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Seneca in Cuba: Gender, Race, and the Revolution in José Triana's Medea en el espejo

2011; Routledge; Volume: 59; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08831157.2012.625911

1940-3216

Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos,

Cuban History and Society

Abstract This article places renewed emphasis on the gender and racial dynamics in José Triana's Medea en el espejo (Medea in the Mirror; Havana, 1960) by examining its relationship to Lucius Annaeus Seneca's Medea, a major source of inspiration for the Cuban dramatist that has been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. It demonstrates that Triana appropriates the image of Medea as a vengeful witch from the Roman text and accordingly constructs a heroine oscillating between antithetical subject positions: man and woman, master and slave, self and other. Situating the play in its sociopolitical context, the article argues that the indeterminacy of Triana's heroine, a mulata named María, for artistic and cultural reasons, is symptomatic of Cuba's liminal position and the collapse of hierarchical distinctions with the advent of the revolution in 1959, a temporal border that marked the beginning of a new era and caused the blurring of social boundaries. Triana, I conclude, revisits the myth of Medea and uses it as a vehicle for raising questions about the abuse of power and the continuous suppression of black agency under Castro. Keywords: Cuban RevolutionliminalityMedeaLucius Annaeus SenecaJosé Triana Notes This article has its origins in a talk delivered at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky in March 2010. I would like to thank Haralambos Symeonidis for the invitation and Enrico Santí for his criticism. I am indebted to the following readers for their insightful comments that helped me improve the paper significantly: Sandra Cypess, Judith Hallett, Lorna Hardwick, Fiona Macintosh, and Maria Marsilio. I am also grateful to actor, Giorgos Doussis, for providing the illustrations from the Athens performance of Medea en el espejo included here and to director, Ioannis Petsopoulos, for sharing his vision on Triana's theater. The research for this publication was supported by a generous summer grant from Saint Joseph's University. 1. Of the four volumes published in English that examine Medea's reception (Bartel and Simon; Clauss and Iles Johnston; Corti; Hall, Macintosh, and Taplin), only Bartel and Simon includes a chapter about a version by Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga. The database of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at the University of Oxford lists only four stage productions of the play in Latin America: Argentina (1954), Mexico (1964, dir. J. Solé), and Brazil (1970, dir. Silnei Siqueira; 2000, dir. José Henrique Moreira). APGRD includes an entry for the 1996 performance of Medea en el espejo at Brixton Shaw Theater in London (dir. Yvonne Brewster) but provides no record of its original production in 1960 in Havana or its recent staging in Athens (Akis Dhavís Theater, dir. Ioannis Petsopoulos, 7 Nov. 2008 to Jan. 2009). Data retrieved from the Web site of the archive (http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk) on 10 July 2011. 2. For these and other titles, see Miranda Cancela, "Medea y su palinodia," "Medea y la voz," "Medea: Otredad," "Palinodia." See, also, Pociña, "Motivos" 519. 3. All quotations from the play are from Triana. All translations are my own. 4. On the reception of Electra Garrigó, see Anderson 97–99 and Townsend 173–74. The play was staged at the same venue as Medea en el espejo, the Sala Teatro Prometeo, under the direction of Francisco Morín, who directed Triana's play a few months later. 5. On Medea in Spanish literature of the medieval period and the Golden Age, see Biglieri; Julio; Pociña, "Tres." On Seneca's Medea (lines 375–79) as an inspiration for Columbus and the navigators in the age of discovery, see Clay; Laird 227. 6. See, e.g., Dauster, "Game" (Latin) 3–4, "Game" (Dramatists) 170–72; Escarpenter and Glaze 468; García 147–49; Lima 561–65; Pérez Asensio esp. 232–51. 7. Scholars generally agree that Seneca's Medea was written during Claudius's reign, most likely after his invasion of Britain in AD 43. See, e.g., Ahl 13–14; Hine 3–4; Nisbet 96–97. 8. Coming from a former colony, Triana received a Eurocentric education and was trained to read the Generation of '98, a group of poets, novelists, playwrights, and thinkers active during the war of 1898, who reinvigorated Spanish letters and restored Spain to a position of intellectual and literary prominence after its defeat by the Americans and the loss of its international prestige. Unamuno occupied a prominent position on this list and had a profound impact on Triana as a writer, as Triana has admitted (Vasserot 124). 9. Bergamín first immigrated to Mexico, where he founded the publishing house Editorial Séneca (Salgado 197). On Seneca's influence on Bergamín, see Camacho Rojo 925–97. 10. Bergamín also sees a strong connection between the story of Medea and Spain's past as a colonial superpower. As he states in Fronteras infernales de la poesía (1959) regarding the reference of Seneca's Medea to Thule (375), an imaginary island denoting the furthest piece of land, as well as an unattainable goal: "aquél última Thule que nos abre de par en par las puertas del infierno … como se las abría a España entero, si esto fue profecía, la aventura de sus trágicos navegantes" (19; qtd. in Mimoso Ruiz 181). See also Citti and Neri 108–09. 11. As Morín (214) observes in his memoirs, he met Bergamín in 1957 while on tour in Paris, where the Spanish essayist showed him a sample of his Medea, which Morín decided to stage. Because Bergamín's play was short—it was written to be read—Morín completed the performance with Federico García Lorca's poem Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín. 12. Besides Unamuno's translation and Bergamín's adaptation, the list of Spanish Medeas in the 1950s includes a play by Juan Germán Schroeder titled Medea (1954) and Elena Soriano's novel Medea 55 (1955; Pociña, "Tres" 758). As Miranda Cancela ("Espejo" 209) notes, in 1958, while Triana was living in Spain, Alfonso Sastre produced his own version of Medea, which was loosely based on Euripides' play. 13. On Spanish Senecanism, see Citti and Neri 81–148. 14. Bibliography on Medea in pre-Euripidean poetry and art is voluminous. See, e.g., Allan 17–23; Giannini; Graf; O'Higgins; Sourvinou-Inwood 262–66. 15. On the representation of Medea as an evil witch in French theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Wygant. 16. For a detailed account of these socioeconomic changes, see Kutzinski esp. 134–62. 17. Arturo Ripstein's Así es la vida, a film adaptation of Seneca's Medea, has the same setting, on which see Tovar Paz. 18. From 1953 until 1961, Medea became identified with the name Maria through Maria Callas's critically acclaimed renditions of the title role in Cherubini's revived opera performed at various international venues and released on record in 1957. In popular imagination, this identification became more prominent when Aristotle Onassis left Callas (who allegedly aborted their child) to marry the American "princess" Jackie Kennedy. See Kerrigan 102–03 for further bibliography. 19. During a talkback in Athens, when he was asked why he chose the name María for his heroine, Triana replied, "[T]here is a María in almost every Cuban family" (qtd. from a telephone conversation I had with director Ioannis Petsopoulos on 11 Aug. 2011). 20. Another zarzuela that premiered in Havana in 1932 is Cecilia Valdés, based on Cirilo Villaverde's novel of the same title, which is regarded as the best Cuban work of fiction from the nineteenth century. It takes place in colonial Cuba in about 1830. Its eponymous heroine is a mulata who falls in love with a white man named Leonardo de Gamboa, son of a land magnate and slave trader. Cecilia is also the product of an affair that Leonardo's father had with a colored woman, which he succeeded in keeping secret. The two young people ignore that they are half-brother and half-sister. Leonard promises Cecilia he will marry her and gains her favors, but when he abandons her for a white, upper-class woman, Cecilia takes revenge by arranging his assassination on the day of his wedding. 21. On the reinterpretation of classical drama through the lens of Catholicism/syncretism in Latin America, see Nikoloutsos 95–99, 102–03; Brunn in this special issue. 22. I intentionally use the verb tame here, for María's uncontrollable and savage nature is compared by Perico Piedra Fina to that of a wild beast and a lioness (44). In her opening monologue (15), María describes herself as a cat that cannot be caged. "Bestial" desire is a core characteristic of Seneca's Phaedra and Medea, on which see Roisman. Medea is called leaina ("lioness") in Euripides (Diggle 187, 1342, 1407). 23. Another epithet attached to María by Perico Piedra Fina is "Snow White's stepmother" (46). In the fairytale, the killer queen in consumed by her obsession with a magic mirror, which she uses as an object of self-gratification and self-assurance. 24. By contrast, in Euripides' play, Medea does not appear onstage until the first episode, in line 214. In Seneca's Medea, the action is divided into five acts. Triana adopts a three-act structure to keep with the Spanish model of dramaturgy, on which see Taylor 16. 25. On catoptromancy ("the practice of divination by means of a mirror") and the reception of Medea in seventeenth-century France, see Wygant 127–51. 26. In Euripides' Medea, Jason's wedding with Creon's young daughter occurs before the play begins. By contrast, in Seneca's tragedy, as in Triana's play, the wedding takes place in the background, during part of the action. 27. Doctor Mandinga bears the generic name of one of the African ethnic groups that were brought as slaves to Cuba after the sugar boom in 1760–1870. The Mandingas introduced the cult of Ozain, the Yorùbá spirit of medicinal and magical herbs. As Brandon observes, "Ozain priests in Nigeria are not simply skilled herbalists; there is also a theatrical aspect to their role in that they allow the deity Ozain to speak to human beings by means of their training as ventriloquists" (136). 28. Triana did not include Madame Pitonisa and Doctor Mandinga in the original version of the play. He added these two characters four years later, as a response to criticism he received when Medea en el espejo was first performed (Edwards xxi). In 1967, Eugenio Hernández Espinosa staged María Antonia, one of the best productions of ritual theater in Cuba. The play narrates the story of a black woman of astounding beauty who is in love with a black boxer named Julián. Motivated by jealousy, María Antonia resorts to Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies to kill her lover. On Cuban ritual theater, see Martiatu Terry. 29. On Medea as both actor and stage manager in act 4 of Seneca's play, see Macintosh 2. 30. The only honor of a mulata is her virginity (Martinez-Alier 115–19), which María lost, as she tells Madame Pitonisa, when Julián forced her to have sex with him one night when he secretly visited her at her father's house. María restores her virginity and honor through the blood of her children. Seneca's Medea also perceives infanticide as a means of revirgination (984–86). 31. On the marriage between Roman and non-Roman citizens, see Treggiari 43–51. 32. By contrast, in Euripides' Medea, the children are to go into exile with their mother. 33. Literally, matules means the "bundles" of tobacco piled one over the other in the barns. 34. By being blonde, J-uliá-n recalls J-aso-n and the Golden Fleece called chrysomallon ("of golden hair") deras in ancient Greek. Julián also wears a gaudy golden chain around his neck and golden rings (39). I owe this observation to director Ioannis Petsopoulos. 35. See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,869811,00.html (accessed 7 Aug. 2011).