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Reading Juan Francisco Manzano in the wake of Alexander von Humboldt

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14788811003700316

1740-4649

Marilyn Miller,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Abstract Abstract Colonial scholars have recently begun to pay closer attention to the traffic of the work of Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano between the Caribbean and Europe, pointing out that the first version of his so-called slave narrative, along with a selection of his poetry, was first published in English translation in London in 1840. This recent shift in Manzano studies signals a growing recognition of the Cuban poet's circulation in an international abolitionist discourse, despite the fact that he himself never left Cuba or even denounced slavery explicitly. By situating Manzano temporally and spatially in relation to Alexander von Humboldt and his comments on Cuban slavery, we can better understand the participation of both in transatlantic efforts to expose and question colonial servitude in the Americas. Keywords: Alexander von HumboldtJuan Francisco ManzanoRichard R. MaddenCubaslaveryabolitionismtranslationreception history Notes 1. Historical uncertainty as to the exact dates of Manzano's birth and death contrasts with the immense amount of biographical information for Humboldt, much of which is provided in his own writings, both scientific and personal. The most careful of Manzano's biographers, Roberto Friol Friol Roberto Suite para Juan Francisco Manzano Havana Editorial Arte y Literatura 1977 [Google Scholar], acknowledges the dearth of documentation faced by historians: without a birth certificate having been located, "one must accept the date Manzano himself indirectly points to, 1793, confirmed date of the birth of Nicolás de Cárdenas y Mazano" (Suite, 49). This date precedes that suggested by Francisco Calcagno Calcagno, Francisco. 1878. Poetas de color, Havana: Imp. Militar de la V. de Soler y Compañía. [Google Scholar] in his 1878 work Poetas de color, which includes a study of Manzano. 2. Cohen Cohen Paul Mapping the West: America's Westward Movement, 1524–1890 New York Rizzolli 2002 [Google Scholar], Mapping the West, 100. 3. In June 1835, Manzano wrote to his benefactor Domingo Del Monte, reminding him: "Yo soy esclavo; y que el esclavo es un ser muerto ante su señor" [Don't forget that I am a slave; and that for his master the slave is a dead being] (Manzano, Autobiografía, 125). I take up this point again later in this essay. For commentary on the difficulties of enunciating the experience of slavery and its multiple forms of violence, including expressive violence, see Barrett Barrett Lindon "African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority." American Literary History 7 3 1995 415 42 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], "African-American Slave Narratives"; Bontemps Bontemps Alex The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press 2001 [Google Scholar], The Punished Self; Davis Davis Charles T. Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Slave's Narrative Oxford Oxford University Press 1985 [Google Scholar] and Gates Gates Henry Louis Jr The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers . New York Basic Books 2003 [Google Scholar], Slave's Narrative; DuBois DuBois Paige Torture and Truth New York Routledge 1991 [Google Scholar], Torture and Truth; Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives; and Scarry, Body in Pain. Despite early examples by Madden and Schoelcher, translators have rarely taken up Manzano's poetry alongside the autobiographical writing. See, for example, King, Autobiography, and Yacou, Un Esclave-poète. 4. Scholars of the works of both authors continue to debate the correct classification of these texts within a specific genre, as well as the degree of "literariness" versus historical value of each work. While Manzano did not call his memoir of early life in slavery an autobiography, nor was it published as such in its first version of 1840, it has now become canonized as the Autobiography. Humboldt's reflection on Cuba, published in 1826 as the Essai politique sur l'île de Cuba, first saw light as chapter 28 of his Relation historique (Paris, 1825–31), which itself was part of the weighty collection of 30 volumes titled Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804 (Paris, 1805–29), thus establishing early on the problem of relegating the text to a specific generic classification. 5. Ortiz and Kutzinski, "Humboldt's Translator," 337; see also Luis, introduction to Autobiografía, 19–20. 6. Havana's City Council deemed Humboldt's Political Essay on the Island of Cuba "extremely dangerous among us because of its author's opinions about slavery and even more so because of the terrible, albeit accurate, picture it presents about the population of color and its immense strength on the island" (Martínez-Fernández, "Introduction," 10). Manzano's story and his text documenting it was apparently considered so dangerous in Cuba that it was secretly smuggled out of the country and first published without attribution of the author, though Friol argues that Madden himself should be censured for the method he used to hide Manzano's identity: "The Spanish authorities did not identify him simply because they chose not to. Manzano was the only ex-slave poet that there was in the Island in that moment. The same goes for using only the initials of the poet on some pages of the book, and the fact that the name Juan appears before some of the poem translations" (Suite, 34). 7. Thrasher, in his preliminary essay to The Island of Cuba, uses the history of Las Casas's defense of the Indians – at the expense of the Africans, who he recommended replace them in their unjust slavery – to chide Humboldt's abolitionist stance: "Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, moved by the deepest compassion for the native races, urged, upon the ground of humanity, the substitution of African slaves for the natives in the labor of the new communities. The hardships of the poor Indian were dwelt upon with the same fervor and zeal, the same heedless inconsistency, that characterizes the appeals of the humanitarians of the present day in behalf of the negro, and the conscience of Europe gave an energetic impulse to the new institution … If we could have an impartial view of the condition of the great mass of negroes in Africa, of their social and military slavery from the earliest ages, subject to the sway of barbarous native chiefs, it might be found that his argument in favor of the change from a savage to a civilized master, was not so inconclusive as is now supposed; and that the step itself was not so cruel as it has been, and still is painted" (Thrasher, "Preliminary Essay," 43–4). 8. See, in particular, Gates, Trials of Phillis Wheatley. 9. Ette Ette Ottmar "Un 'espíritu de inquietud moral.' Humboldtian Writing: Alexander von Humboldt y la escritura de la modernidad." In Humboldt y la modernidad Leopoldo Zea and Hernán Taboada 25 50 Mexico, D.F Fondo de Cultura Económica 2001 [Google Scholar], "'Espíritu de inquietude moral,'" 25. 10. As indicated, there is debate concerning the poet's birth date: Manzano's description of his birth in the Autobiography situates the event in relationship to the birth of his "young master" Nicolás de Cárdenas, for whom varying birth dates have also been suggested. See, for example, the introduction to the 1962 Cuban edition of Manzano's Zafira. 11. Manzano, Autobiografía, 84–5, 89–90. 12. Franco cites communication between Manzano and a fellow poet of color, in which Manzano attests to having hoped for "moral and material improvement" when he left behind the life of servitude, but finds instead that he has become a pariah and victim of colonial society for being an intellectual and black ("Juan Francisco Manzano," 26). 13. Sweeney, "Atlantic Countercultures," 402. 14. Werner and Zimmermann, "Beyond Comparison," 30. 15. Zeuske, "Humboldt, esclavitud, autonomismo," 260–1. 16. See Zeuske, "Alexander von Humboldt and Slavery." 17. See Zeuske, "Alexander von Humboldt and Slavery." Zeuske reiterates certain elements of this argument in "Comparing or Interlinking?" 18. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 127–8. 19. Martínez-Fernández agrees with Humboldt's characterization, noting: "At the time of Humboldt's scientific tour slavery had not reached the appalling intensity and extreme brutality that it would during the apogee of sugar in the middle decades of the nineteenth century … As the century unfolded and as King Sugar spread its wicked mantle across Cuba's plains this picture yielded to a far more sinister scenario with higher rates of enslavement, higher rates of plantation slavery, lower rates of manumission, and growing oppression of blacks and mulattos, both free and slave" ("Introduction," 9). 20. Marable and Mullings include Wheatley's poem in their collection, acknowledging that while many critics have accused her for her "weak stance on slavery," more recent interpretations have been more sympathetic, recognizing that "Wheatley was a product of her times" (Let Nobody, 8). 21. Manzano, Autobiografía, 84. 22. See Branche, "'Mulato entre negros.'" 23. Before he was 20, Del Monte wrote a piece for El Revisor Político y Literario, announcing a poetry collection soon to be published by a young author who for the first time had achieved an "authentic Cuban lyric" style (Bueno Bueno Salvador Domingo Del Monte. ¿Quién fue? Havana Ediciones Unión 1986 [Google Scholar], Domingo Del Monte, 8). That poet was José María Heredia, considered the inaugural voice of Cuba's national literary tradition, despite the fact that some 70 years would pass before Cuba would gain its independence from Spain in 1898. 24. Bueno, Domingo Del Monte, 9. 25. Manzano, Autobiografía, 122. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 26. Branche, Colonialism and Race, 136. 27. Manzano, Autobiografía, 125. 28. Manzano, Autobiografía, 125. 29. Manzano, Autobiografía, 125. 30. "Temo desmerecer en su aprecio un ciento por ciento pero acuérdese su merced, cuando lea, que yo soy esclavo; y que el esclavo es un ser muerto ante su señor, y no pierda en su aprecio lo que he ganado" (Manzano, Autobiografía, 125). 31. "Temo desmerecer en su aprecio un ciento por ciento pero acuérdese su merced, cuando lea, que yo soy esclavo; y que el esclavo es un ser muerto ante su señor, y no pierda en su aprecio lo que he ganado" (Manzano, Autobiografía, 127. 32. For an excellent review of a Cuban slave's right to seek a new master in cases of mistreatment, as well as coartación, the means by which a slave could purchase his or her own freedom, see Fuente Fuente Alejandro de la "Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel." Hispanic American Historical Review 87 4 2007 659 92 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], "Slaves." 33. Manzano, Autobiografía, 128. 34. For an excellent study of Manzano's intellectual milieu, see Labrador-Rodríguez, "La intelectualidad negra." 35. Manzano, Autobiografía, 128. 36. See Azougarh, Juan Francisco Manzano, 117, and Manzano, Autobiografia, 129. 37. Burton, Ambivalence, 63. 38. De Terra De Terra Helmut Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander Von Humboldt, 1769–1859 . New York Knopf 1955 [Google Scholar], Humboldt, 84. 39. Humboldt, Ensayo, II.44–5; also cited in Puig-Samper, "Humboldt," 335. 40. See, for example, "Mariano Luis de Urquijo (1768–1817)," Centro Virtual Cervantes, http://cvc.cervantes.es/ciencia/humboldt/contactos_03.htm, which states: "Urquijo fue el prototipo de político ilustrado, enemigo de los privilegios de la Iglesia, defensor del progreso científico y social (promovió la abolición de la esclavitud en España)". [Urquijo was the prototype of the enlightened politician, enemy of the privileges of the Church, defender of scientific and social progress (he promoted the abolition of slavery in Spain)]. 41. Sachs, Humboldt Current, 84. 42. Humboldt, Political Essay, 260. 43. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 260–1. 44. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 261, 263–5. 45. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 264. 46. Humboldt, Political Essay, 261. 47. Burton, Ambivalence, 20. 48. For Madden's role in the abolition of slavery in Cuba, see Quintana García, "Madden." 49. Madden, La Isla de Cuba. 50. Madden, Island of Cuba, vi. 51. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 259. 52. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 260. 53. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 260–1. 54. Madden, Island of Cuba, xix–xx. 55. Lubrich, "'Egipcios por doquier.'" 56. See Madden, The Turkish Empire. 57. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 260. 58. Madden, Memoirs, 129. I have not been able to identify with certainty the "Albert" referred to in these verses, but it may very well be Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury in the United States when Humboldt visited in 1804, a visit Gallatin referred to as an "exquisite intellectual treat." See "Humboldt as a Resource of Information about the West," Alexander von Humboldt Digital Library Project, http://www2.ku.edu/~maxkade/humboldt/subwashington.htm. 59. Madden, Island of Cuba, vii. 60. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 266–7. 61. See Burton, Ambivalence, 30–1. 62. Madden, Memoirs, 77; also quoted in Burton, Ambivalence, 30. 63. Burton, Ambivalence, 31. 64. Arguably, Manzano's little-known play in verse, Zafira, published in Havana in 1842, is in some sense much more an example of his authorship than is the Autobiography, since it bears his name and was hailed by his contemporaries as the first work of its genre published by an Afro-Cuban. But given that it is set in Algeria in the sixteenth century, it is hard for modern-day readers to understand just why such a text should matter, since it gives us little or nothing of the first-hand account of Cuban slavery so poignantly recounted in the Autobiography. As I have tried to demonstrate in a longer essay, Manzano's Zafira was heralded in the Cuban press, it represented an early milestone in the development of a "minority" literature in the island, and its setting, though remote in time and geography, was read – at least by some – as an allegory of Cuba's colonial condition. I suggest that Manzano drew on the historical precedent of the sixteenth-century Arab King Selim's defense of his territory from the incursions of the Turkish despot Barbararoja, as well as the fresher, first-hand experiences of Madden in Turkey and the Middle East, to dramatize and re-present conflicts familiar to mid-nineteenth-century Cubans engaged in independence struggles, a device many readers would have recognized from Humboldt's writings (see Miller, "Imitation"). 65. Burton, Ambivalence, 24. Burton draws on post-colonial theory, particularly Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence, to explore affinities and tensions between the two men. 66. Burton, Ambivalence, 24. Burton draws on post-colonial theory, particularly Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence, to explore affinities and tensions between the two men. This is not corroborated by Roberto Friol, Manzano's chief biographer. 67. See Miller, "Rebeldía narrativa." 68. Add to this circuitous and uncertain publication history another glaring paradox: the second part of Manzano's autobiographical account, alluded to in the first, disappeared soon after it was written in 1839. What might part two of the Autobiography tell us of Manzano's fate after his early runaway attempt, the point at which the preserved segment of his story abruptly breaks off? While Friol and a handful of other historians have done admirable work tracing Manzano's trajectory in the years between that early flight and his death in 1853 (Friol, Suite, 165), very little is known of the details of Manzano's life in his adult years, particularly after his manumission in 1836. 69. Madden, Poems by a Slave, 156. 70. Manzano, Poems by a Slave, 156. The full text reads: "And surely, a cause like this whose efforts are directed to the removal of ills, terrible beyond all other evils, that involves the question of life and death – that treats, not of the doom of one man, or ten thousand, but of the destiny of the whole people of a quarter of the globe – whose business is with the wrongs and sufferings of stolen men, and whose denunciations are for the atrocious deeds of Christian brokers in the trade of blood, who roll in riches and move in the goodly circles of Cuban society – surely it requires no exaggeration of the evils of Cuban slavery. They are great, indeed, beyond the power of imagination to picture to itself. All that I have ever seen of slavery – and I have seen some of its horrors in various countries–in Africa itself, in Asia likewise, and in America, even in as bad a form as in either of these regions – all that Clarkson ever penned of the magnitude of its evils, when this trade was at its height, or that Sturge or Scoble recently witnessed of its mitigated atrocities, in the transition from slavery to freedom, in the British colonies – and mitigated as they were, God knows they were bad enough to be witnessed even by those already acquainted with all the evils of this system, but still worse to be seen by persons whose eyes were not accustomed to the practical horrors of slavery; yet all that these gentlemen witnessed or described in our colonies, or that I have myself seen there of cruelties inflicted or endured, falls infinitely short of the terrible evils of the slave-trade, that is now carried on in Cuba. It is little to say, that 25,000 human beings are annually carried into Cuban slavery; that at the expiration of thirty years from the date of the abolition of the slave-trade on the part of Great Britain, the odious traffic continues in full force; that no small amount of foreign capital is invested in this trade; that British subjects, now that slavery is put down in our colonies, are embarking their means with impunity in slave properties in Cuba, are buying their slaves of necessity in the slave market, for there is no natural increase of the slave population of Cuba, but a terrible decrease by deaths; which, at the ordinary mortality on the sugar plantations, would sweep away the race in slavery, in ten years, and, according to Humboldt's calculation, in much less, for he states this mortality to vary from ten to eighteen per cent per annum" (156). 71. A more extensive citation bears including: "Tolerably well acquainted with some of the British West India islands, with one of them, both previously and subsequently to the act of emancipation, and having seen something of slavery in many eastern countries, I brought perhaps some little knowledge of the condition of men held in slavery to the subject, which has been the object of anxious inquiry with me, during a residence of upwards of three years in a Spanish colony, where slavery flourishes, and where upwards of four hundred thousand human beings, exist in that condition. Perhaps this extensive acquaintance with slavery in various countries during the last ten years, may have qualified me to form some opinion of the relative evils or advantages of slavery in a Spanish colony" (Manzano, Poems by a Slave, 171). 72. Madden, Memoirs, 86; also cited in Burton, Ambivalence, 19. 73. Madden, Twelvemonth's Residence, vi. 74. Madden, Twelvemonth's Residence, II.32. 75. I am indebted to Vera Kutzinski for bringing this parallel to my attention. See Kutzinski, "Translations of Cuba." 76. Ortiz and Kutzinski, "Humboldt's Translator," 337. 77. Humboldt, "Baron von Humboldt's Political Essay," cited in Ortiz and Kutzinski, "Humboldt's Translator," 337. 78. Thrasher, "Baron Humboldt and Mr. Thrasher," cited in Ortiz and Kutzinski, "Humboldt's Translator," 339–40. 79. Friol, Suite, 41–5. 80. The other single most important first-hand account of slavery in the Latin American canon is, of course, Miguel Barnet's Biografía de un Cimarrón [Autobiography of a Runaway Slave] (1968), which was based on a series of interviews in which the centenarian Esteban Montejo recounted his life during slavery and after its abolition in Cuba. While Montejo's story is compelling, it presents several thorny problems in terms of questions of authorship and its categorization as biography or autobiography, and even as history or fiction – see, for example, Sklodowska, "Testimonio mediatizado." Both texts attest to the ways in which slave narrative was a genre indeed characterized by fictionality and derivative material. 81. Gomáriz Gomáriz José "La poética de resistencia de Juan Francisco Manzano." Casa de las Américas 219 2000 115 20 [Google Scholar], for example, writes that Manzano constructs a "poetics of codified resistance through diverse anti-hegemonic strategies, such as the 'conscious interpretation of a role,' escape from the sugar plantation, and a confrontation with hegemony" ("La poética," 115; my translation). Providing a counterpoint, Branche's essay shows how Manzano makes a concerted effort in his life story to project a self that is fundamentally different from the rest of the slave body; that is, his text does not develop a common cause with other enslaved individuals (see "'Mulato entre negros,'" 79). 82. See Williams's excellent chapter, "Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografía: Narrating the Unspeakable," in Representation, 21–51. Like most critics, Williams ignores, in large part, Manzano's poetic production. On attempts to compile the collected works of Manzano in different eras, see the 1852 manuscript version of the Obras completas at Yale and the 1972 Obras published by the Instituto Cubano del Libro in Havana. 83. Azougarh, Juan Francisco Manzano, 89. This phrase does not appear in the Luis edition of the Autobiografía (see Manzano, Autobiografía, 104). 84. Madden claimed that the second part of the Autobiografía came into the hands of the poet's cruel ama [slavemistress] by way of Ramón de Palma, who was given the task of correcting and copying the manuscript (Burton, Ambivalence, 63). 85. Schoelcher, Polemique Coloniale, 89–93. 86. Welborn, "Victor Schoelcher," 95. 87. Despite the fact that he never left Cuba, Manzano's persona and behavior were linked early on to two French Enlightenment thinkers when an observer remarked of the young slave, "Mire Ud. que éste va a ser más malo que Rousseau y Voltaire" [Watch out, this one is going to be worse than Rousseau and Voltaire] – a comment that propelled the young slave to ascertain "quienes eran estos dos demonios" [who were those two devils] (Azougarh, Juan Francisco Manzano, 82). In chapter 4 of The Social Contract, written in 1762, Rousseau had argued: "To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties … Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts" (Du Contrat social, Essai I.iv, 239). Voltaire decried the religious defense of slavery: "We tell them that they are men like us, that a God died to redeem them, and then we make them work like beasts of burden," he wrote in his Essai sur les moeurs et l'ésprit des nations, a text first published in 1753, with later editions containing new chapters on European colonies in the Americas (Voltaire, 380; also quoted in Hunting, "Philosophes," 409). 88. Madden, Island of Cuba, iv. 89. Manzano, Autobiografía, 137–8. Scholars have arrived at varying conclusions regarding the relationship between Manzano's emancipation and (1) his recital of the sonnet "Mis treinta años" in Del Monte's tertulia and (2) his writing of the Autobiography. The most recent timeline of these events, included in Luis's 2007 introduction to Manzano's writings, dates the composition of the Autobiography to 1835 and the declamation of the sonnet and the purchase of his freedom by members of the Del Monte tertulia to 1836 – both events prior to Madden's arrival that same year in Havana. Nonetheless, many critics tie the freedom papers to the completion of the life story, which Manzano was reluctant to write and repeatedly stymied from finishing, when the painful recollections of his early years in slavery forced him to relive those traumatic events. Brickhouse Brickhouse Anna "Manzano, Madden, 'El Negro Mártir,' and the Revisionist Geographies of Abolitionism." In American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900 Martin Brückner Hsuan L. Hsu 209 35 Newark University of Delaware Press 2007 [Google Scholar] affirms, for example, that "he produced the autobiography in exchange for his freedom" ("Manzano," 210). 90. Various versions of this famous sonnet exist, including one that Friol claims is written in Manzano's own hand. The differences in the two versions point once again to the intervention of editors and correctors in Manzano's textual production (and authority), even in the original Spanish (Friol, 12). 91. Manzano, Autobiografía, 84. 92. Humboldt, Island of Cuba, 265.