Calibán-Retamar-1971

 

culture and identity

Caliban- article available on JSTOR

Interesting lecture notes available here- http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/sp5/nation/Ariel-Caliban.htm (See complimentary note on blog post of Ariel)

(These notes include info on Ariel, which is another required reading)

-Begins with explanation of Anderson’s Imagined Communities: ‘Imagined’ because no matter how small the nation, none of the individual members will ever meet or know all of the others, and so therefore the existence of some form of communion between a particular group of people must be imagined. A ‘community’  because no matter what the actual inequalities that exist within the nation it is at base ‘conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’

-narrative is at the heart of the imagined nation…. But what tropes structure this narration? One of the most important in Latin America is that of the movement from barbarism to civilisation.

- The history of America, for Sarmiento, for example, is that of ‘toldos de razas abyectas,’ of ‘un gran continente abandonado a los salvajes incapaces de progreso’. For such a vision, the act of governing, of creating a nation is one of destruction and conquest.

- As both Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson  point out, the nation-state suffers the contradictory desire to both affirm its modernity while at the same time attesting to an authenticity grounded in a distant autochthonous past.

- He returns to Shakespeare. Calibán is, of course, Shakespeare’s ‘savage and deformed slave’, the original inhabitant of the island that Prospero now rules. ‘Calibán’ is Shakespeare’s anagram of ‘cannibal’, and ‘cannibal’ derives from the Spanish deformation of ‘carib’ the original, warlike and supposedly anthropophagus  inhabitants of parts of the West Indies. A people extinguished by  Spanish genocide. For Fernández Retamar there is no doubt that The Tempest refers to America, that its island is one of America’s, and that Calibán is America’s Carib. 

-Calibán is truly America; indigenous and mestiza, no longer the provenance of a criollo elite. He quotes Simón Bolívar: ‘nuestro pueblo no es el europeo, ni el americano del norte, que más bien es un compuesto de África y de América que una emanación de Europa’

-Speaking of both language and rule: ‘The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.’

- Bhabha highlights the possibilities of utilising the coloniser’s language as a tool of liberation because of what he terms the ‘ambivalence’ of dominant discourses. This ambivalence fractures the attempts of colonisers, or criollo elites to create a totally hegemonic national discourse.

- By rejecting, or attempting to reject long established European models of civilisation we do not arrive at a vision that more accurately represents America’s authentic autochthonous ‘reality’. What Fernandez Retamar provides is an analysis that demonstrates the ways in which no dominant discourse is totally hegemonic.

- It is thus in a resistance that works through the interstices of colonial discourse that America begins to exist, and it is here that Rodó and Fernandez Retamar, despite the radical differences in their work, strangely, coincide.

- The difference between these two authors is that Fernandez Retamar realises that there is no gloriously authentic past to be resurrected in the creation of the liberated Latin American nation - whether that past be European or American.

Notes from the text

-Opening ? from Euro journalist: Does a L.Am culture exist?

-Author thinks: Do you exist? Without culture, there is no existence.

-Capitalist countries achieve homogeneity, L.Am. is mestizo. 

-mentions different forms of mestizaje

-L.Am taken for rough drafts/dull copies of Europeans, all use languages of colonizers

Caliban=Cannibal, comes from word Carib (which is a stereotype perhaps propagated by Colombus)

-Colonizer’s version: due to irremediable bestiality, Carib must be exterminated (in the process, also exterminated peaceful Araucos)

-In 1945, UN changes terminology…colonial or backward areas à economically underdeveloped

-First writer to assume L.Am. identification with Caliban, Lamming notes that “Prospero’s gift of language to Caliban is the very prison in which Caliban’s accomplishments with be realized and restricted.”

-John Wain says: Caliban has the pathos of the exploited people everywhere…even the lowest savage wished to be left alone rather than be “educated” and made to work for someone else.

-In 1969, three Antillian writers take up Caliban as a symbol.

- Thesis: “Our symbol is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but rather Caliban”

-Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood.

-Rodós essential position against N.Am. penetration would thus appear to be an afterthought in the work.

Observations on the destiny of Martí’s work:

-well-read in his lifetime, harsh judgements against the U.S. were well known

-work fell into “relative” oblivion upon his death in 1895.

-Martí is just NOW being really appreciated; his work had a future-oriented importance.

-Martí: rejection of the ethnocide that Europe practiced is total, identification with aboriginal culture

-Sarniento, on the other hand= anti-indigenist (“a great continent abandoned to savages incapable of progress”)

-Borges also had a bit of imperialism in him: “I believe our tradition is Europe”…The work of Borges, written in a Spanish difficult to read without admiration, is one of the American scandals of our time. His works (e.g Jardin de los senderos bifurcantes.) are the painful testimony of a class with no way out.

-Martiátegui: The time of free competition in capitalist econ. has come to an end. We are in an era of monopolies/empires. The L.Am. countries are experiencing a belated entry into competitive capitalism….Dominant positions have been established and the rest are economies.

-Mentions Fuentes, Death of Artemio Cruz, trying to maintain a semblance of leftist philosophy…yet he’s a pretty right-wing dude

-“our culture is-and can only be-the child of revolution, of our multisecular rejection of all colonialisms. Our culture, like every culture, requires as a primary condition our own existence.”

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So, Ariel can either serve Prospero as a slave or ally himself with Caliban in a struggle for true freedom.

-History is in the making!

-more interesting quotes: http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/sp5/nation/Caliban.htm