III.2.7 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1056617
This text is excerpted from “Calibán: notas hacia una discusión de cultura en nuestra América,” the landmark essay by influential Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar (born 1930). It subverts José Enrique Rodó’s [SEE DOCUMENT III.2.1] concept of the Europeanized Ariel as the embodiment of Latin American culture and identity, proposing instead the beastly, enslaved Caliban, who had been robbed of his island, as a more appropriate metaphor for the Continent’s racial intermingling. Fernández Retamar begins his essay with a significant question that underscores and influences a broad section of the present volume: “Does a Latin American culture exist?” According to him, Latin Americans are ethnically, although not culturally, differentiated from one another. Written in 1969 and first published in 1971 in Casa de las Américas [(Havana), no. 68 (September–October 1971)]—a combative journal that Fernández Retamar established in 1965 and directed for a number of years—the essay also appeared in the anthology Calibán: apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América [Roberto Fernández Retamar (Mexico City: Editorial Diógenes, 1971)]. This excerpt is from the text’s first translation into English published as “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” [Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, Translated by Edward Baker, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–45].
A European journalist, and moreover a leftist, asked me a few days ago, “Does a Latin-American culture exist?” We were discussing, naturally enough, the recent polemic regarding Cuba that ended by confronting, on the one hand, certain bourgeois European intellectuals (or aspirants to that state) with a visible colonialist nostalgia; and on the other, that body of Latin-American writers and artists who reject open or veiled forms of cultural and political colonialism. The question seemed to me to reveal one of the roots of the polemic and, hence, could also be expressed another way: “Do you exist?” For to question our culture is to question our very existence, our human reality itself, and thus to be willing to take a stand in favor of our irremediable colonial condition, since it suggests that we would be but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere. This elsewhere is of course the metropolis, the colonizing centers, whose “right wings” have exploited us and whose supposed “left wings” have pretended and continue to pretend to guide us with pious solicitude—in both cases with the assistance of local intermediaries of varying persuasions.
While this fate is to some extent suffered by all countries emerging from colonialism—those countries of ours that enterprising metropolitan intellectuals have ineptly and successively termed barbarians, peoples of color, underdeveloped countries, Third World—I think the phenomenon achieves a singular crudeness with respect to what [José] Martí [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.4] called “our half-breed America.” Although the thesis that every man and even every culture is mestizo could easily be defended and although this seems especially valid in the case of colonies, it is nevertheless apparent that in both their ethnic and their cultural aspects capitalist countries long ago achieved a relative homogeneity. Almost before our eyes certain readjustments have been made. The white population of the United States (diverse, but of common European origin) exterminated the aboriginal population and thrust the black population aside, thereby affording itself homogeneity in spite of diversity and offering a coherent model that its Nazi disciples attempted to apply even to other European conglomerates—an unforgivable sin that led some members of the bourgeoisie to stigmatize in Hitler what they applauded as a healthy Sunday diversion in Westerns and Tarzan films. Those rogues proposed to the world and even to those of us who are kin to the communities under attack and who rejoiced in the evocation of our own extermination—the monstrous racial criteria that have accompanied the United States from its beginnings to the genocide in Indochina. Less apparent (and in some cases perhaps less cruel) is the process by which other capitalist countries have also achieved relative racial and cultural homogeneity at the expense of internal diversity.
Nor can any necessary relationship be established between mestizaje [miscegenation] and the colonial world. The latter is highly complex1 despite basic structural affinities of its parts. It has included countries with well-defined millennial cultures, some of which have suffered (or are presently suffering) direct occupation (India, Vietnam), and others of which have suffered indirect occupation (China). It also comprehends countries with rich cultures but less political homogeneity, which have been subjected to extremely diverse forms of colonialism (the Arab world). There are other peoples, finally, whose fundamental structures were savagely dislocated by the dire activity of the European despite which they continue to preserve a certain ethnic and cultural homogeneity (black Africa). (Indeed, the latter has occurred despite the colonialists’ criminal and unsuccessful attempts to prohibit it.) In these countries mestizaje naturally exists to a greater or lesser degree, but it is always accidental and always on the fringe of the central line of development.
But within the colonial world there exists a case unique to the entire planet: a vast zone for which mestizaje is not an accident but rather the essence, the central line: ourselves, “our mestizo America.” Martí, with his excellent knowledge of the language, employed this specific adjective as the distinctive sign of our culture—a culture of descendants, both ethnically and culturally speaking, of aborigines, Africans, and Europeans. In his “Letter from Jamaica” (1815) [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.2], the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, had proclaimed, “We are a small human species: we possess a world encircled by vast seas, new in almost all its arts and sciences.” In his message to the Congress of Angostura2 (1819), he added:
Let us bear in mind that our people is neither European nor North American, but a composite of Africa and America rather than an emanation of Europe; for even Spain fails as a European people because of her African blood, her institutions, and her character. It is impossible to assign us with any exactitude to a specific human family. The greater part of the native peoples has been annihilated; the European has mingled with the American and with the African, and the African has mingled with the Indian and with the European. Born from the womb of a common mother, our fathers, different in origin and blood, are foreigners; all differ visibly in the epidermis, and this dissimilarity leaves marks of the greatest transcendence.
Even in this century, in a book as confused as the author himself but full of intuitions (La raza cósmica, 1925), the Mexican [educator] José Vasconcelos [SEE DOCUMENT IV.1.2] pointed out that in Latin America a new race was being forged, “made with the treasure of all previous ones, the final race, the cosmic race.”3
This singular fact lies at the root of countless misunderstandings. Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Arab, or African cultures may leave the Euro-North American enthusiastic, indifferent, or even depressed. But it would never occur to him to confuse a Chinese with a Norwegian, or a Bantu with an Italian; nor would it occur to him to ask whether they exist. Yet, on the other hand, some Latin Americans are taken at times for apprentices, for rough drafts or dull copies of Europeans, including among these latter whites who constitute what Martí called “European America.” In the same way, our entire culture is taken as an apprenticeship, a rough draft or a copy of European bourgeois culture (“an emanation of Europe,” as Bolívar said). This last error is more frequent than the first one, since confusion of a Cuban with an Englishman, or a Guatemalan with a German, tends to be impeded by a certain ethnic tenacity. Here the rioplatenses [people of the River Plate region] appear to be less ethnically, although not culturally, differentiated. The confusion lies in the root itself, because as descendants of numerous Indian, African, and European communities, we have only a few languages with which to understand one another: those of the colonizers. While other colonials or ex-colonials in metropolitan centers speak among themselves in their own language, we Latin Americans continue to use the languages of our colonizers. These are the lingua franca capable of going beyond the frontiers that neither the aboriginal nor Creole languages succeed in crossing. Right now as we are discussing, as I am discussing with those colonizers, how else can I do it except in one of their languages, which is now also our language, and with so many of their conceptual tools, which are now also our conceptual tools? This is precisely the extraordinary outcry that we read in a work by perhaps the most extraordinary writer of fiction who ever existed. In The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s last play, the deformed Caliban—enslaved, robbed of his island, and trained to speak by Prospero—rebukes Prospero thus:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language…!4
1
See Yves Lacoste, Les pays sous-developpés (Paris, 1959), 82–84.
2
Currently Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela.—Ed.
3
José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (1925). A Swedish summary of what is known on this subject can be found in Magnus Mörner’s study, La mezcla de razas en la historia de América Latina, [trans.] Jorge Piatigorsky (Buenos Aires, 1969). Here it is recognized that “no part of the world has witnessed such a gigantic mixing of races as the one that has been taking place in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1492” (15). Of course, what interests me in these notes is not the irrelevant biological fact of the “races” but the historical fact of the “cultures”; see Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire [1952] (Paris, 1968).
4
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Act 1, Part 2, 362–64).