Global Islands

At any rate, the attitude of the poem is passive, allowing French to domesticate difference. Beginning in the late 1930s, writers of Negritude, especially Aimé Césaire, were concerned with forcing the European language to culturally express a hybrid context, where very active non-European ingredients could participate. Césaire said that he had wanted “to make an Antillian French, a black French that, while remaining French, would bear the black mark”². This decolonizing operation gives a communicable voice to the excluded and to difference. Shortly before, in the same epoch, Nicolas Guillén, of Cuba, introduced rhythms, intonations, sonorities, and airs of African ancestry into classic Spanish.³ Desiderio Navarro concludes: “by speaking Spanish, the poet is also speaking in a black-African language”⁴. Already the tonal character of the Bantu and Sudanese languages influences the manner in which we Cubans pronounce and intonate Spanish.

This phonic synthesis participates in the ideology of cultural mestizaje that lays the foundations for the idea of a Cuban identity that Guillen’s poetry helps to construct in the ’30s:

This position coincides with that of the ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, who compared Cuban identity to ajiaco – a stew of very diverse ingredients, in which the broth which stays on the bottom represents an integrated nationality, that of synthesis.⁶ Similar hodge-podge metaphors, as, for instance, callaloo or sancocho, continue to be used today to define the Caribbean, mythicized as the paradigm of diversity and amalgam.

The problem with this idea of cultural mestizaje is that it can be used to create the image of a fair and harmonious fusion, disguising not only differences, but also contradictions and flagrant inequalities under the myth of an integrated nation or culture. It is the problem of all notions based upon synthesis, which tend to erase imbalances and conflicts. What remains to be seen is which part of the ingredients each puts into the callaloo, and who gets the largest spoonful. Moreover, it is necessary to emphasize that, apart from the broth of synthesis, there remain bones and hard meat that never dissolve, although they support the substance of the broth. The paradigm of the ajiaco, as it refers to hybridization, would have to be complemented with that of the moros con cristianos ("Moors with Christians", the Cuban name for a plate of rice and black beans cooked together), as a reference to integrated coexistence without fusion.⁷ Both plates interconnect: they must be eaten together. And what for drinking? Perhaps a Coke ...

Another difficulty is that the model of hybridization leads to thinking about intercultural processes through a mathematical equation, by means of division and the sum of elements, the result of which is a tertium quid, the consequence of the mix. These types of models obscure cultural creation that is not necessarily the fruit of the blend, but rather an invention or a specific use of a foreign element.

This is precisely a fertile aspect of creolization: the neologic transformation and invention of cultures in response to different milieus and historical situations. Regarding the Caribbean, emphasis has been placed on mixture and syncretism – to not doubting crucial processes in the region. However, the creolizing dynamics involving different displaced cultures, which share a conflicting new space, is as important for Caribbean ethnogenesis, and more productive to understand current cultural transitions taking place at a global scale.

Cooptation menaces all cultural action based on syncretism. To a greater or lesser extent, syncretism has been a path to resistance and affirmation of the subaltern. Today, in the global and postcolonial era, the syncretistic processes are defined as a basic negotiation of difference and cultural power.⁸ Those processes, however, cannot be assumed comfortably as if they were a harmonious solution to postcolonial contradictions. They have to maintain their critical stance. There is no real syncretism in the linking of noncontradicting antagonism; syncretism is a strategy of participation, resignifying, and pluralization against hegemony.

If Laleau experienced the European language as a ball and chain, and Césaire and Guillén proposed to transform it, there are other instances in which there is little concern for its use from a position of alterity. At the beginning of the '60s, the Congolese intellectual Théophile Obenga proclaimed in his poem "Tu parleras," dedicated to Césaire:

This position eliminates the conflicts over the origin of the cultural instrument underlying its use. But it maintains duplicity between foreign language and one’s own discourse. These days a dialogic relationship seems more plausible, in which the imposed language and culture are experienced as “own-alien”, as Mikhail Bakhtin stated it in his discussion of literary polyglossia.¹⁰ Hegemonic cultural elements are not only imposed but are also assumed,¹¹ reverting the schema of power through the apprehending of the instruments of domination. In this way, for example, the syncretism in the Caribbean and Brazil of African deities with Catholic saints and virgins, practiced by forcibly Christianized slaves, was not only a strategy to disguise the former behind the latter: it implied the installation of all of them at once in an inclusive, multilayered system.

All cultures always feed from one another, be it from situations of domination or subordination. Conscious and selective cultural antropofágia (in other words, the critical swallowing of foreign elements to incorporate them into one’s own organism), proclaimed by the Brazilian modernists in the ’20s, has been a constant of Latin American modernisms. Antropofágia as a program is not so fluid as it seems, since it is not carried on in a neutral territory but rather one that is subdued, with a praxis that tacitly assumes the contradictions of dependence. In the end, who eats whom?

The flux of culture cannot always remain circulating in the same North-South direction, according to the structure of power, its circuits of diffusion, and the accommodation to them. However plausible the appropriating and transculturating strategies may be, they imply an action of rebound that reproduces the hegemonic structures, even if contesting them. It is also necessary to invert the current — not by turning it over to a binary schema of transference, defying its power, but by endeavoring to actively diversify and enrich culture in a truly global direction.

In her poem “Not Neither”, the Nuyorican poet Sandra Maráa Esteves oscillates between languages and identities, constructing a “de-alienating” option that lives through the displacements between disjunction and affirmation proper to this dynamic:

Bilingual poetry underlines the paradoxes endemic to translation, as translating would mean just to invert languages or to eliminate the text's bilingual character. But this poem also involves a statement in favor of bias instead of neutral bilinguality, biculturalism, and, beyond that, of every transcultural process. As Juan Flores has discussed about a similar poem by Tato Laviera, this text synthesizes a poetics of convergence and divergence.¹³ Esteves subscribes to and simultaneously unsettles Bakhtin’s “own-alien” notion, by way of turning it around to emphasize the “alien-own”.

Gerardo Mosquera. Global Islands, in: Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Octavio Zaya (ed.): Créolite and Creolization. Documenta11_Platform3. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit. 2003, pp. 87–92.

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