One World Periphery Reads the Other : Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula [1 ed.] 9781443817929, 9781443816571

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One World Periphery Reads the Other

One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula

Edited by

Ignacio López-Calvo

One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by Ignacio López-Calvo and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1657-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1657-1

To Juan Callejo

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Ignacio López-Calvo Chapter One: Mexican Orientalisms Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism ................... 18 Alán José Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai ............................... 39 Juan Ryusuke Ishikawa Octavio Paz and India: Blanco, Modernity, and the Poetics of Simultaneism......................................................................................... 56 Roberto Cantú The National Geographic’s Orientalization of the Maya........................... 82 Carlos Miguel Bazua Morales Chapter Two: Cultural Production by and about Asians in Peru Identity Confusion in Siu Kam Wen’s ‘La conversión de Uei Kong’ ..... 102 Debra Lee-DiStefano Shadows in the Wind: Images of the Japanese in the Works of Nisei Peruvian Poets José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato............................ 114 Rebecca Riger Tsurumi Building the Nation From the Outside: Flexible Citizenship, American War Propaganda, and the Birth of Anti-Japanese Hysteria in Peru ......... 130 Ignacio López-Calvo Chapter Three: Latin American Fictive and Parodical Orientalisms Three Visions of China in the Contemporary Latin American Novel ..... 150 Héctor Hoyos

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Staging Absence: Severo Sarduy’s Fictive Orientalism in De donde son los cantantes ............................................................................................ 172 Paula Park Chapter Four: Lusophone Orientalisms Orientalism in Portuguese Literature: Eça de Queirós and Pessoa .......... 188 José I. Suárez Arab Heritage in Brazilian Writer Raduan Nassar’s To the Left of the Father ............................................................................................ 197 Lizbeth Souza-Fuertes Chapter Five: Erasing the Arab Heritage in Spain The Thousand and One Nights as Living Narrative: Transgressing the Boundaries of the Textual Tradition .................................................. 212 Camila Pastor de María y Campos The Expulsion of Muslims and Jews in Don Quixote and the Picaresque of the Sixteenth Century .......................................................................... 232 Nicolás Alemán Separation and Displacement in Francisco Pradilla’s Orientalist Paintings: La Rendición de Granada (1882) and El Suspiro del Moro (1892) ........ 244 María A. Castro Chapter Six: Adopting the Other’s Culture in Spanish Cultural Production María Zambrano: A Ray of Eastern Light in the West............................ 258 Pilar Valero-Costa Zoraida’s Conversion in Cervantes’s ‘Captive Tale’ and Latin American Theory ..................................................................................................... 274 Juan E. de Castro

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Chapter Seven: U.S. and Far East Orientalisms How Does an Other Write anOther? The Filipino in Alfredo Véa’s The Silver Cloud Café ............................................................................. 282 Stephanie Fetta Cultural Configuration of the Philippines in the Sixteenth Century: Relationship with Spanish America......................................................... 297 Roberto Fuertes-Manjón The Japanese Oxymoron: A Historical Approach to the Orientalist Representation of Japan........................................................................... 309 Blai Guarné Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements ........... 330 Malgorzata Skorek Chapter Eight: Musical Orientalization and Self-Orientalization The Song of the Dragon: Fred Ho and the Formation of an “Afro-Asian new American Multicultural Music” ......................... 346 Kevin Fellezs The Western Exoticism of Twelve Girls Band ........................................ 366 Marco Valesi Chapter Nine: Filmographic Orientalism Somewhere out beyond the Stars: Orientalism and Star Trek Deep Space Nine...................................................................................... 380 Michael Barba South Reads Western and Eastern East: Second-hand Orientalism in Kiltro, A Chilean Martial Arts Film .................................................... 393 Moisés Park

INTRODUCTION IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

In her study of the genealogical affinities between theory and cultural studies carried out in the first chapter of her Ethics after Idealism, literary and cultural critic Rey Chow presents the critique of Orientalism as one of the four main forms of analysis to have developed in cultural studies in the United States in recent years. As she posits, the controversial and seminal study Orientalism (1978) by the U.S.-based Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward W. Said (1935-2003) does not offer viable alternatives: Because the issue of otherness is delineated by Said on the premise of a racial dyad—namely, the white West as opposed to the non-whine non West—his logic seems to foreclose the possibility of the non-white nonWest every having its own “culture.” Said’s work begs the question as to how otherness […] could become a genuine oppositional force and a useable value. (2)

Chow proposes to carry out alternative studies of the racism and sexism that appear—in a latent or overt form—in the stereotypical assumptions, misperceptions, and representations of cultural “others” present in cultural artifacts: “We need to explore alternative ways of thinking about crosscultural exchange that exceed the pointed, polemical framework of ‘antiorientalism’—the lesson from Said’s work—by continually problematizing the presumption of stable identities and also by continuously asking what else there is to learn beyond destabilized identities themselves” (75). This second interdisciplinary volume on (the critique of) orientalism and the Asian and Arab diasporas in the Americas and the Hispanic World, a follow-up to the first one, Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (2007) addresses Chow’s question as well as several others: Can we speak about orientalist discourse when the exoticist gaze comes from formerly colonized countries? Can a text be considered orientalist if it exoticizes the other without an obvious idealization of self? Can we talk about orientalism when dealing with non-eastern cultures and

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Introduction

peoples? How can strategic self-orientalization be used for economic or political profit? Is the “Orient” still helping Europe and the Western Hemisphere to define themselves? From Latin America to the Philippines and from the Iberian Peninsula to the United States, these studies cover a wide range of geographical areas, topics, approaches, disciplines and genres, including literature, philosophy, music, film, painting, mass media, and advertising. As could be expected, several essays in this volume take Said’s Orientalism as a point of departure to examine the imaging of the Near and Far East in the Western world. Other essays, including mine, deal directly with cultural production by or about people of Asian or Arab descent in the Americas and the Hispanic world. Most of them, however, share a common interest in issues of assimilation, racism, migration, transnationalism, citizenship, exile, identity, transculturation, and hybridity (including musical hybridity, as we see in Kevin Fellezs’s and Marco Valesi’s essays). And non-Asian social groups can also be “orientalized,” as Carlos Bazua and Michael Barba argue in their essays on the representation of the ethnic Other in magazines, television programs, and films. While it is true that in some cases, as Julia A. Kushigian posits, the orientalist discourse in the Hispanic literary tradition has been very different from the one described by Said (she cites the cases Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy, and José I. Suárez, in this book, adds Lusophone authors José Maria Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa), it is also true that the other type of orientalism—hegemonic, dehumanizing, prejudicial and racist—has also had a long tradition in these regions. Several of the essays included in One World Periphery Reads the Other attest to this other use of orientalism in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.1 This volume also addresses other types of orientalism as well as related approaches. A key concept, for instance, is self-orientalization, in its diverse filmic, literary, and musical expressions (as we can read in Valesi’s essay on the western exoticism of the Chinese musical group Twelve Girls Band). Along these lines, in both Valesi’s and Héctor Hoyos’s essays, we will see how Occidentalism—that is, the reverse phenomenon of the “Orient”’s othering, demonizing and inventing the Occident—also informs and redefines cultural exchanges and interpretations. 1

For additional cases, see, for example, the first volume, Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond, my monograph Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture, or my forthcoming articles “Latin America and the Caribbean in a Sinophone Studies Reader?,” “Los japoneses en la obra de Mario Vargas Llosa,” and “Refugiados y Asalto al Paraíso de Marcos Aguinis: apropiaciones y reapropiaciones del discurso palestino.”

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Other studies, such as Fellezs’s, examine creolization, a process by which local cultures and ethnic minorities, even if they are in a subordinate position, can creatively assign different meanings and uses to commodities and cultural artifacts they import as a result of global interconnections. They can create “creolized,” hybrid products and identities by selecting and fusing heterogenous elements from the adopted and the receiving cultures. Another related concept re-visited in this book is “glocalization,” which argues that “universal,” globalized goods, ideas, norms, and practices can be interpreted or appropriated by local cultures in highly different ways, which may result in new, hybrid forms and cultures. Considering today’s increasing global interdependence and consciousness, Michel Foucault’s theories about the connection between discourse and power and Said’s practical exploration of cultural hegemony and the way in which knowledge is produced—in spite of its many contradictions—continue to be relevant, as new intellectual developments, particularly in post-colonial studies, have drawn from their original ideas. This volume examines both the traditional and the new ways in which writers, intellectuals, philosophers (see Pilar Valero-Costa’s essay), painters (see María A. Castro’s study), filmmakers (see Barba’s and Moisés Park’s studies), musicians (see Fellezs’s and Valesi’s essays), and even advertising agencies (see Malgorzata Skorek’s essay) continue to relate to the Near and the Far East and their inhabitants, with which they may or may not have had direct contact, depending on each case. As we will see, in most texts references to these regions, as well as to local Chinatowns or other “ethnoburbs” (urban ethnic enclaves) do not reflect direct experience or knowledge, but have been mediated by idées reçues from previous readings. At times, texts and films that, in a cursory reading, seem to continue the Orientalist tradition of manipulative appropriation, exoticization, essentialism and reductionism, simply respond to a selfconscious and parodical play on superficial decodifications of clichés. In a closer reading, one can realize that these authors make clear, from the onset of the narrative, that this lighthearted defamiliarization, with all its essentialized caricatures and stereotypes about the “typically oriental” (the “fictive orientalism” in the title of Paula Park’s essay), have little or nothing to do with the real-life “Orient.” Rather than claiming to be to the product of Sinologist research, these representational practices approach the East from a ludic standpoint that disregards verisimilitude. In fact, they often echo a situated knowledge of “South-South” dynamics between formerly colonized peoples. On the other hand, several essays study the authors’, filmakers’, and musicians’ admiration and even emulation of Asian cultures: for example,

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Juan Ryusuke Ishikawa analyzes José Juan Tablada’s use of haikai; Moisés Park studies the Chilean film’s Kiltro’s imitation of Hong Kong martial arts films; and Fellezs’s explores Fred Ho’s formation of an “AfroAsian new American multicultural music.” In all these cultural borrowings, as well as in others, instead of romanticizing, fetishizing or exoticizing Asian cultural production (although it would not be too farfetched to argue that they may be commodifying it), they simply incorporate, from a position of respect and sometimes even veneration, their impressive cultural achievements to their own local traditions. In my view, it would be absurd, for example, to argue that Tablada’s imitation of the Japanese haikai is a “hegemonic act of oppression”; on the contrary, it responds to a sincere will to understand (rather than control and manipulate) the “Oriental” Other or to a desire for “humanistic enlargement of horizons” (Said xix). Other cultural artifacts under discussion also reflect an awareness of the effects of globalization. The transnational export and import of culture is, of course, affected by economic and political developments. Fear of cultural imperialism or a global monoculture (not only the so-called McDonaldization of the world but, increasingly, also of its Sinicization through global markets), be it justified or not,2 drives expressions of social and racial anxiety at both local and global scales. The drive for cultural survival in the face of the rapid extinction of minority languages (and, in some cases, of cultures as well) informs the feelings of cultural shock, as well as of attraction and rejection for the Other. At times, this negotiation of cultural difference is eerily reminiscent of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s arguments in his much-criticized theory of the Clash of Civilizations; that is, that after the fall of communism, “civilizations” have replaced nations and ideologies as the driving force in today’s volatile global politics, and that cultural and religious identities will inevitably be the source of armed conflict in the future. Yet, as we see in Chapter 5, “Erasing the Arab Heritage in Spain,” similar fears as well as the strategy of misrepresenting, excluding, or even erasing the Other’s presence and historical legacy are certainly not new. On a more positive note, Chapter 6, “Adopting the Other’s Culture in Spanish Cultural Production,” shows how cultural flows coming from both sides can also be well received by both “Orientals” and Westerners, establishing a fruitful dialogue among (and hopefully, one day, an alliance of) civilizations. 2

Contrary to common belief, Joana Breidenbach’s and Ina Zukrigl’s ethnographic work claims that, rather than homogenizing world cultures, globalization has had a diversifying effect.

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While Said focused on the perceptions and stereotypes of the Near East “Oriental” in England, France and the United States, most of these essays study the decentering interplay between “peripheral” areas of the Third World, “semiperipheral” areas (Spain and Portugal since the second part of the seventeenth century), and marginalized social groups of the globe (Chicanos, African Americans, and Filipino Americans). We will see, for example, how China and the Far East in general are imagined and represented in Latin America and the Caribbean, or how ethnic minorities in the United States, such as Chicanos and African Americans, incorporate Filipino characters in their novels or creolize their music with Chinese influences. As the title of this book suggests, sometimes these “peripheral” areas and social groups talk back to the metropolitan centers of the former empires or look for their mediation, while others they avoid the interference of the First World or of hegemonic social groups altogether in order to address other “peripheral” peoples directly, thus creating rich “South-South” cross-cultural flows and exchanges. The main difference between the imperialistic orientalism studied by Said and this other type of global cultural interaction is that while, in their engagement with the “Orient,” they may be reproducing certain imperialistic fantasies and mental structures, typically there is not an ethnocentric process of selfidealization or an attempt to demonstrate cultural, ontological, or racial superiority in “South-South” intellectual and cultural exchanges. This way to de-center or to “provincialize” Europe—pace Dipesh Chakrabarty— disrupts the traditional center-periphery dichotomy, bringing about multiple and interchangeable centers and peripheries, whose cultures interact with one another without the mediation of the European and North American metropolitan centers. As Chakrabarty puts it, “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought— which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all—may be renewed from and for the margins” (16). Some of these essays, therefore, challenge the inevitable “centrality” of Europe, proposing new transmodern, intercultural paradigms. As Enrique Dussel explains, “The Eurocentric view reflects on the problem of the crisis of modernity solely with the European-North American moments (or now even Japanese), but it minimizes the periphery. To break through this ‘reductive fallacy’ is not easy” (17-18). The Eurocentric paradigm claims that the phenomenon of modernity is exclusively European; it developed, according to them, in the Middle Ages and then expanded to the rest of the world. Against this model, Dussel presents a planetary- or world-system

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from which Europe, having been itself the periphery for centuries (the centers being in Bagdag, China, India and other civilizations), became the center at one point thanks to the incorporation of the American territories as their periphery. He proposes, therefore, a transmodern liberation that emerges from the periphery to transcend a Western modernity that he considers simply as a “rational management of the [Western] worldsystem” (19). Dussel argues for recouping what is redeemable in modernity, a “‘civilizing’ system that has come to an end” (19), and halting “the practices of domination and exclusion in the world-system. It is a project of liberation of a periphery negated from the very beginning of modernity” (19). A good part of this book echoes this proposed encouragement of transmodern, inter-(semi)peripheral, and South-South cultural dialogues, which claim their own place beyond the traditional Western modernity that had excluded previously them. The first section of the book focuses on this discourse of Orientalism as seen in Mexican cultural production as well as on description of the Maya in the U.S. mass media. In his first essay, Alán José proposes a guide to read Farabeuf o la crónica de un instante (1965), a short novel by the Mexican author Salvador Elizondo (1932-2006), which should provide the reader with the necessary clues to grasp its secret meanings, including the pleasures and horrors of hypnotic submission and a Chinese game with ivory balls, as well as the aesthetics of dismemberment and corporal deformation. This novel also offers, according to José, unrecognizable images of ourselves in forbidden fantasies, exotic monsters, the aesthetics of torture, and the magic of divination. Elizondo’s literary project, explains José, was to experiment with the creation of meaning by using non-logical inference and non-sequential narratives. With this goal in mind, he followed Eisenstein technique of montage, the structure of Chinese pictogrammatic signifying, and the fortune-telling rules of the I Ching, the Chinese book of mutations. In turn, Ishikawa’s study illustrates how Mexican poet José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) molds the Japanese poetic subgenre of the haikai in order to create a new conception of the poem and to perceive his surrounding environment in a different way, always marked by Modernismo. Yet, Ishikawa explains, in his modification and adaptation of the haikai to a Western literary framework and to a different natural world, he never forgets the fundamentals and the minimalism of this centenary style. The study traces the gradual changes that Tablada adds to the haikai in three different collections of poems. In the third essay, Roberto Cantú proposes a different reading of Blanco, one of the most experimental poems by Octavio Paz. He deploys

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multiple sources and various methods (close reading, Structuralism, cultural studies) to locate the key this poem’s hermetic cultural codes. Generally associated with the poet’s residence in India while serving as Mexico’s ambassador in Delhi (1962-1968), Blanco has been read as the result of the poet’s studies of Tantrism, Buddhism, and other religious and cultural aspects of India’s ancient civilization. Cantú considers this poem to be more complex and inclusive of other civilizations, thus best understood in the context of Paz’s own reflections on twentieth century avant-gardes, such as Cubism and Surrealism, art movements which Paz unified under one name: Simultaneism. Searching for the meaning of Simultaneism and modernity as found in Paz’s writings, Cantú applies his findings to a reading of Blanco, finding in art history and Mesoamerican civilization the other elements that make Blanco intelligible as a poem next to India’s ancient past. No less important, he raises a question often neglected by critics: the historical conditions in the 1960s that remain implicit in the writing of this poem. Closing the firs chapter, Bazua argues that the Orientalization of the Maya people has been a constant activity of western intellectuals and mass media. This Orientalization, a way of studying and representing those who were colonized, has imposed a hierarchy of representation and ownership of geographical territory. More specifically, Bazúa analyzes the National Geographic’s misrepresentation and Orientalization of the Maya: they have chose to romanticize and highlight the Maya’s ancient and mysterious glories, while disregarding the most urgent human rights violations committed against these diverse populations. As the critic points out, the National Geographic refuses to acknowledge how millions of Maya people are considered either second-class citizens in their own nations (Mexico and Guatemala) or leveled as illegal aliens in the United States. The second chapter explores prose, poetry, and testimonials produced by Peruvian authors of Chinese or Japanese descent. First, Debra LeeDiStefano’s essay focuses on a short story collection by Sino-Peruvian author Siu Kam Wen (1951-) entitled El tramo final. In her view, this book, which has the barrio chino as the unifying connector, is a great example of how Latin American writers of Asian descent are offering their distinct visions of the societies in which they live. Against the background of a city of Lima that is described from the perspective of Chinese Peruvians from different generations, the stories explore different identitarian issues and interpersonal relationships not only among members of Lima’s Chinatown but also between Chinese or Sino-Peruvian characters and the rest of society. More specifically, Lee-DiStefano

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analyzes the nature/nurture debate in the story “La conversión de Uei Kong.” The main character, Tío Keng, is plagued by his own prejudice against the kuei (or non-Chinese) and their phenotype. Lee-DiStefano unravels the various levels of identity issues in this short-story and how it also portrays the complexities of Latin American identity. Moving from the Chinese community in Peru to the Japanese one, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi studies images of the Japanese in the works of two Peruvian Nisei poets: José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato. According to Tsurumi, their poetry reflects their own unique experiences as first generation Peruvians struggling with the complexities of identity and assimilation. She explores the commonality of their expression and the divergence of their poetic voices, reflecting differences in gender, age and sexual orientation in Elogio del Refrenamiento, La piedra alada, Chambala era un camino, Diario de la mujer es ponja, and several essays. Still in the realm of the Japanese Peruvian community, in my essay I analyze Seiichi Higashide (1909-1997)’s remarkable testimonial Adiós to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (2000) (Namida no Adiósu, 1981), which adds a new page to the history of the Japanese diaspora, and to the sad episode of the deportation of Latin American residents and citizens to U.S. concentration camps with the purpose of using them as pawns for the exchange of prisoners of war with the Japanese Empire during World War II. At the same time, this text reveals additional nuances to the historical notion of citizenship in Peru and the rest of Latin America. It is also crucial to understand how an outside influence (in this case American anti-Japanese agitators) successfully overturned Peruvian officials’ widespread support for the Axis powers, and turned mainstream population against their Japanese neighbors, including those naturalized Peruvian or born in Peru. Cultural prejudice together with economic competition and wartime anxiety had become the perfect culture medium for the birth of anti-Japanese hysteria. As we will see, even though the cosmopolitanism of “flexible citizenship” can be socially and economically rewarding in times of peace, Higashide’s testimony shows its structural limits, dangers, and personal costs during wartime, regardless of how much hard-earned cultural capital and social prestige have been accumulated as a strategy of flexible positioning. After dealing with orientalism in Mexico and Peru, the third chapter includes two essays that still deal with Latin American literature, but concentrating on fictive and parodical orientalisms: one on the novel De donde son los cantantes, by Cuban author Severo Sarduy, and the other focusing on novels by the Colombian Santiago Gamboa, and by the Argentines César Aira and Ariel Magnus, Hoyos presents a comparative

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study of three contemporary novels by these three Latin American authors that reflect the changing ways in which Latin Americans conceive of China in a time of globalization. By examining how ideology shapes narrative structures in these works, Hoyos analyzes visions of Sino-Latin American relations that express anxiety about the implications of global transformation through the use of exoticism and comedy. As Hoyos states, “Chinese products may have become ubiquitous in Latin American markets–or have “flooded” them, as a frequent metaphor goes–but China remains by and large an invisible, underrepresented culture in Latin America. Fictionalizations of Sino-Latin American relations have something of dealing with repressed dreams, perhaps nightmares.” Switching to the Caribbean basin, Paula Park analyzes Severo Sarduy (1937-1993)’s constantly playful imprecision when dealing with real Oriental referents in De donde son los cantantes (1967). In his quest for the Orient, argues Park, the West is absorbed. In the novel, a blond Spanish military man becomes obsessed with Flor de Loto, an idealized transvestite Chinese opera singer. After “her” show, he waits outside her changing room but he can never see her because, without her make-up, she walks out as an unattractive male Chinese man. In spite of his failures, the General still wants to “conquer” and possess her, so he sends her a sinister gift (a bracelet with miniature blades) to at least see her dead body. Nevertheless, before his plan is executed, the chapter ends. The author shapes a textual stage in which an imprecise notion of void manages to expand and escape infinitely, unreadable and unperceivable as it is. Moving on from Hispanophone to Lusophone Orientalisms, the two studies in the fourth chapter look at the Arab heritage in the works by Brazilian Raduan Nassar and at a different type of orientalism in the works of Portuguese authors Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa. First, José I. Suárez argues that, although Edward Said was perhaps accurate in his observations regarding Orientalism in French and English literature, he missed the mark when he included Portugal among colonial powers whose literature reflects this bias. He examines two novels by José Maria Eça de Queiroz, The Mandarin (1880) and The Relic (1887), as well as two poems by Álvaro de Campos, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym: “Opium Eater” and “Ode (an excerpt).” According to Suárez, these Portuguese writers were unprejudiced against the East, even though they included in their works the themes of colonialism and modernity in the Orient, and topics such as Eastern religions, the Holy Land, opium, and mandarins. They developed these themes, he argues, in a sympathetic light, one that today would be categorized as culturally diverse.

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Introduction

From Portugal, the second essay of the fourth chapter turns to Brazilian literature. Lizbeth Souza-Fuertes studies the orientalist component in the works of Raduan Nassar, heir of a rich Arab cultural tradition that he incorporated into his novel, Lavoura Arcaica (To the Left of the Father, 1975). This Middle Eastern legacy is clearly reflected in the lyricism that permeates the narration, the insertion of descriptions that originate in The Arabian Nights, the power of reminiscence, and the predominant role that religion, the erotic, and sensuality play in the novel. Incorporating traditional values and customs within modern times, argues Souza-Fuertes, it contributes to define the complex world of interrelationships between characters, the family, religious and cultural conflicts, and the difficulties that emerge. Arab heritage is again studied in the fifth chapter, albeit this time it is its erasure from Spanish history that is addressed. Thus, Camila Pastor explores the possibility of imagining the Spanish language as a vehicle for the Thousand and one Nights as a living narrative tradition, a genre with both textual and oral variants. She argues that the invention of the Nights as a single artifact is an eighteenth-century Western European phenomenon later imported back into the Arab East. French Orientalist Antoine Galland’s translation and subsequent ones can be read as the realignment and inscription of the tradition within the crucial modern binaries of religious/secular, East/West, and textual/oral. Following Slyomovics’s conceptualization of the oral performance of stories from the Nights, Pastor maintains that the Iberian history of the Nights can be re-scripted once we recognize them, rather than as a single text that needs to be reconstructed and authenticated, as an oral-textual discursive tradition, a genre of verbal art. She proposes the reconstruction of the historic elasticity of the various boundaries according to which the Nights have been codified and of the various discursive universes they have traversed in their thousand years of textual circulation. Along the same lines, Nicolás Alemán reminds us about how after the expulsions of Moors and Jews from Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, official national histories tried to erase their cultural heritage. However, argues Alemán, two passages from Don Quixote echo the fact the Church and the monarchy acted against the people’s will in their religious and political decisions. The first scene takes place in chapter 54 of the second part of Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza encounters his Moorish neighbor and friend Ricote. The second passage deals with “The Story of the Captive” in chapters 38 through 42 of the first part of the novel, which reflects the author’s own experience as a captive in Algiers. The captive in the novel is a new Christian and son of

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converted Jews, who is married, or about to marry, a Muslim woman, also about to become a new converted Christian. By mixing the three ethnicities (Christian, Jewish, Moorish) in the character of the captive, the author is questioning the authenticity of the “Pure blood” decree. Implicit is also the criticism to the myth that Spain was founded by only one social and religious group. And closing this exclusion of the Arab/Muslim past in Spain, María Castro demonstrates how Francisco Pradilla’s historical paintings La rendición de Granada (1882) and El suspiro del moro (1892) present a dualistic and compelling image that celebrates the triumph of Christian self-affirmation, power, and control over Muslim defeat, sadness, and loss. She argues that this Orientalist approach glorifies the will to dominate non-Christian peoples and emphasizes the spatial and psychological separation between Islam and the Christian West, thus signaling Pradilla’s lack of understanding, knowledge, and respect for the non-Christian “Other.” The deliberate expression of failure and displacement of the Muslim group depicted in the paintings attests to an Orientalist vision that victimizes “other peoples” as a way to gain power and superiority for the triumphant group. La Rendición de Granada and El Suspiro del Moro, claims Castro-Sethness, represent an artistic model characterized by denial of coexistence, compassion, and understanding. Still in the sphere of Spanish cultural production, but now going from exclusion to inclusion and dialogue, in Chapter 6 we have two essays that consider Sufi influences in the philosophy of María Zambrano and the topic of transculturation in Don Quixote. Both reflect the adoption of the Other’s culture or voluntary acculturation. Valero-Acosta analyzes María Zambrano’s Los bienaventurados (1990) y Los sueños y el tiempo (1998) from the perspective of the symbology of Light and the way, among others, using the teachings of the Sufi mystic Ibn Arab and a spiral movement that goes, beyond philosophical thought, from the outside to the inside. The result, argues Valero-Acosta, is a crossing of lights in which Oriental consciousness enlightens the roots of Western thinking. Zambrano, explains the critic, proposes rescuing what she calls a “poetic reason” or “philosophy of light,” which will help Western reason (blinded since Descartes’s times) recover the right path. As to Juan de Castro’s essay, it looks at an example of acculturation in “The Captive’s Tale,” one of the interpolated tales in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Narrating the conversion to Catholicism and escape to Spain of Zoraida, a young Moorish woman, this fragment from Don Quixote would seem to illustrate José María Arguedas’s version of acculturation. However, on closer examination, it is possible to read Cervantes’s text as problematizing

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Introduction

acculturation understood exclusively as cultural substitution, as well as contemporary notions of hybridity as necessarily subversive. Two of the essays in the seventh chapter deal with Filipinos in the United States and the Philippines and the third one, with the portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. magazine advertisements. In the first one, Stephanie Fetta analyzes the politics of a Chicano novelist writing the Filipino into the Chicano cultural imaginary in Alfredo Véa’s The Silver Cloud Café. Common labor conditions provide a framework that legitimates Véa’s presentation of the Filipino, but a shared sense of humanity is wrought through mutual subjugation to his notion of racialized brownness. In assuming this conceptual cultural authority, Véa articulates Filipinoness by employing thematic and literary strategies of the body, cultural ritual, and language. These strategies succeed in voicing subaltern knowledge, while at other times they seem complicit with marginalizing discourses. This politic of discernment and commonality, argues Fetta, makes an incursion into the discourse of multiculturalism but from the perspective of anOther, a Chicano writer, writing anOther, a Filipino. The Silver Cloud Café corrects the historical frame by remembering the Filipino presence and struggle alongside the bracero, but demonstrates a complex engagement with multiculturalism that both broadens the space of receptivity and contracts the complexity of Filipinoness into melancholic exoticism. Going back in time, Roberto Fuertes explores the cultural configuration of the Philippines during the first century of Spanish colonization, which was based on the political structures and cultural experiences that Spaniards had already had in Latin America. As Fuertes explains, although the Philippines were of great strategic importance to the Spanish Crown— both Charles III and Phillip II made them their base of expansion towards the East—, the reality is that the cultural center of gravity continued to rotate around Latin America. Since there was no direct control of the viceroys, almost all cultural institutions were left in the hands of the religious orders, which created a unique system, different from the one in Latin America. This project would soon obtain full autonomy, beginning with the predominant role of the Catholic Church, not only in the structural and cultural design, but also in the colonization per se of a territory defined by its geographical uniqueness, racial complexity, variety of previous cultural influences before the Spanish conquest: indigenous religious practices mixed with Islam and a commercial relationship with neighboring countries, especially Siam, the Moluccas, the Malaysian peninsula, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra had already been well-established.

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Blai Guarné studies the Orientalist imaginary in the representation of Japan. Its implications, he explains, run deep in the stereotypical characterization of Japan as well as in the modern recognition of the very idea of the West. Guarné’s essay considers that image through the genealogical analysis of the oxymoronic narrative as a discursive formation involved in the imaginary construction of Japan, in and out of its frontiers. He considers the historical conformation of this narrative, considering especially its prefigurement in the early Jesuit chronicle and its modern resignification in the Nihonjinron or Nihonbunkaron (“discourse on the Japanese and on Japanese culture”) thought, as a representational practice that turns Japan into a dialogic Other of the West. Within the field of advertising, Malgorzata Skorek investigates whether the “model minority” stereotype of Asian Americans is reflected in U.S. magazine advertisements and discusses the potential consequences of its presence for both the Asian minority itself and the broader public. Her analysis of 620 advertisements from five different American magazines published between 2006 and 2007 shows that certain aspects of the “model minority” stereotype were indeed present in advertising. Asian Americans were over-represented in magazines focusing on business, science and technology, and personal and office electronics. Asian models were most often found in decorative roles although every fifth ad featured an Asian model in a working role (twice as often as models of other races). Moreover, Skorek found that the majority of Asian models were gazing away from the camera and that they do not have a user function in the ads but are rather shown in a symbolic association with the product. There are several harmful effects associated with this reinforcement of the “model minority” stereotype. Following the expectancy theory, for example, several individuals may experience heavy pressure to excel at math and sciences, and failure to fulfill this expectation may lead to lower self-esteem or increased anxiety. At the same time, it may lead the broader public to accept the stereotype as a reality and exert even more pressure on the Asian minority. The last two chapters concentrate on music and film. Chapter 7 includes two essays, one dealing with Fred Ho’s articulation of a “popular avant-guard” and the other one with the self-orientalization of the Twelve Girls Band, and the last chapter explores orientalism in Star Trek Deep Space Nine and second-hand in the Chilean martial arts film Kiltro. Fellezs’s essay focuses on composer Fred Ho’s articulation of a “popular avant-garde” as a critical aesthetic stance. Ho’s work engages a wide variety of musical traditions–jazz, rhythm-and-blues, funk, Chinese opera, samurai film soundtracks–creating a rich mélange he describes as “Afro

14

Introduction

Asian new American multicultural music.” Understanding his own work as operating within a tradition he terms the “popular avant-garde,” Ho argues that his use of popular culture elements is both aesthetic strategy and political advocacy. Binding his sense of a popular avant-garde to his iteration of an Afro Asian new American multicultural music, explains Fellezs, Ho’s creative works demonstrate the inherent power of subaltern cultural production despite its marginalization, occlusion, and/or defamation by dominant cultural hierarchies by voicing truth to power. Moving on now from the United States to China, Marco Valesi’s study offers an historical overview of the hybridization process between Western and Chinese musical traditions and elaborates on the relation between trans-modern and commercial music, focusing on 12 Girls Band and analyzing a questionnaire about this musical group. Recruited from China’s major music conservatories and trained to play traditional Chinese instruments, the band—backed up by Western artists—mixes Chinese and Western music, traditional and contemporary sensations, and ethnic and pop features. Thanks to a process of self-orientalization, they have become one of the most successful international Chinese popular music groups. Valesi emphasizes the concept of commercial appropriation and distribution of a cultural identity through a process of selection, invention, and utilization of traditions. He also explores what it means today to juxtapose Asian and Western notions of popularity, sexiness, and world music. Tied up with these notions are issues of national and cultural identity. Drawing on Said’s, Bhabha’s and Canclini’s perceptions of Orientalism and colonialism, he demonstrates that 12 Girls Band incorporates images of otherness, foreign aesthetic, commercial and musical standards, simultaneously feeding Western interest for the exotic and pan-Asian request of global acceptation. He shows how vulgar processes of music commercialization the provoke a decline of traditional music because of its relegation from central ritual and social functions to an entertainment for a global public or a touristic celebration of the past. Closing the book, we have the studies on Orientalism in film by Barba and Moisés Park. Barba’s essay argues that while the mission of Star Trek was to portray a future in which a peaceful Earth has done away with problems of racism, Star Trek often perpetuated the Western idea of the creation of the Other, specifically in its treatment of alien races. In 1993, Star Trek introduced Deep Space Nine, thematically the most ambitious of the Star Trek series, which broke ground for the series by challenging accepted notions of equality within the constructed Star Trek Universe. The series presented a complex view of the Other, which simultaneously

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reinforced traditional Western ideals and orientalized alien cultures, while challenging and resisting the accepted construct of the Other. Moisés Park closes the volume with his analisis of Kiltro, the pioneering Chilean martial arts film featuring Palestinian and Korean characters. The paper recognizes and evaluates several seemingly Orientalist aspects such as the exoticism of the scenography, the casting of actors with physical Asian features, the sexuality of women and the portrayal of violent characters of Arab and Korean heritage. The Orientalist aspects of the film are not political in the sense that it does not perpetuate stereotypes that demean Eastern cultures, as Edward Said points out in his book Orientalism. In fact, the purpose of representing the Orient is characterized by its frequent references to other martial arts films, Hollywood action films, Japanese pop culture and kitsch cult films. Although this film fails to break any stereotypes and does not portray a realistic view of the Arab and Korean community in Chile, the purpose of the making this film are exclusively commercial and burlesque. This film is second-hand Orientalism since the film represents an already represented Orient, rather than distorting a direct view of the Orient. The imaged Orient in Kiltro, therefore, is merely an imitation and/or a parody of other imagined representations and self-representations of the Orient by other films. Several questions still remain concerning the justification of Orientalist representations for the sake of entertainment, in the form of martial arts comedy. While this kind of misrepresentation could have an anti-Orientalist effect to those spectators who understand the manifest exaggeration, the parody and the mocking homage, the ignorance of these references could result in a perpetuation of Orientalist schemes, unintentionally demeaning the representation of Arabs and Koreans in Chile.

Works Cited Bridenbach, Joana and Ina Zukrigl. “The Dynamics of Cultural Globalization. The myths of cultural Globalization.” International Cultural Studies , accessed 13 July 2009. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000. Chow, Rey. Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ehtnicity-Reading. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998.

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Introduction

Dussel, Enrique D. “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World System and the Limits of Modernity.” The Cultures of Globalization. Ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, North Carolina Duke UP, 1998. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Kushigian, Julia A. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition. In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. López-Calvo, Ignacio. Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. —. “Los japoneses en la obra de Mario Vargas Llosa.” Identidad cultural. El discurso sobre la singularidad japonesa. Ed. Blai Guarné Cabello. Barcelona: Ed. Casa Asia (forthcoming). —. “Latin America and the Caribbean in a Sinophone Studies Reader?” Sinophone Studies Reader. Eds. Chien-hsin Tsai and Shu-mei Shih. Irvington, New York: Columbia UP (forthcoming). —. “Refugiados y Asalto al Paraíso de Marcos Aguinis: apropiaciones y reapropiaciones del discurso palestino.” Cuadernos de ALDEEU López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

CHAPTER ONE MEXICAN ORIENTALISMS

WHY YOU CANNOT READ FARABEUF: ELIZONDO AND ORIENTALISM ALÁN JOSÉ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Farabeuf or the Chronic of an Instant (1965) is an important text that ensured Salvador Elizondo’s place in the pantheon of Spanish-language literature.1 Because of textual complexities and unsettling imagery, this work defies easy interpretation. Aside from shocking bourgeois sensibility–épater les bourgeois–Salvador Elizondo’s project was to experiment with the making of meaning out of non-logical inference and non-sequential narratives. It is impossible to read, because it has to be played, and it is impossible to be played because the game it proposes has but one outcome in which the audience is an accomplice to a disturbing crime and in which you–whom the narrative voice addresses–die and fall into oblivion while struggling to discern signs from meaningless scribbles. Romero argues, from a postcolonial perspective, that Elizondo is one of the major orientalists in the Hispanic tradition, together with Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy, the figures on which Julia Kushigian focuses her book Orientalism in the Hispanic Tradition (1991). Romero essentially agrees with Kushigian’s argument that, in contrast with Anglo-French Orientalism, Hispanic Orientalism “Reflects not so much a political posture toward the Orient rendered in innumerable oppositional structures but is, rather, a more thoughtful approach that values a dialogue of discourses, reflecting an antithetical denial of, and openness to the Other.” (10). For Romero, Farabeuf is a reaction against the idea of nationalism sought by the Mexican School of Arts. In his view, Elizondo establishes a dialogue between the spectacle of pre-Columbian sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli and Chinese death by dismemberment, the Leng t’ché. “Clearly,” he says “America first appeared to the European imagination as Asian.” He then proceeds to quote from Richard 1

I would like to thank Ignacio López-Calvo for his careful reading and edition, which made this a better essay.

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Rodriguez: “The Indian is forever implicated in the roundness of the world. America was the false India, the mistaken India, and yet veritable India, for all that–India–the clasp, the coupling mystery at the end of the quest” (7). “After all,” Romero concludes, “America was but a joke that the Orient pulled on Europeans. America was their Madame Butterfly” (1998: 39). Romero’s metaphor is memorable although not completely on point. In partial support to his reading, one could recall that Salvador Elizondo first explored the possibility of being a painter. He joined the workshop of Jesús Guerrero Galván, from whose Mexican-School influence he repeatedly struggled to escape, according to his personal diary, which his wife Paulina has recently started publishing in the Mexican magazine Letras Libres. Although I would suggest a different name altogether for the “Hispanic representation of the East,” I would essentially agree with Romero too in that Kushigan’s argument for the distinction of American and European Orientalism, has significant explanatory power both interand intra-nationally, and in that other writers should be added to her list, José Juan Tablada being perhaps the most striking but not the only example. It is unfortunate, however, that Romero’s idea of “a dialogue between Mexico and China that goes through France,” appealing as it sounds, is difficult to substantiate in his thesis. In Farabeuf, there is clearly a dialogue involving France and China, but no mention of Huitzilopochtli or indigenous individuals, a central omission that Romero explains as Elizondo’s reaction against the Mexican School of Arts, and that he goes around by quoting from Richard Rodriguez, a different writer. Mexican sources in Farabeuf are very subtle. Consider for example the description of the peculiar demeanor of the first known Mexican serial killer, Gregorio Cárdenas–a.k.a. “The monster,”2 as recounted by Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, the doctor and criminologist in charge of him: “[Gregorio Cárdenas walked] very slowly, hesitantly, and dragging his feet in small 2

The murders committed by Gregorio Cárdenas (1915-1999) took place from August 15 to September 2, 1942. They were widely covered by the Mexican press, especially in the 1940s when they were committed and in the 1960s and 1970s, when the process of his reformation occurred. Cárdenas, a chemistry student, avid reader of poetry, music lover, piano player, painter, and director of a literary magazine, is a unique serial killer who, after conviction, managed to study law and medicine in order to achieve “ideal reformation” and be pardoned by a president. He would go on to publish four books, participate in a play about his murders, and inspire a dozen novels and movies. He also tried to copyright his crimes in order to receive royalties. Since Cárdenas became a media phenomenon, it is improbable that Elizondo missed this information.

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism

steps.”3 Now consider Farabeuf’s characteristic form of walking: “We had anticipated his hesitant wandering along the street of the École de Médecine” (78); “Farabeuf’s footsteps on the stairs, slowly dragging his feet on the landings” (1); “the dry sound of his little orthopedic boots on the steps of the deserted stairs” (5).”4 It is unlikely that the similarities are coincidental; yet Elizondo never mentions Cárdenas by name. The reason might be, as Romero suggests, Elizondo’s reaction against the Mexican School; but also, I argue, that Cárdenas’s criminal activity and preColumbian sacrifices simply falls outside the short and accidental meeting between a modern Western photographic camera and an obsolete Eastern punishment at the turn of the twentieth century, the chronotope of Farabeuf. If Mexican sources are mediated or diluted, Farabeuf presents us instead with four conspicuous systems of assemblage, both aesthetic and philosophic, which are closely related to its set timeframe: James Joyce’s superimposition of classical and modern mythologies; Pound’s imagist proposal of Chinese pictogrammatic signifying as a medium for poetry; Eisenstein’s formalist technique of montage; and the numerological grammar of divination of the Chinese Yî King or Book of Changes. Elizondo uses these different perspectives to glance over six Chinese elements: Lo Shu magic square, the ideogram liù (⏼), an ivory puzzle ball, the hexagram kuai, a pillow book, and a photograph of a Chinese execution by dismemberment, the leng t’ché.

Farabeuf and the West Like Joyce’s Ulysses (1918-1920), Farabeuf is a kaleidoscopic text with an extremely formal, schematic structure deeply rooted in classic mythology (Greek for Joyce, Chinese for Elizondo). In sharp contrast with the relatively simple sequence of events, its textuality displays a panoply of techniques (from stream of consciousness to profuse allusions and metatext from other works) in order to convey an obsessive focus on detail. An experiment in pure écriture–typical of the decade in which it 3

“[Gregorio Cárdenas caminaba] con mucha lentitud, en forma titubeante y arrastrando los pies en pequeños pasos” (27). The report on Cárdenas’s mental condition that lead to his transfer from a jail to a mental institution in 1943 is included in the latter’s anthology and memoir. 4 “Habíamos presentido su paso vacilante a lo largo de la rue de l’École de Médecine” (78); “Los pasos de Farabeuf subiendo la escalera, arrastrando lentamente los pies en los descansos” (1); “el sonido árido de sus anticuados botines ortopédicos sobre los peldaños de la escalera desierta” (5).

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was written, as well as of French symbolism and English modernism at the turn of the twentieth century that form part of the chronotope of Farabeuf– , the central character of the text is text itself. Elizondo was intrigued by Pound’s rendition of the works of Ernest Fenollosa–which he translated into Spanish–and influenced by the “Ideogrammic Method,” according to which poetry can deal with abstract content through the superimposition of concrete images. Pound suggested that this “philology” explained the historical formation of Chinese characters. In Elizondo’s interpretation, the simultaneous perception of two or more concrete signs would produce a specific metaphor and a particular sensation that would prevail as long as both signs remained in sight or were remembered. Farabeuf seeks to pinpoint the maximum extension of time that a vision or memory can persist in the human mind. He also explores the universe of possible metaphors that could be formed out of a limited number of concrete signs. In this sense, Farabeuf constitutes a literary language. Elizondo used a trope he observed in Pound and combined it with Pascal’s metaphor of men as funambulists suspended across two abysses, the infinite and the infinitesimal. With them in mind, he perfected a textual technique that would simulate the cinematic effects produced by varying depth of field. According to Elizondo, Pound intentionally modified dates or introduced variations in his quotes to send scholars off into labyrinthine disquisitions, while keeping non-academic readers focused in the poetic core of his texts. Elizondo’s objective was not to throw off academic readers–although that might have been a collateral consequence–but rather to control what I have referred to as “textual depth of field.” Elizondo introduces blur in details or distortions in narrative logic, to control how much the background, mid-ground, and foreground are rendered in “acceptable focus” for the reader to make sense out of it. Since Elizondo applies this technique throughout the whole text, examples are profuse: the name of Farabeuf is H.L. Farabeuf instead of L.H. Farabeuf; Fou Chou Li was executed on April 10, 1905, and not on January 29 1901, etc. By distorting details Elizondo discourages the reader from trying to read “too closely” and encourages him or her to go beyond the textual depth in which the literary occurs. By keeping the reader constantly “at literary distance,” Elizondo reminds us to continuously question what we accept as reality; hence, through a simple enthymeme, he shows that our perception is a construct that can be altered. As one reads and interprets Farabeuf, it is crucial to keep in mind Elizondo’s omniscient recourse to textual depth of field to avoid overinterpreting or projecting personal idiosyncrasies where there is intentional

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism

blur.5 Variations in textual depth of field are not mere imprecision. Elizondo goes great lengths to caricature the inaccuracies of European texts at the turn of the twentieth century, because for him it is in the typographic error, in the mistake, in the unusual and abnormal where individuality, and thus identity, lie: “We are a typographic error that has gone unnoticed and that makes a text that would otherwise be very clear, confusing; the interchange of the lines in a text that makes us become alive in a prodigious way.”6 Alterations happen at all levels and go through cycles of what Baudrillard has termed “simulacra” to signify, dissimulate, and simulate: a Chinese execution becomes its photographic representation; then a staged surgery in an amphitheater; then an erotic encounter or abortion in the room of a French hotel; and finally the caricature of a doctor-magician in a Chinese robe presenting a freak-show. Elizondo’s manipulation of textual depth of field brings to central stage the limits or cuts necessary for human perception to signify simulacra. The technique, together with montage, persistence of vision, and souture is a surgical metaphor to describe, in medical terms, the cinematic illusion of reality. The phenomenon called “positive after images” by psychologists, and “retinal persistence of vision” by film critics, was advanced as a commonsense explanation of the perception of motion in film at the turn of the twentieth century, since it allows one image-frame to “bleed” into another. Psychologists observed that when a person stares at lights, and these are turned off, he or she could still see their color and brightness relations. Elizondo equates the imprint of light in the eye, with terror in the memory of the spectator: 7 5 Manipulation of textual depth of field differs from a Verfremdungseffekt. While the latter refuses Aristotelian categories such as empathy, anagnorisis, catharsis, and re-establishment of nomos, the use of “you” throughout Farabeuf is aimed at constructing empathy of horror and disgust. Catharsis exists in the form of death, death of the victim, of the text, of the experience of the reader and thus of the reader himself that ceases to be a reader in the moment he stops reading the book. Finally, the text in its entirety recounts a prolonged anagnorisis in which the character named “you” recognizes that you are vivisected and dying, and the reader recognizes himself in awe and terror either in you the victim or in the narrative voice of the victimizer. 6 “Somos una errata que ha pasado inadvertida y que hace confuso un texto por lo demás muy claro; el trastrocamiento de las líneas de un texto que nos hace cobrar vida de esta manera prodigiosa” (62). 7 Although the term is ubiquitous in film scholarship, it has been proved wrong in scientific literature. On this, see Anderson, Joseph & Barbara. “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures.” The Cinematic apparatus. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Print, Nichols, Bill, and Susan

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and a terrifying persistence of that image, similar to the photograph of a man at the moment of his death or orgasm, got recorded in his bloodthirsty retina. Why the persistence of that image in the mind? (121) […] The name of the man in the picture, a naked, bleeding man surrounded by curious people, whose face persists in memory, but whose true identity is forgotten (2) […] [Farabeuf] concluded a meditation about the persistence of memory, started previous to the mediation about the effects of time passing. In fact, there is something more tenacious than memory–he thought–: oblivion.8

Elizondo was also familiar with Alexandre Astruc’s concept of camerastylo, but in Farabeuf the pen is not only a camera but also a scalpel with which the writer/doctor/ psychoanalyst/executioner/Dom practices a vivisection over the body of the reader/page/victim/sub. Farabeuf is, in this sense, a pillow book, a more or less permanent calligraphy imprinted on a human body. The “écriture” represents the public-arena/operation-room/amphitheater/hotel where an intervention/ torture/ritual/power-transfer/erotic-scene is to be performed. The camera/ stylo/scalpel makes surgical cuts that leave traces of blood/ink over the paper/body, and discover the entrails of the subject for the reader/medicalstudent/audience to learn and marvel in horror. Farabeuf’s series of impressive and horrific stills constitute a spectacle inside a box camera. Nine times you enter the dark chamber or camera obscura, and nine times the shutter cuts the light flow of your life to preserve an image imprinted in a photographic silver plate, inverting opposites: light into shadow, pain into pleasure, Yang into Yin. Elizondo conducts the experiment to test two claims: first, Georges Bataille’s notion of orgasm as “la petite mort,” an instant infinite in ecstatic and aesthetic rapture; and second, Roland Barthes’s observation that eroticism is a spectacle produced through successive interruptions of our gaze over an object of desire: “We form part of a spectacle of recreational magic. […] J. Lederman. “Flicker and Motion.” The Cinematic apparatus. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. 8 “y una aterradora persistencia de esa imagen, como la fotografía de un hombre en el momento de la muerte o del orgasmo, se grabó en su retina ávida del color de la sangre. ¿Por qué la persistencia de esa imagen en la mente?” (121) […] “El nombre de ése que está ahí en la fotografía, un hombre desnudo, sangrante, rodeado de curiosos, cuyo rostro persiste en la memoria, pero cuya verdadera identidad se olvida” (2) […] “[Farabeuf] concluyó una meditación acerca de la persistencia del recuerdo, iniciada con anterioridad a la meditación acerca de los efectos del transcurso del tiempo. “En efecto, existe algo más tenaz que la memoria–pensó–: el olvido” (51-52).

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism

We are the fleeting and involuntary image that crosses the mind of lovers as they meet, in the instant when they enjoy each other, in the moment they die.”9 Along the way, Elizondo unveils the desperate quest for meaning at that instant, for making sense out of the series of stills [that form] life. While you, in your very last moment, desperately seek to take apart signs from scrawls, scribbles, doodles, scrabbles and squiggles, those same signs are being severed from their signifiers through oblivion.10 Each of those nine instants constitutes a still in a film assembled according to Eisenstein’s theory of montage–the juxtaposing of images by editing to achieve filmic metaphors or concentrate narration–. Farabeuf, in that sense, is a simulation of cinema and of the physical myths–retinal persistence of vision in particular–that would allow film to offer the illusion of time, of movement, of reality. Scientific gaze kills the object of study through reification, and the narrative strategy reverses the image, presenting perpetrators as saviors, and torture as an act of love.11 Today’s films endure a similar series of cuts and editions, but are usually pieced back together–both physically and emotionally–into coherent successions of events or shots. Jean-Pierre Oudart uses a medical metaphor to construct his influential concept of cinematic souture: the completion of one shot with another that reveals the place from where the first was taken. Souture reassures our voyeuristic desire, confirming that our body is absent, that we do not form part of the spectacle, that our experience is therefore free from consequences. Elizondo refuses the reader the safeguard of souture: Farabeuf is an unsettling experiment of textual scrutiny, and not a vehicle of communication and pleasure. It is

9

“Somos parte de un espectáculo de magia recreativa. […] Somos la imagen fugaz e involuntaria que cruza la mente de los amantes cuando se encuentran, en el instante en que se gozan, en el momento en que mueren” (63). 10 A similar idea but on a lighter tone, can be found in El grafógrafo, where Elizondo maintains that in order to attain new levels of expressivity, one needs to forget the beautiful musicality of the Spanish language and sever its links to its normal signifiers. “Sistema de Babel”, in Elizondo, Salvador. El grafógrafo. el volador. 1ed. Mexico: Joaquín Mortíz, 1972. 11 Elaine Scarry tells us that it is not uncommon for executioners to use theatrical metaphors: “The production room” is the name given to the torture chamber in Philippines; “The cinema,” in South Vietnam; “The blue scenario,” in Chile. According to Scarry, torture is inflicted in three parallel stages: first, increasingly amplifying pain for the victim’s body; second, increasingly amplifying the perception of pain by the audience; and third, negating the reified pain by increasingly amplifying the obsessive mediation of the agency by the executioner who presents it as an act of social or personal goodness.

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like the Yî King–also known as Yi Jing or I Ching–, on which it is based, a book that is not read by the reader, but that reads the reader.12.

Farabeuf and the East The structure of Farabeuf rests on Lo Shu magic square, also known as the Nine Halls Diagram. Lo Shu is part of the legacy of the most ancient Chinese mathematical and divinatory tradition of the Yî King. It is used as representation of mandalic circumferences in Feng Shui rituals of geomancy –the act of divination through marks on the ground or patterns formed by tossed handfuls of sand, rocks, or soil–. The Lo Shu is connected graphically and numerologically with the eight trigrams that can be superimposed to correspond to the eight outer cells, following a circular trigram diagram. The numbers 1 and 9 (beginning and completion) are the most auspicious, while the number 5 at the center represents totality and balance between the two extremes. Chinese literature dating from as early as 650 BC recalls a great flood. As King Yu tried to channel the water out to the sea, a turtle emerged with a curious pattern on its shell: circular dots of numbers that were arranged in a three by three grid pattern such that the sum of the numbers in each row, column and diagonal was the same: 15. Fifteen being the number of days in each of the 24 cycles of the Chinese solar year, Lo Shu magic square helped communicate, understand, and control river cycles. In consequence, the Square of Lo Shu is sometimes referred to as the Magic Square of Time and its numerical values can be obtained from the workings of the Yî King when the trigrams are placed in an order given in the first river map, the Ho Tu or Yellow River (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Lo Shu Magic Square circa 650 BC, and its western representation.

12

The relationship of Farabeuf to the Kantian notion of an art that reads the degree of humanity in its audience is discussed in Alán José’s Farabeuf y la estética del mal: el tránsito entre realidad y ficción (Mexico: Ediciones Sin Nombre & Conaculta, 2004).

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism

The ritual of divination of the Yî King–or Book of Changes–uses the signs on a turtle shell (The Lo Shu Square). However, if you accidentally misspell a “g” for an “r,” it will change the meaning from “tortuga” (turtle and tortoise) to “tortura” (torture). Elizondo places the signs on the body of a victim instead of a turtle and imagines, instead of the reading of a shell with the Book of Changes, a divination ritual of anthropomancy using Farabeuf, Farabeuf is, therefore, a textual “game” at the center of which is a ritual of anthropomancy performed over a living subject: the act of divination via the interpretation of the entrails of a human sacrifice. The book allows you to access the game from nine different points of entry, each of which leads you to a scene where a precise combination of characters and elements interact with you. The game turns to horror as you realize all combinations and points of entry lead inevitably to the same result: your ritual vivisection and death. All nine scenes are narrated precisely at the instant of your death, while a voice continuously repeats in incantation the Leitmotiv “do you remember?” inspired by Cristina Rossetti’s poem “Remember me when I am gone away,” and associated in Farabeuf with the myth that “persistence of vision” is at the source of what makes cinematic reality possible. It is also associated with the philosophical idea that we are but a dream in someone else’s mind: “I am, perhaps, the last image in the mind of dying man. I am the materialization of something that is about to vanish; a memory about to be forgotten.”13 Elizondo gives an uncanny turn to the familiar topic of La vida es sueño (Life as a dream) as he ponders if the person dreaming is a god, a common person, or a demented: You could be for example, the characters in a literary fiction that have suddenly become alive and autonomous. We could be, on the other hand, the conjunction of dreams that are being dreamt by different people in separate places around the world. We are the dream of another. Why not? Or a lie. […] We are the thought of a demented. Some of us are real and the rest are their hallucination.14

13 “Soy, quizá, la última imagen en la mente de un moribundo. Soy la materialización de algo que está a punto de desvanecerse; un recuerdo a punto de ser olvidado” (12). 14 “Podríais ser, por ejemplo, los personajes de un relato literario del género fantástico que de pronto han cobrado vida autónoma. Podríamos, por otra parte, ser la conjunción de sueños que están siendo soñados por seres diversos en diferentes lugares del mundo. Somos el sueño de otro. ¿Por qué no? O una mentira. […]

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The nine chapters in Elizondo’s Farabeuf correspond to the nine possible positions in the Lo Shu Square. Each number inside is associated by Elizondo to one character, and series of numbers and dates in the book correspond to series in the square.15 Elizondo does not follow straight lines and diagonals to make those series. Manipulating once again the professional reader’s experience through textual depth of field, and following the cinematic technique of montage, he superimposes on top of the Lo Shu Square two images of oriental and occidental torture: the Christian cross, and the Chinese character for number 6, liù (⏼), that Elizondo imagines a stylized representation of leng t’ché. Figure 3, might give you the flair of the “grammar” of a montage:

Figure 2. Graphic reconstruction of Farabeuf’s “textual shots” (Chrestomathy by author)

Farabeuf shares with other novels and films of the 1960s the technique of using a game or a grid as basis for experimenting on non-sequential Somos el pensamiento de un demente. Alguno de nosotros es real y los demás somos su alucinación” (62-63). 15 In Romero, Rolando J. “Ficción e historia en Farabeuf.” Revista Iberoamericana 151 (1990): 403-17. Romero suggests a series of intriguing possibilities on the numerology of the Magic Square, and the superimposition to it of the ideogram Lí.

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism

construction of meaning: Julio Cortázar composed Rayuela (1963), for example, according to the hopscotch grid, and his text is offered to the reader according to the game’s rules; L’anné dernière à Marienbad (1962) by Alain Robbe Grillet (novel) and Alain Resnais (film) is structured following a ritual representation of the game of Nim.16 Elizondo’s work is informed by these texts, and his obsessive and disciplined construction is based on the Square of Lo Shu. However, the Magic Square is not a game to which the reader can be invited like hopscotch, and neither can it pass for a game like Nim. The Lo Shu Square has been made into a mathematical puzzle with which we are familiar today thanks to Sudoku, but it needs an additional element to become a game. Elizondo calls this element “clatro,” and the game “hsiang ya ch’iu”: “through the discipline of the ivory puzzle ball [the master’s memory] has reconstructed, as it is done with a puzzle, the image of a unique moment: the moment in which you were tormented.”17 “Clatro” has been translated in the English and French versions of the text as “ivory balls” or “boules d’ivoire”; a more precise translation would be “ivory puzzle ball,” as those carved pieces are normally called by antiquarians today. Hsiang ya ch’iu or xiang ya qiu, as it is spelled in modern Chinese “pinyin” (using letters to represent sounds), is the name of the ball itself: “xiang (elephant) ya (tooth) qiu (ball).” An ivory puzzle ball is a sculpture carved out of ivory, consisting of a series of concentric spheres that represent the cosmos, and the dragon of life. Spheres are carved one at a time inside the ivory ball, through the holes that are progressively made by the artisan. The technique was not revealed to westerners who were “puzzled” as to how one ball could be inserted into another, and oftentimes called them “balls of the devil”: Notice that because of an arrangement that only a demonic ability could conceive, the holes at the different levels do not always continue from the periphery to the center; that is to say that if a series of six orifices coincides from the first level to the center of the ivory ball, all other series 16 Nim is a two-player “game” in which each one takes turns removing matches or other objects from distinct heaps. It is normally a “misère game,” in which the player to take the last object loses. One of the oldest versions of Nim, is the Chinese Jianshisi, in which stones are picked in turns. In 1901, Charles L. Bouton proved that the game (for which he also coined the occidental name of Nim) was not a game but a mathematical strategy–a ritual one could also say–because the first to play will always win if he is familiar with the combinatorial theory of it. 17 “mediante la disciplina del clatro [la memoria del maestro] ha reconstruido, como se hace con un rompecabezas, la imagen de un momento único: el momento en que tú fuiste el supliciado” (113).

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of six orifices will not necessarily coincide in the same way through each one of the levels.18

Here, again, Elizondo plays with varying textual depth of field. The xiang ya qiu is, in theory, a toy, and the puzzle-game consists of carefully moving the balls using a pointed stick to line up all or some of the holes. In the most complicated xiang ya qiu only some or one of the cone-shaped holes would go all the way to the smallest ball, and some would go only part of the way. Lining up the balls is all the more difficult, which is what the “diabolical puzzle-maker” wants. In his modified version of the xiang ya qiu, Elizondo imagines that the concentric balls can be thrown or set to spin, and that their ending position can be “read” as are bones, coins, or sticks to determine which section of the Book of Changes to read in an act of divination. Of course, the game Elizondo proposes is impossible to carry out literally and it is but a metaphor of the successive layers of the body of the victim that are progressively exposed during a ritual of anthropomancy. Each “throw of the ivory ball” is a toss of a human body: it is the vivisection of a different individual, who is in addition the character Elizondo calls you.

Figure 3. Chinese ivory puzzle balls, circa 1850. (Private collection. Courtesy of David Wyatt.) 18 “Advierte que por una disposición que sólo una habilidad demoniaca pudo concebir los orificios de los diferentes niveles no se continúan siempre desde la periferia hacia el centro, es decir que si una serie de seis orificios coinciden desde el primer nivel hasta el centro del clatro, no necesariamente coinciden de la misma manera los otros seis orificios de cada uno de los niveles” (117-18).

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism

As with the Yî King, where a sequence provided by the disposition of the three coins, bones or sticks corresponds to a hexagram interpreted with the help of the Book of Changes, the ivory puzzle ball disposition, representing the eviscerated body of the victim, is to be read with the help of Elizondo’s poetic and metaphysical text. Finally, the ritual of anthropomancy I have been mentioning throughout this reflection is a practice that has been documented in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and amongst the Celtic druids. It is also mentioned in both Old and New Testaments, as Elaine Scarry has shown,19 and it has been described as relatively frequent in pre-Columbian America as well. However, none of these historical accounts forms part of Farabeuf. Instead, Elizondo decides to follow the steps of a French doctor as he documents, reproduces, and perfects in France the techniques of human vivisection that he observed in China. This choice is not casual: Elizondo carefully selects the narrow window of time in which modern technology clashes with obsolete institutions, and is first recorded in print; a moment that fascinated Spanish-American writers because it corresponds with the birth of Latin-American republics torn between European modern monstrosity and Indigenous atavic barbarism. In chapter seven,20 Farabeuf includes an actual photograph of an execution by leng t’ché. According to the text, the person being executed is Fu Chu Li, charged with stabbing the prince Ao Jan Wan for motives related to the Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1901, a violent anti-foreign, antiChristian movement led by the “Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists in China” in response to European imperialist expansion and missionary evangelism. The Boxer Uprising served as pretext for a joint intervention of the Eight-Nation Alliance that included Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, The United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and the United States. On September 7th, 1901, China, defeated, was compelled to sign the “Boxer Protocol” with the Eight-Nation Alliance. Latin American writers know of Leng T’ché through Georges Bataille’s Les Larmes d’Eros (1961), and Elizondo is no exception. Bataille claims that he got the picture through a friend–Le Docteur Borel– and assumes that the photograph forms part of the series of four, published by Louis Carpeaux in a widely circulated pamphlet, Pekin s’en va (1913) of the execution of Fou Chou Li. Bataille thus decides to include 19 “the interior of the body carries the force of confirmation [of belief]” (Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York & Oxford University Press, 1985. 20 This is true for most editions, but there is at least one exception: In Montesinos it appears on chapter two.

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Carpeaux’s accompanying text in Les larmes. In truth, the picture published by Bataille and reprinted by Elizondo is from another, probably earlier execution by Leng T’ché, of a person that has come to be known as the “Pseudo-Fou Chou Li.” In Elizondo’s text, Farabeuf is documenting the execution because he is looking–ironically if one thinks of the motives of the Boxer Uprising–for possible martyrs that could be of help to Jesuit missionaries, including a feminine Christ-like figure that would resonate with the fin de siècle discourse of the “New Woman.”21 Elizondo was not the only Latin American writer to have included the execution by leng t’ché in one of his texts: Julio Cortázar includes it in Rayuela (1963) and Severo Sarduy in Cobra (1972). In his essay “Del Yin al Yang,” Sarduy discusses chapter 14 of Rayuela, where Wong–a member of the “Club of the Snake”–shows Oliveira photographs of leng t’ché, which Sarduy interprets as a metaphor of the fragmentary nature of language. This chapter instructs the reader to continue on chapter 114 or 117. In the former, we learn about the capital punishment of a prisoner at San Quentin (114); and in the latter, about the execution of minors by hanging or on the stakes, when it was proven that they could tell right from wrong. Similar to Rayuela, in Farabeuf the oriental execution and torture is equated with western forms of torture, especially by doctors and psychoanalysts. Elizondo’s technique is not logical but rhetorical; it aims at persuasion and not at demonstration. Consider, for example, the fictional account of a conversation between Jean Jacques Matignon author of Dix ans du Pays du Dragon (1910) and Louis Hubert Farabeuf: Doctor Matignon, a doctor of the Legation, a former resident of China, explained to me the origins and the procedure in all its details. I must say that the procedure is completely devoid of subtlety. Much has been said about the refinement of the Chinese on these matters, to the extent that the expression “Chinese torture” has become a synonym of cruel refinement. Yet I believe that for occidental surgery, even in situations of the harshest adversity–let us remember what the battlefields of the seventies, or even of fourteen-eighteen have been–, I say this in all modesty, the blinking of an eye sufficed to make the amputation of a leg at the hips or the amputation 21

The influence of Christ’s Passion in the depictions of Chinese supplices– particularly Leng T’Ché–by European travelers in China, has been a topic of recent interest–see for example Maria Pia Di Bella: “Voir le Christ en Chine: les sources chrétiennes des représentations du lingchi” (Paris : MSH: Proceedings of the 1st Réseau Asie Congress, 2003) . However, Elizondo, to my knowledge, remains a pioneer in exploring it together with gender blur, and with the Freudian trauma of the “primal scene.” I owe to Francisco Morán the insight about the contemporary “New Woman” discourse.

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Why You Cannot Read Farabeuf: Elizondo and Orientalism of the upper maxillary–one of the feats of battlefield surgery. Leng T’ché, on the contrary, is the tedious exhibition of an extreme manual inability.22

Perhaps the most authoritative figure on eastern representation of Chinese torture is Jérôme Bourgon, to whom we owe “Chinese Executions: Visualizing their Differences with European Supplices” (2003), together with its impressive associated photographic archive “Turandot”.23 According to Bourgon, Fou Chou Li (1880-1905) was a guard at the service of the Mongol prince head of the Aohan. He was executed in the Ta-Tché-Ko plaza of Peking on April 10, 1905, for having stabbed Prince Ao Jan Wan to death, on Chinese New Year’s eve (February 1905), after Jan Wan kidnapped his wife (and not for motives related to the Boxer uprising, as Elizondo claims). The execution was witnessed at close range by a number of observers, and photographed by two or three cameras, none of which were operated by Louis Carpeaux, who was not present at the execution despite his claims. More than a hundred other executions were documented and circulated widely through French, Belgian, and German editions24; and twenty-one photographs are now found of Fou 22

“El doctor Matignon, médico de la Legación, antiguo residente en China, me explicó los orígenes y el procedimiento con todos sus detalles. Debo decir que el procedimiento carece por completo de sutileza. Mucho se ha hablado del refinamiento de los chinos en estos aspectos, al grado que la expresión ‘tortura china’ se ha convertido en sinónimo de refinamiento cruel, sin embargo yo creo que la cirugía occidental, aun en condiciones de la mayor adversidad–recordemos si no lo que han sido los campos de batalla del setenta o inclusive del catorcedieciocho–en que, lo digo con toda modestia, bastaba un parpadeo para hacer la amputación de una pierna en la cadera o la amputación del maxilar superior–una de las más grandes proezas de la cirugía de campaña. El Leng Tch’é por el contrario, es la exhibición tediosa de una inhabilidad manual extrema” (53). 23 Bourgon, Jérôme. “Chinese Executions: Visualizing their Differences with European Supplices.” European Journal of East-Asian Studies 2.1 (2003): 151-82. Print. and Turandot: Chinese Torture / Suplices Chinois, Université de Lyon / Institut d’Asie Orientale, 2003 [cited April 20th 2009]. Available from . 24 See for example, Jean Jacques Matignon’s Dix ans du Pays du Dragon (Paris: Maloine, 1910); Louis Carpeaux’s Pékin qui s’en va (Paris: Maloine, 1913); F. Commandant Harfeld’s Opinions chinoises sur les barbares d’occident (Paris, Bruxelles: Plon-Nourrit & Cie, Albert Dewit, 1909); Robert Heindl’s Robert, Meine Reise nach den Straftkolonien Berlin, Vienna: Verlag Rolf Heise, 1913), “Die Strafrechtstheorien Insel.” Jahrbuch der Charakterologie 1 (1924): 89-52, and Der Berufsverbrecher: Ein Beitrag zur Strafrechtreform (Berlin: Verlag Rolf Heise, 1926); Martin Monestier’s Peines de mort. Histoire et techniques des exécutions capitales, des origines à nos jours (Paris: Le Cherche-Midi Éditeur,

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Chou Li’s execution, either printed on glass for stereos or on paper prints. In his essay “Chinese Torture and Aesthetical Contemporary Sensitivity,” Bourgon discusses the frenzy that these pictures caused in Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century: The perception of “Chinese torture,” and the success that the expression met with, are from 1895 on, closely linked to photographs of lingchi. The photographs taken during the three executions which took place in Beijing in 1904-1905 gave a “documentary” basis to this representation. The photographers were able to take advantage of a rather short period, as the conditions for such photographs to be taken at technical, military and diplomatic levels allowing this, existed only after 1900, while “cruel” punishments were abolished on 24 April 1905. During this period of less than 5 years, over a hundred photographs were shot. “Chinese tortures” disappeared almost a century ago; however the image they convey is still vivid. The short and accidental meeting between a modern camera and an obsolete punishment generated a surprisingly lasting image. These photographs have taken their place in a pre-existing “aesthetics of horror,” which has a definite influence on contemporary sensitivity.

The “short period” Bourgon describes constitutes the timeframe Elizondo chooses for Farabeuf. In it, are circumscribed not only the technical, military, and political, but also the aesthetic, and scientific discourses of Farabeuf. Elizondo’s choice to base it on Chinese elements and his pervasive misrepresentation of the other, make him a target for Orientalist scrutiny. Leng T’ché was certainly orientalized in Said’s sense: it was presented as a morbid curiosity by Carpeaux; it was reified in pseudoscientific terms by Dumas; it was presented as exotic and as a banal proof of the atavistic cruelty of Chinese by photocards that the post actually accepted and delivered.25 Elizondo, who took his information from 1994). Two of these editions are particularly interesting for scrutiny in contrast to Elizonodo’s treatment: first, the second edition of Georges Dumas’s Nouveau traité de psychologie (1932), which includes a series of pictures that he dates circa 1880, and that correspond to the ones published by Bataille; and second, the novel by Georges Soulie de Morant, T’seu-Hsi, Impératrice des Boxers (Éditions Youfeng, 1911), which, in chapter IV, “Eunuch Ngan Te-hai’s executed by lingchi on Empress Dowager Ci Xi’s order” (86-94), mixes, like Farabeuf does fifty-four years later, historical facts with lurid details inspired from the viewing of Leng t’ché photographs and Carpeaux’s narrative appended to them. 25 The twelve postcards series “Supplices chinois,” published in Tien-tsin by Liouseu, for example, were partly used by Matignon and Carpeaux for their books. Jerôme Bourgon explains that “This serial of 12 postcards was probably made of one same set, taken at Caishikou on the 10th of April 1905, when the last lingchi

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Bataille, could be guilty also of orientalization: his gaze is filled with Bataille’s eroticization, and he undoubtedly shares the morbid curiosity of Matignon (1910), Carpeaux (1913), or Heindl (1913; 1924; 1926). He duplicates the physiological tone of Dumas (1932), and also imitates the medical-aesthetics and metaphysics of Louis Hubert (1889). With Georges Soulie de Morant (1911), amongst others, he additionally shares the technique of mixing historical with imaginary facts. Elizondo is thus not a hallowed sage lost in signs and ancient glyphs, oblivious of world politics; but neither is he an agent for colonial murky plans of world domination. Elizondo accomplishes, in fact, a reversal of orientalization, a reversal that was promised to readers as early as 1909 by the Commandant Harfeld in his book Opinions Chinoises sur les Barbares d’Occident. The crucial distinction to be made is awareness. While Harfeld believed he was reporting an objective account of facts (see for example the epistolary exchange over his book with Maspero in 1910), Elizondo is deliberately bringing to central stage the manipulative nature of discourse to denounce how the occidental notion of self-righteousness is a construct. He is aware, and he wants the reader’s awareness, or even better, his or her loss of innocence. Elizondo’s perspective is not orientalist as it does not seek to justify domination. It is not a Verfremdungseffekt either, as he does not conceive art as a tool for social change. Elizondo’s ontological project distrusts reality as well as representation. He does not seek to justify appropriation, or to instigate social revolution,26 but to seize the forbidden fruit of knowledge and self-awareness. To construct Farabeuf, Elizondo draws indistinctly from European and Chinese systems of assemblage, and the narrative voices are descriptive and do not posit themselves as better or superior than the other, but as equally perverse. In Elizondo’s text, we observe that there is a difference, not in the reification and exoticization of “the other” or in the construction of monsters–Chinese executioners and French doctors appear equally abominable–but in the construction of self. Even when the narrator stands next to the executioner and observes, he helps; if you play the game, it will only be to realize in horror that it ends in the ritual vivisection of you, an androgynous being; or in the realization execution was meted out. Fu-zhu-li’s dismemberment (n° 2 to 6, and n° 9) was preceded by decapitations (n° 1, 7, 8, 12). N° 10 and 11 come from other sets (nº 11 dating back to the Boxer’s executions, four years earlier).” The full series of photocards, sealed and stamped, can be seen at:

26 As most members of his literary generation, Elizondo briefly joined the Communist party, but he soon felt disenchanted and left.

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that your voyeuristic gaze made you, the reader, an accomplice to the perpetrator.

The gaze of the problematic self In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said argues that the political and academic discourse in the United Kingdom, France and the United States referring to Arabs, Islam and the Middle East, has been an instrument for, and a reflection of European colonialism. The sine qua non condition of Said’s model is a sharp inequality leading to a rapport de force verbalized in the description the strong makes of the weak, and in which cultural difference is subsumed by weakness (Orientalism 204). According to Said, the characterization in which the subaltern is not allowed to present his case, but is voiced by an authoritative voice posed as benevolent, cannot be an innocent misrepresentation. It is a calculated strategy identifying otherness with inferiority to legitimize political and economic subjugation (Orientalism 273). Latin-American descriptions of the Far East cannot be Orientalism in strictu sensu, as there is no cross-national military, political, or economic dominion to legitimize over the Orient. The continent has been the locus of American and European colonial interests for the past three and a half centuries, which places it in a position comparable to the Orient, or even East to it, as Richard Rodriguez, Kushigian, and Romero argue. On the other hand, Latin-American depictions of the East could also reflect the notion of American settlers looking to build a new and better world, “An Occident west to Occident,” as Octavio Paz calls it, and to which a number of Criollos, and Upper-class Mestizo intellectuals identify. The coexistence of both discourses could indicate that “Latin-American Orientalism” is to be found within national borders, rather than across–an interpretation in line with Said’s suggestion that the core element of Orientalism is inequality–, and it could also be indicative of the unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable problem of Latin-American identity. Farabeuf is a characterization in which the victim’s condition and weaknesses are introduced by an authoritative voice presented as benevolent, but it is not an example of Orientalism because the speaking voice is presented as monstrous and perverse. Farabeuf is a philosophical text concerned with a problematic identity, a question that resonates deeply in Elizondo’s Latin-American “déjà-là.” A momentarily loss of identity of the lovers embraced into one another during an instant extracted from time and thus infinite is the root for Georges Bataille’s metaphor of orgasm as the “little death”. Elizondo zeroes in Bataille’s

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assumption and elaborates on the idea of “Death” as equivalent to identity loss. The symptoms Dr. Farabeuf tries to apprehend are progressive alienation, disorientation, and loss of identity: Death, Elizondo concludes, is oblivion. For him–as for Hegel from whose phenomenology he draws– identity needs to be acknowledged by a significant other who then becomes part of one’s interior identity. Robinson Crusoe is not, until he meets Friday, and the victimizer is not, until recognized by the victim. Identity is thus a collective problem. “Who am I?” is devoid of significance without the complementary “Who are we?” The literary text is the establishing contract between identities and mutual acknowledgments. Said is suspicious of essential identities, and Elizondo distrusts essential representations. His ontological experiment does not seek to establish an immutable essence but, on the contrary, to expose the mutable substance of identity, its phenomenology and its ecstatic, but not static characteristics. An insight I owe to Tzevtan Todorov is that history is written in terms of we versus they: we, the heroes or the victims; and they, the villains or the passive beneficiaries of goods; we, humans and they, monsters or worm-men. Elizondo reminds us in Farabeuf that the executioner, the perpetrator, is not less human than ourselves. The monster, the criminal is not the other. Humans will not be delivered from Evil until they are delivered from Good. I argue thus that Orientalism can only occur if both exoticization of the other AND idealization of self occur. In Farabeuf, as in El retrato de Zoé y otras mentiras, Elizondo is guilty of exoticization and eroticization of the East, but his more dreadful monsters not only come from Asia. They are also French doctors, albino mutants, and deformed reflections of self. For Elizondo, on the one hand, Western and Eastern philosophies and aesthetics are comparably valid; on the other, in the world presented in Farabeuf, there are only monsters. While for you–the character–there is no alternative, the reader can cling to his innocence and die with you, or accept his voyeuristic gaze in the spectacle and become an accomplice to an executioner. To survive the experience, Farabeuf’s reader needs to accept that he is not a good person, that he cannot only be a good person. That is Elizondo’s dare.

Works Cited Anderson, Joseph & Barbara. “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures.” The Cinematic apparatus. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.

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Astruc, Alexandre. “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde - La Camérastylo (texte de la personnalité).” L’Écran française 144 (1948): 5-6. Bataille, Georges. Les larmes d’Éros. Paris: Jean Jacques Pauvert, 1961. Bourgon, Jérôme. “Chinese Executions: Visualizing their Differences with European Supplices.” European Journal of East-Asian Studies 2.1 (2003): 151-82. Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1963. Elizondo, Salvador. El grafógrafo. Mexico: Joaquín Mortíz, 1972. —. Farabeuf o la crónica de un instante. Mexico: Joaquín Mortíz, 1965. Farabeuf, Louis-Hubert. Prècis de Manuel Operatoire. Paris: Georges Mason Éditeur, 1889. Harfeld, F. Commandant. Opinions chinoises sur les barbares d’occident. Paris, Bruxelles: Plon-Nourrit & Cie, Albert Dewit, 1909. Harfeld, F. Commandant, and M. H. Maspero. “Lettre du commandant Harfeld et Réponse de M.H. Maspero.” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 10.10 (1910): 282-83. Heindl, Robert. Der Berufsverbrecher: Ein Beitrag zur Strafrechtreform Berlin: Verlag Rolf Heise, 1926. —. “Die Strafrechtstheorien Insel.” Jahrbuch der Charakterologie 1 (1924): 89-152. —. Robert, Meine Reise nach den Straftkolonien. Berlin-Vienna: Verlag Rolf Heise, 1913. José, Alán. Farabeuf y la estética del mal: el tránsito entre realidad y ficción. Mexico: Ediciones Sin Nombre & Conaculta, 2004. Kushigian, Julia Alexis. Orientalism in the Hispanic literary tradition: in dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. Monestier, Martin. Peines de mort. Histoire et techniques des exécutions capitales, des origines à nos jours. Paris: Le Cherche-Midi Éditeur, 1994. Nichols, Bill, and Susan J. Lederman. “Flicker and Motion.” The Cinematic apparatus. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “La Suture I & II.” Cahiers du cinéma. 41 (1969): 211-12. The Pillow Book. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Perf. Vivian Wu, Ewan McGregor, Yoshi Oida, Ken Ogata, Hideko Yoshida, Judy Ongg, Ken Mitsuishi. Kasander and Wigman Productions, 1996. Rodriguez, Richard. Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father. New York: Viking, 1992.

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Romero, Rolando J. “Ficción e historia en Farabeuf.” Revista Iberoamericana 151 (1990): 403-17. —. “Violencia, cuerpo y estética: el orientalismo y Farabeuf de Salvador Elizondo.” Juan García Ponce y la Generación del Medio Siglo. Ed. José Luis Rivas Vélez. Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, Instituto de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias, 1998. 431-39. Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market and other Poems. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Sarduy, Severo. Cobra. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1972. —. “Del Yin al Yang: Sade, Bataille, Marmori, Cortázar y Elizondo.” Escrito sobre un cuerpo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

ECHOES FROM A DISTANCE: JOSÉ JUAN TABLADA’S HAIKAI JUAN RYUSUKE ISHIKAWA CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

My mother kept those conches and seashells in a large Chinese box, like the ones brought to her native port town by the Nao de China. (Tablada, La feria de la vida 25; my translation)1

José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) is considered by many the first poet to introduce the haikai2 into the Spanish-American literary tradition. Octavio Paz, among others, has recognized his influential role in opening the dialogue between Spanish-America and Asia through literature, art, and culture, and has also signaled his importance as a link between Modernismo and the Avant Garde.3 There is no doubt that Tablada was 1

“De esos caracoles y conchas mi madre guardaba una gran caja chinesca de las que la Nao de China llevaba antaño a su puerto natal.” 2 The name haikai derives from haikai no renga, which is an all-encompassing poetic genre which includes haiku, haiga and senryu, among other styles. The term haikai was the one first introduced into the Latin American literary tradition, therefore it has remained. Later on, at the end of the nineteenth century, poet Masaoka Shiki gave the poem its current name, haiku. The characteristics of the haikai are the same as the haiku. These poems consist of 17 moras (5-7-5) or metrical phrases and they have a kigo, or seasonal pivot word. The form was originally practiced as a collaborative poem—in many cases through gatherings called kukai—which was also linked, consisting of hokku, the short poem, and a prose piece which together were known as renku. This poetic form has seen changes throughout history, with some master poets giving it a more humanistic touch, others plainly sketching nature, and others including a humoristic or satirical component. 3 Rubén Lozano Herrera, in his book Las veras y las burlas de José Juan Tablada (1995), mentions the following about the influential role of Tablada: “Of everything that has been said, no one would be surprised by placing on him the adjective of innovator. According to the concepts of the Abbot Mendoza, Tablada opened paths through new fields, and if having been the first one to appreciate the

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai

greatly innovative in his approach to poetry. He was one of the first to appreciate the literary value of the Japanese poetic form. Tablada transported the haikai into the Spanish-American context and, in this framework, he created a unique concept of it. Furthermore, this brief poetic form served him as a way to perceive his surroundings and to capture images, which in turn were reflections of a sense of nostalgia or longing for a Mexico that had become distant. As Paz affirms in Las peras del olmo with regards to Tablada, “[L]ater on, his poetry made us see our landscape directly and his images taught us to consider the poem as a living whole; as an animated organism” (54; my translation).4 This essay will analyze the period of Tablada’s haikai production focusing on how three collections, Un día… (1919), El jarro de flores (1922), and La feria (1928), can be read as reactions to and establish an intertextual relationship with his own experience of displacement: both as self-exile and as an imposed one. Tablada’s direct contact with Japan first occurred in 1900 when he landed in the port of Yokohama.5 There, he was astounded by the harmony between culture, aesthetics, and society. Tablada was inspired by this encounter, seeing in Japanese art the integration between nature and the human being, which results in emotional beauty. It can be stated metaphorically that this was the moment a seed was planted in Tablada that would later bear the fruits of his haikai production, as well as his love of Japanese visual art. He returned in 1910 to the Asian country, where he deepened his understanding of its culture, especially Zen Buddhism. From importance and the potential of new artistic currents was praiseworthy, his achievement is even bigger since he felt these in “a Mexican way” (my translation). (“De todo lo que se ha dicho nadie extrañaría que se le aplique el adjetivo de innovador. Según los conceptos del Abate de Mendoza, Tablada abrió las brechas por terrenos antes no recorridos, y si fue meritorio haber sido el primero en percibir la importancia y las posibilidades de las nuevas corrientes artísticas, se acrecienta su tarea por haberlas sentido “a la mexicana” [140]). 4 “Más tarde su poesía nos hizo ver directamente nuestro paisaje y sus imágenes nos enseñaron a considerar el poema como un todo viviente, como un organismo animado.” 5 Details of Tablada’s impressions of Japan can be found in his book En el país del sol (1919). These were first published as a series for the magazine Revista Moderna. His descriptions begin in San Francisco where he embarks on his journey to the Asian country. He stayed in Yokohama’s Chinatown and visited Tokyo. He saw the Imperial Palace, attended sumo wrestling, participated in a tea ceremony, looked at originals by ukioe painter Hokusai, etc. In the book, Tablada talks about his familiarization with Japanese aesthetics through the Goncourt brothers, and about the lack of knowledge about Japan in Mexico.

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these experiences in Japan, as well as his residence in Paris between 1911 and 1912, when he familiarized himself with the Imagist movement,6 Tablada began his journey into the world of haikai and into his deterritorialization.7 Once Tablada delved into the world of Japanese culture, his interest and passion for the country’s art forms took the shape of a transcendental book on the master ukioe painter Hiroshigue: Hiroshigué: el pintor de la nieve y de la lluvia, de la noche y de la luna (1914).8 Tablada became an active participant in the world of Japanologists. Unfortunately for Tablada, this first incursion into scholarship on Japan coincided with the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican poet’s rejection of strife, conflict, and the ideas behind this revolution resulted in his public criticism of Madero and his support for Porfirio Díaz. According to Rubén Lozano Herrera, Tablada’s intentions were not to get involved in the politics of opposition, but rather to express the deep sense of desperation he faced in a chaotic Mexico that was no longer engaged in fomenting culture and artistic expression (104).9 As a result of this opposition to the revolutionary cause, Tablada was forced into exile. He chose New York City as his residence, where he spent four years from 1914 to1918. In spite of feeling a deeply rooted nostalgia for his abandoned Mexico, Tablada continued his scholarship on Mexican and Japanese art and culture in this metropolis and world cultural center. In 1919, he decided to spend some time in Esperanza, Colombia, along with his wife, Nina Cabrera. There he began producing haikais. That same year, Carranza decreed a governmental pardon for Mexican intellectuals in exile, and Tablada was assigned the position of Second Secretary of the Mexican embassies in Venezuela and Colombia. Four 6

This is a reference to the poetic movement led by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to the Imagists, they aimed to employ precise, everyday words instead of decorative words in their poems; used free verse; focused on presenting an image; could choose the subject freely; and believed on being clear with the image presented. 7 This term refers to the concept proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), signaling the debilitation of the relation between culture and place especially as a result of displacement. Here, I specifically refer to Tablada’s self and imposed exiles, and their effect on his literary creation and cultural perception. 8 The book is dedicated to “Edmundo de Goncourt” and it includes a list of future publications on Japan: Aztecas y japoneses; La ceremonia del the (Tcha no yu.); La fiesta del incienso (Ko-Kuai); and El arte floral (Hana-iké). None of these works are available since they were never published. 9 Here, by “culture” and “artistic expression,” I am specifically referring to Tablada’s perspective, which focused on “high culture” bearing in mind the controversial aspect.

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai

years had gone by in New York and he was finally back in a SpanishAmerican country. This return was marked by the first publication of a book of poetry entirely composed of haikais: Un día…. According to his wife, this change of atmosphere was very favorable for Tablada.10 His return to a Spanish-speaking country and his return to a space overflowing with nature–unlike New York—served as a catalyst for his engagement in the production of poems based on the Japanese form. A total of nineteen years had passed since his first visit to Japan. It is worth noting that there is an interesting dynamics at play here, since the Mexican poet expressed his emotionally charged return to a familiar context, which would create a surge of an amalgam of feelings, through a controlled and condensed aesthetic response. In his first haikai collection, Tablada manifests his understanding of this Japanese poetic form and applies it to reflect his new surroundings. As was mentioned above, Un día… (One Day…) was published in 1919 in Caracas, Venezuela. The book, which consists of 37 haikais, has a subtitle, “poemas sintéticos” or “synthetic poems.” According to literary critic Esther Hernández Palacios, this was not the first time that the haikai was introduced in Spanish, since there were translations previously made, and Alfonso Reyes had published a haikai–or a poem with its form—titled “Haikai de Euclides” on the same year (95). Nevertheless, she states: “Tablada, therefore, was not the person who introduced the haikai into Spanish, but he certainly was the first one to leave an impression, and the first one, in our language, to go in depth into the poetics of this genre” (95; my translation).11 The first element that should be noted to understand Tablada’s intention in using this poetic form is the subtitle. Why did he place the name “synthetic poems” instead of simply naming them haikais? According to Hernández Palacios, this is because “in writing these short poems Tablada tried to transport them into Spanish, into the Hispanic literary tradition and to its own sensibility, and never did he try to ‘copy them’ nor translate them literarily” (95; my translation).12 In other words, the critic defends the originality that Tablada wanted to give to this 10

Details about Tablada’s wife’s memories of the poet can be found in her book José Juan Tablada en la intimidad published in 1954. 11 “Tablada, pues, no fue el introductor del [h]aikai al español, aunque sí el primero que dejó huella y el primero en ahondar, en nuestra lengua, en la poética de este género.” 12 “Considero que al escribir estos poemas breves Tablada intentó transportarlos al español, a la tradición literaria hispánica y a su propia sensibilidad y nunca ‘copiarlos’ o traducirlos literalmente.”

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collection. Furthermore, adding to the poet’s unique effort, we can see other characteristics that reflect the adaptation: the use of pivot words or kigo that are not related to natural phenomena or elements linked to seasonal changes, but rather to changes within the span of a day; the combination of poems and engravings to form a dialogic relation between word and image; and the fact that he did not strictly follow metrical phrases, but kept the three-verse structure. This first collection of haikais is divided into four parts: morning, afternoon, evening, and night. These four divisions correspond to the four seasons, which are the basis for the pivot words. Through the four moments that compose a day, the reader participates interactively with a common notion: a common space and ground evoking emotions and sensations, which lie in at the base of the poems. Tablada’s haikais are appreciations of minute treasures of nature and brief moments of happy surprises. These captured scenes are diametrically opposed to the heavily descriptive Modernista vision; a respite is reached through poetry in this reunion with the natural world, and a meditative vision of one’s surroundings is attained. The following are two examples of Tablada’s acute perception: THE BEES13 Uninterruptedly there drips honey from the beehive; each drop is a bee… (Un día… n.p.; my translation) 14 THE TOADS Bits of mud, through the dark road the toads jump. (Un día… n.p.; my translation) 15

The first poem belongs to the section titled “Morning”. In the three verses of his haikai, Tablada masterfully captures the scene where bees begin their workday and we can sense the intense movement of the insects that fly out of the beehive. This sensation is captured by the word “uninterruptedly” (“sin cesar” in the original Spanish) which opens the poem, and also by the ellipsis marks at the end. The action derives from 13

All the poems and quotes by José Juan Tablada with no pagination come from the internet site José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen: a project coordinated by Rodolfo Mata and the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 14 LAS ABEJAS: “Sin cesar gotea / miel el colmenar; / cada gota es una abeja…” 15 LOS SAPOS: “Trozos de barro, / Por la senda en penumbra / Saltan los sapos.”

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai

this continuity, and it can be extended to reflect the repetitive nature of the insects’ labor. On the other hand, we see a distinct element in Tablada’s haikai that marks a dialogic relation with a previous masterwork by haijin16 Moritake. In the Mexican poet’s version, the bees are superposed onto the honey drippings, as they coincide in their golden color. Arakida Moritake (1473-1549) had used the same integration of two elements of nature as a way to create an aesthetic twist in his poem: A falling blossom returns to branch: a butterfly!17

In Moritake’s case, the “falling blossom” is actually a butterfly. Undoubtedly, Tablada knew about this poem and employed the same imagery to talk about his reencounter with a natural environment in Venezuela and Colombia. The second poem by Tablada is also a reflection of a moment in time, which is the “Evening.” The same technique is employed in this haikai. The bits of mud that jump up as a person runs along or a bicycle passes by, quickening its pace in its return home, are superposed on the toads awaiting the night to fall. A similar dialogic relation can be found with the famous poem by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694): The old pond a frog jumps in the sound of water.18

Even though the influence is not as stark as in the previous case, we can clearly see that the imagery of the frog–in Tablada’s case a toad— jumping is a reflection of a movement that disturbs the static atmosphere of the old pond. The sound produced is itself also a sign of this rupture. A similar playing with the senses can be perceived in Tablada’s poem. An evening’s tranquility is interrupted as a passerby steps on the puddle of mud, producing a splash, which coincides with the toads leaping. The pieces of mud and the toad coincide in texture, and their jump/leap begets a notion of rushing back to a place as night fast approaches.

16

The term refers to a person that practices haikai or haiku. Here I use Ezra Pound’s translation of the original poem: “rakka eda ni / kaeru to mireba / kocho kana.” 18 Here I use R. H. Blyth’s translation of the original poem: “furu-ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto.” 17

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Another element that the poet incorporates as a unique “transportation” of the Japanese poetic form is the use of pictorial images such as engravings that accompany the haikais. Tablada employs a characteristic of the renku–a type of haikai where a short poem or hokku is placed together with a prose piece—practiced by Basho in Oku No Hosomichi (1689) as a way to give further movement to the image. The original text shows the following:

Image courtesy of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Tablada himself produced the etching, vividly expressing the surrounding darkness and the toad that jumps. The toad’s liveliness becomes evident once it is combined with the haikai. Through the verb “jump” we can imagine the specific moment and feel the quick-paced way home as night fast approaches. This analysis of some examples of Tablada’s initial haikais, leads us to some preliminary conclusions. First, it is clear that Tablada had studied the Japanese poetic form and that he purposefully applied it to express his perception of the new contexts. Second, his concise and brief poems control the overflow of emotions. Instead of talking about the grandeur of Spanish-America–which translated into poetry becomes something static—Tablada focuses on this minute image filled with vitality as an indication of a new perception of what poetry should be: merely a glimpse of an animated universe where everything is alive. The dynamism hidden behind the apparent brevity of the poem became the Mexican poet’s response when faced again with the immensity of nature that surrounded him. What we see here coincide with Tablada’s understanding of haikais and his own perception of what poetry ought to be, as he mentions in the prologue of this first collection:

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai … In brief verse make shine Like a drop of dew All the roses of the garden; … Little snail shell of the sea, Invisible over the beach And sonorous of immensity! (Un día… n.p.; my translation) 19

Although living away from his beloved Mexico and as emotionally drained as he might have been, Tablada did not produce poems filled with nostalgic undertones. Quite the contrary, this immersion into a natural environment evoked a strong inner desire to express himself through a Japanese poetic form. Brevity was the Mexican poet’s answer to his surging emotions. This paradisiacal parenthesis in the exiled poet’s life did not last long. After the assassination of Carranza, Tablada and his wife were forced back to New York since they could not go back to Mexico. Once again, Mexico remained distant. Back in the great metropolis Tablada published some Apollinaire-inspired idiographic poems in 1920. For purposes of this essay, I will leave the analysis of this collection aside. One point that must be noted in reference to this collection, however, appears in a letter Tablada writes to fellow Mexican poet Ramón López Velarde: [i]n my work, the ideographic characteristic is circumstantial. General characters are more of a suggestive synthesis of pure and discontinuous lyric themes, and a more energetic relationship of actions and reactions between the poet and the causes of emotion […] My books Un día…and Li-Po will better explain to you my purposes than this premature exegesis. (n.p.; my translation)20

19 “En breve verso hacer lucir, / Como en la gota del rocío, / Todas las rosas del jardín; // …Parvo caracol del mar, / Invisible sobre la playa / ¡Y sonoro de inmensidad!” 20 “[e]n mi obra el carácter ideográfico es circunstancial, los caracteres generales son más bien la síntesis sugestiva de los temas líricos puros y discontinuos, y una relación más enérgica de acciones y reacciones entre el poeta y las causas de emoción [...] Mis libros Un día y Li-Po le explicarán mis propósitos mejor que esta exégesis prematura.” Excerpt from José Juan Tablada’s letter to Ramón López Verlarde, found in “La nueva lírica del poeta José Juan Tablada.” El Universal Ilustrado 13 nov. 1919. , accessed 2 June 2 2009.

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Again, Tablada’s insistence on the value of a concise poem where the poet and the emotions are condensed to create a strong expressive energy is the underlining basis of his haikai production. Tablada’s return to New York marked a new perception of the haikai, which can be seen in his second collection published in 1922 and titled El jarro de flores (Vase of Flowers). This work contains sixty-four haikais distributed among nine subtopics or themes. What characterizes this second collection is the focus on the ludic and/or irony, which is evident in the subtitle, “Lyric dissociations” (“Disociaciones líricas”). As an introduction to this book, Tablada writes a brief text titled “Hokku,” explaining his motives: …The “Synthetic Poems,” like these “Lyric Dissociations,” are but poems in the style of the Japanese “hokku” or “haikai,” which I am pleased to have introduced to the Spanish lyric tradition, despite their simply being a type of reaction against the tattered rhetoric, … The “Haikai,” of floral nakedness, does not need vases. In its essence, it is the precise vehicle for modern thought; pure lyric theme, Adamic like a surprise, and wise like irony. (n.p.; my translation)21

Tablada’s opposition to the excessive recourse to adjectives and rhetoric is clear. For him, the fundamental aspect of poetry consists of limiting it to its essence. The key elements for this second collection are surprise and irony—short poems characterized by a touch of wit. In this work, we do not find poems that are attempts at controlled exaltation resulting form the poet’s encountering the natural environment anew, as were the previous haikais. Here, innovation, brevity and humor are the essence. Ironically, the majority of the haikais in this collection are not based on the urban space of New York, but rather on the rural or coastal space of Spanish-America. The scenes that are presented are to a large extent depictions of an everyday, immediate rustic reality categorized, as mentioned previously, under subtopics such as “Bestiary,” “Landscapes,” “In the Garden,” “Trees,” and “Fruits.” Tablada’s focus on two contrasting components within a poem is again a result of his understanding of one of the characteristics of haikai. One of the foremost experts on Tablada’s Japonism, Atsuko Tanabe, states: “The 21

“Los ‘Poemas Sintéticos’, así como estas ‘Disociaciones Líricas’, no son sino poemas al modo de los ‘hokku’ o ‘haikai’ japoneses, que me complace haber introducido a la lírica castellana, aunque no fuese sino como una reacción contra la zarrapastrosa retórica, […] El ‘Haikai’, de floral desnudez, no necesita búcaros. Por esencia es justo vehículo del pensamiento moderno; tema lírico puro, adámico como la sorpresa y sabio como la ironía.”

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai

original meaning of haikai is play or trick (tawamure), jest or joke (odoke) and humor (kokkei). Naturally, Tablada knew all this. It is for this reason that many of his haikais have, essentially, a final shock that is humoristic and clever” (100; my translation).22 This second collection of haikais, therefore, focuses on this element, developing the “lyric dissociation” Tablada was aiming for. I will now proceed to analyze some poems from this collection, keeping in mind that: 1) in essence these follow the traditional Japanese form but have a strong presence of the poetic voice— subjectivity—in the form of questions or implicit criticism of the scene presented; 2) nature is the main topic but there is an increased number of poems in which this is not the case; and finally, 3) some haikais have more or less metrical phrases or have a rhyme, which is not seen in the traditional ones. The section titled “Marinas” (Of the Sea) contains the following: FLYING FISH. When hit by the sun’s gold The sea’s glass explodes into splinters. (n.p.; my translation)23

In this haikai, Tablada both masterfully captures a moment and proposes a combination of elements that produce the aforementioned dissociation. First, we note that various layers of shininess can be seen: the flash of reflection as the flying fish leap into the air; the sun’s golden color, and the sea described as glass. This luminous plethora is broken into pieces as the sun hits the fish’s scales when they fly out of the water. The dissociation in this poem can be identified in the different grades of solidness we find. The malleable flying fish are petrified when they figuratively become the splinters of the broken sea. The reflections of these fish are superposed with the flashes produced by the sun’s reflection on water to create this moment of “surprise.” Even though this haikai lacks the ironic factor, it clearly evidences Tablada’s intention to create pure lyricism. There is no need for excess use of adjectives. The humoristic side of this second attempt with haikais by Tablada can be seen in the following two poems from “Bestiary” and “Fruits” respectively: 22

“El significado original de haikai es juego o broma (tawamure), chunga o chiste (odoke) y humorismo (kokkei). Naturalmente Tablada sabía todo esto. Es por ello que muchos de sus hai-kais tienen por esencia un choque final, humorístico e ingenioso.” 23 PECES VOLADORES: “Al golpe del oro solar / Estalla en astillas el vidrio del mar.”

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LITTLE DONKEY While being loaded The little donkey in the shade Dreams of emerald paradises. (n.p.; my translation)24 WATERMELON Of summer, red and cold Guffaw, Slice Of Watermelon! (n.p.; my translation)25

In the first poem, we can see the presence of a subjective voice, acting as an intermediary between the reader and the personified animal’s emotions. The swift outline of a donkey has an underlying criticism. The act of “being loaded” presents a contrast with the “act of dreaming”– implying an elevation—which is further enhanced by the connection one can establish between the emeralds that are carried on the backs of donkeys and those that decorate paradise. In this haikai we can find the wit and ironical elements that Tablada intended to express. These three verses evoke feelings of injustice, oppression and victimization of the poor. Clearly, the message is that of social criticism. A closer look at the second haikai also illustrates a conscious attempt by Tablada to foster the idea of humor, irony, and wit in this brief poem. The half-moon-shaped red summer fruit is equated with a guffaw, producing a humoristic combination of shape and act. Furthermore, this same superposition characterizes the joy, laughter, and warmth evoked by the summer season. In a simple image of a slice of watermelon, Tablada condenses this wide array of feelings and connotations. This haikai represents the Mexican poet’s concept of the witty dimension poetic expression. After briefly analyzing poems from Tablada’s second collection of haikais, we can see that, on the one hand, the frantic modern world of the urban context in New York is reflected through the fast, brief, and poignant verses. Nonetheless, the scenes presented are mostly reminiscent of the rural space of distant Mexico. This stark contrast of haikai as practiced by Tablada, and his ever-growing nostalgia of homeland allow 24

EL BURRITO: “Mientras lo cargan / Sueña el burrito amosquilado / En paraísos de esmeralda…” 25 SANDÍA: “Del verano, roja y fría / Carcajada, / Rebanada / De sandía!” It is worth noting that in the case of the original poem, there is a rhyme in the first and last verses as well as in the second and third ones. Similarly, this haikai breaks with the traditional three-verse structure.

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai

for the quest of the “pure lyricism” that the poet aims for in El jarro de flores. Furthermore, he is proposing a drastic innovation in SpanishAmerican poetry–leaning towards Avant Garde, as in the case of Apollinaire—but he is not able to separate himself from his local and cultural roots. In other words, his adoptive New York City was not his main canvas. In this sense, Tablada remained loyal to the idea that the haikai was a poetic form to perceive nature, live with nature and a form to integrate into nature. The Mexican poet’s connection with this universe–in a Zen Buddhist perspective—came with his memories of a lost place. Finally, we have a third collection of poems by Tablada titled La feria (The Marketplace), published in New York in 1928. This time, however, unlike the previously discussed collections, there are only five haikais, or “jaikais” as the term is spelled in the text. These are some examples: MICROCOSM Flying bees above; Below, the ants’ nest: Infantry headquarters. (La feria n.p.; my translation)26 SNAKE Does it guess my theosophy This snake that sunbathes And doesn’t run away and trusts me? (La feria n.p.; my translation)27

What can be perceived from these poems is that, whereas nature is still the prevalent theme, the poems are much more poignant and remind us of senryu which is a poetic form with a similar concise structure as the haiku but is “concerned with poking fun at human behavior as opposed to the profound, sublime world of nature where haiku shine” (Reichhold n.p.). 28 Bees and ants, with their own particular characteristics as insects, also evoke at a metaphorical level the presence of conflict and wars. The interim between World War I and World War II is clearly an unstable and conflicted time. The association between the metaphorical representation and the historical reference is evident. In the case of the second haikai, 26

Original poems under “Jaikais de la feria” (Jaikais of the Marketplace). MICROCOSMOS: “Aviadoras abejas arriba; / Abajo, el hormiguero: / Cuartel de infantería.” 27 Original poems under “Jaikais de la feria” (Jaikais of the Marketplace). CULEBRA: “¿Adivina mi teosofía / La culebra que se asolea / Y no huye y en mí confía...?” 28 Definition by Jane Reichhold, < http://www.ahapoetry.com/whbkglo.htm >, accessed June 5, 2009.

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even though the snake is associated with nature, its purpose is not to evoke the grandeur of nature and the emotions it evokes, but to point towards a more philosophical–some might say zen-like—pondering of puzzles. Through this, we see that Tablada’s haikai diverges from the original proposal of a new style of poetry and becomes a device for questioning, criticizing, and ultimately coming to terms with the exiled self. In other words, whereas the previous two collections of haikais stand out because of the mastery and uniqueness of the Japanese poetic style, which intended to bring freshness to poetry in Spanish, in La feria, the theme of Tablada’s reflection on and treatment of one of Mexico’s traditions predominates. And through this collection, Tablada poetically recreates what in essence is dear to his heart. An obvious characteristic of this book that stands out is Tablada’s breaking away from using only haikais as a means of expression. In this collection, we have an eclectic array of long poems, short poems, and “jaikais” all revolving around the scene of a typical Mexican marketplace. There is no denial that Tablada was evoking and reminiscing about a space with a strong local flavor, and was engaging in a poetic dialogue with Ramón López Velarde, a friend whom many consider “Mexico’s national poet.” Through La feria, Tablada becomes a voyeur of the marketplace, evoking colors, sounds, and images of his distant homeland. On this occasion, however, nostalgic feelings overweigh his poetic agenda. The haikais are only part of the descriptive overflow of the space, and Tablada’s desire to express these memories cannot be contained in threeverse poems. From the distance of New York, the Mexican poet recreates a pastiche of everyday Mexican reality. Parallel to this literary voyage back home, the haikais have become “microcosms” encompassing bits and pieces of a larger theosophical union with a universal whole. The Japanese poetic form no longer mitigates the geographical displacement or deterritorialization. The haikais are now a form of expression where distance from the homeland is merely an echo of an unfulfilled desire. Tablada, through this third collection of poems claims: “But how many vain words…! Poets, motherland, me… When motherlands and men are not but dust of atoms in the harmonious vortex that drags us towards God!” (n.p.; my translation).29 It is a culmination of his longing for Mexico and a realization that through haikai, he is able to access the sense of being part of–atoms—a larger cosmos. Thus, even though he is not physically in Mexico, Tablada is now reconnected to home at least 29

“¡Pero cuánta vana palabra... ! Los poetas, la patria, yo ... Cuando patrias y hombres no son, no somos, sino polvo de átomos en la armoniosa vorágine que nos arrebata hacia Dios!”

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Echoes from a Distance: José Juan Tablada’s Haikai

spiritually and poetically. Similar to the haikais that in this collection are one form of expression of a nostalgic space, the direct mention of the typical Mexican marketplace is his recognition that the search for the lost homeland is over. Now, the phase of longing via the Japanese poetic form has offered Tablada a metaphorical answer which pulls him from displacement to that of placement in a larger, philosophical realm. Tablada’s production of haikais, his desire to go back to Mexico, and his artistic expression through the publication of poems, all have had closure.30 In this trip with Tablada through the lands of exile and haikai, we can see that both physical displacement and elements of innovative poetic expression run hand in hand. Whereas, residing outside of Mexico served as a catalyst for the poet to engage in innovation and reexamination of a stagnant Spanish-American poetic tradition through the Japanese poetic form, the thematic anchor remained in his distant homeland. The interconnectedness of these two essential preoccupations for Tablada helped produce masterful collections between 1919 and 1928. There is no doubt that Tablada’s engagement with haikai and his ever-growing understanding of the Japanese culture that he highly venerated helped mitigate the sadness and pain of living in exile. One could claim that there was a therapeutic value in the Japanese poetic form for Tablada, and similarly point towards the future poetic style that he was striving for. From a poetic standpoint, Tablada was certainly able to give new breath to the Hispanic poetic tradition. From a philosophical standpoint, he was able to transcend the geographical locality of being from a place, to that of belonging to a large cosmos. Therefore, Tablada’s passion for diverse Japanese cultural manifestations was, eventually, part of the answer the Mexican poet arrived at as he lived through the “marketplace of life.” Just like the conches and seashells that his mother used to keep in a Chinese box brought over by the Nao de China, Tablada heard the echoes from a distance through haikais and Japanese culture.

30

Here, it should be noted that a compilation of Tablada’s selected poems by J. M. González de Mendoza titled Los mejores poemas de José Juan Tablada was published in 1943 by Editorial “Surco” del Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas in Mexico. This collection, however, consists of previously written poems–albeit a few of them had not been published—and is not an entirely new book. Therefore, La feria becomes Tablada’s last poetry book. By the end of the 1920s, Tablada would devote himself solely to prose writing.

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Works Cited Cabrera de Tablada, Nina. José Juan Tablada en la intimidad. México: Imprenta Universitaria, 1954. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Hernández Palacios, Esther. El crisol de sorpresas. Xalapa, Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1995. “La nueva lírica del poeta José Juan Tablada.” El Universal Ilustrado. 13 nov. 1919. José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. and Coord. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. 2 June 2009. . Path: Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; Carta de José Juan Tablada a Ramón López Velarde. Lozano Herrera, Rubén. Las veras y las burlas de José Juan Tablada. México: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1995. Paz, Octavio. Las peras del olmo. Mexico: UNAM, 1957. Reichhold, Jane. “A Glossary of Literary Terms.” Aha Poetry. 2002. < http://www.ahapoetry.com/whbkglo.htm >, accessed 5 June 2009. Tablada, José Juan. “Culebra.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. and Coord. Rodolfo Mata. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. 2003. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; La feria; Índice; Jaikais de la feria. , accessed 14 June 2009. —. “El Burrito.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; El jarro de flores; Bestiario; El Burrito. , accessed 12 June 2009. —. El jarro de flores (disociaciones líricas.) New York: Escritores Sindicados, 1922. —. En el país del sol. New York: Appleton & CIA, 1919. —. Hiroshigué: el pintor de la nieve y de la lluvia, de la noche y de la luna. Mexico: Monografías japonesas, 1914. —. “Hokku.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003.

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Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; El jarro de flores; Hokku. , accessed 11 June 2009. —. La feria. New York: F. Mayans, 1928. —. “La feria.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; La feria; Índice; La feria. , accessed 19 June 2009. —. La feria de la vida. Mexico: Botas, 1937. —. “Las abejas.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; Un día…; Las abejas. , accessed 10 June 2009. —. “Los sapos.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; Un día…; Los sapos. , accessed 10 June 2009. —. “Microcosmos.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; La feria; Índice; Jaikais de la feria. , accessed 14 June 2009. —. “Peces voladores.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; El jarro de flores; Marinas; Peces voladores. , accessed 11 June 2009. —. “Prólogo.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; Un día…; Prólogo., 11 June 2009.

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—. “Sandía.” José Juan Tablada: letra e imagen. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. 2003. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, UNAM. Poesía de José Juan Tablada; Índice; El jarro de flores; Frutas; Sandía., accessed 12 June 2009. —. Un día… (poemas sintéticos). Caracas, Venezuela: Ed. Bolívar, 1919. Tanabe, Atsuko. El japonismo de José Juan Tablada. Mexico: UNAM, 1981.

OCTAVIO PAZ AND INDIA: BLANCO, MODERNITY, AND THE POETICS OF SIMULTANEISM ROBERTO CANTÚ CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES

When I imagine the poem as a configuration of signs on an animated space I do not think of the page in the book: I think […] of the moon that is multiplied and extinguished and disappears and reappears over India’s dripping breast after the monsoon. Constellations: ideograms. —Octavio Paz1

Octavio Paz was one of the few poets of the twentieth century best known for his lucid and interdisciplinary theoretical reflections on poetics, politics, and world civilizations. In 1990—the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature—he published a collection of essays under the title The Other Voice, where Paz reflects on poetry and politics but keeps a steady focus on twentieth century avant-gardes such as Cubism and Surrealism, viewing their shared radical tendencies under one name (“the most descriptive,” he says): Simultaneism. In this book, Paz contends that Simultaneism was an art that favored world classicisms other than the Greco-Roman, resulting in concrete expressions in poetry, cinema, and painting (48). Although at first impression these views seem to be a retrospective judgment on the art of a different era, Paz was revealing the avant-garde aesthetic that shaped his own poetry. He was also defining Simultaneism according to his conception of art and poetics, particularly as he applied it to two of his most experimental poems: Sunstone (Piedra de sol;1957) and Blanco (1967).

1

Quote derives from Octavio Paz’s literary manifesto “Signos en rotación” (“Signs in Rotation”), published in 1965 in the literary journal Sur (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and later as the epilogue to El arco y la lira (first edition in Mexico, 1956). The English translation has been taken from The Bow and the Lyre, p. 249.

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In Cubism in the Shadow of War, David Cottington clarifies in specific detail the various contending meanings of Simultaneism during the years prior to the 1914 outbreak of First World War. As a cult of the modern, Cottington observes that Simultaneism was a celebration of the dissolution of the individual in the growing urban collectivities of place, occupation, and custom. It also referred to the simultaneity of past, present, and future in the artist’s mind, producing a work of art that was meant to be the synthesis of memory and perception. For Robert Delaunay, Cubism meant modernity as manifested in the Eiffel Tower, simultaneously visible to all but challenging the artist alone with aesthetic problems related to color theory, mobile perspectives, and visual sensations. With Delaunay— Cottington claims—Cubist or Simultaneist art was no longer concerned with the mere representation of surfaces and appearances; perception gave way to conception (179). The retinal approach to painting was set aside in favor of the quest for essences and archetypes.

Fig. 1. Robert Delaunay, Windows Open Simultaneously, 1912

Delauney’s painting titled “Windows Open Sumultaneosly” includes the shadow of a classic past excluded from Cotttington’s formal analysis. Standing in the background of the Parisian cityscape with the Eiffel Tower at its center, one glimpses its equivalent Egyptian “double” in the Pyramids of Giza, the archetype of an ancient civilization linked to French history through Napoleon’s invasion in 1798. The visual

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impression is of a simultaneous representation of two marvels of human engineering that resonate in a sublimated geometric field of triangles, with a recognizable spiritual and mystical symbolism: the holy mountain; a metropolitan area as a cosmic center; a point of contact with the sacred.

Fig. 2. The Pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx, by David Roberts, 1838

Simultaneism, as proposed by Paz, favors this synchrony of ancient and modern, illustrating a historical dimension in Paz’s genealogical ties to Cubism and Surrealism from which he will develop his own poetics, first proposed in The Bow and the Lyre (1956), and later given expression as literary history in Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (1974). In this book, Paz comments on Simultaneism indirectly, opting for a sustained reflection on modernity, its critical attitude toward the present, and a no less critical interest in ancient civilizations: The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by otherness. A bizarre tradition and a tradition of the bizarre, modernity is condemned to pluralism. The very old can be adopted by modernity if it rejects the tradition of the moment and proposes a different one. Consecrated by the same controversial forces as the new, what is very old is not a past but a beginning. Our passion for contradictions resuscitates it, breathes life into it, and makes it our contemporary. (1, 4)

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In what follows, I propose a reading of Blanco based on Paz’s poetics of Simultaneism.2 Given the limitations of space, I will only study three parts of the poem (1, 4, and 6), but with its entirety in mind. My aim is to re-orient, so to speak, our reading of Blanco by showing that its thematic features transcend ancient India, but in full accordance with Paz’s idea of simultaneity, exemplified in a poetics of a synchronous conjunction of civilizations and historical eras, both ancient and modern (Cantú 2007: 19).

I. Blanco and Its Readers Blanco is a poem that belongs to one of Paz’s most productive periods. Between 1965 and 1970, Paz published his poetic manifesto “Signs in Rotation” (1965); two essays on Mesoamerica (“Dos apostillas”) written in Delhi in 1965; a book of essays titled Alternating Current (1967); two other books, one on Claude Lévi-Strauss (1967), the other on Marcel Duchamp (1968); a book of poetry titled East Slope, written in Delhi (1962-1968) and published in Mexico in 1969; a book on Buddhist Tantrism, titled Conjunctions and Disjunctions (1969); and, among other works, his essay “Blank Thought,” published as a preface “to the first exhibition of Tantric art in the West” held at Paris, France, in February 1970 (Convergences 269). Reflecting on Paz’s life-work shortly after the poet’s death in 1998, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) summarized as follows: [Paz] participated in all the great historical and cultural debates, aesthetic movements, and artistic revolutions, taking sides and explaining his preferences in essays often dazzling for the excellence of their prose, lucidity of their judgment, and vastness of their learning. He was […] an impassioned actor in what was happening around him […] unafraid of swimming against the current or braving unpopularity. (195)

Vargas Llosa openly confessed his love of Paz’s poetry, but expressed concern over Blanco, Topoemas, and Renga, claiming that Paz “succumbed to that eagerness of the new […] subtly undermining the lasting value of works of art” (197). Blanco has been studied carefully by Jason Wilson, one of the most informed scholars on Paz’s interest in India. He rightly warns readers that “though Paz adopts a tantric framework, he 2

An abbreviated version of this article appeared as “Octavio Paz and Blanco: Ancient Civilizations, Modernity, and the Poetics of Simultaneism” (Boletín Octavio Paz. Ed. Luis Ríos, 1.1 (April-May 2009): 13-18.

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rejects many of the premises of Eastern thought”; in Blanco, Wilson adds, “Paz expands and enriches the analogies between copulation and the writing or reading of the poem” (143). John Fein’s study of Blanco is systematic and thorough, achieving what it sets out to do in a line-by-line close reading in which the interpretive focus often produces break-through results, and yet at decisive instances misses the complexity of the poem’s play of allusions and cultural codes. In turn, in his analysis of Blanco, Manuel Durán turns interpretation and textual analysis into paraphrase and a nervous recapitulation of the poem’s contents: “New visions, red deserts, frenzied screams of yes and no, seem to shake the entrails of this poem like a vast earthquake. More than once we feel we are drowning in a sea of intoxicating sensations” (180). Although admitting the undeniable contributions of these studies, I maintain that Blanco’s “hermeneutic problem” must be approached with a different interpretive method and a concept of poetry not limited to traditional ideas of aesthetic beauty. Paz’s poems inspired by Asia—with China, India, and Japan as key centers—must be read as an attempt to understand the Other as one’s own. “I can understand what it means to be Indian,” claimed Paz, “because I am Mexican” (In Light of India 81). Blanco’s staggered representation of ancient civilizations (more complex than in Delaunay’s painting) includes Egypt, India, and Mesoamerica, thus leaving a “blank” space for the historical moment in which the poem was written, a fundamental element that shapes the poem and its sense. I will return to this point.

II. Blanco as (Inter)Text Octavio Paz often added explanatory notes to his poems, and the ones in Blanco are proposed as a blend of spatial and temporal categories, turning Blanco into a ritual, a pilgrimage, a river, desiring the poem to be also analogous to a mandala, a human body, or an ancient book of pictures and emblems, like a scroll from ancient China or Egypt or, among other possibilities, a Mesoamerican codex.3 Paz’s labyrinthine description, written as a procession of analogies and correspondences that are 3 As Elizabeth Hill Boone specifies, Mesoamerican screenfold codices have their own internal almanac structure with different reading protocols: “Most of the almanacs in the divinatory corpus, as well as the manuscripts themselves, read from right to left. The Tonalamatl Aubin, Borgia, Fejerváry-Mayer […] all read in this direction. The almanacs in the Borbonicus and Cospi, however, read the opposite way, from left to right […] Although the preferred reading order seems to have been from right to left, there was clearly a choice” (67).

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implicitly trans-historical, concludes with an emphasis on writing and reading as fundamental activities. Blanco‘s initial commentary and reading instructions thus underscore a triangular field of relations: poet, poem, reader. In the authorial notes, Paz explains Blanco’s tripartite composition, its chromatic stages (yellow, red, green, and blue), its four human faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, and understanding), and the possibility of “variant readings” of the poem (e.g., reading it in its totality, hence as a poetic unity; reading only the central column, etc.). His point about “variant readings” of Blanco, however, transcends the limits of a mere aesthetic experience, turning instead into a structuralist notion of “literature” in which texts are viewed as fragments of a larger system. The search for meaning, therefore, shifts from the text to the system that establishes its conditions of possibility. In other words, Paz’s reading instructions are only a reminder that Blanco is a game with its own rules: since meaning is produced in a system of relations, the operating ars poetica is really an ars combinatoria, with structural relations governed by metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor. Fated to remain incomplete, interpretation is nonetheless always initiating other readings and generating new meanings. This will explain the fascination Paz has with the fragment as a synecdoche of the mutilated body (sparagmos), ritual dismemberment, the cult of Osiris, and Mesoamerican ritual sacrifices. The reader of Blanco turns into Isis: in reading the poem, s/he gathers the scattered limbs of Osiris, resuscitates the body, and makes it our contemporary. A close reading of Blanco, consequently, has the sole choice of reconstituting the poem’s fragments into one unified “book,” but with attention to its parts or rotating members that seek their own reconfiguration. In other words, from Blanco’s opening lines to its conclusion the reading must be structural, not linear. There’s no way around it: one must read simultaneously and in succession the poem’s 14 fragments (4 + 6 + 4), clustered in the axes of three columns. Moreover, one’s critical attention must consider the system in which Blanco belongs, yet knowing all along that readings of the poem are fated to evanescence and, on occasions, they are generative of other readings. With this goal or blanco (target) in mind, I will begin by charting the poem’s structural composition in its totality, but due to space limitations I will only analyze three sections: 1, 4, and 6.

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III. Blanco and Octavio Paz Blanco begins like a myth of origins or a prayer, stuttering at first then chanting, mantra-like, the emergence of primal matter, the birth of language, and the initial gendering of the universe (male and female): the siblings then emerge from a body that is the earth, the universe, a constellation, signs on a page. Introduced by epigraphs taken from The Hevajra-Tantra (“By passion the world is bound, by passion too it is released”), and a sonnet by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), (the eighth line in “Ses purs ongles” [her pure fingernails]), the reader’s attention branches out in different directions with the force of three traditions: the literature of western hermeticism; Tantric Buddhism—its art, eroticism, and doctrine—and the literary inheritance claimed by Paz: that of modern poetry, which in Mexico includes its own ancient Mesoamerican civilization. To visualize Blanco’s internal organization, let us note its composition in terms of sections, lines, and functions: Section 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6:

Lines lines 1-13 lines 14-52 lines 53-110 lines 111-161 lines 162-224 lines 225-318

Hinges with an Iterative Function “She who was buried with open eyes” “The passion of compassionate coals” “Transparency is all that remains” “The world a bundle of your images” “brings reality to seeing” “brings reality to seeing”4

Blanco’s composition is divided internally in six poetic sections that connect poems on the center, left and right columns—as in the tradition of the pictorial triptych—and with the scrolling of the poem marked by a concluding phrase or hinge that signals a stop in each strophic section with an iterative function that is recognizable in Blanco’s last lines (6: 76-94). As we will note shortly, the hinge-like structural model is twofold: horizontally (syntagmatically), with the lateral eight poems; vertically (paradigmatically), with the central six poems. The hinges thus function like Janus, the double-headed Roman god who represented the sun and the moon, thus the porter of heaven (opener and shutter) who “presided over the beginning of everything” (William Smith 225). The poems adjacent to the central column tell two stories: to the left, it is a story of love and its images according to the four elements; to the right, it records the spiral 44 Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Blanco have been taken from the bilingual edition in Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, transaletd by Eliot Weiberger.

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unfolding of the soul’s faculties (but differing in number from Plato’s and Aristotle’s), from the senses and perception to imagination and understanding.

III.1. Blanco, lines 1-13 As of its opening verses, Blanco traces on the page the tortuous birth of language branching like a mountain river in a downward flow. a stirring a steering a seedling sleeping the word at the tip of the tongue unheard unhearable matchless fertile barren ageless she who was buried with open eyes stainless promiscuous the word speechless nameless 5

The poem begins with isolated nouns, puns and no punctuation, but with a suggested context that alludes to myths of origin, of language, of sprouting corn, or of the first couple, confirmed by the alliterative music in six syllables in the Spanish version (om, cim, sim, in, im, sin), which recall mantras of compassion, or the ancient Hindu Carnatic music with its emphasis on single notes. Observed closely, the syllable om is repeated 5

In Spanish: “el comienzo / el cimiento / la simiente / latente / la palabra en la punta de la lengua / inaudita / inaudible / impar / grávida / nula / sin edad / la enterrada con los ojos abiertos / inocente / promiscua / la palabra / sin nombre / sin habla.” The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, p. 313 (my emphasis). My translation: “the beginning / the bedrockk / the seed / unripe/ the word at the tip of the tongue / unprecedented / imperceptible/ singular / pregnant / void / ageless / she who is buried with eyes open.” I have sacrificed the puns and the sound sought in Eliot Weinberger’s translation, and have instead emphasized the sense of the words. Arguably, no translation can repeat the original, but alternative translations would serve to suggest other ways of reading Blanco’s poetic discourse. For an earlier translation of Blanco, see the one by G. Aroul and Charles Tomlinson in Configurations. This version, however, capitalizes the beginning word in each line of the central column, thus disfiguring the poetic movement and nuances of the original.

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three times as a tacit reference to a mantra’s beginning (“om mani padme hum”), and as an anticipation of a poetic pattern that will breathe life into the poem’s parts: iteration (polyptoton, anaphora) or parallelism at the word or sentence level, which will make repetition, return, and convergence a structural possibility. In the concluding pages of “Signs in Rotation,” Paz articulates the poetics that six years later will define Blanco: “Poetry is born in silence and mumbling, in not being able to say, but it aspires irresistibly to recuperate language as a total reality. The poet makes word of everything he touches, not excluding silence and the blanks in the text” (260,). The alliteration is accompanied by a rhyming pattern in the endings of the four opening words in Spanish (ienzo, iento, iente, tente) that join the notion of beginning (“comienzo”) with foundation (“cimiento”), seed (“simiente”), and the latent or unripe (“latente”), hence with home, fertility, and pregnancy. The musicality of the lines, the fractured discourse, and the conceptual relations in the opening words also include a religious iconographic reference to a Saint Andrews Cross that can be read as an earth-centering sign, such as the five cardinal directions with a cosmic center or quincunx, a frequent image in Mesoamerican screenfold codices. Since our aim is not a hermeneutic but a combinatorial method that explores the ways in which a text makes meaning possible, let us look into the insinuation of a quincunx in Paz’s concrete poetry at its minimalist level.6 The opening lines, with four nouns and a first full sentence (“the word at the tip of the tongue”), appear to be a symptom of an initial attempt at speech, therefore situating these opening lines of the poem as its prologue, in the sense of being “before” discourse or language. The birth of language begins to shape syntax in two full sentences (the fifth and tenth lines), and by two concrete poetic images mentally connected to a quincunx— interestingly, with “palabra” (“word,” previously at the tip of the tongue) as the axis mundi in lines 11-13: unheard

unhearable matchless

fertile stainless 6

barren promiscuous

Read Paz’s “topoema,” composed as a helix with five rotating words: Cifra / Como / Calma / Cero / Colmo, written in Delhi on March 20, 1968. See original and English translation in Collected Poems, p. 339.

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nameless7 (my emphasis)

In the opening page of the Fejerváry-Mayer Codex (“the most often reproduced page of all the Mexican codices,” as noted by Elizabeth Hill Boone), one finds “a cosmogram of the central Mexican world and a 260day almanac […] Around a central figure of Xiuhtecuhtli, the lord of the year and of time” (114).

Fig. 3. First page in the Fejerváry-Mayer Codex

Hill Boone adds a comment that establishes a relational link with the reading of Blanco’s opening lines: “Each arm of the cross, and thus each direction, has its own color: red in the east, yellow in the north, blue in the west, and green in the south” (114). These are the corresponding colors in Blanco. In terms of the figure at the cosmic center, David Carrasco describes Xiuhtecuhtli as an ancient divinity in Mesoamerica’s cosmology, hermaphrodite in nature, ruler of the gods, master of the cardinal points, and lord of “the three general regions of the universe, the upperworld (Ilhuicatl), the earthly level (Tlalticpac), and the underworld (Mictlan)

7

In Spanish: “ inaudita / inaudible / impar/ grávida / nula / inocente / promiscua / la palabra / sin nombre / sin habla” (Ibid., my emphasis).

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[…] the fire god was believed to dwell in all three regions of the world connecting them at the center, the axis mundi” (104). From its initial mimetic representation of poetic mantras and mandalas, Blanco extends its allusions simultaneously to Mexico’s ancient civilization and to one of its best-known codices, the Fejerváry-Mayer Codex. Traditionally, Blanco’s beginning has been read in its thirteen initial lines, a point that Paz seems to have favored.8 In his 1990 interview with Alfred MacAdam, however, he explained Blanco’s genesis as an invocation (the words at the tip of the tongue) and as a sudden flow of the poem’s initial ten lines, adding that Blanco has a structure much more complex and richer than Sunstone (347-48). By its very poetic nature, however, Blanco is marked by two numerical beginnings, with number ten as a sign for matter (prakriti, the female energy), and number thirteen as that of form (purusha, the male ruler of time). Instead of choosing between number ten and thirteen as the real “beginning” of the poem, more significant to our reading would be to note how Blanco’s poetic architecture (“more complex, much richer”) marks each one of its six levels with a full phrase, beginning with “she who was buried with open eyes” (I:10), and concluding with “brings reality to seeing” (VI: 93), a line that echoes verbatim the previous concluding line (V: 63), therefore insinuating the stages or signposts on the gestational process leading to a couple’s birth. As I will comment later, Blanco concludes simultaneously with lines from previous stanzas or poetic clusters. As a result, more so than a cumulative and absolute ending, Blanco expresses syntactically the past and the present as occupying the same point in time. In conformity with the model of the Tria Prima or creative threefold, Blanco is flanked by two other columns, composed of four poems each, with the one on the left corresponding to the four traditional elements (hence, the body), and the one on the right to the faculties of sensation, perception, imagination, and understanding (therefore, the soul). In Tantrism, this trinitarian model is associated with the “Body, Speech, and Mind of all the Buddhas” (Snellgrove 28); it follows then that the central variegated column can be read as the kundalini (the cosmic serpent of fire) that, coiled in the yogin’s spine, touches the various lotuses in its ascent through the latter’s body. By the time the fire-serpent reaches the sixth lotus between the yogin’s brows, “the rising force then enters the ultimate thousand-petaled lotus at the crown of the head […] where Shiva [male 8

For example, in Paz’s Obras Completas: Obra Poética (1935-1970), vol. I, edited by Paz himself, Blanco’s initial 13 lines and concluding 93 lines are in the same font but different from Blanco’s poetic core.

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deity] and Shakti [female deity] are one” (Zimmer 592, my emphasis). The poem’s telos or “target” (“blanco”) is thus samadhi (“the One-without-asecond”), the sacred union that leads to the cosmic androgyny, a yogin’s condition in which “the experience and bliss of this degree of samadhi is silence” (Zimmer 437).

III.4. Blanco, lines 111-161 This section enters our field of vision with form and matter in their world-centering stage, initially through its full mastery of syntax and punctuation, then with visual images of earth and earthquakes. The soul’s imagination is now empowered by a developing synesthesia based on sound and sight, but with taste and smell implicit in its entirety. The landscape is mixed in its iconography: it begins with images associated with Mexico’s origins: the emblematic cactus (“Hay púas invisibles, hay espinas” [There are thorns, invisible spines”]), then shifts to Hindu associations with sacred animals, such as the cow (“reses de ceniza / mugen los árboles” [“herds of ash. / The chained trees howl”]).9 Drumbeats drumbeats drumbeats. Sky I beat you, land I beat you. Open sky, closed land, flute and drum, lightning and thunder, I open you and beat you You open, land, your mouth full of water, your body gushes sky, you burst, land, your seeds explode, the word grows green.10

9 In Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith, Paz correlates both emblematic associations with Isis: “The theme of the cow and Isis, in the hermetic tradition, is linked with that of the Egyptian cross […] in one of the [Vatican] frescoes, in the so-called Room of the Saints, Isis is seen at the center, seated on a throne with the emblems of her wisdom” (173). 10 In Spanish: “Tambores tambores tambores. / Te golpeo cielo, / tierra te golpeo. / Cielo abierto, tierra cerrada, / flauta y tambor, centella y trueno, / te abro, te golpeo. / Te abres, tierra, / tienes la boca llena de agua, / Tu cuerpo chorrea cielo, / tierra, revientas, / tus semillas estallan, / verdea la palabra” (lines 134-36). In Collected Poems, p. 320.

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The landscape is of a primal Earth scorched by a merciless god of fire (“este sol es injusto. / La rabia es mineral” [“this sun is unjust. / Rage is mineral”]) who watches an earth goddess (Coatlicue) give birth to Chalchiuhtlicue (“Her Skirt is Jade”), the goddess of water (“Te abres, tierra, tienes la boca llena de agua” [“You open, land, your mouth is full of water”]). Through “ultrarapid exposure” (Marcel Duchamp 141), one goddess morphs into the other, with the latter being the equivalent of an ancient Mesoamerican manifestation of the Great Mother who presides over marriage ceremonies as a sign of fertility.11 This female divinity is simultaneously the male demiurge of the Rig Veda who tears his body to pieces, with his mouth becoming Brahma (Convergences 277). This chain of analogies in Tantrism is explained by Paz as follows: “The relation between the universe and the human body, and between the body and the poem, is repeated in painting and sculpture […] Analogy is a river of metaphors” (Convergences 274).

Fig. 4. Chalchiuhtlicue, Goddess of Water

The cosmic imagery in Blanco clearly unifies themes of creation, tremors, gendered consorts, and the lunar calendar, with direct 11

Chalchiuhtlicue is the consort of Tlaloc, the god of rain, caves, the underworld, source of earthquakes and earth monsters such as the crocodile (cipactli), agriculture, and one city: Teotihuacan. To the Aztecs, this city represented the origin of the Fifth Sun of movement.

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correspondences to the birth of humans and their fate. In her study on Teotihuacan’s influence on post-Classic Mesoamerica, Doris Heyden refers to Chalchiuhtlicue’s associations with a city’s origin and human birth: The insignia of the city of Mexico is an eagle devouring a snake, perched upon a nopal cactus that grows from a rock on top of a cave, and from which flow streams of blue and red water […] The symbolism of blue (or green) and red (or yellow) was important in traditional Mexican thought. For example, when a child was born, the midwife addressed Chalchiuhtlicue, advising the goddess of water that she was bathing the infant in blue water, in yellow water. Evidently, these two colors (for red was synonymous with yellow, and blue with green) had deep meaning for the people. (176-77)

Blanco’s chromatic symbolism stems from plural mythic sources, now Egypt, then India, including Mesoamerican codices and rituals for the birth of cities or humans. Symbolically, a fourth day of Creation (but the third in the Judeo-/Christian tradition, as described in Genesis 1:9-11), this section of Blanco registers an evident shift from yellow and red to green, with the movement of colors representing the birth of a goddess whose fertility brings forth all of Nature and the promise of culture in the references to musical instruments (flutes, drums) with religious functions. The birth of a water goddess as a dancing deity or a whirling planet (“girando girando”) is described in the poems flanking the right and left sides of the central column where, for the first time in Blanco, they fuse and merge as in a primordial sexual act that will spread creation throughout the Earth: “se levanta se erige Ídolo…desnuda como la mente…girando girando” (“rising erecting an Idol…naked as the mind…turning turning” lines 147-48, 150). The fourth section marks the world-making stage in Blanco, with the appearance of Coatlicue (the Aztec earth goddess) giving birth to Chalchiuhtlicue (the goddess of water), who is associated with fertility and the cleansing of newly-born infants, thus prefiguring the birth of the first human couple.

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Figure 5. Coatlicue

In Blanco, Tlaloc and Chalchihutlicue parallel Shiva and Shakti, with this female consort closer to Kali than to the benevolent PƗrvatƯ, as recalled by Paz in his book In Light of India. In other words, between 1965 and 1995 there are visible changes: the younger Paz writing Blanco leans toward analogies between Kali and Chalchihutlicue/Coatlicue because of their associations with the forces of nature, the horrific symmetries of the sacred, and regeneration. The Kali-artist associations turn into a variant of “unequal” relations ruled by Kali, the night-blue Goddess whose presence is significant in Paz’s poetry. In the Tantric tradition, Kali stands over the body of the slain lover with decapitated heads as war trophies: note the eight arms of Kali, repeated in Blanco in the eight poems that “embrace” the central column of six poems, hence fourteen fragments that suggest the sacred, sacrifice by dismemberment, and fate: the congregation of the scattered members.

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Fig. 6. Kali, the Black Tantric Goddess

The kundalini in Blanco’s central axis announces Kali’s hierophany as India’s ancient tribal goddess. Kali’s cult is associated with ritual dances, possession, fire-walking, menstrual blood, lunar cycles, and a mountaindwelling goddess whose origins predate the Aryan and Muslim invasions of India. Kali’s devotees abound to this day and are associated with tribal, dark-complected aborigines. “Some of the areas where Kali dominates the religious landscape,” writes Sarah Caldwell, “are at the edges of the physical subcontinent of India—at the seashore, in the Himalayan foothills, […] in Bengal” (259). Kali is generally portrayed with a garland of decapitated heads, a skirt of men’s arms, menacing, destructive, and sexually powerful. Conversely, Kali’s cult is based on Motherhood, the cure of diseases, and “men disguised as women” (266). Hugh B. Urban studies Kali in relation to her political symbolism in India’s nationalist movement: From the outset, the extremist leaders of the nationalist movement had made use of traditional religious and mythic themes to legitimate their revolutionary activity […] But surely the most powerful symbol employed by the revolutionaries was the Tantric goddess Sakti, particularly in her

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most frightening incarnation, Kali. Although Kali has long appeared in Indian mythology as a goddess of military power and violence, her largely mythological figure was to assume a very concrete political role in the context of colonial Bengal […] Kali, the bloodthirsty image of India in an age of foreign oppression. (93-94)

The book contemporaneous with Blanco is Conjunctions and Disjunctions, described by Paz as follows: “These are ruminations in the shadow of Coatlicue: destruction through movement or through immobility. A theme for an Aztec moralist” (8). Paz, however, harbors no nationalist sympathies in relation to ancient goddesses; his views on Mesoamerica’s past (a civilization torn constantly by internal wars) are similar to his interpretation of India’s modern history: The English left an invaluable legacy in India: democratic institutions, the rule of law, and modern administration that the Indians had the talent to maintain. But they also left intact the ancient religious, ethnic, and cultural traditions. Those divisions […] quickly turned into bloody civil struggles. The result was the current tripartition: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. (In Light of India 100-01)

Paz’s service as Mexico’s ambassador in India, Aghanistan and Sri Lanka, next to his life-long interest in Mesoamerican civilization, specifically the Nahua, led him toward a trans-cultural (Tantric) weaving of the Mother Goddess: Kali, Chalchiuhtlicue, Coatlicue, Virgin of Guadalupe, thus from ancient to colonial eras, from a native polytheism to a conquering monotheism. According to him, these are cultural junctures that connect the histories of India and Mexico (In Light of India 79).

Fig. 7. The Ganges River

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VI: Blanco, lines 225-318 This section parallels Blanco’s poetic prologue both structurally and thematically, suggesting a nostos or round trip: it journeys by itself with no lateral poems, and it registers an evanescence of language (note the absence of punctuation) and life so abrupt as if to emphasize the ephemeral nature of the lovers’ existence on earth. The sixth section marks, consequently, Blanco’s “epilogue,” one which dramatizes a couple’s metaphysical pilgrimage that leads to incarnation, followed by a journey back to primal matter. Features of the primordial garden are found, such as the tree (“El árbol de los nombres” [“The tree of names”] and “El árbol nim que nos protege” [“The neem tree that shelters us”]), an archetypal season (“primavera nocturna” [“spring night”]), the nudity of the Eve-like female, and the simultaneity of Creation: instead of six days, only one night (“esta noche / [esta música] / Mírala fluir” [“this night / (this music) / Watch it flow”]): the green thunder ripening in the foliage of the sky You are naked like a syllable like a flame 12

The simultaneous representation of a pilgrimage toward incarnation and back to the origin illustrates what has been a recurring pattern in Blanco, with different stages and ages spinning and spiraling in a temporality that includes past, present, and future: in other words, an eternal present in constant rotation. The total absence of punctuation in this epilogue speeds up the tempo of our reading, stripping away the syntactical cohesion of language. On the other hand, the reference to a tree that embodies Adam’s poetic faculty of naming nature (“El árbol de los nombres” [“The tree of names”]), stands next to a tree (the neem tree) associated with healing powers and an erotic life (Collected Poems 643), thus implicitly erasing the notion of original sin and the biblical stain on an eroticism meant for mutual pleasure and not for procreation. The analogy between the woman and the flame— swaying, burning, cleansing—is telling: there is no hell for lovers. Given 12

In Spanish: “el trueno verde / madura / en el follaje del cielo / Estás desnuda / como una sílaba / como una llama,” lines 304-09, Collected Poems, 330.

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the Alpha and Omega structure of this section, the imagery of the Garden of Eden and the end of the world find expression in the language of apocalypse, with revelations and visions in the midst of thunderclaps, storms, whirlwinds, and lightning: the world / the body / spirit enters a phase of violent implosion and collapse: At the center of the world of the body of the spirit the cleft the splendor No In the whirl of disappearances the whirlwind of appearances Yes The tree of names No is a word Yes is a word they are 13

they are air nothing

The opening lines in section six trace the Romantic discourse that Paz has claimed as his own, with its language of the sublime, violent storms, dreaded night, and lightning with its thunderclaps. There is a centered world, an axis mundi, and by implication a sacred space inhabited by a founding couple (cuerpo, espíritu), suddenly caving in (“la grieta”) under the illuminated sky (“el resplandor”) of a world about to end, suggested by the whirlwind of appearances and apparitions and the throw-back of language (“la palabra” [“the word”]) to the music of cosmic alliteration (“aire son nada son” [“they are air nothing”]), clearly punning with “son” (“they are”), and “son” (a rhythm). Paz’s admiration for the poetry of Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) rings in our ears with a “son” and sense that unify the scattered limbs of the poem: a world that is body, spirit, tree, language, nothing.14 13

In Spanish: “En el centro / del mundo del cuerpo del espíritu / la grieta / el resplandor / No / En el remolino de las desapariciones / el torbellino de las apariciones / Sí / El árbol de los nombres / No / es una palabra / Sí / es una palabra / aire son nada / son,” lines 225-38, in Collected Poems, 326. 14 See Góngora’s sonnet CLXVI (“Mientras por competir con tu cabello” [“As long as burnished gold gleams in the sun”]), which ends with the famous line: “en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada” [“earth, vapor, shadow, dust, nothing at all”]. This sonnet is included in The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance, and translated by Edith Grossman (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 142.

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The poem: an animated space, a constellation of signs, and a lightning bolt (Vajra) that “also stands for the male sex organ in Tantric rites and language. The vulva is the ‘house of vajra’ and also wisdom […] The two metaphors in the end become one: a fusion of the macrocosm and the microcosm” (Conjunctions and Disjunctions 7). The continuous references to atmospheric forces such as torbellino, remolino, trueno, relámpago and centella represent the cosmic expansion and contraction of Creation, revealing the nature of the spirit, the body, and the world as mere illusions and ingenious inventions: “En el torbellino de las desapariciones / el torbellino de las apariciones” (lines 229-30). There are then three different poetic settings in this section: Creation’s sublime dimension, with its sound and fury, contrasting with the silent condition of the couple, macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds that converge as signs written by the poet on an animated page. In Paz’s writings, this is a metaphor for the incarnated instant, the fourth dimension; not a poem of the absolute, but one that is open to it: How can we distinguish between apparitions and appearances?, Octavio Paz in his book on Marcel Duchamp.15 He answers: “The fourth dimension is the heaven inhabited by apparitions, which are archetypes or molds of beings here below […] a sort of “mirror-image,” a being made of reflections […] the shadows of the fourth dimension” (143). In the first part of the Duchamp book originally titled Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza (written a month after Blanco), Paz defines the fourth dimension as part of a hermetic tradition in the West, meaning “the moment of the carnal embrace, during which the pair fuses time and space into one unique reality. The fourth dimension is the erotic dimension” (42, my emphasis). Was Paz writing Blanco with Duchamp’s work in mind, or did he analyze the latter’s art through his poetics? In other words, is it a question of Duchamp’s well-known claim: “The spectator makes the picture” (Marcel Duchamp 85). What is important is that Paz specifies the 15

The first part of the Duchamp book appeared under the title Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza in Mexico in 1968. In December 1972, Paz wrote the second essay on Duchamp, titled “Water Writes Always in Plural.” Both essays were published in an English translation in 1978 under the title Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. Our immediate interest should be in the fact that the first part of this book was written in Delhi in October 1966, therefore one month after Paz completed Blanco, written between July-September of the same year. Our reading of Blanco depends not only on the authorial notes and reading instructions at the beginning of this poem, but also on other books and essays by Paz, from El mono gramático to Conjunctions and Disjunctions and the book on Duchamp, to name a few.

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intentionality of his poetic language, providing a key that enables the reader to make sense of his work as he analyzes the Simultaneist art of the avant-garde. Admittedly, we are not given all the keys to the castle: the fourth dimension means more than an erotic embrace or the interplay between apparitions and appearances (archetypes and their shadows). The fourth dimension contains a physics and a philosophy of life that have inspired artists across the ages, from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí.16 Blanco’s poetic structure stems from a triptych tradition that plays with time, both synchronically and diachronically, and in agreement with Paz’s poetics of the instant and simultaneity. The notion of “simultaneity” thus acquires an importance that is undeniable if we are to understand Blanco’s spirited tempo, which defines it from beginning to its last line. It allows us to understand that the fast poetic movement is the equivalent of ultrarapid exposures of an un-hinged world that is now dismembered. This world is therefore in a swirl of residual fragments and signs that rotate on a cosmic axis with the millennia of past civilizations, Cubist images of life on earth whirling in fragments, with the poetic couple about to join the maelstrom: thus, from conception and birth to a brief life in Paradise—but without Bosch’s image of hell. We can now reread the poetic juncture between section five and six as being not necessarily a snapshot or brief instant that marks the couple’s birth, maturity and tacit dissolution as taking place in a few lines. The poetic image is a temporal illusion, broken by a self-referential moment of metalepsis; it is the unexpected voice of the poet: fluttering among the lines of an unfinished unfinishable page Thought fluttering among these words 17 16

In Marcel Duchamp Appearance Stripped Bare, Paz discusses the difference between the art of Hieronymus Bosch and that of Marcel Duchamp, see p. 73. In later pages, he describes Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) in words that could well illustrate both Bosch’s painting and Blanco’s journey back to the cosmic origin: “different moments in the journey back toward original form” (160). 17 In Spanish: “revoloteando entre las líneas / de la página / inacabada / inacabable / El pensamiento / revoloteando / entre estas palabras,” lines 240-46, Collected Poems, 326.

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Fig. 8. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1504

The image of a revelation as apocalypse is abruptly transgressed with these lines which speak of thoughts whirling around a page as if searching for syntax and semantic coherence in the act of writing. The poetic voice is thus clearly self-referential and metapoetic in the sense of it marking an entry into the poem by the poet himself, who rewrites the image of apocalypse as the end [goal, purpose, revelation] of the poetic imagination when the word is written on the page. This motif first appears in section four (“El cielo se ennegrece / como esta página. / Dispersión de cuervos” [“The sky blackens / like this page. / Scatter of crows”], lines 127-29), then emerges in this section in embodied form. The synchronicity that characterizes the sixth section would also explain the repeated appearance of the junctural lines that functioned as hinges between one section and the next, signifying the simultaneous whirl of past, present, and future in the fourth dimension where ancient fragments of a World Culture—Egypt, India, Mexico—rotate in a centripetal temporal vortex in which chronometric time has lost its mundane sense and meaning. Although the hinge-like lines in Blanco resonate with their synchronous apparitions throughout the sixth section, let us look closely at Blanco’s concluding 13 lines (lines 305-17), signaling repeated lines in italics:

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Octavio Paz and India You are naked like a syllable like a flame an island of flames the passion of compassionate coals (2: line 52) The world a bundle of your images (4: line 161) drowned in music Your body (5: line 214) spilled on my body (5: line 203) seen (5: line 215) dissolved (5: line 215) brings reality to seeing (5: line 224).18

Given that the epilogue contains echoes of the prologue and the repetition of internal poetic lines instead of a conclusion of its own, the circular structure of the poem turns into a cognitive formal possibility for the reader. Blanco clearly has no conclusion; instead, if one associates the poem’s implicit cosmology with Mesoamerican myths of creation, the notion of multiple creations comes to mind. At this point in Blanco, Paz leaves India and returns to the legacy of modern poetry in the West. Indeed, there is absolutely no temptation in Paz to “go native”; his critique of the modern is launched constantly from the trenches of ancient classicisms—Asia and Mesoamerica as frequent critical dugouts.19 As of The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Paz’s modernity is founded on a negation of the modern, and Blanco’s modern body is tattooed with ancient codes and signs not altogether impenetrable. Besides being a worthy avatar of his 1957 poem Sunstone (and a continuation in fascinating ways), Blanco is a critique of Indo-European civilization at the

18

In Spanish: “Estás desnuda / como una sílaba / como una llama / una isla de llamas / pasión de brasa compasiva / El mundo / haz de tus imágenes / anegadas en la música / Tu cuerpo / derramado en mi cuerpo / visto / desvanecido / da realidad a la mirada,” lines 305-17, Collected Poems, 330. 19 A repressed source in our reading of Blanco has been Euripides, close to Paz’s poetics and a center piece in The Bow and the Lyre. Necessarily ignored was Euripides’s play Bakkhai, with the image of the young Dionysus reaching the West (Thebes) from his Asiatic origin (“After I set everyone in Asia / Dancing and founded my rites there”), thus as an exile back to his western home. In Euripides’s play, we find the same images that interest Paz in Blanco: earth goddesses, lunar cults, erotic rites, women who, in a frenzy, slay their loved ones, the dismembered bodies (sparagmos), the loving assembling of the limbs, and so on. See Euripides, Bakkhai, trans. Reginald Gibbons (New York: Oxford UP, 2001).

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level of empires and a reflection on a cultural triad: sexuality, eroticism, and love.

Fig. 9. Salvador Dalí, Galatea of the Spheres, 1957

As observed at the beginning of this essay, Paz defined modernity by its otherness: to be modern means to reject the present tradition in favor of an anterior age which, once life is breathed into it, returns with the renewed force of its own passion for contradiction and creation—the true mission of an avant-garde. Blanco’s structural composition, with an initial and concluding rotating chaos and maelstrom of fragments, can now be read as a poem composed during the Cold War and as an ideogram of the world seconds after the detonation of a hydrogen bomb—but with a poet’s moral courage while imagining Nothingness. More so than an emphasis on ancient India, or a proposed cultural syncretism as a remedy to global troubles, Blanco is a series of “ultrarapid exposures” of appearances (the worldly shadows, replicas) and apparitions (the archetypes) with a fuguelike representation, synchronous and contrapuntal: “For a mere instant we are the oculist witnesses” (Duchamp 141). In the opening pages of In Light of India, Paz affirms that he was born again in India the day of his marriage to Marie José in 1964. “It was a

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second birth,” Paz writes, thus claiming India as his second homeland. A Cubist image: the Simultaneity of plural places of birth, the near and the distant, like the Pyramids of Giza behind the Eiffel Tower in Robert Delaunay’s painting. After reading Blanco, for a mere instant we are the oculist witnesses. Transparency is all that remains.

Works Cited Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Caldwell, Sarah. “Margins at the Center: Tracing Kali through Time, Space, and Culture.” Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West. Ed. Rachel F. McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 249-72. Cantú, Roberto. “Octavio Paz and Blanco: Ancient Civilizations, Modernity, and the Poetics of Simultaneism” Boletín Octavio Paz 1.1 (April-May 2009): 13-18. —. “Points of Convergence: Ancient China, Modernity, and Translation in the Poetry and Essays of Octavio Paz, 1956-1996.” Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond. Ed. Ignacio López-Calvo. Newcastle, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 228. Carrasco, David. City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Cottington, David. Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905-1914. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Durán, Manuel. “Irony and Sympathy in Blanco and Ladera Este.” Octavio Paz. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. 173-81. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Euripides. Bakkhai. Trans. Reginald Gibbons. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Fein, John M. Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems, 19571976. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986. MacAdam, Alfred. “Tiempos, lugares, encuentros.” Octavio Paz. Obras Completas, Miscelánea III. Vol. 15. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003. 326-54. Paz, Octavio. Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey. Trans. Jason Wilson. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999.

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—. In Light of India. Trans. Elliot Weinberger. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,1997 —. The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. —. Obra poética (1935-1988). Barcelona: Seix-Barral, 1990. —. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. Trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner. New York: Arcade, 1990. —. The Monkey Grammarian. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Arcade, 1990. —. Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. —. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Ed. Eliot Winberger. New York: New Directions, 1987. —. Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987. —. Conjunctions and Disjunctions. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: The Viking Press, 1974. —. Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the AvantGarde. Trans. Rachel Phillips. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1974. —. Blanco. Illuminated by Adja Yunkers; intro. Roger Shattuck; trans.Eliot Weinberger. New York: The Press on Washington Street, 1974. —. The Bow and the Lyre. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. —. Configurations. Trans. Muriel Rukeyser. New York: New Directions, 1971. Poniatowska, Elena. “Suma de Octavio Paz.” Octavio Paz. Obras Completas, Miscelánea III. Vol. 15. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003. 315-25. Smith, William. Classical Dictionary. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1996. Snellgrove, D.L. The Hevajra Tantra. Vol. 1. London: Oxford UP, 1959. Urban, Hugh B. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Language of Passion. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000. Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics. London: Cambridge UP, 1979.

THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S ORIENTALIZATION OF THE MAYA CARLOS MIGUEL BAZUA MORALES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

This paper will address the social and ethical responsibility of individuals and institutions towards the present social conditions that affect millions of Maya people throughout Guatemala, Mexico, and also the United States, since there is now a growing number of Maya migrant communities in this country coming from Mexico and Guatemala. These Maya migrants come from regions that have largely been studied by Western academics since the middle of the eighteenth century (Stephens 1843, La Farge 1931, Redfield 1934, Farriss 1984). On the other hand, the fascination with the great ancient cities and temples has attracted millions of tourists who visit the region’s main attractions: pyramids, ancient preHispanic cities, jungles, beaches, rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Although the Maya region is rich with natural, cultural and historical resources, the indigenous inhabitants of the area both in Mexico and Guatemala are excluded from the economic profit and benefits of these resources. The magnitude of the Maya migration requires that we develop an understanding of these communities and their cultures. An examination of the concept of “Maya” is related to the power relations embedded in the making of identities and histories; that is, a consideration of who writes history and for whom it is written. In his book Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said explains how imperial hegemony is characterized by the twinning of power and legitimacy. On the one hand, there is a direct domination enforced by military power and on the other hand is the cultural sphere, dominated by a handful of American trans-national corporations that control “the manufacture, distribution, and above all selection of news relied on by most of the world” (Said 1993:292). News may not be the same as history, but news do make history. And news media have a great influence in guiding people’s opinions about all types of social and economic issues. This, as Said explains, is a clear example of the cultural control that

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emanates from the United States to the rest of the world. Hence, by establishing ownership of the means of production, of creating, circulating, images and representations of “truth” through news, American media hegemony reinforces the political and economic decisions taken to subordinate weaker states or peoples around the world. Therefore, what I will analyze here is how the Maya people and culture are represented in today’s mass media. From this perspective, Said’s concept of Orientalism is a useful tool for this endeavor. In his influential work from the late 1970s, Said explains that by Orientalism he means several interdependent things: An academic field or institution for scholars that research the Orient; a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the “Orient” and the “Occident”; and the large body of knowledge produced in texts during the colonial empires of Great Britain and France and later of the United States (Said 1978: 2-4). Hence, for this essay I use Orientalism as a concept that refers to the representation, the imitation, or the depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by scholars, writers, designers, artists, and politicians that reinforce this duality. Consequently, to understand the concept of Orientalism, we must acknowledge the relationship between those who are able to write, reproduce, and diffuse their ideas versus those that are not. That is why, there are, as Said explains, varying degrees of these complex hegemonic practices, characterized by the relationships of power and domination. Thus, one cannot approach the subject of Orientalism without considering the political sphere of the international world market and its effect on the peoples in the lowest stratum of the social order. In this case those referred to are the indigenous peoples of the Americas, more specifically those that are known as Maya. It is essential to understand that both the Guatemalan and Mexican States have denigrated, abused, and excluded its indigenous populations for centuries. For that reason, it is worthy of note that now, through their migration, these different Maya groups add to the multicultural diversity of the United States. It only takes careful observation in various cities of the United States to realize the vast diversity of Maya peoples living under the shadow of the mainstream due to their often undocumented legal status. Oddly enough, as many scholars have presented through their work, the same national and economically driven interests and institutions that label them “illegal” are the ones that, through regional and international economic and political systems, are directly responsible for the uprooting of these people from their homelands. Regardless of how these groups of survivors are labeled– exiles, refugees, migrants, or immigrants–it is

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imperative to recognize the historical processes of war, exploitation, and displacement that the Maya have suffered in both Mexico and Guatemala. Today it is the economic interests of the political parties and economic elites of Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States that have extended the genocide and exploitation of the sixteenth century into the twentieth century. There is an essential cultural and historical continuity that cannot be ignored. Maya movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the PanMaya intellectual renaissance in Guatemala are clear examples of the ongoing struggle for self-representation and freedom from economic and political subjugation by the nation-States of Mexico and Guatemala. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Guatemalan President Rafael Carrera (1840-1871) through very liberal governmental policies, granted property rights to the indigenous peoples of Guatemala, then referred to as “Indians.” Later, General Justo Rufino Barrios (1871-1885) responded to the international pressures of the need for an agro-export economy driven by United States investments. Consequently, in 1871, he organized a coup that overthrew Carrera and abolished any property rights given to the indigenous peoples. Barrios assured US investors that labor conditions and infrastructure would be favorable to their business interests by implementing the mandamiento, a government policy that required mandatory labor service for the government. The policy mainly materialized through road construction and plantation work. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and its effect on world coffee prices, then President Jorge Ubico established “vagrancy laws” in 1934 as a national policy. This policy replaced the mandamiento in more invasive and exploitative ways. All people with neither a legitimate profession nor sufficient farmland were required to work 100 days of the year for landowners. Accordingly, such discriminatory and racist measures coerced 90 percent of the highland population into performing forced labor for the landed elite (Thompson 52). In order to understand Guatemala’s Maya Diaspora, it is necessary to analyze US policy and involvement in this process. The US influx of weapons and military training for the CIA-sponsored coup in 1954, for example, has shown the complicity of the US government with US agribusiness corporations in Guatemala such as the United Fruit Company, which benefited from cheap and even free Maya labor. Today, it is also the US demand for cheap labor, cheap food products and wellmanicured lawns, that has increased the pull factors for Guatemalan migrants into the US (Thompson 179). Unlike Guatemala, Mexico’s rich oil industry gave this country a strategic position that was wisely exploited through its good relations with Cuba, its support for the Central American guerrillas, and its open borders

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to leftist political exiles from throughout South America. The end of the twentierh century reflected a deep polarization between Mexico and the United States as their international relations and foreign policies differed greatly. Nonetheless, the focus of their relations was trade. After Mexico’s economic crisis in 1982 caused by the foreign debt, President De la Madrid (1982-1988) began moving Mexico toward an export economy and joined what would later become the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the early 1990s, President Salinas de Gortari followed the steps toward trade liberalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted (Papademetriu 6). On January 1, 1994, the day the agreement took effect, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) composed of mainly indigenous Maya from Chiapas declared war on the Mexican State. It has been more than fifteen years since this Maya indigenous uprising began. However, many changes have transformed the political landscape of Mexican politics and the Zapatista movement has had to adapt to a changing national and regional political environment. The analysis of the Zapatista movement and its contemporary challenges to the Mexican state and civil society are beyond the scope of this paper. The point I want to emphasize is that in Mexico there is an indigenous Maya movement of resistance to national submission and assimilation, and through the evolution of the movement, they have become more and more marginalized from the mass media and from Mexican politics. From this perspective, I argue that the Orientalization of the Maya people has been a constant activity carried out by politicians, businessmen, Western academics and mass media from the United States, Mexico and Guatemala. This process of Orientalization, as an intellectual activity, has developed and imposed a hierarchy of representation and ownership of geographical territory. In this sense, it is a way of studying and representing a post-colonial society. For the most part, these “Orientalists of the Americas” have disregarded the human rights violations perpetually suffered by these diverse populations. Instead, they have chosen to romanticize and highlight their ancient and “mysterious” glories. Although I do not intend to generalize by arguing that all Western academics and knowledge producers of the Maya are Orientalist, I will point out particular cases that demonstrate how the West’s mass media and scholarly discourse still have a tendency to fall into Orientalist representations of “the other,” in this case, the Maya. Notwithstanding, the presence of artists, activists, intellectuals, and academics in the struggle for human rights has been essential and must not be ignored. For instance, the works of Dr. Allan Burns and Dr. Charles D. Thompson, among many others, have been essential sources of information regarding the unjust

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social processes through which Maya populations have survived. These seminal works have also been the core of various works that have followed the same path of solidarity with subjugated populations. In other words, because of their work of documenting the abuses and ways of survival of the Maya population, and by supporting the struggle for human rights though the creation of great ethnographies that denounce the attacks on the Maya, they represent the antithesis of what I am calling the “Orientalist of the Americas.” It was not hard to find the perfect mass media example of the Orientalization of the Maya peoples. As Peter Hervik explains, The National Geographic Society has constructed the Maya as museum pieces, part of the dramatization of the archeological wonders that can be known by the intrepid visual tourists of its Western readership (Hervik 59). For that reason it seems pertinent to analyze how the Maya have been represented from an Orientalist perspective in the mass media’s production, using National Geographic Magazine in the beginning of the twentieth century as a case in point. This process of Orientalization by the mass media contributes to the misrepresentation of the contemporary Maya, while millions of members of these marginalized communities continue to be either considered second-class citizens in nations like Mexico and Guatemala, or are leveled “illegal aliens” in the United States. In the beginning of Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said reminds us of the particular responsibility of the citizens and intellectuals of United States due to the fact that they live in a large country that is an enormously influential and frequently interventionist power all around the world (Said 1993:54). Hence the urgent need of attention by intellectuals and society as a whole is needed in order to rectify the economic and political consequences of this morally unacceptable subjugation of people based on their cultural and linguistic histories. The National Geographic Society was founded at the end of the nineteenth century and the Maya have been a favorite topic ever since. As Peter Hervik observes, between 1925 and 1975 there were 68 sponsored projects producing dozens of articles on the Maya (Hervik 65). Up until today, few academics would want to criticize or question the perspective produced by The National Geographic Society on the Maya because it is still a strong funding resource. Nonetheless, unlike archeologists who depend on bigger budgets for their research, social anthropologists do not need to be in good terms with the views of an imperialistic output of culture like National Geographic Megazine. As Orientalism in the Western world speaks for those “others” of the Orient, most anthropologists who work with Maya communities would agree that

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National Geographic still represents an evolutionist perspective on the social world, as its speaks about the Maya and for the Maya, a characteristic that I point out to be Orientalist. Another trait of Orientalism is that of the ownership and authority of those it speaks for, hence the importance of ownership of the material in the form of knowledge that results from an archeological dig. The sponsored projects of National Geographic are owned by the Society, meaning that they have the right to financially exploit the findings that result from their research. In The Conquest of America: the Problem of the Other (1982), Tzvetan Todorov focuses on various issues of representation and power relations dealing with moral and ethical questions proposed by intellectuals. By dedicating the book to a Maya woman who was eaten by Spanish war dogs in the first encounters of the sixteenth century, he is claiming that the atrocities committed in the past should not be forgotten, especially considering that the time of this publication, the early 1980s, was the time when the “scorched earth” policy1 was in effect, massacring at least 200,000 people in Guatemala among whom the vast majority were Maya. Unfortunately, atrocities are not a thing of the past but clearly something of the present. The State violence against more than 600 Maya villages in Guatemala during the 1980s, their economic hardships in Chiapas and Yucatan, and the repression and low-intensity warfare by the Mexican army in Chiapas since 1994 are examples of the on-going human rights violations toward the Maya population. Adding to the traumatic experiences of the Maya in their homelands, Maya in the United States have experienced a new wave of immigration raids and deportations. I mean a “new wave” because on May 1, 2006, thousands of people across the nation marched in the streets; some say that for the first time thousands that lived in the shadows came out to march for their rights. The response was a harsh wave of raids in the homes of thousands of migrants. Many reports tell of non-uniformed personnel knocking on the door, people opening it, and a swat team storming in and sweeping through the house, taking everyone into custody. These raids, however, have not targeted specifically the Maya: they have targeted working-class families from all over Central America and Mexico. On July 25, 2008, an article in the newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle by Carolyn Lochhead explained that arrests in the US based on the persecution of undocumented workers 1

The scorched-earth policy or war was the major thrust of the counterinsurgency campaign against the civilian populations that were or could have helped the leftist Guerrillas. As Susanne Jonas explains, the goal was literally to annihilate the populations that lived in the area where the guerrilla movement operated and to eradicate its civilian support base (Jonas 1991:149).

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have risen sharply from around 1,200 arrests in 2005 to approximately 4,500 arrests in 2008.2 This is due to the increase of raids that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) conducts in Latino and immigrant neighborhoods. One of the largest attacks on undocumented working families occurred this year in a meat packing plant in Iowa where nearly 400 undocumented workers, mainly Guatemalans, were arrested in the largest worksite immigration raid in US history.3 The point Lochhead underscores is that non-Latino ethnic groups would not tolerate these raids. It would be a scandal if such raids occurred in Anglo, Asian, or African-American neighborhoods or working places. The point of comparison is relevant as the article explains that the charges against arrested international undocumented workers abducted by the raids (fraud for using a false social security number and aggravated identity theft) are violations that are also committed by non-Latino and non-immigrant populations. Angrily Lochhead states, “When dealing with Anglo identity theft subjects, is federal law enforcement going to start cordoning off white neighborhoods or workers, handcuffing and detaining everyone, and only then sorting out the accused?”4 Nonetheless, as Todorov suggests, what we need to think about is an analysis and an explanation of the ways in which both national and international power structures enable the Law to act in such ways. By analyzing the cultural output of the representation of the “other,” we will see how Maya people are directly affected by the recreation of a great past followed by a collapsed civilization whose remains are the wretched survivors seen today merely as uncivilized peasants. Therefore, I argue that the non-recognition of the “real history” of the Maya is due to the constant romanticization of the great achievements of the ancient Maya whose objective seems to be to sell it as merchandise to attract tourism. A perfect example of this type of scheme took place in the summer of 1994, when former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari went to Chiapas to publicly celebrate the archeological finding of the Red Queen in Palenque, in the mist of the Zapatista uprising. Therefore, while he celebrated the uncovering of a great Maya tomb and appeared in the front cover of major newspapers, he attacked the modern Maya population who had organized itself and demanded land, democracy, work, health, and other basic human needs. Likewise, the Discovery Channel and National 2

Lochhead, Carolyn, “Workplace immigration raids called harsh, punitive.” The San Francisco Chronicle (July 25, 2008). 3 It is not specified in the article if the detainees were Maya. 4 Lochhead, Carolyn, “Workplace immigration raids called harsh, punitive.” The San Francisco Chronicle (July 25, 2008).

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Geographic have produced many stories and videos on the subject of the city of Palenque, its most known ruler Pacal, and the Red Queen, while completely ignoring the deep social polarization and the complexity of the Zapatista struggle and its “Mayaness.” In 2004, two close friends of mine from Mexico City were hired to film a Discovery Channel docudrama in which the story of the Red Queen was reconstructed. In their script, they invented and incorporated into the story some war scenes whose action and drama highlighted the “mysteries” of the identity of this royal figure. Who was the Queen? What did she look like? Was she the mother or wife of the great Pacal? Where did she come from? While millions viewed the Discovery Channel documentary, outside the internet pages of the independent media, the work of a growing number of Maya video makers remains largely marginalized and inaccessible. In consequence, the mass production and representation of the great ancient but collapsed Maya prevails over the real struggling surviving Maya of the twenty-first century. I do not mean to imply that archeological practice and the reconstruction of the past is a futile and socially irresponsible phenomenon. I began studying archeology and went to work on a dig in Dzibanche, Quintana Roo, while the Zapatista rebellion had only a couple of months of struggle. However, I could not dig out royal tombs of the ancient Maya while the contemporary populations where waging a revolution in Mexico. So I quit my archeology dreams fueled by too much Indiana Jones and decided to pursue work in social anthropology and human rights. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the past and have many professors, friends, and colleagues who are archeologists and whom I deeply respect. It should also be noted that Mexico has gone through significant changes in the last two decades. Notwithstanding, my point here is that I understand our present existence as the outcome of a historical process in which economic and political hierarchical positions among cultures and nationalities have been imposed and maintained by the power of war. Our conception of nations and national boundaries is the outcome of violent clashes through which the militarily strongest has dominated the political, economic, and intellectual landscape. For this reason, the concept of Orientalism is essential in understanding the contemporary situation of the Maya and the importance of an academic tradition within the humanities that points out the misleading representation of people’s past and present cultures in support of social justice. If we take Said’s argument that Orientalism, as an intellectual practice, developed as an elemental part of imperialism, then the concept of Orientalism is even more relevant in the discussion of the rights of the Maya, whose colonial repression has extended to today’s modern

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economic and diplomatic policies which continue to condemn them to the lowest ranks in the social hierarchy. One of my main arguments is that the Maya diaspora is an urgent human rights issue. Why is this important? Because the vocabulary used to describe social phenomena is essential for recognizing the experiences that different populations have had in the past. I point out the Orientalization of the Maya people in order to reveal the symbolic power of mass media representation. Furthermore, the historical experience of the Maya people has been constantly overshadowed since the production of the accounts of the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century, through the exploration literature of the nineteenth century, magazines and travel guides of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, to the fantasy portrayal of the ancient civilizations in movie theaters. In all, native peoples have been repeatedly misrepresented in various romantic and degrading forms. Both Allan Burns (1993) and Peter Hervik (2003) have criticized the representation of Maya peoples by US mass media venues like the National Geographic Society. Although they never used the term Orientalization, I believe it is a useful analogy due to the power relations involved in the power of representation. Burns begins his ethnographic study, Maya in Exile, with a harsh criticism of the October 1989 issue of National Geographic Magazine with “La Ruta Maya” represented on its cover. He points out that the idea of “La Ruta Maya” was to represent an eco-tourist destination filled with wonder and mysticism among jungles and pyramids, without paying any attention or consideration to the Maya peoples and their contemporary situation of exploitation, forced displacement, and genocide. In Maya Identities and the Violence of Place: Borders Bleed (2001), Charles D. Thompson, Jr. explores the contemporary connection between the history of the Maya diaspora, its violence, and its economics, issues totally ignored by the National Geographic Society academics and reporters. He explains that North Carolina, Florida, and California have become entangled in the maze of paths that cross numerous borders for Maya people who as travelers, refugees, repatriates and survivors have managed to insert themselves in the world market economy, while at the same time reinforcing their identity. Their stories of crossing and survival must be understood as related to the direct involvement of international policies of the US in people’s lives, a major reason they now live outside their homelands. Thompson highlights that it is very interesting to realize that North Carolina, where this growing Jakaltec community has established a strong Maya community in exile, is geographically close to the military base of Fort Bragg where military officers of Guatemalan

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repressive regimes have been trained (Thompson 2001:179). Nonetheless, the US involvement in the exploitation of the Maya goes far beyond military assistance to the power elite in Guatemala. We must remember that Guatemala’s armed conflict only ended in 1996, and that by 1989, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional; EZLN) was also preparing for war in Chiapas, Mexico. Therefore, it is interesting that while the Maya population of the region lives in a hostile and volatile environment, in war with their respective States, venues like the National Geographic Society choose to solely focus on a tourist route to attract visitors to the marvelous ancient Maya sites. Rodrigo Liendo, an archeologist who works in the site of Palenque, Chiapas, explained to me that “La Ruta Maya” was a concept invented by some publicists of tourism; this idea was later used by National Geographic. It is evident, therefore, that scholars like Burns are preoccupied by the fact that the regions where the Maya people with whom he works (many of whom are escaping massacres and persecution) are being represented as an attractive tourist destination. For this reason, Burns is very critical of academics who study and glorify the past of the ancient Maya while simultaneously ignoring the plight of present-day indigenous inhabitants of the area. Hervik, also criticizing the same article dealing with the so-called “La Ruta Maya,” affirms that the National Geographic Society, since its foundation, has clearly avoided any controversial issue that relates to poverty, exploitation, or violence. It deliberately ignores any connection between the economic consequences of the world market economy and international policy and their effects on different cultures throughout the world. Along the same lines, the National Geographic Society has traditionally disregarded the active military intervention of the United States in other countries such as, in the case pertinent to the Maya, the training of and financial assistance to the Guatemalan army (García 2006: 26). Consequently, the purpose of the publications of the National Geographic Society is “a commercial mass-circulated cultural product that does not wish to bring disorder into the world view of middle class Americans” (Hervik 65). As both Burns and Hervik point out, in this process of commercialization, the Maya are used as a product. In this context, I argue that it goes beyond a commercialization; it is a process of Orientalization of the Maya that makes them as foreign and exotic as a person from the “Orient;” they become so foreign and distant, so strange and exotic that their existence becomes removed, mythical, and invisible. Hervik places special attention to the type of picture reporting that is represented on the pages of the magazine. His observations coincide

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perfectly with the implicit message of the cover of Said’s book Orientalism (1979), where a naked boy with a large snake in his hands is standing in front of an “Oriental” chief with his tribe of dark skinned men. They are being entertained by a snake charmer who is playing the music for the snake and the boy to perform. The representation of primitive men as beings who are naked due to their closeness to nature is a perspective perpetuated by the Orientalist. The cover displays the romantic view that the West has of the Orient, and by placing the naked boy as a central piece of the representation, it is clear that nudity and the acceptance and enjoyment of it, are a prime characteristic of the primitive and uncivilized men. Similarly, Hervik analyzes the opening picture of the 1989 article of “La Ruta Maya”; in it, a young man is portrayed in front of a distant archeological site. We can only see the focused “Maya” sweaty face and its naked torso. His anonymity and lack of ornaments and clothing clearly signify a “classic natural figure” in a timeless Maya dimension (Hervik 66). The main problem of the representation of this timeless Maya dimension is the ahistoric framework that is presented to the readers. The editors and author place special emphasis on creating a connection between contemporary Mayas to the archeological sites with the intention of boosting mysticism in order to attract tourism (Hervik 70). It is not their intention to make people aware of the fact that the Maya have been suffering from abuse, land dispossession, massacres and other human rights violations that intensified during the last decades of the twentieth century and that the world economic order imposed through military force is responsible for the underdevelopment of the Maya region. Appropriately, it is interesting to note that the August 2007 cover issue of National Geographic reads “Maya Rise & Fall; How a Great Culture Rose and Fell.” The focus is then directed towards the picture of a pyramid at the archaeological site of Tikal, one of the major cities of the Maya classic period. Hence, the reference is to those architectural wonders of ancient civilizations rather than to the contemporary Maya. For this reason, I will later expand on what “Maya” means. For the moment, it is evident that the title of the article does not refer to today’s Maya, the ones who have organized a political movement and a guerrilla in Chiapas, Mexico, or to those who live as second-class humans in the United States. Neither does it refer to the courageous Maya communities that have raised their voice against the human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan army, the same military that has based their identity on Maya symbols while at the same time acting as a repressive institution responsible for massacres against the Maya populations in its own

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territory.5 Thus, it is clear that the National Geographic Society is principally concerned with the archeological findings that highlight the glory of the ancient Maya civilization. Clearly, they are not interested in the efforts of socially responsible archaeologists who, in light of the political situation in their country, have decided to direct their scientific research to exhumations of mass graves with the purpose of providing evidence of the Guatemalan army’s responsibility for the massacres in 626 Maya communities (Loucky & Moors 2000:3, Manz 1988:17). These archeologists have created the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG).6 This topic is unlikely to appear in any issue of National Geographic or in any documentary of the Discovery Channel. The problem, of course, is not the research on the Ancient Maya; the issue, as Víctor Montejo points out, is that, as scholars, we must recognize the power relations that create a dynamic where the Maya are represented, through the academic circles and the mass media, as people that have fallen from their high levels of civilization into a culture of colorful submissive peasantry. This approach does not take into account the past 500 years of repression, exclusion, exploitation, and genocide inflicted upon them by the force of arms, economics, and politics. More importantly, it ignores their rebellions and their long-lasting survival strategies (Montejo 1999:15). It is precisely for this reason that the concept of Orientalization is important in order to understand how this misrepresentation of the social reality of the Maya is currently affecting the attention that the real history and struggle demand. We must, therefore, follow Said’s proposal to use “humanistic critique to open up fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short burst of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprisons us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective

5

The clearest example of this can be seen in the name of the special military forces: The Kaibiles. This special unit acted as the principal repressive and counter-insurgence bastion against the leftwing guerrillas and the civilian, peasant, Maya population. The name “Kaibil” comes from Kayb’il B’alam (Kaibil Balam), a Mam indigenous leader. 6 FAFG is a non-governmental organization that investigates, documents, and raises awareness of human rights violations through forensic examination. FAFG’s forensic anthropologists exhume clandestine mass graves and analyze human remains in order to enable criminal prosecutions to be brought against the perpetrators, many of whom are walking Guatemala’s streets freely. To date, FAFG have exhumed over 400 graves and examined 3000 skeletal remains.

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identity rather than understanding an intellectual exchange” (Said 1979: xxii). By now, I hope to have coherently explained why I believe that the term Orientalism is relevant when talking about the representation of the Maya. From this perspective, I intend to show that these same attitudes of imperialist relationship are taking place today. Since one of Said’s principal arguments is that Orientalism was used (wittingly or unwittingly) as an instrument of empire, I argue that the National Geographic Society is also an instrument of empire. Maya migrant communities are growing in the United States. Coming from Mexico and Guatemala, these migrants’ experiences have interesting similarities with those of the Maya in Mesoamerica but at the same time they also differ greatly. To understand the historical background of the migration of thousands of Maya into the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is essential to recognize the relation between US interests, Mexico’s economic policies, and the genocide that took place in Guatemala in the 1980s (Watanabe 30). In what follows, I will set out to examine the concept of “Maya” so that we can better understand the complexity of misrepresenting a largely diverse group of people. Who are the Maya? I shall refer to the Maya in the same manner as John Watanabe: Those people whose communities of residence or reference resemble one another in their differences from the national societies of Mexico and Guatemala. These communities speak some thirty related languages and exhibit cultural practices in common, as well as political subordination within Mexico and Guatemala that Maya activists on both sides of the border seek to rectify. (39)

Burns explains that the Maya are the largest group of people who live in their traditional lands in Central America and Mexico. The Maya live in Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico. Because of recent migrations, now the Maya diaspora stretches into the United States and Canada (Burns 1993:1). It has been estimated that there are sixty-two indigenous languages spoken in Mexico. The number of Maya speakers in this country is more than two million. After Spanish, Nahuatl, and Yucatec Maya are the most widely spoken languages.7 In Guatemala, there are 7

Yucatec Maya is spoken by 1,475,575 persons. It is the third largest language of Mexico, Spanish being the first and Nahuatl, the second. For specifics on the number of speakers of each of the Maya languages and other Mexican languages,

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twenty three indigenous groups. Approximately six million are Maya, which is half of the population of the country (Lovell and Lutz 1996). There are seven indigenous groups in Honduras, which represent close to 13 percent of the total population of the country. Among them, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 Chorti-Maya descendants who have not received much attention despite their activism and demands for property in and near the archaeological site of Copan.8 Interestingly, this uprising of the rightful descendants of the founders of this famous Maya city did not really make many headlines even though they took over the site. The authorities were able to negotiate a peaceful resolution to a volatile situation. It will be interesting to see how the Chorti and the Government of Honduras settle this dispute, since it could be a good predictor of the new type of relationships between the original populations and the nation-State. Both El Salvador and Belize have a comparatively smaller Maya presence. Their cultural and historical continuity as well as present struggles are far too complex to study them in this essay. With regard to their language, linguists break down the Maya language into five sub-families: Ch’ol-Tzotzil, Huastecan, Chujean-Kanjobal, Quichean-Mamean, and Yucatecan. All of these languages are natively spoken in Mexico and Guatemala. Maya languages are natively spoken in seven states of Mexico: Veracruz, San Luis Potosi, Tabasco, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Chiapas, and Yucatan. The 1996 Peace Accords that ended Guatemala’s thirty-two-year civil war recognized twenty two Maya languages. Burns argues that there are 26 distinct Maya languages in Guatemala and that they are as different from each other as French is from Spanish (1993:8). Víctor Montejo explains that according to linguists today, there are actually thirty-one Maya languages (2005:17). Concurrently, these sources clearly show the great diversity of languages that are spoken by Maya peoples. Today, through new patterns of migration, thousands of people living in the United States speak these languages (Burns 1993, Montejo 1999, Loucky and Moors 2000, Fink 2003, Adler 2004, Fox & Salgado 2004). I emphasize the complexity of the term “Maya” to show the difficulties of categorizing peoples without understanding their historical, cultural, and language diversity. It can be inferred that the term Maya applies to a wide range of distinct peoples. By explaining the diversity of languages see . Or visit Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas

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and cultures encapsulated in the concept of Maya, I hope to clarify any misconceptions about the term. I also want to point out the complex historical continuum of the Maya peoples that now live beyond national boundaries and speak more than thirty different languages. At the same time, I insist on the fact that they have managed to survive invasion, persecution, and violence for more than five hundred years. It is also important to understand the historical continuum because most of the popular representations of the Maya, as I have tried to argue, have Orientalized them and have focused exclusively on their pre-Columbian past, hence the association of the term “Maya” with pyramids and great ancient Mesoamerican cities. Montejo, a survivor of the massacres perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army during the early 1980s and now an anthropologist and Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, explains, in his book Maya Intellectual Renaissance (2005), how, for centuries, the Guatemalan government and the Guatemalan society in general have created and perpetuated the denigrating concept of indio (Indian) as being a second-class citizen while at the same time highlighting the importance of the ancient Maya for early nation-building and their creation of Guatemalan national identity (2005:1). Likewise, I argue that this is also part of the process of Orientalization by distancing the present-day Maya from their glorious and admirable ancient past. Hence, there is an incongruent discourse. While the elites construct a national identity through a valorization of the indigenous population’s glorious past and economically benefit from the archaeological sites as tourist attractions (once civic and ceremonial centers of the ancient Maya), they concomitantly maintain a racist and repressive attitude toward present-day indigenous peoples. Most importantly, they are able to control, to some extent, the process of representation of the Maya peoples. However, Montejo explains that after centuries of ideological, political, and economic repression of the Maya population of Guatemala, they are no longer passive about the representations that come from the Guatemalan elite and, most importantly, from Western mass media and academic institutions, whom I have called here the “Orientalists of the Americas.” Hence, as Said reminds us, the process of Orientalization has deeper implications than just misrepresentation. Its unveiling leads us to grasp the reality behind modern imperialism. Montejo explains the intricacies of the Pan-Maya movement in Guatemala, which emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. It can be understood as the resurgence of the Maya culture in response to the attack inflicted upon this population a State policy of genocide (2005:16).

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Hence, Pan-Mayaism can be understood in the context of the revitalization and resurgence of the inhabitants of the Mayab (the Maya-speaking region) who recognize aspects of a shared Maya culture and trace their common ancestry to the ancient Maya in a very simple way: “the Maya culture lives on, because we, its descendants, live on” (2005: 22). Montejo points out that since there is not one group that represents the Maya, we must understand the Maya culture as a complex system of ethnic groups, each forming a subsystem distinct and partially interrelated to the other ethnic groups. By recognizing this complexity we can begin to comprehend the concept that Montejo describes as the macro-Maya culture and the need to study both its particularities and its differences with this recognition in mind (2005:36). From this perspective, could we think of a macro-Maya migration? Can we acknowledge the great distress that these migrations create as the historical continuity of repression against the Maya? I argue that, following Montejo’s explanation for the need to understanding the Maya as a macro-Maya culture, we should refer to all migrations of the Maya, past and contemporary, as the macro-Maya diaspora. This way we can grasp the meaning of the power relations embedded in the historical continuity that has shaped the present hierarchical structures of power, as well as the reality of the violence, displacement, abuse, suffering, resistance, and courage that are involved. In conclusion, the macro-Maya diaspora is a social phenomenon that must be recognized. Could one convince the National Geographic Society to publish an issue of their magazine under this title?

Works Cited Burns, Allan F. Maya in Exile. Guatemalans in Florida. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. —. “Why do they hate us?—Reflections on Chiapas and Florida.” 1998 http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/1998_01/19980112.html, accessed March 3, 2009. Carmack, Robert M., ed. Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis. London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Farriss, Nancy M. Maya Society under Colonial Rule. The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Fink, Leon. The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Fox, Jonathan and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, eds. Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States. San Diego: Center for US-Mexican

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Studies and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2004. García, María Cristina. Seeking Refuge. Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Hervik, Peter. Mayan People within and beyond Boundaries. Social Categories and Lived Identity in Yucatan. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999. Jonas, Susanne. The Battle for Guatemala. Rebels, Death Squads and U.S. Power. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1991. Kearney, Michael, Carole Nagengast, and Rodolfo Stavenhagen. Human Rights and Indigenous Workers: the Mixtecs in Mexico and the United States. La Jolla, California: Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1992. La Farge, Oliver and Douglas S Byers. The Year-Bearer’s People. New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, 1931. Loucky, James and Moors, Marilyn M. The Maya Diaspora; Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000. Lutz, Christopher H. and George Lovell. “Survivors on the Move: Maya Migrations in Time and Space.” The Maya Diaspora; Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives. Eds. James Loucky and Marilyn M. Moors. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000. “A Dark Obverse”: Maya Survival in Guatemala: 1520-1994.” Geographical Review. Latin American Geography 86.3 (1996): 398407. Manz, Beatriz. Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counter Insurgency in Guatemala. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. —. Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. —. “Terror, Grief and Recovery. Genocidal Trauma in a Mayan Village in Guatemala.” Annihilating Difference. The Anthropology of Genocide. Ed. Alexander Laban Hinton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Manz, Beatriz, Xochitl Castaneda, and Allison Davenport. “Mexicanization: Survival Strategy for Guatemalan Mayans in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Migraciones Internacionales 1.3 (2002): 46-60. Montejo, Víctor. Mayan Intellectuals Renaissance. Identity of Representation and Leadership. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

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“Angering the Ancestors: Transnationalism and Economic Transformation of Maya Communities.” Pluralizing Ethnographies. Eds. John M. Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer. New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2004. —. Voices from the Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Nash, June C. Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2001. Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Remaking of the US-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002. —. “The Abuse of Memorialized Space and the Redefinition of Ground Zero.” Journal of Human Rights 4 (2005): 267-82. Papademetriou, Demetrios, John Audley, Sandra Polaski, and Scott Vaughan. Nafta’s Promise and Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004. Redfield, Robert. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Said, Edward W. Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. —. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Stephens, John L. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. Vols. 1-2. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Thompson, Charles Dillard. Maya Identities and the Violence of Place. Borders Bleed. Farnham: Ashgate, 2001. Warren, Kay B. Indigenous Movements and Their Critics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Watanabe John M. and Fisher Edward F. Pluralizing Ethnography. Comparisons and Representation in Maya cultures, Histories, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004. Womack Jr., John. Rebellion in Chiapas. An Historical Reader. New York: The New Press, 1999.

CHAPTER TWO CULTURAL PRODUCTION BY AND ABOUT ASIANS IN PERU

IDENTITY CONFUSION IN SIU KAM WEN’S “LA CONVERSIÓN DE UEI-KUONG” DEBRA LEE-DISTEFANO SOUTHEAST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY

Siu Kam Wen is quickly becoming the voice for the barrio chino in Lima, Peru, and perhaps, on a grander scale, the literary representative of what it means to combine art with the portrayal of the transcultural experience in the new homeland, especially in regards to the Chinese community. To be sure, although Siu has written many literary pieces that leave the barrio chino, it is precisely his ability to capture the often tumultuous inter and intra-cultural relationships that sets him apart from other writers. Indeed, Humberto Rodríguez Pastor has commented that “Siu Kam Wen presents his world to us, that of the Chinese community in Lima. For a social scientist it is valuable because it is like a testimony that truly reflects the life of the Chinese [in Lima] today”1 (239). Siu admits that his discussions of the barrio chino are deliberate. He states that when he writes, he looks to bring “added values” (Lee-DiStefano 125). These “added values” are the artist’s desire to “convey a philosophy or worldview, to give expression to their innermost, nobler emotions; to show the horrors and futility of war, to criticize the hypocrisies of modern society, to show the ugly faces of poverty, to advocate for social or political causes” (125). In his case, the barrio chino is often his ground for analysis of both the dominant and marginalized cultures. Yen Huei Lan concurs. In regards to the collection El tramo final, she states that “…this collection reflects the process of transculturation and its influence on the first and second generation of Chinese immigrants; that is, the formation of a new cultural identity with the mixture of two different cultures. Alternating generations will experience diverse processes of alienation and transformation” (148). Indeed, the collection is diverse in 1

“Siu Kam Wen nos presenta su propio mundo, el de la colonia china en Lima. Para un científico social tiene valor por ser casi un testimonio que realmente refleja la vida de los chinos en la actualidad” (239). All translations are my own.

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regards to its inclusion of the plethora of identity issues that can materialize when members of an immigrant community engage the outside, dominant community. However, as Huei appropriately points out, similar misunderstandings occur within the immigrant community when generational conflicts play out. Consequently, with each generation the definition of ethnic identification morphs into one that represents that generation. Plainly said, the defining process is elusive and arbitrary because it is totally dependent on the group forming the definition. To be sure, often what emerges is a clash between ethnic and cultural identity (Huei 153). The intergenerational conflicts within the immigrant community concentrate on whether it is better to be phenotypically compatible with and chronologically close to the origins of the community or to participate in the cultural practices associated with the group. Perhaps the story in the collection that most engages this issue is “La conversión de Uei-Kuong.” The author creates an atmosphere of genuine confusion, in both the minds of the readers and the characters because culture is, essentially, an imaginary construct respective to the characters. The reader witnesses the interaction between two characters largely separated by biological differences; culturally, they are very similar. It is, however, the question regarding one’s phenotypic, or ethnic, traits in the creation of a cultural identity in both the imaginary and symbolic spheres that comes to the forefront. The story tells of the genuine relationship that developed between Tío Keng and Uei-Kuong, who met on a plane in San Francisco that was heading for Lima. The oddness of the relationship emerges as the reader learns that Uei-Kuong is a kuei, or devil, who speaks perfect Cantonese. The fact that Uei-Kuong is a kuei is a constant source of consternation for Tío Keng. The story begins with Uei-Kuong coming to visit Tío Keng fifteen days before New Year’s Day. The reader learns that this is customary: ““[Uei-Kuong] arrived, as he had done every year for a decade […]. It was an early pai-nin (Siu 69).2 The reader learns that there is something about Uei-Kuong’s appearance and his interaction with Tío Keng that astounds the customers: “They spoke in Cantonese, in loud voices and without showing a single inhibition in regards to the many shoppers that were in the store at that moment. The shoppers just stared at Uei Kuong with their mouths open (70).3 The narrator then adds: 2 “[Uei-Kuong] llegó, como lo hiciera todos los años desde hacía una década [...]. Era un pai-nin adelantado” (69). 3 “Hablaban en cantonés, en voz alta y sin mostrar inhibición alguna frente a los numerosos parroquianos que había en la tienda en aquel momento. Estos últimos se habían quedado mirando boquiabiertos a Uei-Kuong” (70).

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Identity Confusion in Siu Kam Wen’s ‘La conversión de Uei Kong’ Tío Keng studied the way the shopper would watch his ex-shopkeeper with surprise […]. It was an expression that had seen more than a few times whenever Uei-Kuong would speak Cantonese. Generally the kueis would seem curious, if not mocking, whenever they heard Cantonese or any other Chinese dialect, but never when it was Uei-Kuong. (70)4

While Uei-Kuong is described as being muscular and in good shape, the reader is left to his own devices to figure out what would make the customers and Tío Keng stand in astonishment before the young man. This withholding of information builds tension as the reader seeks to find answers. In the next section the reader receives the answer. The story’s nonlinear nature brings the reader from the present to the past as a means of explaining the origin of the relationship between Tío Keng and UeiKuong. While waiting for the plane to disembark from San Francisco, the narrator informs the reader that Tío Keng and Ah-lang, his daughter, are the only Chinese on the plane. They are returning to Lima from a trip to Hong Kong where they had visited Tío Keng’s mother. The narrator states, “Now, surrounded by kueis on all sides, Tío Keng had no one to talk to, except to pay attention and respond to the silly questions his daughter would ask him” (71).5 The physical description of the passengers on the plane contradicts the fact that he hears someone speaking Cantonese. His daughter informs him that a man wants to speak with him, a man the reader will learn is Uei-Kuong. The first exchange between Tío Keng and Uei-Kuong occurs when Uei Kuong asks him in Cantonese if he can borrow his Chinese newspaper. The narrator’s portrayal of Tío Keng’s surprise is climactic: “For a few moments Tío Keng felt as if his ears were playing a trick on him. ‘This was a kuei’” (71)!6 It is at this point that the reader learns that Uei-Kuong is not Chinese, that he has not one drop of Chinese blood. The confusion that Tío Keng feels is extended to the reader. The search for some physical marker that would reveal some ethnic reason as to why this man would speak perfect Cantonese is never 4

“El Tío Keng se percató de la forma cómo los parroquianos miraban asombrados a su ex dependiente [...]. Aquella era una expresión que había visto en no pocos rostros cada vez que Uei-Kuong se expresaba en cantonés. Por lo general los kueis suelen mostrarse curiosos, si no burlones, cuando oyen hablar cantonés o cualquier otro dialecto chino, pero jamás cuando lo hacía Uei-Kuong” (70). 5 “Ahora, rodeado por kueis por todos los lados, el Tío Keng no tenía con quién conversar salvo atender y responder a las preguntas sosas que le hacía su hija” (71). 6 “Por unos segundos el Tío Keng tuvo la sensación de que su oído le estaba jugando una mala pasada. ‘¡Pero si éste es un kuei!’” (71)!

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discovered because it does not exist. Uei-Kuong gives the answer to the confusion by saying that he is a kuei. He was raised in China and did not know how to comport himself in any way other than like a Chinese man. Through the story that emerges, the reader learns that his mother had married a Chinese man, his stepfather, Lau. Uei-Kuong’s real name was Manuel Lau Manrique and he knew nothing of his own father. One day Lau decided to return to Pun-yi, China, taking his own children and UeiKuong with him. He gave the child the name Uei-Kuong, enrolled him in a Chinese school, and essentially converted Uei-Kuong into a Chinese boy. He lived his life as a farmer until his father was executed by the Republic. Uei-Kuong then went to Hong Kong where he came to know his real name and his country of birth. He then set forth to Lima to begin a new life in his native land (73-74). The knowledge surrounding Uei-Kuong’s past allows the reader to understand the title. “La conversion de Uei-Kuong” refers to his conversion from being born a kuei and his transformation into a Cantonese speaking Chinese. The conversion was cultural rather than religious but constituted just as great a change in mentality, beliefs, and morality as a religious conversion would. However, being that Uei-Kuong was only two years old at the time that Lau took him to China, one must question as to whether or not the young boy Manuel had enough cultural awareness to truly constitute a conversion. Conversion is defined as merely a change from one thing to another. In as much as a two year old can possess a way of life capable of changing, Manuel, who most certainly was hearing Spanish, living according to Peruvian customs and eating Peruvian food, was integrated into and consequently adopted the life of a Chinese. In every aspect of his being, regardless of his physical appearance, he was a Chinese man. Little is said about his life in China and Hong Kong, except to describe his life as being like all the other young Chinese boys. His confrontation with Tío Keng and his return to Peru, however, quickly demonstrate that Uei-Kuong is trapped between two ethnic identities: the one he physically, or ethnically, emulates comes into direct opposition with the one with which he has cultural ties. The narrator presents many instances where there is a collision between the two. The first is the strained scene at the airport when Uei Kuong meets his Peruvian aunt. The narrator says that she “couldn’t contain her emotions and practically fell on Uei-Kuong, covering him with kisses. Uei-Kuong was not used to such effusive ways of outwardly showing affection […] and remained as stiff as a piece of

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wood” (76).7 Emotionally, he was not used to the Peruvian way of showing affection. Second, Tío Keng had reservations about hiring Uei-Kuong in his store. He had never been robbed by workers of Chinese descent but kueis were known for stealing. In short, in Tío Keng’s mind “the kueis couldn’t be trusted” (76).8 He admits that the Chinese were not by nature more honest. It was simply a matter of logistics. The Chinese moved within the confines of the barrio chino and one bad deed could ruin one’s chances of finding employment elsewhere. However, as for the kueis there were “sufficient reasons to distrust, indistinctly, all kueis” (77).9 Yet there was something about Uei-Kuong that convinced Tío Keng to help him, a cultural connection that separated Uei-Kuong from the other kueis. Tío Keng was in constant conflict regarding how he should treat Uei-Kuong. As long as Uei-Kuong spoke Cantonese and Tío Keng did not have to look at him, all was fine. He could imagine that he was Chinese. But there were many moments when Tío Keng was brought back to the reality of UeiKuong’s physical ethnic heritage: When he was quiet, with that inscrutable expression on his face, or when he spoke what little Spanish he knew, Tío Keng would once again be overcome by fear and suspicion. All the mistrust [he felt] towards workers who were kuei would resurface […]. The illusion that Uei-Kuong was Chinese would disappear, and Tío Keng was forced to accept the unpleasant reality that through his employee’s veins ran not one drop of blood from the Yellow Emperor. (78)10

Tío Keng possessed such strong feelings regarding kueis that he could never fully accept Uei-Kuong, regardless of the fact that Uei-Kuong was often described as being more Chinese than even Tío Keng.

7

“no pudo contener sus emociones y prácticamente se abalanzó sobre Uei-Kuong, cubriéndolo de besos. Uei-Kuong no estaba acostumbrado a tan efusivas formas de exteriorizar los sentimientos [...] y se quedó tieso como un trozo de leña [...], incómodo y colorado” (76). 8 “los kueis no son de fiar” (76). 9 “suficientes motivos como para desconfiar, indistintamente, de todos los kueis” (77). 10 “Cuando permanecía en silencio, inescrutable la expresión de su rostro, o cuando se expresaba con lo poco que sabía del castellano, al Tío Keng le asaltaban temores y recelos repentinos. Toda la desconfianza hacia los empleados de origen kuei renacía de nuevo [...]. La ilusión de que Uei-Kuong fuera un chino se desvanecía, y el Tío Keng se veía obligado aceptar la ingrata realidad de que por las venas de su empleado no corría ni una gota de la sangre del Emperador Amarillo” (78).

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This brings us to the third manner in which the dissonance between physical traits and the imaginary cultural construct is revealed. Uei-Kuong asks Tío Keng to loan him money so that he can become a partner in another store. This was a very common practice in the Chinese community: “it is normal custom to make loans without asking for a guarantee or asking them to sign a contract” (79).11 Tío Keng had known about Uei-Kuong’s desire to borrow money for some time and had been trying to decide what to do. These types of loans usually were based on “the trust that one had in the person asking for the loan” (79).12 The fact the Uei-Kuong was not ethnically Chinese was the only reservation that Tío Keng had. The reader learns that Tío Keng decides to loan him the money. The reasons for this decision were that Uei-Kuong had been a good worker for Tío Keng and had never learned to speak Spanish well: The four years that Uei-Kuong wokred for him had erased many of the prejudices that he felt towards the kueis (being this isn’t completely true, the feeling he felt for this kuei were different from those he felt towards the others). In his eyes each day his employee was becoming more of a native Chinese than a kuei. Like all Chinese Uei-Kuong couldn’t speak even the most rudimentary Spanish well […]. Tío Keng had always believed that the Chinese were the people with the least aptitude to learn a foreign language; after meeting Uei-Kuong, he realized a simple question of aptitude or natural gift […], it was the difference between these speakers and their mother tongue. Uei-Kuong, for whom Cantonese was his native language and not Spanish, was suffering from the same ineptitude as all other Chinese. (81)13

The reader witnesses another conversion of Uei-Kuong, this time in the mind of Tío Keng. His decision to loan Uei-Kuong money essentially 11

“es práctica común dar dinero en préstamo sin exigir a cambio garantías, ni hacerse firmar letras u otros engorrosos documentos de respaldo” (79). 12 “la confianza que le tiene a la persona que ha pedido el préstamo” (79). 13 “Los cuatro años que Uei-Kuong había pasado con él habían borrado muchos de los prejuicios que sentía contra los kueis (de no ser esto cierto, por lo menos sus sentimientos hacia este kuei eran diferentes a los que sentía hacia los demás). A sus ojos su empleado se parecía cada día más a un chino nativo que a un kuei. Al igual que un chino, Uei-Kuong no podía hablar decentemente ni el castellano más elemental […]. Tío Keng siempre había creído que los chinos eran las personas con menos aptitud natural para aprender lenguajes; después de conocer a UeiKuong, se dio cuenta de que no era en realidad una simple cuestión de aptitud o don natural […] se debe a la diferencia abismal entre estos y su lengua maternal […]. Uei-Kuong, para quien el cantonés era su lengua materna y no el español, padecía de esa ineptitud de la misma forma de cualquier chino” (81).

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places Uei-Kuong within the confines of the cultural practices of the barrio chino. Tío Keng is symbolically showing his acceptance of the young man. The symbolic action allows him to treat Uei-Kuong as a member of the family. However, in the end the reader must question as to how complete this conversion is. The reader does come to learn that the loan was the origin of the visit that Uei-Kuong was making to Tío Keng at the beginning of the story. Even though he had already repaid the loan, the visit became a customary practice of paying respect to Tío Keng. The fourth manner in which we see Uei-Kuong’s cultural link to the Chinese community being questioned is when it comes time for UeiKuong to find a bride. Tío Keng’s wife works as match-maker; however, they realize that they are trying to achieve what is almost impossible. No decent Chinese family would allow their daughter to marry a kuei. After two failed attempts, they realize that the other Chinese have the same prejudices about Uei-Kuong that they had in the beginning. They decide not to mention Uei-Kuong’s nationality. As his name was Lau Uei-Kuong, they decided to let people think that he was a tusán. The narrator states that “he wasn’t really a very convincing tusán, because of his lack of Chinese features, but in the end, an unconvincing tusán was much better than a self-confessed kuei” (83).14 In the end, they do find a wife for UeiKuong, but it is not the belief that he is a tusán that earns him the bride. It was his comportment, his way of behaving like a Chinese man that would. The narrator states that “hearing Uei-Kuong speak fluent Cantonese and seeing him comport himself with timidity–a quality or defect that one could hardly expect from a kuei” was the behavior that worked in his favor (83).15 No deception, however small, could be more effective than UeiKuong’s own personality. As mentioned at the beginning of the analysis of this story, the concept of culture, particularly on the part of Tío Keng, is really an imaginary one. The only separation between the characters is phenotypic differences. In every other aspect, Uei-Kuong is as much a Chinese man as is Tío Keng. The narrator gives constant proof of Uei-Kuong’s affiliation with the characteristics that members of the barrio chino would find acceptable: his native use of Cantonese; his inability to speak Spanish; his mannerisms and his morals. Any rejection of Uei-Kuong by the Chinese community, and most notably by Tío Keng, would stem from the inability to overcome 14

“No era por cierto un tusán muy convincente, por su falta total de rasgos chinos; pero, a fin de cuentas, un tusán poco convincente era mucho más preferible que un kuei confeso” (83). 15 “escuchar hablar a Uei-Kuong en cantonés fluido y verlo comportarse con timidez-cualidad o defecto que difícilmente puede esperarse de un kuei” (83).

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the physical, ethnic barrier that Uei-Kuong’s appearance creates. Tío Keng’s concession to loan Uei-Kuong money and his admission that his prejudices are changing leads the reader to hope that Tío Keng has accepted Uei Kuong unconditionally. The closure of the story dashes any hope that this has happened. The narrator reveals that Tío Keng still can not overcome the physical barrier. The story ends with Tío Keng and Uei-Kuong sitting down to tea. UeiKuong was quietly eating his cake when the narrator states: Tío Keng watched him attentively and he didn’t like what he saw: when Uie-Kuong was quiet and sullen, he looked like a kuei. To break the unpleasant illusion the old man sat up and forced him to say, anxiously, “More tea?” The man with the pronounced nose that was right in front of him lifted his face from his cake and answered in soft, artful Cantonese, “Thank you, Keng tai-súk.” (86)16

The reader realizes that Tío Keng has not fully accepted Uei-Kuong as a Chinese. He cannot get past the physical difference, the only one that separates them. However, this separation for Tío Keng seems to take precedence. He requires a congruency between his sight and his mind. He refuses to let his mind process the fact that one could culturally be Chinese without looking like one ethnically. The story is very poignant on many levels. The author is deftly challenging the reader to read the story from many different perspectives in order to glean the most meaning from it. First, the reader is presented with an immigrant society with no qualms about not fitting into mainstream culture. Through the character of Tío Keng the reader is exposed to a culture that seems unwilling to acclimate to the new home. We are never presented with a reason; the distrust that members of the barrio chino feel towards the outside, the kuei, is only given to us through the narrator’s voice. From the dominant culture’s standpoint, it seems that reverse racism is taking place and that if steps are not taken by the dominant culture to change, it could be attributed to the fact that the immigrant culture never let itself become incorporated. This argument might work if it were not for markers that the narrator offers the reader

16

“El Tío Keng lo miró atentamente y la vista no le gustó: cuando Uei-Kuong se callaba y se ponía adusto, daba la impresión de que fuera un kuei. Para romper esta ilusión tan poca grata el viejo extendió de nuevo y se apresuró a decir, solícito, ‘¿Un poco más té?’ El hombre de nariz pronunciada que se hallaba enfrente suyo levantó su rostro del pastelillo, contestó en suave y cálido cantonés, ‘Gracias, Keng tai-súk’” (86).

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suggesting the opposite, that perhaps initial interaction caused a distrust to form. First, the narrator seems to be telling of the story from Tío Keng’s perspective. The reader is seldom told anything from the viewpoint of Uei-Kuong. Instead, it is Tío Keng who sets the tone for what is related. That being said, the narrator refers to this character as Tío Keng. Given that he always claims to rely solely on Chinese customs and the Chinese language, it is odd that he be referred to as tío, or uncle. We see that UeiKuong refers to him as tai-súk, which also means uncle. In the story, referring to him as Tío Keng rather than Keng tai-súk links the character to his new homeland. It is a linguistic marker that designates him as a Peruvian, manifested by being called by a Spanish name first. Secondly, the narrator, when speaking of Uei-Kong’s ability to gain consent to marry the young woman, the narrator’s refers to his “timidity-quality or defect” (83).17 The narrator seems uncertain as to whether or not this supposed Chinese characteristic is good or bad. One who felt certain that Chinese customs were superior would not offer this choice. Once again, Uei-Kuong possesses a characteristic that seems to be too Chinese perhaps from the point of view of the narrator. Lastly, we see Tío Keng’s surprise that UeiKuong speaks worse Spanish than he does. The narrator states that “his pronunciation was as deplorable as Tío Keng’s or even worse” (81).18 The question that seems to be asked is: Who is more Chinese, someone who is ethnically different but has freshly emerged from the culture, or someone who is physically compatible but has lived outside in complete immersion? In fact, the reader learns that Uei-Kuong speaks Cantonese better than Tío Keng, “who didn’t know how to speak the dialect until he was 18, when he went to live in the capital of the province” (77).19 This lack of naming what capital and province also brings up the question regarding Tío Keng’s own origin. He was visiting Hong Kong and the continent, seeing his mother for the last time. His origin is never explicitly mentioned. Not enough information is given to assume any answer but we are presented with one character, an outsider, who exhibits greater Chinese traits than an insider. Even if he were to be originally from China, the fact that he is referred to as Tío Keng depicts a certain amount of longevity in Lima, more than his counterpart’s first two years of life. Yen Huei Lan writes that the connection to language is often a discriminatory method. Typically, there may be a disconnection between generations where 17

“timidez – cualidad o defecto” (83). “su pronunciación era tan deplorable como la de Tío Keng o incluso peor” (81). 19 “no supo hablar el dialecto sino a partir de los dieciocho años, cuando se fue a vivir a la capital de la provincia” (77). 18

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language is concerned. She writes, “Through the reproduction of the local language Siu not only establishes a permanent connection with the source of his inspiration, China and Peru, but also reflects the social and personal reality of so many Chinese-Peruvians, who are neither totally Chinese nor totally Peruvian (154). In the case of Uei Kuong, language cannot be used as a barrier because the man in question speaks the immigrant language fluently and cannot speak Spanish, his supposed ethnic native language. The absence of information about Tío Keng, coupled with the expertise of Uei Kuong’s abilities to speak Cantonese, further demonstrate Siu’s interrogation of the community’s ideals and perceptions of cultural belonging and relevancy. Indeed, perhaps Siu has masterfully included a double metaphor which not only probes the Chinese community but also extends to the dominant society of Lima, questioning what it constitutes as a proper definition of what it means to be Peruvian. All of this brings into question what interaction between the inside world (immigrant community) and outside world (Lima) has occurred and what has made the Chinese distrust kuei so much. The narrator leaves many holes for the reader to fill in this respect. The author, through the voice of the narrator, seems to be posing the age-old question of nature versus nurture, with nurture definitely taking precedence. Uei-Kuong has proven without a shadow of doubt, through all the instances presented, that culturally he is Chinese; yet his biological traits oppose his cultural practices. The author seems to be showing the reader that judging anyone by a mere glance at the outside is imprecise and erroneous. One need not be born in a culture in order to practice it. The immigrant is capable of assuming the norms of the culture and of incorporating them with deftness. The author seems to be discursively attacking Peruvian law and society for not allowing him citizenship after residing in the country for twenty-five years and for not assuming that a native Cantonese speaker could learn Spanish well enough to write fiction (Siu 5). Lastly, in regards to the idea that this story works as a double metaphor that brings to the forefront discriminatory practices on the part of both groups, it is important to note that, to a certain extent, Lin Maan asked the same question. She queries if this is a collection through which the author is “able to criticize some of the Chinese practices and customs, calling them antiquated and retrograde” (Siu 7)?20 To be sure, Siu, on the one hand can demonstrate overtly, via the thoughts of Tío Keng, the schism that separated the Chinese community from Peruvians, and one can find 20 “es capaz de criticar algunas prácticas y costumbres chinas tachándolas de anticuadas y retrógradas” (7)?

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the historical evidence that explains how this distrust became so entrenched. Uei-Kuong could be a symbol for Siu’s early life in Peru and his inability to become a citizen and to be accepted as Peruvian, no matter how much he acclimated. However, Siu does not leave it at that. He also demonstrates the prejudice that the Chinese exhibit towards other Chinese who do not resemble what they define as being Chinese. The constant referral to the lesser Chinese status of tusáns and to the way in which UeiKuong is treated reveal that within the community, the same power structures that marginalized the Chinese from the greater community were also at work. Siu is astutely pointing to the hypocrisy of Tío Keng, and to a larger extent, of the Chinese community, for marginalizing others the way they have been marginalized. Indeed, one wonders if there will ever be a resolution. Siu’s stories achieve in their depictions what few Latin American stories with Asian characters have: it places the Chinese-Peruvian in the center and tells his story through psychological description of difference rather than physical markers of difference. The characters are Chinese; their experiences are told through their eyes as they would see their society. The evidence of their situation is not expressed as an opposition to limeña society but rather limeña society revolves around them and the issues that they face. There are few physical references of description. The author uses cultural markers such as language, manner of dress, and cultural practices to represent the Chineseness of his characters. This nonorientalist approach to the material demonstrates the naturalness and, dare I say, authenticity of the characters and their situations. Siu displaces the focus on the dominant culture, objectifying it while subjectifying the characters. That is not to say that the dominance of limeña society is not existent. On the contrary, Siu’s characters are all affected by it. The effect is so engrained that there is no need to describe it. What Siu manages to accomplish in his stories is a rewriting of the Peruvian experience. His characters are Peruvian; they just happen to represent another part of Peruvian society. Siu’s stories, when compared to other Asian-Hispanic writers such as José Watanabe and Pedro Shimose, actually bring to light, in an openly unapologetic manner, what the AsianLatin American experience is. Siu’s stories are examples of what Rustomji Kerns describes as “works of literature and art as creations of the writer’s or artists personal, unique vision rather than as ‘factual’ social documentaries for entire communities” (6). Through individual characters and their personal experiences, he is able to depict what the AsianPeruvian community faces in regards to cultural inclusion and the effects it has on their sense of identity.

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In conclusion, the vision of the transnational experience that permeates the works of Siu Kam Wen is but one of the many facets of what can be called the Asian-Latin experience. Not all authors, painters, journalists, or politicians hold the same viewpoints that Siu does. However, it is this conglomeration of difference of thoughts and ideas that make this field of study so fascinating. Further inspection of its varying histories and cultural significances can only serve to enrich the fields of academic inquiry.

Works Cited Lee-DiStefano, Debbie. Three Asian Hispanic Writers from Peru: Doris Moromisato, José Watanabe and Siu Kam Wen. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Rodríguez Pastor, Humberto. Herederos del dragón: Historia de la comunidad china en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2000. Rostmji-Kerns, Roshni. Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Siu Kam Wen. Cuentos completos. Morrisville, North Carolina: Lulu, 2004. Yen, Huei Lan. “Identity, Culture and Resistance in Two Stories of Siu Kam Wen.” Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond. Ed. Ignacio López-Calvo. Newcastle, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 146-55.

SHADOWS IN THE WIND: IMAGES OF THE JAPANESE IN THE WORKS OF NISEI PERUVIAN POETS JOSÉ WATANABE AND DORIS MOROMISATO REBECCA RIGER TSURUMI CITY COLLEGE AT CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Peruvian Nisei poets José Watanabe (Laredo 1946-2007) and Doris Moromisato (Chambala 1962-) create images of the Japanese that are striking in clarity, intensity, and depth. Tapping a rich vein of perceptions and emotions, they conjure indelible childhood memories of their Japanese/Okinawan immigrant parents and siblings and of lessons learned from their own unique perspective as second generation JapanesePeruvians. Although they speak to their readers in divergent tones reflecting generational, gender and sexual differences, Watanabe and Moromisato share common ground because of their Japanese heritage and experiences growing up in large families that lived from the land. Elements of Japanese philosophy, religion, language, and culture learned from their parents helped shape the poets’ creative expression. In their works, Watanabe and Moromisato allude to elements of bushidǀ, the ethical code of the warrior nobility, religious beliefs guided by Buddhism and Shintoism, as well as the Japanese kinship with art and nature, perhaps “the richest source of metaphors and symbols for many aspects of Japanese thought”(Asquith and Kalland 22). Unlike some Peruvian narrators without Japanese ancestry who set their Japanese characters down at a distance, these Peruvian Nisei poets draw their readers close, making the Japanese perceptions of the world transparent and personal from a knowing, insider’s perspective.

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José Watanabe Varas Viewed as “the most important point of reference for today’s young Peruvian poets”1 by Peruvian critic Eduardo Chirinos, José Watanabe received critical recognition of his prodigious talent from the very beginning of his career (Introducción, Elogio del refrenamiento 10). A member of the generation of poets of the seventies, Hora Zero and Estación Reunida, he won first prize in the prestigious competition for Poeta Joven del Perú in l970 for his book Álbum de familia (1971).2 In l989, Peruvian critics called his second book of poetry El huso de la palabra the most important poetry book of the eighties. When La piedra alada was published in Valencia in 2005, it became Spain’s number one poetry bestseller. As a final honor following the poet’s death in 2007, the Asociación Peruano Japonesa renamed its national competition of literary creation as the Premio José Watanabe Varas. The image of the Japanese that José Watanabe carried in his heart was that of his father, Harumi Watanabe Kawano, who left Japan fleeing the prospect of an arranged marriage and arrived in Peru without friends or family in l913 at the age of twenty. Although he came from an affluent Japanese family, the poet’s father began his new life working as a manual laborer on a Peruvian sugarcane plantation, which was the only job open to Japanese immigrants at that time.3 When he left Japan, Harumi Watanabe had already completed his academic training as an artist and had worked as a painter in his hometown of Okayama, a city in Chnjgoku on the southern coast of the island of Honshnj. Unlike most other Japanese immigrants, he chose a native Peruvian woman rather than a Japanese picture bride as his mate. Together with Paula Varas Soto, a young Andean woman from the sierras, Harumi Watanabe started a family in 1

¿Por qué, hoy por hoy, Watanabe es el más importante punto de referencia para los jóvenes poetas del Perú?” 2 In his introduction to Watanabe’s Elogio del refrenamiento, Peruvian critic Eduardo Chirinos observes that although Watanabe was a member of such groups as Hora Zero, Estación Reunida and the angry generation of the seventies, he still retained his “aesthetic independence” and became known as an “insular” poet. Chirinos adds that while keeping his characteristic insularity, Watanabe did adhere to some of the radical ideas of the groups but did not, for example, sign the manifestos of Hora Zero (9-10). 3 José Watanabe, personal interview, 30 June 2005. Watanabe revealed that his father never told him or his siblings about his initial experiences in Peru as a manual laborer at a sugarcane plantation near Lima nor share any details of his early bohemian life in Lima after he left the plantation and before he traveled to Trujillo.

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Peru which would swell to eleven children including José, the first of their offspring who was born in Laredo at the sugarcane plantation of La Libertad. While struggling to feed his growing family on a limited income, Harumi Watanabe set the coordinates of his son’s future as a poet by sharing his own knowledge of the arts, particularly painting and poetry.

The Poet’s Legacy in the Arts: Haiku In his essay “Elogio del refrenamiento,” José Watanabe recalls how his father instilled in him an enduring appreciation of poetic language which would lead him to develop a unique mode of poetic expression based upon haiku. While the two did their chores in the farmyard at their modest home in Laredo, Harumi Watanabe introduced his young son to the sounds and rhythms of haiku by reciting from memory and translating into Spanish the haiku of the renowned seventeenth-century Japanese master Matsuo Bashǀ. José Watanabe alludes to this poetic legacy from his father in the following passage: My father was a reader of haiku written in the style of Chikamatsu. In the midst of the chickens and ducks of the farmyard at my house, after taking long pauses for reflection, he used to translate those brief poems for me which I did not fully understand at the time. That was the first poetic language I knew. Haiku is an exercise in self-restraint when faced with one’s own discovery of beauty.4 (14)

It is this lifeline of haiku imparted from his father that sets José Watanabe’s poetry apart. In our interview, the Peruvian Nisei poet referred to his own haiku as “haiku recreado” (re-created haiku), since he did not follow the strict laws governing the number of syllables of haiku.5 For Watanabe, haiku are “those brief Japanese poems which represent an exercise in humility when standing before nature.”6 To carry on his

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“Mi padre era lector de haikus, que no están lejos de la poética de Chikamatsu. En media de los pollos y patos del corral de mi casa, me traducía, entre grandes pausas reflexivas, esos breves poemas que entonces yo no entendía claramente. Ese fue el primer lenguaje poético que conocí. El haiku es un ejercicio del pudor frente al propio descubrimiento de la belleza” (“Elogio del refrenamiento” 14). 5 The traditional haiku is an unrhymed poem consisting of seventeen syllables distributed in three lines of five, seven and five syllables. 6 “Aquellos breves poemas japoneses que constituyen un ejercicio de humildad ante la naturaleza.” José Watanabe, “Tilsa: La Pintora Bendita,” Caretas. Ed. 1636, 14 Sept. 2000,

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father’s legacy, Watanabe used to read haiku with his three daughters, one of whom was named Issa for Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) the renowned Japanese haiku poet of the late Edo period.7 In his poetry anthology Elogio del refrenamiento, Watanabe extols the haiku written by his father and by the masters Bashǀ and Arakida Moritake. In “Imitación de Matsuo Bashǀ,” the poet creates a poetic diary combining prose and haiku, using Bashǀ’s travel sketches as his model. In poetic prose he tells the story of his audacious escape with his young love riding on horseback into the foothills of the sierra. Welcomed at a rustic country inn owned by an honest, credulous innkeeper, they marvel at the natural beauty of nature and its creatures. The poem ends with a traditional haiku that teaches a moral lesson based upon the example of the lascivious mountain goats: the rapture of unbridled love is laden with danger: At the top of the crag gambol the he-goat and his mate. Below the abysm.8 (1-3)

Watanabe delineates his creative process: how a visual image inspires him to compose poetry in “Mi ojo tiene sus razones.” The poet suggests that his eye surveys the landscape taking in all the details until it fixes on one memorable sight that holds his interest. In the second stanza, the poet recites one of his father’s haikus to impress his love with his wisdom. Harumi’s haiku reinforces the overall theme: the artist’s eye scans the surface until it finds its mark. In addition to his admiration for haiku, Harumi Watanabe also transmitted his love of the arts to his son by sharing his precious art books and by exposing him to the enchantment of film.

The Poet’s Legacy: Film and Painting In our interview, José Watanabe recalled how his father, despite his limited resources, introduced him to the world of film and imparted a refined appreciation of the arts. It was at the Laredo movie theater that Harumi Watanabe took his son to see his first movie “Los milagros de Fátima.” This early exposure made such a powerful impression on the young Watanabe that he later became an inveterate film aficionado and accessed 22 Jan. 2007. 7 José Watanabe, personal interview, 30 June 2005. 8 “En la cima del risco / retozan el cabrío y su cabra. / Abajo, el abismo.”

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eventually a highly successful screenwriter whose most famous work was the feature film “La ciudad y los perros” directed by Francisco Lombardi and based upon Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel. Harumi Watanabe also shared his love of art with his son by pouring over his precious art books that contained reproductions of his favorite artists, especially Cézanne, Pissarro, Degas, and Van Gogh. When he was young, José Watanabe also dreamed of becoming a painter or an architect, and received artistic training like his father. He studied painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Trujillo but abandoned his classes there, as he did his architectural studies in Lima, when he finally chose poetry as his vocation.9 Watanabe linked that gift of artistic and linguistic sensibility to the pictorial quality of his poetry when he stated: “My poems are a kind of diary of a frustrated painter, because my poems have a pictorial basis […] I don’t paint, I ‘draw poems.’”10 Although the poet did not paint as his father did, he enjoyed drawing.11 Watanabe’s poetic process always involved a visual inspiration, “a sight that provokes thought.” For example, he wrote the poem “Piedra alada” after seeing a bird’s wing stuck to a rock on a beach. In our interview, he elaborated, “sometimes I see something poetic, a chance encounter. I like the tactile and the concrete. I always begin with something visual. I don’t have abstract thoughts.” The Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki also observed the intimate bond between art and poetry, especially between painting and haiku, according to the eminent scholar on Japan, Donald Keene in his book Dawn to the West (4: 99). To enhance the visual acuity of his images, Watanabe refers to some of the great artists of the world including Da Vinci, Goya, Chagall, and Munch. For example, in two poems from Álbum de familia (1971) included in the poetic anthology Elogio del refrenamiento, Watanabe alludes to the eighteenth-century Japanese masters Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. In “Acerca de la libertad,” the poet captures the abstract notion of freedom with simple visual images taken from everyday life. The poetic voice is a young boy who marvels at his ability to purchase a bird at the marketplace with the ease of someone buying a piece of fruit 9

José Watanabe, personal interview, 30 June 2005. “Mis poemas son una especie de diario de un pintor frustrado, porque en mis poemas hay una situación pictórica… no pinto, yo ‘poema.’” José Watanabe, personal interview, 30 June 2005. 11 José Watanabe, personal interview. 30 June 2005. The poet told me that he particularly loved the works of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the paintings of the “best Peruvian painter Tilsa Tsuchiya and another Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyslo.” 10

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or a bouquet of flowers. He refers to the legends surrounding a renowned Japanese artist when he writes: “They say that Hokusai bought birds in order to free them” (4).12 The poem reaches a climax defining the meaning of the word “liberty” as the young boy wrestles with the power that lies within his hands: “I am tempted to free this bird / to return to him / his right to die on top of the wind”13 (9-11). In “Las manos,” Watanabe begins a very personal elegy to his father by using the simple, visual, and tactile image of his hands as a metaphor for his father’s legacy. The poet’s hands are his living keepsake, a memento of his father’s love. The poet hints at the artistry of Utamaro to heighten the visual effects of this tender portrait of his father. When the poet looks at his hands he sees his father’s: “I say that these could very well be his hands/ lit like an Utamaro print/ from the faint image of a man beneath the rain”14 (8-10). While most Utamaro woodblock prints feature the beauties of the Yoshiwara district, one print in the book Shiki no hana (Flowers of the Four Seasons) shows a slender, poorly-dressed male peasant escorting the young women. With one bare hand, he holds up a wooden parasol to shield them against the driving rain and with the other hand, a lantern with which to light the way. In addition to transmitting his love of the arts and sharing his knowledge of language, poetry, and painting with his son, Harumi Watanabe also exposed him to the teachings of bushidǀ, Buddhism, and Shintoism, which, along with the poet’s own exploration of religious literature, found its way into his poetry.

Bushidǀ, Buddhism, and the Japanese Kinship with Nature The poet viewed his Japanese father not only as a source of cultural wisdom but as a model of ethical conduct whose refined dignity and natural restraint were firmly rooted in the teachings of bushidǀ, the 12

“Dicen que Hokusai compraba pájaros para liberarlos.” According to Masato Naitǀ, there were many anecdotes about Hokusai and his “flamboyant behavior.” As a young man, he went all over Japan demonstrating his artistic talent in what would be considered “the forerunners of action paintings” In a celebrated contest with Tani Bunchǀ, for example, Hokusai immersed a chicken’s feet in red paint and then allowed the bird to skitter across a piece of paper that he had painted blue. Hokusai called the piece “Maple Leaves on a River” (The Dictionary of Art 848). 13 “Estoy tentado a liberar este pájaro / a devolverle / su derecho a morir sobre el viento.” 14 “Digo que bien pueden ser éstas su manos / encendidas también con la estampa de Utamaro / del hombre tenue bajo la lluvia.”

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Japanese code of conduct prescribed for the warrior nobility that ruled Japan for centuries. The Japanese word “bushidǀ” literally means “the Way [dǀ] of the warrior [bushi].”15 In his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Nitobe Inazǀ explains that bushidǀ “is not a written code,” but rather a series of “maxims” that were transmitted by mouth or “ coming from the pen of a well-known warrior or savant.16 More frequently, it is a code unuttered and unwritten, possessing […] the powerful sanction of veritable deed and of a law written on the fleshy tablets of the heart” (35). Buddhism as a source of bushidǀ offered “a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death” (Nitobe 39). Nitobe goes on to elucidate the concept of self-control according to the teachings of bushidǀ when he writes: “The discipline of fortitude on the one hand, inculcating endurance without a groan, and the teaching of politeness on the other, requiring us not to mar the pleasure or serenity of another by expressions of our own sorrow or pain, combined to engender a stoical turn of mind…” (99). José Watanabe’s father passed along these lessons to his children by telling them samurai tales which he had learned as a child.

Watanabe’s Poetry Inspired by Bushidǀ In “Poema trágico con dudosos logros cómicos,” the poet adds touches of humor and wry irony to depict his family’s passive belief in destiny, their submission to the inevitable, and their stoic acceptance of death. The poetic voice describes how his family had adjusted to a life of poverty with grace and remained self-reliant without depending upon doctors or 15

Collcutt, Martin C. “Bushidǀ.”Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. 1983. According to Collcutt, the term “bushidǀ” was first used during the Edo period to refer to the ethical code of the ruling samurai class and included “not only martial spirit and skill with weapons, but also absolute loyalty to one’s lord, a strong sense of personal honor, devotion to duty, and the courage … to sacrifice one’s life in battle or in ritual” (221). From the mid-1880s and particularly after the Sino-Japanese War, he observes that bushidǀ found new expressions. He writes that Nitobe Inazǀ (author of The Soul of Japan) “presented bushidǀ, stripped of the most extreme of its militaristic, antimodern, and anti-Christian aspects, as a vehicle to define for Western readers all that was admirable in the Japanese tradition, including … politeness, generosity, honor, loyalty, and self-control” (223). Collcutt cites Nitobe who believed that the importance of bushidǀ which he felt “had spread from the warrior class to permeate all of Japanese society, was still alive in the physical endurance, fortitude and bravery of the Japanese”(223). 16

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priests. The summer sun made them healthy, natural plants and herbs cured their illnesses, and everyone died “with a touching modesty” (8). In accordance with the Shinto doctrine of honoring one’s ancestors, the poetic voice peruses his family tree in search of someone worthy of poetic remembrance but discovers that there is not one deserving figure among them. He belongs to a “tribe” of watchmakers, civil servants, innkeepers, and taxi drivers similar to the families of other Japanese immigrants in Peru. In the final stanza, he recalls an irreverent image of how they all used to walk along the riverbank, smashing toads with sticks. While his family reclines in the sun, the poetic voice concludes that they were all just as ordinary and resigned to death as the toads they left to die on the stones. In the poem “La Impureza,” the poet remembers the lessons of bushidǀ that his father taught him: that the individual must triumph over fear with courage, integrity, and goodness. While desperately ill in a German hospital where he is being treated for a mortal illness, the poetic voice speaks to himself as he tries to rally his forces against his “impurity.” In this antiseptic environment, the “impurity” or contaminant is his own fear of death and of his inability to measure up to his father’s expectations.17 His father had died a “beautiful” death with great dignity by using Japanese koto music rather than morphine to ease his excruciating pain and lift his spirits: The Japanese man died “eaten by a cancer more fierce than the eagles,” without money for morphine, but with what elegance, listening to with what elegance the notes first measured and later like a thousand hurtling from the koto of the Radio Hour of the Japanese Colony.18 (8-15)

Then the poetic voice recalls his mother, a hardened woman of the sierras, self-reliant and disciplined, who proudly displayed her strength even in old age, casting aside any pity for her troubles from the outside world. Neither the mother nor the father of the poetic voice is physically 17 In my interview with José Watanabe in 2005, we discussed the autobiographical basis for this poem when he was hospitalized for cancer at the age of thirty nine and was treated in a hospital in Hannover, Germany. 18 “El japonés / se acabó ‘picado por el cáncer más bravo que las águilas’, / sin dinero para morfina, pero con qué elegancia, escuchando / con qué elegancia / las notas / mesuradas primero y luego como mil precipitándose / del kotó / de La Hora Radial de la Colonia Japonesa.”

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present to lend him moral support, but his memory of their teachings and examples is strong. By the end of the poem, he decides to embrace his fear and to use it as a weapon to fight his battle and become worthy of his parents’ love. Watanabe’s thoughts about death reflect the influences of Buddhism as well as the Shinto belief in the importance of honoring one’s ancestors. Although his mother was Catholic and made sure that the poet and his siblings were baptized at the age of nine, José Watanabe told me that he was not a Catholic nor did he accept the Catholic hierarchy. He believed in transcendence, although he was not sure about the existence of a soul or spirit. If transcendence did exist, he said he hoped that he would become part of something larger than himself, like a mountain.19

Poetic Reflections on the Japanese Kinship with Nature The Buddhist belief in the continuity of man and beast in nature through time and space was a perpetual inspiration for Watanabe in his books Elogio del refrenamiento and La piedra alada. In “Escena de caza” and “En su caída,” the Nisei poet endows two creatures of nature, a deer and a gull, with the virtues of bushidǀ as they face death in unequal battles. Both creatures fight to the end with valor, rectitude, and dignity. In each poem, Watanabe builds remarkable intensity up to the climactic moment when the beaten prey turns to surprise its enemies with one final defiant gesture. Asquith and Kalland note that Shintoism teaches that divinity (kami) is present in different parts of nature, including the planets, trees, flowers, rocks, streams, animals, and even individuals with unusual qualities. In Japanese mythology, “natural phenomena are themselves offspring of deities” (2). In this context, in “El Ciervo,” the poet creates a creature so strong and perfect that it approaches divinity. The stag, however, does not appear in nature but in a recurring dream in the poet’s imagination. The poet created this stag of immense strength invested with immortality to represent and enable himself to courageously confront his illness. In “La oruga,” the poetic voice observes a caterpillar in its cocoon the day before it will turn into a butterfly. He assigns the caterpillar divine knowledge when he asks it to tell him the next day how it feels to fly. According to Buddhism, all things are linked together “in a web of interdependencies, both spatially and temporally, through the laws of cause and effect” (Asquith and Kalland 9). In the following poems, the 19

José Watanabe, personal interview, 30 June 2005.

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Nisei poet embodies the Buddhist belief in the continuity of man and beast in nature through time and space. In “El anónimo (alguien, antes de Newton),” the poetic voice discovers the yet unexplored force of gravity after throwing a stone off a cliff. He is satisfied with having observed the event, realizing that someday in the future another person will make the same discovery. In “La risa,” the poet injects playful humor into the concept of the continuity of man and nature through time as he travels from the present back to the past. While tearing down a house, some workers discover a set of paw prints on an adobe wall dated l910, and laugh when they imagine the anger of those old adobe makers and the dog’s frustration with cement stuck to its paws. Watanabe alludes to the physical link in the human brotherhood in his prose poem “El envío” which deals with an anonymous blood transfusion. The recipient of the blood does not wish to be indebted to more than one person but ultimately realizes that this is a gift of life from the entire human species. The poet completes the life cycle in “Los tablistas,” assuming the role of an old surfer who has reached an age when he accepts his limitations and no longer envies the young. He anticipates the actions of the young surfers and observes the eternal forces of nature symbolized by the returning white caps. In the poems of La piedra alada, José Watanabe explores the Japanese symbolism attached to stones and rocks that appear in nature and others that have been artificially arranged by man. Citing Hayakawa Masao, Joy Hendry writes that “there is a sympathy between stones and the inner world of human emotions” (96). The poet elaborates this concept further when he integrates movement and change over time, reflecting the Japanese belief that nature is not inherently static. With reference to the stones or rocks in Japanese gardens, Hendry explains that nature and culture in Japan are not viewed as being mutually exclusive and that the Japanese love nature “in an idealized form” but dislike “nature in the raw,” which must be tamed (84). According to Hendry, stones were worshipped in the gardens of Shinto shrines in order to communicate with the deities they were supposed to represent (96). The intention of Zen Buddhist gardens, on the other hand, is to direct the visitor’s attention inward in an examination of the inner self (96). In his haiku “Jardín japonés,” Watanabe interprets the purpose of the Japanese garden to promote introspection. The poetic voice instructs the reader on the proper way to view a Japanese dry landscape garden. He tells us that it was the spirit of a tranquil man and not an uncontrolled force of nature that chose the central rock, placing it on white raked stones at the Eastern part of this Zen meditation garden. Visitors should leave their worldly problems behind in order to

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contemplate the stone and learn its secret. Embodying the most treasured Japanese qualities—discretion and humility—the stone represents a mountain. In poems like “Las mariscadoras,” the Nisei poet invests the rocks with human traits such as pride, dignity, and tenacity to reflect some of the doctrines of bushidǀ. The dark rock that frolicked with the young shellfish gatherers by day when the tide was low must endure immersion in the sea when the tide rises in the evening. The next morning, the poetic voice suggests that the rock emerges with its unhappy pride intact in its solitary, independent existence. Some stones possess more power than the rocks that exist in nature, like the huge stone in “La conjetura,” which acts as a witness of truth, a protector of humanity through time, or may even possess divine knowledge. Watanabe shares a Japanese perspective when he links life, art, and nature in his moving testimony about the difficulty of artistic creation. Awakened by a sparrow’s song, the poetic voice is awash in a haze of exhaustion after spending the night searching for the perfect word. He contemplates whether artists, like other creatures of nature, must perish before achieving their goals. In the final verse, the poet calls out to God in the hope that someday all will be able to show Him the tenacity of their character and the depth of their artistic devotion.

Doris Moromisato Another Peruvian Nisei poet who has dedicated her life to artistic perfection is Doris Moromisato, who was born in l962, sixteen years after José Watanabe. The youngest of eleven children in an Okinawan farming family in Peru, Moromisato has drawn a moving portrait of the Okinawan immigrant experience in Peru and speaks for those who have struggled in a different way with their dual identity. In two collections of poetry, Chambala era un camino (1999) and Diario de la mujer es ponja (2004), she wrestles with formidable questions of gender, sexual preference, national identity, and her passion to preserve nature and the environment, embracing them as primary themes in her poetry. In Chambala era un camino, Moromisato offers an introspective view of her life that began in Chambala, a farming village east of Lima in the foothills of the Andes. Intense memories of her home, childhood, parents, and siblings are brought into focus with Japanese and Okinawan words and cultural references that enrich her poetry. As in Watanabe’s works, Moromisato shares a deeply-engrained understanding and oneness with nature and makes numerous allusions to Buddhism, bushidǀ, Japanese works of art and literature, as well as Okinawan customs and culture.

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With degrees in law and political science, Moromisato fiercely works to protect the environment from pollution which has already destroyed the life and natural beauty of Peruvian villages like her beloved Chambala. In her poetic prose introduction and conclusion of her book Chambala era un camino, she protests the damage from modern corporations who singlemindedly pursue profits without considering the consequences of their actions for the inhabitants of the lands they pollute. Like Watanabe, Moromisato writes in a deceptively simple, concise style to express the powerful emotions that give meaning to her life. In the title, dedication, and goals of her book Chambala era un camino, the Okinawan-Peruvian poet elucidates her belief in Buddhist reincarnation. Dedicating her book to her deceased mother, Moromisato hopes that her poetry will enable her mother to be reborn in her, resuscitate the past, and allow her to look back at her childhood. She wants her poetry to bring back the beauty of Chambala and to make her many deceased family members live once more. The images of the Okinawan people which emerge from Moromisato’s poetry are complex and at times contradictory. Her words reflect a rich cultural heritage with deeply-engrained gender differences and an added sense of marginality because of her lesbian lifestyle and her OkinawanPeruvian ancestry. Given their historical differences, the Okinawans and mainland Japanese in Peru tended to avoid each other. In her poetry, Moromisato draws a sharp dichotomy between her loving mother, Utoo Miasato Shikya and her distant, authoritarian father, Ansei Moromisato Taira, who came to Peru in l930 in search of a better economic future. In a series of poems about her father, the poetic voice alludes to his despondent spirit and cold demeanor, his severe, authoritarian manner, and his penchant for frightening his children with chilling tall tales. She stresses his stoic inclination, his attempts to follow the strictures of bushidǀ at all times, and his unfeeling, cruel treatment of her mother. In the first poem of the series “Mi padre” in Chambala era un camino, Moromisato creates a stark profile of her distant father probably as an old man and fixes her gaze on his most startling, distinguishable features: My father was blind in one eye. He was a man full of nerve. He had an old shirt and an eyelid drooping over a sad eye. …………………………………………… Sometimes I believed that my father was crazy he looked through his dead eye and swore to me that God turned over his black pupil

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Shadows in the Wind to make him see inside his heart.20 (1-4, 13-16).

Along the same lines, in “El fantasma de mi padre ronda mi pequeña habitación,” Moromisato suggests that her father is someone who learned from bitter experience that nothing endures, and therefore tries to teach that hard lesson to his youngest child so that she would grow up to be strong. One morning, while she dreamed of a profusion of blue tillandsias in a field of flowers, her father’s ghost appeared and tore off the heads of all the flowers. Afterward, he presented her with a bouquet of stalks and sadly declared that everything is short-lived just like the color blue. In the poem “El hogar,” the poet deftly alludes to the unquestioned authority enjoyed by her Okinawan father when she writes: “My father was a temple / the sun used to go down at five to die in his arms”21 (12-13). Although the poetic voice suggests that her father maintained his stoic composure and never showed the slightest interest in her thoughts or feelings, she is not entirely unforgiving. In poems like “La luna sobre el arrozal,” she smooths over the rough edges of his personality and examines him from all angles. The poetic voice delineates her father’s weariness after so many years of laboring in the fields, his exhaustion after struggling to try to learn Spanish, his sad longing for his beloved Okinawa and his quixotic insistence on singing the ancient Okinawan songs, accompanying himself on his homemade shamisen fashioned from an old guitar. Moromisato draws exquisite images from nature, creating an indelible vision of the unbounded affection she shared with her mother. In “‘Si silbas, vendrá despacio el viento,’” she recalls how her mother taught her to whistle while they sat on their mats like royalty, calling the wind to their reign. In her poem “El traje verde de las damas afiliadas,” the poetic voice praises her mother’s ingenuity for discovering that artichokes, the “damas afiliadas,” satisfed her children’s insistent hunger pangs which abated like the setting sun once they devoured them. In “Todas las nubes no alzanzan para nombrarte,” she defines the infinite parameters of the extraordinary realm she shared with her mother, which extended from the earth to the heavens. Not only did her mother teach her about the planets and the stars but also found ways to help finance her studies by selling her ducks and guinea pigs: “My teachers sprang from the guinea pigs and 20 “Mi padre era tuerto. / Era un hombre lleno de raza. / Tenía la camisa vieja y el párpado caído / sobre un ojo triste. … / A veces yo creía que mi padre estaba loco / miraba por su ojo muerto / y me juraba que Dios le volteó la bola negra / para que viera dentro de su corazón.” 21 “Mi padre era un templo / el sol iba a las cinco a morir en sus brazos.”

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ducks./ It was curious, really./ On weekends she used to sell them / and Kafka, Neruda, Heidegger and Woolf came into my life”22 (7-10). Even in her death, the poet’s mother quietly slipped away without any commotion, but only after completing all her household chores in accordance with the teachings of bushidǀ. In Diario de la mujer es ponja, Moromisato amplifies her view of the Okinawan/Japanese world as she revisits familiar themes of identity, family and marginality, adding cultural references to haiku, and ukiyoe woodblock art. In addition, in the title and poems of this collection, she makes definite references to her lesbian lifestyle. Beyond the sexual allusions of the title are allusions to her Okinawan/Japanese ancestry since “ponja” is the word “Japan” spelled backward. In the title poem, “La mujer es ponja” the poetic voice hints at questions involving identity and marginality. She reveals her lingering doubts and vulnerability about who she is because, as a lesbian and an immigrant’s child in Peru, she does not possess the proper pedigree to gain acceptance into Peruvian society. In “No puedo eludir la tristeza,” her anxiety at being treated as an outsider has physical repercussions because she suffers from persistent insomnia. The poetic voice imagines what it would have been like to have been “normal” like her sisters-getting married, raising a family, reproducing the ancestral line in accordance with the Japanese tradition. She knows that the path she has chosen means that she will never “elude her sadness.” Moromisato’s essay, “El mundo de afuera y el mundo de adentro: ¿qué es ser nikkei peruana?” is a fitting conclusion to the images of the Japanese explored by Watanabe and Moromisato, since it probes what it means to have dual identity in Peru. The poetic voice is that of a young girl who describes her memories of national holidays when her parents treated her and her siblings to movie tickets. During the opening ceremony before the film, the crowd rose to its feet to recite the pledge of allegiance and to sing the national anthem. At that moment, the poetic voice looks around her and feels the embrace of Peruvian identity: On national holidays they used to treat us to movie tickets. Scarcely were the lights turned out when the people stood up, and with their hands placed over their hearts, sang the national anthem in unison: “We are free, may it always be so…” From a short person’s limited view, I watched that serious gesture, my brother’s face melting into a sea of races, and the 22

“De los cuyes y los patos surgieron mis maestros. / Era curioso, en verdad. / Los fines de semana ella los vendía / y Kafka, Neruda, Heidegger y Woolf llegaban a mi vida.”

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Shadows in the Wind almost sacred moment when the red and white flag fluttered on the luminous screen. “Long live Peru!, the room erupted and all of my identities fused into one. But upon returning home, my father used to speak to my mother in the language of the old country and all the calendars with the Japanese kanji, the Buddhist altar and the Japanese 23 objects evoked an almost mythical realm on the other side of the sea. Okinawa: Un siglo en el Perú, (84-85).

Works Cited Asquith, Pamela J. and Arne Kalland, eds. Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. Richmond, Surrey, Great Britain: Curzon, 1997. Collcutt, Martin C. “Bushidǀ.” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd., l983. Hendry, Joy. “Nature Tamed: Gardens as a Microcosm of Japan’s View of the World.” Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. Eds. Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland. Richmond, Surrey, Great Britain: Curzon, l997. 83-105. Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. Poetry, Drama, Criticism. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol 4. New York: Columbia UP, l999. —. Diario de la mujer es ponja. Lima: Flora Tristán, 2004. —. Chambala era un camino. Lima: Centro de Comunicación y Cultura para la Mujer, l999. Moromisato, Doris and Juan Shimabukuro Inami. Okinawa: Un siglo en el Perú. Trans. Midori Hirata. Lima: Ymagino, 2006. Naitǀ, Masato. “Katsushika Hokusai.” The Dictionary of Art. New York: Grove, l996. Nitobe, Inazǀ. Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002. Riger Tsurumi, Rebecca. Personal interview with José Watanabe. 30 June 2005. 23

“Cada Fiestas Patrias nos premiaban con ir al cine. Apenas las luces se apagaban la gente se ponía de pie y con la mano extendida sobre el corazón coreaba el himno nacional: ‘Somos libres, seámoslo siempre…’ Desde mi pequeña estatura contemplaba aquel gesto grave, el rostro de mi hermano confundirse en un mar de razas, y el instante casi sagrado en que la bandera roja y blanca flameaba en el luminoso ecran. ‘¡Viva el Perú!’, estallaba la sala y todas mis identidades se fusionaban en una sola. Pero al volver a casa mi padre hablaba a mi madre en su idioma ancestral y los almanaques con sus kanji, el altar budista y los adornos japoneses rememoraban un reino casi mítico al otro lado del mar.”

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—. Personal interviews with Doris Moromisato. 1 July 2005 and 4 July 2005. Watanabe, José. La piedra alada. Madrid: Pre-textos, 2005. —. Elogio del refrenamiento: Antología poética 1971-2003. Ed. Eduardo Chirinos. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2003. —. “Tilsa: La pintora bendita.”Caretas 1636.14 Sept. 2000

accessed 22 Jan. 2007.

BUILDING THE NATION FROM THE OUTSIDE: FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP, AMERICAN WAR PROPAGANDA, AND THE BIRTH OF ANTI-JAPANESE HYSTERIA IN PERU IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

Deep are my feelings for the Latin country I call my “second motherland” —Seiichi Higashide I looked into the faces of these humble, bewildered people—shopkeepers, farmers, carpenters, barbers, and fishermen—starting out involuntarily on a voyage to an unknown future. These were not spies, saboteurs, bomb throwers, or plotters against the state. —John K. Emmerson, Third Secretary of the American Embassy in Peru

For some time now, anthropologists have praised how the flexible transnationalism of “nomadic” or multiply displaced subjects allows them to elude repressive state structures and state disciplining. In this context, referring to the cultural logics of Chinese transnationality, Aihwa Ong states that “‘Flexible citizenship’ refers to the cultural logics of capital accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions. In their quest to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes” (6). However, global conflicts have added nuances of victimhood to the purported liberatory benefits of the flexibility of transnational ethnicities. As we will see in this essay, under certain circumstances, the same deterritorialization and freedom of spatial constraints that can liberate subjects from oppression in their home nationstate can also lead to cultural othering and to the biggest spatial constraint of them all: imprisonment. As Ong posits, “even under conditions of transnationality, political rationality and cultural mechanisms continue to

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deploy, discipline, regulate, or civilize subjects in place or on the move. Although increasingly able to escape localization by state authorities, traveling subjects are never free of regulations set by state power, market operations, and kinship norms” (19-20). From this perspective, I will discuss issues of citizenship, national identity, and racial anxiety as they are affected by foreign wartime propaganda and represented in Adiós to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (2000) (Namida no Adiósu, 1981). This testimonial was originally written in Japanese by Seiichi Higashide (1909-1997), an Issei (or first-generation Japanese emigrant) born in the Japanese island of Hokkaido who migrated to Peru in 1930. Following in the footsteps of other successful Japanese immigrants, Higashide soon became owner of several stores and the president of the Japanese Association in Ica (a town 500 miles south of Lima).1 Yet his dream would be cut short when the United States State Department reached an agreement with the Peruvian government to arrest Japanese Peruvians and deport them to concentration camps (euphemistically termed “internment,” “relocation,” or “alien detention” camps at the time) in the United States in order to use them as pawns in the exchange of prisoners of war with Japan. While Higashide managed to escape recruitment for the mandatory military service in Japan while he was living in Peru, this host nation was more successful in locating and arresting him. Considering that the dark chapter of the deportation of Japanese Latin Americans to U.S. concentration camps had not received much scholarly attention until recently, the publication and translation of Adiós to Tears is an invaluable landmark that allows us to hear the story from the victims’ perspective.

1 As Higashide explains, his role model was the Japanese immigrant Shintaro Tominaga, who “had operated four types of businesses: lumbering, construction, smelting and rubber manufacturing. At one time he had employed more than 250 people and his business interests grossed up to 2 million soles a year” (46). He also lists other successful immigrants who belong to the their contract group: “Tatsujiro Kurotobi, who came to be almost a surrogate father for me; Sengoro Watanabe, the owner of the Watanabe company, to whom I was much obligated while in Cañete; Tajiemon Nishii, (my sister-in-law’s husband’s father) who built the Nishii Irrigation Waterway; Chuzo Fujii, who established the Suetomi business group; and my wife’s father, Kahei Yoshinaga, were members of that third group. They overcame unbelievably poor conditions to become inspirational ‘success stories’” (55). Among the deported Japanese Peruvians, Gardiner also lists Nikumatsu Okada, manager of six cotton-producing haciendas and Fukuichi Ikeda, owner of a successful bus and car-body factory (45).

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Adiós to Tears as a Testimonio The narration of this betrayal by the Peruvian government is precisely what makes Adiós to Tears a testimonial account: the first-person narrator goes from an explanation of his individual trials to become the synecdochical voice of all members of the Japanese Peruvian community during the Pacific War. As is typical of the Latin American testimonio, Adiós to Tears was the first work published by the testimonialist, who was not a professional author but just a witness and victim of international repression. Also in consonance with the tradition of the testimonio, Higashide’s main goal is not of an aesthetic nature. Rather, his writing responds to a twofold commitment. First, his desire to inform the historical memory and conscience of Peru, the United States, and Japan gives his book pedagogical overtones. Secondly, ethical concerns are at the core of most arguments: he denounces sociopolitical injustice and corruption, moves the reader to collective political action, and demands a public apology from the U.S. government as well as redress for the Latin American Nikkei deported to U.S. concentration camps. As we will see, he also exposes the shortcomings of the Japanese Peruvian community. In all, the testimonialist hopes that his voice will provide formerly interned Japanese Latin Americans with political agency and, what is equally important, with a page in the history of the Pacific War. For this reason, from the onset of the narrative he states his claim to historical truth. His book is part of a wider effort that expanded throughout his life in the United States (sending letters to members of Congress and even to President Ronald Reagan) to seek justice and redress for his fellow Japanese Latin Americans whose civil rights were flagrantly violated during World War II. When Higashide and his peers found out that the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians created by the U.S. Congress in 1981 was focusing solely on the abuses committed against 110,000 Japanese Americans, they decided that this commission also had to hear the voice of former Japanese Latin American internees. They were determined to expose how they were arrested or kidnapped between 1942 and 1944, imprisoned without charge in their respective Latin American countries, and transported at different times in seven different evacuation ships and one army transport airplane to Panama, and the United States. Throughout the account of this sadly bizarre chapter in wartime history, the testimonialist affirms the authority of his voice as an eyewitness and as one of the victims who lived those tragic events. Of course, readers have to take into account the input of editors (who

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organized and selected information, added photographs, and so on) and others who glossed his text (there is a foreword by C. Harvey Gardiner, a preface by Elsa H. Kudo, and an epilogue by Julie Small). Moreover, as any autobiographical text, Adiós to Tears is, by definition, subjective and it goes through a process of selection of memories that can lead to modifications or exaggerations of actual events. However, the veracity of Higashide’s perspective can be corroborated by contrasting it to historical studies such as Gardiner’s Pawns in a Triangle of Hate, Barnhart’s “Japanese internees from Peru,” Emmerson’s chapter “Japanese and Americans in Peru,” included in The Japanese Thread, and Personal Justice Denied, a report of the United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. As to the motivations for writing Adiós to Tears, the testimonialist cites the urging of his children to leave a record of his life for them. It is clear from the onset of this chronological account, however, that he directs it to a wider audience than his children, even if he chose to use his native language. Higashide’s autobiographic, historical, and testimonial account provides a revealing insight into the influence of wartime foreign political propaganda on the formation of nativism, nationalistic xenophobia, and racial anxiety. More specifically, it exposes the manipulation by U.S. intelligence agencies of public opinion about the Nikkei community in Peru. Adiós to Tears is also an important document to understand the perception and self-perception of the Japanese diaspora in Peru as well as its significance for the formation of Peruvian national identity.

Anti-Japanese Xenophobia in Peru As Higashide explains, of the 2,118 persons of Japanese descent (2264, according to Stephanie Moore) deported from thirteen Latin American countries, 84 percent (approximately 1,800) came from Peru and 1,094 were “family members who responded to the U.S. State Department’s summons to voluntarily join their interned fathers [and husbands], following a scathing protest by the Japanese government that the U.S. was inhumanely allowing women and children left behind to suffer” (177).2 Only 79 persons of Japanese descent (mostly Nissei and naturalized Peruvians) were allowed to return to Peru after the war was over.3 That the 2

According to Stephanie Moore, approximately 4058 Germans and 287 Italians resident in Latin America were also deported. 3 The emergence in Brazil of the Aikoku Doshi-Kai, a nationalistic pro-Japan underground movement that soon spread to the rest of South America, complicated the return of Japanese Peruvian internees to Peru (Gardiner 151-53).

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Peruvian government refused to accept the re-entry of deported Japanese alien residents after the end of the Pacific War proves that it had seen the armed conflict as an excellent opportunity to get rid of the unwanted Japanese presence in the country. We find additional evidence of Peruvian authorities’ aversion for Peruvian Nikkei in the fact that they demanded (like their counterparts from Ecuador and El Salvador) a selective repatriation policy that “would be lenient for Germans and highly restrictive for Japanese,” even though the latter were considered harmless by Washington and the former, dangerous (Gardiner 132). In most cases, Peruvian Nikkei were arrested without evidence of illegal activity and when no charge had been made; afterward, no hearings were considered necessary and their assets in Peru were expropriated before they were embarked to an unknown destination. The deported Japanese Latin Americans were initially relocated in some of the ten internment camps administered by the War Relocation Authority, where they lived alongside the 110,000 Japanese Americans expelled from Hawaii and the west coast of the United States. Some time later, however, they were lodged in two detention camps in southern Texas known as Kenedy and Crystal City, which were run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and in an all-male one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Initially, thirteen states joined the treaty that shipped at least 8,500 Axis nationals from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States during World War II: Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama (including the Panama Canal Zone), and Peru. Later, British Honduras (Belize), Chile, Cuba, and Paraguay would join them. To Higashide’s dismay, among the one thousand Japanese Peruvians corralled and deported in the name of the Western Hemisphere’s security were not only resident aliens, but also native-born Peruvians and naturalized citizens (although some had been denationalized by a measure targeted at persons who supported the Axis powers and Nisei [second-generation Japanese] who had received their formal education in Japan). When Japanese Peruvians and their friends protested, regional and governmental officials would refuse admitting any responsibility by stating: “The American Government has given us orders” (Gardiner 91). According to the report Personal Justice Denied, elaborated by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, before any deportations occurred, almost 500 Japanese Peruvians (978, according to Emmerson [139]) had requested repatriation at the Spanish Embassy in Lima, which represented Japan’s interests in Peru and played the role of protecting power for Japanese Latin American internees (308). While most

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of the first 141 deportees that left Callao on April 4, 1942 aboard the S.S. Etolin were volunteers, the majority of the other Peruvian Nikkei in the concentration camps had been forcibly deported (other than family members who wished to be reunited with their father or husband). After the end of the war, considering that neither Peru nor the United States would accept them, over 700 Japanese Peruvian men and over 1000 family members chose transportation to Japan (Barnhart 174). Other 300 remained in a legal no man’s land as “stateless” refugees in the United States. In September of 1946, they were offered “parole” relocation in a farming community in Seabrook, New Jersey, and 209 of them agreed to moving there as parolees. In spite of having been forcibly and illegally transferred by the U.S. government, Latin American Japanese were now considered “illegal aliens on conditional release” (Higashide 8). Since their passports had been confiscated before arriving in the United States and the U.S. State Department had forbidden American consuls in Latin America to issue visas to the Japanese Latin American deportees, they entered the country “illegally,” according to the Immigration and Naturalization Services (Gardiner 29). This strange situation, which had been designed to justify a second deportation or repatriation to Japan, would continue until 1954, when they were finally given entry visas. The historian Harvey Gardiner points out that contacts between the Peruvian and U.S. governments regarding the deportation and internment of Japanese Peruvians had begun during the 1938 Pan American Conference in Lima (10). Three decades after the events took place, Third Secretary of the American Embassy in Peru, John K. Emmerson, referred to President Manuel Prado’s cabinet in these terms: “Rarely has a foreign government cooperated so enthusiastically in actions urged by Washington” (135). As Higashide reveals, in the late 1930s U.S. intelligence agencies realized that a large number of officials in several Latin American countries, including Peru, Argentina and Chile, were increasingly showing estrangement from the United States and expressing their affinity with the Axis Powers. To reverse this situation, in June 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigations to post agents in U.S. embassies in Latin America to carry on intelligencegathering operations.4 Their objective was to pressure South American governments, promote animosity against the Axis powers among the civilian population, and supervise the activities of pro-Axis sympathizers and “potentially dangerous” Axis nationals (mostly, community leaders) in 4

As Emmerson points out, the army and navy also send staff to Peru to gather information on the German and Japanese communities (127).

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order to prevent subversive propaganda, espionage, or sabotage. Lacking competence in Japanese and often trusting questionable Peruvian sources, FBI agents propagated rumors about the “military-type” organization of the Japanese Peruvian community and its plans to create a “fifth column.” They also exaggerated the number of males and the percentage of them who had served in the Japanese army (Gardiner 10). By the same token, Gardiner cites Ambassador R. Henry Norweb’s eagerness to improve diplomatic relations with Peru (a country that could provide a significant economic contribution to the war) by helping its government get rid of the “threat” posed by residents of Japanese descent, as it had already been done in Panama (13-14). Many Peruvians willingly collaborated with these officials’ political designs and, according to Higashide, Chinese shopkeepers were also suspect of collaboration with American instigators. With no proof to back up this speculation, he considers business competition and the Japanese invasion of China as plausible incentives. Higashide’s guess is confirmed by Emmerson, who writes in his memoirs about the Chinese informants who aided the U.S. embassy. In any case, according to Gardiner, even though Sino-Peruvian merchants were happy to see their Japanese competitors included in the Proclaimed List, lack of close contact with the Japanese Peruvian community since the beginning of the Second SinoJapanese War (1937-1945) severely limited the amount of information they could provide. In any case, the FBI’s tactics would soon yield the expected results: In 1939, outrageous rumors began flying about, and disquieting developments were reported from various parts of Peru. Completely unsubstantiated reports that the Japanese in Peru had organized a “fifth column,” that they had secretly built a military base, that they had landed large shipments of arms and ammunition somewhere in South America, etc., came to be rumored as if completely true. (Higashide 103)5

5

Emmerson corroborates this account: “rumors circulated in Lima that arms had been smuggled to Japanese in Callao, that twenty-five thousand rifles had been discovered on a Japanese farm, that eight thousand machine guns had been found concealed in a Japanese florist shop in Lima, that a crate containing an unassembled airplane had been accidentally opened at the port of Chimbote, and that the police had come across caches of arms and ammunition in various towns, intended for use by a fifth column composed of from one to five thousand Japanese ex-soldiers. According to one report, American intelligence officers had been responsible for uncovering the plot” (134).

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During the following months, public opinion about Peruvian Nikkei gradually shifted from indifference (or perhaps passive prejudice and economic jealousy) to radical distrust and animosity. As to Peruvian officials and the government, they capitalized on this historic event to rid themselves of a social group they obviously despised. Some of them, such as Dr. Javier Correa Elías, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Pedro Beltrán, the Peruvian ambassador to the United States, were in favor of the deportation of all Japanese nationals in Peru (Gardiner 64, 106). In addition to spreading false rumors, another tactic used by U.S. intelligence agents was the creation of a blacklist of dangerous Axis nationals known as the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals: It was December 24, 1941. On that unforgettable day, two major Peruvian newspapers, El Commercio [sic] and La Prensa, published a lista negra, a “blacklist” of approximately 30 “dangerous Axis nationals” residing in Peru. Of the 30, approximately 10 were Japanese. Shivers passed through me. “Can this really be true?” I thought. My name was included in the list. We learned that the list had been leaked to reporters by a local U.S. agency. (Higashide 114)

As we can see, the Peruvian print media was quick to collaborate with an American propaganda machine designed to create distrust among the local population, to dishearten and bankrupt citizens from Germany, Japan, and Italy, and to expel the leaders of their communities. Dark clouds became darker when, in 1942, representatives from the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela created the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense, which recommended Latin American governments the internment of Axis nationals and the close control of potential subversive activities. On January 24, 1942, the Peruvian government severed diplomatic ties with Japan and the deportation of leaders of the Japanese Peruvian community began. For months, the United States continued to encourage and facilitate arrests and deportations, including that of Higashide. Yet, in his testimonial, he never abandons his good humor and confesses that he actually felt proud, since this surprising notoriety somehow reflected his achievements. Higashide provides one last example of anti-Japanese inflammatory propaganda in Peru. In the last days of 1942, the FBI noticed a new fashion trend among Japanese Peruvians and managed to turn it into the so-called “people’s uniform incident”: a tailor in Lima, inspired by the latest fashion in Japan, had decided to use khaki-colored cloth to make what the FBI inaccurately claimed were “military uniforms.” The tailor’s

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claim that the uniforms were simply a way to save money in wartime was found unconvincing. Immediately following the FBI’s reports, twenty employees of the tailor shops and the people who had placed orders were arrested and deported to a concentration camp in Panama, leaving their families behind. Along the same lines, following unsubstantiated rumors about a potential landing of the Imperial Japanese Army in Peru and about the accumulation of weapons by Japanese residents, many were inhumanely removed from coastal areas or given only three days to move elsewhere: “In order to enforce the expulsion order, the governor of Ancash Province went out himself, snapping a bullwhip, to force out local Japanese” (Higashide 127). Those destined for Talara were transported through the desert in the extreme heat of summertime for two and a half days, in uncovered military trucks and without food provisions. Others met an even more tragic fate: several members of the group that was moved to the Huaraz region (the mountain town of Huaraz is 10,000 feet above sea level) could not adjust to the unfavorable climate and died of disease. Higashide denounces other unjust practices, such as sending government auditors to Japanese-owned shops to confiscate the profits from daily sales, leaving only a prescribed amount for the owner’s daily expenses. Soon, all large Japanese-owned businesses were harassed by this economic warfare into closing or were simply ordered to close. The beneficiaries of this economic warfare, he explains, were their business rivals: Chinese merchants who bought the businesses and Japanese owners of small shops who flourished with the elimination of competition. While the strategic use of false rumors was designed to turn Peruvian public opinion against the Axis powers and its overseas citizens, there was also a more practical reason for the forced transportation of Peruvian Nikkei to internment camps in the United States: “American authorities apparently intended to transfer all ‘enemy aliens’ residing in South America to the United States for the purpose of exchange, if necessary, for Americans held in Japan” (Higashide 129). As Gardiner has explained, in the plans for the exchange of prisoners of war, the Japanese government had designated ten international merchants from Peru and Bolivia and twenty-five Japanese residents of Mexico. However, Japan had not requested the repatriation of the 226 Peruvian Nikkei included by the United States in the exchange list and, in fact, was not interested it. Eventually, of the 737 Latin American Nikkei (55 percent of the total exchange) who were used as pawns and who sailed aboard the M.S. .

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Gripsholm from New York to Japan, 484 were from Peru (Gardiner 84).6 The historian Stephanie Moore cites the oral testimony of the Peruvian citizen Naeko Tamashiro (recorded by Wesley Ueunten, of the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project; Lima, Peru, March 25, 1999), in which the latter remembers the horrors of her deportation to Okinawa, then under United States control: Not even at night could we rest… at night, Americans and nonAmericans—there were Filipinos among the soldiers—would come to our village […] to rape women […]. They broke into homes. Today, one can go to a court, but back then, one could only cry in silence. After the war, there were many of such incidents. Many women, who now must be seventy or eighty, suffered. (n.p.; my translation)7

Throughout the narrative, Higashide never hides his disappointment with the violation of human rights perpetrated by the United States (a country that he had always admired for its principles of freedom and equality), even if they took place in wartime and the Axis nations were responsible for similar or worse injustices: “Why, then, had that country moved to take such unacceptable measures? Where was the spirit of individual rights and justice that had filled the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? If I termed Peru, even provisionally, a ‘third rate country,’ was not America, in this instance, no different?” (143). Likewise, he voices his disappointment with Peru, the host country where he had found a new life and started a family. In fact, his final deportation culminates a series of disappointments with Peru that had begun early in his arrival, when he did not expect to find the desolate desert terrain of the Peruvian coast. To this first negative reaction to the local landscape, he adds a description of his cultural shock upon learning about Peruvians’ penchant for bribery, theft, alcohol abuse, and superstition. Although Adiós to Tears opens with a paragraph in which the 6

Of the 1,340 Japanese included in the exchange for American prisoners, 484 were from Peru, 390 from the United States, 160 from Panama, 151 from Hawaii, 61 from Canada, 36 from Costa Rica, 34 from Mexico, 6 from Nicaragua, 5 from Cuba, 5 from El Salvador, one from Guatemala, and another one from Alaska (Gardiner 85). 7 “Hasta en la noche no podíamos descansar bien…en la noche, los Americanos y no-Americanos – había Filipinos entre los soldados – venían a nuestro pueblo por las mujeres…a violarlas…Ellos entraban a las casas particulares. Hoy en día uno puede ir al tribunal, pero en aquel entonces, sólo podían llorar en silencio. Después de la guerra, hubo muchos incidentes así. Muchas mujeres, quienes ahora tendrán más de 70 y 80 años, sufrieron” (Moore n.p.)

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testimonialist declares his unconditional love for his three motherlands (Japan, Peru, and the United States), he now voices his feeling of betrayal: Locked within its hold, I suddenly became very angry. I had earlier felt a deep hatred towards wars, but now I grew angry at the cowardliness of the 8 Peruvian government. If Peru had been a direct enemy of Japan, I would have understood my situation. Peru had severed diplomatic ties with Japan, but it was still a third party to the dispute. Even if it had been pressured by the United States, what country with any pride and independence would have said, “Yes. We shall comply,” and hand over innocent people? If it were only those with Japanese citizenship, a case might have been made. But the Peruvian government had given in to American pressure even to the point of deporting naturalized citizens and Peruvian citizens who had been born there. […] I had always protested when I heard Peru called “a third-rate country” or an “uncivilized country,” but now I felt justified in using such terms myself. (142-43)

Although at first the United States had only asked for the deportation of diplomatic and consular officials of the Axis powers, enemy aliens considered dangerous, and some Japanese businessmen, the Peruvian government preferred to get rid of its entire Japanese community. Later, lack of coordination between Peruvian and American officials led to the deportation of Japanese nationals and even Peruvians of Japanese descent who were neither considered dangerous nor included in the blacklists compiled by the American embassy. Furthermore, when men on the Proclaimed List escaped deportation through bribery or substitution, the Peruvian police arrested others just to fill the numbers (sometimes from Peruvian prisons). Guided by contempt for this ethnic group, they often used coercion to benefit from the situation. To make matters worse, after the war was over, Peru used the exclusionary law against Japanese immigration it had promulgated in 1940 to forbid the return of Peruvian Nikkei deported to American concentration camps while simultaneously requesting the return of German internees. Indeed, after President Harry Truman signed a decree for the expulsion of all the Latin American internees still in the United States, Peru was one of the twelve Central and South American countries that decided, in the 1945 international conference of American states that took place in Mexico City, not to accept the return of their Japanese residents. So determined was the Peruvian government to not allow the re-entry that it took the issue to the United Nations. Eventually, as Higashide notes, Peru would allow the return of 79 persons who held Peruvian citizenship, but 364 of the original 8

Peru did not declare war on Japan until February 1945.

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2,118 detainees “remained in the United States with no place to go” (Higashide 177). The complaints of the Spanish embassy were to no avail. Beyond the condemnation of American wartime propaganda, Higashide ponders about additional causes of the anti-Japanese riots during the Pacific War. In his view, Peruvian Nikkei were themselves partly at fault for their feeling of cultural superiority and their refusal to identify with their host country or become naturalized. These attitudes were sometimes reflected in the tradition of sending children to study in Japan (the equivalent of the Kibei in the United States). Higashide also criticizes their voluntary isolation from Peruvian society, which created a separate “nation within a nation” (Higashide 77). Along with a lack of interest in assimilating into mainstream society, Higashide lists other causes behind this new anti-Japanese sentiment, including the fact that they were the last wave of immigrants, their rapid economic success, and their decision to congregate in Lima, instead of dispersing throughout the country.

Japanese Peruvian Resistance Japanese Peruvians were not passive victims of international interests during the Pacific War. Along with the denunciation of racism and injustice, Higashide also provides examples of Japanese resistance. For instance, some avoided deportation by hiding, paying “substitutes” to take their places, or through the use of bribes. These acts of resistance continued after the deportations. He mentions the defiance of the “anticitizenship” group in the detention camp, who advocated renouncing U.S. citizenship. As he explains, they received harsh treatment from American authorities and were placed in extremely crowded conditions. Another form of resistance used by Japanese Peruvian internees was litigation. Following the example of some German internees who had filed habeas corpus petitions to challenge their detention, claiming that they were not natives or citizens of an enemy country as stated in the Alien Enemy Act of 1789, Japanese Peruvians hired Wayne M. Collins, a San Francisco attorney who was visiting Crystal City at the time, to pursue the same goals. In other passages, Higashide is critical of some oppositional attitudes. He condemns, for example, the demeanor of a group of internees that he calls “small frogs.” Considering it a “war of attrition,” these single men decided to protest by breaking chinaware, thinking that their destruction of state property would decrease the enemy’s material resources. At one point, Higashide voiced his embarrassment, an action that gained him a

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reputation for being pro-American: “I grew irritated by such foolishness and warned them to stop. I ‘sermonized’ to them that, as Japanese, they were representatives of a great civilization and were obligated to behave in a higher, more civilized manner” (159). Later in the narrative, Higashide expresses again his detachment from a Japanese militaristic ideology that had survived in the isolated Nikkei community in Peru. He describes how some of his fellow internees, upon hearing news that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, considered committing ritual suicide: “Speaking very loudly, the Peruvian businessman addressed the Japanese American, ‘If this report is true, we should take up short swords and mutually stab each other in suicide here and now. Is that not so?’” (173). As we can see, a collective psychology that had been characterized by its cohesiveness throughout the months of internment now begins to gradually break apart. Along with their husbands, Japanese Peruvian women were also active in confronting the manipulation of their families by international interests. The heroic demeanor of Higashide’s wife first while the latter was hiding in an excavated secret room in their house, and later, when she was left behind in Peru, is an excellent example. During these trying times, her courage challenged the testimonialist’s early doubts about the character of Nisei—she proved to be a “true daughter of Japan” and an example of the “way of the warriors” (131).9 Gardiner also mentions the rage of Japanese Peruvian women who were ordered to clean toilets and bathrooms aboard the Cuba: “The outspokenness of the Japanese women, contradicting their usual quiet and self-effacing demeanor, possibly derived from the moral and psychological reinforcement their husbands provided” (94). Curiously, their behavior seems to go against Gardiner’s expectations, who had insisted, throughout his book, on the docility and cooperativeness of Japanese internees in contrast with the belligerent attitude of their German counterparts. At a personal level, Higashide decided to avoid the government’s economic boycott against Japanese nationals by becoming his wife’s “shop manager.” By closing the shop and starting a new one with a business permit in her name, he hoped that her status as a Peruvian citizen would prevent the closing of their business. Later, in a new example of resistance and ingenuity, he outwitted Peruvian authorities by hiding in his

9

With the phrase “the way of the warrior,” Higashide is referring to the Bushidǀ, a samurai code of conduct and way of life that emphasizes frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and honor until death.

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own home.10 In his underground room, he was able to listen to broadcasts from Japan as he had connected the antenna of his shortwave radio to the antenna at a neighboring school. After almost one year in hiding, in January 1944 Higashide made the mistake of thinking that it was safe to appear in public and was arrested. However, as happened when he first read his name in the blacklist, he felt proud: “While it is debatable whether or not I was a major figure, the fact was I was the only person arrested in the province of Ica this time. Four detectives had been sent from Lima to arrest me. Perhaps, I thought, I was a major figure after all” (136). Eventually, he was placed in a urine-soaked jail cell where he had to eat “disgusting, smelly meals” (239), while waiting to be deported to an undisclosed location. On the day of his deportation, Higashide realized that he was a “prisoner of war” when he was led to the gangway by American soldiers carrying rifles. In a scene that is eerily reminiscent of the arrival of Chinese coolies to Latin America and the Caribbean, Japanese Peruvian prisoners were forced to undress and surrender all their possessions. Then, they were locked into the hold of a ship that would take them to concentration camps first in Panama, where they did hard labor without pay, and then in the United States. Since Higashide did not have his family with him, he was sent to Kenedy, a camp for “single men.” Six months had passed after being deported from Peru, when in July 1944 he was finally reunited with his wife and five children at the “family camp” in Crystal City, Texas. He would spend two and a half years there. The agreements for the treatment of prisoners of war reached in the Geneva Convention of 1929 were violated by putting Japanese Latin American civilians to unpaid hard labor both during voyages and in the Panama Canal Zone.11 The United States also breached the international law that prohibited sending prisoners from a nonbelligerent state to a belligerent one.

The price of social prestige and assimilation Aihwa Ong maintains that “in translocal strategies of accumulation, the migrant’s ability to convert economic capital into social prestige is limited by the ethnoracial moral order of the host society” (25). This statement 10

Although the Ica police chief (who, like provincial governor and many police leaders in the region, was pro-Japanese) was aware of his whereabouts, he never informed authorities as he considered it outside his jurisdiction. 11 The Panama Canal Zone was a ten-mile-wide strip of land across the Isthmus of Panama that was administered by the United States for the operation of the Panama Canal until 1979, when it was turned over to Panama.

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could certainly explain Higashide’s trials. From the time when a fellow Japanese national gave him the Otani Company in the town of Cañete (located in southern Lima Region), Higashide made a conscious effort to make acquaintances beyond the imaginary (albeit seemingly insurmountable) borders of the Japanese Peruvian community. He was interested in making this type of connections not only for business purposes but also to integrate himself into his new country or, in his own words, to have a “sense of belonging” (8). That these upper-level social groups (which included prominent figures in political, business, and law enforcement circles) accepted him must have seemed like a blessing at first; however, this hard-earned social prestige was later deemed enough to warrant the label of “dangerous” in the eyes of U.S. intelligence agencies. Indeed, his success in securing the affection and support of the Peruvian elite thanks to both his economic success and his position as a leader of the Japanese community in Ica ended up bringing about his demise: in spite of having avoided involvement in political activities, he was one of the first victims of wartime anti-Japanese propaganda. His first reaction, Higashide confesses, was wondering why such a young man without political affiliations, with modest economic success in a provincial town, and who had been in Peru for only a decade would be included in the blacklist. Only some time later would he find out the true reasons behind his arrest and deportation: “rather than being influential persons or leaders within their respective communities, those on the first list were Axis nationals who had involved themselves deeply with the local Peruvian establishment” (Higashide 115). Months of extenuating work in the local food processing factory in Seabrook, New Jersey, and the subsequent relocation to Chicago would eventually lead Higashide to economic success also in the United States, but he never forgot the injustice: he would devote the rest of his life to educating the public about this little known injustice and to requesting redress from the U.S. government for this violation of human rights. The struggle continues today thanks to the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project (JPOHP).

Conclusion Adiós to Tears is a remarkable testimonial because it shows how, along with the violation of human rights committed against Japanese Americans during World War II,12 the U.S. government went beyond its borders in its 12

The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, has made a great effort to keep this memory alive.

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recruitment of pawns for the exchange of prisoners of war. Therefore, it adds a new page to the history of the Japanese diaspora, and to the sad episode of the deportation of Latin American residents and citizens to U.S. concentration camps. At the same time, it reveals additional nuances to the historical notion of citizenship in Peru and the rest of Latin America. As Barnhart points out, The drastic treatment meted out by an American state, Peru, to a group of its citizens with the encouragement and assistance of another democracy, the United States, and eventually with the sanction of all the republics of the Western Hemisphere reveals the sad level to which the status of citizenship in this democratic nations declined under the pressures of prejudice and war. (178)

This testimonio is also crucial to understand how an outside influence (in this case American anti-Japanese agitators) successfully overturned Peruvian officials’ widespread support for the Axis powers, and turned mainstream population against their Japanese neighbors, including those naturalized Peruvian or born in Peru. Cultural prejudice together with economic competition and wartime anxiety had become the perfect culture medium for the birth of anti-Japanese hysteria. One of the protagonists of this deportation program, Emmerson, tried to find an explanation for the violation of the human rights of innocent Nikkei in the atmosphere of the times: “The war against Japan was a total war. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the enemy was deemed capable of any act, no matter how unreasonable or unlikely. As a consequence, the enthusiastic exploitation of prejudice, hatred, emotion, and covetousness became respectable and acceptable” (149). However, he also admits his shame in having participated in the deportation-internment program: As I look back on the Peruvian experience I am not proud to have been part of the Japanese operation. One steeled oneself against the heartbreak being inflicted on hundreds of innocent Japanese caught up in the wargenerated hysteria that marked each of them a suspect. It is hard to justify our pulling them from their homes of years and herding them, whether born in Japan or in Peru, onto ships bound for a strange land, where they would live in concentration camps. (148)

At any rate, the end result was the tragic disruption of the lives of hundreds of Latin American Nikkei, some of which were separated from their families forever. Adiós to Tears also challenges the traditional debates about Peruvian national identity that would only consider the dichotomy between criollos and indigenous people, disregarding people of

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African and Asian descent.13 Finally, even though the cosmopolitanism of “flexible citizenship” can be socially and economically rewarding in times of peace, Higashide’s testimony shows its structural limits, dangers, and personal costs during wartime, regardless of how much hard-earned cultural capital and social prestige have been accumulated as a strategy of flexible positioning.

Works Cited Barnhart, Edgard N. “Japanese internees from Peru.” Pacific Historical Review 31.2(May 1962):169-78. Bertin, Gilles. “Migrants’ US hopes sunk after Peru hell.” The Standard.com. 21Feb. 2007: , accessed 14 March 2009. Emmerson, John K. The Japanese Thread: A Life in the U.S. Foreign Service. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978. Gardiner, C. Harvey. Pawns in a Triangle of Hate. The Peruvian Japanese and the United States. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981. Higashide, Seiichi. Adiós to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps. Foreword, C. Harvey Gardiner; preface, Elsa H. Kudo; epilogue, Julie Small. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. —. Namida no Adiósu: Nikkei Peru imin, Beikoku kyosei shuyo no ki. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 1981. Moore, Stephanie. “Los Nikkei internados durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial: La larga lucha por una reparación justa.” Discover Nikkei.com. 12 March 2007. , accessed 14 March 2007. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1999. United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. “Appendix: Latin Americans.” Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of

13 The criollos are sons and daughters of Spanish (or other European) settlers born in the Americas, or their direct descendents.

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Civilians. Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1997.

CHAPTER THREE LATIN AMERICAN FICTIVE AND PARODICAL ORIENTALISMS

THREE VISIONS OF CHINA IN THE CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL HÉCTOR HOYOS STANFORD UNIVERSITY

How does fiction respond to the sharp intensification of global economic interdependence that has taken place over the last few decades? This essay discusses a group of novels that reflect interesting and seldom revisited aspects of the later stage in the wayward history of assimilation, mutual yet uneven exoticization, and imaginative re-creation that takes place when cultures meet–an event to which, as of late, we have given the name of “globalization.” I will read side-by-side Una novela china (A Chinese Novel, 1987) by César Aira, Los impostores (The Impostors, 2002) by Santiago Gamboa, and Un chino en bicicleta (A Chinaman on a Bike, 2007) by Ariel Magnus. Whereas these novels vary greatly in their styles and themes, they share the common trait of being contemporary Latin American novels on Chinese subjects, broadly defined. There are precedents in Latin American literature on dealing with the topic of the Orient in general, for fin-de-siècle modernistas such as Rubén Darío or José Asunción Silva turned chinerías, luxurious crafts from the East, into their own aesthetic emblem; Alejo Carpentier, the fore-father of magical realism, cited an eye-opening world tour that included the Orient as the foundational experience that would allow him to appreciate the marvelous real (lo real maravilloso) on his way back to his native Cuba; and so forth. The novels we are about to consider are exceptional not as Latin American representations of the Orient, but in that China has such a preponderant place in their narrations; they are exceptional, too, in that they have appeared so close in time from each other. I hypothesize that these qualities have indeed to do with globalization, for they constitute the early manifestations of a new wave of Latin American interest in the Orient that may carry out at the level of culture the sort of exchange that is now a well-established fixture in the economic realm.

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Beyond the Green Mountains At various moments, narrators in all three works assimilate China to an archetypal faraway land. Aira makes thorough use of this resource in his Chinese novel, which could just as well be his Martian novel, for his interest in the setting lies in its potential for defamiliarization. Aira is known for genre-bending narratives, where a science fiction plot can lead to a sophisticated if humorous theological discussion, or a nineteenth century-inspired travel narrative by a landscape painter turn into a surrealistic rendering of life in the pampas, to cite but two examples.1 The text at hand features Aira’s characteristic narrative loops and speculative rants, which on this occasion converge around Lu Hsin, the protagonist. He is a petit bourgeois intellectual and bureaucrat described as a “faux Mandarin,” who is called upon to coordinate various hydraulic and pedagogical projects–also one who happens to be raising a child in the hopes she becomes his lover later in life. Aira, who has challenged other literary conventions with an astute recourse to nonsense, tackles the genre of the orientalist novel and gets more than a few laughs from a plot loosely inspired in the Great Leap Forward. Una novela china is rich in idle details; it emphasizes the local color of a non-place. The Chinese landscape depicted in the novel is so green that its mountains are simply called “montañas Verdes”; characters alternate dreamy painting with contemplative tea parties, and so forth. The plot takes place in an “archipelago” of villages by the mountains, eternally a region of poor peasants that has an “exquisite bureaucracy” (13)2. The villages are surrounded by the “Han,” a group of mountain people whose name coincides with that of the principal ethnic group of real-life China. The name is dropped among a plethora of mono and bi-syllabic words that sound Chinese to the Spanish-speaking reader. Villagers look down on the Han, who provide the orphan child, Hin, whom Lu Hsin will adopt. In an oblique reference to the tragic outcomes of the Great Leap Forward, Lu Hsin’s hydraulic projects lead to the extinction of the Han: The mountain race, as Lu had foreseen at a given moment, had dispersed, and not just geographically, as a result of the changes in the course of the Qu, which had brought irrigation to the slopes of the Green Mountains (they were nowadays a prim grid of gardens). In less than a decade, that 1

See, respectively, El juego de los mundos (2000) and Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (2000; trans. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, 2006). For a study of Aira’s treatment of genre and gender, see García. 2 All translations are my own.

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Lu Hsin will ultimately marry his adopted daughter, the last survivor of her kin, and live happily ever after. This storyline of incest frames the novel as a distorted fairy tale. Before the “happy” ending, however, Lu Hsin must overcome his own moral doubts and go through a number of inconsequential, comical adventures upon his appointment as the director of a newspaper, La Gaceta Hidrológica, initially devoted to hydrology and, gradually, a political publication where young Red Guards make their first attempts at editorializing. Lu Hsin editorializes himself, notably with a farcical piece on Marxism entitled “La espera pueril,” the Puerile Wait. Lu Hsin does not quite recognize that he plays a part in a revolution that needs not be awaited, that is happening under his eyes and indeed at his desk of high-ranking social engineer. He is summoned to Beijing, presumably to pay for his ideological deviation. Lu Hsin is zealous of doing his job, but is otherwise disinterested in ideology; he sees no danger in this call to order. In an absurdist turn, he ends up being treated to statesponsored tourism in the capital and taken for the fist time to see the Great Wall, a sight that prompts him to make an observation that one can read just as an ars poetica: “When one has spent a long life thinking about an object it may be uncomfortable to be transported to the very feet of that object, where admiration can only manifest a faint obviousness.”4 This unsettling effect of facing the object of exoticist fantasy defines Aira’s narrative method. Whenever it establishes a pact of verisimilitude–the fairy tale, the travel narrative, the political novel–it takes narrative convention to a limit, breaks the pact, and carries on. Incest leaves the borders of the fairy tale and occupies the main stage; in doing so, taboo becomes mundane. Similarly, unspeakable politics are spoken and distant places lose their aura, as if the only operation that were required to go from clandestinity to the mainstream, or from the periphery to the center, was to physically go and occupy a new place. Such ludic distortions 3

“La raza montañesa, tal como lo había previsto Lu en su momento, se había dispersado, y no sólo geográficamente, por efecto de las modificaciones en el curso del Qu, que habían aportado riego a las laderas de las montañas Verdes (hoy eran cuidadosos vergeles cuadriculados). En menos de una década, esa gente se había extinguido, lo que daba para pensar. La niña misma era una reliquia, milagrosamente preservada por el gran truco del deseo de Lu Hsin” (112). 4 “Cuando uno se ha pasado toda una larga vida pensando en un objeto, puede resultar incómodo ser transportado a los pies mismos de ese objeto, donde la admiración sólo puede manifestar una pálida obviedad” (147).

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confront readers at a conceptual level and also at a level that, for lack of a better term, one might call “unconscious”: that of the deep structures of orientalist reading. Aira shows how orientalism takes place in a broader canvas that includes Eurocentrism and occidentalism; he emphasizes, even in his distinctly comical register, that in a globalizing world, simple dialectics of center and periphery must make way for truly multipolar modes of thinking. The village sits at the center of its valley, as if part of a solar system that in turn gravitates around distant, all-powerful Beijing. But new layers of meaning are added onto these power relations when the narrator suggests an identity between Lu Hsin and Kant, the German philosopher, and between the novel’s unnamed town and the often exoticized, idyllic Königsberg, where Kant lived his entire life and wrote the works that would become monuments of European rationality. This parallel allows Aira to engage in an idiosyncratic form of cultural critique. Orientalizing Kant challenges cultural essentialism; it constitutes an iconoclastic rendering of a defining figure for the West. That Lu Hsin and Kant can trade places means that the periphery and the center are themselves interchangeable–they belong in a changing web of relations. In a fable within the fable, readers learn that Königsberg can be as much of a faraway land as China is, and, paradoxically, that these distant places are not entirely isolated after all. The narrator recounts how, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a Chinese diplomat and philosophy enthusiast intercedes to the Russians to save Kant’s city, then renamed Kaliningrad (109). Invoking the name that an existing place goes by signals the gap between the fantasized past and the more prosaic present. Here China mediates between Germany and Russia, while orientalist narrative, the history of philosophy and the Argentine novel become entangled. The double movement of juxtaposing seemingly fantastic places and of referring distorted historical events brings about a comical crisis of verisimilitude that challenges the center/periphery dichotomy as a valid frame of reference. After cracking a joke on both Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism, the novel makes way for a protean structure where there is no center at all, either narrative or geopolitical. Una novela china invites questions such the following: given radical multipolarism, can history have a direction? And could one still hold the belief in a singular world history, or should some form of plurality take its place? Lu Hsin finds it impossible to engage in the future tense of orthodox communism; he is both the diligent functionary of the revolution and an unapologetic reactionary. Similarly, various other elements lie in irresolvable tension. The peasants wear ethnic clothes that border on

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anachronism, without falling completely into that category, for they are “in the precise point of neutrality: the antiquated was not a sign of wealth as before, and it was not yet a sign of falling behind as it would surely be within a few years. This fragile equilibrium was the most patent sign that the country had finally entered (after how many millennia?) into History.”5 History with a capital H stands here, ambivalently, for both revolution and any historical narrative that transcends the local. Aira’s orientalism thus reveals the inherent contradictions of the exoticist gaze, which both brings its object forth and hides it from view. Said famously claimed that Europe constructed a supremacist vision by setting itself against the Orient. What does this latter day fictionalized Latin American orientalist discourse gain from offering exotic visions of the Orient? According to Graciela Montaldo, exoticism gives Aira the means to break with the Argentine imperative not to write about Argentina as the quintessentially Argentine thing to do.6 This paradoxical idea stems from an influential if misleading interpretation of Borges’s landmark essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” according to which the author would not only invite Argentine writers to overcome provincialism and assume that the entire world can be both their topic and their audience, as he does, but also prescribe a certain high-brow, “serious” register. By being so utterly removed not only from nationalistic literature, but also from the terms in which this debate was framed, Aira would relieve Argentine literature from the strictures of its antinationalistic tradition. In this sense, Aira’s orientalism is not a way of coming to terms with the Orient, it is a way of achieving an “autonomization of the fictional world,”7 and more importantly for our present purposes, of unsettling his own positionality as an Argentine writer (108). I would supplement Montaldo’s reading by calling attention to a different aspect in the politics of Una novela china. Although the Cultural Revolution is an object of downright mockery in every novel discussed in this essay, Aira presents a thorough elaboration of how orientalism shaped Western visions of Maoist reform. The novel does not only estrange 5

“en el punto preciso de la neutralidad: lo anticuado ya no era signo de riqueza como antaño, y todavía no era señal de atraso como seguramente lo sería dentro de pocos años. Ese frágil equilibrio era la señal más patente de que el país había entrado al fin (¿después de cuántos milenios?) en la Historia” (26). 6 “Para buena parte de la literatura argentina durante casi los últimos cuarenta años fue seductor, posible y casi natural pensar que el argumento borgiano que señala el carácter nacional de un texto por su ausencia de color local, era uno de los más indicados para producir literatura” (105). 7 “autonomización del mundo ficticio.”

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readers from their exoticist preconceptions of classic China, it binds relates such expectations with a superficial familiarity with Maoist reform, in particular with its iconography. Chinese landscapes become themselves propaganda and different temporalities collapse into each other to reveal the residues of orientalism proper–its consistency, which ultimately has the upper hand over ideological difference, conceived in more conventional terms. The juxtaposition is reductionist and ahistorical, but within the book’s nonsensical provocation it does more in the way of exposing contradiction that in concealing it. The exoticist gaze is thus exposed in all its superficiality, in its assimilating history and ideology into landscape. Fantasies of social engineering abound in Una novela china, as changing the course of a river or willing incest into love receive the same narrative importance. Unsettling literary conventions may be the primordial objective of this operation, but its by-product is staging contemporary orientalist imagination at the peak of its inventiveness. If, for Said, the Orient was an invention of Europe, for Aira the Orient is an invention of middle-class Argentines. The stress lies on invention, creativity, benign play. Exoticism is here a point of departure for creativity: all that primitivism meant for surrealism without the ideological superiority, without the teleology, a meeting of the have-nots in the Green Mountains and the have-nots in Coronel Pringles, the fable-like Greater Buenos Aires town that Aira chose as his site of enunciation.

The New Boxers In comparison to Aira, Gamboa includes more contextual elements from real-life China but puts forward a less sophisticated exploration of orientalism. Los impostores presents various parallel stories that gradually intersect, notably those of Nelson Chouchén, a Peruvian university professor of Chinese ascendance who teaches Latin American literature in Texas and doubles as a mediocre novelist; Gisbert Krauss, a German armchair sinologist; and Suárez Salcedo, a Colombian journalist who lives in France. The characters visit Beijing for the first time. Once there, they find themselves involved in an international conspiracy of rivaling factions that battle to recover a missing manuscript. In their more or less touristic explorations of the city’s landmarks, parks and avenues, the characters present travel narratives that correspond to different ways of relating to the Orient: a personal search for family origins, pure intellectual contemplation, reporting on China for a Western audience.

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These alternative takes on the initiatory Chinese experience carry out at the level of the plot a similar exploration to that which Aira carries out in his formal experimentation. Although the book assumes the conventions of travel narrative unironically, remaining for the most part a predictable adventure novel written in a comical key, the diversity of the characters’ accounts of China brings about a nuanced vision of cultural encounter.8 It may appear at first that Chouchén has the stronger claim on Chinese culture, given that his Chinese grandfather migrated to Peru in the early twentieth century; however, he is a cholo or mestizo who was not raised in the culture of his ancestors. In turn, Krauss has a wealth of knowledge but no direct rapport with his object of study. Suárez Salcedo goes to China precisely because he is an ignoramus in the Orient; he can be trusted with the mission of retrieving the manuscript because he does not appreciate its cultural significance. The novel builds its narrative arch around an unfulfilled promise of exoticist expectations. At their peak, it appears as if the lost manuscript could bring the past back to life. A new sect attempts to seize control of the manuscript in order to kindle the spirits of the infamous Boxer rebellion (1898-1901), a milestone in East-West relations. In a dialogue with openly pedagogical intent, Krauss presents the Western account of that crucial historical juncture, while an erudite Chinese bookseller informs him that “Boxers” is “the erroneous Western name” for the secret society of the Yihequan (137). In the first narrative, the Boxers are barbarians who murdered priests out of thirst for blood; in the second, they are akin to freedom fighters against the vanguard of Western, Christian imperialism.9 As if a deus ex machina, a cat springs onto the arms of the bookseller before this laying out of points of view can turn into more specific arguments about historical responsibility (138). Nonetheless, the point is made that a rich, textured history underlies present day relations. In such way, Gamboa not only charts the unfrequented territory of the Orient for the Latin American reader, he also presents it in historical perspective. The obscure leaders of the revived sect hope Chouchén will be instrumental in rallying their faithful back to their cause, since he happens to be the descendant of one of the original Boxers. Yet mystery falls to opportunism and Realpolitik: Chouchén welcomes the idea of occupying a 8

For a narratological analysis of Gamboa’s adaptation of the conventions of adventure and detective genres, see Ardila. 9 Paul Cohen notes that the Boxers are “a prime focus of Yellow Peril demonology,” a free-floating symbol that resurfaces time and again, most recently in regard to the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution (179).

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high-ranking position in the sect because this might open the doors of the Chinese market for his works of fiction, while the leadership of the sect engages Chouchén only to satisfy the superstitious beliefs of its base. In this vein, the manuscript fetishism that maintains suspense for so much of the novel ultimately wanes away, not because the manuscript should turn out to be a hoax, but because once it is found, it can be reproduced as many times as need be–perhaps an allusion to China’s role in a global industry of counterfeit goods. At a conceptual level, this signals to mechanical reproducibility and loss of aura, bringing about a demystified understanding of East-West relations. Like Aira, Gamboa makes a parody of the search for authenticity that drives orientalist travel writing. Both authors turn orientalist fiction insideout, so to speak, in order to question western mythologies. If Aira looked back at the Western philosophical tradition through the lens of a learned exoticism, Gamboa’s characterization of Chouchén achieves something similar in regards to the Latin American literary tradition. Chouchén often alternates orientalist fantasy with delirious re-creations of the literary Boom. In one notable such passage, he daydreams that Julio Cortázar invites him over for a long weekend. In the following dialogue, the renowned author bargains with the aspiring novelist: “Nelson, why don’t you come spend Easter in my chalet in Saignon?,” said Cortázar. “Octavio Paz and María José are coming. I have promised them that you will be there. They are dying to meet you. Octavio wants to talk to you about an essay he is writing on one of your novels.” “I don’t know, Julio,” replied Nelson. “I must attend a conference series on my poetry at the Institute for Iberoamerican Cooperation in Madrid, and then present in Copenhagen the Danish edition of Cuzco Blues. It’s gonna be tight, as you can see.” “Well, Nelson,” insisted Julio Cortázar, “then just come for a couple of days. Here you will be able to rest, drink some good bordeaux and be with friends who love you, isn’t that enough for a good cronopio like you?”10

10

“-Nelson, ¿por qué no vienes a pasar Semana Santa en mi casita de Saignon? – decía Julio Cortázar-. Van a venir Octavio Paz y María José. Les he prometido que estarás. Se mueren de ganas de conocerte. Octavio quiere hablar contigo acerca de un ensayo que está escribiendo sobre tus novelas. -No sé, Julio –respondía Nelson-. Debo asistir a un ciclo de conferencias sobre mi poesía en el Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, en Madrid, y luego presentar en Copenhague la edición danesa de Cuzco Blues. Está algo difícil, como ves. -Bueno, Nelson –insistía Julio Cortázar-, pues entonces ven sólo un par de días. Aquí podrás descansar, beber unos buenos burdeos y estar con amigos que te quieren, ¿no es eso suficiente para un buen cronopio como tú?” (59-60).

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Beyond the fantasy of critic and writer trading places, it is notable that these eminently comical lines should occur against a background of orientalism. This suggests an isomorphism between the established vision of the Orient as a place of wonder and luxury, and a certain vision of the Boom as the topmost of sophistication, a literary jet-set. In this unexpected transformation of a familiar motif, the opium dream takes place in China, but it brings back a distorted vision of home. Thus, in one deft movement, Gamboa deflates two myths. At the same time, he makes way for conceiving the economy of prestige of Latin American authors beyond the Europe-Latin America axis. While Chouchén bemoans the fact that Latin American authors must first be recognized in Spain in order to achieve recognition in their home countries (61), he seeks to use China as a springboard for his own international career and speaks from an unstable site of enunciation that encompasses Lima and Texas. After such dislocations, the establishment of a global reputation appears as an overdetermined convergence of events. Chouchén’s imaginary acts of inscription in the literary canon reveal his own personal flaws as a character; indeed, the novel repeatedly presents him as an unethical scholar who seeks easy fame. Yet at a different level, these reveries stage the changing ways in which Latin American authors see their place in the world. After all, Gamboa is doing something that is not altogether different from what his character does, for Los impostores itself vindicates China as a legitimate topic for Latin American literature. While Chouchén daydreams with rewriting literary history, Gamboa anticipates a historiographical model where the paradigm of world literature supersedes that of regional literature, or at least one where sites of enunciation are unstable. The fantasy of conquering the Chinese literary market with Latin American books turns the tables on the dominant trend of the market at large, where China sits comfortably as the undisputed source for the larger part of the world’s imports. In this sense, Los impostores proposes an inverted image of a significant aspect of present-day Sino-Latin American relations. The novel elaborates on other moments in these relations as well. Gisbert Krauss represents an earlier stage, that of orientalism proper, understood as the humanistic orientation that saw its heyday in the nineteenth century. The character embodies the aspirations of orientalist philological practice, which, in Said’s words, sought to be “a veritable science of humanity” (133). Krauss believes in the now abandoned theory that studying a language, oriental or otherwise, may reveal the soul of its people: “A language, as philologists know, is nothing else than an Order of the universe conveyed through a system. Although a language must be

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learned, a great part of its structure follows a method, has a backbone that coincides with the worldview of the society that produces it.”11 Krauss preserves this quasi-mystical approximation to Chinese language, although he deploys it with caution and self-awareness. In numerous episodes, the character is portrayed as a tactful, virtuous scholar–the opposite of Chouchén–who is careful not to impose Western views on the phenomena he encounters. But it so happens that his orientalist, abstract knowledge of China coincides with his findings, colonial adventures included. Krauss discovers that his bookish knowledge of Chinese culture allows him to interact with the locals; although he has no experience speaking everyday Mandarin, he finds he can communicate easily with taxi drivers, salesmen, and passers-by. He also finds that his readings in travel narratives and orientalist adventures allow him to assume his role in the plot that surrounds the manuscript. In sum, Krauss represents a seasoned continuation of the traditional orientalist point of view, a way of conceiving the Orient that coexists with various other alternatives within the novel. The past of East-West relations comes back to haunt the novel, be it through Krauss’s academic orientalism or through the danger of a return to colonial struggle. Should the new Boxers prevail, an entire century of changing international relations would be wiped out. Even in its farcical register, Los impostores plays out the anxiety of this possibility. Notably, it is Latin Americans who reestablish peace. One can read this as a gesture toward stronger Sino-Latin American relations, but also as an acknowledgement that such relations are currently scarce, almost impossible. Chouchén and Suárez Salcedo go to China only because they occupy positions in Texas and in Paris, respectively, as if indicating that South-South exchange requires the mediation of the First World. Does the title of the novel allude then to the fact that Chouchén is an impostor in the United States before being one in Beijing? Symptomatically, when Suárez Salcedo attempts to disobey orders, his bosses threaten to affect his legal visa status back in France. These elements serve as reminders of the precariousness of real-life Latin American cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the appearance of travel narratives set in China may suggest that Latin Americans are free to roam around the world as early modern European adventurers, but material conditions always 11 “Un idioma, y estos lo saben los filólogos, no es otra cosa que una ordenación del universo enunciada a través de un sistema de lenguaje. Si bien éste se debe aprender, gran parte de la estructura que lo conforma responde a un método, a una columna vertebral que coincide con la visión de mundo de la sociedad que lo produce” (36).

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make themselves present, even within fiction, to get things back in proportion. The novel takes these limitations into account. By the same token, it reflects certain particularities of globalization, whereby Latin American identities find themselves in flux, and immigration into the First World needs not be a one-way street, but the starting point of multiple trajectories that can all take place within the span of one lifetime. Layers of identity and lived experience superimpose throughout the novel. The sight of a crowded avenue in Beijing makes Suárez Salcedo feel homesick for Bogotá, while other findings make him miss his life in Paris. In this way, Gamboa signals that, for Latin Americans, encountering China is never a one-to-one relation; it is always already mediated. Imposture, costume, and disguise are all figures for the Latin American experience in China, but as the outlandish becomes familiar, characters shed their masks. Once the manuscript loses its mysterious power, characters find their place in the world: Chouchén gains respect, Krauss attains the knowledge he always sought for, and Suárez Salcedo heals from old wounds. In short, imposture becomes truth. Encountering the Other turns out to be a personally enriching comedy of errors, a misunderstanding overcome. As in the above-cited passage by Aira, nothing happens when one finally confronts the object of exoticist fantasy. The manuscript, a metonymy of the Orient itself, does not solve the riddle of otherness–it dissolves it, rather. China was never hidden, one needed just see it with unclouded eyes.

A Chinese Stockholm Syndrome Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the three judges that awarded Ariel Magnus with the literary prize “La Otra Orilla” were César Aira and Santiago Gamboa (the third was Nuria Amat, the Spanish writer). At thirty thousand dollars and guaranteed regional distribution through Editorial Norma, the emerging prize favors middle-brow page turners with a certain literary quality. True to these traits, Un chino en bicicleta is a wellachieved novel that ventures in a territory seldom explored by Latin American literature, as its primary setting is the Chinese neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It tells the story of Ramiro Valestra, a middle-class porteño who is kidnapped by Li, alias Fosforito, a presumed pyromaniac of Chinese origin. The narration of this sui generis captivity, which gradually turns into friendship, gives Magnus occasion to present an original take on East-West relations.

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The novel represents Chinatown as an “inner post” of Chinese culture.12 In doing so, it follows some of the conventions established by Aira and Gamboa. From the former, Magnus keeps the slapstick; from the latter, the nonsensical games. In both counts, humor serves the purpose of relaying cultural shock diachronically, as a gradual overcoming of prejudice, essentialism, and cultural determinism. Consider the following dialogue under this light, where a former goalie with an unremarkable career in professional sport explains his success as a soccer teacher among Chinese tourists: “Picture I played with Maradona, and for the Chinese that is like for an Argentine that a Chinese guy fought with Bruce Lee.” “But wasn’t Bruce Lee American?” “Well, I am not Argentine myself; I was born in Uruguay.”13

The juxtaposition of the iconic Argentine soccer player and the Oriental martial artist challenges cultural essentialism by suggesting that scales of value are translatable. At the same time, translation here has a certain arbitrariness to it that may add or subtract value, a mechanism by which the devaluated soccer player can gain an unexpected reputation, or the famed martial artist prove to be overvalued. As in Gamboa, ludic imposture constitutes a point of departure, but, unlike Gamboa and Aira, the terrain in which cultural exchange takes place is not ideology or politics writ large, but the everyday. In Magnus’s account of East-West relations, reasoned invocation and confrontation of myth and stereotype facilitate cultural exchange. And could there be a better medium to carry out such a project than “Chinese” jokes? These abound in the novel, ranging from the silly to the sophisticated, from jokes that require no cultural awareness on the part of the audience to those that only make sense when one has gained a minimum familiarity with Chinese culture, something the novel provides alongside the jokes. Among the silly ones, Valestra’s conversation with Lito, one of his new friends, stands out. The latter responds to every 12

A notable precedent to this approach can be found in Severo Sarduy’s De dónde son los cantantes (1967, trans. From Cuba with a Song, 1994), a novel that pays homage to the Chinese presence in Havana. Whereas Magnus depicts Chinese culture as peripheral to Argentine national identity, Sarduy highlights its importance within Cuban identity. 13 “-Pensá que jugué con Maradona y que eso para los chinos es como para un argentino un chino que peleó con Bruce Lee. -¿Pero Bruce Lee no era Yanqui? -Bueno, yo tampoco soy argentino, nací en Uruguay” (106).

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question by saying “yes and no” (in Spanish: “sí y no”) as if displaying some kind of Oriental wisdom that defies conventional logic, when it turns out, he explains hilariously, that he is practicing “sinorogía”–synology (161). In the opposite end of the spectrum, the novel introduces a parable entitled “Story of the Chinaman Who Wanted to Buy 6 medialunas and Ended Up Taking 10,” subtitled “Brief Allegory about Culture Shock, but with a Happy Ending” (195). The story delivers these promises by creating a space where readers may reflect on the difficulties–but not on any alleged “impossibility”–of translating gestural language. Readers are to fill in the blanks that explain the seemingly absurd dialogue between a Chinaman and a baker who does not understand him. The former asks for six medialunas (croissants), the latter replies that he can use the phone. When asked about eight medialunas, the baker raises his arms as if pointed by a gun. The joke starts to make sense only when one considers that Chinese speakers represent quantities by positioning their fingers in different ways than Westerners. Note that readers may arrive to this passage with such knowledge or gain it as they go along; in either case, they encounter an atypical Chinese joke that makes fun not of perceived cultural inferiority but of culture shock itself. As the epigraphs of many chapters suggest, for all that the novel may mock Sinology, its street-wise orientalism is rooted in intellectual reflection. Magnus’s epigraphs are an eclectic collection of thoughts from or about the Orient, drawn from eclectic sources that include Eastern thinkers (Lao-tse, Sun Tzu), Western philosophers (Leibniz), Latin American authors (Borges), Hollywood movies (Polanski’s Chinatown), local entertainment culture (Gabi, Fofó y Miliki; Les Luthiers), among others. The dialogue between epigraphs and chapters is one of the most original features of the novel, since it calls for speculative considerations alongside the less abstract approach that results from readerly identification with the protagonist’s circumstance. In such way, the novel offers readers the double opportunity of imagining themselves in Valestra’s shoes and of situating that experience within the bigger picture of East-West relations. The epigraphs provide different and often conflicting attempts at rationalizing the events narrated. They introduce Oriental proverbs and denaturalize orientalist discourses; find truth in silliness, prejudice in children songs, and among the latter a tradition of undertheorized assumptions about the Orient. In sum, they seek to reconfigure the readers’ relation to all things Chinese. Consider but two examples that mark pivotal moments in the plot:

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Look, the world is being turned upside-down. Mao Tse Tung, Poems In a forest of China the little Chinese girl got lost and since I was lost myself we both found each other. Topo Gigio.14

The first epigraph corresponds to Valestra’s immersion in the topsyturvy world of Chinatown and to his “revolutionary” new way of perceiving Buenos Aires. The second corresponds to the beginning of the ex-machina romantic relationship that will lead him to lay roots in the neighborhood. Between these two citations, the novel presents a detailed ethnography of porteño Chinese culture that includes aspects such as language, food, table manners, recreation, sexuality, hygiene habits, medicine, even physiognomy–at some point Valestra starts to appreciate “that not all Chinamen look alike” (64). The second epigraph signals a new round in the process of transculturation, as Valestra goes from infatuation with his captors, that is, Stockholm syndrome, to full-fledged assimilation. There are other landmark events in this process. Most are comical, as when Valestra’s yearning for bife turns into an intolerance to eat that much red meat in one sitting. Some are tragic: after spending about a year in Chinatown, Valestra stumbles into his mother, who cannot recognize him (242); shortly after, he is taken by surprise by the death of Lito and Chen, a Laurel and Hardy-like tandem who had befriended and guided him into neighborhood life. Everything that bound Valestra to his previous self is gone, and all that remains is the future. Indeed, Yintai, his Chinese-Cuban fiancée, is expecting a child. The novel closes with her voice, in her language, wishing Valestra a happy new year, that is, a happy Chinese new year: “᩺ᖳ䢧, ᑚ䵋” [sic] (281).15 The presence of simplified14

“Mira, / el mundo está siendo puesto patas para arriba” / Mao Tse Tung, Poemas” (59). “En un bosque de la China / la chinita se perdió / y como ya andaba perdido / nos encontramos los dos. / El Topo Gigio” (131). 15 The sentence is in fact ungrammatical. In order to say “feliz año nuevo, amorcito [happy new year, honey],” as the context implies, the first clause should read ᩺ᖳᛄ䢧. The typo suggests that the author’s competence in Chinese culture does not match that of his character–or perhaps, that Yintai is not a fluid Chinese speaker after all. I am indebted to Hsiao-Shih Lee for this observation.

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Chinese characters on the final page of the book gives a sense of closure to the plot and to the process of transculturation that defines its narrative arch. The year is now 4075 and Valestra is already “on the other side,” living under a different calendar. However, given the context, non-Chinese speaking readers can infer what that final sentence says and, as it were, join Valestra in the first moments of a new stage in the deepening of his relation to Chinese culture. Whereas Gamboa’s novel closes on a note of personal transformation through cultural exchange, Magnus delves into the intersection of the personal and the geopolitical. In both cases, globalization translates into lived experience, but the emphasis is different. If one takes into consideration Zygmunt Bauman’s insight that the freedom of movement of the tourist and the restricted travel possibilities of the illegal immigrant represent two facets of globalization, one can appreciate how Gamboa sides with the tourist circuit and Magnus with the community of immigrants. His comic register of choice does not take Magnus far down the road of denunciation and cultural critique, although we do learn that the Argentine police and judicial system mistreat Lito and Li, as arguably they do with their counterparts in real life. Nonetheless, the real adventure of Un chino en bicicleta is cultural assimilation, while, in Los impostores, bare-knuckle fight adventure prevails over cultural exchange. Magnus brings home, literally, many of the insights of Aira’s Una novela china. As such, it represents a swing in the pendulum of the selfperceived place of Argentine literature in the world, caught between provincialism and cosmopolitanism at least since the days of Jorge Luis Borges. The challenge posed by Magnus is that of reinventing the provincial in light of unexpected forms of cosmopolitanism that do not originate in the intelligentsia but in the ordinary people that undergo globalization. Chinatown is by definition extra muros from what Ángel Rama called “the lettered city,” a privileged if provincial space that remains to some extent as cultural space where most of the literature in the region belongs. In choosing Chinatown as a prism for cosmopolitan discourse, Magnus ambiguously de-centers, or broadens, this traditional literary space. It is soon to say which of these alternatives will make a more durable impression. Perhaps one should borrow Silvano Santiago’s concept of a “cosmopolitanism of the poor” to describe the kind of cultural formation that Magnus is pointing at. Along such lines, one may consider Un chino en bicicleta a failed project, an overcoming of elitist parochialism that falls short of achieving its intended goal. But would a novel, even one as loosely knit as this one, be a suitable medium for such a project? Can one

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imagine forms that combine Eastern and Western narrative structures, or a bilingual Spanish-Chinese poetics that reaches beyond the realm of the experimental into the more mainstream waters that Magnus navigates? Answering these questions will largely depend on whether Un chino en bicicleta paves the way for more radical works or stands as the furthest that the Latin American literary establishment is willing to go East.

Toward a Transpacific Poetics Magnus states unequivocally, “more than a Chinese man or China, the protagonist [of Un chino en bicicleta] is our (my) vision of the Chinese and of China” (“Premian” n.p.). As we have seen, the same holds true for the works of Aira and Gamboa, for they too have a limited rapport with real-life China. Purposefully “inaccurate,” their interest lies precisely in their creative misrepresentations of the Orient. Analogously, Said’s original conceptualization of orientalism focused on the consistency of the discourse on the Other rather than on whether it coincides or not with any existing phenomenon (22). One may borrow such terms to note that the consistency of the specific fictionalized orientalism found in the novels hinges on a certain Latin American, middle-class, whiter-end-of-Criollo image of China. Novels are no exception to the rule that orientalist discourse reveals more about its site of enunciation than about its object. All the more so, it bears noting that Latin American authors should resort to China as an important point of reference when it comes to defining their own place in the world, particularly since hitherto Western metropolises had always sufficed for this purpose. At the turn of the twenty-first century, China gradually became less of a faraway land for Latin Americans. The country’s increasing participation in global markets resulted in a surge in bilateral trade and travel flows (Shixue 34). Only a year after the publication of Magnus’s novel, the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics occupied the front page of the newspapers in the region over the course of many months. Similar events have led to a generalized perception that Sino-Latin American relations gradually undergo a shift from economic to cultural integration. Novels play out this perception, from the fracture in the orientalist fable in Una novela china to accounts of cultural immersion in Un chino en bicicleta. In the latter work, the protagonist finds it easier to imagine the world without the U.S. or Europe than without China: Without China, our life would immediately sink into chaos; surely most of the things we use daily either comes from China or is partially “Made in”; if Americans went on strike, we would have some communication

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Despite the obvious hyperbole, the passage represents a point of inflection in a trajectory of recognition. It also reveals the limiting economistic sign under which cultural exchange takes place: bluntly put, China is the stuff it produces. In the novel, realization of the daily-life presence of things Chinese is coupled with familiarization with the life of Chinatown, thus bridging the gap between imports and local sights, between objects and neighbors. Gone are the days of luxurious and ultimately depersonalized chinerías, while venial utensils and actual people make their way into the Latin American imagination. However, leaving the silk robe for a pencil sharpener is going from one extreme to the other, from mystification to effacement. These tensions and contradictions reflect a state of affairs, since globalization has brought about phenomena such as interconnectedness without strong cultural bonds, abundant yet scattered information, and a growing curiosity unmatched by first-hand experience. Contemporary Latin American fiction knows that oriental stereotypes are not the Orient, but it does not quite have a developed imaginary to replace them. The present juncture is rich in possibilities, as exoticism still drives the literary imagination forward, while its more undesirable aspects appear less taxing. South-south orientalism engages imperialist fantasy without reproducing its ideology of cultural superiority–at most, it represents imperialism as a residue. By the same token, the corpus studied here speaks to a certain yearning for the familiar grid of imperialism and Cold War dichotomies. Conceiving global cultural interaction in the present poses many a challenge; it is not surprising, then, that the exploration of different modes of cross-cultural representation should constitute such a central concern in these works. Metaphorically speaking, one can describe different approaches to fictionalizing contemporary Sino-Latin American relations according to where they find themselves in a spectrum that goes from obscurity to transparency. On one end, there is incommensurability and incomprehension; 16

“[Sin China] nuestra vida se hundiría instantáneamente en el caos, de seguro que la mayoría de las cosas que usamos diariamente o viene de China o tiene alguna parte Made in, si los yanquis fueran al paro tendríamos algunos problemas de comunicación por falta de satélites y si los huelguistas fueran los europeos nos quedaríamos sin cine de autor por un rato pero si los que pararan fueran los chinos se pararía el mundo” (244).

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on the other, identification and continuity. Somewhere in between lies opaqueness, which recognizes that cultural difference exists but is not insurmountable. Gamboa’s sweeping secularization of East-West relations borders on impudicity, while the gradual unveiling that takes place in Magnus attends to a potential for estrangement that is still present, even in the everyday. Sometimes, what is truly shocking is that there should be no culture shock at all or that we should expect to be spared from cultural difference. Opacity requires a degree of textual transfiguration that takes place in some of the works studied here, but not in all of them. It is time to interject a piece of information withheld until this late hour. Doing so will exemplify the ways in which opacity works, as presumably some readers will have found this data to be missing, while others may have not. Just as “Han,” the name Aira gives to the peasants of his novel, resonates with the name of the largest ethnic group in the world–it encompasses over a billion people–, the name of the protagonist, Lu Hsin, evokes that of the best-known Chinese writer of the twentieth century. Read by hundreds of millions, 喴㎷, whose name is transliterated into Spanish as “Lu Sin” (English “Lu Xun” or “Lu Hsun”) was, moreover, the official writer of Chairman Mao’s regime. Mao held him to be “the saint of modern China,” as Confucius was of old China: the epitome of the revolutionary writer (2:372). Had Gamboa’s impostors strolled around Shanghai and not Beijing, they would have come across a major city park named after him. A cursory examination would reveal that this allusion has been overlooked by the critical literature on César Aira. Is it irrelevant? Is it some kind of private joke on the author’s part, despite the fact that so many potential readers, but precisely not his readers, could join in? Aira’s Lu Hsin is more than a virtual homonymous of Lu Xun; it is that author’s political mirror image. As the character in Aira’s novel, the real-life author did risk imprisonment for the articles he wrote, except these were vindications of Marxism-Leninism published under the unsympathetic government of Chiang Kai-shek. Given my own limited cultural competence, I must defer to future studies the task of expounding on the issue of how Aira’s intervention resonates for someone who has been brought up in the Chinese literary tradition. Nonetheless, some of the manifold implications of the petty-bourgeois Argentine rendering of the revolutionary Chinese writer are at plain sight. First, this “finding” may lead to characterizing Aira’s textual politics in terms of anti-engagement, where the paradigm of engaged literature does not refer to the French tradition, epitomized by Sartre and familiar to Latin

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American readerships, but to Maoist social realism.17 Such meaningful references to actual Chinese subjects further problematize Montaldo’s reading of the Oriental backdrop as the bouncing wall of internal disputes within the Argentine canon. In a similar way, one could revisit the argument presented above about how the consistency of Aira’s orientalism lies in its subversion of the conventions of the fairy tale. Given the opacity of the work, this is but a partial truth. A reading that privileges nonsense and creative freedom may work for that vast portion of Latin American, indeed Western, readers who do not know about Lu Hsin. It may also work for the Chinese reader, but in a different way, where nonsense may turn into irreverence and perhaps even into subversion. The bond between Aira’s character and the regime’s author does not quite burst the bubble of a purely self-contained orientalist fantasy, for these elements coexist. It does however posit itself as the key that opens a particular roman à clef that globalization has made possible. Contrary to the expectations that globalization would lead to homogeneity, the various possible readings of Aira’s work speak about multiperspectivism: readers may “see” the same object, but not necessarily the same thing. In this way, an ideal reader is hard to come by, and perhaps unnecessary, for the work elevates crosscultural partial understanding (“opacity”) into an aesthetic value. If indeed the historical figure of Lu Xun stands behind the protagonist of Una novela china, the gesture of pitting Lu Hsin against Kant reveals the extent to which Aira is truly a provocateur. After Aira, it seems that quasi-mythical local narratives such as those of Kant’s Königsberg or Lu Hsin’s revolutionary youth do not fare well the test of a geographically and ideologically unbound readership. Given a post or supranational horizon, can national authors still be, as the saying goes, greater than life? Perhaps the humoristic approach that underlies the novels considered here is a response to such a question. Within the realm of the national, cultural significance is often codified in terms of seriousness. The sort of crosscultural humor displayed in these novels results from the clash between systems of cultural value, as if the rubbing off against each other of two “seriousnesses” produced lightheartedness. Psychoanalysis holds that jokes, like dreams, reveal the unconscious of an individual. Given an ongoing supranational reconfiguration of cultural value, these high-blown

17 Other possible allusions to Lu Xun’s biography include his arranged marriage to Zhu An, an illiterate rural gentry girl who had her feet bound in the traditional manner (the adopted child in Aira’s rendering). Reportedly, the marriage was never consummated, although Lu Xun always provided for her economically (Pollard 55-68).

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jokes would amount to manifestations of a more collective nature–pace Jameson, those of a “global” political unconscious. In the novels, humor often reveals sources of social anxiety, notably that of losing in the economic game of globalization, or “quedarse sin laburo” (lose one’s job), as Magnus puts it (33). There is also the vertiginous change in cultural value–as in the juxtaposition of Kant and Lu Hsin–or the blurring of the line that used to separate foreign from native. Fear of interpenetration is a recurrent motif in Gamboa’s novel, where proctologist jokes and threats of torture that involve the anus sexualize the fear of “giving in” to a different culture. Is it a coincidence that the plots of all three novels involve kidnapping? One could understand this metonymically as an attraction-repulsion impulse toward transculturation: becoming other, if by force. The seduction plot in Un chino en bicicleta and the avant-garde poetics of Una novela china mold themselves to the demands of textual transformation and of writing as an other that result from this impulse. Another likely source of anxiety behind the works is uncertainty over the unforeseeable structural changes in ways of life that globalization could bring about. For one, real-life China, be it during the Cultural Revolution or in the present, challenges the idea that multi-party representative democracy is some kind of natural state of affairs. Can one really anticipate under which political model will globalization proceed? Literature is no stranger to such matters, for as Aira insinuates with his allusions to Lu Hsin, the social function of cultural artifacts does not go unaltered with epochal political changes. And since globalization needs not follow a script, one cannot readily anticipate its cultural consequences. In this sense, the works analyzed in this essay may anticipate profound changes in regional and national paradigms of understanding culture. One can formulate, despite the risk of falling into a chicken-or-egg question, that new markets bring about new cultural formations. But if this becomes apparent in hindsight, and here a figure like Marco Polo comes to mind, it is not an easy task to appraise the response of contemporary culture to the major economic change currently underway. Such a response is certainly not straightforward, nor is it mimetic: it can be as unruly and suggestive as jokes or dreamwork. Chinese products may have become ubiquitous in Latin American markets–or have “flooded” them, as a frequent metaphor goes–but China remains by and large an invisible, underrepresented culture in Latin America. Fictionalizations of Sino-Latin American relations have something of dealing with repressed dreams, perhaps nightmares.

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Before ushering a new era of transpacific literary studies, we would do well in minding various conditions found “on the ground.” China and Latin America both belong to the Global South, which means that, despite ongoing efforts at bilateral integration, northern metropolis broker their relations. Such a triangulation, incarnated in Gamboa’s character of the French-Colombian journalist, carries on into the arts. Consider also that one cannot take for granted the autonomy of the cultural realm, neither in a State-controlled public sphere like China’s, nor in the commodified cultural economy of post-neoliberal Latin America. Gamboa’s lighthearted Beijing may serve as a sales-pitch setting for a comic adventure novel, while Mandarin translations of Latin American classics enter China through closely-monitored channels, as all other foreign culture does.18 What would result then from a hypothetic translation and distribution of the works of Aira, Gamboa, and Magnus in China? How would their slapstick and irreverence carry across? Such an operation might leave behind a trail of failed jokes that could highlight a less publicized face of globalization, that of misencounter and contradiction.

Works Cited Aira, César. Un episodio en la vida de un pintor viajero. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. —. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2006. —. El juego de los mundos: novela de ciencia ficción. La Plata: El Broche, 2000. —. Una novela china. Buenos Aires: Debolsillo, 2005. Ardila, Clemencia and Grupo de Especialización en Hermenéutica Literaria Eafit. “Los impostores de Santiago Gamboa: El juego de la escritura.” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 13 (2003): 121-38. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1973. Cohen, Paul A. “Humanizing the Boxers.” The Boxers, China, and the World. Eds. Robert Bickers and R.G. Tiedemann. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. 179-98. 18

I read this between the lines of Lu Rucai’s article on the presence of Latin American literature in China, published in the government-sanctioned monthly magazine China Today.

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Gamboa, Santiago. Los impostores. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2002. García, Mariano. Degeneraciones textuales: los géneros en la obra de César Aira. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Magnus, Ariel. Un chino en bicicleta. Bogotá: Norma, 2007. Mao Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961. Pollard, David E. The True Story of Lu Xun. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002. “Premian la novela de un argentino.” La nación. 21 Sep 2007. , accessed 27 Jun 2009. Rama, Ángel. La ciudad letrada. Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984. Rucai, Lu. “La impronta de la literatura latinoamericana sobre una generación de chinos.” China Today Mar 2005. , accessed 3 Feb 2009. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Santiago, Silviano. O cosmopolitismo do pobre: crítica literária e crítica cultural. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2004. Shixue, Jiang. “The Chinese Foreign Policy Perspective.” China’s Expansion into the Western Hemisphere: Implications for Latin America and the United States. Eds. Riordan Roett and Guadalupe Paz. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008. 27-43.

STAGING ABSENCE: SEVERO SARDUY’S FICTIVE ORIENTALISM IN FROM CUBA WITH A SONG PAULA PARK UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN

Sarduy’s Orientalism Any elaborate biographical approach to Cuban writer Severo Sarduy results in an unraveling of his deep engagement with the Orient. During his young adulthood, for example, Sarduy was introduced to Oriental philosophies through the Society of Theosophy in his hometown, Camagüey.1 In 1960, he received a scholarship to study in Spain and he later moved to France, where he had more access to Taoism and Buddhism as well as to Chinese painting and poetry. Furthermore, reading Octavio Paz (who at the time was the Mexican ambassador to India) and eventually making his acquaintance, Sarduy experienced the depths of Tantrism and felt inclined to embark on his own explorations of the Oriental worlds.2 It is well documented in memoirs, letters and photos how he traveled extensively to the Orient from France. He went to Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Indonesia, Iran, India, Nepal and Tibet.3 Much of his work was written during these travels or, as his critics argue, inspired by them. 1

This society was led by the Camagüeyan poet Clara Niggemann (1910-2000) who was profoundly devoted to the teachings of J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986), the popular Brahmin who was believed to be the reincarnation of the Maitreya Buddha and who is explored as a central theme in Sarduy’s fourth novel, Maitreya (1978). 2 More about the encounter with Paz appears in his brief essay “Paz en Oriente” (1990). 3 More details of the dates and places that Sarduy visited can be found on the complete works edited by Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (see bibliography) and El Oriente de Sarduy, a collection of essays and a catalogue for an exhibition that was inaugurated by the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid in May 2008 and was to travel in various other locations in Europe, Africa and Asia.

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It might be a cliché to proceed with this essay’s theoretical discussion by conferring with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). However, I find it necessary and crucial to do so, since Sarduy’s work eventually reflects upon the criticism of the Western inability of dealing with the Orient, pointed out so pungently by Said’s work. Commenting on his academic formation in comparative literature, Said recalls the “danger of distortion”4 he perceived when reading Western canonical writers, beginning with those of the nineteenth century, such as Flaubert or Nerval. The Palestine critic describes how impacted he was by the extent to which the Orient was exoticized or expected to “fulfill” an Orientalized version of itself. These representations could not be related to the Orient he knew and had experienced—the real Orient where he had grown up. The imagined Orient of major French writers was so ambiguous that Said was concerned by how they expressed no interest in specifying which Orient was being integrated into their fictions. For this reason, Said refers to Orientalism as a “Western style.” Writing or speaking about the Orient from the Occident entails a process of exclusion, a re-structuring and an Othering of the Orient: “The Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact […] The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient” (Said 21). The Orient cannot represent itself because it is easily trapped by the dominating discourse of the West. The West filters everything that the Orient says, transforming or minimizing its “poor” discourse. The Orient, Westernized, is dispossessed of the agency of representing itself—it becomes absent. Academic critics of Orientalism make an effort to study the gaps in Western experiences that are filled by inaccurate conceptions of the Orient, yet the same problem is faced. The French feminist philosopher and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray poses this question when she analyzes Schopenhauer’s references to Hindu philosophy: “Which India is evoked in Western philosophy, when it is evoked?” (29). From the Oriental side—the other world, so to speak—in a speech delivered in 2001 titled “Our Asias,” the Indian literary critic Gayatri Spivak reflects on the various Asian peoples and cultures. Asia spans from “two absurdities at its two ends: Israel and Japan” (11). Thus, 4

In Orientalism, Said discusses how Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798 set the strategy for modern imperial conquests. This expedition convoked a number of scientists, philologists, historians, and botanists to produce a scientific survey of the Egyptian people and culture for the Europeans. He points out how the Orient has been carefully studied by various specialists with an imperialistic approach.

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how could one critical discourse fit such a diverse cultural and symbolic range? Even when studying one Oriental culture, one Oriental nation, there is a plurality that is incalculably overlooked. We realize, then, how much of the Orient is lost or disfigured as it is filtered, even through recent intellectual parameters. Let us now examine to what extent Sarduy participates in the still fervent and growing debate on Orientalism. In his fiction, he evokes an exaggerated abundance of Oriental settings and referents. They are either presented in juxtaposition or they remain completely unadjusted from the textual context. If there is an absence of the Orient being produced in the West, he fills it up incessantly. To illustrate these approaches, let me choose three random cultural referents from two novels, which are detached from narrative development and context. In From Cuba with a Song (1967), the cosmetic appearance of Lotus Flower, to whom I will refer more in detail in the following sections, is described as lighter that the Korean ti sound (133). In his fourth novel, Maitreya (1978), the dying Master teaches his followers that life is ephemeral and metaphorically states that they will not see a Korean screen folding much longer (21). Later, as two main characters are traveling around, they encounter a group of old toothless women who are compared to Korean witches (117). In these three instances there are Korean referents; however, no importance can be attributed to their Koreanness. In this context, what is Sarduy’s approach to these Korean referents or to Korean culture in general? Can we speak of a Sarduy-Korea connection here at all? Certainly we cannot. The mystical sound, the folding screen, and the witches could very well be Japanese, Tibetan, or Indonesian. These artificial and disjointed referents have flown away from their cultural root. I begin by proposing that in Sarduy’s narrative there is, for the most part, an ornamental or cosmetic accumulation of the Oriental. Sarduy’s Orientalism chooses to remain on extreme ambiguity; it functions unsystematically, chaotically. Each referent is released and participates in the simultaneity of a purely textual context. What do we do, then, with Sarduy’s extremely “distorted,” artificially imagined Orient? Can we still trace masked imperialistic or postcolonial implications in his writings since he chose to re-imagine the Orient so disorderly even though he was deeply engaged with it? To answer these questions, let me focus for a moment on the group of intellectuals in Tel Quel, the avant-garde literary journal to which Sarduy was connected while studying at the École du Louvre in Paris. The contributors to this journal had a particular and yet diversified fascination with China during the late sixties and early seventies. During these two decades, several

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articles in the French journal were devoted to Maoism and to Chinese language, aesthetics, and women. Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva repeatedly interpreted how both Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Chinese poetry expressed “aspects of the West’s repressed” (Hayot 121). In 1972, there was a special issue dedicated to Chinese thought with the title “Le pensée chinoise.” They also showed a sharp interest in Chinese theater. In all, Western intellectual interests were projected exponentially into an imaginary China. This idealized fixation of French intellectuals culminated with an organized trip to China in 1974. The group was composed of Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Sollers, Wahl, and Maciocchi. At the last minute, Lacan was also integrated into the group. Following this trip, each intellectual published extensive works regarding their impressions and there was also another special issue, which praised the Cultural Revolution. Yet this fascination with China would soon come to an end. The critic Eric Hayot refers to this moment as the “Telquelian embarrassment.” This sudden rupture had to do with the deterioration of Maoism and also with the criticism from Asian intellectuals regarding Tel Quel’s detached observations about China. In addition, there was a growing feeling of “anti-Orientalism” within the Telquelian group, led by the French philosopher François Wahl (Sarduy’s partner), who was sensitive towards these unrealistic and dreamlike approaches to the Orient. Following Wahl’s critical hesitation, it is important to point out how this experience helped the Tel Quel group to notice the limitations of Western ideology. The end of the fascination revealed that the West needed to reformulate its relation with or interest (symbolic and material) in the Orient. It is crucial, therefore, to consider how these debates on Orientalism and the imaged China of the Tel Quel group permeated Sarduy’s fiction. But given the author’s constant perceptions of the artificiality of organizing life events as if there was causality and then immediate succession,5 one of my objectives is to appreciate his imprecision. Sarduy’s Orient is movable, expansive, and dynamic—an exciting textual stage. As a reader of Sarduy, I do not intend to decipher correspondences between each potential allusion integrated in his works and the points of reference in his Orientalist repertoire, but rather to exercise a reading of several other possible Orients: an evocative Orient, a “fictive” Orient. 5

In an interview with Mihály Dès, Severo Sarduy points out that life is chaotic, that there is no imperative post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Letras Libres 57). Even within his fiction, he suggests as the character “I” who is in dialogue with a “Reader” in From Cuba with a Song: “Well, dear, not everything in life is coherent. A little disorder with the order, I always say” (26).

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Seemingly, only by chance will the excesses of his writing match a glance of the real Orient. Roland Barthes, who was a very close friend and critic of Sarduy’s, opens his brilliant book Empire of Signs (1970) by affirming that he wants to imagine a “faraway” nation, a “fictive nation” with an “invented name.” According to Barthes, there would be a certain number of features, which would then deliberately form a system that would coincidentally be called Japan. Barthes openly dismisses speaking about the real Japan. In the same way, in his engagement with the Orient, Sarduy does not claim to speak for nor from the Orient, even if he may be given a flashing “license” to do so. Instead, he effectively parodies the attempt and the permanent desire of constructing the Orient from the West, through an exaggeration of it. The real Orient, which he would have contacted in his voyages, in his perception of Oriental writings and arts, and even in his blood as he was of Chinese descent, is covered by his Orientalized artificiality. I will limit myself to analyze one section titled “By the river of rose ashes” from his second novel, From Cuba with a Song, where one of the main characters is a Chinese soprano named Lotus Flower. The setting of this chapter is the historical Shanghai Theater that used to be located in Havana’s Chinatown. With this narrative characterization and stage, Sarduy acknowledges the Chinese as a partaker in Cuba. The novel presents how the Chinese Cubans have been overlooked and should be integrated in Cuban literature and in the Cuban imagery. In the “Note” at the end of the novel, Sarduy clearly affirms that Cuba is mainly composed of a triple Spanish-African-Chinese amalgamation.6 The “Orientalness” in Cuba is ready to enter the textual stage that belongs to it.

The Western Desire for the Spectacular Chinese The fictive integration of the Chinese is maximized through the desire of a Spanish military, referred mostly as “General,” who goes regularly to the Chinese Theater and becomes obsessed with the Chinese singer, Lotus Flower. Recreating the commercialization of tourism and the culture of spectacle in Cuba during the 1950s, which is more and less when this story presumably takes place, will allow us to examine the General’s aggressive pursuit of this “foreign” beauty. Under Machado, the tourist industry in Cuba underwent a rapid growth from the 1920s to the 1950s, when Batista 6

He mentions this in an explanatory final section: “Three cultures, at least, have been superimposed to constitute the Cuban—Spanish, African, and Chinese—; three sections alluding to them constitute this book” (From Cuba with a Song 154).

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became “tourism’s producer, director and stage manager” (Schwartz 147). Waves of rich tourists went to the island on vacation and stayed in lavish hotels, gambled in casinos, and attended exotic cabaret performances. Through the numerous tourist commissions, travel articles and brochures, Cuba was transformed into a major destination for mass tourism. This ever-growing business produced a culture of excessive spectacularity, a culture to be observed, a culture for outsiders. During this time, the Chinese quarter in Havana, created by the first Chinese coolies and their descendents, was considered one of the touristic options: “In the popular imagination, the Chinatown ‘labyrinth’ became an ‘exotic, impenetrable, obscure’ neighborhood” (Schwartz 76). Western audiences would liberate their desires on the sensual island, no matter how manufactured, artificial, or touristy the spectacles were. The Spanish General in the novel is one of them: a desiring tourist that becomes obsessed by the exotic and mysteriously talented Chinese opera singer. The lustful Spaniard becomes so infatuated with her that the narrator has to replay or re-narrate her spectacular movements as he infinitely fantasizes them. The descriptions of her dance and her extravagant cosmetic appearance produce a growing distance between his exoticization and her real spectacle: “Faraway, the China maid shrieks, and dances the Canton mambo. And he, stuck, here. Still” (26). Furthermore, there is a production of textual waste as, throughout the chapter, Lotus Flower’s admirers refer to her using different names. As readers, we can add up the singer’s complete pseudonym as “Lotus Flower by the river of rose ashes,” denoting her vanishing essence.7 Her name evokes an abundance of fading referents: ephemeral like a flower, flowing like a river, and expansive like ashes. On the other hand, the General’s attitude conforms to an identity that is charged with solid Western characteristics—a stereotypical foreigner visiting Cuba. He is a blond Spaniard who smokes Romeo and Juliet, the finest cigars in Cuba. He thinks in terms of his victorious battles and carries around all his clanking medals, highlighting the weight of his military conquests. Accordingly, his devotion towards Lotus Flower is presented as a need to conquer her, to re-name her as a possessed object, to make her “his Chinese cherry, his lychee” (31, emphasis is mine). This reminds us of John Quincy Adams, who stated that Cuba was a fruit that would gravitate towards the North. As president, he stated that Cuba would fall “like a ripening plum” into the lap of the union (Pérez 30). In 7 It is worthwhile to mention that the Spanish name “Flor de Loto junto al río de cenizas de rosas” sounds more redundant and excessive than the translation.

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the same strategic manner or as historian Louis Pérez phrases it, with “imperial impulses,” the General aspires to own Lotus Flower. He desires to possess this culturally different ornate figure through a militant modus operandi: “The Butcher is ready to fight” (From Cuba 25). In this carnal desire we see a violent discourse: he is ready to destroy, as he wants to impose his sexual authority on her. Through his militarized imagination we begin to suspect that Lotus Flower has to be embodied through his dominance. According to the Cuban critic Roberto González Echevarría, in Sarduy’s fiction, “The Orient is the sacred, the Occident is the profane; the Orient is the permanent and the Occident is the historical” (Ruta 203, my translation).8 The West “profanes” the Orient by deforming it through its powerful gaze, or, as Said would call it, the “Western lens.” The Orient is forcibly inscribed into a Western history, as if it needed to be recorded to become text. We may interpret that Lotus Flower is profaned and artificially Orientalized at the Spaniard’s service. However, she is always able to escape that gaze. While the General is still “fixed” in the audience seat, Lotus Flower goes through constant transmutations that are analogous to her overflowing names. She cancels out all the geographies imagined by the General for her as she changes her disguise and performs with growing speed: Lotus Flower leaps up… Now she’s the white mask striped by shadows of sugar canes, now the flight of a dove, the streak of a rabbit. Try and see her. You can’t […] [Lotus Flower] attacks. Changes disguise, throws stones, appears and disappears in the same place, runs zigzag so that no weapon can reach her […] she scats centipedes, squirrels, chameleons […] one by one she exhausts her scenic resources. (25)

On stage, her body is exhaustingly changed and obscured, constantly disappearing. It is a fugitive body. After the performance, the General decides to wait for Lotus Flower to come out of her dressing room with a bunch of roses on one hand and a cigar on the other, like a romantic admirer. But the Spaniard never sees her. According to him, she never comes out. Instead of a beautiful Oriental delicacy, a “skinny bald” Chinese man comes out of Lotus Flower’s changing room. So strange is it all, that the Spaniard desperately goes in and looks here and there, sniffing; he goes into the bathroom, checks behind doors, under the bed, in the closet. He looks for her everywhere, yet she is not there—she is 8

“El Oriente es lo sagrado, el Occidente lo profano; aquél es lo permanente, éste lo histórico”.

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missing. The truth is that Lotus Flower is actually a man, a transvestite who finishes the show and naturally comes out without costumes or make up; she is that skinny bald man that had come out before the General’s eyes. Therefore, it is not a matter of not seeing her but of not recognizing her. The General’s inability to understand this cosmetic plurality (and simultaneously what appears to be the absence of Lotus Flower) stages how the West is trapped by the lack of means for interpretation, by the deficient coding parameters. Now, the narrator constantly refers to Lotus Flower in accordance to an unmistakable Chineseness. For example, it is said that her skin never turns pale because she is naturally so white from eating rice and tea (24). Furthermore, some of her given names are Empress Ming, the yellow one, simply Ming, or “la china.”9 These multiple names confuse the reader and put him in the place of the General whose imaginary deprives him of knowing where or who she is. The General feels impotent and becomes desperate, as he only knows that she is Chinese; he is actually “stuck” by that single fact and thus cannot read her spectacle beyond that.

The Cosmic/Cosmetic Orient Sarduy’s verbal constructs may be described as meaningless but they are not really worthless. As Barthes points in The Pleasure of the Text, Sarduy’s verbal excess participates in another kind of confluence.10 The 9

Incidentally, in From Cuba with a Song, the Chinese are referred to with deliberate disaffection. For example, their eyes are described, in a derogatory manner, as “piggy bank holes” and Chinatown is identified by unpleasant attributes such as its smell of urine. At the conference on Orientalism, “West Reads East; East Reads West”, held at the University of California, Merced, in April 2009, a question arose: whether Sarduy himself falls into a continued articulation of the Orientalism that he criticizes. This is also mentioned in López-Calvo’s Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2008): “Notwithstanding the symbolic and metaphoric levels of his prose, his identification of Chinese characters and culture with passivity and cruelty […] leads us to question whether Sarduy himself manages to evade the paradigm that he condemns” (66). Said’s Orientalism is thus very much present in Sarduy’s fiction, but its excess creates a de-contextualization that makes the condemnation illusory. By inscribing a de-centered condemnation, Orientalism is taken to an extreme of pure parody. Sarduy also creates exaggerated characters that are stereotypically Westernized, such as the Spanish General. This parallel mockery of several cultures makes us reconsider the judgment involved in any verbal appropriation. 10 Barthes’s comment refers to Sarduy’s third novel, Cobra. “In Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, the alternation is that of two pleasures in a state of competition; the other

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verbal buildup does not remain on one surface: “Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of words” (8). Instead, Sarduy celebrates the superficial volatility of appearance building it up on that elsewhere. To further explore Sarduy’s re-configuration of excess, I will focus briefly on the role he attributes to cosmetics. On stage, the role of cosmetics is to exaggerate facial features. This mutability of exterior appearance implies a phenomenological cominginto-view. Lotus Flower exploits the application of make-up to metamorphose, to remain in trans-formation. “She will cease to be Empress Ming; she will be a piece of paint-smeared hide” (31). In the original in Spanish, this phrase is alliterated as “puro pellejo pintado”— pure painted skin. Ironically, beyond remaining on the surface, the notion of cosmetic appearance allows an in-between zone, a constant conversion between being and not-being. It allows the overly produced characters to oscillate between an exaggerated appearance and an illusive disappearance, thus emphasizing that which is not, that which is covered. This way we can better understand the volatile and simultaneously excessive omnipresence of the chorus girls, especially Help and Mercy. Regarding them, the narrator states at the end of the novel: “Both want to disappear, to be someone else: therefore the constant transformation, the wealth of cosmetics, artifices” (156). In his critical essays, Sarduy inscribes keen observations about Oriental theatrical disguises, the art of cross-dressing. The author directly references the Oriental use of masks, which is characterized by an excess of jewels, or practices like the Japanese theater Kabuki: “Dress-art goes further. It is about erasing (not on the edge but beyond limits), annulling, making the body-support disappear” (Simulación 1294, my translation).11 According to Sarduy, in these aesthetic practices what is more imperative and worth observing attentively as spectators is not the thematic structure of the performance, but rather the elaborate make-up and dressing. This echoes Barthes’s observation of pleasurable language, in which meaning or content is covered by a pristine textuality. Through an excess of cosmetics and dressing, there is a way of being that builds up from outstanding visibility. By emphasizing Lotus Flower’s extremely superficial presence, there is also a simultaneous transcendence of the edge is the other delight; more, more, still more! one word more, one more celebration. Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every king of linguistic pleasure” (Pleasure of the Text 8). 11 “El dress-art va más lejos. Se trata, no al límite sino más allá de todo límite, de borrar, de anular, de lograr la desaparición del cuerpo-soporte”.

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limits of appearance. Moreover, the more she hides herself behind cosmetics and clothing, the more intrigue and anxiety she produces in the General. This addresses an Oriental conception of eroticism: “Erotic thoughts arise after the body is fed and clothed” (Ping citing Confucius, 55). The use of cosmetics is not only in effect as a new or embellished reality for the time of the spectacle. We also have the preceding time of its application. The stylists or the performers themselves are never tired of repeating, of having to fulfill the same external practice. The cosmetics are more and more exaggerated even when the initial aesthetic objective of looking Oriental has been achieved. This search for “more and more” contains a Barthesean playful pleasure in it that moves us to think about the cosmetic/textual flux that builds up and goes beyond appearing visually appealing. The aesthetic application presents a ritualistic process. There is supremeness in the passionate cosmetic devotion of repeatedly correcting, celebrating, or transcending the surfaces of beauty. In La Simulación, Sarduy indicates that the word “cosmetic” comes from the same Greek term (țȩıȝȠȢ, “order”) that generates the word cosmos. Thus, cosmetic practices create a new cosmos—a new order, although in its process it also may produce an illusive effect of chaos. Order and chaos participate in a cycle. The new order—a disorder of the previous order—is not a finite innovation of the complexion, but rather a continuity of the behavior of the grander cosmos. Through her spectacular use of cosmetics, the transvestite Lotus Flower assumes multiple beings and yet s/he does not eliminate his/her masculinity on the stage. Rather, she covers and plays with it, allowing a presence that is in dialogue with an actively and continuing co-existing form of being—a vertiginous alternation of ying and yang. Being from such different worlds, Lotus Flower and the General are displaced into opposing extremes of an ellipsis and, therefore, they cannot consummate unity: their bodies cannot touch with the growing cosmetic textuality between them. The union is also prevented by the General’s incapability to understand Lotus Flower’s chaotic cross-being. The critic René Prieto analyzes how Sarduy often censors or eludes scenes of sexual penetration or contact. He discusses, for example, how the characters in several of Sarduy’s novels are on the verge of sexual intimacy— sometimes a complex orgy—and yet in an instant, the male sexual organ disappears, or it is metamorphosed.12 The extreme avoidance of sexual 12 René Prieto convinces us that the “Little Man” that appears in Sarduy’s novels corresponds to a substitution for the penis. This same interpretation can be applied

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consummation in Sarduy is filled up with fear. Mythically, this happens because sexual union implies or evokes a form of violence; it is the residue of the various traumas regarding various separations of body parts. On a similar note, in El Cristo de la rue Jacob, Sarduy recounts the trauma of being born, of coming out of the mother’s womb and having to assume a new skin.13 Being born is compared to a wound; it is remembered as being exiled or mutilated from the maternal body. Life consists of remembering or trying to forget that separation. Extending this discourse of bodily separations, in Conjunctions and Disjunctions (1969) Octavio Paz suggests that after civilizations ceased being a unified “primordial substance,” Oriental cultures seem to have retained a balance of vibrant and plural distinct elements within them. For instance, in Hinduism divinities appear as couples, Shiva and Parvati; in Chinese philosophy there is the yin and yang. The West, on the other hand, developed a predominance of the masculine element. Consequently, the Orient and the Occident feel alienated from each other having developed into distinct separated civilizations. In Sarduy’s literature there is always an effort of returning to an origin, to the wound or the primordial substance—his characters “suffer from nostalgia” (González Echevarría 3). This observation complements the tendency of imagining the unified body as evoked personally by Sarduy and mythically by Paz. Cultures are near each other in their search for a lost counterpart. The West looks at the Orient with a particular longing, with curiosity, assuming an erotic desire of becoming whole, one with it. Nevertheless, there are misunderstandings and traumas that keep them apart. They engage in wasteful sexual fantasy instead of achieving consummation. In the pleasurable proliferation of playful imaginations, the Orient and the West may come close to each other, but an actual corporal unity is inconceivable. Instead, there is a symbolic plurality that caresses the carnal bodies sustaining their desirability. Lotus Flower must remain inaccessible and separated from the General’s touch. Sarduy constructs a stage for gestures emphasized by layers of make-up and clothing. It produces a space for the distorted, idealized, and artificial mutual gaze of the covered skin, but excludes having to identify or account for the performing body itself. to the white dwarf Pup in Cobra and the “enano” in Maitreya. According to Prieto, this dwarf-penis analogy was “pretty evident even back in 1973” (81). 13 “Nos habíamos separado en el dolor, en el intersticio de esa herida mínima. Ahora sabía que era dueño de otra piel” (Cristo 12). (“We had been separated by pain, by the interstice of that minimum wound. Now I knew that I was the owner of another skin”.)

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The Horrifying Pleasure of Textual Transformations As Lotus Flower becomes impossible to find, the anxiety of this military Westerner, who desires for the unknown and erotic Oriental, grows hyperbolically. Now, the incognito that Lotus Flower performs again may refer us to Orientalist implications of giving the Orient artificial names and qualities, of inventing an Orient that does not and cannot exist by itself. Sarduy presents the possibility of this interpretation and then takes it further: he purposely mocks the jaded framework of the Westerner’s desire for the exotic and emphasizes the horrifying consequent chaos or the return to a trauma of separation, as the General cannot possess the exotic figure. Coming from a patriarchal and Western fixed world, the General is blinded by his categories of femininity and masculinity, which are set in a binary construction. He panics in confusion and seeks help as he comes to the horrifying possibility that Lotus may, in fact, come from nowhere. She manifests an impenetrable existence, a ghostlike plurality, which transcends all the systems or ways of being that he knows. The opera choir singers Help and Mercy, who pretend to help him out in his romantic misery, tell him with a seemingly wise tone: “[Lotus Flower, Empress] Ming is pure absence, she is what she is not” (38). He is confused as he sees her on her stage, but cannot find her outside it nor can he enter that stage that belongs to her. In Julia Kristeva’s words, he confronts “a void that is not nothing but indicates, within its discourse, a challenge to symbolization” (51). The General is incapable of keeping up with her void discourse, manifested in permanent escapes and liquid emergences. Inevitably, he undergoes severe suffering. As he searches for Lotus, he is described as Arcimboldesque: “he’s made of parsley, wood, edible snail when he explores the forest; here in the theater corridor where he advances along the all, he continues sideways” (114). Like the portrait paintings of the sixteenth-century Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo, he is overwhelmed by the surplus of her random appearances. It even affects the way he walks; he roams through the streets of Havana hopelessly and with a growing anxiety. The General is completely swamped and absorbed by her. Soon, this void begins to penetrate and mutilate his textual existence. His name begins to change; at times it is shortened as “Gene.” A horrifying vacuity comes to invade and inhabit him. A single letter and a terminal period further abbreviate his name: G. no longer eats or sleeps. He gets cramps, visions, constipations. He feels looked at […] he weathers storms in a wine cup—tea he no longer

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Staging Absence takes—he’s all choked up, something’s pressing his throat […] At night he searches. Absence eats his liver—ontological cirrhosis (49-50).

He undergoes an ontological alteration: “G.” becomes a drowning referent, lost in the illusionary flowery textuality of the opera singer. He becomes incapacitated for trying to find her, as he is consumed by his overwhelming project of finding something that exists only on stage. Towards the end of the chapter, his “ontological crisis” drives him to a final desperate and perverse desire of finding her at any cost. Help and Mercy, who later captivate him and warn him to leave Lotus Flower alone, hear him yelling angrily, with “purple veinlets furrowing his triple chin”: “All I want to know is where she is, who she is, why she doesn’t come, where does she hide herself, where” (52). He no longer fantasizes nor desires her movements, but her frigid body. The General just wants to know the exact geographical space her body occupies in order to attack, to finally resolve this military battle that he is definitely losing. Then, he comes up with a perfect tactical plan that consists in giving her an anonymous gift: a beautiful ornamented bracelet, with blue jade and painted flowers and butterflies, and two miniature blades that are to target her wrist veins when being locked. After delivering the gift, the General waits, sadistically, for Lotus Flowers’ corpse. In the final line “[h]e’s waiting for them to carry a pale body out the dressing room doors” (55). Incapable of pacifying his erotic pleasure in her plural names or appearances, he plans to see a final show, a single unmovable dead body. As readers, we are invited to wait for Lotus Flower alongside the military Spaniard; this time, we expect her to perform her formal final act. As we read, we may think that the General has conquered and won his aggressive battle. She will be dead pale for him. Yet before his calculated plan is executed, the chapter has already met its end. The General is just waiting. So we never find out whether Lotus Flower will receive the gift, whether or not she will wear it immediately. If, in fact, she is killed by the bracelet her corpse may be all dressed up or she may come out as the skinny bald Chinese man, in which case the General would never recognize. The possibilities of her sliding away from verbal appropriation continue even after the text is over. Neither the General nor the readers are able to bring an end to her staging absence.

Conclusion From Cuba with a Song presents the Orient and the West separated, yet unmistakably sharing the same page. They perform an unfinished act and produce a construct that needs active revision and multiple readings.

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Accordingly, let us briefly return to the very beginning of the chapter, that is, the title: “By the river of rose ashes.” Through a close reading, we see that the most recurrent name during this section—Lotus Flower—is not present. I propose that this textual absence codifies and antecedes her apparent disappearances throughout our reading of her. Lotus Flower is simultaneously there and not there. Like the Orient, she appears without becoming text. Later as we read, we somehow find her there in the excess of words, unreadable, textually active in her absence. In the end, she remains suspended, challenging the text. She stimulates her readers and the narrator that has confined her to an artificial and stereotypical Chineseness. Like the General, we cannot see Lotus Flower, but we know that she is in her changing room. Perhaps she is ritualistically wearing her make-up and costumes, rehearsing her parts, or warming up her vocal chords for a radiant performance. Yet, through the immediate reality of her absence, she becomes untraceable; she stands and acts on her own. We do not see her, yet that does not prevent her from being there, where she cannot be seen. Just as it is impossible for the General to possess and to see her body, Sarduy suggests a mutual and continuing search for the Orient, a complex yet permanently pleasurable search. He refuses to conclude it all in a sudden death, a conquest carried out by a passing spectator’s reading.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. —. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. González Echevarría, R. La Ruta de Severo Sarduy. Hanover, Ed. del Norte, 1987. Guerrero, Gustavo and Xosé Luis García Canido. El Oriente de Sarduy. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes, 2008. —. “Perfil: Severo Sarduy.” Letras Libres 57 (September 2003): 54-58. Hayot, Eric. “Tel Quel.” Chinese Dreams. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007. Irigaray, Luce. Between the East and the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Kristeva, Julia. Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York, Columbia University Press, 1982. López-Calvo, Ignacio. Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture. Gainsville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2008.

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Paz, Octavio. Conjunctions and Disjunctions. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1974. Pérez Jr., Louis A. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Ping, Wang. Aching for Beauty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Prieto, René. “The Queer Theories of Severo Sarduy.” Between the Self and the Void. Alicia Rivero-Potter, ed. Boulder, Colorado: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, University of Colorado. 1998. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1994. Sarduy, Severo. De donde son los cantantes. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2005. —. Cobra and Maitreya. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. —. El Cristo de la rue Jacob. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamerica, 1994. —. From Cuba with a Song. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. —. La Simulación. Severo Sarduy: Obra Completa. Eds. Guerrero, Gustavo and François Wahl. Paris: Ediciones Unesco, 2000. —. “Paz en Oriente.” Severo Sarduy: Obra Completa. Eds. Guerrero, Gustavo and François Wahl. Paris: Ediciones Unesco, 2000. Schwartz, Rosalie. Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Our Asias.” Other Asias. Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

CHAPTER FOUR LUSOPHONE ORIENTALISMS

ORIENTALISM IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE: EÇA DE QUEIROZ AND PESSOA JOSÉ I. SUÁREZ UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO

Since its publication in 1978, Orientalism, Edward Said’s oft-cited-yet controversial work, has engendered much discussion about how Westerners view and write about the Asian continent and about Asians living in the West. (Although his concept of Orientalism is primarily limited to the Middle East, mostly Egypt and Palestine, scholars have broadened it to include all that is considered “Eastern.”) Because, according to Said, this perception was not fully realized until the latter part of the nineteenth century, Portugal is barely mentioned in his book. The omission may be attributable to certain facts. First, although the Portuguese were the first Westerners to establish contact with the East, they had all but vanished from that part of the world by the nineteenth century. Second, Said specialized in French and English studies and, as it is often the case, neglect or outright disregard for Iberian studies or cultural production might account for this omission. Such an attitude is evident in the “Introduction” to Orientalism, in which Said makes two remarks on which he does not expound: “Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I will be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (1). (Incidentally, his reference to the Swiss is puzzling.) Further on, he reiterates his exclusion, “Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on. Yet my discussion of that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to “the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal.” (17). He goes on to say, “I had to focus rigorously upon the British-French […] because it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of

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the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history” (15). If Said is here limiting the Orient to the Eastern Mediterranean, then his observation is accurate; however, if he is referring to the entire “Orient,” then he is gravely incorrect because, as generally known, Portugal pioneered European entry into India and the Far East.1 (Significantly, Said does not repeat mention of the Swiss.) Other than possible disregard for Spain and Portugal, a vestige of the “Black Legend,”2 another reason for Said’s exclusion or superficial mention of the Portuguese is that, since at least the nineteenth century, most Portuguese writers have thematically portrayed the East, not in the Orientalist manner defined by Said, but in a sympathetic and realist manner. This paper proposes to support this contention through concrete examples. For this purpose, I have chosen two works by Portugal’s acclaimed nineteenth-century novelist José Maria Eça de Queiroz and two poems by its most renowned poet, Fernando Pessoa. Eça de Queiroz’s novella O Mandarim (The Mandarin 1880) uses the apparition of a dead Chinese noble to make a non-Orientalist point. The inspiration for the work is likely autobiographical.3 On December 20, 1872, Eça de Queiroz assumed his duties as Portuguese consul in Havana, Cuba, then under Spanish rule. In this capacity, he represented those Chinese laborers who had come to Cuba through the Portuguese colony of Macau. Those who had arrived prior to February 15, 1861, had the opportunity, after expiration of their eight-year contracts, to apply for Portuguese citizenship through the consulate and remain on the island as foreign residents. Those who arrived afterwards, however, faced a tragic dilemma: to leave the island within two months or to sign a new contract. (Renewal contracts, often forced, kept the Chinese immigrant in virtual slavery.) Because the indentured workers lacked the money to return home, they had no choice but to renew their contracts. Eça was steadfastly committed to putting an end to this horrible practice despite attempted bribes by those benefiting; when these failed, they resorted to threats. It remains unclear the extent to

1

In Chapter I, “The Scope of Orientalism,” Said acknowledges Portugal’s pioneer presence in these areas (see 73-75). 2 The Black Legend’s influence on Said is obvious in his comparison between Napoleon Bonaparte’s “humane” conquest of Egypt to Spain’s “barbaric” conquest of the New World (82). Although his Iberian bias continued with Culture and Imperialism (1993), he mentions in the Introduction that he purposely excludes certain empires, “…there are several empires that I do not discuss: the AustroHungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Spanish and Portuguese” (xxii). 3 See Suárez 51-56.

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which his position was a determining factor, but these abusive practices toward the Chinese eventually ceased. A summary of the plot of O Mandarim: Teodoro, a government employee, while reading one night, is encouraged by the devil to ring a small bell that appears on a table beside him. By so doing, he will kill a mandarin in China whom he will never see and whose wealth he will then inherit. Teodoro obliges and, months later, receives news of the death of a mandarin who has willed him a fortune. However, soon after embarking on a life of debauchery, he is constantly plagued by the dead man’s ghost. He decides to travel to China to find the mandarin’s relatives, give them what remains of the inheritance, and set his conscience at ease. Unsuccessful in finding any relative and suffering various mishaps in that country, he resigns himself to his fate. He prepares for his impending death by leaving this observation as his sole legacy, “Only that bread tastes good that we earn each day with our own hands. Do not kill the Mandarin!” (89).4 This is also Eça’s advice to the powerful in Cuba—i.e., earn your wealth through your own labor, not by exploiting the Chinese. This moral stands in contrast to Said’s observations of European literature. Nonetheless, as Ignacio López-Calvo states, the text is not entirely exempt from Orientalist prejudices, as Teodoro’s visit to China illustrates: During his stay in China, Teodoro sees this country through Orientalist lenses, that is, as a place where rulers live in lavish luxury while their subjects starve. For this reason, a visiting Russian general, Camiloff, warns Teodoro that should he decide to give millions to the Chinese Emperor, “They would be swallowed up in planting gardens, collecting porcelains, carpeting floors with furs, and providing silks for concubines. They would not relieve the hunger of a solitary Chinese or repair one stone of a public highway. They would go into orgies of Asiatic extravagance” (49). […] Evidently, this passage connects with a long-standing Western literary tradition that began with Marco Polo’s accounts of Kublai Khan’s luxury, excesses, and centralized power. However, this situation could be found in Europe, in pre-Colombian civilizations, and throughout the world. (63)

By the way, the term “mandarin” is not Chinese but derived from the Portuguese verb “mandar;” it was how the first Portuguese visitors to China referred to local officials. It should be noted, however, that Orientalist comments are not made by Teodoro, but by the Russian general. 4 “Só sabe bem o pão, que dia a dia ganham as nossas mãos: nunca mates o mandarim!” (267).

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A Relíquia (The Relic 1887) is a second novel by Eça de Queiroz, this time partially set in Said’s Orient, namely Egypt and Palestine (Eça visited Egypt in 1869 and attended the opening of the Suez Canal). Raised by his aunt, Teodorico Raposo feigns a strong religious zeal in an effort to inherit her fortune. The real Teodorico, however, is absorbed with the pleasures of the flesh and wishes to travel to indulge his libido. Knowing that his aunt would never consent to Western metropolises, he persuades her, by promising to return with a relic, to finance his visit to the Holy Land. En route, he enlists a traveling companion, Dr. Topsius, a German professor who is gathering data for a book. In Alexandria, Teodorico has a torrid affair with an Englishwoman who, as a memento, gives him her nightgown along with a love note. Both men proceed to Jerusalem where Teodorico is hard-pressed to locate a relic. Finding a thorny bush, he cuts and shapes the twigs into what he plans to claim is Christ’s crown of thorns. However, back in Lisbon he mistakenly gives his aunt the package with the lingerie and the written evidence instead of the crown. She immediately disinherits him and expels him from the house. Faced with this abrupt reversal of fortune, Teodorico arranges employment, marries, and makes his own fortune. Hypocrisy or false religiosity is exemplified in this richly narrated tale that, like O Mandarim, illustrates why we should earn our keep by our own labors, not at the expense of others.5 Like O Mandarim, this novel contains Orientalist perspectives expressed by a non-Portuguese. Dr. Topsius, commenting on the women of Alexandria, says, “in all of Alexandria there was but one honest woman, who wrote a commentary on Homer and was aunt of Seneca” (76).6 Of special interest to this study is the protagonist’s dream or vision while in Jerusalem.7 Eça devotes an intercalated chapter solely to this imagined experience, where Teodorico, along with Dr. Topsius, finds himself in the first century C.E. witnessing Christ’s trial, crucifixion, and presumptive ascension. Most of what is described is in keeping with Biblical tenets, although a different light is at times shed on these events or 5

“‘Uma lição lúcida e forte’—eis o propósito moral de ‘A Relíquia’. Mas que lição? Tal como ‘O Mandarim’, a lição ‘lúcida e forte’ do novo romance é o dinheiro obtido com poucos escrúpulos […] advertir o homem de que não devia esperar a fortuna senão do esforço e do trabalho pessoais. As duas obras da fase ‘fantástica’ traduzem por isso, um propósito ético de recente data”. (Simões 47778) 6 “em toda a Alexandria, só havia uma dama honesta, que comentava Homero e era tia de Séneca. Só uma!” (75). 7 See Simões 479-80.

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earlier ones. For example a money changer, chased from the Temple by Christ, maintains that only the poor like him were banished, not the rich merchants. Because it is a dream, anachronisms are understandable as, for example, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and watches. The two characters do not attend the Via Crucis spectacle, but do go to Calvary, where Christ, having been crucified, agonizes. Then they leave to spend time with local learned men. After heated philosophical and theological discussions on this Easter day (Sunday is not mentioned), they learn of a scheme devised by Christ’s followers. It turns out that before the crucifixion, Christ was given wine mixed with a strong narcotic so that he might better endure the ordeal and, having fallen into a stupor, feign death. The guarding centurion had also been bribed to lower Christ from the cross when he reached that stage. Afterward, he was to be placed in an open sepulcher where he would appear dead to anyone peering in. The plan was for followers to remove him from the burial site at nightfall and to resuscitate him. Unfortunately, once removed, he dies unexpectedly (possibly from the unforeseen spear thrust into his side) and is quickly buried in a nearby cave. Returning to the original sepulcher and finding it empty, Mary Magdalene, in the company of other women, shouts out, “He is risen, He is risen” (221).8 This interpretation of the final days of Christ, while not in keeping with that of the Christian Bible (Matthew 28), is closer to the dogma of the principal Middle Eastern religions. In Islam, Jesus Christ is considered a prophet, not the Son of God. In Judaism, he is not considered. What was Eça’s aim with this intercalation? It does not alter the novel’s plot or its outcome. If anything, although masterfully written, it seem incongruous because Teodorico had no manifest ambivalence or doubts about Christianity, to say nothing of the fact that he lacked the education to evince such precise and rich details of the daily life and events of the period. Unequivocally, just like in O Mandarim, Eça is giving his own non-Orientalist, impartial interpretation of what he believed happened on those fateful days nearly two thousand years before. Eça knew that this “dream” chapter would not to be well received in Portugal, even among the literati. Ana Leticia Pereira Marques Ferreira corroborates just how aware our author was: Queiroz, in a letter to Ramalho Ortigão, says that he entered the novel in the Lisbon Academy of Sciences literary contest “not because there is the slightest chance that I be given the award” but because he wanted “to enjoy the Academy’s reaction before the character Raposo!” Eça knew 8

“Ressuscitou, ressuscitou!” (210).

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that the Academy was unprepared to accept this new approach to narrative that was The Relic. Eça was correct. Pinheiro Chagas rejected the work on grounds that “Raposo’s dream was improbable.” He, along with all other critics, thought that such a lowly character, lacking in psychological depth, was unworthy of having the great religious revelation that occurs throughout the dream. From his perspective, both author and character fuse within the work, the result of which may best be explained as an error 9 of judgment on Eça’s part. (Translation mine)

Another Portuguese writer who dealt with the East in his work was Fernando Pessoa. While crossing the Suez Canal by ship in 1914, Álvaro de Campos, a Pessoa heteronym, composes “Opiário” (“Opium Eater”) a poem that he dedicates to his close friend and fellow poet, Mário de Sá Carneiro, who would commit suicide in Paris two years later. Symbolist in essence and belonging to that movement’s Decadent phase, “Opiário” expresses the poet’s disenchantment with life and the resulting apathy from which opium offers a temporary escape. The expected link between opium and the Far East is there, albeit not in Orientalist fashion. The opening stanza reads, “It’s before my opium fix that my soul is sick / It kicks back and quakes, feeling life, / And I go looking for some opium to claim me, / Some Orient east of the Orient” (35).10 Campos is indeed saying that through the use of opium he finds relief in an illusory “far off” land that lies beyond the Orient. This line, in a way, may be viewed as an attempt to disassociate China from opium. To be in the exotic and bewitching Far East will not restore his sickly soul. Thus, what is considered Oriental about the East in Westerners’ minds is only an imagined construct. Further in the poem, he details his non-Orientalist view of the Orient, “I think it’s not worth having gone / To the Orient, seen India and China. / The earth is always so small and the same. / And 9

“Queirós, em carta a Ramalho Ortigão, diz que inscreveu o romance no concurso da Academia das Ciências de Lisboa “não porque haja sequer a sombra fugitiva d’uma probabilidade mais magra do que eu, de que me seja dado o conto” mas porque desejava “gozar a atitude da Academia diante de D. Raposo!” (QUEIRÓS, 1946, p. 136). Eça sabia que a Academia não estava preparada para o recebimento de uma nova proposta de narrativa como é A Relíquia. O autor estava certo. Pinheiro Chagas refutou a obra baseado em uma pretensa “inverossimilhança do sonho de Raposão”. Pinheiro Chagas, assim como o restante da crítica, acreditava que um personagem baixo, sem grandes nuances psicológicas, não seria digno da grande Revelação da religião que ocorre durante o sonho. Segundo sua visão, autor e personagem fundem-se no romance, como se isso fosse obra apenas de um descuido de Eça.” (6) 10 “É antes do ópio que a minh’alma é doente. / Sentir a vida convalesce e estiola / E eu vou buscar ao ópio que consola / Um Oriente ao oriente do Oriente” (135).

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there’s only one way to live” (36).11 Life, to the poet, is similar throughout the globe and that the Orient, regardless of Western notions or biases, is no exception. He continues in this vein: “I smoke, I grow weary. Oh, for a place on earth / Far enough West not to be East yet! / Why did I visit the India that exists / If the only real one is the one in my soul?” (36-37).12 After Vasco da Gama reached India in the fifteenth century by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese became the first Europeans to commerce with China and Japan, arguably the beginning of globalization. England, having with Portugal the oldest active treaty in the world, the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373, proceeded to carve out its empire in areas the Portuguese had explored—the crippling defeat of Portugal’s King Sebastian at the hands of North African Muslims in 1578 was also an enabling factor to the English. Consequently, much of the Portuguese overseas influence, particularly in Asia, was soon diminished. Campos captures the shattered hopes and broken dreams of the Portuguese nation in these verses from “Opiário”: “I belong to a type of Portuguese / Who since discovering India / Has been unemployed. Death’s a certainty. / I’ve thought about this a great deal” (38).13 Further on, he again stresses how uninteresting and mundane the Orient is to him by comparing it to a straw mat that ceases to be an object of beauty when rolled up: “Life—the devil take, and let the people have it! / I don’t even read the book at my bedside. / The Orient nauseates me. It’s a straw mat / Rolled up, its beauty faded” (38).14 He proceeds by decrying his tedium, his restfulness before life, hoping only for temporary relief through the drug and extolling his impending tragic end. In concluding the poem, Campos reiterates his disillusionment, not only with life, but also with what he has been led to expect about the Orient: The absurd—like the flower of India Never encountered there—awakes In my brain tired of tiring itself out. My life, God, change it or end it…

11

“Eu acho que não vale a pena ter / Ido ao Oriente e visto a Índia e a China. / A terra é semelhante e pequenina / E há só uma maneira de viver” (137). 12 “Fumo. Canso. Ah uma terra aonde, enfim, / Muito a leste não fosse o oeste já! / Pra que fui visitar a Índia que há / Se não há Índia senão a alma em mim?” (138). 13 “Pertenço a um gênero de portugueses / Que depois de estar a Índia descoberta / Ficaram sem trabalho. A morte é certa. / Tenho pensado nisto muitas vezes” (140). 14 “Leve o diabo a vida e a gente tê-la! / Nem leio o livro à minha cabeceira. / Enoja-me o Oriente. É uma esteira / Que a gente enrola e deixa de ser bela” (140).

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Leave me here in this chair, Until they come to lower me in the coffin. I was born to be a mandarin, a man of quality, But I just don’t have the serenity, the tea, the straw mat.15 (40)

Campos returns to the Orient in “Dois Excertos de Odes “ (“Ode [an excerpt]”) imploring the Night to bring solace to his soul: […] the rest of me Send off to the East, The East where everything comes from, daylight and faith, The fanatical East with its high pomp and its heat, The teeming East I shall never see. The East of Buddha, Brahma, and Shinto, The East having everything we have not, The East being all that we are not— The East which is where—who knows?—Christ may still be alive today,

Where God may really exist as King over all… (42-43)16 Campos here lays out his pro-East outlook, one very much in opposition to that of colonial powers and the Christian world. Like Eça de Queiroz before him, he is acknowledging Christ as a historical figure and humanist, not as the omnipotent and omnipresent anthropomorphic deity of most Christians. In conclusion, it is possible that, were Edward Said alive today, he might still deem these artists to be Orientalists, though unprejudiced against the East. His reasoning, as seen in his works, would be that, as Western Europeans, they have been conditioned or indoctrinated for centuries regarding peoples of color. Thus, as detailed here, they include in their works the hackneyed themes of colonialism and modernity regarding the Orient, i.e., mandarins, opium, Eastern religions, the Holy Land. While it is true that both were a product of their culture and times, they cannot be 15

“O absurdo, como uma flor da tal Índia / Que não vim encontrar na Índia, nasce / No meu cérebro farto de cansar-se. / A minha vida mude-a Deus ou finde-a... // Deixe-me estar aqui, nesta cadeira, / Até virem meter-me no caixão. / Nasci pra mandarim de condição, / Mas falta-me o sossego, o chá e a esteira” (143). 16 “[...] o resto de mim / Atira ao Oriente, / Ao Oriente donde vem tudo, o dia e a fé, / Ao Oriente pomposo e fanático e quente, / Ao Oriente excessivo que eu nunca verei, / Ao Oriente budista, bramânico, sintoísta, / Ao Oriente que tudo o que nós não temos, / Que tudo o que nós não somos, / Ao Oriente onde — quem sabe? — Cristo talvez ainda hoje viva, / Onde Deus talvez exista realmente e mandando tudo…” (158).

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blamed; moreover they, like other modern and postmodern Portuguese writers, developed these themes in a sympathetic light, one that today would be categorized as culturally diverse.

Works Cited Eça de Queiroz, José Maria. A Relíquia. Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, 1969. —. The Relic. Trans. Aubrey F.G. Bell. New York: Noonday, 1954. —. O Mandarim. Lisbon: Livros do Brasil,1969. —. The Mandarin and Other Stories. Trans. Richard Franko Goldman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1965. López-Calvo, Ignacio. Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Pereira Marques Ferreira, Ana Leticia. “A Relíquia, Romance Neopicaresco, ‘A Bengalada’ do Homem Realista.” Labirintos 2 (2007-8). , accessed 18 April 2009. Pessoa, Fernando. Poesias de Álvaro de Campos. Lisbon: Ática, 1980. —. Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. New York: Ecco, 1986. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vantage Books, 1979. Simões, João Gaspar. Vida e Obra de Eça de Queirós. Lisbon: Bertrand, 1973. Suárez, José Ignacio. “Cuba y El mandarin de Eça de Queiroz.” Círculo: Revista de Cultura (12) 1983: 51-57.

ARAB HERITAGE IN BRAZILIAN WRITER RADUAN NASSAR’S TO THE LEFT OF THE FATHER LIZBETH SOUZA-FUERTES BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

The Arab presence in Brazilian culture has been a constant ever since the beginning of the colonial period in the 1500s. Nevertheless, as time passed, the once intense Arab influence that had infused Portuguese culture progressively became diluted throughout the years. It was only in the nineteenth century that Brazil would recover this influence, as a consequence of high levels of immigration, especially of Lebanese and Syrians, who would once again give vitality to the Arab culture. In the twentieth century, they would leave their mark in all fields, particularly in art and literature. The list of Brazilian writers who come from an Arab background is quite large—poets such as Carlos Nejar, Jorge Tannuri, Jorge Tufic, and Leila Echaim; short story writer Mário Neme; and novelists Cecílio Carneiro, Salim Miguel, Raduan Nassar, and Milton Hatoum have created very personal, lyrical, and evocative works in which they have naturally blended the religious and cultural traditions of the East and West. Other authors include Célio Salomão Deba, David Nasser, Floriano Faissal, Emil Farhat, Mário Chamie, and Mussa Kuraiem. Several Brazilian authors with no personal connection to the Arab culture also contributed in a significant manner to the expansion of knowledge and the revitalization of this culture, which undoubtedly was intense in Brazil during the twentieth century. Examples include Paulo Coelho, who in 1988 published The Alchemist; Jorge Amado, who incorporated a long list of Arab characters into his works; and, most importantly, Malba Tahan, who revitalized the literature and customs of the Eastern world. Thus, in The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho brings us closer to the Eastern Middle Ages, with all its fantasy, mystery, and creativity, taking us on a trip filled with symbolism, which becomes a complex search for self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the world.

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Jorge Amado, in his attempt to provide a global view of Brazilian reality and as a result of his interest in the populist world, included immigrants of Arab origin profusely in his works. Characters such as Nacib in Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), or Fadul Abdala in Tocaia Grande (Showdown) are clear references of a work that reflects the extraordinary importance that the Arab presence and their descendants have had in Brazil. Malba Tahan, pseudonym for the Brazilian teacher and writer, Júlio César de Mello e Souza (1895-1974), translates and re-creates amazing works in an innovative manner, based on oriental literary tradition. Both in the creative aspect—he wrote treatises on mathematics, pedagogy, oriental short stories, children’s stories, and plays, among others—and in his dissemination of eastern culture, he took all of the mystery, enchantment, and originality of the Arab culture and sciences to Brazil, by integrating it into the teaching of mathematics, using as a basis the stories of the Arabian Nights. His book, The Man Who Counted (O Homem que Calculava), is an example of his ability to combine the exotic and original elements of oriental cultures, and to claim their contributions to the sciences and culture. The goal of this article is to study the orientalist component in the works of Raduan Nassar, heir of a rich Arab cultural tradition, which he incorporated into his novel, Lavoura Arcaica (To the Left of the Father), published in 1975. This Middle Eastern legacy is clearly reflected in the lyricism that permeates the narration, the insertion of descriptions that originate in The Arabian Nights, the power of reminiscence, and the predominant role that religion, the erotic, and sensuality play. Incorporating traditional values and customs within modern times, it contributes to define the complex world of interrelationships between characters, the family, religious and cultural conflicts, and difficulties that emerge. From the beginning of the novel, the author establishes rich cultural connections. In fact, in the first edition, he clearly specifies that he has a large cultural debt in his work. On the one hand, he recognizes that he bases his work on the parable of the prodigal son, together with the manipulated incorporation of the account “The Famished,” from The Arabian Nights. On the other, he inserts verses from texts belonging to Thomas Mann, Novalis, Walt Whitman, and quotations from André Gide, Jorge de Lima, and Almeida Faira (Nassar, Lavoura 193). Nassar uses a wide variety of sources, which reflect and attempt to blend different cultural backgrounds, although the emphasis is on the Mediterranean world, with priority for biblical references, the Greco-Latin classics, and

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contributions from oriental cultures. In reality, he highlights many common elements which are projected on Brazilian reality by means of a family of Christian-Lebanese immigrants, who has difficulties living in a rural area, since social customs and cultural heritage provoke tension within the suffocating family nucleus. The prominence given to the Mediterranean cultural space—a natural crossroads between the eastern and western worlds as well as the context of constant cultural exchanges throughout history—allows the author to recreate and update these different influences. At the same time, he uses this cultural component—in which the historical, mythical, and religious aspects form a complex amalgamation—in order to establish a series of values that will be determined by this complex cultural syncretism, and which will be established as traditional, but are not always clearly defined. The characters of the novel feel trapped by these values in one way or another. This is one of the main justifications for the tensions that appear in the novel, especially when one factors in that some characters feel that they have lost their cultural roots. The circular structure which characterizes To the Left of the Father reinforces the image of the closed and oppressive world in which André, the protagonist, lives. It consists almost exclusively of his own family, which is dominated by a series of rigid ancestral customs and dogmatic attitudes. This harsh and alienating reality will reveal itself throughout the novel by means of a contrast of oppositions which develops based on two fundamental ideas: patriarchy versus matriarchy, and tradition versus modernity. It actually deals with the confrontation between acceptance of the sense of power of the patriarchy versus the youth’s attitude of rebelliousness when faced with impositions. These conflicts are projected against the background of a complex cultural context in which the author combines biblical references, excerpts of the Koran, and the interrelationship between Islam and Christianity. The rebellious spirit that permeates the novel and is personified in André is based on a manipulated view of the parable of the prodigal son. In this case, the son abandons his parents’ house as a consequence of incestuous relations with his sister Ana and because of the tyrannical and intransigent attitude of his father. The reintegration of André into the family after his return—in contrast to what happened in the original parable—is problematic because he continues to have a defiant attitude at home and does not accept any kind of guilt. This free interpretation of the parable is what gives the novel its strength and dramatic intensity. As Alceu Amoroso Lima states, it is “as if the classic tragedy, the relentless

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blind Destiny came into conflict with the sublime regenerative Vision of Love” (87)1 The incestuous relations between André and his sister have a profound impact on the family nucleus, which is extremely rigid and clearly divided, led by a father who represents the prototype of the patriarch—defined by his inflexibility, religious dogmatism, and incapability to adapt to a new world and to modern times. He seems to live in a world with no horizon, takes refuge in his past, and adopts behavioral principles born of a radical interpretation of the Bible’s teachings, which ultimately are the cause for such deep fissures within the family. His constant biblical allusions succeed in filling André’s mind with a deep sense of guilt, from which he tries to free himself by running away from home. On the other hand, his escape can be contemplated as a clear sign of the destruction of the family, of their customs, and of their world. The attack on the patriarchal power that held them together symbolizes the disintegration of their values; that is, the destruction of the family unit takes place at the same time as the rupture from their ancestral world. This whole progression of splits, misunderstandings, and rebellion is based on a symbolic level which is the key element that defines both the message and the world in the novel. And all of the components, beginning with the seating positions of the family members around the dinner table, up to the names of the characters and the places where they live, are filled with religious and cultural references which contribute to show the reader a world overflowing with different and varied profiles, but no horizons. It is a world dominated by a cultural heritage subject to mistrust and lack of understanding. The novel reflects the path that the three generations followed: the grandfather personified loyalty to the principles of the Arab culture; the father, Iohanna, practiced a dogmatic Christianity; and the young, rebellious André was the one who confronted his father, as he considered him responsible for the loss of the original family values. The consequence of his rebellion is his isolation and alienation from a world in which he feels he has lost his roots. The inflexible grandfather views himself as the transmitter of a series of positive values, given that he represents untainted traditions. André considers him his model and inspiration. Through a conversation with Pedro, his brother, André defines him as “this old, lean man, carved out of the wood from the family furniture; in reality, Peter, he was our true ancestral foundation. He was an old hermit, an authentic family leader that 1

“Como se a tragédia clássica com a implacabilidade do Destino cego entrasse em conflito com a sublime Visão regeneradora do Amor.”

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marked the direction of our footsteps, it was always him” (41-42).2 He concludes by stating, “in the sweetness of old age lies wisdom and, at this table, in the empty chair at the other end of the table, is the example: in our grandfather’s memory lie our roots, in the old man who drank water and ate salt in order to provide us with a clean home” (56)3. The grandfather is a prototype who, like the mother, represents faithfulness toward the Arab past and, compared to the father, portrays courage, moderation and a capacity to maintain the purity of traditions, their authentic value. As André points out: In memory of our grandfather, I make this statement—he always answered to the sun, the rain, and the wind, as well as other manifestations of nature which made our crops grow or die, contrary to our father’s promiscuous discernment, in which several geographical transplantations would appear, on behalf of all our father’s churches and sermons, he always answered with a crude burp which counted for all science, all our father’s churches and sermons: “Maktub.” (86)4

The term maktub has several meanings and is of special importance in the novel. Luíza Strambi compares it to all the primitive oral poetic forms in Aramaic. As she explains, it means “that which is written”5 (Strambi 57) and is a clear illusion to predestination. It expresses a fatalistic view of life and reflects everything that life presents as relentless, hard, and inevitable. At the same time, as Strambi observed, it is possible for André to justify his own incestuous relations: “Maktub would come to remove the deep guilt of love between siblings, since that which is written is subject to destiny, fate.”6 2

“esse velho esguío talhado com a madeira dos móveis da família; era ele, Pedro, era ele na verdade nosso veio ancestral. Era o velho asceta, autêntico guía de família que marcava a direção dos nossos passos em conjunto, sempre ele.” All translations from this text are mine. 3 “na doçura da velhice está a sabedoria e, nesta mesa, na cadeira vazia da outra cabeceira, está o exemplo: é na memória do avô que dormen nossas raízes, no ancião que se alimentava de água e sal para nos prover de um lar limpo.” 4 “Em memória do avô, faço este registro: ao sol e às chuvas e aos ventos, assim como às outras manifestações da natureza que faziam crescer ou destruir nossa lavoura, o avô, ao contrário dos discernimentos promíscuos do pai—em que apareciam enxertos de várias geografías, respondia sempre com um arroto tosco que valia por todas as ciências, por todas as igrejas e por todos os sermões do pai: ‘Maktub.’” 5 “o que está escrito” 6 “Maktub viria, assim, para retirar o peso culposo do amor entre irmãos, visto que o que está escrito está subordinado ao destino, à sina.”

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The grandfather’s death leaves the family without direction, at a loss, because the authentic connections with the ancestral world have been lost. This is clearly reflected in the novel in the references to the “empty chair” left by the grandfather (56). This metaphorical suggestion has a physical reference in the chair that presides over the table where the family meetings take place. It is filled with a large amount of symbolism and connotations, and will become the setting and reflection of the family tensions. The position of the family members at the table is set by careful selection: on the right side sit Pedro, Rosa, Zuleika and Huda, and on the left, the mother, Ana (the incestuous daughter), André, and Lula (the youngest, and, like André, dominated by a rebellious spirit and the desire to run away). The right side represents western culture—the masculine side, strong and responsible; while the left side, which is fragile, delicate, and rebellious represents the feminine side (Silva 39). Furthermore, in Mediterranean cultures, the left side represented the direction of death (Cirlot 165). This opposition is reinforced due to the combination of Christian and Arab names, which emphasizes the importance of symbolism in the novel. The names reveal a contrast between two cultures: the split, division, and even the oppositions symbolized by the family, with a clear religious background. Andrés, in the Bible, just as in the novel, is Pedro’s brother, and both are John’s sons (Iohana in the text) (Silva 39). Pedro, in both Aramaic and Greek means “rock”; and André, “strong, vigorous, and powerful.” Therefore, even their names carry the qualities that define them as men, especially the hero, represented by Pedro as the symbol of strength (40). The names of the other siblings also have strong symbolic meanings and are usually combined in some form. Zuleika, of Arabic origin, means “peach,” a term associated with youth and marriage (Cooper 118). It is combined with the symbolism of the rose, representing the passive principle. According to Regina Silva, Rosa as a flower and Zuleika as a fruit, are the symbol of abundance and fertility. Hulda, which means benevolent, affable, and gracious, completes, with her sisters Rosa and Zuleika “the feminine registration of total acceptance of the father’s orders” (Silva 40-41)7. Ana, the main female character, has a Hebrew name which means grace, compassion, and mercy. The other three sisters play a secondary role (Silva 3). Lula, on the other hand, means pearl, that is, “formed inside the house (shell).”8 Silva suggests that a symbolical 7 8

“o registro feminino de total aceitação das ordens do pai.” “Formado na interioridade da casa (concha).”

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reading of the characters’ names indicates that “even in relation to the choice of names, the novel is structured in such a manner that they shape the register of different and dissonant voices in regards to the traditional values, crystallized over time in the history of western culture; they try to break the links that insist on limiting the existential experience of human beings” (5)9. This existential experience through which André lives, which is defined by oppression and the misery of being subject to a ruthless family setting, is modernized by his re-encounter with his brother Pedro in the city. This encounter implies a return to the past, an experience he remembers, by saying: “once more I felt the powerful force of the family collapsing over me like a heavy rain,” (Nassar, Lavoura 7)10. It is also a clear allusion to an oppression from which he feels incapable of freeing himself. André’s means of escape are through his mother’s and sisters’ affection, especially his sister Ana, by finding refuge in the old house, and through his contact with nature. Once again, the symbolism associated with them strengthens the relationship between characters. It also completes and reinforces the messages. Mystics have traditionally associated the house with the female element of the universe as well as an enclosed garden (Cirlot 120); in more general terms, it has been assimilated with wisdom, or tradition itself (120). It also consists of “the center of the world; the protective aspect of the Great mother, symbol of control and protection” (Cooper 44)11. The house is the place where tradition meets again, where one seeks refuge, where the split is established. It is precisely there where the love affair between the protagonist and his sister takes place: “on my side, I don’t even mind giving up the chance to have children, but at the old house, I want to enjoy the pleasure of this secret love twice as much” (129)12.

9

“mesmo em relação à escolha dos nomes, o romance é estruturado de forma que, aos valores tradicionais, cristalizados ao longo do tempo, na história da cultura ocidental, impõe o registro de vozes diferentes e dissonantes, que buscam romper com as amarras que teimam em limitar a experiência existencial dos seres humanos.” 10 “mais uma vez senti a força poderosa da família desabando sobre mim como um aguaceiro pesado.” 11 “un centro del mundo; el aspecto protector de la Gran madre; símbolo contenedor y de protección.” 12 “de minha parte, abro mão inclusive dos filhos que teríamos, mas, na casa velha quero gozar em dobro as delícias deste amor clandestino.”

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This passionate attitude, reinforced by symbolism, blends in with an intense spiritual component, which is based on the integration of nature in order to define its aesthetical message. When André thinks of his sister Ana in the old house, he says: “her peasant body, barefooted, disheveled clothes, so graceful, white, white, her white face, and I thought of the pigeons, the pigeons of my childhood; I see myself like that, peeking through the blinds” (Nassar, Lavoura 92)13. This association of Ana with a pigeon emphasizes the idyllic characteristics of love and also adds new nuances. The pigeon, symbol of the souls, like any winged animal, is linked to spiritualists and the power of sublimation (Cooper 353). It is clearly related to the vital spirit: the spirit of light, purity (although in some traditions it is lust); “innocence, tenderness, peace” (136). Traditionally, the pigeon has been associated with the vine: “the pigeon perched on the vine symbolizes the faithful search for God’s refuge” (137), which also takes place in the novel. It is in the context of this old house, while continuing to contemplate Ana, that the connection between passion and affection is once again established, when André affirms: she was there, white, white, her white face, and I could feel all her doubt, her inner turmoil, and I was able to think, filled with faith, that I am not wrong in the midst of this fire, in this passion, and I kept thinking of a way to attract her in an appropriate manner; I should have created a winding path of steps made of grapes, up to the edge of the stairs, hanging fresh pomegranate on the window frames, and made a wreath of flowers in bright colors, covering the old banister on the porch that circled the house (Nassar, Lavour 93).14

The symbols of the pigeon and the vine, as previously mentioned, are usually linked together. The grape, frequently presented in a cluster, “symbolizes both fertility (due to its fruity taste) and sacrifice (because of the wine, especially red wine)” (Cirlot 454).15 Nevertheless, it is also 13

“o seu corpo de camponesa, os pés descalços, a roupa em desleixo cheia de graca, branco, branco o rosto branco e eu me lembrei das pombas, as pombas da minha infância, me vendo também assim, espreitando detrás da veneziana” 14 “ela estava lá, branco, branco, o rosto branco, e eu podia sentir toda dubiedade o tumulto e suas dores e pude pensar cheio de fé, eu não me engano neste incêndio, nesta paixão, e fiquei imaginando que para atraí-la de um jeito correto, eu deberia ter tramado com graus de uva uma trilha sinuosa ate o pé da escada, pendurando pencas de romas frescas nas janelas da fachada e ter feito uma grinalda de flores, em vivas cores, correr na velha balaustrada do varandão que circundava a casa.” 15 “simbolizan a la vez la fertilidad (por su carácter frutal) y el sacrifico (por el vino, en especial si es de color de sangre).”

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related to immortality, since the cluster of grapes is like an “attribute of the gods of agriculture and fertility, and they represent the wine of life. Thus, its assimilation to immortality” (Cooper 182)16. Therefore, the grapes take on the symbol of “wine during intoxication, of hospitality, orgy, and youth” (Cooper 182).17 The religious component, the connotations of spirituality and sublimation, and the attempt to justify himself or avoid guilt in regard to his behavior with Ana seem evident. This dramatic component, which is based on his rebellion against religious dogmatism and the ethic codes that limit the possibilities of love, is mixed with a concept of love brimming with sensuality and eroticism, personified by André’s sisters at the family gatherings. He defines them as “our sisters of Mediterranean nature” (37)18 and inserts them into a bucolic context with clear classical reminiscences: “with their air of peasant girls, filled with unknown promises hanging in the purity of a love that is larger than their light-colored dresses, running around gracefully, filling the woods with laughter, taking their fruit baskets and setting a blanket between the trees, slicing watermelons and cutting fruit amongst shrieks of laughter” (25).19 The sisters, through their dancing, will reflect the transgressive and provocative spirit of youth, reproduced in Ana, the incestuous sister, whom André describes while she is dancing: I could guess her precise gypsy steps in the middle of the circle, progressively moving with skillful gestures among the baskets of fruit and flowers, barely touching the ground on her tiptoes, her arms lifted high above her head, slowly slithering like a snake to the trill of the flute, slowly swaying, her graceful hands turning high above, her whole being filled with a savage elegance, her melodious fingers snapping, as if they were the origin of the castanets, and around her the circle spinning faster and faster, deliriously, her palms spiraling hotter and stronger, more unruly, magnetizing all those around her. (Nassar, Lavoura 27)20

16

“atributo de las deidades de la agricultura y la fertilidad, y representa el vino de la vida. De ahí, su asimilación a la inmortalidad.” 17 “del vino en la embriaguez, la hospitalidad, la orgía y la juventud.” 18 “nossas irmãs de temperamento mediterrâneo.” 19 “com seu jeito de camponesas, cheias de promesas suspensas na pureza de um amor maior, nos seus vestidos mais claros e mais leves, correndo cheias de graça, cobrindo o bosque de risadas, deslocando as cestas de frutas para o lugar onde antes se estendiam as toalhas, os melões e as melancias partidas aos gritos de alegria.” 20 “Eu podia adivinhar seus passos precisos de cigana se deslocando no meio da roda, desenvolvendo com destreza seus gestos curvos entre as frutas e as flores dos

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He concludes by saying: she first thoroughly hid the grape stem under her tongue, and then bit into a bunch of grapes with her white teeth, the sweet grapes now covered with saliva, while she danced in the middle of the floor, causing life to be more unsettled, upsetting pain, drawing shouts of excitement from those present; among the elderly one could soon hear the words to simple verses, a kind of song, chanted in a strange language. (27)21

This Middle Eastern dance—similar to that of a gypsy woman—in which sensuality, incitement, primitivism, naiveté, and gracefulness are mixed, brings the reader back to the Mediterranean tradition but also to different realities. The concept of Nassar’s gypsy girl, which has a wide cultural scope and vast meaning in Mediterranean societies, coincides significantly with Federico García Lorca’s model presented in 1928 in Romancero gitano (The Gypsy Ballads): a woman filled with drama and the personification of a primitive culture that is dominated by passion and sensuality. She represents freedom, the rupture from legal norms, from oppression and social conventionalism. At the same time, she is identified with nature and the exaltation of elementary instincts. Deep down, she is the reflection of instinctive forces that dominate rational, repressive behavior, which underlie the dogmatic beliefs that are so criticized in Nassar’s novel. She is the mysterious force of exotic origin, pure essence of the Mediterranean, insinuating, provocative, and simple. In a game in which love and death are the protagonists, Ana has an important erotic role which contributes to emphasize the rebellious attitude of both André and herself. This Arab context is emphasized in the novel through the addition of a famous narration entitled “The Famished,” which corresponds to Night Number 32 in The Arabian Nights. In fact, there are three versions that cestos e só tocando a terra na ponta dos seus pés descalzos, os braços erguidos acima da cabeça serpenteando lentamente ao trinado da flauta, mais lento, mais ondulante, as mãos graciosas girando no alto, toda ela cheia de uma selvagem elegância, seus dedos canoros estalando como se estivesse ali a origem das castanholas, e em torno dela a roda girava cada vez mais veloz, mais delirante, as palmas de fora mais quentes e mais fortes, e mais imtempestiva, e magnetizando a todos.” 21 “esconder primeiro bem escondido sob a língua a sua peconha e logo morder entre os dentes brancos o cacho de uva que pendia em bagos adocicados e túmidos de saliva enquanto dançava no centro de todos, fazendo a vida mais turbulenta, tumultuando dores, arrancando gritos de exaltação, e logo, entoados em língua estranha começava a se elevar os versos simples, quase um cântico, nas vozes dos mais velhos.”

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appear in a relatively concealed manner: reality, the manipulated version narrated by the father, and André’s personal interpretation. The original version stresses the protagonist’s cleverness. A hungry man knocks on a rich man’s door, and begs for food. He is invited in by the generous owner, an old man, who pretends to offer the beggar a banquet with drinks and desserts. The beggar stoically endures the situation but, in the end, tired of being the butt of a joke, he punches the rich man in the face and, at the same time, gives him a clever explanation about his behavior. With a good sense of humor, the beggar explains that he acted in such a violent manner because he had become inebriated with the wine given to him by his host. The rich man likes the explanation, recognizes how clever the beggar is, and invites him to live with him (Las mil, Vol. 1, 235). The father, in his teachings during family meetings, modifies the story by avoiding the aggressive reaction on the beggar’s part. Praising his composure, he ends the story by quoting the old rich man who says to the beggar: “Finally, after searching all over the world, I found a man who has a strong spirit, firm character and, above all, he revealed to have the most important virtue that a human being can have: patience (Nassar, Lavoura 80). This is a clear message of acceptance of the norm and of obedience toward the establishment. Faced with his father’s insistence in reminding André of the numerous times he told him the story emphasizing that only through patience can one find rewards in life, André’s reaction was to personify the story, adding new meaning to the father’s version; the two versions are practically opposed from one another. André’s version states: Father, I also have a story, and it, too, is the story of a hungry man, who toiled from sunrise to sunset, without ever succeeding in satisfying his hunger, and that from writhing so much in hunger, ended up bending his body in half, to the point where his teeth could reach his toes; after surviving so many tribulations, all that was left for him was to hate the world. (Nassar, Lavoura 153-54)22

This third version is a clear reference to André and his rebellious spirit that has not changed despite returning home. Given his father’s elementary interpretation, André opposes the complexity of life and reality by saying:

22 “Eu também tenho uma história, pai, é também a história de um faminto, que mourejava de sol a sol sem nunca conseguir aplacar a sua fome, e que de tanto se contorcer, acabou por dobrar o corpo sobre si mesmo, alcançando com os dentes as pontas dos seus próprios pés; sobrevivendo à custa de tantas chagas, ele só podia odiar o mundo.”

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“All order brings with it a seed of disorder, clarity, a seed of darkness” (154)23. In opposition to the father’s conservative and alienating discourse in which order, patience, family unity, love, work, and “austere purity” (Nassar, Lavoura 18) are praised as the fundamental norm of behavior (with an intensive religious background based mainly on the Bible, although there are also elements from the Koran), we are presented with André’s mindframe. It is modern and rebellious and completely removed from religion. His thinking is that of a layman: it is based precisely on criticizing the inflexibility, excesses, and religious dogmatism that dominate the family. Since he defends open and tolerant attitudes that are not accepted by the family, he ends up confronting his father and leaving home. The religious component, together with the recreation of the classic world, are two of the main elements of the novel. They are useful not only to understand the cultural context but also to define the characters and their ideologies. Sabrina Sedlmayer points out the wide spectrum of sources that integrate the religious sphere—from biblical allusions to quotes from the Koran. She presents a few cases, such as some of the valuable biblical references, such as the manipulated version of the parable of the prodigal son (Nassar, Lavoura 42), the parable of the sower (46), the parable of the lost sheep, and the parable of the lost drachma (47). If the religious element is associated with the ethical, and the Arab one with lyricism and the exotic, then the classical references remind us of the drama in the work. According to Helena Buescu, from the beginning we see that “everything happens within the apparently ordained, but, oh so tragic, inner space of a family, where curses cannot be avoided, only lived (I might as well say performed). The core problem (although by no means the only one) is the existence of incest, or rather, of incestuous desire that is not overcome by any form of flight but merely delayed” (267). Later, she states: The narrator describes his sisters, his “dark Mediterranean” sisters, several times as if they were a tragic chorus, like the Erinyes, who will not be transformed this time into the Eumenides—this would be a supreme form of irony, if we recall that these primitives archaic godesses, born from the drops of blood coming from Ouranos’ mutilation, were specially linked to the revenging of crimes against family order. But if we take into consideration that they are also frequently depicted in contexts involving 23

“Toda ordem traz uma semente de desordem, a clareza, uma semente de obscuridade.”

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dancing, feasting and libations, specifically wine drinking, it is not hard to recognize in them the surge of chaotic and anarchic desires and violence that the priestesses of the cult of Bacchus both propitiated and ritualized. (268)

And Buescu finishes by affirming: “So, we are clearly supposed to feel the primitive breath that sweeps through this novel, and maybe even recognize the weight of ancient traditions in the political authority (patriarchal power), religious education, and mythical and symbolic echoes that resonate throughout society” (267-68). In conclusion, of the three works written by Nassar, Lavoura Arcaica (To the Left of the Father), Um copo de cólera (Goblet of Wrath), and Menina a caminho (Young Girl on Her Way), the only one that has clear references to the Arab world is To the Left of his Father. These references are key because the novel contains a fatalistic view, an intense and strong lyricism, and a great capacity for cultural integration. As a book with a variety of possible readings and with clear universal themes, it is presented not only as an argument against inflexibility and dogmatism, but also as a reflection on co-existence, contradictions, and the difficult blending of cultures.

Works Cited Borges, Anderson. “A colheita impossível: Breve estudo sobre a memória em Raduan Nassar e Herberto Helder.” A Produção Literária de Raduan Nassar. Ed. Sabrina Sedimayer. Belo Horizonte: FALE, Editora da UFMG, 2008. Buescu, Helena Carvalho. “How Far is Modernity from Here? Brazil, Portugal: Two Novels in Portuguese. ” How Far is America from Here? Ed. Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelak Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 263-69. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. Diccionario de símbolos. Barcelona: Labor, 1985. Cooper, J.C. Diccionario de símbolos. Mexico: Gustavo Gili, 2000. Lemos, Maria José Cardoso. “Raduan Nassar: apresentação de um escritor entre tradição e (pós) modernidade.” Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura. 20 (April 2003): 81-112. , accessed 10 May 2009. Lima, Alceu Amoroso. “Romances.” Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura. Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura. 20 (2003): 81-112. , accessed 10 May 2009.

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Nassar , Raduan. Menina a caminho. São Paulo: Schwarcz, 1994. —. Um copo de cólera. São Paulo: Livraria Cultura, 1978. —. Lavoura Arcaica. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1975. Las mil y una noches. Ed. Juan Vernet. Vols I and II. Barcelona: Planeta, 2006. Pérez Rioja, J.A. Diccionario de símbolos y mitos. Madrid: Technos, 1984. Sedlmayer, Sabrina. Ao lado esquerdo do pai. Belo Horizonte: FALE, Editora da UFMG, 1997. Silva, Regina Céli Alves da. “A tra(d)ição dos nomes na Lavoura Arcaica, de Raduan Nasssar.” Revista Philologus. Rio de Janeiro, (April 2003): 38-44. , accessed 10 May 2009. Spagnol, Lara. “Entre experiência e tradição: um descompasso em Lavoura Arcaica.” A Produção Literária de Raduan Nassar. Ed. Sabrina Sedimayer. Belo Horizonte: FALE, Editora da UFMG, 2008. Strambi, Luíza. “O germe de outro.” A Produção Literária de Raduan Nassar. Ed. Sabrina Sedimayer. Belo Horizonte: FALE, Editora da UFMG, 2008. Vidigal, Assis Benvenuto. “O amor como dispositivo do universo.” A Produção Literária de Raduan Nassar. Ed. Sabrina Sedimayer. Belo Horizonte: FALE, Editora da UFMG, 2008. García Lorca, Federico. Romancero gitano. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

CHAPTER FIVE ERASING THE ARAB HERITAGE IN SPAIN

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS AS LIVING NARRATIVE: TRANSGRESSING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE TEXTUAL TRADITION CAMILA PASTOR DE MARÍA Y CAMPOS DIVISIÓN DE HISTORIA, CENTRO DE INVESTIGACIÓN Y DOCENCIA ECONÓMICAS (CIDE), MEXICO

This paper was born of a piece by a great interpreter of the Nights, Jorge Luis Borges.1 It was initially one of seven lectures offered to a general public in the Coliseo theater of Buenos Aires in 1977, which were revised and published in Mexico under the title Seven Nights in 1980. It is a text he dictated to a friend when already blind; a transcribed recitation, the blurring of the boundary between textual and oral narrative is one of its conditions of existence. Borges tells us: A crucial event in the history of the West was the discovery of the East. It would be more precise to speak of a continuous consciousness of the East, comparable to the presence of Persia in Greek history. As well as this consciousness of the Orient—something vast, immobile, magnificent, incomprehensible—there are high points, and I will mention a few. (Borges 1980: 57)

I was struck by the ambivalence of the author’s relationship to the Orient. Did the Orient need to be discovered? Or had we always known it? Had we always known that it was there, more ancient and more powerful than “us”? This fracture in the discursive location of the speaker suggests an ambiguity in the location of his medium: the Spanish language. A language which, given its formative entanglement with Arabic and the 1

I wish to thank Susan Slyomovics and Josep Puig for their generous guidance in the conception and revision of this text, and to acknowledge the rich discussion during the conference on Orientalism at the University of California, Merced, on April, 24-25, 2009.

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Islamicate universe, affords a particular consciousness of the Orient. It is one that may imagine it not only as a place to be discovered (then conquered and looted?) but also as one with which “we” have been continuous, in a problematic yet productive dialogue. Though he proceeds to state what every Arabist must, that the first European compilation of the Thousand and One Nights was published by the French Orientalist Antoine Galland in 1704; that it was with the Romantic movement that the Orient fully entered the European imaginary. He goes on to say: “When we say Orient, I think we all think, in the first instance, of the Islamic Orient, and by extension of the Orient of northern India. This is the first meaning it has for us, and that is the doing of the Thousand and One Nights. There is something we feel as the Orient, which I have not felt in Israel, and I have felt in Granada and in Cordoba” (Borges 1980:64). Who falls within this ‘we/us’ of his address? How does he understand the link between Al-Andalus and the Nights? How is the Spanish Arab tradition reconciled by Spaniards, Spanish speakers and Spanish scholars with the eighteenth-century invention of the Orient by French, German and British scholar-adventurers, being temporally prior and logically marginal to this hegemonic discourse? Throughout his text Borges oscillates between alignment and resistance to central European orientalism in a pattern reminiscent of what postcolonial theorists and writers on negritude (notably, Fanon and Bhabha) called the split psyche of the colonized. He aligns with the tradition in his vision of the Nights as the ultimate, exotic, fantastic experience. The Nights allow him to dream the Orient as an elsewhere where the impossible is possible. He resists by arguing that the Orient in fact can exist only as fiction; he enjoys the European fantasy while being conscious of it as fantastic: In the title of the Thousand and One Nights there is something very important: the suggestion of an infinite book… and how should we define the Orient, not the real Orient, which doesn’t exist? It is above all a world of extremes in which people are very unhappy or very happy, very rich or very poor. A world of kings, of kings who don’t need to explain their actions… There is also the notion of hidden treasures. Any man could discover them. And the notion of magic, very important. (Borges 1980:67)

One move, or one moment in his reconciliation is an alignment with “Europe” in the perception of what Cooperson calls a “wish-granting East” (1994). I propose that this perception is not only the product of a long history of luxury trade but also a colonial vision and a particularly complicated one, since Al-Andalus is conqueror and conquered: by the Arabs for some

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time, by Christian Europe afterwards. Spain’s participation in the colonization of the Muslim Orient has been limited to incursions in the Maghreb; in practice, Spain’s paradigmatic wish-granting lands were the American colonies. Accidentally discovered during the search for a sea route to the Orient--in an attempt to directly access this source of spices, scents, and luxury textiles—early orientalisms tinted the Spanish encounter with the Indies, described as magical places full of extraordinary riches, mosques, and populations with customs akin to those of Moors. There are even more radical transgressions embedded in Borges’s reflection. He dissolves the boundaries of the text in his imagination of an infinite book. Then, he claims the Nights as a living tradition that is already part of “our memory” and of his own narrative performance: The Thousand and One Nights haven’t died… The Nights will have other translators, and each translator will produce a different version of the book. We could almost speak of many books titled the Thousand and One Nights. The Thousand and One Nights are not something that has died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, since it is already part of our memory, and it is part of tonight as well. (Borges 1980:74)

We can interpret Borges to be making an argument for the universality and the universal appeal of the Nights. We could also see him as an Argentine, speaking to his compatriots in Spanish. From this perspective, his indexical practice suggests, not the labyrinthine geometries and universalizing abstractions of Borges’ fiction, but a localized universe: it points to the history of Arab presence in Europe, and the particularly lengthy and intimate inhabitation of what is now Spain by an AraboIslamic tradition.

Imagining the Nights as Living Narrative The Nights can be understood, as they usually are within the Spanish Arabist tradition and other Orientalist schools, as a text. It can be argued, however, that the invention of the Nights as a single artifact is an eighteenth-century Western European phenomenon later imported back into the Arab East. Galland’s and subsequent translations can be read as the realignment and inscription of the tradition within the crucial modern binaries of religious/secular, East/West, and textual/oral. Following Slyomovics’s conceptualization of the oral performance of stories from the Nights in southern Egypt during the 1980s as the artwork of a contemporary poet who improvises on a tradition, I argue that the Iberian

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history of the Nights can be re-scripted once we recognize them, rather than as a single text that needs to be reconstructed and authenticated, as an oral-textual discursive tradition, a genre of verbal art. I will explore the possibility of imagining the Spanish language as a vehicle for the Thousand and One Nights as a living narrative tradition. Pascual de Gayangos, a nineteenth-century Spanish Arabist who attempted a partial translation of the Nights, describes the social life of the stories in the East in precisely those terms. Gayangos compared four Arabic language editions of the Nights and various manuscripts kept in public libraries of Europe, and he found that: There are no two alike, being very different in style, and in the number and order of the stories. And the reason is obvious: the Thousand and One Nights form, so to speak, the heritage of a certain class of people that abound in Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and other populous cities of Syria and Egypt, who walk the streets, inns, squares and other public spaces reciting, in exchange for a small fee, stories taken from them, in the manner of our blind people who sing romances in the streets. Most of them know them by heart, and this is the reason for the corruption of style that one notes in them and the divergence between various copies of the same narrative or story. It is only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the learned critics began to pay attention to the research on the origins of this book which is so significant and so important to universal literature. (Pascual de Gayangos, 1847 cited in Menéndez y Pelayo 1908:135)

What is interesting here are not his claims about the corrupting influence of storytellers, but first, his suggestion that they are the primary transmitters of the tradition, and then, his comparison with a parallel practice in Spain. Rubiera Mata (2004) has described the presence of juglares, public entertainers, or reciters in Al-Andalus and postReconquista Spain. Gayangos also points to a contrast between the popular and the learned, present both in Eastern traditions of scholarship and in the nascent Western Orientalist one; and to their common disdain for the Nights as a popular phenomenon. All kinds of objections can be made. What analytic traction does such an intervention provide? Are we to toss the folktale universe as a whole into the Nights? Should we allow the textual tradition to establish the legitimate boundaries of the genre? Are a set of tales or their treatment the defining criteria? or is it the simultaneity of these tales and their social life? Should we follow the practice of localization in terms of space and faith as definitive: the Persian stories are adopted and set in Damascus, Cairo, Southern Egypt, Toledo; the action happens in an Islamicate or in a

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re-Christianized world? Is it their concatenation/collection into cycles and their insertion in a frame story? I suggest that it is productive to reconstruct the historic elasticity of the various boundaries according to which the Nights have been codified. If it is generally recognized that they have circulated in various textual forms since the ninth century (Fihrist), I would point to the various discursive universes they have traversed in their thousand years of textual--and oral-circulation. Some of these boundaries are salient within the Iberian Arabist tradition in spite of its own ambivalence, or perhaps because of it, and because of the preference for the erasure of the region’s Arabo-Islamic history in official discourse.2 In order to claim themselves as European,albeit as inhabitants of Europe’s margins, it seems Spanish-language scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must suspend Arab Spain as a backdrop to their tradition. Historians of literature in the peninsula declare time and again that the Nights were made known to Western Europe through Galland’s work.3 Through this move, Spain is discursively located within “the European’” and its Orientalist tradition. Early twentieth.century histories of literature (Menéndez y Pelayo 1908, González Palencia 1928, Cansinos Assens 1954), however, stubbornly throw up the continuous presence of a number of tales and cycles of tales from the early centuries of Arab presence in the Western Mediterranean through the present. What is more, they describe their progressive Iberization and Christianization, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Reconquista and its Consequences The century-long negotiation of the erasure of Muslim Spain was marked by a long sequence of progressively more invasive prohibitions on Islamicate culture by local monarchs and what appears to have been their very uneven application, sparking numerous popular revolts. Nineteenthand twentieth-century efforts to remove the Arab from Spain must be understood against the backdrop of the early history of the Reconquista project of the Catholic kings Fernando and Isabel, who went back on the word of their treaty early on, forcing mass conversions. Cardinal Cisneros infamously set fire to Arabic manuscripts in Granada in 1499, and in 1502 Muslims were officially required to convert or to leave all territories ruled by the Spanish crown. The dismantling of centers of learning, the ban on 2 3

There are important exceptions, such as Americo Castro and Gonzalez Palencia. For an example, see Juan Vernet’s introduction to his 1964 translation.

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the public use or transmission of the Arabic language and on the public practice of Islam in 1566 were additional watersheds. González Palencia describes an exodus of learned men from AlAndalus long before the eventual expulsion of the moriscos from Spanish territory between 1609 and 1614—which itself affected urban centers and towns under the crown but not those under princely rule (González Palencia 1925). He also describes the “decadence” of literature in general as local Arabic speakers ceased to have access to training in the classical tradition. He, in fact, interprets the emergence of the textos aljamiados— texts written in romance dialects with Arabic script—as a symptom of such decadence. Alarcón has argued that this is also the reason for the appearance of texts written in local Arabic dialects. Recognizing that historically it has been extraordinarily unusual for a dialect of Arabic to be recorded in writing, Palencia attempts an analysis of the conditions that facilitated such a practice in sixteenth-century Granada: “It could only have happened given a series of extraordinary coincidences […] which led Arab culture among the moriscos to the pitiable state portrayed by historians […] proximate precursor of what is reflected in the aljamiada literature” (González Palencia 1925). Careful attention to the aljamiado texts and their conditions of production could shed much light on medieval understandings of different textual genres and the popular and learned ideologies surrounding them. Like other tracks left by the Arab presence, the tradition seems to have been rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century. Early expectations of the scholarly potential of this literature were enormous. Estébanez Calderón discussed its then recent discovery when appointed to the Arabic chair in Granada in 1848: “[Aljamiada literature] is, so to speak, the Indies of Spanish Literature, which are on the brink of being discovered, and offer great riches to the first settlers that visit” (Valero Cuadra, 2000, 55). After this initial excitement scholars are said to have been disappointed by the aljamiado, dismissing it as a copyist and therefore poor or impoverished tradition; the desperate efforts of a persecuted minority to salvage its cultural and religious identity in a hostile environment. It seems to have received relatively little attention until it came back onto the scholarly radar in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship has underscored that, in fact, the origins and motivation for the aljamiado-morisca tradition are unknown. O. Hegyi has argued that “from the point of view of Islamic civilization, the aljamiado phenomenon represents a normal development, especially in frontier zones” (Cited in Valero Cuadra, 2000, 42). Historically, the Arabic alphabet has been used to write many other languages—Farsi and Urdu are

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examples. Valero Cuadra (2000) reminds us that in medieval Spain the practice was standardized, with fixed equivalences between Arabic and Latin graphemes. This suggests the existence of one or more regulating centers of production rather than a fragmentation of transmission. She claims that though the practice probably developed much earlier and remains undocumented, a key figure in its institutionalization and legitimation was the head mufti of Segovia in 1462, Isa de Yebir. This religious leader and scholar is credited with having produced the first Spanish language edition of the Quran as well as with translating an abridged version of the Islamic legislative corpus, known as the Breviario Sunni or Segoviano. The later was written in aljamiado, and responded to the needs of his correligionaries as mudéjares (Muslims under Christian rule), as he tells us in his own words: And because the Moors of Castile, with great subjugation and many tributes and great hardships, have diminished in their wealth and lost the schools and Arabic, and on their needs friends of mine spoke very compellingly […] who with great mercifulness begged that I compile a very brief writing of our law and asuna, in romance, of all that every good moor should know and do, so that I answered their request (Cited in Valero Cuadra, 2000, 45)

Isa is sometimes described as the ‘creator’ of aljamiado. Valero Cuadra (2000) concludes that the phenomenon began towards the mid-fifteenth century in Castille and later spread to Aragon. Regardless of its earlier uses or trajectory, it is a corpus that embodies transition and resists the boundary between East and West, Arabic and Romance languages, Islamicate and Christian, and medieval and earlymodern notions of genre. A number of tales later included in editions of the Nights circulated in medieval Spain in Arabic and later in aljamia. I argue that the aljamia may constitute a crucial moment in the popularization of the adab tradition, as a result of the subalternization of the Moors and of their narrative traditions. It is unclear how the collapse of the formal educational and religious establishment affected the oral transmission of tales. If we recognize them as a popular phenomenon, however, this problem would not have particularly affected them. On the other hand, the destruction and surveillance of Moorish spaces of everyday interaction socialization, and probably storytelling, surely did.

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Genre and the Construction of Textual Boundaries There have been some preliminary attempts to periodize this literature and describe its genres. A. Montañer Frutos suggests a series of genres which she claims are related to or derived from Arab ones. Among them we find Quranic and legal texts, prophecies, prayers and praises, magical and divinatory arts and an array of what would now be codified as literature: didactic literature, recontamientos, especially of Arab and religious themes; autobiographies (Cited in Valero Cuadra, 2000, 52-53). A quick look at González Palencia, writing in 1928, suggests the instability of the distinctions between the novela (novel) the cuento (folktale), the leyenda (legend), and religious narratives in the AraboSpanish literary heritage: Of more literary interest than the Castilian verses of the Moriscos are their novelesque narratives. These legends or folktales usually transpose narratives, sometimes quite animated ones, almost always Arab in origin, into Castilian traditions, of moments in the life of Jesus, of Moses, of Jacob and especially of Muhammad and his companions, all of them impregnated with a strong tint of fantasy elements […] such are The Hadith of the Golden Castle and the Story of The Serpent, The Hadith of Ali With the Forty Maidens; or the Tale of Temim Addar (one of Muhammad’s companions), transported to the region of inns, whose life he describes when he comes back to earth, “a collection more strange than beautiful, but rich in inventiveness in the end,” according to Menéndez de Pelayo, and of the genre of the Thousand and One Nights (no. 161). Some folktales of this famous collection ran among the Moriscos: The Story of the City of Alaton and the Alcancames (jars), in which Solomon had imprisoned the devils; a myth linked to legends of the conquest of Spain by the Arabs, as these were propagated by the Egyptians and the Syrians. (González Palencia 1928, 307-08).

The situation is complicated by the Spanish medieval terminology (recontamiento, estoria, alhadiz), which reveals the tracing of genre boundaries as a dangerously anachronistic endeavor. In the medieval Arab tradition, the modern boundaries between the historic and the fantastic are blurred. So are the boundaries between the religious and the fantastic; so that these three fields overlap and interpenetrate in a marvelous mess. The construction of genre boundaries should not be understood as an exclusively Western phenomenon but as an elastic practice present in many historical and sociocultural settings. The expurgation of the fantastic from orthodox Muslim traditions, be it perceived as literary or popular, has been advocated by different schools at various points in the history of Islam and has certainly become a

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prominent feature of the globalized Saudi tradition in the late-twentieth century. Rubiera Mata describes adab as a genre that gradually emerged in contrast to religious learning or ‘ilm in the course of the development of Arab urban and courtly culture during the Abassid period. She and her students have argued that many of the stories later included in textual variants of the Nights came from the adab tradition, which was itself a motley compendium of forms of secular knowledge. While this may be more or less the case for stories like that of lady Tawaddud or Teodor, of whom I will say more later, this brings up the question of the relationship between the adab as classical, literate tradition, and the Nights as popular storytelling, a boundary which appears to have been itself quite porous until Galland’s intervention. In fact some modern appropriations and translations both in the Arab world and Ibero-America implicitly argue for the recognition of the instability of the boundary between the textual and the oral in the quotidian transmission of stories in social contexts that treat them as resources (see Mernissi 1994). This may require the presence of the tradition as a widespread oral phenomenon, and that may be circumscribed to Arab settings and their hinterlands, which include Spanish-speaking populations.

Medieval and Early-modern Translation Practices Boundaries have also been inscribed in the exercise of translation. Translation presupposes difference. One can only translate between languages, registers, worlds. The need for but also the possibility of translation requires the construction of boundaries and paradoxically reifies them. Among the boundaries mentioned as requiring or generating translation in the context of medieval Spain are those of language, between classical Arabic and Latin in the case of scientific and religious texts, sometimes via one or more vernaculars. This productive boundary is well documented. González Palencia tells us, First in Cataluña, in the tenth century, there was already a circle of translators of scientific works […] Later in Toledo, from the beginning of the twelfth century, when the political work of the Reconquista is first being consolidated, translations begin to be made, through which the transfusion of ideas and Arabic books can be verified and an enormous flow of knowledge passes to the schools […] This work of translation would continue in the thirteenth century and beyond, especially in the hands of Jews like Jacob ben Ammari […] and others. (González Palencia 1928, 52-53)

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He sketches a vivid scene of scholars gathering from all corners of Christendom for patient years of poring over the Arabic originals and collaborating towards translation, some putting the works into the local vernacular for others to take them into Latin. An implicated set of boundaries are those of religious traditions— boundaries between the Islamicate world and Christendom. The postReconquista construction of the Arab as other, as exclusively Islamic, and in fact as a sort of ethno-racial category is reflected in González Palencia’s need to undo those linkages: “I wish to note that I apply the qualifier ‘Arab’ to all authors who write in Arabic, be they Muslims or not, be they of Arab race or not” (González Palencia 1928,11). Andalusi Jews may have been socially well placed to engage in translation between the two dominant religious discursive traditions. Rubiera Mata (2004) notes that Pedro Alfonso, also Rabi Moisés Sefardí, a Jewish convert, was one of the pioneering translators in the twelfth century. Most scholars describe the reign of Alfonso X, El Sabio (the Wise) as the most fertile period for translations. The scholars he gathered at his court in Castile are known as the “alfonsí” translators, given their reliance on the patronage of Alfonso X and that of his relatives and successors. After these concerted medieval efforts there is a long silence, broken only by sporadic projects. There was little interest in translating Arab texts in Spain until the professionalization of an Arabist academic tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Popular Literatures Clearly an enthusiast of recognizing the Arab legacy of Al-Andalus, González Palencia has been a pioneer in the project I am engaged in here—the imagination of the Spanish language as a vehicle for the Nights. He is so eager to find the Nights in medieval Spain—perceiving the echoes of their presence everywhere—that he is willing to imagine that they existed as a textual artifact: Some recension of the Thousand and One Nights must have circulated through medieval Spain, even though it has been believed that westerners did not know them until Galland translated them into French at the beginning of the eightennth century. Aside from the story of the lady Teodor […] which circulated in libros de cordel4 in the sixteenth century and was used by Lope in a comedy, we can point to other reflections of the Thousand and One Nights in our literature. Thus the frame of Calderón’s Life is a Dream, is found in the well-known story “The sleeper 4

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The Thousand and One Nights as Living Narrative awakened”; the novelita caballeresca [chivalry novel] of Clamades and Clarimunda is related to the story of the magical flying horse; and in the popular novel Pierres de Provenza and the beautiful Magalona there are episodes derived from the story of Camarazaman and the princess Badura. Menéndez y Pelayo attributed the relationship, in the last two cases, to a Crusader oral tradition; but the fact that there are Spanish manuscripts which include the story of Camarazaman inclines us to modify that hypothesis. The Moriscos preserved in aljamiado stories like The Golden Alcazar, The City of Tin, Temim Addar, which figure in the On Thousand and One Nights; which proves that the famous collection was already in circulation in the later stages of the Spanish Muslim era. Besides, today we can point to themes of Scherezada’s stories in other Spanish ones. (González Palencia 1928)

I am willing to imagine with him, but it may be more productive for scholarly purposes to focus on what we can observe. One cycle that has received much scholarly attention is the Sendebar, known in its medieval Spanish translation, commissioned by the Infante Don Fadrique de Aragón in 1253, as the Libro de los engaños e los asayamientos de las mugeres (Book of the Wiles and Slyness of women).5 The story of La Doncella Teodor (The Maiden Teodor) clearly caught, first the popular and more recently the scholarly imagination, given the volume of publications that address and document different aspects of the tale and its transmission. We therefore know much more about its extant manuscript and printed versions than we do for any other comparable case. As Valero Cuadra notes, “it constitutes a very long tradition which spans the eastern milieu and the Christian one, from Arab literature to the Castilian one. This tradition is made up of three known Arabic versions and thirty one Castilian ones, five in manuscript and twenty-six printed, which saw the light between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries” (Valero Cuadra, 1996, 14). The story, but we could also imagine, the genre, has been incredibly productive in the Spanish language, as numerous further appropriations of it also attest. I find the early work of Menéndez de Pelayo to be among the most provocative accounts, as I will discuss later in the paper; though there are many more recent ones (Valero Cuadra 1996). From the late-fifteenth century until the early decades of the nineteenth century, Latin America, as cultural and social space, was continuous with the peninsular world. Not only was the migration of New Christians--Jews and Muslims who had accepted or at least performed conversion—to the New Spain a common phenomenon according to Toussaint, despite 5

See González Palencia 1946, Belcher 1987, Rubiera Mata 2004:223.

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legislation to the contrary.6 Valero Cuadra reminds us of the commercial export of texts to the Americas, or Indias (Indies) as they were known. Regarding Teodor, she tells us that “we also know that it was one of the most widely known tales in Indias, as one can read in the following statement by G. Lohman Villena, which only confirms what we have already said about the popularity enjoyed by the tale of Teodor among the public during the Siglo de Oro [Golden Century].” She goes on to quote Lohman: Among the [literary] works of oriental origin, [those which] enjoyed the favor of residents of the Indies [were] “The Story of the Very Brave and Hard-working Knight Clamades,” of which no shipment of printed materials ever lacked a copy, just as none ever lacked one of the version of one of the stories from the Thousand and One Nights, “The Maiden Teodor,” whose brevity allowed it to be sent sometimes even by the hundreds.7

This extraordinary and, for its time, massive export of printed Iberian popular literature to the New World suggests the importance of such a popular literary tradition in the peninsula and the widespread consumption of such texts. It also reminds us of the very different configuration of political and cultural boundaries in the medieval and early modern period. A prominent Spanish Arabist and one of the twentieth-century translators of the Nights, Juan Vernet chose to speak on the influence of the Nights on the medieval Spanish novel during his address to the Royal Academy of Letters of Barcelona on occasion of his public reception into this scholarly body: Until today we have only alluded in passing to themes of the Thousand and One Nights which have passed into or had an influence on Spanish literature, and these allusions have only referred to those already consecrated and known for many years: The clavileño, La Vida es sueño, La doncella Teodor. We do not want to insist on these but to call attention to a series of small stories, apparently lacking transcendence, but in which we believe lays the most remote origin of our picaresca. (Vernet 1959, 25)

His argument, he tells us, relies on earlier work by González Palencia, who suggested that the Spanish popular genre of picaresca or novela picaresca, considered the first product of Spanish literature as such, was rooted in the Arab genre of the maqama. Vernet’s suggestion brings up the 6

On the prohibition of migration in 1543, see Toussaint 1946. G. Lohmann Villena, “Los libros españoles en Indias,” Arbor, 2 (1944): 253, cited in Valero Cuadra 1996, 14. 7

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question of the relationship between early medieval Arab genres, medieval Muslim Arab and Christian Arab genres, and their codification as literary forms in the early modern and modern periods.

Spanish Language Translations of the Textual Tradition The professionalization of Spanish Arabist scholarship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sparked the first modern efforts at translating textual recensions of the Nights, or fragments thereof, directly from the Arabic to Spanish. In an article about the fate and fortunes of the story of the lady Teodor, Menéndez y Pelayo mentions a nineteenthcentury translation of the Nights which apparently was never completed. Its author was the Spanish Orientalist Pascual de Gayangos, who “had begun to translate it and published the story of King Yunan as a sample” (Menéndez y Pelayo 135) sometime in the 1840s. Otherwise the tales circulated in Spanish-language contexts in numerous translations of Galland’s French adaptation. Sometime in the early twentieth century, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez translated J.C. Mardrus’s French rendition. This translation was edited in Valencia for popular consumption and came out in periodical volumes.8 The next known effort is the translation completed by the Sevillian writer Cansinos Assens and published in Mexico City in 1954-1955, possibly deflected to that site of publication by censorship in Franco’s Spain.9 It was enthusiastically hailed by Borges as wonderful and long overdue: “now, happily, we have the Castillian version of my former teacher, Rafael Cansinos Assens. The book has been published in Mexico; it is, possibly, the best of all translations; it also includes notes” (Borges 72). The scholarly reception of the translation in Spain itself was decidedly chilly, if we go by Vernet’s evaluation: Leaving Blanco Ibáñez’s version, derived from Mardrus, aside, one should cite the one done by Cansinos (Méjico, 1954-1955; 3 vols.), based, according to its author, on Arabic texts rather than French ones; this statement should not be taken at face value, however, since some notes clearly refer to texts given by Mardrus and missing in other versions; other stories come from western texts of various origins which are not usually specified- as in “The Story of What Happened between Yacub Ben Yusuf and the King Aldfonsch” or “The Signs of Love,” where a series of symptoms taken from Ibn Hazm’s The Dove’s Necklace are inserted (it is 8 9

No publication dates provided. Joseph Puig, personal communication spring 2008.

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not indicated); or various authors’ verses. We are, then, in the presence of a work composed through the assemblage of materials of quite varied origins and many of them foreign to the Thousand and One Nights. The logical consequence of this integration is the upset in numbering of the nights, which already from number 30 deviate from the order traditionally admitted by ZER. The translation, archaizing in flavor, cannot be said to be very close to the original, especially in the verses (see the verses of night 489 or 439; which he says are missing but are not missing in Bulaq). (Vernet 1964 xxi)

Such severity could be attributed to personal or political differences between contemporaries. It could also be read as the contempt of a professional Arabist for a man of letters. Vernet is a brilliant academic, an authority in the Spanish Arabist context with more than forty books and three hundred articles to his credit, while Cansinos was a poet, essayist and literary critic who did not share Vernet’s institutional prestige. In fact, all subsequent translations were made by scholars anchored in the academic world; most of them the intellectual and institutional products of the “Barcelona School,” as Vernet himself is. Or is this the disapproval of a Catalan man for the Spanish of an Andalusian? This conjecture is suggested by his labeling of Cansinos’s choice of words as “archaicizing,” since what is memorable for the reader of Cansinos in contrast to Vernet’s or anyone else’s translations is his systematic choice of Andalusian vernacular Spanish whenever possible. In fact the speaker of standard, not to mention other regional dialects of Spanish, often feels the need for a translation of the translation! The Andalusian dialect is so densely populated with Arabisms and an array of syntactic and semantic borrowings from Arabic that some linguists have gone so far as to classify it as a dialect of Arabic (Kaye 1994). Some of Vernet’s discomfort, it seems to me, derives from the deliberate transposition of the Nights into a language that can be claimed as dialect by two different linguistic traditions. His choice profoundly destabilizes the boundaries between East and West, Spanish and Arabic. To a Spaniard of the northern provinces this may in fact look like an unfortunate reversal of past and present, a slip into the archaic. I would argue that Cansinos violates allegiance to the European Orientalist cannon not only through his lexicon, but in structural choices. His borrowings from Andalusi literature—both popular and classical, and his weaving of that local tradition into the text without marking it as extraneous, seems to exactly mirror the process through which the Nights themselves were created, as evidenced by the sprinkling of Abu Nuwas’s classical verse in the stories for example. His practice in a sense reveals just how Arab the Andalusians

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are, how imbricated in a tradition that “should” require translations of many kinds. An eminent scholar based at the University of Barcelona, Juan Vernet produced his own translation of the Nights, published in 1964 by Editorial Planeta, also in Barcelona. As the Spanish scholar Ruiz Girela reminded me in an email exchange, “Vernet, is the author, as you know, of the best and most complete version [translated] directly into Spanish.” In his introduction, Vernet tells us that he translated from the Bulaq, fifth edition in four volumes, of the Sarfiyya Printing Press, Cairo, 1906 and from the Dar al-kutub al-arabiyya al-kubra (n/d) which coincides with the ZER texts. For some stories he used the second Calcutta, and other texts for the “displaced” stories. A few years later, Juan A. G. Larraya and Leonor Martínez Martín published another translation directly from the Arabic, from what they simply state is the Bulaq edition. Vernet’s introduction to it is sober but quite generous compared to his treatment of Cansinos; perhaps because Leonor was his wife. This three volume edition was published by Editorial Vergara in Barcelona, in 1969. The authors are both Professors of the Section of Semitic Philology at the University of Barcelona. Francisco Ruiz Girela, an Arabist at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, translated a collection of erotic tales from the Nights in the 1970s. When I contacted him to inquire about the project, he modestly responded: “My contact with that oeuvre was accidental and very superficial, and only consisted in translating the erotic stories (which are not very much so, seen from today’s perspective) contained in that oeuvre in collaboration with my colleague at the Department, Dr. Sobh.” Another partial translation was made by Professor Julio Samsó at the University of Barcelona, published by Alianza Editorial in 1975. Margarita Castells and María Dolores Cinca Pinos, professors of Semitic Philology at the University of Barcelona, translated the Syrian manuscript compiled and edited by Muhsin Mahdy. Their translation was published by Ediciones Destino in Barcelona in 1998. Professor Samsó kindly informed me that the two authors also published a complete translation of the Nights into Catalan, this one based on the ZER in the Bulaq edition. Given issues of regional autonomies and language politics in contemporary Spain, it is fascinating that these scholars chose the brief scholarly manuscript as the template for the language of the State, while indulging in the more prolific Egyptian recension when it came to transposing the Nights into their mother tongue. While this could be an effect of the late incorporation of women into the workforce and into academic labor in particular in the second half of

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the twentieth century, the Spanish translations from the Arabic are the only ones that have been produced by women. While the question of how gender shapes translations of the Nights is beyond the scope of this paper, this historical turn introduces another interesting dimension to their story.

The Erotic and Other Problems of Modern ‘Taste’ A constant across a number of translators of the genre into Spanish, and their commentators, is the insistence—be it in the form of complaint, praise, disclaimer or other index of discomfort, in footnotes or the introduction, regarding the “unsuitability,” the “macabre,” or the “poor taste” inherent in the tale(s). Different translators go on to either legitimize their edition of the text in an effort to make it more respectable, or their translation of the “indecent” or the “unspeakable” in an effort to remain “true to the text.” Menéndez y Pelayo, writing in 1908, states the following: When in 1704 Galland, who never saw the complete text of the Thousand and One Nights, produced with them his ingenious and charming piece for the use of European readers, purging them of the thousand filthinesses that they contain in the original, unburdening them of features in bad taste, omitting many novels in their entirety, and filling the gaps with others which he took from various Persian and Turkish books, success was immense and unanimous, but more popular than literary. The Thousand and One Nights ran from tongue to tongue and from hand to hand as a book of innocent entertainment; and what among the Orientals served to incite the slumbering sensuality of the harems, or to entertain the vicefilled laziness of opium smokers in the coffeehouses, could be handed to tender European children without more serious risk (and some it is, in fact) than to accustom their imagination to wild fables and sayings. (Menéndez y Pelayo 132-33)

Such statements read very much like those of the Europeans visitors to the Middle East in the nineteenth century cited by Ze’evi (2006). In his brilliant analysis of various sexual scripts in the Ottoman Middle East, Ze’evi documents the emergence, in the modern period, of a new tone of contempt and self-righteousness in European discourses on the region and especially on discourses regarding gender and sexual practices and their expression in forms of popular art—be it narrative or shadow theater. The theme of the introduction of the text in Europe as a collection intended for children surfaces again as Vernet tells his audience:

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The Thousand and One Nights as Living Narrative The reader will be able to see that we have kept the Arabic text in all its crudity in the passages in which this exists, but we had no choice but to proceed thus since, as we said—and wrote—in our address at the Royal Academy of Letters (Barcelona 1959): “If the Thousand and One Nights is not a book fit for minors, it is not more sinful than Il Decamerone or certain works of our classical literature which have been printed repeatedly. What is more, many of the texts written in our time achieve a sensual effect sending the imagination down certain paths, the ending being left to the reader’s free will. Here this is impossible, since the detail, crude in itself, forecloses any progression beyond the limits sketched out by the text. (Vernet 1964 LXIII-LXIV)

The translation of the Nights’ textual tradition into the European cannon required that it be split into versions shaped by different kinds of censure, to accommodate the historical emergence of that little creature, the child. As the modern disciplines of childhood developed and spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new restrictions came into being regarding the activities and themes that children could be appropriately exposed to. Among those banned was sexuality. In the Spanish case, it seems that the expurgation of sexual themes and scenes may have begun much earlier, sometime in the fourteenth century. Valero Cuadra notes a gap in early translations of various genres: It is also notable that in the two Arab texts those parts of the body that refer to sex are included among the other body parts, while in the Castilian ones these are absent. Thus, the reduction from four to three parts may be merely an attempt to eliminate that which is escabroso from the text […] Logical or not, the Castilian versions eliminate that which is escabroso in relation to the adab text, to which they are very similar […] It is impossible to know for certain whether this is done to make the escabroso disappear or to structure the text around the magical medieval number three. (Valero Cuadra 1996, 38)

Escabroso can be translated in many ways; most of which fall into the semantic field of “threatening,” “horrifying,” “dangerous”, or “lewd”. It is interesting to point out that as in the other cases I have discussed, it is the scholar who passes judgment. It is hard to imagine a resolution to the question of why the stories were edited in this particular way. It seems incongruous, however, to have such censorship when the well known Libro de buen amor (Book of Good Love [1330, 1343]), which it is centrally concerned with sex, sexual pranks and scheming is a product of the Spanish Christian popular imagination of the same period. The erotic is not the only aspect that translators have found threatening. Other transgressions have also fallen out in translation.

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Menéndez y Pelayo summarizes an early Castilian version of the ‘lady Teodor’ in which the exam takes a humorous turn. One of the sages in charge of questioning her is so confident in his intellectual superiority that he makes a bet with the lady. Whoever fails to resolve the algebraic problem in question must remove an item of clothing. The adventure ends with the sheikh naked even of his turban and his sandals scampering off in humiliation while Tawaddud enjoys her triumph and the caliph roars with laughter (Menéndez y Pelayo 159). When the lady is asked to define “carnal copulation” later on in her exam, her answer, delivered after some hesitation, is replaced by the translator with the phrase “let it stay in Arabic”; we only know that it caused the caliph and his advisers to burst into laughter once again (Menéndez y Pelayo 163). In the literate tradition stories were hispanicized by Christian writers. The process involved latinizing names, giving the adventures Iberian settings, making heros and heroines Christian, and presenting the resulting tales as part of a “Spanish” literary tradition. Similar localizations of the tales seem to have occurred in the popular oral tradition. Menéndez y Pelayo gives us a good sense of the process, though further scholarship has brought to light other cases: A single story of the ones which today are part of the Thousand and One Nights was incorporated from very early on into popular Castilian literature, transmitted directly from the Arabic original, and it is, by the way, one of those which Galland left untranslated […] I am referring to the Story of the Lady Teodor, which is still among the libros de cordel, although unfortunately modernized, and whose known editions go back to 1524 at least. (Menéndez y Pelayo 142)

He tells us that the story was printed in Zaragoza in 1540, Toledo in 1543, Sevilla- multiple editions in 1545, 1642; Valencia in 1676; Madrid in 1726; with popular editions running into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. He goes on: It has all the marks of the fourteenth century, if it does not go back to the end of the thirteenth, in which many analogous works were translated, and in all the important points coincides with texts of the Thousand and One Nights modernly printed in Bulaq and in Beirut […] This old Castilian translation, which without a doubt can be considered contemporary to the Bonium or Golden Bites […] is substantially the same as the one on which the curiosity of our popular classes still grazes, but it has of course been modified in the details with the passing of time. In the printed texts the fabrication’s Arab coloring gradually fades. The merchant is no longer from Baghdad but from a region of Hungary; and not a Moor therefore but a Christian: Teodor also has another homeland and religion, she is

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Works Cited Alarcón, M. “Carta de Abenaboo en Árabe Granadino (Estudio Dialectal).” Miscelánea de Estudios y Textos Árabes. Madrid: Imprenta Ibérica, 1915. Belcher, Stephen. “The Diffusion of the Book of Sindbad.” Fabula 27 (1987): 33-58. Borges, Jorge Luis. Siete noches. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980. Cansinos-Assens, Rafael. Libro de Las mil y una noches... Por primera vez puestas en castellano, del árabe original, prologadas, anotadas y cotejadas con las principales versiones en otras lenguas y en la vernácula. Mexico: Aguilar, 1966. Cinca Pinos, M. Dolors and Margarita Castells Criballes, trans. Las Mil y Una Noches. Barcelona: Destino, 1998. De Villegas, Antonio. Historia del Abencerraje y le Hermosa Jarifa. New York: Las Americas publishing Co., 1956. Enciclopedia of Islam. “Alf Layla wa Layla.” E. Littmann Online. n/d. Galland, Antoine. Las mil y una noches / ilustraciones, reproducciones persas e indúes inspiradas en los cuentos de Las mil y una noches. Barcelona: Óptima, 2002. Gayangos, Pascual de. “La edición árabe de las mil y una noches de Calcuta.” Antología Española 3. 1848. —. Historia de la literatura arábigo-española. Barcelona: Labor, 1945. —. Moros y cristianos en España medieval; estudios histórico-literarios. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Antonio de Nebrija, 1945. —. Historia de la España musulmana. Madrid. Labor, 1932. —. “Influencia de la civilización árabe.” Discursos leídos ante la Academia de la Historia en la Recepción Pública de Don Ángel González Palencia el día 31 de mayo de 1931. Madrid: n/e, 1931 —. Los mozárabes de Toledo en los siglos XII y XIII. Madrid.1930. Hurtado y Juan Jiménez de la Serna. Historia de la literatura española. Madrid: S.A.E.T.A., 1949. El libro de las mil y una noches. Trans. J.C. Madrus. Ed. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Valencia: Prometeo, n/d. “Libro de los engaños e los asayamientos de las mugeres.” Versiones castellanas del ‘Sendebar’. Ed. Ángel González Palencia. Madrid and

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Granada: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Patronato Menéndez y Pelayo; Instituto ‘Miguel Asin, 1946 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. “La doncella Teodor.” Estudios de Crítica Literaria. Madrid, 1908. Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World. How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain Back Bay Books, 2003. —. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Las mil y una noches. Trans. Larraya, Juan A. G. and Leonor Martínez Martín. Barcelona: Vergara, 1969. Rubiera Mata, María Jesús. Literatura Hispanoárabe. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2004. Samso, Julio. Antología de las mil y una noches. Selección. Madrid Alianza Editorial, 1975. Slyomovics, Susan. The Merchant of Art: an Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Toussaint, Manuel. Arte mudéjar en América. Mexico: Porrúa, 1946. Valero Cuadra, Pino. La doncella Teodor: un cuento hispanoárabe. Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert, Excma. Diputación Provincial de Alicante, 1996. —. La leyenda de la doncella Carcayona: estudio y edición crítica. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2000. Vernet, Juan. Las mil y una noches. Vol 1. Barcelona: Planeta, 1964. —. “Las mil y una noches y su influencia en la novelística medieval española.” Discurso leído el día 25 de enero de 1959 en la recepción pública de D. Juan Vernet Ginés en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona y contestación del académico numerario Dr. D. José Ma Millas Vallicrosa. Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1959. Walther, Wiebke. “Modern Arabic Literature and the Arabian Nights.” The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. vol. 1. Eds. Ulrich Marzolph and Richard Van Leeuwen. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2004. 54-61

THE EXPULSION OF MUSLIMS AND JEWS IN DON QUIXOTE AND THE PICARESQUE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY NICOLÁS ALEMÁN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

As stated in different official histories, there is a great silence about the cultural contributions of non-Christian social groups to the foundation of Spain as a nation. However, it has been founded by three ethnic groups rather than just by one. The main reason we speak of Spanish Catholics as the ones solely responsible for the establishment of the bases for Spanish culture is the centuries-old imposition of a mono-cultural official version of what it means to be Spaniard, which was limited to a conservative, Catholic perspective. Many abuses against these two minority groups were committed by imperial Spain, thus erasing their participation in the foundation of the nation from history. From the end of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century, Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain, even though they were as Spanish as the other social groups that formed this rich and cosmopolitan culture. This cultural amputation, to use Miguel de Unamuno’s metaphor, which caused the fragmentation of Spain and the exile of innocent people who would spread all over the world was the result of intolerant ideas. The edicts for the expulsion of Muslims and Jews passed by the Spanish crown brought about either forced converstions or the condemnation to wandering around for not adhering to the official religion. On April 23, 2009, we commemorated Cervantes’s death, and on March 31, it was the 500th anniversary of the re-conquest of Granada by the Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabel. Once they captured the last Muslim city in 1492, they signed a decree of forced conversion to Christianity for Muslims and Jews. On September 22, we are also going to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the last attempt to exile, once and for all, all people with Muslim or Jewish blood from the Peninsula. This time it did not matter whether or not they had converted to Christianity

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(Armstrong 3). How it was proved who had Muslim or Jewish blood is another topic that we are going to briefly discuss in this essay as well. In this context, I will now analyze the negative consequences of these expulsions and will also problematize the mistake of thinking that the massive exile of Moors and Jews from Spain was, indeed, forever. However, my main goal is to root out from our collective subconscious the belief that Spain was founded by only one social-religious group. As we weave our way into the central theme, we will make intertextual references to other literary works (mainly picaresque works such as Lazarillo de Tormes and the Guzman de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán) that share elements with Cervantes’s masterpiece. This will also help to establish the social, religious, and political environment in which this historical event took place. We will finish by pointing out some passages from Don Quixote that support our claim that Spanish people did not have much input in the crown’s decision to expel Moors and Jews. There are several elements in common in all these texts that are essential to our discussion. First, they question the sociopolitical and moral values of the time. Second, they also reflect the fact that, although never officially considered a theocracy, the crown and the Church always functioned as one single mind, a situation that continued until Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. In fact, both absolute regimes, Franco’s dictatorship and the Spanish crown at this time controlled literature. Like Mateo Alemán, the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes and Cervantes, Camilo José Cela, Carmen Laforet, and others somehow had to write in “code” to communicate their message. Another common element found in these texts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that they were written for two types of readers: the “vulgar” and the “discreet” (meaning, judicious or intelligent). Consequently, there were “codes” directed at either the “bad readers” or the “good readers.” Whereas bad readers were those who believed everything they read literally, good readers questioned the veracity of the text. Among the former group was the Church, since they tended to interpret texts, including literature considered sacred, literally. Cervantes makes this evident in allusions through meta-characters in Don Quixote: readers, writers, and narrators within the text itself. But it is the burning of Don Quixote’s library where we can find a more direct criticism of the Church. Incidentally, being “vulgar” is not synonymous with illiterate, since one could be highly intellectual and still be “vulgar.” This is why humanist writers chose characters with humble backgrounds to show precisely this contrast. For example, in the picaresque gnre main characters belong to the lowest social class. To clarify, the humanism I am referring to is the one

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promulgated by Edward Said in his preface to his seminal work Orientalism (1978): […] By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mindforged manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. (Said xvii)

Generally speaking, there are two types of humanism: one concentrates on the individual while the other is community oriented (Fuminobu 28). The former separates the individual from others and finds excessive pride in who he is; the latter seeks common traits in all individuals as essential to their existence. Moreover, the humanism that concentrates on the individual also promotes division and might even encourage the annihilation of those different than him; by contrast, communal humanism promotes unity and the co-existence of all individuals. Blake’s humanism, as alluded by Said, belongs to the humanism that concentrates on the individual; like Said, Cervantes and the authors of the early picaresque belong to the humanism that promotes unity. Other then Quevedo, all these authors humanists, as their writing style suggests. Although aesthetically rich, their diction is very simple, as it is part of the characterization of their protagonists. Interestingly, several of these authors were of Jewish or Muslim descent, a fact that might explain their anticlericalism. For instance, the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes is thought to have come from sixteenth-century Erasmian or New Christian circles..From this perspective, two passages in Don Quixote support my claim that the Church and the monarchy acted against the people’s will in their religious and political decisions. The first scene takes place in chapter 54 of the second part of Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza encounters his Moor neighbor and friend Ricote. The second passage deals with “The Story of the Captive” in chapters 38 through 42 of the first part of the novel, Another important contemporaneous, historical event connected to the expulsion of Moors and Jews is the “discovery” of the New World by Christopher Columbus, the Genovese and, according to Armstrong, son of Jews converted converted to Christianity (5). This historic event resulted in the re-conceptualization of the world, particularly after the new cartographic design in 1507, the year to be taken as the beginning of the history of the Americas for Europeans, as discussed by Edmund O’Gorman in The Invention of America (129). In addition, the “discovery” of the New

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World came to postpone what seemed to be inevitable, the economic downfall of the Spain, thanks to the exploitation of gold and silver mines in the new continent, particularly in Zacatecas and Potosí. Between 1500 and 1600 “150.000 kilograms of gold and 7.4 million kilograms of silver reached Spain from America,” which were used to support all the wars in which Spain was involved (Kamen 154). In despite of all this wealth, by the end of 1540 the war debt consumed 68 percent of ordinary income of the Castilian treasure. By the end of the sixteenth century, Castile’s funding of the religious wars in defense of Catholicism in Europe made the total debt was eight times bigger than its annual income (Kamen 158). But the battles against France and England were not only religious but also economic. However, the battles that brought Spain to her knees were the one fought in Lepanto in 1571, mentioned in Don Quixote in the “Story of the captive,” and the one fought in 1588 against England, in which the Spanish Armada was lost. Although it is true that Spain, as part of the Holy League, won the battle against the Ottoman Empire in Lepanto, its economic resources were irredeemably weakened. This paved the way to the loss of the battle against the British navy and to the eventual end of the Empire. But Felipe II was blind to this fact and continued supporting The League in the battles against the infidel, mainly the Turkish, which brought Spain to a much deeper debt. As Spain was engaged in unnecessary, long, and expensive wars, her citizens were going through very hard times. The society was divided, economically speaking, in two groups: the haves and the larger have-nots. There were also those who did not have but that pretended to have. It is within this anarchical environment where the expulsion and exile of Muslims and Jews occurred, perhaps being used as escape goats for the national crisis. We also need to take into account that the decree passed by Philip III stated that the expelled people could only take what they could, as they were leaving. Obviously, they could not take either their lands or their cattle, and most of their belongings were left in Spain. This is all portrayed in Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman de Alfarache, and the Quixote. Although the Lazarillo still remains anonymous, the probable author was Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, which would prove the relationship between the early picaresque and Muslim or Jewish conversos, As we read in the “Introduction” to The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities, translated by Clements Robert Markhan, Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was the son of the marquis, first Spanish Governor of Granada. The Governor had his palace in the Alhambra near the Torres de Picos, which is now demolished […] But the smaller house

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While he was a student at Salamanca, Don Diego purportedly wrote Lazarillo de Tormes. He returned to Spain from Italy in 1554 at the age of fifty. He was not appreciated by Philip II, and seldom came to Court, living, with his splendid library, in his house in Granada. Tellingly, in his great work, La Guerra de Granada, a narrative of the rebellion of the Moors (1568-1570), he did the Moors such impartial justice that his book could not be published until many years after his death (Markhan xxv). Mateo Alemán, author of Guzmán de Alfarache, was also related to Jewish conversos. He was the son of a medical doctor, and he was a doctor himself, as it was the tradition among Jews. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that both narratives take place in Toledo and Seville, two communities with large Jewish populations, as mentioned by Francisco Márquez Villanueva in “Sevilla y Mateo Alemán” (Atalayas del ‘Guzmán de Alfarache’ 45- 64) [“Seville and Mateo Aleman” (45-64)]. But Márquez Villanueva goes even further in saying that Guzmán de Alfarache is autobiographical and that the author narrates, through the protagonist, his own life’s adventures. Márquez Villanueva reads the text as is a dialectical battle between liberty and oppression/fear. Both Guzmán de Alfarache and Lazarillo are satires of Spain’s moral values and beliefs. Thus, in Guzmán de Alfarache the author discusses the concept of honor as an intrinsic quality: those who have honor do not claim to have it. At the same time, he contrasts “honor” with “vengeance.” Another issue questioned in these texts is the celibacy imposed by the Church on priests. Especially in Lazarillo, this topic is treated as an act of hypocrisy. Clearly, the texts suggest that is impossible for men to live under celibacy. All these were important issues at the time these texts were written, and they they continue to be in vogue in this century. As a new literary genre, the picaresque is born precisely out of all these sociopolitical and religious problems. Generally speaking, it is a satire directed at both the monarchy and the Church for their hypocrisy, their exaggerated ambition, and their insensible decisions. It is also an ideological weapon used by new converted Christians. In this sense, James A. Parr cites Alberto del Monte when the latter points out the criticism Charles V’s insensibility in Lazarillo de Tormes:

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The anonymous author of the Lazarillo […] was warning that the imperialist policies of Charles V undermined the aspirations of his country [Spain] and put at risk its society and its resources in exchange for a military glory alien to the true traditions of the Peninsula and ruinous for its economy and, consequently, illusory, false, and replete with fatal consequences. For this reason, he chose as the beginning of his narrative an authentic defeat, Djerba, which must have stirred painful memories and have taken on symbolic value, and an illusionary triumph, that of the emperor after the victory of Pavia: in between a series of episodes illustrating hunger, misery, deceit, the selfish struggle to gain a purely material, evanescent, and dishonorable well-being, a bitter fable born of pessimism, one that symbolizes, through the adventures of a young lad, the adventures of Spain of his day, a Spain that had forgotten its role in the Re-conquest, a Spain sunken into misery but still putting on airs. (Don Quixote,Don Juan, and Related Subjects 236)

Here Del Monte contrasts the misery of the population in Spain and the vainglorius military triumphs outside the Peninsula. In Lazarillo, we have mothers who have to give away their children for not being able to feed them or who have to prostitute themselves in order to survive the economic crisis. Since his story parallels that of Spain, therefore, Lázaro becomes an essential symbolic figure in the novel. As Lázaro grows up with different masters, he gradually loses the moral values he had learned as a child. At the end, he thinks he has succeeded in life thanks to all the benefits he receives from the archpriest of San Salvador, after agreeing to marry his mistress, thus helping him to avoid any suspicion of breaking his chastity vows (Lazarillo 153) Clearly, what Lázaro calls progress is just the change of his spiritual and innocent life into an illusory, corrupted, and material one. This aspect also runs parallel to the moral decay of the entire nation. In this context, as the narrator relates his good fortune, he also brings about Charles’s V military victories outside Spain: “This was the same year in which our triumphant emperor entered this distinguished city of Toledo and had Cortes in it, and there was great joy, as your majesty must has heard. Since at that time, I was prosperous and on top of the Fortune Wheel”1 In this sarcastic way, the author shows the reader Spain’s moral decay in which Spain has fallen into at the same time that he suggests that past times were always better.

1

“fue el mesmo año que nuestro victorioso emperador en esta insigne ciudad de Toledo entró y tuvo en ellas Cortes, y se hicieron grandes regocijos, como vuestra merced habrá oído. Pues en este tiempo estaba mi prosperidad y en la cumbre de toda Buena fortuna” (155).

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Therefore, all these literary works suggest that both the monarchy and Church were only interested in keeping their hegemony over the suffering and starving Spanish people. These texts also imply that the main victims of their misdoings were women and children. Likewise, they suggest that rather than learning from their numerous mistakes, Spain’s political and religious leaders looked for scapegoats. In fact, one can easily speculate that King Felipe III would not have expelled the Muslims and Jews had it not been for the economic crisis. He was also blind to the fact that while Muslims were the equivalent of those times’ working class, the ones who supported the nation economically, Jews acted as the country’s banks. Therefore, he repeated the same mistakes made by his grandparents, the Catholic Kings, Fernando e Isabel, was and then by Carlos V and Felipe II (Elliot 106). The contribution of these two communities was, of course, not limited to the economic plain. They were also protagonists in the world of Spain’s arts and letters. Ironically, the main beneficiary of the expulsion was Spain’s worst enemy, the Ottoman Empire. As the historian Raymond P. Scheinlin explains, As the Ottoman Empire expanded, it inherited first Greek-speaking Jews of the old Byzantine Empire and the mostly Arabic-speaking Jewish communities of the Middle East; when the disaster befell the Jews of Spain, it gladly welcomed the Spanish-speaking exiles. The sultans considered the Jewish exiles an economic asset to their expanding nation, which was strong in the military and agricultural arts but deficient in commercial experience, international connection, linguistic skills, all of which the exiles from Spain could supply. (125)

Scheinlin also comments on the rich economic and cultural foundation that the Islamic community had created in Spain since 711, including the rich cultural architectonic legacy, especially the Alhambra and the cities of Cordoba and Sevile, among others One of the Islamic regions that was flourishing just as Iraq was entering its decline was Spain, which the Muslims had conquered in the eighth century [...] By the tenth century […] Cordoba became a magnificent metropolis and for the time ranked as one of the great cities of the Islamic world, attracting wealth as well as artists and scholars. (Scheinlin 83)

The intellectual legacy was equally impressive. As Ramón Menéndez Pidal explains, Toledo had been the capital city of the ancient Visigoth kingdom and had achieved a high level of sophistication in both the sciences and the arts. A few years after it was re-conquered by the Christians in 1085, it became the Mecca, so to speak, of the transmission

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of Arabic wisdom. For this reason, it was Toledo rather than Cordoba the most visited city by the great European minds of the time. Toledo’s libraries were full of books written in Arabic and it was there where the “Toledo School” was founded by the Archbishop Raymond of Toledo. This school was important because those Arabic texts contained abundant information not found in Latin texts. Through the Toledo School, knowledge about Aristotle, Archimedes, Plato, Ptolemy, Plotinus, and Euclid, among others, was transmitted. These authors’ texts were not only translated into Arabic; they were also deeply analyzed by their translators and commentators. The transmittal of this information was possible thanks to the connection between the Islamic world and the Hindustani culture. Among many other brilliant Hispanic-Arabic translators and thinkers of the Toledo School, we have Aben Bayiah, Avenparece in Latin, who was born in Zaragoza in 1090, and Aven Sur, Avenzoar in Latin, who was born in Sevilla in 1902 and whose books about medicine were known all over Europe. However, the most famous of all these Hispanic-Arabic translators and thinkers is Aben Rosd, Averroes in Latin. This prominent scholar was born in Cordoba in 1126. It was thanks to Averroes that Thomas Aquinas knew Aristotle’s philosophy. Ironically, Aquinas later accused Averroes of “depraving” Aristotle’s philosophy. In contrast, Dante honors him in The Divine Comedy by placing him in the circle of the Limbo, along with Aristotle, Socrates and the rest of the highest pagan spirits.2 Although a moral and theological issue, I believe that, religiously speaking, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews was also a mistake, since it violated one of the most fundamental principles of Christianity: the practice of this religion out of free will, as explained by Saint Agustin in On Free Choice of the Will . It also violated Christ’s mandate of loving your neighbor, which He instituted in the “Sermon of the Mountain,” and it is manifested in the agape love we must offer one another through good deeds (Mat 5:1s). On the other hand, the exile of Muslim and Jews brought about the separation of their families. To justify their exile, they were accused of thievery, lying, laziness, and even of cannibalism. This false image is also read in the propagandistic literature of that time, a discourse that can be easily connected to Edward Said’s about the demonization of the other in Orientalism. As Said suggested, literature is informed by preconceived and false ideas about other people’s culture and history, which are promulgated by the empire or the social group in power for their 2

It is also believed that the first foreigner to visit the Toledo School was the British philosopher Adelard Bath (Menéndez Pidal 33-58).

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own purpose. However, this is just one of the many elements that perpetuate otherism, as part of a sophisticated and well structured system. Out of the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada’s advice, in 1492 the Catholics Kings ordered the expulsion of Jews under penalty of death. At this time, some countries opened their doors to them, as was the case of Italy and Turkey. Others moved to Portugal and eventually to Brazil, fleeing from the Inquisition (Patterson 14-15). According to Charles Patterson, during the reign of the Catholic Kings, some marranos (swine), as crypto-Jews were called, were burned at the stake. Others were abused, imprisoned, and deprived from their property. Years later, Felipe III’s decree stated that no one with Muslim or Jewish heritage could remain in Spain, under penalty of death. Moreover, this time many who ventured themselves into Islamic countries, especially in Africa, were rejected. According to Fernández-Armestro, this time the majority of the people expelled (approximately 275, 000) were Muslim (133). Taking into consideration that the population at that time was relatively small, this number was significantly numerous. We need to take into consideration that many sectors of the Spanish society did not make a distinction among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Perhaps, this is the message that Cervantes wants to convey in the encounter between Sancho Panza and Ricote. In the scene, Sancho is expelled from Barataria, an island in which he once was a governor. Meanwhile, Ricote, who had fled Spain before the expulsion decree was put into effect by Felipe III, is momentarily returning, in disguise and with a group of pilgrims coming from France, Italy, and Germany, the places he has visited to secure a place for his family. In the following scene, after they had drink and eat along with the pilgrims, Ricote and Sancho, still without recognizing each other, start the conversation: “Español y tudesqui, tuto uno: bon compaño!” And Sancho would respond: “Bon compaño, jura Di!” And he burst into laughter that lasted for an hour, and then he did not remember anything that had happened to him in his governorship; for during the time and period when one eats and drinks, care tend to be of little importance. Finally the end of the wine was the beginning of a fatigue that overcame everyone and left them asleep on their tables and cloths; only Ricote and Sancho were awake, because they had eaten more and drunk less then the others; Ricote moved away with Sancho to sit at the foot of a beech tree, leaving the pilgrims deep in their sweet sleep, and

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Ricote, without sleeping at all into his Moorish language, said these words in pure Castilian: “You know very well, O Sancho Panza, my neighbor and friend, how the proclamation and edict that His Majesty issued against those of my race brought terror and fear to all of us; at least I was so affected, I think that even before the time granted to us for leaving Spain had expired, I was already imagining that the harsh penalty had been inflicted on me and my children. And so I arranged, as a prudent man, I think, and knows that by a certain date the house where he lives will be taken away and he’ll need to have another one to move into, I arranged, as I said, to leave the village alone, without my family […] because I saw clearly, as did all our elders, hat those proclamations were not mere threats, as were saying, but real laws that would be put into effect at the appointed time […] No matter where we are we weep for Spain, for, after all, we were born here and it is our native country; nowhere do we find the haven our misfortune longs for, and in Barbary and all the places in Africa where we hoped to be received, welcome and taken in, that is where they most offend and mistreat us […] The greatest desire in almost all of us is to return to Spain; most of those, and there are many of them, who know the language as well as I do, abandoned their wives and children and return, so great is the love they have for Spain; and now I know and feel the truth of saying that it is sweet to love one’s country. (II, 54)

The message in this conversation between a Moorish “new converted Christian” and “old Christian,” which is something in which Sancho takes great pride throughout the entire novel, is clear and eloquent: it corroborates that, for many Spaniards, there should not be any distinction among citizens, regardless of their religious creeds. The other relevant passage is the “Story of the captive” in chapters 38 and 42 from the first part of the Quixote, which also deals with the fallacy of being of “pure blood.” It would not be too far-fetched to assume that what the captive’s discourse reflects the unfolding of Cervantes’s own experiences as a soldier. As is well-known, a year after losing his left hand in the Battle of Lepanto in October 7, 1576, Cervantes enlisted himself in the tercio of Lope de Figueroa, where he was later joined by his brother (Campos 29). After many battles, Cervantes was captured on his way back home by a pirate ship and taken to Algiers where he was kept captive for five years, from 1575 to 1580. Most of the narration by the captive probably parallels the experiences lived by Cervantes as a soldier, as is suggested by the fact that the captive mentions that he has a partner by the name of “Saavedra” (I, 42), alluding, of course, to the author. However, there is a more significant meaning behind this historical background, which has to do with the “Pure blood” decree, which Cervantes is

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probably questioning and that may also be related to his plausible Jewish background. In this respect, critics such Daniel Eisenberg, Carlos Alvar, Giuseppe Grilli, Kenneth Brown, Ruth Fine and Or Hasson, among many others, argue that Cervantes descended from converted Jews, from the time of the Catholic Kings. For this reason, the Jewish influence in the confection of the text is latent. In this context, in the story of the captive, which, as previously stated, reflects the author’s life own experience, the captive is a new Christian and son of converted Jews, who is married, or about to marry, a Muslim woman, also about to become a new converted Christian. It is obvious that by mixing the three ethnicities (Christian, Jewish, Moorish) in the character of the captive, the author is questioning the authenticity of the “Pure blood” decree. Implicit is also our central argument in this essay: the myth that Spain was founded by only one social and religious group. Instead, the author suggests that it was established equally by Jews, Muslims, and Christians.

Works Cited Alemán, Mateo. Guzmán de Alfarache. Madrid: Cátedra, 1994. Alvar, Carlos. “Cervantes y los judíos.” Cervantes y las religiones. Eds. Ruth Fine and Santiago López Navia. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008. 27-54. Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Augustine. On Free Choice of the Will. Trans. Thomas Williams. Cambridge: Hacket, 1993. Campos, Jorge. Cervantes y el ‘Quijote.’ Madrid: La ballesta, 1959. Carr, Raymond. Spain, a History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Eisenberg, Daniel. “La actitud de Cervantes ante sus antepasados judaicos.” Cervantes y las religiones 55-78. Elliot, J. H. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. Cambridge: Penguin Books, 1990. La Biblia Latinoamericana. Pamplona: Verbo Divino, 1992. Lazarillo de Tormes. Santiago de Chile: Ercilla, 1984. Márquez Villanueva, F. “Sevilla y Mateo Alemán.” Atalayas del Guzmán de Alfarache. Ed. Pedro M. Piñero. Madrid: Sevilla UP, 2002. 45-64. Menéndez Pidal, R. España, eslabón entre la cristiandad y el islam. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968. O’Gorman, Edmundo. La invención de América. Mexico: Cultura, 1992.

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Patterson, C. Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond. Lincoln: Walker, 2000. Parr, James A. Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Related Subjects: Forms and Translation in Spanish Literature, 1330-1630. Cranbury: Rosemont, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1979. Scheindlin, Raymond P. A Short History of the Jewish People. New York: Oxford, 1998 The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes. Trans. Sir Clements Markham. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908

SEPARATION AND DISPLACEMENT IN FRANCISCO PRADILLA’S ORIENTALIST PAINTINGS: LA RENDICIÓN DE GRANADA (1882) AND EL SUSPIRO DEL MORO (1892) MARÍA A. CASTRO CLAREMONT-MCKENNA COLLEGE

Both Francisco Pradillas’s paintings La Rendición de Granada (1882) and his El Suspiro del Moro (1892) present dualistic and compelling images that exalt the triumphant culmination of the Christian victory in the Peninsular War of the Reconquista and simultaneously create an image of separation and hostility regarding the Muslim “Other.” In the words of the Marquis of Barzanallana, who commissioned the former painting to be part of the decorative iconographical program1 for the Conference Room of the Palace of the Senate in Madrid, Pradilla’s work was intended “to immortalize the surrender of Granada and the delivery of its keys by King Boabdil to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand on January 2, 1492, as a representation of the unification of Spain and as a starting point for the great deeds achieved by our ancestors under those great monarchs.”2 This message clearly conveys the Orientalist philosophy of Christian self1

The Orientalist nature of two of the other paintings that decorated the Conference Room of the palace of the Senate reasserted and reinforced the supremacy and heroic spirit of the Christians over Muslim power. Moreno Carbonero’s Entry of Roger de Flor in Constantinople (1888) celebrates the entry of the Christian armies in Constantinople to assist the emperor Andronicus II Paleologus to fight against the Ottoman Turks, who were advancing to take control of the Byzantine Empire; Juan Luna y Novicio’s Combate naval de Lepanto (7 de octubre de 1571) (1887) glorifies and elevates the Christian triumph over the Turks in the battle of Lepanto. 2 Letter (my translation) dated August 17, 1878 from the Marquis of Barzanallana, then the president of the Spanish Senate and commissioner of the painting, to Francisco Pradilla.

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affirmation, power, and control over Muslim defeat, sadness, and loss. Moreover, the textual assertion illustrates, through mechanisms of exaltation of the Christian rulers and domination of the Islamic “Other,” how Orientalism intends to demonstrate that “European culture gain[s] in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said 3). Just as the surrender of Granada marked the pacification of the Arab Other and the beginning of the Spanish “discovery” and subsequent domination of the Americas, Pradilla’s painting connects the idea of the displacement of Muslim culture and peoples with the initiation of Spain’s external enlargement of Christian dominance in the “New World” after the Reconquista. Pradilla’s mention of the necessity to assert and consolidate history’s “greatness” and “poetry” over the insistence of mere “decorative character” in the creation of the painting, as his detailed letter to the Marquis of Barzanallana states in regards his artistic conception,3 makes clear his view that the ascendancy of Christianity over Islam constitutes historical progress and advancement. The artwork was commissioned as a commemoration of the final victory over the Moorish occupation of Spain, thus marking a celebration of nationalistic orthodoxy under the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. La Rendición de Granada, therefore, validates an ideology that, in its defence of Christian values and principles, rejects and regards the foreign “Other” “with derisive contempt” (Said xxvii). Before turning to our analysis of the painting itself, it might be productive to first consider Pradilla’s aforementioned letter to the Marquis of Barzanallana. As a mode of expression that can be said to complement the pictorial image itself, it can also be interpreted as an Orientalist creation. It is interesting to see how Pradilla’s written account supports and is concomitant with the dominant nationalistic vision that sought to elevate and glorify what he saw as “some of the most transcendental and epic moments of the history of Spain.”4 Pradilla largely focuses his description on the contrast between the triumphant right side of the painting, his primary interest being to show the authority, power, and superiority of “the Occident” and the failure and frustration of the “Orient.” With such purpose, he describes the prominent placement assigned to the Catholic monarchs, their two oldest children, and their accompanying members of the nobility, all situated in the center of the inscribed semicircle that he uses to enclose the Christian group. Pradilla 3

This letter is included in the book La pintura de historia del siglo XIX en España by Jose Luis Díez, 362-66. 4 Letter to the Marquis of Barzanallada (my translation).

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goes on to name each of the different royal, aristocratic, and religious figures on horseback belonging to the Christian side and to describe their rich and elaborate clothes and jewels. In contrast to his long and detailed description of the Christian West side of the painting, his account of the Muslims on the left side of the image comprises but a few lines. Pradilla concerns himself with mentioning just King Boabdil and his accompanying noblemen, and only the former by name; it is thus only they, in a sense, who constitute the whole of the description of the human “Other” half of the image. This deliberate absence of real human identities on Pradilla’s description of the Muslim side clearly speaks to an Orientalist vision of the scene, since the lack of understanding, knowledge, and respect for the “foreign culture” represented by the Moorish group is reflected in the unbalanced treatment of its narrative content. Moreover, Pradilla’s ethnocentric perspective is secured in linguistic terms. The relationship between the two sections of the painting is established by contrasting adjectival descriptions of marked superiority and inferiority in reference to the configurations of body and movement. Whereas in the Christian group the artist mentions expressions such as “voluminous figure,” “lifted up stance,” and thus reinforces common paradigms of social reality and the ascendancy of Christian power, Pradilla uses words such as “inclined,” “confused,” or “contained feelings” in the depiction of the Muslim group, hence further infusing weakness to the overall defeated side of the painting. As a pictorial image, La Rendición de Granada presents, both symbolically and ideologically, a perfect coincidence with Pradilla’s letter describing the painting. The artistic creation largely focuses on the victorious right half of the composition, its main objective being to promote and elevate the West as a dominating, victorious cultural force. In contrast, his depiction of the Moors expresses the declining power of the “Orient.” A careful examination of both images within the painting will try to demonstrate the validity of this argument. To begin with, there exists in quantitative terms a notable imbalance between the two scenes, as Pradilla depicts a far larger number of figures on the right than on the left. This greater number of figures expresses a definite closeness and cohesion among the Christians, thus providing a feeling of internal unity, ideological agreement, and ontological coherence. The presence of this compact group also points to the idea of established and solid power, and therefore reflects the greater military strength of the Christian side. In contrast, the Muslim side lacks the number of figures granted to the Christian image. It consists of a fewer number of people that, within and because of their spatial arrangement, suggest a noticeable degree of separation among them. There is, then, a

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prevalent feeling of frustration and alienation that undoubtedly reflects the Moors’ sense of cultural weakness and lack of morale. Moreover, the inclusion of four members of the royal family on the Christian scene— Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in front and Princess Isabella and Prince Juan behind them—also contributes in a quantitative manner to establish a marked power imbalance, as King Boabdil is the only authoritative figure appearing on the left image. It is interesting to note that the inclusion of Queen Isabella in the painting further emphasizes the celebratory spirit of the painting since, according to historical documentation, the royal monarch herself never attended this event.5 Along these lines, the gestural and decorative component of both contrasting scenes further emphasizes the celebration of Christian power against the depiction of Moorish declining authority. Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand, their children Prince Juan and Queen Isabella of Portugal, as well as most of their accompanying members of the nobility and clergy exhibit arrogant, calm, and authoritative facial expressions. Holding up their heads, they all seem to look in the same direction toward King Boabdil. Most of the lavishly dressed Christian figures are on horseback, showing thus their strength, richness, and power. Conversely, the Muslim side exhibits a notable degree of positional inferiority, as Pradilla presents only King Boabdil as being on horseback. As Said has pointed out, Orientalism depends for its strategy on the idea of positional superiority, “which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand” (7); Pradilla, in his artistic mission, has made use of this technique of domination and control through the expression of physical elevation. As the rest of the Muslim figures appear on foot, cultural superiority is confirmed and consolidated. Additionally, and with the exception of King Boabdil, who displays a straight and forceful expression towards the Catholic monarchs, the men who follow the Muslim leader seem to direct their eyes and thoughts in different directions. The barefoot figure carrying King Boabdil’s horse lowers his head as a sign of respect and fear, while the other two officials who are situated behind King Boabdil display contained feelings of anger and frustration. A third Muslim official, dressed in a white and blue ceremonial dress, seems to be dominated by sadness and loss. Situated on the left lower corner of the painting, another accompanying member of King Boabdil’s retinue crosses his arms and lowers his head as a gesture of peace and submission to the Catholic monarchs. This difference of gestural representations, although depicting a 5

José Luis Díez, 369.

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common sense of defeat, translates into a broken and discontinuous entity that clearly contrasts with the victorious uniformity of the Christian side. La Rendición de Granada emphasizes the physical and psychological separation of Islam and the Christian West. It is necessary to point out that Pradilla, as a non-Muslim painter and hence not necessarily knowledgeable about or interested in Muslim affairs, not only lends support to the Catholic monarchs’ historical project of non-integration with and expulsion of those deemed “Other” but also follows a nineteenth-century nationalistic artistic movement that revives those principles. In fact, cultural leadership during the Romantic era in Spain promoted the idea of Christian supremacy and reiterated the concept of Oriental threat with the purpose of solidifying and asserting traditional monarchical and religious authority. La Rendición de Granada, in its physical and optical configuration, conforms with and projects the idea of distance and hostility between the two represented entities. The central lower space is dominated by an emptiness that marks a profound division between the two groups. While King Boabdil advances forward on horseback to deliver the keys of his city of Granada, there is no intention on the part of King Ferdinand to approach and contact him physically. His arrogant and ceremonious manner does not allow for a forward move on his part; instead, like a king on his throne, he awaits the keys to be delivered. Moreover, the separation is also indicated by two distinct natural areas belonging to the two halves of the painting: the Christian unity rests on a field where prickly flowers bloom whereas the Muslim figures move forward on a muddy, crackly surface. The physical environment here depicted, then, could act as a powerful symbol that reproduces hostility and animosity on the triumphant side and humiliation and desolation on the defeated side. Additionally, separation is further suggested by what seems to be an invasive and ceremonious silence: Pradilla, perhaps following traditional Spanish understanding of this event, insists on the lack of verbal communication between the two groups and thus emphasizes the victory of the Spanish and the introspective sadness of the Moors. In conclusion, then, Pradilla’s use of artistic devices to divide and marginalize arguably reflects a marked lack of interest in and respect for non-Christian cultures, as often presented in Orientalist creations. Edward Said refers to the terms “strategic location” as a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material s/he writes about and “strategic formation” as a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts acquire density and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large (20). Due to the correspondences between different

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modes of cultural expressions, we could apply the same analysis in reference to an Orientalist painter’s position in a painting and in relationship to other paintings, works of art, and texts that have depicted “the Orient.” In Pradilla’s case, and due to the very problematic history between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, we should point that his position probably has been not only influenced by several centuries of Orientalist perceptions and judgments, but also by the production of contemporaneous artistic and literary works that exhibited similar ideological positions. Historically speaking, since the celebration of the end of the Spanish Reconquista with the surrender of Granada, the Muslim “Other” has been largely represented in dominant Western culture through similar preceding images that, in turn, were created from similar previous traditions that not only glorified the arduous process of Christian victory but also insisted on the separation of the Islamic Orient and the Christian West. Pradilla’s case seems to follow this pattern. The communication of previously created texts and images regarding the Islamic “Other” in Spanish historical accounts, literature, and culture in general contributed to and consolidated the formation of ideas of negativity and hostility between the Christian West and the Muslim “Other.” It is known that Pradilla not only did research on his artistic project by reading texts and articles describing the war of Granada and its final surrender, but also travelled to Granada in 1879, where he copied on watercolour a wooden relief entitled The Delivery of the Keys of the City of Granada by King Boabdil to the Catholic Monarchs (Díez 369). This artistic work is located next to another scene entitled The Catholic Monarchs and the Christian Armies that could have also been an important source of inspiration for Pradilla’s painting. Both images belong to Granada’s Royal Chapel’s main retablo, created between 1520 and 1522. Its function and intention, argues Martínez Medina, was to proclaim the triumphant religious, political, and territorial unity achieved by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand (99). Given that objective, the main retablo was divided into three thematic areas: scenes of the life of Jesus as symbols of the new achieved religious unity; images of saints as messengers of political unification; and representations of historical events during the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand as references to territorial unity (Martínez Medina 99).6 The retablo scenes corresponding to the thematic of the Muslim surrender of Granada constitute an illustrative example of an Orientalist artistic 6 Granada’s Royal Chapel was created to house the mortuary monument of the Catholic Monarchs.

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tradition that was used to transmit and reproduce the Muslim world according to the political and cultural interests of the Christian West. Other scenes, also belonging to the Capilla Real’s retablo, depict images that stand in strict ideological correspondence with the Granada reliefs. Themes such as Santiago on horseback crushing the Moors, in which the Christian saint appears as a cruel destroyer of the Islamic “Other,” and the two reliefs representing images of the Muslim minorities’ submission and obedience to the authority of the Christian West, Baptism of the Moriscos [male Moors] of the Kingdom of Granada and Baptism of the Moriscas [female Moors] of the kingdom of Granada, belong to a system of cultural representations in which despair and victimization reign among the Islamic Orientals and, by contrast, control, power, and success are prevalent for the Christian rulers. In fact, the presence of this iconographical discourse is not arbitrary. It serves and reinforces a political and religious purpose (Martínez Medina 108), for it is known that after Cardinal Cisneros tried to apply strict policies of rigorous orthodoxy and forced conversions among the Moriscos, a revolt took place, followed by military intervention and harsh policies of repression, including forced baptism for the opposing minorities (Cruz 292). Pradilla, through careful study and observation of those previous images representing Western triumph and Moorish defeat, followed and adopted the same narrative authority and included similar structural and symbolic language from sixteenth-century wooden relief. In this respect, the importance of what Said defines as idées reçues lies in constituting an influence prone to “be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically” (Said 116) as powerful instruments of control of subsequent representations of the Orient. Pradilla obviously reasserted old conservative ideological values characterized by their essential inertia and whose limitations produced fixed, non-changing images of the Orient for the Western consciousness. The close relationship between the Royal Chapel’s wooden reliefs depicting the surrender of Granada and Pradilla’s La Rendición de Granada points thus to the existence of a continuity in the cultural representation and transmission of the Orient in Spanish art. It also demonstrates that “the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (Said 5). Structurally, the retablo images, despite their proximity in the lower part of the retablo configuration, are articulated as separate and independent artistic entities. In that respect, the divisiveness and Christian sense of exclusion towards the Moorish group that appears in the Royal Chapel’s wooden reliefs have been incorporated into

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Pradilla’s intentional broken spatial configuration, and as such prove how strongly later representations of the Oriental-Islamic have been built on earlier ones (Said 68). Related to this analysis, and from a hierarchical perspective, there is a significant quantitative and positional difference between the two reliefs that is later reiterated in Pradilla’s historical painting. The similarity of both artistic configurations points to the continuity of the Orientalist view with respect to the representation of essential European-Muslim relationship as one between a strong and a weak partner (Said 40). Whereas in The Catholic Monarchs and their Christian Armies there is a large group of figures, many of them carrying spears and thus symbolizing cohesion, strength and power, The Delivery of the Keys of Granada by King Boabdil presents only three main figures bereft of an accompanying army symbolizing weakness and failure. Moreover, many of the men and women on the Christian side are depicted on horseback, while the three Muslim individuals are represented as being on foot. Pradilla’s instrumental use of quantity as symbol of power as well as positional superiority and inferiority in his treatment of elevated figures versus grounded individuals, then, reproduces the same artistic and moral discourse as Granada’s retablo wooden reliefs. Furthermore, disunity, emptiness, and alienation in the Oriental-Islamic relief is suggested through the creation of a spatial separation between King Boabdil and his two officials and the rest of the Moorish group leaving the city of Granada. In a similar manner, Pradilla created a spatial distance between the foreground and the background figures among the Moors, with the probable intention of expressing internal incoherence and breakdown. The creation of Pradilla’s conflicting painting confirms Said’s idea about Orientalism’s construction of hierarchy between East and West, since “comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals came to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient” (Said 150). Another painting by Pradilla, entitled El Suspiro del Moro (1892), also illustrates how Orientalism constitutes “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3). The painting relates very closely with La Rendición de Granada in its depiction of the defeated and expelled minorities from Spain after the Reconquista, following trends that examine this motif as well as the theme of the expelled minorities from Spain after the Reconquista in nineteenth-century Spanish painting (Reyero 52). One specifically Spanish contribution to the artistic theme of Muslim loss and displacement is the painting by Gabriel Puig y Roda, entitled Expulsión de los moriscos (1894). In the words of the art historian and critic Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, this artwork “is

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presented as an instrument of power, a sole power, unquestionable, and of divine right, that does not allow another understanding but the exalting one” (32). Other paintings, such as Batalla de las Navas de Tolosa (1864) by Francisco de Paula Van Halen, and El asalto de Montefrío por el Gran Capitán (1838) by José de Madrazo, among others, also act as powerful artistic vehicles shaping Spanish understandings of and responses to the Muslim minorities through depictions of domination, power, and control of the Christians versus failure and humiliation of the Islamic Orientals. These images, as many others, are in communication with one another, asserting, consolidating, and solidifying previous notions and perceptions that have been maintained unaltered for the Christian West. In this respect, and quite in a constant way, artistic images created by and for the West belong to a large and complex system of representations that emphasizes a relationship of inequality between the Orient and the Occident. The relationship between Pradilla’s pictorial narratives El Suspiro del Moro and La rendición de Granada demonstrates what Said has said with respect to continuity, consent, and agreement in the creation of the Orientalist authority: “each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works on the Orient, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself” (20). The image represents King Boabdil after he leaves Granada on his way to his exile in North Africa. According to popular legend, the last Muslim king of Granada exited the city in deep silence, having promised not to look back at the citadel and palace of the Alhambra. Despite his desire to be truthful to himself, he could not contain his emotions and turned to see his old possessions for the last time. At that point, he began to weep and cried out: “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!). Seeing this, his mother, the Sultan Aixa Al-Horrá, exclaimed: “It is good that you cry as a woman for what you were not able to keep and defend as a man!” In El Suspiro del Moro Pradilla, in his depiction of the Moors’ exile, emptiness and loss, reiterates the concept of failure and defeat that he gave his previous work, showing thus the internal unity and consistency of Orientalist images as regards the dominant culture (Said 22). The painting tries to capture King Boabdil’s sense of isolation and humiliation after having accepted his fate of having lost his kingdom, his power, and his authority. In portraying Boabdil’s turning back to Granada, and thus his breaking his promise, this painting depicts a moment of weakness and hence emphasizes his suffering and deep emotional distress, as well as those of the Moors in general. As a result, we encounter a negative image that represents, refers to, and relies on previous conceptions and treatments not only of the Islamic Orient in general but also of the Muslim defeat in the Spanish Reconquista specifically.

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The scene takes place on the top of a small mountain where Boabdil, his mother, and his accompanying officials have momentarily stopped. Most of the figures and even some of the horses are presented from the back, turning their faces away from the viewer, as a sign of distance and introspection on their part. The only exception is Boabdil’s mother, who is shown to deliberately point her finger (both metaphorically and actually) at Boabdil’s failure, hence adding another punitive voice to the already “punished” narrative image. Lastly, the world that Pradilla presents in El Suspiro del Moro appears as something located “on the outside,” and, as such, in its distance and exteriority is not part of the dominant SpanishWestern culture but instead constitutes a rather foreign and inaccessible entity. In this sense, then, the idea of displacement and separation here is clearly reminiscent of that communicated in La Rendición de Granada. Edward Said has pointed out the connection between Orientalism and imperialism. In Spain, colonialism and imperialism in the Americas started the same year as the final defeat of the Muslims in the Peninsular War of the Reconquista. In that respect, La Rendición de Granada offers a suggestive image of the beginning of Spain’s imperial expansion, and therefore is thematically connected with the idea of empire. Indeed, the very period of artistic production of Pradilla’s painting itself coincides with a period of unparalleled European colonial expansion; in 1882, the same year Pradilla’s painting was created, Britain began its occupation and colonization of Egypt. Two years later, of course, the Berlin Conference took place and the major European powers effectively carved up the African continent. Orientalism, or the representation of the Orient by the West, expanded enormously during the nineteenth century due to the interests of European colonial powers to dominate, appropriate, and control the Orient. In relation to this, it is interesting to note how Spanish art during the nineteenth century produced a great quantity of historical paintings that celebrated Christian domination and control, and glorified the imperial expansion in the American continent that started in the fifteenth century. These artworks, conceived as illustration of past events that have a meaning “[which] should stand out for moral and political purposes” (Pérez Sanchez 17), reveal the belief in the idea of European identity as superior in comparison to all the non-European peoples and cultures (Said 7). It is also possible that European cultural trends notably influenced nineteenth-century Spanish artistic production, due to geographical proximity and a history of established artistic exchanges and influences. In France and England, Orientalism had already attained a considerable degree of intensity during the late eighteenth and the beginning of the

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nineteenth century. Later in the century, Delacroix and other French and British painters brought the Islamic Orient back to Europe through images of “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, and intense energy” (Said 118). Pradilla, as many other artists working under European cultural forces, was probably influenced by the desire to recreate and re-make the Arab “Other” for Western consciousness. Yet Pradilla was not interested in the depiction of sensuality, exoticism, and nudity that characterized some Orientalist images. Instead, he focused on historical representations of past events that reconnect the present with what he considers to be of “historical transcendence” (Díez 362) and, in that respect, he used tradition as a tool for creativity. As a consequence, the Orientalist values and notions contained in both La Rendición de Granada and El Suspiro del Moro, already historically existent in Spain in diverse contexts filtered by tradition in the first place and by nationalistic impulses secondly, could have also been intensified by French and English Orientalisms at work during the nineteenth century. In conclusion, Pradilla’s paintings constitute an illustrative example of a political vision that tried to persistently represent the European Christian world and the Oriental Islamic culture as two distinct and separate entities whose radical difference was defined by the strength and superiority of the West and the Orient’s weakness and inferiority, ultimately expressed in the fall of the city of Granada. The hostile and divisive artworks produced by Pradilla show that understanding of and concern for non-European realities was a distant moral reality for at least part of the official and political language of artistic representation that was dominant during the nineteenth century in Spain. In this context, we close with Edward Said’s words: “If the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and for the poor Orient” (Said 21).

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Works Cited Cruz, Lola. Mil años de historia de España. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000. Díez, José Luis. La pintura de historia del siglo XIX en España. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992. Martínez Medina, F. Javier, “El gran retablo mayor.” El libro de la Capilla Real. Granada: Ediciones Miguel Sánchez, 1994. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. “Pintar la historia.” La pintura de historia del siglo XIX en España Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992. Reyero, Carlos. “Los temas históricos en la pintura española del siglo XIX.” La pintura de historia del siglo XIX en España. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

CHAPTER SIX ADOPTING THE OTHER’S CULTURE IN SPANISH CULTURAL PRODUCTION

MARÍA ZAMBRANO: A RAY OF EASTERN LIGHT IN THE WEST PILAR VALERO-COSTA CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

From the time of Cartesian thought, the conscious gained in brightness and clarity, and as it stretched, it took over the entire man. And whatever stayed outside were not things, but nothing less than reality, a reality dark and multiple. As knowing was reduced to reason alone, that sacred initial contact of man with reality was also reduced to a single mode: that of the conscious. Only the conscious remained in its lunar clarity isolated from the very body. —María Zambrano. El hombre y lo divino 180; my translation1

María Zambrano’s work is solidly grounded within Western philosophical thought, and especially in the teachings of Ortega y Gasset and German idealism. Yet she ultimately recognizes the failure of rational subjectivity, a Western concept, to explain human reality. Zambrano argues that, in attempting to explain the human self only with intellect and reason, rationalists devour an important part of the human essence: “As the subject was amplified, one may say that as it absorbed the functions previously performed by the soul, reality would shrink” (180).2 She insists that the human self has a metaphysical disposition to maintain its link with a larger “reality” and that the violent separation provoked by rationality

1

“A partir del pensamiento cartesiano la conciencia ganó en nitidez y claridad y al ensancharse se apoderó del hombre todo. Y lo que iba quedándose fuera no eran cosas sino nada menos que la realidad, la realidad oscura y múltiple. Al reducirse el conocimiento a la razón solamente, se redujo también eso tan sagrado que es el contacto inicial del hombre con la realidad a un modo único: el de la conciencia. Quedaba la conciencia, en su claridad lunar aislada hasta el propio cuerpo, donde no se sabe qué contingencia venía a estar insertada” (El hombre y lo divino 180). 2 “a medida que el sujeto se ampliaba, diríase que absorbiendo las funciones que antes el alma desempeñaba la realidad empequeñecía” (El hombre 180).

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alone interrupts the self’s natural drive toward communion and participation with its intrinsic spiritual whole.3 In espousing these viewpoints, Zambrano might be named “the Eastern Light in the West.” I refer to her as such because, in her search for a path to a Unified Reality or existential truth, she becomes a writer of light. During her lifelong study of rationalistic philosophy, Zambrano slowly develops a realization that rationalism alone is incapable of responding to the structure of human transcendence. She concludes that Western philosophy and thought have begun to spiral into their decline and ultimately reached a dead end. As a consequence, she begins to explore other paths of knowledge including Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Pythagorism and Pantheism, sources that had also influenced Spanish medieval Sufi mystics and, in turn, Christian mystics in the Spanish Golden Age. The numerous and careful annotations in the margins of her own books on these subjects (archived in her foundation in VélezMálaga), such as the works of Ibn Masarra de Murcia and his disciple, Ibn Arabí, or those of San Juan de la Cruz and Saint Teresa, among others, attest to the immense influence of these writers on the development of her project. As she conducts her own journey of personal, internal discovery, Zambrano uncovers a different source of knowledge and consciousness. She uses this self-realization to illuminate the history of human metaphysics and its relation to the cosmos. She postulates, then, a different form of reason that supersedes the antinomy of the logos: “something that would be reason, but wider, something that would also slide through the internal being, like a soothing and softening drop of oil, a drop of happiness” (86).4 Mystic writing is not speculative; on the contrary, it is categorically assertive as it affirms the existence of human life transcendence. Moreover, it explores not only human life and its transcendence, but also the possibility of understanding them. Overall, Zambrano’s mission is to look for a transcendent truth. Consequently, her work proposes the necessity of an inward voyage to the very center of the self through a path full of “awakenings,” which will help define the human being’s relation with itself, with the cosmos, and with divinity. This inward journey is very 3

This larger view of reality mirrors Plato’s concept of the real essence of reality that is only dimly reflected in physical existence. Our perception is a construction that represents only a part of a permanent, immutable world of ideas that can only be partially recognized through the world of the senses. Therefore, one cannot arrive at a true sense of reality through intellect alone. 4 “algo que sea razón, pero más ancho, algo que se deslice también por los interiores, como una gota de aceite que apacigua y suaviza, una gota de felicidad.”

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similar to a mystic’s search, though independent from religious denominations, culture, or time. Even though on the surface Zambrano undertakes the subject rigorously, she renounces the occidental logic of the intellect as the only way. Instead, she proposes that, through instances of luminosity, one can learn to listen to the call of the unknown confined in the depth of self. She also believes in the need to follow this secret call with fidelity. Zambrano accepts the fact that human existence is relative, but she does not renounce the absolute inherent in existence, which is difficult to comprehend with a rational intellect. If the rational intellect could comprehend the absolute quality of human existence, it would cease to be absolute, though perhaps it would be possible to decipher it in its obscurity. This article aims to demonstrate that two very distinct philosophical currents inform Zambrano’s thought and writings. On the one hand, it manifests Aristotelian metaphysical elements as well as German idealism, combined with Ortega y Gasset’s vitalist theory; on the other, it has, as an undercurrent, not only elements of Sufi practices, doctrine and world vision, but also the terminology and symbolism of Sufi mystic writings. I base this conclusion on the writings and annotations I have observed and studied in Zambrano’s private books, which she donated to the María Zambrano Foundation. These books were clearly well read, analyzed and annotated, indicating a careful and profound study with aims of assimilation. As early as 1926, she read Massignon, one of the most learned Islam scholars in the West, and she was particularly interested in Ibn Arabí’s writings. Zambrano also read and assimilated Heterodoxos españoles, an important and seminal work of Menéndez y Pelayo; moreover, she was very interested in the theory and findings of Miguel Asín Palacios, who demonstrated, with El Islam cristianizado, that Santa Teresa, San Juan, and Ramón Llull shared, in part, the symbolic language of Sufi writers. Zambrano immersed herself, accompanied by Asín Palacios’s findings, in the Spanish Golden Age mystic school. She was especially amazed by the mystic poetry and prose of San Juan de la Cruz who, according to Luce López Baralt: “shares with his coreligionists of the Orient many of his symbols and his more important technical mystic language” (226).5 She also studied a genealogy of Ibn Arabí’s thought as transcribed by Corbin in Vida de santones andaluces and La epístola de la santidad, where the great mystic talks about the human eternal origin and refers to “strange islands,” “fire lamps,” and the visions these lamps 5

“comparte con sus correligionarios del Oriente muchos de sus símbolos y su lenguaje técnico místico más importante.”

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provide. Likewise, Zambrano annotated Corbin’s La imaginación creadora and El hombre de luz, the latter a study of Islamic Persian visionaries. Zambrano, a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset, became a professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid in 1931, where she taught until 1936. Of leftist ideals and very active in the Second Republic, she exiled herself in 1939 when it became obvious that National Catholicism and its movement had won the Civil War. She began her exile in France and later lived an itinerate life in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Italy, France and Switzerland, where she survived as a professor of philosophy, participating in numerous conferences and tirelessly publishing her innovative ideas in books and essays. She returned to Spain in 1984 during the first legislative government of Felipe González. During her exile, she constantly corresponded with other exiled intellectuals, especially with members of the Group of 27, who greatly respected the originality of her thinking. Her work was mostly ignored until, in 1966, José Luis Aranguren published his article “Los sueños de María Zambrano” in La revista de Occidente, which catapulted her to a merited recognition in the academic world and introduced her to readers interested in revolutionary philosophical ideas. She received the Premio Príncipe de Asturias in 1981 and the Premio Cervantes in 1988. In exchange for a life pension, Zambrano donated all of her possessions, including a large number of unedited manuscripts, to the Foundation that bears her name and is located in Vélez Málaga, Spain. As interesting as her life travels are, Zambrano’s writings are even more intriguing due to their originality and complexity. One can say that her work is a blend of philosophical inquiry and poetry, all supported by a profound spirituality. Her work has been analyzed and studied using different paradigms and theories that have arrived at contrasting conclusions. For example, Juan José Ortega Muñoz, among many other scholars, defines her work as a philosophy of hope; Mercedes Gómez Blesa contends that Zambrano’s thought departs from philosophy and arrives at a poetic interpretation of the world; Jesús Moreno Sanz describes her writing style and understanding of the world as a confluence of Oriental and Occidental writings and teachings; and Ana Bundgard defines Zambrano’s philosophy as a mystic inquiry. These varied interpretations suggest that Zambrano’s work offers a rich field for study. For this current analysis, I propose to examine more closely a common thread that explains why Zambrano’s work seems to embrace both the West and the East; that is, that Zambrano’s philosophy has many common

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denominators with Spanish Sufi writings developed in Medieval Spain, mainly between the eighth and ninth centuries.6

Sufism From the Occidental perspective, Sufism is frequently characterized as Islamic mysticism. Sufism is the way to the personal experience of Divine Love with which God graces human beings. The true student of Sufism learns through the intuitive experience of the heart, and is guided by a spiritual master rather than through books, which are considered detours along the way. However, to consider Sufism as a purely religious, literary, or philosophical phenomenon is something of a misunderstanding or at least an understatement. The teaching and vital formulas of Sufism are integral to the complete social and psychological life of its practitioners– the central teaching of Sufism is that all human beings have within themselves all knowledge of their being, just as a seed contains all knowledge of the plant. If the complete human is like a book, then it is a book that can be read only by itself, and only when one pays attention from within oneself. The supreme goal of Sufis is to attain absolute self knowledge beyond the appearance of a reality conceived and understood by the logical mind. Every human wants to open this book, even though some are unaware of it or of what their self is truly seeking. The path to self knowledge is difficult and students of Sufism need a master or guide who guides them down the road to attaining this realization and understanding of the self. Sufis generally merge with the surrounding society rather than separating into communities or orders; they can train for and practice any profession. In fact, sometimes they pass through society silently and 6

During the Arab domination in Medieval Spain flourished many Sufi school of thoughts directed by superb teachers born in the Peninsula as for example the school of Ibn Masarra (831-941) known as “mountain dweller” who’s teaching expanded throughout the Cordoba caliphate; the school of the sadhilis ,founded by Abul- Hassan- Al Sadhili introduced and directed in Spain by Ibn ‘Abbad de Ronda (1333-1390), precursor of the great Christian mystic San Juan de la Cruz; the school of Murcia created by Ibn Arabi (1165-1245), whom developed his method based on some of the theories and ideas first proposed by Ibn Masarra . Ibn Massarra as well as Ibn Arabi, after creating their schools traveled to Mecca for the necessary one in a life time peregrination. While there the two great mystics extended their teachings creating new schools. For more information, please read Tres estudios sobre pensamiento y mística hispanomusulmanes by Miguel Asín Palacios.

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unrecognized. This desire to remain hidden may be prompted by self preservation as some Sufi practices are seen as violations of some rules dictated by the Qur’an. For example, they seek a loving God who is closer to man, a different view from the traditional Islamic conception of Allah, who is just and good, but very distant from humans. There are many contradicting ideas about the origins of Sufism. Miguel Asín Palacios provides a compelling explanation in several important studies, stating that it can be traced to the first years after the Hegira, to pious men who clothed themselves with coarse material imitating the Christian Oriental ascetics. While these men followed the teachings of the Qur’an, they also practiced some spiritual ways used by Oriental Christians that were contrary to the strict and rigid Qur’an Law. As a consequence, they were persecuted. During the first few years, it was easy to find Sufis, because they were denounced by other Muslims whenever the general community noted something strange in their religious practices. Soon after, and as a survival method, Sufis developed a secret system of life with a hermetic code of symbols in order to practice their beliefs and transmit their ideas in writing. With the Muslim invasion of Visigoth Spain, many Oriental ideas propagated throughout Spanish society. Among these new ideas and ways of life were the Sufi teachings. If we consider that Muslims lived among Jews and Christians in Spain for almost eight hundred years, we can follow Miguel Asín Palacios’s observation that the origins of many conceptual principles of philosophy and theology of modern Spain are based, in part, on a series of sects considered heretic by “true” Muslims: “The sects manifest neo-Platonic, gnostic, mystical, and pantheist characteristics that left a profound imprint on the Spanish thought and soul” (Tres estudios 4).7 Zambrano assimilates Miguel Asín Palacios’s findings and retrieves part of the collective memory inherent in Spanish culture, which is full of the Sufi elements that flourished as an integral part of a diverse Spanish culture over eight centuries. To the Occidental mind used to fixed patterns and the rational method, the concept of the Sufi Path with all its heterogeneity is difficult to understand. Moreover, the obscure and symbolic language used by the Sufis to describe Absolute Knowledge is, by its very nature, too elusive to describe in exact words. Keeping in mind that Sufis were loosely organized in secret sects to escape persecution or even death, they developed a symbolic discourse to transmit forbidden ideas that combined 7 “Las sectas manifiestan caracteres neoplatónicos, místicos y panteístas que dejan una profunda huella en el pensamiento y el alma española.”

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the sacred and the profane. The symbol becomes a loaded message with which to manifest the possible and the impossible: “Only the symbol has the necessary flexibility to express the great multifaceted diversity of Vital Reality,” states Idris Sah in El camino del sufí (27).8 For Maria Zambrano, the symbol “is an expression that goes beyond and is more intimate and also more sensorial than the one established through concepts and their respective relationships. It is neither an identification nor an attribution, but rather another form of connecting link and unity” (Notas de un método120).9 The religious symbol differs from the non-religious one because it represents that which lies outside the conceptual sphere and, directed toward the understanding of Reality, moves human attention to what is fundamentally important. It is also multivalent because it is capable of expressing in only one plane what is not evident in the immediate experience (Tillich 98). Moreover, the religious symbol illuminates the sacred dimension of human existence; seen through its light, symbols reveal the unknown and the secret characteristics of life. It can express paradoxical situations or immediate experiences that are impossible to describe in any other way. When an experience alters the conscience, consciousness acts not only as discourse, but as an immediate vision that can be very difficult to describe in words alone. Yet human communication is dependent and frequently constrained by language: how can one narrate a pure experience without the use of words? The necessary tools depend on the cultural and collective memory stored in the mind, and on the cultural baggage of the individual writer who will use familiar symbols taken from his religious or cultural background to describe the visionary experience. Zambrano uses symbolic discourse frequently as she explains: Therefore, the symbol is already reason: only when an image that is loaded with meaning penetrates reason can it acquire its whole symbolic character. Because it is only then that its meaning is completely accepted by consciousness and it has expanded to every corner of the soul. When it is not like this, the symbol is only a fetish, a magical figure that refuses to penetrate reason, or else stays outside the door of reason, which rejects it.

8

“Solamente el símbolo tiene la necesaria flexibilidad para expresar la gran variedad multifacética de la Realidad Vital.” 9 “es una forma de expresión que va más allá y es más íntima, más sensorial también que la establecida por los conceptos y sus respectivas relaciones. No se trata de una identificación ni de una atribución, sino de otra forma de enlace y unidad.”

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It can not be deciphered, it wanders threateningly. (El sueño creador, 7677)10

There is a fascinating commonality in how some Occidental and Oriental writers describe an experience through which they have encountered Absolute Knowledge: they use not only the same symbolic approach, but also use the same words. This phenomenon happens regardless of the social, temporal, or cultural location of the writers. For example, symbols such as a cavern, a path, a heart, seven concentric circles, the light, or the tree of life constantly appear in texts that describe the encounter and understanding of the Absolute. Both Zambrano and her Sufi guides seek to explain an Absolute that they felt spontaneously, free of the deceptive and pedantic constrain of logical reason, an illumination expressible through symbols.

Path-Guide According to Asín Palacios, the Sufi Path is the medium through which the soul can liberate and empty itself from sensual hunger, egotism, and all inclination toward worldly creation (Tres estudios 6). Typically, the path cannot be discovered without a guide or spiritual master who has already attained the state of absolute recognition, and who must be introduced to the individual through inspiration. For Zambrano, words are the path. Only the “inspired logos” will illuminate what lies secretly languishing within the innermost recesses of the heart. When one recognizes the path presented by the inspired word, one can then begin the quest toward the Absolute Knowledge: “But it is understood that man, a being of word, will carry in a unique way the initial received word, from which, if a path emerges, it will be itself unique, partially hidden, which only a complete revelation can provide” (Notas de un método 46).11 While the path exists and each person has the potential to uncover its secrets, it remains elusive; only a few that truly desire to enter this path 10

“Pues que el símbolo es ya razón: sólo cuando una imagen cargada de significado entra en la razón adquiere la plenitud de su carácter simbólico. Porque solamente entonces su significación está plenamente aceptada por la conciencia y se ha extendido a todas las regiones del alma. Cuando no es así es sólo fetiche, figura mágica que se resiste a entrar en razón o que se queda a las puertas de una razón que la rechaza. No puede ser descifrada; vaga amenazadora.” 11 “Mas se entiende que el hombre, ser de palabra, llevará en modo único la inicial palabra recibida, de la cual si surge un camino será a su vez un camino único, oculto a medias, que sólo una plena revelación le podrá dar.”

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actually achieve Absolute Knowledge. For each journey started on this sinuous path, there is a master who provides the necessary experience to progress, just as a gardener takes care of his plants. For Sufis, the master represents the function of the Prophet. He refers to the Theophony of the divine grace given to those who truly seek it. For Zambrano the masters have the following attributes: Beings of silence, cloaked, withdrawn from the word. Saved from the word, they go toward the unique, received, given, being word, in the path to become word themselves. But their slowness becomes misleading for those who look at them from the outside, and everyone looks at them from the outside at first. (Los bienaventurados 64)12

Zambrano states that the master “clarifies the circumstances and makes them passable. He manages to illuminate them by making them vanish in his light so many times” (60).13 With regard to Ibn Arabí, he compares the master-guide to a doctor whose mission is to diagnose and to heal the illness of a disciple who wants to get closer to God and the Absolute Knowledge. The master cares and cultivates the disciple’s needs as cultivation is necessary for the plant to reach its development. Without a master, the material world imposes difficulties that plague the path and potentially block the transition. By contrast, helped by the master, one can enter the spiritual path toward the innermost center of the self, being or profound consciousness, which Zambrano and Ibn Arabí describe as the “spiritual core” where the seat of feeling is accommodated. The ideas of a spiritual master and of the inner path are strange to Westerners. Intellectual acceptance of their meanings usually requires the formation of a new category in one’s mental process. Both have inherent qualities that are inconceivable to a mentality governed by logical reason and deductive scientific method, since neither the path nor the guide has a scientific explanation. For example, the guide can change his aspect without changing his permanent self, becoming more himself to the measure of the change: “And that is why the Guide must change his appearance while continuing to be himself, becoming mostly himself as he changes. Only if he changes his appearance in order to be more and more

12

“Seres de silencio, envueltos, retraídos de la palabra. Salvados de la palabra camino van de la palabra única, recibida, dada, sida, camino de ser palabra sola ellos. Mas su lentitud resulta engañosa para quien desde fuera los mira, y todos los miran desde fuera en principio.” 13 “esclarece las circunstancias y las hace transitables. Llega a iluminarlas de tanto hacerlas desvanecerse en esa su luz.”

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inexorably himself, can he really be called a true guide” (39).14 Ibn Arabí, referring to the moral qualities inherently needed by a guide, argues that the most important one is a rigid and severe character so that he can correct the disciple. He also specifies, as does Zambrano, that the guide should continue to follow the path to perfection by using meditation, charity and self-examination, and also by practicing piety (cit. in Asín Palacios, El Islam cristianizado 143). The path is sinuous, circular and difficult, and there is no guarantee that it will end in the right place. Therefore, the person who decides to follow it is condemned to suffer. However, if the person is persistent in his desire, he will find the Light of Absolute Knowledge. On achieving the knowledge, he will become a person of light: “they are men whose human condition is particularized by the newly achieved identity. They are who they are without any sort of contradiction and, from the clarity of their position, they will be able to irradiate light” (Los bienaventurados 66).15

Light: Inner Center According to Guenón, light is composed of the seven colors of the rainbow. But in reality, there are only six colors, because the seventh is the white from where all others generate. The three fundamental colors (blue, yellow, and red), and the three complimentary ones (orange, violet, and green) are all simultaneously integrated and separated from the white color. Therefore, the white color is the unity, the beginning, and it is the center of the other six that form distinct concentric circles around it. Symbolically, the center represents the un-manifested unity and the other six concentric circles are the manifestation of the un-manifested. White is the primordial, that which gives origin to the other colors; at the same time, it is the point of return. As such, color “white” is the point of origin and return (360). As a symbol, light corresponds to a foundation that is associated with the Unity and Beginning. If we observe the dichotomies “light-obscurity” or “day-night,” it can be deduced that light has a positive quality. When the human being returns to the Unity and Beginning (from which, it may be argued, he was never really separated, as in the concentric circles of the colors), not only does he find the understanding of 14

“Y por eso el Guía ha de cambiar de aspecto permaneciendo él mismo, haciéndose mayormente él mismo a medida que cambia. Sólo si se muda de aspecto para ser cada vez más inexorablemente él mismo, es el Guía verdadero.” 15 “son hombres en quienes la condición humana se especifica desde la lograda identidad. Son los que son sin contradicción alguna y desde la diafanidad de su situación podrán irradiar luz.”

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the self, but he can also rest, knowing that the answer lies within himself. Ibn Arabí understands light as the divine grace settled down in the soul, and, like the colors, the divine grace is divided in six concentric circles: heart, membrane, entrails, nucleus, bottom, and blood.16 Each one of these circles, as organs, corresponds to a determined function of the divine grace by the correlative order: faith, love, God vision or contemplation, God presence, mystic revelation, and illumination (Cit. in Asín Palacios, El Islam cristianizado, 133). Illumination can be understood as initiation and it takes places in the moment when the soul crosses the last circle and arrives at the very center, the place where the flame, or principle of light, resides. In that moment, the soul cannot separate itself from the flame that consumes it and it stays in the interior where it awaits in astonishment another penetration from the ray of light. The flame not only illuminates, but also purifies, something that the Sufis explain as being the incandescent fire of absolute love. Zambrano defines the very same moment as an “auroral knowledge” that depends on consecutive encounters or illuminations taking place in the center of the self being. As said before, light is the most important element to experience the realization of knowledge, when consciousness becomes immediate vision. Zambrano explains this contemplative experience: “The light that is glimpsed and the light that threatens, the light that wounds. The light that lies in ambush in the immensity of a horizon where losing oneself seems inevitable, and that wounds with a ray that awakens beyond that which is bearable, calling to a complete vigil, that one where the mind would entirely burn” (Los bienaventurados 81).17 This auroral knowledge is, for Ibn Arabí, an illumination preceded by a certain spiritual heaviness, “something like the agony of death. And this is so because the illumination has its symptoms, which are like the rising of the aurora that precedes sunrise” (The Mecca Revelations, cit. in Asín Palacios, Tres Estudios 138).18 Once the soul has experienced Zambrano’s auroral knowledge or Ibn Arabí’s illumination, and the individual has 16 María Zambrano tends to use these words quite astutely throughout her entire works, but especially in Claros del bosque, Los bienaventurados y Los sueños y el tiempo. 17 “La luz que se vislumbra y la luz que acecha, la luz que hiere. La luz que acecha en la inmensidad de un horizonte donde perderse parece inevitable, y que hiere con un rayo que despierta más allá de lo sostenible, llamando a la completa vigilia, ésa donde la mente se incendiaría toda.” 18 “algo así como las angustias de la agonía de la muerte. Y esto es así, porque la iluminación tiene sus pródomos, que son como el apuntar de la aurora que precede a la salida del sol.”

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understood the definition of himself through the emergence of the self being, the person begins another and more profound inward and circular journey in order to arrive to the very center of his being. For Ibn Arabí and other Sufi mystics, the inward circular journey to attain the self center is similar to the colors’ circularity. Just as the colors return through concentric circles to the white center from where they originated, the soul travels inward in a circular motion, passing through seven concentric dwellings. At the end of the journey, the self encounters such a strong luminosity that the light explodes into colors and seems like fire. From this fire, one begins to glimpse that signs and their significance are the same, and that the subject loses its subjectivity and becomes an object and vice versa. Luce Irigaray compares this moment to a mirror made of glass or ice, “so ethereal that it had already entered and mingled everywhere” (196). The individual feels that he has entered the cosmos and been dissolved into it. It could also be understood as an instant when self attains the absolute knowledge and its cosmic relation. It is important to note that the illuminative union has to happen passively, when the self forgets about itself and obtains a contemplative state where life and being, thought and sense are synchronized. As all passivity, this state is characterized by a debilitation and slowness of movement; but weighing on the soul and not on the organic body. The passivity envelopes the subject, who is wordlessly projected to the center. Spatial constructions collapse and the soul is projected to a place where everything is warped by an intense light and where everything is consumed by the fire of knowledge. Truth comes to the one who passively opens himself to following the call of light. Truth encounters the self just as love or death find us. It is perhaps sensed as a presence just before moments of total plenitude. Truth is and has always been residing in the center of self being; men do not “discover” it, but, on the contrary, it is truth that presents itself to men to help awaken the unknown. Truth reveals and illuminates a rebirth of the authentic life that is already within conscience. The problem is that this pure truth is actually rather terrifying to most and, to protect himself from the perceived terror, man seeks refuge in science and reason. This solution is actually counterproductive; reason asks questions, but produces only insatiable questions, without true answers. Only one who transcends science and hands oneself over to truth without terror will encounter self knowledge. At this moment, when humans recover the lost memory printed on their souls over millions of years, they will become selfinitiated in the light.

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The Heart For Sufis, the heart is the center and the culminating point of human individuality. It also corresponds to the axis of a garden where the tree of life grows and where the fountain of knowledge originates. Moreover, the heart is the threshold where the natural world ends and the supernatural begins (Lings 50). For Zambrano, the heart, with its beatings, its cavities and its continuous flow, is the remnant of a sacred time when men communicated with their gods through this vital center: “The first thing we sense in the life of the heart life is its condition as a dark cavity, of a hermetically sealed enclosure; visceral, entrails. The heart is the symbol and the chief representation of all the entrails of life, the viscera in which all the other entrails find their definitive unity and nobility”. (El hombre y lo divino 54)19 Sufi writers represent the heart’s image as a small burning lamp where the divine light is reflected; thanks to the heart, one can experience and know God without reason, like a breeze that opens the door to understanding. The heart penetrates the essence of things and when it is illuminated, it reflects divinity: “My Earth and My Heaven contain Me not, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.” (Hadith cit. in Arberry 28) 20 For Zambrano, the heart is “A place where all inextricable feelings, those that jump over reason and that which can be explained, take shelter. It is wide and also deep, it has a bottom from where all great resolutions, all great truths that are certain, emerge” (Hacia un saber sobre el alma 55).21 Zambrano’s truths are impossible to understand or define through reason because they are ineffable; they are reminiscent of something preceding thought. For Sufis, the heart is the feminine principle from which the process of becoming is derived. The active heart, not the brain, governs intuition and is the instrument of illumination. For Zambrano, the 19

“Lo primero que sentimos en la vida del corazón es su condición de oscura cavidad, de recinto hermético; víscera, entraña. El corazón es el símbolo y representación máxima de todas las entrañas de la vida, la entraña donde todas encuentran su unidad definitiva, y su nobleza.” 20 Arberry uses this quote attributed to God through the Prophet. Michael Sells provides a detailed explanation of this type of quotation, known as a Hadith. Hadith are the prophetic narrative of the word of God, usually communicated through Muhammad’s reception of the divine word. Hadith may be based on some passages of the Qur’an, but they are literary elaborations. (Sells 19) 21 “Un lugar donde se albergan los sentimientos inextricables, que saltan por encima de los juicios y de lo que puede explicarse. Es ancho y es también profundo, tiene un fondo de donde salen las grandes resoluciones, las grandes verdades que son certidumbres.”

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heart is the seat of willpower that “is ignited when, liberated, visible reality presents itself to whomever looks at it, a flame-like vision. A flame that fuses the senses all the way to that blind instant with its corresponding sight, and with reality itself, which offers no resistance” (Claros del bosque 51).22 How do we know Reality? The more important thing is to experiment with it and to live it, in the same way we understand life by living. Sufi writers, as well as Zambrano, propose that human beings are closer to Reality when they reflect upon their own heart’s palpitations, leaving aside the schemes and interference of anything that is not life. One must sense the intuitive heartbeats that are recognized when one interiorizes existence. The heart responds to a call that intellect cannot, or did not, want to follow, because it gets entangled on strict rules and is suspended on external anagrams, those things that did not have a life of their own. The heart propels itself to encounter the Word and abandons itself to its own destiny. Only one that is situated in the center of an illuminated heart and open to eternity from that very empty and silent point will witness the presence of true being; from that being, he will learn to accept the center as a mirror of divinity. In her writings, Zambrano provides a message that can transform those who read carefully and practice her method. Moreover, she helps us understand our own destiny and the complexity of the surrounding world because she asks essential questions. Yet Zambrano clearly recognizes that words themselves are insufficient; it is almost impossible to express, in a comprehensible way, the singularity of every human being, the individuality of every circumstance, and the ineffability of some experiences. To overcome these limitations, her texts are full of symbols and images endowed with germinal force, a symbolism where the guide, the path, the light, the heart and the concentric circles are more important than reason and logic. Zambrano’s language constitutes the expression of the originating being against the dry and rational language of reason; reason can only express form and it excludes the immediate and particular experience, alienating life. Instead, Zambrano’s discourse involves human pathos, expressing the immediate experience of Reality taking place in her “originating feeling.” Retrieving Medieval Oriental ideas and teachings assimilated by the Spanish collective imaginary, her work illuminates a new philosophy previously darkened by logic and reason. José Lezama 22

“se enciende cuando en libertad la realidad visible se presenta en quien la mira, la visión como una llama. Una llama que funde el sentido hasta ese instante ciego con su correspondiente ver, y con la realidad misma que no le ofrece ninguna resistencia.”

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Lima recognized all these virtues when, in 1970, he dedicated a book of poetry to Zambrano, writing: “I believe, my dearest María, that you are always by my side, that you are life and our life. To your finesse as a person and to the grace of your intellect that make you so mysterious as an illuminate of the twentieth century.”23

Works Cited Arberry, Arthur John. Sufism. An Account of the Mystics of Islam. New York: MacMillan, 1950. Asín Palacios, Miguel. El Islam cristianizado. Madrid: Saenz, 1930. —. Tres estudios sobre el pensamiento y mística hispanomusulmanes. Madrid: Hiperión, 1992. Bundgard, Ana. Más allá de la filosofía: sobre el pensamiento filosóficomístico de María Zambrano. Madrid: Trota, 2000. Chadkiewicz, Michel. The Mecca Revelations: Ibn al ‘Arabí. Paris: Simbal 2002. Gómez Blesa, Carmen. “Zambrano más allá de la razón vital.” Revista de Occidente 276 (2004): 73-87. Guénon, Rene. Símbolos fundamentales de la ciencia sagrada. Trans. Juan Valmard. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1969. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Women. Trans. Gillian Gill. New York: Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1974. Lings, Martin. What is Sufism? Berkeley: University Press, 1997. López- Baralt, Luce. San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam. Madrid: Hiperión, 1990. Moreno Sanz, Jesús. Encuentro sin fin con el camino de pensar de María Zambrano. Madrid: Endymión, 1999. Ortega Muñoz, Juan Fernando. “El horizonte de la esperanza en María Zambrano.” Revista de Occidente 276 (2004): 51-72. Sha, Idries. El camino del sufí. Barcelona: Paidós, 1995. —. Neglected Aspects of Sufi Study. London: Octagon Press, 1977. Sell, Michael A. Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur’an, Mi’raj and Theological Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1996. Zambrano, María. El hombre y lo divino. Madrid: Siruela 1991. —. E l sueño creador. Madrid: Turner. 1986. 23

“Me parece queridísima María, que usted está siempre a mi lado, que es la vida y nuestra vida. A su delicadeza como persona y a la gracia de su intelecto que la hace tan misteriosa como una alumbrada del siglo XX.”

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—. “San Juan de la Cruz: De la ‘noche oscura’ a la más clara mística.” Sur (Bueno Aires) 9.63 (1939): 57-70. —. Notas de un método. Madrid: Mondari, 1989. —. Los bienaventurados. Madrid: Siruela, 1990. —. Los sueños y el tiempo. Madrid: Siruela, 2004. —. Claros del bosque. Madrid: Siruela, 1992. —. La razón poética o la filosofía. Madrid: Tecnos, 1998. —. Hacia un saber sobre el alma. Madrid: Siruela, 1992

ZORAIDA’S CONVERSION IN CERVANTES’S “CAPTIVE TALE” AND LATIN AMERICAN THEORY JUAN E. DE CASTRO EUGENE LANG COLLEGE, NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY

In his celebrated speech “No soy un aculturado” (“I Am not Acculturated”), José María Arguedas, arguably the greatest of the indigenista writers, stated: “I am not acculturated. I am a Peruvian who proudly, like a happy demon, speaks as a Christian and as an Indian, in Spanish and in Quechua” (257; my translation). Arguedas’s rejection of acculturation is obviously based on the fact that he sees it as a process in which one culture is punctually replaced by another. For him, acculturation meant the substitution of indigenous by Hispanic culture, Quechua language by Spanish, native religious beliefs by Catholicism. Arguedas’s rejection of acculturation as a process and as a term has, of course, an important precedent in Latin American thought, that of Fernando Ortiz, the noted Cuban ethnologist. For Ortiz, as Malinowski points out in his introduction to Cuban Counterpoint, “[acculturation] is an ethnocentric word with a moral connotation. The immigrant has to acculturate himself; so do the native, pagan or heathen, barbarian or savage, who enjoy the benefits of being under the sway of our great Western culture” (lviii). Instead of acculturation, Ortiz proposed transculturation as better reflecting the process of “disadjustment and adjustment” which he saw as characteristic of cultural contact (98). Instead of the linear displacement of original cultural traits by acquired ones, Ortiz saw a counterpoint in which both original and acquired cultures struggled to find a point of equilibrium, which ultimately included elements from both the source and target cultures, but was never completely static. In this essay, I look not at Latin American instances of acculturation or transculturation, but instead at a much earlier literary case: “The Captive’s Tale,” in my opinion the most important of the interpolated tales in Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ classic among classics. Published in 1605, “The Captive’s Tale,” narrates two interrelated stories. The first, that of

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Ruy Pérez de Viedma, a Spanish soldier held as a captive in the “baths” of Argel. The second, that of Zoraida, the Moorish maiden and the soldier’s betrothed, who facilitates and joins his escape to Spain. It is Zoraida’s transformation into María, that is, her conversion from a Muslim into a Christian, which interests me.1 After all, conversion is frequently the religious name for acculturation.2 One of the problems faced by any attempt at analyzing Zoraida’s story is that she is mostly silent in Don Quixote. She is presented as speaking only Arabic and most of what we know about her is embedded within the captive’s narration of his adventures. Nevertheless, Cervantes presents her voice in three manners: briefly and directly when interviewed by the other women at the inn, where she and the captive run into Don Quixote, Sancho, and their companions; through the inclusion of the messages she wrote to Pérez de Viedma; finally, Zoraida’s statements are reproduced directly and indirectly within Pérez de Viedma’s narrative. The first time we hear her speak is in response to the greetings from the women at the inn, who have been informed by Pérez that her name is Zoraida. She corrects them: “No! Zoraida! María, María.” And “Yes, Yes, María; Zoraida macange, a word that means no” (328). The change from the putatively Arabic Zoraida to the female Christian name par-excellence, María, can be taken as representing her will to become fully acculturated, to become Christian instead of Muslim, Spanish instead of Arab. Even if when introduced she seems to be still aligned with her source culture or at least between cultures—her Moorish clothes and languages lead the women at the inn to “think she is what we would rather she was not,” that is a Muslim believer (327)—this is a temporary situation. One can safely assume that at the conclusion of her physical journey from North Africa to León, which corresponds to a cultural journey from Moor to Spaniard, and from Muslim to Christian, she will dress and speak accordingly. All traces, 1

According to http://babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com, “Zoraida may be of Arabic origin, but could also be an invention of the author Cervantes” (n.p.). 2 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the corresponding definition of conversion is: “The bringing of any one over to a specified religious faith, profession, or party, esp. to one regarded as true, from what is regarded as falsehood or error. (Without qualification, usually = conversion to Christianity.)” Malinowsky makes a relevant comment about acculturation: “the word acculturation contains a number of definite and undesirable etymological implications. It is an ethnocentric word with moral implications. The immigrant has to acculturate himself; so do the natives, pagan or heathen, barbarian or savage, who enjoy the benefits of being under the sway of our great Western culture [. . .] The “uncultured” is to receive the benefits of ‘our culture;’ it is he who must change and be converted into ‘one of us’” (lviii).

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or at least most, of her Moorish origins will have been erased when she is married to Pérez Viedma. Her name change to María indicates a desire to be acculturated—even if her use of Arabic temporarily problematizes the achievement of this desire. However, a brief look at the messages she sent Pérez when he was a captive may indicate that her transformation may not be based on a complete acceptance of Spanish culture or Peninsular Catholicism. In her letters not only are prayers called zalás, Mary called Lela Marien, but God is invariably called Allah, which implies the identification of the Christian and Islamic deities. The net effect of reading her letters is to come into contact with what could be called a translational or maybe transcultural vision of Christianity in which Spanish and Western elements are systematically translated into Arabic ones, but are subtly modified by this act of translation. After all, for many Catholics at the time, the God of Islam was not the God of Christianity. Moreover, earlier in DQ there is an ironic reference to the “the idol of Mohammed made all of gold” (21). (However, this identification of the Christian God with Allah is congruent with Islamic beliefs). Nevertheless, the use in Zoraida’s letters of Arabic terms and their identification with Catholic counterparts present the reader with an estranged Christianity where traditional elements are once present and removed. But the messages written by Zoraida are also characterized by the peculiar omission of any reference to Christ.3 In fact, the only implicit reference she makes to Christ throughout the “Captive’s Tale” is when she flashes a home-made cross to show she is a Christian. Although Marian Christianity had long been central to Spanish Catholicism, and even more to its colonial versions, references to Mary are completely absent from the first part of Don Quixote with the obvious exception of “The Captive’s Tale.” (One must add, however, that religion as a whole is barely mentioned in the first part of Don Quixote). In fact, Zoraida’s story is not only the one truly religious moment in the first volume, but also the one in which magical or supernatural events are recounted in the whole novel: Zoraida apparently receives the visitation of the dead Christian Slave and of Lela Marién. Thus, underlying Zoraida’s transformation into María is a conversion not only from Islam to Christianity, but to a Marianist version of Christianity. Given that her mother died at childbirth, Zoraida’s conversion can be seen as congruent with her attempts at replacing the lost 3

A similar point has been made by Erin Garrett: “Zoraida’s references to Lela Marién are further undercut by references to Allah, an Islamic frame that excludes Christ from its center. Zoraida’s apparently effortless intermingling of the two religious systems does little to clear the ambiguity that surrounds her” (146).

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mother with mother figures, such as the Christian slave and, ultimately, Lela Marien, herself. Moreover, her conversion implies a rejection of the patriarchy of Islam and its substitution by a Marianist Christianity, apparently purified from patriarchal elements. Moreover, given Zoraida’s isolation from all Christian institutions and instruction, her version of Christianity instead of being based on tradition or Biblical interpretation, is based on supernatural experience.4 This may be another way of saying that the version of Christianity Zoraida ultimately constructs represents her own desires and needs than traditional religious beliefs. Nevertheless, “The Captive’s Tale,” while in some aspects unique in the first part of Don Quixote in that it deals explicitly with the Islamic other and with religion, can also be seen as one in the series of interpolated tales that interrupt the narrative proper of Don Quixote. Most of these deal with the role of women in love relationships and implicitly defend a woman’s right to choose her partner, or not to choose a partner at all, as in the case of the faux shepherdess Marcela. Thus, while Zoraida’s conversion leads to her substituting a patriarchal religion with what could be called a proto-feminist revision, it also gives her the possibility of choosing whom to marry. In her message to Pérez Viedma, she states, “and when we are there you can be my husband if you like, and if you do not, it does not matter, for Lela Marién will give me someone to marry” (347). Choice regarding marriage is no longer in male hands—the lover, the father, even Allah—instead is now in female hands—Zoraida, ultimately Lela Marien. As should be obvious, there are limits to Zoraida’s rebellion against patriarchy, as her acceptance of marriage makes clear. What she is doing is replacing a harder-edged patriarchal system with what is, at least in her mind, a softer one that allows her greater agency. However, when seen as one in the series of interpolated tales, it is difficult to be completely optimistic regarding her decision. For with the exception of Marcela, whose rejection of marriage is set within an asocial, even ahistorical, pastoral setting, all the other stories—including those of Dorotea, Luscinda, and Clara, who greet Zoraida at the inn—arrive at a happy ending only because Cervantes’s respect for the comedic nature of the text precludes a more realistic tragic ending. The resolution of the love complications among these characters ultimately depends on Don Fernando, the arbitrary and unjust noble who is the ultimate figure of patriarchal authority in this section of Don Quixote. He has rejected 4

Garrett has made a related point: “Zoraida’s fervor for Lela Marién, Arabic for the Virgin Mary, is not based on visions of the Madonna, but on the rather uncanonical visitations of a dead nurse” (146).

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Dorotea, whom he had seduced, and is attempting to force Luscinda, who had been betrothed to Cardenio, to marry him. It is a surprising decision to honor his word of marriage to Dorotea that permits a happy ending for all. In the case of Zoraida, although Pérez Viedma is presented as a sympathetic character, her happiness would in the end be exclusively dependent on him. The Spanish society into which Zoraida wishes to assimilate is patriarchal to a degree which the character may not be presented as imagining, but of which the reader of Don Quixote is fully aware. However, even if Islamic culture is ultimately rejected, one important Muslim character is portrayed in a positive light: Zoraida’s father, though personally, culturally, and symbolically rejected, is ultimately an extremely sympathetic figure. Cervantes’s novelistic respect for plurality of views leads him to incorporate his view on his daughter’s conversion, which is obviously also a Muslim view: “Do not think she has been moved to change her religion because she believes yours is superior to ours, but only because she believes that in your country there is more lewd behavior than in ours” (363). Moreover, the father is abandoned on the Cava Rumía, in English “Wicked Christian Woman,” a small cape, named after Florinda, the daughter of Count Juliá, who in search of revenge against King Rodrigo, invited the Moors into Spain. But this Muslim voice is soon transformed exclusively into that of a grieved father: “Come back my beloved daughter, come ashore, I forgive everything” (363). Nothing is further from Don Quixote than a facile condemnation or the caricaturization of Islamic culture. In his classic essay, “Perpectivism in Don Quixote,” Leo Spitzer argues that this perspectivism, that is the Spanish author’s ability to bring in diverse points of view and undermine epistemological certainties, “had to acknowledge ultimately a realm of the absolute [. . .] that of Spanish Catholicism” (184). For the great Cervantista, Zoraida’s abandonment, maybe even betrayal of his father, that is, the abandonment of her paternal culture, is, in last resort, justified in Don Quixote in the absolute trueness of religion. Again, in Spitzer’s words, “There can be no doubt that what Cervantes is dealing here with is the tortuous and jesuitic divinity he was able to see in his time, whose decisions he accepts, while bringing out all the complications involved” (191). One can extrapolate from Spitzer’s arguments about religion and argue that acculturation, regardless of its pains and dangers, is in Don Quixote necessarily justified by the truth of Catholicism which, in turn, justifies Spain, its culture and its Empire. However, as we have seen, it is possible to read Zoraida’s conversion in different terms. If her conversion indicates a desire for a different kind of life to that permitted by her society, if her construction of a personal

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version of Marianist Catholicism implies an attempt at a proto-feminist revision of religion, if both signal a desire for greater control over and agency in her life, Don Quixote as a whole undermines any uncritical celebration of the options actually open to Zoraida as a Catholic and Spanish woman. If her conversion is not seen as acritically endorsing Catholicism, then Don Quixote becomes a text that subtly and indirectly questions the core beliefs of Spanish society in the seventeenth century. Cervantes’ narrative brings into view an aspect in cultural conversion, whether acculturation or transculturation, that neither Arguedas nor Ortiz (nor, for that matter, Malinowski) consider: the role of personal choice. In this sense, there is a very modern air to Zoraida’s story. Like many today, she decides to emigrate and assimilate into another culture due to a search for personal improvement and empowerment. Even the religious content of her story can be seen as having contemporary relevance. After all, religious conversion is today linked to acculturation and immigration to a much greater degree than during Cervantes’s time. In fact, during Cervantes’s time, the notion of “freedom of conscience,” that is, the right to choose one’s religious beliefs, was frowned upon—except in the second part of Don Quixote.5 Moreover, migration outside cultural or political areas was rare. In fact, conversion is frequently one of the steps by which an immigrant becomes assimilated into her or his new society. For example, the importance of conversion as part of acculturation has been of particular importance in the case of the Latin American immigration to the United States. Olivier Roy, among others, has noted that “the way in which Latinos convert to Protestantism is a good example of the [. . .] process of combining deculturation and religiosity” (34). As is the case for many Latinos, acculturation, conversion, and the desire for personal improvement are imbricated in Zoraida’s story. Implicit in both Arguedas’s and Ortiz’s opposition to acculturation is a rejection of cultural hegemony or essentialism. Arguedas’s premonition of 5

According to Francisco Rico, in a note to the Real Academia’s Fourth Centenary edition of Don Quixote, “In the Christian Spain of 1615, freedom of conscience was universally understood in negative terms, as unacceptable permissiveness before evil” (964 n. 29; my translation). However, Cervantes’s text seems to present “freedom of conscience” in positive terms. As Thomas Mann argued about Cervantes’s reference to “freedom of conscience,” “He even takes it on himself to speak of the freedom of conscience; for Ricote [an exiled Spanish Moor friend of Sancho] tells how he went from Italy to Germany and there found a sort of peace” (39). Mann, who significantly wrote his essay on Don Quixote in route to exile in the United States, adds: “It is always pleasant to hear praise of home out of a stranger’s mouth” (39).

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contemporary theories of hybridity celebrates the subversive possibility of biculturalism—he is a happy demon outside all existing classifications. And Ortiz’s transculturation denies the possibility of a fully successful cultural imperialism. However, Zoraida’s conversion is not exclusively an example of cultural resistance, even if her narrative and those of the other female characters in Don Quixote can be seen as critical of patriarchy in both North Africa and Spain; no or is her story one of a facile and umproblematic acculturation. Zoraida’s conversion strides both poles— resistance to cultural erasure, celebration of the new culture—while raising questions about the characteristics of both original and target cultures. Therefore, it may very well be that the truly radical and unequivocally subversive hybridity in the story is, not surprisingly, to be found in Don Quixote’s perspectivism—its consistent undermining of religious, political, and cultural absolutes—which Zoraida’s conversion exemplifies so well.

Works Cited Arguedas, José María. “No soy un aculturado.” El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Ed. Eve-Marie Fell. Mexico: Colección Archivos, 1992. 256-58. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Francisco Rico. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2005. —. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossmann. New York: Ecco, 2005. Garrett, Erin Webster. “Recycling Zoraida: The Muslim Heroine in Mary Shelley’s Frankestein.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society 20.1 (2000): 133-56. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Introduction.” Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1995. lvii-lxiv. Mann, Thomas. “Voyage with Don Quixote.” Cervantes’s Don Quixote: Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. 13-45. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1995. Roy, Olivier. Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Spitzer, Leo. “Linguistic Perspectivism in Don Quixote.” Cervantes’s Don Quixote: A Casebook. New York: Oxford, 2005. 163-216.

CHAPTER SEVEN U.S. AND FAR EAST ORIENTALISMS

HOW DOES AN OTHER WRITE ANOTHER? THE FILIPINO IN ALFREDO VÉA’S THE SILVER CLOUD CAFÉ STEPHANIE FETTA, PH.D. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

You can only read against the grain if misfits in the text signal the way. —Gayatri Chakravorky Spivak He pressed hard against this inner sight, his wrists quaking uncontrollably as unfamiliar thoughts stepped tenuously out from a darkened corner of his soul; long forgotten faces came forward into half shadow; lost names were almost audible; vanished places were cast in low light. Blinded by the palms of his own hands, he saw reincarnated lines of brown men laboring their prime, bending in the hard, curving heat of the lettuce fields, their taut, sweaty bodies cupping soft, cool ideas within their sweating skulls. —The Silver Cloud Café, 88

In this passage, Zeferino, the Chicano protagonist of Alfredo Véa’s second novel, The Silver Cloud Café, begins to remember the ones he left behind in the fields—his family forged from the conditions of migrant labor. Now an attorney, the theme of social ascendance plots Zeferino’s life, nodding sarcastically to the cultural politics of American meritocracy that has affected a deep and literal forgetting of his bracero past. Zeferino’s forgetting echoes the silence in the Chicano cultural nationalist narrative of the history and life of “Mexican”1 braceros who worked alongside Filipino migrant laborers or manong2 in Central California. 1

US racism uses the term “Mexican” to refer to Mexican nationals, Americans of Mexican descent, Chicanas/os, and Central and South American nationals. 2 The term manong comes from the Spanish word hermano or brother. Manong is used by the Ilokano (also spelled Ilocano) as a term of respect for male elders but, in a US context, the Ilokano have also used the term to designate Filipino immigrants of the twentieth century, most of whom are Ilokano (Ilokano. 7 July 2009. Wikipedia. , accessed 11 July 2009

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In The Silver Cloud Café, the who dun-it is actually more of a howdun-it, as the Chicano lawyer protagonist, Zeferino, startles into remembering the first part of his life as a young Mexican boy living with his family of tíos and tiyos: that is, Mexican braceros and Filipino manong who take him in and raise him as their collective son. Zeferino’s experiences depict the conditions in the campo de agricultura circa 1960 to 1970. This story is told outside of previous Chicano discourse of white/brown tension to reposition the manong alongside the bracero, and inside the multi-cultural world of Mexican and Filipino agricultural laborers3 in Central California. In what could be argued a loose sequel, Zeferino’s story in The Silver Cloud Café begins where Alberto, the protagonist of Véa’s first novel, La Maravilla, had ended.4 In La Maravilla, Lola, Alberto’s beautiful but angry mother, takes Alberto from his grandparents’ adobe home to a new life in the fields of Central California, where she and her current boyfriend, a pinoy or Filipino, are headed. Alberto’s boyhood is left behind on the car ride to the asparagus camp. In Véa’s second novel, The Silver Cloud Café, the boy protagonist Zeferino tells what perhaps is the rest of Alberto’s story, beginning with the trio’s arrival at the Ditto Farm asparagus camp. Because Zeferino arrives at the asparagus camp with his Mexican mother’s Filipino boyfriend, he is taken in the Filipino Quonset, or laborers’ hut. Zeferino’s circumstances of being Mexican but living among the manong will allow him to move between the Filipino men’s Quonset and the Mexican one. The movement afforded Zeferino opens discursive space in this Chicano novel to narrate what is primarily a manong story—a story hereunto forgotten by the adult Zeferino of Véa’s novel, as it has by Chicana/o letters at large. Alfredo Véa has written three novels: La Maravilla (1993), The Silver Cloud Café (1996), and Gods Go Begging (2000). All three write of the murder and mystery solved by a Chicano attorney.5 Each novel sets up 3

There were and are other ethnicities working in the fields during different periods such as the Chinese, the Japanese, Native Americans, Oakies and Arkies, and vagrants of varied ethnicities (Wixson). 4 The figure of the enano or little person is prefigured in La Maravilla as an African American who will become the protagonist in The Silver Cloud Café, but this time, he will be developed as a Filipino character. This change should be considered more fully. 5 There is a well-established murder mystery genre of Chicana/o writing most of which have Chicano attorneys as protagonists like Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1972), Manuel Ramos’s series of murder mysteries (1993-2004), Michael Nava also has the Henry Rios (also a Chicano attorney)

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death, spirituality, and grappling with human violence through ethnically diverse figures. This study focuses on how The Silver Cloud Café engages the history and social fact of the Filipino community in a Chicano story. This essay will consider labor history to situate this narrative move in conjunction with how Filipino ethnicity is constructed from Véa’s cultural vantage point. This articulation is partly a question of discernment and partly a positioning of commonality. To discern Filipinoness, Véa employs thematic and literary strategies of social ostracization, cultural ritual, and language. To draw out a sense of shared humanity, shared labor conditions provide a framework for Véa’s presentation of the Filipino, but mutual subjugation to racism secures their common condition. This politic of discernment and commonality intervenes in the discourse of multiculturalism but from the perspective of a Chicano writer, an Other, who writes anOther, the Filipino. A Chicano writing the Filipino into the Chicano cultural imaginary occupies the complicated space of conceptual cultural authority. This essay will conclude with a cursory analysis of the politics of that gesture. Véa’s second novel, The Silver Cloud Café, builds on his first novel, La Maravilla, in the way that the “Asian” figures in a Chicano social and labor framework. In so doing, he interpolates the Asian into the Chicano cultural nationalist project. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s was largely structured around field labor conditions and is iconically represented by labor organizer, the late César Chávez (1927-1993), who appears as a minor character in the novel. Chávez’s union organizing of the United Farm Workers and his successful grape boycott campaign galvanized the Chicano community as a unified political entity. Because of the public role Chicano labor has had as well as its prevalence as a theme in its fiction, the subject of Chicano field labor has been an organizational framework in many instances of Chicana/o literatures.6 The circular chronology of The Silver Cloud Café points to a moment in time by dated chapter headings that tie the varied plots to the historical account of field labor. Asians have worked California fields since the late 1800s7 to the present and have been a strong unionizing force, merging with braceros to series, including two excellent novels, The Hidden Law (1995), The Burning Plain (1997) and Rag and Bone (2001). 6 One feels this structure broadly in chronology and themes from Tomás Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971) to Virgil Suárez’s The Cutter (1998), in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994), and in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). 7 N.A. “We Have Fed You for a Thousand Years.” N.D. On line Available: farmworkers.org/strugcal.html

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establish the United Farm Workers Union in the 1962. Filipinos are currently the second biggest Asian American population in the US, laboring still in agriculture, but more often in white-collar professions (Macabenta). Labor has been one of several coordinates of historical contact and alliance between Filipinos and Mexicanos. The second coordinate is color. Véa opens up racialized color-coding during the temporal and spatial coordinates of the mid-twentieth century in California’s agricultural fields to re-inscribe Filipinos as brown, thus creating a parallel with the way in which Chicanos and other Latinos continue to be codified as brown. I study the concept of brown elsewhere,8 but here I would like to summarize my understanding of brown as a consolidation of categories of race and ethnicity under US programs of racialization. The national imaginary circumscribes latinidad through the sign of brown skin to homogenize ethnicity, class, and race for Chicanas/os and Latinas/os. Véa’s novels engage this highly contested fetishization of brown, but they posit that brownness, in particular spaces in time, has been extended to Filipino field workers as well. The novel The Silver Cloud Café refers to the Filipino workers with the Ilokano term manong, or “brothers,” and to Mexican and Chicano workers with the Mexican term braceros, or those whose who work with their arms. The use of these terms creates a primary selfidentification as foreign laborers. Racism pressures this kind of racialized consolidation through the indiscriminate use of the term brown: the manong and braceros are designated by their “brown faces” (128); their bodies, rented labor (129) as they are described through out the novel. Both ethnic groups are further conjoined by the novel’s inclusion of antimiscegenation laws that prohibited “everything from interracial marriage to interracial dancing” (133-4). These laws, the novel explains, also forbade Filipinos, Mexicans, and Chinese9 to use public parks, recreational facilities, and public toilets (134). Véa concludes by citing the 1948 California State Supreme Court law in the case of Perez v. Sharp, which the novel argues proved that racism and discrimination were “now based on color rather than on national origin” (134). These inclusions of case 8

I argue for the recognition of brown as a phenotypic and ethnic collusion of latinidad as Chicano/a Latina/o Otherness is constructed in the United States. For an extended discussion, see my dissertation Shame and Technologies of Racism in Chicana/o and Latina/o Literatures, (Diss., University of California, Irvine, 2009). 9 These laws also included African Americans and Native Americans. Among many materials supporting this contention, see website http://www.everything2.com/title/African+American+and+Native+American+disc rimination+from+1864+to+1954.

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law, racist social custom, and field labor demonstrate the process of phenotypification of class and labor through the optic symbol of brown skin. The commonality of brownness in US racialization is made hyperbolic through the novel’s protagonist, Teodoro Teofilo Cabiri, otherwise known as Ted For Short: a pun on his stature as a little person acknowledges the pressure of racialization that makes his birth name laborious, if not ridiculous, for white American mouths and minds. A wigged man with unusual charisma who in La Maravilla simply passes through the unincorporated community of Cady, Arizona, becomes the little person, Ted For Short, in The Silver Cloud Café, a charismatic Filipino fieldworker-cum-magician and singer who was a father figure for Zeferino as a child.10 While Véa is democratic in making most of his characters from lower economic groups unusual, Ted For Short stands in distinction. Some of the other characters have fantastic powers or have been subjected to particularly difficult circumstances that Véa morphs into their personalities and bodies. Ted For Short however is the only character born with a congenital difference. He is highly cognizant of his difference as his punned nickname infers but he, unlike the others, doesn’t dismay over his difference. While the other characters are burdened by their selves and thereby conform to a desire for “normalcy,” Ted For Short is fully alive with and through his difference. Jailed as a murder suspect, Ted For Short meets Zeferino, his attorney in an interrogation room. Rather than inhibit him, the shackles, the prison garb, the repressive environment become props in Ted For Short’s spontaneous variety show. Unbound by the confines of the room, Ted For Short magically produces lit cigarettes, appears in flashy stage wear, and performs a cabaret number that somehow all of the prison can hear: The suspect was brown-skinned and gray-haired with a bald spot on top. The jailer had indicated that the prisoner was at least seventy years old, but the man who stood before them had a face that seemed ageless […] He had a small hunched back and tiny fingers, and he was wearing special shoes; one had a sole that was at least five inches thick. In his right hand he had a small cane […] The little man, with a flourish, stepped from the leg chains and dramatically presented the opened cuffs to an amazed and frustrated jailer. …

10 In fact, physically and mentally speaking, Zeferino is perhaps the only typical or ordinary character in the novel.

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Ted For Short began to belt out “That Old Devil Moon.” Zeferino, near the window, could not believe his ears. Stuart Klezmer raised his head from a notepad, blinking his unbelievable eyes at the scene before him. […] [Ted For Short] was lit by a single intimate spotlight, the sequins on his jacket and pants glinting red and green. His bow tie was studded with rhinestones, and there were heavy gold rings on his fingers. […] There was the unmistakable sound of musical accompaniment, a guitar, a drum, and an electric piano. (47-51)

Ted For Short’s vitality suggests a highly actualized self on the one hand, while it falls perilously close to the discourse of the freak on the other. The freak is a discursive construct that fetishizes aspects of bodies, in synecdochical fashion, to recast the person as a single characteristic. The person—who becomes known by her/his defect—has been presented historically to the public as an anomaly to be ostracized through venues like the circus freak show. The freak show makes the case against human variation by consolidating “our” normalcy. Rosemarie Garland Thomson analyzes the phenomenon: Freak shows framed and choreographed bodily differences that we now call “race,” “ethnicity,” and “disability,” in a ritual that enacted the social process of making cultural otherness from the raw materials of human physical variation. The freak show is a spectacle, a cultural performance that gives primacy to visual apprehension in creating symbolic codes and institutionalizes the relationship between the spectacle and the spectators. In freak shows, the exhibited body became a text written in boldface to be deciphered according to the needs and desires of the onlookers. (60)

Ted For Short’s stature, his regalia, his spectrum of talents, and his special powers collude with his personal history with what becomes increasingly convincing reading of a Filipino protagonist constructed through the discourse of the freak. Ted For Short’s back-story is a tale of deformity, non-conformity, and social rejection as an enano or little person in the Philippines during the 1950s. His parents seek to gain social legitimacy for their burden of a son by auditioning him for the reenactment of the resurrection—a Filipino cultural tradition of tying young boys to a wooden cross in an Easter competition (AP News 6 April 2007) that brings good luck and social standing to the winner’s family and village. Ted For Short loses to his future archenemy, Bambino Reyes, who was nailed to the cross rather than tied. Bambino won the contest but almost died in the process, a death planned for the vainglory of his wanton mother. When Ted For Short rescues Bambino from his ensuing death, Ted For Short inadvertently is marked with the psychological projection of

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Bambino’s maternal rejection to become the target of Bambino’s murderous hatred. Creating the Filipino protagonist with such a stylized physicality does not necessarily serve the dynamic of the narrative anymore than would a physically more mundane character.11 Likewise, the Filipino cultural custom of the reenacting the crucifixion works well to heighten the dramatic tension. However, as in his extreme physical depiction, choosing such a violent custom from Filipino culture grows suspiciously orientalist. Starting with Edward W. Said’s orientalist argument and considering subsequent writings on colonial discourse analysis, the way the West depicts the Other produces knowledge that must be considered by its political agenda as Orientalist knowledge, often obscuring their creation of social asymmetries when not oppression. The political skew of this knowledge forces an understanding of the Other as unassimilable for Western ethos and culture systems. Though The Silver Cloud Café demonstrates an intense literary engagement of a Chicano text with the history of Filipino field laborers, it falls prey to orientalist tendencies in Véa’s depiction of Ted For Short. While Véa, in his second novel, opens up the racial field of brown to the Filipino farm worker, his first novel, La Maravilla, engages the project of orientalism in its reconstruction of the power and authority of an “oriental” subject, the Yaqui Manuel, set against European hegemony figured in Manuel’s Spanish wife, Josefina. La Maravilla endeavors an anti-orientalist perspective through the trajectories of Josefina and Alberto that deepens this analysis of the Filipino in The Silver Cloud Café. Manuel’s entrance in the novel is set up with a domestic scene: the elderly shaman appears in his rocking chair, consumed in a Yaqui vision of time that conjoins past, present, and future. The spiritual journey allows Manuel to experience his life simultaneously in his adobe home and flying in the sky. This ability to transcend Western concepts of space and time and the ontological premise of the Native’s sense of humanity is handed down to Manuel’s grandson Alberto. La Maravilla offers a well-founded criticism when Manuel explains to Alberto the foolishness of mainstream US culture from his Native perspective, as it is done in many other passages in both novels. More importantly, Manuel’s discourse is a way of “keeping himself,” his “atomic” fundamental difference as an ethnic 11 Bambino Reyes also hunts down and kills Ted For Short’s best friend, Faustino, in a secondary plot. I mention this part of the plot to point out Véa’s insistence on marginality, as Faustino is deeply hated by the manong because of his sexual orientation. (However, Faustino is hunted down by Bambino because of his involvement in the death of Bambino’s father, not because of his sexuality.)

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person (242). The novel is replete with Manuel’s correctives on the orientalist perspective, a knowledge and philosophy that he circumscribes to his indigenous ethnicity. While Manuel’s depiction could be conceived as a moment of essentialism,12 Véa’s characters create ethnicity as an exclusive epistemology. Josefina is a touchstone for European colonialism: she reenacts the colonialist project of othering the native, her husband Manuel. Over the course of the novel, she begins to discern her culturally inherited colonialist mindset as it interferes with her relationship with Manuel. At the same time, Josefina’s aversion to Manuel’s spirituality masks her repression of her pagan practices and worldview. She is also the figure who situates the Asian as the most other of her others. The opening pages bring forth her visions, which are suddenly voiced in Cantonese, a language she cannot understand. She refers to the Chinese market owners as chinos, the code word for all Asians in Spanish. Although she procures a filial relationship with the chinos by curing Mrs. Cheung of an ailment, she continues to mistrust their business practices and the quality of their goods. The presence of more Others, such as mayates (a racial slur for African Americans), indigenous people (who are referred to as “damn indios”), and whites (called Arkies and Oakies, thus extending their historical monikers from the 1930s), results in a pecking order of color, class, and culture. Initially, Josefina ascribes more legitimacy to whites and African Americans than to chinos and indigenous people by virtue of their native use of the English language, which gives them, in her mind, a socially sanctified place in the United States. Josefina deems the mayates and the Oakies to have positive and negative cultural attributes, some of which fuel her prejudice. Nevertheless, she never questions their rightful place in America. Josefina plays the quintessential European, not because of who she is or how she lives, but because of the way she psychologically holds the space of Europeanness in the context of the legacy of colonialist relations.13 12

Spivak complains that strategy has been forgotten beside essentialism in an over simplification of her concept “strategic essentialism” (“The Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson Interview”, Boundary 2, 20(2), 24-50, 1993). However, Chicana/o and Latina/o writers and artists strategize their engagement with essentialism by constructing an artifice that mirrors back how race is constructed, commercialized, and disseminated. Performance artists Carmelita Tropicana, and Coco Fusco, and the theater of Teatro Campesino are examples of this engagement. 13 Europeanness is fairly devoid of value in the fictitious unincorporated community of Cady, Arizona, where the action takes place but works more in the field of emission of the novel—a productive artifact that negotiates cultural

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Curiously, this Chicano novel barely discusses el mexicano, and the Chicano is absent altogether. There is an occasional mention of Mexican migrants who work alongside other field laborers and construction workers, but they are treated as passers-by. Despite the fact that Josefina prepares Mexican food exclusively and daily, and occupies the ethnic space of the Mexican in her community, neither she nor Manuel identifies as mexicana/o, Chicanas/os, or as Latinas/os (to use the term in a panLatino sense). While their imagined identification as brown people seems implicit to a hegemonic program of racialization, these characters seem to hold no personal sense of brownness. La Maravilla consciously interrogates the legacy of the colonial struggle in the marriage and worldview of Manuel and Josefina, positing the Asian as enigmatic and the perhaps the most foreign of the foreign. As mentioned above, Véa’s first novel ignores the presence of the mexicano community and says nothing of the Chicano community. For novels that closely follow socio-historic fact, this silence must be discerned. Although The Silver Cloud Café partially recuperates this silence through its Chicano narrator, Zeferino, the Mexican culture of los braceros is almost a shadow, a culture that lurks behind and alongside the more emphasized Filipino culture. Considering The Silver Cloud Café as a loose sequel, the shadow cultures of mexicanos and Chicanas/os in La Maravilla create a cultural backdrop to discern Asian brownness in the second novel in two ways. The first way is through language. Language discursively fleshes out the role of the foreign in colonialist projects. The way that Chicana/o writers use languages with/against/through Standard English enters into the discussion of postcolonial discourse. Chicana/o texts use the foreign and/or nonstandard language to discern how and what constitutes the ethnic self. Language in these texts navigates the self through racism and resistance, and sometimes complicity. One quality of language is its intention to embody a message and oftentimes to communicate a message to another. Ethnic language and even exclusive use of Standard English pressures the ethnic writer and ethnic texts into disclosing a relational politic of the writer to non- and hegemonic cultures. Like other Chicano novels where italics section off Spanish, thereby quickly orientalizing it as that which is to be conceived of foreign, Véa engages multiculturalism through profound renderings of characters who, in their reflection on race and ethnicity, bring forth Spanish, Ilokano, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Yaqui, relations with its readers and related institutions. Véa’s description of Cady resonates in population, rural conditions, and poverty with actual incorporated communities such as Why, Nothing, Liberty, Eden, and Arivaca, Arizona.

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Apache, and other cultures through language. Whereas some writers give the English definition of a Spanish word or repeat a Spanish expression in English in a moment of dialogue, they miss the opportunity—which Véa seizes—to bring the mainstream reader to the place of fundamental difference of culture. The characters speak tenderly to Zeferino, a naïve child narrator, in order to share their culture with him. Zeferino’s tiyos talk with him to instruct, not to apologize or relativize their knowledge into a cultural economy of equivalents. The love and mutual vulnerability of these relationships opens this psycho-emotional space that makes their difference accessible to the reader. This space, however, is bordered in both novels’ unwillingness to allow characters to over explain themselves or to be cajoled into the self-colonizing role of the native informant.14 La Maravilla’s Manuel offers an example of language, and the functionality of the communication dyad between a Yaqui shaman and his Chicano grandson, Alberto—a naïve child, his interlocutor in communicating his cultural difference. Manuel’s trilingualism is occasion for Manuel to teach this difference in a discussion of the word “poor” as used in English and in Spanish. Manuel explains that Yaquis are never poor or pobre because in the Yaqui language, the word poverty does not exist: To say his family was poor would be accurate enough but not really true. In Spanish pobre would be true but in his mind, not very accurate. In Yaqui to be kia polove is to be without desire for “things.” There is no concept of “poor for a non-comparative, communal society.” A Yaqui is only poor when he deals with the whites or the Mexicans. When he is forced to pay taxes on land he has always lived on or when the laws of Arizona require that he buy a tombstone, there is poor. Then he must reach outside his language for the word. (31)

In The Silver Cloud Café, language is the place of flourish. Véa creates Filipinoness to a large degree by the way Ted For Short speaks. While he is worldly man of little formal education, he is also a Filipino migrant field worker who however uses Standard English with few Tagalog or Ilokano borrowings or syntactic markers. His expression is floral, self-effacing, and thoughtful. Ted For Short speaks with spiritual reverence that is eloquent and filled with pun and comic one-liners while he invokes the 14

Chetan Bhatt describes Spivak’s concept of Native Informant as “`a blank' that only `the Northwestern European' tradition and its `Western-model disciplines' commencing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could inscribe. However, [Spivak] argues, today various other figures such as `benevolent cultural nativists', `self-marginalizing migrants', and `postcolonials' are masquerading as native informants.”

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squalid, degrading realities of migrant labor and brownness. As he begins telling his story to Zeferino, he chooses to return the beginning of his life story: My life started before my birth. So did my death […] Even before I descended into the first seconds of life, even before I was a small, tepid pool of encoded brine, I was a sojourner. I was a spirit who moved about between this earth and the next, waiting to re-enter life according to my so-called merits […] Well, I can only say that I must have been very cruel in my last life because God has certainly been cruel to me in most of this one. Look at me. What more could He do to me short of death? For me, the womb was an ambush. (209-10)

His expression provides a narrative respite and a poetic experience from the field workers’ life circumstances. The flourish of his speech, however, creates a psychological remoteness from middle-class EuroAmerican life, as if his life were not his own but rather a performance with the theatrical connotations the term “performance” implies. His expression is, in some sense, a melancholic malaprop. As such, it could be read as parodic, but the hostility of parody gives way to Ted For Short’s tender instruction and love of the boy, Zeferino.15 The linguistic style serves as a literary technique that delineates a distance between the Filipino and the shadowed braceros as well as with their circumstance, social standing, and oppression. The contrast of life circumstance and this linguistic register stop just short of becoming tedious. At pivotal moments of narrative tension, the tiyo’s speech changes in intention; there, it is more extensive interlocution than his stylistic soliloquy. His embellished words also become fewer and more precise. This linguistic engagement marks the beauty that each individual may find in her/his life, regardless of circumstance, and that acknowledgement of beauty can be read as an act of resistance. This style challenges the ability of racialized brownness to swallow Ted For Short whole, to totalize his sense of self. Alfredo Véa’s The Silver Cloud Café has investigated the postcolonial implications of the Filipino in an expressly Chicano novel—an Other writing anOther in drawing out related discourses of social class, labor, and racialized brownness through which the Chicanoed Filipino is projected. As Ania Loomba argues, highlighting these discourses through which an othered subject is constructed is not enough. She states: “we must also think about the crucial relations between […] different forces and discourses. Because post-modern thinkers do not consider this 15

As does the expressions of filial and romantic love for others in the novel.

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interrelation, their work does not help us in the task of recovering the subaltern subject in colonial history” (240). This essay has sought to examine the “relation between” in the act of writing anOther. The Filipino evolves from the generalized chino of La Maravilla to his particularity in culture, time, and place in the fields of Central California during the early and mid-nineteenth century.16 This novelistic evolution is a socio-cultural approchement of the lived connections between the Chicano and the Asian communities. At the same time, a Filipino protagonist does disrupt the conventions of the realist and the magicorealist novels17 (Aldama) that so often dominate the tone of Chicano fiction. Breaking such ties with convention of tone and of the constructed isolation of braceros in Chicano cultural nationalism, Véa’s novels engage a more poignantly political multiculturalism. The novel calls for a general reflection of interethnic and interracial life in the United States in the twentieth century. My reading of The Silver Cloud Café, like La Maravilla, suggests a criticism of multiculturalism as a hollow derivative of “enlightened” Western democracy. Véa’s novel agitates multiculturalism’s supposition of social transcendence. The academy’s faith in the ameliorative potential of multiculturalism underestimates the power of racism and class to dictate the parameters of human relations even when the two groups in question, Chicanos and Filipinos, shoulder the burden of brown. His work challenges the rhetoric of multiculturalism as a theoretical exercise of unfounded optimism where the West authorizes itself to read and incorporate its Others. The lived experience of 16

With a less numerically significant field worker population from 1965 as the postwar Filipino migrants aged and were not to replaced in equal numbers due to changes in immigration law. The Kennedy-Johnson Immigration Act of 1965 sought to reunite families first and foremost. It also made preferential provisions for the Filipino white-collar population rather than manual laborers (Almirol, 5263). 17 Frederick Aldama argues in Post Ethnic Narrative Criticism: Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kurcishi and Salman Rushdie for a critical revamping of the Latin Americanist literary modes of magical realism and lo real maravilloso. While initially appropriated as politically resistant to colonial and postcolonial production of knowledge, Aldama analyzes their complicity with schemes of exoticism, sexism, and class. In his study of Chicana/o literatures, Aldama understands magicorealist texts’ engagement with fantastic realities coexisting in mainstream urban environments in the United States as an aesthetic mode that exposes the extreme pressures of capitalism and racism among other oppressions on marginalized people. Aldama carefully delimits the ethnographic and political value of magicorealism from its aesthetic value as discursive resistance to the totalizing regimes articulated in many poststructuralist theories.

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multiculturalism engages a different set of premises, of the demystification of both noble proletariat and the poor degenerate, of inter-racism that cuts as often as it binds different groups together, citing the ways in which love—nor class affiliation—conquer all. Véa’s contribution to Chicano discourse in The Silver Cloud Café lies in his emphatic contextualization of the socio-historical into his fiction visà-vis Filipino field labor alongside Chicano and Mexican field labor. Where Chicano literary predecessors put forth plots that invoke the indigenous in projects of Chicano cultural nationalism, La Maravilla presents the relationship between indigenous Americans and Chicanas/os from the perspective of labor history of mestizos understood in these novels as Mexicans with strong indigenous ties, and Mexicanized Native Americans of the Southwest. If we consider Spivak’s dictum to cultural producers and other agents to work, “not to give the subaltern voice, but to clear the space to allow it to speak” (de Kock interview), then the question must be asked as to whether Véa engages in his own sort of orientalism when he creates a hyperbolically stylized enano or little person replete with bizarre, by Western standards, cultural practices, while Mexican culture fades to a referential backdrop. Occupying the space of authority to write about the Filipino manong, Véa demonstrates how the adult protagonist, San Francisco defense attorney Zeferfino who is assumably a member of the middle class, forgets his tiyos and his tíos and himself during the part of his life spent in the fields. This forgetting engenders his complicity in deeming his former father figure freakish so that at two levels: the level of language, and at the dramatic level, the Filipino discerned in The Silver Cloud Café remains in subalterity. Justice is ultimately served albeit in a spiritual and fantastic way, and Zeferino the adult revalorizes his childhood and the family he grew with it. However, The Silver Cloud Café’s focus on the Filipino field laborer points to his place in the field and the dance hall more than clears a space for him to speak.18

18

Still, there remain odd silences. Given the historical inscription in The Silver Cloud Café, why are Filipino United Farm Workers Union leaders Phillip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong not mentioned along with Chicano César Chávez? Why isn’t the Mexican bracero culture more deeply developed? In what way do narrators Zeferino (in The Silver Cloud Café) and Alberto (in La Maravilla) relate to Mexican or Chicano cultures? Do they need to? What are the premises that codify this text as Chicano literature? By virtue of holding a bigger market share than Filipino American literature, was it more commercially attractive way to classify Véa’s novel as Chicano?

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But now we know he has been there—there, in the field. The Silver Cloud Café corrects the socio-historical frame of Chicano field labor first by remembering the Filipino presence and struggle alongside the bracero, and second, in articulating the dynamics of brownness that subjugated both groups. Véa’s work interrogates multiculturalism’s occlusion of class and labor, seeing instead that these discourses are among the substrata that co-produce ethnic cultures and interethnic relations. Written against a facile multiculturalism, these Others rhizomatically engage one anOther in a fantasy embrace.19 Véa’s texts show the embrace partial, riddled with complexity of layered (post)colonialist complicity, an occurrence often by happenstance, frustrated and thereby not easily forgotten; Véa’s Filipino, momentarily transcendent rather than agential.

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick. Postethnic Literary Criticism: Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. Almirol, Edwin B. Ethnic Identity and Social Negotiation: A Study of a Filipino Community in California. Immigrant Communities and Ethnic Minorities in the US and Canada: 10. New York: AMS P, 1985. Associated Press. “Lenten Devotees Crucify, Whip Themselves: Lenten Ritual Goes On Despite Opposition Catholic Leaders in the Philippines.” 6 April 2007 MSNBC World News/Asia Pacific. 10 July 2009 Available: msnbc.msn.com Bhatt, Chetan. “Kant’s ‘raw man’ and the miming of primitivism: Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason.” Review. Radical Philosophy. Jan/Feb 2001 , accessed 10 July 2009. Fetta, Stephanie. Shame and Technologies of Racialization in Chicana/o and Latina/o Literatures. Diss. U of California, Irvine, 2008. Proquest Doc. 1615860811. UMI 3334591. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2008. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism and Postcolonialism Series: The New Critical Idiom. New York and London: Routledge, 1998.

19 Spivak argues that “the ideal relation to the Other, then, is an ‘embrace, an act of love’ (The Spivak Reader, 269-70). Such an embrace may be unrequited, as the differences and distances are too great, but if we are ever to get beyond the vicious cycle of abuse, it is essential to remain open-hearted; not to attempt to recreate the Other narcissistically, in one's own image, but generously, with care and attention” (Spivak 269-70).

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Macabenta, Greg. “An Undiscovered Market: 3-4 million FilipinoAmericans.” ABS-CBN News/Filipinas Magazine. 12 July 2008. , accessed 20 June 2009 Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Spivak Reader. Eds. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. New York: Routledge, 1996. 15-28, 141-74, 203-36. —. Interview with Leon de Kock. "New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 23:3 (July 1992): 29-47 —. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Véa, Alfredo. La Maravilla. New York: Dutton, 1993. —. The Silver Cloud Café. New York: Plume, 1996. Wallovits, Sonia Emily. The Filipinos in California. Thesis [M.A.], U of Southern California, 1966. San Francisco: R&E Research Association, 1976. Wixson, Douglas, ed. and introduction. On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps. Austin: U Texas P, 2007.

CULTURAL CONFIGURATION OF THE PHILIPPINES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: RELATIONSHIP WITH SPANISH AMERICA ROBERTO FUERTES-MANJÓN MIDWESTERN STATE UNIVERSITY

The extraordinary significance of the colonization of America within Spain’s imperial project and the belated conquest of the Philippines led the colonization of the latter to depend on and be based on the cultural and political structures that already existed in Spanish America. Although the Philippines were of great strategic importance to the Spanish Crown— both Charles III and Phillip II made them their base of expansion towards the East—, the reality is that the cultural center of gravity continued to rotate around Spanish America. This caused almost all cultural institutions to be left in the hands of the religious orders, since there was no direct control of the viceroys; consequently, they created a unique system, different from the one in Spanish America. The goal of this study is to examine the cultural configuration of the Philippines during the first century of colonization, beginning with and based on cultural experiences of the Spaniards in America. This project would very soon obtain full autonomy, beginning with the predominant role of the Catholic Church, not only in the structure and cultural design, but also in the colonization per se of a territory defined by its geographical uniqueness, racial complexity, variety of previous cultural influences before the Spanish conquest, and a solid religious implementation. Pagan religious practices mixed with Islam and a commercial relationship with neighboring countries, especially Siam, the Moluccas, the Malaysian peninsula, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra had already been well-established. It will be precisely these contacts with other countries that will reveal the differences between the colonization of these Islands and that of Spanish America, since the influences left by the Chinese, Malayans, Arabs, Hindus, and Japanese will determine the cultural projects and

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achievements of Spanish colonizers. The Philippines already shared certain cultural and technical developments with the West, contrary to what the Spaniards encountered in Spanish America. It is important to stress the significant role of the Catholic Church during this stage of the colonization and in the conquest itself. As Filipino historian Gregorio Zaide states, the conquest of the Philippines “was achieved more by the Cross than by the Sword” (156).1 The Spanish troops during Legazpi’s time numbered only 300 soldiers, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were 1707 soldiers. Despite their military superiority, with such a limited army, they would have never been able to defeat the indigenous population, a brave and bellicose people, numbered, during Legazpi’s time, over 500,000, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, over one million (Zaide 156). That is why the Church’s cooperation, with all its political and cultural influence, was crucial, especially when one considers how quickly the colonization was established. Legazpi founded the first government enclave in the Philippines in 1565, at the island of Cebú. And only six years later, the first government was created and Manila was declared the capital city (152). During the first decades of the seventeenth century, Spain’s sovereignty is clearly established, with a central government that controls and substitutes the small local kingdoms, carries out the construction of new cities, and secures the dissemination of Christianity, which substitutes former religious practices. In a short period of time, Spanish civilization is clearly implemented on the Islands (Zaide 158). This achievement took place also because of the intensive cooperation between civil power and the Church. While Legazpi established political power, the Augustinians created the foundation for Christianity on the Islands. When the religious orders arrived, they implemented and shaped the cultural structure that would define the colony. The models they chose were based on Latin culture, the Spanish language, Catholicism, and Renaissance values. Only twelve years after the arrival of the Augustinians with Legazpi’s expedition in 1565, the Franciscans arrived, and four years later, the Jesuits, who would be the representatives of the spirit of modernity until the Philippines’ independence three centuries later, a period interrupted only between 1768 and 1859. The Dominicans arrived in 1581, and the Recollect, in 1606. The Benedictine priests arrived in the nineteenth century, in 1895. While the contributions of each religious order are obviously different, at first they are all driven by the same missionary zeal 1 “fue logrado más por la Cruz que por la Espada.” All translations from this text are mine.

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and a spirit of cooperation, among themselves as well as with the civil authorities, contrary to what happened in Spanish America. The Augustinians create a foundation for a new evangelization based on education and the fight against the practice of pagan religions. They are the ones who arrived with Legazpi, and they devote themselves fervently to the new missionary task and are very successful from the beginning. The importance of their work, together with the scope and the limited number of priests, requires support from other religious orders. The Franciscans, with their vast experience in Spanish America, since they were the pioneers who opened the path to the evangelization of New Spain, complete this mission and begin a new project—less ambitious than the one in Spanish America, but with a more practical orientation. Their educational experience in Spanish America clearly surpasses their efforts at evangelization. They established the foundation for the new goals in the Philippines—cultural training of the indigenous peoples and training of the indigenous clergy, although the second aspect is not emphasized due to prior negative experiences. The basic educational goals continue to be the same, following the model that was implemented in America, where schools provided three different levels of teaching: a large number of elementary schools; some high schools, such as the one at Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, where Latin scholars were trained; and schools of arts and craftsmanship, which prepared native artists and artisans, such as the one founded by Friar Pedro de Gante (Lopetegui 416). This allowed the introduction of certain elements of European material culture to New Spain, but without forgetting the knowledge of the techniques used before the arrival of Cortés. The creation of the first two schools in the New World—the first, in Tetzcoco in 1523 and, the second, in Mexico City in 1525, with a wide range of offerings from the educational viewpoint, also included teaching young girls; they also knew that the only possibility that the Church had in establishing itself in America would be through the education of a specific cultural elite of lay people and of indigenous priests. This would be the foundation of a new policy of education within the Spanish empire (420). The Franciscan’s initial goal was to prepare native priests and political authorities with a humanistic view so that the indigenous people would have an authentic Christian culture, fact that did not occur in Europe, and at the same time, prepare them to function as colonists and civil servants capable of rationally exploiting the New World by means of an ambitious project (the Dominican and Augustinian priests joined them) with clear utopian goals in which an attempt was made to unite the community with an ascetic spirit, taking advantage of the opportunity to fulfill the ideals of

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the primitive Church, shaping the indigenous society according to their own vision. Georges Baudot substantiates this by stating: The Franciscan missionaries [...] dream of building the millennial kingdom announced in the Apocalypse within the ancient empire of the Mexicas. But not only do they plan on building a providential political platform which would allow them to prepare the final judgement, but also build, with the help of the Amerindians of Mexico, a new humanity, spiritually prepared for the end of times, renewed in their spiritual task but also to reintegrate their own discourse, re-elaborated semantically. (Wright 40)2

As a result of the problems that emerged due to the lack of a common educational policy among the different religious orders for the indigenous population as well as for the training of native clergy, the success of their work was compromised. While the Franciscans were in favor of teaching all educational levels, the Dominicans, who at first accepted some Indians, were against creating high schools and refused to teach Latin to the natives (Lopetegui 421). The clearest example of the consequences of these tensions was the indigenous high school of Santiago de Tlatelolco, inaugurated by the Franciscans in 1536, which never reached the projected goals. Later, it was directed by alumni, but it failed. In 1570, Franciscans took over again, but the school never recovered its initial splendor (Lopetegui 423). Perhaps the main reason for the strong hostility of the clergy, the devotees, and the general Spanish public against the Tlatelolco School was rooted precisely in the possibility that some natives could eventually be ordained priests (Lopetegui 426). Civil authorities also supported and shared the same goals and principles of teaching and educating the natives, as verified in the letter that Rodrigo de Albornoz wrote to the Emperor on December 15, 1525, in which he pointed out the need to provide schools for the children of local leaders and the elite, where they could be taught how to read, grammar, philosophy, and other arts (Lopetegui 421). The goal of fully integrating indigenous peoples into the Christian cultural world was never achieved either through education or through utopian projects, such as the one proposed by Vasco de Quiroga in Michoacán. This project of developing a 2

“Los misioneros franciscanos […] sueñan con edificar en el antiguo imperio de los mexicas el reino milenario anunciado en el texto del Apocalipsis. Mas no sólo piensan en construir una plataforma política providencial que permitiese preparar el juicio final, sino erigir, con los amerindios de México, una humanidad nueva, preparada espiritualmente para el fin de los tiempos, renovada en su quehacer espiritual y además, también, reintegrada en su discurso propio, semánticamente reelaborada.”

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new social order in New Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century would also be attempted in the Philippines during the second half of the century, but this time taking into account the specific characteristics of the region, which was under the influence of powerful cultures such as the Chinese, and the firm adoption of Islam in part of the territory. Furthermore, while, in Spanish America, education and evangelization were carried out by a large number of clergy supported by local authorities, and produced quick and profound changes within society, in the Philippines the number of priests was very low and the influence on local culture was weak. Only superficial changes were made. Spanish colonial authorities did not make profound changes in the social structure, and even governmental positions were in the hands of local authorities. Another important aspect is that, as had happened Spanish America, a large part of the efforts was dedicated to the fight against indigenous religious practices and to the priests’ learning of local languages. Dominican and Jesuit friars were the ones who set the standards for the educational trends in the Philippines until its independence. Even though the Jesuits did not have much experience in Spanish America, they did have widespread contact in the East before arriving at the Philippines— Pope Paul III had approved this new order in 1540, and the Jesuit missions were established in Florida (1566), Peru (1568), and Mexico (1572) (Costa 4-5). In 1541, Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary, was on his way to India and, before his death at the gates of China in 1552, he had founded mission centers throughout the line of Portuguese trading posts from Goa to the Moluccas and obtained a foothold in Japan (Costa 4). With the establishment of the episcopal see at Manila in 1577 and the appointment of the Dominican Fray Domingo de Salazar for the post due to his experience in the Mexican missions, a close relationship of cooperation develops between the religious orders and civil authority, which is another characteristic that defines this colonization, as can be seen in his request to take some Jesuits with him. Two of the four Jesuits that Fray Domingo de Salazar took with him, Antonio Sedeño and Alonso Sánchez, were great intellectuals with a vast background in missionary work. The latter would play a very important role in the Synod, directed by Bishop Salazar from 1581 to 1586, and would also have a great impact on the future of the Philippines. It is through this Synod that they would update all of the great colonization projects that had taken place in Spanish America: the rights of conquest that Spain had over its territories, the treatment and rights of the natives, the limitations and rights of the

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encomenderos,3 placing special emphasis on the topic of forced labor and slavery (the Augustinians had firm views on these two issues). Based on the decree signed by Philip II, “forbidding the colonists to retain native slaves under any pretext whatsoever” (Costa 25), the Synod defended the idea that under no circumstances could the Filipinos be made slaves. The Spanish titles used to justify the conquest were questioned and were finally accepted thanks to their goal of Christianization (Costa 2627). It was a new interpretation of the conquest that took into consideration former experiences in Spanish America, tried to correct previous mistakes, and contributed new goals. The Synod established the obligations of the mayors and encomenderos and sided with giving complete freedom to the native Filipinos. Taking as its starting point the principle that “the Indians are as free in their own country as the Spaniards are in theirs, and neither the king nor the gospel has deprived them of this liberty” (Costa 33), they also recommended that the Filipinos be allowed to “share in their own government, at least on the local level” (34). Furthermore, the Synod “prescribes the duties of other classes of persons in the colony, such as army and navy officers, public defenders or protectores de indios, wives, widows, and heirs of encomenderos, native rulers and magistrates, Chinese traders, and artisans, sometimes going into great detail” (Costa 35). In other words, the Church establishes a new path, even in areas that are not its direct responsibility. It takes on the main role, which shows its enormous influence in the cultural and social design of the Islands, reinforced by the extraordinary task that religious orders develop in political and strategic affairs in the region. For example, the Jesuit Alonso Sánchez is sent to China as ambassador with powers to negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce, and to request permission for the Spaniards to establish a trading post on the coast similar to what had been conceded to the Portuguese at Macao (Costa 40). Another example is the importance of the design of the so-called La empresa de China, sponsored by Filipino governor Ronquillo and Bishop Salazar, and with Alonso Sánchez, which consisted in a: project to send an armed expedition from the Philippines to China with the object of compelling the Chinese government to permit the entry of missionaries into China, and of providing the missionaries with an armed escort to ensure their safety while preaching Christianity to the Chinese. If

3

A kind of feudal lord. The king of Spain would usually assign an encomienda (piece of territory) to a conquistador.

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the Chinese government resisted, war was to be declared and Spanish sovereignty imposed on the conquered territory. (Costa 50)

The goal apparently is to evangelize, but in reality, it conceals a political ambition. It would not be possible to understand the cultural actions or the plans of evangelization of the Church in the Philippines without studying the renaissance component that was the basis of encouragement for all these projects and actions. Humanism and evangelization followed the same path in the Philippines as they did in America, but this time they had a more realistic perspective. It is neither the initial utopian humanism of Vasco de Quiroga nor the Jesuits’ powerful and optimistic humanism during the second half of the sixteenth century, but a mixed continuation of the New Spanish Renaissance, which, as Lopetegui observes, at the beginning had a double goal. The first one is to organize the Spaniards who became new men in this strange land, of which they believe they are conquerors when in reality they are conquered by it. Motivated by the incentives of fame, domination, or greatness, they dedicate themselves to their work, with the highest humanist aspirations, dedicating all their efforts, body, and spirit (Lopetegui 678). The other objective is to educate the indigenous people, based on two essential propositions: “equality for all men and the ideal of a human society in which all live in fraternal union, without any distinction between race, men, and nations” (Lopetegui 678-79).4 This humanism, which has a strong social content, is widespread in America. In Mexico, for example, the Erasmism of the Christian Doctrines by Bishop Friar Juan de Zumárraga corresponds to the deep sense of evangelization, according to the Franciscans’ New Spain (Lopetegui 549). Furthermore, the project of evangelization adopted by Erasmus will be applied in the doctrinal schools for children and at the Tlatelolco School. Similarly, Zumárraga used the moral part of Enquiridión as the moral objective in preaching to the Spanish people in the Indies (Lopetegui 549). On the other hand, the local hospitals, designed by the Bishop of Michoacán, Don Vasco de Quiroga, and the laws that regulated them, were inspired in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). He wanted to implement a Christian society with a strong economic foundation, and to integrate the natives to Christianity without them losing their good qualities. That is, he wanted to found a “new and primitive

4

“igualdad de todos los hombres y el ideal de una sociedad humana en que conviven fraternalmente unidos, sin distinción de razas, hombres y naciones.”

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Church” (Lopetegui 550).5 One can also find More’s and Erasmus’s mark in the works of Bartolomé de las Casas and of Juan Luis Vives, as well as in those of Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, the first professor of rhetoric at Mexico’s university (1535). Another outstanding humanist was Bartolomé Melgarejo, first professor of canon law at the Mexican University. Mexico’s primitive humanism and evangelization efforts were closely connected. Moreover, the dissemination and influence of the teaching curricula were constant, both at the high school and university levels (Lopetegui 550). A good example of this is the Tlatelolco Imperial School. The Jesuits made important contributions in the project of humanist dissemination. In those studies, they followed the Ratio studiorum method, based on the widespread experience of the Jesuit schools, which had been used in Roman schools (Lopetegui 552). The experiences in America will allow the system of cultural configuration in the Philippines to be more realistic. It is important to note that this system was also based on evangelization and education, given the relative failure of the Franciscan experience in education and training of the native clergy in Spanish America. Likewise, Vasco de Quiroga failed in his attempt to transform society and to bring about the full integration of the indigenous peoples into Spanish society. Although these religious orders travel to the Philippines with the same enthusiasm and spirit that allowed them to evangelize America, now their goals are less ambitious. Furthermore, upon their arrival at the Islands, they are received by the natives without excessive hostility and they notice that the social development there is acceptable. These events were recorded by Father Chirino, who wrote Relación de las Islas Filipinas, published in 1604, and Antonio de Morga, who published Sucesos en las Islas Filipinas five years later. These are the most important and reliable documents on the Conquest of the Philippines in the sixteenth century. They offer an objective and fascinating description and interpretation of Filipino reality. Both stress the importance of the Philippines, which consider a key element for the Spanish empire, not only as a military base, but also as a mission base from which Catholicism could be spread throughout Asia. The Philippines are considered to be a fundamental element in imperial expansion, Catholic evangelization, and the spreading of Hispanic culture. The significance of Sucesos en las Islas Filipinas lies in the fact that it was the first non-religious history of the Philippines written by a Spaniard. It is also the first interpretation that combines the Spanish colonial world with a clear Renaissance perspective. As in Relación de las Islas Filipinas, 5

“Iglesia nueva y primitiva.”

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in this text the Philippines are always viewed from the perspective of the experiences in Spanish America. Sucesos en las Islas Filipinas emphasizes the social life of the Spanish empire, specifically in the Philippines. It studies the development of the city, hospitals, religious schools, forts and buildings, and the relationship between the Church, the authorities, and the people. Most importantly, however, it describes the Philippines and its inhabitants. Worthy of notice are the descriptions and detailed information in the book. It describes, among other things, the native dress before and after the arrival of the Spaniards, their language, habits, hygiene, food, drinks. It also depicts animals, plants, and products on the Islands. The author admires the intelligence of the aborigines of the island of Luzón, their determination and manual abilities, and their dedication to work in the fields, fishing, trade, and navigation. He also describes their ability as sailors, ship builders, and their variety of sail boats and canoes, along with their knowledge in the use of sailboats and nautical equipment; their ability as fishermen and their extraordinary knowledge of nature and plants; their knowledge of mining; their talent in making ceramics; and women’s excellent skills in making clothes. He talks about different social classes, agriculture, types of government, legal system, sexuality, and religious beliefs. And specifically, he analyzes the power and importance of Islam in the Philippines as well as the successes and failures of the Spanish colonization (Morga 27). Jesuit priest Chirino presents a similar perspective of the Filipino world. His study, although primarily centered on missionary work, presents key elements in order to understand the cultural development of the Islands. For him, the complexities and beauty of Tagalog, the main language of the Islands, reflects this rich culture. Chirino claims that it is a language that possesses qualities of the most important languages at that time: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Spanish—it has the same mystery and obscurity as Hebrew; the articles and accuracy of Greek; the abundance and elegance of Latin; and the politeness of Spanish (Chirino 41-42). The achievements of the religious orders in the cultural and social sectors as a consequence of their strong cooperation with local authorities, their total dedication to their work, their accumulated experiences in Spanish America, and their focus on education were very quickly noticed. They tried to stop tribal wars; abolished human sacrifices and pagan ethic codes; supported the abolition of slavery; contributed to the idea of Filipino identity and its development; built cities, roads, bridges, irrigation systems, and other public works; introduced new plants and animals; established new industries related to the production of silk, salt, fish, coffee, wheat, bananas, ceramic tiles, and bricks (Zaide 190-93).

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In the fields of education and the sciences, they established the bases for a scientific study of the native flora and fauna, and created the study plans that would determine the cultural profile of the Islands. At the beginning, there was a great amount of cooperation between the different religious orders, but later they subdivided into two main groups in regard to their teaching approaches: the Dominicans, who over time became profoundly conservative, and, the Jesuits, who maintained their spirit of research and modernity, defined by a realist and practical sense. In their work as educators, the religious orders founded schools and universities, many of which are still active: the University of San Carlos (1595), the University of Santo Tomás (1611), the College of San Juan de Letrán (1630), the Athenaeum of Manila (1859), the College of San Agustín (1895) in Iloilo, and various colleges for girls, including Santa Isabel (1632), Santa Catalina (1696), Beaterio de la Compañía (1694), San Sebastián (1719), Santa Rosa (1750), La Concordia (1869), Looban (1885), and the Assumption Convent School (1892). (Zaide 194) By the same token, the Franciscans established the first printing press in Tayabas, in 1606, although in 1593, two books on Christian doctrine had already been published: one was in Tagalog and Spanish, the other, in Chinese (Zaide 194). They also stood out thanks to their knowledge and teaching of music, as well as their decisive practical contributions to the sciences. The first sundials were built by Father Juan Sorolla O.S.A. in 1841. But the great legacy of the Church in the Philippines was the Manila observatory, founded by the Jesuits in 1865. It became famous because of the studies carried out on the forecasting of cyclones and earthquakes (Zaide 199). Other missionaries excelled in their studies in botany, pharmacy, physics, chemistry, medicine, and cartography. In the arts, they built hundreds of churches and convents, many of which became authentic “art schools,” where they taught the Filipinos the rudiments of western painting and sculpture (Zaide 202). This colonial society, historically dominated by monastic institutions, would finally undergo a profound crisis. It was helpless when faced by the threat of a new revolutionary spirit led by an enlightened minority, which appeared during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was motivated by the search for a national identity and the desire to apply a liberal political project in the Philippines. Open criticism against the colonial system implied the need to find other ways to insert the Philippines into modernity. Two novels by the Filipino nationalist José Rizal, Noli me Tangere (The Lost Eden, 1887) and El filibusterismo (The Subversive, 1891), are essential to understand Filipino reality at the turn of the century. Their

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revolutionary character, modernizing spirit, documental importance, and historical transcendence are revealed by their influence in the revolution of 1896 in the Philippines and their impact on nationalist movements in the region. The Filipino writers of the nineteenth century, more specifically the romantics Cecilio Apóstol and Fernando Canon, pay tribute to Rizal’s works. Immediately afterwards, modernist poets Isidro Marfori, Claro M. Recto, and Lorenzo Pérez Tuells, simultaneously exalt both the Filipino and the Spanish, a clear revelation that identification with the Spanish cultural world had become weaker. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the separation between the two cultures is complete. In conclusion, although the cultural configuration of the Philippines is undoubtedly connected to the colonization of America, it possesses its own characteristics, especially in regard to the role of the religious orders, who accomplished an enormous cultural mission. This cultural achievement very effectively reflects the evolution of the Spanish Empire. What had begun with great motivation and a creative force, with ambitious and even utopian objectives, turned into a situation of apathy and a lack of projects. It is even more obvious in the Philippines because of the internal clashes within the Church—the spirit of renovation and modernity of the Jesuits versus the conservative and traditionalist spirit of the Dominicans. The result at the end of the nineteenth century is discontent and a sense of alienation for the Filipino intellectuals who rebel against what is clearly perceived as an unfinished project.

Works Cited Baudot, Georges. La pugna franciscana por México. Mexico: CNCA/Alianza, 1990. Costa, H. de la, The Jesuits in the Philippines: 1581-1768. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1961. Esdaile, Charles. Spain in the Liberal Age. From Constitution to Civil War, 1808-1939. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Fernández, Pablo Armando, O.P. Dominicos donde nace el sol: Historia de la provincia del Santísimo Rosario de Filipinas de la orden de predicadores. Barcelona: Yuste, 1958. Lopetegui, León y Félix Zubillaga. Historia de la Iglesia en la América Española. Desde el Descubrimiento hasta comienzos del siglo XIX. Vol. 1. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1965. Morga, Antonio de. Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971.

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Oliver Belmas, Antonio. Síntesis de literatura hispano-americana y filipina contemporánea. Madrid: Gráficas Corrales, 1965. Reines, Bernard. A People’s Hero. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971. Rizal, José. The Lost Eden (Noli me tangere). Trans. María Guerrero León. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. —. The Subversive (El Filibusterismo). Trans. María Guerrero León. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1962. Watson, C.W. “Rizal, the Philippines and 1898.” Spain’s 1898 Crisis. Regenerationsim, Modernism, Post-colonialism. Eds. Joseph Harrison and Alan Hoyle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 279-90. Wright Carr, David Charles. Los franciscanos y su labor educativa en la Nueva España (1523-1580). Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2002. Zaide, Gregorio. Philippine Political and Cultural History. Vol.1. Manila: Education Company, 1974.

THE JAPANESE OXYMORON: A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO THE ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATION OF JAPAN BLAI GUARNÉ UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA / STANFORD UNIVERSITY

This inflamed his rage; he repeated his threatenings, and turning to his companions, spoke with great vehemence in the Japanese language, as I suppose, often using the word Christianos. —Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift Si je veux imaginer un peuple fictif, je puis lui donner un nom inventé, le traiter déclarativement comme un object romanesque, fonder une nouvelle Garabagne, de façon à ne compromettre aucun pays réel dans ma fantaisie (mais alors c’est cette fantaisie même que je compromets dans les signes de la littérature). Je puis aussi, sans prétendre en rien représenter ou analyser la moindre réalité (ce sont les gestes majeurs du discours occidental), prélever quelque part dans le monde (là-bas) un certain nombre de traits (mot graphique et linguistique), et de ces traits former délibérément un système. C’est ce système que j’appellerai: le Japon. —L’empire des signes (1970), Roland Barthes

The analysis of the Orientalist representation of Japan must necessarily stem from being considered in itself an elusive historical construct.1 In this 1

This work was supported by the Commission for Universities and Research; Department of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise; Autonomous Government

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sense, Naoki Sakai argues that “Japan” and “Japanese culture” are made to be equivocal terms in their historical projection. Only in recent times, as Sakai reminds us, has it become possible to vindicate the putative unity of Japanese culture. It is only in the Eighteenth Century that the unities of Japanese culture, language and ethnicity as they are conceived of today were brought into existence. Thus, Sakai points out, “the Japanese were born in the Eighteenth Century” (220). This is not an exceptional case. In Imagined Communities (1983), a key work for understanding modernity, Benedict Anderson has analyzed the imaginary construction of the nation as a specific and finite community, which is fulfilled beyond the direct relationship among its members. For Anderson, all communities are imagined and, therefore, far from the ideological effort to be distinguished by their falsity or genuineness. It is pertinent, then, to consider the style in which they are imagined, since in it lies what makes them real. In this process, identities are constructed in an imaginary way, emphasizing the internal similarities to a degree only proportional to the underlining of their differences with the outside world. Therefore, identity and difference are the fundamental premises of a representational equation that inscribes the gaze in the realm of the imaginary. It is in this imaginary domain that the Western representation of the Orient is built. As warned by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), the Orient only acquires its sense in the discursive articulation that establishes the Western dominance over the rest of the world. That is also what Stuart Hall encapsulates in the formulae of his essay “the West and the Rest” (1992): the ideological construction of Western hegemony in a world order drawn in the hierarchical dichotomies non-West/West, traditional/modern, particular/universal. In other words, a landscape of power imbalances characterizes the Orient by the lack of something (social change, modernization, civil society, etc.), an absence that defines it negatively in relation to the Occident (Turner 5). These are the questions I would like to reflect upon in this essay. I will do it from the perspective of the representation of Japan in the Western of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya). Various parts of this article are based on my essay “La mirada y el (re)conocimiento. La producción jesuítica del saber sobre el Japón en la Europa mediterránea de los siglos XVI y XVII,” presented at the conference “MedAsia: Transmisión del conocimiento científico entre Asia y el Mediterráneo”, IEMed, Casa Asia, CSIC, Barcelona, 27-28 November 2007. I thank its convenor F. Xavier Medina (IEMed, Spain) and participants for their inspiring discussion about my paper. My special thanks go to Luis Calvo (CSIC, Spain) and Harumi Befu (Stanford University) for reflecting on this work.

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imaginary and its implications in Japanese self-perception. For this purpose, I will go through what I denominate the oxymoronic narrative: the paradoxical construction of Japan as a specular image that is simultaneously symmetrical and inverse to the West. Prefigured in the early Jesuit chronicles and reconfigured in the modern scenario of Western imperialism, its analysis confronts us with a discursive formation2 that becomes instrumental in the articulation of the particular “regime of truth” of Orientalism. It confronts us with the formation of a complex representational practice in which very different historical periods are involved. Thus, discontinuities compose, at the same level as regularities, a narrative practice –fragmentary and disperse– in which what is said is just as relevant as what is omitted in the representation of Japan and the construction of the West.

1. Lasting Precedents The first representations of Japan in the European imaginary of the Other can be found at the end of the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, the fabulous stories by Marco Polo established the description of the mythical Cipango as an enigmatic and mysterious civilization. It is a fascinating cultural puzzle that would be picked up again two centuries later in the chronicles of the explorers and writers Jorge Álvares, Fernâo Mendes Pinto and Tomé Pires, among others. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jesuit missionaries would find in the essential language of paradox the ideal means to construe a Japan embedded in contradictions and antagonism toward Europe.3 In the historical consideration of this image, the revision of two main texts is illuminating: Sumario de las cosas de Japón (1583, 1592) (Summary of the Things of Japan 1583, 1592) by the Father Visitor Alessandro Valignano, and the Tratado em que se contem muito susinta e abreviadamente algumas contradiçôes e diferenças de custumes antre a gente de Europa e esta provincia de Japâo (Brief Treatise on the Contradictions and Differences in Customs Between the people of Europe 2

À la manière of the Foucauldian binomial power/knowledge (see Blai Guarné, 2005). 3 Michael Cooper (1965), Endymion Porter Wilkinson (1981), Peter N. Dale (1986), John Ashmead (1987), Ian Littlewood (1996) have reflected upon the paradoxical construction of Japan in the Western imaginary of the Orient. In this article, I take their contributions as a starting point in an approximation to the representational turn that involves the resignification of the oxymoronic narrative in forming the Nihonjinron discourse.

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and this Province of Japan, 1585) by Father Luís Fróis. The interest of these works lies in their double dimension, instrumental and representational, as a prime example of a political knowledge used to develop the Jesuit mission in Japan as well as its exposition in Europe. The Sumario is an extensive report exclusively dedicated to Japan that Valignano submitted to the Jesuit General Claudio Aquaviva in 1583. After three years in the field (1579-1582), the Visitor considered it necessary to draw up a specific work, persuaded that “In its qualities and customs, in its things, and in our matters and modes of living, as well as in everything else, Japan is so different and opposite to India and Europe, that there is no way of understanding its reality, and what its government should be, unless a very clear, distinct and abundant treatise is drawn to this purpose” (2).4 Thus, from the very Proemio, the text expresses the need to understand Japan as a reality set apart from all the rest, far from being considered “an accessory entity to the Province of India” (2)5, as Valignano himself proposed in 1577.6 The object of informing Rome about a territory considered a vice-province, but organized de facto as a province, would compel Valignano to write this new Sumario with the explicit aim of: [given that the things that affect Japan are] “so many, so new, and so different and contrary to what could be imagined in Europe [...] they must be considered well done although they are not fully understood” (3). Therefore, “when Japan is dealt with in Rome, do not be surprised about the things that are heard, but it should be understood that the determination of many of such things should be reserved to those who govern Japan” (3).7

4

All the translations from this work by Alessandro Valignano are mine. “Japón en sus cualidades y costumbres, y en las cosas, negocios y modos de vivir de los nuestros y en todo lo demás, es tan diferente y contrario de la India y de Europa, que no se puede en alguna manera entender cuál sea su estado y cuál haya de ser su gobierno, si no se hiciere de él un muy claro, distinto y copioso tratado” (2).

5

“una cosa accesoria a la Provincia de la India” (2). Sumario de la India (Summary of India) (1577), corrected in a final version in August 1580 as Sumario de las cosas que pertenecen a la Provincia de la India Oriental (Summary of the Things that Belong to the Province of Eastern India). 7 “tantas, tan nuevas y tan diferentes y contrarias de lo que se puede en Europa imaginar […] se den por bien hechas aunque no del todo se entiendan” (3); “cuando en Roma se trata de Japón no se extrañen las cosas que se oyen, antes se entienda que la determinación de muchas de ellas se ha de reservar para los que gobernaren a Japón” (3). 6

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Therefore, a political will seems to permeate Valignano’s account when he legitimizes his own situation by presenting the state of the mission. Characterizing Japan as a real missionary challenge will be a first-rate representational strategy in the narration of a unique land where actions will have to be so exceptionally proportional to its nature that “sometimes I falter when it seems to me that my work will be in vain, somehow losing my hope of being able to relate the true concept of Japanese matters in such a way that it can be perceived in Europe” (5)8. This political will finds in the antithetic description of Japan a means sensitive to expressing the difficulty of fitting his impressions into the premises of the sixteenth-century European world, and the classifications laid down between “Christian civilization” and “Heathen barbarism.” Certainly, the society found by Valignano had many of the elements generally attributed to barbarians: geographical remoteness, bizarre and strange habits (in his view), and obvious ignorance of the “True Faith,” but the presence of these elements was disconcerting in a culture that was sensitive to the arts and organized in complex forms of government, and had religious institutions and a high sense of honour. Obviously, all these elements were assumed as exclusive characteristics of European civilization. The complexity of the new-found culture, and the ability of their chroniclers to understand it, would soon reveal the difficulty of applying the civilization/barbarism dichotomy to the interpretation of Japan.9 The modernity of an insight capable of recognizing civility in the 8

“que a veces me desmayo pareciéndome que será mi trabajo en balde, perdiendo en cierta manera la esperanza de poder de tal manera declarar que se perciban en Europa el concepto verdadero de las cosas de Japón” (5). 9 In the words of Andrew C. Ross, a capability that would be “betrayed” later on in Europe. “The Europe of the eighteenth century, whether Catholic, Protestant or Deist, was not ready for it and could not understand it. To the arrogant imperialist expansionism of nineteenth-century Europe it was nonsense” (Ross 1994: 206). “The arrival of the Portuguese in Japan ousted two inveterate fibs for Europeans. Because, first of all, Japan was a country with cultural standards never lower than those of the West, except that everything was done the other way around; and second, it was a country with a moral level never inferior, but where they did not believe in Christ. On the other hand, the arrival of barbarians from the South challenged two prevalent apodictic assumptions in Japan. In the first place, there could be a great civilization in the world coming from elsewhere besides China; and secondly, there could be a religion in the world unknown to China, as sublime as Buddhism” (Cabezas 42; my translation). (“La llegada de los portugueses a Japón desbancó dos inveterados infundios de los europeos. Porque, lo primero, Japón era un país con un nivel de cultura no inferior al de Occidente, pero donde todo se hacía al revés; y lo segundo, era un país con un nivel de moralidad no

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Other, and to advocate for a cultural adaptation, even for an “adaptacionist” strategy of evangelization will turn Japan into a cultural oxymoron, to the extreme of instituting this image as a keystone in its narration.10 They have also other rites and customs so different from those of all other nations that it would seem they studied on purpose how not to conform with any other people. It is not possible to imagine what happens with this, because it can really be said about Japan that it is a world upside down, from what it is like in Europe, because everything is so different and contrary, that they hardly coincide with us in anything [...] the difference and contrary nature is so great that it cannot be written nor understood. (Valignano 33-34)11 Just as we remove our cap or hat and we stand up to honour those we see, they, on the contrary, remove their shoes and sit down, considering it highly impolite to welcome someone on their feet. We enjoy having our hair fair and our teeth white, but they all dye both things with ink, making them black, leaving to lower or sickly people white teeth and fair hair. We mount our horses from the left [...] they do it the other way around, mounting from the right. Women ride horses like men do, and when they inferior, pero donde no se creía en Cristo. Viceversa, la llegada de los bárbaros del sur lanzó un reto a dos apodícticos presupuestos prevalentes en Japón. Porque, lo primero, podía existir en el mundo una gran civilización que no fuese originaria de China; y lo segundo, podía haber en el mundo una religión, desconocida en China, tan sublime como el budismo” [42]). 10 Parallel to the insight of De las Casas, Sahagún or Acosta in other latitudes. As ascertained by Lisón Tolosana (156), the customs of the Japanese could be viewed as strange or even repulsive, but not enough so to dissuade Valignano from asserting that “because we live among them, it is necessary that we adapt ourselves to them” (“porque vivimos entre ellos es necesario que nos acomodemos”). He thus proposed some sort of “culturalizing” project that would not be alien to “bonzenizing” the missionaries. “We are the bonzes of the Christian religion” (“Somos los bonzos de la religión cristina”), would write Valignano (1581) in his Advertimentos e avisos acerca dos costumes e catangues de Jappâo, a statement that will ring loudly in Rome and will mean applying a pragmatic rationale in adapting actions through imitation of the Other. 11 “Tienen también otros ritos y costumbres tan diferentes de todas las otras naciones, que parece que estudiaron de propósito cómo no se conformar con ninguna gente. No se puede imaginar lo que acerca de esto pasa, porque realmente se puede decir que Japón es un mundo al revés de cómo corre en Europa, porque es en todo tan diferente y contrario que casi en ninguna cosa se conforman con nosotros [...] es tan grande la diferencia y contrariedad que no se puede escribir ni entender” (33-34).

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have their train with them–ladies, maidens, and other women–they all go before them, and their servants behind them, contrary to what women are used to doing in Europe. (Valignano 36-38)12

The exquisite civility of the Japanese, their refined habits, the complexity of their ritual practices, the density of their social relations, their intellectual capacity, self-respect, and sense of hierarchy fascinated Valignano to the point of placing Europe at a lower level in comparison. Although it is true that practices such as abortion and infanticide, the relative appreciation of virginity and criticism of sodomy, or the cruelty attributed to their punishments and death penalties leave him flabbergasted, bringing back to him images of other peoples considered heathens, his characterization is still far away from the beastly and immoral behaviour attributed to Mozambicans, Malabarians, and Indians (Lisón Tolosana 79). In Valignano’s works.13 the formulation of a contrasting narrative– traditionally used in the description of non-European peoples–would acquire specific features in the representation of Japan as opposed to Europe, but without being able to qualify it as “savage” or “barbarian.” These contradictions shaped a society where, although “the difference is so big and contrary in nature that it cannot be written nor understood,” its people were “of much prudence and order,” far from behaving like “barbarians,”14 and in spite of “going the other way around from Europe in everything” (Valignano 34). All this will lead Valignano to conclude that he stands before “the most sensitive and honest people found in the world” 12

“Como nosotros quitamos la gorra o sombrero y nos levantamos en pie para honrar a los que vemos, así ellos por lo contrario se quitan el zapato y se sientan, teniendo en suma descortesía el recibir a alguno en pie. Nosotros gustamos de tener los cabellos rubios y los dientes blancos, más ellos así los unos como los otros tiñen con tinta haciéndolos negros, dejando para la gente baja y abatida los dientes blancos y cabellos rubios. Nosotros cabalgamos en caballo por la parte izquierda [...] ellos lo hacen al contrario cabalgando por la parte derecha. Las mujeres andan a caballo como los hombres, y cuando llevan su acompañamiento las señoras, mozas y doncellas y otras mujeres, todas van delante de ellos y los criados atrás, al revés de lo que usan las mujeres en Europa” (36-38). 13 Also in Fróis: “And many of their customs are so remote, strange and farremoved from ours, that it seems hard to believe that we can have so much opposition from people who are so refined, vivacious of spirit, and have such natural knowledge as they do” (31) (“Y son muchas de sus costumbres tan remotas, peregrinas y alejadas de las nuestras que casi parece increíble poder tener tanta oposición en gentes de tanta fineza, vivacidad de espíritu y saber natural como ellos tienen” [31]). . 14 Something that “did not appal” (34) (“no era de espantar” [34]).

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In 1585, Luís Fróis writes a work revealingly entitled Tratado em que se contem muito susinta e abreviadamente algumas contradiçôes e diferenças de custumes antre a gente de Europa e esta provincia de Japâo (Brief Treatise on the Contradictions and Differences in Customs between the people of Europe and this Province of Japan). Fróis, interpreter of Valignano between 1582 and 1594, will bequeath us a rare text. It is a minor one if we compare it to his História de Japam (History of Japan) but highly interesting in the imaginary construction of the Other: “a treatise that contains in a concise and in brief manner some of the contradictions and differences in customs between the people of Europe and of this province of Japan” (Fróis 31).17 This a short piece was written in a direct, precise, and sober style, using the contrast of laconic statements concatenated in staccato. The text links its pedagogical role–as a travel notebook to prepare the new missionaries sent to Japan–to the antithetic characterization of customs, ceremonies, social practices, eating and dressing habits of those qualified as “Them,” against a not less diffused “Us,” referring to the Europe of the religious people (“Portuguese,” “Spaniards,” “Italians”). In spite of being an exercise in systematic comparison, Fróis manages to articulate a text close to a certain equity. It is an “ethnographic work,” up to a point, which is closer to a rationale than to a moral. We can find its immediate precedent in the thought of Francis Xavier, his successor Cosme de Torres, and Valignano himself: We go into houses with our shoes on; in Japan this is discourteous, and shoes must be left at the door. (40) In Europe the supreme honour and wealth for young women is their excess of modesty and the inviolate 15 “tan grande la diferencia y contrariedad que no se puede escribir ni entender”; “de mucha prudencia y policía”; “gente bárbara”; “en todo van al revés de Europa” (34); “la más puntuosa gente y de más honra que se halla en el mundo” (7). 16 “es la mejor [gente] que hasta agora está descubierta, y me parece que entre gente infiel no se hallará otra que gane a los japanes. Es gente de muy buena conversación, y generalmente buena y no maliciosa, gente de honra mucha a maravilla” (369; my translation). 17 “tratado en que se contienen muy sucinta y abreviadamente algunas contradicciones y diferencias de costumbres entre la gente de Europa y esta provincia de Japón” (31). The translations of this work by Fróis are mine.

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cloister of their purity; the women of Japan take no notice of virginal purity, and neither lose honour nor marriage for not having it. (45) It is not very common among us that women can write; honourable women in Japan would consider themselves ashamed if they were not able to do so. (51) Among us, it is customary to thrash and punish our children; in Japan this is very rare, and they only reprimand them. (56) We bury our dead; the Japanese burn them in most cases. (70) People in Europe delight in eating grilled and baked fish; the Japanese take pleasure in eating it raw. (74) We write across from the left to the right hand; they do it from the top down, and always from their right to their left hand. (98) We hold printing as something special; they use handwriting for nearly everything, because printing does not fit in with their script. (98) Our walls are of stone, lime or brick; those in Japan have paper doors. (102) People in Europe sleep high up in beds or cots; people in Japan sleep low down on 18 tatamis, with which the house is carpeted. (103) (Fróis)

This opposite characterization of Japan as a unique and paradoxical land would turn the missionary effort into a challenge made-to-measure of the Jesuits, as its European interpreters. Thus, the instrumental knowledge compiled in these works will be cross-linked with a political aim in a narrative that is in keeping with the opposition of Valignano to sharing the work of evangelization with other religious orders (Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian). In the same way, it is also possible to interpret his organization of the Embassy of the Christian lords of Kyushu19 (15821590) to the Courts of Philip II and Pope Gregory XIII. Somehow, the embassy constituted a representational punctum in the European 18

“Nosotros entramos en las casas calzados; en Japón eso es una descortesía y hay que dejar los zapatos en la puerta. (40) En Europa la suprema honra y riqueza de las mujeres jóvenes es la pudibuntez y el claustro inviolado de su pureza; las mujeres de Japón no hacen ningún caso de la limpieza virginal, ni pierden honra, por no tenerla, ni matrimonio. (45) Entre nosotros no es muy corriente que las mujeres sepan escribir; las mujeres honorables en Japón se tienen por humilladas si no lo saben hacer. (51) Entre nosotros es habitual azotar y castigar a los hijos; en Japón es cosa muy rara y solamente los reprenden. (56) Nosotros enterramos nuestros difuntos; los japoneses en su mayor parte los queman. (70) La gente de Europa se deleita con el pescado asado y cocido; los japoneses huelgan mucho más de comerlo crudo. (74) Nosotros escribimos al través, de la mano izquierda a la derecha; ellos a lo largo, y siempre de la mano derecha a la izquierda. (98) Nosotros tenemos la impresión por algo especial; ellos casi en todo usan la escritura manual, porque la imprenta no se acomoda bien a sus caracteres. (98) Nuestros tabiques son de piedra y cal o ladrillo; los de Japón de puertas de papel. (102) La gente de Europa duerme en alto, en lechos o catres; la de Japón en bajo sobre los tatamis con que la casa está esterada” (Fróis 103). 19 The daimyô Ôtomo Yoshishige, Arima Harunobu and Ômura Sumitada.

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imagining of Japan.20 Valignano had a double purpose: presenting in Europe the relevance of his work in Japan and, at the same time, making the Japanese see with their own eyes the power and splendour of Christian Europe. As Moran reminds us, the young ambassadors who on that day in March 1585 had ridden in splendid Japanese dress through the center of Rome to meet the Pope, marched six years later through the streets of Kyoto in sumptuously European attire, to be received by the most powerful man of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was avid to hear their news. In this intersection of gazes, after being received in the Spanish Court, the young men were greeted by the choir of the Zaragoza cathedral with the Offertory verse for the mass of the Epiphany (Moran 11). The popular imagination connected this to the tradition of the Magi, the three wise men from the Orient who, thanks to the missionaries’ efforts, paid their homage in the heart of Christendom. Bestowed with all kinds of attentions by two Popes and the monarch of the vastest empire,21 their visit inversely reproduced a cultural encounter depicted in the Namban (“southern barbarians”) art of Japan. In the Namban-byôbu (“Namban folding screens”) the disembarking of missionaries and noblemen from the Kuro-fune (“black ships”), followed by their court of African slaves and coolies carrying rich presents and marching in procession with exotic animals, establish an imaginary dialogue with a similar retinue of Japanese noblemen ready to welcome them (Boxer 200-01). This was a ambivalent process in which the images of Europe and Japan were embedded and developed within a dialogical relationship that swung between fascination and horror of the Other.22 These mutual imaginings find also a significant expression in what must certainly have been one of the main technological imports brought to Japan by the Jesuits, together with firearms–the movable type printing press.23 Over one hundred titles came out of the presses of Nagasaki and 20

Precedent of the Hasekura Embassy of Date Masamune, daimyô of Sendai (1613-1620), organized by Franciscan friars. 21 Gregory XIII and his successor Sixtus V, who ascended to the papal throne on 1 May 1585, during the embassy’s visit to Rome. 22 In that sense, Bailey points out how in the Namban-byôbu, “Their view of Europe was in many ways heavily filtered indeed. In an era when lords and traders alike devoted their energies to controlling the annual Portuguese silk ship, these panels are an appropriate reflection of the obsession of the day. Like ‘peep shows’, the later ones satisfied the tastes of a xenophobic society at once fascinated and horrified by foreigners” (80). 23 The printing press was bought by Valignano in 1586, probably in Lisbon or Rome, and carried over to Japan via Goa and Macao. The Mission had at least two more printing presses. These were probably built in Japan, one in Nagasaki around

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Kyoto, which were committed to publishing devotional texts as much as grammar and linguistic works in Latin, Portuguese, and Japanese of the Kirishitan-ban (“Christian publications”).24 Among all of them, those that stand out are the ones printed on topics that brought together the European, Japanese and Chinese literary traditions, as was the case of the Feiqe no monogatari (Heike monogatari, 1592), the first printed work in Japanese literature; the collection of Chinese maxims of the Qincuxu (Kinkushû, 1593); the poetry anthology of the Royei. Zafit (Wakan rôeishû, 1600); the Japanese epic of the Taiheiki (Taiheiki nukiyaki) (Chibbett 61-67); and the Japanese edition of Aesop’s Fables (Esopu no fabulas, 1593), and Cicero’s Speeches (1590-1593) (Boxer 192-93). The expulsion of the Jesuits would imply a break up in the Western characterization of Japan. Once the period of Civil Wars that had devastated Japan, Sengoku, was overcome, these religious men went from being considered useful allies to being seen a subversive presence for the isolationist policy of the Tokugawa Bakufu (“Tokugawa Government”), which was determined to eliminate any kind of potential dissidence. After the edicts against Christianity issued by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1587, his successor in government, Tokugawa Ieyasu would dictate in 1614 a ban to expel the missionaries and to forbid their presence. This was the beginning of a persecution that would be continued by his son, Hidetada, and his grandson, Iemitsu. From then on, and according to the edicts (1633-1639) on national “seclusion” of the country, Sakoku, the only Europeans authorized to deal with Japan were the Dutch traders, but they were confined to the small artificial island of Deshima, in Nagasaki harbour. Through that tiny trading enclave, the Dutch translations of European medical treatises would give way to the intellectual flourishing of the Rangaku (“Dutch learning”) that would considerably influence Japanese

1600, and another one in Kyoto in 1610, accountable for the printing of the Contemptus Mundi. All of them could print European alphabet types as well as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabary, as well as the most common kanji characters. Despite this, the printing technique using movable type would show to be inferior to the traditional method with wood blocks, and the Jesuit influence in this field would be short-lived and limited to only the first four decades of the Seventeenth Century (see Boxer (1951), Chibbett (1977), and Kornicki (1998). 24 The Dictionarium Latino Lusitanicum ac Iaponicum (1595), the dictionary Racuyoxu (Rakuyôshû, 1598-99) and the linguistic studies by Father Joâo Rodrigues, Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam (1603-4), Arte da Lingoa de Iapam (1604-8) and Arte Breve da Lingoa Japoa (1620), printed in Macao after the missionaries were expelled from Japan.

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thought until the forced opening of the country by Commodore Perry of the United States Navy in 1859.

2. Imperial Rise Ironically, what became a prevailing influence was the paradoxical characterization of Japan in the Western imaginary of the Orient, which was prefigured in the “contradictions” laid out by Valignano and Fróis. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Guarné, 2008), the fact that this discourse had penetrated in a deep and lasting manner throughout time has turned out to be particularly interesting. Ultimately, setting a pattern of formal correspondence between Europe and Japan implied recognizing a relationship of equivalence, something that considerably bordered the weighing up of Western centrality in the world. After Japan’s forced opening in the second half of the nineteenth century, the quick Westernization of the country would turn it into a unique presence within the international order. In such a context, the imperial imaginary would have to articulate particular forms of domination that could fit Japan within the idea of “Orient.” Stereotyping Japan in terms of an unwonted, peculiar, and paradoxical characterization would thus form a fruitful strategy to embed its image into the political order articulated by Orientalism “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3). Therefore, the impossibility to capture a scenario that obstinately eluded the Orientalist imaginary would give way, once more, to an absolute estrangement in which Japan would be “Orientalized” “not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered common place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be —that is, submitted to being—made Oriental” (Said 5-6; Italics in the original.) The celebrated topsy-turvydom entry included in Things Japanese (1890), a minor work by the scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain that became a best-seller in his time, is witness to the intellectual reification of this extravagant image. Once more, the oxymoronic narrative became the perfect means for the imaginary representation of an inverse world in which the sublime and the grotesque seemed possible. From then on, the description of Japan as an amazingly strange land where everything seems to appear ‘topsy-turvy’ will shape a story persistently reproduced up to date. This will be an imaginary story written between admiration and rejection, between the seduction by the peculiar and the uneasiness for what is equivalent:

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Japanese books begin at what we should call the end, the word finis coming where we put the title-page. The footnotes are printed at the top of the page, and the reader inserts his marker at the bottom. […] The whole method of treating horses is the opposite of ours. […] The Japanese do not say “north-east,” “south-west,” but “east-north,” “west-south.” They carry babies, not in their arms, but on their backs.. […] Japanese keys turn in instead of out, and Japanese carpenters saw and plane towards, instead of away from, themselves. […] Japanese women needle their thread instead of threading their needle, and that instead of running the needle through the cloth, they hold it still and run the cloth upon it. Another lady, long resident in Tôkyô, says that the impulse of her Japanese maids is always to sew on cuffs, frills, and other similar things, topsy-turvy and inside out. If that is not the ne plus ultra of contrariety, what is? […] Strangest of all, after a bath the Japanese dry themselves with a damp towel! (Chamberlain 481-82)

In that same period, the books and travel stories by Henry Adams (1858-1891), William Gray Dixon (1882), Arthur H. Crow (1883), Rudyard Kipling (1889), Douglas Sladen (1892, 1903, 1904), J. Llewelyn Thomas (1895), Henry Theophilus. Finck (1896), George Waldo Browne (1901), Henry Norman (1908),25 the Japanese tales of Lafcadio Hearn and the exotic novels of Pierre Loti (1887, 1889, 1905)26 will narrate a Japan only understandable in its essential contrast with the West. As in The Mikado, the comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan (1885), their works will represent a “Japanized” Japan in a tableau vivant of samurais and geishas in kimono that will elliptically allude to the Western society. In the middle of the twentieth century, this indirect characterization of the West will be found once more, epitomized in North-American society, 25

The letters of Henry Adams (1858-1891); the books by William Gray Dixon (1882), The Land of the Morning: An Account of Japan and Its People; Arthur H. Crow (1883), Highways and Byeways in Japan; the writings of Rudyard Kipling (1889); Douglas Sladen (1892), The Japs at Home, Queer Things about Japan (1903), and More Queer Things about Japan (1904), written together with Norma Lorimer; J. Llewelyn Thomas (1895), Journeys among the Gentle Japs in the Summer of 1895; Henry Theophilus Finck (1896), Lotos-Time in Japan; George Waldo Browne (1901), Japan: the Place and the People; and Sir Henry Norman (1908), The Real Japan. 26 Pen name of Louis Marie Julien Viaud. Works such as Madame Chrysanthème (1887), Japoneries d’automne (1889), La troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905). It is worth mentioning that Madame Chrysanthème (1887) would give way to one of the most powerful Orientalist images, the Western myth of Madame Butterfly in its various versions, such as the musical adaptation by André Messager (1893), John Luther Long’s story (1898), the theatre version by David Belasco (1900), and the well-known opera by Puccini (1904).

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when the imminent end of the Pacific War will make it necessary to prepare the U.S. administration of a vanquished Japan. Again, the oxymoronic narrative would be the starting point, even the condition of possibility to understand a paradoxical culture of aesthetes and warriors, as refined in growing chrysanthemums as it is brutal in the art of forging katanas, following the image proposed by Ruth Benedict (1946) in her popular work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: During the past seventy-five years since Japan’s closed doors were opened, the Japanese have been described in the most fantastic series of “but also’s” ever used for any nation in the world. […] All these contradictions, however, are the warp and woof of books on Japan. They are true. Both the sword and the chrysanthemum are a part of the picture. The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their misstep. (Benedict: 1-2)

As Clifford Geertz points out in his revision of Benedict’s classic, as the Japanese cease to appear strange, North-Americans are the ones who begin to look like that, to the extreme of “what started out as a familiar sort of attempt to unriddle oriental mysteries ends up, only too successfully, as a deconstruction, avant la lettre, of occidental clarities. At the close, it is, as it was in Patterns of Culture, us that we wonder about. On what, pray tell, do our certainties rest? Not much, apparently, save that they’re ours” (Geertz, 1988: 121-22). Up to a point, the incitement to recognize one’s own difference in the reflection of the Other, to which Benedict pushes us, fulfils a circular and autopoietic discourse that would end up getting involved in the self-image of Japan. This influence might seem surprising if we consider that Benedict wrote her work with the explicit purpose of understanding “the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle” (1), as part of a research project commissioned by the Office of War Information (OWI).. Conceived from the theoretical perspective of culture and personality studies, Benedict analyzes the Japanese national character in search of “what makes Japan a nation of Japanese” (13). The question of national identity becomes, therefore, a keystone in her research approach. One should undoubtedly take into account this element when trying to understand the popularity of this book in Japan (See Fukui [1999] and Kent [1999]), as a society deeply interested in the issue of national identity

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since its forced inscription in the Western world. The impossibility to do any fieldwork in Japan made Benedict analyze interrogation reports to prisoners of war, literary works, films, newspapers, and surveys on Japanese culture.27 Altogether it became the basis for a study that gives the reader the impression of grasping a well-defined image of the Japanese culture.28 In spite of its reifying character–or rather because of it--during the post-war period the book was seen as an example of how Japan was being perceived in the United States and, by extension, in the Western world. This is probably one of the most significant factors to understand its popularity in Japan. As the anthropologist Tamotsu Aoki (1990) points out, in the desolate days after the war, when identity certainty became more necessary than ever, the polar contrast between the United States and Japan would contribute to place the defeated in an equal plane with the occupier. This dimension would confirm Benedict’s study as the first post-war work on Nihonjinron or Nihonbunkaron (“discourse on the Japanese and on Japanese culture”) thought in relating the uniqueness of Japan.

3. Japanese Resignification Defined in the essential contrast between the no-less essential notions of “the West” and “Japan,” the Nihonjinron is a discourse on Japanese identity with the aim of ascertaining the ontological principles of “Japaneseness” (Guarné, 2006). Its representational practice articulates the oxymoronic narrative in a totalizing definition (racial, cultural, and political) that encompasses all aspects of Japanese culture, from its ethnic origins to its social structure, including going through the psychological experience of its actors, the Nihonjin (“the Japanese”), who are characterized in a discourse of inclusions and exclusions. Reproduced in academic studies as well as in the popular media from the beginning of modernity and massively in the second half of the twentieth century, the influence of Nihonjinron thought is particularly deep in the production of knowledge on contemporary Japan, in and out of its frontiers. In its narrative, the systematic reproduction of stereotypical images on the mystical communion with nature, linguistic uniqueness, racial and cultural homogeneity of a group-oriented society operates as a persistent scheme in the normative prescription of what the “Japanese culture” is. It is thus an 27

This is an example of the methodological approach of the study of culture at a distance (see Mead and Métraux 2000). 28 For Japanese criticism of Benedict’s study, see Kent (1999).

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ideology, “a doctrine and a myth about the constitution of Japanese culture, people, and history, constructed particularly to prove–at least to the satisfaction of the producers of this genre—Japan’s difference form the West, if not from the rest of the world” (Befu, 1993: 126). Determined according to the national borders of the geopolitical entity of modern Japan, the historical projection of those images covers up the constant reinvention of tradition in an ideological fantasy–in Slavoj Žižek’s words–forged in the particular visual regime of the Nihonjinron imaginary. A perfect isomorphism binds together the notions of nation, race and culture, defined as equivalent and exchangeable entities in a chain of homologies that are confirmed and reinforced univocally.29 Thus, the Nihonjinron becomes a hegemonic discourse in hiding difference under the ideas of cultural purity, homogeneity, and uniqueness. As in the imaginary là-bas in which Roland Barthes placed Japan in 1970, the Japanese culture rises as an exception, unique and singular, shrouded by an opacity veil that makes it exotic to the West at the same time that it essentializes its internal image. Therefore, the Nihonjinron production shapes a sort of “cultural essentialism” in the task of representing Japan as a particularism that confirms what implicitly is assumed as the norm: the universalism of the West. In the words of Harumi Befu: Nihonjinron and other discourses of identity result from contrasting and comparing the self with others […] For the Japanese, the “Other” for this contrast and comparison has been by and large the West. […] Perry’s gunboat diplomacy, which forced open Japan’s ports, was indeed a euphemism for the symbolic rape of Japan. Japan was painfully made aware of the West’s military and economic superiority. This caused Japan to look to the West as its most significant Other that could not be ignored. Moreover, throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the West maintained a hegemonic dominance throughout the world. All the more, 29

As Yoshio Sugimoto points out: “Nihonjinron proponents build their arguments on a triangular, three-way and tautological equation, which one might call the N=E=C equation, between N (nationality), E (ethnicity) and C (culture). These three dimensions are used as synonyms. The equation makes the Nihonjinron discourse both exclusivist and assimilationist. It is exclusivist in assuming that the Yamato race is the genuine Japanese race and in excluding Okinawans, Ainus, resident Koreans and other minority groups from its demographic bases. The equation is assimilationist in implying that those who have learned and acquired Japanese culture are the authentic Japanese. The direction of the causal arrow points from cultural characteristics to demographic attributes, not the other way around. As a logical consequence of this model, for example, Ainus are supposed to be able to become Japanese once they are acculturated into Japanese culture” (33) (From the English original article published in Catalan at Guarné in 2006).

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Japan came under the West’s hegemonic spell. For these two major reasons, for Japan, “the Other” almost always has meant the West. A consequence of this fact is that the Nihonjinron as we know it is not an objective account of who the Japanese are. Instead, it is an account of how 30 Japan contrasts with the West. (Befu 18)

The Nihonjinron resignification of the oxymoronic narrative, rather than a critical revision, constitutes in this way a tacit acceptance of the Orientalist imaginary. However, its essential dramatization of identity does not contribute to the stereotyping of the Other, but to the "alterization" of Japan, in a sort of “self-Orientalism.” It is not random that the foundational works of the Nihonjinron literature were written in English in order to explain the Japanese culture to a Western audience. That is the case of Japan and the Japanese (1894) by Kanzô Uchimura, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899) by Inazô Nitobe, and The Book of Tea (1906) by Kakuzô (Tenshin) Okakura. Written in parallel to the travel books by Western authors referred to above, it would be their success in Europe and America what convinced the Japanese that “they could present themselves to the West in this manner” (Funabiki 25). As Funabiki points out: One of the reasons why these books are still read by the Japanese, particularly the three works written in English, is precisely because they were written in that language, were read by westerners, and got their support. That is to say, for having been distinguished with the prestige of being read abroad. [...] In a sense, these works give foreign readers an impression of Japan easy to get used to, and they create an outstanding image of a society and culture easily comprehended. Thus, these works keep being read by foreigners and, therefore, also by the Japanese, something that reinforces their static and essential view of Japan, or perhaps an image fitting the Orientalist perception of Westerners. (Funabiki 25-26) 31

Other books, such as The Structure of “Iki” (Iki no kôzô, 1930) by Kuki Shûzô or Climate and Culture (Fûdo, 1935) by Tetsurô Watsuji, also considered Western reception in their writing. Something similar took place in the social context of the economic miracle with the publishing of the English version in 1970 of the best-seller Japanese Society (Tate shakai no ningen kankei: Tan’itsu shakai no riron, 1967) by the anthropologist Chie Nakane. Her insights on Japan as a group-oriented society, which turns its respect for hierarchy and social harmony into its 30 31

From the English original article published in Catalan at Guarné in 2006. From the Japanese original article published in Catalan at Guarné in 2006.

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main asset, is in keeping with the most popular common places of the Nihonjinron discourse. Similarly, the psychoanalyst Takeo Doi analyzed, in his Amae no kôzô (1971), the idea of dependence referred in the Japanese notion of amae, as the psychology underlying Japanese groupism.32 Thus, these psychological, social, and political phenomena can be understood as a symptom of an unwonted and ineffable culture that corroborates in every experience the uniqueness of the Geist, of the Japanese ethos. By means of this cultural production, the Nihonjinron builds up a discursive entity called Japan in which reality becomes accessory and the community is imagined in terms close to those pointed out by Anderson. Japan is thus presented in a factual, natural and self-evident way by reproducing the beliefs of the national mythology of Japaneseness. In such a way, the self-reflexive gaze, the desire to know oneself that the Nihonjinron displays in tropes and synecdoches shapes the circularity of a self-referential discourse that is legitimated in its own practice. Thus, eventually, the Nihonjinron thought becomes a systematic and penetrating ideology, the efficacy of which is proportional only to its capacity to hide the discursive strategies through which it operates.

4. As a Conclusion: Mutual Complicities “But there is nothing more surprising in this than in the fact that Racine and Molière were contemporaries, or that the same people who arrange chrysanthemums cast swords” wrote Geertz (1973: 452) making reference to the title of Benedict’s book, and inciting us to understand that all identities are born out of a paradoxical relationship with a dialogic Other. There is no hiatus between essentializing the self and making the alien exotic. A common strategy operates in both–stereotyping a difference attributed or assumed in a symbolic relationship. Without ever having been formally colonized, Japan was forced to join Western modernity and decisively opted out for it to become its most outstanding disciple. Its acceptance confirmed the superiority of the West as much as it contributed to unsettle its hegemony by making use of its own arms. The specificity of the Nihonjinron discourse lies precisely in 32

As John Lie points out “First, both works [by Nakane and Doi] lack comparative perspective and unduly emphasize Japanese distinctiveness. In creating a polar contrast between Japan and the West, they reify and homogenize the West and ignore altogether non-European societies. The West appears as an antipode of Japan […] Secondly, both works are ahistorical and reify Japan and Japanese as static essences” (Lie 255).

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this representation of Japan as a counter-image of the West. This is a paradoxical image, deeply rooted, articulated in a tacit dialogue of mutual complicities and reproaches that in James Clifford’s words “permit us to see the functioning of a more complex dialectic by means of which a modern culture continuously constitutes itself through its ideological constructs of the exotic” (272). Last episode of the oxymoronic narrative, the Nihonjinron thought resignifies in this way the Orientalist discourse, articulating an essential commentary on Japan that reproduces as much as contests Western hegemony in the world.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1991. Aoki, Tamotsu. “‘Kiku to katana’ no seikaku.” “Nihonbunkaron” no hen’yô: Sengo Nihon no bunka to aidentitî (The Transformation of “Nihonbunkaron”: Post-War Japanese Culture and Identity). Tokyo: Chûôkôron Shinsha, 1990. 31-55 Ashmead, John. The idea of Japan 1853-1895: Japan as Described by American and Other Travellers from the West. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987. Bailey, Gauvier Alexander. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773. University of Toronto Press, 2001. Barthes, Roland. L’empire des signes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Beasley, William G. Japan Encounters the Barbarian. Japanese Travelers in America and Europe. New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1995. Befu, Harumi. “Aspectes de la identitat nacional japonesa.” Identitat i representació cultural: perspectives des del Japó. Ed. Blai Guarné. Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya 29 (Dec. 2006): 8-19. —. “Nationalism and Nihonjinron.” Cultural Nationalism in East Asia: Representation and Identity. Ed. Harumi Befu. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993. 107-35 Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Christian Century in Japan 1549-1650. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Cabezas, Antonio. El siglo ibérico del Japón. La presencia hispanoportuguesa en Japón (1543-1643). Valladolid, Spain: Universidad de Valladolid, 1995.

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Chamberlain, Basil Hall. (1890) Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travelers and Others. London: J. Murray; Yokohama: Kelly & Walsh, 1905. Chibbett, David G. The History of Japanese Printing and Book Illustration. Tokyo: Kodansha Int., 1977. Clifford, James. “On Orientalism.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1988. 255-76. Cooper, Michael. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965. Dale, Peter N. The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. London: Croom Helm; Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies, 1986. Javier, Francisco. Cartas y escritos de San Francisco Javier. Ed. Félix Zubillaga. Madrid: Editorial Católica, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1953. Fróis, Luís. Tratado sobre las contradicciones y diferencias de costumbres entre los europeos y japoneses (1585). Ed. Ricardo De la Fuente Ballesteros. Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2003. Fukui, Nanako. “Background Research for The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” Dialectical Anthropology 24.2 (June 1999): 173-80. Funabiki, Takeo. “Raons històriques del Nihonjinron.” Identitat i representació cultural: perspectives des del Japó. Ed. Blai Guarné. Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya 29 (Dec. 2006) 20-31. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. —. “US / NOT-US” Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 102-28. Guarné, Blai. “Imágenes de la diferencia. Alteridad, discurso y representación.” Representación y cultura audiovisual en la sociedad contemporánea. Eds. Elisenda Ardèvol and Nora Muntañola. Barcelona: UOC, 2005. 47-127 —. “On Monkeys and Japanese: Mimicry and Anastrophe in Orientalist Representation.” Orientalism [online]. Ed. Carlos Prado-Fonts. 10 Digithum UOC (2008) 26-36. May 2008 , accessed 5 June 2009. —. “Presentació: Identitat i representació cultural. Perspectives des del Japó.” Ed. Blai Guarné. Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya 29 (Dec. 2006): 6-7.

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Hall, Stuart. (1992) “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Formations of Modernity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press and The Open University, 1995. 276-335 Kent, Pauline. “Japanese Perceptions of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” Dialectical Anthropology 24. 2 (June 1999): 181-92. Kornicki, Peter. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Lie, John. “Ruth Benedict’s Legacy of Shame: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Study of Japan.” Asian Journal of Social Sciences 29. 2 (2001): 249-61. Lisón Tolosana, Carmelo. La fascinación de la diferencia. La adaptación de los jesuitas al Japón de los samuráis, 1549-1592. Madrid: Akal, 2005. Littlewood, Ian. The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths. London: Secker & Warbung, 1996. Mead, Margaret and Rhoda Métraux, eds. The Study of Culture at a Distance. New York. Oxford: Berghahn, 2000. Moran, Joseph Francis. The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth- Century Japan. London, New York: Routledge, 1992. Ross, Andrew C. A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542-1742. Edinburgh : Edinburgh UP, 1994. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London, Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Sakai, Naoki. “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism.” Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 153-176 Sugimoto, Yoshio. “Conflicte paradigmàtic en el discurs sobre ‘Japó’.” Identitat i representació cultural: perspectives des del Japó. Ed. Blai Guarné Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya 29 (Dec. 2006) 32-51. Turner, Bryan S. Orientalism, Postmodernism & Globalism. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Valignano, Alessandro. Sumario de las cosas de Japón (1583). Adiciones del sumario de Japón (1592). Ed. José Luis Álvarez-Taladriz. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1954. Wilikinson, Endymion Porter. Misunderstanding: Europe versus Japan. Tokyo: Chuokoron-sha, 1981.

PORTRAYAL OF ASIAN AMERICANS IN U.S. MAGAZINE ADVERTISEMENTS MALGORZATA SKOREK UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

1 Introduction Asian Americans are often considered a “model minority” (Cohen 1992). This notion stems from the fact that, as a group, they have higher income, higher education level, and higher occupational status than an average American (American Management Association Research Report, 1987, n.p). They are renowned for their hard work, strong work ethic, selfdiscipline, intelligence, outstanding math and science skills, as well as the ability to assimilate into American culture (Yim, 1989, Delener and Neelankavil, 1990, Cohen, 1992, Taylor and Lee, 1994). In this study I will investigate whether the above stereotype of Asian Americans is reflected in American magazine advertising. I will also discuss what effects this fact might have on the public, in particular on the Asian American minority itself. The major goal of this essay is to contribute to previous research by analyzing more recent magazine issues and different magazine titles, looking at the link between ethnicity, gaze, and different types of roles.

2 Literature Review Within the past forty years, a lot of research has been done on the portrayal of gender (for review see Wolin [2003]) and race (e.g. Culley and Bennett [1976], Frith et al. [2004], Millard and Grant [2006]) in American magazine advertisements. With regard to race, studies investigated most often the images of African and Latino Americans. The image of Asian Americans, by contrast, has been largely overlooked. Only recently has it attracted researchers’ attention. One of the reasons for the

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recent analyses of the image of Asian Americans is that it has become one of the fastest-growing U.S. minorities (Yoshihashi, 1989) and one of the minorities with the highest purchasing power (Cohen, 1992) - both reasons suggesting that this group may be becoming more present in advertising. In a study of consumer responses, Cohen (1992) showed that white consumers react more positively to advertisements of high-technology electronics products when Asian models are in them than when they were absent. She also found more negative responses to advertisements of products associated with status (e.g. men’s suits) if Asian Americans were in them, as compared to those that portrayed white models. No differences in responses were found for convenience products (e.g. vitamins). These findings suggest why the presence of Asian models in advertising may be of high importance. Most of the results of content analyses of magazine advertisements revealed that the portrayals of Asian Americans reflect commonly held stereotypes of this ethnic group (Taylor and Lee, 1994, Taylor et al., 1995, Taylor et al., 2005, Sengupta, 2006). Taylor and Lee (1994) conducted one of the first content analyses on the portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. magazine advertising. They reported that Asians were: (1) more often found in ads of technologybased products than other product categories, (2) they appeared more frequently in business, popular science/mechanics publications than in women’s or general interest magazines, (3) they were portrayed more often in business rather than in other settings, and (4) were depicted more frequently as coworkers than in family or social relations than other models. The above results were largely replicated by Taylor et al. (2005). The authors have also found that there is no difference between magazines with high or lower Asian readership in the proportion of Asians portrayed in their ads.1 Two other studies, more concerned with the intersection between race and gender, analyzed advertising representations of minority versus white women. Frith et al. (2004) compared images of Asian and Western women in Singaporean, Taiwanese, and U.S. women’s magazines and found that Asian models were rarely presented in American magazines. The majority of the Asian models looked into the camera and were most often found in beauty products. A smaller proportion, yet, still a majority of Western women also gazed into the camera. The analysis of gaze is particularly interesting, as it refers to cultural differences between 1

Additional studies were conducted on the portrayal of Asian Americans in television commercials (Taylor and Stern, 1997, Bang and Reece, 2003, Mastro and Stern, 2003). Yet, because television is such a different medium from advertising, those studies will not be discussed in this paper.

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Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements

Asian and Western women. It is suggested that a direct gaze is often associated with power (Karan, 2007), and in many Asian cultures it may be considered aggressive and unfeminine (Samovar et al., 2001). Hence, it is a surprising result that Asian models did not fit into the shy and submissive stereotype. Sengupta (2006) found that women were presented predominantly in technology-based product advertising and they had mostly minor roles as compared to other models. Yet these results may be slightly biased as they were based on a sample in which Asian Americans were largely under-represented (only three ads with Asian models in total). Similar to the focus of the previous research, the current study investigates the way in which Asian Americans are portrayed in magazine advertising in general, hence, I will look at their portrayal in a sample composed of five different magazine genres. I am not going to be concerned with the differences in their portrayal in different genres; these differences are, however, meaningful and will be investigated in further research.

2.1 Research hypotheses Based on the previous findings, I expect that common stereotypes of Asians will be reflected in advertising; hence, the following hypotheses were formulated: H : Asian American models are over-represented in business, science, 1 and technical magazines. H : Asian American models are predominantly portrayed in ads of 2 technology-based products (i.e. electronics). H : Asian American models are more often portrayed in working 3 rather than in family, recreational, or decorative roles. H : Asian American models are more often portrayed as users of a 4 product than as endorsers or having a symbolic relationship with a product. H : Asian American models are portrayed more often as gazing away 5 from he camera than looking directly into the camera.

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3 Method 3.1 Sampling frame 3.1.1 Selection of magazines Magazine advertising is often believed to contain numerous and high quality visual impressions of men and women; hence, a lot of content analyses use this medium for the interpretation of gender portrayals. Different magazine genres often have different editorial and advertising content and are likely to portray gender as well as ethnic groups differently. Therefore, I decided to focus on a few genres to get a broad picture of portrayals. The genres I selected are the following: men’s lifestyle, women’s lifestyle, business, technical, and science magazines (see table 1). Examination of the ways in which those different genres present men and women might give us insights into how the genders and ethnic groups are presented to men, women, businessmen, scientists, and engineers. Table 1: Magazines under study Men’s Women’s Lifestyle Lifestyle Men’s Health Women’s Health

Business

Science

Technical

CIO

Popular Science

Maximum PC

The selected magazines were among the ones with moderate circulation in their respective genres and they were retrieved in February 2008 from an online source: Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/). The fact that we have selected only one title per genre should not limit the generalizability of our results to respective genres, as previous research suggests that portrayals of men and women are consistent across different titles within the same genre (Skorek, 2008). Communication is an ongoing process. Therefore, in order to understand the forces shaping it, one has to examine the content at various times (Riffe et al., 1998). In this study, eight issues of each magazine were included (40 issues in total). All of the magazines studied have a monthly circulation (with the exception CIO that has bimonthly circulation). I included the sample issues published in the first month of each season from 2006 and 2007.

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Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements

3.2 Coding The unit of analysis was any advertisement larger than half a page and containing at least one adult man or woman, as smaller sized ads were difficult to analyze. If two actors were present in an ad, each person was coded separately. In case three or more people were present in an ad, only the two most important and salient models were coded (one man and one woman in mixed-gender ads). Table 2: An overview of coded variables 1 2

Variable name Brand name Product type

Values and labels String variable 1 - Beauty products 2 - Clothing 3 - Accessories 4 - Cars 5 - Travel 6 - Sport equipment

3

Actor type

7 - Financial services 8 - Other services 9 - Cleaning supplies 10 - Home appliances 11 - Personal & office electronics 1 - Single man 2 - Single woman 3 - Couple

4 5 6 7 8

4 - Two or more men 1 - Male 1 - Caucasian American 2 - African American Working/nonworking1 - Working role 2 - Family Functional role 1 - User 2 - Endorser Gaze 1 - Into the camera Actor’s gender Actor’s race

12 - Furniture & house elements 13 - Media & entertainment 14 - Industrial products 15 - Drugs 16 - Food products 17 - Non-alcoholic drinks 18 - Alcoholic beverages 19 - Cigarettes 20 - Charity 21 - Institutional ads 22 - Other 5 - Two or more women 6 - Man & two or more women 7 - Woman & two or more men 8 - Mixed group 2 - Female 3 - Asian American 4 - Other 3 - Recreational 4 - Decorative 3 - Symbolic 2 - Away from the camera

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Formal content of an ad pertaining to advertisement’s origin was coded first; the variables included magazine title, magazine issue, and magazine genre. Next, ad-related content variables were reported and included brand name and product type, as well as actor type, actor’s gender, and race (see table 2 for an overview of ad-related content and interpretative variables). Finally, interpretative variables included working/nonworking role (Courtney and Lockeretz, 1971), product-related role, and gaze. 3.2.1 Inter-rater reliability All ads were coded by the female author and approximately 10% of the ads were additionally coded by a second male coder. This was to ensure that the use of the coding scheme was reliable and that the interpretation was not in any way gender-biased. For all ad-related and interpretative variables, there was an almost perfect agreement.2

4 Results In total, 620 advertisements were coded and 767 models portrayed in those ads were analyzed: 468 men and 299 women. Male models were dominant in all genres except for the women’s magazine, which indicates that the audience of the other four magazines was likely to be dominated by men.3 Even though genre differences are expected, the following results will not be presented with a magazine genre stratification, due to the fact that some magazines contained only 5-10 Asian models and in the overall sample there were only 51 Asian Americans. However, wherever genre differences were noticeable, they will be commented on in the text.

2

Our interpretation of the values of kappa follows the work of Landis and Koch (1977) who distinguished between three types of agreement: moderate agreement (0.41–0.60), substantial agreement (0.61–0.80), and almost perfect agreement (0.81–1.00). Kappa values for all variables: product .98, actor .89, gender 1.00, race .81, gender role .88, functional role .85, and gaze .90. 3 As a more general note, most Asian American models coded seemed to have East Asian (Korean, Chinese, Japanese) rather than South Asian (Pakistani, Indian) origins.

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Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements

Table 3: Representation of Caucasian, African, and Asian American models in different magazine genres Caucasian American % CIO 75.2 Maximum PC 77.9 Popular 87.7 Science Men’s Health 85.8 Women’s 86.6 Health N 643

African American % 9.9 7.4 6.2

Asian American % 14.9 14.7 6.2

121 68 81

10.2 10.5

4 2.9

325 172

51

767

73

Race differs according to magazine genre

F

2

29.4,df

N

8, p  .001

Overall, 83.8% of the models in our sample were Caucasian, 9.5% were African American, and 6.6% were Asian American. The proportion of Asian models in the advertisements studied is 50% larger than the proportion of Asian Americans in the U.S. population (4.4% in 2007).4 Yet when we look into more detail (see table 3), it appears that this average is influenced by two genres, business and technical, that have a particularly high proportion of Asian models in their ads (approximately 15%). The science magazine has a proportion close to the average (6.2%), and the men’s and women’s genres feature Asian models least frequently (4% and 2.9% respectively). Therefore, hypothesis 1 stating that Asian models are over-represented in the business, science, and technical magazines is confirmed.

4 In 2007 (July), the population of the United States was estimated to be approximately 303,800,000, 79.9% of which were Caucasian, 12.8% African American, 4.4% were Asian American and 2.9% of other ethnic identification (ICA World Factbook, July 2007 estimate, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html).

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Table 4: Representation of Caucasian, African, and Asian American models in different product categories Caucasian African Asian N American % American % American % 10.7 2.7 71

Beauty products Clothing 19.6 Accessories 4.8 Cars 5.5 Travel .8 Sport 2.6 equipment Financial 1.6 services Other services 9.7 Home .3 appliances Personal &18.5 office electronics Furniture &.6 house elements Media &4.2 entertainment Industrial .2 products Drugs 10.9 Food products 3.4 Non-alcoholic 1.4 drinks Alcoholic .3 beverages Institutions 3.1 Other 1.9 N 643

17.8 6.8 2.7 1.4 4.1

7.8 3.9 -

143 36 39 6 20

2.7

9.8

17

20.5 -

9.8 -

82 2

11

41.2

148

2.7

-

6

-

5.9

30

-

-

1

15.1 5.5 1.4

3.9 5.9

83 26 13

1.4

-

3

4.1 73

2 9.8 51

24 17 767

Race differs according to product

F 2 95.26,df

36, p  .001

Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements

338

In comparison with the other ethnic groups (see table 4), Asian models are absent in many of the product categories advertised. They are portrayed particularly often in advertisements of personal and office electronics. e.g. digital cameras, cell phones, laptops, etc. (41.2%), as well as relatively often in ads of financial (9.8%) and other services (9.8%). Hence, hypothesis 2 stating that Asian models are predominantly portrayed in ads of technology-based products is confirmed. For a comparison, Caucasian American models are most often present in clothing ads (19.6%), personal and office electronics (18.5%), as well as drugs (10.9%) and beauty products (10.7%). Yet the proportion of Caucasian models in the ads of electronics is less than half of the proportion of Asians portrayed in this product category. African Americans are most often found to endorse non-financial services (20.5%), clothing (17.8%), and drugs (15.1%). Table 5: Representation of Caucasian, African, and Asian American models in working/nonworking roles Caucasian American % Working 9.5 Family 3.6 Recreational 17.9 Decorative 69.1 N 643 Race

role F

differs 2

17.79,df

African American % 9.6 1.4 34.2 54.8 73 according

Asian American % 17.6 3.9 9.8 68.6 51 to

N 77 26 145 519 767

working/nonworking

6, p  .05

Contrary to our expectation that Asian Americans would be most often featured in working roles (hypothesis 3), they were most often portrayed in decorative roles (68.6%), a category that was dominant across all races (see table 5). The working role was, however, the second most often portrayed role by Asian Americans (17.6%). The second most common category among Caucasian and African American models was the recreational role (17.8% and 34.2% respectively).

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Table 6: Representation of Caucasian, African, and Asian American models in various functional roles Caucasian American % 27.4 2 70.6 643

User Endorser Symbolic N

African American % 30.1 1.4 68.5 73

Race does not differ according to functional role

Asian American % 21.6 2 76.5 51

F 2 1.26,df

N 209 15 543 767

4, p ! .05

Hypothesis 4 stated that Asian Americans would be more often portrayed as users than in other functional roles; however, the data does not seem to support it (see table 6). Asian Americans, just like models from any other racial category, were most often depicted in a symbolic relationship with the product. Overall, no significant differences were found between race and functional roles. Table 7: Representation of Caucasian, African, and Asian American models by type of gaze Caucasian African Asian N American % American % American % the39 41.1 25.5 294

Into camera Away from61 the camera N 643

58.9 73

Race does not differ according to gaze

F

2

74.5

473

51

767

3.92,df

2, p ! .05

As presented in table 7, three times as many Asian models were looking away from the camera (74.5%) than gazing into the camera (25.5%); hence, hypothesis 5 stating that more Asian Americans are gazing away from the camera is confirmed. These proportions did not differ significantly among gender of Asian models.5 Interestingly, the gaze 5

Looking into the camera - 29.6% men and 20.8% women respectively; looking away from the camera - 70.4% men and 79.2% women respectively;

F 2 .47,df

1, p ! .05 ).

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Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements

of Asian Americans did not differ significantly from the gaze of other models; in all groups the less powerful gaze, i.e. away from the camera, was dominant.

5 Discussion and conclusions Our above findings largely confirm previous research showing that the “model minority” stereotype is reflected in magazine advertisements. First, we found that Asian American models are over-represented in magazines that focus on science, business, and technology. The frequency of Asian models reached 15% in those magazines, a proportion closely resembling the results by Taylor and Lee (1994) or Taylor et al. (2005). Second, Asian Americans are also found predominantly in ads of personal and office electronics (41.2%); an even higher proportion was reported by previous studies (Taylor et al., 2005). Third, almost one fifth of models were found in working roles (17.6%), twice the proportion of other races shown in this role. However, Asian Americans were most often portrayed in decorative roles, rather than in working roles, and were found predominantly in a symbolic association with a product and not in a user role, as predicted. This finding is also true for Caucasian and African American models and could be explained by an overall nature of today’s print advertisements. Very rarely models in the ads have anything to do with the product, unless it is clothing or sports equipment. In almost all other product categories models are to attract viewers’ attention and serve as a decoration; they do not drink the advertised beverage nor drive the advertised car. We also predicted that Asian Americans would shy away from the camera following another common stereotype of Asians. We found that the majority of Asians did indeed look away, even though previous studies suggested this stereotype may not be reflected in certain magazine genres (Frith et al., 2004, Karan, 2007). Moreover, a similar pattern of dominant gaze was found for the other two races. Based on the above, we can conclude that several stereotypes of Asians can be noticeable in advertising by merely analyzing the proportions of portrayal of Asians in different magazine genres, products categories, or roles.

5.1 Consequences of the usage of stereotypical images of Asian Americans in Advertising As stated above, presence of stereotypical portrayals in advertising may have an effect on the general audience and on the stereotyped group

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in particular. Expectancy theory (Jussim, 1990) suggests that portrayals of minority group stereotypes, even of those positive ones, can have harmful effects on minority groups. In a way, by reinforcing stereotypes advertising creates even stronger expectancies of Asians to be hard working, ambitious and excellent in math, which may be too high expectations for some members of the minority group. Pressure on individuals less skilled in the stereotypical “Asian” fields may have obvious consequences like lowered self-esteem (Graham, 1983) or increased anxiety (Lee, 1996). On the other hand, psychologists argue that once a member of a group is reminded about a positive stereotype that exists about their group, it can improve their performance (‘stereotype lift’, Shih et al., 2000). Women reminded of their Asian identity (‘Asians are good at math’ stereotype) perform better on math tasks than those Asian women who were not reminded of it, or who were reminded of their gender (‘women are bad at math’ stereotype) (Ambady et al., 1999). As far as other viewers are concerned, the cultivation theory (Gerbner et al., 1980) suggests that repeated exposure to stereotypical imagery is likely to result in viewers accepting it as reality, which in turn may lead the members of a host culture to wrong expectations and a loss of interest in getting to know the real culture of the minority groups (Faber et al., 1987). Moreover, it may also cause the host to neglect the needs of those minority individuals who are uneducated and have a lower socioeconomic status (Taylor et al., 2005). More generally, stereotypes discourage thinking about individuals and encourage relying on generalizations and pre-conceptions (Schneider, 2004). Hence, it will be harder for someone to see an Asian American as an individual than as a member of a group about which certain common generalization exist and can be instantly applied. Oftentimes, stereotypes of certain groups may then lead to prejudice against those groups and even discrimination.

5.2 Limitations One of the major limitations of the current study is the low number of ads portraying Asian Americans. This fact did not allow us to make meaningful comparisons across genres. Even though inter-genre differences were not part of the major research question, as we looked into a more general portrayal of Asian Americans, analysis of this aspect could have provided important insights into the ways different genres present different races. Hence, including more magazine titles and more magazine issues would hopefully increase the sample size sufficiently to reveal inter-

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Portrayal of Asian Americans in U.S. Magazine Advertisements

genre differences in the way Asian Americans are portrayed by the American media.

6 Further Research As mentioned in the literature review, there is still very little research on the portrayal of Asian Americans and other less numerous minorities in mass media; hence, several questions remain open. For instance, how does the portrayal of different minority groups in American advertising change over time? What is the consumer response to products advertised by models of different races? What product-race matches are most successful? Another important direction is also an experimental investigation of the effects of stereotypical imagery on the perception and behavior of Asian Americans. Further studies will hopefully answer some of these questions.

Works Cited Ambady, N., Shih, M., Kim, A., and Pittinsky, T. L. “Stereotype susceptibility: Effects of identity activation on quantitative performance.” Psychological Science 12.5 (1999): 385-90. American Management Association Research Report. Successful Marketing to U.S. Hispanics and Asians: Players, Agencies, Media. New York: American Management Association, 1987. Bang, H.-K. and Reece, B. B. “Minorities in children’s television commercials: New, improved, and stereotyped.” Journal of Consumer Affairs 37.1 (2003):42-66. Cohen, J. “White consumer response to Asian models in advertising.” The Journal of Consumer Marketing 9.2 (1992): 17-27. Courtney, A. and Lockeretz, S. (1971). “A woman’s place: An analysis of the roles portrayed by women in magazine advertisements.” Journal of Marketing Research 8.1 (1971): 92-95. Culley, J. D. and Bennett, R. “Selling women, selling Blacks.” Journal of Communication 26.4 (1976): 160-74. Delener, N. and Neelankavil, J. P. “Informational sources and media usage: A comparison between Asian and Hispanic subcultures.” Journal of Advertising Research 30 (1990): 45-52. Faber, R. J., O’Giunn, T. C., and Meyer, T. P. “Televised portrayals of Hispanics: A comparison of ethnic perceptions.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 11 (1987): 155-69.

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Frith, K. T., Cheng, H., and Shaw, P. “Race and beauty: A comparison of Asian and western models in women’s magazine advertisements.” Sex Roles 50.1-2 (2004): 53-61. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., and Signiorelli, N. “The ‘mainstreaming’ of America: Violence profile no. 11.” Journal of Communication 30 (1980): 10-29. Graham, M. A. “Acculturative stress among Polynesian, Asian and American students on the Brigham Young University-Hawaii campus.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 7 (1983): 79-103. Jussim, L. “Social reality and social problems: The role of expectancies.” Journal of Social Issues 27 (1980): 185-95. Karan, K. “The power of gaze in the media: Visual representations in ‘For Him Magazine’ (FHM) Singapore.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, California. 24-28 May 2007. Landis, J. R. and Koch, G. G. “The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data.” Biometrics 33 (1997): 159-74. Lee, S. J. Unraveling the ‘Model-Minority’ Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. New York, New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. Mastro, D. E. and Stern, S. R. “Representation of race in television commercials: A content analysis of prime time advertising.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 47.4 (2003): 638-47. Millard, J. E. and Grant, P. R. “The stereotypes of black and white women in fashion magazine photographs: The pose of the model and the impression she creates.” Sex Roles 54 (2006): 659-73. Riffe, D., Lacy, S., and Fico, F. G. (1998). Analyzing Media Messages: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Samovar, L. A., Porter, R. E., and Jain, N. Communication between Cultures. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 2001. Schneider, D. J. The Psychology of Stereotyping. Distinguished contributions in psychology. New York, New York: The Guilford Press, 2004. Sengupta, R. “Reading representations of black, East Asian, and white women in magazines for adolescent girls.” Sex Roles 54 (2006): 799808. Shih, M., Pittinsky, T. L., and Ambady, N. “Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance.” Psychological Science 10 (2000): 80-83.

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Skorek, M.. “Gender roles and gender stereotypes in magazine advertisements from Germany, Poland and the United States.” Master’s thesis, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany. 2008. Taylor, C. R., Landreth, S., and Bang, H.-K. “Asian Americans in magazine advertising: Portrayals of the ‘model minority.’” Journal of Macromarketing 25.2(2005): 163-74. Taylor, C. R. and Lee, J. Y. “Not in Vogue: Portrayals of Asian Americans in magazine advertising.” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 13.2 (1994): 239-45. Taylor, C. R., Lee, J. Y., and Stern, B. B. “Portrayals of African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans in magazine advertising.” American Behavioral Scientist 38.4 (1995): 608-21. Taylor, C. R. and Stern, B. B. (1997). “Asian-Americans: Television advertising and the ‘model minority’ stereotype.” Journal of Advertising 26.2 (1997): 47-61. Wolin, L. D. “Gender issues in advertising. An oversight synthesis of research: 1970-2002.” Journal of Advertising Research (March 2003):111-29. Yim, Y. S. (1989). “American perceptions of Korean Americans.” Korea and World Affairs 13.3 (1989): 519-42. Yoshihashi, P. “Why more ads aren’t targeting Asians.” Wall Street Journal (July 1989) 20: B1.

CHAPTER EIGHT MUSICAL ORIENTALIZATION AND SELF-ORIENTALIZATION

THE SONG OF THE DRAGON: FRED HO AND THE FORMATION OF AN “AFRO-ASIAN NEW AMERICAN MULTICULTURAL MUSIC” KEVIN FELLEZS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

I am trying to create a new American opera that appeals to today’s youth – particularly inner city youth – who think of opera as something conservative and exclusionary […] I at least want my artistic/theatrical concept to be more exciting and captivating, and for the martial arts to demolish the aesthetics of grade-B action films, boring Broadway and moribund modern dance. —Fred Ho1

Fred Ho’s Journey Beyond the West: The New Adventures of Monkey (1996) was an “Afro Asian score for ballet,” an eclectic brew of high and low culture as well as Afrodiasporic and Asian American cultural elements. Moreover, as he admitted, “not only [was Journey Beyond the West] the first Chinese American ballet with a libretto sung totally in (Mandarin) Chinese, but more significantly, [it included] a music score that defied categorization as either Chinese or ‘jazz’ music but was a unique and unusual hybrid“ (“Kreolization” 142). Creating new music, however, is not merely an aesthetic exercise for the self-taught baritone saxophonist and composer. As he explains, in order to create new music “there has to be a new type of ensemble, i.e., players directed into new musical and social relationships” (“Kreolization” 142). New music, new hybrids, new social, and musical relations–this was political as well as cultural “kreolization,” to echo Ho’s re-spelling of Creole in order to (re)define intercultural mixing as “the formation of entirely new identities

1

Ho, “Beyond,” 47.

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and cultures” that arrives from a subordinate positioning (“Kreolization” 143).2 Ho defines kreolization as a process of continual renewal because kreolized identities and cultures have often been “selectively appropriated by dominant social groups into the dominant identity and culture, but politicized and deracinated,” forcing the creation of ever “newer” identities and cultures (“Kreolization” 143). His work is thus positioned in “already hybrid” spaces complicated by his use of elements gleaned from popular culture. Understanding his own work as operating within a tradition, he terms the “popular avant-garde,” his use of popular culture elements is both aesthetic strategy and political advocacy. Yet while he is candid about his desire for large-scale populist audiences, he is equally opposed to “accessible” art. Defining the popular avant-garde as an aesthetic program dedicated to “elevating standards, promoting the necessity and importance of experimentation but at the same time being rooted, grounded and vibrantly connected to the people,” Ho castigates accessibility in art as a needless “dumbing down, a pandering” to popular audiences.3 He is also wary of various connotations of “avant-garde” because “it can be both purveyor of change or perpetuator of privilege, solipsism and snobbish elitism [particularly if it implies] the completely anti-political position of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake, which I and others would assert, is political by asserting the autonomy of art and ideas as standing above society and thereby tacit acquiescence and accommodation to the status quo)” (“Imagine,” n.p., original emphasis). While Ho’s work operates within a context of an historical Asian American jazz movement and its set of political commitments, in this essay I want to pursue a slightly different tack and focus on Ho’s articulation of a “popular avant-garde” as the basis for the creation of his music. Indeed, Ho’s creative work engages a wide variety of musical traditions in his efforts to create the music he describes as an “Afro Asian new American multicultural music.” * * * Antonio Gramsci, an early theorist of popular culture, understood “the popular” as a locus of intersecting interests, rhetoric and representations, a

2

Ho acknowledges Dorothy Désir-Davis, who re-spelled “kreolization” as a way to distinguish her perspective from Melville Herskovitz’s and from conventional anthropology writ large. 3 Interview with author, September 05, 2007.

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space of both conformity and opposition to elite culture.4 Similarly recognizing popular culture’s hybrid nature and yielding both conservative and radical energies, Ho channels his creativity into recognizable forms he can then implode from within, challenging audiences’ expectations even as they are entertained. Because Ho’s extravagant creativity and unapologetic embrasure of consumer cultural signs occurs in tandem with his stated agenda of revolutionary creative production, he interrogates popular culture’s commodification of creative work through a provocative set of inquiries into the meanings of various idioms, traditions and cultural hierarchies, especially as he points to “the people” for their tastes and legitimation. Ho’s admiration for Lone Wolf and Cub, a manga (Japanese comic book) and the movie series it inspired, is not only to participate in otaku (manga and anime fan) culture but is also an expression of his political and cultural solidarity with popular audiences. A robust muscularity energizes Ho’s creativity as well as his hypnotic cover of Duke Ellington’s and Juan Tizol’s “Caravan.” The title of this composition speaks to cross-cultural exchange and its dominant modal flavor connects jazz to non-Western musical traditions. It also speaks directly to a legacy of a “popular avant garde” in jazz. Ably demonstrating his sympathies and abilities within a jazz tradition, Ho’s arrangement of the song highlights the centrality of cross-cultural fusions in Afrodiasporic music and, in particular, within jazz.5 Royal Hartigan’s introductory drumming is precise yet coupled to an edgy nervousness that is mirrored by Kiyoto Fujiwara’s bass ostinato pattern, both men providing the “Latin tinge” early jazz musician “Jelly Roll” Morton argued was an integral component of jazz music. Peter Madsen’s arpeggiated entrance on the piano pauses the track briefly before the horns enter, stating the first theme. The saxophonists–alto saxophonist Sam Furnace, tenor saxophonist David Bindman, and the baritone saxophone of leader Ho–emphasize the melismatic nature of the dominant theme, a modally inflected line that conjures a vaguely Middle Eastern aura. While supporting the

4

See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings. Trans. William Boelhower. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1991. 5 For a cogent investigation of Ho’s work in relation to jazz, see Susan Asai, “Cultural Politics: The African American Connection in Asian American Jazzbased Music.” She also provides a succinct summary of Ho’s early activist and musical activities. For a more detailed biographical sketch, see Wei-hua Zhang, “Fred Wei-han Ho: Case Study of a Chinese-American Creative Musician.” Ho provides an outline of his public activities in his article, “Beyond Asian American Jazz: My Musical and Political Changes in the Asian American Movement.”

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heterophonic reading of the theme by the saxophonists, Fujiwara and Hartigan continue their Afro-Latin dance. Despite its rhythmically charged undercurrent, the straightforward tonality and swing rhythm of the second section of “Caravan” works as an aural respite after the protracted modality of the initial section. While the saxophone solos are fine examples of postbop jazz improvisation and provide a textural contrast to the rhythm section’s spirited propulsion, Madsen’s piano solo is a compelling blend of modality and Don Pullenesque technique, his sharply focused glissandi and chord clusters lending his solo line a powerful emotionalism. Finally, an energetic crescendo achieves an unequivocal resolution.6 Ho’s rich oeuvre, however, covers more than energetic interpretations of past jazz masters. His original music thunders, whispers and whirls on its own merits while paying homage to his creative influences and predecessors. On the recording, Red Arc: A Call for Revolución con Salsa y Cool (Wings Press, 2005), Ho and his collaborator, poet raúlsalinas, evoke the fire music and jazz poetry happenings of the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, as titles such as “Peltier 1” and “On the Police Murder of Jonathan Rodney” attest, they are directly concerned about contemporary realities. Journey beyond the West: The New Adventures of Monkey (1996) is a re-interpretation of popular Chinese tales of Monkey King, a figure who protects the lowly and oppressed from evil spirits and the caprices of the gods. As Susan Asai notes, “Within the socialist framework of Ho’s politics, The Monkey King can be thought of as the equivalent of a working-class hero defying the capitalist, bourgeois forces that oppress the masses” (Asai 98). Through all of his works, Ho has built an aesthetic informed by political histories as well as by his insistence on the efficacy of music to serve as a revolutionary tool of “the people.” It is not only Chinese mythology that inspires him. In the composition, “Monkey Decides to Return Home ‘to Right the Great Wrongs,’” included in Journey, Ho’s voicings for the horns recall Chinese opera themes and they are assisted in no small part by the use of instrumentation borrowed from Chinese operatic ensembles. Another recording, Voice of the Dragon: Once Upon a Time in Chinese America (1997), is a re-invention of ancient Chinese myths, the Chinese martial arts tradition and its popular 6

Don Pullen was a jazz pianist who developed a highly individualized style blending conventional piano technical abilities with avant-garde sensibilities. During the latter part of his career, he was involved with integrating African, Brazilian, and Native American musical traditions with his wide-ranging blend of jazz styles. His piano performances were noted for his precise use of glissandi and chord clusters.

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culture form, the martial arts action film, as well as of Asian and Afrodiasporic musical influences Ho describes as “Afro-Asian new American multicultural music” (“Kreolization” 142). We can hear this merging of political acumen and musical hybridity throughout his work. For example, “The Unity! Suite (For The Struggle of Workers),” from We Refuse to Be Used and Abused (Soul Note, 1988) is introduced by a horn section led by Ho’s baritone sax, which slowly works towards a propulsive riff, the rhythm section as a whole energized in a hyper-big band swing journey of militant self-knowledge and political awareness. Jon Jang’s insistently dissonant piano jabs contrast sharply against the horn charts and performances, which are finely balanced and energetic, while Ho’s arrangement effectively renders the piano’s evocation of workers’ struggles within the unity of the larger ensemble. Hafiz Modir’s tenor saxophone solo midway through the recorded track is another evocation of Middle Eastern musical traditions and performance styles that, underscores the multicultural orientation of Ho’s music. Ho’s baritone saxophone riffing is the source for much of the pulse’s energy but the ensemble is clearly enjoying themselves, inspired by the charts and each other’s performances.7 There is an increased sophistication to Ho’s arrangements on The Underground Railroad To My Heart (Soul Note, 1994), particularly in the tune, “Lan Hua Hua (‘Blue Flower’),” which begins with a visceral solo baritone saxophone introduction leading to soprano vocalist Cindy Zuoxin Wang’s singing a Chinese folk song about the story of a beautiful young woman, Lan Hua Hua. The song recounts Lan Hua Hua’s sale at auction to the highest bidder, an old man with a face marked by “many an evil scar.” The figure of Death appears to save Lan Hua Hua, while he sings about giving his “heart and mind, [to] take the love of Lan Hua Hua.” the song’s haunting melody registering her only escape from her oppressive marriage-contract. Signaling how her physical beauty has doomed her, Ho’s baritone sax re-enters, initially squeaking and squonking (thus recalling the introduction), but he slowly works towards Wang’s plaintive vocalizing. Indeed, when she re-enters, voice and baritone saxophone voice the melody together, blending effortlessly and ending the piece in a dramatic unison crescendo. Ho described the piece as a “Chinese folk song of Chinese peasant women in protest against the oppressive tradition of

7

The liner notes to We Refuse to Be Used and Abused list Fred Wei-han Houn on baritone and soprano saxophones and flute. He has legally changed his name to Ho in 1989. I use “Fred Ho” throughout the text.

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arranged marriages.” Indeed, his forlorn arrangement grants listeners an opportunity to feel the frustrations and discontent of those women.8 In contrast, “Big Red! (for Malcolm X and Mao Zedong),” from the recording of the same name (Big Red! 2004), begins as an exhilarating call to action. Pianist Art Hirahara is a highlight of the track and the support from Hartigan on drums and Wesley Brown on bass fill out the piano trio central to the arrangement, forming an alert and compatible musical partnership. Brown keeps everything anchored, enunciating pulse, harmonic movement, and confidence to the rest of the rhythm section. In addition to Malcolm X and Mao Zedong, Ho dedicates the composition to political activists Richie Perez, Safiya Bukhari, Kwame Ture, and Modibo (James Baker). Likewise, the spoken word section honors the memories of victims of racially motivated hate crimes, including Vincent Chin and Yusef Hawkins. As the composition unfolds, the larger ensemble gives way to the piano trio, which generates a sense of discursive contemplation. When Ho re-enters, the trio shadows his spoken word diatribe against political complacency, lending the track an energized sense of social awareness. One last musical example: the composition, “Free Mumia Suite,” finds Ho directing a fusion-era big band, complete with Hirahara’s prominent electric piano. Once again, Hartigan shows why he has maintained the drum chair for Ho’s recordings. He is sublime under Ho’s robust solo, providing both propulsion and timbral interest. Hirahara’s switch to organ under Bindman’s tenor sax moves the composition towards the blues but the group soon strays away to oblique Carla Bley-esque ensemble interplay. As the piece continues, Hirahara returns to an acoustic piano and the performance becomes even more abstract. Eventually, abstraction gives way to funky soul jazz and the ensemble hits a deliciously joyous groove during the final “Stop the Execution, Start a Revolution!” section of the suite, before ending somewhat unsatisfactoril –or perhaps, ambivalently, voicing a reluctance to end the demand for justice. The controlled frenzy of the composition and its clear debt to the blues echo the politicized creative work of Charles Mingus, a composer who similarly blurred the distinctions between mainstream and avant-garde trends in jazz while anchoring much of his music in the blues. The political tenor of jazz artists such as Mingus, Max Roach or Archie Shepp, who drew equally from the past as well as from their own individual musical aesthetics were models for Ho’s own developing sense 8

All quotes in paragraph, Ho, liner notes to The Underground Railroad to My Heart (Soul Note, 1994), except for Lan Hua Hua’s English translation by Miles Tomalin.

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of purpose for his music.9 But it is not only African American precedents Ho recognizes. He cites earlier Asian American cultural expression, writing, “Other early Asian American folk cultural forms include oral tradition of folk stories, ballads, chants and folk songs brought over by the early Asian laborers from their peasant oral traditions.” Importantly, “the great body of the Asian American cultural tradition emanates from the working class Asian communities and is [created and performed in] the Asian languages and dialects” (“Revolutionary” 384). In other words, confining Asian American cultural expression to those writers, musicians, and artists who chose to create works that would resonate with the dominant English-speaking mainstream culture or who attempted to scale the cultural ladder to high art status, neglects or forgets the rich panorama of Asian American culture that operates outside of dominant-culture requirements such as English language use. Moreover, early Asian American folk culture was shaped by the structural racism Asians faced and by their poetry, music and other cultural activities that expressed their “feelings and experiences of separation, loneliness, disappointment, bitterness, pain, anger and struggle” (“Revolutionary” 384). Ho has also written articles detailing the musical and political histories of an earlier generation of Asian American musicians that included Frank Chin and his group, A Grain of Sand, as well as the folk group, Yokohama, California.10 Ho has tapped into these reserves of Asian American culture in forming his Afro-Asian new American multicultural music, the musical component of his popular avant-garde. * * * Ho has written about his idea of revolutionary art and its relation to popular culture, setting a four-point agenda–speak to the people, go to the people, involve the people, and change the people–and emphasizing the need to engage popular audiences. His goal is not to merchandise his art more effectively or to lessen the political impact of his art, but to increase the effectiveness of his work in creating a revolutionary consciousness in his audiences (“Revolutionary” 289). His views echo those of Angela 9

He mentions Mingus, along with Ellington, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp as musical influences in an interview with Fiona Ma, “Talking About a Revolution: Fred Ho’s Monkey Orchestra shakes up the San Francisco International Jazz Festival.” 10 See Ho’s article, “An ABC from NYC: ‘Charlie’ Chin: Asian American Singer and Songwriter.”

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Davis, who has argued, “As Marx and Engels long ago observed, art is a form of social consciousness–a special form of social consciousness that can potentially awaken an urge in those affected by it to creatively transform their oppressive environments. Art can function as a sensitizer and a catalyst, propelling people toward involvement in organized movements seeking to effect radical social change. Art is special because of its ability to influence feelings as well as knowledge” (236; added emphasis). Ho’s idea of a popular avant-garde is fundamentally anchored to Davis’s notion of popular culture’s engagement as a means to motivate audiences to question normative assumptions and ideologies. I want to focus on two of Ho’s major works, Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armaggedon! and The Voice of the Dragon: Once Upon a Time in Chinese America . . ., as they exemplify his efforts to create a new type of ensemble and a new set of musical and social relations through an aesthetic practice he terms the popular avant-garde. His use of popular culture as source material for his art provides a sharp contrast to his efforts at organizing and funding his creative endeavors through the institutions of high art culture. Though Voice of the Dragon was commissioned by the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the World Music Institute, and the New York State Council on the Arts and Deadly She-Wolf Assassin was funded partially through the Japan Society and composed while in residency at the For David and Julia White Artists Colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica, Ho insists that artists do not–indeed, must not–acquiesce their political positions in order to receive grant monies. While continuing to rely on conventional arts funding organizations, Ho also has recognized the constraints granting organizations can often require in exchange for their support and has turned his entrepreneurial energies towards selfproduction. As he admits, “In the absence of a revolutionary national organization or movement, I have [formed] my own production company, Big Red Media, Inc..” In this way, he adds, he has taken control of the means of production and distribution of his art (“Beyond” 50).11 This has meant an increasing attention to developing a popular audience rather than

11

Bruce Lee faced similar obstacles in Hollywood and eventually returned to Hong Kong to make movies. Enter the Dragon was essentially a Hong Kong movie with distribution and a small sum of capital from Warner Brothers Films. In a move that mirrors his cinematic and narrative strategies, Lee attempted to use Warner Brothers and Raymond Chow, a Hong Kong movie mogul, in a synergistic manner: the publicity that Warner Brothers studios could give this film coupled to the knowledge of the Asian markets by Chow and his associates helped Lee achieve the transnational success of the film.

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relying on grant funding to subsidize smaller, elite audiences of high art patrons. Ho’s reliance on the appreciation of an audience willing to fund his work through their purchase of tickets and recordings partly motivated his development of “a growing body of opera/ballet/musical theater works aimed at […] children, teenage and adult audiences” (Voice n.p.; emphasis added). At the same time, his interest in cultivating a youth audience partially motivated his incorporation of the martial arts action film, a genre he once found demeaning for its depiction of Asian males as cold-blooded asexual killing machines–a representation of Asian masculinity as nonhuman at its most basic level.12 However, Black Cherokee activist Day Star advised him to recognize martial arts as part of his tradition. Otherwise, Star argued, you will allow the way in which they have been “appropriated and misrepresented [in films] influence you because then you’re just reacting to it. Take it back! Make it something revolutionary.”13 Her advice forced him to recognize the liberatory possibilities of martial arts and, by extension, of martial arts movies. In fact, Voice of the Dragon was part of Ho’s program to “deEuropeanize” the world, fueling his search for alternative models and forms onto which he could transpose his larger creative ambitions.14 Soon after his conversation with Day Star, he began incorporating martial arts choreography. By the same token, just as martial arts movies take their narrative cues from classical Chinese literary works such as Luo Guanzhong’s The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Ho uses Chinese folk 12

Ho is aware of other US popular culture misrepresentations of Asian males such as the emasculated laundry boy and cook employed in domestic tasks that were gendered female under US patriarchy. See Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture for a cogent study of the ways in which Asian males have been (mis)represented in popular culture. Lee addressed other stereotypes of Asian males in a response to an offer to portray Charlie Chan’s son in a television series that was to be titled Number One Son. Lee, in rejecting the offer, said, “It’s about time we had an Oriental hero. Never mind some guy bouncing around the country in a pigtail or something. I have to be a real human being. No cook. No laundryman” (Little, Words 98, added emphasis). His constant struggle was to “be a real human being.” This was not just an internal struggle but a battle that he waged in the world, in the society of men, much like the heroes of Three Kingdoms and Outlaws. As noted in the text, Lee placed himself within a contemporary perspective that transcended historicism or an overly reverential reliance on tradition. 13 Interview with author, September 05, 2007. 14 See Kyle Gann, “Monkey Business: Fred Ho De-Europeanizes Opera with Martial Arts.”

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tales and mythology, thus linking these two traditions in his work since the mid-1990s. Significantly, his scores, which are a blend of African American musical practices and instrumentation with Chinese instrumentation and musical aesthetics, form a kreolized accompaniment to his martial arts-themed works. In this sense, Ho asserts, “Martial arts and music, for me, have many parallels. Each is a metaphor for the other. Music is about developing a sound that will bring down the walls of Jericho, it’s about finding chi. Martial arts [also develops] a way to transform form so that it becomes highly individual, agentive and impactful.”15 Jazz musicking privileges collective dialogical frameworks, the development of an individual “sound,” and the metaphor of the soloist as both member of and distinct from the rest of the ensemble. These are wellknown tropes throughout jazz discourse. Correspondingly, a major part of traditional Asian martial arts training is the perfection of forms, a specific series of moves which an individual must master in order to advance and attain mastery of a specific style. However, the belief is that the martial artist will acquire these moves as a type of “second nature,” allowing the martial artist’s chi to flow effortlessly through any physical confrontation. In this way, Asian martial arts address both the physical and the spiritual development of its adherents. The links he suggests between Afrodiasporic music and Asian martial arts practices are connected through his view concerning the essential nature of African musicking. In a discussion of the nature of “the groove” in various Afrodiasporic and popular musics, he juxtaposed “commodified and reified music” against music with a “vibrant, vital sense of the [Afrodiasporic] tradition,” arguing that while the former is merely entertainment, the latter conceives musicking as shamanism, a sound and activity directly connected to the forces of nature: “[African] rhythms [move] down deep to the cellular level and those rhythms will fill the body and keep the body alive, energetic, sensual, fertile. That’s the kinesis of it! It’s not just simply recreational spectacle. The real African kinesis of it is that these rhythms are energizing at the cellular level [and in] life at all levels.”16 The links between music, physical and spiritual development, and aesthetics mark the correspondences within the variegated elements comprising Ho’s popular avant-garde and his vision of an Afro Asian new American cultural synthesis.

15 16

Interview with author, September 05, 2007. Interview with author, September 05, 2007.

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* * * The music of Deadly She-Wolf reinforces the ways through which conventional connections are rearranged. Asian and Afrodiasporic elements blend into coherent musical statements and serve as aural compliment to the conflictual yet familial relations among characters in the work. These blended musical elements in Deadly She-Wolf exploit this contradiction in order to (re)create myth as a site of counterhegemonic contestation as well as an enactment of a revolutionary popular avantgarde. Describing his aesthetic agenda for the work, Ho has admitted his debt to not only the narrative of Lone Wolf and Cub but also to the film series’ composers, Hideakira Sakurai and Kunihiko Murai: The music for the Lone Wolf movies innovatively combines Japanese traditional influences with the hippest of contemporary “jazz.” In the film music, there is virtually no melody. Rather, texture and rhythm abound. I’ve tried to retain this approach in my score. The only “thematic motif” is a three-note descending line (whole step to half step ala traditional Japanese iwato mode) and a four-note ascending figure (minor thirdwhole-step-whole step) evocative of a clarion jazz-blues riff or the first four of five notes in a primal pentatonic mode. I’ve upped the musical intensity with increased metrical complexity, more “free” improvisation and greater layering of cross- and poly-rhythms, while at the same time retained much of the flowing, poignant “minimalism” of traditional Japanese music-theater.17

In conjunction with his stated musical purpose, “The Way of the Wolf” leads things off with the sound of Masaru Koga on the Japanese fue, or bamboo piccolo, accompanied by Royal Hartigan’s percussion work and Yumi Kurosawa on koto (Japanese string instrument). After a brief introductory section, Art Hirahara’s electric piano begins a rhythmic accompaniment figure above a funky backbeat, supporting Koga’s alto sax solo. The next track, “Imperial Intrigue,” begins with ethereal koto figures. The drums and an electric piano join the koto in a conversation between the Asian and Afrodiasporic musical elements. Towards the end, a flute enters, maintaining the song’s ephemeral feel. The conclusion is almost comical with its contrastingly declarative mood. “Enter: The She-Wolf Secret Weapon” is built from an interlocking set of rhythmic and thematic lines performed independently by each member of the ensemble. “‘Round and ‘Round Hades We Go!” is distinguished by solo percussion sections and an extended finale. “In the Shadow of the Wolf” is the recording’s 17

Program notes for Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon!, n.p.

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ballad, which temporarily suspends the loud volumes and swift rhythms dominating the other pieces in the work. At one point in the ballad, the instrumentation is reduced to solo electric piano, underlining the poignancy of the piece. The next composition, “Nightmares,” is a lively flute vehicle that evokes the soul jazz fusion of the 1970s with its steady backbeat rhythm and electric piano ‘comping’ though a koto faintly playing in the background lends the track an enigmatic touch. “In a Silent Way I Seek My Prey” is a haunting melody performed on the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and supported by the koto. The pair sensitively accompanies each other before the koto performs its own significant solo segment. “Bok Mei: The White Lotus of the King Kong Palm of Death” is primarily a hypnotic modal groove with an accompaniment figure that, as the track progresses, is passed from electric piano to koto and the horns. A notably visceral electronic keyboard solo is a highlight and the track ends with a simple tonic resolution dominated by the horns and rhythm section. “Colonel Ulysses Sam Armageddon” provides a funky koto line above what sounds like an undiscovered 1970s martial arts film soundtrack. The next song on the recording, “Qaseem, The Killing Machine” begins with a funky bass line. The piano trio introduction is appropriately suggestive and the composition develops into a hard bop modal excursion. Midway through the track, the piano solo is a singular example of the musicianship in this group and Hartigan’s drumming is again to be singled out for its exemplary musicality and technical virtuosity. “The Storm of the She-Wolf” begins with a statement on solo koto of Ho’s four-note ascending figure. Despite the composition’s title, the track is dominated by koto and flute, sounding more like the calm before the storm than like the actual storm. In fact, as “The Storm” segues into the next track, “We Have Arrived in Hell,” the vibrancy of the latter track evokes the tensions and unease of an arrival in the netherworld, offering a distinct contrast to “The Storm.” Finally, in “Pick up the Sword: End of the Assassin,” the koto introduces the central motif of the composition above Hartigan’s intriguing cymbal work. The baritone sax enters briefly after a false ending by the koto but the conclusion of the piece is one last statement of the four-note ascending motif by the koto, accompanied by the shakuhachi’s high pitched squeal and a bass note sounded out by the electric piano. The Japanese and funky jazz elements are aligned at the end, signaling their musical and aesthetic congruencies. I described, if all too briefly, a large part of the music from Deadly She-Wolf in order to convey two ideas. First, the music can stand alone without the dramatic narratives to sustain it and is able to convey the

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tensions as well as the compatibilities between the diverse Asian and Afrodiasporic musical and cultural elements. As ethnomusicologist Weihua Zhang observes, Diversity is [one] of Ho’s musical qualities. He likes to synthesize different musical styles and genres and mold them. His expanding use of elements from a variety of musics such as West African, Latin, reggae rhythms, Filipino kulintang, Chinese and Korean instruments, Arabic and Japanese modes, has become characteristic of his compositions. Almost all of his works are marked by multiple sections and changing meters and moods. (Zhang 96)

Secondly, and more importantly to this essay, the development of Ho’s multicultural music increasingly took shape as not only Asian instrumentation and musical aesthetics were blended with Afrodiasporic musical traditions, particularly jazz and rhythm’n’blues, but in conjunction with his idea of the popular avant-garde, utilizing links to Asia that were not exclusively bound to Asian high art cultural traditions such as Japanese Noh or Chinese Peking Opera, but to popular-culture forms such as manga and samurai and kung fu film genres. * * * Ho’s attraction to Japanese samurai and Hong Kong kung fu films as creative models increased as he began to note these genres’ oppositional aesthetics. Additionally, using popular forms such as the martial arts action film as inspiration and foundation for his aesthetic principles, Ho created works that openly celebrated their populist origins.18 Similar to writer Lu Xun’s revolutionary use of woodblock prints in early-twentiethcentury China, Ho chose to appropriate a degraded form of commodified culture, such as the martial arts action film, in order to create revolutionary works that subvert hegemonic or corporate-economic signification and authorization.19 The martial arts movie Enter the Dragon and, in particular, its star, Bruce Lee, influenced Ho’s aesthetic and political vision for The Voice of the Dragon, a work he describes as a “music and martial arts cantata,” ironically citing a high art musical form in tandem with the martial arts. 18

See Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, a journal of Lee’s philosophical and aesthetic thoughts. 19 For more on Lu Xun and the historical context in which he operated, see Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980.

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An example of the value of Lee’s work for Ho is his borrowing of Lee’s iteration of “the art of fighting without fighting” as an ideal. In Enter the Dragon, Lee’s character is challenged to a fight by another martial artist, known simply as Parsons, after Lee answers a question about his fighting style with the aphoristic “My style is the art of fighting without fighting.” Unable to avoid his challenger, Lee points out that the ship’s deck is too small for a fight and suggests taking one of the lifeboats to a small island nearby. Parsons agrees and steps into a lifeboat. Without getting into the lifeboat himself, Lee lets out its lead line, stranding Parsons as he and the lifeboat separate from the larger ship. Handing the line to Chinese ship workers who had suffered abuse from Parsons earlier in the scene, Lee cleverly “fights without fighting.” Clearly echoing Lee’s dialogue, Chen Jack, a character in Ho’s Voice of the Dragon, declares, “To subdue your enemy without fighting is the highest skill.” In Ho’s popular avant-garde, popular culture is the repository of “folk” knowledge and the subaltern epistemes of “the people,” who, he recognizes, are no longer the peasants of rural seventeenth-century China (the period in which Voice of the Dragon is set) but, to varying degrees, cosmopolitan subjects whose common ground can be found in popular culture. Thus, Ho positions his music and creative work within the same discursive turf populated by devalued popularculture forms such as the martial arts film genre in order to reach those audiences he is most interested in educating–people, particularly the young, who are marginalized and oppressed because of their skin color, class, and/or gender positioning. Defending his use of martial arts films as a creative template, Ho pointed to an introductory scene in Enter the Dragon with a conversation between Lee and his Shaolin master teacher to illustrate how Lee was a philosopher-fighter whose martial arts skills had “gone beyond the mere physical level [to reach] the point of spiritual insight.”20 When asked to name the highest technical level he hopes to achieve, Lee replied, “To have no technique.” In Ho’s view, this intuitive, “down to the cellular level” act of immersion in an aesthetic and technical tradition acts to transcend conventional limits. Likewise, as his self-taught musicking attests, it mirrors his own immersion in jazz through working with established jazz artists such as Archie Shepp as important first steps that

20

This quote begins the conversation between Lee and his master teacher under discussion. This scene was cut from the original theater and video releases of the film. Its re-insertion to the DVD release radically re-frames the film’s narrative and Lee’s message or intent for the film.

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enabled him to work through the jazz tradition and to eventually transcend it. More provocatively, Ho views Lee as “the Asian John Coltrane.”21 In order to understand this comparison, it might help to recall Amiri Baraka’s assertion (writing under the name LeRoi Jones) that “John Coltrane [. . .] is an example of the secular yearning for the complete change, for the religious, the spiritual” (Baraka 198). Coltrane, recognized widely in the jazz world as one of the most visible advocates for the spiritual impulse running through jazz music, cast a wide influential net. For his part, Coltrane recognized music’s affective powers and looked for ways in which to focus his music towards benevolent ends: I’ve already been looking into those approaches to music—as in India—in which particular sounds and scales are intended to produce specific emotional meanings [. . .] I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’d receive all the money he needed. But what are these pieces and what is the road to travel to attain knowledge of them, that I don’t know. The true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them must be, I believe, the goal of every musician. I’m passionate about understanding these forces. I would like to provoke reactions in the listeners to my music, to create a real atmosphere. It’s in that direction that I want to commit myself and to go as far as possible. (Quoted in Porter 211; emphasis added) 22

Ho views the creation of an Afro Asian multicultural music in the same way: “I was profoundly drawn to and inspired by African American music as the expression of an oppressed nationality, for both its social role as protest and resistance to national oppression, and for its musical energy and revolutionary aesthetics” (“Kreolization,” 135). In this way, he comments further on the various ways African musicians transformed various Western European musical practices and assumptions through their own aesthetic frameworks to create vital African American music cultures and traditions As stated earlier, Ho, like Coltrane, believes the shamanistic power of African music – and by extension, of African 21

Interview with author, September 05, 2007. I am indebted to Porter’s explication of these interviews for the information contained in this paragraph. The chapter entitled, “So Much More to Do,” from which this quotation is taken, deals at length with Coltrane’s interconnected interest in spirituality and music. 22

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American music–enables the music to “reach down to the cellular level” and empower both musician and listener. He further supports his comparison of Lee and Coltrane by noting that both were iconoclastic innovators. In 1960, Coltrane recorded The AvantGarde, announcing his immersion in free-jazz aesthetics, which did much to legitimize the style for some jazz critics due to Coltrane’s proven stature within mainstream jazz. In Lee’s case, his “total system,” as Ho calls it, known as jeet kune do, was a break from traditional kung fu, incorporating not only martial arts techniques but also a philosophy with a strong Taoist influence. Furthermore, Ho points to Lee’s assertion that an individual, using self-discipline and a high degree of intuition that has been “trained” by philosophical ideas found in Taoism and Buddhism, must often act in opposition to hegemonic interests in order to maintain her political, ethical, and artistic integrity. * * * Ho’s Afro Asian multicultural music is an aural complement to the idea that a multicultural ethos might arise to subdue or overcome the divisive idea of “pure” cultures or the unyielding allegiance to conservative notions of culture. Ho’s music articulates the inability of tradition by itself to give contemporary Asian Americans a voice as well as to reveal how tradition can be used to evoke a multicultural perspective that transcends the limits of race, gender, and nationality. As Rey Chow writes, “In the ‘third world,’ the displacement of modernism is not simply a matter of criticizing modernism as theory, philosophy, or ideas of cognition; rather, it is the emergence of an entirely different problematic, a displacement of a displacement that is in excess of what is still presented as the binarisms of modernism-postmodernism” (Writing Diaspora 57). Ho’s multicultural orientation confronts notions of race, however defined and manifested, which are unwittingly aided by the intentions of postcolonial critiques that appear grounded, intentionally or not, by ideas of cultural purity. Chow argues, “This, then, is the first of the postcolonial dilemmas faced by peoples of the non-Western world – the inevitable tendency toward nativism as a form of resistance against the dominance of Western colonial culture” (Ethics 152).23 This “self-fetishizing gaze” becomes another instance of the continuing legacy of colonial domination. 23

In the chapter, “Between Colonizers,” from which this quotation is taken, Chow pursues an interesting study of Hong Kong’s unique position within a postcolonial context. Her observations can be grafted onto Lee’s own stratagems given his formative years spent in Hong Kong but space does not permit exploring this idea.

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For example, as Chow notes, Hong Kong has “always been dismissed by the mainland Chinese as too Westernized and thus inauthentic” (Ethics 154). Describing the situation as an opposition between nativists and postmodern hybridites, Chow writes, “While nativists suppress the fundamental impurity of native origins, postmodern hybridites tend to downplay the legacy of colonialism understood from the viewpoint of the colonized and ignore the experiences of poverty, dependency, and subalternity that persist well beyond the achievement of national independence” (Ethics 155; original emphasis). Thus, “[f]or the postmodern hybridite, the word ‘postcolonial’ does not differ in essence from ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘international’” (Ethics 155). However, Ho avoids Chow’s dilemma by constructing the two positionalities (nativist and postmodern hybridite) not as simply oppositional but as dialectical. Because engendering a revolutionary consciousness in his audiences remains Ho’s primary goal, not merely entertaining them with highconcept spectacle (though he assuredly accomplishes that, as well), his creative work remains rooted in dialectics between education and entertainment, popularity and populism, and tradition and innovation. Ho’s popular avant-garde is a masterful blend of Afrodiasporic and Asian musicking, Chinese martial arts, and the martial arts action film genre, which draws its counterhegemonic power from its ability to reach audiences without having to dilute its revolutionary message or massage its transformative ideological impulse. Asian martial arts such as kung fu and karate, after all, originated in the practical strategies for confronting elite power created by oppressed populations who had been stripped of weapons other than their bodies and intellects. Binding the popular avantgarde to his iteration of an Afro Asian new American multicultural music, Ho’s creative works demonstrate, by voicing truth to power, the inherent power of subaltern cultural production despite its marginalization, occlusion, and/or defamation by dominant cultural hierarchies. Importantly, Ho reminds us that blacks and Latinos embraced the martial arts as well, because it revolutionized, to use his term, their sense of identity by fostering camaraderie and self-discipline. Indeed, Ho’s innovations on the myriad set of influences and traditions through which he creates lend his work remarkable power. The popular avant-garde, then, is more than a means to educate–it is a powerful cultural adjunct to revolutionary action. From this perspective, Ho asserts, Many would say: Fred, let’s focus on what’s possible. Or, Fred, your ideological and political predilection seems to preclude propensities for the here-and-now possible reforms. But I will only quote Sun Ra in response: Everything possible has been tried and nothing has changed.

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What we need is the Impossible. The music we make must embrace the Impossible in the arduous journey to make the music a true force for social revolution. (“Imagine” n.p.)

Ho activates his audiences to reconfigure the racialized and gendered inequalities that are the basis for the normative relations of power they face in their daily lives by creating alternative and imaginative narratives of women warriors and other revolutionary agents. By placing these “impossible” examples of multiple multicultural perspectives within his hybrid cultural productions, Ho ably demonstrates, even if only within the space of one of his performances, the possibilities his “popular avantgarde” art hold for advancing progressive, even radical, social transformation.

Works Cited Asai, Susan M. “Cultural Politics: The African American Connection in Asian American Jazz-based Music.” Asian Music 3.1 (Winter-Spring) 2005: 87-108. Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Black Music. New York: Apollo-William Morrow, 1968. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Davis, Angela. “Art on the Frontline.” The Angela Davis Reader. Ed. Joy James. Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Dimberg, Ronald G. The Sage and Society: The Life and Thought of Ho Hsin-yin. Honolulu: UP of Hawaii, 1974. Farquhar, Judith and Mary L. Doi. “Bruce Lee vs. Fu Manchu: Kung Fu Films and Asian American Stereotypes in America.” Bridge: An Asian American Perspective 6.3 (Fall 1978): 23-40. Floyd, Jr., Samuel. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Gann, Kyle. “Monkey Business: Fred Ho De-Europeanizes Opera With Martial Arts.” Village Voice 19-25 (Nov 1997): n.a. Guanzhong, Luo. Trans. Robert Moss. Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel. Beijing: Foreign Languages P/U of California P, 1999. Guanzhong, Luo and Shi Nai’an. Trans. Sidney Shapiro. Outlaws of the Marsh. Beijing: Foreign Languages P/Indiana UP, 1981. Ho, Fred. “An ABC from NYC: ‘Charlie’ Chin: Asian American Singer and Songwriter.” East Wind 5.1 (Spring/Summer 1986): 29-31.

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—. “Beyond Asian American Jazz; My Musical and Political Changes in the Asian American Movement.” Leonardo Music Journal 9 (1999): 45-51. —. “Imagine the Impossible! Perpetuating the Avant Garde in African American Music.” Keynote address for the Fourth Annual Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Colloquium, “What’s Avant Garde about the Avant Garde,” held at the University of Kansas, 30-31 Mar 2007. —. “‘Jazz,’ Kreolization and Revolutionary Music for the 21st Century.” Sounding Off! Music as Subversion, Resistance, Revolution. Eds. Ron Sakolsky and Fred Wei-Han Ho. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1995. —. “Revolutionary Asian American Art: Tradition and Change, Inheritance and Innovation, Not Imitation!” Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America. Eds. Fred Ho, Carolyn Antonio, Diane Fujino, and Steve Yip. San Francisco: AK Press, 2000. —. “Voice of the Dragon.” Big Red Media , accessed 13 Dec. 2007 —. “What Makes ‘Jazz’ the Revolutionary Music of the 20th Century, and Will It Be Revolutionary for the 21st Century?” African American Review 29.2 1995: 283-90. Hong, Terry. “Rebel Yellow: In his bold multimedia performance pieces, saxophonist and composer Fred Ho combines politics, prose and a dash of revolutionary fervor.” A. Magazine 31 (Mar 1998): 78. Hsia, C. T. The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1968. Hsun, Lu. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Beijing: Foreign Languages, 1959. Kim, Jungwon. “Intersections.” A. Magazine (Feb/Mar 1999): 39+. Lee, Bruce. Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Santa Clarita, CA: Ohara Publications, 1975. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Little, John. Bruce Lee: Words of the Dragon, Interviews, 1958-1973. Boston: Tuttle, 1997. —. The Warrior within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee. Chicago: Contemporary, 1996. Ma, Fiona. “Talking About a Revolution: Fred Ho’s Monkey Orchestra shakes up the San Francisco International Jazz Festival.” AsianWeek 20.11 (11 Nov 1998): 21. Ming, Lai. A History of Chinese Literature. New York: Day, 1964.

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Plaks, Andrew. The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1987. Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Rolston, David L., ed. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1990. Shatz, Adam. “New Seekers in Jazz Look To the East.” New York Times 23 (Nov 1997): n.a. Spence, Jonathan. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980. New York: Penguin, 1982. Thomas, Bruce. Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit. Berkeley: Frog, 1994. Zhang, Wei-hua. “Fred Wei-Han Ho: Case Study of a Chinese-American Creative Musician.” Asian Music 25.1-2 (1993-1994): 81-114.

THE WESTERN EXOTICISM OF TWELVE GIRLS BAND MARCO VALESI UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

In contemporary China, the dichotomy China–West still appears as a work in progress, which suggests that the Chinese have maintained, despite the overture to a global cultural and economical context, a clear self-awareness while at the same time constructing their relation with and perception of the other and of the West. This resistant self-awareness influences the ways in which the modern Chinese imagined and construed the West. In her Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in PostMao China, Xiaomei Chen has identified two tracks of occidentalist discourses in modern China: “one is the official Occidentalism, in which the West is portrayed as the demon and the other one is the anti-official Occidentalism, advanced by various groups of the intelligentsia, in which the West becomes a useful metaphor for their critique of domestic oppression” (113). These divergent ways underscore the importance of considering the essential differences that arise in the construction of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Diverging from Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, in which he presents the East-West dichotomy in order to stress western hegemony, the presentation of Occidentalist discourse has shown that such relationships can be bidirectional depending on the specific socio-cultural context. As we will see in this essay, one example is the Westernization of traditional Chinese music carried out by 12 Girls Band. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the fact that Asians’ perception of the West is shaped not only by the western, international, and global climate of the modern world but also by the domestic context in which such a perception is created. As Timothy Dean Taylor argues in Beyond Exoticism. Western Music and the World, It’s important to know how musical practices signifying non-western peoples entered western European musical vocabulary and how occidental thought shaped the pan-Asian cultural conditions of early-twentieth-

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century music. In the era of globalization, new communication technologies and the explosion of marketing and consumption have accelerated the production and circulation of tropes of otherness. We have to consider World Music as a cultural production created under rubrics including multiculturalism, collaboration and hybridity; in this way we can scrutinize contemporary representations of difference. (76)

This consideration should be applied not just to music or cultural production, but also to Asians’ construction of their own identity, as their image is also often constructed and presented under and for the Western gaze. As stated in “China and Occidentalism“: this practice of presenting Self for Western Other has been given various terms, such as Orientals’ Orientalism, self-imposed Orientalism and cooperative Orientalism. But to the extent that is predicated on a projection by non-westerns onto the west on which they set out to present their own cultures, it also amounts to a form of Occidentalism. If this exercise of Occidentalism acts on an anticipation of how the western other is to gaze at the self, there seems to be another way in which the western other is shown more accessible and cooperative for the self. In this presentation the East and west/self and other divide central to Said’s critique of Orientalism becomes increasingly blurred. It thus calls for considerations of various contexts in which such conceptions are imagined and construed. This call for historical specificity perhaps marks the most notable contribution that the discourses of Occidentalism have made to our understanding of the world. (n.p)

In this identitarian process, it is necessary to discover how authenticity gets defined in a global world. I argue that authenticity tends to be based on very particular elements of local culture that get transplanted to a global scale. Those elements are changing and mixing each other very rapidly, thus ceasing to be representative of the starting cultures to end up representing a new third, in-between (to use Homi Bhabha’s term) realities. In this constructive structure, it will be crucial to formulate a comparative analysis of mainstream appropriation of cultural forms and practices that are producing worldwide homologation or similar results. Said’s Orientalism theorizes that dominant mainstream cultures typically act in an imperialistic and ethnocentric manner that defines their own identity and that of the other. We can think about a commercial-oriented representation of culture that happens not just because, as Said explained, the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter-ego, but also because the marketing pressure of the cultural sector needs easy and fast common elements even

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if it produces an apparent diversity. An example of this identitarian forced process, as previously mentioned, is the international success of the 12 Girls Band and their projection of the gendered and sensuous Chinese self. Their style can be considered simultaneously global and popular. Although it has attracted many Chinese and non-Chinese audiences, it has also drawn a lot of criticism, from both sides, regarding the group’s sexism and its vernacular representation of music emerging from traditional and Confucian China. In this context, Joseph Lam posits, “according to a Confucian ideology and practice music should be used to cultivate virtues not to corrupt people’s aspirations and topple nations with sexy women performing vulgar sounds” (37). To refute such criticism, supporters of the band and their music argue that China has a long tradition of men hiring women to entertain their male eyes and ears. In short, the music of 12 Girls Band encapsulates the new politics that the engendered and sensuous China wants to create. In conclusion, I think that we have to change the paradigm West-East. The end of Orientalism and Occidentalism means exchanging roles for new third realities in which there is a new subject-object relationship between Self and Other. The West must cease to be only a subject; it can become also an object. Likewise, the Orient must stop being just the object to become also the central subject and vice versa. In this way, the subjective idealism switches from Western colonial modem times to a Third-World postcolonial new time in a fruitful way, thus creating, through a hybrid process, new stimulating cultural creations.

The Hybridization of Western and Chinese Music The discussion about Occidentalism and China or about the Westernization of the Chinese cultural tradition appear to be new because China’s long and strong historical and cultural tradition has remained quite resistant to Western influence and has maintained its cultural heritage. However, the hybridization of Western and Chinese music has an interesting history in China. As Johanna Namminga explains, “the trend towards adopting Western styles in music started early in Chinese history with the first traders and colonization. The cultural imperialism brought by colonization created a trend towards Westernization which has continued throughout Chinese history” (3). It is, therefore, very interesting to analyze the assimilation of the Western music in China as well the Western influences on their culture.

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As can be seen so far, the Chinese conception of music in its traditional sense is rather different than the Western view. In this sens, Johanna Namminga postulates: “The function of music in Europe for the last thousand years had been mostly artistic and religious, embellishing life rather than being essential to it. In contrast to this, Chinese music has a function which is pervasive and which permeates into every experience of human living, which is fundamental to life itself, and expresses itself in all kinds of activity” (5). Therefore, we can notice that the traditional Chinese views about music are quite different from those of Western cultures: the Chinese conceive music as permeating life, whereas in the Western mind, music is an accessory to life. Chinese people’ views of music can be seen as changing with the growing influence of Western civilization on the Chinese culture. There have been many different sources of Western influence throughout Chinese history, each one having a different effect on Chinese society. Some aspects of exposure to Western culture have helped Chinese culture while others have harmed it. Although Western cultural imperialism has been prevalent in Chinese society, the influence has not been all negative. Western musical influence in China began with early Christian missionaries in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when they taught the Chinese traditional Christian hymn songs. The Chinese were eventually colonized by European countries. During this time period, the Chinese began to adopt Western music as their own. The influences of colonization on the Chinese and their eventual adoption of Western ideas were initially a demoralizing loss of their own cultural identity. Western culture so deeply dominated the Chinese one that some aspects of the Western cultural productions even became part of the creation of the Chinese cultural society. Yet, although Western culture became the high form of culture, traditional Chinese culture did not simply disappear. Instead, early forms of hybridization began to occur with the blend of Western popular music and Chinese folk-music. After Mao Zedong’s death, Chinese culture regained much of its vitality. After Deng Xiaoping was named president, he began to make social reforms that greatly helped Chinese culture to flourish once again. Traditional and Western music were no longer banned, foreign trade was restarted, tourism was promoted, and new relations began with foreign countries, especially the United States. By the same token, radio stations began to broadcast again popular music and mood music was played in public instead of military marches. The music industry once again began to flourish. The reforms that Deng Xiaoping made helped Chinese culture and began the cultural and musical hybridization of Chinese and Western music. However, with this interest

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in imported music, not only Western music was sampled, but also the music of Japan, India, Taiwan, and other Eastern cultures. It is easy to assume that the West forces its culture upon other societies through globalization and cultural imperialism. However, as China has shown, cultures will take parts of Western cultures that suit them while at the same time sampling from cultures that are non-Western. China has a long, tumultuous music history with times of prosperity and times where music was greatly restricted. China has gradually adopted many of the characteristics, styles, and ideals of Western music while still making it their own unique music. However, the trends of modern Chinese society show an increasing interest in Western music and a continued hybridization of the two. Although China has been greatly influenced by western imperialism, especially in cultural terms, its recent history has shown that despite this, the Chinese have used what has been imposed upon them to create a music form of their own. I begin the analysis of the creation of a girl band by using their website: http://www.12girls.org/. I will also report some passages included in the site in order to better understand the philosophy of this project. Curiously, in the “About us” section of the web page there is a simple presentation of the group (About Band), but a much more detailed presentation of the company (About Company) and of the band’s artistic producer (About Wang Xiaojing). It could be argued that while, after thousands of years of cultural heritage, Chinese music still maintains its gentle and elegant flavor, the emergence of a new genre in Beijing had made its mark: the result is the 12 Girls Band. The name of this musical group signifies the symbolic choice of various aspects of Chinese numerology with twelve months in a year and, in ancient mythology, twelve jinchai (golden hairpins, which represent womanhood). Inspiration was also drawn from Yue Fang, the female chamber orchestras that played in the royal courts of the Tang Dynasty. Most important than the number is that those twelve young (which actually numbers 13, including one alternate), attractive (“they had to be beautiful. Twelve beautiful girls standing on a stage is a spectacle in itself, even without any music,” said Wang in an interview) Chinese women clad in trendy clothing present a sort of new folk interpretation of various Chinese traditional instruments. In fact, the group presents traditional Chinese music mixed with modern pop, jazz, and rock. According to the band builder, reforms had to be made in order to make Chinese folk music more enjoyable and to help it enter the international market: “Mr. Wang Xiaojing, in accord with his goal formed in the beginning, also actively got in contact with craft brothers abroad and did his best to introduce 12 Girls Band to the international

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market. Beijing Shi Ji Xing Die Cultural Communication Limited Company and the Japanese Platia Company have begun to cooperate in opening up new markets for 12 Girls Band in North America: “It is expected that 12 Girls Band, on behalf of both Chinese music and Eastern music, will manage to penetrate into the mainstream music market of North America. Our goal is Grammy Awards,” (n.p) as the 12 Girls Band web page explains. The idea of forming a musical group like the 12 Girls Band took shape in June 2001. Through a long recruitment phase (“A great number of campus students and graduates from three major professional musical academies--the Central Conservatory of Music, China Conservatory of Music and Central University for Nationalities–participated in the competition” [n.p.]), the twelve girls were found. All the members of the band not only excel in traditional music instruments like “thegu zheng, pi pa, er huandyang qin, but can also master some less familiar instruments like thedu xian qin, tu liangandju chi qin” (n.p.). Up to this point, the project seems a normal selection process but, as reported in the band presentation, Wang also noted that besides musical skills and accomplishments, another important requirement for recruitment was style and charisma. The 12 Girl Band not only provides audiences with modern Chinese folk music, but also emanates visual appeal: “After much picking and filtering, 12 beautiful girls got enrolled” (n.p.). Watching some videos of the band and of traditional Chinese music, I realized that the band’s stage presence diverges greatly from that of traditional Chinese musicians. In fact, traditional performers played various instruments while seated; these women, however, stand tall and use their body language to emit a strong atmosphere of youthful vigor. Their adapted folk music incorporates the percussion and electronic music from the West, which makes the traditional Chinese vibes more rhythmic and enthusiastic. However, there were different opinions from the beginning. Some were optimistic about 12 Girls Band and its new performing modalities for folk music, while others doubted whether Chinese folk music would become popular. Among other concert reviews found in one of the band’s forum, Andrew Kao, a sixteen-year-old AsianAmerican, states: “I was never really attracted to traditional Chinese music, but I listen to Mandarin pop,” Kao said. “The 12 Girls Band reminds me of Superstar, by S.H.E.; in Superstar there was a mix of Chinese traditional music and American rock. I think that factor contributed greatly to its chart-topping ratings” (n.p.) Others, like Ada Lee for example, had a harsher assessment. “They’re selling out Chinese

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classical music; it’s too commercialized. Chinese music is really classical. […] [The Twelve Girls Band] doesn’t match” (n.p) In spite of the critics, the band became very popular, especially among young people everywhere in Asia. It cooperated with a Japanese company to debut their first album on July 24, 2003, which had already sold 1.8 million copies; a subsequent 32-date tour in Japan sold out in ten minutes. Their second album, Shining Energy, went platinum since its release in March. In Japan, they have appeared in advertisements for cell phones and chocolate, and look-a-likes have even appeared in a pornographic video. Rei Miyazaki, an editor at the Tokyo-based music magazine Oricon, stated: “nobody thought a foreign band could ever do that, much less a Chinese one” (n.p.). Entertainment industry publication Variety wrote, “China dolls take traditional music off the shelf” (n.p.). Likewise, Time Asia called them “China’s first exportable supergroup” (n.p.). The inclusion of performances such as a medley combining themes from Mozart and Beethoven to the Mexican standard La llorona, interpreted with Lila Downs, was a clear indication that ensemble founder Wang Xiaojing intends to take the 12 Girls into even broader territory. Eastern Energy, which is geared specifically for the American market and features versions of Coldplay’s hit “Clocks” and Enya’s “Only Time,” entered at number 62 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Their charting marked the highest debut in Billboard history by an Asian recording artist. It also debuted in the Top 10 on the Internet Album Sales Chart, keeping company with names such as Tim McGraw and Usher. Mainstream media has also picked up on the Chinese phenomenon: in the United States the promotion for the band has been large, including advertisements on major cable networks, billboards, and print publications. Wal-Mart and Amazon are selling their CD. To quote Time magazine: There’s something mesmerizing about the band’s graceful stage presence, their technical virtuosity–and most of all, their euphoric expressions as they play their instruments. The entrancing and expansive music on the new Romantic Energy reflects the group honoring their heritage, combined with a genuine love for all styles of music–from complex classical works to enduring pop tunes. The aura of a beaming morning sun colors the album’s title song; and a lovely wistful version of Simon and Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa brings a new dimension to a beloved classic. (n.p.)

Trans-modern Music or Commercialization of Music In this final part of my analysis, I would like to consider whether 12 Girls Band can be conceived as an example of trans-modern music or as a

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case of commercialization of traditional music. Before doing so, I will also analyze a multiple-choice questionnaire I prepared to collect data from Chinese and Chinese-American teachers and students at the University of California, Merced. There were 49 responses, with 44 being valid for analysis. There were responses from 44 students and 5 teachers. It is necessary to clarify the conceptual situation in which culture, society and theories are placed. We are undoubtedly living a reality that is difficult to analyze if we start from modern concepts; consequently, we should use the term postmodernity to define a reality where the subject moves away from univocal and clear opinions, acquires multiple profiles, becomes a fractal figure. Yet postmodernity, in turn, has also failed, as it is incapable of explaining the new reality where global discourse has re-emerged and where, at the same time, the fragments of postmodernity come together. Thus, according to Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, “the dispersed fragments have been included thanks to the virtual revolution of the information society” (n.p.). Therefore, I suggest to use the term transmodernity and trans-modern music to describe this new reality. This concept is employed by the Spanish philosopher influenced by Jean Baudrillard, and will in turn be adapted by different authors in their fields of research to analyze new cultural manifestations and to differentiate them from previous ones. New events and new cultural productions are based on different ideas to those in modernity or postmodernity. As Enrique Dussel states, “transmodern theories are those that proceed from marginalization to claim their own place opposite Western modernity” (43). This emergence of subordinate studies, of border epistemology, leads to the postcolonial reflection which is also referred to as post/imperial/Western/colonial reasoning (W. D. Mignolo) or as the idea of cultural hybrids by the Argentinean sociologist Néstor García Canclini.. The concept of transmodernity will allow us to define new cultural currents, which may be called transnational or transcultural–irrespective of the name we give them, these hybridizations have characteristics that clearly differentiate them from those present in the modern or postmodern era. In this new reality, there is a mix that goes from the global to the local, rather than just the global, as happened in modernity: from the metropolis to the colony, from the Eurocentric “empire” to the periphery or to other “empires.” Nor is it solely a study from a local perspective for a local audience, as was the case in postmodernity, but rather it is a dialogue between the global and the local and between the local and the local (we can refer to a new reality, glocal), given that population flows have led to mixed races in both colonizing and colonized countries, which at the same

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time has generated trans-ethnic communities in the heart of delineated regions and transterritorial ethnic communities. In his Transmodernidad e interculturalidad, Dussel sees this as “developing universal cultures, which assume the challenges of modernity and even European-North American postmodernity, but from another perspective, also from their own cultural experiences, therefore creating a combination of cultures which are not considered individually but rather as fragments forming a new culture, a type of hybrid” (49). The term transmodernity will help us understand the transnational and cultural hybridization processes. In particular, it will reveal that creative processes are actually the product of a cultural hybridization in which the actors converse under equal conditions. Processes, then, are imposed by the global market, appearing more like the mechanism of modernity, that is, an appropriation of subordinate cultures by Western society. I have based my analysis of 12 Girls Band on the understanding that dialogue at local levels and even between the global and the local is possible, but I would stress that transmodernity or the processes of hybridization are not always conflict-free and do not always allow horizontal dialogue. The global market imposes its tastes, appropriates them from subordinate cultures and, as stated by Enrique Dussel, “removes everything in these cultures related to anticapitalism and then assumes them” (101), diverting, as a result, from true hybridization. Globalization and transnationalism tend to remove meaning from subordinate cultural manifestations. They assume them for marketing purposes thus stripping them of their defining resistance. The danger of transmodernity is not the loss of differences, as happened in modernity, but rather, as García Canclini states: “that only marketable differences find a place and that ever more concentrated market management reduces the audience’s options and their dialogue with the creators. This is the greatest risk, not the imposition of a single homogeneous culture” (69). There are clear examples of Pan-Asian, Latin American, AfroAmerican, and mixed-race cultures in an attempt by the market to remove political content and protest from the different movements, and draw them all together in a simplified but profitable model. As García Canclini states, MTV appears to be the central producer of mixed-race culture but there is not a trace of the real richness of a multicultural-intercultural interaction; instead, it proposes a Benettonization of cultural meanings for circulation of racial and ethnic clichés and banalities that cultural marketing share in order to create a bigger customers’ network. The transnational market is appropriated with local cultural initiatives, given that it has understood that culture is an industry that generates a considerable amount of money.

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As reported by the Beijing Weekend, Warner Music executive Kazuma Tomoto formed his own record label, Platia Entertainment, to successfully launch the Twelve Girls Band in Japan. This provided earnings of almost of $50 million. Then, he developed the idea of bringing the Twelve Girls Band to North America with Ken Pedersen (a Virgin Records executive behind the world music-oriented Luaka Bop and Real World), Ray Cooper (former Virgin Records America president and one of the key developers of the Spice Girls, who helped design the group’s presentation to the American and European markets), and Phil Quartararo (EMI North American Executive Vice-President). Their coordinated promotion in the United States included TV spots on the History Channel, A&E, CBS and MTV–along with print coverage of the band in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and CNN.com. In this context, one of the most ferocious criticisms in the survey I carried out was linked to the sexual exploitation of the musicians. The most chosen (75%) of the possible answers of the questionnaire, at question number 8 (Do you think we can consider them cases of gender commercial discrimination or it’s just marketing?) was: It is a clear example of sexual discrimination. Central to the septet’s appeal are dance beats and, well, sex appeal. Appearing in publicity shots wearing skinbaring outfits, and strategically-placed instruments. Also, question number 5 (Do you think their music is an example of westernization--a process whereby societies come under or adopt the Western culture—of Chinese traditional music?) helps clarify the perception of the group. The yes (15%) and no (20%) options obtained only 35% of the answer, the third (It’s a natural evolution of a cultural process), 5%, and the last one (It’s not Chinese traditional music anymore), the absolute majority with a 60%. Given all these reasons and analyzing all the questionnaire answers--even if it is just a partial representation of the potential 12 Girls Band public, it would be naïve on my part to think that all cultures can converse among one another with the same level of opportunity and in a horizontal manner. It is clear that the global market, basically controlled by western majors or by western stereotype and ideals, continues to impose his tastes and culture. This homogenization is apparent in all fields, including cultural production. Finally, trying to answer the initial question, “is 12 Girls Band a cultural hybridization?,” we have to answer no. In fact, if we accept García Canclini’s description of the process as”socio-cultural processes in which structures or discrete practices, which existed independently, are combined to generate new structures, objects and practices” (20), we cannot speak in this case just of cultural global process in which the distinction between

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‘us’ and the ‘other’ disappears. Rather, it seems to be a transplantation and transformation of Western music in the non-Western parts of the world, where Western music has become part of the national soundscape. In my view, 12 Girls Band is a carefully packaged musical product: gentle enough to please New Age fans, unusual enough as a visual presentation to have some appeal in the MTV-oriented Western music media. In practice, that means retaining just enough Chinese flavor to create an exotic sheen without alienating listeners unaccustomed to the moan of the erhu (a two-stringed fiddle) or the plink of the pipa. The manager Wang Xiao-Jing’s creation—the 12 Girls Band–is a living embodiment of China’s national strategy of “harmonious growth” and their sales strategy is reminiscent of that employed by the United States and Britain, decades ago, with groups like the Go-Gos, Bangles, Bananarama, SpiceGirls and by other countries liked Japan with Princess Princess, Turkey with Volvox, Brazil with Scatha, Finland with TikTak, and Australia with Bond.

Works Cited Benson, Cynthia and C. Victor Fung. “Comparison of Teacher and Student Behaviors in Private Lessons in China and the United States.” International Journal of Music Education 23 (April 2005): 63. China and Occidentalism. accessed 23 April 2009. De Kloet, Jeroen. “Authenticating Geographies and Temporalities: Representations of Chinese Rock in China.” Visual Anthropology 18 (March-June 2005): 229. Dussel, Enrique. “Transmodernidad e interculturalidad (interpretación desde la filosofía de la liberación).” UAM-Iz.(2004). Erasmus. Revista para el diálogo 1/2 (2003): n.p. García Canclini, Néstor. La globalización imaginaria. Barcelona: Paidós, 1999. 95. Goetzman, Keith. “Chinese Pop.” Utne 98 (July/August 2003): 1-110. Green, Edward. “Zhou Long and the Future of Chinese Music: An Interview with Commentary. I.” Chinese Music 27 (2005): 12-55. Hu, Xenia Xien-Yue. “Im Spannungsfeld der Transkulturalitat: Neue chinesische Musik im Umbruch.” Positionen: Beitrage zur Newen Musik 68 (May 2005): 1-25 Huang, Hao. “Voices from Chinese Rock, Past and Present Tense: Social Commentary and Construction of Identity in Yaogun Yinyue, from

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Tianenmen to the Present.” Popular Music and Society 26 (June 2003): 68-183. Keyes, Christopher. “Recent Technology and the Hybridization of Western and Chinese Musics.” Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology 10 (April 2005): 1-51 King, Anthony D., ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan Press, 1991. Lau, Wilfred. Singing in the Ring. Compact Disc, Go East 1003536923, 2004. Mittler, Barbara. “Rhapsody in Red: How Western Music Became Chinese.” The China Quarterly 181 (2005), 1-199. Namminga, Johanna. “The hybridization of Western and Chinese music”.

Nettl, Bruno. The Western Impact on World Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1985. Nettl, Bruno and Philip V. Bohlman, ed. Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music:Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. Transmodernidad. Madrid. Anthropos, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle, Dwayne Winseck, et al, ed. Media in Global Context: A Reader. London: Edward Arnold Publishing, 1997. Taylor, Timothy Dean. Beyond Exoticism. Western Music and the World. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2007. Wai-Chung, Ho. “A Comparative Study of Music Education in Shanghai and Taipei: Westernization and Nationalization.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education 34 (June 2004): 231. Wiant, Bliss. The Music of China. Hong Kong: Chung Chi Publications, 1965. Xiaomei, Chen. Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in PostMao China. New York, Oxford UP, 1995. Yan Zi. The Moment. Compact Disc, Warner Music (HK) 02083480878, 2003.

CHAPTER NINE FILMOGRAPHIC ORIENTALISM

SOMEWHERE OUT BEYOND THE STARS: ORIENTALISM AND STAR TREK DEEP SPACE NINE MICHAEL BARBA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

You know, I think I figured out why humans do not like Ferengi […] The way I see it, humans used to be a lot like Ferengi—greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget […] But you’re overlooking something; humans were a lot worse than the Ferengi—slavery, concentration camps, interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. See we’re nothing like you. We’re better. —Quark, the Ferengi to Benjamin Sisko “The Jem’Hadar,“ Star Trek Deep Space Nine Even though they are trying to project it into the twenty-fourth century or wherever, it is still a reflection of who we are right now. —Andrew J. Robinson, actor who played Garak in Star Trek Deep Space Nine Telephone interview, 27 March 2009

Star Trek has been an American popular culture phenomenon for almost forty-five years. The modest show from the 1960s has spawned several follow-ups over the last four decades, including an animated television show, eleven feature films, and four additional television series. All told, Star Trek has accumulated hundreds of hours of viewing, and built a devout following of fans who see the promise and optimism of a future where humans learn to solve their problems (financial, political and environmental), and become leaders of an intergalactic Federation that promotes understanding and equality among Earth and alien races. The irony of Star Trek is that throughout most of its existence, while portraying an Earth that has done away with racism, it has often perpetuated the Western idea of the exoticized Other, specifically in its creation and treatment of fictional alien races. This was the paradigmatic

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construct of Star Trek and, with the exception of the 1993 spinoff, Star Trek Deep Space Nine,1 these ideas went relatively unchallenged. Perhaps because DS9 was the first post-Cold War Star Trek series, when America held both hope and anxiety for a new world, or because DS9 sought to distinguish itself from prior Star Trek incarnations, or a combination of both, DS9 began to challenge the constructs of the Star Trek that preceded it in both the original series and Star Trek The Next Generation.

The Alien and the Other in Science Fiction and Star Trek For over a hundred years, that is, long before Star Trek, the alien has been a popular element of science fiction and its use as a metaphor has evolved from self to the Other. In the late nineteenth century, H.G. Wells’s War of the World was a pointed attack on Western imperialism: he turned the tables on the British audience and portrayed Great Britain as the subject of an invading force (Davis 285). Yet a couple of decades later, portrayal of aliens, such as the red and yellow aliens of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series, clearly represented the West’s xenophobia. As Bill Brown points out, “A Princess of Mars depicts a white southern male reestablishing racial order“ (155).2 In turn, the alien invaders of the 1950s have clearly been read as communist invaders and even contemporary scholars have read the Other into the metaphor of the alien. Charles Ramirez Berg sees our current debate over immigration manifesting itself in this metaphor, “I contend that these new extraterrestrial films are a culturally unconscious means of working out the whole question of immigration as it has emerged in the last several decades“ (155).3 1

From this point on, I will refer to Star Trek Deep Space Nine interchangeably with the designation DS9. 2 A Princess of Mars was the first in a series of John Carter of Mars books. 3 While I agree that aliens can be representative of America’s fear of immigration, I think it is dangerous to correlate a fictional alien race with one particular culture, for the simple reason that America’s xenophobia certainly predates current issues with Mexican immigrants. Even though the anxiety reflected over the last thirty years certainly has something to do with those fears of invaders from south of the border, I believe that the issue of immigration is much larger and more complex than Berg reflects in his writing. However, one cannot deny that science fiction has metaphorically portrayed relations between cultures; even in Star Trek, much has been written of the correlation between the Klingons and the Soviet Union, or the Nazi Germany/Jewish relationship that is clearly represented in the Cardassian/Bajoran relationship of DS9. That being said, I find that trying to correlate one alien race to one particular culture depends on stereotypic markers

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Star Trek is not immune from this kind of critical postcolonial reading. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, conceived of the show as one where in the future Earth will be a Utopia: no poverty, no pollution, no war, and certainly, no racism. Earth was to be the leader of an intergalactic collection of worlds whose first mission was exploration and discovery. While Roddenberry was very careful to illustrate this in his command crew, uniting Whites, Blacks, Asians, Russians, with the half-alien, Mr. Spock,4 Star Trek has perpetuated the Western perception of the Other or, as Edward Said described it, Orientalism, vis-à-vis the science fiction tradition of the alien as metaphor.5 As Leah R.Vande Berg observed, “a closer analysis of [Star Trek’s] episodes indicates, racial tensions, differences and issues have not disappeared; they have merely been transformed into species differences“ (55). Said recognized that the perpetuation of stereotypes would persist more aggressively in the age of the electronic media, “One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes […] Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds“ (26). Through television, Star Trek displaced a traditional hegemonic paradigm of Orientalism on human/alien relations and encounters, whereby the United Federation of Planets stood in for a which tend to essentialize that race. Rather, I prefer to look at the aliens’ relations with Earth, or Humans, as symbolic representations of Western Society’s, specifically America’s relation to the Other. 4 Star Trek and subsequent Star Trek spin-offs portrayed racially diverse crews, but noticeably absent from the regular crew of every series was Latino representation. While Roxann Dawson and Robert Beltran, of Star Trek Voyager are both Latino actors, they both portrayed characters that only touched upon a Latino identity. Beltran played Commander Chakotay, of Central American Mayan descent, and it was this indigenous aspect of his culture that was highlighted in the series. He is also the first character in Star Trek to be a Native American, albeit, a Native Central American. Dawson played B’Elanna Torres, who is half Klingon and half human, presumably of some Latino descent; however, the series chose to highlight her struggle with her Klingon identity, and ignore her human cultural identity. There has yet to be a Star Trek regular representative of the United States’ largest Latino group, Mexican or Chicano, although Chakotay’s Mayan culture comes close. While it is interesting to note this, it is an issue whose exploration would merit its own paper, and for that sake I am merely pointing out the apparent inequity in Star Trek’s culturally diverse crew composition. 5 Although Said discussed the Occident’s perception of the Orient (specifically the Near East),as his model for the West’s perception of the Other, it is this model of identity and identification through, or more precisely against, the Other that I am addressing when I use the term Orientalism.

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dominant culture, and more specifically, Western or American culture. Furthermore, Said wrote, “Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing the upper hand“ (7). Not only did the West define itself through differences with the Orient, but it also reinforced its feeling of superiority over the East. In this context, one may argue that Star Trek both defined and reinforced Western feelings of superiority over the Other through its portrayal of human relations with alien races. Andrew J. Robinson who played the alien Garak in Star Trek Deep Space Nine and directed an episode of this series, as well as several of the subsequent Star Trek Voyager, asked of Star Trek’s structure, “So why do you go to an alien place? You go either because they are in trouble or because they are evil, or you crash land or whatever, so you know the problem is always with the place and the heroes (are) in the spaceship, you know it’s a colonial idea, we have to civilize these people and we have to take care of their problems and all these aliens are just unreliable or evil or whatever“ (Telephone interview, 3 April 2009).6 The traditional structure of Star Trek, with the exception of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, was that, every week, the Federation’s starship, Enterprise or Starfleet, would travel to a new alien world or culture where they encountered dilemmas that often came from the unenlightened aliens’ backwards culture. And while every series had alien representatives as a part of the crew, an alien’s “success as a member of the Federation is contingent on how closely his or her actions correspond to the specifically human ideals of hard work, loyalty, and compassion; aliens, on the other hand, are those who do not willingly subordinate their cultural impulses to the dominant model“ (Fulton n.p.). In other words, alien Starfleet officers, like the Vulcan, Mr. Spock, or the Klingon, Worf and the Betazoid, Deanna Troi, are all successful members of the Federation because they adopt and assimilate to the Federation’s values and beliefs, thus further representing the superiority of human, or Western, beliefs over those of the Other.7 6

I would like to thank Andrew J. Robinson, who portrayed Garak, for allowing me to interview him. While I did not use a great deal of his interview, my discussion with him certainly helped me to focus my ideas for this paper. 7 When looking at the alien crew members prior to Star Trek Deep Space Nine, we should also note that they are not entirely alien: Mr. Spock is a half Vulcan, half Human; Deanna Troi was half Betazoid and half Human, and as the Enterprise’s counselor often depended upon her Betazoid ability of telepathic empathy to aide in helping the crew on many missions; and Worf was a Klingon orphan adopted and raised by a Russian couple. While these examples certainly have their ties to

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Although this structure of cultural superiority is present in every Star Trek incarnation, I assert that Star Trek Deep Space Nine challenges and, at times, subverts the traditional model that dominated Star Trek prior to and following DS9. This being said, rather than throwing away the imperialistic construct of previous Star Trek series, what DS9 did was to challenge those constructs in its portrayal of both alien races and the Federation.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine-Challenging the Star Trek Paradigm By 1993, the original Star Trek’s three seasons had been playing on television for 27 years, and had spawned six motion pictures and a spin-off series. The follow-up series, Star Trek The Next Generation, was in its sixth season, and plans were already underway at Paramount to transition the show to motion pictures following the series’ seventh season. While the motion picture franchise was lucrative, the exposure and money from a television series was also valuable to the studio, and plans immediately were set in motion to launch a spin-off series from Star Trek The Next Generation. However, after almost thirty years of the same formula, creators for Star Trek felt that DS9 needed to distinguish itself from preceding Star Trek incarnations. Launched in 1993, Star Trek Deep Space Nine was a first in many respects for the long running franchise: it was the first series to feature a Black commander;8 instead of setting the series in another spaceship, this series was set on a space station; most of the aliens, and almost half of the regular characters of the show were not members of the Federation or Starfleet; it was the first series to have an overarching theme which would propel it through its seven seasons; it was created without the direct influence of Gene Rodenberry, who had passed away prior to the creation of the series; and finally, it was the first Star Trek created in a post-Cold War America. While all of these “firsts“ factor into the culture of Earth, in words, they privilege their alien cultures, but their acceptance and success on their respective Enterprises is contingent upon their acculturation to Starfleet and the Federation. 8 Avery Brooks took on the role of Commander Benjamin Sisko. While he was the first Black commander to lead a Star Trek series, it is, I believe, important to note that he was only a commander, not a captain like Kirk and Picard of the preceding series, for the first three seasons of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. In the final episode of the third season, he is finally promoted to the rank of captain. Furthermore, I think it is also of interest to note that the Human Federation officers are all representatives of former postcolonial cultures: Black, Irish, and Indian.

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the texture of the show, I believe the mere fact that DS9 wanted to distinguish itself from the other Star Treks and the fact that this was the first post-Cold War Star Trek were important in laying a foundation that allowed DS9 to challenge the conventions of the Star Trek structure. From the beginning of the series, we see that DS9 is already at odds with previous Trek series, and certainly, one would be hard pressed to label any Star Trek as postcolonial; although the degree to which Star Trek Deep Space Nine is a postcolonial text can be questioned, one thing is certain: it did take a postcolonial stance in its treatment of the Other and its alien races. Gene Rodenberry has been popularly quoted as conceiving of Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars“ (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine– Ten Years After“).9 The image of the American West is one of the most enduring images of the imperialistic urges of America under Manifest Destiny.10 When Major Kira Nerys, a former Bajoran resistance fighter and liaison officer assigned to DS9, shows the shambles of sickbay to the Federation doctor, Julian Bashir, she challenges the Western construct of Star Trek: Kira: I’m afraid we’ve had some security problems. Looks like looters got in here. Bashir: Oh, this will be perfect. Real frontier medicine. Kira: Frontier medicine? Bashir: Major, I had my choice of any job in the fleet. Kira: Did you? Bashir: I didn’t want some cushy job or a research grant. I wanted this— the farthest reaches of the galaxy. One of the most remote outposts available. This is where the adventure is. This is where heroes are made. Right here, in the wilderness. Kira: This “wilderness“ is my home. Bashir: Well, I-I-I didn’t mean… Kira: The Cardassians left behind a lot of injured people, Doctor. You can make yourself useful by bringing your Federation medicine to the natives. Oh you’ll find them a friendly, simple folk. (“Emissary“ n.p.)

9

Wagon Train was a popular television show which ran from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. It followed a wagon train of settlers moving from the East Coast to the West, and chronicled their journey and encounters across the West. 10 Manifest Destiny was an idea that became a driving force in America’s westward expansion. The idea, coined by John O’Sullivan in 1845, was that the United States was destined to expand from one coast to the other. It was this philosophy that motivated nineteenth-century expansion and the Mexican American War, among other imperialist acts.

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Dr. Bashir’s perception of working on DS9 is consistent with the vision Roddenberry had outlined for the show, but Major Kira’s disdain for Bashir’s frontier heroism clearly indicates to the viewer that this will not be another “Wagon Train to the Stars.“11 The preceding Star Treks dealt with displacing issues of the America of the 1960s and the 1980s to the future, one of those issues being the Cold War. Since America had a clear enemy, Star Trek and Star Trek The Next Generation delineated who was the good guy and who was the bad guy via the symbols of the Federation and the alien races they encountered weekly.12 But the end of the Cold War brought more uncertainty than answers. Charles William Maynes, former editor of Foreign Policy magazine, notes that with hope, “there is also anxiety“ (5). He goes onto further state, “Perhaps the most important consequence of the Cold War‘s end will be to deprive the American foreign policy establishment of its main organizing principle: anticommunism. For decades this principle justified every aspect of American foreign policy from the composition of its alliances to the size of its foreign aid program“ (8). America’s shifting political climate allowed for DS9 to subvert the imperialist paradigm of previous Star Treks through its portrayal of alien races. However, because the Cold War left an anxious America as well as a hopeful one, the idea of the Other in DS9 became a much more complicated construct. Robinson further noted of working on the series, “I think all of the characters on that station were complicated people, and I think, indeed, it was a signal to an audience that this is not going to be easy if you are looking for the one night stand on each planet where the good guy vanquishes the evil alien“ (Telephone interview 27 March 2009). Indeed, the idea of “good“ 11

Although it is interesting to note that creator Rick Berman and Michael Pillar did conceive of the show with a Western paradigm in mind, they saw DS9 as a “Rifleman to the Stars“ (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine–Ten Years After“). The structure of the Promenade recalled the design of the Western boomtown, complete with merchants and a local saloon, Quark’s Bar. It is perhaps because they both wanted to stay within the confines of a Western structure and distinguish themselves from previous Star Trek series that DS9 created such an interesting and complex narrative. Thereofore, I contend that while the claim is that the creation of DS9 might have been one that was to be consistent with the imperialist Western paradigm, the series, in fact, subverted itself. 12 It has long been speculated that the Klingon/Federation relations reflected the Cold War relationship between the USSR and the United States. As a matter of fact, Nicolas Meyer, director and co-writer of Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country, asserts that the peace between the Klingon Empire and Federation achieved at the climax of the film reflects the end of the Cold War (“Nicolas Meyer: Gorkon is Gorbachev“ n.p.).

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Federation and “evil alien“ is subverted by DS9; on the station, alien races were not forced to sacrifice their own cultures to fit in. The station is unlike any space station shown before, as it is not a Federation space station; it was constructed by the Cardassian Empire, and used as an ore refinery where the Cardassians used Bajoran slaves to process the minerals. Now the Cardassians have withdrawn from Bajor, presumably due to the aide of the Federation on behalf of Bajor. The Federation has agreed to help with the reconstruction efforts of a newly freed Bajor, but not without an ulterior motive. The mere fact that the Federation administrator’s office is the former office of the Cardassian overseer again links the Federation to the imperialist power structure that has dominated this region of space for nearly half a century. Maynes, in 1990, further speculated that a post-Cold War foreign policy would include extending American ideology: Some analysts argue that the export of democracy should replace anticommunism as the guiding principle of American foreign policy. The operative word is “export.” Virtually all American foreign policy analysts would agree that the United States should support the growth of democratic values and practices abroad. To this end they would deploy a considerable portion of the resources of American diplomacy, including financial support. (14)

The idea that America’s foreign policy should export its political ideology is reflected in the pilot for DS9, when Captain Picard, of Star Trek The Next Generation, delivers the Federation’s mandate to Commander Sisko: “I am a strong proponent of Bajor’s entry into the Federation,“ he tells Sisko, “Your job is to do everything short of violating the Prime Directive to make sure they are ready (to join)“ (“Emissary“ n.p.). However, Major Kira questions the inherent imperialist intentions of the Federation when she first meets Commander Sisko and tells him, “I don’t believe the Federation should be here“ (“Emissary“ n.p.). Throughout much of the series, Major Kira believes that Bajor’s entry into the Federation is a wrong step for the newly liberated planet. Similarly, in season five, Captain Sisko warns Bajor not to join the Federation, undermining years of Federation political maneuvering on Bajor (“The Rapture“ n.p.). Clearly, DS9’s narrative elements question the hegemonic devices that always placed the Federation in a position of superiority in other Star Trek narratives. Further subverting the imperialistic narrative structure of Star Trek can be seen in DS9’s use of alien cultures. Valerie Fulton explains, “Frequent episodes (of Star Trek The Next Generation) demonstrate that individual crew members who have succumbed to the invasive influences

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of some alien culture or identity must be subdued, brought back into line“ (n.p.). Therefore, if ever a Federation member acted in an Un-Federation manner, it was always due to the influence of an alien on that Federation officer. When Captain Sisko tricks the Romulans into joining the war against the Dominion, the casual viewer might see this as the Cardassian Garak’s influence on Sisko.13 In the end, however, Sisko makes it clear that his actions were his decisions and no one else’s, “So… I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all [pauses] I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would. Garak was right about one thing: a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the entire Alpha Quadrant, so I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it“ (“In the Pale Moonlight“ n.p.). The use of aliens, neither good nor bad (and at times good and bad), existing within their own culture and outside of the Federation was a groundbreaking step for Star Trek. One need look no further than the Federation’s, or rather the Federation’s representative, Commander Sisko’s, relation to the Ferengi characters on the station. As mentioned earlier, Quark forced Sisko to see that his disdain for Ferengi was analogous to racism: “You Federation types are all alike. You talk about tolerance and understanding, but you only practice it towards people who remind you of yourselves. Because you disapprove of Ferengi values, you scorn us, distrust us, insult us every chance you get“ (“The Jem’Hadar“ n.p.). Quark’s assessment of the Federation’s racial bias is substantiated throughout all of the series: the degree to which an alien race is perceived as bad or evil is directly proportionate to the alien’s similarity in appearance to humans. Even “bad“ aliens of the original Star Trek were made to look less human in the films and Star Trek The Next Generation while the more human looking aliens, the Vulcans, were left unaltered between the 1960s and the re-launch of the franchise in the 1970s and 1980s.14 In DS9, the alien race that looks the least human, the Founders, 13

For several seasons, DS9 focused on a war with an invading alien empire known as The Dominion, whose leaders were shape-shifters known as the Founders who genetically engineered other alien races to follow their orders. The interesting construct of these aliens was that in their true form they held no shape and could become anyone or anything. As we see in the Founders, DS9 still, to some degree, relied on the traditional Star Trek paradigm of Us versus the Other in its narrative. 14 Both the Klingons and Romulans of the 1960’s Star Trek were made to look less human in the 1970s and 1980s as both had grotesquely pronounced brow ridges added to their foreheads. The biggest change was in the look of the Klingons, who

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who have only a gelatinous liquid form in their natural state, became the chief antagonists of the series, replacing the Cardassians who, next to the Founders, Ferengi, and Klingons are the least human looking of the regular alien races in the series.15 Quark’s words call upon the viewer to re-examine the relationship that the Federation has with other races, and in examining even DS9, the viewer can see that Quark’s assessment resonates as true. Later in the series, Quark’s nephew, Nog, wants to join Starfleet because he claims he does not, “have the lobes for business“ (“Heart of Stone“ n.p.). It would seem that Nog is on his way to assimilating to the Federation’s (or the dominate culture’s) life, but his case is not so simple. When he asks Commander Sisko to sponsor his application to Starfleet as a non-Federation member, he not only acknowledges his shortcomings, but also his strengths as a Ferengi: “I may not have an instinct for business, but I have my father’s hands and my uncle’s tenacity. I know I have something to offer. I just need the chance to prove it“ (“Heart of Stone“ n.p.).16 To be successful in Starfleet, he is relying on what has been passed onto him from his father and his uncle. In the episode entitled, “Treachery Faith and the Great River“ Nog uses his belief in the Ferengi, “Rules of Acquisition“ and “The Great Material Continuum,“ to trade and negotiate with several Federation Starships so he can acquire a gravity stabilizer for Captain Sisko and the U.S.S. Defiant (n.p.).17 When Nog is briefly assigned to ground duty on planet AR-558 to help guard a captured in the 1960s looked like humans with dirt smudged on their face, but in later films and series they became more primitive and animalistic with larger, malformed foreheads and crooked, sharpened teeth. Interestingly, in World War II comics, artists added fangs to Japanese to make them look less human. 15 Of importance to note here is that at one time or another Klingons, Ferengi and Cardassains were all enemies of the Federation, although by the end of DS9, the Federation has found peace with each of these races, working with them to defeat The Dominion. 16 The Ferengi are aliens whose culture is based entirely on acquisition of material possessions and money. They live their lives by “The Rules of Acquisition,“ handed down by the first grand Nagus, and their business acumen is often compared to the size of their lobes, as Ferengi have enormous ears. Many, including Robinson, have read the Ferengi as anti-Semitic caricatures (Telephone interview 27 March 2009). 17 At the beginning of the second season, the writers of Star Trek Deep Space Nine decided that the show would benefit by adding a ship, so the crew could explore farther into the Gamma Quadrant, and protect the station. To this end, the starship U.S.S. Defiant was introduced to the show and used for the remaining five seasons, becoming an integral piece in the Federation/Dominion War.

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Dominion communications array, he uses his ears to detect what their sensors cannot, as Ferengis are gifted with acute and sensitive hearing (“The Siege of AR-558“ n.p.). Indeed, as a Starfleet ensign, he regularly relies on his Ferengi ingenuity, physiology, and even acquisitiveness to succeed at his tasks. Nog’s status as the singular representative of his race in Starfleet is nothing new to Star Trek. The Vulcan Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, and Star Trek The Next Generation’s Worf was the first Klingon. Vande Berg points out that Worf’s liminality, or his state of being stuck between two cultures, illustrates how “In (Star Trek The Next Generation), species has become a metaphor for race, as the series treatment of the character Worf indicates“ (55). Worf was always caught between his culture and the Federation culture, and as such, the series frequently privileged the Federation culture over Worf’s Klingon culture, as Captain Picard tells Worf: “I felt what was unique about you was your humanity, compassion, generosity, fairness. You took the best parts of humanity and made them part of you“ (qtd. in Vande Berg 61, emphasis added). Ultimately, Vande Berg feels that, “over the course of the series […] cultural imperialism—and not multiculturalism—is the dominant discursive position affirmed in [Star Trek The Next Generation]“ (65). And while DS9 does not move away entirely from the discourse of cultural imperialism, it does take steps to question the Federation’s superiority, especially in its portrayal of Worf, who joined the series in the fourth season. Initially, Worf joins the crew on DS9 to spy on Klingons and uncover their plan to invade Cardassia. Worf shares this information with Captain Sisko, but is then excommunicated from the Klingon Empire as a traitor (“The Way of the Warrior“ n.p.). At first glance, it would appear that DS9 is following the lead of Star Trek predecessors by further separating Worf from his own culture, but this is not the case as the show progresses. During the course of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Worf gravitates constantly closer to his culture. He assists legendary Klingon Warrior Kor in a quest for the Klingon artifact, the sword of Kahless. His place of honor is reinstated when he is invited to join the respected House of Martok. He fights alongside Klingons, both on the Federation ship Defiant, as well as on the Klingon ship, I.K.S. Rotarran, against the Dominion. When he marries Jadzia Dax, a non-Klingon Federation officer, he does so in a traditional Klingon ceremony. And finally, when the war with the Dominion is over, Worf accepts a position as an ambassador to

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the Klingon homeworld of Qo‘noS.18 While the character of Worf maintains his liminality throughout his seasons on DS9, his character is clearly redirected towards discovery of his own culture as a Klingon, ultimately leaving his character on the Klingon homeworld. While Star Trek Deep Space Nine did not completely subvert the paradigm of human/alien Orientalism, it did call into questions assumptions regarding Star Trek’s previous handling of the Other. Star Trek continued to marginalize alien races, but DS9 offered some light and hope with regards to how we can see the Other, thereby subverting almost thirty years of discursive tradition. As the Cold War came to a close, the narrative of Star Trek Deep Space Nine offered a new prospect for our relations with the Other, as it allowed for viewers to see that aliens (or the Other) did not have to assimilate and adopt our values to be relevant. One could only hope that Star Trek had continued to evolve down the path the DS9 carved for the series, but unfortunately subsequent incarnations of Star Trek adopted the previous narrative paradigms and continued to privilege the Federation’s positionality over those of alien cultures.19

Works Cited Berg, Charles Ramirez. Latino Images in Film Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Brown, Bill. “Science Fiction, the World’s Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915.“ Cultures of United States Imperialism. Eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1993. 129-63. Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. Fulton, Valerie. “An Other Frontier: Voyaging with Mark Twain and Star Trek’s Imperial Subject.“ Postmodern Culture. 1994. , accessed 21 March 2009 18

Of course, it should be noted that in the 2002 Star Trek The Next Generation film, Star Trek Nemesis, Worf, is reassigned to the Enterprise once again as its head of security. There is no explanation offered as to why Worf relinquished his ambassadorship, or why he left the Klingon homeworld. This is further evidence of the Star Trek franchise’s continuing along the path laid out before DS9, rather than further exploring the imperialist impulses of the Star Trek paradigm. 19 Indeed, even in the 2009 film Star Trek, Spock is not so at odds with his Human half, as he acknowledges Earth as one of his homes and even engages in a romantic relationship with the Human officer, Nyota Uhura.

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Maynes, Charles William. “America without the Cold War.“ Foreign Policy 78 (1990): 3-25. JSTOR , accessed 7 April 2009 “Nicolas Meyer: Gorkon is Gorbachev.“ StarTrek.com. 29 Jan. 2004. , accessed 20 April 2009 Robinson, Andrew J. Telephone interview. 4 April 2009. Robinson, Andrew J. Telephone interview. 23 March 2009. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine–Ten Years After.“ Star Trek.com. 31 Jan. 2003. , accessed 20 April 2009 Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Paramount Studios. Perf. Avery Brooks, Colm Meany, Nana Visitor. 1993-1999. —. “Cardassians.“ Dir. Cliff Bole. 24 Oct. 1993. —. “Emissary.“ Dir. David Carson. 3 Jan. 1993. —. “Heart of Stone.“ Dir. Alexander Singer. 6 Feb. 1995. —. “In the Pale Moonlight.“ Dir. Victor Lobl. 15 April 1998. —. “The Jem’Hadar.“ Dir. Kim Friedman. 12 June 1994. —. “The Rapture.“ Dir. Jonathan West. 30 Dec. 1996. —. “The Siege of AR-558.“ Dir. Winrich Kolbe. 18 Nov. 1998. —. “The Way of the Warrior.“ Dir. James L. Conway. 2 Oct. 1995. —. “Treachery, Faith and the Great River.“ Dir. Steve Posey. 4 Nov. 1998. Vande Berg, Leah R. “Worf as Metonymic Signifier of Racial, Cultural and National Differences.“ Enterprising Zones Critical Positions on Star Trek. Eds. Taylor Harrison, Sarah Projansky Kent A. Ono, and Elyce Rae Helford. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. 51-68.

SOUTH READS WESTERN AND EASTERN EAST: SECOND-HAND ORIENTALISM IN KILTRO, A CHILEAN MARTIAL ARTS FILM MOISÉS PARK UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

Contemporary Chilean film industry is moderately known for documentaries that denounce Pinochet’s regimes, such as Jaime Guzmán’s Salvador Allende (2004) or Carmen Castillo’s recent Calle Santa Fe (2007), among others. The documentary is a well-known genre in the Southern Cone but recent comedies and dramas, such as the international acclaimed drama Machuca (2004) by Andrés Wood or the SpanishChilean comedy Promedio rojo (2004), have had a growing national spectatorship and production. Chile only released a dozen films between 1997 and 2003. Although the military regime ended in 1990, the film industry took more than a decade to actively start experimenting with commercial features (de la Fuente 11). The action genre, for instance, is limited to few attempts such as Johnny 100 pesos (1993), which is mostly considered a drama, since most of the action happens in one room with no action sequences that require more than a gun. The possibility of making a Chilean martial arts film seemed precarious when the national media announced the filming of Kiltro. Compared to the blockbuster successes of Yimou Zhang, Ang Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan films in Hollywood, Kiltro was a pioneering effort to introduce “Southern” martial arts. This release would challenge the dramatic and comedic homogeneity of Chilean national cinema, portraying uncommon Chileans—immigrants from Arab and Korean descent—in martial arts stunts, enhanced with the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery), comparable to some Hollywood and Hong Kong martial arts films. Kiltro was released in 2006 and was produced by the PalestinianChilean martial artist and stuntman Marko Zaror, “the Latin Dragon,” who had previously gained recognition for his work as a stunt double for wrestler-actor The Rock. He is also the star and the producer of Chinango (2007), the first Mexican martial arts film, and Mirageman (2007),

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directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, who also directed Kiltro. The bibliography concerning the critical revision of the most recent (and perhaps the only) Latin American martial arts films (Kiltro [2006], Chinango [2007], Mirageman [2007] and La gran sangre [Perú 2007]) is limited to few reviews. By contrast, articles regarding martial arts film from Eastern Asia and even Hollywood are abundant. The present article attempts to critically review Kiltro, the pioneering martial arts film, by recognizing and evaluating several seemingly Orientalist aspects. The conclusion will determine the possible political implications of representing Arab and Korean characters from this film’s point of view. Although the definition of Orientalism has evolved since Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, it seems important to emphasize two of his original major points regarding the representation of the Orient. First, many depictions of the Orient are exoticized, to purposely situate and portray the Orient as foreign place, vulnerable for military violence. Said theorized that Orientalist art represents the Orient as inferior, differentiating and isolating the Oriental Other in case of a military intervention from the West, or justifying an intervention as a necessary tactic to “pacify” the Other for Imperialists’ profit. Secondly, Said points out the difference in power between the West and the East, argumenting that Orientalist representations depict the Orient as weaker or uncivilized, compared to the West (204). In this way, the intervention would be considered a plausible and an ethical tactic to perpetuate the Empire. Although the complexity and the branching of this concept has turned to different directions in East Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Cultural Studies–to name some of the disciplines that deal with Orientalism–this article will focus on only these two aspects that Said recognizes in the arts and literature, in relation to this Chilean martial arts film. Kiltro follows the conventional martial arts film plot: the hero is technically inferior to the villain, a journey allows him to learn new techniques from a master and, finally, the hero defeats the villain. The film opens with daylight landscape shots of the solitary Atacama sand dunes in Northern Chile, recognizable by Chilean spectators, yet easily interchangeable with the sets of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) or The Ten Commandments (1956). These landscape shots rapidly dissolve to urban spaces, starting with a crowded dance club and finally introducing the main set: Patronato, the Korean-Arab1 neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. 1

In Chile, the media generalize Palestinian identity as “árabes” (Arab) or “turcos” (Turks), a common confusion which explains the lack of racial specificity in reviews and summaries of the film in cyber and mass media. Lebanese and Syrian

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Zamir (Zaror), the Palestinian-Chilean hero, is a street fighter who spends time in the streets of Patronato with Kiltros, a street gang composed of Korean and Palestinian teenagers. Zamir follows and tries to protect Kim (Caterina Jadresic), a Korean-Palestinian high school student whose Korean father, Teran, is a member of a secret martial arts cult called Zetas. The conflict develops as Max Kalba, a revenge-seeking Palestinian swordsman comes back to Santiago in order to murder all the Zetas. The villain kidnaps Kim and her father, as a series of flashbacks reveals that Kalba was married to Kim’s mother, and that Kim is the fruit of an affair between Kalba’s wife and Teran, Kim’s father. Meanwhile, the hero trains in the desert with Master Soto: a Chilean Zeta master, an alcoholic hermit living in a cave near the Atacama Desert, a Zeta/Zen philosopher and as it is revealed, Zamir’s real father. At the end, on the brink of defeat, Zamir takes strength from Kim’s eyes, which are overtly “Orientalized” with make-up, and Kalba is defeated. According to Orientalist schemes, underlying the exoticizing of an Oriental subject or of an Oriental setting there is always a political attempt to demean the Other by accentuating the difference between the imperial-nationalist identity of the author and audience, and the representation of the barbaric or inferior Other—the Oriental. The Orientalist set of Kiltro was particularly well crafted, given the limited budget of Chilean films. The decorated sets during Zamir’s training scenes enhance the exoticism of the desert, using the Atacama Chilean desert as a parallel to Middle Eastern and East Asian deserts; it dislocates the Orient in Northern Chile. Conventional kung fu training sets tend to be greener. Trainees run through the woods, hit and climb trees, jump from rock to bamboo branches, swim or walk on rivers and lakes, etc. This is not the case in Kiltro, being one of the few films where training is done in a desert.2 The red/orange sunset during the “special kick” scene is purposely theatrical, self-parodying the ridiculousness of training naked in the driest desert in the world. Furthermore, to many martial arts film viewers, this set recalls early Shaw Brothers films, which were famous for the fake colorful sunset back drops used to minimize the costs of traveling to ideal landscapes. However, in the case of Kiltro, given the availability and proximity of the Atacama desert, it is evident that the director chose to use immigration are considerably large, although the Palestinian community is the largest in comparison to the Lebanese and Syrian populations. Although the number varies, sources claim that there are least 350,000 Chileans with Arab ancestry (Adams n.p). 2 These scenes recall Lucas’s Star Wars, which is not a martial arts film, but it is an obvious point of reference for several oddities of this film.

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the back drop, instead of shooting actual sunsets, in order to link the exotic set to the legacy of martial arts B-movie genre rather than to link the set to “Orientalist deserts.” Excessive Orientalist clichés make a parody of these imagined spaces from the “filmic Orient.” The film does not perpetuate inferior views of the Orient with a demeaning purpose, although the ignorance of specific cultural details could be interpreted as profane or as politically incorrect at best. For instance, private spaces such as Kalba’s home and Kim’s fabric store manifestly reflect Orientalist portrayals. Strong and dominant colors are used in Kalba’s home, invoking Orientalist paintings with bright colors that match spacious banquet hall curtains with belly dancers’ dangling clothing. Bright fabrics, Chinese paper umbrellas, pagodas hanging from the ceiling, musicians with drums, smoke coming from giant hookahs and incense, and random fire curtains that separate the viewer from the belly dancing: the mise-en-scène recreates a foreign space, far from the duller “Chilean home” where Zamir lives. At his home, a Palestinian-Chilean home, the dining table set has bowls with colorful fruits that recall Orientalist oil paintings. Other details in the humble hero’s home such as the painting of a semi-naked Asian woman with a jar or the poster of Japanese manga in his bedroom explicitly show Orientalist elements in the film; yet, there is no link to any specific purpose to represent Arabs or Koreans as inferior. Orientalist depictions of “Oriental” women as exotic, erotic and promiscuous beings highlight their purportedly uncivilized and morally inferior nature in comparison to the elegance of the British, French, and American empires. Kim’s character, for instance, being half Korean and half Palestinian, is the object of desire of both main characters—the hero and the villain. Her mixed, double Orientalist sexuality combines the exotic nature of the stereotypical stripping belly dancer from the Middle East and the pale geisha-like Kimono-wearing female samurai from the Far East. In addition, her facial features, eyes, hair style, and outfit suggest that Kim is, superficially, more Korean than Palestinian. In Orientalist terms, being a belly dancer or a female ninja would not make her any less or any more exotic. Nevertheless, the choice of accentuating the East Asian eyes, intentionally makes her “more Asian” or, in Said’s words, it provides a “manifest Orientalism,” hence a “more exotic” one. The casting for Kim had a Korean runner-up who ended up being rejected because she had a darker skin than Jadresic, the Chilean teenage model cast for Kim’s role. Jadresic had to use make-up and straight black wigs in order to look Asian. The irony of this casting overly presents an Orientalist aspect of the

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film, since the casting director found a Chilean actress of European descent to have a closer resemblance to the imagined Asian feature. Both desired women are Palestinian characters, yet again, their sexuality merely follows the patterns of any other martial arts film with a romantic element, combining the kick-flick with the chick-flick, mixed with the Bond-exotic girl franchise, namely, casting a woman who has to bare her skin to seduce and later has to be rescued from a vicious villain. According to Orientalist readings, the representation of Kim’s mother wearing a dangling costume homogenizes all Palestinian women as thorax-exposing belly dancers, bluntly flirtatious, and experts in the art of seduction. This overt patriarchal, sexist element where women are the materialized object of desire, nonetheless, does not target a specific race for a particular political reason. Most accurately, the portrayal and implications of representing the female body as an object in this film has a lot more to do with patriarchal influences than Orientalist schemes. It is important to notice that Zamir’s mother (of Arab descent) was abandoned by Soto (Zamir’s father) when he joined the Zetas. She is not a Palestinian woman who dances all the time, nor a woman who is quietly submissive under religious fanaticism, but the motherly type character who does not want her husband or son to be involved in gangs. Her death is part of the formulaic tactic to justify the hero’s need to punish the villain. Moreover, the undeniable influence of anime, sometimes referred to as “techno-Orientalism” (Kee 672) in Kiltro complicates the application of the Orientalist critique. This anime-inspired representation would merely be the imitation of self-Orientalism. In other words, when the film portrays Kim or Zamir imitating anime characters, it is not observing and representing the Orient, but rather, a representation of the Orient’s selfrepresentation. Unlike the “imagined World” that other Orientalist works of art portray, this film does not imagine an Orient, it forges it—Kiltro distorts what was already distorted. To complicate this scenario even more, the racial self-representation of anime is not really self-Orientalist (since this would entail portraying Asian features), a conflicting element in Occidentalized anime. Much has been said about the aesthetic Occidentalization in anime, including the colored hair, pale skin and big blue eyes of animated female characters, which means that the selfrepresentation is interfered by re-imagining the self as the (White) Imperialist Other.3 What Said found racially biased in Conrad, Kipling, 3

Although pre-World War II Japan was an Empire, it is no longer a multinational Imperial force or a colony. The Japanese Empire, however, cannot be parallel to the Western Empires, given the obvious discrepancies in the current “Imperial condition.” Anime, in itself, is a complex genre that does not fit into the Orientalist

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and Austen seems to be dislocated in anime depictions, since this Japanese genre also embodies “a ‘quality’ that offers aesthetic pleasure” (Shin 326) but in this case, the producers and the audience are local Japanese artists and viewers instead of the Imperial West. In fact, Dragon Ball, probably the most popular anime in Chile, consists of pale-skinned, black-haired and black-eyed main characters who control their anger in order to morph into more muscular characters with blond hair and green eyes. Anime, therefore, could be referred to as a self-imagined Occidentalized Orient. The character of Kim in Kiltro, although attending a Chilean school, wears a sailor uniform top that resembles Japanese high school uniforms and a navy blue mini skirt that reminds us of anime female high-school students. Moreover, Kim’s school outfit and hairstyle resemble Sailor Moon, another well-known anime, where the main character is a blue-eyed blond Japanese high school heroine. Additionally, Star Wars’ Princess Leia hair is given homage, something that is easily noticed by viewers. Lucas’s Star Wars has been often criticized as containing Orientalist elements such as samurai-like Jedi, Princess Leia’s clothing, Asian-named characters Obi-Wan, Yoda, etc. Furthermore, Said’s intervention concerns the power struggles since Orientalism “is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness” (204). According to Said, this representation of weakness is a military and moral inferiority. He notices that representations from the West tend to focus on brutal violence and promiscuous sexual activity as the only activities in the East, as a tactic to prepare or justify Western intervention in the lands of the Others. In addition, if it is true that Said’s description of Orientalism consists of Western-Imperialist cultural productions, then Kiltro would not belong to the category of “Western” since Chile does not adhere to Imperialistic ethnocentrism (although some might disagree). Unless Chile is viewed as “Westernized,” Orientalism would not be compatible to this film. Thus, if this last premise is true—that Chile is a Westernized country—the Chilean characters would be portrayed as morally and military (martially) superior to Eastern characters. This entails, nonetheless, that some characters would be “entirely Chilean,” “entirely Western” or “entirely Eastern.” The word “kiltro” has Mapuche etymological roots, and refers to dogs or “bad men.” Nowadays, the term is not used to describe men, as much as it is wildly used to describe dogs with mixed breeds, which is the case of scheme, but it deals with several complexities (identity, ethnocentrism, imperialism, etc.) with Orientalist implications.

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most street dogs in the streets of the Patronato neighborhood. It is important to notice that both lovers would be “kiltros” in the sense that Kim and Zamir have mixed racial backgrounds. She is half Korean and half Arab, while he is half Arab and half Chilean. The gang members might not be “kiltros,” but the term could also be used to describe immigrants who have lived in Chile long enough to adapt to local culture, “mixing” their ancestry and their current surroundings. If we recognize and evaluate Orientalist elements in this film, racial signifiers and racial identity would be essential in the understanding of power struggles between characters, since “the West” would be represented as more powerful and glorious than “the East.” However, the only instance in which English speakers appear in the film is when Zamir goes to the North in search of Soto and two topless men drinking beer and with exaggeratedly poor Spanish accent tell him that Soto is drinking at a bar. The credits clarify that these two Westerners are indeed “American” (from the United States). The credits recognize them as “Gringo 1” and “Gringo 2,” presenting a non-heroic but rather, a dismal representation of White America. Can this imply that Kiltro is anti-Orientalist because it mocks the only Westerners as beer drinkers with a poor Spanish? In this context, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon is celebrated as an overt challenge against films with imperialist agendas (Bond franchise) and is sometimes recognized as anti-imperialistic (Pashad 71). Paradoxically, Kiltro has heavy influences and references to Bruce Lee’s cinematic legacy and also, to Bond’s U.S.-U.K. heroic nationalism. Kiltro, all in all, does not focus on the West, as much as Westerns (the films). In any case, there is no confrontations between these two “Western” men and the rest of the characters, leaving the discourse of power difference to be discussed between “Southerners” (Chileans) and Easterners (Palestinians, Koreans). This means that the representation of the power imbalance between the Near East and the Far East would be the determining factor to how Orientalist this film is. As we compare the representation of the two Eastern cultures, Palestinians and Koreans, we infer that Kalba’s cane is the only weapon that betrays the aura of “organic,” bare-hand martial arts fighting, implying that the Middle Eastern villain uses weapons such as the curved sword and the cane/sword, while the Korean and Chilean fighters use only their fists and kicks. Can this imply that Palestinian violence is more brutal and less artistic than Korean martial arts? We know that both the hero and the villain are of Palestinian descent, although while the villain is “entirely Eastern,” the hero is half Chilean and half Palestinian. Could we infer, then, that the film differentiates Middle East martial violence from Far

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East martial arts, marking a divergence between brutal violence and artistic violence? These questions are very misleading in determining a solution to the questions of Orientalism. In fact, it is unnecessary to try to figure out the racial ancestry of each individual character to evaluate if this film is Orientalist at all. The “Kiltro-factor,” the fact that so many culturally hybrid characters are not “entirely Eastern” problematizes the application of the Orientalist label to this film. If there is indeed an imbalance of power and a degrading or at least a mocking representation of a racial group, it would be the Chilean characters, who are represented as weak, and are kicked into the air by power kicks and punches. For instance, Kim’s previous boyfriend, a Chilean young man by the nickname of El Maniático (The Maniac) is stiff, sluggish and obviously inferior in comparison to Zamir, who defeats him with a spectacular 360 degree kick. Also, Master Soto, who turns out to be Zamir’s father, is another “entirely Chilean” character. Soto mocks the conventional character of the mysterious hermit master who lives in solitude, escaping from a traumatic past. He lives in a cave and spends most of his time drinking and smoking his pipe. His face and clothing make him resemble a drunken beggar, an erratic vagabond. Moreover, Soto’s “generic” Chilean surname might simply be an intentional reference of the Chilean roto, which is also a minimal pair (Soto-roto). In Chile, the term “roto” refers to an impoverished and uneducated man with vulgar habits and of rural origin. These attributes seem entirely unfit for a role as a martial arts master. By the same token, Soto’s speech is so full of Chilean slang that Chilean viewers can easily understand the mismatch between a Secret Sect Kung Fu Master and a Chilean roto such as Master Soto. He does not have the poetic rhetoric of an expert in secret powers such as Star Wars’s Yoda, who poetically alternates the subject-verbpredicate order, or Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi, whose brevity of speech and whose accent give him an aura of superior, foreign wisdom. Soto prefers to drink and smoke while Zamir learns the secret techniques of the Zetas. Would this entail that Chile is weaker and inferior than Korea, hence perpetuating a self-defeating inferiority of the “South” that exalts the “North,” the “West,” or the “East”? Again, this ridiculous behavior points out to entertainment as the main goal of this film, rather than political indoctrination. If there is, in fact, a political discourse (which is unlikely, in my opinion), it would be that Chileans are inferior to all other communities. While this possibility is immediately discarded, the only possible explanation of this misrepresentation is the self-parody of making a Chilean martial arts film to begin with; thus, the intentional self-parody

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serves as a trailer-attractive, blockbuster-friendly, and formulaic martial arts film. But now, we must posit the following unwavering and unanswered questions that contradict everything that Said endeavored: How effective can overt intentional and/or manifest Orientalism serve as entertainment? Without the external references, the representations of self-Orientalist martial arts film simply become a demeaning representation of a new projected Orient. If the spectator does not recognize the references, or the void political and intellectual content of the film, could this film be a disorienting Orientalist film? The spectator might voluntarily or involuntarily observe this misrepresentation and imagine a “third-hand Orient” that perpetuates a negative exoticism of the local Korean and Arab communities in Chile, perhaps arousing enmity towards the local immigrant communities. Moreover, does entertainment justify Orientalism? Could a film like this debunk Orientalist views perpetuated in Santiago? Said’s project is not and cannot be fulfilled by films such as Kiltro, which seemingly have no power against Orientalistic schemes. Even so, manifest Orientalism in this film cannot deny this film’s satiric reading of the kitschy martial arts genre, the Bond franchise, and techno-Orientalism. In order for a kitsch film to be anti-Orientalist, all the homage and allusions would have to challenge Orientalist stereotypes, generalizations, and misconceptions. However, this film, as second-hand Orientalism, can be read as a starting point to carefully evaluate the differences between cultures, as well as the mistakes and misrepresentations that are intended as satirical humor, in a critical and objective way. The task of studying and debunking Orientalist schemes lies in the eye of the beholder: the historian, the critic and the scholar, according to Said. Nonetheless, the existence of such film and the beginning of critical discussions concerning commercial films such as Kiltro could initiate more dialogues to begin to eradicate some stereotypes and misconceptions that create the distances and enmities between the Arab world, the East Asian world, and the Chilean community. This film has more references to other films than to the Orient. It mixes influences from Japanese, European cult films, 80s Hollywood and Tarantino-B-movie cinema, rather than invoking a subliminal message to invade the Middle East or North Korea. The unveiling of parody needs to be addressed in order to discard this film as a serious threat against the Arab and Asian immigrant communities. The following examples of how this film is a collection of other sources will be enough evidence to categorize it as a satire that denies any political attempt to demean the Orient. To begin with, Zamir is the name of a character in the gymnastics-

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ninjutsu martial arts film Gymkata (1985), directed by Robert Clouse (director of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon). Max Kalba, the full name of the villain is the exact name of the character Max Kalba from the 1977 Bond film The Spy who Loved Me, killed by the infamous metal-teethed Jaws. The name of the three-feet character Nik Nak in Kiltro is a reference to the henchman villain Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974 Bond movie). Likewise, the name Drax, Kalba’s henchman, derives from another Bond villain, Hugo Drax, from the 1979 Bond film Moonraker. The name “Zetas” is probably a reference to the widely viewed Japanese animation Dragon Ball Z, which is the sequel of the martial arts series. The scene where Zamir runs down a street at night to the music of David Bowie‘s “Modern Love“ is a parody of a scene in Leos Carax‘s Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), where the French protagonist runs in angst with the same background music. Additionally, the film’s score is taken from Ennio Morricone‘s spaghetti Westerns, directly quoting from Once upon a Time in the West (1968). Also, the scene in which Zamir must attempt to snatch a pebble from his master’s hand is a reference to the famous test in the television series Kung Fu (1972). CGI five-foot blood spurts are reminiscent of Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi (2003) and video games such as Mortal Kombat.4 The choreography and sound effects that involve explosive kicks that blow enemy’s bodies up to twenty feet into the air explain the influence of manga, anime, and video games. The torture scene where Teran is suspended by hooks in Kiltro is from the Japanese cult gore film Ichi the Killer (2001), following Hollywood’s new wave of gory films such as the Saw series and other films along those lines. Also, the warehouse set at the end of the film is a remarkable allusion to the set of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, since the Kiltro character Teran’s ear is cruelly injured, just like it happens in the famous warehouse scene in Tarantino’s movie. Lastly, the ending of Kiltro resembles the ending of an anime, where the erratic hero walks against a setting sun as the credits roll up. This incomplete list of references perpetuates the kitschy element, so characteristic of Tarantino’s films, as if all the seemingly Orientalist elements were “second-hand Orientalism” with the non-political purpose of representing an already represented subject with a different purpose from the original representation. 4 Ironically, Zaror modeled for the video game designers for a Mortal Kombat character. This video game is well known for its graphic depiction of violence, decapitation, mutilation, and a series of gruesome acts that serve as entertainment. Although the film does not replicate these moves, the sounds and blood spurts seem to be clear references to these games.

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Thus, in this case, instead of West reading East, this “second-hand Orientalism” can be summarized as a combination of South reading Eastern-East (self-Orientalism), South reading Western-East (ImperialistOrientalism), South reading West (Hollywood, parody, homage) and South reading South (in the form of parody). Hence, Kiltro redeems itself from the “guilt of self-Orientalism” that, according to some critics, some contemporary martial arts films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have adapted to fit the Western aesthetics of transnational audiences (Chan 6). Kiltro, on the other side, escapes from this “guilt” mainly because of the incompatibility of considering this film as an imperialist production, or an Eastern film portraying itself. Neither is this film targeted for such spectatorship, since the primary target was the Chilean audience (though the filmmakers never abandoned the hopes to reach out to the international spectatorship). After all, like many films, Kiltro is the result of a large filmmaking community. It was produced and starred by a martial artist of Palestinian-Chilean descent, directed by Chilean filmmakers who satirize Americans and Chileans, borrowing innumerable elements from European Indie films, as well as Hollywood and East Asian cinema. Kiltro, as its title describes itself, is a film with multiple sources, a kitschy (“kiltrish”) work of art with unstable grounds to catalogue it as Orientalist in Said’s original definition based on the exoticism and negative portrayal of The Orient. As previously stated, while this film in itself is not Orientalist, there are manifest Orientalism elements that need to be addressed carefully, without the vainness of falling into swift judgment and overinterpretation. Misconceptions and misrepresentations of the Orient are an expected result of the distance between two cultures, Said points out. However, the “whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence—in which [Said does] not for a moment believe—but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting” (Said Orientalism 273). Hence, representations, whether authentic and faithful to truth or homogenizing and fictitious, have a specific purpose in any work of art. There is an endeavor to recognize its purpose and to evaluate whether its implications are politically dubious. Said concludes that representations “are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks” (273). Overall, it is apparent that the purpose, the tendency, the specific historical, intellectual (if any), the economic setting, and the task of the representation of the Orient by Kiltro respond to the commercialization of this film, void of any ideological agenda. At the same time, it is important to recognize the political and historical

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background—the Palestinian and Korean immigration and the cultural hybridity of the Patronato neighborhood, represented for the first time in a film—in Kiltro, but there is neither veracity nor historicity in any of the other elements in the film. Therefore, the obvious purpose of Kiltro is to exalt the physical artistry of Zaror, utilizing the cultural elements as a secondary means to entertain and gain profit. Inevitably, some manifest Orientalist representations can be exposed without the knowledge that many of these signifiers are outside references. Kiltro is far from any political standpoint, while ignoring any political correctness. It presents a commercial projection of Zaror, rather than an iconic Palestinian (or Chilean) Messiah. It seems unlikely that the film makes references to Imperialistic forces linking the main characters to the Ottoman Empire or the Korean Zetas to the North Korean dictator, as targets to degrade, thus unveiling a new axis of evil. The prejudices are ridiculous enough in order to highlight the sexual tension of the characters, the spectacle of acrobatic kicks, and the embellished violence of the action sequences, leaving no space for political agendas. In conclusion, Kiltro evokes parody rather than politics, emphasizing martial arts rather than the need to use any form of martial-military violence.

Works Cited Arabe.cl. 8 Oct. 2006. Mundo árabe. , accessed 4 April 2009. Adams, David. “You see how many we are!” St. Petersburg Times.online World and Nation. 2 Jan. 2001. , accessed 4 April 2009. Chan, Kenneth. “The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese SwordFighting Movie): Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Cinema Journal 43.4 (2004): 3-17 De la Fuente, Anna Marie. “Chile’s Pic Pace Heats Up.” Variety 402.10 (2006): 11 Donovan, Barna William. The Asian Influence on Hollywood Action Films. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2008. Kee, Joan. “Trouble in New Utopia.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 12.3 (2004): 667-86. Kiltro. Dir. Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. Perf. Marco Zaror, Caterina Jadresic, Miguel Ángel de Luca, Daniela Lhorente, Luis Alarcón. Mandrill, 2006.

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Pashad, Vijay. “Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11.1 (2003) 51-90. Rossel E. Pablo. “Comunidad de inmigrantes coreanos del barrio Patronato.” Colección: Fondecyt 1050031. Comunidad e Identidad Urbana: Historias de Barrio del Gran Santiago (1950-2000). Santiago: Fodecyt, 2005. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1994. Shin, Mina. “New American Orientalism.” Journal of Asian American Studies 9.3 (2006) 319-27. Zaror, Marko. Marko Zaror. The Latin Dragon. < http://www.markozaror.com/>, accessed 4 April 2009.