January 7, 2005

The Savage Discourse


The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs














Note: The book proceeds in three parts: the first two explore the European rationalist and the mantuano discourses, their logic and history, and their role in shaping Latin American culture. Both are fascinating, but I will skip to the last section, what he calls The Savage Discourse. The reason is simple - most of my readers have a pretty good handle on rationalist and mantuano values, behaviors, and ideas. We are western, after all. It's the savage discourse that baffles us, confuses us, it's the non-western strand of our culture we tend to repress, and therefore can't formulate explicitly or understand. So this is the section that struck me as most surprising, lucid, iconoclastic and valuable. As in the other two sections of the book, the style morphs gradually as the essay progresses: what begins as an academic treatise on the nature of Latin American identity has dissolved, by the end, into a poetic, first person defense of the discourse. This gradual, initially barely perceptible, but by the end complete, shift in the narrator's standpoint is, I think, what makes the work so thrilling.

The Savage Discourse

Identity and Discontent



Currently, our countries are a part of the great western family. Our language and dress, our schools and cemeteries are testimony to our lineage. Our political institutions, scientific activities and individual aspirations openly proclaim our heritage. Particularly our writing - that level of humanity where one's degree of self-knowledge becomes verb - unequivocally points to our familial belonging.

Our dependence and backwardness do not cast doubt on our cultural kinship. A poor relative is still a relative. What's more, we all decided long ago that the fundamental task of our generation is development and our plans and projects in this regard conform strictly to the western style. The development gap will be bridged within the family.

Europe is our essence and our end.


And yet...no. No "and yets." The answer, previous to any question about our identity, is not up for debate: we are western.

It's just that the answer - and this is not meant to cast doubt on it - comes hand in hand with a lament that rings like the disharmony of a musical note. A gripe, a discontent when it comes to "these people" (esta gente, este pueblo.) So, you hear people say, for instance, "party, party, (bochinche, bochinche) all these people know how to do is party." "You can't get anything serious done here because these people don't have any discipline." "They're scared of work and water: they're lazy and dirty." "Without a strong government, you get corruption, anarchy and chaos." "We will have to change the entire socioeconomic and political structure and create a new man, because these people are corrupted." "The crooks are the least stupid ones." Etc.

The discontent about "these people" ("esta gente, este pueblo") seems to point towards the absence of virtues that characterize western culture. An absence only? Or could it be also the presence of non-western factors, elements and powers?

Sometimes the blame contained in this complaint is externalized, projected on foreign countries, neocolonial powers, responsible for a certain - though unconfessed - diminished potency of westernness; the externalization of blame is carried out either through manichean arguments or with an analysis borrowed from political economy.


When we note this disharmony in the affirmation "we are western" we do not deny the statement. It could well be, quite honorably, that ours is a identity in combat. But then we would have to ask, "against what? against whom?"

So our early and agile answer about our identity is spared: we are western. But it is still worth questioning the tacit subject: we. We are western. Who says so? Who says "we"? "We" is a pronoun: what noun does it refer to?

It is the same voice that says "we are western" that issues the complaint about "these people." Yet it is those same people we are identifying as western.


It's as though we were speaking rather in the imperative: "be western" - layered over an unspoken "it would be unbearable not to be so", all to conceal the strongly repressed sense that "horror, we aren't!", which only bolsters the imperative: "become western right now!" which again becomes indicative, but is now rendered superstitious, magical: "we are western."


Tribulation of the European in America

A European visiting our America finds western style republics, purveying western culture - he also finds backward aspects and areas, but aspects and areas of western backwardness, backward manifestations of his own western culture; at worst, a sense of marginality or colonialism, not of exteriority. If the visitor stays to live in our America, he begins to see and feel something strange, unexpected, undefinable, incalculable in the behavior and the aims of these people, something foreign to his cultural horizon. His friends, whose thoughts, emotions and goals are clear in ordinary western communication, friends who socialized with confidence and assuredness, even his closest friends can suddenly turn opaque, enigmatic, impenetrable, totally other - only to later recover their "normality." There's no kind of explanation for those unpredictable changes. "What is that? Who is that?" asks the befuddled foreigner, staggered like someone who has just caught a peak, through the evanescent parting of a curtain, into an unsuspected landscape, faced with the friend who is now once again smiling, welcoming, inspiring his trust.


The European of America, whether he runs a guerrilla column or an army barrack, a whorehouse or a convent, a band of robbers or a business, parliament or the horse racing workers' union, a cabinet meeting or a seminar on political economy, the noble European of America, buttress of the culture of these people, confronted incessantly with that deaf, cowardly, unnegotiable, hypocritical, surreptitious opposition, the virtuous European of America says to himself during his sleepless nights "we've got to hold this place together moment by moment, without a break...otherwise, it comes apart at the seams, it dissolves" and he wonders "what do these people want? It isn't the end of civilization, because they never push quite hard enough to destroy it. Could it be that they want to hold it to a minimum, and no more? but why?" But he doesn't question himself far beyond that, or not seriously. Ultimately, he doesn't much care about the cause of that opposition, it's enough for him to know how to crush it, it's enough to know his duty and carry it out.

The situation seen from the other side.

Let us question farther.


What does this situation look like from the other side?



That priest, those old nuns who watch over me tirelessly - I can't say to them "I will do what I find good and just, I will do what gives me pleasure, what wells up in me spontaneously, I will do what the joy of life dictates." No, they represent official morality based on a catechism I never quite learned, and they have the means to impose it. Plus, they have God on their side, the undisputed source of eternal punishment. All pleasure is banned, hidden, underground - its home is the night. I confess, repent, and even so I'm always dirty, blameworthy. When the priest dies, another priest will come, when the nuns die, other nuns will come. Behind them lie the bishops, the archbishops, the cardinals, the pope, the celestial throne, the hordes of angels and an invisible sword that secretly wounds the organs of my body to distribute the various forms of death. When I see the priest, I kneel, "bless me, father", when I see the nuns, I bow my head, "yes, doña María, yes doñita." Their benevolence can alleviate the disgrace of being who I am, it can make my condition less intolerable.




From those registers flow norms, trials, technologies, progress and the words of wisdom and poetry that say beautifully, for me, everything I would want to say, even if I say it I can only say it badly, even if I can't say it completely and it ends up half stammered.




And I, when I see his abominable face, sheepishly say "yes, teacher. Yes, professor. Yes, master. Yes, doctor. Yes, poet!" as I stalk him. Sunk in the shame of my defeat, smeared by mental sperm, broken and bowed, I gaze at him, I stalk him over time, even if all I can do for the moment is put thumb-tacks on his chair and water in his ink bottle.


The hills, the forests, the fields, the animals and the plants have masters, they have owners. I walk on someone else's land, where I am tolerated as a servant; and there is no place I can call my own. With my work I barely manage to pay for the things I consume and the rent of the ones I use. I use and consume the worst there is, and even so I barely survive. All things are exchanged for money; my work as well. But the amount of money I get isn't enough to buy the things I need. I walk around in rags and I raise sickly children fated to sell their blood.

Sometimes the masters have the faces of landowners, or bosses. I say to them "yes, master, yes boss, whatever you say, chief, right away Don Ra-amón." But more and more often they have no face and they're called corporation, ministry, institute, central committee, transnational corporation - I deal only with foremen or officials. It does me no good to kill the masters because their heirs come to take possession; it does me no good to kill any foremen or officials because they immediately appoint others, who could be worse; to say nothing of the punishments and reprisals.

I know my presence is repugnant to them, that I disgust them, that if they could do without my work (replacing me with machines, for instance) they would eliminate me physically, they'd exterminate me like a rat.







To understand the mechanism of the revolutionary trap, let's take a bird's eye view of our society. It's made up, first of all, of the lords, the powerful, the ones on high, the masters; let us call them whites. Second, there are those who, even if they are not masters, have varying stakes in society's well-being, they're the foremen, managers, teachers and professors, small businessmen, policemen, professionals: let us call them pardos. They can rise within their category, and some can even leave it to reach the ranks of the whites. Third, there's us, that is, "the indians and the blacks", those below and outside.

Quite often, fights break out between whites - fights between lords. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and when they've achieved their goals, when they've settled their white men's scores, they get rid of us little by little through delays, deferrals, intrigues, divisions, partial rewards and, sometimes, with the help of their now reconciled adversaries.





Haven't you noticed how the revolutionary leaders are always whites or pardos? Black and indian revolutionary caudillos have always been "antelopes working for alligators."



Nostalgia for barbarism and catastrophe

The thing is that there's a nostalgia for the pre-western past, a nostalgia that allies itself with the nostalgia for childhood and for paradise lost, a nostalgia - I want to return, return, return - that grows as the difficulties of today and the uncertainties about tomorrow grow.






Western progress as domination

The development plans, projects, programs and policies are expressions of the will of the west, e pluribus unum, panta hen. We recognize them right away. They can't understand why we won't collaborate with them, seeing how they're meant for our benefit, they pretend not to understand our resistance. They are their plans, projects, programs and policies. We are forced laborers; since we don't like the enterprise, we don't take care of it, instead we sabotage it, as much as our condition of domination allows.

Dominated. Faced with the superior strength of the west, our defeated ancestors had to choose between slavery and death. Many died fighting. Others accepted servitude, they bowed, knee to the ground, they lowered their gaze to survive. It is from they that we descend, it is from they that we inherited that disgraceful love of life, greater than our love of liberty and honor. We don't understand heroic values, we can't comprehend how anything can be more important than life. To live on your knees is still to live, and while there's life there's hope. We inherited the cowardly rejection of death, but also the mischievousness, the astuteness, the long term resistance masquerading as servitude, the careful aggressiveness always ready for a coup de grace or a retreat. Dominated, but existing. We conserve our identity. We are us. Other, different from them, the dominators; such that they haven't truly dominated us, they haven't assimilated us, they haven't integrated us into their being. They oppress us, repress us, compress us, depress us and squeeze us, but ultimately they can't impress themselves upon us or suppress us. And there's a light at the end of the tunnel. We can dream of the splendorous day when the roofs of the greenhouses will cave in and the zoo cages will burst open; the plants and animals will escape their taxonomies; all machines will start their long, slow return to their home in mother earth and through the broken fragments of conceptual buildings we will see the growth of myth and song liberated.



My rejection of the west has followed a fourfold path

First: open rebelion. As a "black", "indian", and "zambo" I've recurred, throughout the history of Latin America, to risings, to armed revolt, assault, confrontation on an open battlefield with no rear guard and no caution. I've been decimated and defeated. In some regions I've been physically exterminated. But this path is and will always be open. Those who propose our death and organize expeditions to destroy us act lucidly: so long as we exist there'll be the threat of violent rising.

Second: submission. By accepting a lord and master one affirms one's existence, one's difference through servitude, guaranteeing one's cultural identity and safeguarding the channels of creativity. Hegel missed this harmonic variant in his master/slave dialectic, even though history is strewn with examples of it.

The last two hundred years, marked by ideologies and wars of "liberation", have obscured the fact that the master-slave relationship is not always and necessarily disgraceful. The good master and the good slave have been forgotten. The good slave accepts his lot without rancor and without any sense of sacrifice or injustice; he longs not for the advantages of the master, he wouldn't know what to do with them, he has other tastes. The good master respects the slave's culture, his idiosyncrasy, his creativity, he recognizes him as other, he doesn't butt into his private life and he doesn't mistreat him.


I must recognize, however, that our good slaves often have not found the good masters needed to build a successful system of servitude on a society-wide level. But they doggedly seek him and at times they find him, at least as an individual solution. There's nothing exceptional about the loyal maid, who's like part of the family; the noble farm-hand, who you can depend on always, onto death, even without if you don't pay him; the devoted and efficient secretary, who remains a celibate spinster through love of her boss, willing to give him her savings and even help him with his erotic adventures; the volunteer body-guard, loyal and sleepless watch-dog, untouchable, undoubting. Isn't there something profoundly human, moving, beautiful in all of this?




It was necessary to write at length on this much-maligned path. These days anyone can understand rebelliousness, because it's fashionable. Only a chosen few understand submission. Believing themselves free and rebellious, most assiduously serve unworthy masters.

Third: Rise within the ranks and false assimilation. A poor animist, lost in a strange society and subjected to its laws, its dynamics, its mechanisms, I've decided to appropriate it for myself, to take it from the inside.














Seismic doubt and its antidote


But when I'm shaken by this doubt I pull myself together telling myself that, if that's the case, I would choose stagnation and chaos. I feel myself whole again and sharpen my laughter again thinking of heterodox or banned currents and coherences. Then, once again, lightning zigzags through my eyes.



As far as residences go, I'm proud to have many. I live not only in the "indians" and the "blacks" and the pardos of every skin tone, but also the mantuanos and the rationalist whites and, most particularly, those who hate me and persecute me in others because they cannot extricate me from their own hearts.

I don't want to exercise power continuously. I'm content to take it by storm, suddenly, paralyze some actions, introduce some perturbances, dazzle with flashing revelations, and then retreat to my stalking grounds, where I revel in my visceral existence, digest my venom and lick my wounds.


Final screed

The non-western in Latin America feels closer to the lizards and the rocks than to European rationalism. It is unstable, rough, omnipresent. It claims unjustifiable license with the language to make plays on words that are not just innecessary but ugly and incorrect. It happily contradicts itself. Are we facing another mask? Couldn't all of this hide something more terrible and flammable than a defense of cultural identity, something deeper than cultural differences? Doesn't it express with symbolic ambiguity something less respectable and more dangerous than the rebelliousness of the oppressed? May not those strings be pulled by some unnamed, frightful will?



