Neruda Caribbean

The Inventions of Paradise: The Caribbean and the Utopian Bent
Author(s): Lemuel A. Johnson

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 15, No. 4, Loci of Enunciation and Imaginary Constructions: The
Case of (Latin) America, I (Winter, 1994), pp. 685-724
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Inventionsof Paradise:
TheCaribbeanand the Utopian Bent
Lemuel A. Johnson
English,Michigan
The man who describes the island of Utopia has

two names, one of which means Messenger of God,
and the other Distributor of Nonsense. Peter New,
Fiction and Purposein Utopia
Abstract In the con/texts that this essay takes as circum-Caribbean, there is

a complex tradition to the myth-making, myth-mocking appeal of the utopian
bent. In his drama of the Haitian Revolution, The Tragedyof King Christophe,
Martinique's Aime Cesaire has Vastey state the case both flamboyantly and
precisely: "This extraordinary concretion of ours is situated at the focal point
of every ebb and flow. That's where God has put us. Our back to the Pacific;
before us Europe and Africa, on either side, the Americas." One apparent
consequence of such variousness is that the circum-Caribbean forever prom-
ises to be, or risks being, itself only in patterns of crossbred genealogies
that are as much Taino and Aztec as Hindi, Yoruba, and Congo. Moreover,
the aw(e)ful plausibility that matter and mind can be reconstituted in ideal
forms has produced its own array of dead ends and fresh beginnings, in
circumstances that are shaped as much by Spanish Golden Age comedia as
by the space-of-faith opposition that pits Babylon against Ethiopia in Rasta-
farian symbology. Christopher Columbus was no less engaged, accordingly,
when in his third voyage he found himself in the "Terrestrial Paradise" and
freshwater spaces between Trinidad and Venezuela, and there conjoined the
myth-making, myth-mocking tradition that would be equally manifested when
slave-hunting dogs were bred in Cuba or Jamaica for use in Haiti. It is not for
nothing, then, that a Derek Walcott would resolutely explore the view that the
New World was "wide enough for a new Eden / of various Adams"; or that a
Pablo Neruda would conceive of the circum-Caribbean at once as the "waist /
where two oceans marry" and as the "gathering place for the tears"-also "of
two oceans."
PoeticsToday15:4 (Winter 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for

Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/94/$2.50.
686 Poetics Today 15:4
The myth-making and myth-mocking identification of the Caribbean/

New World with the utopian bent has a complex tradition. The push-
pull consequences have included passing comments on the utopian
propensity, as in, say, Roger Garaudy's AlternativeFuture, with its ob-
servation that "the birth of capitalism and the sudden broadening
of man's horizon during the Renaissance directly influenced Thomas
More to situate his Utopia(1516) in Cuba, Campanella his Cityof theSun
(1623) in Peru, and Bacon to write The New Atlantis"(Garaudy 1974:
107). The tradition also generated a set of critical filters through which
Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, for one, dramatized
the conversion and the clash of cultures in his 1598 El nuevo mundodes-
cubiertopor CristobalColon (The new world discovered by Christopher
Columbus). As it is, then, Lope de Vega's comediais one in which we get
to hear the Devil's dystopian complaint at the Court of Providence that
the Columbus enterprise would be nothing but an act of usurpation in
a world that could be neither moral nor new. "Oh, Blessed court," he
protests, "why are you sending Columbus / to renew my evil deeds?"
But this curious "boca de maldad" (voice of evil) despair, who begs the
court, "No me hagas este agravio" (Do not inflict this injury on me),
provokes a response that is couched in terms of manifest destiny: "La
conquista se ha de hacer" (The conquest is fated). Thereafter, the pat-
tern of responses becomes one in which "oro," "armas," and "indios
espantados" (gold, arms, and terrified Indians) are as foregrounded
as "una Cruz grande verde" (a large green Cross [Vega 1965 {1598}:
34-35]).
From the beginning, then, dystopian sub/versions were always part
and parcel of the onslaught of idealism and the attendant assault
on paradise in the Americas. And such is the case in chronicle after
chronicle-as is readily apparent in the extraordinary blindness and
insight with which Columbus reported on his first Caribbean contacts
at "the Great Landing in Barcelona" in April 1493, an event that Alejo
Carpentier has aptly described, in The Harp and the Shadow, as the
"first great spectacle of the West Indies, with authentic men and ani-
mals presented before the public of Europe" (Carpentier 1990 [1979]:
122):
I, Christo Ferens [Bearer of Christ], have been in the land of the Great
Khan from where the spicescome. The people are lovingand gentle and fit
to be Christians.They are docile and will make good slaves.The distance
is not half what the mathematicianswould have it. (Foss 1974: 18)
Relevant, too, is the con/fusion of values that we get in Gonzalo Fer-
nandez de Oviedo's latter-day (1535-57) history of the Indies. From
Oviedo, as from the more celebrated Bartolome de Las Casas (al-
though the two men were remarkably divided in their allegiances),
Johnson ? Inventionsof Paradise 687
we learn that "the New World ... was a victim of the 'conquistadors,
who would more accurately be called depopulators or squanderers
of the new lands,' and of 'private soldiers, who like veritable hang-
men or headsmen or executioners or ministers of Satan [caused] vari-
ous and innumerable cruel deaths . . . as uncountable as the stars."'
Thus did Oviedo pass judgment even as he was himself declaring that
gunpowder used against Indians ("dirty, lying cowards who commit
suicide out of sheer boredom, just to ruin the Spaniards by dying")
should be considered incense to God (Sale 1990: 158; see also Keen
1990 [1971]: 79; Hanke 1971: 106).1
Of course, so conflated a judgment does have a somewhat peculiar
affiliation with, say, the view of Francisco Lopez de Gomara, in whose
historia of 1552 "the discovery of the Indies" would be represented
as "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excluding the
incarnation and death of Him who created it" (Sale 1990: 224).2 Ulti-
mately, in the more or less balanced accounts of the Caribbean that
result from Derek Walcott's getting down to business in one of his
memories-of-the-future "New World" poems, we learn that
Adam had an idea:
He and the snake would share
the loss of Eden for a profit.
So both made the New World. And it looked good.
(Walcott 1976: 12)
In light of such revisions and transvaluations, it is worth calling at-
tention to the strategic use that, some four centuries after the event,
Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier made of the ensuing conflation of
values. In a direct appeal to Lope de Vega's El nuevo mundo, for ex-
1. I write in some awareness, but with no direct investment here, of that Spain-
in-the-Americas furor lascasista and the consequent Espana-defendida coinage, la
leyenda negra (the black legend), of Julian Juderias. In addition to Benjamin Keen
(1990 [1971]) and Lewis Hanke (1971), see, for a tidy summary, Bill Donovan's
introduction to Bartolom6 de Las Casas's Devastation of the Indies (Las Casas 1992
[1552]: 1-25).
2. The premise is still in circulation: See, for example, Joel Achenbach's "Debating
Columbus in a New World" (WashingtonPost [national weekly ed., Oct. 7-13, 1991]:
11), where he quotes Frank Donatelli, chairman of the U.S. Christopher Colum-
bus Quincentenary Commission: "Let's not forget the fact that what Christopher
Columbus accomplished was possibly the most important thing that happened
to the world since the birth of Christ." See, too, the parenthetical comment by
Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria in his review of Carlos Fuentes's The Campaign (New
York Times Book Review [Oct. 6, 1991]: 3). Echeverria notes a movement among
Latin American novelists away from that "consecrated moment" when "the con-
quistadors themselves, as well as the first historians of the New World, believed
that the discovery of America by Columbus was the most significant event since
the Crucifixion."
ample, Carpentier focused on the Devil's complaint, which he used as

the epigraph to his 1949 real maravillosonovel of the Haitian Revolu-
tion, The Kingdom of This World(Carpentier 1970 [1949]). The impli-
cations of such a move will be assessed later. For now, it is enough to
make the point that whenever the utopian bent is not thus directed
toward the failure of the future in the Caribbean archipelago, the
focus is instead on the seduction-and the terror-of Aboriginality.
For example, in what Roger Abrahams and John Szwed (1983) have
aptly described as "shrill lampoonery," Ned Ward's 1698 "Character
of Jamaica" refracts a terra cognita out of which is constructed a dys-
topia of moral regressions. In this case, it is by way of an extravagant
crescendo of images of rubbish that Ward makes the Caribbean a
site of the "geographical unconscious," to borrow a term from Robert
Hughes's (1986) Southern Seas reterritorialization of Freud, First En-
counters, and (surely) Fredric Jameson in The Fatal Shore, his epic
narrative of the violent founding of Australia.
As principle and event, "Jamaica"thereupon emerges as a Bad New
World, as "a shapeless Pile of Rubbish confusd'ly jumbled into an Em-
blem of Chaos, neglected by Omnipotence when he form'd the World
into its admirable Order." The character of Jamaica, thus engendered
by and justified in Ward's inverted Genesis myth of unregenerate and
contaminating Aboriginality, brings us up short and face to face with
the insufficiency of the Word and the impossibility of Eden, leaving us
upon "the Dunghill of the Universe and the Refuse of the whole Cre-
ation." It is hardly surprising, then, if to come to Jamaica is to enter a
world of excesses that are as much nurtured as they are natural. For
here, after all, is the place ("Wicked as the Devil [and] Subject to Tur-
nadoes, Hurricanes and Earthquakes as if the Island, like the People,
were troubled with the Dry Belly-Ach")where "Pandora filled her box"
(Abrahams and Szwed 1983: 12-13).
Parenthetically, it is relevant to note here that some fifty years later
"JAMAICA" would fare no better under the pen of a philosopher than
it had under that of a lampoonist. As spatiotemporal (and cultural)
construct, "Jamaica"surfaces quite predictably in David Hume's 1748
essay "Of National Characters." For in exploring his suspicion that
"the negroes, and in general all the other species of men, [are] natu-
rally inferior to the whites," Hume remarks, "In JAMAICA indeed they
talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but 'tis likely he is
admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks
a few words plainly" (Bracken 1978: 256). One may rightly suppose
that such persistent attitudes led Abrahams and Szwed to conclude
that narratives like Ned Ward's "Character of Jamaica," for one, re-
verberate with "fears of a reversion of Europeans to their own savage
past."
It is also worth paying some attention to yet another form of traffic
Johnson * Inventionsof Paradise 689
and trade in Ned Ward's "Jamaica":the sexual politics of conquest and

possession and its consequent attribution of a virtually intransitive,
but contingently disruptive, role to Woman-Pandora and her box-
in the (un)making of new worlds and other gardens of delight. There
is a certain sense, of course, in which, from Roman and Sabean to He-
brew and "pagan," such a vision and its variants have ever been (in) the
way of idealizing the condition of the (patriarchal) Elect in their New
Worlds, or Gardens of Delectation. Thus, in this or that tradition, we
soon come upon relevant conjoinings of certain conquistadorial rites
and rights in the master texts of record-and no less so, incidentally,
for Columbus and his journal. For such manly protagonists, "Theirs
[have ever been the likes of] dark-eyed huris, chaste as hidden pearls;
a guerdon [created as] virgins [and] loving companions for those on
the right hand." Which, one might recall, is how the Qur'an records
a context that Fedwa Malti-Douglas elaborates upon in Woman'sBody,
Woman'sWord, where she focuses on gender and discourse in Arab-
Islamic writing. Hers is an elaboration according to which the "sexual
and liquid aspects of the Qur'anic Garden, water sweeter than honey
and melted sugar, suggest the rivers of honey in the Qur'anic Paradise,
just as the fruit-women whose sexual enjoyment surpasses that with
normal women irresistibly evoke the ever-virginal black-eyed huris"
(Malti-Douglas 1992 [1991]: 91).
Elsewhere, as in the biblical tradition of the conquest of Canaan,
for example, the yoking of Elect to "choice part" also engages a vision
and a narrative in which the certain conjoining of sword and virgin is
at work in the lay(ing) of the land-and in the consequent making of
the Promised Land. Thus, the divine injunction to put all the inhabi-
tants to the sword-to "utterly destroy [the children as well as] every
male and every woman that hath lain by man"-does hold out the
compensatory climax nonetheless of a harvest of 400 young virgins,
"who had not had any intercourse with any male." And these were
brought to the land of Canaan, to a land flowing with milk and honey
(Judges 21:6-23). It is relevant, and enlightening, that in Death and
DissymmetryMieke Bal calls attention to the fact that the coherence of
such a politics, and the politics of its coherence, is heavily invested
in what she refers to as "scattered virginity." "The Book of Judges,"
Bal observes, "is full of virgins. Collective virginity is at stake in the
bride-stealing scenes at the end of the book, as in the formulaic tran-
sitional ... mini-narratives of the 'sons' taking and giving 'daughters,'
exchanging virgins with other, pagan tribes" (Bal 1988: 69; see also
Trible 1984; Garbini 1988 [1986]; and Stern 1991).3
3. Mark Twain calculated a total harvest of 32,000 virgins in this transport-to-the-

Promised-Land tradition, which he described graphically: "Their naked privies
were probed, to make sure that they still possessed the hymen unruptured; after
I am persuaded that such transports of and traffic in women help to

explain why and how Samuel Eliot Morrison chose to celebrate Colum-
bus and his companions' taking the lay of the Land-in-Waiting some
four and a half centuries into the history of our "new" world. Morri-
son's 1942 "life" of the "Admiralof the Ocean Sea" accomplished such
a celebration by way of a striking reinvestment in, so to speak, Pan-
dora's box. "Never again," Morrison marveled, "may mortal man hope
to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October
days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to
the conquering Castilians" (Morrison 1983 [1942]: 236).
In his DeconstructingAmerica,Peter Mason (1990: 27) appears to be-
lieve that perhaps the "most baroque" in/version of this tradition and
its tropes is the following one, by an anonymous nineteenth-century
author: "America is a female form, long, thin, watery, and at the forty-
eighth parallel ice-cold. The degrees of latitude are years-woman
becomes old at forty-eight." As things turn out, however, the lay(ing)
of the land in Cuban writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo's more recent (1985)
essay, "The Repeating Island," is nothing if not spectacularly old-
fashioned in its very modern bent, in its self-confessed "accusatory and
militant rhetoric." For, his radical appeals notwithstanding, Benitez-
Rojo depends as much on the despoilers-of-the-womb tradition as
he does on the panache of the "desiring machine" premise in Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1972) Anti-Oedipus,Capitalismand Schizo-
phrenia. "The Atlantic is the Atlantic," Benitez-Rojo (1990 [1985]:
88) declares, "because it was once engendered by the copulation of
Europe-that insatiable solar bull-with the Caribbean archipelago."
And the Atlantic is now the space of capitalism
because Europe . . . conceived of the project of inseminatingthe Carib-
bean womb with the seed of Africa, and even of Asia; the Atlantic [i.e.,
NATO, the European EconomicCommunity,etc.] because it was the pain-
fully delivered child of the Caribbean,whose vaginawas stretchedbetween

continental clamps, between the encomienda of Indians and the slavehold-
ing plantations, between the servitudeof the coolie and the discrimination
toward the criollo,between commercialmonopolyand piracy,between for-
tress and surrender;all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth
of the Atlantic:Columbus,Cabral,Cortez,de Soto, Hawkins,Drake, Hein,
Rodney, Surcouf.... After the blood and saltwaterspurts,quicklysew up
torn flesh and apply the antiseptictinctures,the gauze and surgicalplaster;
this humiliation they were sent away from the land that had been their home."
Twain'sNew World is the object of a conjunctiveindictment of such divine sanction
and North American white and Indian relations, an indictment that climaxed in-
structively with an 1862 massacre in Minnesota ("LetterXI" [Twain 1974 [1942]:
52-54).
then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating,always

suppurating.4 (Ibid.)
For Ramon Diaz Sanchez, writing in 1936, it was of course some
400 years earlier that the "Americas" had first experienced so con-
summate a "gestode dominioy de enamoramiento"(a gesture of domina-
tion and a passionate embrace). Accordingly, in his Mene, a novel of
petroleum and Venezuela, "rending" and "digging manoeuvres" are
predictable enough thrusts in an invasive cycle of re/membering and
degradation. With "black prows tearing into her blissful virginity,"
with "the grey lymph torn asunder, the hymen [was thus] broken from
America in her hymenal latitude." Still, Diaz Sanchez temporizes, "it
was less frenetic then; more parsimonious." For the "ancient prows
[had] advanced with smiles which masked their deeds of domination
and love-making," raising their "lofty forecastles as if to let the Latin
voice reach lyrically to the ears of the Indian mermaid [al oido de la
sirena indiana]" (Diaz Sanchez 1989 [1936]: 31). In any event, pedi-
gree and goodness-of-fit make it appropriate now to recall that by
August 17, 1495, Christopher Columbus, yearning for the Terrestrial
Paradise, had in fact engendered and inscribed in his journal that
celebrated image of a hemisphere which "has the shape of a pear,
which is everywhere very round, except where the stalk is, for there
it is very prominent ... placed something like a woman's nipple, and
this part, where the protuberance is found, is the highest and nearest
to the sky." The Admiral of the Ocean Sea went on to add, at the Gulf
of Paria, "I call that the 'end of the East,' where end all the land and
islands" (Columbus 1988 [1498]: II, 30).
In Alejo Carpentier's subsequent retelling, this "shining thought"
erases the High Admiral's initial doubts about the classical authority
for paradise: "I cannot find, nor have I found, any Latin or Greek au-
thor who states categorically where the Earthly Paradise is situated in
this world, nor have I seen it marked on any map" (Carpentier 1979
[1962]: 246). But that was before the Gulf of Paria: "Here then at the
Dragon's Mouths, where the water turned transparent in the rising
sun, the Admiral could shout his exultation aloud, having understood
the meaning of the age-old struggle between the fresh water and the
salt water." For his part, Carpentier is suitably, and ironically, baroque
4. An even more remarkablestretch, so to speak, occurs in the following redactions

from the history of gynecology: "One twentieth-centuryhistorian calls [Dr. Marion
Sims] the 'Architectof the Vagina.' ... He adapted a spoon handle for the holding
open of the vaginal opening, calling it a 'speculum.''Introducing the bent handle
of the spoon, I saw everything no man had ever seen before. ... I felt like an
explorer in medicine who views a new and important territory.' Sims could see
himself as Columbus, his new world the vagina"(Barker-Benfield 1976: 95).
in thus reconfirming the issue, weaving it into Explosionin a Cathedral,

his narrative of the Enlightenment (el siglo de las luces) and its contra-
dictions in the Caribbean archipelago: "Let the King and Queen, the
Princes and all their Dominions, give thanks to our Saviour Jesus
Christ who has granted us this victory," his Admiral exults. "Let there
be processions; let solemn celebrations be held; let the churches be
filled with palms and flowers; let Christ rejoice on Earth, as there is
rejoicing in Heaven, to think that salvation is at hand for so many
people hitherto consigned to damnation." For this voyage by the High
Admiral of the Ocean Sea to "the Gulf of Pearls in the Land of Grace"
was to lead to his discovery that "the world was shaped like a woman's
breast, at the tip of whose nipple grew the Tree of Life." In sum, "the
prophecies of the Prophets had been fulfilled, the divinations of the
ancients and the inspired intimations of the theologians confirmed ...
after an agonising wait of so many centuries" (ibid.).
Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that F. Scott Fitz-
gerald, in that other Empire of the North, would play out the sexual
politics of the (re)discovery in predictable enough ways when, at the
end of The Great Gatsby, "the inessential houses began to melt away"
into what appeared to be yet another promise of access to the insu-
laefortunatae, namely, the promise that "ahead lay the scalloped ocean
and the abounding blessed isles" (Fitzgerald 1991 [1925]: 118). For
as the moon rose higher and higher, Nick Carraway, at once sybarite
and puritan, gradually became aware of "the old island here that flow-
ered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new
world." Carraway thereupon speculates in the appropriate register:
"For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in
the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contempla-
tion he neither understood nor desired"-even as paradise "pandered
in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams" (ibid.: 140).
"Licence my roaving hands, and let them go, / Before, behind, be-
tween, above, below, / O, my America!" John Donne had been, typi-
cally, rather more calculatedly virile when he went a-courting in the
plainer song, so to speak, of "To His Mistress Going to Bed":
my new-found-land,
My Kingdome, safeliest when with one man mann'd,
My Myne of precious stones, My Emperie
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
(Donne 1912 [1699]: Elegie xix)
Finally, Sir Walter Raleigh, some ten years before, had famously
and appropriately condensed the sexual politics in such "discourses on
western planting," with its accompanying argument for "discoverie"
and "power"-and for delectation: "Large, rich, and bewtiful, . . .
Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Madenheade" (and thus must
be ripe for the taking), never having been "sackt, turned, nor wrought,
nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance, the graues
haue not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges"
(Raleigh 1968 [1596]: 96). And, in any case, the issues were not much
different (patriarchally speaking) when Alejo Carpentier made his
template of "choice parts" in conjoining Carib, Arawak, and Land-
in-Waiting. What was always involved, as involved it must be, was an
Empire of the North where there always had to be the lure of both
imaginable "virgins' baths" and "unimaginable buildings." In that cycle
of the assault on paradise, "all the males of other races were ruth-
lessly exterminated, and the women kept for the propagation of the
conquering race. Thus there came to be two languages: that of the
women, the language of the kitchen and of childbirth, and that of
the men, the language of warriors, to know which was held to be a
supreme privilege" (Carpentier 1979 [1962]: 243).
The thrust of these master(ing) tropes and the gardens of delight
in which they seek to engender lines of succession provide yet another
orientation in Mesoamerican narratives of the utopian bent. What we
get is, at bottom, the female-bodied reconstitution of El Dorado as a
"colony of joys given over entirely to [conquistadorial] care." At which
point, it indeed becomes, in the George Lamming formulation devel-
oped below, a "native" of the conquistador's "person" whom "some
tyranny of love had condemned to his need" (Lamming 1986 [1971]:
65). Predictably, this approach to the lay(ing) of the land, with its
women as the "negative imprint of domination" (Pfaelzer 1988: 141),
compels the masculine gaze and conquering phallus, on the one hand,
while, on the other, it conjures up "La Madre Dolorosa / a black rose
of sorrow, a black mine of silence / raped wife, empty mother, Aztec
virgin / transfixed," her sex "the slit throat / of an Indian," as Derek
Walcott (1979: 51) puts it in The Star-AppleKingdom.
There is a body of seminal issues entailed by such ways of making
brave new worlds and all who dwell in them-issues that have prolif-
erated in any number of narratives purporting to trace the genealogy
of psychosexual consciousness and the longing for national form in
the Americas. The dissemination of these issues, in addition, becomes
all the more intensified whenever appeals can also be made to female-
(em)bodied myths of cycles of disorder and order. One such mythic
subtext holds, according to Octavio Paz (1973: 92), for instance, that
"Diana and her bow, [Mesoamerican] Coatlicue and her skulls, god-
desses covered with blood, are life itself, the perpetual rebirth and
death of the seasons, time unfolding and turning back upon itself."
Gilberto Freyre (Brazil), Octavio Paz (Mexico), and Frantz Fanon
(Martinique) are among those who have sought to tease out such mat-
ters and their implications in their work and to exalt them into design.
More often than not they have done so by mixing all the issues that
remain concomitant to the "mythic subtext," the "discursive debris,"
and the "risible simulacra" with which Latin America has fashioned its
"irresistible romance," its "foundational fictions"-and its "plagiarized
authenticity" (Sommer 1990: 136-55). Paz et al. have thus been en-
gaged either in conceptions of multiracial or multiethnic nationalisms
or in elaborated crises of allegiance and degeneration. In The Laby-
rinth of Solitude,for example, Paz works at and in both categories when
he proposes a Mexican exceptionalism that is in fact overdetermined
by the disruptive chingon/chingada genealogy on which he insists for
"The Sons of La Malinche":
Bad words [those two], the only living language in a world of anemic
vocables... corrosiveand shaming... the idea of violencerules darklyover
all the meanings, [and] the dialecticof the "closed"and the "open"fulfills
itself with almost ferociousprecision.The chingonis the macho,the male, he
rips open the chingada,the female,who is pure passivity,defencelessagainst
the exterior world. (Paz 1961 [1950]: 77)
This "memory-of-an-infamy" obsession with Mesoamerican geneal-

ogy continues to be variously active and activated, as much in Benitez-
Rojo's birth of the Caribbean as in the outrageously casual conceit
that Thomas and Carol Christensen introduce in the preface to their
translation of Carpentier's novel about the beatification of Christo-
pher Columbus, El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow). The
Christensens declare, quoting Tzvetan Todorov, "'We are all the di-
rect descendants of Columbus,"' and then go on to make the remark-
ably egregious statement: "Likewise, all American translators-that
abject lot!-are descendants of our mother La Malinche, Cortes's in-
former, the famous whore and traitor" (Carpentier 1990 [1979]: xii).
The "memory" is similarly at work in the anxiety-ridden genealogical
terrain that Chicano writer Nash Candelaria (1977: 173) explores in
Memoriesof theAlhambra-in his case, by way of a flight to ancestry ("A
kind of grudging accord one gives a rapist [Cortes] whose victim gave
you birth") as well as a flight from one: "Certainly no Malinche.... So
not Malinche, a quiet voice continued. Perhaps Pocahontas. Or Desert
Blossom. Mestizo. Child of the Old World and the New." In sum, as
I have put it elsewhere, a critical consequence of such genealogies is
that "the female body is thus called into service as the vessel in which
the body politic is (man)-made and (woman)-unmade" (Johnson 1990:
132).
There is reason enough, then, to call attention to Otilia Meza's
Malinalli Tenepal, La gran calumniada, a "biografia de La Malinche."
Urgently polemical and articulate in its revisionist bent, Meza's "veri-
dica historia" (true history) forms a partial counter-narrative to the

tradition that inscribes (de)generation and "dystopia" with and in the
female: "Seguin se ha asegurado siempre, la Malinche fue una nefasta
figura para Mexico, pues contribuyo con su inteligencia a la destruc-
cion de Tenochtitlan. Quienes ese aseguran estan en un error" (We are
invariably told that La Malinche was an ominous presence in Mexico's
history; that she abused her intelligence to contribute to the destruc-
tion of Mexico. Those who persist in making this assertion are mis-
taken [Meza 1988 {1985}: 5 [my translation]). "The woman [has been]
interchangeably called by three names: Malintzin, Malinche, Marina,"
writes Norma Alarcon (1983), in the elaborate mission of recuperation
that she embarks upon in "Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision
through Malintzin or Malinche: Putting Flesh Back on the Object."
Her essay appears, appropriately enough, in an edited volume entitled
This Bridge Called My Back, where Alarcon makes the point that the
woman's "historicity, her experience, her true flesh and blood were
discarded" and that a "Kantian, dualistic male consciousness stole her
and placed her on the throne of evil, like Dante's upside down frozen
Judas, doomed to moan and bemoan" (ibid.). The issue is one to which
Alarcon returns, extensively examining narratives in which La Ma-
linche is (nationalistically) worked up into-or else out of-the "mon-
strous double" of La Virgende Guadeloupe,in "Traddutora, Traditora:
A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism" (Alarcon 1989). Here,
she explores the circumstances of invention, disempowerment, and
recuperation in what is ultimately an extended hermeneutic of suspi-
cion about constructions of gender and modes of social division. It is
the case, Alarcon argues, that "as historical subject Malintzin remains
shrouded in preternatural silence, and as object she continues to be
on trial for speaking and bearing the enemy's children and continues
to be a constant source of revision and appropriation-indeed, for
articulating our modern and postmodern condition" (ibid.: 85).
Something of the same revisionist spirit is arguably at work in Natives
of My Person when George Lamming brings his Chorus of Women, on
the ship Penalty, to a critically inflected epiphany: "Weare a future that
they must learn," say the women (Lamming 1986 [1971]: 350). They
say so in the New World cave where they are left stranded when a
penchant for utopian violence, aided and abetted by the women's own
miscalculating complicity, comes to a dead end, so to speak. Theirs is
the epiphany that seals off Lamming's seventeenth-century novel of
extravagant gestures, all of which are as full of middle-passage ex-
citement and murder as they are suffused with gilt-edged dreams of
social and moral regeneration: the yearned-for "virgin" territory of
San Cristobal, which was to be the site for a "new and enlightened
society," is also "the Isles of the Black Rock," where "the Tribes cele-
brate their slow but certain extinction." This cross-eyed perspective

and its vision of the good, which "no common greed supports," are ap-
propriately embodied in the would-be founding father, Commandant
of the ship Reconnaissance,whose pride it was, and no less, to recon-
stitute his battalion of honest men and vandals alike. He would thus
"plant some portion of the Kingdom in a soil that [was] new and freely
chosen, namely the Isles of the Black Rock, more recently known as
San Cristobal" (ibid.: 31). In the words of his own conviction: "I have
seen men of the basest natures erect themselves into gentlemen of
honour the moment they were given orders to seize command over the
savage tribes of the Indies" (ibid.: 17). As ever, the thrust of discovery
and reconstitution remains very much encapsulated in the conviction
that "virgin lands ... are the most blessed territory.... A man can
start from scratch, turn any misfortune into a fact of triumph. You
can only manage it in virgin lands where you can start from scratch"
(ibid.: 111).
When we come upon the utopian bent in the Antillean context of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (1976) Autumnof thePatriarch,his "ungrasp-
able old man" is ensconced in, yet virtually disseminated through-
out, the wonder-working corruption of a "great, chimerical, shoreless
nation" (ibid.: 102). Intriguingly enough, the Colombian novelist has
his "father of the nation" orienting himself toward the Caribbean ar-
chipelago from a vantage point much like Columbus's at the Gulf of
Paria. Marquez's Patriarch-Politician, and "false dead man," is thus
in a position to "contemplate [a] line of islands as lunatic as sleeping
crocodiles in the cistern of the sea" (ibid.: 152). It is in precisely that
context-"the whole universe of the Antilles from Barbados to Vera-
cruz"-that the Patriarch, "somewhere between 107 and 232 years
old," conjures up an alternative future of utopian bent: that one island
"which doesn't even have a sea to get there by ... [that] saddest and
most beautiful [of] islands in the world that we go on dreaming about
until the first light of dawn." He does so in the face of the "blandish-
ments of death" and the ambiguous temptation of other islands that
are as extravagant and myth-inducing "in the showcase of the sea" as
they are mundane and myth-mocking:
The perfumed volcano of Martinique. .. the tuberculous hospital, the
gigantic black man with a lace blouse selling bouquets of gardenias to the
governors'wives on the church steps.... The infernal marketof Parama-
ribo . . . the crabs that came out of the sea and up through the toilets,
climbing up onto the tables of ice cream parlors,the diamonds embedded
in the teeth of black grandmotherswho sold heads of Indians and ginger
roots sitting on their safe buttocksunder the drenching rain . . . the solid
gold cows on Tanaguerabeach .... The blind visionaryof La Guayrawho
charged two reals to scare off the blandishmentsof death .... Trinidad's
burning August, automobilesgoing the wrong way,the green Hindus who

shat on the middle of the street.... [The Patriarchalso sees] the rebirthof
Dutch tulips in the gasoline drums of Curacao . . . the stone enclosure of
Cartagenade Indias. (Ibid.: 39-40)
The aw(e)ful plausibility of matter and mind in Caribbean Meso-
america-Neruda's "waist / where two oceans marry"-becoming
available for reconstitution in ideal forms thus engenders visions of
the end of history, of the "gathering place for the tears of two oceans."
But it also engenders the promise of fresh beginnings. This view of
the Americas as inviting-indeed, as intrusively inviting and yet, as
ever, so inaccessible-is a familiar enough one. It informs, for ex-
ample, the "one hundred years of solitude" in which the Marquezian
narrator tries to set and to encompass Macondo. The resulting sense
of time and place is as intransitive in its ahistorical beginnings as it is
transitive in its sensuous, dependent urgency. It helps, then, to recall
that Macondo's site is "the bank of a river of clear water that ran
along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous like
prehistoric eggs; [a site where] the world was so recent that many
things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to
point" (Garcia Marquez 1970: 11).
One consequent feature of the facts and fictions of such geographies
is that the utopian misalliances of politics, desire, and metaphysics in
them are of the sort that prove to be "so intimate, so exacerbated, and
so deadly" (Paz 1972: 94). And just such a misalliance is what we find
foregrounded in the Haitian context of Aime Cesaire's 1963 work, La
tragediedu roi Christophe(The Tragedyof King Christophe).So, too, in the
version of that Caribbean explosion which the Cuban Carpentier had
earlier produced, in 1949, as El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of
This World). In 1943, Carpentier had found himself standing on soil
where thousands of men, desiring freedom, had put their faith in the
lycanthropical powers of Macandal; he had learned of the fantastic
story of Bouckman, the Jamaican initiate; he had ventured into the
Citadelle La Ferriere, a work of unparalleled architecture, where he
had breathed in the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a mon-
arch of incredible endeavors, much more surprising than all the cruel
kings invented by the surrealists, as susceptible as they were to imagi-
nary, though not actually suffered, tyrannies: "I discovered 'marvel-
lous realism' at every step of the way."Carpentier had thus translated
experience and impact into the celebrated theory of lo real maravilloso
in the Americas, into the formulation that would preface The Kingdom
of This World.In Cesaire's case, meanwhile, a corollary transvaluation
of values added a tragicomic edge to the historical parable that he
would make of Christophe's Citadelle La Ferriere.
"Against fate, against history, against nature" (Cesaire 1969 [1963]:
44), Christophe had had his City of Stone built on the summit of
a chain of rugged mountains at an altitude of almost one kilometer
above the vast spaces of the Plaine du Nord. The justifications for La
Ferriere went equally against the grain of conventional territorial de-
fense. Howard W. French, limning the relevant conflation of contexts
in his "Milot Journal" report on the restoration work of contemporary
Haitian architect Albert Mangones and the Haitian Institute for the
Preservation of the National Patrimony, notes that "for all the Cita-
delle's architectural splendor, Christophe's choice of a site for his fort,
far too distant from the water to guard Haiti's shores, was seen as
stubborn folly." Over time, however, "a more generous view of his
strategy has taken hold. Without a navy to ward off Napoleon's aveng-
ing forces, whose defeat had won independence in 1804 for a nation
of slaves, Haiti's early rulers conceived a large network of internal de-
fenses to repel invaders overconfident for having easily taken lightly
defended shores." French relevantly cites Roger Kennedy's observa-
tion that although "it is conventional to dismiss all this as an expression
of madness, . . . it [was] not that at all." Witness, for example, the
"elaborate water collection and drainage system ... that would enable
a 5,000-man garrison to withstand siege for a year." No less signifi-
cantly, French recalls the Haitians' profound need to exalt self and
tribe beyond the reach of abuse, injury, and extinction. Legend has it
that Christophe "dedicated the fortress with the words, 'To a people
they would have on their knees, I offer this upright monument."' The
exceptionalist conclusion to which the architect Mangones comes is,
quite simply, "There is nothing like this in the whole hemisphere"
(French 1991: A4). In the end, it was the singular, and darker, coalesc-
ing of ironies in the metamorphosis of man and stone that Carpentier
would capture when he wrote: "Henri Christophe would never know
the corruption of his flesh, flesh fused in its architecture, integrated
with the flying buttresses. Le Bonnet de L'Eveque, the whole moun-
tain [would eventually] become the mausoleum of the first King of
Haiti" (Carpentier 1970 [1949]: 156).
What Cesaire (1969 [1963]: 44) described as a "phantom vessel,
riding the swell of a magic ocean suddenly stilled in the middle of
the storm," may appear to be a remarkable instance of what Robert
Hughes (1980: 164) meant when he posited architecture as "the cara-
pace of political fantasy" in his discussion of "trouble in utopia." Still,
La Ferriere was quite plausibly grounded, so to speak, on histori-
cal reality, from Napoleon and his (brother-in-law) General Charles
Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc and Chief of Staff General Pierre Boyer,
through the slave trade and Versailles, to the slave-hunting dogs from
Cuba and Jamaica that were set upon Haiti. Just as foundational for
Johnson * Inventions of Paradise 699
La Ferriere were the self- and other-consuming excesses of the French

Revolution and its reverberations in the Antilles. So, too, were the
events of that night of August 22, 1791, when, "with torch in one hand
and knife in the other, the slave of Saint-Domingue [began the destruc-
tion of] a society which had oppressed him for nearly one hundred
years" (Ott 1987: ix). In The BlackJacobins,C. L. R. James provides us
with a fitting summation of this history of violent romance and moral
discrepancy. The force of James's summation derives, in part, from
the indictment that Pierre de Vaissiere produced in Saint-Domingue,
1629-1789, on the basis of records in the French Colonial archives.
"On such a soil as San Domingo slavery," concluded James, "only a
vicious society could flourish. Nor were the incidental circumstances
such as to mitigate the demoralisation inherent in such a method of
production" as slavery was (James 1963 [1938]: 27).
Still, in light of so convoluted a set of circumstances, Henri Chris-
tophe's La Ferriere could not but be what it was. And in Cesaire's
equally tendentious real maravillosoreconstruction, the architecture of
the (im)plausible certainly (un)becomes itself as a "very unusual plat-
form, turned toward the north magnetic pole, walls one hundred and
thirty feet high and thirty feet thick, lime and bagasse, lime and bull's
blood" (Cesaire 1969 [1963]: 44). In addition to which, Christophe
himself, ex-slave and ex-cook at the Sign of the Crown in San Domin-
gue, was driven to effect an equally (un)becoming reconstitution of
self and place: "Henri, by the Grace of God and the Constitutional
Law of the State, King of Haiti, Ruler of the Islands of La Tortue and
Gonave, and others adjacent, Destroyer of Tyranny, Regenerator and
Benefactor of the Haitian Nation, Creator of its Moral, Political, and
Military Institutions, First Crowned Monarch of the New World" (Car-
pentier 1970 [1949]: 147; Cesaire 1969 [1963]: 27). "Not for nothing,"
as Carpentier observes, "had those towers risen, on the mighty bel-
lowing of bulls, their testicles toward the sun." For in the event of any
attempt by France to retake the island, "He, Henri Christophe, God,
my cause and mysword,could hold out here," outside, or rather beyond,
history-"above the clouds for as long as necessary, with his whole
court, his army, his chaplains, his musicians, his African pages, his
jesters." Fifteen thousand men could live, Christophe believed, within
its "Cyclopean walls and lack for nothing."
Once the drawbridgeof the Single Gate had been pulled up, the Citadel
La Ferriere would be the country,with its independence, its monarch, its
treasury,and all its pomp. Becausedown below,the sufferingsinvolvedin
its building forgotten, the Negroes of the Plaine would raise their eyes to
the fortress, replete with corn, with gunpowder,iron, and gold, thinking
that there higher than the birdsthere, wherelife below was a remote sound
of bells and the crowing of roosters,a king of their own race was waiting,
close to heaven, which is the same everywhere,for the thud of the bronze
hoofs of Ogoun'sten thousandhorses. (Carpentier1970 [1949]: 124-25)
"Majesty," Engineer Martial Besse had pointed out to Christophe
in Cesaire's dramatic version, "these are terrifying slopes to build on"
(Cesaire 1969 [1963]: 44). Or, as Madame Christophe put it in the
politics-of-intimacy translation that she made of affairs and reasons of
state: "Take care, Christophe! / If you try to put the roof of one hut
on another / it will be too little or too big!" (ibid.: 41). But then, as
yet another Caribbean poet would one day propose, the slave-kings of
Haiti, Dessalines and Christophe, were "men who had structured their
despair" into, among other forms, the "only noble ruin in the archi-
pelago: Christophe's massive citadel." It was, Derek Walcott (1970: 12)
went on to say, in a half-celebratory vein, "a monument to egomania,
more than a strategic castle." Such constructions being what they are-
at once ou-topos(no-place) and eu-topos(place of happiness [see Marin
1984: 263-65]), at once "solid cornerstone and firm foundation, as-
sault on heaven or the sun's resting place" (Cesaire 1969 [1963]: 44)-
it is not surprising that what Carpentier labeled Christophe's "Ultima
Ratio Regum ... [a] stronghold, unique in the world [but] too vast
for one man," should have provoked great ambivalence in Caribbean
con/texts (Carpentier 1970 [1949]: 148). In "What the Twilight Says,"
an early artistic manifesto, this was how Walcott finally confronted
Christophe's monumental effort to arrest a history of racial degra-
dation by bringing history itself to an end in one last stone gesture.
"The only noble ruin" in the archipelago was "an effort to reach God's
height," Walcott concluded. Even if "the slave had surrendered one
Egyptian darkness for another, that darkness was his will, that struc-
ture was the image of the inaccessible achieved. To put it plainly, it
was something we could look up to. It was all we had" (Walcott 1970:
12, 14).
Ambivalence of this kind is, it may be argued, an act of historical
and moral generosity, of aesthetic gratitude even, so caught (up) was
Walcott in the blinding clarity of a trance/fixing illumination: "Now,
one may see such heroes as squalid fascists who chained their own
people, but they had size, mania, the fire of heretics" (ibid.: 13). He
was, said Walcott of himself, "in awe of their blasphemy." But Georges
Bataille and Octavio Paz would appear to be of some cautionary use
here-especially so in the focus that Michelle H. Richman (1982) gives
to Bataille's view of "reactionary exaltations" as, merely, "Icarian illu-
mination." Richman provides us with a relevant, and synoptic, reading
when she examines Bataille's judgment on visions of excess and the
depenseof certain kinds of "aspirations to the sun" within which "ideal-
istic utopianism" offers itself up as the "redeeming light, rising above

the world, above classes, [as] the epitome of the spirit" (ibid.: 50-51).
In which case, hell-bent on resisting the contaminations of contin-
gency, such utopian visionaries do steal fire. But they do so within a
closed economy and thus manage to annihilate themselves. In other
wor(l)ds, it is the fate of what Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera In-
fante (1973) has called the "misfired Midas" to produce a Golden Age
that is very much iron-bound. And such, indeed, is the case when the
"anti-utopian" Cabrera Infante engages in an "avatar of Attila" (Che
Guevara) and a "West Indian version of Jehovah" (Castro) represen-
tation of fidelismo.
The representation of the failure of political vision and will is no
less disconcerting when, in that "Springblade" of his Black + Blues
collection, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1977: 40) contemplates the de-
generation of "sons, dreamers, lovers" ("we could have had them")
and a postcoloniality of "figment, scheme, and fantasy" that is shot
through with the "psychedelic flashes of madmen." For it is apparently
the case that, after "all should have been soaked in real blood" and
been "anchored in the real bone,"
... we set them up here
some to build crazy
palaces,imperialshops, super-
marketsthat have become cages
that have become prison.
The quest for the ideal enclave ends thus, in full cry and irony, and
in a super/cessation that does make of utopia a closed, impenetrable
space of possibilities that have been terminated. Necessarily so, for its
terminus may indeed be like the one to which we are transported in,
say, the Guyanese context of Martin Carter's "Jail Me Quickly," where
it is ineluctably the case that "men murder men as men must murder
men to build their shining Governments of the damned" (Dabydeen
and Tagoe 1988).
Still, we are in Mesoamerica, and the romance of a second chance is
an old one:
Awaitingthat moment, the GuaraniIndians [had once]journeyed through

the condemned land. ... Fromthe sea coaststo the center of America,they
have sought paradise.They have skirtedjungles and mountainsand rivers
in pursuit of the new land, the one that will be founded withoutold age or
sickness.... The chantsannouncethat corn will grow on its own.... [And]
neither punishmentnor pardon will be necessary. (Abreuy G6mez 1982)
Given a world that can be so suffused with dawn-of-an-age shininess
and paradisiac promise, "how can we fail to be reminded of the images
of Genesis, of Arab tales, of the myths of the South Pacific or Central

Asia, of the Teotihuacan paradise of Tlaloc?" Octavio Paz (1973: 90) so
frames a tenacious propensity in AlternatingCurrent.But Paz is being
rather pointed, of course, in a question shot through with the laziness
of easy romance. The rhetorical effect of his exuberance merely delays
the counter-narrative of an "other side," of l'autreface du royaume(Mu-
dimbe 1973). The promise of the ideal enclave is therefore postponed
on the very grounds upon and into which eu-topos unbecomes itself
in ou-topos. Paz proposes, accordingly, that there is always "another
sort of vision: [of] deserts, rocks, thirst, panting," in which context the
"dagger-eye of the sun" looks down upon and fires into existence a
"landscape of damnation .... Transparent infernos, a geometry of
crystals; circular hells, hells of garish, clashing colors, a pullulation of
forms and monsters. Hell: petrification" (Paz 1973: 90). He also works
his way through various refractions of the "broken mirror where the
world sees itself destroyed" to find in the Aztec aspiration to the sun
an especially dramatic measure for Mesoamerica, and for the well and
truly bent utopia:
The Aztec versionof Mesoamericancivilizationwas grandioseand somber.
The militaryand religious groups,and also the common people, were pos-
sessed by a heroic and inordinate belief: that they were the instruments
of a sacred task that consisted in serving, maintaining,and extending the
solar cult and thus helping to preserve the order of the cosmos. The cult
demanded that the gods be fed human blood in order to keep the uni-
verse operating. A sublime and frightening idea: blood as the animating
substance of the motion of the worlds, a motion analogous to that of the
dance and to that of war. The war dance of the stars and planets, a dance
of creativedestruction. (Paz 1972: 90)
In all such contortions to fulfill the utopian imperative, "what stuns
and paralyzes the mind," Paz further elaborates, "is the use of real-
istic means in the service of a metaphysic both rigorously rational
and delirious, the insensate offering up of lives to a petrified con-
cept" (ibid.: 94). In the face of "the constant incipiency of chaos" or
"the contaminations of contingency," the utopian bent is effectively the
consequence of an all too insistent "wager against the unpredictable"
(ibid.: 189, 201).
To my knowledge, nowhere else in the literature has such wager-
ing been as elaborately worked (up) as in the baroque confection that
we get in Carpentier's Reasons of State when the Man, who had been
"hailed as restorer and custodian of Liberty," delivers a speech before
an immense crowd at the Olympic Stadium. It is a speech in which the
"Wise Man of Nueva Cordoba" unleashes "a torrential onslaught-
without pause to take breath-as if a dictionary were unbound, let
loose, with pages in confusion, words in revolt, a tumult of concepts
and ideas, accelerated impact of figures, images and abstractions in a

vertiginous flood of words launched to the Republic, from the Logos
to foot-and-mouth disease, from General Motors to Ramakrishna."
From beginning to end, the speech, which will in fact leave behind
"a total mental emptiness-blank brains and an agnostic trance," is a
veritable encyclopaedia of figures, schemes, and fantasies, all of them
utopian and all of them bent. Appropriately, the de- and transvalua-
tion of all values does not prevent the Wise Man and Austere Doctor
from coming to the synthetic conclusion that, "from the Mystic Mar-
riage between the Eagle and the Condor, and as a result of the fer-
tilization of our inexhaustible soil by foreign investment, our America
would be transformed by the vigorous Technology that would come to
us from the North, [for we were] on the threshold of a century which
would be the Century of Technology for our Young Continent." And
out of this version of the "extraordinary concretion" (Cesaire) that is
the Americas,
a synthesis would be born between the Vedanta, the Popul-Vuh and the
parables of Christ-the-first-socialist, the only true socialist, nothing to do
with Moscow Gold or the Red Peril, or an exhausted dying Europe, without
sap or talent-and it would be as well for us to break finally with its useless
teaching. . . . The start of this new Era, in which the thesis-antithesis of
North-South was complemented by the telluric and the scientific, would be
manifested in the creation of a New Humanity, the Alpha-Omega, the party
of Hope, expressing the sturm-und-drang,the political pulse of new genera-
tions, marking the end of Dictatorships in this Continent, and establishing
a true and authentic Democracy, where there would be freedom of syndical
action, provided that it did not break the harmony between Capital and
Labour; ... and, finally, the Communist Party would be legalized, since it in
fact existed in our country, provided that it did not obstruct the functioning
of institutions nor stimulate class war. (Carpentier 1976 [1974]: 289-90)
I propose an identification of this verbal equivalent of Christophe's
La Ferriere with yet another Mesoamerican particularity, one that is
linked, reasonably enough, I trust, to a "sited" concern about lan-
guage in Octavio Paz. For there is, in the vertiginous concretions of
the act of speaking above, clear evidence of the working of a "great,
empty mouth of chaos with its fatal seduction for man and the uni-
verse," which is how Paz (1974: 26) once proposed that we understand
the central image of the Aztec Sun Stone. There is that; and there
is, in addition, the way in which the cross(ed)-genealogical bent of
Mesoamerican utopianism manifests itself, namely, in patterns of dis-
integration and agglutination, of fragmentation and reconstitution.
"Divided to the vein," as Walcott (1962: 18) puts it, the issues that are
engendered become as (de)generative as they are (con)fused. In any
event, what we are confronted with is heterogeneity driven off-scale
in the pursuit of utopian wholeness. The ironic consequence is "a con-

tinuous eruption of fragments, particles, pieces" that begins and ends,
succinctly in Paz (1973: 81), with and in the "copulation of syllables
[and] the fornication of meanings."
In Nueva Cordoba con/texts like ours, the pull of the Aboriginal
thus coincides with sub/versions of itself. The resulting, so to speak,
mis-generating force is one that precludes the kind of compromise
utopia which Rosemary Radford Reuther's Sexism and God-Talk, for
one, posits as a quite "livable future," based on conversion or metanoia,
instead of on endless flight into an unrealized future. For "while there
is no one utopian state of humanity lying back there in an original
paradise of the beginning, there are basic ingredients of a just and
livable society" (Reuther 1983: 254).
Still, a rather more generous assessment of the utopian propensity
is, of course, possible, as can be seen when Frank and Fritzie Manuel
emphasize process, condition of being, rather than teleology. They
view "the truly great utopian" as "a Janus-like creature, time-bound
and free of time, place-bound and free of place," with a duality that
"should be respected and appreciated" (Manuel and Manuel 1979:
13). Furthermore, the Manuels call attention to the fact that "particu-
larly rich utopian moments have been attached to political revolutions
and the dictatorships that follow in their wake. For these are periods
in which all things seem possible, and the utopian appears no madder
than other men" (ibid.: 24). Roger Garaudy (1974: 107) is rather more
sedate in his agreement: "A utopia is not born just anytime; only at a
turning point of history."
Along with all of the readings above, it is also relevant to note that a
Yoruba-based cautionary tale simultaneously empowers and subverts
Cesaire's and Carpentier's versions of Henri Christophe in Haiti. In-
sofar as the circumstances reflect genealogy, certain dimensions of
the Haitian affair take on particular colorations, so to speak (see Bio-
baku 1973; Soyinka 1976). Accordingly, it is not incidental that Aime
Ce'saire foregrounds the dramatic import of the myth and the his-
tory of Shango-that "storm on the edge of a knife" (Thompson
1983: 85)-in The Tragedyof King Christophe.The salute that Shango
receives from Cesaire's African Page is encompassing and telling be-
cause Shango is there: "Power of night, tide of the day / [who rides] /
through the halls of heaven / mounted on the flaming ram of the
tempest" (ibid.: 95). In The Kingdom of This World, meanwhile, Car-
pentier is hardly being casual when he invokes a millenarian "waiting
for the thud of the bronze hoofs of Ogoun's ten thousand horses" at
the Citadelle. Neither is he any less historically or discursively invested
in the weight of such matters when he has Macandal predict that at
"the sign for the great uprising . . . the Lords Back There, headed
by Damballah, the Master of the Roads, and Ogoun, Master of the

Swords, [will] bring the thunder and lightning ... [will] unleash the cy-
clone that [will] round out the work of men's hands" (Carpentier 1970
[1949]: 42). Nor, yet again, when he later has the Jamaican Bouckman
initiate the revolution in Haiti under the aegis of Ogoun (ibid.: 66).
In this "land of look behind" (Cliff 1985), what we are thus engaged
with is a genealogy of ecstasy and control that can be traced back to
the likes of Yoruba Ogun. He it is who lives on the cutting edge of
iron and in the flames of the blacksmith's forge and on the battlefield,
who cleared the primordial forests with his iron, and who, according
to his oriki, is the "terrible guardian of the sacred oath"; the "owner
of high fringes of palm fronds," to whom is due "the salute of iron
on stone" (Thompson 1983: 52-53). "To dare transition," as Soyinka
(1976: 157-58) further explains, "is the ultimate test of the human
spirit, and Ogun is the first protagonist of the abyss." Accordingly,
when all has been so specially said and done, there is an exquisite par-
ticularity to the concretion of ironies entailed by Christophe's dying
a suicide's death at the Citadelle and being immured, upright, in a
wall of La Ferriere. For he thereupon becomes, in Cesaire's telling, "a
king erect holding [his] own memorial tablet over the abyss" (Cesaire
1969 [1963]: 95). Appropriately, anticipation and denouement in both
Cesaire's and Carpentier's versions are thus framed by the consuming
significance of the Lords Back There, if not Ogun's, then Shango's:
he who "dances savagely in the courtyard of the impertinent," who
"carries fire as a burden on his head" (Thompson 1983: 86). And
it is he who holds another key to the future-past of Mesoamerican
Henri Christophe. Shango was, after all, "the tempestuous mythic
king" whose wife was the whirlwind; it was Shango who recklessly ex-
perimented with a leaf that had the power to bring down lightning
from the skies and who inadvertently caused the roof of the palace of
Oyo to be set afire by lightning, killing his wife and children in the
blaze. Half-crazed with grief and guilt, Shango went to a spot outside
his royal capital and hanged himself. "He thus [suffered] the conse-
quences of playing arrogantly with God's fire, and became lightning
itself." In sum, "in the lightning bolt Shango met himself" (ibid.: 88).
There is good reason, then, to note Carpentier's and Cesaire's build-
ing up of euphoric speculation and concrete measure into a dramatic
architecture that highlights the epic yet subversive turn of this caution-
ary tale. In it, the significant cornerstone encourages us to remember
that when the axe came into theforest, the treessaid, "The handle is one of
us"; to keep in mind what Ajala Alm6o, the Yoruba potter of heaven,
observed, namely, that a ki i da ese asiwere m6 l'6ojuona (nobody can
identify the footprints of a madman on the road).
Given the bent and the force of Mesoamerican circumstances, it
is not at all surprising that affiliations in Caribbean narratives must

cover so much ground, or that in doing so they provide con/texts in
which "the star-apple kingdom" can suffer such a dystopian reduction
as to become no more than that "whole fucking island." At the same
time that, "from Monos to Nassau," the "kingdom" is just as apt to
be rescued and restored to a time "when these slums of empire was
paradise," as Walcott's (1979) Shabine would have it in "The Schooner
Flight." After all, it appears to be the case, and often enough, that
there really was a time when "we were blest with a virginal, unpainted
world / with Adam's task of giving things their names," as Walcott
wrote in AnotherLife (Walcott 1982 [1973]: 45). Furthermore, it was in
the face of real enough colonial ordinances and imperial prohibitions
that Earl Lovelace's historical novel The Wine of Astonishmentasserted
defiantly and with utopian stoicism the conviction that "God don't give
you more than you can bear. .... 'Cause for hundreds of years we
bearing what He send like the earth bears the hot sun and the rains
and the dew and the cold, and the earth is still the earth, still here for
man to build house on and fall down on, still sending up shoots and
flowers and growing things" (Lovelace 1983: 1).
Peter Abrahams had earlier provided us with the counter-narrative,
in This Island, Now, where it was inscribed, with perhaps too heavy a
hand, in the details of a post-Independence politics of betrayal. So,
too, in the collapse of a borrowed and badly applied liberation the-
ology (in light of which President Moses Joshua "could no longer be
called names like 'The Liberator,' 'The Dark Crusader,' 'The Guard-
ian of the People' "). "This island now is an unjust society," we were
told. "Harsh and cruel to the majority of its people, [it is one in which]
forces have been manipulated first to run the slave state, then to run
the colonial state, then to run the independent state which was handed
over not to the mass of the people but to the descendants of the slave-
owners and the heirs of the colonial state" (Abrahams 1967: 259).
In his Omeros,meanwhile, Derek Walcott (1990: 29) adopts a pro-
phetic stance, with his memories-of-the-future prediction that "one
day the Mafia / will spin these islands round like a roulette . . . and
ministers cash in on casinos." However, in AnotherLife, Walcott had
earlier conceived of an even more comprehensive context in which to
register this propensity for betrayal writ large. His collaborative man-
ner of doing so, by way of an epigraph from Carpentier's Lost Steps, is
broadly significant. It was in his 1953 "memories of the future" novel
that Carpentier proposed the vision which Walcott takes as premise
in the "Homage to Gregorias" section of AnotherLife. The novelist and
the poet thus concur in finding evidence of an Ab/original failure of
the future in the Americas, a failed future in which we witness "the
Indian turning green, the Negro's smile gone, the white man more
perverted, [and all of them] without heart to set themselves to the only
task appropriate to the milieu that was slowly revealing ... the nature
of its values: Adam's task of giving things their name" (Walcott 1982
[1973]: 45).
From Aztec to Yoruba, from Mesoamerica to Ethiopia, there is a
generic, assault-on-paradise sense in which this is all as it should be.
"Paradise," writes Paz (1973: 91-92), "would appear to be ruled by
two warring sisters ... a nexus of contrary meanings [that oscillates]
between water and light." And elsewhere, in the baroque erotics of
Conjunctionsand Disjunctions,the Mexican's rather singular conceptual-
ization of the issue is that "our sex organs and all their images-from
the most complex down to jokes in a barroom-remind us that there
was a time when our face was down close to the ground and to our
genitals.... Our sex organs tell us that there was a golden age; for the
face, this age is not the solar ray of light of the Cyclops but excrement"
(Paz 1974: 20). Dominic Baker-Smith's less idiosyncratically relevant
sense of utopian thought has implications that are as much epistemo-
logical as they are political and psychological. He has observed, at the
center of all utopian writing, "a concern with the mediating process be-
tween ideal forms and the inadequate provisions of experience." The
utopian bent is thus principally driven by "the effort to reconcile ideal
possibilities with the recalcitrance of the known" (Baker-Smith and
Barfoot 1987: 8). A conviction that we are consequently (duty-)bound
to violence and violation makes le devoir de violencethe grounds upon
which Mali's Yambo Ouologuem is driven to conclude that "often, it
is true, the soul desires to dream the echo of happiness, an echo that
has no past" (Ouologuem 1971 [1968]: 181). Small wonder, then, that
the corollary concept of paradise lost has become a "most plangent
and enduring" motif, as Beverley Ormerod observes in a discussion of
Caribbean writers in search of paradise. She develops her thesis with
appropriate metaphoric force: "Time guards the gates of Eden . . .
as sternly as any angel with drawn sword"; hence there can be no re-
turning to eras of "simplicity and optimism, with [their] divine illusion
of permanence" (Ormerod 1985: 1). Such a recognition, or at least
the suggestion of one, is aphoristically conveyed by Louis Marin's tem-
poral and spatial "play" with "utopics": "Living at the origin-and at
the founding moment-is impossible ... After space comes the rude
reality of time" (Marin 1984: 276).
In the Yoruba landscapes of Amos Tutuola, meanwhile, architec-
tural and discursive inversions devolve from the circumstances in
which the utopian quest seeks to cross the abyss-and to stay alive
through it all; very much, indeed, like "Father of the gods who could
do everything in this world" (Tutuola 1953: 10). In any event, Tu-
tuola's treatment of the urge to do so is as representative as it is
inimitable. The results take us further down the road and on into
the "UNRETURNABLE-HEAVEN'S TOWN." Although it is "very clean," the
road that thus compels our movement leads us deeper into that nexus
of contrary meanings which Peter New (1985) describes as the man
who announces Utopia having two names, one of which means "mes-
senger of God," and the other "distributor of nonsense." Tutuola's
Palm-WineDrinkardand His Dead Palm-WineTapsterin Dead'sTowntakes
us, through a Yoruba fantasy on rude realities, into an "unreturnable-
heaven's town" that "was surrounded with a thick and tall wall."
There we saw that if one of them wanted to climb a tree, he would climb
the ladder first before leaning it againstthat tree; and there was a flat land
near their town but they built their houses on the side of a steep hill, so all
the houses bent downwardsas if they were going to fall, and their children
were alwaysrolling down from these houses, but their parentsdid not care
about that; the whole of them did not wash their bodies at all, but washed
their domestic animals;they wrapped themselveswith a kind of leaves as
their clothes, but had costlyclothesfor theirdomesticanimals,and cut their
domestic animals'finger nails, but kept their own uncut for one hundred
years. (Tutuola 1953: 56-58)
In the Caribbean, the process of negotiating the "gradient of dis-
similarity" (Midgley 1988: 30) between the pliable and the recalcitrant
has always been freighted with the aw(e)ful plausibilities of the vari-
ous genealogies involved: from Abeokuta to Zion, from Extremadura
to Madras, and places beyond. The push-pull effects have held true
as much for Henri Christophe, Emperor by the Grace of God, as for
"the congeries of volatile and fissiparous Jamaican movements known
collectively as the Ras Tafarites"(Wilson 1973: 63). And never mind,
either, that the Rasta Man's utopian bent derives from a deeply par-
ticular space-of-faith assumption whose genea-theo-logical conceit is
that
de spiritof the Lawdwent over into Ethiopiawhen Israelwas parted among
the nations.De twelvetribeswere scatteredan' lost. But de spiritof de Lawd
passed over into Ethiopia,after the Queen of Shebacame to Solomon and
learned all his wisdom,an' passedover backto her own land. So it wasblack
men out of Africa who became God'schosen people, for they had learnt de
Way. (Mais 1979 [1954]: 74)
Equally catalytic is a "Babylonian" captivity and a misgovernance
that have produced "men, women and children stark naked, lunatics
of wants," and "executives in horseless chariots [who] sometimes pass
through [and] hold their noses," in the words of the Rasta poet whom
Leonard Barrett (1977: 12) quotes in his study of the Ras Tafarites,
of paradise lost and cultural dissonance. And the views, if not quite
the visions, of Rasta Poet and Prime Minister sometimes coincide.
Thus, "in instituting the . . . Minimum Wage Law of 1975,... the
Johnson ? Inventions of Paradise 709
Honorable Michael Manley startled the House of Parliament with the

following revelations: twenty-eight thousand or more Jamaicans earn
less than ten dollars per week, sixty-four thousand earn less than fif-
teen dollars per week; and one hundred one thousand earn less than
twenty dollars per week." Moreover, writing in the Caribbean context
of the late 1960s, it was still possible for Walter Rodney (1969: 61)
to assert that "the Rastafarians have represented the leading force of
the expression of black consciousness. They have rejected . . . philis-
tine white West Indian society. They have sought their cultural and
spiritual roots in Ethiopia and Africa." Elsewhere, in a parenthetical
discussion of the Rastas in Caribbean literature, Selwyn Cudjoe (1980:
165-69) similarly presented the Rastafari "as a positive and progres-
sive force, concerned with the welfare of the dispossessed masses."
Cudjoe's favorable characterization relied primarily on Roger Mais's
1954 novel BrotherMan, with its sympathetic depiction of the move-
ment's beginnings in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Mais had written
of the period as one in which anti-Rasta sentiment ("a secret cult and
a menace to society") was "carefully fanned to a nice conflagration by
political opportunists and a partisan press." As a consequence, "many
members of the Ras Tafarite persuasion were forced to shave their
beards in secret, or suffer public humiliation of another kind" (Mais
1979 [1954]: 175; see also Wilson 1973: 66; Campbell 1987: 71).
All the same, in surveying those who have been "liberated from
the obscurity of themselves," Cudjoe notes that Rex Nettleford under-
scores the Rastafarians' "unashamed commitment to Africa and . .
yearning for knowledge of the African past . . . [their] unfaltering
expressions of wrath against an oppressive and what [they] regarded
as a 'continuing colonial society' . . . [their] expressed hatred for
the humiliating 'white bias' in the society, though not necessarily for
white people, [and] the deprecation of the agonizing logic of a his-
tory of black slavery and white domination" (Cudjoe 1980: 169). For
his part, Horace Campbell (1987: 89) tries to persuade us that the
(now widely diffused) Ras Tafarite symbols-flag, lion, drum, chal-
ice, [dread]locks-and distinctive language (I an I Gwine Beat Down
Babylon; Let The Power Fall On I) of resistance are "neither crazy nor
millenarian." In this light, even when Rasta Time seems eschatologi-
cal, as in Edward Kamau Brathwaite's "Conqueror," the machine-gun
drumbeat clocks an apocalypse of the here and the now: "like a rat /
like a rat / like a rat-a-tap tapping...."
an we burnin babylone
haile selassiehallelu/jah
(Brathwaite1977: 10-11)
In the treatment of Rastafarian Ethiopianism that we get in The

Children of Sisyphus, however, Orlando Patterson (1982 [1964]) reori-
ents us in a decidedly dystopian direction. He does capture, it is true,
the requisite "by the rivers of Babylon" anguish and radical insight
about "Ethiopia, the land of our Fathers, / The land where all Gods
love to be," that so distinguishes the Chosen of Ethiopia among the
"red-seamed agents of Babylon":
Our redeemer is calling us home
We see there is no truth in Rome
Our heaven is in Ethiopia
With King Rastaand Queen Ethiopia.
(Ibid.:97)
But by emphasizing the Rasta investment in the return of an unreturn-
able fiction, Patterson also portrays them as pathos-filled and self-
consuming. In the process, he attaches to their utopian idealism the
tragicomic bent of the quixotic. The Rastafarian assault on the ideal
is accordingly arrested "across the dark-brown, silty shore," where
the inadequate provisions of experience and the recalcitrance of the
known leave "so many silhouetted majesties swallowed over with all
the harvest of their expectancy." Stranded "upon the undulating, stale,
delicious filth," they remain "ravished and exhausted [in] their living
hell. So now there was only the dead nothingness of joy" (ibid.: 173).
Resignation and retreat are inconceivable, however. Thus there can
be no acceptance of, for example, that brand of New World, and re-
combinant, affiliation which Trinidad's Sparrow plays out in the hindi
and soca beats of his marashin calypsos, of that "new combinations"
identity which Guyana's Wilson Harris confronts in The WholeArmor-
with its argument, as cited approvingly by C. L. R.James (1963 [1938]:
416), in favor of "a whole world of branches and sensations we've
missed. [For] we'rethefirst potentialparents who can contain the ancestral
house" (James's emphases). Neither can there be much Rasta comfort
in that "divided to the vein" identity that Derek Walcott has made his
being and his due, from "A Far Cry from Africa" (Walcott 1962: 18)
to the epic negotiation of coherence in Omeros(Walcott 1990). Nor
can there be Ras Tafarite consolation in that descent into vernacular
skepticism with which Jamaica's Louise Bennett (1982) addresses the
temptations of (in)coherent Caribbean genealogy in "Back to Africa."
True, "Granma was African," but then again, "great great great /
Granpa was Englishman."
Den yuh great granmodderfader
By yuh fader side wasJew?
An you grampaby yuh modder side
WasFrenchieparlez-vous?
(Ibid.: 104)
Johnson * Inventionsof Paradise 71 1
The point is that even in versions that are more negotiable than
Bennett's, such as Nicolas Guillen's Cuban "Balada de los dos abue-
los" ("Ballad of the Two Grandfathers" [Guillen 1973: 67]) or his "El
apellido" ("My Last Name" [Guillen 1972: 161]), with its crescendo
of questions-"How do you say Andres in Congolese?"-the mixing
and the crossing of genealogies equally appear to be inviting a crisis
in (un)becoming. Rastafarian accommodation is in any case not really
possible under such circumstances as those described above. Nor is
it likely to be any more so in the mediation suggested by Lamming's
In the Castle of My Skin, where Pa reports that "the silver of exchange
sail across the sea and my people scatter like clouds in the sky when
the waters come ... silver sailing vessels, some to Jamaica, Antigua,
Grenada, some to Barbados and the island of oil and the mountain
tops. . . . [But] I make my peace with the Middle Passage to settle
on that side of the sea the white man call a world that was west of
another world" (Lamming 1975 [1953]: 233-34). As Lamming puts it
elsewhere, in The Pleasures of Exile:
A fantastichuman migration[had moved]to the New Worldof the Carib-
bean; deported crooksand criminals,defeatedsoldiersand Royalistgentle-
men fleeing from Europe, slavesfrom the WestCoastof Africa, East Indi-
ans, Chinese, Corsicans,and Portuguese.The list is alwaysincomplete,but
they all move and meet on an unfamiliarsoil, in a violent rhythm of race
and religion. (Lamming1992 [1960]: 17)
Ever since, the site of all this "scatteration" (Smart 1984) has been
trying to, indeed, has had to, contain the Trinidad house of V. S. Nai-
paul's Mr. Biswas, with its Brahminical contradictions, as well as the
tremendistabarrios of Cubena's Panama-not to mention the virtually
forgotten cimarronesof Pueblo San Nicolas Tolentin on Mexico's Chica
Costa (see Aguirre Beltran 1946; Wa Githiora 1990). "This extraor-
dinary concretion of ours is situated at the focal point of every ebb
and flow," Cesaire's Vastey declaims in The Tragedyof King Christophe.
"That's where God has put us. Our backs to the Pacific; before us
Europe and Africa; on either side, the Americas" (Cesaire 1969 [1963]:
73).
One apparent consequence of being the site of such variousness is
that the Caribbean forever promises to be, or risks being, itself only
in the pattern of conflict and desire manifested by, say, Benitez-Rojo's
racially dizzying (and yet ethnically inadequate) literary inventory "of
the black who studied in Paris; of the white who believes in the Yoruba
orichas or in the voodoo loas . . .; of the mulatto who wants to be
white; of the white man who does not want his daughter to marry a
black man; of the white man who loves a mulatto woman; of the black
woman who loves a white man; of the black man who despises the mu-
latto; of the rich black and the poor white; of the white who claims that
race does not exist" (Benitez-Rojo 1990 [1985]: 105). But the Carib-
bean story has also been that "of the black who wants to return to
Africa after so many centuries." And, in the case of the Rastafarians,
especially Patterson's Rasta, the story has insisted on Ethiopia unbound
and unadulterated-in spite, or precisely because, of other Caribbean
voices impatiently saying, "If you hear some young fool fretting about
going back to Africa, keep far from the invalid and don't force a pas-
sage to where you won't yet belong" (Lamming 1975 [1953]: 234). As
represented in The Childrenof Sisyphus,the Rastafarian insistence on
the Great Return results in a conflation of desire with an anxiety that is
obsessive, hysterical even, in its conviction that "the ship would come.
They talked. They laughed. The ship of the great Emperor would
show itself in the morning with the glory of the sun" (Patterson 1982
[1964]: 173).
[On] the morrowwould not the holy ship be comingfor them?Could not the
spirit of the Holy Emperorbring [them]back to life? Babylonwas wicked.
He had never realized it could be so wicked.But no matterwhat they did,
there was nothing which the Holy Emperorcould not repair. He made all
things; he destroyedall things; and he could remakeall things.
And so he kissed her gently on her lips. He said a short prayer for her.
"Tomorrow,"he whisperedwith all the deep fervourof his faith. "Tomor-
row we shall meet in Paradise." (Ibid.: 190)
So conceived, Rasta messianic millenarianism is necessarily limited to
avoidance and rebuke, to awaiting the demise of the offending society,
in C. Eric Lincoln's judgment.5 "And when the end comes, the disin-
herited will survey the ruins and gather themselves to await the call to
come home ... in the case of the Rastafarians, to Africa. To Ethiopia.
To be with Ras Tafari, Negus Negast, the Conquering Lion of Judah"
(Wilson 1973: 67).
And yet, this deconstruction of Rasta utopian time and space not-
withstanding, there is a historical record of a counter-text, of paradise
regained. Moreover, it was even occasioned by the signs-and-wonders
visit of "His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie," the Conquering Lion
of Judah, to Jamaica, on April 21, 1966, which may have appeared
to be the kerygmatic return of an unreturnable fiction, an End-Time,
"when every cultist on the island began to prepare for what the Greek
New Testament called a parousia."Nevertheless, Rastafarian chronicles
could record, and in virtual reality time, that "the King of Kings and
5. "Except by some a priori argument of false consciousness, it is difficult in view

of this typical millennialist response to follow the thesis propounded by Orlando
Patterson, in 'Ras Tafari: The Cult of Outcasts,'New SocietyNo. iii (12 November
1964), pp. 15-17, that the last thing which the cultist wants 'in the depth of his
being ... is for the ship to come"' (Wilson 1973: 67).
Lord of Lords did not think too highly to leave his High Throne in
Ethiopia to sit on a chair in the King's House among the servants of
the earth .... 'His coming lifted us from the dust and caused us to
sit with princes of this country"' (Barrett 1977). Indeed, it did. For
so massive was "the outpouring of support for [the] African monarch
that the State had to call upon Rastafarian leaders, such as Mortimer
Planno, to participate in the official functions" (Campbell 1987: 127).
All the same, I must revert, for the purposes of illumination here, to
the ironic land-in-waiting narrative that Emperor Henri Christophe's
tragedy becomes when it is seen as a Shango- and Ogun-generated
cautionary tale, as a failed epic-a perspective, incidentally, that re-
mains as pervasively relevant today as it was in 1949 and in 1963 for
Carpentier and Cesaire, respectively. Which is why it holds true in
Edouard Glissant's play MonsieurToussaint-another "prophetic vision
of the past" from Martinique about, yet again, the Haitian Revolution.
And nowhere more so than when Glissant's principal characters also
"return," also invoke the loas of Africa. From Toussaint L'Ouverture
and his Ogoun to Macandal and his Eshu Elegba, "we plow the seas
from America to Africa .... Walk, walk ... with Africa .... Shout
the name ... in the forest, and on the hills, O Legba!" (Glissant 1981
[1961]: 97). We are thus reminded of Cesaire's irredeemably suicidal
Henri Christophe as he heads down his cleanly elegiac road into an
alternative future:
Africa, help me to go home, carryme like an aged child in your arms. Un-
dress me and wash me. Strip me of my nobles, my nobility,my scepter, my
crown. And wash me, oh, wash me clean of their grease paint, their kisses,
wash me clean of my kingdom. (Cesaire1969 [1963]: 90)
It is not surprising that such crises in the Caribbean future-past
soon become couched in terms of an ideal(ized) bent toward ancestral
roots. In the double-edged narratives of flight into and away from
lineage that all this entails, Carpentier, for example, duly notes the
fact that "Henri Christophe, the reformer, had attempted to ignore
Voodoo, molding with whiplash a caste of Catholic gentlemen." Facing
a native insurrection of subjugated knowledges on the last night of
his life, however, Christophe comes to recognize "the real traitors to
his cause" as St. Peter with his keys; the Capuchins of St. Francis;
the blackamoor St. Benedict, along with the dark-faced Virgin in her
blue cloak; the Evangelists, whose books he had ordered kissed each
time the oath of loyalty was sworn; and, finally, "all the martyrs to
whom he had ordered the lighting of candles containing thirteen gold
coins." The night had nonethelessgrown "dense with drums. Calling to
one another, answering from mountain to mountain, rising from the
beaches, issuing from the caves, running beneath the trees, descend-
ing ravines and riverbeds, the drums of Bouckman, the drums of the
Grand Alliances.... A vast encompassing percussion.... A horizon
of thunder was closing in" (Carpentier 1970 [1949]: 148).
Although his appeal to context is a different one, Derek Walcott
(1970: 13) identifies a central issue that both Carpentier and Cesaire
explore in rendering Henri Christophe's return to his native land:
"The theme has remained: one race's quarrel with another's god."
Furthermore, in writing about an earlier, Mesoamerican template for
this kind of conflict, Carpentier had observed that "two irreconcilable
historical periods confronted each other. Totemic Man was opposed
to Theological Man.... The Discovery had suddenly taken on a gigan-
tic theological dimension" (Carpentier 1979 [1962]: 244, 247). Even
more apt for our contexts here is the proverb "Your god, my good
brother, cannot set my god right; nor shall my dreams step down for
yours to step up," which Ethiopian dramatist Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin
(1977) uses as the epigraph to Collisionof Altars. This play locates the
collapse of Emperor Kaleb's Axumite kingdom amid the clashes and
competing claims of four religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and
the Religion of the Serpent) in sixth-century Ethiopia (ibid.: 77-80).
In light of such crises of allegiance, it fits, too, that wherever they
converge in the Caribbean, similar Aboriginal undertows pull at Ara-
wak and High Admiral, at Rasta and Carib, at Yankee and Yoruba.
Thus a favorite sranan tongoaphorism of Suriname's J. G. A. Koenders
effectively captures the divided-to-the-vein appeal and threat that are
entailed by such crises (the consequences of which Henri Christophe,
for one, understood too late): "Yukan kibrigranmama,mayu no kan tapu
kosokoso-you may hide your grandmother, but you cannot prevent
her from coughing" (Koenders 1975 [1943]: 137).
In both Cesaire's and Carpentier's treatments of Henri Christophe,
such quarrels and the concomitant collapse of erstwhile "blessed isles"
do as much for Emperor as for commoner. This is clearly the case in
The Kingdom of This Worldwhen the narrative foregrounds the telling
nature of Soliman's exile in Rome and the vernacular move that he
makes toward the Land-in-Waiting of Eshu (childless wanderer, alone,
moving as a spirit) Elegbara (owner-of-the-power): "Papa Legba, lift
up the barrier; open up the gate, and let me pass."
Turning his back on all, moaning to the wall papered with yellow flowers
on a green background,Solimanwas seeking a god who had his abode in
far-off Dahomey, at some dark crossroad,his red phallus on a crutch he
carried for that purpose.
PapaLegba,I'ouvribarrie-apoumoin,agoye,
Papa Legba,ouvri barrie-apou moin,pou moinpasse. (Carpentier 1970
[1949]: 168)
Given the reductive potential of Carpentier's penchant for erotolep-

tic, and essentialist, notions about his mulatta and Afro-Caribbean
characters, it may help to further contextualize the Great Return in
a more consciously activist way, as Eduardo Galeano (1973) does with
Cuba in Open Veins of Latin America: "Some slaves committed mass
suicide, mocking their masters, as Fernando Ortiz has put it, 'with
their eternal strikes, their unending flight to the other world."' They
thought, explains Galeano, that they would thus be brought back to
life, body and soul, in Africa. However, "by mutilating the corpses so
they would return to life castrated, maimed, or decapitated, the mas-
ters dissuaded many from killing themselves." By 1870, Afro-Cubans
were, on the whole, no longer committing suicide; instead, "a magic
chain gave them power and they 'flew through the sky and returned
to their own land"' (ibid.: 98).
It seems, then, that "The People Who Could Fly" to the Land-in-
Waiting have always sought to do exactly that (see Hamilton 1985;
Wilentz 1990). Consider, for example, Toni Morrison's (1978: 332)
counterpointing of exuberant epiphany ("He could flyyyy!") with
moral gravity ("You can't just fly off and leave a body"), in Song of
Solomon, or Cuban Esteban Montejo's engaging us in a remembrance
of things African, airborne-and past, in Autobiographyof a Runaway
Slave (Montejo 1969). So, too, in Galeano's (1987) recontextualization
by fire and genesis of Carpentier's master-poisoner, Macandal. The
year is 1758, the place Cape Francais. Francois Macandal, he who had
announced "the hour of those who came from Africa," is in the pro-
cess of being burnt alive at the stake when, all of a sudden, a shriek
splits the ground, a fierce cry of pain and exultation. Macandal breaks
free and is lost in the air to the accompanying, and knowing, cry of
"Macandalsauve!" (Macandal is saved! [ibid.: 26]). Michelle Cliff (1978:
63-64) expresses the Jamaican truth of the matter in Abeng:"Africans
could fly. They were the only people on this earth to whom God had
given this power. Those who refused to be slaves and did not eat salt
flew back to Africa, [but] those who were slaves and ate salt to replen-
ish their sweat, had lost the power, because the salt made them heavy,
weighted down."
As it turns out, this future-past fails.6 It failed in the kingdoms of
6. In addition to that of Bennett (1982), as shown above, see the contra-negritude

nativism of Guadeloupean Maryse Conde: "Being woman and Antillean is a des-
tiny that is difficult to unentangle. At one time, Antilleans believed that their quest
for identity had to go through Africa.... I would like to have Africa as my adop-
tive mother, but she cannot be a natural mother. The Antilles is my natural mother
and it is with her that I have accounts to settle, like any daughter with her mother,
before becoming completely an adult" (Conde 1984). See also the mere revee, mere
this world where, as Carpentier notes, "the word of Henri Christophe

had become stone and no longer dwelt among us." For in the end, "all
of his fabulous person that remained was in Rome, a finger floating
in a rock-crystal bottle filled with brandy" (Carpentier 1970 [1949]:
177). Carpentier also links this failure to gene-soaked anxieties and
other black skin/white mask obsessions in the Caribbean. Christophe's
latter-day sovereign state, with its "tide smell of the future" (Cesaire
1969 [1963]: 45), became a race-(de)graded dystopia, having by then
forgotten its ancient properties. For "a spurious aristocracy ... a caste
of quadroons," which "not even Henri Christophe would have sus-
pected that the land of Santo Domingo would bring forth, [had taken
over] the old plantations, with their privileges and rank" (Carpentier
1970 [1949]: 177). Reason enough, I suppose, for being led into the
same temptation that dooms Vincent Placoly's protagonist in the Mar-
tinique of Freres volcans: "Dans l'archipel des Antilles," we are told,
"Tout se passe a huis clos" (In the archipelago of the Antilles all the
signs point to a decisive No Exit)-and this in a chroniquede l'abolition
de l'esclavage(Placoly 1983: 55).
In the final analysis, as has been more than hinted at in this essay,
Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral is especially effective in giving
to the utopian obsession with a Great Migration the requisite shades
which Mesoamerican con/texts demand. It does so by presenting
and re-presenting the issues as complex, embedded in superimposed
epochs and proclivities. In the elaborately imagined yet meticulous
historical novel that El siglo turns out to be, Carpentier makes moves,
sea voyages to abounding blessed isles, that construct a palimpsest of
the Caribbean Sea. He plays out in extravagant form the ironies of
desire and invention that ensue whenever Arawak and Carib; Carib
and Maya; Euro-conquistador and Carib; and Caribbean and Yankee
pursue ideal enclaves and imagined communities of "immense espla-
nades, virgins' baths, and unimaginable buildings" (Carpentier 1979
[1962]: 242).
A self- and other-consuming artifice, the Empire of the North thus
forever remains the Land-in-Waiting that makes and unmakes, even
as it is made up. That was true, once upon a time, of the state of affairs
that prevailed when the ideal(ized) future seemed almost to appear
before the eyes of the Caribs as they engaged in Carpentier's ver-
sion of their canoe-driven and Arawak-destroying assault on paradise:
"From talking so much about the Empire of the North, men began to
acquire proprietary rights over it.... Three more islands, two more,
perhaps only one ... [before] they would reach the Land-in-Waiting"
reelle compact expressed in her interview with VeVe Clark, "Je Me Suis Reconcili6
avec Mon Ile" (I have come to terms with my island [Cond6 1989]).
(ibid.: 243-44). It was then, however, that the Caribs encountered

other "unsuspectable invaders, from no one knew where": there began
"to loom on the horizon strange, unrecognized shapes, with hollows
in their sides, and trees growing on top of them, beating the canvas
which billowed and fluttered, and displayed unknown symbols." As a
consequence, that Carib/bean "Great Migration would no longer have
an objective, the Empire of the North would fall into the hands of
these unexpected rivals" (ibid.: 244).
Meanwhile, for those unsuspected others, gold-driven and cross-
sanctioned, "the prophecies of the Prophets had been fulfilled, the
divinations of theologians confirmed. The everlasting Battle of the
Waters, in such a spot as this, proclaimed that they had finally reached
the Promised Land, after an agonizing wait of many centuries" (ibid.:
247). In short order, the disputed archipelago would suddenly become
a "Theological Archipelago" when the first island "discovered" was
christened San Salvador. "The Antilles were being transformed into
an immense stained-glass window": Santo Domingo, Santiago, Our
Lady of Guadeloupe, all set up in the showcase of a sea now "whit-
ened by the coralliferous labyrinth of the Eleven Thousand Virgins-
as impossible to count as the CampusStellae"(ibid.: 245).
Given the bent of mind and the temptation of matter in Meso-
america, what followed was inevitable: a "proud excremental squan-
dering of gold, blood, and passion: a monstrous, methodical orgy
[consummated by] the ritual destruction of American Indians" (Paz
1974: 24); inevitable, too, was the disappearance of Carib, Taino, and
their kind in "a blind wild forest of blood"-with the Aztecs then
singing as the sun went down on Tenochtitlan, "We have chewed dry
twigs and salt grasses / we have filled our mouths with dust and bits of
adobe; / we have eaten lizards, rats, and worms" (Leon-Portilla 1962:
138). Meanwhile, from across the waters of the Caribbean, "that mis-
chievous gift, the sugar cane, would be introduced" into the islands
(Lamming 1992 [1960]). Given such "rites of perdition and waste . . .
sacrifice and defecation" (Paz 1974: 24), Carpentier had started his
"age of enlightenment" narrative, as it turns out, with the appropri-
ate ironies in place, providing it with a prologue in which the siglo de
las luces sea voyage to the new world, "now attainable, accessible and
knowable in all its splendour" (Carpentier 1979 [1962]: 246), was as
much a matter of vision as it was of murder: "I saw them erect the
guillotine again tonight. It stood like a doorway opening on to an im-
mense sky-through which the scents of the land were already coming
to us" (ibid.: 7). Appropriately, all that remained of the land's capacity
for paradisiac myth-making and myth-mocking even then was "the
reality of Carib petroglyphs ... with their human figures, inlaid in the
rock, a proud solar symbolism" (ibid.: 245), which had been "dealt a
death blow" just as matters were about to climax in yet another one of
Mesoamerica's "age-old design[s]" on utopia.
In 1958, workmen uncovered "a coffin of heavy metal, a coffin of
huge proportions," while digging near the churchyard of a High An-
glican church erected in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1692. So wrote Michelle
Cliff (1978) in her complex Mesoamerican novel Abeng.Sacrament and
cargo cult, war and death by water, the womb contained and despoiled
all meet in the details that follow, for the find was not really in the
shape of a coffin at all. Instead, it was more like "a monstrous packing
case, made of lead and welded shut" (ibid.: 7). It is richly appropri-
ate that in explaining this Caribbean exhumation, Cliff invoked, only
to subvert, the play of tropes that has dominated narratives of the
utopian bent: exodus to a promised land, sea voyages to blessed isles,
migration (ideological or physical) to an Empire of the North-in sum,
that nuclear fable of Carpentier's Explosionin which
the children of the Castilian plain would dream ... of the Valley of Jauja
after a supper of crust of bread with olive oil and garlic. The Encyclopaed-
ists . . . [of] a Better World in the society of the Ancient Incas, [and in
which] the United States had seemed a Better World, when they sent am-
bassadors to Europe without wigs, who wore buckled shoes, spoke clearly
and simply, and bestowed blessings in the name of Freedom. (Carpentier
1979 [1962]: 247)
Parenthetically, it is perhaps worth pointing out that such a con-

ception of an Empire-of-the-North future of triumphant Yankee-dom
had provoked Carpentier's compatriot Nicolas Guillen to conjure up
in the 1920s a Land-in-Waiting that would be "without Pershing and
without Lindberg / and even without New York." Guillen's anything-
but "Futuro" hopes
that other men will come
(White men or Black, it's all the same),
more powerful, more resolute,
who in the air and on the sea
will obliterate our airplanes
and impose on us their truth.
(Guillen 1972: 124-25)
"I'd like to see the Americans then!" is, finally, the thrust of Guillen's
challenge:
They, who bend us with their might,
modern Incas, new Aztecs, what will they do?
Like the ancient Indians they would work
the mines for the new Spaniard.
(Ibid.)
In Cliff's Abeng, meanwhile, a brass plate affixed to the "monstrous
packing case" informs the vicar of the High Anglican church that
within are the remains of a hundred plague victims, part of a shipload

of slaves from the Gold Coast who had contracted the plague from
rats on the vessel that brought them across the Atlantic from Africa to
Jamaica. On no account, warns the inscription on the plate, is the cof-
fin to be opened, as the plague might still be viable. Thereupon, given
this latter-day stage of the utopian bent in the Caribbean/New World,
Cliff's vicar concludes the matter appropriately: he commissions "an
American navy warship in port to take the coffin twenty miles out and
sink it in the sea" (Cliff 1978: 8).
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The Inventions of Paradise: The Caribbean and the Utopian Bent

Author(s): Lemuel A. Johnson

The man who describes the island of Utopia has

Abstract In the con/texts that this essay takes as circum-Caribbean, there is

PoeticsToday15:4 (Winter 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for

The myth-making and myth-mocking identification of the Caribbean/

ample, Carpentier focused on the Devil's complaint, which he used as

and trade in Ned Ward's "Jamaica":the sexual politics of conquest and

3. Mark Twain calculated a total harvest of 32,000 virgins in this transport-to-the-

I am persuaded that such transports of and traffic in women help to

fully delivered child of the Caribbean,whose vaginawas stretchedbetween

then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating,always

4. An even more remarkablestretch, so to speak, occurs in the following redactions

in thus reconfirming the issue, weaving it into Explosionin a Cathedral,

This "memory-of-an-infamy" obsession with Mesoamerican geneal-

dica historia" (true history) forms a partial counter-narrative to the

brate their slow but certain extinction." This cross-eyed perspective

burning August, automobilesgoing the wrong way,the green Hindus who

La Ferriere were the self- and other-consuming excesses of the French

istic utopianism" offers itself up as the "redeeming light, rising above

Awaitingthat moment, the GuaraniIndians [had once]journeyed through

of Genesis, of Arab tales, of the myths of the South Pacific or Central

and ideas, accelerated impact of figures, images and abstractions in a

in the pursuit of utopian wholeness. The ironic consequence is "a con-

by Damballah, the Master of the Roads, and Ogoun, Master of the

is not at all surprising that affiliations in Caribbean narratives must

Honorable Michael Manley startled the House of Parliament with the

In the treatment of Rastafarian Ethiopianism that we get in The

5. "Except by some a priori argument of false consciousness, it is difficult in view

Given the reductive potential of Carpentier's penchant for erotolep-

6. In addition to that of Bennett (1982), as shown above, see the contra-negritude

this world where, as Carpentier notes, "the word of Henri Christophe

(ibid.: 243-44). It was then, however, that the Caribs encountered

Parenthetically, it is perhaps worth pointing out that such a con-

within are the remains of a hundred plague victims, part of a shipload

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo

fault, with an introduction by Bill M. Donovan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

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