Slavery and African Oral Traditions in the Historical Novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves by John Thomas Maddox IV

Dramas of Memory: Slavery and African Oral Traditions in the Historical Novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves By John Thomas Maddox IV Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish and Portuguese August, 2014 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Earl E. Fitz, Ph.D. Jane J. Landers, Ph.D. William Luis, Ph.D. Emanuelle K. Oliveira-Monte, Ph.D. Benigno Trigo, Ph.D. Copyright © by John Thomas Maddox IV All Rights Reserved ii To Luciana Silva, who made Brazil part of me and came with me in search of more, to Dad, who told me I would be the first Dr. Maddox, and to Mary Margaret, Joyce, and Regina Maddox, who cared for me in ways only they knew how. iii Acknowledgements The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is a team. My professors and colleagues have all contributed to my formation as a scholar, teacher, and professional, but I am especially grateful to Earl E. Fitz and William Luis. They have pushed me to be my best since my arrival at Vanderbilt, and their support and mentorship have led to many victories during my time here, including this dissertation. Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte, Benigno Trigo, and Cathy Jrade have devoted much time and effort to improving my scholarship. The Center for Latin American Studies, under Ted Fischer and Jane J. Landers, provided encouragement, camaraderie, and opportunities that shaped my research. Paula Covington and Kathy Smith supported my work with the Manuel Zapata Olivella Archives. The Joseph B. Johnson Black Cultural Center welcomed me into African Diaspora Studies. Ana Maria Gonçalves and Isabel Allende were generous with their time and attention. The Robert Penn Warren Center, because of the leadership of Edward Friedman and Mona Frederick, provided me with valuable feedback from accomplished young scholars in diverse fields, generous support, and, most importantly, time to work. All translations in the dissertation are mine unless otherwise noted. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………………………iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………….………………………………………………...…iv Chapter Introduction..............................................................................................................................................................1 I. Literary History: The Nuevo Muntu in Relation to the Literary Treatment of Slavery and the post-Boom............................................................................................................................................18 II. Dramas of Memory for a Nuevo Muntu……………………..…………………………………….........100 III. Setting the Stage for the Nuevo Muntu: Zapata Olivella, Gonçalves, and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic……………………………………………………………………..…………………………...136 IV. Writing Mother Africa………………………………………………………………………….............186 V. The Nuevo Muntu Today……………………………………………………………..…………...........243 VI. Conclusion. Open Gates…….…………………………………………………………………………..290 REFERENCES..……………………………………………………………………..…………………………300 v INTRODUCTION For the first time, a predominantly black group of novelists from throughout the Americas is writing a history of New World slavery that transcends national histories and uses oral and written sources of authority of Western, African, and African-American origin. The focus of this dissertation will be two of its most representative sagas: Afro-Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el gran putas (1983) and Afro- Brazilian Ana Maria Gonçalves’s Um defeito de cor (2006). My definition of historical fiction as a dramatization of history stems from these novels and it incorporates elements of oral and written discourses. This combination allows syncretic traditions of the African Diaspora to be incorporated into written histories of slavery. These authors use historical fiction to create individual and collective black diaspora identities that redefine the tragic history of the nations of Africa and the New World. “Mother Africa” and maternity are central to how these novels construct black history. These novels are prototypes of a subgenre of historical fiction I call Nuevo Muntu (‘New World’ in Spanish and Bantu) historical novels, which revise the history of slavery in the Americas and bear the impact of American and African racial politics of the 1960s. These texts deserve a place in the literary canon, thus making a step toward specific periodization of “contemporary” Latin American literature, now called “post-Boom” narrative by Hispanists, the dominant force in Latin American literature in the United States (Shaw, A Companion, Antonio, “Allende’s”). Before describing the dissertation’s chapters, I will define the four key terms I have borrowed and modified to facilitate discussion of these works: “dramas of memory,” “guardiero,” “Nuevo Muntu,” and “Mother Africa.” I give full credit to those who came before me, though this dissertation will help develop a language with which to discuss New World history and literatures in a new way. Incorporating the oral traditions of enslaved Africans into the literary canon means the meeting of oral and written texts to recall slavery. The origins of Western literature lie in Classical Greece, where Aristotle and the Sophists before him developed rhetoric with which to recall speeches. These were based on special cues that were called a “theater of memory” (Ong 111). Today, literary scholars distinguish between the oral, corporeal performance of theater and its written representation, drama. Eugene Vance uses “dramas of memory” to 1 describe Medieval epic (400), as I develop in Chapter 2. The origins of literary theory and criticism in the West begin with Aristotle’s debate with Plato over the function of literature (what they called “poetry,” and which was almost all orally transmitted). Aristotle concluded that literature was closest to the ideals beyond the appearances of the world (53). His favored form of literature (oral poetry) was the tragedy (53). This performance’s plot structure, designed for the stage, has been taken up by historians from “the last tragedian” Thucydides (20) to Hegel (White 122), and its structure is repeatedly found in historiography. If the novel of today, unlike the poetic genres Aristotle defines, has no specific form (it is, in Latin America, an anti-genre that emulates and often discredits “official” prose for González Echevarría [183]), if it is not the literary critic’s task to establish true/false binaries but to study linguistic forms (thus disabling a separation between historical and novelistic narrations), historical fiction, which can be called “dramas of memory,” must be a narrative mode, structure, or form. This mode can be part of a work or all of it, though it is constant in historical fiction. The historians and philosophers of history that historian Hayden White studies all create dramas of memory, as do the authors of the Nuevo Muntu historical fictions, on which I will further elaborate. This mode of narrative has been present in the New World since the relaciones of the Conquistadores and is present in virtually all novels in the New World. However, what literary critic Seymour Menton calls “historical novels” and “New Historical Novels” use this combination of oral and written discourses almost exclusively (15–17). These texts are the written representation of oral performance. Like the epics and tragedies of old, they are centered around transcendental acts of violence, as is the case of Hegel’s greater drama of history. Thus, combining oral African myths with written Western myths reveals that the West has its own roots in oral myths, as the tragedians knew, so literary critic Walter Ong’s binary of written (European) versus oral (African) cultures cannot be interpreted as a Manichean division between two worlds without considerable common ground. Brazilian Anthropologists have, since Nina Rodrigues, compared Sub-Saharan pantheons of Orishas, Loas, Vodouns, and other spirits to the Greek gods, such as using the word “epopee” for their myths (115). If literary critics do the same, one must question why some pagans have been, since the origins of literature, treated as purveyors of high culture, while others have been consistently excluded from the tradition of the novel. These great gods and immortal heroes 2 are treated as a pantheon, which modern-day tragedians like Zapata Olivella, Gonçalves, and the novelists that come after them appropriate for their works. The notion of the canon, of high literature, is challenged by the presence of the African spirits. By including these myths in their performances, these authors subvert the Western canon, thus becoming an innovative part of it that changes the rest. These novels have new favorite pagans and perform on a never-before-seen stage. Like Cuban writer Miguel Barnet and 104-year-old former slave Esteban Montejo’s text, and the nineteenth-century enslaved poet Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiography before the novels I study, there must also be a perceived double to these novels, permitting a counter-narrative or supplement to previous notions of history. Historical fiction is a double that points out and ameliorates the reader’s ignorance to its new version of history. This is in the tradition of William Luis’s scholarship. His Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (1990) shows that abolitionist novels tell the history that history could not at the time they were written. He views these texts as a counter-discourse

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