Read:
Rojo, Antonio Benítez, and James Maraniss.
"The repeating island
."
New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly
7, no. 4 (1985): 430-452.
Week 1 Discussion Board Assignment due by midnight prompt:
In 200-250 words Respond to Benitez Rojo’s claim of the Caribbean as a series of “repeating” islands that are produced through the chaos of colonization.
Include citations and references. See
Lehman College Library Citation Resources
The Repeating Island The Repeating Island Author(s): Antonio Benítez Rojo and James Maraniss Source: New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly , Summer, 1985, Vol. 7, No. 4, The Caribbean (Summer, 1985), pp. 430-452 Published by: Middlebury College Publications Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40375647 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Middlebury College Publications is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly This content downloaded from �������������128.228.0.70 on Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:46:38 UTC�������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms https://www.jstor.org/stable/40375647 William Luis version is not the only one, but is one among many vershanns. Rhygin's explanations are as important as those proposed by the dominant and powerful elements in society. If writing is a Euro- pean invention, Caribbean people have appropriated it in order to narrate their side of the (his)story. The historical development of the black theme in Caribbean literature represents an impor- tant stage in which Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone literatures, in spite of nationalistic and linguistic differences, emerge into the same light. Antonio Benitez Rojo The Repeating Island Translated from Spanish by James Maraniss In recent decades we have begun to see a clearer outline to the profile of a group of American nations whose colonial experiences and languages have been different, but which share certain undeniable features. I mean the countries usually called "Carib- bean" or "of the Caribbean basin'*. This designation might serve a foreign purpose - the great powers' need to recodify the world's territory better to know, to dominate it- as well as a local one, self- referential, directed toward fixing the furtive image of collec- tive Being. Whatever its motive, this urge to systematize the region's political, economic, social and anthropological dynamics is a very recent thing. For it is certain that the Caribbean basin, although it includes the first American lands to be explored, conquered and colonized by Europe, is still, especially in the discourse of the social sciences, one of the least known regions of the modern world. The main obstacles to any global study of the Caribbean's societies, insular or continental, are exactly those things that scholars 430 This content downloaded from �������������128.228.0.70 on Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:46:38 UTC�������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms usually adduce to define the area: its fragmentation; its instability; its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogenei- ty; its lack of historiography and historical continuity; its contingen- cy and impermanence; its syncretism, etc. This unexpected mix of obstacles and properties is not, of course, mere happenstance. What happens is that post-industrial society - to use a new- fangled term - navigates the Caribbean with judgments and in- tentions which are like those of Columbus; that is, it lands scien- tists, investors and technologists (the new discoverers), who come to apply the dogmas and methods that have served them well where they came from, and who can't see that these refer only to realities back home. So they get into the habit of defining the Caribbean in terms of its resistance to the different methodologies sum- moned to investigate it. This is not to say that the definitions we read here and there of pan-Caribbean society are false or useless. I would say, to the contrary, that they are potentially as produc- tive as the first reading of a book, in which, as Barthes said, the reader inevitably reads himself. I think, nevertheless, that the time has come for post-industrial society to start re-reading the Carib- bean, that is, to do the kind of reading in which every text begins to reveal its own textuality. This second reading is not going to be easy at all. The Carib- bean space- remember- is saturated with messages sent out in five European languages (Spanish, English, French, Dutch and Portuguese), not counting aboriginal languages or the different creole tongues that erode Prosperous discourse from the canebrake to the urban marketplace. Further, the spectrum of Caribbean codes is so varied and dense that it holds the region suspended in a soup of signs. It has been said many times that the Caribbean is the union of the diverse, and maybe that is true. In any case, my own re-reading has taken me along different paths, and I can no longer arrive at such admirably precise reductions. In this (today's) re-reading, I propose, for example, to start with something concrete and easily demonstrated, a geographical "fact": that the Antilles are an island bridge connecting, in "another way," North to South America. This geographical acci- dent gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction (of what?): empty spaces, unstrung voices, ligaments, sutures, voyages of signification. This archipelago, like others, can be seen as an island that "repeats" itself. I have drawn attention to the word "repeats" because I want to give it the unsettled meaning with which it appears in post-structuralist discourse, where all 431 This content downloaded from �������������128.228.0.70 on Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:46:38 UTC�������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Antonio Benitez Rojo repetition brings necessarily a difference and a deferral. Which one, then, would be the repeating island Jamaica, Aruba, Puerto Rico, Miami, Haiti, Recife? Certainly none of the ones that we know. That original, that island at the center, is as impossible to reach as the hypothetical Antillis that reappeared time and again, always fleetingly, in the cosmographers' charts. This is again because the Caribbean is a meta-archipelago (an exalted quality that Hellas possessed, and the great Malay archipelago as well), and as a meta- archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center. Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own Sea with a vengeance, and its ultima Thule may be found on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores of Gambia, in a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850, at a Balinese tem- ple, in an old Bristol pub, in a commercial warehouse in Bordeaux at the time of Colbert, in a windmill beside the Zuider Zee, at a discotheque in a barrio of Manhattan, in the existential saudade of a Portuguese lyric. But what is it that repeats? Tropisms, in series; let's say a dancing flourish, a deep improvisatory sense, a taste for certain foods (great streams of rice, plantain, bean, pep- per, yucca), polyrhythmic expression, intermarriage, syncretic forms, a high level of popular culture, ways of approaching and avoiding the Western world (remember that, as Malaparte said, the Volga is born in Europe), the socio-economic experience of the plantation, in short, parallelisms here and there, contradic- tions here and there. Too much has already been written about all this. The Carib- bean is this and much more. What I've said so far is not enough to make it a meta-archipelago or anything of the kind. But the Caribbean really is something quite sophisticated and accom- plished: the last of the meta-archipelagoes. If you need a visual explanation, a picture of what the Caribbean is, I would suggest the Milky Way, that flux of transformative plasma whirling nar- rowly on the dome of our globe, drawing there an "other" map that changes with each passing instant, where objects are born to light while others disappear into the vault of darkness; produc- tion, interchange, consumption, machine (these are words that come to mind). There is nothing marvelous in this, or even poetic, as will be seen. A few paragraphs back, when I proposed a re-reading of the Caribbean, I suggested as a point of departure the unargued fact that the Antilles are an island bridge connecting, "in another way," South with North America; that is, a machine that links the nar- rative of the search for El Dorado with the narrative of the finding This content downloaded from �������������128.228.0.70 on Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:46:38 UTC�������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of El Dorado; or if you like, the discourse of Utopia with the discourse of history; or even, the language of desire with the language of power. I made a point of the phrase "in another way" because if we were to take the Central American ligament as our connection between continents, the result would be much less fruit- ful and would not suit the purposes of this study. That connec- tion gains objective importance only on maps concerned with our current situation seen as geography, geo-politics, military strategy and finance. These are maps of the pragmatic type which we all know and carry within us, and which therefore give us a first reading of the world. The words "other way" are the signs of my intention to give meaning to this text as an object of re-reading, of an "other" reading. In my reading, the link that really counts is the one made by the Caribbean machine, whose flux, whose noise, whose presence, covers the map of world history's contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures. Let's be realistic, let's be skeptical at least: the Atlantic is the Atlantic (with all its port-cities) because it was once engendered by the copulation of Europe - that insatiable solar bull - with the Caribbean archipelago; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the space of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory, con- ceived the project of inseminating the Caribbean womb with the seed of Africa, and even of Asia; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic (NATO, European Economic Community, etc.) because it was the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps, between the encomienda of Indians and the slaveholding plantation, between the servitude of the coolie and the discrimination toward the criollo, between commercial monopoly and piracy, between fortress and surrender; all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth of the Atlan- tic: Columbus, Cabral, Cortez, de Soto, Hawkins, Drake, Hein, Rodney, Surcouf. . .After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating. Without intending to, I have drifted toward the accusatory and militant rhetoric of my first writings about the Caribbean. It won't happen again. At any rate, to put an end to the matter, it must be agreed that before there was a Caribbean Sea the Atlantic lacked even a name. Its having given birth, however, to such a favored ocean, with 433 This content downloaded from �������������128.228.0.70 on Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:46:38 UTC�������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Antonio Benitez Rojo its coasts and everything, is not the only reason that the Carib- bean is a meta-archipelago. There are other reasons of equal weight. For example, it is possible to defend successfully the hypothesis that without deliveries from the Caribbean womb Western capital accumulation would not have been sufficient to effect a move, within a little more than two centuries, from the so-called Mer- cantilist Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the history of the Caribbean is one of the main strands in the history of capitalism, and vice versa. This conclusion may be called polemical, and perhaps it is. Here is surely not the place to argue the issue, but there's always room for some observations. Let's look: The machine that Christopher Columbus hammered into shape in Hispaniola was a kind oibricolage, something like a medieval vacuum cleaner. The flow of Nature in the island was interrupted by the suction of an iron mouth, taken thence through a trans- atlantic tube to be deposited and redistributed in Spain. When I speak of Nature in the island, I do so in