THE KONGO RULE: THE PALO MONTE MAYOMBE WISDOM SOCIETY (REGLAS DE CONGO: PALO MONTE MAYOMBE) A BOOK BY LYDIA CABRERA AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION FROM THE SPANISH Donato Fhunsu A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature (Comparative Literature). Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Inger S. B. Brodey Todd Ramón Ochoa Marsha S. Collins Tanya L. Shields Madeline G. Levine © 2016 Donato Fhunsu ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Donato Fhunsu: The Kongo Rule: The Palo Monte Mayombe Wisdom Society (Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe) A Book by Lydia Cabrera An English Translation from the Spanish (Under the direction of Inger S. B. Brodey and Todd Ramón Ochoa) This dissertation is a critical analysis and annotated translation, from Spanish into English, of the book Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe, by the Cuban anthropologist, artist, and writer Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991). Cabrera’s text is a hybrid ethnographic book of religion, slave narratives (oral history), and folklore (songs, poetry) that she devoted to a group of Afro-Cubans known as “los Congos de Cuba,” descendants of the Africans who were brought to the Caribbean island of Cuba during the trans-Atlantic Ocean African slave trade from the former Kongo Kingdom, which occupied the present-day southwestern part of Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, Cabinda, and northern Angola. The Kongo Kingdom had formal contact with Christianity through the Kingdom of Portugal as early as the 1490s. These Africans brought with them to Cuba their religious beliefs and practices; their healing, harming, and fate-structuring and restructuring arts (kinganga); their language (Kikongo); and their storytelling practices (myths, fables, narratives, songs, poetry) which, in the process of coping with their new condition and environment in the Americas, became the knot of material intimacies of “people from all four quarters of the globe” who labored in this new space to produce commodities for European consumption. In Cuba, they blended their African traditions with the traditions of the iii native peoples of the island, of the Asians, and the Spanish and Christian Catholic tradition of the slave masters to produce a distinct, creole inspiration, language, and storytelling mode. Cabrera was inspired to do this work while studying art at the École du Louvre in Paris in the 1930s, after meeting the Négritude poets (Césaire, Senghor, and Damas), whose works she translated from French into Spanish. The dissertation shows that Reglas de Congo creates what the Congolese philosopher Valentin Mudimbe calls “espace metissé,” a new, creole, hybrid, “translated” space that challenges the colonial assumptions of African and “black” personhood and articulates a religious-artistic, ontological, and epistemological dimension of personhood that, inserting itself on its own terms in this new cosmology, has come to be called “Kongo-inspired” and has led to a reconfiguration of the national project—what it means to be human and Cuban. iv Zaya ku utuka, kuzaya ku ukuenda ko. (Know where you are coming from, not where you are going.) Kongo proverb Mbidi bantu, mbidi kizoba. (A multitude of people, a multitude of stupidity.) Kongo proverb You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions. Sven Lindqvist “Exterminate all the Brutes”, p. 2 To my father and to my mother: Tata, ikutondedi beni. Mama, lutondu lu ntima. To “my” Jesuit Fathers: Comment vous remercier pour tous ces dons spirituels, intellectuels, émotionnels, physiques et culturels? Dieu seul sait comment je suis reconnaissant de cet “esprit sain dans un corps sain” dont vous avez été les catalyseurs. To Don Joaquín Alonso Alonso: La Vida finalmente me dio la respuesta a aquella pregunta que le hice a usted en Kinshasa acerca de la traducción. La Vida también me permitió aplicar aquella lección que me enseñó usted acerca del agradecimiento. Muchísimas gracias del corazón. To Don Elio Hernández: Si lo hubiera sabido entonces, le habría hecho muchas preguntas acerca de Cuba. Gracias por las otras respuestas que usted sí me dio. To El Señor Bernardino De Michele: Que quede sentado que “El hijo de Bernardino” lo recordará siempre a usted con aprecio y agradecimiento. To Pablo Nieto, Reazin Charles, Bertha María de La Cruz (Gaby), Gloria Lantigua, and my fellow martial artists and spiritual seekers in Venezuela: Cuando estaba perdido en Caracas, ustedes me ayudaron a encontrarme y encontrar mi camino. Muchas gracias. v To the Peña Family: Gracias por haberme ayudado a entender el sentido de las palabras “hermano” y “hermana.” To Ninoska Escalante and Judith Escalante: Gracias por invitarme en sus vidas. To the Antersijn Family, the Maduro Family, and my extended Family in Curaçao: Pakiko Korsow? Mi no sa, pero no ta importa. Masha danki di tur kurason. To my extented Family in Trinidad: Thank you for the Calypso vibrations and the memories. To the Liñán Family and the Gómez Family: Thank you for allowing me to explore with you the potentialities of mature spirituality and the possibilities of “loving understanding.” To the Reverend June Schmidt, Don Schmidt, the Rogers, and my extended U.S. Family in Colorado: What else can I say? Thank you for the faith, the grace, the love, the hope, and the works. To Mrs. Aileen Hicks, Mr. John Hicks, and my extended U.S. Family in Topeka, Kansas: Thank you for the many loving surprises for the spirit, the soul, and the body. To the State of Kansas and the University of Kansas: Thank you for embracing me as a certified Jayhawk, one of your own, when everybody else was wondering who I was. To Dr. David A. Dinneen (DAD): Thank you, DAD, for teaching me how to teach—and learn and live. To Linda Wiley: Thank you for considering the “crazy” hypothesis that world citizens are interpreters and translators of the unseen possibilities that are manifesting all the time. To Dorothy Kurtz, Mark Kurtz, and the whole Kurtz Family: I am glad to know that for us, “out of sight” has meant “in the mind and in the heart.” Thank you. To Vivian June Tubbs and the Tubbs Family: Thank you for the hospitality, the friendship, and the path walked together. To Terrie Jordan: Thank you for making Kansas worthy of carrying in the heart. To the Institute for Applied Linguistics (IAL) at Kent State University, “the other KSU”: Thank you for helping save my academic and cultural soul with the Gospel of Translation. vi To Sabine Marina Jones, Marianne Jones, Opa, and the Toms Family: Thank for the love and for sharing the many joys and the two or three frustrations of the Path of Language Mediation. To the Chapel Hill Institute for Cultural and Language Education (CHICLE): Thank you for your professional hospitality—for letting me interpret, translate, teach, and simply be. Jane Stein, Adam Stein, Miriam Palacio, Enrique Palacio, Sharon Mujica, Perla Saitz, Kevin Hunt, Becky Cabrera, Ricky Ayers… The list is long. To Master Youngsoung Ko, Master Kyle Wagner, and the Kotox Taekwondo Family: Kamsa hamnae da. To my fellow students and co-workers on the Path of Discipleship in the World of the Unborn, the World of the Living, and the World of the Dead: Thank you for allowing me to share with you the privileges and the burden of the One Work. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When in the 1930s Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas, three young students of literature from various parts of the African Diaspora, met in Paris, France, and decided to launch the political, philosophical, sociocultural, artistic, and literary movement that came to be known as Négritude, they were saying one thing: “‘Black’ lives matter!” “Of course, all lives matter!” they were constantly reminded. “Just look how much the Paris cultural scence has appropriated all things African, from the cubism of Pablo Picasso to the surrealist poetry of Guillaume Appollinaire!” The beauty of human existence is that life is big enough to accommodate the voices of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Appollinaire, and also the voices of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas, three inquisitive souls who felt the need to affirm the humanity of people of African descent. For those who, back then and now, experience human history clothed in an Africana skin, it is hard not to feel conflicted and wonder: “If all lives do indeed matter, why do I feel in myself and in my world the paradox of experiencing a negation that compels me to affirm that my life does indeed matter?” The Comparative Literature Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has attracted me because I have found it to be the perfect home for me, a mansion big enough and with enough rooms to accommodate my many interests in languages and national literatures as well as my interest in the disciplinary fields of translation studies and religious studies, which, viii together, have culminated in this Ph.D. dissertation. A hybrid space where, indeed, all scholarly lives matter! I am grateful to Dr. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, with whom I started this final stage of my tenure in the Program, and to Dr. Inger Brodey and Dr. Todd Ramón Ochoa, who have directed me to the finish line. My gratitude to them is deeply felt and polyvocally expressed! I am also grateful to Dr. Marsha Collins and Dr. Tanya Shields for their support, inspiration, and encouragement. This project, the academic, scholarly translation of Lydia Cabrera’s Reglas de Congo, would not even have been undertaken if it were not, really, for two people.