Present but Unseen
Dr. Matthew Pettway examines African Cuban spirituality and emancipation in the liturgy of 19th-century poet Juan Francisco Manzano
OVERVIEW
Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution.
Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress.
Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.
Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection by Matthew Pettway (University Press of Mississippi, 2019)
EXCERPT
The following excerpt (adapted for Open Plaza) is from “Present but Unseen: African Cuban Spirituality and Emancipation in the Literature of Juan Francisco Manzano,” Chapter Four in Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection (pages 148-50).
[Juan Francisco] Manzano’s attempt to appease the wrath of “the saints”—Saint Anthony chief among them— implied a belief in the paradoxical nature of divine entities, something incompatible with Church doctrine but consistent with Yoruba-inspired conceptions of the spirit world. Moreover, there is a correlation between the San Antonio figure and Manzano’s pursuit of freedom within the narrative. In his poetry, correspondence, and narrative, Manzano employs fate not only as a conventional trope but also as a metaphor for the uncertain outcome of spiritual warfare.
[…]
In Manzano’s liturgy, San-Antonio-Elegguá embodied the Yoruba conception of destiny, individual chance, and uncertainty in the quotidian struggle to survive and prosper. He was a paradoxical figure, empowered to open or close the crossroads, and he had to be placated lest the poet’s destiny be adverse. Cuban scholar Rómulo Lachatañeré challenged [Fernando] Ortiz’s criminological lens in the book Los negros brujos (1906), which lent scientific credence to popular perceptions that African Cuban religiosity was a mishmash of primitive superstitions that imperiled civilization. Lachatañeré exposed Ortiz’s methodological problems and argued that African-inspired spirituality constituted a coherent system of practices pursuant to its own logic. Moreover, Lachatañeré renamed Yoruba-inspired religion santería, or worship of the saints, to do away with Ortiz’s racialized idiom, witchcraft (brujería) (“Las Creencias religiosas de los afrocubanos” 197). Lachatañeré describes Elegguá as the owner of the crossroads (caminos), which are the four corners of the universe in African cosmologies [see Daniel Walker’s No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans. Walker writes that wooden artifacts representing Elegguá, dating from the mid- to late nineteenth century, have been located (52–53)]. If Elegguá closes the crossroads, he impedes contact with other divine entities and may eliminate personal aspirations. Elegguá is not motivated by a transcendent notion of goodness; rather, he requires appropriate sacrifice to open the crossroads, thus enabling adepts to achieve equilibrium within the uncertainty of human existence (103). In terms of Manzano’s narrative, however, San Antonio’s transculturation with Elegguá may be explained by the fact that both divine personages are skilled travelers, capable of wielding extraordinary powers and alleviating personal woes.
Elegguá is a decisive factor in Manzano’s successful escape. In Cuba this orisha is known as Elegguá-Echú, a paradoxical manifestation of the same spirit who interferes in all matters human or divine. As the proprietor of the passageway, Elegguá is the indispensable orisha, so that nothing is possible without his involvement (Bolívar 36). Comparable to Nigerian scholars, Natalia Bolívar explains that orishas do not embody the absolute concepts of good and evil. Rather, the orishas embody the relationship between positive energies and destructive powers since there cannot be peace without discord, and there is no safety without danger (36, 40).
Book cover image of The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina by John Andrew Jackson (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1862) depicts Jackson escaping the horrors of slavery on horseback—as Juan Francisco Manzano had in Cuba. Source: Documenting the American South
Fleeing on foot from Matanzas to Havana exposed Manzano to grave dangers: possible disorientation from hunger or thirst, or even being taken into custody by slave-hunting parties [see José Luciano Franco, La presencia negra en el nuevo mundo, and Laird Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas]. Manzano entrusted the orishas with his passage from slavery to freedom, as the final paragraph of his autobiography indicates. Manzano described it thus:
“me puse de rodillas me encomendé a los santos de mi debosion me puse el sombrero y monté cuando iva a andar p[a’] retirarme de la casa”
(I knelt down and I commended myself to the saints of my devotion. I put my hat on and mounted the horse when I was going to get away from the house) (Manzano, Autobiografía 340).
Manzano’s commitment to the orishas was so devout that he “commended” himself to them one last time before escaping the plantation. San Antonio-Elegguá—one of only two saints named in the autobiography—was the most important “[of his] saints of [his] devotion.” The details of Manzano’s escape are unknown, since the second part of his slave narrative was either lost or destroyed while in the possession of Ramón de Palma (Azougarh 31). Whatever the particulars of his escape, running away meant the very real possibility of death. Since Elegguá is a near-omniscient warrior spirit who possesses knowledge of Creator, of other orishas, and egun (Yoruba for “spirits of the dead”) (Brown 127, 156), Manzano performed the rituals to please “God’s secretary.” Elegguá represents Manzano’s hopes to be free and he signifies the very real possibility that he may fall into the hands of the authorities. Just as Elegguá’s Janus-faced ritual objects gaze in diverging directions, the orisha may look upon Manzano with generosity and transmit his prayers to the Supreme Deity. Or an alternative scenario could emerge in which Elegguá disregarded devout prayers, provided no assistance, and left Manzano to fend for himself. For this very reason, the poet endeavored not to offend the orishas through a perceived lack of devotion (Manzano, Autobiografía 318). While the Catholic Saint Anthony is renowned for his patience and chastity, Elegguá is a provocateur that may or may not gratify the desires of his devotees (Cros Sandoval 218).
I am saying that Manzano did not pursue freedom within a Catholic conception of redemption, which implies penitence and salvation. The problem with the concept of sin in Cuban slave society is that it created a false equivalency, because it assumed the culpability of the enslaved and the slaveholder. Such doctrines render the oppressor guilty for abusing the weak, but oppressed people do not escape blame or condemnation either. They too are condemned, for their hatred of the oppressor. Whereas the word pecado (sin) appears in “Oda a La Religión,” where Manzano lamented that the Christian God had abandoned him to a sinful world, the concept is nowhere to be found in the autobiography. Resistance through the appropriation of what was presumed to be Catholic ritual empowered Manzano to resignify the tools of the master, hence granting new meaning to Catholic prayer verses. Cros Sandoval observed that African-inspired religious practice incorporates Catholic liturgical devices such as the novena (79). The introduction of Catholic rites in Manzano’s ritual space does not rule out the possibility of an African cultural frame of reference. Cuban scholar Guillermo Sierra Torres also notes that the sign of the Cross and the Lord’s Prayer are an integral part of the rituals in honor of certain orishas (302). For a Hispano-Catholic readership, the novena and the Lord’s Prayer signify Christian devotion, but they may have also spoken to the redemptive power of transculturated African-inspired ritual for black interlocutors.
WORKS CITED
Azougarh, Abdeslam. “Destino y obra de Juan Francisco Manzano.” Juan Francisco Manzano: Esclavo poeta en la Isla de Cuba. Spain: Ediciones Episteme, 2000.
Bergad, Laird W. Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Bolívar, Natalia Aróstegui. Los orishas en Cuba. Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1990.
Brown, David H. Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Cros Sandoval, Mercedes. Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
Franco, José Luciano. La presencia negra en el nuevo mundo. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1968.
Lachatañeré, Rómulo. El sistema religioso de los afrocubanos. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2001.
Manzano, Juan Francisco. Autobiografía del esclavo poeta y otros escritos / Juan Francisco Manzano: Edición, introducción y notas de William Luis. Edited by William Luis. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2007.
Ortiz, Fernando. Los negros brujos: Apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal. Miami: New House, 1973.
Walker, Daniel E. No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
The 1840 English edition of Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiography was translated from the Spanish original by Irish abolitionist Richard Robert Madden and published in London as: Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba, Recently Liberated; Translated from the Spanish, by R. R. Madden, M.D. With the History of the Early Life of the Negro Poet, Written by Himself; to Which Are Prefixed Two Pieces Descriptive of Cuban Slavery and the Slave-Traffic, by R. R. M. (Thomas Ward and Co., 1840).
Dr. Pettway notes that this translation “omits [Manzano’s] frequent references to the saints, thus effacing their indispensable role in the original manuscript as purveyors of freedom from the plantation.”
READ the full text of R.R. Madden’s translation via Documenting the American South
LISTEN to an excerpt of Madden’s translation via Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
READ the full text by Manzano in the original Spanish, edited and annotated by Alex Castro
