Dark Horse Poetics

Dark Horse Poetics: Lévi-Strauss, Benítez-Rojo, and Caribbean Epistemology Rose Réjouis

A dark horse which had never been thought of, and which the careless St. James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph. —Benjamin Disraeli, The Young Duke And how the scene of the struggle has shifted! —James Weldon Johnson

The concept of bricolage that Claude Lévi-Strauss articulates in his 1962 book La pensée sauvage has become central to the description of Caribbean culture. It recurs in the thought of many Caribbean writers, and it is deployed as a strategy aimed at, according to Wendy Knepper, “the transformation of cultural disinheritance into a strategy of resistance, ‘re-membering,’ and creative self-determination.”1 Françoise Vergès explains how creolization, a Caribbean modus vivendi, enacts the logic of bricolage: Creolization is about bricolage drawing freely upon what is available, recreating with new content and in new forms a distinctive culture, a creation in a situation of domination and conflict. It is not about retentions but about reinterpretations. It is not about roots but about loss. It must be distinguished from cultural contact and multiculturalism because, at heart, it is a practice 1

Wendy Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” Small Axe, no. 21 (October 2006): 85.

small axe 43 • March 2014 • DOI 10.1215/07990537–2642791 © Small Axe, Inc.

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104  |  Dark Horse Poetics: Lévi-Strauss, Benítez-Rojo, and Caribbean Epistemology and ethics of borrowing and accepting to be transformed, affected by the other. In the current era of globalization, processes of creolization appear in zones of conflict and contact. They are the harbingers of an ongoing ethics of sharing the world.2

Anne Mélice qualifies this concept of bricolage and persuasively argues that Lévi-Strauss envisaged it to theorize interactive improvisations in a closed system, “un ensemble clos” (a closed set) with no “new content.”3 In his inaugural essay for Small Axe, David Scott articulated the black diaspora’s predicament of being “virtually obliged to provide the counter-evidence, the historical and ethnographic evidence, to demonstrate that as a people your cultural sources were not (or not only) European ones” when engaging with normative epistemology.4 The delivery of this “counter-evidence” as proof of self-identity, and epistemological solvency is a central “scene of the struggle”5 for Caribbean thinkers. Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor have acknowledged as much when they described the ethnographic works of Maurice Delafosse and Leo Frobenius, which gave legitimacy to African civilization, as turning points in their own articulation of a Pan-African culture.6 Armed with this evidence, Césaire and Senghor were able to engage with a postwar change of criterion—a rejection of European imperialism and an acceptance of less visible forces, such as the unconscious, and the value of peoples who had not yet articulated national identities for themselves. Scott’s statement recalls Talal Asad’s claim that the central question in “the culture of the weak” is one of translation, namely, that of translating oneself for the “culture of the strong.”7 I begin with Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage because it creates the possibility of treating historical contingencies like non-Western identity as epistemological resources, not liabilities. What I wish to do here, however, is to enlarge the discussion around bricolage by showing that this concept is part of a wider discussion about non-Western epistemology. Specifically, I wish to analyze how Lévi-Strauss borrows images that describe common denominators of human culture to enunciate ways of knowing outside of a Western history of ideas, developing in the process an aesthetic politics I will refer to as a dark horse poetics.8 This avant-garde poetics, a defense of the weak, or 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Françoise Vergès, “Kiltir Kreol: Processes and Practices of Créolité and Creolization,” in Okwui Enwezor et al., eds., Créolité and Creolization, Documenta11_Platform3 (Ostifildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 184. Anne Mélice, “Un concept Lévi-Straussien déconstruit: Le ‘bricolage,’” Temps Modernes, no. 256 (2009): 87, 93. David Scott, “Introducing Small Axe,” Small Axe, no. 1 (March 1997): 24. I have argued elsewhere that Rhonda Cobham makes a parallel statement regarding the floating spiritual African legacies in the Caribbean, describing how the fact that they are not officially acknowledged—unlike African “traditional” culture—is an epistemological liability for Caribbean selfidentity. See my “Tasks without Solutions: Why Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams Matters to Translation Culture,” Small Axe (forthcoming). James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French, 1912), 73. Césaire has acknowledged this in many interviews, including in Euzhan Palcy’s 1994 three-part documentary Aimé Césaire: Une voix pour l’histoire. Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 157. In my “Negritude as Dark Play,” an essay published in the notes of the summer 2009 exhibit “Négritude,” at EXIT ART cultural center in New York, I use Richard Schechner’s idea of “dark play” to describe what James Clifford has called Césaires’s “politics of neologism,” articulating in the process an aesthetics related to a dark horse poetics: “Négritude is an example of Césaire’s agency, of his ‘dark play,’ for it is a neologism that allows a racial epithet (nègre, negro, nigger) to coexist with an affirmation of images of Africa. As such, it embodies the multi-voicedness [of disruption, deceit, excess and gratification] that ‘dark play’ allows.” And, indeed, in Césaire’s poetry, the reader experiences what Schechner describes so well: “Dark play subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules, so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed.” Richard Schechner, The Future of Rituals (New York: Routledge, 2004), 36. It now seems to me that this “dark play” is an aspect of the “dark horse poetics” I wish to describe here.

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of the ugly and comical (“laid et comique”) social outsider (to borrow a phrase Césaire takes from Baudelaire), was already present in the work of many other writers. I engage with its presence in the ethnography of Lévi-Strauss because he thickens it with an interdisciplinary discourse that provides tools for the articulation of non-Western epistemologies as well as of a genealogy that includes sixteenth-century critiques of European ethnocentricity. It is in the context of this project that I will explore the call-and-response between the activist historiogaphies of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island. Benítez-Rojo articulates not only the type of bricolage practiced in the Caribbean—supersyncretisms—but the alternative logic, a logic of a “certain kind” that rules the antiviolent social space this bricolage creates. Aware of the cultural domination of powerful nations, Lévi-Strauss attempts to crystallize common languages, languages that are finally reconciled (“des langages enfin réconciliés”)9 between the old and the new, the strong and the weak, and he first does so most fully in his 1955 book-length essay Tristes tropiques. With its description of Western angst (“inquiétude morale” [460]), it echoes Billy Holiday’s 1946 song about everlasting blues, “Good Morning, Heartache,” and does so better than Françoise Sagan’s 1954 glib novel, Bonjour tristesse (literally, “Good morning, heartache”). Although Tristes Tropiques is an ethnographic classic, it is written in the first person, yet it is less an autobiography than a moment in the career of ethnography. It is in this book that Lévi-Strauss begins—and he will never cease—to redefine the task of anthropology. In some ways, the book begins in medias res. Fearful of becoming concentration camp prey (“gibier de camp de concentration” [19]), the narrator is fleeing France via its overseas territory, Martinique, and via New York. But beyond this Atlantic crossing, the narrator is going to Brazil to do fieldwork, following in the footsteps of another member of a persecuted faith, those of Jean Léry, the French Calvinist minister who spent two years (1556–58) in Brazil, the first on the early Huguenot settlement located on the island of Dieppe (just off the Brazilian mainland, in the bay of modern-day Rio de Janeiro) and the second living on the mainland among the Tupinamba Indians. Lévi-Strauss came to refer to Léry’s 1578 memoir, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre de Brésil, autrement dite Amérique, as “the ethnographer’s breviary,” both because, unlike previous travelers, Léry described only what he saw with his own eyes, referring to such analysis, as Chartier points out in his lecture, as “autopsie,”10 and because Léry engaged in a kind of epistemological chiasmus that set a precedent for ethnography when he declared the cannibalism he claims to have witnessed among the Indians—the eating of dead men—as less cruel than the Catholic massacre of living Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572).11 In his memoir Léry includes the first transcription of Indian language, as he describes a scene he witnessed. A prisoner from another tribe, about to be eaten, declares, “Pa, che tan tan, ajouca atoupané” (Yes, I am very strong and have eaten many [of your men]).12 The prisoner points out that 9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 59; hereafter cited in the text (all translations mine). 10 I have relied on Roger Chartier’s close reading of the text for this claim. His Collège de France lecture on print culture was broadcast on the radio program Eloge du savoir in 2103. 11 It is widely acknowledged that Montaigne used Jean Léry’s work for his 1580 essay “Des Cannibales.” 12 Jean Léry, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre de Brésil, autrement dite Amérique (La Rochelle: Pour Antoine Chuppin, 1578), 241 (italics in original). This is a scanned first edition, published online at www2.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/gordon/ renworld/lery.html#histoire.

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that by eating his body, the Tupis will really be eating their own flesh because of all the Tupi men he himself has eaten. Léry cites this exchange to insist that the Tupinamba Indians do not eat others for subsistence but for revenge. These acts of violence are not random or genocidal but ritualized, that is, explicitly inscribed in a kind of social circularity, a circularity made even more complicated by the fact that before he is eaten, a prisoner is even given the comfort of a wife—who will eventually eat his flesh too and who often gives birth to his child after his death.13 Half ethnography, half essay, Tristes tropiques does indeed take its cues from Léry’s Urtext as it discusses the indigenous Tupinamaba, the fragility of language and culture, universal cruelty, and the myth of “the good savage.” For Lévi-Strauss, the predator on cultural diversity, the “true cannibal,” is global capitalism. In an apostrophe to Indian culture, Lévi-Strauss uses the term cannibalism to describe Western imperialist appetite: “Non satisfait encore ni même conscient de vous abolir, il lui faut rassasier fiévreusement de vos ombres le cannibalisme nostalgique d’une histoire à laquelle vous avez déjà succombé” (41) (Neither satisfied nor even aware of having abolished you, [the “monoculture” of modernity] feverishly needs to feed your shadows to the nostalgic cannibalism of a history to which you have already succumbed). In order to establish a balance of forces between the culture of the “weak” and that of the “strong,” Lévi-Strauss also extends an epistemological chiasmus: modernity is impoverished and cannibalistic, while “primitive cultures” still have an abundant and unpredictable diversity. In so doing, he authorizes what I call a dark horse poetics, a poetics committed to revealing the unexpected resources within the culture of the “weak”—giving it its tropes and enabling its recognition. An example of this dark horse poetics is present in Derek Walcott’s 1992 Nobel Prize address, which, in a salutary blurring of the Lévi-Straussian concepts of the bricoleur and engineer, describes the Caribbean poet as both: “The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself.” Walcott’s poet assembles cultural legacies (like a bricoleur), while making his tools (like an engineer). It is surprising that Walcott identifies the Caribbean poet with the European Crusoe and not with Crusoe’s “my man” Friday, a “native” Crusoe saves and who becomes his servant. One might say that it is Lévi-Strauss’s work that gives him this license, both by suggesting that the workshop of the Neolithic man (with its deprivations and creativity) is the building block for all civilizations and that, by extension, deprivation is the workshop of all creativity—including that of “mechanical civilization.” In other words, for Lévi-Strauss, both Crusoe and Friday are bricoleurs; both men take the closed space of certain givens as their point of departure. Lévi-Strauss’s opposition between the figure of the bricoleur and that of the engineer is not an opposition between non-Western and Western epistemology but a move toward unveiling myths central to Western epistemology. Jacques Derrida notes that Lévi-Strauss is saying that everyone’s

13 Ibid.

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work is, like the bricoleur’s, derivative, made with communal or appropriated material. The engineer, the lone artist who makes all of his tools himself, is a myth: L’ingénieur, que Lévi-Strauss oppose au bricoleur, devrait, lui, construire la totalité de son langage, syntaxe et lexique. En ce sens l’ingégnieur est un mythe: un sujet qui serait l’origine absolue de son propre discours et le construirait “de toutes pieces” serait le créateur du verbe, le verbe lui-même.14 (The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, would then build the totality of his language, syntax and lexicon. As such, the engineer is a myth: a subject who would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would build it “from scratch,” would be the maker of speech, would be speech itself.)

For Derrida, Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage emphasizes the declared renunciation of any reference to a center, a subject, a privileged reference, to an absolute origin or arche (“l’abandon déclaré de toute référence à un centre, à un sujet, à une référence priviliégiée, à une origine ou à une archie absolue [419].” Indeed, Lévi-Straus displaces the idea of a center with something a more decentered notion, that of the “transformation group.” In a provocative essay that takes as its central agenda the tension between the twin concepts of “structure” and “machine” in Lévi-Strauss’s work, Mauro W. Barboso de Almeida traces this concept to advances in mathematics, computer programming, physics, and biology: A transformation that leaves certain features invariant is called a symmetry. . . . We can think either of a fixed observer and a family of changing objects (retaining some invariant features) or of a family of observers (who retain the ability to communicate with each other) and certain constant points of view. This line of thought was formulated with respect to geometry by a mathematician whose name appears in the writings of Lévi-Strauss: Félix Klein. . . . From this perspective there are no favored objects. Any myth may be the point of departure for obtaining a whole transformation group. . . . Diversity becomes compatible with unity.15

Lévi-Strauss mobilizes earlier literary (Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust), philosophical (JeanJacques Rousseau), and ethnographic texts as well as contemporary interdisciplinary scientific language—which goes back to the naturalist work of Georges Cuvier and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—to empower the antiracist agenda of his work.16 As Barbosa de Almeida points out, LéviStrauss, in the 1973 essay “Race and History,” argues “against an evolutionary interpretation of human diversity. All societies are equal if the model of each is simply a transformation of the models of the rest.”17 This core belief in the commensurate value of human cultures animates a “dark horse” poetics, that is, an activist historiography that both explicitly advocates for “the culture of the weak” and, as Lévi-Strauss’s appendix to The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage) shows, stresses “the overlap of long- and short-term events,” the contiguity of the primal and the modern within the same 14 Jacques Derrida, L’ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 418 (all translations mine). 15 Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida, “Symmetry and Entropy: Mathematical Metaphors in the Work of Lévi-Strauss,” Current Anthropology 31, no. 4 (1990): 371–72. 16 This is not to say that there are no problematic statements and attitudes about race in the work of Lévi-Strauss. 17 Almeida, “Symmetry and Entropy,” 373.

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society, and encourages our “postmodernist questioning of the unity and objectivity of [historical] periods.”18 Lévi-Strauss’s dark horse poetics can be summed up this way: man’s Neolithic intelligence—first revealed in “primitive” cultures—is always already both at the point of departure and at the point of the arrival of the orbit of culture. For Lévi-Strauss, it is because industrial civilization has lost its way that ethnography must do a labor of “expiation” in its name (466). There are many examples of this dark horse poetics in Lévi-Strauss’s work. One of them occurs when, overlooking the habitual classification of Martinique and Puerto Rico by colonial history, language, politics, or racial statistics, Lévi-Strauss examines them as members of one “transformation group”—the Caribbean—and compares the traditional rum-making of one island and the modernized rum-making of the other: In Martinique, I had visited a neglected and rustic rum distillery still using tools and techniques from the XVIIIth century. On the contrary, in Puerto Rico, the corporate factories which have a monopoly on the entire production of cane showed off their white enamel and chrome pipes. And yet, the Martinican rums which one could taste straight out of the old wooden vats still zesty with debris were smooth and flavored while those of Puerto Rico were vulgar and brutal. Does the refined taste of [Martinican rums] come from archaic preparation that tolerates impurities? In my eyes, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization whose charms are essentially due to the residues it carries in its flux, although we don’t seem able to prohibit ourselves from getting rid of these very residues. (459–60)

What is at stake for Lévi-Strauss is not whether Martinican rum tastes better than Puerto Rican rum but a Marxist poetic justice in which “a certain kind” (to borrow from Antonio BenítezRojo) of residual contingency in mechanical civilization leaves an ineffable trace of surplus value, something absent in what is completely industrial. Benítez-Rojo’s elusive “a certain kind” alludes to this mystical residue in its explicit elevation of the Caribbean’s alternative body of knowledge. Out of the discursive tropes established by Lévi-Strauss—as interpreted and extended by Edouard Glissant into a poetics of the diversité of the transformation group that is the Caribbean, and by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into the forking tropes of structures and machines— Benítez-Rojo shapes his own dark horse poetics. The very title of his work, The Repeating Island, refers to the Lévi-Straussian trope of transformation groups. According to Benítez-Rojo, the symmetry, the invariant feature that repeats in the Caribbean, is a double structure. There is a plantation machine that morphs the Caribbean into a transformation group of islands, on the one hand, and there are, on the other, cultural “machines ‘of a certain kind’” that work to “defus[e the] violence”

18 David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 65. Lévi-Strauss’s appendix is a transcript of German, Polish, and Ukrainian versions of a folk allegory. One could describe these different versions as a transformation group. The (slightly divergent) allegories comment on the book’s French title, La pensée sauvage, since they weave a tale of family dysfunction around the colors and petal composition of the flower known as pensée sauvage [wild pansy]. Lévi-Strauss presents this folklore as evidence of the unacknowledged coexistence between a “primitive” Europe, with its folk epistemology, and a modern Europe, with its history of modern capitalism, printing, and Christianity. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).

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created by the first machine.19 These two machines are the invariant features of the transformation group that is the Caribbean. First, Benítez-Rojo describes the Caribbean plantation machine: The machine that Christopher Columbus hammered into shape in Hispaniola was a kind of bricolage. . . . . . . The singular feature of this [plantation] machine is that it produced no fewer than ten million African slaves and thousands of coolies (from India, China, and Malaysia). All this, however, is not all: the plantation machines turned out mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism (see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery), African underdevelopment (see Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), Caribbean population (see Ramiro Guerra, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean); they produced imperialism, wars, colonial blocs, rebellions, repressions, sugar islands, runaway slave settlements, air and naval bases, revolutions of all sorts, and even a “free associated state” next to an unfree socialist state. You will say that this catalog is unnecessary, that the whole subject is already too well known. . . . But how is one to establish finally that the Caribbean is not just a multiethnic sea or a group of islands divided by different languages and by the categories Greater and Lesser Antilles, Windward Islands, and Leeward Islands? In short how do we establish that the Caribbean is an important historico-economic sea and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor? (5, 9)

Describing the Caribbean as one transformation group “without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one” offers the solution to the problem of self-identity for “a group of islands divided by different languages and by the categories Greater and Lesser Antilles.” Such an insight acknowledges the diversity within the group while making the claim for its unity and self-identity. There is no “reference” island, no center, in Benítez-Rojo’s “cultural meta-archipelago.” Whereas many, like Derrida, have focused on what Lévi-Strauss’s work says about Western epistemology, Benítez-Rojo has focused on what it says about non-Western epistemologies. He has thus distanced himself from Derrida’s poststructuralism, instead defining Caribbean ways of knowing, or “a certain kind of way,” an alternative space out of the reach of the authoritarian monotheism of the Western episteme: The space of “a certain kind of way” is explained by poststructuralist thought as episteme—for example, Derrida’s notion of differance—while Caribbean discourse, as well as being capable of occupying it in theoretical terms, floods it with a poetic and vital stream navigated by Eros and Dionysus, by Oshun and Elegua, by the Great Mother of the Arawaks and the Virgin de la Caridad del Cobre, all of them defusing violence, the blind violence with which the Caribbean social dynamics collide, the violence organized by slavery, despotic colonialism, and the Plantation. (23)

19 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss (1989; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 12, 23; hereafter cited in the text.

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It may be tempting to see little else than a modernist primitivism in Benítez-Rojo’s poetics. Although such a current may not be altogether absent, placing the alternative Caribbean epistemology he articulates in a genealogy that includes Lévi-Strauss’s work makes it possible to map the poetics and politics of his alternative historiography better, to understand, for example, that, in referring to the Caribbean people as “the Peoples of the sea” (16), he invokes a transformation group that also includes the people of Ancient Greece and of the African coasts, thereby claiming for them (and them for) a world history. The “invariant features” that characterize this unlikely group are what Benítez-Rojo calls “supersyncretisms,” forming a supersyncretic polytheism in which older always/ already syncretic deities are used to create new divine triptychs and a supersyncretic “polyrhythm” in which “rhythms cut through by other rhythms, which are still cut through by other rhythms” (18; emphasis mine). For Benítez-Rojo, these supersyncretisms mask an underground heroism since they can “displace the participants toward a poetic territory marked by an aesthetic of pleasure, or better, an aesthetic whose desire is nonviolence” (21). Polytheism does so because it translates between nature deities and Christian saints, while polyrhythm does so by allowing for release through improvisation.20 The poetics of Lévi-Strauss and Benítez-Rojo question normative historiography, which, as thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur have noted, often treats such “logical subjects” as nations, religions and classes as characters in a novel.21 The presence of a first-person narrator in the works of Lévi-Strauss and Benítez-Rojo reveals a subjectivity that is often strategically veiled in traditional historiography. Lévi-Strauss refers to the centrality of his breathing, seeing, feeling, and thinking body as a vessel for the intelligibility of the world.22 Benítez-Rojo explicitly allows autobiography and history to “overlap,” as he does in the following anecdote: I can isolate with frightening exactitude—like the hero of Sartre’s novel—the moment at which I reached the age of reason. It was a stunning October afternoon, years ago, when the atomization of the meta-archipelago under the dread umbrella of nuclear catastrophe seemed imminent. The children of Havana, at least in my neighborhood, had been evacuated; a grave silence fell over the streets and the sea. While the state bureaucracy searched for news off the shortwave or hid behind official speeches and communiqués, two old black women passed “in a certain kind of way” beneath my balcony. I cannot describe this “certain kind of way”; I will say only that there was a kind of ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs, a scent of basil and mint in their dress, a symbolic, ritual wisdom in their gestures and their gay chatter. I knew then at once that there would be no apocalypse. . . . The choices of all or nothing, for or against, honor or blood have little to do with the culture of the Caribbean. . . . In Chicago, a beaten soul says: “I can’t take it anymore,” and gives himself up to drugs or to the 20 On polytheism, see Jan Assman, Moses, the Egyptian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3. 21 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellaeur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 197. 22 In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss writes, “That once in a while the miracle does occur, that on this and that side of the secrete fissure emerge, side by side, two plants of different species, each having chosen the soil best for it and that at the same time one notices in the rock two ammonites distorted by uneven complexities, evidence, in their own way, of a gap of tens of thousands of years: in a flash, space and time dissolve and the vibrant diversity of the moment juxtaposes and embodies the eras. . . . It is as if I were swimming in a denser intelligibility, amongst which centuries and sites call and answer each other in languages that are finally reconciled” (59).

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43 • March 2014 • Rose Réjouis  |  111 most desperate violence. In Havana, he would say: “The thing to do is not to die,” or perhaps: “Here I am, fucked but happy.” The so-called October crisis or missile crisis was not won by J.F.K. or N.K. or much less by F.C. (statesmen always wind up abbreviated in these great events that they themselves created); it was won by the culture of the Caribbean. . . . . . . If I were to put it in one word, I would say: performance. But performance not only in terms of scenic interpretation but also in terms of the execution of a ritual, that is, that “certain way” in which the two Negro women who conjured away the apocalypse were walking. In this “certain kind of way” there is expressed the magic or mystical (if you like) loam of the civilizations that contributed to the formation of Caribbean culture. (10–11)

Benítez-Rojo clearly takes a great deal of poetic license in this retelling of world history in which the Missiles crisis overlaps with the leisurely stroll of “two Negro women.” In this re-telling of history, he makes what I have been calling a dark horse poetics the unexpected winner of the race: “The so-called October crisis or missile crisis was not won by J.F.K. or N.K. or much less by F.C. . . . It was won by the culture of the Caribbean” (emphasis mine). It must be noted, however, that BenítezRojo’s Caribbean historiography does not express any solidarity with US blacks. In this narrative, the Caribbean stands alone. It is not a part of “the Americas”—of either the American South or of South America— and the heroism of Caribbean black culture is described at the expense of US blacks, described here as passive. Extending the work of Léry, Michel de Montaigne, and Lévi-Strauss, Benítez-Rojo describes the transformation of cannibalism into bricolage. For him, the history of the Caribbean is a history of “the glorious cannibalism of men and of words, carib, calib, cannibal, and Caliban” (13). This reference to Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest suggests a reading of Benítez-Rojo’s poetics as a “family romance,” to use Sigmund Freud’s phrase.23 The Tempest takes place in the “contact zone” of a colonized island. It is often called a romance, and indeed a love story is at the center of the play’s multiple relationships characterized by ambivalence or outright hatred. The antiromance of enslaving parental figures (Prospero enslaves Caliban, while Sycorax enslaved Ariel before her death) recedes to make room for a European family romance: Prospero reveals to Miranda her aristocratic lineage, a lineage that is cemented when she becomes engaged to marry Ferdinand. This romance stands in sharp contrast with the many antiromances that plague the colonial experience. Prospero’s parasitic bond to Ariel eerily evokes the first kind of colonial unions: the temporary coupling called mariage à la mode du pays between European traders or officials to signares, wealthy African or Eurafrican women with large social networks. William Cohen described this institution as practiced in Saint Louis and on the island of Gorée in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “a stylized, contractual relationship that was binding only as long as the European remained in Africa. 23 I follow Linda Hunt’s understanding of the term: “In Freud’s formulation, the family romance was located in the individual psyche and was a way for individuals, especially boys, to fantasize about [a higher] place in the social order. Thus the individual psyche was linked to the social order through familial imagery and through intrafamilial conflict.” See Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), xiii. See also “Family Romances” in vol. 9 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), 238–39. I also have in mind Freud’s fascinating return to this theme in Moses and Monotheism. See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (1939; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 7–8.

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112  |  Dark Horse Poetics: Lévi-Strauss, Benítez-Rojo, and Caribbean Epistemology

. . . What marked it apart from a civil-code marriage was that it was not for life but for the duration of the European’s stay in Senegal.”24 Furthermore, just like Caliban and Ariel the children of such marriages were usually left behind. Vassilis Alekakis recovers an ironic expression for this parental rejection: in Sango, the Bangui Creole spoken in the Central African Republic, biracial children were called ngba-kongo (stay-in-the-Congo).25 Yet, in Benítez-Rojo’s dark horse poetics, a family romance in which a Cuban writer claiming filiation to and maternal protection from “two old black women” is possible, although he does claim these women malgré elles (unbeknownst to them) (10). SPACE> Colonialisms are obviously related, but Lévi-Strauss’s Jewish biography links an orientalism that would include anti-Semitism, as Daniel Boyarin has argued, to colonialist discourse in revealing ways.26 In other words, Lévi-Strauss’s poetics is a response both to imperialism and to an orientalist anti-Semitism. One object that artfully represents Lévi-Strauss’s political aesthetics, while situating it in the larger experiment of Jewish assimilation in Europe, is the kaleidoscope, and this object indeed makes its first appearance in the context of an ethnically charged discursive scene of struggle: Proust’s discussion of the inclusion of Jews in French high society in his magnum opus, A la Recherche du temps perdu. Julia Kristeva once wrote, “It is clear that the Jewish problem is the open secret of A la Recherche du temps perdu.”27 And, indeed, in Proust the Jewish insidersoutsiders are passive—knowing their social inclusion to be provisionary and revocable, at the mercy of a social kaleidoscope they do not control: But like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, right-minded ladies had had the stupefying experience of meeting an elegant Jewess while paying a social call. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a “change of criterion.” The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme Swann’s, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed its colored lozenges. Everything Jewish, even the elegant lady herself, went down, and various obscure nationalists rose to take its place.28

For Proust the kaleidoscope figures as a “contact zone” between secular Jews and non-Jews ruled by implacable political changes of criterion. In this passage, as in his entire work, Proust emphasizes the contrast between the continuity of perception and subtle underground shifts. For many who, like Arthur Cohen, have studied European Jewish history in general and the Dreyfus affair in particular, the “change of criterion” from religious to racial anti-Semitism masks the continuity of 24 William Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (1980; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 125. 25 Vassilis Alekakis, Foreign Words, trans. Alyson Waters (Iowa City: Autumn Hill Books, 2006), 209. 26 See Daniel Boyarin, “Epater l’embourgeoisement: Freud, Gender, and the (De)Colonized Psyche,” Diacritics 24, no. 1 (1994): 18. 27 Julia Kristeva, “Proust: In Search of Identity,” in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identiy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 152. 28 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 2, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff and Terrence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 122.

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anti-Semitism and the falseness of the concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition.29 For Lévi-Strauss all racisms are “mystifications,” and he seeks to displace them with his own poetics, all the while knowing many might describe the latter as likewise “mystical” (460). In Lévi-Strauss’s work, the kaleidoscope evokes the chiasmic logic of bricolage itself: “Cette logique opère un peu à la façon d’un kaléidoscope: instrument qui contient aussi des bribes et des morceaux, au moyen desquels se réalisent des arrangements structuraux” (This logic functions a little like a kaleidoscope: a contraption full of bits and pieces that come together to make different structures).30 In anglophone postcolonial thought, the concept of décalage reflects the trajectory of the trope of the kaleidoscope from its Proustian use as a figure for social mobility to its LéviStraussian use as a figure for visualizing differences as related, as relations.31 It reveals the contrast between the pessimism of Proust’s orientalist kaleidoscope—in which Jews always, eventually, go down—and the optimism of Lévi-Strauss’s algebraic kaleidoscope with its many possible futures. There is “a future,” to echo Jorge Luis Borges, in which a Jewess (maybe Proust’s Jewish mother) is recognized as a crucial interlocutor for the author; in which Benítez-Rojo realizes that there is merely a décalage and not a rupture between Caribbean and African-culture; in which Lévi-Strauss writes not only about the beauty of the “construction site” that is New York but also about American segregation and Billy Holiday’s unforgettable performance of “Good Morning, Heartache.”

Acknowledgments Kelly Baker Joseph has offered invaluable support as I turned a talk given at the 2011 Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium, “Bricolage and Slavery,” into the present work. David Scott and Brent Hayes Edwards have been thoughtful interlocutors and readers from the first. Alessandra Benedicty, Christian Flaugh, Kaiama Glover, and Maja Horn encouraged me to keep writing. For a provocative discussion in 2011 of the “banda norte” in Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, I wish to thank Nayana Abeysinghe. For incisive comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Vanessa Agard-Jones, Nicholas Birns, and my anonymous readers. The essay is dedicated to my husband, Val Vinokur.

29 Arthur Cohen notes, “The de-judaized Jew had consummated the paradox of the [politically] emancipated Jew. Obviously, the Jew wanted to collect the rewards of enlightenment and emancipation. Quite equally, enough Gentiles regretted that history had entered into such an unpleasant bargain with the Jew. Enthusiasm has its limits—egalitarian enthusiasm as much as any. But a de-Christianized Christendom could not make an effective case against a de-Judaized Jewry. The religious mythology of the Jew had therefore to be transformed into a racial and national mythology, religious anti-Semitism to give way to racial anti-Semiticism, and from the Dreyfus Affair to Auschwitz there would be a straight line.” See Arthur Cohen “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” in An Arthur A. Cohen Reader, ed. David Stern and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 129. 30 Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, 51. 31 Ranajit Guha, however, uses it to describe a moment of “overlap” when a social group “challenges the authority of another that is older and moribund but still dominant.” See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 13, 157. See also Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 173, 330. Brent Edwards unearths Senghor’s use of it in a 1971 essay to describe “a changing core of difference, the work of ‘differences within unity’” among US blacks and African blacks, classifying both as one transformation group. See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 13–15. Edwards’s own project is to articulate a larger “practice of diaspora” that, in some of its iterations, includes both a history of the Jewish practice of diaspora and a history of black internationalism. See Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 19, no. 1 (2001): 45–73.

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