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Errant maternity: threatening femininity in Caribbean discourses of family, nation, and revolution

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Errant maternity: threatening femininity in Caribbean discourses of family, nation, and revolution

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Content Errant Maternity Threatening Femininity in Caribbean Discourses of Family, Nation, and Revolution by Sarah Skillen A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Spanish and Latin American Studies) August 2020 Copyright 2020 Sarah Skillen ii For Mama, Rad, and Mansky. You gave me the love and support to be boldly vulnerable and radically open. And for Papi. iii Acknowledgements I want to begin by saying that all the glory and honor of this be to God, my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. When my strength failed and spirit quavered, Your love endured. You directed my path and gave me courage, even when I felt that I stumbled. Thank you. This has been a long journey, and these pages could never suffice to give thanks for all the people, all the gestures of kindness, that have brought me to this day. I am immensely grateful for my dissertation committee: Dr. Edwin Hill, Dr. Natalie Belisle, Dr. Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, and especially Dr. Roberto Igancio Díaz. Professor Díaz has been a mentor and guide throughout my dissertation project and helped me to visualize my path as a PhD student before I had even applied to the program at USC. It was an absolute pleasure to work with him these years. Roberto helped me to grow in confidence as a scholar, teacher, and writer. The lessons of curiosity and openness that he taught me will continue to reverberate through my research and classrooms. I am thankful for the time and contributions of each of these professors. Their generosity and attention has helped to shape this project and the future of my inquiry. I also want to thank the many other professors who have influenced me and helped me to grow as a scholar. Julián Gutierrez-Albilla first introduced me to the work of Bracha Ettinger, which has been central to my understanding of maternity and relation. I am also indebted to Erin Graff Zivin who has read most of my work and who—from the beginning—partnered with us to become more effective researchers and to professionalize ourselves for lasting careers in academia. I am also thankful for Goretti Prieto Botana, who helped me to develop my pedagogy and made me the teacher I am today, and for my first year professors: Olivia Harrison, Natania Meeker, and Panivong Norindr. They helped me find my feet and my voice in those first semesters. I am immensely grateful to each of the professors in the Comparative Studies in iv Literature and Culture Doctoral Program who helped to evolve my thinking and engaged with my work. Growing up, I was enamored of my family’s Cuban heritage. I lived for the stories my grandparents and their cousins told. I absorbed all the history and cultural artifacts I could. Finally, I got to experience Cuba for myself in 2014. Then I had the opportunity to work with Professor Ivette Miriam Gómez. She mentored me as an instructor and opened the doors to Cuba for me. It was a privilege to TA for Ivette. Those trips and the experiences we had in the island changed my perspective and helped me to grow in intimacy with my family’s homeland. This sense of exile and belonging flows through the pages of this dissertation. The work of dissertating is often more than research and writing. There were myriad moments when a snag or a bump in the road could have derailed the entire project. I would not have made it this far without the help of Katherine Chan Guevarra, Bertha Arce, Amelia Acosta, and Andrea Parra. I owe each of them so much for the way they helped me navigate the course with patience and understanding. And also, thank you, Mr. Patrick Irish, who has always been so kind and cheered me up while waiting for my qualifying exam results. I was also blessed to be surrounded by an amazing cohort of graduate students. Working in the Spanish Assistant Lecturer office became a space for creativity and therapy. My friends and colleagues in the years ahead of me shared their insights and wisdom, helping me to better understand the path forward. I want especially to thank Vanessa Ovalle Perez, Jackie Sheean, and Nike Nivar. They have been constant companions, and I am truly grateful for their friendship, honesty, and support. I look forward to our future labor together. I also owe thanks to the undergraduate professors who first spoke to me about applying to PhD programs, wrote letters of recommendation, and explained to me some of the mysteries of v this vocation: Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Dr. Maria Rosa Olivera Williams, and Dr. Thomas Anderson. This would not have been possible without the generous financial support that I received to attend conferences and complete research. This support came in many forms, and I want to recognize the Del Amo Foundation; the Graduate School’s fellowships and research travel awards; the Graduate School’s Provost’s Fellowship, Russell Endowed PhD Fellowship, the Research Enhancement Fellowship, and the Final Year Fellowship. Funding from the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Program also supported much of my travel and research. I also want to recognize the collections and scholars at the Archivo General de Indias, the Archives Nationales D’Outre-Mer, the Archives Départementales de la Martinique, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Additionally, I found wonderful camaraderie and exchange of ideas within the Latin American Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and the Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas, which will be publishing an article related to my second chapter in the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. My staunchest supporters, emotionally and spiritually, have been my family. I am overwhelmingly grateful for all my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. I am especially grateful for my parents and my brother. You have all walked with me every step of the way. My mom has listened to my daily phone calls and fears about the dissertation process. My dad has read emails and commiserated with me. My little brother has made me laugh and taken my phone calls when I felt overwhelmed. I wrote this dissertation fully aware of how inextricable one’s self can be from a myriad of others. And I don’t entirely know how we did it, but my parents, brother, and I all somehow made it through the final drafts of this dissertation and the defense vi while quarantined together for three months during COVID-19. I will be forever thankful for their support and encouragement through those long weeks. This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, my abuelo, mi Papi, José Antonio Samartin. Papi died in January 2019. It still breaks my heart to write this. He was a wonderful, loving man, a man fiercely dedicated to his family and who cared deeply for everyone around him. As I was beginning to research and outline my dissertation, he listened to my plans and shared books with me. They were the books that he had brought with him from Cuba as a young man. I owe him gratitude not just for being a wonderful grandfather, but also for his many contributions to my bibliography and analysis. I also want to thank my Abuela, Tania Samartin, who after losing the partner of her life, invited me into her home to live with her for the last year of my dissertation, even as she struggled with her grief. In the Fall of 2019, I lost my other grandfather, Dr. Ralph Skillen. He was thrilled to have another doctor in the family and listened with sincere interest to my descriptions of travel and research. I will miss him, and I hope he is proud of me. I also hope that these words of thanks reach Mima, my great-grandmother, Abuela Blanca, who was a teacher in the Cuban countryside, a lover of literature, and a guardian over her family. Que descansen en paz. Finally, I offer my thanks to the many close friends who gave me places to stay and welcomed me into their homes when I passed through for conferences, especially Lauren Henderson. I know I asked a lot of her at times, but she always offered her home as safe refuge in my travels. Writing a dissertation can be lonely, and finding community makes it bearable. For this I am grateful to my Church community, everyone in Trinity Young Adult Ministry at Holy Family, and the friendship and prayers of Marisa Moonilal. vii Just as this dissertation argues for radical relationality, it becomes evident that writing a dissertation is not accomplished in isolation. Without the inspiration and involvement of each of these scholars, confidants, and allies none of this would have been possible. Thank you. viii Table of Contents Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...ix Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Ultra Amar: Legitimacy and the Family in Nineteenth Century Cuba and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab………………..…………………………………20 Chapter 2: Estranged Mother: José Martí, the Matrixial Father in Exile………………………...85 Chapter 3: Screeching Love: The Mother Tongue and Mothering Bodies in French Antillean Women’s Literature………………………………………………………….138 Chapter 4: Flowering Corpse: Decay and the Body of the Mother in Rosario Ferré’s Work and Archive………………………...…………………………………………….200 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...261 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………267 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………..288 ix Abstract Errant Maternity draws upon maternal relation within the Spanish and French Caribbean to problematize structures of national and familial legitimacy and belonging. I argue that the presence and rejection of the mother within Caribbean literature and culture reveals a relation that interlinks the distinct geo-linguistic entities of the Caribbean and complicates paternal myths of filiation. What this research contributes to the field of Caribbean studies is an understanding of the unifying threads of slavery, gender, and colonialism that run through the body of the Caribbean mother. The dissertation begins with a study of the Cuban, abolition novel Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, read through and against nineteenth-century legal testimonies either claiming or denying paternal legitimation. From there I discuss José Martí’s maternal writing in exile and demonstrate the ways in which his poetics function to disintegrate the borders between the national body, the individual, and the reader. The second half of Errant Maternity deals with the question of failed independence and the rise of territorialization in the French and Spanish Caribbean of the twentieth century. I begin by engaging the work of Maryse Condé and the writing of illusory, maternal genealogies in Guadeloupe. From there, I look to the work and personal archive of Rosario Ferré to interrogate questions of maternal decadence in Puerto Rico. This dissertation cuts across centuries and island boundaries to make the claim that the mother in the Caribbean resists fictions of legitimacy and places us in a relationality that transverses borders. 1 Introduction “Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshipped. He said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ ~ Job 1:20-21 1 “Habían dos hermanitos Compartiendo un pedacito Porque eran muy pobrecito Y no tenían ni mamá” ~ Rita Indiana y los Misterios, “Da pa lo do” 2 In the spaces between islands, water surges. Below the swell of water, volcanoes and tectonic activity push the ocean floor towards the surface. Each island of the Caribbean, standing alone and wreathed in water both crystalline and turbid, is connected along the vast ocean shelf of the Caribbean plate. Waves meet these volcanic and sandy beaches sometimes with violence and sometimes with a gentle caress. This sand, coral macerated by parrot fish and the tide, has its own stories. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, coral was the product of seaweed that had been acted upon by the force of Medusa’s severed head: The victorious hero cleansed his hands in the water they drew for him. Fearing to bruise the Gorgon’s snake-covered head on the hard sand, he softened the ground with leaves and covered it over with seaweed, to serve as a mat for the head of Medusa, the daughter of Phorcys. The fronds which were fresh and still abundant in spongy pith absorbed the force of the Gorgon and hardened under her touch, acquiring a strange new stiffness in all the stems and the foliage. […] Coral even today preserves this identical property: contact with air induces its hardness and what was a flexible shoot under water is turned to rock on the ocean’s surface 3 1 Job 1: 20-21, The Holy Bible, 595-596. 2 Rita Indiana y Los Misterios, “Da pa lo do,” El Juidero (2010). 3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, “Book 4,” 168. 2 Medusa, once beautiful, is turned by the sea god’s rape into a monstrous creature, one upon whom men fear to gaze. Now beheaded and turned to a trophy by Perseus, he places her head upon the seaweed, to cushion his prize. Her power exudes even in death and turns the seaweed into coral and sand, the shore that defines the island’s borders, at the space where water and land meet. This violation of the woman’s body, becomes a kind of founding violation that long precedes the invasion and enslavement of the Caribbean islands. Her monstrosity is met by another mother of the island: Sycorax, the witch mother of Caliban in William Shakespeare’s allegory of European colonization of the New World, The Tempest (1611). Reimagined in 1969 by Aimé Césaire as a postcolonial critique, Caliban resists his enslavement by Prospero, and when asked what he would be without Prospero, Caliban responds: “Sans toi? Mais tout simplement le roi! Le roi de l’île! Le roi de mon île, que je tiens de Sycorax, ma mère.” 4 These monstrous mothers of the islands, of their shores and of their colonized peoples, stand at the slippery shore of relation and signification. Bringers of death and life, beauty and monstrosity, the island’s body and magic, they offer a gesture towards and glance at the anxiety of the origin, of the possibility that these island’s borders are not so easily closed as they appear. The island is perforated at its ports, exploited in colonization and trade. The monstrous mothers of the island are forgotten and expelled to make way for a more permanent and patriarchal closure of her lands. The sandy shores are eroded, and the virginal beach is an illusion. The erosion and the slippage of the shore, the movement and overlapping of bodies, is what Bracha Ettinger paints in her supplementary matrixial relation, the maternal as a supplement to the Lacanian, phallogocentric model of signification which must deny the feminine to arrive at language. Elissa 4 Césaire, Une tempête, 25. See translation by Richard Miller: “Without you? I’d be the king, that’s what I’d be, the King of the Island. The King of the Island given me by my mother, Sycorax” (Tempest, 17). 3 Marder writes that “To be born is to be born into language and to be exiled from the mother,” 5 but an exile—however permanent—always bears its traces, the sense of non-belonging and loss. Ettinger asserts that there is a borderspace, the insufferable indeterminacy of the exilic border between the I and the non-I, which are co-constitutive of each other. The I is formed in its relation to what it is not, just as the mother comes into being by her relation with the child. The heroic father of the island, slayer of Medusa and subjugator of Sycorax’s child, must do away with these troublesome mothers, because their very existence is a threat. This feminine danger of incursion, the memory of her violation, is a threat to the dream of a properly ordered border. Instead, she reminds us of a time when the island’s bodies were linked and that link was severed. In her introduction to Ettinger’s work, The Matrixial Borderspace (2006), Judith Butler writes: “Bodies are up against each other here, not yet individuated, not fully […] The matrixial is what we guard against when we shore up the claims of identity.” 6 Like islands appear circumscribed at their borders, at the kiss of waves upon the sand, subject bodies also appear individuated and autonomous in the spaces between them. This exilic distance is illusory and points always to the phantasm of relation, that first imminence. In the cutting of the umbilical cord, a link is severed, while its trace remains. I am not reading the Caribbean as a new cosmology, but rather, the Caribbean—and islands—as a particularly interesting site to read relation and the postcolonial. The maternal specifically encourages us to imagine the many metaphors of conquest and nation formation that have relied on images of family and nation to justify their claims. Metaphors of the mother abound in the construction of colonial societies: la madre tierra, la madre patria, la mère patrie, and Marianne. Each of these mothers performs a very un-maternal function. She stands in the 5 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 196. 6 Butler, “Foreword: Bracha’s Eurydice,” The Matrixial Borderspace, ix-xi. 4 place of those other mothers, disturbing mothers, and her role is to distract, to reassure us that the maternal phantom has been conquered and subjugated to the needs of the institution. She is a paternalized mother who safeguards the law of legitimacy and filiation, but if you look at her shadow, you are reminded of the maternal specter, that impossible-to-shore-up differentiation that she so staunchly denies as she wraps herself in the flag of the colonizer. In this dissertation, I argue that the maternal relation seethes in the spaces between bodies, those of the island and those of the subject, to trouble this space of differentiation. She posits for us an ethics and politics of relation that is insubordinate to that of paternal filiation and the Law of the Father. The maternal is not a figure that will be traced, but a relation. It is a relation that exists in our understanding of language and subjectivity, just as it exists in the relation between bodies and corporeality. Through readings of archival texts on legitimation and personhood, as well as literary texts of the Caribbean canon, I argue that there is a maternal specter that is constantly at war and being warred against in these pages. The maternal takes away from or adds to the linearity of paternal filiation. She is the dissonance in the construction of the Symbolic, of the paternal line that would bequeath subjecthood. Her exclusion from the Symbolic order is always incomplete and leaves behind it the trace of her presence. In Poetics of Relation (1990), 7 Édouard Glissant explains filiation in terms of a mythical line of inheritance, the land being passed one generation to the next by the conquistador, conqueror, and colonizer who must justify his right to the land. 8 He writes that legitimation of this colonizer’s hold upon the islands depends upon this fictive linearity, upon a transparency of lineage, but instead there persists an opacity resistant to the totalizing effects of the hegemonic order. Within this opacity, I read the maternal relation, a constant muddying of the waters of legitimation. 7 First published in French in 1990 by Gallimard. 8 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 138. 5 The construction of legitimizing myths is always perturbed by the circularity of the maternal presence, the womb and the pregnant belly. 9 Glissant writes that the imaginary—the pre-linguistic space of the mother in the Lacanian system—has “a certain form in space: I spoke of circularity (imitating, perhaps, those curvatures of space-time that Einstein invented) and of volume, the spherical nature of concepts, of various poetics and the realities of the chaos-monde, all of which reconstitutes (for me) the image of the mother planet, an Earth that would be primordial. But mothering is excluded from this symbolic system—at least, I believe that it is.” 10 This dissertation will explore Glissant’s “I believe that it is” and ask after this excluded mother and why the Caribbean islands continue to resuscitate her lurking presence. Why is it that the myth of legitimacy must deny her, and what does she effect in this very denial? If the border can only be assured through her denial, why are island borders the hardest to shore up? This doubt as to her presence and her action is the gap in the door of the Symbolic that would hope to shut out the mother. Throughout the literature of conquest the land is repeatedly described as a mother and a womb for insemination. She is reduced in these images of world and body, to land and the 9 In her 1995 work, Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock writes that Christopher Columbus described the Caribbean as having the shape of a woman’s breast, with a nipple at its center: “toward which he was slowly sailing. Columbus’ image feminizes the earth as a cosmic breast, in relation to which the epic male hero is a tiny, lost infant, yearning for the Edenic nipple […] the female body is figured as marking the boundary of the cosmos and the limits of the known world, enclosing the ragged men, with their dreams of pepper and pearls, in her indefinite, oceanic body” (21-22). McClintock goes on to ask: “What is the meaning of this persistent gendering of the imperial unknown? As European men crossed the dangerous thresholds of their known worlds, they ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries. Female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone” (24). She describes ships as “threshold objects” (McClintock 24), and we will see the ways in which these threshold objects play a role in the perforation and porosity of borders that become the fixation for the paternal labor of shoring-up. Referring to McClintock’s description of the scene in which the native woman weaponizes the desire of the colonizer, Guillermina De Ferrari writes: “Although the erotic scene provides the stage for the most dramatic reversal of forces, it is neither the only one nor the richest site for the personal manipulation of symbolic power. Bodies lie at the heart of what Ann Laura Stoler calls ‘the affective grid of colonial politics’ (2002, 7) […] in the embodiment of colonialism as a constantly negotiated vulnerability” (De Ferrari, Vulnerable States, 26). 10 Glissant, Poetics, 154. 6 primordial origin, because if she can be made a figure, if she herself can be shored up into more of the Same, then she can be evicted from the scene of our coming-into-being. She is denied presence in the present, and is without time in the sense that the prehistorical is without time, because it is without language and the sense of time that language supplies. 11 Like Judith Butler’s conception of the incompleteness of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, we find that this lack arises not in the absolute absence of the mother, but in our irrecuperable relation to the maternal. Stories are created to fill in these gaps and to guard against the uncertainty introduced by her undeniable presence in a story that should have been one of autonomy. Western ontology finds a comforting solution in the Father, because perhaps he can do what the mother could not. He can give us a name and give us back to ourselves, where the mother seeks to tear us apart. To try to access the maternal void of our birth is to risk falling into the bottomless pit of relation. We might lose ourselves in there. This fearsome cavern of the maternal rises up whenever we look back. So, we content ourselves with our fictions of filiation, the linearity of a historical time that can be accounted for. 12 How then can we approach her? If she is beyond language, how do we make the mother speak, let alone write? Is she reduced to the animal sounds of a groan? Jacques Rancière writes in Dis-agreement (1999) that this differentiation is where politics arise, “We could say that the difference is marked precisely in the logos that separates the discursive articulation of a grievance from the phonic articulation of a groan,” 13 in the moment when one only given the 11 Working through Heidegger and Arendt, Anne O’Byrne writes of the tendency of philosophers to regard birth as “merely natural and therefore not an appropriate object of philosophical reflection […] Such a response often relies on a naturalized understanding of nature as a brute and determinate given from which thought must extricate itself; appealing to nature as a pure and privileged given would rely on the same mistake, and it is not what I aim to do here” (Natality, 8). 12 See Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005. 13 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 2. Originally published as La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie, Éditions Galilée (1995). 7 power of groaning—the voice without speech—makes itself heard. So I ask again, can we—or should we—force the mother to speak? Can we ask her to confess her trauma and her melancholy? Is she object only, the object of our discursive desire for breast and to return to the womb of our creation? What, then, would be the form of a speaking mother? Is it possible that she has always spoken, and that her untimely and phantasmal appearances are part of a politics of the maternal? 14 Andrew Parker explains in The Theorist’s Mother (2012), that even Derrida did not see a place for the mother in philosophy, but instead posited himself as a kind of grandmother to a futural, post-philosophy in which mothers could take part in thinking. This dissertation opens itself to the possibility of an already thinking mother. It engages the phantom of maternal relation, her destabilizing force in the narrative of nation and family, and looks to the troubling of the waters that occurs at her feet, at the point where bodies are rubbed raw in their contact. And so the mother cannot be relegated or excluded towards non-time and death, or before-life. We are formed in relation to this (m)other. 15 If we are formed and continue to be formed in relation to this Other, then the maternal is no longer relegated to absolute absence or to a time beyond time, but neither is she the here and now. 16 The desire for an autonomous and fully differentiated self results in what Butler calls the “founding repudiation” and for Julia Kristeva bears the name of “abjection.” Judith Butler’s discussion of sex in Bodies that Matter (1993) reveals that the exclusion of the mother necessary for Western metaphysics, is haunted by 14 Andrew Parker, The Theorist’s Mother (2012), 5. 15 O’Byrne writes, “birth, in contrast, reveals us as being in relation” (Natality, 9). 16 O’Byrne argues that this indeterminate space of relating will always be present just as it is absent: “Maternity, in addition, requires the opening of a space within the woman’s body that is not precisely identifiable as her body but that does make it a maternal body. Having shared in the generation of difference, the maternal body withholds its identity in order to make possible the development of another identity in the course of the fetal struggle to discern self and non-self. It is a struggle that is not resolved at the moment of birth and may never be resolved” (Natality, 145-146). 8 that very exclusion. 17 This haunting of the self by the abjected mother can also be understood as a relation, our relation to an “uncognized other” that is slightly beyond our access and yet always imminent. For Ettinger, these repudiations and abjections of the mother are never complete, and leave behind traces of relation, which she calls the “borderspace of encounter.” 18 These links— which I argue never disappear entirely nor are they ever only prior—between the I and the non-I, arise throughout the writing of the family and of islands. This non-mythic, non-originary mother, stands at the borderspace of relation. In legitimacy, she disturbs the Father’s right to Name; and in nation formation, she interrupts the line of filiation. This maternal relating is described by Ettinger as compassionate, as a coming-into-being with and through our relating to the other of the mother. This compassionate encounter with the mother is still anxiety-provoking. In the book of Job, we see a connection made between the womb and tomb of the mother’s body. In the moment when he is told that his children have all been killed and his property and livestock robbed and slaughtered, Job declares that he will return to the womb naked. The womb is a grave. Without differentiation from the mother, we risk psychosis. 19 Death and Mother collide in Derrida’s Circumfession (1993), his response to 17 Butler writes, “This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (Bodies, xiii). 18 Ettinger writes, “I have suggested that if—alongside traces of objects—we conceive of traces of links and relations, form the angle of a co-emerging I and non-I prior to the I versus others, there arises a different kind of passageway proper to these links […] This different, other passage I have termed metramorphosis. It draws a nonpsychotic yet beyond-the-phallus connection between the feminine and creation […] I wish to create a hiatus in the ‘original register’ [‘matrix’] by spinning the usual connotation of the uterus itself—considered as a basic passive space, an imaginary ‘only interior’ locus—toward that of a dynamic borderspace of active/passive co-emergence with-in and with-out the uncognized other. The matrix is not a symbol for an invisible, unintelligible, originary, passive receptable onto which traces are engraved by the originary and primary processes; rather, it is a concept for a transforming borderspace of encounter of the co-emerging I and the neither fused nor rejected uncognized non-I” (Matrixial, 64). 19 Marder writes that we are overcome by our anxiety towards birth (in the Age of, 81). Toxic maternity and maternal stagnation lead to death, the freezer: “an ambiguous and ambivalent figure of both life and death: It is simultaneously a womb, a tomb, a stomach, and a crypt […] this radical confusion between birth and death” (Marder, in the Age of, 25-26). 9 Geoffrey Bennington’s exegesis of his oeuvre. This text addresses the question of the author’s authority over and paternity towards the text, echoing Derrida’s work in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and miming Saint Augustine’s confessions and the saint’s dialogue with his mother, Saint Monica. Derrida’s mother is on her deathbed, and he approaches her in the viscous relation occurring on the page. His authority over text is compromised, just as his authority over self is compromised by the mother, a relationship that is “nonsuturable” where the cut is never complete and yet remains unclosed. 20 Compassion, love, and hurting are intermingled in this crossing of borders, between the word, the writer, and their maternal relation. The matrix of writing is a placental barrier that allows toxin and nourishment to pass through to the generating life or un-life within. As a boundary, this fleshy skin barrier is a porous membrane. It protects the body from the world, but is a fragile barrier and allows the world to seep into the body. In this way, the question of race becomes crucial for our understanding of denial and repudiation. Alexander Weheliye develops the concept of “racializing assemblages” and habeas viscus to address the limitations of biopolitics in its elision of race, and to understand the way subjects are constructed and differentiated along racialized lines, wherein race is not an absolute but a violent system for differentiating the ways in which subjects are seen and heard. 21 Similarly, Butler explains that our Western approach to language and subjectivity relies upon the “heterosexual imperative,” 20 In his sixth entry, Derrida addresses the paternal law that presides over writing and comes into play between himself and Bennington, whom he addresses as “G.” He describes this relationship between writer and critic as a “jealous scene” (Circumfession, 31) in which Derrida feels as if he is “fighting him over the right to deprive me of my events” (Circumfession, 32). He considers the possibility of “signing” his work, when his writing is being taken up by another, and so: “when will this giving birth have begun, like a ‘logic’ stronger than I, at work and verifiably so right down to so-called aleatory phenomena, the least systemic, the most undecideable of the sentences I’ve made or unmade, this matrix nevertheless opens, leaving room for the unanticipatable singularity of the event, it remains by essence, by force, nonsaturable, nonsuturable, invulnerable, therefore only extensible and transformable, always unfinished, for even if I wanted to break his machine, and in doing so hurt him, I couldn’t do so, and anyway I have no desire to do so, I love him too much” (Circumfession, 34-36). 21 In Extravagant Abjection (2010), Darieck Scott looks to the deployment of “abjection” as the means of “maintaining the boundaries of the (white male) ego” (Extravagant, 4). 10 which becomes clearly delineated in Kristeva’s theorization of the phallus and the abjection of the mother. 22 Just so, if we attempt to break away entirely from this heterosexual imperative, overthrow the domination of the phallus, the break can only be clumsy and will always be haunted by that which it denies. We are already formed by this discourse of phallogocentrism, abjection, and repudiation of the maternal. As such, this study of the maternal directly confronts the “absence” which is not. These exclusions by which we define and delimit discourse, subjectivity, and nations, arise in the site of maternal relation. Understood in this way, the repudiation of the maternal makes clear not only that certain exclusions are made necessary for the maintenance of the border, but how and along what lines these borders are drawn. This is why the maternal is a pivotal force when addressing issues of race and sexuality in the Caribbean. The repudiation of the maternal is the site at which various abjections have occurred, and continue to occur, for the shoring up of the borders of a white, heteronormative, nuclear system of family and nation. Darieck Scott writes: “the constellation of tropes that we call identity, body, race, nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary.” 23 These tropes rely on the fiction of an unassailable border, without which they cannot stand. For this reason, Guillermina De Ferrari argues in Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (2007) that vulnerability along the lines of sexed, raced, sickened, and embodied Others becomes the fodder for national identification. It is only by defining itself in opposition to these Others that the 22 In Powers of Horror (1980, First published in French in 1980 by Éditions du Seuil), Kristeva writes, “The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling. The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (or being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm—in other words, the problem she has with the phallus that her father or her husband stands for—is not such as to help the future subject leave the natural mansion” (Powers of Horror, 13). 23 Scott, Extravagant, 9. 11 nation can declare its existence. Scott writes that abjection occurs to assure that modes of subjectivity rely on a white, heterosexual axis, but that while there is no inherent “truth” or necessity to this, it remains the foundation upon which our systems of representation have been wrought. 24 Of course, people—including the people who belong to the groups and societies discussed herein—live and die and love without worrying over these questions, what Scott calls “the lie.” Still, these questions remain a vibrant and central element to the field of literary studies and have shaped the contours of our cultural and social understandings, whether we participate in them directly or not. For this reason, I find it necessary to intervene in this discussion of gender and sexuality and the denial / exclusion / absence of the feminine, which is truly anything but. Scott argues that sexuality is always a way of speaking about conquest. 25 It is the conquest of the self by the Other and Other over the self. The maternal body is always already a conquered body, first by the lover and then by the child. The maternal body is not a body that belongs to itself, but exists only in relation to an-other, just as the author/reader only exists in relation to the text. For the field of Caribbean studies as a whole, this has some striking implications. Weheliye argues that the study of diaspora runs a serious risk in its adherence to the concepts of nation and language as a kind of origin for the diasporic principal: “national borders and/or linguistic differences are in danger of entering the discursive record as ontological absolutes, rather than as structures and institutions that have served again and again to relegate black subjects to the status of western modernity’s nonhuman other.” 26 De Ferrari also challenges the 24 Scott writes, “There is of course no necessary connection between black people and sexual ex/repression, just as there is no definite centrality of sexuality to subjectivity or to personhood or to the ‘truth.’ But these connections are rife, and thickly imbricated, in the stew of our cultures. As a consequence I am drawn to them rather than to the laudable attempt to surmount them” (Extravagant, 7). 25 Scott argues that “Sexuality is used against us, and sexual(ized) domination is in part what makes us black, though sexuality is a mode of conquest and often cannot avoid being deployed in a field of representation without functioning as an introjection of historical defeat” (Extravagant, 9). 26 Weheliye, Habeas, 31. 12 reification of national/linguistic demarcations that occurs when we trace the literary and political movements of the Caribbean: “it is striking that most of the theories that seek to reach a deep understanding of the entire region are not in conversation with each other. This becomes dramatically evident when one considers that the master tropes of the predominant theories, mestizaje, métissage, creolization, transculturación, and créolité, are both surprisingly similar to each other and yet operate as though they had been formulated in complete isolation, each maintaining what seems like a parallel trajectory to the others.” 27 As such, the exclusions that demarcate race and sexual difference, are also at work in the demarcations between institutional fields. Approaching the maternal relation should allow us to examine and bring into conversation national and institutional discourses that have been estranged. Through a reading of the maternal, this dissertation will make an urgent inquiry across geo-linguistic borders, revealing the various ways in which these borders have been constructed upon the body of sexed and raced mothers. In The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), J. Michael Dash looks to the various instantiations of Caribbean and American studies within academia. Beginning with an epigraph by Aimé Césaire that mentions “maternal anxiety,” 28 he discusses the terms used to define our field: New World, which remains Eurocentric and ignores “centuries of Amerindian civilization in the Americas”; American studies, which often elides Latin America or the Caribbean; and World Literature, which claims a totalizing knowledge and continues to posit everything in its scope as the “other” to English literary studies. 29 I am arguing 27 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 16. 28 The epigraph reads: “’The archipelago arched like the anxious desire to deny itself, as if it were a maternal anxiety to protect the delicate tenuity that separates one from the other America’ –Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” (Dash, The Other, 1). 29 Dash, The Other, 1-2. Dash writes, “A New World perspective is not the product of a polarizing, exclusivist politics or an attempt to create a new cultural enclave, but rather concerns itself with establishing new connections, not only among the islands of the archipelago but also exploring the region in terms of the Césairean image of that frail, delicate umbilical cord that holds the Americas together. A New World approach is also being proposed 13 that the maternal goes a step further towards breaking down the colonial-linguistic divisions closely guarded within academia and the institution of the university. While it might appear that the utter destruction of all borders is the tantalizing solution to this problem, Dash reminds us that if we fail to acknowledge certain regional particularities then we create the erasure of these particularities. For Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the ethical encounter with the Other in “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite” (1993), this would amount to the reduction of the Other to the Same, or my reductive summation of the other’s existence for me. It would imply that the self and the Other are coeval and coterminal, instead of co-constitutive and differentiating. The self and Other are created in their relation to each other, in the exclusionary cut of one from other, and they are perpetually haunted by this presence of the thing they would make absent from the self. We risk annihilation if we deny all differentiation and exclusion. I also reiterate that the goal of a study of the maternal relation is not to arrive at fusion. The border does not disappear entirely, but the maternal illuminates the border and its ports of entry. The relation between mother, language and mother tongue—or the coloniality of a language—is further complicated and continues to resound in the former slave societies of the Caribbean. In La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (1989) 30 Antonio Benítez Rojo describes the genealogy of the Caribbean founded on slavery: “el Atlántico es hoy el Atlántico (con todas sus ciudades portuarias) porque alguna vez fue producto de la cópula de Europa—ese insaciable toro solar—con las costas del Caribe; el Atlántico es hoy el Atlántico –el against the background of a still prevalent tendency to fragment the Caribbean into zones of linguistic influence or ideologically determined categories” (Dash, The Other, 3). 30 Describing the work of Benítez Rojo, J. Michael Dash writes: “He rejects the phantasm that there is some way of establishing an essence, a stable synthesis, or any fundamental unity from this broken chain of islands; rather, he uses his reading of the deconstructive impulse in postmodern theory to elaborate on the Caribbean as a being always in motion, forever in a state of flux, not a fixed ground but an open field of signifiers” (Dash, The Other, 8). Dash continues from his discussion of Benitez Rojo to talk about Martí as one of the earliest and most influential writers to envision an American idea of the Caribbean and as a confrontation with North American expansionism (Dash, The Other, 9-10). 14 ombligo del capitalismo—porque Europa, en su laboratorio mercantilista, concibió el proyecto de inseminar la matriz caribeña con la sangre de África.” 31 This Caribbean womb—again the feminization of the land—is inseminated with African blood by the violation of capitalism and colonialism. Benítez Rojo carries the mother-Caribbean and father-Europe trope through his seminal work on the Caribbean. For Benítez Rojo, there is a paradoxical vacillation between the here and there, the acá and the allá of the colonial subject, wherein the subject finds itself shifting between the symbolic subjectification of the Law of the Father and the maternal imaginary wherein self and Other are not yet fully individuated. Ultimately for Benítez Rojo, the mother-Caribbean is violated and inseminated by the colonial Father through slavery and conquest. She, the Caribbean, is incapable of legitimizing her children, a function that only the colonizer can perform. The Caribbean is thus linked to this strange, slippery failure to legitimize itself. The Caribbean becomes a locus for the kinds of relation that arise within this dynamic. Along this archipelago, linguistic and colonial differences coincide and bump up against each other. They chafe. Between the distinct geo-linguistic and cultural developments of the Caribbean exist varying enunciations of femininity, masculinity, and the notions of legitimacy that are dependent upon them. In his 1971 essay “Caliban,” 32 Roberto Fernández Retamar postulates a specific kind of postcolonial legitimacy, founded on the masculinity of Caliban as opposed to Ariel, in which it is better to eat than be eaten. He encourages the men—never the women—of Latin America to take up arms against the European colonizer. This call is against one’s own vulnerability, that threatening feminine vulnerability that forces us to face the porosity of borders, the always incomplete fissure that undergirds our autonomy. Hortense J. Spillers also confronts the denial of 31 Benítez Rojo, La isla, 23. 32 First published as an essay in Casa de las Américas, No. 68, September-October 1971. 15 the feminine that occurs in the Caribbean, specifically noting the alienation that slavery imposed upon colonial subjectivity and the family. Spillers asks: “But what is the ‘condition’ of the mother? Is it the ‘condition’ of enslavement the writer means, or does he mean the ‘mark’ and the ‘knowledge’ of the mother upon the child that here translates into the culturally forbidden and impure? In an elision of terms, ‘mother’ and ‘enslavement’ are indistinct categories of the illegitimate inasmuch as each of these synonymous elements defines, in effect, a cultural situation that is father-lacking.” 33 By western cultural formulations, the father is still what is ultimately necessary for legitimacy and being. The lack of father incurred by the system of slavery, one in which violation and rape become the generating principal of the island, engenders an excessive presence of the mother. Spillers critiques this insistence upon the absent father that results in a move to deny the mother, who is deemed excessively present. Like Spillers and the writers who have followed her, I reject the absent father trope and turn instead to the movement of mothers complicating the fictions and legal scenes of familial legitimacy. This mother, meant to be absent, is also the disturbing quality, the insubordinating force enacted upon the father’s legitimacy-bearing condition. In a cultural system that demands the presence of the Father and the Father’s name, what can it mean for a child to be denied (by) this legitimating narrative? Here, I explore the case for legitimation and the ways in which the mother’s presence and her status disturb the paternal law. In its first chapter, “Ultra Amar: Legitimacy and the Family in Nineteenth Century Cuba and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab,” this dissertation takes up nineteenth-century cases for legitimation in Cuba alongside early antislavery literature. These cases for legitimacy, held in the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, detail the lives and status—both social and racial—of 33 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 80. 16 Cubans seeking to legitimize either themselves or their children. These cases interestingly problematize issues of property and propriety in the nineteenth century where a woman’s and a child’s personhood before the law depended entirely upon certain performances. The exclusion of specific kinds of embodiment are clearly delineated in these cases, with the mother’s failure residing at the heart of the problem. Also discussed in this chapter is the 1841 novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Written by an elite, white woman, this antislavery novel takes as its protagonist a young, mulato slave who falls in love with his master’s daughter. This story of forbidden love bears a close resemblance to the French novella Ourika (1824) by Claire de Duras. Looking at the masks adopted by these two women, I discuss legitimacy and the eruption of indecorous bodies—infertile bodies—into the scene of filiation. This chapter takes Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) as its primary interlocutor as I discuss the kinds of exclusion that take place for national and subjective consolidation. Each of these literary texts is framed by the confessional plea, an admission that also acts as a demand upon the reader. This chapter begins and ends by looking to Jacques Derrida’s Circumfession as a way of understanding the give and take of the exchange that is harbored in the confession. This relational mode of writing interpolates the reader in the same way that the legal testimonies of legitimation beg a response. In this way, the chapter engages its relational orientation as a reply to the textual demand that acts as a document of inheritance bequeathing to us our role as reader. In chapter two, “Estranged Mother: José Martí, the Matrixial Father in Exile,” I discuss José Martí’s maternal anxiety and maternal relation to the nation and child in his early political drama, Abdala (1869), and the book of poetry dedicated to his son, Ismaelillo (1882). These works fail to fall into the image of José Martí as national hero and martyr, and instead reveal to us a different Martí than the official one. I discuss José Martí’s maternal writing in exile and 17 demonstrate the ways in which this writing functions to disintegrate the borders between the national body, the individual, and the reader. First, Abdala subverts the reader’s expectation by delivering not the political epic that it promises, but a melodramatic dialogue between mother and son. The entire text takes place in the private quarters of the palace where the child endeavors to separate himself from the maternal body so that he may sally forth into battle. Instead, he dies in her arms, pierced and broken. The second text, Ismaelillo, is treated as the heralding forefather of modernismo. In this way, it can be identified as the progenitor of this uniquely Latin American literary movement. Instead of reading Martí’s Work, we read a maternal poetics in which the division between bodies is remarkably blurred upon the penetration of the threshold. This sensual work betrays Martí’s longing for the child from whom he has been separated by political exile. Martí’s maternal caresses and vulnerable awareness of the child’s imminence bring us to Bracha Ettinger and The Matrixial Borderspace (2006). While Ettinger’s theoretical framework relies upon the matrix as an originary site of relation, I look to the maternal as the continued bonds that exist between selves, where even exile is an acknowledgement of separation’s reliance upon the thing removed. A maternal reading of Martí opens new horizons to the study of his work, horizons that allow him to transgress the borders of paternity. In this way, I read the subversion of the canon by one of its most prominent Fathers. The second half of the dissertation deals with the question of failed independence and the rise of the Outre-Mer and the Ultra Mar. The dissertation performs the kind of uneven cut between colonization and independence that is exemplified by the departmentalization or territorialization of certain French and Spanish colonies. Full independence for the colony is never achieve, not for Cuba within the scope of this study, nor for the French départements d’outre-mer or for the Spanish colony, Puerto Rico. In its third chapter, the possibility of a legitimating narrative for 18 these overseas islands is continually disrupted by maternal eruptions into the narrative. Chapter three, “Screeching Love: The Mother Tongue and Mothering Bodies in French Antillean Women’s Literature,” primarily looks to the history of the mother’s mother as imagined by Maryse Condé in Victoire: les saveurs et les mots (2006). This novel refuses to confirm its own legitimacy, whether it is an act of invention or of investigation, and constantly doubles back on itself proposing alternatives to its own “truth.” Reading this in conversation with Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) and Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection (2010), I explore the phantasmatic recuperation and attractive lie of a maternal genealogy taking place in Condé’s novel. I also look to the ways in which Condé uses this novel to respond to the history of maternal genealogies in French Caribbean literature and the corpus of texts dealing with femininity and masculinity in the French postcolonial environment. Her work obliquely addresses the postcolonial theories of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire in order to trouble the masculine assumptions that undergird Antillean theories of alienation and liberation. Condé’s novel evades the trap of nostalgia and originary desire by disallowing the certainty of our reading. Instead, the grandmother’s history remains opaque as does our access to her story. This chapter, like Condé’s novel, traces a genealogy as it also figures its ultimate rupture and impossibility. By writing against the genealogical mode, questioning the truth propositions of scholarly research, and claiming gastronomy as writing, Condé turns to a futural compassion, a relation towards the maternal site of absence that is always as imminent as it is elusive. This writing in and through cooking, through the generation of maternal bodies, draws Condé’s reader in by the giving of the body as maternal ingestion. In my final chapter, “Flowering Corpse: Decay and the Body of the Mother in Rosario Ferré’s Work and Archive,” I read the sickly and diseased body of the mother. Here I look to the 19 writings and personal archive of Rosario Ferré to interrogate questions of maternal decadence in Puerto Rico. This moribund mother is eternally and infinitely proliferating as it dies in Rosario Ferré’s Maldito amor y otros cuentos (1986) and Papeles de Pandora (1976). In each of these texts, scenes of sickness and of melting, of disintegrating bodies, draw us to the conclusion. Death here is not finite or final, instead it is constant corruption, the corruptible boundary between the living and the dead. The living body can only understand itself in opposition to the dead body, and must maintain this boundary. Sick and dying bodies become the border at which the living body may delineate its-self. Instead, Ferré’s bodies are breaking apart and refusing this exclusionary principle. The dead mother against which the self can achieve subjectification continues to haunt the space of our living. The sick body, the undesirable body, becomes the Other against which the nation may define itself. Through Guillermina De Ferrari’s concept of the sick body as a border for society and the nation in Vulnerable States (2007), I read these rotting bodies and the excessive maternal body as an Other posited for male domination and inheritance of the land. While De Ferrari focuses on the sick body, I read the parallel between this and the pregnant body for an excluded and quarantined Other. However, this exclusion, as Ferré reminds us, is always incomplete. In Maldito amor, the mother’s deathbed testimony interrupts the familial legacy and haunts their legitimizing narrative. With this confession of illegitimacy and inheritance, we come full circle and return to the first chapter. This doubling back heralds the cyclical—never linear—and futural modes of the maternal relation. These excluded, abjected, repulsive bodies cannot be washed away. Their residue coats the scene of their expulsion, like a bad taste in the mouth. The mother’s dying voice is a spectral whisper that never quite disappears. 20 Chapter 1: Ultra Amar Legitimacy and the Family in Nineteenth Century Cuba and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab This, like all things, must be given a beginning. It is the way of telling stories, and it can hardly be deferred, but not all beginnings are truly an origin and many are belated. This is the beginning of a chapter about stories, just as it is a chapter about beginnings, though it can make no claim of access to the Truth of these beginnings, to the origin. In fact, the stories it tells precisely gesture towards the truths that are masked and constructed in the storytelling, whether it be stories told to entertain or to persuade. In his imitation of St. Augustine’s Confessions, Jacques Derrida circumfesses “making truth has no doubt nothing to do with what you call truth, for in order to confess, it is not enough to bring to knowledge, to make known what is, for example to inform you that I have done to death, betrayed, blasphemed, perjured.” 34 He writes that instead, the truth of confession, “the essential truth of avowal having therefore nothing to do with truth, but consisting, if, that is, one is concerned that it consist and that there be any, in asked-for pardon, in a request.” 35 His confession, and the closest it can arrive at truth, is in this request. The confessing body, the storytelling body, requests an audience, desires to be heard and read and responded to. This chapter is a kind of confession and also a response. We will begin with one genre of confession, a testimony made before the courts. Specifically, this chapter will look to the testimony of those seeking and denying the legitimation of children born outside of legal matrimony in early nineteenth-century Cuba. In some cases, it is the children themselves who reach out seeking to be recognized by a father and granted his name. In others, it is a mother, begging a man to save her and her daughter from the kind of 34 Bennington and Derrida, Circumfession, 48. 35 Bennington and Derrida, Circumfession, 48-49. 21 social death that results from an illegitimate birth. This type of testimony contests the beginning of life. It contests the origins, the birth of the child, and later the child’s naming. The second type is the deathbed confession: the confession made before God and loved ones. It is a different kind of emptying of the body, this time of the self’s soul rather than the soul of an-other. Two texts will be of particular interest here. The first is the Cuban novel Sab (1841), written by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. In this novel two confessions are told, both near the moment of death, one in blood and one in the quiet wasting of the body. This novel, however, has a predecessor, an earlier confessional novel that may perhaps have inspired it, that of Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1824). These, like the cases of legitimation, are confessions of illicit love. They are a request made to a listener, and as is the case in each, the listener comes far too late. Even so, this chapter will offer a response. It will follow these stories, and it will illuminate the fictions that are created of beginnings, the stories that are told of race and birth and death. I argue that these novels and these legal testimonies are the constructed truths that define the borders of families and of nations, that draw the dividing line between belonging and exclusion. Derrida remarks that his confessions are of violence done, of betrayal and blasphemy. He points to the ways in which these stories destroy even as they create, the ways in which our readings cannot hope to fulfill any desire for truth, but will always fail in their reading. They too are guilty of offenses, and so too is the writer in this particular act of telling. And yet, we are forced to respond. For Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with the face of the Other—like the encounter with the text—imposes a certain ethical demand, “‘You shall not kill’” 36 which “forbids me my conquest.” 37 This face, the face that greets us from the page, brings us into 36 Levinas, “Philosophy,” 109. 37 Levinas, “Philosophy,” 110. 22 encounter, 38 it invites—or rather requires—a response, drawing us into relation. 39 This is the call to reading, not rendering judgement upon a case for legitimation long since past or upon the motivations of the author, but rather opening up a new page that is aware of how little it can claim to know of these truths. Both Levinas and Derrida argue against a totalizing reading of the confession, one that claims to have the authority of dogma, but rather that our readings exist within a compassionate unknowability, a maternal embrace. The intention of these cases for legitimation is to claim the authority of the father, to either persuade the courts to demand his recognition or lift any impediment thereof. Similarly, Gómez de Avellaneda’s and Duras’s works explore the vagaries of racial and familial belonging in the nineteenth century, each with a view towards the proper progenitors of the national family. In each case, the mother’s womb becomes the contested site, whether the purity and the propriety of her womb were deserving of bearing the nation into being. Only a fatherly origin could perform such a function. The paternal performs the authorizing function, while the maternal is the murky, opaque space of unknowability, the stickiness of relation, of intercourse. This is why our reading must be maternal, must acknowledge the illusion inherent in these stories of origin. 40 38 For Levinas, the exact encounter is with the Infinite, the awareness of something utterly external to ourselves and irreducible to our taxonomies. In thinking of the Infinite, we do not reduce its alterity to an idea, or the Same, in that the very idea of the Infinite negates the I’s ability to conceptualize the Infinite: “the infinite is the radically, absolutely, other” (“Philosophy,” 107). Levinas points out that the understanding of the infinite does not come from within the philosopher (Plato, Descartes, etc.), but is “more” than the philosopher. It comes from an external experience of the Other. This infinite is not reducible to the distance between subject and object. A distance can be encapsulated within the Same, but the infinite exceeds all such attempts at conceptualization. It is the “epiphany,” the surprise, of the face of a truly exterior being, the resistance of the infinite. The other speaks and “its logos is: ‘You shall not kill’” (“Philosophy,” 109). The mind may seek to reduce the Infinite to an idea, but it will fail. This is Desire: the thought that “thinks more than it thinks” (“Philosophy,” 113). 39 Levinas describes this relation as the “fortunate meeting of fraternal souls that greet one another and converse. This situation is the moral conscience, the exposedness of my freedom to the judgment of the Other (l’Autre). It is a disalignment which has authorized us to catch sight of the dimension of height and the ideal in the gaze of him to whom justice is due” (“Philosophy,” 119). 40 In her work Infertilities (2001), Robin Truth Goodman writes of the relation between capital, sexual politics, and the family: “in an era of globalization, the family cannot any longer be thought of as the root principle on which economic policy is structured. Even as it is caused by capital shifts in mobility, the coming apart of the family enters culture as a moral problem, usually about women. The current foregrounding of debates about, say, gay and lesbian rights, abortion, or maternal surrogacy brings out female infertility as a hidden thematic setting the tone of much 23 This first story, the story of a birth—or in this case of numerous births—begins somewhere in the middle, with the signature of a woman authorizing the telling of her story without the authority to do so. The signature is written at the end of a letter sent to the Governor of Havana in 1818: Señor – Doña María Loreto Acosta natural y vecina de la ciudad de la Habana con el más profundo respeto a V.M. expone: que en sus mas tiernos años tubo la desgracia de conocer a Don Pedro Antonio de Ayala, quien lejos de respetar su inocencia, hizo los mayores esfuerzos para seducirla y corromper su corazón, arrastrado sin duda de los impulsos de la sensualidad mas brutal; logrando al fin el inicuo triunfo a que aspiraba, por que su falta de experiencia, su sensillez y el desaliento a que la reducía su escasa fortuna, unido al abandono a que se hallaba reducida, menguaban las fuerzas con que pudo y debió resistir al hombre que trataba de ajar su pudor, y de ponerla en el camino de la corrupción: pero prevaleciéndose aquel de las razones explicadas, y del desamparo en que la constituía la falta de padre, quiso robustecerlas aun, haciéndola la mas halagüeña pintura de la mutación que experimentaría su fortuna, si accedía a sus insinuaciones y ruegos, explicándose con la energía y falcedad que en esos casos acostumbran los hombres, y particularmente los que como el citado Ayala, han hecho un estudio en el arte de seducir. 41 The reader of this letter is presented with a woman. Abandoned by her father, she is vulnerable with little to no legal position in her community. No record is provided of her age or family, but we are given to understand that as a young woman—perhaps a child still—she was seduced by a political movement and debate in the United States today. This shows a large amount of cultural anxiety forming around issues of inheritance even as paternity is becoming more ascertainable. This concern with inheritance testifies to a growing insecurity about economic issues more generally, a feeling of instability and panic among ordinary people about the changing nature of industrial production, the limits to social mobility, and the related transformations in work-force roles” (Goodman, Infertilities, viii). 41 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 167, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1816-1821. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,167. See translation: “Sir—Doña María Loreto Acosta native and resident of the city of Havana with the most profound respect to Your Grace explains: that in her most tender years she had this disgrace of meeting Don Pedro Antonio de Ayala, who far from respecting her innocence, made the greatest efforts to seduce her and corrupt her heart, without doubt dragging her by the impulses of the most brutal sensuality; finally achieving the iniquitous triumph to which he aspired, because her lack of experience, her simplicity and despondency to which she was reduced by her poor fortune, united with the abandonment in which she found herself reduced, decreased the forces with which she could and should have resisted the man that tried to wither her power, and to put her in the path of corruption: but taking advantage of the reasons explained, and of the helplessness which consisted of her lack of a father, he wanted to fortify them further, painting for her the most jovial picture of the change her fortune would experience, if she gave in to his insinuations and pleas, explaining to her with the energy and mendacity that men in these cases are accustomed to, and particularly those like the cited Ayala, who have made a study of the art of seduction.” Note, all translations of archival texts from the Archivo General de Indias are done by the author of this dissertation. 24 much older man. Taking advantage of her vulnerability and poverty, this man has overcome all her natural resistance and corrupted her. This letter paints a very different picture of the man described over and over again in the letters predating that of Doña María Loreto Acosta. In 1817, Don Pedro Jose de Ayala 42 began the lengthy process of attempting to legitimize his then nearly forty-year-old son. 43 Don Pedro was a lawyer of great renown, practicing in Havana and in Puerto Príncipe, present-day Camagüey. He was a man of honor, fortune, and good breeding. His case file even provides evidence from six witnesses testifying to his good standing in the community. He explains that he only wanted what any loving father would, to make his only son the heir to his fortune and bearer of his name. He explained to the courts that he had raised his son in the “Santísimo temor de Dios” 44 and that he would have married the boy’s mother, Doña Antonia de Betancourt y Cepero, who “como sus padres, fueron de familias blancas, y de toda distinción en esta Isla sin mancha ni mala de raza alguna,” 45 but she had the misfortune of dying. He also went on to explain that with no other children or relatives who could inherit, there was no reason his son should not be given his name and made heir to his father’s fortune. After all, Don Francisco Ignacio de Ayala was now a “Capitan de Milicias Disciplinadas de esta plaza de la Havana, con todos los honores y gracias que son anexas.” 46 He was also married to a gentlelady, named Luisa 42 I have decided not to add accents where they would normally be included in today’s Spanish as they are often omitted in the original documents. 43 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 167, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1816-1821. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,167. 44 See translation: “in the Holiest fear of God.” 45 See translation: “like her parents, were of white families, and of all distinction in the Island without any stain of bad blood.” 46 See translation: “Captain of Disciplined Militia of this the Plaza de la Havana, with all the honors and graces that are included.” 25 O’Kelly y Sánchez, and was already the father of three daughters by the time these proceedings began. 47 Three years after Don Francisco’s first daughter was baptized at the Santo Cristo parish in Havana, his half-sister was baptized in the Santo Angel parish in the same city. 48 Thirteen years later, Doña María Loreto Acosta signed the letter describing the circumstances of her relationship with Don Pedro and this daughter’s birth: Triunfó Señor de su fragilidad: tubo las primicias de su persona, y el resultado de su criminal condescendencia, fue una hija natural nombrada Doña Inés Joséfa María, según se acredita con la partida de bautismo que acompaña, que sirvió para robustecer los lazos que la sujetaban a la escandalosa vida que ha pasado al lado de un hombre cuyos numerosos años le obligaban a dar ejemplo de moralidad a sus conciudadanos, y a consolidar las buenas costumbres. La exponente ha permanecido a su lado trece años o más viviendo públicamente bajo un mismo techo, y con la misma familiaridad, que las personas a quienes une el estrecho vínculo del matrimonio; y separada hoy por su espontanea voluntad de ese concubinato, ha tratado en oído de su resolución, de legitimar a otro hijo natural que tiene de otra mujer con quien vivió con la misma publicidad, sirviendo toda su vida de escandalo a este publico, como que ha sido testigo de la relajación de su conducta en lo moral. 49 Doña María’s statement returns repeatedly to the idea of her innocence and of Don Pedro’s advanced age. Her virtue and honor are clearly destroyed, and she is later described as “desamparada, sin opinión, desacreditada en lo moral, ajadas sus naturales gracias.” 50 Ann 47 See Historias de familias cubanas (Tomo II) by Francisco Xavier De Santa Cruz y Mallen, https://archive.org/details/FranciscoXDeSantaCruzHistoriaDeFamiliasCubanasTomoII/page/n37/mode/2up/search/fr ancisco+ignacio+de+ayala (p. 38 of 222). 48 See Historias de familias cubanas (Tomo II) by Francisco Xavier De Santa Cruz y Mallen, https://archive.org/details/FranciscoXDeSantaCruzHistoriaDeFamiliasCubanasTomoII/page/n37/mode/2up/search/fr ancisco+ignacio+de+ayala (p. 38 of 222). 49 See translation: “He triumphed Sir of her fragility: he had the first fruits of her person, and the result of his criminal attention, was an illegitimate daughter named Doña Inés Joséfa María, as has been accredited by the accompanying baptismal certificate, which served to fortify the ties that subjected her to the scandalous life that she had lived at the side of a man whose many years obligated him to be an example of morality to his fellow citizens, and to exemplify good manners. The witness has remained at his side thirteen years or more living publicly under the same roof, and with the same familiarity, as those people united by the tight bonds of matrimony; and is separated today by the spontaneous will of that cohabitation, he has tried in the hearing of your resolution, to legitimate another illegitimate child that he had with another woman with whom he lived in the same public manner, making of her entire life a public scandal.” 50 See translation: “defenseless, without voice, morally discredited, faded her natural graces.” 26 Twinam writes that one way a woman could retain some of her honor was to attribute her fall to women’s “fragility.” 51 This was considered an appropriate way to explain away why a woman might be convinced to engage in premarital sex; her sensuality or sexuality must always be denied for her honor to remain salvageable. She must never be promiscuous. As such, the argument follows that while Doña María is clearly “discredited,” so must be Don Pedro. This statement, this confession of Doña María’s fall into dishonor, demonstrates the way in which the colonial order failed to hold Don Pedro to the same standards of honor and propriety, that he should have been twice in his life allowed by his community to live in a state of concubinage with two different women and bear children by them. 52 It is implied in many of the statements included in this letter that a falling out between Don Pedro and his young mistress was what precipitated Don Pedro’s decision to legitimate his adult son by another woman. It is also implied that Don Pedro would rather die intestate just to spite her and to make sure that she received none of his estate: “debe presumirse morirá abintestato para satisfacer su venganza, y saciar su cólera hasta sobre esa inocente, fruto de su corrupción y de su libertinaje.” 53 According to her letters, she is the innocent, somehow-still-virginal victim of Don Pedro’s libertinage. Doña María’s statement finally asks that she be treated with equality in the eyes of the law, “En el piadoso corazón de V.M. no cabe levantar a unos para humillar a otros, ni menos permitir que el sexo fuerte triunfe del débil,” 54 even though her social status precludes her. She asks that her daughter be spared the disgrace and vulnerability that she herself suffered as a ruined woman without a father. If the courts could acknowledge her suffering and grant her daughter some 51 Twinam, Public Lives, 63. 52 It also implies that there are perhaps many other “víctimas de su seducción” (victims of his sedduction). 53 See translation: “One must presume that he would die intestate to satisfy his revenge, and to satiate his anger even on that innocent, fruit of his corruption and his libertinage.” 54 See translation: “In the pious heart of Your Grace it cannot be that one be lifted up to humiliate others, and less to permit that the stronger sex triumph over the weak.” 27 recompense, this would be “justa pesa a su seductor.” 55 She demands justice against the man who stole her innocence and begs that the court protect the innocence of her daughter. The paternity of the children is never questioned, and Doña María Loreto Acosta acknowledges that she has no hope of forestalling the legitimation of Don Francisco: “Sabe la que habla no puede impedir la explicada legitimación.” 56 What is important here is that she speaks. This hopeless irruption of the woman’s voice—and not just any woman, but a disgraced woman—into the legal scene, the legitimizing scene, is what Jacques Rancière calls the “redistribution of the sensible.” She speaks not for legitimacy but to receive a simple response, to be seen. She changes the scene of the name’s conferral, the scene of politics, where the speaking body breaks with the established order. She speaks where she has no authority to do so and is heard within this legal sphere that dictates who and what is hearable. 57 Even though the mother is “sin opinión, desacreditada en lo moral,” she still stands before the courts and demands to be heard. Alexander Weheliye draws a distinction between law and justice as they are capable of seeing or not seeing certain people, those they relegate to the status of humans, not-quite- humans, or nonhumans. 58 This mother asks that she be treated according to justice and not the law—the law, which distributes rights and belonging according to its own registers of 55 See translation: “a just weight upon her seducer.” 56 See translation: “She who speaks knows that she cannot impede the explained legitimation.” 57 Rancière describes “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (Dis-agreement, 29). In this passage, Rancière describes the police as this first line of order, but the legal falls into a second scene of partitioning of the sensible. 58 Weheliye quotes C.L.R. James’ description of his incarceration at Ellis Island—a movement to deport James following the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act the logic of which was to allow only selective immigration and curtail the immigration of communists into the United States—stating: “By refusing the modus operandi of calculability, James leaves the law in the dust and summons the incalculable: justice. ‘Law is not justice. Law is an element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it demands that one calculate with the incalculable’” (Habeas Viscus, 123). 28 excludability. The law has already counted her as a non-person, possessing no rights and no personhood, but she asks to be heard according to the incalculability of justice. 59 The decision, however, was finally made to grant Don Francisco Ignacio de Ayala his legitimacy upon the payment of 5,500 vellos reales by his father to the Spanish courts. 60 This legitimacy was granted “sin perjuicio,” meaning without loss or consideration for his half-sister by Doña María Loreto Acosta, and all we know of the abandoned Doña Inés Josefa María is that she died in Paris in 1876. 61 The final ruling on the part of the courts is consistent with Article 12 of the law of 1505, which states that the only way that an illegitimate child may inherit is if no child of lawful marriage exists or is later legitimized by lawful marriage. 62 This reflects the desire by the state to maintain a unity of the family’s possession and to regulate the ways in which a family’s goods could be distributed. This desire for unity, for oneness and the clear distinction of the family’s borders, is again affirmed in the 1624 law, which removes from provincial courts and governors the power to legitimize children: “Real Cédula a los virreyes, audiencias y gobernadores de las Indias prohibiéndoles dar legitimaciones a ninguna persona y ordena que a las personas que les pidieren, las remitan al Consejo, para que vistas las razones 59 Weheliye, Habeas, 123. 60 The word “vellos” most likely refers to the Spanish vellón, but I have opted to maintain the spelling as it appears in the original document. 61 See Historias de familias cubanas (Tomo II) by Francisco Xavier De Santa Cruz y Mallen, https://archive.org/details/FranciscoXDeSantaCruzHistoriaDeFamiliasCubanasTomoII/page/n37/mode/2up/search/fr ancisco+ignacio+de+ayala (p. 38 of 222). The ultimate decision is made that no third party, meaning neither Doña Maria Loreto Acosta nor her daughter, may make any claims upon the inheritance. However, Doña Maria is informed that she may apply to the governor for help. While various letters were written to the governor regarding her case, it does not appear that they received any serious legal attention. 62 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional. “Madrid, R/3894 (2).” MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, n.d. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R/3894 (2), Book 19: “Cuaderno de las leyes y nuevas decisiones sobre las dudas de derecho que continuamente solían ocurrir en estos reynos en que avía mucha diversidad de opiniones entre los doctores y letrados de estos reynos: las cuales se imprimieron por Pedro de Pascua vezino de Salamanca con privilegio…podays imprimir y imprimays y vendays las leyes que se fizieron y publicaron en la Cortes que yo tuve en la Ciudad de Toro este presente año…fecha en la ciudad de Toro a catorze días del mes de Março de mil i quinientos y cinco años. Yo el Rey” (pp. 3v-4r), dated 14-03-1505. 29 que alegan se provea lo que convenga.” 63 Power to decide who belongs in the family and what belongs to the family is at this point centralized. This family, allegory for the nation, becomes the central focus of the Romantic novel. 64 Doris Sommer writes in her now canonical study of nineteenth century romances, Foundational Fictions (1991), that novels such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab were written to allegorically model desire for the idealized nation. Typically this meant a white, upper-class nation, and often required the death of any suitors to the nation that might be racially mixed or representative of non-European origins. 65 While the divisions between races and classes in early modern Cuba appeared “ubiquitous,” 66 the elites of colonial Cuba later felt a desperate necessity to safeguard against miscegenation through the creation of a bureaucratic state that would closely regulate such things as the supposed privacy of the family and even the apparent rights of the individual. 67 Race and gender are formed through these processes that dictate who and what is 63 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE. “Leg. 429, Lib. 37.” Gobierno: Indiferente General, October 4, 1624. Archivo General de Indias. See translation: “Royal Document to the viceroys, courts and governors of the Indies prohibiting them giving legitimations to any person and orders that those that would ask for them, remit them to the Council, so that after reviewing the alleged reasons the Council will provide what makes sense.” 64 The normative principle of white, heterosexual union was an arm in the hands of imperial nation formation, and the Romantic novel of the nineteenth century played its part by seducing its reader. See Doris Sommer: “Romantic novels go hand in hand with patriotic history in Latin America. The books fueled a desire for domestic happiness that runs over into dreams of national prosperity; and nation-building projects invested private passions with public purpose” (Sommer, Foundational, 7). 65 Ann Laura Stoler also explains in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002) how the idea of an European conformity was also a fiction: “Colonial authority was constructed on two powerful but false premises. The first was the notion that Europeans in the colonies made up an easily identifiable and discrete biological and social entity—a ‘natural’ community of common class interests, racial attributes, political affinities, and superior culture. The second was the related notion that the boundaries separating colonizer from colonized were thus self-evident and easily drawn. Neither premise reflected colonial realities” (42). 66 María Elena Martínez writes in Genalogical Fictions (2008) that “the concept of genealogy is central both because it alludes to the process of historicizing race and because in the early modern Hispanic world it was ubiquitous and consequential, the foundation of a multitude of practices and identities that helped mold historical memory at both the individual and collective levels” (Genealogical Fictions, 3). Emily A. Maguire also adds in Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography that the twentieth century saw a similar pull to “create a legitimating national narrative” (13). 67 In The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), Lisa Lowe looks to trace a genealogy of modern liberalism that examines the ways in which understandings of human rights and belonging are dependent upon the very denial of those rights or belonging. She approaches the archive as a tool of the empire: “I regard its architecture of differently functioning offices and departments as rooms of the imperial state; they house the historically specific technologies of colonial governance for knowing and administering colonized populations, which both attest to its contradictions, 30 visible, who and what has a voice and presence in the sociopolitical milieu. We have already seen how these cases for legitimation performed the function of establishing who did and did not belong to the family, just as their existence within the archive serves to delineate who does and does not belong to the nation, what is seeable and legible to the nation. The Ayala case for legitimation demonstrates the politics of both family and nation that existed in colonial Cuba and emphasizes the importance of the father’s name for establishing proper belonging and descendancy in nineteenth-century society. Yet there is something else happening here. This chapter traces a different kind of genealogy, or the slippage that occurs in the attempt to concretize and formalize paternal legitimacy. It does not claim a maternal genealogy as a solution, as an inversion or outside to paternal genealogies. In fact, it does not claim a maternal genealogy at all. Instead, it affirms the maternal as constitutive and troubling to the paternal logic of the nation, family and authorship. Twinam describes the way colonial societies sought to shore up the distinction of belonging in the face of an increasingly porous social system in which the stratifications of class and race were rapidly blurring. 68 She describes the limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) statutes which were intended to organize Spanish colonial subjects along racio-religious lines, but that this “purity” became vaguer and vaguer as and yield its critique” (Intimacies, 4). Similarly, Weheliye notes how race and racializations should not be considered a “biological or cultural classification but […] a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Habeas Viscus, 4). 68 Twinam writes “the closing decades of the eighteenth century marked rising tension between white and racially mixed populations […] In a colonial society in which elites traditionally justified their status in the hierarchy by their legitimacy as well as by their whiteness, the presence of such upwardly mobile groups—some who participated in the economic boom, some who were legitimate, and some who could pass as white—posed a particular challenge to the established order. Both royal bureaucrats and local elites responded with even more vigorous enforcement of traditional and new discriminatory barriers to forestall such upward mobility” (Twinam 13). In his essay “Ennobling Savagery?,” Jerome Branche also writes on patriarchal anxiety in the face of miscegenation in the colonies (Branche, “Enobling,” 15). 31 increased miscegenation took place in the colonies and the colonial government lacked the power and influence to regulate it. 69 The borders of the colonial nation were thus threatened as these borders depended upon the secure differentiation between the colonizer and colonized. 70 Robin Truth Goodman identifies the female body as the complicating site of this paternal logic of ownership that governed the colonies, whose borders were only as secure as her honor. The “phantom colonial border” is visited upon the colonial family, whose domesticity and purity were carefully policed and narrated in such stories as those this chapter explores. 71 We see here how the regulation of the maternal was an attempt to deny the porosity of these boundaries between differing “others,” and the fictitious lines that are drawn to circumscribe identity and belonging. It is particularly interested in the “constructed” nature of these “imperial formations,” as Ann Laura Stoler describes them. 72 In the case of the Spanish colonies, there always remained an opacity in terms 69 Twinam writes that what began as the “purity of blood [limpieza de sangre] ordinance provided guidelines by which Spaniards could identify each other through a shared obsession with Catholic orthodoxy. The not-so- coincidental result was the origin of a self-conscious national identity intensified by common rejection of the despised ‘other’” (Public Lives, 42). 70 The colonial family, especially the mother’s body, was a battlefield upon which the borders of the nation would be decided. Evelyn Picon Garfield draws the connection between the romantic novels of the nineteenth century to the concept of war for the definition of the colonial nation in her book Poder y sexualidad: el discurso de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: “Es evidente, como explica Foucault, que la historia de los discursos es la historia de la sexualidad. Es más: el proyecto de la ciencia de la subjetividad se ha tendido hacia una problemática de la sexualidad, incluso en cuestiones de la causalidad, el inconsciente, la verdad y el conocimiento. Aquel poder del discurso se articula como una situación compleja y estratégica, codificado en términos de la guerra o de la política” (Picon Garfield, Poder, 17). 71 Goodman, Infertilities, 92: “The certainty of the colonizer’s reproductive legacy through the domestic control of his women would, at least provisionally, ensure a symbolic economy, the certain dissemination of his authority, heritage, and name. The endless indeterminacy that feminine sexuality actually introduced into the policing structures of colonial authority, however, suspends the implementation of colonial rule through domestic authority […] the impossible regulation of female sexuality [is] the phantom colonial border that continues to make and unmake the domestic resolution of colonial narrative.” 72 Stoler, Carnal, xx. Ann Laura Stoler also remarks upon this blurring of the boundaries between “self” and “other” that occurred in the European colonies: “I have preferred the concept of imperial formations to emphasize, not steady states with fixed borders but the ongoing processes that produce states of becoming with porous boundaries, ambiguous borderlands, and populations subject to often opaque criteria for access to social and political rights” (Carnal, xx). 32 of access to social and political rights based on race; as opposed to the British or French, social belonging could be more radically negotiated in a place like Cuba. This blurring of the borders between “local elites” and those of mixed race or social legitimacy led to the creation of “myths of filiation,” a concept derived from Guillermina De Ferrari’s reading of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. She writes in Vulnerable States that “According to Glissant, land possession has traditionally based itself on the myth of uninterrupted Filiation (1997, 13).” 73 The creation of these myths is a retrospective act that reaches for an imagined origin to legitimize and therefore justify colonial society, the enslavement of peoples, and the seizure of indigenous land. Glissant writes that “Territory is the basis for conquest. Territory requires that filiation be planted and legitimated. Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation.” 74 The logic of filiation applicable here to the colonial seizure of land and defense of its borders is also applicable at a more granular level—though no less essential—to family land ownership. 75 In this we bear witness to a valence of relation, the maternal valence, that instead of proposing a solution to filiation, exists as the necessary site of vulnerability in the linearity of filiation. The maternal exists within the genealogy, which while a fiction, cannot be denied in that its violence was and continues to be acted out upon real bodies, most often female, Black, and Brown bodies. In Oficios de mujer, María del Carmen Barcia Zequeira describes the rise of the 73 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 19. 74 Glissant, Poetics, 151. 75 Emily Maguire’s Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011) further expounds upon the concept of “myths of filiation”: “This search for ‘national culture’ was a search for what Martinican writer Édouard Glissant refers to as ‘filiation’: a (real or mythic) linear history anchored in a ‘root,’ a physical territory and/or a moment of origin (Poetics 47). As Glissant observes, filiation speaks only to the history of one particular group; myths of filiation fail to include ‘the other as an element of relation’ (50). The search for filiation is thus inherently problematic for young, postcolonial nations whose histories are based on the uprooting and encounter of multiple peoples” (13-14). 33 male-dominated medical establishment in Cuba, especially the regulation of midwives in Cuba during the colonial period. 76 She writes: “Todo comenzó cuando una mujer ayudó a otra a parir.” 77 This sentence, “It all began when one woman helped another give birth,” almost reads as the opening lines to an apocalyptic novel or to the recounting of some personal disaster. It is as if, this intimate moment of contact and creation between two women breaks with the established order in that it occurs without sanction by the male presence. This entirely female birth is a kind of impossible origin, and yet it is a beginning. There is no possible female genealogy, not only because a male-dominated scientific establishment got in the way, but also because a female genealogy would only be the repetition of the same exclusions which it sought to dismantle. Instead, this slippery maternal meeting of bodies oozes through the pores of the walls built around it. The bodies most contested in these cases, fictions, stories, and genealogies are the bodies of women, especially African, enslaved, and indigenous women. Slavery in Cuba was not abolished until 1886, and before this Spain had passed the Ley Moret, also known as the libertad de vientres (the “Law of Free Wombs”), approved in 1870 and back-dated to 1868. According to this law, children born to enslaved women were no longer enslaved themselves but lived under patronato (patronage). The nineteenth century in Cuba saw a dramatic shift in the racial politics and makeup of the island. 78 Stoler explains that “the assertion of European supremacy in terms of 76 Barcia Zequeira, Oficios, 48-49. 77 Barcia Zequeira, Oficios, 5. 78 In her introduction to Sab, Catherine Davies writes, that “By 1810, 40 per cent of the Cuban population were slaves, and by the 1840s the greater part of the Cuban population was non-white” (Davies, Sab, 8). Davies goes on to describe the British slave trade abolition in 1807 and the patrolling of the Caribbean and Cuba’s coastline and ports by British ships. Davies writes about the “British magistrate in Havana, Richard Madden who had supervised the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. In Cuba he was the Superintendent of Liberated Africans in Havana and Judge- Arbitrator in the International Court for the suppression of the slave trade […] Madden translated into English an autobiography written by the freed Cuban slave Juan Francisco Manzano […] Not unreasonably, the vast majority of Spanish and Cubans regarded British activity on the high seas and in Havana as tiresome meddling in their domestic affairs by a self-appointed imperial bully” (Davies, “Introduction” 9). 34 patriotic manhood and racial virility was not only an expression of imperial domination, but a defining feature of it,” 79 and because the maintenance of the Crown depended upon the continued dominance of white masculinity, special care had to be taken to define the limits of the “official family.” The borders of the state were then clearly protected through “proper” marriage and filiation. Verena Martinez-Alier explains that, according to the laws of the nineteenth century, “the nobility enjoyed absolute freedom of marriage. However, they did so only in theory.” 80 She examines cases in which marriage between nobility and persons of color was opposed. Legitimation is a similar phenomenon in which the right of a child to inherit was dependent upon the race of both their parents. If either parent was non-white, then legitimation could be denied, and in some cases even revoked. In one case for legitimation from 1819, Don Luis Pio Somo de Villa sought to legitimize his ten-year-old son Don Juan de la Cruz so that his son would be able to attend a private, Catholic school in Havana that did not admit illegitimate children. 81 In most of the cases for legitimation housed at the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, the courts would usually confer legitimacy in cases where a father sought to legitimize a son. In cases where a daughter or mother was the plaintiff, the legitimation was generally denied. This case is unusual in that a father seeking to legitimize his son is denied, but what is less unusual about it is the fact that their case is denied on the grounds of the mother. The procedure in these cases was to first 79 Stoler, Carnal, 16. 80 Martinez-Alier, Marriage, 11-12. Verena Martinez-Alier describes the changes in laws at the end of the eighteenth century, intended to control who could marry and produce offspring with whom: “In 1776 the Spanish Crown enacted a Pragmática Sanción aimed at preventing unequal marriages resulting from the allegedly ill- understood freedom of marriage. Parental consent to marriage was made a formal requirement for those under twenty-five years of age and/or living under parental tutelage. Parental dissent was deemed justified when it was thought the proposed marriage would ‘gravely offend family honour and jeopardize the integrity of the State’” (Martinez-Alier, Marriage, 11). 81 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 167, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1816-1821. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,167. 35 ascertain whether either party was already married, in which case they would be summarily dismissed. Next they would check the baptismal receipt of the child in question and if any other legitimate children or possible heirs existed with a stronger claim. Finally, the race and “quality” of the mother was to be confirmed. 82 If she was anything other than white, the case was dismissed. In the present case, Don Luis Pio Somo de Villa made several attempts to attain his son’s legitimation without revealing the identity of the mother, at first claiming that he did so to protect her reputation. 83 Twinam explains that a noble woman could engage in extramarital sex and retain her honor in certain cases, such as that of Doña María Loreto Acosta in which she claimed that she was innocent and overcome by another person’s lack of honor. In other cases, a woman could maintain her honor as long as pregnancies were kept a secret and she married, or at least lived out the rest of her life as a pious spinster or nun. 84 It appears that Don Luis attempted to make the argument that this was the status of the mother of his son. Ultimately the courts pressed the issue and Don Luis was forced to disclose the identity of the child’s mother. The courts confirmed that as long as it turned out that the mother was not of mixed race or of any other “caste” that would be considered “indecorous” among the polite society of the private school, then the boy may be admitted: “si a lo menos resulta ser las buenas circunstancias de la madre, de suerte que se supiese que no había sido mulata, o de qualquiera 82 Ann Twinam also explains this process of delinating legitimacy: “Although colonists never conceptualized this explicitly, they acted as if an individual’s birth status were composed of at least four elements. The first was the newborn’s natal status, which depended upon civil and ecclesiastical conventions concerning whether the parents were related and whether they were unwed, married, or a priest or nun at the time of their child’s conception or birth. A next determinant was the official baptismal status […] This was the infant’s social status, which depended on whether recognition by parents and kin was private or public. Last was civil status, the state’s legal acknowledgment of the legitimacy (or lack of legitimacy) of a colonist’s child. In the case of legitimate births, a baby’s natal, baptismal, social, and civil status were congruent: The parents recognized, baptized, and raised the newborn as their own, and the state acknowledged their legal relationship” (Twinam, Public Lives, 127). 83 According to Twinam, honor was negotiable and “was located in the public sphere, where an individual’s reputation was malleable and ultimately defined by other peers” (Public Lives, 33). 84 Twinam explains the uneven distribution of honor and ways that it could be managed (Public Lives, 339-340). 36 otra casta, por no ser en tal caso indecoroso para el mismo colegio y sus individuos que fuese admitido en el.” 85 It is clear that the underlying issue is not only the son’s “purity,” but also the effect that he would have upon the other students with whom he would be in contact and the reputation of the school. This acts as a microcosm of the kind of politics at play in the larger colonial context. Almost one year later on July 6, 1820, the child was granted permission to attend the school but did not receive legitimation on the grounds that while the mother was confirmed to be white, she was also a woman of bad reputation: “la calidad de la madre es conocida, y es blanca, pero de mala reputación por sus costumbres. Añade el Obispo que tiene por otra parte este mismo informe, mas también le tiene de que las costumbres de aquella no han influido en la educación del citado niño; por que el padre le separó enteramente de ella, procurando desde el principio sus adelantamientos.” 86 It is clarified here that the only reason that the son was permitted to attend the school was that, while the mother was considered to be a person unsuitable for “polite” society, the child had been removed from her at an early age by his father and raised outside the sphere of her influence. It becomes clear in this particular case that the stains to one’s honor were considered transmissible between persons. It also becomes clear that while inheritance was negotiable, so too was social belonging. Propriety is thus an issue of property, something that obeys the laws of purchase and ownership. As political history and these cases for legitimation make clear, honor was available for purchase in the Spanish colonies, and honor became a weapon of 85 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 167, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1816-1821. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,167. See transaltion: “if at least it turns out being good circumstances of the mother, by luck that it was known that she was not a mulatta, or of any other caste, not being such that it would be indecorous for the aforementioned school and its individuals if he be admitted in it.” 86 See translation: “the quality of the mother is known, she is white, but of bad reputation because of her habits. The Bishop adds that he has from another source the same information, also that the habits of the mother have not influenced the education of the cited child; because the father separated him entirely from her, procuring from the start his advancement.” 37 colonization. 87 The possession of honor, honor as property, dictated which civil and social rights a person could wield. This discussion of rights and of the rules that governed honor and propriety in the colonies was most firmly established in the breaking of these rules and the exclusion of some. 88 According to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, the nineteenth century was intensely aware of and focused on the sexual practices of the nation, “The sex of husband and wife was beset by rules and recommendations. The marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than anything else; more than any other relation, it was required to give a detailed account of itself. It was under constant surveillance: if it was found to be lacking, it had to come forward and plead its case before a witness.” 89 Access to rights depended upon a person’s ability to perform and inhabit a certain kind of embodiment, one that reflected the exclusionary politics of the nation. 90 Within this family—both that of the nuclear family and of the nation as modeled by such a family—property rights and the rights of inheritance were strictly guarded. Who could inherit was clearly a subject of anxious reflection, binding property and personal propriety in the negotiation of these claims. Propriety was a kind of capital in that a person’s proper claim to land rights and to civil rights was dictated by the complex arrangement of social status. 91 However, as 87 Twinam writes: “Honor was profoundly important because it rationalized hierarchy, the division of Hispanic society between a privileged few and a deprived majority. It established a distinctive agenda of discrimination, because those who possessed it were privileged with special access to political economic, and social power, and they maintained their superior rank by discriminating against everyone else” (Twinam, Public Lives, 32). 88 We see this in Ladelle McWhorter’s Introduction to Bodies and Pleasures (1999): “As Foucault’s analyses so often show, there are many ways in which our socially and historically produced identities endanger us, make us vulnerable, and close us off from possibilities. Identities often stand opposed to freedom. Insofar as they do, examination of them and of the processes that generate and maintain them is philosophically urgent” (xix). 89 Foucault, Sexuality, 37. 90 Doris Sommer writes in Foundational Fictions “families were a stabilizing force, a ‘cause’ of national security. But we may also reckon the high seriousness attributed to family ties as a possible ‘effect’ of the nation. Without the goal of nationhood, alliances and stability would be perhaps less transparently desirable than they were. Seen from either angle, the mutual dependence of family and state in Latin America […] could and sometimes did mitigate the tension between private and public allegiances which has dogged Western political philosophy” (20). 91 In her seminal work on nineteenth-century Romantic literature, Susan Kirkpatrick writes that, “Individual agents and their interest lay at the heart of classic liberal political economy, which conceptualized the market operations 38 we have shown, such rights were exclusive, as the articulation of rights must always be in relation to an exclusion. 92 In the present case, the exclusion was of any non-white or non-male person. Interiority was a possession. 93 Lisa Lowe explains that certain persons were not considered within this order to have the same access to interiority as Enlightened, European men, and that such interiority held “value” or capital, and finally that the interiority of non-male, non- white subjects was “cast as failed or irrelevant because they do not produce ‘value’ legible within modern classifications.” 94 The nineteenth century sees a concretization of this concept of interiority, an interiority that is also exterior and justifies the very real lines drawn in sand and mountain and territory. And so, the legibility of interiority gains urgency when one considers these illegible moments that make their way into the records of empire. Such moments as the compulsion of an elite, white woman to write the story of a black, enslaved person, or the moment when a woman begs to be heard by the courts even while acknowledging that she is utterly excluded from civil status, are the persistent irruptions of the illegible into the record. For Rancière, politics occurs when an unhearable voice makes itself heard and “In politics ‘woman’ is the subject of that determined value in terms of an impartial mechanism mediating the actions of individuals. The ‘rights of man,’ principles that would provide political protection for the self-motivated autonomy of the private self, seemed ‘self- evident’ to the extent that a person’s inner core was held to be separate and inviolable” (Románticas, 5). 92 In her critique of Luce Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus, Judith Butler discusses these exclusions: “what must remain outside these oppositional positions as their supporting condition. There is no singular outside, for the Forms require a number of exclusions; they are and replicate themselves through what they exclude, through not being the animal, not being the woman, not being the slave, whose propriety is purchased through property, national and racial boundary, masculinism, and compulsory heterosexuality” (Bodies, 25). 93 Lowe explains that “Just as we may observe colonial divisions of humanity, I suggest there is also a colonial division of intimacy, which charts the historically differentiated access to the domains of liberal personhood, from interiority and individual will, to the possession of property and domesticity” (Intimacies, 17-18). 94 Lowe, Intimacies, 17-18. In Habeas Viscus, Alexander Weheliye writes that “personhood-as-ownership” becomes a defining characteristic of discourses attempting to rid themselves of racialized and gendered distinctions, “Where bare life and biopolitics discourse aspires to transcend racialization via recourse to absolute biological matter that no longer allows for portioning of humanity or locating certain forms of racism in an unidentified elsewhere, habeas corpus, and the law in general, at least when it is not administering racial distinctions, tends to recognize the humanity of racialized subjects only in the restricted idiom of personhood-as-ownership” (Habeas Viscus, 4). 39 experience – the denatured, defeminized subject – that measures the gap between and acknowledged part (that of sexual complementarity) and a having no part.” 95 Women’s voices are again registered only as they break with the plane of male discourse, but in doing so this breakage is the scene of politics, and with it the scene was changing. White women at this time were beginning to make claims to the male sphere of interiority, and a new genre of women’s writing was taking form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kirkpatrick illuminates the way in which the eighteenth century saw the domestic space begin to afford women some small “regulated authority in language” and that with it grew the genre of “female writing.” 96 Creativity, even women’s creativity taking place within the private bosom of the home, was a work of self-possession. However, the private arena was only nominally so. It was as highly policed and regulated as the public, perhaps with even more paranoia. Lowe argues that the private or the intimate sphere does not actually exist, but is rather another facet or instantiation of the liberal commodity market. 97 The private/public dichotomy is purely a fiction created by a society desperate to control, commodify, and surveil this “private” sphere above all else. Women did not act in silence or in privacy, but instead, the private quarters of the feminine world were a tensely disputed political arena. The territory and borders of the private space were a nation under siege as much as any other borderland, and no one was more invested in the outcome of this war than the colonial authority. 95 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 36. 96 Kirkpatrick writes, “The model of female difference that emerged in a number of eighteenth-century discourses, ranging from medical science and conduct books to Rousseau’s rethinking of the natural and the social, gave rise to a new bourgeois image of woman as the angelic arbiter of domestic relations. This norm, while it enclosed women within the patriarchal household, gave them an unprecedented though limited and strictly regulated authority in language. The valorization of individual subjectivity and of imaginative self-expression that culminated in the Romantic movement combined with the rising feminine norm to encourage female writing” (Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 2). 97 This is reified by Goodman and Twinam who point out the ways in which the private, especially in Spanish America, functioned very much within and beneath the eye of the liberal, commodity society of the nineteenth century. 40 Among the most notable masters of this territory of women’s writing in the nineteenth century was Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Through poetry, novels, and letter writing, she managed to carve for herself a considerable space within the male-dominated territory of Spanish letters. Her most famous novel, Sab, is a portrait of a young Black man living in Cuba as the slave of the father of the woman he adored. According to Sommer, Gómez de Avellaneda not only represents the young slave, but actually represents herself and her own oppression as a woman within this society through him: “The stunning thing about this self-portrait is that it identifies author with apparently helpless slave through their shared productive function, their literary labor conditioned in both by the need to subvert and to reconstruct. The obscure slave represents the privileged novelist because both vent their passions by writing and because their literary slippages destabilize the rhetorical system that constrains them.” 98 Sommer claims that through this shared act of writing—Gómez de Avellaneda in the act of writing the novel and Sab in the act of writing his confession—the author manages to undermine the male economy of letters and insert both a female and a black subjectivity into the scene. However, this reading of the literary scene is forgetful. It too easily equates the situation of the bourgeois bedroom with the slave quarters. It also too easily allows the white woman to slip into the position of the Black subject and adopt it as her own. If women were denied interiority, their claiming of this space only served to echo a logic that had underpinned not only land rights, but also the rights to the ownership of people. 99 If one can take possession of one’s self, then the argument made to do so also justifies the taking 98 Sommer, Foundational, 115. 99 Lowe points out that the same arguments used to establish the rights of men were also their limitations: “While the language of both political and economic rights had been used to justify European ownership and trade in captive people, by the eighteenth century, abolitionists employed liberal principles to argue for the emancipation of slaves, however much liberalism’s imbrication in colonial slavery paradoxically restricted the realization of freedom” (Intimacies, 12). 41 possession of others. However, Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab has been hailed as the earliest abolition novel written in Spanish. 100 These discussions of the rights of man were at their core discussions of the rights to property, and therefore, their rights to human property. Evelyn Picon Garfield writes in Poder y sexualidad: el discurso de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: “Las normas patriarcales de la esclavitud sancionan estas violaciones sexuales de la propiedad negra femenina sin culpar al hombre blanco.” 101 Male landowners were granted nearly unlimited rights over the bodies and personhood of their slaves, which extended to the rape and violation of enslaved women. 102 Within this society, men could behave promiscuously with certain kinds of women, the dishonored and/or enslaved, without incurring any guilt upon their own honor. Women, however, bore the guilt and burden of honor and penance. Picon Garfield goes on to explain that enslaved women faced the “doble opresión histórica de la esclava, por ser propiedad (botín) y por ser femenina (concubina), la observamos en el discurso hegemónico de la narrativa anti-esclavista cubana,” 103 and that the white mother/wife bore the guilt of her husband’s concubinage. Her role was to safeguard the purity of the house, and it was her honor that was threatened if she failed to do so. 100 It is a part of what Jerome Branche calls the “the mythification of race relations in the Americas” (Branche, “Enobling,” 13). 101 Picon Garfield, Poder, 56. 102 Sasha Turner writes in Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Chidrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (2017), of the ways in which gender was used to understand who and what was visible before the law in cases of the torture of slaves. Turner details the torture suffered by a young woman, whose cause of death as described by William Wilberforce as he argued for abolition before British Parliament, was “shame” (Turner, Contested 2). Decency then becomes linked to the argument for abolition. The girl was not described as having died from the weeks of torture she endured, but from the shame that overcame her later. Turner writes, “He used such details to argue that African females embodied feminine virtues, which he and other late eighteenth-century British reformers promoted as necessary for the unfree inhabitants of the West Indian colonies to possess in order to transition from slavery to freedom. The reproductive bodies of female slaves were the vessels through which abolitionists articulated the pathway to freedom. Modesty and shame become the recurring descriptors that newspaper writers used to describe the unnamed victim” (2). It is almost as if the affirmation of female sex was not enough, but that their gender as “women” had to be affirmed in order to make this argument. 103 Picon Garfield, Poder, 56-57. 42 In the Spanish colonies there was an increasing fear over reproduction rights, especially the fear of mestizaje, one of the defining characteristics of the Spanish Caribbean. 104 Efforts were made to encourage a reproductive, white household, a sentiment which also lay at the core of the antislavery movement in Cuba. One of the most prevalent desires within the antislavery movement was not the abolition of slavery and the equality of liberated persons, but the whitening or blanqueamiento of Cuban society. Just as the colonial government had sought to establish its dominance through the equation of woman and land, so too did the new nationalism in Cuba imagine itself as the creators of a white nation. The land/woman equation meant that the new nation, just like the old colony, had to be inseminated by the right sort of man in the right sort of womb. 105 The domination and regulation of the womb is the mimesis of his domination of the colonized land. Luce Irigaray traces the process by which man realizes and possesses himself through property, through the conversion of human bodies into capital for the purchase of selfhood. In the suit for legitimation, the mother becomes “legal tender,” 106 whose value is gauged by the colonial bureaucracy, in exchange for personhood and “derechos civiles.” 107 Women during this period were beginning to avail themselves of this same human capital, buying for themselves culture, carved out of the “nature” to which they had been relegated. This began with the domestic sphere and women’s letters. Novels, poetry, and letter writing were the genres in which women began to explore and claim subjectivity. However, their 104 Goodman writes that in colonial society, “Not only in scientific worlds but also in social spheres, underproductivity was becoming, in the late nineteenth century, an anxious focus demonstrating a crisis at the center of social life. The medical professions’ and institutions’ growing involvement in the control of female reproduction talks about a general sense of crisis” (Infertilities, xvi). 105 Luce Irigaray writes in This Sex Which is Not One that in order to dominate the land, man releases himself of his nature by converting woman into “landed property” (This Sex, 185). The idea of women’s “natural” function also occurs in Susan Kirkpatrick’s Las Románticas: “The female body was represented no longer as an imperfect version of the male but as the perfect instrument of women’s ‘natural’ function—maternity” (6). 106 Irigaray, This Sex, 185. 107 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 167, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1816-1821. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,167. 43 place was still tenuous, as we see with Gómez de Avellaneda’s publication of Sab as well as Duras’s first edition of Ourika. Both authors began with a certain distancing from their creative works. Duras first told the story of a black child brought back from Senegal to France by the Boufflers family, the governors of the colony, in one of her salons in Paris after the restoration of the French monarchy in 1814. Living the life of nobility once again, Duras was able to entertain and regale her audience with the story of an African child raised by the princess of Beauvau. This life in the salon is described in Las mujeres toman la palabra as a liminal space in which the bourgeoise could hold political influence at the interstices between the private and the public. 108 The salon was a literary space that was also the home, and dominated by women, but a public and discursive space nonetheless. Following the success of the story, she published the novel anonymously, though the fame of her narration and of the published book eventually forced her to claim the publication in 1824, 109 and it was almost immediately translated and published in Spanish, becoming an instant best-seller. Almost twenty years later, in 1841, Gómez de Avellaneda published her novel Sab. The similarities between the two novels are striking. Both tell the story of a young person, Ourika and Sab, who has been forcibly removed from their families and from Africa to be violently inserted into a racist society, whose economic foundation was enslavement, and raised by masters named Mademoiselle de B… in Duras’s novel and Don Carlos de B… of Bellavista in Gómez de Avellaneda’s. They spend their childhoods in a state of ignorance to their unequal situation within this society, being raised alongside the children of their masters, Charles de B… in 108 See María Cristina Arambel Guiñazú and Claire Emilie Martin, Las mujeres toman la palabra: Escritura femenina del siglo XIX en Hispanoamérica Tomo. 1 section “La vida de salón”: “Las integrantes de la burguesía ejercen influencia política desde las salas bien concurridas de sus casas donde se establece el contacto entre lo privado y lo público” (18). 109 See the Introduction by John Fowles in Ourika: An English Translation (xiv). 44 Ourika and Carlota de B… in Sab, and eventually falling in love with them. It is at this moment their worldview is shattered, that their separation both from the society of their masters and from that of their natal community is forced upon them resulting in their alienation. They are plunged into melancholy and depression as they grapple with their place in society and the inability to escape the position in which they have been placed. This melancholy results in the death of each, preceded by their final confession. Additionally, each novel begins with a negation of the author’s authorship. Duras attempted to conceal her connection to the book by publishing it anonymously and resisted recognizing it, and Gómez de Avellaneda published the novel preceded by her “Dos palabras al lector”: Por distraerse de momentos de ocio y melancolía han sido escritas estas páginas: La autora no tenía entonces la intención de someterlas al terrible tribunal del público. […] Acaso si esta novelita se escribiese en el día, la autora, cuyas ideas han sido modificadas, haría en ella algunas variaciones: pero sea por pereza, sea por la repugnancia que sentimos en alterar lo que hemos escrito con una verdadera convicción (aun cuando ésta llegue a vacilar), la autora no ha hecho ninguna mudanza en sus borradores primitivos, y espera que si las personas sensatas encuentran algunos errores esparcidos en estas páginas, no olvidarán que han sido dictadas por los sentimientos algunas veces exagerados pero siempre generosos de la primera juventud. 110 Gómez de Avellaneda performs the contradictory task of distancing herself from her work while simultaneously asserting herself as author. In her introduction to the novel, Davies writes that Gómez de Avellaneda did so in an effort to shield herself from the criticism of a society still 110 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, Edición Cátedra, 97. All citations for the novel Sab will be from the Edición Cátedra. All translations of the novel will be from the translation by Nina M. Scott in Sab and Autobiography. See translation: “These pages were written for amusement during moments of leisure and of melancholy: at that time the author had no intention of exposing them to the public’s unforgiving eye […] If this little novel were written today, the author, whose ideas are now somewhat different, might perhaps make some changes therein. But whether out of laziness or our unwillingness to alter something we wrote with real conviction (even when the latter might vacillate to some degree), the author has made no changes in her original drafts, and hopes that if judicious persons find some mistakes scattered among these pages, they will not forget that the latter were composed by the at times exaggerated but always generous sentiments of early youth” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 26). 45 discomfited by literary women. 111 Taking this into account and the distancing performed by both authors, we can begin to see how women were viewed as almost illegitimate authors. As such, both authors discussed here sought to delegitimize their works, removing from them their names, this authorizing and legitimizing signature. Following Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, the written word as both a cure and a poison that resists the intentions of its master, we can understand how both authors might have feared their words being used against them. Derrida explains that while the written word is powerful, what distinguishes it from the spoken word, is that it relinquishes the paternal authority of the author once it is printed. It commits patricide in the printing. 112 Both the authorial distancing of Gómez de Avellaneda and Duras appears to react to this apparent threat of this uprising. The novel is de-authorized at the same time that it performs the work of the legitimizing narrative. Sommer remarks that within the Romantic novel, the conflict between lovers is external to them, and the solution is “an alternative society.” 113 Romance and domesticity are only achieved in the dream of an ideal nation. Sab is often characterized by a certain slippage both in its adherence to the dictates of nineteenth century social norms as well as its direct subversion of these codes. Sommer remarks that Sab opens up the possibility of an inheritance against legitimation, one that may fall into the hands of women and people of color. Despite the fact that the eponymous hero lacks “any claim to legitimacy in the patriarchal symbolic order, precisely because he has no father and no patronym […] In this social vacuum, ‘author-tiy’ can 111 See Davies’s introduction: “It is difficult to assess the extent to which Avellaneda’s prefatory disclaimer ‘Dos palabras al lector’, written presumably in 1841, was a true reflection of her ideas […] She was much criticized for sitting on the fence with regard to Cuban independence. However, most women writers prefaced their work in apologetic tones at the time and, in view of the tense situation, the young Avellaneda was probably wise to be prudent” (Davies, Sab, 13). Kirkpatrick also refers to the sense of distance allowed to women within the novel that might have allowed them greater liberty of expression. 112 See Jacques Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon in “La Farmacia de Platón.” In La Diseminación, Vol. 33. 32. Tel Quel, 1968. 113 Sommer, Foundational, 18. 46 pass on to new hands, feminine and/or mulatto hands.” 114 According to Sommer, Sab’s suffering is a mask through which Gómez de Avellaneda expresses her frustration with the servitude of the woman in nineteenth century society. 115 Duras’s Ourika similarly performs the function of expressing the author’s dissatisfaction with the restraints placed upon women in noble social circles. Ultimately, the novels’ antiracist messages are deauthorized both by their authors’ distancing but also by the subordination of the apparent abolitionism to the status of vehicle for an altogether different message. Both authors were born into families of lofty social standing. Claire de Duras (neé Claire- Louise Lechat de Coëtnempren de Kersaint) was born in 1777. Her father supported the French Revolution but was eventually guillotined along with much of the French aristocracy. Duras’s mother was a native of Martinique, and the two women fled France to Philadelphia and later to Martinique where they hoped to recover the family fortune. 116 Claire de Duras married her husband Amédée-Bretaigne-Malo de Durfort, duke of Durfort and future duke of Duras, while in exile in Switzerland. It was after the Haitian Revolution, the fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of monarchy in France that Duras told the story of the young, African woman. Antonio Benítez- Rojo writes that this was not only the first novel to portray a black heroine in European literature, 114 Sommer, Foundational, 119-120. However, Sommer’s reading of the novel is perhaps a bit too optimistic. She claims that in the absence of mothers, the adoptive mother, Martina, who claims to be descended from the indigenous leader Camagüey, who was killed by the Spanish conquistadors, could be the future “wresting a kind of independence from bondage.” Sommer goes on to propose that from his alienation Sab too “can wrest a kind of independence too; the space allows him to construct a different ‘artificial’ order that can recognize his natural legitimacy” (Foundational, 119-120). According to Sommer, the garden that Sab plants in the center for his master’s fields as a tribute to his beloved Carlota is a sign of his taking property and territory from the slave master, but is Carlota not an extension of the master? Furthermore, Carlota does not accept this gift or even recognize who has given it. She is the only possible legitimizing mother for the future, and she rejects the garden in preference for the mercenary intentions of Enrique Otway. 115 Lucía Guerra-Cunningham also writes that this dual illegitimacy of Sab, that of his parentage and authorship, results in the de-legitimation of the antiracist story by the feminist claims that overtake it. See Lucía Guerra- Cunningham’s “Estrategias femeninas en la elaboración del sujeto romántico de la obra de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda” (709). 116 In “La mujer y la literatura antiesclavista,” Antonio Benítez Rojo describes the life and Works of Claire de Duras (115). 47 but that it was also the first novel “narrada por la voz de una protagonista negra, la primera novela que muestra un conflicto amoroso interracial, y la primera novela donde un escritor o escritora de la raza blanca intenta entrar en la mente de un personaje negro. La denuncia del prejuicio racial que hace Claire de Duras pareció en su época tan sincera, que gran parte del éxito que tuvo Ourika se debió a que muchos pensaban que, lejos de ser la obra de una elevada aristócrata, era una muestra de la propaganda abolicionista.” 117 Although the novel was often read as abolitionist, Ourika is not a slave, but neither was she actively granted her freedom. This is because according to the Code Noir, first published in 1685 and the primary document for establishing the rights and treatment of slaves and persons of color within French society until the Revolution, any slave brought to France was freed upon stepping foot in the motherland. Following to this document, Ourika was freed upon reaching France. If she had been sent to the French colonies, her life and the lives of her children would have been dictated by this code. Even limiting a reading of these novels to the fact that they are both by elite, white women writing from the perspective of black subjects, it is surprising how little criticism exists placing the two novels into dialogue. Most frequently, Sab is discussed among such texts as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), and Harriet Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). 118 Antonio Benítez-Rojo provides one of the only sustained readings of Ourika in conversation with Latin American letters. The only other discussion of the relation 117 Benítez Rojo, “La mujer,” 116. 118 In (Re)Mapping the Latina/o Literary Landscape, Judy Newman traces the similarities between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Sab, “Just as novels link to other novels, so slavery offers a web of connections across the globe. What drew Stowe to Sab? The internal evidence leaves no doubt that she knew it, though there is no extant record of her reading it, or having it read to her […] In calling Sab to mind, Stowe could not have been unaware of the ways in which despotism, revolution and slavery were intertwined in the example of Cuba. But more specifically, Cuba was in the news just when Stowe was writing. The plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin swerves suddenly to Louisiana at a crucial point in Cuban-American relations; the chapters set there are directly related to Cuban events and evolve in tandem with public reactions to them” (Newman, “Cuban Characters,” 27-28). 48 between the two texts appears to be “Ourika: Hispanic Intertexts” by Roger Little and published in the French Studies Bulletin: Ourika had been translated and published in Spanish, as it was in English, in 1824, but any Hispanic intertextuality has not been explored. This made all the more intriguing for me [SIC] work currently being undertaken on a forthcoming French version of the Cuban novel Sab, the first edition of which appeared in Madrid in 1841, and which is, according to Catherine Davies, ‘the only feminist-abolitionist novel published by a woman in the nineteenth-century Spain on its slave-holding colony Cuba’ […] This is a filiation of which all the branches have yet to be explored. The ramifications of Ourika are manifestly exceptional. Just as they have been shown to spread across Europe to Russia, so they extend to the New World. 119 Like Little, I read a clear genealogy between these two novels, texts which also are deeply concerned with the possibilities of love and legitimacy in slaveholding society. Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel appears to go even further than simply drawing inspiration from Duras’s novel, seeming to almost provide a kind of proto-fan-fiction sequel. One generation after Ourika dies in France of alienation and her forbidden love for Charles de B, Sab pines for and later dies of a broken heart for his own Carlota de B, daughter of Carlos de B. It might not be possible to pinpoint the exact moment that Gómez de Avellaneda read this novel, but considering what we know about Gómez de Avellaneda and the publication of Ourika, it seems virtually impossible to claim that it would not have crossed her path. Gómez de Avellaneda was an avid reader and exceptionally well-educated for a woman during this period, especially considering the fact that she was not raised in the metropolis of Havana, but rather in the relatively insular, land-locked city of Puerto Príncipe, today’s Camaguey. In 1846, when 119 Little, “Hispanic Intertexts,” 25-26. John Whittaker cites Roger Little in “French Studies: The Romantic Era,” noting the impact of the 1824 best-seller and its immediate translation into Spanish and finding that it seems to have had an influence on the composition of Gómez de Avellaneda’s Cuban novel Sab (1841). 49 Gómez de Avellaneda was in her thirties, an entry was published in the DICCIONARIO Universal de historia y de geografía, Tomo 1 120 describing the person and life of the author: AVELLANEDA (Da. Gertrudis Gomez de): nació en 23 de marzo de 1816 del matrimonio del teniente de navío de la real armada D. Manuel Gomez de Avellaneda, comandante de marina en la provincia central de la isla de Cuba, con D.a Francisca de Arteaga y Betancourt, natural del país y miembro de una de sus mas ilustres familias: desde sus primeros años manifestó estraordinariamente afición á la lectura, y en 1823 que tuvo la desgracia de perder á su padre, compuso los primeros versos lamentando con ellos aquella irreparable pérdida, en sentidísimos conceptos, aunque con el desliño é imperfeccion consiguiente á sus cortos años, pues solo contaba 7: hízose notable su infancia por la ausencia de aquella alegría natural en ella: su carácter era soberbio y melancólico; sus juegos de niña revelaban ya la índole de su talento: divertíase en representar tragedias con sus amigas, en las cuales siempre se reservaba papeles de hombre que ejecutaba con grande energía: todos los esfuerzos maternales no consiguieron nunca aficionarla á las labores de su sexo, ni fueron poderosos para vencer su ardiente pasión por la poesía y el teatro, las armas del ridículo con que intentaron sus parientes atacarla: á los 12 años de sus edad, Gertrudis, que era fanática admiradora de Quintana, escribía diariamente odas que por lo regular perecían quemadas al día siguiente por mano de su misma autora. 121 This entry describes Gómez de Avellaneda’s aberrance, her failure to emulate the traits proper to a young lady. She is neither sprightly nor feminine. Instead, she is melancholic, reads excessively, and prefers the roles of male characters in her plays. The dictionary also states that all the maternal forces were not able to correct this troubling behavior. It is fascinating to read 120 The full title continues: “obra dad a luz en España, por una sociedad de literatos distinguidos, y refundida y aumentada considerablemente para su publicación en México (1853)”, which was first published in 1846: Cervantes, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de. “Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía. Tomo 1.” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 1853. 121 See translation: “AVELLANEDA (Da Gertrudis Gomez de): born on the 23rd of March in 1816 from the matrimony of the naval lieutenant of the royal armada D. Manuel Gomez de Avellaneda, commander of the navy of the central province of the island of Cuba, with D.a Francisca de Arteaga y Betancourt, native of the country and member of one of its most illustrious families: manifested from her earliest years an extraordinary passion for reading, and in 1823 when she had the misfortune of losing her father, composed her first verses lamenting in them that irreparable loss, in the most sentimental concepts, although with the slips and imperfection resulting from her few years, as she was only 7: she made herself notable in her infancy for the absence of any natural joy: her character was sober and melancholic; her games as a girl revealed the nature of her talent: she entertained herself by producing plays with her friends, in which she always reserved for herself the roles of the men which she executed with great energy: all of the maternal forces never managed to interest her in the labors of her sex, nor were they powerful enough to overcome her ardent passion for poetry and theater, the ridiculous weapons with which her family tried to attack her: at 12 years of age, Gertrudis, who was a fanatical adorer of Quintana, wrote daily odes that were regularly burned on the following day by her own hand” (translation mine). 50 the supposed universality of this dictionary entry, the idea of its facticity and objectivity, and its appeal as both a colonially marginalized text—writing to and from the margins of Western society—and as a text from Spain in the twilight of an empire already losing the cultural dominance it once boasted in Europe. 122 After the death of her husband, Gómez de Avellaneda’s mother married another military man, Don Gaspar Isidoro de Escalada y López de la Peña, with whom Gómez de Avellaneda shared a troubled relationship. He had little appreciation for her literary endeavors and even less for her lack of interest in matrimony. Following a broken engagement, Gómez de Avellaneda decided to leave Cuba for Spain. She had already established herself within Cuban intellectual circles and eventually came to be read alongside the works of other antislavery writers such as the Del Montinos in Havana. 123 On the 9th of April 1836, she boarded the Bellocham for Europe. She then lived in Galicia with her step-father’s family who were apparently quite scandalized by her behavior. They found her to be utterly inept at what were considered the domestic arts proper to the nineteenth-century female and made fun of Goméz de Avellaneda’s intellectual and literary studies, calling her “La Doctora.” 124 After spending almost two years in La Coruña with her step-father’s family, she and her brother traveled to Portugal, then to Cádiz and Sevilla, where she resided for many years. She lived between Sevilla and Madrid where she published 122 See Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014). 123 Although, Gómez de Avellaneda is not strictly considered to be one of this group, Jerome Branche demonstrates the frequent association of her name with that of the Delmontinos: “the group of literati that congregated around Domingo Del Monte in Havana in the 1830s, who sponsored the freedom of Cuban slave poet Juan Francisco Manzano (and who produced the foundational works of this putative canon), are often portrayed as enlightened intellectuals, and as beacons of change in an oppressive and racist society. Avellaneda’s Sab is frequently, if only by association—since she was not a member of the Delmontine tertulia included in this abolitionist grouping. Her abolitionist credentials, in the wider hemispheric context, are taken for granted, however, in the repeated reference to Sab as having preceded Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-2) by ten years. In the local context, it is her feminist convictions that serve to locate her in the vanguard of the mostly male Cuban writing on slavery” (Branche, “Enobling Slavery,” 13). 124 Kirkpatrick, Las Románticas, 140. 51 actively and participated in the rich social and literary scene of the time. Despite her attempt to take the place of her mentor Juan Nicasio Gallego in the Real Academia Española, she was denied in 1853. 125 The writing of Gómez de Avellaneda’s biography tends to follow one of two tracks: either organized by her literary publications or more dramatically by her love affairs. Perhaps her most famous, or infamous, was with Ignacio Cepeda y Alcalde, to whom she wrote a series of letters describing her life story. 126 Kirkpatrick maintains that this letter writing was less an act of seduction and more the composition of self, stating that Gómez de Avellaneda produces herself as “a subject in writing” through this epistolary autobiography written in 1839 for Ignacio Cepeda, 127 in which “she creates herself in the image of what she finds most attractive.” 128 This autobiography becomes an act of desire, not for the other, but desire for self, desiring herself and to be constituted for herself. In his Circumfession, Derrida writes, “I have been seeking myself in a sentence” (13). So too, Gómez de Avellaneda’s letters to Cepeda are less about how he might gaze upon her and more about her own composition of selfhood. She writes to Cepeda: “si yo fuese hombre y encontrase en una mujer el alma que me anima, adoraría toda la vida a esa mujer.” 129 Her search is for her own inner being, a being which she would adore and possess all her life. 125 The first woman to be admitted was Carmen Conde only in 1978. 126 Letter writing is considered to be one of the oldest forms of women’s self-affirmation in the literary and pseudo- public sphere: “Las cartas aquí estudiadas presentan un elemento común: la presencia y despliegue de un yo que ejerce su poder sobre el interlocutor ausente. La ausencia del ‘otro’ es remplazada por su reconstrucción imaginaria en la escritura; el tú deseado cuya voz se hace oír esporádicamente en las réplicas del yo, permanece siempre a cierta distancia como eco de sí mismo. El sujeto escritor ejerce también su poder en la autorrepresentación textual que conduce a la invención de un sujeto escrito” (Arambel-Güiñazu, Las mujeres toman la palabra 21). 127 Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 135. 128 Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 136. 129 Severa, “Introducción,” Sab, 18. See translation: “if I were a man and I found in a woman the soul that animated me, I would adore that woman all my life” (translation mine). 52 Gómez de Avellaneda fashions herself in her writing. She constructs herself over and over again. I will attempt to follow Kirkpatrick’s strategy by differentiating between Gómez de Avellaneda, the author, and Tula, the textual creation and subjectivity that Gómez de Avellaneda invents for herself. Gómez de Avellaneda was very aware of and sought to manage the way these two personas were perceived. In her 1846 poem, “Romance contestando a otro de una señorita,” Gómez de Avellaneda responds to another poem written about her and denies the comparisons made between herself and other famous women writers: Prescinde, pues, te lo ruego, De las Safos y Corinas, Y simplemente me nombra Gertrudis, Tula o amiga. 130 She begins by citing a certain female, literary pedigree, starting with the famous Sappho, a popular referent for nineteenth-century women writers. Her sensual and lyrical style was deeply influential to Gómez de Avellaneda, who imitated and translated some of her works. She also cites Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, first published in 1807, a novel about a fiery and creative young woman who loses the love of her life because she fails to embody the ideals of womanly domesticity. Although at other times she was thrilled to admit comparisons between herself and her predecessors, 131 Gómez de Avellaneda was a revolutionary writer in many respects. 132 Kirkpatrick describes the ways in which she dealt with the ambivalence that went into constructing a feminine, Romantic subjectivity within a worldview that largely precluded women’s access to the kinds of feeling and interiority necessary for such a subject position. She 130 Gómez de Avellaneda, Obra selecta, 65-67. 131 Gómez de Avellaneda denies any similarity between Tula and these literary women. However, her translations of Sappho’s works betray a certain alliance with this poet, and Kirkpatrick points out that to one of her earliest lovers, Ignacio Cepeda, Gómez de Avellaneda wrote “Some of my friends have told me that there are similarities between me and the protagonist of this novel [Corinne], and so I want to read it again with you and look for the similarity I’m supposed to have with such a beautiful ideal of genius as that of Mme Staël” (Kirckpatrick, Románticas, 139). 132 Doris Sommer writes that Gómez de Avellaneda “understood that in order to write something new one had first to violate an earlier text to open a space for oneself” (Sommer, Foundational, 121). 53 writes that one of the ways Gómez de Avellaneda broke into the hallowed ground of masculine creative subjectivity was to appropriate their verses. She explains that Gómez de Avellaneda’s translations and appropriations of English and French Romantic male writers served to demonstrate her “mastery of fluent, correct Castilian versification. And indeed, virtuosity in the craft of poetry making was one form of authority she asserted with no concession to the proprieties of feminine modesty.” 133 Kirkpatrick explains that these imitations and translations of the male Romantics negotiated a tension and slippage between gendered subject positions, but that Gómez de Avellaneda ultimately carved out space for herself. 134 Gómez de Avellaneda’s legacy, either as one of the great writers of Spanish literature, as a Cuban genius of abolition, or as feminist with complicated notions of race, remains contested. As is the case with almost any writer or artist who has garnered so much attention across so many generations of readers, she is always found to be doubling back on herself, contradicting in one poem what was stated in another, or writing in private something quite different from the ideas apparently defended in her publications. She has been mobilized and triumphed and vilified and denied over and over depending upon the time and place in which she finds herself. Much of the criticism that surrounds both her person and literary production is linked to her views of gender and race. However, it is not for us to attempt this fixation and fossilization of her person, 133 Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 179. 134 Because of the significant literary persona Gómez de Avellaneda created for herself in Spain, she was able to live with extraordinary liberty. She carried on numerous, highly-publicized romances, including an affair with Gabriel García Tassara, with whom she had a baby girl Brenilde (Marí), born in April 1845 and deceased November 9, 1845. Devastated by the ill health of her infant daughter, she wrote to Tassara asking him to visit the child. He neither recognized the baby nor condescended to visit her. Despite having vowed in her youth to never marry, Gómez de Avellaneda did so twice. Her first husband was Pedro Sabater, whom she married in 1845. He died in August 1846. She then married Domingo Verdugo y Massieu, a coronel and court diplomat, in 1855. He died in Cuba on October 28, 1863. Gómez de Avellaneda traveled to Cuba in 1855 to visit her mother, who was in poor health and died on December 5. After the death of her husband in 1863, Gómez de Avellaneda returned to Spain and died on February 1, 1873. 54 to say precisely whether she believed this or was that. Instead, what stands out is the very ambiguity, the seductive slippage that occurs between her words. When talking about Gómez de Avellaneda the term queer is not quite right but certainly beguiling. In “Queer Anachronisms: Reimagining Lesbian History in Performance” 135 , Sarah Mullan combats the idea that queer theory results in the erasure of lesbian and feminist queer experiences by continuing to place male queer subjectivities at its neutral point. 136 Mullan develops a theory of queer anachronism in which temporality is removed from its “straight,” linear understanding and embraces “an interaction between past and present.” 137 It is a relational temporality rather than a hierarchical one that allows us to place past and present into conversation. This queering of time, this anachronism that plays upon the work, directly instigates the maternal reading of these narratives of filiation. Instead of pursuing the linearity of historical time and filiation, it doubles back on itself into a circularity, a mobius strip—to borrow 135 In Queer Dramaturgies. International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, edited by Campbell Al, Farrier S., Palgrave Macmillan (2016). Mullan takes up Valerie Traub’s argument for a “queer potential” and identifies “the foregrounding of lesbian subjectivity: queer anachronism and […] reimagining” in a 2010 performance of Sappho…in 9 fragments. Another concern is that imposing such a term as “queer” upon a nineteenth century subject flattens out their historical context and reality. Mullan writes that “Rather than advocating a lesbian revisionist history, which Halberstam has outlined can problematically collapse identities onto one another (1998: 150), Freccero suggests that there is potential in the state of anachronism. The potential of anachronism as a performance strategy that renders the lesbian subject visible, yet ensure that she remains transhistorical […] I posit that the use of the historical figure of Sappho as an anachronism is a form of this queer historical impulse at work, and that the connections this anachronism facilitates are productive for challenging the apparent fixedness of lesbian identity. […] The occurrence of an anachronism in (queer) historical scholarship constitutes a significant methodological concern, especially with respect to terminology. The dominant position contends that anachronisms should be avoided in the course of accurately recording the past” (Mullan, “Queer Anachronisms,” 246-247). She writes that this can, however, function to uncritically cement false and essentialist categories and taxonomies. 136 Her argument specifically traces the elaboration of queer theory as enunciated by Eve Sedgwich, Teresa de Lauretis, and Judith Butler. 137 She describes her use of anachronism stating: “An anachronism, in itself, can be viewed as inherently queer. It fits into current formulations of queer temporality, which challenge conventional conceptions of time and advocate a move away from linear timelines; the temporal flux that typifies an anachronism defies ‘straight’ linearity (Edelman 2004: Halberstam 2005). An anachronism in performance facilitates an interaction between past and present, and has the potential to challenge the fixedness of identity labels, such as lesbian. I use the phrase ‘queer anachronism’ to foreground the queerness of anachronism, and draw on Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of ‘temporal drag’ to provide a useful critical lens for considering the efficacy of the anachronistic figure in this production. Freeman suggests that ‘drag’ can be thought of as a temporal phenomenon” (Mullan, “Queer Anachronisms,” 247-248). 55 an image from Bracha Ettinger. Ettinger proposes a maternal valence to subjectivity that is not external to the masculine economy, but rather resides at its inverse, but not its inversion. 138 It is a Möbius strip, turned in its turning, and the maternal relation is the moment that occurs before the cut, before the “future subject” 139 is separated from the Other. 140 It is a temporality that is both futural and reminiscing. It is without time, without gender, without subjectivity, anachronistic. Gómez de Avellaneda’s performance of gender was certainly shocking to her contemporaries, but it is hardly interesting to speculate as to her identification/orientation, and it would be an even less interesting kind of anachronism to do so. What is more fascinating is to follow the queerness of time and gender as they express themselves in her work, the doubling back of subjectivity and legitimacy, Gómez de Avellaneda’s indeterminacy. As we have demonstrated, women’s personhood and sexuality is firmly denied within this narrative of the nineteenth-century nation and family. 141 While male desire was permissible and even the means of propagating the nation, women’s desire was utterly unforgivable. 142 This is one of many reasons why Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda continues to capture critical attention more than 138 Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 126-127. 139 Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, 126. 140 See Butler’s “Foreword” to Ettinger’s Matrixial Borderspaces (ix). 141 Goodman details the way it was women’s sexuality that became the primary focus for establishing the borders of the colonial nation: “I trace Darwin’s findings through discussions of cultural representations wherein female unreproductiveness is a defining feature, arguing how femininity has come to represent global markets. As such, this book is vitally concerned with the role of the family in policing identity but also with how the family itself is involved—within literature, discourse, and politics—as a defense against the ravages of new capitalist orders. It shows, for example, how Latin America offers an origin story of migrant identities where femininity defines the border along which economic interests—or, rather, the so-called natural freedoms of market enterprise—are seen urgently, like the family, as needing protection” (Goodman, Infertilities, vii). 142 On the subject of women’s sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kirkpatrick writes: “The reinterpretation of the female body by Enlightenment medical science and by Rousseau and his followers legitimized the development of a characteristically bourgeois ideology of womanhood, with its corresponding social practices […] That powerful nineteenth-century stereotype of feminine identity, whose English version Virginia Woolf called the ‘Angel in the House’ [angel del hogar] […] The Angel’s main characteristics stressed her subordinate complementarity to men: whereas men were capable of grand endeavors, intellectual, political, military, that linked their self-interest to the universal good, the true woman was finely, selflessly, and almost exclusively attuned to the needs and feelings of her domestic circle. The idea that while men were affected by sexual passion, women were designed to experience maternal tenderness but not sexual desire was one of the most universally accepted propositions of the new ideology of gender” (Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 7). 56 two hundred years after her birth. Her novel carefully guards the purity of her protagonists, while in her personal life, she was far more liberal in her affections. Gómez de Avellaneda was, at the time, something of a curiosity where her gender and femininity were concerned, and was often the subject of gossip. She was also vividly aware of her capacity to wield these perceptions. Her creation of Tula, the fictional construction and artefact of Gómez de Avellaneda’s imagination, was a weapon she mobilized against the conservative politics of the time. On November 3, 1850, La Ilustración published an article detailing the life and publications of Tula, written by Gómez de Avellaneda herself: 143 “Es cuanto puedo decir de mi vida literaria. De mi carácter, si se quiere indicarlo, diré con igual franqueza que no peca de dulce. He sido en mi primera juventud impetuosa, violenta, incapaz de sufrir resistencia. En el día está quebrantando mi carácter: soy menos irritable y también he perdido el entusiasmo que era su base. Mis escritos, dicen muchos que revelan más imaginación que corazón; yo no lo sé; pero creo que tengo, o al menos he tenido, grandes facultades de sentimiento, si bien confieso que siempre con más pasión que ternura. Don Juan Nicasio Gallego ha dicho de mis poesías que nada indicaba en ellas la blandura de una fibra femenil y la languidez de una hija de los Trópicos: que sus calidades sobresalientes eran la altura y energía de los pensamientos y el varonil vigor de la expresión. Otros críticos han dicho también que yo no era poetisa, sino poeta: que mi talento era eminentemente varonil. Yo creo que no es exactamente verdad: que ningún hombre ve ciertas cosas como yo las veo, ni las comprende como yo las comprendo; pero no niego por esto que siento que hay vigor en mi alma y que nunca descollé por cualidades femeninas. Mis amigos saben que soy sincera hasta rayar en indiscreta.” 144 143 Ezama Gil, “Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: Un siglo de manipulación e invención en torno a su autobiografía (1907-2007),” 2. 144 Ezama Gil, “Un siglo,” 2. See translation: “This is what I can say of my literary life. Of my character, if you please, I will say with the same frankness that it does not sin by sweetness. I have been since my earliest youth impetuous, violent, incapable of suffering resistance. Today my character is breaking: I am less irritable and I have also lost the enthusiasm that was its foundation. My writing, many say reveals more imagination than heart; I don’t know; but I do believe that I have, or at least I have had, great faculties of sentiment, I must confess with more passion than tenderness. Don Juan Nicasio Gallego has said of my poetry that nothing in them indicates the softness of a feminine fiber and the languor of a daughter of the Tropics: that their outstanding qualities are the loftiness and energy of their thoughts and their manly vigor of expression. Other critics have also said that I was not a poetess, but rather a poet: that my talent was eminently virile. I believe that this is not exactly the truth: that no man sees certain things as I see them, nor does he understand them as I understand them; but I do not deny that because of this I feel that there is vigor in my soul and that I never stood out for my feminine qualities. My friends know that I am sincere to the point of indiscretion” (translation mine). 57 She directly confronts the criticisms made of her and the statements by other notable contemporaries that she was manly, a poet rather than a poetess. 145 The most famous of these barbs was directed at her by Bretón de los Herreros who said: “Es mucho hombre esa mujer.” 146 What we see in these excerpts is a woman who was keenly aware of the societal expectations placed on her and the ways in which she chose to subvert these expectations. Her gender performance and expression were not taken for granted, and that is why it is also interesting that, unlike Duras, she chooses a male subject to represent her grievances. Gómez de Avellaneda’s fictional self-representation, Tula, is replaced in her novel by Sab, a male slave. The reader is led to imply that he is the son of his master’s brother and one of their father’s slaves. This relationship between master and slave is, however, portrayed not as a violation, but as passionate love: “mi madre amó. Una pasión absoluta se encendió con toda su actividad en aquel corazón africano. A pesar de su color era mi madre hermosa, y sin duda tuvo correspondencia su pasión pues salí al mundo por entonces. El nombre de mi padre fue un secreto que jamás quiso revelar.” 147 Sab states that his mother and father hid his paternity, and 145 Ileana Álvarez wrote a 2016 article in Árbol invertido, titled “La Avellaneda en Martí: del juicio sombrío al testimonio de luz,” in which she details José Martí’s criticism of Gómez de Avellaneda. She focuses upon Martí’s comparison of Gómez de Avellaneda with Luisa Pérez Zambrana, whom he describes as “the flower,” and Tula as “the rock”: “No hay mujer en Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: todo anunciaba en ella un ánimo potente y varonil; era su cuerpo alto y robusto, como su poesía ruda y enérgica; no tuvieron las ternuras miradas para sus ojos, llenos siempre de extraño fulgor y de dominio: era algo así como una nube amenazante. Luisa Pérez es algo como nube de nácar y azul en tarde serena y bonacible. Sus dolores son lágrimas; los de la Avellaneda son fierezas. Más: la Avellaneda no sintió el dolor humano; era más alta y más potente que él; su pesar era una roca; el de Luisa Pérez, una flor. Violeta casta, nelumbio quejumbroso, pasionaria triste […] Para la Tula el mineral que significa dureza, solidez, solidaridad consigo mismo, que también puede connotar poder, frialdad, cohesión, arrogancia masculina; […] Para una, el cuerpo, su carnalidad; para otra, el espíritu, el numen, a la larga lo inmortal, lo que verdaderamente permanece a pesar de su carácter frágil.’” Álvarez quotes another friend and critic of Gómez de Avellaneda, Nicasio Gallego, who wrote: “’Todo en sus cantos es nervioso y varonil; así cuesta trabajo persuadirse de que no son obras de un escritor de otro sexo. No brillan tanto en ellos los movimientos de ternura, ni las formas blandas y delicadas propias de un pecho femenil, y de la dulce languidez que induce en sus hijos, el sol caliente de los trópicos que alumbró su cuna’” (Álvarez, “La Avellaneda en Martí,” 2016). 146 See Álvarez’s 2016 article “La Avellaneda en Martí”: “que durante gran parte del siglo XX se esgrimió como un gran “halago” por críticos e historiadores.” See translation: “She’s a lot of man, that woman” (translation mine). 147 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 109. See translation: “she had fallen in love. A deep and powerful passion was kindled in her African heart. In spite of her color my mother was beautiful, and undoubtedly her passion was 58 that upon the death of the youngest brother of the de B… family, Sab was given to Carlota’s father to be raised and protected. It is through his life and torment that Gómez de Avellaneda explores the enslavement of women to romantic ideologies of womanhood. Sommer writes: “At the same time that Sab abandons the strong colors that could tragically divide Cubans against themselves, the novel also relaxes an implied binary system of gender coding. It shows the porousness and the strategic availability of signs, for example the signs ‘male’ and ‘female.’” 148 She and Picon Garfield explore the crossing and transgressing codes taken up in Sab. Instead of giving to the reader Carlota, the beautiful and indelibly white daughter of Cuba, we are given Sab, and Sab desires her. 149 However, his desire is thwarted. Though constantly portrayed as “pure” and “virtuous,” the desire between black and white bodies is greeted always with death. Sab speaks of his mother’s death and her love of his father in the same breath. It is almost as if the penalty for this love were her life. Later, when Sab finally decides to take action inspired by his ardent passion for Carlota, he dies a bloody and agonizing death. Catherine Davies quotes Jerome Branche, arguing that part of the reason Sab might have been censored in Cuba was not because it was abolitionist, but because of the incestuous desire originating in the rape of the slave mother. 150 Not only would Sab’s union with Carlota have broken the ban on interracial marriages, but it would also have resulted in the marriage of first cousins. Irigaray explains that the incest taboo in reciprocated because about that time I came into the world. My father’s name was a secret which she always refused to reveal to me” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 31). 148 Sommer, Foundational, 121. Evelyn Picon Garfield writes in Poder y sexualidad: el discurso de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda that “en la heteroglossia del proceso dialógico, no sólo de sus novelas sino también de su drama, se evidencia la coexistencia de contradicciones socio-ideológicas que no se excluyen sino que se cruzan” (Poder y sexualidad, 10) 149 Jerome Branche writes “That it is also the story of the impossible love that the male slave holds for his mistress, has prompted the observation that the novel is a feminist reversal of the Romantic paradigm. Here in addition to the fact that it is the male who dies broken-hearted, the female subjects are depicted as the subjects rather than the objects of desire (Kirkpatrick 120)” (Branche, “Enobling,” 14). 150 Davies, “The Gift,” 46. 59 modern society derives from the equation of women’s bodies with “legal tender”: “The incest taboo represents this refusal to allow productive nature to enter into exchanges among men.” 151 By restricting a woman’s body to circulation within the family, she brings no value to the family within the class economy. Irigaray writes that it is through man’s circulation and conversion of woman into commodity that man constitutes himself, that he builds culture and capital out of the natural. Mother is only made valuable in this circulation, and to extend the circulation beyond the bounds of white bodies was to devalue the family as commodity. Ultimately, this novel is trapped within a confusion between two kinds of property, slave and woman. Beside Sab is Carlota’s cousin, Teresa. Also the illegitimate child of one of the de B… family, she is portrayed as sallow-skinned and uninspiring. Yet all the interiority of the novel lies between these two, though both will meet with tragic ends. Fatally enamored of Carlota’s betrothed, Enrique Otway, Teresa tries to console herself with Sab and convince him to marry her. After he secures his own fate by winning the lottery and providing Carlota with the dowry necessary to win Enrique’s hand, Sab dies leaving Teresa with his written confession, knowing that Carlota will be “profaned” by her marriage to the unworthy Otway. After Sab’s death, Teresa takes religious orders and upon her deathbed delivers her confession and Sab’s to Carlota, who has lived a sad and loveless life beside the cold and mercenary Otways. Teresa, like Sab, has no value in this marketplace of the Romantic era. 152 They cannot be bearers of the nation. The novel ends with Teresa’s delivery of Sab’s letter to Carlota and Carlota’s visit to Sab’s tomb. Like Sab, Ourika falls in love with her mistress’s child, alongside whom she has been raised as if equal in the eyes of their society. When she is forced to face the reality of her skin 151 Irigaray, This Sex, 185. 152 Joan Torres-Pou explains that “Dentro del sistema patriarcal esclavista, Teresa y Sab son dos ‘productos’ destinados a no encontrar comprador o, al menos, no el comprador para el que su educación, desatendiendo su condición social, los ha destinado” (“La Ambigüedad,” 61). 60 and status, she is plunged into a depression, realizing also that she will never be loved as she desires. She sees that she could, with the wealth of her connections, secure a marriage alliance, but she scorns the idea of marriage as transaction. The novel is framed by her deathbed confession to a doctor who comes to treat her at the convent where she has found her only home, taking as her family and children all the poor and rejected of the world. Before we can talk about the final moments of these heroes, we must first discuss their beginnings. Both novels are eponymous, deriving their titles from the names of their protagonists, but what do these names mean and where do they come from? It is not the protagonists themselves that have named the work. It is the author who bears the authority of naming, even if she has taken pains to deny her paternity. Furthermore, she denies paternity in siting the source of the name in the long-deceased mothers of these heroes. The first moment of encounter between a text and the reader is the title. In this case, the encounter occurs upon the name given by a mother: “’Mi nombre de bautismo es Bernabé, mi madre me llamó siempre Sab, y así me han llamado luego mis amos […] mi madre […] nació libre y princesa.” 153 Gómez de Avellaneda not only undermines the master and the father’s right to name, but also the baptismal name: one of the pillars upon which legitimacy was based in colonial society. That Sab should 153 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 108-9. Picon Garfield argues that Sab overturns the paternal authority of naming by drawing upon a Biblical illusion and demonstrating the way that Gómez de Avellaneda places the name in the mother’s line. She writes: “De mayor relevancia, sin embargo, es la posible procedencia del signo que escoge Gómez de Avellaneda para representar a su protagonista y el título de la noval misma. El vocablo ‘Sab’ invoca el recuerdo de la famosa Reina de Sabá del Antiguo Testamento, la que visita al rey Salomón (Reyes I:10). Una leyenda árabe sobre estas figuras antiguas nos cuenta que la reina africana tuvo con el rey hebreo un hijo, Menelek, antepasado de los reyes actuales de Etiopía (Encyclopedia XX. 877). No podemos ignorar la posibilidad de que la cubana, quien transtextualiza y ficcionaliza con libertad las historias bíblicas en varias obras suyas como Saúl y Baltasar, haya escogido conscientemente nombrar a su protagonista mulato Sab, quien como Menelek es hijo de una madre real negra y un padre blanco. En esa intertextualización bíblica, la autora re-valoriza la miscegenación en el mulato Sab, y por ser él heredero real, también logra que se desplace el centro político del poder desde Europa y el catolicismo hacia la periferia (África/Cuba). Puesto que nombrar es ejercer poder, mediante el acto de suprimir el patronímico (signo político-social-económico) y de reemplazar Sab por el nombre cristiano, Bernabé (signo religioso), la autora subvierte el sistema patriarcal. Incluso vincula el nombre de su protagonista con el linaje materno africano en lugar del semítico del padre Salomón” (Poder y sexualidad, 74-75). 61 have a baptismal name is a mark of paternal power, but instead, Gómez de Avellaneda returns the name to the long-deceased mother. 154 Instead of inhabiting the site of humiliation or the lack of legitimacy, the absence of the father—for Avellaneda—opens doors. The lack of the patriarchal symbolic order provides a space for the feminization and rupture of racial codes in this place of power in the novel. Although dead long before the action of the novel commences, the mother is not absent. The naming of the novel is an event that happens outside the historical time of the story, but whose authority over the text is insoluble. It is a different kind of time. Anne O’Byrne explains that “our natal arrival remains vital but irretrievably lost to our experience. […] we are born into a world that is older than us but that we must make our own.” 155 As natality is lost to us, we are deprived of this first story of coming-into-being. As such, stories are created to legitimize our existence. Just as the colonial nation whose coming-into-being in the land is legitimized through renaming and storytelling. 156 O’Byrne argues against an understanding of maternity that links the maternal only with nature and places the paternal act of naming within the social or cultural sphere, the moment when we become social subjects differentiated from the mother. 157 She resists the reading that views the maternal as the non-time or void of our birth, the risk of falling into the bottomless pit of relation. Instead of relying on these fictions of filiation, the linearity of a historical time that can be accounted for, the maternal introduces a certain anachronicity. She is 154 Doris Sommer writes that Sab “carece de legitimidad en el orden simbólico patriarcal, precisamente porque no tiene padre, porque, por decirlo así, no tiene nombre. En este vacío social, la autor-idad puede pasar a nuevas manos, manos mulatas y femeninas” (“Sab c’est moi,” 28). 155 O’Byrne, Natality, 11. See also Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005. 156 Anne Mcclintock writes in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) that “The land, which is also the female, is literally mapped in male body fluids” (3). 157 Anne O’Byrne writes in Natality and Finitude that “by privileging the moment of naming, that is, the occasion when paternity traditionally makes its claim, it shores up the distinction between nature and history in a way that serves to consign maternal experience to the side of nature […] What occurs second is the event that begins the process by which that birth turns out to have been my birth, an event that can happen only in a context provided by those who have been around longer than I have” (Natality, 105). 62 not ahistorical or prehistorical, but introduces a certain irruption of “filiation’s linearity” 158 by exposing us as being in relation to innumerable others—including, but not limited to, our mothers. 159 Maternal naming and relation disrupts the order that privileges the father’s right to name and the child that bears the name. In fact, it is the deceased mother who dominates the novel and authorizes it within her own symbolic order. The novel does not bear the name of the father, of the white master, but rather, its name is bequeathed by the mother. She is the one who inscribes the novel with a name. It is not clear if it is Ourika’s mother who names her, though it seems likely. She describes the moment following her mother’s death, when Monsieur le chevalier de B. saw her being loaded onto a slave ship: Je fus rapportée du Sénégal, à l’âge de deux ans, par M. le chevalier de B., qui en était gouverneur. Il eut pitié de moi, un jour qu’il voyait embarquer des esclaves sur un bâtiment négrier qui allait bientôt quitter le port : ma mère était morte, et on m’emportait dans le vaisseau, malgré mes cris. M. de B. m’acheta, et, à son arrivée en France, il me donna à Mme la maréchale de B. , sa tante, la personne la plus aimable de son temps, et celle qui sut réunir, aux qualités les plus élevées, la bonté la plus touchante. 160 In this scene she describes the purchasing of her person and her separation. It is a scene of salvation and condemnation. Reduced to property, she is liberated in being brought to France, but although she will not live the life of a slave, she will be forced into permanent and complete exile from all belonging. Her name becomes a mark of exoticism and curiosity. It is a part of her 158 Glissant, Poetics, 138. 159 O’Byrne describes a relational history: “We are generated (i.e., natal) beings who form ourselves into generations, who go on to generate, and who eventually pass from the scene. For [Wilhelm] Dilthey, meaning is found in the relation of a part to the whole; his achievement is in identifying a thought of life—that is, historical, generative life—that fills the role of the meaning-giving whole without ignoring the natal impulse” (O’Byrne, Natality, 12). 160 Duras, Ourika, 7. See translation: “I was brought here from Senegal when I was two years old by the Chevalier de B., who was then governor there. One day he saw me being taken aboard a slaver that was soon to leave port. My mother had died and in spite of my cries I was being carried to the ship. He took pity and bought me and then, when he returned to France, gave me to his aunt, Mme la Maréchale de B. She was one of the most attractive women of her time, combing a fine mind with a very genuine warmth of heart” (Ourika, Translation by John Fowles, 7). 63 social value as object and merchandise. It is the moment when “the Other fixes me with his gaze.” 161 These maternal names are also somehow unpronounceable to their authors. They purport to be names given by African women, names of Senegal and of the Congo. Yet, the name is displaced. 162 It is colonial property, forged by white aristocracy and dominion. Derrida circumfesses the moment in which his mother, in exile from her home in Algeria, is no longer able to pronounce his name: Consign them here, but why I wonder, confide to the bottom of this book what were my mother’s last more or less intelligible sentences, still alive at the moment I am writing this, but already incapable of memory, in any case of the memory of my name, a name become for her at the very least unpronounceable, and I am writing here at the moment when my mother no longer recognizes me, and at which, still capable of speaking or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for her and therefore the rest of her life I no longer have a name. 163 He is unnamed. The mother names, but she can no longer pronounce the name of her child. She no longer remembers. This chapter and these stories—those of Ourika, Sab, and every unclaimed child—is a story of unnaming. It is not decolonial, but rather delegitimizing in that it points the finger at the fiction, the createdness, of genealogy and filiation. Similarly, both Duras and Gómez de Avellaneda made movements to separate themselves from their written work, to delegitimize the work that they had named. Duras attempted to publish the novel anonymously, but parentage was forced upon her. Gómez de Avellaneda wrote her “Dos palabras” as if to convince her reader that this disgraceful child was not hers—or at the very least—estranged from 161 Fanon, Masks, 89. 162 Jerome Branche argues that “Avellaneda’s avoidance of the Sabbian mother may well lie in the class and race differential that explodes the (uneven) slave-wife analogy. That the laboring Black women around her may be invisible to her elitist eyes is suggested in her own abhorrence of domestic chores. Her often-quoted autobiographical comment in Spain, which is used to highlight her love of letters and garner sympathy in the face of relatives who scoffed at her inability to cook and clean, etc., also clearly exposes the fact that, for herself, as for any young lady of her class, such house work was considered ‘degrading.’ Evidently it was fit only for the poor and the Black women slaves” (Branche, “Enobling,” 14). 163 Derrida and Bennington, Circumfession, 22. 64 her. As if this were not enough, they have named the novels with unpronounceable names— unpronounceable to them anyway. These white women of the ruling elite gave to their novels names which were illegible to them that put them to paper, or am I revoking their authorship? Do they not deny it themselves? These names are triply delegitimated. They are attributed to enslaved, deceased women: women who are not granted legitimizing power both in being women and in being Black. They are then again delegitimated in the veiling of their authors. Gómez de Avellaneda puts clear distance between her novel and herself, even stating that her feelings on the subject matter might have changed. Her use of the black body as a means of exploring her frustration with Woman’s position in the nineteenth century is not unheard-of however. Branche explains: It was British writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who, in 1792, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, first described wifely dependence as “slavish.” The metaphoric equivalence among women abolitionists, of (European) wifely subordination with that of slaves, allowed their public to more readily empathize with the plight of the unfree. It became a rhetorical point of reference for the abolitionist cause both in Britain and the United States. In the women’s movement, the image of laboring Black women slaves helped undermine patriarchal discourse that would exclude the female sex on the traditional grounds of their supposedly “delicate” constitutions. 164 Black women’s laboring bodies are thus conscripted to fight for white women’s emancipation. 165 This distancing of white feminism from black women reduces black women’s—and men’s in the case of Sab—bodies to subject matter and metaphor. Branche goes on to note that Gómez de 164 Branche, “Enobling,” 14. Brigida Pastor also describes the ways in which the oppression of enslaved Africans in the Americas was mobilized by many, but in this case especially Avellaneda, to propose a white, feminist message: “This article argues that neither the romantic nor the abolitionist argument manages to see clearly the novel’s main purpose: to express Avellaneda’s feminist thought. Thus, the allusions to black slavery only constitute the author’s vehicle for communicating her frustrations as a woman in a society where the female role was unquestionably inferior” (Pastor, “Symbiosis,” 188). Pastor writes that Avellaneda felt that her argument for women’s emancipation would seem less radical than an argument against slavery, and that the anti-slavery argument becomes a vehicle for her revolt against the social mores of the nineteenth century. 165 Branche describes the critical gap between he feminist and abolitionist readings of the novel: “In many critical discussions of the novel, despite an apparent anxiety to vindicate Sab as either abolitionist or feminist, abolition as ‘putting an end to slavery’ is almost never defined. Neither is it explained how Sab the protagonist, an individual sworn to slavery, becomes a universal symbol of freedom. Similarly, feminist readings of the novel demonstrate a remarkable blind spot for the Black women lurking in the shadows of the narrative” (Branche, “Enobling,” 13). 65 Avellaneda makes no attempt to join together with black women or allow them access to a feminist sisterhood, constituting a “double exploitation.” 166 The racial anxiety expressed by these two authors, however, is not limited to the domestic space of the family and of forbidden love. One of the most subtle yet striking shared traits of these two novels is the absolute terror and condemnation with which the two authors approach the concept of a slave revolt or any kind of violence against their masters. 167 Duras points very directly at Haiti, and with Gómez de Avellaneda we see a more oblique horror at the possibility. Cuba was directly affected by the Haitian revolution when many French colonists fled to Cuba and Cuban plantation owners felt themselves directly threatened by the possibility of an uprising in their own homes. Interestingly, many of these slave revolts did begin in the home with domestic slaves using their position close to the family to orchestrate poisonings and other acts of violent resistance. 168 The slave revolt in Santo Domingo, today known as the Haitian Revolution, is the background for one of the more prominent cases for legitimation of the early nineteenth century. What makes this suit interesting is not that it is daughters being legitimated or that both parents are in agreement as to their parentage, but rather the underlying narrative of their losses due to the uprising in Santo Domingo that is curious. In 1807, Don Nicolas de Toledo found himself happily divested of a sickly and unappealing wife, Doña Maria Gertrudis de Mora. 169 Her death left him free to marry his true 166 Branch, “Enobling,” 14. However, Kirkpatrick writes that Gómez de Avellaneda’s feminism did not extend to the kind of “lyrical sisterhood” that was becoming popular at this time, in which women writers banded together and assisted each other in publishing (Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 82-85). 167 Maguire writes that “Haiti continued to haunt the Cuban imagination as the possibility of black uprising (one carried out in a Creole vernacular), a fear that, even if unstated, fueled tensions around the issue of slavery throughout the nineteenth century” (Maguire, Racial Eperiments, 7). 168 The scene of domestic slaves in Haiti poisoning their masters is detailed in C.L.R. James’s history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, and Alejo Carpentier’s novel on the subject, El reino de este mundo. 169 I do not use an accent on the “I” in Maria in these names, because they are not accented in the original documents. 66 love, Doña Maria Merced del Monte y Maldonado, with whom he had been carrying on an affair since 1796 when he was stationed on Hispaniola. Described as a “hombre de naturaleza frágil y miserable mientras en la debilidad humana,” 170 he could not help but fall in love with “Doña Maria Merced del Monte y Maldonado dama circunstanciada por las dotes personales de honestidad, religión, y buena educación, que la adornan, como por ser de noble nacimiento y ser de las primeras familias de la referida Isla Española.” 171 She became pregnant with their first child and gave birth in 1797 to “Doña Maria de los Dolores de Toledo y Monte natural de la Ciudad de Santo Domingo en la Isla Española y emigrada con residencia en la Ciudad de la Havana.” 172 Unfortunately for this daughter, Don Nicolas’s wife was still living at the time. Because of her father’s public position and her mother’s nobility, the pregnancy and birth were hidden, and her baptism was recorded without naming her parents. 173 Their second daughter, Doña Maria Belen, was born after the death of Don Nicolas’s wife and was subsequently legitimized when her parents married. Doña Maria de los Dolores, however, was repeatedly denied legitimation until 1815, when after five years of negotiations and the payment of 25,000 ducados, she received her legitimation. 174 170 See translation: “man of weak nature and wretched within human weakness.” 171 See translation: “Doña Maria Merced del Monte y Maldonado lady favored with the personal gifts of honesty, religion, and good education, that adorn her, as being from noble birth and being of one of the first families of the referred to Isla Española.” 172 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. See translation: “Doña Maria de los Dolores de Toledo y Monte native of the City of Santo Domingo in the Isla Española and emigrated with residency in the City of Havana.” 173 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. “Fue estando en Santo Domingo Don Nicolas de Toledo, siendo Secretario de la Presidencia, Gobierno y Capitanía Gral de aquella Isla, y de estado casado con Doña Gertrudis de Mora, dedicó, por los años del 1796, algunos obsequios a Doña Maria de la Merced del Monte y Maldonado, que se hallaba soltera, y de su amorosa correspondencia resultó embarazada, y salió a la luz del mundo la exponente en 1797. […] Las circunstancias de un hombre casado, y de un empleo publico tan visible obligaron a ocultar en la partida de bautismo el nombre de los Padres, y en el libro asientos se puso ser hija de Padres no conocidos.” 174 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. 67 The many letters accompanying this case pleading for Doña Maria de los Dolores beg the court’s clemency on the grounds of the “cariño extraordinario” 175 of the couple’s relationship and the honesty and nobility of their names. 176 Also marshalled in their favor is the fear shared among the slave-holding class of Cuba in the wake of the uprisings in Santo Domingo. Doña Maria de la Merced, mother of the illegitimate Doña Maria de los Dolores writes that it has been difficult to pursue the legitimation because many of her documents proving her “ascendencia, genealogía y distinguido nacimiento […] quedaron perdidos” 177 because of the “cesión de su patria a la Francia por el tratado de Basilea, e inesperada ocupación de su territorio por el negro Tuisaint [sic].” 178 Another letter was written on their behalf by Pedro de Garibay, a Spanish military officer who fought to quell the rebellion. 179 He describes the situation in Haiti as “una Isla atada de una insurrección extrema y sanguinaria […] los grandes acaecimientos de aquella Isla se han rozado en todos los Ministerios. Doña Maria del Monte será siempre recomendable por su emigración, por las haciendas, ganados, y otras fincas que perdió por ella, y por que su virtud cautivó la voluntad du un hombre de luces que la conoce, y la aprecia.” 180 He describes the bloodshed and states that Doña Maria de la Merced was good to bring what properties she could to Cuba. Among these properties he includes her daughter of whom he writes: “¿cuánto mas a una doncella que a todo lo que puede aspirar es a ser una virtuosa madre de familia, 175 See translation: “extraordinary affection.” 176 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. 177 See translation: “ancestry, genealogy and distinguished birth […] they were lost.” 178 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. See translation: “cession of her homeland to France by the treaty of Basel, and the unexpected occupation of her territory by the negro Tuisaint [sic].” 179 Pedro de Garibay was a Spanish military officer who fought in Santo Domingo and later participated in the first coup in Nueva España. 180 See translation: “an island fettered by an extreme and bloody insurrection […] the great events of that Island have chafed every Ministry. Doña Maria del Monte will be always commended for her emigration, for the property, livestock, and other farms which she lost there, and for the virtue that captured the will of a man of status that knows and honors her.” 68 haciendo feliz a un hombre, y dando hijos al estado que no le avergüenza de encontrarse con la reseña de aquel lunar?” 181 The young girl, roughly thirteen at the time, can only hope to provide children for her husband and her country, and only once liberated from the stain of her birth. His statement is an accounting of the riches that Doña Maria de la Merced has wrested from the bloody uprisings in Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo), and he asks if the state truly wants to reject the potential value of this commodity. One of these letters bargaining for the legitimation of Doña Maria de los Dolores refers to the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture, as “el negro Tuisaint.” According to C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the great—and possibly the only—flaw in Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership of the Haitian Revolution was his understanding of the war he was waging, which was based upon the French principles of the Rights of Man, and his failure to properly communicate this to the men he led: “Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.” 182 For his men, the war appeared to be one of Black men rising up against white slave-owners, but Toussaint did not conceive of war in this way. For James, the war waged by Toussaint was one of the slave class rising up against the ruling class. 183 James writes, “The race question is subsidiary to the class 181 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. See translation: “how much more a young lady who can only aspire to be a virtuous mother of a family, making a man happy, and giving children to the state that she should not be embarrassed to be found with the criticism of this mark?” 182 James, Black Jacobins, 288. 183 In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault states that it is a mistake to say that class war is not a race war. By definition, war between classes, according to Foucault, is a war between races: the race of the powerful against the race of those without the exercise of power. This conception of “race” however is not dependent upon the color of one’s skin but rather upon one’s proximity or ability to maneuver within discourses and relations of power. In this way, the war fought by Toussaint both was and was not a race war, and his politics were also maneuvers within this war. Foucault inverts Clausewitz’s “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” quoted by James when writing on how Toussaint’s followers could not understand his tactics. 183 Foucault states rather that it is politics, which is the “continuation of war by other means.” 183 Therefore, we exist in a perpetual state of war. It was this war waged in the guise of politics that created misunderstanding between Toussaint and the people. Of course, to take up 69 question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” 184 According to James, Toussaint was a true believer in the ideals of the French Revolution. He deeply espoused its claims of liberty and equality and hoped to see San Domingo a free and prosperous actor within the revolutionary state. However, the extent to which the French Republic would allow the implementation of its ideals within the colony was stymied by the desire to maintain the economic gain achieved through slave labor. 185 In his study of ideology within slave society, Misplaced Ideas, Roberto Schwarz argues that slave society in Brazil could be broken into three classes: the slave; the slave owner; and the so-called free man who was not, in fact, free but rather depended upon the favor the of the slave-owning white man. We see a similar distribution in James’s history, though perhaps his depiction of slave society becomes a bit more complex. For James, slave society in Santo Domingo was divided into big whites, little whites, free Mulattoes, free blacks, enslaved Mulattoes and enslaved blacks, with intricate friendships, alliances and animosities woven between them. Roberto Schwarz also argues that what supported the existence of slavery in Brazil was the perversion of European liberalism Foucault’s argument is to reduce racial oppression to a class issue, which results in the erasure of the very real history of enslavement and racial discrimination that fueled the Haitian Revolution. 184 James, Black Jacobins, 283. 185 Jerome Branche details the ways in which the desire for freedom was limited by the fact that the French and Spanish ruling class did not want to undermine an economic system that was dependent upon slave labor: “it is important to point out that neither as citizens nor as writers were they [the Delmontinos etc.] free of contradictions. In spite of the celebration of Del Monte as nationalist and humanitarian, for example, on the question of race he was decidedly non-egalitarian. For him the unfortunate Africans who happened to be enslaved, had no place in a future Cuban republic. Their immediate release from slavery (abolition), as abominable as the institution might be in moral terms, would have meant economic ruin for his family and the members of the planter class, as he pointed out in 1845. Not unlike the French Revolutionary Assemblies that had declared the Rights of Man, but rejected in 1789, the petitions from their West Indian delegates ‘of color’ for full citizenship, abolitionism in practice differed greatly from the idealism of humanistic theory. Again, like Napoleon’s decision to reinstate slavery in 1802 in order to restore the productivity of rich Caribbean colonies, for those who benefited from the institution, it was the economic factor that mattered most in the final analysis” (Branche, “Enobling,” 13). Sasha Turner also writes in Contested Bodies (2017), that part of the hope in ending slavery was to enable natural reproduction among the population of unfree peoples (Turner, Contested, 2-4). Turner identifies “the paradox of abolitionists’ quest to save the hapless victims of the slave trade but not without ensuring that the sugar plantations maintained their productivity” (Turner, Contested, 4). 70 when applied to the slave state. While in Europe liberalism supported the rights of man, such idealism had to be warped in order for slave society to persist. Because of this, Schwarz argues that true intellectualism cannot but fail to thrive in these societies whose intellectual maturation has been stunted by the collusion of liberalism with slavery. What we can perhaps see in James’s narrative of the life of Toussaint is the desire and impetus to overcome this perversion of liberal humanism. Toussaint ardently wished, according to James, to implement and realize the same ideals of liberty and equality that the Frenchman at home was seeking to achieve. His was not a truncated idealism, but a fully-fledged conviction. For James, it appears that such conviction was the often-lacking component required for successful revolution. It was in this that Robespierre failed, 186 just as Toussaint would eventually do: “His desire to avoid destruction was the very thing that caused it. It is the recurring error of moderates when face to face with a revolutionary struggle.” 187 The character of Sab would be one such moderate. When faced with the impossibility of their situation, Teresa and Sab meet upon the banks of a river one night. Sab begins to rage against the injustices suffered by his fellow slaves and the distance placed between himself and them. He cries out asking why no one would rally them, and in this scene we see Gómez de Avellaneda herself draw her hero back from the precipice of revolution: —¡Teresa! ¡Entonces recordé también que era vástago de una raza envilecida! ¡Entonces recordé que era mulato y esclavo…! Entonces mi corazón abrasado de amor y de celos, palpitó también por primera vez de indignación, y maldije a la naturaleza que me condenó a una existencia de nulidad y oprobio, pero yo era injusto, Teresa, porque la naturaleza no ha sido menos nuestra madre que la vuestra. ¿Rehúsa el sol su luz a las regiones en que habita el negro salvaje? ¿Sécanse los arroyos para no apagar su sed? ¿No tienen para él conciertos las aves, ni perfumes las flores? …Pero la sociedad de los hombres no ha imitado la equidad de la madre común, que en vano les ha dicho: ‘¡Sois hermanos!’ ¡Imbécil sociedad, que nos ha reducido a la necesidad de aborrecerla, y fundar nuestra dicha en su total ruina!’ 186 James, Black Jacobins, 177. 187 James, Black Jacobins, 300. 71 Calló un momento, y Teresa vio brillar sus ojos con un fuego siniestro. —¡Sab!—dijo entonces con trémula voz—, ¿me habrás llamado a este sitio para descubrirme algún proyecto de conjuración de los negros? ¿Qué peligro nos amenaza? ¿Serás tú uno de los…? —No—la interrumpió él con amarga sonrisa—, tranquilizaos, Teresa, ningún peligro os amenaza; los esclavos arrastran pacientemente su cadena: acaso sólo necesitan para romperla, oír una voz que les grite: ‘¡Sois hombres!’ pero esa voz no será la mía, podéis creerlo –Teresa alargó su mano a Sab, con alguna emoción; él fijó en ella sus ojos y prosiguió con tristeza más tranquila. 188 Teresa asks him if his reason in calling her to meet him is to warn her and the family of a possible uprising, but he tells her no; their slaves will patiently drag their chains until such time as someone reminds them they are men, but that this person will not be him. Although this is a shocking statement for a wealthy, white author from a slave-holding family to make, she does deny her hero his revolution. 189 Duras similarly posits her heroine’s desire for liberation, but revokes it through Ourika’s disgust over the bloodshed and loss in the French colony: On commençait à parler de la liberté des nègres : il était impossible que cette question ne me touchât pas vivement ; c’était une illusion que j’aimais encore à me faire, qu’ailleurs, du moins, j’avais des semblables : comme ils étaient malheureux, je les croyais bons, et je m’intéressais à leur sort. Hélas ! je fus promptement détrompée ! Les massacres de Saint- Domingue me causèrent une douleur nouvelle et déchirante : jusqu’ici je m’étais affligée d’appartenir à une race proscrite ; maintenant j’avais honte d’appartenir à une race de barbares et d’assassins. 190 188 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 206-207. See translation: ““’Teresa!’ he added, lowering the voice which up to then had been full, sonorous, and clear and which now took on a sadder and darker timbre. ‘Teresa! Then I remembered that I was the offspring of a defiled race, then I remembered too that I was a mulatto and a slave…then my heart, seared by love and jealousy, first began to throb with indignation, and I cursed nature which condemned me to worthlessness and shame. But I was unjust, Teresa, for nature has not been any less our mother than yours. Does the sun hide its light form the regions where the wild black makes his home? Do the streams dry up in order not to quench his thirst? Do not the birds sing for him and the flowers emit their perfume? But human society has not imitated the equality of our common mother who has told them in vain: “You are brothers.” Idiotic society, which has reduced us to the necessity of hating it and of founding our happiness on its total destruction!’ He was silent for a moment, and Teresa saw his eyes glitter with a sinister fire. ‘Sab,’ she said with quivering voice, ‘have you perhaps summoned me to this place to reveal some plan of conspiracy among the blacks? What danger threatens us? Are you one of the—’ ‘No,’ he interrupted her with a bitter smile, ‘calm yourself, Teresa, you are not threatened by any danger. The slaves patiently drag their chains: in order to break them they might only need to hear one voice which cries out to them “You are men!,” but I assure you that voice will not be mine.’ Teresa stretched out her hand to Sab with great feeling; he fixed his eyes on her and proceeded with a calmer kind of sadness” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 97). 189 José Gomariz writes “en última instancia Sab contribuye a ocultar, sino suprimir, los deseos de emancipación del esclavo. Aunque es capaz de reflexionar sobre la inmoralidad de la esclavitud, como esclavo modelo se somete al orden esclavista y patriarcal” (Gomariz, “Intelectualidad reformista,” 108). 190 Duras, Ourika, 20. Translation by John Fowles: “About this time talk started of emancipating the Negroes. Of 72 Ourika, raised among the aristocracy, gifted with exquisite taste, molded in the image of her slave-holding family, cannot bear the reality of the revolution surrounding them. Like the ideals of the French Revolution and the Rights of Man were compromised when born to bear in the case of slavery, the call for revolution in both novels becomes the very stage upon which the revolutionary ideal is dismantled. As such, the character of Sab is marked by a measure of passivity and docility. When Enrique Otway is struck down by a tree branch during a storm, Sab considers finishing the job and killing the unworthy Otway. Instead, he saves his rival. When finally beginning to decry the treatment of his people, he is repulsed and resigns himself to “patiently dragging the chain.” Finally, when he makes a desperate ride to save his beloved from heartbreak, this one scene of action leaves him vomiting blood and wasting away. José Gomariz writes that in this way Sab continues to show all the characteristics of the docile slave, even while the “subterranean” threat of the political collective simmers in the background. 191 Gomariz goes on to state that Sab’s docility aligns him and the slave with feminine qualities, according to the patriarchal codes of the nineteenth century. 192 His allegiance, as he makes clear when speaking with Teresa, is not to his fellow slaves but to his masters. Claudette Williams also describes the way in which Sab’s discourse undermines the anti-slavery message it proposes, and that Sab often takes the “planter course this question passionately interested me. I still cherished the illusion that at least somewhere else in the world there were others like myself. I knew they were not happy and I supposed them noble-hearted. I was eager to know what would happen to them. But alas, I soon learned my lesson . The Santo Domingo massacres gave me cause for fresh and heartrending sadness. Till then I had regretted belonging to a race of outcasts. Now I had the shame of belonging to a race of barbarous murderers” (Duras, Ourika, Fowles translation, 21). 191 See Gomariz, “En la novela se formula una crítica de la subalternidad de la mujer blanca en la sociedad patriarcal; sin embargo, el discurso sobre la esclavitud está delimitado en parte por la cultura y la clase de la narradora […] al suprimir cualquier expresión de rebeldía el discurso concuerda con el código delmontino del esclavo dócil. No obstante, la rebeldía del esclavo aparece en el subterráneo político colectivo” (Gomariz, “Intelectualidad reformista,” 107). 192 Gomariz writes “Por su naturaleza dócil, según se desprende de las palabras de Sab, el esclavo posee cualidades femeninas de acuerdo con el código patriarcal; se le equipara así a la mujer subyugada al amo/esposo” (Gomariz, “Intelectualidad reformista,” 108). 73 perspective” when describing the work and lived reality of slaves. 193 Adopting this viewpoint, however, is not only a sign of Sab’s rootedness in the bourgeois politics of his author. It also speaks to the kind of alienation suffered by the protagonist. 194 Sab and Ourika alike are separated from all people in their unequal upbringing. Sab cries out to Teresa that the doors of freedom and revolution are closed to the enslaved: “¡El poder y la voluntad! En vano un instinto, una convicción que les grite, ‘levantaos y marchad’, porque para ellos todos los caminos están cerrados, todas las esperanzas destruidas. ¡Teresa!, esa es mi suerte. Superior a mi clase por mi naturaleza, inferior a las otras por mi destino, estoy sólo en el mundo.” 195 Both Sab and Ourika express a sense of deep isolation, belonging neither to the family in which they have been raised nor to the people from whom they were separated. They each contemplate reintegrating into slave society and seeking the love of someone not denied them by their race, but find that they are incapable of doing so because of their education and the elitist social structures in which they have been immersed. Duras’s Ourika expresses her profound isolation and horror at her own body and her prospects for marriage: C’était un grand changement dans ma vie, que la perte de ce prestige qui m’avait environnée jusqu’alors ! […] J’épuisais ma pitié sur moi-même ; ma figure me faisait horreur, je n’osais plus me regarder dans une glace ; lorsque mes yeux se portaient sure mes mains noires, je croyais voir celles d’un singe ; je m’exagérais ma laideur, et cette couleur me paraissait comme le signe de ma réprobation ; c’est elle qui me séparait de tous les êtres de mon espèce, qui me condamnait à être seule, toujours seule ! jamais aimée ! Un homme, à prix d’argent, consentirait peut-être que ses enfants fussent nègres ! Tout mon sang se soulevait d’indignation à cette pensée. J’eus un moment l’idée de demander à Mme de B. de me renvoyer dans mon pays ; mais là encore j’aurais été isolée : qui m’aurait entendue, qui m’aurait comprise ? Hélas ! je n’appartenais plus à 193 Williams, “Cuban Anti-Slavery,” 158. 194 Claudette Williams illustrates the way Sab is paradigmatic of Fanonian alienation. He lives in the profound confusion that is brought on by existing in the liminal space between the world of the white family and that of the enslaved. He finds himself trapped within a binary tension in which he cannot situate his own subjectivity (Williams, “Cuban Anti-Slavery,” 161-162). 195 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 220. See translation: “’Power and will! In vain an instinct, a conviction which cries out to them “Rise up and walk!” because for them all roads are barred, all hopes dashed. Teresa! This is my lot. Above my station because of my nature, below all men because of my fate, I am alone in the world’” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 107). 74 personne ; j’étais étrangère à la race humaine tout entière ! 196 She finds herself alienated from all humanity and condemned to live alone and rejected by all, but most especially by herself. If the door to freedom and equality is closed in these novels, it is not merely a reflection of the societal realities in which they were written, but it is also by the will of the author that they are closed. Neither Gómez de Avellaneda nor Duras are willing to admit a world in which racial divisions are rescinded nor one in which the prospect of revolt is not quashed. Instead, their heroes are fated to live always alone and always enamored of the master, patiently wasting away in service of this system. Sab even goes so far as to enter into the transaction of buying and selling humans with his lottery winnings. It is by bestowing the 40,000 duros on Carlota that Sab dissuades the Otways from abandoning the engagement. However, the intermediary between Sab and Enrique is not Carlota, but rather her father. Davies writes: “Sab gives Carlota the 40,000 ‘duros’ so she can sell herself to Enrique; so Enrique will buy her. Sab therefore increases the value of Carlota, making her a more valuable object of exchange. In doing this, he sets up a commodity relationship with the person he least wanted to and, in effect, places himself in the situation of the slave as object or property, the use and exchange value of which added to the planter’s wealth insofar as slaves were a valuable commodity.” 197 Davies, drawing on Cixous, argues that Sab turns himself back into a slave in order to raise the value of 196 Duras, Ourika, 15. See translation: “This loss of the till-then-unshaken sense of my own worth effected a profound change in my life […] All my pity was for myself. My face revolted me, I no longer dared to look in a mirror. My black hands seemed like monkey’s paws. I exaggerated my ugliness to myself, and this skin color of mine seemed to me like the brand of shame. It exiled me from everyone else of my natural kind. It condemned me to be alone, always alone in the world. And never loved! For the price of a dowry, a fellow might consent to have mulatto children! My whole being rose in a rage against that idea. I thought for a moment of asking Mme de B. to send me back to my homeland. But I would still have been alone. Who there could listen to me now, or understand me? I no longer belonged anywhere. I was cut off from the entire human race” (Ourika, Translation by John Fowles, 14-16). 197 Davies, “Gift,” 51. 75 his mistress. This is not exactly the case. Rather, what he does is raise the value of Carlota so that he may sell her. Davies argues that the lottery winnings in Sab perform a different function and do not enter into the masculine economy: “For Hélène Cixous a masculine economy is founded on property, and gifts are calculated to increase profit; in a feminine economy gifts are given without calculation and for pleasure.” 198 She explains that what separates the lottery ticket from true capital is its status as “gift,” that Sab expects nothing of Carlota in return for the dowry he bestows on her: “Sab, then, represents an ethics of generosity, not merely as another instance of the natural goodness and guilelessness of the ‘noble savage’ but in direct contrast to the ethics of appropriation, the materialism, represented by Enrique Otway.” 199 However, the winnings are not given to Carlota. They are used to buy and bargain for Enrique’s commitment to the marriage. This is no feminine economy. Sab has merely entered fully into the economy of the white, planter class and enabled a transaction of property. The particular disturbance with which the protagonists confront their own faces is indicative of the discomfort that the authors felt when confronted with the values of their social class and the enslaved bodies that sustained their dominion. Gómez de Avellaneda describes Sab as: “un compuesto singular en que se descubría el cruzamiento de dos razas diversas…los rasgos de la casta africana con los de la europea, sin ser no obstante un mulato perfecto.” 200 He resists description. His face somehow turns away from the narrator and refuses to comply with the identifiers she would give him. This same slippage occurs in Ourika when the doctor first comes to visit her. He, an educated white man, is overcome when she turns to face him: “Elle se tourna 198 Davies, “Gift,” 47. 199 Davies, “Gift,” 46. 200 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 104. See translation: “His face was a singular composite which revealed the mingling of two distinct races, an amalgam, it could be said, of the features of the African and the European yet without being a perfect mulatto” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 28). 76 vers moi, et je fus étrangement surprise en apercevant une négresse ! Mon étonnement s’accrut encore par la politesse de son accueil et le choix des expressions dont elle se servait.” 201 Ourika becomes so distraught at the vision of her body and the reactions of those around her that she removes the mirrors from her room and begins wearing gloves and a veiled hat so that none will see her face. She imagines returning to Senegal: “j’aurais voulu être transportée dans ma patrie barbare, au milieu des sauvages qui l’habitent." 202 As a white woman taking up the perspective of a black subject, Gómez de Avellaneda, like her predecessor, is deeply disturbed by this face. The cultural order in which she exists is resistant to this face and denies its interiority, and yet this is the mind she attempts to inhabit. Gomariz explains that the Cuban reformists of this period sought the whitening or blanqueamiento 203 of their society, the end of slavery with an increased homogeneity and domination by the white planter class. 204 For Gomariz and Julia Paulk, Gómez 201 Duras, Ourika, 4. The description continues: “Son aspect ne confirmait que trop cette triste description de son état : sa maigreur était excessive, ses yeux brillants et fort grands, ses dents, d’une blancheur éblouissante, éclairaient seules sa physionomie ; l’âme vivait encore, mais, le corps était détruit, et elle portait toutes les marques d’un long et violent chagrin. » Translation by Fowles: “She turned toward me. I had a strange shock. I was looking at a negress. I very soon found myself even further surprised by her welcoming grace of manner and the elegant simplicity of her language […] Her appearance only too exactly confirmed this unpromising syndrome. She was excessively thin. The sole things that gave light to her face were her extraordinarily large and luminous eyes and her dazzlingly white teeth” (Fowles translation, 4). 202 Duras, Ourika, 27-28. See translation: “I should have liked to be transported back to my uncivilized native land and its savage inhabitants” (Ourika, Translation by John Fowles, 28). The full passage is as follows: “j’avais ôté de ma chambre tous le miroirs, je portais toujours des gants ; mes vêtements cachaient mon cou et mes bras, et j’avais adopté, pour sortir, un grand chapeau avec un voile, que souvent même je gardais dans la maison. Hélas ! je me trompais ainsi moi-même : comme les enfants, je fermais les yeux, et je croyais qu’on ne me voyait pas […] j’aurais voulu être transportée dans ma patrie barbare, au milieu des sauvages qui l’habitent, moins à craindre pour moi que cette société cruelle qui me rendait responsable du mal qu’elle seule avait fait. J’étais poursuivie, plusieurs jours de suite, par le souvenir de cette physionomie dédaigneuse ; je la voyais en rêve, je la voyais à chaque instant ; elle se plaçait devant moi comme ma propre image. Hélas ! elle était celle de chimères dont je me laissais obséder ! Vous ne m’avez pas encore appris, ô mon Dieu ! à conjurer ces fantômes ; je ne savais pas qu’il n’y a des repos qu’en vous » (Duras, 27-28). 203 Gomariz writes: “La intelectualidad criolla agrupada en torno a Del Monte se mostraba favorable al cese de la trata, a la abolición gradual de la esclavitud, a la deportación de los libertos, a la transición del trabajo esclavo al asalariado, y sobre todo, al fomento de la inmigración blanca, lo cual contribuiría tanto al fin progresivo de la esclavitud como al blanqueamiento de la sociedad” (Gomariz, “Intelectualidad reformista,” 99). 204 See Gomariz: “Los reformistas cubanos concebían la sociedad cubana a su imagen y semejanza: una nación racial y culturalmente homogénea poblada exclusivamente con descendencia europea. Su deseo era blanquear la población para convertir a Cuba en la colonia más europea de América. El blanqueamiento no ‘solo se refiere al color de la piel, sino a los valores, a las prácticas culturales, al sistema económico, a los costumbres sociales europeas de la época identificadas en el pensamiento hegemónico con la modernización y el proceso” (Gomariz, 77 de Avellaneda’s discomfort and denial of the black body is evidence of a suppressed racism in her work. While we cannot claim to have access to the author’s true feelings on the matter, we can discern something else from her hesitation. Sommer argues that the whitening of Sab is not evidence of Gómez de Avellaneda’s racist attitudes, but rather an artifact of the absence of a vocabulary or a “sign” within European language to adequately communicate Sab’s difference. 205 This absence of the sign is telling. The author is confronted with the unseeable face, bringing us back to Rancière’s politics and Levinasian ethics. The unseeable face, that which does not count in the societal order as having speech or presence, confronts the author and she is overwhelmed by its otherness. She cannot reduce it to a sign, to a symbol, and it is this tension and deep-seated discomfort that seethes from the pages in these texts. This is why readers are still confounded and distressed by something so incalculable between these pages. It is because the authors themselves could not see what they were writing. 206 Their own words were illegible to them. The major difference between the French and Spanish colonies at this point in time was their understanding of race. The society of the Spanish colonies was somewhat less concerned with the actual lineage of a person and a bit more flexible in whom they would and would not allow to pass in and out of societal belonging. 207 In one case for legitimation from the late eighteenth century, a man seeks to have his wife legitimated. Doña Maria Ana Florencia was raised, baptized and recognized by her father. She moved easily through society, married and “Intelectualidad reformista,” 101). Paulk refers to this clear discomfort with race in Sab: “At the literal or mimetic level of meaning, Sab reveals not only antislavery and feminist positions that were radical for their time but also a racist message that is antithetical to the novel’s own progressive position” (Paulk, “Allegory,” 229). 205 Sommer, Foundational, 117. 206 Weheliye emphasizes the “visual phenomena” of racialization, the invisibility or hyper-visibility of certain bodies, “Racializing assemblages represent, among other things, the visual modalities in which dehumanization is practiced and lived” (Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 6). 207 See Gomariz, “Intelectualidad reformista,” 101. 78 produced offspring. Years later, her own sister, in a bid to increase her inheritance, revealed that Doña Maria Ana Florencia was not the daughter of their father’s wife, but of a slave that had worked in their home. 208 Until the moment of her sister’s revelation, Doña Maria Ana Florencia had been allowed to exist within their society. This passing was a common practice in colonial Cuba. In her famous 1995 essay “From Mulatta to Mestiza,” Mary Bucholtz argues that while passing between gender identities is considered to be a liberatory “transcendence of sexual difference,” passing between racial signifiers is more complicated: “Individuals of ambiguous ethnicity patrol their own borders, using the tools of language and self-presentation to determine how the boundaries of ethnic categories are drawn upon their own bodies.” 209 Just as individuals may pass between ethnic borders, as Doña Maria Ana Florencia was able to do for decades, the society within which they live is similarly concerned with policing these borders to defend their power to deny or permit access. This ambiguity and incoherence surrounding the border is what arrests the eye of Gómez de Avellaneda. No longer able to read the face of the Other as absolute alterity, as having no face, as being a thing, she is struck blind by the incoherence, 210 forced to 208 MINISTERIO DE CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Consejo de Indias. “Ultramar 166, Cartas de Naturaleza y Legitimación de Hijos.” Archivo General de Indias, 1775-1816. ES.41091.AGI/36//ULTRAMAR,166. 209 Bucholtz, “Mulatta to Mestiza,” 352. Although written in 1995, this remains the core argument for discussions of cultural appropriation today. See Bucholtz: “Whereas gender theorists celebrate passing as an achievement, a transcendence of sexual difference, in ethnic studies, the phenomenon is generally considered an evasion of racism, an escape that is available only to individuals who can successfully represent themselves as white […] The assumption than an essential core, whether biological or social, determines one’s race and ethnicity promotes the belief in ethnic authenticity. Authenticity—that is, the legitimacy of one’s claim to ethnicity—underlies the traditional definition of passing given above, which posits a recategorization of the passing individual from her ‘own’ ethnic group to another that is not her ‘own.’ […] then, passing is the active construction of how the self is perceived when one’s ethnicity is ambiguous to others […] Individuals of ambiguous ethnicity patrol their own borders, using the tools of language and self-presentation to determine how the boundaries of ethnic categories are drawn upon their own bodies” (Bucholtz, “Mulatta to Mestiza,” 352). 210 In 2013, Claudia Milian took this concept of racial ambiguity further by declaring that what makes Latin American “Latinities” unique is the “Incoherence underlying other Latin constructs that interrupt the eyes and inaugurate new biographical knowledge formation as well as conceptual cultural terms” (Latining America, 59-60). Milian quotes Bucholtz’s statement: “ethnic identity, especially for those of ambiguous ethnicity, is a consciously constructed product of self-presentation. The fluidity of ethnicity means that individuals can authenticate themselves a variety of ways, and language use is a particularly effective tool in this process” (Bucholtz 369). Milian writes that much of this performance is situated in language: ““Passing Latinities, however, do not depend on ambiguity alone to tinge an individual with an other’s ethnoracial signifiers. Such Latinities tackle ideas of an authenticating essential 79 turn away. It makes less sense to her than it does to us, and so we read her confusion, her attempts to cross an ethno-racial border that is incomprehensible to her. Her racial insecurity is not limited to those of African origin, but extends also to the remnants of indigenous culture in Cuba. The only trace of indigeneity in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel is Martina, “la vieja india” and the woman who has assumed the maternal role in Sab’s life. She, unlike Sab, is described in great detail: Prevenida la vieja por Sab salió a recibir a sus huéspedes con cierto aire ridículamente majestuoso y que podía llamarse una parodia de hospitalidad. Rayaba Martina en los sesenta años, que se echaban de ver en las arrugas que surcaban en todas direcciones su rostro enjuto y su cuello largo y nervioso, pero que no habían impreso su sello en los cabellos, que si bien no cubrían sino la parte posterior del cráneo, dejando descubierta la frente que se prolongaba hasta la mitad de la cabeza, eran no obstante de un negro perfecto. Colgaba este mechón de pelo sobre la espalda descarnada de Martina, y la parte calva de su cabeza contrastaba de una manera singular, por su lustre y blancura, con el color casi cetrino de su rostro. Este color, empero, era todo lo que podía alegar a favor de su pretensiones de india, pues ninguno de los rasgos de su fisonomía parecía corresponder a su pretendido origen. 211 core used as a baseline assumption to visually produce and hermetically seal a particular group’s semiotics. The tools of language and self-representation in these passing but cohabiting Latinities speak to the incoherence underlying other Latin constructs that interrupt the eyes and inaugurate new biographical knowledge formation as well as conceptual cultural terms” (Milian, Latining America, 59-60). 211 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 176. See translation: “As Sab had prepared the old woman for their visit, she came out to greet her guests with a kind of ludicrously majestic air, almost a parody of hospitality. Martina was nearly sixty years old, which showed in the many wrinkles lining her lean face and long, sinewy neck but which had not affected her hair; although it covered only the back of her skull, leaving bare a forehead and receding hairline, it was nevertheless perfectly black. This swatch of hair fell down Martina’s thin back, and the bald part of her head, by virtue of its shine and pallor, contrasted singularly with the almost yellowish hue of her face. This skin color, moreover, was all that supported her pretensions of being Indian, for none of her facial features appeared to match her pretended origin” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 78). Of Martina, Davies writes, “Martina, aged about 60, has a strange, hybrid appearance, and believes she is descended from the indigenous chief Camagüey, from whom the region takes its name. The narrator is skeptical and says Martina does not look the part (that Martina’s body belies her identity), but nevertheless describes the woman as almost stereotypically Amerindian. The narrator asks the reader to indulge Martina by accepting this genealogy as truth, in which case the death of Martina and her grandson signifies the end of the indigenous population” (Davies, “Introduction,” Sab, 26). Barcia Zequeira describes the indigenous culture in Cuba and their birthing practices: “La cultura cubana, fuertemente mestizada, surgió de dos raíces esenciales: la española y la africana, con todas implicaciones multiculturales que estos orígenes entrañan por la multiplicidad de pueblos y grupos diferentes que habitaban, tanto en la península, como en el continente africano. A estos inicios, ya de por sí complejos, se unían elementos arcaicos procedentes de las corrientes aruacas que poblaron la isla de Cuba antes de la llegada de los europeos. Existen algunos testimonios de los conocimientos ancestrales de las parteras aborígenes. Se conoce, por ejemplo, a través de sus mitos y leyendas, que realizaban la operación cesárea post mortem” (Barcia Zequeira, Oficios, 26). 80 Gómez de Avellaneda invites the reader both to affirm and deny the genealogy claimed by this woman. She invites us to stare at her body and contemplate her skin, but her features too are threatening to the genealogy that is being established in the new Cuba. This adoptive mother of the mulatto Sab cannot be allowed to continue existing. She disrupts the legitimating narrative of the white society that is being regretfully wrought, and for this reason she too must die, but only after having been transformed. After reading the letter from Sab, Carlota travels to Cubitas to visit Sab’s gravesite. The people of the town tell her the story of Martina, who visited the graves of Sab and her grandson every night after their deaths until she too succumbed. She was accompanied to the gravesite by her grandson’s dog, Leal (Loyal), until the dog also died while standing vigil over the graves of those he had loved in life. Carlota disappears after hearing this tale, and the people of Cubitas forget about her, until one night when the ghost of Martina, “la vieja india,” begins to return to the grave. But, when the people of Cubitas see her now, she is strangely transformed. Instead of withered and olive-skinned, she is beautiful and pale, praying beside the tombs of those she loved. In this scene, the Carlota of before disappears and is replaced by a mestiza Carlota, a Carlota who is also the ghost of the massacred indigenous of Cuba, a Carlota who can love Sab and be united with him. 212 However, this scene perhaps reveals a hidden desire. Instead of converting Carlota, the white woman idealized by Sab, into a true descendent of the island of Cuba, Avellaneda converts Martina into Carlota, “ni flaca, ni de color aceitunado, sino joven, blanca y hermosa.” 213 The indigenous woman is literally whitened and the only figure capable of healing the wounds of Cuba’s past and inheriting its future is a white woman who arrives at the 212 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 272-274. 213 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 274. See translation: ““no longer either old, thin, or olive colored, but young, white, and beautiful” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 147). 81 gravesite accompanied by “Belén y dos de sus más fieles esclavos,” 214 despite having promised the man she came to honor that she would liberate all her family’s slaves once she was married. As it concludes, Cuba’s future remains uncertain. Carlota is disillusioned with her marriage and childless. She is a constant visitor at the convent where Teresa has hidden herself away following Sab’s death. The future generations of Cuba remain unaccounted for as Teresa too is infertile, removing herself from society. It is clear from the start, however, that Teresa could not be the woman to bear this ideal family: “Teresa tenía una de aquellas fisonomías insignificantes que nada dicen al corazón. Sus facciones nada ofrecían de repugnante, pero tampoco nada de atractivo. Nadie la llamaría fea después de examinarla; nadie, empero, la creería hermosa al verla por primera vez, y aquel rostro sin expresión, parecía tan impropio para inspirar el odio como el amor.” 215 She is not the Romantic ideal and cannot inspire the kind of love necessary for the Romantic family that Sommer describes. Additionally, she voluntarily removes herself from circulation. 216 According to Goodman, by renouncing the sexual arena, Teresa leaves a kind of “temporal gap” and that this “female sexual restraint gives impetus to a 214 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 272. See translation: “Belén and two of her most faithful slaves” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 146). 215 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 115. See translation: “Teresa had one of those ordinary faces that fail to speak to the heart. Her features, while not repugnant, were in no way attractive either. After a close look at her, no one would call her ugly; however, on seeing her for the first time, no one would think her beautiful, for her face was so devoid of expression that it might just as well inspire hate as love” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 35). Of Teresa, Kirkpatrick writes: “The lesson that Teresa teaches, then, is that compassion and love, the shared subjectivity of the oppressed, provide the only consolation in a hard, mercenary world, the only antidote to solitary despair. If the sublimation of passion into intelligence, the abstraction of philosophy from pain, are processes of the psyche explored in Teresa, Sab represents the movement of unprocessed emotion” (Kirkpatrick, Románticas, 152). 216 Picon Garfield writes “La ausencia de la figura materna desde las primeras páginas de Sab persiste en las últimas pues la autora elimina el eje fundamental de la familia decimonónica, es decir la madre cuya misión biológica es reproducir la especia. Teresa voluntariamente se refugia en el convento, rechazando así ser el objeto del comercio entre los hombres quienes la desvalorizan por su falta de herencia, de legitimidad y de belleza […] Teresa se niega a circular en esta economía. Se aparta también de ella Carlota, pues después de cinco años de matrimonio, no tiene hijos. Como nos explica Foucault, una preocupación de la burguesía era asegurar la proliferación del cuerpo femenino mediante la organización de la sexualidad para que afirmara la hegemonía de su clase (I. 149). Con estos dos personajes femeninos, Gómez de Avellaneda deconstruye la misión social de la mujer como reproductora, y la destina a una esterilidad proscrita por el discurso hegemónico patriarcal” (Poder y sexualidad, 65-66). 82 male desire for superseding, for mastery.” 217 Teresa removes herself from the historical linearity of the filiation myth. Rather than entering into this stream, she creates a void, a void which must be filled and fixed by masculine mastery of the line. 218 Together, Sab, Teresa, and Carlota disrupt the narrative of the colonial family, and the wake of this disruption is felt in Carlota’s melancholy and infertility. Sab tells Teresa that he hopes and knows that Enrique Otway’s base and mercenary nature will be revealed to Carlota in time. He is right, and their plotting by the river has the untimely effect of disrupting the line of inheritance in the Otway-de B… family. Teresa is portrayed as nearly monstrous, repulsive to more delicate feelings. She is illegitimate, improperly white, and fails to perform her gender. And yet, she desires Enrique. Knowing what he is, she still wants him, and this wanting makes her a pariah. For Foucault, this sites her as one of those irregulars who in the nineteenth century were called upon to come forth and to confess. 219 Their sexuality was no longer permitted to exist in silence and shadow, now they must confess and expose all that was once veiled. Her desire is enigmatic and her celibacy, monstrous. She is the alarming evidence of sexual anxiety in the colony as she is not “perfectly” 217 Goodman, Infertilities, xiv. 218 Joan Torres-Pou writes that Teresa “Es un producto sin mercado cuyo único futuro, como evidencia el destino de Teresa, es la soledad y la muerte” (“Ambigüedad,” 58). And yet Torres-Pou maintains that it is with Teresa and not Carlota that we come to understand the feminist message of Sab, in which a Teresa and Sab unite in their battle against “una problemática compartida” (“Ambigüedad,” 61). Sab and Teresa lack all access to power or the ability to conduct it, according to Foucault’s formula. Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 113: “’Para ti debe ser más hermosa la noche y las brisas más puras: para ti que eres feliz […] Hija adorada, ama querida, esposa futura del amante de tu elección […] Hermosa, rica, querida…no eres tú la que debes llorar.’” 219 See Foucault: “The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the system centered on legitimate alliance to undergo two modifications. First, a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy […] The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it was through a reflux of movement, originating in there peripheral sexualities” (Foucault, History, 38-39). 83 white. 220 Like Ourika before her, she removes herself with her impossible desire from the gaze of the world, resigning her undesired womb to infertility. Teresa’s final moments set the scene for the novel’s conclusion. With her death and delivery of Sab’s letter to Carlota, only a grave and an foreclosed future lay ahead. Everywhere in the novel, desire is caught up in the death-drive, 221 except between Sab and Teresa. Their final confessions, to each other and transmitted through Teresa to Carlota, are creative and compassionate. Their two souls are not fused, but they are unintentionally touching and sliding against each other. Sab’s confession, his letter, is written in blood. Both Teresa and Ourika die internally exsanguinated, wasting away as love is denied them, and their final act is a confession. All confession is a wound, a maternal wound of opening towards the Other. It is a story without time. Derrida writes of circumcision like a confession, circumcision like an open wound, the open womb from which he emerges. 222 The confessional wound, the confessional womb, is never closed, never cauterized, it never stops bleeding. The mother dies on the birthing bed. The confession is an infant wail, an infant text, a becoming text. And yet this becoming text is already over. The confession is made, that of Sab, that of Teresa, that of Ourika, and those countless bloodily, inked-out confessions of fatherless children. The text of confession is both past, but its potential, its reading is limitless and beyond the time of its writing. It is anachronism and maternal opening of written word and the reader’s body. We encounter this text in fragility and woundedness and it bleeds for us. Reading is as violent an encounter as it is compassionate. 220 According to Goodman, “the movement of white women into colonial spaces did not so much help to consolidate a racial border but instead intensified the apprehension surrounding the positioning of femininity as the guardian and defense of white racial authority” (Infertilities, 75). 221 Ettinger, “Copoeisis,” 709. 222 Derrida and Bennington, Circumfession, 43: “when I arrive at the end of this sentence which seems to bear the death that bears her, if she will live long enough to leave me time for all these confessions, and to multiply the scenes in which I see myself alone die, pray, weep, at the end of the circumnavigation trying to reach its bank in a story of blood at the point where I am finally this cauterized name, the ultimate, the unique, right up against what, from an improbably circumcision, I have lost by gaining.” 84 We cannot read and hope only to gently caress the page, the timeless hand of the writer who bled into that page. We also tear and rend it apart. Teresa’s final words haunt us: “Entonces tendrás ese papel: ese papel es toda un alma: es una vida, una muerte: todas las ilusiones resumidas, todos los dolores compendiados…el aroma de un corazón que se moría sin marchitarse […] y cuando el ruido de los vivos fatigue tu alma, refúgiate en la memoria de los muertos.” 223 Life and death born together in a single page, this life of the text arrives upon us belated and is still arriving. 223 Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 263. See translation: “’Then you will have this paper: this paper is an entire soul, a life, a death, a summary of dreams, a compendium of sorrows…the fragrance of a heart which died without withering […] and when the clamor of the living tires your soul, take refuge in the memory of the dead’” (Sab, Translated by Nina M. Scott, 138-139). 85 Chapter 2: Estranged Mother José Martí, the Matrixial Father in Exile The political life of José Martí began on October 21, 1869, when at sixteen-years-old, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy against Spanish colonial authority in Cuba for the presence of his signature at the bottom of an unsent letter. 224 This event marks the beginning of an extraordinary life and the immortalization of this man’s name and works. While exiled in Spain almost two years later, Martí would describe this experience in El presidio político en Cuba, the essay published in 1871: Era el 5 de abril de 1870. Meses hacía que había yo cumplido diez y siete años. Mi patria me había arrancado de los brazos de mi madre, y señalado un lugar en su banquete. Yo besé sus manos y las mojé con el llanto de mi orgullo, y ella partió, y me dejó abandonado a mí mismo. Volvió el día 5 severa, rodeó con una cadena mi pie, me vistió con ropa extraña, cortó mis cabellos y me alargó en la mano un corazón. Yo toqué mi pecho y lo hallé lleno; toqué mi cerebro y lo hallé firme; abrí mis ojos, y los sentí soberbios, y rechacé altivo aquella vida que me daban y que rebosaba en mí. Mi patria me estrechó en sus brazos, y me besó en la frente, y partió de nuevo, señalándome con la una mano el espacio y con la otra las canteras. 225 Martí is ripped from his mother’s arms by his patria. A word translated as both “country” and “fatherland,” it is nevertheless feminine. He kisses her hands, and she abandons him to himself; but the reader, at least at first, may wonder whether it is the madre or the patria whose hands he kisses, who leaves him abandoned to imprisonment and exile? In the following sentences, Martí’s kisses are returned as she kisses his face, and Martí’s reader becomes lost in the “su” that refers either to “mi patria” or to “mi madre.” Then again, in Martí’s uncanny diction, perhaps the 224 See José Martí, Obras Completas, 1:39 and Alfred J. López, A Revolutionary Life, 55-56. 225 Martí, OC, 1:53-54. See translation: “It was the 5 th of April of 1870. Months had passed since I had turned sixteen years old. My country had ripped me from the arms of my mother, and shown me a place in her banquet. I kissed her hands and I wetted them with my tears of pride, and she left, and abandoned me to myself. She returned five days later sever, and circled my ankle with a chain, and dressed me in strange clothes, and cut my hair and stretched her hand out to me holding a heart. I touched my chest and found it full; I touched my mind and found it firm; I opened my eyes, and I felt them sober, and I loftily rejected that life that they had given me and that overflowed within me. My country held me in her arms, and she kissed my forehead, and she left again, showing me with one hand space and with the other the quarry” (translation mine). 86 two entities are one. 226 The nation is a motherland that bears Martí, but so too does Martí bear the nation, carry it into being. The reader, like Martí, is confounded by the indecipherable jointness between mother and nation, the womb of creation that is also Martí. In this chapter, I argue that José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, may be understood as a maternal father, a reading based on an analysis of Abdala (1869), an early political drama, and Ismaelillo (1882), an intimate collection of poems, as maternal texts. 227 I maintain that these two largely overlooked texts open a space for us to read an-other Martí that resists the reader’s desire to arrive at any definitive encapsulation of Martí and his Work. My interpretation of this early political drama and far better known book of poetry resorts to Bracha Ettinger’s concept of matrixial borderspaces and borderlinking. What the matrixial helps us to read is a Martí that does not close the borders of the hombre natural, of the nation, or of his own meaning, but is rather a figure that opens inwards and outwards towards the inhabitation of the other, the foreigner, the child. 228 The matrixial does not work to strike an opposition between 226 We see a similar gesture in Octavio Paz’s reading of “Dos patrias” in which Cuba and “la noche” are the great mother to whom José Martí speaks. I will discuss the way Martí can also be figured as maternal in this opening towards the figure of Cuba, the widow. 227 A certain temptation toward hagiography lurks within the scholarship surrounding José Martí. Many Martí scholars begin their work by making claims against a hagiographic tradition, the fables of the lives of saints, or they give in completely and compose elegies to the “Maestro y Santo de América.” See Luis Rodríguez-Embil, José Martí: el santo de América, 7-8; also Armando García de la Torre, José Martí and the Global Origins of Cuban Independence, 20; also José Miguel Oviedo, La niña de New York, 11, 119; also López, A Revolutionary Life; also Bejel, José Martí: Images of Memory and Mourning, 5; also Memoria del Congreso de Escritores Martianos, 38. Oviedo responds to the idea of hagiography by stating: “las biografías sobre él tendían a aburrirme, con su tendencia hagiográfica y su tono reverente. Según esas obras y estudios, Martí no es un hombre (aunque el calificativo se subraye en varios libros): es una figura sobrehumana, un titán incorruptible, un gigante de la especia a salvo de las flaqueas de los comunes mortales. No sólo un gran escritor; está nimbado por una triple corona: Apóstol, Héroe, Mártir” (La niña, 11). Emilio Bejel explains the ways in which the readings of Martí have been controlled and manipulated, both by governmental/ideological forces and also by Martí himself who was undeniably self- conscious. Antonio José Ponte, adds to this: “lo escrito por Martí debería arriesgarse a la rotura, a la pérdida, a la pelea de perros de la crítica, para seguir fluyendo. Cien años después de muerto, José Martí debería estar en discusión. A la idea de un Martí que se construye cada día faltaría emparejarla de un Martí rompiéndose” (“abrigo,” 83). Oscar Montero, alongside many others, warns of the sheer grandiosity of the bibliography on Martí and writes “The last thing Martí needs is another eulogy” (José Martí: An Introduction, 4). 228 The “o” in “other” is not capitalized because it does not indicate the absolute Other, but rather refers to an-other who can be both absolute and corporeal. The hyphen in “an-other” acts as the umbilical cord, the incomplete severance of one from other. 87 mother and father, but instead works as a movement towards the relational position in which the maternal corrupts and corrodes the individuating borders between the self and the other, the borders between islands and nationalisms. The matrixial maternal resists the fiction of individualism, of discreet subjects, and of autonomy. Both Abdala and Ismaelillo can be read with an eye towards what Ettinger terms the matrixial borderspace, the transgressible and transversible line between the I and the non-I. This chapter will demonstrate how Martí’s work is not purely paternal creation, but a maternal one that announces itself in his poetics. So too, Martí’s paternity is neither fixed nor “monolithic,” 229 and neither are paternity nor maternity chained to physiological sex. Rather, they are defined as they stand in terms of relation to the other, to the supposed offspring. 230 I will here engage José Martí as mother, an alien mother, a strange and exilic mother, an estranged mother in the midst of birth pains, bringing himself into being with and as the (m)other. Throughout the history of estudios martianos, scholars have marveled at the sheer volume of work surrounding the life and work of José Julián Martí y Pérez, also known as José Martí, formerly known as Pepe. 231 José Martí was born in Havana, Cuba on the morning of 229 Oscar Montero writes that Martí is not only the “monolith” that has since been erected in the wake of his death, but he is also “more fluid and more elusive” (José Martí: An Introduction, 4). 230 Rather, they are defined as they stand in terms of relation to the Other, to the supposed offspring. Andrew Parker writes in The Theorist’s Mother: “motherhood as ethical relation is as applicable to men as to women” (21). He goes on to state that this should not be seen as a male appropriation of a purely female role: “Indeed, if to imagine (male) philosophers as mothers is to assume ‘both the appropriation and the disavowal of woman’s ability to reproduce life,’ it is also to assume that women have nothing of their own to contribute to culture—neither writing nor children” (Theorist’s Mother, 114). 231 Alfred J. López describes the immensity of this bibliography “Martí would not be the subject of a book-length biography until 1932, when Jorge Mañach’s Martí, el apostol (Martí, the Apostle) introduced the revolutionary’s life and work to a generation of Cubans who had grown up hardly knowing his name. […] Martí’s legend grew through the 1940s and 1950s, and a proliferation of published articles, tributes, and hagiographies followed that outdid even Mañach’s 1932 biography in their reverential treatment of the Cuban hero […] Havana’s Center for Martí Studies has published thousands of pages in books and articles on the Cuban hero, and his name and image are, if anything, even more ubiquitous than they were before 1959. Not to be outdone, since the 1950s the Cuban diaspora has published untold thousands of pages on Martí, in whose history of exile they see their own hopes of a future Cuba that better reflects their hero’s revolutionary vision” (A Revolutionary Life, 332-333). José Miguel Oviedo writes in La niña de New York: Una revisión de la vida erótica de José Martí: “La bibliografía martiana es inmensa, quizá inagotable” (10). 88 January 24, 1853 to Leonor Pérez, a young woman from the Canary Islands who against the dictates of the time had taught herself to read and write, and to Mariano Martí, a military man born in Valencia. 232 Pepe was their first child, to be followed by seven daughters. Despite his early successes, Mariano began to struggle in his military career, and in 1857 the family moved to Valencia, Spain, following the death of Mariano’s father. They had hoped to find relief from their financial struggles among Mariano’s family, but life was difficult in Spain as well, and so they return to Cuba after less than two years in the “mother country.” 233 Because of his continued difficulties, Mariano was forced to move to wherever he could find work and often took young Martí along with him, removing him from school. This, however, greatly upset Martí’s mother, according to Jorge Mañach: “Doña Leonor, que se ha quedado viviendo en La Habana, escribe largas cartas, sin ortografía, sobre la necesidad de la instrucción. Pero don Mariano no tiene en mucho la opinión de las mujeres” (16). Young Martí moved with his father to Hanábana where Mariano was tasked with enforcing the 1817 ban on the slave trade. 234 This impossible task led to some of Martí’s first and most profound encounters with the injustices of slavery and racism. 235 Martí was finally able to begin his formal studies in 1865 at the Escuela Superior Municipal, where he met his long-time mentor Rafael María de Mendive. 236 In 1869, before signing his name to the letter that led to his arrest, José Martí wrote and self-published Abdala, a dramatic poem in which the young author explores the relationship between mother and country, sacrifice and love. 237 Later that year, he was arrested, condemned to forced labor, and exiled to 232 See Mañach: “Allí, en la madrugada del 28 de enero de 1853, le nació un varón, a quien el capellán del regimiento paterno dio por nombre José Julián” (Martí, El Apóstol, 10-11). Also López, A Revolutionary Life, 1. 233 López, A Revolutionary Life, 14. 234 López, A Revolutionary Life, 19. 235 López, A Revolutionary Life, 20-21. 236 López, A Revolutionary Life, 29. 237 Bejel, Images, 32. 89 Spain. Nearly his entire life from this moment on was lived in exile. While in Spain he completed degrees in philosophy and law. From there he traveled to Paris and then New York, collecting love affairs on the way, before joining his family in Mexico where he would meet his future wife, Carmen Zayas Bazán, and indulge in a few amoríos. After Mexico, Martí began a promising academic career in Guatemala where he met María García Granados whom he immortalized in the poem “La niña de Guatemala.” Despite these love affairs, Carmen joined Martí in Guatemala where they married, but because of Guatemala’s political upheaval, Martí resigned his university post and returned with his wife to Havana. Under her influence, he attempted to lead a domestic life, but was quickly imprisoned once again for engaging in revolutionary activities and exiled to Spain where he lived under constant surveillance. Regardless, he managed to escape and fled to New York where he formed attachments that would last the rest of his short life. Martí found refuge with the Mantilla family who hosted a boarding house for friends and exiled Cubans. Carmen (Carmita) Miyares de Mantilla, the wife of ailing Manuel Mantilla, became a partner both in life and in labor to Martí, achieving a relationship that Martí and his wife were never able to realize. Martí first became a father on November 22, 1880 to his son José Francisco Martí, known as Pepito, with his wife, Carmen Zayas Bazán. It is to this son that the collection of poems Ismaelillo is dedicated, and it is here that the line between child and creation is blurred. Understood in Spanish, the word criatura—meaning both child and creature—is also the creation, the work of art birthed by the author. Ismaelillo, then, makes reference to the son, but is also the creation/child of Martí itself. 238 Also complicating the relation between father and creation is the birth of María Mantilla, born on November 27, 1880 only days after Pepito. It is 238 Sylvia Molloy describes this as the “contamination between written page and child” (“His America,” 371). 90 now generally accepted that Martí became again a father when this daughter was born to Carmen Miyares de Mantilla, proprietor of the boarding house where he lived and fellow revolutionary spirit. Upon the birth of María, Martí left New York for Venezuela where he began writing Ismaelillo, which he finished during the voyage back to New York and published in 1882. The following years were filled with travel and labor on behalf of the revolutionary movement in Cuba and amongst the island’s exile community. On February 2, 1887, Mariano died and Leonor came to visit New York on November 22 of the same year. Carmen Zayas Bazán and Pepito twice visited Martí in an attempt to save their family, but this ended with Zayas Bazán’s sudden departure on August 27, 1891, upon which José Martí “never saw his wife or son again.” 239 Despite the fact that he suffered immensely from an ongoing systemic infection caused by the wounds he received during his period of forced labor under Spanish colonial imprisonment, Martí worked tirelessly for the cause of Cuban independence. He raised funds, published extensively, and travelled for speaking engagements in support of independence both from Spain and the United States. In what is now the stuff of legend, Martí landed in Cuba in 1895 to take up arms alongside his fellow Cubans, and on May 19 he was felled by a Spanish bullet while charging into battle at Dos Ríos. 240 His mother would not give credence to the news of her son’s death, and on May 30, the New York Herald published an article dolefully titled “Martí’s Mother Thinks He Lives.” 241 239 López, Revolutionary Life, 251. 240 See López, Revolutionary Life; also John M. Kirk, Mentor; also Laura Lomas, Translating; also Mañach, Apóstol; also Carlos Márquez Sterling, síntesis, 194; also Oviedo, La niña; also Quintana, Cronolia; also Carlos Ripoll, La vida; also Rodríguez-Émbil, el santo. 241 See Quintana, “MAYO 30 / La madre de José Martí, en una entrevista con el corresponsal del periódico neoyorkino ‘The New York Herald’, publicada en esta fecha, expone su criterio de estar dudosa de que sea cierta la noticia de la muerte de su hijo. / MARTÍ’S MOTHER THINKS HE LIVES, EN: ‘The New York Herald’, New York, 30 de Mayo de 1895, No. 21465, (Pág. 9)” (Cronolia, 262). 91 Although Martí is hailed as “el gran Padre de Cuba,” 242 Martí’s maternal relation, his relation to and as the mother, forms neither authority nor antecedence, but a coming-into-being together. What the maternal makes evident in Abdala and Ismaelillo is not a relation of paternity but rather a profound maternal relation, neither tied to the supposed sex of the speaker, but towards an indefinite nation and towards the child, towards a watery border that can never be fully shored up. Through Ettinger’s concepts of matrixial borderspaces or the maternal, we begin to come to terms with the maternal “copoiesis” of the one and the (m)other—the I and the non-I who are co-constitutive of each other. The mother does not create her child unilaterally but is maternally created alongside the other to whom she is (m)other. Ettinger writes, “Matrixial awareness engenders a disturbing desire for jointness with a foreign world, the unknown other, the uncognized, the stranger inside the known other, a stranger who by definition is never a total stranger because it is unthinkingly known […] joining the other matrixially is always joining the m/Other and risking mental fragmentation and vulnerability.” 243 These spaces between mother and child are both infinite and imminent. Her concept of the uncognized world or a non- totalizing knowledge resounds with Édouard Glissant’s concepts of opacity and errantry: “one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.” 244 This world, the opaque world of the other, cannot be conquered, cannot be subjected to a totalizing ontology. It permits only knowledge in relation, a maternal knowing that is non-teleological and non-hierarchical. Maternal knowledge is a knowledge of the internal secret, a knowledge pregnant with its own mystery and unknowability, 242 Oviedo, La niña, 12. 243 Ettinger, Matrixial, 147. Also see Ettinger, “Copoeisis” 709. 244 Glissant, Poetics, 20. 92 the inborn thing that is hidden and yet evident to the world. It is unlike the top-down knowledge of paternal creation, the omniscient view from above, but a knowledge that moves laterally, flowing across the placental barrier, crossing oceans, and entering ports. We never truly know the alien, the other, the foreignness within me that is co-emergent with me. 245 As one encounters Martí, one enters an immense congregation of previous readers whose injunction is to perform certain kinds of address. A prevalent demand is to produce a faithful reading of Martí—to undertake a “neutral” and/or “organic” study of the man and his works— thereby arriving at an understanding of his totality and/or “essence.” 246 The maternal precisely undermines the very possibility of this kind of reading, the idea that the totality of Martí’s works can be distilled into a singular truth. The maternality of these texts, their jointness with the other, disrupts that very totality. Instead of a homogenous or fixed surface that we may call Martí, there is a fissure. The maternal turns the reader’s eye towards the fluid aporias so ubiquitous in Martí’s work, which directly contravene a reading of mastery. 247 The matrixial reading that Abdala and Ismaelillo make possible opens a space in which other readings of Martí are possible, where instead of attempting to synthesize a totality of Martí’s meaning, we may read matrixially. His 245 See Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, “Some of the non-I’s foreignness will never yield to the mastery of my phallic recognition, yet we are the witnesses of others-becoming-ours; we share with our strangers an-other space” (110). 246 Kirk, Mentor, 17. Also see Montero, “[Otmar] Ette concludes that ‘the division between a ‘political’ Martí and a ‘literary’ Martí continues to be a central problem in studies on the poet and revolutionary. There is still no organic understanding of the totality of Martí’s works, […]’ (408). My brief, selective comments on Martí and his works can hardly pretend to provide such an ‘organic understanding.’ […] I have tried to be mindful of the tradition so expertly reconstructed by Ette without presuming to account for all its ambiguities. In any case, there is no innocent return to Martí’s text” (An Introduction, 3). See Ottmar Ette, “Hasta ahora, no se le había dado mucha importancia a este hecho en la investigaciones sobre Martí que se limitaban a comparaciones más bien ahistóricas, puramente ‘literarias’” (“Apuntes,” 137). 247 Emilio Bejel responds to this idea of neutrality by stating: “Instead of immersing in these political debates, my book’s point of departure is the idea that the history that interposes itself between the visual image and the observer’s present is never neutral. All this means that no single interpretation of Martí’s iconography is able to completely control the aporias and contradictions that a critical reading can bring to light. We can critically reread Martí’s images due to the fact that they themselves contain the possibility of self-subversion; only through a critical analysis can we be more conscious of their effects on us and acquire agency as members of the human community” (Images, 6). 93 writing is already open to this, amenable and nurturing of these heterogeneous readings, encounters that transgress the impenetrable bulwark of his oeuvre, and instead look towards his work as a labor, as a bringing thought and thought-of-the-nation into being. Enrico Mario Santí argues that we will only begin to truly write “crítica sobre Martí [cuando] haya dejado de ser un temeroso ejercicio de superstición.” 248 He goes on to describe the inclination towards this other, unsuperstitious direction of critique: “No es que Martí no se merezca admiración: su amor por ‘Nuestra América’ sólo se paga con el nuestro. Pero hay amores que matan, y para un escritor, el peor de todos es el homenaje vacío que petrifique su obra y le condene al silencio.” 249 Antonio José Ponte adds to this: “lo escrito por Martí debería arriesgarse a la rotura, a la pérdida, a la pelea de perros de la crítica, para seguir fluyendo. Cien años después de muerto, José Martí debería estar en discusión. A la idea de un Martí que se construye cada día faltaría emparejar la de un Martí rompiéndose.” 250 The injunction to produce “faithful” or “organic” readings of Martí are euphemisms for mastery. It is a call towards mastery of the text and of the man as text. The maternal specifically directs us towards this impossibility or illusion, as Ettinger reminds us: “The phallic gaze excited us while threatening to annihilate us in its emergence on the screen, giving us the illusion that we participate in its mastery. The matrixial gaze thrills us while fragmenting, multiplying, scattering, and assembling together the fragments […] linking us and allowing our participation in a drama wider than that of our individual selves.” 251 The matrixial in maternal relation alerts us to the fiction of total individuation, either in self-mastery or in mastery of the other, and works in exile and diaspora. We cannot fully know the other, master her presence. She is an uncognizable, foreign world. Mastery and conquest, colonial 248 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 840. 249 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 811. 250 Ponte, “abrigo,” 83. 251 Ettinger, Matrixial, 154. 94 classifications, and nationalistic boundaries, slip in the sediment of her terrain. It is not the project of this chapter to complete this dissection, the psychoanalysis of Martí, the psychic or historic profile of the man, or even to contribute my own hagiographic ode. Do we fear that the great hero cannot stand up to our words, or that we might tarnish his divine remains? Do we fear what Thamus, Plato’s “King of all Egypt,” did when confronted by Theuth, the god of writing, that Martí’s words will run away without him and we will be forced to live in the uncertainty of his authority over them? 252 It is precisely this authority and authority’s vulnerability that is at stake here. 253 But what do I mean by an author’s authority? And how does one relinquish both one’s sense of duty to that authority and one’s own sense of authority over the text? The author appears at first glance to be the authority over his writing, but as Derrida reminds us, this writing escapes his authority, the authority of a paternal author in the text. The sense that there can be some definite meaning derived from the text is discussed by Roberto González Echevarría in The Voice of the Masters where he states: “My assumption throughout has been that there is a correlation between closure and authority, brought about by the same ideology on which the rhetoric of power is based. By ‘closure,’ I mean a perfect correlation between language and meaning, a seamless fusion of form and content that covers the struggle within language itself 252 In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida explains the notion of the Father of Logos, wherein writing becomes a threat to its author because writing can exist aside from its “writer” and therein commits patricide of author who is no longer in authority over it as it can now be read and translated by any that should take it up. See Barbara Johnson, “Translator’s Introduction”: “In other words, the deconstructive reading does not point out the flaws or weaknesses or stupidities of an author, but the necessity with which what he does see is systematically related to what he does not see” (Dissemination, xv). 253 Guillermina De Ferrari writes in Vulnerable States that vulnerability may be a way to conceive of embodiment in the Caribbean and the fact that “colonial domination was effectively based on the vulnerability of the material body to the forces of symbolic power” (Vulnerable, 2). She goes on to write that “for several decades theory has sought to conceptualize the archipelago’s social and cultural uniqueness almost exclusively from the perspective of race. Taking the imagery and discourses of miscegenation, theory has often sought to present contemporary Caribbean societies as the unexpectedly creative consequence of the region’s colonial history. While it is imperative to underscore the significance of race as a constitutive aspect of Caribbean societies, it is also important to understand its relation to other forms of colonial embodiment” (Vulnerable, 11-12). 95 and the inherently misleading quality of rhetoric.” 254 In looking for a “true” Martí, what we seek is the closure of his meaning. We desire his words to achieve closure. We wish for his unbroken paternity over the text. What we attempt to create is an authoritative Martí, and ourselves as authorities authorized by such a Martí. His work, however, achieves and reaches for no such closure. Instead its seams are open and the structure of power and meaning are undone, unstitched. If our aim is to thus release Martí from the bounds of an authoritarianism that we foist upon him ourselves, a dictatorship he himself would have resisted, then let us work towards el destejido (unstitching) of his literature, the embrace of the opening, not to close it in our arms, but to open it wide for the entrance of our minor anachronisms and literariness. 255 This openness towards reading is an openness towards the other, a maternal opening against authority that marks the maternal relation between text and reader rather than patriarchal totalitarianism of the text. 256 In this way we develop an ethics of reading rooted in Martí’s own writing, a democratization of the word, not Logos of the Father, but a distribution of meaning that is not closed within his Being. In his notebooks, Martí conducts certain surveys of Western thought and philosophy. He discusses the philosopher’s quest for the knowledge of everything based in his own Cartesian centeredness (a priori) and in naturalist philosophies that prioritize scientific observation as the root of knowledge (a posteriori): “Hay, pues, en Filosofía sujeto que conoce, y 254 González Echevarría, Voice, 2. 255 See Ponte; also Enrico Mario Santí; also Lilian Guerra; also Doris Sommer; also Alfred J. Lopez. 256 See also Doris Sommer’s “José Martí, Author of Walt Whitman” where she writes of the ambivalence in the text, a text that is not dead but lives in its reading: “Ambivalence keeps alive what the ethicist Emmanuel Levinas calls ‘the Saying,’ that is, the mystery and transcendence of social intercourse; it doesn’t allow language to kill the desired Other by getting his meaning right. The ambivalence, for example, of hoping to speak the same (Latino) language and issuing a bilingual booklet suspends the copula between the speaker and her identity, so that ‘American’ cannot yet ‘be’ any essentialized, definitive, or dead thing. It remains a range of simultaneous belongings—desired, virtual, but wisely and prophylactically unconsummated connections—that safeguard Saying Our America, in all its accents, shifty attributions, and impossible refusals” (88). 96 que aislado, produce la Filosofía subjetiva alemana: objeto conocible, que aislado, produce la Filosofía naturalista moderna, y medios de conocer. Dedúcese que la Filosofía debe estudiar al hombre que observa, los medios con que observa y lo que observa: Filosofía interna, Filosofía externa y Filosofía de relación.” 257 José Martí’s vision is not of an individual possessed of autonomous knowledge or of a knowledge derived from this individual’s private observations, but of a knowledge produced in relation and that may or may not be knowable. Laura Lomas writes: “The foundation of the edifice of Western modernity, reason, loses its footing in Havana’s Presidio. Martí conceptualized his subjectivity in terms of broken and contradictory strivings. Deportation, incarceration, and migration lead him to privilege a ‘philosophy of relation,’ as he calls it in his early philosophical notebooks, over the Western philosophical tradition’s conception of a self-present, transcendental, and universal subject.” 258 The world and the text that philosophy studies are others, and our knowing of this other is not a totalizing knowledge but a relational one that allows for the other’s excess. 259 We cannot claim that any reading of Martí’s work or investigation of his life can deliver the totalizing knowledge we might desire, the desire to possess and render him manageable. Instead we are delivered unto ourselves in our encounter with him, as is he with the other. The self and the other remain uncognizable 257 Martí, OC, 19:362. See translation: “There is, then, in Philosophy a subject that knows, and that isolated, produces the German, subjective Philosophy: knowable object, that isolated, produces the modern, naturalist Philosophy, and means of knowing. Deduce that Philosophy should study the man who observes, the means with which he observes and what he observes: internal Philosophy, external Philosophy and Philosophy of relation” (translation mine). Roberto Agramonte explains the turn away from individualism in Martí: “el yo y el tú martianos, o sea, persona y prójimo […] el nosotros martiano o sea, patria y humanidad […] La individualidad es el distintivo del hombre […] es la aurora precursora de la personalidad. Pero la individualidad no tienen en Martí el poder omnímodo con que la dota el individualismo […] Lo que advierte el superbo sociólogo es un fenómeno como de descentralización de la inteligencia” (“Persona y Prójimo,” 801). 258 Lomas, Translating, 48. 259 Emmanuel Levinas describes the desire to know or identify the other as a violent possession and reduction of their being, not being as in Heidegger’s Dasein, but rather of their absolute alterity, their infinite otherness. He calls the idea or identification to which we reduce the other “the Same” and points out that in thinking of the Infinite, we do not reduce its alterity to an idea, or the Same, in that the very idea of the Infinite negates the I’s ability to conceptualize the Infinite: “the infinite is the radically, absolutely, other,” (“Philosophy,” 107). 97 and always excessive in their relation. They are created in their relation, not autonomously and not hierarchically. This is lateral and mutual creation. Martí’s texts are not read here as authoritative in their authorship. Ettinger’s understanding of the matrixial borderspace allows for the generation of a new reading of the aesthetic in which the father can be maternally linked and invested with the becoming of the child. Each text casts a shadow or a hue upon the other, and their readings change in this mutual relation. In this way, the relation between theory and text, author and creation, is also maternal or matrixial, “relationally affected. It is composed by linking and relating”, and that “In the matrixial perspective, becoming-together precedes being-one [...] the co-emerging partial self and Other, or a different kind of relations to the Other.” 260 It is this excessive, maternal relation that marks Mart’s work. This relation undermines our grasp of the other as it does the knowledge of the self. Judith Butler argues that the “I” cannot fully narrate or cognize its own history or subjectivity as it cannot fully account for the infinite others inscribed in that self. 261 For Butler and Athena Athanasiou, any subject is deprived of its self-possession in relation to Others just as states are dispossessed in the contact their borders take with other states and peoples. 262 Such dispossession has both a negative and positive valence. In one sense, a person or state can be dispossessed of rights, land, food, and even life. On the other hand, dispossession is the position of finding oneself in relation, relinquishing some of one’s autonomy for the sake of relation with an-other. Martí’s dispossession is both of his self-knowledge in relation and of his relation to the 260 Ettinger, Matrixial, 48, 72. 261 Martí also describes the nature of this undecidability: “Lo representado está en alguna manera en lo representante: podrá conocerlo por sí mismo lo representante, o por una idea conductor; pero siempre existe relación entre lo uno y lo otro, y la idea conductor es el vínculo de la relación. En toda percepción hay unión del ser con la cosa percibida” (Martí, OC, 21:59). 262 See Butler and Athanasiou’s Dispossession: The Performative in the Political as well as Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. Agramonte also describes a certain kind of ethic of dispossession in Martí: “El verbo reflexivo ‘deponerse’ lo usa mucho, como contrario a personalismo […] Deposición absoluta y continua es la palabra de orden de Martí” (“Persona y Prójimo,” 803). 98 nation. His desire for the nation, to beget the nation, deviates from the desire for paternity, just as José Martí’s own paternity is complicated. 263 These two lesser texts, lesser in the sense that they evade the call of majority, alert us to the slippery topography of Martí’s writing, the relational valence that undermines its own conquest. The maternal text is one in which the reader begets the author in his reading, and so is produced in return, just as the author is produced in concert with his verse. 264 We see this most prominently in Martí’s famous words from Ismaelillo, where he states: “Hijo soy de mi hijo! Él me rehace!” 265 The father, like the author, is made such not by his own, autonomous power, but rather becomes father in concert with the birth of his creation. The father is not the pure antecedent of the child, but is created as father by the child, a child who is also the written work that undoes the father’s paternal authority. Instead, he is remade in a maternal coming-into-being with the other. It is this excessive, maternal relation that punctuates Martí’s work. 266 Birth occurs in the chaotic invasion of the other, where the other is the work of art which is no longer the sole possession of its author. 267 This work is an acknowledgement of the chaos inherent in modernity which modernity had hoped to overcome through cold rationalism. It is a chaos inherent in our relation to the world, in our relation to others, the unconquerable element. Authorial paternity and domination are overcome as the author becomes chaotically inhabited by the other. The 263 According to Ivan A. Schulman, Ismaelillo is evidence of this invasion of the Other/the undecideable and the following dispossession of self-assurance: “Chaos—born of the structures and contradictions of modernity in its initial phases—invades and pervades the aesthetic space of Ismaelillo, a volume published in New York shortly after the poet’s arrival there in 1880” (painting, 2-3). 264 Glissant describes this writing, “The literary text plays the contradictory role of a producer of opacity […] Literary textual practice thus represents an opposition between two opacities: the irreducible opacity of the text […] and the always evolving opacity of the author or a reader” (Poetics, 115). These two opaque others act upon each other in relation. 265 Martí, OC, 16:31. 266 See Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. 267 According to Santí, Ismaelillo was a response to the positivist and naturalist philosophies of modernity (“Martí y el Modernismo,” 838). 99 maternal in this sense is not tied exclusively to sexual difference, but is a theory of ethical/political relation that exceeds the binaries of male and female. 268 This is not to say that Martí does not strictly identify male and female roles. He certainly does and often delineates them in explicit terms: “El hombre es rudo e impaciente, y se ama más a sí que a los demás. Y la mujer es tierna, y goza en darse, y es madre desde que nace, y vive de amar a otros.” 269 However, the thread of the maternal is not strictly dictated by the maternal organ or by the idea of childbearing as ultimate, female purpose, but is a trembling, fluid thread that evokes the slippage and vulnerability within Ismaelillo and also Martí’s first self-published work, Abdala. This maternal thread and relation is evoked in the act of letter writing, a genre that is never individualistic but always composed with the consciousness of an-other to whom it is directed, and comprised Martí’s first compositions. Perhaps some of Martí’s best-studied works are his letters, and the first letter he ever wrote was to his mother while assisting his father as a clerk in Hanábana on October 23, 1862: Estimada mamá: Deseo ante de todo que Ud. esté buena lo mismo que las niñas, Joaquina, Luisa y mamá Joaquina […] Y todo mi cuidad se pone en cuidar mi caballo y engordarlo como un puerco cebón, ahora lo estoy enseñando a caminar enfrenado para que marche bonito […] Y no teniéndole otra cosa que decirle déle expresiones a mamá Joaquina, Joaquina y Luisa y las niñas y a Pilar déle un besito y Ud. reciba de su obediente hijo que le quiere con delirio / José Martí. 270 268 Parker reminds us that “[Levinas cites] Numbers (11:12), where Moses complains to God about the Hebrews’ constant complaining: ‘Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their forefathers?’ We grasp here that Moses is their mother, that he did give his people birth” (Theorist’s Mother, 21). He who was once called Father of the nation, can also carry the nation as child in the womb. 269 Martí, OC, 9:288. See translation: “Man is rude and impatient, and he loves himself more than the rest. And the woman is tender, and she finds joy in giving of herself, and she is a mother from birth, and she lives in loving others” (translation mine). 270 Martí, OC, 20:243. See translation: “Dear Mama: I desire before all else that you would be well and the same for the girls. Joaquina, Luisa and Mama Joaquina […] And all my care goes into taking care of my horse and I am fattening him up like a fattened pork, now I am teaching him to walk reined-in so that he walks prettily […] And not having anything else to tell you give my thoughts to Mama Joaquina, Joaquina and Luisa and the girls and give a kiss to Pilar and you receive from your obedient son who loves you with delirium / José Martí” (translation mine). 100 This first letter paints a charming portrait of the soon-to-be revolutionary. In it we see a son’s abiding love for his family, especially his mother, and a nurturing nature. He describes the horse that he is training as well as a young rooster. Ponte writes that José Martí’s dearest friend used to make fun of Martí and the besotted tone that he would use to write to his mother and sisters. 271 Even his earliest writings convey a certain maternal preoccupation with the well-being of those he loves that would have been unusual for a young man of the era. Later, however, this nurturing and warm tone would be directed also to the nation he hoped to foster, to its people, and would demonstrate a sense of duty. His love is no longer reserved for his mother and sisters, but also for his country, and this would lay the path for the conflict we see in Abdala. The prevailing analyses of this work and the body of Martí’s writing is that it is here where he becomes the husband to Cuba, the father of its people. He inseminates the land with his blood: La pasión cubana de Martí le ha valido todavía un título más, muy significativo para mi búsqueda: Martí es el gran Padre de Cuba; él la engendró, la insufló vida y la fecundó con su propia sangre. Ahora él es Cuba y Cuba es él; hay una lianza indisoluble entre la vida (y la muerte) de ese hombre y la de su país. Pero, al mismo tiempo, Martí es el Esposo de Cuba: sus bodas de sangre se celebraron en 1895, el año de su muerte, y se confirmaron tres años después, en 1898, cuando la patria soñada por él ve alumbrar su demorada independencia. 272 If he breathed life into Cuba and gave her his blood, can we truly read this metaphor in exclusively paternal tones? Is this not also a scene of pregnancy? His life and the life of Cuba are one in being, in coming-into-being together. He does not stand apart, the patriarchal before-all. Instead he becomes as Cuba does. This bloody wedding and the birth of a nation described as illumination all hint at the Spanish term for giving birth: dar a luz. Luis Rodríguez-Émbil 271 See Ponte, “Fermín Valdés Domínguez se burlaba del tono de enamorado con que su amigo Martí escribía a su madre y sus hermanas. Ese mismo tono de enamorado lo puso en todo, no importó a quién se dirigiera, y por eso puede empalagar en él tanta seducción” (“abrigo,” 79). 272 Oviedo, “La niña,” 12. 101 describes the life and legacy of Martí in terms that echo the Catholic Mass and portrays Martí as a lover and his country: “por ti creada y adorada, Madre e Hija tuya, cómo en esta nuestra América, y en Cuba, se realizó una vez más, después de Santa Rosa, el fenómeno sumo de la santidad.” 273 These metaphors depicting wife, daughter, mother, father, Creator, and son all become confused and tangled throughout the scholarship on Martí. However, the thread of maternal relation that I follow here precisely undermines such genealogical tendencies. It does not seek to identify who came first, who created whom, who is father, wife, mother, or child. Instead, it gives life to—da a luz—the very ambiguity and unknowability that is present in the maternal relation, the place where Martí himself is confused by the borders between self and other, mother and nation, father and son. Traditionally, Ismaelillo has been read as a kind of document of inheritance, a literary last will and testament in which José Martí would bequeath a new literary style upon his successors and the nation to a proper heir. Written by José Martí as a flight of fancy, it has since been branded as the first strides towards modernismo. Read along these lines, Ismaelillo is a paternal text whose heirs would be more numerous than grains of sand on the beach, to paraphrase the Biblical story invoked by its title, 274 the greatest of these being Rubén Darío. However, this text is not only foundational in the sense of style, but, like other works of the nineteenth century, it functioned to establish the legitimacy and genealogy of the nascent nation. According to Julio Ramos: “Martí obstinately insisted upon the power of filiation as a legitimate model in and for history [...] And notwithstanding the claim that Martí’s first book of poetry, Ismaelillo (1882), demonstrates the early modernization of Latin American poetry, it in fact casts poetic discourse 273 Rodríguez-Émbil, el santo, 7-8. 274 See Genesis 22:17. This is the beginning of the story of Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Ishmael, and Isaac, in which God promises Abraham that despite being childless, his descendants would be as numerous as grains of sand on the seashore or stars in the sky. 102 in the form of an allocution by the father to a son. How, then, is it possible to speak of broken families? Martí’s insistence on a filial hierarchy must be read as a will to continuity.” 275 For Rafael Rojas, the family and state similarly erect their symbolic borders, and it is through correct continuity and legitimacy that such borders and the definition of the Family/State is maintained. 276 Lilian Guerra also writes that José Martí established for the Cuban nation a new parentage, a break from the past that would engender a new, inclusive lineage of Cubans. 277 This new genealogy involved a parentage that was not tainted by colonialism or imperialism: an ideal nation. Jonathan Goldberg adds to this idea of the ideal nation by writing that Martí’s language is “inflected to naturalize the fantasy of sons produced by fathers (often without mothers), that is, to naturalize a homosocial/homophobic brotherhood always defended against its own homoerotics.” 278 The nation therefore depends upon the family—upon the father’s name, the son’s inheritance, and the decency of their wives and daughters—for its legitimacy. And so the task of literature becomes the affirmation of this relation and of the nation’s legitimate inheritance, rooted in the name of the Father. However, Martí’s will to continuity is not sufficient to overcome the turmoil of discontinuity. Bejel writes that Martí’s ideology remains locked within a paradox of masculinity that charges both modernity and the “traditional values” of Spanish colonialism with the crime of emasculating Cuban men. 279 Martí’s resolution of this paradox remains incomplete and 275 Ramos, Divergent, 198. Ramos writes that modernity posed a problem for Martí and the writers of his time in that it forced upon them the incertitude of their inheritance, of the borders and rightfulness of the Latin American nations that were in this period being drawn out of Spanish colonialism and newly mapped as independent entities. 276 Rojas, “Lecturas filiales,” 19-20. 277 Guerra, The Myth, 259-260. 278 Goldberg, Tempest, 12. See also Sylvia Molloy, “Martí’s obsession has been diversely commented on first by Angel Rama and then, most convincingly, by Julio Ramos, who reads Martí’s insistence on filiation as a way of setting up a new model of affiliation, in Said’s sense of the term, as the replacement of one family model by another. That women are excluded from Martí’s new family model—this ‘rigid and self-sufficient male couple,’ as Rama calls it—is, of course, obvious” (“His America,” 372). 279 Bejel, Gay, 16. 103 unfulfilled. According to Martí’s hombre natural—a well-known concept that arises later in Martí’s writings and political philosophy—this masculine force is endowed with the power to shore up borders and establish national belonging, while the effeminate man will always remain open and penetrable. This tension between inside and outside, the affirmation of the nation and the sex’s borders, remains unresolved. For Sylvia Molloy, the father-son dyad in Ismaelillo sets up a “construct ensuring historical continuance” through “filial feeling.” 280 However, Molloy also makes clear that it is not what Martí wishes the reader to see, but rather what he himself strives to erase that most captivates. 281 Throughout Ismaelillo, the reader is assaulted by inversions of the paternal order and discontinuity. Santí speculates: “Si el error de la tradición crítica en torno a Ismaelillo ha sido de concebir su importancia en términos genéticos –es decir, concibiéndolo como libro influyente—, entonces la inversión genealógica que constituye la poética de Ismaelillo habrá de contener, en cifra, la historia de ese error.” 282 According to Santí, the poetics of Ismaelillo do not support the claim of a will to continuity or the creation of a lineage, but rather signal the inversion or reordering of that genetic succession. It is in his own poetics where Martí himself is confused by the borders between self and other, mother and nation, father and son. Martí’s very first publication, the epic poem Abdala, interestingly portrays this confusion. The little scholarship that exists on this often-overlooked work focuses on the conflict between Nubia and the invader: its “patriotic message” and foretelling of Martí’s own death in battle. 283 The poem takes place in Nubia, where a young 280 Molloy, “His America,” 371. 281 See Molloy, “An obsessive meditation on progeniture and filiation runs through the pages of José Martí. Of his first book of poetry, Ismaelillo, celebrating his three-year-old son, he writes (in French) to his friend Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun: ‘I have just published a little book not for profit but as a present for those I love, a present in the name of my son who is my master. The book is the story of my love affair with my son [mes amours avec mon fils]: one tires of reading so many stories of love affairs with women’” (“His America,” 370). 282 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 839. 283 Emilio Bejel writes “despite his youth, Martí was already so aware of his political image, given that a year before he was imprisoned he had written the dramatic poem ‘Abdala’ (Martí 1869) […] It would seem that, interpreted 104 prince watches a foreign army invading his land. He feels the call to war and listens to the sound of battle. However, the battle is not the scene of the poem; in fact, we never leave the private quarters of the prince. Abdala emerges then less a poem about the battle for political independence than it is about a son’s obsession with the mother. The text seethes with a maternal anxiety that would be present throughout Martí’s life and works. This self-published play made its debut to readers on January 23, 1869, following a revolutionary outburst in a theater that inflamed Spanish colonial intolerance of revolutionary sentiment. 284 Alfred J. López writes that Leonor was terrified for her son, fearing that the Spanish would soon become aware of his “extracurricular” activities: “Far from celebrating Pepe’s accomplishment, Leonor Martí was beside herself with anguish and the fear of what would befall her sixteen-year-old son after putting his name to such a publication in the environment of the moment […] his play Abdala was prescient in its anticipation of Leonor’s fears.” 285 She was not wrong to be afraid, and it is fascinating that Martí’s play, published a day before his sixteenth birthday, would so accurately predict the unfolding of his own life. However, it is not his death to which I refer, but rather the maternal concern that enveloped him and is the primary motif of the play. Martí’s Nubian mother and Nubian alter-ego here present the defenders of (Cuban) independence and are the foundation upon which autonomy might be set. However, such a representation of the champions of Cuban nationalism might have troubled many of the would- be revolutionaries Martí intended to reach in this moment. To project Cuban nationalism as an from a nationalistic perspective, Martí, from a very young age, had sketched the personal and political destiny that would culminate in his dramatic death in Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895. All this, of course, is a retrospective interpretation of what happened” (Images, 32). 284 López, Revolutionary Life, 39. 285 López, A Revolutionary Life, 39. 105 African or Black movement was highly unpopular at the time not just because of the rampant racism that governed what was still a slave-holding society, but also because the events of the Haitian Revolution lurked in the minds of Cuba’s elite. 286 This portrayal of Cuban independence also came close upon the heels of the declaration of Cuba’s Ten Year’s War, in which Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves with the injunction that they would fight for Cuban independence. Ada Ferrer describes the ways in which Martí both sought to champion black Cubans at this time, but also continued to develop an image of a Cuban nation that was “raceless” and therefore less threatening to white planters who feared losing their supremacy if the revolution were to lean towards such leaders as Antonio Maceo. She wrties that “This doubleness was inherent in the patriotic language of Martí, but was inherent as well in the nationalist movement as a whole—a movement defined by a powerful struggle between racism and antiracism, between revolution and reaction.” 287 Martí’s doubleness cannot be denied in Abdala. This alter-ego cannot help but remind us of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where he writes: “I am overdetermined from the outside. I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ others have of me, but to my appearance.” 288 Martí is able to appropriate a certain performance and take up the mask of blackness in order to posit the idea of revolution, but from a distance. His work here does not transcend race or make a meaningful statement regarding the lives of Afro-Cubans and African slaves. Although the semblance he adopts in Abdala is 286 Ada Ferrer writes in “The Silence of Patriots: Race and Nationalism in Martí’s Cuba” that “fears about black ascendancy” (233) often led to the erasure of or “silence” surrounding race in the discourse of independence. Ferrer writes: “The silence then becomes evidence neither of nationalist resolution of the racial division nor of elite efforts to preserve a racist status quo. Rather, it was emblematic of the ways in which the struggles between racism and antiracism defined Cuban nationalism” (“Silence,” 232). Martí’s work often discusses race as if racism would be overcome in the simple act of revolution. At the end of “Nuestra América” he states: “No hay odio de razas, porque no hay razas.” López details the ways in which Martí’s revolutionary work constantly had to dance around the issue of race in order to appease both sides of the Cuban contingent. 287 Ferrer, “Silence,” 244. 288 Fanon, Masks, 95. 106 African, it does not mean this poem and the larger works of Martí ordain the end to racism in Latin America that many scholars have wished to find. 289 Indeed, Martí’s legacy does not leave the battlefield unscathed, but bears traces of the doubling of the discourse of race. He is not innocent. José Martí’s marked fascination with and objectification of the Other, continues in Ismaelillo where he depicts his son as an Arab prince, a sultan, and ultimately as Ishmael, the illegitimate son of Abraham, father of the tribe of Israel. Rubén Pérez Nápoles writes that José Martí was “un hombre admirador y enamorado del mundo y de la cultura árabes.” 290 For Santí this boils down to simple Orientalism, a term coined by Edward Said, in which European/Western writers invent rather than describe with any accuracy the “Orient.” 291 Nubia and Africa are disembodied, abstracted, and positioned as a blank canvas for the imagination of a Cuban battle against imperial occupation, but they are not drawn into conversation with the very real issue of race and slavery in Cuba. Instead, Martí perhaps rests in the comfort of the “exotic” to distance himself from the very present anxiety of his actual mother, the actual island, and real human bodies with whom he was drawn into war. 289 Anne Fountian’s José Martí, the United States, and Race appears overly complicit in the kind of silence which Ferrer describes. Her aim in this book is to take the whole of Martí’s work and form a kind of neutral and historical analysis that would judge this totality against the attitudes and philosophies towards race at the time in which he wrote. Her finding is that Martí was ahead of his time where thoughts about race were concerned. She writes: “The word raza (race) has many applications in the work of José Martí. He uses it as a distinctive color-based descriptor: black, white, mulatto, yellow. He calls Indians by their tribal names in North America and writes of Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations as well as using a generic term, indios, for Native Americans. He refers to immigrants arriving form Europe as races, as peoples, and by nationality, and he classified the Chinese as a racial and cultural community. Martí also used raza to mean a type or kind of person, as he did in Havana in 1879, when he declared himself unwilling to bow to Spanish authority: ‘Martí is not of the race who can be bought’ (Mañach 131) […] All these ways to talk about race belong to the same person who summed up all races as belonging to a single category: mankind (2:298)” (132). 290 See Pérez Nápoles, José Martí: el poeta armado, 183: “El Ismaelillo era un diminuto libro de quince poemas, al que Martí adjudicó el título basándose en el personaje bíblico de Ismael, aquel niño hijo de Abraham con la esclava Agar, que fue enviado a Egipto porque Sara, la esposa legítima de Abraham, no lo quiso más en el seno de su familia. Y anduvo el Ismaelillo errante por el desierto, entre el hambre y la sed hasta casi morir. Y en el desierto, después de beber, creció y se hizo diestro en el manejo del arco, y de su estirpe nació el pueblo sarraceno. Tal vio a su hijo Martí. Era él un hombre admirador y enamorado del mundo y de la cultura árabes.” 291 See Santí for this analysis of Said’s work (“Martí y el Modernismo,” 820). 107 In the very first lines of the poem, the young hero, Abdala, spies enemy forces on the horizon and declares: “Y si insulta a los libres un tirano / Veremos en el campo de batalla! / En la Nubia nacidos, por la Nubia / Morir sabremos: hijos de patria, / Por ella moriremos, y el suspiro / Que de mis labios / postrimeros salga, / Para Nubia será, que para Nubia / Nuestra fuerza y valor fueron creados.” 292 What is typically translated as “fatherland” is here a feminine “she”, an “ella” that gave life to her soldiers and will give them strength, and for whom they will die. This is Martí’s first, published proclamation that the brave die for liberty. Abdala’s soldiers and senators all gladly agree to march into battle, but it is here that the mother enters the scene: ESP.: ¿Y tanto amor a este rincón de tierra? ¿Acaso él te protegió en tu infancia? ¿Acaso amante te llevó en su seno? ¿Acaso él fue quien engendró tu audacia Y tu fuerza? ¡Responde! ¿O fue tu madre? ¿Fue la Nubia? ABD.: El amor, madre, a la patria No es el amor ridículo a la tierra, No es el amor ridículo a la tierra, Ni a la yerba que pisan nuestras plantas; Es el odio invencible a quien la oprime, Es el rencor eterno a quien la ataca;-- Y tal amor despierta en nuestro pecho El mundo de recuerdos que nos llama A la vida otra vez, cuando la sangre, Herida brota con angustia el alma;-- ¡La imagen del amor que nos consuela Y las memorias plácidas que guarda! ESP.: ¿Y es más grande ese amor que el que despierta En tu pecho tu madre? ABD.: ¿Acaso crees Que hay algo más sublime que la patria? ESP.: ¿Y aunque sublime fuera, acaso debes Por ella abandonarme? ¿A la batalla Así correr veloz? ¿Así olvidarte De la que el ser te dio? ¿Y eso lo manda 292 Martí, OC, 18:14. See translation: “And if a tyrant insults the free/ We will see each other on the battlefield! / In Nubia we are born, for Nubia / To die we will know: sons of the fatherland, / For her we will die, and the sigh / That from my lips / finally goes, / For Nubia it will be, that for Nubia / Our force and valor were created” (translation mine). 108 la patria? ¡Di! ¿Tampoco te conmueven La sangre ni la muerte que te aguardan? 293 These questions signal the conflict in which Martí finds himself. Is Cuba so sublime that he should die for her? Again, the play of pronouns is interesting. When Abdala speaks of the mother/fatherland he uses feminine pronouns. The first time Espirta speaks, diminishing “la patria” into just “este rincón de tierra,” she uses the masculine pronoun but later switches to the feminine. She asks of her son whether it was this motherland that carried him on her breast and gave him life, and Abdala appears unable or unwilling to answer this question. And yet he claims that it is, in fact, this motherland that has awoken life again in him. Espirta gave him life at first, and now the country would give him life a second time, and with that life he would die a martyr’s death. The border between the mother’s body and the body of the nation becomes confused to the point where one wonders: what is land and what is mother? Why does this dialogue even take place? Why is it so necessary for Abdala, and apparently for Martí himself, to explain to his mother the reasons for his sacrifice? Was Martí so shamed by his mother’s appearance at the theater that he felt compelled to make a public response? If this is the case, then it speaks volumes about Martí’s excessive maternal anxiety. Love and duty appear to drive them. A love whose sublimity and greatness defy conception, defy the knowledge that would allow us to test their limits. Roberto Fernández 293 Martí, OC, 18:19-20. See translation: “ESP: And so much love for this corner of earth? Perhaps he protected you in your infancy? Perhaps as a lover it carried you in its bosom? Perhaps it was he that generated your audaciousness and strength? Respond! Or was it your mother? Was it Nubia? ABD: The lover, mother, of the fatherland is not the ridiculous love of the earth, nor of the plants that our feet crush; it is the invincible hatred of those that would oppress her, it is the eternal rancor for those that attack her;—And such a love awakens in our breasts a world of memories that calls us to live again, when the blood, wounded arises with anguish in the soul;—The image of love is what comforts us and the peaceful memories what guard us! ESP: And is it more grand this love than the love that your mother awakens in your chest? ABD: Perhaps you believe that there is something more sublime than the motherland? ESP: And even if it were sublime, because of her you should abandon me? To battle run so quickly? In this way forget about her who gave you being? And this is what the motherland commands? Speak! Neither are you moved by blood or by the death that await you?” (translation mine). 109 Retamar defines this love: “As a young man, he writes, in his dramatic poem ‘Abdala,’ ‘Mother, love of country / Is not the ridiculous love of the land, […] It is the invincible hatred of those that oppress her, / It is the eternal rancor toward those that attack her…’ It is much more than a word game that Martí displays, unadorned, in these verses placed in the mouth of an adolescent alter ego: ‘Love…is…hatred…is…rancor.’ I do not mean, of course, to now present Martí as a hater, which he never was, but to explain the source of his love. This combative love […] was born, dialectically, out of hatred and rancor.” 294 Fernández Retamar argues that love of country is a love born in the dialectics of love and hate. This love is in conflict with maternal love which is not oppositional but born in the “fragilization” of the borders between self and other, the very borders which such a dialectic would work to cement. Ettinger writes “In the opening to an unconscious matrixial event-encounter, the artist can’t not-share with an-other, she can’t not witness the other. The I and non-I are wit(h)nessing one another, and by that they become partialised, vulnerable and fragilised.” 295 Abdala thus becomes a poem not about the call to arms, but about overcoming the conflict between relinquishing the bonds of maternal love and fully embracing combative love, described as being the love of nation. 296 Yet this conflict is never won, and the confusion between the borders of mother and nation, or those of love and death, continue to be crossed. Abdala may free his nation from the invader but he is never free of the maternal juncture. It might be tempting to read this poem as a scene of matricide where the son must kill the mother in order to fully individuate himself, in order to become a man and fight for his country instead of staying home and clinging to his mother’s breast. For Kristeva “the loss of the mother 294 Fernández Retamar, “Martí in His (Third) World,” 92. 295 See Ettinger, “Copoeisis,” 704. 296 Fernández Retamar, “Martí in His (Third) World,” 92. 110 is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation.” 297 Killing the mother, our ultimate separation from the mother’s body, is the very means by which we realize ourselves rather than being pulled into a maternal vacuum. 298 However, it would be inaccurate to read Martí in this way. This poem is not about killing off the mother for the realization of self and nation. O’Byrne provides a different way for us to read death and the maternal. She writes: “we select death as the cipher for our finitude […] it turns out to be what individuates us; birth, in contrast, reveals us as being in relation.” 299 It is through his own death and not his mother’s that Abdala comes apart from his mother. It is the inverse of matricide: not the mother’s death but the individual’s turn towards death, and away from birth, that produces a separate subjectivity, a separate destiny. What this also suggests is that perhaps there is no realizable individuation in life, but that all life is being in relation with many (m)others. José Martí does not kill the mother, but he does wrestle with her specter, with her overwhelming love from which he remains inextricable. The young prince of Nubia cries out “What torments! What terrible anguish! My mother cries…Nubia calls me…Son I am…I was born Nubian…I no longer doubt. Goodbye! I go to defend my country.” 300 He struggles between the mother and the nation and is racked with terrible pain at the choice. His turn is towards death, towards the battlefield, and yet in the end he returns to his mother and breathes into her his dying breath, “I come to exhale in your arms, mother, my last sighs, and my soul!” 301 297 Kristeva, Black Sun, 27-28. 298 Kristeva, Black Sun, 27-28. 299 O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude, 9. 300 “ABD: ¡Cuántos tormentos!... ¡Cuán terrible angustia! / Mi madre llora… Nubia me reclama… / Hijo soy… Nací nubio… Ya no dudo: / ¡Adios! Yo marcho a defender mi patria. (Se va.)” (Martí, OC, 18:20). 301 “ABD: “¡Vengo a exhalar en vuestros brazos, madre, / Mi últimos suspiros, y mi alma!—“ (Martí, OC,18:23). 111 If the son here remains caught within the mother, and this is not a scene of matricide, then our next option is Oedipal incest. In Otmar Ette’s article analyzing José Martí’s use of the pseudonym Orestes, he writes: El núcleo trágico de la Orestiada lo forma el espantoso delito sangriento de Orestes, el indecible crimen del matricidio: Orestes tiene que matar a Clitemnestra para ejecutar la venganza por su padre. […] Sin embargo, en este breve ensayo, se excluirá la temática del antagonismo irresoluble entre el deber hacia la patria y la responsabilidad ética hacia la madre, muchas veces vinculado al problema del incesto y del matricidio que puede observarse, desde el drama Abdala pasando por Amor con amor se paga y Adúltera hasta la única novela de Martí, Amistad funesta, a lo largo de toda la obra martiana como estructura básica obsesiva, y permite una interpretación psicoanalítica pudiendo demostrar una relación entre el tabú de incesto y el ‘pecado original’ en Martí. Queda fuera de duda que este complejo, es decir el tema del matricidio, establece una relación importante entre Martí y su seudónimo “Orestes.” 302 What is most interesting about Abdala is precisely this clear “obsession” with the mother and the “unsolvable antagonism between duty to the nation and the ethical responsibility towards the mother,” and not our imposition of a Freudian reading. Ette here conflates the Orestes myth with the Oedipal myth, neither of which adequately account for the mother in José Martí’s work. He is not, however, alone in this analysis. In his article “Oracular: apropiaciones de la voz maternal en Ismaelillo de José Martí,” Jorge Camacho writes, “si en ‘Musa traviesa’ la mujer/madre/novia es el centro que informa la búsqueda del héroe poético, la figura arquetípica implícita del hablante es la de un Edipo hijo que busca conocer su origen e identidad, usurpando el lugar paterno y deslizándose al terreno del cuerpo y la prohibición que supone el incesto.” 303 The Oedipus analysis over simplifies what is going on in Martí’s poetics. In the case of Ismaelillo, it requires the invention of a mother who simply is not present, both in life and in the text. The son, Martí, does not desire the prohibited incest with the mother. “Son I am of my son” is not the same as “Father I am of myself.” Instead, he wishes to be both father and mother and child; past, present, 302 Ette, “Aputes,” 139. 303 Camacho, “Oracular,” 9. 112 and future of an ideal child, Cuba, who is, in fact, himself. Perhaps Martí is doing something more interesting than equating the mother with a nature he will inseminate in Ismaelillo or an incestuous union in Abdala. 304 As literary critics, we often rely heavily upon the Oedipal analysis handed down to us by Freud, and perhaps it is time that we began to push our treatment of the mother a bit further, and look to see if she is doing something other than remaining the passive object of either matricide or incest. 305 All male relation to the mother need not be reduced to an Oedipal desire, and Freud need not be the final authority where mothers are concerned. So, if we can no longer kill her or sleep with her, what do we do with her? Or better yet, what is she doing? Martí appears particularly perplexed by this question. The words of Abdala are echoed in Martí’s final letter to his mother: Montecristi, 25 marzo, 1895 / Madre mía: Hoy, 25 de marzo, en vísperas de un largo viaje, estoy pensando en Ud. Yo sin cesar pienso en Ud. Ud. Se duele, en la cólera de su amor, del sacrificio de mi vida; y ¿por qué nací de Ud. con una vida que ama el sacrificio? Palabras, no puedo. El deber de un hombre está allí donde es más útil. Pero conmigo va siempre, en mi creciente y necesaria agonía, el recuerdo de mi madre. Abrace a mis hermanas, y a sus compañeros. ¡Ojalá pueda algún día verlos a todos a mi alrededor, contentos de mí! Y entonces sí que cuidaré yo de Ud. con mimo y con orgullo. Ahora, bendígame, y crea que jamás saldrá de mi corazón obra sin piedad y sin limpieza. La bendición. / Su / J. Martí / Tengo razón para ir más contento y seguro de lo que Ud. pudiera imaginarse. No son inútiles la verdad y la ternura. No padezca. 306 304 Patricia Sweir describes the maternal in her article “The Maternal Bonds of Patriotism: Modernismo and the Nationalist ‘Discourse of Desire’ in José Martí’s ‘La muñeca negra’” as a pedagogical tool in some instances and in others as the bond one feels to the patria. She writes, “The space of refuge which is associated with poetic language and nature is later manifested in the maternal role […] symbolizing the patriotic bonds that Martí hopes to instill in those Latin Americans dazzled by the progress and economic gains associated with modernity” (Sweir, “Maternal,” 52). 305 There has begun what is being termed “the maternal turn” in literary criticism. This is demonstrated in such texts as Andrew Parker’s The Theorist’s Mother and Elissa Marder’s The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Ettinger’s work, among others. This “maternal turn” is described by Elissa Marder and Andrew Parker in an article titled “The Maternal Turn: Elissa Marder and Andrew Parker” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, in which the authors review and dialogue on the maternal in literary theory. 306 Martí, OC, 20:475. See translation: “My mother: Today, the 25 th of March, in the vigil of a long journey, I am thinking about you. Without ceasing I think of you. You are in pain, in the anger of your love, at the sacrifice of my life; and why was I born from you with a life that loves sacrifice? Words, I cannot. The duty of a man is here where he is most useful. But you will go with me always, in my growing and necessary agony, the remembrance of my mother. Embrace my sisters and your friends. That I could one day see them all around me, happy with me! And then yes I would take care of you with indulgence and with pride. Now, bless me, and believe that never from my heart will come a work without piety and without purity. Blessings / Your / J. Martí / I have reason to go out more content and confident than you can imagine. Truth and tenderness are not useless. Do not suffer” (translation mine). 113 Her love is motivated as well by pain, by the sacrifice that the nation demands, but now her pain and love are joined with that of her son. He was born of her in order to partake of her sacrifice, the sacrifice that is necessary to bring into existence an-other. 307 Martí’s duty does not arise from the nation alone, but is born in him of his mother. He describes his “growing and necessary agony, the remembrance of my mother.” It is in the remembrance of his mother, her maternal suffering, that he goes forth in his own. His duty to bear the nation is a maternal one. At one moment in this dialog with his mother, the young warrior who had just described himself saying “Only a bolt of lightning could detain the strength and valor of the noble Abdala,” 308 finds himself crying in his mother’s arms, hoping no one important will see him: ABD.: Perdona ¡oh madre! Que de ti me aleje Para partir al campo. ¡Oh! Estas lágrimas Testigos son de mi ansiedad terrible, Y el huracán que ruge en mis entrañas. (Espirta llora.) ¡No llores tú, que a mi dolor ¡oh madre! Estas ardientes lágrimas le bastan! El ¡ay! del moribundo, ni el crujido, Ni el choque rudo de las fuertes armas, ¡No el llanto asoman a mis tristes ojos, Ni a mi valiente corazón espantan! Tal vez sin vida a mis hogares vuelva, U oculto entre el fragor de la batalla De la sangre y furor víctima sea. Nada me importa. ¡Si supiera Abdala Que con su sangre se salvaba Nubia De las terribles extranjeras garras, Esa veste que llevas, madre mía, Con gotas de mi sangre la manchara! Sólo tiemblo por ti; y aunque mi llanto 307 José Raúl Vidal describes in José Martí: a la Lumbre del Zarzal the death and the suffering of the nation as a maternal suffering, the mother who suffers for her children oppressed by the foreign invader: “Dos patrias”, “La opresión de la patria se actualiza en el término viuda. Su simbolismo revela la pena oculta en el alma de cada cuban o que divaga en la diáspora. La viuda, símbolo femenino de la patria ausente, no designa aquí la condición de una mujer cuyo esposo ha muerto, sino a la madre que ha perdido sus hijos—caídos en la guerra unos y disgregados en el exilio otros—. En tanto concepto—la viudez vinculada a la patria—expresa lo mejor de la poesía martiana de la emigración” (a la Lumbre, 31). 308 Martí, OC, 18:18. “ABD: ¡Un rayo sólo detener pudiera / El esfuerzo y valor del noble Abdala!” 114 No muestro a los guerreros de mi patria, ¡Ve cómo corre por mi faz, ¡oh madre! Ve cuál por mis mejillas se derrama! 309 His pain and suffering are linked with hers, and he envisions the victory of independence in the blood that he will spill upon his mother’s robes. His mother is the only witness to his vulnerability. 310 We see an inversion of the mother’s blood. It is a private scene, and yet the son inhabits it. Bejel writes that for Martí “el proyecto nacional aparece como un discurso en el cual los espacios son distribuidos en base a los roles sexuales o de género […] las mujeres están completamente encerradas dentro del marco hogareño mientras que los hombres se ocupan de los asuntos públicos y políticos fuera del hogar.” 311 However, the son here turns to the feminine, private space. He partakes of it. Part of the resistance to the feminine body, the maternal body, that we see in these discourses is its openness, the holes and perforations that leave it open to foreign invasion, penetration, rape, and pregnancy. Laura Lomas writes, “The term ‘imperial modernity’ refers to 309 Martí, OC, 18:18-19. See translation: “ABD: Pardon me, oh mother! That from you I distance myself to leave for the battlefield. Oh! These tears witnesses they are to my terrible anxiety, and to the hurricane that roars in my gut! (Espirta cries.) Don’t you cry, that at my pain, oh mother, these ardent tears should satisfy! The ‘ay’ of the dying, nor the crunch, nor the loud clash of strong arms, nor the cry that rises to my sad eyes, nor do they startle my valiant heart! Perhaps without life to my home I will return, or hidden in the clamor of battle I will be a victim of blood and furry. Nothing matters to me. If Abdala only knew that with his blood he would save Nubia from terrible, foreign claws, this robe that you wear, my mother, with drops of blood I would stain it! I only tremble for you; and although I do not show my cries to the warriors of my country, see how they run down my face, oh mother! See how they pour down my cheeks!” (translation mine). 310 See Ettinger, “Copoeisis,” 704. 311 Bejel, “’Amistad funesta’ de Martí: la ‘mujer hombruna’ como amenaza al proyecto nacional,” 2. Bejel writes that for Martí women were meant to fulfill a strictly domestic role and that he found “manly women” threatening and repugnant to his vision of the world. This is supported by his writing and many of his letters to Carmita and Maria Mantilla where he instructs them as to how to live as decent and genteel women. However, his writing is not without its own femininity and neither are such assertions without the addendum that they should live as independent women without need to chain themselves to a man. This is evidenced most clearly in his final letter to María Mantilla (Martí, OC, 20:236). Jacqueline Cruz writes that the woman in José Martí’s work is a subordinated subject, the woman as slave to the man, and that Martí defines the difference between the man and the woman as the “la dualidad alma/cuerpo” (“’Esclava vencedora,’” 35). Beatrice Pita references “Vindicación de Cuba” stating “Clearly Martí, here as elsewhere in his writings, is responding to a strictly delineated and highly romantic division of spheres for the feminine and the masculine—a dichotomy that extends as well to the literary” (“Engendering Critique,” 139). 115 just this state of penetration of a country by a proximate and growing imperial power, the United States. We note how Martí associates the experience of vulnerability with the adjective ‘Latino.’” 312 The Latino/Cuban/Nubian body is a body assaulted by the other, pierced and plundered by imperial powers, first Spain and then the United States. This is a violable body as opposed to the masculine body which is conceived as whole and impenetrable, a fortress whose borders are clearly defined and whose points of entry are secured. In Abdala, the young prince must defend his country from just such an invasion, close up its borders against the invader who would rape and pillage, wrest from the nation its masculine wholeness. And in great agony the mother pictures the suffering of all the mothers of Nubia and the moment when her young prince is felled in battle and brought back to his weeping mother, his body wounded, fragile and pierced: ESP.: Partió… partió… Tal vez ensangrentado. Lleno de heridas, a mis pies lo traigan; Con angustia y dolor mi nombre invoque; Y mezcle con las mías sus tristes lágrimas, ¡Y mi mejilla con la suya roce Sin vida, sin color, inerte, helada! […] ¡Porque al rudo clamor de la batalla Oyen mezclarse el ¡ay! que lanza el hijo Al sentir desgarradas sus entrañas! 313 His mother holds his fragile, violated body in her arms, and tenderly touches his face as his blood drips away, for her and for the country. This wounded and pierced body is not the inviolate body of the hero, but a body broken in suffering, pierced and penetrated by the lance of the foreign invader. 312 Lomas, Translating, 5. 313 Martí, OC, 18:21. See translation: “ESP: He left…He left…Perhaps bleeding. Full of wounds, to my feet they will bring him; With anguish and pain he will invoke my name; And mix his tears with mine, and I will caress his cheek with my own, without life, without color, inert, cold! […] Because mixed in the rude clamor of battle they hear the ‘ay’ that rises from my son upon feeling his intestines ripped apart!” (translation mine). 116 This prefigures another scene that Martí would relate in “El presidio politico en Cuba.” After being arrested and sent into forced labor shortly after publishing Abdala, Martí is visited by his father. He writes describing one “repugnant detail.” His father begins to weep at the sight of the wounds inflicted upon Martí by the chains that bind him. He had brought with him small pillows made by Leonor to protect Martí’s skin from the bite of iron. As he tries to bandage Martí’s legs “he broke into sobs! His tears fell over my wounds; and I fought to dry his tears; tearing sobs knotted his voice, and at that moment the work hour was sounded, and a rude arm yanked me away, but he remained on his knees in the earth soaked by my blood […] What a bitter day! And I still do not know how to hate.” 314 As well as being a scene in contrast to Fernández Retamar’s conception of amor martiano, we see here a scene of fragilization where the body is broken before and for the other. The mother in both the presidio scene and the scene in Abdala seeks to heal and console the body of the child, to make whole the broken body. Ettinger writes: “A matrixial co-emergence has a healing power, but because of the transgression of individual boundaries that it initiates and entails, and because of the self-relinquishment and fragilization it calls forward, it is also potentially traumatizing.” 315 There is a trauma to the breakage of the borders between self and other. The father’s tears falling upon the wounds of young Martí are one such scene, as is the mother holding the pierced body of her child. The 314 Martí, “El presidio político en Cuba,” OC, 1:58. “Detalle repugnante, detalle que yo también sufrí, sobre el que yo, sin embargo, camine, sobre el que mi padre desconsolado lloró. Y ¡qué día tan amargo aquel en que logró verme, y yo procuraba ocultarle las grietas de mi cuerpo, y él colocarme unas almohadillas de mi madre para evitar el roce de los grillos, y vio al fin, un día después de haberme visto paseando en los salones de la cárcel, aquellas aberturas purulentas, aquellos miembros estrujados, aquella mezcla de sangre y polco, de materia y fango, sobre que me hacían apoyar el cuerpo, y correr, y correr! ¡Día amarguísimo aquél! Prendido a aquella masa informa, me miraba con espanto, envolvía a hurtadillas el vendaje, me volvía a mirar, y al fin, estrechando febrilmente la pierna triturada, rompió a llorar! Sus lágrimas caían sobre mis llagas; yo luchaba por secar su llanto; sollozos desgarradores anudaban su voz, en esto sonó la hora del trabajo, y un brazo rudo me arrancó de allí, y él quedó de rodillas en la tierra mojada con mi sangre, y a mí me empujaba el palo hacia el montón de cajones que nos esperaba ya para seis horas. ¡Día amarguísimo aquél! Y yo todavía no sé odiar.” 315 Ettinger, “Copoeisis,” 705. 117 construction of boundaries and borders between self and other can also be traumatic as the self fights against the intimacy, against this contact and the razing of the walls that stand between. The son finds the scene of his father’s visit repugnant, just as the young prince strives to separate himself from the love of his mother, and yet the transgression of these boundaries is nonetheless present. The border wall does not stand, and son is touched, contacted, and invaded by the (m)other. As we have already seen, it is not just the borders of the self that are at stake here, but the first borders that come under attack in Abdala are those of the nation. The explicit goal of the text is to enunciate a nationalistic dream, what Roberto González Echevarría calls nationalism and the “romantic ideal.” 316 It is intended to stir up the fervent feelings of Cuba’s would-be revolutionaries, to spur them into action for the war of rebellion that was just beginning. In it we witness the hope to awaken a manly vigor in the hearts of young men. Beatrice Pita writes that in Martí’s later essays, specifically “Nuestra América,” “Martí can invert the characterization, ‘feminize’ the United States and impugn its ‘virility’ just as dominant U.S. discourses have feminized Latin America into the role of subaltern female.” 317 At the time he wrote Abdala, the major threat apparent on the horizon was Spain, however, Martí’s later travels would reveal that the United States was perhaps the greater threat. Aside from this, his writings all work as a kind of masculinizing portraiture of América, his intent to turn back the sense of “femininity” with which outsiders had begun to identify Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole. 318 In his 316 González Echevarría, “Introduction,” to Selected Writings by José Martí, xiv. 317 Pita, “Engendering Critique,” 138. 318 A similar trajectory of “feminine” representation is present in the French Caribbean as well. Also, in writing “América” with an accent I am drawing on the second chapter in Laura Lomas’s book, Translating Empire, as a means of differentiating between what Martí conceived as two distinct Americas, one in very real danger of the other, a distinction connoted by Martí’s “our.” Ricardo Ortiz writes that the “we” of Martí and Fernández Retamar is always an inclusion that establishes itself by means of an exclusion. It is not relation but resistance to relation. He indicates that this exclusion for a masculine politics is for these writers always the exclusion of the effeminate man and the woman, that it is they who do not factor into the great “we” of Latin America. 118 work José Martí and the Global Origins of Cuban Independence, Armando García de la Torre writes that nationalism must first be imagined and then imagined in contrast to others. 319 He goes on to state that Martí had to turn attention away from Spain as the motherland and towards América as madre América. 320 Part of the purpose of such a movement is also to claim and establish a new legitimacy. If legitimacy could no longer be claimed in the colonizer, nationalists and revolutionaries had to construct for themselves a new genealogy, albeit imaginary. 321 Abdala sets up not a new father of the nation but a mother who sets the sights of the nation’s mothers towards future generations: ESP: Mas ¿por qué he de llorar? ¿Tan poco esfuerzo Nos dio Nubia al nacer? ¿Así acobardan A sus hijos las madres? ¿Así lloran Cuando a Nubia un infame nos arranca? ¿Así lamentan su fortuna y gloria? ¿Así desprecian el laurel? ¿Tiranas, Quieren ahogar en el amor de madre El amor a la patria? ¡Oh, no! ¡Derraman Sus lágrimas ardientes, y se quejan Porque sus hijos a morir se marchan! 319 García de la Torre writes: “Anderson considers the nation to be an ‘imagined community’, facilitated by the rise of ‘print-captialism’ that allowed new loyalties to be established by people who had little, if any, day-to-day contact with each other. Anderson recognizes that all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact, and perhaps even these, are imagined […] Two key themes run throughout Anderson’s writings on nationalism: first, that the nation is imagined; second, that the imagined nation exists in comparison to others in the wider world” (Global Origins, 5-6). 320 García de la Torre writes: “Martí’s Latin American—and Caribbean-based patriotism served to establish Cuba as part of a greater whole. This was an important way for him to think about space, belonging and politics in between the national, the regional and the global. On a practical level, shifting the madre patria (mother country) from Spain to a madre América (mother America) served to ideologically anchor Cuba in a spiritual commonwealth of Latin American and Caribbean sister republics, while moving the island nation-state away from the shadow of Spanish colonial despotism” (Global Origins, 36). 321 Lilian Guerra describes in The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba they ways in which Martí’s image was used to construct such legitimacy and the imaginaries of nationalism. See Guerra: “nations and nationalists may be best defined historically in terms of the relational identities that they invoked and the nature of the state that they posited. Beginning in Cuba’s last anticolonial war in 1985, nationalists conceived projects for the state as extensions of their ‘nations.’ By gaining state power in the Republic, nationalists believed they could ensure not only the implementation of their visions but also the legitimacy of their own notions of identity vis-à-vis those of others. After all, if people ‘imagine’ nations, they also ‘acted,’ with nationalist ideals and tenets in mind, to implement the nation-project in practice. Conflicts arose precisely because their visions did not coincide” (The Myth, 18-19). 119 ¡Porque si nubias son, también son madres! 322 Martí’s nationalism establishes a genealogy that is perhaps just as maternal as paternal, resting upon the shoulders of mothers as much as of sons and fathers. Just as the mother decries the suffocating love of Nubia’s mothers, she laments: “but if they are Nubians, they are also mothers.” The two, mother and nation, appear to be co-existing and antagonistic postures. The mother bears the son and together they bring the nation into being, co-emergent and co- constitutive. The mother is no longer metaphor for nation, primordial origin, or the opposition to paternal generation of the nation. The anxiety surrounding the mother is not resolved, she remains and is ambiguity, the crossing of the border between self and other, unhinging autonomy, but she is also compassionate and creative. Inversely, the history of Ismaelillo tells the story of Martí’s paternal anxiety, his fear of and for his procreative power. After writing Ismaelillo, Martí grew suddenly ashamed of its tenderness and its extravagance, stating that he could now see that the light that inspired him was madness. 323 Santí writes: “A los cuatro años de su publicación en Nueva York todavía confesaba en una carta que tenía ‘toda la edición en mis cajones.’” 324 The fertile father of the literary creation, a metaphorical son, now jealously guards his offspring from the critical eye of the reader, keeping it safe in his cajones. It might not be too far a leap to read this as a masculine desire to maintain control and dominance over his issue, especially, perhaps, if one considers what is known of Martí’s medical history. The irons he had worn around his leg during his time as a political prisoner of the Spanish colonial government had left him with a recurring case of 322 Martí, OC, 18:21. See translation: “ESP: And more, why should I cry? Did Nubia give us so little strength at birth? Is this how mothers make cowards of their children? Is this how we cry when a villain tears Nubia away from us? Is this how we lament her fortune and glory? Is this how we disdain her laurel? Tyrants, do they want to drown in a mother’s love the love for country? Oh no! They pour out their burning tears, and they groan because their sons are marching to die! Because Nubians they are, and also mothers!” (translation mine). 323 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 814-815. 324 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 814. 120 sarcoidosis, resulting in numerous surgical procedures one of which ended in the removal of one of his testes. 325 A firm believer in potent masculinity, Martí found himself constantly battling infirmity and teetering on the edge of castration. His virility must have been, if not to the public then at least in his private mind, very much in question, despite his being the father of two children by different women. Ismaelillo then becomes a testament to a certain paternity in question. The purpose of literature during this period, as Ramos writes, was to establish the legitimacy and genealogy of the nascent nation. Ramos explains: “Literature would be charged with the enormous and, at times, unbearable weight of this representativity.” 326 Following this logic, we find literature firmly situated within the Law of the Father, by which the paternal authority claims the power of naming and conferring legitimacy. 327 Literature therefore had the task of calling upon the Father in order to fulfill its mission of legitimizing the nation, which it sought to delineate. Literature according to this project seeks to legitimize the very paternity upon which it stands. This demands the question, must literature and art necessarily take on this paternal valence? For Ramos, the profile of the nation in Martí’s texts was firmly rooted within the family: “the family was a form of naturalized representation—a representation given validity by the genealogical and filiative claims that conflated a historical continuity with a biological process.” 328 The nation therefore depends upon the family for its validity, and the task of literature becomes the affirmation of this relation and of the nation’s legitimate inheritance, 325 López, A Revolutionary Life, 128. See also Oviedo, La niña, 121. 326 Ramos, Divergent, xlv. 327 In his study of José Martí and modernismo, Julio Ramos describes the ways in which Martí envisioned a project for the Latin American writer. According to his study, Martí saw the task of literature in Cuba and Latin America as the consolidation and definition of Latin American and national identities in the decades following independence from Spain. This is especially evident in Martí’s chronicles and his essay Nuestra América. 328 Ramos, Divergent, 197. 121 rooted in the name of the Father, or so it appears. Therefore, Martí’s broken family and illegitimate daughter pose a threat to the definition of these well-drawn and legitimizing borders. The paternal line is broken and a maternal one established in its place, though to speak of a maternal line is misleading. The maternal is not linear as is the paternal relation. Maternal relation is coexistent and immediate, non-hierarchical. O’Byrne describes natality as the projection towards our future and our death, whereas birth is “being in relation” and without futural projection. If anything, it is circular, endless, like the borders of an island. Ismaelillo thus relinquishes its genealogical motives and claims to paternity. It is relational above all. Ismaelillo performs the subversion of its own paternity. The male right to naming and inheritance is undone in the maternal embrace of Martí’s language. Cual de mujer, mi rostro Nieve se trueca: Su sangre, pues, anima Mis flacas venas [...] ¡Éntrese mi tirano Por esta cueva! [...] ¡Déjeme que la vida A él, a él ofrezca! 329 Martí paints himself as the fragile, feminine character. Femininity and fragility are now the domain of the father. This is also a scene of pregnancy or menstruation, the mother who is imbued with the blood of the child. It is the invagination of the father who becomes the maternal life-giver of the son that he calls to enter into the cave-womb. As if to affirm fatherly power, the dedication to Ismaelillo appears to perform the paternal function of authorization, conferral of the patronym, and the bequest of the work to its heir that Ramos describes: 329 Ismaelillo, “Príncipe enano,” 67-8. See translation: “What of woman, my face / Snow is traded: / His blood, then, animates / My fragile veins […] Enter my tyrant / Through this cave! / Allow me my life / To him, to him offer!” (translation mine). 122 Hijo: Espantado de todo, me refugio en ti. Tengo fe en el mejoramiento humano, en la vida futura, en la utilidad de la virtud, y en ti. Si alguien te dice que estas páginas se parecen a otras páginas, diles que te amo demasiado para profanarte así. Tal como aquí te pinto, tal te han visto mis ojos. Con esos arreos de gala te me has aparecido. Cuando he cesado de verte en una forma, he cesado de pintarte. Esos riachuelos han pasado por mi corazón. ¡Lleguen al tuyo! 330 From these first lines, child, father, and the created thing become “contaminated,” their borders indecipherable. 331 If the son is the poem, and the poet is created as poet by the poem, then this dedication acts as a plea and not an inheritance. The maternal father’s heart is trans-versed by “Esos riachuelos,” the blood, the umbilical fluid of the son. Martí’s creation is not necessarily of an-other but rather with an-other. Poet and poem are co-constitutive of each other, co-creators of each other’s subjectivity, and it is in this way that they are maternal, linked across the matrixial border-space. This is not patriarchal, univocal creation, but creation with the other. Creation and Creator come into being together and in relation, instead of preserving the hierarchical dimension of genealogies, inheritance, and anteriority. A paternal Creator is univocal, singular, autonomous, and god-like in its generative power. The maternal creator emerges and becomes with and alongside the creation, it is created and made maternal in relation to the other. Martí does not become a female father nor a male mother. Instead, he is a maternal, matrixial, father in that he is born alongside and in relation. This is his maternal rather than paternal genealogy. In the Biblical account evoked by the title Ismaelillo, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are unable to bear children. Despite this, God tells Abraham that his descendants will be more 330 Martí, OC, 16:17. See translation: “Son: / Frightened by everything, I take refuge in you. I have faith in the betterment of humanity, in the future life, in the utility of virtue, and in you. / If someone tells you that these pages look like other pages, tell them that I love you too much to profane you in this way. As I paint you here, so have my eyes seen you. With these gala trappings you have appeared to me. When I have ceased seeing you in one form, I have ceased to paint you. These streams have passed from my heart. / They arrive at yours!” (translation mine). 331 Molloy, “His America,” 371. 123 numerous than grains of sand on the beach, at which Sarah laughs because she is beyond the childbearing age. In order to fulfill the prophesy, Sarah suggests that Abraham sleep with her slave, Hagar. Abraham and Hagar conceive Ishmael, but to everyone’s surprise, Sarah becomes pregnant as well and bears Isaac, the legitimate son of Abraham. Concerned for the inheritance of her son and jealous of her rival, Sarah asks Abraham to expel Hagar from their camp, sending Hagar and Ishmael into exile in the desert. Santí describes the similarities between the Biblical allegory and Martí’s home life, but writes that it is “engañosamente simétrico. Agar e Ismael son desterrados al desierto, pero Carmen y José Francisco regresan del desierto al oasis, es decir, del destierro de Nueva York a las comodidades de la Cuba colonial.” 332 But which is the oasis really? Both Abraham and Hagar lived in the desert, and Martí would not have considered colonial Cuba an oasis, though his wife might have. Martí may have been exiled from Cuba, but his wife was exiled from his household and in part because of another woman. Furthermore, Hagar was not Abraham’s wife and Ishmael was not his legitimate son and heir. Ishmael would not generate his father’s nation, and perhaps, neither would José Francisco. Clearly, the symmetry between the two stories does not hold up. In his final letter to José Francisco before departing for Cuba and dying on the battlefield of Dos Ríos, José Martí wrote: “1º de abril de 1895 / Hijo: / Esta noche salgo para Cuba: salgo sin ti, cuando debieras estar a mi lado. Al salir, pienso en ti. Si desaparezco en el camino, recibirás con esta carta la leontina que usó en vida tu padre. Adiós. Sé justo. / Tu / José Martí.” 333 To his son he sends a watch chain. This is interesting, because as the story goes, the watch that José Francisco wore was one that his 332 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 823. 333 Martí, OC, 20:480. See translation: “1 st of April of 1895 / Son: / This night I leave for Cuba: I leave without you, when you should be by my side. Upon leaving, I think of you. If I disappear on the journey, you will receive this letter with this watch chain that your father used in life. Goodbye. Be just. / Your / José Martí” (translation mine). 124 grandfather, Mariano, had given him and bore the Spanish crest. 334 And while his son receives the watch chain, Martí would send the ring he wore to Carmita, the same ring engraved with the word “Cuba” and made from the irons that Martí wore in political prison in Cuba when he was a boy. It is therefore not José Francisco, despite his status as legitimate son, who inherits the nation. If he is, in fact, Ishmael, then in this subversive play, Isaac’s position remains unspoken. This poetical inversion of legitimacy perhaps stands to benefit María Mantilla, who might here be the absent Isaac, who did inherit the ring and with it “Cuba.” The daughter, therefore, exists in her very erasure from this book of poems, and so too does the mother, though she might not be what we expect. Santí writes that Ismaelillo, although dedicated to the son, is actually a veiled indictment directed at Martí’s wife. 335 He and Jorge Camacho agree that the unmentioned mother that lurks in the subtext of Ismaelillo is Carmen. It is entirely possible that this is the case. Oviedo cites a letter that Martí wrote to a good friend of his, Manuel Mercado, in which he writes: “’Regaño a Carmen porque ha dejado de ser mi mujer por ser madre’ (p. 61).” 336 It is a well-established fact that Martí suffered immensely over the separation between himself and his legal family and that he found in Carmita Miyares de Mantilla the partner that he lacked in Carmen. In Ismaelillo, then, the mother that is erased from the volume of poetry might be Hagar/Carmen. However, in this movement Martí subtly equates his wife with the slave whom he would cast from his house. She is obliterated from the volume 334 See Oviedo “Escribe Erna Fergusson: ‘A friend of Martí related that he boy showed his father a watch engraved with the Spanish crest; his grandfather had given it to him so that every time he looked at the hour he would be reminded that he was Spanish’ (Cuba, pp 189-190). Compárese este amuleto con el anillo de Martí, hecho con los hierros de su presidio” (La niña, 75). 335 See Santí: “a pesar de que Ismaelillo se inspira en el hijo de Martí y a él va dedicado, es a su esposa a quien Martí lo dirigió implícita o secretamente, acaso con la esperanza de que ella descifrase la alegoría y regresase a su lado” (“Martí y el Modernismo,” 825). 336 Oviedo, “en una carta a Mercado, escrita en 1880 (su primer año neoyorkino), Martí le hace una reveladora confidencia relativa a su mujer y su Pepito: ‘Tiene ojos profundos y frente ancha. Pero es, blanco y sencillo, como a sus mese toca. Regaño a Carmen porque ha dejado de ser mi mujer por ser madre’ (p. 61)” (La niña, 76). 125 of poems and yet the maternal persists. Camacho writes that the mother in Ismaelillo only appears in the figure of nature, but is otherwise erased entirely from the book of poems. For Camacho, the mother is dominated (as symbolic) and appropriated by the poetic voice. This reading is, in part, correct. However, it assumes that the maternal is tied exclusively to the female, a dangerous proposition, and to the “nature” archetype. In doing so, we reduce the woman to her maternal function or to abstraction. 337 Instead, the maternal arises precisely where we expect the father to stand. I do not call José Martí a father or even a mother here as if to strike a dialectic. I argue that this collection of poems eschews the paternal in fatherhood and all its genealogical movements towards inheritance and legitimacy. It plays with and subverts the hierarchical relationship this would imply. It is Martí who adopts the tender caresses of the creative, sensual and feminine, a maternal opening towards the inhabitation of (an)other, its aporetic presence and absence. This relation, one in which the foreign invader resides within and crosses these borders between self and other, threatens the desire for a closed, autonomous subject, both that of the self and of the nation. Martí’s poems allow us to think a trans-subjectivity where two bodies meet upon the matrixial plane, a site where proximity and distance, presence and absence, are blurred. These poems open space for a reimagining of the heroic father of this island whose borders can never be fully shored-up. The poetic I gives birth to himself and becomes the mother of himself as well as the child of his son, the non-I. Ismaelillo is abundant in its scenes of pregnancy and birthing: Cual si el sol en mi seno 337 Camacho creates a parallel between this idea and that of God’s relationship with the Israelites as a bride or that of Christ with the church. However, this parallel does not hold up. These are merely two different usages of the mother as metaphor. This nature/poet metaphor here acts as an erasure of the mother. In our understanding, the maternal is the site at which the relation between these subjects is identified. The aim of this work is not to catalog instances where the maternal metaphor has been employed. There is something much for interesting in the maternal, that exceeds the metaphor. Camacho also describes a Trinitarian relation between Mother, wife and oracle (Camacho, “Oracular,” 6). We can accept this, if the poetic voice here incarnates all three and is Trinitarian in the Christian sense of the word. 126 La luz fraguase:— ¡Y estallo, hiervo, vibro, Alas me nacen! Suavemente la puerta Del cuarto se abre, Y éntranse a él gozosos Luz, risas, aire. 338 These wings that are born of him are also the wings of the son who enters into his room/womb. 339 It is the room that is assaulted and invaded by the child’s presence. Creation, poetic and maternal, occurs in this room, this nurturing space that is simultaneously closed and open to the violent entrance of the child. Light is born in him and enters unto him. Before this giving of the child over to the light—dar a luz—the two existed in opaque relation to one another. The birth of the creation then becomes the birth of the self out of opacity and into apparent transparency, 340 the co-emerging and co-fading subject that becomes illuminated in its contact with the child. Father and son are neither inverted nor conflated, but rather enter joyfully into maternal contact and embrace. The maternal relation for Ettinger is not one of return to the womb, but a fragilization of the borders between self and other, the uncleft and uncut schism between two subjects. Creation and Creator are dislodged from their patrilineal and hierarchical structures, leaving them floating upon the sea of matrixial relation, a room whose door is closed and yet also open. Instead of fixing meaning authoritatively and creating a closure, meaning and the maternal remain errant qualities that are irreducible to metaphor. 341 This is not just a book of 338 Martí, “Musa traviesa,” OC, 16:28. See translation: “Like the sun in my bosom / The light is forged:— / And I burst, I boil, I vibrate, / Wings are born of me! / Softly the door / Of the room opens, / And give him joyful entrance / Light, laughter, air” (translation mine). 339 Elissa Marder writes on Freud’s view of the womb as a casket and expands this reading towards a photographic understanding of the womb and fixation. 340 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 111-120. 341 González Echevarría, Voice of the Masters, 2. 127 poems about how much a father loved his son, and neither is it a fixed, Biblical allegory. There are flickers of meaning that we cannot see or cannot pull entirely into focus. These are the moments in which Martí’s maternality is in motion, gliding towards the other. Lomas references Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, the escape from the mandate of clarity, in stating “Martí’s modernity uses willfully opaque, imaginative language that refuses to hand over a positive meaning and thus calls into question the very possibility of mimetic representation.” 342 While these allegories and visions begin to open a passage for reading Ismaelillo, we cannot lean too heavily upon them. Martí’s “hijo redentor” 343 might redeem us in some ways, but perhaps not in the way we anticipate. He might be an-other child. The redemption here is one of distance, the creation of a fully proximate intimacy, and an idealized child who would not be fractured from the maternal relation. But, as Molloy states, what we do not see in Ismaelillo is as important as what we do. 344 The child, Ismaelillo, is an irrational creation, a creation outside of reason, outside of the filiative demand of literature that Ramos claims Martí sought to champion. This little book of poetry opens up a world of fantasy even science fiction, a world where the super-powered boy, the child warrior, the angelic devil, floats and fights and gleams in the face of the paternal and colonial authority, subverting rationalist claims to knowing and transparency. A 342 Lomas, Translating, 24. 343 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 818. 344 Oviedo, La niña, 46-47: “se lo recuerda justamente por lo que lo haría más tradicional, no más innovador. Se dice, por ejemplo, que es un libro dictado por el más delicado amor de padre; que la figura del hijo preside un reino de encanto, misterio y exotismo; que todo en él prueba la discreta elegancia, la virtuosa transparencia afectiva y estética del autor. Ismaelillo, en fin, sería el claro documento de una visión serena y armoniosa de la vida, alumbrada por la simple alegría del amor por el hijo. Decir eso es decir la verdad a medias: sin negar que es la impresión general que el libro puede producir, su valor moral literario está en otra parte, que precisamente hunde sus raíces en el profundo drama que vive Martí en esos momentos y en la alternativa que le plante como poeta. El libro es una obra de creación que quiere elevarse sobre las vicisitudes que antes hemos visto, negándose a aceptarlas como insuperables; la obra emerge como una voluntariosa elaboración que quiera hundir ‘lo otro’ en el olvido; lo que no vemos en Ismaelillo es tan importante como lo que reduce en él.” 128 transubstantiation occurs where the blurring between bodies confuses the reader, losing us somewhere in the interstices between father and son: “Son I am of my Son.” 345 The relation here is not one of a paternal Creator but rather of maternal co-emergence, a father who maternally bears and is born in relation. Santí follows the way Martí describes a spontaneous creation, or the way in which poetry persecutes the poet and not the other way around. 346 It is the creation of the poet by poetry: “hijo soy de mi hijo.” 347 The hierarchical line of authorship is turned over into mutual creation. It is what Santí calls poetic “transmutation,” in which salvation comes through profound relation with the other. 348 He writes: “Y si el hijo y el libro (lo que equivale a la poesía) resultan ser lo mismo, como hemos visto, entonces la conclusión a que se llega en el poema equivale, en efecto, a lo que Martí había previsto oscuramente en el quinto cuaderno: ‘las obras literarias son como los hijos: rehacen a sus padres.’” 349 This does not mean that the literary creation is a direct reflection of the father/author, but rather that the author is remade in relation to the literary creation. Martí gives infinite birth to the poem just as he constantly draws his son back into his orbit, absorbing the body of the child from whom he has been separated: Mi cuerpo, como rosa Besada, se abre, Y en su propio perfume 345 Martí, “Musa traviesa,” Ismaelillo, 76. 346 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 835. 347 Santí cites Paul de Man writing, “Martí ‘permanece tan estrechamente vinculado a la acción, que nunca puede liberarse del todo de la tentación de destruir lo que le separa de su acto’ [Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight]. Ese acto fue, para Martí, la experiencia de la poesía, que si bien creó el poema, antes lo transfiguro como persona: lo hizo un poeta,” (“Martí y el Modernismo,” 838-839). 348 Santí, “Transmutación que no es sólo spiritual, sino, como hemos visto, poética. Mejor dicho: es poética porque logra ser espiritual: funde vida con creación, acto vital con reflexión estética. Por eso, a partir de este cambio, salvar el alma –rehuir de la amargura y del resentimiento—equivale a salvar el poema. La salvación es mutua: crear el poema equivale salvarse por el otro. Crear equivale a crearse. Y si el niño se convierte en el padre, en un niño viejo, también será cierto que el padre, siguiendo el modelo del hijo se convertirá en un niño: asumirá esa niñez que es la condición del poeta moderno, de la modernidad. Por eso del hijo en Ismaelillo se podrá decir lo que de la poesía se dice al final de Versos sencillos: ‘Verso, o no condenan juntos / o nos salvamos los dos’ (I, 283)” (“Martí y el Modernismo,” 836). 349 Santí, “Martí y el Modernismo,” 837. 129 Lánguido exhálase. Ricas en sangre nueva Las sienes laten [...] ¡Lejos de mí por siempre, Brazos fragantes! 350 The maternal father opens (him)self to the child and breaths in the presence of the other. He is bathed in their fragrance, a sense and not an essence of the other he imbibes. This body opens to the other in vulnerability and fragility. It is not sexual but sensually maternal, the fullness of pregnancy, the new blood of the other that fills the body of the self: Que en la profunda Sombra se abre, Donde en solemne Silencio nacen Flores eternas Y colosales, 351 This is the scene of an immense and unknowable birth, a pregnancy that is opaque and yet revealed, the swollen belly that all can see but none can truly fathom. Instead of the uterus, Ettinger refers us to the matrix which is not tied to the concept of an organ or to fusion but rather “an enveloping outside this also inside: the womb […] an human becoming-subject-to-be, male or female, in relation.” 352 This father becomes a creative and generating matrix that opens outwards and inwards to the child he conceives. Ved: sentado lo llevo Sobre mi hombro: Oculto va, y visible Para mí solo! 353 350 Martí, “Brazos fragantes,” OC, 16:23-24. See translation: “My body, like a rose / Kissed, opens, / And in his own perfume / Languid exhales. / Rich in new blood / The temples pulse […] Far from me forever, / Fragrant arms” (translation mine). 351 Martí, “Amor errante,” OC, 16:41. See translation: “That in the profound / Shadow opens, / Where in solemn / Silence is born / Eternal flowers / And colossal” (translation mine). 352 See Ettinger, Matrixial, 140. She also refers to the matrix as a generative space. 353 Martí, “Sobre mi hombro,” OC, 16:42. See translation: “See: seated I carry him / Upon my shoulder: / Hidden he goes, and visible / To me alone” (translation mine). 130 It is also this father who carries his son with him into his exile, though this son is present only for him. Only he knows the touch and embrace of a child who is simultaneously absent and present. 354 The son’s loving embrace becomes a kind of solace to the poet in his solitude. It is not a sensual love or sexual Eros, but what Ettinger calls “compassionate Eros,” a love unmotivated by the death drive. It is a love directed towards the non-time of birth, a non-linear history of being and presence. It is neither aggressive nor possessive. It asks for nothing, but is pure relation. 355 In this compassion, the poet is able to reach out across the oceans and take the illusory child into his arms. Sylvia Molloy identifies the ways in which the love between father and son disturbs the patrilineal “family model” or “will to continuity”: “Between opposing but reversible male foci of love, the son and the father, the I operates as a shifter, brokering the relation and effectively subverting its rigidity, playing father to the son and son to the father, making the son his father and the father his son […] The playful give-and-take, which should be taken most seriously, assures not so much the presence of a ‘rigid…couple’ […] as the polymorphous, nonhierarchical exchange of all-male feeling.” 356 Instead of creating a discreet and individuating border between self and other, the border between father and son is disturbed, transmuted by love or by the fragilization of borders. The maternal asks nothing of him, and his embrace is non-threatening. It is a nurturing and healing relation. Martí writes that the greatest relief for the pain of solitude is 354 This duality of presence and absence brings to mind Lacan’s idea of maternal absence. According to Freudian and Lacanian theories, the mother is understood as lack and absence (of the phallus). Feminist psychoanalysis has worked over the years to either invert or overthrow this paradigm. Ettinger proposes the matrixial as a supplement to the phallic paradigm in which the maternal is not marked by absence but a co-fading with and of the other. 355 Ettinger writes that sexual and compassionate Eros may be mixed in an experiential sense but their drives are different. Ettinger writes of a “Compassionate Eros and sexual libido are different psychic instances. They might intermix, but they nurture different kinds of love. Where sexual libido takes the lead, Thanatos – death drive – is there too, never too far. In that case, the potentiality for compassion is often deformed. By compassionate Eros a non-aggressive Thanatos is revealed. Not death, but the non-life as the not yet emerged, the not yet becoming alive, is accessed and intended” (“Copoeisis,” 709). 356 Molloy, “His America,” 372. 131 love and friendship, and that “the knowledge of oneself cannot come to the point of dispossessing us of the knowledge of others.” 357 It is lovingly attacked as the other dispossesses the self of the soundness of its borders. 358 The border as a space of relation allows for Martí’s poetry to explore a relationality that overcomes his position as exile. Despite living half a continent away from his child, Martí imagines a kind of dreamscape where he and his son exist in intimate proximity. His exile is what makes this kind of relation possible. Ramos writes, “For Martí, the poet was an exile from the law, and literature was the ‘desperate cry of the song of an unknown great father, who asks his mute mother [nature] to reveal the secret of his birth.’ As nature’s son, like the illegitimate Ishmael of the desert whose name becomes the title of Martí’s first book of poetry [...], to be a writer is to be displaced from the paternal institution – to be an exile from the polis.” 359 According to Ramos, the mother is nature, but who is Ishmael really in this formulation? Martí here inhabits the maternal position and not nature. It is the “great father” who is forgotten as Martí sings instead a “desperate cry” for his son. If the writer is an exile from the law of the Father, then the writer is a mother. Martí reaffirms a different kind of literary authority, one that is not rooted in the legitimizing Law of the Father, but instead in a maternal relation that is neither passive nor absent. This (m)other is both present and active despite her position as exile from the Law (both that of the polis and of the Father). The maternal relation occurs before the cut, the splitting of self from other. This exile seeps into the space between islands, the space between bodies, the space between m/other/father and child: Me hablaban de que estás lejos: 357 Martí, “Schopenhauer,” OC, 19:368-369. “El conocimiento de sí mismo no puede llegar hasta desposeernos del conocimiento de los demás. […] Son orígenes tan puros de placer las dos formas de esta relación consoladora: la amistad y el amor.” 358 See Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession. 359 Ramos is referring here to Emerson, Divergent, xxxviii. 132 ¡Locuras me hablan! Ellos tienen tu sombra; ¡Yo tengo tu alma! 360 One of the major critiques of Martí’s work is the duality of body and soul, and while a certain prioritization of spirit over embodiment might be read here, this book of poetry is undeniably sensual. 361 The body takes precedence everywhere as arms and bellies and mouths and feet strive to cross the distance imposed by Martí’s banishment from Cuba. The dreamscape of Ismaelillo is a different kind of territorial understanding, not of paternal borders but of the maternal threshold, the matrixial borderspace that is perforated and crossed. Martí writes to his son, “Hijo, en tu busca / Cruzo los mares.” 362 The maternal father wanders, errant, in search of his lost child. He crosses oceans, these watery borders that stand between islands. The border once traversed calls for a maternal relation that undoes the paternal call to autonomy, to the surety of borders. The ocean again is a barrier but also a site of contact. The Father of Our America who at once writes to delineate its borders is also the maternal father whose abounding relationality probes and perforates the borders that would separate beings in 360 Martí, “Hijo del alma,” OC, 16:38. See translation: “They tell me that you are far away: / Insanities they tell me! / They have your shadow: / I have your soul!” (translation mine). 361 For Guillermina De Ferrari, this dichotomy between soul and body comes down to an understanding of Cartesian ontology by which “The model of disembodiment that lies behind what Glissant calls transparency has made possible the dissymmetry by which ‘one’ has a body while the Other is a body” (Vulnerable, 11). Cruz discusses this body/soul dichotomy that is apparent in Martí, writing: “un conflicto fundamental en Martí: la incompatible dedicación a la causa de la independencia cubana y a cualquier sentimiento amoroso [...] dicotomía patria/mujer está íntimamente ligada a la dualidad alma/cuerpo” (Cruz, “’Esclava Vencedora,’” 35). Keja Valens also takes up this discussion in writing that “For Martí, the embodied woman, the narrated novel, is too traversed by material needs, too mixed up and entangled by complex desires to be ideal. And yet the ideal’s inability to account for these things is its demise. It is a bleak end. And yet, as he composes a foundational failure, Martí reveals the profound recognition that to radically reimagine the nation outside of a colonial status might require to radically reimagine the relational and generic forms on which it can rest” (Valens, Desire, 44). 362 Martí, Amor errante,” OC, 16:39. 133 relation. 363 For instance, Abdala defends the nation’s autonomy against the unnamed invader and yet, his own borders, his own autonomy is threatened by the mother: ESP.: ¿Que no llore, me dices? ¿Y tu vida Alguna vez me pagará la patria? ABD.: La vida de los nobles, madre mía, Es luchar y morir por acatarla, Y si es preciso, con su propio acero Rasgarse, por salvarla, las entrañas! Mas… me siento morir: en mi agonía (A todos) no vengáis a turbar mi triste calma. ¡Silencio!... Quiero oir… ¡Oh! Me parece Que la enemiga hueste, derrotada, Huye por la llanura… ¡Oid!... ¡Silencio! Ya los miro correr… A los cobardes Los valientes guerreros se abalanzan… 364 She asks if the nation will pay her for the life of her son, and he declares himself a son and defender of the nation, the feminine patria, whose violation he has prevented. And yet, the warrior’s body is a body profoundly penetrated, unto death and the bloody birth of the now autonomous nation. He watches the foreign invader flee across the plains, supposedly across a border not marked as islands are. An island appears closed at its borders by the ocean, a barrier that Martí in exile could only cross on pain of death, but the ocean becomes another matrixial plane linking the archipelago through ports and harbors, the penetrable womb of the island. The blurring of these borders through the penetration of the maternal opening towards the other is profoundly imagined in Martí’s maternal poetics: 363 Ramos writes that Martí’s prologues and chronicles were maps that drew the limits of the state and culture. It differentiated between North and Latin America, creating distinctions that would allow for the “autonomization or the specification” of Latin American letters and identities (Divergent, xxxviii). 364 Martí, OC, 18:23-24. See translation: “ESP: You tell me not to cry? And one day the country will pay me for your life? ABD: The life of noble ones, my mother, is to fight and die to honor her, and this is just, that with his own steel, he would tear his own insides. More…I feel myself dying: in my agony (To all) do not come closer to disturb my tragic calm. Silence!...I want to hear…Oh! It appears that the enemy host, beaten, flees across the plain…Listen!...Silence! I can see them running…Against the cowards the valiant warriors charge…” (translation mine). 134 En mi seno desnudo Déjante el alba; [...] De la noche revuelta Te echa en las aguas. Guardiancillo magnánimo, La no cerrada Puerta de mi hondo espíritu 365 Martí writes of his naked breast, the site where a mother might feed her child, in place of the heart. In this scene, the door into the maternal father’s spirit is not closed but open. This door is the site of a matrixial relation, the partially emerging self and other. It is where interiority and exteriority meet and are blended. The self that would seal its-self off from the other is opened as a door and admits the entrance of an-other subject across this threshold. The imagery of the child floating on the sea carries itself through this door into a the safe harbor of the father’s “deep spirit” away from the tumultuous sea. Ettinger writes that transformation through maternal relating is a “passageway composed of transgressive borderlinks that transform, simultaneously and differently, co-emerging partial-subjects, partial Others, partial-objects, and tracing elements, and of slippery borderlines between subjective and objective ingredients in the process of becoming thresholds that allow for floating and transgressions.” 366 This space, at once infinite as the horizon, is also the space of a maternal drawing-in, co-creating subjectivities that find each-other in the floating transgression of border crossing. These ports of the Caribbean are open, to trade, to violation, to the amorous caress, and to maternal jouissance. Martí writes of the son as the “interna tormenta.” 367 This storm is the pain and pleasure of pregnancy, the storm of 365 Martí, “Hijo del alma,” OC, 16:37. See translation: “In my naked breast / Leave the sunrise; […] From the tumultuous night / You are tossed in the water. / Magnanimous little guardian, / The unclosed / Door of my deep spirit” (translation mine). 366 Ettinger, Matrixial, 65. 367 Martí, “Sobre mi hombro,” OC, 16:42. 135 the body that takes and inhabits the mother in mutual otherness. It is the open port that is overcome and invaded by this storm. It was the storm of revolution that finally opened the doors of the island to Martí. In the midst of crashing waves, Martí, General Máximo Gómez, and four soldiers rowed the last mile to Cuba’s shores. Martí’s invasion was begun, and here is where Martí ultimately earns the title that many have bestowed upon him: “prophet and visionary.” 368 In the first lines of Abdala, one of the young prince’s soldiers proclaims: “¡Y si mueres luchando, te concede / La corona del mártir de la patria!—“ 369 It is as if even sixteen-year-old Martí dreamed of such a glory, the crown of martyrdom, the ultimate mark of sacrificial love. In these final moments of his life, Martí is said to incarnate the very storm that brought him to Cuba’s shores. Jorge Mañach writes: “’Su voz— observó un testigo—, suave y melódica al comenzar la oración…, se fue tornando atronadora, como los acentos del huracán.’” 370 This hurricane, a small and sickly man who had lived an itinerant and painful existence, would charge a battlefield against the recommendations of his superiors and die of gunshot wounds to the neck and chest. Though legends abound, some trying to minimize the importance of his death, others trying to mystify it, one fact remains: the same day as Martí’s funeral in Santiago de Cuba, María Mantilla received these words from Martí as if from beyond the grave: 371 Con tu cartica sentí como un beso en la frente. Bien lo necesita mi mucha pena. Es bueno sufrir, para ver quien nos quiere y para agradecerlo. Cuando te vuelva a ver, te he de tener 368 See Camacho, “Oracular,” 3. Also Fernández Retamar, “The Modernity of Martí,” 15. González Echevarría also states that Martí’s death adds a “prophetic quality” to much of his writing where he describes his own death (“Introduction,” Selected Writings, xxiv). Guerra writes that Martí “prophesied” a future threat from Cuba’s North American neighbor (The Myth, 2). Also see Schulman, “Void and renewal: José Martí’s modernity,” 174-175. Also Ripoll, “The Falsification,” 27. 369 Martí, OC, 18:17. See translation: “And if you die fighting, you are given / The crown of martyr of the nation!— ” (translation mine). 370 Mañach, El Apóstol, 248-249. 371 López ends his biography of Martí with this scene, writing that perhaps even at the same hour of Martí’s funeral, after his body had been transported and mistreated for weeks, “María Mantilla received a farewell letter her father had written more than two months earlier” (A Revolutionary Life, 333). 136 mucho tiempo abrazada,--aunque esto es siempre así, aunque tú no lo sientas, porque yo velo por ti, y estoy siempre junto a ti, y te defenderé de todas las penas de la vida. Quiere mucho a tu madre, que no he conocido en este mundo mujer mejor. No puedo, ni podré nunca, pensar en ella sin conmoverme, y ver más clara y Hermosa la vida. Cuida bien ese tesoro. El libro de citas—tu verás como va a alejar de mí todo peligro: lo llevaré siempre del lado del corazón. 372 In his final words to his daughter, Martí reaches across the expanse of the ocean and across continents to wrap her in his arms, to defend her from pain, and to feel his own pain lessened in the proximity of those he loved. This letter, written from Haiti on April 9 just days before landing in Cuba, is both the synthesis and the inversion of Abdala and Ismaelillo. He defends his child as he defends the nation, and he reaches across this final exile to embrace her. It is also in this letter, at the moment when he describes the book of quotations, an amulet he carries from his daughter, that Martí’s clairvoyance fails him for the first time. Martí’s poem “Dos patrias” 373 acts as a premonition both of his death and of contemporary poetry, according to Octavio Paz, who writes that it is a poem in which “the beginning contains the end.” 374 In this poem, Cuba appears to the poet as a “viuda triste” (sad widow), and he opens the window to her as she, like a cloud, passes in the night sky. This window open to the night mirrors the door which Martí opens to allow the invasion of the child riding on light and clouds in “Musa traviesa.” It is the revolutionary invasion of the other towards which Martí opens his “pecho, destrozado está y vacío.” 375 Paz writes that Martí presents “the country and the night as two women, death as the one and only woman, the one and 372 Martí, OC, 20:236. See translation: “With your little card I felt a kiss upon my forehead. Well my great pain needed it. It is good to suffer, to see those we love and to thank them. When I return to see you, I will have to hold you for a long time,—although this is always the case, even when you don’t feel it, because I watch over you, and I am always beside you, and I will defend you from all the pains of life. Love your mother well, as I have never known a better woman in this world. I cannot, nor will I ever be able to, thing of her without being moved, and see life more clearly and Beautifully. Take good care of that treasure. The book of quotations—you will see how it will keep all harm far from me: I will carry it always beside my heart” (translation mine). 373 Martí, OC, 16:252. 374 Paz, Children, 99. 375 Martí, “Dos patrias,” OC, 16:252. See translation: “breast, destroyed it is and empty” (translation mine). 137 only abyss. Death, eroticism, revolutionary passion, poetry: the night, the great mother, contains it all […] The poet does not raise his voice, he speaks to himself when he speaks to the night and to revolution.” 376 This is because Martí is also the mother, the night and abyss of death that is the womb/tomb bearing revolution. The beginning of revolution, like birth, contains an end—a container for life and death, a womb. 377 Martí’s poetry gives birth to modern poetry and to a nation. He presents a writing that is at once a national writing, the narrative of an island and revolution being born, sailing over the horizon and into view. And yet we encounter in these two early works a maternal Martí whose legacy is not ossified, and whose meaning escapes fixation through the maternal flow that disintegrates the island’s borders, crosses its frontiers, and opens a window towards the inhabitation of unknown, unforeseen others. 376 Paz, Children, 100-101. 377 Marder, The Mother, 25-26. 138 Chapter 3: Screeching Love The Mother Tongue and Mothering Bodies in French Antillean Women’s Literature Pregnancy begins as a silent relation, the small movements and knowing, followed by birth, which is a kind of storm, one that overtakes the body and cannot be evaded. This hurricane force makes its way from the Atlantic through the Antilles. Its force increases and collides with the island. It is overwhelmed by the intensity of rain and water, the pummeling and driving devastation, but then so quickly, the sun returns. Suzanne Césaire’s cyclone builds upon the crystal blue waters, and “Après la pluie, le soleil. Les cigales haïtiennes pensent à crisser l’amour.” 378 These tiny insects, invisible but for the traces of the carapace they discard upon the trunks of trees and roofs of houses, make this ear-splitting keening, screeching their love to the skies. The rain cannot wipe them away. They return with the sun. Death and life, and their insistent existence. The islands bear this trace of death, homes and cities razed and ravaged. Every time Maryse Condé describes the landscape or a place of the Antilles in her novel, Victoire: les saveurs et les mots (2006), she also tells of its history of destruction, the ravages of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes. She tells of the rebuilding, the dogged insistence upon that place. This text is a similar reconstruction, this time of a life forgotten, of the small traces left upon the surface of skin and island body. The work of the author bears a signature, her signature, and this signature bears with it a history and legacy written into these letters. It is more than a name, more than the history of that person. The signature of the author is also the trace of hundreds of years of the movement of peoples and territories. The name Maryse Condé is that of a Guadeloupean woman. She is a 378 Suzanne Césaire, “Le grand,” 85. See translation: “After the rain, the sun. The Haitian cicadas are thinking of screeching love” (translation by Keith L. Walker, 39-40). 139 woman and an author from Guadeloupe, but to be a woman and to write and to be a woman writer and to write from Guadeloupe and to write in French from Guadeloupe as a woman, is all far more complex than to simply say that she is a Guadeloupean author. Her novel, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, if novel is the correct term, tells this very story, the story of generations of Guadeloupean women and their writings. It is the author’s history and the history of the women who came before her. In the epigraph of her quasi-novel, quasi-(auto)biography Condé quotes Bernard Pingaud: “Il devient indifférent que je me souvienne ou que j’invente, que j’emprunte ou que j’imagine.” 379 Condé obscures the truth, or perhaps our access to the truth, by refusing to identify the text as either novel or autobiography. Whether the story of her family is, in fact, the work of research or invention, or both, is beside the point. The very claim to truth is questioned and undermined in this genealogy, a genealogy of women that does not seek to draw lines of descent but rather questions their very possibility. Condé was born in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe in 1937. In her youth, she saw Guadeloupe survive the Second World War and vote for departmentalization in 1946. She studied in France through her teen years and completed her undergraduate and doctoral degrees, in Comparative Literature, at the Sorbonne in Paris. 380 She has since taught in West Africa and some of the most elite universities in the United States. She currently holds the title of Professor Emerita of French at Columbia University. 381 Condé first began writing and publishing fictional works in the 1970s. Her novel, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, is a reflection of her experience as a literary critic and researcher, as well as acting as a critique of the expectations and politics she encountered as a scholar of the French Caribbean. Condé actively frustrates our desire for scholarly facticity. 379 Condé, Victoire, 11. See translation by Richard Philcox (2010), “What does it matter whether I remember or invent, Whether I borrow or imagine” (My Mother’s Mother). 380 See Dawn Fulton’s Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism (2008), 3-5. 381 See Columbia French Faculty biography on Maryse Condé. 140 She confronts academia and the postcolonial critic’s need for the Other to represent herself as transparent testimony. 382 Condé refuses to perform the testimonial act that is expected of her. She refuses to be made exemplary of Guadeloupean Otherness, or seductive “authenticity.” 383 Condé resists the thematization of Black bodies and women’s experiences in her work, unlike the kind of writing we see in the first and second chapters where Duras, Gómez de Avellaneda, and Martí employ Black bodies as a blank slate upon which to make a case for liberation. Instead, the history that Condé tells is errant and ironic, allowing herself and her protagonists some distance from the reader’s gaze. This maternal telling elides the scholar’s grasp, the possibility of certainty or capture. Like Martinique, Guadeloupe voted for departmentalization in 1946, becoming a Département d’Outre-Mer. Yarimar Bonilla explains the uneven status of the département, stating that they carry “a status roughly similar that of Hawaii or Alaska in the United States. The political status promised full integration in to the French Republic, political representation in the National Assembly, the extension of French civic institutions, and a socioeconomic leveling with the citizens of mainland France. Yet, as their name suggests, the departments of the outre-mer remain marked as both geographically and categorically distinct: outside of, and separate from, the (unmarked) departments of the French Republic.” 384 In the decades following departmentalization, many independence movements have arisen, and the French government 382 Dawn Fulton explains that “Maryse Condé’s ‘critical incorporations’ expose the bounds of categorical reasoning and the burdens of representativity imposed by theories of postcolonialism, thus mounting a dialogical critique of postcolonial reading practice” (Signs, 3). She later describes the ways this is imposed upon indigenous women: “women from Third World countries are especially afflicted with the perception of transparency—Rigoberta Menchú is a by now classic example of an un-equivocally embraced stand-in for the oppressed—and the native woman intellectual in the Western institutions that cast this reductive gaze gains an uneasy status as an informant, offering ‘unmediated glimpses’ of this now transparent Other” (Signs, 7). 383 Fulton writes that Condé has been criticized for failing to produce herself as the essentialized and authenticated Caribbean woman that is expected of or desired for her by Western institutions (Signs, 18-20). 384 Bonilla, Non-Sovereign, 2. 141 responded by granting greater autonomy to Guadeloupe at a local level. However, Guadeloupe continues to rely on the French government but fails to see the kind of economic equality that its citizens expect. Both Guadeloupe and Martinique suffer under deep-seated, structural racism, resulting in riots and the massacre and silencing of protesters fighting for equality and representation. 385 Their status legally confirms their equality in the eyes of their former colonizer, however the lived experience of Guadeloupeans has been quite different. They continue to stand in an unequal and shifting relation to the colonizer. Throughout this dissertation, we never directly touch upon independence. Guadeloupe and Martinique, like Puerto Rico to follow, remain bound to colonial-imperialist governments, and Cuba’s independence is never achieved within these pages. Haiti stands as a distant and shadowy relation, but instead we focus upon these fluctuating borders, where relation to the colonizing power remains disputed. The affirmation or realization of autonomous selfhood is always incomplete. Within the context of the Caribbean, the maternal evokes the question of family and lineage, a question that has long been the site of tremendous anxiety. The ability to produce and testify to one’s parentage, especially to one’s father, has been treated as the necessary step to affirm one’s own place and identity within the complex social, racial, and (post)colonial environment of the Antilles. In 1965, US Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a study on African American families, known today as the Moynihan Report. 386 In this study, Moynihan and his staff argued that true equality would not be achieved until the disintegration of the Black family caused by enslavement could be undone. Hortense J. Spillers responds to this report in her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” identifying the way 385 See Gery Dambury, The Restless (2018). See also Crowell, “The Island” (2018). 386 See Geary, “The Moynihan Report” (2015). 142 the Report places the fault of the absent father upon the mothers and daughters of the Black family in the Americas. For Spillers, the Report essentializes sex/gender, the family, and “ethnicity” so completely as to grant them “the affects of the Eternal,” turning it to mythical time, and reifying paternal authority as the key to achieving some brand of equality. 387 Spillers writes that this movement effects a second capture and mutilation in that it reduces the human body to object value, or the flesh “being for the captor.” 388 However, while Spillers attempts to recover Fathers and Daughters from the discourse of toxic matriarchal dominance, Condé eschews the recuperation of gendered roles. Spillers proposes a rescue of the family from the Western linkage of “Family” with property, a “vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic.” 389 Spillers writes that in the case of many children of the enslaved, their relationship to the mother should have remained “unique and unambiguous” but is disrupted by the system of enslavement which must ensure that children cannot “’belong’” to their parents, and so captive women were not allowed to be mothers. 390 It is also under this system, where the “master” might be the father, that “Fatherhood, at best a supreme cultural courtesy, attenuates here on the one hand into a monstrous accumulation of power on the other.” 391 Spillers explains that the Moynihan Report’s great misunderstanding was in claiming that the excessive power of mothers was somehow at fault, when the trouble lies in the fact that mothers could not even claim their own children. 392 Condé’s speculative tracing of her own family’s genealogy is critical of this narrative of the missing father, the dehumanizing and ungendering of historically captive persons, and of critical essentialism, but she goes a bit further. Even when fathers are missing 387 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 66. 388 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 67. 389 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 74. 390 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 76, 75, 78. 391 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 76. 392 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 80. 143 from the scene, her maternal characters are recalcitrant in their denial of the prefigured tropes ascribed to them or the redemptive motherly function. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire traced a Caribbean genealogy similar to that outlined by the Report. They describe how race and class issues in the colonial context have affected the family drama of the Antilles; the way the captor has placed and continues to place his stamp upon the genealogy of the French Antillean family circle. Through the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture and a history of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James argues that it is not a question of race but rather of class and ideology that creates the fracture within Caribbean society. This chapter will undertake a dialogue between these writers of Antillean masculinity and Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, wherein the reader is presented with these same debates, but through the lens of a de-essentializing, Antillean women. It will do so with an eye towards the constructed nature of these categories and the effect that enslavement and colonial occupation has had upon understandings of gender in the Caribbean. The signature of the mother in this portrait bears into the world a new history, not of legitimizing paternity, but of maternity’s questing: one that undermines the heroic history of revolution to posit a rupture and destabilization of this narrative. While these maternal phantoms illuminate a certain absence of the father and the struggle against racial alienation, their maternal pain offers up an approach to the past and the future of the Antilles that is relational and opaque: the possibility of an ethics of relation that can perhaps hope to heal without erasure or essentializing exclusions. The English translation of Condé’s work proudly boasts on its cover the classification of novel, while the French version assiduously evades this taxonomy. Above the copyright and publication information of the English translation by Richard Philcox is written: “This book is 144 largely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are transpositions of the life of the author’s mother and grandmother.” 393 The French version contains no such caveat. Truth, then, becomes a deceptive word. This history of a family makes no claims to truth and yet preserves some of its weight. Condé begins the work with a conversation between herself and her mother. In this conversation, young Condé gazes upon a photograph of her grandmother. She asks her mother about this mysterious woman with her straight hair, white skin, and pale eyes. From this conversation a mission is born, but it is a mission deferred. Years of pursuing other projects and voyages will distract the author from engaging this peculiar mystery of her past. Feeling pursued and chastised by the ancestral ghost, Condé begins the arduous task of researching the life of this woman, described erroneously and anachronistically by her mother as “’Elle ne savait ni lire ni écrire. Pourtant, c’était un proto-mitan, une matador.’” 394 The picture of the grandmother that Condé traces is very different from the matador woman, the feminist avant- la-lettre, that her mother proposes. 395 In the final lines of her elusive genealogy, Condé writes “Avec son chagrin et ses remords, Jeanne édifia un mythe qui ne correspondait guère à la réalité, et laissait dans l’ombre les aspects incertains de la personnalité de Victoire. En un mot, elle tenta à tout prix de la couler dans la moule sans originalité de la ‘matador’ guadeloupéenne. Il me plaît, quant à moi, que ma grand-mère demeure secrète, énigmatique, architecte inconvenante d’une libération dont sa descendance a su, quant à elle, pleinement jouir.” 396 Condé writes that 393 Marta Asunción Alonso Moreno explores this concept of the autobiographical fiction and history as fiction: “Condé acomete la tarea de relatar la vida de su antepasada adoptando y adaptando a las exigencias narrativas de la tercera persona al precepto básico de la denominada ‘autoficción’: todo relato literarios es (auto)biográfico, toda (auto)biografía es ficcional” (Alonso Moreno, “Memoria,” 8). 394 Condé, Victoire, 17. See translation: “’She could neither read nor write. Yet, she was the mainstay of the family, a formidable woman’” (My Mother’s Mother, 4). 395 This description of the grandmother almost exactly anticipates Ina Césaire’s 2009 poem for her mother, “Suzanne Césaire, ma mère”: “Ma mère militante avide de liberté” (Le grand, 123). The English version of the poem translates “avide” as “hungry.” This hunger becomes an abiding theme for Condé. 396 Condé, Victoire, 155. Translation: “In her grief and her remorse, Jeanne constructed a myth that barely corresponded to reality and left in the dark uncertain aspects of Victoire’s personality. In short, she endeavored at all 145 her grandmother was an “improper” maker of the liberation that she and her children have enjoyed. She is not transparent to the record of our analysis or of her mother’s origin story. Instead, the grandmother’s history resists proper recording, proper inscription. Her grandmother may not have been taught to write, but her language was food, and Condé makes it clear that a communication occurs between herself and her grandmother through the language of cooking. She explains that the text of freedom and of creativity that her grandmother undertook was written in the exuberance of her kitchen. It is an opaque and slippery text, and it is in its resistance to transparent reading that Condé posits a relational understanding, a maternal text. Condé has made herself known as one of the most prominent novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She explains, however, that while she sometimes wonders if she is a good writer, she knows that she is a good cook, which becomes the shared language linking her present to her grandmother’s past. Lydie Moudinleno writes in “La Gastronomie Furtive de Maryse Condé,” an article published years before Victoire, that “Maryse Condé reconnaît elle-même ses talents de cuisinière. Elle annonce ainsi dans le récent French Caribbean Cuisine dont elle signe le préface : ‘J’aime à le répéter sans fausse modestie…après une quinzaine d’ouvrages, j’ignore encore si je suis une bonne romancière, alors que sans doute possible, je le sais, je l’affirme, je suis une excellent cuisinière’. Elle parlera plus loin de cette activité où pourtant, contrairement à la littérature, elle touche à des certitudes.” 397 Condé claims that there is a certainty in the language of cooking that she struggles to find in words. At first, this might appear to rise out of an apparent ability to skirt the complications that arise in the language of the colonizer. However, the Creole dishes that Victoire invents are as steeped in the costs to have her conform to the clichéd norm of the Guadeloupean matador, the fighting woman who courageously resists life’s trials. As for me, I prefer my grandmother to remain secretive, enigmatic, the improper architect of a liberation that we, her descendants, have known how to enjoy to the full” (My Mother’s Mother, 195). 397 Moudileno, “La Gastronomie,” 421. 146 history of colonialism and subjugation as anything else. Their language is complex, and Victoire is able to maneuver and create within it. Anne-Marie, Victoire’s employer and the wife of Victoire’s lover, is obsessed with Victoire’s cooking, and is able to establish a reputation for her household through Victoire’s talent and creativity. She begins to show off their cook through lavish feasts, and articles are published to Victoire’s acclaim. However, Condé writes that Victoire cared little for this: Elle aurait préféré en conserver le mystère. Et puis, pour elle, cuisiner n’impliquait aucun désir de vengeance vis-à-vis d’une société qui ne lui avait jamais fait de place […] c’était sa manière d’exprimer un moi constamment refoulé, prisonnier de son analphabétisme, de sa bâtardise, de son sexe, de toute sa condition asservie. Quand elle inventait des assaisonnements, ou mariait des goûts, sa personnalité se libérait, s’épanouissait […] Alors, elle dominait le monde. Pour un temps, elle devenait Dieu. Là aussi, comme un écrivain […] J’entends poursuivre ma comparaison. Comme beaucoup d’artistes et d’écrivains, Victoire se souciait peu de la reconnaissance de l’Autre. Au contraire, sa timidité lui faisait chérir l’anonymat. En cuisinant, elle ne se souciait que de répondre à son exigence intérieur. 398 Victoire’s creative force occurs in cooking. This is where her power is felt, and while she prefers anonymity, this force is shared. Condé plays tricks upon the scholarly desire for evidence. She provides the reader with two clippings from an invented paper, L’Écho pointois, describing these meals. The names for the dishes are not the cook’s but are provided by her mistress and friend. Victoire’s language is reserved for herself. It remains incalculable to the colonizing power, secretive and insubordinate. For Hélène Cixous, all women’s writing is a destructive as well as creative force, breaking apart the institutions of male domination and colonialism. 399 Victoire’s 398 Condé, Victoire, 100-103. See translation: “She would have preferred to keep it a secret. For her, cooking in no way implied wreaking vengeance on a society that had never made room for her […] it was her way of expressing herself, which was constantly repressed, prisoner of her illiteracy, her gender, and her station as a servant. When she invented seasonings or blended flavors, her personality was set free and blossomed […] She dominated the world. For a time she became God. Once again, like a writer […] Pursuing my comparison, like many writers and artists, Victoire cared little for recognition by the Other. On the contrary, her shyness made her cherish her anonymity. Cooking was her way of satisfying an inner need” (My Mother’s Mother, 71-73). 399 Cixous writes, “Un texte féminin ne peut pas ne pas être plus que subversif : s’il s’écrit, c’est en soulevant, volcanique, la vieille croûte immobilière, porteuse des investissements masculins, et pas autrement ; il n’y a pas de 147 victory comes less from a suturing of the wounds of the past and arises in the ethical embrace of its pain, precisely in the cut of knife into flesh, the place where her voice is silenced but cooking becomes her language, the space where she writes herself in secret. 400 Whatever healing may occur is not an erasure of the wound of history. It is not a story with a happy ending. Pain and laughter are written in Condé’s text and Victoire’s dishes. Condé’s mother, the intermediary link, begins the invention of this history of the warrior mother. The novel introduces itself as the unraveling of the mystery of this enigmatic woman, and yet Condé invites the reader to embrace the uncertainty of this history, the opacity of its many truths. 401 Perhaps the best description for this fictitious genealogy of women that Condé constructs is what Darieck Scott calls a “speculation on history.” 402 We are invited in as writers and readers, entering into a pact with the author, to engage actively as she reflects upon her own role as researcher and inventor of this history. 403 Our reading is creative as we respond in relationship to its author, embracing and accepting the story as she tells it. 404 The extensive research that Condé performs is always self-reflexive, casting doubt upon the reliability or place pour elle si elle n’est pas un il ? Si elle est elle-elle, ce n’est qu’à tout casser, à mettre en pièces les bâtis des institutions, à faire sauter la loi en l’air, à tordre la ‘vérité’ de rire” (Le Rire, 59). 400 Sarah Mosher argues that through “uncovering her maternal lineage” Maryse Condé is able to suture the wounds of race and class warfare in the French Caribbean, especially by drawing parallels between Victoire’s cooking and Condé writing (“(Auto)Biographical,” 150). 401 Condé’s fictional history, whatever its truth may be, seems to anticipate what Darieck Scott states as the emancipatory project of his work: “My aim here is not to seek the revelations of history but to emphasize that key component of the work of historical excavation that involves the construction of the past: that is, to work imaginatively with—and rework, and work over, and maybe, if we are lucky, work through—the material that history provides” (Scott, Extravagant, 10). 402 Scott uses this term to describe Toni Morrison’s Sethe who is “not really a slave or ex-slave, even though she is inspired by a historical personage,” writing also “the structure of her logic is of a piece with the harsh structures of her social world, where sociality is governed by strict racial hierarchy and property law. We are not Sethe and we do not live her exigencies, and thus we cannot judge her actions” (Extravagant, 1). 403 Nicole Simek writes in Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: “Condé’s text, for its part, considers the divergent paths history might have taken and invites the reader to compare them” (Simek, Hunger, 151). 404 Marta Asunción Alonso Moreno writes that a certain pact exists between the reader and the author in accepting fiction as truth and entering into this relation of ambiguity: “En Victoire…, los límites entre realidad y ficción se difuminarán hasta desaparecer en un tan voluntario como voluntarioso ejercicio de ‘memoria por procuración’. Los postulados de tal ‘pacto’ o juego memorístico-creativo le son explicitados al lector, para su aceptación activa, desde el íncipit mismo de la novela” (Alonso Moreno, “Memoria,” 9). 148 veracity of these sources, while asking us—the readers—to reflect upon our own engagement with the text. 405 She writes that it was only in taking a step back from her own research that she was able to begin this project of researching her-self. In this, we are asked to question our task as researchers and readers and this search for some truth of our-selves or our histories that continues to dominate both the literary and scholarly realms. Our writing, even the writing of this text presented here, cannot help but fall back into the autobiographical. We search out ourselves and our place within each of these readings, reflecting back at our readers our own face. Through her research, Condé explores the scars of slavery and colonialism in Guadeloupe. Additionally, she explores the evolving role and treatment of women in her island home, but it is not a straight-forward story. Unlike the picture of her grandmother that her mother provides, that of the matador woman, Condé’s depiction is troubling. It fails to fit into the ready- made molds of Caribbean femininity that we might seek to delineate within its pages. Condé’s “femmes-colibris” 406 escape our classifications. Through this story she obliquely addresses Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire as well as the legacies of postcolonial discourse that they developed. She confronts their theories on women, sexuality, and Antillean subjectivity, but rather than propose any new foundational theory, she opens a space for the feminine disruption of their narratives. She addresses the history of the Antilles, her own history, in order to weave 405 Simek suggests that Condé’s work functions as a critique of research and the anthropological studies of the Caribbean that sought to capture it within colonialist taxonomies. Simek describes the work of Condé as something “stitched together” from various, disparate sources including “The ‘on dit’ or rumor [that] provides insight into the individual experience of broader social patterns” (Hunger, 158). Simek also writes, “What makes these forebears strange is less their deviation from the norms of their time than their individuation itself and their distance from present-day modes of thinking and classification […] Condé disrupts absorptive identification, and draws attention instead to the estranged position of the present-day researcher, who labels and categorizes in an attempt to make sense of the habits of distant others. Such markers punctuate the text throughout recalling to mind that the story we are reading is a composition stitched together from various components, ranging from present-day scholarship to travelogues, newspapers, and birth and baptism records from the period, to private personal effects (notebooks, objects, and letters) and attributed and anonymous oral sources and personal communications with the author” (Simek, Hunger, 158-159). 406 Suzanne Césaire, “Le grand camouflage,” 86. See translation: “hummingbird-women” (translation by Keith L. Walker, 40). 149 an opaque and disturbing narrative of the scars that the past leaves; the wavering and untimely traces—to use a term from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx—that come both before and after the self takes up its place in the story. I argue that Condé’s unraveling of this maternal genealogy introduces us to the untimeliness and the opacity of this history wherein the narrative of Caribbean legitimacy and the family is disrupted by the maternal thread. As we have seen in previous chapters, the idea of a redemptive origin for the former slave society was often expressed through an idealized Haitian Revolution, the image of a land liberated from the white colonizers, where the ghosts of the past are utterly overthrown. It is the almost-victorious hero and the near realization of his revolutionary dream that is the narrative focus of the historian’s hindsight in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Beginning with the sufferings and massacres that followed the beginning of the slave trade in the West Indies, James traces the history of slave revolt and eventual revolution in San Domingo, identifying its heart in Toussaint L’Ouverture’s French Jacobin revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 407 Within this struggle to loose the bonds of slavery in San Domingo comes the equally violent and impossible struggle to understand the self both within and beyond the bounds that captivity had created. For Toussaint, France continued to be the mother country, but it is precisely these contentious images of motherhood or homeland that divide the subject who can neither claim the captive mother nor 407 First published in 1938, James paints a glorious and dramatic narrative of the rise and fall of this freed slave turned military leader. James narrates the way Toussaint’s pure desire to bring freedom to the slaves of Santo Domingo and equality to men of all races was undercut by politics and the greed of the French bourgeoisie. James affirms throughout his narrative that revolution in San Domingo, later Haiti, was a class and not a race war, and that Toussaint was its greatest hope for fulfillment. He draws parallels between Marxist class warfare in Russia and Cuba, with his Appendix, in order to support the theory that it was this kind of struggle and not one of whites versus blacks that Toussaint was waging. Through James’s history we see how race and ideology appear to act upon each other in the identification of self and other within the Caribbean. 150 the white father. Who is the mother land? Is she France or Africa? 408 The question of one’s identity, whether black or white, became an obsession for many of the most prominent writers within the French Antilles, both former colonies and present départements. 409 Condé’s novel confronts this troubling face of the mother and the grandmother, whose light eyes and skin spoke to women’s vulnerability and violation. Also implied within this search for origins is the identification of home and land: either France or Africa or the island, all posited within the imagery of the mother. This question, of course, continues to echo for the French Overseas Departments whose status before the “motherland” remains confused. Unlike Haiti, their revolutions never occurred and their independence remains incomplete and contested. Slavery was briefly abolished under the French Revolution, but reinstated by Napoleon in fear of what abolition would do to the French economy. The institution of slavery was finally abolished in 1848, but Fanon writes that the black man is subjected to abolition rather than having taken it for himself. He writes that instead of winning freedom by revolution, he is unchained by the French, by Victor Schoelcher. Fanon writes: “The black man is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude. The white master who allowed his slaves to eat at his table. […] So the white masters grudgingly decided to raise the animal-machine man to the supreme rank of man, although it wasn’t easy. Slavery shall no longer exist on French soil. The upheaval reached the black man from the outside. The black man was acted upon.” 410 Fanon sees 408 James writes, “The mothers of the Mulattoes were in the slave-gangs, they had half-brothers there, and however much the Mulatto himself might despise this half of his origin, he was at home among the slaves […] No Mulatto, therefore, whatever his number of white parts, was allowed to assume the name of his white father” (Black Jacobins, 38-9). According to James, this created immense tension along the racial lines that the slave society created. The denial of the father’s name also functions towards the systematic exclusion of certain peoples from visibility before the law and civil society. 409 The terms département and territory refer to the complex nature of 20 th and 21 st century colonial and imperial practices. Political bodies such as Guadeloupe and Martinique, like Puerto Rico, exist in varying degrees of subjecthood in relation to the colonizer. 410 Fanon, Masks, 194. Italics are Fanon’s. 151 this as containing the seed of oppression in the Caribbean where “the black man does not know the price of freedom because he has never fought for it. From time to time he fights for liberty and justice, but it’s always for a white liberty and a white justice.” 411 In his formulation of the history of the Antilles, the former slaves are now enslaved to white, liberal politics. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon proposes a solution to this conflict: the violent seizure of liberty, and not liberty according to Western liberalism, but a complete rupture of the system of values created by French colonialism, which still exists in the French Overseas Departments. Both Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth read the mutilation of the black man’s psyche as it is his skin that is read and subjectified by the gaze of the white man. Fanon discusses the way in which colonial racism engenders a fragmentation and alienation of the black psyche that results in neurosis for the black male subject. However, one of the most interesting elements of his analysis of the colonial situation and its aftermath is the division created between male and female subjects. Françoise Vergès similarly confronts this ghost of slavery that haunts those living both within and yet marginalized by French culture and colonialism. 412 Paul Gilroy also writes that an unresolvable conflict remains between those who hope to belong both to Europe and to Blackness, resulting in “double consciousness.” 413 For Fanon the only resolution to this form of alienation was violent resistance against the “master,” 411 Fanon, Masks, 195. 412 Vergès wrties, “French overseas territories and ‘banlieues’ have emerged as sites where French national identity, the myth of the Nation, national narrative and national culture are questioned from the viewpoint of a still unwritten story: the story of slavery and of the ‘republican colony’. It is within the French national body that we now observe the frame of French colonialism, the effect of postcolonial amnesia, of the return of the repressed. The ghosts of the slaves, of the indentured workers, of the poor settlers, of the colonized, the spectres of the colonial politics of race and gender, inhabit the contemporary French Republic” (“There Are,” 94). 413 Paul Gilroy begins by stating, “Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness […] where racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses orchestrate political relationships so that these identities appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity has been viewed as a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination” (Black Atlantic, 1). 152 something never undertaken in Martinique, his homeland, or Guadeloupe, its neighbor. Vergès writes: “Fanon disavowed a society in which the Master is always present, on the scene of history and in the primal scene. Fanon disavowed the Creole filiation: the enslaved father and the raped mother could not be his parents. Nor did he symbolize métissage, this encounter, violent or loving, between people of different races of which he was a product. For Fanon, the Antilleans were emasculated men. Algeria gave Fanon his dreamed filiation.” 414 This métissage, what Suzanne Césaire calls the “femmes aux quatre races et aux douzaines de sang,” 415 does not and cannot enter into the dreamed-of filiation for a liberated society. Condé’s disavowal, however, is of this very trope of emasculation. She does not perpetuate the stereotype of the absent father or the emasculated man. Instead, her own father is very present within the space of the novel, acting upon the family and maternal dynamics. I argue that she establishes a maternal counter-history that deviates from the linearity imposed by patriarchal history and whose truth claims and modes of writing perforate the racist and exclusionary genealogies reiterated by colonization. For Condé, the ghost of the past is one she faces without violence. Her own grandmother is the daughter of her mother’s rape in her early adolescence by a white man. As the specter of her grandmother watches speculatively from the corner of her room, Condé confronts this often violent and always painful past, but she does so without rejection. 416 She is welcoming of a certain tension in the narrative or the possibility of impossible truths. In Euzhan Palcy’s documentary Aimé Césaire: une voix pour l’histoire, 417 Condé describes Aimé Césaire’s 414 Vergès, “Disavowal,” 594. 415 Suzanne Césaire, “Le grand,” 86. See translation: “the women of four faces and dozens of bloodlines” (translation by Keith L. Walker, 40). 416 Laurie Corbin writes “The other thematic thread that I am following […], that of maternity is another profoundly ambivalent signifier. The links of mother and daughter in these texts are quite painful, and in both the cases represented—Victoire and Jeanne and Jeanne and Maryse—it is a pain that continues well after the death of the mother” (“The Return,” 238). 417 Of the essay film in the French canon, Laura Rascaroli embraces the volatile place where the narrator/director/creator’s point of view meets, inhabits, and clashes against the viewer’s. She also points to the 153 complex relation to the Antilles and the tense relationship that the “West-Indies” have with France, saying: “I think I was quite critical about this tension at one time, but that I’ve completely changed now, because I believe that Césaire’s contradictions and conflicts belong to all of the people of the West-Indies. I think we can adopt a very hard position regarding France. For example, claim independence, yet we can remain very attached to these French values and have integrated them into our culture.” 418 The question of independence from France, which Aimé Césaire voted against in Martinique by voting for departmentalization in 1946, creates an issue for questions of belonging. Departmentalization meant that the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique would experience greater equality and that their pseudo-colonial status regarding France would be transformed, formalizing them as participating members in the French government. Tension persisted, however, as racism and economic inequality continued to plague the islands, granting preferential treatment and access to white settlers like Victoire’s employers, the Walbergs. Suzanne Césaire laments the aporetic belonging that assaults the Antillean: “Voici un Antillais, arrière-petit-fils d’un colon et d’une négresse esclave […] Le voici avec sa doble force et sa doble férocité, dans un équilibre dangereusement menacé : il ne peut pas accepter sa négritude, il ne peut pas se blanchir. La veulerie s’empare de ce cœur divisé.” 419 Condé’s text embodied spectator, the director’s intentional and perhaps personal address to the embodied subject. She writes, “the essay must embrace openness and uncertainty; it must leave questions unanswered, and accept and nurture the ultimate instability of its meaning. Open and fluid by both choice and ethos, the essay film articulates its rhetorical concerns in a performative manner, by integrating into the text the process of its own coming into being. Performance, as a result, plays a key role in essayistic cinema” (The Personal Camera, 84). See also Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, 103: “the essay film is a performative, highly open and unstable form, and that it produces unpredictable results, which depend on the embodied receiver’s idiosyncratic and independent process of appropriation of the text.” 418 Palcy, une voix. 419 Suzanne Césaire, “Le grand,” 91. See translation: “Here is an Antillean, great-grandson of a White colonizer and a salve Negress […] Here he is with his double strength and double ferocity, in a dangerously threatened equilibrium: he cannot accept his negritude; he cannot whiten himself. Spinelessness takes hold of this divided heart” (translation by Keith L. Walker, 43). For Aimé Césaire the answer to colonial alienation was négritude. Négritude was a way of turning to the past, to the earth, to a nostalgic primordial apocalypse in order to escape the alienation of the colonial world. Fanon writes that the belief of négritude was in the black man and black culture’s mystic and primal relation with the universe, a relation denied to the white colonizer: “Blood! Blood!...Birth! 154 perhaps leaves space open for a means of mending the breach and overcoming the exclusionary politics that result in these “divided hearts.” 420 The confusion of the divided heart and its opacity has its effect in history and in the way that identity is perceived. Like Condé, Édouard Glissant questions notions of belonging and writes that the Antilles are neither wholly French, nor are they wholly divorced from the French. Instead, they form a complex interweaving of disparate timelines. Errancy becomes the formula for a new history and subjectivization based on relation that “challenges and discards the universal—this generalizing edict that summarized the world as something obvious and transparent, claiming for it one presupposed sense and one destiny […] there is no basis for certainty; the relation is tragic.” 421 Certainty is the home for erroneous and violent identifications that seek to establish the legitimacy of one Man’s self over an-Other’s. This kind of identity is dependent upon myth, or an idealized history of that nation/family, and the exclusion of certain Vertigo of tomorrow […] the Mother Earth bond, and that mystic carnal marriage between man and the cosmos […] I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation” (Fanon, Masks, 104-7). This apocalyptic vision was Aimé Césaire’s, the hope for a new beginning that saw its place in the ultimate beginning as well as an apocalyptic negation of self. Fanon argues that by making the black man everything, making him ahistorical, Aimé Césaire negates his very presence, and that it was in the historicity of the black man that Négritude met its “first limitation” (Fanon, Wretched, 154). He states that “In order to secure his salvation, in order to escape the supremacy of white culture the colonized intellectual feels the need to return to his unknown roots and lose himself, come what may, among his barbaric people” (Fanon, Wretched, 155). Scott also identifies the limitation of Négritude as discussed by Fanon: “blackness is an invention that accomplishes the domination of those who bear it as an identity […] eventually needs to be surpassed in favor of a conception of nation (which is also a conception of self) that does not depend on racial definition. Hence, Negritude—and Black Power—is insufficient and ultimately misleading for Fanon, and it partly is so because blackness is constituted by a history of abjection, and is itself a form of abjection” (Extravagant, 4-5). 420 Dawn Fulton unpacks many of the ideological and scholarly categories that have been used to write about the “postcolonial” and expresses that perhaps the only escape from these essentializing and reductive categories is a “theoretical openendedness” (Signs, 8). Alonso Moreno writes, “Maryse Condé se propone demostrar la peligrosa ambigüedad moral de todos estos estereotipos raciales, con el fin de visibilizar, dignificándola, la figura injustamente silenciada de su abuela materna” (Alonso Moreno, “Memoria,” 11). Corbin also makes clear that “Condé is known for her skepticism concerning many reified concepts” (“The Return,” 237). 421 Glissant, Poetics, 20-1. 155 people from these groups. 422 Condé’s myth of the family is of a different register. She does not erect Myths, the mythic foundation of the mother of the nation, but gives her reader the relational fracturing of these foundations. Relation sets up a scene of identity and history that is not limited to a single stream or to a locked historicity, but “is an open totality evolving upon itself […] In Relation the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity.” 423 In his novel, La Lézarde (1958), Glissant describes the worker in the cane fields who “thinks of a greater misery, deep in the past, in distant, forgotten forests.” 424 Still with him is the painful legacy of slavery, of the slave trade, of men and women ripped from their African homes and transported across the ocean that circumscribes the island to now populate and make fertile their island prison. The history and identity of the Martiniquean and Guadeloupean people is not simply the history of France, they are not simply French, but they are projected through a multifaceted and diffracted lens. Glissant writes that we should “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.” 425 Opacity becomes the possibility of a past without closure, one that Condé embraces. Like Condé, Glissant identifies the masculinist bent of many of the emancipatory theories developed in the French Caribbean during the twentieth century: “The legitimacy confirming filiation in patriarchal societies also implies femininity as the locus of a counterforce, generally 422 Glissant writes “Identity will be achieved when communities attempt to legitimate either right to possession of a territory through myth or the revealed word” (Poetics of Relation, 13). Giles Deleuze writes that islands are outside of this linearity of history. They are both before and after men, and that to dream of islands is to dream with what is already lost and returning (L’île, 15). 423 Glissant, Poetics, 192. 424 Glissant, The Ripening, 45. 425 Glissant, Poetics, 189-90. 156 of a spiritual order.” 426 The feminine undermines and subverts male claims to lineage and certainty. Only her womb is certain and only she carries the secret of the father. Both of these texts by Glissant propose the feminine as a powerful, subversive force in the establishment of the people. Glissant writes of the beauty of the islands and the way this beauty had to be tamed and manipulated to confirm the legitimacy of the master. 427 The beauty of the island, this horrendous beauty is cast as deeply feminine, the ugliness of an all-too-beautiful island. 428 Throughout La Lézarde, the female students both drive and undermine the political activity of their lovers and friends. Towards the end, Mycéa, the beautiful militant, and Mathieu, her militant lover, embrace: “What passes between them is more than the intense thrill of desire, more than that which cannot be expressed or that which roars loudly, even more than the certainty of two trees whose roots are joined beneath the surface and so embrace deep within the earth, no! It is the welling up of sap, it is the very cry of the root, no! It is that gesture, perfected by our ancestors since the beginning of time and now reborn, hard and tender, on this land. Welcome, woman! Welcome, master!” 429 They are the island and also much more than the island. The woman is no longer subsumed into the metaphor of woman/fertility/earth, but becomes woman, though still subject to her master. However, the novel undercuts any simple master-slave dynamic between the man and the woman, as it is the man who seeks actively for his lover, desiring and burning 426 Glissant, Poetics, 59. 427 Glissant writes “Then delusion. Unlike this oral and popular literature, though equally discontinuous, another, written and elitist literature developed. The colonists and the Planters, as well as the travelers who visited them, were possessed of a real need to justify the system. To fantasize legitimacy […] Reality was fantasized here as well, its image the product of a disguised apology rather than that of an austere realism. One condition of the process was that conventional landscape be pushed to extremes—the gentleness and beauty of it—particularly in the islands of the Caribbean ” (Poetics of Relation, 70). 428 See Mara Negrón’s closing address “Why Do Some Love Islands? Why Don’t Others?” delivered at Emory University on November 5, 2011. 429 Glissant, The Ripening, 114-15. 157 with the need to be regarded by her and made by her. Maryse Condé’s story of the island is the story of herself, and—as such—is opaque to her. The novel is the quasi-history of this opacity. The mystery of the grandmother’s history is also the mystery of her father. Victoire is the product of her fourteen-year-old mother’s mysterious pregnancy. Her mother dies in childbirth, and Victoire is raised by her grandmother. Later, Victoire is impregnated by a Marxist militant, Dernier Argilius, who abandons her after using her body for his pleasure. Each of these daughters described resembles her father more than her mother. The mother is erased in the visage of the child who becomes the mirror image, the mirroring image, of the father. Of the surprise of Victoire’s birth, Condé writes, “Plus que la mort soudaine d’Éliette, ce qui bouleversa la famille, ce fut l’apparence de la nouvelle-née. Une tête garnie d’épais cheveux de soie noire. Des prunelles d’eau claire. Une peau coloriée en rose. Tonnerre de sort ! Où Éliette avait-elle croisé le chemin d’un Blanc ?” 430 She looks exactly like her father who is reported to be a French soldier returned to Paris. Later when Jeanne, Condé’s mother, is born, she writes: Nous le savons, toute naissance est boucherie. L’enfant pesait 3 kilos 450 grammes. Dès le sortir du ventre de sa mère, elle fut belle, ma mère. Une peau de sapotille, une toison de cheveux plus bouclés que frisés ou véritablement crépus, du moins dans son premier âge, car cela devait changer à ses sept ou huit ans, le visage d’un ovale parfait, un front haut, des yeux en amande brillants, des pommettes hautes, une bouche bien dessinée. Elle était le portrait craché de son père. L’ayant essuyée dans un linge, Dodose la posa sur la poitrine de sa mère et elle s’empara goulument de son sein. Alors Victoire fondit en larmes. C’était la première fois. Elle n’avait pas pleuré lors de la mort de Caldonia. Elle n’avait pas pleuré lors de la fuite de Dernier. J’emploie ce mot, alors que nous ne saurons jamais avec certitude si Dernier était au courant de son ventre. […] Est-ce alors à travers ses sanglots qu’elle jura à sa fille de veiller sur elle, de mettre toutes les chances de son côté afin que jamais personne ne puisse la piétiner comme on la piétinait, elle ? L’instruction, l’instruction, promis juré, serait l’instrument de son émancipation. Sa fille serait instruite. Elle se sacrifierait pour cela. 431 430 Condé, Victoire, 20-21. See translation: “More than the sudden death of Eliette was the appearance of the newborn that shocked the family. A full head of thick black silky hair. Eyes the color of clear water. A skin tinted pink. For heaven’s sake! Where did Eliette cross paths with a white man?” (My Mother’s Mother, 6). 431 Condé, Victoire, 69-70. See translation: “ We know that any birth is a butchery. The child weighed six and a half pounds. As soon as she emerged from her mother’s womb, she was beautiful, my mother. A skin as soft as a sapodilla, a mass of hair more curly than frizzy or downright kinky, at least to begin with, for things were to change when she was seven or eight, a perfectly oval face, a high forehead, sparkling almond-shaped eyes, prominent 158 This is where the reader becomes confounded. Why would an author so dedicated to resuscitating the history of her grandmother, erase any trace of the mothers, leaving only the likeness of the fathers in their daughters’ faces? The absent father becomes hauntingly apparent in the face of his daughter, the daughter he never knew existed. Condé reiterates in her novel that such births were commonplace in the Antilles. Such a daughter was not extraordinary. Condé takes care to demonstrate that lineage in the Caribbean was never a simple matter in the wake of colonization and enslavement, but her movement here invites another doubl-take. These mothers were not the sole parents of their daughters, as their faces became the daily witness to a father long gone. Condé points here to the reader’s blindness to her face. 432 In desiring a novel of purely mothers and daughters, she forces her readers to stare into the father’s face. In a society built upon the concept of patriarchal dominion, any absence of the father— even an imposed or invented one—created an anxiety to attest to the father, the father’s presence, to make the father present. In making the father present, the mother is absented from the picture. The mother’s presence becomes the site of excess, the excessive absence of the father. In the Antilles, Condé writes that “Jusqu’à une date récente, nos hommes étaient pareils à des semeurs, ensemençant sans réfléchir le premier champ venu. La sociologie, la littérature sont remplies d’histoires illustrant ce machisme. La ‘condition de la femme antillaise’ est un incontournable cheekbones, and a well-defined mouth. She was the spitting image of her father. Once Dodose had wiped her with a cloth, she laid her on her mother’s chest, where the baby greedily guzzled on a breast. It was then that Victoire burst into tears. For the very first time. She hadn’t cried when Caldonia died. She hadn’t cried when Dernier ran away. I use this verb, “ran,” although we will never know for certain whether Dernier ever knew about her pregnancy. […] Was it then, through her tears, that she swore to her daughter she would watch over her and give her every possible chance in life so that nobody would ever trample on her daughter like they had trampled on her? Education, education, swear to God, would be her emancipation. Her daughter would be educated. She would sacrifice herself for that” (My Mother’s Mother, 46-47). 432 In Rhetoric of Blindness, Paul De Man writes that readers, writers, and critics are all blind to something but that this blindness reveals “insight” (Blindness, 109). 159 sujet d’interviews, de thèses, de mémoires.” 433 The father is typically written as absent, though this so-called “condition” became somewhat diminished around the time Condé’s mother was marrying her father. However, this absence is not merely that of the father. The mother is equally absent. After Victoire gives birth and lies feverish and dying, “Elle délirait, réclamant Caldonia et Éliette, sa mère, qu’elle n’avait jamais connue.” 434 Both mother and father, those forces conferring legitimacy and identity, are absent or ever retreating from the picture. Condé delivers the story of her mother’s mother only to show that such a mother never existed. 435 The origin of the story is always elusive. The reader is continually reminded that this history is a construction—the research and the gaps that Condé fills—but we are more often aware of what cannot be known than what can be. These retreating and advancing bodies are those of the sun and moon in Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal where each is necessary for the movement of earth and sea: “Sang! Sang! tout notre sang ému par le cœur mâle du soleil / ceux qui savent la féminité de la lune au corps d’huile.” 436 The sun is evidently male, the source of Antillean blood, but the femininity of the moon is only evident to those who know, to whom it is revealed by the male sun, which is the source of her light. When one is absent the other remains to testify to that absence. When the father is gone, the mother is the witness to his excessive presence in her daughter’s face. 433 Condé, Victoire, 116. See translation: “Up till very recently our men were like sowers, carelessly sowing the first field they came across. Sociology and literature are full of stories illustrating this machismo. ‘The condition of the Antillean woman’ has become an indispensable topic of interviews, dissertations, and theses” (My Mother’s Mother 83). 434 Condé, Victoire, 70. See translation: “She was delirious, calling for Caldonia and Eliette, her mother whom she had never known” (My Mother’s Mother 47). 435 For Negrón, this is the action of the mother, to retreat and remain: “No hay dos tiempos de la acción porque no es que la madre se haya ido y que luego se constate que no está, y vuelva a parecer. No. Es que mientras más ida, más lejos, más aquí está, pues siempre nos queda el carrete de hilo, y el hilo. La madre es el espacio de una ecuación de substitución” (animalidad, 213). 436 Aimé Césaire, Cahier, 48. See tranlstion: “Blood Blood! All our blood aroused by the male heart of the sun / those who know about the femininity of the moon’s oily body” (Notebook, 36). 160 According to Laurie Corbin, it is in the (grand)maternal presence evoked by the recreation of this history and in the recreation of the extravagant, Creole menus concocted by Victoire that we see “a bridge between the individual and surrounding society that represents what it is to live and die in the French Antilles, in the mixture of languages, ethnicities, races, and cultures that were the legacy of French colonization in these islands.” 437 However, Condé makes it clear that Victoire’s story is not a bridge. It is about an almost unbridgeable alienation that occurs between Victoire and her society and later between her and her daughter, based almost entirely upon the color of her skin. The lightness of her skin becomes a reproach against her, a reproach born through her own mother—Condé’s great grandmother—who was violated by a white man and whose daughter bears this stigma in lieu of her mother who is dead. Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother, that the slave is marked as “stranger” by the color of their skin and their location in the world. 438 Victoire’s skin becomes a sign of her non-belonging. Instead of opacity, it is a declaration imposed from without. Victoire is thus doubly strange, outcast from all communities, shamed. Condé writes at the beginning of the novel that her grandmother asks her why she would continue traveling when the real journey, that of her self- discovery, has yet to be taken. Corbin points out that Victoire is filled with scenes of voyages, each a painful undertaking. Victoire herself hates crossing the water, and when Condé’s mother 437 Corbin, “The Return,” 236. Like Corbin, Mosher sees in the grandmother, a space carved out for women within this French colonial society: “It is through and around the grandmother’s talent for cuisine that Condé represents and reconstructs Victoire’s identity within literary space. Cuisine and writing, the mother and the grandmother, and the three-tiered society of Guadeloupe are at the heart of Victoire, les saveurs et les mots. Although Victoire could not read or write a cookbook, she created a multitude of authentic Caribbean culinary masterpieces throughout her lifetime. Through her cuisine, Victoire contributed to the establishment of a culinary identity for the island of Guadeloupe and for the Caribbean archipelago. Symbolic of her genius, talent, and individuality, Victoire’s cuisine secured her a place in Guadeloupian society” (Mosher, “(Auto)Biographical,” 164). However, the “society” that Mosher uncritically proposes here is a white, creole society, the society of Victoire’s employers. It is a society of which both Condé and her mother were critical. Part of Condé’s reconstruction of her grandmother’s life is an acknowledgement of her double marginality within “society” and society. 438 Hartman writes, “The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one’s country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage” (Lose, 5). 161 travels to Paris, she feels excluded from French culture, rejected as not being truly French. 439 As grandmother, mother and daughter travel, they are each treated as foreigners. And as their travels take them further and further afield, each of these voyages is marked by the trauma of the Middle Passage: “Thus the voyage plays an ambivalent role in these writings—often a sign of freedom but sometimes a sign of the wrenching away of all freedoms. One wonders how many voyages made by the peoples of the Caribbean are shadowed by this history.” 440 Like language, the voyage is not as simple for those bodies marked by capture and colonialism. And so Condé renounces travel in order to travel inwards and know herself and know this history better. However, she makes it clear from the start that knowing is foreclosed. According to Glissant, certainty and knowing are oppressive forces, totalizing and circumscribing the possibilities of the object of study. Condé’s history of the grandmother is intentionally opaque and clouded. Even when details and sources are noted, they are obscured, their references clouded by aliases and fictions. Nicole Simek delves into the clues left surrounding the identity of Condé’s grandfather, attempting to pinpoint his real personage in the annals of Guadeloupian history, 441 but finally admits that perhaps it is not as important as it might at first appear. Condé seems to almost tempt her reader into this trap, into following these clues and searching the same 439 Corbin writes, “These autobiographical writings are in part an exploration of the ‘voyage’, whether interior (as is suggested in the grandmother’s imagined reproach) or exterior and they also address how these movements can shape identity as much as the place we come from. The notion of ‘voyage’ is thus opposed to the notion of ‘home’ with each representing a possibility of growth or stagnation” (“The Retun,” 237). 440 Corbin, “The Return,” 237. Bonnie Thomas describes the nomadism of Condé’s work, similar to the concept of the voyage and how it relates to a certain rejection of French colonialism’s constriction of her world: “Renowned Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé has been a practitioner of littérature-monde for decades. Despite her seminal role in French Caribbean literature she has never limited the subject of her writings, nor her physical inhabitation, to a single confined space […] The seeds of this nomadic approach are sown in childhood, evident in her autobiographical narratives […] in which Condé reflects on her Guadeloupean roots and her relationship to the wider world” (“Practitioner,” 78). 441 Simek speculates, “The ambiguity that remains in this sly portrait of Condé’s grandfather—for we cannot know if Argilius is Légitimus, or if both simply stand in for another (or perhaps multiple others fictionally condensed into one) whose traits they share—also throws into question the value of knowing the specific identity of the progenitor” (Simek, Hunger, 161). 162 archives and genealogies she intimates, but the joke is not who is the grandfather, but that we should even care enough to ask the question. Just as Victoire’s skin, straight hair, and light eyes point to an elusive mystery, Condé’s blending of historical figures in the character of Dernier Argilius is only a smoke screen. 442 The mystery of paternal relation is a commentary upon the often-cited absence of the black father in former slave societies where family separation and rape of the black woman by the white master is a constant specter. 443 She tempts us into following this train of the father, when it is the maternal relation that is most salient. Instead of a search for paternity, Condé constructs an uncertain maternal genealogy. Marta Asunción Alonso Moreno argues that Condé performs the construction of a maternal genealogy with the grandmother as the cornerstone. 444 This maternal genealogy, according to Alonso Moreno, is an escape from the exile and orphan-hood created by male patriarchal systems. The maternal genealogy that Condé constructs is a deviance from paternal systems, and by winking slyly at the paternal absence, the flight of the father from the familial scene, she unhinges the order in which the maternal genealogy would serve to reify the primacy of 442 Simek writes, “The irony of disguise and indirection brings together multiple lines of thought in one character, and allows her to emphasize the value to collective history of events whose causes cannot be reduced to the idiosyncrasies of a single political figure” (Simek, Hunger, 161). 443 Many writers today, such as Gerty Dambury, are fighting against the repetition and insistence upon this theme of the absent father, addressing the ways in which this stereotype continues to enact violence upon the family and disempowers black men and families in former slave societies. 444 Alonso Moreno explains that “La genealogía intelectual femenina, por lo tanto, tiene su base afectiva en la familia como ‘matronado’ y en la madre como piedra angular. Al decir ‘madre’, entiéndase también ‘abuela, bisabuela materna, hijas’: toda antepasada, en fin, reducida u olvidada por causa del exilio forzado de la mujer a la familia y, en consecuencia, la genealogía masculina del padre-marido […] entra en juego el sentimiento de orfandad intelectual femenina y de rebeldía frente a la exclusividad de la genealogía masculina familiar que les ha sido legada” (“Memoria,” 13). Sarah Mosher writes that between the story and the dedication to the novel, Condé constructs a complex maternal and feminine genealogy or filiation: “In re-creating her grandmother’s past within literary space, Condé traces her family heritage through five generations of Guadeloupian women, beginning with a discussion of her great-great-grandmother, Caldonia, born not long after the final abolition of slavery in 1848. The novel references two additional generations of women on the dedication page, which reads ‘A mes trois filles et mes deux petites-filles.’ This dedication establishes a succession of past, present, and future female lives and voices within the literary space of the text […] she establishes an authentic Caribbean textual space in which the biographical, the autobiographical, the culinary, and the literary collaborate and coexist” (Mosher, “(Auto)Biographical,” 153). 163 genealogy. Instead of an affirmation of maternal genealogies as a solution to the problem of patriarchy, Condé’s maternal filiations are troubled and fractured. The line she traces back to her grandmother is broken and falsified, and intentionally so. This mother arrives upon the scene of Condé’s writing, giving to her a new history, one that is both the occlusion and the affirmation of a redemptive history through a maternal line. It is her personal history, national history, and transnational history, all the while dispensing with a unifying and ordering history. 445 Her filiation is instead disordered, opaque, and confused. It is speculative and imaginative, willfully filling in the gaps with her own desire. Condé’s oblique histories of the family and the Antilles and the Antilles as family converge upon the question of origins and the past that most confounds such thinkers of Antillean masculinity as Fanon. She looks directly into the face of her mother’s pain, the pain of generations and asks the questions that for Fanon are so shameful. Vergès argues that for Fanon the origin of the black man is founded in the rape of the black mother by the white master that results in the birth of the Antillean people. 446 It is for this reason that he “re-created his family, reinvented his filiation, and situated his symbolic ancestry in Algeria. The Creole filiation, a site of anxiety and ambivalence, was displaced, and a revolutionary filiation took its place; the heroic fighters of the national struggle became his fathers and brothers. But upon his disavowal he created a theory of masculinity.” 447 Fanon focuses his attention on the relation of the black, male subject to the white world, whether it is the white man or woman who “fixes” him and deprives 445 Cixous writes, “elle arrive, vivante, nous sommes au commencement d’une nouvelle histoire, ou plutôt d’un devenir à plusieurs histories se traversant les unes les autres. En tant que sujet à l’historie, la femme se passe toujours simultanément en plusieurs lieux. Elle dé-pense l’histoire unifiante, ordonnatrice, qui homogénéise et canalise les forces et ramène les contradictions dans la pratique d’un seul champ de bataille. En la femme se recoupent l’histoire de toutes les femmes, son histoire personnelle, l’histoire nationale et internationale" (Le Rire, 49). 446 See also Condé’s “Stealers” for the black man’s search for the phallic power of which he is deprived by colonialism and the rape of the black mother (162). 447 Vergès, “Disavowal,” 579-80. 164 him of his humanity. For him the black woman of the Antilles is almost non-existent, non-black. He writes “Those who grant us our findings on the psychosexuality of the white woman may well ask us what we have to say about the black woman. We know nothing about her.” 448 This black woman whom Fanon must deny is precisely the woman whom Condé resuscitates, to whom she attributes voice and writing, even if that writing comes through food rather than words. For Condé, cooking functions as Victoire’s emancipated language. Cooking is a safe space where she exists, almost unseen to the reader, and where she is no longer hampered by the colonial legacy of Creole and French, a language to which she does not have access. Fanon explains that the Antillean self becomes divided between the language of his homeland and the French language which would purportedly liberate him from his provinciality. 449 Language is the place where the Antillean defines himself. Fanon writes that language is “being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.” 450 Language is a space of relationality where the Antillean man positions himself in “relation to the civilizing language” and to other Antilleans as well as the Parisian of the metropole. 451 It is also a space of politics, where the grinding of disparate languages against each-other creates friction. Fanon describes the Antillean man who travels to Paris as commanding an image of an elevated self. Similarly, his 448 Fanon, Masks, 157. Fanon also writes in Black Skin, White Masks about the difference between the rape of the black mother and the black man who sleeps with the white woman: “Since he is the master and quite simply the male, the white man can afford the luxury of sleeping with many women. This is true in every country, and especially in the colonies. But relations between a white woman and a black man automatically become a romantic affair. It is a gift and not a rape” (Masks, footnotes, 28). 449 Gwen Bergner writes that Fanon utilizes psychoanalysis to structure his study in which sexual difference is no longer the oppositional characteristic but rather race defines the “fundamental differences that constitute subjectivity. [Fanon] asks how sexuality and language, the primary constituents of the symbolic, are inflected by race, as well as how they construct categories of race” (“Who,” 76). See also Vergés, “Disavowal,” 594; and Bhabha, Location, 50. 450 Fanon, Masks, 1. 451 Fanon, Masks, 2. 165 language, if it is pure French, raises him above the level of his fellow Antilleans. Fanon writes, “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being…there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.” 452 For Condé, the grandmother’s distance from language results in distance from her daughter. When Victoire’s daughter and Condé’s mother, Jeanne, begins to attend the social and political club of the Grands Nègres, Jeanne longs to present her mother as the “right kind” of mother. However, the French language, and therefore belonging within this club, eludes Victoire: “Assise sur le bord de sa chaise Hepplewhite, elle demeurait muette à travers toutes les conversations parce que incapable de manier le français, cette arme clé sans laquelle les portes de la civilisation demeurent closes.” 453 Language is a weapon, employed first by the colonizer to subjugate the colonized, and later by the colonized to elevate themselves to the level of the colonizer. However, Condé rejects this simple strategy. Instead, she writes in French, Creole, and food not to legitimize them, but to delegitimize the concept of Language. Another writer of the French Caribbean, Gisèle Pineau, makes a similar statement in her semi-autobiographical novel, L’Exil selon Julia (1996). She, like Fanon, describes a generation of Antilleans who seek out French and identify a societal jealousy among their fellow countrymen as they work to appropriate the French language. 454 Fanon’s study of language becomes the voice of Pineau’s parents who steered her away from Creole when she was a child. However, language for this subsequent generation of Antilleans, especially for the girls, is appropriated in a very different manner. Instead of rejecting the Creole of their parents, or 452 Fanon, Masks, 2. 453 Condé, Victoire, 165. See translation: “Sitting on the edge of her Hepplewhite chair, she didn’t say a word throughout all the conversations because she was incapable of handling French, that weapon without which all the doors of civilization remain closed” (My Mother’s Mother, 122). 454 Pineau, L’Exil, 16. 166 grandparents, Creole becomes something to be desired. 455 Pineau describes the narrator and her siblings in their struggles to lose their rolled R’s and Parisian accent. Their grandmother is astounded to see that while her children reject her Creole, her grandchildren desperately attempt to own this foreign language as a way of gaining admittance into the black world from which they have been excluded in their attempt to enter into whiteness. 456 Condé writes of this shift: “the major contribution of this new generation of writers living in exile is to eliminate the opposition between ‘colonial language’ and ‘mother tongue.’ Up to recent years, the essentialism of language, like the essentialism of Race, was a widely held belief.” 457 For Condé and Pineau, language does necessitate the kind of rift that takes place in Fanon’s text. Where he envisions the black man laboring under the desire for whiteness, Pineau sees a reversal of this relation to the language of the colonizer. Her characters attempt to infiltrate the society from which their parents had separated them. Fanon’s productive rift, the place where colonized and colonial language comes into conflict, is inverted in Pineau’s formulation of the Antillean’s relation to her world. Condé’s Victoire writes in food because she never learned to write, which Condé laments, as literacy was the key to emancipation. She first questions why Victoire’s lover, Dernier Argilius, the apparent father of her daughter, and a proxy for other revolutionary men, failed to recognize in her the plight of the people he championed, that while advocating for equality and education, he never sought to help Victoire gain access to these same liberatory ideals. After his desertion, Condé blames the employers who never paid Victoire and who claimed to love her, but who denied her the education that they, as philanthropists, provided so 455 Veldwachter, “An Interview,” 181. 456 Pineau, L’Exil, 158-159. 457 Condé, “O Brave,” 5. 167 graciously to others. Access to the French language became a kind of talisman within Caribbean culture. Glissant describes how to possess the “universal” language was to free oneself from the insularity of speaking a dialect. 458 To be able to handle the language of the métropole without slipping into Creole was seen as the pathway to self-realization. Paris, the métropole, was considered the place of enlightenment, where one met the world fully and for the first time. 459 Condé describes her mother’s discovery of “la <<métropole>>. Je pense que la France, Paris furent véritablement ses grands amours.” 460 Her mother’s great love, her greatest desire, was access to the métropole, belonging within its supposed universality. Condé depicts how her mother’s correct use of French and her grandmother’s ignorance of the French language limited them both as they sought to place themselves within their society. Her novel engages French language and culture as a metaphorical mother, as in “mother land” or “mother tongue,” but also as a maternality that unhinges the exclusionary structures of belonging and essentialism. For Bracha Ettinger the “matrix” is the “original register,” or the womb, in which one becomes subjectified through language. 461 Language as mother tongue 462 is being played with throughout Condé’s novel as she switches between French and Creole. Victoire, the 458 Glissant that “Either you speak a language that is ‘universal,’ or on its way to being so, and participate in the life of the world; or else you retreat into your particular idiom—quite unfit for sharing—in which case you cut yourself off from the world to wallow alone and sterile in your so-called identity” (Poetics, 103). 459 Fanon writes that the “black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod […] After a fairly long stay in the métropole, many Antilleans return home to be deified” (Masks, 2-3). James also demonstrates the immense weight that French culture carried in the Antilles, even as the Antilleans fought to free themselves from France. In his novel La Lézarde, Glissant describes how the student militants “read everything that came from the world outside. Having learnt to open their eyes to the unimaginable poverty of this land (for they had hardly felt themselves such poverty), they came to believe that true life is in the realm of the spirit where solutions can be found for the essential problems of hunger and happiness” (23). 460 Condé, Victoire, 218. See translation: “the métropole. I do believe that France and Paris were truly the loves of her life” (My Mother’s Mother, 165). 461 Ettinger writes, “The term ‘matrix’ is already in use with the meaning ‘original register’ (Larousse). I wish to infuse it with new meaning by restoring to it its ancient feminine/maternal etymology—from the Latin for uterus, womb” (Matrixial, 64). 462 The mother tongue, Andrew Parker writes, “the mother (dis)-appears in turn as an inassimilable body, a constitutive absences, and a foreign native tongue” (The Theorist’s Mother, xii). 168 grandmother, rarely speaks. When she does, it is in Creole, but more often she cries or stares voiceless and inscrutable into the face of her interlocutor. 463 Fred Moten writes that the cry is a rupture from within the language of the colonizer, from within the history of slavery. 464 Condé does not embrace either French or Creole as the revolutionary language, the emancipatory ideal, but rather exhibits the undecidable nature of both, how they were each mobilized to free and to enslave. Her work seeks to confound rather than elucidate. 465 Simek argues for empathy as a structuring theory within Condé’s work: “If restricting history to the knowable, to available documentation, and insisting on the opacity of the unknowable represents one way to be faithful to the real, empathetic imagination represents another, a means for doing some justice to that which exceeds the known or which the known eclipses. Victoire’s juxtapositions suggest that each serves as a complement to, and check on, the other, a joining that produces not synthesis, but vacillating movement and multiplication.” 466 This empathetic reading is perhaps a way of filling in gaps in the record, finding a way of filling in the absences left by a colonial order that was only capable of seeing and hearing certain lives. While irretrievable gaps lie in the records surrounding this obscure woman, Condé’s empathic reading of the historical record, is able to see and hear more than the colonial bureaucracy was able to. My use of the term “empathy” or empathic reading is distinct from the definition sustained by Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection. Hartman proposes that empathy is the 463 Consider Jacques Rancière’s distinction between noise and speech, the grunting of a complaint and the voice of discourse. 464 See Moten “Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture. Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song. Frenzy cutting scream with silence, movement gesture. The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic” (In the Break, 39). See also Barbara Webb, Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction, 23. 465 See Njeri Githire “Drawing on Glissant’s concept of opacity—in other words, an active strategy of resistance that fights ‘against transparency everywhere’—the adoption by Caribbean/Indian Ocean writers of an opacity that resists the transparency of consumable meaning in their writing therefore aims at resisting the literary cannibalism enacted by metropolitan readers enamored of exotic texts […] Opacity, therefore, translates into resistance to assimilation into frameworks of recognition” (Cannibal Writes, 178). 466 Simek, Hunger, 160. 169 appropriation of the pain of another with an element of savoring of that pain. I would argue that her definition is closer to the “pity” expressed in W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Strivings of the Negro People” in which he states “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” 467 This conception of “pity” is also very similar to the “fixation” that Fanon describes. While in Fanon’s example the instant of fixation occurred in a child’s astonished exclamation, there is also a fixation that happens in the pitying gaze of the Other, in their sympathy. Rather than fixation and sympathy, the appropriation of the suffering and feelings of the other, my reading of empathy is closer to the kind of relationality expressed by Glissant, Ettinger, and Levinas. It is an opaque and undefinable opening towards the Other, the “fragilization” 468 of the self’s borders to the Other, a radical response and encounter with the Other’s demand upon me. Condé’s genealogies are not fixating nor are they totalizing. She does not use her grandmother’s suffering to suture her present pain. Rather, the reading she makes of these records and her presentation of the text is generous and exuberantly open, offering embrace in a vulnerable and maternal openness without being crushing or oppressive of that which escapes the record or the Other’s opacity. Condé’s research ironically plays with the kind of facticity implied in such a project. Much of this text is concerned with documentation of the disparate sources that undergird her retelling of her grandmother’s life, and yet how many of these are verifiable? How many of these stand up to the expectations placed on scholars by the Academe? In every source cited in the reconstruction of her grandmother’s biography, Condé doubles back and casts doubt. Simek writes: “Victoire also ironizes the thirst for documentation that Condé seems not only to 467 Du Bois, “Strivings,” 194. 468 Ettinger, “Copoeisis,” 704. 170 acknowledge but also to share, throwing into question its function in the text.” 469 She argues that the propelling force of the text is Condé’s desire to solve the paternal mystery: who was her grandfather? The novel is then converted from a story of women’s genealogies to yet another Caribbean search for legitimation through the Name of the Father. 470 She then details the clues placed throughout the text and calls them a “playful, oblique paternity claim.” 471 This is Condé’s act of misdirection. Just as Condé makes a paternity claim, she delegitimizes it and breaks with the paternal order. Simek writes that this is done to function as a critique of the Great Men of history who publicly champion the downtrodden, but leave scores of ruined and exploited women in their wake. 472 Her cry, the cry of her grandmother, is also wrought in laughter— though often bitter—and irony. These function as strategies for a feminist text. In Rosario Ferré’s Sitio a Eros, Ferré theorizes on irony and ire, writing that the venom of these strategies become a feminist and feminine writing that burns through paternal filiation: “El veneno se extiende por la expresión estética como un aceite conflagratorio y mortal: a cada trago recibimos un golpe y cada golpe vale por cien, por los que recibieron nuestras madres, nuestras abuelas, nuestras bisabuelas.” 473 For Cixous, as well, laughter and a feminine resistance are born together in the figure of the Medusa who is only threatening to the male gaze that dreads to look upon her, even though “Il suffit qu’on regarde la Méduse en face pour la voir : et elle n’est pas mortelle. Elle est 469 Simek, Hunger, 160. 470 In his analysis of the theory of “abjection” and paternal filiation and naming by the father as the supreme path to legitimate Naming, Scott writes “Abjection establishes itself in the development of subject-object relations: the subject is produced by relation with objects, as the two mutually bring one another into being. Abjection is experienced in the realm where the development of object relations is belayed or strays—thus preventing, even if only transiently, the subject from making its ‘normal’ appearance. Abjection is part of the process of becoming a subject—which is to say it is part of the process of encountering language (the Name of the Father)” (Extravagant, 15). 471 Simek, Hunger, 161. 472 Cixous critiques these “great men,” calling for women’s writing and asking who it is that has barred them from writing: “Et pourquoi n’écris-tu pas ? Écris ! L’écriture est pour toi, tu es pour toi, ton corps est à toi, prends-le. Je sais pourquoi tu n’as pas écrit […] Parce que l’écriture c’est à la fois le trop haut, le trop grand pour toi, c’est réservé aux grands, c’est-à-dire aux ‘grands hommes’” (Le Rire, 39). 473 Ferré, Sitio, 99. 171 belle et elle rit.” 474 Cixous is writing from exile within French colonial culture, and Ferré suffers her own colonial exile as a Puerto Rican author. Laughter and irony thus function as a feminine strategy, but also as a response to the colonial order. This response and ironizing of the colonial text has been enunciated by writers of postcolonial theory and literature as a cannibalizing of colonial forms. We see this in such works as the Manifesto Antropófago by the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade in 1928. 475 It also becomes an important motif and strategy of resistance for Suzanne Césaire. In his introduction to the translation of Suzanne Césaire’s body of work, Keith Walker explains her mobilization of anthropophagi: “To be cannibal implies a selective eating of the Other […] It was also an expropriation and redeployment of the image of cannibal imposed by Europe upon the Americas. As an attitude, a cannibalist positionality expressed a hunger for originality, emancipation, economic empowerment, and justice through a strategic and selective assimilation of the strengths of Afro-Euro-American values and cultures.” 476 Suzanne Césaire’s husband, Aimé, similarly draws upon this imposition of the cannibal upon the Americas in his rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This play has been rewritten and reimagined across numerous Latin American literary traditions. Césaire’s Une tempête is both a rejection of the colonizer’s naming and framing of the Caribbean while it also functions as a cannibal practice. In one of the first interactions between the European, Prospero, and Caliban, son of the witch queen Sycorax, Caliban rejects the name that the colonizer has given him: Caliban : Si tu veux, je te dis que désormais je ne répondrai plus au nom de Caliban […] Eh bien, y a que Caliban n’est pas mon nom. C’est simple ! […] 474 Cixous, Le Rire, 54. 475 Daniel Silva argues that de Andrade’s concept of cannibalism “surpasses the scope of the nation in order to flesh out the parameters of what I argue to be a decolonial site of consumption from which delinking can take place. While anthropophagic consumption itself can potentially destabilize Western meaning, I trace out these works’ call for a destabilized site of consumption that does not foreclose the emergence of other sites” (Anti-Empire, 25). 476 Walker, Camouflage, x-xi. 172 Prospero : Diable ! On devient susceptible ! Alors propose…Il faut bien que je t’appelle ! Ce sera comment ? Cannibale t’irait bien, mais je suis sûr que tu n’en voudras pas ! […] Caliban : Apelle-moi X. Ça vaudra mieux. Comme qui dirait l’homme sans nom. Plus exactement, l’homme dont on a volé le nom. Tu parles d’histoire. Eh bien ça, c’est de l’histoire, et fameuse ! Chaque fois que tu m’appeleras, ça me rappellera la fait fondamental, que tu m’as tout volé et justqu’à mon identité ! Uhuru ! 477 He explains to the European man, an outsider stranded and yet attempting to appropriate himself of the island’s power, that the name Caliban is not his own, and neither is “cannibal.” In fact, he has no name because his proper name has been wrested from him by the history of the European’s appearance. Aimé Césaire recasts these characters, cannibalizing them in the same movement that he rejects the cannibal figuration of the Americas and Africa. This cannibal figure speaks to more than just European exoticism or the subversive re- deployment of this perspective. For Suzanne Césaire it is also a response to hunger, the hunger for freedom and expression. She writes of a vibrant and burning island in which her friends hunger: “ils voient s’aviver les flammes tropicales non plus aux balisiers, aux gerberas, aux hibiscus, aux bougainvilliers, aux flamboyants, amis aux faims, aux peurs, aux haines, à la férocité qui brulent dans les creux des mornes. C’est ainsi que l’incendie de la Caraïbe souffle ses vapeurs silencieuses, aveuglantes pour les seuls yeux qui savent voir.” 478 Hunger and the feeding of friends announce themselves in these texts as a political action. This fire upon the island becomes a kind of cooking fire, the flames that feed the longing of their community. 477 Aimé Césaire, Une tempête, 28. See translation: “Caliban: Put it this way: I’m telling you that from now on I won’t answer to the name Caliban […] Well, because Caliban isn’t my name. It’s as simple as that. / Prospero: My, aren’t we getting sensitive! All right, suggest something else…I’ve got to call you something. What will it be? Cannibal would suit you, but I’m sure you wouldn’t like that / Caliban: Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen. You talk about history…well, that’s history, and everyone knows it! Every time you summon me it reminds me of a basic fact, the fact that you’ve stolen everything from me, even my identity! Uhuru!” (A Tempest, translation by Richard Miller, 20). 478 Suzanne Césaire, “Le grand,” 94. See translation: “they see tropical flames kindled no longer in the heliconia, in the gerberas, in the hibiscus, in the bougainvilleas, in the flame trees, but instead in the hungers, and in the fears, in the hatreds, in the ferocity, that burn in the hollows of the mountains. It is thus that the Caribbean conflagration blows its silent fumes, blinding for the only eyes that know how to see” ” (translation by Keith L. Walker, 45). 173 Moudileno explains that the figure of food in literature is often tied to desire, while for Condé it is a means of creatively exploring the contradictions of the political. 479 Condé’s grandmother’s cooking is a radically compassionate and creative action. The desiring effect of the meal is both supported and undermined in the explicit sensuality of these meals and of the political scenes in which they enter. This becomes clearest in the scenes in which Victoire is denied cooking by her own daughter who fears the ridicule of her bourgeois, revolutionary friends. She wants to deny her mother’s past work as a domestic servant, even though this work was where she established her own art and political speech. Food becomes then a site for the desire of and for the Other just as it frustrates and occludes this desire. The fleshiness of the white Creole employers is juxtaposed against Jeanne’s anorexia, her utter refusal to eat what her mother has prepared in what she sees as the shameful vestiges of slavery. She rejects her mother’s gift, the creative joy of cooking and the only language in which her mother can express her love for her daughter. This denial of sustenance becomes also a denial of the black mother and of her own flesh. It is not, however, pure abjection of the mother, as Alexander Weheliye explains in Habeas Viscus, where he describes the play of hunger and enfleshment in the interstices of slavery and emancipation. In describing the laws by which some are denied existence as Man, and by which the law establishes codes for the reading of bodies according to exclusion and denial, Weheliye writes: the hieroglyphics of the flesh in which marking, encampment, branding, whipping, imprisonment, denial of nourishment, life, and death concoct a continuum. To properly digest ‘what all this means for modern civilization,’ then, is to acknowledge how the 479 Moudileno writes, “L’on verra que si la présence de la gastronomie paraît imperceptible, c’est que le discours sur le culinaire s’articule presque uniquement sur le mode du désir, de l’inaccompli ou du rêve. À partir du constat de cette présence spectrale de l’expérience gastronomie, je voudrais en souligner les implications par rapport aux impératifs dominats des trajectoires mises en scène, dont l’engagement politique, communautaire et/ou intellectuel des personnages. Dans les topographies souvent imprévisibles où Condé projette ses personnages, le rapport à la nourriture est beaucoup plus déterminant qu’il n’y paraît. C’est peut-être dans ce rapport, paradoxalement, que s’énoncent le plus distinctement les idéaux, les désillusions, les contradictions des personnages” (“La gastronomie,” 422). 174 ether of the flesh surrounds us as a potentiality in every and all things, not just in states or spaces of exception. Partaking of the flesh, albeit the habeas viscus kind rather than the pure abjection varietal, tenders flavors and textures found in lives of imprisoned freedom, desires for survival, and viscous dreams of life that awaken future anterior humanities, which exceed Man’s inesculent culinary laws. 480 Weheliye describes the uncertain limitations of freedom and the indeterminate borders between free and un-free. Condé plays actively with this uncertainty, wondering always at the state in which Victoire lived, whether she chose or enjoyed the life she lived, especially with the Walbergs, where she was both cook and concubine to Monsieur Boniface Walberg. Victoire then goes from living in the internment of the Walberg’s home, where she exists in a state of both sexual and manual servitude—nominally free and yet never paid a wage—to living in her daughter’s home where she is equally denied. Victoire’s cooking exists in this dreamed-of beyond law that Weheliye proclaims, the “viscous dreams of life.” Weheliye asks: “How do we describe the sweetness that reclines in the hunger for survival? How is the craving for life sweetened by the sugary textures, smells, and tastes of freedom? What tastes does ‘the joy of being human’ in and beyond ‘a land of freedom’ proffer? Will every cook finally be able to govern once we leave Man by the wayside?” 481 Victoire’s cooking is not law, but the “relationality of flesh.” Condé’s mother feels she must reject the grandmother in an attempt to realize the bourgeois and liberal image of the Antillean Revolutionary that was popular during this period. 482 Her work is in many ways a response to the masculinist trajectory plotted by twentieth- century, postcolonial theory. At the same time, however, she—like Gerty Dambury and many other scholars of the Antilles, gender, and queer theory—casts doubt upon the bulk of literature 480 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 124. 481 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 113-114. 482 Condé writes that the Antillean woman has rid herself of heroes and myths (“Stealers,” 163). 175 written as a recuperation of the woman’s story and woman’s suffering as an escape or resolution of this inequality. Condé specifically mocks the fixation of North American academics upon the “plight of the Antillean woman.” What is interesting, is that instead of positing this history of women as the recuperation of lost voices or witnessing of the oppressed, Victoire actively and self-consciously engages in the history creation and fictive generation of filiations in the Caribbean. In these narratives it is often the proclamation of male filiation that announces an emancipatory legacy, his inheritance to pass down to his sons a nation released from the grip of fixation and alienation. The maternal in these myths of filiation steps forth to complicate this decidedly paternal portrait of the nation/people, a portrait that must deny the tropes of emasculating slavery and colonialism. 483 Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia parallels and precedes Condé’s tracing of a maternal genealogy beginning with the author’s grandmother and foregrounding an articulation of the French Antillean experience as narrated by Frantz Fanon, but from the feminine perspective. Through her novel, the reader is re-introduced to the Black, Antillean woman who is forced to endure erasure in the work of Fanon. Her novel draws upon of the phantoms that haunt Fanon and that he sublimates in his own work. Pineau’s text takes up these same questions of sexuality, sexual difference, shame, and slavery, but unlike Fanon, she does not deny the face of the Black woman. 484 In fact, she frees Fanon’s work to acknowledge the black woman he fears and claims 483 According to Bhabha, there is an invisible eye, a curse, a voyeur in black, women’s writing: “these partial eyes bear witness to a woman’s writing of the postcolonial condition. Their circulation and repetition frustrate both the voyeuristic desire for the fixity of sexual difference and the fetishistic desire for racist stereotypes. The gaze of the evil eye alienates both the narratorial I of the slave and the surveillant eye of the master” (Location, 53). 484 Just as Pineau finds renewed access to language through Fanon’s work, so too she is able to reinvent female sexuality along the lines of the problematic and troubling portrait painted by Fanon’s psychoanalysis. Instead of moving within the spectrum of Freud’s “What does woman want?,” Fanon poses a new question: “What does man want? What does the black man want?” (Masks, xii). By framing his study in this way, Fanon excludes feminine sexuality. He certainly writes about women’s desires as he understands them, but women’s subjectivity is effaced. Bergner writes that “this intertextual shift from Freud to Fanon reveals black women’s double oppression or exclusion” (“Who,” 78). Also see Bergner (“Who,” 79) for women as “lack” in feminist film theory. Also see 176 not to know. Pineau’s novel treats the story of a young girl and her grandmother, both transported from their native Guadeloupe to Paris by the narrator’s father. She states that for many women, France was seen as a land of liberation, a place to escape the “paternal yoke.” 485 Condé points out that approximately half of the population of the French Antilles lives abroad, many experiencing the kind of alienating treatment described by both Fanon and Pineau, one which both elevates and casts down those who venture beyond their island homes. 486 Fanon writes that “The black man who has lived in France for a certain time returns home radically transformed.” 487 This man gains something by going to France, by excising the Antilles from his- self. However, of the black woman studying in France, Fanon remarks, “I admit I am worried because in a few years’ time this Martinican woman will graduate and return home to the French Antilles to teach. It is not hard to guess what will come from that.” 488 Victoire’s daughter, Jeanne, follows a similar trajectory. Fanon claims that this woman’s search for admittance into bourgeois, French society leads to an inevitable sense of inferiority, but the protagonists of Pineau’s novel do not aspire to access whiteness or Frenchness, but rather to be allowed access to their own subjectivity and a nostalgic identification, just as Fanon desires to forge a path for the Black man into a sane sense of Black identification away from the alienating gaze of the white man. 489 While Fanon describes the Antillean longing to “see Paris and die,” 490 Pineau’s characters present a different reaction to Parisian life. They are rejected and depressed, longing Vergès (“Disavowal,” 580) for Fanon’s reading of Lacan’s mirror stage in relation to sexuality and the colonial relation. 485 Pineau, L’Exil, 6. 486 Condé, “Order,” 160. 487 Fanon, Masks, 2-3. 488 Fanon, Masks, 30. 489 Fanon, Masks, 41. 490 Fanon, Masks, 3. 177 to return home and recover the traces of who they were and what it means to be Antillean. Of her own experience in Paris, Pineau states in an interview: “I grew up in a very racist suburb. Racism to which I was very sensitive…I held it against my parents for a very long time that they had made a ‘Negropolitan’ of me. Especially when I came back to the Antilles, as an adolescent, I didn’t understand why you could leave your country and inflict that on your children. It is then, an exile by inheritance. I was born in Paris. I am Parisian. But I was in exile with my grandmother. Every day she prayed to return to Guadeloupe.” 491 The young protagonist of her novel, though born in Guadeloupe, experiences an almost identical racism. Pineau expands upon this lived “experience of the street,” which Homi Bhabha identifies as an aggressing figure in Fanon’s study of the black, male subject. 492 Fanon writes that a black child in the Antilles without any contact with the white world will grow up healthy and sane, but the moment that connection is formed, the black child experiences a rupture, a shattering of this plenitudinous self. 493 Bhabha points out that this fracturing of the subject occurs in both instances, for the white subject and for the black subject. It is a moment where the self is confronted by the Other in a “paranoic identification” where this other is seen as something to be conquered, feared, and appropriated. 494 This fear comes into play throughout Pineau’s text, revealing the ways she takes up these Fanonian threads to weave the feminine story he cannot. The island home is a complicated and complicating site to think family and origin, to think desire and nostalgia, but because of this it acts more powerfully upon the way we understand these concepts. James presents the perspective of the European planter’s desire for and repulsion towards what they saw as the primal beauty of the island, stating: “The traveler 491 Veldwachter, “An Interview,” 182. 492 Bhabha, Location, 41. 493 Fanon, Masks, 127. 494 Bhabha, Location, 61. 178 from Europe was enchanted at his first glimpse of this paradise, in which the ordered beauty of agriculture and the prodigality of Nature competed equally for his surprise and admiration. But it was monotonous […] which could develop into active dislike.” 495 According to Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s fictional account of the Haitian Revolution, what differentiates Latin America from Europe is that it is essentially marvelous, while Europe only plays at being marvelous. He argues that in Latin America the clash of cultures resulting from conquest is the source of an indomitable miraculousness that becomes the region’s defining trait. 496 For James, the miraculous and overwhelming beauty of the jungle and the island are historical, just as the African was already historical and the Caribe was already historical. The body of the Black man/woman/mother is already excessively rooted in the history of the Middle Passage. Africa poses for the nostalgic version of history a dreamed-of escape from this conscription of the black body. For Scott, the black body is articulated as black because of this history, linking blackness to abjection and the history of slavery. For many twentieth-century thinkers of the post-colonial and Blackness in the Caribbean, Africa existed as an idealized homeland and subjectification anterior to the trauma of slavery. As such, these stories of home tend to reflect the desire for an essence or a belonging that was lost. They strive to regain and reconstruct something that slipped away, the myth of a past that can be reconquered and reclaimed in an apocalyptic future. It is an apocalyptic desire, but it is also an originary and 495 James, Black Jacobins, 28. Similarly, in a talk delivered at Emory University on November 5, 2011 “Why Do Some Love Islands? Why Don’t Others?”, Mara Negrón discusses the abjection of the island or the “absence of world” in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. She states that the island in its sovereignty “is not simply beautiful, it is excessively beautiful. It is a beauty that seizes us an unreal. It reveals itself eternal, the island was beautiful before and after its colonization; it is a beauty that ends up being almost a-historical” (“Why Do Some Love Islands?”, 5). 496 In his prologue to El reino de este mundo, Carpentier writes: “todo resulta maravilloso en una historia imposible de situar en Europa, y que es tan real, sin embargo, como cualquier suceso ejemplar de los consignados, para pedagógica edificación, en los manuales escolares. ¿Pero qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real-maravilloso?” (26). Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría states in Myth and Archive that Carpentier “dismantles” the belief in the ability to identify the Caribbean or the jungle as an a-historical or pre-historical place, but rather states that history and language were always already present (Myth and Archive, 4). 179 utopian desire. 497 Aimé Césaire wrote in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: “Il faut bien commencer. / Commencer quoi ? / La seule chose au monde qu’il vaille la peine de commencer : / La Fin du monde parbleu.” 498 He calls for his fellow Martiniqueans to strive for a beginning that is also an end, a death that is birth. Origin and dénouement overlap and kiss. This story of nostalgia is not unique to the Antilles, but there is something to be explored in these islands. Their linguistic and spatial differences have led many to rend the fabric that binds them, to sunder them apart, but slowly we begin to see the stories that link them. 499 There is a nostalgic desire for identification with home, an essential Caribbean or an essential Africa, an originary and apocalyptic essence that is an Other Self, but this Other Caribbean eludes identification. It is the product of a nostalgic desire for an origin one cannot claim, upon which one cannot lay hands, it is always in the process of becoming, imminent and yet infinitely distant. 500 In Aimé Césaire’s Cahier, the poet becomes the tree and the land of origin: “A force de regarder les arbres je suis devenu un arbre et mes longs pieds d’arbre ont creusé dans le sol de larges sacs à venin de hautes villes d’ossements à force de penser au Congo / je suis devenu un Congo bruissant de forêts et de fleuves / où le fouet claque comme un grand étendard.” 501 Aimé Césaire imagines himself as the embodiment of these dreamt-of roots. He is bound to the earth that is the 497 Gilroy writes, “In the period after slavery, the memory of the slave experience is itself recalled and used as an additional, supplementary instrument with which to construct a distinct interpretation of modernity. Whether or not these memories invoke the remembrance of a terror which has moved beyond the grasp of ideal, grammatical speech, they point out of the present towards a utopian transformation of racial subordination” (Black Atlantic, 71). 498 Aimé Césaire, Cahier, 32. See translation: “One must begin somewhere. / Begin what? / The only thing in the world worth beginning: / The End of the world of course” (Notebook, 22). 499 Antonio Benítez Rojo, among others, affirms that there is a Caribbean to speak of, a chain of islands connecting the Americas of the North and the South and the Center, that is not merely a smattering of “literaturas locales” (La isla, 44). 500 In Critical Nostalgia and Caribbean Migration, J.A. Brown Rose defines nostalgia as the “attempt to renegotiate the past […] Caribbean writers are continuously looking back to home in an attempt to understand who they are and where they belong” (4). In order to understand themselves these writers and intellectuals renegotiate the past, and this renegotiation takes the form of an identification of the Caribbean essence. 501 Aimé Césaire, Cahier, 28. See translation: “From staring too long at trees I have become a tree and my long tree feet have dug in the ground large venom sacs high cities of bone / from brooding too long on the Congo / I have become the Congo resounding with forests and rivers / where the whip cracks like a great banner” (Notebook, 18). 180 essential Martinique. He is also bound to Africa, incorporating this origin into his identity. However this nostalgic desire for a consolidated, originary narrative is undercut by the impossibility of this narrative. In Euzhan Palcy’s documentary Aimé Césaire: une voix pour l’histoire, Condé states: “Aimé Césaire is the only West-Indian writer whose return to the native land was a success […] To those of us who are constantly wandering, constantly nomads, he reminds us that the real fight is within the country itself.” 502 Like Victoire who never returned to her home, Condé finds the return to origins impossible. 503 For the author, this origin is a womb lost, and she imagines it as “une terre mythique, un paradis à reconquérir ? J’y avais perdu mon placenta, enterré sous un arbre que je ne retrouvais plus.” 504 Her novel is a search, but a search that embraces its own futility, the womb that is lost and buried in a troubled and destabilizing past. It is the work of searching her past and writing the narrative of the mother that is produced by writing. She is constantly changing and being rewritten, and she is not a conclusion or discovery, because no discovery is possible. The author’s very understanding of the text is that there is no truth or fact upon which it can rest. No genealogy or lineage can provide the key to the secret of her opacity, her identity buried is in the island. She wanders endlessly in search of her past, her mother’s past, and her mother’s before her. This history of the mother, an untimely and disrupting history, opens the narrative towards the opacity of its reading. This relation to the mother, the womb, and the origin is intrinsically tied to her relation to the island. Condé asks herself, “Je me demande souvent ce qu’auraient été mon rapport à moi- même, ma vision de mon pays, des Antilles et du monde en général, ce qu’aurait été mon écriture 502 Palcy, Une voix. 503 Condé writes, “She was never to return to her native island. She was never to know any member of her mother’s family. Her mother never described to her La Treille or Grand Bourg and she never spoke to us, her children, about it. Is that why Marie-Galante in my imagination signifies a mythical land, a lost paradise waiting to be repossessed? I had lost my placenta there, buried under a tree I could no longer find” (My Mother’s Mother, 54). 504 Condé, Victoire, 79. See translation: “a mythical land, a lost paradise waiting to be repossessed? I had lost my placenta there, buried under a tree I could no longer find” (My Mother’s Mother, 54). 181 enfin qui les exprime, si j’avais sauté sur les genoux d’une grand-mère replète et rieuse, la bouche pleine de : /Tim, tim, / Bois sec ! La cour dort ?/ Non, la cour ne dort pas ! / D’une grand-mère, ancienne étoile du gwo ka ou de la mazouk, me soufflant à l’oreille un mythe doucereux du passé.” 505 She relates to the island as she relates to her grandmother and the search for this island is wound—and is a wound—into her search for her grandmother. For Glissant, relation is the opposite of an absolutist certainty in identity, “Relation is an open totality evolving upon itself […] In Relation the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity.” 506 It makes no claims but opens itself. There is no closure. For Condé, her relation to the island is always one of exile, of distance, even when she is in and on The Island. Rosario Ferré calls this experience “insile.” 507 As opposed to exile, one is within but still separated from the island, or the motherland, for which one longs. There is an incessant desire to return to the past, to the womb of the motherland, from which we have been expelled like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Condé makes reference to the innumerable texts and photo essays that have described the Caribbean as Paradise on Earth. She remarks upon the foundational lie that underpins these descriptions, their claims to origin and prehistory, time before the Law of the Father, naming. 505 Condé, Victoire, 17. See translation: “I often wonder what would have been my relation to myself, my vision of my island, the Antilles and the world in general, what my writing that expresses all this would have been, if I had been cradled in the lap of a buxom, jovial grandmother, full of the traditional tales: Tim, tim! Bois sec! Is the audience asleep? No, the audience is not asleep! A grandmother, former dancing star of the gwo ka and mazurka, whispering in my ear sweet myths of the past” (My Mother’s Mother, 4). Pineau’s depiction of the grandmother is in many ways, exactly the grandmother Condé here longs for. Pineau describes her grandmother stating, “she tells us stories—no body admits that they believe her—about how in Guadeloupe, friends of the Devil have the power to fly, to turn themselves into dogs, to halt the course of rivers, and to dismantle life” (L’Exil, 7). 506 Glissant, Poetics, 192. 507 Ferré writes that the people of Puerto Rico dream of an island home that does not exist: “Los que sufren el insilio sueñan muchas veces con una isla que no existe más que en su imaginación; los que viven el exilio mueren soñando regresar algún día o se pasan la vida viajando” (Maldito amor, 9). 182 Condé writes that her father always told extravagant stories about who his father might have been, and that thanks to her father and these stories, “Grâce à lui, j’ai compris depuis petite que les identités se forgent.” 508 Identity is an act of storytelling, being able to tell a convincing story, one that convinces both the teller and the audience. Glissant echoes this sentiment stating: “As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence […] I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me.” 509 Identity is not proper to any being, it cannot be distilled into a definable thing. Instead, our subjectivity comes into being through our relation to the other. 510 Just as Butler and Bhabha underscore the ultimate impossibility of arriving at any kernel of truth in identity, because identity is always already frustrated by the presence of the Other, we see in Condé’s novel that the presence of this haunting Other and their proliferation of names interrupts the construction of a totalizing history. 511 Condé beautifully performs this impossible exercise throughout the length 508 Condé, Victoire, 16. See translation: “Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity” (My Mother’s Mother, 3). 509 Glissant, Poetics, 192-3. 510 Ettinger responds to Lacan, stating that subjectivity should not be established on the complex of phallic lack, but rather on a new concept of the womb, our relation to an-Other, the (m)other. Ettinger writes “’Castration,’ which is a sexual notion even though the ‘phallus’ is considered neutral, is the prototype of any separation form the bodily and archaic partial dimension, of any loss and absence that leads to an inscription in the Symbolic. Intrauterine phantasies are not referred to by Freud any differently, nor do they serve to indicate another function. It is here, however, that an unavoidable difference is revealed to us: an originary feminine difference […] the matrixial complex, referring to the maternal womb/intrauterine complex. I think that we must clearly separate these two kinds of archaic phantasy complexes” (Matrixial, 47). 511 In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler explains that any narrative will remain incomplete or untrue because the self that proposes the narrative can never fully grasp the other existing within and disrupting this attempt at consolidation: “Our narratives come up against an impasse when the conditions of possibility for speaking the truth cannot fully be thematized, where what we speak relies upon a formative history, a sociality, and corporeality that cannot easily, if at all, be reconstructed in narrative. Paradoxically, I become dispossessed in the telling, and in that dispossession an ethical claim takes hold, since no ‘I’ belongs to itself” (Giving, 132). Instead, the self is formed also by the other, the countless others that circumscribe and interrupt the narrative of the self. According to Butler, we are formed by these others and, because we cannot truly know who the other is and to what extent he/she shapes us, we can never fully know ourselves. In order to achieve a totalizing image of the self, one must also constrain the Other by claiming to know her. Here I choose not to capitalize the O in “other” as this would imply a kind of unthinkable, absolute Other, where Butler posits the possibility of corporeal and experiential others that have actually passed through our experience of the world. 183 of her novel. She never reveals the truth of herself, her mother, or her mother’s mother. Instead, we face an impenetrable mystery, an equivocally equivocating feminine secret. Condé’s novel at first claims to search out an identity of the mother’s mother, to make clear her story, but this story is filled with holes, missing time and thoughts that the author does not pretend to know. The mother’s mother cannot be properly identified or defined. This is why Condé leaves the question open, presents her grandmother as an enigma, a woman whose desires and beliefs and feelings exist only in a kind of effervescent vapor. Andrew Parker writes that the mother is a “destabilizing influence” and that “‘her’ resistance to univocal meaning” makes it impossible to say exactly who she is or what she means to the self. 512 We are left with a mother who proposes no opposite effect to the father, but is rather that which exists both within and outside (our)selves and He that fathered us. For Glissant, the father’s legitimacy and power to confer legitimacy is subverted by the mother, her femininity which erupts from inside, making it impossible for the father to impose himself as the only source of rightness and visibility in society. 513 History, according to Glissant, is a kind of myth—what we have called the myth of filiation, one that makes a truth claim upon the past. Society, according to Glissant, establishes its legitimacy, territorial and familial legitimacy, through this myth, through the word of the father. 514 This myth provides the foundation for colonization, conquest, and the enslavement of human subjects. Spillers addresses the a historicizing myth structured so that only the white man can lay claim to the legitimizing narrative, while: 512 Andrew Parker writes “the mother’s destabilizing influence cannot be diminished through more precise definition; ‘her’ resistance to univocal meaning suggests the opposite, in fact” (Parker, The Theorist’s Mother, 11). 513 Glissant writes “The legitimacy confirming filiation in patriarchal societies also implies femininity as the locus of a counterforce, generally of a spiritual order” (Poetics, 59). 514 Glissant writes “Identity will be achieved when communities attempt to legitimate either right to possession of a territory through myth or the revealed word” (Poetics, 13). 184 The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve. This human and historic development – the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent – takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women’s community: the African- American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated – the law of the Mother – only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law. Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegitimacy.” 515 This illegitimacy, or Law of the Mother, indicates the mythic and fictive foundation of paternal legitimacy, what Spillers calls the “social fiction of the Father’s name” founded in the racist policies of enslavement, colonization, and neoliberalism. The mother might be rejected and sublimated, but she cannot be fully excised from either the history of captive, colonized, or colonizer. She does not directly oppose the father, does not set herself up as the inversion of his power, claiming a matriarchal society that mirrors in every way the patriarchal one she overthrew. Spillers makes it clear that the mother is both present and absent in the sense that her maternity in captivity was denied. Instead, she presents a destabilizing history. Her signature, devoid of patriarchal authority, claims a very different narrative, an opaque narrative of relating that is intimate and imminent without incurring the sin of fusion: “would bring us together forever and make us permanently distinctive.” 516 She directly pinpoints the flaws in the bulwark of these legitimating fictions. 515 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 80. Spillers continues to argue that because of this, the African-American male is uniquely situated to embrace the rejected female within himself: “Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood – the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within” (“Mama’s Baby,” 80). 516 Glissant, Poetics, 194. 185 In the story of the opaquely present grandmother, Condé is writing the history of her family, a family legacy traced through mothers rather than fathers. The mother’s mother’s history is recounted in such a way that any clarity is obscured beneath layers of opacity, or sediment as Glissant describes it. 517 For Condé the act of writing this novel is one of making present a ghost, Derrida’s specter who brings the past and future together into play. Condé writes: “Ce que je veux, c’est revendiquer l’héritage de cette femme qui apparemment n’en laissa pas. Établir le lien qui unit sa créativité à la mienne. Passer des saveurs, des couleurs, des odeurs des chairs ou des légumes à celles des mots.” 518 The legacy of this woman is not written, and its absent writing is written in food, a text that brings grandmother and granddaughter into untimely relation. 519 The original French title is Victoire, les saveurs et les mots and traces the relation between cooking and writing, while the English translation, Victoire: My Mother’s Mother: A Novel, chases the elusive genealogy of the maternal grandmother. What is privileged in the French title is the active author figure of Victoire who writes her own story in the only way she can, through cooking. Parker claims that the mother destabilizes the veracity of history, of literal language, just as food language here destabilizes the totality of the written word. 520 In the novel Condé also explains how the official history came to her obliquely, how its pain and trauma was eluded: 517 Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation, “conquest and discovery […] Transparency no longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, sit that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even today” (111). 518 Condé, Victoire, 85. See translation: “What I am claiming is the legacy of this woman, who apparently did not leave any. I want to establish the link between her creativity and mine, to switch from the savors, the colors, and the smells of meat and vegetables to those of words” (My Mother’s Mother, 59). 519 Food and the final meal work as Victoire’s way of writing history, “It was her way of writing her last will and testament. One day, she hoped, color would no longer be an evil spell. One day, Guadeloupe would no longer be tortured by questions of class. The white Creoles would learn to be humble and tolerant. There would no longer be the need to set a club of Grands Nègres against them. Both would get along, freely intermingle, and who knows, love each other” (My Mother’s Mother, 189). 520 Parker writes, “the mother is often invoked to regulate the distinction between the literal and the figural, a distinction that she undermines nonetheless and just as frequently” (The Theorist’s Mother, 18). 186 personne dans ma famille ne m’instruisit ni de la Traite, de ces voyages initiatiques qui fondèrent notre destinée d’Antillais, ni de l’esclavage. Je dus négocier sans aide le poids de ce terrible passé. Par contre, les histoires individuelles ayant pris la place de l’Histoire collective, ma mère me fit à plusieurs reprises allusion à un voyage qu’effectua cette grand-mère dont pourtant elle parlait rarement, hormis quelques phrases stéréotypées, à la Martinique au cours de l’année 1901. Je m’interroge encore. Que signifiait son insistance ? Que voulait-elle me dire ? Sa version édulcorée de cette modeste odyssée e reprenait les thèmes du home sweet home, chers aux Anglais, en illustrant les risques qu’encourt une honnête femme en quittant la sécurité de son chez-elle. Aventures avec des hommes sans foi ni loi. Épreuves physiques. Possibilités de souffrance, de déchéance et de mort. À force d’y réfléchir, je crois que c’était sa manière d’exorciser un souvenir dont la douleur ne s’apaisait pas. En réalité, à la faveur de ce voyage, sa mère avait rencontré un étranger, l’avait suivi, abandonnant pour lui la Guadeloupe et son enfant. Peu importait qu’elle se soit ressaisie et fut revenue à la niche, l’intention demeurait. C’était la preuve que sa fille n’avait pas signifié tout pour elle. 521 Both her mother’s pain and the pain of generations has been avoided like a raw nerve. Slavery, exile, and abandonment are painted over with fiction, either the mother’s stories meant to conceal her mother’s rejection or the fiction that this might be in any way her family’s history. The past is arrived at late, and Condé’s negotiation of these scars is written in an untimely and elliptical manner. 522 Instead of dealing with the trauma of capture and enslavement, her mother introduces her to the trauma of abandonment, the moment when her grandmother failed to return from a trip to Martinique. Instead, Victoire stayed behind with a new lover and began a new life. This painful crossing—or failing to cross and return to her daughter—marks Condé’s mother. 521 Condé, Victoire, 117-118. See translation: “nobody in my family told me anything about slavery or the slave trade, those initiatory voyages that founded our Caribbean destiny. I had to negotiate on my own the weight of this terrible past. On the other hand, since individual stories have replaced our collective history, my mother on several occasions alluded to a journey my grandmother (whom she seldom mentioned except for a few clichés) made to Martinique in the year 1901. I keep asking myself why she insisted. What did she want to tell me? Her watered- down version of this modest odyssey took up the home-sweet-home theme, so beloved of the English, illustrating the risks an honest woman ran by leaving the security of her home; by having adventures with men who respect nothing and nobody; by undergoing physical ordeals and leaving herself vulnerable to suffering, degeneration, and death. When I think about it, I believe it was her way of exorcising a memory whose pain never subsided. In actual fact, as a result of this journey, her mother met a stranger and abandoned Guadeloupe and her daughter for him. It didn’t matter that she recovered her wits and returned home, the intention was there. It was proof that her daughter did not mean everything to her” (My Mother’s Mother, 84). 522 Derrida, Derrida writes that the specter is historical, but that “it is not dated […] Untimely, it does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day” (Specters, 3). So too, the island, as Gilles Deleuze illustrates, comes both before and after its inhabitants. Its history is both lost and still arriving (Deleuze, L’île, 16). 187 The history of voyaging and family separation is repeated through this episode rather than in the collective past. History is not an ossified form but evolving and flowing and disintegrating through our contact with its flesh. The painful parts can only be touched upon briefly and indirectly. This contact between bodies, the bodies of the Caribbean and of the mother and child, reveal the sites of porosity and crossing that occur along the borders of Caribbean islands and subjectivities. There is no maternal order, but rather a maternal contact that is the locus of the fissure in the wall of paternal filiation. Theories of subjectivity might propose her subjugation, rejection or abjection, but these are only denials of relationality. Discussing the feminist epistemologies that would seek to overthrow “the pernicious effects of the dualistic binary thinking in which one partner in the cognitive couple is always dominated by its repressed and subjugated other half—male/female, rational/irrational, nature/culture, light/dark,” Gilroy points out that while he agrees with this movement, he takes issue with the fact that “self always fist in this litany.” 523 Gilroy points out that for all its shortcomings, the master-slave dynamic does have one point in its favor, it is relational. Unlike Enlightenment and Cartesian epistemologies, it takes the relationship between master and slave as the basis for knowledge and being, instead of deriving it from an idealized self, which even when “substituting black women for its forerunner rooted in the lives of white men” continues to fall into the same dead ends. 524 I am not proposing the mother-child as an alternative to the master-slave dialectic—primarily because I reject the hierarchical nature of the relationship—but it does appear that relational understanding offers a way out of self-centered epistemologies, if instead the maternal relation describes a way of coming into knowledge of self and other simultaneously through relating. This way of 523 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 52-3. This is grounded in his criticism of Patricia Hill Collins. 524 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 53. 188 understanding subjectivity does not foreground the individual and denial of the maternal other— the (m)other—as the center of being, but takes into account the bonds of relationality between infinite (m)others. According to this relational mode of arriving at subjectivity, the colonizer and colonized have a similar and complicating effect upon each-other. The subjectivity of the self is arrived at through the imposition of the colonizer’s gaze upon the colonized body and not through self- reflexive introspection. Bhabha points out: “The ambivalent identification of the racist world […] turns on the idea of man as his alienated image; not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity. And it is that bizarre figure of desire, which splits along the axis on which it turns.” 525 He speaks here of the work of Fanon as he analyzes this racism of the white gaze. Instead, Condé’s image of her light-skinned grandmother plays with the idea of a black gaze, finding that both black and white are Other, othering, and the other inscribed within the self. She complicates the simple binary of black and white by indicating the fissure that exists between Caribbean, European and African or even more subtle divisions and the ways the self responds to the Other’s gaze. What these texts and 525 Bhabha, Location, 63. Bhabha quotes Fanon in writing, “the colonial subject is always ‘overdetermined from without’…It is through image and fantasy—those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious—that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition” (Location, 43). For Fanon, the problem begins with identification, not self-identification but rather the identification that one enacts of one’s self for the Other, the colonizer. This identification begins with the gaze of the other who “fixes” the black subject. This fixing is a binding, a constraint and reduction of the self to the color of his skin. Fanon relates this to the “being for other” as described by Hegel. The self is exploded and forced into the mold created by the colonizer’s gaze. He is then separated, alienated, from himself, his self. These fragments are “put together by another me” (Masks, 89), not the true self, if such a self is attainable, but an Other self. Bhabha writes “the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy – it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. The demand of identification – that is, to be for an Other – entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness” (Location, 64). Fanon is made other, transformed into another man, by the Other’s gaze and forced to assume the identity that this gaze proscribes for him. He also describes the so-called Prospero Complex in which the colonized desires to impress and appropriate the colonial, or European, authority and culture. 525 Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth that colonization is the “systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: ‘Who am I in reality?’” (Wretched, 182). 189 the work of Condé reveal is the impossible desire for a nostalgic belonging, an identity of the self that would depend upon the identification of the Origin, the French and/or the African origin. Condé’s novel subverts the reader’s desire for perfect belonging and the originary return. She frustrates the desire to reach back and search for self through the creation of a past. Her own self- creation is a gesture towards this desire. The mother’s history that Condé erects is not a linear or limiting history. 526 It is an-other history than that which is presented through the name of the father. The play of names in the novel, especially Quidal, becomes important. The name ceases to confer legitimacy on the child but rather exacerbates the understanding of the child’s illegitimacy. All the illegitimate children on the island bear the name of Quidal, and yet for Condé this name is filled with power. She writes, “À La Treille, section de Marie-Galante, non loin de Grand-Bourg, les Quidal se comptent aussi nombreux que les grains de sable des places. C’est leur fief. On dit qu’ils descendent du bien du propriétaire d’une habitation-sucrerie, le sieur Antoine de Gehan- Quidal.” 527 These children bear the name of their master, but they are not recognized by him. Their name becomes the sign of an age-old violence, the rape of their mothers by the oppressing colonial power. 528 However, this name for Condé is a ringing and beautiful name: “Elle me paraissait doublement étrangère […] –Victoire Élodie Quidal. / Le nom m’emplit d’admiration, 526 Fulton writes, “Racial and cultural categorizations are fundamentally tied to a notion of temporal continuity. To the extent that constructed identities are generated by the need for legibility, for traceability, the positing of a common identity simultaneously draws out a continuous line toward a common origin” (Fulton, Signs, 9). 527 Condé, Victoire, 19. See translation: “In the hamlet of La Treille on the island of Marie-Galante, not far from the town of Grand Bourg, the name of Quidal is as common as grains of sand on the beach. This is their domain. Rumor has it that they are descendants of the property belonging to Master Antoine de Gehan-Quidal, owner of a sugar plantation” (My Mother’s Mother, 5). 528 According to Vergès the métissage of the Antilles “requires accepting a genealogy and a heritage. In other words, the recognition of a past rape, violence, slavery, and the recognition of our own complicity with the wicked ways of the world. No projection onto the Other, no denial of one’s complicity […] To recognize the split in oneself means to accept that one can have conflicting desires and wishes, that an object can be both desired and rejected, that love and hate, envy and jealousy, are part of the human condition” (Monsters, 11). In other words, one cannot simply negate historical truth in order to create an idealized, nostalgic image of what the Caribbean was/is/could be in order to identify oneself with this essentialized image. There is an elision here of the totalizing narrative. 190 moi qui déplorais les sonorités du mien. Je haïssais surtout mon prénom que je jugeais mièvre. Maryse, petite Marie ? Celui-là avait le poids d’une médaille de bronze. Sonore.” 529 It is the name of a bell chiming over her legacy, vibrating and quaking the stolid mass of history. Condé also comments on the importance of bearing the father’s name in this period: “À cette époque, posséder un père, être reconnu de lui, partager ses jours ou simplement porter son nom était l’apanage de rares privilégiés. Il ne me choquait nullement que mes parents surgissent, à l’instar de tant d’autres, d’une espèce de brouillard.” 530 The name does not solidify identity but rather it identifies its weak spots, its ambiguity and slippage. Condé does not come to her encounter with the past at a precise moment but through a process of getting-to-know-each-other. Her understanding of her grandmother is equally gradual and problematic. The “official history”, that which she receives from her mother, is a myth that paints her grandmother in sweeping tones as the quintessential Guadeloupean grandmother, but Condé knows that this history is gravely over-simplified. 531 She is a secret, one that Condé does not try to exhume, but allows to waver between the present and past as only a specter can. In “The Stealers of Fire”, Condé writes: “We have to rid ourselves of myths. They are binding, confining, and paralyzing […] As for the writer, she no longer believes she is invested with a 529 Condé, Victoire, 14. See translation: “She appeared to me double strange […] ’Victoire Elodie Quidal.’ The name filled me with admiration, especially as I lamented the sound of my own. I particularly loathed my first name, which I considered insipid. Maryse, little Mary? Her name resounded with the deep ring of a bronze medal. Resonant” (My Mother’s Mother, 2). 530 Condé, Victoire, 15. See translation: “At the time, to have a father, to be recognized by him, to share his daily existence or quite simply bear his name, was the prerogative of a rare privilege. It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog” (My Mother’s Mother, 3). 531 Condé writes, “Avec son chagrin et ses remords, Jeanne édifia un mythe qui ne correspondait guère à la réalité, et laissait dans l’ombre les aspects incertains de la personnalité de Victoire. En un mot, elle tenta à tout prix de la couler dans le moule sans originalité de la ‘matador’ guadeloupéenne. Il me plaît, quant à moi, que ma grand-mère demeure secrète, énigmatique, architecte inconvenante d’une libération dont sa descendance a su, quant à elle, pleinement jouir” (Victoire, 255). See translation: “In her grief and her remorse, Jeanne constructed a myth that barely corresponded to reality and left in the dark uncertain aspects of Victoire’s personality. In short, she endeavored at all costs to have her conform to the clichéd norm of the Guadeloupean matador, the fighting woman who courageously resists life’s trials. As for me, I prefer my grandmother to remain secretive, enigmatic, the improper architect of a liberation that we, her descendants, have known how to enjoy to the full” (Victoire, 195). 191 higher mission, such as taking her people back to a lost Africa […] the victory of women writings from the French-speaking Caribbean is a pyrrhic victory. By appropriating the fire behind the writing, they set light to themselves and destroy the role and position that their brothers were bent on taking.” 532 The woman writer questions the totalizing myth of history, the African myth, the Antillean myth. The Caribbean is unstable and slippery, defying the grasp of the postcolonial, state-building project. Condé almost appears to be channeling Fanon as he demands revolution over revival: “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future.” 533 Here we can see Fanon almost declaring the untimeliness that Derrida will describe decades later. Similarly, Condé does not erect the myth of her grandmother as a stalwart bulwark of the past to defend her against the future. This untimely woman, barely existing in her own moment, imbues and infects the future as all readings are already read and waiting to be read. Condé turns her reader to face the complexity of language as well as sexual politics throughout the novel, those between lovers as well as between “master” and servant. Desire and power are exposed in equal measure and with stark brutality. Vergès writes on the politics of desire in the colonial world and critiques Fanon stating that he “blamed the black woman who ‘desires’ the white man,” 534 and claims that the only true redemption for the Antilles is the acceptance of métissage, where desire and filiation are complicated by the interaction of colonial forces. Such a heritage is exactly what we see in Victoire, the light-skinned grandmother who 532 Condé, “Stealers,” 163-4. 533 Fanon, Masks, 201. 534 Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries, 248: “Paternity is a contested site, and women and men have responded to the absence of the native father in different ways. Fanon blamed the black woman who ‘desires’ the white man. His resentful and bitter reproach found an echo among postcolonial critics, who when they celebrated a woman chose a strong, motherly figure, especially a grandmother, a woman who has ‘lost’ her sexuality.” 192 shames Condé’s mother with her inability to play the role of either benevolent progenitor or revolutionary avantgarde. Vergès argues that in writing of the Antilles it is productive to work in terms of this métissage, which she views as the historical reality of the islands as well as a site of resistance against and the oppression of the colonizer. Rather than denying the rape of the mother, this mother must be recognized and embraced for the people to march onwards. Condé’s project in writing and questioning history seems to announce a future by troubling the past. However, Fanon’s focus is not upon a restitution of the mother but of the son and the father emasculated by her rape, the solidification of their power over past and present. For him the ultimate goal of decolonization is “truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The ‘thing’ colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.” 535 This process of liberation becomes the site of contention for Victoire and her daughter, Jeanne. Victoire’s daughter rejects her mother for being unable to take up the banner of liberation and bourgeois respectability that is legible to her. Victoire’s meekness and subservience are humiliating to the mother who cannot understand the kinds of relations and labor that she undertakes. Her writing, and the writing of food are not violent, but a kind of love language, inscribed in the feeding and nurturing of others, many disparate and foreign others. Loving is a labor undertaken by women. 536 It is the hope of “freedom dreams” and “possibilities of other worlds” that Weheliye describes. 537 In her cooking, Victoire is able to dream and build a 535 Fanon, Wretched, 2. 536 In all about love, bell hooks writes that “Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners” (love, xx). Plato argues that the search for love is an effect of the desire to recapture the unity of the astral bodies whose splitting resulted in male and female bodies: “The male kind was originally an offspring of the sun, the female of the earth, and the one that combined both genders was an offspring of the moon, because the moon shares in both. They were spherical, and so was their motion, because they were like their parents in the sky” (Plato, “Symposium,” 47). 537 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 2. 193 possible world in which her daughter would have access to the education that was always foreclosed to Victoire. Cooking is an act of limitless generosity for Condé and Victoire. 538 The food-writing of Victoire is a generosity that gestures towards a possible plenitude without closure or circumscription. 539 She is radically vulnerable in the presentation of the meal from which she does not partake but offers up of herself without restraint. 540 It is the only way she knows how to communicate love. Even if it remains illegible and unhearable to her daughter, the utterance is there. In her futural dream, Victoire empties herself of personhood in order to expand the horizons of possibility for her offspring, even if this dream appears void to her daughter. Aimé Césaire looked to a similar future, and a kind of idealized future family in which he would be the lover of the people of the Antilles. 541 This love holds a certain force, a power, that is mobilized by the writer—the cook. Scott talks about “black power” as a “counterintuitive power.” 542 Any kind of empowerment is necessarily constituted by powerlessness and vulnerability, making his power counterintuitive that it arises precisely from the site of vulnerability and powerlessness. 543 538 Moudileno writes that in the work of Condé, “si elle laisse entrevoir une plénitude possible, le roman n’en consacre jamais l’avènement. […] L’art gastronomique, en d’autres termes, ne propose pas l’accès à une vérité transcendante comme pourrait le faire l’écriture. Au contraire, la vérité de l’expérience conviviale rêvée se situe dans un moment présent, qui serait simultanément un moment de participation et un moment parfait. C’est en ce sens, que je dirais que l’écriture de la gastronomie chez Condé marque les limites du discours cynique : la présence furtive de la gastronomie signale hors-texte une éthique qui réhabilite,--contre la frugalité bourgeoise—l’espoir d’une convivialité qui s’accommoderait à la fois du hasard et de la générosité" (“La gastronomie,” 426-7). 539 This concept of a “possible future” is in dialogue with Judith Butler’s conception in Bodies that Matter wherein she understands power and racial/sexual divisions being marked by exclusion, not as essentially differentiated but being produced as difference through a process of “temporalized regulation of signification, and not as a quasi- permanent structure” (xxix). Butler posits a “possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world” (Bodies, xxix). 540 Cixous writes, “Et avec quelle force dans leur fragilité : ‘fragilité’, vulnérabilité, à la mesure de leur incomparable intensité. Elles n’ont pas sublimé. Heureusement : elles ont sauvé leur peau, leur énergie” (Le Rire, 56). 541 Aimé Césaire writes “Faites de ma tête une tête de proue / et de moi-même, mon cœur, ne faites ni une père, ni une frère, / ni un fils, mais le père, mais le frère, mais le fils, / ni un mari, mais l’amant de cet unique peuple” (Cahier, 49). 542 Scott, Extravagant, 9. 543 “Power” is here defined in Judith Butler’s terms, “power as a constrained and reiterative production […] power works through the foreclosure of effects, the production of an ‘outside,’ a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility 194 Scott writes: “’Power’ in this context thus assumes a form that seems repugnant or even nonsensical, for its conditions of appearance are defeat and violation” and that this power only emerges “through the unflinching investigation, depiction, and manipulation of an originary history of violation.” 544 This history of violation, the originary violation of slavery, Hartman’s “stranger,” 545 is the locus for a different enfleshment of power. Love and relationality, the vulnerability of the body’s exposure to the other, give rise to an ethics of vulnerability and the power of encounter. And so, Condé questions the nature of Victoire’s relationship with Boniface: “Fut-elle voluptueuse ? Eut-elle du goût pour l’amour ? Tout incite à le penser.” 546 Was she aroused? Did she enjoy it? Did she possibly want Boniface? Scott similarly interrogates the notion of sexuality and the black body and identifies an instability in this discourse, the orgasmic eruption of a sexuality that is not violation: “deployments of notions of black sexuality are frequently the very means by which that freedom and that power are curtailed.” 547 Condé too refuses to curtail Victoire’s sexuality, reducing it to the articulation of power dynamics and revoking the possibility of a sexuality unbounded by power. She refuses to limit it as she sees her mother do, but allows space for the possibility of enjoyment. Just as the articulation of freedom is always necessarily an articulation of the limits of freedom and of its exceptions, just as the idea of sexual that bounds the domain of intelligible effects” (Bodies, xxx). De Ferrari posits vulnerability as a way of reading the Caribbean that takes questions of both race and gender into account when considering questions of the colonized and alienated body. 544 Scott, Extravagant, 9. Gilroy appears to be working towards a similar conclusion when he writes of memory: “In the period after slavery, the memory of the slave experience is itself recalled and used as an additional, supplementary instrument with which to construct a distinct interpretation of modernity. Whether or not these memories invoke the remembrance of a terror which has moved beyond the grasp of ideal, grammatical speech, they point out of the present towards a utopian transformation of racial subordination” (Black Atlantic, 71). 545 Hartman, Lose, 5. 546 Condé, Victoire, 95. See translation: “Was Victoire sensual? Was she fond of lovemaking? Everything points to the affirmative” (My Mother’s Mother, 67). 547 Scott, Extravagant, 8. He writes, “The twinning of blackness and the sexual—the relentless, repetitive sexualization of black bodies, the blackening of sexualized bodies—also fails always fully to contain the forces that articulation works to control: eruptions occur or can be provoked” (Extravagant, 7). 195 liberation creates its own kind of sexual politics of control and policing of behaviors, the limitation of the black body’s desire to systems of enslavement and inequality become their own censure. The power of love, in this case, is closer to what bell hooks proposes: “Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination.” 548 Condé addresses the stereotype that the fundamental family drama of the Caribbean is the rape of the mother and the emasculation of the Black man. This fictive scene of filiation is one that both Spillers and Scott take up as well. Condé writes, “Ajoutons qu’aux Antilles, une pratique est honorée depuis des temps immémoriaux. Le Blanc épouse la Blanche, mais fait main basse sur les mulâtresses et les négresses qui vivent dans son entour. Esclavage ou pas.” 549 She also laments: “Ce qui me révolte, c’est que, dans cette affaire, personne ne considéra jamais Victoire comme une victime. J’excuse Thérèse que sa propre douleur aveuglait. Mais les autres. Pas un instant d’apitoiement. Victoire avait à peine seize ans. Statutory rape. Dernier avait deux fois son âge. Il était instruit, notable respecté, voire renommé. Tous la traitèrent comme une criminelle.” 550 Victoire was a child, significantly younger than her lover who, according to our author, took his pleasure by force. She writes of a number of scenes where she would have liked to document a case of rape or incest or pedophilia, but could find no evidence. 551 She is also anxious to analyze the sexuality and sensuality of her characters as she writes in her essay “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer” that sexuality, once conspicuously 548 hooks, love, 87. 549 Condé, Victoire, 87. See translation: “in the Antilles there is a time-honored practice where the white male marries the white female, but takes his pleasure with every mulatto or black girl he can lay his hands on. Slavery or no slavery” (My Mother’s Mother, 61). 550 Condé, Victoire, 61-62. See translation: “WHAT DISGUSTS ME in all this is that Victoire was never considered a victim. I can excuse Thérèse, who was blinded by her own grief. But as for the others, there was not a moment of compassion. Victoire was just sixteen. Statutory rape. Dernier was twice her age. He was educated, and a respected, even well-known notable. Everyone treated her like a criminal” (My Mother’s Mother, 39). 551 One example is the scene between Jeanne and Boniface Jr. where “He greedily planted a kiss on her mouth while his hand undid his fly. What a pity for my story he did not take her by force! Unfortunately, nothing serious happened. She fought him off” (My Mother’s Mother, 108). 196 absent from Caribbean literature, is only introduced within the confines of “male sexuality.” 552 She is therefore eager to express that sensuality was a very real characteristic of the women in her novel. According to her research, Victoire spent many happy years as the good friend of her Creole mistress, Anne-Marie, and as the lover of her mistress’s husband, Boniface Sr. In telling the story of an awkward dinner between her newly-wed daughter, her son-in-law and her lover’s family, she states, “Il la méprisait. Sous ses abords plaisants, il était intolérant, noiriste ainsi que tous les Grands Nègres, convaincu comme eux que les rapports sexuels d’une femme de couleur avec un blanc pays constituaient un intolérable sandale. Si Fanon avait déjà écrit Peau noire, masques blancs, il aurait hautement apprécié les pages sur le complexe de lactification.” 553 The term “lactification” is used by Fanon to indicate the desire of the black woman to achieve whiteness through marriage or sexual union. Only the feminine subjects of his study are condemned for this crime. According to Gwen Bergner, Fanon absolves Jean Veneuse of the desire for “lactification,” but unmercifully condemns Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise, for harboring a similar desire. 554 Condé challenges this over-simplification of the dynamics existing between the former slave holders and the freed peoples of the Antilles. Victoire is the daughter of a black woman who had unknown relations with a white man, and she later becomes the lover of a white man. While Fanon’s focus is upon the restitution of the father emasculated 552 Condé, “Order,” 159. 553 Condé, Victoire, 180. See translation: “As for [her son-in-law], we shouldn’t be under any illusion. He despised her. Beneath his easygoing manners, he was intolerant, a militant black like all the Grands Nègres, convinced that sexual relations by a woman of color with a white Creole constituted an intolerable scandal. If Fanon had already written Black Skin, White Masks, Auguste would have certainly appreciated the pages on the complex of lactification” (My Mother’s Mother, 133). 554 Bergner, “Who,” 83. See also Bhabha (Location, 60) for Veneuse’s desire to view himself from the place of the white man. Condé’s essay, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” concludes with the section titled “Disorder,” which focuses on women in literature. In it she states: “the female writers of the West Indies are little known. Their works are forgotten, out of print, misunderstood. The best example of incomprehension remains the criticism of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise by Frantz Fanon…The unjust criticism has forever cast a slur on the book and overshadowed its other interesting aspects. For instance, it contains a deep and penetrating picture of Mayotte’s father, whose irresponsibility and mistreatment of her mother might well be partially responsible for Mayotte’s hatred of the black man” (161). 197 by the black mother’s rape, Condé’s is upon the many women whose stories have not been told. She states that Victoire left no legacy behind but her cooking, and so this story becomes a kind of translation, turning recipes and menus into histories, the chronicle of a forgotten life. Performing this act of remembering becomes a sign of the womb, of pregnancy and the great separation that follows. The womb is both a place of presence and absence, of excessive fullness and excessive parting. We are separated from the womb at birth, and this separation leaves a scar of remembrance. Negrón writes, “esa separación del cuerpo del origen, que es ciega, pues nadie asiste a su propio nacimiento; nos queda su huella. La ausencia y el vacío significan más. Ese vacío recoge el otro significado de ‘de(s)madre’: es decir, exceso.” 555 Narrative and remembering become the work of the womb, of the mother who remembers. After her first birth, Victoire falls ill and is no longer able to bear children, leaving her empty: “Dans nos sociétés, de nos jours encore, être mère est la seule vraie vocation de la femme. La stérilité revient à trainer un corps inutile, privé de sa vertu essentielle. Papayer qui ne donne pas de papayes. Manguier qui ne donne pas de mangues. Concombre sans graines. Écale vide.” 556 She finds herself deprived of this miracle, the womb to fill her with life, until her daughter becomes pregnant and they are finally drawn back together one last time, “—Merveille des merveilles ! Ma fille est enceinte ! Celle que j’ai portée en moi, porte à son tour un enfant. Un petit inconnu a pris refuge en elle. Il respire et se nourrit à travers elle. Dans neuf mois nous connaitrons son visage. Merveille des merveilles !” 557 She is filled with the joy of their shared maternity, a link to 555 Negrón, animalidad, 214. 556 Condé, Victoire, 71. See translation: “In our societies, even today, to be a mother is the only true vocation of a woman. Sterility means nothing less than dragging around a useless body, deprived of its essential virtue. Papaya tree that bears no papayas. Mango tree that gives no mangoes. Cucumber without seeds. A hollow husk” (My Mother’s Mother, 48). 557 Condé, Victoire, 201. See translation: “’Marvel of marvels! My daughter is pregnant! The woman I carried inside me is now carrying her own child. A little stranger has taken refuge inside her. It’s breathing and feeding thanks to her. In nine months we shall know its face. Marvel of marvels!’” (My Mother’s Mother, 151). 198 that original and fleeting plenitude. Paul De Man writes of reading as a kind of maternity: “when desire coincides with enjoyment, the self and the other are united in the maternal warmth of their common origin, and consciousness speaks with the voice of truth.” 558 This origin that speaks with the voice of truth, perhaps only an illusory or momentary truth, is the common origin of the text, which is now the text as womb. We readers are born of this text—this relation—and the end to reading is our separation from the womb. Condé’s novel is perhaps an attempt to recreate or re-appropriate the womb from which she has been separated, or to create a link from her origin to an ur-origin, the urtext of her grandmother. However, the womb is not simply life-giving, but presents a vacillation between life and death. The child who longs to return to the womb also desires a kind of return to the grave. Throughout her novel, Condé presents the womb as the interstitial zone between life and death. For instance, Victoire’s only interaction with her mother is during her supernatural disappearance and reappearance at her mother’s tomb: “Victoire dormait sur celle de sa mère, sous la croix qui portait en lettres malhabiles : / ‘Éliette Quidal / Morte en sa quatorzième année’ / Dieu, que nos mères meurent jeunes !” 559 Condé also describes Victoire’s thoughts for her daughter, “C’est ma faute, ma très grande faute. Dès que tu as bu mon lait, tout s’est gâté. Au lieu de t’insuffler de la force, il t’a contaminée avec mes malaises et mes peurs. Et à présent, j’empoisonne ta vie. D’ailleurs, est-ce que je ne l’ai pas toujours empoisonnée, croyant bien faire ? Tu mériterais une autre mère.’” 560 She is an orphaned daughter whose sorrow and pain are 558 De Man, Blindness, 115. 559 Condé, Victoire, 35. See translation: “Victoire was asleep on her mother’s grave, under the cross that bore the clumsy lettering: ELIETTE QUIDAL PASSED AWAY IN HER FOURTEENTH YEAR God, how our mothers die young!” (My Mother’s Mother, 18). 560 Condé, Victoire, 204. See translation: “’It’s my fault, my very own fault. As soon as you drank my milk, everything changed for the worse. Instead of breathing strength into you, it contaminated you with my malaise and my fears. And now I’m poisoning your life. Besides, haven’t I always poisoned it, thinking I was doing the right thing? You deserve another mother’” (My Mother’s Mother, 153). 199 transferred to her daughter. This is the story of deceased mothers rising before the reader in the spectral play of writing, a logos that is dead and orphaned. 561 The mother is always a fleeting and elusive character. She cannot be penned or pinned into her supposed role. She is always distant and evasive. The mother from the very start of the novel is dead. She is the untimely specter whose story is already finished and also in the process of arriving. 562 Her death is foretold but also long past, “Son intuition lui souffla que, sous peu, elle allait aborder à cette heure qu’aucun d’entre nous ne peut envisager sans effroi : la mot de sa mère.” 563 This fear of death, the ultimate separation from one’s origin, becomes a present fear of the past, of the passing of the mother, of the intersection between life and death, history without telos, the cycle of storm and the screeching song of the cicada. 561 In “Plato’s Pharmacy” Derrida describes the conception of the spoken word as living and authorized by the paternal authority of the speaker while the written word is dead and murders the father who wrote it. 562 Derrida writes, “There are several times of the specter. It is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being. Once again, untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary” (Specters, 123). 563 Condé, Victoire, 244. See translation: “Her intuition told her that very soon she was going to face that moment which terrifies every one of us: the death of one’s mother” (My Mother’s Mother, 186). 200 Chapter 4: Flowering Corpse Decay and the Body of the Mother in Rosario Ferré’s Work and Archive Among the many photographs of Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) housed in the archive of her papers at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library is a scene of Ferré as a young child standing beside her father, Luis A. Ferré, the future governor of Puerto Rico (1969- 1972) on an empty field, the jungle in the distance and a small building behind them. 564 To Luis Ferré’s right stand ranks of soldiers and men in suits, all saluting a flag outside the frame of the photograph. Their legs are reflected in puddles left by a recent rain, and a heavy sky glowers above them. Young Rosario Ferré is not saluting. She is wearing a striped dress and carries a small purse tucked under her left arm. Her right hand is tucked into her father’s arm, his hand in a fist. He stands at attention, but her eyes range somewhere to right of the phantom flag, the flag whose presence we must assume, but whose design is hidden from the spectator, the same spectator whose eye is drawn to the punctum of Ferré’s quizzical smile, her inattention to the ceremony at hand. 565 The archive is a peculiarly privileged site that includes by excluding and builds by cutting, by separating out and declaring what will and will not form its body. 566 At its inception the archive commands presence, the presence of the document and of the reader. For Derrida the 564 Childhood Photographs, Black Foto Album – Childhood; 1930s-1950s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 20 Folder 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. Photographs on pages 11-14. Another version of this photograph is signed by a US Colonel. See Appendix figure 1. Also see Columbia Finding Aid, “History / Biographical Note,” Rosario Ferré papers, circa 1900-2014 [Bulk Dates: 1950s-2010]. 565 Roland Barthes draws a distinction between the studium of the photograph, what the photograph depicts, and the punctum, that which “breaks” or “punctuates” the photograph. It is a kind of wound that pricks the spectator of the photograph (Camera, 26-27). 566 Jacques Derrida writes at the beginning of “Archive Fever” that we should begin not at the beginning, and yet he commences with commencement: “there where things commence […] There, we said, and in this place. How are we to think of there? And this taking place or this having a place, this taking the place one has of the arkhë? We have there two orders of order: sequential and jussive. From this point on, a series of cleavages will incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon” (“Archive,” 9). He goes on to state that “In a way, the term indeed refers, as one would correctly believe, to the arkhë in the physical, historical, or ontological sense, which is to say to the originary, the first, the principal, the primitive, in short to the commencement” (“Archive,” 9). 201 archive is first associated with the house, with law, and with citizenship. It implies a commandment as well as an origin, an ordering of the record and bodies as record. These are necessarily tied to the question of power and belonging, the power to decide who or what belongs. It is therefore tied to vulnerability and exclusion as well. The body of Rosario Ferré’s work as well as her actual body is ordered here. Stepping into the gleaming halls of the archive and opening a box of photographs of a young girl forces the spectator to draw upon this intersection between domesticity and citizenship. What and who belongs to the archive? Its collections are catalogued, curated and domesticated for the reader’s discriminating consumption. 567 Ferré collects herself in this archive. Many of the manuscripts and folders were arranged and catalogued by her own hand. 568 Also included are journals and scrapbooks, the remains and fragments of a life, the life of an intellectual and the one-time First Lady of Puerto Rico, 569 now housed in New York City, in the privileged place of the University, bringing to light the liminal space of the Puerto Rican both possessing and failing to possess citizenship. Ferré’s stated project in her writing and political activism was explicitly the demolition of a certain class of domesticity: the standards and limits placed upon women’s bodies and their labor within the pseudo-colony of Puerto Rico. 570 Her political project evolved over the years, but her preoccupation with women’s bodies and the economy in which they circulate never slackened. 567 For De Ferrari, collection and accumulation are inextricably tied to capital and possession: “Collecting, then, facilitates the acquisition of agency and individual mobility in the colonial social and power structures” (Vulnerable, 174). 568 In the Columbia University Finding Aid, a note has been added: “Ferré used an alphanumeric numbering system for filing many manuscripts, professional files, and computer disks, however, no key to the system was found with the papers” (https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead//nnc-rb/ldpd_11527175#using_collection). 569 Ferré acted as First Lady of Puerto Rico to her father following the death of her mother in 1970 and until the end of her father’s term in 1972. See Columbia Finding Aid, “History / Biographical Note,” Rosario Ferré papers, circa 1900-2014 [Bulk Dates: 1950s-2010]. 570 Eileen J. Suárez Findlay demonstrates how morality, decency, and reputation were used to properly domesticate Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans as a colonized people, how their belonging was dictated by their capacity to perform certain social roles and rituals within gendered and raced guidelines. Any infraction against this order and belonging is abolished. 202 As Derrida implies, to talk about the archive begs the question of the origin, or a kind of non-originary origin. Ferré’s work is similarly concerned with this construction of history, the way in which the origin is fixed. And yet, she seeks to break with the patrilinear History, a history of filiation. So too, this study interrogates and creates a certain archive. It builds a body, a body composed of the remains and decaying fragments of other bodies. It is life-building, but also destructive, cutting and clipping as it sews new life together. In “The Writer’s Kitchen,” Ferré contemplates imagination and recurrence to autobiography. She imagines Mary Shelley and writes: “It would never have occurred to me to ask Mary Shelley, for example, if, on her walks along the bucolic paths surrounding Lake Geneva, she had ever run into a living-dead monster about ten feet tall […] It had always seemed to me that contemporary criticism gave too much importance to the study of writers’ lives, but in that insistence on the unabashedly autobiographical nature of my stories confirmed my fears.” 571 She critiques a certain practice of writing that would seek to faithfully respond to the author’s life and project. 572 Like Derrida’s pharmakon, 573 she posits the idea that once written, the text exceeds the authority of its author. She also critiques the special interest that critics take in the domestic lives of women authors. However, the labor of this particular work of criticism in recurring to Ferré’s archive is not to attempt to prove anything about Ferré or her intention as an author, or even to take interest in the autobiographical nature of her writing, but simply to build our own monster, the stitching 571 Ferré, “Kitchen,” 238. 572 This brings to mind Ferré’s works of translation and Walter Benjamin’s own writing on the subject, which will be discussed later in this chapter. 573 Derrida writes, “The common translation of pharmakon by remedy [remède]—a beneficent drug—is not, of course, inaccurate. Not only can pharmakon really mean remedy and thus, erase on a certain surface of its functioning, the ambiguity of its meaning. But it is even quite obvious here, the stated intention of Theuth being precisely to stress the worth of his product, that he turns the word on its strange and invisible picot, presenting it from a single one, the most reassuring, of its poles […] Now, on the one hand, Plato is bent on presenting writing as an occult, and therefore suspect, power […] On the other hand, the King’s reply presupposes that the effectiveness of the pharmakon can be reversed: it can worsen the ill instead of remedy it” (Dissemination, 97). 203 together of bits of flesh into a roughly walking and reading whole. 574 Ferré’s textual bodies are rich with such traces, the traces of figurative and literal bodily remains. This text, Ferré’s archive, and her literary production, present a putrid fecundity, the excess of productive force of the maternal and of the island. The literary text is capable of signaling a feminine creation that evades the dialectics of materiality, the inescapable schism between presence and absence, between material and culture, body and reason. The maternal is not reducible to the corpse, the already dead mother at the origin of cultural creation. The maternal does not unify. It is not the collapse of one into other, of child into mother, but is the pulsating and perforating juncture. The maternal identifies the cleavage, the cut occurring in signification between presence and absence. 575 Working with De Ferrarí’s understanding of vulnerability and the body as well as feminist responses to the materiality of the feminine, I argue that Ferré’s bodies of/at work labor over creation. I will look to the abounding presence of maternal bodies within Ferré’s literary work and her personal archive to argue that Ferré’s textual bodies respond to a certain double bind of the maternal in philosophy. This chapter will analyze specific artefacts from this archive in an attempt to understand the vulnerability existing 574 In her work on the text as a textual body, René Prieto writes: “Like minefields, plots of fiction are full of buried surprises. Littering the landscape of each page, these surprises are the trace an author leaves behind, the clues that allow entry into his or her personal labyrinth” (Body, 3). 575 Here I am drawing in part upon Bracha Ettinger’s distinction between presence and absence and formulation of the matrixial as a borderspace between the two and the impossibility of their total realization: “In the matrixial perspective, becoming-together precedes being-one. As a consequence of this sexual difference stemming from the feminine, the ‘woman-not-All’ is not the Other but the co-emerging partial self and Other, or a different kind of relations of the Other. And the matrixial objet a is not the figure of a rhythmic absence/presence scansion, but the figure of relational difference in co-emerging Relations-without-relating and distance-in-proximity preserve the co- emerging Other as both subject and object without turning the Other into an object only; and they preserve the matrixial woman as both subject and object, not as object or Other only. The woman is not the price of culture incarnate, nor is she an entirely phallic subject, nor is she absent to her-self. The woman is not subjected to the rules of ‘castration’ that make of her either a subject or an object. Nor is she the absent par excellence. Borderlines between subjects and objects become thresholds, borderlinks between partial-subjects are transgressed, and traces of diffracted objects are shared between, and are transferred among, several partial-subjects with-in active-passivity in metramorphosis. This sharing and this transferal are created form, but also create, a borderspace where the passage occurs form unintelligible traces to the subsymbolic” (Matrixial, 72). For Ettinger, the matrix, as in language and the womb, forms a kind of borderspace. It is the pregnable, penetrable and porous tissue between one space and another. 204 at the site where presence and absence bump up against each other. Ferré’s archive as well as her texts, Papeles de Pandora (1976) and Maldito Amor y otros cuentos (1986), overflow with cuerpos descuartizados, bodily remains, and grotesquely beautiful limbs. Bodies are consumed and teeth spill out of the pages. There is an excessive life, and it is in this excess that the maternal works, that she undoes any strivings for totality and plenitude. Ferré collects her-self in the writing of the maternal body and the self-mothering that occurs in her archive. De Ferrari asks: “After all, what better way of altering the system of filiation than to give birth to oneself?” 576 I argue that Ferré, like Gómez de Avellaneda and Condé, writes herself into being. She births herself in a textual and archival body, this exuberant proliferation of body parts. Rosario Ferré was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1938 to one of the wealthiest and most politically influential families the island had ever seen. Her father served as the third governor to Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1972 and was the founder of the conservative Partido Nuevo Progresista, supporters of US statehood for the island. After the death of her mother in 1970, Ferré served as Puerto Rico’s First Lady until the end of her father’s term. 577 Her childhood photos represent a lively, smiling girl often perched upon a slide with her brother and their puppy, all surrounded by pristine verandahs and lush vegetation. 578 In another box are photos of Ferré as a young ballerina performing at the Teatro La Perla, in Ponce, and photos of the party for her sixteenth birthday at the Casa de la Alhambra. 579 Ferré first gained literary fame and 576 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 177. 577 See Biographical Note, Rosario Ferré Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 578 Childhood Photographs, Black Photo Album – Childhood; 1930s-1950s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 20 Folder 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. These photos appear on pages 1-2, 13-14, and 17- 18. 579 Ballet Photographs with Related Clippings; 1953; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 Folder 2; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. Fiesta 16 años Rosario Ferré, Casa de la Alhambra; 1954 or 1955; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 Folder 3; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 205 notoriety for her work on the publication Zona de carga y descarga (1972-1975), 580 for which she was vilified by much of her family for standing in direct opposition to her father’s politics. In her archive is preserved an eight-page letter from one of her uncles, bearing his signature/authorization at the bottom of each typeface page. The letter is a careful catalog of each perceived insult against the family, even going so far as to measure and demonstrate how she over-exaggerated the height of a wall separating the family property from the surrounding town. 581 Ferré’s literary and political labor, especially in her younger years, was fervently directed towards the liberation of Puerto Rico from US imperialism and of women’s bodies as part of feminism’s second wave. 582 In the early years of Ferré’s political and literary career, Ferré opposed her father’s conservative politics and support of Puerto Rican statehood. Later, however, these opinions began to shift. Puerto Rico, like Martinique and Guadeloupe in the previous chapter, exists in a strange relationship to its colonial past. After the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States under the Treaty of Paris and now exists as an Estado Libre Asociado. 583 This status continues to be debated and voted upon to this day, with another vote scheduled for November 2020. The political and economic rights of Puerto Ricans have been severely undercut by this loose “association” with the United States, and many see the path to statehood as a means of achieving greater financial equality and access to social services, much in the way that it was viewed in the French Départements d’Outre-Mer. Ferré explains that her father was interested in these questions since before her birth. Ferré’s mother, however, 580 She founded this publication alongside her professor and mentor, Ángel Rama. See Biographical Note, Rosario Ferré Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 581 “Carta Personalisima” [Memorias de Ponce] Original Working Papers; 1991-93, N.D.; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 11 Folder 4; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 582 Celis, “’Algo Tan Feo,’” 561. 583 Bonilla, Non-Sovereign, xii. 206 described politics as “’teatro sobre el viento armado.’” 584 Unlike her husband and daughter, Ferré’s mother desired an anonymous and free life. She wanted no memorials of her death or at her gravesite. In lieu of this, Ferré dedicated to her mother her Memoria (2012). Ferré links her mother’s domesticity with her own, tracing through the maternal line a creative thread that was painfully dampened in her mother. She explains that her parents never encouraged her to find a career but sought instead to prepare her for marriage and a place in society. Her description of her early literary education and dislike for the domestic is strikingly similar to Gómez de Avellaneda’s. She too finds herself at odds with a society that seeks to mold her into wife and mother, an opposition that resulted in her divorce from Benigno Trigo, the father of her three children. Like we see in Condé and Fanon’s writings on Paris and Europe, Ferré addresses a sense in the island that one had to leave home in order to achieve access to the universal “Para papá y mamá, Europa era la Fuente de toda cultura y civilización. ‘Un viaje a Europa equivale a un año de universidad,’ decía mamá.” 585 Ferré instead found this universal cosmopolitanism in her ancestry: Como puertorriqueña y caribeña, llevo en mi cuerpo la memoria de un bisabuelo corso, de un tatarabuelo francés que emigró a Cuba y luego a Panamá a construir el canal con Ferdinand de Lesseps, de un bisabuelo que se quedó ciego y sobrevivió vendiendo billetes de la lotería, de un tatarabuelo castellano y de uno cordobés que emigraron a la Isla buscando fortuna. Todos ellos amaron y sufrieron en ella, y están enterrados en Puerto Rico. 586 584 Ferré, Memoria, 9. See translation: “theater upon the armed wind” (translation mine). 585 Ferré, Memoria, 93. See translation: “For papa and mama, Europe was the fountain of all culture and civilization. ‘A trip to Europe is as good as one year of university,’ my mother used to say” (translation mine). 586 Ferré, Memoria, 109. See translation: “As a Puerto Rican and Caribbean, I carry in my body the memory of a Corsican great-grandfather, of a French great-great-grandfather that emigrated to Cuba and later to Panama to construct the canal with Ferdinand de Lesseps, of a great-grandfather who was blinded and survived selling lotter tickets, of a Castilian great-great-grandfather and one from Córdoba that emigrated to the Island seeking his fortune. All of them loved and suffered in the island, and they are all buried in Puerto Rico” (translation mine). 207 Caribbean and Puerto Rican are characterized here by Ferré as a lineage of migration and of the tomb. She dedicates this text in the place of a memorial on her mother’s grave, and here she remembers a litany of those buried in Caribbean soil. The intensity of her desire for women’s rights, and Puerto Rican sovereignty, as well as the destruction of the patriarchal, imperial order is evident throughout her work, though her political aims with regards to Puerto Rico changed over time. In this chapter, I will focus on one particular artifact from the archive of Ferré’s youth: Ferré’s and her mother’s entries in a baby book titled, Your Child Year by Year: A Development Record and Guide from Birth to the 16 th Year published by Dr. John E. Anderson and Dr. Florence L. Goodenough of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare in 1935. Not only is this artifact fascinating in its attempt to dictate and pathologize normative child development in terms of the child’s physiological, psychological and gendered state, but it is also central to this study in terms of the entries made by mother and daughter. I will focus on the medical nature of the entries and the moment at which Ferré’s mother abandons the project, and Ferré herself begins recounting the stories of her illnesses and accidents. Also of note is the fact that Ferré preserved three of her teeth within the pages of this book. I contest that this inscription of body on regulating text and regulating text upon the body, indicates the puncture of the veil between author as creator and author as the text itself. Ferré’s writing body eschews the hierarchical relationality of authority and splits the page. It signals the rupture of a maternal reading that crosses the authorial border. Ferré’s archive and fiction disturbs the regulatory divisions of discipline and exclusion. Her undisciplined bodies refuse to know their place, seeping out of the pages. 587 For Butler, 587 This record becomes a clear example of what Judith Butler discusses in her 1993 work Bodies that Matter where she discusses the materiality of sex as a function of Foucault’s “regulatory ideal,” discipline, and exclusion. Alexander Weheliye describes a similar process in Habeas Viscus (2014) whereby the body is racialized: “The idea of racializing assemblages, in contract, construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of 208 “viable” bodies come into being through certain exclusions necessitated by the heterosexual imperative of Western society and the dictates of Western reason and philosophy. She writes, “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.” 588 This exclusion of the body by Descartes, of the feminine by Plato (via Irigaray), and the abjection of the mother by Kristeva, all result in the same thing, the policing of an imperfect border. The exclusion is never complete, never absolute, and the thing which must define itself by the excluded Other is always haunted by its possible return, the excessive absence of this “threatening spectre.” The exclusion becomes a kind of skin, a film upon the self-assuring border. It is an excessive secretion that coats the smooth and yet porous surface of the skin. In this chapter I will also argue that the abundant repetition of sick bodies, bodily remains, and festering productivity are all symptoms of the maternal that oozes through the membranes of the paternal Order’s exclusions. 589 Much of the critical reception to Ferré’s work has consisted of the testing of her work against the literary projects set forth by feminist emancipatory movements of the late twentieth century. 590 Many have pointed to the doll in “La muñeca menor” as a symbol of women’s break sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (4). Weheliye’s reading of the not-quite-human and the nonhuman is a response to Butler’s reading: “the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation” (Bodies, xvii). 588 Butler, Bodies, xiii. 589 Here I turn especially to Lynne Huffer’s Are the Lips a Grave? A queer feminist on the ethics of sex, who constructs a maternal genealogy that breaks with the paternal genealogy of Western philosophy that requires “the murder of the mother and the absence of a maternal genealogy at the level of the symbolic” (4). 590 Elba D. Birmingham Pokorny writes that Ferré’s work is a response to Kate Millet and Hélène Cixous’s call to reclaim the woman’s voice and body from patriarchal control: “denouncing and advocating a departure from the mechanisms of phallologocentrism in literature that impedes the true possession of language, the creation of a feminine discourse of the female body and the emergence of a new female identity […] responding to Millet’s and Cixous’s imperative: ‘woman must writer herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away violently as form their bodies. Woman must put herself into the text, as into the world and into history’” (“(Re)Writing,” 75). In Rosario Ferré: A Search for Identity, Suzanne Hintz describes Ferré’s 209 form the patriarchal order. Carmen S. Rivera writes that the outwardly beautiful and innocent- looking doll hides a sinister reality: “The rotting doll then is introduced as a metaphor of the anger and frustration that are consuming women inside.” 591 The question of race has received somewhat less attention within studies of Ferré’s work. Virginia M. Adán-Lifante describes the way Ferré’s work falls into the camp of second wave feminism and the movement towards a feminist solidarity. She claims this shares a history with expressions of black feminism and “sisterhood.” 592 She sees Ferré’s storytelling practice as a call for women to resist the oppression of patriarchal, religious, and classed pseudo-colonial society. She writes that this overcomes the silence and absence/invisibility to which women were subjected. 593 David Gilliam Akbar describes the way Ferré attempts to resolve the question of race and violation within the history of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Additionally, Linda S. Zee connects Ferré’s works to many of the larger myths circulating through the Caribbean. While race and inequality do appear in these works, they are largely framed within the context of women’s subordination. Just as many of the studies on Ferré’s fiction focus upon her interest in constructing a women’s fiction, others interestingly signal the way she complicates and rejects this project. 594 Most interesting within this line of questioning is the work of Nadia V. Celis who begins her feminism and identification with Cixous’s argument for a new women’s literature, that recuperates a “woman” who is not written by “men.” 591 Rivera, “Porcelain Face,” 96. Ksenija Bilbija also writes that the doll in Ferré’s work is a metaphor for women’s sexual subordination to men: “The youngest doll, however acts as an extension of her female creator and not only avenges the damage that the patriarchy has done to her, but she also replaces her own referent (the married niece) in the stagnant and subordinate position that the newborn patriarchal generation required her to assume” (“On Women, Dolls, Golems,” 883). 592 Adán-Lifante, “Historia y Solidaridad,” 125: “La idea de hermandad, en el contexto feminista de ese período, expresaba no sólo la solidaridad entre mujeres, sino también, como señala Joanne Hollow, su experiencia común de opresión por el sistema patriarcal.” 593 Adán-Lifante, “Historia y Solidaridad,” 130. 594 Marie Murphy puts Ferrés “Isolda en el espejo” into conversation with Luce Irigaray’s theories on phallologocentrism and “specularization”, writing: “By means of inversions, narrative point of view and defiant female characters, wrongs done to women through history are symbolically vindicated while the feminine is continually problematized, and ultimately fragmented and dispersed” (“en el espejo,” 145). 210 study by commenting on the feminist project within the author’s work, “Ferré señala su necesidad de llevar a cabo una doble tarea. Las escritoras deben tomarse la palabra para destruir, por un lado, las estructuras de dominación patriarcales y su definición de lo femenino, y para construir, por el otro una voz escritural propia que exprese una feminidad hasta entonces colonizada por el discurso masculino.” 595 Celis then goes on to place Ferré’s writing within the larger feminist critiques of philosophy and psychoanalysis. 596 Ferré is aware of the double bind in which the philosopher finds himself when entering into the naming of a positive identification of the feminine. 597 To say that woman can write herself into being or write a philosophy that is not bounded by phallologocentrism is to always already relegate the Woman to outside, to exclusion, because the very foundation of this question rests upon Woman’s Otherness. The issue is now less about arriving at identity or identifying women, but looking to what the feminine is doing, what the maternal performs and makes of literature and philosophy by acting as its “outside.” There is consistently something of the maternal in Ferré’s work that corrodes the very system of signification, founded in the absence of the maternal, that names Men and Women as such. Therefore, this chapter is not about the search for a feminine literature or 595 Celis, “’Algo Tan Feo,’” 559-560. 596 Celis writes that this opens Ferré’s work to: “un proyecto ético y estético común: romper con el monopolio de la palabra masculina y sus paradigmas de feminidad para denunciar la ilegitimidad del discurso y las prácticas patriarcales, así como las violentas consecuencias de su poder para la identidad de las mujeres. Este objetivo requiere una emancipación del lenguaje. Decir lo no dicho, nombrar la sexualidad femenina, romper los tabúes con un léxico directo, a veces soez, y, sobre todo, con una furiosa lucidez” (“’Algo Tan Feo,’” 561). Celis goes on in her article to work through Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray’s discussions on the feminine to tease out an understanding of feminine embodiment within Ferré’s work. 597 When asked in an interview about the possibility of a philosopher mother, Derrida responded: “’All the deconstruction of phallologocentrism is the deconstruction of what one calls philosophy, which since its inception has always been linked to a paternal figure. So a philosopher is a father, not a mother. So the philosopher that would be my mother would be a postdeconstructive philosopher, that is, myself, or my son. My mother as a philosopher would be my granddaughter, for example. An inheritor. A woman philosopher who would reaffirm the deconstruction. And consequently, would be a woman who thinks. Not a philosopher. I always distinguish thinking form philosophy. A thinking mother—it’s what I both love and try to give birth to’” (Parker, The Theorist’s Mother, 5). It is for this reason that the philosopher is gendered as “he/him,” following Derrida’s insistence upon the phallologocentric foundations—foundation not origin—of philosophy. Parker goes on to state that “Derrida is even willing to imagine himself as a mother who gives birth to himself, to his son, and to his granddaughter—but not to his mother” (The Theorist’s Mother, 5). 211 Woman’s identity, even if this is the author’s project; rather, it investigates the unintended consequences of this work, the seething maternal absence, that is excessive presence, that demands to be read. Ferré writes that her novel Maldito Amor y otros cuentos is the exploration of a duality between Puerto and Rico, between the industrialized island and the riches of its natural bounty. This island, open to capitalist investment, is not the embodiment of paradise that she parodies but stands precariously upon the edge of catastrophe. Ferré’s novel points to the seduction of the island and the distribution of its land as capital and commodity. The novel spans roughly one hundred years of Puerto Rico’s colonial and pseudo-colonial history, following the end of the Spanish-American war to the end of the twentieth century. Composed of four stories, the novel recounts the saga of the De la Valle family and the history of Puerto Rico to an apocalyptic end. In it sex, race and sugar compose the high notes of the cacophonic struggle with history and colonialism. In her introduction to Maldito amor y otros cuentos, Ferré writes, that the people of Puerto Rico dream of an island home that does not exist: “Los que sufren el insilio sueñan muchas veces con una isla que no existe más que en su imaginación; los que viven el exilio mueren soñando regresar algún día o se pasan la vida viajando.” 598 Ferré provides no clear alternative, no way out of this dream. Instead we are left with promiscuity, vulnerability and opacity. 599 It is in this space that we find ourselves in relation to others. The island of Puerto Rico, like the maternal body, is open to foreign incursion. This is the nature of the port and of the 598 Ferré, Maldito, 9. See translation, “We spend a great part of our lives traveling to and from the continent, citizens of that no-man’s land shadowed by Eastern Airlines’ gliding silver ghosts” (Sweet Diamond Dust, vii). With few exceptions, the translations of Maldito amor will be taken from Ferré’s own translation, Sweet Diamond Dust. The reader will notice that the translations are not “exact,” and in this instance, the closest we arrive to the term “insilio” used in Maldito amor is “no-man’s land.” For Janice A. Jaffe, the danger of translation is the loss of personal identity (“Translation,” 72). She attempts to argue that Ferré works towards a positive identity of the self and of Puerto Rico in her text. 599 Glissant, Poetics, 194. 212 island. 600 Islands impel the islander to travel, to flowing through ports: “El puerto nos define, nos constituye en un país de caracoles viajeros, de peregrinos que vamos por el mundo con nuestra casa a cuestas.” 601 The port is a site of perforation in the porous border of the island, the site where that which is excluded oozes and probes the boundary. Ferré writes, “Puerto Rico le ha dado albergue tradicionalmente a un sinfín de refugiados que han venido a tocar a sus puertas legal o ilegalmente […] permanecen en la isla algunos años, quizá hasta una generación, pero sueñan siempre con el día en que podrán ingresar a los Estados Unidos, que constituye para ellos el verdadero objeto de su viaje.” 602 Ferré presents the island as a liminal space, offering an Edenic paradise from which one is always expelled and to which one yearns to return. In her stories, bodies come and go, through her ports, pillaging the land for sugar, proliferating and dying beyond reason. The island does not trap bodies within its borders. These ports open themselves to the outside. They are penetrable and vulnerable but also beckoning, sirens and lovers. Ferré’s island bodies make any shoring up of the border impossible, even her own myths are fluctuating and penetrable. In previous chapters we have discussed Guillermina de Ferrari’s concept of the “myth of filiation,” drawing upon Édouard Glissant’s concept of the “void.” She writes that, because of conquest, the Americas existed outside the norms of legitimacy and filiation that structured power and land ownership in Europe: “It is the lack of legitimacy over land possession through Filiation that made the symbolic aspects of the colonizing process such 600 Antonio Benítez Rojo writes that “la insularidad de los antillanos no los impele al aislamiento, sino al contrario, al viaje, a la exploración, a la búsqueda de rutas fluviales y marinas” (La isla, 45). 601 Ferré, Maldito, 14. See translation: “The myth of paradise confounds but consoles us. Puerto Ricans are never sure the island exists, precisely because we’re always about to leave it. Our port defines us, turns us into a population of traveling snails, roaming the world with our home on our backs” (Sweet Diamond Dust, x). 602 Ferré, Maldito, 12. See translation: “Exile is also related to change, and in the last ten years we have given thousands of immigrants haven on our island. The Caribbean has long been a region prone to political strife, and Puerto Rico has opened its doors to all the exiles who have knocked legally and illegally on it” (Sweet Diamond Dust, ix). 213 an effective instrument in the region’s conquest.” 603 In order to overcome this “lack,” myths of filiation are constructed to justify colonial presence and occupation. De Ferrari explains that land possession is rooted 604 in the “myth of uninterrupted Filiation,” but that this line of filiation is violently disrupted by the arrival of the colonizer and the annihilation of the Caribbean indigenous. 605 Because of this interruption, the Spanish colonizer had to perform the invention of a new line of inheritance and possession. Perhaps one of the most infamous of such justifications was the concept of Reconquista, in which the Spanish justified their “re”-conquering the Christian world, which they viewed as having fallen away from the true and original faith. The encomienda system arose out of the Reconquista and later the Conquista of the New World as a power structure that justified Spanish right to conquer and subjugate the indigenous under the egis of conversion and religious formation and responsibility. 606 This logic allowed for the transfer of filial possession to the newly arrived colonists. This particular myth was succeeded by numerous others, including Doris Sommer’s “national romances” discussed in my first chapter. One such myth is portrayed in Maldito amor as the novel that Don Hermenegildo, a friend of the 603 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 20. 604 De Ferrari here refers to opposition between the concepts of the Root and the Rhizome proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Vulnerable, 19-20). 605 De Ferrari writes: “According to Édouard Glissant, all tragedy deals with a community threatened by a break in the chain of filiation; in fact, tragedy is the process of uncovering that interruption” (Vulnerable, 177). 606 Rolena Adorno writes that Bartolomé de las Casas wrote in opposition of the encomienda system, stating that the Indians could not be legally enslaved and their lands not legally possessed by the Spanish because they had not been captured in “just war”: “In the sixteenth century, two types of slavery were generally condoned. One was the legal slavery of captives taken in a just war; this was called civil slavery. The other was natural slavery, a doctrine which postulated that the governance of certain peoples by others was justifiable in so far as once group could be considered inferior in some way to the other […] Las Casas, like everyone else, condoned the taking of slaves in a just war, and this meant, in the Christian world, the war against Islam. Las Casas argued that there were only three just causes for war: (I) to defend the Christian nation against those, such as the Turks and Muslims of the Mediterranean and North Africa, who invade and make war against it; this, he says, is not called war but rather a natural and legitimate defense (‘legítima defensión y natural’); (2) to defend the nation against those that seek to impede or destroy Christianity and spread their own creed in its place; and (3) to oppose those who have wronged the republic and refuse to make restitution […] In Las Casas’s view, peoples who had neither invaded nor attacked a Christian principality gave no cause to make war against them. He applied this principle to the Indians of the New World and, when he learned about the origins of the international slave trade, to the Africans as well” (Polemics of Possession, 65-66). 214 De la Valle family, writes chronicling the history of “Ubaldino De la Valle, nuestro ilustre prócer.” 607 This history acts as a myth of filiation in that it establishes a legitimizing line of filiation that secures the rights of land and nation within the father figure of Ubaldino. Waiting to overthrow this legitimizing narrative are the women of the family. De Ferrari also writes that the nation establishes itself in terms of belonging and exclusion, specifically in relation to sick bodies. 608 Quarantine provides systems of containment in which the healthy body, that of the nation state, attempts to wall off the sick body. The state, secure in its definition and signification, must secure itself from that which would corrode those boundaries and challenge that security. De Ferrari writes that the utopian, idealized nation state requires the presence of the sick body “as ‘other’ to affirm and justify its existence” and that the sick body “is an imperfect boundary for his self, which makes his body an undersignified body, or a subbody, a body whose interior is literally exposed and which, as a consequence, may die at any moment. At the same time, however, other people’s fears of contagion make his body an oversignified body, or a hyperbody.” 609 I would argue that the maternal body and the feminine function similarly within the symbolic field. The mother’s body, the feminine, and the pregnant body are all hyperbodies whose excessive materiality are both necessary for the existence of the symbolic but also threaten its (b)order. Without evasiveness, the maternal in literature points to the throbbing site of the slippage between the absence/presence of the already-dead-maternal and the male sex. Fiction exposes the residue of the maternal in the symbolic and points to this unresolved division between presence 607 Ferré, Maldito, 35. See translation: “Ubaldino De la Valle, Guamaní’s patrician statesman” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 24). 608 De Ferrari demonstrates this in terms of the AIDS crisis, which “exposed the extreme porosity of borders that separate center and margin” and led to much of Cuba’s definitions of itself in terms of hypermasculinity, and to leprosy (Vulnerable, 64). 609 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 69. 215 and absence at the heart of Western metaphysics. She gestures towards the always incomplete fissure between the one and the Other. The maternal signals the rot at the heart of masculine presence, its constitutive absence, always degrading its totality. Literature, as we see in Ferré’s maternal figures, points to the always-already-dead mother who refuses to die and continues to haunt from the shadows of the symbolic. 610 The reclaiming of a female subjectivity always already posits the “female” or the “mother” as an outside to the discourse and symbolic that relies upon these figures as their outside for its very existence. Butler writes that “the task is to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon,” 611 which means the maternal is sited not as past but as a futural relation at the border, a border crossing. The maternal is no longer only “impossible,” but a possible future. Literature and discourse manage to invoke a certain gesture towards—and even perhaps of—the maternal, without naming her, through its fear of her haunting, through its disgust at the residue on its skin. As such, the feminine as the necessary foundation for all figuration also corrupts that very foundation, bleeding into it. It is not the mother as a character in the novel or the work of art 612 that creates this slippage. It is not enough for Ferré and other feminist artists and philosophers to write about mothers and daughters and prostitutes and wives, though these characterizations of the feminine abound throughout Ferré’s work. An infinite horde of such characters could not write the feminine into Being. The feminine surges forth precisely from the site of her exclusion. 613 Hélène Cixous gave to women the 610 This concept is not entirely dissimilar to Benigno Trigo’s, Ferré’s son and Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University, articulation of the maternal imaginary (Remembering, 3). I agree with Trigo that the maternal is only experienced as an effect or relation through discourse and literature, but that it also evades enunciation and its total exclusion. 611 Butler, Bodies, 25. 612 Here I gesture towards Bracha Ettinger’s work on the maternal and the matrix as the bordersite within artistic creation where the artist and the spectator become matrixially transversed by the work of art. They are unevenly and incompletely linked by the creation. 613 Butler describes Irigaray’s argument, writing: “when and where women are represented within this economy is precisely the site of their erasure. Moreover, when matter is described within philosophical descriptions, she argues, it is at once a substitution for and displacement of the feminine. One cannot interpret the philosophical relation to 216 injunction: “Ils disent qu’il y a deux irreprésentables : la mort et le sexe féminine. Car ils ont besoin que la féminité soit associée à la mort ; ils bandent par trouille ! pour eux-mêmes ! ils ont besoin d’avoir peur de nous.” 614 Perhaps she did not mean that “men” should fear “women” but that the phallologocentric system of signification that privileges the masculine should fear its “constitutive outside.” 615 Within the realm of Western philosophy, women were historically associated with the body, that which stands outside the symbolic, while men were envisioned as more capable of divorcing themselves from the body and residing in the realm of the mind and also language. This “form/matter distinction” or the division which situates the feminine as the outside to any philosophical binary begins with the platonic ideal and later the Cartesian divide between body and mind, or between materiality and rationality. 616 Within this dialectic, the affirmation of the feminine necessitates the recurrence to the body—or the pre-symbolic—meaning that sexual difference is non-symbolizable within post-Cartesian metaphysics. The creation of language, as the feminine through the figures that philosophy provides, but, rather, she argues, through siting the feminine as the unspeakable condition of figuration, as that which, in fact, can never be figured within the terms of philosophy proper, but whose exclusion from that propriety is its enabling condition” (Bodies, 12). 614 Cixous, Le Rire, 54. 615 Butler writes that “Irigaray’s task is to reconcile neither the form/matter distinction nor the distinctions between bodies and souls or matter and meaning. Rather, her effort is to show that those binary oppositions are formulated through the exclusion of a field of disruptive possibilities. Her speculative thesis is that those binaries, even in their reconciled mode, are part of a phallogocentric economy that produces the ‘feminine’ as its constitutive outside. Irigaray’s intervention in the history of the form/matter distinction underscores ‘matter’ as the site at which the feminine is excluded from philosophical binaries. Inasmuch as certain phantasmatic notions of the feminine are traditionally associated with materiality, these are specular effects which confirm a phallogocentric project of autogenesis” (Bodies, 10). 616 Guillermina de Ferrari writes that “Contemporary, post-Cartesian concepts of the body propose the opposite view. The body is understood as a text of culture, inseparable from identity, and an inalienable source of human experience” (Vulnerable, 10). She describes how for Butler and Foucault the body is “the locus of social control through discipline” and “the body is fully materialized through the repetition of cultural discourses—through practice—by which it becomes implicated in a dynamics of power” (De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 10). Dalia Judovitz writes that “The advent of Cartesian subjectivity leads to the exclusion of the body from the purview of metaphysics, and to its reduction to a notion of materiality, whose logic is governed by the regime of the machine” (Culture, 4). Judovitz goes on to write that “Descartes’s elaboration of a rational subjectivity founded on the primacy of reason entails the redefinition of the body as a machine whose objective reality is sundered from its subjective existence” (Culture, 5). 217 described by Julia Kristeva, is part of the process of abjection. It is the turn away from the breast of the mother to the symbolic of the father. 617 For Kristeva, autonomy is an effect of the break that occurs as an abjecting of the mother and an eternal process of splitting one’s self from the mother. However, the site of this cleavage, of the break is “already haunted” by the maternal, by the possibility that the split and division never occurred or is incomplete. In order to speak, we must affirm that it took place, and yet how can one ever be certain of the surety of these borders? The abject becomes a kind of sickness that troubles and effects the putrefaction of the border between one and Other. Kristeva writes: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” 618 I argue that the maternal is precisely this “in-between,” the rot that has no respect for the hermeticity of borders, that corrupts the wall between self and Other, and that Ferré’s rotting bodies effect just such a corrosion of the hermetic (b)order. The maternal causes us to desire that the mother be abjected, that the threat of her presence be cast into the murky beyond. The maternal is an illness within autonomy and within the (b)order of signification. She forces us to consider the reality that the divide between body and soul, or between body and language is never complete. De Ferrari writes that “For the body to be considered an attribute of distinction in modern times, however, it has to be present in an absence-like quality. If the body’s presence is felt, it is usually in the form of a devaluation of humanity. Illness, in its capacity to bring attention to the corporeality of the individual, provokes a disruption in cultural codes […] the capacity of body to produce an 617 Kristeva, Powers, 45. Kristeva writes that, “The abject would thus be the ‘object’ of primal repression. But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat […] The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (Powers, 12-13). 618 Kristeva, Powers, 4. 218 oversignification that accompanies its own devaluation as body.” 619 Like illness, the body as feminine, or the pregnant body, heralds the disintegration and disruption of the code by which the body is subordinated to reason. The putrescence of the body threatens the singularity of the Mind. For De Ferrari and Ferré the ill body and the pregnant body function similarly and are both troubled by their hyper-presence. Ferré plays with and troubles these distinctions between reason/soul and the body. I argue that the maternal does not claim the restitution of the feminine but supposes its incomplete erasure from the scene of signification. The maternal does not stand at the crossroads of the binary, but rather indicates the broken and porous divisions within the fissure that would establish the binary in the first place. 620 The maternal that is evoked in Ferré’s writing is a creative disruption of the system that precludes the lived, experiential body from the realm of its representation. The question of materiality and creation is forcefully evoked in Ferré’s short story “La muñeca menor.” In this story the spinster aunt of a once-wealthy family of sugar planters, begins making dolls for her nieces. After suffering a mysterious—and vaguely sexual 621 —wound caused by a river prawn that is embedded and rotting in her leg, the aunt resigns herself to the life of a recluse and devotes herself to making the dolls that will serve as stand-ins for the daughters she will never bear. She creates a new doll for each niece on her birthday: “Al principio eran solo muñecas comunes, con carne de guata de higüera y ojos de botones perdidos. Pero con el pasar del tiempo fue refinando su arte hasta ganarse el respeto y la reverencia de toda 619 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 81-2. 620 We are again interested in Ettinger’s discussion of the linking and co-emergence that occurs in the matrixial. It is not fusion of the I and the non-I, but the porous border between them. 621 Bilbija explains that the dolls are “an extension of her female creator” meant to exact revenge against the patriarchy, and that the scene of bathing in the river evokes the dangers of a young woman’s coming into her sexuality: “It is not an exaggeration to say that this quite erotic description relates the awakening of a young woman’s sexuality and its consequences” (Bilbija, “On Women, Dolls, Golems,” 884).. 219 la familia. El nacimiento de una muñeca era siempre motivo de regocijo sagrado.” 622 The dolls increase in the complexity of their creation until they become almost identical to, and perhaps even more beautiful and precious than, the nieces they signify. Upon the marriage of the youngest niece, the aunt creates her last doll for the niece to carry with her to her nuptial home. The doll is of rare value and craftsmanship, which the niece’s mercenary husband quickly realizes. He removes the eyes and sells them for a watch, but: Una sola cosa perturbaba la felicidad del médico. Notaba que mientras él se iba poniendo viejo, la menor guardaba la misma piel aporcelanada y dura que tenía cuando la iba a visitar a la casa del cañaveral. Una noche decidió entrar en su habitación para observarla durmiendo. Notó que su pecho no se movía. Colocó delicadamente el estetoscopio sobre su corazón y oyó un lejano rumor de agua. Entonces la muñeca levantó los párpados y por las cuencas vacías de los ojos comenzaron a salir las antenas furibundas de las chágaras. 623 It is the scene of a something coming into being, beyond reason and beyond language. His wife and the doll are now one, the borders between the doll and the human are blurred. Ferré clearly writes this story in dialogue with Freud’s “Uncanny.” 624 In his essay, Freud identifies several instances or symptoms of the unheimlich as they appear in the story “The Sandman” from Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman. In this story the young man, Nathaniel, is taught by his mother to fear the Sandman, who will come to steal his eyes if he does not go to 622 Ferré, “muñeca,” Papeles, 2. See translation: “At first they were just plain dolls, with cottony stuffing from the gourd tree in the garden and stray buttons sewn on for eyes. As time passed, though, she began to refine her craft more and more, thus earning the respect and admiration of the whole family. The birth of a new doll was always cause for a ritual celebration” (The Youngest Doll, 2). 623 Ferré, “muñeca,” Papeles, 8. See translation: “There was only one thing missing from the doctor’s otherwise perfect happiness. He noticed that, although he was aging naturally, the youngest still kept the same firm, porcelained skin she had had, when he had called on her at the big house on the plantation. One night he decided to go into her bedroom, to watch her as she slept. He noticed that her chest wasn’t moving. He gently placed his stethoscope over her heart and heard a distant swish of water. Then the doll lifted up her eyelids, and out of the empty sockets of her eyes came the frenzied antennae of all those prawns” (The Youngest Doll, 6). 624 Bilbija identifies the uncanniness in the story as being of the prawn that bites the aunt’s leg and briefly relates the removal of the doll’s eyes to the “Sand Man” story in Freud’s “Uncanny.” She writes that the reduction of reproduction to the creation of dolls is symbolic of the male desire to affirm the primacy of male reproduction: “What all of these creations—golems, homunculi, automata, robots—have in common is the symbolic desire of their male master to avoid the female role in the process of procreation and, therefore, the urgency to prove that men have the sole power in creation” (“On Women, Dolls, Golems,” 878). 220 sleep. The story is employed any time the father’s lawyer—a man who repulses the young boy— comes to call late at night. Later in his life, Nathaniel falls in love with Olympia, who is truly an automaton whose eyes were provided by the very same lawyer Nathaniel feared as a child. Nathaniel goes mad after confronting the Sandman and the former object of his affection. According to Freud, the effect of the automaton is one kind of uncanny experience as is the boy’s reaction to the Sandman. The latter he relates to the fear of castration, the eyes being a stand-in for the male procreative organs. 625 Ferré’s story inverts the dynamic of castration. It is not the father or another male authority who threatens castration; instead, the husband who marries the automaton is castrated when he himself removes her eyes. The doll in this way acts passively as the castrating force, subverting the structure and direction of the Oedipal fear of castration. However, the automaton functions outside the Freudian schema. It is also key to understanding the Cartesian system of subjectivity. Instead of making the body machine, she makes the machine a body. The creation and repetitive reproduction of the automaton reinforces and re-inscribes the body as lived and uncannily symbolizable. Ferré describes the aunt’s uncanny, funereal mode of procreation: “la tía llamaba a su habitación a la niña con la que había soñado esa noche y le tomaba las medidas. Luego le hacía una mascarilla de cera que cubría de yeso por ambos lados como una cara viva dentro de dos caras muertas; luego hacía salir un hilillo rubio, de cera derretida, por un hoyito en la barbilla. La porcelana de las manos era siempre translúcida; tenía un ligero tinte marfileño que contrastaba con la blancura granulada de las caras de biscuit.” 626 The dead and living faces are interchangeable and indistinguishable. 625 Freud writes: “This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes” (The Uncanny, 138), and he later explains that it is in the story of Oedipus Rex where the castration complex comes full circle: “In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration” (The Uncanny, 139). 626 Ferré, “muñeca,” Papeles, 3-4. See translation: “the aunt would call the niece she had dreamt about the night before into her bedroom and take her measurements. Then she would make a wax mask of the child’s face, covering 221 Ferré leaves her readers in doubt, lost in the ambiguity of the doll’s true nature. It is neither living nor dead, it is disintegrating out of existence and yet horrific to encounter. This monstrous reproduction is a continuous theme throughout Ferré’s work. Trigo writes that in Puerto Rico of the 1930s, there existed a vociferous debate surrounding the supposed “overpopulation” of the island, which led to the forced sterilization of many women and the rise of “the figure of the monstrous mother and its menacing, out of control, reproductive body.” 627 Ferré’s maternal labor as author breaks with both this figure of the monstrously reproductive mother and that of the idyllic, objectification of motherhood by presenting a maternal that is not nurturing but breathes life and death simultaneously. It probes and penetrates the boundary that would separate presence from absence, life from death, and creates a monstrous and putrid procreation. In the section “El regalo” of Maldito amor, the protagonist, Merceditas, daughter of an old-money, high-society family, receives a mango from her best friend Carlota, a mulata girl admitted to the Catholic preparatory school on the basis of her wealth but against the wishes of the nuns. As a punishment for the gift, Merceditas is forced to allow the mango to rot. Finally, Carlota is expelled from the school for her provocative behavior, but before she leaves, the mother superior beats her mercilessly until Merceditas steps in, handing her the rotted mango and saying “Aquí tiene, Madre—dijo, adelantándose a la Madre Artigas con una profunda it with plaster on both sides like a living face sheathed in two dead ones. Then she would draw out an endless flaxen thread of melted max through a pinpoint on her chin. The porcelain of the hands and face was always translucent; it had an ivory tint to it that formed a great contrast with the curdled whiteness of the bisque faces” (The Youngest Doll, 3). 627 Trigo, “Lullaby,” 658. Trigo describes a certain feminine mode of writing called “lullaby poetics” that subverts the political agendas that would mobilize the mother as either Madonna or monster: “This poetics stood in opposition to both the idealization and the abjection of the mother and her lullabies by the discourse of motherhood” (“Lullaby,” 658). This mode of writing interestingly resounds within Ferré’s work, but not as a vehicle for political propaganda or to “give voice” to any silenced mother. In this article, Trigo describes the various ways in which the maternal was mobilized and deployed within Puerto Rican politics during the 1930s and 1940s. He writes that the mother’s voice was recuperated through a lullaby poetics that functioned through “an uncanny maternal language and an ambiguous lullaby poetics […] instead of disavowing or reducing it to a set of stereotypical and gendered coordinates of national identity, as the dominant discourses of motherhood had done” (“Lullaby,” 658). 222 reverencia--. Aquí tiene su Sagrado Corazón. Se lo regalo.” 628 Ferré pits the sterility of the Mother Superior’s Sacred Heart against the rotting heart of the girl’s fecund promiscuity. The beautiful gift of friendship is transformed in this scene into a grotesque, rotting heart and presented as the Sacred Heart for which the school is named and at which Ferré studied. Like Carlota and the Sacred Heart, there is a strange intermingling of the virginal and the sacred, with the turn towards the decadence and degradation of sensuality. Ferré signals that the ordering of female sexuality along religious lines already contains within it this germinating seed. This corrupted beauty is that of the Gorgon, a woman punished for the Other’s desire, for the crime of rape visited on her because of this beauty. She is the grotesque and the abject. She is what cannot be looked upon, though we cannot help but desire to stare full into her face. 629 She wears snakes for hair, snakes described as “horrible” or “indecent,” because how dare a woman wear this phallic symbol upon her head? Carlota is beautiful and is simultaneously rewarded and punished for her beauty when she is named queen of the carnival. Ferré describes a beauty that is also grotesque and animal-like: “el enorme cuerpo de animal pesado y manso” 630 and “sacó de su bolsillo el maybelline, el pancake y el crayón de labios y se volvió a pintar minuciosamente el rostro. Agrandadas, exageradas por las capas de pintura, sus facciones cobraban una dimensión aterradora.” 631 Her face becomes terrifying in its grotesque performance of beauty, a satire of 628 Ferré, Maldito, 119. See translation: “’Here it is, Mother,’ she said, curtsying before Mother Artigas for the last time. ‘Here’s your Sacred Heart. It’s my gift to you’” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 118). 629 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 169-171: “[Perseus] travelled through rocky regions remote and secluded, littered with broken trees, and finally came to the home of the Gorgons. Across the fields and along the tracks he had seen the statues of men and beasts transformed to stone at the sight of Medusa…Medusa was once an exceedingly beautiful maiden, whose hand in marriage was jealously sought by an army of suitors. According to someone who told me he’d seen it, her marvelous hair was her crowning glory. The story goes that Neptune the sea god raped this glorious creature inside the shrine of Minerva. Jove’s daughter screened her virginal eyes with her aegis in horror, and punished the sin, by transforming the Gorgon’s beautiful hair into horrible snakes.” 630 See translation: “her huge body gently swaying forwards like a tame heifer’s” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 89). 631 Ferré, Maldito, 89, 111. See translation: “she took out a stick of mascara, a lipstick, and a tube of heavy pancake makeup, and applied them generously to her face. Her features, shaded by the thick layers of paint, acquired a grotesque aspect that, as Carlotta later told Merceditas, laughing, was in character with the savage nature of the mestizo women with whom Juan Ponce de León probably fell in love” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 111). 223 bourgeois society’s ideals. One desires to look upon her just as one is repelled by and terrified by the sight. 632 We cannot look upon the Gorgon, the face of Medusa. She is too terrible, too beautiful to see. 633 Because the woman is not castrated, she is laughing and beautiful. Ferré’s woman is laughing, but she also cries in the laughter. She is beautiful and horrendous. We are challenged to look upon her and see not perfection, not an image of the feminist or emancipatory ideal, but instead we encounter ambivalence. This ambivalent borderspace between the living and the dead, the decay and rot that is an excess of life, functions as the inscription of the maternal domain, the disintegration of the borders that construct our dialectics. Irigaray describes the need our metaphysics has of this feminine “other” to stand still as its “mute” foundation, “That which separates, divides, splits, must be taken away from the other, from the ‘feminine,’ for otherwise mathematics and dialectics no longer know what they’re about.” 634 This mute, immobile “screen” upon which difference is marked provides the sterile agar upon which dialects and reason are produced, but they require this “silence.” The maternal is not silent. She is “uneven.” She troubles these divisions, the split between one and Other, I and non-I. 635 She makes impossible the totality of individuation. Butler writes that Irigaray imagines for the feminine “a field of disruptive 632 Kristeva writes of the abject in relation to the maternal and the feminine as a kind of ecstatic encounter with “an unnamable otherness. Kristeva states, “What we designate as ‘feminine,’ far from being a primeval essence, will be seen as an ‘other’ without a name […] a coming face to face with an unnamable otherness—the solid rock of jouissance and writing as well” (Kristeva, Powers, 58-59). 633 Cixous dares us to stare into her face, to encounter the sirens that call men to their deaths: “Est-ce que le pire, ce ne serait pas, ce n’est pas, en vérité, que la femme n’est castrée, qu’il lui suffit de ne plus écouter les sirènes (car les sirènes, c’étaient des hommes) pour que l’histoire change de sens? Il suffit qu’on regarde la Méduse en face pour la voir : et elle n’est pas mortelle. Elle est belle et elle rit” (Le Rire, 54). 634 Irigaray, Speculum, 360. 635 Ettinger describes a similar hole in the screen, a perforation that is not a rape but a matrixial drawing in and through, being together. She sees in artwork and painting the co-creation of artist and spectator taking place upon the screen. According to Ettinger the matrix, not the womb as organ, presents a border space of relation, which she terms trans-subjectivity, the threshold across which the I and the non-I meet and are inscribed relationally in each other. 224 possibilities,” 636 the ability to break upon the scene and probe its boundaries, the screen that separates the symbolic from the unsymbolizable “feminine.” The maternal is precisely what troubles and posits the limits of all such figuration. She is the liminal space where the distinction between “inside” and “outside” falls away in decay and rot. In this way she is also an unthinkable origin. She is unthinkable in that to think her we have to think ourselves as undifferentiated and undefinable in relation to her. The self, the nation, even subjectivity are made meaningless and psychotic when absence is made, not present but neither fully absent. For Ettinger, the matrixial, which I designate as a kind of maternal and relational rupture, effects not the pre-symbolic semiotics of Kristeva but a constant and timeless rupture of the dialectics of the symbolic. 637 The maternal is the impure matrix, impure in that it muddies the waters between presence and absence, between this One and that Other. It is opaque and sedimentary, as Édouard Glissant would have it. 638 What Ferré effects is not the total figuration of the feminine, but the generation of a rotting matrix, the maternal, at the heart of this figuration, an immaterial maternity that posits the failure of the symbolic to rightly identify its outside. In the first story of Maldito amor, it is the moribund mother, Laura, who torpedoes the idealized history that Don Hermenegildo writes of the family. According to Don Hermenegildo’s history, the De la Valle family stands as the civilizing and foundational family of the island. 636 Butler, Bodies, 10. 637 Ettinger delineates the ways in which the matrixial perturbs the symbolic: “With Kristeva’s ‘abject,’ ‘the alien is effectively established through (this) expulsion’; consolidation of ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ ‘pure’ and ‘defiled’ maintain social regulation as well as controlling and establishing the Other as rejected and repulsive. In the phallic paradigm that underlines social conventions [male and female, the binary frame], not only Law and Order but also Creation are founded on the marking of a frontier between pure and impure in order to overcome the ‘abyss’ that becomes its Other, its inaccessible side […] The breach of separation between subject and object is presented as perversion. In the phallic paradigm, such a transgression does indeed stand for a collapse of the difference between desire, phantasy, and event, whereas castration establishes the difference between event and representation. In the matrixial paradigm, on the other hand, differentiation-in-transgression stands for a creative principle that does not correspond to the Phallic Law and Order, but does not replace them either. For the matrix, creation is before-as-beside the univocal line of birth/Creation-as-castration. It is in the im-pure zone of neither day nor night, of both light and darkness” (Matrixial, 109). 638 Glissant, Poetics, 111. 225 Laura, however, reveals the abjected secret of the family, that the father of their patriarch, “nuestro prócer” 639 Don Ubaldino, “Don Julio Font, era negro. Pero ésa es, después de todo, la función de la muerte: nivelarnos a todos en nuestra última hora.’” 640 It is also the mother who demonstrates that their entire lineage is other than that which the historian had thought. She recounts how the son of her daughter-in-law is not her grandson but is actually the illegitimate son of her husband, Don Ubaldino. The mother has also written a secondary will that grants inheritance to her husband’s illegitimate son who is now also the half-brother of his mother’s husband. This oral story is told by the mother instead of the historian or the father, because her final motive in telling this story is to make it impossible than any such lineage be drawn: “’creyéndose dueño del mundo, bajo el palio cardenalicio de este mismo lecho, el que ahora abriga, en una última ceremonia ecuménica, la moribunda sombra de mi muerte.’” 641 A maternal signification constructs no lineage or history. Her history is that of the specter as she declares her will from the shadows of her deathbed, the site where her already rotting body overturns the patriarchal order of signification and legitimacy. 642 Vacillating between life and death, absence 639 Ferré, Maldito, 37. 640 Ferré, Maldito, 75. See translation: “Don Julio Font, was a black man. But such is, after all, the role of death: she evens us out at the last, and forces us to admit that we are all born equal, innocent of race and caste” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 74). Murphy affirms that Ferré’s works are a labor for the vindication of the woman but that her feminism problematizes and fragments any image of the “woman” instead of launching or proposing a kind of feminine plenitude (“en el espejo,” 145). 641 Ferré, Maldito, 69-70. See translation: “After my passing there’ll be no more De la Valles reigning over the emerald fields of Diamond Dust; none that shall be able to accumulate bags of gold in underground vaults; none that shall again sit at our dining-room table, strutting their false pride over its polished surface like well-fed peacocks and surrounded by the twelve leather shields that were once supposed to belong to Charlemagne’s Knights and that were ridiculously made into chairs by Ubaldino’s aunts; none that shall lie again under the Episcopal canopy of this bed which shelters my body from the cruel winds of passage, offering my shadow its sacred refuge during its last trial” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 65). 642 Derrida writes “haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar. Untimely, it does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day” (Specters, 3). 226 and presence, body and phantom, this maternal perforates linear temporality or phallologocentric systems of figuration. 643 Instead of recuperating or affirming a plenitudinous, fully present “feminine” Being, the maternal body fluctuates elusively and spectrally between presence and absence towards the interstices between life and death. The body of the mother is a creative and simultaneously rotting body, excessively life-giving, it is no longer the body of the Madonna, the virginal and sterile canvas upon which the masculine Order is drawn. On her deathbed, the mother explains to her daughter-in-law: “’la muerte es mujer como yo, y por eso siempre es justiciera y valiente; no hace jamás distinciones entre los hombres sino que, con su pie helado, dobla y humilla la cerviz hasta de los más soberbios. Por eso no me importa morir, Don Hermenegildo, por eso no me importará entregarme a ella dentro de algunos momentos. Ella, como su gemelo el amor, es la madre de todos.’” 644 Life and death turn upon each other, birth towards death and death as a birth towards another life. The desire to return to the origin, to the womb, is a desire for death. In her critique of Lacanian philosophy, Ettinger argues that the matrix no longer forms the site of absence of the phallus but the presence of an absence; this perturbing ambivalence, our very separation from the site of origin, from the womb, is called into question by her entrance upon the scene of figuration—not that the maternal can be figured as such. Literature achieves in this way what philosophy is unable to do. The maternal acts without Being, by virtue of her 643 María José Bustos Fernández writes “A través de la incorporación de múltiples voces, Maldito amor cuestiona la autoridad textual hegemónica. Ferre elige una forma narrativa en la cual varios narradores van tomando la voz y construyendo una figura que tiene como fin destruir un mundo textual y levantar no una sino varias utopías que se enfrentan” (“Subversión,” 23). 644 Ferré, Maldito, 69. See translation: “Death is a woman, and for that reason she’s courageous and just, and never makes distinctions between mortals; she’ll crush the ignorant, the arrogant, and the wise alike under her icy foot. Because I see myself in her, because I recognize myself in her eyes, I really don’t mind dying, Don Hermenegildo, and in a few minutes I’ll surrender myself gratefully unto her arms. Death is the twin of love and mother of us all, she struggles equally for men and women and never accepts differences of caste or class” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 65). 227 exclusion. In relating and in sensuality, she violently penetrates the screen that requires the absence of the feminine for the symbolic to occur. 645 Negrón writes that we continue to feel our separation from this matrixial, relational origin: “esa separación del cuerpo del origen, que es ciega, pues nadie asiste a su propio nacimiento; nos queda su huella. La ausencia y el vacío significan más. Ese vacío recoge el otro significado de ‘de(s)madre’: es decir, exceso.” 646 This absence is excessive to the point of presence. It is unnamable but—perhaps—maternal in nature. For Negrón this blindness to the origin and to the excess of its trace are the wounds of an inescapable but irrecuperable origin. The maternal is both embodied reality and unsignifiable absence from the scene of representation. We, as reader and as subjects, are caught inextricably in the ambiguity between the life and death of the mother’s specter that watches us from the bed of childbirth and death. 647 The legitimate son of Don Ubaldino De la Valle tells the historian, Don Hermenegildo, that the stories he has heard about his mother are true: “mamá se encuentra moribunda en el cuarto contiguo,” but compared to the apocalyptic death of his father, her death “no es sino una mala copia.” 648 Her death—and impending absence from the family scene—is absurd and without meaning compared to the death of the patriarch which was ripe with Significance and Meaning. 645 Ettinger writes that we must think towards “a different subjectivizing stratum (different from the phallic one), which I have called matrixial […] it is relationally affected. It is composed by linking and relating” (Matrixial, 48). 646 Negrón, animalidad, 214. 647 Derrida writes “the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. […] One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. One does not know if it is living or if it is dead. Here is—or rather there is, over there, an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, ‘this thing,’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy” (Specters, 5). 648 Ferré, Maldito, 45. See translation: “Mother has been agonizing since yesterday. Her passing on, however, will not be anything extraordinary; we see it as a smeared, bespattered copy of a greater tragedy, our father’s foreboding demise five years ago, when our dignity was rent to shreds” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 35). 228 The son must reject the mother’s body and also her body of writing, her testimony, in order to continue to exist in his legitimacy: “Los vivos tenemos entonces que comenzar a desembarazarnos de nuestros muertos, que comenzar a olvidarlos.” 649 He must become unencumbered by the dead, unimpregnated with their memory. The son would be forced to contend with the destabilization of his inheritance if he allows the maternal its signification. 650 The maternal is not a figure or a being in this sense but rather an effect of relation, the relational interruption between subjectivities, an indwelling disturbance. The maternal works in the interstices between materiality and rationality, and this work is most starkly evident in the posture and corruption of the body. Ferré writes of women and their bodies as cultural and textual bodies, bodies that reflect and respond to intersectionality. 651 For Celis, the “game” that Ferré plays with Order is mediated by rage, evident in the deformed and rotting bodies the populate Ferré’s body of work. Celis argues that for Irigaray and Butler alike, the performance of gender enacts the creative rupture of the feminine within Ferré’s work, 652 and 649 Ferré, Maldito, 48. See translation: “We who are still alive must then begin to rid ourselves of our beloved dead, lending a deaf ear to their pathetic snapping and gnashing of teeth; we must attempt to forget them, pushing them tenderly to one side or tearing their embraces of ice away from us as they attempt to press us desperately to their bosom, to drag us down with them to the depths of oblivion” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 37-38). 650 For Butler, the white, heterosexual imperative requires the legitimizing exclusion of sexed and racialized others in order to establish “the terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility” (Bodies, xiii). Ettinger writes of the denial of the maternal body necessary for maleness to establish itself: “The womb as a female bodily specificity and the womb phantasy went under denial. Freud did not deny the denial of the womb as a female bodily specificity, nor did he deny its implications. On the contrary, he insisted on the importance of such a denial, on its necessity! The magnitude of the denial gives us the measure for what is at stake for the male person. For the (universal neutral) child (who happens to have a penis) the idea that the womb belongs to the woman would be a catastrophic blow to narcissism, inasmuch as the child believes that he owns every possible bodily organ of any value. The child must therefore, says Freud, deny the womb and take up the belief that children come from the anus (even if, so the theory goes, the child happens to be a girl who has a womb). Thus, the infantile scenario of childbirth without a womb (from the anus) preserves ‘neutral’ narcissism and in the same move saves univocal, ‘neutral’ psychoanalytic theory” (Matrixial, 54-5). 651 Celis argues that Ferré, as well as other feminist authors, tells stories from the body and the experience of her protagonists, thus exceeding the “dicotomías entre naturaleza y cultura, interior y exterior, entre otras distinciones jerárquicas fundamentales a la racionalidad patriarchal” (“’Algo Tan Feo,’” 562). Celis interestingly positions this argument in relation to subjectivity, embodiment and power (“’Algo Tan Feo,’” 562). 652 Celis writes: “Su ‘juego’ es, sin embargo, mediado por una profunda rabia, evidente en la grotesca galería de cuerpos deformados – obesos, amputados, derretidos, llagados, ponzoñosos […] En los cuerpos se inscribe ese ‘exceso perturbador’ (74) al que Irigaray atribuye el poder de desplazar la norma patriarcal en el discurso. Judith 229 that this feminist literature embodies the search for a language capable of addressing the feminine outside the realm of the patriarchal order of signification. 653 However, Irigaray and Butler demonstrate that it is not enough to decry the patriarchal order and write from the subject position of women as such. 654 They argue that to take such a position acts only as the reification of that same patriarchal, phallic (b)order. To affirm and reclaim the “woman” from her position as Other or the outside of the patriarchal only re-inscribes her within this double bind. Both Irigaray and Butler agree that the feminine is always elided within the logic of the binary, but that a certain disruptive force challenges their mutual exclusion. 655 I claim that the maternal is precisely the disruption that threatens the distinctions between materiality and rationality, inside and outside, self and Other. Literature obliquely addresses the feminine. Its encounter with the feminine and the outside is revealed in shadow and opacity, in sickness and vulnerability. This fragility and ephemeral enunciation dissipates like a vapor when philosophy attempts to fix it in its gaze. There is in the work of Ferré an attempt to recover the woman, the daughter, even the mother, who has been shunned by the philosopher as Other. It remains aware of the corporeality of the woman’s body without shying into essentialism. De Ferrari writes that: The model of disembodiment that lies behind what Glissant calls transparency has made possible the dissymmetry by which “one” has a body while the Other is a body. The white, knowing male sees himself as having a body, which he considers accessory and Butler sitúa en la performance subversiva del género un similar poder de ruptura. Así, la batalla de los cuerpos de las niñas decentes’ […] sintetiza la búsqueda de un lenguaje que dé cuenta de la experiencia de ser y hacerse mujer y, al mismo tiempo, la lucha de las autoras por legitimar su voz escritural” (“’Algo Tan Feo,’” 561). 653 Celis writes, “sintetiza la búsqueda de un lenguaje que dé cuenta de la experiencia de ser y hacerse mujer y, al mismo tiempo, la lucha de las autoras por legitimar su voz escritural” (“’Algo Tan Feo,’” 561). 654 The work of Bracha Ettinger attempts to address this issue. Instead of sustaining the reification or essentialization of the “woman” as outside, Ettinger calls for a supplemental order of the matrixial that stands in relation to the phallologocentric Order. 655 Butler explains, “For both Derrida and Irigaray, it seems, what is excluded from this binary is also produced by it in the mode of exclusion and has no separable or fully independent existence as an absolute outside. A constitutive or relative outside is, of course, composed of a set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system as its own nonthematizable necessity. It emerges within the system as incoherence, disruption, a threat to its own systematicity” (Bodies, 13). 230 useless, while his identity is ciphered in the “spiritual” activity of thinking, an activity that, while actually grounded in the body, is independent from it. The Other, however, is always her body. The child and the madman are Descartes’s examples, but also the woman, the nonwhite, the ill, the abject—bodies, in short, whose identities do not recuperate in their overwhelming materiality an original harmony with self and world. On the contrary, they are relegated in their corporeal overdetermination to the status of nonpersons, partial subjects. 656 I contend that the pregnant body also exists within this formulation. Overdetermined from the outside, the pregnant body cannot escape its materiality. It is eruption of the body into the unthinkable. The pregnant body is a revealing absence. Pregnancy and maternity are for Ferré distinct from “woman.” They are a kind of usurpation of the woman’s body. In her book of essays Sitio a Eros she writes, “la maternidad es siempre involuntaria en la mujer; le es impuesta por la naturaleza y en esa situación su libre albedrío fue aniquilado.” 657 For De Ferrari “illness is compared to pregnancy, since the subbody of the unborn child, a body that cannot yet sustain its own life, inhabits the body of the mother, now a hyperbody.” 658 The mother’s body is overtaken and occupied by the unseen and uncognizable Other. 659 Maternity as ethical relation is always involuntary. We are exposed to the Other against our will. For Levinas, our encounter with the Other is always against our will and against our autonomy. The relational nature of the maternal is the dissolution of said autonomy. We encounter the other and become pregnant with their presence. For Levinas, it is in this encounter that the freedom of the self becomes impinged upon by the Other. However, it is precisely this awareness of the Other and questioning of our autonomy that becomes, for Levinas, the ultimate “investiture” of freedom. It is where the freedom in questioning its own 656 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 11. 657 Ferré, Sitio, 120. See translation: “maternity is always involuntary in women; it is imposed on her by nature and in this situation her freedom is annihilated” (translation mine). 658 De Ferrari, Vulnerable, 87. 659 Ettinger, “Copoeisis,” 709. 231 right and guilt, begins to allow for the heteronomy which it experiences. Here, the self becomes aware of its interminable responsibility to the Other, a “moral consciousness” which remains “unsatisfied, or again, is always Desire.” 660 In the eyes of Levinas, the face of the other should be where all ethics starts, as it is this face that brings us into encounter with the Infinite. It is also the affirmation that we are not alone in our freedom, but that when freedom collapses before heteronomy we enter into ethical relation. 661 This desire is not the desire of love or need. These things are affective and can be satisfied. Desire exists beyond satisfaction, is the “unquenchable.” It is this unsatisfied desire that allows the self to recognize the “alterity of the Other.” 662 This hunger of the maternal relation to the Other eats away at the fullness of autonomy and Being that arises from the neat distinctions of binarity and differentiation. For the doctor in Ferré’s short story “Amalia,” all sexual relation is the result of a desire to create the self and own the process of creation: “es el vicio de todo el mundo porque la relación sexual es siempre meternos dentro de nosotros mismos, meter el espejo dentro del espejo, el espejo redondo dentro del útero de nuestra madre por donde asoma la cabeza sangrienta de nuestro hermano, carne de mi carne y sangre de mi sangre que te meto dentro, ¡oh! dios creó al hombre a su imagen y semejanza pero el hombre se sintió solo en aquel paraíso tan grande y entonces dios creó a la mujer y se la presentó.” 663 The doctor is clearly alluding to Freudian theories on the Oedipus complex and the neutral subject’s incestuous desire to create 660 Levinas, “Philosophy,” 117. 661 Levinas writes that we are found to be irreducible and unified in the “fortunate meeting of fraternal souls that greet one another and converse. This situation is the moral conscience, the exposedness of my freedom to the judgment of the Other (l’Autre). It is a disalignment which has authorized us to catch sight of the dimension of height and the ideal in the gaze of him to whom justice is due” (“Philosophy,” 119). 662 Levinas, “Philosophy,” 114. 663 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 63. See translation: “It is the vice of all the world because sexual relation is always to enter ourselves, to stick the mirror inside the mirror, the round mirror inside the uterus of our mother from whence the bloody head of our brother appears, flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood I stick you inside, oh! god created man in his image and likeness but man felt himself alone in that paradise so large and then god created a women and presented her to him” (translation mine). This passage is omitted from the English translation. 232 and above all to bring the self into being, symptomatic of a kind of male fear that he does not possess all the organs. 664 Patrilineal filiation must affirm its own unilateral reproduction. This kind of autonomous, self-creation would allow for the complete autonomy and self-possession of the subject. Instead, our autonomy is overcome by the mother, the mother whose presence as unsignifiable Other threatens our autonomy. The story “Amalia” tells of a young girl who is afflicted with a mysterious disease that renders her vulnerable to the sun. The story begins with the child crossing the threshold of the home, escaping the family order, to lie facing the sun: “Ahora ya estoy aquí, en medio del patio prohibido […] sudando caballos blancos y gaviotas que vomitan sal. Ahora empiezo a acunar entre los brazos esta masa repugnante que eras tú, Amalia, y era también yo, juntas éramos las dos una sola, esperando el día en que nos dejaran encerradas en este patio […] y doy un suspiro de alivio porque ya estoy sudando, porque ahora por fin puedo sudar.” 665 She holds her melting wax doll as her own body begins to disintegrate under the influence of the Puerto Rico sun. She is overwhelmed by the imminence of her embodiment upon transversing this threshold into the interior exteriority of the patio. For De Ferrari the sick body functions as the necessary outside to the national body. Its uncertain limits help to pose the limits of the state, and also for the self. She writes that this is an especially urgent mission in such societies as Puerto Rico, ones that might be described as vulnerable, ones that continue to exist as the territories of an imperial power and fail to properly 664 Kristeva writes: “Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing” (Powers, 77). 665 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 61. See translation: “At last I am inside the forbidden garden […] hemmed in by drying sheets buffeted by the wind and screaming gulls that excrete salt droppings all around me. I begin to rock in my arms this melting bundle which used to be you, Amalia, as well as I, together we were one inseparable being, waiting for the day when we could finally enter the garden, knowing that one day they’d finally leave open the door. Now everyone has left; the house is smoldering like a bleached bone and I can sigh with relief because I’ve finally begun to perspire, because at last I can perspire all I want” (The Youngest Doll, 47). 233 establish their borders in opposition to the domination of the Other. 666 In order to establish the Self, they must shore up the borders between themselves and the Other. However, in the case of the sick body, or the rotting body, this becomes increasingly difficult as the borders and limits of the body itself become corrupted by decay and decomposition. At first the doctor asks the mother about any possible relation amongst the father’s family, any possible contaminant in their blood, to which the mother responds: “no hay lazos de sangre si eso es lo que usted quiere decir, no quedábamos ni primos lejanos, pero por qué pregunta eso, qué es lo que está pensando, no nada, es que en estos casos de degeneración genética siempre hay detrás algún incesto, son los mismos genes que se superponen unos as otros hasta que se debilitan la paredes y entonces aparece en el hijo una característica de naturaleza distinta.” 667 She fears that he is accusing them of class-based incest on the father’s side of the family, the kind of tradition derived from marriages of nobility amongst their own to protect or enhance the “limpieza de sangre.” 668 She affirms that this is not the case, but rather that the disease is of a mysterious and inscrutable nature. While the ill individual threatens the supposed evenness of their society, they also provide the body against which a “healthy” society defines itself. The pregnant body, as I have shown, functions similarly to the ill body. 669 The self is defined in its distinction from the 666 Benigno Trigo writes that the history of Puerto Rico is written upon the bodies of women, especially in terms of pregnancy and reproduction: “Feminist historians have argued that the struggles for control over the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico during the twentieth century were not only played out in the public squares of the main cities of the island, they were also played-out on the bodies of women in general, and on the maternal body in particular” (“Lullaby,” 655). His article works with Kristeva’s concept of the maternal hold to describe the ways in which a “lullaby poetics” resisted the regulation of women’s bodies through sterilization and the penalization of abortion on the island. 667 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 63. See translation: “not that I know of, we weren’t related at all if that’s what you mean, not even distant cousins, why are asking me that; maybe I’m wrong but in cases like these the cause of genetic degeneration may have been incest” (The Youngest Doll, 48). 668 In Genealogical Fictions, María Elena Martínez describes the link that exists between the concept of “purity of blood”—which indicated that one and one’s lineage excluded persons of Jewish, African or indigenous descent— and the caste system that rose up in the Americas as a result of this concept. 669 In describing a novel on the AIDS crisis in Cuba, De Ferrari writes: “In Pájaros de la playa, Sarduy shifts the focalization of illness from the nation to the individual and speaks of the ill body as an enemy, not of the state, but of the self […] illness taints the relationship between an ill individual and the society that simultaneously constructs 234 pregnant body, in having effectively achieved individuation. However, the threat and sublimated memory of that joint-ness with the mother remains. Having been pregnant or consumed by the pregnant body haunts the scene of total individuation. This uncertainty and the ambivalence of the limits between one and Other remains. In Ferré’s story the mother complains to the doctor: “lo peor es no saber lo que tiene, saber nada más que no tiene remedio, verle esa piel blancucina y transparente como un bulbo de cebolla encogiéndose y ensortijándose al menor contacto con el calor, ver el agua que le sale por todas partes como si fuera una vejiga y no una niña y la estuvieran exprimiendo.” 670 Her transparent and white skin decays in contact with sun. Her body becomes like a rotting vegetable whose skin, the barrier between it and the outside world, collapses and degrades. The distinction between mother and child also erodes, and the body that gives life is also one of decay. What is left are bodily remains: an umbilical cord or a child’s baby teeth. In “La muñeca menor,” the dolls the spinster aunt crafts are fashioned using the niece’s baby teeth: “El día de la boda la menor se sorprendió al coger la muñeca por la cintura y encontrarla tibia, pero lo olvidó en seguida, asombrada ante su excelencia artística. Las manos y la cara estaban confeccionadas con delicadísima porcelana de Mikado. Reconoció en la sonrisa entreabierta y un poco triste la colección completa de sus dientes de leche.” 671 When the niece takes the doll—her double—into her arms, she finds her warm and that her mouth hides the full set of her baby teeth. and destroys her, Sarduy’s novel adds that an ill individual also constructs and destroys the society it sustains” (Vulnerable, 75-6). 670 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 62. See translation: “the worst part is not knowing how to treat it, the illness doesn’t even have a name, seeing her onion-white skin shrivel and turn transparent at the least ray of sunlight, seeing her sweating through every pore as if she were a sponge and not an eleven-year-old girl and someone were squeezing her” (The Youngest Doll, 48). 671 Ferré, “muñeca,” Papeles, 6. See translation: “On her wedding day, as she was about the leave the house, the youngest was surprised to find that the doll the aunt had given her as a wedding present was warm. As she slipped her arm around her waist, she examined her attentively, but quickly forgot about it, so amazed was she at the excellence of the craft. The doll’s face and hands were made of the most delicate Mikado porcelain, and in her half- open and slightly sad smile she recognized her full set of baby teeth” (The Youngest Doll, 5). 235 The boundary between the living and the lifeless is violently ruptured, stretching the ambiguous line that is drawn between human and automaton. The heat of the doll’s body and the remains of the child’s body puncture this divide. The textual body is perforated and corroded by the reader and by the maternal relation. Cradling the doll and the book in one’s arms, its heat and palpable embodiment disturb the logic of the symbolic, of the properly figurable. We see a similar scene in Ferré’s archives wherein is preserved the baby book purchased for her upon her birth. The book is titled Your Child Year by Year. 672 Published in 1934, the book is intended to track the development of the child, male or female, and provide a “guide” for the parent to follow. This normativizing rubric for child development was written by Doctors John E. Anderson and Florence L. Goodenough of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare and published in 1930 and 1934 by The Parents’ Publishing Association, Inc. Publishers of “The Parents’ Magazine.” 673 The purpose of the book is clearly stated in its “Forward”: Parents who carefully record in this volume the growth and development of their child will write a book different from any other ever written—a book that will become their most precious possession because it contains the story of their child’s life—a book that will be valuable to their child’s doctor and teachers—a book that will be fascinating to their son or daughter when grown up. […] The records are easy to keep. Parents will enjoy every minute they spend on the book. It enables them to compare their child’s physical, mental and character development with the ‘average’ child and with other children and it tells, from birth through the sixteenth year, how normal children grow. 674 This book prompts the parent to begin a kind of normativizing and disciplining narrative of the child’s life. In its first pages, someone has recorded the gifts received upon Ferré’s birth. In the following pages are listed the details of the birth of “Rosario Josefina Ferré y Ramirez de 672 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 673 Third Edition. Published in January, 1934 / Fourth Edition. Published in November, 1935. 674 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. vi). 236 Arellano. who was born on Sept. 28/1938 at 1:00 P.M. in Clinica Pila, Ponce, P.R.” 675 She weighed 7lbs 2 oz at the time of her birth. 676 The book provides spaces for photos of the child, godparents, family members, and a page for pictures of the father, mother, and their first home. Only a photo of Luis C. Ferré—signed presumably by the former governor himself—is pasted into the page, and upon his photo someone—possibly Rosario herself—has drawn a kind of halo around his head. 677 The father is mythically and monumentally present throughout Ferré’s life and work, while the mother remains conspicuously absent. 678 The subsequent pages contain recordings of Rosario Ferré’s height and weight followed by what we can only assume are her mother’s, Lorencita Ramirez de Arellano Bartoli, descriptions of Ferré’s illnesses. There is also a list of her vaccinations including smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus and a few others recorded until 1951. 679 There are more than a few mentions of a tetanus vaccination in Ferré’s early years. During Ferré’s first week of life, her mother provides the dates of September 28-October 5 and writes: “Child always coughs before crying.. / Holds head erect when held against shoulder” 680 and later: “Begins to smile in response to social stimulation […] NOV. 25 TH . Followed a person with her eyes around and back of her head. 675 I have reproduced the names without accents as this is how they appear in the document. 676 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. i). 677 See figure 2 in appendix. 678 “On Autobiography (Memories of Ponce)”; 2000-2005; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 3; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. In 1992, Ferré published a (auto)biography on her father, titled Memorias de Ponce, derived largely from interviews she recorded between herself and her father. In an unpublished speech written for the presentation of the biography, Ferré writes: “La autobiografía es siempre un género nacionalista; pretende rescatar la memoria de una comunidad que nos dio el ser, y de la cual somos testigos autodesignados. / Este libro es una prueba de que esa cita de Sylvia Molloy, una escritora Argentina y profesora de literatura amiga mía, es una cita acertada. En este libro de memorias de mi padre él es el personaje principal, pero lo es también Ponce, Puerto Rico, y todos nosotros. Es un libro que nos ayuda a entendernos y a conocernos mejor, pero sobre todo que nos ayuda a luchar por ser mejor de lo que somos.” 679 Your Child Year by Year; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 57). 680 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 73). 237 Moving eyes and rotating head about neck.” 681 The book clearly regulates both what is considered “normal” child development, but also what might be considered “normal” mothering. It educates and dictates the practices and temporality of the mother into a regulated norm. Later in the book, Ferré’s mother switches to writing in Spanish and includes a “Libreta de enfermedades de Rosario Josefina Ferré / Nació Sept. 27/1938” 682 printed on a piece of paper taped into the book from a planner or calendar from February 24, Thursday, 1938. She records how at shy of being three years old, the infant Rosario suffered from a severe fever: “Junio 5, 1942. Fiebre de 39.5. Se le dió purgante aceite costos. Fiebre siguió igual. Se le pusó inyección R[…] 0.50 gm Le dieron convulsions a la hora; fiebre empezó a bajar. Capsulas […] cada dos horas. / Junió 6 – Fiebre 38.5 / ‘’ 7 – ‘’37.7” 683 , “Oct. 17, 1950. / Octubre 9, 1950. El día anterior le había subido la fiebre a 40° C. Hoy no, se la adm.” 684 The recording of her fever and medications administered goes on for pages. Here we see the figure of the nurse and mother come together fulfilling their role as constraints upon the performance of femininity. The tribulations of this illness are concluded with a collection of documents from Ferré’s graduation from the first grade including an honor student ribbon with medal, the “Ejercicios de Graduación Primer Grado Colegio Ponceño Ponce, P.R. 1945” 685 , Scholarship Certificate for “Penmanship”, Excellent Conduct Certificate, Scholarship Certificate for “Excellence in 681 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 75). 682 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 83). See translation: “Book of the illnesses of Rosario Josefina Ferré / Born Sept. 27/1938” (translation mine). 683 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 86). See translation: “June 5, 1942. Fever of 39.5. Given purgative of oil. Fever continued the same. Gave her injection R […] 0.50 gm Gave her convulsions upon the hour; fever began to go down. Capsules […] every two hours. / June 6 – Fever 38.5 / ‘’ 7 – ‘’ 37.3” (translation mine). 684 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 87). See translation: ““Oct. 17, 1950 / October 9, 1950. The day before her fever had risen to 40° C. Today she will not be given adm.” (translation mine). 685 See translation: “Graduation Exercises from Ponce’s First Grade School of Ponce, P.R. 1945” (translation mine). 238 Elementary Science”, Scholarship Certificate for “Excellence in Reading,” Scholarship Certificate for “Excellence in Religion”, “Scholarship Certificate” for “Excellence in English,” Scholarship Certificate for “Excellence in Spelling.” 686 The mother’s entries in the book end here, as if having overcome childbirth and illness her task was complete. The long-suffering mother/nurse now steps aside and a new author takes up authority over the narrative. From this point on, the book changes hands. 687 Ferré, herself, becomes the maternal author of her own chronicle of illness and injury. Trigo connects Ferré to a maternal position that “resisted occupying the position of a self-hating or suicidal maternal subject […]resisting the social imperative to fit the mold of either the ideal or the abject mother, and refusing to be just a beautiful and silenced muse.” 688 We see this resistance to traditional feminine roles as Ferré usurps the place of her mother and takes up the maternal position in reference to her own body and subjectivity. However, Ferré does not break with her mother’s interest in the sick and ailing body. In fact, the fixation with the wounds and maladies becomes heightened, only now it is her own body that she addresses. She approaches her body with liveliness and almost as if it were a curious specimen. On one page labelled “MISCELLANY / On this page make records of any outstanding events in the child’s life not covered in the preceding records. If you keep careful 686 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 90-91). 687 There are a couple exceptions where later in the book, her mother comments on Ferré’s talent in ballet (227) and another bout of fever: “A RECORD OF DEVELOPMENT FROM SIX TO SEVEN YEARS [230, photo] […] Below and on the following pages record significant things that you notice in the child’s development during this period. ‘Mayo 1945. Pasó sarampión con fiebre de 40* C el primer día pero relativamente benigna el resto del tiempo. No tuvo complicaciones’” (230-231). 688 Trigo, “Lullaby,” 659. Trigo is writing here of Clara Lair, but I argue that the same can be said of Ferré, especially as he is here citing Ferré’s analysis of Lair. Trigo goes on to write: “Lair survived the effect on women of a death drive that was unbound from language by the sexist imperatives of her social context. By practicing a form of symbolic maternity in her poetry, by offering an alternative to a prevailing discourse of motherhood” (“Lullaby,” 659). 239 account of your family expenses, you may wish to record the pro rata expenses of the child here,” 689 Ferré writes: 1. – Fell stumbling from the back stairs hurt forehead with stall shoe cleaner. She stayed marked for her life. / 2. – She fell from the bed and broke upper lip. Also a little scar stayed. / 3. – While running with a jelly jar, fell to the floor. A piece of glass pierced left eyebrow. A Scar is there to remind. / 4. My dog, Penny bit me while I tried to help him out of a place he had fallen. My left ankle still carries the scar where his eyeteeth sank. He also bit my center finger of my right hand. They took me to the hospital and put on an antitetanic vaccination. / 5. – While climbing under a spiked fence a nail scarred my left arm in the joint. 690 First, it is necessary to note that this book clearly links reproduction with production and capital in that to be included in the record of the child’s development is the child’s expenses. Ferré’s entry, however, does not follow the guidelines set forth by the book; in fact, there is only one point in her entries where she does follow parameters set forth by the Drs. Anderson and Goodenough. 691 Unlike the previous record keeper, she does not make her entries according the suggestions of the book, but she does continue in the same theme. Each of these entries documents a permanent bodily scarring with an almost eternal quality. Between two entries she switches from third to first person. The stories become her own. In the next entry Ferré writes of the father whom she adored but whose politics she openly opposed during his tenure as Governor of Puerto Rico. The entry begins on a page labelled “SNAPSHOTS / On this page, mount a snapshot of the child taken as near the first 689 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 117). 690 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 117). 691 On page 346, Ferré completes the section titled: “CHILD’S SIGNATURE / THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY / Was there a party? No / Describe how the day was spent. / We had several girls for lunch. I had on a new dark blue dress. / SIGNATURE OF GUESTS / Ana M. Rodriguez/ Noney Defills / Nery.” 240 birthday as possible.” 692 Again, she utilizes the page as a blank space for her own entry, disregarding the intended purpose of the book: 6. – My father accidentally hit me with a baseball bat while playing baseball. He didn’t see me when I walked in front of him and he batted my head instead of the oncoming ball. My left eyebrow got the whole impact and miraculously I didn’t stay blind of my left eye, (the doctor said), My eye swelled for about three weeks and everybody said I had been in a fight where I had gotten a black eye. 693 This scene paints a fascinating portrait of their family life. As a child, Ferré is accidentally injured by her father. What stands out is that it is everyone else who tells a different story. To help her father save face, everyone else says that it was Ferré who got into a fight. She is both victim and culprit in her small wounding. Later she recounts getting lost in a New York subway station while traveling with her aunt’s mother. She writes that she was “all alone on the plataform [SIC] at the age of 5, without knowing almost any English and completely amongst strangers. When the lady arrived at the next station she telephoned to where I was and told a man to go and look for a little girl in a yellow and brown cotton dress.” 694 These stories find their echoes throughout Ferré’s fiction. Of course, we do not mean to fall into the trap earlier indicated: relying upon a female author’s biography to analyze and legitimize her writing. However, there is a subversion of genre going on here. These are not journal entries and neither are they an autobiography. Ferré appears to have written these entries—a story of scars, both physical and psychological—years after the actual injuries occurred. They are enumerated as if she were making a record or an accounting of certain injuries and encounters, ones that stood out to her. 692 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 118). 693 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 118). 694 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 131). 241 What arises again and again is not her relation to her mother, but rather to her father. Instead, she performs her own self-mothering. At another point she writes: “17. – I nearly drowned when I was about 6 years old and were bathing in a friend’s swimming pool in Mayagüez. My father told me not to go any further down the steps because it was to [SIC] deep for me. I wanted to see how deep so while he wasn’t looking I let myself slowly down. The next thing my father saw when he placidly looked towards the pool was a pair of frenetic hands weaving a sincere goodbye. He didn’t have to give me artificial respiration.” 695 Even in what appears at firsthand to be an emotionless inventory of her injuries, Ferré’s writing is filled with irony and humor. She laughs. Later she writes about almost dying during a hiking trip when her father sent her back with her nursemaid, because the trail was too treacherous. On their way back down, the trail crumbled away beneath them, and Ferré found herself suspended over the precipice. According to the archivists, this journal was last updated in the 1940s. However, Ferré’s last entries appear to be dated somewhere around her fourteenth birthday in 1952. 696 In one she writes: “20. – I had to have my four cordals dug out at 14 because they had no space to grow and were pushing my front teeth out. [teeth preserved in tape here] I always had to cover my moth when I laughed. It hurt so much. I still do it unconsciously.” 697 Three of Ferré’s teeth are taped into the book. The textual body becomes a text of bodily remains. The rotting teeth, fixated in tape that itself has rotted and yellowed, are the inscription of the author’s body upon the page. Her presence is no longer that of the phantasmatic author, but rather is that of the very present corpse, putrefying upon the page. The teeth consume but are also consumed by the 695 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 142). 696 Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 346). 697 See figure 3 in appendix. Your Child Year by Year; 1930s-1940s; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 17 and Folder 26; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (p. 143). 242 reader. They bite into the page. They form an archival hieroglyph, unreadable and yet imminent, beyond the scope of the symbolic. Teeth are present throughout Ferré’s fiction. They flash from laughing mouths, threatening the reader. We see this, for instance, in “La muñeca menor” where the spinster aunt crafts the final doll using her niece’s baby teeth. The image of teeth is also repeated in “Amalia” when the daughter’s mother and her uncle laugh, or perhaps fight, flashing their teeth at her: “Entonces mi tío se rio como embromándome y un chorro de pelotas blancas rebotaron contra mí.” 698 A flood of teeth washes against her. Her uncle’s teeth mimic the assault upon the young girl, an assault that is played out again when he proposes a kind of sexual or matrimonial union between them by supplying her melting wax doll with a mate that is fashioned after his image. These teeth then perform a phallic function. According to Solimar Otero, the teeth are “polyphallic” symbols, explaining their presence in the “vagina dentata” motif. 699 The vagina dentata, or the linking of female sexuality with teeth, has to do with the fear of the consumption of the male organ by the female, though it also reflects a certain desire, the desire to return to the womb that is complicated by the castration complex, the knowledge that the father will castrate the son if he seeks sexual union with the mother. 700 698 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 65. See translation: “Then my uncle laughed as if he were enjoying a private joke of some kind and I felt as if a stream of white tennis balls bounced all over me” (The Youngest Doll, 49). 699 Otero writes, “There are several different theories in the psychoanalytic literature concerning the origin and formation of the vagina dentata motif. These fall into two broad camps: (1) the camp that finds the motif to be of a male projective origin, and (2) the camp that believes that the motif and its related themes originate in the regenerative power of female sexuality. As a rule, the male projective theories are far more phallocentric in nature than the theories concerned with female sexuality as threatening in itself. (It is the difference between fearing the castration of a phallus by a father or mother-with-a-phallus, or fearing castration from penetration alone.) So, the issue seems to be whether it is the dentata that is most alarming or whether it is the vagina itself that is rendered terrifying. And, taking the latter, if the polyphallic symbols of the teeth are a male compensation for this dread” (“’Fearing,’” 270). 700 See Freud’s The Uncanny. 243 The uncle laughs at the daughter, opening his mouth wide and spitting teeth at her. His teeth violently attempt the rapto of the child, overtaking and consuming her, but Amalia learns to laugh on her own: “Amalia ayayay comenzó a enloquecer rompiendo todas las leyes ayayay subiendo y bajando por todas las galerías al principio jugando Amalia abriendo y cerrando tus faldas negras por entre los balaustres ayayay riendo Amalia por primera vez riendo con dientes de guayo […] Amalia subía y bajaba por todas las galerías en completa libertad.” 701 Amalia laughs with the teeth of a grater, teeth meant to rend flesh, teeth of a violent and rebellious feminine sexuality. While the other dolls, proxies of the prostitutes living in her uncle’s home, are only able to walk along their designated corridors, Amalia can walk freely where she pleases, laughing all the while through her own tearing teeth. 702 Laughing, even laughing through one’s teeth, is a liberatory gesture. It points us towards a rend in the fabric, in the flesh between the phallic Order and the phantasmatic outside of the feminine. Ferré’s own teeth are excessively preserved alongside the record of her birth, breaking the spine of the book and gnawing on the page. She bares her teeth and laughs at her reader. Within Ferré and Cixous’ writing, this feminine laughter is also tied to singing. Cixous writes of a feminine song to come; song and music are bound within the feminine voice and feminine writing, a writing to come, a victorious and exuberant futural emancipation of the feminine: “Dans la parole féminine comme dans l’écriture ne cesse jamais de résonner ce qui, de nous avoir jadis traversé, touché imperceptiblement, profondément, garde le pouvoir de nous affecter, le chant, la première musique, celle de la première voix d’amour, que toute femme 701 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 72. See translation: “until Amalia, oh oh oh, began to lose control of herself; she began to break the laws of the game, oh oh oh, she ran up and down the galleries lifting and lowering her skirts, oh oh oh, as if she had lost her mind, shaking the skirt’s black silk folds between the balconies’ banisters, oh oh oh, laughing for the first time with her tiny teeth […] From then on Amalia could come and go through all the sideboard’s galleries as freely as she wished” (The Youngest Doll, 53-54). 702 Laughing appears again in Cixous’s feminist discourse where she describes the feminine figure of the Gorgon not as fearsome or hideous, but “Elle est belle et elle rit” (Le Rire, 54). 244 préserve vivante.” 703 It is futural in that it is an emancipation from the kind of legitimizing histories and myths of filiation that had trapped women within the paternal structures of the territory. 704 Ferré responds to this injunction and musical temporality by beginning her novel with the eponymous song by Juan Morel Campos and concluding it with “La extraña muerte del Capitancito Candelario,” where music is the final battleground and weapon in the war for Puerto Rican independence. This story, like those that precede it, makes a critique of different constructions of history, genre and family in Latin American letters: a paternal history in Don Hermenegildo’s novela, a homosocial history in the friendship between Merceditas and Carlota in “El reglao,” a specular history in “Isolda en el Espejo,” 705 and a sonic history. all framed within the tradition of the novelas de la tierra 706 : En el pasado los guamaneños nos sentíamos orgullosos de nuestro pueblo y de nuestro valle. Desde los riscos almagrados que se deshacen en llanto a nuestro alrededor todos los días a las tres de la tarde, cuando cae el aguacero de rigor, nos gustaba contemplar, terminadas ya las labores de subsistencia del día, el correr de las nubes de pecho de paloma por sobre las calles meticulosamente limpias de nuestra población. Los habitantes de Guamaní amábamos nuestro pueblo y lo considerábamos, con razón, el pueblo más hermoso del mundo. 707 703 Cixous, Le Rire, 47. 704 Butler also affirms that the exclusion and eviction necessary for the formation of the border is a temporal process “materialized through time” and that “a radical resignification of the symbolic domain, deviating the citational chain towards a more possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world. To recast the symbolic as capable of this kind of resignification, it will be necessary to think of the symbolic as the temporalized regulation of signification and not as a quasi-permanent structure” (Bodies that Matter, xxix). 705 Marie Murphy writes: “According to Irigaray’s theory of specularization, in the history of male-dominated thought, the female difference has been reduced to absence or negation of the male norm. In ‘Isolda en el espejo,’ Augusto reduces whatever may be particular about Adriana into an abstract and stultifying image. If the mirror of which Irigaray speaks reverses the terms of reality and repeats man—not woman, then the fact that Adriana deliberately places the postcard of ‘Isolda’ image against the mirror, allows her to reverse the female image once again. If not reflecting the feminine, she can mime the Feminine by painting over her own image/body” (“en el espejo,” 149). 706 In her work Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer describes the novela de la tierra as the ultimate nationalist genre, saying that the nation—according to this tradition—is born in copulation between the legitimate—or legitimizing father—and the earth that he cultivates. It is he who fights to civilize this barbaric earth and convert it into a civilized fatherland, now deigned worthy to be the mother of the nation’s children. Sommer writes that this metaphor mother/land is that which erases and substitutes the mother for the earth that depends upon the father, because “the feminine patria literally means belonging to the father” (257-8). 707 Ferré, Maldito, 17. See translation: “’In the past the people of Guamaní used to be proud of their town and of their valley. From the red-ochered cliffs that pour their blood upon the valley every day at three o’clock, when the inevitable afternoon showers burst upon it, we loved to behold our town nestled on the silvery arms of Ensenada 245 Here in the depiction of Guamaní, Ferré presents her reader with the fantastical harmony between nature and civilization, but this fantasy only exists within the communal past. She writes that today all has changed, as if presence or the present could be identified within the novel’s impossible temporality: “Hoy todo esto ha cambiado. Lejos de ser un paraíso, nuestro pueblo se ha convertido en un enorme embudo por el cual se vierte noche y día hacia Norteamérica el aterrador remolino de azúcar que vomita la Central Ejemplo.” 708 No longer a paradise, the saccharine sweetness of the territory is vomited from the family’s sugar plantation into the lap of North America. This critique of the industrialization and mechanization of the island also gives rise to a certain abjection of the mother/father/land. 709 So too, Puerto Rico is violently born in the sugar that it vomits unto the imperial force that dominates it. However, the distinction between Puerto and Rico, which Ferré draws herself, and between the island port as transaction and the colonial power is blurred. Neither is secure or totally individuated. 710 The border between the island and its northern neighbor is not “shored up” by the ocean—and certainly not by the ambiguous legal language that defines their relation—but remains penetrable by trade and immigration. The island is sick and in pain, vomiting its guts into the markets of a ravenous mouth. Honda bay. Having finished the day’s chores, we like to drive up to Hawk Nest’s Point and sit there awhile, admiring its sparkling clean streets, its houses spreading their balconied verandahs upon the slopes like a debutante’s brightly colored skirts, its bright-yellow cathedral, with the shimmering plume of its belfry and the red-tiled crest of its dome, preening like a bird of paradise in their midst, and the townspeople running frantically to and fro, as they took cover from the pelting, gaily pealing rain that fell from the scudding dove-breasted clouds. At that time, many years ago, we were convinced Guamaní was the most beautiful town on the island’” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 3). 708 Ferré, Maldito, 19. See translation: “’Today all that has changed. Far from being a paradise, Guamaní has become a hell, a monstrous whirlpool from which the terrifying funnel of Snow White Sugar Mills spews out sugar night and day toward the north’” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 7). 709 Kristeva writes that by abjecting the mother “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (Powers, 3). 710 Kristeva goes on to state: “We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity” (Powers, 9). 246 The decay and disintegration of these borders is figured elusively and errantly in the sick body, the body as enacted by a maternal materiality. In the case of Ferré’s Amalia, the sick body is also a maternal body. In the scene of the daughter’s decomposition, Ferré combines images of the maternal caress with those of illness and of the social codes of bourgeois, colonial culture. The mother complains to the doctor: “pero ella es lista como una ladilla y se les escapa todo el tiempo […] y cuando ve que no hay nadie sale y se acuesta en el piso ardiendo como una cualquiera, como una desvergonzada, ensuciándose el traje blanco y las medias blancas y los zapatos blancos, con esa carita inocente vuelta hacía arriba y los brazos abiertos, porque quiere saber lo que pasa, dice, quiere saber cómo es.” 711 Clearly the mother’s concern is not simply for her daughter’s health and wellbeing. There is also a clear issue with the daughter’s intelligence, which is compared to that of a pest, often associated with uncleanliness and sexual misconduct. The insinuation of the daughter’s sexual impropriety is redoubled as the mother continues her description, employing aspersions often meant to impugn a woman as wanton or lustful. The mother’s repeated declarations of the whiteness of the daughter’s clothing are also uncannily reminiscent of racial and class prejudices held by Spanish colonial societies. 712 The mother 711 Ferré, “Amalia,” Papeles, 62. See translation: “she’s slier than a squirrel and she slips past them all the time […] after making sure nobody’s around she lies down on the floor like a common slut, burning under the sun and dirtying her white dress, her white socks, her white shoes, with her little girl’s face upturned to the sky and her arms opened wide, because she wants to know what happens, she says, she wants to know what it’s like” (The Youngest Doll, 48). 712 Suárez Findlay remarks that Puerto Rican society reflected a strange ambivalence in its relation to the empires of Spain and the U.S. (Imposing, 10). She goes on to state that this created a strange sort of desire towards inclusion of the subaltern or the oppressed within Puerto Rican society by the Puerto Rican elite. Suárez Findlay writes that because it was difficult to shore up the domain of classes within the ambiguously positioned social stratification of the territory, markers of power were affixed to the body: “Joan Scott and Elaine Combs-Schilling, among others, have noted that ideas about gender often become the ‘constant’ of power relations because they are more easily connected to the body and what is supposedly ‘natural.’ Gender relations are therefore deemed more immutable than class relations. The same can be said about race, which is often linked, at least discursively, with physical characteristics” (Imposing, 11), such as whiteness and the “purity” of the daughter’s clothes in this scene or the whiteness and delicacy of her face. Suárez Findlay goes on to state that in the Puerto Rican family “Surveillance functioned especially intensely within the family […] Mothers were held responsible for girls’ sexual regulation until their ‘proper’ establishment in either marriage or consensual union” (Imposing, 49). 247 describes the strict measures imposed by the household staff to ensure that her daughter would not venture into the patio and expose herself. These responsibilities are later passed to the uncle upon the mother’s death. However, the propriety of the family is even further jeopardized as the uncle converts the family home into a brothel and turns the incestuous attention he once lavished upon the mother to the daughter. The ambiguity of the prepubescent daughter’s sexual awakening creates a troubling tension within Ferré’s story. Ferré obliquely describes certain games the daughter and the chauffeur like to play. They are similar to the games he plays with the women living in her home, and ultimately it is him whom she chooses in place of her uncle, painting her uncle’s white-skinned doll black and giving him a chauffeur’s uniform. Ferré plays a similar game of types in “Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres,” where Ferré positions Isabel Luberza, respectable society lady and wife of Ambrosio, beside Isabel la Negra, her husband’s mistress and madame of the brothel which he frequents. These two women—the virginal wife and the prostitute—fuse until two become one, and the distinction between them is dissolved. The two Isabels contaminate each other. Isabel Luberza laments: “Porque hasta ahora, por causa de ella, no he comprendido todo este sufrimiento, todas estas cosas que me han atormentado tanto, sino oscuramente, como vistas a través de un espejo enturbiado,” 713 which appears to almost directly quote Glissant’s Poetics of Relation: “conquest and discovery […] Transparency no longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even today.” 714 Their 713 Ferré, “Cuando,” Papeles, 41. See translation: “Because until now these events have all been shrouded in mystery, and I haven’t been able to fathom the meaning of so much suffering except through a glass darkly, but today I’ve begun to see clearly for the first time” (The Youngest Doll, 145). 714 Glissant, Poetics, 111. 248 relation is made opaque, eschewing the transparency demanded by the politics of race and class that divided them. Isabel Luberza turns to the door of her husband’s mansion now evenly bequeathed upon his death between his wife and lover: Ahora me le acerco porque deseo verla cara a cara, verla como de verdad ella es, el pelo ya no una nube de humo rebelde encrespado alrededor de su cabeza, sino delgado y dúctil, piel ya no negra, sino blanca, derramada sobre sus hombros como leche de cal ardiente, sin la menor sospecha de un requinto de raja, tongonéandome yo ahora para atrás y para adelante sobre mis tacones rojos, por los cuales baja, lenta y silenciosa como una marea, esa sangre que había comenzado a subirme por la base de las uñas desde hace tanto tiempo, mi sangre esmaltada de Cherries Jubilee. 715 In the end, Isabel Luberza looks down at her hands and sees that she wears the same nail polish color as Isabel la Negra, “Cherries Jubilee.” The language of the wife and the prostitute changes subtly in the middle of that final sentence, just as their bodies do. Crossing over the threshold, the nail polish they both wore for the desire of their deceased lover creeps into their veins. This threshold is a maternal site of linking between subjects, according to Ettinger. Here it effects precisely this perforation of the membrane separating one from the Other. In the titular “Maldito amor,” first of the four stories that make up Ferré’s novel, Gloria Camprubí takes up a similarly ambivalent position between wife and prostitute. Gloria falls in love with Arístides, but marries his brother and becomes the mistress of their father: “La mañana de la boda la pasó con papá, bañándolo sobre su lecho de inválido; la tarde con mamá, sirviéndole de secretaria, y la noche, como siempre, conmigo, en la habitación de los sótanos.” 716 She negotiates a sexual contract within the family, commodifying her body in this way, 715 Ferré, “Cuando,” Papeles, 41. See translation: “Now that I’ve drawn nearer to her I can see her as she really is, her hair no longer a cloud of smoke raging above her head but draped like a soft, golden chain about her neck, her soft skin no longer dark, but spilled over her shoulders like dawn’s milk, a skin of the purest pedigree, without the merest suspicion of a kinky backlash, now swaying back and forth defiantly before her and feeling the blood flow out of me like a tide, my treacherous turncoat blood that has even now begun to stain my heels with that glorious shocking shade I’ve always loved so, the shade of Cherries Jubilee” (The Youngest Doll, 145). 716 Ferré, Maldito, 56. See translation: “Gloria spent the next morning with Father as usual, giving him his invalid’s bath on a rubber sheet spread out on the bed; the afternoon with Mother, reading to her or doing secretarial work; and the night with me, in our cellar boudoir” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 48). 249 “colocando con ternura mi mano sobre el monte sedoso y negro de su sexo—Creí que ésta era la entrada a mi Gólgota, a mi monte de los Olivos. No sospeché nunca que llevaras una caja registradora entre las piernas.” 717 Loving is also a business negotiation. Ferré’s text is simultaneously subversive of and participative in this market of feminine types, the negotiation, exchange and consumption of the feminine body. Instead of writing the exultant work of a feminist liberation from a paternalistic system or of Puerto Rican independence, Ferré engages the troubling and complex environment of an island consumed from both outside and inside, its ports brutally penetrated by trade and taxation from without. The prostitute does not build fortresses, does not erupt victoriously from the mire of male domination, but like the Gorgon, she sings softly and turns heads towards her petrifying gaze. She trades in both pleasure and pain, life and death. She does not overturn order but exposes its own vulnerability. This woman, this feminine body, becomes both the figure of death and desire, the giving woman who gives pleasure but also shame and death. 718 This gift, when entered as commodity into the masculine economy yields results that incline towards the apocalyptic. In the final story of Maldito amor, “La extraña muerte del Capitancito Candelario,” the Capitán is finally murdered by his lover, whom he names Bárbara. In naming her and never allowing her own name, he takes possession of her, makes her an object. What he is unaware of is that she is maneuvering her own sexuality for the independence of Puerto Rico, seducing him while secretly supporting his best friend in his insurgency. This death marks the entrance of Puerto Rico into 717 Ferré, Maldito, 54. See translation: “placing my hand tenderly over the silky mound of her sex. ‘I thought this was my own private Golgotha, my holy Mount of Olives,’ I joked. ‘I never suspected there might be a cash register buried in its depths’” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 46). 718 Julia Kristeva points out that the discovery of Oedipus was the linkage between desire and death (Powers, 83). For man, this joining of death and desire occurs in the womb, both the womb of sexual intercourse and of birth. The womb is the tomb into which he would sink if his desire to return to the origin were realized (Powers, 64). Bracha Ettinger points out that the masculine fears castration by the womb, the disappearance of the phallus in the feminine realm (Matrixial, 46-48). 250 independence by force, upon which the North American businessmen and bureaucrats retreat from the island, leaving behind them: “Aquel prado sereno por el cual habían surcado en arco sus pelotas de golf, aquel páramo mágico por el cual habían retozado, a la hora del ocaso y para su deleite, las manadas de delfines y de careyes que luego habían ido a decorar, eternizadas en túrgidas taxidermias, las paredes de sus oficinas y de sus mansiones suburbanas, se había convertido ahora en un marasmo mecido por el canto de sirenas muertas.” 719 These dead sirens sing of a paradise, but this paradise is as catastrophic as it is beautiful. It is death and the sweet pleasure of a lover’s arms. The sexuality of the prostitute, her pleasure-giving function, is also tied to her function in giving both death and life. The dying mother in “Maldito amor” explains to her deceased husband’s would-be biographer that death “no admite diferencias de casta o de clase: la muerte que me parió es la misma que me mata, y en eso la mía ha de ser idéntica a la de cualquier rey o al a de cualquier pordiosero.” 720 Maldito amor begins with the land and ends with the birth of a state that is marked by death and marks its own catastrophe, a death by the temptation of woman. This death is not conclusive but rather apocalyptic in the sense of a second coming. That which gives death also gives life. Language is ultimately destroyed here by Woman upon whose 719 Ferré, Maldito, 172. See translation: “In any case, the senators and representatives said to us, we should be thankful for having enjoyed the privileges of paradise for more than a hundred years, during which we had benefitted from the Metropolis’s bounties. And it had been all our own fault, they insisted, because during that century we had been the victims of false national pride, of an insane hubris that now had begun to strangle us like a useless umbilical cord, forcing us to remain forever a stillborn state” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 164). The passage in the Spanish version most closely corresponds with this; however, there is no exact translation. Ferré has commonly been criticized for the manner in which she has translated her own works. Many critics claim that she presents the United States too favorably and backs down from her more radical political beliefs. Janice A. Jaffe, however, writes that the translator and the prostitute are two figures that Ferré employs in order to construct a positive identity for Puerto Rico, one that slips between English and Spanish in order to dispel any discord or separation between them (“Translation and Prostitution”). Zachary Rockwell Ludington describes Ferré’s translation in terms of lenses and fidelity, explaining how the two translations act like two eyes that produce a single image. It is all dependent upon perspective and the perspective is constantly shifting in self-translation, which is almost “exceptional” according to Ludington (“Les Belles Infidèles”). 720 Ferré, Maldito, 69. See translation: “thus my death shall be like everybody else’s death, as majestic and as pathetic as a king or a beggar’s, neither more nor less” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 65). 251 exclusion it relied. If to reclaim the name of “Woman” is necessarily to buy into the system of representation that precludes her, then the only escape is not out but perhaps an erosion of the boundaries. Literary language becomes a vehicle for this kind of evasive maneuvering. Ferré reproduces and populates her books with productive and producing women. Their excessively fecund bodies are a screen upon which the story is told. In this multiplication of their bodies, they begin to engage in their own exchange. They ambiguously dance between the positions of object and subject. In the story “Isolda en el espejo”, the third story in Maldito amor, the protagonist Adriana agrees to marry a wealthy industrialist and art collector who compares her to two works of art he has purchased, Isolda and the Venus of fidelity. In the end, as Adriana prepares for her wedding, she covers her body in white dust and a dress resembling that of Isolda: “Tomó, de la consola del tocador, los polvos de Coty tonalidad ‘Alabastro’ y comenzó a empolvarse […] El vestido la hacía parecerse aun más a su doble, y eso haría sentir contento a Augusto.” 721 Adriana becomes the alabaster woman who trades her body. However, this exchange is not one of financial security for submission. Neither is it the revolutionary act of the Woman who intentionally topples an economic or patriarchal giant. When her little trick is over, when she has revealed her converted stone body to the wedding guests, she cries, “y no entendía por qué.” 722 It is not clear if this disruption of the exchange of her body, once belonging to her lover and now to her lover’s father, is the violent eruption of rebellion or if she has rather submitted to becoming the image constructed by the hegemonic masculinist paradigm. In the 721 Ferré, Maldito, 163. See translation: “She took off her clothes, took a box of heavy powder—‘alabaster tone’— from her vanity shelf, and began to powder her body from head to toe” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 155). Again, part of the passage from the Spanish text is not reproduced in the English. 722 Ferré, Maldito, 167. See translation: “When the waltz was over Adriana realized she was crying, but she couldn’t understand why” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 160). 252 end, her revolution is never complete. It is never victorious, at least not within the present (b)order. One of Ferré’s most controversial interventions in Puerto Rican letters is in her translations of her own work. 723 Instead of resorting to a different person to prepare her work for an English-speaking audience, Ferré wrote many of her own translations. These translations depart from what Walter Benjamin interprets as a “faithful” translation. 724 They do not translate word-for-word, but rather, the meaning is slightly distorted in each translation, re-creating itself as a unique text. Janice A. Jaffe writes that Ferré performs an emancipatory translation in each of these works, a kind of prostitution that liberates as it subverts meaning. The translation of the prostitute, the prostitute into legitimate mother, the prostitute into state, the prostitute into translation, marks a revelation or an exposure of the body: “In them the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding.” 725 The translation exposes the body of the original, but through the screen of language. In “Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres,” Isabel la Negra is both prostitute and also a secondary reproductive, maternal figure. She is not the chaste mother: “madre respetable, de esposa respetable” 726 but rather the aberrant mother who produces men. 727 The translator is also a kind of perverse mother. She perverts the perceived “purity” of the “original,” 728 but with Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond 723 Ferré was also widely criticized for writing her later novels, including House on the Lagoon (1995) and Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998), in English. See Biographical Note, Rosario Ferré Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. In her Memoria, Ferré explains that she first wrote House on the Lagoon in Spanish, but that she finally was pressured to translate it into English to be more appealing to a “universal” audience (Memoria, 145). 724 Benjamin writes “The traditional concepts in any discussion of translation are fidelity and license—the freedom to give a faithful reproduction of the sense and, in its service, fidelity to the word. These ideas seem to be no longer serviceable to a theory that strives to find, in a translation, something other than reproduction of meaning” (“Task,” 259). See also Janice A. Jaffe, “Translation and Prostitution.” 725 Benjamin, “Task,” 255. 726 See translation: “respectable mother, respectable wife” (translation mine). 727 Ferré, “Cuando,” Papeles, 31-32. 728 See Benjamin on the philosopher and the artist’s search for “pure language” or a “language of truth” (“Task,” 259). 253 Dust there is no pure original. Each is the translation of the other and each text perverts the perceived hermetic sanctity of the so-called original. Ferré, like Isabel la Negra, can be seen as a kind of Madame, the mother of prostitutes who, once a prostitute herself, now sells her “daughters” to the highest bidder. She plays both the subversive role of the destroyer of polite society at the same time that she participates fully in the exchange of women’s bodies within a paternalistic economy. Ultimately, these scenes of prostitution and translation are the work and the play of tongues, between tongues. Negrón and Ettinger write that language is anxiously concerned with the maternal body, the uterus or womb. Negrón writes of the so-called “lengua materna,” citing Roland Barthes: “El escritor no se quiere alejar del cuerpo de la madre, entiéndase de la lengua materna […] La operación de escritura aparece como una desfiguración de la naturaleza realizada en la lengua materna […] ‘El escritor es alguien que juega con el cuerpo de la madre.’” 729 The writer cannot separate themselves from the body of the mother, the maternal tongue. They play with this body, with these tongues. In “Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres,” Ferré writes that Isabel la Negra is used by her lover to “make men” of the sons of his friends “tu eres la mejor que lo haces, contigo nada más podemos, moriéndolos a pedacitos de membrillo o de pasta de guayaba, macheteándome los cachetes la frente la boca los ojos con el rodillo de reda para excitarlos […] para que sus papás pudieran por fin dormir tranquilos porque los hijos que ellos habían parido no les habían salido mariconcitos.” 730 She becomes their sexual 729 Negrón, animalidad, 208. 730 Ferré, “Cuando,” Papeles, 31-2. See translation: “’you’re the only one who knows how to do it, you’re the one who does it best.’ You’d tell them ‘sure you can, son, why not, just let yourself go, that’s all, as though you were skiing down a mountain of soapsuds without stopping,’ so their fathers could sleep peacefully because their offspring had not turned out to be gay sissies” (The Youngest Doll, 140). 254 mother, birthing men into the world, through the tongue rather than the uterus, an act of translation. Ferré describes Puerto Rico as a kind of exceptional space for translation. The port is open and porous. Puerto Rico is a masculine name in Spanish, and yet the port is open to foreign penetration: trade and imperialism. 731 The work of the translator/prostitute is to both expose this openness, this vulnerability, but also to turn this feminine vulnerability masculine through the work of the tongue, of turning tongues. 732 Masculinity is imbibed and translated, violated by the maternal opening towards the feminine Other. In translating her own work, Ferré both gives birth to a new text as she kills the supposed “original.” The legitimate child is assassinated to make way for the bastard of the translated text, but it becomes impossible to tell the difference between them. The womb is both the giver of life and of death. Arístides, the son of the mother and the lover of the prostitute, calls for the abortion of the dead, of the beloved past: “Los vivos tenemos entonces que comenzar a desembarazarnos de nuestros muertos.” 733 History is haunted by its dead but also by the future that this past proclaims, an apocalypse or a second coming, the afterlife of the text. Ferré as the translator of her own text is the prostitute mother who kills her own child in order to give it life. Cixous tells us that that feminine of writing is the desire that gives, that rejoices in the life to come, the life she will give, the economy of the feminine that is 731 For Octavio Paz, the woman in Latin America is vulnerable to violation, “Ni la modestia propia, ni la vigilancia social, hacen invulnerable a la mujer. Tanto por la fatalidad de su anatomía ‘abierta’ como por su situación social — depositaria de la honra, a la española— está expuesta a toda clase de peligros, contra los que nada pueden la moral personal ni la protección masculina. El mal radica en ella misma; por naturaleza es un ser ‘rajado’, abierto” (El laberinto, 60). 732 The idea of limbo becomes interesting here as well. Jaffe writes “Ferré purports to praise the mutability of the translator, prostitute and colonized Puerto Ricans, she also indicates how such qualities have been construed pejoratively […] I cite these examples and the ambivalence they reflect to illustrate the intimate tie between Ferré’s vision of the prostitute and the translator and the colonialism which has placed Puerto Ricans in a similar limbo” (“Translation,” 68). Limbo is an existing between. This is the place of production and reproduction, the swinging between two absolutes or being denied access to totality. 733 Ferré, Maldito, 48. 255 a giving economy. 734 But this is not the utopic economy that Ferré presents. There is no utopia on the horizon, no generous giving, but only the negotiations of the prostitute mother, a different future. In the end, Gloria Camprubí foretells the ultimate destruction of the De la Valle family, “Ya no llores más, mujer, ya no importa, no pierdes más tu tiempo con esas tontas lágrimas […] canta, canta conmigo al unísono: ya tu amor / es un pájaro con voz / ya tu amor / anidó en mi corazón / ya sé por qué / me consume esta pasión / y por qué ardió.” 735 They sing their passion and time to death, the passionate death that creates life and gives birth, and that will finally consume them. Ferré’s song, like her laughter, is an elision of historical truth, of transparent meaning. She writes towards opacity, the veil before the manifesto and the revolutionary zeal. She names this concealment and opacity, irony: “la ira atemperada, amartillada por los minuciosos martillos de la ironía, en el discurso femenino.” 736 She writes that this irony consists in the veiling of rage, “precisamente en el arte de disimular la ira, de atemperar el acero lingüístico para lograr con él un discurso más efectivo.” 737 It creates a “historic distance” from the furor that resides in the woman’s breast, the anger that has accumulated after centuries of subjugation, and also from the literary and political movements that strive to “give voice” to this anger. Historically women’s writing arises from a place that laments and rages against a past, present, and structure that 734 See Cixous, “Elle, l’arrivante de toujours, elle est le désir-qui-donne […] jouisseuse de notre devenance. Nous n’en finirons pas ! Elle traverse les amours défensifs, les maternages et dévorations […] Elle donne à vivre, à penser, à transformer. Cette <<économie>>-là, elle ne peut plus se dire en termes d’économie” (Le Rire, 68). 735 Ferré, Maldito, 85. See translation: “And then I saw Gloria walk out of a dark corner and resolutely cross the room. She came near the bed, and before I could do anything to prevent it, she shut Laura’s eyes with her fire-red polished fingernails. She didn’t say a word or even look at me. She slid her hand brazenly under the lace pillowcases and took out Laura’s will from under them. Then she slowly, deliberately tore it in half and threw it into the wastepaper basket, before walking out of the room without looking back” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 80). The final lines of the two stories are distinctly dissimilar. 736 Ferré, “De la ira,” Sitio a Eros: Quince, 191. See translation: “rage tempered and hammered by the meticulous hammers of irony, in feminine discourse” (translation mine). 737 Ferré, “De la ira,” Sitio a Eros: Quince, 192. See translation: “precisely within the art of dissimulating rage, of tempering the linguistic steel in order to achieve with is the most effective discourse” (translation mine). 256 necessitates their suffering and oppression, but Ferré calls now for a turn to irony that would distance itself historically and in this way strike the small, furtive, calculated blows of irony. These blows do not construct the edifice of Women’s Writing, the inversion of the phallologocentric Order and thus the re-inscription of the Woman as the outside to this Order. She does not tell “the woman’s side” to overthrow the paternal, legitimizing, mythic history of Don Hermenegildo. The maternal effect of Ferré’s fiction gives life to an untimely and spectral present/presence that disrupts Don Hermenegildo’s linear ordering of history. The feminine historia creates a kind of ironic fissure or rupture within the phallocentric framework of national identity erected in her novel. The mother, Laura, in “Maldito amor” disturbs the myth of filiation fabricated by Don Hermenegildo. She introduces opacity, muddies the waters as she muddies the lily-white dreams of Don Hermenegildo. It is with her that ironic distance is created, in that she is the one of the only characters in the novel who does not take up the narrative function. Every other character takes up the authorial “I” at one point or another, yet her words are only ever transmitted to the reader via the intermediary of another narrator. She is never accessible to us. We can only approach her through a male narrator. Thus, the voice of the mother, dispossessed and abject upon the brink of death, is ventriloquized by the hegemonic masculine voice. This is the irony of the prostitute who laughs in the face of history, who overturns the myths of the founding fathers and yet services them to their delight and their capital. This translator-prostitute figure then creates a kind of family of texts, legitimate and illegitimate children of the author. 738 Ferré writes that she is creating a confounding myth of 738 Benjamin writes in “The Task of the Translator” that the traditional understanding of translation is that it reveals the kinship between languages: “Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead langagues that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own […] If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translations, this is not accomplished through the vague resemblance a copy bears to the original” (“Task,” 255-6). 257 nationality for Puerto Rico, “El mito confunde y a la vez fortalece: los puertorriqueños no están nunca seguros de si su isla de veras existe […] En Maldito Amor intento contar esta transformación de Puerto Rico en Puerto; lo que podría llamarse el mito de la moderna (o posmoderna) nacionalidad puertorriqueña.” 739 It will always be lacking and insecure and will never confer legitimacy. It precisely indicates the fictive nature of these myths. 740 The feminine is the counterforce of legitimacy, of filiation, and it is the maternal that corrupts the distinction between force and counter-force, legitimacy and bastard. 741 Ferré undermines her own authorial position both in the translation and in the excess of the archive. 742 When we read, we pull apart and reassemble the text according to our understanding. Ferré’s text and archive respond outside of her authority and yet she paradoxically authorizes this insubordination. 743 In fact, she encourages a certain capaciousness of the text that is her bastard child, a child whom she does not bind forcibly to herself. The text and the archive grow and flourish in relation to her maternal creativity, the unnamable and unsignifiable linking and perforating that occurs at the threshold of meaning. 739 Ferré, Maldito, 13-14. See translation: “Myths confound and at the same time strengthen: Puerto Ricans are never sure if their island really exists […] In Maldito Amor I mean to tell of this transformation of Puerto Rico into Puerto; what one could call the myth of the modern (or postmodern) Puerto Rican nationality” (translation mine). It is a myth because no such nationality exists in reality. 740 See also Andrew Parker, “the mother is often invoked to regulate the distinction between the literal and the figural, a distinction that she undermines nonetheless and just as frequently” (The Theorist’s Mother, 18). 741 Glissant, Poetics, 59. 742 In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates states that the danger of writing is that it addresses its readers without the protecting authority of its “father” or author: “When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support” (On Love, 148). 743 According to Derrida, the mother’s voice is different from the voice of the father of the Word. Derrida writes that the scene of the presentation of writing is “all about fathers and sons, about bastards unaided by any public assistance, about glorious, legitimate sons, about inheritance, sperm, sterility. Nothing is said of the mother, but this will not be held against us. And if one looks hard enough as in those pictures in which a second picture faintly can be made out, one might be able to discern her unstable form, drawn upside-down in the foliage, at the back of the garden” (“Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, 143). 258 The mother’s voice within the text becomes a phantasmatic voice, one that disappears in its enunciation, obscuring meaning and obliterating presence. In “Maldito amor,” Ferré writes of the mother’s voice: “La voz de Laura había ido adelgazándose, hasta no quedar de ella más que un susurro tenue que se perdió en las penumbras de la habitación.” 744 Like shadow, her voice wavers between presence and absence, voice and whisper. Laura, the rejected mother and wife of the patriarch, writes a secondary will that will bequeath her father’s fortune to his bastard son by his daughter-in-law. However, Gloria, mother of the illegitimate son of the patriarch, destroys Laura’s testament, the will that would have given him rights to the family land and their diminished fortune. The maternal voice invades and corrupts the paternal will to confer legitimacy and inheritance, to command presence. Her voice, speaking spectrally and from the shadows, invades and corrupts the patriarch’s authority. The feminine word is unsignifiable and thus degrades the signification of the phallogocentric Order. Language and lineage are destabilized in contact with the maternal effect, the site where the maternal makes contact with the Order of signification, the Order that excludes the feminine as its constitutive Other. The maternal punctuates the sentence of the paternal will and testimony. In “Maldito amor” it is Spanish—the mother tongue—and the Spanish, colonial law that allows for this specific legality of the mother’s testimony. Laura explains: “’he decidido dejarle a esa infeliz, a Gloria Camprubí y a su hijo, todo lo que poseo en este mundo. Usted no puede ni podrá nunca comprenderlo, Don Hermenegildo, porque para ello tendría que ser mujer y no lo es; porque Usted, desgraciadamente es un hombre.’” 745 It is because of the “Código Español,” 746 the colonial code 744 Ferré, Maldito, 80. See translation: “Laura’s voice had become increasingly weaker as she talked, so that at the end it was no more than a whisper which faded into the shadows of the room” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 80). 745 Ferré, Maldito, 69. See translation: “I decided to bequeath all my worldly possessions to Gloria Camprubí and her son. You’ll never be able to understand the reason, Don Hermenegildo, because in order to do so you’d have to be a woman and you’re a man” (Sweet Diamond Dust, 64). 746 Ferré, Maldito, 67. 259 created by the so-called “Madre Patria,” 747 that it is possible for her to write her maternal conquest of the paternal will. In a speech at the Museo de Arte de Ponce Puerto Rico, Ferré’s son, Benigno Trigo announced the publication of his mother’s Memoria: Lanzamiento de Memoria de Rosario Ferré / Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico / 7.29.2012 (por Benigno Trigo) “Con su característico estilo directo, Rosario reconoce en un momento de su Memoria que su decisión de hacerse escritora tuvo un efecto complejo en la vida de sus hijos, en nuestra vida. Al principio de la sección titulada ‘Como empecé a escribir’ Rosario dice, / ‘mis hijos…han tenido existencias difíciles a causa de mi lucha por liberarme de las convenciones sociales que me parecían que limitaban los horizontes de la vida.’ / El pasaje me recuerda dos momentos que quisiera compartir con ustedes hoy. / El primero se remonta al año 1972, cuando salió el primer número de Zona. Recuerdo que Mami y mi tía Olga, se reunían en casa con el resto del comité editorial para hacer el emplanaje de la revista en la sala. Un día Rosario subió las escaleras rojas al segundo piso de la casa con unas tijeras stainless Steel en la mano, buscando ‘material’ para la revista. Mi hermano, Luis, tenía en su cuarto un gran Atlas del Mundo, National Geographic, con las tapas color vino que Papi le había regalado. Mami lo hojeó con determinación, buscando algo, y para mi gran sorpresa y consternación, le metió tijera al Atlas, y recortó la isla de puerto Rico para usarla en la revista. […] Si en aquellos años tuve lo que Mami llama una ‘existencia difícil,’ tal vez fue a causa de que la liberación del Atlas que era nuestro patrimonio requería de unas tijeras stainless Steel. […] En conclusión, mami dice que nosotros tuvimos existencias difíciles a causa de su lucha por liberarse de las convenciones sociales. Yo prefiero creer que la lucha de Rosario nos liberó de la tiranía del pasado, y que su escritura nos lleva al futuro abierto de la imaginación.” 748 747 Ferré, Maldito, 43. 748 “Lanzamiento de Memoria de Rosario Ferré / Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico / 7.29.2012”; 2000-2005; Rosario Ferré Papers; Box 11 and Folder 2; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library (pp. 2-3). See translation: “Launch of Memoria by Rosario Ferré / Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico / 7.29.2012 (by Benigno Trigo) ‘With her characteristically direct style, Rosario recognizes in a moment of her Memoria that her decision to be a writer had a complicated effect upon the lives of her children, on our lives. At the beginning of the section titled ‘How I began Writing’ Rosario says, / “my children…have had difficult existences because of my fight to liberate myself from the social conventions that appeared to me to limit the horizons of life.” / The passage reminds me of two moments that I would like to share with you today. / The first takes place in the year 1972, when the first edition of Zona came out. I remember that Mom and my aunt Olga, got together at home with the rest of the editorial committee to put together the plans for the magazine in our living room. One day Rosario came up the red stairs to the second floor of the house with some stainless steel scissors in her hand, looking for “material” for the magazine. My brother, Luis, had in his room a huge National Geographic World Atlas, with wine-colored covers that our father had given him. Mom paged through it with determination, looking for something, and to my great surprise and consternation, she stuck the scissors in the Atlas, and she cut out the island of Puerto Rico to use it in the magazine. […] If in those years I had what Mom called a “difficult existence,” perhaps it was because of the fact that liberation of the Atlas that was our inheritance required stainless steel scissors. […] In conclusion, Mom says that we had difficult existences because of her fight to liberate herself from social conventions. I prefer to think Rosario’s fight liberated us from the tyranny of the past, and that her writing carries us to an open future of the imagination’” (translation mine). 260 He writes that in pursuit of her creation, Ferré cut Puerto Rico out from the paternally gifted Atlas given to her sons. The father symbolically gifts the entire world as a patrimony to his sons, but it is the mother who in creativity liberates them from and through that gift. She literally perforates the page of the book, the border of the island and the paternal legacy, to create something new. It was a difficult time, a time when Ferré felt her role as mother to be in conflict with her creative and political will. Ferré’s maternal effect is to the disintegration and rot of the paternal (b)order. Ferré plays with the lengua materna, or the maternal body of language, to make present her own absence by plaguing the ambiguity and contact between the absence of the feminine and presence of the masculine Order. She disfigures paternal writing, and probes its limits through maternal embrace and relation. 749 The work of the reader becomes that of entering into relation with the text, and playing with it as a maternal body, not to arrive at the certainty of its borders or the totality of a philosophical binary, but to probe the effervescent port of contact between one and other. This word play unravels in a multiplicity of meaning and sensation. The maternal body opens itself up to the reader in shadow and light, always dancing away and somehow still drawing us into a crushing embrace. 749 Negrón, animalidad, 208. 261 Conclusion This is not a conclusion. If nothing else, I hope that this dissertation has demonstrated the violence of closure, of exclusion. These texts and testimonies, even this one, are not through speaking. They will continue to change and grow in their reading. This dissertation was completed and defended during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. During this time, we saw the deployment of medical discourse to both safeguard and to segregate. We saw communities come together in solidarity and in xenophobia. Not long after this dissertation was defended, this nation and the world was asked to confront the evils of current and past racism, its pernicious threads that continue to run through the fabric of our society. In many cases, we turned away, because we feared facing this truth. My hope is that most of us felt that demand to confront the reality of living in a political, legal, and economic system that relies upon the oppression of Black and Brown bodies. Because of these facts, this dissertation is not now what it was at its conception. My thoughts on maternal relation are hopeful. This encounter between bodies, the fragilization of our borders, I hope will be a call to step outside ourselves, our comforting narratives. These stories that confirm our place in the world, our landed-ness, should be disturbed by the encounter with the Other. We should be continuously made aware of their presence and our imposition, the ways in which My Autonomy / My Rights / My Privilege is violently opposed to the other’s existence. Instead, the maternal relation is a weakening of division, of the legitimating narratives of foreclosure and domination. It is a recognition of power in vulnerability and openness. It is, I hope, a labor of love. In many ways, this statement is premature and perhaps a bit naïve, but maybe it must be. The work still has to be done and will never be finished. In studying the Caribbean islands, we 262 are also asked to think about institutional divisions. Our area studies and national language departments are often a reinscription of colonial history. To divide Spanish from French Caribbean islands, even to study them as such, is to ignore the converging lines of indigeneity, colonization, enslavement, and trade that linked these islands. Their relationality is limitless, and there persist major lacunae within this narrative. The indigenous voice is hauntingly absent from the scene, only represented in one nineteenth-century disavowal. This silence speaks volumes upon the genocidal presence of the Spanish settlers in the Americas. Also absent are the voices of other colonial, Caribbean societies, such as the English and the Dutch. Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) is the absent mother par excellence. These are futurally and spectrally inscribed within the pages of this dissertation. Their absence is a presence, like that of the mother. While reading Spillers and Maryse Condé’s search for a (grand)maternal presence, I am reminded also of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The formerly enslaved, recently liberated grandmother of the protagonist’s children, Baby Suggs, explains that her son Halle was the first of her children that she was allowed to keep. The rest were stolen from her, and even her love for him was shrouded by this threat. Condé’s grandmother and great-grandmother are all haunted by this fear of loss, the violent loss of the mother or the child. Her own relation to the mother and grandmother is interrupted by this fear and the mediation of history that it effects. The theft of motherhood is a theft of relation, both the relation of mother to child and child to mother. It is a denial of personhood, which is not autonomous but exists in our being in relation to many (m)others. We each come into being—as mother, child, lover—through our relation to the Other. Without this relation, we are denied something of our being. Part of enslavement’s violence was in the denial of relationality. However, it is never complete, and relation persists. These texts are 263 a reminder of the interrelatedness of these seemingly disparate geographies, geographies of islands and of bodies. The Caribbean and the Americas are inextricably linked through their shared histories of enslavement, colonization, and postcolonial racism. The maternal reveals the undeadness of this history. She also demonstrates the undeadness of the colonial marker. Looking to Puerto Rico, which currently awaits another vote on statehood, and what departmentalization has meant for Martinique and Guadeloupe, we see how the colonial project is not finished with us. Even in twenty-first century Cuba, the bloqueo (embargo) continues to fuel decolonial discourse in the island as well as in the United States, existing as an emblem of US imperialism. Debates rage over this sixty-year failure of policy, one that continues to provide the (post)-Castro government with a scapegoat for the financial hardships and oppression faced by the Cuban people. These island bodies are neither isolated nor sovereign. The sovereignty and autonomy of states is no less tenuous than our own. The maternal threat of incursion is always present, and the waters that seem to hem the island in are traversed and permit an endless movement. There is no first crossing. There have been infinite crossings, ranging in their destructive and creative potential. Of the Middle Passage, that terrible deportation and torture, Glissant tells us that “the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss […] This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death.” 750 This pregnant body, this crossing of the threshold where bodies are broken down and disintegrated, is a catastrophic relation. It continues to make and unmake us in relation. We are still coming into ourselves in the knowledge of this crossing, in the ways it remade people according to race, 750 Glissant, Poetics, 6. 264 according to sexed and un-sexed bodies, denials and recriminations. The mother and family are annihilated, and fictions replace them, fictions to establish European hegemony and state building. And yet, the mother rises from her watery grave, not content to be silent. Her spectral voice speaks to us of the unmaking of filiative myths, the impossible foreclosure of her presence, and we cannot ever be separated from her. As a result, neither can we ever be fully separated from each-other. Each of the texts and geographies discussed in this dissertation take up a certain contention with the maternal body and a desire for autonomy. They look to the ways in which the island struggles to separate itself from its colonial, enslaved past, just as individuals seek to cut away from the vacuum of the maternal womb. I look to the play of race, gender, and sexuality as they have been inscribed within and excluded from this drama. For José Martí, there is a clearly delineated national project in place, a vibrant desire for sovereignty; however, Martí insists upon a certain color blindness. Black and Brown bodies are exotic tropes, distanced from the Cuban reality, and amplified to fantastical proportions. They become pure fantasy, related to Cuban independence only in that they provide a canvas. Inversely, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s writing places the visibility of race in Cuba at the center of her proto-feminist discourse, while the case for an independent Cuba remains ambiguous. Each also counter-sexes their bodies through their writing. Gómez de Avellaneda inhabits the body of a Black man, and Martí becomes a mother. They unhinge these categories of exclusion, creating a blurred boundary between who does and does not belong. After Cuba’s independence is only spectrally achieved within the dissertation, we approach the Départements d’Outre Mer and the Estado Libre Asociado. These categories of belonging describe an inside that is still peripherical, the tenuous linking of something neither 265 fully ingested nor expelled from the colonial apparatus. Condé’s pseudo-fictive account of her maternal genealogy, unravels her maternal relationality to the legacy of French culture and language in the Caribbean. She is clear that this relation is always, at best, ambiguous and opaque. She embraces Creole, French, and cooking as linguistically significant, emphasizing that the politicization of language is often oppressive instead of emancipatory. Ferré similarly addresses Puerto Rico’s shifting relation to coloniality, first to Spain and later to the United States. This fluctuation takes place in the language she uses and in the ephemeral solidity of female embodiment. The skin barrier of her subjects, as well as her own body, begins to erode, signaling to the reader that these boundaries are never to be trusted. The reader, writer, and text enter into a mutual violation of flesh and signification. Meanwhile, as Martí writes himself in relation to the mother and the child, Gómez de Avellaneda, Condé, and Ferré all write themselves into being, into presence. They create themselves in their fiction, elaborating and deconstructing the genealogies of women in the Caribbean. They see themselves in relation to the island, their community, and their families. These relations are often claustrophobic and stifling, but they are also laden with potentiality. They imagine relations unbounded by genealogy or by the correctness of women’s postures. They decry the utilization of women’s bodies for statecraft and their subjection to masculinist, liberation projects. Their relations to themselves are an affirmation of interiority and a response to the exclusion of women—especially mothers—from the political scene. Their writing allows us to imagine a thinking mother not absented from philosophy and meaning. She is a mother who speaks, writes, and means what she says. Perhaps this counter-conclusion is my response to Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s “Dos palabras al lector,” reminding the reader that this dissertation is open to change. The 266 circumstances of its coming-into-being have changed it, as they always must. The text is also changed in its relation to the reader. This is a disavowal of this present reading, just as it avows future readings. Nothing remains the same. Future readings and rewritings will certainly occur, as each reading is a writing in itself. 267 Bibliography Adán-Lifante, Virginia M. “Historia y Solidaridad Femenina En La Cuentística de Rosario Ferré.” Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 27, no. 2 (2003): 125–31. 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Creator Skillen, Sarah (author)

Core Title Errant maternity: threatening femininity in Caribbean discourses of family, nation, and revolution

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Spanish and Latin American Studies)

Publication Date 07/16/2020

Defense Date 04/28/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abjection,abolition,Antilles,Caribbean,Colonialism,diaspora,embodiment,exile,Family,femininity,gender,Independence,legitimacy,maternity,nineteenth century,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,relation,revolution,sexuality,twentieth century,vulnerability

Language English

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Advisor Díaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee chair), Belisle, Natalie Lauren (committee member), Hill, Edwin C. (committee member), Mendoza-De Jesus, Ronald (committee member)

Creator Email sarah.skillen1@gmail.com,skillen@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-330674

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