retamar caliban (3 page)

Although he is (apparently) the first writer in our world to assume our identification with Caliban, the Barbadian writer George Lamming is unable to break the circle traced by Mannoni:

Prospero [says Lamming] has given Caliban language; and with it an unstated history of consequences, an unknown history of future intentions. This gift of language meant not English, in particular, but speech and concept as a way, a method, a necessary avenue towards areas of the self which could not be reached in any other way. It is this way, entirely Prospero’s enterprise, which makes Caliban aware of possibilities. Therefore, all of Caliban’s future—for future is the very name of possibilities—must derive from Prospero’s experiment, which is also his risk. Provided there is no extraordinary departure which explodes all of Prospero’s premises, then Caliban and his future now belong to Prospero . . . Prospero lives in the absolute certainty that

Language, which is his gift to Caliban, is the very prison in which Caliban’s achievements will be realized and restricted.
³⁶

In the decade of the 1960s, the new reading of
The Tempest
ultimately established its hegemony. In
The Living World of Shakespeare
(1964), the Englishman John Wain will tell us that Caliban

has the pathos of the exploited peoples everywhere, poignantly expressed at the beginning of a three-hundred-year wave of European colonization; even the lowest savage wishes
to be
left alone rather than be ‘ ‘educated’ ’ and made to work for someone else, and there is an undeniable justice in his complaint: ' ‘For I am all the subjects that you have,/ Which once was mine own king.” Prospero retorts with the inevitable answer of the colonist: Caliban has gained in knowledge and skill (though we recall that he already knew how to build dams to catch fish, and also to dig pig-nuts from the soil, as if this were the English countryside). Before being employed by Prospero, Caliban had no language: “ . . . thou didst not, savage,/ Know thy own meaning, but wouldst gabble like/ A thing most brutish.” However, this kindness has been rewarded with ingratitude. Caliban, allowed to live in Prospero’s cell, has made an attempt to ravish Miranda. When sternly reminded of this, he impertinently says, with a kind of slavering guffaw, ‘‘Oh ho!

Oh ho! —would it have been done!/ Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/ This isle with Calibans.” Our own age [Wain concludes], which is much given to using the horrible word “miscegenation,” ought to have no difficulty in understanding this passage.
²⁷

At the end of that same decade, in 1969, and in a highly significant manner, Caliban would be taken up with pride as our symbol by three Antillian writers — each of whom expresses himself in one of the three great colonial languages of the Caribbean. In that year, independently of one another, the Martinican writer
Aime
Ceaire published his dramatic work in French
une tempete: Adaptation de “La Tempete” de Shakespeare pour un theatre negre;
the Barbadian Edward Brathwaite, his book of poems
Islands,
in English, among which there is one dedicated to “Caliban” and the author of these lines, an essay in Spanish, “Cuba hasta Fidel,” which discusses our identification with Caliban.
²⁸
In C6saire’s work the characters are the same as those of Shakespeare. Ariel, however, is a mulatto slave, and Caliban is a black slave; in addition, Eshzu, “a black god-devil” appears. Prospero’s remark when Ariel returns, full of scruples, after having unleashed—following Prospero’s orders but against his won conscience—the tempest with which the work begins is curious indeed: “Come now!” Prospero says to him, “Your crisis! It’s always the same with intellectuals!” Brathwaite’s poem called “Caliban” is dedicated, significantly, to Cuba: "In Havana that morning ...” writes Brathwaite, ‘ ‘It was December second, nineteen fifty-six./

It was the fust of August eighteen thirty-eight./ It was the twelfth October fourteen ninety-two./ How many bangs how many revolutions?”
²⁹

Our Symbol

Our symbol then is not Ariel, as Rod6 thought, but rather Caliban. This is something that we, the
mestizo
inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language—today he has no other—to curse him, to wish that the “red plague’ ’ would fall on him? I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality. From Ttipac Amaru, 77-
radentes,
Toussaint-Louverture, Simon Bolivar, Father Hidalgo,
Jose
Artigas, Bernando O’Higgins, Benito Juarez, Antonio Maceo, and Jose Marti, to Emiliano Zapata, Augusto Cesar Sandino, Julio Antonio Mella, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lazaro Cardenas, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara, from the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the
Aleijadinho,
the popular music of the Antilles, Jose Hernandez, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Ruben Dario (yes, when all is said and done), Baldomero Lillo, and Horacio Quiroga, to Mexican muralism, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Cesar Vallejo,
Jose
Carlos Mariategui, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Carlos Gardel, Pablo Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Ni-colSs Guilldn, Aim6 Cesaire, Jose Maria Argued as, Violeta Parra, and Frantz Fanon—what is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?

As regards Rodo, if it is indeed true that he erred in his symbols, as has already been said, it is no less true that he was able to point with clarity to the greatest enemy of our culture in his time—and in ours—and that is enormously important. Rod6’s limitations (and this is not the moment to elucidate them) are responsible for what he saw unclearly or failed to see at all.
³⁰
But what is worthy of note in his case is what he did indeed see and what continued to retain a certain amount of validity and even virulence.

Despite his failings, omissions, and ingenuousness [Benedetti has also said], Rod6’s vision of the Yankee phenomenon, rigorously situated in its historical context, was in its time the first launching pad for other less ingenuous, better informed and more foresighted formulations to come. ... the almost prophetic substance of Rodo’s Arielism still retains today a certain amount of validity.
³¹

These observations are supported by indisputable realities. We Cubans become well aware that Rodo’s vision fostered later, less ingenuous, and more radical formulations when we simply consider the work of our own Julio Antonio Mella, on whose development the influence of Rod<5 was decisive. In “Intelec-tuales y tartufos” (Intellectuals and Tartuffes] (1924), a vehement work written at the age of twenty-one, Mella violently attacks the false intellectual values of die time—opposing them with such names as Unamuno, Jose Vasconcelos, Ingenieros, and Varona. He writes, "The intellectual is the worker of the mind. The worker! That is, the only man who in Rod6’s judgment is worthy of life, ... he who takes up his pen against iniquity just as others take up the plow to fecundate the earth, or the sword to liberate peoples, or a dagger to execute tyrants. ’
⁰²
Mella would again quote Rod6 with devotion during that year
³³
and in the following year he was to help found the Ariel Polytechnic Institute in Havana.
³⁴
It is opportune to
recall
that in
this same
year, 1925, Mella was also among the founders of Cuba’s first Communist party. Without a doubt, Rod6’s
Ariel
served as a “launching pad” for the meteoric revolutionary career of this first organic Marxist-Leninist in Cuba (who was also one of the first on the continent.)

As further examples of the relative validity that Rod6’s anti-Yankee argument retains even in our own day, we can point to enemy attempts to disarm such an argument. A strange case is that of Emir Rodriguez Monegal, for whom
Ariel,
in addition to ‘‘material for philosophic or sociological meditation,
also
contains pages of a polemic nature on political problems
of the moment.
And it was precisely this
secondary
but undeniable condition that determined its immediate popularity and dissemination.” Rod<5’s essential position against North American penetration would thus appear to be an afterthought, a
secondary
fact in the work. It is known, however, that Rod6 conceived it immediately after American intervention in Cuba in 1898,
as a response to the deed.
Rodriguez Monegal says:

The work thus projected was
Ariel.
In the final version
only two direct allusions
are found to the historical fact that was its primary motive force; . . . both allusions enable us to appreciate how Rod6 has
transcended
the initial historical circumstance to arrive fully at the essential problem: the proclaimed decadence of the Latin race.
³⁵

The fact that a servant of imperialism such as Rodriguez Monegal, afflicted with die same “Nordo-mania’ ’ that Rod6 denounced in 1900, tries so coarsely to emasculate Rod6’s work, only proves that it does indeed retain a certain virulence in its formulation—something that we would approach today from other perspectives and with other means. An analysis of
Ariel
—and this is absolutely not the occasion to make one—would lead us also to stress how, despite his background and his anti-jacobianism, Rodo combats in it the antidemocratic spirit of Renan and Nietzsche (in whom he finds “an abominable, reactionary spirit’ ’ [224]) and exalts democracy, moral values, and emulation. But undoubtedly the test of the work has lost the immediacy that its gallant confrontation of the United States and the defense of our values still retains.

Put into perspective, it is almost certain that these lines would not bear the name they have were it not for Rodo’s book, and I prefer to consider them also as a homage to the great Uruguayan, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. That die homage contradicts him on not a few points is not strange. Medardo Vi tier has already observed that “if there should be a return to Rodo, I do not believe that it would be to adopt the solution he offered concerning the interests of the life of the spirit, but rather to reconsider the problem. ”
³⁶

In proposing Caliban as our symbol, I am aware that it is not entirely ours, that it is also an alien elaboration, although in this case based on our concrete realities. But how can this alien quality be entirely avoided? The most venerated word in
Cuba—mambi—
was disparagingly imposed on us by our
enemies
at the
time of
the war for independence, and we sell) have not totally deciphered its meaning. It seems to have an African root, and in the mouth of the Spanish colonists implied the idea that all
independentistas
were so many black slaves—emancipated by that very war for independence—who of course constituted the bulk of the liberation army. The
independentistas,
white and black, adopted with honor something that colonialism meant as an insult. This is the dialectic of Caliban. To offend us they call us
mambi,
they call us
black;
but we reclaim as a mark of glory the honor of considering ourselves descendants of the
mamb(,
descendants of the rebel, runaway,
independentista
black —never descendants of the slave holder. Nevertheless, Propero, as we well know, taught his language to Caliban and, consequently, gave him a name. But is this his true name? Let us listen to this speech made in 1971:

To be completely precise, we still do not even have a name; we still have no name; we are practically unbaptized— whether as Latin Americans, Ibero-Americans, Indo-Americans. For the imperialists, we are nothing more than despised and despicable peoples. At least that was what we were. Since Gir6n they have begun to change their thinking. Racial contempt—to be a Creole, to be a mestizo, to be black, to be simply, a Latin American, is for them contemptible.
³⁷

This, naturally, is Fidel Castro on the tenth anniversary of the victory at Playa Giron.

lb assume our condition as Caliban implies rethinking our history from the
other
side, from the viewpoint of the
other
protagonist. The
other
protagonist of
The Tempest
(or, as we might have said ourselves,
The Hurricane)
is not of course Ariel but, rather, Prospero.
³⁸
There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the intellectual—as both Ponce and C6sire have seen.

Again Marti

This conception of our culture had already been articulately expressed and defended in the last century by the first among us to understand clearly the concrete situation of what he called—using a term I have referred to several times — “our mestizo America”: Jose Marti'
³⁹
to whom Rod6 planned to dedicate the first Cuban edition of
Ariel
and about whom he intended to write a study similar to those he devoted to Bolivar and Artigas (see 1359, 1375), a study that in the end he unfortunately never realized.

Although he devoted numerous pages to the topic, the occasion on which Marti offered his ideas on this point in a most organic and concise manner was in his 1891 article “Our America.” 1 will limit myself to certain essential quotations. But I should first like to offer some observations on the destiny of Marti s work.

During Marti's lifetime, the bulk of his work, scattered throughout a score of continental newspapers, enjoyed widespread fame. We know that Ruben Dario called Marti “Maestro” (as, for other reasons, his political followers would also call him during his lifetime) and considered him the Latin American whom he most admired. We shall soon see, on the other hand, how the harsh judgments on the United States that Marti commonly made in his articles, equally well know in his time, were the cause of acerbic criticism by the pro Yankee Sarmiento. But the particular manner in which Marti's writings circulated—he made use of journalism, oratory, and letter but
never published a single book—bears
no little responsibility for the relative oblivion into which the work of the Cuban hero fell after his death in 1895. This alone explains the fact that nine years after his death— and twelve from the time Marti stopped writing for the continental press, devoted as he was after 1892 to his political tasks—an author as absolutely ours and as far above suspicion as the twenty-year-old Pedro Henriquez Urena could write in 1904, in an article on Rodo’s
Ariel,
that the latter’s opinions on the United States are ‘ ‘much more severe than those formulated by two of the greatest thinkers and most brilliant psycho-sociologists of the Antilles: Hostos and Marti.”
⁴⁰
Insofar as this refers to Marti, the observation is completely erroneous; and given the exemplary honesty of Henriquez Urena, it led me, first, to suspect and later, to verify
that it was due simply to the fact that during
this period the great Dominican had not read,
hod been unable to read,
Marti adequately. Marti was hardly
published
at the time. A text such as the fundamental “Our America” is a good example of this fate. Readers of the Mexican newspaper
El Partido Liberal
could have read it on 30 January 1891. It is possible that some other local newspaper republished it,
⁴¹
although the most recent edition of Martis
Complete Works
does not indicate anything in this regard. But it is most likely that those who did not have the good fortune to obtain that newspaper knew nothing about the article—the most important document published in America from the end of the past century until the appearance in 1962 of the Second Declaration of Havana—for almost twenty years, at the end of which time it appeared in book form (Havana, 1910) in the irregular collection in which publication of the complete works of Marti was begun. For this reason Manuel Pedro Gonzalez is correct when he asserts that during the first quarter of this century the new generations did not know Marti. “A minima] portion of his work” was again put into circulation, starting with the eight volumes published by Alberto Ghiraldo in Madrid in 1925. Thanks to the most recent appearance of several editions of
his
complete works—actually still incomplete—“he has been rediscovered and reevaluated.”
⁴²
Gonzalez is thinking above all of the dazzling literary qualities of this work (‘ ‘the literary glory” as he says). Could we not add something, then, regarding the works’ fundamental ideological aspects? Without forgetting very important prior contributions, there are sill some essential points that explain why today, after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and because of it, Marti is being “rediscovered and reevaluated.” It was no mere coincidence that in 1953 Fide) named Marti as the intellectual author of the attack on the Moncade Barracks nor that Che should use a quotation from Marti—“it is the hour of the furnace, and only light should be seen”—to open his extremely important “Message to the Tricontinental Congress” in 1967. If Benedetti could say that Rodo’s time “was different from our own ... his true place, his true temporal homeland was the nineteenth century,’ ’ we must say, on the other hand, that Martis true place was the future and, for the moment, this era of ours, which simply cannot be understood without a thorough knowledge of this work.