Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter Three: Tricks of Gender Xing
When Europeans crossed the Atlantic “discovering” the New World, their boats may have lacked female sailors, but undoubtedly their minds were filled with that other and weaker sex. In the place of real women, they carried with them images and words, texts that could call to mind the absent body. Yet as they did, they kept her apart in the very act of bringing her along. For those texts defined woman in accordance with a principle of difference, which, regardless how proximate the female body may be, always constructs it in absentia from the male. This ideological differentiation crossed the sea with those sailors and engendered the “discovery” of the “New World”: it served as the conceptual grid upon which they wrote the spatial difference of the newly encountered place and the racial difference of the newly encountered people. Consider two examples that illustrate the Spanish and English writing of the “New World.” Some 460 years ago, Hernán Cortés found a new land and named it after a fictive island in Las Sergas de Esplandián, book five of Amadís de Gaula. Cortés saw in “California” what he had read in the chivalric romance: an island of riches and dark-skinned warrior women. And perhaps the most telling expression of the English writing of America is John Donne’s “To His Mistres Going to Bed:” License my roaving hands, and let them go, For Donne, “Woman” and “America” collapse into one discoverable and namable other. At the centers of the representational practices conceiving “New World,” “America” and “Native,” there operated some of the most fundamental precepts of Western patriarchal ideology. And it is the nexus of “woman” and “writing,” that is, “writing woman” and “woman writing,” during the invention and conception of colonial America that concerns me here. I begin with the premise that European representations of American Others were prefigured by European conceptions of gender. European conquest and colonization of Native America was conceived historically after the fact of the European male’s subordination of the European female. I wish to focus on the time and place of colonial New Spain, to focus on the implications of the phenomenon of the New World woman writer. These implications demonstrate how Europe’s reach across genders prefigured its reach across oceans, races, and epochs as well. In the case of Sor Juana, the New World woman writer crosses the straight and narrow line of masculist gender differentiation and then that of European race differentiation. New World differences strained the old vocabularies and libraries; truly there were people, places, and things for which they had no names. The European could contain the newness of America as Cortés had, through the practices of representation, by encapsulating within the writing of the new the meanings contained in the old. Beginning with Columbus’s emulation of Marco Polo, the discoverers read the Old World as they perceived and wrote a New. California, the Amazon, Nueva España, and New England all denoted new places yet connoted old texts. A name like “Nueva España” troped a relationship between old and new. The new was textualized as a spatial dislocation of the preexistent, the old stories and old civilizations in a new place. These Old World tropes textualized relationships across space and across time.
OLD MUSE, NEW MUSE In 1689 in Madrid, the capital of the Spanish empire, there appeared an American text entitled Inundación Castálida de la única poetisa, musa dézima, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz; it was a collection of writing by a New World woman writer. Text and author were described, as were other new phenomena, according to an old, familiar semantics. Sor Juana’s writing was called Inundación Castálida, “Castalian Inundation,” figuratively, poetic spill from the fountain of the muses. And she herself was named musa décima, the “tenth muse.” And just as “California” refers to the new object in the terms and world view of the old subject, the term, “tenth muse,” encapsulates both neologism and archaism; the phenomenon of the New World woman writer is written according to an old European world view. The designation musa decima, of course, carries with it great symbolic value, but, in one sense, it functions literally as well, for Sor Juana wrote many ten-line décimas. So while she might have been the tenth muse figuratively, she was a decima poet literally. But the very allusion to the Greek muses writes Sor Juana in particular relation to the dominant cultural ideals. That is, from the vantage point of baroque, imperial Spain, the classicism of Greece and Rome could touch Spanish letters, and Spain itself, because of its tenth muse. By placing Sor Juana at the end of the line of the nine previous muses, Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania, the Spanish Siglo de oro could appear as living Terminus of the line from the Classical Golden Age. The New World woman writer provided one means for the enhancement of the Spanish self. Sor Juana’s evocation as the tenth muse was not the first such troping of the New World woman writer. In 1650, in London, there was published Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America. or Severall Poems. Generally, the conjunction of woman and writer in the New World was written similarly in England as it was in Spain. The new phenomenon served as a means to validate the authority of a single line from the past: both Sor Juana and Anne Bradstreet were evoked as New World muses through whom the Classical World could cross over to imperial Europe. Woman and America were evoked, then suppressed, as feminine Others so that a metonymic link could be articulated with the classical male subject. In a very simple way, “tenth muse” asserts the contiguity of Classical Antiquity and Imperial Europe, a continuity of cultural transmission from man to man. In such an exchange of authority, the presence of New World woman writer is fleeting: the tropic operation effaces both Americanness and femininity. The “tenth muse” is an Imperial European celebration of Greek poiesis after all, and neither the celebration of in xóchitl in cuicatl, Mexican poetics, nor that of feminist poetics. But Sor Juana’s poetics involves an even more complex tropics, one that gives woman a greater presence in the writing of America. Her texts cross the straight and narrow metonymic line of Eurocentric, masculist tropics with chiasmus.
SOR JUANA'S CROSS After declaring its author the tenth muse, the title page of the Inundación Castálida describes its text as varios metros, idiomas, y estilos, “various meters, languages and styles,” and the description is accurate. Its diverse meters and styles range from short decimas and sonnets, to long villancicos and dramatic loas, to prose allegory, to cite a few examples. And there is diversity of yet another sort: the book is written in various languages as well. Good examples of this are the villancicos written in a dialog of voices in Spanish and Latin and a variety of other languages. “San Pedro Nolasco” and “Asunción” are two that include as part of their extensive heteroglossia, a Nahuatl tocotín and Afro-Spanish dialect verse. In fact, these villancicos are among the very earliest representations of Afro-Spanish speech. There is even tremendous discursive range within a single language, in the crossing of different social voices. Sor Juana’s redondilla, “Hombres necios,” is a proto-feminist polemic that attacks masculist discourse for representing woman as the embodiment of masculine vice. This sort of discursive gender crossing was to achieve its fullest development in her intellectual autobiography published one year after the “tenth muse” text, La Repuesta a la Muy Ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz in 1691. In “Hombres necios” and the Respuesta, Sor Juana directly confronts the misogynist heart of Eurocentric culture. The crossing of gendered discourses, as well as racial discourses, and the keen appropriation of Euro-male, homosocial rhetoric marks the “various meters, languages and styles” of Sor Juana, the New World woman poet. Sor Juana’s poetics stands in marked contrast to the simple metonymic linking practice of the “tenth muse” trope. When Anne Bradstreet undertakes the “Dialogue between Old England and New,” for example, gender is presented relatively traditionally, race is ignored, and New World individuation is suppressed: Mother Old England dictates opposition to the Church of Rome, and Daughter New England embraces the colonial, and ultimately, patriarchal, single line of authority. But in “San Pedro Nolasco” and the Respuesta, Sor Juana undertakes a crossover poetics, intersecting competing lines of authority. And this textual activity is informed by Sor Juana’s understanding of gender relations: she perceives New World racial alterity from her perspective of gender alterity. Cortés, Donne and Bradstreet base their visions of America on a monolinear and traditional system of gender differentiation, Sor Juana is alone in basing hers on a blinear and proto-feminist one. I have chosen to characterize Sor Juana’s poetics by the trope chiasmus and to call her rhetorical strategy chiastic tricks. Chiasmus is a crossing of verbal elements. It is usually described as a figure of form, a grammatical crisscross in which the syntax in one line of verse is reversed in a second. The lines of corresponding elements, therefore, form a cross, an X. Chiasmus creates alternate syntax and each alternate line of opposed elements is invested with alternate meaning. It is in the propensity of crossed elements to provide crossed reading, that chiasmus figures here. Chiasmus is related to metonymy, for its suppressive-adjunctive operation on syntax is similar to metonymy’s on semantics. Like metonymy, it orders meaning contiguously, but while metonymy is the trope of linearity and telos, chiasmus is the trope of the cross and opposition. When the Inundación Castálida declares Sor Juana the latest in the sequence of classical muses, it asserts a metonymic relationship. “Tenth muse” is a combined neologism-archaism which affirms cultural continuity from Greece to Spain, at the expense of Sor Juana’s femininity and Americanness. But if an alternate line were acknowledged, that of the feminine, of the American Other, then the trope of the narrow line would give way to that of the cross. The author of Inundación Castálida is Sor Juana Inés of the Cross,musa décima. The book includes fourteen examples of the ten line poem, the décima from the Latin, decem, for “ten”. Meters, languages and styles cross in a poetics of the cross: chiasmus, “placing crosswise,” from the Greek the letter X, “chi;” and descussatio, from the Roman numeral X, the Latin for ten, decem. This is a new world of literary miscegenation, one engendered by tropes at work at the convergence of “New World” and “woman.” Sor Juana’s texts, like “San Pedro Nolasco” and the Respuesta, emphasize the crossing of borders. The borders vary. Race is transgressed in “San Pedro Nolasco” and gender in the Respuesta; in both there is a similar style of engaged opposites, a common poetics of alterity. For Sor Juana, gender politics informs race politics; it colors the object of representation and the language in which it is written. It is a feminine chiasmus, X, in that, conflict along the axis of discursive difference is always a rearticulation of the conflict along the primary axis of gender difference. The various languages, the Spanish, Latin and Nahuatl of “San Pedro Nolasco,” for example, engage in conflicts for presence and authority which replicate the gender conflicts articulated in the Respuesta. One slash of the X is always Male/Female; the other can be Spanish/Nahuatl, Villancico/Tocotín, White/Indian; the cross is chiasmus and is always played out in language. And so to the line of the nine muses and their realms, Epic, History, Lyric, Music, Tragedy, Song, Dance, Comedy, and Astronomy, can be added the musa décima and the realm of chiasmus. Sor Juana’s chiastic poetics sets writing against the written and enacts a counter-hegemonic tactics by writing difference. The Respuesta counters the Euro-male, homotextual suppression of the female Other, in this case, St. Paul’s dictum, mulieres in ecclesia taceant, “let women keep silent in church.” “San Pedro Nolasco” counters the Eurocentric suppression of racial Others, by similarly employing the trope of the cross. These tricks oppose the silencing of the other by articulating marginalized discourses that cross, but do not supplant, the dominant discourse. Such an articulation of difference is characteristically chiastic. Female and male, as well as Spaniard and Mexican, cross and engage in dialogue. There is not the monolineal silencing of the other; instead there is the chiasmus that acknowledges bilineal, present differences. In the Respuesta, the feminine voice demands presence before the masculist hegemony. In “San Pedro Nolasco,” the Black and Indian speak in their languages for the first time in the master’s church. And even if “San Pedro Nolasco” is read as a white woman’s appropriation of the Black and Indian slaves’ voices, it nevertheless remains clear that Sor Juana argues race and gender similarly. In both, there are the rhetorical tactics, “tricks of the weak,” that enact the chiastic tricks that advocate an antisexist and antiracist ideology.
RESPONSIBLE TRICKS The Respuesta is Sor Juana’s most fully articulated defense of women; it is her intellectual autobiography, and it is, literally, a respuesta, a response to a letter. Its rhetorical tactics, its tricks of engaging repressive logic, have earned the text’s recognition as the strongest argument by “America’s first feminist.” It defends the rights of women to write and attacks the injunction that they be silent. It is a letter of response: La Respuesta a la Muy Ilustre Sor Filotéa de la Cruz, “Reply to the Very Illustrious Sister Filotea de la Cruz,” responds to a critical letter by the Bishop of Puebla, which he signed with the cross-gendered, feminine pseudonym, Sor Filotéa de la Cruz. But if the Respuesta is understood as a purely personal defense for her own writing, it is a failure. For after the Respuesta, Sor Juana all but ceased, writing virtually nothing more until her death. But the web of responses of the Respuesta is much more complex than a simple reply to cross-gendered criticism by the Bishop of Puebla. The first response was Sor Juana’s to an old text. She orally criticized the “Sermon on the Mondate,” a noted theological treatise originally delivered by the Jesuit Antonio de Vieyra at the Colegio de Lisboa in 1650. Sor Juana’s comments had been uttered spontaneously in a conversation, yet an unidentified authority request that she commit the criticism to paper. Sor Juana’s response to the request was to write the Critique of a Sermon, which was distributed privately. At some point it came into the possession of the Bishop of Puebla who had it published. In the process he renamed the Critique of a Sermon the Carta Athenagorica, thereby transforming the “critique” into a “letter” and making reference to the classical, yet pagan, Goddess Athena. He also inserted a preface to the work, a letter addressed to Sor Juana, which he wrote but signed with the feminine pseudonym, Sor Filotéa de la Cruz. The Bishop’s letter, ostensibly written nun to nun, responded critically to Sor Juana’s “letters,” not just to her criticism of Vieyra, but to her writing in general. It is his simultaneously shrouded and official censure that sparks so intense a response in the Respuesta. For through Sor Filotea’s letter the Bishop asserts authority over the feminine, appropriating a feminine identity and, infinitely more consequential, appropriating, through prescription and circumscription, feminine discourse. The Bishop, in the guise of a nun, writes to Sor Juana: My Lady: I have seen your letter in which you impugn the favors of Christ as discussed by the Reverend Father, Antonio de Vieyra, in the Sermon on the Mondate.... At the very least, I have admired the liveliness of the concepts, the keenness of your proofs, the energetic clarity with which you prove the matter.... The Bishop’s letter vehemently asserts its femininity, from the opening “My Lady,” through such posturing as “our sex,” to the final signature, B.L.M. de Umd. su afecta servidora. Philotea de la Cruz, “Kissing your hand, your affectionate servant, Filotea de la Cruz.” It declares its femininity, a letter written by one woman to another. And yet, Sor Filotéa writes like a man. Her words, we can imagine, articulate those of the Bishop, for “she” espouses the very precepts of the Spanish-Catholic patriarchy that codify the hierarchy (literally, the sacred rule) that locates bishop and man above nun and woman. Sor Juana responds with La Respuesta a la Muy Ilustre Sor Filotéa de la Cruz. The Respuesta terminates the interplay of authors, and the interplay of authorities, which were set into motion when Sor Juana first responded critically to the “Reverendissimo Padre” Vieyra. The Bishop’s assumption of authority over Sor Juana’s Critique on a Sermon, his authorized publication of it as Carta Athenagorica, and the authority he asserts over Sor Juana’s writing in general, are clear indices of gender politics. The authority of the New World woman author is contained and controlled at each exchange with, in every response to, Sor Juana, from the nameless authority’s command that she write, to the pseudonymous authority’s command that she not write. The contest of authority in the American publication of Carta Athenagorica (Puebla, 1690) is similar to the matter of the “tenth muse” in the European publication of the Inundación Castálida (Madrid, 1689). The Bishop’s alignment of Sor Juana with Athena emulates her previous alignment with the muses: the link between poet and goddess confirms an unbroken and straight line of transmission from ancient Greece to imperial Spain. In this scheme, the female poet functions as the requisite intermediary, much as the mother enables the transmission of patrilineal authority. Complicating this trans-temporal, homosocial self-valorization is the fact that not only does the poet reside in the body of a woman, but that that body resides in America, in the distant and female continent as well. The inferior-sex / inferior-place, status is exploited by the Bishop who authorizes a publication that aggrandizes, not only Spanish letters in general, but himself as well. Renaming the Critique on a Sermon as the “Athena-like Letter,” generates the same surplus value as does “tenth muse:” praise for the New World woman’s text praises the praising patriarchal culture and the praising publisher father. The renaming also operates more insidiously. First of all, it shifts focus away from the act and object of criticism toward a mythical objectification of its writing subject: the praxis of criticizing Vieyra’s sermon is supplanted by an ontology of the feminine and Athena-like letter writer. The Athena metaphor itself is equivocal, inscribing “Sor Juana” with both classical wisdom and classical paganism. The latter dimension of Athena supports the shift from critique to letter, for it represents Sor Juana’s text as a mere pagan letter about Christian theology. Sor Filotea’s negative evaluation of the pre-Christian letters of Egypt was clearly meant to apply to Greek letters too. No matter how erudite Egyptian reason was, it remained “foolishness and mere vanity” precisely because it was pagan. Even when the Bishop / nun compares Sor Juana’s poetry favorably to that of Christian saints, it comes up short in the most important dimension, “I wish that as you imitate their meter, you so imitate their choice of subject matter.” And then there is the matter of the title page. Carta Athenagorica de la madre Juana Ynes de la Cruz is supplemented with que imprime, y dedica a la misma Sor, Phylotea de la Cruz su estudiosa, so that the text appears co-authored, albeit graciously so. The Carta Athenagorica becomes an epistolary anthology, Sor Juana’s “letter” and “Sor Filotea’s” letter. The first page of text is the Bishop’s imprimatur, signed Bishop Manuel of Puebla; this is followed by the letter signed Sor Filotea. Only then does Sor Juana’s text appear. The Bishop manipulates the text and its authorship, authorizes its publication, and inserts text and an author he authored. From behind the veil of his transsexual alter ego, the Bishop articulates “woman” to woman an implicit command that she refrain from man’s work, that she stop writing. “Following this dictum, I do not suggest that you to silence your genius by renouncing books” does not censure explicitly; it obscures both authority and command. Explicit censure would mark Filotea with greater authority than that of a nun, and further, it would open the implication to argument. The veiled censure obscures the Bishop and works to defer theological debate. In fact, the Bishop only alludes to St. Paul’s mulieres in ecclesia taceant after acknowledging his bene docentes “and the women teaching well;” and in so doing, silences objection of a literal following of his dictum. It is a clever piece of rhetoric, one that masks the author, acknowledges the opposing argument, and that seemingly undercuts its own authority. Even the Bishop’s recognition of St. Jerome is significant too because Sor Juana’s religious order is that of St. Jerome, an order that specifically encourages the education and writing of women. The Bishop’s articulation of St. Paul though the persona of a nun, “[F]ollowing this dictum, I do not suggest that you silence your genius…” ascribes his pronouncement a full range of authority and a full complement of perspective. When Sor Filotea offers “although I do not suggest you stop reading books,” it almost sounds as if spoken by an ally, but the negative construction undercuts any sense of positive encouragement. The criticism of “reading books” is particularly misplaced, for Sor Juana’s act in Carta Athenagorica is not one of reading books, but rather, it is the act of writing criticism. Sor Filotea’s implicit injunction undercuts a much more passive act than Sor Juana’s. The Bishop’s articulation of Saint and nun acknowledges a central tenet of the patriarchal, theological oppression of women, even though the statement has nothing to do with Filotea’s point, that women should read sacred letters. Effectively, by positing the dictum that women should be silent in church, the Bishop condemns Sor Juana’s act of writing theological criticism in particular and her writing in general. This appropriation of feminine author-ity is the context for Sor Juana’s response and informs the text of the Respuesta. The topos of vos me coegistis, the denial of authorial responsibility, is reiterated in the Respuesta. For as Sor Juana states, she wrote very little on her own account but, rather, was violentada y forzada, “forced” (with an echo of “violence” and “violation”), by fuerza ajena, by “outside force.” She does not articulate with the authority of the unified male subject as does the Bishop, and in her representation of racial others, neither do the Black or Indian. Racial and gender Others write and speak and are allowed a degree of autonomy to do so, but fuerzas ajenas ultimately authorize their articulation. Both the Bishop and the anonymous authority are able to appropriate Sor Juana’s words because they possess greater power; she is like their colonial subject. The original act of criticizing the theology of the European male priest is permitted, in fact it is authorized, but its articulation is strictly controlled by fuerzas ajenas. But of course she does write. In reaction to all of this, she writes the Respuesta. Its rhetorical tactics are simple: to utilize the limited authority allotted the weaker writer and to appropriate the logic of the hegemony, that is, to turn the masculist word back upon itself. These tricks are configured by chiasmus and assert presence and engagement. The masculist single line of authority is crossed by another line; it is not replaced; both lines are present and active. When the Bishop/nun posits mulieres in ecclesia taceant to argue that the woman poet should “subordinate profane letters to sacred letters,” and “read more about Christ Our Lord,” Sor Juana responds with a cross: How, without Logic could I be apprised of the general and specific way in which the Holy Scripture is Written? How, without Rhetoric, could I understand its figures, its tropes, its locutions? How, without Physics, so many innate questions concerning the nature of animals, their sacrifices, wherein exist so many symbols, many already declared, many still to be discovered? How should I know whether Saul’s being refreshed by the sound of David’s harp was due to the virtue and natural power of Music, or to a transcendent power God wished to place in David? How, without Arithmetic, could one understand the computations of the years, days, months, hours, those mysterious weeks communicated by Gabriel to Daniel, and others for whose understanding one must know the nature, concordance, and properties of numbers? How, without Geometry, could one measure the Holy Arc of the Covenant and the Holy City of Jerusalem, whose mysterious measures are foursquare in their dimensions, as well as the miraculous proportions al all their parts? How, without Architecture, could one know the great Temple of Solomon, of which God Himself was the Author who conceived the disposition and the design, and the Wise King but the overseer who executed it, of which temple there was no foundation without mystery, no column without symbolism, no cornice without allusion, nor architrave without significance; and similarly others of its parts, of which the least fillet was never intended solely for the service and complement of Art, but as symbol of greater things? How, without great knowledge of the laws and parts of which History is comprised, could one understand historical Books?… How, without great erudition, could one apprehend the secular histories of which the Holy Scripture makes mention, such as the many customs of the Gentiles, their many rites, their many ways of speaking? Such is the cross of Sor Juana. She assumes the Bishop’s discourse: she does not refute the logic of the religious doctrine nor its authority; she does not oppose the authoritative line of thought. And to the degree to which she acknowledges that authority, she espouses the Euro-male homosocial discourse. But her argument is much more complex than that; it is, perhaps, too subtle for the Bishop to grasp. Her heterotext crosses his line with another. The tactics of the Respuesta are the chiastic trick. Sor Juana appropriates the authoritative discourse but employs it to prove the Bishop wrong. She does not reject the hegemony’s semantics, logic, nor authority, but rearticulates them in a different style, in another line of thought. So configured, this alternate alignment asserts an alternate semantics. She crosses the authoritative, male to male line and the logic of self-reference and tautology, with a relativizing, female line and a chi-logic of presence and engagement. The Bishop’s use of St. Paul’s mulieres in ecclesia taceant is clear, even if uttered through the fiction of Sor Filotea: male utterance constitutes male authority. When she uses the quote, Sor Juana does not question its authority, but she does rearticulate it and writes, literally, from the body of a woman. This feminine locus is both appropriation and realignment of the Euro-male homosocial metonymy; the feminine articulation crosses the male at the point of silence in church. She authorizes her own authority as author through the troping that connects and opposes by chiastic trick, by speaking like a woman speaking like a man. And Sor Juana also responds to the Bishop in the Respuesta as a woman speaking to a woman. Sor Juana frequently addresses Sor Filotea as “my lady” and writes as if she were addressing a confidant, another nun. It is as if Sor Juana discusses the world of women in passages of feminine discourse; her scientific observations in the kitchen are one example. There is clear irony aimed at the Bishop in her so repeated woman to woman rhetorical coloring. This is perhaps sharpest in her discussion of men. For she expresses a very ladylike disdain for contact with men. Nun to nun, Sor Juana explains her entry into the convent para la total negación que tenía al matrimonio “because of my complete oppostion to marriage.” She carries this disdain further, appropriating the Church’s vision of sin in female and male contact. She turns Filotea’s argument back upon itself with another chiastic trick: For I do not find that the custom of men teaching women is without its peril, lest it be in the severe tribunal of the confessional, or from the remote decency of the pulpit, or in the distant learning of books—never in the personal contact of immediacy. And the world knows this is true; and, notwithstanding, it is permitted solely from the want of learned elder women. Then is it not detrimental, the lack of such women? The question should be addressed by those who bound to that Let women keep silence in the church, say that it is blasphemy for women to learn and teach, as if it were not the Apostle himself who said: The aged women…teaching well. Filotea’s use of mulieres in ecclesia taceant comes back to undermine the Bishop’s strategy, for St. Paul also recognizes women teachers. And as Sor Juana argues that the Bishop’s discourse argues, women should teach women, and to “know” religion, it is necessary to “know” the profane. Yet despite the efficacy of Sor Juana’s chiastic tricks, in her appropriation of the masculist discourse and articulation as a woman, the Respuesta comes up short as prescriptive writing. It is, after all, virtually the last thing she writes. The proto-feminism which is most clearly delineated in the Respuesta had an impact on her other writing as well. For her relationship to masculist authority prefigures Sor Juana’s representations of racial alterity. Her woman’s body and woman’s words and the tactics she employs to counter misogynist suppression set the pattern for her reading and writing American Others.
HER SELF AND OTHERS The “Villancicos San Pedro Nolasco” was included in Inundación Castálida, but was originally published as a single volume in 1677. It problematizes race and language politics in a manner similar to Sor Juana’s problematizing of gender relations. “San Pedro Nolasco” and “Asunción” both represent two marginalized American Others, Pilico, an Afro-Hispanic slave, and an unnamed Indian. The Black and Indian are represented, that is, given presence in the text, and both are given voice in the style in which they speak. For Sor Juana’s representation of these American Others incorporates the representation of their speech styles. Not only are they present in a context that normally excludes them, they speak in languages not normally printed. This representation of racial alterity follows the style of Sor Juana’s representation of gender alterity: both are manifested in discursive crossing. Villancicos are laudatory verses, literally sung in church on the day of the Saint they praise. The series of eight villancicos that comprises “San Pedro Nolasco” was performed at matins on January 31, 1677. In writing sound and sense, Sor Juana took the opportunity to re-contextualize the life of the Saint and to interject local son et lumière in the process. Nolasco is the slave’s saint: in the thirteenth-century, he spent his fortune ransoming Christian captives, that is, buying slaves, from Moors in Catalonia. Sor Juana delineates the life of the French Saint, but she does not stop there, she seizes the opportunity to link the Old World slavery in Nolasco’s time with the New World slavery in her own time. The eighth and final villancico offers criticism from two New World slaves, a Black and an Indian. The villancicos cross over from praise for the Old World male to criticism by the New World male by way of the New World woman writer. The seven villancicos end with a final testimony to Nolasco, a striking chiasmus that undercuts the lines of praise:
“Since he was a good Frenchman, he would cure them from French illness,” that is, from syphilis. Venereal disease appears fifteen lines from the end of the seven villancicos attesting to Nolasco’s venerable status. It appears in the chiastic cross of buen Francés with mal francés. In one sense, the mal francés anticipates the eighth villancico, which is the “Ensaladilla,” that is, the “salad” of disparate and comic voices, for there is humor in the crossing of the euphemism. In another sense, however, the mal francés infects the image of the buen Francés. Those lines, after all, are the conclusion of the “serious” villancicos. The serious praise for Nolasco is further undercut by the second line of the chiasmus. The first line of the X links buen Francés with mal francés, and the second links como era with curaba. The first asserts irony of sense and similarity of sound: it is the play of difference and similarity that makes the line between buen Francés and mal francés work, that makes it humorous and cutting. At first, the second line seems to function only formally: the sound of the tri-syllabic como era resonates with the sound of curaba. But the line chiasmus draws from como era, “since he was,” to curaba, “he would cure,” can be read in a variety of ways. Chiasmus formally inserts como (of como era) and cura (of curaba) into the new syntax como cura. The new line, como cura, can then be read as either, “since/how he cures” or, significantly, “like a priest.” The pun almost works in English too: “cures” nearly replicates “curate.” The sense of como cura as “like a priest” is supplemented by other possible chiastic readings: como era cura translates as “since he was a priest,” and como cura va(cura va pronounced the same as curaba) translates as “as the priest goes.” Chiasmus, then, constructs two new syntactical arrangements and then crosses them. It constructs new meanings as when the ironic line of “venerable Frenchman and venereal disease” is crossed by a line that reads “like a priest,” “since he was a priest,” and “as the priest goes.” The second line undercuts the irony of the first and the link of priest and disease is rendered literal. But the chiasmus has it both ways at once, the “serious” veneration coexists with the venereal contamination of man and profession. In the final villancico, Nolasco remains the object of a praise of sorts, yet new characters participate in a comic-critique, in dialogues among colonial subjects who are literally a world apart. A complex interplay of languages, discourses and styles radically shifts the focus of “San Pedro Nolasco” from the religious-historical Old World to the social realities of seventeenth-century Mexico. For brought into the church to conclude the praise of the slave’s redeemer are the New World slave and colonial subject, Black and Indian. They sing slaves’ songs in the words and rhythms of conquered peoples. The eighth villancico is the “Ensaladilla,” a mixture of sounds and styles, it is also the one villancico that crosses the other seven. It crosses the authoritative discourse by representing the word and body of the racial Other. This final villancico is divided into three sections, each of which is prefaced by the poet-narrator in literary Spanish. The first section, “Puerto Rico,” is comprised of estribillo and coplas in the Afro-Spanish speech of the Caribbean slave. This is followed by the so called “Dialogue,” the failed attempt at communication across class, between a pompous Latin-speaking student and an uneducated Spanish-speaking man. Finally, the “Tocotín” concludes “San Pedro Nolasco;” it is an interlingual, Spanish-Nahuatl, version of the tocotín, a combination of indigenous poetry, song and dance. The interlingualism of “Puerto Rico” and “Tocotín” provides the linguistic shift that Americanizes and updates “San Pedro Nolasco.” The style of the “Ensaladilla” forces a reconsideration of slavery by extrapolating Nolasco to a New World context. The presence and utterance of Pilico, like that of the Indian, interjects alterity into the “sacred letters sung at matins,” that is, into the Eurocentric, homosocial, self-valorizing ritual. And this is very like the chiastic trick of realigning mulieres in ecclesia taceant in the Respuesta. The “Ensaladilla” crosses with “Puerto Rico,” “Tocotín” and “Dialogue” so that “San Pedro Nolasco” is cross-hatched by lines of race and class. “Puerto Rico” is striking. Pilico’s language must have shaken up the mass at matins on January 31, 1677. For after seven traditional villancicos praising Nolasco, the singing of the nuns in the cathedral was crossed by a Black slave whose words and rhythms and body had not figured in such services before: ¡Tumba, la-lá-la; tumba, la-lé-le; “Wherever Pilico is, no slave remains” chants Pilico to what could be the Ur-salsa rhythm and in words born of the culture clash of America. His Spanish is Africanized: escrava for esclava, ya for está, Pilico for Perico. His metro and estilo enact difference. The sense of his speech is equally striking. Pilico criticizes the religion and race that enslave him: They say that they redeem, but it seems like trickery, Pilico quite explicitly denounces racism and does so in Afro-Spanish dialect and in 1677. “San Pedro Nolasco” ends with the unique combination of metro, idioma y estilo of the tocotín. As with Pilico, the Indian’s sound and sense seem remarkably out of place. The Indian’s language combines Spanish and Nahuatl in the interplay of the intercultural colonized subject. His language mirrors the conflicts embodied in colonial relations. The oddity of his presence in both villancico and church signifies his marginalization in Eurocentric consciousness. The Indian begins in doubt: Los Padres bendito “The blessed fathers The unnamed Indian continues and concludes the whole series of villancicos with an affirmation of the faith: he wants to buy a redeemer like Saint Pedro Nolasco. It is an odd affirmation that follows his original reticence at accepting the praise for Nolasco, yet it is an affirmation of sorts. The odd acceptance of Nolasco, that is, the Indian’s desire to purchase him, at once belies the Indian’s faith (he is an idolater) and Nolasco’s stature (he is a commodity) yet, ironically, is in accord with Nolasco’s practice of buying others. The discursive styles of Pilico and the Indian are similar in that they mix languages, but differ in the levels of that mixing. For Pilico escrava signals the Africanization of Spanish, but he speaks Spanish. His is variation within one national language. For the Indian, however, quemati no Dios, demonstrates a linguistic crossing between national languages. The difference in styles could well point to differences in Eurocentric conceiving Pilico and the Indian nationally, that is, the country-less Black and the Mexican colonial subject. Both styles, however, assert alternate presence and engage through difference. The marginalized Other’s presence is manifested in the form of the expression; Afro-America and Native America engage Spain in the play of words. This interlingualism reflects, of course, the more general interculturalism at play in colonial America. Pilico and the Indian’s words articulate linguistic mestizajes that emerge in the broad context of cultural and racial mestizaje. But the backdrop for their linguistic interplay, as it is manifested by the nun’s pen, is a pervasive bilingualism that informs a bi-gendered world view. The Black and Indian (and feminine) discourses cross a Latin and Spanish bilingualism because the line of authority from Rome to Spain to New Spain is written in those two languages. Latin and Spanish are the languages of Church and State, of religion and empire. Latin always exists as the etymological and theological backdrop to Spanish, and, significantly, Latin is gendered: it is the language of patriarchal authority; it is the language that constitutes that authority. It is the Latin, mulieres in ecclesia taceant, that writes the ethical suppression of women. And it is in Spanish that the two slaves come to be negro, indio and esclavo. In this way the tricks of race crossing in “San Pedro Nolasco” replicates the tricks of gender crossing in the Respuesta. In both cases Spanish and Latin are the languages of authority; they constitute race and gender power relations. Sor Juana’s chiastic tricks function similarly with regard to race and gender: in both cases they do not deny the Eurocentric patriarchal authority, but they do cross it discursively; they do cross it critically. The form of the content of slave utterance and feminine utterance is similar too. Both the Respuesta and “San Pedro Nolasco” interject the (sub)altern into the consciousness of the hegemony by the appropriation and rearticulation of the authoritative discourse. The woman crosses the male in arguing for her right to write; the Black and the Indian cross the Catholic colonist in doubting his and her religious authority. And it is relatively her authority too. Both Pilico and the Indian are represented by the criollo woman; there is no question of their self-presentation; she author-izes their words. And eventually, the radicalism of their speech is undercut by what their words say. Ultimately, Sor Juana supports the colonist religion. And in missionary form, she authorizes Pilico and the Indian’s recanting. While both may have doubted, both recapitulate: Pilico declares that the devil made him doubt; the Indian wants to buy a Saint who bought Christian slaves. The text opposes racism, but it clearly supports Catholicism. Perhaps the key to understanding this lies in “Catholicism,” in the claims of “universality” of the Roman Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire. In this “catholic” sense, simultaneous and non-contradictory pleas could well be made for the recognition of difference and for the acknowledgment of the authorities of the Church (over the soul) and Empire (over the body). And yet it is worth considering to what degree Sor Juana’s texts espouse colonialism. In the first place, the context of the performance of the villancicos, matins in church, offers limited opportunity for radical discourse. In this sense, the performances of Pilico and the Indian, as well as the mal francés, seem radical enough. If contemporary readers of the Respuesta can be cautioned in the introduction to ignore the passive tone of its opening in order to recognize a truer radicalism, then perhaps a similar reading could apply to “San Pedro Nolasco” as well. And even if we were to downplay other factors contrasting “San Pedro Nolasco” with the Respuesta, factors such as her relative age at authorship, twenties versus forties, or the problem of representing others compared to self, there are still the common chiastic tactics that demand consideration. It is true that slave and colonized subject ultimately say they embrace the one true faith and recognize the single line of authority, but they say it in the interplay of languages that crosses that single line. And it is true that Sor Juana says she acknowledges mulieres in ecclesia taceant, but she says it in a cross of proto-feminist discourse. There is no erasure of Black or Indian or Woman. And while none of their voices supplants the dominant, each engages it, crosses the line of authority. Sor Juana does not seek to erase the hegemony, and she remains ardently Catholic. After the Respuesta she writes three affirmations of faith and signs one of them in her own blood. For her, Christ is the chi of the chiasmus, the Xmus, the point of convergence, the point of articulation where Other lines can cross. For me, Sor Juana is the point on the line of cultural transmission crossed by the body and the words of a woman.
© 1994 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |
