The Oxymoron of Sexual Sovereignty: Some Puerto Rican Literary Reflections Centro Journal, Vol
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Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of New York Estados Unidos Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo The oxymoron of sexual sovereignty: Some Puerto Rican literary reflections Centro Journal, vol. XIX, núm. 1, 2007, pp. 50-73 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37719103 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative Cruz(v3).qxd 6/3/07 3:49 PM Page 50 Cruz(v3).qxd 6/3/07 3:49 PM Page 51 CENTRO Journal Volume7 xix Number 1 spring 2007 The oxymoron of sexual sovereignty: Some Puerto Rican literary reflections ARNALDO CRUZ-MALAVÉ ABSTRACT What is the relationship of sexuality, especially “queer” sexuality, to sovereignty in a colonial setting such as Puerto Rico’s? This essay revisits sexuality as a troubling, and often oxymoronic, trope for the formation of a geographically bounded sense of community or nation in modern Puerto Rican texts. What is the relationship of this sexual trope to Puerto Rico’s political status as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in its also notoriously oxymoronic Insular Cases? Does the excessive sexual trope to which Puerto Rican literary texts insistently return point to an area of agency or self- determination still worth pursuing or advocating? Through an examination of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s recent meditations on sovereignty and on its implications for political action in what he calls our contemporary, globalized “state of exception” this essay explores those timely questions. And it does so, especially, by returning to the work that inspired Agamben’s meditations, the work of the German Jewish philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin. [Keywords: Sexuality, Sovereignty, Queer Studies, U.S. Constitutional Law, Colonialism, Agency] Cain/Cain en la Calle Luna, 2005, by David Antonio Cruz. Oil on canvas with wood frame and doors, 72" x 72" [ 51 ] Cruz(v3).qxd 6/3/07 3:49 PM Page 52 “Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of exception.” —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” A literature adrift Much of Puerto Rican literature has tried to construct the state of territorial sovereignty we Puerto Ricans lack through writing. And the privileged trope for this construction, as well as its systematic undoing, has been sex. Like other literatures of the Caribbean area, Puerto Rican writing has identified the Island’s coast, its ocean-swept ports and cities, with foreign invasion, penetration, prostitution, plagues—in sum, with colonialism. And it has consistently set its sight on that other utopian space where sex and geography would mesh to form a productive, tightly bound, cohesive community—that tropical forest, historically home to runaway slaves, indigenous deities, and African orishas, that served during a large part of the 18th and 19th centuries as both the imaginary and factual limit to the slave-owning plantation—el monte. Consider, for instance, what is one of the national romances of the Caribbean, the Dominican novel Doris Sommer has called one of Latin America’s “foundational fictions,” Manuel de Jesús Galván’s 1882 historical novel, Enriquillo. While most Latin American national romances set out to elicit, as Sommer has analyzed, the reader’s desire for a consolidated community, or nation, by following the passionate trials and tribulations of a mixed-race couple of lovers, Enriquillo, on the contrary, seems to evacuate all desire with its slow, morose, legalistic prose. Its heroine, the mestizo princess Mencía appears throughout the text cold and impassive to the advances of the novel’s hero, the Indian slave Enriquillo. And it is only toward the last three pages of the novel when Enriquillo revolts, defeating the Spanish usurper Valenzuela and installing himself as sovereign of the kingdom of the mountains of Bahoruco, appearing thus, according to the text, “great, truly free,” and invested “with the august halo of heroic valor and recovered dignity” (Galván 277), that Mencía, one could say, finally loses her poise. Her heart starts to beat then, and her excitement is such that she can hardly manage to react with one single, coherent [ 52 ] Cruz(v3).qxd 6/3/07 3:49 PM Page 53 emotion: she throws herself in the arms of Enriquillo, who is “still covered by the dust of combat” (277), like all heroes, and she kisses him and cries while she whispers words of love in which passion is mixed with no small amount of pride, and rage: “Grande, libre, vengado...; ¡así te quiero!” [Great, free, avenged... —¡that’s how I want/will love you!] (277). How could Mencía, a princess, have loved a slave in slave territory? But here in el monte, in Bahoruco, in clearly delimited sacred ground, she falls in his arms as if possessed by all the contained emotion that she had repressed throughout the novel’s 300-odd pages. Strikingly, unlike most Latin American foundational fictions, in Enriquillo, it’s only once geography is secured that desire begins. It’s not the pull and take of desire that propels the story’s heroes and us forward, dialectically constructing thus out of our shared desire the community or the nation. No, desire does not construct here, in this most extreme case of the relations between geography and eros in Caribbean fiction, the nation. Rather, desire is so eviscerated here that when it finally makes its appearance in the novel’s last three chapters it gives the impression of being born uncontaminated, pure and chaste, from the bowels of the newly constituted territory, or state. No concessions have been made by the novel’s author, Galván, to the usefulness of grounding his narrative in actual historically specific desire in his overwhelmingly black and mulatto country, desire which could then be channeled or transformed. Instead, Galván simply refused to notice, or as Sommer has quipped, he preferred to “squint” at dark Dominicans “to create an optical illusion of racial simplicity” (251). And because sexuality and race are not merely related in colonial contexts but are mutually constitutive, or intersectional, as scholars of colonialism and race have advanced, to cleanse sex of all its colonial relations, of its deeply tangled history, is also to erase actual, historically specific race, as indeed happens here in this Dominican foundational romance where even the indigenous characters are culturally and phenotypically indistinguishable from whites and blacks and mulattoes merit only a passing reference. I call Enriquillo an extreme case in Caribbean fiction, though not an unrepresentative one. Puerto Rican literature, to my knowledge, does not include such a pure case of unrepentant forgetfulness. Notably, the Puerto Rican nineteenth- century novel that sets out to constitute a sovereign state, a Caribbean confederation composed by the islands of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, on the model of a romance, Eugenio María de Hostos’s La peregrinación de Bayoán, is not only a failed romance but one which transpires mostly at sea, where its main character seems doomed, perhaps endlessly, to peregrination.2 A literature characterized by guilt, or rather, as Rubén Ríos Avila and Frances Negrón-Muntaner have claimed, by “trauma” and shame,3 Puerto Rican writing must of necessity locate itself and its characters not on the sacred monte but on the porous coast, in the peripheries, in the slums of La Perla or El Fanguito, or in exile in New York. And yet there remains in that exile the trace of that other space where sexuality and geography would mesh, where both community and sexuality would finally begin. Such is the case even for the twentieth-century modern Puerto Rican writer, René Marqués, a writer whose authority, I have argued elsewhere,4 derives from a perverse sort of inversion, from turning impotence and failure into a national rallying call. And yet in his 1958 classic, the suggestively titled bildungsroman, La víspera del hombre, whose probable translation into English, “The Eve of Man,” I have also considered (1995 143), seems unintentionally insightful (as it bespeaks of the sort of gender dislocations that Marqués associates with the Island’s “colonial modernity” [ 53 ] Cruz(v3).qxd 6/3/07 3:49 PM Page 54 and that haunt his prose),5 that utopian space of el monte as a privileged metonymy for an erotic state prior to colonialism makes a certain, if brief, appearance. As the novel opens, its protagonist Pirulo, a young country boy, or jíbaro, from the symbolically charged mountains of Lares, home to the Island’s 19th-century revolt against Spanish rule, watches the sea for the first time. And as he watches the sea and its open, jaggedly “unprotected” coastline (9), he feels naked and ashamed as before the gaze of God (9–10), and the modern colonial world of displacement, fragmentation, lack of (legal) recognition, dislocated gender and sexual identity, orphanage, and exile that awaits him, and where his development as a “man” must take place, is foreshadowed. But significantly before he turns to face this modern colonial world the protagonist takes one last look back at the mountains from whence he came, and the narrative self-consciously flashes back to the protagonist’s childhood to reconstruct not only the privileged patriarchal world of the coffee plantation where he had been raised, as Juan Gelpí has proposed (81–2), but a much older world, hidden amidst the plantation, the native Indian world of el monte where, according to legend, the Indian princess Anaiboa and her lover Manicato unsuccessfully sought refuge from the invading Spanish hordes.