Leo Cabranes-Grant

Transit and Dwelling: Notes for a Poetics of the Pluricultural

Leo Cabranes-Grant

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

The question I want to foreground in this short intervention is our increasing need to develop more nuanced epistemological models for the understanding of intercultural relations. I am concerned here with the phenomenological description of pluricultural environments, social sites in which several affective histories have been inflected by a particular process of conquest, trade, or political resistance. Intercultural exchange is an everyday event —no culture has ever been totally isolated from its neighbors. What I want to showcase is how we react when those daily negotiations are intensified by a demand to recognize new forms of self that were not explicit before. An intercultural process is at its most challenging when the prefix “inter” becomes obsolete, and the cultures involved forge ahead into something other. At that point tensions between cultures are also perceived as tensions within those cultures. There is a moment when the either/or of intercultural encounters becomes the both/and of an emergent identity. That is the moment I want to focus on. In order to unpack my investigation, I will confront two texts: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s prologue to her religious play The Divine Narcissus, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Each of these works addresses a particular intercultural predicament, and each of them offers a different theoretical template to manage it.

I

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s prologue to The Divine Narcissus has become a fundamental piece in postcolonial studies, and it has been read from myriad perspectives ranging from ecological analysis to feminist discourses. Its popularity is fully justified: in a few pages, Sor Juana manages to propose a transatlantic imaginary in which western and indigenous elements blend. The function of this loa is to prepare us for the narrative of the play that follows it, in which the story of Narcissus —taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses— is utilized to explore the mysterious operations of Christ’s love. This is not the place to unpack the theological and metaphorical densities of Sor Juana’s auto sacramental, but we should keep in mind that the Eucharist is considered a miracle in which a substance (the hostia) is transformed into the body of Jesus without losing its appearance as a wafer. Sor Juana’s originality lies in her decision to present the conversion of the Indians as a process of moving from one substance to another —like the Eucharist— without changing their cultural attributions. As we know, the prologue starts with the entrance of several dancing Indians celebrating the God of Seeds. Lead by a couple —Occident and America— the Indians praise the natural wealth of their land until the Europeans arrive. A Spanish couple —Zeal and Religion— confront Occident and America, asking for their conversion to Christianity. While Zeal is willing to use violence, Religion prefers to deploy persuasion. Not without resistance, by the end of the prologue the Indians are traveling to Spain with the Europeans, and all of them leave the stage singing their joy to the God of Seeds.

The fact that the initial Indian chorus, “y en pompa festiva, celebrad al gran Dios de las Semillas” returns at the end of the prologue while being joined by the Spaniards “¡Dichoso el día que conocí al gran Dios de las Semillas!”1 is a perfect example of Sor Juana’s talent for combining rhetorical dexterity with philosophical acumen. As we said earlier, the essential feature of the Eucharist is that substance can change while external form remains: a piece of bread can become the body of Christ and still look like a piece of bread. The conceptual intricacies involved in this miracle perplexed even Thomas Aquinas, and we have no time to explore them now. But when Sor Juana re-cycles the form of the Indian chorus at the end of the prologue, this form has now a new substance and, as such, it replicates the transformative powers of the Eucharist itself.

If Sor Juana had an intercultural theory, this was it: appearances can remain, while the substance becomes something else. And in terms of substance, Indians and Spaniards are now the same. What matters here is not what we see, but what we believe. The visual components of the prologue —the costumes, the movements— are displayed on the stage in order to invite us to contemplate a spiritual truth. Religion claims that for the Indians ideas are primarily understood through visual means:

Pues vamos. Que una idea metafórica, vestida de retóricos colores,

1 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. “Loa para el Auto Sacramental de “El Divino Narciso”, en: Obras Completas, t. III: Autos y loas. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), pp. 3-21.

representable a tu vista, te la mostraré; que ya conozco que tú te inclinas a objetos visibles, más que a lo que la Fe te avisa por el oído; y así es preciso que te sirvas de los ojos, para que por ellos la Fe recibas.

To this, Occident responds:

Así es: que más quiero verlo, que no que tú me lo digas2 .

It is clear that the Indians trust their eyes while the Spaniards trust their ears. This is a fundamental tension that still grounds our theatrical distinctions between spectators and audiences. Sor Juana’s recourse to allegorical tropes al-lows her to mobilize this tension: an allegory is a set of images that has to be explained through words, and this is exactly what The Divine Narcissus does. When, at the end of the prologue, Zeal challenges Religion to explain how a play written in Mexico can be performed in Madrid, Religion defends her position by asking:

¿Pues es cosa nunca vista que se haga una cosa en una parte, porque en otra sirva?

————————————— Como aquesto sólo mira a celebrar el Misterio, y aquestas introducidas personas no son más que unos abstractos, que pintan lo que se intenta decir, no habrá cosa que desdiga, aunque las lleve a Madrid: que a especies intelectivas no habrá distancias que estorben ni mares que les impidan3 .

The prologue can be transferred from Mexico to Spain because its tangible elements are primarily representative forms that actually stand for a conceptual and theological content.

Cultural diversity is presented by Sor Juana as a series of variations that —through conversion and faith— are sooner or later merged into one, a common Christian narrative. What matters about cultural forms is that they are assimilated into the Church without losing any of their external differences —just like the bread becomes the body of Christ without losing its shape

2 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ibid., 17-18. 3 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ibid., 19-20.

as bread. Sor Juana is participating in what Erich Auerbach has called a figurative mode of thinking. For Christianity, history is a cumulative sequence of types that gradually discloses a divine archetype: God, and His definitive plan for the world. Every individualized historical figure is a partial fulfillment of God’s providential narrative, a preview of something that is yet to come. It is thanks to this figurative theorization, that Christianity was able to accept classical Antiquity —a time before the birth of Christ— as part of its intellectual heritage. For Sor Juana, the Indians are also a figurative variation, their difference can be absorbed into Christian history as far as they end participating in the common substance of the Eucharist. All cultural singularities are subsumed under this belief, this Catholic momentum toward God. And this is what Catholic actually means. From the Greek kata (“with respect to”) and holos (“whole”), katholicos is usually translated as universal —a quality that exists across differences and supersedes them into a shared experience of the sacred. For Sor Juana, the cultural difference of the Indians is a difference in transit towards a unified Catholic universality that is still to be achieved.

II

The Eucharist was a model for intercultural relations. (This is something Ernesto Cardenal and Enrique Dussel have also explored in our time). But the Eucharist is a model in transit —from diversity to integration, from accident to substance. Closer to us, Gloria Anzaldúa proposes an alternative intercultural model that also contains religious elements. But Anzaldúa is less interested in transiting toward a common goal, than in turning the transiting itself into a lifestyle, what she calls a third space that contains but is not reduced to a duality. In her book Borderlands/ La Frontera she proposes that our identity is in “a constant state of transition”4. The book itself performs transition by mixing several genres and languages, asking us to navigate our reading across multiple discourses. She also mentions the indigenous concept of nepantla (“being in the middle of it”) as a mental frame for an understanding of cultural diversity.

While Sor Juana was trying to fuse into one substance all external differences, Anzaldúa writes from a recognition of external differences as pointers of race, mestizaje, and gender —and it is by sustaining and holding all those differences together that we access our own process. Let’s remember that Sor Juana firmly believed that the soul has no accidents- the soul has no gender. Sor Juana ends her prologue in a setting where Indians and Spaniards move from Mexico to Europe; but Anzaldúa takes us on board:

Because I, a mestiza, continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultáneamente5 .

4 Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 25. 5 Gloria Anzaldúa, Ibid., 99.

In Anzaldúa’s case, transportation is not a means but a form, a dwelling. We are expected to remain mobile, experiencing a “constant change of forms” and developing our “tolerance for ambiguity”. Many of the expressions she uses (“perplexity”; “healing the split”; “blending”; “juggling”; “counter/stance”) signal a reluctance to find cultural stability. As opposed to Sor Juana, in Anzaldúa there is no conversion into a common sub stance —plurality is the ground for the self from the start. For Anzaldúa, borders are geopolitical demarcations that can be crossed elsewhere. It is the border itself that we actually inhabit —the navigation itself is our home.

These two women present us with two supplementary models for intercultural exchanges: the Eucharist and the Border. The Eucharist, a miracle that transforms bread into God, has the power to translate all cultures into one; the Border, a location that travels, provides us with a portable home full of many rooms. The history of the Eucharist is linear: things advance toward an encounter with the divine, a point of convergence. The history of the Border is a spiral: things traverse multiple spaces, and each space brings its own chronological standard. The history of the Eucharist finds its culmination in the assimilation of all differences into the sacred. The history of the Border embraces multiple versions of the sacred, layering them in interactive ways: the Mexica Coatlicue co-exists with the Catholic Virgen de Guadalupe, and shamanistic rituals dance side by side with the levitations of Santa Teresa de Avila. The history of the Eucharist is based on a transcendental act of translation. The history of the Border resists translation in order to force several languages to wrestle together (Spanish, English, Nahuatl), forming a new language that contains all of them.

Both models are valid, of course —but we should be aware of their differences, and the leap from the Baroque to the PostModern certainly implies some historiographical fine tuning. The prologue to The Divine Narcissus shows an extremely acute understanding of the conflicted logistics of cultural conquest and religious transformation; nevertheless, Sor Juana is not proposing a situation of parity between Mexico and Spain. What she is sponsoring is a gradual immersion of one culture through another into the dominant narrative of Catholic Imperialism. America and Occident can go to Madrid because they have been submitted to the teleological drives of the return of Christ. It should not surprise us that a nun is the person exploring this option; Viceregal post-colonialism (if we can call it so) tended to emerge from a poetics and a politics of preaching and conversion. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas intended to protect the Indians from military and monarchial control; but the frame for this effort was primarily pastoral, and it implied considering the Indians as children in need of parental guidance.

Anzaldúa proclaims a pragmatic nepantlalism that elevates the border to an ontological status. But there are some issues here too. A theory of the self that is in constant motion faces some stubborn philosophical problems. An underlying stability is necessary even when we embrace the mechanics of process and becoming —change always happens to something that has survived change before. What exactly is this material that remains available through change, this permanence that travels from one point to the next? In a belated expression of existentialist aesthetics, Anzaldúa supports an agonistic methodology that endorses radical freedom and reciprocity:

Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity–I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate6 .

But this resistance to translation occludes the fact that translation is already at work in Spanglish- to code switch in the middle of a sentence, or to prefer one particular language over another at any given point reflects an affective process of selection that has already compared options and pondered equivalencies. In addition, the twin nature of ethnicity and language that Anzaldúa promotes so passionately can very easily be seen as a new form of essentialism that cancels other somatic and non-verbal forms of cultural identification.

The intercultural —a translational experience if there is any— cannot be defined mathematically; there is always a hesitation, an uncertainty, a lack of precision —we know we are moving from and toward; we know that both/and is more accurate than either/or; and we know that for each in-between there is an in-within. This is why I suggest that we replace the intercultural with the pluricultural —a recognition of how meshed and entangled all cultures are, and how our sense of boundaries and expansions is always emerging out of a particular coordination of space and time that is always inflected by diversity and difference. Transit and dwelling are two fundamental, indispensable pluricultural strategies, two interlaced ways of confronting the conundrums of our unfolding self in its constant demand to survive-by-staying and to survive-by-moving.

“En busca del tiempo perdido”. Fotografía. Stephanie García.

6 Gloria Anzaldúa, Ibid., 81.