About The New Black Thought

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In tales of the Caribbean, published in Cuba by Casa de las Américas, Andrew Salkey's Anancy stands out; not for wrong reasons, it would be a mistake to criticize Cuban cultural policy at its greatest moment of prestige; but for the way it illustrates the errors that ruined that prestige, true even if manipulative. Anancy is not only a folkloric character from the Caribbean basin, but a divinity imported with his slaves; and in this story, he has a note from the translator, clarifying that this type of tradition used to have parabolic and moral value.

Salkey's tale undoubtedly has a parabolic and moral value, but that would be only its practical and minor aspect; logical at the time when enlightened rationalization was rushing into its decadence, from the vortex of its heyday. As of a divinity, Anancy's adventures explain the processes in which the Self is existentially resolved; from which to extract specific notes, to clarify also specific situations, but at the cost of their greater scope.

In this one, Salkey recounts how Anancy is betrayed by his spirit, which defeats him instigated by his enemies; from which the advice of never fighting with oneself is extracted, for this is what weakness consists of. Beyond this advice, Anancy could be prostrating the complexity of existential determinations; that being of extrapositive value, they would not be rationalizable, but no less true.

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It would be that, in the tense relationship with reality, the spirit is inevitably dissociated from the Self; but as a process, not a state, which thus points to its maturity, with its subsequent reconciliation. This would even be the case for black in the Americas, including that black depth of the Caribbean, in its tension with the West; the one he can even save from himself, but as long as he reaches this maturity of the spirit of Anancy reconciled with Anancy.

In this sense, the translator's reductive note would be pointing to the same process that impoverished culture; from the arrogance of modern immanentism, reducing everything to the positive aspect of reality; even when it refused to do so in the Germanic negativism, which was only its renomination, just as reductive. In both cases, it was the reduction of reality to its immanence, identified as positive or negative; but ignoring in any case the transcendent aspect, from which its determinations would come.

This explains the excesses of the tradition of German Idealism, no less than those of French Rationalism; to which it only replies, but incorporating in it its own formal determinations, as its mere contradiction. From that fatality, incorporated with the Manichaean Catholicism of San Agustín, is that we are saved this literature of the Caribbean; infusing in the West the sufficiency of African ontology, with the immense flow of its myths and cosmologies; no greater than those of the same Western tradition, but still incorrupt because its contraction to the reflective function of literature.

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It would have been the process of excellent rationalization of reflective practices that corrupted this function; giving rise to that other one, as excellent as it was excessive, which vitiates Western philosophy in its history. This would have been Senghor's intuition, in his search for an African philosophy, lost in his later subordination; when in search of the legitimacy of the enlightened elitism of the West, he turns to the Sartre that precipitates it in its abyss.

From that morass is that we are rescued by this Caribbean literature, recovering the reflexive function of art; that in its access to the transcendent determinations of reality, offers back the understanding of its ontology. This is what The New Black Thought is all about, in its attempt to rescue this much-needed contraction in a singular philosophy; not only by forming its critical body over that of early Black thought, but also —and better— over its art.