The Repeating Island
The Repeating Island
Author(s): Antonio Benítez Rojo and James Maraniss
Source: New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly , Summer, 1985, Vol. 7, No. 4,
The Cari
ean (Summer, 1985), pp XXXXXXXXXX
Published by: Middlebury College Publications
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William Luis
version is not the only one, but is one among many vershanns.
Rhygin's explanations are as important as those proposed by the
dominant and powerful elements in society. If writing is a Euro-
pean invention, Cari
ean people have appropriated it in orde
to na
ate their side of the (his)story. The historical development
of the black theme in Cari
ean literature represents an impor-
tant stage in which Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone
literatures, in spite of nationalistic and linguistic differences,
emerge into the same light.
Antonio Benitez Rojo
The Repeating Island
Translated from Spanish by James Maraniss
In recent decades we have begun to see a clearer outline to the
profile of a group of American nations whose colonial experiences
and languages have been different, but which share certain
undeniable features. I mean the countries usually called "Carib-
bean" or "of the Cari
ean basin'*. This designation might serve
a foreign purpose - the great powers' need to recodify the world's
te
itory better to know, to dominate it- as well as a local one,
self- referential, directed toward fixing the furtive image of collec-
tive Being. Whatever its motive, this urge to systematize the region's
political, economic, social and anthropological dynamics is a very
recent thing. For it is certain that the Cari
ean basin, although
it includes the first American lands to be explored, conquered and
colonized by Europe, is still, especially in the discourse of the social
sciences, one of the least known regions of the modern world.
The main obstacles to any global study of the Cari
ean's
societies, insular or continental, are exactly those things that scholars
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usually adduce to define the area: its fragmentation; its instability;
its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogenei-
ty; its lack of historiography and historical continuity; its contingen-
cy and impermanence; its syncretism, etc. This unexpected mix
of obstacles and properties is not, of course, mere happenstance.
What happens is that post-industrial society - to use a new-
fangled term - navigates the Cari
ean with judgments and in-
tentions which are like those of Columbus; that is, it lands scien-
tists, investors and technologists (the new discoverers), who come
to apply the dogmas and methods that have served them well where
they came from, and who can't see that these refer only to realities
back home. So they get into the habit of defining the Cari
ean
in terms of its resistance to the different methodologies sum-
moned to investigate it. This is not to say that the definitions we
read here and there of pan-Cari
ean society are false or useless.
I would say, to the contrary, that they are potentially as produc-
tive as the first reading of a book, in which, as Barthes said, the
reader inevitably reads himself. I think, nevertheless, that the time
has come for post-industrial society to start re-reading the Carib-
bean, that is, to do the kind of reading in which every text begins
to reveal its own textuality.
This second reading is not going to be easy at all. The Carib-
bean space- remember- is saturated with messages sent out in
five European languages (Spanish, English, French, Dutch and
Portuguese), not counting aboriginal languages or the different
creole tongues that erode Prosperous discourse from the cane
ake
to the u
an marketplace. Further, the spectrum of Cari
ean
codes is so varied and dense that it holds the region suspended
in a soup of signs. It has been said many times that the Cari
ean
is the union of the diverse, and maybe that is true. In any case,
my own re-reading has taken me along different paths, and I can
no longer a
ive at such admirably precise reductions.
In this (today's) re-reading, I propose, for example, to start with
something concrete and easily demonstrated, a geographical
"fact": that the Antilles are an island
idge connecting, in
"another way," North to South America. This geographical acci-
dent gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the
character of an archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction
(of what?): empty spaces, unstrung voices, ligaments, sutures,
voyages of signification. This archipelago, like others, can be seen
as an island that "repeats" itself. I have drawn attention to the
word "repeats" because I want to give it the unsettled meaning
with which it appears in post-structuralist discourse, where all
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Antonio Benitez Rojo
repetition
ings necessarily a difference and a defe
al. Which
one, then, would be the repeating island Jamaica, Aruba, Puerto
Rico, Miami, Haiti, Recife? Certainly none of the ones that we
know. That original, that island at the center, is as impossible to
reach as the hypothetical Antillis that reappeared time and again,
always fleetingly, in the cosmographers' charts. This is again because
the Cari
ean is a meta-archipelago (an exalted quality that Hellas
possessed, and the great Malay archipelago as well), and as a meta-
archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a
center. Thus the Cari
ean flows outward past the limits of its
own Sea with a vengeance, and its ultima Thule may be found
on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores
of Gambia, in a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850, at a Balinese tem-
ple, in an old Bristol pub, in a commercial warehouse in Bordeaux
at the time of Colbert, in a windmill beside the Zuider Zee, at
a discotheque in a ba
io of Manhattan, in the existential saudade
of a Portuguese lyric. But what is it that repeats? Tropisms, in
series; let's say a dancing flourish, a deep improvisatory sense, a
taste for certain foods (great streams of rice, plantain, bean, pep-
per, yucca), polyrhythmic expression, interma
iage, syncretic
forms, a high level of popular culture, ways of approaching and
avoiding the Western world (remember that, as Malaparte said,
the Volga is born in Europe), the socio-economic experience of
the plantation, in short, parallelisms here and there, contradic-
tions here and there.
Too much has already been written about all this. The Carib-
bean is this and much more. What I've said so far is not enough
to make it a meta-archipelago or anything of the kind. But the
Cari
ean really is something quite sophisticated and accom-
plished: the last of the meta-archipelagoes. If you need a visual
explanation, a picture of what the Cari
ean is, I would suggest
the Milky Way, that flux of transformative plasma whirling nar-
rowly on the dome of our globe, drawing there an "other" map
that changes with each passing instant, where objects are born to
light while others disappear into the vault of darkness; produc-
tion, interchange, consumption, machine (these are words that
come to mind).
There is nothing marvelous in this, or even poetic, as will be
seen. A few paragraphs back, when I proposed a re-reading of the
Cari
ean, I suggested as a point of departure the unargued fact
that the Antilles are an island
idge connecting, "in another way,"
South with North America; that is, a machine that links the nar-
rative of the search for El Dorado with the na
ative of the finding
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of El Dorado; or if you like, the discourse of Utopia with the
discourse of history; or even, the language of desire with the
language of power. I made a point of the phrase "in another way"
because if we were to take the Central American ligament as ou
connection between continents, the result would be much less fruit-
ful and would not suit the purposes of this study. That connec-
tion gains objective importance only on maps concerned with ou
cu
ent situation seen as geography, geo-politics, military strategy
and finance. These are maps of the pragmatic type which we all
know and ca
y within us, and which therefore give us a first reading
of the world. The words "other way" are the signs of my intention
to give meaning to this text as an object of re-reading, of an "other"
reading. In my reading, the link that really counts is the one made
by the Cari
ean machine, whose flux, whose noise, whose
presence, covers the map of world history's contingencies, through
the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of
races and cultures.
Let's be realistic, let's be skeptical at least: the Atlantic is the
Atlantic (with all its port-cities) because it was once engendered
by the copulation of Europe - that insatiable solar bull - with the
Cari
ean archipelago; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the space
of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory, con-
ceived the project of inseminating the Cari
ean womb with the
seed of Africa, and even of Asia; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic
(NATO, European Economic Community, etc.) because it was
the painfully delivered child of the Cari
ean, whose vagina was
stretched between continental clamps, between the encomienda
of Indians and the slaveholding plantation, between the servitude
of the coolie and the discrimination toward the criollo, between
commercial monopoly and piracy, between fortress and su
ender;
all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth of the Atlan-
tic: Columbus, Ca
al, Cortez, de Soto, Hawkins, Drake, Hein,
Rodney, Surcouf. . .After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly
sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze
and surgical plaster; then the fe
ile wait through the forming
of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.
Without intending to, I have drifted toward the accusatory and
militant rhetoric of my first writings about the Cari
ean. It won't
happen again. At any rate, to put an end to the matter, it must
be agreed that before there was a Cari
ean Sea the Atlantic
lacked even a name.
Its having given birth, however, to such a favored ocean, with
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Antonio Benitez Rojo
its coasts and everything, is not the only reason that the Carib-
bean is a meta-archipelago. There are other reasons of equal weight.
For example, it is possible to defend successfully the hypothesis
that without deliveries from the Cari
ean womb Western capital
accumulation would not have been sufficient to effect a move,
within a little more than two centuries, from the so-called Mer-
cantilist Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the history
of the Cari
ean is one of the main strands in the history of
capitalism, and vice versa. This conclusion may be called polemical,
and perhaps it is. Here is surely not the place to argue the issue,
but there's always room for some observations.
Let's look:
The machine that Christopher Columbus hammered into shape
in Hispaniola was a kind oi
icolage, something like a medieval
vacuum cleaner. The flow of Nature in the island was inte
upted
by the suction of an iron mouth, taken thence through a trans-
atlantic tube to be deposited and redistributed in Spain. When
I speak of Nature in the island, I do so in