How Olódùmarè is effectively God

The problem with religious syncretism is its approach from opposites, even based on the same presupposition; which is wrong, trying to preserve religious structures in their purity, not in their functionality. For essentialism it is corruption, and for relativism it is an indiscriminate mixture of unrelated elements; and both positions assume that religions are definite phenomena, not functional systems in continuous adjustment.

But it is this continuous adjustment what gives consistency to the religious phenomenon, as its existential function; which is to regulate the relations of the concrete person with reality, in the reflection of its formal determinations. Hence, syncretism is precisely the development of this phenomenon, as an adjustment of this relationship; whose function is then ontological —and therefore structural—, relating functions of that reality, including the religious person.

So this is not a question of concrete religious identities, but of those functions of reality, conventionally represented; and where, for example, the Abrahamic God is not a figure essentially distinct from other supreme divinities. The difference would then lie not in their metaphysical nature, but in their different representations by the culture; and whose differences are in fact functional, marking that difference of their respective representations.

In that same example, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition develops in highly institutionalized cultures; where representation fulfills a regulative function of the political and economic order, not merely existential. On the other hand, Olódùmarè belongs to a cosmology where this function is not representable, invokable or personified; that is, it is not subject to representation, because its culture has not developed that conventional institutionalization; so that their representation admits non-conceptual figures, and therefore alien to the logic of human hierarchies.

This contrast, however, is not an absolute opposition to Western rationality, but a functional difference; since this representation is not exclusive to Greek rationalism, but a consequence of its institutionality. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, religion already contracted from its double function, of infra and super-structural, to super-structural; with the political tension on the figure of the prince-priest, in which the former assumes the administration of trade and tribute.

From this transition arises the need for a conventional representation, which allows the management of the divine; in that super-structural function in which it organizes the instituted order, with culture as a transcendent identity. In this context, the equivalence between principles of different traditions is not ignorance or reductionism; rather, it is a structural operation, in which functions are translated, from one hermeneutical spectrum to another; and where hermeneutics is precisely cosmology, as a reflection of the transcendent determinations of the real.

What is thus at stake is not identity nor the names, but the function they fulfill in the cosmological system; in which Olódùmarè is "the vastness that knows the mystery", and God "the creative principle that orders the world". The equivalence does not lie in their respective attributes, but in their position in the ontological structure of culture; and in which syncretism does not fuse Olódùmarè with God out of naivety, but out of structural necessity; since what is at stake is to sustain a cosmology, whose very function is in fact existential and not religious; because the function of religion is existential, as that regulation of the relationships in which reality structures itself.

Thus, syncretism is not a symbolic negotiation, but a structure of survival, which resolves the function of the divine; and it can be said that the critics of syncretism respond even to that determination that they deny, in their representation; since, they must recognize that reductive representation of the divinity as of absolute value, not only epistemic. Thus, syncretism must be understood as an ontological reflection, of functional equivalences, that preserves religious structures; and does this subsuming them in other forms, for their validity lies in the functions they fulfill, organizing the relationships with the reality.

About the concept of Ubuntu

As an ideology, Afrocentrism provides a vital reference to black political thought in the United States; but in this, it can reproduce the same defects as Eurocentrism, thereby losing its own meaning. This is a problem of transcendentalism in general, as a nature of the idealist tradition, which funds modern philosophy; and which determination is serious, as hermeneutical, because of this reproduction of the defects that gave rise to it.

In this sense, the so-called African or Africanist thought only has its object in Africa, but not its nature; given in the interpretation of African traditions, but with the ideological instruments of that idealist tradition. That is the problem, because it distorts the original meaning of these African phenomena and objects, in a Western sense; perpetuating relations of cultural subordination, such as Christianity, in that function of political ideology.

In short, if Christianity served the objects of economic domination, ideology is the new capital; which in its political nature, allows the manipulation of the popular masses, subordinating them to the social structure. As an illustration of this, there would be the elaborations that interpret the concept of Ubuntu in a humanistic sense; a term of Bantu origin, restricted here to its ideological connotation, as political and social, not properly ontological.

That is the difference, since in its original context, the concept of Ubuntu is a complete ontological category; whose connotation is the social projection of the individual, but which is only possible for him as an individual. As a concept, Ubuntu can be traced through the mystical tradition of the Congo culture, in the dikenga; the cosmogram that synthesizes Bantu cosmology, and in which it functions as a category of human excellence.

However, the concept is problematic there, as part of a parallel tradition to imperial absolutism; which it justifies, in that same transcendentalist sense of European idealism, with which he coincides functionally. This is what is interesting, because these imperial formations are not natural to African tribalism; no matter how much the scholars brandish it, mimicking Western political structuralism, because of its identity complexes.

Like Congo imperialism, there was also that of Mali, Oyó and Dahomey, all equally transcendentalist; founded on a supremacy of the state, which emulates European absolutism, of the Richelieu-Mazarin doctrine. In the face of African imperialism, there is the greater naturalness of its tribalism, in a geronto-democratic model; more efficient than that of Western democracy, avoiding the oligarchic character of the latter, based on wealth.

That is what changes in the transition to postmodernity, with the transformation of capital, from financial to political; with the importance of the intellectual specialization of the middle class, in the justification of its class interests. This would be what lies behind the supposed political leadership of Afrocentrism, made up of an academic elite; that is, a specialized middle class, which seeks to define the interests of the popular class, without participating in it.

It is this elitism what can afford the luxury of transcendentalist elaborations, which ultimately defend its interests; which are of class, in the same type of determinism of which they accuse the bourgeoisie, with which they compete. Hence elaborations such as this one, which reproduce that distortion of transcendentalism, typical of the West; focusing political expression on a transcendent idea, such as that of the Common Good (Kant), rather than on an immanence.

As proof, the new boom in the ideological use of this concept comes from Monsignor Desmond Tutu; who in the Anglican tradition —not the African— responds to Christian Humanism, which is the foundation of the entire crisis of the West. We should remember that Anglicanism inherits the Christian exegetic tradition, as a science specialized in doctrinal interpretation; that justifies the political object in its transcendence —hence transcendentalism— with the reference to tradition.

From Tutu's undeniable —but Westernist— teaching, there are countless scholars given to these elaborations; but all of them come from European institutions, although they brandish African objects for their own justification. The difficulty responds to the hermeneutical nature of its contradiction, in the development of Idealism; by its subjection to the successive dichotomies of dialectics, which are nevertheless fallacious and unnecessary in their artificiality.

Ontological Pragmatism of African Origin, from the Epilogue to MogiNganga

The parallelism of the Greek and African cosmogonies is curious, although by confluence rather than direct influence; like in the rivalry of Olokun and Obatalá for control of the world in Ifé, as in Poseidon and Athena for Athens. In the Greek case, Athena defeats Poseidon by proving her usefulness, granting the people the power of judgment; in the Yoruba case, the judgment is of the divinities themselves in their sufficiency, and Obatalá wins it for his intelligence, not his usefulness. The Yemallá of popular tradition —collected by Rómulo Lachatañeré— synthesizes this conflict as existential; like the original Yembó, a sterile farmer woman, who receives fertility as she adopts Shangó, son of Obatala[1].

In this sense, the historical figure of Shango is that of the unpopular tyrant, condemned to suicide for his excesses; which he must undertake by the hand of his wife —with her as nature—, given its own scope as a political expression. This would not be a symbol of moral value —as from historical transcendentalism— but an existential dynamic; by which in its realization, as a political expression, the human being cannot overcome his individuality; and acts according to his interests, first individual and therefore as a class, corrupting that transcendentalism.

That is why its nature, at the height of its contradictions, produces its structural crisis in as a political expression; but existential in this critical sense, because of the contradiction of its immanence, in that transcendentalism. As a historical figure, assimilated to Yakutá, Shangó thus reorders the meaning of the pantheon, inaugurating the political; who’s potential then lies in Oggún, unfolding the cosmic drama in tension with him, through Yemallá.

Like Shangó —but unlike Oggún— Yemallá is a historical figure, assimilated to the divinity of Olokun; referring to the end of the age of the Erumales[2], more conceptual than the Greek cosmogony at the end of the titanic age. As an example, the personalities associated with Shangó are also associated with politics, or at least with its pretensions; but they are in themselves tragic and controversial, tending to the violence and existential frustration of this realization.

In an explanation of the example, a primordial myth of Shango explains its tragedy, similar to that of Heracles; bringing himself the misfortune of his house, with the careless manipulation of his powers over lightning, causing his madness. Note that, with Shango as a historical figure founding the political expression of the real, this is born of water; reproducing the dynamics of the Bantu cosmogony, although not in a consequential but converging, in parallelism.

That would point to a practicality, as not arising from nothingness but from the formless, like the Greek Chaos; whose first current connotation is in the wild, the Mount (Mayombe) as the spirit (Elán?) that expresses itself in the real. As a space of effective and non-symbolic value, this is the transcendent city of literature, in its referential function; from the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 21:1-2) to the City of God, which ranges from Platonic Idealism to the humanism of Thomas More.

In that same function, but symbolic (political) rather than as a efferent, it appears in contemporary literature; in the transcendentalism of the so-called Magical Realism, from Santa Monica de los Venados, Macondo and Nueva Venecia. However, contrary to those previous cases, this space is not an abstraction (Eidos) that culminates the real (Power); but its Potential, to which the real turns in search of its references, which are existential, not political determinations like the former.

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[1] . Cf: Rómulo Lachatañeré, El sistema religioso de los afrocubanos [Oh, mío Yemallá!], Ed. Ciencias Sociales, La Habana 2001. // It should be noted that, contrary to Lachatañeré's mestizo and popular origin, Cuban ethnography is mostly the work of whites of bourgeois origin.

[2] . Erumale means radiance in the Yoruba language, explaining the emanationism of this cosmology, with the erumales coming from the absolutivity of God, while the orishas (Igbamoles) come from the Igba (güira) formed by Obatalá and Oduduwa.

Bantu persistence in Cuba, another prelude to the MogiNganga

One element slips away its silent presence in the political violence of Cuba's history, and that is its undeniable raciality; it may be invisible today, given the trauma that paralyzed all processes in the country, but latent in its rawness and potential. Of course, even the political trauma of the Cuban revolution exhibits its racial nature, in its own recurrences; but it has also camouflaged this nature of the conflict, with the myth of priorities, avoiding its transhistoricity.

Cuban racial violence would be submerged in politics since independence itself, which was already artificial; if in fact it did not count on the will of the people to redeem, but on the interests of his economic elite, which it legitimized. The first break would occur with the very first conflict of the republic, given its inconsistency, not directly but laterally racial; capitalizing on racial resentment in the face of the apathy and cynicism of that economic elite, which was already also political.

That would not be gratuitous, coming from the arrogance that justified this violence, with its literary and political fictions; which is the perversion inflicted with Martí's martyrology, like a useless Christ in that idealism of the modern spirit. Nor will it be gratuitous that the expression of times and place is Modernism, with its symbolist grandiloquence; surreptitiously perpetuating the postposition of black people, which is the one bringing some realism, in his existential pragmatism.

From there, like everything that is denied, that element will feed on its own negation, growing in its potentiality; not so total as to annihilate the nation, but enough to wash it down, in its impossibility. However, nothing can hide the contradiction, transparent in the inconsistency of the country's projections; and in which, what is frustrated with surreptitious racism is reality itself, rather than the black who expresses it.

The Negro, as a person in whom reality as a human is enhanced, cannot be frustrated in the face of difficulty; but only to remain in that same latency, looking for the way out in which to realize itself as that reality. Racial frustration is here the political trick with which he is manipulated, to tie him in symbol to transcendentalism; which as historical instead of metaphysical, does not offer him any possibility, but is what keeps him unreal.

The conflict then erupted in 1906, with Quintín Banderas, executed by the arrogance of his own naivety; in which, like the mythical popular simple faith of Catholicism, he mocked those he executed, in the name of his executioners. The conflict thus becomes scandalous with the massacre of 1912, but it is insidiously hidden, blaming Morúa Delgado; who covers the bastardy of José Martí, like the cursed inheritance of a nation arisen against the will of its people.

That’s why the conflict is retracted to the crisis of the Batistatos, making it clear that the problem is of a cultural nature; it is transhistorical instead of historical, not of transcendence but of immanence, denying the cosmos that sustains the black; and with it the whole adjustment of the Western culture, as the force in which the Negro would realize himself, if he overcomes the difficult. The peculiarity consists in the double religiosity that permeates Batista's culture, blackened in its popular character; with strong and cunning officials, such as the Coc of Buena Vista, positioned over the corpse of the one from San Isidro.

It is known that Morúa Delgado was a Freemason like Martí, it is speculated if that —unlike him— he could be a palero too; but it is known that Gustavo E. Urrutia was a palero, with fables of cauldrons buried in the gardens of Miramar; signifying, to the horror of Cuban Catholicism, that cultural advance, insidious because of hermeneutical in existentialism. Nor can it be gratuitous that the political violence against Batista was led by the Catholic university students; with a systematicity that provokes a reaction in accordance with its bloodthirstiness, but unforgivable for what it meant.

New Abakua Suite, prelude to the MogiNganga

To Ediel González

Because of false political miscegenation, much is known about Abakuá mythology, but little of its political ascendancy; when it emerged as the Ekpe Society, putting an end to the slave trade, basing the economy on palm oil[1]. The process was obviously more complex than merely political, but it implied a clear purpose of resistance; which is extremely original, since in that same process, the Ekpe society was an emerging, unconventional alternative[2].

In fact, it would be as a result of this that the Calabar region would lose its commercial supremacy, with the railroad; which allowed the relocation of colonial authority to Lagos, without depending on the coastal privilege of the Efik culture. This would undoubtedly demonstrate great maturity and political will, to negotiate a commercial specialization; moving from the assured success of the slave hunt, to an economy of production, not of mere consumption.

This is especially important, conditioning the anthropological narrative, which explained trafficking in culture; without considering that, even if exceptionally, there were degrees of extreme maturity and will in this regard. The same would happen with the Igbo geronto-democracy model, which is common to the Cameroon area; including that Efik culture, and the complex cosmogonic movements with the Efut and Efor, from which the myth Ekpe is taken.

What this highlights is that capacity of this cultural phenomenon in its political emergence, emulating the original crisis; when the decline of the original cult (Ndem), with the development of new lifestyles, broke the social structure. Then, as now, the Ekpe Society was only a mutualist society, interested only in the priesthood; and the latter even with an openly political interest, because of the susceptibility of the traditional priesthood to sorcery; which is what beats in the gender conflict of the founding myth, after the drama of Princess Sikán, of Efut origin[3].

The secret character of the magical aspects of the phenomenon, would be what shows its political, not practical, nature; from the capture of the ekpe in the original ceremonies, producing the sound —but not the vision— that betrays its presence. This is later reduced to liturgical value, strengthening its doctrinal function, in what is already a convention; sufficient to sustain society in its emergence, with a moral code, which legitimizes the individual in his social function.

This would have been the previous cause of Ndem religiosity, due to the social disorganization in the cults of the forest; which empowering the individual with his private practice, returns to that sense with the domestic ascendancy of the female priesthood. As a political phenomenon, the organization of the Ndem cult then becomes entropic, displacing the private potential; which comes to transform itself through the female priesthood, until it also becomes politically conventional.

In any case, what this shows is the political sufficiency of that cultural structure, subsumed by the Cuban one; that in its surreptitious racism, refuses this emergency, since its most serious outbreak in the cabinet of Fulgencio Batista. However, what this process also shows is its inevitable character, as trialectic rather than dialectical; mediating throughout the Cuban internal conflict, as its true backbone, in the resilience of the black world.

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[1] . Cf: Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Religion in Calabar, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1988, p 42.

[2] . The Ekpe Society appears as a mature entity by the mid XIX century. Cf: Michael Ukpong Offiong The ancestral cult of the Efik and the veneration of saints, Pontificia Facultad Teológica Teresiana, Roma, 1993., p. 28.

[3] . Cf: Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Op. cit., pp 34-35.

Frantz Fanon against Negritude, the mask

If Leopold Sedar Senghor is the capital figure of Negritude, Frantz Fanon is the reaction that tries to make it revolutionary; an effort in which he ends dissolving it, because it precisely attacks the exceptionality that gives it its meaning. Fanon's dynamic in this sense reproduces that of self-confessed communism, as in the case of the Haitian René Depestre; but it is more interesting than this, because his anti-culturalism is pseudo-culturalist, in his psychological diagnosis of the political problem.

To begin with, it is impossible to have an anti-culturalism that does not participate in the culturalism that is criticized, as it’s determination; the praise of Jean Paul Sartre, the target who rationalizes Senghor's poetics, subordinates it to him, is enough for suspicion. As with Senghor, Sartre seizes Fanon in the prologue to The Wretched of the Earth, imposing his exegesis; which responds to that false universalism of political determination, to which he reduces Marxism even from its economism.

In fact, Fanon's critique of Senghor —about the idealization of the African past— is erroneous and uncomprehending; for although Irrationalist is not romantic, and even romanticism is not historicist but referential in its reflexivity. This type of reduction is recurrent, precisely because of this misunderstanding of that object, in its extrapositivity; clarifying their incapacity, both to understand the real, and to provide a viable solution to their contradictions.

As if in an act of mockery (MogiNganga?), Fanon wears the black mask on the white spirit of Marxism; and gives lessons —although putting the body as a neo-cristical praxis— of how blacks should not be blacks but proletarians. Unfortunately, Fanon does not have the reference of English liberalism, which gives existential scope to W.E.B. Du Bois; his whole life is of a pure praxis, which does not allow him to peer into the paradoxical walls of history, but only to suffer it, at its feet.

Hence his poetic enthusiasm for the second verse of The Internationale, which still moves even its victims; even more so to his revolutionary and practical sensibility, not an intellectual one, exhausted in that pure existence. The mistake is in giving intellectual connotation to the groan of the slave who cannot maroon, believing in the contra mayoral; that Sartre of a ladino Marxism —not theoretical but political— as a monk who weaves theological subtleties about Marian virginity.

Fanon's books are thus only manuals of revolutionary theology, their reference is morality and not intelligence; and Negritude can do nothing in the face of this, because it is not a reality but a necessity, supposed as formal. Negritude, on the other hand, is another extension, not necessary but possible in its own formality, which is therefore not constrictive; instead of rational dogmatism, it responds to irrationalist probabilism, not to the psyche but to poetry, as poetic.

Fanon nevertheless has a capital value, enhancing the hermeneutical density, still necessary, by contradicting it; a function that becomes more amiable in that anti-culturalist pseudo-culturalism of his, instead of the political aridity of Depestre. After all, Fanon does not speak to the wretched of the earth but to himself, as yet another among them, hopeful; while Depestre participates in that elitism of the Haitian mestizo bourgeoisie, without the level of praxis that Fanon exhibits.

On the mystical and recurrent ghost of Duvalierianism

One of the most incomprehensible and strange phenomena of Haitian political culture, is the recurrence of voodoo; as an example, by Western standards, of the primitivism of this culture, whit repercussions on its social backwardness. In the first place, the problem would be that Haitian political culture does not respond to these parameters of the West; not being able to materialize as such since its emergence as a country, product of the same Western political crisis.

In this sense, and beyond its historical references, Haitian political tradition and culture is hard broken in its periods; without a connection between these, allowing the consolidation of any residual tradition, to be used as a reference. The first problem here is in the French pressure, posing the economic debt that prevents this organization; not only in that conflict of the nineteenth century, but also in the present, with the American interests, throughout the twentieth century.

It should be remembered the creation of the Haitian central bank, transferring the debt to the United States; and the occupation of the country for two decades, creating the imbalance that conditions any attempt at restructuring. In this context, Duvalier's rise to power —like that of Batista in Cuba— responds to this structural deficit; which is of a sufficient political tradition, and dates to the destabilization caused by the Petion-Boyer’s republic.

This instability is not due to the brutal tribalism of Dessalines and Christopher, with their monarchical pretensions; but precisely to the idealistic pretensions about a democratic republic, without the economic resources to do it. Due to the early stage of modern humanism, the incomprehension of this is easy to understand, as with any development; but no the persistence of those pretensions, despite the evidence of this importance, while still not allowing this development.

Strangely, this is what explains the ascendancy of mysticism, as a substitute for an organized political culture; which, not being able to establish itself, subsists in that perpetual —and certainly brutal—contraction of religious functionalism. This is what the monarchism of Dessalines and Christopher meant, legitimizing itself as a revolutionary mysticism; from that Boukman's proclamation to the Bondye, in which the revolution began, to Louverture's struggle with the French recalcitrance.

The answer to the Haitian political problem is thus anthropological, because the problem is first anthropological; emerged from the great crisis that was the French Revolution, as an anthropological disaster of West culture. This does not mean that the alternative to Haiti's political deficiency is Duvalier's violence, but only that it’s deficiency; and its solution would be an emergent development, by which these contradictions are appeased, in a national reconciliation; allowing the weaving —as anthropologic— of economic relations at popular level, no corporate and less still of foreign.

This is the meaning of Haitian gangs, which are also popular and not elitist, as an alternative to interventionism; whose violence is not different from that of the recurrent dictatorships, because it fulfills the same coercive function. In fact, it is not new but the same as the movement that opposed the martyrdom of Charlemagne Peralta to American interventionism; which resurfaces after the same threat of intervention, from the dictatorship —no less brutal— of Raoul Cedras.

No one will ever want to accept this premise, because of the idealistic faith that keeps the whole West in crisis; not just Haiti, which is only the place that lacks a sufficient tradition to assimilate and consume that disaster; but to the entire West, converging in the transitive —even racial— tension, that begins in Haiti and culminates in Cuba. Haiti is then only the extreme expression of that crisis, which by its dimensions resembles the Minoan cataclysm; now reproduced as culture, thus preventing its recovery, as that of Phoenician commerce on Mycenean population.

So spoke the uncle, introductory review to the book

This major catauro by Jean Prince-Mars ispublished by Memories of the Inkwell, explaining its synthesizing function; by which, even with political value, it is in truth an understanding of politics in its anthropological, not ideological, value. This already establishes it as the updating and adaptation of all the references in this regard, from Antenor Firmín, who establishes them as the very principles of humanism, but which Mars applies to Haitian singularity.

At both extremes is the development of that understanding of blackness as a nature, in Blackness as a possibility; which as typical of the West culture, adequate its idealistic excesses, with the realistic practicality of African cosmology. We must be careful with this, because there are many meanings of Realism, most of them of a materialist nature; but here the notion of realism refers to reality —or the real— as the object of reflection, distinct from its transcendent determination. It is from this that this black cosmology is understood as a new pragmatism, but already practical in realism; not idealistic, like that one —lacking the Dasein— of the tradition it opposes, as Western Idealism in general.

Mars begins his treatise asking —without rhetoric— whether the body of Haitian traditions are their own or assimilated; this allows him to establish the measure of consistency and uniqueness of this culture, and therefore its value, if any. The book then proposes an inquiry, which allows this probabilistic development of realism, in its pragmatic approach; avoiding the errors of extreme positivism, which does not differentiate between appearance and reality, or in fact dissolves one into the other.

Of course, none of this is possible ignoring that dense extension of the Haitian enlightenment, crowned by Mars; especially if it is based on a conditioned approach such as that of René Depestre, who precisely says goodbye to Negritude. But that does not have the fatality of the oracle either, since Depestre is only an ideological and not a philosophical wall; beyond him, the rainbow of communism dissolves his optical illusion into Haitian reality, and this is narrated by Mars, not by him.

Mars's analysis is acute, he uses a principle of discrimination instead of infinite sum to organize this body; starting from a demand for idealist rationality (Leibniz), which guarantees him the right understanding of reality. This is the kind of subtleties that culturalism resolves as a practical realism, in its reflexive pragmatism; Mars's contribution is thus philosophical, with the adequacy of transcendental pragmatism (Peirce) in Du Bois; which is here immanentialist, and thus more efficient in its probabilism, as the realistic basis of black thought.

By rationalizing this body of traditions as folklore, Mars distinguishes the analysis of the masses from that of the elites; obviously opting for the popular, which in its pragmatism extracts the desideratum from all traditions, even those of others; appropriate in their practicality and not because of their apparent necessity, in a function that is then existential rather than political. Blackness is important here, because it is that African cosmology —not western philosophy— what allows this realism; which survives in tradition, and not —Mars clarifies— as a vestige of the past, but actualizing the functional principles of the social structure, as a culture.

The Western defect is to ignore this cultural nature, solving its structure in its political expression as a determination; thus provoking the crisis of modern humanism, from its origin in medieval Christianity, which inverted that order. The Haitian enlightenment —as of blackness— is the effort to reverse this disorder, which is the entropy of the West culture; renewing its structure, with that contraction to the functional principles in which it organizes, through the reflexivity of African cosmology.

Welcome Back to Blackness

The conflict that Captain General O'Donnell faced in Cuba was not one of effective rebellion, but of cultural blackening; as a danger emanating from the recent Haitian republic, providing a paradigm political for black Cubans. This does not translate into dangerous uprisings, which the geography of the country would have allowed to control easily; but the formation of an enlightened focus in Santiago de Cuba, which would hinder the primacy of the white sacrocracy.

It is no coincidence that the Independents of Color rose up in Santiago, nor the Haitian ascendancy of their leaders; nor that this was also the ascendancy of Rómulo Lachatañeré, the black anthropologist who questioned Ortiz. Santiago de Cuba was undoubtedly a focus of new hermeneutics, arising from the conflicts between Haitians and Dominicans; who landed there with their problems, even of identity, immersed themselves in their discussions, foreign to Havana.

The reference is strong, with an Antenor Firmin who challenges the founder of French anthropology in France; and a Joseph Janvier who rescues the discipline to its own value on humanity, from its ethnological reductions. Black tension is strong in Cuba, with the West threatened on two fronts, not only the one at the East; there is also that of the trade with Louisiana, to where fled Haitians and French, mixed in their disagreements.

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Meanwhile in Cuba, the most that can be done is to launch that dove of intellectual flight of miscegenation; which is postulated as pure logical necessity, but of difficult reality in this fiction of political syncretism. In short, miscegenation is not only an abstract and conventional category, but also conditioned by its subordination; while people behave like blacks or whites —no emulates— relatively but also firmly.

Mestizaje cannot access the intricacies of politics, which reacts angrily every time the rule is broken; that is what the bourgeoisie did not forgive Batista, justifying the violence against him as revolutionary. Behind Batista was the broad wing of black conservatism, which had bourgeois aspirations in its proletarian character; and that was unthinkable, like that constant threat emanating from the Caribbean, until the revolution was able to control it.

That is what René Depestre's work consists of, with a title as illustrative as Welcome and Goodbye to Negritude; but so meticulous that it collects and organizes even his own political shortcomings, with which he dissolves the movement. This book by Depestre emulates the dissolution of the Niagara Movement, by W.E.B. Du Bois, in North America; subordinating all possible American blackness to the political strategy of liberalism, which is ideological and white.

Depestre's critique focuses on the culturalism of the movement, as a futile effort to establish a new ontology; not seeing that it was a matter of recovering the original ontology of black ancestry, adequating the defects of the Western one. He could not understand it —as it cannot yet be understood— because the problem is not only ontological; it is in fact hermeneutical, because that dependence of Marxism on the Idealist tradition from which it evolves, even as its expression; and whose transcendentalism derives to the historical, trying to resolve some immanentism for its lacks, but unsuccessfully.

Blackness still offers that capacity for renewal for the whole of the West, which stubbornly refuses to do so; not because it is perverse but childish in its stubbornness, given that insufficiency in which it cannot understand its shortcoming. The New Black Thought, by reorganizing the phenomenon, can make up for this lack, which is hermeneutical; and that due to the enlightened excess of modernity, has precipitated its entire civilization into entropy; which is not serious, if after all there is Haiti, ready with its own enlightenment, welcoming Negritude again.

About the return to the native land, from Cesaire to Depestre

Cuba's impact on the projection of blackness as an identity is important, because of the problems it poses; first, it allows us to understand the legitimate function with which liberalism appropriates the problem and capitalizes on it. Even if it is presented as historical manipulation – which one is not?—, this has a raison d'être, also historical; which, in this sense, is not unaware of this emergence of the phenomenon as part of anti-imperialist and decolonization efforts.

Before the Cuban process, and for whatever reasons, England led anti-slavery efforts in the world; adding the payment for the manumission of slaves in their territory, with a debt that only ended in the twentieth century. The rise of the scientific-technical revolution can be argued, which required the development, production and sale of machinery; more efficient, but requiring a heavy investment, compared to the slave method, more onerous but already established.

We should remember that, at the height of the Enlightenment in France, it suffered a depression in England; which reaching the closure of universities, sees its elite emigrate to North America, refunding them in line with this process; which does not include this abolitionist aspect, at least as a political priority, but does include strong industrialization. But even in America, the emergence of the Democratic Party does not occur as a harmonious an organized liberalism; and the racist reticence of the first workers struggles in the United States, is soon overcome by a more radical faction.

This is the one that monopolizes, pointing to an openly socialist formula, and capitalizes on the racial cause; not the Republican Party, whose strategy is one of accommodation and appeasement with the country's sequential segregationist legislation; but that elite —Enlightenment if you will— that will lead the violent struggle for civil rights on the legislative front. The important thing here is not that it is a manipulation, but that it is already a legitimate historical fact; and which cannot solve the racial problem, because it’s not interested in it as such but as a class; but at least it does allow the development of this new phenomenon, although it must consolidate and mature by itself.

This is what dilutes the phenomenon of Blackness —like the so-called Harlem Renaissance— in its contradictions; given by its inevitable immaturity, as the first stage of that development, in which it will acquire that maturity. That maturity is what comes gradually, with the correction of precisely these problems and contradictions; as the set in which this phenomenon will organize its own hermeneutical spectrum, with its respective ontology.

That ontology in turn, obeying the decline of that of the West, would be the one that works regressively; as a recovery of the original reflexive functions, prior to modern political determinism of Modern philosophy; which, arising from the apotheosis in that sense of Christianity, would reach its own apotheosis in the Enlightenment. Therefore, these are not illegitimate or incomprehensible processes in any way, but only defective; which must be resolved in a constant and inevitably critical correction due to its contradictory nature, like all development.

Therefore, it is not strange but illustrative, that in this whole process contradictory and internal reflections arise; above all that these occur in art, at least in the case of the Francophonie, because of their reflexive scope. The example here is Aimé Cesaire's Notebook of Return to the Native Country, not A rainbow for the Christian West; but it is the complexity of Depestre, not the consequence of Cesaire, what will unfold all these contradictions with his life. That is why it is like the appropriation —in such a transcendental universal authorship— of one by the expression of the other; because in the end both are the expression of the same phenomenon, which is all less harmonious and clear in its ambiguity.

Carlos Martiel and the actuality of Slavery bondage

There should be no doubt about the religious edge nature of art, but religion is no longer a cultural reference; reduced to its mere political function, in contradiction to the historical transcendentalism of modern Idealism. That is why this nature of art goes unnoticed, with the distortion of the anthropological structure of society; which, no longer determined by culture but by politics, resolves its ideological character in this projection of art.

That is important, because in this religious edge nature, art becomes a pseudo-religious function; providing in this a hermeneutical structure (ideology), for that political determination of society. In this sense, art assumes the reflexive-discursive function of mystical traditions in religion; with an emphasis on the discursive, channeling this ideological rather than reflexive function, with its ethical referents; but also with reflective scopes, in this mystical character that it provides in its spiritual exaltation.

On the face of it, that order is already inverted as part of this distortion of society's determination; which is not resolved in culture itself —as an existential praxis— but in politics, with this effect. That is why, as a mystical sublimation of discourse, art no longer contradicts the institutional function of discourse; contrary to the pre-modern tradition on which it is based, and in which mysticism continually subverted this institutionality.

This is again important, as the dialectical loop in which society loses its capacity for renewal; by justifying, rather than adapting its institutionality, in the hermeneutical function of this historical transcendentalism. It is here that the contradiction is serious, as seen in the extreme cases of social marginalization; which segmented into conceptual abstractions, such as intersectionality, it cannot comprehend the individual.

The serious thing here is that the individual is the ontological basis of society, resolved in its existential praxis; which —thus disappeared— causes the stagnation of the whole structure, already doomed to an accelerated entropy. As an example, see the case of performances in plastic art, with their openly discursive projection; which, by recreating itself in the drama of an original experience, prevents its overcoming as practical.

The example would be in cases such as that of Carlos Martiel and his treatment of racism, which is always political; as it does not refer to an existential experience, but only recreates that of slavery in the black historical past. Martiel, to explain the example, does not contextualize the phenomenon as historical, but only morally; so that in the end it is decontextualized, in the same Manichean tradition of moral institutionalism; which born in Christianity, subverts its own anthropology as soteriological, with the political function of ideology.

Martiel thus reproduces the impact of the mystics on the Christian tradition, with its metaphysical drama; but, as we have seen, not in the anthropological function with which this mystique subverted tradition; made in the updating of that soteriological character of the experience he proposed, against institutional political pressure; but rather confirms and justify —as transcendental— that institutionality, with its moral transcendence. In fact, Martiel's work —as a postmodernist in general— requires a massive and systematic subsidy; which would already corrupt him, in that supposedly unconventional nature, with a political compromise.

As a result, to continue with the example, the black person will never be able to overcome his past as a slave; as the modern Christian can never escape the supposed but institutional blackmail of his liberation by Christ; which is supposed, since in reality it would occur at the individual level, by their consciousness, not institutionally. In this case, the black people is affiliated as a principle to an ideology, which spreads its protective mantle over him; that is to say, he loses the power of his own political expression, which is individual as practical and existential.

Negros cubanos del exilio

Por supuesto, los negros tendremos que organizarnos si queremos tener alguna influencia en el desarrollo de cuba; pero para eso tendremos que entender las experiencias anteriores, y la recurrencia con que fallan. El problema parece ser la ambigüedad, por la que la red de intereses personales se expande en los políticos; como una proyección social de los mismos, que es lo que los explica en su autenticidad, pero también los pierde.

Eso es entonces apenas natural, ya que los intereses no existen en abstracto sino en esa consistencia de lo personal; pero como una relación peligrosa, en que el peso del egoísmo y la mezquindad arrastra a la inteligencia en su falta de alcance. Es por eso que este esfuerzo no debería estar sesgado por esas limitaciones personales, no importa la premisa; y eso por una cuestión incluso práctica y no moral, en tanto proyección personal, que nunca generará la confianza que necesita.

La experiencia ha mostrado que como objeto común, la expresión política ha de ser colegiada; asumiendo la reunión de todos los intereses, no importa lo difícil que sea, y hasta las contradicciones que eso implica. En definitiva, la contradicción es sólo el condicionamiento de toda proyección, más allá de lo personal; que así deviene en práctica, en vez de sublimarse en el idealismo, cuya falsa moral la hace inconsistente.

Los negros cubanos podemos seguir intentando todas las exclusiones que queramos, legítimas o no; es la realidad misma la que se impone, decidiendo qué tiene futuro y qué no lo tiene. El error es la persistencia de posarse sobre el ego, ansioso de reproducir el poder blanco; porque esto es lo que resta posibilidades a toda proyección, con la misma soberbia que dice combatir.

El mismo hecho de que alguien lo reconozca y no se atreva a cruzar ese límite, sería la señal de peligro; que no reside en la legitimidad, sino en la inconsistencia, terminando por socavar esa legitimidad. ¿En definitiva, si una proyección es tan personal, cómo puede ser legítima y coherentemente política?; ese es el contrasentido que secuestró a la revolución cubana, conduciéndola al desastre antropológico que es.

Eso es lo que, por ejemplo, permite la manipulación en discursos que secuestran la fuerza colectiva; haciendo que los conflictos sean insolubles, abstraídos a su legitimidad, tras el prestigio personal; que es en definitiva aparente, ocultando sus falencias inevitables, y que no tendría que ser tan importante. Lo práctico es entonces lo que permite la solución de los problemas, explotando todas sus aristas; pero para lo que tiene que ir más allá de lo personal, desconfiando de ese genio sublime que no puede negociar.

El ejemplo de esto sería la incapacidad de los negros, para establecernos como fuerza política en el exilio; no importa el crecimiento proporcional desde el éxodo de 1980, que reconfiguró al exilio histórico. Quizás el problema esté en sus genios, ocupados en construirse un nicho político en la élite blanca de ese exilio; en vez de dirigirse a una mediación con los afro norteamericanos, que redunde en el debilitamiento de su liberalismo.

O quizás no, sino que ese puede ser precisamente el propósito, en un esfuerzo solapado por ese ascendiente; que con su fe en lo político marca al liberalismo desde su nacimiento, con la Modernidad. También quizás, esto provenga de que esos líderes no son genuinamente negros, sino sólo por defecto; porque los blancos les recuerdan que no son blancos, siendo negros por resentimiento y no por valores positivos. Esto explicaría esa dependencia del liberalismo blanco, que a cambio los usa como moneda de cambio; pero debilitándolos tanto que no pueden intentar ningún esfuerzo efectiva, dado que su consistencia es ideológica y no existencial.

Eso explicaría la incapacidad anterior para actuar en una mediación efectiva ante la fuerza política de los afroamericanos; a los que no se puede presentar una alternativa suficiente, en esa inconsistencia, que nos sume en su misma ambigüedad. Para eso necesitaríamos una proyección que comprenda incluso nuestro conservadurismo, que es pragmático y no moral; e incluso la verdadera hondura en una nueva profundidad ontológica, en vez de repetir lugares comunes con la mera esperanza de —por fin— hacer filosofía.