domingo, 7 de febrero de 2010

Cuando el ciudadano Kane posó sus garras en Segovia


  

Al magnate del periodismo norteamericano William Randloph Hearst (1863-1951), cuya vida inspiró Citizen Kane, la obra maestra de Orson Welles, no se le tiene mucho cariño en España. Varios historiadores a ambos lados del Atlántico, entre ellos Upton Sinclair, lo acusan de haber inventado la prensa amarilla para provocar, ganándose el apoyo popular, la guerra de Cuba. Hearst acabaría siendo conocido además por su impresionante colección de arte, de la que fue víctima también nuestra provincia. En concreto, se encaprichó, como es bien sabido, del claustro medieval, la sala capitular y el refectorio del Monasterio de Santa María la Real, que fue fundado en 1141 y luego adquirido (y rebautizado en nombre de San Bernardo de Clairvaux) por monjes cistercienses en un valle cerca de Sacramenia donde habían habitado San Juan de Pan y Agua y otros eremitas. 


 El edificio fue desmantelado cuidadosamente, numerando cada piedra y colocándolas en cajas de madera también numeradas y llenas de paja. Randolph lo compró en 1925 por 40.000 dólares pero, tras sufrir una grave crisis financiera durante la Gran Depresión, decidió no reconstruirlo. Además había surgido un problema: las cajas en que venían las piedras se pusieron en cuarentena debido a la fiebre aftosa que afectaba al ganado segoviano de la época. Más tarde, parte de la información del etiquetado se perdió porque, después de que quemar la paja de las cajas en prevención de posibles contagios, los encargados no se fijaron en los bien números y las colocaron como quisieron. El rancho californiano del multimillonario se quedó sin su claustro segoviano.


Durante casi tres décadas, las piedras del que ahora es uno de los edificios más antiguos del hemisferio occidental, quedaron olvidadas en un almacén de Brooklyn, Nueva York, adonde habían sido transportadas en carguero. Después de que finalmente otros dos magnates, Raymond Moss and William Edgemon, se acordaron de ellas y las compraron en 1952, fueron transportadas a North Miami Beach, al norte de Miami, donde las más de 35.000 piedras fueron reensambladas pieza por pieza. La broma les costó un millón y medio de dólares de la época y los más de veinte obreros, bajo la dirección de Allen Carswell, tardaron diecinueve meses, entre 1952 y 1953, en reconstruir el rompecabezas (si bien algunas de las piedras nunca se llegaron a usar). Años más tarde, volvió a pasar por varios dueños: el obispo Henry I. Louttit lo compró en 1964 para la Diócesis Episcopal del Sur de la Florida y luego se lo vendió al coronel Robert Pentland, Jr., quien acabaría regalándoselo a la parroquia episcopal de San Bernard de Clairvaux.

Además de servir oficialmente como templo episcopaliano, el “Antiguo monasterio español”, como se lo conoce ahora”, se ha convertido en atracción turística, que lógicamente es de especial interés para los segovianos (por si tienen interés, la dirección es 16711 West Dixie Highway, North Miami Beach, Florida 33160). Allí se celebran ahora misas y bodas. Afortunadamente, la abadía románica sigue siendo uno de los principales monumentos de Sacramenia.

Parte del desinterés que se demostró en la época por este edificio se debe a que después de siete siglos de uso religioso y como consecuencia de la desamortización de Mendizábal en 1835, que nacionalizó los bienes de los monasterios, el monasterio cisterciense pasó a manos de un terrateniente de la comarca que lo transformó en granero y establo. De la Iglesia de San Martín de Fuentidueña, cerca de Sacramenia, también se llevaron los norteamericanos un ábside, que ahora cumple las funciones de sala de conciertos en The Cloisters, parte de Museo Metropolitano de Arte de Nueva York. En el mismo lugar se encuentran partes de otras iglesias españolas.
Aunque algunas agencias internacionales acusan a España de estar a la cola de Europa en el cuidado del patrimonio artístico, afortunadamente pruebas del desprecio por las joyas artísticas nacionales como éstas son ya cosa del pasado. No obstante, siguen abandonados los valiosos restos otros monasterios que cayeron también a raíz de la desamortización de Mendizábal, como el de las Hoces del Duratón y muchos otros que se hallan cerca de la capital, que desde luego podrían haberse cuidado mejor.

*U.S. copyright law prohibits reproduction of the articles on this site "for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research" (see Title 17, US Code for details). If you would like to copy or reprint these articles for other purposes, please contact the publisher to secure permission.

Building the nation from the outside: Flexible citizenship, American war propaganda, and the birth of anti-Japanese hysteria in Peru.

Published in One World Periphery Reads the Other. Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. Ed. Ignacio López-Calvo. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 130-47


TO READ A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSION, CLICK HERE


Deep are my feelings for the Latin country I call my “second motherland”

Seiichi Higashide

I looked into the faces of these humble, bewildered people—shopkeepers, farmers, carpenters, barbers, and fishermen—starting out involuntarily on a voyage to an unknown future. These were not spies, saboteurs, bomb throwers, or plotters against the state.

John K. Emmerson, Third Secretary of the American Embassy in Peru


For some time now, anthropologists have praised how the flexible transnationalism of “nomadic” or multiply displaced subjects allows them to elude repressive state structures and state disciplining. In this context, referring to the cultural logics of Chinese transnationality, Aihwa Ong states that “‘Flexible citizenship’ refers to the cultural logics of capital accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions. In their quest to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes” (6). However, global conflicts have added nuances of victimhood to the purported liberatory benefits of the flexibility of transnational ethnicities. As we will see in this essay, under certain circumstances, the same deterritorialization and freedom of spatial constraints that can liberate subjects from oppression in their home nation-state can also lead to cultural othering and to the biggest spatial constraint of them all: imprisonment. As Ong posits, “even under conditions of transnationality, political rationality and cultural mechanisms continue to deploy, discipline, regulate, or civilize subjects in place or on the move. Although increasingly able to escape localization by state authorities, traveling subjects are never free of regulations set by state power, market operations, and kinship norms” (19-20).

From this perspective, I will discuss issues of citizenship, national identity, and racial anxiety as they are affected by foreign wartime propaganda and represented in Adiós to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (2000) (Namida no Adiósu, 1981). This testimonial was originally written in Japanese by Seiichi Higashide (1909-1997), an Issei (or first-generation Japanese emigrant) born in the Japanese island of Hokkaido who migrated to Peru in 1930. Following in the footsteps of other successful Japanese immigrants, Higashide soon became owner of several stores and the president of the Japanese Association in Ica (a town 500 miles south of Lima). Yet his dream would be cut short when the United States State Department reached an agreement with the Peruvian government to arrest Japanese Peruvians and deport them to concentration camps (euphemistically termed “internment,” “relocation,” or “alien detention” camps at the time) in the United States in order to use them as pawns in the exchange of prisoners of war with Japan. While Higashide managed to escape recruitment for the mandatory military service in Japan while he was living in Peru, this host nation was more successful in locating and arresting him. Considering that the dark chapter of the deportation of Japanese Latin Americans to U.S. concentration camps had not received much scholarly attention until recently, the publication and translation of Adiós to Tears is an invaluable landmark that allows us to hear the story from the victims’ perspective.

Adiós to Tears as a Testimonio

The narration of this betrayal by the Peruvian government is precisely what makes Adiós to Tears a testimonial account: the first-person narrator goes from an explanation of his individual trials to become the synecdochical voice of all members of the Japanese Peruvian community during the Pacific War. As is typical of the Latin American testimonio, Adiós to Tears was the first work published by the testimonialist, who was not a professional author but just a witness and victim of international repression. Also in consonance with the tradition of the testimonio, Higashide’s main goal is not of an aesthetic nature. Rather, his writing responds to a twofold commitment. First, his desire to inform the historical memory and conscience of Peru, the United States, and Japan gives his book pedagogical overtones. Secondly, ethical concerns are at the core of most arguments: he denounces sociopolitical injustice and corruption, moves the reader to collective political action, and demands a public apology from the U.S. government as well as redress for the Latin American Nikkei deported to U.S. concentration camps. As we will see, he also exposes the shortcomings of the Japanese Peruvian community. In all, the testimonialist hopes that his voice will provide formerly interned Japanese Latin Americans with political agency and, what is equally important, with a page in the history of the Pacific War. For this reason, from the onset of the narrative he states his claim to historical truth.

His book is part of a wider effort that expanded throughout his life in the United States (sending letters to members of Congress and even to President Ronald Reagan) to seek justice and redress for his fellow Japanese Latin Americans whose civil rights were flagrantly violated during World War II. When Higashide and his peers found out that the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians created by the U.S. Congress in 1981 was focusing solely on the abuses committed against 110,000 Japanese Americans, they decided that this commission also had to hear the voice of former Japanese Latin American internees. They were determined to expose how they were arrested or kidnapped between 1942 and 1944, imprisoned without charge in their respective Latin American countries, and transported at different times in seven different evacuation ships and one army transport airplane to Panama, and the United States.

Throughout the account of this sadly bizarre chapter in wartime history, the testimonialist affirms the authority of his voice as an eyewitness and as one of the victims who lived those tragic events. Of course, readers have to take into account the input of editors (who organized and selected information, added photographs, and so on) and others who glossed his text (there is a foreword by C. Harvey Gardiner, a preface by Elsa H. Kudo, and an epilogue by Julie Small). Moreover, as any autobiographical text, Adiós to Tears is, by definition, subjective and it goes through a process of selection of memories that can lead to modifications or exaggerations of actual events. However, the veracity of Higashide’s perspective can be corroborated by contrasting it to historical studies such as Gardiner’s Pawns in a Triangle of Hate, Barnhart’s “Japanese internees from Peru,” Emmerson’s chapter “Japanese and Americans in Peru,” included in The Japanese Thread, and Personal Justice Denied, a report of the United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. As to the motivations for writing Adiós to Tears, the testimonialist cites the urging of his children to leave a record of his life for them. It is clear from the onset of this chronological account, however, that he directs it to a wider audience than his children, even if he chose to use his native language. Higashide’s autobiographic, historical, and testimonial account provides a revealing insight into the influence of wartime foreign political propaganda on the formation of nativism, nationalistic xenophobia, and racial anxiety. More specifically, it exposes the manipulation by U.S. intelligence agencies of public opinion about the Nikkei community in Peru. Adiós to Tears is also an important document to understand the perception and self-perception of the Japanese diaspora in Peru as well as its significance for the formation of Peruvian national identity.

Anti-Japanese Xenophobia in Peru

As Higashide explains, of the 2,118 persons of Japanese descent (2264, according to Stephanie Moore) deported from thirteen Latin American countries, 84 percent (approximately 1,800) came from Peru and 1,094 were “family members who responded to the U.S. State Department’s summons to voluntarily join their interned fathers [and husbands], following a scathing protest by the Japanese government that the U.S. was inhumanely allowing women and children left behind to suffer” (177). Only 79 persons of Japanese descent (mostly Nissei and naturalized Peruvians) were allowed to return to Peru after the war was over. That the Peruvian government refused to accept the re-entry of deported Japanese alien residents after the end of the Pacific War proves that it had seen the armed conflict as an excellent opportunity to get rid of the unwanted Japanese presence in the country. We find additional evidence of Peruvian authorities’ aversion for Peruvian Nikkei in the fact that they demanded (like their counterparts from Ecuador and El Salvador) a selective repatriation policy that “would be lenient for Germans and highly restrictive for Japanese,” even though the latter were considered harmless by Washington and the former, dangerous (Gardiner 132).

In most cases, Peruvian Nikkei were arrested without evidence of illegal activity and when no charge had been made; afterward, no hearings were considered necessary and their assets in Peru were expropriated before they were embarked to an unknown destination. The deported Japanese Latin Americans were initially relocated in some of the ten internment camps administered by the War Relocation Authority, where they lived alongside the 110,000 Japanese Americans expelled from Hawaii and the west coast of the United States. Some time later, however, they were lodged in two detention camps in southern Texas known as Kenedy and Crystal City, which were run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and in an all-male one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Initially, thirteen states joined the treaty that shipped at least 8,500 Axis nationals from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States during World War II: Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama (including the Panama Canal Zone), and Peru. Later, British Honduras (Belize), Chile, Cuba, and Paraguay would join them. To Higashide’s dismay, among the one thousand Japanese Peruvians corralled and deported in the name of the Western Hemisphere’s security were not only resident aliens, but also native-born Peruvians and naturalized citizens (although some had been denationalized by a measure targeted at persons who supported the Axis powers and Nisei [second-generation Japanese] who had received their formal education in Japan). When Japanese Peruvians and their friends protested, regional and governmental officials would refuse admitting any responsibility by stating: “The American Government has given us orders” (Gardiner 91).

According to the report Personal Justice Denied, elaborated by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, before any deportations occurred, almost 500 Japanese Peruvians (978, according to Emmerson [139]) had requested repatriation at the Spanish Embassy in Lima, which represented Japan’s interests in Peru and played the role of protecting power for Japanese Latin American internees (308). While most of the first 141 deportees that left Callao on April 4, 1942 aboard the S.S. Etolin were volunteers, the majority of the other Peruvian Nikkei in the concentration camps had been forcibly deported (other than family members who wished to be reunited with their father or husband). After the end of the war, considering that neither Peru nor the United States would accept them, over 700 Japanese Peruvian men and over 1000 family members chose transportation to Japan (Barnhart 174). Other 300 remained in a legal no man’s land as “stateless” refugees in the United States. In September of 1946, they were offered “parole” relocation in a farming community in Seabrook, New Jersey, and 209 of them agreed to moving there as parolees. In spite of having been forcibly and illegally transferred by the U.S. government, Latin American Japanese were now considered “illegal aliens on conditional release” (Higashide 8). Since their passports had been confiscated before arriving in the United States and the U.S. State Department had forbidden American consuls in Latin America to issue visas to the Japanese Latin American deportees, they entered the country “illegally,” according to the Immigration and Naturalization Services (Gardiner 29). This strange situation, which had been designed to justify a second deportation or repatriation to Japan, would continue until 1954, when they were finally given entry visas.

The historian Harvey Gardiner points out that contacts between the Peruvian and U.S. governments regarding the deportation and internment of Japanese Peruvians had begun during the 1938 Pan American Conference in Lima (10). Three decades after the events took place, Third Secretary of the American Embassy in Peru, John K. Emmerson, referred to President Manuel Prado’s cabinet in these terms: “Rarely has a foreign government cooperated so enthusiastically in actions urged by Washington” (135). As Higashide reveals, in the late 1930s U.S. intelligence agencies realized that a large number of officials in several Latin American countries, including Peru, Argentina and Chile, were increasingly showing estrangement from the United States and expressing their affinity with the Axis Powers. To reverse this situation, in June 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigations to post agents in U.S. embassies in Latin America to carry on intelligence-gathering operations. Their objective was to pressure South American governments, promote animosity against the Axis powers among the civilian population, and supervise the activities of pro-Axis sympathizers and “potentially dangerous” Axis nationals (mostly, community leaders) in order to prevent subversive propaganda, espionage, or sabotage. Lacking competence in Japanese and often trusting questionable Peruvian sources, FBI agents propagated rumors about the “military-type” organization of the Japanese Peruvian community and its plans to create a “fifth column.” They also exaggerated the number of males and the percentage of them who had served in the Japanese army (Gardiner 10). By the same token, Gardiner cites Ambassador R. Henry Norweb’s eagerness to improve diplomatic relations with Peru (a country that could provide a significant economic contribution to the war) by helping its government get rid of the “threat” posed by residents of Japanese descent, as it had already been done in Panama (13-14).

Many Peruvians willingly collaborated with these officials’ political designs and, according to Higashide, Chinese shopkeepers were also suspect of collaboration with American instigators. With no proof to back up this speculation, he considers business competition and the Japanese invasion of China as plausible incentives. Higashide’s guess is confirmed by Emmerson, who writes in his memoirs about the Chinese informants who aided the U.S. embassy. In any case, according to Gardiner, even though Sino-Peruvian merchants were happy to see their Japanese competitors included in the Proclaimed List, lack of close contact with the Japanese Peruvian community since the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) severely limited the amount of information they could provide.

In any case, the FBI’s tactics would soon yield the expected results:
In 1939, outrageous rumors began flying about, and disquieting developments were reported from various parts of Peru. Completely unsubstantiated reports that the Japanese in Peru had organized a “fifth column,” that they had secretly built a military base, that they had landed large shipments of arms and ammunition somewhere in South America, etc., came to be rumored as if completely true. (Higashide 103)

During the following months, public opinion about Peruvian Nikkei gradually shifted from indifference (or perhaps passive prejudice and economic jealousy) to radical distrust and animosity. As to Peruvian officials and the government, they capitalized on this historic event to rid themselves of a social group they obviously despised. Some of them, such as Dr. Javier Correa Elías, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Pedro Beltrán, the Peruvian ambassador to the United States, were in favor of the deportation of all Japanese nationals in Peru (Gardiner 64, 106).

In addition to spreading false rumors, another tactic used by U.S. intelligence agents was the creation of a blacklist of dangerous Axis nationals known as the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals:

It was December 24, 1941. On that unforgettable day, two major Peruvian
newspapers, El Commercio [sic] and La Prensa, published a lista negra, a “blacklist” of approximately 30 “dangerous Axis nationals” residing in Peru. Of the 30, approximately 10 were Japanese. Shivers passed through me. “Can this really be true?” I thought. My name was included in the list. We learned that the list had been leaked to reporters by a local U.S. agency. (Higashide 114)

As we can see, the Peruvian print media was quick to collaborate with an American propaganda machine designed to create distrust among the local population, to dishearten and bankrupt citizens from Germany, Japan, and Italy, and to expel the leaders of their communities.

Dark clouds became darker when, in 1942, representatives from the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela created the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense, which recommended Latin American governments the internment of Axis nationals and the close control of potential subversive activities. On January 24, 1942, the Peruvian government severed diplomatic ties with Japan and the deportation of leaders of the Japanese Peruvian community began. For months, the United States continued to encourage and facilitate arrests and deportations, including that of Higashide. Yet, in his testimonial, he never abandons his good humor and confesses that he actually felt proud, since this surprising notoriety somehow reflected his achievements. Higashide provides one last example of anti-Japanese inflammatory propaganda in Peru. In the last days of 1942, the FBI noticed a new fashion trend among Japanese Peruvians and managed to turn it into the so-called “people’s uniform incident”: a tailor in Lima, inspired by the latest fashion in Japan, had decided to use khaki-colored cloth to make what the FBI inaccurately claimed were “military uniforms.” The tailor’s claim that the uniforms were simply a way to save money in wartime was found unconvincing. Immediately following the FBI’s reports, twenty employees of the tailor shops and the people who had placed orders were arrested and deported to a concentration camp in Panama, leaving their families behind.

Along the same lines, following unsubstantiated rumors about a potential landing of the Imperial Japanese Army in Peru and about the accumulation of weapons by Japanese residents, many were inhumanely removed from coastal areas or given only three days to move elsewhere: “In order to enforce the expulsion order, the governor of Ancash Province went out himself, snapping a bullwhip, to force out local Japanese” (Higashide 127). Those destined for Talara were transported through the desert in the extreme heat of summertime for two and a half days, in uncovered military trucks and without food provisions. Others met an even more tragic fate: several members of the group that was moved to the Huaraz region (the mountain town of Huaraz is 10,000 feet above sea level) could not adjust to the unfavorable climate and died of disease. Higashide denounces other unjust practices, such as sending government auditors to Japanese-owned shops to confiscate the profits from daily sales, leaving only a prescribed amount for the owner’s daily expenses. Soon, all large Japanese-owned businesses were harassed by this economic warfare into closing or were simply ordered to close. The beneficiaries of this economic warfare, he explains, were their business rivals: Chinese merchants who bought the businesses and Japanese owners of small shops who flourished with the elimination of competition.
While the strategic use of false rumors was designed to turn Peruvian public opinion against the Axis powers and its overseas citizens, there was also a more practical reason for the forced transportation of Peruvian Nikkei to internment camps in the United States: “American authorities apparently intended to transfer all ‘enemy aliens’ residing in South America to the United States for the purpose of exchange, if necessary, for Americans held in Japan” (Higashide 129). As Gardiner has explained, in the plans for the exchange of prisoners of war, the Japanese government had designated ten international merchants from Peru and Bolivia and twenty-five Japanese residents of Mexico. However, Japan had not requested the repatriation of the 226 Peruvian Nikkei included by the United States in the exchange list and, in fact, was not interested it. Eventually, of the 737 Latin American Nikkei (55 percent of the total exchange) who were used as pawns and who sailed aboard the M.S. Gripsholm from New York to Japan, 484 were from Peru (Gardiner 84). The historian Stephanie Moore cites the oral testimony of the Peruvian citizen Naeko Tamashiro (recorded by Wesley Ueunten, of the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project; Lima, Peru, March 25, 1999), in which the latter remembers the horrors of her deportation to Okinawa, then under United States control:

Not even at night could we rest… at night, Americans and non-Americans—there were Filipinos among the soldiers—would come to our village […] to rape women  […]. They broke into homes. Today, one can go to a court, but back then, one could only cry in silence. After the war, there were many of such incidents. Many women, who now must be seventy or eighty, suffered. (n.p.; my translation)

Throughout the narrative, Higashide never hides his disappointment with the violation of human rights perpetrated by the United States (a country that he had always admired for its principles of freedom and equality), even if they took place in wartime and the Axis nations were responsible for similar or worse injustices: “Why, then, had that country moved to take such unacceptable measures? Where was the spirit of individual rights and justice that had filled the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? If I termed Peru, even provisionally, a ‘third rate country,’ was not America, in this instance, no different?” (143). Likewise, he voices his disappointment with Peru, the host country where he had found a new life and started a family. In fact, his final deportation culminates a series of disappointments with Peru that had begun early in his arrival, when he did not expect to find the desolate desert terrain of the Peruvian coast. To this first negative reaction to the local landscape, he adds a description of his cultural shock upon learning about Peruvians’ penchant for bribery, theft, alcohol abuse, and superstition. Although Adiós to Tears opens with a paragraph in which the testimonialist declares his unconditional love for his three motherlands (Japan, Peru, and the United States), he now voices his feeling of betrayal:

Locked within its hold, I suddenly became very angry. I had earlier felt a deep hatred towards wars, but now I grew angry at the cowardliness of the Peruvian government. If Peru had been a direct enemy of Japan, I would have understood my situation. Peru had severed diplomatic ties with Japan, but it was still a third party to the dispute. Even if it had been pressured by the United States, what country with any pride and independence would have said, “Yes. We shall comply,” and hand over innocent people? If it were only those with Japanese citizenship, a case might have been made. But the Peruvian government had given in to American pressure even to the point of deporting naturalized citizens and eruvian citizens who had been born there. […] I had always protested when I heard Peru called “a third-rate country” or an “uncivilized country,” but now I felt justified in using such terms myself. (142-43)

Although at first the United States had only asked for the deportation of diplomatic and consular officials of the Axis powers, enemy aliens considered dangerous, and some Japanese businessmen, the Peruvian government preferred to get rid of its entire Japanese community. Later, lack of coordination between Peruvian and American officials led to the deportation of Japanese nationals and even Peruvians of Japanese descent who were neither considered dangerous nor included in the blacklists compiled by the American embassy. Furthermore, when men on the Proclaimed List escaped deportation through bribery or substitution, the Peruvian police arrested others just to fill the numbers (sometimes from Peruvian prisons). Guided by contempt for this ethnic group, they often used coercion to benefit from the situation. To make matters worse, after the war was over, Peru used the exclusionary law against Japanese immigration it had promulgated in 1940 to forbid the return of Peruvian Nikkei deported to American concentration camps while simultaneously requesting the return of German internees. Indeed, after President Harry Truman signed a decree for the expulsion of all the Latin American internees still in the United States, Peru was one of the twelve Central and South American countries that decided, in the 1945 international conference of American states that took place in Mexico City, not to accept the return of their Japanese residents. So determined was the Peruvian government to not allow the re-entry that it took the issue to the United Nations. Eventually, as Higashide notes, Peru would allow the return of 79 persons who held Peruvian citizenship, but 364 of the original 2,118 detainees “remained in the United States with no place to go” (Higashide 177). The complaints of the Spanish embassy were to no avail.

Beyond the condemnation of American wartime propaganda, Higashide ponders about additional causes of the anti-Japanese riots during the Pacific War. In his view, Peruvian Nikkei were themselves partly at fault for their feeling of cultural superiority and their refusal to identify with their host country or become naturalized. These attitudes were sometimes reflected in the tradition of sending children to study in Japan (the equivalent of the Kibei in the United States). Higashide also criticizes their voluntary isolation from Peruvian society, which created a separate “nation within a nation” (Higashide 77). Along with a lack of interest in assimilating into mainstream society, Higashide lists other causes behind this new anti-Japanese sentiment, including the fact that they were the last wave of immigrants, their rapid economic success, and their decision to congregate in Lima, instead of dispersing throughout the country.

Japanese Peruvian Resistance

Japanese Peruvians were not passive victims of international interests during the Pacific War. Along with the denunciation of racism and injustice, Higashide also provides examples of Japanese resistance. For instance, some avoided deportation by hiding, paying “substitutes” to take their places, or through the use of bribes. These acts of resistance continued after the deportations. He mentions the defiance of the “anti-citizenship” group in the detention camp, who advocated renouncing U.S. citizenship. As he explains, they received harsh treatment from American authorities and were placed in extremely crowded conditions. Another form of resistance used by Japanese Peruvian internees was litigation. Following the example of some German internees who had filed habeas corpus petitions to challenge their detention, claiming that they were not natives or citizens of an enemy country as stated in the Alien Enemy Act of 1789, Japanese Peruvians hired Wayne M. Collins, a San Francisco attorney who was visiting Crystal City at the time, to pursue the same goals.

In other passages, Higashide is critical of some oppositional attitudes. He condemns, for example, the demeanor of a group of internees that he calls “small frogs.” Considering it a “war of attrition,” these single men decided to protest by breaking chinaware, thinking that their destruction of state property would decrease the enemy’s material resources. At one point, Higashide voiced his embarrassment, an action that gained him a reputation for being pro-American: “I grew irritated by such foolishness and warned them to stop. I ‘sermonized’ to them that, as Japanese, they were representatives of a great civilization and were obligated to behave in a higher, more civilized manner” (159). Later in the narrative, Higashide expresses again his detachment from a Japanese militaristic ideology that had survived in the isolated Nikkei community in Peru. He describes how some of his fellow internees, upon hearing news that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, considered committing ritual suicide: “Speaking very loudly, the Peruvian businessman addressed the Japanese American, ‘If this report is true, we should take up short swords and mutually stab each other in suicide here and now. Is that not so?’” (173). As we can see, a collective psychology that had been characterized by its cohesiveness throughout the months of internment now begins to gradually break apart.
Along with their husbands, Japanese Peruvian women were also active in confronting the manipulation of their families by international interests. The heroic demeanor of Higashide’s wife first while the latter was hiding in an excavated secret room in their house, and later, when she was left behind in Peru, is an excellent example. During these trying times, her courage challenged the testimonialist’s early doubts about the character of Nisei—she proved to be a “true daughter of Japan” and an example of the “way of the warriors” (131). Gardiner also mentions the rage of Japanese Peruvian women who were ordered to clean toilets and bathrooms aboard the Cuba: “The outspokenness of the Japanese women, contradicting their usual quiet and self-effacing demeanor, possibly derived from the moral and psychological reinforcement their husbands provided” (94). Curiously, their behavior seems to go against Gardiner’s expectations, who had insisted, throughout his book, on the docility and cooperativeness of Japanese internees in contrast with the belligerent attitude of their German counterparts.

At a personal level, Higashide decided to avoid the government’s economic boycott against Japanese nationals by becoming his wife’s “shop manager.” By closing the shop and starting a new one with a business permit in her name, he hoped that her status as a Peruvian citizen would prevent the closing of their business. Later, in a new example of resistance and ingenuity, he outwitted Peruvian authorities by hiding in his own home. In his underground room, he was able to listen to broadcasts from Japan as he had connected the antenna of his shortwave radio to the antenna at a neighboring school. After almost one year in hiding, in January 1944 Higashide made the mistake of thinking that it was safe to appear in public and was arrested. However, as happened when he first read his name in the blacklist, he felt proud: “While it is debatable whether or not I was a major figure, the fact was I was the only person arrested in the province of Ica this time. Four detectives had been sent from Lima to arrest me. Perhaps, I thought, I was a major figure after all” (136).

Eventually, he was placed in a urine-soaked jail cell where he had to eat “disgusting, smelly meals” (239), while waiting to be deported to an undisclosed location. On the day of his deportation, Higashide realized that he was a “prisoner of war” when he was led to the gangway by American soldiers carrying rifles. In a scene that is eerily reminiscent of the arrival of Chinese coolies to Latin America and the Caribbean, Japanese Peruvian prisoners were forced to undress and surrender all their possessions. Then, they were locked into the hold of a ship that would take them to concentration camps first in Panama, where they did hard labor without pay, and then in the United States. Since Higashide did not have his family with him, he was sent to Kenedy, a camp for “single men.” Six months had passed after being deported from Peru, when in July 1944 he was finally reunited with his wife and five children at the “family camp” in Crystal City, Texas. He would spend two and a half years there. The agreements for the treatment of prisoners of war reached in the Geneva Convention of 1929 were violated by putting Japanese Latin American civilians to unpaid hard labor both during voyages and in the Panama Canal Zone. The United States also breached the international law that prohibited sending prisoners from a nonbelligerent state to a belligerent one.

The price of social prestige and assimilation

Aihwa Ong maintains that “in translocal strategies of accumulation, the migrant’s ability to convert economic capital into social prestige is limited by the ethnoracial moral order of the host society” (25). This statement could certainly explain Higashide’s trials. From the time when a fellow Japanese national gave him the Otani Company in the town of Cañete (located in southern Lima Region), Higashide made a conscious effort to make acquaintances beyond the imaginary (albeit seemingly insurmountable) borders of the Japanese Peruvian community. He was interested in making this type of connections not only for business purposes but also to integrate himself into his new country or, in his own words, to have a “sense of belonging” (8). That these upper-level social groups (which included prominent figures in political, business, and law enforcement circles) accepted him must have seemed like a blessing at first; however, this hard-earned social prestige was later deemed enough to warrant the label of “dangerous” in the eyes of U.S. intelligence agencies. Indeed, his success in securing the affection and support of the Peruvian elite thanks to both his economic success and his position as a leader of the Japanese community in Ica ended up bringing about his demise: in spite of having avoided involvement in political activities, he was one of the first victims of wartime anti-Japanese propaganda. His first reaction, Higashide confesses, was wondering why such a young man without political affiliations, with modest economic success in a provincial town, and who had been in Peru for only a decade would be included in the blacklist. Only some time later would he find out the true reasons behind his arrest and deportation: “rather than being influential persons or leaders within their respective communities, those on the first list were Axis nationals who had involved themselves deeply with the local Peruvian establishment” (Higashide 115). Months of extenuating work in the local food processing factory in Seabrook, New Jersey, and the subsequent relocation to Chicago would eventually lead Higashide to economic success also in the United States, but he never forgot the injustice: he would devote the rest of his life to educating the public about this little known injustice and to requesting redress from the U.S. government for this violation of human rights. The struggle continues today thanks to the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project (JPOHP).

Conclusion

Adiós to Tears is a remarkable testimonial because it shows how, along with the violation of human rights committed against Japanese Americans during World War II, the U.S. government went beyond its borders in its recruitment of pawns for the exchange of prisoners of war. Therefore, it adds a new page to the history of the Japanese diaspora, and to the sad episode of the deportation of Latin American residents and citizens to U.S. concentration camps. At the same time, it reveals additional nuances to the historical notion of citizenship in Peru and the rest of Latin America. As Barnhart points out,

The drastic treatment meted out by an American state, Peru, to a group of its
citizens with the encouragement and assistance of another democracy, the United States, and eventually with the sanction of all the republics of the Western Hemisphere reveals the sad level to which the status of citizenship in this democratic nations declined under the pressures of prejudice and war. (178)

This testimonio is also crucial to understand how an outside influence (in this case American anti-Japanese agitators) successfully overturned Peruvian officials’ widespread support for the Axis powers, and turned mainstream population against their Japanese neighbors, including those naturalized Peruvian or born in Peru. Cultural prejudice together with economic competition and wartime anxiety had become the perfect culture medium for the birth of anti-Japanese hysteria.

One of the protagonists of this deportation program, Emmerson, tried to find an explanation for the violation of the human rights of innocent Nikkei in the atmosphere of the times: “The war against Japan was a total war. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the enemy was deemed capable of any act, no matter how unreasonable or unlikely. As a consequence, the enthusiastic exploitation of prejudice, hatred, emotion, and covetousness became respectable and acceptable” (149). However, he also admits his shame in having participated in the deportation-internment program:

As I look back on the Peruvian experience I am not proud to have been part of the Japanese operation. One steeled oneself against the heartbreak being
inflicted on hundreds of innocent Japanese caught up in the war-generated
hysteria that marked each of them a suspect. It is hard to justify our pulling
them from their homes of years and herding them, whether born in Japan or in Peru, onto ships bound for a strange land, where they would live in
concentration camps. (148)

At any rate, the end result was the tragic disruption of the lives of hundreds of Latin American Nikkei, some of which were separated from their families forever. Adiós to Tears also challenges the traditional debates about Peruvian national identity that would only consider the dichotomy between criollos and indigenous people, disregarding people of African and Asian descent. Finally, even though the cosmopolitanism of “flexible citizenship” can be socially and economically rewarding in times of peace, Higashide’s testimony shows its structural limits, dangers, and personal costs during wartime, regardless of how much hard-earned cultural capital and social prestige have been accumulated as a strategy of flexible positioning.

Works Cited

Barnhart, Edgard N. “Japanese internees from Peru.” Pacific Historical Review 31.2 (May 1962):169-78.
Bertin, Gilles. “Migrants’ US hopes sunk after Peru hell.” The Standard.com. 21Feb. 2007. , accessed 14 March 2009.
Emmerson, John K. The Japanese Thread: A Life in the U.S. Foreign Service. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978.
Gardiner, C. Harvey. Pawns in a Triangle of Hate. The Peruvian Japanese and the United States. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981.
Higashide, Seiichi. Adiós to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps. Foreword, C. Harvey Gardiner; preface, Elsa H. Kudo; epilogue, Julie Small. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
---. Namida no Adiósu: Nikkei Peru imin, Beikoku kyosei shuyo no ki. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 1981.
Moore, Stephanie. “Los Nikkei internados durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial: La larga lucha por una reparación justa.” Discover Nikkei.com. 12 March 2007. , accessed 14 March 2007.
Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1999.
United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. “Appendix: Latin Americans.” Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1997.




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A postmodern plátano’s Trujillo: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, more Macondo than McOndo

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Published in Antípodas 20 (2009): 75-90

A NOTE FROM YOUR AUTHOR
I know what Negroes are going to say. Look, he’s writing Suburban Tropical now.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao


This purpose of this essay is to evaluate Junot Díaz (1968-)’s role as a native informant in his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as well as the anxiety of influence that has affected his writing and his unacknowledged debt with Magical Realism. It will also frame this novel within the tradition of the novel of the Latin American dictator and, in particular, within the narrative cycle about the Trujillato. Eleven years after the publication of his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Drown (1996), Dominican American writer Junot Díaz published The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Sargent First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007, and the prestigious Pulitzer Prize the following year. This captivating novel narrates the way in which the long-gone Trujillato (1930-1961) still affects, during the 1980s and early 1990s, the life of Oscar Wao, a heavyset, suicidal, and sexually frustrated Dominican American boy who grows up in New Jersey and is obsessed with science fiction books, girls, and the fukú curse that has damned his family for generations. Toward the middle of the novel, however, there are several chapters with events that take place decades earlier and are devoted to his mother, Hypatía Belicia “Beli” Cabral, and his grandfather, Abelard, both of whom suffered directly the tragic consequences of living under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina (1891-1961; ruled 1930-61).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao deals with topics that had already appeared in Drown, such as diasporic Dominican identity, but, like many novels of the Latin American dictator, adds a new meditation on the nature of dictatorship as well as on the dangers and far reach of authoritarian power. As Díaz himself explains, the writing experience was also part of a process of decolonization and a soul-searching voyage back to the source, to paraphrase Alejo Carpentier’s novel Viaje a la semilla (1944): “You come to the United States and the United States begins immediately, systematically, to erase you in every way, to suppress those things which it considers not digestible. You spend a lot of time being colonized. Then, if you’ve got the opportunity and the breathing space and the guidance, you immediately—when you realize it—begin to decolonize yourself” (Céspedes 896).



This personal search for the true essence of Dominicanness, however, is not exempt from stereotyping and essentialism. Overall, the novel defines Dominicans (and especially their historic leaders, Trujillo and his court favorite and surrogate, Joaquín Balaguer 1906-2002; President 1960-1962, 1966-1978, and 1986-1996), as irredeemable racists who are ashamed of their own African heritage: “Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian, half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe” (26). By the same token, Oscar’s mother, Beli, prefers to consider herself “India” rather than “morena” (115), and her mother, La Inca, despises her own black skin (80). Even worse, when Beli’s parents and sisters die, no one on her father’s side of the family wants to adopt her because of her darkness. As a result, she ends up being a sort of child servant or slave (known in Haitian Creole as restavek or restavec) for a poor family that abuses her and burns her back with acid when she insists on going to school. As Yunior, the hilarious narrator and aspiring writer (Lola, Oscar’s beautiful sister, also narrates part of the story), tells us, Beli’s sisters, “Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf (often suffering Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow” (213). Despite his humorous take on Dominican white supremacy and black self-hate, at one point he bitterly denounces, “That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen” (248).

Excluding Oscar Wao, the rest of the Dominican men in the novel are all unfaithful machos, who often take pride in this demeanor, until we reach the quintessential super-macho of them all: Trujillo. In an interview, Díaz shows his predisposition to deal with this topic in his novel: “I also wanted to screw with traditional Dominican masculinity, write about one of its weirder out-riders” (O’Rourke n.p.). However, the fact that several characters present Oscar as not only the exception to the rule but also a true Dominican oddity seems to have the opposite effect to what, according to this interview, Díaz was trying to accomplish. Indeed, Oscar’s peers question his Dominicanness because he is not good at sports, does not play dominoes and is not a good fighter, but mainly because of his lack of success with women. In direct contrast, his college roommate, the womanizing Yunior, defines himself as “the biggest player of them all” (186) and lightheartedly considers the need to check himself into “bootie-rehab” (175) because he cannot stop cheating on his girlfriends (including Oscar’s sister). This blatant male chauvinism, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells us, is taught at an early age by Dominican mothers. Thus, Beli had the following reaction after noticing that her son, Oscar, was crying for a girl: “She threw him to the floor. Dale un galletazo, she panted, then see if the little puta respects you” (15). And yet at one point Dominican society during the Trujillato is defined by its blatant homoeroticism: “When the time came, Abelard would shake El Jefe’s hand, cover him in the warm effusion of his adoration (if you think the Trujillato was not homoerotic, then, to quote the Priest, you got another thing coming)” (215).




Considering this unfettered portrayal of Dominican society, and especially if we take into account the harsh reception that Julia Álvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) had in the Dominican Republic, it is somewhat surprising that on May 1 2008, the Dominican cámara de diputados officially named Díaz “cultural ambassador of the Dominican Republic in the world” and that he was also acknowledged by the Secretaría de Estado de Cultura during Santo Domingo’s International Book Fair. In contrast with Álvarez, Díaz, who, as we have seen, is much more aggressive in his denunciation of what he perceives as the Dominican Republic’s social ills, attaches no disclaimers to his novel and there is no mention of previous literary or historical texts about the Trujillato in his long acknowledgments after the novel. Whether this differential treatment responds to his defining himself as a Dominican author, his receiving a Pulitzer Award, or any other reason is left to speculation but it is nonetheless noteworthy. It is, in any case, a reason to praise the Dominican government.

The Native Informant

In the search for a transnational Dominican identity that permeates Díaz’s novel, his characters find several “others” that help their own self-exploration. They contrast Dominican American identity to those of Euro-Americans and Dominicans on the island: “That’s white people for you. They lose a cat and it’s an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon” (66); and later: “We postmodern plátanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion” (139). These two polarizations bring about the following question: for whom does Díaz write? In a recent interview, he insists on his refusal to act as a cultural translator for his readers, as some of his peers do: “I feel I’m not a voyeur nor am I a native informer. I don’t explain cultural things, with italics or with exclamation or with side bars or asides” (Céspedes 900). And he repeats the same idea in a different interview: “Plenty of writers of color will give you that voyeuristic thrill. I just don’t want to participate in those patterns. Way too often writers of color are, basically, nothing more than performers of their ‘otherness.’ I’m trying to figure out ways to disrupt that” (Lewis n.p.).

However, let us reconsider: in reality, is he not acting as a native informant? Is he not unwillingly giving us that “voyeuristic thrill” that he tries to avoid? While the novel at times suggests that Díaz writes with Dominican and Dominican American readers in mind (for example, when the narrator states “It’s all true, plataneros” 155), it is also evident that many of Yunior’s footnotes (or are they Díaz’s footnotes?) are concise explanations of slang (pariguayo), beliefs (guanguas, mongooses, fukús, zafas), traditions, superstitions, legends, and historical characters and events with which most Dominicans and Dominican Americans are already familiar. Díaz himself has explained the role of these footnotes: “The footnotes are there for a number of reasons; primarily, to create a double narrative. The footnotes, which are in the lower frequencies, challenge the main text, which is the higher narrative. The footnotes are like the voice of the jester, contesting the proclamations of the king. In a book that’s all about the dangers of dictatorship, the dangers of the single voice—this felt like a smart move to me” (O’Rourke n.p). While this approach is commendable, the information included in his footnotes is still very close to what I would consider the cultural translations of a native informant, even if Díaz leaves entire phrases in Spanish without translation and refuses to use quotation marks or italics. And, of course, that the novel was written in English also suggests that he did not have the “plataneros” on the island in mind.

Incidentally, these footnotes reflect Díaz’s totalizing attempt to grasp the entire reality of the period by considering, albeit in a succinct way, most of the historical landmarks and highlights of the Trujillato. In effect, whereas Manuel Vázquez Montalbán devotes an entire novel, Galíndez (1990), to the kidnapping and assassination of the Basque exile Jesús Galíndez by Trujillo’s henchmen, Díaz summarizes the event in a footnote with a quotation from Robert D. Crassweller’s Trujillo: the Life and Times of a Caribbean (1966); while Julia Álvarez re-creates the tragic story of the Mirabal sisters in In the Time of the Butterflies, again Díaz mentions them in passing in another footnote; likewise the elaborate characters of Joaquín Balaguer and the Johnny Abbes in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000) are reduced here to a couple of derogatory footnotes; finally, whereas Freddy Prestol Castillo dedicates his testimonial novel El Masacre se pasa a pie (1973) and Edwidge Danticat her novel The Farming of Bones (1998) to Trujillo’s genocide of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the Dominican Republic, Díaz cannibalizes once again all these events in a single footnote, as if trying his best to re-create the entire reality of the period without leaving aside any important event.

Junot Díaz’s Anxiety of Influence

Díaz reveals, in another interview, the reason he dared to approach the topic of the Trujillato even though it seemed so saturated after the publication of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. According to him, there is still something essential missing from the novels about the Trujillato: “Como novela, La fiesta del Chivo es irreprochable, y, sin embargo, cuando la leí me dejó mal sabor de boca, porque me di cuenta de que a Trujillo le hubiera encantado, porque perpetúa el mito. Yo intento interrumpir el ritual celebratorio. El poder de Trujillo se perpetúa en las historias que se escriben sobre él. Mi libro trata de levantar una contrahistoria” (Lago n.p.). But again, it could be argued that Díaz’s Trujillo (a character in the shadows that does not have a main role in the novel but whose ever-extending influence affects everyone even after his death) perpetuates the myth more than Vargas Llosa’s. The recollection of so many of the rumors, anecdotes, and legends about what Yunior humorously calls the “world’s first culocracy” (217) undoubtedly responds not only to the fascination of Dominicans with this larger-than-life historical character but also to that of the author. Along these lines, in a more than arguable remark, footnote number 9 in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao claims that Joaquín Balaguer “appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat” (90). Seemingly with the intention to solve this inaccuracy, Díaz often calls his character “The Election Thief” and “Demon Balaguer,” as if to leave no doubt about his evil nature, only overshadowed by Trujillo’s. Likewise, besides using some of the numerous and well known nicknames ascribed to Trujillo, Díaz often calls him “the Failed Cattle Thief” as if to make sure (as Bertolt Brecht would have done) that readers do not fall into the temptation of identifying with the tyrant. Yet some passages actually give the impression that Trujillo, in his exaggerated machismo, is the most Dominican of all Dominicans: “If you think the average Dominican guy’s bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse. Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass” (217). In fact, in an interview Díaz corroborates this assumption: “ Trujillo was so fundamentally Dominican, and for a Dominican writer writing about masculinity, about dictatorship, power, he’s indispensable” (O’Rourke n.p).

Díaz’s interpretation of the Era of Trujillo has been mediated by his reading of novels and historical texts about the period, including Trujillo’s political propaganda disguised as biography and historical records; Jesús Galíndez’s La Era de Trujillo (1958); Robert D. Crassweller’s Trujillo. The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator; and perhaps also José Almoina’s A Satrapy in the Caribbean (1949) and Yo fui secretario de Trujillo (1950), and Bernard Diederich’s Trujillo: the Death of the Goat (1978; in the description of Trujillo’s assassination). Although Díaz makes a conscious effort to differentiate his re-creation of the period from these other texts, several of his main messages and conclusions coincide with those of previous works. Thus, the character of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral brings to mind the condemnation of patriarchal attitudes and male submissiveness to the dictator in Álvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies: “In his own way, Papá was a Trujillista,” Minerva announced. … His advice was always, don’t annoy the bees, don’t annoy the bees. It’s men like him and Jaimito and other scared fulanitos who have kept the devil in power all these years” (Álvarez 179). Furthermore, Yunior’s explanation, “One of our last nights as novios she said, Ten million Trujillos is all we are” (324), has the same effect.

In fact, it may fairly be argued that one senses a sort of anxiety of influence (to use Harold Bloom’s term), particularly in Díaz’s comments about other Trujillato narratives.Again, his repeated connection of Trujillo’s rule to the colonization of the Taínos by the Spanish conquistadors (see the stories of Hatüey and Anacaona summarized in individual footnotes) is also crucial to Julia Álvarez’s story and to many of the novels about the Trujillato, as I have pointed out elsewhere. To his credit, Díaz never hides the fact that he has read these works that, I argue, may have influenced his writing. Thus, at one point the narrator clarifies: “(It wasn’t like In the Time of the Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student. No Miranda (sic; Díaz is probably referring to Minerva Mirabal in this passage) here: everybody shunned her.)” (83). Similarly, when Yunior concludes “And thus passed old Fuckface. And thus passed the Era of Trujillo (sort of)” (155), Díaz is inevitably stepping onto the territory of Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat: the political legacy and consequences of living for thirty-one years under Trujillo’s ironclad rule (curiously, Beli’s surname, Cabral, also coincides with that of Urania’s character). And, as mentioned above, the story of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral, so superficially acquiescent with the regime’s atrocities, is reminiscent of both Álvarez’s Enrique Mirabal and Vargas Llosa’s Agustín “Cerebrito” Cabral. An obvious difference with the latter, of course, is that Abelard never gives in to Trujillo’s lust for his daughter.
Even Vázquez Montalbán’s Galíndez, which Díaz does not mention in his novel, has points in common with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in that we never find out which one of all the versions we read about the reasons behind Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral’s imprisonment is the historical truth. The multiple perspectives in both novels leave the mysteries unresolved even though in both cases there is no question that the authors are condemning Trujillismo. But, more interestingly, in a sort of oedipal act, Díaz, this time acting as literary critic in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, openly states that Vargas Llosa’s plot is far from original:

Let’s be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty
common one on the Island. As common as krill. (Not that krill is too common on
the Island but you get the drift). So common that Mario Vargas Llosa didn’t
have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There’s one of
these bellaco tales in almost everybody’s hometown. It’s one of those easy
stories because in essence it explains it all. (244)

This is, in fact, a good example (in the narrative version) of Harold Bloom’s apophrades

An Unacknowledged Debt with Magical Realism

Elsewhere I have argued that one of the main real-life inspirations for Gabriel García Márquez’s tyrant in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) was precisely Rafael Trujillo. Along the same lines, there are alos traces of García Márquez’s writing style in Díaz’s novel. In fact, even the tone of some of the sentences in his novel seem to have been taken directly from one of García Márquez’s short stories. Compare, for example, his sentence, “Let me tell you, True Believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never been prayer like this” (139), with the opening sentences of “Los Funerales de la Mamá Grande”: “Ésta es, incrédulos del mundo entero, la verídica historia de la Mamá Grande, soberana absoluta del reino de Macondo, que vivió en función de dominio durante 92 años y murió en olor de santidad un martes de septiembre pasado, y a cuyos funerales vino el Sumo Pontífice” (131). In this vein, in the last paragraph of the opening chapter of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator, while pondering whether the book we are reading is actually his own zafa or counterspell against fukú, confesses, “I used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak, in Macondo than in McOndo” (7). Here, he is obviously referring to the Colombian author’s magical realism as well as to the proclamation of the McOndo group led by the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, by which a group of young Latin American writers distanced themselves from the magical realist literary tradition. “Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez’s imaginary Macondo,” argued Fuguet in 1997,

my own world is something much closer to what I call “McOndo”—a world of
McDonald’s, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-
politicized, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an ç
overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South
America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en español), addicted to movies and connected
to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere
that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape. (“I am not”
n.p.)

Instead of picturesque, exotic, tropical, underdeveloped, and rural settings dominated by magical phenomena, they propose a more “cultural realistic” approach that resorts to contemporary urban or suburban settings, popular culture, and the consequences of globalization. Fuguet, for example, has complained about the expectations that U.S. and European critics and publishing houses have of Latin American literature. When he was participating in the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, his writings, he explains, were rejected because they lacked “magical realism”: “but the flying abuelitas and the obsessively constructed genealogies didn’t seem to fit in my work” … Add some folklore and a dash of tropical heat and come back later. That was the message I heard” (“I am not” n.p.).

Like Fuguet, Díaz’s transnational upbringing inspired a different vision of his own environment. Indeed, he coincides with the Chilean author and other writers of the McOndo group in his multiple references to popular culture (classic science fiction, comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, old television shows, video and role-playing games, the Internet, Hollywood and anime films), including the epigraph from Fantastic Four that opens his novel. Where The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao clearly deviates from the usual topics in Fuguet’s writing, however, is in hismore openly political overtones (concentrating mostly on the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic and the atrocities committed by the Trujillo regime) and in its central focus on collective social injustices, including poverty, political oppression, and diaspora. In fact, Díaz has admitted that he has “an agenda to write politics without letting the reader think it is political” (Céspedes 901).
Moreover, Díaz’s description of the provincial city of Baní and even of the capital city of Santo Domingo in the 1940s and 1950s as well as in the 1980s and early 1990s certainly fits within “the cult of the underdeveloped” (“I am not” n.p.), as Fuguet has described magical realist writing. Likewise, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao exhibits a typically magical realist interest in the exotic world of spiritual or metaphysical phenomena. Thus, in one of the numerous metanarrative and self-reflective passages, Yunior points out, “But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena. How else could we have survived what we have survived?” (149). Not surprisingly, the first paragraph of the novel offers a cultural explanation (or dictionary definition) of the traditional fukú superstition or belief: “Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.” (1). This fukú ultimately becomes the leitmotif that gives coherence to the story of the different generations of the family (and yes, the family saga, is also reminiscent of several landmark novels of Latin America’s Magical Realism) in both the Dominican Republic and the United States. The novel itself is not only presented as a fukú story but, as previously mentioned, as a zafa or counterspell against fukú. Soon, we are told that Christopher Columbus was “both its midwife and one of its great European victims” and, in another analogy between the times of the Spanish Conquest of the Caribbean and the Era of Trujillo, we learn that “No one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse’s servant or its master” (2-3).

By the same token, although in the final analysis we are left to believe that Junot Díaz and Yunior, his literary alter ego, look upon these Caribbean beliefs as skeptical and ambivalent outsiders, there is also a warning against dismissing them as myths and naïf superstitions of “backward” people. In this context, Trujillo is said to have supernatural powers: “It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond” (3). In fact, one of the contrasting versions about the reasons behind Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral’s imprisonment deals with the speculation that the government had found out that he was writing a book that “was an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president—that he was supernatural, that he was not human—may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (245). By putting these beliefs in the pen of one of the most lucid minds in the novel, Díaz instills doubt in his readers, even if the narrator half-heartedly dismisses them only a few lines later: “The Lost Final Book of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral. I’m sure that this is nothing more than a figment of our Island’s hypertrophied woodoo imagination. And nothing less” (246).
To further mythify the figure of Trujillo, we are later told that not only did Beli’s entire family (including Oscar Wao at the end) die as the result of the dictator’s fukú but also that the Kennedy family has paid dearly for the CIA’s backing of Trujillo’s Dominican assassins: “For what Kennedy’s intelligence experts failed to tell him was what every single Dominican, from the richest jabao in Mao to the poorest güey in El Buey, from the oldest anciano sanmarcorisano to the littlest carajito in San Francisco, knew: that whoever killed Trujillo, their family would suffer a fukú so dreadful it would make the one that attached itself to the Admiral jojote in comparison” (3). Similarly, the constant reminder that many Dominicans believed in the second coming of El Jefe and that he had supernatural powers (“that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away, that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island” 226) does not help to de-mythify his image. Along the same lines, Díaz denounces the god-making sycophancy of the Dominican media by quoting from the journal La Nación in the epigraph that opens the second section: “Men are not indispensable. But Trujillo is irreplaceable. For Trujillo is not a man. He is… a cosmic force… Those who try to compare him to his ordinary contemporaries are mistaken. He belongs to… the category of those born to special destiny” (204). However, even if true to historical facts and written in a lighthearted style that the New York Times’ literary critic Michiko Kakutani has called “a streetwise brand of Spanglish,” the description of Trujillo as “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated” (80), who created an impregnable “Plátano Curtain” and had a Secret Police that was more efficient than the Stasi (“you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass” 225) also ends up contributing to magnify his aura and his stature as a quasi-mythical figure.

In this light, in many ways Díaz’s novel involuntarily perpetuates Trujillo’s myth as much if not more so than The Feast of the Goat. The fact is that perhaps the Dominican tyrant’s personality and exploits cannot be re-created easily without resorting to a vocabulary and a tone that is somehow reminiscent of Magical Realism, hence seemingly abetting his mythification and encouraging the belief that he had supernatural powers. In fact, in an interview Díaz agrees with this position: “Because without curses and alien mongooses and Sauron and Darkseid, the Trujillato cannot be accessed, eludes our ‘modern’ minds. We need these fictional lenses, otherwise It we cannot see” (O’Rourke n.p.); and he echoes the same idea in the first footnote of the novel: “At first glance, he was just your typical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (2).
Perhaps for this reason, Díaz unconsciously projects Trujillo’s evil nature beyond the human realm: “but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered” (156). Despite possible pre-conceptions about Latin American literature, this perception of his novel as belonging to the magical realistic tradition seems to be the one reflected in several reviews, such as the ones by Kirkus, which considered it “a compelling, sex-fueled, 21st-century tragi-comedy with a magical twist” (Weich n.p.), and by A.O. Scott, of the New York Times, who describes it as “a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism” (n.p.). And, indeed, the tropical exoticism, the hyper-violence and sensualism, the cult of Third-World underdevelopment, the incorporation of superstitions, mythical legends and popular folklore, the typical “special effects” of magical realism (where “magical” or illogical elements appear in apparently normal circumstances and characters accept them instead of questioning them) are all there.

Finally, one more literary device commonly associated with Latin American magical realism is the distortion of time, which either becomes cyclical, or stagnant, or simply disappears. This is clearly the case in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where the present keeps imitating the past: “La Inca found herself in practically the same predicament Beli’s father had found himself in sixteen years earlier, back when the House of Cabral had first come up against the might of the Trujillos” (158). Later, Yunior alludes to this concept of circular time more explicitly: “(See the trend? Trujillo wanted the Mirabal Sisters, and the Spaniard wanted Anacaona)” (244); or

“Where did they take him Oscar? Where else. The canefields.
How’s that for eternal return?” (296)

This essay is, of course, not a negative criticism of Díaz’s debut novel, which I consider an admirable accomplishment. Other authors of what I have termed the “Trujillo cycle,” such as García Márquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch and Marcio Veloz Maggiolo in La biografía difusa de Sombra Castañeda (The Vague Biography of Sombra Castañeda; 1980) had already resorted to magical realist techniques in order to re-create the Era of Trujillo. This study simply shows that, despite the rejection from new generations of Latin American writers such as the McOndo group, there are still rescuable elements from the traditional Magical Realism that Gabriel García Márquez popularized with his On Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In the final analysis, for all the irreverence of his prose, Junot Díaz’s approach is not as radical as he intended it to be.





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Dos visiones contradictorias de la Iglesia Católica en la obra de Rubén Darío

Publicado en Ínsula 699 (March 2005): 17-19

Ignacio López-Calvo
University of California, Merced

El sentimiento anticlerical está presente en la obra de varios modernistas latinoamericanos. Así, el argentino Leopoldo Lugones lo exhibe en su libro El imperio jesuítico (1909) y el uruguayo Julio Herrera y Reissig, en las dos series de “eglogánimas” incluidas en su libro Los éxtasis de la montaña (1904, 1910). En el caso de Rubén Darío, la crítica se ha concentrado principalmente en su anticlericalismo juvenil, que suele considerarse pasajero, y en los numerosos textos hagiográficos y de alabanza de la vida monacal. Asimismo, son numerosos los estudios que han tratado la espiritualidad, la religiosidad y la duda religiosa en su obra poética. Por lo general, se concentran en su tendencia al sincretismo y en su admiración por los cultos esotéricos (platonismo, pitagorismo, ocultismo, gnosticismo, hermetismo, teosofismo y otras corrientes filosófico-religiosas). En realidad, es más que probable que—al igual que Jorge Luis Borges—en lugar de afiliarse a ellas, el poeta las viera con curiosidad como el eterno esfuerzo del ser humano por responder a las grandes preguntas, o simplemente como una fecunda fuente de inspiración para su poesía. Críticos como Pedro Salinas, Joseph A. Feustle Jr., Saúl Yurkievich e incluso el propio Rubén (en su novela autobiográfica inconclusa El oro de Mallorca) han enfatizado la lucha que se da en su obra entre lo irracional (Pan y Dionisio) y lo racional (Apolo), entre lo faúnico y lo angélico, entre lo profano y lo sagrado. La crítica ha estudiado, igualmente, la importancia del catolicismo como subtexto en la poesía dariana. Así, Kathy L. Jrade aclara que, más allá del vocabulario religioso y las referencias a la liturgia divina, existe un trasfondo de esperanza en un dios personal y, “though often overtaken by doubts and despair, Darío appears unable to reject out of hand the basis of hope provided by Catholicism”. No obstante, si bien pocos críticos han dudado de su anticlericalismo durante su época juvenil, se ha prestado menos atención a las distintas representaciones directas de la Iglesia Católica que aparecen tanto en la poesía como en la prosa en su época de madurez. En cierto modo, estas imágenes sorprendentemente contradictorias (no en vano, también Rubén se hizo masón y pocos años más tarde hizo declaraciones sumamente críticas de la masonería) forman parte de la unión de contrarios que es, en sí, una de las claves de su cosmovisión poética. Desde esta perspectiva, en este ensayo se analizará la complejidad de su postura con respecto a la visión de la Iglesia, el Vaticano y lo clerical, particularmente en su obra de madurez.

Algunos de sus biógrafos y críticos, en su afán de glorificar o santificar al nicaragüense, han construido la imagen de un Rubén Darío piadoso y ultracatólico, minimizando al mismo tiempo la importancia de sus textos decididamente anticlericales o bien encuadrándolos en una etapa de su obra juvenil supuestamente breve y transitoria. En este sentido, Sandro Abate celebra la literatura de tema hagiográfico en la que Rubén se aparta “de las falsas actitudes antirreligiosas”. Igualmente, Catalina Tomás McNamee lamenta: “la retórica jacobina—fugaz, por dicha—de aquel librepensador adolescente; los altisonantes versos anticlericales escritos bajo la explotación de ‘protectores masones’ y de políticos liberales”. De manera similar, Guerrero y Soriano, tras citar poemas anticlericales de Rubén como “El libro”, “A la razón” y “El Jesuita”, hacen hincapié en su piedad religiosa y sus alabanzas al Papa, a los obispos y a la Iglesia Católica en general: “En cada ocasión propicia, sus versos sellan como en el Libro de los Misterios del visionario de Patmos, el evangelista Juan, su devoción altísima por cuanto habla de Cristo y de su Iglesia” ; “Le resulta inolvidable ver, primero, al Papa León XIII; y más tarde postrarse a sus pies para besarle la mano y el anillo del Pescador, con piedad sin límite”. En la misma línea, Guerrero y Soriano mencionan otros poemas de esa época como “Charitas”, dedicado a San Vicente de Paúl, el panegírico al obispo de Córdoba, “En elogio del Ilmo. Sr. Obispo de Córdoba, Fr. Mamerto Esquiú, O.M.”, o el soneto “Creer”, escrito en San Salvador, donde se ensalza el ritual de la Iglesia Católica para luego entrar en el terreno de esa duda religiosa tan unamuniana: “Del sacerdote el canto funerario,/ los acentos del místico salterio/ y las cruces del triste cementerio/ y el humo que expide el incensiario./ Y la esquila del alto campanario/ y la oración envuelta en el misterio,/ la quietud del oculto monasterio/ y la lámpara que arde ante el Santuario;/ todo esto da consuelo, luz y vida,/ las esperanzas del creyente escuda/ y levanta a la fe desfallecida,/ con elocuencia conmueve, muda,/ y el bálsamo es del alma que está herida/ por el hierro candente de la duda...” Finalmente, Guerrero y Soriano cierran el resumen biográfico con la visita de un obispo a Rubén Darío en su lecho de muerte (también mencionada por Catalina Tomás McNamee), exaltando cómo tomó la comunión agradecido y cómo en la misma catedral de León se tributaron ocho días de honras fúnebres “para príncipes y nobles” al poeta muerto.

No cabe duda de que son mucho más numerosos los textos de Rubén Darío en los que, de alguna manera, se ensalza la herencia católica que los que la ponen en tela de juicio. Así, para citar sólo algunos ejemplos, vemos una anécdota del “mínimo y dulce Francisco de Asís” en el poema “Los motivos del lobo”; al casto ex soldado San Martín, obispo de Tours, en el cuento “La leyenda de San Martín, Patrono de Buenos Aires”; la humilde ofrenda al Niño Jesús del organista franciscano Longinos de Santa María en “Cuento de Noche Buena”; al fraile Liborio y a Santo Tomás en “Historia prodigiosa de la princesa Psiquia”; al ambicioso científico fray Tomás de la Pasión en “Verónica” y, en la otra versión (en donde la “terrible mirada” en los ojos de Cristo al final del cuento se convierte en una “dulce mirada”), a fray Pedro de la Pasión en “La extraña muerte de fray Pedro”; a la bondadosa hermana Adela en el cuento “El Dios es bueno”, en el que la niña Lea le pide a Dios que no sea malo cuando una bomba hiere a la religiosa; a la antigua cantante Eglantina Charmat que, tras la muerte de su prometido, se convierte en la piadosa Sor Filomena en el cuento homónimo; a Fra Domenico Calvalca en el capítulo homónimo incluido en Los raros (1896) ; a Santa Judith de Arimatea y a San Félix Romano en el cuento “Voz de lejos”; y al viejo y generoso capuchino Fray Juan en “La nube de verano”. Como explica Sandro Abate, la aparición de textos de inspiración hagiográfica medieval coincide con el momento su plena madurez estética; es decir, la última etapa en Buenos Aires, el viaje a París y los años entre Prosas profanas (1896) y Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905).

Uno de sus escritos más elogiosos de la Iglesia Católica es el ensayo “Roma”, del libro Peregrinaciones, donde habla en términos sumamente elogiosos del Papa León XIII, como se mencionó anteriormente. En efecto, allí elogia la diplomacia del Sumo Pontífice por haber sabido evitar guerras, admira su mecenazgo del arte, lo considera justo, poeta y filósofo y, en definitiva, el “Santo Tirano” del poema “Al Papa” se convierte ahora en un “Beatísimo padre y querido colega”: “El viejo feo de Zola, el avaro de los decires de antecámara..., el papa de los periódicos, despareció, se borró por completo de mi memoria, para dar lugar al Papa columbino, al viejecito sagrado que representa veinte siglos de cristianismo, al restaurador de la filosofía tomística, al pastor blanco de la suave sonrisa, el anciano paternal y al poeta”. Además de los textos mencionados anteriormente, Rubén cuenta con otros aparentemente devotos en su obra de madurez. Uno de los que, en principio, contrasta más con su línea antagónica es “La Cartuja”, incluido en Cantos a la Argentina y otros poemas e inspirado por su estancia en La Cartuja de Mallorca desde finales de 1913 a principios de 1914. En una primera lectura de este poema (uno de los más citados e incluidos en antologías) se observa su aparente admiración por la pobreza, obediencia, castidad, santidad y humildad de los monjes. Coincidiendo con el poema “Creer”, el autor implícito expresa la envidia que siente por esos dichosos “callados hijos de Bruno” (v 4) que saben triunfar ante las tentaciones satánicas y que en el día del juicio final se verán salvados por la luz celestial. Quisiera matar, como ellos, su “orgullo perverso” (v 49) y frenar su concupiscencia, “el palpitar de la carne maligna” (v 50). Según vemos, sin renunciar a su conocida admiración por la idea pitagórica de la armonía cósmica, Rubén confiesa que desearía “oír como un Pitágoras cristiano/ la música teológica del cielo” (vv 55-56). Por eso, envidia el consuelo y la armonía que encuentran los monjes en Dios. No obstante, aunque cansado ya de su infructuosa búsqueda del orden y la armonía del universo, sabe que nunca podría entregarse a esa vida de mortificación, oración, ayuno, soledad y silencio; a esa erásmica “locura de la cruz” (v 5) de los místicos y los santos. Si bien es consciente de que esa soledad y ese silencio (la riqueza, la mina de diamantes del monasterio) lo pueden encaminar también a él hacia la armonía espiritual que tanto echa de menos, no se siente con la fortaleza necesaria para emprender tan tortuoso camino. Aun así, la aparente ansia de emular sus virtudes y de acceder a la salvación va más allá del poema, pues Rubén llega a hacerse retratar con el hábito de los cartujos de San Bruno.


Sin embargo, a pesar de que este poema se ha citado varias veces como ejemplo de la profunda devoción del poeta, como se observa a partir de la duodécima estrofa, toda esta profesión de fe y admiración por los monjes se queda, a la postre, en un mero contraste retórico para realzar la descripción del “furor sexual” (v 12) de “fauno” (v 57) de la propia voz poética. En otras palabras, a pesar del título, el tema de “La cartuja” no es otro que la sexualidad culpable del yo poético. La descripción de los devotos monjes aparece como un recurso poético para la autorreflexión, o quizás para ese mal encubierto alarde de la desenfrenada libido del poeta que también aparece en “Canción de otoño en primavera”. De repente, la palabra “darme” abre anafóricamente todas las estrofas desde la dieciséis hasta la diecinueve, rogándole a Dios—aunque probablemente sólo a efectos retóricos—que le conceda otra boca, otras manos, otra sangre y otros ojos menos libidinosos para así refugiarse del demonio, el mundo y la carne en la vida ermitaña o en el mundo de silencio de los monjes de la Cartuja. Es en estas cuatro estrofas donde llegamos al paroxismo de su aparentemente desenfrenado deseo sexual. Allí el poeta se presenta a sí mismo como un sátiro loco y medio chivo que persigue la sensualidad de los “labios rojos” y las “redondeces de nieve” (v 64) de los senos femeninos. Desde el pulcro ascetismo de los primeros versos viajamos, por tanto, al culto dionisiaco por el que se rigen “sus manos lúbricas de amante” (v 71), su pecaminosa vida de “vinos y besos” (v 67) y su sangre desbordada de apetito sexual que le “hace arder las venas,/ vibrar los nervios y crujir los huesos” (vv 75-76). El poeta implícito comulga, por tanto, con la imagen negativa y pecaminosa de la sexualidad que presenta la Iglesia tradicional. Como es de esperar, dicha postura nos lleva, en la decimoquinta estrofa de “La Cartuja”, al reflejo de una velada misoginia marianista, por la que la mujer queda reificada como tentanción y relegada al ominoso mundo del pecado y de las diablesas quevedescas: “Por la oración y por la penitencia/ poner en fuga a las diablesas malas” (vv 59-60).

La visión del monasterio de la Cartuja le inspira culpabilidad al comparar la quietud y la paz de los clérigos con su naturaleza epicúrea y proclive al pecado. Este sentimiento podrá ser sincero o una mera pose poética, pero no hay duda de que, en contraste con varios otros poemas, en este caso su erotismo no apunta ni hacia lo divino ni hacia la armonía cósmica. En definitiva, si bien en las conclusiones de su libro Louis Bourne resume una de las fases de la poesía de Rubén Darío explicando que “la reverencia por los dioses del mundo pagano estimulaba su imaginación, sobre todo en el caso de Venus y Pan, porque le permitieron dar una visión divina con las características humanas de su erotismo personal” , es evidente que, como vemos en “La Cartuja”, también la religión católica y en concreto el mundo monástico le sirvieron para evocar—aunque por contraste—el propio instinto sexual del poeta. Ese católico remordimiento por el pecado que se hace tan obvio en “La Cartuja” es de nuevo el tema central de otros poemas como “La dulzura del ángelus” y “Spes” de Cantos de vida y esperanza, poema este último donde la voz lírica le habla directamente a Jesucristo: “Jesús, incomparable perdonador de injurias,/ óyeme. Sembrador de trigo, dame el tierno/ pan de tus hostias; dame, contra el sañudo infierno,/ una gracia lustral de iras y lujurias./ Dime que este espantoso horror de la agonía/ que me obsede, es no más de mi culpa nefanda;/ que al morir hallaré la luz de un nuevo día/ y que entonces oiré mi ‘¡Levántate y anda!’.” En cualquier caso, en contraste con la presencia de la tiara papal en sus poemas de juventud, en “La Cartuja” la Iglesia aparece representada por el apóstol San Pablo; por el palestino San Hilarión (290?-371), un monje eremita y anacoreta; el ermitaño egipcio San Antonio (251?-350), famoso por sus tentaciones y considerado el primer monje de la cristiandad (v. 29); y por los lamentos del profeta hebreo Jeremías (“profesor del llanto” v. 13) de los siglos seis y siete a.C. Todos ellos parecen haber hallado “el concepto más profundo” (v 27): que un día habrán de morir y, por tanto, tienen que prepararse resistiendo casi heroicamente las “mil visiones de fornicaciones” (v 32) con que les tienta el Demonio. Gracias a las enseñanzas que reciben de la epístola del apóstol San Pablo a los Efesios, saben protegerse con “corazas evangélicas” (v 42): “Vestíos de toda la armadura de Dios, para que podáis estar firmes contra las asechanzas del diablo” (Ef 6:11); “tomad toda la armadura de Dios, para que podáis resistir en el día malo, y habiendo acabado todo, estar firmes” (Ef 6:13). Frente al deseo sexual que parece dominar a la voz poética, el espíritu de los monjes arde de amor sacro en el momento de la comunión. Paradójicamente, la profunda admiraci¬ón que se respira en este poema puede contrastarse con la visión opuesta de esta misma orden religiosa que aparece en un poema en el que Rubén ser burla del periódico El Centro-Americano: “Es el cartujo con capucha alzada/ Que combate el Derecho y la Razón,/ Que canta oremus y que tiene el fondo Casi... casi... de libre pensador”.

En línea con su compleja y contradictoria postura con respecto a Iglesia Católica en su obra, veamos ahora la evolución de su otra postura, la anticlerical, desde sus primeros versos hasta los últimos libros de su producción tanto poética como narrativa. Como explica Louis Bourne, el liberalismo y la masonería pronto minaron la base de la fe de Darío y acabaron con su afiliación católica: “tanto por la afiliación liberal como estudiante del liberal polaco Leonard, así como por su admiración hacia los intelectuales franceses, entre otros, Hugo, Lamartine y Renan, adoptó, después de su inicial educación católica, una postura anticatólica, antijesuita y antidogmática que, pese a que se atenuó en su madurez, no fue acompañada por un retorno a las directrices de la Iglesia”. Por el mismo camino, David E. Whisnant subraya las influencias anticlericales que tuvo Darío en su juventud: “Leonard’s influence on fourteen-year-old Darío appears to have been substantial. Darío began to write poems against the Jesuits and the Pope and to read nineteenth-century liberal French writers along with the Romantic, anticlerical Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo”. En efecto, junto a las pruebas de su devoción católica mencionadas anteriormente, ya a los quince años Darío contaba con poemas anticlericales e incluso se había atrevido a criticar al Papa en un largo poema de mil versos en cien décimas titulado “El Libro” que leyó ante el gobierno nicaragüense el 24 de enero de 1882: “Ven a mí, musa querida;/ mi lira dame: levanta/ y únete a mi voz y canta/ la humanidad rediminda./ Redimida con la vida;/ no con Gólgota ni cruz,/ ni martirios de Jesús;/ sino con la fuerza inmensa.../ fuerza que bulle y que piensa/ ¡Con el libro, que es la luz!”. A causa de este poema, el presidente del Congreso Nacional Pedro Joaquín Chamorro le negó al poeta-niño una beca para continuar sus estudios en letras en Europa. Por el mismo camino, en el poema “Al Papa”, del libro Poesías desconocidas, el joven Rubén tilda de “Santo Tirano” al Pontífice y le acusa de ensuciar a Cristo: “No vayas al Altar, Santo Tirano/ que profanas de Dios la eterna idea./ Aun la sangre caliente roja humea/ en tu cáliz, en tu estola y en tu mano”.

Las enseñanzas liberales, krausistas y masónicas—con toda su carga anticlerical y antimonárquica—del profesor hispano-polaco de Rubén, José Leonard, que había sido miembro de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza de Madrid, reaparecen en el poema “A los liberales”, donde Rubén ensalza a los liberales por romper “la tiara y la corona” (2). Esta postura se refleja, asimismo, en los dos tercetos del soneto “A la razón”, en los que se enfatiza la dicotomía entre dos sistemas axiológicos opuestos, el positivo, representado por la razón del progreso liberal, y el oscurantista, emblematizado por la fe de la Iglesia Católica: “Ya tu poder gigante y soberano/ que el Orbe en otro tiempo no admirara,/ contra el altar del Sacro Vaticano/ el Papa quiebra con dolor su tiara;/ y aterido y helado, cual la escarcha/ grita con Pelletán: ‘El mundo marcha’” (vv 9-14). En la misma línea, en “El Jesuita”, compuesto por dos décimas, el poeta no sólo se rebela contra los mismos jesuitas de la parroquia de la Recolección que lo habían educado durante su niñez en León, sino que adjudica un valor satánico a la Compañía de Jesús y augura el fracaso de su lucha contra el progreso liberal: “¿Qué es el jesuita? –Bolívar/ preguntó una vez a Olmedo./ Es el crimen, el enredo;/ es el que da al pueblo acíbar/ envuelto en sabroso almíbar./ Bien: ahora hablaré yo./ Juzga, después, lector, tú:/ el jesuita es Belcebú/ que del Averno salió./ ¿Vencerá al progreso? No!”. Cathy L. Jadre ha indicado, asimismo, esta vena anticlerical de la poesía dariana: “The receptive and restless youth followed the model set for him. In his poems, Darío denounced the mystery of the trinity, the dogma of papal infallibility, and the sacraments” (Rubén Darío 11). Paradójicamente, en su autobiografía Rubén habla con cariño de algunos de sus profesores jesuitas e incluso afirma, en el sexto capítulo, que le encantaban los ejercicios espirituales, si bien aclara que eso se debía a las deliciosas vituallas y el chocolate que allí se ofrecían.

Ahora bien, ¿será cierto que esta postura abiertamente anticlerical se atenúa en su madurez, como afirma Bourne, o que llegue a desaparecer para siempre tras una suerte de arrepentimiento que condujo al poeta a la apología de lo eclesiástico, como apuntan varios críticos? Teniendo en cuenta el anticlericalismo radical y contestatario de sus primeros versos, sorprendería que su obra posterior abriera los brazos incondicionalmente a la misma Iglesia a la que tanto había criticado. Por el contrario, cabe esperar que estas mismas influencias liberales y masónicas se vean traducidas, de alguna manera, en un nuevo discurso denunciatorio contra esa misma institución o sus miembros durante su época de madurez poética, tal y como ocurre en las obras de otros poetas modernistas como Lugones y Herrera y Reissig. En efecto, según señala Carlos Ruiz Ortiz, su postura anticlerical sigue observándose en los artículos periodísticos que escribió el nicaragüense en su época de madurez: “con el Darío de los años maduros de su vida coexiste un fenómeno político, que es la Revolución Liberal de 1893 del general José Santos Zelaya, quien sin ser marxista ni ateo, trastoca los intereses políticos y económicos de la Iglesia Católica ... Darío como periodista y prosista apoya a la Revolución Liberal de Zelaya”. Así, Diego Manuel Sequeira recoge varios artículos de Rubén que iluminan esta postura. Por ejemplo, bajo su conocido pseudónimo de Ursus, el poeta comenta en un artículo titulado “El siglo XX” y publicado en El Porvenir de Nicaragua el 11 de junio de 1885: “¡Ah, el siglo XX! ... ni habrá tanta devoción ni tanto clérigo, ni tanta gente llena de piedad ganando indulgencias en vez de ganar otra cosa”. En el mismo número de ese períodico Rubén alaba de la siguiente manera al ecuatoriano Juan Montalvo: “luchan por elevar al Ecuador a un puesto alto, por arrancarla del poderío de esos hipócritas inquisidores que se rodean de frailes y curas creyendo hallar fortaleza en esos martirizadores de la conciencia popular”. De manera similar, critica al periódico clerical El Republicano de la siguiente manera: “Es un pedazo de sotana vieja/ Que huele a incienso pero está podrido./ Párate pluma, deja, deja, deja,/ No toques a un follón y mal querido”. El mismo tono sarcástico aparece en las críticas a otro diario, El verdadero estandarte, dirigido por el cura de la parroquia de Granada: “Que ha de ganar mucha parte/ Con sus frases en latín”; y a La Tribuna: “Puf! qué hedor, santo Varuna!/ ¡Por los jesuitas: qué hedor!”

Muchas otras son las pruebas que nos han quedado de la postura anticlerical por la que optó en algunas etapas de su vida. Así, en reacción a la noticia que aparece en el semanario La República con respecto al hecho de que el poeta Juan José Bernal recibiera las últimas órdenes, Rubén escribe un soneto cuyo primer cuarteto lamenta: “Bernal ya es sacerdote. –¡Desgraciado!/ Bernal ya es sacerdote. –¡Qué espantoso!/ —En labrarse su ruina qué afanoso!/ —En huir de sus laureles qué porfiado!” Una de sus críticas más abiertas a la Iglesia Católica española se resume en el artículo “Semana Santa”, donde Rubén dedica varias páginas a exponer la falta de religiosidad del obrero español, el nefasto fanatismo religioso sin fe profunda del español en general, lo medieval de la mortificación pública del penitente y “la idolatría católica de figuras también primitivas”. Se adentra, incluso, en una crítica a la historia de la Iglesia en donde recuerda las motivaciones políticas de la Inquisición y el valor de divertimento popular, al estilo de las corridas de toros, que tenían los autos de fe. En este marco se encierra la denuncia más directa contra la Iglesia contemporánea: “En Andalucía, en Castilla, buena parte del clero ha contribuido, con su poco cuidado de los asuntos espirituales, a debilitar las creencias ... en las regiones inferiores no es un mirlo blanco el sacerdote de sotana alegre, amigo de juergas, de guitarras y mostos. La navaja no es tampoco, en ciertos ejemplares, desconocida. El sacerdote sanguinario y cruel no ha sido escaso en las guerras carlistas. En cuanto a la moralidad, es éste el país en donde el ‘ama del cura’ y las ‘sobrinas del cura’ son tipos de comedia y cantar” (Gullón 234).

Pero volviendo a su producción poética, si bien, como explica Jrade, la anarquía del mundo moderno hace que en poemas como “Canto de esperanza”, “Spes”, “¿Qué signo haces, oh Cisne, con tu encorvado cuello...”, “¡Oh, terremoto mental!” y “El verso sutil que pasa o se posa...” Darío exprese su añoranza por la fe católica de su infancia , vuelve a jugar irónicamente con consignas anticlericales en “Agencia...”, un poema incluido en El canto errante que se caracteriza por su inclinación a un prosaísmo más contemporáneo y que, en cierto modo, anuncia el vanguardismo. Así, en un determinado momento vemos que “en la iglesia el diablo se esconde/ Ha parido una monja... (¿En dónde?)” (v 13-14); más tarde, el poeta hace una nueva referencia un tanto burlesca al Sumo Pontífice cuando afirma que “Ya no tiene eunucos el papa” (v 20); y al final advierte: “La fe blanca se desvirtúa/ y todo negro continúa./ En alguna parte está listo/ el palacio del Anticristo” (226). Ese tono un tanto irrespetuoso, con esporádicas proclamas anticlericales, continúa en la segunda parte de la excepcional “Epístola” dedicada a la esposa de Leopoldo Lugones: “¡Y he gustado bocados de cardenal y de papa!...” (v 14). Del mismo modo, en el poema “Ite, missa est”, de Prosas profanas, que Ricardo Gullón tilda de “casi sacrílego” (20), vuelve a mencionar de manera tangencial e irónica motivos religiosos, mezclando de vez en cuando el léxico erótico con la terminología religiosa para hablar de sus amores: “su espíritu es la hostia de mi amorosa misa” (v 3). Finalmente, como apunta Alberto Acereda, en “Impresiones de salón”, incluido en Parisiana (1908), una colección de crónicas que Rubén envió al diario porteño La Nación, enumera algunas de las causas de la ausencia de artistas latinoamericanos en los museos parisinos: “el utilitarismo, el mammonismo, por un lado, y el socialismo y el clericalismo, por otro, han dado mucho y están para dar por completo a todos los diablos el sentimiento aristocrático de lo bello”. El clericalismo, por tanto, es una amenaza para la “aristocracia del pensamiento” y la lucha contra la mediocridad artística por las que aboga el nicaragüense. Queda claro, por tanto, que la postura anticlerical, si bien se hace menos recurrente, está lejos de atenuarse y mucho menos de desaparecer. Lo que sí ocurre, en cambio, es que se producen al mismo tiempo dos discursos contradictorios: uno de aparente profesión de fe y alabanza a lo cristiano, y otro que continúa en los parámetros de su anticlericalismo juvenil.

En líneas generales, en la poesía de Rubén Darío vemos un extraño conflicto ideológico en el que dialogan dos posturas opuestas: la sagrada y la profana, la proclerical y la anticlerical. Mientras que en la primera se aprecia una clara admiración por la Iglesia Católica y una comunión con el concepto pecaminoso de la sexualidad típico del catolicismo, en la segunda, aparece una crítica agresiva contra el Papa, el Vaticano y la Iglesia en general. En cualquier caso, según se ha demostrado, no cabe duda de que la denuncia y el ataque anticlerical no desparecen misteriosamente de la obra madura de Rubén, como han señalado varios críticos.


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