The Post-Columbus Syndrome

Identities, Cultural Nationalism, and Commemorations in the Caribbean

F. Viala

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349495405, 9781137443748
• eBook ISBN: 9781137439895
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Reflecting on the relationship between memory, power, and national identity, this book examines the complex reactions of the people of the Caribbean to the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World. Viala analyzes the ways in which Columbus became a reservoir of metaphors to confront anxieties of the present with myths of the past.

PART I

Post-Columbus Systems of Memory: Recycling Heritage in the Caribbean

CHAPTER 1

Transculturation as Commemoration: Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban longue durée, and the Role of Columbus

In the Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y elazúcar (1940),Fernando Ortiz retraced in 25 chapters the story of the birth and growth of the tobacco and sugarcane cultures in Cuba. To tell the history of the Caribbean basin before Columbus and until 1940, Ortiz created a new theoretical device, the counterpoint, to describe how cultural translations operated in the Caribbean among Taíno, African, and European cultures. Tobacco and Sugar, with diametrically opposed connotations,¹ are the two protagonists of Ortiz’s reading of the Caribbean in the longue durée. This reading is both geo-semiotic and historical-economic. What I mean by this is that the terms “tobacco” and “sugar,” because they mean more than their literal meaning for Ortiz, have become memory triggers in his book: they are trade products that represent Caribbean identity since its origin; therefore, telling their “stories” (as if tobacco and sugar were the characters of a plot) allows him to go back in time and describe, analyze, and understand the history of the region and its particular geographical identity.

Because of its broad historical scope, its densely descriptive and analytical nature, which relates the mutations of race and culture in Cuba to the evolution of the colonial and postcolonial economy on the island in the very long term, Ortiz’s contrapuntal method invited the reader to understand race and culture in Cuba through anamnesis: that is to say, to look at the Caribbean as a cultural zone characterized by selective and creative cultural memory, of which tobacco and sugar were the antecedents. Ortiz created a device that allowed for multiple and interdisciplinary memory-loaded narrations (connected to history, economy, geography, cultural anthropology, comparative mythology, and national identity), looking back in time to remember the past; for him, understanding Caribbean culture meant explaining how the past still existed in the present, and under which form. Thanks to the symmetry of his contrapuntal method, he turned the history of racial tensions in the Caribbean into a history of positive translations, turning the multiracial Caribbean imaginaries into one common process of alternative transformations. The latter resulted, for Ortiz, in the unique national identity of the Cuban postcolonial Republic. In this sense, I believe that Ortiz’s analysis of Caribbean culture should be defined as commemorative, in the sense that in such a system, memory sustains national identity and the pride of belonging to a common Cuban heritage.

In Contrapunteo, anamnesis starts with the title of the book and the meaning of each two symbolic character. Tabaco in Spanish comes from the Taíno word for smoking pipes. Smoking tobacco was an important ritual of the natives, who believed it allowed the opening of the threshold between the supernatural world and everyday reality. It was a translational device that played a pivotal role in their social cohesion, passing on the fundamental beliefs of the community and translating them into a metaphysical and collective creed. In Contrapunteo, Ortiz explains how, centuries after the disappearance of the Taínos on the island, tobacco culture became a craft in Cuba, representative of a Cuban savoir-faire and knowledge, protected by laws of conformity and non-falsification, thanks to specific labeling. Tobacco is portrayed heroically as a local Antillean treasure and a token of cultural and national pride in Ortiz’s book, with chapter titles such as “De como el Tabaco habano salió a conquistar el mundo” (How the Tobaco from Havana conquered the World) or “Del tabaco habano, que es el mejor del mundo” (On the Tobaco from Havana, which is the best in the World).

The second term of the title is addressed in the second part of the counterpoint, from chapters 12 to 19, which describes how sugar, the other fetish of the Cuban economy,² was introduced by the Spaniards for the purpose of mercantilism in the preindustrial plantation system. Ortiz tells how sugar production became a premodern capitalist industry from the early trapiches (sugar mills) to the later ingenios (sugar refineries), which required an organized, numerous, and systematic use of mano de obra for the hungry plantation, fed by the massive importation of black slaves from Africa. The brown gold was obtained through sugarcane processing. The sugar industry was also the result of another kind of translation: this is how Spain translated the exoticism of the New World into a profitable economy and justified expansionism after discovery.

My argument in this chapter will consist of two points. First, I suggest that transculturation—a word coined by Ortiz in Chapter 2 at the beginning of his book—was the keystone of a method of cultural anamnesis for understanding the Caribbean as a regional culture in the longue durée. I believe that transculturation, as the theoretical device defined by Ortiz, allows one not only to remember the Caribbean, but also to constantly commemorate its identity as an originary myth, retold in different contexts in the present.³

Ortiz described transculturation as a three-stage process of creative cultural adaptations in Cuba, in which the actors were the Spaniards and the Europeans who crossed the Atlantic on one hand, and the local Taíno-Arawak Indians and the black people brought from Africa on the other. Ortiz’s theory put forward a positive and compensatory cultural mechanism that transformed the violence of the arrival of the Europeans in the region into a process of cultural creation, epitomized by Cuban identity. Transculturation is the result of the cultural behavioral translations between Taínos and Africans. Ortiz examines how the slaves in Cuba adopted particular cultural elements from the native peoples of the Caribbean in order to resist and adapt to the Spanish and Catholic yoke. The main point is that European cultural traits were eventually modified by the incorporation of syncretic Taíno-African elements to give birth to a new, specific, and richer cubanidad on the island.

The three-stage process of transculturation—deculturation, acculturation, and neoculturation—corresponds to alternative external and internal fluxes. On one hand, transculturation is a necessary centrifugal movement of de-possession, in order to erase, disguise and forget a cultural element— precisely when its practice is repressed by the hegemonic power, as it was the case with African metaphysical and religious beliefs in the context of Catholic colonial society; on the other hand, it exists in a series of centripetal movements of appropriation, to incorporate, in compensation, a foreign cultural element, in other words, to remember something coming from another cultural, racial, linguistic and social group.

Transculturation shares the characteristics of anamnesis: it is based on the ability to select what can be remembered or erased, and to replace and adapt elements of latent collective memory to the needs of the everyday life. Ortiz’s system combines multiple meanings of anamnesis. First, it draws on the religious/spiritual/mythical definition of anamnesis, when telling the origin repairs the damage of colonization and slavery (what Eliade calls apodictical and cathartic in the Myth of the Eternal Return). Second, it resonates with the medical meaning of anamnesis, in the sense that tobacco and sugar are the antecedents of Cuba’s racial history. In Ortiz’s early and criminologist approach, race was the disease that needed to be cured; eventually, race became for Ortiz part of Cuban syncretism and cultural richness. In that sense, the antecedents are to be understood as the origins of the national identity. Lastly, Ortiz’s cultural memory shares the characteristics of the Platonic definition of anamnesis: remembering something we know while being unaware of this knowledge. Ortiz’s reader is invited to remember what he knows about the Caribbean (sugar and tobacco being obvious products associated with the region) while being at the same time unaware (and therefore enlightened by the reading of his book) that the words “sugar” and “tobacco” have got a deeper meaning, in relation to the cultural origins of the region; therefore, the method of the counterpoint is Ortiz’s tool to revive the memory of the reader, as Socrates’s questions trigger the young boy’s knowledge of geometry in Meno.

In addition, Ortiz considers transculturation as a type of cultural memory, specific to the Caribbean, which operates by mimetism and transfer: one culture takes of the other what seems most familiar among many alien cultural practices. This is how the Caribbean tobacco-smoking ritual came to be recognized, understood and adopted by the black slaves to commune with the supernatural world—it was a practice close to the rituals performed in Africa before the Middle Passage, but whose exact procedure had been lost during the voyage. What was apparently lost and forgotten because of the trauma of the slave trade in fact remained at a latent stage in collective memory; transculturation allowed it to be remembered with a different, mixed, and enriched Taíno-African performative style.

In Ortiz’s definition, transculturation is unpredictable, continuous and undoable; it is a process of cultural transformation in the very long term and across generations, where all cultural parts are transformed, including the economically dominant culture. Transculturation is equivalent to a memory procedure in Ortiz’s view: cultural elements are never completely lost or forgotten; rather, they are recreated, re-membered, thanks to the cultural interactions of the different racial groups in Cuba. At the time he forged his theory, he thought that full transculturation had yet to be fully achieved but promised assimilation as a horizon d’attente for a future, modern Cuba. In other words, transculturation was for Ortiz the mechanism not only to describe cultural memory in Cuba but also to praise its progress as a nation able to remember collectively and to build a feeling of common cultural belonging. The Caribbean aptitude to recycle and rearrange cultural traits coming from different racial, linguistic, and religious backgrounds was for Ortiz the cultural talent of Cuba, able to self-repair and self-improve.

The second pillar of my argument is that Columbus was a key figure in Ortiz’s system of anamnesis and that he played a major role in transculturation. For Ortiz, Columbus was the agent of the Caribbean–European interferences. Yet this is problematic for us as contemporary researchers in Caribbean Studies. Critical studies since the 1960s have returned to the fact that Columbus did not discover the Antilles but thought that he had found the Indies he was looking for (O’Gorman 1958, Dussel 1992); that he interpreted erroneously the signs of the foreign culture he encountered in order to take possession of it (Todorov 1982, Carew 2006); and that he did not feel it necessary to understand the natives (Hulme 1986, Greenblatt 1991). His influence of the New World he discovered resulted from the delusional projection of his exploratory dream, born out of his fascination for Marco Polo, and the confirmation that the territories discovered were fit for Spanish crown’s profit.

But in Ortiz’s version, Columbus is the one who exported tobacco to the Old World and brought the sugar plants with him to the New World on his second voyage. As much as tobacco and sugar were two colonial fetishes, symbolic of Spain’s “marvelous possession,” Columbus was the hero who transported them: tobacco and sugar were part of the transatlantic relation, smuggled by Columbus, at the threshold between the Old and the New World, the very threshold deemed central to Campbell’s monomyth in his study of the constitutive elements, episodes, and archetypes of heroic initiations (Campbell 1949).

Columbus Eshu? Columbus Elegua? Ortiz endows the European mariner with the talent of translation that characterizes the Caribbean dioses de los caminos (gods of destination and destiny) called Elegua in Cuba and Eshu in Haiti, portraying him as an agent between the natural and the supernatural, between reality and myth, between mercantilism and capitalism. Ortiz’s Columbus is a hybrid, symbolic character that holds in one hand tobacco and in the other sugar. With Contrapunteo, Ortiz’s purpose was not to write a history of colonialism in the Hispanic Caribbean, but to show how the three major cultures—from the perspective of Cuban citizenship—transformed themselves through contact with each other by means of transfer, syncretism and creative appropriation. Indeed, with the neologism of transculturation, Ortiz brought to light the fact that Cuba’s transcultured post-1898 society was not simply the result of the addition and adaptation of different cultural layers resulting from the violent colonial encounter. Such a scenario would be to read the Caribbean in terms of multiculturalism.⁴ Instead, in Cuba, Ortiz saw a process of creative, interactive, and perpetually intermingled translations, born out of the complex context of a chaotic transplantation, where Columbus was a key figure. He appeared as an embryonic epic character in Contrapunteo in 1940 and reached the stature of a Cuban Odysseus in Huracán in 1947. In the main body of this chapter, I will retrace and analyze the evolution of this character and propose new perspectives for reading the relationship between Cuban heritage, citizenship, and national heroism in Ortiz’s work. In particular, I will explore how economy, race, and culture became the agents of a primitive Caribbean- and Columbus-oriented process of constructing a Cuban national reservoir of memory. This will allow us, in chapters 2, 3, and 4, to understand the Ortizian dimension of Brathwaite’s, Glissant’s, and Benítez Rojo’s memory systems; their unusual interest in Columbus; and their specific postmodern approaches to Caribbean imaginations in the longue durée.

Transculturation for Praising and Remembering Cubanidad

In his numerous anthropological essays, Ortiz studied most recurrently the representation of black culture in Cuba, particularly Yoruba religion and music, and more specifically, the sociocultural relations and crossbreeding between blacks and whites on the island. His life-long attempt to analyze the particularity of Cuban cultural identity through race was rooted in his desire to contribute to the progress of Cuban society. Though his primarily positivist mind-set became less aggressive and more subtle with time, Ortiz never ceased to posit his understanding of Cuba in terms of improvement and modernity, and to narrate the nation as young, not yet fully realized, but endowed with the cultural depth of a grand civilization whose ancient origins were tied up in a complex racial and cultural encoding.

The model he elaborated in the first half of the twentieth century focused on the twists and turns of the syncretic elements that define Cuban culture, dissecting their origins, showing how they intersected, and analyzing how they recreated themselves in a way that changed negative and traumatic elements into positive and self-affirmative ones, elements of which, he felt, the Cuban should be proud. As an analogy, one might say that Ortiz’s transculturation theory proposed a reading of the Caribbean as a region with its own DNA, where identity was as much as inherited—Indo-Antillean, white, or black—as duplicated, thanks to the complex reassociation of the information encoded in each cultural sequence, after a mistake led to a mutation of the original identity sequence. The mistake was epitomized by the violent rupture caused by colonization and slavery, corresponding to what Ortiz calls deculturation and acculturation. This occurred with Columbus’s arrival. In Ortiz’s mind-set, the positive emerged from the negative. Indeed, what prevented the imposition of a homogenized Hispanic culture in Cuba was the trauma that arose from the start of each identity sequence: the enslavement of the Taínos and the uprooting of the Africans. The primary cultural information from each was displaced, erased, and uprooted from its original cultural and geographic context, and therefore had to renew and diffuse itself into multiple syncretisms. In the particular case of Cuba, which was most dear to Ortiz, the polytraumatic historical origins (the resettlement of the criollos, the genocide of the Indians, the slavery of the Africans) were turned in the long term into a cultural gift, thanks to the capacity of adaptation of the Cuban people, and their ability to syncretize cultures and to reach the stage of civilization.

When he chose the word transculturation in 1940, Ortiz was correcting the ethnocentric English term of acculturation, which he himself used in his earlier works to describe the atavisms of black culture, which he believed were responsible for the blockages of Cuba’s progress toward modernity. What the new word brings is the possibility to highlight the negative and turn it into the basis of the positive. Indeed in Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint, no creative and appropriative transculturation would be possible without, first, a phase of deculturation and, second, of acculturation. The negative prefixes in the system are essential to stress the primary and original loss upon which cultural regeneration can operate:

La transculturación expresa mejor las diferentes fases transitivas de una cultura a otra porque este no consiste solamente en adquirir una distinta cultura (lo que significa el termino anglosajón de “acculturation”) sino que el proceso implica también necesariamente la perdida o desarraigo de una cultura propia, lo que pudiera decirse des-culturación y además significa la consiguiente creación de nuevos fenómenos culturales que pudieran denominarse de neo-culturación

(Ortiz 1963, p.101)

In 1944, Ortiz corrected and augmented his previous analysis of Afro-Cuban cultural practices in Los Negros Brujos (1906) and Hampa Afro-cubana: Los Negros Esclavos (1916). He expanded the transculturation model to remap the history of “the relations between blacks and whites in Cuba” for the purpose of an article published in the Phylon Journal of Atlanta (Ortiz 1944). This article shows how Ortiz modified and rendered more complex his first positivist analysis of black Cuban communities. For the purposes of clarity, and for the readers not familiar with the text, I will begin by describing Ortiz’s analysis.

The first stage called deculturation moves from hostility to compromise. The first cultural “encounter” between white dominant and black slave cultures is violent (“the white man attacks the black man and enslaves him by force, the black rebels against his oppressor if possible, the people are told that the Negro is sub-human and bestial, at last the black man is conquered but he is not resigned to his fate”) (Ortiz 1944, p.22). Then comes the “good master/ good ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—The Post-Columbus Syndrome: A Comparative Approach to Caribbean Memory in the Longue Durée
• Part I: Post-Columbus Systems of Memory: Recycling Heritage in the Caribbean
• Part II: Anamnesis Caribensis: Columbus in 1992
• Conclusion: Toward an Archipelagic Memory
• Notes
• References
• Index