overseas Japanese were neither unaware of, nor fully inoculated against, the efforts at total war mobilization already underway in Japan such as the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement (Kokka sodōin-hō; 1938) and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei yokusankai; 1940) implemented by Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro that aimed at unifying

S. Jacobowitz (*) CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, The City College of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_9

143

144 

S. JACOBOWITZ

industry, government, mass media, and military production under a single totalitarian system. Tensions inherent in the Japanese Brazilian community since the inception of state-sponsored mass migration in June 1908 would erupt into internecine strife precisely when Japanese imperial subjectivity was not only threatened, but foreclosed upon, by Japan’s unconditional surrender and loss of its empire. When Brazil entered the war on the Allied side in August 1942, laws targeting immigrants from the Axis powers fell disproportionately hard on the Japanese Brazilian community. In the previous decade they had already seen their once unrestricted migration severely limited to about 5,000 people a year in consequence of anti-Japanese sentiments led by Miguel Couto, Arthur Neiva, Felix Pacheco, and Xavier de Oliveira ratified in the Constitutional Congress of 1934. From 1938, the community was further targeted by a raft of immigration policies designed to discipline and punish them into the mainstream of Brazilian political and cultural life set by Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo (1937–1945).1 The prohibition of the Japanese language press and even the right to speak Japanese in public, coupled with a confiscation of assets, pressure on Japanese immigrant-­ owned businesses, and forced relocation of immigrants from the coast and the  Japantown in Liberdade,  São Paulo, profoundly alienated vast segments of the Japanese Brazilian population from mainstream society. This left a vacuum that would be exploited by ultranationalist factions in their midst, chief among them Shindō Renmei (League of the Imperial Way). Although nominally an organization that pledged its loyalty to the Japanese emperor and state, Shindō Renmei entirely confined its political and cultural activities to Brazil. During the war, it raised monetary aid and engaged in forms of volunteerism ostensibly to unify the community, as well as the opportunistic destruction of agricultural products and fields seen as beneficial to the Allies in their war against Japan. Following Japan’s 1  On April 18, 1938 Decree-Law 383, Article 1, prohibited immigrants from “exercising any activity of a political nature, or intrude, directly or indirectly, in the public affairs of the nation”(https://www2.camara.leg.br/legin/fed/declei/1930-1939/decreto-lei-383-18-abril1938-350781-publicacaooriginal-1-pe.html, accessed December 1, 2019). The remaining articles prohibited all media, civic organizations, and cultural activities that introduced foreign political parties or ideologies, with Article 8 reserving the right for the Ministry of Justice and Internal Affairs to shut down any periodical found to be in violation of the law. This and further decrees regulated not only the press and other forms of communication, but forbade teaching foreign languages to children or for non-Brazilians to administer educational institutions, forcing many Japanese schools to operate clandestinely even before Brazil entered the war (Handa 1987: 596–97). Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, the translations from Portuguese and Japanese are my own.

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

145

defeat, the group’s mission intensified into a coordinated disinformation campaign, and targeted attacks against opposing members of the community, resulting in no fewer than  23 political assassinations and 147 wounded persons. By no means the sole organization of its kind during the era, it was nevertheless the largest, most dangerous, and had the most lasting impact on for the Japanese immigrant communities in Brazil and Latin America as a whole.2 Historical and legal documents can provide considerable insight into the double bind that resulted from the competing demands of Japanese Brazilian transnational belonging, but they do not readily afford access to the narratives of intergenerational conflict or the degrees of militancy captured in literature and film, especially with respect to the ideological construct that I call here “imperial masculinity.” Mindful of the asymmetries and aporias in cultural production occasioned by the war and its aftermath, this chapter situates the short story “Fukushū” (Revenge 1938) by prolific prewar Japanese immigrant writer Sugi Takeo (pen name of Takei Makoto, 1909–2011) in dialog with Vicente Amorim’s critically acclaimed contemporary Brazilian film Corações Sujos (Dirty hearts 2011).3 Some perspective is in order before such a comparison can be effectuated. “Fukushū” was first published in São Paulo in the short-lived Japanese-language literary journal Chiheisen (Horizon) and subsequently reprinted as one of the canonical works of Japanese Brazilian immigrant literature by the Koronia Bungakkai (Colônia Literary Association) in 1975. In contrast to the near-total obscurity of Sugi’s work, even in 2  As Daniel M. Masterson and Sayaka Funada have observed in “The Japanese in Brazil and Peru: A Comparative Perspective,” “Influenced by Brazil’s Shindō Renmei, Peru’s militantly nationalistic Japanese formed the Aikoku Doshi-kai (Society of the Japanese Patriots of Peru) to perpetuate the myth of Japan’s invincibility. This society did not engage in the extremist tactics associated with Shindō Renmei in Brazil, but its very existence was used by the Peruvian government to justify its restrictive measures against the Japanese following World War II” (in Baily and Miguez 2003: 129). Handa Tomoo likewise relates a noteworthy incident: “On April 1, 1946, the same day that Shindō Renmei murdered industrialist and community leader, Nomura Chūzaburō , they also attacked the Brazilian residence of Furuya Shigetsuna, Japan’s former envoy to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and before that a minister to Mexico. Furuya, who had become a widely respected leader and landholder in the community since he emigrated to Brazil in 1928, escaped without injury” (Handa 1987: 660). 3  Ignacio López-Calvo (2019) provides the most comprehensive study to date of postwar Nikkei Brazilian literature and film, including a chapter dedicated to Morais’ Dirty Hearts, its cinematic adaptation by Vicente Amorim, and Jorge Okubaro’s novel in Portuguese O Súdito (Banzai, Massateru!) (The imperial subject [Banzai, Massateru!], 2008).

146 

S. JACOBOWITZ

modern Japanese literary studies today, Amorim’s film, which features a predominantly Japanese national cast, garnered numerous accolades on the domestic and international film circuit, culminating in the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2013. This screenplay by David França Mendes was, in fact, adapted from Fernando Morais’ Corações Sujos: A História da Shindō Renmei (Dirty hearts: the history of Shindō Renmei, 2000), which was awarded the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Journalism in Brazil 2001. The book and film alike document, and to a certain extent, sensationalize, how the largest of these pro-imperialist extremist groups violently enforced unquestioning acceptance of Japan’s inevitable victory in WWII within the Japanese immigrant community from 1942 into the late 1940s. It is inescapable, therefore, to recognize that while “Revenge” preserves the authentic word of the Japanese overseas brethren (kaigai dōhō), the two versions of Dirty Hearts have assumed iconic status in mainstream Brazil and the wider world as representative narratives for the rise and fall of Shindō Renmei. While taking into account  the decidedly non-isomorphic nature that comparison between “Revenge” and Dirty Hearts entails, I seek to disclose how both portray a crisis in male homosociality4 and the hypocrisy behind its expression as imperial subjectivity. These divided loyalties not only polarized the community, but also paradoxically served to midwife the community’s transformation into a diaspora that is Brazilian by nationality, yet Japanese Brazilian, or “Nikkei,” by ethnicity.5 Despite the violence and discord that attended this era, imperial Japan, the sublime object of ideology, was in the end irrevocably superseded by the exigencies of the postwar world order. ***

4  Drawing upon its origins in the social sciences, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick defines homosociality as the continuum in same sex relations between sexual and social affairs and which can reveal the boundaries between them. See Between Men, pp. 1–19. 5  If it is beyond the scope of this chapter to interrogate more fully the philosophical contradictions inherent in the modern construction of nation and ethnos, I can at least provisionally note here that Japanese Brazilian (nipo-brasileiro) and Nikkei do not precisely correspond as legal or cultural categories. In fact, the ways this “ethnicity” enfolds into, but also is held distinct from “nationality” in contemporary Brazil and Japan, as well as something that obtains between them, is a continued testament to the unfinished business that Jeffrey Lesser fittingly calls “negotiating national identity.”

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

147

Sugi Takeo’s short story “Revenge,” which is set in September 1937, depicts the uneasy love triangle between a Nisei farm boy named Maekawa and his neighbor Sachiko. She is being pursued, meanwhile, by a wealthy, slightly older Issei suitor named Aida. Their ages are never divulged, but Maekawa and Sachiko are presumably teenagers, while Aida is in his twenties or thirties. Aida, who dismissively describes Maekawa as “one of those born here who can barely read Japanese,”6 is in charge of the community’s young men’s association (seinenkai). He does not see that his dismissive remarks about Maekawa could also apply to Sachiko as well, and fails to recognize that his arrogance will cost him the chance to win her over. Sachiko’s mother, on the other hand, has no such qualms about him. She sees Aida as the better match for her daughter and tries to play matchmaker by encouraging her daughter to accept his offer of a shopping trip into town the following Sunday as a ploy to bring them into more intimate acquaintance. When Sachiko rebuffs him in order to meet Maekawa instead, Aida seeks revenge by trying to discredit and humiliate the younger man. That Sunday, Maekawa and Sachiko serendipitously meet and lose track of time while taking a walk through the countryside, the air suffused by the fragrant white flowers of the coffee plantation. Unbeknownst to either of them, Aida has organized the young men’s association to perform the annual labor of fixing their pothole-ridden country roads without sending Maekawa the usual aviso (Sugi employs the Portuguese loan word for an announcement, as was the custom among the immigrants themselves). He then plans to donate the proceeds raised by their roadwork to Japan’s national defense fund. This road maintenance was a regular feature in the Japanese Brazilian colonies in remote areas, as the federal, state, and municipal governments rarely provided adequate services or infrastructure. Instead, supported by private and public capital from Japan, the Japanese Brazilian communities built their own schools, hospitals, and other essential institutions. They also formed agricultural cooperatives and other, smaller associations such as are depicted in the text. All the while, these colonies preserved close economic and cultural ties with their homeland. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese language remained the lingua franca and language of instruction for the second generation (Nisei) living in the countryside. The young men’s association evening gathering is located in the “shabbily built classroom” [tatetsuke no warui kyōshitsu] (Sugi 1975: 68), likely a one-room schoolhouse. Maekawa arrives late, as the young men are singing their danka, or group song, before beginning the meeting. 6

 Sugi Takeo, “Fukushū,” Koronia shōsetsu senshū, 67.

148 

S. JACOBOWITZ

Maekawa attempts to sneak into the back, but the squeaky door betrays his presence to Aida, whose eyes flash as he awaits his opportunity to denounce his rival. It is worth quoting Aida’s speech at length, which reveals the broader geopolitical stakes behind their civic duties: To whom can we give thanks for living safely in this country of Brazil? It goes without saying, to our homeland Japan. If you want to know how terrible it is to be a people without a state, you need only look at the persecution of the Jews. And to belong not only to a state, but to our Japan, with its unbroken imperial line, our national polity (kokutai) unequalled anywhere in the world—what would it be to lose such one’s country and endure the misery of civil war like the Chinese? (Sugi 1975: 68)

Admonishing the young men against the selfish pursuit of pleasure and profit in Brazil, far from Japan during its state of emergency, he singles out in his lecture a certain unnamed youth, who instead of doing his small part for the nation along with the others, went off with a girl to have fun. Understanding perfectly well whom Aida is referring to, and the hypocrisy behind those words, Maekawa rises to his feet and loudly challenges him to name that irresponsible person. He begins to rebut Aida’s accusations, insisting he never received the aviso to join the others, and simply ran into Sachiko by accident. Yet overwhelmed by the sudden attention from the crowded room, he rushes away from the schoolhouse building and burst into tears of anger and humiliation. His friend Gondō follows him outside, reassuring Maekawa that he, too, sees through Aida: “Does he think he’s a patriot (aikokusha)? That guy is just good at self-promotion” (Sugi 1975: 70). This was Aida’s way of getting revenge, Maekawa realizes, simply because Sachiko preferred his company to Aida’s. “The guy is a coward,” Maekawa exclaims to Gondō . “So I’m unpatriotic because I didn’t know about the stupid road cleaning work?” (70). The two boys laugh at Aida’s transparent attempts to conceal his true agenda as they walk home in the dark down the empty country road. It is highly unlikely that “Revenge” could have been published in Japan in 1938, when ultranationalist sentiment was flying high after Japan’s conquest of Shanghai and Nanjing occurred late in the previous year. In fact, by the late 1930s many established authors in Japan who did not wish to participate in pro-imperialist and militarist causes either ceased writing altogether, or dedicated themselves to less controversial projects to avoid the fate of those imprisoned, tortured, or killed for their political views.

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

149

The proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji, who died in police custody in 1933, was already an example of which few needed to be reminded. Given the repressive climate that had likewise emerged in Brazil by 1938, it was probably for the best Sugi followed a common practice at the time and published his stories under a pseudonym. In her informative study The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil, Barbara Weinstein recalls the Nisei Brazilians who served on the Paulista side in the Constitutional Revolution of 1932. Although few in number, their presence belies the notion all Japanese immigrants were blindly loyal to Japan. Indeed, Weinstein’s research reveals the often strikingly different obligations toward national identification between Issei and Nisei Brazilians: The pro-Constitutionalist press also celebrated the Paulista patriotism of two young voluntários of Japanese descent, both students at the law school. In an interview with O Estado de São Paulo, the father of José Yamashiro praised his son, who “as a Brazilian and Paulista … obeyed the natural impulse to take up arms to defend [his] State. (Weinstein 2015: 126)7

This is a valuable corrective to facile notions of intergenerational lockstep. At the same time, we must also recognize that the Nisei fighting for the Paulista partisans, who were quickly defeated by the federal government, inevitably contributed to the Vargas administration’s willingness to restrict their numbers and impose further conditions to Brazilianize the population, taking the lead from the Yellow Peril and eugenicist politicians in Rio de Janeiro. Despite the fact that Yamashiro and his fellow Niseis’ patriotism was expressed against a coup d’état and the usurpation of democracy (a recurring motif in modern Brazilian political history), the outlook in the years ahead for the community as a whole was darkened by heightened perceptions of divided loyalties to the State of São Paulo, as well as Japan, rather than the federal government.8 The war era was a period of literary silence for the Japanese Brazilian community that coincided with the upsurge in ultranationalist sentiment  The brackets appear as per Weinstein’s translation from the Portuguese.  To this day the uprising that began on July 9, 1932 when five students were killed by federal troops while protesting the coup is still widely commemorated in São Paulo, but not in the nation as a whole. This includes annual state holiday on July 9, and the date also lends its name to a major thoroughfare that cuts through the city, a university (UNINOVE), a hospital, and so on. 7 8

150 

S. JACOBOWITZ

and action, and one from which the nascent Japanophone literary scene championed by Sugi  never fully recovered. The repressive state mechanisms that shuttered the Japanese press in Brazil from 1942 to 1945 paradoxically empowered the clandestine activity that further radicalized a large segment of the Japanese Brazilian population. Yet my investigation of the Japanese language newspapers, magazines and literature during the peak immigration years of the 1920s and 1930s reveals no such public expressions  of imperial militancy  within the Japanese Brazilian community. What one finds instead, and with alarming frequency, are announcements about the state of emergency in Japan due to political assassinations. These occurrences, along with other world events such as the Great Depression and the ascendancy of fascism in Europe, were reported quite objectively across the four main newspapers that served the community. As regards imperial ideology, the annual celebration of the emperor’s birthday (Tenchōsetsu) was duly commemorated in the press, but it was a largely secular and commercial affair, not unlike what one sees in the Japanese press today for New Year’s celebrations. Emperor worship or State Shinto as such are not at all in evidence. A significant exception to the question of ideological bias came not from the far right, but from the far left in the anti-authoritarian and socialist editorials of Sakuzō “Sack” Miura (1881–1945) of the Nippak Shimbun. In May 1939 he was expelled for the second time from Brazil in retribution for these provocations.9 Although his advocacy for agricultural cooperatives and labor rights earned him a loyal readership in his own community, he ran afoul of both the Brazilian authorities and the Japanese consul for his satirical criticisms of both governments, as well as his denunciations of the Japanese empire’s military adventures and depredations. His departure caused the closure of his newspaper, which he had run since 1919. It resumed publication under the title Brasil Asahi in July 1940 in recognition that its editorial position was fundamentally changed, effectively rendering it a different paper altogether. Nevertheless, it lends too much credence to the authorities to assume blanket censorship of Japanese language materials was a necessary and 9  Miura had previously been forced to leave Brazil in 1931, although the circumstances for his departure and return unfortunately do not appear in any of the secondary sources consulted in this article. Morais claims that Miura’s second and final deportation came at the request of Shindō Renmei’s political fixer Tsuguo Kishimoto, who Miura blasted in the Nippak Shimbun as the “yellow Rasputin” (Corações Sujos, 307).

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

151

sufficient condition to quash the perils of sedition. As Jeffrey Lesser observes, “even the Portuguese-language [journal] Transiçaõ was shut down when the Nipo-Brazilian Student League was declared illegal” (133). By the same measure, it is justifiable to insist as I do here that immigrant literature (imin bungaku), also known as colonial literature (shokumin bungaku or shokumin bungei), was in fact a moderating force in the Japanese community in Brazil. The formation of the Japanophone literary scene in South America was fed by newspapers such as the Burajiru Jihō, Nippak Shimbun, and Seishū Shimpō that solicited contributions from the community. The abundance of short stories and short-form poetry (haikai/haiku and tanka) in their back pages provided more of a window onto the failures and setbacks suffered by the average newcomer than the successes of any participating group or individual. Glorification of the empire or any other discernible kind of jingoistic sentiment such as Aida espouses in “Revenge,” are nowhere to be found. *** When Brazil entered the war on the Allied side on January 15, 1942, repression of the Japanese community intensified further. As Fernando Morais recounts, disgruntled veterans of the Japanese Imperial Army formed Shindō Renmei that same year in direct consequence of the crackdowns on their community, using the pretext of a Japanese wedding in the town of Marília to gather and celebrate a new pathway to resistance. Both versions of Dirty Hearts begin their narratives with a Brazilian military officer, Captain Edmundo (called Garcia in the film), breaking up a prohibited Japanese gathering, humiliating those present, and wiping his boots with the Japanese flag. In the film, the confrontation leads to the arrest of the group’s leader, a Colonel Watanabe (based on Shindō Renmei co-founder Colonel Kikawa Junji) and his loyalists, who seek to decapitate the Brazilian captain for offending the honor of the imperial flag. This conflates events that involved seven Japanese immigrants in the town of Tupã with the origins of the ultranationalist movement itself. The film inevitably telescopes a complex series of historical events into a cinematically more manageable scale of time, place and dramatis personae, taking even further liberties than the creative non-fiction approach adopted by Morais. Consistent with the insights of William Luhr (1990) and Graeme Turner (1993), and in keeping with David Bordwell’s definition of classic Hollywood cinema, Amorim’s film possesses a familiar

152 

S. JACOBOWITZ

double emplotment of public and private worlds in which world history is retrofitted to an individualistic story of heterosexual romance. The film pivots around the handsome and taciturn, but deeply patriotic Japanese immigrant photographer Takahashi, who is based on Shindō Renmei operative Sakane Eiiti,10 who became one of the group’s most  fervent assassins. Veering into pure fiction, Takahashi’s ultranationalist activities in the film  cost him the love of his wife, Miyuki, and sunders his  tender friendship with  the eight-year-old Nisei  girl Akemi, whose father Takahashi will later kill as a traitor. The moral complexities that beset the Japanese Brazilian community thus boil down to one man’s choice of duty over personal feelings. This renders the film thematically consistent with the central conflict of giri-ninjō that defines postwar Japanese samurai and yakuza genre films. In a profound break with historical fact, moreover, Takahashi belatedly struggles with his conscience when he is commanded to doctor photographs of the war’s end to perpetuate the myth of Japanese victory. He ultimately confronts and kills Watanabe, then turns himself into the police to confess to multiple murders of innocent men. The term Nikkei that is now used to describe this community has often been teleologically projected not only onto the Japanese Brazilian  or transnational Japanese diaspora, but onto their origins in the prewar era. The term did not take hold, however, until after Japan’s loss of the war and its empire, such that wherever Japanese imperial subjects had emigrated they and their descendants now solely became subjects of their adoptive nation. This categorical break from Japanese sovereignty could not make its appearance in Brazil in the immediate postwar era precisely because Shindō Renmei targeted for assassination anyone who openly admitted that Japan lost the war. The recurring label for such individuals in the film is the Japanese word “traitor” (kokuzoku) scrawled on the 10  Takahashi is played by Ihara Tsuyoshi (1963–present), a Japanese actor, writer, and entrepreneur of Korean descent, born and raised in Osaka. He previously had the role of the historical figure Colonel Baron Nishi Takeichi in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), which undoubtedly was a major contributing factor to his casting in Dirty Hearts. He also bears a passing resemblance to Sakane, who appears in several prominent photographs and is the main subject of the seventh chapter in Morais’ book. Considering Ihara’s ethnic background in this act of passing for an ultranationalist Japanese immigrant, it would be remiss to let pass the opportunity to point out that the establishment of the legal category “Korean domicile” (Chōsen-seki) that confers permanent resident status on the so-called Korean residents of Japan (zainichi Kankokujin/Chōsenjin) in lieu of Japanese nationality followed from the same historical processes—Japan’s unconditional surrender and total loss of empire—that produced “Nikkei” in the Americas.

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

153

homes of Shindō Renmei’s victims. Amorim adds the synonymous slur hikokumin (unpatriotic)  to refer to anyone seen as fundamentally un-Japanese. Morais’ central thesis is that Shindō Renmei’s extremism was not only a consequence of the excesses of Japanese militarism clandestinely imported to South America, but arose in response to how the community was abusively treated, especially in the crucible years 1938–1945. The power vacuum that resulted from the departure of Japan’s diplomatic corps would likewise be filled by Kikawa and the kachigumi clandestine organizations, which adopted a hardline rejectionist path from August 1945 after it was clear Japan had been defeated.  In the immediate postwar era, moreover,  journalists, newspaper editors, and civic leaders who publically denounced Shindō Renmei as “good Brazilians” could end up getting shot, stabbed, or letter bombed. One of the first victims of the group was Chūzaburō Nomura on April 1, 1946, an industrialist, former editor of the Nippak Shimbun, and leader in Nisei education. He was thus the second editor of the paper after Miura to be marked for removal. Insofar as Shindō Renmei effectively controlled the community mediasphere, it stood to reason they would violently remove anyone capable of challenging their narrative of the war’s true end and outcomes. On the question of imperial masculinity, moreover, Morais further makes an astute observation about gender imbalance in the make-up of the organization: A week after the death of Chūzaburō Nomura and the frustrated attempt on Shigetsuna Furuya, the police had apprehended more than 2,000 Japanese. Although they varied considerably in age, one peculiarity captured everyone’s attention: there wasn’t a single woman among them—a faithful portrait of the secondary role reserved for women in Japanese culture. (173)

Regardless of the actual numbers of women involved,11 Morais’ claim resonates insofar as it marks a dual chauvinism in terms of Japanese imperialist ideology and the predominantly wounded masculinity that closed ranks 11  Morais later mentions there was only one woman, who identifies herself as “Sachiko,” out of 436 Japanese Brazilians, who in 1946, attended the prestige-laden meeting at the Campos Elíseos Palace with the federal intervener Macedo Soares in a desperate attempt to halt Shindō Renmei’s killing spree. This claim is further bolstered by the list of all federally indicted persons that appears in the book’s epilogue.

154 

S. JACOBOWITZ

around it. Amorim introduces several strong female characters who provide the film with its moral compass independent of Takahashi’s belated crisis of conscience. Three figures predominate: the plucky eight-year-old girl named Sasaki Akemi, who is the Brazilian-­born Nisei daughter of a neighbor whom Takahashi will eventually assassinate as a traitor; Akemi's mother, Naomi;  and  Takahashi’s wife Miyuki, with whom he shares a physical but not spiritual intimacy. They are powerless to prevent the murders and ideological radicalization that transpires entirely, to borrow Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s turn of phrase on male homosociality, between men.12 If the women bear witness as alternatingly fearful and horrified observers to imperial masculinity and its violent repercussions, lending Dirty Hearts’ at times the atmosphere of a horror film, Amorim nevertheless gives them the last word  as the survivors and testimonial-bearers of  its trauma. In the film’s closing scene, an adult Akemi accidentally discovers the now-elderly Takahashi in a photography shop, where he continues his original profession. It only gradually dawns upon her that the visibly older figure is her childhood friend, although she still does not know that it was, in fact, Takahashi who murdered her father. She asks to have a passport photo taken, which effectively brings full circle the indexical value of the photograph, seen previously as an instrument of propaganda and historical revisionism of the worst kind. The dramatic irony is unmistakable, as Akemi’s request for the photograph—that which  authenticates her Brazilian nationality, while also enabling her to cross national boundaries— is the antithesis of Takahashi’s photographic manipulations and violent enforcement of ultranationalist ideology. Akemi tells Takahashi that Miyuki remarried and returned to Japan many years ago, completing the sense of Takahashi’s permanent loss due to his moral failings. In a final voiceover Miyuki completes the film with the melancholic reminiscence, “I passed the war’s end in the Japanese colony in Brazil. In that war I lost the person I loved.” It is no coincidence that the same sense of loss due to complicity pervades both of Kazuo Ishiguro’s historical novels Artist of the Floating World (1986) and Remains of the Day (1989), as the Japanese propagandist and quintessential English butler each plays a willingly part in the fascist project of the war years and must come to grips with a morally bankrupt legacy. Here, 12  Drawing upon its origins in the social sciences, Sedgwick defines homosociality in Between Men as the continuum in same sex relations between sexual and social affairs and which can reveal the boundaries between them (Sedgwick 1985: 1–19).

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

155

too, we must recognize that the most internationally acclaimed author of a transnational Japanese diasporic heritage, albeit one with roots in neither North nor South America, twice attempted in his early works to reconcile, if not altogether seek to redeem, the disgraced figure of the collaborator.  By portraying the conflict essentially in a single rural community, the film gives the impression of a much smaller scale than Morais’ original. A postscript title card that ends the film after Miyuki’s final words returns to the structure of Morais’ epilogue. In lieu of narrative closure, he simply lets the tally of victims and perpetrators speak for themselves: 31,380 people suspected of involvement with Shindō Renmei, of which 1423 were accused by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, with 381 of those named pursued by the Ministry of Justice. He then lists those 381 in alphabetical order by first name to restore their place in the historical record. Yet the fact remains that even the 80 who were deemed “elements harmful to national interests” by President Eurico Gaspar Dutra and ordered expelled were granted amnesty. On this last point, where Amorim’s film ends in personal tragedy and a poignant, but all-too-brief, return to the magnitude of Shindō Renmei’s activities, Morais closes on a note closer to national farce: terrible crimes go unpunished and once-durable ideological conflicts are brushed under the carpet as a new domestic postwar consensus takes shape in Brazil. Although it goes unmentioned in the film, Morais makes the implicit claim that the organization’s leadership bribed their way into amnesty by backing Brazilian politician Adhemar de Barros (1901–1969), such that none of its convicted members were deported back to Japan and the vast majority escaped without formal charges brought against them. Barros, the first democratically elected governor of São Paulo following Brazil’s re-­ democratization in 1947, was the original figure for whom the universal expression for Brazilian political corruption “rouba mas faz,” that is, “he steals but gets things done,” was coined. After several unsuccessful runs at the presidency, he would go on to back the military coup of 1964. If Morais’ thesis holds true, the Japanese Brazilian community’s integration into Brazil’s racial democracy as an ethnic minority in perpetual diaspora was eventually resolved in the 1950s through the same compromised processes that characterized the tenuous restoration of democracy between the two eras of dictatorship. Whether willing or coerced, the broad base of support for Shindō Renmei and other militant kachigumi groups in the immediate aftermath

156 

S. JACOBOWITZ

of the war were ultimately a bulwark against the terrifying implications that came with Japan’s unconditional surrender and loss of empire. Defeat portended more than the loss of ethnic solidarity or patriotism: it meant the community no longer had the backing of the Japanese Empire and lost their right of return to Japan. The social contract was broken on both sides of their transnational belonging, instantiating a new diasporic consciousness and realities on the ground. *** These grounds were necessarily the same that Sugi traversed in “Revenge” and his other stories about life in the São Paulo countryside. Yet the visions Sugi summons up of a bucolic microcosm rooted in simple pleasures, honest work, and collective belonging were already shaken by Aida’s schoolhouse speech about the unthinkable prospect of ending up like the stateless Jews or divided-and-conquered Chinese. Regrettably, the confrontation between Aida and Maekawa is curtailed without further opportunity to speak truth to power or to articulate the multivalent concept of diaspora itself lurking behind the Aida’s imprecations. Instead, Aida’s ham-handed attempt at “revenge” is laughingly dismissed by the Nisei youth walking the dirt road home beneath the starry sky as nothing more than the actions of a spurned suitor seeking to humiliate and discredit his rival. Nevertheless, as a figure willing to bend patriotic duty toward personal benefit, Aida cannot help but uncannily anticipate the birth of Shindō Renmei that lay only four years ahead. For a long time, shame and silence were the only evidence for a reign of terror that had not only been propelled by Japanese or Brazilian nationalisms in the 1940s, but arose from within the community as a crisis of imperial and imperiled masculinity. The rarity of works such as “Revenge” and Dirty Hearts serve as indicators of the absolute importance of testimonials and fictional narratives alike to give voice to this era. In so doing, they reinvigorate our contemporary understanding of Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian history. It is in this light that I concur with Ignacio López-Calvo that “by highlighting identitarian heterogeneity, Japanese Brazilian cultural production prevents (self-)essentialization or the temptation to homogenize Japanese Brazilian consciousness or experiences” (2019: 15).

9  MILITANCY AND IMPERIAL MASCULINITY IN SUGI TAKEO’S “REVENGE”… 

157

References Azuma, Eiichiro. 2016. Internment and World War II history. In The Oxford handbook of Asian American history, ed. David K.  Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma. New York: Oxford University Press. Baily, Samuel L., and Eduardo José Miguez, eds. 2003. Mass migration to modern Latin America. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources. Dirty Hearts. Dir. Amorim, Vicente. 2011. Downtown Films. Film. Fujisaki, Yasuo. 1974. Heika wa ikite orareta! “Burajiru kachigumi” no kiroku. Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Ō raisha. Handa, Tomoo. 1980. Memórias de um imigrante imigrante japonês no Brasil. São Paulo Centro: de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros. ———. 1987. O imigrante japonês: história de sua vida no Brasil. São Paulo: Centro de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros. Lesser, Jeffrey. 1999. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, minorities, and the struggle for ethnicity in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. A discontented diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the meanings of ethnic militancy, 1960–1980. Durham: Duke University Press. López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2019. Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic identities and cultural production. Louisville: University of Colorado Press. Masterson, Daniel M., and Sayaka Funada-Classen. 2003. The Japanese in Brazil and Peru: A comparative perspective. In Mass migration to modern Latin America, ed. Samuel L. Baily and Eduardo José Miguez. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. ———, eds. 2004. The Japanese in Latin America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Morais, Fernando. 2000. Corações Sujos: A Historia da Shindo Renmei. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky. 1985. Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sugi, Takeo. 1975. Fukushū. In Koronia shō setsu senshū, ed. Koronia Bungakkai, vol. 1, 65–70. São Paulo: Koronia Bungakkai Hakko. Weinstein, Barbara. 2015. The color of modernity: São Paulo and the making of race and nation in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Quiet Revenges: The Infinite Intensity of the Silenced History of Japanese Peruvians in Carlos Yushimito del Valle’s “Ciudad de Cristal” Shigeko Mato

Introduction: Yushimito as a “Permanent Traveler” In his essay “Elogio de la miopía” (Eulogy of myopia), Carlos Yushimito del Valle, a contemporary Peruvian writer, states that a writer writing from abroad has a very similar gaze to that of a nearsighted person and can offer a different, and, perhaps, unsettled understanding of the reality that the writer (like a nearsighted person without eye glasses) blurredly and not entirely captures (2015: 81–86). Yushimito, who has been living abroad This study was partially supported by a JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science) grant (no. 16K02612). S. Mato (*) Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_10

159

160 

S. MATO

since 2008,1 considers a writer such as himself, writing from abroad, as a migrant or “permanent traveler” (83). His experience as a “permanent traveler” in a foreign land keeps him poised in contemplation at a new threshold, as he indicates: Being in contact with another landscape, going beyond the language, and being that kind of permanent traveler that I have become, has made me more solitary and introspective, so that my subconscious has ended up allowing me to be freer than I was when I was assuming that my community, my language and all my affections were positions naturally earned or my own, and therefore it never occurred to me to question them.2 (82, emphasis added)

Yushimito’s encounters with new, foreign, and unfamiliar cultures, languages, and landscapes destabilize his former knowledge system collectively acquired through his original community and language, freeing him from a unified system and enabling him to wonder about the fixity and legitimacy of concepts accepted communally, as well as his own individual understandings. This inquisitive mind of the “permanent traveler,” who starts doubting the fixity and legitimacy of his naturalized knowledge system upon his contact with a foreign land, at first glance seems to echo what Iain Chambers delineates about a nomadic or migrant mode of thinking. Chambers notes that a nomadic or migrant mode of thinking “wander[s] without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world,” and “provid[es] the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging” (1994: 4).  Yushimito’s aspiration to be a myopic “permanent traveler” and find intellectual liberation through writing is clear. Yet, for him, intellectual liberation does not 1  Yushimito moved to the United States in 2008 and currently teaches at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile, according to the online “Alumni News” of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. 2  “[E]star en contacto con otro paisaje, pasar por encima del idioma, ser esa especie de pasajero permanente en que me he convertido, me ha hecho ser más solitario e introspectivo, de manera que mi subconsciente ha terminado por permitirme ser más libre de lo que era cuando daba por hecho que mi comunidad, mi idioma y todos mis afectos eran lugares, por naturaleza, ganados o propios, y por lo tanto no merecían cuestionamiento alguno” (82, emphasis added). All translations of Yushimito’s works are mine.

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

161

necessarily mean total liberation from an established power system, but rather a way to constantly challenge an established power system. The last section of Yushimito’s essay encapsulates his principal understanding of intellectual liberation, and it is worth examining the entire passage: Sometimes I think that the nearsighted themselves easily grow accustomed to carrying normality on the bridge of their nose. But I believe that a nearsighted person has a natural way of being different and relating himself… differently with the world. In the same way, I think that writing abroad should be like looking at the world without glasses on. Accustomed to a reality confused with dreams, without boundaries, where synesthesia will grow into writing, as weeds in gardens that are nothing but spaces of exact domestication. I think one should clean his eyes full of dirt. And that one must fight against that solidity, against all those contours that were once solid and clear.3 (86, emphasis added)

He asserts that a writer, as a nearsighted person, should not be fully adapted to or conformed to the normalized and solidified belief system of the society where he resides and should not lose his or her myopic ability to observe the world from a distance. For him, this ability to continuously challenge a solidified system even though one has to reject his or her own comfort and convenience can lead to his or her intellectual liberation. While Yushimito’s passage asserts the importance of intellectual liberation; it also, more importantly, exposes the process of how intellectual liberation is achieved. The process involves negotiations with an established power and knowledge system, and this implies that Yushimito’s aspiration for intellectual liberation from normalized and solidified knowledge exists always in a relationship with the dominance of that knowledge system. Yushimito illustrates this power relationship between liberation and domination through his philosophy of writing and the roles of a writer 3  “A veces pienso que hasta los propios miopes se acostumbran con facilidad a portar la normalidad sobre el tabique de su nariz. Pero yo creo que alguien miope tiene… un modo natural de ser diferente y de relacionarse de forma distinta con él. Del mismo modo, pienso que escribir en el extranjero debe ser como mirar el mundo sin los anteojos puestos. Un poco acostumbrado a que la realidad se confunda con el sueño, lavado de límites, donde a la escritura le crezcan las sinestesias como la mala hierba le crece a los jardines que no son otra cosa que espacios de exacta domesticación. Pienso que uno debe limpiarse los ojos llenos de tierra. Y que uno debe luchar contra esa solidez, contra todos esos contornos que alguna vez fueron sólidos y nítidos” (86, emphasis added).

162 

S. MATO

writing from abroad. He perceives a written text (la escritura) as a fixed and controlled space created by a set of traits and marks normalized and shared by a certain community, but he believes that from this domesticated text, synesthetic phenomena emerge and expand themselves into the text, disturbing the rigidity of the text and transforming it into something constantly mutable and unruly. He also uses the analogy of a garden and weeds to demonstrate that unruly synesthetic phenomena emerging in a text are like weeds growing in a garden. Both can keep growing out of control and constantly change the shape of the neatly organized text or garden. In this sense, both weeds in a garden and unruly synesthetic phenomena in a text function as destabilizing forces for the established structure and order, but he does not forget to point out that both are germinated in and grow into the same domesticated garden and text and that both are the products of the established power system. This study examines the short story “Ciudad de Cristal” (City  of Crystal), as an example of showing the following two points: (1) Yushimito’s philosophical understanding of writing as a means to reveal dissonance and unnaturalness within an already established and unified system of language, signs, and structure; and (2) his perception of a writer as a “permanent traveler” who must use his or her myopic vision in order to avoid becoming numb to normalized and immobilized visions, incessantly producing a dissonant and unnatural atmosphere. Ignacio López-Calvo (2013) and Rebecca Riger Tsurumi (2012), foremost scholars of Japanese Peruvian and Japanese Latin American writings, have analyzed the story, focusing on Yushimito’s affinity to his Japanese heritage.4 However, no studies thus far have drawn attention to Yushimito’s 4  In her study, Riger Tsurumi situates “Oz” (Oz), “Ciudad de Cristal” (City of Crystal), and “Criaturas aladas” (Winged Creatures) in the category of Yushimito’s stories with Japanese protagonists, as opposed to his other stories without Japanese protagonists (113–30). Riger Tsurumi explores Yushimito’s Japanese immigrant grandfather’s background and experience, and tries to read the stories as a reflection of Yushimito’s ethnic background as a sansei (third-generation) grandson (114–30). In his study, López-Calvo presents Yushimito as an example of a Peruvian writer with Japanese heritage who rejects this label. Although his study questions the homogeneous notion of Japanese Peruvian identity and complicates the meaning of being Nikkei in Peru, as Riger Tsurumi’s study, his discussion seems to consider the three stories as stories that have Japanese and Japanese Peruvian characters and thus fall into the category of the works reflecting the author’s affinity to his Japanese ethnic background (136–43, 159).

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

163

philosophy of writing and understanding of the roles of a writer. As the title “Ciudad de Cristal” already suggests the deportations and internments of the Japanese Peruvians and Japanese Latin Americans in the relocation camp, Crystal City in Texas, during World War II (López-­Calvo 2013: 138), it can be read as a story that recovers the long-silenced history of the institutionalized wrongdoing by the Peruvian and US governments and reveals the impact of this injustice on the Japanese in Peru and Japanese Peruvian community. This theme is presented in the two scholars’ discussions; however, what they center on through the theme is a connection between Yushimito’s possible intention to create a story about the Japanese and Japanese Peruvian traumatic experience and his Japanese ethnic background (López-Calvo 2013: 138–140; Riger Tsurumi 2012: 122–126, 128–129). Their studies are useful for exploring a reflection of Yushimito’s ethnic heritage in the story, but this exploration may lead to simple discussions of which of his stories do or do not show his Japanese heritage and how much his stories show or do not show them. Beyond the exploration of the connection between the story and his Japanese heritage, this study looks into the theme of the silenced history of the Japanese and Japanese Peruvians’ wartime suffering and its traumatic impact on the Japanese in Peru and Japanese Peruvian community, drawing on Yushimito’s philosophy of writing and his notion of the roles of a writer as a “permanent traveler” with a myopic vision. As described above, according to Yushimito, a “permanent traveler’s” myopic perspectives enable him or her to critically view the world from a distance and produce destabilizing forces to challenge solidified and normalized visions, although their challenge always takes place within an established order (2015: 86). Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the nomadic “war machine,” (1987: 351–423)5 together with Edward Said’s insights, this study aims to examine how and why destabilizing forces emerge in the linearly structured main plot of “Ciudad de Cristal” and explore how they disturb and negotiate with the normalized way of reading the linearly developed main plot.

5  Deleuze and Guattari attempt to offer an alternative history to the history that “dismiss[es[the nomads as incapable of any innovation” and to the history that “considers the nomads a pitiable segment of humanity that understands nothing” (394). Their nomadology is a way to reveal an alternative perspective.

164 

S. MATO

The Nomadic “War Machine”: Between Liberation and Cooptation Deleuze and Guattari’s “war machine” is a metaphoric term that can be understood as a resisting and transgressive mechanism that allows autonomous groups, individuals, or social, political, and artistic movements to infinitely form and invent other types of assemblages and movements, floating in “smooth space” (the deterritorialized space, as opposed to the organized territories of a state, “striated space”  [1987:  370–372]), in order to resist any rigid fixities of the hierarchical structures and norms of a state (1987: 336–67, 416–23).6 Although “the ‘war machine’ does not necessarily have war as its object,” after being appropriated by the state, “it tends to take war for its direct and primary object” (1987: 416, 418). Said draws attention to this relationship between the “war machine” and the state apparatus: This quite original treatise contains a metaphor about a disciplined kind of intellectual mobility in an age of institutionalization, regimentation, co-­ optation. The war machine, Deleuze and Guattari say, can be assimilated to the military powers of the state – but, since it is fundamentally a separate entity, need not be, any more than the spirit’s nomadic wanderings need always be put at the service of institutions. The war machine’s source of strength is not only its nomadic freedom but also its metallurgical art  – which Deleuze and Guattari compare to the art of musical composition – by which materials are forged, fashioned “beyond separate forms; [this metallurgy, like music] stresses the continuing development of form itself, and beyond individually differing materials it stresses the continuing variation within matter itself.7 (1994: 331–332)

The “war machine” can be appropriated by the state apparatus and subordinated to “a plan(e) of organization and domination” of the state (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 423). But the energy of the “war machine” continues to spur, as its principal object, “the drawing of a creative line of

6  Paul Patton (2000) refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s “war machines” as “metamorphosis machines” or “abstract machines of mutation and change,” whose main objective is not war, but to create infinitesimal mutations and changes (119–120). For Patton’s further discussion on the “war machine,” see pp. 109–115. 7  The quote is Said’s translation. The English translation by Brian Massumi is found on p. 411.

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

165

flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space” (422). Said draws attention to this “bipolar” relationship between the nomadic “war machine” and the state apparatus by pointing to the mastery of the “metallurgical art” through which the “war machine” is invented (Said 1994: 332).8 Metallurgy requires a particular matter and fixed form (like ingots) prepared for and controlled by a certain operation of capture and domination, but at the same time, it enjoys its autonomy of metallurgical art to transform the matter prepared in a fixed form into a “continuous development of form” and a “continuous variation of matter” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 411). Said observes a resonance between the transformativeness and transgressiveness of the metallurgical art of “the war machine” and those of “a disciplined kind of intellectual mobility” (1994: 332). Both can or need to be attached to a part of the state apparatus and incorporated into it, yet it keeps inventing unexpected movements and shapes that can challenge the system of domination. Said asserts that despite the cooptation of the intellectual, its mission is to liberate the oppressed from imperial (or institutional) domination without reproducing other types of the established order of domination: [I]t is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. (332)

Rather than replacing the old repressive system of power with a new order that confines and ravages certain groups of people, Said’s intellectual attempts to reveal and articulate the dissonances, tensions, conflicts and contradictions that emerge in the spaces of in-betweenness, in order to transgress the old system. 8  Although Deleuze and Guattari make references to specific ancient nomadic groups in particular geographical regions, they use the term “the nomadic metallurgy” in order to metaphorically illustrate the concept of metallurgy as a way of creating continuous transformative movements and forms (deterritorialization) within a given material and mold (410–411).

166 

S. MATO

This mission of the intellectual recalls that of the metallurgical artist of the “war machine” who contributes to the “continuing development of form itself” and “continuing variation within matter itself” as described above (Said 1994: 332). As the metallurgical artist depends on a very particular rigid form and matter (inside the mold of the state apparatus) in order to transform the form and matter, the intellectual also needs to depend on the forms of thought and expression inherited from “the domesticated dynamics of culture” of both imperial and post-colonial institutions, in order to continuously (re)create unexpected variations of forms of thought and expressions (332). This intellectual mobility from the “domesticated dynamics of culture” to the “exilic energies” recalls the mobility that Yushimito attempts to create by letting the destabilizing forces of “synesthesia” and “weeds” grow in the domesticated space of text and garden. In the following section, I examine such a transformative and mobile phenomenon as it appears in “Ciudad de Cristal” by applying the notion of intellectual liberation and cooptation which Said observes in the concept of the nomadic “war machine.”

Against the Main Plot of a Revenge Story in “Ciudad de Cristal” “Ciudad de Cristal” (City of Crystal), narrated by an omniscient third-­ person narrator, tells a story about a seven-year-old Japanese Peruvian boy, Pedro (Hideo) Komatsu, whose father is deported from Peru to the US internment camp during WWII. The boy lives with his family, now only his grandmother and sister, and Nazareno, who used to work for his father, but now takes advantage of the owner’s deportation and takes over the store. Perceiving Nazareno as a looter who invades Pedro’s family’s lives, Pedro comes to hate him and tries to harm or kill Nazareno with a poisonous spider. The main plot linearly develops through Pedro’s actions of hunting a spider for a fighting match, catching one, watching Nazareno’s spider killing Pedro’s in a match, and letting the killer spider loose to poison Nazareno. At first glance, this sequence of Pedro’s actions, drawing the reader’s attention to how he, unintentionally or intentionally, prepares and completes his revenge, may lead the reader to interpret Yushimito’s work simply as Pedro’s revenge story. The linear sequence of the main plot

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

167

can be considered to be an established order of text that normalizes the linearity. However, it cannot be denied that there exist sub-stories, distracting the reader from the linearity and centrality of the main plot. More specifically, the deviating sub-stories emerge in Pedro’s interactions with two other characters, Minoru Tsuchigumo, an aged Japanese storeowner, and Pedro’s silent grandmother, through which the fragmentarily presented story of his father’s deportation comes to occupy space within the revenge story. These characters’ sub-stories told to Pedro also reveal other factors beyond his resentful feelings that propel him to use a poisonous spider to take revenge on Nazareno. If the linear sequence of Pedro’s revenge functions as an established order of the text, the deviating sub-­ stories of the two characters can be interpreted as the disturbing forces that destabilize the order of the text. The story is divided into three parts. The first part includes the introduction of Pedro, his hunting a spider, and his interactions with Tsuchigumo; the second part describes a spider fight; and the third part mainly shows Pedro’s relationship with his grandmother and his action of letting Nazareno’s poisonous spider loose. The opening scene is in the present time, and the reader can grasp that the boy’s dog, slowly walking ahead of him, stops walking and comes back to where the boy is. However, in the first opening paragraph, the reader knows, neither the meaning of this scene, nor the boy’s name. But these vague points soon become clear. First, the narrator tells that the boy is a son of a Japanese immigrant from Hokkaido, Pedro Hideo Komatsu, whose grandfather has the same Japanese name, and that his immigrant father’s Peruvian name is also Pedro. Then, the narrator takes the reader back to the same time and space of the beginning, which turns out to be a scene of Pedro searching for a spider, following his dog: the dog, barking at a hole, lets him know where to find spiders, but he cannot find any. Then, instead of continuing with this hunting story in the present, the narrator suddenly shifts it into a flashback in which Tsuchigumo, teaching Pedro that spiders are nocturnal, encourages him to go to the market at night with his dog to find a stronger fighting spider. He remembers that thanks to Tsuchigumo’s advice, he has gone on a spider hunt with his dog and found a spider. On the surface, Tsuchigumo is characterized as a wise old man who cares about Pedro and his family and teaches the boy about spiders. However, the role that he plays in this story is more complicated

168 

S. MATO

than that of simply a wise guardian and mentor. What Tsuchigumo does, through his interactions with Pedro, is to implicitly unveil the silenced history of the Peruvian government’s deportation of the Japanese immigrants to the US internment camp, Crystal City, Texas, during WWII.  Because in his conversations with Pedro, the stories of Japanese immigration to Peru and their deportation become central themes, as seen below, and the development of the main plot that focuses on the boy’s revenge story is temporarily hindered by the intercalated sub-stories. The following passage is an example of showing how the theme of Japanese immigration to Peru, implicitly but assuredly, appears in conversations and diverts the reader’s attention from the main plot. In Pedro’s flashback, Tsuchigumo tells a story about spiders arriving in Peru from Brazil: [S]ome arrive from Brazil, camouflaged among fruits… They often end up crushed by a vendor’s rubber sandals or the hard soles of a loader. Some go out to hunt rodents, –says Tsuchigumo, nonchalantly –, and he had seen them wrap them up and drag them to a cave built under the frames of market stands.9 (11–12)

The spiders hiding among the fruits being transported from Brazil can be interpreted as a metaphoric image suggesting the Japanese immigrants who arrived in a foreign land with hope. As the spiders crushed by the vendor’s sandals or loader’s shoes, the Japanese immigrants probably vanished during the journey; yet as some of the spiders which survive and manage to get to the market place, some of the Japanese immigrants also managed to own a store at a market place. Tsuchigumo’s story about spiders, initially serving to help Pedro find a stronger spider for a match, now functions as a means to insinuate an analogy between the spiders and Japanese immigrants. Because of this shift in focus in the story, from an advice how to find a strong spider to the experience of Japanese immigrants, the main plot drifts into the margin. Even when the narrator takes the reader back to the present time from Pedro’s flashback, the main plot continues to stay at the margin. 9  “algunas llegan desde el Brasil, camufladas entre las frutas… A menudo acaban aplastadas por los llanques de una vendedora o las duras suelas de un cargador. Algunas salen a cazar roedores  – dice Tsuchigumo, despreocupadamente–, y él las había visto envolverlas y arrastrarlas hasta una cueva armada bajo las armazones del mercado” (11–12).

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

169

After his flashback ends, a dialogue between him and Tsuchigumo takes place in the present: —¿How is your Granma? —Good – says the boy. —And Sayoko? —With Nazareno. … —Something about your Dad? … —Granma says there is nothing on the radio – he responds. —And I still call myself Minoru Tsuchigumo and I still have a store – the old man shakes his head.10 (12–13)

This brief dialogue appears to be an ordinary greeting of a caring old man to a neighborhood boy, but gradually informs the reader about Pedro’s father’s disappearance. Tsuchigumo’s last repeated sentences, questioning why Pedro’s father, not Tsuchigumo, was deported and why the former’s store, not his, was taken, helps the reader understand that Pedro’s father has been unjustifiably taken away from his home. In this dialogue, the old man and Pedro never explicitly talk about his father’s deportation and internment in the United States, as if these words were erased from the history of WWII in their community. The narrator is the only source that provides a description of what happened to his father. He describes: Since he was taken to Crystal City camps, nobody has heard from him… the truck saturated with Japanese was moving away, invisible, towards the port. […] About his father, they only know that he sent a note so that they would know that he did not disappear by his own will. That he was taken away by a war that he had not fought, but, perhaps, had lost. And that he was a good man, who did not abandon his children.11 (13)

10  “—¿Cómo está la obachan? /—Bien –dice el niño. /—¿Y Sayoko? /—Con Nazareno. /… /—¿Algo sobre tu viejo? –dice al rato. /… /—La obachan dice que no hay nada en la radio –responde. /—Y yo sigo llamándome Minoru Tsuchigumo y todavía tengo una tienda –mueve la cabeza el anciano” (12–13). 11  “Desde que se lo llevaron a los campos de la Ciudad de Cristal nadie ha vuelto a saber de él… el camión saturado de japoneses se alejaba, invisible, hacia el puerto. […] De su padre sólo saben que lanzó una nota para que supieran que no desaparecía por su propia

170 

S. MATO

This is the only passage, throughout the story, that exposes the unjust and abrupt deportation of Japanese immigrants. Pedro’s father did not have a chance to talk to his family before his deportation, and all he could do was to throw a note from the truck, showing that he was forced out of the country against his will. Although the title already refers to the name of the US internment camp, the reader is not told about the deportation and internment until the above-quoted dialogue and passage appear at the end of the first part. After this dialogue, the incident of the deportation and internment is no longer mentioned anywhere else throughout the rest of the story. Despite the absence of further details of Pedro’s father’s deportation and internment, once the reader learns about the silenced incident, it becomes impossible not to consider a cause-and-effect relationship between this silenced incident and Pedro’s revenge. Thus, even when the main plot is brought back to the reader, the silenced incident of the deportation and internment steadily and firmly permeates the reader’s mind. These sub-stories about the hardships of the Japanese immigrants arriving, settling, and surviving in Latin America and their experience of deportation and internment draw other angles and dimensions as the main plot is laid out, destabilizing its linearity and centrality and forming alternative story assemblages and variations. This emergence of different assemblages and variations, which intrude on the linear sequence of Pedro’s revenge, resonates with the function of the nomadic “war machine,” which disturbs the institutionalized and fixed norms and order of a state (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 366–367, 416–423). However, just as the metallurgical art of the “war machine” does not oust an established order of a state (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 410–411; Said 1994: 332), the new assemblages of stories do not exist to replace the main plot, but rather its principal purpose is to create “a continuous development of form” and “a continuous variation of matter” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 411) and expose dissonance within the established order of the main plot. In other words, the main plot continues to stay in the text, while at the same time being entangled with other sub-stories. The second part, in fact, temporarily takes the reader back to the linear sequence of the main plot. It opens with a scene in which Nazareno shows off his largest spider to Pedro, and then goes on to a fighting match in voluntad. Que se lo llevaron por una guerra que no había peleado, pero, acaso, sí perdido. Y que era un buen hombre, que no abandonaba a sus hijos” (13).

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

171

which Nazareno’s huge and monstrous spider injects its poison into its contender and kills it. Along with these scenes, what is highlighted here is Nazareno’s arrogant and dominant attitude toward Pedro and his family, which echoes the supremacy of his spider over other spiders. When Pedro mistakenly observes that Nazareno’s spider is dead, the latter contemptuously tells the former that he is wrong, calling him “chino” (Chinese) and clicking his tongue to show his supremacy. He does the same clicking, not only when he goes to Pedro’s sister’s room and tells Pedro not to bother him, but also when he puts coins in Pedro’s grandmother’s hands at the end of each month. Although there is no word about Pedro’s father’s deportation in the second part, the reader cannot help noticing that Nazareno’s domination is the consequence of his former employer, Pedro’s father’s deportation. The deportation, without being mentioned, is quietly, but always referenced by Nazareno’s usurpation and domination. Moreover, Nazareno’s spider kept in a crystal jar can be a covert metaphor that reminds the reader of Pedro’s father’s internment in Crystal City. This image also resonates with the description that appears earlier in the first part, when Pedro catches a spider: “[Pedro] has pushed the jar with his foot and the spider has entered the glass. There it stays. The spider obeys with caution, resigned, sad. And, as if putting away his eight exhausted legs, he folds them against himself”12 (11). This spider, obedient, resigned, and sad, entering the crystal jar, recalls the Japanese deportees who are resigned to be interned in the camp Crystal City (Riger Tsurumi 2012: 125–126), especially after the analogy between the spider and the Japanese immigrants is created in Tsuchigumo’s story, as seen above. Because of these imaginations of Pedro’s father’s deportation and internment, the continuity of the main plot is disrupted again in the second part. After the spiders’ fighting match, Pedro’s next action of letting Nazareno’s spider out of the jar should appear as the successive episode to complete the linear sequence of the main plot. However, it does not continuously appear, but rather, the main plot is intermingled again with the silenced history of the deportation and internment. This quiet, yet constant presence of the silenced history continues to permeate the third part, in which Pedro’s grandmother physically appears 12  “[Pedro] ha empujado el frasco con el pie y ella ha entrado en el vidrio. Ahí sigue. La araña obedece con cautela, resignada, triste. Y, como si guardara sus ocho patas exhaustas, se pliega contra sí misma” (11).

172 

S. MATO

for the first time. She lives with the silenced history of her son’s deportation and internment. Now being old, she no longer talks much and cannot hear well, though she tries to listen to the radio: “Grandma almost does not talk anymore. She pretends to listen, but she does not hear. She falls asleep in the afternoon, sitting on her couch, listening to the radio that she cannot hear”13 (16). Listening to the radio that she cannot hear is her only hope to find the whereabouts of her son, but she cannot find anything. She seems resigned to the silenced deportation and internment of her son and never mentions anything about the incident. The beginning of the third part is imbued with the silenced history surrounding his grandmother, and this impregnated silence impedes the reader from seeing Pedro’s vengeful action promptly after the scene of the spider fight, with which the second part ends. However, his grandmother’s silence, which discontinues the sequence of the main plot, ironically, also helps to resume it. Toward the end of the story, Pedro remembers his grandmother’s advice—not to look at the spider too close through the jar because his magnified eye reflected in the glass will scare the spider: “It will be as if an enormous eye saw the spider through the glass, said the grandmother before falling asleep. Do not scare it. It will be the image with which it remembers you”14 (16). This is the only time that she gives him advice throughout the story. She does not give him further information about how the spider may react to the gigantic eye, either. This “quiet advice” seems like harmless, day-to-day advice from a grandmother to her grandchild, but when it is immediately followed by the narrator’s description of the spider and Tsuchigumo’s warning about spiders, it becomes a point of resuming the sequence of the main plot toward Pedro’s revenge. The narrator describes its enormous size and monstrous appearance, showing that it can be harmful and astute: “— How will a sting hurt? – Tsuchigumo had said, closing his hand with a feigned gesture of pain”15 (16). His question suggests that the spider can bite and harm a human. The narrator does not explicitly show a cause-­ effect relationship between his grandmother’s advice and Tsuchigumo’s question and Pedro’s last action of letting the spider out of the jar. 13  “La abuela ya casi no habla. Hace como si escuchara, nomás, pero no oye. Se queda dormida por las tardes, sentada en su sofá, escuchando la radio que no puede oír” (16). 14  “Será como si la viera un enorme ojo a través del cristal, ha dicho la abuela antes de dormirse. No la asustes. Será la imagen con la que te recuerde” (16). 15  “––¿Cómo dolerá una picadura? ––había dicho Tsuchigumo, con un falso gesto de dolor, cerrando la mano” (16).

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

173

However, one can imagine his grandmother’s advice and this question as the explosion of their cry for justice silenced for a long time. It is Pedro’s grandmother and Tsuchigumo who indirectly trigger Pedro’s revenge. Furthermore, here it is worth examining the meaning of the Japanese name, Tsuchigumo. Literally translated as an “earth spider,” the name can evoke the meanings of insubordination, rebellion, discrimination, enemy, and revenge, stemming from Japanese ancient mythology/chronicles of the eighth century (circa)16 (Fukunaga 2003: 170–171; 2005: 174–175) and the folktales that appeared later around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries17 (Reider 2013: 56; Takemoto 2001: 5). In the ancient mythology/chronicles, Tsuchigumo refers to a group of bandits who resist subordinating themselves to the ancient Japanese imperial court and are, therefore, considered as the imperial court’s savage enemy to be vanquished (Fukunaga 2003: 170–171; Kojima 2007: 65, 84–85, 87–88; Inoue 2001–2019). Then in the later Japanese folktales, Tsuchigumo is presented as an individual supernatural monster or trickster which tries to harm Minamoto no Raiko (Yorimitsu) (948–1021), a skillful samurai warrior (and the regent of the clan Fujiwara, during the Heian period), but on the contrary, the gigantic spider is attacked by Raiko and escapes. Later, Tsuchigumo is found and killed by the warrior and his loyal followers (Reider 2013: 57–58, 66; Takemoto 2001: 4).18 Through this intertextual relationship between the “earth spider” in the Japanese folktales and Tsuchigumo, the old man in the story, Yushimito suggests a close connection between the violent resistance of the rebellious “earth spider” against those in power, and the character Tsuchigumo’s indirect expression of a desire to take action against Nazareno. If the reader follows the linear sequence of the main plot, ignoring the intertextuality, the simple ending appears to be Pedro’s last action, the action of letting out the spider from the jar for his revenge. However, this intertextual Japanese story about the “earth spider” adds another layer to the ending, complicating the meaning of Pedro’s revenge. If the rebellious spirit of the “earth spider” monster is awakened in the character 16  The Japanese ancient chronicles that Tsuchigumo appears are Nihon Shoki (completed in 720) and Kojiki (712). 17  Six to seven (or eight) centuries later, the Japanese folktales showing Tsuchigumo appeared in a picture scroll called Tsuchigumo Soshi [Picture Scroll of Tsuchigumo Tale] (circa late fourteenth century) and a classical Japanese theatrical performance known as Noh around the late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century. 18  Riger Tsurumi introduces the connection between the character Tsuchigumo and the Japanese folklore in a note, but does not further explore this connection.

174 

S. MATO

Tsuchigumo and if he transmits his knowledge about spiders to Pedro in order to take revenge on the powerful, whose revenge is it? Even when the sequence of the main plot is completed with Pedro’s last action of setting the spider free, the question remains unanswerable. Just as the silenced history of Pedro’s father’s deportation and internment and his grandmother’s silence distract the reader from the main plot, this unanswerable question impedes the reader from accepting the definite conclusion in a linear sequence. The main plot suggests that Pedro is the one who takes revenge on Nazareno, yet it is also possible to interpret that the revenge is not only Pedro’s, but also his grandmother’s and Tsuchigumo’s. The story ends with Pedro’s speculative thoughts desiring that the spider, being inveigled by the sound of Nazareno’s hard breathing, climb up to his bed and that his opened big eye make the spider hate him: “when the spider arrives, it will see his opened big eye and will have a reason to hate him”19 (17). The reader is left with an unsettled feeling with this ambiguous ending, wondering whether or not Pedro’s vengeful plot is successfully accomplished and what it means for him and the other possible avengers to succeed or fail. The horizontal line of the main plot (Pedro’s hunting for a spider, finding one, watching Nazareno’s spider’s fight, and letting it out of the jar) does not answer these questions. Pedro’s revenge story can no longer exist as a simple revenge story of a boy who fights against his condescending and arrogant enemy. The silence and ambiguity, interlaced with the main plot, form multiple shapes of assemblages that bring further dissonance and disorder to the linear flow of the main plot. As seen above, the assemblages and movements of Deleuze and  Gattari’s “war machine,” infinitely invent other shapes of assemblages and movements, creating an open-ended “smooth space” (1987:  366–367, 416–423). The unsolvable ambiguity that emerges together with the silenced history of the deportation and internment serves as Yushimito’s “war machine,” which constantly invents an open-ended and heterogeneous space in which any fixed and horizontal ways of reading Pedro’s revenge become impossible.

19  “cuando llegue, la araña verá su enorme ojo abierto y tendrá una razón para odiarlo” (17).

10  QUIET REVENGES: THE INFINITE INTENSITY OF THE SILENCED… 

175

Conclusion By creating forces disturbing to the established order of structure, through the persistent revelation of the silenced history of the deportation and internment, the analogical image of spiders and Japanese immigrants, the implication of the name, Tsuchigumo, and the ambiguous ending, Yushimito encourages the reader to see the text beyond the linear main plot of a boy’s revenge story. As Deleuze and  Gattari’s “war machine,” these elements of the story vertically and diagonally floating around the main plot, meld into and develop transformative assemblages and movements that weaken the rigid linearity and centrality of the main plot and scatter it into multiple directions. The constant formation of these assemblages and movements of the disturbing forces recall the germination of the unruly “synesthesia” and “weeds” in the order of a written text and in the domesticated space of a garden, to borrow Yushimito’s expression again (2015: 86). However, as seen above, Said reminds the reader that the “war machine” or Yushimito’s disturbing forces need to be attached to the established order. The metallurgical artists who make “war machines” need to use a particular prepared matter and fixed form permitted or given by the state apparatus, yet they do transform the matter and form into various shapes, leading to the infinite, heterogeneous, and unforeseen variations (Said 1994: 332). In the case of Yushimito’s “war machine,” the author needs to depend on a particular structure already prepared by the established system of writing to advance a story (or publish it), but at the same time, he gains the autonomy of metallurgical art to reconstruct the structure in constantly changing shapes. Although Yushimito’s unruly “war machine” keeps disturbing the linearity of the main plot, he does not claim the rightness of the unruliness in the story. On the contrary, he emphasizes the importance of seeing both the domestication and rupture of the domestication from a “permanent traveler’s” eye—that is, the myopic eye seeing codes and signs from a distance and with a blurry perception. In his essay, “Reflections on Exile,” Said states, “[w]e take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy” (2012: 185). By making his “war machine” through his “synesthesia” and “weeds,” Yushimito attempts to continue to reside in his myopic world as a “permanent traveler” without his glasses on, in order not to fall into the peril of the dogma and orthodoxy.

176 

S. MATO

References Chambers, Iain. 1994. Migrancy, culture, identity. Abingdon: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The war machine. In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi, 351–423. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fukunaga, Takehiko. 2003. Gendaigoyaku Kojiki [Kojiki in modern translation]. Tokyo: Kawade-shobo-shinsha. ———. 2005. Gendaigoyaku Nihonshoki [Nihonshoki in modern translation]. Tokyo: Kawade-shobo-shinsha. Inoue, Tatsuo. 2001–2009. Tsuchigumo. In Complete Japanese encyclopedia (Encyclopedia Nipponica). Japanese knowledge lib, 2001–2019. https:// japanknowledge-com.ez.wul.waseda.ac.jp/lib/en/display/?lid= 1001000153392. Accessed 6 July 2019. Kojima, Noriyuki. 2007. Nihon shoki: jo [Chronicle of Japan: Book one] Vol. 2, Nihon no koten o yomu [Reading Japanese classics], ed. Kojiro Naoki, Kazutami Nishimiya, Susumu Kuranaka, and Masamori Mouri. Tokyo: Shogaku-kan. López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2013. Carlos Yushimito’s post-nationalist and post-­ identitarian short stories. In The affinity of the eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, 136–159. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Patton, Paul. 2000. Nomads, capture and colonisation. In Deleuze and the political, 109–131. London: Routledge. Reider, Noriko T. 2013. Tsuchigumo soshi: The emergence of a shape-shifting killer female spider. Asian Ethnology 72 (1): 55–83. https://asianethnology.org/ articles/208. Riger Tsurumi, Rebecca. 2012. Images of the Japanese in the short stories of Carlos Yushimito del Valle. In Peripheral transmodernities: South-to-south intercultural dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic world and “the orient,” ed. Ignacio López-Calvo, 111–132. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Said, Edward. 1994. Movements and migrations. In Culture and imperialism, 326–336. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2012. Reflections on exile. In Reflections on exile and other literary and cultural essays, 173–186. London: Granta Books. Takemoto, Mikio. 2001. Taiwa de tanoshimu Tsuchigumo. [Tsuchigumo to enjoy in dialogue]. Tokyo: Hinoki-shoten. Yushimito del Valle, Carlos. 2009. Ciudad de Cristal (City of Crystal). In Ten en cuento a La Victoria: cuentos: MLV: segunda version del cuncurso [Take into account La Victoria: Stories: MLV: Second version of the contest], ed. Dimas Arrieta Espinoza, 9–17. Lima: Municipalidad de La Victoria. ———. 2015. Elogio de la miopía (Eulogy of myopia). In Marginalia: breve repertorio de pensamientos prematuros sobre el arte poco notable de leer al revés [marginalia: A brief repertoire of premature thoughts on the not-so-remarkable art of reading backwards], 81–86. Lima: Magreb Producciones.

CHAPTER 11

The Sea and Poison: Shusaku Endo’s Prelude to Silence José I. Suárez

In May 2016, I had the fortune of attending the Freeman Summer Institute in Japan at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Though many aspects of Japanese culture were broached during the ensuing three weeks I, because of my training and background, was particularly interested in the literature sessions. Among the selected works read and discussed, I found the 1966 novel Silence by Shusaku Endo to be far superior to the others. A few months later, Director Martin Scorsese released his film based on Endo’s novel to good critical reviews; it is however my belief that few, if any, of these critics read the book. (I also find it peculiar that no mention is made of Chinmoku, the 1971 Japanese movie version of Silence, directed by Masahiro Shinoda.) After all, Scorsese’s concluding scene is not that of the book or the Japanese film, which also differs from the book; it is, rather, a pro-Christian ending that detracts from Endo’s impartial conclusion. Silence’s plot, set in sixteenth-century Japan, recounts the zealous attempt by Jesuit missionaries to Christianize the population.

J. I. Suárez (*) University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO, USA © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_11

177

178 

J. I. SUÁREZ

Because Christianity was forbidden by the Shogunate—perceived as a European pretext to colonize—these priests were persecuted and tortured to the point that they began to question their own faith. Sectarian drivel and absurd interpretations about this novel and others by Endo abound. For example, particularly among non-Catholic scholars, we find observations that beg the question as to their sustainability. The late How Chuang Chua avers the following: “The Tridentine decrees which stipulated Latin to be the language of the Mass … gave no encouragement whatsoever to anyone attempting to translate the Bible into Japanese. Consequently, when the missionaries were expelled from the country, Roman Catholicism would suffer a catastrophic blow simply because the church did not have a good, standardized Japanese translation of the complete Bible to nurture the faith of subsequent believers” (49). Yet one may wonder: how many Bibles were translated into the vernacular before the Reformation? Yet, from London to Constantinople, Christianity reigned supreme. In India, where the Protestant British translated the Bible in the eighteenth century, less than 2.5 percent of the population is Christian and most of these are Catholic. Regarding the Jesuit priests in Silence, Yanaihara Isaku, a professor at the Protestant Doshisha University in Kyoto, “insisted that the faithful Christian martyrs … had, indeed, heard the voice of God, but that the apostate priests … were denied that blessing because they did not have faith in Him from the beginning” (Dennis 26), thereby implying that they did not inspire faith among the natives. Misleading is the fact that the so-­ called Christian martyrs numbered no more than 10 percent of the approximately 300,000 Catholic converts of the period. The vast majority went into hiding or, when offered the opportunity, renounced their faith and apostatized. And, when it comes to Catholic missionaries in Japan at the time, figures are unavailable; however, it is surmised that, of those there, few chose torture and death when offered the alternative of apostasy. For example, those in Silence apostatize, except for Garrpe, whose character, unlike those of Ferreira and Rodrigues, is not based on a historical figure. William Johnston, a Jesuit priest and translator of Silence, alleges that “from the beginning of the mission until the year 1632 … no missionary apostatized” (Silence xvii). Although this statement may be factual, it is a bit misleading given that apostasy was not offered as an option until 1629 and, in all likelihood, its general implementation was delayed throughout the islands.

11  THE SEA AND POISON: SHUSAKU ENDO’S PRELUDE… 

179

This persecution and extermination of Catholics in Japan, lasting from 1603 until 1867, took place during the Tokugawa Shogunate under its different rulers. The official justification given for their actions was that Japanese traditions and culture were incompatible with Christian doctrines (Spae 5). According to Mark B. Williams, the English and the Dutch also did their best to stoke the flames of anti-Catholicism among the first Tokugawas (Silence xiv-xv). And, like Catholics are derogatorily called “Papists” by certain non-Catholics and their religion referred to as “Roman” Catholic to cast an aura of foreign loyalty on them, Ieyasu, the Japanese Tokugawa, also saw Catholicism as a threat when he himself “observed the unquestioning obedience of his Christian subjects to their foreign guides” (Silence xv). With this background, the purpose of this chapter is to examine an earlier work by Endo, The Sea and Poison (1958), in order to later render a more accurate reading of Silence, because “it can be read as the most concerted attempt to that date by the author to penetrate deeper into the realm of the unconscious in the hope thereby of hinting at a greater complexity to human nature than is initially apparent” (Williams 78). This novel also teaches us how Endo was able to introduce Christian characters into the plot without having to label them thus and how these may not be what one would expect from a Japanese Catholic writer. The Sea and Poison was inspired by the experiments in human vivisection on American prisoners of war (POWs) by Japanese authorities during World War II (WWII). Unlike those of most critics of Endo’s work, who view it through Christian lenses, this work will be read from a non-religious perspective.1 For some, understanding why Christianity has never taken hold in Japan is not enigmatic. Japanese religious beliefs are, and have long been, a combination of Shinto and Buddhist precepts. In other words, unlike those of many Christians, their metaphysical understanding is pantheistic and, more importantly, polytheistic—with its virgins and saints, some may argue that Catholicism is also polytheistic. The concept of a single God and sin are foreign to them and discordant with their values. It is for this reason that Endo, through his fictional characters, called Japan “a swamp” where the Christian seed would find it difficult to take hold. He himself, and avowed Catholic, always felt that he wore Christianity like a “western 1  Because I do not have a reading knowledge of Japanese, I read the novels in their English translations and make my observations to the extent that these translations reflect the originals.

180 

J. I. SUÁREZ

suit.”2 I believe that this uneasiness is much more reflected in his works than has been acknowledged. Emi Mase-Hasegawa, while commenting on the Japanese attitude toward “sin,” makes this sweeping statement about The Sea and Poison: “This issue of Japanese insensitivity to sin is pursued further in … Sea and Poison (1958). Here, [Endo] exposes the dichotomy between sin and the lack of a sense of guilt in Japanese men” (67). This conclusion is, at best, unfounded. As mentioned, because of their beliefs, the concept of sin is unfamiliar to most Japanese. In terms of their language, the noun that comes closest to capture the Western meaning is tsumi, which signifies “crime,” “fault,” “indiscretion” or “transgression.” Thus, when “sin” appears in the text as a translation for tsumi 罪, it must have been the decision of the translator Michael Gallagher in consultation with Endo. I say this because, to Endo, only a Christian or someone who identifies with that religion would have used the word “sin.” By the same reasoning, only a Christian would refer to “God” in the novel—kami 神, the only possible Japanese translation for “God,” is a Shinto plural concept that more accurately defines worshiped spirits or phenomena. According to Chuang Chua, “in the writings of … Endo, it is often very clear when [he uses] kami to refer to the Christian God” (4). Consequently, just two protagonists in the work refer to either or both concepts in the English translation: Hilda, the chief surgeon’s German wife, and Toda, a medical intern at the hospital where the vivisections took place. Most revealing about these characters—the Second Part’s first two chapters are individually devoted to each—is that they feature among the most reprehensible. In the 1930s, the Japanese and the Germans, along with the Italians, created the military coalition known as the Axis Powers. This alliance almost succeeded in subjugating the world under its fascist and racist ideology in the conflict known to Westerners as WWII and as the Pacific War to the Japanese. Both Italy (the Vatican) and Germany (Martin Luther) may be considered great examples of a Catholic and a Protestant country respectively. It is therefore unsurprising that Dr. Hashimoto meets and marries a German woman while studying in that country, thus affording Endo the opportunity of introducing a Westerner and a Christian into the 2  “Christianity was like a western suit that my mother and aunt made me wear when I was growing up … I suffered from the fact that this western suit did not fit. […] How often have I thought of throwing away this suit!” (Mase-Hasegawa 211).

11  THE SEA AND POISON: SHUSAKU ENDO’S PRELUDE… 

181

plot. Ironic is the fact that, while the novel presumably depicts Japanese indifference to guilt, Hilda indirectly brings to the readers’ minds how so-­called German Christians of that period eclipsed the Japanese in acts of cruelty and barbarity. (Wermacht soldiers during the Third Reich wore on their belt buckles the slogan “Gott mit uns” [God is with us].) While performing her “work of devotion” in the hospital, that is, doling out biscuits and collecting dirty laundry from resistant patients, she encounters Nurse Ueda who, under doctor’s orders, is about to inject a dose of procaine into an expiring patient. Overreacting, Hilda sanctimoniously chastises the nurse’s intent by invoking her own Christian god: “Even though a person is going to die, no one has right to murder him. You’re not afraid of God? You don’t believe in the punishment of God?” (98).3 Through this tirade, Endo illustrates that not all Christians react out of sheer altruism or goodwill because Hilda, as we will also shortly see with Toda, reacts not out of empathy or care, but from a sense of fear or obedience to her religion. Hans-Peter Breuer corroborates this observation by stating that “when [Hilda] asks Ueda whether or not she believes in God’s punishment, she does indeed reveal that her charity is motivated by a sense of duty inspired not so much by a felt sympathy for the patient as by a disciplined conformity to a Christian command. What stands behind this command is the judging and punishing God of the Old Testament” (96). Regarding the medical intern Suguro, around whom the novel evolves, at least one critic seems to be of the erroneous impression that it was he, not the other medical intern Toda, who is the second Christian in the narration. It is unclear as to why this is, other than perhaps it stems from Suguro’s namesakes in Endo’s short stories, “My Belongings” (1963) and “Unzen” (1965), and novel, Scandal (1986), who are all Catholic. Breuer, whose analysis of the novel reflects impartial literary scholarship, commits this very error when comparing Dr. Suguro to “a man also called Suguro [in “My Belongings”] … [who] is also (emphasis added) a reluctant Catholic” (99). Williams similarly implies Suguro’s Christianity in his 3  Although for a different reason, Nurse Ueda upholds Rey Chow’s dictum regarding European women falling in love with Asian men in fiction, that is, if European female protagonists sacrificed their standing by falling in love with poor and perhaps unattractive Asian men—the plots would fail; such women would have been considered insane (Chow 79). when she observes, “Suddenly I began to take an interest on Dr. Hashimoto… because he was the husband of this Hilda. […] How could Hilda, who was like a young athlete, love somebody like this?” (95).

182 

J. I. SUÁREZ

study: “his subconscious religious devotion”; “Suguro’s awakening to the enormity of his sin” (82). But, as earlier indicated, Christians apparently are those who solely raise the name of God or mention sin in Endo’s fiction. Besides Hilda, just Toda, if English translations are faithful, allude to these Western concepts. Just like Hilda’s unexpectedly brings up the subject God, likewise Toda, on the night before the first vivisection, suddenly asks Suguro whom he is questioning about his commitment to participate in the procedure: “If you think you should have refused, you still have time to do it” “Uh.” “Will you refuse?” “I suppose not.” “Do you think there is a God?” “A God?” “Oh, what the hell, Suguro! … Look, a man has all kinds of things pushing him. He tries by all means to get way from fate. Now the one who gives him the freedom to do that, you can call God.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” […] “For myself, I can’t see whether there’s a God or whether there’s not a God makes any difference.” (79)

At this stage, this exchange does not confound readers because they now sense that Toda is the Christian and, as such, he will eventually refuse participation in the sadistic procedure. However, Endo, who up to this point has shed little light as to Toda’s identity, introduces in the next section a detailed psychological sketch revealing who this apparent Christian truly is, as despicable a character as they come. From lying, stealing, indifference toward the suffering of others to adultery and abortion, his callousness knows no bounds. He openly admits to an adulterous affair with a married cousin, employing the word “sin” twice within his monologue: “there’s a stigma attached to adultery. […] I committed this sin” (118); “it isn’t just a matter of adultery, nor just a matter of having a deficient sense of sin” (121). In short, at the time of the vivisection, Suguro, who has shown prior compassion for patients, breaks down and refuses to participate in the horrific crime (“I can’t do anything at all,” he groaned, looking towards the [American prisoner]. “I can’t do anything for you” 148). Toda, on the other hand, not only fully participates, but also did not even feel “the prickly sensation of being about to murder someone. […]

11  THE SEA AND POISON: SHUSAKU ENDO’S PRELUDE… 

183

He felt that all would be brought automatically to a proper conclusion” (143). It is revealing that, in the midst of one of Suguro’s and Toda’s discussions about their vivisection participation, Endo intercalates a sutra that is being read by a patient to another patient: The Lord Buddha deigned one day … to visit one of his disciples who was sick. […] “Did you,” he asked, “when you were in good health, watch beside the beds of your friends who were sick? Know that you are suffering so terribly … because you failed to care for others before. […] When you cross into the other world, you will be tortured with pains that your heart will not be able to bear.” (136)

I say revealing because, throughout the narration, though Suguro’s conscience seems to lapse on occasions, he, not Toda the Christian, is genuinely concerned about his brethren. The quoted intercalation, from my perspective, shed much light on why Suguro ultimately refuses to participate in the vivisection, that is, not out of a Christian conviction that he does not understand, nor care about, but out of his Buddhist-Shinto foundations that, given this story, need not be supplanted by foreign religions. Williams, as most critics with a religious bent, gets it partially wrong when he observes that “By the end of the work … confrontation with the existence of absolute evil has resulted in Suguro’s awakening to the enormity of sin—and to increased understanding of the complexity of human nature in general” (82). Indeed, Suguro realizes that he is facing human wickedness at the hospital, but he has no clue of, nor does he appear interested in learning, what sin is, let alone his own. What the reader is left with is that Suguro’s transformation has arisen unconsciously based on his Japanese upbringing, not on any Christian teachings. Toda, on the other hand, remains unrepentant to the novel’s end: “I have no conscience, I suppose. Not just me, though. None of them feel anything at all about what they did here” (157). As a portrayed Christian, divine retribution for his transgressions does not appear to cross his mind; rather, his only concern is the punishment that will eventually be meted out by society: “Even when the day of judgement comes, they’ll [including himself] fear that punishment of the world, of society” (126). When Suguro, at book’s end, reminds him that someday they will have to answer for this crime, he retorts: “Answer for it? To society? If it’s only to society, it’s nothing much to get worked up about … If those people who are going to judge us had been put in the

184 

J. I. SUÁREZ

same situation, would they have done anything different? So much for the punishments of society” (166–67). As shown in this work, Shusaku Endu, though a Catholic writer, as he and others profess, does not fictionally depict his adopted religion and its followers in favorable terms. (Actually, given his original feelings toward his forced religion and his negative experiences in France as a student, such a portrayal is explainable and justified.) Now one may ask whether this novel is an exception to his creations because it depicts a non-­Christian Japanese displaying a conscience and thus his intent, through national pride, was to exemplify that his compatriots were not all callous heathens who felt no guilt. No, The Sea and Poison is not an exception; whereas, in addition to vindicating Japanese cultural and ethical values, novels like Silence and The Samurai (1980; Endo’s last published work) reveal much more about colonialism and, in a way, “coloniality” than about the persecution of Catholics in sixteenth-century Japan. This topic will be examined in future studies.

References Breuer, Hans-Peter. 1988. The roots of guilt and responsibility in Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison. Literature and Medicine 7 (1988): 80–106. Chow, Rey. 1998. Ethics after idealism: Theory, culture, ethnicity, Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chuang Chua, How. 2017. Japanese perspectives on the death of Christ: A study in contextualized Christology. Diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2007. I-Share. Web. 27 Aug. Dennis, Mark W., and Darren J.N.  Middleton, eds. 2015. Approaching silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel. New  York/London/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury. Mase-Hasegawa, Emi. 2008. Christ in Japanese culture. Theological themes in Shusaku Endo’s literary works. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Shusaku, Endo. 1992. The sea and poison. Trans. Michael Gallagher. New York: A New Directions Book. ———. 2016. Silence. Trans. William Johnston. New York: Picador Modern Classics. Spae, Joseph J. 2017. The Catholic Church in Japan. Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Nagoya: Nanzan University. n.d. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. Williams, Mark B. 2002. Endo Shusaku: A literature of reconciliation. London/ New York: Routledge.

PART IV

Crossroads of Asia-Latin American Narratives and Travel Writing

CHAPTER 12

The Peripheral Spanish World in the Antipodes: The Filipino T. H. Pardo de Tavera in the Centennial Argentina Axel Gasquet

Trinidad Hermenegildo Pardo de Tavera (1857–1925) was one of the most illustrious intellectuals among those first-generation Filipinos who, like José Rizal, supported the independence movement. Belonging to a distinguished Hispanic-Filipino family, he spent many years residing in Paris before returning to Manila and becoming a public figure. He visited Argentina in 1914,1 soon after the Centennial celebrations of that 1  We do not know the exact date of his trip and stay in Argentina, but based on some indications of the story, we deduct the indicated year. For example, he says: “When I visited Buenos Aires, Mr. Sáenz Peña was president of the Republic” (Pardo de Tavera 1916: 53). Roque Sáenz Peña was elected president for the 1910–1916 mandate but, in fragile health, he took sick leave and died on 9 August 1914, and was replaced by Vice President Victorino

A. Gasquet (*) Department of Spanish Studies, University of Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_12

187

188 

A. GASQUET

country’s independence (1910).2 The motive for such a trip was not intellectual curiosity, but rather to visit his younger brother, the sculptor Félix Pardo de Tavera (1859–1935), who, along with his family, had settled in Buenos Aires in 1885. Among Pardo de Tavera’s copious publications, we find the essay “Argentine Memories,” published in Spanish by The Philippine Review in 1916. Its contents are exceptional given that Latin American travelogues written by Philippine intellectuals are very rare. When Pardo de Tavera visited Argentina, he was already a well-known intellectual at home on account of his numerous and scholarly studies on Philippine culture, linguistics, ethnography, and history (Santos Cristóbal, 7–10).3 In his later years (1922–1925), Pardo de Tavera simultaneously served as Director of the National Library and the National Museum. de la Plaza. We infer that Pardo de Tavera remained in the Argentina until before the death of Sáenz Peña. 2  The “United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata” (now the Republic of Argentina) began their struggle for emancipation on 25 May 1810. The peculiarity of this independence, officially declared on 9 July 1816, is that it knows no reverses and counter-revolutionary overturns as those that took place in other places in Spanish America (e.g., Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico). The 1910 Centennial celebrations lasted several months and constituted an “official showcase” of the nation’s progress in its first century of existence. Through these festivities, the government shows off to the world the triumph of the liberal project at its institutional and economic zenith. In Argentine historiography and the national imaginary, the Centennial is often referred to as the country’s “Golden Age.” 3  For an evaluation of his work until 1913 and his prominent role in Philippine culture, we refer to the study of Santos Cristóbal (1913). This work brings together a miscellaneous series (50–183) of lectures, speeches, essays, and interviews published by Pardo de Tavera in the Manila press between 1906 and 1912, a scattered work that translates some of the prominent political ideas of Pardo de Tavera on identity, culture, politics, economics, and education in the Philippines. The volume brings together the following works: “The Filipino Soul” (7 May 1906, 50–66), “Social Authorities” (17 April 1909, 66–77), “The Printing Press in the Philippines” (20 June 1911, 77–92), “Modern Japan” (October 1912, 99–111), “Why General Nogi Committed Suicide” (28 September 1912, 112–116), “The New Filipino Mindset” (14 November 1912, 116–138), “Results of the Philippine Economic Development” (November 1912, 138–171), “Industrial Development” (August 1911, 171–178), and “Where and How We Should Go” (February 1912, 178–183). It would be of great interest to compare some of these essays with the testimony of his trip to Argentina, since there is a deep thematic proximity that would allow us to analyze the scope of some of his concerns about Philippine modernity and his national project, and the vicissitudes of the institutional, political, social, and economic development modernization linked to the latter. But such an effort exceeds the dimensions of this work, undoubtedly deserving a specific study focused on the political thought of Pardo de Tavera and his conception of modernity.

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

189

His perception of the Argentina of his visit was influenced by other known testimonials regarding the Centennial’s official celebrations in which French President Georges Clemenceau and Bourbon Princess Elizabeth (Alfonso XIII’s aunt), together with heads of state and distinguished delegations from South American and other countries of the world. Many other foreign artists and scientists were also in attendance at the celebrations; they too left their (written) impressions.4 However, these celebrations were marred by acts of sabotage and attacks carried out by anarchists, actions that led to a declared state of siege that lasted several weeks. During these years, the Argentine federal government and the City of Buenos Aires initiated significant urban (buildings, monuments) projects: the beautiful architecture of the Colón Theater, the Congress building, Centennial Park, the Courthouse, the “February 3” Park (known as Palermo), and May Avenue, in addition to high-end stores and grandiose structures such as hotels, fountains, sculptures, stadiums, industrial and agricultural exhibition halls, and so on (Gutman 1999). Within such celebratory pomp, Pardo de Tavera’s testimonials are more nuanced than that of other personalities because, while he does not hide his admiration for the young nation that knew how to get ahead on the road to modern civilization (Argentina projected a winning image after its independence), he also makes certain observations regarding the reigning social and political conditions—conclusions that travelers often reach when comparing such conditions with those of their own countries. Both positive and negative aspects are evident in his exposition, with more of the former. In short, Pardo de Tavera is not always condescending in his official discourse about material, social, educational, institutional, and moral progress exhibited by this South American country. Even when he closely examines Argentina’s bona fide successes, he does so by stressing those aspects that, to him, are a “worthy” ideal for the Filipinos (immigration, cosmopolitism, resolute integration to the global economy). A couple of unanswered questions guide our chapter: to what extent does Pardo de Tavera seem convinced by the official story of a successful 4  Let us mention the American dancer Isadora Duncan, the French actress Marguerite Moreno, high-profile intellectuals, and writers and journalists such as Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Anatole France, Jean Jaurès, Ramón del Valle Inclán, Jacinto Benavente, Rafael Blasco Ibáñez, and Enrico Ferri, without forgetting the engineer Guglielmo Marconi or the physicist Albert Einstein.

190 

A. GASQUET

Argentine modernity related by the governing elite that had ruled the country for more than fifty years? To what degree was he able to observe the country’s political and social reality beyond the official story? Together with the institutional accomplishments, the integration of the immigrant masses, and material progress, the Argentine government set in place in 1862 an ideological discourse founded on self-invention, which Nicolas Shumway calls “guiding fictions.” Adapting this concept to the Argentine situation, the historian defines national fictions in these terms: “The guiding fictions of nations cannot be proven, and indeed are often fabrications as artificial as literary fictions. Yet they are necessary to give individuals a sense of nation, peoplehood, collective identity, and national purpose” (Shumway, xi). Given that this is accurate, one last question must be asked: to what extent does Pardo de Tavera desire to extrapolate from these Argentine material accomplishments and “guiding fictions” for his country’s benefit in its search of a modernity that is capable of carrying out its project of national emancipation? Pardo de Tavera’s trip was abruptly interrupted because of matters that demanded his presence in Paris. He writes thus to The Philippine Review’s director: I would have like to have stayed a while longer, but an unexpected event made me return to Europe before I had completed my plans; not only did I return before wanting to, but I also left, here and there, books and papers that, if I had them now, they would be useful in giving you more pertinent and detailed facts.5 (42)

Written after his visit, his recollections lack an internal structured organization while spelling out in forty-six points some of the topics that the author believes “may be of interest to the Philippine reader regarding Buenos Aires and the economic and political life of the Republic of Argentina,” derived from notes in which “I have jotted down only those things and facts that, without seeking them, I have seen and known” (42). We imagine that, though no explicit mention of this is made, these impressions are, to a degree, based on his experience of living for almost thirty years in his brother’s country. These experiences coincide with those years when the country consolidated itself into a modern liberal and dynamic 5  For simplicity, we cite this essay with direct references to the page within parenthesis. All translations are mine.

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

191

nation. Despite Trinidad’s objections, it is obvious that, in order to draft his essay, the author also relied on some well-known documents about the country with respect to its financial aspects and its foreign policy. We will frame our analytical presentation in three basic points that condenses the 46 points made by Pardo de Tavera: (a) his miscellaneous personal impressions about the country’s social life; (b) his observations about its political, social, and financial structure; and (c) his perspective (or predictions) about its future, which he bases in his own observations. At the conclusion, we will point out the substantial insufficiency of Pardo de Tavera’s testimony by focusing on his historical, social, and political shortcomings. If indeed his impressions’ global balance is positive, they are also acritical and superficial in other aspects. Actually, Pardo de Tavera has no complex or dialectical vision regarding Argentina’s path to modernity; even though he stresses contradictory aspects, he is incapable of noticing that the process of immigrant inclusion—already analyzed along with its contradictions (Bertoni, 121–59)—is counteracted by the social and political exclusion of indigenous people. Therefore, Argentina’s national wealth is derived from the direct appropriation of indigenous lands by the federal government—to the benefit of the oligarchical landowners, that is, the liberal political elite in power (Gaignard, 205–218, 223–182)—and by the exclusion of indigenous people from Argentine citizenship6 (Hernández; Sábato, 11–29; Viñas).

Social and Urban Footprints Buenos Aires is described in positive terms as a dynamic and modern city, not only because of its social and high-urban composition, but also because of its infrastructure: port authority and customs, transportation, hygiene (health care, running water), urbanism, building structures, cultural life, clothing apparel and style, and so on. With stopovers in Brazil and Uruguay, “upon returning to Buenos Aires, we feel as though we have

6  This aspect is directly linked to the treatment of the racial question within Argentine modernity. The racial conception of the project of Argentine national civilization, after the violent subjection or extermination of natives, excluded any policy of integration of the native peoples in the “melting pot” publicized by the State as a constituent element of the “guiding fiction” on national identity and cosmopolitanism. We cannot analyze the racial question in Argentina in this chapter, but we emphasize its fundamental importance, and we point out the non-observance of this problem by Pardo de Tavera.

192 

A. GASQUET

returned to Europe” in the southern cone, an essentially white overseas European city: You see many blacks in Rio de Janeiro; in Buenos Aires you do so every now and then. Its population is purely European, and the indigenous element that might be there has been diluted, drowned out by the enormous race mixing produced by white immigrants that, if it at all exists, cannot be evidenced in Buenos Aires. (43)

The Spanish language, according to him, “has evolved there, along the characteristics exhibited by the Argentines” (43); it contains idioms, accents, vocabulary, and syntax coming from a thousand horizons, which blend into what Pardo de Tavera labels as the “Argentine dialect.” Because it is so different from standard Spanish, he is seduced by this typically Argentine idiomatic expression, whose idioms. Accents, and syntax “I loved from the beginning” (43). Pardo de Tavera rejoices before Buenos Aires’s modernity, to which he feels linked. This feeling constitutes his starting point and has a high symbolic worth: “I was proud of admiring something that seemed to touch me” (44). Buenos Aires takes him back to Manila through its language link: “it was our common language that made me feel bewitched by this beautiful city, as if it were mine, which also made me share in Argentines’ pride for their magnificent capital, second only to Paris in the Latin world, which is saying something” (44). He is surprised by the quick capacity to assimilate by those immigrants who arrive in large numbers to Argentina. Social assimilation is reached by the rapid adoption of the Spanish language; political assimilation is made through the automatic access to citizenship offered to the immigrants’ children (a policy then rejected by European countries). “One must see how proud the children of Italians, Spaniards, British, etc. are when they call themselves ‘Argentines;’ all of those born there are not only outright citizens, but also patriots at heart and in fact” (44). Pardo de Tavera thought that this empowering social assimilation was only an American phenomenon. The power to social assimilation is correlated to modern society, while the opposite phenomenon, maintaining one’s original identity or defending one’s country of origin is linked by Pardo de Tavera to the traditional social model of the European type. It is perplexing that he says nothing in his memoirs about the educational system that facilitate the adoption of the Spanish language to immigrants’ children, to say

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

193

nothing of their civic education so important to future citizens. The educational question, a key element to assimilation, is a topic that is absent in his trip’s chronicle. This is interesting, since “education” was a topic that Pardo de Tavera stressed when discussing his native country. He goes on to point out the public’s urban manners, both of citizens as well as those of policemen and public officials. “No one smokes or spits while riding streetcars because it is forbidden; no one even thinks about disobeying these regulations” (44). Policemen are helpful and disciplined, they know how to control their impulses and maintain a cool demeanor. He praises these agents of the public order to a degree that he considers them true models: “surely police agents of many European capitals and large cities could learn much from these Buenos Aires public servants and could gain much by following their example” (45). The Argentine capital stands out for its orderly urban customs, which are civilized because the absence of street shouting, abuses, and public rudeness. Courtesy and moderation, he goes on to say, are “manifestations of culture”, that which we call a “good upbringing.” Any foreigner, no matter from where, who arrives in Buenos Aires, “can here learn lessons in public civility” (45). Yet, Pardo de Tavera points out a negative quality that may be observed in this capital city: the large number of beggars seen on its streets. Without giving any social explanation to this phenomenon, the explains by means of a true national prejudice: “It may be said that begging is an Italo-­ Hispanic curse. Wherever these languages are spoken, begging totally flourishes” (42). Begging only awakens in him moral indignation, yet he gives no explanation other than it is the cultural legacy of Iberians and Italians. Being an intellectual of high social standing, Pardo de Tavera regularly interacts with people at the same level—he makes no explicit mention of his social relations during his stay. He describes places identified with high society, that is, those places frequented by those leading the High Life, for example, the luxurious and exclusive Jockey Club of Buenos Aires or the city’s prestigious horse track. At the Jockey Club, “one is able to admire paintings by Goya, Sorolla, Pradilla, Bouguereau,7 et al.,” along with “the naturalness of manners and expression of those attending [the Palermo 7  We correct the errata (“Bouguerao” in the text). It refers to William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), French painter, a representative of academic art during the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition to the Jockey Club, a work of his is included in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires.

194 

A. GASQUET

horse track], very different from that observed in Europe” (46). He tops off his comments with an explanation regarding the difference between class haughtiness (bourgeois or aristocratic) in the Old World and the civilization of modern customs: [Europe,] where high society folks brag about their haughtiness, employing social manners dictated by the blindest of vanity and by an individual desire to manifest a sense of superiority to others. In Argentine society, despite French accusations of it being ostentatious, nothing is evident that can justify this ostentatiousness. On the contrary, their inherent refined behavior is instantly seductive and may serve as a model to other societies that, deeming themselves more cultured, are merely victims of their yesteryear vanity and pride. (46)

It is evident that this judgment is pronounced by an observer of exalted social status who, even living in Europe, definitely does not belong to European society. These words express the social pride of a notable Philippine Creole who identifies with the historical design of the Argentine patrician class: to build a modern civilized nation through the guiding action of the elite. And this civilization is verified in the manners and social customs adopted by an educated people. Pardo de Tavera identifies with this destiny of the aristocratic Argentine political leadership: he hopes that the Philippine elite manages to assume in the future a similar tutelar destiny. Liberal Argentina, open and cosmopolitan during those years, embodies the possibility of civilized modernity within the Hispanic culture; Pardo de Tavera wishes the same destiny for his country, although the conditions and means to achieve it are different.

Remarks About the Argentine Socio-economic Model The exceptional progress of Argentina obeys, according to the Philippine observer, three combined factors: (1) The social and economic wealth represented by the massive immigration enterprise set up by Argentina in 1862; (2) the availability that the national territory has of fiscal territories, offered for sale or lease to newly arrived colonists, for extensive farming; and (3) the sound political and institutional management of immigration and the country’s infrastructure, both maintained in constant development and adaptation to the demands of the world market. Let us see the details of these essential elements.

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

195

Pardo de Tavera highlights the policy, observed by the ruling elite, of the open door for immigrants, without discrimination based on origin, creed, race and without conditions of admissibility (that is, without practicing selective immigration). The promotion of mass immigration is registered in the Federal Constitution of Argentina and is promoted through a National Immigration Agency with active delegations throughout Europe. Only two countries practiced such a policy for attracting immigrants: the United States and Argentina. The latter was the exception among the young Spanish-American nations. “The emigrant is welcomed as a friend and, more so, as a benefactor.” And the immigrant “knows that his condition as a foreigner is not an obstacle, but a plus for his development in the country” (46). The work force created by immigrants was the essential factor for the development of the economy and the aggrandizement of the nation. Without this foreign contribution, the country would not have known its rapid material progress. Ensuing governments diligently kept up promoting and welcoming it during the next fifty years, thereby creating the appropriate structures to attract immigrants. Pardo de Tavera describes the infrastructures employed to welcome these newcomers: through the Hotel de Inmigrantes at the North Dock of the port of Buenos Aires; likewise, in Rosario and Bahía Blanca, where the newcomers could stay up to five days with expenses paid, before being assigned and sent, coupling their skills to an area’s labor needs, to their destinations. The facilities were extremely modern. Those who became ill could stay longer or, if necessary, sent to quarantine centers. “The government’s immigration department is responsible for placing those who arrive without a given destination. If anyone wishes to reside in the provinces, the government pays for transportation to the chosen place where, up to ten days after their arrival, they are lodged at the expense of the State” (47). Pardo de Tavera points out a noticeable transformation in the newcomers: The change is even more radical because [the immigrant’s] intelligence has been awakened, and all the welfare and the material progress that surrounds them has influenced their moral conditions, “Argentinizing” and turning into a modern man the miserable and ignorant peasant of yesteryear. (47)

Beef and agricultural production went into a period of profound transformation, diversification, and expansion. Large farm owners were enriched by the incorporation of productive lands (whose extension

196 

A. GASQUET

seemed unlimited) but, above all, by the fact that they understood in time that, for these lands’ productive modernization, they required the continuous contribution of foreign labor. They improved livestock breeds, intensified production, and built immense refrigerators for the massive and global beef exportation. Pardo de Tavera had the opportunity of visiting two huge refrigerators in Buenos Aires and La Plata, accompanied by a Swedish veterinarian sent by the kingdom of Sweden to perform sanitary controls. Their description is highly detailed as well as the statistics of the dizzying evolution of the country’s cattle stock, something that particularly interested Pardo de Tavera (48–49). Extensive agriculture encompasses lands formerly destined for livestock grazing, now exploited by peasants at the service of large landowners and who also have the possibility of establishing themselves as settlers or tenants. “As land is not worth anything as long as there is no one to cultivate it, there is a great demand for immigration everywhere and, to attract it, plots of land are put on public sale according to the auction system,” (49) explains Pardo de Tavera. With the knowledge provided by the immigrant laborers, and the desire to advance progress, the agricultural industries (wine, fruit, oils, etc.) diversified. The drilling of artesian wells and the construction of new irrigation systems contribute to agricultural expansion in a land extension (the pampa) that seems to have no limits and that can equally accommodate large properties such as small colonies or tenants. He affirms that “all that magnificent land underwent a colossal transformation that enriched both those who worked and the sedentary owner who, by increasing the value of his property, had the happy opportunity of running to Europe, without loss of time, in search of the pleasures of its great cities” (49). The productivist objective of agricultural and livestock exploitation has generated an undoubtedly excessive euphoria. Pardo de Tavera, a noted observer, warns of the immediate risks of such debauchery and inflationary escalation of value (based on the laissez faire of the Physiocrats). Sentence: “Everyone speculates on land value. That is the great danger in Argentina: speculation, which unsettles everyone because of the uncertain and fictitious nature of the basis for calculating the ‘future’ of a given land” (50). The abrupt decrease in immigration due to the start of World War I, unleashed on 28 July 1914, led to a sudden fall in land values that, without the contribution of foreign labor, could no longer maintain speculative value. “Land prices rise, in the hope that immigrants will flock in because, without them, nothing acquires value or consolidates value

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

197

gained” (50). This speculation gave rise to the crises that Argentina repeatedly encounters, linked to fictitious valuation cycles (and based on the continuous contribution of new labor). Pardo de Tavera is keen to understand the country’s economic functioning, capturing the essential mechanisms of production and (high) prices, and how the latter are artificially created, through the rising cost of labor. He understands how prices are created independently of market laws; for example, abundant fruit production can reach the market at high prices as a result of the “artificial scarcity” manipulated by producers who control production to raise prices with less labor. Consequently, not only does the law of supply and demand regulate prices, but these also are falsified by the programmed restriction of supply and by the fact that, in the Argentine context of the time, “the price of labor could be set by the same individuals who employed the workers” (50). Pardo de Tavera therefore points out that salaries tend to artificially level off at the high end, because all those who work “tend to level off labor’s worth” by any means. “Daily wages are very high, as are all wages; in addition, the general cost of living is extremely high. […] Consequently, life there is very expensive” (50). Argentine trade then had a favorable balance because it exported much and imported little (more money came in than left) and foreign labor counted as a main import item. The flow of capital, especially British, was “unlimited” and it fueled the national economy, provinces and municipalities, along with private credit. Pardo de Tavera points out an astonishing fact: “I know of no country where, for its economic development, first counted on capital, then… on the labor force” (51), initiating a virtuous cycle that, strengthened by the immigration influx, attracts new European capital. “Manpower and foreign capital have been behind the prosperity of that country” (51). He sees that, to Europe’s detriment, the ongoing war will cause an increase in trade with and capital inflow from the United States. In spite of the cultural resistance and the political distrust of Argentine governments, ties with the American economy seem inevitable because “poor Europe stops its reproductive industrial production to dedicate itself entirely to destructive production” (51). Comparing Argentina with the Philippines, Pardo de Tavera wonders about the past and present of both countries. He argues that the colonial economic system was similar in both, using the term “tutelary kidnapping economies” (51–52) to qualify it; he even asserts that this was more unfavorable to Buenos Aires than to Manila. The destinies of both regions definitively bifurcate during the nineteenth century, due to the “political

198 

A. GASQUET

sagacity” of the “great men” who shaped Argentina since its 1810 independence, calling for the participation of its foreign population from the beginning. “Those founders of the Argentine nation had the sagacity to discover all the importance and all the transcendence of immigration for the development of the country” (52). Among the “great men” are two former presidents: Domingo F. Sarmiento and Carlos Pellegrini. The first would develop in an exponential way the national educational system, an essential vector of human development nationally and a fundamental basis for the economic and social development of the nation. Sarmiento, says Pardo de Tavera, “believed, like the American founding fathers, in the redemptive omnipotence of education” (52). For him, one of the secrets of modern Argentina is the mutual understanding between the “children of the country” and the “foreigners.” Native Argentines never harbored misgivings or fears regarding the newcomers. On the contrary, the good fortune of the locals depended closely on the flow of immigrants to increase land value and increase production. Conversely, “immigrants have not had to fear the competition of the country’s children, whose main aspiration, and for most the only one, was to govern and to hold political authority” (51). As a matter of fact, there existed a harmonious social division between immigrants and nationals, provided that the former did not demand political representation in the management of public affairs, and that the latter maintained the monopoly of the nation’s political and social administration. What Pardo de Tavera cannot witness in 1914 is that this tacit social equation or pact between the foreigners and the ruling elite was about to crumble because of the growing and pressing pressure of the former over the latter. These immigrants and all their children, already Argentine citizens, claimed for themselves a series of social rights and a growing political representation, a turn of events that was not considered in the founding pact of liberal and oligarchic Argentina in force since 1862. Indeed, the migratory flow into Buenos Aires and other cities, forged a working class with political aspirations and newly organized unions that, from the last decades of the nineteenth century pushed for political and social participation with class demands. Its claims were hardly audible to a national oligarchy that was forged by the generation of 1880 and followed by subsequent governments. Reforms to the political system were taking place while Pardo de Tavera was visiting the country, but this phenomenon was not evident to him. In effect, President Roque Sáenz Peña had voted in Congress, in February 1912, for the law that established

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

199

universal, secret, and mandatory voting for citizens over eighteen years of age. The essential objective of this law was to broaden the social base of citizen participation in politics, providing greater legitimacy to new governments. Also, while satisfying the demands of the opposition (the Radical Civic Union and, to a lesser extent, the Socialists), it sought through this law to wrestle support away from the sectors most opposed to the extensive hegemony of the National Autonomist Party. This calculation was not, however, favorable to the conservatives: in the first elections of 1916, carried out under this system, Hipólito Yrigoyen, candidate of the opposition (Radical Civic Union) is elected. Not only was Pardo de Tavera’s inability to observe certain determining social phenomena due to his quality as a temporary, non-resident visitor, but we also believe that this social blindness was attributable to certain class limitations. This means that, as a distinguished member of the Filipino Creole elite, he naturally identified with the Argentine ruling class (the “the country’s children” who ran the country as they ran their own plantations), thus his omission to bring up another social reality: the new working class. Numerous are the passages of his travel chronicle where a barely disguised identification with the “political sagacity” of the Argentine “great men” is at work. This recurring identification constitutes both a class reflection of an exalted Filipino and an identification with a successful and modern Latin American model, which in his eyes showed “the way” to be followed by his own country (he nonetheless abstains from establishing deeper parallels along these lines). We can assume that the perimeter of their social frequencies was restricted to the Buenos Aires elite (those identified with the Jockey Club, the hippodrome, the mundane life of the Avenida de Mayo, the residential neighborhoods, the Mar del Plata resort). In any case, there is no record of his recollections regarding social life in the working-class neighborhoods. He is, if anything, a witness to the end of the conservative and oligarchic republic, without envisioning the new direction that the country was taking with its subsequent uncertainty period. He points out, without criticism, the conditions within power is exercised in the conservative republic: The country’s children are very fond of public office. All government employees are “native,” as we say in the Philippines. The most important posts, including the presidency, are monopolized by a small number of

200 

A. GASQUET

f­amilies, by an oligarchy composed of Argentines from old families fused with new elements brought about by the recent redeeming immigration. (53)

This depiction is completed a while later with a glowing and benevolent description of the Creole nobility characterized, in his judgment, by unselfishness and altruism, as well as by personal glory as a psychological feature: Regularly, the members of this oligarchy do not seek power to enrich themselves, though there are exceptions, because almost everyone is wealthy; rather, for the pleasure of exercising power, for being something and someone in political life. All of the country’s children are lovers of progress and accept what, in their opinion, can improve the material and moral state of their countrymen. (53)

He then puts an end to his views with a plethora of positive qualities and attributes: “They are intelligent, educated, ambitious, and refined. They know how to distinguish gold from tinsel and the verbosity of talent” (53). This patrician aristocracy affirms itself through two essential conditions: “money, which gives social rank, and official office, which gives political rank” (53). With this sober and precise language, Pardo de Tavera conveys his admiration of the Argentine ruling class, whose qualities (he thought) were similar to his and those Filipinos of his condition. In his description of modern Argentina, Pardo de Tavera also points out another important factor: the existence of a multitude of social authorities in the provinces and municipalities, of qualified local officials, capable of “influencing all other manifestations of Argentine life” (54). His role is decisive, according to him, in the evolution of national politics. This socio-­ political fabric sustains the stability of the country, distinguishing it from “the life of political disturbance and government of force, common to the Latin American republics” (54). These local authorities are the guarantors of order and social legality. Without these intermediate authorities, who exercise an important role of social mediation, “Argentina would be another small republic of military pronouncements and coups d’état, in a state of permanent civil war, where official posts would be the only lure of ambition. Where social authorities are unknown, individuals only fight for the possession of political authority” (54). Pardo de Tavera then details extensively the political and institutional deficiencies of those other Latin American republics that are “impervious” to foreign immigration and

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

201

addicted to a petty nationalism that encourages mistrust of foreigners, and where oligarchies exercise a predatory and confiscatory right over their own populations: “an oligarchy monopolizes the government and at will exploits the patriotism of the ignorant and poor masses that it conquers by means of rhetoric, bribery, and force” (55). He states that this opinion is partly applicable to the Philippines, a country hostile to immigration and whose people recognize those like themselves (56). Having shifted to the Philippine social and political environment, Pardo de Tavera operates (and summons) a tacit identification of his country with the US administration that, in his opinion, is playing a progressive and modernizing role in the archipelago.

A Radiant Future Pardo de Tavera dwells extensively on the analysis of an international conflict of great transcendence at the beginning of the twentieth century: the December 1902 Anglo-Italian-German naval blockade of the Venezuelan port of La Guaira. The general interest of this episode allows him to weigh the increasing diplomatic importance of Argentina in the context of the period, one when American power was still asserting itself in Latin America while the European imperialist rationale was on its last legs in the region. The blockade was finally lifted with the signing of a protocol by both parties, initialed in Washington on 13 February 1903. During the incident, Argentina, through its Minister of Foreign Affairs, José María Drago, adopts a clear position against interventionism for the collection of financial debts. Heading the group known by the acronym ABC (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), Argentine diplomacy advances the criterion that “no civilized law accords a rich or strong man the right to establish himself as judge and executor of the guilty poor or weak” (56). Before US ambiguity, which did not wish to apply the Monroe Doctrine to this case of blatant European intervention (judging that it did not apply to cases of loan collections), José María Drago’s firm position in international forums, founded in the Calvo Doctrine,8 helped make Argentina 8  It is an International Law doctrine founded by the Argentine legal expert Carlos Calvo (1824–1906), which establishes that those living in a foreign country must establish their claims before local courts, refraining from diplomatic pressure or direct military intervention from their own countries. Several Latin American countries have included the Calvo Doctrine in their constitutions. The Drago Doctrine is a more restrictive and limited application of the Calvo Doctrine.

202 

A. GASQUET

the protector of the Latin American republics. Most countries, even the belligerent European ones, ended up accepting this principle. According to Pardo de Tavera, the Venezuelan incident “highlighted the international extent of Argentine diplomacy.” So “the civilized world witnessed how a Latin American republic managed to enforce a doctrine that safeguarded not only the dignity of the sister republics, but also the true authority of justice” (57). The Venezuelan events motivated the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, a corollary that initiated the interventionist phase of the United States in Spanish America. Faced with the convulsions caused by the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Theodore Roosevelt sought consensus to intervene in Mexico, running into strong disapproval by Argentina that, deeply distrustful, perceived the expansion of American paternalistic hegemony in the region. The Mexican events again confirmed the strong diplomatic leadership of Argentina during those years and, for Pardo de Tavera, this leadership was the result of the farsighted international achievements of the “great men” from Argentina. For him, Argentina’s future was promising because its modernity in all areas put it at the head of the progressive nations. He thought that its agro-export economy and its incipient industry sheltered the nation from crises because the four main exports (meat, cereals, hides, wool) were universally consumed products. Its economic weak point of its economic was the continuous need to increase foreign labor, a need which went unmet in 1914 because of World War I. “The lands yet unused and the transformation of farming through intensive methods, offers agriculture an immense future” (58). Pardo de Tavera argues that, once the global conflict ends, European emigration to the United States and to Argentina will resume and intensify (59), providing these countries with new workforce and a share of moral restraint. The characteristics observed by Pardo de Tavera among the Argentines and the virtues of the country’s ruling class, as well as its education and material prosperity, have elevated Argentina to a unique standing among Latin American nations. Along with France, it is resolutely cosmopolitan and open, making both countries the exceptions in the Latin world. He goes on to stipulate that the “Argentine type,” despite those virtues inherited from Europe, has managed to forge a kind of humanism endemic to the New World, one founded on simplicity and openness. Only two critical comments by the author of the Filipino tarnish this idyllic description. Both comments are related to the same phenomenon:

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

203

the excessive cultural proximity of Argentina to Europe and, inversely, its cultural distance and excessive political reticence toward the United States. According to Pardo de Tavera, although Europe occupies an undisputed place as far as civilization and culture are concerned, the United States embodies the true ideal of the modern democratic spirit, a reality that no Old-World nation can improve on. For him, Argentina’s progressive course can only be improved by closer contacts with the United States as it distances itself from its European origins. Before commenting on a quote about the foreigners by President Roque Sáenz Peña, Pardo de Tavera points out: When I visited Buenos Aires, Mr. Sáenz Peña was president of the Republic. His compatriots argued with him much because of his aristocratic airs, a European legacy, a continent where so many Argentines go to lose the most appreciable qualities of their character: simplicity and openness. In the diplomatic corps of Europe, Argentines become undoubtedly refined but, unfortunately, they do not democratize themselves. On the contrary, through imitation, they accept and acquire the airs and the aristocratic attitudes that they then maintain [reproduce] in their country. (53)

Close contact with Europe forges an arrogant and aristocratic character; close contact with the United States, however, forges a genuinely democratic character. Pardo de Tavera observes that the reasons for distrusting the rise in American imperialism are valid and reliable. But these do not justify, however, the tenacious distance tinged with suspicion that Argentina has toward the United States. Beyond the diplomatic slogans that have fostered mutual reluctance and distrust (“America for the Americans,” Monroe and Roosevelt argued; “may America be for all humanity,” Sáenz Peña replied), Argentina’s rapprochement with the great nation to the North seems to him ineluctable. With legal residency in France, Pardo de Tavera indicates the limits of this inspired phrase by Roque Sáenz Peña, who was widely applauded by Spanish Americans, both for what he said and for what he did not say or implied. As a Filipino and Asian, he, incisively and critically, states the following: As a phrase, it is undoubtedly beautiful: as a feeling it is more poetic, more altruistic, more extensive than the other but, in the end, what does it mean? Words, words, words. Neither literally nor legally what the Argentine said was true because the Constitution of his country, as well as all the official

204 

A. GASQUET

documents related to immigration, always say “favor European immigration” and, in truth, humanity does not reside exclusively in Europe. In the midst of all formulas of altruism, Argentines reject the emigration of the yellow race, so that “humanity” is something like a poetic license, and nothing else. (53)

Likewise, Pardo de Tavera restores an undisputed truth over the battle of political slogans, because surely “America for the Americans” does not express the idea of “closing doors to individuals but not to nations”; he notes in passing that, when Argentines open their doors to humanity, “it is in hopes that the humanity that comes into the country will become Argentina” (53). Pardo de Tavera observes that, behind this diplomatic and political contest, the real reason is that Argentines “want to extend their hegemony over Latin American… A diplomatic attitude that clearly reveals his concept of his own national and international duty in the New World” (59). From this legitimate attitude, “it can be assured that Argentina understands that its role will be to organize resistance against U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America” (59). The United States represented an absolute boundary to Argentine hegemonic aspirations in Spanish America. Confident about Argentina’s auspicious future, Pardo de Tavera adopted a realistic position and knew that this dispute for leadership was not to be settled in diplomatic circles or through debates and moral arguments, but by the country’s simple economic supremacy. Having reached this conclusion, he concludes with these words his extensive report on Argentina: “I say that political, literary, artistic, industrial and commercial hegemony will belong to the most powerful, and the most powerful will be… the richest, the country with the greatest economic development” (59). Surely, between the modesty and the false uncertainty of the ellipses, the author had placed the United States as winner.

Conclusion In the light of the later history of Argentina after Pardo de Tavera’s 1914 visit, his enthusiastic opinions have proven excessive. Without falling into exaggerated judgments, Argentine twentieth-century history seems to systematically deny the qualities and achievements once attributed to the country, its people, and its ruling class.

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

205

It would be easy to demonstrate that Pardo de Tavera’s impressions were erroneous or superficial in many of their essential aspects. But these memories of an enlightened Filipino traveler did not aspire to complete an exhaustive historical, economic, or sociological study of the country. His observations were intended only to paint, as reliably as possible, a picture for his fellow Filipinos. Earlier, we indicated the precautions taken by the author in his letter to the editor of The Philippine Review in Manila. Under this light, his memories reflect enough (or partially) the reality he faced. A myriad of positive judgments, similar to those of Pardo de Tavera, can be summed up in other testimonies, especially among European travelers. His visit corresponds with Argentina’s culminating point as a liberal and oligarchic nation, in its zenith of maximum confidence and splendor. To measure these historical circumstances, it is enough to compare these positive opinions with those that, simultaneously, international observers had made about other countries in the Americas, Europe, or Asia. The global economic statistics show that, in 1913, Argentina occupied the fifth position in the world when it came to GDP per capita, ahead of Germany and France (Maddison, 153). In Pardo de Tavera’s testimony, we find three fundamental interpretive limitations: historical, social, and political. Except for a few comparisons with the Philippines during its colonial period (51), the author does not mention the essential coordinates of Argentina’s territorial expansion for in the nineteenth century, the basis for its national enrichment (Gaignard). He never wondered how so much land was available for speculation, nor how it was taken after a bloody war against the indigenous people who were exterminated and those who remained were secluded in remote reservations. Officially, the war against the Indian in Argentina ended in 1916, that is to say that, during Pardo de Tavera’s visit, military action against the indigenous resistance had not yet stopped (especially in the Northeast, in the border region with Paraguay). Comments on the Argentine situation in the social sphere constitute another structural lacuna of his testimonial, comments that were limited to an analysis of immigration. The acceptance and integration of the foreign population is described in glowing terms and is largely illusory. Although the statistics and data provided by Pardo de Tavera are reliable, the reality of the social and political integration of the foreign masses was much more conflictive than he suggests. Not all immigrants were submissive and obedient to the host country’s law, nor were all natives (as well as members of the ruling class) convinced and militant “immigrationists”

206 

A. GASQUET

(Bertoni, 166–172). The birth of Argentine nationalism as a political and cultural expression is concomitant with the years when the liberal nation affirms itself and expands, that is, the result of the Generation of 1880, whose work was celebrated by Pardo de Tavera in the figures of Domingo F. Sarmiento and Carlos Pellegrini. Numerous voices were raised against an immigration viewed as excessive. We have previously indicated that mass immigration gave rise to, as its immediate consequences, the origin of social demands, the emergence of class and radical trade union action (the anarchist union federation, FORA (Federación Obrera Regional Argentina)), the rebellious Radical Civic Union movement (UCR, Unión Cívica Radical) and/or revolutionaries (Socialist Party, anarchists, etc.). Numerous historical investigations have analyzed in detail this issue; it is impossible to synthesize and develop these aspects here. Finally, the political comments of Pardo de Tavera are weak because he never penetrated the meanders of Argentine political life; he stays on the surface, without grasping its complexity. The description of the Argentine political class, rising from patriarchal and elitist roots, is portrayed as a ruling class without internal fissures, like a homogeneous block dilated in time—this turns out to be a phenomenon far removed from historical reality. The ruling class was highly challenged in Argentine political life until 1916 (at least three revolutions led by the Radical Civic Union, in 1890, 1893, and 1905, and many other strikes put down by violence), not to mention that the crises after 1914 would be even more virulent. The same happened with a shaky economy, which went through numerous national and international financial crises due to excessive speculation—a fact pointed out by the author. The positive aspects attributed by Pardo de Tavera to Argentine development are described as a unilateral accomplishment of its ruling class (the work of the “great men”). In his enthusiastic identification with the measures and political actions carried out by the Argentine liberal leadership, he truly revealed his evident class identification with those who project their own desire. He looked forward to that one day in the Philippines when the “great men” would wake up and attempt a similar objective. The ventures of this ruling class were seen with benevolence by him, stating little criticism and no objection toward them. The actions of this oligarchic political class reveal a sort of miraculous teleology, as if these great men had been touched by a magic wand. The achievements of modernity are the miracle of global capitalism: “In a word: the old colonial model of a military and religious society, has today been replaced by a modern society grounded on science and productivity

12  THE PERIPHERAL SPANISH WORLD IN THE ANTIPODES: THE FILIPINO… 

207

that works behind the weight” (54). Between the colonial era and the modern nation, there is a great ellipsis in Pardo de Tavera’s testimonial. Such an ellipsis is the essence of Argentine political disputes of the nineteenth century: the struggles between the federals and the unitarians, between liberals and conservatives, between supporters and opponents of the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires and its nationalization of the custom house, and between nationalists and cosmopolitans. All of these appear to be absent from Pardo de Tavera’s testimonial.

References Bertoni, Lilia Ana. 2001. Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Gaignard, Romain. 1989. La Pampa Argentina. Ocupación, población y explotación, de la conquista a la crisis mundial (1550–1930). Trans. Ricardo Figueira. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar. Gutman, Margarita. 1999. Buenos Aires 1910: Memoria del Porvenir/Buenos Aires 1910: Memories of the world to come. Buenos Aires: Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto Internacional de Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo (IIED-­ América Latina). Hernández, Isabel. 1992. Los indios de Argentina, Series Indios de América, n° 4. Madrid: MAPFRE. Maddison, Angus. 2002. La economía mundial: una perspectiva milenaria. Madrid: OCDE-Mundi-Prensa. Pardo de Tavera, Trinidad H. 1916. Recuerdos de Argentina. In The Philippine Review-Revista Filipina. Manila, I (2): 42–59. Sábato, Hilda (coord.). 1999. Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones. Perspectivas históricas de América Latina. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica-El Colegio de México. Santos Cristóbal, Epifanio de los. 1913. Trinidad H.  Pardo de Tavera. Manila: Imprenta Cultura Filipina. Shumway, Nicolas. 1991. The invention of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press. Viñas, David. 2013. Indios, ejército y frontera. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor.

CHAPTER 13

José Rizal and the Foundational Novels of Latin America Jorge Mojarro

The figure of Rizal awakens burning passions in his homeland. There is hardly any dissent or doubt on the excellence of his written work, especially in his native Philippines, where his dignified figure decorates hundreds of squares and avenues. The Museum of José Rizal in Intramuros highlights that he was able to speak a dozen languages and that he was extraordinary talented in any activity he carried out: from sculpture to ophthalmology. Focused exclusively in his life and his “martyrdom”, his figure is mercilessly used to feed the pride of being a Filipino.1 Paradoxically, if the curious reader goes to some bookstores of Manila in search for a title in the “Rizaliana” section, more than anything, he will encounter books written to feed the gossip on the most irrelevant episodes of his life. As a 1  In this sense, the evident political use and the extreme reductionist, devotional-oriented, display of the figure of Rizal offers a good study-case of a postmodern construction of national memory. See Huyssen (1995).

J. Mojarro (*) University of Santo Tomás, Manila, The Philippines e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_13

209

210 

J. MOJARRO

consequence, it is not by chance that in the end, the biographies that help promote interest among the most unknowledgeable abound. On the contrary, very few works have been focused in the thankless and laborious work of understanding his thought. Compared to the countless biographers, scholars who have dared to evaluate the quality of his literary works and analyze the details and the complexities of his intellectual endeavor have been just a few.2 The immediate veneration following his execution and his consideration as a national hero has had one unintended consequence: an appropriation by Philippine nationalist historians, who have found in his life the epitome of Philippine patriotism.3 Rizal, therefore, is generally considered an isolated genius whose literary production was somehow created with little connection with his contemporaries, except for his political commitment with the independence of the Philippines. This view only contributes to misunderstand his figure and simplifies the significance of his works. Literary critics have been influenced by this pervasive perspective, and as a consequence, literary works—not only Rizal’s— have not been studied as such, but in terms of its contribution to the construction of the Philippine nation (Álvarez-Tardío 2011; Mojarro Romero 2018). However, José Rizal wrote two novels, many poems and a considerable number of essays and articles, and we have to keep in mind that it is precisely for this arduous intellectual production for which Rizal wanted to be remembered: his writings were fueled by a decided literary ambition he even confessed in several letters to his friends. For this same reason, the very rich bibliography on the novels of Rizal does not reflect, as far as I know, any research devoted to analyze the surprising similarities of his magnum opus—Noli Me Tangere (1887)—with some Latin American contemporary novels, the so-called foundational fictions (Sommer 1991), which display deep similarities and a common literary mindset.4 2  Notable exceptions to the absence of a literary approach to the works of Rizal and, specifically, Noli Me Tangere, are the pioneer work Radaić (1961), Manuud (1967), Bernad (1967, 2004), Arcilla (1998), Sánchez Fuertes (1988), Dizon (1996), the essays contained in Elizalde Grueso and Álvarez-Tardío (2011), Álvarez-Tardío (2011) and, more recently, Matibag (2018) and Barrera (2018). 3  For example, the circle of intellectuals and journalist of El Renacimiento (1901–1910), a newspaper in Spanish that criticized harshly the US domination, often published articles authored by Rizal in its pages. The publication of the first biography of Rizal by Wenceslao E. Retana, Vida y escritos de José Rizal (1907), was announced in El Renacimiento as an event of historical importance for the nation. 4  This does not mean, however, that there is an absence of studies dealing with Philippine and Latin American authors using a comparative approach. Hagimoto (2013) has explored

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

211

Literature and Nation-Building in the Philippines: The Ilustrados In order to understand the significance of a novel published in the Spanish language and written specifically for Filipinos in 1887, as Noli Me Tangere was, it must be taken into consideration that literature, after language and religion, was considered as an efficient instrument to legitimize and define the identity of emerging European nations throughout the nineteenth century (Even-Zohar 1996). Literature, especially novels, was converted into a useful and recurring tool to convey sentiments of solidarity and to support a narrative of certain socio-cultural cohesion within the nation. Literature as an institution or the very creation of a national literary system stands as an argument that distinguishes the identity, on a par with history, language, music and one’s own traditions and folklore. It evokes a defined sense of belongingness, a legitimizing bond that is sanctioned and recognized by all members of a community. From the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, each nation willing to shape its nationhood had had the obligation of possessing a body of canonical authors to whom to turn in order to defend and be proud of itself. In this sense, Dante, Shakespeare and Montaigne are built and are expressed as monumental literary figures and linguistic dignitaries of their respective nations, even if this recognition be done subsequently, such as, in the case of Romanticism. Literature, therefore, legitimized the nation, and Philippine authors in the last decades of nineteenth century were aware of that. Likewise, the fictional narratives in prose were the preferred genre in the nineteenth century in many European and Latin American nations, especially during the romantic and realist period.5 Nations in the pursue of self-definition needed the existence of literary works par excellence or worthy of emulation. These works, once they had reached a certain critical and public recognition, did not delay in achieving the national canon and the anti-imperialist ideas in the writings of Martí and Rizal; Escondo (2014) uses an innovative transoceanic approach to confront the literature of Philippine propagandistas and the Latin American modernistas from Cuba and Puerto Rico; Hartwell (2017) addresses the anti-colonial discourses and strategies of historiography, travel writings and novels from the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico at the end of nineteenth century. More recently, a monograph dealing with connections between Philippine and Latin American has been published (Mojarro 2019). 5  We have in mind authors like Adam Mickiewicz (Poland), Alessandro Manzoni (Italy) and Aleksandr Pushkin (Russia).

212 

J. MOJARRO

in joining the school curriculum with some clearly extra-literary goals: to showcase a great book that is intelligible to all. The state would take charge of working with the exegetes and cultural agents so that this would reflect the national idiosyncrasy and would be a source of national pride. Oddly, in this process of searching and justifying the sense of identity, the Philippine intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century was quite original. The so-called ilustrados, instead of opting for the novel, preferred to write essays more than any other genre, such as La Antigua Civilización Tagálog (1887) and Los Itas (1890) by Pedro Paterno (1857–1911), Ilocanadas (1887) and El Folklore Filipino (1889) by Isabelo de los Reyes (1864–1938), the anti-friar leaflets of Marcelo del Pilar (1850–1896), the fiery articles of Graciano López Jaena (1856–1896) or a liberal and well-­ argumented work like El Progreso de Filipinas (1881) by Gregorio Sanciangco (1852–1897). They willingly engaged in the discussion of political ideas, often leading to harsh controversies, as the ones kept by the contributors of La Solidaridad (1889–1895) and La Política de España en Filipinas (1891–1898). They were able to awaken the sense of belonging of their fellow Filipinos through the production of a rich and varied textual corpus whose goal was to imagine the Philippines, to define it, to shape it, to vindicate it, to proclaim its originality and its “soul” as opposed to the European metropolis. Even apparently unimportant issues like linguistic preferences, could provoke a very vivid polemic (Thomas 2016: 141–170). The main theme of these works was invariably the Philippines— with its current political status—and the discursive strategies most often dealt with the indigenous, the pre-Hispanic and costumbrismo, even though each author had completely different preferences that impelled them to argue roughly. Looking to the past in search of the excellences of native culture prior to the arrival of the Spaniards was a preferred intellectual activity among ilustrados. This attitude explains the almost simultaneous edition of Juan de Plasencia’s treaty on Tagalog customs, edited by Paterno and Pardo de Tavera.6 Likewise, José Rizal made a valuable contribution by editing in 1890 Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609) by Antonio de Morga, whose 6  Pedro Paterno: El barangay; con la relacion de Fr. Juan de Plasencia, escrita en 1589 de cómo se gobernaban los tagalos en la antigüedad y una carta de D. Miguel Villalva Hervás y Paterno (Madrid, 1892); Trinidad Hermenegildo Pardo de Tavera: Las costumbres de los tagalos en Filipinas (según el padre Plasencia) (Madrid, 1892). In both cases, the text was probably extracted from Juan José Delgado: Historia General Sacro-Profana Política y Natural de las Islas del Poniente llamadas Filipinas. Manila: Imprenta de El Eco de Filipinas, 1892, 371–392.

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

213

eighth chapter praises the industriousness of the inhabitants of the archipelago (Ocampo, 1998).7 These publications are early outstanding examples of intellectual works aimed to shape the Philippine identity in a scholarly and essayistic way. Most importantly, they attempted to argue that prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, there was a flourishing and developed civilization that was erased by the arrival of the Spaniards and that needed to be rescued.8 It is in this context of intellectual effervescence towards the status of the Philippine archipelago and the capability of their inhabitants where the publication Noli Me Tangere must be placed, even if the novel had to see the light in Berlin due to censorship.

Ninay as a Precedent of Noli Me Tangere In line with this, a pioneer of the group of ilustrados was the unjustly forgotten Pedro Paterno,9 probably the first intellectual to write extensively about the Philippines from a purely Filipino perspective. It was him who also for the first time felt the need to create a “Biblioteca de Autores Filipinos”, although it would only be with a book of poems of little merit written by himself—Sampaguita y otros poemas (1880). Unfortunately, the planned collection was discontinued. Eventually, he foresaw the need to create and try the foundational Philippine novel in Nínay (1885), with the superfluous subtitle “Filipino customs”. However, his proposal did not succeed either. The novel narrates the unsuccessful love story of Nínay, a young lady from a respectable family, and Carlos, a brave young man who saved her life twice. Pilar, adopted daughter of the parents of Nínay, also loves Carlos, and Federico, an evil hacendero from Antipolo whose father 7  Rizal was especially concerned by the supposed laziness of the Philippine people, as he showed in the article he published serially in La Solidaridad (July–September 1890): “La indolencia del filipino”. See Alatas (2006: 98–111). 8  During those years several books were published by the Spaniards in order to defend their role in the progress of the archipelago. The Biblioteca Histórica Filipina was funded with this purpose although it was only able to publish four volumes. A vindication of the papel civilizador of the friars in the Philippines was published right after the expulsion of the Spanish colonial government: Valentín Marín y Morales: Ensayo de una síntesis de los trabajos realizados por las corporaciones religiosas españolas de Filipinas, Manila Universidad de Santo Tomás, 1901, 2 vols. For this author, see Mojarro Romero (2015). 9  A meritory attempt to recover this controversial figure can be found in Mojares (2006: 3–118). Philippine historiography has traditionally considered Paterno a traitor for being the middle person between the Spanish government and the revolutionary members of Katipunan during the Pact of Biak-na-Bató (April 1897).

214 

J. MOJARRO

already forbade the marriage between two humble lovers—Berto and Loleng, loves Nínay. Pilar plots the separation of Nínay and Carlos, by telling Federico to use his influence to arrest the father of Nínay. Pilar’s plan—Federico promised to liberate Nínay’s father in exchange of her promise to marry him—is broken by the sudden appearance of Berto, who kills Federico. As a consequence, Evaristo, Nínay’s father, dies by execution the same day. Carlos saved his life the same day Evaristo was arrested by escaping in a boat with Berto’s help and spent three years of adventures in a wild island. When he is finally able to return to Manila, he discovers Nínay became a nun and decided to visit her to the convent. By that time, he is already sick of cholera and dies before the entrance religiously assisted by Nínay, who will die of the same illness a few days later. Taking aside the arguable qualities of the novel and the bizarre development of the narration, there are two elements that made this novel completely unfit to be a proper foundational fiction, at least according to the features provided by Sommer (1991): a novel written for the elite of the nation, “produced during the nation-building period” (26), where a tragic romance goes along with politics. In the first place, there is a complete absence of social or political conflict. The Philippines is described in an extremely bucolic manner, as a very pleasant paradise populated by courteous people who enjoys the pleasures of life and happily practices Philippine traditions. The locus of the love troubles could have been any other. The hierarchical structure of the Philippine society appears in perfect harmony and the political situation of the archipelago is deliberately absent. The conflict strictly occurs in the sphere of the romance. Secondly, the plot of the novel seems to be a mere excuse for the display of Paterno’s knowledge of the Philippines. The narration is constantly interrupted due to the verbose explanations on the behavior and particularities of the Filipinos found at the footnotes. Paterno feels the need to explain not only every ritual, but every plant, fruit, animal or geographical location of the novel, often quoting scholarly bibliography to support his claims. Nearly 40% of the text is made of footnotes. Paterno’s novel was not intended to be read by Filipinos, but by Spaniards: it was an operation of publicity to appear as the most knowledgeable person on Philippine matters to the Spanish intelligentsia in Madrid and Spanish authorities.10 10  Paterno’s use of books as a sources of intellectual and political legitimacy lasted until his death. Other examples of this pragmatic use of literature can be seen in El pacto de Biyak-naBato (1897 and 1910) and En automóvil por el primer distrito de la Laguna de Bay (1907). Regarding his last literary incursions, see López-Calvo (2019).

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

215

Nínay, therefore, must be considered an interesting unsuccessful attempt. Its principal error consisted precisely in the fact that was not a written work for the Filipino elite who did not need to read pieces of his own culture in a didactic way. Instead, it was meant for the Spanish bourgeoisie in which Paterno wanted to integrate himself and by whom Paterno wanted to be recognized. On the other hand, the weak plot, interrupted by tedious footnotes of an antiquated Romanticism style did not manage to catch the attention of the Spanish reader who was already used to the more elaborated novels of Realism. However, the proposal of Paterno was significant and pioneering in the sense that he was the first Filipino author who saw the possibility of contributing of the nation through the creation of educated literary works that had a genuinely Filipino flavor (Matibag, 2010). He had the will to found a literary tradition, a task taken by a more talented narrator: José Rizal.

Latin American Fictions and Romantic Imagination The Philippines did not have to wait for a long time to see its great novel. Noli Me Tangere was published only two years after Nínay. However, most of critics have unexpectedly failed to point out the fundamental similarities between both novels. The creation of Noli me Tangere was undoubtedly inspired by Nínay, despite the novel is not listed in the belongings of the library Rizal (Ocampo 1960). A biographer of Rizal mentions that he actually corrected the style of the novel by Paterno’s request (Palma 1949: 54).11 An exception to this critical absence is Guerrero’s biography of Rizal: The parallel between the two plots is obvious: Berto is Elías in the Noli; Carlos, Ibarra; Nínay, María Clara; don Evaristo, Capitán Tiago; the ruin of Carlos, like that of Ibarra, is encompassed by a false denunciation of complicity in a rebellion; like María Clara, Nínay sacrifices her lover by her father and goes into a convent, believing her lover dead. The bare plot of the Noli is in fact reminiscent of Nínay. (1969: 134)

Rizal might have conceived the creation of his novel after reading Nínay. However, Noli Me Tangere surpasses Paterno’s novel in every single aspect and his multiple literary readings, especially from the romantic authors—Hugo, Schiller—surely helped to shape the novel.  We have tried to find evidence to this claim among the letters of Rizal, to no avail.

11

216 

J. MOJARRO

Regarding the genesis of the novel, its literary influences remain an important factor to be studied in depth.12 What it seems evident from a literary perspective is the romantic nature of the novel, even if the plot is set up in a contemporary and recognizable Manila and tackle with real socio-political problems of the archipelago (Radaić 1961). Moreover, we argue that Noli Me Tangere resembles the romanticism typical in nineteenth-­century Latin American novels, even if Rizal might have never read those novels.13 Noli Me Tangere is a successful example of foundational fiction as defined in the classical work of Sommers (1991): if there is a group of novels with which the Noli Me Tangere conforms, in argument and intention, and with which it should be compared in order to understand its meaning and value, it is, without any doubt, with the so-­ called Latin American foundational novels:14 José Mármol (1817–1871) Alberto Blest Gana (1830–1920) Jorge Isaacs (1837–1895) Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1832–1896) Juan León Mera (1832–1894) Manuel de Jesús Galván (1834–1910) Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894)

1855 1862 1867 1869 1879 1882 1882

Amalia Martín Rivas María Clemencia Cumandá Enriquillo Cecilia Valdés

Argentina Chile Colombia Mexico Ecuador Dominican Republic Cuba

From a sociological point of view, all these novels were written by authors, like Rizal, of great erudition and a humanist spirit. They were writers who practiced the most diverse literary genres. They collaborated in newspapers and were politicians in the widest sense of the word. The problem of nation-building especially concerned them. They chose the novel as the 12  Sánchez Fuertes (1988) provides a list of seventeen possible sources, from which only four are literary in nature: Recuerdos de Filipinas (1877 and 1879) by Francisco Cañamaque, Carlos II, el Hechizado (1844) by Antonio Gil y Zárate, Las luchas de nuestros días (1884), by Francisco Pi y Margall and Doña Perfecta (1876) by Benito Pérez Galdós. The similarities between Noli Me Tangere and Doña Perfecta are particularly striking. See Sánchez Portuondo (2004). 13  We are having in mind the second kind of supranationality in the field of comparative literature, as told by Guillén (2005): the study of literary phenomena or processes that, being genetically independent or belonging to different civilizations, are justified and carried out because those imply common socio-historical conditions (96). This is the case of Noli Me Tangere and its Latin American peers. 14  The concept of foundational novel is especially useful, derived from the concept of “imagined communities” coined by Benedict Anderson in 1985 (1996), in order to frame both the nineteenth-century novels of Latin America and the first two novels of José Rizal.

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

217

best means to reach the most number of literate people. These Latin American novels were often written in a time of continuous civil wars or deep political conflicts. Most of these men belonged to young nations or nations about to be born. They were looking for a definition to identify themselves as a nation, and in writing these novels, they were not doing but imagining and desiring a nation. “These novels were part of the general project of the bourgeoisie in order to attain hegemony in this culture which at that time was still in the state of gestation” (Sommer 1991: 29). The social and cultural heterogeneity of these new nations made the task difficult, especially because their ambitions were to create a nation following what they believed to be most progressive and advanced model: the European nation. In this sense, we can’t forget the elitist nature of these narrations: they were novels written by the elite for the elite. Rizal wrote the novel in Spanish, a language most of Filipinos did not understand. Only the bourgeoisie could purchase novels for economic reasons and they were the preferred audience because they had the capacity to take action in accordance to the desires of the author in order to change and transform the status quo of the nation. In Rizal, like in the foundational novelists of Latin America, a lucid awareness of history was behind the creative process. Noli Me Tangere is not only a means of entertainment, or a recreation of landscapes and customs, or a description of social types, or a presentation of inherent tensions in the nation-building process; it is also a seminal and foundational literature for the citizens of the future. Rizal, like his Latin American contemporaries, created Noli Me Tangere with a very concrete mission that appears explicit in the brief preface that opens the novel and in some of his letters: “The book contains, therefore, things about which none of us have spoken until now; they are so sensitive that they cannot be touched by any person. As far as I am concerned, I wanted to do what no one has dared. I wanted to answer the calumnies which for so many centuries have been heaped on us and our country. I described the social situation, the life, our beliefs, our hopes, our desires, our complaints, our sorrows. I unmasked the hypocrisy which, under the cloak of religion, was impoverishing and brutalizing us” (Sánchez Fuertes 1988: 58–59).15

 Letter from José Rizal to Félix Resurrección Hidalgo, dated March 5, 1887, and originally written in French. 15

218 

J. MOJARRO

It is the aim of the novel to awaken the consciences of the Filipinos and show them the “social cancer”. In Noli, like in Amalia, Cecilia Valdés, Cumandá or Martín Rivas, the project of national modernization is drawn in a love story beleaguered and hampered by circumstances beyond their control and by political intrigues that surround them. While the problem of slavery is key in the Cuban novel Cecilia Valdés or the marginalization of Indians is the axis of the Peruvian novel Aves sin nido (1889) by Clorinda Matto de Turner, in Noli, the omnipresence of the friars in all aspects of life is the most important factor, although not the core, in order to explain the status of decadence, oppression and torpor in the archipelago. Rizal did not spare almost anyone of the spite of his novel. Rizal insists in the fact that what prevents the development of the nation is not only the intolerance of religious orders, but the apathy and the lack of unity of the Filipino people, who has no nation awareness nor the education to elevate its cultural level (Casas 2001: 135). All these authors, without exception, chose the love story novel —what Sommer call “romance”—in order to develop the plot. The love of young people tries to fight and sway the strict social conventions of the time that sanction the relations between individuals of different races and social classes. One significant case happened in Cumandá, where the love between young people of different races is accepted because the girl belongs to the aristocracy of the indigenous people. In Cecilia Valdés, a novel that denounces the slavery and the discrimination of black people, the lover abandons the protagonist of the novel for a white woman of his own status. In the two novels, interestingly, the possibility of incest ends up breaking the supposedly interracial love. In the case of the novel of Rizal, Crisóstomo and María Clara are mestizos of the affluent class. The problem arose due to the intrusion of Linares who was sent by Father Dámaso. The latter symbolizes the disastrous intervention of the friars in the peaceful and happy life of the country. In all these novels, the couples do not only represent the foundation of a family, but also the foundation of the nation aspired for. But in Noli, strangely, another circumstances impede that the marriage be consummated, as Rizal allegorically projects in his characters his pessimism on the destiny of the Philippines. Doris Sommers affirms that the coherence of these novels “comes from their common project to build through reconciliations and amalgamations of national constituencies cast as lovers destined to desire each other. This produces a surprisingly consistent narrative form that is apparently

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

219

adequate to a range of political positions; they are moved by the logic of love” (24). With the nuanced exception of Martín Rivas, all novels belong to the romantic and sentimental genre and prolong the topic of problematic passions following somehow the exemplary characters of Atala (1802) by Chateaubriand or Paul et Virginie (1781) by Bernardine de Saint-Pierre. This is seen more clearly in the case of María. Although probably Rizal had an intention of presenting the reality of the country in a detailed and true manner—something that is rather open to discussion, even if Rizal defended the impartiality of the narration—what is certain is that the omnipresence of the narrator with his interpolations, opinions and sarcasms, brings it away from any stylistic similarities with Balzac—to cite an realist author whom he must have known very well. The stylistic originality that distinguishes Rizal from other foundational novelists is that he subjects the Philippine reality in a process of parody through caricature, the grotesque and bitter humor, starting from the first chapter.16 It overwhelmingly proofs that he was a good reader of Cervantes: This dinner was given in a house on Anloague Street, and although we do not remember the number, we will describe it in such a way that it may still be recognized, provided the earthquakes have not destroyed it. We do not believe that its owner has had it torn down, for such labors are generally entrusted to God or nature—which hold the contracts also for many of the projects of our government.17 (Rizal 1998: 39)

The examples are countless. The humor of Rizal is present throughout the novel through a myriad of sources, from the irony and the sarcasm of the play of words to the simplest nonsensical things uttered by the wife of the lieutenant. The omniscient narrator does not interact with the polite reader, as what happens in the melodramatic novels, but it makes him participate in a very particular way to see the Philippine reality. This distinguishes him from other Latin American novelists of the nineteenth 16  Rizal’s fantastic sense of humor in Noli Me Tangere has been already pointed out by Radaić (1961) and Bernad (1967, 2004). 17  “Dábase esta cena en una casa de la calle de Anloague y, ya que no recordamos su número, la describiremos de manera que se la reconozca aún, si es que los temblores no la han arruinado. No creemos que su dueño la haga derribar, porque de este trabajo s encarga allí Dios o la naturaleza, que también de nuestro Gobierno tiene muchas obras contratadas” (39). English translation by Charles Derbyshire (1912).

220 

J. MOJARRO

century. In Noli, the grotesque scenes, moments of crude reality and paragraphs in the purest idealizing style are combined, especially when describing the Philippine sky or the physical beauty and virtues of María Clara. With this overlapping of planes, we see one of the most innovative aspects of the novel. On the other hand, the characters tend to be divided in a Manichean or dualist way, between the good and the bad, in a typically romantic manner. Their psychological characterization does not allow any ambiguities and complexities: Ibarra, María Clara, Elías and Tasio are opposed to the lieutenant, Victorina and the friars. The male heroes generally have a dark past and they appear as carriers of justice and generosity. They are reflective and conversationalists, but they are also very sensitive and empathetic towards their suffering neighbors. They even manifest fits of madness like when Elías discovers that the grandfather of Crisóstomo Ibarra is the cause of the misfortunes of his family. The heroines, on their part, are virgins, innocent, fair. They patiently wait for their loved ones for years and they only take initiative when moved by love’s passion. As regards the characterization of personalities, Rizal closely follows the style of his Latin American contemporaries, especially like in Cumandá or María: the parallelisms between the main two characters of these novels and Ibarra and María Clara is evident. From the political point of view, the foundational novels are essentially liberal, although they would show a kind of liberalism that would seem to favor the retention of the status quo of the creole elite. A deep critic of the class system or the racial discrimination does not exist in the Latin American novels—except in Cecilia Valdés. This might be so because the authors belonged to that creole elite. Moreover, they adopted the idealized European model for the nation that they wanted to create, France being an example par excellence. In particular, the biography of Facundo (1854) of the Argentinian Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, is not short of racist commentaries and proposes a Europeanization of Argentina as the only way to attain progress. The novel of Cirilo Villaverde advocates for the end of slavery, although such a proposal never means putting the blacks in the same social level as the whites. An exception to this liberalism by convenience can be seen in the figure of Crisóstomo Ibarra, who does not only believe in the capabilities of the native Filipino, but also actively participates in the promotion of equal opportunities through the construction of schools. Ibarra is convinced that only through education is it possible to attain freedom. In this sense, the novel of Rizal is much more

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

221

subversive than the Latin American novels because it suggests a negation of the superiority of the individual by birth or social class. Interestingly, in this regard, some obvious aspects are missing in the novel, i.e., the nonChristian indigenous people from the provinces are not present. The action always happens in Manila and its surroundings. Seen from a historical perspective, it shows that the Philippines of Rizal was extremely Tagalog-centered and surprisingly homogeneous.

Conclusion Noli Me Tangere justly establishes itself as a foundational novel of the Philippines, with striking similarities with their Latin American contemporary peers. Rizal paints a fresco of contemporary Philippine society and his so-called social cancer: the friars, the deficient administration, the wrong social values and ignorance. Noli presents to us the nation aspired for by Rizal. The nation-building project of Rizal, of which Noli Me Tangere totally forms part, includes the laying down of the foundations of the nation. But in order to found a nation, it was necessary to form the citizens by educating them and giving them opportunities. In this sense, the conversations between Crisóstomo and Elías, and the complaints of the friars commenting on the debasement of the young Filipinos who go to Europe and return with pernicious ideas, are the two sides of the same coin. They form part of a literary device with multiple readings, a novel with several meanings. Consequently, we can say without exaggeration that Rizal, in making his novel, like Mármol, Galván, Isaacs or Villaverde, was at the same time proposing a model of nation and pointing out the reasons for the unfinishing nature of the desired project.

References Alatas, Syed Hussein. 2006. The myth of the lazy native. New York: Routledge. Álvarez-Tardío, Beatriz. 2011. Rizal’s novels as literature. Paper presented at the “Sesquincentennial Conference Rizal’s in the 21st Century: Local and Global Perspectives, University of the Philippines. Anderson, Benedict. 1996. Comunidades imaginarias. Fondo de Cultura Económica: México D.F. Arcilla, Jose S. 1998. Once more the Noli – With understanding. In Understanding the Noli: Its Historical Context and Literary Influences, ed. Jose S.  Arcilla, 183–199. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila & Phoenix Press.

222 

J. MOJARRO

Barrera, Beatriz. 2018. El fasto barroco y el proceso de independencia filipina: Noli Me Tangere, de José Rizal. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 88 (2° semestre): 217–240. Bernad, Miguel A. 1967. Some aspects of Rizal’s novels. In Brown Heritage, ed. Antonio Manuud, 527–538. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. ———. 2004. Humor and craftsmanship in the opening chapters of the Noli. In The native sky. Studies in the life and writings of Jose Rizal, 27–40. Quezon City, Ateneo de Manila. Casas, Lourdes. 2001. Noli me tangere: María Clara o la imposibilidad de constituir una nación filipina. Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 54: 121–138. Dizon, Alma Jill. 1996. Rizal’s novels: A divergence from melodrama. Philippine Studies 44 (3): 412–426. Escondo, Kristina. 2014. Anti-colonial archipelagos: Expressions of agency and modernity in the Caribbean and the Philippines, 1880–1910. Columbus: The Ohio State University. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1996. The role of literature in the making of the nations of Europe. Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliguée 1.1: 39–59. Guerrero, León María. 1969. The first Filipino: A Biography of Rizal. Manila: National Historical Commission. Guillén, Claudio. 2005. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura comparada. Barcelona: Tusquets. Hagimoto, Koichi. 2013. Between empires. Martí, Rizal and the intercolonial alliance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartwell, Ernest Rafael. 2017. Footnotes to empire: Imaginary borders and colonial ambivalence. Cambridge: Harvard University. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight memories. Marking time in a culture of amnesia. New York: Routledge. López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2019. From Self-Orientalization to Revolutionary Patriotism: Paterno’s Subversive Discourse Hidden in Romances. UNITAS 92 (1): 143–166. Manuud, Antonio. 1967. Toward a theory concerning the development the development of Filipino poetry in Spanish. In Brown heritage, ed. Antonio Manuud, 457–482. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Matibag, Eugenio. 2010. The spirit of Ninay. Pedro Paterno and the first Philippine novel. Humanities Diliman 7 (2): 34–58. ———. 2018. Rizal y la dialéctica, o el diálogo inacabado. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 88 (2° semestre): 197–215. Mojares, Resil B. 2006. Brains of the Nation. Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Mojarro, Jorge (ed.). 2019. Transpacific Connections of Philippine Literature in Spanish, special issue of UNITAS, vol. 92 (1).

13  JOSÉ RIZAL AND THE FOUNDATIONAL NOVELS OF LATIN AMERICA 

223

Mojarro Romero, Jorge. 2015. An essay on ‘Ensayo de una Síntesis de los Trabajos Realizados por las Corporaciones Religiosas de Filipinas’ by Fr. Valentín Marín, O.P. In Lumina Pandit. A continuum, ed. Ángel Aparicio, 159–194. Manila: UST Miguel de Benavides Library and Union Bank of the Philippines. ———. 2018. El estudio de la literatura hispanofilipina durante el siglo XX. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 66 (2): 651–681. Ocampo, Esteban. 1960. Rizal as a Bibliophile. Manila: Bibliographic Society of the Philippines. Ocampo, Ambeth. 1998. Rizal’s Morga and views of Philippine history. Philippine Studies 46 (2): 184–214. Palma, Rafael. 1949. Biografía de José Rizal. Manila: Bureau of Printing. Paterno, Pedro. 1885. Nínay (Costumbres Filipinas). Madrid: Imprenta de Fortanet. Radaić, Ante. 1961. Rizal. Romántico Realista. Manila: UST Press. Rizal, José. 1998. Noli Me Tangere. Madrid: Círculo de Lectores. Sánchez Fuertes, Cayetano. 1988. Literary sources of Noli Me Tangere. In Understanding the Noli: Its historical context and literary influences, ed. Jose S. Arcilla, 57–112. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila & Phoenix Press. Sánchez Portuondo, María J. 2004. La novela realista al servicio de "La Propaganda": Noli me tangere de J. Rizal y Doña Perfecta de B. Pérez Galdós. In Actas del XXXIX Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Europea de Profesores de Español, ed. Sara M. Saz, 183–216. Madrid: AEPE. Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational fictions. The national romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, Megan. 2016. Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados. Filipino Scholarship and the end of Spanish Colonialism. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing.

CHAPTER 14

Is It Not So Easy to Go from West to East? A Political View of Cecília Meireles in India Everton V. Machado

In 1953, one of the most important voices of twentieth-century Brazilian poetry, Cecília Meireles (1901–1964), a native of Rio de Janeiro, spent a little over two months, from 1st January to 6th March, travelling through India. This was a time when the new world order was beginning to be defined with the decolonization process that would affect three continents, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Meireles died shortly before what Immanuel Wallerstein defined as the third turning point in the modern world-system,1 when “revolutionaries” in the Social Sciences “began to 1  This chapter picks up on part of the theoretical base of my book (Machado 2018), which uses modern world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein to broaden the debate about Orientalism. The first ‘turning point’ occurred with the emergence of capitalism as “économie-monde” (Fernand Braudel); the second, with the French Revolution (1789); and the third, with the worldwide social and student movements of 1968 (Wallerstein 2004: x).

Translated from the Portuguese by Karen Bennett. E. V. Machado (*) Centre for Comparative Studies, School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_14

225

226 

E. V. MACHADO

raise questions about underlying epistemologies of the structures of knowledge” (2004: 16). As Western representations of the Orient did no more than cognitively appropriate the Other, would the Brazilian, who was born and raised in a country located, like India, at the periphery of the modern world-system, be able to break with the dangerous essentialisms, ideologies and identity politics? We might even wonder if Cecília Meireles’s reading of India, and the narrative she created out of it,2 may not have in some ways anticipated Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), given that the Palestinian’s project was “to write a universal history grounded not on the ideology of Homo occidentalis but on a concept of humanity that recognized the differences, while supporting itself notably on a non-essentialist notion of identities” (Fistetti 2009: 28). Orientalism lifted the veil worldwide on questions that are reflected in Meireles’s own work. Indeed, her literary and philosophical reflections might be seen as an attempt to construct “an alternative framework” to Eurocentrism, which still today conditions our perceptions of the world that surrounds us: [T]he transformations of the balance of power in the world-system ended the simple certainties about universalism that prevailed for most of the history of the modern world-system and which entrenched the binary oppositions that were deep in all of our cognitive frameworks, and served as the political and intellectual justification of the dominant ways of thinking. What we have not yet done is achieve any consensus on, indeed any clear picture of, an alternative framework – one that would permit us all to be non-Orientalists. (Wallerstein 2006, 44)

To my mind, Cecília Meireles’s work contains a pragmatic political vision of the world that goes beyond the essentially poetic and metaphysical dimension of her output, as expressed by other researchers, such as Dilip Loundo:

2  She wrote poems and chronicles about her trip across India. The latter were first published by the Brazilian press, some were later reprinted in the book Giroflê, Giroflá (1956). All were finally collected, along with accounts of trips to other destinations, thirty years after her death, in three volumes of Crônicas de Viagem (Travel Chronicles, 1999). In 1961, she had published Poemas escritos na Índia [Poems Written in India]. She was on the following route: Mumbai, Delhi, Sikandara, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, Patna, Kolkata, Cuttack, Puri, Chennai, Coimbatore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Golconda, Aurangabad, Ajanta and Goa.

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

227

Cecília Meireles’ poetry could be fairly described as an inquiring into the roots of existence, a philosophical/spiritual process of self-realisation wrapped in serenity and cognition. Its thematic and ideational radicality constitutes a moment of rarity in a Brazilian poetical tradition predominantly marked by romantic, confessional, or socially engaged forms of lyricism. As critics and biographers have pointed out, the foundational ground for the emergence of such a poetical meditation lies in the intensity, gravity and drama of her personal experiences and reflections. At the same time, the herculean and solitary path that brought them under a specific metaphysical resolution was equally facilitated, at various crossroads, by the development of special partnerships and as many guidances. Travelling, both symbolically and concretely, was the conscious “methodology” employed by the poet to locate and identify them. And among the places she stepped on, India emerged since early in her life as a privileged destination, a cultural geography where she found as perhaps nowhere else, spiritual affinities. An active contemplation of parallel destinies such as those she came across in epic and philosophical sagas, and above all, in India’s major contemporary representatives like Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), gave her confirmatory and strengthening signs for the correctness of her philosophical resolution. (2003: 14)

It will not be difficult to show that aspects of her “philosophical resolution” were imprinted on the observations she made about her Indian sojourn, as regards the material problems in the modern world-system.3 Similarly, we cannot forget that Gandhi, to mention only one of her main influences, “illustrates the specific impact of the era of imperialism rather well” (Hobsbawm 1989: 77). Her views are, however, not free of contradiction because she remained silent about Portuguese colonialism in India, while rejoicing at India’s freedom from British rule since 1947. Portugal had controlled Goa, on the southwest coast, since 1510, and its empire— distributed also around Macau, Timor and Africa—would be the last European empire to fall. Portuguese’s rule in Goa ended in 1961, with the occupation of the colonial territory by the Indian army. This means that when Meireles visits India, the Portuguese possessions in India were still colonial territories.

3

 I shall concentrate on the author’s prose and on a lecture that she gave in India.

228 

E. V. MACHADO

Supporter of a “True Internationalism”? In New Delhi, Meireles was invited to a “Seminar on the contribution of the Gandhian outlook and techniques to the solution of tensions between and within nations” (MEGI 1953), where she met the then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), who, since India’s Independence from British colonial rule in 1947, had wanted to make his country into “the leader of peoples struggling against the colonizer” (Jaffrelot 2009: 351). In 1955, India had managed to inscribe its leader’s Asian perspective “into the larger framework of solidarity between third-world countries” (mostly freshly emerged from colonialism) during the historic Conference of Bandung (Indonesia) in April 1955, which brought together some twenty nations in rejection of the Cold War blocs (ibid.). Said, referring to the various intellectual positions on European domination throughout history, points out that “there was no overall condemnation of imperialism until […] after native uprisings were too far gone to be ignored or defeated” (1994: 241). While in prison, under the British Empire in 1944, Nehru set the tone of the struggle he wished to wage, clearly inscribing the desire for India’s independence into the political, economic and cultural convulsions of the modern world-system, whose history, since the Early Modern period, had been no more than the “expansion of European states and peoples in the rest of the world” (Wallerstein 2006: I): [L]ife becomes more international. We have to play our part in this coming internationalism and, for this purpose, to travel, meet others, learn from them and understand them. But a real internationalism is not something in the air without roots or anchorage. It has to grow out of national cultures and can only flourish today on a basis of freedom and equality and true internationalism. […] We are citizens of no mean country and we are proud of the land of our birth, of our people, our culture and traditions. That pride should not be for a romanticised past to which we want to cling; nor should it encourage exclusiveness or a want of appreciation of other ways than ours. It must never allow us to forget our many weaknesses and failings or blunt our longing to be rid of them. We have a long way to go and much leeway to make up before we can take our proper station with others in the van of human civilization and progress. […] We shall therefore seek wisdom and knowledge and friendship and comradeship wherever we can find them, and co-operate with others in common tasks, but we are no suppliants for others’ favours and patronage. (Nehru 1989: 565–566)

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

229

After hearing Nehru speak at the Seminar’s inaugural session in New Delhi (5 January 1953), Meireles recorded her impressions. Her state of mind was not very different: I feel – rather than think – this unanimous palpitation from the earth, this anguish of human problems, this need for us all to be close, to be friends, to understand each other, to build each other up, to love each other. That planetary unity. This tiny minute of life that we have in the universe. Races, religions and languages…East, West, History. The loneliness of Earth, so small, and the eternal combat between Good and Evil… Pandit Nehru begins to speak. He has on his head the white cap, distinctive of the independence struggles. (Meireles 1999, vol. 2: 46)

Her enthusiasm may be explained by the “period of great optimism” that occurred after the end of the Second World War (1945): “the economic future seemed bright, and popular movements of all kinds seemed to be achieving their objectives. […] The modern world-system had never looked so good to so many people, a sentiment that had an exhilarating effect, but in many ways also a very stabilizing effect” (Wallerstein 2004: 83–84). Of course, Meireles’s Brazil had already freed itself of Portuguese imperial control over a century before (1822), anticipating, along with other territories of Latin America, a worldwide phenomenon, as regards the transformation of former colonial possessions into independent nations. Brazil’s precedence with respect to India did not mean, however, that its autonomy in the new order was settled, and thus, the communion of the former with the latter should involve (in a practical sense for Meireles, I believe) the “true internationalism”, as Nehru desired. For Meireles, Brazil was in a better position to understand India (and vice versa, we assume), given their respective histories and marginal status. It is clear, in her writings, that her perception of the two countries derived from their continual peripheral and subaltern positions in the modern world-system. And although she did not directly raise the problem of “structures of knowledge” (Wallerstein above) or that of the cultural and political processes of orientalization (Orientalism, in its narrow meaning of a field of academic study,4 was actually a starting-point for 4  “The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and

230 

E. V. MACHADO

Meireles in her acquisition of knowledge about India, having ultimately restricted to the “imaginative” orientalism of the poet and traveller), it is clear that her perspectives include what in the 1980s (with the development of Subaltern Studies) became known as the subaltern’s agency or capacity to speak:5 From Europe, where the various peoples are more or less entwined in a common history, where problems are almost identical, it is difficult to understand the eastern panorama, which requires a clear eye, a calm head, and an intelligent heart. As paradoxical as it may seem, it is easier to understand the Orient if one knows Brazil, whose problems are curiously similar (struggles to affirm nationality, urgency in adapting to international circumstances, the harnessing of wealth, racial setbacks, the consolidation of the economy, plans for education), except as regards their respective ages, and the date of their independence. (Meireles 1999, vol. 2: 40)

Although she was an avowed reader of one classic of imaginative orientalism—Pierre Loti (1850–1923) (Meireles 1999, vol. 3: 46–47), author of exotic novellas—and rhetorically contributed, through the descriptions and dramatic situations in her chronicles, to the cultivation of a dream-like fantasy atmosphere inherited from the One Thousand and One Nights, Cecília Meireles did not ignore the more immediate material reality. She evoked a subalternized people without the usual value judgements, despite the fact that she used herself stereotyped figures that traditional western what he or she does is Orientalism. […] The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative [by artists, thinkers etc.] meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined – perhaps even regulated  – traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978: 2–3). 5  In the Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, Said wrote: “I will not deny that I was aware, when writing the book, of the subjective truth insinuated by Marx in the little sentence I quoted as one of the book’s epigraphs (‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’), which is that if you feel you have been denied the chance to speak your piece, you will try extremely hard to get that chance. For indeed, the subaltern can speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century eloquently attests” (2003: 335).

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

231

literature had established to indicate their distance from the modern West (washerwomen, porters, servants, temple dancers, street vendors, beggars, veiled women, etc.). It was in the third session of the New Delhi Seminar on 8th January that she located her approximation of Brazil to India in the complex aftermath of the European expansion: Without any intention of criticism, only for the sake of truth and from a personal standpoint, I dare to say that many of the difficulties of Brazil at present arise on the one hand from the diversity of the primitive population of Whites, Negroes and Red Indians who are not completely amalgamated, as well as from the problems caused by this complex coming together of different cultures and from the vastness of its territory and the repercussion of international problems of utmost importance in the process of its national integration. This great complexity, however, enables us all the more to “share” the Indian problems: the variety of populations, the multiplicity of languages, the religious diversity and the contrast between its millennial existence and its recent Independence. (MEGI 1953: 76)

With that invitation, then, Cecília Meireles was finally able to get to know the civilization that had fascinated her since adolescence. However, the journey she made to India was more pragmatic in character, with various official commitments, as her own chronicles confirm. In fact, her trip was closely connected to the context of India’s emergence as an independent nation and also, in the atmosphere of the post-1945 promise and Cold War developing, to the sounding out of problems and solutions that were then the order of the day for many countries. In Parliament House, where she had spoken, “people from such contrasting places were discussing a formula to make this world a better place”, while on the side of the locals, there were those “that are creating the Indian nation, with a vigour, a seriousness and a love that the West cannot ignore” (1999, vol. 3: 61). In another chronicle, she stresses: “we, in the West, should be here to learn (that is my opinion). But we are also here to contribute (which seems like oriental kindness.)” (1999, vol. 2: 180). Meireles’s enthusiasm and her suggestions for a rapprochement between Brazil and India were naturally not limited to structural questions. A compatriot of hers, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), who had travelled to India two years before, claimed (in a work published the same year as Meireles’s trip) to be struck not only by “the exotic features – exotic from the European point of view – of its landscape, culture

232 

E. V. MACHADO

and population, but also by the similarities that I have noticed with the landscape and population of Brazil or tropical America” (Freyre 1953: 155). In the 1953 Seminar, Meireles noted: “the vastness of the land, the ethnic variety and the religious diversity are some of the many points we share with India. There are also some similarities as regards human physiognomy and landscape to be added” (MEGI 1953, 76). Her impressions are confirmed in the travel chronicles: she could imagine the Brazilian Romantic poet “Casimiro de Abreu [1839–1860] in a country house in Coimbatore” (1999, vol. 3: 3); “to Brazilian eyes, accustomed to the identity of colours, the size and profusion of the trees, these beautiful walks under vast fronds do not cause much surprise” (ibid.: 198) in a city like Calcutta, whose “cries […] remind me immensely of the old voices in the streets of Brazil” (ibid.: 205); in Cuttack, “I saw people eating green coconuts and drinking coconut milk as if they were in the north of Brazil” (ibid.: 218); in Puri she was delighted with “these Indian houses with many floors, many balconies, which seem so familiar to us” (ibid.: 222). In Goa colonized by the Portuguese, she obviously found even more similarities, such as the use of the Portuguese language,6 identical cultural references and urban architecture similar to that of the historical colonial cities of Brazil (ibid.: 11–27, 53–57). As well as describing a solemn ceremony organized by the Portuguese governor of Goa as “an affectionate encounter between Portugal, India and Brazil” (ibid.: 25), she even reproduced the benevolent image of the controversial figures of Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the Basque missionary who served the Portuguese Empire (and was canonized) and Afonso de Albuquerque (1452–1515), the conqueror of Goa (1510). Like Cecília Meireles, Gilberto Freyre was, according to Susanne Klengel “a paradigmatic voice amongst the many intellectual voices of the South in that period”. Klengel locates her analysis of the sociologist’s work in the palpitating context I have described, in which “there existed a brief temporal space, a kind of historical interstice, in which it became possible for the intellectual actors of the South to actively participate on an equal footing in a global universalist discourse, in a world that was desolate and destroyed but was in the process of reconstructing itself” (2016: 6  There is some exaggeration here, both from her and from the sociologist, as a census done in the 1960s (including of Portuguese living in Goa) indicates that fewer than 4% of the population were Portuguese speakers (see my considerations with respect to the idea formed by the two authors in Machado 2009).

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

233

125). The following observations by Freyre are very similar to Meireles’s East-West problematization: We need to draw closer, to understand one another, we who, in the East and in the West, consider and study problems which, in their roots, are common to the human condition, though peculiar, in various aspects, to diverse regions or cultures. Between Brazilians and Indians there are affinities of culture, of regional experience, of social situation conditioned by similar influences from the physical environment. This is why their men of letters need to come together, anticipating the statesmen. (Freyre 1953: 160)

On the other hand, “Gilberto Freyre’s travels and the publication of his books coincided with changes in Brazil’s foreign policy, which was moving from an anti-colonialist position to one of support for Portugal in its rejection of Goan independence, insistently demanded by Nehru’s government” (Klengel 2016: 126). Would this explain Meireles’s silence (and she of course visited India at the same time as Freyre) about Portuguese colonialism in Goa? It is even more surprising given that, in the same year as her visit, she published her politically engaged collection of poems, Romanceiro da Inconfidência (1953), about the first Brazilian insurrection against Portuguese domination (1789). Freyre’s trip had been sponsored by the dictatorial (and colonialist) regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970), the so-called Estado Novo (1933–1974). The question of cottage industries and agriculture in the independent India, like its education policies, were worldly topics which really occupied Meireles’s mind on her trip to the subcontinent. Indeed, she insisted that the country of Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore could set an example for the world, proving the need for a “true internationalism”, able to transcend the particularities of nation, identity and so on.

Solving Problems in Its Own Way Meireles’s presence at the conference on Gandhi is justified by the fact that she was an important educationalist in Brazil. Given the “concern of the period with the popular education movements, she emphasised the importance of education for all as a way of ensuring better conditions in the battle for the life of the less favoured classes” (Niskier 2003: 127). She was also concerned with teacher training, which was still “without a solid knowledge base and still practising a form of education unrelated to the

234 

E. V. MACHADO

reality of the students and of society as a whole” (ibid.: 131). In the 1953 Seminar, Meireles claimed: “in the present world situation, it seems that education is the field where Gandhi’s outlook will have its best application” (MEGI 1953: 79). However, the strongest or at least most controversial aspect of her speech (which was otherwise connected with the educational principles she defended) was her critique of industrialization—which of course had been a linchpin of the modern world-system since the eighteenth century—and valorization of cottage industries (a key part of Gandhi’s nationalist and economic concerns). While India was still under the British Empire, mass industry had only had limited development and traditional handicrafts flourished. In fact, after 1914, with the stimulus given by Gandhi, these cottage industries became an objective of the nationalist movement (Markovits 1994: 533). The social reform imagined by Gandhi to eradicate poverty, particularly in the countryside, envisaged, on the one hand, rehabilitating the dignity of manual labour, and on the other, enabling the rebirth of cottage industries in order to achieve a type of society that would end the exploitation of the masses (Markovits 2000: 181–182). The economic globalization then under way was a clear rival: “a major leading industry will be a major stimulus to the expansion of the world-economy and will result in considerable accumulation of capital” (Wallerstein 2004: 30). Gandhi did not reject wealth, but viewed accumulation of it as an unnatural process. “He supported economic management of public funds and [took a stand] against wastefulness, in the name of a traditional mercantile ethic that is different from the modern capitalist spirit” (Markovits 2000: 187). Gandhi’s vision therefore did not fit perfectly into the “promises of Independence of countries that would later be called the Third World”. As “the liberational impulse” of the Independence struggles owed a great deal to the “emancipatory ideals of Eurocentric modernity”, the new movements broadly shared the “promises of development, capitalist or socialist, and the belief in modern science and law, and in the progress that these would generate” (Santos 2008: 344). Thus, “Gandhi’s conceptions and proposals were inevitably considered eccentric, utopian, the product of a brilliant mind but one which had lost contact with the world of his time, and which arrogantly refused to acknowledge the imperatives of development, the only ones that could eventually guarantee the survival and prosperity of the great majorities oppressed by colonialism” (ibid.: 345).

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

235

Points 5 and 6 of Meireles’s speech served “to remind everyone of Gandhi’s sayings about industries and more generally about the exaggerated use of the machine in everyday life […] in order to dignify human labour, to encourage handicraft in every sector, in schools, provinces, etc.” (MEGI 1953: 80). The first question she was asked came from the Prime Minister of Iran, Marine Daftary, whose position would clearly exemplify the dominant paradigm (“the imperatives of development”), if it were not for the fact that she was at that time a judge in the International Arbitration Court of Hague and Professor of Law at the University of Tehran: I want to comment about this Gandhian doctrine for industries. As regards our country, and other undeveloped countries, how can we avoid industrialisation? How can we apply these principles? We want to develop our country and development of the country necessitates machinery, mechanisation of agriculture, etc., etc. How can we apply the Gandhian doctrine and, at the same time have the development of undeveloped countries? (MEGI 1953: 80–81)

By this time, there were considerable doubts about Gandhi’s positions: in his investment predictions, though he gave more attention to agriculture and to rural development (in a counter-current perspective) “big industry [was not] so neglected, which proves that it was necessary to nuance the simplistic claims of Gandhi’s radical opposition to industrialization. On the level of principle, he was not in favour of it, but he knew how to weigh things up” (Markovits 2000: 196). On her trip around India, Meireles gave great attention to the “impulse given by handicrafts” (Meireles 1999, vol. 3: 198), not without first having made a statement: “it’s necessary to see the tremendous resistance of art, despite the passage of time, political transformations, economic hardships, all the hostile things able to make man give up an activity that is purely poetic” (ibid.: 8). In Gandhi’s view, there was an aesthetic and spiritual concern that was confounded with the practical plane of the economy or actually embodied it, given that one of his main critiques of modern civilization had to do with the production of large-scale ugliness (an aesthetic appreciation that applied to all forms of labour). He considered that manual labour not only had something sacred about it, but constituted in itself one of the ways of reaching God (Markovits 2000: 83). Meireles did not therefore let her arm be twisted in her response to the Prime Minister of Iran:

236 

E. V. MACHADO

Madame says7 that she is very much interested in the folklore of her own country. She realised that folklore is the best approach to find out the unity of people. To understand other countries and other people, one will have to understand one’s own countrymen thoroughly. When machines are introduced, they are so abstract that they kill all idea of concrete self-experience in peoples’ minds, because they have no more to bother about producing their daily needs with their own hands. You can employ machinery in so far as it does not kill the creative urges in man. (MEGI 1953: 81)

What was being done for agriculture in India was also discussed in her chronicles. Her second husband, Heitor Grillo (1902–1971), an agriculturalist, went to meet her in Delhi in the north (she herself had arrived alone in Mumbai, in the south, twenty days before) and their route was thereafter dictated “by the injunctions of the former’s official visit to India as a member of the National Research ‘to study the organization and learn about the activities of various Indian institutes of agronomical research’” (Loundo 2003: 40). The mastery with which Meireles integrates into her chronicles considerations about the climate, the human component, the history and literature of India allowed her to construct a narrative of the grandeur of the subcontinent, which, while not managing to break with the traditional clichés in general terms, at least inscribes it in a dialectic between present and future, in which India’s destiny is not only in its own hands but could also serve as an “example for so many other peoples!” (1999, vol. 3: 62). On her journey to Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), she wrote: I am not going to describe an institute dedicated to experiments with sugarcane: but it would be worth doing it to reveal this constructive aspect of India, which seeks to solve its serious problems through its own resources, in its own way, adapting the most advanced conquests of science and technology to its own convenience and possibilities. […] What a great example for the West, which is so disturbed nowadays, and so dangerously confuses at every step the happiness of a people with the particular benefits of some individuals! (1999, vol. 3: 1)

The regeneration of the world through India, an old topic of European orientalism, thus acquires a more worldly attire in a new phase of the 7  Uncomfortable with English, she moves into French, and is immediately translated by a colleague.

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

237

modern world-system. Nevertheless, Meireles continues to reproduce the ancient myth or discourse of the fabulous or spiritual Orient: “Between those long visits, between those curious explanations that come from fable (when the sugar still inhabited the sky) to the counting of chromosomes and photoperiodism, there are other delicious moments” like the visit to a temple, which confirms for her that “God is the constant dream of India in all directions” (ibid.: 2–3). Eager to see the ritual chariots of Jagannath, she cannot resist warning her readers that “India is essentially fabulous: it can be seen and interpreted in a thousand different ways” (ibid.: 222), thus reinforcing the perennial idea of the impenetrability of the Orient (an idea whose effects were reflected in the desire for restructuring of the oriental world), the secret of the Orient which, ultimately, the scholars hoped to penetrate with the knowledge that they sought to organize: It’s not so simple to go from the West to the East. The traveller should prepare his soul for that visit to far-off lands, or else risk not understanding anything, and of being easily shocked by the poverty and diversity of habits to which his sensibility will be exposed. The Western traveller needs an initiation before leaving for the Orient. I believe that that initiation will be useful to him, whatever country he goes to. He needs to know the history of those ancient peoples, a little of their philosophical and religious ideas, a good part of their customs and traditions. (Ibid.: 39)

In fact, in the 1953 Seminar, Meireles proposed that there should be greater dissemination of “academic orientalism”, referring to the subjects that formed the nucleus of the discipline of Oriental Studies: “taking into account the necessity of a general knowledge of the world, to encourage, especially at the university level, the teaching of oriental languages, eastern philosophy and comparative religions, so as to acquaint the West with oriental thought by means of its millennial conceptions” (MEGI 1953: 80).

Concluding Remarks: An Epistemology of the South? The Indomania of the second half of the eighteenth century (Schwab 1950), which eventually became part of the so-called Oriental Renaissance (Quinet 1841) underpinning the constitution of “modern Orientalism”, implied “combining the sources of Europe and India, seeing another Greece emerge – a ‘non-Greek’ Greece, if one might dare to say so – and

238 

E. V. MACHADO

of expecting from it nothing less than the constitution of a authentically universal humanism” (Droit 2004: 107). If, on the one hand, the “new epistemological paradigm of modernity” promoted “an interested interpretation of the modern subject, who objectivises and estranges everything that resists European secularization and rationality and […] constrains it to serve the cultural, social and economic models of the West” (Catroga 1999: 200–201), the “return to the inexhaustible generating power of the primitive Indian Orient” could also “enable the modern West to produce new forms” (Droit 2004: 129). Said indicated very well what could be revealed behind this last use of the Orient by Europeans: one of the facets of the orientalised (i.e. created) Orient “in all those ways considered common-place by an average nineteenth-century European”, would become “the idée reçue ‘Europe-regenerated-by-Asia’ [in which] lurked a very insidious hubris. Neither ‘Europe’ nor ‘Asia’ was anything without the visionaries’ technique for turning vast geographical domains into treatable, and manageable, entities” (1978: 5–6, 115). In Cecília Meireles, who takes up the topoi of Western conceptions of the Orient (in what was also a variant of the “visionaries’ technique”), the understanding of the Orient was not marked by the ontological preconception or rejection of what oriental peoples would legitimately consider to be their necessary being-in-the-world and autonomy in the concert of nations or in the inevitability of the modern world-system. The poet ultimately inscribes herself in a different way into the tradition of European orientalism, at least not that which constituted itself as “having authority over the Orient” (see Note 5), despite the obvious epistemological limitations. In her work, there is no rupture with the erudite tradition of the West over the East, but she integrates the voice of the Other (for how could she not identify with that Other, having herself come from the periphery of the modern world-system?), confirmed by the chronicle in which she starts to “recall my first encounters with India” through Tagore and Gandhi, but also through the prose-writer Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (1876–1938), a recollection that made her “[feel] my debt to India”, a “debt that is that of many Westerners” (1999, vol. 3: 209–210). The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Tagore in 1913 and the emergence of the figure of Gandhi on the international scene gave rise to a new orientalism that had India again as its epicentre, in the hands of the pacifists, in the wake of the First World War (Machado 2016). The French novelist Romain Rolland (1866–1944), a first-order pacifist concerned with the direction in which the world was heading, had, with his

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

239

biography Mahatma Gandhi (1924), made the legend of Gandhi take on “a truly worldwide dimension” (Markovits 2000: 32). Meireles explains better the genesis of her discovery of India: “France established the best intellectual ties of West to East with the numerous translations of classical and contemporary authors, commentaries on Indian philosophy, and Romain Rolland served to interpret the two worlds that could get to know each other, that could certainly love each other” (1999, vol. 2: 299). Although “the Orient of Romain Rolland [is] a stereotype factory” (Roudil 2013: 49) and literature about Gandhi produced elsewhere in the world sometimes gave the impression that it was “an invention of Romain Rolland” (Markovits 2000: 32), he “[glimpsed] the possible regeneration of a West racing towards the abyss” (Lardinois 2008: 837). There was the desire for a world policy even on the part of the subalterns in the modern world-system, based on their own convictions and experiences, as expressed in an article by the Sri Lankan intellectual and interpreter of Indian culture, Ananda K.  Coomaraswamy (1887–1947)—dedicated in fact to Rolland and reproduced by him in his diary: “we should take everything that is most valuable and most profound in our culture, especially our philosophy, our passion, our music, and we should give all that to the world, without conserving anything, in the sure conviction that it matters little what will come from India, provided that the fruits are planted in fertile soil” (see Rolland 1960: 11). Going against an European academic orientalist tradition that imprisoned the Orient in the past, and then accused Orientals of not having achieved modernity in the way the West had done, Meireles claims that the “Western traveller […] also needs to know the present of those peoples, that they are not dead, mummified, uncertain, but, on the contrary, alive and vibrant” (1999, vol. 2: 39). Of course the times were different, but they were living the effects of one more world war and a Cold War had set in; for that reason, the example of the Rolland and Coomaraswamy generation had not been erased: The greatest disaster of war is not the death toll on the battlefield but the moral damage left in heritage to the survivors. The belief in moral values, in the respect amongst individuals and in the fundamental truths of religion is being lost. That is why after every war the world is faced anew by chaos. And if Brazil, being so far, is affected by these deplorable consequences, one can well imagine the pitiful conditions in other countries which were involved in the conflicts. (MEGI 1953: 77)

240 

E. V. MACHADO

From everything described here, could we then speak of an attempt, by Cecília Meireles, to construct “an alternative framework” to Eurocentrism, as suggested in the introduction? Boaventura de Sousa Santos has argued for what he calls the “epistemologics of the South”, in the ambit of a “reinterpretation of the world” as a “collective task” (2008: 9), characterized by “[occupying] the hegemonic conceptions of epistemology, which I call the epistemologies of the North. Despite resorting to the North-­ South dichotomy, the epistemologies of the South are not symmetrically opposed to the epistemologies of the North, in the sense of opposing a valid knowledge that excludes the other” (ibid.: 11). It would seek to “identify and valorize that which often does not even count as knowledge in the light of the dominant epistemologies, the cognitive dimension of the resistance struggles against oppression and against the knowledge that legitimizes that oppression” (ibid.: 20). In that sense, intercultural translations are important, going south-north or north-south—“between the (Western or Eurocentric) knowledges that the global North has of the global South (which also includes the Orient)”—and also south-south— “between different knowledges or cultures of the global South” (ibid.: 70). These translations have “a distancing effect in relation to our own point of view which enables us to assess its relationship—whether of competition or cooperation—with other points of view”. The very “Gandhian trajectory shows that there exists a mid-term between excessive pride in one’s own convictions and the abandoning of them in favour of a multi-­ faceted vision of the world” (ibid.: 355): Gandhi himself was a critic of orthodox Hinduism in his country and strongly influenced by Western thinkers. There would be a “global anti-imperial South [that] emerges through a dual act of de-familiarization, in relation to both the global North and the imperial global South—that is, the South that actively reproduces the economic, political and cultural mechanisms that sustain the global domination of capitalism, colonialism and the patriarchy” (ibid.: 357). To return to Cecília Meireles and her inscription within a European Orientalist tradition whose “structures of knowledge” began to be questioned when the author was still alive, this, as argued by Eric Hobsbawm at the end of the 1980s, helps us to problematize the question of India in the work of the Brazilian poet and educationalist: [T]here was a more positive side to this exoticism. Intellectually minded administrators and soldiers  – businessmen were less interested in such

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

241

­ atters – pondered deeply on the differences between their own societies m and those they ruled. They produced both bodies of impressive scholarship about them, especially in the Indian empire, and theoretical reflections which transformed western social sciences. Much of this work was the by-­ product of colonial rule or intended to assist it, and most of it unquestionably rested on a firm and confident sense of the superiority of western knowledge to any other, except perhaps in the realm of religion, where the superiority of e.g. Methodism to Buddhism was not obvious to impartial observers. Imperialism brought a notable rise in the western interest in, and sometimes the western conversion to, forms of spirituality derived from the orient, or claiming to be so derived. Yet, in spite of post-colonial criticism, this body of western scholarship cannot be dismissed simply as a supercilious depreciation of non-European cultures. At the very least the best of it took them seriously, as something to be respected and from which to derive instruction. (Hobsbawm 1989: 80–81)

In addition, we cannot overlook how Gandhi, for Cecília Meireles, who was in India five years after his assassination, could still play a role in the modern world-system, as, in her words, he “did not recognise frontiers”— a clear example of intercultural translation of the global anti-imperial South: “I do not believe that a Gandhian world can be created out of nowhere, nor does it seem immediately necessary. But I do believe that the evil in the world could be lessened progressively through the utilisation of a certain number of ideas, moderate in their application, but efficient in their results” (MEGI 1953: 79). Contrary to what she affirms in one of her chronicles, for her at least, in a south-south dialogue, it seemed simple to go from West to East.

References Catroga, Fernando. 1999. A História começou a Oriente. In O orientalismo em Portugal: séculos XVI–XX, ed. Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 197–239. Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses. Droit, Roger-Pol. 2004. L’oubli de l’Inde: une amnésie philosophique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Fistetti, Francesco. 2009. Théories du multiculturalisme: un parcours entre philosophie et sciences sociales. Paris: La Découverte. Freyre, Gilberto. 1953. Um Brasileiro em Terras Portuguêsas. Introdução a uma possível luso-tropicologia, acompanhada de conferências e discursos proferidos em

242 

E. V. MACHADO

Portugal e em terras lusitanas e ex-lusitanas da Ásia, da África e do Atlántico. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1989. The age of empire: 1875–1914. New York: Vintage Books. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2009. Jawaharlal Nehru. In Dictionaire de l’Inde, ed. Catherine Clémentin-Ojha, Christophe Jaffrelot, Denis Matringe, and Jacques Pouchepadass, 350–351. Paris: Larousse. Klengel, Susanne. 2016. La Goa de Gilberto Freyre. Laboratorio lusotropical Para el pensamiento transareal desde el Sur. In Sur/South: Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America/India, ed. Susanne Klengel and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, 113–134. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Lardinois, Roland. 2008. Rolland, Romain. In Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, ed. François Pouillon, 836–837. Paris: Karthala. Loundo, Dilip. 2003. Cecília Meireles and India. In Travelling and Meditating: Poems Written in India and Other poems, by Cecília Meireles, ed. Dilip Loundo, 13–49. New Delhi: Embassy of Brazil. Machado, Everton V. 2009. A experiência indiana de Cunha Rivara. In Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara, 1809–1879, by Luís Farinha Franco, Gina Guedes Rafael and Everton V.  Machado, 25–36. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal. ———. 2016. Romain Rolland et le Goa portugais: entre nationalisme et orientalisme. In Romain Rolland et l’Inde: un échange fructueux, ed. Roland Roudil, 101–112. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon. ———. 2018. O orientalismo português e as Jornadas de Tomás Ribeiro: Caracterização de um problema. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal. Markovits, Claude. 1994. Commerce, industries, villes (1860–1950). In Histoire de l’Inde moderne (1480–1950), ed. Claude Markovits, 518–539. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2000. Gandhi. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. MEGI (Ministry of Education, Government of India). 1953. Seminar on the contribution of the Gandhian outlook and techniques to the solution of tensions between and within nations. New Delhi: Ministry of Education, Government of India. Meireles, Cecília. 1999. Crônicas de viagem, 3 vols. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1989. The discovery of India. Delhi/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Niskier, Arnaldo. 2003. Cecília Meireles – A Educadora. Scripta 6 (12): 119–133. Quinet, Edgar. 1841. De la Renaissance orientale. Revue des Deux Mondes 4 (28): 112–130. Rolland, Romain. 1960. Inde – Journal, 1915–1943. Paris: Albin Michel. Roudil, Roland. 2013. Ce baba cool de Romain Rolland. Cahier de Brèves 32: 46–49. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient. New York: Pantheon Books.

14  IS IT NOT SO EASY TO GO FROM WEST TO EAST? A POLITICAL VIEW… 

243

———. 1994. Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2003. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient. London: Penguin Books. Schwab, Raymond. 1950. La Renaissance orientale. Paris: Payot. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 2008. O Fim do Império Cognitivo: A afirmação das epistemologias do Sul. Coimbra: Almedina. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-system’s analysis: An introduction. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. ———. 2006. European universalism: The rhetoric of power. New York/London: The New Press.

CHAPTER 15

Orientalism Expanded? Latin American Travel Narratives Heading East Estefanía Bournot

Leaving Home Bolaño’s enthusiastic sentence “Leave it all behind again. Take to the roads,”1 which appeared in the Manifesto of Infrarealism in 1976, seems to have been a premonition of what the next generation of Latin American writers would take as one of their main mottos: expansion. Indeed, in the last decades, not only did a great number of travel narratives emerge, along with the revival of the chronicle genre, but also entire series from some of the biggest publishing houses were conceived as tools for the enlargement of the literary space-imaginaries. By the turn of the millennium, Bolaño’s international acclaim would grow, along with a new ideal of a nomadic and cosmopolitan literature that intentionally sought to abandon the regional tendency towards 1  “Déjenlo todo, nuevamente láncense a los caminos” (all translations from Spanish are mine).

E. Bournot (*) Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria © The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2_15

245

246 

E. BOURNOT

self-portraiture, which was confined to its geographical limits and the exotic stereotypes of magical realism, and would instead begin to expand the pathways which had been traveled thus far.2 In this context, entire collections of travel literature were conceived, such as Mondadori’s Año cero and Companhia das letras’ Amores expressos, in order to open up a new world panorama from a Latin American perspective. Among the destinations chosen for the authors to write about, those located in the “East” (from a Eurocentric perspective, of course) were especially novel, or at least unusual: The regions and countries of Africa, Asia or the Middle East now appeared in the newly extended cartography of Latin American travelers. This expansion reflected on the one hand the intention of younger authors to showcase themselves as global citizens participating in a more extensive network of cultural flows as well as in the larger market of world literature. Anthologies like McOndo, edited by Fuguet and Gómez in 1996; Líneas Aéreas, by Becerra and Andahazi (1999); or Aquí se habla español, in 2000, as well as other essays and manifestos such as Crack and those collected by the Seix Barral publishing house in Palabra de América would configure a new constellation of Latin American voices of mixed origin—travelers and migrants all who were no longer interested in showing an image of Latin America to the world, but rather showing a cosmopolitan stance by expressing their own particular vision of the world. On the other hand, this shift from being observed to becoming world-­ observers was encouraged by the publishing houses, which were keen to sponsor cultural products for global consumption. As Jorge Locane argues, one of the publishers’ main concerns since the nineties was to validate Latin American writers as global voices not attached to a specific territory, which led to a revival of the old struggle between regionalists and cosmopolitans: “The writers recruited, as ‘young’ aspirants to take over, will stage the attempt to reconfigure the market in terms of a ‘break’ with the ‘regionalist’ tradition and in favour of the postulates of ‘cosmopolitanism’” (Locane 2019: 85).3

2  About the referential role of Bolaño in the construction of the Latin American global novel, see Hoyos (2015). 3  “Los escritores reclutados, en tanto ‘jóvenes’ aspirantes a encarnar el relevo, por su parte, van a escenificar el intento de reconfiguración del mercado en términos de ‘ruptura’ con la tradición ‘regionalista’ y en favor de los postulados del “cosmopolitismo’” (85).

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

247

In this contribution, I would like to explore the expansion of literary geographies that has taken place in recent decades in Latin American travel literature by looking at texts that go beyond national scenarios and surpass the canonical transatlantic journeys to Europe4 by including regions and countries of the Global South whose tenuous links with Latin America have historically been ignored. In the first place, I would like to highlight how the recent rise of travel narratives in Latin America, as well as the geographical expansion within the texts themselves towards new subaltern southern scenarios, in many cases are strongly linked to specific editorial and commercial strategies which aspire to reframe Latin American literature to fit a world-space of multiple and horizontal connections. And, in the second place, I would like to discuss the way some of the texts resulting from these expansionist publishing strategies contribute to creating an expanded horizon for Latin American literature by putting the “Orient” back in the spotlight. Hector Abad’s novel Oriente empieza en el Cairo (2001) and Mongolia (2003) by Brazilian author Bernardo Carvalho will serve here as examples of an exoticized rhetoric of the Orient that raises questions about the possibility of an alternative South-to-South epistemology that evades Western patterns: Are these texts offering new insights on the ever-alienated oriental “other,” or are they just a new version of an expanded Orientalism?

The “Zero Chronotope” The consolidation of a new canon of world literature that addresses or imagines new geographical horizons beyond the nation-state undoubtedly has gone hand in hand with the interests of the publishing houses in creating cultural products that can circulate broadly. As Sanchez Prado claims, “cosmopolitanism functions as a double ideology in the context of the neoliberal economic market: as a site of resistance and as a commodity” (2018a: 26). On the one hand, authors resist being “essentially” Latin American and on the other hand, they elaborate texts that fulfill the requirements of the transnationalization of cultural capital. The body of Latin American works which explores new geographies outside of the authors’ homelands has increased so much in the past decades that “taking to the roads,” as Bolaño urged his fellow writers to do almost fifty years ago—meaning to go out in search of something, to investigate, to travel 4

 Colombi (2004).

248 

E. BOURNOT

as “savage detectives” attracted by what is beyond the horizon—was no longer just an option, but an imperative in order to take part in the international literary scene and grow into a larger literary market that is able to circulate worldwide, then here again with Locane’s words: “world literature, as a category of transcendence of the local, can only be imagined from a locus of enunciation strong enough to detach itself from its local roots and project itself on distant imaginary”5 (Locane 2019: 10).6 The increase in fictional travel narratives and travel chronicles, for instance, provides a clue to how the weakening of the nation-state as an epistemological framework progressively gave way to the emergence of a cosmopolitan Latin American subject who freely moved around the world. The Año Cero collection, for instance, is a good example of how publishing policies would try to shape a more globalized image of a younger generation of Latin American writers, by expanding and diversifying their travelling routes around the world. This series, created by Mondadori— one of the largest publishing houses in the Hispanic world—financed a number of famous or increasingly famous writers, such as Roberto Bolaño, Santiago Gamboa, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Héctor Abad, Gabi Martínez, José Manuel Prieto and Rodrigo Fresán,7 to each travel to a different city and write about it. The chosen destinations included some of the most distant corners of the globe: Bolaño, Gabi Martinez and Rodrigo Fresán would visit the relatively “traditional” destinations of Rome, New York and Mexico, but Rey Rosa, Gamboa and Abad were sent to more unusual destinations: Madras (Chennai), Peking (Beijing) and Cairo. As the title “Year Zero” suggests, it was about—at least as a marketing strategy—a new beginning, both in time, corresponding to the new millennium, as well as in space, by creating a blank map on which one might draw a new literary cartography that could function as an expanded platform for Latin America writers. The words of José Manuel Prieto are eloquent in this respect:

5  “La literatura mundial, en tanto categoría de trascendencia de lo local, solo puede ser imaginada desde un locus de enunciación lo suficientemente dominante como para lograr despegarse de su arraigo local y proyectarse sobre imaginarios distantes” (10). 6  On the discursive and formal codifications of “(Latinamerican)World-Literatures,” see Locane (2019) and the collected volume: Müller, Locane, Loy (2018), Sánchez Prado (2018), Hoyos (2015). 7  The inclusion of women writers at that time was still clearly not an issue.

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

249

[T]his is a bouquet of works that show Latin American authors’ vision of the world. A reversal, in essence, from observed subjects, as had been the norm, to astute and intelligent observers of the main cities of the planet in the year 2000.8 (Prieto 2013: 16)

Some of the authors would continue to explore uncharted territories in their later narratives. Bolaño’s Detectives Salvajes (1998); Gamboa’s Los impostores (2001), Hotel Pekín (2008) and Plegarias Nocturnas (2012); and Rey Rosa’s La orilla africana (1999) are examples of a nomadic literature that makes its way through geographies disconnected from the traditional Latin American space-imaginaries and local attachments. A few years after Mondadori’s collection appeared, the Brazilian publishing house Companhia das Letras would undertake a similar project with its travel series, Amores Espressos. Here, besides writing a love story taking place in seventeen different cities around the world, authors would have to create a blog while abroad and editors would then release trailers of each novel before it was published. Some of the most prominent names in contemporary Brazilian literature took part in this ambitious project: Bernardo Carvalho was in the series with his O filho da mãe (2009), set in Chechnia; Luiz Rufatto wrote about Portugal’s capital in Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2009); Sergio Sant’Anna considered Prague in O livro de Praga (2011). These were among a long list that included destinations such as Istanbul, Tokyo, Sydney, Havana and Buenos Aires. These travel series, in addition to illustrating some of the new publishing initiatives and sponsoring policies that are increasingly common today, show an intensification of global commercial dynamics that require not only the expansion of networks for the distribution of cultural goods, but also the expansion of the fictional space itself, one which integrates for the first time the specific perspective of Latin American travelers on some parts of the world that have mostly been ignored by Latin American readers. With this, a new, undiscovered and expanded geography appears that recalls what Ignacio Padilla defined already in 1996 in the Crack Manifesto as one of the main features of the literature to come: the “zero chronotope.” This is a literary “non-place” that implies the configuration of a 8  “se trata de un ramillete de obras que muestran la visión de autores iberoamericanos sobre el mundo. Una inversión, en esencia, de sujetos observados, como había sido inveteradamente, a observadores sagaces e inteligentes de las principales urbes del planeta en el año 2000” (16).

250 

E. BOURNOT

new spatial imagination in which there is an emptying of the telluric referents of an identity anchored in citizenship or nationality and, on the contrary, fosters mobility and transcultural exchanges in multiple directions: [T]he non-place and the non-time, all times and places and none. […] mimicry of a crazy and dislocated reality, product of a world whose mass-­ mediatization brings it to the end of a century truncated in times and places, broken by an excess of bonds.9 (Padilla 1996: 6)

The Crack authors justified this “dislocated” spatiality as a way to avoid the third-worldism aesthetics that the global market assigned them as Mexican writers or, with Sanchez Prado’s words, as a way to escape the “magical realism imperative.” Instead of staying attached to exotic stereotypes, Crack writers would opt to create alternative personal canons “under the aegis of strategic Occidentalism,” which would “allowed writers to self-fashion as authors and intellectuals in tension (and sometimes in outright conflict) with the imperatives created in the neoliberal literary landscape” (Sánchez Prado 2018b: 186). At the same time, publishers were interested in sponsoring a cultural product that featured a rejection of “local color,” and which would integrate the diversity of local expressions under the same single label of “Latin American” literature in order to reach a transnational audience. The large Spain-based labels, which play the most important role in the disseminating of recent Hispanic-American literature on an international scale, were especially keen to create a type of work that could easily circulate throughout the Hispanic space without revealing specific ties to a region, whether dialectal or cultural.

Heading East The configuration of a broader transnational space for literature, where the authors express themselves from a central position as “world observers” or “world discoverers” implies as well the determination of new or redefined peripheral zones. My argument is that, if Latin America was defined as a marginal outpost in relation to hegemonic Western culture, 9  “El no lugar y el no tiempo, todos los tiempos y lugares y ninguno. (...) Remedo de una realidad alocada y dislocada, producto de un mundo cuya massmediatización lo lleva a un fin de siglo trunco en tiempos y lugares, roto por exceso de ligamentos” (6).

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

251

most of the narrations arising under the expansionist publishing policies enforce transperipheral links with the Global South in order to establish new heterotopies: geographical and symbolic places in which to place the other, the difference, and thus position themselves within the expanded market of world literature as representatives and inheritors of a dominant Western culture. Good part of the travel writing of the last decades heading East thus reproduce the colonialist gesture of European literature, which, as Said clearly showed, elaborated a discourse of otherness as a means of self-positioning and empowerment. This self-positioning strategy driven by the literary market and the authors themselves needs to be formulated anew according to the postcoloniality value regime, which according to Graham Huggam “capitalizes both the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods”10 (2001: 28). Mariano Siskind (2014) describes the incorporation of European Orientalism into the literature of Latin American modernistas as a “cosmopolitan” gesture that would break with the nationalist regionalism that had shaped the foundational literature so far. By expanding the perspective of their literature beyond the metropolitan centers of hegemonic power, the authors were able to expose a pluriversally connected America to a “world” that existed beyond Europe. Similar “world desires,” which Siskind ascribes to modernistas, can be observed in recent travel narratives, but now transformed and fostered by the logic of the transnational market. The progressive shift from “local” forms of representation—such as those proposed by magical realism—to new global cartographies is also being accomplished through an expansion of the routes towards the East and the staging of alternative spatial relations. In both cases, for the modernistas and for the authors of the twenty-­ first century, the construction of the “world” entails the incorporation of the margins of the Occidental hegemonic space. As Mabel Moraña points out, these orientalist operations can be interpreted as exercises of “insertion” into an occidentalism (which reveals the desire to belong to that space of power), but also as an exploration of other margins (which shows a desire for differentiation) (2004: 209). Francine Masiello argues that, in this restructuring of the map through new connections, the East is presented as a cultural and formal reverse 10  There is an interesting paper on “Nuevos exotismos” and the nomadic Latin American writer by Idalia Morejón (2008).

252 

E. BOURNOT

“open to a project of translation, allowing the writer to reflect on subjectivity and displacement, sexuality and language, history and literary form” (2002: 143–144). Indeed, I would say that some authors extrapolate the binary models according to which Latin America usually defined its identity into a global order. In this way, the imaginaries of otherness that was previously conceived from the national perspective in binomials such as countryside/city, civilization/barbarism, today—this is one of my main hypotheses—is extrapolated and redefined within a postcolonial and neoliberal global scheme by recovering the antithetic rhetoric and symbology of an exoticized and essentialized Orient.

We and the “Others” Héctor Abad Faciolince’s book on his journey to Egypt, Oriente comienza en el Cairo, published as part of the Year Zero series in 2001, represents very well the objective of this series, which was to show a “globalized” Latin American literature that little by little disassociates itself from the canonical spaces of local representation. The title of Abad’s book outlines what appears to be one of the main objectives of the journey, which is to validate the existence of antagonistic spatialities, which is announced already in the opening paragraphs: Of all the dichotomies that divide the world, there is still an imaginary wall that has not come down: that of East and West. Since I suppose we are from the West (“western” is at least the language in which I write and the culture that colonized this corner of America, the New Granada, the territory that today is Colombia), then it would be better to undertake a journey that takes us to what they say is different. The problem is to know where what is ours ends, what is western, and where what is foreign begins, what is eastern.11 (Abad 2008: 14)

The employment of pronouns such as “ours,” “we” and “they,” as well as the appeal to a common sense of belonging (“we are from the West”), 11  “De todas las dicotomías que dividen el mundo hay todavía una muralla imaginaria que no se ha derrumbado: Oriente y Occidente. Ya que supongo que somos de Occidente (occidental es al menos la lengua en la que escribo y la cultura que colonizó esta esquina de América, la Nueva Granada, el territorio que hoy es Colombia), entonces mejor será emprender un viaje que nos lleve hacia lo que dicen que es distinto. El problema es saber dónde termina lo nuestro, lo occidental, y dónde empieza lo ajeno, lo oriental” (14).

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

253

contributes to reinforcing this supposed imaginary border, created, as the text itself lets slip, as an effect of a colonial history. The narrator declares from the beginning that he feels identified with the culture and language of the colonizer more than with other colonized cultures. The traveler thus approaches this “unknown object,” Egypt, from a perspective pre-­ established by “them”—but who exactly are they? The journey is clearly unfolded into two parts: It begins even before embarking physically, “with what we read and what we imagine” (Abad 2008: 172),12 and continues as a constant counterpoint between literature and reality: “While sailing on the waters of the Nile, I read about the Nile, instead of looking at the Nile” (ibid.).13 So this “they” is meant to be the complex web of intertextualities that gave form to the Orient as a discursive space, which takes us very close to Said’s definition of Orientalism as “a system for citing works and authors” (Said 1995: 23). Abad’s Egypt is a universe recreated mainly from European modernist and nineteenth-­ century literature as a complex web of intertextualities, among which we find references to Flaubert, Gérard de Nérval, Edith Warton, Mark Twain, Kipling, Goytisolo and constant quotations from The Thousand and One Nights. The traveler’s views on Egypt are so deeply rooted in the exotic stereotypes of European literature that the literary space prevails over the material space that the narrator discovers in present time. In the spatial displacement to the Orient, Abad’s romantic rhetoric projects also a temporary displacement towards an archaic and civilization: “Those who want to see a real medieval, still alive, boiling, must come to Cairo […] the change is not only geographical, but also temporary: one truly feels like one is in another time” (169–171).14 This vision of Egypt as a remnant of a formerly glorious past conceals what Karen Kaplan calls a form of “imperial nostalgia,” which shifts the desires for authenticity, freedom or escape of the modern subject towards a distant space-time and thus establishes a sort of historical tourism. Bearing in mind that Abad’s observations arise from a peripheral position at the margin of the imperial powers that symbolically defined the Orient as the space of the subaltern other, the book’s perspective comes closer to what Hoyos defines as the  “Con lo que leemos y lo que imaginamos” (172).  “Mientras navegaba sobre las aguas del Nilo, leía sobre el Nilo, en vez de mirar al Nilo” (172). 14  “Los que quieran ver un medievo real, todavía vivo, en ebullición, deben venir a El Cairo [...] el cambio no es sólo geográfico, sino también temporal: uno se siente de verdad en otro tiempo” (169–171). 12 13

254 

E. BOURNOT

“cosmopolitics of South-South escapism,” as a way that certain contemporary works of Latin American writers present fantasies of evasion through leisurely travel to more unusual destinations (Hoyos 2015: 65–95). However, what would the “politics” be in this “cosmopolitan” literary tourism? Graham Huggan describes the exotic and fetishistic spectacle of “otherness” in terms of a “postcolonial exotic” that has turn marginal writing from or about the outskirts of hegemonic power as a commodity of the neoliberal market (Huggan 2001: 28). It is no coincidence that the imperialist rhetoric of delegitimization and exoticization of the other also accentuates gender differences in the Abad’s story. The narrator’s authority is based on both his Westernness and his masculinity. There is a clear parallel between the projection of an exotic Orient and the erotization of its women: Both are relegated to being mere objects of contemplation and domination: In the West, this image interspersed with the erotic fascination of Sherezade’s words populated the East for us with pleasant macho resonances. Ah, to be able to have, like eminent Muslims, a different woman every day […] A dream that still inhabits our dreams. (2008: 95)15

The West is identified with a masculine gaze, which sees in the other an object of possible appropriation that resists him—the author is clearly disappointed that women are covered, and that the Egyptians live a demure and taboo sexuality—the East, on the contrary, is clearly feminized, not only by the sensuality inspired by its women, but by smells, colors; even men show “effeminate” gestures, to the point that the author dares to detect a greater share of homosexuality as a result of a limited heterosexuality and repression in the conjugal environment. The city of Cairo is even described as a woman’s body waiting to be stripped naked by the intrepid Western traveler: Dear city of Cairo: I liked your face better before I met you. I can’t say anything about your body yet because you are covered from top to bottom by a dense and opaque dusty garment. I still don’t want to arrive, to look you in the eyes, to remove your veils, to pass my curious hand over your golden 15  “En Occidente esta imagen entreverada con la fascinación erótica de las palabras de Sherezade, pobló para nosotros el Oriente de gratas resonancias machistas. Ah, poder tener, como los musulmanes eminentes, una mujer distinta cada día [...] Un sueño que todavía puebla nuestros sueños” (95).

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

255

back, and to talk about you, or with you (…) Dear city of Cairo: let me remove your veils one by one. (Abad 2008: 26)16

Orientalist rhetoric allows us to see a complex dialectical game by means of which a culture establishes its own declarative space in function of its ideological constructions of alterity, now displaced towards the subaltern space, in this case, Egypt. This provides the upper-middle-class male Latin American subject with another type of antagonism that places him in a privileged position as a spokesman for Western patriarchal power. Abad’s novel takes up certain recurrent tropes of European literature on the Orient, reaffirming an unequal Eurocentric system in which the other is sexually objectivized and essentialized.

The Unspeakable, the Silent Other Mongolia, a travel fiction published in 2003 by Brazilian author Bernardo Carvalho, presents a similar rhetoric of an exoticized South-to-South orientalism. The novel was not a part of either the Amores Expressos collection or Año cero, but its production followed a similar pattern. In this case, it was the Oriente Foundation in Lisbon which, in order to promote cultural ties between the Portuguese-speaking world and Asia (especially China), financed the author’s trip to the country that gives its name to the book. The plot of the novel thematizes the search of a Brazilian photojournalist, who—seduced by the mythology of enigmatic pictorial symbols— enters the most remote places of Mongolia to unveil the mysteries of Narkhajid, a Buddhist goddess. This character embodies the romantic traveler, who in a similar way to Abad’s traveler, holds an exotic vision of the East, strongly eroticized and marked by the sublimation of the landscape. The text is articulated through the voices of three different narrators. After the mysterious disappearance of the Brazilian photographer, a Brazilian diplomat nicknamed “the Westerner” by the local Mongolians is sent to look for him. Both travelers write a journal about their journey, 16  “Querida ciudad de El Cairo: me gustaba más tu cara antes de conocerte. De tu cuerpo no puedo decir nada todavía porque te cubre de arriba a abajo una densa y opaca vestidura de polvo. Aún no quiero llegar, mirarte a los ojos, quitarte los velos, pasar mi mano curiosa sobre tu lomo dorado, y hablar de ti, o contigo (...) Querida ciudad de El Cairo: déjame quitarte tus velos de uno en uno” (26).

256 

E. BOURNOT

both of which are collected and edited by another extradiegetic narrator who puts together the stories years later in Brazil. In this way Carvalho gives a twist to the travel journal genre by multiplying the points of view in an interesting game of perspectives. The journey of both travelers is conceived as a field investigation that combines two registers: the apparent informative rigor of the scientific discourse—with historical, political and artistic allusions that seek to illustrate the “state of the art” of Asian culture—and, in contrast, the subjective register, with reflections of a more intimate nature, implied in the travel narrative.17 Thus, the scientific vision expressed by interpreting symbols, establishing relationships and drawing conclusions about Mongolian customs and habits is relativized and even questioned from the perspective of the frustrated travelers who do not quite understand what they are facing. As in Abad’s novel, the first thing we read in Carvalho’s text is the identification of the Latin American traveler, in this case a Brazilian, with the West. The first sentence reads thus: “He was nicknamed ‘the Westerner’ because the nomads could not pronounce his name when he traveled the confines of Mongolia” (Carvalho 2003: 9).18 The sentence illustrates the way cultural antagonisms are articulated throughout the novel: The Brazilian is assumed openly to be Western and the Mongols, unable to reproduce the phonetics of a Western foreign language, are silenced. The short circuit in communication leads to a barbarization of the other, then as Mabel Moraña points out: The East is also more than an interlocutor, a “silent Other” that, like pre-­ Hispanic cultures, can be stereotyped, appropriated and assimilated for its emblematic value, as if it existed outside of time and already without a voice, in a parallel post-historic, post-ideological and post-communicative dimension. (Moraña 2004: 139)19

17  About ethnographic writing in contemporary Latin American contemporary fiction see Diana Klinger (2007). 18  “Foi chamado de Ocidental por nomades que nao conseguiam dizer o seu nome quando viajou pelos confins da Mongólia” (9). 19  “El Oriente es, también, más que interlocutor, un ‘Otro silencioso’ que, como las culturas prehispánicas, puede ser estereotipado, apropiado y asimilado, por su valor emblemático, como si existiera fuera del tiempo y ya sin voz, en una dimensión paralela poshistórica, posideológica y poscomunicativa” (139).

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

257

The unspeakable name of the Westerner is also a symbolization of the ‘ineffable” cultural differences that the main characters of the plot, two Brazilian travelers, try to capture through writing or photography: the mystery contained in that “other” which is the Mongols. Two opposing movements, present in the opening sentence, run through the entire story: On the one hand, the impulse and desire to decipher the other is manifested in the descriptive and reflective annotations of the Mongolian people and their landscapes in the diary of a Brazilian who, astounded and disappointed, observes Asian culture as a foreigner looking in. On the other hand, the failed translation exercises reveal the limits of language and art, which are unable to bridge the distances between the two cultures. In spite of the multiple narrators, the novel does not present itself as a space for dialogue with an otherness, since this does not obtain its own voice, but is always observed from the “Western” perspective, from where the other, the Mongolian, is either mute or emits incomprehensible messages. The scenes in which the diplomatic traveler experiences situations of incommunication due to failed translations are repeated throughout the novel and make him feel increasingly deceived. There is a parallel between the untranslatability of Asian culture and the ideograms of Chinese—a parallel that is also present and prominent in the narrations of Aira and Bellatin (Bournot 2017)—which places the problematic unfolding of the literary representation of Asia as an antagonic and distant other. Rather than demystifying the usual stereotypes, some “orientalist” narrations stage the lapses and barriers of communication through situations in which translation is crucial. The ideogram works as a paradigmatic element of this deficient translation, since it is a signifier that condenses several meanings that depend on the context and for which there is not a single and accurate correspondence in another language. The ideograms highlight, as the narrator-editor of Mongolia declares, not only the limits of language, but also its richness: “The fascination is precisely what is in them inexpressible. To speak is to betray them. Translation is impossible. It is always an explanatory approach to what cannot be said but is contained in the forms” (Carvalho 2003: 27).20 The narrator-editor of the travel-journals points out the frustration that results from the impossibility of apprehending the other in a process of cultural translation that is 20  “O fascínio está justamente no que hé neles de inexprimivel. Falar já é traí-los. A traduçao é impossivel. É sempre uma aproximação explicativa do que não pode ser dito mas está contido nas formas” (27).

258 

E. BOURNOT

­ ecessarily incomplete, since there are areas of that otherness that will n remain forever closed and hidden. The “Westerner” instead, sees Mongolian culture as marked by automatisms and monotony that, from his point of view, are clearly linked to the repressive policies of communism and a strong Buddhist tradition that leave no room for creative subjectivity. He experiences a sense of abandon and emptiness in perceiving the architectural design of the cities and landscapes, which are compared to the cultural emptiness he attributes to contemporary China and Mongolia: “As soon as I stepped back onto the streets, I realized that the society before me was lacking in any interest in art or aesthetic pleasures. A pragmatic and coarse people” (Carvalho 2003: 21).21 Not only does urban space in Mongolia become material evidence of a devalued culture, even the natural landscape is a manifestation of the barbarism of a people that did not know how to assimilate in a creative way the cultural principles of Western modernity. Not far indeed from the Sarmientine representations of the Argentine Pampa that would give shape to the untamed and violent spirit of the gaucho, the Mongols of Carvalho are described in a similar paradigm that resembles nature, vast, wild and depopulated with the primitivism of its inhabitants, to whom a whole series of personal qualifiers derived from this relationship with the surrounding landscape are ascribed:22 There is contained violence among the Mongols, which can be unleashed at any moment. It is a mad violence, a manifestation of ignorance and brutality that nomadism dilutes among the most beautiful landscapes on the planet. (Carvalho 2003: 171)23

Mongólia is an example of the construction of an orientalist otherness that articulates a relational model from South to South, conceived as a new analogy of the paradigm of civilization and barbarism. In the 21  “Bastou eu pôr os pés de novo nas ruas para voltar a impressão de que estava diante de uma sociedade sem nenhum interesse pela arte e pelos prazeres estéticos. Um povo pragmático e tosco” (21). 22  For a more detailed description of the Sarmientine representation of the “oriental spirit” of the gauchos, see Gasquet (2015). 23  “Há uma violência contida entre os mongóis, que pode se desencadenar a qualquer instante. É uma violência louca, uma manifestação da ignorância e da brutalidade que o nomadismo dilui entre as paisagens mais belas do planeta” (171).

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

259

characterization of the other situated at the antipodes of his own cultural identity. Everything the traveler finds in his path is deficient in relation to a Western artistic model that has not been reworked in an original manner, and therefore only reproduces devalued copies: “Chinese artists oscillate between academicism and pastiche, the mimicry of occidental art” (2003: 30).24 The “Westerner” eye, represented here by a Brazilian upper class white male, perceives the Mongolian people as an alienated culture that is not the owner of its own history: He considers them incapable of shaping a future by altering the established order with a tradition that they assume without critical conscience: “No one knows anything about any place. They have learned not to commit themselves. The past, when not lost, is now only legends and nebulous suppositions. They have no other use for the imagination” (2003: 91).25 The narrator eliminates the possibility of any creative potential in the Mongols, at the same time that he suspends their prospective and retrospective subjectivity as architects of their own history. According to the Westerner, the Mongols monotonously repeat inherited traditional structures. This anchors them to a past that prevents them from reacting to or modifying the established order.

And Back West The last decades have seen a diversification and problematization of the spaces of identification in Latin American literature. Many narratives have illuminated opaque areas of the processes of construction of national or regional identities that left aside ethnic or cultural minorities such as the Chinese communities in revolutionary Mexico, the Nikkei substratum in Brazil and the Andean countries, and Arab migration to the Amazon basins or to Chile (to name just a few examples). Some chapters collected in this volume focus precisely on these “transperipheral” links between apparently distant cultures or peoples.26 24  “Os artistas chineses oscilam entre o academicismo e o pastiche, o mimetismo da arte occidental” (30). 25  “Ningém sabe nada de lugar nenhum. Aprenderam a não se comprometer. O passado, quando não se perdeu, agora são lendas e suposições nebulosas. Eles não têm outro uso para a imaginação” (91). 26   More studies exploring transperipheral relations were edited by López Calvo (2007, 2009).

260 

E. BOURNOT

The case of travel literature, more specifically certain travel literature driven and promoted by the publishing industry, has also contributed to the reconfiguration of a new (Latin American) global literary geography, stretching strategical linkages with territories and cultures possessing very few material and symbolic ties to Latin America. As I tried to show with the Mondadori and Companhia das Letras series, contemporary travel fiction extended the routes, especially eastward, incorporating destinations that were referential vacuums in the symbolic space-repertoire of Latin America. However, this approach differs considerably from the narrations that are intending to voice those silenced subjects that had been hidden or ignored by the modernizing and identity-building projects of the Latin American Nations. Both of the novels I have briefly presented here show an image of an “alienated other” as a static object, deprived of subjectivity and declared incapable of possessing any prospective or retrospective dimensions. The texts’ approach to eastern cultures is mostly based on unquestioned stereotypes, which reveals “the persistence of colonial and imperial mediation as a structure for feeling” (Sánchez Prado 2018b: 65).27 Far from distancing themselves from a Western and colonial episteme, authors construct a notion of globality by establishing new spatial relations from and towards the margins of colonial power. However, none of these connections are considered to be horizontal, then both narrators seek to upgrade their own postcolonial and subaltern condition by creating a new antagonistic space that reasserts them as inheritors and allies of an imperial/Western legacy. Orientalism can thus be understood as one of the “self-positioning practices” of “strategic Occidentalism,” which Sánchez Prado describes (2018b), as the gateways to the neoliberal literary market.

References Abad Faciolince, Héctor. 2008. Oriente empieza en El Cairo. Bogotá: Alfaguara. Becerra, Eduardo, and Federico Andahazi. 1999. Líneas aéreas. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo. Bolaño, Roberto. 1977. Déjenlo todo, nuevamente. Primer manifiesto del movimiento infrarrealista. Revista menstrual del movimiento infrarrealista, Octubre/noviembre, 11.  “La persistencia de la mediación colonial e imperial como estructura de sentimiento” (65).

27

15  ORIENTALISM EXPANDED? LATIN AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES… 

261

Bolaño, Roberto, et al. 2004. Palabra de América. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Bournot, Estefanía. 2017. El Oriente de Aira y Bellatin. In Robert Folger and José Elías Gutiérrez Meza (Eds.), La mirada del otro en la literatura Hispánica, 259–272. Münster: LIT Verlag. Carvalho, Bernardo. 2003. Mongólia. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Colombi, Beatriz. 2004. Viaje intelectual. Migraciones y desplazamientos en América Latina (1880–1915). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo. Fuguet, Alberto, and Sergio Gómez, eds. 1996. McOndo. Barcelona: Mondadori. Gasquet, Axel. 2015. El llamado de Oriente. Historia cultural del orientalismo argentino (1900–1950). Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. Beyond Bolaño. The global Latin American novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The postcolonial exotic: Marketing the margins. London: Routledge. Klinger, Diana. 2007. Escritas de si, escritas do outro: o retorno do autor e a virada etnográfica. Rio de Janeiro: 7letras. Locane, Jorge J. 2019. De la literatura latinoamericana a la literatura (latinoamericana) mundial. Condiciones materiales, procesos y actores. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Retrieved 21 May. 2019, from https://www.degruyter.com/ view/product/510696 López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. 2007. Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and beyond. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———, ed. 2009. One world periphery reads the other: Knowing the “oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Masiello, Francine. 2002. The art of transition. Latin American culture and neoliberal crisis. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Moraña, Mabel. 2004. Crítica impura. Estudios de literatura y cultura latinoamericanos. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Morejón Arnáiz, Idalia. 2008. Nuevos exotismos: escritores latinoamericanos en tránsito. In XI Congresso Internacional da ABRALIC, ed. Sandra Nitrini et al. Sao Pauolo. Ebook. Müller, Gesine, Jorge J. Locane, and Benjamin Loy, eds. 2018. Re-mapping world literature. Writing, book markets and epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South: Escrituras, mercados y epistemologías entre América Latina y el Sur Global. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Ebook. Padilla, Ignacio. 1996. Septenario de bolsillo. In Manifiesto Crack. Revista Lateral. http://www.lateral-ed.es/tema/070manifiestocrack.htm Paz Soldán, Edmundo, and Fuguet, Alberto. (eds.). 2000. Se habla español. Miami: Alfaguara. Prieto, José Manuel. 2013. ‘Treinta días en Moscú’. La escritura de un libro de viajes, 10–26. Caracol (São Paulo).

262 

E. BOURNOT

Said, Edward W. 1995. Orientalism. Western conceptions of the orient. London: Penguin Books. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2018a. África en la imaginación literaria mexicana. Exotismo, desconexión y los límites materiales de la ‘epistemología del Sur’. In Re-mapping World Literature, 61–80. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Ebook. ———. 2018b. Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican fiction, the neoliberal book market, and the question of world literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan desires. Global modernity and world literature in Latin America. Chicago: North Western University Press.

Author Index1

A Abad Faciolince, Héctor, 14, 247, 248, 252–256 Abraham, Nicolas, 55 Abreu, Casimiro de, 232 África Vidal Claramonte, M. Carmen, 90, 91, 98 Agar Corbinos, Lorenzo, 40 Aguiló, Ignacio, 28 Ahmed, Sara, 20–23, 30, 33 Aira, César, 257 Al-Assad, Bashar, 66, 71, 72 Al-Assad, Hafez, 66 Alatas, Syed Hussein, 213n7 Albuquerque, Alfonso de, 232 Alfonso XIII, 189 Alighieri, Dante, 94, 95, 211 Allende, Isabel, 107, 108 Altamirano, Ignacio, Manuel, 216 Altman, Janet, 65, 66

1

Álvarez-Tardío, Beatriz, 210 Amorim, Vicente, 11, 143–156 Andahazi, Federico, 246 Anderson, Benedict, 216n14 Aniñir, David, 94 Ankar, 46, 47, 49, 51 Arcilla, José S., 210n2 Auil, José, 39 Azuma, Eiichiro, 157 B Bachner, Andrea, 3 Baily, Samuel L., 145n2 Balboa, Núñez de, 4 Balzac, Honoré de, 219 Bandia, Paul F., 90, 90n2, 91 Barrera, Beatriz, 210n2 Barrón Soto, María Cristina E., 4 Barros, Adhemar de, 155

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2

263

264 

AUTHOR INDEX

Barros, Pía, 38n2 Becerra, Eduardo, 246 Beck, Ulrich, 31 Benavente, Jacinto, 189n4 Bennett, Karen, 225–227 Bernad, Miguel A., 210n2, 219n16 Bernal, Rafael, 4 Bertoni, Lilia Ana, 191, 206 Bhambra, Gurminder K., 32 Blasco Ibáñez, Rafael, 189n4 Blest Gana, Alberto, 13 Bordwell, David, 151 Borges, Jorge Luis, 83, 107 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 193, 193n7 Bournot, Estefanía, 13, 32, 257 Braccio, Gabriela, 4 Braudel, Fernand, 85, 225n1 Brecht, Bertold, 113 Breuer, Hans-Peter, 181 Brunette, Peter, 82 Butler, Martin, 70 Butler, Samuel, 114 C Cabezas, Omar, 115 Calvo, Carlos, 201n8 Câmara, Hélder, 115 Cánovas, Rodrigo, 39, 54 Carpenter, Ted, 71n24 Carvalho, Bernardo, 14, 247, 249, 255–258 Casanova, Pascale, 84 Casas, Lourdes, 218 Castro, Fidel, 111, 112 Catroga, Fernando, 238 Cervantes, Miguel de, 219 Chahín, Edith, 39 Chambers, Iain, 160 Chateaubriand, René de, 219

Chatterji, Sarat Chandra, 238 Chauán, Eugenio, 41 Chihuailaf, Elicura, 94 Cho, Hyun-il, 110 Cho, Young-il, 107 Chow, Rey, 83, 84, 181n3 Chuang Chua, How, 178, 180 Chuaqui, Benedicto, 39 Chun, Doo-hwan, 114n3 Chung, Young-mok, 110 Civantos, Christina, 2 Clemenceau, Georges, 189 Clifford, James, 42 Cohen, J. M., 111 Colombi, Beatriz, 247n4 Columbus, Christopher, 4 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 239 Cortázar, Julio, 83, 108 Costamagna, Alejandra, 38n2 Couto, Miguel, 144 D da Gama, Vasco, 3 Damrosch, David, 84n5 Dario, Ruben, 189n4 Delano, Poli, 106 Deleuze, Gilles, 163–165, 163n5, 164n6, 165n8, 170, 174, 175 Delgado, Juan José, 212n6 Denardi, Luciana, 33 Deng Xiaoping, 84 Dennis, Mark W., 178 Díaz, Bartolomé, 3 Dizon, Alma Jill, 210n2 Donoso, José, 11, 106 Dorfman, Ariel, 108, 109 Drago, José María, 201 Droit, Roger-Pol, 238 Duncan, Isadora, 189n4 Dutra, Eurico Gaspar, 155

  AUTHOR INDEX 

E Einstein, Albert, 189n4 El Attar, Heba, 39 Elcano, Sebastián, 4 Elizalde Pérez-Grueso, María Dolores, 210n2 Elssaca Aboid, Theodoro, 39 Eltit, Diamela, 38, 38n2, 48 Endo, Shusaku, 11, 12, 177–184 Erber, Pedro, 3 Escondo, Kristina, 211n4 Ette, Ottmar, 2, 92 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 211 F Fanon, Franz, 41, 115 Fernández, Bernardo, 20n1 Fernández Bravo, Álvaro, 20n1 Fernández de Quirós, Pedro, 4 Fernández, Nora, 38n2 Ferrando Pérez, Roberto, 14 Ferri, Enrico, 189n4 Fisher, Kayleigh, 25 Fistetti, Francesco, 226 Flaubert, Gustave, 253 Foucault, Michel, 122 França Mendes, David, 146 France, Anatole, 189n4 Francis Xavier (Saint), 232 Franco, Jean, 110 Fresán, Rodrigo, 248 Freyre, Gilberto, 231–233 Fuguet, Alberto, 246 Fujimori, Alberto, 131 Fujisaki, Yasuo, 157 Fukunaga, Takehiko, 173 Fumimaro, Konoe, 143 Funada, Sayaka, 145n2 Furuya, Shigetsuna, 145n2, 153

G Gaignard, Romain, 191, 205 Galván, Manuel de Jesús, 221 Gamboa, Santiago, 248, 249 Gandhi, Mahatma, 7, 227, 233–235, 238–241 García Márquez, Gabriel, 107 García, Jerry, 139n42 Garib, Walter, 39 Gasquet, Axel, 2, 6, 12, 32 Gates, Henry Louis, 47 Gidi-Lueje, Andrés, 39 Gogol, Nikolai, 109 Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, 189n4 Gómez, Sergio, 246 González Casanova, Pablo, 112 Goya, Francisco de, 193 Goytisolo, Juan, 253 Grillo, Heitor, 236 Gruzinski, Serge, 4 Guattari, Félix, 163–165, 163n5, 164n6, 165n8, 170 Guéguen, Nicolas, 25 Guerrero, León María, 80, 215 Guevara, Nicole Saffie, 40 Guillén, Claudio, 216n13 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 115 Gutman, Margarita, 189 H Hafiz, 6 Hagimoto, Koichi, 3, 210n4 Hales, Jaime, 39 Hall, Stuart, 38, 43, 44, 47 Handa, Tomoo, 144n1, 145n2 Hartwell, Ernest Rafael, 211n4 Hassan, Waïl, 39 Heine, Heinrich, 113 Hennessy, Rosemary, 81n4

265

266 

AUTHOR INDEX

Herbert, Julián, 10, 20n1, 79–81, 80n2, 85 Hermans, Theo, 90, 90n3, 91 Hernández, Isabel, 191 Hernández, Miguel, 111 Herralde, Jorge, 108n1 Hidalgo, Félix Resurrección, 217n15 Hirohito (japanese Emperor), 125 Hirsch, Marianne, 38, 42, 45, 49, 51 Hobsbawm, Eric J., 227, 240, 241 Hoyos, Héctor, 253, 254 Huberman, Leo, 113, 114 Hubert, Rosario, 3 Hu-De Hart, Evelyn, 3 Huenún, Jaime, 94 Huggan, Graham, 254 Hugo, Victor, 215 Huyssen, Andreas, 209n1 Hwang, Byeong-ha, 107, 108 I Iglesias, Enrique V., 54 Inoue, Tatsuo, 173 Isaacs, Jorge, 13, 221 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 154 J Jaar, Alfredo, 39 Jacob, Alicia, 39 Jacobowitz, Seth, 11, 12, 143 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 228 Jang, Jeong-il, 108 Jara, Víctor, 103 Jaurès, Jean, 189n4 Jeanmaire, Federico, 9, 19–33 Jeong, Jong-hyun, 115 Johnston, William, 178 Junji, Kikawa, 151

K Kabir, 6 Kang, Dae-suk, 113 Kaplan, Ann, 69, 71 Kaplan, Caren, 19, 21 Kazumi Stahl, Anna, 10, 92 Khayyam, Omar, 6 Kim, Bong-seok, 112 Kim, Byung-ki, 110 Kim, Dae-Jung, 114n3 Kim, Hyeon-kyun, 109, 113 Kim, Jae-yong, 109 Kim, Nam-ju, 112–114 Kim, Soo-haeng, 112 Kim, Soo-young, 110–113 Kim, Verónica Junyoung, 3 Kim, Young-Ha, 81n4 Kipling, Rudyard, 253 Kishimoto, Tsuguo, 150n9 Klengel, Suzanne, 3, 232, 233 Klinger, Diana, 256n17 Ko, Chisu Teresa, 3 Ko, Myengo-cheol, 116 Kobayashi, Takiji, 149 Kojima, Noriyuki, 173 Kosovsky Sedgwick, Eve, 146n4, 154 Kos-Stanišić, Lidia, 1 L Leavy, Patricia, 55 Lee, Jae-bong, 114 Lee, Man-yeol, 112 Lee, Myung-bak, 108 Lee-DiStefano, Debbie, 3 Leinius, Johanna, 32 Lenin, V. I., 48 León Mera, Juan, 13 Lesser, Jeffrey, 3, 146n5, 151 Lienlaf, Leonel, 94 Lim, Walter, 80 Littin, Miguel, 39

  AUTHOR INDEX 

Locane, Jorge, 80n2, 246, 248 Lolas Nazrala, Olga, 39 López Jaena, Graciano, 212 López, Kathy, 3 López-Calvo, Ignacio, 1, 11, 145n3, 156, 162, 162n4, 163, 3, 31 Loti, Pierre, 230 Loundo, Dilip, 226, 236 Loy, Benjamin, 248n6 Luhr, William, 151 Luther, Martin, 180 M Maalouf, Amin, 60, 60n10, 61 Machado, Everton, 13, 225n1, 232n6, 238 Macías Brevis, Sergio, 39–41 Maddison, Angus, 205 Magallanes, Fernando de, 4 Magnus, Ariel, 20n1 Mahfouz, Naguib, 60, 60n10 Manuud, Antonio, 210n2 Manzoni, Alessandro, 211n5 Marconi, Guglielmo, 189n4 Marín Cobos, Nieves, 80 Marín y Morales, Valentín, 213n8 Markovits, Claude, 234, 235, 239 Mármol, José, 13, 221 Martínez Assad, Carlos, 10, 53–73 Martínez, Gabi, 248 Marx, Karl, 230n5 Mase-Hasegawa, Emi, 180, 180n2 Masiello, Francine, 251 Massis, Mahfud, 39 Masterson, Daniel M., 145n2 Matibag, Eugenio, 3 Mato, Shigeko, 3, 12 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 218 Maturana, Andrea, 38n2 McDowell Carlsen, Lila, 9, 38 McSherry, Patrice J., 103 Meireles, Cecília, 13, 225–241

267

Mera, Juan León, 13 Mercer, Kobena, 47 Meruane, Lina, 9, 37–51 Metuaze, Farid, 39 Meza, Ramón, 122, 122n2 Mickiewicz, Adam, 211n5 Mignolo, Walter, 55, 56, 56n1, 61, 70, 94, 94n8 Miguez, Eduardo José, 145n2 Miller, Nancy K., 42, 45, 51 Minns, John, 79 Miura, Sakuzō “Sack,” 150, 150n9, 153 Mo, Yan, 29, 31 Mojares, Resil B., 213n9 Mojarro Romero, Jorge, 210, 211n4, 212 Montaigne, Michel de, 211 Montt Strabucchi, María, 3, 9 Moon, Bu-sik, 112 Moraga, Cherríe, 94 Morais, Fernando, 145n3, 146, 150n9, 151, 152n10, 153, 153n11, 155 Moraña, Mabel, 121, 122, 126, 136–139, 138n40, 251, 256 Morejón Arnáiz, Idalia, 251n10 Moreno, Marguerite, 189n4 Moretti, Franco, 84 Morga, Antonio de, 212 Morin, Marie-Eve, 22 Morris, Paul, 25 Morrison, Edward R., 25 Mucci, Clara, 55, 63, 66 Müller, Gesine, 248n6 N Naito, Kie, 127, 129, 130 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 20–22, 30, 32 Nassar, Farid Hidd, 39 Nasser, Tahia Abdel, 3, 38, 39 Negy-Zekmi, Silvia, 3

268 

AUTHOR INDEX

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 228, 229, 233 Neiva, Arthur, 144 Neruda, Pablo, 11, 104, 105, 107, 109–113 Nerval, Gérard de, 253 Niskier, Arnaldo, 233 Nomura, Chūsaburō , 145n2, 153

Pradilla, Francisco, 193 Prado, Manuel, 131 Pratt, Mary Louise, 43, 45 Prieto, José Manuel, 248, 249 Princess Elizabeth, 189 Puig, Manuel, 83, 84, 107 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 211n5

O Obama, Barack, 77, 78 Ocampo, Ambeth, 213 Ocampo, Esteban, 215 Okubaro, Jorge, 145n3 Oliveira Salazar, António de, 233 Oliveira, Xavier de, 144 Ortiz-Wallner, Alexandra, 3

Q Quijano, Anibal, 55, 64 Quinet, Edgar, 237

P Pacheco, Felix, 144 Padilla, Ignacio, 249, 250 Paik, Nak-chung, 109 Palma, Rafael, 215 Pardo de Tavera, Félix, 188 Pardo de Tavera, Trinidad Hermenegildo, 12, 187–207 Park, Chung-hee, 113, 114n3 Park, Ji-young, 110 Park, Paula, 3 Park, Suk-ja, 107 Paterno, Pedro, 13, 212–215, 213n9, 214n10 Patton, Paul, 164n6 Paz, Octavio, 117 Paz Soldán, Edmundo, 261 Paz Zamora, Néstor, 115 Pellegrini, Carlos, 198, 206 Picasso, Pablo, 109–111 Pilar, Marcelo del, 212–214 Pinochet, Augusto, 47, 103, 106, 108 Plaza, Victorino de la, 187n1

R Radaić, Ante, 210n2, 216, 219n16 Rafide, Matías, 39, 41 Randall, Margaret, 115 Reider, Noriko, 173 Renmei, Shindō , 144, 145n2, 146, 150n9, 151–153, 154n12, 155, 156 Retana, Wenceslao E., 210n3 Rey Rosa, Rodrigo, 248, 249 Reyes, Isabelo de los, 212 Rhee, Syng-man, 110n2, 112 Ricci, Cristián, 38, 39 Riger Tsurumi, Rebecca, 162, 162n4, 163, 171, 3, 173n18 Río, Fernando del, 210n1 Rivas, Zelideth, 3 Rivera Garza, Cristina, 20n1 Rizal, José, 12, 13, 187, 209–221 Rodríguez, Juan José, 11, 121–141 Rojas, Rafael, 111, 112 Rojas, Rodrigo, 94, 94n8, 94n9, 95, 97 Rolland, Romain, 238, 239 Romero, Robert Chao, 2, 5 Roosevelt, Theodore, 202, 203 Roudil, Romain, 239 Rufatto, Luiz, 249

  AUTHOR INDEX 

S Sábato, Hilda, 191 Sabella, Andrés, 39 Sáenz Peña, Roque, 187n1, 198, 203 Said, Edward, 38, 41, 42, 46, 51, 63, 81, 163–166, 164n7, 170, 175, 226, 228, 230n4, 230n5, 238, 251, 253 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 219 Sakai, Kazuya, 7 Sakane Eiiti, 152, 152n10 Salazar, Jorge, 11, 121–141 Sánchez Fuertes, Cayetano, 210n2, 216n12, 217 Sánchez Portuondo, María J., 216n12 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M., 10, 80, 247, 250, 260 Sanciangco, Gregorio, 212 Sant’Anna, Sergio, 249 Santos Cristóbal, Epifanio, 188, 188n3 Sarah, Roberto, 39 Sarmiento, Domingo F., 198, 206, 220 Schiller, Friedrich, 215 Schoene, Berthold, 32 Schwab, Gabriele, 55, 63 Schwab, Raymond, 237 Scorsese, Martin, 177 Segal, Charles, 38n1 Selman, Aycha, 41 Sepúlveda, Luis, 106 Shakespeare, William, 211 Shimizu, Momoru, 124, 125, 127 Shinoda, Masahiro, 177 Shumway, Nicolas, 190 Siskind, Mariano, 107, 251 Siu, Lok, 3 Skármeta, Antonio, 11, 38n2, 105, 106 Small, Lisa, 25 Smith, Keri E., 55

269

Smith, Sidonie, 57, 57n3, 57n4, 57n5, 58 Sommer, Doris, 13, 210, 214, 216–218 Sorolla, Joaquín, 193 Soto Antaki, Maruan, 10, 53, 54, 64, 66–71 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 240 Souza-Fuertes, Lizbeth, 4 Spae, Joseph, 179 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 90, 91 Stam, Robert, 84n5 Suárez, José I., 12 Sugi, Takeo, 11, 143–156 Sutherland, Juan Pablo, 40, 48 Sznaider, Natan, 31 T Taber, Robert, 111 Tagore, Rabindranath, 6, 227, 233, 238 Takeda, Sumiko, 127, 130 Takeichi, Nishi, 152n10 Takemoto, Mikio, 173 Tambling, Jeremy, 83, 84 Teichman, Judith, 79 Teo, Stephen, 83, 84 Thomas, Megan, 212 Thomassen, Bjorn, 30, 31 Thorndike, Guillermo, 124, 125 Tinajero, Araceli, 3, 6 Torok, Maria, 55 Torres, Verónica, 10 Torres-Rodríguez, Laura, 3, 80n2, 81, 81n3 Trump, Donald, 78 Tse, Lao, 95 Tsuyoshi, Ihara, 152n10 Turner, Graeme, 151 Twain, Mark, 253 Tyutina, Svetlana, 3, 134, 135, 139, 140

270 

AUTHOR INDEX

U Ueda, Nurse, 181, 181n3 V Valdez, Napoleón, 125 Valle Inclán, Ramón del, 189n4 Valmiki, 6 Vargas, Getulio, 144, 149 W Woo, Sukkyun, 10 Wright Mills, Charles, 111–113 Wu Fu, Puo-An, 10

Y Yaki, Sentei, 128, 128n14 Yamashiro, José, 149 Yanine Paulo, Salvador, 39 Yen, Huei Lan, 3 Yim, Jung-bin, 112 Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 199 Yu, Hua, 84 Yushimito del Valle, Carlos, 12, 159–175 Z Zhang, Yimou, 84 Zheng, Nan, 38n2, 39, 40

Place Index1

A Agra, 226n2 Ajanta, 226n2 Al-Andalus, 38 Algeria, 44 America, 14, 2, 152n10, 203, 205, 232, 251, 252, 39, 39n3, 4, 40, 5, 7, 81, 95 Angola, 133 Argentina, 8–10, 12, 20–23, 25–32, 40, 83, 92, 100n17, 105, 145n2, 187–207, 220 Asia, 1–14, 31, 77, 78, 81, 83, 91, 112, 114, 205, 225, 238, 246, 255, 257 Atlantic (ocean), 3, 4, 62, 78, 79, 84, 85 Aurangabad, 226n2 Australia, 77, 77n1, 78

1

B Bahía Blanca, 195 Baiqon, 62 Bandung, 228 Bangalore, 226n2 Beirut, 60n10 Beit Jala, 37, 40, 43, 48, 48n16 Beit Safafa, 40 Beit Sahour, 40 Bethlehem, 40 Bolivia, 105, 115 Brazil, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 40, 144–146, 144n1, 145n2, 146n5, 148–152, 150n9, 154, 155, 168, 191, 201, 229–233, 239, 256, 259 Brunei, 77, 77n1 Buenos Aires, 9, 20, 29, 82, 83, 92, 187n1, 188–193, 195–199, 203, 207, 249

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2021 A. Gasquet, G. Majstorovic (eds.), Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52571-2

271

272 

PLACE INDEX

C Cairo, 43, 248, 253–255, 255n16 California, 1, 5, 127 Canada, 77, 77n1 Chacra Colorada (Breña), 124, 124n7 Chechnia, 249 Chennai, 226n2, 248 Chepén, 92 Chile, 8, 10, 37, 39–46, 46n11, 77, 105, 160n1, 188n2, 201, 259 China, 2, 5–9, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–30, 28n12, 32, 78, 80n2, 84, 85, 96, 114n3, 129, 139n42, 255, 258 Cisjordan, 46 Ciudad de Cristal (Crystal City Internment Camps), 12, 159–175 Coimbatore, 226n2, 232, 236 Colombia, 10, 40, 252 Cuba, 5, 7, 111, 112, 114, 211n4 Cuttack, 226n2, 232 D Damascus (Damasco), 67, 70, 71 Delhi (New Delhi), 226n2, 228, 229, 231, 236 Dominican Republic, 114 E East Asia, 2, 4, 79, 91, 97, 111 Egypt, 43, 60, 252, 253, 255 El Salvador, 10 Europe, 2, 3, 5, 8, 14, 31, 60n10, 82, 150, 190, 192, 194–197, 202–205, 211, 221, 230, 237, 238, 247, 251 F Fatehpur Sikri, 226n2

G Gambia, 133 Gaza, 43, 49 Germany, 92, 180, 205 Glew, 20, 23, 23n4, 23n5, 24, 27, 29 Goa, 226n2, 227, 232, 232n6, 233 Golconda, 226n2 H Haiti, 114 Havana, 249 Hebrón (Hebron), 49 Hiroshima, 124, 130 Hong Kong, 8, 10, 79, 82–84, 95, 114n3 Hyderabad, 226n2 I India, 2–4, 6, 7, 9, 13, 178, 225–241 Indonesia, 7, 8, 78, 228 Israel, 39, 39n3, 40, 46–50, 9, 50n19 Istanbul, 249 J Jaffa, 37, 46, 48, 49 Jagannath, 237 Jaipur, 226n2 Japan, 111, 125, 127, 131, 133, 139n42, 143, 144, 145n2, 146–150, 146n5, 152, 152n10, 154–156, 177–179, 184, 5–8, 77, 77n1, 78 Jordan, 39 K Kolkata (Calcutta), 137n38, 226n2, 232

  PLACE INDEX 

L La Guaira (port), 201 La Plata, 196 Latin America, 1–14, 19, 20, 29, 31–33, 77–79, 80n2, 81–86, 92n6, 95, 97, 104, 112–115, 133, 145, 170, 201, 204, 216n14, 217, 229, 246–248, 250, 252, 260 Lebanon (Líbano), 9, 40, 53, 56–61, 63, 64n15 Libia, 39, 39n3 Lisbon (Lisboa), 255 London, 25, 26, 47, 178 M Macau, 92, 95, 227 Madras, 248 Malaysia, 7, 77, 77n1, 78, 8, 86 Manila, 4, 83, 187, 188n3, 192, 197, 205, 209, 214, 216, 221 Mar del Plata, 199 Mazatlan, 134, 135, 137, 137n38, 138 Mediterranean (sea), 3, 62 Mexico (El Messic), 10, 114, 135–137, 139, 140, 145n2, 188n2, 202, 248, 259, 4, 5, 53–73, 77, 77n1, 79–81, 8, 81n3, 92 Middle East, 2, 53–73, 246 Mongolia, 96, 255, 257, 258 Morocco, 137n38 Mumbai, 226n2, 236 N New Mexico, 124 New Orleans, 98 New Spain, 4, 85

273

New York, 42, 46, 50, 111, 248 New Zealand, 77n1, 78 Nicaragua, 115 Nile (river), 253 Nueva Granada, 252n11 O Oceania, 77, 79, 225 Okinawa, 128n14 Ottoman Empire, 40, 59 P Pacific (ocean), 4, 10, 77–86, 132, 136 Palestina (Palestine), 9, 39–44, 46–51, 46n11 Paraguay, 145n2, 205 Paris, 60n10, 61, 84, 187, 190, 192 Patna, 226n2 Pearl Harbor, 143 Peking (Beijing), 109, 248 Peru, 10, 105, 123, 125, 127, 128, 128n14, 131–133, 139, 140, 145n2, 162n4, 163, 166, 168, 188n2, 5, 7, 77, 77n1, 92, 97 Philippines (Filipinas), 2, 4, 7, 8, 78, 85, 188n3, 197, 199, 201, 205, 206, 209–221 Prague (Praga), 249 Puerto Rico, 211n4 Puri, 226n2, 232 R Rímac, 132, 132n26 Rome, 248 Rosario, 195 Russia, 139n42, 211n5

274 

PLACE INDEX

S Salamanca, 90 San Francisco, 135 Santiago de Chile, 37 Shanghai, 20, 148 Sikandara, 226n2 Silk Road, 78 Sinaloa, 134 Singapore, 77, 77n1, 8, 86 South America, 10, 11, 40, 91, 151, 153 Southeast Asia, 79 South Korea, 8–11, 78, 79, 103–105, 107–110, 112, 114, 115 Soviet Union, 109, 112 Spain, 4, 85, 90, 104 Spain (Iberian Peninsula), 4, 39, 134 Suzhou, 9, 20, 23, 24, 29 Sydney, 249 Syria (Siria), 9, 39, 40, 54, 64–69, 71

Tel Aviv, 37, 47 Texas, 12, 124, 163, 168 Thailand, 8, 78 Timor, 227 Tokyo, 249 Torreón, 10, 79, 80

T Taiwan, 8, 78 Tehran, 70, 235

W Washington D.C., 130, 201 West Bank, 37, 43

U United States (U.S.), 5, 7, 8, 12, 48, 77, 78, 82, 84, 92, 109, 111–114, 125, 127, 130, 133, 160n1, 163, 166, 168–170, 195, 197, 201–204, 210n3 V Venezuela, 188n2 Vietnam, 114, 7, 77, 77n1, 78, 8