DIECIOCHO 35.2 (Fall 2012) 231 BIBLICAL ALLEGORY AND CREOLE CHIASMUS: THE MARQUESA JÚSTIZ DE SANTA ANA’S DISPATCHES FROM OCCUPIED HAVANA (1762)1 RONALD BRIGGS Barnard College Introduction: “Tretas” of the Erudite Luisa Campuzano’s 1990 essay, “Las muchachas de La Habana no tienen temor de dios…,” performs a literary rescue of Beatriz de Justiz y Zayas, marquesa de Santa Ana, to whom she grants the title of “la primera escritora cubana” (13).2 The apparent author of a letter of protest to Carlos III criticizing governor Juan del Prado’s ineffectual defense against the 1762 British invasion («Memorial» dirigido a Carlos III por las señoras de La Habana en 25 de agosto de 1762) and of a lighter, poetic treatment of the same topic (Dolorosa métrica espresion del Sitio, y entrega de La Havana, dirigida N.C. Monarca el Sr. Dn. Carlos Terc[ro]), the marquesa owes her long-term anonymity, Campuzano argues, to the “flagrante transgresión” the texts represent (“Las muchachas” 27).3 Since they enter forcefully into questions of statecraft and military strategy and therefore “representan géneros de discurso eminentemente masculinos,” Campuzano argues, we should not be surprised that Cuba’s historical memory and the process of canonization has tended to remember the texts and forget their author, or that critics who acknowledge the marquesa’s authorship have emphasized the influence 1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the IV Simposio Internacional, Las Mujeres en la Independencia de América Latina, Universidad de San Martín de Porres (Lima, Peru) in August 2009, and, subsequently, at a departmental workshop at Columbia University. I am grateful for the assistance of the Barnard Faculty Support Fund, which allowed me to attend the conference in Lima. I also want to thank to Carlos Alonso and Orlando Bentancor for numerous and extremely helpful suggestions. 2 Campuzano explains the contemporary importance of the marqueza Jústiz as precursor and exemplar for Cuban feminism, describing her own interest as part of a project to bring about “una recuperación de la memoria de modelos y ejemplos” (“Ser cubanas” 5). 3 See Saínz, 144-54, for a detailed description of the strong, if circumstantial, evidence for the marquesa Jústiz’s authorship for both texts. 2 3 2 Briggs, "Marquesa Justiz de Santa Ana: Dispatches from Havana" of her husband (“Las muchachas” 27-28).4 Furthermore, the marquesa compounds the singular transgression of being a female author with something to say with the further transgression of extolling the virtues of the island’s most marginalized inhabitants, its slaves (“Las muchachas” 17- 18), as the division between habaneros and peninsulares transcends the island’s interior caste divisions.5 Along with her acerbic wit —the marquesa notes the governor’s fondness for “muchos consejos de guerra, / faltando Guerra, y consejo” (191)— the texts, and especially the Dolorosa métrica, insistently employ Old Testament allusions as allegories for the political situation of the island and the Spanish empire. In the space of twenty-four ten-line stanzas, the Dolorosa métrica manages to bring up the well-known family sagas of Abraham and Isaac; David and Absalom; and Esther and Mordacai, as well a parade of kings and prophets from the period of Judea’s resistance to and conquest by Egyptian and Babylonian armies. Literary historian Enrique Saínz finds the proliferation of such allusions “excessive,” but, all the same, sees in them a world-historical elevation of this relatively small battle of the Seven Years’ War. They demonstrate, he concludes a desire to “identificar los hechos y las singularidades nuestras con los grandes momentos de las viejas culturas” as well as “un afán moralizante y aleccionador” (154). For her part, Campuzano sees the marquesa’s allusionary mania as a kind of poetic credential, one of several stylistic proofs of the erudition and sense of poetic vocation of a writer “no entregada por azar a la poesía de ocasión” (“Las muchachas” 22). What neither of these conclusions takes into account is the specific content (and therefore the likely connotation) of each allusion. While biblical allusions in general certainly establish the author’s erudition, the use of so many varied references also raises several questions—Why these references? Why in this order? and, most importantly, What do the particular allusions she chose to employ say about how the marquesa viewed her position and that of her texts in the Havana of 1762? This essay proposes to examine the marquesa’s use of biblical allusions as a device, a 4 Asunción Lavrin notes the persistence of this prejudice against female participation in matters of state as one that continues into the Wars of Independence, despite the presence of strong (and sometimes famous) female leaders: “Wars were masculine events, and women who ventured into the political and military terrain during the years of war were invading men’s space” (73). 5 As Campuzano and Vallejo put it in their preface to Yo con mi viveza, “su voz no sólo se alza en representación de su clase de habaneros nobles y ricos, sino que también habla explícitamente por los pardos y morenos que han sido sacrificados o explotados por el gobernador, y particularmente por las habaneras, acosadas tanto por los ingleses a quienes desprecian, como por los soldados españoles que saben que ellas los acusan de cobardes” (10-11). DIECIOCHO 35.2 (Fall 2012) 233 “treta,” to borrow Josefina Ludmer’s term, which allows her to encapsulate an acid critique of the monarchy of Carlos III within the accepted formulas of praise and loyalty. Ludmer’s use of the term accompanies an analysis of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s difficult position in colonial, patriarchal society. Ludmer proposes a number of tactical maneuvers or “tretas” the female writer must employ to conceal her complete perspective from male authority figures, an approach she sums up as a separation between knowledge and voice: “no decir pero saber, o decir que no sabe y saber, o decir lo contrario de lo que sabe” (51-52). In this essay I will be arguing that biblical allegory serves as a “treta” that allows the marquesa to cloak her most critical gestures in a veneer of submission to authority. While it would be anachronistic to argue for an independentista reading of a text written decades before any sort of coherent independence movement had broken out, I will argue that comparisons with the Judea of the books of Samuel and Chronicles provides a particularly flexible template for thinking through notions of Cuban nationality not necessarily in conflict with a larger concept of pan-Hispanic nationhood. Poised in a historical moment marked by what 19th-century historian Antonio Bachiller y Morales has called “la desaparición de los gobiernos personales en el mundo civilizado” (185), the marquesa Justiz de Santa Ana fashions an intense and personal appeal to the king buttressed by biblical stories notable for their ambivalent attitude about monarchy in general and their specific examples of individual kings whose poor leadership leads to national disaster. The marquesa’s particular take on Creole identity also corresponds to the larger pattern in Spanish America in which, as O. Carlos Stoetzer puts it, “faith in God and loyalty to the king” would “have as much judicial validity in the Wars of Independence as they had in the days of the Spanish conquest” (1). The use of biblical allegory allows the marquesa to alternate between constructions that fold Havana and all of the Spanish empire into a single term and those that let the island or the city stand alone —an arrangement in which she manages to appeal to local feelings of national pride while always presenting herself as a loyal subject of the empire.6 Historical Footnote / Divine Inspiration The British occupation of Havana began in August, 1762, after a two- month siege, ended less than a year later, in July, 1763, and included only the city and surrounding area (Leuchsenring VII). Given Havana’s strategic importance as a port and naval base, however, and the series of independence movements that would begin to rock the Western hemisphere a decade later, this eleven-month interlude takes on an outsized 6 Anthony Pagden has pointed out the anachronistic nature of the Spanish American independence movements that identify themselves as seeking “a restitution of the status quo” and arguing that “It is, therefore, the crown, or its agents, that are the destroyers of order” (Spanish 122). 2 3 4 Briggs, "Marquesa Justiz de Santa Ana: Dispatches from Havana" historical importance. Since the occupying army included troops from what would become the United States and the defenders presented a mixture of Spanish regulars and local militia, this small theatre of the Seven Years' War could be called a global one whose repercussions included “a ‘sensation’ in the North American colonies” (“Conquest” 469) replete with prayers and sermons of Thanksgiving, and a court-martial back in Madrid that convicted Governor Juan del Prado and other principles for their perceived negligence (see Kueth 18-22).7 While Allan J. Kueth’s historical account cites the circumstances of the battle and the Spanish reforms that followed it as proof that “the Spanish simply lacked the trained soldiery to repulse the British invasion,” contemporary responses concluded that it was the British who had triumphed against the odds, and found the cause to be either divine influence or military negligence. A century later, in 1863, the Atlantic Monthly would quote Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard, who saw “the visible hand of God” in the British victory (“Conquest” 470), and Judith Weiss's recent article cites Joseph Treat’s 1762 Thanksgiving sermon as a collusion of British and North American notions of imperialism that celebrated the North American colonies’ stake in the British imperial project—“se elabora una justificación del imperio británico como expresión de la Gracia divina” (100).8 Historians seem to agree on the largely lenient nature of British governance and of the attitude of fierce resistance maintained by the city’s population. Guiteras, for example, underscoring his own opposition to Spanish rule, speaks of an occupation “conforme al carácter conciliador, humano y liberal” of the occupying nation (98), but one in which the British rulers “procuraron en vano captarse la estimación de los naturales del país” (97). Campuzano’s title, “Las muchachas de La Habana no tienen temor de Dios…” originates in a bit of light verse condemning the habaneras for fraternization with occupying troops, and ending in a rhyme on “Dios”: “y se van con los ingleses / en los bocoyes de arroz” (“Las muchachas” 22). 7 David Syrett notes that the operation was anything but an unqualified success from the perspective of the North American troops who were involved. Concluding that “the role of the Americans at Havana was short, deadly, and inglorious” (390), Syrett suggests that “probably the forty-three percent casualties suffered by the Connecticut provincials accurately reflects the overall rate of losses of the whole brigade of American provincials during the campaign” (390). For the most part, these were not battlefield casualties: “The vast majority of these deaths were the result of disease” (390). 8 Weiss’s article provides an excellent overview of 1762’s significance for the nascent U.S. national consciousness, and served as my entry into both Treat’s sermon and the Atlantic Monthly’s centennial remembrance, written in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. DIECIOCHO 35.2 (Fall 2012) 235 And while our current perspective on the occupation cannot help but be colored by its short duration, the marquesa Justiz and her contemporaries had no assurance that their city would soon return to Spanish control. In economic terms, the occupation had a deep if varied impact on the city's inhabitants. On the other hand, Juan Pérez de la Riva’s comment that “La toma de La Habana fue un buen negocio para mucha gente” (29) could well apply both to North American traders who saw a new market open and a handful of habaneros ready to take advantage of the situation (see Cluster, Calleja Leal, and Leuchsenring for more on the economic effects of the occupation), but on the other hand Celia María Parcero Torre has pointed out that the immediate economic consequences were dire for most habaneros, and a “la sensación de desamparo” worked to create a feeling of political isolation (154). From this isolation grows the habaneros’ particular patriotic spirit, what Saínz has called “su amor a la tierra donde nacieron, en abierto contraste con el desinterés y la desidia de los jefes” (155). Just as the economic benefits proved more acute for the North American colonies than for Great Britain itself, so the experience of being occupied created an experiential barrier between the habaneros and their mother country, even as it provoked stronger and stronger expressions of loyalty. Under the circumstances, in fact, loyalty to the king becomes an essential component of the nascent sense of Cuban or habanero identity (Guerra 175). Kueth's analysis convincingly calls into question the factual basis for this particular notion of Creole nationhood, arguing that “The Spanish regulars generally fought well, occasionally with incredible heroism” (19), while “The militia, by contrast, contributed very little” (19-20). It was the “isolated exceptions to this pattern of behavior,” Kueth argues, that formed the nucleus of the myth of the brave Creole and cowardly Spaniard, and he cites as an example the history of the conquest according to “the mid-nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist Guiteras” (20n54).9 However factually valid the notion of a distinction in valor between Creoles and Spaniards may have been, the marquesa’s texts serve as one indicator that it was something more than an ex-post-facto creation of the nineteenth-century independence movement. Indeed, one of the difficulties of reading the Memorial and the Dolorosa métrica two and a half centuries later is the unavoidable refraction produced by the facts of independence. Reading the marquesa as a proto-independentista has thus become an almost unavoidable response to her work. Saínz compares the Dolorosa 9 One of the points Guiteras insists on is the premature nature of Juan del Prado’s decision to surrender the city. He notes that the British soldiers “decían que los españoles eran valientes pero no tenían jefes que supiesen mandarlos” (69), and that the sight of flags of truce was so shocking to the city’s defenders that “los regidores pasaron a inquirir el intento de aquella demostración” (86). 2 3 6 Briggs, "Marquesa Justiz de Santa Ana: Dispatches from Havana" métrica with Silvestre de Balboa’s 17th-century work Espejo de paciencia (which wasn’t published until the mid-nineteenth century and therefore could not have influenced the marquesa Justiz directly) as an early example of a Creole sensibility in which Cuban identity trumps race and class (154). Indeed, Balboa critic Raúl Marrera Fente speaks of Espejo’s functioning in those absent years as “un fantasma en las figuras retóricas principales de la literatura cubana” and names “el sentimiento de ser criollo” and “el ideal comunal” among those figures (11). José Lezama Lima singles out the marquesa as “una excepción que marca la rebeldía frente a la gobernación española, que aconseja la unidad de los pobladores y que procura elevar el nivel cultural” (13). This notion of Cuban unity in the face of attack and isolation forms a key component to the distinction Campuzano sees between “los paisanos” and “los españoles”: while members of the first group appear “intrépidos y listos para combatir”, those in the second “aparecen soberbios y desdeñosos de los vecinos de la ciudad” (“Las muchachas” 19-20). In each case the act of resistance against British rule and critique of the government sent by Spain becomes the basis for a definition of the “Cuban.” Whether or not we agree with Salvador Arias’s characterization of colonial Cuban poetry as “el testimonio del surgimiento el desarrollo y la maduración del sentimiento de la nacionalidad isleña” (6), the marquesa’s commitment to at least an “isleña” identity remains beyond dispute. The irony, of course, is that she bases this identity on the island’s exceptional loyalty to the crown and to a notion of efficient monarchical government from which too frequently it sees the crown depart. This combination of a strict sense of local mission and a larger identity is embodied in the marquesa’s choice of analogies for the peculiar position of Cuba and the Spanish empire in the vast, imperial struggle that has visited itself upon the island. Praise, Critique, and Punishment of Kings Nothing could be slipperier than the ascription of originality for the use of Old Testament allegory and, in particular, identity with the historical struggles of ancient Israel. The rhetorical move is such a commonplace in Western nationalist discourse as to defy trademark or copyright. And given the variety of struggles and anecdotes recounted in Exodus, Chronicles, 1 and 2 Samuel, and the books of the prophets, some sort of Old Testament allusion can come to serve nearly any set of historical circumstances, from Christopher Colombus’s feeling of being the embattled leader of a fractious and isolated group (ctd. in Las Casas 2:85) to Joseph Treat’s exuberant exclamation that “Israel got not the land of Canaan by his own sword; but it was the right hand of God” —proof that in Havana the Royal Navy and DIECIOCHO 35.2 (Fall 2012) 237 Army enjoyed similar favor (11).10 Even the lost Espejo de paciencia employs the tactic, as a speaker prays for his own salvation by mentioning the Deity’s past actions—“a tu querido pueblo de Israel / De egipceos le libraste y Faraones” (Balboa 29). The marquesa de Justiz, arguing from the losing side, chooses a different Old Testament approach, one more specifically applicable to the military details of the battle. Having noted, in both the Memoria and the Dolorosa métrica the widespread disgust and despair provoked by the Governor’s decision to pull back his troops from la Cabaña, a key elevated position, she takes particular offense at the casualties suffered in repeated attempts to retake the ground that should never have been given up: Contra toda la Prudencia del mas arreglado Juicio, de Cavaña el sacrificio cifró de Ysác la obediencia: dos veces a consecuencia se dirigió expedición mas con tal desproporcion que el morir hera preciso, no haviendo divino aviso faltando revelacion. (61-70) The stanza cites a story that would surely be familiar to the poem’s readers: the episode in Genesis in which Abraham believes he has been commanded to make a sacrifice and offering of his son Isaac, a ceremony for which a lamb is normally used. As father and son make the normal preparations for an animal sacrifice, Isaac asks innocently “but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” and Abraham replies, cryptically, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (Genesis 22: 7-8). At the moment when Abraham has literally raised the knife to kill his son, an angel appears and tells him to stop —the whole episode had been necessary to prove his willingness to sacrifice even his own child. The angel indicates that a ram is just appearing and will serve as the animal to be sacrificed, thus rendering prophetic Abraham’s reply to Isaac. For the marquesa’s purpose the story of Abraham and Isaac provides two moments of dramatic effect. The first invokes the notion of sacrifice in general, as when she makes the Cabaña stand in for Isaac as the son that the 10 Enrique Krause’s treatment of Las Casas’s influence on contemporary politics in Chiapas focuses on the work of Samuel Ruiz and points out that “La idea de los sacerdotes y los indios como encarnaciones de Moisés y el pueblo elegido tenía antecedentes en las misiones jesuitas del Paraguay, en el siglo XVII” (n. pag.). In Ruiz’s continued support for the Zapatista movement, Krause sees a notion of “el nuevo pueblo de Israel en marcha hacia la Tierra Prometida” (n. pag.). 2 3 8 Briggs, "Marquesa Justiz de Santa Ana: Dispatches from Havana" father (Juan del Prado) has imprudently decided to sacrifice. Of course, in the case of Abraham and Isaac the father’s apparent imprudence is really attentiveness to divine orders that defy reason, and the angel’s equally irrational appearance averts the deadly consequence of this unreasonable behavior. The marquesa points out that no such friendly angel is frequenting the counsels of power in 1762 Havana. The second moment comes with the revelation that the sacrifice of the position has led to the decision to sacrifice soldiers, who have now slipped into the position occupied by Isaac. With no divine intervention the result is just the sort of reasonable consequence one would expect from sending an outnumbered force “con tal desproporcion” against a fortified position. Even worse, from the marquesa’s perspective, is the obvious lack of perception on the part of the city’s government. If Abraham, hearing a divine voice, perceives more than those around him, the powers that be in Havana seem to perceive less than the common people charged to their care. In the Memorial the marquesa notes the public outcry occasioned by the original decision to abandon the Cabaña—“Toda la ciudad lloró con amargura esta pérdida”— and concludes (with a nod perhaps, to Feijoo, whose work would likely have been familiar to her) that in this example, at least, the voice of God speaks through common sense rather than divine revelation: “fue en esta ocasión voz del Pueblo, voz de Dios” (185).11 While the elevation of the people’s voice as more reasonable than that of their leader might be classified as a challenge to the colonial hierarchy, the marquesa is careful to condemn this state of affairs as a perversion of the normal order. In the tradition of letters of protest going back at least as far as Las Casas, she argues that the real interests of the monarchy are in fact being thwarted in the colonies by leaders who act in its name.12 Thus, in the Memorial, she speaks of the “despotiquez” of colonial governors who respond to local whistleblowing with the charge of sedition: en donde a cualquiera vasallo que toma el legítimo recurso de quejarse a V.M. o noticiarle algún aviso importante lo atropellan, cerrándoles esta puerta con la palabra sedición, a cuya farsa vivimos expuestos (sin más arbitrio que padecer) los que lejos de la sombra de V.M. veneramos rendidos sus más pequeños preceptos. (188) 11 Stoetzer points out Feijóo’s importance as a writer who counteracted “the stereotyped views which foreigners had of Spain” and his popularity in the New World: “it was in Spanish America in particular that his works attained the greatest fame” (66). 12 In the introduction to his recent edition of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación, José Miguel Martínez Torrejón refers to Las Casas’s use of “la imagen de los reyes ignorantes, víctimas del engaño de sus subordinados, que son los verdaderos culpables” (40). DIECIOCHO 35.2 (Fall 2012) 239 The “farce” to which the marquesa refers, is the world turned upside down in which the charge of sedition applies to those who seek to advance the interests of the monarch. Her phrasing also draws attention to the peculiar fate of colonial subjects who find themselves in the clutches of local mismanagement while their true leader remains an ocean away and largely inaccessible, leaving them “(sin más arbitrio que padecer)”. Unlike the revolutionaries who follow her by a few decades in Spanish America and a bare decade in North America, the marquesa seeks a restoration and seems implicitly to trust the king’s ability to bring that restoration about. Where she does prefigure the tone of those revolutionaries —especially Benjamin Franklin’s “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” (1773)— is in her pithy invocation of the absurdity of the colonial subject’s position. In the Dolorosa métrica, for example, she speaks of the colonial paradox as a chiasmus in which “mas fue advitrio del Poder / el no poder arbitrar” (69-70), and one from which she and like-minded subjects would prefer to escape: “si es delito la obediencia, / que otras Leyes se nos den” (79-80). But if the poem’s overt fireworks direct themselves towards a deeper loyalty to the king and a contrast between his virtues and the incompetence of his appointed governors, the marquesa’s choice of royal allusions begins to resemble a “treta” in which the vector of the allusion slips from Juan del Prado, to Carlos III, the very king in whom the texts seek deliverance. Midway through the Dolorosa métrica, having chronicled the governor’s military misjudgments and surrender, the marquesa introduces the string of “excessive” allusions, and in its midst embeds a justification for comparing the people of Ancient Israel and the monarchy of 18th-century Spain. She, like Joseph Treat, sees the hand of God in Britain’s victory, but with the terms of the analogy reversed. It is not, she argues, that a British army has, like Israel, conquered the Promised Land with divine intervention, but rather that Spain, like Isreal, has suffered a temporary defeat as punishment for its own imprudence and iniquity. Her argument fits into a single stanza: Muchas guerras padecia Ysrrael, Pueblo escogido, el que siempre fue vencido quando ingrato delinquia: De ordinario se valia Dios, en sus Jucios constantes de Instrumentos semejantes; por esso en esta ocacion los que te dominan son tan pocos, y Protextantes. (141-50) What the Old Testament proves, she argues, is a divine tendency to use opposing armies “Instrumentos semejants” as vessels of judgment. Thus 2 4 0 Briggs, "Marquesa Justiz de Santa Ana: Dispatches from Havana" the victorious British are not the real protagonists of the narrative but rather a tool for expressing divine displeasure. And the same “against-the- odds” quality cited by Treat proves only that the Spaniards must owe their defeat to divine intervention rather than force of arms. On a subtler level, the stanza makes clear a change in vector already under way. While the whole poem is written as a second-person address to King Carlos III (with the exception of a handful of verses explicitly directed to the people of Havana), the analogical target of the Abraham-Isaac allusion is clearly the local government rather than the monarchy itself. The marquesa’s explanation for her invocation of the Old Testament analogy comes in the midst of a biblical anecdote that cannot help but shift the focus back to Madrid. One stanza before explaining the allegorical relationship between Spain and ancient Israel, the marquesa brings up the case of Josiah (Joseas) the Judean king famous for instituting a series of religious reforms that failed to save his country from disaster: Prendas mui recomendables tuvo el Rey Joseas Justo; y aunque en su renombre augusto, fué en sus empresas fatal, dando causa a tanto mal pecados del Pueblo injusto. (135-40) On one level we could argue that the passage isolates the people rather than the king as the source of national ills—it identifies Josiah as a righteous king who fails because of the unrighteousness of his subjects. The king, by this reading, may not in fact be capable of saving his kingdom from the folly of those beneath him—whether “those beneath him” means his subjects, full stop, or the Juan del Prados of his colonial administration. While Josiah’s story is certainly more obscure than that of Abraham and Isaac, listeners familiar with its details would see subtle connections with Carlos III. Josiah’s mantle of reformer comes as a result of the discovery, in the midst of his rule, of sacred texts detailing the proper performance of religious rites. When Josiah makes a great show of repentance for having unwittingly violated the sacred texts and orders the reforms that will bring the kingdom’s practices in line with them, he does so knowing (by a divine message his priests have received) that national punishment is already inevitable. These priests bring, directly from God, the disquieting news that his reforms, however sincere, are too little, too late, as they will only bring about his personal deliverance and not that of his kingdom: “you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the evil which I will bring upon this place” (2 Kings 22:20). While the marquesa, in 1762, would lack the historical perspective to see Carlos III under the mantle of “Bourbon reformer”, she does remark, in