Category Archives: postcolonial

State’s madness and crimes. Notes on Rebellion in the Backlands, Os Sertões (1902), Euclides da Cunha, trans. Samuel Putman

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Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, Rebellion in the Backlands, from 1902, tells the story of the military campaign the government of the young republic of Brazil undertook against the Sertões, a set of rural communities in the Northeastern region of Canudos at the end of the nineteenth century. In an introduction from 1943, the Brazilian homme de lettres Afrânio Peixoto considered da Cunha as Brazil’s “number one-geographer and sociologist” (xxvii). Peixtoto goes as far as to say that if “the Book of Genesis may be said to be, in the symbolism that it holds for the faithful, a biography of earth, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism; it is a saga of the first flaming days of the earth and of man and of primal man’s first direct contact with other men known as civilized” (xxix). What, perhaps, Peixoto misses in his laudatory “Preface,” is that the da Cunha’s text is the genesis of the Brazilian modern state.

The conflict between the Brazilian state and the sertões is not directly presented. Da Cunha digresses into observations of the landscape and the people of the Backlands. In an environmental determinism key, da Cunha presents a people that is strongly tied to the geographical conditions of the space they inhabit. That is, since the Canudos is a region of extreme climates, in which the dry season is unbearable because of its lack of “natural resources,” and the rainy season is chaotic due to the constant floods, the dwellers of these areas have, as well, an extremist and fatalistic behaviour. Nature, for da Cunha, has an energy “it shares with man” (37). And the people from the Backlands, the sertanejos, are a very particular type of people, for Cunha. They are mestizos, miscegenated individuals, but contrary to other mestizos in Brazil, for da Cunha, the sertanejo is “above all else a strong individual […] he is ugly, awkward, stooped […] He is the man that is always tired” and by the same token is “an amazingly different being, capable of extraordinary feats of strength and agility” (89-90). Between admiration and contempt, da Cunha paints an ambiguous enemy of the Brazilian state.

If the military campaign against the sertões marks the birth of modern Brazil, then, to some extent, the campaign is not only against a particular group of people, but against nature. Da Cunha empathized with the belief that in Latin American nations, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a struggle between civilization (European values and traditions) and barbarism (the values of the peripheries). Just like Domingo Sarmiento in Argentina, da Cunha would champion civilization over barbarism. The rebellion in the Backlands ran for almost two years. And the event that triggered it was a dispute over the purchase of lumber between Antonio Conselheiro, a priest, leader of the sertanejos, and founding father of the settlements where the sertanejos dwelled, and Arlindo Leoni, the magistrate of the Joazeiro. Da Cunha states that Conselheiro had purchased “a certain quantity of lumber which the extremely impoverished caatingas of Canudos were unable to furnish him” (178). The purchase was legal and in good faith, but “when the time agreed upon for the delivery of the material, which was to be used in the completion of the new church, came around, there was no lumber in sight” (179). There was a pre-existing beef between Conselheiro and Leoni, so da Cunha tells us, and by not delivering the lumber, the magistrate was “evening the score” (179). So Leoni sent a telegram to the respective authorities informing of the possibility of an imminent attack from the setanejos. With this, several expeditions and four regular expeditions begun against the sertanejos. And while surely, in early October 1897, the dwellers of the Backlands were fully defeated, how did these enterprises of civilization had such a hard time defeating the poor barbarians of the Canudos?

“Nature protects the sertanejo” (195), tells us da Cunha. And it is not only nature that aids the setanejos. After the defeat of Moreira Cesar, a commander who was supposedly undefeatable, may of the soldiers became disappointed. These soldiers were all “mestizos, of the same racial stock as the backwoodsmen; and in their discouragement over the inexplicable defeat which they had suffered […] they fell victim to the power of suggestion and, seeing in it all an element of the marvelous and the supernatural, were filled with an unreasoning terror —a terror that was further increased by the extravagant stories that were going around” (369). As the campaign continued, the warfare increased its affects. During the last days of the struggle, the state forces used dynamite as a way of fully destroying the sertanejo’s labyrinthic settlements. For da Cunha, this was “fitting enough” because “the sertanejos had inverted all psychology of ordinary warfare; their resistance was stiffened by reverses, and they were strengthened by hunger, hardened by defeat” (464). With the bombing of the houses, the violence of dynamite was bringing hell on earth, and as da Cunha puts it the bombing was both “a recognition and a consecration” (463). From this perspective, then, just like the sertanejos had inverted all “psychology of ordinary warfare,” they had also inverted the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. If civilization reveals to be destructive and annihilating, then on what grounds can it place itself superior to barbarism? And more importantly, how can civilization offer anything appealing to the barbarian? The Canudos, the sertanejos, da Cunha tells us, “did not surrender” (475). At the very end of the conflict when Conselheiro was already dead, “an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, [were] facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers” (475). While da Cunha tells us that what happened next “we could not describe” (475), the horror is alluded. The campaign against the sertanejos, then, had the “essential outlines of crime and madness,” and as the last two lines of the text suggest, (“The trouble is that we do not have today a Maudsley for acts of madness and crimes on the part of nations…” [476]), how can one determine that a nation-state is insane or has committed a crime when it is the nation-state who seeks civilization, order and progress?

Nostalgia del soberano. Notas a 499 (2020) de Rodrigo Reyes

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Un conquistador sin nombre naufraga en las costas de Veracruz y repite los mismos actos que en 1519 llevaron a cabo Hernán Cortés y sus tropas. Este anacrónico conquistador se empeña en repetir las ya sabidas acciones que marcaron fuertemente a la conquista (la lectura del requerimiento, la escritura de crónicas, el viaje de Veracruz a “Tenochtitlan,” la alianza con “ciertos pueblos adversarios” al dominio de Moctezuma). Sin embargo, esta vez no hay Cortés ni Moctezuma, no hay soberano ni lucha por la soberanía, sólo una violencia que resulta familiar para el conquistador anónimo y que, sorpresivamente, termina por superarlo, literalmente, quitarle su voz —nunca oímos que el conquistador hable con ningún personaje luego de que pierda la voz al leer por primera vez el requerimiento. El conquistador anónimo se encuentra con víctimas de la violencia en México: hijos que llevan el duelo de la muerte de sus padres, madres que buscan a sus desaparecidos, comunidades de autodefensa en la sierra, migrantes tratando de montarse a la bestia, exmiembros del narco, una madre que se negó al linchamiento de los violadores y asesinos de su hija y que ahora vive presa de la indignación porque los malhechores están en libertad y un sinfín de personajes que miran entre burla y extrañeza al anacrónico conquistador. 

La película resuena, sin necesariamente proponérselo, con Er is wieder da [Él está de regreso] (2015) de David Wnendt. En la película alemana, Hitler regresa misteriosamente de la muerte y se da cuenta de que muchos de los sentimientos con los que simpatizó en el pasado siguen vigentes. Mientras que en Él está de regreso, gracias a la sátira, se consiguen momentos brillantes de crítica sobre la situación actual de muchos movimientos nacionalistas en Alemania, en 499 difícilmente se pudiera decir que hay una crítica. Las dos películas coinciden en que el elemento más perverso de la historia de ambas latitudes (Hitler para Alemania, un conquistador para México) regresa y encuentra demasiadas similitudes con “su versión de la historia.” Esto es, de la misma manera que Hitler vio en el nacionalsocialismo una manera para congregar los afectos de la posguerra, volverlos hábito y catalizar y mover multitudes desquiciadas, el conquistador anónimo de 499 se encuentra con un mundo incomprensible y violento que se entrega a los peores pecados imaginados por la cristiandad. Sin embargo, mientras Hitler, en Él está de regreso, se acopla bien a la sociedad que se encuentra, el conquistador anónimo no se acopla al mundo que lo recibe. De hecho, esto pudiera ser, sin quererlo, uno de los mejores atributos del filme. Esto es, dado que el conquistador anónimo está completamente desempoderado, su errancia en el “Nuevo Mundo” testifica la total incomprensión que las tierras de Mesoamerica presupusieron para Cortés y los otros conquistadores. Por otra parte, el filme parece no interesarse en esta repetición de las errancias. De hecho aquí subyacen los problemas más grandes del trabajo de Rodrigo Reyes. 

El hecho de que un conquistador anónimo recorra de forma anacrónica la misma ruta que los conquistadores del siglo XVI y que, además, recupere los horrores de una violencia incomprensible (los conquistadores de Cortés veían así los ritos prehispánicos), articula, necesariamente la pregunta por los grandes ausentes en la reelaboración histórica del filme. Esto es, si el filme contrapone la violencia “incomprensible” con la que se encontraron los conquistadores de Cortés con la violencia contemporánea con la que se encuentra el conquistador anónimo, no lo hace para criticar las formas en que la violencia se articula en el presente, sino para preguntar, ¿dónde están los soberanos? Desde esta perspectiva, 499 es más una apología de la necesidad de un soberano y menos un recuento nuevo sobre la violencia en México. De hecho, la película (o documental, como se le categoriza varias veces) parece muy fácilmente deducir que la gran tragedia de nuestros tiempos no es tanto la violencia, sino la ausencia de un Cortés y un Moctezuma. Sin soberanos, hasta un conquistador debe humillarse (el conquistador anónimo se convierte en peregrino de la virgen de Guadalupe y luego en empleado en un restaurante en Nueva York). Sin soberanos, toda la violencia en México, y en otras partes, no es sino la hermenéutica que pudiera salir de cualquier cacicazgo latinoamericano: hartazgo por la descontención del Katechon que busca y demanda lastimosamente la presencia de un soberano. 

Notes on From Lack to Excess. “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008) by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

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Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s From Lack to Excess. “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008) departs from the understanding that writing in times of the Spanish Crown expansion in America in XVI is, in more than a way, a minor discourse. It is not that the Spanish “Empire” completely captured and controlled the ways writing was produced. This means that beyond any possibility of turning the Chronicles of indies a simple mirror that reflects the agendas of homogeneus/unitary nationalist ideas, understanding the writing of the Chronicles as a minor discourse “allows us to make the transition from the ambivalence of the colonial subject to the rhetorical ambiguity of a colonial discourse” (36). After this, it becomes visible that the Chronicles are “sites of intervention within the hegemonic discursive matrix that can still be effectively elucidated by the particular exercise of reading” (38) in a minor key. What the texts analyzed by Martínez-San Miguel offer is the description, or depiction, of a radical change between orality and writing, between “verbal” lack and “linguistic excess”. The Chronicles, as texts that mix both colonial discourses (“those textual moments in which the project of colonization and conquest is depicted from an Americanist perspective” [39]) and imperial discourses (“conceived from within a metropolitan perspective, and they endorse a European colonizing project” [39]) are knotted by the transition from lack to excess. The awe that emptied the conquistadors and colonizers soon was supplanted by a dominant control. 

Martínez-San Miguel revisits a vast collection of canonical texts. Her insights on Colón, Cortés, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca, el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sigüenza y Góngora and Sorjuana Inés de la Cruz illustrate the stated progression from lack to excess. In other words, the depiction of an empty discourse in the chronicles is filled with a baroque overwhelming presence as a general teleology. At the same time, it seems that Martínez-San Miguel, suggests that the complete domination of the “imperial interpretative matrix/paradigm” of the Spanish Crown was never fully achieved. For instance, when closing her argument about Sor Juana’s silence, as something that brakes and “produce[s] an eccentric intellectual, a colonial and feminine subjectivity that attempts to correct, complete, and reconfigure interpretation of herself and her works produced in the metropolitan centers” (182), Martínez-San Miguel suggests that as much as writing was still “a response to a required dialogue to achieve a reinscription as a colonial subjectivity” (183) the imposed logic of the “empire” was incompetent. After all, as all minor writings, this serve, or have “an unsurmountable hermeneutic limit” (183) where the domination of the empire sees their deformed and fake idea of hegemony. It is, then, that minor discourses in colonial times sometimes were able to depict a voice “that incorporate itself but also ‘corrects’ its official representation within an hegemonic discursivity” (184). Martínez-San Miguel sees this as something that is “beginning to exhaust its capacity of capture [of the imperial hermeneutic matrix]” (184). With this, From Lack to Excess finishes its argument and its meaningful insights. Yet, the pretended progression insisted in the book, might suggest to reflection on some arguments of the beginning of the book.

If aphasia serves as the foundational moment where lack emerges as the necessary “void” of the expression of the conquistadors, excess would be a sort of “plug” that in an ominous way cancels the depth of the void. The thing is that as much as “aphasia signals the failure of language to apprehend or grasp the complexity of the American reality as a discursive strategy parallel to the lack of epistemic and material control over the newly discovery lands and subjects” (45), as it happens eminently to Colón, aphasia is already, and always in the Chronicles, a catachresis because the lack of epistemic-voice is already deposited writing. That is lack is always a conglomerate of writing, and this writing as the one of Sor Juana is already showing how “fast” the limit of the imperial hermeneutic is reached. If “the admiral” cannot fully capture all the marvelous things he sees, his aphasia is a stasis that turns to be active, an active passivity. The limit was not only reached by the imperial logic, but also by writing itself. After this, then, it might be possible to rethink how the transition from lack to excess is not a process that started and finished, but a constant strategy in Latin American temporality in general (and perhaps elsewhere). Lack is always a void but never a place that misses something. Lack does more than a silenced and fascinated face, lack writes. From this perspective, the lack in Cortés, or any other colonial writer, is a result of something that exceeds it, something that forces writing as emphasis, as repetition, as enumeration, as a list. If “what is visible cannot be contained by language” let the writing turned it form and content so that the yes might see it, so that at least the illusion of readability be achieved.