Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America

Jerome C. Branche

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780826520630
• eBook ISBN: 9780826520647
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Imagine the tension that existed between the emerging nations and governments throughout the Latin American world and the cultural life of former enslaved Africans and their descendants. A world of cultural production, in the form of literature, poetry, art, music, and eventually film, would often simultaneously contravene or cooperate with the newly established order of Latin American nations negotiating independence and a new political and cultural balance. In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche presents the reader with the complex landscape of art and literature among Afro-Hispanic and Latin artists. Branche and his contributors describe individuals such as Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote an autobiography on the slave experience in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The reader finds a thriving Afro-Hispanic theatrical presence throughout Latin America and even across the Atlantic. The role of black women in poetry and literature comes to the forefront in the Caribbean, presenting a powerful reminder of the diversity that defines the region.

All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.

1

The Altar, the Oath, and the Body of Christ

Ritual Poetics and Cuban Racial Politics of 1844

Matthew Pettway

In the shadow of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), free and enslaved persons of African descent organized a series of insurrections designed to abolish slavery, depose the Spanish military government, and boldly institute a new republic of blacks and mulattoes on the island of Cuba. Government interrogations confirmed that the chief conspirators had initiated their plans in 1841 (Paquette 263–65) and subsequently concealed the plot by compelling would-be rebels to swear unconditional allegiance to give up their lives before revealing anything to their white enemies. To this end, loyalty oaths were a pervasive means to effectively organize anti-slavery revolts, maintain secrecy, and assure unity among insurgents.¹ The 1844 Movement particularly alarmed colonial authorities because it enjoyed widespread appeal among blacks, effectively recruited both enslaved and free persons, and was composed of multiple nuclei that traversed the urban/rural divide (Paquette 263–65).²

The historical record confirms that loyalty oaths had both a political and spiritual component (Finch 171). Members of the chief junta inducted Cuban and African-born persons alike through ritual initiations wherein would-be rebels pledged abiding allegiance to the cause. On occasion, loyalty oaths involved the transgressive appropriation of Catholic rituals in an apparent attempt to confer religious significance on the uprisings and to invoke divine power in hope of speeding its success. In this essay, I analyze the oaths administered by mulatto sacristan José Amores, a constituent of the 1844 Movement. I argue that Amores knowingly appropriated, refashioned, and resignified Catholic rituals in accordance with an African-based religio-cultural paradigm so that the tools of normative religious discourse became instruments of insurgent activity. African-born captives and their Cuban descendants appropriated Christian religious figures and images in order to dissemble African-derived sacred practices (Sandoval 41, 53). The appropriation of Catholic practices speaks to a transcultural historical moment wherein Africans and their descendants amalgamated the rites, rituals, and symbols of the dominant religious order with the cultural values of African divine spirits. Insurgency rituals—such as the oath performed by José Amores—reworked the sacraments through the lens of an African-based spiritual worldview, thus transculturating the Blessed Sacrament and the sacred speech act.

The seditious engagement of José Amores with Christian ritual and his reliance on hallowed speech acts warrant careful study. My archival research at Harvard University’s Houghton Library revealed that the sacristan’s clandestine activities involved taking hold of the Eucharist to administer scared loyalty oaths. Amores’s initiations adopted what are among the holiest symbols of Catholicism: the altar, the oath of fidelity, and the Body of Christ. My cultural-studies reading of historical text explores how the oaths transgressed church dogma and assigned a new system of meaning to otherwise normative rites. In this way, José Amores’s activities were not only politically subversive but also endangered Hispano-Catholic notions of the colonial order.

Not much research has been conducted concerning the loyalty oath as a component of the counter-hegemonic thinking that informed the 1844 Movement. To my knowledge, no literary scholars in either Cuba or the United States have seriously engaged the topic. Nevertheless, I am familiar with historians who have touched upon the matter: Aisha Finch, Jane Landers, and Robert Paquette. In her ground-breaking dissertation, “Insurgency at the Crossroads: Cuban Slaves and the Conspiracy of La Escalera, 1841–1844,” Finch effectively excavates the narrative of African-descendant political struggle and demonstrates that rural Africans helped to organize and lead the 1844 Movement.³ Finch acknowledges the sacred character of the loyalty oath and characterizes chief conspirator Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés as one responsible for administering such oaths to would-be rebels (171). Jane Landers offers a far more abridged discussion of the loyalty oath, mentioning Plácido’s 1840 poem “El Juramento” (“The Oath”) without any analysis of its religio-political significance to the 1844 Movement (204, 227). As part of a broader discussion about the use of African ritual powers as insurgent tools, Robert Paquette mentions the curious account of a mulatto sacristan by the name of José Amores, who was convicted of perverting that which is holy to recruit an enslaved person to rebellion (243). While these studies contribute to our knowledge of the oath as a tool of insurgency in nineteenth-century colonial Cuba, research remains to be done that examines the transcultural sacrality of such a speech act.

The Sentencia pronunciada por la Seccion de la Comisión militar establecida en la ciudad de Matanzas para conocer la causa de la conspiración de la gente de color (Sentence pronounced by the Section of the Military Commission established in the city of Matanzas to uncover the motives of the conspiracy of the colored people), an eight-page Spanish-government document dating from 1844, is located at Harvard University’s Houghton Library.⁴ The Sentencia is an authoritative and condemnatory text, legitimated by Queen Isabel II but executed under the auspices of Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell, who was charged with performing the will of the monarch. The Military Commission’s account had three stated functions: to name those accused of conspiratorial activities, to frame the uprisings in terms of an indefensible race war, and to graphically detail the executions of persons condemned to death. The Commissioners characterized the oath that José Amores issued to an enslaved rebel as a particularly abominable act because it dishonored the Blessed Sacrament—the holiest of Christian relics—in a religio-political struggle to deconstruct the colonial order.

I analyze the aforementioned text as a conspiracy narrative whose espousal of conflicting worldviews is grounded in a Christian as well as an African belief in the inherent power of the spoken word. From the hegemonic viewpoint, the Afro-Cuban exploitation of Catholic rituals for conspiratorial ends was a terrifying prospect. Such symbolic inversions of the religio-political order threatened to Africanize Cuba and transform the island into another Haiti (Paquette 211). Nevertheless, if we read the government account from the rebels’ vantage point, the loyalty oath emerges as a sacred pact among brethren whose ritual poetics equipped them for revolutionary exploits. This essay examines how peripheral discourses appropriated the tools of dominant society in an effort to gain discursive presence. My research has presented a series of questions that require our attention because they have yet to be explored. What is the religio-political function of the loyalty oaths that José Amores professed and administered to others? How might scholars make an Afro-Cuban subject position legible in a government narrative that sought to efface it? I contend that the oath is a transgressive representation of Catholicism and a sacred speech act that usurps and resignifies the normative authority of religious discourse, thus transforming the dark body into a sacred vessel consecrated for uprising.

Government accounts of uprising tend to portray events in a way that highlights the legitimacy of the power of the colonial state. Such narratives deliberately create silences, speak in coded language, and otherwise dissemble the truth. Self-dissembling further complicates an already difficult task since the critic must make the text readable in order to do a suitable analysis. In order to make the Sentencia legible to a broader readership, I have adopted an interdisciplinary historicist method that draws upon religious ethnography, literary theory, and theories of transculturation. Colonial-era documents tend to obscure, misrepresent, and/or omit African and Afro-Cuban points of view because they were written for a white bureaucratic readership. The Military Commission’s racialized account requires that we read between the lines, observing silences and speaking where the text does not. Drawing upon multiple disciplinary practices, my aim is to identify, disinter, and effectively reconstruct African descendant subject positions.

The loyalty oath was a spoken utterance, not a written text; thus, it evaded the power of an austere censorship regime. Documents from the colonial era illustrate the role censorship played as a technology of power intricately designed to maintain the imperial order.⁵ Censorship is an example of what Michel Foucault has termed the rarefaction of discourse: determining what can be said, choosing among subjects to speak, and avoiding chance appearances of speech that does not belong “within the true” (216).⁶ My research at Harvard University’s Houghton Library yielded an original 1835 decree from Captain General Miguel Tacón published in Diario de la Habana, concerning the censorship of religious writings.⁷ Spanish censorship was an observable system of control for African and European descendant writers whose true power was less visible to the reading public. Colonial censors were chosen by and directly responsible to the Captain General, the chief military officer appointed by the crown. For my purposes, there are three themes that require attention: prohibitions on religious writings that contradict the holy faith, slanderous statements about the monarchy, as well as any reference to liberty or progress.⁸

I employ a theoretical framework that privileges the inherent power of the spoken word, the oath, body politics, and religious transculturation. Giorgio Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language situates the oath in the intersection between religion and politics (Prodi qtd. in Agamben 1) so that the utterance performs a sacred and secular function. The oath represents a pact, a socio-political commitment between diverse interlocutors within a given polity. Political crises arise when the sworn oath has been disregarded or even dishonored by one or all of the actors in question. Agamben’s philosophical archaeology of the oath also explores how Christian monotheism establishes a precise correlation between words and reality. According to such a formulation, the words of God are oaths since he alone swears truly. As a consequence, human beings can know nothing of God that his word does not reveal because his word “testifies with absolute certainty for itself.” The oaths administered and received by humans represent an attempt to conform human language to the divine model in order to enhance its credibility (Philo qtd. in Agamben 21).

Inherently, the oath is a religio-political utterance, so it cannot be said that religion preexisted the oath. On the contrary, as Agamben says, the oath is “[the] originary performative experience of the word.” Therefore, it is the oath that gives explanation to jurisprudence and religious faith (65). The oath-event is both a speech act intended to swear faithfulness and a “consecration of the living human being through the word to the word” (Agamben 66). J. L. Austin says that the speech act considers the entirety of the situation in which speech occurs in order to establish a parallel between statements and performative utterances (52). Austin envisions the issuing of a performative utterance as the realization of a deed, which is given life through language, so that “the utterance is the performing of an action” (6–7). According to this rendering, “I do”—the most important declarative statement of the matrimonial ceremony—seals a contractual pact and weds two individuals in sacred ritual (5, 7). For the purpose of this project, I define ritual poetics as verbal practices performing language as sacred discourse inscribed upon the body. Ritual poetics derives its power from the speech act’s capacity to manifest language in quotidian circumstance, having been forged through the intractable conflict and asymmetrical dialogue between disparate spiritual traditions in the Cuban colonial context.⁹ Though I acknowledge the top-down relationship between the sacristan and his African recruit, I also recognize that such a hierarchical affiliation was the result of church power, not African-descended political organization. As transculturator, the African recruit is active in the process of meaning making, thus transforming the clergy/laity relationship into a sacred pact among brethren.

All of this is relevant to my analysis of the government’s portrayal of insurgent loyalty oaths. José Amores professed and administered oaths that broke faith with the authority of the colonial regime and delegitimized the official religion of the colony, which he was sworn to uphold and defend. By focusing on the oath as a religio-political contract breached by an officer of the church, I seek to determine the way in which Afro-Cuban interlocutors selectively appropriated and resignified Christian speech acts in order to create conditions for a new covenant among what might have been an emerging racial community.

Pronouncing Judgment and Condemning Bodies: The Sentencia pronunciada por la Comisión militar establecida en Matanzas

The Spanish government’s account of the conspiracies and uprisings of 1844 is a violent story of intrigue and chaos, designed to manipulate entrenched white suspicions of African descendants’ ambitions for political power.¹⁰ The Sentencia is a racialized religious narrative legitimated within normative ideas about whiteness and Catholicism in an attempt to construct Cuba within the Hispanic imaginary. Colonial society is written in Hispano-Catholic terms as a divinely sanctioned social structure besieged by vicious persons who would pervert its holy mission and natural hierarchy. I analyze the Sentencia as the official government narrative of the events of 1844 that makes explicit claims to veracity in order to justify the imprisonment, torture, executions, and coercive expatriations of enslaved and free persons of African descent thought to be involved in the plot. Sanctioned by Queen Isabel II de Borbón, the Sentencia reads as an acerbic refutation of conspiracy and revolt. I seek to illustrate how the Sentencia unwittingly portrays Africans and their descendants as religio-cultural subjects who appropriated and refashioned normative rites in order to administer ritual oaths of spiritual adherence and insurrectionary commitment.

The government’s story portrayed people of African descent in a way that spoke to their socio-economic standing in the colonial order. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo’s close reading of the judgment against the political leaders of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Altar, the Oath, and the Body of Christ: Ritual Poetics and Cuban Racial Politics of 1844
• 2. Seeking Acceptance from Society and the State: Poems from Cuba’s Black Press, 1882–1889
• 3. Imagining the “New Black Subject”: Ethical Transformations and Raciality in the Post-Revolutionary Cuban Nation
• 4. Realism in Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Drama
• 5. Bojayá in Colombian Theater: Kilele: A Drama of Memory and Resistance
• 6. Uprising Textualities of the Americas: Slavery, Migration, and the Nation in Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Women’s Narrative
• 7. Disrobing Narcissus: Race, Difference, and Dominance: (Mayra Santos Febres’s Nuestra Señora de la noche Revisits the Puerto Rican National Allegory)
• 8. Bilingualism, Blackness, and Belonging: The Racial and Generational Politics of Linguistic Transnationalism in Panama
• 9. Racial Consciousness, Place, and Identity in Selected Afro-Mexican Oral Poems
• 10. Afro-Uruguayan Culture and Legitimation: Candombe and Poetry
• 11. Quilombismo and the Afro-Brazilian Quest for Citizenship
• 12. (W)riting Collective Memory (De)Spite State: Decolonial Practices of Existence in Ecuador
• Contributors
• Index