SELF-CONSUMING FICTIONS: THE DIALECTICS OF
CANNIBALISM IN MODERN CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES
by
EUGENIO D. MATIBAG
Iowa State University
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.3 (May, 1991)
Copyright (c) 1991 by Eugenio D. Matibag, all rights
reserved. This text may be freely shared among
individuals, but it may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the author
and advance notification of the editors.
Parce que nous vous haissons vous et
votre raison, nous nous reclamons . . .
du cannibalisme tenace.
--Aime Cesaire, _Cahier d'un
retour au pays natal_
[1] Howling words of fresh blood to spark the sacred fire
of the world, Aime Cesaire in 1939 claimed kinship with
madness and cannibalism. In Cesaire's view, colonialism and
western rationality had imposed a falsely barbaric identity
--or, in effect, a non-identity--upon the peoples that
Europe had uprooted, subjugated, enslaved and otherwise
mastered. Against the Eurocentrist representation of
American otherness, Cesaire, within his poem's ritual of
parthenogenesis, prophetically identified with that
otherness, subsuming it into his apocalyptic redefinition of
Afro-Antillean selfhood. By such iconoclastic gestures,
Cesaire and numerous other writers of the region have
demonstrated the manner in which poetic self-identification
can mean empowerment in providing the starting point for
resisting the cultural annihilation of colonialism. My aim
in this essay will be to account for some of the ways in
which Cesaire's "cannibalisme tenace" has indeed persisted,
tenaciously and obsessively, in modern Caribbean narratives
concerned with the question of critiquing and constructing a
post-colonial cultural identity.
[2] Cesaire's affirmation of a unique Caribbean identity
raises certain questions that remain to be addressed. The
Afro-Antillean self of %negritude% is constituted on the
violent exclusion of all other cultural elements that have
formed Caribbean culture, including the contributions of
indigenous, Asian and even European inhabitants. (One is
led to ask if a truly Caribbean discourse of decolonization
must negate or devalorize all such contributions.) The
privileging of an African otherness furthermore entails the
risk of reiterating the categorizations and exclusions
inscribed in colonial discourse, for it was indeed the
latter that hollowed out the representational space for what
colonialism associated with "Africa" (the irrational, savage
and infrahuman).^1^ Moreover, the concept of "identity" has
itself become suspect in recent anti-essentialist
theoretizations that have problematized the Cartesian notion
of the subject. Jacques Derrida has displaced the subject
along with other "transcendental signifieds" that have
supposedly governed the play of signification within a
cultural system from an assumed metaphysical center (249).
Jacques Lacan has demonstrated the "subversion of the
subject" as a function continually constituted and
undermined in the chain of signifiers and in the "dialectic
of desire" to which the self is subject-ed by its accession
to language.^2^
[3] The post-structuralist attack on the unified, self-
present and self-transparent cogito thus puts in question
the simplistic assumptions underlying a call to define a
specifically Caribbean identity, but I would argue that it
does not in the end disqualify that call. Within a Third-
World context in which we could situate such a claim to
original identity, the postmodern announcement of the "death
of the subject" sounds premature and betrays a complicity
with world-capitalist systems that have already dispersed
and canceled out individual subjectivity. In an emergent
culture like that of the Caribbean nations, the subject may
represent a refuge and a source of resistance to hegemony.
Andreas Huyssen in "Mapping the Postmodern" raises the
questions of what subjectivity could mean precisely in the
face of capitalist modernization:
Hasn't capitalist modernization itself fragmented and
dissolved bourgeois subjectivity and authorship, thus
making attacks on such notions somewhat quixotic? And
. . . doesn't poststructuralism, where it simply denies
the subject altogether, jettison the chance of
challenging the %ideology of the subject% (as male,
white, and middle-class) by developing alternative and
different notions of subjectivity? (44)
A certain Caribbean discourse of decolonization, I would
argue, has held out for a counter-movement to modernist
fragmentation and dissolution in very its tendency to
"develop alternative and different notions of
subjectivity."^3^ In this discourse, far from having
become obsolete, the subject has yet to come into its own.
[4] Appeals to integration of the divided colonial self
have preoccupied Caribbean writers who have attempted to
vindicate their right to self-definition. This vindication
itself joins the broader question of cultural syncretism and
synthesis endemic to Caribbean culture. In the "post-
negritude" approach of Edouard Glissant, for example, this
identity is acknowledged to be an identity-in-process, a
"becoming-Antillean" through the operations of cultural
synthesis creating an identity that is specifically a local
production, not imposed from the outside.^4^ Before
Glissant, Edward Brathwaite in his essay "Timehri" (1970)
articulated the experience, shared by a generation of West
Indian (principally British Caribbean) writers in the early
postcolonial period, of the individual's "dissociation of
sensibility" and "rootlessness" in a fragmented creole
culture incapable of grounding a firm sense of self (30).
In Brathwaite's account, such figures as C.L.R. James,
George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul reflected on the dilemma of
a post-plantation society in which the cultural
contributions of Africans, Indians, Europeans and Asians had
never been completely synthesized; in which individuals,
living in such a heterogeneous, disunified world dominated
by persistent colonial structures, feel cut off from any
history and community they could call their own (29). In a
more recent, "second phase" of Caribbean "artistic and
intellectual life," however, Brathwaite sees an attempt on
the part of Caribbean writers to "transcend and heal" the
problem of dissociation, the nonidentity and fragmentation
produced by and under colonialism (31). Brathwaite's
solution for cultural rootlessness calls for a search and
reintegration of forgotten origins, such as those
"inscriptions" which are the %timehri% themselves: these are
"rock signs, painting, petroglyphs; glimpses of a language,
glitters of a vision of a world, scattered utterals of a
remote %Gestalt%; but still there, near, potentially
communicative" (40).
[5] But the %timehri% remain ambiguous, indecipherable and
scattered. They alone cannot found a distinct Caribbean
identity, although they may serve as a point of departure.
It is another Caribbean trope, that of "cannibalism" and its
ramifications, as I hope to show, which provides a more
fruitful focus on the manner in which recent Caribbean texts
have undertaken a search for identity in the traces left by
Antillean "forerunners," while at the same time ironizing
the implicit search for origins. In claiming this, I do not
mean to elevate cannibalism into a master trope but rather
to use it as a sign of radical difference whose
reinscription, in Caribbean discourse, opens up new
approaches to the question of identity.
[6] As "the mark of unregenerate savagery" (Hulme 3),
"cannibalism" displays the uncanny quality of binary
oppositions: it is a sign both of animalistic nature and
cultural practice; of affection and aggression; of
transgression and consecration; of indigenous custom and
European imputation. In remarking "cannibalism," Caribbean
texts participate in a common intent (1) to invert and
reinscribe the hierarchies implicit in a colonial discourse
on cannibalism; (2) to create a synthesis of disparate
cultural elements, but especially those linked with the
Caribs as ancestors, in the common impulse to decolonize an
autocthonous cultural identity; (3) to critique the
metaphysics of that synthesis precisely by ironizing the
notion of synthesis; and (4) to open up, by that critique,
to new and empowering articulations of the subject. Points
(3) and (4) imply that the %mestizaje% or transculturation
in Caribbean discourse leads first not so much to a
synthesis or a plenitude but to an annihilation of the
subject, a strategy that constitutes the first defense
against the colonial imposition of identity and which in
turn produces what Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has called "a
void where elements meet and cancel each other to open up
the question of being" (10). What is lost in such a
cancellation is a mystified notion of identity as grounded
in primordial origins; what is gained is a certain self-
consciousness and freedom for a process of identity-creation
that establishes subtle links with latent social forces in
the present.
[7] Within the European discourse of colonialism,^5^ the
very name of the Caribbean has linked the region and its
peoples with the image of cannibalism. Working within a
framework more encompassing than that of the Eurocentrist
perspective, Antonio Benitez Rojo evokes a "grandiose epic
of the Caribs" as a part of "Caribbean discourse," an epic
in which are projected
%las islas arahuacas como objeto de deseo caribe . . .
las matanzas, el glorioso canibalismo ritual de hombres
y palabras, caribana, caribe, carib, calib, canib,
canibal, Caliban; y finalmente el Mar de los Caribes,
desde la Guayana a las Islas Virgenes%. (xviii)
Note that in Benitez Rojo's linguistic morphology, whose
transformations are catalogued above, the European
impositions are mixed in with the native self-designations.
Together, they suggest the "discursive morphology" of
"cannibalism" pursued by Peter Hulme in _Colonial
Encounters_ (16).
[8] This discursive morphology may be continued in an
examination of those modern Caribbean texts, among others,
that address the legacy of Shakespeare's _The Tempest_, in
which the New World cannibal makes his appearance as
Caliban. In his influential _Caliban_ (1971), Roberto
Fernandez Retamar asserts that "El %caribe%, por su parte,
dara el %canibal%, el antropofago, el hombre bestial situado
irremediablemente al margen de la civilizacion, y a quien es
menester combatir a sangre y fuego" (14). This image of the
American as Carib/Caliban/cannibal served as a weapon of
ideological legitimation within colonial discourse. As
manifested in _The Tempest_, the dichotomy opposing the
"natural" Caliban against the "cultured" Prospero assured
the European audiences and readers of the superiority of
their civilization and the legitimacy of their drive to
colonial expansion.
[9] To reverse the hierarchy of values implicit in this
vilification, Latin American intellectuals, in Fernandez
Retamar's view, should realize that it is not Rodo's Ariel
but rather Caliban who is to be "asumido con orgullo como
nuestro simbolo," and consequently rethink their history
from the viewpoint of this "otro protagonista" (_Caliban_
1971; 29, 35). "Cannibalism" thus receives a new function
in this negation of the negation; the dialectic of
cannibalism merges into the dialectic of Calibanism. The
latter dialectic has already been discussed at length
elsewhere,^6^ but what is pertinent to the present re-
reading is the way in which the image of cannibalism is
remade, in Calibanism, into a trope of writing which
redefines the Latin American self's relation with what is
now a %European% other, precisely by a valorizing and
recharging of the denomination of alterity it had received
from Europe. What was mistakenly accepted as a literal
reference to barbaric practice or its "authentic" image is
becoming refunctioned as a literary figure.
[10] Despite the possible pejorative associations to which
this refunctioning may give rise, Calibanism does not imply
neo-primitivism or misology; on the contrary, it may involve
the most sophisticated internationalist viewpoint, one
capable of mastering and then relativizing or deflating all
partial nationalist or ethnocentric viewpoints from a more
systemic or global perspective. Fernandez Retamar is
conscious of this epistemological advantage when, in 1985,
he cites the remarks of his Mexican commentator Jorge
Alberto Manrique:
It would be well to remember, as Borges himself has
said, that vis-a-vis . . . [the] reading of Europe, he
takes the sniping stance of an ironist, "from without."
The best of his work is made of that: and in it can be
recognized an attitude of Caliban. . . .^7^
[11] George Lamming had already refitted Caliban to other
roles in his recounting of Caribbean history from this once
subjugated, now revindicated perspective. "If Prospero
could be seen as the symbol of the European imperial
enterprise," writes Lamming in _The Pleasures of Exile_,
"then Caliban should be embraced as the continuing
possibility of a profound revolutionary change initiated by
Toussaint L'Ouverture in the Haitian war of independence" (6
[unnumbered]). Indeed, the figure of the Haitian
revolutionary leader effected and continues to represent
both an overturning of the European-imposed hierarchies and
a disruptive intervention in the continuum of colonial
oppression, as the novelist proposes in the very title of
his chapter on Toussaint and C.L.R. James's _The Black
Jacobins_, namely, "Caliban Orders History" (118).
[12] On the other hand, "cannibalism" persists in the early
modern period as an image of either barbarity or aggression
associated with rebellious African slaves as characters.
Among Cayetano Coll y Toste's _Leyendas puertorriquenas_
(1924-1925) is the story of "Carabali," the runaway
plantation slave who may have resorted to cannibalism in
order to survive in his mountain cave and who became a kind
of avenging phantom in the Puerto Rican popular imagination.
In the folktales of Lydia Cabrera's _Cuentos negros de Cuba_
(1940), most of which are Yoruban in origin,^8^ cannibalism
is presented as a primitive practice associated with the
animal realm ("Noguma") or an unacceptable form of sacrifice
("Tatabisako"). In Alejo Carpentier's _El reino de este
mundo_ (1949), the slave Ti Noel fantasizes a cannibalistic
feast of white and bewigged heads served up by "un cocinero
experto y bastante ogro" in what amounts to an anticipation
of the imminent Saint-Domingue revolt (10). In Coll y Toste
and Carpentier, cannibalism symbolizes black defiance or
rebellion against the white colonial world; in Cabrera's
tales set in an Afro-Cuban context, it symbolizes evil and
social otherness. Whether practiced, imagined or rejected,
"cannibalism" in these narratives also serves to define the
particular identity of individual African slaves (or their
descendants) as literary characters whose psychic and
linguistic resources for survival provide a paradigm for the
possible Caribbean self.^9^
[13] Whereas such writers have sought to incorporate the
African contribution into a syncretic Caribbean identity,
later writers have sought origins for this identity in a
recollection of the original Caribs and their descendants.
What nevertheless stands out in a re-reading is the
remoteness or virtual absence of true Carib ancestors. In
Carpentier's _El Siglo de las Luces_ (1962) the protagonist
Esteban, meditating on the possible foundations for an
American selfhood, recalls the legend of the pre-Columbian
Carib migration to a "promised land" lying northward of the
continent. The recollection suggests a search for
alternatives to the debacle of "enlightenment" in the New
World. Finding himself at the Venezuelan Bocas del Dragon,
where the fresh water meets the salt, Esteban remembers the
migration as another search for the Promised Land, an
American Exodus of "the horde" under whose conquest of the
islands "[t]odos los varones de otros pueblos eran
exterminados, implacablemente, conservandose sus mujeres
para la proliferacion de la raza conquistadora" (172). The
northward migration is of course thwarted by the encounter
of the aboriginals with the Europeans: "Los invasores se
topaban con otros invasores . . . que llegaban a punto para
aniquilar un sueno de siglos. La Gran Migracion ya no
tendria objeto: el Imperio del Norte pasaria a manos de los
Inesperados" (173). Esteban's account of "la Gran Migracion
fracasada"--an alternative history decentering the
historical narrative of the West--reminds us that the
Europeans were themselves as much a conquering tribe as were
the aboriginal forefathers. The Caribs stand for an
unrealized historical possibility, but also suggest that the
struggle for freedom and self-determination is as much
motivated by utopian or messianic impulses as by class or
"tribal" antagonisms.
[14] In any case, the Caribs of Esteban's late-eighteenth-
century present provide no unequivocal model for resistance
against colonialization, for a Carib delegation has already
come to Guadeloupe in order to apply for citizenship in the
French Republic. The application prompts Commissioner
Victor Hugues to show
una mayor simpatia hacia los caribes que hacia los
negros: le agradaban por su orgullo, su agresividad, su
altanera divisa de 'Solo el caribe es gente'--y mas
ahora que llevaban cucardas tricolores en el amarre del
taparrabo. (109)^10^
Representing a beleaguered people in the process of
submitting itself to the colonial order, the delegation
becomes a walking myth, wearing the very symbol of the
French Republic (the tricolor cockade) on their
breechcloths, their very pride and aggressivity accommodated
into the self-representation of hegemonic discourse.^11^
[15] The beginnings of this incorporating process, by which
colonial discourse itself cannibalized the specificity and
strength of its indigenous adversaries, are revealed in
Carpentier's _El arpa y la sombra_ (1979), a fictionalized
biography of Christopher Columbus. In the novel, the "real"
Caribs are conspicuously absent from Carpentier's
"transcriptions" of Columbus's diary and ship's log--the
first productions of colonial discourse. Columbus of course
believed that he had reached the lands of the Great Khan,
already anticipating the discovery of "islands without men,
people without hair, and inhabitants born with tails," all
previously "described" by Marco Polo (Williams 19).
Carpentier's Columbus records that he heard "Indian" reports
of "tierras pobladas de canibales que tenian un ojo solo en
cabeza de perros--monstruos que se sustentaban de sangre y
carne humana" (138). This seminal misreading may have
originated in a linguistic misunderstanding on Columbus's
part: for Columbus, who did not understand the Indian
language, native references to the hostile %Cariba% may have
suggested %Caniba%, or, the people of the Khan, but also
%cane%, the Spanish word for "dog, suggesting, as Tzvetan
Todorov puts it, that "these persons have dogs' heads . . .
with which, precisely, they eat people" (30). Carpentier
thus retraces the process by which the India of Spices
becomes, for Columbus, the India of the Cannibals, although
nowhere does Columbus claim to have observed native acts of
anthropophagy (162). Yet it is precisely this imputation
which justifies, both in Columbus's mind and in discursive
practice, the Indians' conquest and enslavement in the
following manner.
[16] As the historical Columbus gradually came to realize
that the true wealth of the West Indies lay not in gold but
rather in the labor they could provide to the expanding
empire, he would eventually describe the "cannibalistic"
Caribs as
a wild people fit for any work, well proportioned, and
very intelligent, and who, when they have got rid of
their cruel habits to which they have been accustomed,
will be better than any other kind of slaves. (Cited
in Williams 31)
The West Indian slave trade begins on Columbus's third
voyage in 1498 with the transport of six hundred Indians to
Spain (Williams 32). At about the same time, the Spanish
monarchs, enjoined by the Pope, issued a decree providing
for the conversion of the Indians to Catholicism and for the
consideration of converted Indians as subjects of the
Spanish crown. These Indian converts could then be
considered "free" to be hired as wage laborers within the
encomienda system, although not finally exempted from its
inhuman demands and conditions. The decree paved the way
for the legalization of the slave trade by the Requisition,
for it implied that the "cannibals," those bellicose Indians
who refused conversion and resisted Spanish rule, could be
legitimately punished with enslavement (Williams 32; Arens
44-54; Todorov 46-47).
[17] In Carpentier's reconstructions of the nineteenth-
century postulation for Columbus's canonization under Leon
XIII, the Devil's Advocate of the Vatican's Congregation of
Rites cites Jules Verne's opinion that Columbus identified
cannibals in the West Indies without having encountered a
single one; the postulation for sainthood was finally denied
on the basis of Columbus's monumental misreading and on the
grounds of his having instituted a slave trade in the New
World (_El Arpa_ 207). Columbus has been posthumously
chastised, but not without having initiated a discourse
practice relegating the Caribbean natives, by denomination
and defamation, to an infrahuman realm.
[18] In _Voyage in the Dark_ (1934) by the Antiguan emigree
Jean Rhys, the Caribs become a symbol of colonial
subjugation and figure the psychological and transcendental
homelessness of Rhys' protagonist, Anna Morgan. In this
novel, the process of constructing a post-colonial feminine
subject is seemingly foreclosed by a history that has
offered no effective escape from colonial domination. Anna
is a dance-hall girl of Caribbean birth living in England.
Jobless, nearly penniless, often intoxicated, she drifts
from affair to affair as the sexual toy of affluent and
influential men. On one occasion, while lying sick in bed,
writing and drinking vermouth, she pauses to recall the
words of a song she once heard in a Glasgow music hall:
"'And drift, drift / Legions away from despair.'" In her
subsequent free-association, the words link up with a
reference, apparently taken from an encyclopedia, to the
Caribs:
It can't be 'legions'. 'Oceans', perhaps. 'Oceans
away from despair.' But it's the sea, I thought. The
Caribbean sea. 'The Caribs indigenous to this island
were a warlike tribe and their resistance to white
domination, though spasmodic, was fierce. As lately as
the beginning of the nineteenth century they raided one
of the neighbouring islands, under British rule,
overpowered the garrison and kidnapped the governor,
his wife and three children. They are now practically
exterminated. The few hundred that are left do not
intermarry with the negroes. Their reservation, at the
northern end of the island, is known as the Carib
Quarter.' They had, or used to have, a king. Mopo,
his name was. Here's to Mopo, King of the Caribs!
But, they are now practically exterminated. 'Oceans
away from despair. . . .' (105)
The passage suggests that the Caribs might have served as a
symbol of defiance, and even of feminine defiance, against a
patriarchal system of domination that has extended itself
across the seas. But because the Caribs are "now
practically exterminated," their king a sad figure of
mockery, history has lost a chance at redemption. The
Caribs have been vanquished, drastically reduced in numbers,
thereafter relocated on the northern end of what is probably
Dominica, where their resistant ferocity has been
successfully contained. The weight of the past hangs like a
nightmare on Anna's brain; the fate of the Caribs prefigures
the protagonist's own victimage and despair when her lover
decides to abandon her just before she must seek an
abortion.
[19] The historical pattern of Carib resistance and European
conquest provides the unconscious subtext for Anna's
forlornness. The first attempt of the English to settle in
the West Indies in Saint Lucia in 1605 met with the fierce
opposition of its Carib inhabitants, as occurred in Grenada
in 1609 (Williams 79; cf. Arens 45). But the colonizers
succeeded in defeating numerous Indian uprisings in the
islands and in exterminating the Caribs or removing them to
Dominica or St. Vincent. In Grenada, the last group of
Caribs to resist the French invaders hurled themselves from
the top of a hill that would henceforth be known as %Le
Morne des Sauteurs% (Williams 95). In both Anna's
experience and that of the Caribs, as this juxtaposition
suggests, history provides no viable means for challenging
to domination other than the self-destructive alternatives
of suicide and infanticide (cf. Lamming 123-124).
[20] Attempts to revive the Carib heritage in other
Caribbean texts may be read as attempts to redress the
defamation the Caribs received in colonial discourse. But
in a present that is, like Anna Morgan's, cut off from all
autocthonous origins, such efforts serve more certainly to
re-open the dialogue on national culture and identity and
therein entertain possibilities of new articulations of the
self with its others. The novel _Beka Lamb_ (1982) by the
Belizean author Zee Edgell tells us that members of the
black creole community "seldom married among the Caribs,
although these two groups shared, in varying degrees, a
common African ancestry" (31-32). Edgell's attribution of a
"common African ancestry" to Carib and creole alike may seem
surprising, but the narrator later explains that those
called "Caribs" by the Belizeans are in fact the descendants
of escaped African slaves who arrived in St. Vincent.
Contradicting Rhys' assumptions concerning the Caribs'
refusal of miscegenation, Edgell's blacks in St. Vincent
"mingled with the %Caribans%, originally from South America,
adopting much of their language and some of their ways, but
keeping many of their African traditions" (68, my emphasis).
Such an intermingling of races and cultures suggests the
possibility of a generalized synthesis originating in the
very displacement and confusion of origins.
[21] But Belizean resistance to such a synthesis persists.
Beka's mother shares the creole prejudices against the
present-day Caribs; for her, the Caribs of Stann Creek are a
corrupting influence on Beka and her Aunt Tama for having
taught them %obeah%, or magic arts. Granny Ivy, somewhat
more generous with the Caribs, says that "'I don't believe
Carib people sacrifice children'" and reminds the other
women that the Stann Creek families sent food up to Belize
during the 1931 hurricane, although she must add that "'I am
not saying I could marry a Carib man. . .'" (67). The
women's prejudice toward the Caribs puzzles Beka, and when
she asks her mother why creoles refuse to mix with them, her
mother ventures to explain that "'Maybe it's because Carib
people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the
world'" (70). Representing a primitive and ignominious past
for the creoles, the Caribs have been excluded from the
mainstream of Belizean society, marginalized and contained
within isolated pockets of the country, called "the bush"
(70). Whereas the narrative keeps the Caribs at a distance,
the schoolgirl Beka has at least made an initial attempt to
reconnect with the cast-off part of her Belizean heritage
they represent, an issue that is especially significant as
the Belizeans approach the dawning of their own nationalist
independence. Beka's questions, however, lead not to an
immediate synthesis of cultural elements within a projected
Belizean cultural identity, but to a certain transcendence
in the awareness that Belizeans, in living a unique history
that has been preconditioned but not totally imposed from
the outside, are different from the British. Defining this
difference would largely consist recognizing the Belizeans'
difference from the Caribs within the national community but
also in recognizing common interests shared with minority
group.
[22] The Caribs reappear in _The Whole Armour_ (1982) by the
Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, but, again, they are no
more than a representation, this time played by a band of
roving carnival rousters. These rousters dressed as Caribs
are encountered in the jungle by the protagonist Cristo, who
is a fugitive from the law, accused of a murder he did not
commit. Cristo later reveals to his lover, Sharon, that his
brief meeting with "the Caribs" has thrust him into a
strange shifting play of identification with the social
other. Covered with mud during his flight and remembering
himself as misrecognized by the "Carib" players, Cristo
wildly reflects that "In the flying rush they assumed I was
one of them . . . one of this . . . shattered tribe. A
terrible broken family" (340). The encounter with the
"shattered tribe" has shaken the structure of Cristo's sense
of identity. Cristo's reflection in the stream momentarily
restores him to his old self, but he later insists that "I
was the last member, remaining behind, of the flying band.
Every guilty body rolled into one. Vanquished as well as
slave, rapist, Carib, monster, anything you want to think
. . . ." (345).
[23] Caught up in the flying constellation of images, a
disoriented Cristo identifies his alleged criminality with
an entire history of Caribbean enslavement and injustice.
The vision of vanquished ancestors furthermore catalyzes
Cristo's sense of belonging to a community or "tribe"
imperilled by its own violent irresponsibility, in which
originated the murders for which he is falsely accused.
Although believed dead, Cristo will return, Christlike, to
his Pomeroon village in order to establish his innocence and
to restore his community's shattered equilibrium with what
amounts to his own sacrifice.^12^ Whereas the Caribs are
absent, even parodied in this account, they provide, under
conditions of rootlessness and chaos, a simulacrum of an
imagined community that supplants the actual fragmented
community, and thereby ground a necessary fiction of
personal fulfillment.
[24] As other Caribbean writings reveal, the remembrance of
the Caribs suggests another, possibly more provocative
association with the cannibalistic act itself. The true
extent to which cannibalism was practiced by the Caribs
remains unclear; the anthropologist W. Arens, relying upon
historical accounts and noting the imperialist biases and
confusions, probably overstates his case in pointing out the
absence of "adequate documentation of cannibalism as a
custom in any form for any society" (21). Regardless of the
existence or non-existence of such documentation, a number
of twentieth-century Caribbean narratives have taken up the
image of cannibalism that has been handed down in Caribbean
discourse and turned it into a trope of identity and a
literary mechanism of self-individuation. These narratives
in general bear out the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday's
assertion that although cannibalism is not a "unitary
phenomenon but varies with respect to both cultural content
and meaning" (x), it is predicated upon the symbolic
oppositions by which "self is related to the other" (xii).
Cannibalism in Sanday's view is a "cultural system" and
"primarily a medium for . . . messages having to do with the
maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the
foundation of the cultural order" (3). Its symbolism
participates in a dynamic of "dialectical opposition" (35);
seen cross-culturally, it may symbolize a social evil,
express a desire for revenge against one's enemies, renew a
generation's ties with its ancestors, provide a mythological
charter for the social order, or function as "part of the
cultural construction of personhood" (25-26).
[25] Freud provides a bridge between anthropology and
psychoanalysis in drawing an analogy between cannibalism, as
he understood it, and the oral stage of psychosexual
development. In oral incorporation and its correlates of
desire, destruction and the installment of the object within
the self, the established object-relations and phantasies
harken back to a prehistoric stage of human social
development. Phylogeny prefigures ontogeny especially in
the "totemic meal" of _Totem and Taboo_, whereby the primal
father is murdered and devoured by the sons of the "horde,"
who, in the act of patricidal consumption, incorporate and
sublimate his desire, strength and authority into their own
structure of identity.^13^
[26] One story among Lydia Cabrera's _Cuentos Negros de
Cuba_, "Bregantino Bregantin," illustrates this Freudian
dialectic with a form of cannibalism exemplifying none other
than self-consumption. The story tells of el Toro, the
Bull, who after capturing and hanging the king from a tree,
imprisons the queen in a "dungeon or latrine" without giving
her any means of sustaining herself save that of eating
cockroaches. When the supply of these runs out, she sees
herself
reducida al extremo de devorarse a si misma, comenzando
por los pies, de dificil masticacion, y rindiendo el
ultimo suspiro por envenamiento, en el colmo de la
indignacion mas justa. (17)
An impossible cannibalism, but nonetheless a paradigmatic
one that foregrounds both the literariness of its treatment
and the possibility of considering anthropophagy as an act
of autophagy. El Toro takes the place of the now executed
king and queen and becomes a tyrant in his own right,
claiming all the women of his kingdom for himself, killing
all of his male sons, outlawing the use of masculine-ending
nouns, and shouting from his mountain top: "--<>" (25). The sovereign self of el Toro reigns
supreme until the day one of his sons, saved from the usual
infanticide, rises up to defeat him in bloody combat. "Y
con esto," the stories concludes, "la naturaleza recobro de
nuevo sus derechos y nacieron varones en Cocozuma" (28).
Here, the Freudian dialectic adumbrated in _Totem and Taboo_
is redistributed into new functors: one son stands in for
the primal horde but does not literally consume his own
father, for indeed it is the latter who has defeated the
king and allowed the queen to consume herself. But true to
the Freudian Ur-plot, the "father's" law and tyranny is
installed in the symbolic order perpetuated by el Toro,
leaving the task of restoring a "natural" cultural order to
his righteously rebellious son.
[27] This ritual--combining aggression, incorporation,
negation and individuation--provides a new kind of anchoring
point for the definition of identity. Its dynamic is
reinscribed in Caribbean narratives appearing in
Brathwaite's second phase of "transcending and healing,"
novels in which I will now remark the dialectical
oppositions motivating cannibalism as a trope of cultural
devalorization and reordering.
[28] In his prologue to the novels comprising _The Guyana
Quartet_, which includes _The Whole Armour_ and _Palace of
the Peacock_ (1960), Wilson Harris avers that the concrete
metaphor validating the particular violations of realist
convention in the latter novel is none other than a
"Carib/cannibal bone-flute" which was "hollowed from the
bone of an enemy in time of war":
Flesh was plucked and consumed and in the process
secrets were digested. Spectres arose from, or reposed
in, the flute [which] became the home or curiously
mutual fortress of spirit between enemy and other
. . . . (9-10)
A symbol of "'transubstantiation in reverse,'"^14^ here the
flute codifies and thereby mediates the subject-object
polarities within a projected cultural system. Sanday's
exemplification of how "a self is made" in cannibal practice
elucidates this mediation:
The flesh or bone marrow is a tangible conduit of
social and psychological attributes that constitute the
subject by either affirming or negating the
relationships that join or separate the subject vis-a-
vis the other. Thus, parts of the body may be consumed
to imbibe the characteristics or the fertile force of
the other; or, consumption may break down and destroy
characteristics of the other in the self. (36)
Harris's bone-flute becomes, in the light of this
explication and his own, a figure of relational self-making
and unmaking, one of the "convertible imageries" serving to
motivate a ritual of "complex regeneration" enacted in all
four novels of _The Guyana Quartet_. What Harris refers to
as "the second death" in his prologue is the death of the
reader's or character's self that undergoes a ritual
sacrifice in "a fiction that seeks to consume its own biases
through many resurrections of paradoxical imagination" (9).
_Palace of the Peacock_ in particular is a phantasmagorical
narrative in which a crew of conquistador-like colonizers
arrive at their first destination only to discover that "not
so long ago this self-same crew had been drowned to a man in
the rapids below the Mission" (37). Upon this violation of
realist verisimilitude, the narrative establishes an
"unreal" and psychologically unsettling perspective that
shuttles back and forth across the barrier separating life
and death, self and other. Faced with a "second death" when
their boat threatens to capsize in the rapids, the crew
members confront, in effect, the imminent dissolution of
their own monadic subjectivities:
The monstrous thought came to them that they had
been shattered and were reflected again in each other
at the bottom of the stream.
The unceasing reflection of themselves in each other
made them see themselves everywhere save where they
thought they had always stood. (80)
[29] Grasping himself as both dead and alive and as self and
other in the specular imago of the self-as-other, each
character gradually loses hold on his former sense of a
self-sufficient or autonomous identity. As the crew members
pursue a fleeing Amerindian tribe they intend to capture
(and which symbolizes for Harris an eclipsed other to be
reincorporated into the tradition [7]), they find themselves
stripped of the egoistic fictions of self that motivated the
pursuit, swept away from themselves in a turbulent stream of
becoming: "They saw the naked unequivocal flowing peril and
beauty and soul of the pursuer and the pursued all together"
(62). In the "second death," pursuer and pursued are now
embraced in what the narrator can only stammeringly refer to
as "'the truest substance of life,'" "'the unity of being'"
in which "'fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance'"
(52).
[30] The novel's conclusion presents the apotheosis of a
blind conquistador-captain Donne who, paradoxically, can see
more clearly than ever before:
[Donne] looked into himself and saw that all his life
he had loved no one but himself. He focused his blind
eye with all penitent might on this pinpoint star and
reflection as one looking into the void of oneself upon
the far greater love and self-protection of the
universe. (107)
Here is the poetry of a cosmic self that sees its
objectified and distanced former self as both a "void" and a
kind of door of perception, now cleansed and opened upon the
infinite. Its transcendent vision of "love and self-
protection" has dissolved the fragile structure of earthly
desires and, with that structure, the fictive boundaries of
the narcissistic self. In an ecstatic identification with
otherness and others, the higher self realizes that it had
always been an other to itself and that the imagined riches
of El Dorado were in reality the spirit's patrimony. This
identification is affirmed by novel's last sentence: "Each
of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever
seeking and what he had eternally possessed" (117).
[31] "Cannibalism" in _Palace of the Peacock_ thus mediates
a nostalgic desire or spiritual aspiration to incorporate
oneself into a lost primordial unity. A similar nostalgia
or aspiration motivates the plot of _Felices Dias, Tio
Sergio_ (1986) by Magali Garcia Ramis, but that desire
progresses within a more historically determinate setting
and toward a more explicitly political statement of
commitment. In Garcia Ramis's novel a young girl named
Lidia narrates her experience of growing-up middle-class in
the Puerto Rico of Munoz Marin and amidst the
entrepreneurial "fat cows" of the Operation Bootstrap era.
Lidia's family expresses a typically bourgeois desire to be
Prospero in their unreflecting imitation of European culture
and scorn for all things Latin American; they inhabit a
house where, because "todo lo heredado era europeo y todo lo
porvenir era norteamericano, . . . no podiamos saber quienes
eramos" (153). The family's adults are proud of their hard-
won success, intolerant of homosexuals and atheists, and
fiercely suspicious of the nationalists and communists. One
could add that the "nordomania" uncritically embraced by
Lidia's family exemplifies a more general process operant
"inside" a dominant culture that pushes all that it
perceives as "outside"--primitive, inferior and other--into
the margins defining its own closed cultural space. The
family's constant preoccupation with cleanliness and
hygiene, as well as repeated references to the adults'
medical professions, parallels a fear of contamination by
unorthodox ideas that would challenge the manichean
distinction between Good and Evil upon which their own sense
of identity is based (28).
[32] And suddenly, into this "perfectly ordered and
unchangeable world" (153) comes Tio Sergio, who signifies
for the narrator a stimulating and disturbing presence in
the Santurce household. Soon it is Sergio who initiates the
children in their study of art, including the painting of
Ollers; who learns to communicate with them in their
"Simian-Spanish" dialect drawn from Tarzan comic books; and
whose frustrated affair with the family's maid-servant
introduces the mysteries of sexuality to the spying Lidia.
It is Sergio, too, who arranges a funeral service for a
disappeared cat named Daruel. The funeral service is
followed by a "mortuary meal" that includes cookies in the
shape of a cat and Sergio's explanation, that
algunos salvajes se comian a los jefes de otras tribus
y a los misioneros para adquirir su sabiduria y su
fuerza; nos dijo que era algo simbolico y muy antiguo
el que nos comiesemos las galletitas como si
estuviesemos metiendonos por dentro todo lo que
queriamos a Daruel. (23)
[33] Aside from parodying the catholic communion ceremony,
the mortuary or totemic meal anticipates the manner in which
Lidia will have seen in Tio Sergio a new ego ideal that she
will incorporate into her personal identity. For once
Sergio has left, Lidia discovers that he was "un hombre casi
al margen de la sociedad," one who discussed literature with
Trotskyites and attempted to form a labor union, one who
collected funds for the Algerian resistance and was
probably, in addition to everything else, a homosexual
(154). Above all, Lidia recalls, Sergio was a man who
nurtured a dream of Puerto Rican independence but despaired
of doing anything to realize the dream. Having brought into
the closed conservative household an element of otherness
and an example of tolerance for difference that the
conservative matriarchs of the family would not have
otherwise permitted, Sergio has introduced to Lidia and her
cousin Enrique an expanded language of "native"
possibilities with which to forge an identity. Having
symbolically acquired "his wisdom and his strength," the
cousins go out on their own to discover who they are:
Con todas nuestras contradicciones, . . . ibamos a
circulos de estudio, comprabamos libros de historia y
poesia puertorriquena, sonabamos con descubrir
yacimientos de los indios tainos, pegabamos pasquines
que anunciaban marchas, y marchabamos lentamente en
busqueda de nuestra puertorriquenidad. (152-153)
By the time that Lidia is caught up in the dream of
discovering her "puertorriquenidad," she has incorporated
the rebellious anti-colonial spirit of Tio Sergio into her
own, renewed sense of Puerto Rican selfhood.
[34] In recodifying and decodifying the bourgeois ideology
concretized in Puerto Rican institutions, Garcia Ramis's
novel rehearses a repeatable process by which Caribbean
discourse may be seen as demythifying the language of
Prospero and giving a hearing to Caliban. George Lamming
anticipated this move when he wrote that
We shall never explode Prospero's old myth until we
christen Language afresh; until we show Language as the
product of human endeavour; until we make available to
all the result of certain enterprises undertaken by men
who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants
of languageless and deformed slaves. (118-119)
Far from "languageless," it turns out, Caliban does speak,
and his profit on language is more than that of knowing how
to curse. In the resurrection of the Carib epic, some of
whose linguistic transformations and discursive
ramifications have been traced in this essay, "cannibalism"
explodes the myth of Prospero by devouring, engulfing and
digesting his secrets, christens language afresh by giving
voice to collective memory and subjugated others.
[35] A metaphor of incorporation and/or differentiation, of
subjective self-divisions and mergings with respect to an
other, cannibalism thus de-defines and re-defines the
divisory line between self and other, with the consequence
of transforming what was considered an antinomy into a
dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a
higher level of transindividual unity. In re-priming the
nature-culture dialectic that had been fixed by colonialism
to Prospero's (and Ariel's) advantage, the discourse of
cannibalism furthermore ironizes its own search for origins
by thematizing the irrecuperable loss of the Caribs or other
"cannibals" as exemplars of rebellious subjectivity. Yet
the Caribs--introjected as a disturbing element of
difference into the metonymic series of displacements,
interrupting the flow of colonial discursive self-
reproduction--serve to open up the "search for identity" to
new, often unexpected articulations of the self with an
other and with others. Forming a sort of counter-tradition,
cannibalism thus re-defined and re-elaborated grounds a new,
founding myth of Caribbean identity and dynamic self-
definition by proposing alternative ego ideals or object-
choices: the tribal or cosmic self of Wilson Harris; the
nationalistic self of Garcia Ramis.
[36] The issue is of course not merely academic. When
Ernesto "Che" Guevara called for the development of an
organic individual willing to sacrifice self-interest for
the sake of the collective good, Guevara called for nothing
less than the creation of "el hombre nuevo del socialismo."
In Guevara's conception, such an individual would be
committed to the revolutionary struggle to leave behind the
realm of necessity for the realm of freedom:
a pesar de su aparente estandarizacion, es mas
completo; a pesar de la falta del mecanismo perfecto
para ello, su posibilidad de expresarse y hacerse
sentir en el aparato social es infinitamente mayor.
(10)
Guevara here undermines the old dichotomy of "bourgeois
individualism" vs. "socialist standardization" by the
qualifier of an "apparent" standardization. The
individual's self-sacrifice to the interests and ends of a
social group in reality entails the transcendence of
individualism, but such that this transcendence means the
cancellation and sublation of "individuality" in its
illusory autonomy and limited rationality and the attainment
of an authentic freedom through a more clearly comprehended
collective praxis. Both anticipating and elaborating
Guevara's notion of "el hombre nuevo," a dialectics of
cannibalism works through one of the paths by which fiction
consumes fictions, including the reigning fictions of
selfhood. Devouring such fictions in the process, we may,
like Harris's boatmen, come to see ourselves everywhere save
where we thought we had always stood.
-----------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
^1^ Here I rely on Paul Brown's definition of "colonial
discourse," exemplified in his reading of _The Tempest_, as
"a domain or field of linguistic strategies operating within
particular areas of social practice to effect knowledge and
pleasure, being produced by and reproducing or reworking
power relations between classes, genders and cultures" (69,
n.3).
^2^ Lacan, "The subversion of the subject and the
dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious" in _Ecrits:
A Selection_, 292-325. For an overview of Lacanian themes,
see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, _Language and
Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the
Subject_, 93-121.
^3^ For an overview of postmodern perspectives on the
subject and a theory of the subject's persistent efficacy
despite its deconstruction, see Ihab Hassan, _Selves At
Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters_,
especially the chapter on "The Subject of Quest: Self,
Other, Difference" (32-45).
^4^ In _Les discours antillais_, Glissant insists that
synthesis is not a "bastardization" or adulteration of
cultures; it is rather "un devenir antillais" and an
inseparable part of "le drame planetaire":
La vocation de synthese ne peut que constituer
avantage, dans un monde voue a la synthese et au
<>. L'essentiel est ici que
les Antillais ne s'en remettent pas a d'autres du soin
de formuler leur culture. Et que cette vocation de
synthese ne donne pas dans l'humanisme ou s'engluent
les betas. (16)
^5^ For Peter Hulme in _Colonial Encounters_, colonial
discourse is a "monologue." To give an example, Hulme makes
reference to the engraving by van der Straet depicting the
encounter between the masculine, civilized, clothed and
armed Amerigo Vespucci with the feminine, primitive, naked
and unarmed indigenous figure representing the New World.
Hulme comments that "Such a monologic encounter [as here
represented] can only masquerade as a dialogue: it leaves no
room for alternative voices" (9). But this view of colonial
discourse is too monolithic and self-defeating, for it
leaves no chance for the opening of the text to a reading of
its "unconscious" substrata or to the encounter of different
voices that the text must master. My interpretation of
colonial discourse, supported by Paul Brown's definition of
the term, would stress, rather than its monologic nature,
its conflictive plurality and dynamic of self-repression
which only at a later moment result in the effect of
monologism.
^6^ In the glossary of _Les discours antillais_ (1981),
for example, Edouard Glissant includes the following entry:
"%*CALIBAN.* cannibale. Shakespeare nous a donne le mot,
nos ecrivains l'ont refait%" (496). In Glissant's view,
Caribbean writers have questioned the colonial "sanction of
the nature-culture equilibrium" posed in the hierarchical
identification of Prospero with culture and Caliban with
nature. Inasmuch as the culture-nature hierarchy implants a
mimetic desire in the "natural" Caliban, _The Tempest_
reveals the way in which European colonial values, once
institutionalized and naturalized within colonial practice,
set the norm for social behavior and thereby alienate the
consciousness of those whom the colonizer has mastered and
seduced to his way of thinking. For Caribbean writers who
repudiate this European prescription of identity, the
alternative would be to acknowledge and affirm the
appellation %Caliban%, once a term of opprobrium, and to
transform it into a symbol of a new, non-colonized self. In
the movement of black affirmation called %negritude%,
African and Caribbean writers, as Charlotte Bruner has
explained, "christen themselves as Caliban and reshape this
image, this Black mask, to fit themselves" (245).
^7^ Jorge Alberto Manrique, "Ariel entre Prospero y
Caliban," _Revista de la Universidad de Mexico_ (February-
March 1972), 70. Cited in Roberto Fernandez Retamar,
_Caliban and Other Essays_ (54).
^8^ According to Fernando Ortiz's introduction to the
collection (10).
^9^ Wilson Harris makes this argument in _Tradition,
the Writer and Society_ when he writes that the individual
slave may be visualized "as possessing the grassroots of
Western individuality" (33), which means an emphatic
rejection of "the sovereign individual" who lives an
illusion of freedom and self-sufficiency "by conditioning
himself to function solely within his contemporary situation
more or less as the slave appears bound still upon his
historical and archaic plane" (34).
^10^ The historical precedent for this assignment of a
role to the Caribs in the protection of French colonial
interests can be found in Colbert's war against Dutch trade
in the West Indies. As Colbert, Minister of the Marine with
colonial jurisdiction, suggested to a colonial governor in
1670, one way of defending the French monopoly against the
Dutch could be that of "secretly aiding the Caribs against
them in case of a war, or by secretly inciting them to
attack the Dutch by furnishing them firearms and munitions"
(cited in Williams 161).
^11^ One is reminded of Roland Barthes' analysis in
_Mythologies_ of the photograph in which a black colonial
soldier salutes a French flag. As this association
suggests, my use of the word "myth" remits to Barthes'
explanation: like bourgeois ideology, "myth has the task of
giving an historical intention a natural justification, and
making contingency appear eternal" (142).
^12^ Marianna Torgovnick's gloss on the meaning of
sacrifice in Georges Bataille clarifies the connection
between human sacrifice and cannibalism: "Human sacrifice is
a symbolic version of cannibalism, in which the human body
substitutes for the animal body, and killing for eating. It
is a symbolic representation of our normal gustatory acts--
but heightened, made less utilitarian, and hence 'sacred'"
(189).
^13^ J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis summarize this
analogy in _The Language of Psychoanalysis_ (55).
^14^ _The Guyana Quartet_, 9. In _Explorations_ (42,
n.8) Harris cites the same passage in Michael Swan's _The
Marches of El Dorado_ (London, 1958), 285.
-----------------------------------------------------------
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