SOURCE: "A Return to Africa with a Carpentier Tale," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 97, No. 2, March, 1982, pp. 401-10.

[In the following essay, Piedra explores the anti-colonialist discourse in "Tale of Moons," drawing inferences that explain the perseverance of African cultural elements in contemporary Caribbean narratives.]

Caribbean portrayals of African traditions often translate on paper as colonialist acts. Even writers reclaiming Africa as their cultural backbone express their claims in Western types of discourse. The fact is that, in deed or on paper, explorers are intruders. The development of native traditions in Africa is interrupted by the act of discovery and repressed by the act of recording. No modern attempt can undo the original takeover.

Caribbean texts exploring Africa shoulder responsibilities similar to those of chronicles of discovery—to relate two cultures within a frame of authority which inscribes the material discovered and, at the same time, justifies the act of takeover. Writing itself becomes an imperialist tool. The frame it provides forces European tradition upon the new territories. Not only is the exploitation of Africans considered a digression in the colonization of America, but the concept of African culture becomes an addendum to the colonialist text.

A colonialist explorer approaches the target culture according to the frame of values of the control culture. The Caribbean literary explorer easily lapses into the same bias when claiming roots for his own culturally mixed domain. In both cases, the evaluation of his efforts and the authority of his results hinge on the timing and the spatial rendering of the discovery; that is, it all depends on who claims whom, when and how.

The question of timing serves as a suitable pretext for colonialism. Takeovers become less objectionable when disguised as reclaiming a space and a people which had been lost to history—the history of the colonial power, that is. Such a pretext served the Spanish colonial theory of the "just war" in the enslavement of Amerindians and Afro-Americans. The theory transformed Aristotle's dictum on natural slavery, by way of Thomas Aquinas, into a political tool for Spanish expansionism.¹ Aristotle's endorsement of hierarchies to maintain socio-historical harmony was interpreted by the Empire as a justification for the enslavement of people on the fringes of history. Ironically, the Spanish proposed to save the uncivilized from the neglect of history; otherwise they would be exterminated indiscriminately in the name of that very history. "Better to enslave than to ignore or to kill them" could have been the Spanish motto. The theory also endorsed the myth of the Indies as a lost part of the Known World needed in order to complete the harmonious unit of the Spanish Empire.

The spatial rendering of discovered cultures, the recording of found materials, constitutes another pretext for colonialism. Non-Western cultures are supposedly saved from obscurity by their cultural enslavement in the book format. Both the ruthless conqueror and the benevolent chronicler disguise their true aims as the saving of lost cultures. Cortés is just as guilty of fitting his experiences of the New World into the pages of the Old, as is the mestizo Peruvian Inca Garcilaso when explaining his Indian heritage to a European public. Even the efforts to record the American experience in native words require those words to follow a colonial syntax. And the most formidable syntactical frame available to the West is the book format.

The West regards the book as an authority-granting format, applicable to oral traditions or traditions otherwise recorded. Furthermore, the book serves to control communication, not only because few have access to its full potential, but because its sequential or linear syntax perpetuates the Western obsession with literacy and progress. As writers and readers confine themselves to the authority invested in a chain of books, they alienate themselves from a first-hand experience of culture. Even the most insignificant variables experienced first-hand have to be recorded reflecting the existing line of authority, and read by the standards of progress.

African methods of recording and reading are dramatically different.² Individuals seek self-realization and social validation by fulfilling their duties and exercising their rights within tradition. They do not require the authority and progress inherent in the written texts of the West. Variables enrich African discourse to the extent that they cause it to grow off-center, by the apparently freewilling interpretations of the individual. Yet, individual interpretations do not lead to haphazard variability, but to a radial pattern of growth. Each individual takes a ritual center as a starting point; his behavior and his interpretations do not tend to stray far from the social core, precisely because he maintains first-hand contact with the needs of his society. The Western book format would never do full justice to African discourse since its view of reality encourages second-hand cultural experiences.

The introduction of the Bible into Africa offers an example of this dramatic cultural shortcoming. Biblical stories represent non-Western source materials which originally sought to codify individual beliefs as oral units with lasting socio-historic validity. Yet the ensuing written tradition has been used by the West to generate obsessively linear interpretations of belief. When the BaKongo were challenged by missionaries about their lack of culture, the Bible was presented to them as an example of literacy, the classic format of revealed authority. The BaKongo retaliated by treating the book as a source of divination.³ Divination cures the book format of its linear complex since individuals read according to their intentions rather than abiding by the authority of the book. Yet the BaKongos' ingenious adaptation of Western values falls short of relieving the prejudice against the alleged non-literacy of African cultures.

The Afro-Hispanic cultures in the Caribbean have had to contend with a similar kind of literacy bias. Catholic dogma constituted their original frame of reference, an unfair but less linear format than the Bible's. Catholic dogma permitted more digressive interpretations to suit the changing interests of the establishment. Papal bulls and edicts of the Inquisition dictated the convenient scriptural readings. Those readings fed the Leyes de Indias, the Spanish legal account of the incorporation of America into the Empire. And although the end result does not reflect popular culture but rather an elitist view of history, the format permitted recording of multi-cultural values on American soil.

Alejo Carpentier, the late Cuban writer, partook in the Hispanic legacy of adjusting the authority of the book to accomodate revisionist readings. In novels such as ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933) and El reino de este mundo (1949), which symbolically open and close his Afro-Caribbean period, he uncovers details which set events outside of the enslaving line of authority. To do so, however, his texts establish the authority line as a model, both historically and aesthetically. In fact, in the author's white-ruled world, the official line is both underlined and underscored by the attempts of a black substratum to rise to the surface. Even when white authority is portrayed as inefficient, the popular black struggle to overcome it confirms the dependence of the oppressed on the oppressors' code. Thus the literary setting presents the full impact of the historical dilemma; the non-colonialist literary treatment predicates a bypassing and avoidance, or a mimicking and mocking of Western rules. Carpentier explores both alternatives.

In ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! the liminal black society remains powerless and hence, much closer to the infra-structure of Cuban destiny than the ruling class. Black Cuban traditions are never gratuitously identified by Carpentier. They represent self-imposed obstacles for assimilation as well as socially-imposed aesthetic or historical prejudices. The enslaved black traditions portrayed by Carpentier are doomed to fail in white markets. Ecue's blacks live in a culture of survival, as their only other alternative would be to legitimize their position by total compromise. The author's partial compromise avoids confrontation between Cuban and traditional Euro-American codes. If this restraint limits the native chances to achieve a white-worth victory, it also curtails the subjecting of Creole voices to a whitewashed defeat.

In El reino de este mundo the Creole's battle against the West is symbolically won. This triumph results in as much adaptation to the oppressors' code as if they had lost. In the revolutionary Haiti depicted, winners and losers, black or white, adapt to the whims of the grande histoire. Those are the textual rules for earth-bound Western kingdoms. The oppressed, as marginal figures, mock the oppressors by mimicking their code; as winners, they come dangerously close to mocking themselves by parodying such a code. Nevertheless, the doomed kingdom suggests a beyond. Haitians under Carpentier's rule can realize themselves through the petite histoire of an unfinished revolution. The popular ferment transcends the oppressive medium by which it is depicted. It does so by way of an African liberation myth—Yoruba-bred heroes literally bypass history by flying away to return at the right moment, beyond the reach of the text.

Both of the novels used as examples match the reach of Western history against the energy of African storytelling. Their plots outline events history considers nonevents because it is not prepared to deal with them. Carpentier's language as an obstacle to action, the intricate architectural reconstruction of events as remnants of a misunderstood past, create a distance between plot lines and recording methods. Such a distance epitomizes a wider cultural gap. The calculated obsolescence of recording methods marks the writer as an intruder in his own recorded material. His code is, in principle, unable to record the energy of transcendental acts trapped within the limited reach of their official wording. Any evidence of an admitted defeat against the colonial code enriches anti-colonialist interpretations. The defeat designed by the writer opens a review cycle in the reading of the story and in the recording of history.

Carpentier's historical revisionism dominates his neglected tale "Histoire de Lunes,"⁴ first published in Cahier du Sud, 1937, and uncovered by Roberto González Echevarría in his 1977 book Alejo Carpentier's The Pilgrim at Home.⁵ The narrative synthesizes an official history line and an infra-official discourse. Both interact at a safe distance in a work conceived off-center: in French, for a European public, about the plight of racially mixed Cuban noble savages resisting the impersonal Euro-American encroachment. Language itself strays off-center, avoiding commitments. The text abounds in impersonal and reflexive constructions which hinder the reader in establishing syntactic relationships of sequence or of cause and effect.

Most of the action centers on the arrival of the express train in a remote Cuban town. An arrival full of the sad prospects of civilization: the politico, the captain, an animal trainer, music students and whores.⁶ Although the plot alludes to the linear passage of time—on that day, the next day, carnival time and patron saint's day, days of the week and hours of the day—a straight linear reading wavers under the puzzling evidence reinstating the train's arrival throughout the plot. Textual time is not gauged according to chronological progress, and rightly so, because most characters remain marginal to such progress. Instead, time is gauged according to the impact half-hidden details make on witnesses and interpreters of the ritual moment.⁷ As a consequence, a straight sequential reading must give way to a radial reading of events that do not lie quietly under the linear hold of history. Each reader attains a different radius of interpretation by exploring the self-limiting means furnished by Carpentier.

The writer sits precariously on the fence. Even the title of his work leaves options open. Histoire in the original French, as in the Spanish Historia, connotes both history and story. In my English translation I have settled for a compromise: "Tale of Moons."

In Western terms, the plot hardly makes history, or, for that matter, does an outline show the text to make much progress "Tale" describes the events that led to Atilano's death, from his enigmatic placement in front of his shoeshine chair to the official report of his death as a Communist anti-hero. The protagonist's significance is trapped between two Western clichés: a low standing in Cuba's social hierarchy and the dubious honor of presenting an international menace. Early signs of deafness or absentmindedness do not identify Atilano as a worthless outcast, but as a man marked by a ritual death. The police report towards the end is not a mere justification of his execution as a red provocateur, but the ritual death of the popular trust in the official line.⁸

Once again Carpentier's text defies the enslaving official interpretation by turning a code against itself, by making evident the writer's limitations. On the one hand, the reader becomes an accomplice in Atilano's execution, burying him as a scapegoat for the sins attributed to the black slave: laziness, overt sexuality, love of the banal and the decorative, and loud, quarrelsome and generally uncivilized behavior. On the other hand, the reader becomes an acolyte in Atilano's ritual death. Black sins give way to the basic virtues of Africans under the yoke: endurance, search for outlets of love, hatred of hypocrisy and false authority, development of an inner life, imagination and self-realization.

From a Yoruba perspective, Atilano emerges as a multifaceted embodiment of human nature. He is an individual with a social duty, yet he never says a word. By voicing his plight he would bow to the oppressor's code; the text lets his silent presence irradiate the plot with the subjacent meaning of a secret code. It would be impossible to reduce his significance to the hierarchical or sequential values favored by the traditional literature of the West. Our tale shows the hero beyond the demarcations of word and action, good and evil, man and nature, now and then. He does not simply act like animals, plants, objects, forces and gods, he is, becomes or is possessed by them. In this context, words of explanation would establish superfluous linear links.

Certain characteristics used as metaphors in the plot are essential tools for an Afro-Cuban interpretation. For instance, the train represents the arrival of progress. The town's survival depends on the effects of such a progress, both because it expects the benefits of trade and the danger of betrayal from the outside world. Moreover, the train stands for Ogun m Yorubaland, San Pedro or San Miguel Arcángel in Cuba. These the manifestations of the Iron God relate to rites of passage—from circumcision, to awareness of sexual duties and the ritual fight for the advancement of humanity.⁹ Therefore the fight for survival takes an added dimension. Atilano's awakened phallic power, as interpreted by the townsfolk, acknowledges the hidden power of Ogun.¹⁰ Women, the traditional keepers of Yoruba-Cuban tradition, sense the full impact. Ogun sows the mythical seed; Atilano is his accidental means.

A Western interpretation alone cannot explain the plot line. Yet no Yoruba dictionary or time table would readily translate the exact meaning and duration of the plot into Western terms. Dictionaries and time tables reflect an implicit Western bias. When applied to African cultures they become colonial tools as much as Bibles and history books. Carpentier avoids taking sides. He emulates the African radial format of inscription but makes it contingent to the Western historical tradition. According to the radial format, communication centers on a concrete nucleus which irradiates multiple interpretations. Spatio-temporal readings are discouraged because they are based on a hierarchical and sequential inscription of data. Yet, the text allows Western-trained readers to arrive at a limited spatio-temporal certainty after their radial exploration of Yoruba clues.

The ritual of Notre-Dame-des-petites-oreilles becomes the concrete nucleus of the metaphorical web. It leads two of the factions in town to confront each other, under the guise of debating Atilano's significance. The fictitious Catholic virgin has a Yoruba counterpart: 0ba, one of Shango's wives, who cuts off her ear to regain conjugal bliss after her husband has strayed from their traditional union. Carpentier substitutes the feuding pair with two other Yoruba-born deities: Babalu-aye (San Lázaro) and Yemaya (Nuestra Señora de Regla).¹¹

The substitution itself is a lesson in survival techniques in the face of the colonizing efforts of history. In the presence of transculturation and adaptation to social oppression, Yoruba deities not only took the names of Catholic counterparts, but also traded attributes to become more compatible with Catholic dogma, Caribbean sensibilities and the strict writing rules of the Western book. The development of the two pairs in question serves as an illustration of such substitutions.

Shango is one of the most powerful and ambiguous of Yoruba deities. Its womanizing bouts are matched by states of subdued androgyny, its fury and deafness are matched by its kindness and understanding. Cubans venerate a milder, less ambivalent image of Shango in Santa Bárbara, the guardian of purity.¹²

Oba's sacrifice of an ear was matched by Yemaya's lack of a breast.¹³ Oba's presence is rare in Cuban rites, although her attributes as well as Yemaya's are associated with Nuestra Señora de Regla. The polygamous relationship which 0ba shares with two other wives of Shango, gave way to a more assertive, Amazon-like attitude during Cuba's colonial siege.

Babalu-aye's feared personality in the Yoruba cult mellowed to his revered status as the Cuban San Lázaro—the patron god of endurance since slave days. Yemaya's original carefree fecundity has been cautiously reinterpreted in Nuestra Señora de Regla as a symbol of nurturing motherhood.

Some processes of cultural adaptation are outlined by Carpentier in the plot. For instance, the character in "Tale" who impersonates San Lázaro is said to have once impersonated Santa Bárbara, following the historical evolution. The exchange of Oba for Yemaya as Nuestra Señora de Regla is more subtle. However, the ironic reference to Notre-Dame-des-petites-oreilles, by virtue of the name itself, encompasses the attributes of the two Yoruba deities on which it is based. Cultural adaptations either appear as explicit, but seemingly insignificant allusions in the text, or as implicit failures of the code to fix the African presence within Western words.¹⁴

Carpentier's "Tale" illustrates the compounded problem of dealing with African cultures translated into a second-hand Cuban code. The domestic quarrels in the pantheon of Yoruba deities acquire poignancy as their traditions fight for survival in the text. Atilano is the messenger of such a battle. He is a literary disguise for the Santo Niño de Atocha. This Catholic figure represents the offspring of Elegba—the Yoruba trickster who questions tradition and ends up as the scapegoat. The reader who explores Atilano's cultural implications experiences the text as a scale model for cultural survival. Ironically, Atilano dies the cruel death of a forgotten martyr. He only survives the reading of the text.

Atilano's sacrifice irradiates meaning. It coincides with the waning crescent phase of the moon, when the moon is "dying."¹⁵ The eighth day of the slow celestial "death" marks the time for a nganga, "a pact with the dead." The most significant nganga occurs September 8th, during the celebration of the day of Nuestra Señora de Regla. Therefore, the African substratum supplies some spatiotemporal certainty to the plot; it places and dates the action as the readers learn to partake in the aforementioned beliefs.

Moreover, the African substratum follows closely the cycles of nature. The mysterious open ending of "Tale" reflects man's attempts to grasp the essence of space and time. The last sentence reads: "The bad influences of the moon vanished for it had entered a heavenly triangle dispelling its evil power over the skulls of men." The "heavenly triangle" in question consists of the other three quarters in which the moon is bound to show more benevolence, after the ritual sacrifice. During September, the benevolent period culminates with a celebration of purity regained, the blessings of nature, a rebirth. The new hope points toward three traditions: the Yoruba Obatala, the Catholic Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, the pagan Harvest Moon. They embody the aspirations men of mixed heritage place on the passage from the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of September.¹⁶

The reader choses among many interpretations implicit in, or suggested by, the cultural adaptations outlined in the text. However, Carpentier's readers share with him the responsibility of channeling such adaptations through the authority-frame ruling the book format. The situation compares to the colonial elite's use of the recording format of the Inquisition and the Papacy as models of authority covering their changing needs and aims in scriptural interpretations. The biased treatment of texts such as the Bible or the Summa Teologica never openly undermines the continuing line of authority. That is why the Conquistadors' Catholic dogma and the neo-Conquistadors' "magic realism" incorporate historical digressions and textual discrepancies into a legitimizing official code, without weakening its foundations. The voracious flexibility of the colonialist writing code allows two systems to coexist in the text: that of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. However, the ironic attitude implicit in such a compromise illustrates the frustrated efforts of a literature intent on recording traditions which history books remain reluctant or unprepared to assimilate, except in colonial terms. When the reader faces such a sad state of affairs, the text begins to yield the forced synthesis of hidden facts and glorified fiction characterizing Caribbean treatment of African materials.

In Carpentier's writing system, Yoruba culture challenges its submissive role. Instead, the text gives it a place of honor in the preservation of Cuban values within the frame of a colonizing history. This honor is warranted for, in general, Yoruba culture has survived well Western renderings. This is evident from a recent report of an Epa festival in Yorubaland reenacting the challenge of traditions and honoring the heroes who return hope or consolation to the group. In that festival, an Atilano-like trickster represents the individual whose ritual role is to question the interpretation of social destiny.¹⁷

As the story claims and history verifies, Carpentier's "Tale of Moons" stands as a scale model for the ironic contradictions of Cuban discourse. Native variables put in doubt a Western control. But what appears as native variables are mostly cultural remnants adopted from African sources. Therefore, the colonized Cuban writer acts also as a colonizer. If African culture cannot win the textual battle, it can survive by default of the recording system.

Notes

¹ On the theory of the "just war," see Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959), pp. 62-73. On Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as sources for that theory, see also Ricardo Levene, Introducción a la historia del derecho indiano in Obras de Ricardo Levene (Buenos Aires: Academia de la Historia, 1962), III, pp. 176-177 and note 5.

² For an introduction to African syntax see the concept of "scale model" and "bricolage" in Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1962).

³ See John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications in Anthropology, 5, 1974), p. 24.

⁴ See Alejo Carpentier, "Tale of Moons: Translated and annotated by José Piedra," Latin American Literary Review, 8, No. 16 (1980) pp. 63-86.

⁵ See Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 89-94.

⁶ A similar array of stock characters is caricatured and satirized by oral poets at Yoruba festivals. See Oludare Olajubu, "Iwi Egungun Chants—An Introduction," in Forms of Folktale in Africa, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), p. 156.

⁷ The distinction between chronological and ritual time is studied by González Echevarría, pp. 90-94. For further Yoruba clues to study the timing of the story, see this author's notes to Tale, Nos. 49 and 55.

⁸ There are several allusions to Atilano's unconsciousness. At the very beginning of the tale he is described as an atemporal, cliché figure, always waiting for the train to arrive. Soon after, his ears and brain appear immune to the sentence of death being discussed around him. And finally, he appears "planted in front of his shoeshine chair, looking on absentmindedly." Towards the end of the story, the text makes clear that the official death report is a cover-up to discourage further social clashes.

⁹ See Ulli Beier, Yoruba Myths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 36.

¹⁰ For the classical work on the subject of Afro-Cuban lore see Fernando Ortiz, Los negros brujos (1906: rpt, Miami: New House Publishers, 1973). See Ortiz, Ch. ii (pp. 23-60) for all the deities mentioned. A good source of popular beliefs on the same subject is Agún Efundé, Los secretos de la santería (Miami: Ediciones Cubamerica, 1978), pp. 71-74 (on Ogun).

¹¹ For Oba's story see Lydia Cabrera, El Monte, Igbo-Finda-Ewe-Orisha-Vititi-Nfinda (Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba) (1954; rpt., Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1975), pp. 224-226. Also Tale, translator's note No. 49.

For Babalu-aye and Yemaya's Cuban representations see Efundé, pp. 61-69. I have found no evidence of their ritual antagonism outside of Carpentier's text, but Yemaya's celebration September 8th coincides with that of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad delCobre, a Catholic figure native to Cuba and venerated as the national patroness. She is identified with Osun (or Ochún, according to its Cuban pronunciation) who does have a traditional feud with Obatala. Nuestra Señora de Regla appears in the text as a scale model for the more widely venerated and traditional figure of Osun. See note 14 for more details.

¹² Efundé, pp. 42-47.

¹³ Efundé, pp. 45-46.

¹⁴ Efundé, pp. 38-41.

¹⁵ For this and the other references to Cuban-Yoruba interpretations of the moon, see El Monte, Ch. v: "Como se prepara una nganga," especially pp. 119-121. See also, Tale, translator's note No. 55.

¹⁶ For the significance of the feud between the "white" or "pure" forces of Obatala, and the "black" or "dark" forces of Osun, at Epa, see Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), Ch. iii, pp. 191-198.

For the significance of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, see Ortiz, pp. 30-31, and Efundé, pp. 30-33.

For the celebration of Harvest Moon, see Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (2nd ed., London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1971), p. 215. See also the Yoruba ritual figure called the Passing-Sign-Of-The-Moon corresponding to the same myth in Thompson, p. 202.

For the timing of Harvest Moon according to the Autumnal Equinox refer to The World Almanac and Book of Facts (New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1978).

¹⁷ See note 16.