Constructing an Archipelago: Writing the Caribbean

Susan J. Ritchie

English Department Ohio State University
sritchie@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu

 

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

 

Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective is a marvelously ambitious rereading of Caribbean literature, letters, and culture, deftly translated here by James Maraniss. But what makes the Cuban author’s book a work of particular interest and importance to postmodern studies is the powerful, shifting, and paradoxical framework he has established for articulating the “certain way” of the Caribbean. For Benitez-Rojo’s chief interest is in the ethnological but nonetheless inessential character that might justify the reference to so many diverse islands, peoples, languages, and histories as “the Caribbean.” His “Caribbean” is a constructed, postmodern, and yet finally coherent sociocultural archipelago.

 

Benitez-Rojo thus engages with the very difficult question of how to perform a cultural study that is postmodern and constructivist but which nonethelessless respects cultural specificities. He puts it this way: “How do we establish that the Caribbean is an important historico-economic sea, and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each a copy of a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor?” (9). Both the value and danger of this work result from the energy and skill with which the author sets often contradictory theoretical apparatuses after this problem and into productive frenzy.

 

The readings are propelled by a roughly Deleuzian conception of an ordering, productive machine that is the Caribbean itself; the very machine from which Caribbean texts seek to escape in their search for non-violence. He calls this machine the “Plantation,” and it is in his attention to the Plantation that he produces the readings that are one of the real gifts of this text. The Plantation system is for Benitez-Rojo the producer of the similarity of differences that makes up the islands of the Caribbean: “the Plantation proliferated in the Caribbean basin in a way that presented different features in each island, each stretch of coastline, each colonial bloc. Nevertheless . . . these differences, far from negating the existence of a pan-Caribbean society, make it possible in the way that a system off ractal equations of a galaxy is possible” (72).

 

His most complete identification of the Plantation takes place in an introductory chapter that examines the history of the Caribbean in terms of the Plantation, and in his examination of his two historical texts: Bartholome de Las Casas’ 1875 history of what he still referred to as the Indes (Historia de las Indias), and Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 essay on the role of sugar and tobacco production in the shaping of Cuba (part of Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar). Benitez-Rojo carefully teases out from Las Casas’ text the author’s guilt for having been an original “encomendero” who both justified the Spanish conquest of Cuba and promoted African slavery as the most efficacious means of running sugar plantations. Las Casas, then, is one of the architects of the Plantation–the larger system of exploitation that would come to determine Caribbean culture. Las Casas, though, is no simple bad guy: Benitez-Rojo’s accomplishment is to show how his work also helps discursively to organize the region’s anti-colonial impulses.

 

Through a scrupulous Freudian reading of Historia” Benitez-Rojo suggests that Las Casas’ text both contains and represents a “rupture” in the “discursive practice that justified the conquest” and that this rupture creates one of the region’s first nationalistic arguments in its imagination of “a providential space in which Europeans, aboriginal peoples, and Africans might live industriously according to religious and civic principles, and where violence toward the Indian and the Negro would be condemned equally by the earthly power of the crown and the Church’s spiritual judgment” (86). The rupture is represented by an enigmatic moment in this historical text: a fantastic description of a plague of ants that reads more like fable than history. Noting the uncanniness of the passage, Benitez-Rojo uses Freudian analysis to show how the fable both disguises and re-presents the actual object of Las Casas’ fascination and guilt: a revolt by plantation slaves. The reading is valuable for its careful attention to the Cuban anti-colonial nationalistic sentiment and to the Plantation’s dual fascination and phobia, its duplicitous posture of defense and exploitation, as regards African culture.

 

As Benitez-Rojo continues to trace the cultural productions of the Plantation-machine in more detail, he takes pains to identify it as a machine born not of postmodernism, but of the Caribbean itself. So while he characterizes Las Casas’ resistance to the colonial binary of master/slave as “an involuntary flourish of postmodernity” (98), his point is finally that these texts offer something more culturally specific. This concern animates his examinations of Ortiz’s often literally fantastic and fabulous discussions of sugar and tobacco production in Cuba, which is less revealing of that historian’s text than it is of Benitez-Rojo’s attempts to ground his own investigations in the explicitly Caribbean. He finds in Ortiz his own precursor: a proto-scholar of the Plantation: “When Ortiz says that ‘to study the Cuban history is fundamentally to study the history of sugar and tobacco as the visceral systems of its economy’ he is suggesting to us ‘another’ mode of investigation whose prototype would be the ‘Contrapunteo'” (158).

 

Benitez-Rojo’s only ungenerous reading similarly projects his own conception of the Plantation on to the work of earlier authors. He criticizes the poet Nicolas Guillen, known for his poems about sugar workers, for his Marxism–and also, it would seem, for his failure properly to understand Benitez-Rojo’s own description of the Plantation well over a half a century before it was articulated. It is strange, he writes, “that Guillen, with his profound understanding of the Plantation, should have fallen for the ingenious pattern of thinking that the mechanical transposition of a European doctrine–as Marxism-Leninism is–to a Caribbean island could be successful as a socioeconomic project; I mean, concretely, that an island plantation, Cuba, for example, could ever produce sugar ‘without tears'” (131). The irony, of course, is that Benitez-Rojo himself is unapologetically supportive of applications of Anglo-European postmodern theories to the Caribbean.

 

Benitez-Rojo is better when he speaks of how he shares this struggle with the West with other Caribbean writers. The Plantation is responsible for the essential paradox of the Caribbean writer: he or she is most Caribbean when most Other. As Benitez-Rojo says of the work of Alejo Carpentier, it “offers itself as a doubly spectacular spectacle: at once directed toward the West in terms of an excess of invention and professional competence (to make an impression, to follow the current), and also directed to the reading in the meta-archipelago, beneath a ritual language, which, in its repetition, tries to interpret two performances of the impossible: to be a Caribbean person and to be there in the Caribbean” (241). Hence in his comparison of the fiction of Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Fanny Buitrago and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, it is Carpentier, whose style bears the greatest resemblance to Western literature, who is celebrated as the most Caribbean. Benitez-Rojo’s eloquent explanation for Carpentier’s appropriation of a largely French naturalism for his own novels is that “It’s obvious that the Path of Words between Europe and America becomes much more assured when one goes out parallel to some famous explorer” (184).

 

Benitez-Rojo does not always trace clear patterns of connection between these sorts of micro-insights about literature and his larger theoretical statements. Indeed, some of his finest moments are also the most disconnected or incidental to any central agenda or design. One of the many oddities of this book, though, is how, despite the apparently loose theoretical bricolage of his own practice, Benitez-Rojo suggests that the Caribbean and its Plantation can best be approached and understood by way of a single theoretical stance: that of scientific chaos theory. Chaos theory, as we have learned in the wake of its recent boom, describes the scientific attempt to study complex natural patterns and behaviors that previously had been thought too noisy or too random to succumb to empirical and statistical prediction. And for Benitez-Rojo, as for other scholars of postmodern culture, what has proved most appealing about chaos is not its highly technical and repetitive mathematics but its seductive thematics and terminologies.

 

Indeed, some of the images generated by chaos theory work well for Benitez-Rojo as descriptions of the turbulent character of Caribbean culture. Like the phenomena that chaos scientists study, his Caribbean text is constantly aswirl in bifurcation and paradox–products of a turbulence which allows equally for radical disturbance and creative productivity. The appeal of chaos as an analogy for postcolonialism is evident: chaos provides a model for the interconnectedness of places and phenomena, yet allows even within that interconnection for the possibility of radical disruption. Like much postmodern theory, work in chaos has described how the local might rupture universalizing metanarratives. The “butterfly effect,” for instance, describes the process whereby seemingly small events, compounded through interdependent feedback loops, can have a dramatic effect on other parts of the system. (The name indicates the statistical conceivability that a group of butterflies flapping their wings in one part of the world could produce a storm in another hemisphere.)

 

But despite the thematic appropriateness of chaos theory, I am uneasy with Benitez-Rojo’s appropriation of it for the analysis of culture. Chaos theory, with its interest in the order of disorder, dabbles in the description of the most mystical of all natural forces: that which in spite of entropy, resists disorder. The end point of scientific chaos theory is a statistical science of wholeness, a goal that seems strikingly at odds with what is otherwise Benitez-Rojo’s confidence in the power of difference. Indeed, his steadfast belief that the cultural diversity of the islands is fully capable of resisting even the homogenizing effects of a postmodern global culture of consumerism is quite marked and controversial: “I see no solid reasons,” he writes, “to think that the culture of the Peoples of the Sea is negatively affected by the cultural ‘consumerism’ of the industrial societies. When a people’s culture conserves ancient dynamics that ‘play in a certain kind of way,’ these resist being displaced by external territorializing forms” (20).

 

Being more suspicious than Benitez-Rojo about the essential character of difference, I am nervous about the practice of once again using a Western science as a means of understanding the history of the colonized world; I worry about how his specific examination of Caribbean texts is sandwiched between discussions of chaos theory as if the Caribbean were some kind of real-world manifestation of Western empirical predictions. Of course, Benitez-Rojo insists that his use of Chaos theory remains on the level of metaphor: “If I have seized hold of certain models belonging to Chaos, it has not been because I think that these can manage to signify fully what’s there in the archipelago; rather it’s because they speak of dynamic forms that float, sometimes in unforeseen and scarcely perceptible ways within the Caribbean’s huge and heteroclitic archive” (269). But while he is interested in understanding the “certain way” of being–the ordering principle that characterizes the otherwise chaotic and disjointed Caribbean–surely even a thematic distinction must be made between that resistance to disorder that we call “culture” and the resistance to disorder that biologists often call “life” itself.

 

Benitez-Rojo’s tendency to understand the cultural specificity of the Caribbean as the product of a “natural” necessity, even while he treats literary texts as strictly social constructions, makes for a strange and troublesome discontinuity in his analysis. One can accept his basic stance on Caribbean literary texts, which, he says, propose “themselves as vehicles to drive the reader and the text to the marginal and ritually initiating territory of the absence of violence” (25). But his characterization of Caribbean culture is more difficult. The identification of the specificity of the culture, what he refers to throughout the book as the “certain kind of way” of the islands, is a highly naturalized, romantic, and even racist process. Thus when he depicts the moment in which he personally reached the age of reason, and understood in a single epiphany what it was to be Caribbean, as the day he witnessed two older Black woman “with an ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs” pass under his balcony in “a certain kind of way,” and that “I knew then at once there would be no apocalypse . . . the Caribbean is not an apocalyptic world” (10), he makes knowledge of the specifically Caribbean dependent on capturing Black women within a male gaze. To praise E. Duvergier de Hauranne’s understanding of the islands, he compliments Haurranne’s 19th-century traveller’s description of Black women walking through a market in Cuba. “It’s clear,” Benitez-Rojo insists, “that Huaranne, a foreigner, saw that these Negresses walked in ‘a certain kind of way,’ that they moved differently than European women” (79).

 

Perhaps it is unfair to expect Benitez-Rojo to transcend the racist sexism of his own cultural text. But these sections of the book are unsatisfactory in other ways as well. Again the terminology of chaos theory seems to impose itself rather awkwardly. Benitez-Rojo ends up describing the Planation as a “strange attractor”–in chaos lingo, a point of regularity within expected randomness (269). But the Planation is no strange attractor; it is the colonial machine in motion. And the exploitation that it has engendered is precisely not the result of natural distribution, as Benitez-Rojo himself suggests in his more Deleuzian moments. After all, he is no ethnographer, but a self-reflective and self-acknowledged product of the very Caribbean he describes, a student of culture doomed, as he discusses in his final chapter, to use alien tools of analysis. A generous reading might recall Benitez-Rojo’s own assertion that the Caribbean text attempts to “neutralize violence” by referring “society to the transhistorical codes of Nature” (17). But this reasoning away of racism is unsatisfactory, for one quickly recognizes that nowhere does Benitez-Rojo account for the ideological or social consequences of this or other particular constructions of Nature. The result is that the unstated mission of a truly Caribbean literature remains the naturalization of some, but not all, of the island’s people through the very act of representation. Thus, for example, when Benitez-Rojo critiques Nicolas Guillen’s poem “West Indes, Ltd,” his vague dissatisfaction that it is too Western appears as the critique that in it, “one does not feel the vital presence of the Negro’s desire” (129).

 

I do not mean to suggest that the troubling paradoxes of Benitez-Rojo’s practice should be cleanly resolved or contained. But his reluctance to chart the make-up of certain key social constructions leaves his work, for me at least, something less than a full engagement with the problematics of postmodernity. For there is often no compelling reason to assume that the fragmentation he enacts is really “postmodern” at all. He acknowledges that Caribbean discourse, like the islands themselves, “is in many respects prestructuralist and preindustrialist, and to make matters worse, a contrapuntal discourse that when seen a la Caribbean would look like a rumba, and when seen a la Europe like a perpetually moving baroque fugue, in which the voices meet once never to meet again” (23). And one of his recurring points is that even if postmodernism might provide a strategically interesting way of addressing Caribbean culture, within the postcolonial context, it will always remain an ill-fit. Yet I am not troubled by the presence of the premodern in the texts, social or literary, but by his description of his own methodology as postmodern. In the terms of classic Derridean symptomology, what is alarming is that Benitez-Rojo’s own postcritical methodology should produce text that so closely matches that of the precritical. “It’s no surprise,” he writes, “that the people of the Caribbean should be good boxers and also, of course, good musicians, good singers, good dancers, and good writers” (22). One wonders: did he need chaos, or even the Plantation, to perform these readings that stick, after all, fairly closely to the text? Perhaps not, but the methodological dynamic of the Plantation is evident in the progression of readings, where repetitions and difference do create a sense of the “endless combat that must necessarily remain undecided within the problematic interplay of confrontations, truces, alliances, derelictions, offensive and defensive strategies, advances and retreats, forms of domination, resistance and coexistence that the Plantation’s founding inscribed in the Caribbean” (111).

 

If I have expressed some serious reservations about this work, the daring with which it displays and enacts its own paradoxes makes it to my mind indispensable to the ongoing project of postmodern cultural studies. And while I have been critical of Benitez-Rojo’s use of the postmodern, perhaps he deserves the label all the more for his own awareness that for him, the postmodern is only an ill-fitting interim strategy with, finally, a single virtue: the “virtue of being the only [paradigm] to direct itself toward the play of paradoxes and eccentricities, of fluxes and displacements; that is, it offers possibilities that are quite in tune with those that define the Caribbean” (271). That Benitez-Rojo would be so restless with a paradigm of restlessness recommends him absolutely.