Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry

Kenneth A. Loparo, Jossianna Arroyo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137305152
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305169
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Addressing the transnational relationships of Freemasonry, politics, and culture in the field of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, Writing Secrecy provides insight into Pan-Caribbean, transnational and diasporic formations of these Masonic lodges and their influences on political and cultural discourses in the Americas.

C H A P T E R 1

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On Secrecy: Freemasonry and Affective Politics

From this point of view the autobiographical is the locus of the secret, but not in the sense—as some would have it—that it holds the key to a secret, be it conscious or unconscious . . . Clearly, the most tempting figure for this absolute secret is death, that which is in relation to death, that which is carried off by death—that which is thus life itself. Now, it is true that the relation to death is a privileged dimension of this experience of the secret, but I imagine that an immortal would have the same experience. Even for an immortal this secret would be concealed, sealed.

—Jacques Derrida, I have a taste for the secret.¹

ON SECRECY

“The locus of the secret” is, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, the place that remains hidden from our own self and others while being, paradoxically, an autobiographical place, a place on the surface of consciousness governed by the rational self. It is this locus of the unknown that defines the self in a certain view of politics in which secrets have always figured as the instruments of power. Disclosure of secrets, even of personal ones, is part of the writing process inasmuch as it is a communicative act that bridges one subjectivity to another. And yet, does the writer who makes this communication understand all that she is communicating? The secret, as it is construed intersubjectively, is a mediated space, lying between the personal and the collective, whether political, familial, or cultural. Secrets are structurally connected to the realm of political and social ethics. Freemasonry, which began as an enlightenment project, was organized around a secret, the secret of the ritual, of membership, in order, partly, to escape detection by church and state. But by basing itself on secrecy, Freemasonry also produced a community in which the common element was keeping the secret and thus, secrecy was uniquely central to the Masonic lodges. This is the reason why Freemasons have been so often associated, both by their enemies and in the public mind, with world conspiracies. In the Freemason’s community of the secret, we see the commonality transcended nation, which in effect meant that Freemasonry grew within its transnational connections, first in Europe and later in the Americas, to become one of the defining factors in the growth of the politics of republicanism in the nineteenth century. In his recent novel, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown, a popular novelist, has extended the world of Masonic conspiracies to Washington, DC.

This book will not enter into the competition with popular books on conspiracy theories about secret societies, although it is obvious that the enduring popularity of this genre, for good or ill, is a measure of how rhetorically powerful the notion of the secret is, and what a fundamental role it plays in the contemporary psychopathology of everyday life.² Instead, I turn to biography, literature, social history, and archival sources to interpret the ways in which transnational Masonic links shaped political cultures in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States in the mid to last decades of the nineteenth century (1850–1898). These were the crucial decades when nation-building, republicanism, and the fights between different empires (Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United States) shook the political structures of the Circum-Caribbean down to their foundations. In these struggles, many Creole intellectuals coming from distinct backgrounds and social experiences found Freemasonry a very attractive system, and forged Masonic alliances that served to advance their respective sociopolitical causes. While it is true that the insights of Masonic scholarship have been somewhat undermined by popular culture, historians and literary critics have studied the cultural and political contributions of Freemasonry to literature, architecture, religion, art, and political-secular culture since the early 1970s. Curiously, the work by two women scholars opened my own path for the sociohistorical, literary, and political analyses of this masculine secret society. While Margaret C. Jacob is the pioneer in European-US Masonic-literary cultural studies, as she has linked secular culture and societies such as Freemasonry to the hegemony of capitalism in the eighteenth century, in the Spanish Caribbean I turn to the work of Puerto Rican scholar, Iris M. Zavala.³ In her work, Masones, comuneros y carbonarios published in 1971, Zavala makes a brilliant analysis of the emergence of social contestatary political movements in Spain, and their transnational influence in their last colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico.⁴ For Zavala, the role of Spanish comuneros, anarchists, and Freemasons that traveled across the Atlantic was key for the revolutionary movements after 1868. While Jacob centers her work on the formation of capitalism and secular masculine ideals, Zavala sees these same movements in Spain and its colonies. Spain fell into the hegemony of British capital and their abolitionist rhetoric that started to take hold after the 1850s. Spain’s last colonies, particularly Cuba, were sources of economic progress—and this economic progress was centered on black colonial slavery. One of my main inquiries after reading these important works was related to the role of freedom in the United States, or Latin America’s post-emancipation societies where colonialism and racial segregation (or white/mulatto privilege) took strong hold, such as Haiti or Venezuela. It was clear that in these societies notions of freedom were shaped within the social-cultural frames of colonial slavery as well as the reality of maroonage, escape, and black revolt. I share Rebecca Scott’s assertion that looking at the 1860s milieu in the Caribbean sorted out different “degrees of freedom.”⁵ What freedom meant for a group of black slaves in a sugar plantation in Central Cuba, differs in meaning for a group of black artisans in colonial San Juan or a restavek (domestic servant) in Haiti.

Freemasonry arrived earlier in British and French colonies, such as Jamaica, Haiti, and Guadeloupe, than in the rest of Spanish or Portuguese empire. Due to the British invasion of Havana (1762) and French migrations to Santiago de Cuba after the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, Cuba had Masonic lodges earlier than Puerto Rico, which officially started its Creole Freemasonry in the late 1860s. The foundations of transnational Masonic connections in the Circum-Caribbean were forged in the Age of Revolution, thus my focus on the articulations of Masonic political-cultural languages starts with the American Revolution (1776) and the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and centers on intellectual Masonic figures who wrote, published and used their Masonic alliances with strategic-pragmatic purposes. I owe to both of these important scholars, and to the pioneer work of Julius S. Scott and Eugene D. Genovese, my initial inquiries on freedom, language, and culture in Caribbean Freemasonry.⁶ Fields such as Caribbean Studies, US Latino Studies, American Studies, and African Diaspora Studies, as well as theories on coloniality, critical race theory, and diaspora studies provided me with the theoretical foundations for this transnational-transdisciplinary research. This book hopes to continue this dialogue, and to contribute to these debates, by addressing the complex connections between the Masonic histories of the Circum-Caribbean and the United States. After completing my archival readings, I understood that more than being associated with forms of social power and middle-class status, Masonic affiliations for white Creoles and black Caribbean men were strongly linked with the legacies of slavery and colonialism. At the same time, they were connected to migration, memory, family, citizenship, spirituality, and politics. A specific form of technology—discursive, political—was embedded in this language.

Today, as we enter the twenty-first century, and as the social struggles of the nineteenth century have been transformed in the reign of the US imperial designs, these social languages, mainly the ones connected to migration, global transnationalism, and secrecy have come to haunt us in different ways. Latin American and Caribbean populations living in the United States face forms of political repression while they are looking for forms of political solidarity similar to the ones that are described in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century histories. The Latino, African American, and Anglo solidarities that have been established during the last thirty years, and strengthened especially in terms of resisting the policies of the Bush administration, were certainly inflected by the election of the first African American president Barack Obama. Yet, under the Obama administration, we are still coping with increasing levels of secrecy, permitted by the “national emergencies” of terrorism and war. Americans and the rest of the world are learning a lesson long known in colonial and postcolonial worlds, that secrecy relates to the personal but also touches the political. This type of secret, “the secret that we speak but are unable to say” as Jacques Derrida has defined it, has important implications for the way politics have been handled in the United States, particularly after 9/11. With the institutionalization of “The Patriot Act” (2001) and the recent intent of passing the Arizona Law (SB1070) in the United States, against illegal immigrants and in support of racial profiling, we witnessed a return to the early Cold War mentality best embodied by Joe McCarthy. Once again, new prescriptions of secrecy generated by the new state of emergency used the enemy—this time, in the war against terrorism—to allow the state to establish its arguments on secrecy on an enormous scale. The new regime, on the one hand, stripped away the secrets of our personal lives and, on the other hand, darkened the transparency of democracy. At the same time, there has been a strengthening of new laws to control immigration, coming particularly from Latin America and the Caribbean. As Latin American and Caribbean populations became the negative other, and were cast as the prototypical “illegal alien,” the levels of censorship and social control have undermined the exercise of personal rights and democracy in everyday life. These forms of “totalitarianism” of the social sphere create a mediated space in between public-private realms. Here, “the secret” becomes, as Derrida defines it, a type of “untouchable” force, a “taste for the secret” that creates a new critical distance that goes against “the totalitarization of democracy.”⁷ His claims for the double use of the secret as a political strategy—where an imposed transparency on the citizenry is proportionate to an imposed secrecy on the apparatus of control—have a lot to do with understanding politics and forms of socialization and agency in our contemporary globalized world. This new subject would claim her not belonging as a space of différance and heterogeneity. Nevertheless, to not belong is part of the insider/outsider structure of the secret where the outsider is marked by not-knowing. For Derrida, it is the individual, not the collective that holds the secret. She who does not belong separates herself from the community to create a critical-ethical distance.

For Alan Badiou, it is precisely “naming the community” as a political strategy that “induces a disastrous Evil” that paves the way for totalitarianism. Fascism and Stalinism were totalitarian regimes precisely because they were built around the technologies of ritualized practices, that is, organized around all-absorbing community rituals for “the good for all.”⁸ Badiou takes a middle stance in between “secrecy” and “naming” with his notion of the “unnameable of truth.”⁹ Truth processes are thus not power formations in themselves, while at the same time they do not have total control of defining all the elements in a particular situation. Derrida’s and Badiou’s arguments touch upon important questions on the uses and abuses of political power, community, and democracy in our contemporary world. While it is not possible to deny Badiou’s claim of state’s abuses of political power, I do not share his view of “naming of the community” as a disastrous evil. Nor can I share completely Derrida’s notion that secrecy should remain with the individual and away from the collective to reflect “the terror of the political.”¹⁰ I want to distance myself from their views to define a pragmatic view of secrecy that creates forms of solidarity and political possibility from below. My understanding of the secret encompasses what Kwame A. Appiah defines as an “ethics of identity,” a form of creative individualism that has the freedom to achieve her own ethical self-pursuits in relation to collective identities, and understands the political through these same relations.¹¹

A close analysis of fraternal organizations such as Freemasonry, as well as many networks and social movements¹² in Latin America today, reflects on what John Beverly has read as a form of national-popular politics that requires “a relegitimization and reterritorialization of the nation state.”¹³ Local, but also transnational, solidarities created by these movements work from a pragmatic view of secrecy that gives them the power to organize, dissent, and reorganize their efforts on many political grounds and for desired effects. Many of these social movements today organize around land, ethnic/racial justice, or human rights. In many ways, Latin American and Caribbean social movements are challenging notions of universal rights by delving into their own local-social realities. At the same time, they see a pragmatic use of that same language of rights for their own claims for social justice.¹⁴

While historically Freemasons do not necessarily speak the same language of rights, for them, as well as for networks and social movements today, secrecy remains an organizational cue, a strategy, from which the main tasks—be them social or political—are achieved. While Freemasons relied on their closed-doors performative rituals to maintain their view of secrecy, their numerous magazines, journals, and addresses organized a print culture that was central to the public consumption of the Masonic secret, built on the notion of the secret that is not a secret. This paradoxical view maintains the universality of the organization (visibility), while retaining notions of secrecy for the sake of the ritual (invisibility). Today, processes of globalization as seen “from below” are registered by the bodies, emotions, and lives of millions of immigrant workers displaced from their countries of origin and working in the United States or Europe.¹⁵ The dire experiences of many of these immigrants make clear that the so-called postcolonial world still endures forms of colonial subjugation where a new global colonial order is creating forms of resistance on the political, racial, and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• 1   On Secrecy: Freemasonry and Affective Politics
• 2   Hauntings: Americanisms in Andrés Cassard and Albert Pike, 1850–1870
• 3   Technologies: Caribbean Knowledges, Imperial Critiques 1860–1900s
• 4   Writing Secrecy: Modernismos and the Opus of the Word
• 5   Urgency and Possibility: Afro-Latin@ Identities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index