2

MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION

MYRIAM CHANCY AND MICHELLE CLIFF

In actuality, there is no such thing as pure Jewish blood. Jews are a creolized people.

—Lewis Gordon, “Out of Egypt”

In Caribbean literature that addresses Sephardic experience, the figure of the tropical synagogue frequently appears as a trace of an absent Jewish presence. At the same time, Caribbean synagogues become emblematic in these texts of an interest in forgotten histories more broadly. Derek Walcott, for example, identifies the Caribbean synagogue with vanished histories when he makes reference in his Nobel speech to “the rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on Something Street” (“The Antilles” 69). This line presages passages in Tiepolo’s Hound about “the lost shul of Charlotte Amalie” in St. Thomas (140) and the now disappeared synagogue of Port of Spain, Trinidad (5). In her novel Hoe duur was de suiker?, Cynthia McLeod exhibits the Sephardic Caribbean past by documenting in quasi-museological detail the design of the Beracha Ve Shalom synagogue in Jodensavanne, the eighteenth-century Jewish settlement in Suriname that at the time the novel is set is already in decline. Similarly in Days of Awe, Achy Obejas memorializes the architectural history of the Jewish Caribbean in a scene in which her heroine visits the dilapidated building in Old Havana that had once housed Chevet Achim, the oldest synagogue in Cuba.¹

Often highlighted in such descriptions are the sand floors that are the architectural hallmark of Caribbean synagogues. Anna Ruth Henriques’s The Book of Mechtilde alliteratively associates the sand floors with loss and mourning: “Sorrow spoke / The sands on the floor / whispered / what they heard” (42). Henriques’s elegiac work commemorates not only the personal loss of her mother but also the collective loss of Sephardic Caribbean memory by evoking “the desert / stretched across the floor” of the synagogue, the “fast-receding / sand” (46), in an image that is simultaneously localizing and biblical. Alongside other recurring figures such as the Zong and Nanny of the Maroons, the sand-floored synagogue is a leitmotif of Michelle Cliff’s writing. In an interview, Cliff comments on the sand floors, whose origins and purpose have been the subject of considerable speculation: “It’s interesting to me that the Caribbean has some very old synagogues in it. Jamaica has the second oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere. All the Caribbean synagogues have sand on the floor. And I don’t think it’s because they’re in the tropics” (“The Art” 63). Here Cliff advances the view—as she will in her novel Free Enterprise—that the sand floors were a survival tactic imported from the Old World: “Because the Jews in Spain had secret gathering places, and they used the sand to muffle the sound of the services” (63). In Cliff’s writing the sand-floored synagogue thus becomes associated not only with memory and loss but also with the strategies of secrecy and coversion that oppressed populations have adopted at various historical moments in an effort to preserve their cultural identity.

As the tropical synagogue motif illustrates, part of the appeal of the little-known story of Caribbean Sephardim is that it resonates with a central theme in postslavery writing: the lost or obscured histories that lie buried in the slavery archive, awaiting recovery. In particular, in the fiction of Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy and Jamaican American writer Michelle Cliff, Marranos—secret or crypto-Jews who preserved a connection with Judaism after their forced conversion to Christianity—become identified with practices of concealment for the purposes of survival that also were cultivated among New World Africans. Kandiyoti has argued that Marranos are popular figures in historical fiction that seeks to recover buried histories because the Marrano himself suggests the project of recovering a concealed past (“Contemporary Literary Sephardism”). This is the case in Cliff’s novel Free Enterprise (1993), a work that is engaged in what Toni Morrison calls a “literary archaeology” of slavery (quoted in Sharpe xi). Marrano motifs also feature in novels such as Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels (2010) and Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody (2002), both of which probe the secret lives of those who endured repressive twentieth-century Caribbean regimes.

While the Marrano metaphor appearing in Caribbean writing is preoccupied with personal and collective pasts that have been concealed or buried, it is also introduced by writers who seek to explore the creolized character of Caribbean identity. Creolization theory has tended to focus on African, Indigenous, and, more recently, South and East Asian constituents of Caribbean societies. The imaginative literature considered in this chapter, by contrast, identifies Sephardic Jewishness as a significant contributor to Caribbean creolization. Both Chancy in The Loneliness of Angels and Cliff in Free Enterprise position the Caribbean within an interamerican and global context. Like Levins Morales’s Remedios, their multiperspectival, kaleidoscopic narratives reconfigure fragmented histories and identities in order to generate a new understanding of the relationships among them. This relational project is supported by the presence of Marrano characters in Chancy’s and Cliff’s novels. Although significant, Marrano protagonists do not dominate either The Loneliness of Angels or Free Enterprise. Instead, they are part of the connective tissue of each novel, helping to relate the diverse characters to one another and, in so doing, to link up the Caribbean to a global landscape. At the same time, with their histories of dislocation, cross-culturalism, and split consciousness, Marranos also serve as emblems in these novels of suppressed and hybridized Caribbean identities. Ultimately, what Chancy’s and Cliff’s fiction suggests is the compatibility of sephardism and its subset marranism with the Caribbean paradigm of creolization. This affinity is signaled by the analogy between Caribbean and Jewish spirituality that Chancy develops and by Cliff’s exploration of resonances between the uncanny figures of the Marrano and the light-skinned Creole.

SEPHARDISM, MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION

The Mexican Jewish critic Ilan Stavans observes that “the Sephardic condition is one of fracture and displacement. Obviously, these ingredients also characterize the last two thousand years of Jewish history as a whole, but the dispersion from the Iberian Peninsula is a particularly dense branch of it, with multiple ramifications” (xvii). Stavans explains that this condition was the product of the practice of forced conversion, which “had been the law of the land during the century that preceded the expulsion. It resulted in a duplicity that marked Sephardic civilization forever: a self at home, another in public. The age of conversos was thus established, coinciding with the colonial enterprise. Scores of New Christians traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a refuge from the Inquisition, only to find an almost equally oppressive atmosphere on the other side. Some Sephardim did manage to survive in the Caribbean basin, in Brazil, and in the other South American countries” (xviii).

Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels and Cliff’s Free Enterprise, which draw inspiration from the historical presence of Conversos and Marranos in the islands and on the Caribbean mainland, invoke a variety of aspects of Sephardic experience including persecution under the Inquisition and expulsion as well as cross-culturalism, conversion, disguise, and double consciousness. Conversos and Marranos become associated in these novels with suppressed and closeted identities and with a variety of forms of racial, religious, and sexual masquerade. This brand of Caribbean sephardism—or marranism, to be more precise—foregrounds tensions between assimilation and the preservation of original identities that Yirmiyahu Yovel has identified as fundamental to the Marrano phenomenon (The Other Within 78).

By the same token, the presence of Sephardic and Marrano motifs in Chancy’s and Cliff’s fiction also reflects their shared preoccupation with creolized identities. With its cross-cultural orientation, marranism supports an exploration of what Cliff describes in an interview as the distinctive “feeling of the Caribbean”: “But that’s part of living in the Caribbean. It’s such a confusing place…. There are so many cultural influences. It’s not just the English and the African influence. There’s Indian, Jewish, many forms of European, Middle Eastern; there are very old Arab communities in the Caribbean, as well as Jewish, Chinese, East Indian…Everybody comes from someplace else” (“The Art” 63). The plural, variegated, and slippery quality of Sephardic identity, which Stavans likens to “a hall of mirrors” (xviii), resonates with models of creolization that emphasize the dynamic, entangled multiplicity of Caribbeanness and its defiance of neat categorization. In this regard, just as Kandiyoti suggests that sephardism complements established paradigms in Latina/o studies such as mestizaje, so, too, sephardism is potentially compatible with Caribbean conceptions of creolization.

Unlike the related term hybridity, creolization has a distinctly Caribbean genealogy and focus.² At the same time, the Caribbean has emerged as a “master metaphor” (Cohen and Toninato 5) to describe the phenomenon of cultural creolization as it extends beyond the Caribbean region.³ This trend has been met with concern by a number of Caribbeanists, who worry that appropriations of creolization by scholars of globalization dilute the concept in what Mimi Sheller identifies as an act of “theoretical piracy” (195).⁴ Still others have challenged utopian applications of the term and the celebratory embrace of creolization by cultural theorists in the 1990s by emphasizing that creolization necessarily entails not only cultural entanglement but also colonial subjugation, trauma, violence, and asymmetrical relationships of power (Hall, “Créolité” 35). In drawing creolization, sephardism, and marranism into relation, I remain attentive to such concerns. At the same time, I also heed the equal and opposite worry voiced by Jewish studies scholars that Jewish—and especially Sephardic—experience is too often appropriated as an empty and deracinated metaphor. It is neither my intention here to annex creolization on behalf of sephardism nor sephardism on behalf of creolization. Rather, I seek to draw attention to the overlapping presence of these two frameworks within Caribbean literature and to the affinity between creolization and sephardism that the texts themselves identify.

It is also worth noting that sephardism and creolization do not simply exhibit a certain structural or syntactic resemblance to one another; rather, they intersect in historical and material terms. The origins of creolization have been traced back to fifteenth-century Cape Verde in what was both one of the earliest “thick” encounters between Europeans and Africans and a prelude to New World colonization (Cohen and Toninato 3). In Cape Verde, intermarriage and sexual relations between Africans and Europeans produced the first population described as Creole. Present in this community were creolized Sephardim who converted Africans to Judaism while themselves becoming acculturated to local faiths (Cohen and Toninato 3, 161). Jewish Conversos, then, contributed to one of the earliest major instances of creolization. Moreover, as one of the most prominent Atlantic trading diasporas, Sephardim also participated in more specifically Caribbean forms of creolization. In colonial Curaçao, for example, Sephardic Jews were instrumental to the consolidation and development of the Creole language Papiamentu, whose earliest known written example is a 1775 letter between two Sephardim (Rupert 109). For historian Linda M. Rupert, the example of Papiamentu raises the question of the role of Sephardim in the creolization of the Atlantic world more broadly (116). In postemancipation Trinidad and Jamaica, as another scholar observes, Jews “followed a trajectory of incorporation into Creole society” alongside other white and near-white trading minorities including Lebanese, Syrians, and post-indenture Chinese (Hintzen 97). The relationship between Sephardic experience and Caribbean creolization, then, is not one of abstract or purely theoretical parallelism but rather of a historical intersectionality.⁵

Caribbean writers’ use of Sephardic and Marrano motifs reflects their awareness of this historical background of Sephardic Caribbean creolization and their interest in exploring the identities of those who “are neither one thing nor the other” (Cliff, No Telephone 131). According to Halevi-Wise, “among the creators of sephardism, we find many figures of in-betweenness” (7). This is the case for the writers considered here, who stage Black-Jewish encounters both to thematize the intercultural dynamics of Caribbean societies and to explore their own interracial identities. Because of what Jonathan Freedman describes as its foregrounding of the “insistently multiple structure of identity and being” (248) and the extent to which identity is forever “shuttling between locations and sources of origination” (250), marranism has a particular resonance in creolized societies such as those of the Caribbean. Stuart Hall has described the Caribbean as a “translated” culture that “always bear[s] the traces of the original, but in such a way that the original is impossible to restore” (“Créolité” 31). Similarly, marranism, which shrouds original identities in secrecy to the point where they become untraceable and forgotten, casts doubt on the fantasy of a return to origins.⁶

“NOU TOUT SÉ JWIF”: CRYPTO-JUDAISM IN THE LONELINESS OF ANGELS

One of the central tropes in Caribbean texts that invoke a Sephardic presence is that of a Jewish bloodstrain that runs through the Caribbean population. This motif references the history of Sephardic Jews who arrived in the islands fleeing the Inquisition and who continued to conceal their faith throughout the sixteenth century after the Inquisition followed them to the New World.⁷ Against this historical background of forced conversion and suppressed identities, the Caribbean protagonists of the novels discussed in this chapter are not always conscious of their Sephardic lineage. Yet their Jewishness manifests itself in the habits of secrecy that they exhibit and in their tendency to keep a part of themselves hidden from view.

In Obejas’s Days of Awe, which I discussed in the introduction, when the father of the heroine Alejandra is questioned as to whether he is Jewish, he replies: “‘All people of Spanish descent have some Jewish blood in them’” (37). Correspondingly, in Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody, the Cuban composer Israel Levis, a devout Catholic, may be of Jewish descent, for “what Spaniard did not have a descendant somewhere with Jewish or Arab blood?” (50). Levis’s Sephardic appearance and Semitic surname would seem to support the possibility of Jewish ancestry, as would his mother’s dream that his father was a Jew. And yet his purported Jewish lineage remains profoundly unverifiable: “The family name, Levis, originated with some distant Catalan ancestor, who may or may not have had some Jewish blood, but nothing was made of that, for, going back centuries to postmedieval Spain, as his father once explained, the peasants often derived their names from their masters—and there had been many prosperous Jews living in Spain before the inquisitions of Isabella forced them either to convert, to die or to flee her sacred kingdoms” (49).

In Cliff’s novel Into the Interior (2010), the great-grandmother’s hooked nose similarly is cited as evidence of a possible but unverifiable Jewish heritage: “The watery silk of her chaise makes the blue of my great-grandmother’s eyes almost unbearable, each lighting the hook of her nose, evoking a Carib ancestor, Sephardic fugitive: who is to say?” (9).⁸ So too, the speaker of Walcott’s poem “North and South” (1981) speculates on the basis of his aunt’s physiognomy that his family may have Jewish forebears:

 

The ghosts of white-robed horsemen float through the trees,

the galloping hysterical abhorrence of my race—

like any child of the Diaspora, I remember this

even as the flakes whiten Sheridan’s shoulders,

and I remember once looking at my aunt’s face,

the wintry blue eyes, the rusty hair, and thinking

 

maybe we are part Jewish, and felt a vein

run through this earth and clench itself like a fist

around an ancient root, and wanted the privilege

to be yet another of the races they fear and hate

instead of one of the haters and the afraid.

(99–109)

 

Such passages present the Caribbean protagonists’ possible Jewish lineage as highly indeterminate, albeit not implausible given the historical presence of Jews in the region. At the same time, by aligning Jews with other “feared and hated” populations, these writers express a desire to claim such a lineage.

The notion of a dormant Jewish bloodstream that runs through the Caribbean populace, escaping detection is one of the organizing motifs of Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels. An investigation of Caribbean spiritual life, Chancy’s novel reaches beyond the more expected African and European reference points to situate Haiti within a larger network of ethnic and cultural geographies. Chancy’s nonlinear narrative ranges across multiple geographical sites (Haiti, France, Canada, the United States, Ireland) and time periods (from the mid-nineteenth century to the 2000s). A multiperspectival novel, it is organized around a series of centers of consciousness, shifting between the voices and points of view of five figures: Ruth, a piano teacher and mystic who is murdered at the outset of the novel; her niece Catherine, a pianist living in Paris who returns to Haiti for her aunt’s funeral; Catherine’s mother Rose, who dies in exile from Duvalier in Canada; Ruth’s adoptive son Romulus, a former Konpa singer who travels to Miami after he is released from prison; and Elsie, an Irish seer and ancestor of Rose who emigrates to Haiti in 1847.

The first two of these perspectives, Ruth’s and Catherine’s, are significantly informed by the Jewish lineage that each woman traces. Although, as a result of the Code noir’s expulsion of Jews from the French islands, the colony of Saint Domingue did not have as prominent a Jewish population as Jamaica, Barbados, or some of the Dutch islands, Chancy’s novel reminds us that the Jewish diaspora reached most corners of the Caribbean, and Haiti was no exception. Accordingly, The Loneliness of Angels references the early twentieth-century emigration of Middle Eastern Jews to Haiti while also implicitly alluding to an older Sephardic and Marrano presence in Haiti dating back to the arrival of Dutch Jews from Brazil in the early seventeenth century.⁹ Crypto-Judaism figures significantly in the opening two chapters of The Loneliness of Angels, where it serves to announce several of the novel’s key concerns, including spirituality and mysticism, memories suppressed and recovered, kinship and its ambiguities, masked identities, and cultural endurance. The crypto-Jewish motif resonates with the novel’s larger themes of survival and deception as well as with its cosmopolitan geography.¹⁰ Sephardism is, I argue, the central mechanism through which the novel advances its inclusive vision of Haitian society as a crossroads of multiple diasporas and faiths. In The Loneliness of Angels, Sephardic themes support the elaboration of a multivocal and labyrinthine narrative structure that foregrounds connections among the intertwined histories that meet in the Caribbean.

Early on in The Loneliness of Angels, the narrator hints at the exotic lineage and religious affiliations of Ruth, the mystic with skin the color of roasted almonds who stands at the center of the novel: “She is of Haiti and not of it, following the threads of practices that seem imprinted in her cells that bear no resemblance to the Catholic rites with which she was raised nor the vodou of the people whom she supports” (15). The narrator then proceeds to relate the story of how, as a child growing up in 1940s Haiti, Ruth discovered the truth about her linen merchant father’s mysterious origins. During Easter week the young Ruth is pressured by friends to participate in a Haitian ritual in which a straw figure is abused and called “Judas.”¹¹ Ruth is distressed by the experience, in part because the straw man bears a certain resemblance to her father, and she runs home crying. Ruth’s mother responds by explaining that the straw man is a Jwif, like her Syrian Jewish grandfather:

 

When your father’s people were made to leave their place of birth, they had to abandon their gods and their altars and build a new life. Some of them took on new names, new religions, new identities. Some of the people they had to leave behind called them traitors but they had no choice. They had to flee to make a life for themselves and for their children. If your grandfather had not left Syria when he did, your father would not be the man he is today….

“Does this mean that I’m a ‘Jwif?’” Ruth asked.

“Yes,” her mother had said, “Nou tout sé Jwif. Even those of us who kick ourselves, not knowing any better, and set ourselves on fire as if we might consume the past by repeating its offences.”

(42)

 

This scene serves to establish Ruth’s Sephardic Jewish origins. At the same time, with the declaration “Nou tout sé Jwif” (we are all Jewish), Chancy signals that the revelation of Ruth’s crypto-Jewish heritage will also illuminate the character of the broader Haitian population.

In an interview, Chancy explains that her incorporation into the novel of Syrian Jewish characters was inspired by the Spanish Converso ancestors of her own maternal grandfather (“Chancy Wins”). Accordingly, Chancy’s presentation of the Syrian Jewish material is inflected by an emphasis on hidden identities and the preservation of secret rituals that is strongly reminiscent of Converso and Marrano narratives. For instance, in a passage describing how Ruth “surreptitiously” teaches her niece Catherine a Jewish prayer that she had learned from her father “for protection,” the narrator explains that Ruth’s father would hide his eccentric religious practices from the church:

 

No, she hadn’t told Catherine about her origins, Fritz’s origins. She hadn’t revealed the source of the prayer except to say that it was her father, Catherine’s grandfather, who had passed it down to them. She didn’t tell Catherine what her own mother had finally revealed to her one Easter that was to alter her forever when she had been hardly eleven years of age. Her mother had revealed that her father’s father came from far away over the ocean, not from Europe, but from the East where the earth was covered with sand dunes and olives hung from the trees like quenêpes here, plentiful and plump, ready for the picking. This was supposed to explain, somehow, why Father didn’t go to Church with them on Sunday mornings. As far as Ruth could tell, Father wasn’t a religious type at all. But he kept an altar in a dark corner of his office with an effigy on it of Moses holding the two stones etched with the ten commandments. Next to Moses was Papa Legba, god of the crossroads, in the guise of St. Peter. These were his gods…. When the Church people came to check on the family’s progress with Bible study, Father covered the altar with a white cloth and argued that he was hiding a mess of papers under it, and everyone laughed and pretended to believe him.

(37–38)

 

This account of Ruth’s father’s covert observance of a syncretic Jewish ritual evokes stories of religious rites preserved in secret by Marrano families. Thus Chancy layers Ruth’s family history of early twentieth-century Middle Eastern Jewish immigration to Haiti over an older postexpulsion narrative of Marrano exile and cultural survival in the New World.

Ruth’s father’s altar strikingly pairs Moses with Papa Legba, the vodou god of the crossroads who serves as an intermediary between the loas (spirits) and humans. Ruth, who inherits not only her father’s house but also his faith and memories, herself spends much of her life learning “how to be a crossroads” (17). Accordingly, Ruth’s function in the novel is a connective one. As the adoptive mother of Catherine, Lucas, and Romulus, she links together Chancy’s dispersed cast of characters. Through her gift as a seer and as the caretaker of a “memory table” on which are displayed photographs of her family as well as the students she has taught over a period of three decades, Ruth also connects the past, present, and future. Finally, as the daughter of a Sephardic father and an African-descended mother, Ruth joins together Jewish and Afro-Caribbean histories and spiritual traditions. The dispersed histories and voices that the novel assembles thus gain a certain cohesion through Ruth’s connective presence.

The Loneliness of Angels situates Haiti at the nexus of a variety of interrelated histories, geographies, and peoples that are bound together by “the great chain of trade that links them all on the island” (59). This network includes not only Ruth’s Sephardic ancestors but also the Irishwoman Elsie. Yet notably it is Ruth who intuits this truth about the composite character of Haitian society: “Ruth could look at Rose and see the girl’s famed, notoriously crazed, great-grandmother Elsie as if the woman existed in the mirror of the girl’s eyes. She could see that Rose was just one pearl on a string that led all the way back to distant lands, all the way back to Nigeria and Ireland, to the wandering geography of her father’s people, her people” (54). I would suggest that Ruth’s crypto-Jewish background, with its double vision and quality of in-betweenness, makes her uniquely suited to articulate the connective perspective that is also fundamental to the novel’s formal construction. Just as Papa Legba translates the requests of humans into the language of the spirits, bridging different worlds, Chancy’s Sephardic characters are cultural brokers and interpreters who display gifts of communication and negotiate diverse traditions. Ruth’s Sephardic father is not only a merchant but also a literary translator who writes poetry in Creole, while for her part Ruth, too, mediates among cultures, serving as a portal for people, goods, and memories.¹²

The crypto-Jewish motifs that are introduced at the outset of The Loneliness of Angels anticipate the theme of entangled genealogies that runs through the novel. In the second chapter, Ruth’s niece Catherine, while studying music in Iowa, meets a Jewish American history student, Sam. Sam is attempting “to trace the links between different groups of Jews, people from varying genetic trees, you might say, from North Africa to Palestine, from Russia to Iowa” (86) and approaches Catherine because he detects in her physiognomy a resemblance to Ethiopian Jewry. When asked whether she has any Jewish ancestry, Catherine acknowledges that Jewish blood is said to be present on her father’s side.¹³ Seemingly confirming these rumors of her Jewish descent, Catherine remarks that the photographs Sam shows her of Ethiopian Jewish women look like “mirrors” of her aunt Ruth (86). Thus The Loneliness of Angels taps into the contemporary interest in multicultural Jewishness and in tracing Jewish communities in far corners of the globe.

At the same time, however, Chancy also calls into question the current fashion for genetic testing as a vehicle of diasporic affiliation. As Catherine explains to Sam, there is some doubt regarding her paternity. Although she has been raised as the daughter of Catherine’s brother Fritz, many suspect that she is in fact the biological daughter of Fritz’s romantic rival, Jérémie. In this regard, Jewishness comes to signal a larger sense of ambiguity about Caribbean origins as well as the indeterminacy of identity itself. At one point Catherine remarks of her relationship with her father that “it’s the ambiguity that binds us, the invisible cartilage of pain that connects us more closely than shared DNA” (208). Thus Ruth’s mother’s comment, “Nou tout sé Jwif” (42), while on one level drawing attention to the Jewish bloodlines that run through the Caribbean population, simultaneously conveys the broader insight that all Caribbean identities are variegated, mixed, and to some extent mysterious.¹⁴ In this second and more potent sense, Jewishness becomes a metaphor for the idea of impure blood and untraceability.

In his provocative discussion of Latino literature and crypto-Jewish narratives, Freedman argues that marranism represents “a new form of Jewishness,” “something much more resembling our modern (or even postmodern) notions of ethnic identity: of a people within a people who believe themselves to have a separate identity but whose identity as such is available to them only through improvised, often invented cultural practices and constructed (and often fictitious) narratives” (216). In this regard marranism offers an alternative to the models of identity put forward both by “ethnic enthusiasts” and by those “for whom ethnicity is a ruse at best, a pernicious snare at worst” (249). Freedman’s account illuminates not only the Latino fiction he discusses but also Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels, in which Jewishness serves to highlight the fundamentally unstable and unfixable character of Caribbean identities—the extent to which, as Chancy puts it, in the Caribbean “nothing is as it seems” and “the culture is more complex than might be assumed” (“Chancy Wins”).¹⁵

The Loneliness of Angels’ emphasis on crypto-Jewishness reflects its larger interest in a Caribbean creolization that is even more tangled and labyrinthine than it appears on the surface. It is significant that the remark “Nou tout sé Jwif” is uttered in Creole, for, as I have been suggesting, through its prismatic narrative structure and wide-ranging geography the novel advances an expansive understanding of Caribbean creolization that extends beyond the spectrum of African, Asian, and Christian European elements more typically associated with Creole identities. Departing from an Afrocentric approach to advance a more eclectic understanding of Caribbean creolization, The Loneliness of Angels is bookended by chapters that trace Haitian family histories back to non-African roots: the Syrian Jewish ancestry of Ruth and the Irish ancestry of Catherine’s mother Rose.¹⁶ Like the Syrian Jewish characters, Elsie undergoes a process of indigenization when she immigrates to Haiti, her “English-Irish bastard” son (333) eventually marrying an Afro-Haitian girl: “Pregnant [Elsie] became, on the journey over the sea. And later her child had a child and so on until they became one with the island people, brown like you and Irish too” (313). The novel suggests the importance of recovering these disparate family memories alongside African genealogies.

By the same token, the novel’s crypto-Jewish motifs also serve to remind us of the profoundly fragmented character of such memories. Ruth is the inheritor and caretaker of her family’s past, which is preserved through the photographs of a “kaleidoscope of multi-hued faces” that are displayed on her “memory table” (15–16). The Jewish ancestral memories that she inherits from her father are, however, highly incomplete: “It would take her many years to find out [what the word Jwif meant] and when she was old enough to learn, her father told her very little of his family’s past. It took her even longer to realize that what her father had to pass on was very little because very little had survived before him. Her father lived in a world made up of fragments of broken lives. He gathered the bits and pieces of those who had been made to travel far from their mother’s bosoms and made it all his own. It was in this way that he kept the memory of his father’s faith alive” (42). To some extent, then, knowledge of the past and of family lineage remains inaccessible. In this respect, the postexpulsion loss of memory suffered by Sephardim resonates with a post–Middle Passage experience of partial amnesia in which significant details of the slavery and preslavery past remain forever irretrievable, lost to the Door of No Return. The elliptical and fragmented narrative structure of The Loneliness of Angels signals this broken quality of both crypto-Jewish and African diaspora memory.¹⁷

In her presentation of Ruth as a humanitarian, a compassionate advocate of the Haitian underclass and author of radical journalism that she publishes under the name of “Erzili Le Flambo,” Chancy also associates marranism with resistance to modern-day Caribbean dictatorships. While the crypto-Jewish theme recedes after the first two chapters of The Loneliness of Angels, it sets the stage for subsequent sections of the novel in which the survival strategies that the Haitians developed while living under the Duvalier regime are reminiscent of crypto-Jewish practices. Chancy’s Ruth is notably defined by “her uncommon strength, the kind needed to weather regimes and coups, dictators and pundits, shortages and starvation” (47). Her niece Catherine exhibits another family trait: the tendency to cultivate secrecy and to “kee[p] some part of [oneself] vaulted away” (211). Both attributes prove valuable in the context of Duvalier’s Haiti. Ruth’s niece Catherine explains that

 

in Haiti, we had been raised in a world in which to reveal one’s self was dangerous. All we had were our stories, what we passed from mouth to mouth in person and over telephone wires, seeking the morsels of truth lodged in the pauses of breath as minds wandered and stories took on lives of their own.

It wasn’t easy to speak about what one knew since much of it came secondhand, information that would never stand up in a court of law. It would be dismissed with one word: hearsay. But here, hearsay was all we had, along with gossip and innuendo, which amounted to much the same thing. Between each nuanced variation in a story lay worlds of truth. I had been raised to sieve through sounds to seek the nugget of gold that would ensure our safe passage through a minefield of lies and deception. How else could the Duvalier years have been survived?¹⁸

(260)

 

The analogy between inquisitorial and Duvalier-era practices that Chancy implicitly develops in The Loneliness of Angels bears comparison with Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody, which parallels the repressive regime of the Cuban dictator Machado with Nazi-occupied Paris. More subtly, by suggesting that his protagonist Israel Levis may be of Sephardic descent, Hijuelos associates Machado’s regime, with its practices of surveillance and violent intimidation, with the operations of the Inquisition that extended into the Iberian New World colonies. If both Machado’s Cuba and Hitler’s Europe force Levis and his friends to adopt secret lives and to undertake various forms of exile, Levis’s habit of concealment and of suppressing his true identity and desires also evokes the background of marranism from which he may be descended.¹⁹

In The Loneliness of Angels, however, the analogy between marranism and resistance to Caribbean repressive regimes is also articulated in religious terms. Chancy presents both kabbalah and vodou as suppressed religious practices that have to go underground to survive migration, assimilation, and Catholic repression. Ruth’s father teaches her about the Shekinah or female spirit of wisdom, which holds a special significance in kabbalah, while simultaneously attending a church that holds secret vodou rituals. Indeed, he becomes convinced that kabbalah and vodou are “all the same” (44): “They’ll have you believing that my father’s people were sorcerers, but look…they called your mother’s people sorcerers and devils too when they rose up and poisoned their masters’ wells…. Remember this Ruth: whatever they’re afraid of, they’ll call it the devil. Whatever stands in their way, they’ll call primitive and backward” (42–43). Similarly Catherine’s boyfriend Sam, who wants to trace the “thread of forbidden mystical practices through the cultural and spiritual beliefs of Jewry,” is “fascinated” to learn of “the divination practices in vodou, certain that there lay a connection there, somehow, between disparate peoples and the lands they were forced to flee to as their own sacred lands were taken over or desecrated in the name of foreign gods” (88). As the daughter of an Afro-Caribbean mother and a crypto-Jewish father, and as a seer who earns the honorific mambo (vodou priestess) while also reciting at bedtime a Jewish prayer for protection, Ruth affirms Sam’s belief in a connection between the two spiritual traditions. At the same time, by aligning Jewish and Afro-Caribbean mysticism, Chancy advances a larger analogy between Jewish and Black diasporic experience:

 

Never mind that [Ruth] had a memory that paired the wanderings of her father’s people with the rolls of the drums of her mother’s people in their native land where the earth was dark and black like freshly mined coal. Never mind that her father’s people had been forced to handle money because in a previous age, their faith and money had been seen as soiling, unclean. Never mind that her mother’s people had been treated like cattle, branded and sold. Never mind that both her father’s people and her mother’s people had been thrown to the wolves by the same zealous mass.

(57)

 

Chancy’s presentation of kabbalah as a counterhegemonic faith (like vodou) to which its oppressed followers remain devoted contrasts strikingly with Walcott’s emphasis on Pissarro’s religious doubt in Tiepolo’s Hound. Instead, it is more akin to Obejas’ exploration of the relationship between Jewish and Afro-Caribbean spirituality in Days of Awe. Like The Loneliness of Angels, Days of Awe, which follows its Cuban American heroine Alejandra’s journey to recover her family’s crypto-Jewish roots, associates marranism with Afro-Caribbean religious observance, which also must go underground to survive. Much like their Afro-Cuban neighbors, Alejandra’s crypto-Jewish grandparents Luis and Sima observe their faith in a doubled fashion, in tandem with Catholic ritual. Outwardly Catholic, both crypto-Jews and Afro-Cubans privately practice their own rituals. Moreover, Santería provides a kind of cover for crypto-Judaism, as when the Jewish naming ceremony for Sima passes as a form of orisha worship (147).

In The Loneliness of Angels crypto-Jewish motifs are introduced in order to underscore the syncretic quality of Caribbean faith. Because marranism implies a doubled form of religious observance as well as a public-private divide, it comes in Chancy’s novel to signal the multiplicity of Caribbean spirituality itself. Ruth and her father blend together Jewish and vodou belief, just as in Obejas’s Days of Awe Alejandra’s parents join together Catholicism, Judaism, and Santería. In Obejas’s novel Alejandra’s mother’s altar to the Virgin, which holds glasses of water, flowers, fruit, and candies in keeping with Santería belief, is situated in the basement next to the office in which her father keeps Jewish ritual objects including a tallis, tefillin, and a siddur. Similarly as we saw earlier, in The Loneliness of Angels Moses and Papa Legba keep company in Ruth’s father’s altar, which is hurriedly covered up when emissaries from the church visit. The father’s secret altar thus becomes emblematic of the creolized and counterhegemonic character of Haitian spirituality.

SEPHARDIC MAROONS IN FREE ENTERPRISE

In her first novel Abeng, Cliff calls attention to the conjunction of the Sephardic expulsion with the onset of the era of exploration and slavery: “The series of [Columbus’] voyages began in 1492, the year he sighted Cuba and made a landfall on the island which became known as Hispaniola…the year the Jews were officially driven out of Spain, following centuries of persecution. Los Reyes Catolicos are credited with unifying the Spanish realm on the Iberian peninsula, financing the discovery of America, enforcing the expulsion of the Jews, and soon after, the Moors, and initiating the slave trade between Africa and the Americas” (66).²⁰ The narrator then proceeds to speculate that “Christopher Columbus…may well have been a Jew himself” (66). Indeed, as historians have documented, Sephardic Jews and Conversos were both Columbus’s patrons and his shipmates on voyages that were themselves financed in part with funds confiscated from defeated Muslims and dispossessed Jews (Sarna 39). Most intriguing from Cliff’s perspective is the theory that Columbus may have been descended from Marranos or Conversos. Accordingly Abeng references the “Sephardi thesis” that was advanced by Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga in his 1940 biography of the explorer but that has since been largely discredited by Columbus scholars.²¹

Cliff’s allusion to Columbus’ possible Marrano origins in Abeng functions similarly to the more sustained considerations of the Sephardi thesis that we find in two Native American novels, Michael Dorris’s and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus (1991) and Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991). As I have discussed elsewhere, these novels distinguish themselves from the mainstream of Native American commentaries on the 1492 quincentenary by advancing an identificatory reading of Columbus, one that is made possible by their presentation of the explorer as a crypto-Jew (“Sephardism”). By drawing attention to the Sephardic expulsion, Dorris’s and Erdrich’s, and Vizenor’s retellings of 1492 resituate the landfall and its aftermath for Indigenous peoples in the context of Europe’s relations with its internal Others. Similarly, Cliff’s more condensed reading of Columbus as a crypto-Jew in Abeng unsettles official history, laying the groundwork for the Anne Frank motif and its challenge to received narratives that I will discuss in chapter 7.²² This nascent marranism in Abeng also presages the fuller development of crypto-Jewish motifs in Cliff’s third novel Free Enterprise. At the same time, Cliff’s reluctance in Abeng to explore the more ambivalent implications of the father of New World colonialism’s possibly crypto-Jewish origins exposes tensions surrounding the application of the Marrano metaphor in a postslavery context.

In Free Enterprise Cliff employs marranism as a key trope through which to explore several dimensions of Caribbean and African diaspora experience including displacement, concealment, survival, and the retention of identity and memory. The central project of Free Enterprise is to imaginatively recover the lost history of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant, who likely funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. In Cliff’s retelling, Mary Ellen meets in 1858 with a Jamaican comrade and fellow abolitionist, Annie Christmas, to plan the uprising. After the failure of the raid, Annie retreats to a Mississippi riverbank near a leper colony inhabited by a host of fellow outsiders who hail from all corners of the globe. Cliff’s account of the raid on Harpers Ferry thus moves beyond a narrowly national U.S. setting by introducing a fictional Caribbean collaborator of Pleasant’s. In so doing, Cliff, like Chancy, also reaches beyond the African diaspora itself, resituating African diaspora women’s experience in the context of global dynamics of subjugation and resistance. Cliff advances this antiethnocentric, global perspective on the struggle for Black emancipation in part by invoking the Sephardic Caribbean.

Two key passages, one at the opening of Free Enterprise and the other at its conclusion, draw attention to the novel’s narrative design. In the opening chapter we are told that in front of Annie Christmas’s house stand trees adorned with a variety of empty bottles whose “babel of scents” linger despite her efforts to scrub them clean (5). The residual scents that commingle suggest a host of disparate memories that persist and come into contact with one another despite their suppression by larger historical forces. As Erica Johnson observes, the bottle tree is emblematic of the novel’s decentered narrative structure and polyphonic reading of history (58). This polyphonic approach is further underscored in a later passage in which Annie recalls a South Carolinian house slave who collected scraps of cloth with the aim of piecing them together into a tapestry: “In the end, of course, it did not happen. No. Our historical moment was lost, so our tapestry dissembled. Oh, it exists piece by piece. Some pieces have been buried with those who have passed on. Some are forgotten, misplaced” (192). The image of the unfinished tapestry announces the novel’s project of piecing together fragmented memories while simultaneously suggesting the inevitable incompleteness of this project. If as Johnson argues, Free Enterprise’s “composition by way of fragments, of the cross-contamination of histories…gives rise to an entire mode of addressing history” (74), my reading of the novel reveals how this strategy of quilting together remnant histories is advanced through the figure of the Marrano.

Cliff’s Free Enterprise, like other examples of Caribbean sephardism, identifies Jews as one of the founding peoples of the Caribbean. At the opening of the novel, the Caribbean is described as a “whirlwind” of cultures and languages that collide. Among Caribbean languages, “Hebrew and Chinese and Arabic, oriental and surreptitious, kept mostly to themselves, for reasons of safekeeping, of the language and the people and their varied strangeness—to the European gaze of course. The sand on the floor of the synagogue muffled the sounds of the services. The clatter of the abacus in the shop was kept as low as possible, and as short-lived, as the beads sang up and down the columns” (8). In this early passage, Cliff’s characterization of Hebrew as a “surreptitious” language and reference to the sand-floored synagogue signal the particular interest that the novel will take in marranism, secrecy, and survival. Yet, in pursuing this nexus of associations, Cliff resists exploring more ambivalent dimensions of Sephardic Caribbean history, instead casting her Jewish protagonist as a fellow victim of the patriarchal and racist regimes that oppress the Black characters as part of her larger connective vision.

A key device through which Cliff advances a global perspective on the struggle for emancipation is the leper colony near New Orleans that Annie frequents when she retreats into the Louisiana swamplands after the failure of the raid on Harper’s Ferry.²³ The colony is built on the site of a former Indian village as well as a plantation, its layered, buried histories linking the lepers’ suffering to other stories of displacement and strife.²⁴ At the leper colony a storytelling circle forms that is comprised of a global cast of oppressed and displaced peoples, including a Hawaiian, a Tahitian, a poor white Kentuckian, and a Surinamese descendant of Marranos. Together, they forge an alternative community on the basis of political solidarity rather than blood that is not unlike the adoptive family Ruth fosters in The Loneliness of Angels. Like the bottle tree and tapestry metaphors, the storytelling circle emblematizes the novel’s formal strategy of piecing together diverse histories of resistance. Yet, if the leper colony advances a perspective of historical adjacency in Free Enterprise,²⁵ the Sephardic presence in the colony of the Surinamese Jew Rachel de Souza, which becomes more pronounced toward the novel’s conclusion, most profoundly signals the pluralistic orientation of the novel.

Rachel de Souza makes two noteworthy appearances in Free Enterprise that help to frame the novel’s retelling of Harpers Ferry. In her first appearance, Rachel joins the storytelling circle and relates her story of resistance and survival in an example of what Levins Morales calls “medicinal history.” When it is Rachel’s turn to speak, she recalls the trauma of the expulsion and the ships that trailed after Columbus:

 

“Soon enough we had to leave Spain, under decree from Los Reyes Católicos, and as Colón set out at the behest of the same pair, so did we…

“They crossed in late summer, the time of sudden storms. Imagine the procession of little ships, coming along behind, some in terror, seasick, homesick, caught in the inexorable currents of the Atlantic. Of course, I want to know how many went down, how many survived; where did the survivors make landfall?

“That ocean floor must be something else again. Where the sand covers centuries.”

(60)

 

Rachel’s tale is abruptly cut off, however, when she runs out of time, and she concludes by recounting somewhat obscurely how after detecting the arrival of “another procession of ships” she “took to the hills, a cimarrón” (61). This lack of closure creates a sense of anticipation for Rachel’s second appearance at the end of the novel, when she escapes the leper colony to visit Annie, who is living in a maroonlike state in the Louisiana swamp. While, in her first appearance, Rachel is simply one of the various members of the storytelling circle, in the later chapter, “Company,” she is privileged from among the other occupants of the leper colony as “the only colonist Annie knew outside the fences” (182). “Company” stages a Black-Jewish dialogue about memory and suffering, one that elaborates a Caribbean perspective on the relationality of Annie and Rachel’s respective histories of displacement.

In Free Enterprise Rachel is a bridging figure who contributes to the theme of interethnic solidarity that is also developed elsewhere in the novel. Yet Rachel’s Sephardic story is not simply another example of a history of oppression to be read alongside that of the Middle Passage but instead occupies the same geographical and—in Cliff’s rendering—ideological space. The most striking aspect of Cliff’s presentation of Rachel is her historically implausible conceit that Rachel is not only a descendant of Marranos but also an honorary Maroon—a fugitive slave who flees to a remote area to escape the reach of the plantation. The intersectionality of Black and Jewish histories is established through Rachel’s membership in a community of Maroons in the Surinamese jungle. As a “Sephardic Maroon” who joins a “company of like-minded rebels” in Suriname (182), Rachel actualizes the larger analogy between marranism and maroonage that the novel advances by occupying both narratives simultaneously. In fact, Marrano and Maroon experience are so little differentiated in Free Enterprise that the former tends to be subsumed within the latter.

With their strategies of concealment and survival, Marranos are described in Free Enterprise as engaging in a form of maroonage. For example, as we have seen, the sand floors that typify Caribbean synagogues are interpreted as a “survival tactic.” Rachel explains that

 

when we were in Spain, under the Inquisition, during the reign of Torquemada, we worshiped in hidden rooms, some underground, some at the ends of tunnels at the backs of houses. We worshiped in secret to save our lives, and used sand on the floor to muffle the sounds of the services. Sound waves again. A wooden or tile floor and we would have been sitting ducks. But the sand quelled the sound, and we carried this tradition with us into the New World. Some people think we needed a reminder of our exile in the desert. Others think, first came the tropics, then the sand. Not at all. It was a survival tactic, as usual.

(59)

 

As in Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Maroon motifs figure prominently in Free Enterprise. The Maroon narrative is underscored through references to the folk hero Nanny of the Maroons as well as by the Kentuckian leper’s stories about rebels hiding in swamps, caves, and other spaces of concealment. Yet Free Enterprise uniquely overlays maroonage and marranism, which are linked by the themes of secrecy, the retention of difference, and resistance: “The marranos, from whom [Rachel] descended, had at least each other; company again. Company in their hiding places, guerrilla bands, in the prisons, in the processions, on the ships of Colon and Magellan, across the seven seas, contradicting the flatness of the earth—were it round, would Jews be safer?—in the thick undergrowth of the New World” (183). Much as Chancy associates kabbalah and vodou as counterhegemonic forms of spirituality, Cliff aligns Marranos and Maroons as participating in common resistant strategies of concealment and survival.

The Marrano/Maroon analogy is most vividly expressed through the disease of leprosy that afflicts Rachel and that normally plagues only “the darker races” (40). The narrator explains that the disease developed a “Surinamese strain [that] flourished especially among Jews and Maroons” and that it was through Rachel’s “long association with the Surinamese Maroons” that she “incubated her particular form of plague” (182). The historical intersectionality of African and Jewish diasporic histories is thus manifested in the disease of leprosy, which both populations carry. Notably, Rachel’s distinctive form of leprosy is characterized by its invisibility: “Her version of plague was especially dangerous, the doctors said, because it was silent. That is, no outward signs were apparent: no toe drops, or finger drops, no flat place where a nose should have been, no missing lips. The damage raged, the scientists told her, on the inside” (182). In this way, the divide between the Marrano’s outwardly Christian appearance and inwardly Jewish identity is displaced onto the disease.

In broader terms, the novel’s conceit that Rachel’s Jewish form of leprosy is undetectable evokes modern and postmodern perceptions of Jewish difference as defined by its indefinability.²⁶ Yet Cliff deftly converts this negative association of Jewishness with racial chameleonism into a positive value in the context of Marrano-Maroon resistance. In one of her conversations with Rachel, Annie associates the tactics of disguise adopted by Mary Ellen Pleasant and the other Black women rebels with the resistant strategies of the Marranos: “Mary Ellen passed herself off as a blacksmith. She was truly something. She dressed as a house servant in San Francisco, came to the convention in Chatham dressed as a jockey, went South as a blacksmith, finally escaped as a middle-aged woman of African-American descent, which she was. Disguise was something she knew well. We all did. It was practically my birthright; you know that. Disguise. Masks. Never give out what you’re thinking…. How to pass through the nets. Like your own people. In search of a New World” (194). In Free Enterprise Cliff offers an inventive reinterpretation of the Jew’s body as a diseased carrier of the plague, recoding leprosy as a positive marker of Rachel’s powers of concealment.²⁷

I want to suggest that behind this governing analogy between the Marrano and the Maroon, which is based in part on their common ability to escape detection, lies another, more slippery and ambivalent analogy in Cliff’s writing: that between the Marrano and the light-skinned Creole. Cliff is not unique in pursuing this analogy. Jews are associated with racial mixture by Paule Marshall and other Caribbean/diaspora writers, and the light-skinned Creole in particular is linked to the figure of the Jew in the work of Jean Rhys, a writer with whom Cliff is often compared.²⁸ In Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939), for example, Sasha Jansen visits a refugee Jewish artist, Serge Rubin, in his Paris studio. Serge shows Sasha some African masks “straight from the Congo” that he has in fact made himself and then proceeds to perform a primitive dance to Martinican music (414). Although Rhys’s Creole heroine does not join in the Jew’s primitivist performance, the dance prompts her to envision a tropical landscape, perhaps the landscape of her birth. Serge then tells Sasha the sad tale of a downtrodden Martinican Mulatta whom he had befriended in London. In Good Morning, Midnight the Jewish artist is marked by a racial and national indeterminacy analogous to that of Sasha herself.²⁹ Rhys’s writing thus establishes a nexus of associations between the figures of the light-skinned Creole and the racially indeterminate Jew that would resurface in Cliff’s work.

In her well-known 1983 autobiographical essay “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire,” which examines the condition of the light-skinned middle-class Jamaican Creole, Cliff makes reference to Marranos in a passage that is worth quoting at length:

 

Then:   It was never a question of passing. It was a question of hiding. Behind Black and white perceptions of who we were—who they thought we were. Tropics. Plantations. Calypso. Cricket. We were the people with the musical voices and the coronation mugs on our parlor tables. I would be whatever figure these foreign imaginations cared for me to be. It would be so simple to let others fill in for me….

 

It could become a life lived within myself. A life cut off. I know who I am but you will never know who I am. I may in fact lose touch with who I am.

 

I hid from my real sources. But my real sources were also hidden from me.

 

Now:    It is not a question of relinquishing privilege. It is a question of grasping more of myself. I have found that in the real sources are concealed my survival. My speech. My voice. To be colonized is to be rendered insensitive. To have those parts necessary to sustain life numbed….

 

Sometimes I used to think we were like the Marranos—the Sephardic Jews forced to pretend they were Christians. The name was given to them by the Christians, and meant “pigs.” But once out of Spain and Portugal, they became Jews openly again. Some settled in Jamaica. They knew who the enemy was and acted for their own survival. But they remained Jews always.

(71–72, emphasis added)

 

In these lines Cliff extends the analogy that Rhys earlier had developed between the Jew and the light-skinned Creole by associating marranism with the Creole’s racial instability. Here marranism, which shares with creoleness the potential for disguise, passing, and double vision, offers Cliff a crucial means of recasting the Creole as a figure not of collaboration but of resistance.

Conventionally, the Creole and the Mulatta have been viewed as degenerative, frail, and disloyal. The challenge for Cliff, as well as for other mixed-race writers such as Rebecca Walker in her memoir White, Black and Jewish (2001), is to overcome the tragic Mulatta narrative that is encapsulated in Langston Hughes’s 1925 poem “Cross” as well as in Rhys’s modernist fiction. For Cliff, in “If I Could Write This in Fire,” marranism offers just such an alternative. While in Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven the father of the heroine Clare Savage instructs her in the art of camouflage as part of his pursuit of an ideology of colorism, marranism suggests that the act of passing can also contain elements of counterhegemonic subversion. Most importantly in “If I Could Write This in Fire,” the Marrano analogy signals the possibility of recovering one’s “real sources,” of returning to origins. In Cliff’s reading of Sephardic history, Marranos adopted the temporary disguise of conversion that enabled their survival while retaining a core Jewish identity that remained uncorrupted beneath their disguise. The implication in “If I Could Write This in Fire” is that the light-skinned Creole, too, retains an essential Blackness that awaits recovery.

Similarly in Free Enterprise marranism offers a salve for Annie’s troubled condition as a descendant of the gens inconnu who have forgotten the African gods and yet whose hair sometimes “snakes” as though “it was going back to Africa” (23). Annie’s response to her mixed-race heritage is to blacken rather than whiten herself, for, according to Mary Ellen Pleasant, “you are who you are underneath all that. Skin is beside the point” (26). This perspective is given crucial support in the novel by the Marrano Rachel de Souza, who maintains absolute fealty to her origins. What enables Rachel to retain her Jewish identity is her powerful sense of the past. Much like other Sephardic protagonists in Caribbean literature, Rachel’s defining characteristics are her proclivity for silence, her solidarity with the oppressed, and her keen memory.³⁰ The intensity of Rachel’s postmemory of the expulsion is such that it transports her back to 1492. She witnesses in her dreams the trauma of the expulsion and has “this extraordinary memory of running. Running and running, and being chased. A common enough thing, I suppose, but I am running down a steep hill, toward a ship about to set sail. The ship raises the flag of Los Reyes Catolicos. I must decide whether to board. I have no choice” (202). When Rachel recounts her inherited memories, Annie responds, “I think we carry more within us than we can ever imagine. If bone structure is passed on, why not memory?” (202). For her part, Rachel urges Annie not to throw away her box of keepsakes: “Don’t be rash, old friend. I for one know about lost things. Don’t discard memory, or that which instigates it” (186).

Cliff’s portrayal of Rachel in Free Enterprise thus echoes her earlier presentation in “If I Could Write This in Fire” of the Marrano as remaining “Jewish always.” I would argue that Cliff’s interpretation of the Marrano can be understood as part of the larger impulse “to make the creole text black” (78) that Belinda Edmondson has identified in her work. Seeking to restore the light-skinned Creole to Blackness, Cliff advances a romantic interpretation of marranism in which “their Christianity was merely a superficial mask, while in their minds and hearts, they were purely and untaintedly Jewish” (Yovel, The Other Within x). Yet marranism can also be read in very different terms that cast the Creole condition in a more ambivalent light. This alternative reading of the Marrano as exhibiting an anxiety-producing “resistance to classification” (Zivin 122) and as “a mixed or divided self, in which the Other is preserved within the Self and partly constitutes it” (Yovel, The Other Within 78) is also pertinent to the light-skinned Creole, who struggles to integrate an irreparably fissured self.³¹ The Marrano’s condition of being “doubly estranged” (Yovel, The Other Within 79) resonates with that of the light-skinned Creole, who also “exist[s] on the cusp of dual belonging or dual alienation” (Bost 675). Cliff, however, does not pursue these more radical dimensions of the Marrano metaphor and of the chameleonic and performative character of Jewishness more broadly. Instead, in her reading, the Marrano retains an essential Jewishness that remains uncompromised by the disguise she adopts—a disguise that is easily shed once it is no longer required. For Cliff, the Marrano’s performance of Christianity represents the possibility of a return to origins rather than a more ambiguous and unstable state in which multiple identities coexist and interpenetrate one another.

As I have suggested, Cliff’s presentation of marranism as a positive model of retaining difference points to the pull of Blackness in her work. Ultimately, Cliff’s interpretation of marranism speaks to a key tension in her writing between this desire to reclaim Blackness and an affirmation of mixed identities. While Cliff’s characters exhibit a striking fluidity of racial and gender identities, they also tend to feel “split in two parts” (Abeng 119) and must choose between white and Black, as Clare does in No Telephone to Heaven when she joins the rebel group. This somewhat uneasy combination of impulses in Cliff’s writing has inspired conflicting interpretations. While some critics argue that her writing embodies the fluidity of identity, others identify it as engaging in a “project of racial recovery” (Edmondson, “The Black Mother” 98).³² The romantic reading of marranism that Cliff advances in both “If I Could Write This in Fire” and Free Enterprise is symptomatic of this unresolved tension in her work.

Cliff’s insistence in “If I Could Write This in Fire” that Caribbean Marranos remained “Jews always” is largely contradicted by the historical and sociological scholarship on Caribbean Sephardim, whose descendants, as Josette Capriles Goldish notes in her popular history Once Jews: Stories of Caribbean Sephardim, “are today mostly Roman Catholics” (xv).³³ Moreover as Schorsch has shown, early modern Sephardim suffered from significant racial anxiety, leading them to attempt to establish their whiteness by defining themselves against Blacks.³⁴ Accordingly, a greater complication of the Marrano motif that remains unexplored in Cliff’s writing relates to the historically asymmetrical access to power of Jewish and Black Caribbeans. Cliff presumably chose to make Rachel Surinamese because of Suriname’s history of Maroon rebellion as well as the pronounced Jewish presence in the Dutch colony. Yet Suriname is notable not only as the site of the largest surviving population of Maroons in the Americas (Price, Maroon Societies xxiv) but also as home during the colonial period to a Jewish community that enjoyed a uniquely privileged status. We are told in Free Enterprise that Rachel comes from the Surinamese village of Jodensavanne but not that Jodensavanne was surrounded by Jewish-owned plantations. Historically, the Jewish settlers of Jodensavanne were not allies but antagonists of the Maroons, whose insurgencies they helped to suppress.³⁵

This chapter and the preceding one have shown that sephardism and marranism hold particular appeal for Caribbean writers who are interested in engaging their multiple cultural inheritances and in situating the Caribbean within an interamerican or global context. Sephardism in the work of Walcott, Chancy, and Cliff supports a connective perspective that advances an inclusive vision of Caribbean society. This relational poetics is expressed through a kaleidoscopic narrative structure that recombines fragmented, broken histories in order to generate new resonances and patterns of meaning. Moreover, in many of the texts sephardism and marranism become emblematic of Caribbean interculturality itself. All three writers employ sephardism to explore aspects of Caribbean creolization. They do so by alluding to the historical presence of Sephardim in the various parts of the Caribbean about which they write: St. Thomas, Haiti, Jamaica, and Suriname. Moreover, Chancy’s and Cliff’s writing as well as novels by Obejas and Hijuelos reveal a particular fascination with Marranos, whose historical presence in the Caribbean they unearth as part of a larger project of postslavery literary archaeology.

While Sephardic motifs yield somewhat different inferences in Walcott’s poetry than they do in Chancy’s and Cliff’s fiction, their presence in these texts consistently signals an investment in a noncompetitive project of comparison that highlights the intersectionality and porousness of apparently distinct histories. At the same time, these texts also expose the potential liabilities of analogical methods. In particular, Chancy and Cliff engage in what Erin Graff Zivin terms “textual conversions” in which “the converso serves as a body upon which the broader values and preoccupations of the writer and his culture can be inscribed” (120). Employing sephardism as counterhistory, Chancy perhaps too neatly aligns kabbalah and vodou, while Cliff conflates the historical figures of the Marrano and the Maroon in order to celebrate survival, resistance, and the preservation of difference.

Cliff’s treatment of marranism as a surrogate for maroonage is especially at risk of reducing Marrano experience to the status of metaphor. In this regard, Walcott’s more self-reflexive invocation of Sephardic Jewish history charts a different path, for his practice of triangulation resists a one-to-one mode of comparison, thereby avoiding the assimilation of the Other to the self. Moreover, while Walcott, too, offers a sympathetic and identificatory reading of Caribbean Jewishness, it is one registering tensions that surround the act of comparison as well as a history of imperial expansion in which Sephardic Jews were active participants. The neoslave narratives to which I will now turn, while continuing to advance a predominantly philosemitic perspective, will bring this ambivalent history of colonial Caribbean Jewry into even sharper focus.