Postcolonial Archipelagos: Essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African Fiction (Trans-Atlántico / Trans-Atlantique) 9782807603981, 9782807603998, 9782807604001, 9782807604018, 280760398X

Table of contents :
Cover
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Archipelagic: A Brief Assembly Manual
Chapter 2. Madness as Conviviality? José Luis Mendonça’s O Reino das Casuarinas
Chapter 3. Autofiction as a Postcolonial Strategy: Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s De humeuren van menee
Chapter 4. Beyond Animality: Mia Couto’s Transmutations
Chapter 5. Caribbean Cultural Discourse and Fiction in an era of Globalization
5.1 Postmodern teratologies
5.2 (Re-)animating the Caribbean
Chapter 6. The Heart of Lightness
6.1 ¿Dónde? Locating the Caribbean subject in the Postmodern Non-place
6.2 The Empire writes back … and goes global
6.3 Decolonizing the nation: the Orwellian cityscape in James Stevens-Arce’s Soulsaver
Chapter 7. Travelling concepts I: From the Caribbean to Europe
7.1 Composite cultures
7.2 Towards a theory of literary creolization
7.3 Literary pidginization
Chapter 8. Travelling concepts II: The Archipelago as a Spatial Concept for Literary Studies
Chapter 9. Narrating Postcolonial Lives
Conclusion: Global Entanglements
Bibliography

Citation preview

Kristian Van Haesendonck

Postcolonial Archipelagos Essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African Fiction

Trans-Atlántico Literaturas

P.I.E. Peter Lang

Writers from different postcolonial regions are usually classified according to their different nationalities or linguistic areas, and have rarely been brought together in one volume. Moving in a new direction, Postcolonial Archipelagos crosses not only geographical but also linguistic boundaries, by focusing on two contexts which seemingly have little or nothing in common with one another: the Hispanic Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa. Kristian Van Haesendonck thus opens new ground, in two ways: first, by making connections between contemporary Caribbean and African writers, moving beyond the topos of slavery and negritude in order to analyse the (im)possibility of conviviality in postcolonial cultures; and secondly, by exploring new ways of approaching these literatures as postcolonial archipelagic configurations with historical links to their respective metropoles, yet also as elements of what Glissant and Hannerz have respectively called “Tout-Monde” and a “world in creolization”. Although the focus is on writers from Lusophone Africa (Mia Couto, José Luis Mendonça and Guilherme Mendes da Silva) and the Hispanic Caribbean (Junot Díaz, Eduardo Lalo, Marta Aponte, James Stevens-Arce and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá), connections are made with and within the broader global context of intensified globalization.

Kristian Van Haesendonck is a research fellow and member of the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group at the University of Antwerp. His interests lie in Ibero-American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, as well as in writing from Lusophone Africa. He has taught in the United States (Princeton, Villanova), Belgium (Universiteit Antwerpen, Universiteit Gent), the Netherlands (Universiteit Leiden) and Portugal (University of Lisbon). He is the author of ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Iberoamericana), Going Caribbean! New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art (Humus), and Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (Rodopi).

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang Brussels

Postcolonial Archipelag

Essays on Hispanic Caribbean Lusophone African Fi Postcolonial Archipelagos

Essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African FictionTrans-Atlán Literaturas

PETER LANG

Kristian Van Haesendonck

Postcolonial Archipelagos

Kristian Van Haesendo

P.I.E. Peter Lang Bruxelles Bern Berlin Frankfurt am Main New York Oxford Wien l

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l

l

l

l

P.I.E. Pete

Kristian Van Haesendonck

Postcolonial Archipelagos Essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African Fiction

Trans-Atlántico Vol. 16

The publication of this book was supported by a grant from the Belgian Science Policy Office.

The book was subject to a double blind refereeing process. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, microfilm or any other means, without prior written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

© P.I.E. PETER LANG s.a.

Éditions scientifiques internationales

Brussels, 2018 1 avenue Maurice, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium www.peterlang.com; [email protected]

ISSN 2033-6861 ISBN 978-2-8076-0398-1 ePDF 978-2-8076-0399-8 ePUB 978-2-8076-0400-1 MOBI 978-2-8076-0401-8 DOI 10.3726/b11460 D/2018/5678/09 CIP available at the Library of Congress and the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Haesendonck, Kristian van, 1974- editor. Title: Postcolonial Archipelagos : essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African fiction / [edited by] Kristian Van Haesendonck. Description: Bruxelles ; New York : Peter Lang, 2017. | Series: Trans-AtlanticoTrans-Atlantique ; Vol. 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017023923| ISBN 9782807603981 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9782807603998 (ebook) | ISBN 9782807604001 (epub) | ISBN 9782807604018 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean fiction (Spanish)--History and criticism. | African fiction (Portuguese)--History and criticism. | Postcolonialism in literature. Classification: LCC PQ7361 .P67 2017 | DDC 863.009/9729--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023923 Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹ http://dnb.d-nb.de ›.

Acknowledgements Special thanks go to Flávia, Mircea, and my parents for their unconditional support during the process of writing this book, as well as to Kathleen Gyssels for hosting this project at the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group at the University of Antwerp.

Abbreviations1 BF Blessed is the Fruit C Caribeños CL A Confissão da Leoa CNT Contos do Nascer da Terra D Donde EC Eloge de la Créolité HBP L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir J Jesusalém MR Midnight Robber MU De humeuren van meneer Utac OW The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao P Pensatempos PI Los países invisibles PSJ Los pies de San Juan RC O Reino das Casuarinas S Soulsaver SDM Sol de medianoche TS Terra somnâmbula V Vampiresas

1



The abbreviations are used only for titles that are frequently quoted.

Contents Introduction ........................................................................................  13 Chapter 1. The Archipelagic: A Brief Assembly Manual ................  23 Chapter 2. Madness as Conviviality? José Luis Mendonça’s O Reino das Casuarinas .....................................................................  61 Chapter 3. Autofiction as a Postcolonial Strategy: Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s De humeuren van meneer Utac and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ................... 97 Chapter 4. Beyond Animality: Mia Couto’s Transmutations .......  119 Chapter 5. Caribbean Cultural Discourse and Fiction in an era of Globalization .................................................................  151 5.1 Postmodern teratologies ...................................................... 151 5.2 (Re-)animating the Caribbean ............................................. 166 Chapter 6. The Heart of Lightness .................................................  183 6.1 ¿Dónde? Locating the Caribbean subject in the Postmodern Non-­place .................................................. 183 6.2 The Empire writes back … and goes global ......................... 199 6.3 Decolonizing the nation: the Orwellian cityscape in James Stevens-­Arce’s Soulsaver ......................................... 216 Chapter 7. Travelling Concepts I: From the Caribbean to Europe ............................................................................................  225 7.1 Composite cultures ............................................................. 225 7.2 Towards a theory of literary creolization .............................. 244 7.3 Literary pidginization .......................................................... 262

Chapter 8. Travelling Concepts II: The Archipelago as a Spatial Concept for Literary Studies ........................................  285 Chapter 9. Narrating Postcolonial Lives ........................................  315 Conclusion: Global Entanglements .................................................  351 Bibliography ......................................................................................  365

Introduction We are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos. (James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture)

How consistent is an assemblage? How united is an archipelago? A common answer would be: “It depends.” Yet a more specific answer would sound slightly different: “It depends on its dependencies.” Instead of a nice (yet admittedly all but poetic) alliteration, what such an answer would imply is that the (often invisible) junctions that transform a random group of islands into an archipelago are the key elements that make it into what it is; likewise, the joints of an assemblage, whether “high” or “low” tech, are of crucial importance in making a technical device work, in “unifying” the various elements that turn it into a functional system. While such questions might have been far from relevant for the humanities three or four decades ago, today they are at the cusp of what the humanities can mean in the present and the future. Doubtlessly, the “liquefying” of traditional, fossilizing ways of thinking under the pressures of intensified globalization is a call to scholars in the literary field to constantly rethink and adapt their methodologies and theoretical reflections on how to study literature from a number of linguistic areas, whether they are engaged in “Lusophone”, “Hispanophone”, “Francophone” or other areas, or the less common comparative study of postcolonial literatures. The term “archipelago” as I will use it here stands for a flexible way of approaching and interpreting literatures (which is also valid for the study of other cultural forms); it is a proposal for connecting literatures which are themselves also embraced as archipelagic structures or entities, on different, complementary levels: in its first and most basic sense, an archipelago is the geographical formation that we know of, more commonly known as a group or “gathering” of islands of some sort. Part of the Caribbean which will be studied here, the insular Hispanic Caribbean or Antillas, are themselves part of a broader, multilingual archipelago. In a second sense, an archipelago invites us to renew our methodologies, not just in a theoretical sense (which reinforces the purely metaphoric, discursive and literary use of the archipelago) but also in a practical sense. Back in the seventies, in the heat of the Cold War, when a group of young and ambitious architects (among them the future “starchitect” Koolhaas) had a

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plan for rethinking a whole city – Berlin – they did so not by starting from scratch, nor by focusing on the (in)famous Wall that split the city in two; instead they started by taking a close look at Berlin’s historical parts, those areas which had been organically formed until the early 20th century, before becoming asphyxiated by generic urbanizations, in order to come up with a fascinating project – yet one left unrealized – to reanimate the complex urban configuration of Berlin. Central to their project was the idea of fittingness: to give valuable historical parts a place amid unstoppable urban changes, in order to create an ecologically responsible “city within the city”, which they baptized “Die Grüne Stadtarchipel” (The Green Archipelago) (Ungers and Koolhaas 2013 [1977]). What can literary scholars, in postcolonial literatures as well as in other fields, learn from such an archipelagic urbanist project, which after all has nothing to do with literatures? In times when the postcolonialists’ tabula rasa has become a rule – to either criticize the canon or simply do away with it – the virus of intolerance at times seems to have adopted strange new forms, including at the heart of postcolonial studies, for what is supposed to be an example of openness to all forms of thinking (including some that are – often hastily – deemed ideologically adverse) turns out to be a field that fends itself off from “hostile” influences. This book departs from the firm belief that true openness does not come down to defending one’s political identity or ideological orientation at the expense of forces that are perceived as inimical, whether in an academic or any other kind of environment. What makes a community more liveable, more “convivial”, is, after all, not the platonic longing for an ideal state as identified with one particular side of an exclusivist political spectrum, nor the ecumenical, forced reconciliation with all conflictive elements present in a world where geopolitical tensions abound. As in any democratic polity – and this is a lesson in openness to be drawn from the handful of ambitious architects and their urban project that I am referring to here – in an archipelagic configuration there is by definition a space for conflict (I prefer the term “configuration” to the somewhat dehumanized term “system”, or the Deleuzian term “machine”). Moreover, in any archipelago or assemblage, the whole is not jeopardized when just one part is (or becomes) dysfunctional, something that was crystal clear to these architects as their pencils first met the paper with the aim of imagining the new cityscape of Berlin; for what makes a city – and the community which inhabits it – a place of conviviality is first and foremost its inclination for “fittingness”. Far-­fetched though it may appear, in an architectural or urban environment, postcolonial literatures can be embraced and studied with alternative tools, as I will endeavour to show in this book.

Introduction

15

“Conviviality” will thus, besides the archipelago, be the second (of three) concepts that will move centre stage throughout this book, in a modest attempt to contribute to adapt literary studies to a changing world. Furthermore, the archipelago, as understood in this study, is, besides a figure of resilience and ideological tolerance, a plea for impurity. In a scholarly world obsessed with categorizations, systematizations and coherence, it is legitimate to ask in how far theoretical and methodological purity have not become a diktat at the expense of creativity and the imaginary, including of the shock of visions within an environment of cultural diversity which can lead to creative outcomes. When we will speak of “creolization” as a form of cultural, theoretical and literary mixing, a process of impurity, we thus come full circle in terms of our conceptual framework, which, besides the overarching notion of “archipelago”, will consist of two more key terms: “conviviality”, and “creolization”. From the outset we will defend the idea that within redundancy and incoherence (whether from a theoretical or practical viewpoint) resides an unexplored potential; within what Caribbean thinkers (Glissant 1997; Benítez Rojo 1989) describe as “chaos” in reference to the (Hispanic and Francophone) Caribbean, and Chabal and Daloz (1999) as “disorder” with regard to Africa, there lies the potential for gauging for and imagining a new kind of order. That alternative order has, for lack of better terms, been referred to as either “postmodern” or “poststructuralist”, yet at other times as “relativist”. What “postmodern” philosophers in the wake of Lyotard (1983) intend to say is that logics, (conceptual) clarity and coherence do not always match with authenticity and truth. Nowadays, many of their ideas have formally been accepted, but in praxis there is an equal amount of resistance to integrate alternative, so-­called “subaltern” forms of thinking. While ideas of impurity have been embraced by many departments (think about the acceptance of Derridian theory, which, much like Lacanian theory, can arguably be read as a praise of impurity and at times even as a theoretical or poetical form of madness), literature departments are still largely divided as they keep organizing their curricula with the same criteria and paradigms, with national language as the organizing principle. While this made sense in the post-­war period, it is time to move on to something else. Instead of surrendering to the attractive, increasingly institutionalized term “World literature”, which seems to be perfectly in tune with processes of intensified globalization, I argue it might be time to ask ourselves what is lost in between these two extremes, between the local concerns of a postcolonial writer and the global ambitions of literary criticism, equally under the pressure of globalizing forces. The Mozambican writer Mia Couto put it this way with reference to his praxis as a postcolonial writer:

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“Dizem que nós vivemos agora numa aldeia global, mas o que se globalizou de facto, foi um mundo sem aldeias, um mundo sem lugares. Já vi os sem-­terra, agora existem os sem-­aldeia; aldeia no sentido desse pequeno lugar onde nos inventamos. Então precisamos duma forma radical – não violenta – de repensar o propio pensamento.” (They say we now live in a global village; but what was globalized in fact was a world without villages, a world without places. We had the landless, now we have the villageless; village in the sense of this small place where we invent ourselves. Hence we need a radical form – not a violent way – to rethink thought itself.)1 Usually labelled into different nationalities or linguistic areas, writers from different postcolonial regions have rarely been brought together in one volume. Moving into a new direction, Postcolonial Archipelagos crosses not only geographic but also linguistic boundaries, by focusing on two contexts which seemingly have little or nothing in common with one another: the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa. The book thus cuts new ground in two ways: first, by making connections between contemporary Caribbean and African writers, going beyond the topoi of slavery and negritude, in order to analyse the (im)possibility of conviviality in postcolonial cultures; and second, by exploring new ways on how to approach these literatures as postcolonial archipelagos, with strong historical links to their respective metropoles yet also as parts of what Hannerz (1987) called a “world in creolization”. Although the focus is on fiction from the Hispanic Caribbean (with an emphasis on Puerto Rico) and Lusophone Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde), connections are made with and within the broader Caribbean, African and European contexts. This book contains many ideas that have matured slowly over the past decade but that I have been developing in a more concrete manner over the past years. As in any archipelago or assemblage, some “parts” or topics have received more attention than others; as in an urban environment, some themes have been more “developed” according to their relevance, yet they all connect to one another in different – both theoretical and practical – ways. Most of the concepts used (at least two out of three: archipelago and creolization) have been identified as “Caribbean” theory. The centrality of these concepts does not imply, however, that I will simply adopt these concepts or that they will be taken for granted (as I believe is the case in much current literary criticism, especially in Francophone studies). In the archipelagic way the book is structured, some chapters connect more tightly with others (such as those on the 1

Fronteiras do Pensamento, “Mia Couto – Repensar o pensamento”, Youtube, 13 March 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahb9bEoNZaU.

Introduction

17

novels of Mia Couto and José Luis Mendonça), while others claim more autonomy and are closer to the more experimental form of the essay, such as the theoretical chapters on literary creolization and on what I will call the (hyphenated) urban archi-­pelago. This integration of diversity has been a conscious decision, for I intend to maintain thematic and theoretical diversity at the heart of this book, instead of forcing an artificial “equality” in length and thematic content upon each of its particular sections. From the outset, it is thus important to acknowledge the theoretical impurity and “contamination”, not only of concepts pertaining to different disciplines and cultural areas, but also the porous border between the scholarly work as an “author” and the non-­fictional work by the writers studied here; between the “objective” knowledge that lies within the discourse of literary criticism and the “subjective” discourse of non-­scientific communities. This is not to say that there is no critical assessment of the concepts being used by scholars; my concern is rather the opposite: to see the relevance of a concept such as creolization for literary studies, or to move the archipelago from the purely metaphoric into the extra-­discursive, or to conviviality as an alternative for the unended (and unendable) debate on the nation and national identity. In other words, from the outset I acknowledge the experimental side of this book: it is by attempting new, unexplored connections – starting with the two postcolonial contexts at stake here, the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa – that one can discover new routes in “postcolonial studies”, “literary studies”, “comparative literature”, “World literature”, without subscribing to one category in particular. It is to acknowledge the entanglements of all of these concepts and categories, without pedestalizing the most fashionable one (which at the time of writing would be arguably the growing lettered city of “World literature”), that I hope to gather new insights and a more “authentic” view of the postcolonial fictions involved; hence I hope to modestly contribute in overcoming the scholarly fear of transgressing linguistic and cultural borders, a fear that in spite of all the discussions on the “postnational” firmly holds literature departments in its grasp, in tune with broader geopolitical issues. Fear sells better than anything else, especially in times of globalization. Once again, it is worth quoting Mia Couto here, who translated this sensation of fear in a lecture titled “Murar o medo”: “Há muros que separam nações, há muros que dividem pobres e ricos. Mas não há hoje muro que separe os que têm medo dos que não têm medo. Sob as mesmas nuvens cinzentas domesticamos os nossos sonhos e encolhemos as nossas esperanças […] E, se calhar, há quem tenha medo que o medo acabe” (Couto 2016: 28) (There are walls that separate nations, there are walls that divide poor and rich. But there is

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Postcolonial Archipelagos

no wall today that separates those who fear from those who are not afraid. Under the same gray clouds we domesticate our dreams and shrink our hopes […] And, perhaps, some are afraid that fear will end). While this quotation is admittedly taken a bit out of context – Couto spoke not about literary criticism but about the political instigation of fear and the creation of walls between nations – I firmly believe it is time to rethink our academic praxis as literary scholars, too often fearing to explore new territories and connections, hiding behind the safe mask of national language. Instead of simply tearing down all walls that surround us (a highly idealistic yet not realistic task), the archipelagic approach I will not only discuss but attempt to apply in this book aims to find creative ways to work around existing problems, what Martinican writer Edouard Glissant (1992: 20) calls detour or a strategy of displacement. More than a decade and a half of research in literary departments in universities in different countries in Europe and the USA has taught me that, since I wrote my doctoral dissertation as a young scholar at the University of Leiden, things have been changing in academia, yet in limited ways: while Caribbean literature and theory have doubtlessly been given more space, it is clear to me that linguistic areas are mostly still seen as autonomous spheres, neatly sealed off entities which are protected to remain intact for the generations to come. For young scholars nowadays, the options of embarking on the study of combinations of languages and literatures are impressive (at least so far as the Bachelor level is concerned). Yet at the graduate and postgraduate level, the reality is that comparative literature has not become the standard, and nor has its successor, “World literature” – no matter if it turns out to be a temporary hype or a more solid category that is here to stay – prevailed in academia. As Claudio Guillén already argued back in 1985: “A peculiar trait of comparativism, for good or for ill, is the problematical awareness of its own identity, and the resulting inclination to rely on its own history. Like certain peoples and religions, comparativism defines and recognizes itself not dogmatically but historically” (Guillén 93). As a result of this lack of “awareness of its own identity”, comparativism continues to be looked at with suspicion in the broader academic communities, for it is seen as an exotic variety in literary criticism yet one with little practical utility, given the predominance of European languages and nationalities in defining the taxonomies for the study of literatures. Guillén already warned of being “forced to emphasize not supranationality, but national literatures (‘the comparison of one literature with another’)” (95). Long before the revival of “World literature”, scholars such as Guillén already felt the artificiality of limiting oneself to the study of one national literature. One can also sense his frustration with the injustice that is being done by accepting

Introduction

19

(instead of challenging) the continued predominance of all things national in defining who is part of a certain literature and who remains excluded: “The fundamental components of literary historiography, the large entities – periods, currents, schools, movements – that provide the structures, make it understandable, and order its temporal evolution, are rarely restricted to single nations” (288). Instead of transnationality and hybridity, the terms used by Guillén include “interweavings and superpositions” (288), yet it becomes clear that he pointed to the limits of a national approach to literary movements and genres, especially as they dominate literary history. I am aware of the fact that in this study two linguistic areas (the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa) are the object of study; however, I do not see this as a contradiction, considering the broader aim of the book: the emphasis is never on the linguistic peculiarity of either these areas. Instead, my motivation has been practical: I have chosen the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa precisely to show that certain themes transcend the linguistic boundaries of these areas, which are usually studied (if studied) within their linguistic communities: the Lusofonía – the institutional extension of what is being known as “Luso-­tropicalism” (a concept I will explain later) and the Hispanophone world, which is seen (if seen) as part of Spanish America. The “if” is indeed a major condition: both the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa are viewed as peripheral “parts” or “extensions” within their own linguistic communities, and are usually considered marginal to the Hispanophone and Lusophone literary canons. Moreover, the terms “Hispanic” and “Lusophone” here do not reflect the internal cultural and linguistic diversity of their cartographies (in Mozambique alone, for instance, there are dozens of ethnic languages which in turn influence the local varieties of Portuguese, as witnessed in the work of Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane or Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa). Finally, this book does not pretend to provide a polished, error-­proof methodology for archipelagic research but contains, or so I hope, the blueprint for the further fine-­tuning of methods and concepts that I have attempted to put into connection with one another. Postcolonial Archipelagos thus has the broader ambition of exploring uncharted territory in flexible ways, whereby some of the “islands” or parts are looked at in a more detailed way than others. Close readings alternate with more casual readings of fictional (and occasionally non-­fictional) works. As in any original assemblage, the book transgresses its initial proposal of discussing only the fictional work by postcolonial writers: it indeed contains one “alien” non-­textual fiction, namely a short discussion of animated film (still considered to be a sub-­ genre of the seventh art) from the Caribbean (Cuban) context.

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Drawing on insights from linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism and postcolonial theory, the book is structured in nine chapters. The first chapter presents a state of the art in comparative postcolonial literatures, as well as the theoretical framework that will be used to discuss postcolonial writers, focusing on three interlinked concepts: archipelago, creolization and conviviality. Approaching postcolonial literatures through these interlinked concepts allows us, I argue, to better understand complex processes of cultural and literary creolization. I draw especially on recent anthropological insights which define conviviality as an alternative form of “living together” whereby conflict is seen as a necessary part of society. The second chapter offers a close reading of José Luis Mendonça’s O Reino das Casuarinas (The Kingdom of the Casuarinas), which has not yet received any scholarly attention. I analyse the relation between madness and conviviality in Mendonça’s lauded novel about post-­independence Angola. Woven around seven characters, the novel echoes Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos picturing seven madmen in revolt, and exploring different modes of madness: instead of conceiving of insanity in negative terms as a psychological disorder (a predominantly Western classification of madness), Mendonça suggests that another, more positive reading is possible: within traditional African beliefs, the supernatural “naturally” takes place – a phenomenon critics would rush to describe as “magical realism” – and enables alternative modes of living together, in the face of the real madness of warfare. The theme of insanity in O Reino das Casuarinas allows for a fertile comparison with contemporary Puerto Rican and Martinican writing (namely with the work of writers such as Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and Raphaël Confiant), in spite of the historical differences between Angola and what I call the “light” postcolonial of these Caribbean islands. In the third chapter I explore two different modes of autobiographical writing in novels from the Cape Verdean and Dominican diasporas, more particularly, how autofiction is dealt with as a postcolonial strategy: I compare De humeuren van meneer Utac (The Moods of Mister Utac) by Guilherme Mendes da Silva, a Verdean diaspora writer in the Netherlands, with Junot Díaz’s critically acclaimed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel which moves back and forth between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. While Mendes da Silva uses autofiction to challenge the boundaries between the fictional and the “real” by adding an effect of verisimilitude, Díaz stages an autofictional persona embodied in not one but two characters (Yunior and Oscar). The appropriation and informalization of autobiographical and autofictional norms as defined by French theorists (Doubrovsky, Lejeune) are but one example of the

Introduction

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creativity of both Caribbean and African postcolonial writers, challenging established ideas of (post)modernity versus tradition, and force us to rethink and expand the category of autofiction itself. While Díaz aims to recover fragments of Dominicans’ diasporic memory, Mendes da Silva offers a satirical picture of the effects of luso-­tropicalismo in colonial Cape Verde, a form of multiculturalism avant la lettre effectively put at the service of Salazar’s colonial apparatus. The fourth chapter deepens some of the aspects dealt with in the previous chapters (autofiction, the supernatural, madness and conviviality), through a close reading of Mia Couto’s novels A confissão da leoa (Confession of the Lioness) and Jesusalém (The Tuner of Silences). I analyse the importance of animality and the topos of the wasteland in Mozambique’s best-­known writer, comparing his ideas with Derrida’s very personal account of animality in one of his less commented-­upon, posthumous essays, L’animal que donc je suis, which I connect to recent anthropological findings. The tension between the two alternating narrative voices (the hunter and Mariamar) fits within Couto’s poetics of ambivalence, whereby the characters tend to shapeshift and merge. Yet here again, as in Mendonça’s case, the novels resist a “magical-­ realist” reading, and the ghost of the civil war returns in Couto’s novels, even though in much less explicit ways if compared to the writer’s earlier work. The fifth chapter deals with the representation of the monster in postmodern Caribbean discourse. Discussing examples from fictional and non-­fictional work published at the beginning of the new millennium, I argue that this “teratological turn” must not be seen as the apocalyptic gesture of a group of postmodern intellectuals, but instead as a critical stance towards the Caribbean’s “monstrous” condition; within the new world order the Caribbean assumes its role as a postmodern Caliban which eternally hovers between imperialism and what Hardt and Negri call “Empire” as witnessed in “light” contemporary fiction, as exemplified by Marta Aponte’s Vampiresas. Contemporary novels and short stories from Puerto Rico and Cuba, I argue, can be read as postmodern depictions of the Caribbean as dystopia. The sixth chapter continues with the question of how far imperialism has disappeared as a visible, “dark” form of repression in favour of new versions (or avatars) of “light colonialism” within the context of a global, decentralized empire. Eduardo Lalo’s pessimist view of the Hispanic Caribbean as a non-­place is compared to representations of empire in Patrick Chamoiseau and Caryl Phillips, as well as with the Orwellian cityscape of James Stevens-­Arce. Chapters 7 and 8 have an explicitly experimental character and aim to go beyond the postcolonial contexts approached in the book: I explore how far the “Caribbean” concept of creolization and the archipelago can be

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used to rethink processes of literary mixing in both postcolonial and non-­ postcolonial contexts, such as Europe. Furthermore, these concepts allow us to envision a new methodology for studying literatures as transnational configurations. The heavy emphasis on Glissantean concepts in literary criticism has had the benefit of putting Caribbean concepts on the map of postcolonial theory. However, it is time, I argue, for scholars in the humanities to explore analogous processes and dynamics of literary mixing in extra-­Caribbean settings, such as Europe. Besides, I explore the concept of literary pidginization, as a process which is different yet closely related to literary creolization. Finally, I argue that looking at the material reality of the urban and architectural archipelagos (e.g. Koolhaas and Ungers’ plan for turning Berlin into a “Grüne Stadtarchipel”) can help us better understand the specific features of the archipelago as a spatial concept (instead of a metaphor) for rethinking literatures from a transnational and trans-­lingual perspective. The ninth and final chapter brings together and assesses some the core ideas and findings on conviviality, archipelagic thinking and creolization discussed in the previous chapters, and draws some concluding yet non-­conclusive remarks on the future study of postcolonial fiction, beyond the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African contexts.

Chapter 1

The Archipelagic: A Brief Assembly Manual

New ideas go through a trinity of stages. First they are ridiculed, next they are fought, and lastly they are institutionalized, taken for granted and trivialized. (Joan Ramón Resina)

Caribbean cultures are often seen as by definition creolized, that is, the result of an intense process of cultural mixing known as creolization. While the term has much less been used in the African context, creolization has been happening on the continent as well, yet to a much more limited extent. Groups of islands, as we can find in the Caribbean archipelago, an important part of the Caribbean basin often referred to as the “Antilles”, have historically been hot-­spots of creolization, both linguistically and culturally. As a result, they have been naturally more open to cultural influences than other regions worldwide. However, with globalization becoming increasingly intense over the past decades, cultural mixing is arguably taking place within other places and regions around the world, which resemble geographical “archipelagos” in their specific status of being in between islands and continents. The anthropologist James Clifford once stated that “we are all Caribbean now in our urban archipelagos […] Perhaps there’s no return to a native land – only field notes for its reinvention” (Clifford 1988: 173), pointing towards the present global interdependency of Western life, as well as to the impossibility of making essentialist claims on cultural purity. Whether one disagrees or not with the label “urban” in Clifford’s sentence, it is clear that the anthropologist touched upon a phenomenon described by Martinican writer Edouard Glissant as the “archipelization” of the globe, which in his view is, unlike Clifford’s, not necessarily an urban phenomenon. In this book  I will embrace the notion that creolization is a powerful concept, which allows me to approach two postcolonial contexts which many would see as incomparable or even as opposites. The Caribbean’s particular history is of course intimately linked to the African continent and these links deserve to be studied closely. Yet it is not my aim here to study the already well-­

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explored influences and legacy of Africa in the Caribbean. It is not my aim to privilege a “one-­way” perspective, but instead to go comparative: I believe that a closer look at the cultural production of the Caribbean and Africa allows us to come to a better understanding of the existential condition of the postcolonial subject amid globalization. For instance, the way “madness” is represented by an Angolan author finds uncanny echoes in the work of a Puerto Rican writer. An important part of this book is about archipelagos, in a geographical, metaphorical, and even analytical sense. The individual chapters, even though they can be read separately, also connect in an archipelagic way: instead of one “master topic”, the different essays deal with a range of topics which I have classified under the linked notions of conviviality and creoleness. The book has explicitly been constructed as a celebration of the Caribbean and Africa’s linguistic, cultural and literary diversity and thus avoids the artificial coherence and homogeneity along linguistic and geographical divisions or nationality that one can find in classical approaches to these areas. Even though for the sake of space we will focus on two particular linguistic groups (Spanish and Portuguese), connections with other linguistic areas within these regions – especially the Caribbean – will be made wherever possible. In this book I will explore fictional work from the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa from a comparative perspective. The aim is to identify and analyse common literary (narrative) and philosophical concerns and trends, going beyond the known geographical linguistic and cultural differences. Rather than the rigorous application of pre-­established concepts, this book aims to be a dynamic dance with theory: while our attention will go in the first place to authors and their works, the theory functions as the “music” in the background without which the more or less close readings (yet never closed readings) of the texts would not make as much sense. Furthermore, while the more traditional setup of a scholarly book consists in looking for the presence of this or that topic within a work of fiction, our method will differ somewhat from that classical pattern. Instead, the different chapters are set up according to what can be called an archipelagic structure: they are interconnected with one another yet also autonomous entities, at least to a certain extent. I do not aim to fall into the trap of mixing up the object of research and the objectivity that researchers aim at. Rather, we seek to rehearse a form of what I will refer to as “archipelagic thinking” in literary studies, whereby the joints or connections between different chapters, works, methods, etc. are come to be seen as equally important as the content or distinct features of the object of analysis. Interdependency, in other words, is more than just a trendy key word: each chapter, while

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dealing with a very different matter, sheds light on the overall topic of the book. To come to an understanding of creoleness and conviviality in the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African contexts, it does not suffice to sum up a series of similarities and differences between these cultural contexts. In lieu of putting the emphasis on a linear, teleological method whereby one moves towards an (often predictable) conclusion, an archipelagic approach has the benefit of allowing for a minimum of autonomy assigned to each chapter in terms of (sub)topic, (sub)concepts and methods used, and theoretical digressions, for instance about the importance of the understudied aspect of autofiction in the postcolonial novel. I am among those who believe that, at times, the most important part of a scholarly work is being said in a marginal footnote or postscript, or has simply been left out of the corpus. An archipelagic approach, I firmly believe, by being more inclusive, minimizes the quest for conceptual “purity” in old-­school approaches.

Africa and the Caribbean: (in)comparable contexts? In spite of the historical links between the Americas and Africa, a comparative focus has been almost non-­existent so far, especially when it comes to the transatlantic study of Caribbean and African writers. This is somewhat surprising given the success of Gilroy’s conceptualizing of the Black Atlantic (1993) as the matrix of emergence of Atlantic cultures. Gilroy’s book, I believe, can above all be read as a call to scholars to engage in the comparative study of transatlantic cultures. It goes without saying that the absence of a comparative focus is part of a broader problem which exceeds the African and Caribbean areas: the lack of comparative studies (in postcolonial, Caribbean, Latin American, African and most literatures tout court) is a well-­known problem and has been addressed by a number of scholars, yet little has been undertaken to make any substantial changes. There are a few exceptions, however. For instance, in Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas, Keown, Procter and Murphy, among others (e.g. Spivak, Torres-­Saillant), including myself (Van Haesendonck 2014), have addressed this problem. The authors explicitly intend to “move beyond postcolonial studies’ primary focus on Anglophone literary texts and contexts” (3); they argue, in addition, that since its inception through landmark works as Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffith’s The Empire Strikes Back (1989), the development of postcolonial studies has to deal with a major ambiguity: “a transnational comparatism is posited as essential, but its realization is perpetually deferred” (3). However, they

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also warn that there are limits to comparatism as a scholarly praxis, as it should not lead to excessive generalization: “scholars must constantly be aware of the differences both between and within colonial traditions” (4). While not limited to postcolonial diasporic contexts, in line with the aforementioned authors this study continues to explore further the limits and possibilities of postcolonial comparative research. Some signs of increasing comparatism are encouraging, such as the publication of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures (Poddar, Patke and Jensen 2008). Yet such publications, as the authors suggest, are still largely the exception to the rule: literatures are being studied, and probably will continue to be in the years to come, as sealed-­off national entities; perhaps not as closed as two or three decades ago, but the nation-­state and its corresponding language are largely the predominant criteria both in and outside academia. The will to implement real change (as opposed to the awareness of the need to do so) is presently manifested by only a handful of scholars. Even though the object of study concerned here is defined as postcolonial literatures, the study of African and Caribbean literatures and cultures should not be seen as subordinated to the field of postcolonial studies, which has become the Western – mainly Anglophone – “standard” for everything that has in one way or another to do with once-­colonized cultures. Caribbean intellectuals have understandingly kept their distances from Western academic trends, such as postcolonialism. While the place of Caribbean concepts within postcolonial studies is not the object of discussion here, it should be noted that thinkers such as the Martinican Edouard Glissant or the Cuban Antonio Benítez Rojo, were, like so many Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals, linked to universities in the USA. Yet none of them openly embraced what Silvio Torres-­Saillant calls the “meganarrative” of postcolonial studies. According to the Dominican critic, postcolonialism “breaks the world in two and applies a single reading mode to three-­quarters of the population of the planet […] at a time when Western thinkers have declared the inadequacy of master narratives” (Torres-­Saillant 162). Instead of a mere provocation, such a viewpoint shows that Caribbean intellectuals adopt a critical stance towards the massive success – or academic “industry” as he would call it – of postcolonial studies. Caribbean theory, he claims, should not be automatically appropriated by Western academia through postcolonialism: “The study of the verbal aggression that the Antillean world has endured, a lingering legacy of colonial violence, becomes especially relevant in light of the state of Caribbean knowledge in the European and North American academic industry since the advent of what has come to be

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called ‘postcolonial theory’” (Torres-­Saillant 111). Postcolonial studies’ centredness on Anglophone literatures is one of the main reasons behind Torres-­Saillant’s rejection of the field as a whole, even though the calls to pay attention to non-­Anglophone postcolonial literatures have been multiplying (e.g. Keown, Murphy and Procter 2009). As a result, Torres-­ Saillant feels compelled to engage in “what could be described as a ‘defense and illustration’ (à la Joachim Du Bellay) of Caribbean thought”, adding that “this undertaking in its advocacy for a region has a distant parallel in the mood of the Creole intelligentsia that in the eighteenth century undertook to refute the widely spread views that posited the inferiority of the lands of the Western hemisphere” (110). Torres-­Saillant thus suggests that Caribbean theory needs to go its own way, without further falling into “Western” traps or academic trends. However, as one can expect, such refutation of anything “Western” (and especially European) comes with its paradoxes. The majority of Caribbean intellectuals simultaneously embrace what they often despise as “Eurocentric”. A good example is the Dominican scholar’s somewhat odd reference to 16th-­century French poet Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), an icon of … French culture and defender par excellence of European civilization! Instead of du Bellay, the author of poetry books such as Les Antiquités de Rome (1558), why not refer to a Caribbean, Latin American writer, if that would be a safer option? Likewise, contemporary Caribbean theory is ridden with concepts borrowed from European philosophers, often used without being adapted or transformed (or “creolized”) into new concepts. Rather than downplaying such striking contradictions and ambiguities as innocent irony or lapsus, we should see them as being at the heart of Caribbean modes of thinking. Likewise, concepts such as the archipelago and archipelagic thinking occupy an ambiguous geographical and ideological position in between islands and continents, in between colonial and postcolonial spheres. However, a handful of scholars have endeavoured to lay the groundwork for engaging in comparative research on postcolonial cultures and literatures, even though their work – which privileges a historical, cross-­ disciplinary perspective – has not received much scholarly attention. This is probably because of the predominant focus on “national literatures” within national language departments (Meltzer 2009), which for obvious reasons have been interested in protecting their own borders instead of going comparative and transnational, due to the limited interest, so far, in multilingual comparative research in the field of postcolonial studies. For obviously practical reasons, however, we cannot encompass the whole Caribbean basin and Africa into one book. Therefore, we will limit ourselves to the Hispanic Caribbean, with a major focus on Puerto Rico,

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and Lusophone Africa, namely Mozambique, Cape Verde and Angola. The justification for limiting my choice to the insular Hispanic Caribbean (instead of including countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama and Venezuela, which are located within the Caribbean basin) is grounded in the common history of slavery and Spanish colonialism of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. I thus follow in the wake of scholars such as Jorge Duany (2011), an anthropologist specializing in the transnational migration between these countries and the USA, as well as intra-­Caribbean demographic movements. While the Caribbean’s African heritage has been largely acknowledged by historians, anthropologists, linguists, neither Caribbean nor African cultures have been studied in a systematic way from a comparative perspective. This study does not pretend to fill that gap, as this would be a work of many volumes and several more years, and even then no comparative study can claim to be exhaustive. Rather, in the wake of the philosophy displayed in Caribbeing (Van Haesendonck and D’haen 2014), it seeks to engage in making connections, and, in doing so, to contribute to fostering more comparative analysis. However, the sceptical minds might rightfully ask: are not long gone the glorious days of Négritude? The movement which effectively created a dialogue between writers from both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to canonized writers such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor and the forgotten “third wheel” of Négritude, Léon-­Gontran Damas (see e.g. Gyssels 2016)? Indeed, it is not hard to find some good reason for scepticism: after all there is no contemporary cultural or literary movement, as there once was in the past. The African intellectual landscape is perhaps even more divided than the Caribbean’s cultural and literary fragmentation (or “balkanization”, to use Glissant’s term [1992: 222]). When attempting to find common ground on which to approach African and Caribbean literatures and cultures things do not get any easier. It is as if chaos and disorder reigned in all senses, or, to use a by now dramatic image that has not lost any of its relevance, “things” seem to keep “falling apart”. Sadly, in the field of literary and cultural studies, especially in a post-­negritude era of accelerated globalization, the absence of comparative perspectives has put a brake on the progress and innovation in fields such as postcolonial studies, stagnating along academic, linguistic and national divisions. Yet there is also reason for optimism, as the essays included here will – I hope – prove. Through the bringing together of African and Caribbean contexts, a pattern of two kinds of “archipelago” – a geographical and a metaphorical one – emerges which roughly have some features in common: a colonial past, and current instability (politically, economically, socially), as well as its cultural fluidity and openness (to very different degrees). Within

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the broader sphere of culture, literature has specific relevance for being a sphere wherein the postcolonial cultural and existential condition can be easily gauged. Contrary to other cultural art forms, such as film, literature is an area which has known increasing activity in the postcolonial sphere over the past few decades. Beyond the characteristics of each literature, of each part, our reading will thus focus on the joints connecting the different “parts” into a postcolonial assemblage. Ultimately, we argue that, in times of globalization and growing interdependencies, literatures – and literary studies – need to be rethought (and taught) as interconnected archipelagos instead of a simple “juxtaposition” of discrete national literatures. Approaching these writers as being part of one diversified “postcolonial archipelago” is thus part of a broader aim: to provide literary and cultural scholars with a clear, explicit example of how to embark on what is definitely a challenging endeavour: to compare literatures that many still deem “non-­comparable” (because of obvious linguistic, geographic and national divisions). Our perspective on postcolonial writers is thus both transatlantic and transnational. Instead of privileging the classical notions of nation and national identity, viewing these writers as part of two archipelagos gives us the opportunity to shed new light on the complexity of the cultural contexts involved: not only between Africa and the Caribbean are there huge differences, but this is also true within each context. In other words, I argue that in spite of important differences and the more obvious geographical, cultural and linguistic separations, interesting transatlantic connections can be made between Caribbean and African cultures, not least in a field as fluid and open to influences as literature, the main subject of this book; by focusing mainly on fiction by writers from the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa, I will thus attempt to make comparative connections with a broader objective in mind: I believe that this kind of approach sheds new light on existing interpretations of postcolonial works that have been appropriated as “natural” parts of national literatures. On a few rare occasions, some scholars have attempted to bring together in one volume both the Lusophone and broader Latin American cultures and/or literatures. This is the case, for instance, with Robert Fiddian’s edited volume Postcolonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa. However, while containing interesting contributions on a wide range of topics, Fiddian’s book misses the opportunity to engage in a comparative study of both contexts, offering instead a juxtaposition of African and Latin American cultures. A better way to approach both contexts is, then, thematically, through topics such as poverty, or cultural memory, as in the case of La memoria popular y sus transformaciones/A

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memória popular e as suas transformações – América Latina y/e países luso-­ africanos, edited by Martín Lienhard. In his introduction to Discursos sobre (l)a pobreza. América Latina y/e países luso-­africanos, Lienhard addresses the common problem of poverty in both the African and Latin American contexts. He emphasizes that poverty permeates much of the literatures of both continents, and that global (political) action can and should resolve the “scandal” of poverty, as he calls it (Lienhard 18). The book shows striking similarities between a common Latin American and African problem, although it does not prioritize a comparative perspective. For instance, one of the book’s contributors, Roberto Francavilla, characterizes Cape Verdean literature as a “literature of the poor” (Francavilla 428), something that is definitely true for most African literatures, with the exception of most South African literature written in Afrikaans. From the outset of this book, I characterize postcolonial literatures as products of poverty, yet also as modern bodies of texts, indeed as witnesses to a Modernity alternative to the dominant, Western version. Most studies of postcolonial literatures, however, focus not so much on one of both cultural regions or contexts (the Caribbean or Lusophone Africa) as on one particular country or territory of that region, for example Mozambique, Angola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica. Within the Caribbean, there is also a division or “balkanization” in linguistic subregions (Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Dutch Caribbean) which, as in the case of Lusophone Africa, ties these subregions to their former metropoles as well as to the linguistic “community” of which they are part. The same accounts for Caribbean as for Lusophone African literatures and cultures: although book-­length studies have been written about these national literatures separately, for instance Cape Verdean (Veiga 1997, 1998) or São-­Tomese (Mata 2010) literatures, rarely are connections made between these island cultures, reinforcing the stereotype that islands are doomed to the condition of insularity as a severe form of isolation; rarely is their place discussed in a broader postcolonial Lusophone context. No studies whatsoever have been carried out connecting the two specific cultural realms we are concerned with here: Lusophone Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean. This is surprising, since both spaces are made out of fluid borders, and have been profoundly determined by a history of colonialism and cultural clashes, and the subsequent, progressive emergence of creole languages. Yet there is an important exception: in her book The Air of Liberty. Narratives of the South Atlantic Past (2008) Ineke Phaf-­Rheiberger traces the historical formation of the Black Atlantic, drawing parallels between the work of African and Caribbean writers such as Pepetela (Angola) and Frank Martinus Arion (Curaçao), who

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deal in their work with the impact of Dutch colonial rule in specific places (ports and cities) during the slave trade. Phaf-­Rheiberger gives attention to the South Atlantic, especially to the axis Angola–­Brazil, but also the Caribbean, since the 16th  century. Moreover, she offers a Latin Americanist’s perspective on a much-­ignored part of the Caribbean: the Dutch Antilles and Surinam. She approaches a wide range of “narratives” of the South Atlantic (inclusive visual art) that in some way dealt with connecting different cultures along the routes of the slave trade. For instance, she discusses novels by the Angolan writer Pepetela and Frank Martinus Arion from Curaçao and examines how the slave trade is an essential theme of their writing. Moreover, she pays close attention to “the representation of urban societies as agents in the scenario of the South Atlantic trade” (xvii), with a special emphasis on portuary cities as gateways for slave trade, but also for cultural change. In her recent work, Phaf-­Rheinberger continues to tear down disciplinary, linguistic and geographical walls. Beyond the Line. Cultural Narratives of the Southern Oceans, edited with Michael Mann, seeks to go beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries that still divide scholars. Above all, the book offers a conceptual innovation, by rethinking and expanding the predominant (racial) paradigm of the “Black Atlantic” and reformulating Phaf ’s earlier approach to the “South Atlantic”. In a similar comparative vein, Neil Kortenaar’s Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy. Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction is one of the rare comparative studies that seamlessly gathers in one volume – through the concept of literacy – the African and Caribbean contexts while maintaining an in-­depth focus through close reading. It is an example of how postcolonial comparatism can go beyond the classical mould of studying a particular nation-­state’s literature. Yet one of its limitations is its linguistic focus, for the author only includes literary texts in English. Kortenaar’s goal is to trace “the history of the spread of literacy in Africa and the West Indies in the twentieth century by using historical novels as case studies”. He is right to argue that the same tension between literacy and orality exists in both the African and Caribbean contexts, adding up to the plausibility of their comparison. Interestingly, Kortenaar eschews the literacy thesis, that is, “the notion that literacy and orality are opposites that determine behaviour and identity in predictable ways” (15). Yet, he argues, it is important to recognize the specificities of the concept in each of these contexts: “Neither literacy nor orality has meaning independent of the other. The two are best understood therefore not in terms of each other but as functions of local literacy–­orality systems that must be compared to other literacy–­orality systems” (17). A local

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focus, in short, must always be present instead of assuming any hastily formulated claim of universalism. This is an idea defended by Daloz and Chabal in their book Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning (2006), a kind of manual on how to practise comparatism written for political scientists but relevant to the humanities as well. An important omission in Kortenaar’s study, however, is the contribution and debate by Francophone Caribbean intellectuals on the “impact of literacy”, for instance in the work of Maryse Condé, Glissant or the so-­called créolistes. Zooming in on both contexts, a quick look at scholarly production shows that – speaking broadly – comparatively little attention has been paid to Africa compared with the Caribbean, which has known a surge in interest over the past few decades (important divergences aside; for instance, the Dutch Caribbean has mostly been ignored, for linguistic reasons, compared to the Francophone or Anglophone Caribbean). While most parts of Africa and the Caribbean have received a substantial amount of criticism in a number of fields, Lusophone Africa, by contrast, has long been ignored as an object of academic research, especially among Africanists. According to Patrick Chabal, Portugal was viewed as different within the African context, while the same can be said of Portugal’s own condition within Europe: For reasons having largely to do with the history of Portugal in Africa, Africanists have tended to view Portuguese-­speaking Africa differently from the rest of the continent. This has had serious consequences for the study of Lusophone Africa, consequences which have had a profound effect on the interpretation of the postcolonial politics in Portuguese-­speaking Africa come under three broad headings. The first has to do with the history of Portugal herself; the second with the history of Portuguese colonial rule and the third with the history of Portuguese decolonization. (Chabal 2002: 29–30)

Especially in the Lusophone African field, proportionally much less research has been carried out so far compared to the attention that has been paid to other African (especially Anglophone) postcolonial countries. Comparative interest in Lusophone postcolonial studies has not simply been lagging behind in comparison to other areas (such as the Anglophone or Francophone cultures of Africa and the Caribbean), but the fact that Portugal had colonies until the late 20th century (namely Macao and Goa), in combination with a persistent Luso-­tropicalism, a concept which will return repeatedly in this book, definitely brought resistance at different levels – not in the least academic – to opening up the postcolonial debate. However, over the past decades work by a number of scholars, many of whom are situated outside of Portugal (Paulo de Medeiros, Phillipe

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Rothwell, Fernando Arenas, Patrick Chabal, David Brookshaw, Stefan Helgesson, among others), has initiated the much-­needed reflection on the postcolonial literature of Lusophone Africa. Within Portugal, scholars such as Miguel Vale de Almeida, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Manuela Ribeiro Sanches also contributed to create an (albeit limited) space for reflection on the former colonies. Although postcolonial reflection is not yet soaring in Lusophone countries, including Portugal, this is most likely to happen within future decades. It is telling that the first comprehensive history of Lusophone Africa was edited and published by the ground-­breaking Africanist and political scientist Patrick Chabal, who also edited the first (panoramic) study of Lusophone African literatures. Studying Lusophone Africa at times implies having the skills of the archaeologist, as bibliographical materials are hard to find (often edited in small editions) or are out of print, with the great exception of best-­selling authors such as Mia Couto, whose books are massively read in Portugal but not in his own country of Mozambique. Most theoretical reflections on the formation of African cultural identities and early creolizations are to be found in studies which nowadays are out of print and/or difficult to find, such as Angolan intellectual Mário António F. Oliveira’s Reler Africa (1990), which includes reflections on the formation of creole societies under colonial rule in Angola. These studies, written in Portuguese and published in Portugal or in very limited editions in African countries, are still not easily accessible to an international (non-­Portuguese-­reading) public; in extreme cases, such as the book I just mentioned, they can only be consulted in the Biblioteca nacional or in university libraries across the country. As such, the delay in postcolonial reflection on Lusophone Africa is comparable to the situation with the Dutch Caribbean, whose colonial past has not yet been thoroughly scrutinized; rather its study is limited to a group of scholars respectively based in the Netherlands and Portugal. Linguistic difficulties or sheer lack of interest? The fact is that the area is conveniently studied – significant detail – in official Dutch institutions. In short, broadly speaking, the Caribbean has fared better than Africa, although certain areas within the Caribbean basin are still understudied: besides the Dutch Caribbean, it suffices to mention those Central American countries that are also part of the broader Caribbean basin, such as Belize, Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, the Guyanas and part of Colombia. Hence, if we would limit our focus exclusively to the Caribbean, we would quickly realize that the broader area has rarely been approached as a whole, that is as a region. Comparing Caribbean cultures from a trans-­lingual perspective, no matter how complex or daunting a task, deserves more scholarly attention

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nowadays than has been the case so far (Van Haesendonck 2014). The rare comparative studies on Caribbean literature have been privileging a historical focus on the Caribbean: James Arnold’s A History of Literature in the Caribbean (2001), as well as the history-­focused six-­volume General History of the Caribbean edited by Unesco. These two have been the most ambitious attempts so far. Even after a quick look at the scholarship it becomes clear that intra-­Caribbean research has equally been cursed by linguistic divisions, as I have previously argued in the volumes Caribbeing. Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (Van Haesendonck and D’haen 2015) and Going Caribbean. New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art (Van Haesendonck 2012), which offer a number of comparative contributions, the latter volume in four different languages. In most pan-/intra-­Caribbean studies, however, history takes centre stage, and slavery is the central historical phenomenon being discussed. Silvio Torres-­Saillant’s An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006), in spite of its limited impact on the academic community, reinforced the perspectives for Caribbean comparatism, for including, among other aspects, in its “intellectual history” some Dutch Caribbean writers, such as Cola Debrot.1 Torres-­Saillant addresses the practical and linguistic problem that underlies the lack of comparative approaches to the Caribbean: To know only one of the languages of a bilingual or multilingual society is to have one’s access to the knowledge of the overall national reality partly blocked. In that respect, language remains as the ultimate border. When it comes to mediating the rapport between Caribbean societies, linguistic difference, more than any other obstacle, has the power to encourage and preserve the otherness of neighbors, preventing the harmonious identification that might otherwise naturally ensue. (Torres-­Saillant 26)

While the Dominican’s argument is definitely in line with my own claim for fostering comparative research, I do not believe that the dissolution of linguistic borders would secure a “harmonious identification” across 1



“To know the thinking of a multilingual culture area requires the skills of the polyglot. Yet students of the Caribbean, including some who have attained scholarly prestige, too often satisfy themselves with knowledge of only one linguistic bloc of the region even while purporting to make holistic claims. Even key interventions in the realm of Caribbean literature and thought such as Edouard Glissant’s Le Discours antillais (1981) and Antonio Benítez-­Rojo’s La isla que se repite (1989) represent looks at the region’s cultural history that depend for their data primarily on each author’s knowledge of his own Francophone or Spanish-­speaking bloc. The question of language demands serious attention since it contributes to sustaining the region’s historical fragmentation more effectively than any other factor” (Torres-­Saillant 26).

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the Caribbean basin. I do not see one Caribbean nation – or one great “family”, to reproduce here an old metaphor – “naturally ensue” if a lingua franca became reality. Cultural and political conflicts can persist within countries where one official language is spoken. Contrary to most African countries, however, the natural border of the sea – that connecting yet also dividing medium – is more of a challenge. And contrary to the African realm, the Caribbean has generated an impressive amount of “local” theories and concepts that have had a certain resonance outside of the broader Caribbean and Latin America. The contrast of intellectual production between the Lusophone African and Caribbean countries is especially striking. Names such as Fanon, Glissant, Benítez Rojo and Hall are but a handful of examples, and the Francophone area has produced by far the majority of the theoretical work. As a result, the wave of “new” academic fields that have seen daylight since the 1970s, such as postcolonial studies, have been keen to integrate Caribbean concepts, yet this has happened mainly over the past few decades. The lack of African perspectives is not so much a matter of intellectual potential as of the distribution of ideas (i.e. an editorial problem); it is well-­ known that many Caribbean authors (e.g. Chamoiseau, Stuart Hall, Frank Martinus Arion, Benítez Rojo) have been successful in publishing in the former metropolis, or in the USA. While African intellectuals have had a substantial presence in the USA (e.g. Gikandi or Ngugi Wa Thiongo), their success and international presence as theorists has not been at the height of their Caribbean peers’ in recent decades. Furthermore, far from the stereotype of theoretical insularism, the Caribbean offers its intellectuals a privileged – even vanguard – vantage point as a “creolizing” crossroads of cultures. As Glissant would put it, the Caribbean has always been an archipelago of interconnected island cultures, yet at times more connected to the world than to the neighbour (island). Its various links with the (former) metropolis (Paris, London, Amsterdam, New York) have been an asset, of course, to Caribbean writers, who often got their education in or resided in these cities. While early anti-­colonialist intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire only temporarily resided in France, in the post-­war period the Caribbean diaspora has been growing exponentially, and many of the contemporary voices, such as Junot Díaz’s, are those of migrants whose work has an impact both in their (current) home or place of residence and their (former) home country. The Hispanic Caribbean is an interesting case, and focusing in depth on “diaspora writers” and their literary, cultural and social ties with the “home” islands or countries has already become an important topic in recent decades, through the work of intellectuals such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Jorge Duany, Juan Flores,

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Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Silvio Torres-­Saillant, Yolanda Martínez San-­ Miguel and Francés Negrón-­Muntaner, among many others. Therefore, it is worth taking a brief look at the impact of diasporas on the debate on postcolonial identity, which has been especially dramatic in the Hispanic Caribbean case.

Living on the hyphen: the diasporic self Things thus get more complex when one tries to locate Caribbean and African diasporas with reference to their respective contexts. Particularly interesting is the so-­called “1.5 Generation” of Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans who came to the USA as children or adolescents. According to Pérez Firmat (2012), who self-­declaredly belongs to the generación 1.5 of Cubans (also often called “Cuban Americans”), the cultural hybridity of being both (partially) Cuban and (partially) American locates him and his peers “on the hyphen”. Such “life on the hyphen” is also what Junot Díaz writes about, and the links with fellow diaspora writers are obvious: they underwent similar experiences of migration, coming to age, adaptation, rejection and insecurity, even though the practical and physical difficulties and experiences of moving from the island to the USA and back have obviously been very different (and often traumatic) for Cubans and Dominicans than they have been for Puerto Ricans. Understandably, not only fictional texts but also many scholarly studies written by Hispanic Caribbean intellectuals include autobiographical narratives. In his book Blurred Borders. Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States, Cuban-­ born anthropologist Jorge Duany, who lives in the USA but grew up in Puerto Rico and has lived there for more than half a century, recognizes himself in Pérez-­Firmat’s hyphenated mirror, referring jokingly to himself as a “Cuba-­Rican” (Duany 2011: 10). He adds a disclaimer, though: the Dominican, Puerto Rican and Cuban diasporas, in spite of all three being deeply transnational (in the sense that they maintain links with their respective home islands, “vary greatly in their citizenship status, relationship to the homeland, possibility of return, timing of the flows, length of stay abroad, and so on” (Duany 2011: 21). Puerto Ricans used to be, par excellence, the Caribbean nation on the move, due to the lack of travel restrictions between island and mainland (as a consequence of the Jones Act [1917] which granted them US citizenship). However, Dominicans have been catching up with their insular neighbours, as Duany explains: “Over the past few decades, the Dominican diaspora has

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become a two-­way flow, including a substantial return migration. This back-­and-­forth movement between the Dominican Republic, the USA and other countries has strengthened ties between Dominicans at home and abroad” (Duany 2011: 231). As a result, Dominicans in the USA “engage more than most other Latinos in transnational practices such as attending cultural events, belonging to hometown associations, and voting in their country of origin”. Puerto Ricans who reside in Puerto Rico nonetheless are (still) deprived of voting for the US presidency, even though this is likely to change if the island becomes the fifty-­first US state. Even more surprisingly than the Dominican case is that the belief in Cuban exceptionalism and Cuba’s isolated status within the Caribbean has led to the misunderstanding that it is non-­comparable in terms of transnational migration, an argument that Duany strongly rejects: “Cubans, like other Hispanic Caribbean migrants, have spun a dense web of social, economic, political, cultural, and even religious ties with their homeland. Like Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, many Cubans abroad.” It is thus safe to conclude that the insular Caribbean forms a kind of trinity in terms of transnationalism with the USA: “Cuba is no exception to current trends in transnational migration; on the contrary, the island is experiencing many of the same forces as transnational nation-­ states like the Dominican Republic and transnational colonial states like Puerto Rico” (Duany 2011: 137). A similar stance is taken by the Cuban writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who rejects the idea of cultural purity and exceptionalism defended by Cuban exiles: “atavistic calls for cultural and linguistic purity on the part of some Cuban exiles have always struck me as singularly inappropriate. Cubans have always been hyphenated Americans. Stretched across the Caribbean, Cuba itself looks like a hyphen on the way to becoming a question mark.” Even though Pérez Firmat focuses exclusively on the Cuban–­American experience, he extends what he calls the Cuban American “hyphen” to the broader “Cuban condition” (Pérez Firmat 2012: 16). Furthermore, his rejection of “atavistic calls for cultural and linguistic purity” strongly echoes the idea of the late Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant, who condemns similar atavisms in a European context (in an interview, see Schwieger-­Hiepko 258; I will come back to this problem in Chapter 7). As for the Lusophone African diaspora, the Cape Verdean case shows interesting links to the Hispanic Caribbean diaspora in terms of transnational dynamics, yet the former is not mainly located in the USA but stretches across four continents, including more than 30,000 Verdeans based in the Netherlands, the place of residence of writer Guilherme Mendes da Silva. The fact that almost half of the Puerto Rican

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populations live in diaspora, and that more than half of the Verdeans live abroad (more than half a million in the USA only), makes the debate on the nation and national identity particularly complex, for it shows that territorial/geographical definitions of the nation have become obsolete as transnational migration continues to profoundly change the shape of what Anderson (1990) called the “imagined community”. Indeed, the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism “undermine the notion of the nation-­ state as the ‘natural’ territorial container of the physical and cultural spaces in which people lead their daily lives. Instead, many people – especially transnational migrants – are part of broader social networks across nations” (Duany 2011: 3). Furthermore, an important idea sustained by Duany is that “migrants’ attachments to their home countries depend largely on the nature of their states’ relationship to the host states” (2). This becomes clear when analysing the autobiographical twist writers such as Junot Díaz and Mendes da Silva put in their novels (cf. Chapter 3): in the latter case, for instance, Portugal’s colonial relationship to Cape Verde in the background of the novel is key to understanding the protagonist’s oscillation between repulsion and attachment to his home island Santiago. Even though Cape Verde provides for an interesting case in studying diaspora in relation to the nation, I agree with Douglas Massey’s statement (on the back cover of Duany’s [2011] book) that “In no region of the world are politics, development and migration so closely intertwined as in the Hispanic Caribbean”. Moreover, one of the big misunderstandings is that transnationalism only occurs between sovereign nation-­states (Duany 2011: 26), leaving out of the equation dependent territories such as Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Martinique, French Guyana, etc. As I argued earlier (in my book on Puerto Rican literature, see Van Haesendonck 2008), Puerto Rico’s current political status indeed can be compared to the social status of the “crossdresser”, that is, a social outcast or anomality which does not fit in any of the options available. If the cross-­dresser can be read as a metaphor for the Puerto Rican nation, it is not hard to see why: neither male nor female, he/she is both at the same time; translated to politics, the Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State) is de facto neither a full “estado” of the USA nor fully “libre”, that is, it is not politically (and economically) sovereign. Finally, it should be noted that an interesting link can be observed between contemporary postcolonial fiction and the scholarly work by postcolonial scholarship produced over the past few decades. As with other Hispanic Caribbean intellectuals (including Silvio Torres-­Saillant, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Gustavo Pérez-­ Firmat, Jorge Duany, etc.) the autobiographical component is crucial in order

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to understand both their work and the “object” of their study. A more personal (i.e. subjective) approach was all but common a few decades ago, especially in scholarly work. With the advent of postmodern and deconstructionist theories, we see a more relaxed and creative approach in the humanities and social sciences. Not in the sense that scholarship has gone “creative writing”, let’s be clear about that; but the hard borders between what is scientifically “objective” and the “subjective” sphere have clearly become more porous – the borders between fiction and autobiography, between Author (as scientific authority) and Other (as object of anthropological curiosity), and also between literature and literary studies. This trend has led some scholars (e.g. Culler 2007) to nostalgic yet vain attempts to put the literary, which had increasingly made its way into theory, back into literature. It should not come as a surprise, then, that writing about the autobiographical self has also undergone changes, and that the border between classical autobiography (as synonym for objectivity or “truth”) and fiction has become blurred. This is particularly salient in contemporary postcolonial writing, although it is part of a larger literary phenomenon. While experimentation with hybrid forms of autobiography (and particularly what I will refer to from now on as “autofiction”) can arguably be observed in works as early as Proust (e.g. Carrier Lafleur 2010), it was only towards the end of the 1970s that such mixed forms became the object of scholarly interest, not by coincidence through the efforts of Serge Doubrovsky, a writer who also happened to be a scholar (Doubrovsky 1977). Since then, “autofiction”, autobiography’s lesser known kin (to which I will come back in detail in Chapter 3) has slowly gained terrain. In short, the inclusion of personal narratives and autobiographical elements, whether in postcolonial fiction, theory, or scholarship on postcolonial contexts, can be viewed as part of a larger, common phenomenon: the cultural and literary hybridization that comes with globalization, which has resulted in the challenging of established borders between the known and the unknown, between object and subject, between Western (usually Eurocentric) Epistemology and Modernity and other, divergent epistemologies and modernities.

The poetics of disorder: archipelagos, conviviality, creolization Besides incisive studies on Lusophone Africa and its historical figures (e.g. Amílcar Cabral), Patrick Chabal has co-­authored important reflections on the condition of the postcolonial subject on the African

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continent. In their landmark book Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, he offered, with Jean-­Pascal Daloz, a compelling, more positive view of “disorder” in an African context, a view which reminds me of the Caribbean poetics: [W]hat we mean [by “disorder”] is […] in fact a different order, the outcome of different rationalities and causalities. It appears as disorder only because most paradigms are based on a notion of a form of social, economic and, therefore, political development which reflects the experience of Western societies. (Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works 155)

What we find here is the search for a more optimistic view of disorder, different from negative Western perceptions of chaos, much as in the Caribbean theory  I’ve been referring to (Benítez Rojo and Glissant). Edouard Glissant summarizes his views well in the sentence “le chaos-­ monde n’est ni fusion ni confusion” (Glissant 1996: 108) (the chaos-­world is neither fusion, nor confusion). Implied in this alternative order, which echoes the Caribbean interest in chaos theory, is the aim of proving that the Caribbean and Africa “work” in different ways, as well as the desire to go beyond the opposition between modernity (order) and tradition (disorder). Like Chabal and Daloz, according to Mozambican writer Mia Couto, the opposition between the traditional – seen as the pure and non-­contaminated side of African culture – and the modern is a false contradiction. However, non-­linear, “disorderly” ways of thinking are to be found about everywhere in Caribbean theory, and, as I will attempt to show, well beyond the Caribbean (e.g. in urban studies). As announced earlier, in this book I am especially interested in the spatial, non-­linear concept of the archipelago, which was introduced into the humanities mainly through Benítez Rojo’s theory of the meta-­archipelago, as well as Edouard Glissant’s pensée archipélique. The archipelago, I will argue, should be approached in connection with two more concepts: conviviality and – as a particular form of conviviality – creoleness.

Thinking the archipelago I will use the terms “archipelago” and “archipelagic thinking” to refer both to the geographical concept and to an emerging abstract (i.e. metaphorical) notion that deserves – I will argue – to be rethought as a conceptual tool. Glissant’s postmodern perspective on the Caribbean has its direct twin in the book La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspective postmoderna (The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern

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Perspective) (1989) by his Cuban colleague Antonio Benítez Rojo. Benítez Rojo’s work is not only particularly significant for the Hispanic Caribbean; like Glissant he has also become one of the most popular intellectuals both within and outside of the Caribbean and its diaspora(s). La isla que se repite quickly became a classic for its innovative attempt to theorize the Caribbean from a “perspectiva posmoderna”, as stated in the Spanish subtitle, thus providing an attractive and innovative model for rethinking the region, particularly by drawing on chaos theory, which since the early 1980s became popular in the exact sciences through works such as Benoît Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982). Benítez Rojo, who was both a US-­based scholar and a writer, draws heavily on fellow Cuban Fernando Ortiz’s work, more particularly on his essay Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar) (1940). In his Contrapunteo the Cuban anthropologist develops the concept of transculturation, centred around the Caribbean’s Plantations, an economy based on tobacco and sugar converted into a “machine” (a term he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari), at the service at what later would become known as capitalism. Ortiz was interested in the complex processes of cultural contact whereby two (or more) cultures entering into contact with one another experience permanent change. The image par excellence that Ortiz used to explain transculturation is that of the ajiaco, the popular Cuban stew where the many diverse ingredients are accepted, adding an equal number of flavours and colours to the whole, and which is by definition an impure mix. Benítez Rojo’s predecessor’s Contrapunteo was a turning point for Caribbean discourse, for cultural contact had never been theorized in its complexity as a cross-­fertilizing and transnational phenomenon (Duany 135). Ortiz’s project was, in spite of its literary and poetic character (something which can to a degree also be said of Benítez Rojo but certainly also of Glissant’s poétique), an early example of “political empowerment” and “postcolonial agency” (Davies 161). Transculturation rejects any essentialist concept of identity and fixity as the ideological construction of otherness, thus undermining colonialist discourses. Ironically, Benítez Rojo himself reads the Contrapunteo as merely that – a piece of literature (159), a product of the Caribbean’s fantastic imagination and creativity, a feature he also sees at the core of Alejo Carpentier’s fiction – yet not as a work with any lasting political and social significance. In addition, Benítez Rojo is eager to draw heavily on European postmodern and deconstructionist concepts, as necessary elements in formulating a Caribbean discourse. This paradox is at the heart of Caribbean intellectual thought (as it can also be found in Glissant or Torres-­Saillant, for instance): a proper discourse can only be forged through the language of the (former)

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master, as crystallized in Shakespeare’s Tempest: if Caliban is able to curse, it is because he has become a product of Prospero’s tongue. Benítez Rojo’s work suggests, from the very title of his book, that the Caribbean is all about islands, or even one particular “proto-­island” that “repeats itself ” across and beyond the Caribbean, and is not exactly evocative of any connectivity as the related term “archipelago” is. As a consequence, a key concept he introduces in his book, the “meta-­ archipelago”, unfortunately loses much of its critical power and visibility between the many enthusiastic digressions on Caribbean literary and artistic expressions, mostly centred, indeed, on his home island of Cuba instead of on the broader Caribbean. It should be remembered, though, that before publishing The Repeating Island the Cuban intellectual had coined his concept of meta-­archipelago in 1986 in his homonymous essay “La isla que se repite: para una reinterpretación de la cultura caribeña” (Benítez Rojo 1986), whose subtitle he later changed for the book version in “una perspectiva pós-­moderna: “el Caribe es un meta-­archipiélago […], y en tanto meta-­archipiélago tiene la virtud de carecer de límites y de centro” (115). (The Caribbean is a meta-­archipelago … and as a meta-­archipelago has the virtue of lacking limits and centre). Instead of a single definition of the Caribbean, Benítez Rojo, like his Martinican colleague Edouard Glissant, speaks in terms of multiplicity: the Caribbean as a fractal superstructure that exceeds the singularity of each of the Caribbean islands. Both authors indeed use the term “chaos”: Glissant describes the universe as chaos-­monde (as a synonym of Tout monde), while Benítez Rojo draws directly on chaos theory, which is better known as “the science of surprises, of the non-­linear and the unpredictable”. Chaos theory aims to teach us to expect the unexpected, whether we are dealing with the changing weather, the stock market, or our daily mood, etc. Thus, when speaking of the Caribbean as “meta-­archipelago” the Cuban author clearly draws on insights of fractal properties of insular landscapes. So does Glissant when describing our globalizing planet as a creolizing archipelago where everyone and everything, even the most remote cultural artifact, is in some way interconnected. The Butterfly Effect is perhaps the most fascinating example of chaos theory, according to which a butterfly in Africa can cause a hurricane in Jamaica. One of the ways in which the Caribbean presents an example of an order-­in-­chaos is by looking at its own geographical constitution. What is often referred to as “archipelagic thinking” stems directly from the insular Caribbean as a geographical (i.e. physical and material) space, and thus deserves our closer attention. Furthermore, archipelagic modes of thinking are crucial, I argue, in reframing the process of globalization in terms of conviviality and

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creolization, two terms that will help structure our conceptual framework. Indeed, if we pretend to analyse the postcolonial condition of the subject in such diverse cultural contexts as Africa and the Caribbean, it is useful to briefly explain each of these (interrelated) terms. Yet Clifford’s earlier-­mentioned statement that “we are all Caribbean now in our urban archipelagos” (1988: 173) does not say much about other (not necessarily “urban”) kinds of archipelagos. The Caribbean itself receives little or no attention, while the archipelago is used in a purely metaphorical way. However, and not by coincidence, Caribbean writers, but also intellectuals and other people from the world of arts, have been interested in modes of what a Martinican philosopher, Edouard Glissant, calls pensée archipélique or “archipelagic thinking”: non-­linear, organic, decentralized, rhizomatic (some would call it “postmodern”) ways of thinking and organizing our environments, as opposed to hierarchical, authoritarian or too rigid forms of organization. Perhaps we are still far away from living in urban archipelagos on a planetary scale; still, it is a fact that an “archipelization” is taking place whereby dwellers recognize new, hitherto unfamiliar forms for establishing ties and forming communities. But the focus must also be placed on the human driving force behind the creation of urban configurations. How do we organize our daily lives in the “urban archipelago”? How does cultural diversity bring people together, or, on the contrary, how does it at times drive a wedge between them? Archipelagic thinking is quite an abstract and poetic notion, but we should not shy away from using it, provided that we can apply it in a useful way. To think in archipelagic modes implies to (attempt to) connect those elements which we formerly perceived as unconnectable: a heterogeneity of elements which make up our cultures, identities, idiosyncrasies, nations and races and whose impurity is historically, rather than simply biologically, determined. In a similar fashion to Clifford (and other cultural critics such as Ulf Hannerz), Glissant sees the world as becoming an archipelago: “le monde s’archipélise”, and this transformation into archipelago implies the cultural creolization of the world. While Glissant sees creolization as a global (i.e. planetary) phenomenon, we will argue here that creolization is happening at least in specific places and regions around the planet. Another attractive point of this mode of thinking is that archipelagic thoughts are never imperialist, hierarchical or dominant: archipelagic thoughts, Glissant (1996) argues, never impose themselves as forces of direction whereas continental thoughts force their way towards the world in a direct and continuous way. Archipelagic thinking has usually been thought of as a metaphor and a discursive concept, released from its material frame of reference. However, as I will endeavour to show

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in this book, archipelagic thinking can be done in various ways, and the humanities can learn from other disciplines as well, in order to rethink the spatial concepts that make much of Caribbean theory so attractive (islands, mangroves, archipelagos). Beyond fiction in the strict sense, the book will include a reflection on how to (re)think Caribbean concepts, often absorbed by postcolonial and cultural studies in a purely discursive way, that is, without much reference to the geographical background that gave birth to these concepts. We will thus also look into how the extra-­ discursive, material reality is important in giving a new (broader) sense to more limited conceptions (such as Glissant’s pensée archipélique). As with “Caribbean”, speaking of “Caribbean literature” hides the multiplicity that exists behind these labels. The importance of creole languages in the Caribbean gained a lot of interest thanks to the so-­ called créoliste movement (founded by Raphael Confiant, Jean Bernabé and Patrick Chamoiseau), converting the Caribbean into an intellectual hub with Martinique at its centre. However, the same cannot be said of Lusophone Africa, where no such organized movement has emerged (at least not yet), in spite of equally intense processes of cultural and linguistic mixing in the Cape Verdean archipelago, São Tome and Príncipe and, to a lesser extent, Guiné Buissau; and, as Mario António Oliveira, an Angolan scholar and poet, argued, along the coastal areas colonized by the Portuguese, including Angola (Oliveira 1990). While it is true that Martinique counts as the Caribbean’s intellectual “powerhouse”, thanks to giants such as Glissant, Césaire and the Créolistes (Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant), the Hispanic Caribbean has made an important contribution since the late 19th  century, with figures like António Benítez Rojo and Julio Ramos and, formerly, intellectuals such as Fernando Retamar, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Eugenio María de Hostos and, of course, José Martí. In Cape Verde, a creole society, there is, for instance, a debate (as in Curaçao) about the role of crioulo in education (Lang 2006; Veiga 1997, 1998), and some Cape Verdean writers have defended the idea that crioulo – known in many varieties – would become a uniform written language. Other Cape Verdean writers, such as Germano Almeida and Joaquim Arena, defend the use of Portuguese as the written language while attempting to “creolize” their Portuguese with creole words and forms of expression. Nowadays, the links between Cape Verde and Portugal show the strength of the postcolonial ties between Portugal and its former African colonies, significantly stronger in any case than its current links with Brazil (e.g. in the debate surrounding the reforma ortográfica). As I will argue throughout this book, the strand of multiculturalism avant

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la lettre that Salazar attempted to promote under the banner of Luso-­ tropicalismo is endemically present in Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola and Guiné Buissau. Besides economic interests, a minor scale of what Edward Said named “cultural imperialism” (2012), it is hard to tell if the interest in Portuguese culture in the former colonies is not simply an avatar of Luso-­tropicalism. As Miguel Vale de Almeida contends, “Luso-­ Tropicalism was never a theory or a school of thought. It was born within a tradition of culturalist essay writing. It was produced by and produced discourses in the field of identity, specificity, and exceptionalism. And it was so both in Brazil and Portugal” (Vale de Almeida 62). In addition, Luso-­tropicalism was not simply imported from Brazil through Freyre’s ideas: as Arenas (2011) asserts, this culturalist ideology was also moulded through the Portuguese colonial experience in Lusophone Africa: “the much touted Lusofonía is as rooted in the efforts of Portuguese empire building during early modernity as it is in the African struggles that led to the empire’s collapse in late modernity” (Arenas 2). Luso-­tropicalism, however, left a large legacy both in the intellectual field and in popular culture and sports. To what extent are interests in popular culture or football, for instance, free from postcolonial ideological bias? A good example of the close links between popular culture and colonial politics would be the Cape Verdeans’ interest in Portuguese football, which goes back to colonial times, when the Mozambican player Eusébio was hired by Lisbon’s top club Benfica. The presence of African players was an easy way of justifying Salazar’s colonialist regime overseas: The recent revival of economic ties with Portugal adds to a sustained Portuguese influence in many spheres of Cape Verdean society since independence. The institutions of the state and civil society are decidedly inspired by Portuguese models. In everyday life in Cape Verde, perhaps the most obvious example of Portuguese presence is football. Almost every man, and many women, in Cape Verde is a staunch supporter of one of the three main football clubs in Portugal: Benfica, Porto, or Sporting. Portuguese television shows and Brazilian soaps (novelas) are also important cultural influences from other parts of the Lusophone world. (Batalha and Carling 15)

More than “inspiration”, both Portugal and Lusophone Africa are arguably imbued with Luso-­tropicalist ideology, which has become part of the different “national” tissue of each country. The influences reached much further than the “inclination toward miscegenation in [sic] the biological level, and the enrichment of the Portuguese language with tropicalisms” (Freyre, quoted in Vale de Almeida 60). As a clever way of tying the colonies into the império’s national fabric, Luso-­tropicalism

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nowadays survives under multiple masks, both official and informally: “something that we could call generic Luso-­tropicalism remains alive – as an inclination, a commonsense interpretation, sometimes as official representation, even when critical discourse becomes stronger (as with the case of the commemorations of the Portuguese Discoveries in the late 1990s). Luso-­Tropicalism has become a social fact” (Vale de Almeida 63). On the surface, the colonial ideology aimed at fostering a multicultural society avant la lettre, hence softening international criticism of what appeared to be a more “human” form of colonialism, intellectually backed by apparently “humanist” ideologues such as Gilberto Freyre. One of our concerns here will, then, logically, be: in what ways is the ideology of luso-­tropicalismo – one of the pillars of Salazar’s colonial politics – represented in Lusophone African literature? Contrary to the showcased Lusophone imperial convivência, the Hispanic Caribbean’s experience was quite different, indeed much less meaningful over time. While the Francophone Caribbean territories or Départements continued to be subject to an intense politics of assimilation, Spain’s sphere of influence had fairly quickly waned after it had lost its last colonies following the Spanish American War of 1898. Even though the Spanish language would in the Spanish Antilles (Puerto Rico, Cuba and Dominican Republic) become a weapon for cultural resistance against the neo-­imperialist threat from the northern neighbour, in the 20th century few serious ideological attempts were made to foster a global Hispanophone community. In that sense Francophonie and Lusofonía bear similarities, as they have always been closely linked to geopolitical interests, contrary to the much weaker Anglophone and Spanish interests in the Caribbean. An interesting yet still unknown case is the Dutch Caribbean: in spite of the Netherlands’ self-­promoted transparency and political openness, the overseas territories have mostly been absent from any open debate. As in the case of Portugal and the Lusophone African countries, true postcolonial reflection on the Dutch Antilles has yet to take off in the Netherlands (Boehmer 2009). It would be interesting to look at the deeper causes of why it has had to take so long for Portugal and the Netherlands, as well as Belgium to a certain extent (Hochschildt 1999), to start to take a look in the postcolonial mirror.

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Beyond the nation: conviviality as a tool for comparative analysis In addition to fostering comparative perspectives in the postcolonial field, our study is motivated by its focus on a second important concept strongly related to archipelagic thinking which has not been addressed so far in literary studies: conviviality. What is conviviality? What makes something convivial? Whatever perspective one adopts, conviviality has as much to do with keeping one’s distance (from neighbours, other communities, etc.) as it has with knowing how to “live together” or cohabit in some kind of peaceful way. While the concept was, not so long ago, introduced into social anthropology, we should from the outset make clear that anthropologists have only recently started to include the notion in their discussions. The term traditionally had festive connotations, usually evoking images of banquets and similar festive scenarios à la Rabelais. According to Steven Vertovec and Magdalena Nowicka (2014), conviviality can be used as an analytical tool to explore ways and conditions for “living together”, understood in a broad sense. In their article “Comparing convivialities”, they summarize well the trend in academia of embracing an inclusive approach to multiform varieties of what is somewhat vaguely referred to as “living together”. They argue that it makes particular sense to compare different forms or modalities of conviviality, indeed different convivialities, in order to understand “how conviviality has been imagined within various traditions, parts of the world and periods of history” (350); by extension, we will argue that comparing different forms of “living together”, as represented in postcolonial literatures, helps to elucidate the differences and similarities between Caribbean and African fiction. Unlike its sister concept, cosmopolitanism, conviviality does not retain a Western footprint; it does not bear any Eurocentric connotations. Vertovec and Nowicka identify three main strings of the debate, “place/ space, conviviality/conflict and normativities beyond essentialisms” (342). While this concept has received an increasing amount of critical attention in the social sciences over the past decade, in the humanities this has not been the case. This lack of critical attention is surprising for at least three reasons. First, conviviality evokes a special importance from the angle of colonialism and post-­colonialism. While the scholarly choir has traditionally emphasized either the survival or resistance of Caribbean and African communities both under colonial rule and after independence, alternative (more complex) forms of living together, of cohabiting (as an “imagined community”) or, more broadly, of simply existing together either under or after colonialism have rarely raised any

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interest. For example, thinking about those cases such as Puerto Rico (or in the Francophone area, Martinique) which find themselves in some sort of association or cohabitation (at least on the political and economic level) with a “motherland”, can this be reframed in terms of conviviality? What are the avatars of colonialism in the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African spheres? Second, issues of conviviality are likely more relevant than ever before. Forms of conviviality are especially relevant from a contemporary point of view, and exceed postcolonial contexts. What happens, for instance, in Europe when the narrative of multiculturalism is increasingly under pressure? Is Europe a convivial space, and how is conviviality manifested or organized? Do new forms of social mixing have an impact on how communities live together (or apart)? How does conviviality depend on and how is it conditioned by hospitality? Is Europe, unlike the Caribbean, inevitably a space for atavisms where each nation rivals its neighbour? Third, conviviality echoes with a wide range of terms which have made their way into the humanities, such as “cosmopolitanism”, “cultural integration” and “multiculturalism”, all concepts whose importance has been acknowledged because of their relevance in relation to the contemporary interlinked phenomena of globalization and migration. Attention has instead predominantly been paid to the social and political effects of the aftermath of colonial rule on institutions, the State apparatus, etc., not to the root causes of what it is that enables or limits forms of living peacefully together. However, and especially in both contexts studied here, forms of social, cultural and linguistic mixing and “living with” the other have been the backbone of creole societies such as Cape Verde or Mauritius. The quest for a (more) convivial space for the postcolonial subject is at the heart of many fictional texts that have increasingly de-­mystified the existential conditions after independence (as in the Lusophone African countries) in the current situation of dependency (as in the case of Puerto Rico and Martinique); rather than projecting a future to work towards, the multiplying of physical (geographical) mobility between different places (between island and diaspora) has not resolved the interiorized psychological, ethnic and social conflicts inherited from the past. Even within one particular African country such as Mozambique, ethnic tensions and false conceptions of “purity” often override broader interests. As Mia Couto (2012) explains, “Mozambique is a nation of many nations. It is a supranational nation. A nation that must live together (conviver) perfectly within the [borders of ] Mozambican space, as we define it. As it must live together within each of us” (Couto 93). Such issues, however, are not exclusively Mozambican, of course. In Mia Couto’s novel Jesusalém,

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for instance, the search undertaken by Mwanito, the protagonist, does not bring him any stability nor happiness. Nor do the many wanderings of the characters in José Eduardo Agualusa’s My Father’s Wives, to mention another example. In the end, much like the frustrated whodunit of postmodern detective novels, what is at stake is not so much the telling of a story, its teleological progress towards a solution of a problem, conflict or mystery, but rather the act of telling itself, as a way of recovering the postcolonial subject’s lost or erased memory. The narrative and thematic linkages between the episodes, it appears, get priority over the meticulous telling of facts or events as a way of reinforcing the credibility of the plot. Adopting a somewhat more dramatic or apocalyptic tone, one could ask: is conviviality today not an illusion when dealing with postcolonial societies? How does it affect the quest for (or obsession with) a cultural identity? The question has led to scepticism by more than one Caribbean and African intellectual. Curaçaoan writer Frank Martinus Arion always remained highly sceptical about Caribbeanness as a basic sense of togetherness and conviviality, whether on a national, transnational or regional scale. Within the Caribbean and African spaces, what most unites the different nations is a negative trait: Creoleness has to start with Caribbeanness. So Caribbeanness should be our first hope and goal. [I have tried to] find common Caribbean traits from as many angles as possible, including geological, historical, ethnological, cultural, religious ones and so on. I tried to be as positive and optimistic as I could […] but unfortunately I could only come up with the negative conclusion that only one common criterion applies to the whole Caribbean region: complete ignorance of each other’s existence. There is more Europeanness than Americanness and practically no Caribbeanness in sight. (Arion 448–9)2

Even though Arion suggests that European identity is a fact, in recent years the very solidity of Europeanness has increasingly come under pressure in the old continent. In spite of pessimism from Caribbean thinkers regarding globalization, echoing emerging tensions on a planetary scale, some voices for a renewed sense of solidarity can be heard in the intellectual arena. The art of “living (peacefully) together” on an increasingly “smaller” planet is probably one of the greatest challenges we face in our times, as suggested by a group of renowned French intellectuals 2

In another essay, he adds that “It is difficult to observe without disappointment the widespread ignorance of the cultural creolization that emerged from slavery – mostly the ignorance of the very perpetrators of this historic sin” (116). Arion, “The Victory of the Concubines and the Nannies (see Balutansky, 110–17).

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(among others, Chantal Mouffe) who call themselves “Les Convivialistes” in a timely manifesto titled “Convivialist Manifesto: A Declaration of Interdependence” (2014): By convivialism we mean a mode of living together (con-­vivere) that values human relationships and cooperation and enables us to challenge one another without resorting to mutual slaughter and in a way that ensures consideration for others and for nature. We talk of challenging one another because to try to build a society where there is no conflict between groups and individuals would be not just delusory but disastrous. Conflict is a necessary and natural part of every society, not only because interests and opinions constantly differ – between parents and children, elders and juniors, men and women, the very wealthy and the very poor, the powerful and the powerless, the fortunate and the unfortunate – but also because every human being aspires to have their uniqueness recognized and this results in an element of rivalry as powerful and primordial as the aspiration, also common to all, to harmony and cooperation. (Les Convivialistes 25)

Managing conflict, they argue, is essential to the “new” politics of what they call convivialism. Besides ecological, moral and political considerations, they define three core principles: individuation, common sociality and managed conflict. The latter, conflict management, is important: the authors suggest that globalization does not do away with conflict. On the contrary, it places conflict at the centre of what convivialism – and creoleness by extension – is about: not repressing any tensions, yet creatively finding solutions to either minimize conflict or channel it so as to create “safe zones” within a conflict-­ridden (or war-­torn) landscape. Creoleness implies, however, that the outcome of creolization is unpredictable, while convivialism claims that the outcome is predictable, the result of human agency, of conflict management: Convivialism is the term used to describe all those elements in existing systems of belief, secular or religious, that help us identify principles for enabling human beings simultaneously to compete and cooperate with one another, with a shared concern to safeguard the world and in the full knowledge that we form part of that world and that its natural resources are finite. (27)

Whereas we are now living a “planetary condition”, as Achille Mbembe (2016) put it in a recent lecture, in which one of the major challenges for the 21st century is to redefine and adapt our understanding of “nationhood”, the latter is still largely defined in a strict ethnic or nationalist sense. Any supranational, communitarian thinking, whether in regions such as the Caribbean, Africa or Europe, is usually eschewed.

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The concept of archipelago, which we will study more in detail in Chapter 8, has received some limited scholarly attention, for instance in the political sciences. One book in particular engages more intensely with the archipelago as a metaphor: The Liberal Archipelago. A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (2003). The author, Chandran Kukathas, contends that a free society is by definition an open society that obeys one core principle: freedom of association. While the book takes a clear political strand – a defence of liberalism – what interests me is not so much the author’s political drive, but instead the way in which he returns to the archipelago as a metaphor in order to come up with an alternative political model for the way politics (in case liberalism) is being conceived. In other words, he engages in what I will call, following Glissant, a form of “archipelagic thinking”. More particularly, Kukathas envisions society, in a somewhat utopic fashion, as an archipelago of different communities operating in a sea of mutual toleration. Unlike its more famous twentieth-­century namesake, the gulag archipelago, the liberal archipelago is a society of societies which is neither the creation nor the object of control of any single authority, though it (end p. 8) is a form of order in which authorities function under laws which are themselves beyond the reach of any singular power. Implicit in this is a rejection of nationalism, and of the idea that we should start with the assumption that the nation-­state is the society which is properly the object of concern when we ask what is a free society. (Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago 20)

What Kukathas in fact defends is a model for conviviality, a society constructed on a non-­hierarchical authority, which can “accommodate the concerns of cultural groups” (21). The different “communities operating in a “sea of mutual toleration” are thus thought of as islands. Yet he goes on to claim that geographical archipelagos can provide more than merely inspiration for a democratic interaction between societies. They can teach us about a particular “horizontal” (i.e. non-­hierarchical) dynamics for the cohabitation of nation-­islands, where not all, however, are necessarily habitable: International society is an archipelago – a sea with numerous islands. Each island is a separate domain, cut-­off from others by waters which are indifferent to its circumstances or to its fate. The majority is inhabited by people most of whom are there by chance rather than by intention (though a few are dominated by recent immigrants). In almost all cases they live under the rule of an authority, though the character, style, and concerns of that authority vary from one island to the next. Some of these islands are lush and verdant, while

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others are barely habitable and in danger of submersion by rising seas; some are remote and all but inaccessible across treacherous waters, while others are almost physically connected by the archipelagic aprons […] Each is at liberty to leave, and the sea is thus dotted with vessels, some moving along established routes, others wandering into uncharted areas, none evincing purposes which are readily apparent (and some without any purpose at all). While conventions have emerged governing conduct on the seas, and some powers have been established to deal with problems of piracy, the archipelago is unmanaged. (Few wish it to be, though from time to time there emerge people who are so firmly convinced of the need for such management that they attempt to turn the archipelago into dry land.) And some of its islands remain on the periphery, almost entirely untouched – insular in every sense of the word – though the location of the periphery is itself unclear. (Kukathas 28–9)

In spite of its purely theoretical character – Kukathas’s work can easily be described as an exercise in utopian thinking – the author touches upon some of the key features that are, I argue, part of archipelagic thinking: envisioning the possibility of a working whole, an “assemblage”, which presents itself as a kind of an “eco-­system” (for lack of a better word), whereby some parts are naturally more functional than others. However, the existence of the archipelagic system is never jeopardized. Rather, its major strength, Kukathas suggests, resides in its resilience. At the same time, the system can include and support parts that at first sight seem incompatible with, or even hostile to, the archipelago: in his case, the “liberal” archipelago can include “non-­liberal” elements, while the surrounding “sea” is not hostile; it is a “sea of mutual toleration”, that is, a foundation for mutual understanding and thus the drive of a convivial society. Furthermore, Kukathas is right to see the archipelago as a low-­ maintenance structure: it being an “unmanaged” system, its strength resides in its natural configuration. On the Caribbean islands, linguistic and cultural creolization occurred as an unplanned mixing of languages, with unpredictable results. This leads us to the third related concept: creoleness, the term used to refer to the outcome of creolization.

Creolization: a travelling concept A third concept, closely related to archipelagic thinking and conviviality, is at the heart of a comparative, “archipelagic” approach to the postcolonial contexts involved. The Caribbean and Africa have, unlike Western societies, been characterized to different degrees to the highly important yet unpredictable factor of cultural mixing. Some of the terms that have been used over the past few decades to refer to those processes are hybridization,

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métissage and creolization. While each of these terms has its own history, they are often mistakenly used as synonyms. In recent decades, scholars – mainly anthropologists and linguists – have been focusing on the latter, perhaps most complex of these concepts: creolization. Born out of colonialism and slavery, most Caribbean and certain African societies historically evolved into places of cultural, racial and linguistic mixing. These processes were initially identified as specifically linguistic, and later as cultural interactions as well. The interesting aspect is that scholars have been investigating whether such processes take place outside of the classical hotspots of creolization: the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean (e.g. Mauritius, La Réunion) and creole societies in “Lusophone” Africa (namely Cape Verde, Guiné Buissau and São Tomé and Príncipe).The accent has thereby – somewhat hastily according to sceptics (e.g. Palmié 2006, 2007; Sheller 2003; Price 2001) – been moved from the local to the global, suggesting there is little in between those two extremes. Yet in recent decades social anthropologists have made the claim that cultural creolization can happen everywhere; processes of cultural mixing (and literary mixing, I will argue) happen in specific regions or places where cultures make contact, often in conflictive ways. Such regions or places can be said to be “contact zones”, to use Mary Pratt’s terminology, which she uses in reference to imperialism (Pratt 2007). With globalization, one can indeed observe that cultures are increasingly dependent on each other, while mobility of individuals is more intense than ever before. Displacement, however, can be forced or voluntary, and the former was often the case in postcolonial contexts. Creolization thus never comes out of the blue, even though its results are said to be unpredictable. Both interlinked concepts, creoleness and, especially, creolization, have been popular – to different degrees – among (social) anthropologists, but have not yet been looked into by scholars of postcolonial literatures and cultures. I will argue that these conceptual tools allow us to approach the “archipelago” of very different postcolonial literatures from a comparative perspective, without jeopardizing the importance of the specificity of the cultural contexts in which these literatures have emerged. However, the disciplinary transfer and semantic and/or contextual displacement that have affected the use of these terms bring along some theoretical problems: while the term “conviviality” initially had exclusively festive connotations, it now often refers to different “cosmopolitan” modalities of living together in an era of globalization and of – often polarizing – identity politics, whereas “creoleness” is increasingly being used in non-­postcolonial (non-­Caribbean) contexts. However, among Hispanic Caribbean intellectuals the term has not been popular, arguably because of the linguistic divide between the linguistic areas. Even though Torres-­

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Saillant uses the term “creoleness” only once in his book, he emphasizes the importance of creole languages in the formation of intellectuals from the region such as Frank Martinus Arion and Kamau Brathwaite. Torres-­ Saillant is right to remind us that it is the Caribbean’s linguistic diversity that led to creoleness, as a result of the process of linguistic and cultural mixing commonly known as creolization: “An awareness of the challenge that language presents to the student of the Caribbean must include a recognition of the creoleness that underlies the region’s tongue even when the words deployed morphologically match the familiar Western words brought to the region from Spain, Holland, England, or France” (Torres-­ Saillant 27). However, in his Intellectual History the Dominican critic omits any reference to one of the landmark texts about creoleness, the Eloge de la créolité, published in 1989 by three Martinican writers who would become known as the créolistes. This omission is rather awkward, given that Martinique and the créoliste movement have been one of the Caribbean’s landmarks during the past thirty years. In Torres-­Saillant’s eloquently written cross-­Caribbean history, perhaps this omission tells us more about the persisting tensions (and not simply ignorance, as Arion would see it) between scholars who, often at their own expense, remain confined to their particular interests. Whenever scholars speak of creoleness, usually what is referred to is indeed Créolité, especially since the publication of the trio’s manifesto Eloge de la créolité. Yet there are other conceptions of creoleness which go beyond the limited (and limiting) scope of Créolité. In her incisive critique of the créolistes, and of their somewhat narcissistic view on creoleness, Juliane Tauchnitz shows how any reference to the related concept of hybridity is excluded from the créolistes’ view of creolization (Tauchnitz 16). Dissecting the concept, she uncovers how créolité offers predecessors to the authors of the famous manifesto, and finds that créolité is embedded in a dense theoretical network which exceeds the Martinican and Antillean context. Even though the créolistes see themselves as the “successors of other concepts or other ideologies” (18), especially their fellow Martinicans Césaire (one of the founding fathers of the Négritude movement) and Edouard Glissant, the theorist of Antillanité is often mistakenly seen as the father of creolization. Finally, one should also mention here Phaf-­Rheinberger’s volume of collected essays (Presencia criolla en el Caribe y América Latina = Creole presence in the Caribbean and Latin America), for its attempt to connect Spanish American notions of creole (criollo/criollización) to the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of confusion among scholars as to the historical background and specificities of the concepts of creolization, creole and creoleness; therefore, one must always be careful as to the specific context in which the

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term is being used. Between those who reject very broad generalizations of these concepts and those who defend an orthodox (linguistic) use of these terms, common sense tells us that between these extremes there is a third option: to assess each case against its specific background, whether we are dealing with a regional literature (such as Europe), a writer (such as Mia Couto) or a specific text (such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). The notion of creoleness which I will embrace here is, contrary to the Créolistes, more inclusive and can be used in non-­Caribbean contexts. It allows me to explore and reflect upon processes of literary mixing, which have not yet received any scholarly attention. Summarizing, I argue that creoleness can be said to be the natural condition (of conviviality) which postcolonial subjects strive towards, yet which has been frustrated through war trauma, a brutal imposition of a Western concept of modernization and “modernity”. I do not intend, however, to downplay the Créolistes’ contribution to the debate. It is safe to assume that the Créolistes not only gave a specific meaning to the term, but also that they monopolized the use of it, in accordance with their purposes as defined in the manifesto. In summarized terms, creoleness has been defined as the natural outcome of creolization, a typically Caribbean process which has a universal reach but which is also essentially “Antillais”. More than Glissant or Benítez Rojo’s accounts, the Créolistes’ manifesto was written from and applies largely to Martinique rather than to the broader Caribbean, to which it only sporadically refers. The manifesto led to numerous reactions from Caribbean writers, ranging from applause to condemnation, the most famous doubtlessly voiced by their Guadeloupian colleague Maryse Condé (e.g. Condé and Cottenet-­Hage1995), who denounced the text as an attempt to essentialize the debate on Caribbean identity, and Caribbean discourse as a whole. The creolization of cultures – whether on a local or a global scale – is arguably the process par excellence that leads to a more convivial form of society, yet it does not do away with conflict as such. More precisely, I argue that creoleness understood as the result of cultural creolization can be defined as a particular form of conviviality whereby the ultimate outcome of cultural mixing is the emergence of a new, creole identity out of two, or various, postcolonial cultures which, because of their particular constituencies, are seen as antagonistic or opposed to one another.3 However, reality and theory usually do not easily match each other. How do continuous suffering and violence block the possibility 3

Conviviality is a state, a condition, not a process, and as a condition it cannot be “creolized”, contrary to what a recent study suggests (a book by Guttiérez Rodríguez

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of conviviality in the postcolonial African and Caribbean contexts? What options does the individual have to survive with dignity in broken societies? In spite of the optimism surrounding creolization from thinkers such as Hannerz, Glissant, Eriksen and the Créolistes, is the world really moving towards more conviviality? If so, how can creoleness, understood as the result of a creolization process in some African and Caribbean societies, serve as a model for conviviality for other regions of the world, which are not necessarily postcolonial? No matter from what discipline or theoretical perspective a scholar looks at creolization, time and again he will be referred to the Caribbean (unless no historical and geographical background is provided, of course), and once in a while also to the Indian Ocean. However, concepts referring to processes of mixing, such as creolization, mestizaje, métissage, hybridization and others, are not unconditionally attached to one specific context. Even though it is correct to argue that, historically, a concept is particularly relevant for one specific context (e.g. the emergence of a pidgin or creole language), a process of linguistic and cultural mixing as such can happen anywhere – that is, including in particular places and regions where colonialism and/or slavery have been absent, or not present as intensely as in Cape Verde or Curaçao: for instance, in Europe since the late Middle Ages, even though there are accounts of white slaves by North African slave traders, as studied by Robert Davis in his controversial yet academically ignored book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (2004). According to Davis, between 1530 and 1780 around one million Christians were enslaved in the Mediterranean, yet there are no clear records of this. Compared to scholarly efforts carried out to estimate the number of slaves that were being transported along the “Black Atlantic”, little scholarly work has been done to estimate the number of Christian slaves. While “convivência”, an early form of conviviality, was said to take place in Iberian peninsula – myth or not (see Fernandez Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain) – Davis’s findings lead to an interesting question: did similar, “early” processes of creolization, besides the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, happen in medieval Europe, namely in places around the Mediterranean, or in the broader Mediterranean region? When dealing with literature, arguably processes of literary mixing – creolization (and pidginization, as I will endeavour to show in Chapter 7) – have been and Tate, published in 2015 with the title Creolizing Europe, yet without reference to the homonymous book chapter I had previously published [Van Haesendonck 2012]).

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happening across different continents: in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, but also Asia. However, little or no attention has been paid to such processes, even though literary criticism is full of terms such as “movements” and “influences”, and, at best, lesser-­known literary genres such as the graphic novel have been described as “hybrid”, and the term “cross-­genre” enjoys a limited success (Freedman 1992). As for the terms “hybridity” and “hybridization”, which are arguably the closest to creolization and creoleness, there has been quite some criticism in their application to literature, more particularly when applied to literary genres. According to Allen, we should speak of “generic blending”: the concept of hybridity, she argues, “necessarily produces insufficient results and should be substituted for a more prolific alternative – generic blending” (Allen 2013). Instead of doing away with concepts such as literary hybridity, hybridization of genres, “cross-­genre” or “generic blending”, I believe the terms “creolization” and “pidginization” can be useful in helping us to rethink literary mixing (discussed in Chapter 7). They are welcome additions to the existing conceptual vocabulary, in spite of the overlapping, misunderstandings or even downright wrong applications of these terms that can be observed across disciplines. Since the publication of works on hybridization at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, such as García Canclini’s landmark book Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity), which appeared just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been an increasing interest in hybridity. García Canclini sees creolization, métissage and mestizaje as more or less classic forms of hybridization, yet not devoid of conflict and inequality in power. However, he does not properly analyse what the terms stand for, instead barely dedicating a few sentences to creolization’s history of slavery and colonialism and to Hannerz’s understanding of it as “processes of cultural confluence” (xxxiii). Thus García Canclini downplays other concepts in favour of his own, which he sees as more adequate to describe a wide range of processes of mixing: “The word hybridization [which] seems more ductile for the purpose of naming not only the mixing of ethnic or religious elements but the products of advanced technologies and modern or postmodern social processes” (García Canclini xxxiv). However, for the Argentinian anthropologist, both hybridization and creolization are part of a similar dynamics that is at work in globalization, and a healthy antidote against fin de siècle identity politics which often tends towards fundamentalisms: “If we want to go beyond liberating cultural analysis from its fundamentalist identitarian tropes, we must position hybridization in another network of concepts:

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for example, contradiction, mestizaje, syncretism, transculturation, and creolization. It is also necessary to understand it in the context of the ambivalences of the globalized mass diffusion and industrialization of symbolic processes, and of the power conflicts these provoke” (xxix). While García Canclini defends an all-­encompassing conception of hybridity and hybridization, which does not contradict but includes creolization (even though he does not clearly establish the difference between the former and the later concepts), he makes an important point about the consequences of processes of cultural mixing in relation to modernity, which can be “entered” and “left”, yet power conflicts are inherent to modernity. Unfortunately, he misses the opportunity to see the hybridity inherent in Modernity itself, instead adopting a homogeneous, fixed view of both modernity and its antonym, tradition. As Renato Rosaldo well observes in the Foreword to Culturas híbridas, García Canclini sees the opposition of modernity vs tradition as self-­evident: “entering and leaving modernity deconstructs – indeed, dissolves into hybridity – the very distinction between tradition and modernity that he resolutely maintains” (Rosaldo 1995: xv). Even though he describes his Argentinian colleague as adopting a “hybrid position between tradition and modernity” (xi), the problem remains that García Canclini fails to see the hybridity of modernity itself, and the possibility of what Julio Ramos (2001) has called “divergent modernities”. Are there any Latin American and African modernities, different from the usually capitalized Western interpretation (Modernity)? – in short, modernities which are not simply attempting to be a copy of the West but going their own – often very different – ways. As with most radical thinking, the anthropologist falls into the trap of hard oppositions, visible from the very title of Culturas híbridas: there is either an “entrance” or an “exit”. Modernity, however, contrary to what García Canclini suggests, can never be seen as the simple opposite of “tradition”, and should not be seen in homogeneous terms as a Western phenomenon: The cultural reconversions that we analyzed reveal that modernity is not only a space or a state one enters into or from which one emigrates. It is a condition that involves us, in the cities and in the countryside, in the metropolises and in the underdeveloped countries. With all the contradictions that exist between modernism and modernization – and precisely because of them – it is a situation of unending transit in which the uncertainty of what it means to be modern is never eliminated. To radicalize the project of modernity is to sharpen and renew this uncertainty, to create new possibilities for modernity always to be able to be something different and something more. (García Canclini 268)

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While creolization has an unpredictable outcome and is by definition chaotic, hybridization by contrast is the product of decision-­making. Indeed, the anthropologist goes so far as to make the radical statement that we have a choice between either chaos or hybridity: “we can choose to live in a state of war or in a state of hybridization” (xxxiii). Interestingly, both processes (creolization and hybridization) are thought of as unfinished, an “unending transit” and replete with contradictions and uncertainty. The question is whether to “radicalize the project of modernity” can be seen as a means to a more convivial world. Therefore, the anthropologist sees postmodernism, also in its cultural and artistic form, as a blessing for the region he identifies with and writes from, Latin America, as he envisions it as a radical form of rethinking the continent’s heterogeneity: “Today we conceive of Latin America as a more complex articulation of traditions and modernities (diverse and unequal), a heterogeneous continent consisting of countries in each of which coexist multiple logics of development. In order to rethink this heterogeneity, the antievolutionist reflection of postmodernism is useful, and more radical than anything that preceded it” (García Canclini 9). It goes without saying that the concepts and notions briefly outlined here are not explicitly discussed in each of the fictional works that will be analysed in the following chapters; however, as I will attempt to show, the Caribbean and African authors concerned here are – even though they do not use these terms – implicitly deeply engaged with issues of conviviality and creolization, but also of (post)modernity and postcoloniality. Therefore, I will throughout the various chapters punctually return to these theoretical aspects whenever relevant.

Chapter 2

Madness as Conviviality? José Luis Mendonça’s O Reino das Casuarinas In this chapter  I aim to analyse how the trope of conviviality is represented in the novel and how it is closely related to the concept of madness in José Luis Mendonça’s O Reino das Casuarinas (The Kingdom of the Casuarinas). Like Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s De humeuren van meneer UTAC, it is an autofictional novel that deals with cultural memory in postcolonial Angola. On a deeper level, I will argue, the novel also deals with the (im)possibility of conviviality in the violent context of Angola’s liberation wars – and their aftermath – of the seventies and eighties. In this respect Mendonça’s work reminds one of some of the novels by Pepetela, such as Mayombe (1980), about the MPLA guerillas in the jungle of Mayombe, as well as A geração da utopia (1992), dealing with the disenchantment of a generation of young people fighting for Angola’s independence. Given that madness, understood as a disruptive psychological affect, goes against the very possibility of conviviality, I wonder what its role is in the novel. I will seek to establish a comparative link between postcolonial African and two Caribbean writers, where similar issues are at stake: the Martinican and Puerto Rican writers I will refer to indeed deal in similar ways with the challenge of peaceful “cohabitation” in the postcolony. Through the topic of madness, I argue, the novel strongly recalls the writing by Puerto Rican writer Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, especially his (anti-)detective novels, which prepared the ground for the current success of postmodern noir in the Caribbean, for example Santos Febres’ recent anthology on Puerto Rican noir fiction (Santos Febres 2016). Moreover, contrary to Angola’s violent past, one can ask whether creoleness can be seen as a “moderately conflictive” yet liveable state of conviviality. Can outspoken creole societies, such as the Caribbean – and by extension its African kin, Cape Verde – be used as models for future modalities of “living together”? Linking the concepts of madness to conviviality seems counterintuitive. Yet in the broader Caribbean and African contexts, madness has usually

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been understood in different terms from the Western clinical conception of psychological disorder. While the latter is usually defined in a negative, pathological sense, in the former contexts things have usually been perceived quite differently: in Africa and the Caribbean, popular and supernatural beliefs, or practices such as witchcraft, voodoo or black magic, tend to complement or challenge (rather than subvert) Western perceptions of insanity (see e.g. Nicolini 2006; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Harries 2001; Horton 1997; Moore and Sanders 2003; Geschiere and Roitman 1997). From the outset the epigraph, a quotation from the contemporary French writer David Foenkinos, refers to the pain of being “permanently uprooted from the present”.1 The story is told by a first person narrator, Nkuku (“small bird”), who tells us about his memories as a soldier and later administrator in the army (funcionário público). The novel covers Nkuku’s memories over a period of roughly thirteen years, from 25 April 1974, Portugal’s Revolução dos cravos (Carnation Revolution), which would lead to Angola’s independence one year later, up until 1987, when the Cold War would wind down, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We learn that Nkuku was a soldier enrolled in one of Angola’s training camps, a so-­called Centro de Instruição revolucionaria (“Centre for Revolutionary Instruction”). The Centre, significantly baptized Povo em armas (“People in Arms”), is the place where Nkuku meets his comrade Primitivo, who is the central character in the narrator’s narrative. In one of his many metafictional comments, Nkuku specifies that the novel he is writing is an attempt to reconstruct his friend Primitivo’s past, since their time as soldiers until the moment of their re-­encounter in 1987, when Nkuku discovers that Primitivo now lives as an outcast off the capital’s shore, on the Ilha de Luanda (Island of Luanda). This is where he discovers that Primitivo in fact has become insane – probably due to post-­traumatic disorder as a result of war, imprisonment and forced labour.

Seven madmen Since the exact order of events in Nkuku’s life is almost impossible to reconstruct by reading the text in its original order (i.e. following the normal sequence of chapters), the novel provides an auxiliary chronological table of dated events at the end of the book. O Reino das Casuarinas is symbolically constructed around seven characters, the inhabitants of a self-­ 1



“La douleur, c’est peut-­être ça : une façon permanente d’être déraciné de l’immédiat” (11).

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declared “kingdom”. The number “seven” reminds us of different works from the world of arts, both literature and film: going from films such as The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, Jane Russell, Howard Keel) to The Seven Samurais (Akira Kurosawa); and, in the Latin American context, the classical novel Los siete locos (Seven Madmen), written at the end of the 1920s by Argentinian writer Roberto Arlt. Los siete locos, in turn, was a surreal and violent piece of fiction written in a turbulent period of Argentina’s history, and was intentionally a rupture with the literary works in vogue, especially the fiction consumed by the country’s middle class. The storylines of both novels diverge, but some interesting similarities can be observed. The protagonist of Arlt’s novel, Remo Augusto Erdosain, is struck by poverty; because of the lack of perspectives he desperately joins a secret society in order to subvert the existing social order through a cruel and terrible social revolution led by a character mysteriously named “the Astrologist”. Contrary to Arlt’s novel, in Mendonça’s strictly speaking we find six men and one woman, Rainha Eutanasia (“Queen Eutanasia”), the only woman character, but one which occupies a privileged position within the group’s hierarchy, thus exposing the matrifocal organization within the kingdom. The characters in Mendonça’s novel, as we will remark later, are also referred to by their nicknames, which in turn refer to an abstract state/condition or social function, such as Profeta (“Prophet”) and Primitivo (“Primitive”). While Arlt’s novel already announces the topic of madness in the title, O Reino das Casuarinas is much less straightforward in presenting madness as a relevant topic: the reader progressively learns about the narrator’s story of a particular period of his life, spanning some thirteen years, wondering if there is not, besides the characters he tells us about, some madness in the narrator’s own account. In narratological terms, what we have here is strictly speaking an “unreliable narrator”, a feature that is typical of narratives with autobiographical features, what elsewhere in this book we have called “autofiction”. Following Hansen’s classification, what we have here is “intranarrational unreliability”: Intranarrational unreliability designates the “classical” definition – that is unreliability established and supported by a large stock of discursive markers. These can be what Kathleen Wall has called “verbal tics” – small interjections and comments that hint at an uncertainty in the narrator’s relating of the events – or unresolved self-­contradictions, etc. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-­ Tale Heart,” could be considered an example of this construction, where the narrator continuously defends his sanity but does so with reference to situations and behavioral patterns that most definitely expose insanity. (Hansen 241)

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Nkuku’s actions (such as his nightly angel-­like wanderings through Luanda’s sky) often take place in his imagination, even though later in the novel he profiles himself as a “sane” subject visiting the seven madmen escaped from a psychiatric institution. Intranarrational unreliability is arguably a frequent feature of autofiction. Not that the autobiographical narrator (the fictional character Nkuku narrating his life) is simply lying; rather, there is a shallow line between what one lives and what one writes about, yet never can there be total equivalence between both. Thus autobiographical fiction (e.g. a fictional character narrating an episode of his or her life) is from a strict fictional perspective not different from a narrative where an author explicitly uses his or her real name for his or her life story: both belong to the realm of fiction, hence they “produce” fictional narratives. This is, however, not the place to discuss further narratological specificities of unreliable vs reliable narrators, object of – as Hansen’s scholarly contribution points out – an unfinished debate, and among the most discussed problems in current narratology (Hansen 227). However, unlike the reference to many other writers and literary works, Roberto Arlt’s name, or the title of his novel, is never mentioned directly in Mendonça’s work, hence the intertextuality is what one calls “accidental”. As a matter of fact, the intertextual references abound, and refer generally to Nkuku’s discovery of novels such as The Twenty Fifth Hour by Romanian writer C. Virghil Gheorghiu. In O Reino das Casuarinas, the protagonist, torn by physical suffering due to the violence of war, finds temporary relief in literature. Nkuku reflects that, in the light of the suffering of the protagonist in Gheorghiu’s novel, Jacob Moritz, his own problems and traumas quickly fade: “Depois de ler o livro compreendi que eu estava a passar pelo mismo probema existencial de Moritz: o de ter vivido no momento da eclosão de um conflito armado. Ele, a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Eu, a Guerra da independência de Angola, o que é um paradox, pois era suposto termos a paz depois da Guerra de libertação” (RC 151). (After having finished reading the book I understood that I was going through the same existential problem as Moritz: [the problem of ] having lived in a period of armed conflict. He, the Second World War. Me, the Angolan war of independence, which is a paradox, because we were supposed to live in peace after the liberation war. Like me, Moritz didn’t understand well what was happening around him. Like Moritz, I also act by intuition.) Moritz was mistakenly accused by the fascists of being a Jew and tortured by the Nazis. Intertextuality, however, also reinforces the autofictional character of the novel, for Nkuku turns out to be a writer, who in turn voices many of the ideas and life experience of José Luis Mendonça. O Reino das Casuarinas continues to build on

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what has unfortunately become one of Angolan literature’s leitmotivs: war. However, it does so with a twist, mainly by using by now “classical” postmodern techniques: through Nkuku’s very personal narrative, which in turn, I argue, is Mendonça’s autofictional account, and by using collage, incisive humour and irony as important devices. The Angolan liberation wars are the novel’s backdrop, yet there are no episodes of direct violence witnessed by the narrator. In that respect the approach is arguably quite similar to that of a film such as Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (1978), where the apparently trivial interaction between the characters takes priority over the background “noise”: the film emphasizes the authenticity of an encounter between Antonietta (Sophia Loren) and Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni) as speakers outside the building blast their official propaganda into the air. Instead of joining the blinded masses and attending Mussolini’s fascist discourse, they establish a friendship, foregrounding the (survival of ) humanity and dignity in the face of bigotry. Likewise, in Mendonça’s novel war is almost permanently present, yet Nkuku’s memories recall other apparently trivial events happening to Primitivo, himself at the Centro de Instruição Revolucionaria, and, later, to the community of the Casuarinas. Contrary to what one would expect, the absence of violent scenes of war does not make this a lighter read; on the contrary, it increases the novel’s complexity. The narrator explicitly evokes a political framework which, wherever necessary, is explained in footnotes. The context of war in Virghil, Scola and Mendonça’s historical fiction is one of violence, but conjugated in its different forms. In Angola, the overall cost of post-­ independence warfare was of an unprecedented violence, as during the 1980s more than 350,000 people died. Another million more were displaced (the so-­called deslocados), when people were uprooted from their homes, fleeing the war in search for safer places. The MPLA government, led by Agostinho Neto, relied on the support by Cuban forces (more than 50,000 troops) to keep the threat of its main rival, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, at bay. A first sign of peace would eventually appear in 1990 as the Cold War would finally draw to a close, and Angola ceased to be the theatre of struggle between the two main power blocs: the USA, backing UNITA with South African help, and Russia, supporting the MPLA along with the Cubans. This way, “Angola featured as part of President Reagan’s strategy of ‘bleeding’ Soviet resources by fuelling insurgencies in countries he regarded as Soviet ‘client states’” (Meredith 600). Besides the war traumas he carries along, Nkuku became twice handicapped for life: early in his life he became sexually impotent after

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being kicked in the genitals during a school fight, and later, as a soldier, he loses a leg due to a landmine (in 1978, according to the timeline included). There were indeed countless landmines being set out in Angola during the civil war. As historian David Birmingham explains, landmines did not just target enemy soldiers; rather, they were one of the most perverse ways of manipulating innocent civilians, especially on the countryside, where 9 million landmines were hidden to maximize human suffering, thus denying farmers or their families’ access to farm land: Military planners on either side were not averse to starving rural populations in order to drive them out of enemy territory where their farm produce could be captured to sustain the opposing army. One way of manipulating civilian populations was by laying minefields around farm land and water sources. Women going out into the fields, or children going down the stream, were liable to have their legs blown off. It was even suggested that the strategy was designed to maim rather than to kill, to cripple the opposing society with the cost of feeding and caring for mine victims rather than to eliminate woman and children by sudden death. (Birmingham 159)

Yet as his own words remind us of, such horrific personal traumas do not stop Nkuku from searching for –and finding – a minimal sense of comfort and joy in life, especially through literature but also by engaging himself in literary writing: the result is his account of Primitivo’s life. His writing activity, we will learn towards the end, culminates in the actual novel we are reading, which is as much an autofictional account through the eyes of Nkuku as it is a partial reconstruction of Primitivo’s life.

Primitivo: the intellectual gone mad Some of the characters in O Reino das Casuarinas have yet another, literary, past. Mendonça acknowledges that he had previously to starting to write the novel in 2010, published a short story about madness in the journal Archote in the 1980s. In an interview, Mendonça clarifies that the short story upon which the novel is based, took root in a factual experience with people in his entourage that he saw literally becoming mad: Eram só quatro personagens. Eu queria fazer um livro sobre o estrato da população que até pelos escritores são esquecidos. Deslumbrava-­me muito saber como chegaram a este estado, de demência.  Tive um amigo que enlouqueceu, dizia coisas incríveis. Morreu e, para o homenagear, quis escrever o romance. Juntei outros personagens. Descobri o PAM, era um

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cidadão que andava por Luanda, vestido de borracha. O Cuco vai narrando a sua vida e inclui os outros, que são amigos dele. E lá consegui fazer a trama. Estava muito calmo, com pouco trabalho, em Paris no ano de 2010. (Lança 2014) (There were just four characters. I wanted to write a book about that stratum of the population who are forgotten even by writers. I was very shocked to find how they had arrived at this demented state. I have a friend who went mad and who said incredible things. He died, and to pay tribute to him, I wanted to write the novel. I brought together some other characters. I described PAM, who was a guy that walked around Luanda dressed in rubber. Cuco tells his own life story and I included the others, who are friends of his. And so I managed to put together a storyline. It was a very quiet time, with not much work, in Paris in the year 2010.)

The “friend who became insane” the writer refers to clearly takes shape in the novel in the character Primitivo. While Mendonça made allusion to the autobiographical inspiration of the work, the smart interweaving of fiction and fact is,  I would argue, what makes – as in the case of Mendes da Silva – this novel autofictional, instead of autobiographical (or an autobiographical novel). By writing an autofictional novel, Mendonça attempts to recover Angola’s cultural memory, focusing on seemingly ordinary facts of everyday life during a period of constant warfare, spanning from Angola’s independence to the last stages of the Cold war period (1975–87): Todos os escritores querem falar das coisas fundamentais da história dos seus países. A ideia central era falar de períodos críticos e cruciais de transição da história de Angola. A insurreição de 61, a independência, o 27 de Maio e o pós–27 de Maio. Em 61 eu tinha cinco anos e assisti à violência e à repressão. Quando vejo o meu livro agora, como crítico, acho que fiz uma espécie de tratado sobre a sobrevivência pessoal e colectiva. O que mais me preocupa é a questão da segurança pessoal e colectiva. Como é que o cidadão comum, que não conhece a política nem a ideologia, que quer trabalhar e descansar, como pode sobreviver? Há forças ocultas a fazer os confrontos entre políticos, as grandes potências que vão afectar o tal cidadão, e como é que ele pode resistir a isso? Agora é o confronto entre terrorismo e civilização, um indivíduo pode estar numa praça e rebentar uma bomba. Pergunto: a segurança do homem esta em Deus, na religião, nas forças armadas, no dinheiro que tem ou onde? (Lança 2014) (All us writers want to talk about the fundamental things of the history of our respective countries. The basic idea was to write about the critical and crucial transitional periods in the history of Angola. The 1961 insurrection, independence, the 27th of May and its aftermath. In 1961 I was four years

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old and I witnessed the violence and repression. When I look at my book now, as a critic, I find that I wrote a sort of treatise on personal and collective survival. How can the common man, who knows nothing about politics or ideology, who wants to go to work and enjoy his time off, how can he survive? There are hidden forces that lead to confrontations among politicians, the great powers that will impact on Joe Public, and how can he resist this? Now we have the confrontation between terrorism and civilization, an individual can be standing in a public square and set off a bomb. Question: is people’s safety to be found in God, in religion, in the armed forces, in money they have? Or is it to be found somewhere else?)

The novel can thus be read, according to the writer, in autofictional terms as “una espécie de tratado sobre a sobrevivência pessoal e colectiva” (a kind of treaty about personal and collective survival). In spite of the non-­linearity of the narration, the story is simple and can be summarized as follows: Nkuku by coincidence reencounters his old comrade Primitivo, some ten years after the splitting of their ways. Primitivo appears to have dramatically changed, sparking Nkuku’s curiosity. He becomes interested in knowing more about Primitivo’s past, but also about his current community (counting six more individuals, whom later in the novel he will identify as patients who escaped from the psychiatric hospital of Luanda). At the time of their re-­encounter, in 1987, Primitivo was living with six “terrifyingly human shadows” (“sombras espantosamente humanas”) (RC 27) in an abandoned house in ruins: “era uma casa cheia de nadas, onde tudo fora partido à pedrada” (RC 28) (it was a house full of nothing, where everything had been cut to pieces). Besides Primitivo, the other six out of seven escapees from the psychiatric hospital have names which indicate their insanity, such as Eutanásia (Portuguese for “Euthanasia”), Povo do Volvo (“People/Folks of the Volvo”), Razões de Cruz Vermelha (“Reasons of the Red Cross”), Katchimbamba (which in Kimbundu means a small bird which is unable to fly, as in the popular tune “Humbi Humbi” by the popular Angolan singer Filipe Mukenga),2 Profeta (“Prophet”), and, finally, the enigmatic 2

The original lyrics of Felipe Mukenga’s song are: “Humbi-­humbi Yange Yele La Tuende/Kakele Katchimamba Osala Posi/Makuenle Vayelela Yele La Tuende/Kakele Katchimamba Osala Posi“ (My navel takes flight/we pity the catchimbamba that creeps on the ground/Your companions take flight/Poor catchimbamba creeps on the ground). The “umbi umbi” (also written “humbi humbi”) which lent its name to the song is a small migratory bird, which, after spending a season in Angola, returns home. The “cachimbamba” is equally a small bird, yet because of its lack of proper wings it is unable to fly and thus accompany fellow birds; the umbi umbi pities the umbi-­umbi and sings, “Who is going to stay behind with the poor Cachimbamba?”.

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character PAM, whose name coincides with the abbreviation Programa Alimentar Mundial (PAM), which translates as “World Food Programme”, referring to the United Nations’ humanitarian Programme put in place in Angola, addressing hunger and promoting food security. Far from their home being a lavish beach filled with casuarina trees, Primitivo and the other members of the “kingdom” live in a precarious setting, reflecting their interiority: As mentes dos súbditos do Reino das Casuarinas eram cascas vazias de cigarras coladas nos troncos das árvores coníferas. Por vezes, um fiozinho de vento da memória penetrava essas cascas e a reminiscência de um canto ecoava no seu bojo. Cada um morava no seu próprio exílio interior. (RC 258) The minds of the subjects of the Casuarinas kingdom were empty shells of cicadas glued to the trunks of the coniferous trees. Sometimes a wisp of wind from memory penetrated these shells, and the reminiscence of a corner echoed in its bulge. Each lived in their own inner exile.

While their house in ruins is “full of nothing”, so is the existential and psychological condition of “emptiness” of its inhabitants. In other words, the notebook reveals to Primitivo that, in spite of his insanity, he was the ideologist and intellectual force behind this community, which Nkuku describes as a “neo-­surrealist tribe” (RC 156). Already during his time at the Povo em Armas Primitivo stood out as the intellectual, not so much in his mission of “alphabetization” but for conceiving what Angola’s future should look like. It is shortly after Nkuku’s reencounter with his friend in 1987 that the mysterious but self-­proclaimed “democratic” mini-­nation is officially founded, baptized “Kingdom of the Casuarinas” because of the omnipresence of the casuarina trees on the island. The “Kingdom”, contrary to Angola’s war-­torn political landscape, boasts democratic values including free elections and the law of equality among its members. Much like Thomas More, then (to whom the novel explicitly refers), Primitivo is an amoral architect obsessed with designing an ideal society, far from the reality that surrounded him. Indeed Primitivo ambitioned the creation of a kind of utopia à la Thomas More. We should not be surprised, then, to find in the text explicit references to the English philosopher whose life ended by beheading in 1535. Although Primitivo succeeds in founding his convivial utopia with the six other members, the kingdom is short-­lived, as we learn at the end. Even though the narrative roughly seems to follow the events in a chronological fashion, in line with the timeline added at the end of the

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novel, the story in fact unfolds, as said earlier, in a non-­linear fashion, which makes for a challenging read: the narrator continues jumping back and forward between episodes of his daily life and historic events. In spite of its non-­linearity, the novel’s structure is circular, as one can notice in the prologue and epilogue. The very first scene of the novel, as a matter of fact, is not the re-­encounter between Nkuku and Primitivo. Instead, the novel opens and closes circular-­wise with the scene of Primitivo’s death: “os olhos de Primitivo reflectiam o intense azul celeste daquela terça-­feira de lua cheia, 14 de Abril de 1987” (RC 13) (Primitivo’s eyes reflected the intense celestial blue of that Tuesday of full moon, 14th of April 1987). In the prologue (we don’t know yet that Primitivo is actually dead) Nkuku discovers in Primitivo’s hand a notebook full of documents, reflections and ideas about what his ideal society – the egalitarian, democratic Kingdom of the Casuarinas – should look like. The novel’s circularity becomes apparent in the epilogue, which recalls the image of Primitivo’s death: we are now informed in detail of the gruesome scene. Primitivo’s corpse turns out to be but one amid six more death bodies, which belong to his fellow members of the recently founded Kingdom. The only surviving member is Katchimbamba, the man who never talked but always smiled. The narrator tells us that “o cenário parecia outra Guernica, um novo quadro de Picasso a respirar controvérsia e profunda compaixão” (RC 300) (the scene looked like another Guérnica, a new painting that breathed controversy and deep compassion). It goes without saying that Guérnica was Picasso’s strongest political statement on the absurdity of warfare, as he made the painting soon after the bombing of the Basque town. This last image of the novel is thus an explicit reference to the persistent damage caused by civil wars, as immortalized in Picasso’s painting. While madness, the condition of being uprooted from the present (“être déraciné de l’immédiat”), apparently goes against the logics of any democracy, Nkuku discovers in his notes that Primitivo had prepared a detailed constitution for his community, and even an “Act of the Foundation of the Kingdom of the Casuarinas in Exile” (201–2); in this document he described the place, date, hymn and government of the Kingdom, mentioning 11 November 1985 as the “historical date of the foundation” of the Casuarinas community. Primitivo’s notebook, however, does not inform about the exact moment or period when he became mad, even though one can logically infer a war trauma, which affected him during his years in the army, as the main cause. Another possibility, the narrator suggests, is that Primitivo became mad in a forced labour camp when he was a dissident and an obstacle to the MPLA (The Popular Movement for

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the Liberation of Angola, Angola’s ruling party after independence). The MPLA would have imprisoned him and later sent him into forced labour. However, it should be emphasized that there is in Nkuku’s narrative no clear-­cut difference between the “sane” and the “insane” Primitivo, and the same goes to a certain degree for Nkuku himself, as we will explain later. Rather, what we have is a coherent discourse on how a “kingdom” can be created in the shape of an ideal community or nation, from a “proverbial constitution” (284), where the first “proverb” reads: “O Reino das Casuarinas é uma monarquia constitucional, fundada nos princípios basilares do comunitarismo primitivo” (RC 284). In another document included in his notebook, Primitivo digresses in a philosophical reflection – indeed almost a manifesto about madness: A loucura não existe enquanto estado anómalo do homem. O homem, ao contrário do que dizia Aristóteles, não é um homem político. O ser humano é maluco por natureza. Vejam o modo, erigido em auténtico costume, como educamos as crianças, sob a ditadura da porrada. Utilizamos até instrumentos de tortura, como a palmatória, a régua, o cinto, fios eléctricos, paus de vassoura, chicotes de cavalo-­marinho e cacetes. Ora, nós, os adultos, cometemos erros muito piores que as crianças, roubamos, mentimos a toda a hora e à boca cheia, principalmente os políticos, cometemos adultério à luz do dia, violamos menores, traficamos seres humanos em pleno século XX, agredimos as nossas mulheres todos os dias, mas mesmo quando cometemos himicídio, somos julgados num tribunal. Este comportamento é um indício da natureza do animal aparentemente mais frágil físicamente, mas o mais racionalmente violento de todos à face da Terra. Um indício do seu estado de loucura permanente. (RC 83–4; italics in the original) (There is no such thing as madness as an anomalous state of man. Man, contrary to what Aristotle claimed, is not a political animal. Humans are nasty by nature. Look at the way we raise our children, which has become an ingrained habit, under the tyranny of corporal punishment. We even use instruments of torture, such as the paddle, the ruler, and the belt; electric wires, broom handles, cavalo-­ marinho whips3 and cudgels. Yet we, as adults, make mistakes that are much worse than those children make:, we steal, we lie constantly and brazenly to boot, especially politicians, we commit adultery in broad daylight, we rape minors, we engage in human trafficking now, in the 20th century [sic], we assault our women day in and day out, yet even when we commit murder we are judged in a court of law. This behavior is proof of the nature of the animal that is apparently the most physically vulnerable and yet is more or less the most rationally violent of all creatures on the face of the Earth. It is proof of our permanent state of madness.)

3

The Cavalo marinho is a whip made of hippopotamus hide, which was formerly used to punish slaves.

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Following Aristotle, Primitivo makes the bold statement that “o ser humano é maluco por natureza” (Human beings are by nature insane) (RC 83). He exemplifies this by criticizing the education system inherited from European models. At first sight one can read Primitivo’s digression as an attack on the authoritarian education system inherited from the Portuguese. Yet what is of interest here is the reinterpretation of human behaviour not as a step towards “progress” or modernization, but instead as a manifestation of his “normal” condition of insanity. “Loucura”, which translates both as “insanity” and “madness”, is thus not understood only as a psychological disorder, but rather as a condition of inhuman (i.e. “animal”) behaviour that has become normalized with modernity through education, politics, etc. Moreover, Primitivo also makes reference to human trafficking as one of globalization’s cancers that must be cured, as a strand of contemporary slavery, foreshadowing the idea that postcolonialism did not mean the end of the suffering that was introduced with early colonial submission. Instead, the problem of human trafficking has transformed from a locally visible practice to a more complex, invisible and global one. Nkuku and Primitivo clearly belong to a generation that has had to cope with the colonial wars – even though little or no mention is made of the period that preceded independence – before being sucked into the madness of the postcolonial liberation wars between different political fractions, as well as the (very contemporary) problem of human trafficking. “To be uprooted from the present”, from what is perceived as “reality”, has a special meaning in the context of postcolonial trauma, in a country where the wounds of colonialism are just about to heal.

From Madness to Magic: the African context How to understand, then, the seamless switch from mutilated memory to magic in Nkuku’s narrative? Could it be that what is perceived as “magic” – Nkuku’s nightly flights – is in fact the manifestation of a psychic disorder as a direct consequence of war violence? However, the characters’ insanity can also be perceived in a more positive sense. Madness or magic? The text is often ambivalent and open to opposite interpretations. Nkuku’s traumatic condition as mutilated war casualty, his psychologic disorder, is likely what causes his hallucinations, such as his nightly wanderings as an angel-­like creature. Does Nkuku, in the end, happen to be the eighth madman? He being an unreliable narrator, are his accounts of imaginary, nightly wanderings using the “wings” of his

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old friend Kangrima not also a product of his own insanity rather than of his creative imagination as a writer? Yet, in the context of African beliefs in the supranatural, it is impossible to disentangle the “magic” from the traditional popular practices which are often seen as “primitive” from a Western perspective, such as witchcraft. The uncanny intertwinement, or rather confusion, of war violence and popular beliefs is well illustrated with a dramatic episode that happened only months after independence, on Madiábu’s day. The traditional day of Madiábu, as the author explains in a footnote, is also known as witches day: stones were traditionally thrown at one’s neighbours’ zinc rooftop. During the war, however, “em vez de chover pedras, choveram tiros e bazucas de RPG-7” (RC 43)) (instead of stones, it rained shots from RPG-7s and bazookas). It is indeed hard to distinguish between episodes of “magic” and “madness”, and it is more likely that Nkuku’s narrative mixes them up on purpose. The text, in other words, foments diverse, often contrary meanings. The confusion nevertheless does not frustrate the narrative; instead it makes it more complex and substantially enriches its semantic tissue. In one particularly relevant paragraph, Nkuku uncannily –and apparently deliberately – mixes up traumatic memory and magic, referring, once again, to the wings he borrowed from his comrade Kangrima. His friend “naturally” grew wings shortly after he, like Nkuku, had lost a leg: A tropa deixa táticas perenes nos escaparates da nossa memória. Isto é claro como água para um bom funje: a vida, mesmo à civil, é uma eterna tropa. Deixei o lusco-­fusco acinzentar o derradeiro cicio das cigarras. Depois abri as minhas duas asas cor de vidro e voei até ao ramo mais alto e sólido da copa de uma casuarina rija e velha que ficava a 50 metros da ruina. As asas, sob as omoplatas de quem, bípede animal, se verte neste mundo, adquirem um mágico pendor, uma espécie de sortilégio utilitário que o comum dos mortais desconhece. De outra forma, dada a minha condição de mutilado de guerra, nunca teria sido capaz de confiscar aquela maviosa ascensão. (RC 26) (The troops leave behind perennial tactics in the windows of our memory. This is crystal clear for a good funje:4 life, even for civilians, is an eternal troop. I left the dusk as it faded to gray the last song of the cicadas. Then I spread my wings that are the colour of glass and flew to the highest and stoutest branch of an old and sturdy casuarina tree that stood fifty metres from the ruin. Wings, on the shoulders of the bíped animal that is thrown into this world, acquire a magical character, a kind of utilitarian spell that the mere 4



Funge: cassava flour porridge.

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mortal does not know. Otherwise, given that I am a wounded war veteran, I would never have been able to confiscate that soft ascension.)

On the one hand, Nkuku is clearly conscious of the damaging effects of war, as he refers to “my condition as a mutilated of war”. On the other, he seamlessly refers to his current condition as a winged yet mortal biped who suffered “a magical bend” after undergoing “a kind of utilitarian spell”. Does Nkuku imply that a “magical bend” is a consequence of traumatic memory? Nkuku, mirroring Primitivo’s notebook, collects and includes in his novel countless documents, such as poems from his own hand as well as from those of others, such as David Mestre, a celebrated poet from Angola (58); oracle-­like “mambos segredos” (RC 261) (secret mambos), which constitute premonitory descriptions of the seven madmen, such as “Oniric revelations of Stravinski the cat” (RC 261–79); instruction manuals such as the “Four requirements to master the art of flying” (RC 68–9), of which the first requirement reads “1° – To possess the sex of the Angels. Kangrima dixit The one who detains the powerful sex of the angels accumulates the necessary vital energy to imagine the pulsion [pulsão] of flying. In that respect, nothing stood in my way” (RC 68). Nkuku’s digression about his magic “Egyptian” cat Stravinski is not just a fait-­divers. Instead, it works as a motor to his as well as the reader’s imagination: if conviviality is nowhere to be found in real life, at least it is in Nkuku’s dreams and Stravinski’s “Oniric revelations” (RC 261). Like the work of Mia Couto, or in the Caribbean context Alejo Carpentier, Mendonça’s novel thus flirts at times with a magical dimension. Stravinski’s appearance as a black cat with anthropomorphic features is not just a coincidence, for it strongly reminds us of the way cats were depicted in ancient Egypt, as explicitly referred to in the text. Stravinski, a present from his East German girlfriend whom he met during his visit to the country, is a “Mau Egípcio” (RC 169; 178; 281), and “a direct descendant of Joseph of Egypt (discoverer of obscure things), the interpreter of pharaoh Ramses’ dreams” (RC 169). From a thematic point of view, however, Mendonça’s writing also connects with that of Angola’s best-­known author, Pepetela, who has also focused the greatest part of his novels on the country’s turbulent post-­ independence period; but contrary to the latter, Mendonça uses with more intensity classical postmodern devices such as humour (through parody), irony and the inclusion of “apocryphal documents” such as excerpts from a notebook (in a similar way to how the writer Patrick Chamoiseau from Martinique does in Texaco, for instance). It should be noted that Mendonça uses a device already popular in Angolan literature: irony has been strongly

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present in Angolan literature since the 1980s. As Ana Mafalda Leite points out, “To be ironic about Angolan society is one way of being critical about the social and historical changes which have (or have not) taken place since independence” (Leite 112). No matter how traumatic the events described in O Reino das Casuarinas, Mendonça avoids an apocalyptic tone (in spite of the tragic end): through humour and picaresque situations narrated by Nkuku, traumatic historic events are turned into narratable memory. For all the differences between Mendonça’s work and that of other Lusophone writers such as Pepetela, Germano Almeida, José Luandino Vieira, Paulina Chiziane and Mia Couto, it is necessary to read Mendonça with the same attitude as one may read his peers’ work with, from an apolitical position – what Leite calls a literary position “without pre-­conceived ideological notions” (Leite 121) – precisely because, I would add, like his fellow writers, Mendonça tends to analyse the past in order to deconstruct official contemporary politics, propaganda and ideology. Rather than simply telling tragic events, Mendonça attempts to capture and include episodes that surrounded landmark dates (such as 25 May 1977) which were seen as either futile or embarrassing, or simply impossible to imagine because of their supernatural, indeed magical, character; for instance, the episodes where Nkuku’s gifted cat Stravinski appears in the story as a kind of musical Egyptian “oracle” with the ability, as I have argued, to create conviviality through music and reflection. In line with the novel’s humorous yet never celebratory tone, the open ending is neither apocalyptic nor optimistic. The end of the temporary “kingdom” with the death of its members (with the sole exception of Katchimbamba, who might have premeditated the killing of his friends) confirms the postmodern character of the novel: we have no certainty of the whodunit, nor does it really matter whether Katchimbamba is the murderer or if a collective suicide is more likely. The novel in the end is not about the telling of a story, but rather insists on the way contingent events are all in some way connected: the existential and supranatural dimensions are smoothly connected, as are the narrative, autofictional and metafictional layers of the novel. Another explicitly postmodern device is the collage or inclusion of other texts within the narrative, which we observe in Primitive’s notebook, as well as the inclusion of Nkuku’s own notes, poems and comments stitched in between the text. Lying underneath much of the narrator’s irony is, as I will briefly outline, an indirect yet fierce criticism towards the MPLA’s mismanagement and the destruction of the illusions borne by the “Geração da Utopia” (Pepetela), especially after independence.

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The root causes of Angola’s “lost decade”: historical aspects O Reino das Casuarinas ends in 1987, well into what is called Africa’s “lost decade” (Meredith 368), because of the steep economic decline the continent endured during the 1980s, when most Africans were as poor or poorer than they had been before independence. The reasons, as suggested in the novel, are not hard to find: complete mismanagement by the government (arguably the term “mismanagement” is an understatement), in power since independence, after the last, chaotic and violent decades of Portuguese colonialism. The MPLA invested more in the armament of their military forces and landmines than in effective social and economic projects. Basic public services quickly deteriorated, while education and hospitals were left without basic funding. Corruption soared, as the lack of proper perspectives intensified the brain-­drain towards other, considered safer countries. Instead of looking for proper ways of fostering the economy, state leaders preferred to centralize power, thus mimicking the repressive authoritarian state of the former colonizers. The MPLA’s blind embrace of Marxism as an ideology without a basic understanding of its concepts quickly hollowed Angola’s potential for building a democracy: though the MPLA still promoted itself as an exemplary Marxist-­Leninist party (in the novel often ironized by Nkuku), its commitment to socialism has been described by historians as entirely “bogus” (Meredith 603). In the novel, the narrator does not hide his irony when suggesting the government’s fake commitment to the greater ideal of serving the nation as a community-­in-­becoming. Ironically, Primitivo does seem the only one among his comrades who really takes Marxist ideology seriously, telling them about “os acontecimentos gloriosos do 1.° de Maio de 1902 na Rússia, e nos oferecia, com uma incontrolada emoção na voz, frases imortais de Leão Trotsky, de quem se dizia correligionário ideológico contra o ‘despotismo radical e monolítico’ de Estaline” (RC 23) (the glorious events of 1 May 1902 in Russia, offering us, with an uncontrollable emotion in his voice, immortal sentences by Leon Trotsky, of whom he had declared himself an “ideologically faithful” against Stalin’s “radical and monolithic despotism”). Profusely quoting Trotsky, Ho Chi Minh and other revolutionary Marxist figures, Primitivo fashions an ideal, “textbook” Marxist’s profile, yet he remains at the margins of the Party’s official power.

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Even before independence the MPLA’s attempt to consolidate its power was from the outset a failure: since its foundation in 1956 and in the years following it was regarded as a largely ineffective organization, weakened by the internal struggle for power and disagreements, and artificially kept alive through Soviet support (Meredith 135). Agostinho Neto, whose poems are frequently referred to and quoted by Nkuku, initially gave the country a burst of hope in the struggle against colonialism. Yet after independence Agostinho Neto’s party, while quickly turning into a dictatorship, massively failed in gainng control over the country, and never was able to obtain and secure stability in its capital, Luanda. As Birmingham explains: The MPLA soon discovered that coming to terms with the management of a city, a bureaucracy, an economy and a country was a greater challenge than driving out their regional enemies with the help of a disciplined Cuban military force. In the long term it was political, economic and administrative mismanagement which brought systematic instability to postcolonial Angola. Although half of the Cubans in the country were deployed in rebuilding a civilian infrastructure, the city and the country were profoundly disrupted by the flight of ninety per cent of the white public service personnel. (Birmingham 150)

Fatal internal ideological rifts between the MPLA’s members caused greater disorder, which opened opportunities for opponents (especially Savimbi’s UNITA) to seek power with help from abroad. In short, the MPLA failed to “create a recognizably normal postcolonial, or neocolonial, state”, culminating in 1977’s coup d’état: “In the city, the expectation that independence would bring rich rewards to young black people had led to constant disappointment through no less than two years of austerity” (Birmingham 152). Nkuklu counts as one of those disinherited, disillusioned, young intellectuals who is condemned to register with the special troops, for want of alternatives. Sadly condemned to suffer his supervisor’s mediocre and abusive mentality at the CIR, Nkuku narrates the atmosphere of paranoia among the instructors mingled with a daily dose of pseudo-­Marxist “knowledge” spat out onto the recruits. At the same time, the instructors’ predominant treatment among instructors is described as near non-­human. The MPLA’s “revolutionary army” (RC 118) included racial discrimination and zero-­ tolerance by the instructors in cases of supposed abuse. Primitivo, in charge of the “alphabetization” task force, is expelled when he is caught smoking a drug (diamba):

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– Já viram, camaradas? Já viram com que tipo de gente é que estamos a conviver? Drogados, a finger que são soldados, que têm competência para alfabetizar, camaradas! Temos de estar vigilantes. A pequena-­burguesia urbana vai fazer todos os possíveis para sabotar a nossa revolução, para sabotar a construção da ditadura do proletariado no nosso país? Mas, custe o que custar, doa a quem doer, fique mal quem ficar, o poder popular vai triunfar em Angola. (RC 117) (– You see, comrades? You see the kind of people we have to live with? Drugged so they can pretend they are soldiers, that they can teach us to read and write, comrades! We must be alert. The urban petty bourgeoisie will do whatever it can to sabotage our revolution, to sabotage the construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country? But, whatever the cost, whoever it hurts, whoever has to pay the price, the power of the people will triumph in Angola.)

Nkuku observes how his comrade Primitivo, in not being recognized as an intellectual and “alphabetizing” force for the troops, instead is repeatedly humiliated by Suku Munhungu, an instructor whose embarrassing racist prejudices and “knowledge” of Marxist “values” remind him of the humiliations between General Cummings and Robert Hearn in Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead: Os exércitos eram, afinal, todos iguaizinhos, em qualquer parte do mundo, fossem eles revolucionários ou imperialistas. Estava ali um comissário politico ([Suka Munhungu] de um exército revolucionário, a tratar um soldado exactamente como o general Cummings havia humilhado o tenente Robert Hearn, no todo-­poderoso exército dos EUA. Aquela humilhação em plena parade, poderia ser conotada com alguma veia racista escondida na alma do comissário Suka Munhungu. Mas como podia isto acontecer, se o próprio Suka Munhungu era mestiço? Racismo de mestiço contra cabrito? (RC 118) (All armies are ultimately the same, in any part of the world, whether they are revolutionary or imperialist. There was a political commissar (Suka Munhungu) of a revolutionary army, who would treat a soldier just as General Cummings had humiliated Lieutenant Robert Hearn, in the all-­powerful US army. That dressing-­down in the middle of a parade could be seen as a strain of racism concealed in the soul of the Commissar Suka Munhungu. But how could that be, if Suka Munhungu was himself of mixed race? Mestizo racism against a kid?)

Racial tension was indeed part of the colonial legacy, for the offspring of (usually) white settlers and native women would create high tension between “true blacks” and mestiços or mixed-­blood Angolans:

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At the political level the legacy of colonial fornication brought intensified racial prejudice to a new postcolonial generation as the children of white fathers, whether legitimate or not, saw themselves as superior to other Angolans while the children of black fathers could be roused to a bitter jealousy towards their mestiço kin. True blackness became a badge that some politicians, including Savimbi, used to proclaim their superiority over the “bastard” children of the Portuguese empire who held sway in Luanda. (Birmingham 162)

Suka Munhungu, a mestiço, is particularly aggressive towards Primitivo, in spite of his perceived racial superiority over Primitivo, who is darker-­ skinned (“cabrito”). Racial discrimination was common currency in the military, and was more vicious when a superior wanted to show his power over a recruit. Significantly, Nkuku describes how only two instructors in the military centre are considered “modest instructors” “humildes formadores”: comissário Lumumba and comrade Nzimbu, both of whom treat their disciples “with dignity” (RC 97). Nkuku’s heartfelt sympathy for Lumumba is not a coincidence: besides the symbolic war name of his instructor, he adds that Lumumba “tinha vivido exilado no Congo Brazzaville” (97) (had lived in exile in Congo Brazzaville). Most of the exiled would return in 1978 at the end of the liberation war between Angola and Congo (then called Zaire), but they “had to work hard to find niches of opportunity”, many speaking French but being “treated as foreigners by the proud and clannish people of Luanda just as they had been treated as foreigners while living on the ‘Belgian’ Congolese side of the border” (Birmingham 157). The sympathy for commissary Lumumba is especially palpable in the novel when Nkuku recalls one of his (scarce) good memories at the instruction Centre for special troops. Lumumba, who is not by coincidence given the name of the revolutionary leader of Congo, has first-­hand experience of what it is to be treated as a foreigner abroad and back home. In addition, Lumumba does not silence the fact that Angola is involved in a fratricide war as a direct consequence of the geopolitical, imperialist interests of the two major players in the Cold War: the USA and the (then) Soviet Union: “O comissário Lumumba é que nos dizia, nas aulas de instruição político-­ideológica, que nós, africanos, tínhamos uma solução democrática própria para os nossos problemas. Que a guerra que estávamos a sofrer, e na qual nos matávamos entre irmãos, era causada pela cobiça imperialista das nossas riquezas, era o rescaldo da Guerra-­Fria” (RC 98). (Commissar Lumumba was the one who told us in our political-­ideological classes, that we, the Africans, had our own democratic solution to our problems. That the war we were waging in which we killed our brothers was caused

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by the greed of the imperialists who covet our riches, that this was part of the aftermath of the Cold War.) However, the ruling MPLA rapidly grew into a dictatorial party, “a self-­selected elite party mendaciously calling itself ‘the workers’ vanguard’. Instead of tracing a path for Angola’s workers, instilling fear among the broader population would quickly become the new path to the future, whereby the survivors of the May coup would use ‘political security forces to repress any independence of thought that might inflame the aspirations of the urban population’” (Birmingham 153). Agostinho Neto’s role as a dictator would rarely be openly condemned until decades after his death, as argued by recent studies (such as Carlos Pacheco’s Agostinho Neto, Perfil de um Ditador [Pacheco 2016]). After Agostinho’s death in 1979, peace did not return since dos Santos took office in 1979, developing a personality cult combined with the authoritarianism inherited from the Portuguese colonial system, and personal enrichment as he accumulated more and more power. As Martin Meredith explains, MPLA’s policies, while promising-­looking the day after independence, had proved nothing less than disastrous on both the economic and social level: For fifteen years it had enforced a Soviet-­inspired system of centralized planning and nationalization, causing the collapse of both industrial and agricultural production. Oil revenue was the only source of wealth. Oil enabled the government to prosecute the war against Unita, to pay for food imports for the urban population and to provide the nominklatura with extravagant lifestyles. The rural population was meanwhile left to fend for itself. Even in Luanda there were constant shortages. (Meredith 602)

Although Nkuku scarcely refers to the deeper causes of the social unrest, he does mention the social injustices that consequently took place. Frustration grew quickly when food resources became scarce and waves of protest swelled, and a witch hunt for dissidents was set up. In the novel, Nkuku describes this hunt for dissidents, as well as the ensuing revolution of May 1977. Popular music, such as Semba, became temporarily prohibited under Neto’s regime, and fear would install itself amid people of the capital. Nkuku insists on fear as the predominant emotion during those years: “Medo. Eu tinha medo de deixar a família que estava a ajudar a sustentar com os desvíos da logística militar” (RC 140) (Fear. I had a fear of leaving the family I was helping to subsist by diverting military logistics.). Those who were frustrated with the lack of social justice after independence became increasingly jealous of the cosmopolitan elite, which “had inherited the colonial trappings of power and the visible symbols

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of prosperity, exploded in violent despair” (Birmingham 152). In the novel the social injustice is embodied in Primitivo, who by mistake gets imprisoned and will only be given amnesty and freed two years later, in 1979, together with all other prisoners of 27 May 1977, the day of Nito Alves’s failed coup against Agostinho Neto. Besides a criticism of the Cold War, the novel indeed thoroughly questions – in a picaresque and at times satirical way – the role of those politicians who have “made” Angolan history. The internal divisions between MPLA leaders from the outset led, according to the narrator, to deepening fractures and instability in post-­independence Angola, culminating in tragic events. Besides the dictator Agostinho Neto, Nkuku reviews and criticizes figures from all political fractions such as the MPLA’s Nito Alves, Daniel Chipenda and Roberto Helder, but also UNITA’s Jonas Savimbi. The central event that triggers that criticism is 27 May 1977. Nkuku describes Nito Alves’s agenda as inconsistent, demystifying the predominant image of the rebel as either a hero or saint, for instance by questioning why Alves chose to take Neto’s side in August 1974 at the Conference of Lusaka, by fighting against another rival, the Southern dissident Daniel Chipenda, who organized the insurgence in eastern Angola (RC 137). Alves secretly organized study groups within the musseques, where the ideals and values of Angola’s struggle for independence, such as true social equality and fair access to employment, were discussed among the disadvantaged people of the suburbs. Significantly, the novel tackles the growing rift between the MPLA’s elite and the populations living in Luanda’s musseques (shanty towns), when Nkuku delivers a “proposal” to the Minister of Finance in power, satirically titled “Se os Ministros morassem no Musseque” (“If the Ministers lived in the Musseque”, 239). It is worthy quoting the ending of the long text: Se os ministros morassem no musseque, haveria escolas para todas as crianças, que andariam nas mesmas escolas dos filhos dos ministros. O ministro da Educação deveria morar no bairro Sambizanga, onde há o maior índice de delinquência juvenile na cidade de Luanda, para poder implanter aí escolas e centros de formação. O ensino teria qualidade. Conclusão: Os ministérios afectivos assim deslocados para o seio das massas populares seriam instituições estáveis e suprapartidárias, mesmo que os ministros todos pertençam ao MPLA, porque o seu desempenho seria avaliado, não pelo discurso politico, mas pela prestação de contas. (RC 243) (If the ministers lived in the slums, there would be schools for all the children, would go to the same schools as the ministers’ children. The Minister for Education should live in the Sambizanga neighborhood, which has the

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highest rate of juvenile delinquency in the city of Luanda, in order to set up the schools and vocational training centers. Then there would be quality education. Conclusion: the ministries thus distributed amidst the masses of the people would be stable institutions that would transcend party lines, even if the ministers are all members of the MPLA, because their performance would be assessed, not by political speeches, but by accountability.)

Musseques were (and still are) the large areas surrounding Angola’s major cities, roughly comparable to Brazilian favelas; in the musseques poverty, popular culture and resistance already went hand in hand during Portugal’s long dictatorship. While O fútebol had become increasingly popular under Salazar, who considered it an easy way of muting the masses with panem et circenses, some clubs, as in the large musseque of Sambizanga, also became a platform where illicit political issues could be discussed without too much risk for persecution. The passion for soccer is visible in Nkuku’s account of the game between his instructors and the recruits, organized by commissary Lumumba, which he goes on to describe in great detail. Angola’s hope for conviviality, Nkuku suggests, starts not at the top but at the bottom, through popular culture and sports, whose role models were star players such as Eusébio: “Era o pantera-negra, o moçambicano ao serviço de Portugal e do Benfica. Era um dos nossos. O melhor de Portugal e da Europa, naquela época” (RC 97) (He [Eusébio] was the black panther, the Mozambican at service of Portugal and Benfica. He was one of us. Portugal and Europe’s best player, in those times). However, what Nkuku does not mention is that Eusébio’s rise to stardom is also a paradigmatic example of Portugal’s Luso-­tropicalist approach to its colonies, foregrounding its “multicultural” and “human” side. Luso-­tropicalism was exercised through multiple cultural devices, but as a colonialist model for conviviality its aims were more than questionable. Popular culture and sports were arguably an efficient smokescreen on the soon to-­be-­renewed stage of warfare that Angola became after independence. Mendonça’s novel indeed smartly links the multiple, often invisible social aspects of the Angolan guerras da libertação (liberation wars), which ended after Agostinho Neto’s death, with the new conflicts that blew up soon after, which constituted both a civil and an international war. Angola had effectively become one of the preferred stages for the Cold War, which, as Birmingham explains, was caused by more than one factor, but one of its key causes was to be located in the Caribbean:

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The causes of the new wars of the 1980s were many. The role of the Soviet Union in Africa during its last ten years of existence is one factor that needs to be taken into consideration and it may be significant that Angola’s second president José Eduardo dos Santos, was an engineer in the petroleum industry who had been trained in Russia. […] In the conflict between the United States and Russia one of the irritants was the political agenda of Cuba, which was anxious to build an international reputation of its own and, in the name of Third World Freedom, provided extensive civilian and military support to the much-­battered MPLA government of Angola. (Birmingham 155)

During the Cold War, for the world’s power blocs African states became playgrounds on the global stage. The position towards Western or Eastern powers that each particular country would adopt after gaining independence would determine its future relation with those powers, for each of which it was “either with us or against us”. A huge competition emerged between West and East to gain influence in the new states, with European countries with (economic and political) interests to seek tightening their links with the former colonies. President Kennedy famously declared that “We see Africa as probably the greatest open field of manoeuvre in the worldwide competition between the [communist] bloc and the non-­communist” (quoted in Meredith 143). The West, and the USA in particular, tended to regard with suspicion and distrust the relations newly established between the socialist Eastern bloc and Africa. In his essay “Da Guerra de Angola, da guerra em Angola ou de Angola na guerra” (2001), Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, an Angolan writer and anthropologist (of Portuguese descent), points to three possible readings of Angola from the perspective of war: the war of Angola, the war in Angola and Angola in the war (“Angola na guerra”). The last perspective, Angola in the war, is of interest here for it implies a global perspective, a desire to go beyond the local problem towards Angola’s broader geopolitical context; it implies a glissando from the analytic to the empirical in approaching the events that indelibly marked the country: “Fazer transitar a questão do enunciado de uma categoria analítica, Angola como Estado ou como país, para uma categoria empírica: Angola como referente semântico a querer dizer Angolanos. Expressões e substantividades de uma guerra que para os sujeitos nela directamente envolvidos deixa de corresponder aos contornos da sistematização em que os analistas a inscrevem” (Duarte de Carvalho 113). (To make the transition from an issue of the statement of an analytical category, Angola as a state or as a country, to an empirical category: Angola as a semantic referent to denote Angolans. Expressions and nominalizations of a war which for those who were directly involved no longer corresponds to the contours of the systemization in which the analysts inscribe it.)

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Duarte de Carvalho clarifies in an addendum that a sustainable solution to the Angolan problem of war, a true peace, can only emerge “não por imposição ou estratégia de poderes [poderes de dentro e poderes de fora], a tal reconciliação das partes com as partes, do povo com as partes de do povo com o povo” (Duarte de Carvalho 116) (not through the political imposition or strategic use of powers (internal powers or powers from abroad) but from a progressive reconciliation of all the parts with one another, of the people with the parts, and of the people with the people). O Reino das Casuarinas, I argue, inscribes itself implicitly in this third perspective of “Angola na Guerra”: the novel expresses, much like Mia Couto’s project for Mozambique, the desire to reconcile Angola with its violent past. In spite of the novel’s referential framework, which draws heavily on the Angolan/Angola’s war, Mendonça’s novel is, I argue, not so much about war and the reconstruction of memory as about the search for a convivial space in postcolonial Angola. Conviviality, however, is rather improvised: it does not take place in official space, but in the shades of a casuarina tree on the shore, in the self-­declared Kingdom of the Casuarinas, in a rare celebration of Carnaval; or during Nkuku’s brief stay in (former) East Germany (RDA), where he attends an (imaginary) piano concert performed by Stravinski, his Egyptian cat, “the fastest domestic cat in the world” (169), which possesses supernatural powers. The characters, with the exception of the seven madmen, indeed move in hostile spaces (battlegrounds, military quarters) which are the opposite of public spaces where socializing and bantering take place; they are the opposite of convivial spaces: most of Nkuku’s memories take us to the instructional military centre (CIR), the improvised Kingdom on the Ilha do Cabo, commonly known as a Ilha or the Island of Luanda, a low sandy strip formed by sedimentation off the shore of Luanda, since 1968 home to the “União Mundo da Ilha” (World Union of the Island/Ilha), a famous Carnival group celebrating “a maior festa de toda a África austral” (RC 161) (the biggest party in all of southern Africa).

“Prisoners of our own device”: African and Caribbean outcasts Looking beyond Angola’s national and broader African context, one finds striking similarities between Mendonça’s work and contemporary Caribbean fiction. In novels by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (Puerto Rico) and Raphael Confiant (Martinique), indeed, the postcolony is being

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described – in terms analogous to Mendonça’s – as a madhouse at the margins of society and of official discourses. The allegorical is, however, more explicit in Caribbean writing, as proven by novels of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá such as Sol de medianoche (2000) and Mujer con sombrero Panamá (2004). Juliá’s noir oeuvre is an excellent example of how allegory is used to go beyond the whodunit of classical and hard-­boiled detective fiction: Sol de medianoche (Midnight Sun), like O Reino das Casuarinas, also clearly draws on Roberto Arlt’s work, as acknowledged by the writer in an interview (Van Haesendonck 2001). Juliá situates the action in a decrepit housing block on the periphery of San Juan, where a community of outcasts lives in a conflictive way in a place called El hospitalillo or “little hospital”.5 What Juliá and Mendonça particularly have in common is the link they establish between spatiality and madness: the post-­colonial habitat is one where conviviality is anything but organized in conventional space. Not by coincidence, Juliá’s novel frequently refers to the song Hotel California, as the characters stage themselves as outcasts who indeed are “Prisoners of our own device”. Moreover, insanity comes as a direct legacy of colonialism, yet it continues with equal force after independence in the case of Mendonça, while Juliá’s Puerto Rico deals with the paradoxical condition of being a “postcolonial colony” where the subject is pushed towards the edges of society and of self, a limit spatially represented by the beach, where the protagonist, private detective Manolo, leads a desolate and empty existence, which he fills with futile investigations of adultery. The schizophrenic first-­person narrator, Manolo, presents himself as a private eye, but he grotesquely fails in every mission he undertakes. Living a lonely life in a residence he calls the “hospitalillo” (Spanish for “little hospital”) among a bunch of drug dealers, refugees and Vietnam veterans, Manolo himself is incapable of love and of establishing any real communication with a significant other. The image of the mysterious midnight sun is almost similar to the metaphor used by French poet Gérard de Nerval in his poem “El desdichado” (“The wretched one”): the “soleil noir” (“black sun”), which Kristeva (1987) interprets as a central image for expressing depression and melancholia. The ambiguity of the midnight sun refers to Manolo’s own double face: suffering from schizophrenia, he finds his identity polarized between an obscure and a lucid side. Both O Reino das Casuarinas and Sol de medianoche prove to have uncanny links in their depiction of a community of psychologically 5

For an in-­depth analysis of the novel see my book ¿Encanto o Espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Van Haesendonck 2008).

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wounded individuals, whereby the “midnight sun” is omnipresent, enveloping both the “Casuarina kingdom” and the hospitalillo. At one particular moment in Mendonça’s novel, Primitivo is surrounded by human “shadows” under a full moon: Para meu espanto, Primitivo estava sentado à porta, com mais quatro sombras espantosamente humanas. O silêncio era o discurso dominante. O grupo parecia aguardar, a todo instante, uma kianda qualquer, saída das águas do mar, que, nas minhas costas, era carícia da mão de Deus no areal banhado pela lua cheia. (RC 27) (I was shocked to see that Primitivo was sitting in the doorway, with four more horribly human shadows. Silence was the predominant discourse. The group seemed to be waiting for some sort of kianda6 at any moment, emerging from the sea, which, on my back, was the caress of the hand of God on the sandy shore bathed by the full light.)

While “o silêncio” is the only effective way of communication between these “human shadows”, their psychic wounds remind us of the community of the hospitalillo off Isla Verde’s shore in Sol de medianoche: A la playa vienen a vivir las almas que convalecen, esos solitarios que huyen de la vista ajena, porque están dolidos, porque, coño, son incapaces del suicidio. Somos como los gatos; nos escondemos por el fracas de estar heridos, o cercanos a morir. La playa, con su rumor estúpido, serena los nervios, supongo que el yodo en el bajo aire seca las heridas. Somos gente que a medianoche siempre está despierta. (SDM 9) (To the beach come to live convalescent souls, those solitary ones that flee from the gaze of the other, because they are hurt, because, damn it, they are incapable of suicide. We are like cats; we hide because of the failure of being hurt, or nearly dead. The beach, with its dumb murmur, soothes your nerves; I suppose that the iodine in the deep air heals wounds. We are people who at midnight are always awake.)

In Juliá’s novel, the repetitive, “stupid rumour” of the waves has a soothing effect on the community of outcasts that gathers in its semi-­ improvised habitat, recovering from its “wounds”. In both settings, the Angolan post-­ war and the Puerto Rican postcolonial contexts, disenchantment and fright is the predominant existential condition that connects these subjects, creatures that are stripped by official rhetorics and authorities of their basic human dignity. 6



Kianda: an Angolan goddess of the sea.

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In his novel L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir, Raphael Confiant sketches a similar disenchanting portrait. The title evokes a frivolous yet problematic sense of conviviality, yet not in the sense of what comes immediately to the reader’s mind. While it immediately evokes the idea of frivolity (a cheap hotel or motel, understood as a place of prostitution, as in Mayra Santos-­ Febres’ novel Cualquier miércoles soy tuya), instead we find a heterogeneous conglomerate of characters whose existence is synonymous with the term précarité (precarity) rather than with “plaisir” (pleasure). Man Florine, one of the older residents, occasionally warns resident tourists (jokingly referred to by the local inhabitants as “emmenés-­par-­le-­vent”, literally “brought-­by-­ the-­winds”) who stumble upon the hotel in search of cheap accommodation but are usually welcomed by some of the residents with disdain: “Ya pas de chambres pour baiser! Ce sont des gens bien qui habitent ici!” (HBP 14) (There are no rooms to shag! These are good people who live here!). The colourful mix of outcasts inhabiting the shaky “hotel” indeed recalls the conditions of precarity which affect the residents of Juliá’s hospitalillo as well as the members of Mendonça’s Casuarina “kingdom”. In Sol de medianoche, Manolo says of his fellow residents and of himself that “Somos como los gatos; nos escondemos por el fracaso de estar heridos, o cercanos a morir” (SDM 9) (We are like cats; We hide because of our failure of being wounded or close to dying), while the narrator in Hôtel du Bon Plaisir ironically describes the residents as people who skew the daylight: “Ces gens-­là sont comme des crabes qui ne sont jamais sortis de leur trou!” (HBP 71) (These folks are like crabs that have never gone out of their hole!). Furthermore, Confiant’s main narrator compares the Hôtel to a shipwreck full of “broken destinies”. Contrary to Confiant, in Juliá’s work, the strange “other” with whom living together is the major challenge is not (or not only) the colonial other, but rather the próximo or kin: in Sol de medianoche, the protagonist and narrator, Manolo, suspects himself of having murdered his brother: the possibility of fratricide is a central motive. In a section of Confiant’s novel, titled “journal de bord d’un naufragé qui n’a jamais pris la mer” (Logbook of a shipwrecked who never went to sea), one character who temporarily becomes a narrative voice metaphorically describes the building as a “paquebot”, a carrier that went adrift and crashed: Au fond, si l’on considère l’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir comme un bateau, un paquebot plutôt, un paquebot échoué, eh bien, mon naufrage n’est pas aussi absurde qu’il en a l’air. Dans cet immeuble bringuebalant se sont rassemblés, comme par un fait exprès, des destins brisés, des existences secrètement gardées, des rêves explosés ou tout simplement le plus terre à terre, les plus insignifiant

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des désarrois: celui de vivre sur une terre où rien ne sera jamais possible. Que pourrait-­on faire, en effet, d’une île où à la sauvagerie de l’extermination des Amérindiens a succédé la barbarie de l’esclavage des nègres? (HBP 133) (Basically, if we consider the Hôtel du Bon Plaisir as a boat, or a liner, a shipwrecked liner, well, my sinking is not as absurd as it seems to be. In this rumbling building were gathered, like on purpose, some broken destinies, some lives that were kept secret, exploded dreams or simply the more down-­ to-­earth thing, the most insignificant turmoil: to live in a place where nothing will ever be possible. What could we do, in effect, with an island where the savagery of the extermination of the Amerindians has succeeded to the barbarity of the black slavery?)

Social inequality literally takes shape in the Hotel’s structure, as social classes correspond to different floors, the more advantaged residents living on the upper floors. The building described by the narrator is not a convivial residence (any more) but rather a refuge in ruins, as witnessed by its residents, semi-­clandestine individuals whose origins are often unknown. Whenever a stranger or tourist shows up, he was never meant to go there – rather, it is a result of circumstances: “Seuls les rares étrangers, qu’on dérisionnait sous le vocable d’‘emmenés-­par-­le-­vent’, à s’aventurer dans cette partie du quartier des Terres – Sainville, parfois cognaient, en vain, sur la porte d’entrée en quête d’une chamber” (Only a few foreigners in search of a room, who ventured in this part of the Terres-Sainville district and whom we derided under the name of “led-by-the-wind”, sometimes knocked in vain on the front door). One character, referred to as “Syrien” (Syrian), recalls the mysterious background of Katchimbamba, the man who always smiles yet never talks in Mendonça’s novel, or the insane character Carabine Commander, the Vietnam war veteran in Sol de medianoche: Mais L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir recélait aussi un locataire clandestine. Ou anonyme. Il était universellement connu sous le nom de “Syrien” et, pour de vrai, vu la longueur de son nez et le poilu de ses bras, il ne faisait aucun doute qu’il appartenait à la race levantine. Syrien occupait, occasionnellement, une pièce bizarre, presque en quinconce, entre le palier du deuxième étage et l’escalier en colimaçon qui conduisait au troisième. Au dire de l’entrepreneur Romuald Beausivoir, expert en la matière, il s’agissait là d’une erreur architecturale […] Personne ne lui rendait visite et, d’ailleurs, il semblait avoir un autre domicile, sans doute plus confortable, car il ne passait à l’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir que deux-­ trois fois par semaine et encore pour n’y rester que quelques heures ou, parfois, une nuit. Un mystère d’homme, oui! (HBP 28–9) (But the Hôtel du Bon Plaisir also had a clandestine tenant. Let’s say anonymous. As we like. He was universally known under the name of “Syrian”

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and, for real, according to the length of his nose and the hair of his arms, there was no doubt that he belonged to the Levantine race. Syrian occupied, occasionally, a strange place, almost staggered, between the second floor and the spiral staircase which leads to the third. In the words of the entrepreneur Romuald Beausivoir, subject matter expert, it was a significant architectural mistake […] Nobody visited him and, moreover, he seemed to have another home, without a doubt more comfortable, because he only came to the Hôtel du Bon Plaisir two–­three times a week and he only stayed for a few hours or, sometimes, a night. A miserable man!)

For all the frivolity Confiant evokes in the title, the story includes multiple historical references to the fairly unknown period of Martinican participation in the Second World War. One of the more extravagant residents, the entrepreneur Romuald Beausivoir, is also known, like Carabine Commander in Juliá’s novels, as an ancient combattant: a veteran of war under De Gaulle, he is transported to the USA, and then to Northern Africa, from where he participated in the liberation of la mère patrie (HBP 18); he is retired, but is now at “war” with another tenant of many years, Man Florine, who, so the rumour goes, had joined the national revolution under Maréchal Pétain and admiral Robert (HBP 17). As such, France’s overseas tensions are also represented, allegorically, within the same building in the “colonie d’outre mer”, much as the many pieces of Puerto Rico’s memoria rota (broken memory) (Díaz-­Quiñones 1996) converge in the hospitalillo, which the narrator describes as a madhouse. In other words, Puerto Rico’s fragmented cultural memory is embodied in its inhabitants. Yet, as in Mendonça’s novel, besides madness there is also endemic racial discrimination in Martinique, which manifests itself particularly towards the native population (“les coulis”). Léon Andrassamy, who resides on the third floor, is not fully accepted by the social community, not even by his black Martinican “friends” who since childhood have treated him like a stranger: Quoique Léon Andrassamy appartînt à la troisième generation, qu’il fût donc né à la Martinique, ses camarades nègres n’en continuaient pas moins à le considerer comme une sorte d’étranger […] Léon n’avait rien oublié, trios décennies plus tard, des insultes et des chiquenaudes don’t l’accablaient certains négrillons lorsqu’ils l’apercevaient, accompagné de ses petits frères, en train de descendre la route colonial, sans chaussures, un cahier moult fois détrempé par la pluie sous le bras. – Ti Kouli, ou ka sanm a, baton-­balé. Tansion pa chalviré-­tonbé, ou ké kasé an dé. Ha-­ha-­ha! (Petit Couli, tu ressembles à un baton de balai. Fais attention à ne pas tomber, tu risqué de te casser en deux. Ha-­ha ha!) (HBP 198)

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(Although Léon Andrassamy belonged to the third generation, he was therefore born in Martinique, his negroes comrades continued to consider him a kind of foreigner […] Léon has forgotten nothing, three decades later, insults and flicks as some negroes called him, accompanied by his little brothers, going down the colonial road, with no shoes, a notebook that had often been wetted by the rain under the arm. – Ti Kouli, ou ka sanm a, baton-­balé. Tansion pa chalviré-­tonbé, ou ké kasé an dé. Ha-­ha-­ha! [Ti Couli, you look like a broom stick. Be careful not to fall, you risk to break in two. Ha-­ha ha!])

Furthermore, it is not uncommon that a corpse is found at some floor, or that a zombie temporarily makes its entrée, as a supernatural phenomenon: A l’époque où seuls deux étages de l’Hôtel Saint François de Sales avaient été achevés, une créature étrange se mit à hanter les lieux. Elle semblait avoir élu domicile dans l’embryon de troisième étage […] La chose ou la bête – nul ne savait comment la nommer – se manifestait peu avant minuit par des bruits sourds qui réveillaient les locataires et parfois mêmes certains habitants des maisons voisines. (HBP 69) (In the time where only two floors of the Hotel Saint François de Sales was achieved, a strange creature began to haunt the places. It seemed to have elected domicile in the embryo of the third floor […] The thing or the beast – no one knew how to call it – sometimes manifested shortly before midnight by dull noises that arouse the tenants and even sometimes some residents in the neighborhood.)

The “thing or beast” is then identified as a “zombie”, who is blamed for the mysterious death of an indigenous beggar “un homme de bien entre deux âges” (HBP 70) (a good middle-­aged man) who was often seen at the Hôtel. However, when two residents take action in an attempt to get rid of the unwelcome creature “à l’identité d’ailleurs incertaine” (HBP 70) (with an uncertain identity) things seem to escalate quickly: “Le zombie ne fut nullement impressionné par la posture martial des deux hommes et se mit à virevolter à leur entour, boule fluorescente qui menaçait de se fracasser contre leurs figures” (HBP 69) (The zombie was not impressed by the martial posture of the two men and began to circle in the air around them, a fluorescent ball that threatened to shatter in their faces). The zombie episode is one of the many stories within the story in the novel; told by the third person narrator, it is significant that the story appears, like other episodes, between brackets and in a smaller font than the main narrative, thus highlighting its “Russian doll” status. Like Nkuku in Mendonça’s novel, the narrator includes in the main text a variety of

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notes, anecdotes, reflections and other digressions, adding a supernatural layer to them that makes the text approach other contemporary novels from the Caribbean, as seen in the example of Sol de medianoche. On the backdrop of Confiant’s novel we find the quick modernization of Martinique; likewise Juliá’s novel is a criticism of the damaging social effects of Puerto Rico’s modernization. Both islands were subject to an ambiguous process whereby colonialism and modernization went hand in hand. Raphael Confiant’s novel is above all a fresco of Martinique’s society of the post-­war period, much like Juliá’s sketch of postmodern (yet in between colonial and postcolonial) Puerto Rico; after the Second World War the island would become one of France’s Département d’Outre Mer (1946), though not without controversy, under the auspices of Aimé Césaire. The modernization of Martinique, Confiant suggests, exterminated the island’s pride as a micro-­creolized society: symbolizing the creole society, the hotel’s falling apart is a metaphor for Martinique’s transformation from a rural setting into an île bétonisé; towards the end of the novel the narrator reveals that the Hôtel du Bon Plaisir’s replacement by a concrete parking spot (rather than a metaphorical ship) is a fact. Significantly, the final sentence of the novel is left in suspension: “A la place des ruines de l’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir, déblayées quelque vingt ans après sa disparition, se trouve, de nos jours, un parking improvisé …” (HBP 307) (Nowadays, in lieu of the ruins of the Hotel du Bon Plaisir, cleared some twenty years after its disappearance, there is an improvised car park …) In his book Caribeños, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá describes his visit to Martinique and encounter with Aimé Césaire. Juliá points to the existing similarities between his home island of Puerto Rico, officially an Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State), a kind of “commonwealth” of the USA, and Martinique, a French Département d’Outre mer: El discurso político martiniqueño se parece al puertorriqueño, a pesar de las anteriores diferencias históricas, políticas, geográficas y demográficas; las obsesiones y temores son casi ideénticos: Ha logrado Martinica un sistema político de dignidad respecto de Francia? Prevalece una relación neocolonial? Debemos lograr mayores poderes autónomos o debemos integrarnos, cada vez más, al centralizado departamental francés? La temida independencia logra el único consenso visible y generalizado. Muy pocos martiniqueños de la clase dirigente la ven como viable, el pueblo le teme como el diablo a la cruz. Se ha convertido, como en Puerto Rico, en una especie de fósil político sólo resucitable [sic], cual Frankenstein por la potencial inmisericordia o arbitrariedad política del país metropolitano. En Martinica existe una ansiedad parecida a la nuestra. Cuál sería la viabilidad económica de Martinica

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si Francia la independizara? La incertidumbre respect del porvenir es una obsession que Martinica comparte con Puerto Rico. (C 278). (The political discourse of Martinique is similar to that of Puerto Rico, despite previous historical, political, geographic and demographic differences; the obsessions and fears are almost identical: Has Martinique attained to a dignified political system with respect to France? Does a relationship of neocolonialism prevail? Should we seek greater autonomous powers, or should we become more and more integrated to centralized, departmental France? Fearsome independence is the only thing that achieves a visible and generalized consensus. Very few Martinicans of the ruling class think it possible; the people fear it like the devil fears the cross. It has become, like in Puerto Rico, a type of political fossil that can be revived only [sic], like Frankenstein, by the potential lack of mercy or political caprice of the metropolitan country. In Martinique, there is an anxiety like ours. What of Martinique’s economic viability if France gave it independence? Uncertainty about the future is an obsession that Martinique shares with Puerto Rico.)

In spite of sharp historical and political differences between the Caribbean and Angolan (and broader African contexts), and even between Puerto Rico and Martinique or the Lusophone African countries, some common patterns emerge in their respective writings. In both contexts, colonialism had a damaging effect on the stability of the country. After Angola’s independence, that instability was further increased, at various levels: social, economic, political. In Martinique and Puerto Rico, colonial links were consolidated yet social stability would remain wishful thinking. It is questionable whether a proper “postcolonial” period ever arrived. In both the African and Caribbean contexts, the broader post-­independence and contemporary period has not brought the prosperity that was hoped for: the novels analysed indicate that the existential condition of the postcolonial subject has remained highly problematic. Ruy Duarte de Carvalho laments: Para alguns estudiosos os poderes da África independente não terão ao fim e ao cabo feito mais do que retomar as práticas que herdaram da colonização, independentemente das retóricas, das militâncias e dos romantismos revolucionários que adoptaram ou não. A própria denúncia do colonialismo, que todas as independencias tão veementemente brandiram, não terá ido além da condenação dos seus abusos, sem verdadeiramente por em causa os seus princípios. (Duarte De Carvalho 38) (For some academics, the powers of independent Africa have at the end of the day done nothing more than replicate the practices they inherited from the colonizers, regardless of whatever rhetoric, militant organization and revolutionary romanticisms they might or might not have adopted. The very denouncing of colonialism, which all of the independence movements

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vehemently brandished, did not go beyond condemning its abuses, without truly questioning their principles.)

Not surprisingly, then, Mendonça in an interview calls for a new revolution, a truly “African renaissance”, not moulded on old ideological models inherited from Europe, but one that creates its own political model much in the sense of José Martí’s Nuestra América, where the Cuban intellectual famously stated: “El vino, de plátano; y si sale agrio, ¡es nuestro vino!” (Martí 20). If Latin América – referred to as “Nuestra América” – were to produce any wine, even from bananas, it would be our home-­made wine! According to the Angolan writer, just as happened in Europe, an African political rebirth – in different forms from the European Renaissance – can and must take place. Yet this renaissance will not be copied from European or other models: É preciso o renascimento africano, que começa com a cultura, mas também com o social e económico. A palavra renascimento comparada com o Renascimento europeu passa por uma coisa: a não-­alienação, a escolha de um modelo político próprio. Podíamos criar um modelo, ainda que tivesse laivos de capitalismo. Só pode existir se houver o diálogo entre os dirigentes e a população. O problema em Angola e em toda a África é que qualquer indivíduo que tenha um bocadinho de poder pensa logo em como adquirir riqueza. (Lança 2014) (An African rebirth is needed, to begin with at the level of culture, but also in social and economic terms. The word “rebirth” compared with the European renaissance hinges on one thing: non-­alienation, the choice of a political model of its own. We can create a model, even if it has traces of capitalism. It can only exist if there is a dialog between the leaders and the people. The problem in Angola and in the whole of Africa is that any individual who has a morsel of power immediately thinks about how he can get his hands on wealth.)

In his history if the continent, Martin Meredith confirms this rather pessimist picture, echoing the MPLA’s plundering of Angola’s inhabitants after they rose to power: Africa has suffered grievously at the hands of its Big Men and its ruling elites. Their preoccupation, above all, has been to hold power for the purpose of self-­ enrichment. The patrimonial systems they have used to sustain themselves in power have drained away a huge proportion of state resources. (Meredith 686)

Contrary to the predominant Latin-­Americanist views since Martí, however, in Mendonça’s view capitalism, or “neoliberalism”, is not the

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core of Africa’s political and social problems. Instead, a dialogue should be established between the elites and the population, much in the sense of living in the musseque as Nkuku proposes in the novel, in order to create awareness among the elites of the social problem of poverty – persistent today – in the musseques. For Mendonça the deeper problem is the lack of desire to create a proper African model (on the economic, political and cultural levels). Frantz Fanon called upon the people of the “Third World” to create something different: “Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else. We can do anything today provided we do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe […] Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving” (Fanon 236). However, Mendonça does not refer to pan-­ Africanism as a movement, in spite of the importance of pan-­Africanist intellectuals such as Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), or the Tanzanian thinker Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), in which he outlines how slavery and colonialism contributed to Europe’s capitalist development. Madness is commonly observed among the characters on both sides of the Atlantic, yet it is not purely approached as a psychological disorder (as defined in Western terms). Instead, there are different forms and modalities of “in-­sanity”, which interfere with each other. While this should in no way be interpreted as a celebration of madness, both in the specific Caribbean and African contexts madness has a long tradition of cultural acceptance related to “magic” practices and belief in the supernatural. In other words, madness cannot be reduced to one, exclusive interpretation. I argue that in these novels, insanity can even be viewed as a positive “disorder”, in the sense that it provides a minimal sense of conviviality; it brings together what Jean-­Luc Nancy (1991) calls an “inoperative community”, whereas true “madness”, in the negative sense, lies in violence, present (warfare) or past (slavery).7 7



L’Hôtel du Bon plaisir does not deal with war trauma, but is loyal to one of Caribbean literature’s leitmotifs: the treatment of slavery and the (indirect) condemnation of this major “crime against humanity”. One example: Lieutenant Bayle, the “writing pen” of Admiral Robert, is sent to Martinique in order to spread Maréchal Pétain’s propaganda. Rather than the ruthless military, Admiral Robert represents the white European homme lettré who nonetheless is ignorant about slavery’s impact on the human level: “– Certes, l’esclavage fut un peu rude, avait-­il coutume de pérorer lors des receptions données par l’Amirauté, il y a eu parfois des cruautés, mais ce fut le prix à payer pour arracher l’Africain à sa barbarie séculaire. Que dis-­je? Millénaire! …” (HBP 121). (Certainly,

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While all three countries briefly discussed here (Angola, Martinique, Puerto Rico) over the past decades have been – at least partially – increasingly sucked into capitalism and globalization, there has been no real transition towards democracy in Angola, but rather a widening gap between the extreme rich elites and the extreme poor. Historian David Birmingham is logically sceptical in his analysis of Angola’s shift of power from colonial to postcolonial rule, for little to no change had been made between the Cold War and the new millennium (thirteen years after the end of the novel, which ends in 1987): Politics in 2000 was as unresponsive to public opinion as it had been in 1969, though the dictator [President José Eduardo dos Santos] who balanced the powers of the several factions of the property-­owning class was now a member of the home-­grown Luso-­African elite of Luanda rather than of Portugal’s imperially-­oriented haute bourgeoisie. […] Freedom of opinion and of opportunity, which had been stifled in the days of empire, proved virtually incapable of resuscitation in the era of liberation. (Birmingham 184)

Even if nowadays power has shifted, new governors have failed in keeping up their promises, usually rushing to adopt the same patrimonial habits of their predecessors. The predatory politics of ruling elites seeking personal gain has time and again resulted in violence, ironically impoverishing even further the poor. The struggle for survival of African people is thus at heart of what Chabal (2009) rightly has called “the politics of suffering and smiling”. In the contemporary Caribbean context, that suffering ironically has been reserved mostly, yet not only, for the people of the independent countries, especially the Haitian population. The overall tone and content in Confiant’s novel is much less politically loaded than in Lusophone African writings. Martinique and Puerto Rico, like most of the Caribbean islands, have not fallen prey to “fratricidal” civil wars, yet internal divisions have impeded the creation of strong cultural and political links between the different Caribbean territories. In Sol de medianoche, the possibility of fratricide haunts Manolo, the protagonist, who might have killed his brother in a moment of hallucination which resembles the crime on the beachfront in Camus’ Etranger. Angola, by contrast, got involved in brutal fratricidal wars, first colonial wars of independence, then the liberation wars, which altogether lasted for over thirty years, permanently scarring the country. slavery was a bit rough, he used to talk during the receptions hosted by the Admiralty, there were sometimes some acts of cruelties, but this was the price to pay to wrench African people from their secular barbarism. I mean … Millennium! …).

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The emphasis on the political in Mendonça is not difficult to understand, given the recent character of the civil war and its involvement in the Cold War, which ended less than three decades ago (which is very little from a broader historical perspective). In Juliá’s and Confiant’s work, the political is more closely related to the poetical than in Mendonça’s work: the allegorical takes priority over satire, and the narrative avoids explicit political references. However, in all three novels official political discourse forms the backdrop or stage upon which the characters bring their tragicomic performance. It is the disparity between the absurdity of the political discourse that contrasts sharply with the “(ab)normal”, indeed “insane”, life of the characters. If official politics sells the illusion of a coherent Marxist-­Leninist mission towards democracy and equality, the outside world exposes the disparity between the idealism of that discourse and the brutality of the real world. To be “insane”, then, also functions as a liberating device: the subject adopts a psychotic position, by which it can detach itself from the perversions of the dominant political context, what psychoanalysis refers to as the symbolic order. There have been, albeit scarcely, accounts or interpretations of insanity-­as-­freedom in literature, for instance in 18th-­century British literature (Natali and Volpone 2016). The Caribbean, with the exception of Cuba (and to a certain extent Haiti), never got really involved in the Cold War. The involvement of Cuba in Angola has to be seen as part of a larger play on the geopolitical stage, being performed by the two major power blocs in the East and West. Cuba and China were the two foreign players seeking active revolutionary involvement in Africa. Cuba’s missions in eastern Congo and Angola, under the command of Che Guevara, would turn into a fiasco. Initially, its support to the MPLA turned out to be promising, as their leaders controlled Luanda by mid-­July 1975, when the US perspective on the conflict had dramatically changed: the fiasco in Vietnam had damaged its name, and Kissinger was anxious to find new ways to reassert American power (Meredith 316). To conclude, the “creole comedies” that constitute both L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir and Sol de medianoche at first blush have little in common with Mendonça’s O Reino das Casuarinas. Yet in all these novels the references to (civil) war and madness are not gratuitous, but refer to past traumas that have led to a broken collective and individual memory: the Caribbean authors and Angolan writer have in common their choice to put on stage “broken” characters in despair, in deep search for a minimal sense of “living together” – of what we have called conviviality; they are restlessly searching for a sense of humanity within the very different yet both problematic social and political postcolonial contexts of Angola, Martinique and Puerto Rico.

Chapter 3

Autofiction as a Postcolonial Strategy: Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s De humeuren van meneer Utac and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao From autobiography to autofiction While scholars have acknowledged the importance of autobiographical writing in postcolonial literatures (e.g. Moore-­Gilbert 2009, Lebdai 2015), especially with reference to so-­called “diaspora” or “migration” literature, rarely are autobiographical narratives defined as autofictional.1 Coined by French writer Serge Doubrovsky in the late seventies (Doubrovsky 2001 [1977]), the term “autofiction” is mostly used by scholars, but is often mixed up with the more common (non-­academic) term “autobiography”.2 The term did not lead immediately to a positive critical response among French scholars, but Doubrovsky, himself a specialist in Corneille, endeavoured to theorize autofiction through a particularly productive (but arguably narcissistic) move, rarely seen in the world of writers: by taking his own work as a conceptual laboratory and showcase for his theory, in order to challenge the self-­sufficiency surrounding the autobiographical genre. Doubrovsky, in an attempt to clarify his concept, usually proceeded by commenting his own fictional work as an “auto-­critic”. Instead of downplaying Doubrovsky’s reflections as a form of critical and creative narcissism, scholars have engaged in a productive debate about the specificities of autofiction, and its difference with related notions such as autobiography and the autobiographical novel. As the term suggests, autofiction is close to autobiography; however, it is not a synonym for the latter. Autobiography is usually defined, quite simply, as the biography of 1



The study of autofictional novels from the Francophone Caribbean by Larrier (2006) is a rare exception to the rule. 2 Doubrovsky’s novel Fils (1977) counts as the first (conscious) attempt to write autofiction. For comprehensive updated work on the (still ongoing) theoretical debate on autofiction, see Gasparini (2008) and Grell (2014).

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a person narrated by him- or herself. It is, in addition to a retrospective narrative, a literary genre: a type of non-­fictional narrative which aims to retell one’s life in the most objective way possible. As famously argued by Doubrovsky’s French colleague Philippe Lejeune, author of Le pacte autobiographique (1975), an autobiography implies that a few conditions are being fulfilled, in the form of a (symbolic) contract or “pact” between the author and the reader, which consists, for the author, in exposing himor herself as he/she is, in a “spirit of truth” ([“esprit de vérité”] Lejeune 31). Like any concept, however, this one does not come without flaws: autofiction is riddled with ambiguities, and it could not be otherwise given its inherent conflict between the factual and the fictional. It goes without saying that its undecided status in between fiction and non-­fiction has not helped to make it as popular and conceptually strong as its relative, the autobiography. These flaws have even led one critic to call autofiction “un genre pas sérieux” (Darrieussecq 1996), but such bold, derogatory statements miss the point: the most common mistake indeed consists in approaching autofiction as a genre, which it is not. Rather, autofiction is a mode of writing, one which deserves more attention in the field of postcolonial literatures and (visual) cultures, since it is, because of the diversity of autofictional forms, a particularly productive one. As Anneleen Maschelein points out, the term is nowadays being used in the (visual) arts as much as in literature: “Autofiction” as a modus rather than a literary genre is a widespread phenomenon at the end of the 20th and early 21st century in various national and linguistic traditions. It borrows its forms from formalism, modernism, postmodernism or other avant-­garde literary traditions: autobiographical narratives are cunningly undermined by fictional elements, memoirs are presented as fragments (often arranged by the alphabet or keywords, i.e. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). Most importantly, the boundaries of different media are conflated, especially by mixing narrative and images (photographs, comics or cinema). Finally, the phenomenon also oscillates on the verge of art and popular culture – television and the internet – where public confession, reality TV, docudrama, “true fictions” and avatars are extremely popular. (Masschelein 2007)

Autofiction can best be defined, I believe, as autobiographical fiction, even though I am fully aware of this contradictio in terminis. The difference is fairly clear, though: contrary to autobiography, which eschews any kind of fictionality, or even any reference to any characters other than the narrative persona (self ) who writes (usually the first person narrator), autofiction

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creatively integrates – with a fair dose of freedom – autobiographical elements, without explicitly claiming any form of empirical objectivity, authenticity or verisimilitude. Instead of a genre, then, autofiction, which can be written in the third person, is quite literally a mix of fiction and (tied within the fictional framework) autobiographical elements, without privileging the author’s biography. Autofiction’s underlying philosophy is to give autobiography a more authentic character than “reality”. What I mean by that is the more commonly accepted idea that the power of fiction resides in its being more efficient in reaching an effect of verisimilitude than non-­fictional narratives which claim to render the “truth” objectively. How does postcolonial fiction proceed to reach its goal of verisimilitude? What strategical tools does it use within the text? While postcolonial narratives differ widely, they usually deal with issues of self (identity), migration, and cultural – often traumatic – memories. These issues are usually related to specific autobiographical “elements” embedded in the textual tissue. Although the importance of autobiography and autobiographical forms in postcolonial literatures has been acknowledged, little critical attention has been paid to this important mode in postcolonial writing. Many postcolonial narratives are rooted in the individual experiences of displacement and diaspora, of a writer who typically moved away from (or was forced to leave) his or her home island, usually (but not always) at a young age.3 What is less known is that postcolonial texts are a particularly good testing ground for studying the ways autobiographical narratives can be “cunningly undermined by fictional elements”. The two authors I will comment upon here engage in different ways with autofictional writing. Although I will analyse two novels from a comparative perspective, I will mainly focus on the one that has not received any critical attention as of today: De humeuren van meneer Utac (The Humours of Mister Utac), published in 2012 by Guilherme Mendes da Silva, a Cape Verdean author based in the Netherlands. This voluminous novel has so far been surprisingly ignored by critics, in the Netherlands as elsewhere. In turn, the second novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won Junot Díaz a Pulitzer and has been studied by quite a few scholars; only months after its publication in 2007 the book already became an internationally acclaimed best-­seller. However, the autofictional aspects of his work have not been scrutinized yet. I argue that in both 3

This is emblematically the case in a novel such as When I Was Puerto Rican, by the Puerto Rican writer Esmeralda Santiago, where the young Esmeralda is torn away from her Island of Enchantment and dropped into the whole new, cold environment of New York.

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authors, the exploration of “self ” (the auto in autofiction) functions as a gateway to discussing broader issues of national, regional and diasporic identities and the construction of an alternative modernity, as well as the postcolonial status of the broader regions. Moreover, I argue that, in spite of obvious divergences between the cultural contexts (the Caribbean and Cape Verde and their respective diasporas), there are reasons why it is worth exploring the autofictional aspects of their work.

Utac, or the changing moods of a return migrant Very few books, in fact almost none, have exclusively been published in translation, instead of first having appeared in the author’s native language. This uncommon fact – that of being published exclusively in translation – applies to De humeuren van meneer Utac (The Humours of Mister Utac), the first novel by Guilherme Mendes da Silva, a hitherto unknown Cape Verdean writer. The book was published entirely in Dutch, while the native languages of the writer are Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole (crioulo) as it is spoken on the island of Santiago. Born in 1935, Mendes da Silva wrote the novel as a way of looking back and reflecting upon his nomadic life. Rather than classical “memoirs”, which one usually writes as a means of autobiographical reflection, Mendes da Silva’s book is clearly, like Junot Díaz’s, an example of autofiction. First published in the Netherlands in a translation from Portuguese to Dutch by Arie Pos, a well-­known translator, the book occupies a curious place in the literary landscape of postcolonial literatures: that of a medium which is the result of a life of travelling, yet whose writing does not – to put it with Césaire – make a round trip to the author’s “native land”, the archipelago of Cape Verde. It is significant that the book was first published in the Netherlands, place of residence of an important Verdean diaspora (especially in the port city of Rotterdam), and of Guilherme Mendes da Silva. Publication in the Netherlands (instead of Cape Verde or a Lusophone country) can be seen as a statement by itself, for it suggests the readership is in the first place proficient in Dutch. The novel has a fairly traditional, chronological storyline, but events happen in a rather random fashion. Mendes da Silva takes us to colonial Cape Verde, in the early sixties of the past century, when he worked as a kapitein op de grote vaart, a captain of the seas on a large carrier. In the novel, the protagonist, a certain “mister Utac”,4 returns to his home island 4



In a filmed interview (Bos and Van der Wel 2013), the author argues the protagonist’s name (“Utac”) is purely fictional and does not exist in the real world.

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of Santiago after fifteen years of having travelled the world, like Mendes da Silva, as a captain of a carrier operating from its home base, the Dutch city of Rotterdam.5 The story centres on Utac’s re-­encounter with his home island, as well as the existential doubts and anxieties that this “return to the native land” triggers in him. The book, at 480 pages, is, in spite of its dimensions, well-­structured, divided into no fewer than 89 chapters spread out over 429 pages. Furthermore, we find a table of contents, a foreword, and some informative annexes targeted specifically at the Dutch reader: a descriptive list featuring the main characters, a glossary, a personalia list explaining the historical characters mentioned in the novel (such as key politicians under the Salazar dictatorship) and, finally, some geographical maps of Cape Verde, including a detailed map of Praia, Santiago’s capital city. The 89 chapters are, however, short ones, as the subtitles reflect small events that happen during Utac’s wanderings on Cape Verde from the moment of his arrival to his return to the Netherlands. Another Cape Verdean writer, Germano Almeida, wittily refers to such stories as estórias,6 a mixture of historical facts, chronicles and fictional stories. The novel thus inverts the general leitmotiv we find in migration literature: the usual pattern one encounters in the genre “migration literature” is indeed the prioritizing of either emigration or immigration; both terms are nowadays often conflated with the term “diaspora”, which is more in tune with the global migration fluxes. While the reader is lured into the less common narrative of a return migrant, it is important to point out that what we have here is a failed attempt to return to the home island, that is, the opposite of the common pattern in diaspora literature: the island as idealized locus, as paradise lost, to which one eventually travels back, usually in order to stay in spite of newly encountered problems of identity and/or social acceptance. Although initially he has the firm purpose of showing his home community how he has succeeded abroad, Utac’s re-­encounter 5

For an anthropological approach to the Cape Verdean diaspora in the Netherlands, see Jørgen Carling’s chapter in Batalha and Carling (2008). In the sixties, many Cape Verdeans came to Rotterdam as seafarers. Nowadays, almost one third of them still live in the city’s central borough of Delfshaven. However, the first generation of migrants (like Guilherme Mendes da Silva), unlike their descendants, did not yet envision transnational connections with the Archipelago: “While first-­generation migrants emphasised emotional ties to Cape Verde, the descendants made more explicit references to the different ways of life in the two countries. The vast majority of the pre-­independence migrants came with the intention of returning. For many, this has been replaced by a desire for a transnational existence” (Carling 98). 6 Some random examples: chapter 24 is titled “Mister Utac digresses about democracy” (112); chapter 30 “Pastor Nogueira’s speech”; chapter 65 “a visit to the penal colony”; chapter 70 “Simplício predicts mister Utac’s future”; etc.

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with family, acquaintances and other locals causes lots of frictions, both in Santiago and during his visits to the neighbouring islands. Utac eventually concludes that he does not fit well in Verdean society and finally, after a long period of hesitation, he decides to return to the Netherlands. The characterization of Utac as a moody character par excellence is already announced in the title, which could hardly be more explicit: Utac is projected as a subject whose humours determine his acts, a man incapable of controlling his emotional excesses. What he finds in Santiago after fifteen years of travelling does not quite please him, and any insignificant event adds fuel to the emotional fire. While Utac boasts about his accomplishments as a well-­travelled, self-­made man who is keen on his individualism, a value he acquired in the West, he does not excel in something the Dutch (among other nations from Western and Northern Europe) are almost stereotypically known for: controlling one’s personal emotions and seeking consensus in serving the common good; in particular, repression of feelings of anger, usually at the cost of personal interests, is perceived as a typically Dutch trait,. By contrast just about everyone in Utac’s social circles knows that he is not particularly good at managing his emotions: his explosions of anger in particular get him into trouble more than once. In addition, he is also very opinionated about everything, ranging from politics and religion to history, as we learn from his conversations with Taninho, the local head of police in his community of Achada Grande, and also his best friend. Utac’s emotional excesses often extend to his affective life: he simultaneously maintains multiple relationships and is a self-­declared womanizer; however, his passion for women is a trait he is rather discreet about when speaking to his close friends. To make things worse, his love for the local liquor (grogue) is not very helpful in controlling his emotions. In addition, he is also extremely undecided; for instance, he often visits his friend Bia and seeks her advice on his troubled love life: should he settle in Cape Verde or return to the Netherlands to get married to Trudy, his soon-­to-­be-­pregnant Dutch fiancée? Any doubt or futility can potentially make Utac angry. At one point he simply gets mad on account of some flies circling around him, depriving him of a good night’s sleep and causing him to curse and generalize about Cape Verdean society as a whole: “only uncivilized people can live in a country like this one. I do not believe that I would be a civilized person if from the day I was born until now I would have lived [here] among this vermin” (MU 53).7 On another occasion, Utac in a sarcastic tone 7

“Alleen onbeschaafde mensen kunnen leven in een land als dit. Ik geloof niet dat ik beschaafd zou zijn als ik vanaf mijn geboorte tot nu tussen al dat ongedierte had geleefd“ (MU53; my translation).

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criticizes his fellow Verdeans for lacking a basic awareness and understanding of democracy and of democratic values, turning them in his view into an easy target for political manipulation by the Portuguese metropolis and its colonization of the Verdean psyche. Addressing another friend, one of the local taxi drivers, he complains: My dear Friend Arthur! They say that democracy is a system of government whereby the people possess sovereignty.  I hope that you, no matter how uneducated you are, do not fall into that trap. Okay, I know that my words are falling on deaf ears, because you ignore what democracy is and I do not blame you. The one to be blamed is mister Salazar, who closes everyone’s eyes, as much here as in his own country, in order for nobody to see the sun and let everybody dwell in darkness. I am sorry to say so but I am only repeating that mister’s philosophy. (MU 113–14)8

In spite of blaming him, Utac’s position towards António de Oliveira Salazar (who was Portugal’s dictator for over forty years) remains highly ambiguous; on the one hand he blames the Verdean population’s ignorance about their colonial regime, on the other he feels an emotional attachment to Portugal, his “fatherland” (MU 332). He even expresses an honest admiration for its dictator, praising him without irony as “the most intelligent politician of the whole world and of all times” (ibid.). The narrator, in various significant meta-­fictional comments, addresses the reader directly, anticipating the latter’s perplexity and need for an explanation after hearing such praise. He clarifies that Utac’s highly ambiguous attitude towards Portugal’s dictator is subject to change according to his particular mood of the day: “Perhaps the reader finds it strange that mister Utac was such an admirer of Prof. Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar. But perhaps even stranger is the fact that the reader finds that strange. Salazar was since 1928 minister of Finance and saved Portugal from a very difficult situation, and, thanks to his diplomatic skills, managed to keep the country out of the second World War” (MU 332).9 8



“Beste vriend Artur! Ze zeggen dat de democratie een regeringssysteem is waarin het volk de soevereiniteit bezit. Ik hoop dat je, hoe achterlijk je ook bent, het daar niet mee eens bent. Goed, ik weet dat ik tegen de muur praat, want je zult wel niet weten wat democratie is en ik verwijt je niets. De grote schuldige is Salazar, die de ogen van iedereen hier en in zijn land laat sluiten zodat niemand de zon ziet en alle blinden in duisternis ronddolen. Neem me niet kwalijk maar ik herhaal hier alleen maar de filosofie van die meneer“ (MU 114; my translation). 9 “De lezer vindt het misschien vreemd dat meneer Utac zo’n bewonderaar was van prof. Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar. Maar misschien is het vreemder dat de lezer dat vreemd vindt. Salazar was vanaf 1928 minister van Financiën en redde Portugal

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Reflecting on Portugal’s colonial politics, the narrator suddenly turns our attention to the fact that we are reading a fictional work, relativizing the historical weight of his words: “Let’s stop here because this is a work of fiction and not a political dissertation” (ibid.).10 While Utac’s return to Cape Verde is situated in the sixties, the narrator (or more specifically the narrator’s moment of enunciation) is clearly situated in the post-­Salazar era; the anonymous narrator suggests that he is the fictional (textual) equivalent of the author narrating Utac’s story in the third person, thus reinforcing our thesis of autofiction. At first sight this third person narrator seems to be omniscient and extradiegetic (located outside the story), but the reader quickly realizes that his voice is everything except authoritarian; possibly he is an intradiegetic narrator,11 but the text does not provide sufficient clues to confirm that hypothesis. In spite of being situated outside the narrative plot, the narrator’s narrative perspective (focalization) comes closest to the viewpoint of an anonymous character, a non-­identified companion who travels around with Utac. Even though the narrator is neither reliable nor omniscient, he is often empathic regarding the protagonist and rarely rejects Utac’s visions as hallucinations or madness. As a matter of fact, Utac does not escape – at least, not any more than the local inhabitants of the island of Santiago – his own belief in superstition, which is as strong as his fellow countrymen’s. Significantly, among Utac’s wanderings and small incidents and stories there is constant reference to superstition and witchcraft. When nhu Maninho, a local pariah who used to be a respected tailor, is unexpectedly killed during a batuque,12 organized to celebrate Utac’s return to Santiago, the story quite abruptly turns fantastic or magic, to such a degree that it is hard to differentiate what is actually “magic” from what is “real”. A dramatic incident occurs when one of the local invited VIPs, Augusto Pele, becomes envious of nhu Maninho as soon as he starts dancing with Bía, whom Pele considers to be his personal concubine: nhu Maninho faints and is brought to hospital but dies soon afterwards. A few days later Utac uit een heel moeilijke situatie en dankzij zijn diplomatieke optreden wist hij het land buiten de Tweede Wereldoorlog te houden“ (MU 332; my translation). 10 “Laten we het hierbij laten want dit is een werk van fictie en geen politieke verhandeling” (MU 332; my translation). 11 An intradiegetic narrator is usually (but not always) one of the known characters in a story, which can have many narrators (i.e. so-­called “polyphony” of narrative voices). 12 In Cape Verdean culture, a batuque can refer either to a celebration in honour of a special person (as is the case here), or to a form of dance. Due to its supposedly “profane” character, under colonial rule, all forms of batuque were condemned by the Portuguese Catholic church, and temporarily prohibited by Salazar.

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is struck when he sees the ghost of nhu Maninho, sitting a few benches behind him in his local church. Utac coincides with him once more in Achada Grande Frente, a nearby neighbourhood, and runs away as soon as he perceives his appearance. Utac still believes that what he had seen was not a product of his imagination but truly Maninho’s ghost. He informs the policeman Taninho about the ghost haunting the neighbourhood. When nhu Maninho is finally found alive by the authorities, Taninho orders him to return home, accusing him by saying that his sudden death was not Pele’s but his own fault. At this point, however, the narrator reflects on how these events led to a major injustice. Because of the common belief that nhu Maninho possesses some strange kind of supernatural power, common people effectively turned him into an outcast: If everybody tells you: “Get out of here and go to the place you belong to because this is the place of the living!”, then why would that person [nhu Maninho] not believe that he is dead, if he has become a living death who everyone rejects and isolates? (MU 172)13

In a similar episode, the protagonist re-­encounters Bitézio, a practitioner of witchcraft whom he has known since his youth, and who is feared by the inhabitants of Santiago as he is deemed dangerous. However, as with nhu Maninho, Utac’s encounters with Bitézio take hilarious proportions, without ever jeopardizing Utac’s safety. Most importantly, such encounters reveal Utac’s deep and often unconscious attachment to local beliefs, in spite of him presenting himself to his peers as an educated, well-­travelled man. Finally, in another, rather dramatic episode towards the end of the novel, Mister Utac collapses while on a boat trip with the local fishermen. In the wake of nhu Maninho, he believes it is now his turn to die, as confirmed by his fiancée Trudy (who accompanies him on the trip) and the crew. However, the next day they witness Utac’s wondrous resurrection, and the fishermen speak of an unprecedented miracle. Suddenly a shoal of flying fish surrounds the boat, and they have the best catch in years. This “food miracle” which accompanies Utac’s resurrection clearly has biblical connotations, most obviously the reference to the miracle draught of fish in the gospels of Luke and John. It would be tempting to interpret the above-­mentioned events as “magical realist”, a term often used – and abused – by scholars, 13

“Als iedereen tegen iemand zegt: ‘Ga weg van hier en ga naar je bestemming want dit is de plaats van de levenden!’, waarom zou zo iemand dan niet geloven dat hij dood is als hij een levende dode is geworden die wordt geweerd en geïsoleerd?” (MU 172; my translation).

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especially in discussions on Latin American and Caribbean literatures. While echoing the fantastic or marvellous events found in the work of, for instance, Alejo Carpentier or Gabriel García Márquez, in Mendes da Silva such “magical” events are radically different in at least two ways: firstly, they have an explicit religious (biblical) connotation, and secondly, they deal with the dialectics of life and death. Moreover, from an autofictional point of view, we witness how in Mendes da Silva’s novel wondrous or magical events are tied up with autobiographical events, as well as with the collective religious or superstitious beliefs of a larger community. What is peculiar in the novel is that biblical phenomena appear as natural events, and, seamlessly mix with traditional African beliefs in witchcraft, thus emphasizing the syncretism of Cape Verdean culture, a historical hotspot of processes of cultural mixing.14 In the work of authors from across the Caribbean, where cultural and religious creolization have always appeared as natural processes since the early days of slavery, we also find a fusion of religious elements, for instance in the work of Boeli Van Leeuwen from Curaçao, whose novel The Sign of Jonah (originally written in Dutch: Het teken van Jona, 1988) is imbued with biblical references and quotations.15 Beyond the specific phenomenon of Caribbean syncretism, one should not forget about the many historical and cultural links between Africa and the Caribbean. Before the heyday of the Latin American literary boom of the sixties, the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier was inspired by the Caribbean traditions of voodoo and Santería (up until today also practised in the Caribbean diaspora), which he used to formulate his theory of lo real maravilloso, for many the predecessor of magical realism. These syncretic forms of cultural expression take root in African religions, but have suffered important transformations in contact with local Caribbean cultures. Nowadays, magical events, superstition, healing practices, belief in the supernatural and references to Afro-­Caribbean (religious) practice are classical themes of both Caribbean and African literatures. What is less known is that they function as a binding force for local communities in both the Caribbean and Africa. Instead of simple expressions of folk culture, these expressions are rarely seen as part of the divergent modernities of both the Caribbean and Africa; they are usually relegated to the realm of primitive practices, that is, to the opposite of what “modernity” 14

Crioulo is the main spoken, creole language in the archipelago; it has many varieties and is itself the result of an intense process of linguistic creolization. 15 The gospels of Luke and John tell the story of the disobedient prophet Jonah who is swallowed by a blue whale which spits him out again.

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should look like. Nevertheless, they are fully part of how Africa and the Caribbean “work” – to use Daloz and Chabal’s (1990) term – and of how they modernize, in a fashion which cannot simply be explained through Western concepts.

Cape Verde: Luso-­tropicalism and changing colonial tides It is significant that the novel is set in the sixties, the decade of important changes in Cape Verde due to the weakening of late Portuguese colonialism in Africa. The topic announced in the title and central to the novel is, as we have said, emotional excess: the ever-­changing moods of a Cape Verdean return migrant. However, I argue that these emotional tides are not merely the expression of an individual’s dissatisfaction with Cape Verde’s perceived “primitiveness” or lack of “modernity” as compared to Western countries. On a deeper level, Utac’s hyper-­sensitivity and anger – his predominant mood – stems from a preoccupation not so much with Portugal’s dictator as with the Cape Verdean nation’s reaction to the colonial stronghold: above all he is frustrated by the way people submit in a docile way to Portuguese rule. Looking beyond colonialism, he proves to be even more sceptical about the Cape Verdean’s lack of action, vocality and sense of belonging, as the archipelago peacefully floats between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Speaking to his friend Taninho, Utac rationalizes that Cape Verde is simultaneously perceived as nowhere and everywhere, both Atlantic and a-­continental: If it [Cape Verde] isn’t located in any of these [continents], it can only be located in the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve read and heard so many things that I don’t understand. Some call us Africans without giving any explanation. Others refuse without any explanation to be called Africans, as if to be African means to be inferior. I am proud to be an African and I am proud of that continent. I believe that it is our luck that our Archipelago is being accepted as the African continent’s most Western and not its most arbitrary islands. (236)16

16

“Als het [Kaapverdië] daar allemaal niet ligt kan het alleen nog maar in de Atlantische Oceaan liggen. Ik heb al zoveel gelezen en gehoord wat ik niet begrijp. Sommigen noemen ons zonder enige uitleg Afrikanen. Anderen willen geen Afrikanen zijn zonder redden of uitleg, alsof Afrikaan zijn wil zeggen dat je inferieur bent. Ik ben er trots op een Afrikaan te zijn en ben trots op dat continent. Ik geloof dat het een geluk is dat

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In spite of the sincere pride Utac takes in being African, how is his harshness towards Cape Verdeans to be explained? Underneath the rejection of the nation’s docility and passivity we find a highly ambiguous attitude towards the ideology that for decades galvanized and justified Portuguese colonialism: Luso-­tropicalism, which was a convenient justifying banner for Salazar in allowing it to continue his colonial project in times when most European imperial forces (e.g.  France, Great Britain, Belgium, Spain) had long granted independence to their African territories. The Brazilian writer and intellectual Gilberto Freyre saw Luso-­tropicalism as an “inclination, on the part of the Portuguese, to an adaptation to the tropics that is not just based on interest, but is also voluptuous” (Freyre, quoted in Vale de Almeida 48). Luso-­tropicalism was the perfect alibi to continue colonialism, for it smoothly integrated the idea of multiculturalism and multiracialism with African occupation instead of decolonization. While Freyre formulated his key ideas of Luso-­tropicalism almost a century ago, the ideology was progressively implemented under Salazar’s regime, but not without any changes – Salazar was cautious, for instance, of making crucial adaptations to Freyre’s original formulations, in order to match Luso-­tropicalism with his own ultra-­nationalist agenda, something that went against Freyre’s ideological viewpoints. Mendes da Silva’s novel does explicitly refer to the many ambiguities involved under Portuguese colonial rule, whereby Cape Verdeans were being integrated as fully Portuguese “white” citizens, in line with Freyre’s ideas on Luso-­tropicalism, which saw Portugal and its colonies romantically as a “tropical” multicultural and multiracial nation and thus a more “civilized” colonizer than the other European imperial powers at the time, practising their repressive politics. In other words, Salazar’s Luso-­ tropical project installed ambiguity – in various degrees of intensity – at the heart of Lusophone Africa. Likewise, Utac’s attitude towards colonialism itself is highly ambiguous: on the one hand he is conscious about his Portuguese citizenship; on the other, he remains critical of the abuses and violent repression committed by colonialism. At times colonial authority indeed went into areas where it was less obvious, such as language. In one of his many conversations with Taninho, Utac suggests that authority is unconsciously being imposed through the colonizer’s language. From a Caribbean perspective, this is a clear allusion to Caliban’s submission and resistance to Prospero: in order to curse Prospero, Caliban does not have

onze archipel door het Afrikaanse continent als zijn meest westelijke en niet als zijn meest willekeurige eilanden wordt aanvaard” (MU 236; my translation).

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any option but to recur to using his Master’s language.17 Utac complains to his friend about the lack of “democratic” value of the Portuguese language: Our [Portuguese] grammar is more dictatorial than [the dictatorship of ] mister Prof. Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar and has more rules than all the police in the world together. Also, our grammar is not at all democratic. […] Those grammaticians only make these little rules for themselves and for their friends! That’s why this country does not make one inch of progress, because they are egocentric people who want to be the only ones to be able to talk and write correctly. Maybe you’ve never thought about it, but those folks talk and write in such a manner that only they can understand themselves. (MU 213)18

Beyond the question of whether he is right or wrong, Utac engages time and again in a monologue: he behaves towards his relatives and friends, in spite of his often good intentions, as narcissistic and obsessed with democratic and moral values. Interestingly, he does not mention at any time in the text that the first spoken (yet as of today still unofficial) language of Cape Verde is not Portuguese but Creole (crioulo), a creole language with many varieties across the archipelago. Instead, Portuguese is downplayed as a marginal and unnecessarily complex language from a global perspective: “Why don’t they [the Portuguese] make a simple language, like the English did? English is spoken anywhere in this world; on the seas and in the air, in commerce and in transportation. It is the most frequently spoken and most respected language in the world” (MU 213).19 Instead of addressing a (predictable) one-­way, moralistic critique to the colonizer and the politics of language, Utac once again blames his 17

In an influential essay, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2003) located Portugal’s colonial situation as a particular one wedged in between Próspero and Caliban, i.e. while it was doubtless a colonizer, the country was itself being colonized by Great Britain; therefore, Portugal would not have been comparable to other colonizing empires because of the country’s semi-­colonial status. The loss of its colonies, while applauded by most, also would have created a strong sense of insecurity for fear of being Caliban within the European context. 18 “Die grammatica van ons is ook dictatorialer dan meneer prof. Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar en heeft meer regeltjes dan alle polities ter wereld. Ze is ook helemaal niet democratisch. […] Die grammaticamensen maken die regeltjes alleen maar voor henzelf en hun vrienden! Daarom gaat dit land geen steek vooruit, omdat het egoisten zijn die willen dat zij de enigen zijn die correct praten en schrijven“ (MU 213; my translation). 19 “Waarom maken ze geen simpele taal zoals de Engelsen? Overal en op de hele wereld wordt Engels gesproken; in de scheepvaart en de luchtvaart, in de handel en het transport. Het is de meest gesproken en meest gerespecteerde taal ter wereld” (MU 213; my translation).

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fellow citizens for its lack of self-­consciousness and willingness to take action in order to change the colonial stronghold. Although no mention is made of other Lusophone African countries, the broader colonial context matters in situating Cape Verde’s apparently passive political attitude: the sixties saw Portuguese colonialism enter its final phase in Africa through clashes and violent wars. While in Cape Verde no significant rebellion took place, the colonial wars had already started on the mainland African colonies, as was the case in Guiné-­Bissau, under the command of Amilcar Cabral (Guiné-­Bissau-­born, of Cape Verdean parents). Although Cape Verde was united with Guiné-­Bissau when it obtained independence, and even though Verdeans fought for independence in Guiné-­Bissau under Cabral’s leadership, in fact Cape Verde under Portuguese rule already enjoyed more autonomy than Angola, Guiné Buissau and Mozambique. The narrator in the novel, clearly situated in a postcolonial moment, recognizes Cabral’s merit in the wars for independence, but downplays the importance of the national hero in Cape Verde’s contemporary context. He reflects: “If Amilcar Cabral would have fought in his own country for the independence of Cape Verde, he would not have been forgotten but neither would he have been adored, as is the case now. Maybe he would have been admired as much, or just a little bit more, as the great heroes that did not participate in the armed battle” (MU 309).20 Instead, the narrator favours the foregrounding of forgotten, historically much less visible “great heroes”; persons who played a major role in the history of Cape Verde, such as Joaquim Avelino Ribeiro, governor of the municipality (concelho) of Santa Catarina, but nowadays unknown to most Cape Verdeans.21 Ribeiro, known as “Quimquim” (written “Kimkim” in the novel),22 while not related in any way to supporting Cabral’s struggle for independence, was a highly successful businessman. Among other achievements Ribeiro was the founder of an aeroclub which rapidly evolved into TACV, a successful airline company that is nowadays Cape Verde’s national airline. By making reference to 20

“Als Amilcar Cabral in eigen land had gevochten voor de onafhankelijkheid van Kaapverdië, dan zou hij niet zijn vergeten maar zou hij nooit zo zijn vereerd als nu het geval is. Misschien zou hij net zo of iets meer worden bewonderd als de grote voorvechters die niet hadden deelgenomen aan de gewapende strijd”(MU 309; my translation). 21 One blogger, for instance, suggests that Praia’s International airport should be renamed Aeroporto Joaquim Ribeiro in praise of the governor of Santa Catarina (“Desconcerto ou atávica preguiça histórica?”, http://coral-vermelho.blogspot.be/2012/01/). 22 While the Portuguese spelling is “Quimquim”, the novel uses “Kimkim”, as this corresponds phonetically with the Portuguese phonetic form.

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Ribeiro’s life in a chapter titled “Kimkim Ribeiro and Amilcar Cabral” (MU 307–10), the narrator seeks to emphasize and recycle the historical legacy of such unknown civilian (not military) heroes. Other references to important cultural personalities include those to Nha Guida Mendi, the archipelago’s most famous “batucadeira” (MU 162), who is said to have made such a deep impression on the Portuguese general Craveiro Lopes during his visit to the island that the batuque parties, which initially were forbidden by Salazar (because of the dance’s “profane” character), became institutionalized as one of Cape Verde’s traditional dance forms.23

Multiplying the Autofictional Self: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Postcolonial autofiction, however, can take various forms. Due to this diversity and frequency among postcolonial narratives, it has become one of the major literary strategies to which authors recur. Like Mendes da Silva, Junot Díaz is a so-­called “diaspora writer” born in the Dominican Republic, albeit one with a very different history of displacement, as his transnational autofiction takes root in the early experience of migration to the USA. In approaching Díaz’s work, most critics have focused on aspects such as genre, gender and cultural memory (the conflictive relation between Dominican Republic’s national history and its diaspora). However, the autofictional aspect of the novel remains unexplored. Yet this is a crucial one: Junot Díaz creates an original and innovative concept of autofiction. Instead of the classical identification of author and character, I argue that the author proceeds to unfold his persona over two characters: Yunior and Oscar. In other words, the proper autobiographical elements are embedded in the text through the attributing of specific traits to each character. Díaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, tells the story of Oscar, described as a Dominican ghetto nerd growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar Wao, the protagonist, does not escape the all-­encompassing curse that has affected Dominicans home and abroad, and which he mysteriously refers to as “the fukú”. The fukú turns out to be not a personal curse, but one that set foot on Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as soon as Columbus discovered the New World: Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. […] No 23

General Francisco Craveiro Lopes was president of Portugal from 1951 to 1958.

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matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not. (OW 15–16)

The spell referred to as “fukú” affects the different characters in Oscar Wao: rather than a fait-­divers in the plot, the spell becomes the final diasporic character of the novel, present in its ghostly form, deeply penetrating the narrative system of the text (what I would like to call the “deep structure” of the autofictional text) as it links with the existentialist theme of the novel: the diasporic subject is paradoxically most present in its absence, as a ghost: that is, as an invisible subject in between the real and the imaginary world. Moreover, the novel emphasizes the popular (Dominican and broader Caribbean) belief in the supernatural and tragic destiny as the deeper (unconscious) dynamic to dictatorship and repression. While supernatural beliefs in the Caribbean and Latin America are usually related to Santería, voodoo and Candomblé (see e.g. Paravisini-­Gebert 2011; Putnam 2012; Brathwaite 1974b), Junot Díaz’s novel shows that the spectrum of the “magical” is broader than these creolized (syncretic) forms of religious expression. On a superficial level, the novel can be read in the tradition of other writing about the Caribbean diaspora and migration: we learn about the difficulties and obstacles encountered by the protagonist as he grows up in the Dominican ghetto as a self-­declared nerd. He perceives that he does not quite fit in the ghetto due to his love for books, ranging from classical literature to sci-­fi to comic books, and more broadly anything that is pop culture. Oscar even succeeds in escaping the ghetto by obtaining a university degree and dedicating himself (like Díaz and Mendes da Silva in a later stage of life) to his passion of writing. The art of writing is also an activity his best friend Yunior engages in, before eventually writing a novel about Oscar’s life. Having been unsuccessful with women since he was at College, Oscar eventually falls in love with a Dominican prostitute, and he eventually travels to the Dominican Republic to meet up with her. He discovers important details about his family’s past and about himself, but also, tied in with his mother’s obscure past, about the traumatic cultural memory of the Dominican Republic and the broader Caribbean. He learns, among other obscured facts, that his grandfather Abelard was tortured under dictator Rafael Trujillo’s regime, and he seeks to shed light on the mystery that surrounds his family’s traumatic and silenced past. While the novel is narrated by various voices, the predominant voice is that of Yunior, Oscar’s best friend, who stands for the traditional Dominican

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macho. Moreover, Yunior is also the main narrator in the book, performing as an authoritarian – indeed dictatorial – voice that narrates Oscar’s and the Dominican diaspora’s (hi)story. As a narrative voice, the authority of Yunior leading the narration is not a coincidence and, clearly, has a specific function in the text. If Dominicans are all unconsciously “deeply attached” to authority, even to dictatorship, the novel suggests, it is because it could not be otherwise, for they have a priori been cursed by a major force against which any battle is vain. Moreover, Díaz suggests that not only Dominicans but humanity as a whole is conditioned by blinding forms of authority. Not by coincidence, the name “Yunior” is also the name of the protagonists in different short stories in Drown, Díaz’s first collection of short stories. As Machado Saéz (531) argues, the book provides too few clues to determine which of the different Yunior-­narrators of the short stories in Drown coincides with the narrator of the novel. There is no doubt, however, that Díaz himself identified not only with “ghetto nerd” (Oscar) but also with Yunior when writing the novel, as was confirmed in an interview: I know that the work transforms utterly any attempt  I make at subtle autobiography. By the time the work gets done with it, it’s unrecognizable. In fact, the book that is completely fiction, Oscar Wao, I would argue is more autobiographical […] If a rumor is going to give my work more verisimilitude, I won’t discourage it. Sometimes you get a lot simply by giving your protagonist your same nickname [Yunior]. (my emphasis)

Even though he does not use the term autofiction, Junot Díaz describes his whole novel as an attempt to writing autobiography through his alter ego Yunior.  I argue, however, that Junot Díaz codes his autofictional doppelgänger in the DNA from two characters, Yunior and Oscar, both writers who in many ways complement each other in spite of their radical differences. Through Yunior’s words we learn that he feels it is his mission to accomplish the task of making an end to the fukú, as Oscar, lost in his sci-­fi fantasies, “strangely enough didn’t think it worth incorporating [the fukú] into his fiction” (OW 32). Like Oscar, his novel’s main character, the author also grew up in New Jersey. He moved from the Dominican Republic to the USA in his early childhood, growing up as a simple “kid from New Jersey” (Irvine 2008), a Dominican nerd who escaped the ghetto. And like Oscar in the novel, the young Junot graduated from Rutgers University in the Garden state. The act of writing itself is thus an autobiographical gesture for the Dominican author. Autofiction fulfils a therapeutic function, even though

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it does not escape the ghost of authority. Significantly, the novel combines the unavoidably authoritarian way of telling with postmodern techniques and genres that tend, in their own way, to obscure any authoritarianism. The narration is arguably a combination of traditional beliefs, modes of writing and (post)modern techniques, including the way it combines fictionality and factuality. A good example is the presence of social media as a popular (yet often historically inaccurate) source of information. Not by coincidence, Oscar Wao, written at the dawn of the “Facebook era”, from the outset recognizes the anti-­hero’s hedonism and links it with traditional Caribbean beliefs. Indeed, Yunior confesses from the outset that after finishing the novel he wrote about Oscar he created a special thread about the “fukú” on an online forum about the Dominican Republic (“DR1”): A couple weeks ago, while I was finishing this book, I posted the thread fukú on the DR1 forum, just out of curiosity. These days I’m nerdy like that. The talkback blew the fuck up. You should see how many responses I’ve gotten. They just keep coming in. And not just from Domos. The Puertorocks want to talk about fufus, and the Haitians have some shit just like it. There are a zillion of these fukú stories. Even my mother, who almost never talks about Santo Domingo, has started sharing hers with me. (OW 6; my emphasis)

Autofiction as a mode of writing has indeed been absorbing the effects of new technologies on writing; as Gasparini (2007) rightly points out, autofiction has also fallen prey to postmodernism’s hedonistic search for and idolatry of the self, transfixing the subject in virtual worlds. Yunior, who became a writer after Oscar taught his friend how to tell stories, focuses on exorcising the “fukú” through the act of writing. Autofiction here becomes a “zafa”, a term Yunior uses to refer to his “very own counterspell” (OW 7), the opposite of and only possible remedy against the omnipresent and all-­condemning fukú. Contrary to what Díaz suggests in the interview – that his novel follows the rule of onomastic identity whereby he assigns his nickname to Yunior and makes him the intradiegetic narrator – Yunior is not the only alter ego for Junot Díaz. In another interview with his peer, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, Díaz refers to the analogy between Oscar’s life and his own: But the character himself, this supernerd.  I was a ghetto nerd supreme: a smart kid in a poor-­ass-­community. The thing with me was that I was a nerd embedded in a dictatorial military family […] Oscar was a composite of all the

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nerds that I grew up with who didn’t have that special reservoir of masculine privilege. Oscar was who I would have been if it had not been for my father or my brother or my own willingness to fight or my own inability to fit into any category easily. (“Interview with Junot Díaz”, Danticat 2007; my emphasis)

Díaz proceeds in his novel not only to resurrect Oscar as the “composite of all the nerds” who he grew up with and who came to be part of his identity; the narrative itself is an autofictional composite of Díaz’s, self-­ embedded in two different characters without “fitting” into eith of them with ease. Two characters who had ambitions of being, like Junot, writers, as a natural consequence of their voracity regarding literature and pop culture.  I argue that autofiction can thus be written across different characters, instead of privileging the classical “I” (first person narrator) as the only possible voice and character corresponding to the narrator and author. Real life events, that is, events that happened during an author’s life, can be strategically spread across the lives of very different characters, while they are all part of the author’s repertoire of biographical facts. As these events get tied into the fiction, the autofictional narrative exposes the multiplicity of the author’s self, arguably creating an effect of verisimilitude and authenticity. Through these characters, Díaz writes about those diasporic lives that he has experienced, and those of others he has witnessed or imagined, to the point where the writing itself becomes a maze of autobiographical elements that seamlessly mix with fictional ones.

Conclusion Autofiction as a mode of writing,  I argue, thus allows the author to create meaning in the postcolony and, as stated above, an effect of verisimilitude through the polyphonic voicing of different characters, allowing him or her to express, rather than multiple personalities, the cultural complexity itself involved in diasporic lives. Díaz uses autofiction to question the authority of the narrative voice itself; Díaz’s rejection of an authoritarian Voice, which represents false “dreams of unity, of purity” (O’Rourke 2008) cannot be seen as isolated from his belief that the classical genre of autobiography and autobiographical writing must be in some ways transformed, made “impure”, “Caribbeanized”: that is, transformed into a new kind of writing adapted to the diasporic experience of the Caribbean. Such a preoccupation with the very way in which the author should interweave autobiographical elements into the fictional tissue is absent in the Cape Verdean’s work. Mendes da Silva, from a technical perspective, is more conservative in his use of autofiction as

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a mode of writing: autofiction is used to narrate a story which mixes autobiographical elements with fictional ones, including the fictional name of the protagonist. In Mendes da Silva’s novel, autofiction serves as an indirect strategy to show how the ideology of Luso-­tropicalism has permeated Cape Verdean culture under colonialism, and – as rendered through the narrator’s scope – extends into the postcolonial era. Luso-­ tropicalism was a form of justifying colonialism through the promotion of multiracialism and multiculturalism in Portugal’s greater empire, an idea which became crystallized in Salazar’s slogan Portugal não é um pais pequeno (see among others Sanches 2006; Marroni 2013).24 Indeed, the protagonist of Mendes da Silva’s novel to a certain extent embodies the Luso-­tropicalist ideals, as a contradictory conjugation of multicultural conviviality and authoritarian patriarchy. By using autofiction as a mode of writing, authors can give verisimilitude to postcolonial lives through the eyes of different characters. This is the case in Oscar Wao, where Junot Díaz draws on both Yunior and Oscar to tell about his experience and the existential implications of growing up as a Dominican kid in diaspora. However, as with Mendes da Silva’s autofictional narrative, the analysis of all the parallels running between the author’s and the characters’ lives have not been our main concern here. Rather, we have focused on the question of how and why autofiction is the preferred mode of writing in these texts, and why it is an important mode in postcolonial writing which conjugates the poetical and political; hence the importance of situating these novels in their context of emergence. As in Mendes da Silva, belief in the supernatural (in witchcraft, ghosts, “fukú”, “zafa”, etc.) in Díaz takes root in local popular traditions, which are entirely part of the Caribbean’s modernity. Even though traditional beliefs in the supranatural are so often packaged with the label magical realism, I believe mechanically applying such a used and abused label would do these works injustice, as it would do injustice to African literatures at large (see e.g. Cooper 2012). Not by coincidence, Yunior makes a reference to García Márquez’s Macondo and the parody of the latter by a younger generation of Latin American writers as McOndo: “It used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak, in Macondo than in McOndo” (OW 7). Caribbean literature, both the texts written in the Caribbean basin and those in diaspora, share some transnational features with African narratives: both 24

“Portugal is not a small country”: slogan used by Salazar as propaganda for reinforcing the argument that Portugal is a great Empire. The sentence was visually represented by a map of Lusophone African countries superposed on the map of Europe, in order to show the empire’s geographical dimensions.

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insist on what we may call the “informalization of writing”, in much the same way as can be observed in contemporary African societies. Political scientists Patrick Chabal and Jean-­Pascal Daloz insist on the importance of taking seriously the “informalization of politics” in Africa, as opposed to Western modes of rational thinking in boxes and classifications. They claim that “it is not possible to understand what might constitute the ‘modern’ and the ‘formal’ in Africa without paying proper attention to the ‘traditional’ and the informal’” (Chabal and Daloz 155). Modernity in their view is not the opposite of the traditional, but a “dynamic process rather than a state of equilibrium” (ibid.). In cultural terms, the informal is represented by phenomena such as witchcraft, usually approached through a Western scope as folk culture or, worse, as a sign of backwardness, of the exact opposite of the “modern”. The juxtaposition of “modern” and “tradition” is also true, I believe, in the postcolonial Caribbean and its diaspora where cultural forms so often escape Western rationality and categorization. While Chabal and Daloz claim that the juxtaposition of the “traditional” with the “modern” is nowhere more striking than in Africa, we should not forget the Caribbean’s deep historical and cultural entanglements with the African continent. The view that societies could modernize without becoming westernized is one which most scholars in the social sciences and humanities do not subscribe to, as they usually speak from a position that sees modernization as a mirror image of the Western state and democracy. Likewise, the appropriation and informalization of the autobiographical and autofictional norms as defined by French theorists is but one example of the creativity of both Caribbean and African postcolonial writers. The autofictional narratives briefly analysed in this chapter are witness to how postcolonial autofiction questions established ideas of (post)modernity versus tradition, as well as of the potential to rethink and expand the category of autofiction itself as multiplicity. I have not subscribed here to autofiction’s criteria of onomastic identity (“identité onomastique”) as a defining trait of autofiction as put forward by (e.g.) Doubrovsky, Vilain, Gasparini and Colonna, who state that, in order to be able to speak of autofiction, there must be absolute homonymous identity between protagonist, narrator and author (Gasparini 209). Indeed, an author and narrator could well use different names, while maintaining autofictional verisimilitude with his or her character. These novels go beyond the norm of identity between author, narrator and character; the postcolonial writer reinvents his/her self beyond the textual and aesthetic boundaries imposed on autobiography, recognizing him- or herself in the multiple characters and excesses that the legacy of colonialism and the experience of displacement

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inscribed in the colonized subject and continues to reproduce– albeit in different and more complex ways than before – in the postcolony. We have insisted on the importance of traditional elements, not as a nostalgic recycling of national folklore or myths, but rather as a way of asserting what Julio Ramos (2001) calls “divergent modernities”, not one that is opposed to, but rather one that challenges, the notion that there is only one model of modernity, represented by the nations of northern Europe and defined exclusively in terms of capitalist development.25

25

As an alternative to the definition of modernity as a homogeneous form of Western capitalist development, Jo Labanye (2007) proposes, in the line of Chabal and Daloz, a definition “in terms not of capitalist modernization but of attitudes toward the relation of present to past” (Labanye 91).

Chapter 4

Beyond Animality: Mia Couto’s Transmutations From Biologist to Literary Alchemist Mia Couto’s linguistic playfulness has rightfully drawn scholarly attention since he first started publishing in the 1980s. However, as David Brookshaw (2016) has pointed out, the writer’s peculiar use of language made scholars forget, to a certain extent, the painful context in which his work has emerged: The obsessive debate surrounding Couto’s use of language, however, detracted from the analysis of the sometimes deeply disturbing messages his stories conveyed about the various tensions being played out in post-­ independence, war-­torn Mozambique in the 1980s – not least the effects of poverty and social isolation on people’s ability and need to dream. These tensions, in turn, were linked to the clash between the uprooting of rural African traditions resulting from war and forced migration, and what might best be described as the “unrootedness” of Mozambican urban modernity. (Brookshaw 2016: 23)

Brookshaw rightly refers to the often forgotten context of rural Mozambique, and the “uprooting of African rural traditions” as a result of war. In this chapter I propose to pay closer attention to these contextual factors, albeit in a limited way. However, as I shall attempt to show in this chapter, the situation is more complex: traditional beliefs were also put to the service of the major political party involved, RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana/National Mozambican Resistance); its permanent challenging of the government, led by FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique/Mozambique Liberation Front), which took power after Mozambique’s independence, has continued until today, especially in the northern parts of the country. While Couto’s work appeals because of its “universal” character as well as its particular status within the postmodern matrix of what is fashioned as “World literature”, the local, “traditional” background of his novels and short stories are important for comprehending the deeper meaning of his texts. One of the most

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fascinating aspects of his works is that it appeals because of its accessibility, without overtly simplifying the particularities of the Mozambican national context. Particularly anthropological and philosophical insights might help to shed light on some aspects of Mia Couto’s work which otherwise remain mistakenly described as “magical realism”, a term which scholars have rushed to apply to the Mozambican writer. Scholars should, on the contrary, as the scholar and translator puts it well, “rigorously qualify the writers’ place in relation to magical realism”, especially the “symbiosis present in his narratives of the ‘living dead’, and the ‘dead who are alive’” (Brookshaw 19). I argue that, instead of forcing the term “magical realism” (which has lost much of its currency nowadays) upon his work, it is more productive to pay critical attention to aspects such as witchcraft and “animality”, and the latter’s relation to “humanity” as it has been given a place within those particular local traditions, but also within disciplines such as contemporary philosophy and anthropology. I will not review Couto’s already extensive work and career here, for it has been the object of an impressive amount of scholarship, both in Portuguese and in English (e.g. the recent edition of A Companion to Mia Couto by Hamilton and Huddart [2016]). A brief look at Mia Couto’s impressive work published so far does not only reveal a progressive change in genre, from short story to the novel, something we observe in the work of other major writers (such as Julio Cortázar) as well. Less visible is the important shift in the way the writer approaches human beings. Here again, Cortázar’s increasing interest in “ordinary people” comes to mind, especially after the publication of the Argentinian writer’s first novel, Los premios, not by coincidence an existentialist novel. After the Rome peace agreement was signed, Mia Couto became more radically interested in the voiceless, the invisible of seemingly ordinary, trivial events and human beings. As Patrick Chabal (2003) rightly points out, the publication of Couto’s third collection of short stories, Contos do Nascer da Terra, documents this shift. As with most of the author’s work, the epigraph sets the tone of what is to follow: Não é da luz que carecemos. Milenarmente a grande estrela iluminou a terra e, afinal, nós pouco aprendemos a ver. O mundo necessita ser visto sob outra luz: a luz do luar, essa claridade que cai com respeito e delicadeza; Só o luar revela o lado feminino dos seres. Só a lua revela intimidade da nossa morada terrestre. Necessitamos não do nascer do Sol. Carecemos do nascer da Terra. (Couto, Contos do Nascer da Terra 121)

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(It is not light that we lack. For millennia the great star has lit the earth but despite that we barely learn to see. The world needs to be seen in another light: the light of the moon, which shines with respect and tenderness. Only moonlight reveals the feminine side of things. Only the moon reveals the intimacy of our earthly abode. We need not Sunrise. We lack Earthrise.)

The epigraph sheds new “light” on many of the novels and short stories that Couto would publish next, putting emphasis on a more intimate approach and paying increasing attention to the existential conditions of Mozambicans and postcolonial Africa. One could easily reject Couto’s statement as a romantic musing of his poetic self, but that would be too simple. The passion with which Couto writes his work is visible in every sentence of both his prose and poetry. Replacing the “sunrise” by “moonrise” is a feasible fact in our imagination, yet also a crucial switch of perspective. Imagining an “earthrise”, as is evoked in the quoted epigraph, requires indeed much more effort. From a poetic and, more scientifically, from an astronomical point of view, however, an “earthrise” is a form of emergence of “birth” which can only be visualized if one imagines oneself to be on another planet, that is, outside one’s comfortable and familiar position within the universe. Another more recent example of this intimate approach is one particular sentence in Couto’s A confissão da leoa (Confession of the Lioness),1 a novel published in 2012. At a certain moment the hunter Arcanjo, one of the main characters and also one of the two narrative voices, says: “Lá fora, a lua cheia desperta em mim uma felina inquietação” (CL 110; my emphasis) (Outside, the full moon awakens some feline restlessness within me). More than an incursion into the poetic, which is a major feature of his work, Mia Couto here reveals his subscription to cross gender boundaries by foregrounding the hunter’s “lado feminino”, the feminine side of all creatures, a side proper to all human beings yet one which has remained in the shadow for too many centuries. From the outset the “feminine” thus largely exceeds the narrowly defined realms of the biological sexes, the masculine as the opposite of the feminine. Moreover, this sentence shows well Couto’s cleverly tying together what are supposed to be opposites: animality and humanity. In this chapter I will, besides A confissão da leoa, also focus on a second novel published by Couto during the last decade: Jesusalém (2009), translated as The 1

I will refer here to the English translations by David Brookshaw (Confession of the Lioness, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015; The Tuner of Silences, Biblioasis, 2009). For the sake of readability, I will only include page references to the original texts in Portuguese.

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Tuner of Silences. While these novels are to be seen as autonomous works, in the sense that they do not consciously form any kind of narrative unity, approaching them jointly nonetheless allows us to detect common concerns, patterns, and arguably also trends, in Couto’s work from the past decade. Since Jesusalém has already received some critical attention, we will concentrate mostly on A confissão da leoa, especially since it is an excellent example of the increasing importance of animality in Couto’s work. Therefore, I will turn to that specific relationship between human beings and animals, which is at the centre of Couto’s philosophy, and which echoes Deleuze’s and Derrida’s ideas on animality as a form of becoming and thinking as animality. In order to get a grasp on Couto’s world, which, as stated earlier, has all too easily been qualified as “magical realism” (like much of contemporary Latin American literature), one needs to go back to his early years as a writer who started to publish during Mozambique’s most difficult period in history: the civil war that broke out after its independence. Having published mostly short stories and poetry, it was only after the end of the civil war that Couto felt ready to publish his first novel. During the war, writing was simply impossible as the author found himself in the middle of traumatic events unrolling in front of his own eyes. As Chabal reminds us, at the end of the war Mozambique was “not a country but a land in which people live in search of meaning above and beyond the war which has devastated their lives and sought to obliterate their memory of an earlier life” (Chabal 1996: 82). This “obliteration” of memory is at the core of Couto’s first novel, Terra somnâmbula (1992), but also, in different ways, of Jesusalém (2009), published almost two decades later, where a father (whose wife turns out to have committed suicide) decides to erase the past: he takes his sons to a completely new (yet unknown) location and gives them new names, in order to forget about and wipe out any trace from the past. In 1996, Chabal wrote: Poorly integrated by the Portuguese during the colonial period, badly bruised by the nationalist struggle and torn asunder by civil war since independence, Mozambique is not yet a country in any meaningful sense of the word. Largely shorn of the social cultural attributes of the modern-­state with which Africans could readily identify, Mozambique is itself part reality and part fiction. And as the reality is so often unpalatable, survival entails living firmly in one’s individual fantasy world. (Chabal 1996: 82)

How have things changed in Mozambique since the mid-1990s? While progress has been made in quite a few areas, in many ways

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Mozambicans’ day-­to-­day survival gets priority over long-­term concerns. Social and political unrest, while mostly located in the northern part of the country, have not disappeared. However, Couto’s scepticism concerning international intervention in his country, visible in his early work (e.g. the United Nations’ problematic involvement in Mozambique described in Terra Somnâmbula), has been replaced by a more optimistic embracement of and permeability to foreign ideas (such as gender equality). However, I would like to emphasize that Couto’s work should not – as with any good literature, with the notable exception of most satirical texts – be seen as the author’s explicit political stance. Rather, it sets a horizon for new readings of Mozambique, Africa and global relations, by breaking down established frontiers of genre, language and characterization: Whatever the situation, the characters are inevitably bound up in events, incidents, or actions that are simultaneously within and outside the common range of human experience, beyond the pale of everyday life. The hallmark of Couto’s writing, then, is the ability to present these characters, as though they were perfectly ordinary, as though what they were doing, what was happening to them, was in every respect logical. (Chabal 2004: 109)

Mozambique as wasteland instead of “country” or “nation” understood as a minimal form of a convivial, multiethnic community continues to predominate in Couto’s work as much in the present as in the 1990s. In Jesusalém the echo of Terra Somnâmbula is obvious: in his first novel, war seeks to destroy the last traces of humanity, a space of precarity/ fragility inhabited by the young boy Muidingo and the old Tuhair. Yet, as we will see further, writing becomes for the different characters themselves a therapeutic activity in his later work (e.g. in the novels that will be discussed in this chapter), a place of survival and a liberating force, restoring (partially) the characters’ dignity. As with Mendonça, the autofictional is never far away, especially in A Confissão da leoa. In this chapter I will focus on the sense of “survival” of the characters, which are usually stuck in their limited physical and/or imaginary world. The apparent simplicity of Couto’s work, reinforced by its linguistic playfulness, betrays the first-­time reader. As Hamilton and Huddart point out, Mia Couto does not easily fit into the fashionable term “World literature” as “some kind of disembodied ‘global novelist’” (Hamilton and Huddart 7). Instead, the “undomesticated strangeness of Couto’s oeuvre” (7), but also, as I mentioned earlier, his own background as a white African writer with European roots (his parents were Portuguese) and deep knowledge of Mozambique’s inner rural and urban worlds, make it an

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almost impossible task to attach specific labels to him, with the exception of “Mozambican writer”. However, I wonder whether “strangeness” is an appropriate alternative label here, for it presupposes that there is a corpus of “normal” writing as opposed to “(e)strange(d)” literature. Furthermore, does it make sense to evaluate to what degree Couto is, or is not, an “African writer”? Given his drawing of inspiration from the art of storytelling (i.e. oral literature as an African tradition), the question itself is clearly redundant: “Mia Couto is a Mozambican and there is no reason to presume, other than out of racism, that the colour of his skin, or his Portuguese ancestry, should make it more difficult for him to draw on the culture within which he has grown up” (Chabal 126). Hence I cannot agree more with Chabal’s statement that “Couto has an extraordinarily sharp ear, not just for the concrete expressions heard every day on the streets of Maputo, but also for the linguistic eccentricities of a language that is made of an unexpected blend of colonial Portuguese and the local vernacular(s)” (Chabal 125). In other words, in addition to an “extraordinarily sharp ear”, Couto has a sensibility that is directly connected with his attempt to reveal the “delicacy” and the “intimidade da nossa morada terrestre” (intimacy of our earthly abode) that he refers to in Contos da minha terra. Beyond knowledge of Mozambique’s complex linguistic landscape, his work also shows an extraordinary familiarity with ethnographic and anthropological notions of Mozambican reality, as also becomes clear from my personal interview with the writer (Van Haesendonck 2016b).

Kulumani, the haunted town A confissão da leoa excels through its formal simplicity, yet it shows a complex semantic and linguistic apparatus. Two voices alternate in the form of two different diaries, one by a woman, another by a masculine voice. The first voice is that of Mariamar, a native from Kulumani, the rural village that forms the stage for the novel. Not by coincidence, Mariamar’s name recalls both “the sea” (mar) and “to love” (amar), thus not only expressing her love for the sea, but also the fluidity of her personality and character: “Não te dou apenas um nome – disse – Dou-­te um barco entre mar e amar” (CL 136) (I’m not just giving you a name, he said. I’m giving you a ship to navigate between ocean and devotion). The novel starts when Mariamar relates the aftermath of an attack by a lion which killed her sister, and the burial afterwards, paying special attention to her parents’ reaction to the killing. While her mother Hanifa Assulua (whose name contains the words su[a] lua, “her moon”), reacts in hysterical ways to

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the loss of her daughter, her father Genito Mpepe tries to control his emotions and take precautions: he decides to lock up his daughter to safeguard her from the lions; but also, under pressure from his wife, he decides to protect her from the “people from outside”, including one “caçador mulato” (CL 27) (mulatto hunter) coming from the capital who are summoned by “os do projeto, esses da empresa” (CL 28) (the people from the project, the ones from the company). Thus the anxiety not just of Hanifa and Mpepe but of all the inhabitants of Kulumani is doubled when they hear about this second kind of intruder, briefly described as “the project” and “the company” which has been sent to the region to resolve the problem. Yet Mariamar, locked up in her tiny space, is constantly haunted by her sister’s memory as she remains trapped in her tormented mind, oscillating between feelings of guilt and shame. In later sections of her diary, Mariamar reveals how she had met Arcanjo sixteen years earlier: she had fallen desperately in love with the hunter after he saved her from being raped by Maliqueto Próprio, a local policeman protected by the authorities. The second narrative voice belongs to Arcanjo Baleiro, the “mulatto hunter” Mpepe referred to, who is accompanied by a writer – this is where the autofictional component, or what is in a way the autobiographical yet fictionalized persona of Mia Couto, comes in. Baleiro is sent to Kulumani (phonetically resembling the Mozambican city of Quelimane)2 on a mission to kill lions that endanger the local inhabitants. Not by coincidence, the local hunters distrust Baleiro and organize their own hunt, separately from Baleiro’s, who they do not trust. 2

In the novel, Kulumani is described as a small village, as opposed to the city of “Quelimane”, numbering almost 200,000 inhabitants. A town named Kulumani does exist, but in Southeastern India (in the Tamil Nadu region), numbering around 4,500 inhabitants. Whether the fictional name is a coincidence is not known; at least no immediate historical and cultural link can be established between the two places. Although Mozambique has an important story of migration from India, in A confissão da leoa no characters with an Indian background make their appearance. Also of interest here is that while the origins of the name of Mozambique’s major city Quelimane are unclear, two hypotheses exist: a first version links it to Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 enquired about the name of the place from some inhabitants labouring in the fields outside the settlement. When he asked what they were doing, they would have simply replied “kuliamani” (“we are cultivating”). A second version tells us that “when the Portuguese reached the settlement, they were welcomed by a notable Arab, or half Arab, who acted as interpreter between them and the natives. The name which the Portuguese applied to this individual, and his settlement, was ‘Quelimane’ (pronounced Kelimãn), because in the corrupt Arabic spoken on the East African coast ‘Kalimãn’ is the word for ‘Interpreter’. In KiSwahili it is ‘Mkalimani’” (Briggs 256).

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While the two characters (Arcanjo and Mariamar) only meet towards the end of the novel, their separate diaries constantly refer to their previous encounter. It is through the combination of both perspectives – the memories of both characters who were once lovers – that the dark image of Kulumani emerges. The setting is similar to Jesusalém’s. While the latter was described as a “wasteland”, post-­war Kulumani is described as an “ill” place – paralleling the characters’ condition, which resembles a “cemetery”. According to its administrator, Florindo Makwala, a “snake” has taken control over the village, destroying everything and everybody it meets: Há na aldeia uma serpente que circula pelo silêncio dos tetos e pela lonjura dos caminhos. Essa peçonhenta criatura procura as pessoas felizes para as morder e as envenenar, sem que elas se apercebam nunca. Esta é a razão porque, em Kulumani, todos padecem da mesma infelicidade. Todos têm medo, medo da vida, medo dos amores, medo até dos amigos. (CL 166) (In the village there’s a serpent that moves around over the silence of ceilings and over distant paths. This venomous creature seeks out happy people in order to bite and poison them, without their ever being aware. This is why, in Kulumani, everyone suffers from the same unhappiness. Everyone is scared, scared of life, scared of love, even scared of their friends.)

By his reference to a “snake”, Makwala suggests that Kulumani is threatened by an outside force which is not only embodied by the lions. As we will see, the lion attacks are but a symptom of a more complex postcolonial life, a post-­war landscape where both humanity and animals, as well as their interrelationship, have come under pressure, losing their natural balance. Yet the dark forces that haunt the town are not explicitly revealed. The fragile balance between human beings and animals (and human beings-­as-­animals) appears to have been broken by a kind of spell or evil spirit. However, the novel does not explicitly explain the root causes; instead the text provides clues – as if it were a detective story – which the reader needs to interpret to come up with his own conclusion. A confissão is explicitly drawn from Couto’s real-­life experience as a biologist, as acknowledged in the Author’s Note (“explicação inicial” CL 9–10) at the beginning of the novel. In 2008, Couto carried out fieldwork in the Cabo Delgado region in Northern Mozambique, when twenty persons were attacked by lions over a period of four months. Hunters would be called in order to protect the people and Couto’s colleagues carrying out their fieldwork, thus becoming “um alvo fácil para os felines” (CL 9) (an easy target for the lions). The novel’s story, so the writer himself claims in the author’s note, is thus based on real facts:

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Os caçadores passaram por dois meses de frustração e terror, acudindo a diários pedidos de Socorro até conseguirem matar os leões assassinos. Mas não foram apenas essas dificuldadaes que enfrentaram. De forma permanente lhes era sugerido que os verdadeiros culpados eram habitantes do mundo invisível, onde a espingarda e a bala perdem toda a eficácia. Aos poucos, os caçadores entenderam que os mistérios que enfrentavam eram apenas os sintomas de conflitos sociais que superavam largamente a sua capacidade de resposta. (CL 10) (The hunter underwent two months of frustration and terror, responding to daily calls for help until they managed to kill the murderous lions. But it wasn’t just these difficulties they had to face. It was suggested to them time after time that the real culprits were inhabitants of the invisible world, where rifles and bullets were no use at all. Gradually, the hunters realized that the mysteries they were having to confront were merely symptoms of social conflicts for which they had no adequate solution.)

The events narrated in the novel are indeed based on verifiable events that happened in the region when Couto visited the area. As I will discuss later, this becomes clear, for instance, when comparing A confissão da leoa with other accounts, such as the observations made by Norwegian anthropologist Bjorn Enge Bertelsen, who did fieldwork in the Chimoio region around Gorongosa, the same year as Mia Couto (2008) (Bertelsen 2016). While Mia Couto was in Northern Mozambique to do seismic research, when people started being attacked by lions, it is highly probable that the surge in attacks he witnessed was related to the ones around Chimoio. However, while Couto speaks of a number of attacks which would become increasingly frequent, resulting in up to twenty deaths in a period of approximately four months, the anthropologist speaks of three deaths, all of women. Interestingly, by putting this preliminary note before the actual (fictional) story, Mia Couto creates the effect of a documentary, for it is “inspired by real facts and people” and thus the reader logically looks for clues that allow him to identify the geographical and historical accuracy of places, names and events. However, to look for such parallels would be missing the point: the novel, as I will endeavour to prove here, does not aim for verisimilitude. Nevertheless, while the precision of the spatial coordinates is not so important – as in Couto’s earlier work – the dialectics between local and global should not be neglected, as I will discuss later: Kulumani indeed is a metaphor for globalization’s forgetfulness of the local (African) village. It would be too trivial to say that Mia Couto draws constant inspiration from the world of animals simply because of his interest in issues related to

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animals and nature, that is, because of his official profession as a biologist. Yet the world of animals and what I will call here “animality” as a philosophical concept and way of thinking have come to play an increasingly important role in his work. The extent to which the Mozambican author draws parallels between the human and animal world finds an important parallel in the work of philosophers such as Derrida, Agamben and Deleuze, all of whom have attempted to revalue the place in philosophy of what we commonly call “animals”. Rather than being merely referential, I argue that animals and animality weave the textual tissue of A confissão da leoa, with deep philosophical implications which are thus both “African” (or “pan-­African”) and “universal”. It would not be exaggerated to say that Mia Couto’s world view is strongly influenced by animals, but it is critical to analyse why this is so. Are ecological concerns or other preoccupations at stake? Is the concern the writer’s or his countrymen’s beliefs in the supernatural? And how does this relate to the context of “social conflicts” the author points to in the Author’s Note? Even before the Kulumani hunters start their unofficial hunt, they are being described by Arcanjo Baleiro as bewitched human beings, transmuting into animals: Durante um tempo os homens dançam e, à medida que rodam e saltam, vão perdendo o tino e, em pouco tempo, desatam a urrar, rosnar e sujar os queixos de babas e espumas. Então percebo: aqueles caçadores já não são gente. São leões. Aqueles homens são os próprios animais que pretendem caçar. Aquela praça apenas confirma: a caça uma feitiçaria, a última das autorizadas feitiçarias. CL 160) (The men dance for a little longer, and while they are gyrating and jumping they begin to lose their inhibitions, and soon they are screaming, growling, and soiling their chins with froth and spittle. It’s then that I understand: Those hunters are no longer humans. They are lions. Those men are the very animals they seek to hunt. What’s happening in the square merely confirms this: Hunting is witchcraft, the last piece of witchcraft to be permitted by law.)

While witchcraft is officially not allowed by authorities, hunting is viewed as one of the few surviving local traditions which are officially allowed yet looked at with suspicion, as the administrator Makwala explains. Conscious of their position as outsiders, the hunter, Arcanjo Baleiro, and the writer who accompanies him, Gustavo Regalo, observe with fascination the rituals and witchcraft taking place at the local hunters’ gathering.

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Yet as the story evolves, there seems to be little or no progress in the hunt, the main “event” in the novel. While hunting is initially presented as the principal theme of the novel, the reader is effectively lured into a narrative trap: instead of being the pursuer who follows the action, the reader becomes the pursued. Like the Cortazarian protagonist of the short story “Continuidad de los parques”, the reader who looks for progress in the novel’s action is bound to become disappointed. The action seems to come to a stop, reminding us of an anti-­detective novel whereby the reader realizes that the “whodunit” was a mere trap for the reader. Here, the trap is quite literally the village of Kulumani itself, where the tension builds even though nothing really happens: the narrative stagnation reflects the inhabitants’ lack of any free movement (except at the cost of their lives: as soon as they leave their habitat they will be wounded or killed). For the women in Kulumani, ironically, not much change is on the horizon, for they were already trapped before the attacks started: Mariamar suggests that many were born already dead and continue to “live” as living dead. Significantly, one women in the story, Tandi, the maid of Naftalinda (Governor Makwele’s wife), will effectively become the second victim of the lions (after the killing of Silência, Mariamar’s sister). Having been the victim of gang rape, suffering her first “death” (“Mataram a alma dela, ficou só o corpo” (CL 161) [They killed her spirit, only her body was left]), Tandi was condemned to a second death, this time voluntarily: “Depois de ser violada, a moça [Tinda] tinha-­se convertido num vashilo, um desses seres sonâmbulos que atravessam as noites. Assim, exposta e solitária, ela se entregou à voracidade dos leões. Tandi tinha-­se suiçidado” (189). (After she’d been raped, the girl [Tinda] had turned into a vashilo, one of those beings who sleepwalk through the night. Exposed and alone like this, she surrendered to the voraciousness of the lions. Tandi had committed suicide). Naftalinda then tells about Tandi’s tragic first “death”: how she was punished by the men taking advantage of her for unknowingly having crossed a mvera, the camp where boys undergo the ritual of initiation into adulthood. After she was taken to the local medical post, local authorities refused to make any arrests for the rape, which is seen as something trivial: “Quem, em Kulumani, tem coragem de se erguer contra a tradição?” (161) (Who has the courage in Kulumani to rise up against tradition?). When one night Naftalinda herself suddenly decides – in what appears to be an irrational decision – to walk towards the lions in a nocturnal escape, this appears to be a moment of pure madness; Naftalinda disappears into the night towards the lions, risking death, but is eventually saved by (a wounded) Mariamar. Instead of sheer madness, what we witness in this scene is a conjugation of something the hunter and writer

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experience in various ways: the invertability of the relationship animal–­ human being. Significantly, for the hunter Arcanjo Baleiro the full moon awakens a “felina inquietação” (110) (feline restlessness) in him, similar to Naftalinda’s nightly attraction towards the lions. Naftalinda’s insane move (from a human, rational perspective) of running towards her death is, then, on a metaphorical and philosophical level, a gesture towards embracing absolute alterity, that is, of being “surrounded”, or immersed by, alterity. In the eighth chapter, “Sangue de fera, lágrima de mulher” (Blood of a Beast, a Woman’s Tear), Mariamar’s narrative makes a U-­turn, as often in Mia Couto’s novels, whereby “normality” and “abnormality” switch roles. “Confesso agora o que devia ter anunciado logo do início: eu nunca nasci. Ou melhor: nasci morta” (CL 251)” (I now admit what I should have announced at the beginning: I was never born. Or rather: I was born dead). It is in this next-­to-­last chapter that Mariamar plainly assumes her status of animality/abnormality as alternative to an untimely death, which occurred during an unfinished act of giving birth: “Ainda hoje a minha mãe aguarda pelo meu choro natal” (CL 251) (even now, my mother is still waiting for my birth cry). The most obvious case in the novel of the intertwining of animality and humanity is Mariamar’s transmogrification into a lioness towards the end of the novel, in the last section of her Diary where she confesses her “true nature”, revealing her terrible secret. Mariamar confesses she is, in the wake of Naftalinda’s nocturnal acting-­out, attracted to the lions. Moreover, she is effectively becoming a lion: her plan is to leave with the lions the same night she will have made a major confession about her shapeshifting identity: “Esta noite partirei com os leões. A partir de hoje as aldeias estremecerão com o meu rouco lamento e as corujas, com medo, converter-­se-­ão em aves diurnas” (CL 258). (Tonight I shall leave with the lions. From this day on, the villages will quiver at my raucous lament and the owls, in fear, will turn into daytime birds). Thus, Mariamar, who at first had rejected Naftalinda’s mysterious behaviour, from that moment on starts to increasingly identify with the lions, culminating in her own nightly encounters with the lions and eventual transformation into lioness: “Na realidade, foi o escuro que me revelou o que sempre fui: uma leoa. E isso que sou: uma leoa em corpo de pessoa” (CL 253) (In truth, it was the dark that showed me what I had always been: a lioness. That’s what I am: a lioness in a person’s body.). The confusion of animal and human identities in Couto’s novel, I argue, can be interpreted as a literary, fictionalized “embodiment” in writing of Derrida’s poetic-­philosophical view of the relationship, or symbiosis, between animality and humanity. Derrida elaborated his ideas on animality

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in four key texts: “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, a lecture given by Derrida on Heidegger’s conception of animality; “‘But as for Me, Who Am I (Following)?’”; “And Say the Animal Responded?” and “‘I Don’t Know Why We Are Doing This’” (all included in Derrida 2008). As Berger and Segarra point out, “What Derrida called “la pensée de l’animal” (which can be translated as “thinking concerning the animal” but also as “animal thinking”) is a “poetic” and “prophetic” way of thinking differently about animality and humanity. “‘Animal thinking’ may help us to think of the world – or imagine the possibility of thinking about it – in an unexclusively human fashion” (Berger and Segarra 11). Mariamar believes strongly in the supernatural, through metamorphosis (shapeshifting into an animal) and contact with the voices of the deceased. In the end she is truly convinced of being a lioness: the last part of her Diary is rather confusing, as we witness Mariamar’s transmutation into madness, as well as her performing a kind of “animality”. Gone is all the doubt, remorse and pain of her past traumas. She now claims with pride: “Esta é a minha derradeira voz, estes são os últimos papéis. E aqui deixo escrito com sangue de bicho e lágrima de mulher: fui eu que matei essas mulheres, uma por uma. Sou eu a vengativa leoa” (CL 258) (This is my last speech, my final piece of writing. And what I leave here is written with the blood of a beast and a woman’s tear: I was the one who killed these women, one by one. I am the vengeful lioness). Mariamar refers here to the killing of her siblings which she presumably committed on purpose after their birth, in order to save them from facing a life full of suffering. Therefore, she reflects, killing someone who is already death is neither an evil nor a good thing; rather, it responds to a deep impulse of nature, which dictated within her that she deliver herself to an impossible paradox, to commit sororicide in order to save her sisters from a future of suffering: Agora já não há remorso. Porque, a bem ver, nunca cheguei a matar ninguém. Todas essas mulheres já estavam mortas. Não falavam, não pensavam, não amavam, não sonhavam. De que valia viverem se não podiam ser felizes? (CL 259) (Now there is no more room for remorse. Because, when I reflect clearly on it, I never killed anyone. All those women were already dead. They didn’t speak, they didn’t think, they didn’t love, they didn’t dream. What was the point of living if they couldn’t be happy?)

Siblicide is, as Salmon and Hehman argue, “more frequent in nonhumans and yet shares many of the same root causes. Siblicide is rare in humans, not surprisingly as it is the most extreme expression of sibling competition” (Salmon and Hehman 138); however, it is not as common

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among human beings as it is among animals.3 But how to understand siblicide in the novel, if not from a mixed human–­animal perspective? The double edge of “tradição” becomes visible: on the one hand, women are victims of unspeakable violence from men – whether systemic violence within society or violent acts committed randomly – as no effective sanctions or punishment by authorities take place; on the other, there is doubtless a continuation of endemic violence within the patriarchal system. Of course, from a purely psychoanalytic perspective (i.e. a classical “Western” point of view) Naftalinda and Mariamar’s “irrational behaviour” can be explained by their lack of representation in the symbolical order: According to Tazi-­Preve, the hysterical subject tries to attain symbolic independence in a patriarchal culture in which female bonding with the mother has no symbolic tradition (Tazi-­Preve 158). While the border between madness, hysteria and other psychotic positions is not thin, what is at stake in all of these conditions is the relationship between the “real” and a symbolic order which the subject perceives as problematic or unbearable. Rather than the psychological hallucinations of one particular character, I argue, almost all characters in the novel are haunted by the condition, conscious or unconscious, of becoming animals. Arcanjo Baleiro undergoes a similar experience, yet in very different circumstances. The hunter is suddenly taken by surprise by the lioness’s gaze, triggering a moment of estrangement, reminding us of Cortázar’s Axolotl, whereby the animal appropriates the human features of the observer. In another passage the hunter recalls his missed opportunity of killing the lioness: Mas eis que, de repente, a leoa suspende a carga. Surpreende-­a, quem sabe, não me ver correr, espavorido. Está frente a mim, com os seus olhos presos nos meus. Estranha-­me. Não sou quem ela espera. No mesmo instante deixa de ser leoa. Quando se retira já transitou de existência. Já não é sequer criatura. (CL 181) (But lo and behold, suddenly the lioness stops her onward rush. Who knows, maybe she is surprised not to see me run away, terrified. She stops in front of me, her eyes fixed on mine. She is puzzled by me. I’m not what she expected. At that same moment, she ceases to be a lioness. When she withdraws, she has already left her existence. She is no longer a living creature.)

Arcanjo’s eyes are captivated by the lion’s gaze, undergoing a moment of estrangement, which triggers an “anthropomorphization” of the 3



Siblicide is fairly common among hyenas in the Serengeti, for instance. Among Black Eagles, facultative siblicide is frequent, i.e. the killing of siblings when resources are scarce, in order to secure the survival of at least one of the nest (see e.g. Buss, Duntley, Shackelford and Hansen).

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animal, which stops being lioness, even stops being a “creature”, and simultaneously triggers an “animalization” of the hunter. “A leoa continua enfrentando-­me, medindo-­me a alma. Há uma luz divina nos seus olhos. Ocorre-­me o mais estranho dos pensamentos: que em algum lugar já havia contemplado aqueles olhos capazes de hipnotizar um cego“ (CL 182) (The lioness continues before me, appraising my soul. There is a divine light in her eyes. I am beset by the strangest of thoughts: that somewhere, I have already contemplated those eyes that seem capable of hypnotizing a blind man). Baleiro gets caught up in a dream-­state in which he becomes the pursued one, gaining life only after having been killed by these “brave creatures” (CL 182), thus confirming Derrida’s hypothesis that the animal always comes before the human being: Sou o oposto do caçador tradicional que, de véspera, sonha o animal que vai matar. No meu caso, sonho-­me a mim mesmo, ganhando vida apenas depois de ter sido morto por bravias criaturas. Essas feras são agora os meus monstros privados, a minha mais dileta criação. Nunca mais deixarão de ser meus, nunca mais deixarão de passear pelas minhas noites. Porque afinal, sou eu o seu domesticado prisioneiro. (CL 182) (I’m the opposite of the traditional hunter who, the night before, dreams of the animal he’s going to kill. In my case, I dream of myself, gaining life only after having been killed by the creatures of the wild. These beasts are now my private monsters, my favorite works of creation. They will never cease to be mine, never stop moving through my dreams. Because I am, after all, their docile prisoner.)

Instead, who is being looked at is the observer himself, reminding one of Lacan’s experience of the gaze; echoing Derrida, the theorist of psychoanalysis suddenly feels, during a boat trip, that he is being looked at by a floating can that is “looking” at him. This “point lumineux” (point of light), in turn, triggers in Lacan a sensation of nothingness, the point of departure for writing his theory of the gaze (le regard). It is the point from which the Other’s gaze looks at me, prior to me looking back at him. “In a sense”, Lacan said, “it [the can] was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated” (Lacan 95). Arcanjo suggests he is having a posthumous experience: seeing himself from the animal’s perspective, becoming alive after having been “killed” by the lioness. The hunter-­pursuer has thus become the pursued one, ending up being captured by the lioness’s gaze. Rather than a “magical realist” experience, Derrida offers a possible explanation for this moment of confusion and estrangement. Although Derrida’s reflection on animality is anchored in an empirical experience

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he had in the presence of his cat, some important similarities are at stake. A simple observation of his cat looking back at him sparks a reflection on the “absolute alterity”: The animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of me – I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-­there-­before-­ me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself – it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next(-door) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat? What is at stake in these questions? (Derrida 2008: 11)

Hence, for Derrida, the animal’s gaze has a crucial effect on the human observer, an experience which to a certain extent reminds one of Lacan’s theory of the gaze: “However, there I am naked under the gaze of what they call ‘animal’, and a fictitious tableau is played out in my imagination, a sort of classification after Linnaeus, a taxonomy of the point of view of animals” (Derrida 2008: 13). While Lacan experiences a feeling of le néant (nothingness), Derrida’s “insane” experience of “the gaze called animal” even provides him with a glimpse of the apocalypse: As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of nakedness, under the gaze of the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself that is to say the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict. I am (following) it, the apocalypse, I identify with it by running behind it, after it, after its whole zoology. (Derrida 2008: 380)

Even though Derrida’s text “L’Animal que donc je suis” (“The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”) is not directly about hunting, the first-­person form of suivre, “je suis”, in the title means both “to be”, and “to follow”. Derrida’s text is, as the title of his essay indicates, about “the animal that therefore he is”, thus a straightforward allusion – even parody to some extent – of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”). More particularly, hunting is a human activity where “following” is at the core: in its classical “human” conception, the hunter follows the

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animal, which is thus the followed one, at least from a “human”, rational perspective. It goes without saying that the opposition hunter (follower) vs animal (followed) has many analogies: master/slave, colonizer/colonized, white/black, repressor/repressed, and so on. Derrida, in his classical gesture, turns the pre-­established, hierarchical relation upside down, suggesting that the human observer is, in fact, being “looked at”, thus being exposed by the animal’s gaze. A “rational” approach to Derrida’s experience calls for the legitimate question: is the philosopher performing an exercise in imagination, or is he to some extent himself engaged in an apocalyptic game, that is, in enacting some form of insanity? Indeed, referring to an episode in Alice in Wonderland, Derrida (2008) describes the very experience as maddening, in a rather positive sense of entering a pre-­Cartesian state of “animal thinking”: Who comes before and who is after whom? I no longer know which end my head is. Madness: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” I no longer know how to respond, or even to respond to the question that compels me or asks me who I am (following) or after whom I am (following), but am so as I am running [et suis ainsi en train de courir]. To follow and to be after will not only be the question, and the question of what we call the animal. We shall discover in the follow-­through the question of the question, that which begins by wondering what to respond means and whether an animal (but which one?) ever replies in its own name. And by wondering whether one can answer for what “I am (following)” means when that seems to necessitate an “I am inasmuch as I am after [après] the animal” or “I am inasmuch as I am alongside [auprès] the animal.” (Derrida 2008: 10)

In the novel, the ultimate “confession” is that the reader is “being looked at” by the lion itself (i.e. the void of the absolute Other). As Derrida argues, the question of “being-­in-­the-­world” radically connects us with issues of our understanding of and being understood by the other: One doesn’t need to be an expert to foresee that they involve thinking about what is meant by living, speaking, dying, being, and world as in being-­in-­the-­world or being-­within-­the-­world, or being-­with, being-­before, being-­behind, being-­after, being and following, being followed or being following, there where I am, in one way or another, but unimpeachably, near what they call the animal. It is too late to deny it, it will have been there before me who is (following) after it. After and near what they call the animal and with it – whether we want it or not, and whatever we do about this thing. (Derrida 2008: 11)

One could go a step further and conclude that the ultimate malaise in the novel is that the reader is removed from his comfortable position

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of spectator, and being forced into the uncomfortable position of the animal being looked at. It goes without saying that Derrida’s “being-­in-­ the-­world” reminds us of Sartre’s existentialist “être-­dans-­le-­monde”, the idea of the absolute contingency of the world; in his L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre stated that human beings are condemned to be free: “Nous sommes seuls, sans excuses. C’est ce que j’exprimerai en disant que l’homme est condamné à être libre; condamné parce qu’il ne s’est pas lui créé lui-­même, et par ailleurs cependant libre parce qu’une fois jeté dans le monde, il est responsable de tout ce qu’il fait” (Sartre 37). (We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does). The human awareness of discovering one’s animality and solitude turns the individual’s perception of his self-­constructed world upside down. Finally, it should be noted that, besides Derrida, other philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Agamben have also theorized about animality and the idea of “becoming” an animal; they “have written about (the) becoming-­animal. Derrida writes the becoming-­animal, writes it into a turning-­animal”. Couto, then, undertakes a similar initiative on the literary level.4 In order to come to a fuller understanding of Couto’s weaving of animality into the human fabric of his characters, we should attempt to go beyond the philosophical interpretation of the novel being a celebration of humanity as a “postmodern” and “open” configuration. Couto’s work must be viewed as strongly rooted in a Mozambican context, as can be proved through anthropological insights.

Transmogrification: an anthropological reading According to the philosopher Roger Scruton, “In the hunt, therefore, are revived, in transfigured form, some of the long-­buried emotions of our forebears. The reverence for a species, expressed through the pursuit of its ‘incarnate’ instance; the side-­by-­sideness of the tribal hunts-­man; the claim to territory and the animals who live in it; and the therapy for guilt 4

Significantly, Derrida also coined the term animot, in order to do justice to the exclusion of animals from philosophy: The word “animot” is thought of as a way of introducing the world of “word(s)” (mot(s) in French), from which animals are said to be excluded. It is also a way of erasing the harm (the “mal” present in the word animal) done to animals by speaking of them in the singular, “the animal” (because animot is a homophone of the French plural “animaux” for “animals”) (Berger and Segarra 13).

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involved in guiltless killing” (Scruton 1997: 479–80). Mia Couto’s own position as an (autofictional) writer is one of in-­betweenness: he oscillates between a (post)modern, fluid psychoanalytical perspective (which consists in differentiating between rational and irrational/unconscious behaviour) and a more traditional, “African” perspective which brings forward local, supernatural beliefs. In the novel, there is a challenging of the writer’s own narrative authority: in the end, the question that the reader asks is: Who writes about (or with) whom? Who follows whom? Is the text based on Gustavo’s notes or are we following Baleiro’s Diary? The hunter frequently catches Gustavo sneaking into his diary, but he seems to like the idea; in any case it never bothers him to the point of hiding his notes to the writer. Instead of being two separate writers, Baleiro the narrator suggests that the manuscript we are reading might have been produced by one and the same narrative voice. In the end, he suggests, does it matter which of the two wrote what? Instead, what matters is, once again, the confusion and transmutation of identities: “O escritor está na sala, trabalhando. Reparo que continua espreitando os meus caóticos papéis. Já não me importo. Também eu leio os cadernos dele e até lhe roubo umas frases. Começo, em troca, a ganhar o tardio gosto de escrever. Qualquer coisa na escrita me sugere o prazer da caça: no vazio da página se ocultam infinitos sobressaltos e espantos” (CL 211) (The writer is in the living room, working. I notice he keeps peering at my chaotic papers. I don’t care any more. I also read his notebooks and even steal the odd sentence of his. On the other hand, I’m beginning to get a somewhat tardy taste for writing. Something about the act of writing suggests the pleasure of hunting to me. In the emptiness of the page, there are infinite shocks and surprised concealed). When in the last chapter the hunter once again catches Gustavo reading his diary, he asks him if it is worth reading. Gustavo responds: “– Escute, eu sou escritor, sei avaliar: quem escreve assim não precisa caçar” (CL 264) (Listen, I’m a writer, I know how to judge: Whoever writes like this doesn’t need to hunt) eu sou escritor, sei avaliar: quem escreve assim não precisa caçar” (264). Stunned by the compliment, Arcanjo reacts with a radical proposal of switching their supposedly fixed roles of being either writer or hunter: – Afinal, não trocamos? Você caça e eu escrevo? – Você deu-­me o que, na caça, está antes da espingarda. (CL 264) (– So can’t we exchange? You hunt and I’ll write. – You’ve given me what comes before the gun in hunting.)

The autofictional mode of writing becomes more explicit, as we see, as in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the author as a sum of two

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characters: a writer-­hunter, for in the end, both activities, so we learn, are part of the same ontological and existential dynamics. Gustavo, a kind of alter ego of Mia Couto, increasingly acquires the identity of the hunter, and vice versa. Moreover, the analogy established by the “writer” Arcanjo between the seemingly opposed activities of “writing” and “hunting” reinforces that idea: the activity of writing is described as an unpredictable one. Just like our expectation/conception of humanity versus animality, the binaries of rational (mind) versus physical (body) are being questioned. The theme of hunting is thus closely related to Couto’s deeper, philosophical, literary and existential concerns. These concerns are embedded in African beliefs which are often hard to grasp for the non-­initiated reader. I hesitate, though, to call these Mozambican traditional beliefs, for “Tradition”, especially in an African and Caribbean context, has too often been interpreted as the sharp opposite of (Western) “Modernity”. The second theme that I have been discussing, animality, emerges from that African context. However, as I have emphasized earlier, there are interesting links with “Western” philosophers, and Derrida is one case in point; therefore we should be careful about “Africanizing” Couto’s work as much as we should resist the temptation to see him as a European writer with a strong European inclination. Rather, it is the hybridity of both worlds (Mozambican African with strong European influences) that makes his work so attractive. However, recent anthropological findings are extremely helpful in placing the “turning animal” in a specific Mozambican and African context. In his recent study, Violent Becomings. State Formation, Sociality and Power in Mozambique (2016), Bjorn Enge Bertelsen describes his fieldwork carried out in 2008 in the city of Chimoio, in the Northwestern part of Mozambique. While more southern than Cabo Delgado, the province where Mia Couto worked as a biologist (as he points on in the “author’s note”), the analogies are more than striking. In a similar account to Mia Couto’s informing the reader about the true events upon which the novel is based, Bertelsen describes how during his fieldwork three women in Honde were fatally attacked by lions. Significantly, the news was placed in a political framework, for the attacks served to bolster RENAMO’s “war of the spirits” against the FRELIMO state form – a war where the former’s “particular sociopolitical force was premised on its self-­styled protective role vis-­à-vis the traditional field” (Bertelsen 108).5 5



By “traditional field” Bertelsen understands an “unruly and contested domain of the social”. The anthropologist’s use of the term “traditional field” is interesting, since he gives it a more open meaning than the term “tradition”, which in Mozambique resonates with the ideologically charged term tradição, which in Mozambique is often

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More specifically, Bertelsen explores the “rural–­urban continuum of Honde and Chimoio to trace specific instances of deterritorialization” (Bertelsen 91). What interests me particularly is how the anthropologist moves to conceptualize what he calls “man-­animality” in the context of the tensions that have been running through Mozambican society’s veins since independence. Strikingly, the locals’ perception of the leão tradicional, or mhondoro as they also call him, is in tune with Couto’s view of animality exposed in A confissão da leoa: The term mhondoro in its basic Shona [language] sense means “lion” but more commonly refers to “a spirit of a deceased person of eminence held to reside in the body of a lion when not communicating from time to time with the living through an accredited human medium – socially recognized as a source of supernatural power, authority and sanctions,” as Abraham defined it (1966: 28). In more ways than one, the mhondoro is the supreme entity coalescing the various ways in which nkika, the traditional field, and its beings – both human and animal – are integrated. The mhondoro or “traditional lion” (leão tradicional), as people in Honde and Chimoio often call it, differs in terms of capacity and orientation from what people recognize as and call “natural lions”. Often called shumba or leão natural in Portuguese, this type of lion is seen to be dangerous and potentially lethal. However, the ferocity and predatory being of the shumba can always be resisted and evaded by eliciting the services of a traditional healer (n’anga) and engaging traditional ways of protecting one’s body and belongings. A critical distinction is made, however, between the Shumba and two other capacities and shapes the lion may take – both of which are generally termed mhondoro dwozutumua. Both shapes comprise “traditional lions” in the sense of being nonnatural in origin and spirit if not in guise. (Bertelsen 103)

Similarly, in the novel, three types of lions are said to live around Kulumani. In a village meeting, the men agree that all three existing lions are real: “há o leão-­do-­mato que aqui se chama de ntumi va kuvapila; há o leão-­fabricado, a quem apelidam de ntumi ku lambi-­dyanga; e há os leões-­ pessoas, chamados de ntumi va vanu” (124) (There is the lion-­of-­bush which is here called ntumi va kuvapila; There is the lion-­brewed, whom they call ntumi ku lambi-­dyanga; And there are lions-­people, called ntumi used to denote a number of official issues, such as formal authority of traditional leaders or ceremonies to hail the president, pre-­colonial idealized moral or cultural orders. (Bertelsen 17–18). Moreover, Bertelsen argues that “a social reordering through processes of de- and reterritorialization is central to state dynamics, and that in the case of Mozambique this also targeted the traditional field in both rural and urban settings” (Bertelsen 265).

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va vanu [my translation]).This tripartition roughly corresponds with the distinction made between mhondoro or “spirit lion”, “i.e. a lion possessed by chiefly or other ancestral spirits”, and the mhondoro dwozutumua, which is a “spirit lion” which has two possible shapes (not explained further by Bertelsen), has violent, “destructive purposes”, and is “sometimes alleged to be created by sorcerous means” (Bertelsen xxi). According to the anthropologist, following the May 2008 lion attacks people in the village “speculated in conversations revolving around past and present contested political and social issues” (Bertelsen 103). While the evil, destructive mhondoro dwozutumua reappeared, devouring three women, the benign mhondoro in turn had been deterritorialized: its disappearance would have been ascribed to “the colonial state, the FRELIMO state, and the RENAMO war machine” (Bertelsen 108). Moreover, the mhondoro, Bertelsen explains, is a “practical example of the dislocating forces of violence and the encroaching colonial state” (Bertelsen 114). Colonial and postcolonial violence are thus intertwined in contemporary Mozambique, and are crucial for understanding not only processes of state formation, but also, I argue, the country’s struggle with the problem of cultural identity. What is at stake, then, in the broader Mozambican political context, is a dislocation of the position of the protective lion as a “force and guardian spirit” (113); the mwondoro or “spirit lion” as a medium has become jeopardized under FRELIMO and RENAMO’s violent pressures, as well as through international involvement: the inhabitants of Chimoio “experienced themselves as vulnerable to the ferociousness of mwondoro dwozutumua”, unleashed through the growing tensions in the regions, which Bertelsen defines in terms of deterritorialization (by FRELIMO’s modernization) and reterritorialization (by RENAMO’s emphasis on ancestral dynamics or tradição). While RENAMO seeks to gather support through the accommodation of ancestral beliefs, FRELIMO’s interventions were perceived as a “deterritorializing attack on what they perceived as tradição”: they made the inhabitants of Chimoio feel vulnerable to the “evil lion” or mhondoro dwozutumua. The anthropologist cites another event, more recent but not less relevant, of how transmogrification into animals is deeply rooted in the popular imaginary of Mozambique, to the point that it occasionally reaches mainstream media. It is worth citing the event at length, in order to show the entanglement of both spheres that are popularly known as the “supernatural” or “magic” and the “real”:

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On 29 September 2015 a motorcade comprising a number of cars holding Afonso Dhlakama, his aides, and soldiers drove along a main road from Chimoio in central Mozambique toward the city of Nampula when they were attacked – apparently by the forces of the Mozambican state. Dhlakama, the long-­term leader of RENAMO, the country’s largest opposition party, had just spoken at a rally in Chimoio. The attack left a number of people dead, but Dhlakama himself allegedly escaped quite spectacularly: He transmogrified into a bird, a partridge – the symbol of his party RENAMO – spread his wings, and flew off. (Bertelsen 1)

What is key, then, is the entanglement of areas that the Western mind would typically approach as separate or even opposite realms: the supranatural (“magic”) and the empirical (“real”). Both realms are closely linked to a third one, the political realm: “The transformative capacity of Dhlakama underlined not so much sorcery as the multiple and intimate connections between political formations, territory, and human–­animal interaction and transmogrification” (Bertelsen 110). The ability of RENAMO’s frontman Dhlakama to appropriate man–­animality features, to shape-­shift into a partridge [perdiz], thus “embodies flight and mobility as powerful capacities in defiance of state apparatuses of capture” (111). In short, whether the Chimoio lion attacks were directly related to the killings that happened during Couto’s fieldwork in Cabo Delgado is unknown, yet the Chimoio context is very similar, to the point that it helps to shed light on the events that inspired the writer. Couto is careful in not providing too many geographical coordinates: not only are too many details irrelevant for the fictionalized version of the events, but they would also diminish the universal appeal of his work, which is read around the world. In spite of the multiple ambiguities and confusion of identities detected in A confissão da leoa, animality has altogether a much more positive connotation in the novel than in Couto’s early work, especially Terra Sonâmbola, which ended – it is worth recalling here – with a spirit medium proposing “Aceitemos morrer como gente que já não somos. Deixai que morra o animal em que esta Guerra nos converteu” (TS 328) (We must accept to die as people which we no longer are. Let the animal into which this war has converted us die). “Animal” in his early novel, contrary to his later work, thus bore a primarily negative connotation, in the sense of a primitive, de-­humanized being. Finally, if no specific spatial (geographic) coordinates are given in A Confissão, if no specific time coordinates are being provided, this is likely the author’s intention. Instead of “Maputo” we are vaguely informed

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about Arcanjo and Gustavo as people coming from “the capital” (CL 12). Through the subordinating of spatial referentiality to the linguistic, poetic and the emotional aspects, the identification with both characters and locations is expanded. The lack of spatial and chronological referentiality in Couto’s work runs parallel to the lack of a plot. If in Terra Sonâmbola “there is no plot, there is no story as such”, as Chabal (82) reminds us, this is true for most of his novels. I argue that in A confissão da leoa, as well as in its predecessor Jesusalém, we are dealing with a similar post-­independence setting to that in Couto’s first novel. The reader is placed amid a common setting: the Mozambican wasteland in which the characters live, or rather attempt to survive. Yet it is not only the lack of time–­space references, but an “openness” that challenges the reader.

Jesusalém, or the postcolonial wasteland Whoever approaches Mia Couto’s work for the first time might be frustrated by what Chabal calls its lack of “closure”, in the sense that it skews a real plot via increasing and decreasing drama between its characters. Moreover, the topics of Mia Couto’s novels happen to be astonishingly dark and pessimistic, suggesting that the characters drawn have little hope for deliverance from the painful situation they are suffering. However, the simplicity of expression and the poetic quality of Couto’s writing guide the reader through the darkness, always providing us with a spark of hope, a minimum of light at the end of the metaphoric tunnel. Terra somnâmbula set the tone for his later work, depicting a war-­torn country where little or no humanity is left. This image of Mozambique as (in)human wasteland instead of a convivial country or “imagined community” (Andersen 1991) continues to predominate in Couto’s work as much as it did in the 1990s. As a consequence, “the novel [Terra somnâmbula] is thus an attempt both to recover some cultural memory and to create a consciousness of the present as a memory for the future” (Chabal 1996: 82). The image of the country in ruins resurfaces in Jesusalém, which resembles Confession of a Lioness and other novels in making the plot secondary to the evocation of a poetic atmosphere. However, the emphasis in the latter is less (explicitly) on the consequences of war. In Jesusalém (translated by David Brookshaw as “Jezoosalem”), by contrast, the apocalyptic setting of Jesusalem, the (imaginary) location where the novel takes place, is – like O Reino das Casuarinas – the stage for characters who are a direct result of past war trauma. Jesusalém (A Tuner of Silences) is about a young boy, Mwanito, who spends his days on an unnamed

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Mozambican ermo (J 10) or wasteland, surrounded by the social and moral ruin of postcolonial Mozambique. Mwanito is also the narrator: A primeira vez que vi uma mulher tinha onze anos e me surpreendi subitamente tão desarmado que desabei em lágrimas. Eu vivia num ermo habitado apenas por cinco homens. Meu paid era um nome ao lugarejo. Simplesemente chamado assim: “Jesusalém”. Aquela era a terra onde Jesus haveria de se descrucificar. E pronto, final. (J 10) (I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears. I lived in a wasteland inhabited only by five men. My father had given the place a name. It was called, quite simply, Jezoosalem. It was the land where Jesus would uncrucify himself. And that was the end of the matter, full stop.)

The characters, who are made to believe by Mwanito’s father (Silvestre Vitalício) that the apocalypse took place, are in need of finding an objective in their lives, but also of restoring a (minimal) sense of harmony with their environment. Removed from the warmth of their parental home, and after the sudden death of their mother, Mwanito and his brother were taken by their father to Jesusalém, a place he founded in a wasteland far away from the city, where he governs with an iron hand. As time goes by and the brothers grow up, they start questioning the “reality” created by the father. After the “foundation” of Jesusalém Silvestre had declared himself the dictator of a loosely connected group of estranged members: besides Mwanito’s brother Ntunzi, the inhabitants of Jesusalém consist of his uncle Aproximado and Zacaria Kalash, an ex-­soldier who is a loyal friend and servant of Silvestre and who drags his weapon around wherever he goes, reflecting his name (echoing the name of one of the deadliest known weapons, the Kalashnikov). As a matter of fact (and significantly), the characters are not allowed to refer to one another by their real names, in order to avoid any reference to the past. In spite of the alienating circumstances and desert environment, Mwanito becomes conscious of his “vocation”: to be an afinador de silêncios, a “tuner of silences”. Yet the fragile social and political order of Jesusalém is shaken up with the arrival of Marta, a young Portuguese woman who reaches the place with the pretext of photographing the environment, more particularly of capturing the beauty of the local egrets, but in fact seeks to mourn her lost love Marcelo, whom she had met in Mozambique. As Mwanito becomes older, his father becomes increasingly insane and paranoid towards visitors like Marta, in whom he quickly loses trust and who he at one point even gives orders to assassinate. Instead of

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becoming a rebel and leaving the place, like his brother Ntunzi (who even at some point plans to kill his father but later changes his mind), Mwanito becomes a kind of mediator within Jesusalém, “tecia os delicados fios com que se fabrica a quietude. Eu era um afinador de silêncios” (J 12) (I wove together the delicate threads out of which quiescence is made. I was the tuner of silences). When Silvestre gives the order for killing Marta, in order to get rid of her once and for all, Ntunzi opts to kill instead their father’s beloved donkey, Jezebel, as an act of revenge. Mwanito, who is the only member to win and keep Silvestre’s total respect, is indeed capable of turning his cohabitants, all of whom have become estranged, self-­centred and solitary “I-­lands”, into a more convivial setting, as they engage in (albeit difficult) dialogues. Jesusalém is, significantly, described as the place where Jesus would “uncrucify himself ” (10): the novel’s biblical connotation evokes the analogy with the figure of Jesus as bearing the cross, yet Couto inverts the original version: if some symbolic “un-­crucifixion” and resurrection has to take place, it has to come from Mwanito’s act of survival through writing. While keeping silent in presence of his father, he creates his own voice through the writing of a manuscript titled Jesusalém, which he eventually presents to his brother “como meu único e derradeiro pertence” (J 284) (as my final and only belonging). The narrative thus comes full circle: as in O Reino das Casuarinas, we are dealing here with a fish-­bites-­its-­own-­ tail narrative, even though in terms of the plot there is no closure. And like Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s hospitalillo, Jesusalém is not a place of joy, but rather a retreat where a small group of survivors licks its wounds from the past. All characters, including the young boy, are deeply scarred by the past, yet they are all unable or unwilling to explain their scars. The brothers’ longing for a lost (maternal) object translates into their obsession with the two women who stay in Jesusalém (Noci and Marta). Dordalma, Mwanito’s dead mother and Silvestre’s wife, whose name time and again secretly circulates in the patriarch’s house, haunts Mwanito and Ntunzi in very different ways, yet with the same effect: Mwanito seeks to reconstruct the memory of his mother through his friendship with Marta, while Ntunzi attempts to reconnect regain affection by attempting to establish a (failed) sexual connection with the Portuguese woman. In short, Dordalma’s ghost is everywhere in Jesusalém, the more so since her name is taboo, both among those who wish to forget about her (Silvestre and Zacaria) and among the brothers who wish to remember her (but cannot). Significantly, Mwanito feels like an “emigrante dum lugar sem nome, sem geografía, sem história” (J 21) (emigrant coming from a place without a name, geography or history). The unknown city Silvestre Vitalício fled from

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indeed remains unnamed. That city, the place of the mother’s suicide (as is revealed towards the end of the novel), embodies the traumatic puncture, the repressed real that is bound to return and challenge the fragile symbolic order invented by the father. The lesson here is straightforward: memory cannot be wiped out, it is the very substance of what we are, of our identity. The silences of repressed memories always seek a way out, until they are in tune with the symbolic world.

Tuning silences If Mwanito embodies silence, one has to ask where this emphasis on silence in the novel comes from. In post-­war literature, the poetics of silence was increasingly important, especially among the so-­called key playwrights of the “theatre of the absurd” such as Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, but also in the poetry of a Paul Celan (Franke 2013). In Pinter’s work, such as The Room (1957), through his most recent work, Silence (1969), Pinter has created a new poetic, in which the real presence, silence, communicates – reflecting fears of real people searching for basic human needs. In Jesusalém, Mwanito fulfills a similar role as the void we find in Waiting for Godot: to fill up/saturate a void left behind: – Venha aqui, Mwanito. Eu estou carecido de um silêncio. (J 186; italics in the original) (– Come here Mwanito. I feel a need for a bit of silence.)

At the end of the novel we find an intertextual reference to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, when his brother Ntunzi reads out loud a letter with father Silvestre’s last words. In that letter, the father proceeds to a confession in which he assumes guilt and fear as the reason why he escaped the city and his old self: Estou assim falecente por causa desta traiçoeira viagem. A fronteira entre Jesusalém e a cidade não foi nunca traçada pela distância. O medo e a culpa foram a única fronteira. Nenhum governo do mundo manda mais que o medo e a culpa. A culpa me fez fugir de mim, desabitado de memórias. Era isso Jesusalém: não um lugar mas a espera de um Deus que estivesse ainda por nascer. Só esse Deus me aliviara de um castigo que a mim mesmo havia imposto. Contudo, só agora eu entendi: meus dois filhos, só eles podem trazer esse perdão. (J 284) (I am in the process of dying because of that perfidious journey. The frontier between Jezoosalem and he city wasn’t based on distance. Fear and guilt were

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the only frontier. No government in the world is more oppressive than fear and guilt. Fear made me live, humble and withdrawn. Guilt caused me to flee myself, empty of memories. This is what Jezoosalem was: it wasn’t a place but a time of waiting for a God to be born. Only such a God would alleviate the punishment that I had imposed on myself. Yes, only now do I understand: my sons, my two sons, only they can bring me that sense of forgiveness.)

As in A confissão da leoa, Jesusalém thus ends with a confession, this time by Silvestre, who confesses to having been led by fear and guilt, and looking for forgiveness from his sons for the absurd – Beckettian – situation that he had put them into. Jesusalem, we learn, was not a place created out of revenge but a result of the father’s sense of guilt, a punishment he had imposed on himself; mistakenly yet unconsciously he dragged his sons into his emotional and physical wasteland. Vitalicio’s castigo or punishment for the committed mistake, he reflects, is like waiting for a God that has yet “to be born”. Beckett gave this undefined act of pointless, nonsensical waiting a name: “waiting for Godot”. Mwanito and the other inhabitants of Jesusalém indeed remind us of Estragon and Vladimir’s loitering by the withered tree, waiting for salvation, which never comes. However, Mwanito, contrary to Beckett’s characters, looks for inner force to find a way out of the claustrophobic place, a force which, like Arcanjo Baleiro in A confissão da leoa and Nkuku in O Reino das Casuarinas, he eventually finds in writing. Mwanito’s writing about Jesusalem, instead of looking to take revenge upon the patriarch, seeks then to reconcile with the father. Instead of revenge, his “tuning of silences” is an act of love and hope. I would like to end this chapter with the recurrent, tragic image of the child who is “born death”, which, like Mariamar, time and again returns in the characters we have seen in Couto’s novels: the problematic condition of “living death”, or “being born death” that connects Mwanito in Jesusalem and the women in A confissão da leoa (Mariamar being its clearest example) bears an interesting comparison in Caribbean writing, namely with Trinidadian author Robert Antoni´s second novel, Blessed is the Fruit (1997). More particularly, the very name “Jesusalem” is not by coincidence referring to a place that oscillates between the sacred and the profane; it is the place where “Jesus would uncrucify himself ”: the creation of Jesusalem is a desperate attempt to survive in a desacralized world. Likewise, Antoni’s novel emphasizes the “blessed” body of the Bolom as a sacred body which becomes desecralized. The title Blessed Is the Fruit comes from the Christian prayer “Holy Mary full of grace”. This prayer, that already appeared in Antoni’s first novel, Divine Trace (1991), returns here as the epigraph of the novel, but

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it has been significantly changed. The changed version goes as follows: “Holy Mary full of grace the lord is with thee blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now, now at the hour of our, of our … life …” By changing the last word of the original prayer (“now at the hour of our life …”, which normally reads “now at the hour of our death”), Antoni changes the original meaning of the prayer. The title refers, then, to the womb’s fruit, the foetus, and gives it a sacred character. As in Couto’s work the dialectics between life and death (and their unpredictable confusion, in uncanny ways) is at the core of Antoni’s work. The storyline in Antoni’s work is, like Jesusalém, as dramatic as straightforward: Blessed Is the Fruit tells the story of two women, Lilla and Velma, also referred to as Lil and Vel (significantly, the juxtaposition of the first letters of their names form the word “Live”). Both women live on the (fictitious) island of Corpus Cristi, in a colonial mansion in ruins, where Velma has been working for years as Lilla’s servant. As in A confissão da leoa, each of the main characters is the two narrative voices. Their personal familial relationships are deeply unstable, violent and traumatic, and could best be described as “a genealogy of exploitation and abuse” (Matos 2004). The relationship between Lilla and Velma is profound, however. Velma hides her pregnancy for her mistress: she binds her belly because she is scared that she will lose her job if her pregnancy is discovered. In a desperate attempt to kill the child, Velma wounds herself and the foetus badly, but both survive in what could be called a miraculous way. From the very beginning, the novel draws a rigid dual social and racial scheme: Lilla is white and from a wealthy background, Vel is black and poor and was unable to enjoy any education. Things change dramatically when Vel gets pregnant. Indeed, Vel tries to hide her pregnancy from the eyes of her mistress, and then to abort the child using drugs, bush medicine and Obeah magic. All of her four previous pregnancies ended in a similar tragic way. This time, however, the attempt at abortion fails. The foetus, referred to as Bolom, survives, and, as in Couto’s novels, it is not clear how exactly the story continues – in other words, we are dealing once more with an open ending. That open ending is significant: rather than a story, Blessed Is the Fruit, like Couto’s novels, presents itself as a sequence of images where the poetic evocation is more important than the plot. In addition, the story begins and ends in the same location: in Lilla’s bedroom, that is, which is strangely also a sanctuary, a space that Velma was never allowed to access before. Her mistress brought her there after finding her wounded body and so the novel starts and ends with

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this image of both women as Bolom’s figurative parents. It goes without saying that Bolom, the aborted foetus, is a character in Derek Walcott’s play Ti Jean and his Brothers (1958). Bolom is the popular folk figure of Saint Lucia which symbolizes the vengeful spirit of a foetus aborted before birth. However, Bolom exists in his absence: he never appears as a spirit-­ character in the novel, while in Couto’s A confissão da leoa there is clearly a confusion of identities. The only information we have on Bolom comes from some scarce descriptions. Lying on the bed next to Velma, Lilla says the following to Bolom (which is a direct allusion to Walcott’s Bolom): How to call you? Bolom is the name I’ve heard your mummy use, when she couldn’t’ve known that I was overhearing […] Bolom, Bolom … but I know that name. […] Bolom. Mythical unborn child struggling for life, destined to die before its birth. Yet living still. Oh, yes! Miraculously living still. (BF 5)

The mystery that lies at the centre of the novel is the identity of this “mythical unborn child” (just like the identity of Magdalena in Divina Trace), which “both figuratively and formally, is the dream of an unborn child, nicknamed Bolom, carried by Velma, a black woman of limited education” (Matos). In Jesusalém and A confissão da leoa, however, Mwanito and Mariamar are also “miraculously living still”: they are still alive after a life full of suffering and physical and/or psychological violence, yet they do not lose their capacity to love. While in the case of Mwanito the possibility of forgiveness is always present, Mariamar’s final confession is more ambivalent: will she join the lions in order to further their “revenge” on the human beings for having disturbed their environment, or, following Bertelsen, the spirits of their forefathers? While Mwanito is described as a child who is already an old man at a young age, Mariamar in turn describes herself as someone who was already dead before birth (CL 251). A similar interest in science is present in Antoni and Couto’s work, with the difference that Couto’s poetics is often linked to material (biological and empirical) findings, while Antoni’s is rooted, according to Matos (2004), besides biology, in science and medicine, in order to pursue alternative models of ancestry: “Ethnologically promiscuous in its approach and  meiotic  in its form,  Blessed is the Fruit  manipulates genetic and reproductive science in its pursuit of alternative models of ancestry, legacy, and heredity, in its desire for renewing difference even within repetition.” Matos points out that Antoni takes a more scientific approach to fiction: he evokes in his work a generative, “meiotic process”, which “offers perspective on what might be the very keystone of his work, an affirmation of the ever-­present possibility of a certain sort of miracle

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birth, an attesting to the tenacity, the sheer insistence on being, available to even the most improbable life” (ibid.). To conclude, the postcolonial condition of the characters in the novels studied here, from Couto to Mendonça and Antoni, points towards rather than to a lack, to an impossibility of conviviality. Except for Jesusalém’s ambivalent ending – will Mwanito be able to create an alternative future out of the ashes of memory? – these narratives express an urge to liberate the imaginary from their postcolonial cages. Madness is present in all of the novels analysed, yet it is not merely seen as a psychological disorder; rather, it recalls, or renews, the close ties with the “traditional field”, that is, with ancient African beliefs that have come under pressure in the present decades of globalization yet are fully part of Mozambican modernity. References to living death or unborn child, or uncompleted lives, serve a purpose: far from wasted lives, they find a meaning in the fluid links between life and death. The multiple transmutations in Mia Couto’s novels should not be reduced as an expression of “magical realism” but find their meaning in ancient beliefs which Mia Couto is familiar with since his early childhood. Yet patriarchy, as shown in Couto’s novels, poses a continued problem to women’s and children’s precarious lives, as they are since birth literally exposed to familial and societal violence which is rarely openly condemned and brought to justice. Finally, the open ending of both Caribbean and African novels emphasizes the priority of the poetic and emotional-­intimate sphere over the rational sphere, of disorderly and of spontaneous events over the linear/chronological sequence of facts common in the greater part of Western literature.

Chapter 5

Caribbean Cultural Discourse and Fiction in an era of Globalization 5.1 Postmodern teratologies The return of Caliban Of the various negative images that have determined the debate on Latin America, one of the most influential ones of the last century is Caliban’s. A monster par excellence, Caliban made his appearance on the literary stage in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (first performed on 1 November 1611). The Caribbean origin of this controversial figure has been long forgotten, especially after intellectuals like Roberto Fernández Retamar gave him a regional (i.e. Latin American) scope. In his famous homonymous essay, the Cuban intellectual consolidated a dialectical vision of colonized versus colonizer, in the wake of other Caribbean thinkers such as Martí, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Latin America would occupy since the appearance of Retamar’s essay the place of the victim, the colonized, and Calibán became for many Latin American intellectuals a symbol of their position as victim of Western politics, and of their destitute identity. In spite of the “crisis of representation” that affects Caliban in the late 20th century, a glance at cultural discourse shows that this figure remains strongly relevant to several critics, specifically Caribbean ones, although they do not say this explicitly. In what follows  I will focus briefly on how some Hispanic Caribbean critics (Duchesne, Torrecilla) perceive themselves as “postmodern monsters”, as a kind of contemporary “Caliban”, which in turn is a symptom of our times of globalization. On the other hand, certain intellectuals (such as Duchesne and Torres-­Saillant) made the claim that Calibán is no longer a Latin American symbol but specifically a Caribbean one. From the point of view of these critics, the Caribbean is a crossroads of contradictions: a space where the pure and the impure, the attractive and repugnant, the postcolonial and the colonial are combined, where postmodernity is lived without one having fully entered modernity.

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In order to illustrate my point, I will specifically focus on the views of two critics who want to be post-­national (“post-­national” because they criticize the Puerto Rican national context and advocate a weakening of the meta-­ narratives of modernity, particularly that of national identity). However, in their attempt to deconstruct so-­called puertorriqueñidad, or Puerto Rican identity, these critics paradoxically return, with a vengeance, to the case of Puerto Rico, whose monstrosity they see as exclusive, meaning that it has no term of comparison with other countries or nations. The return of Caliban is marked by a fairly unknown essay by Juan Duchesne, entitled “Calibán by Lacan ¡Posmodernos del Caribe, separaos!” (Caliban by Lacan, Postmoderns of the Caribbean, Separate!).The text is part of the book titled Ciudadano insano y otros ensayos bestiales sobre cultura y literatura contemporáneas (2001) (Insane Citizen and Other Bestial Essays on Contemporary Culture and Literature). In his essay, Duchesne tries to escape the fraught debate about national identity by focusing on the wider Caribbean community (the idea of moving from the Puerto Rican/national context to the wider Caribbean context is, as I will argue in next chapter when discussing Lalo’s Los países invisibles, still rare among Caribbean critics). Contrary to Ruffinelli (1992), who announced Caliban to be a defunct symbol in postmodernism, Juan Duchesne suggests that it does make sense to continue to resort to Caliban in the cultural debate, yet not as a Latin American metaphor but as a specifically Caribbean one. We will clarify that the mixture of English and Spanish in the title (“by Lacan”, in English) is intentional. To achieve his objective, Duchesne proposes a Lacanian interpretation of the Caribbean, from another anagram embedded in the proper name Caliban (the character of Shakespeare’s who became famous for Retamar’s essay). While this is already an anagram of Caribbean and Cannibal, the sequence “by Lacan” is, instead, “otro nombre anagramático de un Calibán que desdice a Próspero desde la otredad absoluta del lenguaje que es el no-­lugar de lo reprimido” (56) (another anagram of Caliban that deprecates Prospero from the absolute otherness of language that is the non-­place of the repressed). The words “non-­place of the repressed” are part of Lacan’s psychoanalytic vocabulary: the entrance of the subject into language (the symbolic order) corresponds with a progressive repression of everything that could threaten the existence of this order, that which Lacan would refer to as the order of the real. The advantage of a Lacanian approach to the Caribbean is, therefore, its non-­attachment to the meta-­narrative of identity, which has overdetermined the discourse on the Caribbean. Lacan, it may be recalled, based much of his psychoanalytic theory on the existence of a gap or break that crosses out the subject, insisting on the impossibility of all coherence and unity (read: identity) of the subject: that is, any firm belief

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in the existence of an identity is an illusion. From a Lacanian perspective, hence, Caliban losing his status as an identity symbol is seen as an advantage: Caliban refers to a “Caribbean subject” without essences, located in a “non-­place” where identity is nothing but an incoherent whole, a dizzying assemblage of divergent elements: “¿Qué es nuestra identidad literaria, cultural y política hoy si no un juego de ensamblajes e injertos matantes de lo latinoamericano?” (Duchesne 2001: 113) (What is our literary, cultural and political identity today, if not a set of matrices and grafts that are Latin American?). It should be noted that, despite his intention of overcoming island boundaries, Duchesne insists tirelessly on “our identity”, which is equivalent to Puerto Rican identity: it is no coincidence that the critic refers only to national symbols such as boxer Tito Trinidad, the island of Vieques, Ferré businessmen, etc. When he speaks of “our society of the spectacle” (p. 53), it is clear that he does not actually speak of the Caribbean but limits his discussion to the Isla del encanto. Another aspect that draws attention in the title of the essay itself is the exclamation “Postmoderns of the Caribbean, split yourselves!”. It is clear that for the Puerto Rican author the Caribbean is the community “of which we have nothing in common” (Duchesne 51). We also find in the title a reference to Beaumarchais, although Duchesne makes no mention of the French writer. Duchesne’s sentence echoes the end of Beaumarchais’ Tarare: Le Couronnement, turned into an opera by Antonio Salieri, first performed by the Paris Opera in 1787. Towards the end of Beaumarchais’ libretto there is a scene that says “People, split yourselves” (“Peuple, séparez vous” [Beaumarchais 1988: 594]). The scene shows a mass of “disorderly”, “disobedient” people, who do not take into account the force of law; instead Beaumarchais stages a mass that obeys its own revolutionary order. In fact, on the eve of the French Revolution (1787), Beaumarchais took a great risk: not by staging one united people that fights for the ideal of the Revolution but instead a chaotic, anarchic, uncontrollable multitude of subjects. Let us recall the end of the opera, in which a high-­minded magistrate arrives, accompanied by a herald of arms expressing the concern of his superior: Au nom de la patrie, Qui vous presse et vous prie, Rentre dans le devoir: aux accents de ma voix. Peuple, séparez-­vous, pour la troisieme fois. choeur du peuple, en désordre Tout est changé. (quoi qu ‘on ordonne, Nous n’obéirons à personne?) (Beaumarchais 1988: 594)

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(On behalf of the homeland, Which presses and prays you, Enter in the duty: to the accents of my voice. People, split yourselves, for the third time. people’s choir, in disorder Everything is changed. [no matter what we order, we will not obey anyone.])

There is no question in this scene of a unified and coherent people mobilized by the ideals of the French Revolution. Moreover, “The Coronation” is one of the rare and problematic early literary examples where an uncontrollable and uncontrollable mass of people is represented (Bettsheim 1994: 96). Thus Beaumarchais inverts the order of the herald of arms, “séparez-­vous”: the people to be “separated” in order to safeguard the order are in fact already divided: they constitute an internally divided, heterogeneous group, a multitude of subjects that exist in a state of divergence.

Nationalism and identity: old and new anxieties It goes without saying that between 18th-­century France and the 21 - century Caribbean there is little politically and culturally in common; at least that is what one would expect. However, worries about political stasis, nationalism and revolutions – even though they are not always as visible – are as contemporary as in Rousseau’s time. In La ansiedad de ser puertorriqueño: etnoespectáculo e hiperviolencia en la modernidad líquida (2004) (The Anxiety of Being Puerto Rican: etnoespectáculo and hiperviolencia in Liquid Modernity), sociologist Arturo Torrecilla defends the idea that Puerto Ricans are subjected to what he calls the “ethno-­ spectacle” and “hyperviolence” that mark post-­modernity (which he refers to as “liquid modernity”). Torrecilla’s book did not receive any criticism beyond the island’s boundaries (the problem of isolation affects Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean), yet it is a fascinating example of postmodernism and its impact on a local cultural debate: the sociologist denounces fiercely the way in which national identity works, contrary to in other times, as an instrument par excellence in the service of cultural nationalism (i.e. it is a nationalism that is not revolutionary but serves the market). This cultural nationalism – the obsessive return to the Nation as a product of marketing, a servant of a banal (neo)nationalism – is the result of the constant re-­enchantment of the meta-­narratives of modernity, which has now become liquid. In spite of the complexity (or opacity) of his st

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critical language, Torrecilla makes a clear statement about the monstrosity that characterizes the cultural debate about Puerto Rico: La anomalía puertorriqueña, su fatal saturación por “exceso de finalidad”, es decir, aquello híbrido, trucado hasta la simulación, el resto o el exceso que traza la huella de una tendencia, de una discontinuidad o bien el cuerpo monstruoso ajeno que el Iluminismo envileció, es lo que ha posibilitado experimentar e implantar tempranamente los resultados de la estrategia semiótica de su fusión de lo local con lo global. (Torrecilla 2004: 49) (The Puerto Rican anomaly, its fatal saturation by “excess of purpose,” that is to say, its hybridity, tricked to the point of simulation, the rest or the excess that traces the trace of a tendency, of a discontinuity or the alien monstrous body that the Enlightenment debased, is what has made it possible to experiment and implant from early on the results of the semiotic strategy of its fusion of the local and the global.)

Torrecilla evokes the other side of the Caribbean in globalization: the spectacle of cultural nationalism: the commodification and sell-­out of Puerto Rican identity in the name of the Nation has led to an “anomaly”, a “monstrous body”, a “hybrid body” which survives in a kind of “tricked”, “simulated” reality. However, more than in Duchesne’s essay, references to the Puerto Rican case are literally everywhere in Torrecilla’s text. This is not without consequences: in fact, the author’s post-­national approach loses force, since his project of deconstructing the National identity paradoxically reinforces it: again, the monster is Puerto Rico, and that monster allows no comparison. Despite its purpose of deconstructing the meta-­narrative of national identity, both Duchesne and Torrecilla see themselves as the exception or anomaly that bears no comparison to any other “case”. Duchesne and Torrecilla are only two examples of a series of critics who, in their eagerness to renew the debate on the nation, insistently return to the exclusiveness of the case of Puerto Rico. The ansiedad or “anxiety” has been and will remain explicitly Puerto Rican; the “insane citizens” (Duchesne 2001) particularly refers to Puerto Ricans, etc. The historian Carlos Pabón describes this uncomfortable cohabitation of capitalism and cultural nationalism as an era of “unbearable ambiguity” (Tabón, 2002) whose generation makes the nation an exquisite corpse and a fetish. To emphasize his criticism, Pabón published in his book an essay entitled “De Albizu a Madonna” (From Albizu to Madonna), accompanied by a controversial photo-­collage depicting a hybrid figure: the head of the revolutionary leader Pedro Albizu Campos with the body of the singer Madonna (Pabón 44). Such a monstrous collage would be the

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perfect incarnation of these ambiguities. De la Campa (2001), Grosfoguel (2003), Torres-­Saillant (1995) and I myself (Van Haesendonck 2008), among others, take into account diasporas and migratory movements that have changed the profile of Latin American nations. However, if the aforementioned critics intend to take into account some of the new perspectives on Latin America and the Caribbean, the case of Puerto Rico is less exclusive than their analysis shows. It is worth mentioning other dynamics that have been determining the cultural and social profile of the Americas, particularly migrations. A fundamental transformation of the Latin American countries has appeared in what Román de la Campa (2001) calls “split states”. At the beginning of the new millennium, more than half of the Latin American countries have permanent diasporas in the USA. I would like to reinterpret these divided states as monsters, albeit in a more positive sense than their traditional acceptance, by extending the concept of “split state” to those divided nations that are not necessarily nation-­states (as in the Puerto Rican case). What divides the nation-­state is, in fact, the separation of the nation that traditionally corresponded to the state. According to De la Campa: A split state implies a permanently severed entity, a loss in many respects; But perhaps it could also suggest a postnational symptom that has many possibilities and applies to more than just states whose paths to modernity are under stress or failed to materialize all together. (2001: 376)

The Latin American nation-­states whose modernity is an unfinished project, divergent from Western modernity (Ramos 2001), are in a constant process of becoming, they cannot be clearly defined yet: this is the monstrous face of divided, liminal nations whose “body” is hybrid or bicephalous (with extreme cases such as Martinique, Aruba or Puerto Rico and other nations with almost half of the population outside the island limits). In other words, and in spite of the poetic and theoretically vague character of his concept, De la Campa suggests that the “split state” constitutes a new configuration that has not yet been recognized (in the sense that even though we can get a glimpse of it, there is a long way to go before its existence will be acknowledged and accepted). As we have seen before, this idea of transforming the nation as rupture/separation is also present in Duchesne’s essay “Calibán by Lacan ¡Posmodernos del Caribe, separaos!”, although this does not transcend the Puerto Rican context. Indeed, for Duchesne what is at stake is a becoming something other than a “Nation” (with a capital); in Duchesne’s words, it is an “advenir a otra cosa que no sea ese todos somos una gran familia y nos queremos tanto” (Duchesne 2001: 55; italics in the original) [a (be)coming (to) something

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else than that we are all one big family and we love each other]. It should be remembered that the “big family” is a direct reference to the myth of the Puerto Rican nation as a “Great Family” (gran familia), a founding myth that accompanied the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State, usually translated as “commonwealth”). What Duchesne refers to is that this “(be)coming” should not be interpreted as a coming back, as a return to the great Puerto Rican family, or as a substitution of it for some kind of “Great Caribbean Family” or “Great Latin American Family”.

New teratologies In spite of what these authors suggest – and therein resides the weaker part of their argument – the monstrous becoming is not exclusive to Puerto Rico or the broader Caribbean; instead it is arguably the quintessential condition of contemporary nations (without their necessarily being nation-­states, as is the case with light colonies like Martinique, Puerto Rico and Curacao) in postmodernity.1 Duchesne’s term Advenir can also be read in the Derridian sense of arriving, putting into port, witnessing. Moreover, he relates Arrivant to the monster and its ability to show/ announce. He understands the Arrivant as openness to the future, to the other’s singularity and alterity: “un avenir qui ne serait pas monstrueux ne serait pas un avenir, ce serait un lendemain previsible, calculable et programmable” (Derrida 1992: 400) (A future that will not be a monster of a future will be a predictable, predictable and programmable tomorrow). The terms “monster”/“monstrous” are understood, from the Derridian perspective, as vehicles of avant-­garde values, loaded with ambivalence. Since monstrosity is a creative and spontaneous force for Derrida, he vigorously defends its existence “sous l’espèce de la non-­espèce, sous la forme informe, muette, infante et terrifiante de la monstruosité” (Derrida 1967: 428) (under the species of the non-­species, in the inform, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity).2 However, even the most 1



2



On the concept of “light colonialism”, a kind of “decaffeinated” colonialism that has the characteristics of the concept of empire defined by Hardt and Negri (2000), see Flores (2000), who uses the term “colonialismo lite”, and Van Haesendonck (2008). Thus, according to Derrida, the fate of the avant-­garde texts, often rejected by their renewing character: “Les textes et les discours qui provoquent au départe des réactions de rejet, qui sont dénoncés justement comme des anomalies or des monstruosités, sont souvent Des textes qui, avant d’étre à leur tour appropriés, assimilés, acculturés, transforment la nature du champ de la réception, transforment la nature de l’expérience sociale et culturelle, l’expérience historique. Toute l’histoire a montré que chaque fois

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avant-­garde perspectives, such as that of De la Campa, have their limits. The inclusion of the monstrous in cultural debates cannot offer remedies for current problems concerning the construction of national identities. It does not aggravate them; it can only stimulate reflection on these issues: it does not seek to suture a nation’s internal fissures. The Caribbean discussion of the “monstrosity” of separate nations does not resolve, but rather confirms, the state of uncertainty that accompanies postmodernity. It is, of course, a trend that, today, affects critics globally. The conceptual vagueness of Hardt and Negri’s much-­ praised and -criticized Empire (2000), for example, also returns in the discussion of national identities. The monstrosity – in the ambivalent sense of transformation and uncertainty, rejection of and openness to hybridity – is, of course, also characteristic of other phenomena. Let us think of the linguistic phenomenon referred to as Spanglish, or code-­ fusions as in Junot Díaz’s work: what we perceive today as a “monstrous” product of the margins of globalization could tomorrow well become a well-­respected, essential component, or even the linguistic norm, in certain parts of divided states or nations. Parallel to what is observed in cultural criticism, in Puerto Rican literature the monstrous is often a visitor in the writings of authors of recent generations, such as Mayra Santos-­Febres.3 Another example is the work of Pedro Cabiya (who writes under the pseudonym Diego Deni), which Duchesne describes as “la abigarrada teratología de la postmodernidad puertorriqueña, abordando personajes muy distantes de fungir como muestras o casos de un mundo enfermo […] los estereotipos se borran para incluir las excentricidades surreales de la familia suburban” (Duchesne 2001: 233) (the motley teratology of Puerto Rican postmodernism, approaching people who are very distant from acting as samples or cases of a diseased world … stereotypes are erased to include the surreal eccentricities of the suburban family.) The monstrous does not appear, therefore, as a disease, but instead is seen as something healthy that deserves to be valued, or, to use a metaphor,

3



qu’un événement s’est produit, par exemple dans la philosophie ou dans la poésie, il a pris la forme de l’inacceptable, voir de l’intolérable, de l’incompréhensible, c’est-­à-dire d’une certaine monstruosité” (Derrida 1992: 400–1). I will briefly mention the novel Sirena Serena vestida de pena (2000) by Mayra Santos-­ Febres, which approaches the subject of monstrosity from the figure of the transvestite Sirena, that functions as a kind of Caribbean allegory in globalization. This novel is set partly in the Dominican Republic, partly in Puerto Rico, and even in places that can correspond hypothetically with any other part of the Caribbean and sometimes with any other place of the world. The novel thus has a Pan-­Caribbean and transnational reach, which makes it attractive to a global readership.

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a kind of virus which does not weaken but immunizes the organism. Beyond its function of foreshadowing, of announcing what is yet to come, and being a vehicle of the future, the omnipresence of monstruosity and animality in Caribbean literary and cultural discourse should not simply be interpreted as an incursion into the fantastic, but rather as a form of (minimum) rebellion against the effacement of the human being’s link with its own animality in our postmodern era. The interest in animality partially overlaps with the presence of animality in African postcolonial writing, as we have seen in the case of Mia Couto’s A confissão da Leoa. In Agamben’s words, these are times characterized by the consolidation of a system that aims at “total management – of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man”; a system which aims at the complete humanization of human life: “It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human […] the total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man” (Agamben, 2004: 77). In our quest to completely humanize the man-­animal concept, close to that of Rousseau’s “natural man”, Agamben argues, we effectively turn into our opposite: inhuman, artificial beings, devoid of all mimesis. Is Agamben’s pessimism justified? Certainly, some critics would prefer to use the term “monster” rather than “animal”: man would be an animal in the positive sense of a hybrid and non-­humanized, organic, vital bearer of the future (cf. the Derridian Arrivant), etc. What unites the reflections by Agamben and Derrida with the texts by postcolonial writers is the fact that the monstrous is not represented in purely negative and destructive terms, but rather as a vehicle of ambiguity and a messenger of new possibilities. According to Slavoj Žižek, “we are all zombies who are not aware of it, who are self-­deceived into perceiving [ourselves] as self-­aware” (2003: 136). Human beings are bearers of the curious capacity for deceiving themselves, by mistakenly perceiving the Other as a zombie. The Other (the “anomalous”) opposes the norm, and is defined by contrast to “us”. Hence our disappointment: we remain unconscious of our own, positive condition as monsters.

Exposed subjects: Caribbean “light” in a postcolonial era It is already a commonplace to say that the phenomenon of globalization, which is discussed so much in academia, media and other public debates, has definitively changed the praxis not only of reading, but also of its object, of the nature of the very texts that are being read – or

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still being read in an age when apocalyptic predictions are being made regarding the future of literature. It is increasingly difficult to identify with the idea of the voracious reader of a Proust, a Sartre or Dostoyevsky. Since the end of the Cold War and with the passage to the new millennium, literature, not least Caribbean, Latin American and arguably in the near future African literatures, are being subject to the phenomenon of the “light”: an easily digestible consumption literature has emerged and consolidated in the market. At the same time as it adjusts to people’s desire for commodities, most of the time anything “light” seems emptied of its “harmful” substance (i.e. criticism). As Jean Franco recalls in her book The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, “the market [is] far from being a free market for its own exclusions” (Franco 261): the liberalized market gains more by exporting telenovelas than by reviving literature. It is not by chance, therefore, that many writers have been forced to choose one of two possible ways: either to insert themselves into the market, producing a transparent text (i.e. writing in order to sell), or to resist the demands of the market and return to the praxis of literature in its most genuine form: as art. In other words, the job of the writer who is taken seriously is to do what Blanchot called “Ecrire pour pouvoir mourir, mourir pour pouvoir ecrire” (Blanchot 115). Now, as I will attempt to prove in what follows, there is a third path still open for exploration. Some authors are quite inventive in the face of the supposedly widespread, global erosion of writing – and reading – as critical practices. My hypothesis is that, more than fusing the two previous paths, they intentionally use the quality of the “reader’s digest” and the marketable (i.e. what I here call here the “light”) in a strategic way. As an example, I will briefly comment on Vampiresas (2004), a short novel by Marta Aponte Alsina. The novel is literally characterized by its portable, “light” aspect: the combination of a charming text, diaphanous, with a plot that the reader easily digests. The novel thus stands out for its lightness, in every sense: aspect, plot, profile of the protagonist, and format. First, however, we should briefly recall the plot in order to make our point clear. Laurita Damiani, a young lady recently graduated in literature and fond of Ann Rice’s novels, makes a living by delivering small parcels and packages, until by coincidence she discovers her “vocation” (V 7): to meet three old women, who turn out to be vampires and seductoras, who live hidden in different places in Puerto Rico. Laurita effectively allows herself to be seduced by them, and she eventually becomes a messenger of strange messages that she must take from one vampire to another in “pulsating envelopes”. In the meantime she ends up falling in love with another young vampire, Gerardo. More than a succession of cruel events (as is often the

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case in horror stories), Vampiresas sets us up in the gallant atmosphere of friendly conversations between Laurita and the three vampires. As one can easily learn from the first pages, fantasy is clearly dominant in Vampiresas, while horror and violence are either absent or happening remotely in the story’s background. Fantasy proliferates, much in the style of the film Amélie (by Jean Pierre Jeunet) to which Vampiresas refers directly (V 34). Apart from its lighticity, what unites these novels is something less frivolous: the figure of the vampire, a living dead, and a paradoxical figure searching to find its place in the symbolic world. It should be said that vampires are more or less absent from Puerto Rican literature, even though in popular culture a vampire-­like figure, known as chupacabras (goatsucker), has made its appearance in the Puerto Rican media and imaginary, and since its “discovery” has been reported throughout Latin America. The myth started after reports in 1995 of livestock attacks, first in Puerto Rico and then in Mexico, when hordes of dead sheep, drained of blood, were allegedly discovered on the island, showing punctured wounds. The myth even became the object of scholarly interest (see e.g. Benjamin Radford’s Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, 2011). Behind every manifestation of charm a sensation of fear and astonishment awaits. That is, while Vampiresas presents itself to the reader as a fantasy novel, a severe trauma underlies the lightness of the plot. It is significant that little or nothing is known about the youth of the protagonists, but some details reveal a problematic social environment, a dysfunctional home, abortions, poverty, fast living and drugs. At the beginning of Vampiresas, for example, one reads how one of Laurita’s many step-­brothers died “metiéndose de un cantazo cuanta basura le compró en el punto de drogas”(V 8) (getting into a cantazo how much junk he bought at the drug spot). However, the stepbrother enjoyed a happy burial, for having been “empleado sobresaliente de McDonald’s, cuya bandera [en el entierro] cubría la tapa inferior del ataúd” (V 8) (an outstanding employee of McDonald’s, whose flag [at the burial] covered the lower lid of the coffin). Having aged prematurely at 23, Laurita lives a “vejez cool” (V 9) (cool old age). She is part of a generation of premature elders, of “jóvenes viejos [que] tardaban años en graduarse, ya que, además de estudiar, oficiaban de cajeros o cocineros de fast foods para pagar las mensualidades de sus carritos, sus celulares y sus beepers y, en el caso de Laurita, algún viaje ocasional” (V 12) (young old women [who] took years to graduate, since, in addition to studying, they worked as tellers or fast food cooks to pay the monthly fees for their carts, their cell phones and their beepers and, in the case of Laurita, some occasional trip).

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To be a vampire is to be, besides a paradox, a nocturnal creature: on the one hand, the vampire flees from the visible world; on the other, it needs the visible human world in order to survive. Moreover, in both worlds the art of vampirism as an art of metamorphosis approaches transvestism as the art of transformation. Those chosen to be vampires are characterized by “una poderosa animalidad, una potente conciencia del cuerpo […] el don de la metamorfosis” (V 87) (a powerful animality, a body consciousness … the gift of metamorphosis) as a strategy for temporarily overcoming the “inclinación a sentirte canario, colilla aplastada” (V 87–8) (the inclination to feel like a canary, with a crushed tail). In the end, the seductive creatures of Aponte’s novel in their own way are above all performers: they are momentarily visible as spectacle (as in the case with Laurita’s vampiresa friend, Gloria, who also literally performs as a Hollywood actress). It is also interesting to see how the lie, a classical form of staging something as truth, occupies a central place in the novel. By telling the story of her nation (i.e. the nation of vampires and vampires), Gloria is thankful for surviving through the “arte de mentir en defensa propia” (V 86) (art of lying in self-­defence), adding that “existen en el Planeta otras naciones sufrientes y perseguidas, que no tienen idea de cómo protegerse” (ibid.) (there are other suffering and persecuted nations on the Planet. They have no idea how to protect themselves). While, as stated earlier, the novel’s light character permeates the text in its different components (style, theme, characters, format), it is important to stress that visual light – visuality – is particularly interesting in terms of theoretical parameters: analysing visuality and luminosity gives us an idea of the light configuration of the characters. What is primarily interesting here is the inner luminosity that characterizes them. Vampiresas does not reveal much about this aspect, however, other than that Laurita is characterized by its “sangre luminosa” (V 117) (luminous blood). Yet this is a crucial detail in the text: what does it mean to be both “luminous” and exposed to the intensity of light (in its different senses)? We are not simply referring here to the idea of the vampire being allergic to light (Aponte avoids this stereotypical behaviour, as is also the case in the Cuban animated movie that we will discuss in the next section). Something deeper is at stake here: a stable light (i.e. a non-­ hesitating light) prevents knowledge. The semiotician Jacques Fontanille argues that “toute lumière installée et stable interdise connaissance, ou la rende intolerable” (Fontanille 66) (Any installed and stable light prohibits knowledge, or renders it intolerable). What the subject is looking for is the instability of the shadow, the intermediate phases of illumination, the luminous hesitation. In order to be bearable for the subject, light needs

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a certain imperfection, which according to Fontanille corresponds to the world of values. On the other hand, the duration, the repetition and the closure (stability) of the light are unfavourable for the subject. Are these subjects, therefore, victims of what Fontanille calls “l’empire de éclat et de l’éclairage” (Fontanille 74) (the empire of brightness and lighting)? Moreover, we should bear in mind that the figure of the vampire is also a melancholic. In the words of Žižek, the living dead is par excellence a melancholic subject in search of salvation: “the fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living […] the undead are not portrayed as embodiments of pure evil, of a simple drive to kill or revenge, but as sufferers, pursuing their victims with an awkward persistence, coloured by a kind of infinite sadness” (Žižek 1991: 23). However, the vampires of Aponte’s novel do not seem to suffer much, but are frivolously “absorbed in their own beauty” (V 199) Is there any suffering? I argue that there is, but that the pain lies outside the fantasy stage and outside the narrative framework. Contrary to much of the Puerto Rican literary tradition, Aponte’s novel does not inscribe itself in the discourse (already completely passé) of Pedreira’s insularismo, which defined the island in terms of isolation and alienation (Pedreira 1934). It can be read as an allegory of the Caribbean in times of globalization, in the wake of work by authors such as Mayra Santos-­Febres, Rosario Ferré, Junot Díaz and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, whose work fosters allegorical readings. At the same time, Vampiresas seems to refer to a nodal point in history: the ambivalent triumph of neoliberalism and the Quintecenario of the discovery of the New World. Vampiresas, however, despite the fact that their history is situated on the island, includes the theme of globalization with everything that implies mobility. Despite their momentary flights through an increasingly smaller globe, significantly referred to as “pañuelo” (“handkerchief ”), Laurita and Gerardo, the vampire couple, “retornan siempre al lugar de origen con la ciega fatalidad de las piedras rodantes, víctimas de un sedentarismo localista” (V 116) (always return to the place of origin with the blind fatality of rolling stones, victims of a local sedentarism). The novel seems to communicate that every attempt to place the problem of Puerto Rican identity within a Caribbean or broader (Latin American, global) perspective entails, automatically and inevitably, a return to the problem of puertorriqueñidad, lurking around every corner; the problem of identity, Vampiresas suggests, is much like a living death claiming its place in the symbolic order. In his book Nación postmortem: Ensayos sobre los tiempos de insoportable ambigüedad (2002) (Postmortem Nation. Essays on Times of Unbearable Ambiguity), Carlos Pabón raises two points that return in these novels.

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On the one hand, he suggests, Puerto Rico has become at the end of the century a kind of “vampire nation”: the nation is an exquisite corpse: the nation is an idea which has emerged out of modernity (since the mid19th century) and which is simultaneously dead and alive in postmodernity. On the other hand, he suggests that Puerto Rico is also a vampire nation that enchants the subject selling its identity as a cultural symbol. However, would it not be better to state that postmodernity involves the transition to another configuration, not so much of the nation as vampire but of the world as Empire? Recently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recall the transition from the Imperialism (and dialectical colonialism) of modernity to what they call the Empire of postmodernism: Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. This step to Empire means, among other things, the consolidation of what Debord decades ago called the “society of the spectacle”, where power is not so much on the side of the colonizer as in a non-­locatable place. As Hardt and Negri put it: “Empire is an ou-­topia, or really a non-­place” (Hardt and Negri 190). Within the recent US context (since 2001), mainland politics continue to affect the island and its further sliding away into debt. The case of Puerto Rico – like other cases – is not simply situated in the world-­as-­empire, but combines imperialism and empire. Perhaps we could best coin a specific term here, “Vempire”, to indicate the broader relationship between, on the one hand, “light” colonies where (for want of better terms) imperialism and the colonialism of other complex forms of dependency subsist and, on the other, what has been referred to as a globalizing world; there is thus a clear connection between scholars’ descriptions of Puerto Rico as “a postcolonial, postmodern and globalized colony” (Pabón 335) and popular concepts such as Glissant’s “Tout-­monde” and Hardt and Negri’s “Empire”. Although Hardt and Negri conclude that the end of modernism goes hand in hand with the end of colonialism as a dialectic of power, can the Puerto Rican case be interpreted as postmodern colonialism, that is, as a condition whereby the “heart of darkness” of modern colonialism is reproduced and transformed into a “heart of lightness”, a much more intimate, diffuse form of repression? Interestingly, several critics (mostly Puerto Ricans), such as Juan Duchesne (1991), Carlos Gil (1991), Juan Flores (2000), Carlos Pabón (2002) and the authors of Puerto Rican Jam (1997), but also I myself (Haesendonck 2008), use the terms light (at times spelled lite, derived from English “light”) to describe the current situation of Puerto Rico. They speak of colonialismo lite, which is synonymous with charm and sensuality, creating consensus and diverting public attention to a range of rather frivolous issues, visibly omnipresent on the Island of Enchantment; issues

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that lack importance in the face of the real political and social problems that keep the island in its grasp: the recent economic crisis, for instance, is but an aggravation of a dormant, permanent state of crisis. Yet suddenly, in 2013, the island made headline news around the world. Among the many media sources reporting on the situation, a rare transatlantic comparison was made, for instance when The Economist described Puerto Rico as “Greece in the Caribbean”. In short, “light” novels such as Vampiresas teach us to go beyond the prejudice that this kind of literature lacks any critical substance. I do not intend to repeat here the much-­heard claim that there is a “highbrow” literature as the exact opposite of “lowbrow” writing, an opposition which is false. However, reading light novels (understood as a “portable” text written in a postcolonial context) makes us ask another question that cannot be postponed: can it be that light colonialism operates as a diffuse form of illumination, an anti-”enlightenment”, so to speak, in the philosophical and cultural sense? As a form of illumination that operates not in one specific place but in many places and regions around the globe? The hyperreal character adopted by this paradox of “postcolonial colonialism” is gaining momentum, and writers, artists and scholars alike are attempting to grasp these “new” complex dependencies. The fact is that the emergence of non-­ places is compatible with the visibly “lighter”, “bearable” and postmodern forms of colonial dynamics. As such, light literature adapts itself to and mimics the very context from which it emerges. Once again, the stubbornness of puertorriqueñidad in the island’s cultural discourse seems to have a “blinding” – if not maddening – effect on writers and scholars alike when it comes to seeing other, similar cases of “light” colonialism. I do not intend, however, to downplay the many interesting studies that have been carried out: focusing on a particular case is indeed helpful in studying the dynamics of imperialist avatars in postmodernity. What I argue here is that the “case” of Puerto Rico is arguably less exclusive than appears at first sight. After all, has not every individual on this globe – and not only the Puerto Rican “comic race” (Ríos Ávila 2004) – become simultaneously a visible spectacle, an abject, invisible subject? Thinking about this process, we finds that the lightness of these novels may not prevent them from maintaining a minimal rebellion against the total commodification of culture; they retain a certain critical substance, not harmful, but simply necessary. Expressions of “light” literature and popular culture are not limited to territories where Western capitalism (as a consequence of capitalism) has found fertile ground. Even in post-­revolutionary communist Cuba,

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a different strand of “light” expositions has been around, at least since the 1980s, in a sector which has remained marginal to the more visible cultural manifestations, and which has exceeded expectations both in its productivity and in its originality: animated film.

5.2 (Re-)animating the Caribbean The genetics of animation Animation, understood as a language and form of literacy, has been instrumental in giving shape to Caribbean identity, both from within and from outside the Caribbean. This can best be illustrated by taking a look at two major productions, one from Cuba and one from Spain. In both countries, animation studios have been active over the past decades, contributing to the promotion of a wide range of film productions at both a national and a regional level. In this section I will take a brief look at the representation of cultural identity in Juan Padrón’s feature-­ length ¡Vampiros en la Habana! (1985), comparing the film to the more recent Spanish production Chico y Rita (2010) by Oscar-­winning director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) and Javier Mariscal, a Barcelona-­based artist and designer.4 While the former feature-­length movie was made in partnership with a Spanish company, the latter not only projects an exotic image of Cuban cultural identity, but also serves as a counterpoint in showing how animation as a universal language is able to strengthen the idea of Caribbeanness. I argue that, although there is an important chronological gap between the dates of release of these films, both show how animation was, and continuous to be (especially in light of new developments in the field), a genre where the representation of cultural identity takes centre stage. Moreover, I argue that while Padrón’s film deals mainly with a particular form of national pride or Cubanness (cubaneo), Trueba and Mariscal’s production transcends the promotion of Cuban identity (cubanismo) in order to negotiate a transnational and diasporic form of Caribbeanness. However, understanding the importance of the genre of animation for a number of academic fields requires us to first take a look at what “animation” actually is or stands for, for its definition is subject to change, especially since CGI (Computer Generated Images) and 3D have become predominant in mainstream animated film. 4



¡Vampiros en la Habana!, Juan Padrón, ICAIC, 1985; Chico y Rita, dir. Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Spain, 2010.

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Nowadays, animation is literally everywhere, from film to videogames, from multimedia applications to photography and the very technological devices we use on a daily basis. According to Lev Manovich (2007): In the second part of the 1990s, moving-­image culture went through a fundamental transformation. Previously separate media – live-­ action cinematography, graphics, still photography, animation, 3D computer animation, and typography – started to be combined in numerous ways. By the end of the decade, the “pure” moving-­image media became an exception and hybrid media became the norm. (Manovich 2007: 1)

Animation, then, can best be defined as a hybrid and “impure” phenomenon. Rather than a neatly defined discipline or art, animation is a phenomenon which crosses different visual arts and fields of graphic activity. Animation is a broad term which has been used to refer to a wide range of forms of cultural expression, from amateur frame-­to-­frame photography to surrealist stop-­motion film, from special effects in the world of spectacle to videogames, from non-­digital, hand-­drawn art to computer-­generated mega-­productions. Furthermore, a wide range of (technological and other) processes related to what is commonly referred to as “animation” have undergone a revolution over the past decades. Animation is not simply the technique of making images move in “frame-­ by-­frame” sequences as it once was defined. One early definition that went beyond “frame-­by-­frame” was Norman McLaren’s, who in the 1950s said that “Animation is not the art of drawings that move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame” (author’s emphasis). Just like the craft of translation, the craft of animation has gone largely unacknowledged, not least in the visual arts themselves. Animation is, for instance, at the core of video art. It suffices to mention the recent hybrid work of artists such as Nathalie Djurberg or Hans Op de Beeck, who creatively integrate animation in their video installations. Nowadays, what we call “video art” – basically, moving images displayed on screens in art galleries – might well be, as one critic noted, “the most riveting, the most reliably surprising artistic medium of our time” (Smee 2014). What is acknowledged less is that video art often draws directly on animation art, including animated film. In other words, animation is an essential component in contemporary video art. However, as Vibeke Sörensen (2003) explains, animation is not just an abstract phenomenon whereby images are put into movement; it is also a complex language and methodology used to communicate by

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putting into relation different language “acts” across various hybrid or interconnected media: previously separate media that were largely based on the senses (such as television) are becoming more dynamic, interactive (e.g. integrated with social media) and “real-­time”, and, as a consequence, more “multi-­ sensory” and “multi-­ media”. Animation language is, according to Sörensen, the primary methodology necessary to explore and understand the inner workings of the different media; animation language allows us to link, to reflect upon and to give shape to dynamic cultural experiences and identities. As with any language, animation has a grammar which is subject to change; and it is a language in which one can become more or less proficient. In other words, it requires a literacy which can be learned, and animators should dynamically adapt their praxis as animation penetrates new areas of activity. Lev Manovich (2001: 2006, 2007) had previously noted that, at the turn of the 21st century, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. Cinema has, since its very beginnings, treated animation as a sub-­genre, while in fact cinema is one of the myriad of modalities of animation: “born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation” (Manovich 2001: 255). When discussing the future of animation, Manovich emphasizes in a similar vein to Sörensen’s how every cinematic phenomenon can be genetically tracked back to animation. Besides animated films proper and animated sequences used as a part of other moving image projects, animation has become a set of principles and techniques which animators, filmmakers and special-­effect artists employ today to create new methods and new visual styles. Therefore, I think that it is not worthwhile to ask if this or that visual style or method for creating moving images which emerged after computerization is “animation” or not. It is more productive to say that most of these methods were born from animation and have animation DNA – mixed with DNA from other media. I think that such a perspective, which considers “animation in an extended field”, is a more productive way to think about animation today, especially if we want our reflections to be relevant for everybody concerned with contemporary visual and media cultures (Manovich 2006: 26). In other words, Manovich does not only argue that the border between animation and cinema has become porous. He suggests something much more significant: that animation is cinema’s mirror in which it discovers its disavowed self: cinema (the centre) is discovering itself – albeit rather late – in animation (which it considers to be a peripheral genre of itself ). Innovative cinematic techniques such as Universal Capture (UCAP), which became popular in the 1990s through films such as The

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Matrix, raised the bar dramatically for rendering computer-­generated body movements in a wide range of software applications, video games, commercials and film. Progressively and unstoppably, photographic realism became the ultimate aim of CGI, leading to an (albeit limited) valorization of animation. Fortunately, from the academic point of view, an analogic valorization of animation – its discovery as a valuable object of interdisciplinary research – has been happening over the past decade, whereas Film Studies has so far considered animation to be a side-­product of cinema (Ward 2003). Animation, while being widely present across different media, at an institutional and academic level suffered for a long time from the prejudice of being a sub-­genre of Film Studies; it took time for both scholars and institutions to fully grasp its importance as a field of knowledge. Formed in the disciplinary field of literary studies, animation’s fate in the academy has, I believe, been to a certain degree comparable with that of comparative literature: if nowadays it is acknowledged that comparative literature (through the study of transnational phenomena) has prevailed, from an institutional perspective “Comp Lit” is still to be found at the margins (above all in Europe), even though it has steadily been moving away from its 19th-­century origins and its initial conceptualization as a Eurocentric discipline. In times of globalization and increased inter-­ cultural contact not so much has changed: still predominant in academy is the division into national literatures, usually the well-­protected object of national language departments.

Animation in Latin America and the Caribbean In the scholarly field known as Latin American studies, it is a little-­ known fact that one of the South American continent’s most appreciated authors, Alejo Carpentier from Cuba, was extremely enthusiastic about the visual art of animated film. In his review of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Carpentier applauded Disney’s ability to translate the “marvellous” dimension of reality to the big screen.5 Carpentier was fascinated by Disney’s ability as a “total creator”, highly praising his interpretation of 5

See also Jason Borge’s (2008) discussion in Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema. Particularly relevant is the chapter on Disney’s impact on Latin American writing. One might even speculate, as Borge suggests, on the existence of a link between Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (Carpentier 1949) and Disney´s concept of a “Magical Kingdom”, an idea which might shock some of the more conservative Latin Americanists, who are not so keen to see a link between the canonized Cuban writer and the American entrepreneur affectionately known as “Uncle Walt”. Interestingly, Disney’s Fantasia challenges the supposed divide between,

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Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring: “having been deceived so many times by choreographers and dancers, Stravinsky, the supreme composer of our times, found in Hollywood the person to capture the true sense of his musical score, showing us what no stage in the world could show us.”6 Nevertheless, the quest for the marvellous dimension has, unfortunately and unpredictably, played tricks both on Carpentier’s own craft – writing fiction – and on animated art: the marvellous quickly turned into a trademark. As with Latin American literature, animation has become synonymous with a language that creates a magical dimension. Carpentier called that dimension lo real maravilloso: an evocation of the marvellous as “magic” naturally blending with reality. The idea of animation as that which makes the impossible possible, as that which turns reality into magic, has long since become a cliché. In a similar fashion, Latin American literature has been packaged and stereotyped as “magical realism”, an all-­encompassing brand which has all too easily been (and continues to be) applied to Latin American authors, even those who have never (consciously or unconsciously) explored the marvellous dimension. Hence, the branding of Latin American literature as inherently marvellous turned it into a kind of literary playground: in Latin American fiction, as in animation, magic is by definition hidden, only to appear unexpectedly. The famous “McOndo” and Generación del Crack movements led by a post-­boom generation of Latin American writers (such as Alberto Fuguet and Jorge Volpi) rebelled against this standardization of Latin American writing. Their rebellion, however, did not provoke the much-­hoped-­for eclipse of the marvellous/magical realist stereotype. Likewise, animation has suffered from the “magic” label, still predominantly applied by Disney’s marketing department. The commonplace of animation as a cinematic genre producing magic has been reinforced to some extent by the predominance of Disney’s animation since the 1930s. Although Disney most often used abstract forms and non-­photographic characters, realism (or even “hyperrealism”, as Paul Wells (1998:  28) describes Disney’s mimicking of the real) and verisimilitude in character design and narrative are at the heart of Disney’s art. Typically, magical things occur within this hyper-­realist world, which is familiar to the spectator. What Carpentier in his time could never have predicted was that his home island, Cuba, would become the place par excellence in the Caribbean where visual arts would be developed. Indeed, on the island a

6



on the one hand, the “highbrow” culture of classical music and, on the other, popular culture, the realm to which animation has been relegated. Carpentier, quoted in Borge (2008, p. 151).

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tradition in film and animation would emerge, albeit on a modest scale and in line with the government’s cultural policies, through the creation of a national film institute: the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC).7 Recently, ICAIC published Explorando el Cine Caribeño (Exploring Caribbean Cinema), a pioneering and fascinating exploration bringing together in one volume various essays – written in or translated into Spanish – on Caribbean film and documentaries, as well as on the process of film production in the broader Caribbean region. Unfortunately, animation is absent from the book, but it shows that Cuba is not, as the stereotype goes, “lagging behind” or being “cut off ” from the rest of the world of filmmaking due to its “insularity” on the political, cultural, economic and academic level. On the contrary: both Cuban academy and filmmaking have been actively participating in the creative scene, exhibiting a great potential for setting trends in the creative arts and research. The creation of a national Film Institute where animation was, since the very beginnings of ICAIC, being given a place is remarkable, especially since animation was to remain an undeveloped field in Latin America until recent years. As a matter of fact, Latin America’s market has largely been served by its northern neighbour, while pioneers of animation such as the Argentinian artist Quirino Cristiani remained lone rangers, invisible both on their own national artistic scene and within the broader Latin American context. Disney’s early attempt to penetrate a new market in Latin America, with official support from the US government, became more obvious with feature-­length films such as Donald Duck’s Saludos Amigos and Los Tres Caballeros released in the 1940s, after Disney and his team of animators had made a trip to Brazil, Peru, Chile and Argentina. Yet the rise and global success of Disney’s animation also prompted some fierce criticism against its cartoons, seen by various intellectuals as a form of cultural imperialism: it suffices to recall the book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic published in 1971 by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart – both of whom could best be described as “Disneyconoclasts”. No matter how one looks at these politically tainted books (or rather pamphlets) with an academic undertone, it is easy to see that such publications were not of much help in promoting the craft of animation throughout Latin America, and even less helpful in promoting it as an object of academic research. 7



Although there is no real school for animation, The Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) has organized many workshops to train animators, under the supervision of the Padrón brothers.

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Nonetheless, over the past few decades there has been an increasing interest in animation, both among Latin American and Caribbean (video) artists and film producers; the proof is the production of feature-­length films (mostly CGI inspired by mainstream north American studios such as Disney-­owned company Pixar), as well as the growing number of animation festivals in the region. An example from the Caribbean was the Kingston festival (2012) in Jamaica, modest of course if compared to the bigger, established festivals in Brazil (Anima Mundi) and Argentina (Animage). In Cuba, ICAIC’s annual film festival is also an important venue for animators. Within the Caribbean, Cuba is still a key spot for the formation of young animators: ICAIC has managed to consolidate Cuba’s tradition in animation thanks to Juan Padrón’s serial production of the popular Elpidio Valdés series of films, which were produced and broadcast for more than three decades (1970–2003).

¡Vampiros en La Habana! Juan Padrón’s ¡Vampiros en La Habana! of 1985 has to be seen as part of a tradition in animation from the 1960s to the 1980s, led by ICAIC, with an impressive number of annual productions (approximately three hundred per year) until the Special Period in the early 1990s, when the Institute was on the brink of vanishing due to a dramatic lack of resources. ICAIC, however, miraculously survived the crisis. In her book On Location in Cuba, which includes a chapter on animation (and the only scholarly discussion of animation in Latin America and the Caribbean so far), Ann Marie Stock draws a positive report of the health of ICAIC’s animation studio: Over the past decade alone [2000–9], computer-­generated images have replaced much of the hand drawing and painting, the ICAIC’s Animation Studio has expanded from a suite of rooms in a house to a seven-­story building, and the staff has grown to include a host of young artists working alongside their experienced counterparts. Perhaps most significantly, the entity has stepped up its efforts to engage with the international arena – participating in and hosting festivals more frequently, entering new markets, and providing services to clients around the world. Without a doubt, Cuba’s animation operation has undergone sweeping changes. Yet, this transformation has not meant a complete rupture with the institution’s past. (Stock 2009: 107–8)

Thus, ICAIC was able to remain as productive as in the 1980s. The feature-­length film ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (1985) was without any doubt one of ICAIC’s greatest successes, and part of it is due to the

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successful international collaboration with Spanish Public Television, Radio Televisión Española (RTVE). The film was made long before computer-­generated images entered the animation production scene. Despite the simplicity of the characters, Vampiros has a fairly complex, not to say chaotic, storyline, where historical references freely mix with fiction and fantasy. While the topic of vampirism firmly situates the film in the realm of fantasy, the story unrolls in the Havana of the 1930s, during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1871–1939). The disordered storyline is in contrast with the simplicity of the hand-­drawn celluloid animation, as well as with the high quality of the musical score. However, Padrón’s film is certainly a tour de force when taking into consideration both the limited team of animators and the difficult logistic conditions in which they often worked, especially during Cuba’s Período Especial, when the studios were left without any basic resources. At a superficial level, then, the hand-­drawn celluloid animation is mainly used as a medium to facilitate the narration of a fantastic storyline that evolves around the protagonist, Pepito, brought to Cuba by his uncle, the genius Dr von Dracula. By administrating his main invention, Vampisol, a magic potion consisting of a mixture of piña colada and rum (an ingredient he discovered in Cuba, and the reason why he moved to the island), von Dracula manages to convert Pepito into a sun-­resistant vampire. Pepito gets involved, against his will, with two gangs of vampires, one in Europe and a rival gang in the USA, both fighting for the recipe of Vampisol. One key element in the storyline is, I argue, Pepito’s intention of freely distributing Vampisol to all vampires, an idea also favoured by Pepito’s uncle, as opposed to the plans of commercial exploitation by the vampire gang of Chicago (operating under the name “Capa Nostra” and led by Jacky Terrori, a character inspired by the legendary mafia boss Al Capone) and its European rival, the elitist “Grupo Vampiro”. Pepito eventually defeats the gangsters thanks to his display of creativity: he succeeds in spreading the Vampisol recipe in the form of a song broadcast over Radio Vampiro Internacional. The very topic of vampirism in the film is presented in a highly ambiguous way: vampires are initially presented as an obscure “European” product but one predominantly popularized in the Americas through the figure of Dr von Dracula. The extra-­diegetic narrator (in voice-­over) differentiates between good and evil vampires, where the evil is embodied by the gangs, and Pepito and his uncle as somewhat naive and creative idealists who care about the common welfare of vampires. Above all Pepito, the protagonist, is profiled as a rebel in an underground mission to fight the regime of General Machado. But what does Vampiros tell us about a

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vampire’s identity? More awkwardly, what does it tell us about Cuban identity? If Pepe’s strength consists in being an indefatigable rebel against everything evil, both from abroad as well as local/national, the choice for Machado (instead of other historical figures such as Batista) is a safe bet from the political point of view: Vampiros’s narrative, by maintaining a chronological distance from the Post-­Revolutionary regime, fits well with the Grand Narrative of the Revolution. Moreover, Pepito’s effective transformation into a vampire neither occurs as a personal choice nor is imposed by his uncle von Dracula; rather’ it appears to be imposed from the outside. His “vampirization” is something he comes to terms with as his struggle against the Machado regime intensifies: the transformation into vampire is significant when analysed in the context of Cuban culture. As Ann Marie Stock points out, Pepito is a character “coded with Cubanness” (Stock, 2009: 116). However, I argue that Stock’s argument can be refined: Pepito is, to be more precise, coded with what is referred to in Cuba as cubaneo, a typical way of communicating and sharing with one’s peers, of being member of a community; as one Cuban writer explains, cubaneo is an “effusive cordiality that characterizes our dealings with each other” (Pérez Firmat 1997: 5). Not by coincidence, Pepito is also a trumpet player, professionally, but he plays his musical instrument as a tool for both socializing and survival, emphasizing what Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined cubanía, or the consciousness of being Cuban (Pérez-­Firmat 1997:  7). Most importantly, the transformation into a vampire does not kill the musician in Pepito. His musical education as well as his ability to shape-­shift into a vampire are naturally presented as a part of his Cubanness – conjugated here as both cubanía and cubaneo – and become part of his revolutionary ideals. Besides being a trickster, Pepito is also a mediator: he operates as go-­between for the Cuban community of vampires and human beings, for he has the privilege of participating in and belonging to both. From the perspective of Cuban national identity, the vampires’ obsession with Vampisol is, as I have stated earlier, more than a fait-­divers. One can argue that the magical potion introduces into the story, in a hilarious (and very obvious) fashion, the topic of the Cold War, the old political dialectic of communism versus Western capitalism (seen as a form of vampirism sucking out the Third World’s blood).8 Recognizably, the tension between free distribution versus commercial exploitation is echoed nowadays in the (global) creation and distribution of so-­called “commons” 8

Marx was one of the prolific users of vampirism as a metaphor, for instance in his Capital, when discussing the negative effects of capitalism (Muller 2007, 196–7).

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and open source (the free availability to all of goods such as education and software) versus the commercial marketing of such products. From an ideological perspective, the free distribution of goods is in line with broader political interests of the Cuban regime: Vampiros can thus easily be interpreted as a film in line with Cuba’s communist agenda in the 1980s, and its aim of strengthening a sense of national identity. However, the choice of Machado’s regime as the historical frame of the film is rather puzzling and contradictory from a historical perspective, for the heroes of the Cuban Revolution fought against General Batista’s dictatorship (which was put in place decades after Machado’s semi-­ dictatorial regime). As a matter of fact, most historians give a rather positive report of Machado, describing him as one of the trailblazers of Cuban independence.9 The result is an uncanny mix of fact and fiction: Vampiros throws (rather heavy-­handed) historical references into a cocktail of pedagogical values and fantasy, but also satire and humour, typical of Juan Padrón. Not by coincidence, the main character, Pepito, inherited some of the traits of one of Padrón’s previous animated characters, the popular Cuban hero Elpidio Valdés.10 From a pedagogical perspective, ¡Vampiros en la Habana! has many of the features of the Elpidio series, which more or less explicitly aimed to educate Cuba’s youth about the country’s revolutionary ideals since the 19th century. It will not come as a surprise, then, that Padrón’s Elpidio Valdés (1979) was also the first feature-­ length film promoting patriotic values mainly to a younger spectatorship: in the theme song we are reminded, for instance, of Elpidio’s rock-­solid identity as an indefatigable “patriot without equal” fighting the Spaniards. It is easy to understand why successful Revolution-­friendly troubadours such as Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez were embraced by ICAIC: by providing the theme songs for Padrón’s films and series they helped to deliver a typically “Cuban” product which was largely appreciated by a national spectatorship which could easily identify with its protagonists. Besides pedagogical values such as patriotism, integrity and courage, Elpidio displayed – through a set of epic characters – a predominantly positive image of Cuban identity. These were, then, the various ingredients of a success formula: a strong musical score, humour, and a dose of patriotism that the spectator could easily appreciate and mimic. Elpidio was, unlike 9



See e.g. Richard Gott’s Cuba, a New History (2005). Juan Padrón’s sequel to the film Más vampiros en la Habana (2003), produced almost twenty years after ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (with the aid of computers), also draws on the mixture of humour and fantasy with historical facts (Más vampiros starts at the dawn of the Second World War and the fight against Nazi Germany).

10

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Pepito’s more fragile appearance, a straightforward, strong character, both in his feeling for strategic action and his problem solving. Finally, both Pepito and Elpidio’s profiles are reminiscent of popular characters such as Paddington’s Felix the Cat, Peanuts characters (such as Charlie Brown), Blake Edward’s Pink Panther, or Quino’s Mafalda.11 From a technical point of view, nowadays Padrón’s movies and series would look inferior, even to most animated series on television, but animators agree that, for the time, Elpidio Valdés was a fairly high-­quality production. Silvio Rodríguez also provided the musical theme for ICAIC’s newest feature-­length film, Meñique (2014), its first entirely CGI-­produced 3D movie, about the adventures of a Cuban hero, inspired by Laboulaye’s classic fairy tale of Tom Thumb. As with the Elpidio Valdés series, Ernesto Padrón’s Meñique y el espejo mágico (Tom Little and the Magic Mirror) (2014) clearly shows a continuation in pedagogical tradition, something we rarely observe in animation produced in other countries. Directed by Juan Padrón’s brother, ICAIC’s most recent animated film was co-­produced by the Galician animation studio Ficción producciones. Unlike Vampiros, Meñique is based on the famous short story by José Martí, the spiritual father of the Cuban revolution, known for his political engagement and his journalism, as well as his pedagogical and literary work. Martí published a journal specifically targeted at children titled La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age), and the short story “Meñique” appeared in the first number of the Journal in 1889.12 Well into the new millennium the studio’s commitment to the ideals of the Revolution, as Ann Marie Stock argues, have remained intact: Animators continue to perceive their primary role as serving their compatriots, especially the children of their nation, and resisting U.S. domination by proffering alternatives to Disney cartoons. So while digital technology and international market forces have had a major impact on Cuban animation in recent years, the island’s local tradition has not been usurped by the global industry. (Stock, 2009: 108)

However, in terms of animation technology and techniques, Meñique, contrary to Vampiros, does heavily mimic Pixar’s (a Disney company) recognizable CGI style. While ¡Vampiros en La Habana! is structured 11

Not by coincidence, ICAIC was in charge of the production of the feature-­length film Mafalda. 12 The film’s soundtrack includes music by Manu Riveiro and songs written by Silvio Rodríguez and performed by Anabel López, Miriam Ramos and Ernesto Joel Espinosa.

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around cubaneo as an axis for the performance of cultural identity, foreign animation films offer an interesting point of contrast to Padrón’s creation, for they place Cuban identity in a broader Caribbean context. It is a commonplace by now to say that since the late 1990s we have been witnessing a global boom in Cuban culture, but also the promotion – and commodification – of Cubanness and Cuban culture. This commodification is what is referred to as cubanismo, or what I prefer to call the “Buena Vista effect”, the promotional wave of films and albums which helped to put Cuban culture on the global map. Chico y Rita (2010), a Spanish film produced twenty-­five years after Juan Padrón’s first Vampiros, is at first blush hardly comparable to the latter, either in format or in content: the film does not refer to any fantastic topics (such as vampirism), and the characters are highly realistic depictions of real actors, made possible by the “rotoscope” technique.13 However, Chico y Rita is also deeply engaged with Cuban culture. I argue that, contrary to Vampiros, the Spanish film seems to transcend the exclusive reference to Cuban culture, placing it in a broader framework: how can Caribbean identity be represented, and what added-­ value does animation give to an outside perspective (or “re-­presentation”) of Caribbean culture? The feature-­length film, produced by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, fits perfectly well with the trend of packaging Cuban culture for the global market. It is not hard to see why: the entire film – with a strong documentary character – is a tribute to (real) Cuban (and broader Caribbean) music entering the global scene at the end of the 1990s. Even director Wim Wenders, best known for his “Independent” documentaries and movies, can be said to have strongly contributed to the promotion of this wave of success through his documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999), a tribute, with Ry Cooder, to forgotten or hidden Cuban musicians: its international success sparked a revival of interest in traditional Cuban music, and in Latin American music as a whole. On a superficial level, Chico y Rita could, quite simply, be seen as a hommage to Cuban music, whereby animation is an effective language for emphasizing the importance of rhythm, corporality and performance in Cuban culture. However, from a broader perspective on Caribbean culture and Caribbeanness, Chico y Rita’s exotically flavoured “Cuban” scenery and characters become a synecdoche for Caribbean culture at large: Cuban music becomes a signifier for Caribbeanness, while specific references to Cuban politics and society fade into the background, even 13

Rotoscoping has been mainly used since the late 1930s for studying human and animal movement instead of actual tracing movements.

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though the spectator is at all times aware of the Cuban setting of the movie. In the wake of Wenders and Cooder, Fernando Trueba had, before co-­directing Chico y Rita, already made a Latin jazz documentary titled Calle 54 (2006) featuring Chucho Valdés, a production which saw the birth of his collaboration and friendship with artist and designer Javier Mariscal.14 Quite obviously, Chico y Rita is largely inspired by Calle 54 and Buena Vista Social Club, and in a sense can be seen as an extension of these documentaries by focusing on the (fictional) romance between the pianist Chico and the woman he falls in love with, Rita, a singer who is discovered by the music industry and taken to New York (Chico is mostly inspired by the character of the legendary pianist Bebo Valdés). Besides, as I will explain later, the documentary effect is very strong in Chico y Rita, thus contributing to the emerging genre of (mostly CGI-­produced) animated documentaries. While the film narrates the betrayal and forced return of Chico to his home island, sensitive political issues are avoided; instead emphasis falls on the cultural heritage of Cuban music as an art form. The language of animation, the film suggests, emphasizes the tropical setting, Cuba’s racial variety as well as sensuality as exemplary for the broader Caribbean, both through the selection and the depiction of its characters and the choice of warm colours. Moreover, Caribbeanness transcends the (cultural) particularities of Cubanness and cubanismo. From a broader perspective on Caribbean culture and Caribbeanness, then, Chico y Rita’s music-­ flavoured scene is the main image that the spectator gets of the Caribbean as a whole: Cuban music here, as it is displaced to New York, becomes a pars pro toto for the deeply diasporic ramifications of Caribbean culture at large; and, we can safely add, Cuban music comes to stand also for one of the key performances of Caribbeanness: music and rhythm become the main representers of Caribbean identity, an identity which is performed as much on the US island of Manhattan as in the geographical region called “Caribbean”. As such, Havana and New York become two “characters” of a two-­fold Caribbean play. In the film’s press book, the directors describe their aim as follows: Havana and New York are two characters in the film. […] Havana is very sunny and warm, and in terms of colours is very rich in palette, and New York is almost monochromatic. This is a very important part of the film. […] 14

In another film, Blanco y Negro (2003), Fernando Trueba brought together Cuban-­ born pianist Bebo Valdés and Flamenco singer Diego “Cigala” in a live recorded performance.

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We have Havana and New York. We have Latino and Anglo Saxon. What is Latino? It’s a weather, it’s a colour, it’s a music, it’s a fashion, it’s a way to spread the love.15

By taking place in two locations (Cuba and New York), Chico y Rita avoids the mise en scène of, say, a production such as West Side Story, where action takes place exclusively in a marginal section of New York, focusing on the Puerto Rican community in the Upper West of Manhattan. The Caribbean imagined and created by Trueba, Errando and Mariscal does, however, foster a romanticized and exotic view of the Caribbean, thus reinforcing some of the persisting stereotypes: the Caribbean represented is one of music, sensuality and pleasure, thus reinforcing what I have called here the “Buena Vista effect”, the commodification of Caribbean culture which was initiated by Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders’ “recycling” of mostly hidden Cuban musicians both in Cuba and in Sweden. Hence, Chico y Rita, while stricto sensu not an animated documentary, reminds us of other animated feature-­length films: mostly historical films which are based on true stories, such as the autobiographical docu-­film Waltz with Bashir (2008), an Oscar-­nominated documentary directed by Ari Folman about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.16 Waltz with Bashir tells the traumatic story of Folman, who tries to recover his memories of the time he was a soldier in Lebanon. The animation in both Waltz with Bashir and Chico y Rita is based on realistically roto-­scoped images; fact and fiction mix in an intelligent way, creating at times a surreal, dream-­like effect, while maintaining a high degree of realism. This is particularly useful in emphasizing the remembrance by the protagonists (respectively Folman and Chico). The result in both films can be best described through Freud’s concept of the “Uncanny” (das Unheimliche), an instance where something is perceived as familiar yet foreign at the same time, resulting in an uncomfortable feeling where the familiar turns into strangeness (Freud 2003 [1919]). The appearance in the film of a host of mythical figures from the world of Caribbean jazz, such as Tito Puente and Chato Pozo, reinforces the realism and documentary effect of the film. Realism, as I have stated earlier, is an important component since the early days of animation, well before the rise of Disney. In The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), for instance, Winsor McCay, a pioneer 15

Chico y Rita Pressbook, 10. www.chicoyrita.com. Another recent example of the growing success of animated films with a strong historical and documentary character is Cafard (2015), by the Belgian director Jan Bultheel.

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of animation and creator of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), realistically re-­ created in 1915 the tragic accident of the passenger liner Lusitania in the Atlantic Ocean, and by doing so arguably created the first animated documentary. Furthermore, Chico y Rita moves away from the current trend of applying CGI just about everywhere in animation, as an exclusive way of reaching a high degree of realism: the “flat” characters occasionally move on a 3D-­rendered background, but the film remains faithful to traditional 2D, hand-­drawn animation. As Ülo Pikkov argues, in recent animated film “the aspiration towards more and more faithful portrayals of reality has been complemented by a quest for an alternative to this fascination with realism by the major studios” (Pikkov 2010: 104). As a hybrid film with documentary traits, Chico y Rita challenges the tradition of the documentary as a pure, non-­animated genre (e.g. Buena Vista Social Club) as well as the current trend of aiming for hyper-­reality in CGI animation (a trend set by blockbuster movies such as Avatar). The aim of CGI, we should remember, is not to imitate Disney-­like (hyper)realism (expressed in a character’s moral and social behaviour), but rather to aim for photographic realism. Vampiros succeeded in combining Disney-­ like “hyperrealism” with an original style and the codes of Cubanness. Logically, Padrón’s film was a huge success in Cuba (easily beating Chico y Rita), but the many references to “lo cubano”, the narrative hoop-­jumping and the spicy, often politically not-­so-­correct humour had a much harder time being understood outside the Caribbean region. Even though it is situated in a fantasy world, ICAIC’s most recent production, Meñique (2014), was criticized precisely for following mainstream (US) trends in animation. Ernesto Padrón’s film indeed largely subscribes to and imitates mainstream American CGI production. Its lack of originality is in sharp contrast with the more daring and creative animation coming from Latin America: Brazilian films such as Luiz Bolognesi’s Rio 2096: Uma História de Amor e Fúria (2013) and Alê Abreu’s O Menino e o mundo (2008) clearly respond to what Pikkov calls a “quest for an alternative” to dominant modes of using computers for generating 3D animation. Both ¡Vampiros en La Habana! and Chico y Rita succeeded in creating an original style and flavour, in spite of being made in very different contexts and in different time frames, largely thanks to experimentation with animation techniques (especially in the latter). The fact that the label “dibujo de animado cubano” appeared on the original poster of Padrón’s film emphasized the national context of production. While the movie targeted first and foremost a national viewership, its success throughout the Hispanophone world was a by-­product rather than an intended goal. Chico y Rita, by contrast, from the outset targeted an international viewership

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(much like Wim Wenders did), with the explicit goal of further promoting Cuban and Caribbean culture. While the former has clear pedagogical and (more indirectly) political objectives, the latter avoids any political reference and projects Cuban culture towards a globally integrated, post-­ communist future. Rather than a convergence of modes of animation, the future will probably see a plurality of modes of production, especially within the Caribbean and Latin American context. Drawing on decades of know-­ how, Cuba occupies a privileged position in the field; ICAIC’s experience allows the Institute, if resources are available, to continue its regional lead in animation, as it has already created its own language and tradition; Cuba can also benefit from a transnational network of collaboration with other Latin American countries, as well as with Europe. The emergence of new technologies, and their accessibility to low budgets, is helping to create new opportunities for animators in very diverse sectors of activity. With regard to Cuban animation, it is to be expected that the Cuban government’s recent relaxation of political ties with the USA will enable directors to work on a wider range of topics for future film production, including animation: less politically determined than in the past (the dictate of serving the ideals of La Revolución) and more open to experimentation, but maintaining an important share in 2D animation. In addition to CGI’s current monopoly in mainstream animated film, stop-­motion’s potential is still unexplored by most Caribbean and Latin American animators, although it is an inexpensive and innovative subgenre of animation, and it is usually seen as less commercial than many of the CGI projects (one thinks about the surrealist work by the Brothers Quay or Jan Svankmayer).17 It is encouraging to see that some of the best animation recently made in Latin America used this technique (e.g.  Uruguayan director Walter Tournier’s movie Selkirk el verdadero Robinson Crusoe (2012), a film aimed at younger spectators). Whether the emerging success of Latin American and Caribbean animation will have beneficial effects (in terms of funding, distribution, creative interaction) on intra-­Caribbean collaborative projects remains to be seen. Many artists and animators across the Caribbean have an explicit interest in transnational collaboration, and concrete projects can give Caribbean animation more visibility. It is encouraging to observe a similar desire for transnational projects among Caribbean documentary and film makers (Notario and Paddington, 2014), many of them working in the diaspora. 17

An important exception in stop-­motion is the pioneering short film Veinte Años, again from Cuba’s ICAIC, directed by Bárbaro Joel Ortiz.

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For Caribbean film, what is at stake, then, is not the implementation of animation as a new genre, but rather the rediscovery, consolidation and expansion throughout the region of its own – already present – animation language.

Chapter 6

The Heart of Lightness 6.1  ¿Dónde? Locating the Caribbean subject in the Postmodern Non-­place Colonialism and invisibility Critics of Caribbean culture, myself included, generally focus (specifically so far as literature is concerned) on the well-­disseminated ideas of a rather fixed and limited number of intellectuals: Edouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez Rojo, Fernando Ortiz, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire. Meanwhile it is never said that there is a kind of “canon” for Caribbean writing as well. However, other, less-­known intellectuals, hidden to the point of invisibility on their own island, offer alternative views on the Caribbean that give the necessary oxygen to keep Caribbean studies safe from calcification. The risk for many comparatists is to rush to celebrate a “happy hybridity” under pressure from a politics of consensus. A closer look to today’s literary and broader intellectual and cultural production, I argue, can invalidate approaches that put an emphasis on place as a discursive construction and pay exclusive attention to the mentioned canon of intellectuals in the Caribbean, which, I believe, if not handled with care, will further pave the way for the kind of “happy hybridity” that contrasts with less celebratory forms of multiple identity. While definitions of what the Caribbean is – or should be – have multiplied over the years, place is still a key criteria, as well as language, nationality or history, for the determination of the field of Caribbean studies. Caribbean studies, as it exists today, is still much focused on place in a geographical yet de-­materialized sense, with little attention being paid to the material context and the inhabitants of a particular place. The concept of place is often mistaken for the physical, material reality: the geographical, physical location of Kingston, Jamaica does not coincide with Kingston as a place, which is a discursive concept (often confused with space). A city can be located on the map, but that cartographic place does not coincide with its physical location. If place were synonymous

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with geography, it would be counterintuitive to my aim; it would go against the very idea of an archipelagic approach as a connection of places, both in a material and a metaphorical sense. Yet the fate of place’s kin, the notion of “space”, has not fared any better: as Bachelard notes, the obsession with “spaces”, whether in a commercial, academic or other sense, has emptied the term of any meaning. Likewise, the much younger concept of non-­place, to which I will pay more attention here, can be said to be neither geographical nor material. In what follows, non-­place will be defined as a symptom of “postmodernity”, not simply in its Western strand (postmodernity as a Western construction) but rather in a more open, composite, creolizing sense of a combination of traditional, modern and postmodern features. In this chapter, I will, first, briefly analyse the case of Eduardo Lalo, a Puerto Rican writer, photographer and video artist who to date has published a series of books, mostly essays and novels (the award-­winning Simone being his most famous novel). While the Puerto Rican author was still very much invisible at the time I started reading him, since 2013 he has been awarded the International Romulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas. Since then he has become fairly well-­known across Latin America, something that is, unfortunately, still rare for most Hispanic Caribbean writers. Other books are self-­acclaimed “hybrid” books, such as Donde (Spanish for “Where”), a book-­length literary and photographic essay, but also, as mentioned on the cover, a “novel” with a non-­fictional aim, described as the “theorization on the history of Caribbean writing”. Although they do not show a direct link with the written text, it is clear that the images in the book – a series of photographs taken by the author – serve to underscore the latter. Donde thus goes further than Lalo’s growing number of essays and novels, namely: La Isla silente, Los países invisibles, Los pies de San Juan, La intemperie, el deseo del lápiz, and his novels Simone and La Inutilidad. Yet Lalo approaches the Caribbean neither as a region nor simply as a place among others, but instead as a non-­place, specifically by focusing on one case study: his home city of San Juan, whose generic character haunts the colonized subject. The non-­place in Lalo’s poetics challenges contemporary attempts to describe the Caribbean as a number of historically and culturally informed places. Hence, a literary geography of non-­places goes against the very idea of the common definition of the Caribbean as a geographical juxtaposition of places. In order to grasp the complexity of the non-­place, it must be contrasted with traditional sociological and anthropological notions of constructed spaces and places. Yet the non-­place is not simply the opposite of place. As French anthropologist and Marc Augé writes in his theory of the non-­place, Supermodernity, “places have

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at least three characteristics in common. They want to be – people want them to be – places of identity, of relations and of history” (Augé 52), whereas the exact opposite can be said about the non-­place. Significantly, Chapter 2 of Donde starts with a sharp denunciation of the “tyranny” of Western cartography that defines places in terms of sizeable maps, scales, measurable distances, parameters, coordinates, and so on: Esa forma de la inexistencia que es la geografía. Tiranía insularista (y occidentalista): pensar solamente refiriéndose al panorama del país … Manifestación personal de la tiranía: no tener otra opción que ser parte del panorama. No existo porque el país no existe …¿Un puertorriqueño puede ser leído como alguien o sólo como un puertorriqueño? … Taras del colonialismo: una literatura llena de libros que no han llegado a ser, en ninguna arte, textos. (Lalo 145) (That type of inexistence that is geography. Insular tyranny (and pro-­western): to think only in terms of the country’s landscape … Personal manifestation of tyranny: having no other option than being part of the landscape. I do not exist because the country does not exist … Can a Puerto Rican be read as somebody or only as a Puerto Rican? … Blemishes of colonialism: a literature full of books that never came to be, in no art, texts.)

Moreover, the author suggests it is mandatory to do away with some of the most persistent leitmotivs (or perhaps clichés is a more appropriate word) that have affected the Caribbean. Lalo undermines not only images of the Caribbean as an exotic paradise, but also images that are more familiar to academics: the Caribbean as a “repeating island”, as Benítez Rojo puts it, as a paradigm of creolization and/or a racial melting pot. The writer-­photographer thus resists readings of the Caribbean as a fractal, an island that repeats itself in a certain way, which has become synonymous with a postmodern view of the Caribbean. For Lalo’s view is, indeed, closer to the insights of (mostly French) philosophers who have been labelled “postmodern” and/or “poststructuralist” (e.g.  Baudrillard, Bachelard, Sloterdijk, Derrida, Bataille and Benjamin) than to the almost obligatory Caribbean references to Glissant or Benitez Rojo. The use of theory, then, gives a fairly new perspective to Caribbean thinking. Some will understandably criticize the Eurocentrism that underlies Lalo’s theoretical underpinnings (something that is true for many Caribbean theorists, such as Torres-­Saillant as mentioned in Chapter 1). I nevertheless would like to emphasize the space Lalo opens up in contemporary Caribbean (and broader postcolonial) fiction by the very fact of using theory. Given that much critical thinking until the nineties was non-­theoretical, one can

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only welcome Lalo’s alternative, hybrid and experimental approach which, unconsciously, aims for innovation in Caribbean theoretical discourse, at the risk of undermining the local literary and scholarly establishment. By mixing theory and fiction in his projects, Lalo thus joins other, so-­called “postmodernist” academics, many of whom have been active in the cultural debate on Puerto Rico over the past two decades. All these intellectuals actively draw on European theory: Juan Duchesne, Ruben Rios Avila, Carlos Pabón, to mention only a few. Moreover, Lalo’s interest in what he calls “invisible nations” – referring to the Spanish region of Valencia – shows a rare comparative and “cosmopolitan” interest in other countries and territories. Going beyond the classical discussion of architecture in postmodern cities, Lalo concentrates on a less pleasant task: the emptying of social (public) space and its replacement by sheer urban consumerism. The city of San Juan, according to Lalo, can best be captured if one tries to identify the sum of features that turn San Juan in a generic non-­place. One of those all too recognizable topoi of consumerism is the fast-­food restaurant. In his early essay “En el Burguer King de la Calle San Francisco” (1986), included in La Isla silente (Lalo 2002), Lalo noted that there is in the modern world perhaps no place that is less a place than a Burger King, because of the fact that they are “construídos con el propósito de hacer creer a sus clients que no han salido del tiempo ni del espacio de un viernes familiar y consumerista en el centro commercial de su localidad” (Lalo 2002: 183) (constructed with the intention of making their clients believe that they have not left the time or space of a consumer Friday spent with the family at the local shopping mall). For Augé, examples par excellence of non-­places are indeed: shopping malls, airports, resorts, fast food chains, supermarkets, and even libraries. Augé, it should be noted, does not use the word “postmodernity” but instead “supermodernity”, suggesting that we are in the last (but also most aggressive and reckless) stage of modernity. As people increasingly wander – and at times even dwell – in these spaces their identity is efficiently being dissolved in the mirroring of similar consumer goods available in similar chain stores and restaurants. According to the anthropologist: Supermodernity produces non-­places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of “places of memory”, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps,

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shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity) […] A world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object, whose unprecedented dimensions might usefully be measured before we start wondering to what sort of gaze it may be amenable. (Augé 78)

Yet Augé suggests that the human cost of “supermodernity”’s imposition of non-­place around the globe is similar to the effects of colonialism: “The space of non-­place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude” (103). From an archipelagic perspective, then, non-­place is clearly the opposite of a connecting figure: while non-­places can be said to be “repeating islands” that reproduce infinitely, cutting across developed and underdeveloped regions, non-­places such as airports or resorts are often self-­sufficient spaces which do not seek or need to connect with other places. Donde –which means literally “Where”– points to the dissolution of specificity of place. Lalo focuses on his home city of San Juan, an urbanized tropical place yet converted into a non-­place where desire has been neutralized: “Un mundo en el que no pasa nada. Esa forma de la impotencia de la inercia. Esta presencia de los amos de la lejanía” (Lalo 2012: 23) (A world in which nothing happens, that form of impotence of inertia, this presence of the masters of remoteness). The condition of being a postcolonial subject thus, according to Lalo, involves inhabiting a homogeneous world emptied of life and cultural differences, a world which encounters its epitome in the airport, one of the non-­places par excellence: Los aeropuertos son la frontera del donde y a la vez el lugar que pierde progresivamente las particularidades geográficas e históricas de este. Lugar del no-­lugar. Donde indonde. El anuncio de las ciudades del futuro y la muestra de cómo las ciudades de hoy, se descivilizan. Sitio intermedio y brumoso, similar en su concepción espacial a las cárceles y los hospitales en los que las libertades quedan veladas, en paréntesis, entre comillas. (D 24) (Airports are the border of the where [donde] and at the same time the place that loses progressively its geographic and historical particularities. Place of the non-­place. Where Un-­where [indonde]. The announcement of the cities of the future and the proof that cities today are emptied of civilization. An intermediate and foggy zone, similar in its spatial conception as the prisons and hospitals in which freedoms remain veiled between brackets and quotation marks.)

More than an avid consumer of theory, Lalo offers in his book a new perspective on urban space in the Caribbean (San Juan being his observatory, as already was the case in his earlier work, Los pies de San

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Juan), and an important reflection on the invisibility of both Puerto Rico and the Caribbean as a community on the mappa mundi: Donde: estas calles que contienen otras calles y otros dondes. Donde que ya no es, que ya no será aquí, un vocablo del diccionario sino un concepto. Donde que es un “espacio” determinado por puntos de la geografía y de la mente, construido por la acción de la cultura y la inconsciencia de los hombres. Pensar el donde, volverlo imagen, es comprobar que el donde no es solamente un lugar. Puede estar en cualquier parte, en cualquier otro donde; porque el donde no es un lugar sino un determinante de origen y una estructura de límites. Y los orígenes y las fronteras son veladuras y éstas esconden y afirman en el acto que esconde. Donde de la historia, donde de lo visible y lo invisible, frontera, borde, material articulado de lo imposible de decir. (D 24) (Where: these streets contain other streets and other wheres. Where that is no longer, that will no longer be here, a dictionary word without a concept. Where that is a “space” determined by points of geography and of the mind, constructed by cultural action and the thoughtlessness of men. To think of the where, to turn it into an image, is to prove that the where is not only a place. It can be in any place, in any other where; because where is not a place but a determinant of origin and a structure of limits. And the origins and the borders gloss over and hide and affirm in the very act of hiding. Where of history, where of the visible and the invisible, border, edge, articulated material of that which it is impossible to say.)

In order not to repeat other generations of anti-­colonialist discourse, the writer departs from the very consciousness that Puerto Rico is still being colonized: Puerto Rico es una colonia? (y qué duda cabe de que lo es y ha sido siempre) cuando la gran mayoría de sus habitantes no luchan ni exigen su libertad? No se puede ver lo que la ley no ha nombrado. ¿No existe lo que el discurso mundialista no nombra? Quizá no. Pero detrás de estas ausencias quedan multitudes, pueblos enteros que no tienen palabras ni conceptos oficializados, visibles, para representarse, para reiterar ante otros su existencia … los países invisibles son pues una forma de anti-­representación. (D 167) (Is Puerto Rico a colony? (is there any doubt that it is and has always has been one?) when the great majority of its inhabitants do not struggle nor do they claim their freedom? One cannot see something that the law has not given a name. Does what the discourse of globalization does not give a name not exist? Perhaps not. But behind these absences hide multitudes, entire populations that do not have any official, visible words or concepts to represent them, to reaffirm their existence in the face of others … invisible countries are, then, a form of anti-­representation.

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For Lalo, the very question of whether Puerto Rico is a colony is redundant: it is indeed a given fact, a point of departure for seeking ways to deal with it, and therefore he only sporadically refers to Puerto Rico’s current condition of colonialism. It is more productive, he suggests, to focus on writing as a way of freeing the imaginary: “Sin ironias de ninguna clase, considero que ésta es la labor más importante que puedo concebir: negar la mirada de otro; efectuar no una re-­conquista sino una contraconquista.” (D 61) (Without any irony, I consider that the most important task that I can accomplish is to disavow the other’s gaze; not to reconquer but to counter-­conquer). More than a photographic essay, Donde is a mirror, while his novels are heavily autofictional. In Donde, the writer sees himself as a walking paradox pertaining at the same time to a place where any form of desire, including literature, is de facto impossible. However, he realizes that literature is the only place from where he can possibly write to preserve himself from psychotic breakdown: “Mi trabajo consiste en usar lo que tengo y lo único que tengo es el donde” (D 143). The daily non-­place is the setting where a minimal form of “revolt” and hope is still possible. The French critic Dominique Maingueneau would define such a situation as the writer’s spatial and identitarian paratopie, his necessary inhabiting of a paradoxical locus: “L’appartenance au champ littéraire n’est donc pas l’absence de tout lieu, mais plutôt une difficile négociation entre le lieu et le non-­lieu, une localisation parasitaire, qui vit de l’impossibilité même de se stabiliser. Cette localité paradoxale, nous la nommerons paratopie” (Maingeneau 1993: 28). (Belonging in the literary field is not the absence of any place, but rather a difficult negotiation between the place and the non-place, a parasitic location, which lives from the very impossibility to stabilize itself. This paradoxical locality, we will call it paratopy). If according to Maingueneau any writer deals to a certain degree with this paradox, in the case of those writers condemned to a “non-­place” that paradox is unbearable, Lalo suggests. As a non-­place, San Juan is literally literary inexistent: San Juan no existe porque no posee aún sus palabras, porque su población no tiene aún su literatura […] Quizá San Juan nunca tenga sus imágenes, sus textos y sus autores. Tantas casas sin un solo libro, sin conciencia, sin consuelo. Esta ausencia, este silencio, esta pobreza que nuestra sociedad no se permite reconocer al mirarse al espejo debe ser el punto de partida para esas palabras que un día nos digan. (PSJ 30). (San Juan does not exist because it still does not possess its own words, because its populace still does not have its own literature […] Perhaps San Juan will never have its images, its texts and its authors. So many houses without a single book, without consciousness, without comfort. This absence, this silence, this

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poverty that our society does not allow itself to acknowledge when looking in the mirror should be the starting point for those words that one day they will tell us.)

The statement that San Juan does not yet have a literature worth that name echoes the beginning of the créolistes’ manifesto on Martinique, where the authors regret that Caribbean literature, albeit for other reasons, is yet to be born (Bernabé et al. 1990: 886).1 Yet the overall image reminds us of the “national depression” that characterizes the detective novels of Lalo’s colleague Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. The island of Puerto Rico appears to them in a constant centrifugal state, whence the “post/slash/ colonial” subject. The real capital of the island, then, seems to be focused on its airport: as people temporarily leave the island – using the “guagua aérea” or airbus connecting San Juan to the US mainland – in search of opportunities, the island is already receiving back those disillusioned return migrants who had left in vain, or who restlessly travel back and forth in search for a home that is to be located somewhere in between Manhattan, Miami and downtown San Juan. If there is a remnant of place in this context, then perhaps there is also hope for recovering Puerto Rico’s wiped-­out cultural memory, or what Arcadio Díaz Quiñones referred to as the “memoria rota” (broken memory) of Puerto Rico. A place of memory or “lieux de mémoire”, where ruins, no matter how small, are significant, meaningful traces of human creativity. While the non-­place can be smoothly connected to modernity (and postmodernity), its most visible signs do not necessarily mean a significant change in terms of “progress”, “development” or global “integration”; for instance, the presence of cutting-­edge technology which virtually connects a place to the globe does not automatically imply more justice or dignity on a human scale. In that sense, Mozambican writer Mia Couto already warns of the illusions that bring forth the shiny yet empty surface of technological innovation if such transformations are not framed by an engagement with more social justice: “Mais do que uma geração tecnicamente capaz, nós necessitamos de uma geração capaz de questionar a técnica. Uma juventude capaz de repensar o país e o mundo. Mais do que gente preparada para dar respostas, necessitamos de capacidade para fazer perguntas” (More than a generation with technical skills, we need a generation capable of 1

“Caribbean literature does not yet exist. We are still in a state of preliterature: that of a written production without a home audience, ignorant of the authors/readers interaction which is the primary condition of the development of a literature” (Bernabé et al. 886).

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questioning technology, a youth capable of rethinking the country and the world. More than people prepared to give answers, we need the capacity to ask questions). Likewise, in his book La raza cómica, the Puerto Rican critic Rubén Ríos Ávila uncovers the illusion behind the visible commodities at hand on the island: “En un país cuya población completa no cabe en su territorio, pero sí cómodamente en sus automóviles, donde casi cada casa tiene un teléfono y un televisor […] se hace difícil aceptar que seamos, así, sin contemplaciones, del tercer mundo” (Ríos Ávila 293). (In a country whose entire population does not fit in its territory, but comfortably fits in its cars, where almost every house has a telephone and a television … it is difficult to accept that we belong thus, without contemplation, of the third world). Yet to create access to commodities does not mean to create conviviality. Referring to his colleague philosopher Carlos Gil’s El orden del tiempo, he asks: “¿Cómo experimenta el sujeto privado puertorriqueño, el que vive ya desposeído de utopías, el que compra en [el mall] Plaza las Américas y sueña con sus vacaciones en Disney World, esa entrada al orden del tiempo?” (Ríos Ávila 249) (How does the private Puerto Rican subject, who lives already stripped of any utopias, who goes shopping in the Plaza las Américas mall and dreams of his holidays in Disney World, live this entering of the order of time?). Gil argues that, in their current paradoxical situation, Puerto Ricans are being artificially “robbed” of the present, as well as of their dreams, cancelling any militancy against the suffering that underlies the “postcolonial colony”. This is in line with Augé’s description of supermodernity as robbing utopian ideals: “The non-­place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society” (Augé 111–12). “How to find a way out of this apocalyptic scenery?”, Lalo asks himself. A strategy for survival, he suggests, is to hyphenize the homogeneous space by ripping it to pieces and to dissect its components: Lo repito: no pensar en un donde exclusivamente físico, porque el donde es otra cosa a la vez que es el donde físico. La incertidumbre, las áreas grises de la definición, son parte integral de la definición. ¿Donde o d-­o-n-­d-e? Incluir los guiones. Incluir el espacio entre los guiones. (D 143) (I repeat: to not only think about a where that is exclusively physical, because the where is another thing besides being the physical where. The uncertainty, the grey areas of the definition, are an integral part of the definition. Where or w-­h-e-­r-e? Include the hyphens. Include the space between the hyphens.)

While Donde remains rather pessimistic and vague in its search for alternatives, in his book of essays Los países invisibles, Lalo attempts, as a

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mode of survival, to “archipelize” Puerto Rico in an ambitious and original move: he places his island’s invisibility in a planetary context, comparing the case of Puerto Rico to that of other non-­places, from an unexpected angle, for he looks back to certain places in Europe. More particularly, he focuses on the Spanish region of Valencia. The inhabitants of the so-­ called Comunidad Valenciana (Community of Valencia), he argues, do not necessarily identify with a “national” space and thus they fall into a sort of representative void (vacío de representación). Writers, and intellectuals in general, are affected by this condition, which increases their invisibility: “los habitantes de las provincias de la llamada Comunidad Valenciana, no tienden necesariamente a identificarse con un espacio “nacional” y por ello la condición de escritor o pensador valenciano cae en una especie de vacío de representación, puesto que la confusa balcanización literaria de la península ibérica no parece tener fronteras, pero a la vez sí las tiene, dependiendo de dónde se escriba y en qué idioma se haga. (PI, 48) (“The condition of the writer or philosopher from Valencia is to find himself in a sort of representative emptiness (gap), given that the confusing literary balkanization of the Iberian peninsula does not seem to have any borders, but at the same time it has borders, depending on where one writes and in what language he writes”; my translation). Not by coincidence, Edouard Glissant used that very same term (“balkanization”) to describe the literary and overall cultural fragmentation of the Caribbean’s literary geography. There is indeed an interesting parallel here between an Iberian “balkanization”, criticized by notable scholars such as Joan Ramon Resina, and the Caribbean context. In his introductory chapter to his book Iberian Modalities, Resina (2013: 1) describes the opposition to “iberianism” as an alternative, peninsular approach encountered in academia, a problem related to the literary “balkanization” that affects the peninsula, but also the Caribbean. Valencian writing (perhaps best-­known through its medieval masterpiece Tirant lo Blanc, the book lauded by Vargas Llosa), finds itself at the periphery of Catalan literature, which in turn was long ignored by Madrid, which imposed Castellano as Spain’s literary language. In Puerto Rico, Lalo’s paratopic space, the question of literature as a living death re-­emerges time and again: “¿Habrá literatura para esta deriva en este país invisible?” (PI 141). While the writer across his books apparently loses all hope of escaping the fast-­food-­and-­chain-­stores-­riddled colony, he recognizes in Valencia – equally subject to intense process of globalization yet not less invisible than Puerto Rico – similar pains and traumas, even though they are not related to colonialism. Such invisibility, he concludes, can occur in the very heart of societies that are protagonists on the world stage. In a particular way, then, Puerto Ricans are indeed

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an invisible community within the USA, not in the least at the electoral level (even though they may not vote in US presidential elections, at times Puerto Ricans do become visible, e.g. through globally-­staged spectacles such as West Side Story). Through his writing, however, Lalo finds hope of salvation, much like San Juan’s evangelical lessons (even though Lalo does not write from a religious standpoint, he seems to sympathize with the saints and their ideals of “love and suffering”, reminding us of Chabal’s emphasis on Africa’s “politics of suffering and smiling”). The writer’s agony is, in the end, not in vain: Aquí está consignado el paso del escritor por la ciudad de su agonía y aquí queda la emoción de los libros que ha leído, las nubes que se acercan desde el sur trayendo el olor a tierra, el fresco y la sensación de que sobre esta acera se escriben palabras y que la literatura es este acto único y severo. Y así, en esta acera, compruebo que nada está perdido. Que tras de mí está la obra de los que escribieron en este país. En este lugar sin esperanzas viven los pies de sus manos. (PSJ 141). (Here is set down the way of the writer in the city of his agony and here remains the sensation of the books he has read, the clouds that come from the south bearing the smell of earth, the coolness and the feeling that on this pavement words are being written and that literature is this act unprecedented and severe. And so, on this pavement, I ascertain that nothing is lost. That before me is the work of those that wrote in this country. In this place without hopes, there live the feet of their hands.)

Lalo and Augé are no lonely rangers in their pessimistic view of the non-­place as the planet’s future destination. In The location of Culture, Homi Bhabha in a similar move defines the colonial space as a non-­place in the great narrative of Western modernity: “for the emergence of modernity – as an ideology of beginning, modernity as the new – the template of this ‘non-­place’ becomes the colonial space. It signifies this in a double way. The colonial space is the terra incognita or the terra nulla, the empty or wasted land whose history has to be begun, whose archives must be filled out; whose future progress must be secured in modernity” (Bhabha 246). Likewise, the inexistence of literature (and literary history), in Lalo’s view, is part of the Caribbean, a colonial space par excellence, at large. However, in an era of globalization, as Hardt and Negri have painstakingly attempted to show, the space of Empire itself operates as a non-­place, what they call an “ou-­topia”: “In this smooth place of Empire, there is no place of power – it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-­topia, or really a non-­place” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 190).While for Modernity and the heydays of European imperialism colonial space was

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considered to be a showcase within the society of the colonizer, Empire does not have such a boundary: “In imperial society the spectacle is a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-­place of politics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to distinguish any inside from outside” (Hardt and Negri 188). Empire, they claim, is not simply the product of globalization but the continuation of an age-­ old phenomenon: it is the successor of imperialism, which belongs to the past. However, if we are to believe diverse Puerto Rican intellectuals, not simply an emerging “Empire” but both imperialism and colonialism have their avatars on the island. According to Lalo: Una vez más me reitero en lo que he expresado en otros textos: Puerto Rico vivió la globalización antes de que existiera el concepto y, por lo tanto, cuando era imposible pensarla […] en este sentido, la cultura puertorriqueña es una superviviente de la globalización avant la lettre. […] No solamente la globalización no nos ha permitido la visibilidad, sino que esta forma de mundialización de la sociedad de consumo ha hecho que, en la medida en que otras sociedades adquieren rasgos de nuestro proceso, nosotros nos perdemos en una inquietante imagen genérica. Se crea así la ilusión, nacida de nuestra condición de inexistencia, de que puede pensársenos como copias de lo que anunciáramos al mundo con décadas de anticipación. (PI 52) (Once again, I reiterate what I have already expressed in other texts: Puerto Rico lived through globalization before the concept existed and, because of this, when it was impossible to think of it […] in this sense, Puerto Rican culture is a survivor of globalization avant la lettre. […] Globalization has not only denied us visibility, but this type of globalization of the consumer society has made it so that, as other societies adopt characteristics of our process, we are lost in an unsettling generic image. In this way, an illusion is created, born out of our state of inexistence, that we can be thought of as copies of what we announced to the world decades before.)

While Puerto Rico is a mirror to the world – yet a mirror that remained hidden – it loses itself in the generic character imposed by Empire: globalization creates the illusion that Puerto Ricans are some kind of “clones” (or “mutants”) of the rest of the world, while Eduardo Lalo suggests quite the opposite is true. Yet in spite of the comparative link with Valencia, Lalo makes little or no reference to the broader Caribbean; this is surprising, since islands such as Martinique and Curacao are politically very close to Puerto Rico, for they belong to yet are outside of their “motherlands”. In that respect, the USA, France and the Netherlands have strong similarities.

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I will not discuss here the many problems surrounding the concept of Empire, as these have been debated elsewhere. Instead I will argue that the case of Puerto Rico is defined as a non-­place in a triple sense: (1) a colonial space whose history remains to be written (see e.g. Quinoñes’ La memoria rota [Díaz-­Quiñones]); (2) a non-­place in the generic sense of a space where Marc Augé´s Supermodernity is taking place [1992]; and, related to Augé’s view, (3) a non-­place that connects in flexible ways (without borders) with Hardt and Negri’s Empire or “ou-­topia” (Hardt and Negri 190). The argument that every place has its unique features and will always be different according to the cultural mixing that takes place is obviously more optimistic. However, this does not take away the power of the argument that the places defined by Augé are de facto, with little variation, exact copies of one another, creating bubbles within culturally and linguistically differentiated spaces. Moreover, Augé notes, “In the concrete reality of today’s world, places and spaces, places and non-­places intertwine and tangle together. The possibility of the non-­place is never absent from any place” (Augé 107). But the opposite is true as well: non-­ places can be dressed up as places: “Words and images in transit through non-­places can take root in the – still diverse – places where people still try to construct part of their daily life” (ibid.). Yet an archipelago can consist of one or more non-­places, without becoming “defective” in any way: contrary to Lalo’s pessimism, there will always be difference and diversity within archipelagic structures: the strength of archipelagos resides in their resilience to colonizing and homogenizing forces of globalization. While protectionism, solitude and similitude are characteristic of islands, archipelagos – and “archipelagic thinking”, offer, if not a solution, certainly a possible way out of the impasse. In societies, such Puerto Rico and Martinique, lingering in a twilight zone between the colonial and the postcolonial, however, one might return to a term that has had limited attention in the critical arena: light colonialism, which relates in particular ways to what Hardt and Negri defined as Empire. In the following section (2), I will discuss this concept more extendedly. While it is fascinating to observe the speed at which such concepts enter and exit from scholars’ interests nowadays, there is reason to believe that some concepts have a longer life than others. One wonders whether Empire will survive over the next few decades. A major issue is that Hardt and Negri’s theory of Empire recycles a centuries-­old term (“empire”): perhaps there is no other option for now? I believe a double dynamics is taking place here. On the one hand globalization shows that there is an increasing need for a new vocabulary, for more nuanced terms than “colonialism”, “imperialism”, “empire”, and “nation”. On the other hand, the prefix “post-” that has insistently and

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inevitably been present to describe contemporary geopolitics points to the fact that it might still be too early to claim that the aforementioned, ageing concepts have officially expired. The “last post”, then, has not yet been passed, as Raphael Dalleo notes in his book Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: “Using postcoloniality as a periodizing concept remains controversial in the Caribbean: when a number of islands in the region are not even nominally independent, implying that colonialism has ended can seem to undercut ongoing political struggles.” He therefore uses the term “to signify not the end of empire but the rise of a new international regime” (Dalleo 227): The strong continuity in terms of which countries occupy privileged positions in the new neoliberal world order – primarily the same countries from western Europe and North America that held power in the modern colonial period – often lends credence to those who see postmodernity or postcoloniality as nothing new. While the rise of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the global culture industry has certainly not led to the dismantling of international hierarchies, the nature of these institutions suggests the management of the global order not by nation-­states, as in modern colonialism, but by global organizations. (Dalleo 15)

This “new regime” has yet to be named, but does it really need to rehash the historically specific terms of “empire” and “colonial”? Hardt and Negri’s claim that global organizations are key players, not nation-­states, needs more theorization. It is significant, Dalleo notes, that even Hardt and Negri continue to describe the present as “postmodern” instead of “postcolonial”, a term they eschew in their work. The term “postcolonial” definitely applies to many Caribbean countries, but the specific interdependencies imposed by globalization call for a new vocabulary. Whether such a vocabulary will emerge remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, light colonialism, I will attempt to show, is the best term available for cases such as Puerto Rico, Martinique and Curaçao. I believe, furthermore, that even the frequently used (and abused) term “neoliberal” has become somewhat of a passe-­partout word in Latin American and Caribbean discourse. The problem with postcolonialism is also the way it transcends place, thus turning itself into some kind of imaginary non-­place. Following Peter Hallward’s critique of postcolonial theory, Stanka Radovic argues that “the problem of the postcolonial […] lies in its constant and absolutely inevitable wavering between the material reality of destitution and the imaginative acceptance of this outsider’s position in the name of some world in which there would presumably exist an option beyond the either/or of privilege and poverty, fiction and reality” (Radović 191).

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In line with his essays, Eduardo Lalo’s novels evoke the futility, or the inutilidad (as the title of his first novel goes) of movements across the non-­ place. More dramatically even, in La inutilidad the subject’s “planetary” wanderings of the protagonist through Paris and his oscillation between two women do not bring any relief or meaning to the protagonist’s life. In Simone, every character is in a different sense a foreigner, including the narrator, a disillusioned writer whose hopes of becoming an established writer are slowly vanishing. Even though the narrator-­writer remains anonymous, he clearly bears similarities to the intellectual-­ writer, Eduardo Lalo, whose name appears on the novel’s cover. When invited to a conference (awkwardly titled “The Right to Raise a Stink” [30]), the narrator is not only a writer but also an academic or scholar clearly familiar with the Universidad de Puerto Rico and French philosophy, as well as with academic life in general. In the novel, San Juan is presented as an invisible place where nobody feels at home. The problem of invisibility affects the writer as well as his lover, Li, a Chinese student who migrated to Puerto Rico and found shelter in a Chinese restaurant owned by remote family members. The narrator reflects: Debe de haber miles de chino en el país (nada más hay que sumar los que trabajan en restaurantes) pero son invisibles. Me he preguntado alguna vez cómo será su vida; cómo han venido a parar aquí, qué sienten. (SI 30) There must be thousands of Chinese people in the country (just count everyone working in restaurants), but they’re invisible. I’ve sometimes wonder [sic] what their lives must be like, how they’ve ended up here, how they feel. Is anyone counting us, the people living on this island? Do we exist for anyone, on this secretive afternoon, as we try to detach from the noise, the heat, the dust? Who hears our life stories? Are we known anywhere by anything other than clichés about us or vague, simplistic accounts of us that deny us our humanity?

Behind the growing global player China there are the individual, untold stories of thousands of migrants to the Caribbean and Latin America. Through his deepening relationship with Li the writer recovers a minimum sense to his life in the non-­place. However, as a writer he remains a Caribbean outcast: the narrator is self-­conscious of his insignificance as a writer whose books no one reads, in an insular space where literature has no meaning whatsoever to its inhabitants. The beginning of the novel sets the tone: Escribir. ¿Me queda otra opción que en este mundo en que tanto estará siempre lejos de mí? Pero aún así sigo vivo y soy incontenible y no importa que esté condenado a las esquinas, a las gavetas, a la inexistencia. (SI 19)

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Writing. What other choice do I have in this world, where so many things are forever beyond my reach? But  I’m still here, alive and irrepressible, and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been condemned to corners, to cupboards, to nothingness. Thoughts emerging from out of nowhere, from the “nothing’s happening,” from the here and now. I say this with the joy you feel when you’ve lost all hope yet still persist, still survive. Writing with no exit, from anywhere. In this opaque city, for instance, where I know my neighbors can’t understand why I’m writing and, in any case, they won’t ever see these pages. Writing from a dead end that will always remain a dead end that may never have been anything else.

The predominant tone, is, once again, one of depression. The capital, San Juan, is described in similar terms as Donde: a non-­place inhabited by people who do not question their condition, but passively accept it: “The world of the future (the future?): people wandering through the streets, the plaza, the highways, the stages of life, without understanding any of it” (18; author’s emphasis). However, one of the novel’s subtopics – immigration to Puerto Rico – seems to have been handled off too lightly, thus leaving the reader with the sensation of a missed opportunity. While immigration to the island is as complex a phenomenon as emigrants leaving Borinquen, we are dealing here with one subgroup, whose story is, as the narrator well announces, invisible yet real: Chinese immigration. In this respect, Eduardo Lalo’s novels strongly resemble one of the lesser-­known detective novels by the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura: in La cola de serpiente, the author apparently sets out to delve deep into the Chinese community of La Habana. However, the novel does not live up to its promises: beyond repeating the structure of a classical detective novel, centred around the whodunit, that is, moving (inevitably) towards the unmasking of the criminal, Padura unfortunately reinforces well-­known gender and racial stereotypes, not just regarding Caribbean women, but also reiterating clichés regarding Chinese people. Yet it would not be very cautious to dismiss Padura’s novel as simply machista without taking into account the writer’s deeper aim: not to provide entertainment through a classical or “postmodern” detective plot, but instead to draw our attention to the widespread corruption in the Cuban government. While Chinese immigration in Cuba goes back at least to the mid-19th  century, little attention in La cola de serpiente is paid to that historical context. In Simone, in turn the focus is not on the Chinese “ghetto”, as in Padura’s novel, but instead on the individual personality of one Chinese student who moved to Puerto Rico: the story of that immigrant counts as a synecdoche not

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only for the migrant to/from Puerto Rico as such (e.g. the Nuyoricans), but also for Puerto Rico’s condition as invisible non-­place floating between the Americas.

6.2 The Empire writes back … and goes global Decades before Hardt and Negri’s bold statement that Empire had become the new world order, anti-­colonialists had been struggling – with more or less success – for their countries’ total independence from the many European colonizers. One of them was the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose work initially had more impact in Europe and Africa than in the Caribbean. However, Fanon’s well-­known announcement of the end of colonialism has taken – from today’s vantage point – an ironic turn. At the end of his book Les damnés de la Terre, the writer from Martinique wrote that the time had come for Martinicans and all repressed people alike, to “shake off the great matter of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light” (Fanon 235). Fanon hoped that the “night”, the dark times of European colonialism that “enveloped” his people (for Fanon, mainly black people), would make way for what he considered to be a point of light for Martinique: the moment of its independence, of the island’s liberation free from colonial repression. Indeed, today, the result of decolonization is not quite what Fanon would have expected. Above all since the end of the Cold War, colonialism makes its presence felt in a much lighter fashion. As I will argue, light colonialism is the general condition that characterizes the Caribbean today, and, as a means of comparatism and to show the affinities to Eduardo Lalo’s work, I will try to illustrate its emergence through a concise reading of Texaco (1992), a novel by the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, a winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. I will briefly discuss how light colonialism operates in the broader contemporary Caribbean. From the outset, however, we need to recognize a theoretical problem. We are here dealing with a kind of colonialism whose conceptual vagueness is currently a major problem, and which needs to be analysed carefully. One could say that the Caribbean resists being further studied, as if it constantly blinded scholars, incapable of grasping its essence. Indeed, while colonialism itself has never really been absent either in Martinique or in the broader Caribbean, it did undergo an important change. While in former times colonialism made itself visible through the often-­violent presence of the colonizer, today, instead of having disappeared, it is much more difficult to comprehend, because of the

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ambiguous effects that leave even the most dedicated scholars puzzled. The very existence of light colonialism might, at first blush, sound like a contradictio in terminis or as an absurd statement tout court. But recent criticism on empire-­building points in the exact opposite direction, and shows that what is happening on a global scale is not far from what was happening in the Caribbean long before globalization became a fashionable term.2 Like so many novels written by contemporary Caribbean writers in all languages, Chamoiseau´s novel Texaco can be read as something other than a mere historical account of Martinique and its Afro-­Caribbean legacy and the formation of the French Caribbean creolized city (see e.g. Jordan [2000], Nnadi [2002], D’Hulst and De Bleeker [2005]): it is above all a history of imperialism from the beginnings of slavery until the postmodern era of corporate control and mobility. As such, it can be seen as a case study of imperialism from its beginnings until its most recent manifestations. The narrator, Marie-­Sophie Laborieux, zooms in on Texaco, a shanty town near Martinique’s capital Fort-­de-­France, which she founded after the major oil company Texaco exploited the people and left the place and its workers when business started to stagger. The novel begins when an urban planner, referred to as “the Christ” by Marie-­Sophie, arrives at Texaco. Aware of the fact that the urban planner has come not to bring peace but to raze the settlement so as to replace it by new housing projects, Marie-­Sophie tells him her life story, hoping to convince him to save the town by narrating its history. She then starts to narrate nearly two hundred years of the history of Martinique. The name, “Texaco”, is significant, since it recalls the corporate character of new forms of dominance. After slavery has long gone, new forms of exploitation arise that go beyond the original French imperialist project: hard-­core capitalist multinational oil companies as well as softer, more diplomatic but fiercely trained urban planners penetrate the field in search of new resources and benefits, at the cost of local people. Marie-­ Sophie defines herself, moreover, as a matador, a symbol of struggle for

2

I use the term “global Empire” to describe the global condition of what others refer to as “New World Order” (e.g. Phillips 2002) or “Empire” (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2000). I do not identify completely with any of these terms as described by those who introduced them. Furthermore, I use the term “light colonialism” to describe the particular condition of the Caribbean that needs to be critically studied in relation to Empire-­building, since lessons can be drawn from the Caribbean case on how globalization operates and what alternatives are left for the inhabitants of the global Empire.

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the local community, and of resistance to the total absorption of Texaco into the late capitalist order. Interestingly, since the late 1980s (i.e. decades after the heyday of European imperialist powers and a few years before the publication of Texaco), the very concept of empire is again brought under scrutiny. Indeed, many books started to appear with either the term “Empire” or “Imperialism” on the cover. One of those works was Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin and Gareth Griffith’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), unanimously said to be the postcolonial “bible”, which reintroduced the concept in the field of postcolonial studies, in the wake of Edward Said’s publication of his path-­breaking Orientalism (1978), later followed by Culture and Imperialism (1993) in the early nineties. A second major work that claimed the “return” of empire appeared a year before the September 11 attacks: Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), the work we have been referring to when discussing Lalo’s work, a book that would soon become a bestseller among academics in the USA and around the globe. Empire immediately gave rise to a series of critical readings. Many applauded the book (see e.g.  Balakrishnan 2003), and Slavoj Žižek’s question, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri rewritten the communist manifesto for the twenty-­first century?” (Žižek 2001a), did not pass unnoticed. Some critics (such as Argentinian critic Atilio Boron) fiercely condemned the weaknesses of the work. The very fact that the book caused an academic uproar is significant, since it is, I argue, a symptom of a general discontent that underlies postmodernity. Other critics, such as Homi K. Bhabha, relate the dynamics of imperialism in times of globalization to centuries-­old colonialism. According to Bhabha, one of the main promoters of postcolonial theory, global decolonization is a fiction, since the old oppositions between colonizers and the colonized are still firmly in place in the neoliberal era: It must seem ironic, even absurd at first, to search for associations and intersections between decolonization and globalization … when decolonization had the dream of a “Third World” of free, postcolonial nations firmly on its horizon, whereas globalization gazes at the nation through the back mirror, as it speeds towards the strategic denationalization of state sovereignty. (Bhabha xi)

Bhabha challenges the idea that globalization equals decolonization and the idealistic fostering of democracy around the globe. Mainly, the creation of financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank has resulted in the firm establishment of dual World economies that make poor countries “vulnerable to the ‘culture of conditionality’”; in addition, these

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economies tend to “mask the ubiquitous, underlying factors of persistent poverty and malnutrition, caste and racial injustice, and the hidden injuries of class, the exploitation of women’s labor, and the victimization of minorities and refugees” (xii). For all the aforementioned reasons, Bhabha decided to publish a new edition of Fanon’s work, one of the most radical anti-­colonialist works written since Bartolomé de las Casas’s denunciation of the abuses committed in the New World under Spanish colonial domination five centuries ago. Although intellectuals such as Fanon and Las Casas struggled for justice before the “global village” would become a reality, Bhabha reminds us that it is necessary for all academics (including literary and cultural critics) to formulate a real “critique of the configurations of contemporary globalization” (Bhabha 2004: xiii). In spite of the many benefits and opportunities it creates, globalization has also a repressive, frightening side that creates new divisions and dominations.

Empire and the Caribbean space In spite of having the suspicious privilege of being the colonized space par excellence, does the Caribbean fit in a volume on empire building? In fact, empire building in the contemporary Caribbean does not exist: it exists outside of it. If today the construction of an empire exists somewhere, it is elsewhere, in different places around the globe: there is no such process of construction in the Caribbean, since Empires have always inhabited the Caribbean since Columbus’s discovery of La Hispaniola. If the edifice of Empire was being built anywhere long before its extension on a global level, it was certainly in the Caribbean, whose history has never been part of History, the Great Narrative of the West, which was written by European and North American colonial powers. Since its “discovery” by a fairly unknown merchant from Genova, the Caribbean has been ruled by various colonial powers and nationalities. Unfortunately, it is necessary to remember that many of these powers (national or transnational) persist in the region, contrary to, for instance, the definitive downfall of the great British Empire in the Middle East and Asia. Furthermore, striking though the return of empire – its powerful presence in current critical discourse – is, I would argue the absence of one particular region from the debate. With their concern about the effects of imperialism in the aftermath of past colonial era, postcolonial studies present the Caribbean more than ever as post-­imperial (i.e. as a decolonized entity). Even Bhabha, who worries about global dynamics as many critics do these days, refers neither to Martinique nor to the broader Caribbean

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in his introduction to the new edition of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Instead, he focuses, like Hardt and Negri, on the global reach of contemporary imperialist ethics. Moreover, he does not mention the Caribbean’s past and present (neo)colonial condition. While he insists on the fact that real decolonization is an unfinished project, he does not ask himself what happened to empires in the Caribbean.3 What Bhabha does not remind us of (contrary to Texaco) is, indeed, that the history of the Caribbean is par excellence the history of the construction of empire. In this sense, Chamoiseau’s novel offers an interesting account of the different ways in which imperialism exactly worked in different epochs. Additionally, one of the strengths of Texaco is to show the complexity of the current situation of light colonialism in times of globalization. The novel traces similarities between colonizer and colonized, for, as Dawson puts it, “[Texaco] reminds us of the structural similarities and mutual dependency of metropolitan and colonial cities. These parallels challenge the exclusive focus on the capitalist core that characterizes much of the recent literature on global cities.”4 Texaco does not forget about local concerns, while in Bhabha and many others the “local” has simply disappeared. Bhabha, like most postcolonial readers of the Martinican intellectual, thus misses the chance of highlighting Fanon’s own background in his attempt to re-­ evaluate the importance of his work. In other words, one cannot properly value Fanon’s ideas about imperialism if the Caribbean context is left out. Thus, a major reason for this absence is the way current criticism deals with “glocal” politics. The success of globalization studies these days, and its weight on the phenomenon of (neo)imperialism, are undeniable. However, the study of the dynamics of globalization per se is not the problem. The current obsession with all things “global” – perhaps the new critical fetish in cultural studies besides the concepts bearing the prefix “post-” – makes the in-­depth study of particular areas apparently a waste of time. While observing the global forest, critics do not pay attention to the features of the trees that the forest is made of (the coincidence of this metaphorical use with the forest pictured on the cover of Ashcroft’s Post-­Colonial Transformation (2001) is not intended here, although the obsession with the “global” at the expense of the “local” certainly counts for postcolonial studies). Although the Pax Imperialis in the Caribbean appears of little or no interest to critics, I argue that it is crucial for studying 3



4



In other important works, such as Nation and Narration (1990) and The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha also omits the Caribbean as a colonized space. Ashley Dawson, “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City”, Social Text 22.4 (2004): p. 23.

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the region’s past and present in order to understand how we all can (or perhaps will) be affected by ambiguous forms of domination (such as light colonialism) in global Empire.

The Caribbean: decolonized chaos? Another problem specifically concerns the way in which the Caribbean is approached in recent cultural criticism. Much recent research on Caribbean culture has been focusing on the powerful theories of two Caribbean-­born intellectuals that define the Caribbean in terms of chaos: Antonio Benítez Rojo and Edouard Glissant. Although their theories are important postmodern attempts to value the fragments of Caribbean cultural identity, they also dramatically move away from the persistent problem of imperialism. Cuban writer Benítez Rojo, author of La Isla que se repite (1989), has become a synonym for the postmodern and postcolonial conceptualization of the islands of the region as a chaotic configuration that repeats itself – in fractalic fashion – across the Caribbean basin.5 No matter how interesting chaos theory is for formulating a contemporary cultural critique of the Caribbean, it has also had another important effect. I argue that the postmodern reading of the Caribbean as chaos has for a great deal diverted attention away from the problem of imperialism that has affected the region; it makes us forget that the Caribbean was for centuries the colonial playground for Europe and the USA. However, Benitez Rojo’s “postmodern perspective” on the Caribbean has been – like Glissant’s concepts – largely accepted by most critics of Caribbean culture and literature.6 Besides its ethnocentric view (taking his home island Cuba as a synecdoche for the broader Caribbean), Benítez Rojo rejects the idea that the Caribbean is de facto in a colonial condition, instead putting forward a view on the Caribbean as a decentred, chaotic and postcolonial space, where typical (cultural) features are “repeated” in the Caribbean archipelago.

5

There is a huge amount of literature on the postmodern and the postcolonial. For a discussion of the postmodern see the Postmodern Studies Series (39 vols) edited by D’Haen and Bertens (1988–2006), Bertens and Fokkema (1997), and Best and Kellner (1997); a history of postmodernism is provided in Bertens (1994). For a discussion of the postcolonial, see Adam and Tiffin (1990), Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989) and Xie (1997); on the relation between the Caribbean and the postcolonial, see Hallward’s chapter on Glissant (2001), Shalini (2004) and Zabus (1994). Among the many works that explore the relation between the postmodern and the postcolonial, see Appiah (1991) and D’Haen and Bertens (1994). 6 See e.g. Bracho (1994), Ette (2004), Hoeg (1997).

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While the postmodern accepts that we have passed the cape of the modern, at the same time it acknowledges its dependency on the latter, that is, the impossibility of detaching itself from the modern. Contradiction is at the heart of the idea of the postmodern. The postmodern accepts the end of history and the great narratives (History, identity, Nation, etc.) but it recognizes that it cannot (yet) completely undo (or deconstruct) these narratives. The postcolonial generally refers to the existential condition of formerly colonized nations and territories. It attempts to respond to the question of to what degree the process of “decolonization” has been realized in these areas, and to identify what colonial remainders or traumas persist in the individual and collective memory of formerly colonized peoples. The postcolonial, however, does not take into account the more ambiguous, less explicit postcolonial cases such as Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Aruba and Martinique, which are in every sense (politically, economically, culturally) on the verge between a colonial and a postcolonial condition. Edouard Glissant, writing from Martinique, where he was born, is mostly known for two major works: Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse, 1981) and Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation, 1990). Like Benítez Rojo, Glissant draws on the concept of chaos, but the former’s concept of repetitivity is replaced here by the concept of relationality: the grass roots of Caribbean cultures link all the islands in such a way that it is impossible to trace the exact origins of each culture. Most importantly, both theories try to describe Caribbeanness in all its complexity: the Caribbean is not represented as a uniform, homogeneous block. Hence, “chaos” has become a key term in Caribbean cultural critique since both authors have valued the “fractalic” nature of the Caribbean. According to Glissant, these interrelations proceed by fractures and ruptures. They are even of a fractalic nature. This process of creolization, the dynamics that underlie the Caribbean “chaos”, foreshadows the complex process of mixing, clashing (éclatement) and hybridization on a global scale. This phenomenon of éclatement and créolisation is what, for both authors, makes the Caribbean unique. In summary, they see the Caribbean as a mirror for what is happening on a planetary scale. Benítez Rojo´s and Glissant´s view of the Caribbean as a space that is chaotic and impossible to define, but where at the same time everything and everybody is interrelated, is extremely important, for it suggests that what happens in the Caribbean “is occurring on a global scale today” (Gyssels 2006): globalization as a confusing, chaotic process that determines our daily lives. However, the Caribbean can function,  I have argued, not only as a model of global chaos but, more importantly, as a case study of what light colonialism, a “decaffeinated”, less repressive form of colonialism that

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determines the new world order, which I will refer to here as “global empire” (“decaffeinated” in the sense Slavoj Žižek (2004: 507), would have it: all dangerous substances have been removed). Therefore, we should first take a look at what effects globalization has on the Caribbean. It is safe to say that the effects of globalization in the region are not fundamentally different from those in other parts of the world: spatial compression, increased communication, and a greater divide between the rich and the poor. A clear example of the latter is how Martinique and Puerto Rico are considered to be faring much better – in spite of persisting colonial ties to their “motherlands” – than, for instance, Haiti or the Dominican Republic, which in the past decades have gone (so the saying goes) from “Guatemala” to “Guatapeor”. Caribbean writers, aware of this divide, are not just complaining about the condition of the marginalized: they are also expressing true concerns about the general disappearance of real public participation in the new global order. In his book significantly titled A New World Order, Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips (born on the small island of St Kitts, a former British colony) notes that, in the new millennium: The old static order in which people speaks down to another, lesser, people is dead. The colonial, or postcolonial, model has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none. In this new world order nobody will feel fully at home. (Phillips 2002 5)

Speaking from his own education under imperialist rule, Phillips hesitates to choose either colonial or postcolonial, and this is significant. Although the writer does not refer specifically to the situation of the Caribbean, he clearly speaks from the position of the Caribbean, as the constant references to its culture and writers (like Chamoiseau) in his book make clear. Phillips’ vision of a “New World Order” is more Orwellian than optimistic, since he suggests that new mechanisms of control will be implemented in the present and the near future in and outside of the Caribbean. His view is close to Bhabha’s: as globalization tightens relations and compresses distance (through technological innovations) between countries and continents, there is no clear-­cut difference (if any) between represser and repressed, between colonizer and colonized. Does the New World Order, in Phillips’ vision, erase the specific (neo)colonial situation that characterizes the Caribbean in a postcolonial world, that is, a world that has in theory been decolonized, where no centre of power imposes itself on the Caribbean as was the case under European imperialism of the past centuries? When discussing the situation of the Francophone Caribbean, he is more explicit: “Martinique and Guadeloupe do not need to see themselves in the context of Europe,

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for there is already the ready-­made illusion that they are Europe” (Phillips 221). The so-­called Départements d’Outre Mer are smoothly integrated into the European body thanks to distortion-­free tele-­technologies. Apparently fostering freedom, Orwellian forms of control lurk behind the corner: Phillips announces a world where “nobody will feel fully at home”, but where each subject enjoys “limited participation” in the “global conversation”.7 How limited will this participation be? Close to Phillips’ idea of Empire as the New World Order is the Orwellian idea of a totally controlled society where “democracy” becomes a signifier that stands for any interpretation possible. A good example of such criticism is On Nineteen Eighty-­Four. Orwell and our Future (2005), edited by Gleason, Goldsmith and Nussbaum. According to the contributors to this volume, Orwell’s theory, perhaps more than Huxley’s, becomes more and more significant in today’s globalized world; the proximity of an “Orwellian future” seems to materialize in our present, with the global reach of telecommunications of all kinds. Although none of the contributors relates Orwell’s dehumanized world view to the process of empire building, it is clear that both are intertwined. At the very heart of the global empire, one or more key Orwellian issues are alive: among others, censorship and surveillance, the exhibition of (military or economic) power, the absence or limitation of democracy and public space.

The Caribbean state of exception Although most Caribbean writers do not express such Orwellian concerns for what looks like a “First World” anxiety, some writers, like Raphaël Confiant, do criticize the “trap” of technological progress, as it does not automatically imply more freedom: the Internet, for instance, ties Martinique more firmly to France. Confiant declared in an interview with Julia Watts: “In fact we are trapped by electronics. Before it was absurd that Martinique depended on France, but as electronics minimize distances … People who are pro-­France use this as an argument: it’s not a problem that there are seven thousand kilometers between France and Martinique because of fax and e-­mail” (J.  Watts 49). In his Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), Edouard Glissant provides a more complex – but also a more opaque – view of technological “progress” than Confiant’s, what he calls the technical hegemony of the West. Glissant’s cryptic view 7



In Phillips’s view of an unhomely world there is a sound echo of Tim Brennan’s book At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997).

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of the importance of technological progress appears optimistic, but he is careful: technology means that the West has exchanged its position of being “sovereign by right” for being sovereign “by circumstance”.8 Furthermore, the issue of sovereignty “by circumstance” takes a dramatic turn when considered from the point of view of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. What does it mean when “right” is “abandoned” for “circumstance”? In his State of Exception (2005), Agamben defines the postmodern condition of the Subject as one in which precisely circumstance plays a crucial role in defining Sovereignty, since “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency … has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-­called democratic ones” (2). Glissant’s statement warns us against such a state of emergency, where a law can momentarily be suspended whenever the Sovereign decides to suspend it. What if colonies can be (momentarily) “dressed” as postcolonies, that is, apparently decolonized colonies, devoid of their dangerous substance. In Homo Sacer, Agamben defined the exception as follows: “We shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” (1998: 18). Moreover, the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form. As such, it allows the Sovereign to commit any kind of abuses within a legal framework. Likewise, in an interview, Phillips suggests that the Caribbean is the embodiment of a paradox: an included exclusion determined by Imperial law: “the sense of dissonance, the sense of being of something but not of something which was created by empire, has had a profound effect not just upon my life as a writer” (Phillips and Lively). As a colony, one is never fully a member of the imperial system, one always fails in becoming a full partner of the imperial club: When  I think of empire,  I don’t think so much of conformity;  I think of something slightly more pernicious: membership – which partly embraces the

8



“[T]echnical hegemony (i.e. the acquired capacity to subjugate nature and consequently to intoxicate any possible culture with the knowledge created from this subjugation and which is suited to it) still permits the West, which has known the anxieties resulting from a challenged legitimacy, to continue to exercise its sovereignty which is no longer by right but by circumstance. As it abandons right for circumstance, the West dismantles its vision of History (with a capital H) and its conception of a sacred Literature”, Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981): 76 (my emphasis). See Gyssels (2001) for a detailed analysis of Glissant’s concept of Tout-­monde (the name he uses to refer to our “global village”) and the role of technology in contemporary globalization.

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word “conformity.” But membership is pernicious. The first thing that the British did when they arrived in those countries is establish a club, and a club involves membership – some people are in it and some people are out of it. (ibid.)

To be a colonial subject is, to quote the title of a fairly recent book on Puerto Rican politics, to be “foreign in a domestic sense” (Burnett and Marshall). Being wedged in between a colonial and a postcolonial condition, the Caribbean thus symbolizes such a liminal figure, a threshold in which the subject is adrift: to be Caribbean means to be both inside and outside, included in and excluded from society; it is on the verge between the colonial and the postcolonial, and because of this very ambiguous position does not fit fully into one of these categories. But in outlining his theory, Agamben (1998: 10, 38; 2005: 4) mentions extreme examples of states of emergency (ex-­Yugoslavia, the camps in Nazi Germany, Guantanamo). Besides these “dark” colonial cases, I argue that “lighter” cases such as the Caribbean’s should be included. The “indistinguishable”, “threshold” zone between life (the colonized subject) and law (colonial law) operates in a much more efficient way where “dark” repression becomes “light”, when the formerly repressed slave becomes himself a consumer, even free to choose his political future on the global market. In the case of Puerto Rico, for example, one can say, along with Flores, that “colonialism has been taking on a new face as its economic and political legitimations become so thoroughly veiled by cultural and commercial ones, and the colonial subject is mostly visible as a consumer” (Flores 12). Besides the dissolution of State organisms during the past decades, it can be argued that in postmodernity “the coming to light of the state of exception as the permanent structure of juridico-­political de-­localization and dis-­location” (Agamben 1998: 38) is much more strongly present in the Caribbean exception, where coming to light means also and primarily becoming light. Contemporary attempts by Caribbean critics to equal capitalism, globalization and (neo)colonialism are significant, but lack a more specific definition. Such forces are only defined in rather vague terms that apparently encompass everything the critic wants to include. A good example of such criticism is Ramon Grosfoguel’s term global coloniality, which is now, according to Grosfoguel, the dominant form of core–­periphery relationships in the capitalist world-­ economy … the concept of ‘coloniality of power’ is useful here to transcend the assumption of both colonialist and nationalist discourses, which state that with the end of colonial administrations and the formation of nation-­ states in the periphery we are living in a postcolonial, decolonized world. (Grosfoguel 6)

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Grosfoguel even goes so far as to state that the end of the cold war intensified the processes of global coloniality. The idea of global coloniality is close to Hardt and Negri’s equally intriguing but nevertheless theoretically vague conception of “Empire”. Grosfoguel’s perspective is close to Bhabha’s, since both stress the repressive side of globalization and the central role of capitalist institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. Under global coloniality, the Caribbean shares its specific condition with other ‘globalized’ areas. However, scapegoating capitalism, as Grosfoguel does, sounds a little too easy: one can easily object that such conceptual vagueness is not favourable to further research; rather, it looks like a dead end that, like Hardt and Negri’s perspective, does not offer any real strategies or alternatives. The problem with such theories is, as Boron puts it, that “in this pseudo-­totality of the empire and in its unbearable emptiness, not only is there no theoretical space in which to distinguish between exploiters and exploited but also there is no room to conceive the dominant coalition as anything different from an undifferentiated gang of capitalists” (Boron 119). But Boron’s own view is equally problematic, since he is nostalgic enough to ground all imperialism in the USA, while Hardt and Negri refute this idea. Hence, he misses the point, for he fails to see the importance of the very complexity in which capitalism operates today; if capitalism “vanishes in the translucent air of postmodernity” (Boron 119) it is only apparently. He does not accept the idea that repression “becomes in a manner of speaking, invisible, just like U.S. imperialism” (123). While, for Boron, US imperialism is necessarily visible repression, he does not acknowledge the existence of more ambiguous forms of imperialism – like light colonialism, which is not simply evil but has doubtless also an enchanting, even ‘enlightening’ face. It goes without saying that a similar trend can be seen in the contemporary phenomenon of postmodernism: everybody tries to define what it is, but none of the responses is really satisfying; something is happening, but what exactly it is (as yet) impossible to identify. If, as Bhabha suggests, old oppositions in times of globalization are kept in place, they certainly make themselves visible in new fashions. Technological progress and new communication “highways”, for instance, give a new attractive face to Martinique and Puerto Rico’s Third World setting. They might even enforce the illusion to Martinicans of being truly “European citizens”, as Phillips suggests, instead of the vigilantes of Europe’s overseas playground, or to Puerto Ricans of being real “Americans”. But they do not account for persisting common social problems in the Caribbean, such as unemployment and economic instability. In postmodernity, Hardt and Negri warn us, “the legitimation of the imperial machine is born at least in part of the communication

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industries, that is, of the transformation of the new mode of production into a machine” (Hardt and Negri 33). Although Caribbean literature does not (yet) give account of such an “informational colonization of being” (ibid., 34), it does locate the ‘imperial machine’ not in the hands of a repressive French or North American State apparatus (obviously absent in the case of Martinique and Puerto Rico) but in those of corporate companies, as the key players in globalization. With its explicit reference in its title to late 20th-­century corporate colonization, Texaco informs us about the urban setting of local centres through which imperial power operates (i.e. through which the metropolis managed its colonial power).9 This corporate mobility has tripled in postmodernity. Identities and goods have become fluid and exchangeable, while multinationals now create virtual centres, that is, nodal points of employment and, hence, of social life, that become marginalized as soon as the companies (a major oil company in case of Texaco) decide to move to another place that suits their financial needs better. This is comparable to the fate of the so-­called “ghost towns” thronging with gold-­diggers in the 19th century. Indeed, multinationals do not operate from one centre of power but, because of their swiftness and mobility in the postmodern era, from what Hardt and Negri (190), like Lalo and Augé, call a “non-­place”. The abandonment of Texaco thus points to a visible global phenomenon on a larger scale, mainly affecting the formerly peripheral countries. Texaco has been transformed into a shanty town since the oil company left, after being hit by one of the major thunderstorms, which damaged its corporate infrastructure and facilities. Particularly significant in Texaco are the “Notes of the urban planner to the Word scratcher”, since they show how the modestly sized Caribbean city of Fort-­de-­France is soon to be transformed under the global empire. These notes constitute intimate moments of reflection that show a guilt-­ridden subject, who compares his own practice of urban planning to trans-­national Empire building, 9



“Aujourd’hui […] les Centres économiques, commerciaux, culturels et financiers […] tendent à une expansion dématérialisée dans le cyberespace. […] Ici, l’hypnose n’est plus en direction d’un Centre particulier comme tu le vis en ce moment, mais la zone aimantée d’une entité inlocalisable, un brouillard de valeurs sécrété par l’ensemble des Centres dominateurs, et flottant-­circulant dans le cyberespace” (Chamoiseau 1997: 219). (Nowadays […] the economic, commercial, cultural and financial Centres of the world tend towards a dematerialized expansion into cyberspace. […] Here the hypnosis does not work towards a specific Centre as you live it at this moment, but the zone of an entity that cannot be localized, a fog of values by the totality of dominating Centres, and drifting-­circulating into cyberspace.)

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razing the environment and dehumanizing society: “But the city is in danger; she becomes a megalopolis and doesn’t ever stop; she petrifies the countryside into silence like Empires used to smother everything around them; on the ruins of the Nation-­state, she rises monstrously, multinational, transnational, supranational, cosmopolitan – a real Creole nut-­case in a way, and becomes the sole dehumanized structure of the human species” (Chamoiseau 1992: 356). Like Bhabha, Chamoiseau does not accept simplistic views of globalization as beneficial to everyone, as “an unproblematic means for escaping the oppressive centre/periphery relationship, for it too can be a vehicle for domination” (Watts 2003:  119). This vision is valid for the broader Caribbean and thus not only, as Watts suggests, for Martinicans. Are not only Arubans or Puerto Ricans, but, in different ways, all Caribbean subjects, regardless of their multiple locations, situated “between two worlds”? Beyond the “Commonwealth” Caribbean people, should we not consider the massive diaspora not only of Puerto Ricans and Arubans, but also of Haitians and Dominicans to the USA? This phenomenon cannot be seen as a simple wave of migration; it is informed by current global politics. It is one of the major proofs of global Empire at work. The decentring of people and identities is, ironically, almost a Caribbean brand. Diaspora and dislocation, in short, the creation of a “non-­place”, is at the heart of the Caribbean colonial experience. With globalization, diaspora is bound to become common currency, albeit in much lighter ways than the often traumatic history of the Caribbean, of which Chamoiseau’s portrait of Martinican history is a great example. More specifically, he suggests that Texaco is a way of corporate decentring that occurs in a smooth, non-­traumatic way. But Texaco does not offer any alternatives to the new forms of repression that have emerged since the end of slavery. Other recent novels, however, do suggest how today’s global Empire operates within the Caribbean, and how the (post)colonial subjects who inhabited this twilight zone strategically overcome old and new forms of repression

Postmodern maroons facing the light If a global Empire is being modelled after an enchanting and disenchanting form of domination, similar to the Caribbean’s light colonialism, the role of the intellectual in global Empire will necessarily be limited, as is the case with the Caribbean intellectual. Moreover, all intellectual praxis will be possible within the same limits the Caribbean

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intellectual has to operate in if we take into account what historian Pedro San Miguel suggests in his book Los desvaríos de Ti Noel: ensayos sobre la producción del saber en el Caribe (2004). According to San Miguel, to survive as an intellectual under (neo)imperialist conditions is to be like one of the most famous characters which Caribbean popular culture and oratory have produced: Ti Noel, the Haitian maroon and trickster of important novels such as Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World, 1984). The trickster is, of course, one of the most fascinating characters of Caribbean popular culture and literature (suffice it to mention Anancy and Ti-­Noel). Mimicry is the main feature of the trickster: by mimicking the Master’s discourse, the trickster finds in simulation a way of survival without losing his dignity and humanity, although he often appears as a monster to the other’s gaze, as is the case with cross-­dresser Sirena Selena in Santos-­Febres’ popular novel. According to San Miguel, the Caribbean intellectual is necessarily a trickster figure who lives in conditions of desvarío, a kind of madness that is productive and creative enough to fight centuries-­old colonial conditions. The desvarío, the play with the Master’s discourse, is one of the very conditions that make it possible to survive (rather than to live freely) as an intellectual in the Caribbean. Just like Ti-­Noel, the Caribbean intellectual lives in a constant state of delirium, for he thinks he can save the world by becoming a participant in a “kind of madness” (San-­Miguel 23). But the ability to shapeshift must not be seen as a weakness but rather as one of the Caribbean writer’s major strengths, since he also practises the art of marooning, escaping skilfully from patriarchal and canonized discourses. Instead of distancing himself from the characters, Chamoiseau practises and thinks like a Ti-­Noel, although the characters in his own novels (like Texaco) are not tricksters: “As a writer he consciously associates himself with the man on the plantation, who, after the white master has gone to sleep, creeps out into the night and begins to tell tales” (Phillips 2002: 224). To be a Ti-­Noel is not to reject but to maintain an ambiguous relationship with the imperial powers. Furthermore, Chamoiseau is also, in a way, in the wake of Ti-­Noel, a maroon, a fugitive slave: Chamoiseau is a follower of Glissant´s theories of marronage, which holds that the runaway slave who opposes the system is the archetypal Caribbean folk hero … The small-­island rebel must remain, to some extent, dependent upon the ‘plantation’ for food, women and friends. Out of this complex, ambivalent relationship to the power structure, the only way effectively to

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resist and affirm identity is to work both with the system and against it at the same time, to undermine it from the inside and the outside. (226)

It goes without saying that, if imperial power goes corporate and global, making efficient use of technologies, the writer perhaps acts like a postmodern maroon but he is obviously not a runaway slave. It is significant that Chamoiseau, when discussing the role of cyberspace and contemporary tele-­technologies, does not simply reject them but, like Glissant, expresses an ambiguous fascination with them. While the trickster figure absent from Texaco, Chamoiseau returns to the trickster in Écrire en pays dominé (1997). More specifically, he is interested in the figure of the hacker, who functions as a trickster in a world that becomes more and more virtual, but where real forms of domination are more than ever active.10 This fascination with hackers and tricksters does not simply reflect a Caribbean preoccupation with encountering ways of forging freedom within a repressive symbolic order, but also informs us about what is probably yet to come in global empire. The global inhabitant of this empire is being exposed to light ways of colonialism that characterize the (post)colonial Caribbean, that is, ways that are not always visibly repressive, where everybody has limited participation, as Phillips sees it. Light colonialism should be taken seriously as in the other meaning of “light”. Indeed, imperialism today functions less as an “illuminating” experience and more as a blinding light, that hinders us from seeing clearly what awaits us behind it. If it is indeed true, as critics increasingly argue in the wake of Hardt and Negri, that a planet-­wide empire is being laid out that transcends the classical colonized subject, this means that trickster figures will become more and more present in the global order, and probably will play an important role in other literatures.11 Hence, while critics do not lack interest in studying the importance of tricksters, the relation between these figures and global empire should be further analysed.

10

“[H]ackers and cyberpunks are presented by Chamoiseau’s Old Warrior as cultural negationists – in the mould of the Guy Debord’s Situationists – who will not allow cyberspace to become the medium of global capitalist monoculture, yet are not attempting to impose a monoculture of their own” (Watts 2003: 119–20). 11 The trickster is a figure that has made its way into different literatures and cultures on the planet, ranging from Africa to America and Asia. On the trickster in American and American ethnic literature see Landay (1998) and Smith (1997); for a study of the global presence of the trickster, see Hynes and Doty (1993).

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To conclude, beyond the attractiveness of chaos theory in times of globalization, of éclatement as Glissant puts it,12 the idea of a sprawling global empire should not be forgotten while studying Caribbean texts. Contrariwise, studies of Empire should take into account the Caribbean case to learn about the dynamics of global empire. If “sovereignty by circumstance” now rules, the Caribbean state of exception does not give us a manual on how to live under imperial rule, but it shows that every subject consciously or unconsciously might be participating – to give a twist to Conrad – in the very “heart of lightness” of this global Order. If the current dislocation of the subject is a global phenomenon in Agamben’s view, the Caribbean state of exception has become “the rule” in what is being described as the order of Global Empire. Therefore, when an empire goes global or “light”, it does not simply become “mad”. There is a method in its madness, just as there is a fractalic order in chaos. Contrary to what Fanon hoped for, perhaps this new empire is a chaotic configuration, but, in order to know its present condition, we cannot cling to old conceptions of imperialism and decolonization. We should not focus on the differences between night and day. In times of light colonialism we should pay attention to the complexity of the local chiaroscuro effects that bring forth the new “enlightenment” on our global canvas. Recently, our era was qualified by the Guardian as “dystopian” when 1984 at the beginning of 2017 rose once more to become the best-­selling book in the USA (Crook, Seaton and Taylor). Likewise, according to criticism of the past decades (e.g. Gleason, Goldsmith and Nussbaum 2005), Orwell has proven to be a clairvoyant, since his novel Nine-­teen Eighty Four is more relevant than at the time of its initial publication. The question whether such pessimism is justified is not relevant, for that question is at the core of speculative fiction. There is no doubt, however, that postcolonial writers have been integrating apocalyptic and dystopic themes in their writing over the past decades, whereby local concerns are placed in a broader regional and global context.

12

“I think that archipelagic places today, like the Caribbean, are places where the sea does not concentrate, but is diffracted, where there is a very intense movement of shattering [éclatement].” [“Je crois que les lieux archipélagiques aujourd’hui, comme la Caraïbe, sont des lieux où la mer ne concentre pas, mais diffracte, où le mouvement d’éclatement est très grand.”] Leupin, Alexandre: “Entretien inédit avec Édouard Glissant: ‘Retrouver dans le monde sa propre transformation’”, in: Mondesfrancophones. com. Revue mondiales des francophonies, 30 October 2006.

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6.3 Decolonizing the nation: the Orwellian cityscape in James Stevens-­Arce’s Soulsaver In the last section of this chapter, I will analyse how Caribbean writers strategically use the popular genre of science fiction in order to formulate their own “postcolonial” cultural critique. I will briefly compare Soulsaver by James Stevens-­Arce as an example of how the novel appropriates/ expropriates the popular genre through satire. As a mode of comparison, I will include in my discussion Midnight Robber, a science fiction novel by Nalo Hopkinson. Both books were published in 2000. I argue that these novels can be interpreted as satires in the Orwellian sense. What draws our attention to the novel is the description on the book cover of “a wild ambulance ride through an Orwellian Puerto Rico”, a description which summarizes well the permanent state of “emergency” evoked by the writer. In Soulsaver, in the USA of 2099 suicide has become the ultimate violation of God’s law. The separation of Church and State belongs to the past. The Christian Alliance rules the country from Washington, DC, abbreviation of “District of Christ”, with the help of technopriests and tele-­evangelists. The very fibre of Juan Bautista’s life consists of the Digital Jesus appearing on his ambulance monitor, the W-­G-O-­D radio station and, above all, the omnipresent tele-­screens of the tele-­evangelist network. The whole network is in hands of the mysterious “Shepherdess”, a kind of “Big Sister” addressing her global audience on a regular basis. In this dystopian cityscape, Juan Bautista, the protagonist, operates an ambulance in the “Greater San Juan Metroplex”, capital of the island of Puerto Rico, now fully a US state. Bautista is a new employee at the SPCA (Suicide Prevention Corps of America), where he works as a so-­called “soulsaver”: it is his task to fight the “crime” of people taking their own lives. Significantly, the slogan of the Corps is “La vida que Dios quiso hacer, solo Dios puede Deshacer/The Life God Makes only God may take” (S 68). In the USA of 2099, suicide has become the ultimate violation of God’s law. Soulkillers must be punished, and thus it is the SPCA’s task to keep them alive. Bautista drives a so-­called FreezVan, a vehicle equipped with cryogenics to freeze bodies on the spot and rush them to the nearest Resurrection Center, where they reanimate the soulkillers’ bodies so they can be judged for their crimes. The twenty-­two-­year-­old Juan Bautista considers himself lucky, because “Getting into the Corps is not easy. Soulsaving is a prestige position, and getting accepted, especially on your maiden try, is pretty special” (S 3). One of the tele-­evangelists active on the island, Jimmy Divine, is clearly inspired by media mogul and chairman of the Cristian Broadcasting Network Pat Robertson. Divine

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nurtures the masses with the word of God in a fashionable way. He reacts blindly to the Shepherdess’s words: “The Shepherdess addressing the nation again so soon? Must be something big. […] The White House Choir slips into I heard the Voice of Jesus as the Shepherdess appears ‘live from the Rose Garden’ surrounded by red and white blooms. ‘Bless you, my Children’, the Shepherdess says. ‘Bless you, dear Mother’, Fabiola and I answer automatically” (S 43). Not only the island of Puerto Rico but the whole world and galaxy have increasingly come to be part of the Shepherdess’ reign: Levicams translate her flesh into digital signals to feed twenty-­two billion hungry viddy screens. With the speed of light, her image girdles the globe and flashes to worlds beyond. It ricochets off geosynchronous satellites orbiting above Europe and Asia and the Indian subcontinent, connecting Australia and Oceania and the three Americas, floating in the warm skies of Africa and the frozen heavens of Antarctica. It zips the five hundred twenty-­seven thousand kilometers to the lunar villes, zooms the five hundred forty million kilometers to the distant Martian colonies. (S 246)

Soulsaver is thus not simply about life in Puerto Rico. Instead, it places the dystopic cityscape within a global network of what Deleuze (1992) called “societies of control”. Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Midnight Robber takes place in a similar dystopian context, yet in a more remote future than Soulsaver, and not on one (real) island but on two (virtual) planets. The first planet is called Toussaint, dominated by a system called Granny Nanny (echoing the Big Brother of Orwell’s Nineteen-­Eighty-­Four; Granny Nanny is a ‘Big Sister’ databank surveillance system), the network that effectively uses nanotechnology to keep crime out of Toussaint. The second planet is called New Halfway Tree. All criminals detected by Granny Nanny on Toussaint are sent to this prison planet. The main character of Midnight Robber is Tan-­Tan, a young women exiled to New Halfway Tree, where she initiates her transformation into a so-­called “midnight robber”, a popular trickster figure in Trinidad and Tobago, inspired by the West-­ African “spider goddess” Anansi, who in turn is close to the weaving figure of Arachne in Greco-­Roman mythology. Tan-­Tan’s displacement to the prison planet occurred after her father had committed a murder taking her with him. She experiences this as a journey from utopia into dystopia and solitude, becoming more and more disenfranchised. Because of this displacement and the extremely ambiguous relationship with her father, she splits her personality into a “bad” (the Robber Queen) and a “good” Tan-­Tan. What defines the young girl, then, is her duplicity, her Duboisean “double consciousness”, echoed in her name. Significantly, Tan-­

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Tan is equipped with an “Eshu”, a nanotechnological device connected to the Granny Nanny network; the “Eshu” operates as a kind of cyberteacher keeping her informed about the past of Caribbean peoples that left the Earth and migrated to Toussaint. Not by coincidence, Eshu is also an Orisha or spirit in the African Yoruba religion, also named Ellegua, or in Cuban santería, Regla de Ochá. We learn that Tan-­Tan’s split personality, reflected in her name, took root in the past relationship with her father, a simultaneously protective and perverse figure, for he maintained an incestuous relationship with her for more than seven years. Her father’s crime made her commit parricide, another crime she later comes to terms with, in a confession to Janisette (her father’s second wife) when accepting her good and bad sides as the two faces of her identity: Is me, I tell you! Tan-­Tan the Robber Queen! The one and the same … Lying under the pounding body she see the knife. And for she grab it and perform an execution. She kill she daddy dead. The guilt come down ‘pon she head, The Robber Queen get born that day, out of excruciation. (Hopkinson 322–5; italics in the original)

As a consequence of this trauma, Tan-­Tan thus takes on the mysterious persona of the Midnight Robber as a way of dealing with her double identity. Her confession reminds us of Mariamar’s confession in Mia Couto’s A confissão da leoa: Mariamar was abused by her father, a tragic yet unfortunately common episode in rural Mozambique, and hardly ever punished by law. Likewise, Couto’s novel suggests that Mariamar is strategically using her animality to take revenge on the patriarchal system that is deeply imbedded in Kulumani. In Soulsaver, Juan Bautista is initially an innocent young man who is later, like Tan-­Tan, condemned to live with a split identity: all his certainties are shattered when he is torn between his old loyalties to the Christian Alliance and the new understandings awakening within him. The Alliance orders him to spy on and exterminate the Twin Angels, who embody authenticity and Truth. However, in both novels, the duplicity of the main characters should be seen in the light of the strong satirical undertone of the texts. More than Midnight Robber, Soulsaver leans clearly towards Orwell’s original mapping of a Big Brother-­dominated society by satirizing the hypocrisy of present-­day Christian fundamentalism; albeit in a more positive (and at times fancy) fashion than 1984, since Bautista’s society cannot really be characterized as “repressive” in the strong sense of the word. Rather, the system keeps things more “light” and bearable in its everyday spectacle: he can always watch “Hallelujah Wrestling” on TV with a tub of “O Little Town of Bethlehem Giant Kernel Popcorn” in

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his hands. Because of its permissive character, the technopolis of Soulsaver is perhaps even more Huxleyan than Orwellian; for Huxley’s world view seems to prevail, as Neil Postman (1985) would put it, when what expropriates the human in society here is indeed what we love, not what we hate.13 In this sense, Stevens-­Arce seems to satirize Puerto Rican society, in between “colonial” and “postcolonial” (what I have been referring to earlier as “light colonialism”). Juan Bautista is the anti-­hero living in a polluted, overcrowded, poverty-­riddled Puerto Rico. In spite of taking place in the year 2099, one can easily recognize today’s problems of the Isla del Encanto (Island of Enchantment): contamination, poverty and unemployment, and a high crime rate.14 Nevertheless, the dark, grim atmosphere of Soulsaver is indeed closer to Orwell than to Huxley’s Brave New World, where Big Brother is not required to deprive people of their autonomy. In short, the close alliance between technology, power and religion in the San Juan Metroplex is much more visible and thus at first sight much more worrying than the attractive world of Hopkinson’s Toussaint, where nanotechnology is smoothly integrated, and, of course, invisible to the human eye. There is no sense whatsoever that Toussaint’s environment is alien. Yet contrary to Tan-­Tan, for Bautista there is not much space for performance, as he is completely absorbed in the society of spectacle that surrounds him. As a matter of fact, Midnight Robber´s position towards control-­intensifying technology is much more ambivalent than it appears at first sight: while Granny Nanny functions clearly as Big Brother, the very name of the network refers also to Jamaica’s national hero.15 Granny Nanny is the well-­known Maroon leader organizing the rebellion against the British and creating Nanny Town, where runaway slaves could live a free life (a nanny meaning a “mother’s assistant”). The system here, contrary to Orwell, really seems to have a human face, as it is at times generous and even helps Tan-­Tan out of her problems. In short, Granny Nanny fulfills both a nurturing and a “smothering” function, as the author explains in an interview: “There are 13

“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure” (Postman 1985: viii). 14 Significantly, within the Caribbean and Latin American context, Puerto Rico’s death rate has been one of the highest, together with those of Cuba and Trinidad and Tobago (CIA World Factbook). https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ rankorder/2066rank.html#rq. 15 “Queen Mother Nanny”, as she is also called, was the leader of the Eastern Jamaican Maroons in the 18th century. She is famous for her heroic struggle against the British colonial empire and slavery. Born in Ghana in western Africa to the Ashanti tribe, Queen Nanny is said to have been brought to Jamaica as a slave.

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no poor people on Toussaint, no wage slaves … [it] does feel like being mothered, and sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a smothering thing” (Hopkinson 2000). There is a strikingly intelligent and almost invisible interweaving of technology and the Caribbean environment reproduced on Toussaint. Finally, there is a tension between the magical realism of the setting and the way nanotechnology is smoothly integrated in society and the ecological environment; so smoothly that one hardly notices the presence of technologies. This is a major difference with the classical science fiction story: the colourful, lively background contrasts with the cold, lifeless setting of most science fiction, where technology is extremely visible. Written in creolized English, Midnight Robber mixes satire with parody. In addition, the novel can be situated at the intersection of the critical distinction (see e.g.  Bainbridge 1986) between the “hard SF novel” (emphasizing the scientific aspects), “New Age” (which emphasizes the experimental) and “Fantasy” (which privileges fantasy over science dimension), but Hopkinson’s novel challenges rigid classifications. This mixing of established differences within the genre is continued at the linguistic and stylistic level, as acknowledged by the author: I’m also experimenting with the complex sets of codes that are Caribbean creoles. (I know one pretty well, and bits of two others.) Caribbean cultures are hybrid cultures. Hybridity was a strategy for survival and resistance amongst the enslaved and indentured people. They all came from different cultures with different languages and then had an alien culture and speech imposed on them. They had to find ways to use elements of all the cultures in order to continue to exist. That hybridity is reflected in the languaging we’ve created. I’ve tried to reflect that in Midnight Robber, largely in the way the characters use language when they speak, but also in the language of the narrative. I’ve tried to write the book as it might be written if it were actually an artifact of the fictional culture I’ve created. (Hopkinson 2001)

Even though Hopkinson use the term “hybridity” instead of “creolization”, there is no doubt that she attempts to create a Caribbean language that also thoroughly creolizes Science Fiction as a genre, both on the thematic (the theme of Carnaval) and the linguistic level. It goes without saying that the Midnight Robber is a key character (normally a male performer) in Caribbean carnaval (mainly in Trinidad), whose role is to satirize not only the Other but also his own language. Brian Honoré, a known performer of the Midnight Robber in Trinidad, calls this character “the most fearsome and lovable character of the Trinidad Carnival” (Honoré 124). “The Midnight Robber, in his deep, dark, episodic description of

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duplicity and depravity, is not a comic character. He is, however, capable of satirizing his own use of language. Always the boaster, he can also – like the Pierrot Grenade – be the master of malapropism and metaphor, and he feels no qualms about selfmockery” (Honoré 130). There is a strong echo of the slave trade: a son of an African King was stolen away into slavery and escaped, and subsequently turns into a bandit to survive. But, as Hopkinson stresses, “it’s also a powerful metaphor for exile and longing for home”, one of the leitmotivs of Caribbean literature. Tan-­Tan in the novel is related to the myth of Anancy, who in African belief is a trickster figure: half-­spider, half-­man, Anancy helps to free the slaves.16 If the creation of a Caribbean language really “infuses meaning into the language that goes beyond its content” (Hopkinson 2001), on the level of content (thematic level), then, the novel takes a distance from some well-­travelled myths of Science Fiction, like the encounter with aliens and, above all, the myth of colonization. But on the other hand, the novel appropriates the alien. As Bakhtin argued, the alien can be embraced in a dialogic novelistic style, through what he calls heteroglossia: each novel is constructed from a multiplicity of voices, assembled into a structured literary system whereby the language used is not “original” in the sense that it has always already been borrowed from others.17 The paradox of Tan-­Tan’s self-­alienation and duplicity is highlighted and reinforced in the style of Hopkinson’s novel: she creates an environment full of “alien words”, that will be perceived in different ways whether the reader is familiar or not with Caribbean culture and the creolization of languages. The very style of Hopkinson’s work highlights otherness: the movement of excluding the other (by not accepting the myths of science fiction) is countered by a second movement of including otherness (through the creation of a creole, “Caribbeanized” language). As a result of this inclusion and exclusion of the alien, one could say Hopkinson creates an effect of expropriation in the Derridean sense that she creates a double movement: meaning is infused by different modes of Caribbean speech – in intimate relation to micro-­technologies – while at the same time she desires to maintain a distance towards “pure” science fiction. Expropriation, according to Derrida, consists in this double movement of appropriating meaning, while at the same time desiring to maintain its status as alien, that is, to keep it in its place as Other: “What I call 16

This is confirmed by Hopkinson in an interview: “Midnight Robber has allowed me to imagine a world rooted in Caribbean culture and folklore.” 17 “The style of the novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of the novel is the system of its languages” (Bakhtin 262).

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‘exappropriation’ is this double movement in which I head toward meaning while trying to appropriate it, but while knowing at the same time that it remains – and while desiring, whether I realize it or not, that it remain – foreign, transcendent, other, that it stay where there is alterity. If I could reappropriate meaning totally, exhaustively, and without remainder, there would be no meaning” (Derrida and Stiegler 111). Hence, Hopkinson suggests that technologies mean neither heaven nor hell to Caribbean countries. She suggests that even where a Big Brother or Granny Nanny is present there is still a possibility of survival through mimicry. I would like to stress that both Caribbean science fiction stories are postcolonial satires;. However, they should not simply be read as speculations about the future; satires deal, more than any other literary genre, with contemporary society. Midnight Robber and Soulsaver do not intend to be prophetic; rather, they are critiques of flaws in contemporary society, and these flaws are generally embodied in one central character (e.g. Candide, Gulliver, here Bautista the “soulsaver” and Tan-­Tan the “Midnight Robber”) The satires’ protagonists’ features usually appear in the titles of the novels or are explicitly laid out from the outset on the first pages. Soulsaver is nonetheless, much more than Hopkinson’s work, a satire in the traditional sense: it criticizes society in a direct way, taking real facts and places as its point of departure. As we know, satire uses a very direct language to reach its aim, and it takes the flaws of society as its object. But these satires also contain powerful allegories of Caribbean nations in postcolonial times. (I defend this idea in other readings of other “postmodern” Caribbean novels, for instance Sirena Selena vestida de pena by Mayra Santos-­Febres.) Although Puerto Rico is now a full part of the USA (and thus has finally resolved the debate regarding its future), I argue that the main character, Juan Bautista, could be read as an allegory of today’s Puerto Rico, technologically and economically totally integrated into the US economy. Indeed, before its name change under US colonial rule Puerto Rico was called San Juan Bautista (in the coat of arms of the island we read: “Joannes est nomen eius”). The religious fundamentalisms and struggles in Puerto Rico are a real problem that has been analysed by a number of other authors (Ana Lydia Vega, Rosario Ferré). But this is just one aspect of reality (of course, the problem of fundamentalism is a problem on a global scale). But the novel suggests that the “plague” of suicides and the omnipresence of telescreens might have been the only possible, but certainly not the most viable, future for Puerto Rico; in other words, it draws our attention to the unresolved problem of the status of Puerto Rico. Tan-­Tan, on the other hand, could be read as an allegory of the broader Caribbean as a nation in an era of

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globalization. While Bautista is clearly a cardboard figure, in the tradition of the satire (little or no emotional development and explicit portrayal of his strengths and weaknesses), one would expect the same to happen to nanotechnological Tan-­Tan. But Tan-­Tan is the contrary: she seems to be human, even excessively human; and her body, violated over and over again by the father, acquires an uncanny presence to the reader.18 Her appearance suggests that in cyberspace we progress towards what Žižek calls “the disembodying of our experience”, returning to an uncanny virtual immediacy that involves a much more intimate corporeality (Žižek 2001b, 54). Of all the Caribbean countries, perhaps Cuba is the least likely to be seen as “suitable” for the writing of science fiction. Young writer José Miguel Sánchez (better known as “Yoss”) ends his essay on Cuban science fiction with the following remark: “the foreign public would rather hear about Cuba’s balseros [raft refugees], its jineteras [hustlers], its gays and its dissidents, but its science fiction?! Is there such a thing? And if it did exist, could it really be worthwhile? Isn’t the everyday reality of Cuba ‘science fictiony’ enough?” (Sánchez). Perhaps the colonial experimentation with the Caribbean allows us to say that, as we also learn from Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao, since Columbus’s arrival in the New World the Caribbean has been a Western playground for testing its own fictions, from Puerto Rico’s conversion in a showcase of modernity, to Cuba’s conversion into a war machine during its “special period”, to present-­day Guantanamo’s biopolitical and technological experiment.

18

According to one of the critics of this novel, Gordon Collier (455), Hopkinson has “an essentially humanistic agenda in which the creation of fully realized human identities in fully realized intact or near-­intact cultures is paramount. The globalized spatial identity that is reflected in Hopkinson’s work is ‘familial’ and otherwise decentred, which fits in with the potentially globalized nature of the Caribbean as a zone without any potent (or successful) nationalist strivings.”

Chapter 7

Travelling Concepts I: From the Caribbean to Europe

We are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos (James Clifford)

7.1 Composite cultures Visiting Césaire Visiting the island of Martinique, Charles de Gaulle once said that “Entre l’Europe et l’Amérique, je ne vois que des poussières”.1 It may not be obvious at first glance that the general thus stretched his own definition of the Europe he dreamt of – a geographical region that stretches from the Ural to the Atlantic – far beyond the borders of the imaginable. After all, was it not a fact that a colonial part of Europe was still located on the margins of the Americas? Indeed, except for some anti-­colonialist voices, those “motes of dust” were not to jeopardize the Elysée’s colonial agenda in the Caribbean. Although in 1964, at the time of De Gaulle’s visit to Martinique, the heat of the struggle for decolonization was over – the independence of Algeria was already a fact – his statement carried at least an imperialist undertone. Today, almost half a century later, the word “imperialism” sounds old-­ fashioned and is considered part of the past of one particular cluster of former empires: Europe. In the context of the Caribbean, the term now evokes images quite opposed to those of an attractive region where masses of tourists arrive daily in hopes of recovering a bit of paradise lost. Two specifically popular destinations for tourists are Martinique and Puerto Rico. While the former mostly attracts Europeans, and specifically the French, the latter is mostly visited by American tourists. This is not a 1



The sentence appears as an epigraph to Glissant’s Le Discours antillais (1981: 7). De Gaulle pronounced these words when visiting the island in 1964.

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coincidence when we take into account the accessibility of these islands to France and the USA respectively. But few tourists (if any) know the history behind the names that are highlighted on the façades of L’Aéroport International Martinique Aimé Césaire in Fort-­de-­France and Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan.2 Strikingly, but largely unknown, both airports bear the names of poets. Aimé Césaire (one of the founding fathers of the Négritude movement) and Muñoz Marín (a would-­be poet who spent many years in the USA) were also major politicians, who helped transform and simultaneously consolidate the ties between their home island and the “Motherland” (i.e. its erstwhile colonizers). Both saw this colonial consolidation as a strategic step towards loosening political and cultural dependency on the motherland (i.e. ultimately as a way of giving their country more autonomy). Of course, today, both airports are places of mass transit, of countless arrivals and departures, not only of foreign tourists but also of Martinicans and Puerto Ricans themselves. These airports are the symbolic capitals of the islands; they are the very knots that, in postmodernity, firmly tie Martinicans and Puerto Ricans to the French and US metropolis (Dash xviii). It it also this transformation of these places in transitory spaces that convert them, according to writers such as Eduardo Lalo, into so-­called “non-­places”, as I have discussed in the previous chapter. More than half a century ago, the political status of the islands was transformed in such a way that a renewed – albeit different – relation of dependence was put in place. Just after the Second World War, Martinique became a Département D’Outre Mer (DOM). In 1952, Muñoz Marín baptized Puerto Rico an Estado Libre Asociado (ELA).3 What is even more striking is that both Muñoz Marin and Césaire once advocated unconditional independence. Muñoz Marín was, before becoming governor of Puerto Rico, a member of the Puerto Rican socialist party that claimed Puerto Rican independence from the USA. Césaire, although he was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on the departmentalization of Martinique, in his own words never ceased to be an indépendentiste.4

2



Recently (15 January 2007), the name of Martinique’s main airport was changed from Aéroport de Fort-­de-­France – Le Lamentin to Aéroport international Martinique Aimé Césaire, to pay tribute to the island’s poet and former politician. 3 It should be noted that the paradox inherent in Puerto Rico’s official status, Estado Libre Asociado (literally Free Associated State), is not rendered in the official English equivalent, Commonwealth. 4 Obviously, there are important differences between Césaire and Muñoz Marín. The latter was first and foremost a politician, while the former maintained a balance between

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When De Gaulle spoke of “motes of dust” separating both continents, he was of course not attempting to coin a metaphor, even though he is known as the proud promoter of the French language and identity. Many will remember his (in)famous exclamation “Vive le Québec libre!” during a visit to Canada (24 July 1967), leaving the country immediately after his discourse to an enthusiastic crowd in Montreal. The general apparently saw Québec as a colonized region deserving of political autonomy, yet he never made any such statement about the French colonies. Significantly, De Gaulle’s “motes of dust” sentence is one of five epigraphs opening a major book about the Caribbean postmodern condition: Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) by the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant. In his book, Glissant is concerned not so much with Martinican francophilie as with what he calls its “Eurofilia”: he satirizes a Martinican planter who refers to himself and his fellow Martinicans as “nous, les Européens” when interviewed on television (Glissant 1981: 123). Moreover, when Glissant uses the term “Occident” to talk about Europe he does not mean this in a geographical sense, but in a discursive one, Europe as the “centre” of the universe. In a footnote he clarifies that “L’Occident n’est pas à l’ouest. Ce n’est pas un lieu, c’est un projet” (12). Notwithstanding the fact that his title, both in the original French and in English translation, suggests a wider application, in practice Glissant’s “Caribbean” discourse limits itself to the Francophone Caribbean, with a strong emphasis on Martinique, and does not cover any other Caribbean island or territory. During his visit to Martinique, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá is amused and intrigued by a sign saying that a new aquarium is soon to be opened. The sign reads: Aquarium de la Martinique, un des plus grands aquariums de l´Europe! (Rodríguez Juliá 280). Juliá interprets the sign in two ways: on the one hand, he sees it as an example of how today’s Martinique is a “playground” (278) for tourists from France; on the other, he sees it as proof of the francophilie and eurocentrism of the Martinicans. Juliá, accompanied by a translator, is on his way to interview Aimé Césaire. A translator is indispensable, since, Juliá reflects, “Nos comunicamos mejor con el amo, o el ex amo, que con el vecino que ha compartido las mismas penurias” (Rodríguez Juliá 2002: 282) (We communicate better with the master, or ex master, than with our neighbour who shares the same lack). Still, in spite of the linguistic differences that tie the islands to the mother tongue of their master (France/USA), he notes striking similarities between Martinicans and Puerto Ricans. They share almost the same his literary and political activities, much like his personal friend Leopold Senghor, with whom he co-­founded Négritude, a transnational black literary movement.

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obsessions and anxieties, not least of which is an obsession with identity and independence. Moreover, for both countries political independence and the creation of a nation-­state seem further away than ever (Juliá refers to Puerto Rico as a “political fossil”, 278), because of the political and economic ties binding the Caribbean territories to France and the USA respectively. Moreover, Juliá asks, “did we reach a relation of dignity with the metropolis?” (278). Juliá’s visit to Césaire is an opportunity for the writer to reflect on his own country, and to make the neighbour island and its major poet known to his fellow Puerto Ricans in Caribeños. For Caribbean literature does not travel easily from one island to another, which is why Francophone authors are lucky if they are able to publish their works in France, and so reach a larger readership. In a similar vein, Puerto Rican writers know all too well that they are read by more people when their work is published in Spain (or, with some luck, in Spanish America) or when they are translated into English, in order to make it in the US bookstores. For Juliá the message is clear: while Caribbean people continue to be ignorant of their neighbours (something they can hardly be blamed for, given the editorial and distributional problems that affect writers and readers in the region),5 and while economic, cultural and political dependence continues to exist, a relationship of dignity between the islands and their respective “Motherlands” is impossible; regardless of whether the Motherland in question is a single-­nation state (France), a federal constellation of states (the USA) or an emerging supranational power (the European Union), Martinicans and Puerto Ricans share the same condition as “second hand citizens” within the current relationship with the USA and Europe. Two of Juliá’s books (Caribeños [2002], as well as Las tribulaciones de Jonás [1981], a chronicle about Muñoz Marín) are imbued with this pessimist undertone, suggesting that, in spite of their good intentions, both poet-­politicians (Césaire and Muñoz Marín) failed – if not completely, at least partially – on the political level in their claim for a more dignified relationship with the metropolises. For Juliá it is clear that the ongoing economic and social crisis in the Caribbean territories concerned reflects the failure of both political constructions, DOM and Estado Libre Asociado. Another Martinican writer, Raphaël Confiant, confirms that in France’s overseas departments both the people in the street and the intellectuals suffer from francophilie and, more generally, eurocentrism: 5



Access to publishing and distribution is, however, a problem in every postcolonial area (i.e. the periphery), and not just in the Caribbean.

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“Nous sommes complètement tournés vers l’Europe” (Torchi 2004: 123). For Confiant, as for Juliá, the hierarchical relation of the islands to Europe is such that writers are more familiar with European authors than with their colleagues from the surrounding islands. The vertical relation that connects the Caribbean islands and territories to the (former) European colonizer indeed facilitates communication with the “master”, as Juliá puts it, but not with “neighbours”. Thus the relationship is that of periphery to centre, rather than a web of non-­hierarchical relations. Significantly, when asked for common traits about the Caribbean, Frank Martinus Arion, a writer from Curaçao, concludes in a similar pessimist tone that what approaches the different parts of the region is the “complete ignorance of each other’s existence. There is more Europeanness than Americanness and practically no Caribbeanness in sight” (Arion 1998: 449). Because of the current situation of dependence, some would not hesitate to describe the Euro-­ Caribbean territories (Martinique, Guadeloupe Puerto Rico, Aruba and Curaçao, among others) as trapped in a (neo-)colonial situation that flirts with the surreal. It should be recalled, though, that the latter term was initially received with enthusiasm. Césaire, along with the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, was one of the key figures that imported and transformed European surrealism in the Caribbean. Although Césaire is known above all as the poet of Cahier d´un retour au pays natal (1939), he is also the author of Une tempête (1969, a postcolonial parody on the Shakespearian play that is part of the genealogy of Caliban), and of Discours sur le colonialisme (1953), an early text in a wave of anti-­colonial essays, among which we find Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), written by another Martinican, Frantz Fanon, and the Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur (1957). As Robin Kelley (2000: 9) reminds us, it is surprising that few assessments of postcolonial criticism pay attention to the Discours sur le colonialisme, compared to the critical attention that works by other key figures, such as Fanon, have received. Published in 1953, Discours took a political stance that can be seen as the ultimate attempt to forge a relation of dignity; Césaire went so far as to explicitly compare European imperialism as practised around the globe to the fascism that had besieged Europe itself. The relative success the essay met with upon publication was due to the weakened state Europe found itself in after the Second World War, and to the resulting process of decolonization in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ironically, though, French overseas territories such as Martinique and Guadeloupe only saw their ties to France strengthened, and this in spite of the poet’s fierce discourse. “It is the bitterest irony of his career that

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Césaire’s efforts have in fact had so little political success in Martinique, where a de facto colonial economy remains essentially unshaken by the island’s having been legally integrated in French society and institutions” is how James Arnold put it in 1981 (76). Until his death in 2008, however, Césaire remained influential in Martinique´s public and intellectual life, as became clear in times of presidential elections in France, or when French colonialist avatars such as the controversial educational law on the “positive effects of colonization” make the headlines. This 2005 law was just another proof, more than half a century after the birth of the DOM, of how decisions can be taken unilaterally in the Elysée and then imposed upon the colonies. Césaire was joined by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, two other prominent Martinican authors, in his anger towards this law that requires teachers to portray France’s colonial past (and “postcolonial” present) as a positive influence.6 As a consequence, Césaire refused to meet with Nicholas Sarkozy (then French prime minister) when the latter planned to visit the island. The meeting finally took place one year later, after the French government had been compelled to annul the controversial law in the wake of a wave of protest on the Antilles. Interestingly, not long after the controversial French law was removed, Martinicans massively voted in favour of the European constitution. The “hexagonal” French themselves, along with the Dutch, voted against the European constitution, but Martinique was one of the rare French overseas departments to vote in favour of a common constitutional system. Within the framework of a European constitution, the promulgation of a revisionist law such as that of 2005 would most probably be impossible in the future, thus finally placing the colonies – at least in theory – on a pied d’égalité with France.7

6



7



Chamoiseau, Patrick and Edouard Glissant, “Lettre ouverte au Ministre de l’Intérieur de la République à l’occasion de sa visite en Martinique”, 7 December, 2005. http:// www.larevuedesressources.org/IMG/_article_PDF/article_518.pdf. At first blush, the Netherlands have been more generous towards their dependencies, for instance by celebrating the work of Frank Martinus Arion, a writer from Curaçao, on the national level by selecting one of his novels, Dubbelspel (Double Game), for a national literature celebration week in 2006. The novel was also to be performed on stage. However, the writer threatened to cancel the performance when a government minister, Mark Rutte, advocated the forced repatriation of young Dutch criminals of Antillean descent to the Dutch Antilles (Van Coblijn 2007). Rutte’s remark was all the more puzzling as he had been one of the actors to perform in the play. Further, one can read this cultural event as a way of consolidating the historical ties with the Dutch colonies, rather than as a step towards decolonization.

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European tribes The question remains to what extent Europe has really decolonized its colonies, and if a form of light colonialism is still in place, which in turn should make us rethink the neoliberal idea of free choice. The lingering remnants of European colonialism do not quite fit the agenda of a new Europe and of the European Union, as they do not fit the criteria of the nation-­state either.8 While the European Union could function as a protective cushion against neocolonial practices from separate nation states, little has changed in relations between Europe and the Caribbean. What mostly is lacking in the current relations between Caribbean territories and their (former) motherlands, according to Caribbean intellectuals, is a relationship of justice and dignity. It is significant that, during the 2007 presidential elections campaign, Aimé Césaire reminded Sarkozy´s opponent for the presidency, Ségolene Royal, of the importance of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”;9 he emphasized the importance of adding a crucial fourth term, “Identité”, which should be a synonym for dignité.10 How can the impulse to propose laws such as that on “positive colonization” be explained and countered? Towards the end of the 20th  century, two Caribbean writers have reflected on what they provocatively call Europe’s “tribalism” and “atavism”. What jeopardizes European unification, what creates disorder and conflict in Europe, according to Glissant, is the survival of cultures ataviques, atavistic cultures 8



It should be recalled that the terms “Europe” and “European identity”, in the West in general, as in the current member states of the European Union, are these days often limited to applying exclusively to that European Union rather than to a broader Europe that, as De Gaulle put it, reaches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals. 9 Words pronounced during Royal’s presidential campaign. “En Martinique, Ségolène Royal dénonce le colonialisme”, Le Monde, 26 January 2007. http://www. lemonde.fr/societe/article/2007/01/26/en-martinique-segolene-royal-denonce-lecolonialisme_860397_3224.html. 10 On the occasion of the performance of “Discourse on colonialism” converted into a play (directed by Jacques Delcuvellerie/Groupov) at the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, Césaire recalled the importance of his book as a document containing the colonial truth about the French DOM. He also emphasized the possibility of fostering “fraternity” with France, which could be read here as a synonym of dignity: “J’ai rédigé ce texte [Discours sur le colonialisme] en un temps où la politique de la France outre-­mer était insupportable aux colonisés. Mais j’ai toujours pensé que la vérité est le meilleur moyen de sauvegarder l’amitié entre les peuples. Le ‘Discours’, ainsi compris, porteur de ce message devrait rapprocher la France et son ancien empire devenu une Union de la Fraternité” (Aimé Césaire, 15 June 2006, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/index. php?lg=fr&nav=271).

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(as opposed to cultures composites, composite cultures). In an interview (Schwieger Hiepko 2011), he defines atavism as the return to the forms of exclusionary identity that are linked to the very nature of atavistic cultures. In addition, the advantage of an atavistic culture is a certain familiarity and intimacy with one’s God, the fact of being able to hear his voice. But in the present state of the tout-­monde, where creolization happens so much more strikingly and rapidly, to have such a point of view is, of course, a terrible handicap, one that burdens all the migrants of Europe. (258)

In atavistic cultures, every attempt at creolization, of cultural contact, triggers the return of a repressed ethnocentric and exclusivist identity within the European nation states.11 I will later return to the concept of creolization, and its importance, not only to conceptualize Europe’s current and future image, but also to renew the dialogue with Europe’s overseas territories. Composite cultures, by contrast, do not thrive on foundational myths. The Caribbean has the great advantage of consisting of composite cultures: the history of the Caribbean is “the history of creolization” that is opposed to the exclusivist idea of one identity, one race, one language, etc. To be Caribbean is, in other words, to be rooted in multiple origins and to have multiple, grass-­root “rhizome”-like identities, and to have a composite cultural perspective rather than a nationalist atavistic one. In his book-­length essay The European Tribe (1987), Caryl Phillips, a British Caribbean writer born on St Kitts, links the atavistic impulses of European countries with what he calls “tribalism”, a primitivism that holds Europe in its grasp. Particularly interesting is the very title of the essay: Phillips does not speak of different European countries as tribes, in the plural, but of one tribe with reference to Europe as a whole. This tribalism reflects the darker face of a Europe that, towards the end of the first millennium, still largely draws on its Great Narratives: the myth of History, the idea of the universal, the Nation and National identity (born par excellence out of 18th- and 19th-­century “enlightened” and romantic ideas propelled by Modernity), etc. Sketching the evolution of Europe into what formerly was known as the European Economic Community (since 1993 part of the European Union), he says:

11

Glissant defines an atavistic culture as “a culture that has felt the need to create a myth related to the creation of the world, a genesis” (Scwieger Hiepko 256).

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Europe’s global pre-­eminence has disappeared during the second half of the twentieth century, but the emergence of the somewhat unstable European Economic Community, a loose group of Western European countries who are learning to cling to each other across old enmities, suggests the extent of Europe’s decline. Europeans squabble, they fight, they kill because of tribal affiliations. (Phillips 2000: 132)

At the turn of the century, Phillips still maintains his pessimistic view of the European Union, suggesting that little progress has been made. The epilogue added to the new edition (2000) confirms his belief in the persistence of a European “tribal” praxis even at the end of the 20th century and in times of expansion of the European Union, and of intensified currents of migration towards Western European countries.12 Although Phillips was born on St Kitts, a former British colony, he does not speak of Britain as the European “tribe” par excellence, even though there is no doubt for him that the British colonial practices in the past and its consequences (visible in the present) were in some ways particularly relevant for what he argues: massive migration from the British West Indies to the Motherland started earlier than in the case of other Caribbean territories towards their respective colonial motherlands, and provoked some of the earliest manifestations of racism.

The European archipelago In spite of the avatars of atavism he sees at work in Europe, Glissant’s view is more optimistic than Phillips’s. The Martinican writer observes an unstoppable process that has thoroughly changed – and will keep changing – the face of Europe: creolization. Glissant suggests that – beyond the much-­discussed expansion of the European Union – another process is taking place: Europe is becoming an archipelago. In an interview (one of the few occasions where he openly talks about Europe), Glissant expands on this idea: “Europe is turning into an archipelago. That is to say that beyond national barriers, we see many islands taking shape in relation to one another. In France, for example, the Basque country, Catalonia, Brittany, Corsica, Alsace … It seems then to my opinion that to unify Europe means to develop these islands, perhaps to the detriment of the 12

The only optimistic note in the afterword is Phillips’s suggestion that the “European tribe” today has a true opportunity to change: “Various and diverse peoples have now settled in a Europe that once reached out and claimed their world, and this in turn has presented Europe with a unique opportunity to embrace the possibilities which come with the ebb and flow of history” (Phillips 1987: 133).

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notion of the nation and, beyond that, of national borders” (Schwieger-­ Hiepko 256–7). Is Glissant’s description of the current transformation of the “Old World” into an archipelago purely metaphorical? Not quite, if we take into account that “islands” of nations in Europe are claiming their own identity (Catalan, Basque, Andalusian, Flemish, Scottish, Welsh, Corsican, etc. not to mention even what is going on in ex-­Yugoslavia). These islands “repeat themselves” dynamically within Europe’s changing borders. The author of Le Discours antillais thus makes an allusion to a major work on the contemporary Caribbean by the Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo, entitled The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1989). Benítez Rojo suggests that Caribbean culture is a chaotic configuration, but that there is an order in this chaos that makes sense, where cultural identity repeats itself “in a certain way”. Both Glissant and Benítez Rojo draw upon chaos theory in a poetic, not a scientific, way to describe the Caribbean from a postmodern perspective.13 In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant defines creolization as cultural contact with unpredictable results. In order to unite Europe, Glissant says, we have to develop these “islands”, taking the Caribbean as a role model for Europe. Glissant suggests that a process of “caribbeanization” is taking place in Europe, where small islands with a proper identity emerge. These islands of nations are currently undergoing a process of cultural creolization, quite similar to what has been happening in the Caribbean over the past five centuries. However, Glissant is not clear on how exactly we have to “develop” these islands. Such a process of cultures entering into contact with each other is unique, and in this sense Europe has a clear advantage compared to the USA, where, in spite of its claims to be a melting pot and the massive immigration into it from Latin America, cultural contact and exchange are limited.

Creolization: a Caribbean concept Caribbeanists tend to forget that creolization is a process that in times of globalization not only occurs in the Caribbean, but in many regions and places across the globe. It is necessary to recall the Caribbean character of the concept before further applying it to other fields, and not to celebrate prematurely the promotion of the region, as critics like Mireille Rosello 13

Elsewhere, Glissant (1997) coins the term “chaos monde” (chaos world) to refer to the process of cultural creolization that takes place in times of globalization, going beyond the Caribbean.

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do: for her, as a consequence of the success of the concept, the Caribbean is almost magically lifted out of its former marginalized position: “As a result [of this success], Caribbean islands are not treated as long-­forgotten origins, references that have become liminal, marginal or peripheral”. In the case of Europe, she continues, “creolisation is not so much re-­ territorialized away from the Caribbean archipelago as used to question the notion of territory” (Rosello 3). It goes without saying that, from this perspective, creolization appears as a phenomenon that goes against every geographical definition (in this case of the Caribbean, of Europe), which is ultimately problematic when facing the problem of the place and identity of the Caribbean as a territorial part of Europe and of European influence (political, economic, cultural) in the Caribbean territories. It is difficult to maintain that, thanks to the academic success of a concept, the Caribbean is “de-­marginalized”, as if suddenly it were moved to some discursive centre. In spite of the academic success of “creolization” as an innovative concept in cultural and postcolonial studies, and a growing interest in the broader Caribbean, the current picture is not as bright as we might wish it to be: in times when concepts such as “hybridity”, “contact zones”, “third space”, “marginalized identities” and “creolization” are essential terms of our research vocabulary, the Caribbean is ironically still largely marginalized compared to other areas, such as India, South Africa and Latin America, that have been explored by postcolonial and other cultural studies. What we are dealing with here is a concept that presents as many problems as possibilities, but as Rosello warns us, we have to be aware of the risks when using the term, in a “semantically shapeless and theoretically meaningless way” (1). In spite of this warning, her own proposal to further “creolise creolisation” (Rosello 3), in my view complicates the concept and, regrettably, contributes to making it semantically shapeless, instead of invigorating it.14 Regardless of the theoretical problems that surround the concept of creolization, compared to those of other Caribbean intellectuals (e.g. Phillips) Glissant’s postmodern perspective on Europe as a creolized region is without any doubt the most dynamic. But some problems persist: 14

Rosello acknowledges the limits of the aim to “creolise creolisation”: “We are not so secretly hoping for a less xenophobic, less racist, less imperialistic, less homophobic, less capitalistic Europe, we are also very much aware that creolisation is no theoretical magic bullet [… we are] on the side of hope rather than on despair, but what is hopefully performative about the decision to talk about creolisation of a non-­Eurocentric Europe is the attempt to give ourselves a chance to reframe the parameters of our critique and the definition of what we wish to contest about the Europe that is and the Europe that is not” (Rosello 6).

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why does he not criticize the metaphorical “elephant in the room”: the fact that Martinique, Guadeloupe and the Dutch Antilles are – in official terms – the “outermost” parts of the European nation. Why does he keep them at bay in his discussion of what he calls the “European archipelago”? Furthermore, can two opposed regional identities, a Caribbean and a European one, be married to each other, given their antagonistic history of the domination of the one over the other?

Europe in the present progressive The changing face of Europe has resulted in criticism that interprets these transformations as an irreversible loss of the dominant position of Europe as the centre of the universe (i.e. a position that is generally referred to as “Eurocentrism”). A substantial amount of critical writing has been produced on European changes, for example: Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) and Blackening Europe (a book of essays edited by Paul Gilroy, 2003). These are more than significant: the present progressives in the titles, “provincializing” and “blackening”, point to an unfinished process; they insist on the process of changing the dominant racial and epistemological paradigms. Although they have led to diverse reactions in the critical field, there is no doubt that both books are proof in themselves of a changing Europe. The authors of these books move towards the claim of a non-­Eurocentric Europe, but at the same time, they realize that most Eurocentric categories and paradigms are not easy to debunk. Glissant’s image of Europe as an “archipelago” is close to Chakrabarty’s view of Europe as a “province”, though the latter has a negative connotation. However, both authors go beyond the pure geographical interpretation of Europe: they see it above all as an imaginary construction without a centre; it is both an imagined and a real (geographical) space that has lost its privileged position on the global map. A particularly dramatic effect for both the Caribbean and Europe has been migration. In Blackening Europe, Gilroy emphasizes the absence of migration in the history of Europe, and its relevance for understanding the root of racism, a growing problem in Western Europe. According to Gilroy: Fascination with the figure of the migrant must be made part of Europe’s history rather than its contemporary geography. The postcolonial migrant needs to be recognized as an anachronistic figure bound to the lost imperial past … I prefer to say that if there must be one concept, a solitary unifying idea around which the history of postcolonial settlement in twentieth-­century

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Europe should revolve, that place of glory should be given not to migrancy but to racism. The racism of Europe’s colonial and imperial phase preceded the appearance of migrants inside the European citadel. It was racism, not diversity, that made their arrival into a problem. (Gilroy 2003: xxi)

It is not surprising, then, that, besides migration, racism and prejudice are important issues in contemporary Caribbean literature, especially in the work of writers on diaspora, such as Caryl Phillips (St Kitts), Andrea Levy (Jamaica), Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe), and Jamaica Kincaid and Marie-­Elena John (Antigua, the latter two focusing on racial issues in the USA). In spite of the success of the concept of creolization and the importance of the process in both areas, it is unsettling to see that, so far, almost no social research on Caribbean migrants in Europe has been carried out; more generally, there is a lack of attention to Euro-­Caribbean relations and interactions.15 In fact, the Caribbean has become almost a synonym for migration and diaspora, dynamic phenomena (dynamic compared to “exile”, for instance, a concept that implies a static condition) that continually shape the European Union, also. In Europe´s Invisible Migrants, Andrea Smith (2003) reminds us of how Europe was affected by the decolonization movements that swept the continent. Between 4 and 6 million migrants returned to Europe from the (former) colonies after the Second World War.16 The “import” of these people changed the face of Europe, and led to the complex image of the region today. While Europe formerly “exported2 people, it now became host to immigrants. Curiously, Smith does not take into account return migrants from any of Europe´s Caribbean colonies, focusing exclusively on Algeria’s pied-­noirs under De 15

Academic articles on Euro-­Caribbean relations (such as Karis Muller’s [Muller 2001]) are very rare; the only book that deals directly with the subject dates from 1991: Europe and the Caribbean, edited by Paul Sutton. However, the book does not seem to have sparked any further academic interest, although the study of the Caribbean has increased steadily since the beginning of the 1990s and the success of cultural studies. In more recent books about Europe and the European Union, there is no trace at all of the Caribbean. As an example, I mention two titles here: Questions of Identity. Exploring the character of Europe (ed. Christopher Joyce, 2002) and An Anthropology of the European Union. Building, imagining and experiencing the New Europe (ed. Bellier and Wilson 2000). While many authors discuss the issue of migration, none of them discusses, for example, migration from and to Caribbean territories, nor the importance of the Caribbean diaspora in Europe. 16 According to Balibar (2004: 8), the global history of imperialism resulted in the fact that all European populations are “postcolonial communities”, which he defines as “projections of global diversity within the European sphere – as the result of immigration but for other causes as well, like the repatriation of displaced peoples”.

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Gaulle, Dutch Indonesia, and the Retornados, the white Angolans who returned to Portugal.17 It is encouraging, however, to see that Caribbean writers from different linguistic areas deal with the topic of migration. One aspect that some authors specifically deal with (and that thoroughly reflects the Caribbean territories’ dependency on Europe) is the untold trauma of the Caribbean experience in the major wars that involved Europe.18 If the fact that the colonies participated in these wars is fairly known, the traumatic effects on the Caribbean people who fought for their lives on the battlefield are almost unknown. Only recently have Caribbean writers started to fully explore the various effects of these wars and to give voice to the memories of survivors. According to Celia Britton: It would be more appropriate to think in terms of multiple effects, of varying degrees of directness. While it is in the first place a matter of political and military history, the war also led to different kinds of geographical displacements, migrations, and exiles, throwing up unlikely encounters between individuals and different social groups. (1)

The novels written by Jamaican (London-­born and -based) writer Andrea Levy (A Small Island, 2004), and Guadeloupan (Paris-­born) author Gisèle Pineau (L’Exil selon Julia, 1996), for instance, return to the wounds of history that deeply influence the Caribbean consciousness. Likewise, as we have already mentioned in Chapter 2, in Puerto Rican literature Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá has explored the effects of Puerto Ricans’ participation in the war in Vietnam in his novel Sol de medianoche (Midnight Sun). He does so through the representation of mad characters that cohabit in a strange residence called el hospitalillo (‘little hospital’); the literal and symbolic centre of conflict is the patio of the residence, called “patio Vietnam”. 17

In spite of the absence of the Caribbean in Smith’s book, the author provides a useful table with numbers on migration from the European colonies to post-­war Europe. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Non-­Europeans (as against 10,000 to 15,000 Europeans) migrated from the British Caribbean islands to the UK. For the Dutch Caribbean, the number of Non-­European migrants varies between 50,000 and 70,000 (as against 3,000 to 6,000 Europeans). Compared to Caribbean migrants, those from the Portuguese, Italian and Belgian colonies moving to Europe were predominantly European (Smith 2003: 32). In short, Caribbean people have been “on the move” to Europe long before globalization intensified the flow of migrants in postmodern times. 18 Here also, there are striking similarities between, for instance, Martinicans who fought in the First and Second World Wars and Puerto Ricans who took part in key US wars. Their traumatic experiences have remained untold.

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Key, in my view, is that the historical traumas and displacements of war are perceived as obstacles to any premature celebration of the Caribbean islands’ adherence to the European Union and of a “creolized Europe”. While creolization is a slow and unpredictable process, the Caribbean deals with the past in ways that exclude the acceptance of a harmonious relation with the European motherlands. Levy and Pineau shed light on the impotence of the Caribbean people to fight problems of racism and social instability, and thus the impossibility of reaching any situation of dignity, even in times of globalization and increased contact between cultures. In short, their works return to many of the key issues affecting the quality of the relations between the Caribbean and Europe (quality in the sense of a movement from lack of mutual respect and cooperation towards a relation of equality) that were already present in Césaire’s work.19

The attraction of Europeanness Focusing on Martinique, both Césaire and Glissant have always remained silent about the political future of the EU’s outermost regions. Their exclusion of the Caribbean islands from the “European archipelago” suggests that, even while different European “islands” emerge on the continent itself, the Caribbean awaits another future: Glissant firmly believed in national and regional independence, and so did Césaire. If this is true, a proper, more natural, regional, Caribbean identity thus takes priority over an artificial, supranational European identity, and corresponds to the hidden truth of the Caribbean. Glissant does not shy away from speaking of a new conquest by the Antillean people, who claim, if not immediately its political autonomy, at least its cultural independence: L´idée de l´unité antillaise est une reconquête culturelle. Elle nous réinstalle dans la vérité de notre être, elle milite pour notre émancipation. C’est une idée qui ne peut pas être prise en compte pour nous, par d´autres: l´unité antillaise ne peut pas être téléguidée. (Glissant, Le Discours antillais 18) 19

The Second World War was also an intense period of cultural exchange between French/European surrealists and Caribbean artists, thanks to the travels of (e.g.) André Breton to the Caribbean. However, Britton’s statement that the war informed the motherland about its colonies is somewhat too optimistic: “the appeal to the peoples of France’s Empire to rally and liberate the mother country […] not only made the citizens of metropolitan France realize how much they owed to their colonized subjects but also, more importantly, enhanced the latter’s status in their own eyes” (Britton 1). In literary accounts of the war we find, on the contrary, that racial prejudice was predominant and national recognition scarce.

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(The idea of the Caribbean unit is a cultural reconquest. It returns us to the truth of our being, it militates for our emancipation. It is an idea that cannot be taken into account for us, by others: Caribbean unity cannot be forged remotely.)

The idea of the Caribbean as an independent, self-­governing region is an obvious reaction to the extended condition of colonialism. As a matter of fact, like most other Caribbean intellectuals, Glissant never expressed any interest in the European Union itself, perhaps because it has a merely administrative, bureaucratic power. The EU cannot steer, counter or promote cultural processes such as creolization, which are in his view by definition uncontrollable. Opposing forces are at work in the Caribbean, forces that invalidate any attempt to formulate straightforward answers on the issue of identity. Although the process of decolonization initially was synonymous with de-­Europeanization, for Caribbean people now, Europeanness more than ever is a much-­desired asset, especially for those who are European citizens because of the territories they inhabit. For Frank Martinus Arion, a Curaçaoan writer, “Europeanness caused by a straight jacket-­like vertical separation of the Caribbean segments continues to dominate” (449). For instance, if in Martinique francophilie counts as a way of belonging to “First World” France, instead of affirming what is perceived as a national (Martinican) identity, it is logical to posit that any parallel quest for a “European identity” thus also takes priority over the search for a “Caribbean” identity. As a “First World” identity, “Europeanness” is still more fashionable than “Caribbeanness”, which from a Caribbean perspective rather fits a “Third World” context and thus to many is no longer desirable. The quest for an Antillean identity (Glissant’s Antillanité), then, is subordinated to that for a more attractive European identity.20 From this perspective, then, there is a gap between the intellectual (leftist) strife for independence and the neoliberal (neo-­colonial) reality that imposes itself on the Caribbean.

20

According to the Haitian poet Jean Metellus (2000), it is impossible to speak of a European cultural identity when the composite identities that Europe is made of are not recognized: “Il y a nécessité d’affirmer les identités culturelles avant de fonder une Europe culturelle englobante, unifiante: on ne peut harmoniser que ce qui a été cerné, précisé, décrit, compris. L’Europe est actuellement une communauté monétaire. […] Il est nécessaire de bien se connaître d’abord: c’est à ce prix que naîtra l’Europe de demain, cette maison commune où chaque nation, chaque culture doit se sentir à son aise. Point de culture dominante ni de langue hégémonique.”

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It goes without saying that this phenomenon is not new. Already in the 19th century, Latin American intellectuals criticized the importation of foreign political and economic models as a way of modernizing their newly independent countries. In his essay Nuestra América (“Our America”), the Cuban writer and revolutionary leader José Martí desperately tried to convince his fellow Latin Americans to believe in the dream of a unified Latin America, able to defend itself against an emerging US imperialism – “Our America”, in which he only implicitly included the Caribbean. At the beginning of the new millennium, Europe, albeit in different ways, is still a pole of attraction to Caribbean people overseas, whether they migrate to Europe from the former colonies (e.g. Jamaicans to the UK) or, with more ease and in greater numbers (for legal reasons), from the current dependencies. This “First Worldism” intensifies the circular migration of Caribbean people, continuously travelling between the islands and the European metropolises (Amsterdam, London, Paris) in search of opportunities for employment and advancement.21 Circular migration is also a common pattern in the case of Puerto Rican migrants, in their case to the USA. The anthropologist Jorge Duany (2005) argues that the “problem” is not exclusively Puerto Rican: “The paradoxical status of contemporary Puerto Rico as a ‘postcolonial colony’ […] provides fertile ground for reconsidering questions of colonial domination, cultural and political nationalism, transnational communities, and diasporic identities, which are not unique of the island, but may well be typical of our postmodern global age” (Duany 2005: 188–9). These “diasporic identities” also characterize Francophone and Dutch Caribbean subjects, who migrate back and forth between islands such as Aruba and Guadeloupe as “postcolonial colonies”, and France and the Netherlands as countries where dynamic, transnational communities are established. However, according to Frank Martinus Arion, neither the European nor the American dream is the ultimate object-­cause of desire. For Arion, geographical and psychological displacements go hand in hand: “Caribbean people do not dream of bringing their own reality up to the level of the reality of Europe, the USA and Canada; they dream of leaving. Even if they do not manage to accomplish this in a physical way, they do so mentally, psychologically” (Arion 449). From this point of view, the airport is not only a physical transit zone, a gateway to Europe; it is also 21

The term “Third World” is in any case problematic: first, for its Eurocentric implications; second, when applied to cases such as Martinique and Puerto Rico, islands that, because of the unfinished process of modernization, do not quite fit the categories “First” and “Third World”.

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the unofficial capital of islands such as Martinique and Curaçao, where the ultimate dream of leaving is constantly renewed, giving shape to a truly centrifugal concept of identity and nation. Moreover, if imperialism has been replaced by a multi-­directional, all-­encompassing “Empire”, as Hardt and Negri (2000) claim, then there is good reason to accept that processes of creolization have equally “gone global”. While traditionalists logically attempt to ground these concepts back in their historical and geographical context, I believe the time is ripe to explore how literary forms of mixing have been occurring, a process we will further explore in the next section of this chapter.

The Caribbean as synecdoche for Europe Inversely, is Europe being “Caribbeanized” as Glissant suggests? Can Europe find its own reflection in the Caribbean, and interpret its overseas territories as a synecdoche for Europe, that is, a part that stands for the whole of the creolized region and its changing borders? Whatever the future is of the current European overseas territories, the idyllic “road to Caribbeanness”, Arion (1998) argues, is much longer than the more pragmatic road to “Europeanness”. Research indicates that pragmatism is an important factor in the identification with “Europeanness”, or a distinct European Identity. “Euro-­ Caribbean” citizens (Martinican, Aruban, French Guyanese, etc.) as well as other EU citizens, do not perceive any pragmatic contradiction between feeling European and feeling their nationality (feeling French/Martinican, Dutch/Aruban etc.). Moreover, they cherish the rights that they are granted as European citizens, that is to say, they have a civic conception of Europeanness in mind, which takes priority over a cultural conception of this identity.22 Does this imply that Caribbean people are not future Europeans, but rather the Europeans of the future? Much will depend, besides local politics in the archipelago, on whether Europe will start looking at itself in the mirror instead of refusing to “come to face-­to-­face with itself ” (Balibar 2004: 6). In the 22

The Euro-­Caribbean reality matches Bruter’s conception of Europeanness: “When they explain that they feel European, citizens actually have specific conceptions in mind, particularly a ‘civic’ conception of their Europeanness, based on the relevance of the European Union as a relevant political system that generates some of their rights, duties and symbolic civic attributes. To a lesser extent, they also hold a ‘cultural’ conception of this identity, based on a perceived shared baggage, which may, according to the individual, be thought to consist of a variety of historical, cultural, social, or moral attributes” (Bruter 2005: 166).

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meanwhile, the use of the term “colonialism”, Caribbean intellectuals suggest, is justified. Likewise, the future of Puerto Rico depends on when and how the USA will (or will not) accept the ever-­growing Hispanic population and its language as essential components of its nation. Europe has, unlike the USA, the advantage but also the challenge of experiencing a process of creolization, whose acceptance might lead to success, provided that the undermining atavistic impulses can be neutralized. The future of Europe is, however, as unpredictable as the very processes of cultural mixing it depends upon. The strength of Europe, Balibar reminds us, is that it has no fixed limits. He even goes so far as to say that Europe is a borderland (“L’Europe est elle-­même frontière”, Balibar 2003:  33), although it does not yet recognize itself as such.23 Hence, if Europe and its institutional equivalent, the EU, want to be politically viable entities, they should draw lessons from Europe’s overseas (post)colonial “parts”. The Caribbean, a cultural borderland par excellence, has the advantage of functioning not as a model but rather as a synecdoche for Europe: the “parts” point to the very process of creolization that its (former) master too is now experiencing, and assure us that everyone will, in the end, benefit from this process. Perhaps it is true that, as Balibar argues, the fate of European identity is above all being played out in the Balkans. But this is certainly not the only zone that constitutes “an image and effect of [Europe’s] own history” which eventually can lead Europe “to put itself into question and transform itself ”. Coming to terms with the colonial history of the Caribbean is necessary if the project of a truly multicultural Europe is to be taken seriously. Only then will Europe “begin to become possible again” (Balibar 2003: 6). Many questions remain, though, regarding how processes of cultural and literary mixing occur in Europe. Is it correct to designate this process using the concept “creolization”, as it has been applied to the Caribbean? Or do we have to make a differentiation in order to refer to the specificity at work in different (non-­postcolonial and other) contexts? For instance, can related linguistic concepts – such as creolization and pidginization (object of the next section) – be used to describe literary specificities? Instead of making a rigorous distinction between different terms, I prefer to treat creolization and pidginization as fluid but very closely related 23

Balibar’s discourse takes a Glissantean turn when he defines Europe as a dynamic configuration of historical and cultural relations between countries from around the globe: “une superposition de frontières, et donc de relations entre les histoires et les cultures du monde” (Balibar 2003: 33).

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concepts. Further research will have to point out the relevance of each of them in the field of literary studies.

7.2 Towards a theory of literary creolization Debating creolization The debate on creolization has become increasingly passionate over the past few years, resulting in a range of books on the subject.24 Simultaneously, over the past decade a growing number of scholars have criticized the way creolization, as a concept, is being used by scholars (e.g. Lionnet and Shih 2011; Palmié, 2006; Sheller, 2003; Verstraete, 2003). The main points of critique concern its conceptual vagueness on the one hand (typical of Glissant´s poetics), and, on the other, its omnipresent use as a passe-­partout or a synonym for cultural mixing – such as hybridity, transculturation or métissage, which, evidently, have very different meanings.25 What is mostly agreed upon, however, is that creolization is a “Caribbean concept” because of the fact that it was naturally associated with the process of creation in the so-­called creole languages, which appeared in the Caribbean. In this section and the following, I will try to systematize the potential of the concept by contributing to the design of a theoretical framework for literary studies. I am specifically interested in the role of creolization in the emerging European context alongside the continued existence (and reaffirmation) of national literatures on the European continent. While creolization is being applied to a number of disciplines, mainly linguistics (creolistics), anthropology and sociology, interdisciplinary research on the subject has been scarce. As for literary studies, little or no attention is being paid to the concept outside of the field of Caribbean studies. This lack of interest in creolization in literature is surprising, since one of its main promoters was, as stated earlier, a writer, the Martinican Edouard Glissant, who in turn adopted the concept from Brathwaite (1974a). I adhere to those who believe in the potential of the concept, 24

Two examples of this success are the publication of a Creolisation Reader edited by Cohen and Toninato (2010), and its increasing presence in academic curricula (e.g. the existence of a programme in creolization at Warwick University in the UK). 25 Glissant drew on Brathwaite´s study on Jamaica, published in the early 1970s (Brathwaite 1971), and started using the concept as synonymous with “mixing” and métissage.

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which, so far, is the best term available to describe the process of cultural mixing in regions such as the Caribbean basin, and beyond (Indian Ocean, Cape Verde, Guiné Buissau, São Tomé and Príncipe), as a conflictive yet creative process.26 Instead of considering in its entirety the complex issue of the relation between literature and creolization, I will focus on a more specific problem: what role precisely does mixing fulfil in the emergence – and recognition – of both a European literature and a Caribbean literature? What can we learn from this “Caribbean concept” so as to come to a better understanding of European literature? In my view, there are three main reasons to apply this term and concept to the study of this process. The first aspect to consider is the fact that, contrary to the separate national literatures that constitute the complex literary landscape of the Caribbean and of Europe, there is no consensus on whether it is legitimate or not to speak of “European literature” and “Caribbean literature” in the singular, as a kind of autonomous (regional) literary space with distinctive features. In an era of intensifying globalization the “natural” character of national literatures around the globe is questioned. When dealing with Europe and the Caribbean, critics usually refer to these literatures in the plural. Can we actually speak of a “European literature”? Likewise, is there a “Caribbean literature”? The Caribbean is most often described as a mosaique of independent, fragmented and heterogeneous cultures, languages and literatures, a region with little or no unity, except for those islands that belong to the same linguistic group.27 As a consequence, literary narratives and cultural artifacts are usually studied separately, creating the impression that one (national) body of writing has little or nothing to do with the literature of the neighbouring island. In that sense, the old spatial metaphor repeatedly comes to mind: even today, in an interconnected world, a Martinican writer is viewed as “vertically” associated with his French or Francophone colleagues in Paris, Bordeaux, Geneva or Québec, rather than being “horizontally” connected to a writer in Havana. Secondly, while the Caribbean is often described as a nation-­space with fuzzy boundaries (there are many geographical definitions of the 26

To a certain degree, the debate on creolization may be compared to that on postcolonial studies: many of its opponents endlessly criticize postcolonial studies for its (over)simplifications, its Western ideological (or even neo-­colonial) implications, etc., while simultaneously failing to propose an alternative classification for this academic field and its subject matter. 27 See Gyssels (2010), where the author makes a call for challenging the problematic “frontiers” between Caribbean literatures.

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Caribbean) the same has been happening with Europe: there is no consensus as to where Europe’s borders precisely start and end.28 In the case of the Caribbean, its diaspora literally dislocates the idea of the nation outside of its geographical space, thus complicating classical Eurocentric definitions of a “Caribbean nation” (which can only be imagined if the constitutive parts of its diaspora are taken into account). Similarly, De Gaulle’s idea of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” was rather vague and controversial, while George Lemonnier, Victor Hugo and other 19th-­century intellectuals made visionary statements for their times because of their concern to create a federal Europe (Patrice, 2006). In a way, this Pan-­European conception would be one possible outcome of the process of mixing in Europe, for it inevitably forges a “United States of Europe” where cultures interact with each other, transforming and reconfiguring the multiplicity of national identities into what will be – albeit in a distant future – a hybridized European identity. If Europe and the European Union are to survive for the next fifty years, a process of mixing beyond the official discourse of “integration”29 will be indispensable for overcoming Europe’s individual conflicts between member states. The profound economic crisis at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium foreshadows such an integration being a conditio sine qua non to the survival of the Union. Yet at the same time re-­emerging nationalisms across Europe tend to reinforce old boundaries between the nation-­states. Thirdly, both the Caribbean and Europe share an intense history impregnated by imperialism and colonialism, and their seemingly opposite roles as “Prospero” versus “Caliban” have always been intertwined: the Caribbean being a space colonized by Europe, its main colonizer has also been transformed and hybridized through contact with the master. Creolization is rightfully seen as bound to the binary thinking inherited from colonialism and slavery: it is moulded on the “colonizer vs colonized” model. However, creolization may be viewed as an attempt to go beyond these binaries. In postcolonial studies the concept itself stems from and 28

For Hudson (2000, p. 419), “serious questions remain about where the boundaries of this common space are to be drawn and what happens on and/or beyond these boundaries in a wider Europe and beyond. This process of boundary definition is closely tied to issues of ‘otherness’ and processes of ‘othering’ […] and the criteria by which ‘Europeanness’ is to be judged, how ‘we’ are to be differentiated from ‘them’.” 29 We should note that there is an important difference between “creolization”, an uncontrolled (spontaneous) process of mixing, and “integration”, a concept reappropriated by official national and EU discourses. The aim of integration is to absorb minorities into the majority culture, whereas the concept of creolization resembles the “salad bowl” as opposed to the “melting pot”.

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reproduces the master–­slave dialectic, what Stuart Hall referred to as issues of domination and subalternity, mastery and servitude, control and resistance (Hall, 2003: 31). The same paradox is thus reproduced at the core of creolization: it constantly refers to what it wants to get beyond.

Creolization and literature Hence, if we follow the hypothesis that creolization is taking place, in varying degrees, both in the Caribbean and in Europe, as well as in other regions, should we not simply conclude that, in the era of globalization, the Caribbean literary space is more creolizing than the European? Given that the Caribbean is seen as the origin of the formation of creole languages, this would be the logical conclusion. But one needs to make a clear distinction between creolization in and creolization of literatures with the (unpredictable) result of a new kind of (regional) literature. While the former refers to the textual level – the phenomenon of intertextuality or presence of Creole in literary texts, the latter is contextual and encompasses literary space as a dynamic system subject to changes. In the case of the Caribbean, one can argue that Caribbean literature has always existed, but it was never recognized as such because of remaining (post)colonial cultural dependencies on the metropolis, the eternal model that attracted and repelled the colonial writer.30 Such an assumption is not without risk, for how to verify such a process of literary mixing without reliable mechanisms of control? How to measure its impact on so-­called regional literatures? The fragmentation of both literary spaces makes it difficult to determine where the process starts and ends, and how it takes place. Before discussing the dynamics of the creolization in Europe and European literature(s), it is useful to take a brief look at how creolization has been dealt with in relation to the Caribbean, where the phenomenon has been scrutinized to a larger extent than in Europe. It seems that all things creolized are directly related to the Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, to the Indian Ocean. A great deal of theory on creolization in relation to literature and culture has been produced by intellectuals based 30

Raphaël Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean Bernabé founded the créoliste movement in the eighties as a reaction against the Négritude movement, which they saw as offering too limited a definition of the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Caribbean. In Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), published in 1989, they explain their view on creoleness (créolité). For an overview of the predecessors of creolization theory and its definitions, see Gyssels (2010).

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on the islands (Edouard Glissant and the créolistes, all originating from Martinique, are probably the best example). As such, we have a particular kind of knowledge – an insular theory one could say – produced by “island intellectuals”. A particular landmark was Eloge de la créolité (“In praise of creoleness”), a manifesto published by the créolistes who aimed to describe the particularities of Caribbean writing which was particularly criticized by non-­Caribbean intellectuals for continuing a masculine pattern of ethnocentrically embedded domination.31 The créolistes build on the linguistic idiosyncrasy of creole languages to define a common Caribbean identity, although in praxis they applied it first and foremost to Francophone writers. However, “Caribbean literature does not yet exist” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1990: 886), they famously stated at the beginning of Eloge de la créolité, their manifesto: We are still in a state of preliterature: that of a written production without a home audience, ignorant of the authors/readers interaction which is the primary condition of the development of a literature. This situation is not imputable to the mere political domination, it can also be explained by the fact that our truth found itself behind bars, in the deep bottom of ourselves, unknown to our consciousness and to the artistically free reading of the world in which we live. (886)

While the créolistes (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant) apparently focused on a regional Caribbean literature, the Eloge de la créolité was in practice mainly discussed in their home island of Martinique, as well as in the Francophone Caribbean, although an English version appeared in Callalloo (1990) and Stuart Hall – an intellectual authority from the Jamaican diaspora – commented on it (Hall, 2003). The insistence on a “true” identity to be discovered, captured “behind bars”, hidden “in the bottom of ourselves” and “unknown to our consciousness” (886) can be said to represent well the créoliste position. It is a call to move away from the alienating influence of France: “We have seen the world through the filter of western values, and our foundation was `exoticized´ by the French vision we had to adopt” (886). Creoleness, they suggest, is the common basis of a Caribbean identity, and it has always been there (contrary to a proper Caribbean literature) though no one saw it; it just needs to be activated. Furthermore, the Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo (1989), and the Jamaican Kamau Brathwaite (1974a), among others, have extensively written on creolizing cultures in a specific Caribbean context, 31

See Palmié (2006: 442) for a short overview of this criticism.

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for instance on the importance of religious syncretism as a transnational but Caribbean phenomenon. Few writers, however, haven been concerned with the question of the existence of a Caribbean literature extending beyond the particular insular boundaries. So far as literary criticism is concerned, the trend is quite the same: literatures are approached by language or nationality, each with their own centres and peripheries. For instance, the Anglo- and Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch Caribbean are generally studied as separate entities bearing little or no comparison to one another. As a “natural” consequence, Hispanic Caribbean literature is usually interpreted at the periphery of Latin American literature, Puerto Rican writing being at the outermost margin because of its political links to the USA, while Cuban and Dominican writers are often interpreted as more “acceptable” Spanish American and/or Latin American authors, for they do not present such strong political dependencies on a cultural Other. However, in comparison to Puerto Rican writers, Jamaican, Anglo-­Guyanese, Trinidadian or Surinamese authors are seen as even less “Latin” American, because of the radical linguistic difference from those countries where Spanish is spoken. This trend is perhaps even stronger among Latin American intellectuals or writers, for whom Caribbean literature, with few exceptions, belongs to an “outside”, an “Other” cultural space separated from the Americas. In short, language is still used as a major marker, alongside the nation-­ state model based on the inclusion/exclusion of a geographically defined space to determine intellectual kinship. Cultural mixing does not only encounter its main obstacles in atavism, but in political dependencies and geographical isolation (the sea connects the Caribbean region but also complicates intra-­regional mobility). In what ways, for instance, is Guadeloupe, a “region ultra-­périphérique” (outermost region) of the European Union, better connected to France and the EU than to the Caribbean and Latin America, although it is excluded from the Schengen area? Cultural institutions and language departments have kept up with this trend in a blind way: Francophone writers, even those from the overseas Départements and Territoires, still receive little attention compared to French continental literature, in spite of the promotion of the Francophone regions. Moreover, research centres on postcolonial literatures and departments rarely engage in a comparative perspective (Van Haesendonck 2014), as if two “postcolonial” linguistic areas had nothing to do with one another (e.g. francophonie vs lusofonía). This is curious, since our study of postcolonial relations is essential for coming to a better understanding of European literature/s today: through the scope of the colonial and postcolonial experience, the colonial war in Algeria,

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for instance, does allow for comparisons with the wars in Angola and Mozambique; both had a tremendous impact on their former colonial motherlands (e.g. through postcolonial migrations to Paris and Lisbon), often with creolizing influences in their growing diasporas.32 Without consideration of such dynamics, there is a risk that Eurocentric views on both European and postcolonial literatures will be maintained.

Changing Europe, changing literature Unlike in past centuries, defining postmodern “Europe” and, by extension, European identity or literature is a more complex task, and, understandably, more than one attempt ends in pure abstract speculations. While the debate about what Europe is – geographically but also symbolically – has intensified during the last decades, much influenced by politics, namely the enlargement of the EU with new member countries, the processes of cultural integration – and their unforeseeable consequences – have too easily been dismissed. Moreover, Europe’s links with, and migrations from, its former colonies have received little attention. The very term “integration” seemingly evokes a smooth, harmonious process of divergent parts becoming a united whole, while signifying a search for a (forced) consensus by repressing existing conflicts. The EU has a decisive role in intensifying European integration, but the ways in which, and the pace with which, this process has been steered have come under fire over the past few years when the Eurozone has entered a severe economic crisis.33 While political decisions on financial and social policies seem far away from the realm of cultural interaction, one can ask how far these decisions influence cultural interaction among member countries. One should be cautious about the acceptance of terms such as “integration”, which are part of the vocabulary used in political contexts but which, at least from a theoretical perspective, are as problematic as “assimilation” or “acculturation”. In what ways is “integration”, for instance, related to creolization?34 32

For a collection of essays on postcolonial literatures in relation to Europe and European languages, see the two volumes edited by Theo D´haen (2002), Europa buitengaats. Koloniale en postkoloniale literaturen in Europese talen. 33 Decades before the current crisis, in the early 1980s, some scholars (e.g. Hüglin, 1983) were highly sceptical about European integration, which already appeared to be stagnating in favour of a “fall-­back to neo-­national protectionism” (Hüglin 345). 34 For an early, yet classic, approach to cultural integration and creolization in the Caribbean see Brathwaite (1974).

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Will the “new Europe” finally change its heading and become a truly multiple union, rhizomically connected to the “other” EU overseas? Will a European identity based on Caribbeanness become a fact, following Clifford´s idea that we are all Caribbeans now in urban archipelagos (Clifford 1988:  173)? For this to happen, the European institutions would have to take into account the disavowed cultural beliefs, encounters and practices – what Slavoj Žižek (2006) calls the “known unknowns”– that have for centuries now been part of Europe´s historical memory. Glissant´s much-­desired change of the imaginaire could, in combination with appropriate EU policies that further stimulate cultural interaction, go beyond the purely poetic and imaginary, leading to a real, enduring change in Europe. The encounter between poetics and politics, apparently two incompatible fields, can, thus, lead to a form of creolization, albeit with an unpredictable outcome. As for the reflection on the existence (or non-­existence) of a common European literature, there have been very few publications on the subject so far, but the debate is here to stay. The first exploratory essays dedicated to this subject can be found in Literature for Europe (edited by Theo D´Haen and Yannis Groenlandt), where Pascale Casanova (2009) contributed an important essay titled “European Literature: Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?”. Casanova does not speak of “creolization” in this text, but she refers to the literary relations of domination which such a process involves. As for a more specific account of how creolization can be applied to European literature, only one publication has appeared to date, an issue of Culture, Theory and Critique edited by Murray Pratt and Mireille Rosello (2007). In La république mondiale des lettres, Pascale Casanova (1999), prior to her essay on European literature, expressed some interest in creoleness (créolité) in comparison with the above-­mentioned “In praise of creoleness” (Chamoiseau and Confiant, 1990), in addition to another article published in the Cahiers vadois by Ramuz, which goes back as far as 1914. Casanova argued that identical dynamics were at work in both culturally divergent spaces: similar processes of reclaiming a local identity were at stake.35 Surprisingly, Casanova (1999: 402) speaks of “la créolité Suisse” (“Swiss creoleness”), thus using the concept outside of the Caribbean context, but without actually referring to creolization as the process of cultural mixing taking place within the Swiss (national) 35

“Leur premier geste commun est de retourner le stigmata attaché d´ordinaire à la langue populaire de leur pays et de revendiquer come une difference positive ce qui était condamné comme provincial ou incorrect” (Casanova 1999: 403).

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context. Although Casanova shows in an excellent comparative analysis how similar identity claims are made in both contexts (one in Switzerland, the other in a French overseas department), she fails to see beyond the literary politics of local concerns – the promotion of patois and créole – expressed by these intellectuals. Indeed, the reclaiming of a local identity is a product of creolization: is not “créolité Suisse” applicable to a broader regional identity as a positive difference on the European level? I argue that a “créolité européenne” will be the unpredictable product of further integration, provided that “integration” can be thought of as creolization (different from multiculturalism or other models). Switzerland is especially interesting in terms of federal organization: it is a micro-­creolizing society; although it ironically does not belong to the EU, it can be seen as a model for European creolization on the macro level in the construction towards a new kind of unity in Europe, an idea George Lemonnier in 1888 foreshadowed as the “United States of Europe”. Not by coincidence, Denis De Rougemont viewed Switzerland’s history of a “peuple heureux” (De Rougemont, 1989 [1965]) as an ideal outcome for a united Europe (1961; 1970), where the former in a certain manner becomes a scale model of the latter. In short, studies on creolization in Europe and on the role of creolization in the emergence of a European literature have not yet been introduced to the discursive mainstream (and this accounts for the study of other creolizing literatures as well). From the outset, however, one should pay attention to the process of creolization in the (re)configuration of European literature: one should carefully analyse how a range of separately national literatures can no longer be considered as discrete, self-­sufficient entities. If anything specific needs our attention, it is the relations between the conflicting but creolizing parts of the European literary space.

Créolité européenne? If further research on creolizing literatures should focus on bridges between secrete literatures, it is key to bear in mind that these links are found on two levels. First, rather than the disappearance of national or subnational identifications, the recognition of a European identity promotes those identifications (Opp 2005). Likewise, the recognition of a European literature does not presuppose the disappearance of (sub)national literatures, but rather, serves as a reinforcement of the latter, thus increasing rivalry between subnational, national and European writings. It is at the level of these intra-­national relations that creolization starts, as attested by the example of “créolité suisse”. However, in her essay

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on European literature, Casanova makes a statement on what literary frictions and rivalry actually mean: The effects of power relations are not a matter of exchange or of simple influence. Not only do they affect contents, they also stamp their mark on stylistic choices, text forms, privileged literary genres, and so forth. That is why a study of the effect of literary domination on the writing of texts itself must reconstruct the relationship (admiration, rivalry or rejection) that the texts under study have with each other at the national, European and international levels. (Casanova 2009: 23)

However, Casanova does not mention any specific relation to postcolonial territories or countries: she refers instead, rather vaguely, to “inter- or trans-­national relations of power operating in the European space” (23). Hence, she suggests that, in studying European literature, the focus should be on continental Europe, a “structure of domination” (23), the battleground where power relations are played out. Casanova sees rivalry and conflict as obstructive forces, rather than essential ingredients of a larger process which can be designated the dynamics of creolization. She concludes, somewhat pessimistically, that “the paradoxical literary unification of Europe” is actually leading to more antagonism; she admits that this is a necessary crisis in the reconfiguration of national literatures into a European literature. In short, the European level does not imply the eclipse of the national level, and, by focusing too much on the conceptual “trees”, Casanova fails to overview and name the “forest” she describes: creolization.36 In a similar fashion, Hudson (2000) fails to name the process as creolization, although he does mention the potential for cultural clashes in the formation of European citizens as new cosmopolitan subjects: he imagines Europe “as a place in which main-­stream and minorities move inexorably towards a cosmopolitan self, as cultural mixing, maybe cultural smashing, begins to challenge identification with an essentialized tradition or a homogeneous community” (Hudson 2000: 420). Besides the power relations at play, the unpredictability of what future European literature(s) will look like is perfectly in tune with the unequal power relations as key features of creolization process.

36

“The hypothesis of a European literary space implies in effect that this is an unequal world, formed and shaped by and through constant violence (in a soft form, to be sure, but relentless nevertheless), characterized by brutal impositions, denied but nonetheless powerful ascendancies, constitutive relations of domination, which imply battles, resistances, uprisings and revolutions” (Casanova 1999: 22).

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Second, if both European and Caribbean literatures are conceived as dynamic systems, the postcolonial links between Caribbean and European literary spaces should be studied simultaneously. It is here, at the intersection of both spaces, that we can start to rethink both European and Caribbean identity. This implies not only studying postcolonial relations, but also other, less visible connections and dependencies between both spaces at the discursive level of EU politics. The political discourse on the EU´s enlargement, as well as on the overseas territories and outermost regions, can have direct cultural implications for the Caribbean. While transatlantic relations involve a modernist, geopolitical cartography of Europe and the Caribbean, which in many ways follows the imperial relations between the “old” and “new” world, a postmodern conception of Europe and the Caribbean is focused on the epistemological, discursive and symbolic relations between both spaces. The fuzzy boundaries of both Europe and the Caribbean are an advantage from a postcolonial perspective, because creolization is a process that only operates where “openness” to cultural contact is enabled – what Glissant (2011) calls the “composite” character of cultures. Only in cultures accepting of such openness does change become possible, and not in regimes closed off from the latter or which are, according to the Martinican writer, too “atavistic” (i.e. sticking to their roots and foundational myths). The “open” conception of the Caribbean facilitates the analysis not only of links within the region, but also of transatlantic influences. This is where Europe and the Antilles diverge, for the latter has a composite structure, while the former, as I wrote earlier, has to resolve the problem of atavism (Van Haesendonck 2006) in order to fully embrace creolization. However, recently, a wave of Euro-­pessimism has emerged, strongly challenging Glissant’s statement that Europe is becoming a creolized archipelago. Euro-­pessimism has not left the debate on the future of European cultures unaffected, even in a Europe formally (i.e. politically and economically) “united” in a European Union. The disintegration of the EU would definitely mean a reinforcement of atavism and its avatars, as many fear that, amid the Eurozone crisis, “Europe looks politically and structurally incapable of adapting to the challenges of today, let alone tomorrow” (Barber, 2010).

Literature, theory, impurity Both the Caribbean and Europe are fluid concepts without any clear profile, and scholars would miss the point entirely if they looked for sharp, exclusive definitions for both, especially in a geographical sense. Rather,

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they are “unfinished adventures”, as Zygmunt Bauman (2004) put it. The future of Europe is an ongoing debate, very much coloured/influenced by the discussion about what the European Union actually is or should be like. The overall impression is that Europe´s former colonial possessions are a “finished business” now, a story that belongs to Europe´s past, at best with little or no relevance for (re)thinking current Europe. However, on the cultural and even political level “the Empire” actively “writes back”, and thus keeps interacting with Europe on many levels. While the field of postcolonial literature is neither fixed nor pure, nor is the definition of the geographical spaces; rather, they are embedded in loose terms, such as the “Caribbean” and “Europe”. In order to understand the impurity of Europe´s colonialist and imperialist past, and subsequent postcolonial relations, an interesting analogy can be made between the creolization of theory (Lionnet and Shih 2011) and the creolization of literature: to a certain degree, theory and literature bear similarities, and creolization as theory brings in the innovative part, for it breaks with stereotypes of the death of theory. Likewise, the “death of literature” proclaimed by more than one scholar (Kernan, 1992) is countered from the perspective of a creolizing literature. National literatures might be said to be waning in the wake of the regression of the nation state; hybridization gives way to new “contaminated” combinations: The coupling of theory with the idea of its possible creolization raises questions about conceptual purity, the clear and distinct ideas that Descartes called “first principles” and that Glissant militates against in his insistence on the notion of opacity […] That is why creolization as theory can undermine the tired opposing arguments about the usefulness (or not) of theory, and the relevance of methodologies that remain divorced from the existential realities of gender, race, class, and sexuality. (Lionnet and Shih 26)

What is true for theory is also true for European literatures: creolization repels purity and invigorates the creation of new genres, hybrid texts and the cross-­fertilization of literary movements. From the point of view of creolization, both European and Caribbean literature cannot be thought of in terms of purity, that is, as a fixed set of writers, texts, genres, and a clearly delimited geographical space (diaspora being a constant dislocator of fixed boundaries), which in turn poses a problem for the canon as an established body of “national” texts. One cannot think of creolization as a tool for more transparency or clarity; it does not give clear answers, but rather confuses and reconfigures existing labels regarding trend, style, movement, genre (national/local) tradition, cultural identity, ethnicity, etc. Clear-­cut categories become overlapping areas with specificities that

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are hard to disentangle. The major focal points of creolization are those where a dominant element changes when it clashes with another element (e.g. a dominant genre) which it cannot or does not want to absorb, but which eventually becomes part of it nevertheless. Just like theories, national literatures are per se heterogeneous repertoires, whose purity is only a rhetorical effect of literary discourse. A European, Caribbean, or any other regional “emerging” literature is necessarily impure, just like a creolized theory which takes form as a coupling of diverse “minor” theories which affect Theory with a capital “T” (Lionnet and Shih 30). We should note that “emerging” is actually a problematic term, since it is applied to a literature whose existence, until recently, was never properly recognized. This is a major lesson to be learnt from the particular way cultural (rather than literary) mixing has occurred in the Caribbean over the past five centuries. For Casanova, Europe, although not quite as composite or “open” as the Caribbean owing to its internal “discordances, disagreements and discrepancies between national literatures or between literary movements” (Casanova 23), has turned into a literary “battlefield”, while new political borders have appeared around its territory. Within a postcolonial framework – and mind frame – Europe appears as a combination of incompatible elements. According to John Neubauer: By a curious but hardly unusual historical twist, Europe´s political unity is inching ahead (accompanied by a “fortress Europe” concept that advocates strict and insurmountable barriers around it), while a postcolonial anti-­ Eurocentrism works just in the opposite direction, showing in various ways that the “idea of Europe” was never cohesive and always an amalgam of conflicting internal ideas and cultural influences coming from abroad … Hence if we talk about a “literature for Europe” we shall have to ask back: “Which Europe? What part of it? What segment of its audience?” (Neubauer 215)

Such “amalgamized” fragmentation also exists in the Caribbean, but its composite structure, as Glissant reminds us, impedes atavist, violent struggles, claims of authenticity and “an uninterrupted filiation” which is so typical of the “old world”: “it is from this filiation that these cultures derive their legitimacy, their sense of ownership of their own land, and their right of expansion, which was the very foundation of colonization” (Glissant 2011: 256). More specifically, the frictions and interruptions of literary relations, rather than the smooth connection, are what makes creolization a necessary concept for describing European identity as well as postcolonial relations between Europe and the Caribbean.

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While Glissant´s view of Europe is mainly a poetic one, it is not difficult to see how it can relate to the politics of the European Union in the last few decades when mobility and migration have become perhaps the two main propulsive forces of creolization in Europe. As such, one wonders whether “Caribbeanness” can provide a model of what a new cosmopolitanism can/should look like, as Hudson (2000: 42) suggests when referring to the potential of cultural clashes in the reconfiguration of a European identity.37 For Glissant, Caribbean identity relates not just to one´s “home” (Martinique in his case) or the broader Caribbean, but to all places of the planet, in rhizomatic ways: “My own place, which is inexorable, incontournable, I relate it to all the places of the world, without exception, and it is by doing so that I leave behind single-­root identity and begin to enter the mode of rhizomic identity, that is to say, identity as relation (Schwieger-­Hiepko 2011: 260; italics those of the editor). Likewise, if European identity is conceived as a rhizome, “a vertiginous inversion of the nature of identity” (260), and if this Europe-­in-­creolization is to be heading towards a grass-­roots structure, then the postcolonial relations with the aforementioned EU territories acquire an essential role in reconfiguring that identity. Therefore, the EU should start to look at itself through the lens of postcolonial memory, paying attention to ignored historical experiences going from the remembrance of slavery to the participation of Caribbean soldiers in the major World Wars.38 Rhizomically speaking, a European identity viewed from the EU´s “ultra-­ periphery” which influences and interacts with the metropolis is capable of turning the classical search of identity upside down – a search from the centre spreading out towards the (continental) periphery.39 37

Glissant’s ultimate goal is to explain the beneficial effects of creolization; the ultimate result of this process would be a new kind of cosmopolitanism, which he and his Martinican colleague Patrick Chamoiseau named mondialité (“worldliness”), a way of being-­in-­the-­world that can serve a major antidote to the uniformizing forces of globalization (mondialisation). See Chamoiseau and Glissant (2007). A cosmopolitanism based on mondialité, supposes, I would argue, a dynamic, civic conception of citizenship (citoyenneté), where all the advantages of being a EU citizen can be played out, thus adhering to a formal Europeanness without renouncing a cultural acceptance of Caribbeanness. 38 On this topic, see e.g. the special issue on “France’s Colonies and the Second World War” of L’Esprit Créateur, edited by Celia Britton (2007). 39 Although Glissant does not refer to the art of mimicry in relating to the Other in strategic ways, identity does have performative features for him, namely when he speaks of opacité. Like mimicry, opacité (opacity) partially involves becoming non-­ transparent as an act of resistance: “Accepting the Other´s opacity means also accepting that there are no truths that apply universally or permanently” (Britton 19). In the

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Trans(re)lations On the surface, in the creolization of literature it is mostly translations that matter. In establishing literary relations, translations can be a key vehicle with which to promote the divulgation of an author´s work: they form the basis of creolization, because translation operates as an interface for transnational interaction. Another form of literary relations is established when not their work but writers themselves are displaced from one context to another (a canonical example is, of course, Alejo Carpentier´s oscillation between Europe and Latin America). Language switching is a possible consequence of such movements influencing, and often mutually so, writers and intellectuals in their new settings, as well as in their “home” (if any) upon their (temporary) return: such moves, multiplied with globalization, can no longer be ignored and challenge the very idea of a national literature. In more recent times, diaspora has taken this role of displacement as a dynamic promoter of, rather than a brake against, literary relations. Another interesting writer to illustrate the power of literary relations is the poet Daniel Maximin, who left his homeland, Guadeloupe, for Paris, where he became quite influential as a Francophone Caribbean writer. In the meanwhile, Maximin also participated in French national politics (e.g. as a commissioner for the Année des Outre-­Mers), an event aimed at uncovering the “cultural wealth” of France overseas.40 Most interestingly, this renowned poet from Guadeloupe was elected commissioner to organize the event. Such a curriculum is, of course, exceptional, especially for a Caribbean writer in diaspora, as most of them do not have privileged political ties with access to official discourses. The celebration of the Overseas possessions (DOM, TOM) exemplifies a strategic way of further binding these territories to the mère patrie, thus as a way of reappropriating the Other by suturing him/her context of creolization, a later concept elaborated by Glissant, the new identities that emerge from this process are not just readable, but need a permanent process of translation to be understood. While Opacity is an active form of resistance to the colonizer´s call for transparence, creolization is an act not of resistance but primarily of openness towards and interaction (albeit conflictive) with the Other. We should also note Glissant´s need or desire to associate himself with a colleague (Chamoiseau) in order to gain authority, as in the case of Deleuze and Guattari: one wonders whether, without this “coupling” to another authority, the same success would have awaited Glissant as a theorist of the Caribbean. 40 A significant detail is that the official government website is only available in French, not in other languages. Given that this is the international “personal card” with which to present oneself, this leads us to ask a basic question: how far does this limitation testify to an openness to other languages and cultures in an era of globalization?

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culturally into the national body, and thus, indirectly, into the European Union´s supranational body. In his inauguration speech, Maximin made a clear distinction between French and Francophone culture, but stated that he does not see a contradiction in belonging to both European France and the Caribbean (Ministère de l’Intérieur 2012).41 Moreover, Maximin’s very act of accepting his role as commissioner can be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand, as a way of celebrating the diverse identities that make up the French overseas “subcultures”; on the other, as a way of showing and reinforcing the existing link with the metropolis, instead of an act of cultural resistance, much as was the case with Césaire, who also reinforced this link by signing the transformation of Martinique into Overseas Department (D.O.M.). Although an official part of France is creolized territory par excellence, it is culturally kept at bay through a sanitized subordination to French mainland culture, impregnated by the avatars of the politics of assimilation, French colonial ideology, whose subsistence can be said to be a product of the “miscarriage of decolonization” (Nesbitt, 2003: 1). As with the ideology of multiculturalism, what cannot be assimilated must be kept at a safe distance. The ambiguous relations between postcolonial interdependencies and European identity need to be addressed; otherwise, the final outcome may be an alienating Union unable to comprehend its cultural memory.42 Understood as an “open” concept, creolization challenges us to look beyond the old historical relations and Prospero/Caliban-­like binaries in favour of the formation of hybrid identities. In a globalizing world, there are intra-­Caribbean and intra-­European dynamics, for sure. However, globalization, a phenomenon established in the Caribbean since the creation of plantations, persists in very different ways; except that, instead of plantations and colonial traffic overseas, what we now have is the boom of tele-­technologies over the past few decades, a trend involving substantial cultural impact and changes in our conception of (geographical) place as the main factor in what determinates a specific culture.

41

Ministère de l’Intérieur. “Lancement de l’année des Outre-­mers” (2011). Online video clip. Dailymotion. 12 January 2011. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgjoa1. 42 “The institution of the Euro, a marker par excellence of European identity, illustrates this postcolonial politics of assimilation. As Nick Nesbitt notes, through this process “the tiny islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique were thus symbolically assimilated into the exchange mechanisms of Europe, enlarging the scope of their dependency to an entire continent” (Nesbitt, 2003, p. 14).

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Literature and intermediality While translations continue to be important, new media and technologies are becoming increasingly important in establishing literary relations for their instant (“real-­time”) transnational impact in the literary sphere. Tele-­technologies, such as the internet, contribute to the reconfiguration of international literary relations between spaces that do not necessarily have strong historical links as ex-­colonies. Besides the improved geographical connections, much literary production today travels through cyberspace, which, in unpredictable ways, helps to creolize literary spaces in the most heterogeneous ways. While the power of tele-­ technologies must not be overestimated, nor do we have to forget that global influences are still more limited within a determined geographical space where mobility is increased, such as in contexts with intra-­national cultural contact (Switzerland) or intra-­regional ones, as occurs within the European Union, which prides itself not only on being a free market but also on allowing free mobility for its citizens. This is true only to a certain degree, since the EU´s overseas territories, for example, are not part of the Schengen agreement, which stands for such mobility. Intermediality – the interconnectedness of new and old media – is an unexplored field, capable of stretching the very concept of literature to new heights. In any case, it is clear that both Caribbean and European identities cannot be based solely on what happens within limited national, regional boundaries. In an important essay titled “European Identity” Tzvetan Todorov (2008: 6) explained this idea well in relation to European identity: The very idea of basing European identity exclusively on the history of the continent could also be questioned. Can collective identity be reduced to only fidelity to the past? There is no such thing as immutable collective identity fixed once and for all. Those who claim that there is are usually participating in a specific political plan: they want to give a substantive content to our identity in order to legitimate the exclusion of those who do not hold it in common with us.

Although he does not refer to Europe’s former colonial territories, Todorov argues that the novel, a “European genre” par excellence, cannot be claimed to be a product of solely European continental dynamics: Today, the traits of European culture can be found far from Europe, while non-­European inventions have infiltrated into Europe as well. For example, it is sometimes said that the novel is a specifically European genre – which is doubtless the case for the past, but not the present: how could we imagine

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the novel today without thinking of its Russian, or Latin American, or North American, or, more recently, Asian and African exemplars? The same is true of painting, philosophy, religion, and every other component of culture: what first originated in Europe ends up coming back transformed by its visits in other places, while at the same time Europe hastens to take in foreign influences ranging from African masks to Chinese calligraphy, or from Buddhist traditions to the magic realism of the Caribbean. (Todorov, 2008: 5–6)

The inevitable questions we should ask, then, are: if the novel has ceased to be a specific “European genre”, influenced as much by North American as Caribbean traditions, in what ways has it become creolized? Moreover, in the long term, are the specific features of national and regional literature (e.g. the use of créole or the presence of orality in Francophone Caribbean literature) condemned to disappear? Not quite; from the perspective of creolization there is no question of the homogenization or “death” of literary spaces, but rather their reconfiguration (which is, it should be noted, not the same as assimilation, the latter implying the disappearance of distinctive features): creolization´s core characteristic is to keep distinctive ingredients visible. It should not come as a surprise, then, that, when digging into matters of cultural creolization, one finds more questions than answers, let alone final conclusions. It is my modest aim to stimulate the study of creolization in and of literatures. Defining the key elements in the study of literary interaction should further specify the role of creolization in the constitution of both a European and a Caribbean literature. Theoretical impurity and contradictions are an inevitable part of the attempt to seek conceptual clarity. One could think what (type of) elements are retained and transformed, versus which are excluded in the process. For example, what is the importance of language (heteroglossia) in the formation of European literature? How is a language transformed (and in what ways) to adjust to a European setting? How has magical realism contributed to changes in European writing? What exceptions (if any) are to be found to this trend? How exactly each of these literary spaces selects and transforms these elements when cultural/ literary contact occurs is the main challenge. The adequate methodology for scrutinizing this process should be further defined. Our struggle to define a theoretical and methodological framework and the various “discontents” of creolization (Palmié, 2006) should not hinder us from further digging into the complex processes of cultural and literary mixing. In the final section of this chapter I am interested in linking Jacqueline Knörr’s “CvP model” (Knörr 2014: 30–2), based on the concept of cultural

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pidginization as theorized in anthropology, to a whole different theory, coming from the field of comparative literature, known as “Polysystem Theory” (PS), evolved by the Israeli scholar Itamar Even-­Zohar (1990). In no way do I pretend here to provide an ideal model for studying the complex phenomenon of literary mixing; rather, it is my aim to explore the potential of the CvP model for the field of literary studies, where it has not received any attention so far, in order to produce the concept of literary pidginization.

7.3 Literary pidginization The CvP model Can the concept of cultural pidginization be extended to literature? In other words, can we theorize literary pidginization, and, if so, how do we proceed? Moreover, can this concept be applied to non-(post)colonial contexts as well? Jacqueline Knörr’s CvP model (Creolization versus Pidginization) defines processes of cultural mixing in terms of pidginization as opposed to creolization. She proposes to shift our focus from cultural creolization to the concept of cultural pidginization as a tool for comparative cultural analysis. The CvP model states that, while in colonial and slave societies cultural creolization was dominant, in postcolonial societies it is cultural pidginization that has taken centre stage, as a result of increased globalization. While Knörr applies the notion of pidginization to the field of anthropology, I believe it could also be useful in literary studies (as well as other fields). In both anthropology and literary studies we are dealing with, respectively, ethnic groups or cultural and literary systems (instead of creoles or pidgins), which remain more or less autonomous, in the sense that these groups and systems do not result in a creolized ethnic or literary identity (creoleness). The point I will make here is that literary pidginization, which I will attempt to define in this section, is an accurate concept with which to describe the specific process that leads to the emergence of a regional literary polysystem. In order to understand why the CvP model deserves our attention in the fields of literary and broader cultural studies, we should first clarify the difference between linguistic and cultural creolization before defining the concept of pidginization as it can be used to rethink literary and cultural systems.43 Pidginization in a linguistic sense presupposes the need 43

Even though we use the term “cultural system” here, we should not forget that, as linguist Robert Chaudenson (2001, 194) warns us, it is vague and debatable: he defines it, however “loosely and provisionally”, as “a presumably structured ensemble

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for a strategy to enable communication in a multilingual environment, what John McWhorther describes as a “communication strategy typically used between groups speaking different languages but seeking transitory, perfunctory exchange” (McWhorther 2005:  11). More specifically, linguistic pidginization is the process whereby a new common language (pidgin) emerges among a group of speakers as a result of the mixing of (ethnically) different languages; however, this process is not linked to the replacement of the ethnic languages a pidgin language stems from. Linguistic creolization, by contrast, implies that a new common language (creole) emerges, made out of the features of different languages (Knörr 2014: 31), but this new common language eventually replaces the ethnic languages it stems from. However, can cultures, and literatures by extension, be approached in the same ways as languages? The participants in the processes of cultural mixing concerned in the CvP model indeed also create and “speak” a new kind of “language”: they create new cultural representations in the sense of cultural forms and features (lifestyle, music, religion, etc.), and they are collectively subject of a process of ethnicization. In cultural pidginization, however, new cultural representations and objects are created without the need for replacing old cultural forms. Cultural pidginization implies that a new common culture emerges even though the “original” or source cultures are kept intact. Cultural pidginization, according to Knörr, can be defined as: A process over the course of which common culture and identity are developed in specific contexts of ethnic and cultural diversity as well – yet, in contrast to creolization, this process does not involve ethnicization. No new ethnic group is formed, and original identities based on heritages of their protagonists remain in existence. (Knörr 2014: 31)

The CvP model is thus defined as particularly apt for studying a range of processes taking place in the interaction between one creole group or identity and a plurality of other ethnic groups or identities, processes that in many postcolonial societies significantly influence the integration and differentiation of ethnic, local and national identities in particular. (ibid. 30)

of traits characterizing a cultural domain in a given society”. Moreover, a cultural system can apply to “a number of ensembles of very diverse sizes and characteristics, such as language, music, cuisine, folk medicine, and oral literature […] as well as to social representations, folk knowledge, kinship, technology, etc.”.

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The Creolization versus Pidginization model, as its very name implies, does not do away with creolization, but approaches it as a different process from – yet one intimately linked to – pidginization: whereas cultural creolization involves ethnicization, cultural pidginization typically involves the development of a trans-­ethnic culture in a context of cultural diversity. One should note that the name ‘Creolization versus Pidginization model’ does imply that we are dealing here with two completely opposed processes, but in fact these processes are very close to one another. The ‘versus’ insists on the importance of making that difference clear for the sake of analytic and scientific precision. Moreover, pidginization does not exclude the possibility that a process of creolization can take place in a later stage, as the former can eventually evolve into the latter. Up to a certain point, both processes do resemble each other closely, with the difference that it will generally take more time for a creole identity to take shape than for the creation of common trans-­ethnic (and transnational by extension) identifications and common cultural representations (Knörr 2014: 32). “Why specifically these two theories?”, one may ask. The two models I will focus on (CvP and PS) have, in spite of the differences between them, a few things in common that are worth exploring further, such as their borrowing and adaptation of specifically linguistic concepts, as well as their emphasis on relationality, which opens up the possibility of new cultural and literary cartographies. Moreover, they both imply an approach to culture and literature as flexible, heterogeneous systems, and offer useful instruments for innovating the way we study a wide range of cultural and literary objects today. In addition, both theories offer a useful tool for trans-­national and even trans-­areal research, even though they are based on a very different architecture, aside from their linguistic foundations.44 In what follows, I will also point to what in my view are some of the strengths and shortcomings of the concept of pidginization for literary use. It goes without saying that I subscribe to the idea that a new cartography of literatures is needed, for, as others have said, the “traditional approach to languages, literatures, countries and nations appears to be far too static in our media age” (Lambert 129). Furthermore, this combined approach to literatures, through the lens of specific concepts of literary mixing, is part of my broader attempt to promote comparative, trans-­national and trans-­areal research on emerging literatures (such as the Caribbean and European literatures, but one could think of other regions as well), in a 44

In simplified terms, the polysystem is a functional-­structural model of centre versus periphery, while CvP (creolization versus pidginization) is based on social rather than structural processes.

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way similar to in anthropology, where these concepts have contributed to fostering comparative analysis. To introduce pidginization into literary studies requires some adaptations, and might serve to test or adjust some of the adaptations made to use it as a conceptual tool in the anthropological field. Given the unexplored character of such an enterprise for literary studies, it is my aim not to provide at this stage an exhaustive theory of processes of literary mixing, but to sketch a rough framework, which obviously will need further development. Any attempt to theorize on emerging literatures bumps against the easy criticism of remaining non-­specific, and this attempt does not pretend to transcend that issue. However, in order to move forward, I argue that opening the (rather conservative) gates of the field of literary studies to a discipline such as anthropology is definitely a step in the right direction. Furthermore, it is my conviction that, vice versa, anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines can learn something from literary studies. I am aware, however, of the risks involved in any interdisciplinary enterprise. There is, obviously, always a risk of watering down concepts as they travel from one discipline to another. It suffices to recall here the anthropologist Stephan Palmié’s (2007) hilarious (but nonetheless relevant) reference to the concept of creolization as the “C-­word”, due to its current status as theoretical passe-­partout. It is my intention neither to push pidginization into a theoretical dead-­end street nor to convert it into, say, “the P-­word”. On the contrary: I strongly hope my contribution helps to foster more reflection on the concept, in both theoretically productive and accurate ways, in line with Jacqueline Knörr’s view of the CvP model. Above all, I hope to find a common base of interest to share ideas about cultural and literary pidginization across the disciplines.

Pidginization as simplification Many doubts remain among linguists when it comes to describing the complex processes of language contact, hence also when attempting to define creoles and pidgins. Perhaps a key lesson to be learned is to simplify the very way we communicate about languages and cultures. As Claire Lefebvre puts it: “Pidgins and creoles are created in order to provide speakers of different lexicons with a common vocabulary so as to facilitate communication. Is it not ironic that the vocabulary developed to talk about these languages and the processes at work in their formation has the effect of hindering communication between scholars?” (Lefebvre 2004: 134).

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We should specify the idea of simplification that pidgins and the derived process of linguistic pidginization represent: in its basic sense, linguistic pidginization implies that communication becomes possible in a simplified form between speakers of different languages. The speakers agree to use a lingua franca or ‘pidgin’ (also often called ‘foreign talk’ [FT] or ‘baby talk’): pidgin languages are thus the result of mutual linguistic accommodation among speakers of different languages, with the exclusive aim of communicating during an extended period of contact (see e.g.Thomason and Kaufman 1988; McWhorther 2005; Siegel 2008; Lefebvre 2004). In order to satisfy their need for communication, the speakers consciously simplify the structures of their native (source) languages in order to be understood by their interlocutors. As a result, pidgins have grammars which are simplified in comparison with the grammars of their input languages.45 Simplifying communication depends largely (but not necessarily) on the sharing of elements: specific kinds of texts (such as translations), but also, more abstractly, the basic rules that govern literatures, what Even-­ Zohar (1990: 6) calls “repertoires” between groups or systems.46 Simplified communication obviously does not imply that such communication is cleared of misunderstandings. On the contrary: the price to be paid by the sender and receiver of the message usually implies a downgrading in linguistic complexity and nuances, and often also a downgrading in communicative quality and social prestige: speaking in pidgin, one cannot – or (because of specific circumstances) does not want to – identify solely with the dominant (or official) language, often the speaker’s mother tongue.47 Instead, a middle ground is sought on which the success or 45

The dominant language in contact situations constitutes the superstrate (i.e.  the language with the highest social prestige, usually the lexifier or European language of the colonizer), while the substrate was regarded as socially inferior to the dominant language, because it lacked socio-­political power. 46 Even-­Zohar replaces Jakobson’s “code” with “repertoire”, which he defines as the set of rules, features and materials which govern a literary system: “‘Repertoire’ designates the aggregate of rules and materials which govern both the making and handling, or production and consumption, of any given product. The communicational term adopted by Jakobson, CODE, could have served the same purpose were it not for existing traditions for which a ‘code’ applies to ‘rules’ only, not to ‘materials’ (‘elements’, ‘items’, i.e. ‘stock’, or ‘lexicon’)” (Even-­Zohar 1990, 39). 47 This does not imply that pidgin languages are necessarily less complex in their working than their lexifier. In order to do justice to the complexity and variety of pidgins as linguistic systems, Jeff Siegel (2008, 11) prefers to speak of “simplicity” instead of simplification, for the former describes a state, while the latter implies a process involving the reduction of complexity.

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failure of the established communication rests. Anyway, while to most linguists simplification is a key feature of pidgins, we should not refrain from asking if this also applies to processes of literary mixing, and if so in what ways. In Polysystem Theory, as in linguistic pidginization, simplification is indeed seen as a core feature of literary interaction.

Polysystem theory and the concept of literary pidginization Polysystem theory is a dynamic functional model in the field of comparative literature, inspired by linguist Roman Jakobson’s communication scheme (1960). I would like to argue here that, in broad terms, the concept of literary pidginization can be used for describing conditions whereby literary identities and repertoires remain largely intact; literary identities and repertoires bear the potential for a supranational identification with a common literary identity and a common repertoire which pertains to an overarching system, such as I will endeavour to explain further, “European literature”. I define literary pidginization here, then, as the emergence of a common literature (i.e. a literature with a similar, identifiable repertoire and set of features, e.g. generic and stylistic ones) out of a diversity of literatures, one, however, which does not imply the disappearance of the literatures of which it is made. This new literature’s backbone consists, as in language, of a simplified “vocabulary” which is taken from the different literatures it stems from: this “vocabulary” consists of repertoires, styles, genres, themes, etc. which can be found across the different literatures, yet the latter are not being replaced in the process of literary mixing. Literary pidginization occurs indeed at the points of entanglement where literatures meet and interact, resulting in the identification, by the receivers (readers) of the texts, with a common literature that is perceived as trans-­local, trans-­ethnic or trans-­national. However, as the CvP model shows us, this process of identification does not imply the disappearance of identities; nor does it imply the replacement of regional or national literatures by this new literature which is willingly embraced by a community of readers. Nevertheless, some preliminary observations must be made on the use of pidginization in a cultural and literary sense. While I am among those who favour the productive move of expanding the theoretical scope of linguistic concepts to other fields such as literature and anthropology – thus agreeing with Hannerz (1987), Hall (2003; 2010), Knörr (2014), Eriksen (2007), Glissant (1997) and others – I do believe, nonetheless, that their specificity lies, besides simplification, in another, more complex

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factor which is not exclusively part of cultural pidginization as defined in the CvP model, but which is arguably present whenever we speak of pidginization and creolization: power. When speaking of pidginization and creolization we are reminded of the power relations and hierarchies that were common currency in slave societies. Both pidgins and creoles were born out of the unavoidable tensions between the master and the slave, tensions which  I would like to (re)introduce in the concept of cultural and literary pidginization, for conflictive power relations and colonization characterize how literatures and cultures interact with one another. Both creolization and pidginization, we should remember, imply the emergence of a new language (with its own grammar), as the result of the mixing of two or more “dominant” languages (superstrata) and lower prestige languages (substrata); both influence each other in the process of linguistic mixing. As Hall (2010) reminds us, “Creolization always entails inequality, hierarchization, issues of domination and subalternity, mastery and servitude, control and resistance. Questions of power, as well as issues of entanglement, are always at stake. It is essential to keep these contradictory tendencies together, rather than singling out their celebratory aspects” (29). The intrusion of power also accounts, in my view, for pidginization. Power is one of the key features that I see at work in both creolization and pidginization, which never result in a smooth process of blending (whether ethnic, cultural, linguistic or literary). Many scholars (e.g. Hall (2010), Crichlow (2009), Lionnet and Shih (2011), Sheller (2003), Palmié (2006)) insist on the colonial heritage and context of slavery out of which the concept of creolization was born. Cultural as well as literary creolization – as well as its twin sister pidginization – takes place in situations of inequality, between a dominant culture/literature and the one(s) it dominates. Historically, this was the case in colonial societies, but, as Knörr and others have shown, postcolonial cultures are equally subject to similar processes, thus pointing to the continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods. However, as Knörr rightly points out: it should be noted that creolization does not necessarily require a social context shaped by the marked relations of domination characteristic of slave and colonial societies. Nevertheless, it was in these social contexts that the conditions that (can) lead to creolization were particularly pronounced – such as the distance from place and group of origin, the necessity of interethnic communication and the need for social solidarity and shared identity and language. (Knörr 2014: 21)

Since power inequality and hierarchization are at the heart of both concepts, I believe it would be a good thing to apply these features to the

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idea of “world in pidginization” as well (Knörr 2010), to which I will come back later, in order to take account of the very way literatures mix (authors, genres, styles, languages, etc.) in the formation of a common literature, in an analogous way to the formation of a common pidgin language, or, as described by Knörr, of a common transnational ethnicity.

The role of translation How does literary pidginization occur? While power relations are constitutive elements of creolization and pidginization, translation can be said to play a key role in the specific process of mixing we have here called literary pidginization: according to Polysystem Theory, translational activities have been key in the appropriation, creation, but, from a historical perspective and perhaps more surprisingly, also the “domination” of other literatures.48 Translation has a key role in configuring a (new) polysystem through procedures such as selection, with or without the explicit intention of innovating in the target literature: Through the [translation of ] foreign works, features (both principles and elements) are introduced into the home literature which did not exist there before. These include possibly not only new models of reality to replace the old and established ones that are no longer effective, but a whole range of other features as well, such as a new (poetic) language, or compositional patterns and techniques. It is clear that the very principles of selecting the works to be translated are determined by the situation governing the (home) polysystem: the texts are chosen according to their compatibility with the new approaches and the supposedly innovatory role they may assume within the target literature. (Even-­Zohar 1990: 47)

The focus of the Israeli scholar is specifically on the role of translation as innovatory process in the emergence of young and peripheral (‘weaker’) literatures, but one could easily add to the list broader regional literatures that emerge as a result of specific processes of cultural and literary mixing (i.e. what we have referred to as pidginization and creolization). While these processes are still badly known in the field of literature, I argue that translation also makes it possible for a common trans-­national literature

48

José Lambert, elaborating on this argument, even speaks of translational “colonization”. For centuries translation has been historically connected to politics (Lambert 2006, 87), and up to today the latter has played a key role in the appropriation and rejection of repertoires.

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to develop: a literature with its own identity, but which does not replace the literary identities of local or national literatures. Moreover, translation is able to fill the void left by weakening or vanishing literatures, or it can have an invigorating effect to the point that a peripheral literature replaces the centre. The same goes for young – what I prefer to call here emerging – literatures: the idea that “since a young literature cannot immediately create texts in all types known to its producers, it benefits from the experience of other literatures, and translated literature becomes in this way one of its most important systems” (Even-­Zohar 1990: 47) is certainly valid not only in the case of “younger” European literatures. A young, transnational European literature is likely to emerge out of “older” national literatures, without doing away with the repertoires of each national literature. The CvP model thus applies in a similar fashion as to ethnic groups to a diversity of literary systems: the emergence of a new trans-­ethnic or trans-­national identity does not automatically lead to the extinction of older, more established identities (contrary to creolization, where older identities are replaced, due to specific societal and historical contexts). Simultaneously, peripheral or minority literatures are striving, or are forced, to move to the centre, thanks to translation: “translated literature is not only a major channel through which fashionable repertoire is brought home, but also a source of reshuffling and supplying alternatives” (Even-­Zohar 1990: 48). In short, I argue that it is mainly at the level of translational activity that literary pidginization takes place as a means of simplified interaction between literary systems.

Centre and periphery: an outdated model? In Hannerz’s views of cultural interaction, strife for the centre is what most characterizes literary dynamics; the periphery will always look at the centre, whether the periphery is a modest rural village looking at a capital, such as Stockholm, or the Swedish capital looking from its own periphery in Northern Europe at the world’s megacities such as London or New York: “an understanding of where a place like Stockholm fits into world cultural process today can revolve around a conception of a set of center–­periphery relationships, where centers and peripheries engage in a spatial pattern for the socially ordered production and flow of meaning and meaningful form” (Hannerz 1996: 153). The Swede insists on the dynamics between centre and periphery in the mixing of cultures taking place in “the world system and its centre–­periphery relations” (Hannerz

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1987: 557). This model by now turns out to be at first blush too rigid for the interpretation of what Hannerz calls “cultural complexity” (Hannerz 1992), for it reflects the traditional Eurocentric categorization of the “West” and the “rest”, leaving little space for nuances: as Knörr puts it, departing from a centre–­periphery model implies that “allegedly modern features are categorized as European and centre culture, while allegedly traditional features are categorized as indigenous and centre culture” (Knörr 2014: 28). Nowadays, a world city like São Paolo, for instance, is not just a megacidade but has arguably become a major player in geopolitical and inter-­cultural interaction. A similar issue is at stake in Polysystem Theory. One could easily criticize Even-­ Zohar’s model for the implicit superiority it assigns to European languages and literatures (occupying the centre), while the periphery is inhabited by “weaker” languages and literatures. In this aspect, Hannerz’s and Even-­Zohar’s theories are quite similar. However, a centre–­periphery model offers some valuable insights about cultural interaction, as the very boundaries and interpretations of both “centre” and “periphery” constantly challenge one another in a tensional field. Moreover, it implies that processes of cultural and literary mixing operate in a power field with changing vectors. According to Polysystem Theory, any literary system has a drive for survival: it is coded to preserve its viability through an “internal, dynamic reshuffling of its central and peripheral elements” (Codde 2003: 114), so as to renew the centre via new additions (such as translations, or semi-­literary texts) from the periphery. While according to this view every literary system also has a centre and periphery, the opposition European (central/[post]modern/ cosmopolitan) versus indigenous (peripheral/pre-­modern/provincial) does not hold here. Rather, what is at stake is a matter of power: the centre of the system is seen as strong, while the periphery holds weaker elements. Within the European polysystem, for example, we see a recycling or recognition, by the centre, of postcolonial and migrant literatures, especially in an urban setting as they gradually become part of the common repertoire. For instance, the attention paid to Francophone Caribbean literature over the past few decades can be interpreted as a renewal of French overseas cultural connections in order to revive the French language; such a reappropriation can also be seen from a broader European and “archipelagic” perspective as a way of renewing the European literary polysystem and its repertoire.49 However, we should ask ourselves 49

This is an especially interesting (and controversial) case given the ambiguous place of writers such as the Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau within the context of Francophone literatures, which are still perceived as a side-­product of French literature.

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why it makes sense to use pidginization to describe cultural and literary dynamics in both postcolonial and (what especially interests us here) non-­ postcolonial contexts.

Pidginization in non-­postcolonial contexts Can the concept of pidginization be used in a non-­postcolonial, and more specifically, a European context? If so, how do we proceed? One might think of a process of linguistic pidginization, as Derek Bickerton does in his essay “Creoles, Capitalism and Colonialism”; pidginization initially took place, as stated earlier, in a colonial context, whereby pidgins enabled a basic form of communication between (generally black) slaves and their (usually white European) masters. Interestingly, at the end of his essay, Bickerton evokes the hypothetical collapse of Western civilization, due to the African conquest of Europe: if in the future Western civilization collapses (not all that unlikely an event) and Europe is colonized by, say, Nigerians, [then] speakers of English, French, German, and Swedish will pidginize just as readily as did speakers of Bambara, Twi, Yoruba, and Kikongo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if their conquerors subject them to similar sociolinguistic conditions. (Bickerton 2006: 150)

Beyond his somewhat dramatic view of the “collapse” of Western civilization, Bickerton evokes the possibility of an inverted process of linguistic mixing: a process happening not in Africa but across Europe – the former imperial power – at some point in the future, in what we might call a situation of “reverse colonization”, whereby Africans conquer the Old continent, leading to the reconfiguration of its linguistic map. Instead of doing away with Bickerton’s imaginary projection, albeit not so probable a scenario as he suggests, I would like to take it as a point of departure to argue that the process of pidginization is already happening in contemporary Europe, not only in a linguistic, but primarily in a cultural and – what concerns me here – a literary sense.50 Bickerton’s 50

I should briefly mention here the problem, related to the emergence of a common literature, of the emergence of a “lingua franca” in Europe amid the current defence of multilingualism. There is a debate in Europe on the existence, and need, for a “lingua franca”, which logically would be English (sometimes called Euro-­English as a kind of “pidgin-­English”). However, scholarly reflection on the emergence of a European “literatura franca”, and on emerging literatures as a whole, is still non-­existent. Some interesting publications have appeared on the subject of a “lingua franca” in Europe,

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specific mention of Nigerians recalls in uncanny ways Ulf Hannerz’s 1987 article “The World in Creolization” where the anthropologist posited the idea of creolization in Nigeria as a cultural phenomenon with a global impact: “Creole cultures are not necessarily only colonial and post-­colonial cultures”, he said, for “in the end, it seems, we are all being creolised” (Hannerz 1987:  386). The concept quickly became popular, and it remains speculation whether some postcolonial intellectuals, such as the Martinican Edouard Glissant, a fierce promoter of créolisation on a global scale, had read the Swedish anthropologist’s essay, which deals with the impact of globalization on Nigerian culture. Glissant and Hannerz do have very similar views on global cultural interaction. One of the more engaging and creative responses to Hannerz is Knörr’s article “Contemporary Creoleness; or, The World in Pidginization?” (2010). As the title makes clear, Knörr subscribes to Hannerz’s idea of cultural mixing on a global scale, but proposes an important change: the replacement of creolization by pidginization. The change was made following a comment that was made by Charles Stewart: In response to some of my ideas on this subject, Stewart (2006) holds that “we might recast Hannerz’ world in creolization as a world in pidginization since Nigerians retain their indigenous culture and do not forget or lose it as they engage with global flows” (118). Hannerz’s Creoles increase their identifications and language competencies without necessarily leaving home, without abandoning much, without giving up their ethnic identities – hence, they pidginize rather than creolize. (Knörr 2010: 739; my emphasis)

Creolization results in a new ethnic (hence cultural) identity, whereby creoles give up their old identities in the process, while, according to the CvP model, this is not the case with pidginization. Specifying her argument why pidginization is a useful concept, Knörr emphasizes that, while the process of creolization dominated in colonial times and in conditions of slavery, pidginization, in turn, happens mostly in “processes of identity formation in contemporary postcolonial societies” (Knörr 2010: 739). including one study commissioned by the European Commission (“Lingua Franca: Chimera or Reality?”). Although analysing the linguistic aspects exceeds the scope of this chapter, I should mention that there is already a substantial literature that reflects on the idea of a European lingua franca (by sociolinguists, philosophers, etc.; e.g. Van Parijs’s book Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World). Whether a European lingua franca, or perhaps a “pidgin-­English”, will crystallize depends closely on (among many factors) the impact that new communication and translation technologies will have and, related to this, on trans-­nationalism in both a European and a global context.

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What is new is that both processes are becoming common beyond (post)colonial spaces.51 Contrary to the views of other anthropologists (e.g. Hannerz) and linguists (e.g. Chaudenson), her focus is on identitary aspects of cultural mixing instead of cultural and material differences. Knörr distances herself from Caribbean intellectuals’ claims such as the one made by the Créolité movement from Martinique, whose founders proposed creoleness as a model for Caribbean identity, rejecting their claim as a “kind of identitarian nirvana” (Knörr 2008: 10) and “postcolonial wishful thinking”. There are indeed a number of problems with the way the movement defined creoleness as an attempt to glorify the creolized nature of Caribbean people (see for this debate, among others, Price and Price 1997). Historical hot-­spots of linguistic and cultural creolization, such as the Caribbean, are not exclusive sites where cultural and linguistic mixing took place. Due to globalization, historically localized processes such as creolization and pidginization now mostly happen elsewhere. Arguably, Europe is being subject to the latter process, while the former is not excluded from happening in the long run. Pidginization is in my view more accurate than creolization as a term to be used in a range of postcolonial and non-­postcolonial cultural contexts. It is also more accurate than the term “hybridization” (which is often wrongly used as a synonym for creolization), for the various European literatures (“subsystems”) remain largely autonomous. Hybridization is a biological term that suggests a juxtaposition of cultural identities, and as such does not reflect the inequalities and hierarchization that are reflected in pidginization and creolization.

Archipelago Europe The general consensus among scholars in a number of fields is that various forms of cultural mixing are taking place around the globe, and creolization is arguably one of them: if not at a global level (world-­in-­ creolization), at least it is happening at the regional and/or local level (creolization-­in-­the-­world).52 However, the controversies surrounding the 51

“[S]uch processes not only are becoming increasingly common in our ever more complexly globalized world but they also are becoming more differentiated” (Knörr 2010, 734). 52 The sociologist Michaeline Crichlow (2009, 181–2) contends that “while it may be wrong to proclaim ‘the-­world-­in-­creolization’ (since that effaces the crucibles of power in the world), it seems impossible to deny a process of ‘creolization-­in-­the-­world’, one

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term, to which pidginization is closely linked, have grown in proportion to its success. One of the misunderstandings stems from the belief that all Caribbean intellectuals and Caribbeanists alike seek to limit the use of the concept to “their” region. In fact, among some of the best-­known Caribbean intellectuals the opposite is true. Take the example of Edouard Glissant or Stuart Hall. Glissant popularized concepts such as archipelago, creolization, opacity and tout-­monde, which he uses to refer, precisely, to a world-­in-­creolization (Glissant 1997); Hall, in turn, left all options open when addressing the potential of creolization: “Whether creolization also provides the theoretical model for wider processes of cultural mixing in the contemporary, postglobal world remains to be considered” (Hall 2010: 37). Edouard Glissant, who is often mistaken for being the inventor of créolisation, especially among French and Francophone scholars and intellectuals, was one of the more visible proponents of a non-­Caribbean use of the term. The idea of applying creolization (and pidginization) to non-­postcolonial spaces, such as Europe, was indeed expressed in an interview with the Martinican philosopher and writer: What is good now is that Europe is turning into an archipelago. That is to say that beyond national barriers, we see many islands taking shape in relation to one another … to unify Europe means to develop these islands, perhaps to the detriment of the notion of the nation and, beyond that, of national borders. (Schwieger Hiepko 2011: 256–7)

Glissant obviously does not refer to physical islands, although we should keep in mind that the Caribbean is his primary frame of reference: the “islands” which he thinks of and which give shape to the European archipelago are, among other regions of Europe, Alsace, Catalonia, Scotland, Corsica, the Basque country, etc., which by analogy can be compared to the Caribbean islands and the way they are culturally interconnected. Instead of referring to nation-­states – a 19th-­century European concept – Glissant refers to island identities and island groups – archipelagos – which are culturally linked to one another.53 As “islands”, that is always on the move shaping post-­Creole imaginations and the related physical and psychic itineraries for place, giving the pervasive condition of unhomeliness”. 53 Ottmar Ette (2009, 155) emphasizes the importance of Caribbean theory in theorizing cultures from a “trans-­areal” perspective, including Europe’s archipelagic region: “It is high time that we highlight[ed] the pluri-­lingual European archipelago in a trans-­areal perspective from the Caribbean standpoint. The theoretical architectures arising from this highly productive literary island-­world and world of islands are extremely relevant in this context.” See Domínguez (2006) and D’hulst (2008) for a tentative approach to European literature as an emerging polysystem.

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these territories and regions do not form discrete nation-­states but are seen as part of an ecumene, much in the way Sidney Mintz sees the Caribbean: composite cultures which maintain flexible links to trans-­ethnic and trans-­ lingual (France, the UK, Spain) or trans-­national (Europe) entities. The Graeco-­Roman cultural heritage is often invoked as the foundation of a common European identity, even though its ‘Europeanness’ never became known as such. While Glissant applauds the emergence of “islands” of cultural identities in Europe, he also warns about the downsides, namely the return of fierce nationalisms and cultural atavisms, but leaves out of the equation other problems such as migration, the status of the EU’s outermost regions (including his mother island Martinique), or the role of the Muslim in Europe, to whom in the public arena is often assigned the role of Europe’s radically non-­assimilable other. Yet it is unclear in Glissant’s vision of the tout-­monde how the process of cultural creolization precisely works. What is clear, however, is that Glissant uses créolisation mainly in a poetic sense, although pidginization,  I argue, is a more appropriate and accurate concept to use to refer to the specific dynamics of interaction not only between cultures, but also between literatures, in a European context.54 Because of the fact that neither ethnicization nor indigenization is taking place in Europe, even though a new common identity emerges (Europeanness), this process can be identified as one of pidginization.55

The European archipelago as polysystem In spite of the many theoretical problems, if applied to literature Glissant’s poetic view of an archipelizing Europe is definitely more dynamic than the classic idea of European literature as a horizontal network or as a juxtaposition of national literatures; the predominant idea of national 54

Theorists such as such as Benitez Rojo and Glissant, in spite of their innovative efforts to integrate complex theoretical insights (drawn from chaos theory), and thus to re-­ envision Caribbean cultural complexity, have moved away from the valuable empirical findings of anthropologists and linguists, as witnessed by the processes of pidginization and creolization. 55 It should be noted that the concept of the cultural pidginization of Europe bears some similarity to Chakrabarty’s concept of “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 2009), even though there are also important differences, which deserve to be studied separately. While pidginization implies an active, dynamic process of cultural interaction between different agents (e.g. nation-­states), the notion of provincialization suggests a withdrawal of interaction, the extinction of power conflicts between European cultures.

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literatures, usually ordered by national language (as in the German expression Sprachliteraturen) where each literature has its own corpus and where authors are neatly confined to national borders, is, in an era of accelerated globalization, at least questionable; and, as Françoise Meltzer (2009) points out, the same accounts for national language departments where these literatures are studied. Glissant’s views of the archipelago also gives a more open view on Caribbean identity than the proponents of Créolité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant [1990]), who, besides their essentialist view on Caribbean identity (Price and Price 1997), cherish the idea that creoleness is by definition usable as a universal model. Such a presupposition is indeed wishful thinking, as Knörr puts it.56 While the concept of archipelago does not bear any direct relationship either to pidginization or to creolization, we should keep in mind that archipelagos have drawn the attention of other major Caribbean thinkers, such as the Cuban-­born Antonio Benitez Rojo, as well as scholars from a number of disciplines, including a few in literary studies (Ette and Müller 2012). Glissant’s metaphorical use of the archipelago in a specific European context is attractive, but questionable given Europe’s constitution as a continent; when being applied to European literature, the archipelago has an inclusive connotation, for it recalls the importance of Europe’s postcolonial (i.e. non-­continental) relations in giving shape to European narratives as such. An inclusive view of emerging literatures such as European and Caribbean literatures thus does away with the classical, rather limited, geographical, national and linguistic definitions of literary Europe, whereby postcolonial literatures occupy a peripheral position with a major influence on (former) literary capitals of Europe such as Paris, Amsterdam and London. Unfortunately, the archipelago is usually approached by scholars as the exact opposite of islands and insularity, respectively as connectivity versus isolation.57 What is at stake in an archipelagic, polysystemic view of literatures is, besides increased connectivity and inter-­literary relations, the idea of the connection of “parts” (in this case literatures) which hitherto were seen as disconnected, or at best juxtaposed in a kind of network of national literatures. A network suggests that, say, literature A equally 56

Knörr rightly points out that “[a]lthough parts of the Caribbean population have developed a Caribbean identity that transcends their ethnic and national identities, it [créolité] by no means replaces the various identifications associated with certain islands, nations and ethnic categories, but at most complements them” (Knörr 2008, 11). 57 As Eriksen (1993) argues, islands have in surprising ways been culturally connected to other continents; thus the argument of insularity as synonymous of isolation does not hold.

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influences literature B, and vice versa; literary pidginization, by contrast, is much less smooth and predictable a process than the notion of network suggests: a common literature emerges as a result of the mobility and reshuffling of repertoires and changing relations between literary agents (i.e. writers, readers, publishers, distribution channels, critics, etc.) through a number of influencing factors (e.g. translation, media attention, book festivals, but also newer phenomena such as blogs and social networking). It is not often acknowledged that inter-­literary relations are also hierarchical, making changes in literary repertoires difficult and unpredictable. While the polysystem is divided into three types of relations (inter- and intra-­systemic relations as well as relations between these two types of relations), PS Theory is, like Hannerz’s perspectives on cultural systems, best known for its architecture as a centre–­periphery model, whereby peripheral literatures move to the centre of the system and where central literatures can become peripheral. It does not come as a surprise that Even-­Zohar himself emphasized the importance of taking into account power relations and the processes of selection, inclusion and exclusion when studying European literatures: within a group of relatable national literatures, such as the literatures of Europe, hierarchical relations have been established since the very beginnings of these literatures […] the process of opening the system gradually [to innovation] brings certain literatures closer and in the longer run enables a situation where the postulates of (translational) adequacy and the realities of equivalence may overlap to a relatively high degree. This is the case of the European literatures, though in some of them the mechanism of rejection has been so strong that the changes I am talking about have occurred on a rather limited scale. (Even Zohar 1990: 51; my emphasis)

With globalization, however, relations tend to become less vertical and more open, also, in the case of European literatures. Literary pidginization is this “bringing closer” or approaching of more or less closed subsystems into a more open system. Nevertheless, there is never a guarantee that literary pidginization will result in the emergence of a new literature: translational activity indeed leads to “overlap to a relatively high degree”, without, however, resulting in a new creolized literature. Europe’s atavistic impulses (or “tribalism”, as Caryl Phillips [1987] once put it) time and again keep innovation at bay: rejection of repertoires by the receiving literature also acts as a counterforce, thus of de-­pidginization.58 However, 58

Inter-­ literary relations happen either through multilingual or translational communication. They give shape to national literatures, but they go beyond the

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Even-­Zohar’s focus on “relatable national literatures” (1990: 48) seems to privilege the nation-­state as organizing criterion, whereas one of the main innovative aspects of PS theory is precisely its capacity to transcend national borders, enabling a new look at European and other (regional) literatures as transnational polysystems; the European literary polysystem, for instance, should be approached with consideration of its – usually ignored – postcolonial connections overseas (Van Haesendonck 2012).

Towards a new European literature? How do the notions of creolization and pidginization help our understanding of European literature as an emerging common body of literatures? Emerging literatures, I have argued here, should be approached not as a simple network of national literatures, authors or texts, but rather as a pidginized archipelagic polysystem. It makes sense to look at Europe as such a system given that the process of cultural and literary pidginization is taking place in the region. By combining the CvP model and PS theory, I have defined literary pidginization as the approaching of literary subsystems in specific ways, whereby translation occupies a key role in the reshuffling of repertoires. As a result, a new common European literature emerges without implying that different national or ethnically discrete literatures disappear. Europe’s “postcolonial” and “peripheral” connections (e.g. Francophone Caribbean writers from Martinique, or performers from Curaçao) play an important role in the process of challenging existing power relations.59 If Europe is viewed as an archipelago of literatures, then more important than the particular national literatures are the connections (the joints) or relations between the different parts; in other words, the focus shifts to the way these parts interact to create a common literature. Indeed, this new “whole” (the European polysystem as archipelagic structure) has little or no meaning without the “parts”, and the links between them, on which the system’s “body” depends. One of the leading scholars in the field of literary studies, Pascale Casanova, reminds us that “one of the most difficult areas of research national spheres. As Lieven D’hulst, one of the scholars favouring polysystem theory as a means of approaching both Caribbean and European literatures, argues, translations help “to regulate power relations between literary communities, to dominate literatures and emancipate others. All in all, the extent to which they have been able to ‘construct’ Europe is far from clear at this moment; but at least they show we should ‘re-­think’ Europe from a set of relational viewpoints” (D’hulst 2008, 90). 59 See e.g. Starink-­Martha (2014).

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offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis” (Casanova 2009: 13). However, as with most literary scholars, Casanova’s view is based on the traditional nation-­state model, which is seen as fixed and immutable: it does not account for multilingual or diglossic spaces, nor for the emerging “island identities” Glissant refers to (Schwieger-­Hiepko 2011: 256–7). What happens, for instance, in the case of Belgium, Spain or Switzerland, all multilingual spaces where, because of a cohabitation of various literatures, the application of the concept of “national literature” as a unified, monolingual corpus simply does not hold?60 According to Casanova, national literatures and identities in a European context must be seen as largely autonomous, and it is only in the institutional form of the European Union that politics, literature and culture tend to be conflated. In her essay “European literature. Simply a Higher Degree of Universality”, she argues: unlike many currently emerging literary spaces, each national space within the overall European space enjoys a great deal of autonomy, and that each small world of literature in Europe, confined within its national borders, is free – at least relatively – from political dependencies and imperatives. (Casanova 2009: 19)

However, Casanova is right to point out that there have always been tensions and “battles” in the literary field of European literatures, but she is pessimistic about the idea of an emerging European literature. Her pessimism stems from a somewhat Manichean view of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War as a map where “battles, resistances, uprisings and revolutions” are constantly played out, in a global context “formed and shaped by and through constant violence”.61 Casanova’s point of view, while acknowledging the many rivalries and tensions in the emergence of a common literature, remains somewhat contradictory: on the one hand a European literature with a common identity seems 60

See Resina (2013) for an engaging relational approach to Iberian literatures and cultures. 61 European literatures have, according to Casanova, since their very beginnings been a “battlefield” with numerous players: “The hypothesis of a European literary space implies in effect that this is an unequal world, formed and shaped by and through constant violence (in a soft form, to be sure, but relentless nevertheless), characterized by brutal impositions, denied but nonetheless powerful ascendancies, constitutive relations of domination, which imply battles, resistances, uprisings and revolutions” (Casanova 2009, 22).

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simply impossible and will not emerge any time soon; on the other, she downplays official policies dictated by national or supranational bodies (such as the EU), for she sees literatures as unbounded, free to travel and mingle, independent from any political constraints. Literary pidginization thus implies more than just an increased amount of influence or domination of certain literatures over other literatures, in a manner that is in no way smooth or equal: while literatures grow or die, their sphere of influence and interaction changes accordingly, and, like the stock market (for want of a better metaphor), their “value” changes in often “unpredictable” ways. I put “value” and “unpredictable” in quotation marks here because literary value is a highly subjective matter; unlike financial market forces, the publishing market is most often determined by cultural politics where publishing and translation are factors that, to an important degree, can be steered. Literary value and the way a particular literature gains visibility are thus partially predictable. Guyanese literatures, for instance, have been ignored by mainstream scholarship not because Guyanese writers lack literary talent; as Richard and Sally Price (2013: 285) are right to remind us, they were ignored quite simply because of the lack of translation of existing works and scholarship, such as is the case with Surinamese literature. If an important work like Michiel Van Kempen’s Een Geschiedenis van de Surinaamse Literatuur (A History of Surinamese Literature) (2003) had been translated into English, then the Guyanese literatures would already be receiving the attention they deserve. Within the panorama of Caribbean literatures, Guyanese literatures can thus be seen as a peripheral subsystem that is valued insofar as more translations of both literary works and scholarship become available. In other words, it is a matter of resources and institutional support, not only when it comes to publishing locally, but also when it comes to funding translations of critical studies about these literatures. While the case of European literature is somewhat different, like the Caribbean it is made out of competing linguistic subsystems, such as is the case with literatures in Dutch, which encompass both Dutch and Flemish authors. Even-­Zohar, however, is parsimonious in his description on how exactly inter-­literary relations in polysystems take place and give shape to literary innovation, for it is not clear how exactly new literatures emerge, especially in a situation of complex cultural and literary mixing. Nevertheless, in combination with Knörr’s CvP model, PS Theory offers a useful framework for further elaboration (even though the terms “cultural system” and “iterary system”, as we have pointed out from the outset, remain problematic).

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Finally, one of the side-­concepts of Jacqueline Knörr’s CvP model is also important for understanding the process of literary pidginization: “pidgin potential” (Knörr 2014: 32). She argues that in pidginization interconnectedness is the binding factor of it all: even though she does not use the term archipelago, the Indonesian ethnic group (Betawi) she focuses on owes its raison d’être to what she calls its “pidgin potential”, which I understand as the capacity to connect to other ethnicities with whom an ethnic group’s identity overlaps: “All these [ethnic] categories are closely interrelated and overlapping in ascriptions and boundaries. Their [Betawi] social, cultural, and political dynamics can only be understood if studied in their interrelatedness” (Knörr 2010:  740). Likewise, regional and transnational literary dynamics require us to focus on the interconnectedness of literatures, as well as on how literatures interact and are affected. As Knörr argues, the determinant in cultural pidginization is the role of “today’s communication and transportation facilities, which facilitate social contacts and ties over long distances and periods of time” (Knörr 2014: 31). Literature is also being increasingly affected by such changes, resulting in the mobility of authors and their (translated) work both in print and in terms of the work’s availability in new digital media and networks. Likewise, literary scholarship is increasingly visible in a wide arrange of cultural and literary journals and on social media. Creoles are known for being mediators between various ethnic groups (Knörr 2010; Eriksen 2007), but also as groups that often live on the edge of being socially marginalized by dominant groups. Besides translational contact, trans-­lingualism has the potential of connecting literatures written in different (national or local) languages: writers such as Jorge Semprún, Amin Maalouf, Gerda Lerner, Yoko Tawada, Julien Green and José Francisco Agüera Oliver, among many others, have a similar status to that of creoles: they have a higher potential for connectedness, hence a higher “pidgin potential”.62 Such trans-­lingual authors are often (but not always) migrant writers: not only do they identify with both their own cultural background and the host culture, but they also move fluently between local, national and supranational levels of identification. Many migrant writers in Europe, for instance from the Caribbean, La Réunion, Mauritius, San Tomé and Príncipe, or Cape Verde, have creolized identities and, as diasporic members of creole groups, they maintain transnational links with their home communities; torn between two (or more) cultures, they thus also, like creoles, “tend to be ambivalent because they emerged

62

For an engaging analysis of trans-­lingual writing in Europe, see Ette (2009).

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in colonial contexts and are therefore associated with the colonial heritage” (Knörr 2010: 747). Can trans-­lingual writers therefore give new meaning to the – by now old – EU slogan “United in Diversity”, with its connotation of self-­ proclaimed cosmopolitanism? The European Union, one of the quickly ageing institutional agents when it comes to official cultural policies63 in Europe, does officially embrace linguistic diversity, albeit in very limited ways, for it does not take advantage of the huge pidgin potential present in its “Union”, endlessly trapped between processes of integration, disintegration and reintegration (Zielonka 2014). Cultural and literary pidginization, instead, take place mostly “from below”, outside the field of action of official public institutions. In spite of the fresh waves of Euro-­scepticism blowing over Europe in recent years, a minimum sense of community, of being “united in diversity”, persists on the continent, from north to south and from east to west. Hence I do believe it would not be a stretch to make a comparison between creole minorities such as the Betawi (as described by Knörr 2010: 741), who stand for such “unity in diversity” in Indonesia, and the literary community of trans-­lingual writers in the European context I am referring to here: because of their in betweenness trans/multi-­lingual and migrant writers have the potential to “represent and communicate different dimensions of identity at the same time” (ibid.) through their work, even without doing so explicitly: local (think about dialects), national, trans- and supranational dimensions. In both cases (ethnic and literary), pidginization has a socially inclusive effect.64 63

For Even-­Zohar, in order for the literary “product” (such as a fictional text) to be generated, “a common REPERTOIRE must exist, whose usability is determined by some INSTITUTION” (Even-­Zohar 1990, 34; capitals in the original). This can aptly be illustrated by the way official policies can either foster or contain cultural and literary mixing. The institutional agent of the polysystem includes not only cultural policies regarding translation or the programming of curricula for the educational system, but also other initiatives regarding multilingualism. 64 A good example of institutional involvement is the EU’s nomination in 2008 of Amin Maalouf, a French-­Lebanese writer, as president of a think tank, the “Group of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue set up at the initiative of the European Commission” (which included, among others, Tahar Ben Jelloun), to reflect on the challenge of multilingualism in Europe. In his conclusion, Maalouf advocated the idea of personal adoptive language as a way of fostering minor languages, besides knowledge of the more emblematic ones; this initiative implies taking action at the grassroots levels, i.e. in primary education. See “A Rewarding Challenge: How the Multiplicity of Languages Could Strengthen Europe”. Proposals from the Group of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue set up at the initiative of the European Commission, Brussels 2008.

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Conclusion To conclude, if an emerging literature can be understood as a polysystemic archipelago, it will be understood as a function of the entanglements between the different literary subsystems, a function of how the different literary “parts” are interconnected. Translation, I have said, is one of the forces which drive literary pidginization. Translation implies modification or domination/“colonization” of repertoires, but also helps in the process of identification of a trans-­national readership with a common literature. Literary pidginization can lead to creolization, but the opposite (creolization > pidginization) is unlikely to happen, at least in a European context. Literary creolization can, eventually, be the endgame of literary mixing, whereby the different literatures are eventually replaced by a creolized literature which is perceived as common; in the case of Europe this is unlikely to happen, insofar as no real cultural integration is happening “from below” whereby individual national and local identities are being replaced by a common one. Official integration policies “from above” can, however, influence cultural and literary pidginization, and its procedures and impact should receive our attention in a future study. Inversely, the literary “parts” can be better understood, in Europe as in the Caribbean, as components of an “interconnected whole” (Price and Price 1997: 4), which we have defined – albeit on an abstract-­theoretical level – as a polysystem. This, as I have attempted to demonstrate, albeit on rough lines, is literary pidginization at work. Translingual writing, as well as translation, should be the focal point for further research on literary pidginization. As with open source cultures and sharing economies, the CvP model, in combination with polysystem theory, has proven to be a useful and productive conceptual tool with which to “do” cultural and literary analysis: it helps to describe those complex cultural and literary contexts which cannot be grasped with classical theories, without therefore contradicting or downplaying the more poetic views borrowed from Caribbean theorists. In times when the “creolization of theory” (Lionnet and Shih 2011) is a reality, the study of literatures and cultures can only benefit from the insights offered by anthropology and linguistics. And vice versa.

Chapter 8

Travelling Concepts II: The Archipelago as a Spatial Concept for Literary Studies

[…] the desire for stability and the need for instability are no longer incompatible […] such a city becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post-­architectural landscape of erasure where what was once city is now a highly charged nothingness. (Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL) Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some improbable salamander. (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago)

Whole archipelagos, and not just islands as Lalo suggests, were once invisible to humanity, as Solzhenitsyn describes in his tragic account of The Gulag Archipelago. Caribbean intellectuals, of course, have presented a more positive image of the archipelago, turning it into a productive concept; however, it is important to remind ourselves that, not so long ago, archipelagos did not draw any attention at all for being a group of islands floating amid the oceans, far away from any continents. Among the most discussed Caribbean intellectuals of the past three decades, two figures stand out for some striking similarities between their works: Glissant and Benítez-­Rojo. While scholars have usually related them to notions such as postmodernism, relation and/or rhizome, one of the less debated concepts is the archipelago as a way of thinking. However, both thinkers have been significant in proposing the archipelago as a Caribbean

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epistemological mode, that is, as both a philosophical and a practical way of re-­organizing and rethinking seemingly chaotic constellations as structured entities. Whether they succeeded or failed in their aims is not the subject of this chapter. Instead, I will focus on shedding light on other archipelagos as they have been used in other disciplines and outside of the Caribbean. More particularly, I am interested in the spatial use of the concept, namely in urban studies and architecture, as well as its relation to creolization, understood as an unfinished process of (cultural, linguistic, literary) mixing. Furthermore, I will explore some of the possibilities and limitations of archipelagic thinking and creolization for the field of literary studies.

On archipelagos: from the geographical to the urban and the literary What have architecture and urban studies in common with literature and literary studies? In this last section of the chapter I am interested in exploring how literary studies can draw insights from architectural and urban theories and the way these disciplines deal with spatial concepts. I will focus on the concept of archipelago and modes of archipelagic thinking within these fields that, at first sight, have very little in common. I will argue that urban perspectives on (re)thinking space give literary scholars important material to learn from: architects and urban scholars have integrated modes of thinking about buildings and urban contexts which are directly relevant to literary scholars and the ways they approach a literary text. My interdisciplinary interest in exploring spatial concepts in Architecture and Urban Studies comes from my dissatisfaction with the way spatial concepts are being dealt with in literary studies, especially the Glissantean concept of pensée archipélique. Instead of doing away with spatial concepts, I believe literary scholars can learn of alternative – yet at times analogous – uses in Architecture, where spatial thinking is related to concrete, geographical, material and empirical problems. At first sight, literature and architecture have little to nothing in common with one another. Yet they both use terms such as “style”, “structure” and “language” to describe respectively urban spaces, buildings or literary texts, which are then usually categorized in “genres” and “movements”, all with their own particular best-­selling or award-­winning “star writers” or “starchitects”. In addition, their work is usually being appropriated by literary “canons” or listed as national heritage (e.g. as national monuments) that are said to be typical of one particular place,

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country or region. An architect’s work is said to have a particular style, while a literary text’s structure can be highly complex, paralleling a building’s structural complexity. From both a historical and a creative point of view, there have been important links and exchanges between architecture and literature as material and cultural praxis.1 Andrzej Piotrowski points out that both are the result of similar creative and cognitive processes: “the creative process of designing architecture is similar to writing a novel or painting a picture because all involve revising in the refinement of an idea in one’s mind” (Piotrowski, Architecture of Thought xi).2 Likewise, in his pioneering book Architecture & Modern Literature (2012), David Spurr makes an important observation about the analogies between three types of vectors at work in both literary and architectural works: “in both arts, the production of meaning is a function of the relations between the respective sets of vectors outlined here: in architecture among topos, typos, and tectonic, in literature among context, genre, and text” (Spurr 5). Meaning is the product of the relations between setting (environment) and the type of object involved in that setting, between the text and its context. Hence, taking a closer look to these fields (urban and architectural theory vs literature and literary studies), we can easily see that both have more in common with one another than one would think at first sight: both the architectural and literary fields are theoretical “sponges”, in the sense that they are theoretically more receptive than most academic disciplines in absorbing concepts from a wide range of disciplines (such

1



See e.g. Boyer’s Le Corbusier, homme de lettres (2011), or the influence of poets such as Mallarmé on Arakawa and Gins’ architectural poetics (Prohm 2010). 2 Piotrowski notes that “architects give shape to multiple and frequently conflicting or unrealized thoughts concerning reality and, in this way, make them conceptually accessible. Later, when the building exists physically, it manifests a symbolic environment distilled from the ideas, visions, and rationales admitted by the design process. A building’s form and the way it functions embody these resulting symbolic concepts of reality (Piotrowski, “representing and knowing architecture” 41). In a similar fashion, David Leatherbarrow (2001) compares the fictional act of drawing to the act of painting or constructing a novel: “To say architectural drawings are fictive is to take advantage of the positive sense of that term, the one commonly used in literature and criticism, not to suggest that drawings of this sort show something impossible or improbable.” Furthermore, Leatherbarrow notes that the fictional character in both the architectural and the literary field must not be understood as an attempt to deceive, but rather as a way of exploring alternative realities. Likewise, Piotrowski reminds us that “buildings and urban spaces have an inexhaustible capacity to reveal the traces of previously overlooked cultural and political phenomena. It is as if material constructs that surround people and frame their interactions record life in its fullest complexity” (Piotrowski, 2011, xi).

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as philosophy)3 and at least with regard to literary studies in inviting us to engage in inter- or cross-­disciplinary thinking. I argue that urban theoretical insights on the archipelago offer literary scholars an alternative to the purely discursive or metaphorical use of spatial concepts, which has become increasingly popular in the humanities since the 1980s. An archipelagic perspective, as presented by urbanists and architects, aims to go beyond the metaphorical and metonymic uses of spatial concepts by the humanities and the social sciences. How can literary scholars close the gap between the purely textual/ discursive reality and the (usually remote or non-­existent) contextual/ extra-­discursive environment? In both architecture and literature the archipelago operates first and foremost on the level of topos or place/ context and is therefore especially relevant in postmodern times.4 However, also at a literary-­textual level (whose equivalent in architecture is the “tectonic” level), archipelagic structures are possible. Can we speak of literary archipelagos (which I here call archi-­pelagos) in ways analogous to those in which we speak of urban archipelagos? If so, how does a literary archipelago take shape, and in what way is it different from national literatures? And do we have the appropriate toolbox for theorizing such a configuration? Instead of aiming to provide a definitive answer to these questions, it is my aim to open the path for further exploration of the links between architecture and literature. The spatial concept of what I call the urban, hyphenated archi-­pelago (as distinct from “archipelago”) can serve to formulate an alternative approach, whereby authors and works are not simply divided and labelled in categories, but “cohabit” in a polycentric, literary archipelago. As a praxis, literary studies can benefit, then, at least from a theoretical perspective, from an archipelagic approach as an 3 4



See e.g. Frichot and Loo (2013) and Lecercle and Kral (2010). Following Spurr’s line of thought, we could argue that the way urbanists and architects have appropriated and creatively transformed and materialized in an architectural project addresses the question of how meaning is produced in postmodernity, whereby new forms of dwelling emerge. While, in the late 19th and early 20th  centuries, dwelling was demystified as a “space that promises rootedness, permanence, and a womblike removal from the experience of modernity” (Spurr 52–3), in postmodernity, experiences of dwelling and nomadism are omnipresent in literature and the arts. Migrations now take place at an incomparably higher pace than half a century ago, and the dislocation of people might eventually become the rule rather than the exception. The fairly new genres of “literature of migration” and “diaspora literature” call for new tools for analysing creolized or hybrid texts which cannot easily be categorized, for they are often born from the interstices and diasporas of national literatures. Spurr does not use the term “postmodern”, since he suggests that modernity as a process which started in the 19th century and is unfinished in the present.

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alternative to the study of the canon of national literatures. In postcolonial literatures such as those of the Caribbean, the consideration of one’s own diasporicity, that is, the awareness of one’s broader diasporic context and ability to connect to other “I-­lands” of writing, is key to imagining the potential of what I will further on refer to as literary archipelagos, which I will discuss after introducing the concept of archi-­pelago. My broader aim is thus to explore conceptual connections between very different disciplinary fields, in order to formulate a critique of the conventional categorization of literary works in national literatures. However, my recourse to the fields of architectural and urban theory is not grounded in arbitrary motives. I argue that both literary texts and urban structures can be thought of as archipelagic configurations: like literary texts, architectural creations and urban projects allow for a flexible dialogue with their environment or context; the reader’s interpretation of literary and architectural features becomes key to the production of meaning. As an illustration I will critically engage, albeit briefly, with a theoretical text, Koolhaas and Ungers’ Green Archipelago project, as well as with one literary text, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Nevertheless, as I will attempt to show, the archi-­pelago is not just one more critical tool in an already rich arsenal of spatial concepts available to literary critics. Contrary to other spatial concepts, its specificity resides in the very multiplicity of connections and fluidity its existence depends upon. Yet the archipelago as a functional “whole” does not exist without the various islands, the “parts” it is made of.

Theoretical groundings: the rise of the spatial concept According to Susan Bassnett, spatial metaphors started to make their presence in literary scholarship in the 1980s with the emergence of post-­ structuralism: Today, the presence of geographical metaphors and metonyms in the work of scholars writing in various languages is strikingly apparent. In the 1980s, with the surge of interest in post-­structuralism […] the figurative language of literary criticism shifted from that of abstract patterning favoured during the structuralist years, to the use of more explicitly spatial metaphors. Among such was the dominant idea of readers undertaking a textual or transtextual journey, hence an emphasis on maps, on mapping out terrain, along with images of islands, trails, pathways, labyrinths, borders and frontiers, and with the growth of post-­colonial thinking, nomadism, contact zones, diasporas, no-­man’s land, inbetweenness. (Bassnett vii)

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The use of spatial concepts is obvious in the case of disciplines such as architecture, geography or urban planning, known for being spatial praxis par excellence, while spatiality is much less obvious in the humanities. Since the “spatial turn” of the 1980s, however, spatial concepts have been predominantly treated in the humanities in purely metaphorical or metonymical terms. What Bassnett does not say is that this trend has led, also in literary studies, to the almost total disconnection, or gap, between the text as a discursive or immaterial reality and place, or the material (i.e. contextual/extra-­discursive) environment in which that text has emerged. While this trend can be observed in the humanities at large, there has been little criticism so far from within the human sciences, with the rare exception of postcolonial theory (including postcolonial ecocriticism). In Postcolonial Geographies (2003) Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan criticized the limits of spatial metaphors for not referring to the physical world that they claim to represent. Instead, their “world” of reference is merely discursive, not material (empirical), with important consequences: “an emphasis on discourse detracts from an assessment of material ways in which colonial power relations persist” (Blunt and McEwan 5); that is why scholars, they argue, should “locate postcolonial geographies on material rather than solely textual or abstract terrains” (6). Indeed, nowadays no empirical evidence or grounding in the “real” world is implied when literary scholars profusely use concepts such as borders, fields, maps, islands, contact zones, etc. While this de-­materialization of spatial concepts is especially obvious in literary studies, in fields such as Area Studies similar issues are at stake. For instance, Stephens and Roberts (2013) criticize the almost virtual place the concept of the island (they refer to the archipelago of the Caribbean Antilles) occupies within contemporary American Studies: “Yet even as the new American Studies has offered crucial insights regarding the cultural geographies that frequently take island-­space as a stage, post-­exceptionalist American Studies has been less attentive to the materiality of the island-­as-­stage, and to the formal topographical assumptions through which islands have been historically and critically engaged“ (Stephens and Roberts 2). Even more curiously, the trend to de-­materialize geographical formations such as landscapes is also present in the field of geography itself, where the archipelago has been discussed at length; yet here also, the metaphorical tends to replace material concerns.5 5

Two articles published in the geographical journal Island Studies are particularly relevant here: Jonathan Pugh’s “Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago” (Pugh 2013) and “Envisioning the Archipelago” (Stratford et al. 2011). Like Bassnett,

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Going against this trend, a cross-­disciplinary perspective, I argue, opts to focus closely on the material environment in which a text has emerged. The underlying challenge is to see how concepts that are now widely known as “Caribbean” have been present, in seemingly unrelated fields, such as the ones concerned here (architecture and urban studies). One of the aims of successful architectural projects is what Roger Scruton calls oikophilia: the respect and love for the local habitat and surrounding neighbours – which in an archipelagic context would be the neighbouring islands (Scruton 2012: 283; 2009: 171). Instead of mimicking or adapting existing theories, architects and urbanists conceptualize the urban archi-­ pelago in their very own way, proposing fascinating features that are absent from other theoretical views. The broader aim of the last section of this book is to reinforce the call for an alternative to literary studies understood as the study of national literatures. In fact, would not any study of literary texts nowadays benefit – if only partially – from a renewed comparative approach? An archipelagic conception of literatures has direct implications for the way literary texts are being approached. Some positive signs have emerged over the past decade: sporadically, scholars have started crossing linguistic borders with more intensity than was the case in the last decades of the past century, when Benedict Anderson’s Spectres of Comparison (1998) was still a rare exception in comparative studies. Books such as Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) or Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas (ed. Keown, Murray and Proctor, 2009), among others, are clear calls to move away from the classical methods whereby national literatures and cultures are compared as neatly, uncontaminated, sealed-­off categories. Spivak does not shy away from criticizing how national literatures are still being approached nowadays as monolithic entities. Moreover, she assumes that the traditional academic discipline of comparative literature is dead. However, her radical statement should not be interpreted too hastily. In fact, Spivak makes a stand for the renewal of comparative literature in a different form. To innovate in Comp. Lit. – and in the study of national literatures at large – we must first do away with a certain comparative praxis, what Spivak calls “old comparative literature” (Spivak 2), that is, the discipline as it has become known since the 19th  century, when literature was used as a channel for Pugh argues that the spatial turn was a crucial moment for the humanities and social sciences, adding that the strength of archipelagic thinking is that it “denaturalizes the conceptual basis of space and place” (Pugh 9). For an engaging study of the links between literature (including Glissant’s work) and the poetics of place as in-­ betweenness, see Prieto (2013).

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reproducing the romantic idea of nation-­states (many of them new-­born) in Europe and beyond.6 Spivak calls for an alliance between a renewed comparative literature, grounded in a thorough knowledge of languages other than the hallowed European “master” languages, and the broader, yet still restricted, area studies (one might think about the label “Caribbean Studies”); but can Spivak’s own cosmopolitan profile be realistically taken as a standard for a comparative study of literatures? Scepticism towards Spivak’s own locus of enunciation and towards comparative postcolonial studies as a “Western” cosmopolitan praxis (see e.g. Torres-­Saillant 2006) suggests that a true creolization of theory (Lionnet 2011) might still face a difficult way ahead. Yet there is also reason to be more optimistic, as some scholars have in their own fashion made a call for a truly comparative approach. Stephens and Roberts, for instance, in their discussion of how to innovate in American studies, call for the field to be turned into a transregional “archipelagic studies”, inclusive of the Caribbean: The idea of a non-­sovereign Caribbean, and the use of such a frame as a category of historical and geo-­political analysis, suggests precisely the kind of contemporary turn an archipelagic studies also represents – a turn away from the trajectories of postcolonial studies as offering the only language for understanding present and contemporary political formations not culminating in the expected narrative of national sovereignty, as merely holding onto the relations of dependency that characterized the colonial past. (Stephens and Roberts 15)

In a similar vein, and regardless of whether the postcolonial vocabulary should be maintained or not, an archipelagic literary studies can be conceptualized as an open field where the very praxis of writing and reading literature survives in increasingly mediatized societies of spectacle.

Defining the archipelago Georges Voisset reminds us that the archipelago as a concept has long suffered from its status as a “chose sans qualité”, an object without any qualities, as if it were an undefinable half-­breed (entre-­deux) in between 6

“As far as I am concerned, then, there is nothing necessarily new about the new Comparative Literature. Nonetheless, I must acknowledge that the times determine how the necessary vision of ‘comparativity’ will play out. Comparative Literature must always cross borders. And crossing borders, as Derrida never ceases reminding us via Kant, is a problematic affair” (Spivak 16).

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two concrete entities, island and continent, both of which it apparently belongs to yet is also differentiated from.7 Voisset regrets that archipelagos have been treated as second-­hand, almost spectral entities: “[situated] in between islands and continents, archipelagos have neither archipelagic features nor archipelagic inhabitants, nor ‘archipelagicity’ (archipélité), a distinct cultural identity. That is how in 2002 French encyclopedia and dictionaries still define them” (Voisset 7; my translation).8 Ottmar Ette and Gesine Müller, in their introduction to the volume Worldwide: Archipels de la mondialisation, archipiélagos de la globalización (2012), suggest that the archipelago is especially attractive from the point of view of the trans-­areal study of cultures, allowing modes of thinking beyond linguistic and national borders. The authors argue that the archipelago is a healthy antidote against ideological narcissism, such as the ideology that drives the communitarian concept of francophonie, and other linguistic families (such as Anglophone, Hispanophone, Lusophone, etc.) alike: Francophonie represents a standardized model of the inheritance of a colonial cultural politics, that of the Grande Nation, which nonetheless is also compatible with postcolonial trends and contemporary forms of representation. The concept of pensée archipélique attempts to counter such established hierarchies and – based on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome, also seeks to show and give value to multidimensional relationalities in a new way. (Ette and Müller 13; my translation)9

Ette and Müller make an important contribution in extending the concept’s use to other continents, as they coin the term “transarchipelagic” to describe the emergence of new cultural and literary constellations or “archipelagos of globalization” (Ette and Müller 21). They suggest that a 7



From an etymological perspective, “archipelago” suffered a curious inversion: Aigaion pelagos in Greek refers to the ancient Sea or the Sea par excellence (now the Aegean Sea). An archipelago is in the first place a sea where an “explosion” of islands drift, but now it refers to a group of islands (see Joubert 318). 8 “[Situés] Entre îles et continents, les archipels, eux, n’ont ni caractéristiques archipélagiques, ni habitants archipéliens, ni archipélité. Ainsi le veulent toujours, en 2002, encyclopédies et dictionnaires français.” 9 “La francofonía representa un modelo estandardizado de la herencia de una política cultural colonial, la de la Grande Nation, el cual, sin embargo, es también compatible con tendencias postcoloniales y formas de representación actuales. Frente a esto, el concepto iniciado por Édouard Glissant de la pensée archipélique intenta romper con las jerarquías establecidas y – basándose en el concepto de rizoma de Deleuze y Guattari – busca también mostrar las relacionalidades multidimensionales y valorarlas de un modo nuevo.”

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trans-­archipelagic model can function as an alternative to the traditional division of national literatures, and that such a model is needed to explain the permanent frictions and connections that literary constellations are made of. This model builds, on the one hand, on Ette’s promotion of “Transareal” studies (2016: 11), which focuses on studying archipelagic and transarchipelagic patterns since Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World. On the other hand, the “trans-­archipelago” is largely based on the theoretical concept of a Martinican writer and philosopher, Edouard Glissant, and more particularly on his pensée archipélique (which can be translated as “Archipelagic thinking” or “Archipelagic thought”).10 Perhaps the clearest definition of what Glissant understands by archipelagic thinking is given in his Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996), where he makes clear the distinction between two diametrically modes of thinking: pensée continental (continental thinking) and pensée archipélique (archipelagic thinking). While he defines the former as “systemic thinking” (pensée systémique), the latter is non-­systematic, fluid, intuitive, more fragile but also – in line with his ideas about creolization as an uncontrollable process – unpredictable (Glissant, Introduction 43). This opposition roughly corresponds to his later differentiation between atavistic and composite cultures, which according to Glissant differentiates Europe from the Caribbean (see Schwieger-­Hiepko 2011; Haesendonck 2012). Even though concepts such as the archipelago and opacité were already present in Glissant’s early work, more specifically since his 1969 essay L’Intention poétique, they grew increasingly important in his later work, eventually becoming a core concept in his Traité du tout monde (1997).11 As Michael Dash points out, Glissant’s drawing on chaos theory is essentially to be understood as a theoretical move: “one could say that he sees the entire world in terms of a Caribbean or New World condition. The world, for Glissant, is increasingly made up of archipelagos of cultures. The Caribbean has become exemplary in this creative global ‘chaos’ which proliferates everywhere” (Dash 23). In Traîté du tout monde, the Martinican describes continents as “ces masses d’intolérance raidement tournées vers une Vérité” (Glissant 1997: 181). The continent embodies coloniality and intolerance, the diktat of the absolute Truth. However, 10

I will use the term “archipelagic thinking” since it reflects Glissant’s idea of archipelization as an active and creative process. 11 Surprisingly, there is to date only one translation of the Traité du tout monde available, in German (Traktat über die Welt: Essay, 2013). A translation into English is still lacking.

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continents, under the pressures of globalization, transform into regions, whereby regions become interconnected, semi-­ autonomous islands or peninsulas (presqu’îles): “the regions of the world become islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, promontories, lands of mixture and transit, and which nonetheless persist (“les régions du monde deviennent des îles, des isthmes, des presqu’îles, des avancées, terres de mélange et de passage, et qui pourtant demeurent” [Glissant 1997: 181]). The archipelago’s particularity of both attachment and unconnectedness has had consequences for the way it has been perceived. Even though Glissant’s distinction is clear-­cut, the opposition between “continental” and “archipelagic” should not be taken too literally: physical archipelagos can de facto connect to continents by proximity, thus resembling peninsulas. Likewise, there are different degrees and nuances between decentred, fluid and more conservative forms of thinking; unpredictable forms which value creativity versus fixed forms where ideas are seemingly immutable and attached to a centre. A common misunderstanding, however, is that the archipelago would have any subversive power. According to Ette and Müller, the archipelago, as a figure of connectivity, has the power to subvert hierarchies of power: “The concept […] attempts to counter such established hierarchies” (Ette and Müller 13; my emphasis). Other critics, such as Adlai Murdoch (2015), argue along the same lines that “Glissant implicitly inscribes an ideal of chaotic relationality, which undoes hierarchical power relations and territorial co-­optation” (Murdoch 22; my emphasis). However, the Martinican writer made the exact opposite claim, namely that the rhizome does not possess or create any subversive power. The related concepts of archipelago and opacité pretend neither to subvert any hierarchies nor to disentangle any power relations: The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. […] The rhizome concept appears interesting for its anticonformism […] one cannot infer from this that it is subversive or that rhizomatic thought has the capacity to overturn the order of the world – because, by so doing, one reverts to ideological claims presumably challenged by this thought. (Glissant 1990: 11–12)

While Glissant was highly fascinated by the power of rhizomatic configurations, his pensée archipélique clearly draws on Deleuze’s insights: it is fair to say that the idea of multiplicity as well as of dynamic expansion of grass-­roots connections permeates Glissant’s work (e.g.  Kullberg 2006; Stevens 2008). The Martinican writer explicitly refers to Deleuze’s

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rhizome in theorizing his own concepts, but he does not explicitly refer to another, related concept from the French philosopher and which is at heart of archipelagic thinking: assemblage. It does not come as a surprise that, because of the features it has in common with the archipelago, the concept of assemblage has sparked a fair amount of interest in urban studies and architecture.12 Deleuzian theory is indeed all about relationality, rhizomatic connections and “assemblages”, as explained in the landmark work Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) published with Félix Guattari in 1980, and thus it provided a welcome theoretical breeding ground for Glissant’s own reflections collected in works such as Poétique de la relation (1990) and Traité du tout monde (1997).13 As a craft, good assembling (e.g. of a piece of furniture) depends on whether the parts are successfully joined and fitted together by their shapes, but often also on the possibility of plugging in, removing, extending or replacing these parts with other ones in cases where a part is damaged or ceases to be functional. The parts of assemblages, Deleuze argued, do not form a smooth and seamless whole (unlike organic entities), and this arguably also accounts for the “parts” of archipelagic formations. Assemblages are made out of what he calls “relations of exteriority”, which means that parts can be easily unplugged or detached from the whole and, as in a modular system, be plugged into (or attached to) another assemblage with a very different dynamic of interaction from the former one (DeLanda 10–11). This means that the component parts in an assemblage enjoy a certain degree of autonomy, and the assemblage’s strength consists in the flexible relation between those parts and the whole.14 Deleuze and Guattari point out that an 12

The clearest example of the importance of Deleuze to architectural theory is the title of the architectural journal Assemblage; published by M.I.T. press, the journal ran from 1986 to 2000, totalling 41 issues. For a study of the concept of assemblage in relation to urban planning see e.g. Wezemael (2008) and Mills (2014). 13 In an interview, Deleuze points to the challenge of consistency inherent in assemblages, which he defines as “first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of ‘consistency’ or ‘coherence’, and it is prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere? Even among very different things, an intensive continuity can be found” (Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness 179). 14 Deleuze was very interested in islands, as is proven by his essay “Desert Islands” (Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974); however, as the contributors to an Island Studies issue on archipelagos have noted, Deleuze only mentions archipelagos in his essay on Bartleby, calling the archipelago “freedom” and “a world in process”, rather than in stasis (Stratford et al. 121; see also Stevens 2008).

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assemblage “is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 9); connections which, by their very nature, are rhizomic and expand horizontally. The relation or way by which the parts are connected provides strength to the whole of the assemblage. In the humanities Glissant has become a familiar name, while architecture and urban design have at first blush little or nothing to do with literatures and cultures. Throughout his work Glissant attempted to integrate the archipelago as a useful way of thinking about cultures, building on his popular idea of relationality, which he draws directly from Deleuze’s rhizome. However, the physical reality is what inspired the philosopher: from his home island of Martinique, Glissant drew directly on the surrounding geographical and ecological reality in order to formulate complex theoretical concepts such as creolization, opacité and Relation. Architects and urbanists have consciously or unconsciously undertaken a similar path to Glissant’s, but their views instead link back to Deleuze’s idea of assemblage.15

Blueprint for a green archipelago Deleuze’s assemblage theory has proven to be popular among architects and urban theorists, as witnessed in journals such as Assemblage, which ran from 1986 to 2000. Not by coincidence, the concept has recently been discussed in the SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, where various contributors speak of “the archipelago-­like character of architectural 15

Glissant’s poetics, as well as post-­ Glissantean Caribbean theory, have become increasingly influential in a wide range of disciplines. Glissant’s influence on critical theory is well-­documented (see e.g. Drabinski and Parham 2015). It is well-­known, for instance, that Glissant was mainly influenced by philosophers such as Deleuze in formulating his theoretical views on culture as rhizomic (see e.g. Kullberg 2006, Stevens 2008). However, scholars have yet to establish further influences by other theorists on Glissant himself. Readers of Glissant’s work easily get the impression that concepts such as créolisation, opacité and pensée archipélique are entirely Glissant’s inventions, whereas in fact there is a rich genealogy to these concepts; the Martinican’s views on créolisation, for instance, are so close to the Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz’s claim of a “world in creolization” (Hannerz 1987) that it is difficult to determine which of the two intellectuals first used the concept to refer to processes of cultural mixing not only in a local but specifically in a global context. Regardless of the trivial question of who read who, identifying the network of theoretical influences on Glissant can help in deepening our understanding of the underpinnings of his pensée, as it is entangled in many disciplines.

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theory” (Crysler, Cairns and Heynen 15). In the book, Heynen and Wright specify: Recent turns in architectural theory all share a reaction against totalizing analyses […] Architectural theory now recognizes diversity, discontinuity, contingency and inevitable if unpredictable changes over time. Many people seem to celebrate these qualities as inherently liberatory. Topics like gender, race and culture have shifted from oppositional dichotomies to include and embrace a spectrum of differences. Interest in cities and ecologies has further amplified these ideas […]. The present condition is often described as an archipelago or a patchwork, evoking both multiplicity and fragmentation. (Heynen and Wright 55; my emphasis)

In other words, contemporary architects themselves call for a theoretical challenge: to think about new ways of (re-)inventing public space in order to adapt to the “inevitable if unpredictable changes” –including the ecological and other challenges – that come with globalization. Moreover, they go so far as to describe “the present condition” as “archipelagic”, as a healthy antidote to various forms of totalitarian thinking. Decades before the current debates about global warming and the problems that emerge with global cities, one Architecture professor and his disciple already thought about new ways of making whole cities greener, especially those urban historical centres that developed organically but fell prey to a quickly growing “cancer”: urbanization. In 1985, the Dutch “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas, along with the Canadian designer Bruce Mao, published SMLXL, a 1,376-page book described on the back cover as an “architectural novel”. The book includes a short text written by Koolhaas, “imagining nothingness”, which  I believe is the architects’ condensed statement on archipelagic thinking in architecture, or rather, in urban planning. Koolhaas recalls one of his first projects as a student at Cornell University under the supervision of the German architect (and professor at Cornell) Oswald Mathias Ungers: more than a decade earlier, in 1972, he had worked on a Summer project titled Die Stadt in der Stadt: Berlin der Grüne Stadtarchipel (“The City within the City: Berlin the Green Archipelago”). The aim was to rethink Berlin as a “Green Archipelago” with a polycentric urban landscape. The ambitious project, which has largely remained unknown to architects and urban scholars, involved a group of students (of which Koolhaas was a member and Ungers the supervisor) and was originally part of a contest organized to revitalize the city. The project consisted of nothing less than a “rescue plan” for Berlin, a city that had increasingly fallen prey to the standardizing force of urban development planning. In their view the

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figure of the archipelago had the benefit of offering a way of working around the growing urbanization of Berlin which, back in the late 1960s, already jeopardized the city’s cultural heritage. In eleven theses, “The City within the City” defined what a “city-­archipel” should look like.16 Koolhaas recalls that the master plan consisted in “the reinforcement of those parts of the city that deserved it, and the destruction of those parts that did not”. This hypothesis, he says, “contained the blueprint for a theory of the European metropolis; it addressed its central ambiguity: that many of its historic centres float in a larger metropolitan field, that the historic facades of the cities merely mask the pervasive reality of the un-­ city” (Koolhaas 1995: 199). The archipelago, then, works as a counterform to the “un-­city”: it replaces public and historical spaces with meaningless grey urbanizations, thereby undoing the city as the very nerve of public life. The problem of urbanization affected an increasing number of cities in Europe, yet little was being done to stop it. Koolhaas and Ungers’ “rescue plan”, the idea of urban archipelagos, however, did not emerge from a consensual understanding between the architects as to what Berlin’s cityscape should look like, but rather from opposed architectural perceptions which nevertheless had a creative result, baptized the “Green Archipelago”. Their archipelagic thinking was basically a process of assembling different philosophical and psychological views that would give back (part of ) the city’s beauty within its historical and natural environment. Even though the project did not win the contest, the idea of taking the archipelago as a model for rethinking the city can be seen as an early form of archipelagic thinking in urban planning and architecture. While Ungers and Koolhaas were dealing here not with architecture but with urban planning as a way of re-­ordering and re-­organizing architectural “islands” within urban space, it is easy to see how architects can also give “archipelagic” shape to buildings in order to fit into their existing environment. Such fittingness is, according to philosopher Roger Scruton, the ultimate goal of architecture: “buildings must fit to each other and to the urban context; and part must fit to part in the composition of the whole. This demand for fittingness stems from a deep human need. We seek to be at home in the world – to come in from our wandering, and to settle in the place that is ours. Hence we need to match and to harmonize, projecting thereby our common commitment to the peaceful settlement of a common place” (Scruton, 2009: 171). In an environment where the subject has become alienated from the context it inhabits (whether 16

Proof of the project’s innovative value is the recent publication of a critical edition of the manifesto by Hertweck and Marot (2013).

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this occurs through colonialism, urbanization, social degradation, cultural imperialism, or some other impacting force), archipelagic structures have the ability to reharmonize the present (urbanizations) with the past (the historical city), without proceeding to the demolition (as in Le Corbusier’s project in Algiers; see e.g. Çelik 1992) or to the nostalgic restoration of the pre-­urbanized city.17 Contrary to Scruton’s view that every single element needs to fit into the whole, I argue that a specific archipelagic approach to urban design does not necessarily imply that some redundant or dysfunctional parts have to be destroyed. Likewise, in a geographical archipelagic formation, not all islands are deemed to be equally functional or beautiful (a highly subjective matter, for sure). Those parts that do not fit quite well (e.g. a postmodern building within a historical quarter) do not per definition jeopardize the functional value of the whole: the archipelago shows precisely as a workaround in the face of possible threats or obstacles, but also of buildings that are considered to be architectural misfits, or constructions with a disposable or temporary character, filling up what Koolhaas calls “junk space” (Koolhaas 2002). Hence, for Koolhaas and Ungers, urban harmonization consisted in “greenifying” Berlin, in dealing with “the pervasive reality of the un-­ city”, instead of opting for its demolition. The objective of the “Green Archipelago” project was thus to deal creatively with the “sea” (pelagos) of impersonal urbanization, of “throwaway architecture”18 (Scruton 2012: 277), a disposable form of construction that invades cities globally, turning them into one homogeneous “junk space”. More recently, commenting on the Green Archipelago project in his book The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on the broader task of contemporary architecture: “What sort of significant and critical relationship can architecture aspire to in a world that is no longer constituted by the idea and the motivations of the city, but is instead dominated by urbanization?” (Aureli 2). The strength of the “Green Archipelago”, he argues, resides in it being a powerful weapon in 17

Interestingly, Le Corbusier’s Algiers project featured the possibility of racial encounters within green belts in the colonial city: “The colonial planners envisioned the green belts as places where ‘contact and collaboration’ between races would not be prohibited: they were the potential sites for interaction”; with the exception of parks and gardens, however, the cordon sanitaire or urban division between Europeans and the Muslim population would be strictly maintained (Çelik 69). 18 Scruton defines “throwaway architecture” as a way of building “involving vast quantities of energy-­intensive materials, which will be demolished within twenty years. Townscapes built from such architecture resemble landfill sites – scattered heaps of plastic junk which will always look like discarded waste” (Scruton 2012: 277).

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the battle against the “un-­city”’s emergence and growth, a “counterform within and against the sea of urbanization” (45). He gives the archipelago almost military attributes, as it is an efficient weapon, he suggests, with which to counter urbanization as a symptom of capitalism and urban commodification. Foregrounding the idea of the Absolute, for Aureli architecture has above all a political function: it is able to express a form of radical thinking. The archipelago here becomes what Glissant would call a way of diversion (détour), where the domination of an Other, the “un-­city” and the plague of urbanization, is concealed. However, unlike Aureli, the Martinican sees the détour or diversion not in absolute terms, but in more complex and ambiguous terms where power and domination are always entangled with the environment: “the strategy of diversion can therefore lead somewhere when the obstacle for which the detour was made tends to develop in concrete “possibilities” (Glissant, Caribbean discourse 92). As Celia Britton has noted, such a détour implies that “lack and constraint become indistinguishable from freedom and mastery” (Britton 146). Far from being an apolitical figure, the archipelago thus (re)claims a space of political freedom yet in a non-­confrontational and non-­subversive way.

From archipelago to archi-­pelago In order to differentiate conceptually between the architectural and other forms of archipelagos, I would like to coin here the hyphenated term archi-­pelago to refer to this specific kind of urban archipelagic thinking: the archi-­pelago as concretization of a mediating urban form within the city (e.g. the Green Archipelago). The hyphenated form refers, then, to the assemblage, neither as an urban concretization nor a simple adaptation of Glissant’s vocabulary; instead, the hyphen emphasizes the affinity and utility of both concepts; philosophical and material ideas are conjugated not with the simple aim of creating a “city within the city” (each with its internal order and hierarchy), but rather to re-­insert and harmonize natural space both with and within the city. As an adaptive form of architectural thinking, the archi-­pelago thus revalues the idea of architectural beauty and oikophilia as defined by Scruton: The example of architecture is especially vivid, since it is obvious to everyone that the way we build determines the nature of our home and the attitude that we take towards its conservation. But beauty guides us in all the other ways that we humans strive to adapt ourselves to the world and the world to ourselves. It motivates our love of nature and species, our reverence towards the earth and the oceans, and our concern for lakes and waterways. It is at the heart

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of oikophilia, and illustrates the deep distinction between prices in a market and the priceless things of home. […] In caring for the environment we are trying to guarantee the persistence of features like beauty, whose value cannot be priced. (Scruton 2012: 283; my emphasis)

The archi-­pelago’s unity, however, is not to be seen as a transparent whole, but rather an architectural strategy for maintaining the density and ability to distract in exposing a dazzling multiplicity in styles and forms. As Koolhaas puts it, referring to yet another archipelago project, this time for Paris: Each of these islands [of the archipelago] can be developed independently of the others, according to the specific demands of site and program. They can even constitute an anthology of projects from the competition. They will be infinitely flexible in accommodating different architects, different styles, different regimes, different ideologies. They can be sponsored by the state, the city, developers, individuals. They accommodate intensity or boredom, density or sparseness. They will not be homogeneous; during the more than 20-year construction of the city, each island will be a microcosm of a different interval. […] The model of the archipelago ensures that each island’s maximum autonomy ultimately reinforces the coherence of the whole. (Koolhaas 1995: 983)

In such “infinitely flexible” and “accommodating” urban settings, any one component or module (e.g.  buildings, bridges, green areas such as parks, etc.) could thus be added or replaced without affecting the autonomy of any vital area (e.g. a historical area) of the whole. The archi-­pelago is thus particularly apt to creatively accommodate or deal with the more liquid challenges of our times (Bauman 2013): not as a figure which celebrates the disappearance of crisis, but rather one which offers a way to deal with – and ultimately survive – an unresolved crisis. Archipelagic thinking, as exemplified by the “Green Archipelago” project, can function as a freeing modality in creating appropriate conditions for a concrete action plan in so far as it proposes a way of “diversion”, of working around existing obstacles, of dealing with permanent difficulties, yet without proceeding to a total urban and conceptual facelift or tabula rasa. The Green Archipelago project showed that, without simply offering a “patch” to urban failures, archi-­pelagos are able – if well thought-­out – to offer a real solution to situations of crisis. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that, nowadays, the “city within the city” continues to inspire the

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future generation of architects, as much as assemblage theory continues to inspire urban planning.19 So, what is the value and potential of the archi-­pelago as an alternative way of archipelagic thinking, different from other views in the humanities (such as Glissant’s pensée archipélique)? What can we learn from architectural theory and projects such as the “Green Archipelago”, especially with literary studies in mind? First, learning from a material (physical) context shows that spatial concepts are anchored in reality and are never purely metaphorical (or metonymical), whereas the metaphorical archipelago is limited to an immaterial discursive perspective. In other words, it helps us see the potential of archipelagic thinking in extra-­discursive places, contexts and practices. From a theoretical point of view, the case of the Green Archipelago shows us that metaphorical conceptions of the archipelago can be challenged: instead of departing from pre-­existing, static, immovable islands, the archi-­pelago may imply a decision to actively re-­organize existing parts in order to dynamize, “greenify” and embellish the whole; or to multiply the presence of complex architectural languages, contrary to the “monolingualism” of commodified urbanization and junk space. In literary studies, spatial concepts can grow and cross-­fertilize well with other popular concepts (e.g. from narratology) if approached and handled with care. Provided that one theory, such as Glissant’s, is not seen as predominant in defining the Archipelago (with a capital A) as overgrowing a multiplicity of theories, from an eco-­critical, literary and overall cross-­disciplinary viewpoint there is much to benefit from. As a spatial concept, the contextual, material uses of the concept of archipelago in architectural theory and literary studies, which I here rebaptize and hyphenate as archi-­pelago, offer new ways of conceiving of complex configurations which cannot be analysed by means of classical theories. The two-­dimensional praxis of textual analysis gets an extra dimension when the ecological, material context is taken into account: the text is apt to accommodate and connect heterogeneous parts – voices, visual elements genres, topics and styles – without necessarily privileging this or 19

See e.g.  the project proposed at the Institut für Städtebau at Graz University of Technology (Austria), entitled “Archipelago Teheran” (Meuwissen/Kraupp 2014), which consisted in proposing a similar project to the “Green Archipelago” as conceived by the Cornell group, for the city of Tehran (Iran), thus emphasizing the universal applicability in urban planning of the archipelago as a critical concept. For a small-­ scale example see the Liopetri Fishing Project in “From Fragment to Eco-­Island: An Archipelago à la Carte” (Ioannou, Stratis and Papastergiou 2012).

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that particular part. Likewise, ecocriticism, as a praxis, aims to reconnect literature with its environment in the face of globalization. Secondly, while Glissant suggests that the archipelago is apolitical (i.e. it is able to reconcile antagonistic forces or neutralize existing conflicts), for urban scholars (such as Aureli and Cacciari) this is not by definition true for the archi-­pelago: it is situated in the polis as a political space; it does not eschew conflict but partakes of it through its form. Yet it does so in a transformative way. As Massimo Cacciari puts it, “archipelago space, due to its very nature, does not tolerate subordination and hierarchical succession” (19–20). The archi-­pelago is by definition an open, unfinished project, aiming to contain the “sea” of negative forces in order to strive for and maintain a convivial manageable habitat. While Glissant’s view privileges diversion (détour) as a strategy of active resistance to the dominant Other, the political goals are never presented in a transparent way. If Glissant were to design a city (appropriately called, say, “opa-­city”), it would be a dense rhizomatic network of buildings with different functionalities and significations; a city whose heterogeneity challenges its readability to the outsider.20 Architects and urbanists, by contrast, reveal from the outset the parts and their respective functionalities within the urban assemblage. Interestingly, the call for an ecological approach to urban and architectural design has become increasingly relevant. To endeavour to implement a new, greener eco-­architecture has been on architects’ agendas for many decades now; as explained by Colin Porteous (2002), one can track the green architectural quest back to as early as the Modern Movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The definition of “green”, however, as applied to architecture and urban planning is highly ambiguous and has enormous scope: the contention is that if a “green” architectural language or syntax does exist, it is very pluralistic and inclusive. […] At one end issues include fundamental planning strategies, policies and dilemmas such as “green-­field” versus “brownfield” development, suburban versus urban housing, mixed versus zoned development. […] At the purely architectural end, the scope of ‘green’ includes: the size and shape of buildings; their usefulness; their materiality; their embodied and recurring energy-­loads; their embodied and recurring output of pollution; their longevity and vulnerability to disrepair; their recyclability and reusability; and their contribution or disruption to micro-­climate and biodiversity […]. (Porteous 47–8)

20

Glissant never showed much interest in architecture, in spite of his many wanderings through Paris (see e.g. Kullberg 2013).

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What is often an issue is the architect’s personal attitude, when other (official) constraints on green design are absent: Some [architects] perceive green design as worthy but dull, whereas others are opportunistic to the point that outcomes are vulnerable to the criticism of merely paying lip-­service to important global ecological concerns. Designing in an environmentally responsible or sustainable manner also tends to become harder the larger the building and the more urban the context […]. The bottom line is that architects who dare to shift experiential boundaries often also offer potential for conversion to sincere green opportunism. This is harder to criticize, and it has much to offer future generations of architects. The green architectural spectrum is then a relatively wide and overlapping one. (Porteous 48)

In spite of the abstract-­philosophical and literary character of these writings, the archipelago has been integrated in fields where materialism is part of the use of spatial concepts, such as in the visual arts and the curatorial field. One of the theoretically more productive definitions of the archipelago, which insists on the changing nature of our present condition as an apparently chaotic multiplicity, comes from the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, known for his theory on Relational Aesthetics (2002). Bourriaud made the archipelago a central element to his Altermodern exhibition in London’s Tate Gallery in 2009: [The archipelago is] an example of the relationship between the one and the many. It is an abstract entity; its unity proceeds from a decision without which nothing would be signified save a scattering of islands united by no common name. Our civilization, which bears the imprints of a multicultural explosion and the proliferation of cultural strata, resembles a structureless constellation, awaiting transformation into an archipelago. (Bourriaud 2009: 1)21

The archipelago functions as a model for representing the multiplicity of global cultures: Bourriaud, like other curators (e.g. his German colleague Hans Ulrich Obrist [Obrist 2011]), applies the concept to his curatorial practice without downplaying what archipelagic thinking basically stands for: establishing (or enabling) an abstract “relationship between the one and the many”, yet one which unmistakably leads to a new form of unity, out of a chaotic “explosion” and friction between “cultural strata”, by which 21

The exhibition (The Tate Triennial 2009: Altermodern, Tate Gallery, London, 2009) had, according to Bourriaud, its origin in two elements: the writings of W. F. Seebald and the idea of the archipelago. Simplifying things, “altermodernism” for the French curator is a way of going beyond the endless circular discussion of postmodernism.

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he signifies the state of cultural fragmentation which precedes archipelagic formations. Bourriaud thus uses the archipelago in a way which recalls the idea of unpredictability, also present in Glissant’s conception of the creolization of cultures; but, contrary to the Martinican philosopher, he sees a structuring principle at the heart of the process of cultural mixing. The clash of cultures, he suggests, does not lead automatically to a watering down or disappearance of cultural differences. Instead, the different elements agglutinate into a new cultural configuration. Moreover, this transformation is not the result of an existential coup de dés, an uncontrollable arbitrary event (as Glissant would see it), but can be the result of a (rational) decision.

The archipelagic novel: the case of Junot Díaz If the archipelago is useful for (re)thinking urban and architectural, as well as artistic, projects, what can be said about textual settings? Beyond Glissantian and Deleuzian – predominantly discursive – uses of assemblages and archipelagos, can literature and literary studies learn from what I have called the urban archi-­pelago? And what about the “fittingness” of literary texts within different contexts? Building on the earlier-­commented notion of a “transarchipelagic” approach as proposed by Ette and Müller, how can we rethink literatures as archipelagic entities, that is, as literatures that are interconnected in a specific way? How does a text accommodate different styles, genres and visual materials into one “convivial” whole? Is literature, if thought of as an archipelago, equally “infinitely flexible” – to paraphrase Koolhaas – in accommodating different kinds of writers, different styles, different regimes, different ideologies? As stated from the outset, this is not the place to answer all of these questions, yet I would like to illustrate my comparative exploration of archipelagic thinking in literature with a brief look at Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I argue that Díaz rehearses a kind of archipelagic thinking in literature, which in turn forces scholars to rethink their own praxis of literary criticism.22 Junot Díaz is a so-­called “diaspora writer”, born in the Dominican Republic, albeit one with a very different history of displacement, as his transnational autofiction takes root in the early experience of migration to the USA. In approaching Díaz’s work, most critics have focused on aspects such as genre, gender and cultural memory (the conflictive relation between Dominican Republic’s national history 22

In this chapter I will use the abbreviation OW to refer to Junot Díaz’s novel.

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and its diaspora). Díaz’s first novel tells the story of Oscar, described as a Dominican ghetto nerd growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar Wao, the protagonist, does not escape the all-­encompassing curse which has affected Dominicans at home and abroad, and which the narrator mysteriously refers to as “the fukú”. The fukú turns out to be not a personal curse, but one that set foot on Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as soon as Columbus discovered the New World: Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. […] No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not. (OW 15–16)

The spell referred to as “fukú” affects the different characters in Oscar Wao: rather than a fait-­divers in the plot, the spell becomes the final diasporic character of the novel, present in its ghostly form, deeply penetrating the narrative system, what I call the “deep structure” of the text, as it links with the existentialist theme of the novel: the diasporic subject is paradoxically most present in its absence, as a ghost, that is, as an invisible subject in between the real and the imaginary world. Moreover, the novel emphasizes the popular (Dominican and broader Caribbean) belief in the supernatural and tragic destiny as the deeper (unconscious) dynamic which explains the Caribbean’s history of violence and repression. On a superficial level, the novel can be read in the tradition of other writing about the Caribbean diaspora and migration: we learn about the difficulties and obstacles encountered by the protagonist as he grows up in the Dominican ghetto. He perceives that he does not quite fit into the rough life of the ghetto due to his love for books and movies, ranging from science-­fiction to comic books, and more broadly anything pop culture. Oscar eventually succeeds in escaping the ghetto by obtaining a university degree and dedicating himself (mirroring Díaz’s biography) to his passion of writing. The art of writing is also an activity his best friend Yunior engages in, before eventually writing a novel about Oscar’s life. Having been unsuccessful with women since he was at college, Oscar eventually falls in love with Ybón, a Dominican prostitute, and travels to the Dominican Republic to meet up with her. He discovers important details about his family’s past and about himself, but also, tied in with his mother’s obscure past, about the traumatic memory of the trujillato in the Dominican Republic. He learns, among other facts, that his grandfather, Abelard, was tortured by dictator Rafael Trujillo’s regime, and, inspired

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by his pop cult superheroes, he seeks to shed light on the mystery that surrounds his family’s traumatic and silenced past. Yet throughout the novel the main character, Oscar, struggles to gain a grasp of reality. His superhero imaginary, the obvious result of voracious consumption of American popular culture, is further fed by his unrealistic expectations of life, until he eventually dives deeply into the traumatic history of the Caribbean, discovering the raw reality underlying his nerdy fantasy world. Oscar’s imagined reality eventually breaks up into an infinitely complex constellation of fragments and voices. Yet in the novel the two spheres, the imaginary and the real, are not contradictory but are connected in uncanny ways. From the outset of the novel we learn that the Caribbean is first described as science-­fiction, before Oscar discovers its physical reality: “He was a hardcore sci-­fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask: What more sci-­fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” (OW 6)

Wao’s life in the ghetto connects in a certain way with remote places in the Dominican Republic visited by his forefathers, the unlikely victims of Trujillo’s decades-­long tyranny: In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world, a town called Peaksville. The white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the “community” live in straight terror of him, denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims or, more ominously, sends to the corn. (After each atrocity he commits – whether it’s giving a gopher three heads or banishing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops – the horrified people of Peaksville have to say, It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing.) (OW 224)

Santo Domingo under Trujillo thus blends smoothly with the Peaksville he learned about in one of the Twilight Zone episodes he consumed at home. Virtual and real places mingle seamlessly. In an interview, the author explicitly declares that the novel “was supposed to take the shape of an archipelago; it was supposed to be a textual Caribbean […] Take a brief look at Caribbean or Dominican history and you’ll see that the structure of the book is more in keeping with the reality of this history than with its most popular myth: that of unity and continuity” (O’Rourke;

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my emphasis). The structure of Oscar Wao appears to be a random textual construction at first sight, yet the narrator constantly intervenes on the metanarrative level, adding a reflective layer to the story. The intensive use of footnotes is the most visible aspect of that metanarrative layer. It is significant, for instance, that Díaz’s novel in a footnote (OW 92) refers explicitly to Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, one of the Martinican’s key works which engages with defining Antillean cultural identity and which laid the groundwork for his pensée archipélique (archipelagic thinking). From a linguistic perspective, the novel is not simply a showcase for an experimental “Spanglish”, but instead engages in a complex phenomenon described by Domnita Dumitrescu, in her brilliant linguistic analysis of the novel’s heteroglossia, as “code-­fusion”: the blending of Spanish into the predominant language, English (Dumitrescu 422). Instead of the alternation or the going “back-­and-­forth” between both languages, code-­ fusion in Díaz occurs through the fluid blending of the Spanish words, sentences and expressions into English grammar to the point where they are treated as if they were English. This phenomenon has been described as translanguaging (Dumitrescu 423), and consists of moving in a flexible way between languages (instead of radically switching from one to another, which is the case with code-­switching): “Díaz does not limit himself to the use of a sustained alternation between Spanish and English, but rather, through congruent lexicalization, he produces a sort of code-­fusion which is reflective of the heteroglossic practices of postcolonial bi- and multilingual societies, known as translanguaging” (Dumitrescu 398).23 Code-­fusion is different from code-­switching in that, even though there is a main language (English), there is a smooth blending of a second language (Spanish) within the former. Besides code-­fusion – the fusion of languages – I argue that there is also a merging of places in the novel: the blending of different locations, whereby tyrannized Santo Domingo (back then, rebaptized by the dictator “Ciudad Trujillo”) merges into the terrorized Peaksville of Twilight Zone. Yet, as in the case of the archi-­pelago, the writer has to deal with Oscar Wao’s context: the Dominican ghetto of Washington heights amid the broader Anglophone American context, in which the use and transformations of Spanish also present in their own right a “coded language”, that is, a kind of linguistic counterform (much like Koolhaas and Ungers’ Green Archipelago), a form that does not stand out but is blended in the cultural patchwork. In other words, what Dumitrescu 23

“Translanguaging … embraces both creativity; that is, following or flouting norms of language use, as well as criticality; that is, using evidence to question, problematize or express views” (García y Wei, 2004: 27; quoted in Dumitrescu 423).

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describes as the discursive praxis of “translanguaging” can be seen as a form of archipelagic thinking and speaking: the speaker who has recourse to code-­fusion creatively engages in a non-­confrontational conversation with his or her interlocutor. While the dominant language, English, is kept in place, the user of code-­fusion finds a creative way of expressing him-/ herself amid the “sea” of English, the dominant language. The blending of Spanish into English grammar can, I believe, be reformulated as a form of creolization, a process whereby a new language might emerge if that process could be continued and intensified. Caribbean literature is, because of the Caribbean’s historical legacy of creolization, an ideal case via which to discuss the possibilities of studying literatures as archipelagos, that is, as a non-­hierarchical configuration. Ironically, the multilingual Caribbean is – with the exception of Cuban literature – often approached as an invisible island within Latin American literature; or worse, it is often excluded from the map of the Latin American “lettered city”. As I have argued elsewhere (Haesendonck 2014), crossing borders between Caribbean literatures only is already a daunting but necessary task, as it gives rise to new interpretations, as well as contributing to depoliticizing these literatures. I argue that literary archipelagic thinking, at least from a theoretical point of view, would greatly relieve the problem of continued parochialism in the field of literary studies. Chris Bongie is right to remind us that, for us to come to a better understanding of the Caribbean, it must be approached in its “archipelagic totality, as a region that can only be adequately understood through comparative, cross-­cultural analysis, focusing less on its discrete parts than on the way these parts exist in relation with and to one another” (Bongie 89). As in the urban conception of archi-­pelagos, special attention should be paid to those formerly downplayed or ignored “parts”: understudied areas of Caribbean literatures such as the Dutch Caribbean. As Elleke Boehmer and Frances Gouda (2009) argue, there has been an institutional resistance within Dutch academia and society at large to facing key postcolonial questions regarding the Dutch Antilles; while most colonizing countries have been actively debating postcolonial issues, the Netherlands has been late – from a comparative perspective – in joining the debate and looking into the postcolonial mirror. The fact that the Dutch Antilles are overseas dependencies does not seem to be a valid argument, for literatures from France’s D.O.M.’s (Martinique and Guadeloupe) have received a substantial amount of attention (albeit unequally, when literature from French Guyana, for instance, is concerned). However, each Caribbean literature can and should be studied from a transnational and trans-­lingual perspective (Haesendonck 2014), not only according to its predominant

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(European) language and within its respective “national literature” department. Caribbean texts in Antillean kréyol, for instance, could be compared with texts in the creole languages (crioulos) from Lusophone Africa. Or the “trans-­archipelagic” perspective could be taken to connect different geographies: what about comparisons, for instance, between the Caribbean, Cape Verde and San Tomé and Príncipe, and the Malay archipelago? Finally, we should remember that diasporic literature such as Junot Díaz’s fiction belongs simultaneously to different known groups of national and regional literatures: Dominican, American, Hispanic Caribbean, Latin(o) American and (Spanish) American. None of these (groups of ) literatures can claim exclusive property rights over the novel. Instead, the novel is part of various – partially overlapping yet always interconnected – archipelagos of literatures. From such a perspective, a literary work thus belongs to different, overlapping literary spheres; it can never be appropriated by one particular canon or national literature. As a Dominican-­American and Latin (Spanish) American writer, Junot Díaz fits well within all of the above categories, but can hardly be circumscribed by one particular sphere, such as the Dominican literary sphere that, typically, locates Dominican writers within the limited geographical space of the island. Furthermore, for the study of overlapping “contact zones” of literatures, broader Latin American literatures offer an interesting case in point. However, the literary cartography that came forth from centuries of colonialism is one which artificially adopted the division between Spanish and Portuguese: Hispanophone (i.e. Spanish American) and Lusophone literatures emerged from colonial Iberia as “natural” extensions of the seemingly disconnected Spanish and Portuguese empires and their respective continental traditions. Yet indigenous languages and literatures, of oral origins, if they had the luck to survive the genocide of indigenous people on the continent, remained off the map of Latin America. Within “Latin” America, language became a determinant factor in defining “Spanish” America versus its Lusophone counterpart, Brazil. The Latin American intelligentsia, the inhabitants of what Angel Rama symbolically named the “lettered city” (Rama 1984), kept those internal divisions neatly alive until today.24 24

In his much-­acclaimed essay La ciudad letrada (1984), Angel Rama shed light on the intimate link between power and urban, literary and material cartographies in Latin America under Spanish imperial rule. “Order”, both in its discursive and its material sense, has been a key word since the very foundation of the colonial city: “El orden debe quedar estatuido antes de que la ciudad exista, para así impeder todo futuro desorden” [Order must be implemented before the city’s existence, in order to avoid all future

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These divisions, backed by the “lettered city”‘s rigid institutional system, were rarely questioned until the beginning of the 21st century.25 During the last three decades of the 20th century, Latin American literature almost became branded as a self-­explicative category, especially since the success of the so-­called “Boom generation” consisting of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, who became the embodiment of its major trademark: magical realism. Latin American writing nowadays, Mexican writer Jorge Volpi argues, might well be on its way to disappearing as an imaginary coherent body of texts born out of colonial Spanish and Portuguese imperial involvement overseas: a body that, especially since the literary Boom of the seventies and eighties, was imagined as more or less homogeneous and easily made its way to global publishing markets. The work of writers like Junot Díaz, Volpi argues, challenges the classical divisions that have characterized national literatures for over a century and a half. Volpi rehearses a form of pensée archipélique when reflecting on what he provocatively refers to as the (in)existence of Latin American literature today. While he does not use the term archipelago (even though it appears in the title of his essay), Volpi argues that, if Latin American literature does exist nowadays, it “exists only insofar literary, social, political and artistic conferences – never scientific ones – about Latin America are organized” (Volpi 270; emphasis by the author; my translation).26 Does Latin American literature really only exist insofar as it is being given artificial respiration by scholars? Or has Latin American literature become an archipelagic, “portable” structure, an assemblage of loosely connected islands of authors? Clearly, Volpi’s intention is not simply meant to be polemical, but to open up a real debate on the obsolete borders of Spanish American literature, rather than drawing a definitive conclusion. In the end, then, is archipelagic thinking in literary studies just a utopian project? Is it the merely wishful thinking of a few cosmopolitan scholars firmly anchored in Western academia? On a practical level, in any case, a well-­known practical challenge persists: where are the chercheurs disorder] (Rama 8; my translation). Within the walls of the colonial city, another city – the ciudad letrada or “lettered city” – emerged, an immaterial city inhabited by “intellectuals” avant la lettre and writers at the service of the colonial order. 25 In academic conferences, for instance, “Latin America” is still usually referred to as either the Spanish American countries or Brazil, depending on whether the association organizing the event is Hispanophone- or Lusophone-­oriented. 26 “[la literatura latinoamericana] sólo existe en la medida en que se organizan congresos literarios, sociales, políticos y artísticos – nunca científicos – sobre América Latina”. Prior to publishing his essay, the author put this sentence on a list of “New Spanish American Fiction (in 100 Aphorisms, almost Tweets)” (Volpi 2011).

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archipéliques, the researchers skilled in literary archipelagic thinking? What are the resources needed to pick up such a challenge? How should scholars, regardless of their location, engage in archipelagic thinking, that is, in the trans-­lingual and comparative approach to literatures (without recourse to a European intermediary)? Whatever one’s geographic and political place as a scholar, this is not exclusively a problem affecting scholars in complex multilingual literatures and cultures, such as the Caribbean’s. In their introduction to Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago (2004), Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor, focusing on the nations of the Atlantic archipelago, already pointed out the importance of renewing literary criticism, instead of continuing our nationally anchored business as usual. While Schwyzer and Mealor favour a comparative approach to literature, they also point to the major practical problem highlighted here which, in light of the current organization of national language and literature departments, is difficult to overcome. As the editors put it, “We should not underestimate the difficulties that lie in the way of a truly comparative approach to the literatures of the archipelago – there are awkward disciplinary barriers, and sometimes longstanding suspicions to overcome. At present, there are probably not many scholars who find themselves linguistically, methodologically, and – not least – emotionally prepared” (Schwyzer and Mealor 4). In spite of all scepticism, there are many reasons why, nowadays, an archipelagic approach is worth striving for: it accounts for a fluid way of studying literary texts, in tune with today’s globalized world. In short, if literatures can be thought of as literary archipelagos, one should logically search for an appropriate methodology with which to study them (see also Haesendonck 2014). Many important questions remain open for further exploration. How can we approach literatures as complex creolizing entities? And where can we find the researchers needed to execute such a complex task? We face a number of theoretical and practical problems that cannot be underestimated and that deserve to be studied at length.

Towards an archipelagic approach to literatures As a way of closing our brief discussion on the archipelago, I have argued that literary studies can draw insights from disciplines which are by definition engaged with spatial concepts, such as urban studies and architecture. The case of what I have called the hyphenated archi-­pelago helps us to better understand the possibilities and limitations of the concept, beyond Glissantean theory. Furthermore, in the wake of Ette

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and Müller, I believe it is worth elaborating further the idea of literatures as “transarchipelagic” configurations, in other words (1) viewing them as parts connected to a broader whole whereby meaning is created in the interaction between text and context, and (2) approaching literary texts as multi-­layered constructions able to mirror the architectural complexity and features of architectural creations. Literatures can be grouped in archipelagos, which accommodate heterogeneous – at first sight incompatible – writers, styles, works written in different languages and pertaining to different ideologies. As such, archipelagic thinking is not a surrendering to a politics of “anything goes”, but rather a justified attempt to upgrade literary criticism to the 21st century, to the needs of the unstoppable process of a “world in creolization”. “Archipelagic thinking” can realistically be integrated with literary studies, yet further research should shed more light on how a methodology should be implemented. This chapter only hints at what can be undertaken, even though my reflection is situated on the theoretical rather than the practical level. While archipelagic patterns can be found in literary texts, such as in Junot Díaz’s fictional work, so we can detect archipelagic structures when re-­ organizing literatures from a “trans-­archipelagic” (i.e. a trans-­national and trans-­lingual) perspective. This applies, I have argued, to both post-­ colonial and non-­post-­colonial contexts (such as Caribbean and European literatures). If, as architects and writers commonly claim, “we are what we build” and “we are what we write”, in the end the same accounts for literary scholars: in our study of literary texts and in the ways we deal with both our textual and material environment, we either symbolically remain solitary “islands” or we endeavour to become “archipelagos”. Mirroring the parallel searches for creative solutions in architecture and urban planning, archipelagic thinking in the literary field can be conceived as a praxis which is by nature comparative, transnational and trans-­lingual. If successful, “archipelagic thinking” – named as such or otherwise – will become increasingly important across a wide range of disciplines, not only as a way of dealing with the complex challenges of globalization, but also as a creative way of thinking the cultural, literary and other configurations that emerge with them.

Chapter 9

Narrating Postcolonial Lives In this last chapter, I aim to further link the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African literary spaces. A first thing that has become very clear is that the concerns which these novels from both spaces deal with transcend their particular linguistic areas: within the Caribbean, for instance, we have seen how Puerto Rican and Martinican novels bear important similarities. While we have not compared Lusophone African fiction with other African literatures (e.g. Francophone or Anglophone writers), there are, beyond differences, arguably similar features between, say, one writer from Angola and another from Kenia, as a growing bibliography of research in African literatures indicates. Going beyond the linguistic, we have explored fiction from different postcolonial areas, exploring themes such as madness, light and lightness, and modes of writing such as auto-­fiction and science-­fiction. Various themes and aspects return across these works in spite of the known geographical, political and linguistic boundaries and divergences that separate Caribbean and African writers. The divisions continue within each of these cultural spaces. However, it is our responsibility as scholars to trace important trends within these spaces, as they emerge unpredictably, usually there where no one expects them to emerge. Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African writers have in common that both their past and their present have been deeply determined by their colonial experience: the impossibility of laying out the foundations of a convivial space transcends national and linguistic boundaries. Colonialisms and imperialisms, whether driven by Portugal, Spain or the USA, were not only spatially but also temporally situated in different eras; the characters of Junot Díaz’s novel only apparently do not bear any link with the colonial past, yet the novel refers to the very first footstep Columbus put on the island of Hispaniola. The curse that came with European colonialism, referred to as “Fukú”, is still relevant today, something that can be easily rejected by the reader; yet in Oscar’s world, this is not just imagination or a nightmare, but rather a lethal fact: the protagonist will become victim of that very curse that the Caribbean has been unable to exorcize. Mendonça

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and Couto, by contrast, see the remote past as rich in traditions and values, as opposed to Angola and Mozambique’s recent history of continued warfare towards the end of the 20th century. In the case of Mozambique, as lived by Mia Couto, besides war that collective past is also riddled with patriarchal violence, not only towards women but also children, as the case of Mwanito’s traumatic past emphasizes. Yet, even in such harsh circumstances, the possibility of love is never far away, even though it is only expressed momentarily, as a fruit of contingency, such as Marta’s visit, which works as an eye-­opener to Mwanito; or, more controversially, through Mwanito’s unconditional respect towards the father figure. Contrary to existing interpretations of Jesusalém (e.g. Rothwell 2016), I do indeed believe that Mwanito’s respectful behaviour towards Silvestre Vitalicio is not simply a performance of survival, a fake expression of affection, but a truly felt compassion with his progenitor who is at the threshold of psychotic breakdown. Moreover, the works analysed suggest that there is no deep gap between the existential situation of postcolonial and colonial subjects: their lives are, after independence, still riddled with ambiguities and frustrated hopes for a better future. In other words, the postcolonial period is deeply felt as an extension of colonialism, instead of a true rupture. Instead of a breakaway from the colonial “cage”, a flight into freedom, these writings forcefully suggest that there is often even the same amount of frustration and suffering after official “freedom” and independence is proclaimed by the new governments in power. The fictional works studied in the chapters of literary analysis channel and communicate those political and social frustrations. I argue that characters such as Mwanito, Nkuku, Utac, Mariamar, Oscar and Juan Bautista and Laurita share a dystopic horizon, where there is in the end little hope for improvement. At best, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, even though that means going through a long and unpredictable process of convalescence, as in Mwanito’s case. The dystopic horizon in Mia Couto’s novels points to an interrogation: the open ending neither confirms nor rejects the hypothesis that a more convivial future awaits the characters.

Autofictional dialogues A constant preoccupation in most of the writing that we have been analysing is the autobiographical element, or more specifically, that which we have time and again been referring to as autofiction in postcolonial Caribbean and African writing. The question of why Mia

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Couto, Guilherme Mendes da Silva, Eduardo Lalo or José Luis Mendonça engage in autofiction could be explained in different ways, for each author might have his or her personal motives. One of the main reasons for using autofiction as a strategy is to give a more personal inflection to a collective experience: individual experience does not serve as an example or kind of model for a collective experience, but instead it is presented as part of something that exceeds the individual level. In other words, individual memory is seen as part of a collective memory, which does not necessarily coincide with one particular group or “nation”. Whether these authors experienced civil war or the avatars of colonialism, the creative intermingling of autobiography and fiction, they suggest, is an effective strategy for exorcizing past traumas which were both individual and collective, as a way of seeking reconciliation with the past. Yet such an explanation turns out to be insufficient. African and Caribbean literatures, beyond the clichés of magical realism, naturally embrace “autobiographical” and “fictional” elements. In Western countries such hybridity was doubtlessly a discovery, or even some kind of “mystery” to be resolved (e.g. in the eyes of French critics such as Doubrovsky and Lejeune), as well as for a host of other scholars who established a (non-­ finished) taxonomy of autobiographical writing into categories of genre. However, the natural fusion of the biographical with the fictional in the text is at the core of much Caribbean and African fiction, where it is naturally perceived as a mode of writing (instead of a literary genre). Does this imply that every single text produced in these cultural contexts is autofictional? Obviously not, but the presence of autobiographical elements is clearly latent in each single literary text; inversely, Caribbean and African texts that are deemed to be “non-­fictional” can unpredictably merge fictional elements within their textual tissue, to the point where it becomes impossible to differentiate between the factual and the fictional. Arguably, the degree of autobiographical elements varies from one work or author to another. The novel A confissão da leoa is definitely one of Couto’s most autofictional works so far, as the figure of Gustavo, the writer who accompanies the hunter, is very likely inspired by his personal narratives, notebooks or diaries. From a strict autobiographical point of view, Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s De humeuren van meneer Utac leans closest to the literary genre of the autobiographical novel: by telling various “estórias”, little stories and anecdotes of daily events, the author follows more or less closely his experiences as a Cape Verdean return migrant who formerly worked as a captain of a carrier, yet the stories are infused with fictional and supernatural events. It is this infusion of the supernatural that gives common ground to these novels. The characters’ names never

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coincide with the authors’, thus reinforcing the autofictional aspect. The lives narrated in these novels do not lead to happy endings; moreover, they rarely provide any closure to or remedies for the endemic societal problems these characters are dealing with. Mendes da Silva takes a particular position within the Cape Verdean literary tradition, whose leading contemporary figure is doubtlessly Germano Almeida. As a diaspora writer (and contrary to Almeida), Mendes da Silva provides a unique “outsider’s” perspective on the archipelago, yet also a more ambiguous one from an ideological point of view: there is neither a clear rejection of Luso-­tropicalism (and its avatars) nor an acceptance of its legacy and postcolonial avatars. In this sense, his perspective is comparable to some of the oscillating, ambiguous viewpoints that are to be found in the intellectual debate on the place of Cape Verdean culture within globalization, especially since the 1990s. A good example is David Hopffer Almada’s Caboverdianidade e Tropicalismo (Cape Verdeanness and Tropicalism), which suggests a similar strand of “tropicalism” as Mendes da Silva’s. Hopffer Almada sees Cape Verdean culture as neither African nor European, but a unique blend of different cultures which resulted in a new creolized “Caboverdianidade” or Cape Verdeanness. It goes without saying that Hopffer Almada’s perspective is thus close to the Créolistes’ view of identity, whose insistence on the singularity of creoleness (créolité) differentiates the Caribbean from other cultural identities. Although the Verdean does not use the term “creoleness”, the similarities in perspective are clear. What is more confusing is how exactly Hopffer Almada’s ideas fit within a broader Luso-­tropicalist theory, as Claudio Alves Furtado has argued.1 Through the integration of “estórias”, anecdotes and trivial occurrences, or at times very unlikely, even surreal stories (such as the resurrection of Utac and nhu Maninho), Mendes da Silva clearly shows that in the Verdean context public and private remembering are part of one and the same dynamics. History (Historia) and stories (historias) are not to be clearly differentiated, something which is also present in the chronicles of Puerto Rican writer Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, for instance. The advantage of mixing both (thus creating estórias) implies a political and ethical 1

“Pour le cas capverdien, bien qu’il ne soit pas explicitement exploré par Hopffer Almada, ce serait cette ambiguïté d’être et de ne pas être. Si nous nous remettons à la question posée par Oswald Andrade concernant le cas brésilien: Tupi or not Tupi. That’s the question!, facteur important pour la compréhension d’une identité changeante” (Alves Furtado 212) (For the Verdean case, [what is at stake], would be this ambiguity, although not explicitly explored by Hopffer Almada, of to be and not to be. Or, if we refer to Oswald Andrade’s key question regarding the Brazilian case, on how to understand shifting identities: Tupi or not Tupi. That’s the question!).

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statement: not to see the private as a confirmation of the public, but rather as a critical reflection, as well as the coexistence and entanglement of both the official and the intimate spheres. This spontaneity in autofictional novels is in sharp contrast with, for instance, autobiographical writing in the 19th century. As Sylvia Molloy argued in her reference to autobiographical writing (thus not “autofiction”), in Spanish America autobiography since its very beginnings aspired to documentary status. However, the fictional aspect was already latent from its very beginnings, even in autobiographical writing that aimed to achieve the status of “history”: [In Spanish America] autobiography, from its very inception, suffers from generic ambiguity. If its uneasy status as an in-­between product is apparent to the modern-­day reader, it is not forcibly evident to the author himself. The nineteenth-­century male autobiographer writes a hesitant text, somewhere between history and fiction; yet he chooses to classify it unambiguously, for the benefit of his readers and his own sense of self-­worth, within the more respectable limits of the former. In the nineteenth century, autobiography is usually validated as history and, as such, justified for its documentary value. This view of autobiography, as has been noted, ignores the petite histoire, cuts nostalgia short (especially if there is any risk of its being interpreted as a longing for the old regime) and summarily disposes of childhood. In addition, this view affects memory, channeling recollection along precise lines and conditioning mnemonic habits. One does not remember publicly, for history, as one remembers privately. (Molloy 140–1)

The 19th-­century Spanish American autobiographer, Molloy points out, was an unstable and hesitant writer, as he unconsciously engaged in mixing fiction and history, creating a highly ambiguous text, in order to reinforce his self-­worth as well as the authenticity and historical accuracy of his narrative. The fictional aspect of autobiography was strongly disavowed. In other words, from its very beginnings autobiographical writing, as Mollow’s account proves, was an impure genre. As Molloy argues: The neglect or the misunderstanding that has greeted auto-­biographical writing in Spanish America make it, not surprisingly, an ideal field of study. As it is unfettered by strict classification, canonical validation or cliché-­ridden criticism, it is free to reveal its ambiguities, its contradictions, the hybrid nature of its composition. It is then, in that state of flux, that the autobiographical text has the most to say about itself provided, of course, that one is willing to hear it out on its own, uneasy terms. (Molloy 2)

Curiously, Doubrovsky’s conception of autofiction has had little or no impact on Caribbean and African literatures, with the exception of

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one scholarly study in the Francophone literary field (Larrier 2006). In Latin America, however, autofiction has become more popular over the past decades, for instance in Brazil and Argentina; in some cases, autofiction rivals testimonio as a popular genre in Latin America reflecting the “authenticity” of a personal narrative in the face of official history. Doubrovsky claimed that autofiction is per definition a hybrid genre: a creative form of autobiographical writing in the first person. Thus, rather than being a semi-­fictional account, autofiction emphasizes that a narrative in the first person about the “self ” is from the outset fictional. Molloy’s argument that the border between the private and public is fuzzy in Spanish American auto-­representation also accounts for contemporary Lusophone African writing. Arguably, how “autobiographical” or “fictional” a literary work is varies wildly from one author to another; within the work of one author there can be just a few autofictional novels, or none, and interviews with a writer are usually not a reliable way to prove which work is autofiction and which is not. The novel A confissão da leoa is definitely one of Mia Couto’s most autofictional works so far, as the writer who accompanies the hunter is undeniably based on Couto’s personal narratives (arguably notebooks or diaries). The other Lusophone African authors Mendonça, Díaz and Mendes da Silva, unlike Mia Couto, make in their novels no explicit reference to any autobiographical underpinnings. Mendes da Silva even rejects any biographical reference outright (Bos and Van der Wel 2013; Van Haesendonck 2016a). José Luis Mendonça, however, does refer to his lived experience in an interview (Rodrigues 2014), where he makes sporadic comments about his time in the military, and thus acknowledges the autobiographical aspect of his novel. The interview, in a mixture of indirect and direct style, makes clear that Mendonça was clearly inspired by the African bird whose name (“Nkuku” or little bird) he borrowed to name the novel’s character: “O narrador tem nome de guerra, Nkuku, como o pássaro que perde as penas na mata mas ninguém consegue encontrar; pelo contrário, o escritor, apesar de admitir que o narrador tem ‘um terço’ dele, nunca o teve: ‘Como não consegui arranjar nenhum, fiquei sempre o Mendonça’“ (The narrator has a warname, Nkuku, just like the bird that loses its feathers on the ground but nobody is able to find him; the writer, in spite of admitting that the narrator has “a third” of him, never got a warname: “since I was not able to obtain one, I always remained Mendonça”). Furthermore, the writer refers to his “real life” friend Primitivo, who was Mendonça’s comrade when he enrolled in the military, as well as characters such as PAM, Eutanásia and Kachimbamba who are inspired by real people he met in those times. In short, what the

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writer in the interview describes as seemingly insignificant details, or just “one third” of the protagonist, Nkuku, is in fact much more relevant for understanding the autofictional narrative. For instance, just like the narrator, the author decided to burn the books written by the dissident Nito Alves; these were books he owned illegally as they were deemed to criticize Agostinho Neto’s regime. However, the current politicians, Mendonça claims, are not the only ones to be blamed for the current social problems, the people’s broken collective memory and its lack of awareness of Angola’s problems: “Há realmente uma falta de consciência. Nem temos um manual de História feito por angolanos. Pouca gente sabe sequer como decorreu a luta contra a escravatura, a luta de libertação. E, depois, como não se lê no país, ainda pior. As pessoas nascem, vêem um país a crescer e fazem coisas erradas, como as revoltas dos jovens, por falta de divulgação, de informação histórica“ (Rodrigues 2014). (There is really a lack of awareness. We don’t have any History manual written by Angolans. Few people know how the struggle against slavery took place, the struggle for freedom. And then, since nobody reads in our country, it’s even worse. People are born, see a country grow up and they make mistakes, such as the young people’s insurgence, by lack of divulgation of historical information.) If Couto is more worried about tearing down the wall between the rational and emotional realms that make up what we perceive as “reality”, Mendonça’s narrative intends to undertake a similar project, but, unlike Couto, he inscribes his autofictional account more explicitly in a political context. As Mendonça confirms in an interview (Rodrigues 2014), O Reino das Casuarinas is a “proposta de intervenção política” (a proposal for political intervention), even though writing has no political power. Autofiction is purely symbolic in the face of political reality: “os poetas não dão para a política” (poets are not apt for politics). Mendonça’s dream, however, is closer to Primitivo’s than to Nkuku’s: to see a new Africa (not just Angola) emerge from its postcolonial ashes: “Criar um regime africano, que não tem nada a ver com a alta política, nem com os partidos” (To create an African regime which has nothing to do with high politics, neither with the [political] parties). This implies cutting the ties between public administration and political parties (“despartidarizar a administração pública”) (Rodrigues 2014). In other words, like Junot Díaz, who embeds part of his autobiographical self in Yunior and another part of that “I” in Oscar, Mendonça takes the opportunity to diffuse his persona over two characters: Nkuku and Primitivo. Thus, as stated earlier, these postcolonial authors creatively fractionate the biographical self over two (or more) characters, breaking with the tradition that autobiographical

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writing, including in its autofictional variant, is per definition a one-­on-­ one relationship between the writer and the protagonist as his alter ego. However, in the work of all the Lusophone authors analysed here, the supernatural “happens” unpredictably and in various forms which refuse to be described as “magical realism”. Mia Couto, while also dreaming of an African renaissance, is, more than Mendonça, Mendes da Silva and Díaz, concerned with his country’s geopolitical context, while clearly speaking from a local, Mozambican point of view. However, unlike the former authors, Couto deals explicitly with politics outside of his fictional texts. It is significant that Couto readily assumes the position of public intellectual, responding to major international events, such as Obama’s election in the USA, or, previously, his open letters to President Bush and President Zuma, or to the Secretary-­ General of the United Nations. Yet he has been wary of adopting a too general and vague “we”, knowing that there are many Africas within the continent. Or rather, he knows that even Mozambique bears many countries inside: “O meu país tem países diversos dentro, profundamente dividido entre universos culturais e sociais variados. Sou moçambicano, filho de portugueses, vivi o sistema colonial, combati pela Independência, vivi mudanças radicais do socialism ao capitalism, da revolução à Guerra civil” (“My country is diverse countries in one, deeply divided between varied cultural and social universes. I am Mozambican, son of Portuguese, I lived under the colonial system, I fought for Independence, I suffered radical changes from socialism to capitalism, from revolution to Civil War”). Couto clearly adopts the position of the postcolonial, creolized intellectual who speaks from Mozambique to the world: “Os moçambicanos conhecem o dor de tudo perder”, he wrote to the UN’s Secretary-­General, “Porém, mais do que a dor, nós conhecemos o doce conforto da solidariedade dos outros. De todos os continentes nos chegou o apoio, o pão, a água, o medicamento, os materiais para tudo recomeçarmos. Com esse sinais de afecto fizemos sempre do sofrimento uma força para refazermos a esperança” (PT 101) (Mozambicans know the pain of losing everything. But more than pain, we know the sweet comfort of the solidarity of others. From all the continents came the support, the bread, the water, the medicine, the materials for everything to start over. With these signs of affection we have always made suffering a force for us to restore hope). Like Mendonça, and unlike Couto’s novels, Mendes da Silva’s autofictional account of colonial Cape Verde does not skew politics. Likewise, Junot Díaz digs deep into Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and broader Caribbean politics. Contrary to Couto

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and Mendonça, the Verdean and Dominican writer refers specifically to dictatorships (Salazar’s and Trujillo’s), which left their traumatic imprint – in different ways – on the personal and collective levels. In addition, contrary to most autobiographical and autofictional accounts, Díaz and Mendes da Silva fashion third-­person narrators. While Mendes da Silva’s novel is situated in colonial Cape Verde (1960s), still fully part of the Portuguese overseas empire, the narrator is clearly situated in the postcolonial period; his own political interests become salient through explicit references to figures such as Salazar and his government in Cape Verde, as well as Amílcar Cabral. Yet the focus on Utac suggests that the protagonist’s mood swings are a reflection of the collective Verdean tropicalist condition, which compared to other, “darker” forms of colonialism can be seen as both a blessing and a curse: a blessing, for de facto promoting a strand of multiculturalism, racial miscegenation and cultural diversity avant la lettre, contributing to the richness of Cape Verdean cultural traditions; yet also a curse, for justifying and continuing the perennial colonial project, its alienations and violence throughout continental Africa. Inequality and injustice indeed caused strife within the Portuguese empire. Suffice it to remember that Verdeans were given more responsibilities in the colonial hierarchy, for they were labelled more “European” than the people from the other colonies, such as Angola and Mozambique. The contemporary “light colonial” backdrop of Puerto Rican fiction is, up to a certain point, comparable with the ambiguous conditions of Luso-­tropicalism under Salazar: in both cases, the argument of a more “bearable”, “human” form of colonial bond is used to justify and continue the perennial colonial project. The repression or violence of colonialism, epitomized in Conrad’s well-­known dystopic image of the “heart of darkness”, is apparently absent from both Luso-­tropicalism and light colonialism; instead, both ideological configurations fit well with contemporary progressive ideas and the values of modernity and liberalism; and that of Luso-­tropicalism matches the idea of colonial conviviality in a Greater Portuguese Empire (“Portugal não é um país pequeno”, as Salazar was eager to adopt as slogan, brandished during the 1934 Colonial Exhibition in Porto [Marroni 2013; Sanches 2006]). Luso-­tropicalism was indeed the very “glue” of the Império ultramarino: it aimed to implement a mode of living together for the colonies as one modern and united empire which had overcome the racial and social tensions of the past; a convivial empire, indeed, which had come to age, accepting its métissage and place within the world’s cultural complexity, a place where multiculturalism and

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multiracialism were explicitly embraced, even though at the service of the metropolis. As Claudia Castelo points out: In its official discourse, Portugal was constituted by a multiracial community, composed by geographically distant territorial parts, inhabited by populations of various ethnic origins, united by the same sentiment and culture. As shown by Freyre’s supposedly unsuspected studies, power as exercised in the Portuguese “overseas provinces” was not of a colonial nature like in territories under the rule of other countries. (Castelo 2015)

In short, Freyre was the right answer the Portuguese regime needed in order to continue and justify its colonial project, which had come under fire from international criticism. Significantly, the very expression “Portuguese Colonial Empire” was banned in the last decades of Portuguese colonialism because of its negative connotations in the new international context, whereby international pressure grew for Portugal to dissolve its empire. Even the term “colonies” was replaced by the term “overseas provinces”, mirrored by the Francophone Départements d’Outre Mer. While assimilation had always been part of French colonialism, whether in Algeria or the Caribbean, the term had been largely absent from the official vocabulary in the Império ultramarino português. Yet the Salazar regime thus decided to shift the predominant tone of its colonialist politics, increasingly moving towards assimilation like the French. In the mid-1930s Salazar recognized that mestiçagem or racial miscegenation had become (unpredictably) part of the colonies, something his regime had in fact kept at bay in previous decades. The 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels is a good example of how Luso-­tropicalism had become ingrained in the colonial system (Castelo 2015). Yet the regime never showed any explicit interest in the creoles and in processes of mixing itself that had historically been happening in various places of the Império, such as the Cape Verdean archipelago. In the contemporary Lusophone world, however, racial tensions have all but disappeared, even though the contemporary situation is, due to intensified globalization, quite different from in colonial times. Mia Couto does not mention Luso-­tropicalism, yet he denounces any attempt to essentialize African identities: “alguns se apressam a encontrar uma essência para aquilo que chamam de ‘africanidade’. Na aparência, eles estão ocupados em encontrar uma raiz para o orgulho de serem africanos. Mas afinal, eles se assemelham à ideologia colonial. África não pode ser reduzida a uma entidade simples, fácil de entender e de caber nos compêndios de africanistas. O nosso continente é o resultado de

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diversidades e de mestiçagens” (PT 60) (Some hasten to find an essence for what they call “Africanness”. In appearance, they are busy searching for a root for the pride of being African. But after all, they mirror colonial ideology. Africa cannot be reduced to a simple entity, easy to understand and fit in the compendia of Africanists. Our continent is the result of diversity and miscegenation). It was precisely the latter aspect –diversity and mestiçagem (métissage) – that was emphasized by the Salazar regime in the wake of its interpretation, adaptation (to fit the colonial agenda) and implementation of Gilberto Freyre’s theoretical ideas. Couto’s warning against essentializing Africa’s mixed, “mestiço” identities reminds one of the Guadeloupan author Maryse Condé’s critique of the créolistes (Condé and Cottenet-­Hage 1995), in whose manifesto she saw a danger of turning creolité into a polarizing ideology under the false pretext of promoting a mixed cultural identity to the world. A similar cultural complexity is present in Lusophone African cultures, yet, as in the Caribbean, there is an equal danger of essentializing the complex, hybrid and creolizing identities that are present on the continent. Yet in how far, one might ask, are Couto’s own views exempt from the avatars of Luso-­tropicalism? When it comes to interpreting the supernatural phenomena in the novels discussed, we should proceed with similar caution. Instead of “magical realism” (and despite some of the obvious similarities), the authors discussed integrate the supernatural as natural components of their narratives. It is seen as fully part of the “traditional field”, as well as of “modernity”, a Western dichotomy which does not make much sense when speaking of African cultures.

The supernatural: beyond magical realism The infusion of supernatural elements in Mia Couto’s work is, unlike in any of the other authors, to be seen in relation to what lies beyond life and death, what David Huddart refers to as the “opaqueness” of animism (Huddart 125). Couto’s conception of his profession as a biologist is not diametrically opposed to his office as a writer; rather, writing for him is an activity analogous to biology, as it is articulated on an alternative method of carrying out scientific work. In the author’s own words, it is a search for “a familiarity with other living creatures that have a different logic and language from ours. I want to become part of their universe and to recover a lost proximity. Mozambicans have a different notion of the borders between what is human and not human – what is alive and not alive” (Jin 2013). Couto believes human beings in a globalized world,

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especially – yet not only – in the West, have become increasingly enslaved by reason and by what is perceived as “reality”. Couto’s “obsession” with animism and beliefs in the supernatural, often misinterpreted by outsiders as African “primitivism”, thus becomes clear when seen from the viewpoint of the writer’s emphasis on the intimate, poetic sphere usually ignored in the political arena: the writer fulfils the role of being a highly sensitive barometer in order to offer an alternative world view to the “truths” and “facts” that circulate in the media and on all sides of the political spectrum. However, he does not call for any form of anarchy, but a critical perception of anything that is being presented to the masses as an unquestionable Verdade (Truth). Particularly striking is the recurrent motif of madness in fictional texts from both sides of the Atlantic, in, however, different ways from those understood in Western narratives. Neither from an “African” nor a “Caribbean” perspective, we have repeatedly said, is there a clear distinction between madness and the supernatural, which from a “Western” perspective are two clearly distinct spheres: the supernatural belongs to the realm of the fantastic, the metaphysical, the religious, the surreal or the mystical, while madness is usually defined in psychological and clinical terms. Due to the similar or analogous acceptance of the supernatural in the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African spheres, I argue, even “postmodern” novels from both cultural contexts express similar, transatlantic forms of madness which are linked to their common interpretation of supernatural phenomena as culturally rooted in African beliefs. Beyond the well-­ known idea that santeria and candomblé are syncretic forms of religious expressions in the Caribbean and Brazil, there are less explicit expressions, not necessarily related to religion, which prove that the supernatural is fully part of daily reality on both sides of Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”. In both Caribbean and African contexts, the postcolonial subject does experiences madness neither as a simple disorder nor as some kind of “magic” event, but as a border condition which often entails unexpected benefits for the characters, in the sense that, paradoxically, it makes their lives more bearable in difficult environments or situations that are experienced as unbearable. I am aware that such a view goes against the principal ways in which madness (or insanity) has been studied in literature and culture, especially in Western academia, where the term “madness” (and the more common term “disorder”) has almost automatically been attributed the connotation of psychic illness. Madness is especially tangential in autofictional texts, usually complicating the reliability of the narrator: the narrative voice is one whose account cannot be taken for granted, both when we are dealing with a first-­person and a third-­person

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narration: is the narrator himself up to a certain point insane? How does his/her insanity affect the story he/she seeks to tell? While the topic of madness can be approached from many perspectives, I believe that both interpretations given in the foregoing chapters – madness as “abnormal”, as a (Western) defined psychic disorder versus madness as “normal”, as part of a (local/regional African and Caribbean) supernatural dimension – do not mutually exclude each other: indeed they correspond to two culturally different world views which from a Western perspective are seen as incompatible, yet are perfectly complementary from both a Caribbean and an African viewpoint. The temptation for scholars, I have repeatedly said in this book, is to mistakenly package the latter view of madness (whereby Mariamar “effectively” turns into a lioness in the reader’s mind) as “magical realist”, further watering down the term by labelling as such any text which mixes (or appears to mix) fictional and factual elements. It goes without saying that Utac’s madness, which is not explicitly related to one particular traumatic experience, is very different from Mariamar’s or Nkuku’s continued suffering. In all cases, however, there is no explicit presentation or clue (given either by the narrator or by a character) that insanity is present at every corner: it is the metaphorical elephant in the room the reader recognizes, yet none of the fictional works refers explicitly to the protagonist’s insanity. Even in non-­autofictional storylines which are presented as linear, such as in Aponte’s Vampiresas or Steven-­Arce’s Soulsaver, the story itself has potentially been produced by the insanity of the narrative instance. Likewise, Padrón’s storyline in !Vampiros en La Habana! is arguably written under the sign of what a “rational” mind in the Cartesian tradition would qualify as its diametric opposite (i.e. as sheer madness): Pepito’s quest to save Vampisol from the corporate elite of Vampires does not link to any logical plot; yet the multiple political references to Cuba’s past (Batista) suggests that the animated feature can be read not merely as the creative evocation of a fantasy world contained in a “light” fictional product, but as a text with a deeply political message. Moreover, the immobility of many characters seems to further degrade their condition and dissipate any hope for improvement: Mwanito is not just stuck, but rather imprisoned in Jesusalém. Mariamar’s condition is quite similar in Kulumani. Nkuku’s wanderings through Luanda do not exactly associate with the freedom to go wherever he wants to, but rather the opposite, in spite of his nightly wanderings as an (imagined) angel. His condition of being literally mutilated, due to his amputated leg, continues on the social level as he seems to be cut off from the rest of his family; Nkuku’s “social life” is limited to the Centro de Instrução Revolucionária

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(CIR) Povo em Armas. Aside from his short-­lived relationship with Anne in Eastern Berlim – an episode which is purely fictional according to the author (Lança 2014) – his (imaginary) conversations with Stravinski (“revelações oníricas do gato Stravinski” [Oniric revelations of the cat Stravinsky]) occupy a good part of his time, besides covering a great part of the novel’s final pages (254–94). The same goes for Stevens-­Arce’s Soulsaver, albeit in a very different setting. The feeling of insularity and isolation does not come so much from the geographical environment of the island where the “action” – or rather inaction – takes place; the sterile movements made by Juan Bautista Lorca through the San Juan metroplex have to do with the all-­encompassing voice that paralyses the inhabitants: wherever he goes, no one can escape the Shepherdess’s omnipresence, making herself heard to the most hidden soul in the Puerto Rican panopticon. Soulsaver’s universe is one where death is provisional, because salvation is always only one footstep away, yet the end of the world is also near. Like Mwanito in Jesusalém, Juan Bautista is a fairly empathetic character whose coming of age is of key importance to the narrative: as with Mwanito’s questioning of the father, Juan begins to question his unconditional loyalty, not to a biological father but to the status quo, and the religious dictatorship he finds himself living under. This claustrophobic atmosphere is reproduced in Eduardo Lalo’s fictional and non-­fictional work, where the non-­place that the narrator moves through is per definition sterile. Lalo’s settings are, however, not as Orwellian as Stevens-­Arce’s, for, as in Jesusalém, eventually there appears to be more space for significant change in the future than Soulsaver’s apocalyptic musings.

Light and darkness The dialectics of light and darkness accompany the protagonists’ madness and experience of (or entrance into) the supernatural. In most of the books commented upon, but especially in Mia Couto’s work, light and darkness play an important role in defining the precarious habitat of the characters, as well in reinforcing their existential and mental conditions. It is thus a theme that deserves more attention, arguably its own study, in further research. While the temporal (as well as the geographical) specifications are scarce or non-­existent in Couto’s novels, the action in Jesusalém and A confissão da leoa takes place mostly at night; the novels evoke an atmosphere of darkness often mixed with melancholia. Nkuku’s nightly wanderings in O Reino das Casuarinas echo Mariamar’s encounters with the lions: when darkness arrives, the clearly delineated identities that

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one could observe during daylight become fuzzy and confused, lifting the characters temporarily out of their bodily and contextual enclosures (Nkuku’s mutilated body; Mariamar’s imprisonment in her parental house); and, it goes without saying, it is par excellence the realm where the “supernatural” becomes possible. The obscure setting in the case of Mariamar and Baleiro evolves into a dream-­like state, after an initial phase of doubt and insecurity, whereby the night creates a kind of smokescreen and immerses the characters in a fog of indecision as to what action to take. Likewise, in the obscurity of Jesusalém, Mwanito patiently waits for some light, guided by his own writing. As a “tuner of silences”, Mwanito reflects: “Somos criaturas diurnas, mas são as noites que medem o nosso lugar. E as noites só cabem bem na nossa casa de infância” (J 235) (We are daytime creatures, but it’s the nights that give us the measure of our place. And nights only really fit comfortably in our childhood home.). Likewise, in Mendonça’s novel, Nkuku also finds relief in literature and writing, but the emphasis is on the various readings ranging from Angolan poet David Mestre to Romanian author Virghil Gheorghiu. In one of his final dreams, Mwanito dreams of an apocalyptic event, very similar to Utac’s (dreamt or imagined?) experience of a miracle in Mendes da Silva’s novel. Jesusalém is being submersed because of torrential rains, recalling one of the seven plagues of the Old Testament: [U]ma certa noite sonhei como se nunca o tivesse feito antes. Porque tombei num abismo profundo e fui por aguas e dilúvios. Sonhei que Jesusalém ficava submersa. Primeiro, choveu sobre a areia. Depois sobre as árvores. Depois choveu sobre a própria chuva. O acampanento se converteu em leito de rio e nem os continentes chegavam para se deitar tanta água. (J 235) (One night I had a dream that I’d never had before. For I fell into a deep abyss and was carried away by waters and floods. I dreamed that Jezoosalém was submerged. First, it rained on the sand. Then on the trees. Later, it rained on the rain itself. The camp was transformed into a riverbed, and not even continents were enough to absorb so much water.)

The dream of the “dilúvio” nonetheless has a precedent in “real” life with Marta, the Portuguese woman who comes to be a figure of salvation to Mwanito. After her arrival in Mozambique, Marta, searching for her lost love Marcelo, undergoes a “real” storm, which foreshadows Mwanito’s dream of Jesusalém becoming inundated, making place for a new life: Pensava que sabia o que era chover. Naquele momento, porém, eu revia os verbos e receava que, em lugar de viatura, deveria ter alugado um barco. Depois de a chuva terminar, porém, é que sucedeu a inundação: um dilúvio

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de luz. Intensa, total, capaz de cegar. E me surgiram quase indistintas: a àgua e a luz. Ambas em excesso, ambas confirmando a minha infinita pequenez. Como se houvesse milhares de sóis, incontáveis fontes de luz dentro e fora de mim. Eis o meu lado solar, nunca antes revelado. Todas as cores descoloriram, todo o espetro se tornou num lençol de brancura. (J 180) (I thought I knew what it was to rain. But at that moment, I had to reassess the meaning of the verb, and began to fear that I should have hired a boat instead of a motor vehicle. Once the rain had stopped, however, the flood followed: a deluge of light. Intense, all powerful, capable of inducing blindness. Water and light: both billowed up before me indistinctly. Both were boundless, both confirmed my infinitesimal smallness. As if there were thousands of suns, endless sources of light both within and outside of me. Here was my solar side that had never been revealed before. All the colours lost their hues, the entire chromatic spectrum was transformed into a sheet of whiteness.)

The torrential rains inundating the land, followed by a “deluge of light”, confirm the complementarity of light and water in Couto’s poetics.2 While the sun is rarely present, the abundance of light invading Marta’s body momentarily breaks the melancholic state in which she finds herself trapped. Marta reflects: “O Tejo transbordou em solos tropicais e em alguma margem próxima o meu amado me espera“ (J 180) (The Tagus has burst its banks in tropical soil and my beloved awaits me on some nearby shore). However, besides the idea of connection between Marta’s homeland and the land of her lost love, I believe the image of the Tagus breaking its banks and flooding the land can be read in multiple ways; going beyond the poetical, a less obvious interpretation would consist in rehearsing a political reading. From a more polemic and political perspective, poetic passages such as this one also reveal a kind of Luso-­tropicalism which undeniably ties Mozambique back into the Portuguese lost “homeland”: the sentence “O Tejo transbordou em solos tropicais” (“The Tagus has burst its banks in tropical soil”) is complemented by the reconfirmation of unconditional love: “em alguma margem próxima o meu amado me espera” (J 180) (my beloved awaits me on some nearby shore). Marcelo’s image recalls the idea of perfect harmonization of a “Greater Portuguese Union” of imperial times. On an unconscious level, then, Marta’s nostalgic longing could be read as the expression of a desire to reunify with the ambiguous colonial reality of a Luso-­tropical empire. Indeed, we further learn that Marcelo, who is being glorified by Marta, was not being faithful to her during his travels in Mozambique, to the point that he might have fathered children. This becomes clear through conversations between Marta and 2



For a study of the role of water in Couto’s work, see Rothwell (2004), Ch. 5.

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Noci, who lives in Jesusalém as the concubine of Mwanito’s uncle Tío Aproximado. Significantly, Marta receives strict instructions not to interfere with the “mad” people living in Jesusalém (J 178). However, the text does not point to any definitive answers, in typical Couto style: the possible interpretations multiply, rather than diminish. In any case, I argue that Couto’s work, like Mendes da Silva and Mendonça’s, is not exempt from Luso-­tropicalist avatars. A political reading obviously does not imply that Couto is nostalgic about a Lusophone empire. However, it could indicate that the writer, unconsciously or consciously, offers a Luso-­tropical portrayal of Portuguese characters. In a different yet in my view analogous context, Rothwell describes this spectre of what he calls the “lusotropical father”. Discussing Almeida’s O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno, he defines him as follows: The lusotropical father gives children to other nations, and is felt as an absence in the land of his birth. If he returns to Portugal, it is a Portugal he no longer knows, and that has celebrated him as an absence. He becomes part of a spectral and bogus justification, whose aim is to conceal an accelerating decadence. (Rothwell 2007: 96)

Likewise, in Jesusalém Marcelo’s role is twofold: he is the absent husband, but also the absent father whose children might in the future be asking similar questions about him, much like the protagonist of Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel As mulheres do meu pai (My Father’s Wives) (2012), who undertakes a long trip through the African continent in search of traces of her recently deceased father, who leaves behind seven widows and eighteen children. The influences, or what I call here “avatars” of Luso-­tropicalism in the contemporary Lusophone literary field, have not yet been thoroughly explored. As creole writers in the sense of being of Portuguese offspring, white African authors such as Mia Couto, José Eduardo Agualusa and Pepetela (who I like to describe as “creole” writers because of the many levels of cultural and literary mixing in their novels) weave into their fiction, I believe, the problem of contemporary Luso-­ tropicalism as an ambiguous phenomenon, and as both a blessing and a curse: one which on the one hand fosters a racial and cultural conviviality with the former metropolis, reinforced by the official cultural politics known as lusofonía, while on the other condemning its continuation of certain cultural prejudices towards the African postcolonial members of what is perceived as a kind of grande família lusófona. We are also reminded here of the analogous ambiguity that we observe in Puerto Rican fiction, for instance in the work of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá: in Puerto Rico’s “light colonial” space, there is a constant reminder

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that there is such a thing as a great Puerto Rican nation, a gran familia puertorriqueña, which celebrates her cultural “autonomy” through multiple manifestations of nacionalismo cultural, while on the other hand the island continues its perennial colonial ties with a greater USA to which it does not fully belong, either on a political or on a cultural level. However, from a very different, gender-­based and queer perspective, the sun is also a masculine symbol par excellence, while the moon counts as bi-­sexual (Monaghan xix–­xxiii). Marta’s transformation (which can be read as a kind of “africanization”) is also seen as the discovery of “my solar side, never revealed before”. While Mwanito sees Marta as a substitute figure for Dordalma, his lost mother, Marta’s inner experience of “thousands of suns” is proof of her interiorization of Marcelo. The narrative suggests that Marta’s sexuality is a frustrated, undisclosed one. Becoming “Africanized”, she says, would enable her to “reconquer Marcelo”: “Para mim, África não era um continente. Era o medo da minha própria sensualidade. Uma coisa parecia certa: se queria reconquistar Marcelo, precisava de deixar África emergir dentro de mim. Precisava de fazer nascer, em mim, a minha nudez Africana” (J 184) (For me, Africa was not a continent. It was the fear of my own sensuality. One thing seemed certain: if I wanted to win back Marcelo, I needed to let Africa emerge inside me. I needed to give birth within me to my African nudity). More enigmatically, she adds: “Sem o saber, estar-­me-­ei convertendo na mulher Africana por quem Marcelo se deixou encantar?” (J 184) (Without knowing it, will I become the African woman by whom Marcelo became enchanted?). While Baleiro in A Confissão da leoa becomes imbued by the moon, a bisexual symbol, transforming him into a “felino inquieto” (disquiet feline), Marta in Jesusalém undergoes the opposite influence as she senses how “her solar side”, consisting of an “infinite number of light sources”, progressively takes over her sensuality. This ambiguity continues on the semiotic level in the texts, through the manifest indistinctiveness between what is “real” and what is “unreal”, between what is authentic and what is mere spectacle. The darkness of the character’s perspectives is different from the obscurity of the night: while the former is defined in negative terms, the night is the realm where the improbable becomes possible. The night is where fixed categories, places and identities dissolve: they become liquid, unstable notions, open to a multiplicity of meanings. As Jacques Fontanille points out in his Sémiotique du visible (Semiotics of the Visible), the dream state can be seen as an “authentic truth”, from the inside of a particular world (which he refers to as “simulacra”), and also as unreal, where there is a break between the referential world and the “unreal”, dreamlike world. Fontanille thus

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summarizes the chain of “obscure states” as follows: “Indistinction > Uncertainty > Doubt > Belief > (Dream [songe])” (Fontanille 184). Dreams and hallucinations, but also meditations, share this cumulative syntagm: Mwanito, Mariamar and Baleiro start by “not being able to see” (indistinction) and continue by “not having to be” (uncertainty) regarding their condition, but, after a moment of doubt, they end up believing what they were initially not able to see. For instance, Mwanito is unconscious of his overall condition of being shut off from the past and the truth in Jesusalém, a blindness he shares with his brother Ntunzi; subsequently, the brothers start to doubt the actual truth that has been presented to them. Contrary to his brother’s oscillation between evasive and violent behaviour (either by escaping Jesusalém or committing parricide), however, Mwanito starts to see an alternative way out of the obscurity of Jesusalém: while on the one hand he lives under the constant shadow of the father, initially (i.e. until his arrival at Jesusalém) he also lives in an unreal state, in a state of denial of the reality that surrounds him. From then on the act of writing for Mwanito comes to stand for an act of freedom and hope. Like Nkuku in O Reino das Casuarinas, Mwanito survives through his writing, even though the power of literature in both novels is only revealed towards the end of the text. Couto’s use of obscurity and darkness, particularly in Jesusalém, resembles its presence in the novel Eloge de l’ombre by the Japanese author Tanizaki, as analysed by Fontanille: “Quand le paraître est suspend par l’effet de l’obscurité, l’être ne peut se manifester qu’indirectement sous la forme de la ‘résonance’. Dès lors, l’être est connu comme n’appartenant plus au champ de présence, comme un ‘quelque chose’ qui existe au-­delà des horizons du champ” (Fontanille 178) (When appearance is suspended by the effect of darkness, being can only manifest itself indirectly in the form of “resonance”. From then on, being is known as no longer belonging to the field of presence, as a “something” that exists beyond the horizons of the field). As a “tuner of silences”, Mwanito has learned the hard way what it means to be merely “resonance”, an echo reflecting the noises that surround him. Throughout the novel, Mwanito becomes a human device that “resonates” with the creatures that surround him: he merely echoes or “re-­flects” the paternalist voices of Silvestre, Zacaria Kalash and Tío Aproximado, without really participating in them. Instead of tuning, fighting or “bending” their paternalist voices, he decides to focus on tuning the silences and voids that bind the characters, as the first step in the healing of their collective trauma, which – the text suggests – is related to their experience of war. As Grant Hamilton has said, “Couto’s chaosmological understanding of silence allows for a particular account of

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language that can begin the task of articulating the absence that drives the experience of trauma” (Hamilton 173). Hamilton’s appropriate use of the term “chaosmological” resonates in turn with Glissant’s and Benítez Rojo’s explorations of chaos (through chaos theory) as an alternative gateway to cultural knowledge.

Cultural disorder as hedge Whereas Mia Couto points to the limits of the natural sciences to explain African space, including African cultures, Caribbean writers such as Benítez Rojo and Glissant see an opportunity in linking the humanities to the exact sciences. As Ottmar Ette (2007) explains, underlying Caribbean theory of the past few decades, especially its interest in chaos as a concept, is an honest belief that progress and self-­reflection within the natural sciences have led to a more dynamic view of cultural interaction, one that can be appropriately used to describe what Ette, in the wake of Benítez Rojo, calls the Caribbean’s “Fractal Dynamics” (Ette 145), a “region of movement” (132) that “allows discontinuous relations of time, space and movement”: This space stores movements that can no longer be solely explained by traditional notions of time and space, but that also function in the sense of fractal patterns and networks that are broken up in a quantum-­geometric fashion […] As António Benítez-­Rojo suggests, important is not so much the chaotic structure of the Caribbean, as the dynamic and living oscillation between chaos and cosmos. (Ette 2007 133)

It is good not to take Benítez Rojo and Glissant’s “fractal” views too literally, for their de-­centralized, rhizomatic (indeed Deleuzian) poetics is mainly a metaphorical way of thinking about the Caribbean. Nonetheless, I believe their view of the Caribbean as a fractal thus connects well with Chabal and Daloz’s (1999) positive reformulation of Africa as a “chaotic” continent with “different rationalities and causalities” (155), one which is profoundly different from Western societies and therefore appears as disorder if judged by Western criteria and paradigms which define Modernity in an exclusive way: To speak of disorder is not, of course, to speak of irrationality. It is merely to make explicit the observation that political action operates rationally, but largely in the realm of the informal, uncodified and unpoliced – that is, in

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a world that is not ordered in the sense in which we usually take our own polities in the West to be. (Chabal and Daloz xix)

In such an alternative “chaosmologic” order – to use Huddart’s term – the supernatural is directly linked to the uncertainty and unpredictability that are usually seen in a negative light. Yet from a Caribbean and African perspective, these notions are, as we have said in previous chapters (6 and 7), associated with the processes of creolization as creative forces within postcolonial societies: Disorder also incorporates within it the notion of uncertainty, a concept with which economists are familiar. Once more, uncertainty is both a cost and an opportunity, against which there is a premium. In a polity of disorder, the ability to hedge uncertainty is a valuable resource – hence, the perennial significance which witchcraft retains as an almighty hedge in Africa. (Chabal and Daloz xix–­xx)

Thus Africa’s politics of disorder has its own logic, beyond the common Western view that it is riddled with (real) problems such as various forms of violence or corruption. While the interpretation of witchcraft as “backwardedness” prevails in Western countries, there is in Africa (arguably more than in the Caribbean) a suspicion of embracing foreign concepts of “order” and “development” as they are usually understood in the West. While the former is usually defined in terms of transparency, disorder is also close to Glissant’s notion of opacité (which can be translated as either “opaqueness” or “opacity”), which, in turn, matches the dialectics of lightness and darkness that we have described above. The importance given to opaqueness/opacity is also an inversion of the hard (Western) binarism of lightness as positivity versus darkness as negativity. In science (optics), opacity is the measure of impenetrability (by forms of radiation such as electromagnetic rays), especially visible light, while opaqueness is the characteristic (of a material) of being impenetrable by light, neither transparent nor translucent. While Caribbean novels are often being described as celebrations of opaqueness/opacity – because of their semantic multi-­layeredness as well as their complex structure and language – there is indeed something “impenetrable” about postcolonial writing, a feature which applies to both Caribbean and Lusophone writers. The opacity of Mia Couto’s work, for instance, is different from the Caribbean concept of opacité (opaqueness). While Glissant defines the “right to opacity” as the “right not to be understood”, adding that “If we look at the process of ‘understanding’ beings and ideas as it operates in western society, we find that it is founded on an insistence on this kind of

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transparency” (Glissant 1990: 204), Britton concludes that for the Martinican writer understanding thus is “an act of aggression because it constructs the Other as an object of knowledge”. Even though Couto also criticizes the “slavery” of reason (Jin 2013), he does not go so far as to polarize Western and African epistemologies. Couto’s opacity is less politically inspired. Couto’s links between disorder or chaos and darkness rather serve a poetic function, which in turn connects to what we have referred to as the supernatural. Miguel Urbano Rodrigues (2015) appropriately describes Couto’s work as an “impenetrable world”, where characters are not to be “understood”. While on the one hand his works fascinate and attract, on the other they should be approached without the (predominantly Western) obsession with “understanding” things in a logical-­rational way, yet Urbano Rodrigues does not see this as a contradiction, but rather as a necessary malaise: Na Kulumani de Mia Couto tudo é diferente, o hoje e ontem não se interpenetram e fundem. Naquela aldeia de Cabo Delgado caminho na escuridão, o amor, os feitiços, o medo, a felicidade, o ódio, os mecanismos da memória, o real e o imaginário, o onírico, o mítico empurram- me para um universo cujas portas me aparecem como inultrapassáveis. (Urbano Rodrigues 2015) (In Mia Couto’s Kulumani everything is different, today and yesterday do not interpenetrate and merge. In that village of Cabo Delgado, in the darkness, love, spells, fear, happiness, hatred, the mechanisms of memory, the real and the imaginary, the dream, the mythical push me into a universe whose doors appear to me as unsurpassable.)

Not surprisingly, Mia Couto’s style, as well as his personal positioning as a white African writer of European descent, has puzzled critics, some of whom have looked at him with suspicion as they expect African writers to be by definition black writers. In countries where the rate of analphabetism remains one of the highest in the world, some critics even find it awkward that sophisticated forms of hybrid writing (which they see as synonymous with “European” writing) emerge. For instance, Maria Manuel Lisboa (2000) questions whether Mia Couto’s “beautiful” yet “inaccessible” prose is actually “Mozambican”: some political significance, therefore, must be supposed to be invested, albeit not in a straightforward manner, in a literary style such as that of Mia Couto, which clearly emerges as inaccessible, in all its punning agility and neologistic revisionism, to any except the highly educated, literary sophisticated, native speakers of Portuguese. It is beautiful. But is it Mozambican? Who is Mia Couto (himself a curious hybrid, a white, culturally European writer, but the holder, emotionally and bureaucratically, of a Mozambican passport)? Who is

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he addressing? Who is his intended audience? Who does he claim to speak for? Speak with? Who should speak? Who will listen? (Lisboa 210; my emphasis)

It seems that Lusophone African authors, as opposed to non-­postcolonial Lusophone writers, necessarily have to be black and not-­too-­educated in order to fit the African stereotype. Moreover, in the Luso-­tropicalist sphere of lusofonía such criticism suggests that the writer necessarily needs to serve the Lusophone community first, before pursuing any universal ambitions. The Mozambican people’s “relationship to language, any language, continues to be one of largely pragmatic, unliterary usage and of Orality” (208–9), and is in sharp contrast, Lisboa argues, with Mia Couto’s virtuoso deployment of Portuguese, with all its foregrounding of linguistic play, neologism, syntactical and grammatical challenges and punning word games, begs questions as to where these exhibitions of highly skilled manipulation and subversion of the language leave the reality of generalized linguistic accessibility in his ostensible (Mozambican) reality. (Lisboa 209)

Thus the critic measures Couto’s literary value in terms of local inaccessibility, instead of approaching his work as part of a context of intensified globalization; its literary value is weighed using the old Luso-­ tropicalist scale that consists in seeing his work as “non-­Mozambican”, as “too sophisticated” to fit the Mozambican “reality”; Couto is seen here as out of tune with the scarce Mozambican readership whose major feature is, sadly, illiteracy. In short, such interpretations show that Luso-­tropicalist stereotypes nowadays are a “social fact” (Vale de Almeida 63): not only do they continue to be part of the Lusophone world of popular culture or sports, but also, not surprisingly, they are also imbued with a good share of scholarly criticism, “under the guise of Lusophony and its avatars” (ibid.).

Mia Couto: a creolized writer? Besides the different forms of opaqueness/opacity shared by Couto and Glissant, there is the notion of a relationality to others which is one neither of opposition nor of identification: the “we”, whether referring to Mozambique or Africa as a nation, is always multiple, defined in relation to the others; it is “relational, internally differentiated” (Britton 37). When speaking of Mozambique Couto says: O meu país tem países diversos dentro, profundamente dividido entre universos culturais e sociais variados. Sou moçambicano, filho de portugueses,

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vivi o sistema colonial, combati pela Independência, vivi mudanças radicais do socialismo ao capitalismo, da revolução à Guerra civil. Nasci num tempo de charneira, entre um mundo que nascia e outro que morria. Entre uma pátria que nunca houve e outra que ainda está nascendo. Essa condição de um ser de fronteira marcou-­me para sempre. As duas partes de mim exigiam um medium, um tradutor; a poesia veio em meu socorro para criar essa ponte entre dois mundos distantes. (PT 106) (My country has diverse countries within, it is deeply divided among varied cultural and social universes. I am Mozambican, of Portuguese descent, I lived the colonial system, I fought for Independence, I lived radical changes from socialism to capitalism, from revolution to Civil War. I was born in a time of hinge, between a world that was born and another that died. Between a country that never was and another that is still being born. This border condition marked me forever. The two parts of me demanded a medium, a translator; poetry came to my aid to create this bridge between two distant worlds.)

I believe, however, that Mia Couto is not a postcolonial “border writer” in the sense of a Camus or Beckett, who in very different ways were impacted by the political conditions under which they wrote. Scholars have indeed wondered how far these canonized monuments of “European” literature (Camus, for instance, was French Algerian pied-­noir) can be reinterpreted as postcolonial authors, as I have explained elsewhere (Van Haesendonck 2008). Mia Couto’s “case” is more complex, I argue, for he is closer to having undergone a kind of creolization which reminds us strongly of the criollos or creoles of European (usually Spanish) descent in the New World, who separated from Spain in order to claim their own independence and cultural identity. Other “white” African writers, such as Angolans Pepetela and Mario Pinto de Andrade, can be said to have undergone a similar process, as described in Pepetela’s novel A geração da utopia (1995). I will briefly explain my – admittedly polemical – point (with reference to Couto), which I briefly touch on here but hope to develop further elsewhere. One overlooked aspect in Mia Couto’s work is the author’s own creoleness. What I mean by that is that his experience and past remind us to a certain extent of the process the European, specifically the Spanish settlers, underwent, centuries ago, in the New World: the process of claiming their own identity by separating from the metropolis. It is clear to me that one popular definition of criollo is the individual of (white or mixed) European descent who turns against the metropolis to claim his or her own independence. Likewise, born of Portuguese parents,

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the Couto family opposed the Salazar regime and took part in FRELIMO’s struggle for independence, causing them to go underground.3 Yet what made the Couto family’s situation unique is that they belonged to a small minority of white Mozambicans taking the side of FRELIMO, and for that reason many (including their own neighbours) saw the Coutos as “traitors” (Jaggi). The creolization which the young Mia and his parents underwent – in the sense of opting for an independent Mozambique being of Portuguese/European descent – and which can be said to be the case for other white African writers such as the Angolan writer Pepetela, who also fought against the Portuguese, goes much further than just active political opposition. Besides Couto being a Mozambican criollo in heart and soul, his writing is a laboratory of literary and linguistic creolizations. Although I am aware that the term “criollo” is not the most appropriate one, I believe its use is justified here since it comes close to rendering the process of personal transformation (i.e. “creolization”) Mia Couto underwent as a writer and as a Mozambican citizen of European descent. It also shows the complexity of what it means to be an African writer today. It should be clear that questioning Couto’s “Mozambicanness” or “Africanness” simply on account of his being white, of European descent and “literarily sophisticated” would simply be a racist statement that has no place within literary criticism. Finally, it is important to remember that there are different creolizations (plural): thus creolization is not a uniform process which simply leads to a form of hybridity. It is understandable that, being a writer, Mia Couto does not use the academic term “creolization”, which in the Lusophone sphere has always been reserved for the more explicit creole societies such as Cape Verde, São Tomé and Guiné Buissau. However, he speaks of mestiçagem, a more popular term which is usually reserved for racial mixing, as in French métissage and Spanish mestizaje: Entre o convite ao esquecimento da Europa e o sonho de ser americano a saída só pode ser vista como un passo para a frente. Os intelectuais africanos não têm que se envergonhar da sua apetência para a mestiçagem. Eles não 3

In a Guardian interview, Couto recalls his family’s rebellion against the colonial authorities: “An ‘atheist poet’ and communist from Portugal, he [Fernando Couto] opposed the fascist dictator Antônio Salazar, and fled into exile with his wife in the early 50s, to Portugal’s ‘overseas province’, where Couto was born. ‘My father knew independence was coming, and he fought for it. My parents educated me and my brothers to be part of the new country.’ When the colonial authorities ousted his journalist father from a newspaper, ‘that was a hard time for us. My mother went to a bishop for help, but he said, “I don’t see your husband in church.” My father refused to go to church just to get a job. But there’s a picture of him later on his knees’” (Jaggi).

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necessitam de corresponder à imagem que os mitos europeus fizeram deles. Não carecem de artifícios nem de fetiches para serem africanos. Eles são africanos assim mesmo como são, urbanos de alma mista e mesclada, porque África tem direito pleno à modernidade, tem direito a assumir as mestiçagens que ela própria iniciou e que a torna mais diversa e, por isso, mais rica. (PT 61) (Between the invitation to forget Europe and the dream of being American, the exit can only be seen as a step forward. African intellectuals do not have to be ashamed of their appetite for miscegenation. They do not need to match the image that European myths have made of them. They do not lack artifice or fetishes to be African. They are Africans in the same way as they are, mixed-­minded urban men, because Africa has a full right to modernity, it has the right to assume the mestizos that it has initiated and that makes it more diverse and therefore richer.)

In an interview with me (Van Haesendonck 2016b), Mia Couto specifies his views on cultural mixing: he makes a distinction between creolization (as a process which happened in the Caribbean and creole societies) and mestiçagem or linguistic and cultural miscegenation against which there was strong resistance in Mozambique. Asked whether he sees any similarities between the historical phenomenon of creolization (in Caribbean and creole societies such as Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique) and mestiçagem in Mozambique, he responded: Estes [lugares como as Caraíbas, Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe] são lugares de chegada, de mistura, onde acontecem muito da diáspora africana e misturas raciais, misturas de histórias, o que não é tanto o caso de Moçambique. Por exemplo, Moçambique é um lugar de partida, é pouco um lugar de chegada, só no sentido em que os europeus que chegaram tiveram uma influência muito pequena, muito efémera e muito localizada. O único lugar em Moçambique em que essa possibilidade de mestiçagem, no sentido genético, no sentido cultural aconteceu, foi no vale do Zambeze, perto da zona da região do Inhambane. São coisas muito circunscritas graficamente e que não foram suficientemente intensas para produzirem um fenómeno de crioulização, um fenómeno de mestiçagem linguística ou cultural. Então acho que não era possível esperar que em Moçambique houvesse a mesma reeinvidicação e ainda por cima com uma certa resistência porque a ideia era a afirmação de uma raça, quer dizer a história estava tão confundida com a negação de uma raça de uma cultura que se pensava ser única, uma grande urgência de responder unitariamente, sem fazer divisões de histórias e de culturas internas de Moçambique […] Nem sequer do ponto de vista interior de Moçambique, houve o espaço histórico para haver mestiçagem interna […] Os processos de migração interna de movimentação, também foram muito circunscritos. (Van Haesendonck 2016b; my emphasis)

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(These [places such as the Caribbean, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe] are places of arrival, of mixing, where much of the African diaspora and racial mixtures, mixtures of stories happen, which is not so much the case of Mozambique. For example, Mozambique is a place of departure, it is hardly a place of arrival, only in the sense that the Europeans that arrived here had a very small, very ephemeral and very localized influence. The only place in Mozambique where this possibility of mestizaje, in the genetic sense, in the cultural sense happened, was in the Zambezi valley, near the zone of the Inhambane region. They are very circumscribed graphically and were not intense enough to produce a phenomenon of creolization, a phenomenon of linguistic or cultural miscegenation. So I do not think it was possible to expect that in Mozambique the same claim can be made, and moreover with a certain resistance because the idea was the affirmation of a race, that is to say, the history was so confused with the denial of a race of a culture that people thought it was unique, a great urgency to respond unitarily, without dividing Mozambique’s histories and internal cultures […] Even from the interior point of view of Mozambique, there was the historical space for internal miscegenation […] The processes of internal migration of movement, were also very circumscribed.)

Although the historical impact of mestiçagem has been very limited in Mozambique, it becomes clear that Couto sees it more as an ideal that Africans (and African writers) should cherish (“African intellectuals do not have to be ashamed of their appetite for miscegenation”). The interview clearly shows that he is informed about the different processes of cultural mixing, including religious syncretisms in Brazil and Cuba, where “De repente, já não se sabe qual é a fronteira entre os Deuses de uns e outros e não sucedeu aqui em Moçambique” (Van Haesendonck 2016b) (Suddenly, it is no longer possible to distinguish the border between different Gods and it did not happen here in Mozambique). Like Couto, Glissant uses the term “métissage” across his work to refer to the specific racial mixing that occurred in the Caribbean, while créolisation refers to a broader, cultural and social phenomenon. However, Mia Couto sees mestiçagem in much broader terms than racial mixing; this becomes clear in his reference to (black) African writers, such as the co-­founder of the négritude movement Léopold Sédar Senghor. Referring to the poet and former president of Senegal, Couto reflects in Pensatempos how for Senghor, Europe became effectively part of the writer, instead of a continent to be repulsed: “Eis-­me aqui”, escreveu Senghor, “tentando esquecer a Europa no coração do Senegal.” O poeta e estadista senegalês nunca conseguiu esse esquecimento. Ele próprio foi uma ponte entre os dois continentes. Nem de outro modo poderia ser. Esquecer a Europa não pode ser eliminar os conflitos interiores

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que moldaram as nossas próprias identidades. A Europa estava dentro do poeta africano e não podia ser esquecida por imposição. (PT 61) (“Here I am,” Senghor wrote, “trying to forget Europe in the heart of Senegal.” The Senegalese poet and statesman never got that oblivion. He himself was a bridge between the two continents. It could not be otherwise. Forgetting Europe cannot be the elimination of the internal conflicts that have shaped our own identities. Europe was within the African poet and could not be forgotten by imposition.)

Regardless of his personal (biographical) experience, Mia Couto describes the figure of the writer (in general) as a “viajante de identidades, um contrabandista de almas” (59) (a traveller of identities, a trafficker of souls). This has been repeatedly expressed by Mia Couto himself in his essay “Que África escreve o escritor africano?” (What Africa Does the African Writer Write?). Couto’s many faces as a Mozambican and African writer make it challenging not only to categorize the writer within the field of postcolonial literatures, but also to categorize him within more recent debates about “World literature”. The context in which Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African fiction has emerged is one of increasing geopolitical tensions and crisis, whereby postcolonial regions risk once more being forgotten between sides who make much more political noise. Writers from both contexts express local and regional, as well as global, concerns. There are some key differences, though, in the ways in which Lusophone Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean react to global politics. The Caribbean’s concerns with “light colonialism” and the consolidation of Empire’s rhizomatic network, fully integrated into what Jameson called “late capitalism” (1991), are very visible in Puerto Rican fiction, and, to a certain extent, in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In Lusophone African writing, historical concerns come to the foreground: authors attempt to make sense of the present by attempting to understand the postcolonial past: a sequence of civil wars, which is described as traumatic, leaving the country in ruins. Creole societies such as Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe are exceptions, for being almost oases of peace in this “sea” of violence. However, the authors include other concerns as well: Mozambique and Angola’s lack of conviviality is due not merely to history, to colonialism and its violent aftermath in the post-­independence period, but also to perennial patriarchal violence which has left its mark on women. Besides A confissão da leoa, such violence is explored most recently in Couto’s trilogy, as well as in the work of his Mozambican colleague Paulina Chiziane.

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After the initial exclusion of the Caribbean from various fields of study, including literary criticism and postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature is now under-­represented in the more fashionable category of “World literature”, with notable – predictably Anglophone – exceptions such as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul. This is also true for Lusophone African literature. Without insisting too much on the importance of the label “World literature”, which made a reappearance around the beginning of the new millennium, it is interesting to note that writers from both postcolonial contexts concerned were producing “World literature” avant la lettre. As Stefan Helgesson argues in an incisive study of Mia Couto and Assia Djebar: One could argue, then, that because of their heightened awareness of the rift between subjective experience and institutionally sustained literary language, writers from colonies and postcolonies have been at the vanguard of world literature. Their position on the margins of the world of letters but with the ambition to inhabit it has forced upon them an awareness of literature as a transportable institution that is enabling and repressive at the same moment. This profound ambivalence towards the world of literature, which marks the work of writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, India, Australia and Africa, may possibly be described as a distinct aspect of what Rey Chow has termed ‘post-­European culture’ […] Although the radical diversity and deep time of the world’s literary cultures will exceed postcolonial concerns, it is not stating too much that postcolonial and colonial writers have been among the first to understand the ambiguous logic of literature as a globalized phenomenon. (Helgesson 498–9)

Thus, contrary to Lisboa, who sees in Couto a “sophisticated” writer whose “fittingness” within African literature is questionable, Helgesson argues that it is precisely the author’s literary complexity and literary inventiveness that place him “at the vanguard of world literature”. What remains understudied in the predominantly Anglophone world of postcolonial studies and World literature is “how their ensuing poetics of cultural and linguistic difference is reinscribed and made public in multiple literary networks“ (Helgesson 499). Some Lusophone African authors, such as Mia Couto, indeed do not have primarily political interests, as most postcolonial writers do. This is also true for many Hispanic Caribbean writers: for instance, to what extent is Dominican and Cuban fiction engaged with the aims of political affirmation that concern primarily postcolonial Anglophone writers from India? From a strictly theoretical point of view, many of these authors fit well neither the category “postcolonial literature” nor that of “World literature”, while

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they simultaneously participate in both. What differentiates authors such as Couto is, according to Helgesson, the “active translational work” which enables them to become writers of World literature. This implies a paradox: in order to be visible the writer needs to (partially or fully) inscribe himself in the literary institutions that assign him a voice and a channel of publication: as Helgesson writes, “It is here, in this active translational work by writers such as Couto and Djebar and their reduction of the plurality of languages to the language of Europhone literary writing that we begin to see what I would call the paradox of world literature. It is by subjecting themselves to the institutionalized, monolingual authority of the graphie that they can speak across continents and languages of what the graphie excludes” (Helgesson 498). However, it is questionable whether we really need to approach fiction using exclusive categories and evaluate writers according to their fittingness for the categories of either “postcolonial” or “World literature”, instead of a combination of both. In other words, instead of simply categorizing them as “Postcolonial World literature” we can approach literary texts without placing them in a hierarchical relationship: a postcolonial novel can be World literature, while, inversely, a novel qualifying as “World literature” may obviously happen to be postcolonial; there is neither a need for subordination (to something more “global” or “political”) nor a contradiction in this. As Helgesson is right to point out, writers from colonies and postcolonies have been in the vanguard of World literature, yet who knows what literary category will be invented and/or promoted next? Whether these writers express a sense of “profound ambivalence towards the world of literature” is altogether another issue; likewise, most African and Caribbean authors are suspicious of their qualification as “postcolonial”. The question of whether they write “World literature” is relevant, but their preoccupation is elsewhere: it is first and foremost with writing literature. Arguably, more theoretically challenging is the question of what role translation plays, not only in the “worldification” and circulation of fiction, but also in the processes of the mixing of literatures: what I have referred to in the more experimental chapters of this book (7 and 8) as literary creolization, as well as its “sister” process, pidginization. The study of these processes, however, needs more attention, as well as differentiation from other concepts, such as literary hybridization. While we have explained the Caribbean background and the relevance of creolization for the study of literatures, including non-­postcolonial literatures, we have not applied the concepts of literary creolization and pidginization exclusively to Caribbean and Lusophone African literatures, since such an exploration would arguably need another volume. However, as I have said earlier, Mia

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Couto can be seen as a creole writer (resembling the criollo experience of the newly independent Spanish American countries), and his literary work can in my view best be described as “creolized fiction”, for many reasons: obviously not for his use of crioulo, but for his linguistic creativity, the integration and mixing of literary genres and modes of writing (including what we have called autofiction). Before being defined as an emergent language, creole was, we have said earlier, used to refer to Europeans born in the New World (as different from the criollos of the metropolis. On a literary level, creolized writing is literature which has undergone a process of transformation, similar to creolized theory, which according to Lionnet and Shih is [a theory] open to vernacular grammars, methods, and lexicons in the originary sense of creolization as a linguistic phenomenon, but also in the sense that it is a living practice that precedes yet calls for theorization while resisting ossification. Creolized theory enables unexpected comparisons and the use of different analytical tools. It can thus make Theory more pliable, less rigid, substituting exchange and communication for hegemonization. (Lionnet and Shih 31)

In addition to their claim that creolized texts allow for “unexpected comparisons”, both critics are right to warn that creolization might too easily be decontextualized, “become too pliable” (24). Instead of sticking to the Caribbean or Cape Verde as “creole societies”, as safer “laboratories” for studying creolization, I believe, nonetheless, that it is good practice to assess each particular case (place or region) to see whether this or that process of literary mixing is at stake. The fact that creolization was initially defined as a “linguistic phenomenon” is indeed a crucial aspect when it comes to theorizing different forms of (literary, cultural, political, racial, etc.) mixing. The aspect of orality automatically comes to the foreground, as it is important in both Caribbean and African contexts. Because of limited space, and since we cannot deepen every single aspect in a study that pretends to be comparative, the aspect of orality has only been slightly touched on in this book, namely when discussing autofiction. The stories told in the novels studied are, as a matter of fact, based on oral history: they take root in the subaltern voices heard at the margins of official discourses of a particular nation, whether defined as Dominican, Angolan, Puerto Rican or Mozambican. In Díaz’s Oscar Wao, these voices range from ghetto slang and Spanglish commonly used in the Dominican American diaspora to colloquial Spanish heard on the island, as well as creolizing forms – code-­ fusion – which are not (yet) referred to in any grammar books.

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Creoleness, the result of a process of creolization, is not simply synonymous with créolité as defined by the créolistes, who saw it as an essentialist form of identity. On the contrary, it can serve as a model for conviviality, at least when we look at anthropological insights in the field. Even societies which are “pidginizing”, and thus maintain their distinct, individual identities while creating a common cultural identity, can arguably be described as having a greater potential for conviviality, as Jacqueline Knörr’s (2014) study of cultural pidginization in Indonesia shows. Knörr indeed suggests that ethnic groups where cultural impurity and mixing are accepted are able to build bridges towards other groups and identities. In addition, “pidginized” and “creolized” forms of literature open up the way to a new form of conviviality as an alternative term for cosmopolitanism: while the latter bears Eurocentric connotations and was usually the privileged terrain of the upper classes, the former cuts through social and racial classes, and allows for a transnational approach to literatures. Instead of speculating on how a literary concept of creoleness should be theorized, it is more fruitful, I believe, to maintain an interdisciplinary perspective on processes of literary mixing, to see which insights can be borrowed from anthropology and linguistics, as well as other disciplines. The archipelagic approach that we have defended across the different chapters is one whereby creolization works on different levels: on a theoretical level, we have linked postcolonial theory produced in the Caribbean to non-­postcolonial territories (such as Europe). From the architectural field and urbanism we have learned that the archipelago is not just a metaphor; it is an accommodating concept with strong material(ist) implications, which complements the predominantly metaphorical uses of the archipelago as a “Caribbean” concept. Likewise, Kukathas’s (2003) figure of the “liberal archipelago” is, in spite of its clear political strand, interesting for allowing us to integrate in its whole a variety of ideologies and perspectives which are opposed to the dominant political orientation. The literary field, however, has its own particularities, and further research should endeavour to find out how a consistent methodology for an “archipelagic” literary criticism can be conceived of, going beyond the comparative study of national literatures, and matching today’s reality of intensified globalization. However, has globalization really changed the core themes and issues that were being dealt with under and after colonial rule, or, in the Caribbean case, in the complex context of a myriad of different political regimes? How do global (inter)dependencies determine the existential conditions of Caribbeans and Africans nowadays? In what ways do they live the contradictions that come with a global Empire,

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when in many parts of the Caribbean, but also Africa, decolonization is definitely “unfinished business”? Hispanic Caribbean writers, as much as their colleagues from the Francophone, Dutch and other areas of the Caribbean, refuse to give a single, definite answer to these questions. Their “light incursions” (e.g. the plot and characters of Vampiresas or the omnipresence of pop culture in Oscar Wao) could easily be dusted off by scholars as “minor” literature (versus the perennial Canon of literature). Comprehensibly, in an age of “TED talks”, “tweets” and other (social) media there is a good deal of scepticism towards these new ways of “sharing knowledge” that are considered more superficial and volatile. Postcolonial writers, as acknowledged in many fictional and non-­fictional texts, are not insensitive to these trends, for they are aware that everything tends to become more liquid in postmodernity and can quickly evaporate, thus not automatically leading to a more “convivial” or “cosmopolitan” world. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing if some more consistent changes might happen as a result. It has become common currency to see social movements and initiatives which make use of spontaneous rhizomatic networks and which look promising evaporate as quickly as they emerged (e.g. movements such as the Indignados, Take Wall Street, etc.). In line with these evolutions and our ingression in what Virilio (2008 [1983]) appropriately called a dromocracy, or a society where power is closely related to speed, one wonders what possible direction(s) postcolonial fiction will take. The future of Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African literatures lies not simply in seeing how it “fits” with the scholarly categories of “Postcolonial”, “Postmodern” or “World” literatures (before another doubtless shows up), but rather in keeping track of the many connections that tie them together: the links between these and other postcolonial literatures, in the first place, but also the connections between postcolonial and canonized writers (which scholars in defence of subaltern authors have too hastily done away with, allergic to anything from the past they identify as “patronizing”). An archipelagic approach, in the end, is not a total continuation of nor a complete break with the past, with that which has been defined here as the “traditional field”. It is not a trade-­off of one thing for another, a replacement of Comparative Literature with a more fashionable World literature. Instead, its innovation lies in thinking creatively about a new methodology for integrating the old and the new, the subaltern and the canon: one which is truly comparative (a term which so far has been much used, but little applied), whereby academic departments are being rethought in terms other than those which privilege national languages and literatures. National concerns and the “Nation” are , however, still the

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predominant parameters that govern the study of literatures, and as long as this is the case it would be absurd to claim that we live in a “postnational” world where the literary canon and national interests belong to a remote past. The “mixed” condition of the Hispanic Caribbean islands, ranging from “light colonial” (in the case of Puerto Rico) to postcolonial (in the case of Cuba and the Dominican Republic), is also reflected in their literature: in Puerto Rican fiction there is a more direct concern with the “light” consumerist condition of the colonized subject as argued by Juan Flores (2000:  12), while Lusophone Africa struggles, like Haiti, with the problems that are usually qualified – using Western criteria – as “Third World” problems: poverty and endemic corruption. These are not, however, the key problems dealt with in the work of authors such as Mendes da Silva, Mendonça and Couto. They are discreetly present in the background, but never being mentioned or evoked explicitly in the text. Does that mean that these authors are insensitive to Africa’s major problems? On the contrary, they look for something deeper than diagnosing well-­known problems: the root causes of continued poverty and corruption. In addition, they avoid a reductionist “Western” interpretation of Africa as “primitive”, “backward”, indeed lacking in “modernity” as mirrored by the West. They thus thwart stereotypes by cleverly exploring the past, not only through the insertion of “estórias” but also by putting (part of ) their biographical “selves” into the text through autofiction. Eduardo Lalo and Junot Díaz do something similar for the Caribbean, which more than any other region has suffered from the stereotypes of the exotic, in sharp contrast to the Caribbean’s dystopic reality. In short, even though it is impossible to predict where these postcolonial literatures are heading, I believe an archipelagic approach allows us to further detect common problems and perspectives that the postcolonial subject – beyond these specific contexts – is dealing with. Conviviality is, after all, a universal problem, and it is to be expected that non-­postcolonial areas (such as Europe) will be dealing with similar problems as those that can be observed in the Caribbean and Africa. Mass migration is definitely a core issue that will have to be taken into account: not only one-­directional migration from the “periphery” to the “centre”, but complex, multidirectional migratory and diasporic movements, which cannot be described in just a few sentences. In a “world in creolization” no region or territory (postcolonial or not) remains unaffected by such vectorial movements. The Caribbean, in that sense, is indeed an ideal point of departure for comparing cultural dynamics, as Ottmar Ette is right to remind us: “It is not only because of its multi-­relationality that

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there is hardly a more advantageous starting point than the Caribbean for transareal studies. For quite some time now, the Caribbean has not only been an object of study but also an active participant in that study. In the dialogue between Caribbean and extra-­Caribbean theories, ideas emerge that cast a new light on cultural developments worldwide” (Ette 150). While the Caribbean was always a “projection screen” for Europe’s utopias, the postcolonial fiction produced on the islands reveals its dystopic horizon. However, this dystopia has nothing to do with insularity in the sense of geographical and existential isolation: if one thing has been revealed by Caribbean theory and confirmed in the fictional works produced by Caribbean writers, it is their cultural relationality and entanglements beyond geographical, and (partially) beyond linguistic, barriers. Lusophone Africa, if considered as an archipelago, has been much more isolated from both the metropolis and the rest of Africa than the Hispanic Caribbean with regard to Latin America, the USA or Europe. This has been so for historical reasons (e.g. Salazar’s politics of isolation of both Portugal and its “Luso-­tropicalist” Empire from the rest of the world). However, even within that condition of insularity, there have always been archipelagic connections reaching to other geographical continents and literary horizons, and it is up to scholars to study these entanglements.

Conclusion Global Entanglements

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly. (Charles Addams)

To formulate a series of conclusions regarding the complex issues dealt with in this book would be counterintuitive to the aims set out at the beginning of this book. The essays contained in this study have been profoundly exploratory in nature, without the pretence of giving definite answers on complex questions and issues (such as the unfinished processes of literary and cultural mixing) which obviously need further elaboration and reflection. Hence, I will limit myself here to recapitulating some of the main ideas that have guided my “archipelagic” journey through the Hispanic Caribbean and the Lusophone African literary fields. Beyond the geographical and metaphorical levels, I have departed from the idea of archipelago as a structuring principle, sketching a possible archipelagic poetics with implications on both the theoretical and practical levels. The book itself has indeed been set up as an archipelagic configuration, whereby the different essays are the “parts” – as with any scholarly work – of a textual assemblage. I have thus departed from and attempted to go beyond the concept of the (meta-)archipelago as theorized by Caribbean intellectuals. Some parts of this study will have been more “functional” than others, depending on the perspective or background knowledge of each specific reader. Some will have read this book as a work of reference (focusing on one or two parts in particular), others as an interconnected whole, and both readings are valid in line with the books’ archipelagic set-­up. In either case, by adopting an approach which is unconventional – an “unfinished adventure” – as Bauman (2004) would put it, I hope to motivate more researchers to cross the particular linguistic and/or geographic boundaries of their particular fields of study in order to take the risk of making connections with other areas. It is by enabling these connections, by putting in place these comparative joints, that a whole new world of critical potential in literary studies opens up. Such an approach to postcolonial literatures also potentially relieves them from the pressure

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that comes with the task of making exhaustive assumptions about one particular writer within his or her particular “national” framework – a task which, at best, is an illusion. The term “archipelago” thus firmly stands for embracing the experimental in literary studies: this experimental approach to literary texts is visible in the variety of interconnected topics discussed in this book, as well as in the flexible ways the chapters connect with (and at times disconnect from) one another. This will definitely have pleased some and left others hungry (for more discussion on one particular literature, writer, or topic), but it can hardly be otherwise, as compromises had to be made. After all, putting emphasis on particular aspects at the expense of others is not exclusive of this kind of study; rather, it is part of any scholarly undertaking. Joan Ramón Resina puts it well: “New ideas go through a trinity of stages. First they are ridiculed, next they are fought, and lastly they are institutionalized, taken for granted and trivialized” (Resina 11). Any progress in research implies going through such a challenging journey of trial and error, a process which is rarely a smooth ride, and this is not any different for the field of literary criticism. Therefore, this book has been set up as a kind of experimental (and temporary) space for meeting with authors from different areas: by selecting a handful of writers from two different contexts – the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa – and bringing them (metaphorically) together in one space,  I have aimed to see what “convivial” dialogue ensues. Quickly, however, one realizes that the dialogue is not a smooth one, but rather riddled with conflict and tensions that point in a myriad of different directions. I have nonetheless maintained that this is not an insurmountable problem from the archipelagic perspective that I have defined here. While mainstream literary criticism continues to promote concepts such as hybridity and “in betweenness” as the new norm, as a kind of conceptual standard, one tends to forget about the incomodidades that are forgotten in processes of cultural mixing; they are always accompanied by uncomfortable truths that underpin the myth of normality, what Lacanians such as Žižek refer to as the “real” underlying the symbolic. Contemplating the increasingly abandoned “landscape” of the humanities – and of literary studies in particular – at the beginning of the new millennium, one wonders how to reinvigorate the literary field, in a broader context where the modern university and its social function as institution are left in ruins, as Bill Readings (1997) already argued two decades ago. The modern post-­Enlightenment university emerged in close association with the nation-­state, at whose service it worked by promoting the idea of national culture. That literary landscape has been

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changing thoroughly towards the end of the 20th  century through the advent and predominance of new technologies and, more importantly, through intensified globalization. Furthermore, as with Ungers and Koolhaas’s close observation of the urbanization and depopulation of Berlin, it is not difficult to witness an analogous “depopulation” of the literary arena as new globally connected generations flock towards other visual media, which they see as more attractive than the written text. How, then, to find a way out of the current crisis? Does literature, like architecture, need an archipelagic project in an attempt to reinvigorate the belletrie? How to rethink our study of the literary text, and through that process rethink the humanities as a multilingual archipelago? The archipelagic approach we have discussed here is only one potential route to follow, yet, I am convinced, it is a promising one. In a relaunched critical edition of Ungers and Koolhaas’s manifesto, Sébastien Marot (Ungers and Koolhaas 2013) has referred to the archipelagic project for Berlin as “the Genesis of a hopeful monster”, starting his text with a significant quotation from Koolhaas’s architectural novel S,M,L,XL: “Each bastard gets his own genealogical tree”. A Caribbean version of this phrase would be “Each creole has his or her rhizomes”: indeed, while Koolhaas recognizes the importance of mixed, hybrid (“bastard”) identity, new ideas spread in unpredictable, rhizomatic ways, as opposed to the single rooted origin of the tree. Marot rightly refers to the monstrous as a positive figure which is headed towards the future: he borrows the term “hopeful monster” from German genetic expert Richard Goldschmidt to refer to the “hope of a renaissance or an evolutionary turning point” embedded in the architectural project. As we have seen, in Derrida’s view the monster is essentially a figure of hope for a better future. It is thus important to reiterate the need for further (re)thinking of literatures as archipelagos, but also to acknowledge the impurity and “monstrosity” – in a Derridian sense – of our praxis as literary scholars, for as critics we are in the end equally subjected to unstoppable and unpredictable processes of literary creolization. Studying such broad literary and cultural areas as the Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone Africa has necessarily entailed making selections, and, as in any anthology or scholarly study, this implies committing the minor yet inevitable injustice of including some writers and excluding others. It goes without saying that it is simply impossible to dedicate an equal amount of attention to every writer of each part of these regions, as this would be the work of many researchers and volumes. In order to approach these postcolonial literatures with respect for their individual complexities we have not prioritized the “national” framework but rather the specific

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context and (often diasporic) connections of the writers whose work we intend to compare. The very use of the terms “Hispanic Caribbean” and “Lusophone Africa” does not come without problems, and we have been using them through lack of alternative terms: they do not encompass whole regions, but only a (linguistic) part of them; nor do they reflect the internal linguistic and cultural diversity of each part. And, as with any comparative and trans-­areal study, it is impossible to cover equally every singular part of each of these contexts. The Hispanic Caribbean goes beyond its islands, stretching far into their diasporas (in the USA) and into the Latin American mainland. The Greater and Lesser Antilles, however, have particularly suffered from the violence related to colonialism and slavery, and therefore they have been subject to more intense processes of creolization. Within these regions, the emphasis has clearly been on Puerto Rico with regard to the Caribbean, with less attention paid to Cuba (whose literature already receives the most scholarly attention within the Caribbean) and the Dominican Republic. As for Lusophone Africa, the most attention has been paid to Mozambican author Mia Couto, even though we have also discussed a few authors from Cape Verde and Angola. Occasionally, we have made connections with the broader Caribbean context (Martinique, Cuba, Curaçao, Trinidad and Tobago), whenever relevant. The textual analysis, however, whether through a close reading or a more general approach, has allowed us to isolate a number of common concerns and to define recurrent themes and motives. In prioritizing a comparative approach, a secondary objective has been to challenge the linguistic divisions governing the study of these postcolonial areas. As Patrick Chabal put it with regard to Lusophone Africa, it is necessary “to overcome the narrow Lusophone focus which afflicts most accounts of Portuguese-­speaking Africa” (Chabal 2002 xviii). This is a problem which, it must be said, is not exclusively Lusophone. A similar self-­centredness and linguistic fragmentation affects most accounts of the different (linguistic) parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, divided in the Hispanophone, Francophone, Anglophone and (understudied) Dutch-­ speaking areas. One of the key themes Chabal put forward in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa was indeed the importance of mending the ethnic divisions and the attempt to forge national unity and nation-­ states after the civil wars. This is comprehensible, for after independence the (lack of a) sense of a “national” unity automatically comes to the foreground: armed struggle did not automatically intensify nationalism, but drastically created tensions and disturbed the balance between rural and urban areas, mainly through massive internal migration. Although it has not been because of war, similar concerns for national unity and

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identity have deeply affected the Hispanic as well as other parts of the Caribbean, but in the latter case this has been due mainly to continued worries over (neo)colonialism and what Hardt and Negri designate as an “Empire” made out of geopolitical interests and driven by rhizomatically connected corporate players and governments worldwide. My focus here, however, has not been on the nation and the limits of nationhood, as in most studies on postcolonial identity, but on the very (im)possibility of conviviality in these contexts. Rather than being a diffuse concept, the possibility of conviviality depends on a community’s self-­perception, not only as an “imagined community” (Andersen 1991), whether in official or personal terms, but also on the existential conditions that are shaped through vernacular, often trivial circumstances: whether a human being is able to live together with his or her neighbour does not depend on national symbols such as a national flag or hymn, but rather on the inverse, “bottom-­up” perspective; on the ability of beings to recognize each other as agents of change, even though temporarily; conviviality in these settings presents itself as an impossible ideal to struggle for, an insignificant action in the face of a violent reality, except for an improvised “community” of madmen that survives in precarious spaces, imagining the foundation of its own kingdom. Hence, in the fluidly defined Lusophone African space, one of the key questions that is at the heart of writers’ concerns (at least in the case of Mozambique and Angola) is: what are the effects on the postcolonial subject of the post-­ independence civil wars? Clearly, Couto and Mendonça’s novels deal with issues of cultural memory, but in a specific way: autofiction, we have said, is the main narrative strategy these authors recurrently adopt to deal with past trauma, for it allows them to take a distance from the (false) objectivity of official History, while exploring the more intimate – personal and existentialist – side, but also the surreal and fantastic aspects of their autobiographical experiences. One of the key aspects explored in most of these fictional narratives is madness, present in a variety of manifestations. Obviously, madness in the Western tradition has never been celebrated as a positive phenomenon or condition, nor is this the case in the Caribbean and African postcolonial contexts. What the novels suggest, instead, is that in the given circumstances (of the wasteland left by civil war, of light colonialist and Luso-­tropicalist avatars) insanity is a way of survival: a psychological defence mechanism that helps the subject cope with extremely difficult circumstances, avoiding total psychotic breakdown. However, I have said that there is one more possible reading, less common yet equally important, which involves a change in perspective: from the regional (Caribbean/African), “vernacular”

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and postcolonial point of view, madness as a psychological disorder is at times difficult – if not impossible – to distinguish from supernatural or transcendental personal experiences which are usually referred to as the “traditional field”, especially in the African context. One must be cautious, however, about putting the label “supernatural” on African cultures, as has been done to a great extent through the global packaging of Latin American and Caribbean literatures as “magic realist”. The characters, like all other characters in the novels commented upon, are, in line with most postmodern literature produced in postcolonial countries, anti-­heroes: the presence of the anti-­hero is in line with a broader trend in postmodern literature and is not presented as a negative trait; on the contrary, the characters’ vulnerability is seen as a quality in the face of brutal violence that has taken place (or is taking place) in the background of the novels. By emphasizing the protagonists’ diasporic complexity, Mendes da Silva and Díaz’s novels create a distance from the respective “national” contexts in which they inscribe themselves strategically (i.e.  towards official Cape Verdean (Luso-­tropicalist) and Dominican history). A striking similarity between Utac and Oscar Wao is that they are, at first sight, just plain anti-­heroes, outcasts without a significant past, without a story worthy to be told. While Oscar is aware of his nerdiness and rebels against his situation before eventually taking action, Utac is too absorbed in his narcissism to realize that his moodiness is affecting his ability to create durable, significant bonds with his social environment. Oscar Wao is an anti-­hero in the strict sense of the word: as a “ghetto nerd” he does not come much further than imagining himself being a superhero, while his academic degree does not secure him the social promotion or way out of the ghetto he had been longing for. However, he is the only character who at least makes an attempt – albeit a failed one – to improve his condition. In the foreground, however, little or no significant action takes place: Nkuku is not particularly any more pro-­active – in the sense of being truly socially and/or politically engaged – than the characters of the casuarinas kingdom. For much though he writes, Mwanito does not actively struggle for (physical) change in his environment as he is immersed in writing “his” bible, the history of Jesusalém, as revealed at the end of the novel: being a tuner of silences boils down to remaining mostly invisible, yet Mwanito’s apparent passivity and withdrawal into writing is also a form of “agency” significant for his survival. In Mendes da Silva’s novel, Utac puts most of his energy (or rather, he wastes it) into his emotional life, not into executing an action plan to overcome the frustrations that he meets on a daily basis in “his” Cape Verde. In Soulsaver, Juan Bautista Lorca drives his ambulance non-­stop around the

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San Juan metroplex to secure the survival of his fellow human beings, but his mobility is, above all, immobility: not simply because of Puerto Rico’s condition as a panoptic island in 2099, but rather because every single one of his moves is being controlled by an Orwellian Big Brother, rendering futile any political action. Finally, in Marta Aponte’s short novel, as well as in Padrón’s fictional account, vampires are not only non-­offensive, they also refuse to carry out any epic or – in line with the gothic vampire novel – any horrific act that stirs the plot. In the Hispanic Caribbean context, such anti-­heroism is in line with the postmodern cultural debates that have emerged since the mid1990s. The old revolutionary rhetoric and Marxist discourse which had been agonizing since the early 1980s are being replaced by a search for alternatives. In the case of Puerto Rico, for instance, the abandonment of revolutionary ideals by a great part of the intelligentsia went hand in hand with the emergence of new, mostly short-­lived but highly interesting cultural journals (such as bordes, Nómada and Postdata) and publications where the anti-­hero, the monstrous, the unrepresentable “insane” subject (as in Juan Duchesne-­Winters’ Ciudadano insano [2001]), was being valued and given a voice. Instead of showing efforts to renew its epic and revolutionary discourse in literature, Cuban authorities have shown a more relax attitude towards the new generation of writers and artists. In the meantime, in the Dominican Republic the cultural and literary production of earlier decades has come to a slowdown, while the literary focus, with notable exceptions such as Rita Indiana Hernández, has moved to the Dominican diaspora in the USA, with award-­winning authors such as Junot Díaz, Julia Álvarez and Josefina Báez, and, most recently, Rey Andújar. Moreover, while the postcolonial authors discussed in this book are not inspired by one particular “model”, by a “prototype” of a postmodern anti-­hero, they are clearly influenced by classical (of mostly “Western” origin) novels where the protagonists are anti-­heroes, ranging from Camus’ Meursault and Kafka´s Gregor Samsa, and from Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, to Morrison’s Milkman and Achebe’s Okonkwo. In other words, it is safe to argue that their writing has equally been “creolized” by works which are now known by the (refashioned) label “World literature”. Specifically European literature and philosophy (one thinks about the influence of Deleuze on Benítez Rojo and Glissant) continues to be a frame of reference for postcolonial writers, as they appropriate ideas and concepts in order to create their theories and fictions. What is equally striking is that all the authors included here, whether dealing with local or “national” problems (such as civil wars), show their “glocal” concerns, that is, their interest in the particular place or location of

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the characters within a broader setting of intensified globalization. A remote place in rural Mozambique is connected to someone in a European capital who eventually visits the place and has an enduring impact on its inhabitants: Marta’s journey and visit are the product not simply of old colonial ties with Portugal with a Luso-­tropicalist flavour, but also of global dynamics and mobility. Her visit to Mozambique matches the Western tourist’s curiosity about postcolonial Africa, even though the reason for her journey is very different; Jesusalém is not simply an exotic place where the colonial “Other” of former times resides, nor is it a familiar place. Rather, Mozambique has become a place of learning, of social and affective interaction (with Mwanito and Ntunzi), and, above all, of mutual recovery and understanding (or at least an attempt at it); a place of cultural encounters yet not exempt from uncanny Luso-­tropicalist avatars, as seen in the previous chapter. Marta symbolizes change and hope for Mwanito, and that change comes not from within, but also from the outside; nevertheless Marta’s visit also triggers in Vitalicio a fear and suspicion of anything Portuguese, no matter how affective the ways in which she attempts to sympathize with the patriarch; a fear which takes root not as much in civil wars as in the colonial times lived through by the father, even though that fear remains unnamed (the term “colonial” does not appear in the book). Like Mwanito, Marta does not express any hate towards Vitalicio but attempts to understand the broader historical context that caused his authoritarian behaviour, which – paradoxically – he is likely to have inherited from the former colonizer. The broadcasting radio station that deeply impacts Juan Bautista Lorca’s life in Soulsaver is not typically “Puerto Rican”, nor is it exclusively a product for mass consumption “made in the USA”, even though historically speaking the USA has doubtless had a privileged role in the propagation of Christian fundamentalism and the creation of tele-­evangelism. Instead, it is the product of corporate, global mass media, which connects well with the global capitalist Empire coined by Hardt and Negri; the effects of tele-­ evangelism and religious indoctrination nowadays operate via the internet as much as via radio and TV stations, and have an impact in Latin America which is arguably as strong as their impact in the USA. In short, precarious lives are played as much on a global as on a local level, reminiscent of the butterfly effect in chaos theory, whereby a small, apparently insignificant gesture in one geographical location potentially has a deep impact on the other side of the planet. The “Soulsaver” elite of which Juan Bautista is a member in that sense does not differ much from the Vampire elite in Juan Padrón’s animated feature: both are the product of global corporate interests which operate both in visible and invisible ways – they remain either underground or are explicitly present in public.

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Contrary to most Hispanic Caribbean writers, Lusophone African writers do not shy away from politics, whether in their fiction or non-­ fiction, criticizing the elites in power. José Luis Mendonça, Mia Couto and Guilherme Mendes da Silva all extensively discuss politics, whereas their Caribbean peers are overall more reluctant to weave political issues (past or present) into their texts. Mendonça is by far the most political of the writers discussed here, as his novel contains direct critiques of the Angolan elites in power since the civil wars, as proven in the highly ironic text “Se os ministros morassem nos musseque” (If the ministers would live in the musseque) inserted in O Reino das Casuarinas as one of Nkuku’s notes (239–44). Like his Angolan colleague, Mia Couto unambiguously voices criticism of the Mozambican elites, but he does so in his non-­fictional work whereas his prose is reserved for a more poetic filtering of reality, and explicit political references are avoided (with the rare exception of Terra somnâmbula where Couto delivered a direct criticism to the address of the United Nations). In Pensatempos, Couto rejects the idea that a country will automatically become “developed” by technocrats as the result of a random accumulation of projects. What happens instead is that the elites, in their fascination with being part of the new language of globalization, continue to turn a blind eye towards the poor: O nosso continente corre o risco de ser um território esquecido, secundarizado pelas estratégias de integração global. Quando digo “esquecido” pensarão que me refiro à attitude das grandes potências. Mas eu refiro-­me às nossas próprias elites que viraram costas as responsabilidades para com os seus povos, à forma como o seu comportamento predador ajuda a denegrir a nossa imagem e fere a dignidade de todos os africanos. (PT 21) (Our continent runs the risk of being a forgotten territory, seconded by the strategies of global integration. When I say “forgotten” they will think that I am referring to the attitude of the great powers. But I am referring to our own elites who have turned their backs on their responsibilities towards their own people, on how their predatory behavior tarnishes our image and hurts the dignity of all Africans.)

As David Brookshaw (2016) argues, Couto has always been wary of “nationalism as an exercise in exclusion rather than inclusiveness”, especially towards political discourses on nationhood which emphasize a bogus “purity of an overarching Marxist belief in national formation” (23). Both Mendonça and Couto attempt to undermine such false discourses in the name of the people, but the latter explicitly foregrounds the plurality of his country, ignored by the elites who maintain a false belief in cultural purity:

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A aprendizagem sera esta: aceitarmos todos as Áfricas, todas as Europas, todas as Ásias que existem em nós. E não olhar nunca essas heranças históricas como qualquer coisa que devemos erradicar, como mancha que devemos depurar em nome da pureza inicial. Do mesmo modo, a Europa necessita de aceitar as Áfricas (e Ásias) que habitam a sua actualidad. Todos os continentes necessitam, afinal, de assumir a sua mestiçagem racial, cultural e religiosa. (Couto 1998: 111) (The lesson will be the following one: let us accept all the Africas, all the Europes, all the Asias that exist in us. And never look at these historical heritages as something that we must eradicate, as a stain that we must purify in the name of initial purity. In the same way, Europe needs to accept the Africas (and Ásias) that inhabit its present day. All continents need, after all, to assume their racial, cultural and religious miscegenation.)

Mozambique is a place of diversity and of mestiçagem, what we have reformulated here as “creolization”. African cultures are not pure but are susceptible to processes of cultural mixing which take place as much in Lusophone Africa as in the Caribbean, and increasingly in Europe, exposed to massive migrations. Mendes da Silva’s criticism, in turn, takes the form of satirical comments towards his fellow Verdean’s handling of societal problems since colonial times. However, behind the satire one can sense the writer’s sympathy and admiration for his people, which keeps smiling in spite of its continued suffering in postcolonial times. The African writers’ colleagues from the Spanish Caribbean, in turn, are more indirect and tend to avoid explicit criticism of local or regional politicians in their fictional texts, while adopting a more moderate or ironic tone in their essays. Besides the authors we have been discussing or referring to, such as Eduardo Lalo and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, one can also mention – so far as the Puerto Rican context is concerned – Mayra Santos-­Febres, Rosario Ferré or Luis Rafael Sánchez; or, in the Cuban context, a writer such as Leonardo Padura. In spite of the occasional channelling of their critique in popular journals and newspapers, they are cautious about openly diving into politics (through satire or other explicit forms) in their fictional work. This does not mean that they skew politics altogether; what happens instead is that, with the exception of Rosario Ferré’s well-­known pro-­statehood column published in the New York Times (Ferré 1998) in 1998 (the same year as an important referendum was held to decide the future status of the island), these writers, I argue, definitely weave their political ideas into their fictional texts, yet in a more indirect – often allegorical or metaphorical – way than their African colleagues. There is, nevertheless, a clear Hispanic Caribbean voice condemning the postcolonial avatars of imperialism and colonialism, refashioned as

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“light colonialism”. Instead of dealing with contemporary politics and its links with history, as in the Lusophone sphere, many Caribbean narratives are still mainly focused on dealing with the ambiguities of current colonial conditions (Puerto Rico) or recovering from past traumas: the violence committed under the communist era in Cuba, and Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In other words, in Caribbean fiction, as exemplified by Junot Díaz, the links between past traumas and their consequences in the present are less important than in Lusophone African texts. In contemporary Caribbean writing there is more distance between the moment of writing and traumatic events from the past (events many writers did not experience directly during their lives but through narratives from their predecessors, as in Junot Díaz’s account of the Trujillo era). What is surprising is that phenomena such as Luso-­tropicalism and colonialism are rarely discussed in the public and academic arenas, with little awareness of their contemporary avatars: according to official discourse, both phenomena were buried at the time of independence (in the Portuguese and Lusophone African countries), and with the end of European colonialism in 1898 (in the Caribbean case), with the exception of Puerto Rico’s entrance into a political twilight zone when its political status turned into Estado Libre Asociado (ELA or Free Associated State, usually translated as “commonwealth”) in 1952. In actual fact, one can safely say that the conditions of, respectively, being colonized through consumerism (light colonialism) and Luso-­tropicalism have become part of the unconscious of the subject that inhabits these postcolonial spaces (including their diasporas). Besides rare discussions in academia (Flores 2000; Vale de Almeida 2004), there is no public debate on such issues: in short, colonialism and Luso-­tropicalism are usually treated as past phenomena, with no relevance or link to the present. The Puerto Rican and similar cases of light colonialism (e.g. Martinique, Guadeloupe, Curaçao, Aruba) are arguably the most complex and invisible ones to discuss, for no bloodshed from wars or dictatorships happened on the “Isla del Encanto”, however they have political and economic ties with a metropolis that many Puerto Ricans qualify as colonialism tout court. Puerto Rico’s independence was indefinitely postponed in 1952 when it became an ELA. Out of fear of sheer poverty as witnessed in Haiti, or ideological stronghold on Cuba, Puerto Ricans have voted to maintain the status quo until today, even though a referendum in 1998 revealed the national dissatisfaction with the ELA status, as the majority famously voted neither for statehood nor for independence nor for the status quo, but instead for a fourth option: “none of the above”. Likewise, a public debate on contemporary forms of Luso-­tropicalism is absent nowadays in

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Portugal as well as in its former Império, in sharp contrast with the emphasis on lusofonía as a de facto linguistic community with similar economic, political and cultural interests. As Miguel Vale de Almeida asserts, Luso-­ tropicalism, instead of having disappeared from the Portuguese mindset, has now become “a social fact”. Therefore, he says: We [Portuguese] need to overcome the more psychological, culturalist, and essentialist aspects of Luso-­Tropicalism. If we do so we will be able to deal with what matters: the construction of a complex world of meanings and powers by Portuguese, Brazilians, and Africans. Luso-­Tropicalism was a discourse permeated with political power and ideological rhetoric: we need to unravel these in order not to reify, once more, “communities” that do not exist as essences. (Vale de Almeida 63)

What is most worrying, according to the anthropologist, is a Luso-­ centric perspective based on the resilience of Luso-­tropicalism under the guise of Lusophony and the diverse avatars under which it manifests itself: Lusofonía, a community imagined as a juxtaposition of Lusophone identities, based on one common language. This is a trend that exceeds the Lusophone sphere, as it is also present in the Caribbean and throughout Africa and Asia under the guise of francophonie: a linguistic area with undeniably political links, based on the old colonialist ideology of the assimilation of the “other”. Vale de Almeida thus warns against the hidden essentialism in the promotion of a linguistic community whose foundations are situated in a colonial system; a danger also latent in the Caribbean’s créolité movement, which in its manifesto at first sight promotes linguistic and cultural diversity yet defines creoleness in narrow terms as essentially Caribbean. Finally, instead of worrying about the success of the writers discussed, or about their inauguration in the hall of fame of “World literature” – literary studies’ latest “hype”, which comes with its own inclusions and exclusions – one should attempt to look through the superficiality or appearances that define globalization in terms either of cultural homogenization or its exact opposite, diversification. Creolization, understood as both cultural and literary mixing in particular places, offers a more balanced view of the global entanglements that are happening in both postcolonial and non-­postcolonial areas. The postcolonial writer – like any author who respects him- or herself – has other motives for writing than purely commercial ones: what drives him or her is not the cultural “resistance” to a repressive other, but the complexity and entanglements between local concerns and the unstoppable process of globalization. As Lionnet

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and Shih point out, “entanglement is an existential condition with a long history, one that takes different forms in the continuous process of creolization” (Lionnet and Shih 30). The study of contemporary Caribbean and African writers teaches us that similar issues are at stake in these geographically, linguistically and culturally divergent literatures, in spite of the many, apparently insurmountable, differences that separate them. These postcolonial writers are aware of the difficult balancing act that it takes to write in and about cultures and imaginaries which have not yet been decolonized. An archipelagic approach to these literatures is, in the meantime, a safe strategy via which to study the entanglements that give shape to postcolonial lives, even though thousands of miles separate them.

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Collection Trans-­Atlántico Littératures Dans le panorama de la recherche et, plus particulièrement, de l’hispanisme, un nouveau paradigme privilégiant la prise en considération des échanges et de la circulation de modèles s’affirme. Cette nouvelle perspective permet l’émergence d’un nouveau champ d’études centré sur les relations transatlantiques, transnationales et intercontinentales ; elle met l’accent sur les échanges, les migrations et les passages qui se déclinent de différentes façons entre les cultures des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, depuis plus de cinq siècles. Plus que le paquebot de ligne destiné à la traversée régulière entre l’Europe et l’Amérique, le titre de cette nouvelle Collection Trans-­Atlántico / Trans-­Atlantique évoque le roman homonyme de Witold Gombrowicz – où apparait justement le trait d’union –, les déambulations du protagoniste entre deux mondes, ainsi que les rapprochements entre des lieux bien différents d’une même réalité (la Pologne, où Gombrowicz est né, et l’Argentine, lieu de son séjour prolongé). La collection “Trans-­Atlántico / Trans-­Atlantique” se veut un espace d’édition ouvert aux travaux qui privilégient cette approche de la littérature comme lieu transculturel par excellence, lieu de dialogue et de controverse entre différents types de discours, lieu, enfin, de tous les possibles, où s’élaborent de nouvelles pratiques de pensée et de création pour donner du sens à l’en-­dehors qui l’entoure.

Directrices de collection Norah GIRALDI-­DEI CAS et Fatiha IDMHAND Comité scientifique Fernando AÍNSA – Écrivain et critique littéraire Zila BERND – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande du Sul y CNPQ (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolmiento Científico e Tecnológico) (Brésil) Maria Carolina BLIXEN – Departamento de Investigaciones-­Biblioteca Nacional (Uruguay)

Manuel BOÏS – Traducteur Oscar BRANDO – Chercheur, critique littéraire et professeur de littérature (Uruguay) Cécile CHANTRAINE-­BRAILLON – Université de Valencienne et du Hainaut Cambrésis (France) Patrick COLLART – Universiteit Gent (Belgique) Ana del SARTO – The Ohio State University-­Center of Latin American Studies (États-­Unis) Carlos DEMASI – Universidad de la República (Uruguay) Carmen de MORA – Universidad de Sevilla (Espagne) Geneviève FABRY – Université Catholique de Louvain-­ la-­ Neuve (Belgique) Rita GODET – Université de Rennes (France) Rosa Maria GRILLO – Università degli Studi di Salerno (Italie) Patrick IMBERT – Université d’Ottawa (Canada) Danuta Teresa MOCEJKO-­COSTA – Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentine) Francisca NOGUEROL – Universidad de Salamanca (Espagne) Alexis (Nouss) NUSELOVICI – Université Aix-­Marseille (France) Teresa ORECCHIA-­HAVAS – Université de Caen-­Basse Normandie (France) Emilia PERASSI – Università degli Studi di Milano (Italie) Ada SAVIN – Université de Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines (France) Marian SEMILLA-­DURAN – Université de Lyon (France) Victoria TORRES – Universität zu Köln (Allemagne) Abril TRIGO – The Ohio State University (États-­Unis) Kristine VANDEN BERGHE – Université de Liège (Belgique) Christilla VASSEROT – Université de Paris III (France)

Titres de la collection Vol.  15 – Marie-­Arlette Darbord, Outras Margens  /Autres Marges. A vitalidade dos espaços de língua portuguesa / La vitalité des espaces de langue portugaise, 2017. Vol.  14 – Rita Olivieri-­Godet (dir.), Cartographies littéraires du Brésil actuel. Espaces, acteurs et mouvements sociaux, 2016. Vol. 13 – Ana Gallego Cuiñas, Christian Estrade & Fatiha Idmhand (eds.), Diarios latinoamericanos del siglo XX, 2016. Vol.  12 – Fatiha Idmhand, Cécile Braillon-­Chantraine, Ada Savin  & Hélène Aji (dir.), Les Amériques au fil du devenir. Écritures de l’altérité, frontières mouvantes, 2016. Vol. 11 – Andrea Perdigón Torres, La littérature obstinée. Le roman chez Juan José Saer, Ricardo Piglia et Roberto Bolaño, 2015. Vol. 10 – Cécile Chantraine Braillon, Fatiha Idmhand & Norah Dei-­Cas Giraldi (dir.), Théâtre contemporain dans les Amériques. Une scène sous la contrainte, 2015. Vol. 9 – Carmen de Mora & Alfonso García Morales (eds.), Viajeros, diplomáticos y exiliados Escritores hispanoamericanos en España (1914–1939) – Vol. III, 2014. Vol. 8 – Zilá Bernd & Norah Dei-­Cas Giraldi (dir.), Glossaire des mobilités culturelles, 2014. Vol. 7 – Michel Boeglin (dir.), Exils et mémoires de l’exil dans le monde ibérique – Exilios y memorias del exilio en el mundo ibérico. (XIIe-­XXIe siècles) – (siglos XII-­XXI), 2014. Vol. 6 – Kristine Vanden Berghe (ed.), La Revolución mexicana. Miradas desde Europa, 2014. Vol. 5 – Flores Célia Navarro, Mélanie Létocart-­Araujo & Dominique Boxus (eds.), Déplacements culturels : migrations et identités - Desplazamientos culturales: migraciones e identidades, 2013. Vol. 4 – Ana Gallego Cuiñas & Erika Martínez (eds.), Queridos todos. El intercambio epistolar entre escritores hispanoamericanos y españoles del siglo XX, 2013.

Vol.  3 – Oscar Brando, Cécile Chantraine Braillon, Norah Dei-­Cas Giraldi & Fatiha Idmhand (eds.), Navegaciones y regresos. Lugares y figuras del desplazamiento, 2013. Vol. 2 – Carmen de Mora & Alfonso García Morales (eds.), Viajeros, diplomáticos y exiliados. Escritores hispanoamericanos en España (1914–1939) – Tomo I y II, 2012. Vol. 1 – Kristine Vanden Berghe (ed.), El retorno de los galeones. Literatura, arte, cultura popular, historia, 2011.

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