LITERARY STUDIES 2021 | Chapter Showcase

Home , Celestine (comics), Daughters of the Rich, More Than a Lover, Stride (composition)

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FROM THE EDITOR

The literary studies program at Lexington Books is committed to publishing the highest quality scholarship across a broad range of literary movements, styles, and theories, from studies in well-established areas such as medieval and francophone literature to works in crucial emerging areas of study such as postcolonial and decolonial literature and race, sexuality, disability, and trauma studies. We are proud to publish works that demonstrate the value of literature and literary theory as a lens through which we may closely consider ourselves and our societies. Regardless of time period or genre, literary works speak to salient issues of the human condition, and the authors and editors who publish with Lexington Books draw out these valuable insights to establish and contribute to indispensable dialogues on literature and its social and cultural resonances. With an extensive array of monographs and edited collections speaking to and from diverse literary perspectives, Lexington Books offers exceptional and innovative academic content for scholars, researchers, and students. The chapters in this showcase—which contribute to scholarly conversations about Latinx trauma and memory; masculinity and race; ecocriticism in speculative fiction; satire in medieval literature; and cultural identity in immigrant narratives—provide a sense of the depth of critical thought and engagement found in our publications and the breadth of our literary studies list. I invite you to publish your next book with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, and revised dissertations by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. While we publish many standalone titles, we also publish books in series that bring together incisive scholarship around key subjects such as After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France, Reading Trauma and Memory, and Studies in Medieval Literature. Click here to see a full list of our series. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published quickly. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers and market our new titles aggressively around the globe. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

HOLLY BUCHANAN Acquisitions Editor LEXINGTON BOOKS

contents

4 - 33 Crescencio Lopez-Gonzalez, “Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation: The Urban Experiences and Realities of Cuban Americans,” in The Latinx Urban Condition: Trauma, Memory, and Desire in Latinx Urban Literature and Culture

34 - 65 LaToya Jefferson-James, “Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa” in Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re- Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora

66 - 83 Tereza Dědinová, “‘The Being that Can be Told’ The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin as a Remedy for the Anthropocene” in Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future, ed. Tereza Dedinová, Weronika Laszkiewicz, and Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun

84 - 104 Joan Ramon Resina, “Inverted Popes, the Apostolic Succession, and Dante’s Vocation as Satirist Ronald L. Martinez” in Dante Satiro: Satire in Dante Alighieri’s Comedy and Other Works, ed. Fabian Alfie and Nicolino Applauso

105 - 115 Wessam Elmeligi, “The In-Between: The Return of the Mind in Miral Al- Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010),” in Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return

The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Crescencio Lopez-Gonzalez, “Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation: The Urban Experiences and Realities of Cuban Americans,” in The Latinx Urban Condition: Trauma, Memory, and Desire in Latinx Urban Literature and Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 119–148. Series: Reading Trauma and Memory. All rights reserved.

Chapter Four

Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation

The Urban Experiences and Realities of Cuban Americans

When Fidel Castro took control of the Cuban government in 1959, about 250,000 families, mostly from the upper and middle class, left the country and came to the United States. Many of those Cubans did not plan to stay long, and they were “fully expected to return to Cuba as soon as Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution failed,” considering themselves temporary “exiles rather than immigrants.”1 The majority of those families relocated to Miami, Florida, where they established communities, businesses, and organizations that later helped transition the future waves of Cuban economic exiles. Between 1965 and 1973 about 300,000 Cubans came to the states through the program known as the “Freedom Flights.” The continuous exodus of Cubans has largely depended on political, economic, and historical events such as the Mariel Crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the general protest in 1994 due to the harsh economic conditions that caused famine and food rationing. When the first waves of exiles came to the United States, they yearned to go back to their country, but as time passed, they stayed and integrated themselves into the American culture, where younger generations developed an identity conflict. The longer a family stayed, the more comfortable with American culture their children felt. Politics is a divisive factor of Dreaming in Cuban, where Cristina García attempts to exhibit several perspectives of Cuba’s political condition through the Pino family. The different political beliefs cause considerable debate, creating a feeling of alienation among family members. The family dispute

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4 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 120 Chapter 4 reproduces tension that exists between the contradictory political ideologies of the Cuban diaspora. The Cuban exodus to the United States caused a geographical displacement, creating an ideological divide among the distinctive waves of exiles who left the country and moved to Miami and to different parts of the United States, including New York, where part of the novel takes place. Katherine B. Payant argues that Cristina García’s experiences as a refugee inspired her to write about Cuban politics in a way that shows the complexity of the issue: “A 1984 trip to the island to visit her mother’s family, supporters of Castro, focused her interest on her identity and larger questions of history and politics, opening up the complexities of the Cuban revolution. Before that visit, she had seen the Cuban situation in the unam- biguous black and white of many Cuban Americans.”2 Another aspect that influenced García was her time working in Miami for Time Magazine where she interacted with the Miami-exile community: “It was a shock, it really was. I felt extremely alienated. I was given a tremendously hard time by my peers and family. They frequently called me communist and attached all kinds of ridiculous labels to me because I was a registered Democrat. . . . I feel that I am not welcome to a daughter in the community.”3 Through the Pino family, García desires to create a broader perception of Cuba’s political history, presenting through her characters other points of view to help the other communities understand other perspectives that are not always represented in the United States. García’s experiences and interactions with family members and Cuban-exiles helped her consider the complexities of the Cu- ban diaspora: She “uses the novel to form in a vaguely autobiographical attempt to reassess her individual and familial dislocation between two an- tagonistic national bodies.”4 García’s perceived geographical dislocation is reproduced in each member of the Pino family at different junctures in their lives. In Dreaming in Cuban (1996), García narrates the story of four women of the Pino family whose lives take different paths during and after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, representing four different perspectives. It explores different ideologies detailing how the revolution destroyed and re-created new relationships with an emphasis on Celia, Lourdes, Felicia, and Pilar. Celia, the matriarch of the family, dedicates her life to the revolution and its leader. Lourdes, daughter of Celia, flees Cuba in disagreement with the communist ideas of her mother and moves to New York where she lives with her daughter Pilar and her husband Rufino Puente. Pilar, daughter Lourdes, rebels against her mother and carries the burden of remembering the fragmented history of the family. Although she has lived in New York since she was two years old, she desires deeply to return to Cuba to reconnect with her cultural heritage. Living in a distant country, but feeling a responsibility and, to a certain extent, a loyalty to Cuba, Pilar has to reconcile several versions of the truth of the Cuban Revolution; a revolution that is different for her grand-

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mother, her aunt, and her mother, demonstrating that history is subjective. The same event, the revolution, is remembered differently by all the members of the family, demonstrating different perspectives and narrating how each experienced it. The distancing of these characters from the family unit creates a state of imbalance, dissatisfaction, and anxiety, separating them further as a family while uniting them with the common battle of their fragile identities. García contrasts the three women (Celia, Lourdes, and Pilar) through their opposing political and ideological differences, demonstrating how memories and experiences negatively affect their perceptions. Celia del Pino, the matriarch of the family, expresses her patriarchal and socialists’ beliefs through writing letters that she keeps but never mails. She is portrayed as idealist, faithful, submissive, and obsessive, obeying orders from all male figures she interacts with, like Gustavo Sierra de Armas, Jorge del Pino, and El Líder of the Cuban Revolution. When Celia was young, she fell in love with a Spanish man named Gustavo Sierra de Armas: “He was a married Spanish lawyer from Granada, and said that he wanted to document the murders in Spain.”5 They met when he visited the store, El Encanto, where Celia worked selling photo equipment that Gustavo needed to document the Civil War in Spain. From there, he returned more frequently to recite love poems and bring gifts to Celia, including the pearl earrings that Celia always had on. “Celia [had] removed the pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.”6 The earrings represent the memory of the romance she had with her Spanish lover, an important moment that impacted her life, holding on to the memory with such determination that she continued to write letters to him for almost twenty-five years. Gustavo’s departure had a negative impact on Celia’s life, affecting her mental health in a very serious way: “The doctors could find nothing wrong with Celia. They examined her through monocles and mag- nifying glasses, with metal instruments. . . . They prescribed vitamins and sugar pills and pills to make her sleep, but Celia diminished, ever more pallid, in her bed.”7 Elena Machado Sáez describes Celia’s condition as borderless emotions that paralyzed the body but do not limit her memory because she continues dreaming of the idealized love, crystalizing it through the letters she writes on the eleventh day of each month. 8 Through Celia’s character, García highlights the role and expectations of women during Celia’s historical time, a function based on the responsibility on being mothers, wives, and of secondary rank after men. It was common during Celia’s upbringing that women offered value if they had husbands, married young and bore children. After Gustavo left, she went through a crisis, becoming “a fragile pile of opaque bones, with yellowed nails and no monthly blood.”9 From Celia’s perspective, her self-worth was diminished, affecting her growth and development as a person. “Celia took to her bed by early summer and stayed there for the next eight months. That she was

6 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 122 Chapter 4 shrinking there was no doubt.”10 Celia’s refusal to communicate provides an inside view of her emotions, allowing the reader to perceive her fear and frustrations as symptoms of frustration. Amanda Easton explains that after Gustavo’s departure, “Celia’s perception of the world falters and she feels hopeless enough to uncharacteristically turn to a ritualistic practice.”11 In a society dominated by men, she lost her identity and purpose when she left. Moreover, Garcia omits details of Gustavo’s conditions upon returning to Spain, reinforcing the dynamics of a superior man and an inferior woman. Also, during the time that Celia was confined to her room, Jorge del Pino, an older man, approached her to court her and help her out of her misery while insisting to marry him: “‘Write to that fool,’ Jorge insisted. ‘If he doesn’t answer, you will marry me.’”12 Celia adopts both options, deciding to marry Jorge del Pino, a good but jealous man, and write letters to Gustavo, dreaming of one day traveling to Spain to find her lover. The lack of passion in the marriage causes a lot of tension, making her feel uneasy, lonely, and without Jorge’s help, who works and goes on long trips, leaving her behind with the continuous harassment of her mother-in-law and other unsympathetic family members. The pressure causes a second psychological episode, forcing her husband to place her in an asylum until she recovers and is able to bear another baby. Both mental health episodes show Celia’s rebelling against society’s expectations, deciding to react and shut down with her body rather than to easily accept conventional norms. Through the letters Celia writes, the reader learns that Celia witnessed the unjust conditions that existed under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. She observed how those of the upper class took advantage of the land, of tourism, and of the working class, compelling her to support and commit herself to the Cuban Revolution. She develops an idealized vision of the revolution, and desires a new beginning for Cuba through the fraternity of networks and community. She also desires social justice under a new government, and imagines how wealthy people like her daughter’s mother-in-law, Zaida Puente, will be “among the first to be hanged.”13 Mary S. Vasquez explains that when Castro comes to power in Cuba, “El Lider has partially taken Gustavo’s place” as Celia’s obsession.14 It is then that she “makes a decision. Ten years or Twenty, whatever she has left, she will devote to El Lider, give herself to the revolution.”15 She immediately begins to work on cane plantations and then as a civilian judge to demonstrate that she has completely surrendered to the revolution. She also sits down on her porch every day and night to guard the coast in the event of another American invasion. The revolution provides her a sense of belonging and empowering, feeling proud of her role in the transformation of Cuba, and a guardian of the Santa Teresa del Mar post. Her loyalty to the revolution consumes her completely, and instead of going to her husband and family for guidance and support, “Celia turns to the Revolution for purpose and emotional guidance.”16 She deeply

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worries about the revolution that she begins to move further away from her family to the point that she doesn’t know how to help them. Celia’s obsession, fidelity, and perseverance to El Líder, forces her to stay and not to travel to the United States with her family. By the time she reduces her revolutionary activity to focus on her family, she has lost them all, feeling disappointed with the revolution. Celia’s idealism functions as a warning that could destroy everything a person loves. Lourdes Puente, the oldest daughter of Celia and Jorge, inherits similar characteristics as her mother, developing an obsession with capitalism that causes her to lose her family while relegating them to the periphery. Just like Celia’s unhappy relationship, Lourdes’s marriage to Jorge also brought her unhappiness because Jorge’s family did not accept her due to her low-social- class status. When Lourdes was pregnant, Celia desires to have a boy so she could travel to Spain to find her lover Gustavo. Upon learning that it was a girl, she felt disappointed, rejecting her and expressing that she “will never remember her name.” 17 The rejection pushed Lourdes away from her mother, developing an uncaring relationship that harmed Lourdes’s growth. Lourdes’s “awareness of her mother’s rejection of her clouds Lourdes’s in- fancy.”18 The indifference that came from her mother frightened Lourdes, and over the years the emotional distance grew between them. As a consequence, Lourdes became slightly closer to her father even though the relationship did not bring much comfort either, because Jorge did not spend much time at home. When the revolution began, the Puente family lost all their money and land, and when they tried to protect the state of their in-laws, the soldiers sexually assaulted Lourdes, causing to lose her unborn. Although she never confides to anyone about the assault, the memory haunts her all her life, imagining that her relationship with her unborn son would have been different from her daughter. She fantasizes having conversations with him the same way that her husband, Rufino, speaks to Pilar. The generational trauma harms Lourdes’s family, creating empty relationships and obsessing over ideological beliefs. Through Lourdes’s story, García invites Cuban exiles to recognize other traumas instead of attributing all their discontent to the revolution. The parallel similarities between Celia and Lourdes continue to increase when Lourdes’s family moves to New York. Lourdes’s departure represents “abandon[ing] her mother and motherland, physically and emotionally,” emphasizing her aversion toward the revolution and toward her mother’s political perspective.19 Katherine B. Payant also proclaims that “their political differences . . . only exacerbate Lourdes’s resentment against her mother.”20 Although both adopt opposite political views, their obsession leads them to self-destruct and discontent. When Lourdes arrives in the United States, she consumes lots of food, leading her to increase in weight rapidly until she becomes obese. Unable to find satisfaction or harmony, she develops an

8 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 124 Chapter 4 addiction to sex, diets impulsively, and yearns to purify herself and settle her dissatisfaction, but she is unable to fill the void where her family and community should be. She also focuses on her two pastry shops, determining her self-worth through the production and success of her businesses, hopping that it will heal her emotional distress. Instead, she becomes a very strict dictator, mistreating her immigrant workers, judging them as thieves, and forcing her daughter Pilar to work for less than minimum wage. Appositive to Celia, Lourdes becomes a fanatical supporter of capitalism, empowering herself through hard work, and completely rejecting communism, including her daughter’s curiosity toward Che Guevara. Despite all her hard work, her emptiness is never filled, lacking contentment in an ideology that has wors- ened her relationships with everyone in her family, including her mother who experiences despair toward the end of her life. Lourdes internalizes Anglo-American capitalism through ideological and cultural immersion, consuming and appropriating the national symbols like the Statue of Liberty and baseball as if they were always part of her own culture. She hides her Cuban cultural heritage and adapts mainstream American values by embracing capitalist consumption and the idea of hard work as representations of her desire to assimilate. Alison Landsberg considers the adoption of a new identity as “cultural amnesia”21 where an individual decides to replace her cultural heritage with new “prosthetic memories in order to craft American identities for themselves.”22

While many immigrants might have longed to assimilate, the prosthetic memories they took on during that process were coercive and homogenizing. In- stead of producing difference and thus enabling empathy and perhaps even counterhegemonic politics, in this case prosthetic memories produced only sameness: the typical American. 23

Through prosthetic memories, Lourdes adheres to capitalism via her two businesses called “Yankee Doodle” where she signals to the public her newly acquired red, white, and blue American values. Through her business, she proclaims American ideals and denounces all the enemies of the United States like communism, Russians, and Fidel Castro. For Lourdes, the American Dream denotes abandoning her cultural history to start anew as a successful businesswoman like her American champion, Du Pont. Further- more, her newly acquired prosthetic memory comforts her sense of superiority toward everyone else, except her father, Jorge, with whom she shares her love for capitalism and her daughter, Pilar, whom she wants to indoctrinate with prosthetic memories and promises of a better future in the United States. Pilar was born in Cuba, but was brought to the United States when she was two years old, finding herself wedged between the interstices of two cultures and two appositive ideologies. According to García’s narrative, both

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ideologies are harmful when practiced to the extreme, suggesting a third option that is represented through Pilar’s character, a young Latina who questions her individual purpose in life: “Who chooses what we should know or what’s important? I know I have to decide these things for myself.”24 Pilar wants to create her own opinion of the revolution, different from her family and relatives, nurturing an internal assertiveness since she was born: “At her birth, Pilar inherits a mission from her grandmother, that of recording the family history.”25 Being cognizant of her family’s past, she searches for explanations to support Cuba’s political system, and to discredit the American way of life, but continuously runs into opposition from her mother, with whom she has a tense relationship. Therefore, Pilar communicates with her grandmother to escape the oppressive environment of her mother’s house. Lourdes does not really know how to communicate with her daughter, spending most of their time fighting over Cuba’s policies, which are the principal issues that causes much of the discord between them. The imposition that Lourdes tries to force on her daughter, and also the indifference that Pilar shows toward her mother, create a distance of distrust between them. It seems that Pilar bases her opinions on the Cuban Revolution in her desire to rebel against her mother. One Christmas, Pilar gave her mother a socialist book about Fidel Castro and the Revolution, and Lourdes responds by immersing the book in water. Pilar, like Cristina García, wants to rebel against this idea that there are only two ways of interpreting the political history of Cuba. Through Pilar, the reader learns that Cuba’s political issues are complex problems that cannot be reduced to black and white. Jon L. Schneider- man explains that “Garcia is using the character of Pilar to represent Garcia’s generation of immigrants that have been frequently overlooked in mainstream literature. . . . Garcia’s portrayal of Pilar puts a face to the previously anonymous generation of Cuban American women who have struggled to create an identity in their adopted homeland.”26 One-way Pilar seeks to find her identity is through music and art; both artistic expressions are powerful habits for her to release many of her feelings and emotions. Pilar’s rebellion against the American capitalist system manifests itself in different forms, including her punk phase, her time in the liberal universities, and in her artwork when she paints for her mother’s bakery. Through music, she feels a sense of personality and expression, identifying with American punk rock that arouses violence and rebellion. “I play Lou and Iggy Pop and this new band the Ramones whenever I paint. I love their energy, their violence, their incredible grinding guitars. It’s like an artistic form of assault.”27 In painting, she crystallizes her personal recogniz- able interpretation of freedom, utilizing the Statue of Liberty. Pilar uses this opportunity to make a painting of the punk style Statue of Liberty that carries the words, “I AM A MESS”. The painting expresses the resentment that Pilar feels toward the capitalism of the United States and also toward her mother,

10 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 126 Chapter 4 who is associated with the ideology of the United States. A unique variation from the original figure is that she paints the torch “float[ing] slightly beyond her grasp, and second, [she] paint[s] her right hand reaching over to cover her left breast, as if she’s reciting the National Anthem or some other slogan.”28 Pilar’s painting suggests that although Anglo-Americans perceive that the green light of prosperity is within reach, it is still a difficult struggle for many to achieve. “Pilar realizes history is a subjective narrative process, one she shapes to include what has not been recognized as official History.”29 As Rafael Miguel Montes proposes in his analysis of Cuban American literature, Pilar feels a need to question the history that is offered to her. Nostalgia, feigned memories, and fragile family relations are the protagonist in the last part of Dreaming in Cuban, representing the views of a Cuban diaspora that struggles to reconnect with their motherland. Pilar associates her country of origin and the Cuban Revolution with the memory of her grandmother, Celia, with whom she shares the same birthday, January 11, and communicates with her through telepathy. Through their communication, the reader can perceive that Celia is helping Pilar to hold on to her Cuban cultural heritage. Suzanne Leonard explains that “the construction of a modern-day ethnic identity relies on the act of making imaginative connections with one’s cultural heritage.”30 Pilar finds herself divided between her idealized memories of Cuba and her reality as an exile living in New York City. She has the unique ability to remember everything, including her first two years of life in Cuba, the sun, the swing on the porch, and traveling to Havana in her grandfather’s car. For Pilar, Cuba is her motherland, the home of her heart, a place that continues to disappear from her memory as time progresses. When she finally returns to Cuba, she discovers that the image of Cuba that she loves and cherish does not exist. As they travel together toward the Peruvian embassy, Celia reveals something important about families and country of origin to Pilar: “‘We have no loyalty to our origins,’ Abuela tells me wearily. ‘Families used to stay in one village reliving the same disillu- sions. They buried their dead side by side.’”31 Celia’s wisdom about the importance of family unity being stronger than nationhood helps Pilar to face the truth. Having lived all her life in the United States, it is the place that she knows best and realizes that it is where she belongs. When Celia asks Pilar, “Are you going to stay with me, Pilar? Are you going to stay with me this time?,”32 she already knows the answer and recognizes that there is no future for Pilar. Elena Machado Sáez explains that “Pilar’s choice to return to the U.S. is deemed inevitable; she has acquired the knowledge she needed, so it is time to leave. Celia’s death at the end of the novel is consequently depicted as a necessary step for Pilar to fully develop her new identity and independence from Cuba.”33 After Pilar and Lourdes leave, Celia walks toward the sea, removes the pearl necklace that Gustavo had given her, and drowns in

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the sea, the same sea that separates the United States and Cuba, the sea that has separated her family. For García, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 marks the dispersal and bro- kenness of the Pino family, whose members embrace distinctive political ideologies, contrasting primarily the views of those who endorsed the socialist ideas of Fidel Castro like Celia, and the members who strongly oppose them like Lourdes. Pilar Puente represents the unsettled memories, relationships, and struggles that Cuban-exiles experience when they decided to leave the motherland. Pilar also functions as a bridge between generations and broken families, reconstructing new perspectives and new identities, remembering and preserving the story of a disperse community that longs to one day return home. Another perspective of the desire to return home is represented in the novel Going Under by Virgil Suárez, where the protagonist drowns in urban landscape of Miami. Going Under by Virgil Suárez is a symbolic representation of a perceived urban reality by first generation Cuban Americans who find themselves adrift at the crossroads of urban capitalism and cultural assimilation in the city of Miami. Central to Suárez’s argument is the protagonist Xavier Cuevas, a rising middle-class businessman who routinely finds himself stuck in traffic and with deteriorating health issues due to overwork, paranoia, and a feeling of an insatiable ambition to have it all. An uncontrollable lifestyle leads him to a psychological mental breakdown, from which he wakes up wondering how and why he had arrived at such an inanimate state of mind. Feeling detached and lost, Cuevas begins a spiritual search back to his ethnic roots, hoping to recuperate the Cuban culture missing in his life. The symbolic realities lived by the protagonist are central to understanding how Xavier’s personal experiences and realities lead him to believe that in order to start a new life he must confront his trauma by untangling his personal memories as he travels back home. Home for the author, Virgil Suárez, is not just a physical place, but also a spiritual and cultural experience. He has stated in multiple interviews that he uses fiction to understand the realities of Cuban Americans living in exile. In a 2000 interview with Ryan G. Van Cleave, Suárez explains his personal feelings toward his literary work:

I write about the nature of exile and the travails of my people because that’s what I feel I know best. My work stems from my trying to understand our condition, our exiled situations and lives. Most of my work in poetry focuses on my voice as an immigrant, someone who is not completely at ease in his new surroundings. I love America, but my love for it will always be an immigrant’s love. Some people say this is the only love there is.34

Suárez utilizes fiction to portray a lived experience, using his literary creation as a repository of the everyday realities of human experience. Michel de

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Certeau explained in the text The Practice of Everyday Life that it is important “to recognize the theoretical value of the literary novel, which has become the zoo of everyday practices since the establishment of modern science.” For de Certeau, narratives are a continuous fictional representation of everyday life, functioning as metaphors of thought and creativity, which have the potential of transforming the cognitive consciousness of the reader.35 David Harvey expands de Certeau’s argument, theorizing how urban literature reimagines and produces a symbolic architecture that permeates the reader’s imagination, generating an atmosphere of alternatives and possibilities that help the reader understand the effects of urban life. 36 These symbolic urban complexities are embedded in Suarez’s literary work, which shows the experiences and realities of middle-class Cuban exiles who came to the United States seeking political asylum after the Cuban Revolution. One of the families that went through this process of migration and integration is Virgil Suárez’s family, which first migrated to Spain in 1970 and then moved to the United States in 1974 when Suárez was twelve years old. Suárez explains that when he came to the United States, he had already “live[d] in more than one world, more than one reality” and had begun the process of learning the English language.37 For Gustavo Perez Firmat, also a Cuban American writer who was born in Cuba, argues that Cuba “is transformed into a location imaginatively that is reconstituted through narratives that are created, at times simultaneously, inside and outside of the territo- ry.”38 These interconnections between memory and space have been theor- ized by the French historian Pierre Nora who argues that “memory attaches itself to sites”39 and “that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual”40 Nuala C. Johnson concurs with Pierre Nora and postulates that “[i]f memory is conceived as a recollection and representation of times past, it is equally a recollection of spaces past.”41 One could argue that the imaginary reproduced in the novel is interconnected with Virgil Suárez’s urban memories, performing the important function of reconstructing and rehabili- tating the character’s personal identity. The intersections between literary narratives and autobiographical histo- ries are visible through the representation of language-narration and the experiences of the characters, particularly the protagonist, whose family came from Cuba under the same political circumstances as other exiles. Xavier’s parents came to the United States when he was a child. He received an Anglo-American education where no one made fun of him because he didn’t fill the phenotype of a foreigner. He grew up embracing American culture and values, making it easier for him to leave behind his Cuban identity. This was perhaps the beginning of an unevenness in Xavier’s identity, developing liminal gaps as he constructed the narrative of who he was. In Going Under, there are Spanish words that are immediately followed by their translation in

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the English language, indicating that the narrative’s audience is Anglo- American, but it also reveals the self-consciousness of the narrator. The internal conflict that Xavier experiences could have been written only in English since it was “the language that was the most familiar to him.”42 English was “his language of choice.”43 Although English was his favorite language, Spanish was also the language of his childhood, which came to him through “vague memories . . . memories of a simpler, happier time, when he was a child.”44 Although he always avoided speaking Spanish, his childhood memories remind him “of displacement and dispossession . . . by memories that serve as a counter movement in attempt to retain the homeland culture.”45 In the narrative, Virgil Suárez portrays the life of Xavier Cuevas, a first- generation middle-class insurance salesman, who came to the United States in 1961 when he was one year old. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, married an all-American Caucasian wife, and lives in a middle-class neighborhood. Cuevas represents a successful young urban Cuban American who had finally achieved the American dream, but along the way he began having doubts about his achievements and soon questioned whether all of his material possessions had as much value as he thought they would. He began feeling unsatisfied, insecure, and confused, causing him a great deal of stress and soon after that a mental breakdown, where his whole body fell into a catatonic state. Unable to communicate for three days, his father took him to a well-known santera, who helped him understand his suspended state of confusion. Xavier’s rehabilitation became a process of self-discovery and self-analysis, providing the reader with multiple clues about internal psychological injuries that had immobi- lized his body. One of the first clues is the collapse of Xavier’s memory. The narrator provides a sequence of incidents that affected his memory: “Lately his memory failed. His concentration waned. He constantly wrote little me- mos to himself to remember things. Sometimes he didn’t remember them until Sarah, his wife, showed the crumpled pieces of paper to him before putting his clothes in the washing machine.”46 Xavier tried to explain his inconsistencies to his wife, but something unrecognizable blocked his memory. The narrator utilizes descriptive language to explain that “something” had deteriorated his memory, forcing his body to shut down. Even though the body appears to function as a fixed location of trauma, the body had accumu- lated this trauma in multiple locations where it had taken place, and in order to heal his body, Xavier must retrace his steps and confront the spaces where the trauma had occurred. Before analyzing each factor that contributed to Xavier’s mental breakdown, it is important to distinguish between psychological trauma and physical trauma. While physical trauma is visible and often times leaves a visible mark, psychological trauma could persist for years without being detected,

14 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 130 Chapter 4 especially if an individual decides to avoid and suppress his cultural identity. In the narrative, Xavier had made the choice early on to blend in to the American mainstream and had also decided to relinquish his Caribbean cultural roots. Cathy Caruth, in her text Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, explains that “in trauma the outside has gone inside without any mediation”47 and that “trauma is not simply an effect of destruc- tion but also fundamentally, an enigma of survival. It is only by recognizing, traumatic experience as a paradoxical relation between destructiveness and survival that we can also recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility.”48 For Xavier, the interconnection between survival and trauma is central to understanding his physical and psychological injuries. Caruth compares the conscious body part of an individual to the symbol of the body—for example, when the body is injured, the living organism tries to recover or heal. The psychological part functions differently because when a threat occurs, the experience of time is off, allowing the trauma to occur. In other words, victims of psychological trauma do not realize that the injury has occurred until it is too late. One of the first factors that contributed to Xavier’s subtle breakdown are the working conditions at his company where he worked selling life insurance packages door-to-door. Each day, Xavier would spend most of his time stuck in traffic and feeling emotions of frustration because he constantly found himself going nowhere. With time he got used to sitting in bumper-to- bumper traffic and unable to reach any destination. Through a repetitive routine, he developed feelings of detachment and disconnection toward his family, his employees, and his friends. When Xavier had his mental breakdown, his coworkers did not know what to do, whether to take him to the doctor or call 9-1-1. But Xavier said, “Get me out of here. . . . Take me to the beach. My father’s.”49 Xavier craved the fresh air and freedom of the beach where his father lived, a place he considered closest to the Cuban cultural spirit. It was the first indication that Xavier required relief from his monotone condition. These accumulating effects of urban capitalism began to have a negative impact on his mental abilities, making him into a wearisome individual who was losing his internal desire to succeed. According to David Harvey, this process of urban deterioration occurs when individuals begin to internalize repetitive work processes, losing their individuality into the urban space they inhabit, and accepting and acknowledging the material realities of everyday life.50 Xavier’s best friend warned him repeatedly and advised him to stop obsessing himself with work and money. He suggested imitating the “iguana” or the “chameleon” condition, “which, as he defined it, was a person who needed to blend, camouflage in order to fit in.”51 Xavier decided not to listen, and over time he lost sight of his cultural identity, finding himself culturally floating within the urban capitalist’s landscape of continuous progress.

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Another aspect that contributed to his personal breakdown was the separation from his Caucasian wife, Sarah, described as an all-American spouse with blonde hair, tall and slender with green eyes, with a traditional Anglo- American family. The narrator provides multiple forewarnings that their relationship is not going to function. When Xavier travels to Illinois to meet his future in-laws, he has the impression that they are not going to accept him, even though he attempts to appear as Anglo-American. His future father-in- law tries to persuade him not to date his daughter, explaining to him, “You come from a different world than she does . . . and you’re bound to have disagreements. Lots of them.” Xavier agreed with him, but in his mind, he felt 99 percent American and 1 percent Cuban, but the “one percent couldn’t be ignored. Obviously, that one percent made all the difference.”52 Xavier’s ambiguous identity was also represented through the consonant “X” as a signifier of Anglo-American desire and inclusion, insisting that the spelling and pronunciation of his name be done with the consonant X rather with the consonant J.53 Living in a Cuban American cultural and social world, people always hesitated about how to pronounce his name, however, his future father in-law perceives it as a vulnerability, questioning the pronunciation: “It’s Javier, isn’t it? Not Xavier. Like Mexico is Mejico.”54 The questioning of his identity reinforced the notion that he did not belong in Anglo- American society, highlighting the struggle that Xavier was experiencing, a yearn to be identified as American and to leave behind his Cuban cultural heritage. In “City Imaginaries” Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson address some of the difficulties that immigrants confront when they are perceived as different through “[p]rejudiced imaginaries of ‘the other’ [as] a source of racism and [how] untrammeled domination of certain collective imaginaries work to exclude others.”55 The allegory of not moving through traffic on the freeway or through urban areas emphasizes that Xavier is stuck and not going anywhere. It also reveals that he is caught in a place of in-betweeness, a fixed location in the urban landscape, without an identity, a cultural map, or directions to follow. Xavier does not recognize the borderless area as a positive aperture, but rather as the opposite, leading him to believe that if he resolves this dilemma, his condition will be redeemed and he will no longer experience anxiety. His condition reflects the experiences of Cuban exiles of living in a state of ambiguity, unable to go anywhere and unable to return to their native country like other Latin American immigrants. For Ilan Stavans, the status of Cuban exiles is an occurrence of “displacement,” described as a “struggle, a way of life, as a condition . . . is, and will remain, a Latin signature. . . . To be expelled from home, to wander through geographic and linguistic diasporas, is essential to our nature.”56 Xavier’s desire to cross over toward the Anglo- American culture is represented as a warning, reminding the reader that cultural inclusion is an impossibility due to the embodied traumas and the

16 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 132 Chapter 4 ethnic signifiers that function as impediments, finding himself trapped like an “ill-equipped translator between two cultures.”57 The internal conflict of identity is also reflected in the relationships that Cuevas has with acquaintances, especially with his best friend Wilfredo, who grew up with Xavier as a Cuban American and is now his coworker. Howev- er, their attitudes toward their inherited culture are very different. While Wilfredo speaks with a strong accent and embraces his Cuban cultural roots, Xavier is embarrassed and desires to blend in to the Anglo-American mainstream. The differences between Xavier and Wilfredo is not only in their attitudes of being Cuban but also on their physical appearance, as Wilfredo is described as being dark-skinned, similar to the thieves who in a previous scene have stolen money from their secretary. Furthermore, the concept of indifference is also revealed when Xavier goes to his mother’s house and eats cumin and coriander with chicken and yellow rice. The same day, at home with his family, his kids want to eat pizza from Chuck E. Cheese or hambur- gers from McDonald’s. Suárez emphasizes these distinctions to reveal how they affect individuals and families developing new traditions. For Arlene Dávila, these characterizations about Latinos are highlighted to emphasize labels which “are consistently portrayed as loving and socially caring individuals but not without simultaneously reproducing the same Anglo-versus- Hispanic behavioral dichotomies that have long patterned Hispanic stereotypes and hierarchies along the lines of values and disposition among Anglos and Latinos.”58 The juxtaposition between losing and gaining a new culture is interconnected as a representation of moral values, where Xavier’s family is portrayed as rejecting its traditions and morally deteriorating while adopting American mainstream values. Another warning is foretold during the time he was dating Sarah at the University of Arizona. The narrator describes a lovely story about Sarah and Xavier going for a run through the Sonora desert. As they ran, Xavier struggled to catch up to Sarah, but could not keep up with her stride and stumbled, injuring his leg. Years later, the repetitive and demanding days of work triggered his body and mind to collapse, as he felt incapable of providing for the expected lifestyle of his wife. This shame of being insufficient gradually increases during the ten years they are married. Thus, when he becomes sick from exhaustion, instead of going home to his wife and kids, he goes to his father’s household. Soon after this episode, Sarah and the children left Miami to live with her family. The abandonment only adds to the intensity of his failures as a provider and father. Utilizing kindhearted, elegant prose, Suárez suggests that the processes of urban capitalism can have adverse consequences not only in the family but also in a person’s cultural identity. Xavi- er’s desire to adapt a middle-class lifestyle becomes harmful to his health, as he develops a predisposition to overworking long hours as a mechanism of survival. He also fails to live in relation to the necessities that dictate urban

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capitalism, and overcompensates to maintain appearances. Instead of utilizing the extra time to bond with his family, he spends it outside the protective walls of his house, mostly worrying about making more money. Anglo- American culture encourages this individualistic focus on material belongings that provide a temporary pleasure by equating time and money as a formula to success. For Xavier, urban capitalism functions as a vehicle for earning money without considering its negative consequences on his personal life. In “After-Images of the City” Harvey explains how “the senseless pursuit of money and pleasure wreak havoc on the social order.”59 In Xavi- er’s case, it appears that his aspiration to fit in pushes him to the extreme, adopting the craving for money as a destructive mechanism. Xavier’s mental collapse is a result of the loss of his individual cultural identity. He had spent most of his life desiring so fervently to assimilate into mainstream Anglo-American culture that later in life he found himself displaced and dispossessed of his cultural memories. When Xavier woke up from his unresponsive state of mind, he recognized that his father had taken him to see a santera, who gave him a spiritual cleansing and who invoked the spirits to guide him through the spiritual underworld. The spirits chose Sonny Manteca, a famous musician known as the best player of Cuban congas. That same night Xavier received his first advice from Sonny Manteca:

You expect too much. Sooner or later you’re going to have to start taking it easy. Relax. Enjoy yourself a little more. You have to go back to the beginning. You have to come in contact with your old self. Think back. Remember how you were before things became cluttered. See through the fog. Clear your mind. Only when you return to basics will you find new meaning in your life. Peace and understanding.60

Gradually, he began to rediscover the Cuban inside his soul. Xavier and his best friend went to the music store, purchased a set of traditional Cuban congas, and as soon as he started playing, he felt the excitement in his blood. According to Leira Annette Manso, it is important to understand the continuous repetition of Cuban rhythm because through the performance the player and rhythm become one projection, “separate[ing] the onlooker from the participant.”61 It was this sudden realization that something as easy as playing the congas could make him feel alive. He went from being a cultural spectator to being a performer and participant in Caribbean culture. Accord- ing to the narrator, the contrapunteo of conga music plays rhythms that cannot be written down because no one knows what direction they will take, but they are there, constantly mixing and making layers. 62 This is what Xavier needed to do with his life, blend the two cultures, interconnect his culture’s beliefs and myths with American traditions, and discover his own inner music, his own rhythm rather than live in a meaningless routine.

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Toward the end of the narrative, Xavier decides to leave everything behind and drive to the farthest point south of Miami. As he drove away from civilization, he saw distorted images through the window of vehicles whizz- ing by. On his way south, he encountered a German man who spoke to him in a language he could not understand, but continued on until he found himself alone, under a cloudless afternoon. He jumped into the sea with a strong desire to swim home:

In the water, he swam, taking wide, long strokes. He moved away from the land, leaving all his troubles behind. . . . Then, Xavier Cuevas turned to the sea and, clothes and all dove off and plunged into the water. He went under, opened his eyes to the sting of the salt, held his breath, and swam. In the pursuit of the unattainable, Xavier Cuevas was swimming home. 63

In reality, Xavier would not have been able to swim the ninety miles to his parent’s homeland, but symbolically he had begun the cultural rehabilitation process with his newfound spiritual faith. Through the guidance of Sonny Manteca, he started to believe in the process of traveling back home, back to his Caribbean cultural roots. When he looked at the bottom of the sea, meta- phorically he was looking inside his soul, rediscovering his Cuban identity. Virgil Suárez’s fictional narrative exposes the urban experiences of immigrants who decide to reject their cultural identity. Shame and cultural stigma are often associated with individuals who struggle with their cultural heritage. These individuals float above the urban cultural landscape, feeling detached and displaced, unable to negotiate between their culture and the monetized individualism of urban capitalism. For Xavier, the reconstruction of his blended self begins as he travels to the southernmost tip of Florida and the nearest to Cuba, leaving behind the fast pace of the city where he sees a sign that reads: “DO NOT SPEED: It is better to arrive late than not to arrive at all!”64 The sign evokes memories of his childhood when his physical and psychological condition were free of stress, anxiety, and tension. Over time, he lost sight of his hybrid self and the accumulation of pressure under capitalist expectations triggered a traumatic malfunctioning of the body, shifting his functioning to pure survival. Roberto G. Fernández’s En La Ocho Y La Doce (On Eight and Twelfth) is a collection of multiple perspectives highlighting the fragmented stories of Cuban exiles living in the city of Miami. While Fernández utilizes humor to contrast the superficiality of Anglo-American cultural values with the nostalgia and desire of Cuban exiles, he also attempts to illustrate the frustrations, resentments, and the transcendental experiences of being displaced and not belonging to any country. The characters’ cultural and moral values undergo a process of erosion, comparable to the continuous ocean waves that erode overtime the coastline. The narratives are succinct, transparent, switching

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sketchily between subjects and characters, with few concrete connections, and the style is intended for readers who don’t want to spend considerable time untangling intersections and interconnections between the characters’ stories. The content seems superficial, with undeveloped characters and a lack of meaningful details, simulating the drive-thrus of fast food chain stores and suggesting that the Cuban-exiles are beginning a new urban city life at a fast pace, adapting to the ephemeral aspects of life. Fernández’s characters experience confusion and cultural isolation in the paradigmatic city of Miami, a place where “even hyphenated Americanism seems to be ruled out. . . . Presumably, there is little in terms of a shared ‘American’ identity in this city. . . . [where immigrants] are less likely to identify with the city as their place of belonging.”65 Fernández and Nijman concur that immigrants’ experiences in the city of Miami are transient, impersonal, and dis- connected, as they find themselves floating across cultural borderlines. The challenge presented to Cuban exiles moving to the West is to assimilate or survive without compromising their cultural heritage to American capitalist traditions and culture. Their perception of the United States is often filtered through media, through their experiences of parks, buildings, commodities, fashion, family, friends, and neighbors, developing the illusion of a very attractive world that is often unreachable, intangible, and superficial. In Mira Nair’s film, The Pérez Family (1995), one of the main characters, Dorita, shows a lot of enthusiasm when she arrives at the Florida coast that she throws herself into the sea to swim toward the shoreline. Dorita’s reaction supports the “notion of the city as a site of overstimulation and excess of feeling . . . vibrant and exciting . . . a space where the play of the senses and bodily pleasures can be celebrated and explored.”66 Dorita exaggerates her emotions and expressions because she feels that she has arrived at the world of famous stars, endless jobs, and abundant opportunities, but in reality she has entered the paradigmatic city, surrounded by people, yet not being personal with anyone. After reality sets in, she begins to adapt to experiences of survival, similar to those experienced by Titina and Jimena, characters of En La Acho Y La Doce, who represent the successful story of an immigrant. Both characters go through a transformation, becoming more superficial with fabricated superficial identities that allow them to reinvent themselves as successful individuals according to the definitions of their adopted culture but who are lacking in empathy and compassion. Titina promotes individualism as an essential characteristic of achieving success, representing the story of an immigrant who had a humble beginning in life and rises up to be a famous Cuban American with a position as talk show host. She is the main presenter with multiple guests who are invited to recount their stories of trauma and difficult situations and thus create an imaginary community of success stories that reinforce the Anglo-American dream. Titina narrates how she became famous by overcoming adversity

20 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 136 Chapter 4 when she was a young girl. Her mother entered Titina into a contest and painted her body with the Cuban flag to win a trip to the Bahamas. After they failed to win the prize, their relationship underwent severe hardships, as Titina’s mother questioned her status as a daughter and forced her to move out of the house. She first moved to New Jersey, but then ended up hitchhik- ing around the country, working at dead-end jobs until she was discovered by Celia, a famous Cuban singer who asked to work for her as a dancer and then as a music arranger until she rose to fame, suggesting that any adolescent could become famous. The experience provides an insight into her mother’s obsession with winning the prize and her over-the-top striving to attain it, not realizing that her daughter was more important than the reward. It also shows the strong enticement capitalist values have in shaping illusory desires to achieve the American dream, where everyone has the possibility of becoming famous if they are willing to wait for someone to discover them. Titina’s mother’s story is a warning against losing track of reality and surrendering family relationships to vain notions of fame. Although Titina’s story embodies the myth of individualism, she advises community involvement as a mechanism to survive capital consumption. She explains how her mother’s obsession with winning pushed her to the edge, displacing her psychologically. She explains how this “país trastorna a la gente. Por eso siempre insisto en mi show que los hispanos tenemos que mantenernos unidos.”67 Nijman considers this phenomenon a symptom of “Miami’s pronounced materialist culture . . . [where] . . . many immigrants came [here] to advance themselves economically. This is also true for the Cuban community, driven to ‘prove Castro wrong’ by building [their] own economic success story.”68 Titina’s message regarding community involvement is questionable because her message is tainted by her obsession with ratings and self-promotion. When she invites guests to her show to narrate their intimate secrets, she does not listen to them and only pretends to care about their stories. Her story could also be considered a parody of the nonfic- tional host Cristina Saralegui, who also interviewed guests at her show between the 1990s and 2010s, reaching and influencing viewing Latinx audiences beyond the United States. Saralegui attempted to cross over to the Anglo-American audience, but her show was eventually cancelled. Fernández utilizes Titina’s character to criticize Cristina’s daily show, which ran daily for twenty-one years, paralleling the Oprah show. Titina tries to integrate into the Anglo-American culture of Miami by wearing a blonde wig and green contacts in an attempt to physically look like a nonimmigrant woman. She enjoys the materialistic culture of Miami, has a giant closet with luxuries and costumes to parade in front of the camera, drinks a martini every morning to start the day, and has servants who help her with everything. Titina’s performance demonstrates that she has abandoned her cultural heritage and has become a manufactured vehicle for selling products.

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The guests and colleagues of the show treat Titina as a figure of power and superiority, almost like an untouchable idol or a saint. At the beginning of her show, Titina asks her assistant, Sam, about her style as a performer and he affirms that her appearance is the trademark of her fame. Almost everyone praises her superficiality, inscribing a falsified lavish identity. Furthermore, as soon as she enters the stage and comes into contact with the audience, they react with strong emotions. “La anfitriona se acercó a los invitados y les extendió la mano. Una de ellas apresó la mano de Titina entre las suyas y se la llevó al corazón, el otro prometió jamás lavarse la mano que había estre- chado la de la rubia.”69 The audience reactions show the amazement and effectiveness of Titina’s disguise as an entertainer. According to Alberts’s study “Changes in Ethnic Solidarity in Cuban Miami,” appearances are an aspect of prestige that matters in terms of being the best minority in Miami. “Thus, older generations of Cuban exiles were very concerned about losing their image as a model minority. Crucial distinctions among Cubans of different refugee waves were their different attitudes, values, and work ethic.”70 As more waves of Cuban exiles and immigrants from other countries arrived to the city of Miami, a geography of inequality started to emerge, and older generations worried that their political status would wither, forcing them to embrace exaggerated representations of success to maintain their perceptions. Titina’s transformation in terms of her inauthenticity and superficiality reveal a problematic identity for the Cuban community and for those communities that watch her show. Jimena is another character who exhibits similar artificial and disintegrat- ing characteristics as Titina, as she embraces Anglo-American values and technology as a transformation toward a futuristic lifestyle. Her newly assim- ilated Anglo-American values are revealed through a Christmas letter that she writes to her friends and relatives still living in Miami. In the letter, she discloses that the family lives in Boston and explains that her daughter, Erin, is a second-year college student at Iowa University, and is the captain of the cheerleading squad. Her son Kyle is a junior in high school, plays tennis and the clarinet, even though her father wanted him to play the bongos, an Afro- Cuban percussion instrument. Jimena’s husband is a general manager of a company, an avid player of penuchle, and rents an apartment in Aruba due to his travels through the Caribbean islands. After teaching civics courses to high school students, Jimena is a student counselor, and president of the Parent-Teacher Association. In the letter, she utilizes popular English words such as potluck, global warming, cheerleader, tickets, Chernobyl, and Bobby Doll. Furthermore, the letter includes their newly anglicized names: Mike, Jean, Kyle and Erin to let everyone know that their family has culturally integrated into mainstream Anglo-American culture. In Jimena’s letter, the family has gone through a seamless cultural assimilation process that brought them pleasure and envy from family members and relatives. In the letter she

22 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 138 Chapter 4 portrays herself as intelligent and her family as Americanized, creating a distance between her future and her past. In the next episode, “Hologramas,” Jimena narrates the emergency business trip she makes to Miami to look for a nursing home for her mother. With the excuse that her mother wanted to be closer to where she grew up, Jimena visits a place that provides the option of interactive holograms, a device that purports to provide an authentic, comfortable environment that includes a reconstructed image of family members with whom she can have conversations through virtual scenarios. The business secretary, Jennifer López, explains that the program increases in cost when it includes landscapes, intersections of streets, and entire cities, allowing the viewer to relive special moments and places that were important in her mother’s life, memory, and identity. Jimena is impressed with the services, and she is willing to pay for the imaginary experiences that her mother will have, replacing herself and her family with a hologram, the ultimate abandonment of family unity. Ed- ward Soja suggests the “blurring” of “boundaries” produces “new ways of thinking and acting in the urban milieu . . . where the frictions of distance appear to be receding and once impenetrable barriers to human communication are becoming more permeable and open.”71 For Jimena, technology allows her to keep up with the appearance that she has integrated herself into the American way of life, leaving behind her old cultural self for the sake of extreme acculturation and superficiality. The replacement is part of a reconstruction of geographical and personal experiences through the use of technology, having the eventual goal of erasing the cultural borderlines and healing displacement. Another example of excessive consumerism comes from the three quinceañeras represented in two episodes, where the parents do not like each other and compete among themselves to see who can spend the most money to celebrate their daughter’s birthday. Although the main goal of the quinceañeras is to bring the community together, for the Cuban exile community it represents unnecessary spending bordering on the ridiculous. Cari- dad’s parents, Joaquín Rodríguez and Mima López de Rodríguez, saved money for years, pushing the family into unreasonable suffering by cutting spending through measures such as turning off the lights and the television to save money on the electricity bill. When Caridad complains to her mother and confesses that she does not want a quinceañera, her mother dismisses her claims, insisting that their sacrifices will provide her a spectacular celebra- tion. Similar to Titina and Jimena, Caridad’s parents are interested in showing that they are successful even though they are barely surviving. Their myopic understanding of achievement is manifested through excessive materialism, a shared notion among those who attend Caridad’s birthday party. Furthermore, the material objects utilized at the quinceañera function as a representation of the longings and desires of Cuban exiles, signaling that

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happiness, memories, and the American dream can be bought. At the event, the cycle of consumption is materialized through the excessive decorations on an Egyptian theme and through an unstoppable European waltz that prompts Caridad to spin uncontrollably. Even after the party has ended, Caridad continues to spin, forcing the parents to bring a Catholic priest to help them afterward, as they seek religious atonement for their excesses. The subject of religion is sprinkled throughout the short stories, shaping the hybrid identity of the Cuban diaspora through the consumption and representation of media, particularly of telenovelas portraying religious beliefs intertwined with stories of Cuban American families. Fernández is aware of the important role media play in shaping Latinx identity through the promotion of generalized cultural beliefs and values. He utilizes five episodes titled “San Guiven” to criticize the construction of spiritual values by the imposition of television programming in Miami. The telenovela “San Guiven” re- surfaces after twenty years of its last broadcast to recount the story of a man living in Miami, Florida, who desires to give away all the turkeys he has raised to help the disposed survive the difficulties of life in exile. Despite the improbability of the plot, it keeps the audience interested, seeing how an unknown individual becomes a real person and decides to throw himself off a cliff after realizing that religious leaders are planning to canonize him into a real saint and economically benefit from his perceived religious miracles. San Guiven represents the combination of Cuban-exile Catholic beliefs with the Anglo-American Thanksgiving holiday, transforming the fictional character into “San Guiven,” a syntactic tracing for the word thanksgiving. Cu- ban exiles are no strangers to this type of cultural mestizaje because in Cuba some of them used to practice Santería, a syncretic religious practice among descendants of African cultural heritage. Fernández criticism is rooted in the purpose of ecclesiastic leaders who are planning to make San Guiven a saint to bring more money and followers to their religion. It also exhibits Cuban exiles as cultural creators who do not necessarily assimilate, but had become an “economic potency of Miami [with a] political clout at the local and national levels [which] have received considerable attention.”72 Fernández also depicts Cuban exiles in positions of power in stories such as “La Gira” (The Tour) where members of the Cuban community go on a neighborhood field trip to visit an Anglo-American reservation located in the southern part of Miami. The visitors are Manolo and his wife Barbarita who take Anglo-American food as humanitarian aid to those who have been expelled from their land and have been placed in a designated area, similar to what Anglo Americans did to Native American tribes. Living under extreme conditions due to an economic embargo, Anglo-Americans had become de- pendents of the food visitors provide them. The interactions between the visitors and the hosts have a condescending tone, where the guide speaks to them in Spanish to accommodate the visitors’ incapacity to learn the English

24 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 140 Chapter 4 language. The hosts, also known as natives, showed their photos and their decaying possessions, which brought nostalgia of the better years to the Anglo-American family. In the background, an albino alligator appears multiple times to show that they are competing with humans for food resources. The story constructs an ironic juxtaposition of what Anglo- Americans have done to Cuba through their instituted economic policies, inviting both communities to reflect on the created animosities that have emerged between both countries. Although the story does not provide details of why Anglo-Americans ended up segregated in an internment camp, it does provide a criticism of the failure of Cuban exiles to assimilate. While stories of integration and assimilation are well represented in Fer- nandez’s narrative, he includes other aspects of urban interaction that show the opposite, equally impacting Miami’s urban population. In the first story, “Milagro en la Ocho y la Doce,” Manolo and his wife Barbarita are walking down on Eight Street and Twelfth when a miracle happens to Manolo, who earlier had an accident that made him blind. After praying a rosary, Barbarita crosses into the private property of Mr. Olsen to pick up the sap that runs down the sea grape tree. She immediately applies the sap to her husband’s eyes, making him recuperate his sight again and declaring the tree of having supernatural healing powers. The miracle brought Spanish-speaking outsid- ers from everywhere, violating the “NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROP- ERTY”73 sign that Mr. Olsen posted everywhere in his yard. The incident indicates that Mr. Olsen has become an Anglo-American minority in a city that a few years earlier was populated by mainly vacationers from up north who had decided to retire in Miami. The story also shows that immigrants like Manolo do not learn the English language because they find themselves comfortable speaking Spanish in Miami’s urban immigrant population. The urban geographer Jan Nijman has observed that “[t]oday’s migrants are increasingly capable of maintaining strong ties to their community of origin. Of course, this is not true for all migrants, but it is true for this emerging cosmopolitan class that has played a key role in Miami’s growth.”74 Al- though language barriers have affected the relationships between Latinx- immigrants and Anglo-Americans, the Latinx metropolitan growth points to more diverse population. Since the 1960s, Miami has been growing at a rapid pace due to immigrants coming from all over the world, especially from the Caribbean islands and South America. In the 1990s, the Latinx population in Miami-Dade County reached a maximum of 49 percent with the total population born abroad reaching 45 percent. It indicates that almost half of the citizens living in Miami-Dade County during this time were foreigners, creating a unique mix of ethnic minorities and their languages. With such a distinct population, more than 60 percent of them spoke a language other than English at home, increasing the demand for interpreters. 75 The increase in Latinx population

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produces segregation and anxiety in the Anglo-American communities, which contribute to misunderstandings and misperception within all cultures. The studies of Dr. Ana Roca in “Language Maintenance and Language Shift in the Cuban American Community of Miami: The 1990s and Beyond” show that the population of non-Hispanic whites is not projected to grow, predicting “an essentially stable non-Hispanic white population over the next 15 years.”76 The stagnant growth of the Anglo-American community has de- creased its political power, yielding the control of the city to a diverse Span- ish-speaking majority. The clash of cultures redirects the growth of Miami into a Latinx paradigmatic city where materialism, superficiality, and technology are embraced to fulfill the American dream. Fernández’s collection of short stories reflect the experiences and realities of Cuban exiles who came to the city of Miami expecting to stay temporarily, but the dictatorship of Fidel Castro came to last much longer than they had imagined. Upon arrival, the clash of cultures produced a multidirectional impact on both communities, altering over time the cultural demographics of Miami. Fernández’s stories criticize the exaggerated ways in which Cuban exiles absorbed Anglo-American capitalism with the purpose of proving Fi- del Castro’s communism wrong. Utilizing magical realism, metaphors, and hyperbole, Fernández condemns the extreme excesses of materialism and superficiality, portraying the characters’ emptiness as overstimulated consumers of capitalism who had traded their cultural roots for an intangible reality reflected in the paradigmatic city of Miami. The three narratives created by Cristina García, Virgil Suárez, and Rober- to G. Fernández demonstrate how immigration and integration of the Cuban American community into the capitalist system of the United States has changed regarding social class, the level of education, skin color, and political and social perspectives. There is no doubt that the first waves of immigrants left Cuba for politically ideological reasons, generally belonged to a high social class, and had a high level of education. These first waves functioned as a foundational economic base in the state of Florida, preparing the economic and cultural space for subsequent waves of immigrants. From 1980, citizens with fewer financial resources began to leave, due to their frustration with the structural problems of the Cuban economy. It should be remarked that these immigrants were initially received with hostility and resentment; nevertheless, they benefited from already established aid organizations, which worked to ensure a passive transition. Starting from the dis- solution of the Soviet Union in 1989 onward, the U.S. policy toward Cuba diminished in importance, culminating in 1994 with the amendment of the Immigration Agreement of 1966 and giving way to the current dry feet/wet feet policy, which was ended in January 2017 by president Barack Obama. The historical context reveals that the political attitude of the first genera-

26 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 142 Chapter 4 tions of exiles also evolved with the frustration and inability to return and recover whatever property Fidel Castro had expropriated. The exiles of the first generations, together with the continuing Cuban emigration serve as a backdrop for the documentary Balseros (2002) by Carles Bosch and Josep M. Domènech. The documentary tells the story of the journey of seven Cuban immigrants who decide to leave Cuba in search of better opportunities, but they are detained by the U.S. Coast Guard and are brought to Guantanamo, where they wait for eight months to resolve their legal status. After several months in detention, they manage to leave and eventually receive the opportunity to integrate into the American urban capitalism. The central purpose of the documentary is to present the process of immigration, integration, and adaptation of the new Cuban immigrants, showing how they acquire the characteristics of invisibility, alienation, and dehumanization as they become part of the labor force in the United States. The documentary is structured mainly in four parts: preparations for the trip, the detention at the Guantanamo Naval Base, integration into the labor system, and adaptation. In the first part, the documentary focuses on exposing the political, economic, and social conditions that are experienced on the island, showing immigrants as individuals working together to buy the parts they need to build a raft. It presents their frustrations with the visa system, framing emotions of despair and uncertainty. Those who remain on the island exhibit both anxiety and hope in the face of the possibility that their relatives will cross the sea, reach Florida, and fulfill their promises. The departure of each boat is presented as a chaotic and ceremonial event, in which the community comes together singing songs with religious content to bid farewell to their heroes who are willing to risk their lives in search of the American Dream. Some of the songs serve as a leitmotiv that accompanies the characters through the film, underscoring the hopes and central motives of the immigrants. In this first part, the primary purpose of the documentary is to show a sense of community and brotherhood, highlighting the emotions of the spectators and interpersonal relationships between family members and individuals in the neighborhood. On the whole, the seven stories reveal a collective experience of an impoverished community in decline, which is drowning in desires and hopes, with utopias that are stunted by an inesca- pable reality. In the second part of the documentary the immigrants are presented with two obstacles: the mighty waves of the sea and the surveillance of the U.S. Coast Guard. Faced with the first obstacle, the smallness and rudimentary preparation of the boats raise questions about the value that the Balseros have given to their lives, in comparison to the lives they led in Cuba. The lens of the camera coupled with the dreary soundtrack of music focuses on the swaying movement of the rafts that have been abandoned in the desert of the sea, suggesting that many boat people have lost their lives to the adversity of

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 27 Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation 143

nature. Next, some of the protagonists are seen at the Guantanamo Naval Base having been arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard. They appear anxious and eager to resolve their immigration status and reach their final destination. In this neutral space and intersection between both countries, the filmmakers serve as a communication link, as they film the messages of detainees to show then to their family and vice versa, creating a dialogic structure that fluctuates in a parallel manner in the narration. This narrative technique generates a juxtaposed dialogue that produces a feeling of nostalgia in the face of the uncertainty of their legal situation, and of the hope that Cuba and the United States will reach an agreement. In May 1995, the Clinton Admin- istration announced the “dry feet/ wet feet” policy, which resolved the dilemma of approximately thirty-three thousand Cubans who were detained at the Guantanamo Naval Base. This agreement allowed the Cuban immigrants to be released from Guantanamo and allowed to enter the United States to be integrated into the urban capitalism system. The integration was relatively similar for each of the immigrants because they used a system of humanitarian organizations that helped them to have a smooth transition into the Unit- ed States. The state apparatus united with these agencies operated as the protectors and benefactors of the Cuban immigrants, establishing a relationship of legitimacy comparable to the Cuban government. Among the benefits they received from the federal government were: a work permit, economic assistance in cash and food stamps, medical coverage through Medicaid, relocation to different parts of the country to obtain employment and temporary shelter while searching for permanent employment. These benefits as- sisted in the adaptation and settlement of each one of the immigrants. Re- garding this process, the urban theorist David Harvey argues that flexibility and adaptation are essential parts of the integration into the labor system for both individuals and families, since both are part of the economic processes in the city. The journey of Guillermo Armas is presented as a story of sacrifice and perseverance. First, he decided to divorce his wife so that she would have a better chance of obtaining a passport as a single mother to allow her and his daughter to enter the country, since their American relatives had submitted a request for a residence permit. With the financial support of his wife, who was already in Miami, he petitioned to enter the country to be reunited with his family four times over a five-year period, but the visa was always denied. Faced with despair and without options, he decided to build a raft. After five years of separation and eight months of being detained in Guantanamo, he manages to reunite with his family. In his first job at Home Depot, he is selected as the best employee of the month for his customer service, and toward the end of the documentary, the filmmakers film a photo session in preparation for his daughter’s fifteenth birthday party (quinceañera). Guiller- mo’s success is due in large part to the emotional and economic stability that

28 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 144 Chapter 4 his wife provided when he came to Miami. The family unit, explains the geographer David Harvey, works as a space of refuge, as a unit that protects the individual from the dangers of urban life. In the city, urban families develop an instinct for survival—that is, they learn to live at a pace dictated by capitalism, they become accustomed to the daily needs of life and adapt to urban customs. There is no doubt that his stability, perseverance, and success are anchored in the emotional and economic security that his wife provides. The process of Miriam Diaz was not as successful as that of Guillermo. When traveling to the United States, she did so as a single mother, leaving her daughter behind in the care of her parents. When she arrived in the United States and got a job as a cleaning worker, the small salary she earned was not enough to pay for the services of a lawyer, who was unable to make the legal petition for her daughter to come to the United States. The errors that were made in the petition created another obstacle for her case to go forward, slowing her daughter’s emigration process, and making her miss crucial years in the growth of her daughter. During the time it took for the shooting of the film, she married twice, gave birth to a second daughter, who came to fill the emotional emptiness of the first daughter she left behind in Cuba. The story of Miriam Díaz shows not only her integration into the labor system, but it also serves as a warning for the immigrant novice who does not know the legal system. The transition of Juan Carlos Subiza and Misclaida González differs from the others because they were the exception to the rule, in which the immigrant usually travels alone. Also, when they arrive together in Connecticut, they realize that each person has their own interpretation of the American Dream. Misclaida began work stocking shelves in a supermarket, and Juan Carlos got a job as assistant to an auto mechanic. The scene that best indicates the difference in attitudes is when they go together to buy a car. Juan Carlos prefers to buy a cheap car that conforms to his budget and needs, while Misclaida wants a more expensive car even though they would have to finance it. That is to say, he opts for deferred gratification, while she loses heart and subverts the couple’s commitment to saving, showing an inability to resist temptation. The differences in expectations are amplified when Mis- claida ends up cheating on Juan Carlos with his friend Reynaldo, a travel companion with whom they shared housing. Juan Carlos blames himself and shows remorse for having neglected the relationship because he worked up to fifteen hours a day. After the separation, Misclaida travels with her lover to Arizona where she works temporarily in a butcher’s shop. In the last interview, filmmakers filmed her in the suburbs of New Mexico, where she explains that she survives on the sale of drugs. The effects of urban capitalism had a human impact on this process of social integration because they could not live comfortably earning the minimum wage. Harvey postulates that the urban individualism clings to the use of money in markets that operate freely,

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 29 Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation 145

reducing all aspects of human life to a value expressed in money, no matter how insignificant they seem. Without a doubt, Juan Carlos Subiza and Mis- claida Gonzalez clung to the joy that money produces in different ways, having adverse effects on both. In the case of Oscar del Valle, the desperation to escape poverty and obtain a better economic level was too big a temptation. In Cuba, he had been a sculptor of considerable talent, and when relocating to New York, he obtained employment as a maintenance worker in an apartment building. After a short time in the United States, he cut off communication with his wife and daughter, became involved with the Cuban mafia, and then remarried a second woman, who ended up accusing him of domestic abuse. After getting out prison, he moved to Pennsylvania where he got together with a third woman, suggesting that he had learned to take advantage of women, monetizing his single male life. At the end of the documentary, the wife he left in Cuba explains that she never received economic assistance from him and that she did not know in what part of the United States he lived. It is clear that Oscar del Valle immigrated with the promise to help his family, but the needs and charms of urban capitalism took control of his life, neglecting his family to focus on the freedom of urban individualism, as he found pleasure in his single life. David Harvey describes the urban seduction as follows, “We can, thus, interpret the preference for suburban living as a created myth, arising out of possessive individualism, nurtured by the ad-man and forced by the logic of capitalist accumulation. But like all such myths once established it takes on a certain autonomy out of which strong contradictions may emerge.”77 Harvey puts in evidence the need to learn to decode the new myths faced by immigrants who arrive eager to succeed in this country and end up lost in the labyrinth of urban life. For Rafael Cano, the hope of achieving his goals was reduced to a phrase “house, a car, and a good woman,” desires that he had expressed in Cuba before immigrating to the United States. This phrase, accompanied by Carib- bean musical arrangements, works as a leitmotiv each time it appears in a scene and has the purpose of connecting desires and purpose throughout the documentary. When Rafael arrives in Miami, he stays at the home of an uncle whom he has not seen in over fifteen years and starts to work as a plumber. Then he moves to a town in Nebraska, where he obtains employment in a factory of frozen meat. Like Oscar del Valle, Rafael Cano breaks off communication with his family and ends up getting lost. Subsequently, his family places an ad in Primer Impacto, Univisión’s Spanish-language news program, and they manage to locate him in San Antonio, Texas. There he had become a pastor for marginalized people in a Pentecostal church after surviving an automobile accident. In the last scenes, the filmmakers show him walking with difficulty while the three words of his phrase are heard . . . a car, a house, a good woman.

30 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 146 Chapter 4 NOTES

1. Ricardo L. Ortiz, “Cuban-American Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to Latino/ a Literature, ed. Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Rout- ledge, 2013), 414. 2. Katherine B. Payant, “From Alienation to Reconciliation in the Novels of Cristina García,” MELUS 26, no. 3 (2001): 163–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/3185562. 3. Rafael Miguel Montes, Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Liter- ature: Making Places = Haciendo Lugares (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 42. 4. T. Mitchell David, “National Families and Familial Nations: Communista Americans in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15, no. 1 (1996): 52, https://doi.org/10.2307/463972. 5. Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1992), 57, Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/dreaming-in-cuban/id438096740. 6. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 61. 7. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 59. 8. Elena Machado Sáez, “The Global Baggage of Nostalgia in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” MELUS 30, no. 4 (2005): 135. 9. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 59. 10. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 43. 11. Amanda Easton, “A Space for Resistance and Possibility: Confronting Borders through Narrative and Santería in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban,” Label Me Latina/o 3 (2013): 5. 12. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 44. 13. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 277. 14. Mary S. Vásquez, “Cuba as Text and Context in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban,” Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 20, no. 1 (1995): 4. 15. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 69. 16. Easton, “A Space for Resistance and Possibility,” 7. 17. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 67. 18. Rocío G. Davis, “Back to the Future: Mothers, Languages, and Homes in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban,” World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (2000): 62, https://doi.org /10.2307/40155309, http://www.jstor.org.dist.lib.usu.edu/stable/40155309. 19. Davis, “Back to the Future,” 62. 20. Payant, “From Alienation to Reconciliation,” 167. 21. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 23. 22. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 51. 23. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 51. 24. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 48. 25. Sáez, “The Global Baggage of Nostalgia,” 130. 26. Jon L. Schneiderman, “Creation of Identity as a Bridge between Cultures in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban” (Master of Arts Thesis, University of North Carolina Wilming- ton, 2007), 3. 27. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 184. 28. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 192. 29. Sáez, “The Global Baggage of Nostalgia,” 132. 30. Suzanne Leonard, “Dreaming as Cultural Work in Donald Duk and Dreaming in Cu- ban,” MELUS 29, no. 2 (2004): 182, https://doi.org/10.2307/4141825. 31. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 317. 32. García, Dreaming in Cuban, 307. 33. Sáez, “The Global Baggage of Nostalgia,” 130. 34. Ryan G. Van Cleave, “La Poesía Está En El Corazón: Virgil Suárez’s Transformation from Novelist to Poet,” Valparaiso Poetry Review Volume III, 1, no. Fall / Winter 2001–2002 (2001): n.p.

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35. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 70. 36. David Harvey, “City Future in City Past: Balzac’s Cartographic Imagination,” in After- Images of the City, ed. Joan Ramon and Dieter Ingenschay Resina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 24. 37. William T. Vandegrift, Jr., “The Work We Leave Behind: An Interview with Virgil Suárez,” Quarterly West 58 (2004): n.p. 38. Montes, Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Literature, 33. 39. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520. 40. Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 9. 41. Nuala C. Johnson, “Public Memory,” in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. James S. Duncan, Nuala Christina Johnson, and Richard H. Schein (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publish- ing, 2004), 323. 42. Virgil Suárez, Going Under (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1996), 84. 43. Suárez, Going Under, 138. 44. Suárez, Going Under, 83. 45. Leira Annette Manso, “‘Going Under’ and ‘Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban- American Childhood’—A ‘Contrapunteo’ on Cultural Identity,” Book Review, Bilingual Re- view 24, no. 3 (1999): 298. 46. Suárez, Going Under, 14. 47. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), elektronische middelen, 59. 48. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 58. 49. Suárez, Going Under, 58. 50. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 229–55. 51. Suárez, Going Under, 111. 52. Suárez, Going Under, 138. 53. Suárez, Going Under, 32. 54. Suárez, Going Under, 124. 55. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, A Companion to the City, Blackwell Readers in Geog- raphy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 8. 56. Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 172. 57. Suárez, Going Under, 17. 58. Arlene Dávila, “The Latin Side of Madison Avenue: Marketing and the Language That Makes Us ‘Hispanics,’” in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York City, ed. Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 418. 59. Harvey, “City Future in City Past: Balzac’s Cartographic Imagination,” 28. 60. Suárez, Going Under, 101. 61. Manso, “‘Going Under’ and ‘Spared Angola,’” 297. 62. Suárez, Going Under, 118. 63. Suárez, Going Under, 155. 64. Suárez, Going Under, 154. 65. Jan Nijman, “The Paradigmatic City,” Annals of the Association of American Geogra- phers 90, no. 1 (2000): 141, https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00189. 66. Bridge and Watson, A Companion to the City, 8. 67. Roberto G. Fernández, En La Ocho Y La Doce, Nuestra Visió n (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 140. 68. Nijman, “The Paradigmatic City,” 142. 69. Fernández, En La Ocho Y La Doce, 109. 70. Heike C. Alberts, “Changes in Ethnic Solidarity in Cuban Miami,” Geographical Re- view 95, no. 2 (2005): 238, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2005.tb00364.x. 71. Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford; Mal- den, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 324.

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72. Kevin E. McHugh, Ines M. Miyares, and Emily H. Skop, “The Magnetism of Miami: Segmented Paths in Cuban migration(*),” Geographical Review 87, no. 4 (1997): 504, https:// doi.org/10.2307/215228. 73. Fernández, En La Ocho Y La Doce, 4. 74. Nijman, “The Paradigmatic City,” 141. 75. Nijman, “The Paradigmatic City,” 140. 76. Ana Roca, “Language Maintenance and Language Shift in the Cuban American Com- munity of Miami: The 1990s and Beyond,” in Focus on Language Planning: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman, Volume 3, ed. David F. Marshall (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), 257. 77. Harvey, The Urban Experience, 122.

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 33 LaToya Jefferson-James, “Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa” inMasculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 29–60. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter Two

Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa

As mentioned in the foreword of this book, much of my thinking about Black masculine identity is not original. It is derived from years of literary study and thoroughly interrogating the nonfiction writings of James Baldwin. In the introduction of this book, I pair Baldwin with Kipling. This also is not new. On November 17, 1962, The New Yorker published Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” In the epigraph, Baldwin includes a stanza from Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” and a stanza from a well- known hymn in African American churches, “Down at the Cross” (those who are seeking this essay will find it published under the name, “Down at the Cross”). Baldwin begins the essay by discussing an intense religious conver- sion and subsequent religious crisis he experienced one summer in Harlem. He then segues to racial relations in inter-war America, and the epiphany he receives that summer. During the epiphany, he realized that the “white man’s burden” (American civilization and concurrent racism) defies all of the Christian rhetoric that influences American culture and informs American law. Remembering that summer, Baldwin testifies to his realization that, “Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.”1 Raw, brute power and retaliation from Black men was a real fear and the source of caricatures and stereotypes. The Black, rapist beast entered into the American imagination as slavery ended and his ramifications lasted well into the twentieth century. The writers in this chapter represent a break with the first generation of Pan-Africanist writers in the West. Rather than ignore or overtly attack the harmful stereotypes of Black males as their predecessors did, these writers 29

34 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 30 Chapter 2 showcase them in imaginative ways. Previous Pan-Africanist writers tended to ignore or directly refute these stereotypes in their political writings; they never explored them in-depth and presented a primordial African landscape with an omnibus culture as an idealistic paradise rather than a real place. In this chapter, I discuss how Richard Wright, Aime Cèsaire, and Amos Tutuola use their texts, Native Son, The Tempest, and The Palm-Wine Drinkard, respectively, to explore and subvert common myths surrounding Black masculinity created by Euro-American men. Western writers illuminate two oppositional forms of masculinity: bad nigger Bigger Thomas and the Shake- spearean creation, creaturely Caliban. Of Africa, Euro-American writers present an untamed wilderness with “savage” people in need of both cultiva- tion and civilization—in keeping with the writings of Carlyle, as seen in the previous chapter. Rather than distance himself from “wild” Africa, Tutuola embraces and normalizes it, making the vestiges of modernity abnormal for the reader. He presents a hopeful form of masculinity, the palm-wine drinkard, based upon his own culture’s standards of masculinity. Wright makes white/Euro-American readers complicit in creating the Bigger Thomases of America, and Césaire gives voice to the European created Caliban, adapting and adopting creature Caliban as a Black island man. Exploration of the destructive, Western type of masculine definitions, while effective in illuminating the complicity of Euro-American males in creating the primitive Black beasts that they claimed to fear, comes with nihilistic limitations that I discuss toward the end of the chapter. Neither Bigger nor Caliban effectively confront their oppressors. Though the palm-wine drinkard does not confront or dismantle his, he does become a productive member of his society. Physically, the writing of this chapter is the last time in this book where I privilege the African American text by presenting and analyzing it first. In many cases, the African American experience has become synonymous with “Black:” the African American experience with racism and oppression has been essentialized as the experience of oppression. Reordering the texts forces writer and reader to acknowledge that there are other experiences of blackness in the African Diaspora. And I am not original in this line of thinking. On the contrary, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Gullah chef/writer/ griot/television personality and known as the “Soul Food Queen,” routinely spoke and wrote of other facts of blackness in the African Diaspora that should be explored and celebrated. Her medium was food: mine is literature. But the idea here, one of incorporating global Black experiences, is the same. In order to understand the creation of these stereotypes of bestial Black masculinity, I return briefly to slavery and its end. As chattel slavery declined in profitability in the New World, Euro-American countries involved in the slave trade ended it and replaced it with colonialism throughout the African Continent and the Caribbean archipelago and sharecropping in the United States. Though formal enslavement ended, the emasculating dis-

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 35 Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa 31

course surrounding men of African descent, which began with scientific racism as discussed in the previous chapter, did not. In fact, at the close of the nineteenth century, it simply metamorphosed and metastasized as white American men suffered their own insecurities in the new, market-driven economy. The period immediately following the Civil War and slavery in the United States, Reconstruction, ushered in a proliferation of violent crimes against Black males, particularly lynching and castrations in the United States. In the Caribbean and Africa, Euro-American men hotly debated the “fitness” of Black men to govern themselves, and justified colonialism with a pernicious brand of paternalism that closely resembled rationalizations of enslavement. With the dawn of the twentieth century and the invention of film technology, attacks on Black people, particularly Black men, were pop- ularized across the globe through films like Tarzan and Birth of a Nation. Perhaps white American men’s increased concentration on dissemination of Black male stereotypes can be explained by the precarious position white Americans males found themselves in after slavery. According to E. Anthony Rotundo, definitions of white masculinity rapidly evolved from a communal definition of manhood to one based on rugged individualism. In American Manhood (1993), Rotundo explains the difference between communal manhood and manhood based upon competition and individuality. The communal idea of manhood dominated for a very long time before the nineteenth century, an idea in which a white American man was not only responsible for the actions of the members in his own household, but was careful to maintain a certain reputation within his community for the sake of conducting business. A man was to put personal and selfish passions aside for the good of his community. A man subdued his individual aspirations in order to maintain communal harmony and to help achieve progress as a family unit. Ultimate- ly, this idea declined with the abolition of slavery and the incremental rise of a competitive market economy. As Rotundo explains, “The new manhood emerged as part of a broader series of changes: the birth of republican government, the spread of a market economy, the concomitant growth of the middle class itself. At the root of these changes was an economic and political life based on the free play of individual interests.”2 Driven by the market economy, white masculine identity took on several models before the “masculine achiever” model, or the self-made man, became the dominant male identity in the nineteenth century. The same traits American people considered selfish and defiant in the previous eras were lauded as proper characteristics of economically successful men in a new one. These characteristics were simply redefined to suit the new, free-market economy as Rotundo writes: “[i]n the new era of individualism, the old male passion of defiance was transformed into the modern virtue of independence.”3 From communal manhood to rugged individualism, white American manhood saw a rapid evolution.

36 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 32 Chapter 2

Antithetical to white American manhood was the body of newly freed African American men, who demanded enfranchisement and participation within the American democracy and the new, competition-based free market economy. Historians Hine and Jenkins agree that, “from the beginning, white American working-class men regarded black men’s slave status as the antithesis of the Self-Made Man, denying the existence of a different and authentic American male experience.”4 Slave labor built America’s capitalist system and the idea of competing with African American men as equals caused violent opposition in white American men. As America immersed itself in what Toni Morrison calls the “architecture of a new white man,”5 it added to the discourse on gender a sharp distinction between a man and a boy. Rotun- do explains this new dimension: “If a man is not a man, then what is he? One answer is obvious in the context of this book about gender: If a man is not a man, he must be like a woman. But nineteenth-century men had a second answer: If a man is not a man, he must be like a boy.”6 Rotundo outlines the difference between boys and men when he writes that, “Boys had enthusiasm, not judgment, and aggression without control.”7 In a racialized context, if a man were not a Euro-American man of Anglo-Saxon descent, but a man of African descent instead, he must be a boy. This description of a boy is eerily similar to Jefferson’s assessment, derived from scientific racism, of African men in the previous chapter. Even when the same characteristics were seen as necessary components of white American masculinity—violent opposition and aggression, animal- like sexual virility, and the desire to remain close to nature—they were seen as boyishness in African American men. According to Hornton and Hornton, “Actions expected of white men were condemned in black men,”8 and white men used extra-legal as well as legal methods to subdue these same tendencies in Black men. Promptly after the Civil War, many states began enacting Black Code and subsequently, Jim Crow laws, designed to limit both the physical mobility and the vertical socio-economic mobility of Black males. For instance, many states enacted vagrancy laws that required Black males to have a permanent residence as well as an employer. Similar to the pass laws of apartheid South Africa, Black men were required to show proof of resi- dency if they were stopped by law enforcement. They were given work “contracts” and became sharecroppers in a system of work and credit that was no better than enslavement. If Black men attempted to leave their respec- tive plantations, normally by walking, they were arrested and charged under the vagrancy law. Punishment for violation of this law included spending up to two years in a state penitentiary where they were forced to work under the convict-lease system doing hard labor. Long after the emancipation of slaves on the islands, economic and cultural dependence upon the metropole created an atmosphere conducive to a colonialism that, like the post-Emancipation United States, lent itself to a

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style of colonialism hardly better than the Plantation. The British and French islands freed slaves and replaced slavery with indentured servitude by the late 1830s and 1840s. The Spanish and Dutch were the last to release their slaves, holding their slaves until the latter half of the 1800s, according to Klein and Vinson. After Emancipation, many of the Caribbean nations remained colonized by European countries well into the twentieth century. Haiti was the first Caribbean nation and only Black republic in the Western hemisphere to achieve independence in 1804. Cuba received independence in the 1800s. Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago all attained independence by the mid-1960s. The Bahamas, Domini- ca, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines received independence in the 1970s. Antigua and Barbuda and St. Kitt and Nevis received independence in the early 1980s. Aruba remains part of the Netherland Kingdom, the Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos remain a part of the United Kingdom, Guadeloupe and Martinique are overseas departments of France, and the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are territories of the United States. Even those Carib- bean nations, such as Haiti, that achieved independence and the right to govern themselves remained impoverished and dependent upon the former metropoles and the United States for economic survival. In addition, the mode of sugar production changed, according to historians Klein and Vinson, but the harvesting of the crop remained unchanged, requiring many hours of manual labor by Black backs and hands Therefore, the Euro-American relationship with the Caribbean remained that of colonizer and colonized, and Black men were continuously plagued by paternalistic writings that claimed they needed guidance from European mother countries and could not be trusted to govern islands. Likewise, some writings claimed that women of African descent on the island did not know how to be subordi- nate to Black males and would cause chaos without the firm guiding hand of colonial systems. In the mid-twentieth century, O. Mannoni offered a “psychological” explanation for the dependency of island nations in his book Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1950). Using the Malagasy people of Madagascar and their reactions to French colonization, Mannoni claims that some races of people simply have a “dependency complex” and others, namely Europeans, have a driving need to colonize while suppressing their own inferiority complex. These traits are simply inherent in groups of people, which makes them prone to being exploited and other groups prone to exploit others. According to Mannoni: “The dependence relationship requires at least two members, and where a colonial situation exists, if one of them is the native of the colony, the other is likely to be the colonizers, or rather the colonial, for he it is who offers us the most interesting subject of study.”9 Mannoni renames that driving need to colonize, oppress, and alien- ate the Other as the “Prospero complex,” evoking Shakespeare’s The Tem-

38 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 34 Chapter 2 pest. He notes how, in Shakespeare’s drama, that “Caliban does not complain of being exploited; he complains rather of being betrayed.”10 According to Mannoni, Caliban does not abhor the exploitation of his labor, but the label- ing of his person by Prospero as something other than a part of the human family. In short, though Mannoni uses the rhetoric of psychology instead of philosophy or history, his justification for colonial dependence is remarkably similar to that of his predecessors discussed in the previous chapter. Though psychology did not exist until the late 1800s, Mannoni’s use of it in his theory smacks of its predecessor, phrenology, a branch of scientific racism developed by German physician, Joseph Franz Gall. Of course African people, according to phrenologists, did not have the correct head shape for reason. Indeed, colonialist works like The Tempest set a standard in shaping the discourse surrounding both the ability of Caribbean nations to rule themselves and Black masculinity within the region. Because of the play’s geography, historians and academics like O. Mannoni, who compare Black men to Caliban, could very easily imagine Caliban as an inhabitant of the Carib- bean islands. Much like the philosophical writings that dehumanize and de- gender men of African descent discussed in chapter 1, Shakespeare presents Caliban as an unintelligent, subhumanoid creature. This portrayal is highly effective, because “although in The Tempest the word creature appears nowhere in conjunction with Caliban himself, his character is everywhere hedged in and held up by the politico-theological category of the creaturely.”11 The “creaturely” being is fit only for manual labor and enslavement. In Shakespeare’s world, not only is Caliban “creaturely,” he is inarticulate and seemingly without a written form of communication. Caliban’s creatureli- ness and his inarticulateness contrast sharply with the refinement, manners, and physical forms of the European characters. In this world of creatures and men, whiteness signifies “civilization” so thoroughly that Caliban cannot differentiate between a drunken European servant like Stephano and the royal Europeans who wash upon the shore. Meanwhile, film technology, introduced in the twentieth century, allowed Euro-Americans to spread myths of Africa as the “Dark Continent.” As colonization of Africa advanced into the twentieth century, many images of Pleitoscene Africa emerged in literature and in the recently developed film technology of the era. Cloaked in discourse that differentiates between “civilization” and “savagery,” Africa was juxtaposed to Europe as a place modernity never reaches. In the article “When Hearts Beat Like Native Drums,” Clara Henderson argues that “this transference of the notion of savagery to non-Europeans coincides with the birth of colonial expansion and added a new racial dimension to the descriptions of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized.’”12 Sup- posedly, European cultures were the most civilized; all other cultures, particularly those nations that were populated heavily with non-Europeans such as

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the nations of Africa, were seen as “uncivilized.” In texts and on screen these images rarely feature Africans as individuals, but as a homogenous group of semi-nude Black bodies that are virtually indistinguishable from primates in the surrounding jungle. The nondescript culture implicates that all Africans are “savage” or “uncivilized” and all Europeans are civilized by contrast. European civility is implied by the perfectly ironed and starched suits white men wear in a sweltering jungle. In addition to being the “antithesis to Europe,” as Chinua Achebe writes in his essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Africa becomes a backdrop for Euro- American masculine pursuits and a place of new markets for Euro-American businesses. One of the most enduring legacies concerning Africa of this era is Tarzan, a popular character from Edgar Rice Borroughs’s book Tarzan and the Apes (1912). According to Bederman, Borroughs “constructed Africa as a place where ‘the white man’ could prove his superior manhood by reliving the primitive, masculine life of his most distant evolutionary forefathers.”13 As a white man of Anglo-Saxon descent, Tarzan represents the best of Euro- American masculinity: he is tall, strong, and physically imposing, and has the ability to subdue both man and animals with violence if necessary (though disdained in men of African descent). Juxtaposed to the white man who glides through the trees in a loincloth is a body of African men who are superstitious, effeminate, and savage. In addition, the texts support and justify lynching men of African descent. After Kulonga, an African, kills Tarzan’s ape mother Kala, Bederman writes, “Tar- zan lynches Kulonga by stealthily lowering a rope noose round his head, and then jerking him, struggling, up into the treetops. To complete the grisly Southern rite, Tarzan then ‘plunged his hunting knife into Kulonga’s heart. Kala was avenged.’ Tarzan had become a lyncher.”14 After this first lynching, Tarzan regularly kills African men for goods and clothing, particularly their loincloths, an obvious phallic symbol. In the African jungle, as well as in the United States, lynching Black men assures Tarzan and his audience that the Euro-American man will remain dominant in this unstable environment: “It is no accident that when Tarzan introduces himself to Jane Porter and her white companions, he identifies himself (in big block letters) as ‘TARZAN, THE KILLER OF BEASTS AND MANY BLACK MEN.”15 According to the film, killing Black men does not make Tarzan a murderer, but is an affirmation that his survival is based on his fitness as a Euro- American man to dominate his environment even through violent tactics. American films like D. W. Griffin’s Birth of a Nation used the body and “purity” of white American women to justify lynching African American males. It portrays a bestial Black man attempting to rape a white American woman (dressed in white to symbolize her virginity). Rather than let the

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Black man rape her, she jumps from a cliff. The Klan, like Tarzan, swoops in to avenge her death. Pivotal to Euro-American definitions of masculinity in the Caribbean and African colonial situation is the role white women play in regard to Black males; they stood between the adaptation of local Caribbean and African cultures and maintaining “civilized” European standards in Euro-American patriarchal supremacist discourse. Perhaps the most insidious charge levied against African American men was that of the Black rapist beast, a mytho- logical construction that hinges upon the white American woman’s body. Sadly, this brand of Black male emasculation was very effective. As Marlon Ross explains, it “settled, at its most basic level, on the sexual deviance and consequent social irresponsibility of black men’s desires and ambitions— equating or analogizing the unreliable passions and uncountable impulses of men of African descent to the unaccountable mysteries of women as legiti- mately disenfranchised creatures.”16 This image of the “boyish” adult Black male, who had an uncontrollable lust for white female flesh, was a peculiar invention of the post-bellum white American imagination that exploded across the United States: “Black rape myths began to appear during emancipation and exploded during Reconstruction, when white Americans expressed their fears of unprecedented black political power by creating the appearance of a solid white racial front.”17 A rash of lynching, sometimes along with the ghastly torture and castration of young, Black males swept the South; Northern media outlets generally sanctioned them. The protection of the virtues for white American womanhood from Black males became a rallying cry that reunited Northern and Southern white men during Recon- struction. In this tense climate, James Baldwin claims in his essay, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” that “to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. The relationship, therefore, of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing.”18 Black males became living phallic symbols in the white American imagination; equally important, extralegal violence ensured that Black men remained symbolic of the bodily or overly-sexual or “boyish” aspects of masculinity and not of patriarchal authority or economic success. In her 1984 study, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Ritu- als, Trudier Harris concludes that motivations for mob violence, lynching, and castration of Black males were the same as the justification for slavery: to ensure that Black males remain cogs in a capitalist system designed to reward Euro-American males. These activities reassured Euro-American men of their cultural/political/economic dominance in an uncertain, free- market economy by working to exclude other men, especially those of African descent. If the new symbol of the promise of American liberty was a demure lady in virginal robes, Euro-American discourse and the lynching

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and mutilation of Black male bodies served to remind African American males that they could take advantage of this freedom neither by consent nor by force. Black femininity does not escape the ravages of the new economy and its media. In the Tarzan series, an ape, Kala, raises the orphaned Tarzan. Kala showers Tarzan in unbridled motherly affection and love and shows him how to survive in the African jungle. The “savage” Mbonga women, who are once masculine and silent, are replaced by an ape, literally. Jane, a European woman and love interest of Tarzan must teach him to separate himself from the African elements by acting as a proper European lady: a stark contrast to the Mbonga women. Bederman explains how Jane’s femininity contrast with the exaggerated masculinity of the Mbongan women: “Jane’s delicacy and need for protection are clearly racial characteristics. They contrast with the savagery and independence of the primitive Mbongan women, who raise their own food, attack their own enemies, and never receive protection from the Mbongan man.”19 She “teaches” Tarzan by presenting objects symbolic of European modernization—like record players, silk stockings, and bottled perfume—that contrast sharply with the Pleitoscene African surroundings. Constant contact with Jane, according to Henderson and Bederman, brings Tarzan into full awareness of his Anglo-Saxon masculinity. When an African male grabs Jane and swings through the trees with her, Tarzan, like his Ku Klux Klan counterparts in the United States, does not hesitate to kill the Black man in her honor. Meanwhile, Mannoni compares European women in a colonial situation with men. Mannoni says of European women in colonized countries, “the European women are far more racialist than the men. Sometimes their racialism attains preposterous proportions. . . . Similar observations have been made in other countries where racialism exists.”20 Women keep the culture and standards of European civilization, according to Mannoni. For instance, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda is without a mother to teach her the refinements of feminine virtues; yet, Prospero, her father, instills in her all of the virtues of life as an Italian royal lady. In Act I, Scene II, Ferdinand declares to Miranda, “O, if a virgin and your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you the Queen of Naples” (I.II. 448–450).21 This assures Prospero that even on a remote island surrounded by slaves, European culture and its notion of superior “civilization” continues in the person of Miranda. Addi- tionally, the justification of Caliban’s enslavement comes through the body of Miranda. Lamming describes the importance of Miranda’s presence in The Pleasure of Exile, saying, “It is through Miranda, the product of Prospero’s teaching, that we may glimpse the origin and perpetuation of myth coming slowly but surely into its right as fact, history, and absolute truth.”22 Prospero accuses Caliban of attempting to rape Miranda: “thou didst seek to violate the honor of my child” (II.II. 350–351).23 Caliban does not deny seeking

42 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 38 Chapter 2 sexual favors from Miranda, but he simply wants to “people the island with Calibans” (I.II. 353–354).24 In hoping to reproduce with the only woman on the island, Miranda, Caliban clearly desires to snatch some equality for himself from the hands of Prospero. Despite his political motivation for desiring sex with Miranda, Prospero declares that Caliban “proves” the savageness of his race, and is “deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst deserved more than a prison” (I.II. 365).25 Unlike his American counterparts, Prospero does not immediately declare death for Caliban; the creature is too valuable as a source of manual labor. Shakespeare’s treatment of Caliban concerning Mi- randa is not historically inaccurate; though Euro-American womanhood became emblematic of that culture in the Caribbean, the Caribbean did not largely adopt its American counterpart’s policy of lynching and maiming Black male bodies. On the contrary, subtle economic tactics were used to impoverish Black men. For instance, in many Caribbean nations, the metropole countries encouraged emigration from Asian countries. These immigrants were given higher wage contract for their work than Black men and were granted higher social status. They were allowed to open businesses in Black communities, while Black men, in many island nations were denied these opportunities. In addition, colonialist educational systems, even when run by Black faces, discriminated against Black pupils, making it impossible for Black people to achieve vertical social and economic advancement even through education. Those few Black people who did achieve some sort of social and economic ascendance served as colonial government middle management and became mired in class struggles with their fellow countrymen. They represent those people least likely to engage in any type of oppositional discourse with Euro- American men and are portrayed as psychologically and emotionally impotent by Caribbean writers. Black Caribbean writers counter the Prospero-Caliban dynamic by embracing and exploring the character of Caliban from his perspective. His dispossessed mother, the erasure of his native tongue, as well as his condem- nation to manual labor and toil makes him a very attractive metaphor for the plight of African Caribbean men. In her book Making Men: Gender, Literacy Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative historian and critic Belinda Edmondson claims that “Caliban is a symbol of black Caribbean manhood in Francophone and Anglophone discourse.”26 Additionally, George Lamming argues that the metaphor of Caliban can be applied to all Black males who inhabit the island nations, regardless of geographical or linguistic boundaries. Black people, like Caliban, in the Caribbean archipelago share a history of enslavement, colonialism, and either voicelessness or voice distortion in dominant discourses. In Continuities and Divergences, Alabi argues “colonial discourses, like The Tempest, naturalize slavery, dis- torting the voice of the enslaved when they represent that voice.”27 Further-

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more, Lamming says in The Pleasure of Exile “for Caliban himself like the island he inherited is at once a landscape and a human situation. We can switch from island to island without changing the meaning of language in The Tempest” (118). Black Caribbean appropriations serve to humanize Cali- ban, who is not a creature, but a man who Prospero “Others” through language. Shakespearean critic Judith Sarnecki notes “Aime Césaire takes Shakespeare at his word when he rewrites The Tempest, taking on the “master” in a political and artistic quest to free himself and his people from the oppression they have suffered at the hands of their colonizers.”28 The plot of the play is much the same; however, Césaire foregrounds the plight of Cali- ban, making him the dominant character rather than Prospero in his play, A Tempest. Many early Black, Pan-Africanist writers used their pens to counter these popular images of Black men as insatiable cravers of white women throughout the New World. For instance, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, in her groundbreak- ing academic study of lynching, The Red Record, thoroughly debunks and refutes the Black rapist beast myth. In fact, Wells called the whole rape mythology an “excuse,” and links the rash of lynching and castrations with the right to vote. Popular mythology, which conflated any kind of sexual act between white women and Black men with political participation, was used to disenfranchise Black voters throughout the South. W. E. B. DuBois’s Soul of Black Folk followed Record, and continued to link economic competition and political equality, not rampant desire of white women, for maiming and killing Black males. In the twentieth century, specifically between World I and World War II, Black male writers began to counter the prevailing stereotypes about Black men directly in literary/social criticism. Writing from the Caribbean, scholar C. L. R. James published the landmark masterpiece, Black Jacobins, which connects the Haitian Revolution with ideals espoused during the French Revolution and highlights the brilliant tactical leadership of Toussaint L’Overture. He subverts the Prospero-Caliban relationship by telling the history of the Haitian revolution from a Haitian vantage point rather than a French one. James’s fellow Caribbean scholar, Frantz Fanon, writes of colonization and the liberation struggle in Africa in his social commentary and literary criticism. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon devotes an entire chapter to refuting Mannoni. Fanon explicitly rejects Mannoni’s psychologically-based theory by stating:

When one tries to examine the structure of this or that form of exploitation from an abstract point of view, one simply turns one’s back on the major, basic problem, which is that of restoring man to his proper place. Colonial racism is no different from any other racism.29

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Fanon declares that regardless of offered justification for colonization, it can only ever end in exploitation of the colonized and coming from the heels of racialized enslavement, colonization is but another manifestation of notions of European superiority and racism. As the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement advanced, fiction writers presented humanized Black masculine characters. Using the ideals of unity espoused by the various political manifestations of Pan- Africanism, Black masculine writers began to acknowledge publicly the connections between oppression of Black masculinity in the New World and the exploitation of Black males in Africa and the Caribbean. This particular strategy is found in Chicago Defender articles written by Langston Hughes as well as those written by W. E. B. DuBois for The Crisis Magazine. Yet, creative writers tended to ignore the Black rapist beast. As the twentieth century matured and more Black-authored scholarship concerning Black culture in America and throughout the Diaspora became available, the fiction writing changed as well; Black writers embraced the scholarship and created stories and characters that closely resemble personality types and situations as articulated by academics. Whereas the academic literature served to educate the public concerning Black life, creative literature served diegetic functions through both narration and characterization. For instance, Richard Wright’s Native Son is the first imaginative text that explores the Black rapist beast mythology. In his book In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances, Andrew Leiter claims that “Wright’s novel offered a new approach by acknowledging the black beast and transfer- ring the responsibility for his existence onto white American society.”30 Rather than substantiate white American stereotypes of the Black rapist beast, Wright demonstrates that Bigger is a creation of white American racist discourse that constantly refers to people like him with animal-like imagery. In exploring the Black rapist beast mythology in Native Son, Wright places the story outside of the American South, and in Chicago, Illinois, a large industrial city of the American North. The location of this text is significant, because it removes the American South as a psychological soothing balm concerning American racism and indicts the entire American justice system for helping the media propagate the Black beast mythology. In the American South, Jim Crowism and de juris racism severely limited economic and political opportunities for all Black people, but the regime was particularly brutal toward African American males. Critic Marlon B. Ross in Man- ning the Race: Black Men in the Jim Crow Era explains that “The Jim Crow regime exploits the ideology of black male deficiency to justify and adminis- ter an entrenched color line through violence, intimidation, coercion, and the sadistic manipulation of the courts, schools, public transport, and other instruments of public interest.”31 Like hundreds of thousands of Black peo-

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ple, Wright tried to escape the racism, poverty, and indignity of the agri- culturally-dominated American South by relocating to the urbanized, industrial American North. The Great Migration, or movement of African Americans from one part of the country to another, occurred in three phases. Great Migration I occurred during World War I. The second and largest phase occurred during the World War II era, and for the first time in the nation’s history, African Americans became an urban-based population. The movement is currently in its third phase, with many middle-aged African Americans moving away from the Rust and Steel Belts, and back to the South’s urban centers such as Houston, Texas, New Orleans, Louisiana, Memphis, Tennessee, Birmingham, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, Jackson, Mississippi, and other mid-sized/large Sun Belt, Southern cities. Please see The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010) by Isabel Wilkerson for general information on the Great Migration, or Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative (1995) by Farah Jasmine Griffin on how this movement affected African American literature. In books like Native Son, “the material conditions from which his black male protagonists want to flee are those of racism and wage-labor in a capitalist society.”32 Yet, as Wright demonstrates in the text, conditions in the American North were often comparable to those in the American South for Black people. In the North, Wright, like millions of African Americans, faced de facto segregation. The racism of Euro-Americans in the city was ubiquitous and vicious, but unseen. Racism in the South was visible with “white only” and “colored only” signs: Northern racist tactics included redlining and Gerrymandering, and were as pernicious and restrictive as poll taxes and Jim Crowism. Redlining involves real estate companies and banks that cooperatively target a certain area of a city and refuse to offer houses to or lend to minorities outside of those areas. Companies would literally draw a red line around these areas on a city grid to delineate these areas from others in the cities; hence, the popular term “redlining.” Historically, rent within these redlined areas was exorbitant for the run-down kitchenette buildings, service-oriented businesses refused to open there, food was overpriced and of poor quality, and even medical care was overpriced or nonexistent. Sadly, many cities would not allow permits for minorities to open better businesses in the neighborhoods where they lived, and federally subsidized loans were denied to minorities attempting to escape these conditions. Therefore, many urban Northern cities created sprawling “ghettos,” and the unfair housing practices became a key issue during the early phases of the civil rights movement. Gerrymandering is a process whereby one particular political party is given electoral advantage by manipulating geographical districts or “redistricting.” Though African Americans were allowed to vote without physical harassment, poll taxes, or Constitutional tests in most Northern cities, their votes essentially

46 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 42 Chapter 2 had no effect on the outcome of most elections due to Gerrymandering. More- over, the threat of the unequal and color-cognizant American legal system in the North and West inspired just as much fear in African Americans as the extralegal lynch mob violence of the South. The first chapter of Native Son is aptly titled, “Fear,” and it opens with another manifestation of the Northern racism: the rat-infested one-room apartment that Bigger must share with his brother, mother, and sister that his mother calls a “garbage dump.”33 Bigger, a Black man in his early twenties, is aware of the powerlessness that constitutes life in Chicago’s Black Belt; unable to do anything about it, he creates a veritable psychological bubble around himself by engaging in a tough oppositional stance even with his family. Bigger “hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So, he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve.”34 The indignity of living in a rat- infested, overly-crowded kitchenette building in the redlined South side of Chicago is but one way that Northern racism personally touches Bigger and the entire Thomas family. Bigger feels emasculated because as the oldest male child of the house he feels responsible for the welfare of the family and is unable to provide enough economically to move them to a better dwelling. To escape the pathetic conditions of his home life, Bigger roams the streets with his friends, Gus, Jack, and G. H. Once outside the home and in the streets of Chicago, Bigger and his friends face daily confrontations with an urban landscape that lead to further feelings of alienation. In Bigger’s world, there is no Black community. There are no men for Bigger and his friends to emulate—at least not in the Black Belt of Chicago. Bigger’s family, like many homes of the Black Belt, is headed by his mother. There is no father because “Bigger’s father has been dead for many years, having been killed in a riot in Mississippi. Bigger has had to take his father’s place in his family while still being considered a child by his mother.”35 There is no viable church community where Black males exercise phallic authority. There are no uncles or other male family members to help the Thomas family, no Black male barbershop conversations where Black men gather to discuss the latest neighborhood crimes or injustices, and no old Black men who act as neighborhood griots. There is not even a popular blues or jazz club where Bigger and his friends can go to hear music and get release of their emotions through collective catharsis. Though the heyday of the Chica- go Blues scene would not reach its zenith until the 1950s, almost twenty years after the setting of Native Son, there was still a bustling music scene in Chicago where jazz and blues performers, like those in New York, played smaller, more intimate clubs for Black audiences. The gang of petty thieves gather at Doc’s pool hall, but Doc does not show any concern for the boys

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and offers them no guidance. When Bigger forces Gus to lick a knife, Doc laughs and asks, “Say, Bigger, ain’t you scared ‘im enough.”36 He neither asks Bigger to stop torturing his friend nor offers Bigger any corrective guidance. In fact, he only asks Bigger to leave at gunpoint once Bigger cuts the surface of a billiard table. The lack of Black male role models in Bigger’s world is a radical break from historical data concerning Black communities of the time (Depression Era Chicago). Literary critic Alexander Nejako claims that Bigger’s alienation is highly improbable during the novel’s setting stating that, “The absence of models for African American masculinity in Native Son is surprising in light of historical and sociological evidence about African American communities.”37 The historical and sociological evidence, even during Wright’s time, shows that even in single, female-headed households, African American males retained some sort of community. Soci- ologist Robert Staples claims that Black males “learn the male role from a variety of sources. Even if there were not strong male role models available, women are able to transmit the male sex-role expectations symbolically, e.g., telling them how to walk, to carry their books, etc.”38 If there are men in Bigger’s world, they are as broken by the conditions of racism in Chicago as he is, and this makes young Black men like Bigger all the more susceptible to the destructive nature of Euro-American supremacist patriarchal thinking. In the Caribbean, Caliban experiences social isolation in A Tempest. As in the Shakespearean play, A Tempest takes place on a remote island. Set at the historical cusp of colonialism, there are no villages, towns, or cities: there are only masters and slaves. In both plays, a shipwreck brings more Europeans to the island, but only Caliban and Ariel are slaves with no communities of their own to which they can retreat. The two slaves both engage in an oppositional masculinity but disagree about how to best gain their freedom from the tyranny of Prospero; thus, they do not communicate with one another regularly, and do not share a common bond in enslavement. Caribbean literature critic James Arnold in his article, “Césaire and Shakespeare: Two Tempests” reasons that “Ariel, although a slave, aspires to the bourgeois values of Prospero. His adoption of a purer form of speech represents an imaginary identification with the power that Prospero wields in fact.”39 In Act II, Scene I, the reader learns that their differences are simply a matter of how to defeat Prospero. Ariel explains his policy of nonviolence to Caliban, “No violence, no submission either. Listen to me: Prospero is the one we’ve got to change. Destroy his serenity so that he’s finally forced to acknowledge his own injustice and put an end to it.”40 Caliban does not agree with Ariel’s policy of nonviolence, saying, “You don’t understand a thing about Prospero. He’s not the collaborating type. He’s a guy who only feels something when he’s wiped something out. A crusher, a pulverizer, that’s what he is! And you talk about brotherhood.”41 A number of critics write that Césaire uses Ariel to reference Martin Luther King and Caliban to signify Malcolm X. I believe

48 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 44 Chapter 2 that Césaire alludes to some island nations’ policy of emancipating slaves, but only after several more years of indentured servitude on the Caribbean islands where they were enslaved. For instance, as mentioned in chapter 2, France did not recognize Black men as adults until the age of thirty-five. Therefore, rather than immediate emancipation, France recommended that slaves in its Caribbean nations remain slaves until the government deemed Black men capable of heading a household. For many Black Caribbean scholars and writers, accepting colonialism and its restrictive policies that deny self-governance is a form of emasculation. In this story, Ariel’s compla- cency with Prospero’s rule cause a rift between them: they separate and never form the vital community that would serve to help both their causes. Meanwhile, Tutuola uses another rhetorical strategy to reverse normal- ized narratives of Africa. He locates The Palm-Wine Drinkard in Pleitoscene Africa, outside of modernity. Tutuola normalizes this world through the structure of his tale, which seems like a random collection of events and objects: “Such hodge-podge cultural shifts are common throughout The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Frequently among ghosts, goblins, and enchanted villages, a seemingly out of place reference to a European object or concept such as a bomb, or a razor blade, or soccer will appear.”42 In the world of the drinkard, such objects appear strange. Rather than exoticize his Yoruba culture as “strange” or portray it as something “Other” than the Euro-American norm, Tutuola uses broken English to cathect objects of modernity with otherness. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Tutuola presents a character who invokes a period predating colonialism. The protagonist relays for the audience, “In those days, there were many wild animals and every place was covered by thick bushes and forests; again, towns and villages were not near each other as nowadays.”43 Like Bigger and Caliban, there is no need to establish any sort of oppositional masculinity that would defy white male authority. As a drinker of excessive wine, he lives in opposition to his community. According to critics and historians, this text is based upon a Yoruba culture, but it does not explicitly state in which country or city the story takes place. The reader is left to assume that the action takes place on the West Coast of Africa where most Yoruba cultures are practiced. Of his personal life, he tells the reader, “My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm-wine drunkard.”44 The protagonist, though the eldest male child in the family, is neither a productive member of his society, nor an economic contributor to his family. In the article, “The Depiction of Masculinity in Classic Nigerian Literature,” Frank Salamone claims that by managing to drink more than any other human being in his world the protagonist, “is certainly assert- ing his masculinity through his drinking. He does so as one knowing that such behavior offends women and symbolizes his masculinity.”45 This be-

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havior certainly defies Yoruba expectations of masculinity, which value a man’s hard work and productivity. While embarking upon a journey to find his dead palm wine tapster, the protagonist, who refers to himself as “Father of the gods who could do everything in this world,”46 encounters many situations. It is as if Tutuola strings together these unrelated events to tell a rambling story written in book form. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was the first African text to receive Euro- pean acclaim, much to the chagrin of Tutuola’s contemporaries: “This antag- onism is certainly felt in the writing of J. P. Clark, a fellow Nigerian writer who feels Tutuola has been raised on the shoulders of European critics solely because he does not write ‘correct’ English and is therefore a proper object for white paternalism.”47 Academics shelved Tutuola’s seemingly “primitive” narrative for the more sophisticated ones written by college-educated Africans such as Achebe. Recently, however, scholars are rereading Tutuola within a postcolonial framework. Read allegorically, each of these tales is a metaphorical representation of some facet of colonialism/imperialism or internalization of European values that the protagonist must reject. In this sense, the “Father of the gods who could do everything in this world” performs the same sort of oppositional masculinity as Caliban, though not as overt. For instance, the tale of how he acquires a wife warns against the attractiveness of colonialism and the devastation wrought by imperialistic policies. On the way to find his dead palm-wine tapster, “Father of the Gods” meets a wealthy gentleman and wife who have a dilemma: their daughter defies Yoruba standards by refusing to marry a man chosen by her father. She defies her father’s patriarchal authority and almost meets her death. The girl becomes enchanted with a beautiful man, follows him, and finds that the man is only a skull. According to Hogan, “Allegorically then, the woman has refused marriage and, implicitly children, and thus has (un- wittingly) followed death.”48 The man and his people enslave the woman by forcing her to sit upon a frog with a cowrie shell tied around her neck. The cowrie shell effectively silences the woman by making a very loud noise any time she attempts to move, making it impossible to eat as well. Even after the “Father of the Gods” rescues the woman, the cowrie shell continues to inhibit her and disrupts her father’s home and patriarchal authority; the shell prevents the girl from eating the food that her father provides. Once the “Father of the Gods” sees this gentleman, he says, “I could not blame the lady for following the Skull as a complete gentleman to his house at all. Because if I were a lady, no doubt I would follow him to wherever he would go, and still as I was a man I would jealous him more than that.”49 In that sense, “Father of the Gods” acknowledges the attractiveness of this creature. Because the protagonist is no mere mortal, but a true “Father of the Gods,” he has wisdom to see the perfect gentleman for what he is while normal humans may not be as fortunate: “I remembered that he was only a

50 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 46 Chapter 2 skull, then I thanked God that He had created me without beauty.”50 Perhaps this story warns against the material pleasures of Western materialism, as Tobias notes when he writes, “Tutuola suggests that although Western ideas and projects might at first seem tempting and attractive, these things ultimately prove little more than a deceptive façade. Once stripped away they reveal the true underlying structures of colonialism: death and enslavement.”51 This brand of manhood, with its beautiful surface and its silencing of women through manipulation, is undesirable. While it may be true that the tales are allegories, this story is more than a clever tale about relying on one’s own cultural teachings rather than shun- ning them for another. Though the girl is restrained at first with a chain to inhibit her physical movement, the Skull uses a cowry shell to control her speech and silence her even in his absence. Hogan articulates the inability to speak with death of a culture: “Here, the connection between death and inarticulate artificial sound is becoming clearer. Death means being unable to speak.”52 The cowrie shell, also used as money by the Yoruba people and other nations living along the West Coast of Africa during this period, becomes a certifiable symbol of death through voicelessness in the hands of the Skull people. Tobias expounds upon this by writing that “through this tale Tutuola hints at the way in which colonial and, subsequently, postcolonial socio-economic systems serve to chain their African victims to money and other seemingly positive trappings while simultaneously trying to remove their ability to voice resistance.”53 Though “Father of the Gods” is not obli- gated to remove the mark of colonialism and silence from the woman’s neck, he does. For his honesty, work, and dedication to completing the task, the girl is given to the palm-wine drinkard to wed. In this way, both the drinkard and the defiant girl fulfill their culture’s gendered expectations; one becomes a productive citizen through dedicated labor and the other becomes a wife. Balance, which is a common motif in Yoruba oral and written literature according to Patrick Hogan, is restored once the glittering trappings of colonialism are removed and the two become husband and wife. By acquiring a wife, the drinkard also becomes a man with a proper place in his Yoruba society. As a man with a wife to support, he must become a producer in order to properly economically support her and any children they may have together. Consequently, “Father of the Gods” is no longer a simple consumer of goods and services in his society, but a producer as well. He becomes a masculine contributor to the well-being of his society. In the United States, like the drinkard’s wife, Bigger is swayed by the powerful trappings of materialism. It is part of his condition as a marginalized minority in a country of extreme wealth. In American newspapers, movies, books, newsreels, and while visiting upscale neighborhoods of Chicago, Bigger becomes aware of the things America could offer him but forbids because of his African ancestry. For many African Americans, going from de

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juris segregation to de facto discrimination, or from the South to the North, does not change this fact. The racism is the same racism just as restrictive and inhibiting, though the immediate threat of death was no longer there. As they walk along the Chicago streets, Bigger and Gus see a plane flying overhead. Bigger informs Gus that, “I could fly one of them things if I had a chance.”54 After several gruff exchanges, Gus reminds Bigger of their limitations as Black people. He says, “If you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane.”55 In order to escape this destitution, Bigger and his friends often “play white”56: the narrator explains that it is “a game of playacting in which he and his friends imitated the ways and manners of white folks.”57 Yet, “more often than not, however, these ‘games’ reflect for Bigger and Gus both a sense of futility and racial impotence.”58 Critical race theorists assert that, “The economic, social, and political racism of 1930s Chicago has had such an insidious effect on Bigger that he has become a cauldron of feelings ready to boil over at the slightest provocation into violence.”59 Bigger abruptly ends the game by yelling, “Goddamit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.”60 Being able to compete freely in the capitalist marketplace and acquire material goods is a critical component of masculinity in America. Yet, critics agree that “perhaps the most frustrating element of Bigger’s contact with the white world is that it will not allow him to obtain the kind of manhood that it offers to him.”61 Attempts to escape the inner-turmoil only add to the young man’s frustration. Here is an example of “castration” being performed only if Black men use white masculinity standards to judge their worth as men. Seemingly without another male role model or strong cultural component that would inform him otherwise, Bigger has internalized white cultural identity markers as they pertain to success and manhood. Since his blackness prevents him from ever achieving standards made by and for white men, Bigger feels impotent and “cut off.” Movies and newsreels often serve to show men like Bigger how their potential to reach the ultimate masculinity is further constricted by racism. Jack and Bigger watch a newsreel:

Bigger sat looking at the first picture; it was a newsreel. As the scenes unfold his interest was caught and he leaned forward. He saw images of smiling, dark-haired white girls lolling on the gleaming sands of a beach. The background was a stretch of sparkling water. Palm trees stood near and far. The voice of the commentator ran with the movement of the film: Here are the daughters of the rich taking sunbaths in the sands of Florida! This little collection of debutantes represents over four billion dollars of America’s wealth and over fifty of America’s leading families.62 (emphasis Wright’s)

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When Native Son was originally published, the movie scene was deleted due to graphic sexual content. But, it was later restored by the Library of Con- gress to good effect. It is at this moment that the creation of the Black rapist beast mythology becomes explicit in the text. As the two young and impoverished Black men sit in the darkened theater the announcer purposely conflates American wealth with the young, attractive white American women on screen. The narrator, presumably a white American man, stresses that these young ladies are symbols of white American wealth, and as they frolic semi- nude on the screen, they represent everything that Bigger and his friends cannot have (emphasis mine). (White women are symbols in this type of destructive masculine discourse. They were also not real people, but representative objects of white civilization.) Acquiring and maintaining material wealth and a rather attractive white woman to share those things with (as the newsreel presents) become associated with masculine agency and dominance in this text. In Depression-era Chicago this is presented in a way that invokes more feelings of impuissance in young, Black movie-goers like Bigger. Since racism and wage discrimination collude, Bigger and his friends turn to crime in order to amass some sort of material goods (robbery, specifically) and secure a tiny bit of masculine agency. Immediately following this scene is the opening to Trader Horn, a cine- matic precursor to Tarzan. In fact, some of Tarzan’s footage is taken from Trader Horn, which actually contained shots from Africa. Clara Henderson says of Tarzan, “the drumming sequences are also most likely taken from the outtakes of the Trader Horn expedition. Despite the fact that the Trader Horn footage used in this film is authentic footage from Africa, the filmmakers thought it necessary to reshoot some of the Trader Horn scenes in Ameri- ca because the wild animal footage was not ‘wild enough.’”63 This image of wild and uncivilized Africa fit a particular narrative, steeped in European superiority or white supremacy, about Africa. It likewise affects the viewing audience. The narrator proclaims that Bigger “looked at Trader Horn unfold, and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances and heard drums beating and then gradually the African scene changed and was replaced by images in his own mind of white American men and women dressed in black and white clothes, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing.”64 For people like Bigger Thomas, the portrayal of Africans as subhumanoid creatures who never advanced past the Pleitoscene era is the only knowledge of his African past available in the United States. In the United States, “[a]s indicated by the emphasis that the screenplay of Trader Horn places on the blackness of the main character’s servant, within the African context “black” becomes one of the signifiers of the notion of “savage,” which is equated with all things African.” 65 White America, Wright emphati- cally claims with these two scenes, is responsible for the creation of the Black male rapist beast that haunts its imagination. Once again, I am referencing

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Foucault here. He claims that discourse not only names but defines an object as it names. Scenes like these in which Africans are shown as inept, inarticulate sub-humanoid creatures and Africa as one large jungle are the types of portray- als that Pan-Africanist theorists and writers strove to dispel with their creative and political writings initially. Unfortunately, Black working-class men and women like Bigger may not have been exposed to Pan-Africanist political and creative writings. They were certainly not taught these things in the white- dominated school curricula at the time. The scene in the movie theater is also Bigger’s first exposure to Mary Dalton, daughter of the rich white American family for whom he eventually becomes chauffeur. One night while Bigger is on duty, Mary becomes intoxi- cated and asks Bigger to carry her to bed because she is too inebriated to climb the stairs. Mary’s blind mother calls out to her daughter, and Bigger smothers the girl out of fear. Even though he is Chicago, he knows the consequences of being Black, male, and alone in a bedroom with a young white woman. Though Bigger does think of raping Mary while she is inebriated, Leiter claims that his motivation for murder is different. Leiter writes, “It is not carnal lust nor a displaced desire for the opportunities of the white world that lead to Bigger’s crime; rather, terror becomes the determining factor in Mary’s murder as Bigger finds himself fully confronted with the fear that has lurked in the back of his mind.”66 In order to hide the evidence, he dismembers the body and stuffs it in a furnace. The plot of the book unfolds after this homicidal accident. As a living embodiment of American wealth, and a justification for the enforcement of white supremacist ideology through the violent mutilation of Black male bodies, Mary becomes complicit in her own murder when she places Bigger in that terrible, uncompromising position of being alone with a helpless white American woman in a bedroom in 1930s Chicago. In justifying her murder, Bigger “felt that his murder of her was more than amply justified by the fear and shame she had made him feel.”67 In murdering Mary, he eases the feelings of powerlessness she invokes in him with her presence. Having murdered Mary, Bigger finds value in his life. The narrator explains why murder gives Bigger a purpose, saying that “He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had anything that others could not take from him.”68 Once discovered and on the run, Bigger interprets his crime not as a reactionary one of fear, but one of individual opposition to the white world that suppresses and controls him: “This movement from an unpremeditated murder motivated by fear to an act of political rebellion involves a series of imaginative leaps on Bigger’s part that conflate murder with rape and rape with politics in a manner of mirroring the white cultural conflation of the same.”69 Though Bigger thinks of raping Mary, he does not; however, he does deliberately rape and murder his Black girlfriend, Bessie. He no longer

54 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 50 Chapter 2 considers raping a crime: “Rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one.”70 Defined in this way, white America “raped” men of African descent by emasculating them; if not physically through brutal acts of castration, then socially and politically by redlining, enforcing de facto segregation through state-sanctioned violence, and job and wage discrimination. Rape, as Bigger ration- alizes it, is another form of his new-found, oppositional masculinity. White American discourse rapes him as a Black man; he physically rapes in order to reclaim some sort of masculinity. Whereas Bigger resorts to robbery and murder for reclamation of masculine agency, Caliban uses language. Unlike Bigger, Caliban is acutely aware of the source of his oppression, has the ability to articulate his oppression, and is openly defiant toward that source, Prospero. In her article about Cé- saire’s creolization of Shakespeare, Judith Sarnecki addresses alienation experienced by Caliban when she writes that “The alienated, fragmented subject (Shakespeare’s Caliban) emerges in Césaire’s play as his own master because he claims the subject position in language in order to undo Prospe- ro’s ‘magic.’”71 Césaire’s protagonist uses an Africanized version of the European language that includes Swahili words. Caliban greets Prospero with a loud “Uhuru”72 a word in Swahili that is more than likely an improv- isation of the author: “That an African slave in the Caribbean is unlikely to have spoken Swahili is true enough. But the aim of this detail is, like the foregoing examples, not narrowly historical. The cry ‘Uhuru!’ has gained a universal currency since it first shook European colonialism in the 1950s.”73 Caliban’s use of African words clearly upbraids Prospero, who protests “I’ve already told you, I don’t like it. You could be polite, at least; a simple ‘hello’ wouldn’t kill you.”74 Caliban also uses a form of Creole language, blending African, American, and European words to make them fit his purposes. In addition to having Caliban challenge Prospero’s linguistic superiority directly, Césaire also adds the African god Eshu to the original play’s Greek and Roman gods and spirit. In fusing the language and adding an African God, Césaire endows Caliban with at least a culture of his own from which he draws strength and identity. Like Bigger, Caliban attempts to banish impuissance. However, Caliban can expect a larger degree of success than Bigger; Prospero’s presence is real and not symbolic like Mary’s and he can directly confront his oppressor through the language and the worship of his own gods. Using nation-language rather than the European language of Prospero is Caliban’s way of engaging Prospero and opposing him simultaneously, and it is also a nonviolent reclamation of Caliban’s masculine identity that does not involve using neither a Black woman nor a European one as a cultural symbol/object.

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In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the allegorical tale of how “Father of the Gods” acquires and abandons a son is basically one of the colonizer, the native informant, imperialistic policies, and violent opposition to those policies. After acquiring a wife and establishing a farm, the community in which “Father of the Gods” and his wife reside experiences a brief period of nor- malcy until his wife’s thumb swells disproportionately and releases a fully- formed son. The child immediately talks as if “he was ten years of age,”75 grows to be more than three feet tall within an hour, and walks to the correct home without being told. Upon hearing his name, “‘ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon,”76 “Father of the Gods” grows afraid and wants to abandon the child. This child, whose conception and birth are supernatural, closely resembles Skull in that he appears one way, but soon changes into something terrible. After hearing the name, “Father of the Gods” understands that the wife, through no fault of her own, has been the unwitting native informant to a terrible force that may soon upset the balance of their village. Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reasoning defines and follows the native informant through “Philosophy,” “Literature” “History,” and “Culture.” One definition of the native informant is the educated elite of the indigenous population who acts as the voice of the “Othered” society or culture. As the “mother” of this child, she nourished it (though not in the uterus, the biologically correct part of her body), and apparently taught the child the language and customs of the village. Unlike Skull, who took victims to his place for enslavement, the child is a colonizer who comes to destroy the people of the village by eating all of their food and flogging them. “Father of the Gods” reports that “this child was stronger than everybody in that town, he went around the town and he began to burn the houses of the heads of that town to ashes.”77 This half-baby nullifies the male leadership of each town by besting them physically and destroying any sem- blance of indigenous male authority. The child establishes his dominance by first physically declaring war upon all those who would stop his total eradi- cation of their sustenance. He then symbolically declares his authority (patriarchal authority) by destroying the homesteads of community leaders. Read this way, this half-baby and the way he eradicated indigenous leadership through violent imposition of his own authority is allegorical of colonial rule in Africa. Like their Black Caribbean counterparts, men in Africa believe that colonialism is as emasculating as slavery. Yet, the people do not totally bow to the child’s tyranny. Like Caliban, “Father of the Gods” devises a plan to destroy the child. In a surprise attack, he burns the house down to the ground where the child is sleeping. The immolation of the child’s home is the village’s violent opposition to his rule. Once again, the wife is attached to a material possession that leads them back to the sight of the child. She pokes through the ashes for a “gold trinket”78 that is invaluable to her. In looking for the gold, they find the child, though

56 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 52 Chapter 2 missing half his body, still alive. Since the wife finds the baby, they must carry this burdensome child. The half-bodied baby is a rustic of colonization, and the results of his behavior are the same as colonialism. In this way, his presence is akin to economic/cultural imperialism—a form of domination that is not as physically repressive as colonialism, but equally destructive to those who come in contact with it. Though only half-bodied, the child still takes away all of the sustenance from his parents. In addition, he makes it difficult for his parents to breathe without him, much like imperialistic policies that are driven by economic investments in undeveloped nations. Without those investments, formerly colonized nations find it difficult to survive; thus, they remain economically dependent upon the metropole that initially took away the colonies’ wealth while suppressing industrial advancement. On this mystical journey, Drum, Song, and Dance—representative of African culture—take the baby away; yet, the withdrawal of this horrible child leaves “Father of the Gods” and his wife penniless. After the baby leaves, “Father of the Gods” uses “juju” to turn himself into a canoe. His wife “used the canoe as ‘ferry’ to carry passengers across the river, the fare for adults was 3d (three pence) and half fare for children.” 79 When capitalistic advancement is limited by race rather than based upon merit, those people who are not of the hegemonic race or class are usually relegated to such subservient jobs. Tutuola demonstrates “in this incident he is reduced by an externally imposed economic system to struggling sub-humanly—yet in a way that appears vaguely, almost cryp- tically bourgeois—for a modest sum of British money.” 80 Only after they spend the day at this menial task are they able to purchase even basic needs for their journey. In colonial Caribbean and African countries as well as Black Code/Jim Crow America, capitalism was race-based rather than meritocratic. Black men were often relegated to the most menial, subservient jobs regardless of their skill set or education. If they were fortunate enough to have received some education, Black men taught in segregated, underfunded schools and may have been principal. These jobs were the lowest paying jobs, making it impossible for men like “Father of the Gods” to be the sole breadwinners of their homes and necessitating that their wives work outside the home as well. If Euro-Americans ration- alized enslavement of African men due to an equally divided workload based on gender, colonialism and Jim Crowism created the conditions that would keep Black men at “faux man” status, according to Euro-American discourse. Men like the palmwine drinkard, so long as he operates within a race-based capitalist system, may always need his wife’s supplemental income, creating a more equal power dynamic within the relationship instead of one based on domination and subordination as in traditional, Euro-American notions of heterosexual relationships.

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Aside from being men of African descent, the protagonists in all three of these narratives have key similarities. First, they each reference an unadulter- ated, pristine Africa as an alternative identity to current, dehumanizing modernity. Though initially ashamed of the images of Trader Horn, Bigger believes the dark-skinned men and women who dance semi-nude on screen as more free than himself and envies those “men and women who were adjusted to their soil and at home in their world, secure from fear and hysteria.”81 Césaire uses African gods to reference Africa, and Tutuola normalizes Plei- toscene Africa by engrossing the audience in a world where bushes and ghost are normal, and football fields, razors, money, and telephones are not. There- fore, references to modernity are defamiliarized. Second, the action of the texts takes place during colonialism in the Caribbean archipelago and on the African continent, and Jim Crow segregation in America, a form of internal colonialism. Because African Americans were relegated to the Black Belts in major Northern industrial cities, they became entrapped within a form of domestic colonization where discrimina- tory practices ensured that they would never be economically equal (and thereby, economic competition) to white citizens. Though Caribbean countries also released slaves, they remained colonized well into the twentieth century. After the end of the triangular slave trade, Africa was colonized by European powers for almost 100 years, which stripped the Continent of many of its natural resources. New policies of imperialism also left these countries dependent upon their former European colonizers for capital and investments like their Caribbean counterparts. Third, though these societies, at the time of the production of these texts, were engaged in political, social, and economic upheaval and change, the discourse that negated Black masculine identity in Africa and the New World did not change. In fact, creation of the Black rapist beast in the New World, the Black Calibans of the Caribbean, and the Pleitoscenic, subhumanoid men of Africa only served to further inhibit and effeminize men of African descent. Savagery, juvenility, and sexual licentiousness became synonymous with Black masculine identity in Africa and across the Diaspora. Each protagonist engages in a form of oppositional masculinity that directly counters those stereotypes and myths. Bigger and Caliban engage in a more physical confrontation, whereas “Father of the Gods” engages his opponents—slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—in battles of intelligence and strategy. Regardless of strategy, oppositional masculinity has several shortcom- ings that reveal themselves in the texts. Wright, Césaire, and Tutuola write pieces that feature a lone male protagonist, a hallmark of Western individualism. This format casts each Black masculine protagonist experience as the representative experience of enslavement/colonization/imperialism for his culture and time. Because the texts feature individuals, there is no in-depth portrayal of how racism and subsequent colonization affect

58 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 54 Chapter 2 communities. A community is implied in Tutuola, but the reader never sees it holistically as the book focuses solely on the drunkard and his adventures. Lack of communal support leads to alienation and an overall tone of hopeless and futility. Bigger never reaches any kind of full masculinity because he disintegrates into criminality. Prospero and Caliban are locked in perpetual struggle. As for the palm wine drinkard, Tutuola demonstrates that if he ceases to live in opposition to his own community, he can attain some sort of realized subjectivity through a communal notion of gender and gender performance. Unfortunately, reclamation of Black male subjectivity depends upon the silencing of Black female voices in all of these texts. If white women play specific roles in white American discourse, Black women play little or no part in these tales of oppositional masculinity. For instance, the Black women in Native Son vacillate between weak and mindless to harsh and complicit with hegemonic discourse in emasculating young Black men. For instance, Vera, Bigger’s sister, is described as timid and afraid of life. She shrinks from life while Mrs. Thomas, Bigger’s mother, psychologically abuses her son with harsh words and name-calling—stirring feelings of confusion and impotence in a psychological adolescent who is already ashamed of his inability to provide for this family in the face of crushing poverty and racism. Mrs. Thomas depends upon her eldest child, Bigger, for economic sustenance; yet, she treats him like a boy by constantly ordering him around and expecting prompt obedience. Completely opposite of Mrs. Thomas is Bigger’s girlfriend, Bessie, who he deliberately rapes and murders. Bessie demands nothing of Bigger aside from sex and alcohol, and Bigger seems to value her only for the easy sexual gratification she provides him. Bessie exists for Bigger in much the same way as Mary does, symbolically. She is a fantasy, and “Bigger can maintain this fantasy of Bessie only by depreciating and ultimately killing the Bessie that resists him and questions his confused thinking and harmful actions.”82 By insisting that Bessie only lives to gratify his most base sexual desire, Bigger shows marked immaturity, or boyishness, in his thinking. Bessie destroys his fantasy of unlimited sexual gratification, so he lashes out like a child. Unfortunately, Bigger has a man’s body and a man’s upper-body strength, not a boy’s, and his lashing out bashes in Bes- sie’s skull. Bessie’s violent erasure is indicative of the silence imposed on most women in colonial texts. A. P. Busia correctly asserts that “the colonized male encounters not himself but his antithesis; the colonized woman encounters only erasure.”83 Like Native Son, the masculine voice is presented as the representation of Caribbean enslavement and colonialism. Both Ariel and Caliban are slaves, and both are males in Shakespeare’s play and in Césaire’s play. Furthermore, both plays feature and invoke Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, but she remains voiceless: “She is invoked only to be spoken of as absent,

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recalled as a reminder of her dispossession, and not permitted her version of her story.”84 Though Sycorax is not physically present, the absence of her voice in both plays is deafening. With Prospero’s landing on the island, Sycorax’s linguistic teachings to her son are eradicated in both plays, and “having lost her language altogether, Caliban curses in the language of the master rather than in his ‘mother tongue.’ The black woman’s voice has been made to ‘disappear.’”85 The absence of Sycorax is indicative of the constructed silence of African women in colonialist literature, as well as in texts that claim to refute representations of African inhumanity. Absent in the original play, Cèsaire does not create a space for her to reclaim the island that Prospero and Caliban admit is rightfully hers. Rather than create a scenario in which Caliban and Sycorax reclaim the island and their indigenous identities together, Cèsaire’s Caliban marches toward oppositional combat alone. In this text, reclaiming identity is a lone, masculine undertaking. Unlike Bessie, Mrs. Thomas, and Sycorax, the wife of “Father of the Gods” seems to be an equal partner in his quest. Yet, she still falls under patriarchal dominion. If Skull and his use of the cowry shell are comparable to signs of enslavement and colonization, the young lady’s silence is indicative of the way enslavement and colonization silence all people, particularly women. According to Gayatri Spivak, the colonized woman is the ultimate subaltern, denied even a voice in opposition and characterized by her forced silence. Even though “Father of the Gods” removes the cowry shell from her neck, the lady remains a voiceless subaltern. Though she speaks several times, her husband “did not understand the meaning of her words, because she was talking with parables or as a foreteller.”86 He never understands her; thus, her words are lost. Though Tutuola portrays some sort of gender com- plementarity as the husband and wife travel together and work together to obtain finances for their journey, the act of speaking—reclamation of voice and identity for African, specifically Yoruba people—is performed solely by “Father of the Gods.” In this text as in Cèsaire’s identity reclamation, even in opposition to Euro-American discourse, is a masculine enterprise. Last, masculinity based upon oppositional defiance articulates the problems of Black masculine negation without necessarily offering a sustainable political, social, or economic solution to it. It simply creates a complex symbiotic relationship of ideological pugilism where discursive punches are countered by anti-discursive blows. Each side circles and dances around one another anticipating the next move of the opponent. In that sense, these characters are prodigious failures as plausible models of Black masculinity. For instance, Bigger kills and acts reactively to gain some visibility in the mind of white America. He wants to affect the psyche of white America, shocking them with his brutality and intelligence in criminality. He wants to reject the white American definition of himself, but “the irony, of course, is that Bigger already exists as an idea in white American minds. He does not

60 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 56 Chapter 2 exist there in the individual particularized details of his crime as he would like, but rather he exists as a fantastically dreadful formula.”87 When he rapes and murders Bessie, he only “proves” the Black male rapist beast formulation. In “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright claims Bigger a success because he does act for once in his life. However, Bigger’s individual acts of rape and murder do not challenge the structural racism experienced by inhab- itants of America’s Black Belts. In fact, based upon Bigger’s brutality, the reader has every reason to believe “there will be increased funding from the government to support police operations to prevent the kinds of acts Bigger was convicted of. And, of course, there will be no stop to the killing machine of the state that took Bigger’s life.”88 People like the Daltons will continue to charge Black Belt residents exorbitant rent, and the police brutality against Black boys like Bigger will more than likely escalate as a consequence of Bigger’s actions. In A Tempest, Caliban engages in a violent form of counter-narration in which “Caliban’s counternarrative represents a more coherently symbolized articulation of bodily resentment into rational speech; in counternarrative the abrupt, pointed, explosive trajectory of the curse unfolds in the fuller form of story and history.”89 Counternarrative as an oppositional strategy allows Cal- iban’s history and contemporary story to be heard, but it does not lead Cali- ban to a successful confrontation in which Prospero is driven from the island. His counternarrative, like Bigger’s oppositional murder, does not produce a feasible political program or philosophy. It simply expresses the desire for freedom from Prospero’s oppression. In addition, Caliban’s actions depend upon Prospero’s actions as well. Instead of proactivity, both Cali- ban’s and Bigger’s actions are reactionary. Bigger reacts to the white, male-dominated newspaper stories about himself: Caliban reacts to Pros- pero’s “tricks” and violent resistance to his demand for freedom. In the end, Caliban does not launch an attack upon Prospero, but rather draws him into a fight, and awaits the other’s actions. Though Prospero sends other Europeans away, he “leaves the island, as Caliban has come to understand, without admitting to himself that his work of colonization has been pointless and ineffectual; he has not won Caliban’s love; he has not converted Caliban to his values; and the isle itself could function perfectly without him.”90 Apparently, Prospero is unwilling to admit his failure, and so the audience is left with an ideological stalemate between colonizer and colonized. Though The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a powerful counternarrative in the Yoruba oral tradition, it does not offer many practical solutions to the problems that plague colonized African countries. While Césaire and Wright use language and stories that are directly confrontational with Euro-American hegemony, Tutuola takes a different approach, in which his protagonist relies upon intellectual capabilities rather than direct confrontation with Euro- American men. Tobias claims that, “[t]hrough a sustained use of sublimation

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 61 Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa 57

and metonymy, Tutuola creates an episodic allegory through which he can vent his personal frustrations with life under British domination.”91 He vents his frustrations while spinning cautionary tales against the materialistic trappings of colonialism and imperialism. He also implicitly suggests that reclamation of Black masculinity need not be directly oppositional but can also be culturally defined. In each allegorical episode, “Father of the Gods” initially confronts Euro-American denigration of his masculinity, but he triumphs by relying not upon a European notion of masculinity, but upon the criteria set forth by griots of his own culture. This is his warning against internalizing the gendered ideas of another culture. Yet, advising caution and offering solutions are not one and the same; especially when that caution comes after colonialism has already gripped Africa. As aforementioned, there is not an urgent need to establish a masculine identity as in Native Son and A Tempest; yet, Tutuola does not articulate how one would reclaim a masculinity that has been nearly annulled by such colonial texts as Heart of Darkness and Tarzan. Throughout the narrative, he characterizes Africa as feminine via his name- less wife. Like in most colonialist literature, Africa stands helpless and voiceless, in need of a heroic, masculine savior. Theoretically, these three texts are textbook (not being facetious here) examples of a chapter in Fanon’s text. In the penultimate chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Negro and Recognition,” Fanon divides the essay into two parts. The first part addresses psychologist and physician Alfred Adler and his inferiority complex as applied to Black people. The second part addresses Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in Phenomenology of the Mind. Though Hegel may have been writing from a strictly philosophical perspective, Fanon uses Hegel’s concept in order to construct the colonial subject. “Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him.”92 He extends that to include masters and slaves, saying, “One day the white Master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave. But the former slave wants to make himself recognized.”93 At the basis of this relationship, Fanon claims, is reciprocity, but in a situation where the other is truly “Other” by the erasure of identity inherent in colonialism, there is no reciprocity, only reaction to one another’s scripted societal roles. Thus, confrontations (direct physical confrontations or more indirect battles of intellect) ensue, each side battling to the death for recognition by the other. Purely oppositional confrontations result in a perpetual Hegelian master/ slave circular motion. Opposition is reactionary and oftern unproductive, as Bigger’s and Caliban’s stories prove. Fanon issues a challenge: “Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in a reaction. . . . To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.”94 Applied to Black male

62 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 58 Chapter 2 writers, Fanon declares that simply creating oppositional characters that demonstrate or articulate the splaying of Black masculine identity is not sufficient; neither is digging up and embracing a primordial African past and using it to claim cultural superiority over Euro-Americans. Though these early narratives of Black masculine identity certainly foreground the plight of Black males, simple Hegelian opposition does not support a plausible Black masculine identity.

NOTES

1. James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: The Library of the Americas, 1998), 299. 2. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolutionary Era to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 3. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood, 3. 4. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, Introduction to A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity v. 1 & 2 eds. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 14. 5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 15. 6. Rotundo, American Manhood, 20. 7. Rotundo, American Manhood, 21. 8. James Oliver Hornton and Lois E. Hornton, “Violence, Protest, and Identity: Black Manhood in Antebellum America,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, v. 1 &2, eds. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press, 1999), 384. 9. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Books, 1990), 97. 10. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, 106. 11. Julia Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.1 (2000), 2. 12. Clara Henderson, “When Hearts Beat Like Native Drums:’ Music and Sexual Dimen- sions of the Notions of ‘Savage’ and ‘Civilized’ in Tarzan and His Mate, 1934” in Africa Today 48.4 (2001): 93. 13. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 220. 14. Bederman, Manliness, 220. 15. Bederman, Manliness, 224. 16. Marlon Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 10–11. 17. Hine and Jenkins, Manhood, 39. 18. James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 269–270. 19. Bederman, Manliness, 227. 20. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, 115. 21. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1994), 448–450. 22. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (New York: Allison & Busby, 1960), 110. 23. William Shakespeare, Tempest, 350–351. 24. William Shakespeare, Tempest, 353–354. 25. William Shakespeare, Tempest, 365. 26. Belinda Edmondson, Making Men: Gender, Literacy Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narratives (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999), 111.

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27. Adetayo Alabi, Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiogra- phies (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 53. 28. Judith Holland Sarnecki, “Mastering the Masters: Aime Césaire’s Creolization of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” The French Review, 74.2 (2000), 276. 29. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, Trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 rpt. of Peau Noir, Masques Blancs, Paris: Editions Du Seil, 1952), 88. 30. Andrew B. Leiter, In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 203. 31. Ross, Manning the Race, 2. 32. Anthony Dawahare, “From No Man’s Land to Mother-Land: Emasculation and Nation- alism in Richard Wright’s Depression Era Urban Novels, “African American Review 33.3 (1999), 455. 33. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial, 1940), 8. 34. Wright, Native Son, 10. 35. Alexander Nejako, “Bigger’s Choice: The Failure of African American Masculinities in Native Son,” CLA Journal 44.4 (2001), 431. 36. Richard Wright, Native Son, 39. 37. Alexander Nejako, “Bigger’s Choice,” 431. 38. Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society (San Francisco: The Black Scholar Press, 1982), 10. 39. James A. Arnold, “Césaire and Shakespeare: Two Tempests,” Comparative Literature 30.3 (1978), 244. 40. Aime Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Books, 1985 rpt. of Une Tempete Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 27. 41. Césaire, A Tempest, 27. 42. Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (New York: Grove Press, 1953 and 1954), 70. 43. Tutuola, Drinkard, 193. 44. Tutuola, Drinkard, 192. 45. Frank Salamone, “The Depiction of Masculinity in Classic Nigerian Literature,” Journal of the African Literature Association 1.1 (2007), 203. 46. Tutuola, Drinkard, 194. 47. William Ferris, “Folklore and the African Novelist: Achebe and Tutuola,” The Journal of American Folklore 86 (1973), 33–34. 48. Patrick Hogan, “Understanding the Palm-Wine Drinkard,” ARIEL: A Review of Interna- tional English Literature 31.4 (2000), 44. 49. Tutuola, Drinkard, 207. 50. Tutuola, Drinkard, 207. 51. Steven Tobias, “Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival,” Research in African Litera- tures 30.2 (1999), 72. 52. Hogan, “Understanding,” 12. 53. Tobias, “Amos Tutuola and Colonial Carnival,” 72. 54. Wright, Native Son, 16. 55. Wright, Native Son, 17. 56. Wright, Native Son, 17 57. Wright, Native Son, 17. 58. Aime Ellis, “Boys in the Hood’: Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son,” Callaloo 29.1 (2006), 188. 59. Johnny Fernandez, Ra’Shaun Kelley, Dennis Sulliven et al. “The Transformation of Self and Other: Restorative Justice in Richard Wright’s Native Son,” Contemporary Justice Review 9.4 (2006), 408. 60. Wright, Native Son, 20. 61. Nejako, “Bigger’s Choice,” 436. 62. Wright, Native Son, 31. 63. Henderson, “When Heart Beats Like Native Drums,” 113.

64 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 60 Chapter 2

64. Wright, Native Son, 33. 65. Henderson, “When Hearts Beat,” 102. 66. Leiter, In the Shadow of the Black Beast, 193. 67. Wright, Native Son, 114. 68. Wright, Native Son, 105. 69. Leiter, In the Shadow of the Black Beast, 205. 70. Wright, Native Son, 227–228. 71. Sarnecki, “Mastering the Masters,” 276. 72. Césaire, Tempest, 17. 73. Arnold, “Two Tempests,” 240. 74. Césaire, Tempest, 17. 75. Tutuola, Drinkard, 214. 76. Tutuola, Drinkard, 214. 77. Tutuola, Drinkard, 216. 78. Tutuola, Drinkard, 217. 79. Tutuola, Drinkard, 222. 80. Tobias, “Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival,” 68. 81. Wright, Native Son, 34. 82. Dawahare, “No Man’s Land,” 458. 83. Abena P. A. Busia, “Silencing the Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female,” Cultural Critique (1990), 95. 84. Busia, “Silencing the Sycorax,” 86. 85. Busia, “Silencing the Sycorax,” 94. 86. Tutuola, Drinkard, 257. 87. Leiter, In the Shadow of the Black Beast,” 198. 88. Fernandez, “The Tranformation,” 418. 89. Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” 11. 90. Laurence M. Porter, “Aime Césaire’s Reworking of Shakespeare,” Comparative Litera- ture Studies 32.3 (1995), 369. 91. Tobias, “Amos Tutuola and Colonial Carnival,” 67. 92. Fanon, Black Skin, 216. 93. Fanon, Black Skin, 217. 94. Fanon, Black Skin, 222.

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 65 Tereza Dědinová, “‘The Being that Can be Told’ The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin as a Remedy for the Anthropocene” in Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future, ed. Tereza Dedinová, Weronika Laszkiewicz, and Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 27–44. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 1

“The Being that Can be Told” The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin as a Remedy for the Anthropocene Tereza Dědinová

OPENING

The term Anthropocene has many connotations, one of them being a culture– nature divide; humanity sees itself as separated from its environment, global society understands itself as superior and entitled to rule the world and to use and abuse it up to its liking. This short-sighted arrogance is possible only when we, the people, feel no responsibility to our future generations but also when we ignore the simple fact that we are not alone in this world. When exploiting, damaging, and perhaps even destroying our home, we thereby exploit, damage, and destroy the homes of countless beings, sentient and suffering due to our deeds. We chose to see our planet as a resource instead of as a complex system interwoven by myriads of connections. We chose to understand ourselves as detached from this web of life and as superordinate to it. The everyday reality of (and not only) climate change proves us horri- bly wrong, yet we continue en masse further and further to cause irreversible changes. The power of art lies in its potential to be eye-opening, to tell new stories, to offer new visions, and to help humanity to understand its place within the biosphere, within the web of life. The Telling (2000) by Ursula K. Le Guin does not offer a strongly actual story directly aiming at the consequences of the Anthropocene. Instead, it shows its readers what it could feel like to be an integral part of the ever-changing whole, to move, to dance in harmony in the flow of being which connects the human body with its both physical and non-physical environment. However, Le Guin is not describing utopia in her novel; the culture based on harmony and interconnectedness of being is

66 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 28 Tereza Dědinová broken in the time of the story, and its remains are hidden in secluded places and under constant threat of disappearance. It is not possible to undo the history of human deeds—not on Aka, nor on Terra in Le Guin’s novel, nor on planet Earth—however, we can, and we must try and find a way to heal the broken integrity, to heal both the people and the planet. In The Telling, Le Guin builds an elaborate metaphor connecting the human body with the entire world and storytelling as both a part of the world and a means of how to grasp this connection. She does not only describe it but, through mimesis, manages to transmit a vivid impression, a compelling and unsentimental story-driven experience. This chapter aims to analyze the relationship between fantastic and mimetic elements and to examine the importance of the (story)telling in the text, to illustrate the role of mimesis on the level of story and discourse, and with the support of cognitive science to point out how the experience of the fantastic fictional world enriches the understanding of the actual world. I argue that an enactive, embodied perception of the story and the fictional world of The Telling, invited by its discourse, enables the reader to grasp a meaning valuable and perhaps essential for the interaction between humanity and our environment in the Anthropocene. The Telling belongs to the Hainish or Ekumen Cycle, a loosely interwoven series of novels and shorter texts set in a fictional world, in which a number of planets inhabited by intelligent beings, through technologies that allow faster- than-light communication and interstellar distance travel, are connected in Ekumen (from Greek oikoumene, meaning “the inhabited world”), a community based on the exchange and free sharing of information and technology. In the first stories from the Hainish Cycle: Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967), a League of All Worlds is introduced, which may be a predecessor of Ekumen (see Left Hand of Darkness). However, Le Guin rejected the idea of the Hainish Cycle as a consistent saga with a fixed history.1 To the Hainish Cycle belong some of her award-winning novels: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Outcast (1974), the novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972), and the short story “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974). Although Le Guin wrote and published more minor texts from the Hainish Cycle during the following years, The Telling is the first and, unfortunately, the last novel set in Ekumen for over a quarter of a century. The very loose connection within the cycle and the number of clues provided in the opening passages allow the reader to place the described events into a broader context—however partial—even without knowledge of the Hainish Cycle. As is usual for Le Guin’s work, while it is not an extensive text, it is rich in meaning and offers vast possibilities for interpretation. Raffaella Baccolini (2003) focuses on history, memory, and options of reconciliation, whereas

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 67 “The Being that Can be Told” 29

Susan M. Bernardo and Graham J. Murphy (2006) analyze the development of both the main characters Sutty and Yara, and they identify a Taoist search for balance as a central theme of the book, while also offering a reading of the novel as a critical dystopia. Sandra J. Lindow, in her comprehensive study Dancing the Tao (2012), reveals a strong connection between moral development and self-awareness not only in the case of characters of Le Guin’s work but with significance to its readers as well. Owing much to these insightful studies, in this chapter I focus on the function of mimesis as a means of crossing the divide between the imagined and the perceived, in other words, on the analysis of how overlapping levels of mimesis and an embodied reading empower the conveying of the story-driven experience into the reader’s real world. Considering the length of this chapter, I will not focus on the development of Sutty and leave aside her relationship with Yara (already analyzed in detail by Lindow, Bernardo, and Murphy). Also, I will not pay much attention to the cause of recent changes of the Akan society, the need for Aka to realize non-uniformity and imperfection of Ekumen, nor the emerging solution to the conflict, and how it is introduced at the end of the novel (for a detailed study see Bernardo and Murphy).

INTRODUCTION TO THE STORY

As a representative of the galactic union Ekumen, the central character and narrator of the story, Sutty, accepts the location on the newly discovered planet Aka and sets out for a world with a rich cultural, philosophical, and literary tradition, fascinating and tempting her for its open society, not subjected to dogmatism, religious fanaticism, or homophobia. Aka seems to promise a new beginning in a happier and wiser world for Sutty, who is deeply traumatized by her life on Terra, where under the rule of theocratic fundamentalists, her family was forced to leave their home in India and move to the free zone in Canada. Years later, her beloved girlfriend is killed during the Holy Wars. However, before Sutty even set foot on the planet, everything changed. During the seven-decade-long interstellar travel (which, due to the time dilatation, takes only months for Sutty), Aka changes beyond recognition. As a result of encountering the technically highly advanced Ekumen and meeting with the fundamentalists ruling Terra, Aka rejects its history and culture, everything old and traditional is outlawed, including the whole system of spiritual and physical well-being and the use of ideographic writing which has been replaced by a simpler alphabet free of symbolic meanings. Literary and philosophical works are burned under the supervision of the ironically named Ministry of Poetry,2 umyazu (centers of learning) are destroyed, and

68 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 30 Tereza Dědinová maz (people of education, narrators, herbalists, and philosophers) are sent to re-education camps. If there are some old books still discovered, they are recycled and converted into thermal insulation; their owners receive cruel punishment and denunciators are publicly awarded. The entire planet is sup- posed to be almost cleansed of ancient—according to the current view of the world, barbaric—past, so that the new “producer-consumers” state governed by a capitalist corporation can march gloriously and effectively toward the stars.3 First, the new regime seems to have achieved absolute success, and Sutty fails to discover any trace of the old culture in the capital Dovza City. Only after leaving the metropolis, far in the country, in a secluded village below a mighty mountain, Sutty finds out that the old traditions are not lost entirely, and slowly learns about the elaborate system of a fulfilled life in both natural and cultural environment, in harmony with body, mind, and nature. The old tradition, so despised by the technocratic government, is created by an elaborate net of countless tellings both abstract and practical, of small and big subjects, concerning community living, love, and death or instructions for physical exercise, food preparation, and the use of herbs. All this allows for the preservation of harmony between people, between man and his surroundings, between the human body and the planet, civilization and nature, solitude and society, life and death. When studying the “old ways,” Sutty gradually gains strength to overcome the shadows of her past and at the end of the book, her position as an observer for Ekumen and her close experience with the Akan culture allow her to take the first step toward healing the broken Akan society.

MIMESIS IN FANTASTIC LITERATURE

While fantastic literature hugely benefits from the transcending limits of the actual reality and offers countless non-realistic fictional worlds stimulating both aesthetically and cognitively,4 mimesis remains a significant means of filling the gaps in the texture of the fictional world and thus contributing to readers’ immersion into the story. As Brian Attebery observed, a “property of extension” is a great advantage of the reportorial mode of discourse (Strategies 131) and without the possibility to extend the fantastic world according to our shared knowledge of the reality “many fantasies suffer from certain thinness even while they seem to be overdetermined” (132). In the following passages, I will analyze the different levels of mimesis in the novel, starting from the most obvious ones and leading to the deepest levels of mimesis which are wholly dependent on the reader’s embodied cognition.

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LEVELS OF MIMESIS IN THE TELLING

In the fictional world ofThe Telling, planet Earth, called Terra, is explicitly remembered primarily due to the influence of troublesome historical incidents (which probably can be seen as an alternative future from the reader’s perspective) on the narrator and the formation of her personality. Important events of the story itself are set on an alien planet. However, the awareness of the actual world, its culture, history, and present are essential to appreciate the novel. If we only read The Telling as a fascinating fantasy from another world that does not reflect our reality, we will deprive ourselves of the immense wealth of thought that the novel offers by overlapping the actual and the fictional worlds. In The Telling, we can identify several levels of mimesis. On an explicit level, there are places from the actual world transferred to the fictional world: the protagonist Sutty was born on Earth, she has Indian and British roots, her entire family was forced to flee the clerofascist regime of the so-called Unists from India to Vancouver in Canada, where one of the free zones opened to those who did not follow the unified teachings of the government. Other places and nationalities transferred from the actual world are also mentioned in the text. The first deeper level of mimesis involves implicit references to historical events and traumas of the actual world. Both Aka and Terra come under the domination of an aggressive regime that imposes its ideology on the whole society, and both are subjected to breaking away from their past and denying the idea of learning from it. As Sutty realizes during her stay on Aka, “the government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past” (Le Guin, Telling 33). Deleting history necessarily reminds her of the home planet: “we on Terra are living the future of a people who denied their past” (9). We can easily find reflections of the actual world in the characteristic features of both regimes. The Corporation rejecting all cultural and religious traditions in the name of progress inevitably brings the Chinese Cultural Revolution to mind—the phrase “cultural revolution” appears twice in the text when the government that imposed fundamental transformation of the general worldview is described (9, 56)—and the Great Leap Forward by Mao Zedong.5 Even more specifically, the history of Taoism during the rule of Mao was a direct inspiration for writing the novel, thus answering to the “silent enormity” (Lindow 158) with telling its story.6 Propaganda inscriptions, slogans, and songs glorifying the new regime are almost unavoidable in the Dovza City. They can allude to different totalitar- ian regimes and their persistent manipulation, with which the actual world has far too much experience. Propaganda disrupts the boundaries of intimate

70 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 32 Tereza Dědinová space, forcing itself into the ears and souls of its voluntary and involuntary listeners. As at the times of the Cultural Revolution in China or during the construction of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe (to name just a few of the many allusions),7 Aka’s regime considers silence and solitude as enemies, since they allow, even though within one’s mind only, to break free from the unified crowd and engage in independent thinking, reflection, and self-reflection:

FORWARD TO THE FUTURE. PRODUCER-CONSUMERS OF AKA MARCH TO THE STARS. Music hovered with them, highly rhythmic, multi-voiced, crowding the air. “Onward, onward to the stars!” an invisible choir shrilled to the stalled traffic at the intersection where Sutty’s robo cab sat. She turned up the cab sound to drown the tune out. “Superstition is a rotting corpse,” the sound system said [. . .]. “Superstitious practices defile youthful minds.” (Le Guin, Telling 7)

The contrast between the recent past of Aka—highly spiritual, with a developed system of well-being in the world—and its present reality could hardly be any bigger. People are not considered people anymore; they are produc- ers-consumers,8 a crowd, marching, singing in forced unity, and destroying everything different, alternative, non-conformist. While there are direct allusions to the Cultural Revolution, we can generalize a universal implication of the situation in Dovza City, pointing to both physical and emotional unbal- ance as the desired state of people to be susceptible to manipulation. The continuous noise imposing simplistic views indeed refers not only to the past, as the author itself confirmed in an interview with Mary Jo Schimelpfenig, published at the end of September 2017. In response to the question about the passage above, Le Guin recalls that social networks are powerful tools of propaganda and how difficult it is to avoid manipulation through them:

TV and electronic media make propaganda incredibly easy to propagate and extremely hard to avoid. I don’t want to say, “Well, if it’s a noisy hole, why not climb up out of it?”—that’s smug and simplistic. All the same, if the noise is coming from something I turned on, I could consider the option of turning it off. (Le Guin in Schimelpfenig)

The clerofascist regime on Terra, in turn, refers to past and present religious radicalism and to power systems in which religion becomes a platform for oppression and persecution of all those guilty of a different attitude to the world. References start at the level of language used by the Unists: “Fathers” as top state leaders, “God’s army,” “Time of cleansing” as a label

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for burning books, destroying cultural artifacts, and the bombing of the so- called Washington Library, which is the allusion to the library of Congress, the most extensive library in the actual world. The barbaric act of destroying the library, a symbol of wickedness for the Unists, is an embodiment of arrogance of the power exercising its right to stand above the cultural and historical heritage, to replace the polyphony of cultural diversity with the united roar of the only truth: “Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error” (Le Guin, Telling 5). The second level of mimesis is evoked by often implicit, yet obvious, inspiration by the philosophical and religious systems of the actual world. We can find many direct allusions bringing the relationship among Aka, Terra, and the actual world into focus. The Telling is introduced by a cita- tion from the Mahabharata. The name Sutty refers to the goddess Sati or Shakti, the wife of Shiva—the dancer, who both destroys and at the same time creates, protects, and transforms the universe.9 And The Telling—like other works by Le Guin—is strongly connected to the principles of Taoism and the Chinese thinking generally. Le Guin was captivated by Taoism since childhood when she watched her father lovingly browse through the yellowed leaves of the abundantly read copy translated by Paul Carus in 1898 (Le Guin, “Introduction” ix). As she later recalls in the foreword to her rewriting of the book, a meeting with the work of the sage Lao Tzu influenced her entire life: “I was lucky to discover him so young, so that I could live with his book my whole life long” (ix). The emphasis on the inseparability of the part from the whole and the whole from the part, the constant movement of the world, the non-existence of stability, and the interdependence of opposites belong to the frequently analyzed features of Le Guin’s work (see Rochelle). Both Taoism and Hinduism emphasize the necessity of balance and harmony linked to nature’s constant flow and change. Sutty herself, at least at the beginning of the story, suffers tangibly by the lack of precisely these quali- ties. Traumatized by her life under the theocratic regime and thus primed to be extremely suspicious toward any religion, she struggles in Aka to remain objective, not to judge, to disengage from her personal experience, and not to interpret all religiosity as the oppressive force that stole her home and lover on Terra. When slowly discovering the hidden net of old ways of thinking on Aka, which she starts calling the Telling, she worries at first to find links to the religion as she knows and fears it. After immersing herself more into the elaborate net of the former Akan culture, she grows to realize that her concerns were unfounded. Sutty’s development in the story can be characterized as a seeking for balance, loss of which is personalized on more than one level by her dead partner, Pao. Sandra J. Lindow observes that in Chinese the name Pao reads the same as Tao, so with losing Pao, Sutty lost much more than a lover; she was

72 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 34 Tereza Dědinová deprived of her own “loving centre of life” (158). While getting into contact with the hidden remains of the ancient Akan culture, she slowly regains the center of herself, the sense of balance and harmony, and undergoes both a spiritual and physical awakening. The character of Sutty invites empathic responses from readers for her many flaws, perpetual experiences of self-doubt, anxiety, unresolved griev- ing and anger over the death of Pao, and inability to refrain from subjective judgments conditioned by her past when dealing with situations on Aka. As Bernardo and Murphy observe: “Sutty’s struggles are personal ones shared by all who have doubted their abilities, grieved over the loss of a loved one, or found themselves stymied by a dominant religious/political ideology” (83). The above-mentioned traumas, widely spread in the actual world, effectively open a means of connection between the story’s character and its readers based on the shared experience; fictional facts thus relate to the reader’s experiential background and contribute to the understanding of meanings offered by the novel.10

MIMESIS THROUGH THE LANGUAGE

The third level of mimesis can be approached through the language of The Telling. Le Guin was not only fascinated by the principles introduced by Lao Tzu, which have become well-known due to several translations of the text; she felt captivated by the language itself, its beauty and richness, which can be translated into another language only with difficulties. In her rewriting of the ancient text, she attempted to capture the substance of the original and to retell it using words and concepts inspiring contemporary readers. While the old translations of the book, according to Le Guin, were mainly focused on content, she intended to capture the poetry of its telling that often disap- peared from previous translations. And along with it not only the beauty but a substantial part of the meaning of the text itself evaporated:

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. (Le Guin, “Introduction” ix)

The intense attention devoted to the language of her stories is characteristic of Le Guin’s entire work: “the patterned intensity of language” reflects

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precisely her mode of writing. Her stories cannot be easily summarized; they resist easy translation and prevent the search for a message that can be extracted from the text without distortion. As Le Guin claims in essays dedicated to her writing, storytelling cannot be reduced to meaning, a message to the reader, it lies in the narrative itself, in its uniqueness, complexity, and interdependence.11 As in Taoism, the whole and the part cannot be separated:

I believe storytelling is one of the most useful tools we have for achieving meaning: it serves to keep our communities together by asking and saying who we are, and it’s one of the best tools an individual has to find out who I am, what life may ask of me and how I can respond. But that’s not the same as having a message. The complex meanings of a serious story or novel can be understood only by participation in the language of the story itself. To translate them into a message or reduce them to a sermon distorts, betrays, and destroys them. This is because a work of art is understood not by the mind only, but by the emotions and by the body itself. (Le Guin, “Message”)

The last quoted sentence opens a path to the deepest level of mimesis in the novel, which is created by its readers, through their emotions, bodies, and minds. It lies in the multilayered network of meanings, stories, and evoked images, drawn from the fictional world of the novel and the fate of its characters through the reader’s consciousness to the actual world. Although every attempt to grasp the meaning of a story outside its natural environment within the text itself is condemned to be partial at best, let us try to approach the means Le Guin employs for conveying the strong relationship between being in the world and telling the world, in other words, the interconnection of the bodily experience with thoughts and language. When considering this connection, we need to address the importance of physicality that is crucial in The Telling on two subsequent levels. First is the level of the story and the fictional facts, where an elaborate metaphor of the Telling as the world and as being in the world unfolds from the metaphor of the body as a tree. Second is the level of reflection of the text as its perception through the body, the so-called embodied cognition which claims that the (human) cognition (including language) is shaped by aspects of the entire body: “The core tenet of embodied cognitive science is that all psychological processes—including those that are traditionally seen as abstract and independent of bodily experience—reflect patterns derived from our physical engagement with the world” (Caracciolo, “Degrees” 14).

74 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 36 Tereza Dědinová

EMBODIMENT AS A KEY ASPECT OF THE TELLING

In The Telling, Le Guin employs an archetypal metaphor connecting the human body and the world. The primary metaphor lies in the likeness of a man to the tree—his skin to the bark (57), his blood to the sap (37), while the tree trunk forms the body of the man. At the same time, the body of the tree, thus the body of the man, creates the body of the world: “The body is the body of the world. The world’s body is my body” (51). The connection between the body and the world is further enhanced by the allusion of the Akan Telling to the philosophical and religious systems of the actual world. Sandra J. Lindow notices that “[a]lthough there is no god, the sense of being right with god or Dharma comes from self-discipline in ways that support the health of the body and the world” (164). And the body is linked with the soul; in the ancient Akan culture, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being is inseparable.12 In the local language Rangma, one phrase means both “good digestion” and “peaceful heart” (Le Guin, Telling 54). The world is inextricably linked with the telling, with “being that can be told” (54); individual tellings are like the leaves that disappear, but they reappear when told again (67). The being and telling are indivisible, since perception involves description (55). To tell means to comprehend, to participate, to appreciate: “By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being” (69). The metaphors mentioned above link the physical space with the abstract system of the Telling (meaning the whole of the old Akan ways) and with the individual tellings, all of them living, changeable, breathing. Pictograms of recently forbidden writings seem to move and breathe like a man or an animal: “evenly, regularly, as if they are inflating and contracting again as if they were breathing” (31). Similarly, people are not separated from nature: group meditation exercises, also prohibited in the new Akan regime, evoke the impression of a harmonious shared breath, like that of a sea billowing, or “pulsing of jellyfish in a dim aquarium” (38). Rhythmically moving people remind of “rooted sea creatures, anemones, a kelp forest” (39). At the same time, Sutty perceives the movements as beautiful and full of meaning (40). The movement and specifically the dance bear many allusions, further enhancing the relationship between the individual body and the body of the world. Sutty is connected to the dance by her name (“You are the dance” (115)), she first saw her beloved Pao leading a round dance (45), and when she starts to understand the Akan Telling, she compares the experience to the dance: “she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it” (52). Not only people but the entire world is capable of dance and Sutty learns how to join it, so people and the world can move in harmony.13

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THE TELLING AS MEANING AND COHERENCE

The Telling as a whole, inherently incomprehensible, is in the novel referred to as the “path through the forest” or “the path to the mountain” (Le Guin, Telling 98); the compendium of some key tellings is called “Arbor” (58). Individual tellings are intertwined together, but the resultant whole cannot be approached otherwise than through its parts: Sutty cannot find the central telling that would give her the key to the old Akan philosophical system or the fundamental set of tellings since all tellings are equally important: “No bible. No koran. Dozens of upanishads, a million sutras” (58). She also fails to figure out the proper naming of the system that she slowly comprehends. It is neither religion nor philosophy. It does not count with the Creator, only with Creation. Eternity is not the end but the continuation. It is focused not on life after death but on life in the world; there is nothing “holier than the world,” no power greater than nature is sought (70). The Telling in the novel is a strand that extends into all aspects of life and being in the world, connecting the small with the great, the past with the present and the future, the real with the dream, and the concrete with the abstract. There is no set boundary between the profane and the sacred, for telling is a way of “holding and keeping things sacred” (102), and when appropriately perceived, with great attention, anything (all deeds and places) is potentially sacred (55). Sacredness is nothing outside the world: “The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the Telling of it is sacred” (102). There are no irreconcilable opposites within the Telling, just two aspects of the one. In a harmonious whole, there is a place for antitheses, for it does not bear the one truth, it is simultaneously spiritual and down-to-earth, it does not contain rules and rewards for their observance, there is always room for alternatives. The single, unique is included in the whole, in the unity—“the One that is Two giving rise to the Three, to the Five, to the Myriad, and the Myriad again to the Five, the Three, the Two, the One” (67). The interdependence of unity and infinite variety creates the cornerstone of the Telling,“ the mystery plain as day” (67). However, the Telling is still a mystery, not an explanation, and remains ungraspable by reason (72). And above all, it is continually evolving, growing up as a tree-world body from its hidden roots and as long as it is told, the leaves on its branches renew. The leaves are not of the same color and shape, and there is no fixed meaning to any single story; they modify and change depending on the situation, narrator, audience, and so on. Thus, tellings function as myths in the actual world, shaped by their storytellers.14 The relationship between the Telling and myth and the importance of storytelling create a strong connection between fictional and actual worlds: In both worlds, by storytelling, we relate to the world; the storytelling is anchoring the unstable and ever-changing into a net

76 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 38 Tereza Dědinová of space, time, and meaning. Through storytelling, we keep balance in the middle of unceasingly arising and vanishing moments. The Telling in the novel is a means of connection between individuals, community, and their environment: “We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is there in our world?” (Le Guin, Telling 73). Without the Telling, people lose contact not only with their history and traditions but with their present community, with themselves, and with their environment as well. To be a part of the ever-variable unity, human beings lacking direct connection with nature need the Telling to remind them that they are an integral part of the whole. According to Lindow, the former Akan culture built a minimalist utopia that satisfied most needs of the people and offered“ the sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully” (Le Guin, Telling 84)15 without leaving the heavy burden of ecological damage on the world. When the old ways were banned, people ceased to take care of their world; the rivers and the land were filled with poison, while both people and their environment were neglected and sick. The capitalist Corporation ruthlessly exploits nature for swift technological progress; the earth itself is perceived as a resource, not a living whole that embraces people too. For Sutty, this development is unpleasantly familiar since on Terra neglecting nature and its damage led to a series of plagues and famines that in turn gave rise to the aggressive theocracy and Holy Wars.

READING WITH THE BODY AND THE SOUL

In the already quoted essay A Message About Messages, Le Guin writes:

Reading is a passionate act. If you read a story not just with your head, but also with your body and feelings and soul, the way you dance or listen to music, then it becomes your story. And it can mean infinitely more than any message. It can offer beauty. It can take you through pain. It can signify freedom. And it can mean something different every time you reread it. (Le Guin, “Message”)

Claiming the act of reading as not a primarily intellectual but physical and emotional activity, Le Guin approaches the current knowledge of cognitive literary science that emphasizes the connection between the experience of the actual and fictional worlds as:“ reading fiction makes the brain simulate cognitive and affective reactions to the actual world, and therefore [. . .] can improve our understanding of the real world” (Nikolajeva 8). The transfer of experience between the actual and fictional world is thus essential for the reflection of a literary work—no matter how fantastic the fictional world is.

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Research on an emotional response to arts shows that emotions experienced when reading the text are “the result of the emotion-laden memories that have been triggered by literary events, characters, and so on, but are not self-consciously recalled” (Hogan, Cognitive Science 157). In other words, the reader reacts strongly to fictional events if they remind her of emotionally powerful real-life experiences (a feeling of falling in love, the death of a loved one, etc.). Therefore, during the reading, the emotion is transferred to the emotional reading experience, but it does not evoke the memory that is associated with that emotion—unless the memory is so strong that it pen- etrates from the subconscious into consciousness, thereby disturbing the perception of the text. Text-driven emotions are thus fundamentally dependent on the world outside the text and on the reader’s experience of it. If we imagine an object, our brain reacts just as if we saw it (Hogan, Cognitive Science 181) and when we read that the hero of the story smiled and raised his hand, the same (motor) centers are activated in our brain as if we smiled and raised our hand. We do not experience reading and knowledge primarily on the intellectual level, but through our own body,16 experience, and memories. As Marco Caracciolo summarizes, “cognition is embodied and situated—in other words, inseparable from the subject’s body and the context in which it is found” (“The Experientiality” 19). In his recent study, Caracciolo develops three permeable degrees of the embodiment of literary reading introduced by linguist David Ritchie. Zero embodiment: language is processed in an “exclusively semantic way” (“Degrees” 18), all associations triggered by language are purely abstract and conceptual. As Caracciolo reminds, this degree is to be understood as a limit case, since “If cognitive scientists of the embodied stripe are right, embodiment shapes our mental—and linguistic—capacities through and through” (18). Second degree: only traces of the reader’s past bodily experience are activated, while activation remains unconscious or produces phenomenologi- cally weak imagery, which is likely to be soon forgotten by the reader. The third degree of embodiment leads to “detailed and fully conscious, imagery of verbally described action or scene” (18). When contemplating literary texts as a form of simulation, Patrick Colm Hogan points out that the difference between factual and aesthetic knowledge—often emphasized as a core distinction between fiction and nonfiction—might be less crucial than the degree of simulation. Put differently, the essential quality concerning the impact of reading might be the degree of embodiment: “the most critical issue may be the degree to which a chosen narrative involves simulation that goes beyond experience and logical inference. In other words, the most important opposition may not be fiction/ fact, but simulation/report” (How 5). Simulation in texts raises emotional engagement with the narrative and as Hogan observes, the emotional profiles

78 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 40 Tereza Dědinová produced by fiction“ may have consequences for real-world behaviour” (How 5). Le Guin allows readers of The Telling to experience the third degree of embodiment through sparse impressive descriptions that are likely to catch the readers’ attention not only due to their relative rarity but also since they appeal to all the senses and often further strengthen the association between the body, the world, and the Telling. Also, as Caracciolo observes, alterna- tion of high-embodiment and low-embodiment sections in literature brings the reader’s attention to the former and prevents habituation and the loss of sensitivity (“Degrees” 25). Apart from the already mentioned metaphors (directly connecting the body, tree, world, and telling), linking abstract and tangible, part and whole, sign and image evoked by the sign also manifest in The Telling in concise yet captivating descriptions, even more firmly relating human body, world, and telling. Bernardo and Murphy observe that “The Telling is almost poetic in its use of sparse descriptions and evocative language that capture the ‘human’ spirit of its characters” (75). I argue that the above mentioned poetic use of language is not aimed at characters of the book only, but it enables and strengthens the experiential quality of images mediating the blending of boundaries between the body and its environment within the narration. Le Guin masterfully managed to invoke a living image in a few words, associations drawing not only on the visual imagination of the reader but engaging her other senses alike. Sensory imagination supports immersion in the story and elicits the rise of emotion through which the connection of the fictional world of narration and the reader’s experience of the actual world is reinforced. Some descriptions not only evoke a picture made by few brush strokes but literally are compared to the actual drawing: “A stream ran through a concrete ditch between high dark walls to join the great river. Above it, a fisherman leaned on the rail of a humpback bridge: a silhouette, simple, immobile, time- less—the image of a drawing in one of the Akan books” (Le Guin, Telling 19). The landscape and the man as its part implicitly approximate the pictograms of the scriptures that are telling the world. Thus, the blended boundaries between part and the whole, concrete and abstract, man and world, world and the Telling are evoked in the novel not only on the level of the story and fictional facts but at the same time on the level of discourse.“ The river, now clear as the wind, rushed by so silently that the boat seemed to float above it, between two airs. [. . .] Land, and sky, and the river crossing from one to the other” (22–23). The reader is encouraged to associate seemingly discontinu- ous facts, to grasp the intangible network of contexts wrapping up the narrated story, the fictional world, the way they are told, as well as the way how they can be read and transmitted through the reader’s experience to her world.

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CONCLUSION

In Le Guin’s novel, mimesis substantially enhances reading on several subsequent levels: it supports interconnections between the narrative and readers’ experience (both direct and mediated) of the actual world by providing many allusions to the past and the present of our reality and by overt inspiration by philosophical systems and religions—specifically Hinduism and Taoism— for creating the Akan Telling. The central idea of the interconnectedness of the part and the whole, including human beings and their environment, is accented through the complex metaphors of the human body as the body of the world and through linking being in the world with telling the world. On the level of the reader’s response to the story, embodied reading is invited through scarce yet highly immersive descriptions, further developing the central issue of blended boundaries. The reflection through physicality is conveyed directly on two levels. First, linking the thought content, attributes, and experiences of the characters (Sutty experiences everything personally, and very strongly, she is by no means a non-participating observer) encourages the embodied reading, through the reader’s own body and emotions. Second, relating body and narration, body and world on the level of the story evokes the connection on a deeper level, between the fictional body and the reader’s body, and thus between the reader and his world. The three key aspects of The Telling can be highlighted as follows. Dynamics—beginning at the level of Sutty’s name and reaching to the very deepest level of mimesis, to the need to keep balance in the constant changes, the flow of life when nothing is static, forever, everything must change, to evolve, to flow, and to dance in harmony. Poetry—the patterned intensity of the language; vivid images help to immerse in the story and to convey its meaning. Universality—The Telling is based on the principles of Taoism and Hinduism. The very familiarity of the central ideas of interconnection and mutual dependency of the part and the whole fortifies the effect of the novel. Similarly, as Le Guin’s actualized Tao Te Ching for today’s readers, The Telling echoes in her readers’ bodies and minds with the power of already gained albeit possibly forgotten knowledge. The novel helps us see it with fresh eyes and recover a clear vision of not only the fictional but primarily actual reality. Given the central theme of this book, we can conclude that Le Guin in The Telling suggests a remedy for Anthropocene, not a strikingly new one; on the contrary, through her writing she helps her readers to reconnect with ancient wisdom. It is not a practical solution; it cannot teach humanity how to harvest solar energy efficiently or how to stop overheating of the Earth,

80 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 42 Tereza Dědinová but it can offer a change of mind. Through the reading experience, it helps rewiring the readers’ brains to see humanity as a part of the whole, and not something overborne, detached, excluding ourselves from the Telling of the planet Earth, from the story in which we participate. If we accept the story experience of The Telling, the need for harmony and balance in the ever- changing environment, if we experience ourselves in oneness with everything surrounding us—with the trees, mountains, cities, other people, and their stories—how could we possibly not care about the nature, the well-being of all other beings, the Earth? The Telling provides its readers with guidelines for a transition from the isolated humanity to humanity as a part of the whole, an inseparable component of the biosphere.

NOTES

1. As she wrote on her website: “The thing is, they aren’t a cycle or a saga. They do not form a coherent history. There are some clear connections among them, yes, but also some extremely murky ones. And some great discontinuities” (Le Guin, “Frequently”). 2. Sandra J. Lindow comments on the ministry name as echoing the doublethink familiar from famous dystopias as 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 (160). 3. The irony of the new Akan regime is enhanced by possible inspiration of planet name Aka by Hindu term akâs referring to “the energy that flows through and unites creation” (Warner 196, qtd. in Lindow 162). 4. For the advantages of fantasy see, e.g., Marek Oziewicz’s Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading (2015) or Maria Nikolajeva’s Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (2014). 5. An ostensible purpose of the radical measures applied by the Great Leap Forward was to force the People’s Republic of China among the supreme world economic powers. Instead, it resulted in an economic downturn followed by the greatest people-caused famine in known history. 6. As Le Guin commented in an interview: “Actually, it was not Tibetan Buddhism, but what happened to the practice and teaching of Taoism under Mao that was the initial impetus of the book. I was shocked to find that a 2500-year-old body of thought, belief, ritual, and art could be, had been, essentially destroyed within ten years, and shocked to find I hadn’t known it, though it happened during my adult lifetime. The atrocity, and my long ignorance of it, haunted me. I had to write about it, in my own sidelong fashion” (Le Guin in Gevers). 7. Sandra J. Lindow reads the “Dovzan material culture as a critique of American capitalism, consumerism and planned obsolence” (161). 8. As Bernardo and Murphy observed in their analysis of The Telling: “Consumer economies don’t have ‘fellow’ persons but only negotiating parties” (77). 9. Sandra J. Lindow offers quite a thorough analysis of the allusions to Hinduism in The Telling.

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10. Bernardo and Murphy also comment on the connection between ideas and characters in Le Guin’s work: “This has always been Le Guin’s strength; her thought experiments are closely tied to the real-world experiences of her characters” (83). 11. Serious reservations toward the literal reading are stated explicitly also in The Telling: “Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preach- ers turned the living word into dead law” (68). 12. As Lindow also observes when commenting on Corporation’s fear of the old Akan culture: “People who are healthy, physically and emotionally, are free to devote their time to spiritual development” (163). 13. Bernardo and Murphy call the relationship of Sutty to the Telling as an evoca- tion of the Taoist concept “wu wei” (literary meaning “without exertion”) referring to the effortless accomplishment, action through inaction, based on “studying the nature and patterns of life” (85) and achieving “effect in the least disruptive manner” (85). 14. In Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth, Brian Attebery highlights the essential role of a storyteller on the evolving meaning of myth here and now (18). 15. See also Lindow 164. 16. “Experimental studies have focused on three areas, which relate to different aspects of linguistic comprehension: motor resonance in understanding action verbs, embodied metaphors, and situation models in reconstructing a linguistically described scene” (Caracciolo, “Degrees” 15).

WORKS CITED

Attebery, Brian. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford UP, 2013. –––––. Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana UP, 1992. Baccolini, Raffaela. “‘A Useful Knowledge of the Present is Rooted in the Past’: Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling.” In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. Routledge, 2003. Bernardo, Susan M., and Graham J. Murphy. Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 2006. Caracciolo, Marco. “Degrees of Embodiment in Literary Reading: Notes for a Theoretical Model, with American Psycho as a Case Study.” In Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics, edited by Szilvia Csabi. Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 11–27. –––––. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. De Gruyter, 2014. Gevers, Nick. “Driven By A Different Chauffeur: An Interview With Ursula K. Le Guin.” www .sfsite .com, 2001. www .sfsite .com /03a /ul123 .htm. Accessed 6 March 2019. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. Routledge, 2003. –––––. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge UP, 2014.

82 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 44 Tereza Dědinová

Le Guin, Ursula K. “A Message About Messages.” ursulakleguin.com , 2017. www .u rsula klegu in .co m /Mes sageA boutM essag es .ht ml. Accessed 6 March 2019. –––––. “Frequently Asked Questions.” ursulakleguin .com, 2014. www .u rsula klegu in .co m /FAQ _Ques tionn aire5 _01 .h tml. Accessed 7 April 2019. –––––. “Introduction.” In Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way. Shambhala, 1998. –––––. The Telling. Harcourt, Inc., 2000. Lindow, Sandra J. Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Nikolajeva, Maria. Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. Oziewicz, Marek. Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading. Routledge, 2015. Rochelle, Warren G. “Ursula K. Le Guin.” In A Companion to Science Fiction, edited by David Seed. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 408–419. Schimelpfenig, Mary Jo. “Powell’s Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin, Author of ‘The Hainish Novels and Stories’.” www .powells .com, 2017. www.p owell s .com /post /inte rview s /pow ells- inter view- ursul a -k -l e -gui n -aut hor -o f -the -hain ish -n ovels -and- stori es. Accessed 7 March 2019.

Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 83 Joan Ramon Resina, “Inverted Popes, the Apostolic Succession, and Dante’s Vocation as Satirist Ronald L. Martinez” in Dante Satiro: Satire in Dante Alighieri’s Comedy and Other Works, ed. Fabian Alfie and Nicolino Applauso (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 33–53. Series: Studies in Medieval Literature. All rights reserved.

Chapter Two

Inverted Popes, the Apostolic Succession, and Dante’s Vocation as Satirist

Ronald L. Martinez

Or te sta’, che tu se’ ben ponito Therefore stay here, for you deserve your punishment 1 —Inferno 19.97

In an epitaph written for Dante in about 1324, as the editors of this volume note in their introduction, Guido da Pisa described Dante as satiricus, as well as tragicus, comicus, and liricus. Guido’s idea of the poet of the Commedia as a satirist was reiterated by later fourteeenth-century commentators Benve- nuto da Imola and Francesco da Buti. Benvenuto treats Dante’s poem as “tragic” in that it deals with the deeds of popes and princes (“gesta pontifi- cum et principum”) but claims it may also be called satire as it reproves vice in whatever form. In making their judgments, these commentators assimilat- ed commentary traditions on the Roman satirists Horace, Persius, and Juven- al, especially the first, whom Dante describes as “magister Oratius” in the De vulgari eloquentia and as “Orazio satiro” in Inferno 4.89,2 and whose supple prescriptions in his Ars poetica furnish advice regarding comedy and satire, as well as tragedy. In Inferno 19, but also in several other passages in the poem treating of the contemporary papacy, Dante’s judgments on ecclesiastical avarice are joined to a satirical upending of the papal body that, as I hope to show in this essay, is modeled in part on Horace’s prescriptions, especially in light of how they were viewed in the medieval commentary tradition on Horace’s influential verse treatise. Although there is an abundant discussion of the simoniacal popes in Inferno 19, they have not previously been treated as objects of satire in a

84 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 34 Chapter 2 technical sense, at least not directly. But the idea of a calibrated “comic” mixing of high and low styles, inclusive of satire, as countenanced by Hor- ace’s Ars poetica, 219–38, has recently been applied to Dante’s third bolgia: in Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja’s view, Inferno 19 marks the “the legitimation and incorporation of the violent import of the satirical tradition into the polysemy of the poem” (“innesto e legittimazione del portato violento della tradizione satirica nella polisemia del poema”).3 Camozzi Pistoja’s important essay contains a wealth of observations, but does not mention the influence of the Ars poetica on Dante’s conception of Geryon, the “filthy image” (“sozza imagine,” Inferno 17.7) that prefaces and foreshadows Dante’s realm of fraud, and governs the poet’s deployment of satire as well. 4 As several scholars have pointed out, Geryon’s complex hybridity is an emblem of Dante’s “comic” mixed style in the Commedia—a style that can include satire.5 In relation to Inferno 19, Horace’s presentation of the monster of incongruity at the beginning of the Ars poetica offers a basis for understanding both the physical inversion of the simoniacal popes, and their participation in a succession, so that Horace’s prescriptions may be seen as fundamental to Dante’s program for satirizing the avaricious papacy of his epoch. 6 As is well known, a tradition of medieval glosses on Horace fixed on the opening section as enumerating a series of possible “errors” relating to poetic composition, a strategy that proved influential on the various Poetrie of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.7 For these commentators, the hybrid monster of Ars 1–7 represents principally errors of arrangement (dispositio) and incongruous stylistic mixtures.8 Horace’s first line begins by describing a hybrid creature, one with a human head but the tail of a fish. This description is set out in verticalized spatial terms, so that what comes first is the human head (“Humano capiti”), which is normally placed above, while what comes last, ending in a fish (“desinat in piscem”) takes the place of what is normally below.9 Mischievously, however, in accord with the highly self-reflexive nature of his text,10 Horace then re-describes this same incongruous body in inverted order, notably by writing a hexameter in which the “fishtail” precedes the “head” (Ars 4): “ends in a fish a woman beautiful above” (“desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne”), and subsequently mentions another fantastical figment in which the foot is not consistent with the head, so that no single unified form is produced (Ars 8–9): “such that neither foot nor head display one form” (“ut nec pes nec caput uni / reddatur formae”). In both cases, a reversal of normal sequence within the verse implies a spatial reversal by which what is below (the foot, the tail), precedes, or is above, what follows (the head)—the creatures presented are thus both vertically and sequentially inverted. Horace’s account is elaborated in commentaries on his text and in rhetorical manuals that follow Horace’s lead. These reiterate the incongruity and disorder of written materials through the reversal and scrambling of typical

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hierarchies. The leonine mnemonic given by Geoffrey of Vinsauf in his Documentum de arte versificandi, naming the sixth and last of the composi- tional errors—lack of a suitable conclusion—is an example: “at the end, sitting last [or lowest], a conclusion dissonant with the beginning” (“fine sedens imo conclusio dissona primo”).11 The leonine verse presents the parts of the composition in inverted order, with fine and imo placed first, and primo last. Fine, “at the end,” suggests a linear sequence, but imo sedens also suggests a vertical order, with a top and a bottom (cf. imus, used at Horace, Ars, 152, in a verse reiterated in commentaries and successive Poetrie).12 As in Horace’s accounts of the incongruous monster itself, two ordering principles are superimposed.13 What is more important for my argument, Dante was evidently sensitive to the importance of the terms opposed in the mnemonic and in the Horatian scheme more generally, and four times in the Commedia rhymes primo with imo, including an instance in Malebolge discussed below.14 Given Geryon’s patent relation to Horace’s monster of errors, the details of its presentation were plausibly noted by Dante, who had scrutinized closely the first lines of the Ars.15 For Horatian commentary, and for the meta- poetic context of Inferno 16–17, Geryon’s hybrid body can model both dispositio, the sequential ordering of the topics treated in the text, and the mixing of incongruous parts, like the patterned Turkish and Tartar cloths that cover Geryon’s flanks (Inferno 17.18), the likely equivalents of Horace’s “purple patch” incongruously sewn on a simple cloth (Ars 14–16).16 Geryon, too, is “incongruous” in being sequentially a hybrid, with a human face or head (his “beginning,” Inferno 17.8, 10), and a scorpion’s tail, coda (his “end,” just as Horace’s monster “ends as a fish,” desinat piscem). Geryon’s mammalian “paws, hairy to the armpits” (“branche pilose”) and “torso . . . of a serpent” (“d’un serpente tutto l’altro fusto”) are sandwiched in between (Inferno 17.9, 25): indeed, Dante describes Geryon’s face, torso, arms, and tail in that order at Inferno 17.10–27. But the actual “headline” of Inferno canto 17, the very first line, begins with the more elegant artificial order, with the threatening tail, “Behold the beast with the pointed tail” (“Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza,” v. 1), before reverting to natural order in lines 9–11 to end once more with the tail, “and beached its head and chest, but did not draw up its tail as far as the bank” (“e arrivò la testa e’l busto, / ma’n su la riva non trasse la coda”).17 In other words the first full presentation of Ger- yon is the inverted one; beginning with his tail; only subsequently is the description reversed back into a “natural” order.18 Given that Geryon embodies and displays the poem’s mixed style, Hor- ace’s celebrated advice to poets in the Ars poetica that they evaluate, or “weigh” subject matter before taking it on, may be seen embodied in the actions of Geryon himself.19 In requiring Geryon’s strong shoulders (“omeri forti,” Inferno 17.42) later called spallacce (v. 91) and schiena (18.19), Vir-

86 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 36 Chapter 2 gil reminds the beast to consider, or rather ponder, the weight of the living, embodied pilgrim (“pensa la nova soma che tu hai,” Inferno 17.99). Geryon is thus an unmistakably Horatian emblem of the task the poet Dante takes on in narrating lowest Hell, the realm of fraud, but also, as we will see, in deploying the “lower” genre of satire (imus . . . ).20 The nearby cantos of the Malebranche (Inferno 21–22), for example, exploit Horace’s discussions of the mixing of high and low styles (Ars, 225–34): Dante juxtaposes the exor- dium referring to the Venetian arsenal (Inferno 21.7–18), and its description of purposeful collective labor, to the slapstick comedy offered later by the devils, and the poet’s proverbial (and humorous) “in church with the saints, in the tavern with the gluttons” (“ne la chiesa / co’ santi, ne la taverna coi ghiottoni,” Inferno 22.14–15), registers the incongruous combination.21 In the previous canto, in Geryon’s wake, and in demonstration of a newly affirmed satirical skill, Dante constructs a demonic parody of Horace’s “shouldered” calibration when one of the Malebranche brings to the edge of the fifth bolgia one of the anziani of Lucca, slung over “his shoulder, which was sharp and high” (“l’omero suo, ch’era arguto e superbo,” Inferno 21.34–39), and dunks him in the pitch (“Là giù’ l buttò,” Inferno 21.43). Not by accident, the submersion of the barrator is immediately followed by a statement of the semantic inversion typical of his crime, “for money there they turn ‘no’ into ‘yes’” (“del no, per li denar, vi si fa ita,” Inferno 21.42). The resemblance between the upended barrator and the upended popes a few cantos earlier is no accident: for our purposes, the third and fifth bolge, respectively punishing ecclesiastical simony and its lay equivalent of barra- try, are often in dialogue precisely in relation to satirical effects, especially in relation to the categories and techniques of inversion. Indeed, in light of the reversed sequences and hierarchies intrinsic to the account of Geryon, the vertical spatial inversion of the Popes emerges as consistent with the entire Malebolge as an exploration of Geryon’s hybridity, artistic “decoration,” and danger: as Teodolinda Barolini observes, the Male- bolge unfold “under the sign of Geryon.”22 Examples are not far to seek. Chiavacci Leonardi notes how Geryon’s honest face and lethal tail anticipate the hypocrites in Canto 23, gilded without, corrupt within—and Virgil in fact names hypocrites first in his list of simple frauds in Inferno 11.58.23 Among the Malebranche, Malacoda’s lie to Virgil, disguised with the truth regarding the breaking of the bridges at the crucifixion, reverse-engineers Geryon himself as a truth that looks like a lie (“quel vero c’ha faccia di menzogna” Inferno 16.124). In narrative terms, Malacoda’s lie seduces with apparent helpfulness so as to subsequently betray, as is made clear when the wayfarers are pursued by the demons: the precise link to Geryon is manifest in the exposure of Virgil’s credulity by fra Catalano (Inferno 23.139–44), who ironically recalls the devil as “father of lies” (“padre di menzogna”). Indeed, the narrative arc stretching from Inferno 21 to the end of Inferno 23 points to

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the perilous diachrony of fraud, which, like Geryon, first shows a good face, and later springs the trap—the sting with the tail—mala coda indeed. Ger- yon’s extensive reach is paralleled by an equally widespread area affected by the damned popes, if we recall Tavoni’s point that the rock into which the popes are thrust—ironically recalling, as John Scott points out, the rock of Peter on which the Church is built—undergirds the whole of Malebolge.24 The entire zone of simple fraud is thus continuous with a parodic “Church.” Geryon’s very description echoes down the bolge. His hairy claws (“branche pilose,” Inferno 17.13) reappear in the Malebranche, and in the “green claws” (“branche verdi,” Inferno 27.45) of the Ordelaffi seignory.25 Geryon’s lethal coda and the rhyming term for fraud, froda, rhyme with terms found among the Malebranche in cantos 21 (vv. 74–78), and 22 (vv. 80–84),26 and in Inferno 24 as well, where they begin description of a hybrid of serpent and man like Geryon (Inferno 24.95, 97, 99: coda; proda, s’annoda). As a “filthy image” (“sozza imagine”) Geryon reemerges near the top of Malebolge for Thaïs the courtesan, “filthy baggage” (“sozza . . . fante,” Inferno 18.130) squatting in her ordure and again near the bottom, in the blood-soaked landscape of the ninth bolgia (“wretched mode”; “il modo . . . sozzo,” Inferno 28.21): symmetrically distributed lexical lashes of Geryon’s “tail,” so to speak. Perhaps most striking, in Inferno 29.37–39, within “l’ultima chiostra / di Malebolge,” the last and lowest of the ditches, primo and imo, markers of first and last, above and below, are juxtaposed as rhymes. The terms are placed in the context of the sinners of the bolgia as ironically conversi (Inferno 29.41), that is, they have been “turned down,” or inverted. And to confirm the generic relationship with Geryon and with satire, we find in the same canto a kitchen simile comparing the alchemists scraping their skin (“the bite of his fingernails”; “il morso / de l’unghie,” Inferno 29.79–80) with the scaling of a fish (pesce), the animal that denotes the lowest part of the Horatian chimaera, just as Geryon, at the “head” of Malebolge, also ends like a fish, with his tail “extending it, he moved it . . . like an eel’s” (“tesa come anguilla,” Inferno 17.104).27 Even the detail of the nails leads back to Horace’s treatise and its commentary. The soul who practiced the ‘art” of alchemy scrapes himself to relieve the itch of his leprous malady: “their nails tore off the scabs” (“traevan giù l’unghie la scabbia,” Inferno 29.82).28 This term resonates with Horace’s reference to the fingernail as the test of perfection when drawn over the surface of a sculpture.29 Here too we have an echo of the upper reaches of the Malebolge, where Thaïs, scratches herself (“si graffia”) with “shitty nails” (“unghie mer- dose,” Inferno, 18.131) in the second bolgia, as she squats in the dung that provides part of her contrapasso.30 Finally, again at the very end of Male- bolge (Inferno 30.52–57), Maestro Adamo whose “face does not answer to the belly” (“il viso non risponde a la ventraia,” 30.54), betrays discord between what is above and what below. By rhyming “ill converts” (“mal con-

88 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 38 Chapter 2 verte,” 53) regarding Adamo’s distempered humors, with rinverte (v. 57) of Adamo’s “turned-up” lip, Dante can suggest two forms of inversion. Adamo is thus another embodiment of the incongruous Horatian monster, and a mise en abîme of the Malebolge itself. 31 Thus it could be said that the poet’s heralding of the simoniacal popes, “now the trumpet must sound for you” (“or convien che per voi suoni la tromba,” Inferno 19.5), announces the Geryonic, which is to say Horace-inspired, inversions and disorders of the realm of fraud—though to complete the satirical picture, we must correlate the epic and apocalyptic tromba, sounded with the mouth, thus from the head, with its inevitable satirical upending in the trumpeting that one demon performs by making a musical instrument with his “tail end” (“avea del cul fatto trombetta,” Inferno 21.139).32 In the satirical acid of the Malebolge, even a denotation of the poet’s voice can be parodied and overturned. As well known, but impossible to overstate as to its significance, in the case of Inferno 19 the inverted position of the Popes, with their heads down and feet in the air, anticipates the inverted position of the traitor, Judas: “with his head inside, waving his legs outside” (“che’l capo ha dentro e fuor le gambe mena,” Inferno 34.63), and also of Satan when viewed from the southern hemisphere:33 the pilgrim sees the once-supreme seraph with legs up in the air (“vidili le gambe in sù tenere,” Inferno 34.90) and wonders why he is fixed upside-down (“com’è fitto / sì sottosopra?” Inferno 34.103–104).34 As in Horace’s placement of the foot first and the head second, but also in view of the fact that the head is normally above, the “tail” or “end” below, Dante’s references in canto 19 to the topsy-turvy popes emphasize the disordered primacy of their feet and legs, which emerge over the circular holes in the stone pavement of Malebolge: “from the mouth of each protruded the feet and legs of a sinner, as far as the thighs” (“soperchiava / di un peccator li piedi e de le gambe / fino al grosso,” Inferno 19.22–24). We also find references to the simoniac’s “red feet” (“coi piè rossi,” Inferno 19.81); to the burning “from heel to toes” (“dai calcagne a le punte,” 19.30, in reverse order), to Nicholas’s “weeping with the shanks” (“piangeva con la zanca,” 19.45)—reversing normal weeping from the eyes35—and to the kicking action (19.26, 120), which Dante’s language allows us to associate with how the Popes reversed Roman and divine justice by kicking down the good and raising the wicked.36 Dante also makes explicit that the position of Nicholas, “you who hold your up side down” (“che’l di sù tien di sotto,” Inferno 19.46) is a reversal of hierarchy, of up and down; to which the former pope adds that “beneath my head are driven the others” (“di sotto al capo mio son li altri tratti,” Inferno 19.73).37 Horace’s concession that tragedy—the genre, as we saw, that Benvenuto associates with the fall of princes and prelates—can be judiciously mixed with satire is put into play when Dante inverts his simoniacs, operating a reversal that Horace also sanctions when he counsels that the serious and tragic can be overturned into play (Ars, 225:

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“ita vertere seria ludo”).38 In one sense, Dante follows the precedent of Saint Peter, who in Acts 8:19–20 curses Simon Magus and in the apocryphal Acts of Peter engineers through prayer the magician’s headlong fall.39 But the “turn to play” also echoes the playfulness of Boethius’s Fortuna, who raises the lowly and topples the mighty.40 In the standardized medieval iconogra- phy of the wheel of Fortune that arose from Boethius’s Fortuna, the reigning figure, wearing a crown, is turned head down, in catastrophe. 41 This outcome defined medieval ideas of tragedy as the casting down of the proud and mighty;42 while in Dante, Fortuna’s wheel is most strongly associated with the punishment of the avaricious ecclesiastics of Inferno 7.43 We can infer that the plunge of the popes into their tombs in Inferno 19 combines the judgment of Minos and subsequent hurling down of the souls, “cast into the deep” (“son giù volte,” Inferno 5.15), with the consecutiveness that Virgil affirms of Fortuna’s actions: “so thick come those who must have their turns” (“sì spesso vien chi vicenda consegue,” Inferno 7.90). Inverted vertical position is, however, only one aspect of Dante’s account of the simoniacal papacy. In telling us that he has predecessors beneath his head, and in predicting the arrival of future popes Boniface VIII and Clement V in relation to the fictional date of the pilgrim’s journey (AD 1300), Nicho- las establishes a sequence of simoniac popes. As scholars have shown, there is an apostolic succession in Hell that mirrors in a parodic manner the apostolic succession beginning with Saint Peter, by which each pope or bishop confirmed his successor with the laying on of hands—precisely the power that Simon Magus, the archetypal simoniac and founder of the infernal church of Inferno 19, and so remembered in ringing terms by Dante in the first words of the canto, wished to purchase from Saint Peter, thus originating of the sin of simony.44 Dante accordingly begins his account of the simoniacs emphasizing their participation in a sequence: “O Simon Magus, o wretched followers” (“O Simon Mago, o miseri seguaci,” Inferno 19.1). The topic recurs in the canto both verbally and conceptually, as in Nicholas’s reference to his predecessors precisely where he names the sin defiling them: “the others who preceded me in simony” (“li altri . . . / che precedetter me simoneggiando,” Inferno 19.73–74), to successors who will one day come (“after him will come . . . a shepherd of even uglier deeds,” Inferno 19.82, referring to Clement V) and in the recall of an early instance of apostolic succession, thanks to an election uninfluenced by monetary reward, in reference to the replacement of Judas by Matthias, “when he was chosen for the place lost by the wicked soul” (“quando fu sortito / al loco che perdé l’anima ria,” Inferno 19.95–96). These lines immediately follow the act that establishes the apostolic succession, which is recalled by the pilgrim’s quotation, in reproach to Nicholas and his seguaci, of Christ’s words to the first apostles, even before the keys were handed to Simon Peter: “Follow me” (“Viemmi retro,” Inferno 19.93; cf.

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Matthew 4:19, “Venite post me”). Significantly, retro is in rhyme with Pie- tro, the first holder of the keys, and metro, referring to the pilgrim’s following words: “I replied to him in this meter” (“risposi lui a questo metro,” Inferno 19.89). It is thus Christ’s very words that forge the idea of succeed- ing, of “coming after” Christ, not merely in following his ethical example, but in taking the place as his vicar or representative on earth: 45 a sequence, and an institution, that Dante refers to near the very beginning of the poem, when referring to Rome, “established to be the holy place where the successor to Saint Peter is enthroned” (“fu stabilita per lo loco santo, / u’ siede il successor del maggior Piero,” Inferno 2.23–24). The rhyme on metro is equally consequential: not only does it underline that the pilgrim voices for the first time in the poem’s verses a phrase spoken by Christ in the New Testament, it also marks the pilgrim’s words as measured, just retribution. When the poet finishes his tirade, Dante reiterates the musical terminology: “while I was singing these notes to him” (“Io li cantava cotai note,” Inferno 19.118), and at that point Nicholas’s anguish is underscored, so that “he kicked violently with both his feet” (“forte spingava con ambo le piote,” Inferno 19.120). This last reference to the feet is also the most rustic in diction (agrestis), harshest in tone (asper), and attests to the fact that the pilgrim’s words have had satirical “bite” (“che’l mordesse,” Inferno 19.119).46 Not by accident, both the metrical format and the biting words are markers of the satirical genre,47 and link Nicholas’s example to Virgil’s definition of simple fraud as one that does not “pocket” fidelity to fellow humans (“fidanza non imborsa”), but gnaws away at the conscience of all (“ond’ogne coscienza è morsa,” Inferno 11.54–58): passages that include rhymes Nicholas adopts for his clan and for his penalty: “I was a son of the she-bear [. . .] I pocketed wealth up there, and myself down here (“fui figliuol de l’orsa [. . .] su l’avere, e qui me misi in borsa,” Inferno 19.70–72). Satire is thus here precisely tailored to the reproach of avaricious fraud. Mention of the apostolic succession then recurs in several numerically corresponding or related cantos where popes appear in the text. When Boni- face VIII next appears in the poem, mocking Celestine V for abdicating the papacy and undervaluing the power of the keys (“son due le chiavi, / che’l mio antecessor non ebbe care” Inferno 27.104–105),48 we find another invocation of the sequence of popes: not to successors, but to a predecessor. This is the moment in Guido da Montefeltro’s account when Boniface sins most greatly, for not only does his threat to damn Guido overstate the power of the keys, it constitutes a shameless use of them for the narrow political end of taking Palestrina and defeating the Colonna—in other words, it is a flagrant act of simony, justifying Boniface’s place in the pit of Inferno 19.49 In Purgatorio 19, Adrian V, Ottobono dei Fieschi, whose expiation puts him face down in the dirt, recites a verse of Psalm 118, “My soul does cleave unto the dust” (“Adhaesit pavimento [anima mea],” v. 73). The former pon-

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tiff endures a humiliation that reverses his elevation, when alive, to the high office of the papacy, “nor could I rise any higher in that life” (“né più salir poteasi in quella vita,” Purgatorio 19.110). Ottobono enunciates in Latin his place in the sequence of popes, acknowledging that “I was a successor of Peter” (“ego fui successor Petri,” Purgatorio 19.99). He goes on to point out, when interdicting the pilgrim’s reverential genuflection, that honorifics disappears at death, again with a Latin quotation, neque nubent—and again using Christ’s words (Matthew 22:30: “they shall neither marry . . .”). The three Latin phrases condense a judgment on the dubious honor of Ottobono’s elevation when viewed from the perspective of the afterlife, and in light of the echo of Persius (Satura 2: 61)—“O souls bent down to earth, empty of celestial things”—that seems to shadow the quotation from the Psalm, the intention and effect of the whole series of Latin phrases may be deemed satirical.50 In Paradiso 27, in the sphere of the fixed stars, in the poem’s penultimate invective, and after enumerating a virtuous succession of seven early martyr- popes whose blood nourished the early Church, 51 Dante’s Saint Peter de- plores how contemporary pontiffs deploy papal power to divide Christen- dom, an action that would have dismayed Peter’s early followers: “it was not our intention that on the right hand of our successors one part of the Christian people should sit, and the other on the other side (“non fu nostra intenzion ch’a destra mano / d’ i nostri successor parte sedesse / parte da l’altra, del popol Cristiano,” Paradiso 27.46–48).52 Saint Peter also reiterates the special conformity of Dante’s damned popes with Satan, both their cast-down state and their inverted or “perverse” position, when he attests to Satan’s satisfaction with them, for their actions “placate the perverted one down there, who fell from up here” (“onde ’l perverso / che cadde di qua sù, la giù si placa,” Paradiso 27.26–27). Dante’s insistence on placing his popes within their successions is linked throughout to his interest in the infernal succession of simoniac popes, which reaches its final expression in Beatrice’s invective in canto 30 of Paradiso. Beatrice’s remark that Pope Boniface, when Clement comes down on top of him, will “enter farther into the rock” (“intrar più giuso,” v. 148) of the third bolgia, vividly reinstates the topic of “succession” in vertical terms, precisely as it occurs in Hell—for as commentators have observed, the papal slot in Hell parodies the cathedra Petri, the seat of Saint Peter (more on this episode below).53 Reviewing this insistent textual emphasis on papal succession both in bono and in malo, however, it is important to notice that Dante is careful to verbally conflate the temporal sequence of Popes occupying the throne of Saint Peter with the vertical “succession” of simoniac popes found in the third bolgia. This is guaranteed for the poem’s verbal texture through the association of Christ’s invitation to the apostles, quoted to Nicholas III at

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Inferno 19.93: “follow me” (“Viemmi retro”), with the position of the avaricious Ottobono da Fiesch in Purgatorio 19. As often remarked, the placement of the avaricious souls echoes that of the simoniacs in having their “backs turned up” (“volti avete i dossi / al sù,” Purgatorio 19.94–95), like the inversion of Nicholas III, “che’l di sù tien di sotto.” The next time the inverted configuration is mentioned, with Ottobono’s answer, it introduces the rhyme on –etri (“perché i nostri diretri / rivolga il cielo a sé” (Purgatorio 19.97–98) and caps it with the rhyme on “successor Petri” (“successor to Peter,” v. 99) echoing the Pietro / retro rhyme of Inferno 19.91–93. Dante thus seamlessly links the inversion of the avaricious, with their hind parts upward (which conflates a front/rear, horizontal distinction with an upper/ lower, vertical one), to their succession as vicars of Christ. An order of succession is thus superimposed on a vertical hierarchy, and scrambled with it, recalling Horace’s conflation of sequential and vertical disorders in the account of the Ars poetica monster, as well as Dante’s accounts of Geryon. “Orazio satiro” is thus at least in part an originator of the principles by which Dante has inverted his popes in their various successions, and established their conformity to Judas and Satan. Returning to Paradiso 27.21–26, Saint Peter’s multiple invocation of “his place” (“il luogo mio, / il luogo mio, il luogo mio” vv. 22–23), echoing Jeremiah 7:4 on the “temple of the Lord” (templum domini), reaches the highest pitch of invective, and of satirical rhetoric, with the characterization of his burial place as a sewer of blood and filth because of Boniface’s usurpa- tions (“fatt’ ha del cimitero mio cloaca / di sangue e de la puzza,” Paradiso 27.25–26).54 Peter’s harsh terminology in part reflects traditional anti-clerical satire,55 which could adopt scatological topics and language, while mocking ecclesiastical preference for dainty euphemisms. 56 Satire, as Horace and his commentators observe, tears away polite veils, adopts “naked” words, nuda verba, and treats the foulness of vice in appropriately fetid language. 57 In Dante’s text scatological terms generally identify the stench of evil and of sinners (foetor mali, foetor peccatorum),58 as exemplified by the puzzo emit- ted by the siren’s belly when exposed by Virgil (relating to the unloveliness of misjudged secondary goods avarice, gluttony, and lust), but most significantly for my purposes to Virgil’s description of Geryon as the beast “that makes the whole world stink” (“che tutto ’l mondo appuzza,” Inferno 17.3), marking the strongest possible expression of the concept by converting it into a verb.59 The focus in Saint Peter’s “place” or luogo in the same passage, alluding at once to his cemetery, his temple, and his throne, and recalling from Inferno 2.23–24 that Rome is the “holy place” (“lo loco santo”) where Peter had his throne, his seggio, should draw our attention to the papal coronation ritual, which included having the candidate sit briefly on the sedes stercoraria (dunghill seat) to signify that he had been lifted, through his

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election to the papacy, from a lowly dunghill to a lofty seat of glory, in recognition of the text of 1 Samuel 2:8.60 In retrospect, however, the scatological aspect has arguably been implicit in the papal series from the outset, and in close association with the Horatian topoi that Dante assimilates to his anti-papal satire. This is apparent with Ottobono in Purgatorio 19.103–105, where—in another of the poem’s adap- tations of Horace’s recommendation that poets test their competence to treat of subject matter, testing “what the shoulders refuse, what they can bear” (Ars, 39–40: “quid ferre recusent, / quid valeant umeri,”)—Ottobono posits that an inability to sustain the burdens of the papacy allows the papal mantle, and the pope’s own person, to be dragged into the mire (“fango”), or into the dung, befouling both (“sé brutta e la soma,” Purgatorio 16.129).61 Bruttarsi is a term that retains scatological resonances in cantos where ordure is part of the punishment, especially Inferno 18, immediately preceding the canto of the damned popes, where the flatterer Alessio degli Interminei, “with his head so filthy with shit” (“col capo sì di merda lordo,” Inferno 18.116), resents the pilgrim’s special attention: “why are you so hungry to look more at me than the other filthy ones?” (“perché se tu sì gordo / di riguardar più me che li altri brutti?” Inferno 18.118–19).62 Alessio’s predicament itself involves an inversion of lower with upper, daubing him with the products of “uman privadi.”63 The contiguous canto 20, book-ending 19 along with 18, also introduces associated imagery in describing the soothsayers, their heads reversed so that “the tears from their eyes were bathing their buttocks down the cleft” (“l pianto de li occhi / le natiche bagnavan per lo fesso,” Inferno 20.23–24), using a word that echoes the fessure (“cracks”) into which the popes fall in Inferno 19.75.64 In the distortion of their bodies, moreover, “overturned” (“travolt[i]”) such that “the face was turned toward the kidneys, and they were forced to walk backwards, since seeing forward was taken from them” (“da le reni era tornato ’l volto, / e in dietro venir li convenia / perché’l veder dinanzi era lor tolto,” Inferno 20.11–16), the seers suffer a horizontal reversal that complements the vertical inversion of the simoniacs.65 The pertinence of scatological imagery to the simoniacs is thus strongly suggested. Indeed, in the case of Inferno 19, the multiple holes piercing the stone of Malebolge (fóri) suggest medieval privies, which typically consisted of round holes in stone benches.66 It is through these holes that the previous popes in the infernal apostolic succession are driven down into the rock, which becomes in effect like the sewer or cloaca that is Rome as the seat of Boniface’s papacy, as subsequently declared by Saint Peter. 67 In this scatological reading, the round papal slot in Inferno 19, a parody of the cathedra Petri, echoes the shape of the sedes stercoraria, and testifies to the deposition of the popes from their high thrones back down to the dust and dung from which they were raised.68 In this light, the cloacal imagery of

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Saint Peter’s language is not a departure in Dante’s program for the papal series, but its fulfillment. 69 Saint Peter’s straightforward, indeed harsh and coarse language might well be called the “naked language” that Horace, especially as interpreted by his commentators, recommends for satire. 70 A closely related phrase is actually used in the poem by Beatrice for the words she promises the pilgrim after the obscurities of Purgatorio canto 32: “now my words shall be naked” (“oramai saranno nude / le mie parole,” Purgatorio 33.100–101). The promise might apply to several of Beatrice’s subsequent lessons in Purgatorio and Paradiso; but the strongest candidate for “nude parole” from Beatrice would be her final words in the poem, which are also its final invective, Paradiso 30.133–48. She reiterates what we already know from Inferno 19.73–77. Clement V, held guilty of betraying Emperor Henry VII, will follow Boni- face, “the one from Alagna,” into the papal slot of the third bolgia, pushing his predecessor farther down (“più giuso”) into the rock. Emphasizing the contrast between the sainted Henry’s great seat (“gran seggio”) high in the Empyrean and the papal “seats” down in the third bolgia, Beatrice’s blunt- ness has often shocked readers,71 but her words are perfectly suited as nuda verba in a satirical key. If, as often done, Beatrice’s voice is identified as the voice of the surviving Church, of Revelation, or of Theology, her harshness would shatter all traditional notions of decorum. Her voice is also, though hardly explicitly, the voice of the poet Dante, and in a very specific, bio- graphical sense. Dante might appear to end Beatrice’s final words on a weak note poetical- ly, rhyming the latinism detruso, “thrust down” with the everyday adverbial phrase “farther down” (“più giuso”) providing the last words of canto 30. The spare, even banal language is, nevertheless, pointed and significant. In addition to recalling Saint Peter’s earlier remark about Satan’s pleasure “down there” (“la giù”), “più giuso” has a clear semantic relationship to the Latin imus (“lowest, farthest down”), the superlative form (along with infi- mus) of the paradigm beginning with infra (“low”) and the comparative inferior (lower”) that we previously saw defining the “tail” or “bottom” of Horace’s monster, and of Dante’s infernal regions as well.72 But, as we saw, the rhyming terms also closely link Beatrice’s words with the text of the canto of the damned Popes and their “vertical” papal succession. The idea of the popes pushed farther down into the rock echoes Nicholas’s statement in Inferno 19 that “beneath my head are driven (“son . . . tratti” v. 73) the others who preceded me in practicing simony” (“che precedetter me simoneggiando,” v. 74). What is more, tratti picks up, from the second Epistle of Peter, “thrust down into Tartarus” (“detractos in tartarum”) in reference to the fallen angels,73 a phrase that Augustine for his part quotes from the pre- Jerome Latin Bible where the verb is instead retrudere,74 meaning “thrust back,” which arguably influenced Dante’s choice of detruso. The scriptural

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variant, in other words, brackets Beatrice’s words with those of Nicholas, and through the allusion to the second Epistle of Peter reinforces the analogy between upside-down popes and fallen angels: principally, of course, Dante’s Satan. Better yet, the rare but conspicuous Latinism detruso, a hapax in Dante’s vernacular, connects the papal contrapasso to the historical Dante Alighieri, both a victim of the papacy and, through the instrument of poetic satire, his own just avenger. For Dante in his early (1302) condolence letter to the nephews of Count Alessandro of Mangona uses the same term, in Latin (a hapax as well), to depict himself thrust down and imprisoned in a dungeon or cave (“me detrusit in antrum”) by the poverty exile from Florence has imposed.75 Dante’s second epistle is especially notable as the first instance of the poet presenting himself as “undeservedly in exile, expelled from the homeland,” a choice of language that as Ettore Paratore observed long ago echoes the self-description of the reconstituted Hippolytus in book 14 of the Metamorphoses,76 on which Dante drew for Cacciaguida’s prophecy of the poet’s exile in Paradiso 17: mistreated by a stepmother Florence identified as Medea, the pilgrim is necessarily a Hippolytus figure. 77 Beatrice’s predic- tion of Boniface’s resting place is thus verbally, one could say philologically, tied to the pope’s role in fostering the Black Guelph coup d’état in 1301 that resulted in Dante’s exile from Florence and impoverishment. With Beatrice’s final words, Dante obscurely, but unmistakably, seals his anti-hierocratic satire and traces at least part of its origin to the injustice that he suffered at the hands of that pope who, in Dante’s view, is the worst of them all.78 As the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani put it: “He took pleasure in that Com- media to heckle and cry out after the manner of a poet, perhaps with respect to subjects not advisable; but perhaps his exile made him do that” (“Bene si dilettò in quella Commedia di garrire e sclamare a guisa di poeta, forse in parte più che non si convenia; ma forse il suo esilio gliele fece”).79

NOTES

1. Inferno 19.97, as transcribed by notary Iohannes Anthoniis Yvani Ferri, Memoriale bolognese 143 (1321, semestre II), fol. 281v; cited from Rime duecentesche e trecentesche tratte dall’Archivio di stato di Bologna, ed. Sandro Orlando (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 2005), 152. The text of Dante referred to in this study is: Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milan: Mondadori, 2005). The emphases in the citations are mine. Translations from the Vulgate are from The Holy Bible, Douay Rheims version (Balti- more: John Murphy, 1899); all other translations are my own. 2. Horace’s text is consulted in: Horace Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (‘Ars Poetica’), ed. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 58–74 (notes on 150–229). Whether Dante knew works of Horace other than the Ars Poetica remains controversial. Suzanne Reynolds and Zygmunt G. Barański argue against it; in favor are Claudio Villa and Mirko Tavoni. See the following: Suzanne Reynolds “Orazio satiro (Inferno IV, 89): Dante, the Roman satirists, and the medieval theory of satire,” The Italianist 15, Supplement 2 (1995): 128–44, here 135–37; Zygmunt G. Barański, “‘Magister satiricus,’

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Preliminary Notes on Dante, Horace and the Middle Ages,” in Language and Style in Dante, ed. John C. Barnes and Michelangelo Zaccarello (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 12–61, here 42–43; Claudia Villa, “Dante” in Enciclopedia Oraziana, vol. 3 (Rome: Treccani, 1998), 189–95, here 190; and Mirko Tavoni, Qualche idea su Dante (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015), 350–57. 3. See Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, “Profeta e satiro. A proposito di Inferno XIX,” Dante Studies 133 (2015): 27–45. His essay, as does mine, relies on the work of Claudia Villa, especially “Dante lettore di Orazio,” in Dante e la bella scola della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica, ed. Gian Carlo Alessio and Amilcare A. Iannucci (Ravenna: Longo, 1993), 87–106; and Zygmunt G. Barański, “Magister satiricus” (see note 2), 13–14, note 3 lists his other essays; see Karin M. Fredborg, “The Ars poetica in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: From the Vienna Scholia to the Materia Commentary,” Aevum 88 (2014): 399–442; here 428–35. 4. I follow Villa and Barański in drawing chiefly on the Materia commentary to the Ars widely known in the late Duecento and Trecento, and comprehensive of earlier commentaries as likely most pertinent to Dante’s reading of Horace; see Karsten Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica in Twelfth Century France. The Horace of Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland,” Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 60 (1990): 319–88; see also Fredborg, “The Ars poetica” (see note 3), 409–13. The Anonymous turicensis enjoyed little circulation (only two manuscripts known), and the newly published Communiter commentary from early in the fourteenth century, was unlikely to have been known to Dante, though its elevation of the status of poetry in relation to the trivium is consistent with Dante’s theory and practice. For the Communiter commentary, see Lisa Ciccone, Esegesi oraziana nel medioevo: Il commento “Communiter” (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2016). 5. See Villa, “Dante lettore” (see note 4), 102–3; also Zygmunt G. Barański, “Sole nuovo, luce nuova.” Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (Turin: Scriptorium, 1996), 159–76. 6. For Dante’s anti-clerical satire of avarice in general: see Mirko Tavoni, Qualche idea (see note 2), 357–61. On the links of Inferno 19 to Inferno 7, where all the sinners are clerics, see Lino Pertile, “Inferno XIX,” in Lectura dantis bononiensis, ed. Emilio Pasquini and Carlo Galli (Bologna: Bologna University Press, 2014), 111–33; here 112. Camozzi Pistoja, “Profeta e satiro” (see note 3), 32 n. 27 lists Latin and vernacular texts of medieval anti-clerical satire, referring also to simony (the Apocalypsis Goliae, De nugis curialum); see also Joan Ferrante, “The Bible as Thesaurus for Secular Literature,” in The Bible in the Middle Ages: Its Influence on Literature and Art, ed. Bernard S. Levy (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 23–50, here 44–48, referring to anti-clerical satire in the Carmina Burana. 7. Friis–Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 323–29, Barański, “Magister satiricus” (see note 2), 36–37; Ciccone, Esegesi oraziana (see note 4), 23–28. 8. See Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de arte versificandi cited in Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 385–86, or her edition of the Materia commentary, 336–38 (“partium incongrua positio” [“incongruous positioning of parts”]); see also Ciccone, Esegesi oraziana (see note 4), 219–25. 9. This is of course a standard way of speaking about places in a text, by which what follows is said to be “below,” as in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia 2.1.5–6: “ut per inferiora patebit” (“as is made clear below”). But given that Dante writes about are precisely “the places below” (inferna), such concepts were more than routine matters to Dante (note the contrast of “basso inferno” with “cerchio superno” at Inferno 12.35, 39). 10. Found also in some followers, such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and his Poetria nova; for observations on that work’s metaliterary reflexivity, see Alexander Leupin, Barbarolexis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 17–38. 11. Cited in Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 385. Geoffrey’s mnemonic is in fact a summary of the entire scheme of “errors,” since its suggestion of an end discordant from its beginning scarcely differs from the first incongruity as the commentators derive it from Horace’s lines, that is, the incongruous sequence of styles that constitutes an error of dispositio regarding the beginning, middle, and end of the composition. Thus the Materia commentary (Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” [see note 4], 336): “primum est partium incongrium positio. Partes autem libri sunt principium, medium et finis. Que utique incongrue ponuntur ‘cum primum medio, medium quoque discrepat imo’” (“first is the incongruous position of parts. For

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the parts of a book are its beginning, middle, and end. Which are surely incongruously placed when ‘the first part is dissonant with middle, and the middle with the last’”). The commentator adapts the same line of Horace, Ars, 152 (“primo ne medium, medium ne discrepet imum” [“lest the first be at variance with the middle, the middle with the last”]) used by Geoffrey for the last of the “errors”; see note 12; see also Friis-Jensen’s apparatus, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 336. 12. For instance, see Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 336: 15–17; ibid, Docu- mentum, 385; and see previous note. 13. Several other “errors,” digressio, incongrua stili mutatio and variatio (“digression,” “discordant shift of styles,” and “variation”) are in fact closely linked to incongrua positio, in that all reproach miscellany or unharmonious mixture: commentary strains to come up with logically distinct categories for Horace’s fluid, urbane account. 14. Inferno 29.37–39 is discussed in the text. Purgatorio 1.98–100, juxtaposes the “primo ministro” at Purgatory gate with the low shores of the island (“ad imo ad imo”); Paradiso 30.107–109 juxtaposes the “mobile primo” with the bottom of the Empyrean “hill”: (“come clivo in acqua di suo imo / si specchia”); Paradiso 1.138 (“giuso ad imo”) is relevant later. 15. Dante’s borrowing from Horace’s Epistulae 1.14.43 in De vulgari eloquentia 2.1.9–10 is well known, probably derived from Uguccione’s Derivationes; in the same chapter Dante compares incongruous ornatus to mixing beautiful women in with malformed ones (“puta cum formose mulieres deformibus admiscentur”), an idea then reiterated by postulating an unseemly woman dressed in gold and silk (“turpis mulier si auro et serico vestiatur”). Formose, turpis, and mulier are three key terms from Horace’s monster of incongruity in Ars: 3–4, ugly below (“turpiter . . . desinat”) and beautiful above (“mulier formosa superne”). Editors of Dante’s treatise have so far not registered these (and other) Horatian borrowings in that particular chapter of De vulgari eloquentia. 16. For this topic, see Franz Quadlbauer, “‘Purpureus pannus,’ Zum Fortwirken eines hora- zischen Bildes in Spätantike und lateinischem Mittelalter,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 15 (1980): 1–32. 17. The scorpion’s tail sits not only behind but also above, and can move forward when striking: thus that animal can breach both hierarchies of above/below and front/rear—just as Dante claims Geryon can breach any barrier (Inferno 17.2, “passa i monti e rompe i muri e l’armi”). 18. The foreshortened glimpse of Geryon as a surfacing diver at Inferno 16.130–36 is a view from above; the terms in the simile (“in sù si stende e da piè si rattrappa”) again juxtapose the relation of upper and lower, in sù, and da piè. For illustrations of Horace’s monster in the manuscript tradition, visually suggestive of Geryon, see Claudia Villa, “‘Ut poesis pictura.’ Appunti iconografici sui codici dell’Ars poetica,” Aevum (1988): 188–97. 19. Ars poetica: 38–40: “Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, aequam / viribus, et versate diu quid ferre recusent, / quid valeant umeri” (“Take up a matter, you who write, equal to your strengths, and ponder long what your shoulders should reject, and what they can support”), echoed in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia 2.4.4: “unumquemque debere materie pondus propriis humeris coequare, ne forte humerorum nimio gravata virtute in cenum cespitare necesse est” (“each should suit the weight of the subject matter to his own shoulders, lest if he take on too heavy a load he fall into the mud”). Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1979), 162–65. 20. Camozzi Pistoja, “Dante satiro e profeta” (see note 3), 35, cites Guido da Pisa’s definition of satyrs, human above, bestial below: “Satyri enim sunt quedam animalia ab umbilico supra formam hominis habentia, sed ab umbilico deorsum habent formam caprinam” (“Satyrs are certain animals with a human form above the navel, but below the navel they have the form of a goat”). On the medieval confusion of satyrs with satire, see Fredborg, “The Ars poetica” (see note 3), 433–34. 21. Horace cautions against going too far with such admixture: “regali conspectus in auro nuper et ostro / migret in obscuras humili sermone tabernas” (“lest one royal in purple and gold enter smoky taverns and their humble speech”), but his lines furnish an image of such mixing. Humor and laughter are ingredients of the satirical critique: see the Materia commentary to Ars, 225 (Friis-Jensen, “Horace’s Ars poetica” [see note 4], 361): “Satira enim derisoria est

98 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 48 Chapter 2 quia cum quodam cachinno reprehendit” (“Satire is derisory when it reproves with certain guffaws”). 22. Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1992), 75. 23. See Anna Maria Chiavacci-Leonardi, introduction to Inferno 23, in Dante Alighieri, Inferno, vol. 1, La Divina Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 1991), 677. 24. Tavoni, Qualche idea (see note 2), 182; John A. Scott, “The Rock of Peter and Inferno, XIX,” Romance Philology 23 (1970): 462–79. Gabriele Rossetti makes a similar claim regarding the rock of Peter in his 1826–1827 commentary on Inferno 19.73–78 (https:// dante.dartmouth.edu/). 25. Geryon’s “branche pilose” link him to Satan’s “folto pelo” (Inferno 34.75), and both with the hirsuteness of satyrs in the commentary tradition and in Uguccione da Pisa, Deriva- tiones, vol. 2, ed. Enzo Cecchini and Guido Arbizzoni (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluz- zo, 2004), 919, on the word pello (“hinc pilosi dicuntur [. . .] hunc alii satirum vocant” [thus they are called hairy . . . some others call them a satyr]). 26. See Inferno 21.74, 76, 78 (oda . . . Malacoda . . . approda); and Inferno 22.80, 82, 84: proda . . . vasel d’ogne froda . . . ciascun se ne loda (note the consecutive verse numbers over the two cantos). The ironic “praise” at Inferno 22.84 alludes to definitions of satire as including both blame and praise; see Reynolds, “Orazio satiro” (see note 2), 134–35 and 143 n 22. 27. Pisces is used only once in the Ars; pesce (Inferno 29.84) is used once in Inferno, once in Purgatorio. Anguilla (Inferno 17.104) is used in the plural in Purgatorio 24.24 to refer to the Bolsena eels preferred by Pope Martin IV. 28. Claudia Villa, “Dante” (see note 2), 189, links Horace’s faber (Ars 32–33) with Dante’s fabbro in Purgatorio 26.117, but not the ungues referring to details that the inferior sculptor (faber imus) can manage, even as he fails with the final touches. 29. Ars: 293: “decies perfectum castigavit ad unguem.” See the Materia commentary, in Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 366: “unde dictum est: res facta ad unguem, id est ad perfectionem” (“so that it is said: a thing done to the nail, that is, to perfection”). In the Materia commentary, it is the “feet” (!) that the bad sculptor botches: “sed tantum in pedibus formandis deficiebat. Cui comparandus est poeta qui materiam inceptam ad finem usque perdu- cere nescit” (“but he was deficient only in forming the feet. To whom the poet is compared who does not know how to draw out what is begun to the end”). 30. Materia commentary (Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” [see note 4], 366): “ad unguem: a marmorariis tractum est, qui marmoribus politis et iunctis unguem superducunt ut, si fuerit ibi scrupulus, offendatur unguis” (“to the nail: taken from marble masons, who draw a nail over polished and joined marble-work, so that, if there were an imperfection there, it would strike the nail”). 31. Appropriately, then, a term of art in medieval satire, leccare; see Bernhard Bischoff, “Living with the Satirists,” in The Classical Influences on European Culture AD 500–1500: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at King’s College, Cambridge, April 1969, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 83–94, esp. 91. It appears both in Adamo’s canto (Inferno 30.128: “leccar lo specchio di Narciso”) and in proximity to Geryon near the beginning of Malebolge (“come bue che’l naso lecchi,” Inferno 17.71). 32. In response to the “Bronx cheer,” made with the mouth, of another demon, Inferno 21.137–38. On the “tromba,” see Gabriele Muresu, “Il tradimento dei simoniaci (Inferno XIX),” Rassegna della letteratura italiana 101 (2007): 5–30; here 6–7; Muresu notes that the trumpet heralded a Jubilee (e.g., Leviticus 25:9) and is thus suited to Boniface VIII, who declared 1300 a Jubilee year. Scholars have linked the the trumpet to epic poetry, to prophetic and apocalyptic biblical modes (e.g., Isaiah 58:1, 1 Corinthians 15:52, Revelations 8:6), to the judicial challenge (cf. Monarchia 1.1.5–6), or to announce penalizing of criminals: all are likely relevant. But it is also the poet’s voice, announcing papal crimes to the world; in Ars, 202–8, the tuba is linked to the other musical instruments that gather an audience to “fill the seats” in the theater (Horace, Ars, 204, “complere sedilia”). 33. See Anna Granville Hatcher and Mark Musa, “Lucifer’s Legs,” PMLA 79 (1964): 191–99; and Ernest N. Kaulbach, “Inferno XIX, 45: The ‘Zanca’ of Temporal Power,” Dante Studies 86 (1968): 126–35.

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34. Inversion is enacted by the wayfarers as Virgil, in transiting the center of the earth, appears to replace testa with zanche, Inferno 34.79: “volse la testa ov’ elli avea le zanche”; for some implications of this reversal, see John Freccero, “Infernal Inversion and Christian Con- version (Inferno XXXIV),” Italica 42 (1965): 35–41. 35. Strikingly, the lower parts of Horace’s monster can be compared to human shanks (“tibias”) in a similarly incongruous mixture mentioned in Geoffrey’s Documentum, as cited in Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 386: “caput equinum, corpus vitulinum, tibias humanas” (“A horse’s head, a calf’s body, human shanks”). Tibias might properly be translated with zanche. 36. Camozzi Pistoja, “Dante profeta e satiro” (see note 3), 32, notes the “meticoloso capo- volgimento” of the popes so that Dante’s poem may “calcare i pravi e sollevare i buoni.” Indeed, Inferno 19.104–105 “che la vostra avarizia il mondo attrista / calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi,” inverts Roman justice as expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid 6: 853 and quoted in Monarchia 2.6.9: “parcere subjectis, debellare superbos” and that of God, expressed in Mary’s Magnificat: “deposuit potentes de sede, exaltavit humiles” (Luke 2:52). I have not seen it noted that the popes’ kicking (calcando) assimilates them to the demons reproached by the “messo celeste” at Inferno 9.94: “perché recalcitrate a quella voglia. . .” (and cf. Acts 9:5, Christ’s reproach of Saul of Tarsus: “durum est tibi contra stimulum calcitrare” (“it is hard for thee to kick against the goad”). 37. In his final note on Inferno 19, Gabriele Rossetti opined that the popes would eventually be driven down as far as Cocito and Satan (Dartmouth Dante Project, https:// dante.dartmouth.edu/). 38. Ars, 226: “ita vertere seria ludo” (“to turn the serious into game”); the Communiter commentary (Ciccone, Esegesi oraziana [see note 4], 244), begins with line to treat of how Horace explains “qualiter admiscenda sit satira ipsi tragedie” (“how satire is to be mixed with tragedy itself”). 39. See Charles S. Singleton, “Inferno XIX: ‘O Simon Mago,’” Modern Language Notes 80 (1965): 92–99; Tavoni, Qualche idea (see note 2), 186–89; and Lino Pertile, “Inferno XIX” (see note 6), 111–33, esp. 117–23. 40. Boethius’s Fortune plays her game (ludus) when she reverses high and low, “infima summis, summa infimis mutare gaudemus” (“we enjoy shifting the lowest to the highest, the highest to the lowest”), which constitutes the “howling of tragedy” (“tragoediarum clamor”). See Anicio Manlio Severino Boezio [Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius], Consolazione della filosofia, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Ovidio Dallera (Rome: Rizzoli, 1977), 126. 41. As in folio 1r of the Codex Buranus MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 4660; see also the fortune’s wheel by Brioloto di Balneo on the façade of the basilica of San Zeno in Verona, with the inscription (“elevo depono”), cited in John Leyerle, “The Rose-wheel Design in Dante’s Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 280–308; here 306–307. 42. For the “Boethian” pattern of tragedy in the late Middle Ages, see Paul G. Ruggiers, “Notes Toward a Theory of Chaucerian Tragedy,” Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 89–99. 43. Camozzi Pistoja (“Dante satiro e profeta” [see note 3], 33) proposes Christ’s overturning (eversio) of the money-changer’s tables in the Gospels as authorizing the “upending” of the popes and Dante’s attack on simoniac prelates. This is a penetrating observation; as I argue elsewhere, it is part of Dante’s strategy of defending the Church from simony, a strategy spelled out in detail in the forthcoming published form of my 2016 Aldo Bernardo lecture (Camozzi Pistoja’s account and mine are independent). One can add that it is precisely Christ’s task to turn the world upside down: “è chi creda / più volte il mondo in caosso converso,” observes Virgil at Inferno 12.42–43 in relating the effects of the crucifixion on the fabric of Hell: Christ is the ultimate eversor mundi. The same applies to the “horizontal” reversal of the ships of state prophesied by Beatrice in Paradiso 27.145–48 (“le poppe volgerà u’ son le prore”), which requires that prows and sterns turn and change places, that is, be reversed (also Geryon’s movement, Inferno 17.103). 44. Reginald French, “Simony and Pentecost,” Annual Report of the Dante Society of Amer- ica 82 (1964): 9–10; Ronald B. Herzman and William A. Stephany, “‘O miseri seguaci’: Sacramental Inversion in Inferno XIX,” Dante Studies 96 (1978): 49. See also Anthony Cas-

100 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 50 Chapter 2 sell, The Monarchia Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 267, n115. 45. For scriptural borrowings in the canto, see Zygmunt G. Barański, “Canto XIX,” in Lectura dantis turicensis, vol. 1, Inferno, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Georges Güntert (Flor- ence: Franco Cesati, 2000), 262. Matthew 4:19, overlooked by Barański, is most important, as it reports Christ’s own words; Barański, Ibid., 263–64 argues that the pilgrim’s pleasing of Virgil at Inferno 19.121 (“al mio duca piacesse”) echoes God’s words registering satisfaction at Christ’s baptism (Matthew 3:16–17, “mihi complacui” [“in whom I am well pleased”]): this would strengthen the association of the pilgrim with Christ. 46. For mordere as the act of satirists, in light of Inferno 19.118, see Camozzi Pistoja, “Dante profeta e satiro” (see note 3), 34–35, and note 43, there citing Persius, Satura 1.107–108 (“teneras mordaci radere vero / auriculas” [“grate on tender ears with biting truth”]). For Horace, the terms of satire are typically “wild” (agrestis) and “coarse” (asper); see Ars, 220–221: “mox etiam agrestis Satyros nudavit, et asper / . . . iocum tentavit” (“soon stripped wild Satyrs naked, and tried out . . . rude jests”): and see the Materia commentary, in Friis- Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 361: “satiros agrestes: Non enim in satira ornata verba sunt, sed agrestia et inculta. Et asper: quantum ad gravitatem tragedie” (“‘wild satyrs’: In satire, words are not adorned, but wild and unkempt. ‘And rude’: compared to the gravity of tragedy”). 47. For Horace and his commentators, satire is metrical composition: see Ars: 73–86, 250–70; for the Materia commentary on meters in 79–86, see Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 349; also Guillaume de Conches, Glosae in Iuvenalem, ed. Bradford Wilson (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 91, who writes: “convicia predicta sunt satire, id est agrestes callidiores autem in artem redigerunt et metrice ceperunt reprehendere” (“the aforesaid reproofs are satires, that is, they rendered their coarse things crafty through art, and began to reprove in meter”). 48. Antecessor is a hapax in the poem; of the four instances in the poem of successor, three relate to popes (Inferno 2.24; Purgatorio 19.99, in Latin; and Paradiso 27.47), and once to secular rulers (Purgatorio 6.102, said to “Alberto tedesco”). Succedette marks Semiramis as following Ninus (Inferno 5.59). 49. The medieval consecration ritual of bishops prohibits as simony the making of promises regarding apostolic power: “Videte ne aliquam promissionem vobis fecerit, quia simoniacum est et contra canones”; cited from Le Pontifical de la curie romane au XIIIe siècle, ed. Monique Goullet, Guy Lobrichon, and Éric Palazzo (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2004), 70. On Boni- face’s ostentation of the petrine keys in images he had made of himself, see Agostino Paravici- ni-Bagliani, Le chiavi e la tiara: immagini e simboli del papato medievale (Rome: Viella, 1998), 20–23, 107–8, and figures 62–63. 50. “O curvae in terras animae et coelestium inanes.” Gabriele Rossetti proposed the allusion to Persius in his commentary (1826–1827), applying it both to Ottobono and to the popes in Hell (https://dante.dartmouth.edu/); see also Giuseppe Billanovich, Prime ricerche dantes- che (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1947): 9–10. Paradiso 11.1 is widely held to echo Persius, Satura 1.1. 51. Paradiso 27.40–45: “Non fu la sposa di Cristo allevata / del sangue mio, di Lin, di quel di Cleto . . . e Sisto e Pio e Calisto e Urbano / sparser lo sangue.” Dante’s Saint Peter inserts Popes Pius and Cletus (Paradiso 27.40–45), who were added to the Calendar of Santa Maria del Fiore after liturgical reforms in 1310 (the other martyred popes in Linus, Sixtus, and Calixtus, go back to Gelasian and Gregorian Calendars). See Marica S. Tacconi, Catholic and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72–73. 52. Peter’s words are followed by reference to the keys: Paradiso, ed. Chiavacci-Leonardi, 748, cites Matthew 25:31–46, evoking Christ’s words during the Last Judgment; in Christ’s presence Peter must vacate his place (Paradiso 27.23–24). 53. See French, “Simony” (see note 44), 7; Scott, “The Rock of Peter” (see note 24), 464–65; Herzman and Stephany, “’O miseri seguaci’” (see note 44), 47; and Tavoni, Qualche idea (see note 2), 181–83.

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54. See Jeremiah 7:3 and 7 (“in loco isto”), also 7:2 (“ad locus meus,” of the altar at Shiloh), and 7:11 (“is this house then [. . .] become a den of robbers?”) originates for the New Testa- ment the idea of the Church transformed from a house of prayer into a den of thieves. See Rachel Jacoff, “Dante, Geremia, e la problematica profetica,” in Dante e la Bibbia: Atti del Convegno Internazionale promosso da “Biblia”: Firenze, 26–27–28 settembre 1986, ed. Gio- vanni Barblan (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 113–23; here 115. 55. Camozzi Pistoja, “Dante profeta e satiro” (see note 3), 37, observes that the astronomical reference to Capricorn at Paradiso 27.66: il “corno della capra,” is a “segno caprino,” pointing to the association of the satirical genre with goat-footed satyrs. 56. Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica novissima, 9.2.11 (De curialitate transumendi): “verba significantia turpitudinem curialiter transumunt et sub velamine cautele occultant. [. . .] stercus autem et urinam ‘superfluitatem prime digestionis’ esse dicunt” (“words signifying vileness are transumed in a curial way and cautiously concealed under a veil . . . they call shit and urine ‘superfluities of the first digestion’”). Boncompagno’s text consulted online at: http:// web.archive.org/web/20070808063343/http://dobc.unipv.it/scrineum/wight/rn9.htm #9.2. 57. See the texts assembled by Reynolds, “Orazio satiro” (see note 2), 130–31 and 147–48 , which makes explicit that satire uses language epic poets eschew: “Nuda est quia circumloqu- tiones non loquitur, ut Virgilius et Ovidius” [It is naked because it speaks without periphrases, as Virgil and Ovid do]. See also the Materia commentary, in Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica” (see note 4), 361: “nudavit. Ad proprietatem satire respexit, que nuda dicitur quia aperte reprehendit” (“strips them bare. This refers to the property of satire, said to be naked because it reproves openly”). 58. See Proverbs 10:7: “Memoria justi cum laudibus, et nomen impiorum putrescet” (“the memory of the just is with praises: and the name of the wicked shall rot”). For the foetor peccatorum, see Theodore Silverstein, “Dante and the Visio Pauli,” Modern Language Notes 47 (1932): 397–99. Satire, caprine, and satyrical, treats of fetid vice with fetid language; see Reynolds, “Orazio satiro” (see note 2), 147: “caprina est satira, quia capra fetida est, sic satira turpia et fetida verba dicitur” (“satire is goatish, because goats stinks: thus satire is spoken with base and stinking words”). And Guillaume de Conches, Glosae, 90: “quam turpiter enim agunt homines, tam turpiter hec reprehendit. Caper vero fetidum est animal, unde satira propter viciorum fetorem similis est satiris caprinos pedes habentibus” (“just as much as men act basely, so basely does satire reprove them. The goat is a stinking animal, and thus satire, on account of the stink of vice, is similar to satyrs, which have goat’s feet”). Although without invoking the satirical genre, a rich treatment of Dante’s scatological language is furnished by Zygmunt G. Barański, “Scatology and Obscenity in Dante,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 259–73. 59. Other uses of puzzo refer to the stench given off by Hell (Inferno 9.31, 11.5, 29.50), and by paganism (Paradiso 20.125); Purgatorio 19.33 refers to the siren; Paradiso 16.55, “lo puzzo del villan d’Aguglion,” combines the urban dweller’s disdain for the unwashed villager with contempt for a swindler. “Il mondo appuzza” said of Geryon metrically anticipates “il mondo attrista” said of the popes’ avarice. 60. On the papal coronation, see Le Pontifical (see note 49), 114 (xiiib.41); also Marc Dykmans, S.J., Le cérémonial papal de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Rénaissance, vol. 2, De Rome en Avignon ou Le cérémonial de Jacques Stefaneschi (Rome and Brussels: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1981), 282–83; and Paravicini-Bagliani, Le chiavi (see note 49), 67–68, 90; for the text of the ritual, see 1 Samuel 2:8: “Suscitat de pulvere egenum, et de stercore elevat pauperem” (“He raiseth up the needy from the dust, and lifteth up the poor from the dunghill”) from which he is raised to the “solium glorie” (“the throne of glory”). See also Paravicini- Bagliani, Le chiavi (see note 49), 107–8 on Boniface’s gisant tomb in the Vatican, sculpted before his death, a possible target of Dante’s satire here. An illuminating exposition of the scatological imagery in Saint Peter’s invective in Paradiso 27 in relation to the sedes stercoraria ceremony, including important documentation, is found in chapter 6 of Nicolino Applauso’s Dante’s Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy: Humor and Evil, forthcoming

102 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 52 Chapter 2 from Lexington publishers. My thanks to the author for sharing this material with me before publication. 61. Echoing Horace’s advice in De vulgari eloquentia 2.4.4, Dante introduces the idea, absent in Horace, that failing to estimate one’s powers will result in a stumble into the mire (“in coenum cespitare”). Usually rendered in Italian as fango, coenum is in Latin also applicable to ordure or dung. 62. See also Inferno 13.10: “le brutte Arpie,” who in Virgil’s Aeneid 3.216–17 (“foedissima ventris / proluvies”), defile food with their droppings. 63. Inferno 18.114. Canto 18, anticipating 19, also emphasizes the feet and head with derisory, satirical terms (“levar le berze,” 18.36; and “battendosi la zucca,” 18.124), using terms appearing just once in the poem. 64. The fifth bolgia, too, is a fessura (Inferno 21.4), echoing the fessure into which the simoniacs fall. 65. Another echo of Geryon, who also moves backward when leaving the “shore” of the usurers (“come la navicella esce di loco / in dietro in dietro” Inferno 17.100–101). 66. Echoing the “umani privadi” a canto earlier, where we also find “in uno sterco” (Inferno 18.113). Regarding the Florentine font, the argument made in Mirko Tavoni’s “Papi simoniaci e Dante profeta (Inferno XIX),” chapter 5 of Qualche idea su Dante (see note 2), 149–225, that not a marble font, but a clay amphora was broken by Dante, has obtained wide, if not universal, consensus. Despite the merits of the study, the reading remains problematic at the literal level of Dante’s simile: briefly put, against Tavoni’s postulation of battezzatoj as clay vessels resting in shallow depressions in the baptistery floor, it seems more likely that Dante understands the fóri, the round holes perforating the rock of the third bolgia at Inferno 19.14, as the grammati- cal antecedent both for the “places” made for individuals who baptize (“quei che son . . . fatti per loco d’i battezzatori” Inferno 19.17–18) and for the containers from which the souls’ feet and shanks protrude (“fuor de la bocca a ciascun /soperchiava / d’un peccator li piedi” 19.22). Tavoni’s reading disrupts the continuity of the things compared by eliding the implicit parallel between baptizers who are right-side-up and popes who are upside-down (see the cogent reservations in Pertile, “Inferno XIX” [see note 6], 128–30). 67. To again cite Boncompagno’s Rhetorica novissima 9. 2. 11: “Item cloacam vel latrinam in ‘sellam’ et ‘urinalem scaphum’ vel ‘calicem’ vocant” (“for example they call the toilet or latrine the ‘saddle’ and ‘urinary bowl’ and ‘chalice’”). 68. See note 59. 69. In a broader sense, the bolge themselves are part of a digestive system; see Robert M. Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell,” in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 61–93. After the “umani privadi” in Inferno 18, we find Maometto’s viscera exposed “fin ove si trulla” and revealing “il tristo sacco che merda fa . . .” (Inferno 28.24–27). The conformation of the popes to Satan may also point to Satan’s eating and excretion of the damned, as in the Last Judgment walls in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and in the Florentine baptistery; significantly, the opening in which Dante places his popes is described as a mouth (“bocca,” Inferno 19.22). 70. See note 55, and Horace, Ars, 220, “Satyros nudavit” (“stripped the Satyrs”); cf. Claudio Villa, “Terenzio (e Orazio) in Toscana fra IX e XIV secolo,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, 3:10 (1992): 1103–15; here 1112–13. 71. See the review of responses by Peter Hainsworth, “Dante’s Farewell to Politics,” in Dante and Governance, ed. John Robert Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 153–69; here 169. 72. Beatrice’s “più giuso” also links Inferno 21.43, “Là giù’l buttò,” to the series of upend- ings, among other passages (e.g., “son giù volte,” Inferno 5.15). 73. See 2 Peter 2:4, “Si enim Deus angelis peccantibus non pepercit sed rudentibus inferni detractos in tartarum traditit in iudicium cruciatos reservari” (“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but delivered them, drawn down by infernal ropes to the lower hell, unto torments, to be reserved unto judgment”), in reference to cast-down demons (echoing Isaiah 14:11, of Lucifer: detracta est ad inferos superbia tua” [“Thy pride is brought down to hell”]).

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74. See Saint Augustine’s Enarratio in Psalmo CXLVIII, 9: “Propterea ad ista caliginosa, id est ad hunc aerem, tamquam ad carcerem, damnatus est diabolus, de apparatu superiorum angelorum lapsus cum angelis suis. [. . .] Et alius apostolus dicit, si enim Deus angelis peccantibus non pepercit, sed carceribus caliginis inferi retrudens tradidit in judicio puniendos servari (2 Petr. 2:4): infernum hoc appellans, quod inferior pars mundi sit” (“Thus to this dark place, that is to this air, as if to a dungeon, the devil was damned, having fallen with his angels from the splendid place of the high angels [. . .] and as another apostle says, ‘if then God spared not the angels that sinned’, but thrusting them down into the darkness of the low places, ‘delivered them . . . unto torments’; calling that place Hell, which was the low place in the world”). See Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 101–150, pars 5, in Enarrationes in Psalmos 141–150, ed. Franco Gori and Claudio Pierantoni (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wis- senschaften, 2005), 256. Detrusus is also used of Virgil’s giants, Aeneid 6.586, who would thrust Jove down from his realm (“Iovem detrudere regnis”). They themselves have been cast down to the lowest (imus) place: “hic genus antiquum Terrae, Titania pubes, / fulmine deiecti fundo volvuntur in imo” (“the ancient race of Earth, the Titan’s spawn, thrust down by the thunderbolt, writhe in the deepest abyss,” Aeneid 6.581–2). 75. See Epistola II.3 in Dante Alighieri, Dante Alighieri Opere minori, vol. 3, tome 2, Epistole, Egloghe, Questio de aqua et terra, ed. Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Brugnoli, Enzo Cecchini, and Francesco Mazzoni (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1995), 529. Dante may also recall Joseph’s imprisonment in Egypt (Genesis 41:10): “iratus rex servis suis, me et magistrum pistorum retrudi jussit in carcerem principis militum” (“the king, being angry with his servants, commanded me and the chief baker to be cast into the prison of the captain of the soldiers”). 76. “exul immeritus, a patria pulsus” in Dante, Epistola. II.1. 529. Compare Ovid, Metamor- phoses 15:504: “damnavit, meritumque nihil pater eicit urbe” [he called down curses on my head, and though I’d not deserved it, my father banished me from the city]; but Dante’s textus receptus read: “arguit immeritumque pater proiecit ab urbe” (“I was blamed, and though unde- serving my father cast me from the city”) as reported by Ettore Paratore, Tradizione e struttura in Dante (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), 41. 77. See Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, “Hippolytus’ Exile, Par. XVII, vv. 46–48,” Dante Studies 84 (1966): 65–68. Virgil’s use of detrudo at Aeneid 7.773 (“Stygias detrusit ad undas” [“thrust down to the Stygian waves”]) refers to Aesculapius, the son to Apollo and demigod of healing cast by Jove into the Styx for healing the dismembered Hippolytus (as narrated in Ovid’s account). Cited in the note to Dante’s second epistle, p. 530. 78. Tavoni, Qualche idea (see note 2), 174–81 contrasts the papal sigillo on Bulls as re- proved by Saint Peter in Paradiso 27.52 to the poet’s suggel in Inferno 19.21 (“e questo sia suggel ch’ogn’ omo sganni”). 79. Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta (Parma: Guanda, 1990), Book 10, ch. 136; translation mine.

104 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase Wessam Elmeligi, “The In-Between: The Return of the Mind in Miral Al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010),” in Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 47–57. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 5

The In-Between The Return of the Mind in Miral Al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010)

Miral Al-Tahawy (b. 1970) has her niche as the voice of Egyptian women novelists writing from the perspective of Bedouin culture in the contemporary Arabic literary scene, based on her experiences as a member of Al-Hanadi clan in El-Sharqiyya, a major province in the Egyptian Delta where she grew up.1 After obtaining a BA from Zagazig University and a PhD in Arabic literature from Cairo University, Al-Tahawy moved to the United States where she currently teaches Arabic literature at Arizona State University.2 Al-Tahawy’s literary career puts her among noticeable contemporary Arab female novelists, with most of her novels translated into English, starting with The Tent (1998), Blue Aubergine (2002), and Gazelle Tracks (2009). Her novel Brooklyn Heights, published in Arabic in 2010, was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal in 2010 and shortlisted for the Arab Booker Prize in 2011, before its translation to English by Samah Selim for the American University in Cairo Press in 2012. New York’s famous Brooklyn Heights is used as the title of the novel. It does not, however, have the centrality that the title suggests in the narrative. As the narrator, Hend, recounts her experiences from a Bedouin village to New York, she interweaves Brooklyn Heights, its streets, shops, people, scents, and colors with their Egyptian counterparts. The narrative begins as an attempt at coping with the reality of emigration. An Egyptian Bedouin single mother with her young son struggling to adapt to New York’s throbbing rhythm raises our expectations to follow her daily encounters and their impact on developing the personalities of the two lonely migrants. Nevertheless, another narrative insidiously threads through the primary one. With almost every new encounter, every street corner, every new character, even every observation of her middle-aged body, the narrator slips in a memory spurred by comparison or contrast to the new reality. The narrative develops on two

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layers, narrating two worlds within two time frames like mirror images that are not identical but, in the narrator’s gradually deteriorating mind, end up forming an alternate reality, a parallel universe that becomes indistinguishable from the reality of Brooklyn Heights. The narrative ends with Lilith, an older Egyptian woman who dies in Brooklyn, leaving a son who has already grown increasingly distant and alienated from his mother. Hend knows Lilith as part of the community of migrants in Brooklyn Heights. When she and Emilia, a Russian migrant friend from the community, gather Lilith’s belongings, “Hend’s head spins.”3 Looking at an old photograph of Lilith’s son when he was a boy, Hend thinks he looks like her own son. Skimming through Lilith’s letters and notes, she thinks they are like her letters. She feels she has seen them before. What is more, she feels she has written them before. She even says, “This is my handwriting, they belong to me.” Emilia dismisses Hend’s state as a déjà vu. As Hend walks home, the Russian woman she knows throughout the narrative looks like her grandmother. Once home, Hend recoils in fear, and has nightmares that push her to instinctively do what she used to do when she was a child, burying her head under the covers. She ends up reaching down to touch her underpants only to find them “wet with fear.”4 Hend does not physically return home. Her mind does. The reader never knows whether Hend’s mental state will be permanently locked in her return to the past. Perhaps of all the narratives of return discussed in this book, Hend’s return is the most brutal and the most irrevocable. Place runs through the narrative, punctuating its structure with chapter titles after different parts of Brooklyn Heights, starting with Flatbush Avenue, the street where Hend and her son live. Other places used for chapter titles include Bay Bridge, The Green Cemetery, Windsor Terrace, Coco Bar, Atlantic Avenue, Fulton Avenue, Prospect Park, and Brooklyn Bridge. Interestingly, Hend now lives in Brooklyn Heights. She grew up in a place called Pharaoh’s Hills, referred to as the Heights as well.5 The novel begins with Hend searching on Google Maps for an apartment. Starting with Google Maps is a hint at the glocality of space stressed in the narrative. Place is pinned on a map, but in Hend’s mind it is a fluid space that traverses between Egypt and the United States, home and diaspora. Early on, Hend searches for Egypt in the United States, already embarking on a slow, silent, and crushing psychological journey back. Hend’s eight-year-old son objects to going with her to Bay Ridge, describing it as dirty and vulgar. When he wonders why she likes it, she says, “Maybe it reminds me of home,” and he replies, “But I don’t like Bay Ridge! And I don’t want to go back either.”6 The return in Hend’s mind is not only spatial, but temporal as well. She declares her intention on returning in the future in another conversation with her son. He notices she is sad and, with the self-concern of a child, asks her what he should do if she dies. She tells him that he should go back to Egypt. When he says he does

106 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase The In-Between 49 not want to go back to Egypt, she rephrases her response by saying more precisely, “But we have to go back sometime,” declaring their entire migrant experience as temporary.7 Places in New York evoke memories of places in Egypt, resulting in spatial twinning or pairing through Hend’s memory. For instance, the Greenwood Cemetery in New York reminds Hend of her maternal grandmother. Referred to as the Guest, the grandmother is a Christian peasant chosen by Hend’s Muslim rich grandfather. She was the only one who bore him children. He set her up in a separate house on a hill away from his wives. She remains one of the sources of many folkloric stories that shaped Hend’s imagination. The Guest’s death is linked in Hend’s perception of the Greenwood Cemetery, as it reminds Hend of how “the grandmother died clutching her wooden cross to her chest and was buried in the family crypt.”8 Coco Bar, the little bar beneath the window of Hend’s apartment in Flatbush, reminds Hend of her father. The whiff of beer coming from the beer barrels brings memories of her father’s masculinity, who was “popular with the ladies” who would sing for him from behind their windows when he walked down the streets as her paternal grandmother Zaynab used to say. He would drink beer in his recep- tion house and his friends, and a woman called Fatima al-Qarumiya would compose poetry for him.9 The space that encapsulates Hend’s mental crossing to her past is Brooklyn Bridge, “the hanging bridge” which “casts a glittering mantle of enchantment” for “the passerby, tourists, and immigrants who have walked across it,” all of them transient figures.10 It is on that bridge that Hend accepts to play the brief, silent role of a mother running after her runaway daughter in a short film by Ziyad, the frustrated migrant whose dreams to become a Hollywood film maker end up with him directing what seems to be a cheap, Orientalist, and possibly pornographic, short film. Hend notices that the flimsy plot of the film is an enactment of the role she has always tried to avoid all her life: the daughter chased by tradition. Here she is, on Brooklyn Bridge, running back to her past in a symbolic return to all that she once left.11 Sex is a significant marker of identity for Hend, and a vehicle for her internal journey home. Her gender is identified with sexuality, whether the dangers of being sexually attractive or the pain of being sexually less attractive than others. Hend has a problematic relationship with her body, always feeling it is “a stranger to her.”12 At the age of early adolescence, she is suddenly not allowed to play in the streets with her brothers. At the same age, she notices how her classmates with fuller bosoms are favored by male teachers. In Brooklyn, the neighbor above her apartment invited her to tango classes that he teaches. At the dance studio, her shyness of her body reminds her of her awkwardness among her female classmates at school in Egypt. Her earliest awareness of the female body is not of her body, but of the bodies of other young women who reached puberty before she did. She remembers

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them discussing their period cramps and growing breasts, giggling at shared experiences she did not understand.13 The same contradicting duality applies to her observations of others. One example is Zuba, a classmate who displays uninhibited sexuality, dancing in recess, and throwing lewd sexual comments and jokes about teachers and students, saying she is from Bulaq, a district in Cairo known for the stereotype of its strong outspoken working class.14 There is also Noha, another classmate and the daughter of a grocer in the neighborhood, who plays hopscotch, revealing her legs as she jumps, and enjoying the attention of boys. For Noha, the sexual innuendo of the simple game “brought her hidden talents” to the attention of boys, and, in a community that was oppressive to girls, that was all she had.15 As Noha hears her father quarreling with her mother, she dances even more furiously. This brings the wrath of Noha’s family. The mother pinches Noha’s thighs because she dared reveal them while playing. Noha and Hend replace the “perilous, obscene game” of hopscotch with collecting beads and the remains of old pottery.16 This does not appease Noha’s family, however, and the mother pinches Noha’s thighs again, this time for “wandering around like a stray cat.”17 The father locks Noha up. Soon, as Noha reaches puberty, she disappears, until Hend hears that her classmate has married. At this point, Hend learns the popular expression that is used to refer to puberty and sexual maturity of young women: “the sculptor of girls kidnapped her,” which, not only sexualizes the female body, but links it permanently, and favorably, to male abduction. The eroticized dance of the hopscotch of childhood reflects Hend’s attempts to learn tango. As Charlie, her neighbor and tango instructor, teaches her the moves, Hend starts to feel sexually drawn to him. This sensation is mainly enhanced by her overhearing his sexual encounters with women who visit him in his apartment on the floor above hers. The sexual tension between Hend and Charlie ends badly. Hend remembers her husband’s repeated incidents of infidelity, including when she witnessed him flirting with her friend.18 She suddenly rejects Charlie’s sexual advances and he leaves, curs- ing her and adding to her insecurity about her body by angrily ridiculing her “big fat ass.”19 Both dances remain sexualized activities that she watches, brushes with briefly, but does not fully embrace. Hend’s sexuality is interrupted by motherhood. Her perception of her body is marked by an acute awareness of bodily fluids, from the blood of her peri- ods, to the milk oozing from her breasts that persists up to the present time of the narrative although her son is eight years old, causing her to vaguely worry about one day dying from breast cancer like her mother did, even to her sweating armpits that embarrass her during the tango dance lessons. Another aspect of Hend’s complex relationship with her body is marred with corporal punishment. Among the earliest incidents she recounts in the narrative is the mother beating Hend for defying her.20 More “attempts to break her in”

108 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase The In-Between 51 follow and fail.21 Hend witnesses more incidents with other girls tamed by their families in Egypt. Ironically, one of her last acts of rebellion in Brooklyn is participating in Ziyad’s film where“ all she had to do was run after a little whore pretending to be her daughter—the very role that she had spent her whole life trying to avoid.”22 What makes Hend perceive the role as a shame- ful betrayal of her endeavors to free herself of restraints is also the rest of the flimsy plot. An Arab man catches his unruly teenage daughter kissing a man on Brooklyn Bridge. He drags her home, pulls down her “tight jeans” and whips her with his belt on her buttocks and legs. The daughter runs naked on the bridge with welts from the whipping on her thighs as the mother, Hend wearing a veil, follows her.23 The published translation does not mention the detail of the welts showing on the daughter’s legs as she is running on the bridge, but the Arabic original does.24 Escaping a reality of disrespect for the Arab female body for its sexuality, Hend leaves her country only to end up enacting a sexual fantasy degrading the Arab female body for the pleasure of an American audience. What is worse, she is not even the lead character. She is her mother, grandmother, Noha’s mother, and all the women who contributed to the humiliation of younger women. She plays the role of the very women she leaves home to avoid. Sex for Hend becomes an element, not only of punishment by adults, objectification by the community, disdain by men, but also betrayal by men, other women, and, ultimately, by herself. The painful associations she has with sex, like other elements of her identity, are strung through a chain of memories that link her past experiences to her present life, taking her back and forth as she relives the sexual oppressions of her past with the sexual frustrations and disillusionments of her present. Religion is an expectedly looming presence in the upbringing of a woman growing up in a conservative community. Religion for Hend progresses in different directions. On a more fantastical side, it tickles her imagination with her father’s Quranic stories. She remembers her father telling his children, who are circling around him, Abrahamic stories such as those of Joseph and Noah.25 For Hend, the aspiring writer, the narrativity of Quranic stories seems to inspire her literary tendencies. Those stories that Hend listens to attract her to Said, a Christian Egyptian in Brooklyn. Thinking that Said is interested in her, she goes out with him and accompanies him to his church. Only there, as she listens to Biblical stories and notices Said’s lack of interest in her as a person does she realize that he is a missionary trying to convince her to convert. Religious stories, then, take a different shape for her and suddenly she sees them as vehicles for indoctrination. As a Muslim in an increasingly conservative Islamic community, hair is problematic for Hend. On the one hand, her mother tells her to take care of it as it is her only good feature, thus establishing a love-hate relationship between Hend and her hair. As an adolescent, Hend is among the first

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students to cover her hair in Islamic veil, perhaps as a response to the delay in puberty that embarrasses her in comparison to her classmates who are rapidly growing as adolescents.26 She “strategically” lets a lock of her hair out of her scarves, however, as God will not “consider a strand of hair as a mortal sin.”27 When she reaches puberty, Hend removes her headcover, and replaces the loose robes she used to wear with tight clothes that flatter her curves.28 Ironically, at the end of the narrative, Hend combines both the curve-hugging clothes with the headcover in the only role she gets to play in Ziyad’s dubi- ously erotic short film. Her role requires her to wear a Pakistani-style veil like the one worn “by pitiful Muslim mothers in old movies”29 and run on Brooklyn Bridge, her breasts heaving under her clothes as the headcover falls off and the sun glistens on her greying hair, in apparent fetishization of the veil.30 The greying hair of the mother Hend plays in Ziyad’s film reflects the reality that Hend had her first grey hairs as early as at age ten, in response to a ruthless punishment by her grandmother Zaynab who locked her up in a dark room where rabbits chewed next to the terrified girl until she wet herself.31 Hair is another bridge symbol that links Hend’s past and future in incidents of oppression, real and fake, parental and religious, Egyptian and American. Once again, as Hend’s relationship with religion oscillates between past and present, it also crosses between Islam and Christianity. Just like religious anecdotes, whether Quranic or Biblical, are narrated to her by patriarchal figures, the role of the victimized woman she plays is influenced by Muslim and Christian cultures. In the old Egyptian movies she watches and enacts again alone in front of her mirror, women are portrayed as repentant sinners. Similarly, at a young age, she is influenced by the notion of sainthood and “when she grew a bit older, she took on the role of the ‘saint’.”32 Religiosity for Hend meant that “she lost weight and went around with a skinny Christ- like body covered in rags that exhibited her piety for anyone who cared to notice.”33 Christianity and Islam mingle in Hend’s memories, with her grandmother The Guest, carrying her wooden cross to the grave, while her mother and other grandmother Zaynab call her “little demon,” using a notorious religious figure to discourage disobedience.34 Religion in Hend’s life reflects the noticeable changes in Egyptian society in the last few decades as it became more conservative. Hypocrisy is highlighted in memories of outwardly religious figures who secretly contradict what they preach. The starkest example is Hend’s art teacher. Following strict conservative interpretations of Islam, he forbids his students from drawing living beings, assigning “landscapes that illuminate the Creator’s wisdom” instead.35 He avoids looking at Zuba, the Cairene student who flaunts her sexuality, and addresses Hend who sits next to her, thus adding to Hend’s self-image that she is less attractive and inexorably linking unattractiveness

110 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase The In-Between 53 to piety. Zuba, in retaliation, mocks him after class and refers to him as a pansy.36 Nevertheless, to everyone’s surprise, one day both the art teacher and Zuba disappear, with rumors that they have run away together after he got Zuba pregnant, introducing Hend to religious hypocrisy.37 Class shows up in the narrative, both in Egypt and the United States. Class mobility, like religion, is linked to a form of hypocrisy, especially in the case of Hanan, another one of Hend’s childhood friends. She is the daughter of the neighborhood’s tailor. Hend’s mother sends her frequently to their house with clothes that need adjusting. Known simply as Umm Hanan, the tailor is known also for her sexual escapades, singing, and flirting, as well as having a large number of young women she trains as tailors, but who in reality hardly do any tailoring, but serve Umm Hanan, including massaging her and pam- pering her, hinting, perhaps, at Umm Hanan’s role as some kind of “madam” using the young, economically disadvantaged women for other purposes.38 Umm Hanan remains unabashedly brazen until her daughter Hanan is married off at a young age to a man who takes her to an oil-producing country. 39 Everything changes after that and Umm Hanan goes to the pilgrimage in Mecca, comes back with merchandise such as headscarves, loose-fitting conservative women’s robes, incense, and other Arabian gulf products that suit the changing Egyptian community of the last two decades of the twentieth century.40 The more serious change, however, is that Umm Hanan starts looking for younger women, not as apprentices, but as wives for rich older men from oil-producing countries, men who never show up in the neighborhood, but wait for their brides to be sent to them. Gradually, Umm Hanan’s nickname changes from “the lady” to “hajja” (or the pilgrim), and instead of saying that the men visiting her are suitors for her, she starts saying they are suitors looking for brides and that she is match-making for free only as a service to the girls of the neighborhood.41 Economic changes make class mobility in Egypt erratic. The narrative points the finger clearly at petrodollars. Many families, like Umm Hanan’s, move up economically. All the friends of Hend’s father leave Egypt and work in oil-producing Arab countries, except her father. He does not give in to her mother’s argument that traveling to oil-producing countries is the only viable economic choice for most people at the time. He staunchly believes he is Egyptian, who will live and die in Egypt. Relying on his affluent family, Hend’s father has never had to work. He graduates from law school but does not practice law. Rather, in his strong community spirit, he solves problems among community members for free, to the anger of his wife who notices he spends more money on his goodwill than gain anything from his profession. Eventually, the family feels the strain of the father’s carefree decisions as the economic changes in Egypt take their toll. Hend remembers how cracks in the ceiling start to show and the mother has to put something to collect raindrops,

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how old clothes regularly need to be fixed to fit the growing children instead of buying new clothes. All this stands in sharp contrast to a few years earlier before the petrodollar economy hit the region, when Hend remembers the father’s elegance as he went the office (which functioned mainly as a private club for his friends) or to the mother’s expensive dresses that she wore on the rare occasions she went out with her father. Hend remembers this as she cleans tables at a local restaurant in Brooklyn. Sitting in coffee shops with the immigrant community in economically less privileged areas of New York, or on the stairs in front of the refugee assistance office, she discovers how the immigrants she gets to know are mostly professionals, teachers or doctors who now work as unofficial nurses with no legal papers or are unemployed. The gradual erosion of the middle class crosses the ocean with migrants, making class issues another unwelcome connection between home and diaspora. Ethnicity figures out in Hend’s Bedouin origins. In Egypt, living near Pharaoh’s Hill, Hend learns the fascinating stories of her lineage. She learns of her grandfather, the rich man who, while riding across his lands, sees a young female peasant, picks her up on his horse and throws a gold coin at her father, then takes the girl to a new house he builds for her on the hill away from his other wives, where she learns to become his new bride and gives him his only offspring. The grandmother, called the Guest, is known also as the Copt. The link between Coptic Egypt and Bedouin Egypt is interestingly intertwined in this marriage, shedding light on the rich, intricate fabric of Egyptian society outside the major cities of Cairo and Alexandria. In Brooklyn, ethnicity for Hend gains broader proportions as she is pro- filed as simply Arab. The details of her background vanish in the migrant overgeneralization. She uses that to lie to those who ask her about her job, and she says she teaches Arabic, thus ascribing to an ethnic aspect of her identity that has become clearer to her only in diaspora. Ironically, the man who bombards her with questions about her legal paperwork and her job is an Arab waiter at a coffee shop called Arabian Nights, symbolizing how Arabic culture is reduced to a self-orientalizing ethnicity that migrants adopt. Even more ironically, the waiter reminds Hend of her stern Arabic teacher although he makes fun of her when she says she teaches Arabic, wondering mockingly, “You think Arabs in America need to learn Arabic? Now they bring teachers over here?”42 The waiter, in his disdain for Arabic teachers while living off his work at a coffeehouse called Arabian Nights, echoes the unstable, self- serving and perhaps hypocritical representation of ethnicity in migration. The contrast between Bedouin outskirts and Cairo is highlighted when Hend accompanies her family in short visits to Egypt’s capital. The mother is always formally dressed in high heels. They always return the same day driving the father’s Cadillac, a mark of his affluent family, bashing the stereo- typical misinformation that communities outside Cairo are poor. The family’s

112 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase The In-Between 55 remarks about Cairo focus on the stifling crowds and the exhausting long avenues. Another contrast is shown in Zuba, the girl from Bulaq, the district in Cairo known in popular Egyptian culture for its unabashedly outspoken residents. Zuba puts her hand on her waist and hurls curses at her classmates, proudly and threateningly telling them she is from Bulaq. She is also the most outgoing sexually and ends up running away with the art teacher. Relying on witnessing Zuba in class, Hend pictures the city-dwellers of the capital with a mixture of awe and fear. Nationality is central to Hend’s interactions with immigrants. Fulton Street, where the Refugee Assistance Agency is located, is a dark satire of American society as a melting pot of immigrants, for the only thing melting in the novel is the hopes of refugees waiting for coupons and other forms of assistance at the agency. There, Hend meets other migrants from various countries. Their countries of origin are consistently part of their identities. There is Narak, the Armenian whose toy shop attracts children that remind him of his work as an art teacher at a school in Baalbek.43 There is Naguib Al-Khalili, whose sweets, such as kunafe, baklava, and lady’s fingers, are prepared in recipes designed to remind his Arab customers of the sweet and painful memories of home.44 Naguib’s nephew is Ziyad, the aspiring film maker and another man who disappoints Hend. She is initially attracted to him only to find out he sees her as a potential second-rate actress who fits the role of the typical Muslim mother in his short film. Nazahat, who fled Bosnia, is a doctor who can only find occasional jobs as an unofficial nurse caring for the elderly, a midwife for those who cannot afford insurance or do not want to attract the attention of immigration authorities, or just as someone who gives medical advice.45 There is Abdul from Afghanistan, twenty years younger than Hend and trying to get her to accept his sexual advances by offering her cigarettes and Afghan hashish.46 Their conversation underlines the narrow non-Arab perception of Egyptians, either confusing them with Palestinians,47 or discussing the Egyptian military.48 Emilia, the Russian woman, reminds Hend of her grandmother Zaynab, triggering the last episode of mental disorientation that sends Hend home hiding under her bedsheets, remembering when her grandmother locked her up with rabbits. Lilith, whose real name is Laila, is an elderly Egyptian woman whose problematic relationship with her son brings to life Hend’s fears that she might end up like Lilith, especially as Hend already feels alienated by her young son who often criticizes her and shows early signs of independence. Hend associates herself with Lilith so closely that her mental state deteriorates sharply when Lilith dies. Going through Lilith’s belongings with Emilia, Hend sees the photos of Lilith’s son as her own son’s, and believes Lilith’s handwriting to be hers and Lilith’s letters to be her letters.49 It is Lilith’s death that finally bridges the gap between imagination and reality, and completes Hend’s mental return to her homeland.

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In Brooklyn Heights, Al-Tahawy’s portrayal of return offers a unique and intimate insight into the mental state of the hesitant migrant whose mind resembles two mirrors facing each other, one of the homeland and another of the destination, producing endless reflections of each other. Hend falls somewhere between the successful return of Mahfouz’s Sinuhe and the failure to return of Hussein’s man of letters. It is also possible to view all three as various modes of return: Sinuhe’s return is spiritual with his burial in his homeland, the return of the man of letters is intellectual through the unpub- lished manuscripts that his friend salvages, and Hend’s return is psychological, living feverishly in her deteriorating mind. What all three of them share is some degree of regret, some acknowledgment of failure, or at the very least disillusionment. Mahfouz’s Sinuhe returns to learn of the tragic mistake he made when he left. The man of letters dies knowing his life’s work went unappreciated by the very culture that he revered, and rejected by the city that he left everything to embrace. Hend cannot physically go back and cannot adapt to the new world, so her body stays while her mind returns, both tortured by her inability to play the leading role she has always craved.

NOTES

1. Faber, https:/ /ww w .fab er .co .uk /a uthor /mira l - alt ahawy /. 2. Ibid. 3. Miral Al-Tahawy, Brooklyn Heights, trans. Samah Selim (Cairo, IL: The American University in Cairo Press, 2014), 181. 4. Ibid., 182. 5. Ibid., 49. 6. Ibid., 29. 7. Ibid., 66. 8. Ibid., 38. 9. Ibid., 49. 10. Ibid., 157. 11. Ibid., 159. 12. Ibid., 71. 13. Ibid., 72. 14. Ibid., 162. 15. Ibid., 91. 16. Ibid., 93. 17. Ibid., 94. 18. Ibid., 77. 19. Ibid., 83. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Ibid., 9. 22. Ibid., 164–65.

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23. Ibid., 158. 24. Miral Al-Tahawy, Bruklin Hayts (Arabic) (Cairo: Dar merit, 2010), 239. 25. Ibid., 64. 26. Ibid., 58. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 159. 30. Ibid., 158. 31. Ibid., 47. 32. Ibid., 160. 33. Ibid., 162. 34. Ibid., 47. 35. Ibid., 162. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 163. 38. Ibid., 98. 39. Ibid., 100. 40. Ibid., 99. 41. Ibid., 100. 42. Ibid., 25. 43. Ibid., 136. 44. Ibid., 138. 45. Ibid., 103. 46. Ibid., 109. 47. Ibid., 106. 48. Ibid., 108. 49. Ibid., 181.

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