The Other as Deviant - Monash University Research Repository

The Other as Deviant:
Literary Representations of the trujillato and
apartheid
by
Paul Begovich
A thesis submitted to Monash University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Supervisors:
Prof. Rita Wilson
Dr Sarah McDonald
School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
Monash University
April 2015
© The author 2015. Except as provided in the Copyright Act 1968, this thesis may
not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.
I certify that I have made all reasonable efforts to secure copyright permissions for
third-party content included in this thesis and have not knowingly added copyright
content to my work without the owner's permission.
Contents
Certificate of Authorship................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................... iii
Abstract ........................................................................................................... iv
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................1
1. The Other as Deviant .................................................................................19
2. Deviant Gradations: Representing Race and Power ..............................50
3. Deviant Bonds: Representing Place and Space .......................................92
4. Deviant Bodies: Representing Desire .....................................................127
5. The Other Responds ................................................................................169
CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................212
Bibliography ..................................................................................................217
i
Certificate of Authorship
I declare that this thesis contains no material that has been accepted for the award of
any other degree or diploma in any university or other institution and affirm that to
the best of my knowledge this thesis contains no material previously published or
written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the
thesis.
ii
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this thesis to my parents. I am eternally grateful to you for your unceasing
love and support. Thank you to my supervisors, Prof. Rita Wilson and Dr Sarah
McDonald, without whose constant reassurance, dedication and scholarly rigour I
would have been unable to complete this work. I would also like to thank Elizabeth
Bryer for her meticulous copyediting of the thesis.
iii
Abstract
The instrumentalisation of physical differences in human beings has been a
characteristic of diverse national discourses. Dominant groups in Latin America and
Southern Africa made up of white or quasi-white national minorities used race to
determine power relations in multi-racial milieus. The dominant groups during the
trujillato (1930–1961) and apartheid (1948–1994) periods in the Dominican Republic
and South Africa gained and maintained power by deploying racist politics and
discourse towards their nations’ black inhabitants. The discourse of these dominant
groups included discriminatory and stereotypical representations that portrayed the
other as deviant and rationalised the existing socio-economic disadvantage of the
other, a legacy of earlier colonial conquest.
This thesis examines constructions of the other as deviant as manifested in literary
representations of the trujillato in the Dominican Republic and apartheid in South
Africa. The representations of these two timeframes by a range of authors allow for an
understanding of how deviance is constructed and how it cannot be reduced to a
single location and timeframe. Rather, we see that deviance is an overarching theme
of othering in which different and interrelated modes of deviance (the other as
uncivilised, amoral, violent and lawless) constitute a historical narrative of othering of
black and dark-skinned people that traverses historical and cultural contexts.
iv
Introduction
Dividing human beings along racial lines has been a defining feature of many
narratives of national belonging. The dissemination of whiteness as the model for
political and socio-economic attainment and the counter-construction of blackness as
its opposite forged a reality in Latin America and Southern Africa in which blackness
came to be considered inherently deviant. In this model, those who were not white
were ‘other’ 1 and, according to the dominant group, deviant. Broadly speaking,
deviance is a term used by sociologists, psychologist, psychiatrists and criminologists
to describe the violation of norms. Deviance is a complex and layered concept, mostly
because it is relative to time and place (social context). In this thesis, I use it to
explore literary representations of otherness in which deviance is all that which in a
person or group diverges physically, psychologically and behaviourally from
whiteness (a concept I define and explore further on in this thesis).
Historically, in the Dominican Republic and South Africa, the dominant group, which
was white or thought of itself as such, derived power from its colonial conquest of the
other, whom it controlled and used for its own economic enrichment. The Trujillo
(1930–1961) and apartheid (1948–1994) regimes were modern and sophisticated
‘post-colonial’ relics of that domination, mirroring the colonial setup in which a
relatively small group of (comparably) physically distinct people acted as gatekeepers
to political power and socio-economic advancement. In order to endorse their control
and exploitation of the other, the Trujillo and apartheid regimes employed a discourse
on race that was validated by the skewed political and socio-economic terrain in the
Dominican Republic and South Africa that they had inherited. This discourse
portrayed the other as uncivilised, amoral, violent and lawless and therefore, deviant
and inferior.
1
Henceforth, I will not use inverted commas to refer to the other.
1
I use these two regimes (the trujillato and apartheid) for the sake of the analysis of
literary representations of otherness because they were similarly rigorous in their
categorisation of race and implementation of racial segregation. The trujillato
curtained off blacks, who were Haitians or labelled as such even if they were AfroDominican, from the national, Dominican space by ethnically cleansing the
Dominican-Haitian border of blacks and corralling Haitians into work compounds,
from where they could be used by the Dominican government as a source of cheap
labour and a useful scapegoat for the problems of Dominican society. Similarly, in
South Africa, the apartheid regime segregated blacks and used them as cheap labour
for the white-controlled economy. It did so by uprooting and shunting as many blacks
as possible from so-called white South Africa into ethnic homelands in rural areas or
townships located on the fringes of cities, and drawing on them as pools of low-cost
workers at the convenience of the white population.
The representations of these two historical periods by several authors provide an
understanding of the construction of deviance and its irreducibility to a single place
and time by revealing how different and interconnected modes of deviance (the other
as uncivilised, amoral, violent and lawless) embody a historical narrative of othering
of black and dark-skinned people that bisects historical and cultural contexts. While
there are a number of authors whose work would fit the parameters of this study, I
have chosen six writers (André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Mario Vargas
Llosa, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Junot Díaz) whose novels (the ones I have
selected) clearly take place in a racialised context (the trujillato and apartheid) and
interrogate the power dynamic at play within that context. To that end, these novels
subvert the idea of the racial inferiority (deviancy) of the other by making explicit the
implicit racism of members of the dominant group.
The authors I have selected have all been recipients of significant literary awards and
accolades and could be considered public intellectuals, given that they have produced
work that is openly political and socially committed in nature. The authors comment
on their own and others’ work, something that is reflected in their division of
perspective on the transcendental issues affecting the living landscapes of the worlds
about which they write. Four of the authors (Brink, Gordimer, Vargas Llosa and
Vázquez Montalbán) are clearly marked by a very specific historical and political
2
context. Commencing their writing careers in the post-World War II and Cold War
periods, they bore witness, both on a national and international level, to a world riven
by deadly ideological conflicts.
The first of these authors, André Brink (1935–2015), was born into a conservative
Afrikaner 2 family and become one of the so-called Sestigers (Sixtiers), a group of
Afrikaans-language 3 writers who went against the Afrikaans literary tradition known
as ‘Veld and Vlei’ (Kossew, 1996, p. 5). 4 Unlike other writers belonging to the
Sestigers, who advocated a purely artistic emphasis, Brink advocated ‘a more overtly
political opposition’ (Midgley, 2010, p. 195). It is unsurprising, then, in the context of
apartheid, that Brink obsessively foregrounds questions of race and identity in his
works. The other white South-African author considered in this thesis, Nadine
Gordimer (1923–2014), in contrast, grew up in an English-speaking Jewish family in
the town of Springs, located on the industrial outskirts of Johannesburg. Gordimer’s
writing career until the early 1990s was marked by her commitment to the antiapartheid cause, which she had written about for over thirty years (Morán, 1991). Her
views coincided with those of the so-called Sestigers, with Gordimer questioning the
morality of apartheid and making whites more acutely aware of the suffering caused
by it (ibid.). Gordimer published over a dozen novels and several anthologies of short
stories and found herself censored at various times by the apartheid government, with
three of her books banned. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,
and her novel The Conservationist (1974) was joint winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1974.
Similarly lauded as writers, Vázquez Montalbán and Vargas Llosa also committed
themselves to write about injustice and oppression. Considered one of Latin
America’s leading thinkers, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–) has undergone a remarkable
2
‘An Afrikaans-speaking white person in South Africa, especially one descended from the Dutch and
Huguenot settlers of the seventeenth century’ (Oxford).
3
‘A language of southern Africa, derived from the form of Dutch brought to the Cape by Protestant
settlers in the seventeenth century. It is an official language of South Africa, spoken by around 6
million people as their first language’ (Oxford).
4
This refers to a ‘romantic-colonist tradition’ of literature, ‘with its appropriation of native landscape
to lyrical, romanticized Eurocentric traditions’ (Kossew, 1996, p. 5).
3
ideological transformation in his lifetime, going from being a socialist in the 1950s
and 1960s to a centre-right presidential candidate in the 1990 Peruvian election and
supporter of neo-liberalism. From a privileged background, Vargas Llosa’s conflictive
relationship with his father, whose behaviour towards his son was ‘hostile’ and
‘authoritarian’, and the emergence in Latin America of right-wing dictatorships as
well as left-wing organisations such as The Shining Path in his native Peru, would all
greatly influence his writing (Nobel). Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2010. From a working-class Spanish background, on the other hand, is
Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003), who was born in Barcelona and had a prolific and
varied writing career, publishing novels, poems, editorials on politics and essays on
popular culture. Independent of the genres in which he wrote, Vázquez Montalbán
showed Spanish society as ‘decadent and corrupt’ and rejected ‘the optimistic theme
of Spanish regeneration’ (Saidullah, 2010).
Junot Díaz and Zakes Mda provide a counterpoint to these authors, both in terms of
their own position as other and the ways in which their narratives deconstruct and
subvert the concept of deviance. Junot Díaz (1968–) was born in ‘a working-class
barrio’ in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and moved with his
mother and siblings to New Jersey in the United States at age six (Marriot, 2008). At
university, Díaz ‘discovered things he hadn’t imagined existed in high school’ and
took courses in African-American and Latin-American history (Stewart, 1996).
During that time, when Latinos ‘were still invisible’, Díaz began to assert himself as a
Dominican-American, coming to meet ‘politically active’ students and see himself as
a writer (ibid.). Díaz cites the move to America as having played a big part in his
interest in literature: ‘I lost so much in immigration—my grandparents who raised me,
my language, the entire world of Santo Domingo…I guess I was looking for a friend
to make up for what had vanished, and books became that friend’ (as cited in Stein,
2010). Díaz’s first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) earned him
the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
While chronologically more aligned with André Brink and Nadine Gordimer, Zakes
Mda is creatively closer to Junot Díaz and, like him, speaks from inside otherness.
Born in 1948, Zakes Mda grew up in a suburb of Soweto, Johannesburg’s largest
township. In order to remove her son from its gangsterism, Mda’s mother took him to
4
live in the Eastern Cape, where his father was from. There, Mda lived with his
grandmother and wrote in his native isiXhosa. After Mda’s father completed his law
studies, the family moved to a small Eastern Cape town called Sterkspruit. There,
Mda’s father was arrested for his antiapartheid activism but escaped custody a year
later and went into exile in Lesotho. Following in his father’s footsteps, Mda studied
law, but dropped out, dedicating his time to writing plays, most of which were
performed in South Africa, where several were also banned. Mda, who had joined his
father in exile in Lesotho in 1964, returned to South Africa in 1994 after that
country’s first democratic election, and while he says ‘politics is still the predominant
discourse of the society’, it is, among young South-African writers, no longer the
main concern (Mda, 2005, p. 67). Nevertheless, Mda (2005) believes that no work is
apolitical: ‘Even when it goes out of its way not to be political, that in itself is a
political statement’ (p. 67). All the novels I have chosen for this thesis are political, as
they portray personal struggles grounded in countries where politics have produced
highly unjust and unequal societies in which skin colour determines a person’s life
chances.
The first South-African narrative examined in this thesis, Nadine Gordimer’s 1974
novel The Conservationist, revolves around the life of Mehring, a wealthy, white,
English-speaking businessman and resident of Johannesburg. One morning Mehring
discovers the body of a black man on his weekend hobby farm, an event that prompts
him to examine his life and mortality. As Mehring grapples with personal questions,
which necessarily have political implications due to his privileged status and white
skin, he begins to lose his grip on the natural environment, his workers as well as his
son. Gordimer uses Mehring as a metaphor for white South Africa in the early 1970s
and the dilemmas it is beginning to confront as a result of growing black resistance.
The protagonist’s mental ruminations point to an inability on the part of whites to take
stock of their country’s grim reality, a handicap the novel suggests bodes badly for
them and the future of South Africa.
In many ways strikingly similar to The Conservationist, André Brink’s 1978 novel
Rumours of Rain revolves around Martin Mynhardt, a middle-aged, Afrikaner
businessman who has reached the pinnacle of his profession as an industrialist and
who has a rebellious and troubled son. Mynhardt adopts an ostrich mentality to
5
apartheid, the feelings of the women in his life, the troubles in his workplace and his
son’s trauma caused by his time fighting for the South-African army in Angola.
Rather than analyse honestly the source of all the unhappiness around him, Mynhardt
opts to justify his self-serving views, couching them as practical and rational.
Mynhardt ends up losing everything because of his morally bankrupt and stubborn
worldview, with the close of the novel more pointedly negative than that of The
Conservationist.
Of the three South-African novels analysed in this thesis, Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel
Ways of Dying is the most nuanced in its representation of otherness, giving, as it
does, a multifaceted view of black South Africa and its internal struggles. The novel is
largely set in an unspecified coastal city during South Africa’s transitional period
(1990–1994) and includes flashbacks to the apartheid era. The novel charts the lives
of Toloki and Noria, both of whom grew up together in an unnamed village. Toloki
wanders the countryside before settling down in the city and working as a selfemployed professional mourner. In the city, Toloki reunites with Noria, ‘whose
affections his own father had stolen’, a fact that had turned Toloki against Noria (Eze,
2013, p. 88). Both Toloki and Noria ‘bear scars from the violence in their lives’ (p.
88)—Toloki from his job as a professional mourner in the violent townships and his
experience of abuse as a child at the hands of his father, and Noria from the loss of
her five-year-old son, who was ‘necklaced’ after unwittingly giving information to the
enemy. Toloki forgives Noria and they move in together and ‘teach each other how to
live’ after witnessing a great deal of death (Mda, 1995, p. 115). Mda shows death to
be an integral part of the lives of black township dwellers because ‘their ways of
dying are intertwined with their ways of living and funerals are still important
community occasions during the transitional period’ (Mervis, as cited in Farred, 2000,
p. 44). Mda’s novel reveals how in the emerging-though-not-yet-quite-conceived New
South Africa questions of ethnicity and class have begun to exert greater influence
than race on the national discourse of power and the power dynamic in black
communities.
The racialised nature of the discourse of power in the Dominican Republic, but also in
Latin America at large, is revealed in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s 1992 novel
Galíndez, which is based on a true story. The novel briefly introduces the reader to the
6
Basque activist Jesús de Galíndez at the time of his kidnapping in 1956 on the orders
of the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, as well as to Muriel, a
fictionalised American researcher who travels to Spain and the Dominican Republic
thirty-two years after the dissident’s murder to find out more about him and his
killers. Galíndez had fled to the Dominican Republic in 1939 from Spain as a political
refugee and worked as a legal advisor to the National Department of Labour in Santo
Domingo. The Basque activist was dismissed by Trujillo after expressing support for
striking workers, and in 1946 fled to New York. Responding to the Galíndez
kidnapping through a part-fictional narrative allowed Vázquez Montalbán to reflect
on the ethics of resistance and criticise American foreign policy, which, according to
García-Posada (1990), is the ‘función ideológica inmediata’ 5 of the novel.
The second work to look at aspects of the trujillato is Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2000
novel La fiesta del chivo. The novel takes the reader into the preparatory and
operational phases as well as the aftermath of the assassination in 1961 of Trujillo by
a group of Dominican conspirators. A second narrative thread takes the reader into the
mind of a fictitious Trujillo and reveals the inner workings of those closest to him
politically. The novel’s third and final thread grounds the reader in the present (1996)
and looks at the return of a Dominican exile Urania Cabral to the island to confront
the demons of her past.
Obviously, Galíndez and La fiesta del chivo, unlike the South-African works, are not
written by insiders, namely Dominicans, but by two outsiders, a Spaniard and a
Peruvian with Spanish citizenship. This fact points to the highly repressive nature of
the trujillato, which provided absolutely no space for Dominican authors to critique it.
Indeed, the before-mentioned case of Jesús de Galíndez, who wrote a dissertation
criticising Trujillo and paid with his life for doing so, attests to this. Consequently, the
criticisms of the Dominican dictator in these two novels buttress my motivation for
using them in my analysis of literary representations of otherness set in two violent
and oppressive regimes. Galíndez and La fiesta del chivo challenge the previously
unchallengeable voice of the trujillato by subverting the dictator’s words (opinions)
5
Immediate ideological function (my translation).
7
and actions and, in places, by providing the other with his or her own voice that
likewise challenges the unassailable assumptions held by Trujillo and his ministers.
The final work used to study literary representations of otherness in the trujillato is
Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel is
narrated by Yunior, who tells the story of Oscar, a fat, geeky Dominican-American
‘with a disastrous love life and a much-ridiculed attachment to science fiction’ (Gioia,
2007). The novel is a layered piece of writing that can be read on at least two levels:
as a family saga or a cultural, political and social critique of the trujillato and
Dominican, Dominican-American and American societies. In the novel, the stories of
several generations of the De León family are told, with events taking place both in
the Dominican Republic during the trujillato and subsequent to it, and in the United
States from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. The novel’s events are captured through
‘a complex narrative, full of flashbacks, side stories, and even footnotes that
eventually encompass a partisan history of the Dominican Republic and complete
accounts of the tribulations of Oscar’s forebears’ (ibid.).
Using the novels as a gateway to understanding the nexus of race and power in two
distinct geographical locations and two distinct cultural contexts, this thesis examines
how the authors depict the dominant group as justifying its control and exploitation of
the other through a self-serving racist discourse that portrays the other as deviant and
thus inferior. In the novels, the dominant group discursively and physically (i.e.,
through borders and boundaries) manipulates race, class, gender and space to box the
other into a position of deviance and inferiority, revealing in the process the ‘different
embodiments of power’ of the trujillato and apartheid regimes; namely what
Zolfagharkhani (2012) calls ‘the triangle of ‘power’, ‘politics’, and ‘discourse’’ (p. 1).
Indeed, overarching modes of deviance that emerge from the dominant group’s
representations of otherness (the other as uncivilised, amoral, violent and lawless)
reveal the following embodiments of power: (1.) hard power: national and physical
borders and state-sponsored violence; (2.) politics: political and socio-economic
boundaries, including particular laws; and (3.) discourse: corporeal and cultural
boundaries, including racist rhetoric.
8
These ‘embodiments of power’ (hard power, politics and discourse) act on and
reinforce what I describe as the socio-economic legacies of colonial domination,
namely, ignorance, deprivation and crime. Because of the apparent inferiority of the
other, the other becomes, in the eyes of the dominant group, increasingly inhuman,
which causes the dominant group to become ever more fearful and hostile towards the
other. Indeed, long before apartheid was implemented, ‘white settler political
ideology in South Africa […] traditionally s[aw] itself as the embodiment of some
form of “civilization” against the threatened “barbarism” of African majority rule’
(Andindilile, 2013, p. 13). The works of Nadine Gordimer and André Brink reveal
these values, with their respective protagonists, Mehring and Martin Mynhardt,
inhabiting farms that are shown (or at least perceived to be) insidiously threatened by
blacks. Similarly, in the narrative context of the trujillato, the fictional Trujillo sees
the other, in this case Haitians, as a literally monstrous threat to the interests of
Dominicans.
Because the trujillato and apartheid regimes set up racial hierarchies that accentuated
existing racialised socio-economic and cultural divisions, it is unsurprising that the
authors of the novels under consideration show the dominant group to be obsessively
preoccupied with maintaining corporeal boundaries. As the case of white characters
othering white characters in racial terms in the South-Africans novels (i.e., equating
them to Coloureds [mixed-race people]) shows, the preoccupation with the corporeal
is more about maintaining power in a multiracial context than anything else. In order
to other along corporeal lines, the dominant group defines the other as ‘a as a sort of
quintessence of evil’ (Fanon, 1963, p. 41), which it does in a context in which the
white body is,
The somatic norm against which all bodies are judged: the physical traits (e.g.,
facial features) of light-skinned races are considered aesthetically pleasing and
those of dark-skinned races ugly, with blacks deemed the worst because of their
distance from the white norm. (Kunsa, 2013, p. 219)
Notions of blackness from the mouths or minds of dominant characters are often
understood in the novels through stereotypes in which the physical and
psychological/behavioural are ‘fused’. The faulty associations (stereotypes) stemming
9
from these ‘fusions’ fix the other’s position of degeneracy and inferiority on a racial
hierarchy in which whiteness is shown to weigh the most (see chapters 2 and 4). The
use of grotesque and carnivalesque literary techniques highlights the moralistic
dimension of the stereotype in these novels.
The dehumanising effect of such representations is evident in The Conservationist, in
which ‘rural black Africa is depicted as not quite human, certainly not “singular” or
“original”, but part vegetable or mineral, with his or her actions and speech shaped in
part by the dark forces of a threatening, unknowable underworld’ (Brittan, 2005, p.
76). Even when relatively inoffensive black characters in the South-African novels are
identified, they are often referred to in such terms, as is the case in Rumours of Rain
when Mynhardt’s son, Louis, describes blacks as ‘sticks’, ‘stones’ and ‘plants and
stuff’ (Brink, 1978, p. 361). These descriptions, according to Brittan (2005),
‘naturalize the circumstances of black Africans’ and ‘disguise’ their ‘human
particularity’ (p. 71). In Ways of Dying, on the other hand, Zakes Mda (1995) subverts
the dehumanisation of blacks by disarticulating stereotypes, which he does for
example when he explains that his protagonist Toloki smelt bad because he had ‘been
too busy attending funerals [working] to go to the beach to use the open showers that
the swimmers use to rinse salt water from their bodies’ (p. 8). Here, Mda not only
collapses the stereotype that blacks are dirty and lazy but also condemns the socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines produced by apartheid.
As shown in the novels, the supposed inhumanity of the other necessitates in the eyes
of the dominant group the physical separation of the other, either through eradication
(massacres) or separation/invigilation (in homelands, work compounds, behind
borders, etc.). Paradoxically, these extreme measures highlight the vulnerability of the
dominant group, which results from the disproportionate power it holds in places
where the majority of the population is poor, disenfranchised and hostile to its
interests and power—power the dominant group vindicates through the supposed
innate brutality, hyper-sexuality, meniality, sickliness, bestiality, etc., of the other (see
chapter 4). These and other characteristics, according to the dominant group, make the
other apt for ‘lowly’ roles, which disallow him or her from exerting any significant
influence over the society in which he or she lives (see chapter 4).
10
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the stigma of being black is shown to
haunt the dark-skinned characters, with the curse of blackness even given a name: the
fukú (a tongue-in-cheek reference). The fukú, which was supposedly brought by
African slaves to the Americas, writes a curse on the new world and ‘shadows the
journeys of’ the De León family (Marriot, 2008), showing the cataclysmic effects of
European colonialism on the Americas, the repercussions of which have echoed
through the centuries and led to the formation of inherently unequal societies in which
race determines a person’s socio-economic status. In Ways of Dying, too, Mda shows
how a self-serving and racist dispensation created an obscenely unequal society, with
institutionalised discrimination and unfairness making a large number of its members
act out of jealousy, fear, anger and hatred towards one another.
As depicted in the novels under study in this thesis and in light of the actual histories
of the periods in question, the models of racism under the trujillato and apartheid
regimes, although they had similar ends, differed to a large degree. ‘Discourses and
conceptions of race are’, says Kunsa (2013), ‘highly sensitive to the specific
circumstances of a given moment in a given location’ and ‘racial categories are not
neatly transportable from nation to nation, continent to continent, and so on’ (p. 221).
This is reflected in the South-African texts by the fact that the dominant characters
tend to take physical blackness for granted, mentioning the supposed shortcomings of
black characters without mentioning their corporeal blackness. Instead, they mostly
refer to blacks as ‘they’ and ‘them’ and (less commonly) as ‘blacks’, ‘boys’ and ‘poor
devils’. In the three texts that look at the Trujillo regime, on the other hand, the
authors frequently refer to the other by his or her race, labelling him/her mulato/a,
mestizo/a, moreno/a and negro/a. The difference between these narratives in terms of
the frequency of racial labelling can be accounted for by the fact that, firstly, racial
(phenotypal) differences were more obvious in apartheid South Africa than in the
Dominican Republic under the trujillato and, secondly, the apartheid regime, unlike
the trujillato, codified race through racist legislation. Nadine Gordimer, author of The
Conservationist, points to the absolute nature of race in South-African society during
the apartheid era when she says,
There is no country in the Western world where the daily enactment of the law
reflects politics as intimately and blatantly as in South Africa. There is no
11
country in the Western world where the creative imagination, whatever it seizes
upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the overall social
determination of racial laws. (Gordimer, 2010, p. 235–6)
The relative mutability of race in the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, made
the underscoring of physical race in the narratives set during the trujillato somewhat
more important for the authors for the sake of the rhetorical stance of the novels,
which, like those set in South Africa, expose and critique racism and oppression.
While there are clear racial categories in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the
novel’s author Junot Díaz subverts them, ‘destabiliz[ing] our comfortable, fixed
notions of racial classification and, in so doing, illuminat[ing] the fundamentally
historical, social, and cultural nature of race and its innate flexibility and malleability’
(Kunsa, 2013, p. 221). While racial boundaries across the novels have their own
nuances, the aims of said boundaries are the same, namely, to bind members of the
dominant group together and fetter those of the other into a position of subservience.
Because of their fear of black deviance and its threat to the integrity of white
civilisation and the nation, the dominant group binds the other to ‘places’ and ‘spaces’
that end up aggravating pre-existing socio-economic divisions and evincing black
inferiority (see chapter 3).
Such a strategy on the part of the dominant group is contingent on the corporeal and
the cultural, though in the case of the trujillato, there is an extra emphasis on the
cultural because the racial consciousness of blacks and mulatos in the Dominican
Republic had been formed in a less hierarchical context than in South Africa. This is
attributable to the Dominican Republic having been a ranching economy (as opposed
to a plantation one) in which white landowners worked alongside their black slaves,
rendering a stringent racial hierarchy redundant (Wucker, 1999, p. 32). As whites left
the Dominican Republic due to the economic stagnation of the colony, blacks, who
Silvio Torres-Saillant (1998) says ‘lacked a material frame of reference in which to
construct a concept of identity based on racial self-differentiation, that is, on
affirmation of their blackness’ (p. 135), came to view themselves as white. Indeed,
black was ‘used in Santo Domingo only in reference to those who were still enslaved’
(p. 134). The white elite and mulatos, both of whom had lost land in the subsequent
Haitian invasion, united to fight Haitian domination, which signified black
12
domination. The trujillato cemented the view of Haiti as black and the antithesis of
Dominicanness, though due to the African component of the Dominican Republic’s
population, it could not do so simply in racial terms; it had to other blacks culturally
as well.
Consequently, dominant characters in La fiesta del chivo and Galíndez denigrate the
Haitian culture, portraying it as completely foreign to that of the Dominican Republic
(see chapters 1 and 3). Senator Cabral in La fiesta del chivo, for example, laments
Haitian immigration along the Dominican side of the border, stating that the
Dominican race, language and religion have been lost to Haitian barbarism (Vargas
Llosa, 2000, p. 217). And in Galíndez, the fictional Trujillo waxes lyrical on
whitening the frontier to make sure Dominicans are ‘lighter than Haitians and more
Spanish than savage’ (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 44). We see through these novels
(including the South-African ones) that because the dominant group uses discursive
strategies to erect cultural boundaries, establishing its culture in opposition to
everything that is other, conviviality is viewed as undesirable and impossible due to
the supposed mutual exclusivity of the two cultures in question.
In the apartheid context, as per the novels, unfavourable demographic factors make it
more of a challenge for the dominant group to keep blacks out of the national space.
Indeed, ‘Mynhardt’s farm, like Mehring’s, is inundated with transient workers and
squatters—too many for the mother either to provide work for or to keep out’
(Graham, 2009, p. 72). Consequently, the white characters in the South-African
novels follow a dichotomous line of thinking similar to that of their white Dominican
counterparts in their portraying blacks as antithetical to white civilisation. The casting
of blacks as uncivilised in The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain, however, is
done in a paternalistic way, with the white characters claiming to want to help black
South Africans—as long as they remain subordinate. In South Africa, a long history
of formal and informal racial segregation under both the Dutch and British gave the
apartheid regime leeway to further harden the physical borders of the country
(national borders, homelands, segregated residential areas, etc.) in a way that
intensified existing cultural and corporeal boundaries. In the process, racial
segregation in South Africa strengthened the already distorted cultural exchange, with
blacks obliged to learn the languages (Afrikaans and English) of the white
13
community. Whites, on the other hand, generally failed ‘to acquire indigenous
languages and also fail[ed] to foster meaningful cross-cultural communication’
(Andindilile, 2013, p. 11). In this sense, white culture constituted the dominant culture
in so-called white South Africa despite whites being a minority, and the black
universe remained a mystery or a ‘non-culture’ to most whites, especially urban ones.
Because of these cleavages in South African society, explicit emphasis on the
physical and therefore cultural differences between the dominant group and the other
is unnecessary in the South-African novels.
Systems of domination like apartheid (and the trujillato) appear and are—for a time,
at least—unbreakable because,
The colonizer’s invariable assumption about his moral superiority means that he
will rarely question the validity of either his own or his society’s formation and
that he will not be inclined to expend any energy in understanding the worthless
alterity of the colonized. (JanMohamed, 1995, p. 18)
The authors attempt to question the validity of the apartheid and trujillato regimes and
humanise the other by bracketing the values of white civilisation. In The
Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer does this by using African languages and the
thought processes of the other, primarily those of Jacobus, Mehring’s foreman. In
Rumours of Rain, André Brink uses the opinions of Charlie Mofokeng, an educated
and articulate black employee who works for Martin Mynhardt to bring about
awareness of the trials of the black proletariat in South Africa. In Ways of Dying,
Zakes Mda uses diverse events and black characters to depict black South Africa as a
three-dimensional society, with blacks being perpetrators (practicing intra-racial
racism) as well as victims in the contest for power during the country’s transitional
period. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Galíndez and La fiesta del chivo
(the third novel to a lesser degree), Junot Díaz, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and
Mario Vargas Llosa reveal how racism viscerally affects the other by giving major as
well as minor black characters an internal ‘voice’.
The dominant group defines the ‘embodiments of power’ (hard power, politics and
discourse) and the other comes to see his own universe, himself, and fellow others in
14
this light, which can have the effect of reinforcing white superiority by proxy. While
the other is othered in similar ways within the trujillato and apartheid contexts as per
the novels, the ways in which the other responds to that othering differs. In the SouthAfrican novels, the other is unable to credibly perform whiteness because of the
absoluteness of race during the apartheid era and the ingrained racial (phenotypal and
ethnic) differences. Consequently, blacks in South Africa were more outward in their
response to racism, 6 as shown in The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain, where it
is inferred, for example, through white fears that blacks want whites off the land and
out of the country (Gordimer, 1974, p. 46; and Brink, 1978, p. 249). The rejection of
whiteness by blacks in these two novels is expressed as either outright (intellectual)
defiance, as is the case with Charlie Mofokeng in Rumours of Rain (Brink, 1978, p.
40, pp. 44–45); or as a subtle undermining of white interests, as is the case with
Mehring’s black farmworkers in The Conservationist (Gordimer, 1974, pp. 202–203).
Only in Ways of Dying, which is set later (when apartheid was being dismantled), do
we see blacks aspire to whiteness. In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand,
power and race relations were more oblique, which meant the other could aspire to
become white, as the fictional Trujillo did in La fiesta del chivo and Galíndez through
his fraudulent physicality (powdering his face), falsified ancestry (alleging all his
ancestors were white) and racist rhetoric towards Haitians.
In the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, a place and time in which the The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Galíndez partially take place, ‘white privilege’
remains, though it is more implicit than in apartheid South Africa (see chapter 5).
Indeed, by 1964, segregation in the United States had ended and all citizens had equal
rights,
But rights’ extension did little to alter the historical privileging of whites over
non-whites: ‘whites’ dominance is no longer constitutionally and juridically
enshrined but rather a matter of social, political, cultural, and economic
privilege based on the legacy of the conquest. (Mills, 1997, p. 73)
6
Exemplified in real life by slogans such as ‘One Settler One Bullet’.
15
The legacy of white privilege and ‘the elevation of white practices/preferences (e.g.,
in music, fashion, and cuisine) over their non-white counterparts in the cultural
sphere’ (Kunsa, p. 219) in the United States but also almost everywhere else in the
Americas (including the Dominican Republic) have meant that the other has
continued to defer to whiteness. This unequal power dynamic has made the other
painfully aware of his or her subordination and, as a result, hyper-vigilant of slights—
a phenomenon evidenced in La fiesta del chivo when the black character Pedro Livio
reacts angrily to being called ‘negro’ by his white (Dominican) friend Huáscar Tejeda
(Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 317) and in Galíndez by the mulato Cuban character Voltaire,
who is resentful after being reprimanded by a white (American) airport official, who
he says takes people like him ‘por indios o por esclavos africanos’ (Vázquez
Montalbán, 2000, p. 318). 7
The sense of inferiority of the other can cause him or her to engage in narcissistic
behaviour and compete with and/or rage against fellow others (see chapter 5). Beli in
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example, lashes out at her boyfriend, the
Gangster, when they meet for the first time and he affectionately calls her ‘morena’
(‘dark’) (Díaz, 2007, p. 115). In Ways of Dying, the other’s inferiority complex is
evidenced by the persistent name calling of Toloki by his father and members of the
community, who label him ‘stupid’ and ‘ugly’ (Mda, 1995, pp. 33, 45, 68, 72, 103).
We see how the other turns this internalised racism onto himself and members of his
community in the case of Nefolovhodwe in Ways of Dying. Since moving to the city
and becoming wealthy, Nefolovhodwe exhibits shame about his background, seeing
his rural marriage as ‘not real because the dowry was cattle and it was done in the old
village’s fashion’ (p. 205). Nefolovhodwe takes out this shame on the destitute Toloki
and Noria by ridiculing them: ‘Hey, Toloki, my boy, don’t you think it’s nice that I
have come to light up your little miserable lives with my white Cadillac?’ (p. 201).
Nefolovhodwe’s remark reveals how status and high self-esteem (the second
contingent on the first) are equated towards the end of white rule in South Africa with
living a Western lifestyle, and ridiculing those who do not is a way of asserting that
fact. In this sense, white privilege around the end of apartheid has taken on a similar
7
‘for Indians or African slaves’ (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 275).
16
guise to that portrayed in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao during episodes in
the novel set after the trujillato and in the United States.
While black characters in the South-African texts are shown to contest racism (unlike
their Dominican counterparts), they are also shown from a distance to engage in selfdestructive behaviour. The black mine workers in Rumours of Rain kill each other
senselessly and brutally during a mine dispute (Brink, 1978, p. 73), and the black
township adjacent to Mehring’s farm in The Conservationist is a place where black
men purportedly stab each other after drinking or kill each other for their pay-packets
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 28). A similar phenomenon is evident in Ways of Dying, with
Toloki describing violence in the informal settlement as something that is almost
customary: On Boxing Day, he says, ‘we engage in an orgy of drinking, raping, and
stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns. And we call it a
joll’ (Mda, 1995, p. 25).
The feelings and reactions of the characters presented across all the novels reveal the
psychic trauma that racism has inflicted on those whom Frantz Fanon referred to as
‘The Wretched of the Earth’ 8 and provide an entry point to understanding how racist
representations work and perhaps, ultimately, how they can be contested. This thesis
examines the potential for contestation across the thematic categories of bodies and
borders beginning in Chapter 1, ‘The Other as Deviant’, by defining and categorising
the modes of deviance in the novels. In this chapter, modes of deviance form the basis
for the discussion in subsequent chapters of deviance as it pertains to the body and
borders, both of which I see as the essence of othering. Overarching representations
and images that depict the other as uncivilised, amoral, violent and lawless flow
across and underpin this essence, with such representations ultimately forming the
nexus of race and power.
This nexus is explored in Chapter 2, ‘Deviant Gradations: Representing Race and
Power’, which looks at how the dominant group in the Dominican Republic under the
trujillato and South Africa under apartheid constructed and exploited race as a marker
of socio-economic and cultural status in order to perpetuate its historically dominant
8
Title of his 1961 book, Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth).
17
position in society. I use historical background, textual analysis and author
commentary to illustrate how this process and its mechanisms operated.
Chapter 3, ‘Deviant Bonds: Representing Place and Space’, explores how the
dominant group in the novels affirms and defends its cultural, social, national,
physical [i.e., terrestrial] and corporeal boundaries by constructing representations of
black people that play into the figurative and literal marginalisation of the other.
In Chapter 4, ‘Deviant Bodies: Representing Desire’, I analyse how stereotypes,
rendered using particular literary techniques, fix the race of the other in corporeal as
well as social terms, reifying and in this way also justifying the other’s lowly status on
a racial/socio-economic hierarchy heavily weighted in favour of whiteness.
Chapter 5, ‘The Other Responds’, studies the other’s responses to the dominant
group’s racist stereotyping and othering, and attempts, in light of the relationship
between race and power, to account for the differences in those responses. The other’s
internalised and intra-racial racism reveals the effectiveness of the dominant group’s
racism and highlights the hypothesis that underpins my discussion, which is that the
other is marked as deviant in the novels because he or she does not conform to the
rules and norms to which he or she is subjected by the dominant group and over
which he or she has no influence. In this sense, the other cannot be anything but
deviant, when the racism of the dominant group is normalised in this way.
18
Chapter 1
The Other as Deviant
In the novels, the authors portray white or mulatto male characters as those who wield
economic and political power. These characters are shown to operate in societies that
in many ways mirror colonial ones in their structure and functioning. A relatively
small group of people who are physically different from the black or darked-skinned
bulk of the population holds a disproportionate amount of power, which has been
gained and is maintained by force. These dominant characters use this force
(oppressive system) to perpetuate the self-serving racist national discourses that
operate around race in apartheid South Africa and the trujillato in the Dominican
Republic to legitimise their own authority. To this effect, the dominant group applies
a Machiavellian concept of race to every sphere of society in order to explain the
inferiority of the other as being a result of race (Fanon, 1963, p. 40) rather than
structural racial inequality.
The theory of othering put forth by the French psychiatrist, philosopher and antiimperialist Franz Fanon (1925–1961) is instructive for understanding how black
people were constructed as the other in the colonial context. Fanon himself was a
colonial subject, albeit a middle-class one, born on the French Caribbean island of
Martinique to a father descended from African slaves and a mother of mixed
European, black and Indian ancestry. Fanon was a politically and socially committed
individual who, during his time as a resident psychiatrist in Algeria, joined the FLN
(National Liberation Front), the main revolutionary organisation fighting French rule
in Algeria. He later served as ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian
Government (GPRA), cementing his anti-colonial credentials.
In one of his most well known works, The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Fanon
analyses the psychopathological effects of colonisation on the colonial subject, whom
he calls ‘the native’ (p. 36). Fanon understands ‘the native’ as existing by virtue of the
19
fact that the coloniser comes ‘from elsewhere’ and is different from ‘the others’ (p.
39). In the novels analysed in this thesis, what I call ‘dominant characters’ (and what
Fanon calls ‘settlers’) are either white or have cast themselves as such cosmetically
and/or culturally. In this way, they are distinguished from the other, who is
black/African and therefore always a ‘native’, geographically and/or in the pejorative
sense of the word, with its connotations of primitiveness and backwardness. The socalled ‘native’ or other is seen by Fanon (1963) in the colonial context as being the
creation of the settler, who ‘brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his
existence’ (p. 36). Indeed, in the novels, the other, along with his or her supposedly
deviant condition, is perpetuated by the racist commentary of the dominant characters,
which the authors use to comment on the racist policies of the trujillato and apartheid.
The uncivilised other
On coming to power in 1930, the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was
confronted with the prospect of having to manage an economy facing ruin due to the
deleterious effects of the Great Depression, precipitated by the 1929 crash of the
American stock market. Trujillo decided, consequently, to use Haitians as ‘scapegoats
for the economic collapse of the island’ through his vilification of Haitian workers
and Haitians living along the Dominican side of the Dominican Republic–Haiti border
(Coppa, 2006, p. 310). Unlike in South Africa, where blacks were physically different
from the dominant, Caucasian group, a fact which facilitated the apartheid
government’s othering of them along physical lines, the trujillato had to imagine a
similarly divided physical reality in the Dominican Republic because of Haitians’
potential to look Dominican and vice versa. As a result, the trujillato rebutted all that
brought Haitians closer to Dominicans by creating an imagined difference in its place.
Trujillo did so by repeatedly condemning the so-called ‘“pacific invasion” by Haitian
migrants in culturally racist rather than simply territorial and political terms’,
‘spread[ing] anti-Haitian propaganda throughout the country in speeches […] and in
new laws, books, and historical texts used in school’ (Turits, 2004, p. 172). Anti-
20
Haitian rhetoric culminated in the Parsley Massacre 9 of 1937 after Trujillo ordered his
troops to murder around thirty thousand Haitians and Dominicans with Haitian
ancestry along the Dominican Republic’s border with Haiti. As the Bantustan system
had done in apartheid South Africa, creating isolated reserves of cheap black labour
and amputating large sections of the black population from white South Africa, the
Parsley Massacre decimated what had been a multicultural zone, establishing a wellfortified border that ‘saw little Haitian immigration beyond that desired for the sugar
plantations’ (p. 173). The Dominican state reimagined Haiti as ‘an internal colony,
marginalized individuals in a society that demands their labor, but refuses to accept
their presence beyond that as units of labor’ (Howard, 2001, p. 30).
In the eyes of the trujillato, the supposed deviance of the Haitian other was not
therefore necessarily physical, in so far as Haitians were in many cases
indistinguishable from Dominicans in terms of skin colour, but was cultural, based on
language and religion, among other elements. Until recently, writes Despradel (1972),
the discourse of Dominican academics, writers, etc., ‘has fostered an equation
whereby anti-Haitianism has become a form of Dominican patriotism’ (Torres
Saillant, 1994, p. 52). The articulation of Dominicanness in opposition to Haitianness
suited the Dominican elite, who, in the words of Buenaventura Báez, president of the
Dominican Republic for five non-consecutive terms, although not ‘absolutamente
blanca’, ‘se había conformado en base a los modelos ideológicos y culturales de las
potencias imperialistas europeas’ (Sang, 1991, p. 54). 10 A speech that the real-life
Trujillo gave in 1954 during a state visit to Spain mirrors the affinity of the
Dominican elite with Spain:
Mi patria, que fue (sic) la primogénita de las provincias ultramarinas de
España, la raíz de la América de la hispanidad, el suelo escogido para servir en
aquella historia de principal escenario a la tradición y epopeya de las
conquistas y de la colonización del Nuevo Mundo es uno de los pueblos
9
In 1937, the Trujillo regime ordered the massacre of Haitians and their descendants living on the
Dominican side of the Dominican Republic’s border with Haiti. The massacre is discussed in greater
length in chapter 3.
10
Absolutely white…had shaped itself on the basis of the cultural and ideological models of the
European imperialist powers (my translation).
21
hispanoamericanos donde mejor se conservan las tradiciones y los ideales que
han servido de base a través de los siglos a la imperecedera amistad de nuestra
raza. (Lilón, 2010, p. 289)
My nation—the firstborn child of Spain’s overseas territories, the source of
Spanish America, the land chosen to serve the tradition and epic of Spain’s
conquests and colonisation of the New World—is one of the countries in
Hispanic America where the traditions and ideals that have served the undying
friendship of our race across the centuries are best preserved. (my translation)
In the speech, the Dominican leader draws parallels between the Dominican Republic
and Spain, rather than Haiti or the Caribbean, in order to highlight the country’s
perceived cultural proximity to Mediterranean Europe. The speech reflects the
Dominican aspiration to whiteness, with the Dominican Republic’s African roots
discarded in order to draw the country closer to Europe, which Trujillo views as the
bearer of civilisation. The fact that most Dominicans are observably mulato or black
seems to matter little to Trujillo when affirming the friendship between ‘nuestra raza’
(‘our race’) (Lilón, 2010, p. 289). Indeed, while the majority of Dominicans do have
some Spanish ancestry, the African component of their racial makeup makes it
impossible for them to be considered the same race as Spaniards. Trujillo’s racial
falsification is rooted in the widespread notion in Latin America that adopting Spanish
culture, i.e., becoming hispanicised, means becoming white (Arrizón, 2006, p. 126).
This is because in Latin America, definitions of race have conventionally been based
on ‘cultural characteristics (values, norms, attire, language, lifestyle, social standing),
not just appearance’ (Pulera, 2002, p. 77). The lack of physical markers between
blacks (Haitians) and ‘whites’ (Dominicans) on the island of Hispaniola meant that
cultural markers had to take precedence in the differentiation of Dominicans and
Haitians: ‘Dominicans speak Spanish while Haitians speak Creole—and in certain
cultural aspects such as music or religion’ there are substantial differences too
(Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral, 2000, pp. 231–232).
Understandably, then, the rhetoric used by the trujillato against Haitians living in the
border region was more often cultural than racial (physical), with the language and
22
religion of Haitians attacked as deviant. Such a view is reflected in the comments
attributed to Trujillo’s ministers, as in the following example in La fiesta del chivo:
—A lo largo de Dajabón, Elías Piña, Independencia y Pedernales, en vez del
español sólo resuenan los gruñidos africanos del creole.
Miró a Agustín Cabral y éste encadenó:
—El vudú, la santería, las supersticiones africanas están desarraigando a la
religión católica, distintivo, como la lengua y la raza, de nuestra nacionalidad.
—Hemos visto párrocos llorando de desesperación, Excelencia —tremoló el
joven diputado Chirinos—. El salvajismo precristiano se apodera del país de
Diego Colón, Juan Pablo Duarte y Trujillo. Los brujos haitianos tienen más
influencia que los párrocos. Los curanderos, más que boticarios y médicos.
(Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 216)
‘All through Dajabón, Elías, Piña, Independencia, and Pedernales, instead of
Spanish all you hear are the African grunts of Creole’.
He looked at Agustín Cabral, who resumed speaking immediately:
‘Voodoo, Santería, African superstitions are uprooting the Catholic religion
that, like language and race, distinguishes our nationality’.
‘We’ve seen parish priests weeping in despair, Excellency’, young Deputy
Chirinos said, his voice quavering. ‘Pre-Christian savagery is taking over the
country of Diego Colón, Juan Pablo Duarte, and Trujillo. Haitian sorcerers have
more influence than priests, medicine men more than pharmacists and
physicians’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 194)
The real-life Trujillo constructed an ideology around Haitians that cast them as the
antithesis to and nemesis of Dominicanness. Consequently, the word ‘Haitian’
became ‘a switch word, connecting themes of poverty, criminality, negritude and
backwardness’ (Howard, 2001, p. 30). In order to devalue Haiti and Haitianness on an
institutional scale, says Torres Saillant (1994), Trujillo employed the essayist Manuel
Arturo Peña, who portrayed Haiti as a bastardised nation without a proper language or
religion (p. 55). Trujillo’s successor, Joaquín Balaguer, continued the tradition of
denigrating Haitians, describing the Parsley Massacre as a ‘patriotic upheaval of
Dominican peasants reacting against four centuries of depredation by wayward
23
Haitians near the border’ (p. 55). In addition to their criminality, Balaguer referred to
Haitians as infecting Dominican communities with the worship of Vodou, ‘a sort of
African animism of the worst extraction’ (p. 55).
Vargas Llosa is unambiguous in locating Haitianness as the nemesis to
Dominicanness in an episode of La fiesta del chivo in which the fictional Senator
Cabral says to an American guest that the Dominican border region has been all but
lost to Haiti:
Ya perdimos nuestra lengua, nuestra religión, nuestra raza. Ahora es parte de
la barbarie haitiana. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 217)
‘We have lost our language there, our religion, our race. It now forms part of the
Haitian barbarism’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 195)
Haitians, according to Cabral, do not speak a proper language but ‘African grunts’
and their religion is not a proper faith but rather magic sorcery (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p.
194). In this sense, Trujillo presents the reality of the border as one of an unnatural or
unholy inversion of the order of things that can only be put right by a process of
physical and cultural blanqueamiento (whitening). 11 The trujillato in La fiesta del
chivo uses the so-called politics of whitening to justify extending its control over
every facet of national life (emigration, politics, economy, etc.), 12 a practice evident
in the apartheid regime too.
11
‘Yo necesito agricultores, médicos, sementales que me blanqueen la raza en la frontera de Haití y
nos hagan más hispanos que cafres, hay que dominicanizar la frontera y compensar con españoles a
todos esos judíos que he dejado establecer en Sosúa…’ (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 60); ‘I need
farmers, doctors, stud who will make sure we’re lighter than Haitians and more Spanish than savage—
we have to Dominicanize the border and establish enough Spaniards to balance all those Jews that I’ve
let settle in Sosúa…’ (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 44).
12
Senator Cabral attributes the fact that the Dominican Republic had not sunk into barbarism like Haiti
had to Trujillo’s civilising legacy: ‘Si su herencia desaparece, la Republica Dominicana se hundirá de
nuevo en la barbarie, volveremos a competir con Haití, como antes de 1930, por ser la nación más
miserable y violenta del hemisferio occidental’ (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 458); If his legacy disappears,
the Dominican Republic will sink back into barbarism. We will compete again with Haiti, as we did
24
It is not surprising, then, that Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo justifies his almost complete
control (monopolisation) of the Dominican economy by arguing with Deputy Chirinos
that the Dominican Republic would have been a ‘paisito africano’ (‘backward African
country’) had he not taken it over and kept it firmly in his grasp:
Y la República Dominicana sería el paisito africano que era cuando me lo eché
al hombro. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 154)
‘And the Dominican Republic would still be the backward African country it
was when I picked it up and put it on my shoulders’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p.
137)
By equating potentially looser Trujillo control over the Dominican economy with a
slide back to being a supposedly African country—which is understood as
representing moral degradation—Trujillo makes it difficult for Chirinos (who is
arguing that the Dominican leader should nationalise a third of his companies) to
disagree with him. Similar to the myopic way in which whites in South Africa and
European colonisers elsewhere across Africa viewed blacks, Trujillo cannot conceive
of Africa and the African as anything but backward, using the diminutive, ‘-ito’ in the
word ‘país’ (‘country’) to belittle and trivialise them. The unquestioning way in which
the fictional Trujillo (and Mynhardt and Mehring in the South-African novels)
expects others to aspire to and imitate Western cultural practices reveals the degree to
which Western power has justified itself in relation to the deviance of other cultures,
rendering such cultures ‘invisible’ in the process of doing so.
In apartheid South Africa, the white minority painted the black majority as deviant as
a way of assuaging its fears of the spectre of black majority rule, which it believed
would threaten its economic and physical wellbeing (Haywood, 2012, p. 147). One of
the ways the apartheid government tried to ward off that threat and provide an
‘answer to the anticolonial African independence movements occurring throughout
before 1930, for the privilege of being the poorest, most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere’
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 419).
25
the rest of the continent’ (Adam, 2005, p. 52) was to create black homelands
(Bantustans) to which the majority of South Africa’s black population would
eventually be relocated. The Bantustans provided pools of cheap labour to white
South-African business owners and industrialists, who ‘extracted the number of cheap
African workers they needed […] and then ‘dumped’ them back when their labor was
finished’ (Beck, 2000, p. 139). Despite the arsenal of ‘political domination, economic
exploitation, and social oppression’ (Lötter 1997, p. 29) that the white population had
at its disposal, control of the black population would not have been possible ‘without
the support of a whole group of ideas that were constantly reinforced’ (p. 30). Black
inferiority was robustly promoted in the South-African media (p. 31), which
propagated myths ‘such as that [black people] are criminal, cannot rule a country, are
unskilled, [and] cannot be educated’ (Fourie, 2001, p. 477). These myths constituted
apartheid’s ‘cultural imperialism’ (Lötter, 1997, p. 30) and racist framework (Fourie,
2001, p. 447), with most whites coming to see them as ‘natural and true’ (Lötter,
1997, p. 30). Afrikaner nationalist criminology rendered blacks as deviant by
depicting them as ‘morally corrupt and racially inferior’ and of having a natural
tendency ‘to violate the laws of civilization’ (Singh, 2008, p. 47). The protagonist in
André Brink’s Rumours of Rain, Martin Mynhardt, expresses a similar opinion of
black people, couching the murder of a black female servant, Thokozile, by her
husband, Mandisi, the foreman on the farm belonging to Mynhardt’s mother, in terms
of civilisation, by asking, ‘What has three centuries of civilisation done for them?’
(Brink, 1978, p. 325). Accordingly, Mynhardt cannot accept Thokozile’s murder as a
tragic event in which a husband with obvious emotional problems is unable to resolve
a marital dispute without resorting to violence. Instead, he sees the murder as another
example of the inherent deviance of black people. Mynhardt’s rhetorical question
suggesting blacks are irrevocably uncivilised abrogates white responsibility for the
plight of blacks in South Africa and reinforces apartheid’s ideology of racial
segregation for the sake of preserving (white) civilisation.
Similarly, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer’s novel, The Conservationist, Mehring,
believes blacks are almost beyond civilising. While unlike Mynhardt he does not
suggest a revocation of white responsibility for black South Africans, he uses the
sheer scale of black backwardness as reason for white privilege in South Africa. He
mentalises this belief while driving back to Johannesburg from his farm for the last
26
time in the novel, during which time he contemplates the re-emergence due to
flooding of the dead black body found and subsequently buried on his farm. Turning
his mind back to the ‘realities of life’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 251), he says to himself,
The white working man knows he couldn’t live as well anywhere else in the
world, and the blacks want shoes on their feet—where else in Africa will you
see so many well-shod blacks as on this road? (Gordimer, 1974, p. 252)
Even Mehring’s ‘realities’ prove to be ‘self-deluding’, nothing more than
‘commonplace justifications of the South African system’ (Barnard, 2007, p 81).
Indeed, with these ruminations, Mehring establishes a causal relationship between
black development and white privilege, the latter of which he sees as the saving grace
of further black degradation in South Africa, namely black South Africans becoming
even more uncivilised like their brethren on the rest of the continent by not being able
to wear shoes at all. Mehring’s self-interested analysis gives considerable weight to
the notion of the self-made man or nation without taking into consideration the critical
role black South Africans played in literally building white wealth. Mehring’s
commentary obfuscates the fact ‘that race and class cleavages formed a “single
reality” in apartheid South Africa, with the enormous wealth of the white population
relative to the black one only ‘made possible by the low wages that could be paid to
black workers who lived in miserable socio-economic conditions’ (Posel, 1983, as
cited in Durrheim, 2011, p. 68). White South Africans like Mehring justified the
‘immiseration’ of blacks ‘in terms of racial inferiority’ through ‘white supremacist
and racist ideologies’, with the backwardness of blacks one of their staples (p. 68).
Both Mehring and Mynhardt convey the notion that black equality is irreconcilable
with the maintenance of modernity and the (white) nation. Mynhardt in Rumours of
Rain believes that blacks have not evolved to the point where whites could afford to
yield them any degree of control:
First of all they must learn to grasp the relationship between effort and reward.
They need training and experience. In our economic system they’ve first got to
become consumers in order to increase production. That as I see it, is the only
logical starting point for the proper exploitation of human resources in the
27
country. And that is why I immediately realised the possibilities of a post for
Charlie. A link in the chain; a step in the right direction. (Brink, 1978, p. 42)
Mynhardt’s mention of blacks needing to become consumers before they can establish
trade unions and ‘handle sophisticated forms of Western organisation’ and his view of
Charlie, his black protégé, as a ‘a link in the chain’, are informed by the notion of
blacks as feeders at the bottom of society (as discussed in chapter 3). In Mynhardt’s
mind, blacks are necessary to support the economy but are not capable enough to run
it, this task best left to whites, who it would seem make up the top feeders in the
metaphorical food chain. Later on in the novel, in a discussion with his mother about
the high black birth rate and the excessive demand on her charity because of it,
Mynhardt does recognise that ‘raising economic standards’ and instilling ‘a sense of
responsibility’ (Brink, 1978, p. 235) are essential to civilising blacks. In the
conversation, such civilising refers to lowering the black birth rate and mitigating
violence, both of which Mynhardt’s mother sees as interrelated. 13 Mynhardt, however,
does not advocate that black upliftment occur with blacks living beside whites; rather,
he believes blacks ‘had to start in their homelands’ (p. 235). Clearly, Mynhardt thinks
it is the responsibility of whites (like parents) to ready blacks (like children) for lives
as consumers and workers in the Bantustans (like children leaving home) for the
white-led South-African economy. In the South-African novels as well as in La fiesta
del chivo, the dominant group’s characterisation of the other as uncivilised in cultural
(including economic) and/or racial terms reinforces its own superiority and justifies
its separation from the other physically (Bantustans, borders and work camps) and
psychologically (racist rhetoric). This separation deprives the other of equal
opportunities and ultimately reduces him/her to a disposable mass of cheap labour that
enriches and further empowers the dominant group.
The amoral other
In order to maintain the status quo of its superior position, the dominant group in the
novels portrays the other as an abomination and a threat to the purity and survival of
13
‘“It’s the men”, she said. “Think it’s a disgrace if their women don’t have babies, so they don’t want
them to use anything. We’ve nearly had murders on the farm because of that”’ (Brink, 1978, p. 235).
28
white civilisation. In view of this threat, the real-life Trujillo was brought to power as
‘both a messiah to redeem the downtrodden and a paladin to lead the crusade into a
new era’ (Matibag, 2003, p. 145). This ‘new era’ aimed at fortifying Hispanicity and
Catholicism by de-Africanising the Dominican Republic and restoring ‘Catholic
values’ (Coppa, p. 310). In order to justify the superiority of Dominican culture (seen
as white) in relation to that of Haitians (seen as black), the Dominican political elite
turned to the divine, alleging that God was on the side of the Dominicans. Churches
being ‘required to post the slogan, Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra (God in Heaven,
Trujillo on Earth)’ (Baker, 2009) exemplified this line of reasoning. Like the Iberians,
who used religion to rationalise their colonial expansion in the Americas as a
civilising mission (Schmidt-Nowara, 2006, p. 4), Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo points to
divine intervention as having played an instrumental role in Santo Domingo
overcoming the adversities brought upon it by Haiti when he recalls the message of a
speech written about his legacy by Joaquín Balaguer:
La República Dominicana sobrevivió más de cuatro siglos —cuatrocientos
treinta y ocho años— a adversidades múltiples —los bucaneros, las invasiones
haitianas, los intentos anexionistas, la masacre y fuga de blancos (sólo
quedaban sesenta mil al emanciparse de Haití)— gracias a la Providencia.
(Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 293)
The Dominican Republic had survived more than four centuries—four hundred
thirty-eight years—of countless adversities, including buccaneers, Haitian
invasions, attempts at annexation, the massacre and flight of whites (only sixty
thousand remained when it declared its emancipation from Haiti), because of
Divine Providence. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 266)
Here, Trujillo indirectly recalls the fact that the white population in Haiti had, after
independence from France in 1804, largely been exterminated. Before becoming the
appointed emperor of newly independent Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the
massacre of all of the fledgling nation’s Europeans, putting ‘some 2,000–3,000 whites
to death, sparing doctors, priests, and Polish colonizers’ (Matibag, 2003, p. 78). The
survival of whites in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in the face of such
29
barbarity points in the eyes of Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo to the divinity of whiteness,
ergo, Dominicanness.
Another example of this logic is Trujillo’s vindication of his own rule over the
Dominican Republic when he recites to himself a part of the speech written by
Balaguer. In it, Balaguer writes that the coming together of the divine and the divinelike (Trujillo himself) had led to the Dominican Republic’s ultimate survival as a
republic and its economic success relative to Haiti:
Dios y Trujillo: he ahí, pues en síntesis, la explicación, primero de la
supervivencia del país y, luego de la actual prosperidad de la vida dominicana.
(Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 293)
God and Trujillo: here, in synthesis, is the explanation, first, of the survival of
the nation, and second, of the present-day flourishing of Dominican life.
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 266)
Vargas Llosa’s narrative highlights the supposed moral superiority of whiteness,
exemplified by the fortitude of the white Christian race (with whom Trujillo and
Balaguer wholly identify) in the face of black barbarism, the relationship between the
two races representing, from the perspective of the dominant group, a contest between
good and evil. During the actual Trujillo regime, an enormous electronic sign
overlooking the Dominican capital, Ciudad Trujillo 14 from a prominent hilltop
expressed this relationship explicitly. The sign read ‘Dios y Trujillo’ (‘God and
Trujillo’), words that were supposed to ward off ‘the looming disaster of Haitian
occupation by making clear that this is the land of Catholics, not worshipers of
Haitian Voodoo, and that Trujillo is in control’ (Anderson, 2011).
Christianity’s foundational approach of viewing phenomena as either good or evil,
and good and evil in terms of light and dark, has meant that long-standing sociocultural representations have become inextricably tied to the colours white and black,
reflected, for example, in Medieval-era mythologies, where ‘the white knight is good,
14
The name Santo Domingo was restored following Trujillo’s assassination in 1961.
30
and the black knight is evil’ (Mooney, 2007, p. 283). Extending the moral principle of
light and dark to physicality in a colonial-like order in which the dominant group sees
the other as subverting Western culture, notably its creed through the practice of
Voodooism and other animistic beliefs, rendered the black body as ‘demonic’. Indeed,
the Devil is ‘black because he is evil and the master of the darkness of sin, the
supreme rebel against the light of holiness and truth’ (Cavendish, 1975, p. 91).
In contrast to such representations of otherness, Mda (1995) portrays the apartheid
system in Ways of Dying as immoral (evil) by showing how it directly impacts the
lives of black people in white South Africa when he describes how Toloki,
Joined homeless people who defiantly built their shacks there [in white
designated areas] against the wishes of the government. Bulldozers came and
destroyed the settlement. But as soon as they left, the structures rose again.
Most of the people who persisted in rebuilding now have proper houses there.
(p. 119)
Here, Mda relates how Toloki, before he was homeless, living on the docks, migrated
to the city twenty years earlier and built himself a shack in a squatter camp or
informal settlement ‘against the wishes of the [white] government’ (Mda, 1995, p.
119). The fact that most of the ‘squatters’ were eventually allowed to stay in the
informal settlement after having their houses bulldozed several times exposes the
futility of the apartheid system and its manipulation of urban spaces that belied
economic imperatives and demographic realities. Apartheid policies, like the attitudes
and values of characters from the dominant group, are out of touch with reality and, as
a result, cause suffering to those who have to deal with the harsh realities of
unemployment and poverty in rural areas.
Like Zakes Mda, Junot Díaz reveals a contrary position in The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao when he debunks the light–dark moral binary, proving that those in power
in the Dominican Republic associated with whiteness/lightness are far from moral or
good. Díaz brings this contradiction into focus when he comments on Beli’s skin
colour in the context of her posh private school, attended mostly by members of the
Dominican Republic’s wealthy white elite:
31
She would never admit it (even to herself), but she felt utterly exposed at El
Redentor, all those pale eyes gnawing at her duskiness like locusts—and she
didn’t know how to handle such vulnerability. (Díaz, 2007, p. 83)
Beli’s white classmates make her feel like an outsider, their ferocious looks a sign of
their disdain towards her. This, despite the fact that in the Dominican setting
becoming white has traditionally been more about becoming educated and cultured
through, for example, becoming well versed in Spanish language and culture, than
actually approximating physical whiteness. Indeed, it is unsurprising that Beli’s
grandmother La Inca brags that her daughter speaks like Cervantes! (Díaz, 2007, p.
85). Despite La Inca’s attempts at elevating her granddaughter, the dominant group
does not accept Beli. Their rejection of her reveals the fraud of Dominican
nationalism, designed by the dominant group to protect its power through the
promulgation of a counterfeited unifying Hispanic/white identity.
Violence and lawlessness as endemic
One of the myths propagated by the apartheid government, that of the inevitability of
black violence, is revealed in The Conservationist when a white police officer
responds to a call from Mehring enquiring about the removal of a dead black man
from his farm and nonchalantly responds, ‘Was it a knife-fight I suppose?’ (Gordimer,
1974, p. 17). In South Africa, during the time in which The Conservationist was set,
momentous events unfolding on the African continent as well as domestically
aggravated white insecurities. One of the first and most significant revolts against a
permanently settled white community in Africa (as the white South-African
community should be classified) was the Mau Mau rebellion, which took place in
rural Kenya in the early 1950s. The Mau Mau, an anti-colonial organisation formed
by the Kikuyu ethnic group in central Kenya, ‘led a revolt from 1952 to 1957 against
the British colonial authorities’, with the organisation’s members ‘commit[ing]
appalling atrocities against whites and uncooperative blacks’ and cruelly slaughtering
livestock belonging to white farmers (Thackrah, 2009, p. 151). Whites were viciously
murdered on farms, with the murder of the Ruck family in 1953 causing a sensation in
the British press, which published ‘graphic images of the massacred Europeans’
32
(Eager, 2008, p. 101). The family was hacked to death ‘by their own trusted servants,
including a six-year old boy in his bed surrounded by his stuffed animals’ (p. 101).
The murder of a four-year-old white child who, while playing outside his family’s
farmhouse, was decapitated as his parents sat inside eating breakfast (Edgerton, 2004,
p. 79) was equally appalling.
The Mau Mau raised the anxiety levels of the white community in Kenya to a fever
pitch due to the horrendous violence it employed, and ‘confused the settlers about
what the future held for them’ (Nicholls, 2005, p. 267). In response, whites in Kenya
acted ‘far more intransigently than they did in purely extractive colonies such as the
Gold Coast or Nigeria’ (Kantowicz, 2000, p. 257). The British press magnified the
violence of a small group of black freedom fighters used to overthrow a racist regime
and projected it onto the entire black population in order to validate its control (and
exploitation) of it. To that end, it employed imagery that depicted blacks as ‘satanic’,
‘barbaric’, ‘fanatical’, ‘bestial’ and ‘savage’, among other things (Kantowicz, 2000, p.
80).
Like Kenya’s white settlers, the permanence of South Africa’s white population and
its significant domestic economic interests dramatically increased the stakes of losing
power to the black majority. It is unsurprising, then, that white characters in the
South-African novels employ similar imagery to that which the British press used
during the Mau Mau rebellion in its characterisation of blacks as inherently violent.
Mehring, in order to bolster his paternalistic justification of white supremacy, evokes
such imagery when he states,
They’ve got no bloody feeling for animals. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 199)
In making such a statement, Mehring underscores the brutality of the other and
indirectly paints a chilling picture of a people (his) surrounded by savages, whose
treatment of animals bodes badly for whites in the case of future black rule.
The novels under consideration portray blacks as deviating from the norm in their
psychological makeup. They show blacks as sadistic psychopaths, people who have a
relentless lust for violence and a lack of remorse about it. In Vázquez Montalbán’s
33
novel Galíndez, the comment by Voltaire, a light-skinned Cuban mulato and longtime resident of Miami, about Haitians preying on refugees exemplifies this
stereotyping:
Si los desgraciados tratan de refugiarse en Haití, allí se los comen. Más de un
fugitivo político ha ido a parar a la olla de un negro haitiano. (Vázquez
Montalbán, 2000, p. 182)
If some of these miserable characters try to take refuge in Haiti, they will be
eaten there. More than one political refugee has ended up in the pot of a black
Haitian. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 154)
In describing Haitians as people who target some of the region’s most vulnerable—
specifically, illegal migrants (in this case, those who have strayed into Haiti on their
way to the United States)—Voltaire shows how sadistic and psychopathic blacks are.
Given the abhorrence and fear that humanity has traditionally felt for such people,
references to Haitians as being sadistically violent on a collective basis create feelings
of revulsion towards them. Such revulsion helps the dominant group rationalise its
moral superiority over and separation from the other, validating the other’s separation,
confinement and invigilation within certain boundaries. The portrayal of blacks as
criminals (as discussed in chapter 3) in the context of the national space is therefore a
likely leitmotif.
In contrast, Díaz (2007) subverts the idea in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao of
the need to ‘imprison’ blacks because of their dangerousness when he describes how
during the Parsley Massacre Oscar’s family had given Esteban, a Haitian worker,
refuge in their home. According to Díaz (2007), Oscar’s grandmother ‘Socorro had
hidden him inside her daughter Astrid’s dollhouse. Spent four days in there, cramped
up like a brown-skinned Alice’ (p. 218). Instead of the narrative showing a black male
creating havoc in society, as the stereotype would dictate, it shows the Dominican
state doing so. To carry out the slaughter of Haitians, Trujillo recruited convicts and
forced people to take part in the mass killings, with machetes, knives and clubs rather
than guns used to make it look like the massacre was ‘spontaneous vengeance
executed by outraged Dominicans, who could then be represented as defending their
34
property’ (Franco, 2013, p. 27). The behaviour of the Dominican army during the
massacre could only be described as predatory and the level of violence it employed,
horrendous, with one Dominican participant in the genocide remarking, ‘we killed
young and old, the aged, women. After they were dead, we cut off their fingers and if
they wore gold rings or jewellery we took it’ (p. 27). In order to avoid international
embarrassment and potential foreign intervention after the massacre, the Dominican
regime used ‘diplomatic language that described the Haitians as hungry marauders
who had illegally encroached on Dominican land’ (p. 28). Díaz’s presentation of
Esteban invalidates this official version. Instead of Haitians and blacks being enemies
of the state, as the Spanish-language novels present them, the state is the enemy of
Haitians and blacks and their peaceful existence within the borders of the Dominican
Republic.
In Rumours of Rain, Martin Mynhardt also pathologises black people as violent when,
after sending his black protégée Charlie Mooching to negotiate a wage dispute with
the mine’s black workers, he is taken aback by Mofokeng’s appearance on seeing him
again:
It was Charlie who came to the gates. But he was followed at a short distance by
the whole horde—a vanguard of ten or twenty, with a solid phalanx in the
background. They were no longer wearing their overcoats: in spite of the June
cold they were all naked or half-naked. Most shocking of all was the sight of
Charlie in this savage guise. (Brink, 1978, p. 46)
In mentioning Charlie’s ‘savage guise’ despite knowing him well, Mynhardt taps into
the Afrikaner fear of blacks that harks back to The Great Trek, when, with the
purpose of breaking away from British rule in the Cape Colony, Boers (Afrikaansspeaking whites) trekked north and established several independent states, 15 suffering
repeated attacks by black tribes while doing so. The Afrikaner-dominated National
Party, in its campaign to win power in the 1948 South-African national election, drew
on this narrative, painting,
15
Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek [Transvaal Republiek], Oranje-Vrystaat and Natalia Republiek.
35
The historic enemies of the volk as black savages who made dastardly attacks on
heroic, freedom-loving voortrekkers and as oppressive imperialists who, in
league with English-speaking white South Africans and turncoat Afrikaners,
had sought to crush the Boers. (FPSF, 1981, p. 40)
Mynhardt points out another aspect of blacks’ lack of civilisation (their tribalism) and
savagery when he reflects on the events of the violent wage dispute at the
Johannesburg mine he manages:
Then all the different tribal groups turned against each other. Xhosas, Zulus,
Tswanas, Sothos. It happens invariably. (Brink, 1978, p. 45)
While tribalism had existed among South Africa’s black population before white
colonisation, the apartheid government sponsored and stoked it in the second half of
the twentieth century, ‘creating clear legal distinctions not just between black,
Coloured, Asian and white, but also within African society’ (Beinart, 1995, p. 17).
Starting under Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, ‘strong chiefs, though always under
his department’s control, and a return to traditional authority structures’ were
promoted (Morris, 2004, p. 165). In later years, the apartheid government ‘cynically
promoted tribalism and racialism, as well as sham nationalism, in order to divide the
oppressed and exploited majority’ and ultimately rationalise the preservation of white
minority rule (Berberoglu, 1995, p. 61).
After attributing the violence of the mine dispute to the invariable tribalism of black
South Africans, Mynhardt points out in graphic detail the result of such violence. The
language Mynhardt uses to describe the carnage of the riot (‘bits of bodies’, ‘hacked
to pieces with pangas’, ‘pulped faces’ and ‘excrement’ [(Brink, 1978, p. 73)])
indicates corporeal desecration, with many of the black mine workers having
mutilated each other’s bodies. By emphasising the deformed nature of the black
corpses and mentioning the fortune of having such violent acts contained behind
‘barbed wire’ away from ‘a civilised community’ (p. 78), Mynhardt shows that he
views the nation in terms of a body, or indeed two: one black and the other white; one
sick and the other healthy. Viewing the black body as sick is nothing new, with
Gilman (1991b) arguing that the black body was seen as a sign of physical sickness,
36
which in turn was seen as a sign of psychological sickness (p. 173). Certainly,
Mynhardt’s description draws on this stereotype (the black male as anti-social), with
the protagonist viewing black men as brutal and uncivilised (tribal, in this case). By
stereotyping the black workers in such a way, Mynhardt simplifies the emotions and
feelings of the men that led to the violence and obscures the reasons for the dispute.
These include the mineworkers’ pent-up anger at the decision of the largely white
management to have their pay docked, their isolation and boredom living behind
barbed wire, and their ethnic rivalries, which, as mentioned, the apartheid regime
reinforced. For Mynhardt, who represents the apartheid regime, the irrational violence
of blacks warrants the need for the status quo of racial segregation.
In Ways of Dying, Mda presents the reader with a more nuanced vision of SouthAfrican tribalism, showing how during the transitional period in South Africa (1990–
1994) ‘members of different ethnic groups resorted to violence as a means to avert the
greater calamity that they feared would befall them’ (Eze, 2013, p. 90). In the novel,
when Mda mentions the ‘rotten tribal chief [who] is exploiting ethnicity in order to
solidify his power base!’ (p. 55), he is obliquely referring to the founder and leader of
the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and prime minister (1970–1976) of the KwaZulu
homeland, Mangosuthu Buthelezi. As a homeland leader, Buthelezi derived economic
support from the white minority government and as a consequence was increasingly
viewed by anti-apartheid groups as a lackey of the apartheid state (Smith, 1988, p.
115). Buthelezi prioritised the interests of the Zulu kingdom and people (who
constitute a plurality of South Africa’s population) over those of national unity
(Horwitz, 2004, p. 70), which was the cornerstone of the ethos of the IFP’s main rival,
the ANC. 16
Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s divisiveness led to a de facto civil war between Zulu
supporters of the IFP and the ANC in the early 1990s in the Zulu stronghold of Natal
province and South Africa’s industrial heartland, the Witwatersrand (Johnston, 2014,
p. 42). The apartheid government took advantage of the conflict and Buthelezi’s
declining power by launching Operation Marion, which involved giving military
16
The African National Congress (ANC) was the main liberation movement leading the fight against
apartheid. It is the current ruling party of South Africa.
37
support to Buthelezi’s Zulu militias (Sarkin-Hughes, 2004, p. 79). The government’s
support of the militias is referred to in Ways of Dying when Toloki says ‘sometimes
the police and the security forces assist them in their raids of death and destruction,
because this helps to divide the people so that they remain weak and ineffective when
they fight for their freedom’ (Mda, 1995, p. 56). The apartheid government employed
the policy of divide and conquer in black communities by ‘forging links with the
Zulus at the expense of other ethnic groups’, says Myabmo (2010), in order to ‘show
the world that the blacks were not ready to rule themselves, i.e., democracy would
mean bloodshed’ (p. 104). 17 Buthelezi, for his part, perpetuated ‘this violence in the
name of Zulu nationalism’, believing that the Zulus should have their own nation, and
for his own self-interest (p. 104).
According to Farred (2000), Mda not only criticises Buthelezi but also ‘caricatures the
contemporary expression of Zulu cultural identity’ (p. 202): Zulus ‘celebrate their
descent from Shaka, one of the continent’s most astute political and military leaders’
while perpetrating cowardly attacks in the run up to the country’s first democratic
election (p. 202). In Ways of Dying, Mda (1995) says the Zulus,
Have internalised the version of their own identity that depicts them as having
inherent aggression. When they attack the residents of squatter camps and
townships, or commuters in the trains, they see themselves in the image of great
warriors of the past, of whom they are descendants. (p. 55–56)
Mda also shows the turf war between the ANC and Inkatha as being increasingly
convoluted, with a confluence of factors contributing to the increasing stakes and
bloodshed. In this context, whites are no longer the single and unifying enemy; the
people, according to Toloki, ‘curse the war-lords, the police and the army, or even the
various political organizations, depending on whom they view as responsible for their
fate’ (Mda, 1995, p. 140).
17
A dramatic example of the violence between the IFP and ANC was the Boipatong Massacre. In
anticipation of South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, armed steel workers loyal to the IFP
living in the KwaMadal Hostel attacked residents of Boipatong, a black township located one kilometer
from the hostel. At least 45 ANC supporters were killed, ‘some of them hacked to death inside their
houses and shacks’ (Smith, 2012).
38
The main factor that contributed to the mind-numbing political violence in the early
1990s in South Africa was the unstoppable fury of a long-running liberation
movement that ‘carries things too far, even when there is a real ‘enemy’’ (Myambo,
2010, p. 104). The excessive violence of this movement is epitomised by the cruel
murder of Noria’s five-year-old son, Vuthu, by the Young Tigers, a local brigade that
defends the township from the hostel dwellers, the tribal chief’s lackeys. Vuthu and
another boy unwittingly give away the secrets of a planned attack on the enemy (the
hostel dwellers) after the hostel dwellers lure them with meat and sweets (Mda, 1995,
p. 188). When the boys leave the hostel, school is out and the other children see them
emerging from the enemy’s camp. Vuthu and his friend try to bribe the children,
pleading with them not to give away their secret, but the children tell their parents,
with the news eventually reaching the Young Tigers. The Young Tigers gather the
children and give Vuthu’s friend, Danisa, and a boy of the same age, ‘the honour of
carrying out the execution’ (p. 189).
Another reason presented in Ways of Dying for the spiralling violence in the informal
settlements is the deep prejudice of black city township dwellers towards rural
migrants, with Noria’s friend, Shadrack admitting that,
Long before the bloody tribal chief contrived to use hostel dwellers from our
ethnic group to do the dirty work for him, we, the township residents alienated
ourselves from these brothers. We despised them, and said they were country
bumpkins. We said they were uncivilized and unused to the ways of the city,
and we did not want to associate with them. It was easy for the tribal chief to
use them against us, for they were already bitter about the scorn that we were
showing them. (Mda, 1995, p. 56)
And a final reason for the brutality is economic, with certain actors taking advantage
of and stoking the mayhem in order to monopolise particular sectors of the black
economy. The chairperson of the taxi association, for example, ‘is said to support the
tribal chief, and maintain close links with the police. He has recruited hostel dwellers
as taxi drivers, and has kept legitimate drivers on existing routes out of work’ (p. 57).
This nuanced vision of the state of black South Africa in the early 1990s stands in
39
stark contrast to the representations of blackness by dominant characters in The
Conservationist and Rumours of Rain. In those novels, white characters portray blacks
as inherently violent in order to justify the continuance of the status quo of white
hegemony and racial segregation.
In all the novels, the dominant characters see black encroachment into white or
Dominican areas as synonymous with increases in crime, with this view evidenced in
Agustín Cabral’s ramblings on Haitians and their presence inside the Dominican
Republic’s borders:
—No se diga los robos, los asaltos a la propiedad —insistió el joven Agustín
Cabral—. Las bandas de facinerosos cruzan el río Masacre como si no hubiera
aduanas, controles, patrullas. La frontera es un colador. Las bandas arrasan
aldeas y haciendas como nubes de langostas. Luego, arrean a Haití los ganados
y todo lo que encuentran de comer, ponerse y adornarse. Esa región ya no es
nuestra, Excelencia. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 217)
‘Not to mention robberies and attacks on property’, insisted young Agustín
Cabral. ‘Gangs of criminals cross the Masacre River as if there were no
customs, checkpoints, or patrols. The border is like a sieve. The gangs demolish
villages and farms like swarms of locusts. Then they drive the livestock back
into Haiti, along with everything they can find to eat, wear, or adorn themselves
with. That region is no longer ours, Excellency’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 195)
This passage, like others in La fiesta del chivo, includes unambiguous references to
blacks as criminals, in this case thieves and usurpers, and equates Haitian criminality
with a loss of national sovereignty. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the ‘phalanx of
ideologues’ who had ideologically supported the Parsley Massacre ‘diverted the
blame from the Dominican army to the supposedly criminal Haitians who were said to
have invaded Dominican territory’ (Franco, 2013, p. 9).
In the South-African novels, too, the main characters believe that blacks are either
criminals or have a strong criminal streak, though they generally express this view
40
more indirectly, as in the following example, in which Mehring’s farmer neighbour
states,
You can’t trust a kaffir about the scale, I can tell you that. You can teach them
as much as you like. It doesn’t matter to them, you see, if it’s so much for so
much. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 53)
When the white characters feel immediately threatened, however, as Mynhardt does
when he is practically forced by Charlie to visit the black township of Soweto in
Johannesburg, their rhetoric around black criminality becomes more direct, as
demonstrated when Mynhardt attempts to drive off without Charlie before realising he
could get into trouble in Soweto due to,
The very real danger of being attacked by a gang of tsotsis in the dark. (Brink,
1978, p. 347)
The South-African slang word tsotsi refers to a young black urban criminal involved
in both petty and violent crime. In the 1940s, the word tsotsi ‘seemed to have a broad
subcultural, fashion-centred connotation’, encompassing people who wore tsotsi
fashion, frequented shebeens, smoked dagga and spoke tsotsitaal (Glaser, 2000, p.
53). With the passing of the decades, however, ‘the criminal and gang connotations
strengthened but remained somewhat ambiguous’ (p. 53). Yet even when the word
became increasingly associated with criminal elements, people continued to use it to
refer to ‘young “city slickers” who were neither in gangs nor involved in criminal
activity’ (p. 53). Despite being a widely recognised word in South Africa, Brink has
undoubtedly used tsotsi with a rhetorical function in Mynhardt’s ‘voice over’; that is,
as a symbol of whites’ abysmal lack of understanding of blacks and the consequent
hardening of attitudes on both sides. A white South African like Mehring separated
from black culture in almost all its forms is unlikely to recognise the fact that a young
man dressed as a tsotsi is not necessarily a criminal. A system that intentionally
blunted the nuances of black culture, reducing the other to a caricature, makes such
recognition difficult. Even when television (divided into white TV1 and black TV2/3)
was introduced into South Africa in 1976 (later than most countries due to
government paranoia),
41
The impressions of Black South Africans that TV2/3 left with White South
Africans were often very problematic, as evidenced by highly racialized
stereotypes of musicians with good rhythm and the supposed dumb jocks of the
athletic world. (Krabill, 2010, p. 79)
The advent of television in South Africa (during the time in which Brink’s novel was
written) brought to the fore just how little white South Africans knew about the inner
lives of blacks, with one white female viewer remarking, ‘I was never fully aware that
black people had their own identities’ (p. 79). Stereotypical representations of blacks
on TV along with the pre-existing ignorance of white South Africans, expressed in
racist everyday comments or thoughts like those of Mynhardt only reinforced the idea
in South-African society that blacks were fundamentally different.
While in The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain we see a plethora of examples in
which the dominant characters stereotype blacks as having little regard for society and
its laws, and thus being inherently criminal, in Ways of Dying, Mda paints a picture of
an apartheid state that is itself lawless, dishing out brutal extrajudicial punishment to
blacks on a routine basis. In the novel, a friend of Toloki tells him that a man
wrongfully accused of stealing maize at the mill at which Toloki worked was tortured
by police, who in order to get a confession from him, punched him in the testicles,
tied him to a chair and attached wires to his neck and fingers (Mda, 1995, p. 62). In
the end, the police failed to get a confession and let the man go. However, the mill did
not reemploy him and his wife complained that he had lost ‘his manhood’ (p. 62).
Toloki asks his friend, who is recounting the story,
‘So is there nothing he can do now? Can’t he go to the law?’
‘Whose law? Was I not just telling you that it was the law that rendered him
manless? At least in the cities we hear that they are beginning to form unions
that will fight for the rights of the workers. Such ideas haven’t reached us here
yet’. (Mda, 1995, p. 63)
With this episode, Mda sets up an opposition between blacks who want to be able to
live and work in dignity and a predatory white police force that has no regard for their
42
human rights. While the man’s life has been destroyed, the fact that he does not
confess nevertheless gives him dignity in the face of apartheid’s inhumanity.
The lack of understanding on the part of white South Africans of blacks is crystallised
in Mehring’s caustic remark on how his foreman, Jacobus, is careful to disassociate
himself and the other black farm workers from the illegal possession of goods found
on the body of the murdered black man discovered on Mehring’s farm:
Jacobus took the objects (the Japanese-made steel watch is the kind of stolen
goods black men offer surreptitiously for sale on street corners) into safekeeping
to show that the people here’ve got nothing to do with the whole business.
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 19)
It is likely that Jacobus, in taking extra care to show that he is putting the dead man’s
belongings into safekeeping, is aware of the disparaging views many whites hold of
blacks. Jacobus is in fact safeguarding his job by showing that he is different from the
others, i.e., not a criminal. For Mehring, though, in light of his account of what black
men purportedly do, which is to offer stolen watches for sale on street corners (p. 19),
Jacobus’s exaggerated reaction to appear honest casts suspicion on the foreman’s
integrity. In Mehring’s eyes, blacks are naturally two-faced (deviant), relying on
whites to make money but all too eager to take advantage of them when they see the
opportunity, their lack of loyalty to whites probably proving to Mehring that apartheid
is right.
Similarly, the following example from the same novel reinforces the basis for white
control by making it difficult—if not impossible, in the case of Mehring—for whites
to want to cede any sort or degree of control to blacks. Mehring plays out in his mind
the potentially ruinous effects of permitting Jacobus to use his pick-up to bring home
building supplies:
He could say to him, take the pick-up on Monday and go to the builders’
suppliers; but there’s no telling how far the interpretation of such authorization
can be taken. The next thing, they’re piling in for a beer-drink or a funeral and
43
the pick-up’s smashed somewhere, a dead loss because the driver was
unlicensed and insurance won’t pay. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 81)
Mehring’s decision not to allow Jacobus to use his vehicle is symbolic of white South
Africa’s self-serving deferment of power and responsibility to the country’s black
majority during the apartheid era. In 1974, the year in which The Conservationist was
published, resistance to white rule in South Africa had yet to reach fever pitch as it
did after the 1976 Soweto Riots, when South-African dissidents were able to seek
refuge in the newly independent and pro-ANC frontline states 18 of Angola and
Mozambique. Before 1975, the white minority in South Africa had felt more secure,
as the country enjoyed the advantage of sharing borders with several white-controlled
countries (Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia) friendly to the apartheid regime.
Nevertheless, anti-colonial wars in those places during the same period would have
held up a mirror to white South Africans in terms of the practicability of whiteminority rule and privilege in a majority black country, the case of colonial Kenya in
the 1950s proving to be the first example of its unworkability. In Kenya, against the
very real threat of the other’s dethroning of it, the dominant group adopted, ironically,
a childish, defensive racism. The following assertions of the leader of the British
settlers in Kenya, Colonel Ewan Grogan, regarding the Westernisation of black
Kenyans is an example of such defensiveness: ‘Just teaching a lot of stupid monkeys
to dress up like Europeans. Won’t do any good. Just cause a lot of discontent. They
can never be like us, so better for them not to try’ (Mwakikagile, 2000, p. 71).
In Ways of Dying, Mda debunks the black-as-criminal stereotype through, among
other characters, his protagonist, Toloki, who is the epitome of honesty and integrity.
These qualities are exemplified when Toloki goes to ask for a job at the home of the
wealthy but hard-nosed Nefolovhodwe, who is a friend of Toloki’s father and from
the same village. When Toloki asks for a job, Nefolovhodwe does not remember him
(or at least pretends not to), but eventually offers him a job to watch graveyards,
where the luxurious coffins he manufactures are being dug up and resold by
18
These refer to countries (Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and
Zimbabwe) in which the ANC had training camps and from which it planned and in some cases
launched attacks against targets of the apartheid state.
44
unscrupulous undertakers (Mda, 1995, p. 130). Every time Toloki goes to
Nefolovhodwe’s house ‘to report on his lack of progress in the investigations’,
Nefolovhodwe’s new, thin wife gives him some food, for which he promises to pay
one day (p. 132). Later in the novel, Toloki returns to Nefolovhodwe’s house to pay
for the food and ‘at first Nefolovhodwe felt insulted, but then decided that Toloki
must be mad. Perhaps poverty had gone to his head and loosened a few screws’ (p.
165–166). Toloki gives Nefolovhodwe the money, but the latter is ungrateful, yelling
at him for having scared his fleas, which he is training for his flea circus (p. 166).
Despite being destitute and not liking Nefolovhodwe very much, Toloki has the
honesty and integrity to pay for the food he has eaten—a representation that contrasts
sharply with those of the thieving blacks in The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain.
Similarly, the actions of Noria’s friend, Madimbhaza, an old woman who worked in
the city as a domestic worker but who has since retired, reveal the depth of goodwill
and compassion that exists in the apparently brutalised informal settlement in which
Noria and Toloki live. Madimbhaza’s house has become ‘“the dumping ground”,
since women who have unwanted babies dump them in front of her door at night. She
feeds and clothes the children out of her measly monthly pension’ (Mda, 1995, p.
166). Through Madimbhaza and Noria (who helps Madimbhaza), Mda suggests that
there is a humane side to South Africa’s poverty-stricken black townships, with
characters finding creative ways of living among the nihilism that appears to pervade
daily life. Such representations counteract the views of characters like Mehring and
Mynhardt in The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain that blacks are criminal and
thus incapable of generating anything of worth or creating a stable environment.
While the other in the novels deviates from other humans because of his violent,
criminal behaviour, he also deviates from them because of his non-human behaviour,
behaving like a terrifying and otherworldly monster. The monstrous rapaciousness of
the other threatens the material integrity of the dominant group, which feels it has to
separate itself from the other via clearly demarcated and defended physical borders
(as discussed in chapter 3). Trujillo’s senators in La fiesta del chivo believe
Dominican sovereignty and prosperity to be threatened by the voraciousness of
blacks, the supposed propensity of Haitians to multiply uncontrollably while
devouring Dominican jobs and farms and gradually the country’s sovereignty pointing
45
in their minds to an ‘hidra’ (‘hydra’, 19 a many-headed monster from Greek
mythology):
Imagine una hidra de innumerables cabezas, Excelencia —el joven diputado
Chirinos poetizaba con las maromas de sus ademanes—. Esa mano de obra
roba trabajo al dominicano, quien, para sobrevivir, vende su conuco y su
rancho. ¿Quién le compra estas tierras? El haitiano enriquecido, naturalmente.
Es la segunda cabeza de la hidra Excelencia —apuntó el joven diputado
Cabral—. Quitan trabajo al nacional y se apropian, pedazo a pedazo, de
nuestra soberanía. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 295)
‘Imagine a hydra with countless heads, Excellency’. Young Deputy
Chirino’s poetic turns of phrase were accompanied by extravagant gestures.
‘These labourers steal work from Dominicans who, in order to survive, sell their
little plots of ground, their farms. Who buys the land? The newly prosperous
Haitians, naturally’.
‘It is the second head of the hydra, Excellency’, young Deputy Cabral
specified. ‘They take work from nationals and, piece by piece, appropriate our
sovereignty’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 217)
The senators dehumanise Haitians by equating them to a monster (hydra) that devours
villagers’ crops and ultimately the villagers themselves. Such a beast has no
conscience (which ties in with the theme of the black male as anti-social, sadistic,
etc.) and therefore must be stopped at all costs. The vanquishing of the Hydra in the
Greek myth calls forth the strength and ingenuity of Hercules and Iolaus, who could
19
In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra was an underworld reptilian-like water beast with several
heads and fatally poisonous breath. When a head from the creature was cut off, two grew back;
however, the Hydra’s weakness was that only one of her heads was immortal. According to the myth,
Hercules, in order to make amends for killing his family in a fit of rage, was assigned by the oracle of
Delphi to kill the Hydra. Escorted by his nephew Iolaus, Hercules lopped off the Hydra’s heads only to
see them grow back; Iolaus, witnessing his uncle being strangled by the mythical creature, used a
burning torch to cauterize the wounds left by his uncle, who continued to hack off the Hydra’s heads,
thus stopping ‘further heads from sprouting’ (Bjørgo, 2005, p. 253). In the end, what killed the Hydra
were Hercules’s strength and Iolaus’s ingenuity (p. 253).
46
be seen as a metaphor for the trujillato. By setting up such a moral opposition, the
senators give the trujillato moral currency in relation to its policies towards Haitians,
with the background to and ultimately exculpation of the Parsley Massacre
foregrounded in this way. Indeed, it is not surprising that the real-life Trujillo
explained his motive for ordering the massacre in terms of Haitian depredation: ‘To
Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among
them, thefts of cattle provision, fruit etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in
peace the fruits of their labour, I have responded, “I will fix this”’ (as cited in Franco,
2013, p. 27). It was only after the Parsley Massacre that ordinary Dominicans bought
into the regime’s Haitians-as-rapacious-monsters rhetoric, with one Dominican
frontier dweller commenting, ‘Haitians? No, things aren’t good. They’re brutes—they
harm children and eat people. They won’t eat me though, because I’m too old. They
want young, fresh meat’ (Howard, 2001, p. 37).
Like the hydra’s heads, which grow back repeatedly, blacks in The Conservationist on
Mehring’s farms represent a presence that is difficult to control, similar to that of a
pest. The pest-like nature of blacks explains why, according to Mehring, ‘boundaries
mean little’ to them (Gordimer, 1974, p. 206), the implication being that blacks do not
respect the limits of white South Africa, as, for example, locusts do not respect the
limits of a farm. In Mehring’s musings on the pest-like (insidious) nature of blacks,
Gordimer uses the character’s house as a metaphor for white South Africa, which if
not occupied and defended by its white owners will be taken over by the black farm
workers:
The bales of feed on the verandah of the house: they ought to have been back in
the barn by now. Unless it’s seen to, the stuff’ll never be put back and indeed
when there’s another load of teff it’ll be dumped there, too. That’s how they are,
the best of them. The house will simply be taken over as another outhouse.
There’s nobody living there to complain. Next thing, there’ll be parts for the
tractor nicely stored in the kitchen. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 244)
The pest metaphor sets up an analogy similar to the morally oppositional relationship
between order and chaos and whiteness and blackness established by Trujillo
throughout La fiesta del chivo in relation to Dominicans and Haitians. Metaphors, in
47
many cases, reveal ‘the degree of scepticism about the rhetoric of diversity’ and show
‘an awareness of the shadow side of diversity, the possibility of chaos and violence’
(Schwabenland, 2012, p. 76). The fear of one’s house (as a metaphor for the nation)
being invaded, for example, was prevalent in the United Kingdom in the 1960s when
the former colonial power received waves of immigrants from its ex-colonies. The
influx was, ‘for many Britons…a terrifying move from order to disorder’, signalling
‘a threatening mixture of races and cultures’, which led the conservative English
politician Enoch Powell to ask when ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the
white man’ (Mallot, 2008, p. 316, p. 316). For a character like Mehring, who derives
his power from the land he owns and controls, the usurpation of said space means a
complete loss of power. Mehring’s mention of ‘a tractor nicely stored in the kitchen’
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 244) and of Jacobus as being ‘better than any white manager’ (p.
145) seem to suggest an uneasy awareness on the part of the protagonist of the
potential for black control. While Mehring ridicules blacks as being insidious and
stupid (both reasons for putting a tractor in his house), he is also increasingly aware
that his farm workers have the capacity to take over and run his farm (see chapter
3), 20 which would make his relative lack of expertise of pastoralism redundant.
Because white control of South Africa is dependent on black social and physical
disempowerment and dispossession, situations that reveal the unjust and illogical
nature of such a paradigm are attacked and debunked by the dominant group, and
using metaphors and analogies that set up moral oppositions portraying blacks as
deviant are, as has been shown, a common way of doing so.
Unlike the white characters in the South-African novels, Trujillo in La fiesta del chivo
is, as has been shown throughout this chapter, able to take fears of engulfment to their
logical conclusion, recalling during dinner with a congressional representative from
the United States how it felt to have thousands of Haitians murdered:
¿Qué sintió Su Excelencia al dar la orden de eliminar a esos miles de
haitianos ilegales?
20
Mehring ‘made it his business to pick up a working knowledge of husbandry, animal and crop, so
that he couldn’t easily be hoodwinked by his people there and could plan farming operations with
authority’ (Gordimer, 1978, p. 23).
48
Pregúntale a tu ex Presidente Truman qué sintió al dar la orden de arrojar
la bomba atómica sobre Hiroshima y Nagasaki. Así sabrás qué sentí aquella
noche, en Dajabón. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 224)
‘How did Your Excellency feel when you gave the order to eliminate
thousands of illegal Haitians?’ ‘Ask your former President Truman how he felt
when he gave the order to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Then you’ll know what I felt that night in Dajabón’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p.
201)
Here, Trujillo suggests that the black victims, like those of Hiroshima, are
unfortunate, tragic casualties of war sacrificed for some ‘higher good’. Killing
Haitians, like Japanese civilians, is therefore a necessary evil in Trujillo’s eyes, with
Vázquez Montalbán revealing in this way the anti-social nature of the Dominican
dictator (who depicts Haitians as such, ironically).
All the representations of otherness found in the novels contribute to the construction
of the other as deviant, with the dominant characters perceiving the black characters
as culturally and morally repulsive and a threat to the nation. The dominant group,
fearing usurpment by the other, preserves its place and space in the nation through
policies (segregation, massacres, fraudulent nationalisms) informed by this revulsion
and fear. In the following chapter, ‘Deviant Gradations: Representing Race and
Power’, I will discuss how the dominant group uses race as a socially constructed
marker to exploit and maintain its dominant place in society.
49
Chapter 2
Deviant Gradations: Representing Race and Power
In this chapter, I intend to show how the racial hierarchies established (and
reinforced) during the trujillato and apartheid, which set up whiteness as superior to
otherness, inform the representations of deviance in the novels. I explore the
intricacies of the two regimes, which recognised race as a gradation, to show how the
exploitation of physical differences between people in the novels is overwhelmingly
about asserting and maintaining power rather than about any aesthetic or cultural
imperative. Indeed, the power relationship between Afrikaans- and English-speaking
white characters and the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the novels proves this
point. In this chapter, I also contextualise the social commentary in the books by
exploring what the novels’ authors say about the historico-political content pertaining
to them.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the most salient racially based conflicts
across the globe were undoubtedly those between blacks and whites. Major examples
included anti-colonial wars in Sub-Saharan Africa (Angola, Kenya, Mozambique and
Rhodesia, to name the main ones), the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and
the civil rights movement in the United States. In the United States, the colonial-era
one-drop rule prevailed, ‘meaning that persons with mixed race ancestry [were]
assigned the social status of the subordinate group’ rather than the dominant white
group (Kivisto, 2000, p, 102). In Latin America, on the other hand, ‘a more complex
consciousness of color sees black and white, but also recognizes many shades in
between’ (Winn, 2006, p. 291). The inferior socio-economic condition of black
people universally due to the pernicious effects of white racism, colonialism and
slavery, and the psychologically limiting effects of segregation on the mind of the
dominant group, diminished desire on the part of whites for relationships, amorous or
otherwise, with blacks, a situation that resulted in the reinforcement of white
privilege. In apartheid South Africa, matrimony between whites and people of colour
was a practical impossibility due to the white-minority government’s ban on
50
interracial marriage and its prohibiting of non-whites from living in white areas and
vice versa. This segregation attempted to preserve white culture, specifically that of
the Afrikaner, and protect white privilege; however, in the process it oppressed and
alienated black, Coloured (mixed race) and Indian South Africans.
Unsurprisingly, the publically visible racist policies of the apartheid government and
the unambiguously subordinate role in which they placed blacks led to the emergence
of a race-based activism that attempted to combat white supremacy within a racialised
framework. The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) led by Steve Biko in South
Africa during the early 1970s perhaps best embodied this sort of political and social
engagement. In mid-twentieth-century Latin America, racist legislation was, on the
other hand, almost absent despite the pervasiveness of racism at all levels of society.
Similar movements to the BCM in South Africa arose in Latin America around the
same time to combat discrimination against black people, with one such example
being the Unified Black Movement (MNU), established in 1978 ‘to challenge racial
and class discrimination in Brazil’ (Howard). An earlier association, the Evolution
Group (GE), established in 1971 ‘to raise racial consciousness among AfroBrazilians’ (ibid.) greatly influenced the MNU. As the objectives of the MNU
suggest, the organisation often discussed questions of race alongside class, a
reflection of the fact that in Latin America class struggles have often subsumed racial
struggles (Grandin, 2004, p. 195). This is in part because in the post-independence
period in Latin America, white elites largely obscured the fact that racism had, since
the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese, always been a prominent feature of society.
Latin-American elites created this diversion through the implementation of
fraudulently inclusive nation-building projects, whose core objective was the
maintenance of white supremacy in a largely non-white region.
With regard to physical appearance, skin colour has often been one way of describing
race, though debatably it has not been the primary one. For instance, most people
would not recognise Northeast Asians and Europeans as belonging to the same race
despite both groups having similarly pale skin. This has prompted some people to
define different populations in terms of their facial features, as Coon (1962) did when
he classified the world’s population into five races: Caucasoid (Europeans, Middle
Easterners and South Asians); Mongoloid (North and Southeast Asians, Polynesians
51
and Native Americans); Capoid (the Khoi and San); Negroid or Congoid (SubSaharan Africans), and Australoid (Australian Aborigines) (Wells, 2013, p. 10). In
isolation, though, such terms cannot define a racial group because groups perform
their race: ethnic/cultural aspects (language, religion, etc.) coalesce with physical
(phenotype) aspects to form the racial sign, e.g., white, black, Dominican, Haitian,
South African, etc. In an analysis of race and power, we need to take into account
both parts of this racial sign because countless regimes in history have devised and/or
maintained forms of discrimination based on cultural differences rather than physical
appearance on its own. Conversely, the idea has existed that racially homogenous
nations are less likely to suffer from intra-communal conflict because physical
similarity foments a feeling of fraternity (Collier, 2003, p. 57). However, the example
of Nazi Germany—where a Jewish population that was relatively physically indistinct
from the white German population was sent to its death for belonging to a race
deemed degenerate and corrosive—refutes this premise. The segregation of Jews in
Nazi Germany and other parts of Europe despite their utter Germanness or
Europeanness underlines, says Gilman (1991a), the symbolic power of language (e.g.,
the term Juden and its pejorative connotations) in the construction of ‘an acceptable
order’ out of ‘any given worldview’ (p. 3).
The mass murder of Jews across Europe by the Nazis was an extreme example of
what Gilman typifies as the human phenomenon of organising the world ‘according to
fictions’, with the body forming a staple of that fiction. According to Gilman (1991b),
Where and how a society defines the body reflects how those in society define
themselves. This is especially true in terms of the ‘scientific’ or pseudoscientific categories such as race, which have had such an extraordinary
importance in shaping how we all understand ourselves and each other. From
the conclusion of the nineteenth century, the idea of ‘race’ has been given a
positive as well as a negative quality. We belong to a race and our biology
defines us, is as true a statement for many groups, as is the opposite: you belong
to a race and your biology limits you. Race is a constructed category of social
organization as much as it is a reflection of some aspects of biological reality.
Racial identity has been a powerful force in shaping how we, at the close of the
twentieth century, understand ourselves—often in spite of ourselves. (p. 170)
52
The phenomenon of race as a constructed category of social organisation is
exemplified by the fact that cultural/ethnic differences often blur the fact that conflicts
have occurred and continue to do so between people of supposedly the same race,
namely between people who are physically indistinct from their respective other.
Indeed, the Rwandan Massacre and the Yugoslav Wars are two recent examples of
how culture (ethnicity) can sustain divisions and conflicts between people who
essentially look the same yet mark each other out as alien for the sake of gaining
and/or maintaining power and status. On the island of Hispaniola, Dominicans have
harboured ill feeling toward Haitians despite both groups sharing African ancestry
(though Dominicans generally have lighter skin than Haitians do).
Foundations of the trujillato
In order to better frame my discussion of the novels, in this section I will discuss the
historical conditions that were prevalent at the time of Spanish colonisation of Santo
Domingo that contributed to the formulation of Trujillo’s worldview. The Spanish,
unlike their Northern-European cousins, had always enjoyed close contact with
culturally non-Western (though still Caucasoid) peoples, notably Berbers and Arabs.
Northern Europeans, on the other hand, who entered the colonial race later than the
Iberians, remained relatively isolated from culturally and racially non-Western
groups. The only visible other in the colonial period in Northern Europe were Jews,
whom Northern Europeans thought of as ‘not exactly white’ (Zohar, 2005, p. 246).
Spain, in contrast to Northern Europe, had a greater variety of phenotypes, with the
Iberian Peninsula having been inhabited by Iberians, Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks,
Celts, Visigoths, Carthaginians, Basques, Arabs, Berbers, Jews and Romani. Over the
centuries, these groups (all more or less Caucasoid) mixed to varying degrees,
producing today’s Spaniards. Despite this apparent diversity, however, Spaniards, like
Northern Europeans, viewed themselves as white, a fact exemplified in colonial-era
Spanish America by the preference of white landowners for their daughters to marry,
Penniless peninsulares (arrivals from Spain) rather than wealthy criollos
(American-born Spaniards). The fact of being born in the Old World was
supposedly good proof of being ‘pure white’—something that could not be
53
assumed of even the wealthiest members of the colonial aristocracy, ‘whose
ancestors had been living for years alongside not just Indians but also the
blacks’. (Chua, 2004, p. 59)
Due to uneven sex ratios in Spanish America, European settlers (initially, nearly
always men) procreated with blacks and Amerindians, producing mixed-race
populations known as mestizos (Spanish-Indian) and mulatos (Spanish-blacks)
(Randall, 2006, p. 46). These groups came to constitute majorities in most SpanishAmerican colonies, though Spaniards continued to occupy the upper echelons of
every sphere of society (Telles and Flores, 2011, p. 2).
The region’s largely white elites, outnumbered and fearing their overthrow, devised
an intricate racial hierarchy in which dark-skinned people could become white, at
least in the socio-economic sense, by purchasing whiteness (Pagden, 1989, p. 78). Out
of this strategy emerged,
An elaborate system of racial privilege that favoured Spaniards and non-Spanish
European immigrants over Amerindians, African slaves, mestizos (mixed race
persons of Spanish and Indian blood), and zambos (mixed-race persons of
African and Indian blood). (Pulera, 2002, p. 76)
In Venezuela, for instance, pardos, ‘free blacks and mulattos’, who formed the
colony’s largest racial group, could purchase ‘legal whiteness’ through cédulas de
gracias al sacar (Bethell, 1987, p. 28). In the Dominican Republic, the white elite
divided the population into ‘three distinct classes: blancos (Creoles), blancos de la
tierra (mulattoes), and negros (African slaves)’ (Stinchchomb, 2003, p. 21). Once an
individual had purchased whiteness, they ‘were authorised to receive an education,
marry whites, hold public office and enter the priesthood’ (Bethell, 1987, p. 28). By
allowing their citizenry to buy whiteness, Latin America’s white elites hoped to
safeguard their status as rulers well into the post-independence period by creating the
impression that social mobility was a possibility for everyone regardless of skin
colour. While the transition of the other into whiteness was not completely illusory,
given that non-whites could in fact legally become ‘white’, only a fraction of the
population under the legal circumstances could ever make such a transition and be
54
incorporated into respectable society. Thus, because it was possible, however seldom,
to be whitened, it was not, says Winn (2006), ‘unusual for people of mixed descent to
identify with the European side of their ancestry, in view of its greater power, wealth,
and status since the Conquest’ (p. 304). With the disintegration of the caste system in
Latin America due to ‘generations of race mixture’ and the equalisation of all citizens
before the law after independence, ‘ideas of lineage were gradually substituted with
informal discourses of physical appearance’ (Telles and Flores, 2011, p. 8). It is
reasonable to claim that blacks that became white would have continued to be viewed
by Caucasians as others in the physical sense. However, the power and status
conferred to such individuals as a result of their official whitening would have
contributed to the reinforcement of the power base in Latin America as white.
Consequently, as Winn (2006) puts it, ‘money whitens’ in Latin America and
‘colonels are never black no matter how dark their skin’ (p. 292). While the fluidity of
racial categories in Latin America has been flawed and uneven, it has nonetheless
influenced understandings of race to the current day.
While ‘white (and often blonde) actors and actresses [are] used in soap operas and
advertisements of luxury items produced in countries [such as] Mexico, as well as
Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela’ (Telles and Flores, 2011, p. 10), race remains
relatively mutable in Latin America in comparison to, for example, in the United
States. This does not mean, however, that race has not been an important part of
understanding nation and citizenship for the other in Latin America. Black
consciousness and indigenous movements in Latin America representing the
continent’s most socially deprived groups, while not always having formed part of the
national discourse, have existed since colonial times. Nevertheless, the fact that in
modern times Latin-American projects around nationalism have ‘exhibited a tension
between “homogeneity and diversity” that has allowed ‘equality and inequality to be
imagined and experienced by various social subjects’ (Andolina, 2009, p. 12) has
complicated the appreciation of the importance of race at the local level. The
distinction between race and ethnicity in Latin America is ‘slippery’, given that ‘while
they refer to supposedly self-evident differences based on phenotype and culture
respectively, the two terms have been used interchangeably in Latin-American
history’ (p. 12).
55
Some Latin-American nations with large black and indigenous populations saw the
need to embrace national narratives that exhibited race mixing and indigenous
symbols (Telles and Flores, 2011, p. 10). Often these countries did so to present
themselves as racially inclusive and, consequently, as morally superior to the United
States (p. 10). While blacks in Latin America had always been ‘a critical part of the
national symbol’, says Sawyer (2008), they had also, he says, ‘historically had
unequal access to social, political and economic power’ (p. 136). He calls such a
phenomenon ‘inclusionary discrimination’ (p. 136). An example of this paradox is
Brazil, where the ascendance of ideologies around racial democracy has made AfroBrazilians ‘part of the cultural economy’ (Hanchard, 1999, p. 67), though, one ‘in
which their women and men embodied sexual desire and lascivious pleasure’, while,
‘at the same time, Afro-Brazilians were denied access to virtually all institutions of
civil society’ (p. 67).
Race mixing in Latin-American nations has produced countries that are neither
Indian, white nor black yet are dominated by Caucasians or at least by those who
perform whiteness or can approximate it physically (Caucasoids). Mexico is an
example of how racism often transcends physicality in Latin America, with a person’s
race coming to be interpreted in terms of cultural and socio-economic factors; namely
language, education, money, class, dress, etc. The duplicitous nation-building project
initiated after the Mexican Revolution increased social mobility in Mexico, creating
‘an optical illusion’ whereby race could be eclipsed by culture as a determining factor
for social status (Aguilar-Pariente, 2009, p. 12). Indigenous and African people could
become mestizo ‘by leaving their communities, educating themselves, and adopting
western habits of dress’ (p. 12). The Mexican government’s effort to create a
homogenous society, though, led people to ‘despise any Indigenous trace’ and give
more value to whiteness (p. 12). Consequently, a correlation between race and social
stratification developed in Mexico, with citizens with white phenotypes coming to
occupy the pinnacle of the socio-economic and political pyramid and people with
Indian and black phenotypes, the base (p. 12). The division is so stark today in
Mexico that the sayings limpiar la raza (clean the race) and mejorar la raza (improve
the race) are said in praise of a dark skinned person who marries a light skinned one
(Glenn, 2009, p. 115). Similarly, in the Dominican Republic, racial appearance
influences an individual’s personal choice of partner, says Winn (2006), whose study
56
of Latin-American societies includes modern-day testimonials from Dominicans
regarding the role of race in their society and personal lives. One such account comes
from a mulata mother, who says that she would prefer her son to marry a white
woman, ‘‘because then he’d improve the race, and the children would come out well.
You have to think of the future’, she explained. ‘A man like him with a black women,
imagine!’’ (p. 301).
The subliminal aspiration to and in some cases deliberate seeking out of whiteness has
created in Latin America what have been termed ‘pigmentocracies’, societies where
one’s skin colour is heavily tied to one’s social status (Glen, 2009, p. 44). Many Latin
Americans still perceive whiteness ‘to be an asset in many areas of social life’, with
whites ‘bestowed with formal and informal privileges, social deference, and positive
attributes’ (Telles and Flores, 2011, p. 3). Whiteness in Latin America, though,
encompasses a wider spectrum physically than it does in places such as the United
States and other former British colonies. For instance, people who would ordinarily
not be considered white in the Anglo world, such as Arabs, would be considered
white in Latin America if their physical features were similar to those of LatinAmerican whites, who are mostly of Mediterranean European stock. Due to the fact
that most Arabs who migrated to Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries were from Syria and Lebanon and hence physically similar to and in some
cases indistinct from southern Europeans, over time they were able to ‘join[] the
national narrative of (whitening) mixture’ (Karam, 2007, p. 110). While Arabs were
looked down on by white Brazilians until the middle of the twentieth century (p. 104),
they have subsequently scaled to the top of the country’s socio-economic hierarchy,
enjoying success in every sphere of Brazilian society as relative newcomers in
relation to black and brown Brazilians, who ‘find themselves in a disadvantaged
position compared to the white population’ (Reygadas, 2010, p. 30). Arabs’ status in
Brazilian society points to Caucasoids having a greater ability to access positions of
power in Brazil than those who do not look white. Such a situation is not unique to
Brazil but found throughout Latin America, including the Dominican Republic, where
whiteness as a physical aesthetic is privileged through the commonly used euphemism
‘buena presencia’ (Cabezas, 2009, p. 80). 21
21
Literally ‘good presence’, meaning pleasing appearance.
57
Racial dynamics in the Dominican Republic represented and still do (although
attitudes are changing) the other side of the one-drop rule. In the Dominican Republic,
any amount of white ancestry in addition to the performance of white (Hispanic)
culture made a person white. A European diplomat in Santo Domingo during the end
of the colonial era remarked on this phenomenon when he described the Dominican
population as being composed mostly of mulatos ‘who say they are white…and had
ended by being considered as such’ (Winn, 2006, p. 302). Apparent racial levelling
occurred in the Spanish colonial period in Santo Domingo (1809–1821, 1861–65)
after economic stagnation resulted in the descendants of Spanish conquistadores
becoming impoverished and the races becoming equalised socio-economically, with
blacks ‘no longer social inferiors’ (Stinchcomb, 2003, p. 21). This, in turn, led to
many whites emigrating from Santo Domingo, a problem Spain attempted to
counteract by luring ‘poor whites from the Canary Islands’ (p. 21). Ultimately,
though, the exercise failed, with white men refusing ‘to marry mulatto women, but
also [because] several storms and smallpox epidemics decimated the population of the
European émigrés’ (p. 21). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, most
Dominicans found themselves in ‘utter poverty’, a situation that ‘seemed to equalize
most of its people, despite their ethnic origins’ (p. 21). Even so, descendants of
Spaniards were intent on maintaining their former social privilege, which they did by
erecting racial barriers in the form of racial epithets. 22
The racial dynamic present today in the Dominican Republic has its origins in
Christopher Columbus’s 1492 landing on the shores of Quisqueya, as the indigenous
Taino inhabitants knew the island of Hispaniola (Zuchora-Walske, 2008, p. 18).
Columbus established the settlement of La Isabela on his second voyage in 1493
(Deagan and Cruxent, 2002, p. 3), but deplorable conditions leading to hunger and
disease caused Spanish sailors to mutiny and abandon it soon after. Four years later,
Columbus’s brother, Bartholomew Columbus, established Santo Domingo (ZuchoraWalske, 2008, p. 20), the present-day capital of the Dominican Republic. The Spanish
forced the indigenous Taino to work the island’s gold mines, but by the beginning of
22
‘blancos (Creoles), blancos de la tierra (mulattoes), and negros (African slaves)’ (Stinchchomb,
2003, p. 21).
58
the sixteenth century, only a small fraction of the original native population remained,
most having died of disease and ill treatment by their European owners (Tuider and
Caplan, 2012, p. 13). The Spanish then began importing black slaves to Hispaniola in
1516 to work on the island’s sugar cane plantations (Candelario, 2007, p. 4) and Santo
Domingo prospered for a time. The colonisation of the American mainland, however,
led to a decline in the Caribbean colony’s fortunes, with the establishment of silver
mines in Peru and Mexico luring many colonists away from Hispaniola and
prompting Spaniards on their way to the Americas to bypass the island altogether
(Weil and Roberts, 1973, p. 35). Santo Domingo’s economy was also severely
affected when Havana became ‘the primary stopover port’ (Ramsey, 2011, p. 27) for
Spanish ships travelling between Seville and Spanish America. The economic decline
of Spain’s first colony and the impoverishment of its inhabitants led to social barriers
coming down and blacks, whites and the remaining Tainos mixing and producing a
majority mulato nation (Matibag, 2003, p. 50).
The Caribbean represents the historical extremes of the Americas, with the region
having undergone immense trauma since Christopher Columbus’s arrival on
Quisqueya (Hispaniola) in 1492. This history, says Junot Díaz, author of The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has been like ‘a 300-year-long Auschwitz’, with
‘genres’ such as ‘endless genetic breeding, time travel; leaving one world and being
miraculously teleported to another’ all evidenced (as cited in Jaggi, 2008). The
Caribbean, believes Díaz, has played a central role in shaping the Western world, with
the Dominican Republic being ‘the ground zero where the Old World died and the
New World began’; indeed, ‘nothing’, he says, ‘is more quintessentially American’
than the Dominican Republic, where Europeans first landed in the Americas (as cited
in Ellison, 2008). Díaz goes so far to say that what happened in the Caribbean, with
its history of slavery, the extermination of indigenous peoples and the rise of
capitalism, played a decisive role in shaping the modern world: every one of us, he
says, are ‘the children of what happened in the Caribbean’ (ibid.).
Dutch trade with the inhabitants of Hispaniola enraged Spain, which in retaliation
carried out the Devastaciones de Osorio, which refer to the burning-out and forced
depopulation ‘of the main smuggling region, the western portion of the island’
(Sellers, 2004, p. 20). The vacuum left by the destruction prompted French plantation
59
owners from the island of Tortuga to colonise the northwestern coastline of
Hispaniola (p. 20); and in 1697, the Spanish ceded it and the rest of the western third
of the island to France under the treaty of Ryswick (Arnold, 1994, p. 120). In 1791,
blacks began an uprising in the French colony (Saint-Domingue, renamed Haiti on
independence) that would constitute ‘one of the great revolutions of the modern
world’ and culminate in Haitian independence in 1804 (Fick, 1990, p. 1). The Haitian
Revolution caused most of Saint-Domingue’s whites to flee or be killed (Winn, 2006,
p. 294). The French, however, retained a presence in Santo Domingo (ceded to France
in 1795 by Spain), which the Haitian Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines attempted to
invade ‘when he learned that the French commander had approved Spanish slave
trading across the mountainous frontier’ (Jenson, 2011, p. 154). The French repelled
Dessalines’ forces, but the Haitians in their retreat pillaged the Dominican settlements
of Santiago and Moca and massacred most of their residents ‘and wasted fields, cities,
and churches’ (Langley, 1996, p. 136). The French were defeated at Palo Hincado in
1808 by the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Santo Domingo with the help of the
British, who ‘imposed a naval blockade that successfully prevented the French from
receiving supplies’ (Sellers, 2004, p. 24). In 1809, the British returned the colony to
the Spanish. However, after the Spanish withdrew from Santo Domingo in 1822, the
Haitians, ‘united again under the southern leader Jean-Pierre Boyer, invaded the area
and dominated the entire island’ (Ramírez-Faria, 2007, p. 299).
Santo Domingo’s Haitian rulers abolished slavery and invited blacks from the United
States to live in the Samaná Peninsula, located in the east of the present-day
Dominican Republic. Dominicans viewed the arrival of blacks as ‘“Africanizing” the
province of Santo Domingo’, a situation they resented (Bryan, 1984, p. 43). They
were further ‘angered’ by the decision of the Haitian leader Jean Pierre Boyer to have
land confiscated from Dominican landowners and the Catholic Church (p. 43).
Politically, the Haitians privileged mulatos over whites, which led to an exodus of
whites both overseas and to the Cibao valley, located in the northern part of the
Dominican Republic. Although Boyer attempted to ‘stimulate the economy’ of Santo
Domingo, ‘both former colonies grew poorer’ (Zuchora-Walske, 2008, p. 24) with
Dominicans forced to assist Haiti in paying its foreign debt (Bryan, 1984, p. 43).
Haitian ‘fiscal tyranny’ led to the decay of Santo Domingo, with the city’s university
closing and ‘unused public schools and churches f[alling] into disrepair’ (Zuchora-
60
Walske, 2008, p. 24). It was in these conditions that Dominicans ultimately began
their struggle for independence from Haiti.
Dominicans had not always viewed Haitians as a threat to their territory. In colonial
times, much of the cibaeño aristocracy initially favoured a Haitian takeover of Santo
Domingo (the colony), as they thought it would facilitate trade by strengthening ‘the
cattle-raising and export industry far beyond the limits previously set by Spanish
mercantile policy’ (Matibag, 2003, p. 79). The aristocracy of Santo Domingo (city),
on the other hand, saw the leader of the Haitian Revolution, François-Dominique
Toussaint-Louverture, as their nemesis and ‘identified the political act of unification
with the violence of invasion and usurpation, while identifying their own program
with that of the ultra-reactionary Ferrand’. The majority of Dominicans would later
share this view (p. 79).
The Haitian occupation, according to Martínez (2003), has been mythologised in the
Dominican Republic, producing hatred towards blacks and ‘a fear of Haitian
“Ethiopianization”’ (p. 85) that some say still ‘runs through every sector of
Dominican society’ (Ferguson, 1992, p. 91). During the Haitian occupation, the need
to unite Dominicans in order to defeat the Haitians, who were more numerous, led for
a time to the coming together of Dominicans and the accepting of racial differences
among them (Winn, 2006, p. 303). The existence of a common enemy but the
inexistence of a uniform skin colour made Dominicans band together under the
banner of culture with the saying ‘it does not matter if one is black, as long as one
speaks clearly’ coming into vogue during the time (p. 303). As a consequence, the
weakened white Dominican elite was able to lead the struggle for independence from
Haiti with the help of blacks and mulatos, a phenomenon similar to most (if not all)
independence projects in Latin America. As a way of legitimising their influential role
in resisting Haitian rule, the white Dominican elite ‘used the struggle to promote a
national identity defined in opposition to Haiti’, with Haiti being black, African and
Voodooist, and the Dominican Republic, ‘white, Spanish and Catholic’ (p. 303). After
twenty-two years of Haitian occupation, Dominicans achieved their independence in
1844.
61
In this sense, ‘the coming into being of the Dominican nation is inseparable from
Haiti as a historical phenomenon’, says Torres-Saillant (1994, p. 54), the two
countries (especially the Dominican Republic) identifying themselves in relation to
one another. In the post-independence period, Dominicans felt confused over their
identity due to their mixed ancestries and the fact that France and Haiti had occupied
Santo Domingo. Dominican independence from Haiti necessitated the construction of
a national identity, which the trujillato (1930–1961) did most intensely during the
course of the republic. Dominican elites constructed ‘a nation building ideology based
primarily on self-differentiation from Haiti, including the area of racial identification’,
says Torres-Saillant (1994, p. 54). Buenaventura Báez (1812–1884), president of the
Dominican Republic for five non-consecutive terms and leader of the revolt against
Haiti that resulted in the annexation of the Dominican Republic, defined
dominicanidad (Dominicanness) in relation to this opposition: ‘[…] no somos blancos
de pura raza, pero jamás soportaremos ser gobernados por negros’ (Sang, p. 54,
1991). 23 Baez himself was mulato.
Academics and observers of Dominican identity have often described Dominicans as
being ignorant of and confused over their racial and ethnic identities (Fennema and
Loewenthal, 1989; Sagas, 1993, as cited in Torres-Saillant, 2003, p. 275). This is
evidenced, they say, by Dominicans’ ‘willingness to accept official claims asserting
the moral and intellectual superiority of Caucasians’ (p. 275). In 1849, the American
Commissioner in Santo Domingo stated that Haitian violence on the island had
created an environment in which Dominican blacks favoured whites, to the point that
when ridiculed about their skin colour, they would state, ‘I am black, but white black’
(Welles, 1966, p. 103–104). The Dominican Republic’s most renowned poet,
Abelardo Vicioso, encapsulated this apparently confused state through one of his
characters, a priest from Santiago de los Caballeros by the name of Juan Vázquez,
who in the early nineteenth century declared, ‘Spanish I was born yesterday / in the
afternoon I became French / Ethiopian I was in the night / today English I am, they
say / My Lord, what in the end will I be?’ (Torres-Saillant, 1994, p. 59). To counter
this confusion, the well-known Dominican historian and emeritus professor Carlos
Dobal supported official views first promoted by Trujillo and later consolidated by
23
‘We are not pure whites, but we will never stand being ruled by blacks’ (my translation).
62
Balaguer that the Dominican Republic was ‘Spanish, Catholic, and white’ (Winn,
2006, p. 299). In reality, however, most Dominicans are ‘the color of coffee with
milk’, with the amount of milk varying, ‘creating a spectrum of skin colors that ranges
from creamy to espresso’ (p. 299). Although the Dominican Republic traditionally has
been more europeanised than Haiti, the two countries share many cultural elements,
including cuisine and Voodoo (Torres-Saillant, 1998, p. 2). Furthermore, in addition
to ‘a significant presence of Haitian Creole in Afro-Dominican Spanish’, the lexical
structures and phonetics of Dominican Spanish suggest ‘retentions from the languages
of African slaves’ that resulted from the unification period (1822–1844) (p. 2).
The insecurity of the ruling white class of Santo Domingo and its fear of another
Haitian invasion motivated it to invite the Spanish to recolonise the island, which the
waning European power did from 1861 to 1865. During the Spanish reoccupation, the
white elite imported blacks from the English-speaking Caribbean and at the same time
mixed with European immigrants. This led to the whitening of the upper classes and
the darkening of the lower classes ‘but without altering the predominantly mulatto
cast of the population’ (Winn, 2006, p. 303). The war for the restoration of Dominican
independence, steered by blacks and mulatos, prompted another white exodus and
brought about a democratisation of the country’s ‘social structure and race relations’,
permitting people of colour to access positions of power (p. 303).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dominican intellectuals typically studied in
Europe, where Western scholars were putting forth ‘racist theories of culture and
human society’ (Torres-Saillant, 1998, p. 7). The paradigm that such scholars used
viewed Caucasians as ‘the owners of the wisdom and ability necessary for civilisation
and progress’ (p. 7), an ideology that made Dominican intellectuals question the
merits of their nation’s largely mixed-raced population. The renowned Dominican
essayist and novelist Federico García Godoy was convinced that in the ‘‘hybridity of
our ethnic origin lie the corrosive germs that have impeded ‘the development of an
effective and prolific civilisation’’ (as cited in Torres-Saillant, 1998, p. 7).
The concept of nationhood has always been problematic in the Caribbean, says Junot
Díaz, because there are ‘so many mixtures, so much hybridity, and as a consequence,
the myth of the nation has to ‘work overtime’ (as cited in Ellison, 2008). At the same
63
time, he says, a nation cannot be a nation if it ‘erases individuals’ (ibid.), something
that Dominican ideologues traditionally have done and continue to do in relation to
the Dominican Republic’s black and Haitian populations.
For his part, the author of Galíndez, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, understands
hybridity—or in Spanish, mestizaje, which in that language normally refers to race
mixing and existing racial mixes—as human interaction or cohabitation. In other
words, he understands it to mean ‘mixing’ in the widest sense of the word, not as
something limited to mixed-race ancestry alone. Mestizaje, says Vázquez Montalbán,
is something human beings have to embrace and whose dynamics they have to
problematise (Fernández Colmeiro, 1995). They can do this, he says, by asking
themselves where they are, how they got to be there, how they relate and depend on
each other and how those relationships condition the north–south global divide (ibid.).
In the context of Latin America, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the
Americas marked an occasion, says the author, to ‘situar el problema en sus justos
términos actuales’ (ibid.).
24
He warns, though, that such a process required
determining who the ‘víctimas y verdugos’ 25 were and what role they played in the
human tragedy that characterised much of Latin America in the second half of the
twentieth century (ibid.). This would have resulted, says Vázquez Montalbán, in the
re-clarification of history and the making of it relevant to the current age, which, he
says, would have in turn operated against the right-wing agenda promoted by Latin
America’s white-skinned ruling classes, made up mostly of criollos, people of mostly
Spanish ancestry who were born in Latin America (ibid.). It is this group, says
Vázquez Montalbán that has obscured history, preferring to ignore its role in the
‘exterminio tremendo’ 26 of the indigenous population by apportioning the blame to
Spain (ibid.). In the second half of the twentieth century, these same elites backed
military dictatorships to repel potential threats to their economic interests from
communist-inspired insurgencies (Vázquez Montalbán, 2002). Said dictatorships were
supported by the United States, which used them to further its own economic interests
and maintain capitalistic and American military hegemony in the region (ibid.). The
24
Situate the problem as it really currently stands (my translation).
25
Victims and persecutors (my translation).
26
Atrocious extermination (my translation).
64
insecurity of Latin America’s ruling classes, says Vázquez Montalbán, ultimately
gave rise in the twentieth century to dictators like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic,
Somoza in Nicaragua, Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela and Castillo Armas and Ríos
Montt in Guatemala (ibid.).
From 1914 to 1928, the United States occupied the Dominican Republic, with the
invasion having an unexpected effect on the nation’s racial dynamics. On the one
hand, the invasion bolstered white privilege and white racism; on the other, it
increased the visibility of mulatos in the political area through political reform (Winn,
2006, p. 303–304). One such mulato, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, was able to
rise to power because of the United States’ involvement in Dominican politics.
Ironically, it was under Trujillo that white racism would reach its zenith, with the
dictator sharing the white elite’s ‘racial attitudes and Hispanophilia’ and transforming
these into ‘a national ideology’ (p. 304). In La fiesta del chivo, the fictional Trujillo
expresses the consequences of this national ideology by saying that,
Gracias a él dejó de ser una tribu, una horda, una caricatura, y se convirtió en
República. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 157–158)
Thanks to him, had stopped being a tribe, a mob, a caricature, and become a
Republic. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 140)
In the novel, Trujillo feels ashamed of his own and the Dominican Republic’s largely
mixed race ancestry. He believes that in light of Haiti’s backward influence and the
Dominican Republic’s own history of political instability, the country needs his
edifying influence, which, like that of his fellow ideologues, notably Joaquín
Balaguer, can return the country’s culture to its supposedly pure European (Spanish)
roots. The paradox, however, is that the trujillato carried out this cultural purification
while simultaneously importing Haitians to work in the Dominican Republic’s sugar
plantations, which by that time were mostly government controlled. Haitians proved
to be a useful commodity for Trujillo, who used them both as a ‘scapegoat’ and ‘a
mass of malleable nonunion labor’ (Martínez, 2003, p. 82).
65
Of the many dictators who were the order of the day in Latin America at the time,
Trujillo was, according to Mario Vargas Llosa, author of La fiesta del chivo, one of
the worst: ‘Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty,
corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities. He pushed to the extreme trends which
were quite common to most dictators of the time’ (as cited in McCrum, 2010). In
1990, Vargas Llosa ran for president in his birthplace Peru but lost to the more
populist Alberto Fujimori, whose rule was marked by human-rights violations and an
autocratic style: ‘he had a virtual dictatorship until the last two years, when he
became very unpopular. Despite his incalculable corruption, he was respected and
feared and followed by millions of people’, says Vargas Llosa (as cited in Collier,
2001). Vargas Llosa remarks on his three-year political career as ‘very instructive
about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind,
destroy principles and values and transform people into little monsters’ (as cited in
McCrum, 2010). The dictator in La fiesta del chivo can be superimposed onto many
countries around the world, says Vargas Llosa: ‘If you write about a dictator you are
writing about all dictators, and about totalitarianism. I was writing not only about
Trujillo but about an emblematic figure and something that has been experienced in
many other societies’ (ibid.).
The main effect of the tyrannical Trujillo regime, says Vargas Llosa, was a kind of
paralysis, ‘the numbing of determination, reason, and free will, which this man,
groomed and adorned to the point of absurdity, with his thin high-pitched voice and
hypnotist’s eyes, imposed on Dominicans, poor and rich, educated or ignorant, friends
or enemies’ (as cited in Freeman, 2001). Vargas Llosa believes that people must resist
oppression because dictatorships, he says, are not ‘natural catastrophes’ but ‘made
with the collaboration of many people, and sometimes even with the collaboration of
their victims’ (as cited in McCrum, 2010). The perpetuation of Trujillo’s rule and his
all-powerful sway over society would not have happened without the ‘passivity and
servility’ of the Dominican people as well as ‘professional Dominicans’, who
abdicated ‘the right to resist’, says Vargas Llosa (as cited in Collier, 2001). This is
one of the reasons, says the Peruvian author, for which he decided not to depict
Trujillo as a monster ‘but rather as a human being who lost his humanness as he
accumulated power’ (ibid.).
66
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo clearly also fascinates the author of The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz, who in the novel writes about ‘that Ahab-like
preoccupation with the father, the ‘American great man’’, who is a ‘nightmare’ (as
cited in Jaggi, 2008). Such a fascination no doubt stems from Díaz’s own father,
whom he describes as one of the ‘Little League dictators’ (as cited in Jaggi, 2008) and
‘a total copy of Trujillo’ who grew up in Trujillo’s military and admiring Trujillo (as
cited in Lantigua-Williams, 2007). ‘The evil of the father’, as Díaz puts it, traverses
generations of Dominicans to the point that ‘the person no longer has contact with the
origins of that evil’—a fact the author says he only became aware of when he was
older (ibid.). Díaz says that although the Dominican dictator had been written on ad
nauseam, to the extent that ‘nadie quiere un libro más sobre Trujillo,’ 27 he believed
the area still lacked something (as cited in Lago, 2008). Indeed, the fact that Trujillo
was such a larger-than-life figure, says Díaz, meant one became his ‘secretario’
without even realising it when writing about him (ibid.). For Díaz, the myth
surrounding Trujillo was perpetuated in Vargas Llosa’s book, La fiesta del chivo
(2000), which he says Trujillo ‘le hubiera encantado’ (ibid.).
28
Díaz (2007) brings
Trujillo into The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao principally through footnotes,
and demythologises the man with humorous depictions such as the following:
Almost as soon as he grabbed the presidency, the Failed Cattle Thief sealed the
country away from the rest of the world—a forced isolation that we’ll call the
Plátano Curtain. As for the country’s historically fluid border with Haiti—
which was more baká than border—the Failed Cattle Thief became like Dr. Gull
in From Hell; adopting the creed of the Dionyesian Architects, he aspired to
become an architect of history, and through a horrifying ritual of silence and
blood, machete and perejil, darkness and denial, inflicted a true border on the
countries… (p. 2)
Such historical footnotes are necessary because Díaz knows ‘putting that into the
mouths of New Jersey teenagers looking for freedom or identity or a quick shag isn’t
going to work’ (Teele, 2007). Díaz also knows most of his readers will have limited if
27
No one wants another book about Trujillo (my translation).
28
Would have loved (my translation).
67
not non existent knowledge of the history of the Dominican Republic, a country in the
centre of Díaz’s universe, but in all practically, an unimportant one politically,
economically or culturally in the world today.
Trujillo sought to pull the Dominican Republic away from its moorings by whitening
it and exterminating traces of its Africanness, which was a difficult objective
considering most of the nation’s inhabitants were mulato. The dictator’s policy of
blanqueamiento (whitening) was wide reaching, with one front being immigration.
After the Parsley Massacre, Trujillo promoted a ‘política de puertas abiertas’ 29 that
aimed to whiten the country, Hispanicise the border area with Haiti and arrest the
growth of the Haitian population there by attracting 500,000 Europeans (including
Central-European Jews) over the course of twenty years (Lilón, 2010, p. 292).
Ironically, Trujillo, an admirer of Hitler, 30 attempted to attract European Jews to his
country while Hitler was purging them from his in order to whiten Germany. Trujillo
also focused on enticing Spaniards to the Dominican Republic, considering them
more acceptable than Jews. The fictional Trujillo in Vázquez Montalbán’s novel
Galíndez expresses the Dominican dictator’s rationale to attract white migrants:
Yo necesito agricultores, médicos, sementales que me blanqueen la raza en la
frontera de Haití y nos hagan más hispanos que cafres, hay que dominicanizar
la frontera y compensar con españoles a todos esos judíos que he dejado
establecer en Sosúa… (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 60)
I need farmers, doctors, studs who will make sure we’re lighter than Haitians
and more Spanish than savage—we have to Dominicanize the border and
establish enough Spaniards to balance all those Jews that I’ve let settle in
Sosúa… (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 44)
In reality, Trujillo’s immigration scheme was a failure in light of the small number of
European migrants attracted to the Dominican Republic and the large number who
29
Open-door policy (my translation)
30
‘Not for his ideas but for the way he wore a uniform and presided over parades’ (Vargas Llosa, 2002,
p. 102).
68
later remigrated (Lilón, 2010, p. 298). Trujillo’s contradictory vision of whiteness in
relation to Hitler’s is an example of how experience and reality (in this case, a
particular demographic reality and the fear of a Haitian invasion) modify schemata
that according to Gillman (1991a) ‘form the basis for future attempts at adaptation
and problem solving’ (p. 2). Our representational world, says Gilman (1991a), is
constantly being ‘influenced by stimuli arising from within and without the
individual, and new schemata are constantly being created as new perceptual and
conceptual solutions are being found’ (p. 2). While in the schemata of both Trujillo
and Hitler, Caucasians were held up as superior and the standard-bearers of
civilisation, Hitler believed in the Aryanisation of Germany, a solution that for
Trujillo would have been unthinkable and unfeasible, given the relative swarthiness of
Spaniards and the Dominican Republic’s overwhelming mulatez.
A critical front for Trujillo in his quest for blanqueamiento was anti-Haitianism,
exemplified by the 1937 Parsley Massacre. The massacre was an attempt to physically
remove the presence of blacks on the Dominican side of the border—described by
Trujillo as a ‘peaceful invasion’—and restore the nation’s ‘Catholic values’ (Winn,
1998, p. 305). Given that Haitians had lived on the Dominican side of the border for
generations, distinguishing Haitians from Dominicans was not as easy as identifying
somebody’s skin colour. For that reason, during the massacre, Trujillo commanded
his forces to order blacks to utter the Spanish word perejil (parsley), as he thought this
exercise would help root out Haitians given most Haitian Creole speakers had
difficulty pronouncing the word.
While before the Parsley Massacre, anti-Haitian sentiment along the border had been
relatively rare, it was widespread among the Dominican elite, which ‘rallied behind
the dictator and vigorously defended the regime from international scandal’ after the
mass killings (Turits, 2004, p. 174). Because of the reasonably stable ‘multiethnic
character of the frontier’, the trujillato had found it difficult to impose its ‘official
discourse to ethnicize national identity’, with such calls falling ‘on deaf ears’ among
frontier dwellers (p. 174). The border, to the dismay and anger of the political elite in
Santo Domingo, had virtually ‘functioned as an extension of Haiti. Haitian currency
circulated freely in the Cibao, the main agricultural region of the country, and in the
south it circulated as far as Azua, only 120 kilometres from Santo Domingo’ (Moya
69
Pons, 1990, p. 517). Trujillo exploited this situation, ‘justifying a heavy handed
control of the Haitian migrant labor’ while ‘unify[ing] and control[ing] the Dominican
populace, precisely through the control of culture’ (Matibag, 2003, p. 145). In the end,
the Parsley Massacre did not reduce the size of the Haitian population in the
Dominican Republic because of Trujillo’s importation of Haitian labour (p. 173).
What it did achieve, however, was ‘state formation’ and ‘national boundaries’ (p.
173), making it easier for the trujillato to justify its ‘anti-Haitianism and official state
racism’ (p. 174) and extend its influence to areas where its presence had traditionally
been weak (p. 178).
Because of the impossibility of blanqueamiento on the physical front, the cultural
front became an important one for the Dominican dictator, with Trujillo extirpating
African cultural elements from Dominican culture and rewriting Dominican identity
to convince the population that they were white. Trujillo banned voodoo and imposed
strict penalties on anyone involved in it in any way (Deive, 1992, in Martínez, 2003,
p. 4). He also rid the traditional merengue dance of the African hand drum, ‘where it
had always been an essential instrument’, changing the genealogy of the dance in
spite of its resemblance to Haiti’s méringue (Winn, 1998, p. 305). These alterations,
according to Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo, had a positive effect on the dance, with
respectable Dominicans coming to see it as worthy of being danced after it had been
divested of its blackness:
El merengue se bailaba en los clubs y las casas decentes gracias a él. Que,
antes, había prejuicios, que la gente bien decía que era música de negros e
indios. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 504)
He said they danced the merengue in clubs and decent homes now thanks to
him. Before, there had been prejudices, and respectable people said it was music
for blacks and Indians. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 461)
In Trujillo’s eyes, the whitewashing of Dominican cultural practices and artefacts
aligned the country with Europe and, by implication, shifted its identity as far away as
possible from Haiti’s.
70
Dominican identity was perhaps the most important front for Trujillo in his whitening
of the country, with the dictator manipulating it at an official level in an absurd
attempt to disidentify Dominicans from their own Africanness. Trujillo did so by
redefining mulatos and blacks as indios in reference to the island’s original
inhabitants, the Tainos, whom the Spanish invaders had wiped out. Trujillo
recognised that Dominicans’ traditional identification with the Tainos suited his
purpose of promoting a racial identity that was neither black (with physical whiteness
being an impossibility) nor white, but somewhere in between (Torres-Saillant, 1998,
p. 7). The term indio was used on the national identity cards of mulatos and blacks for
the thirty-year duration of the regime and for some time afterwards too. Dominicans
came to see indio as a reference to a specific skin colour rather than to a race, with the
term serving the same descriptive function as mulato while crucially divesting the
individual of his or her racial identification with black Africa. The claim by the
Dominican historian and emeritus professor Carlos Dobal that ‘our slaves were not
blacks from Sub-Saharan Africa as in Haiti. They were Berbers from North Africa’
[who are Caucasoid] (Winn, 2006, p. 305) exemplifies official attempts to recognise
the existence of a darker skin colour (i.e., one that was not white) in the Dominican
Republic but denying it as being the result of black Africanness. Dominicans were
unprepared, says Torres-Saillant (1998) ‘to fend off’ Trujillo’s racism because of their
‘deracialized consciousness’ (p. 6), with the dictator driving a wedge between
Dominicans and their blackness by means of a racially, historically and culturally
counterfeited nationalism that operated in opposition to everything black.
Those Dominicans most damaged by the country’s opposition to everything Haitian,
says Winn (2006), were ‘darker mulattos and Dominican blacks’ (p. 306), who
encountered racism (and still do) in their daily lives. The racism stemmed from the
country’s anti-Haitian/black nationalism and the fact that ‘despite their public identity
as ‘dark Indians’, in private other Dominicans regard them as ‘black’’ (p. 306), a label
which, says Tatika, a Dominican interviewed by Winn (2006), is ‘‘never meant as a
compliment’’ (p. 306). In La fiesta del chivo, Pedro Livio, one of the conspirators in
the assassination of Trujillo, becomes infuriated every time his co-conspirator
Huascar Tejeda jestingly calls him negro (black). Although both men are good
friends, the word negro reminds Livio of the racism he encountered in the United
States army, and causes him to have a visceral reaction:
71
Pero, ese humor que lo llevaba a encenderse como una antorcha cuando
alguien le decía Negro y a dar puñetazos por cualquier motivo, frenó sus
ascensos en el Ejército, pese a su excelente hoja de servicios. (Vargas Llosa,
2000, p. 307)
But the temper that made him blaze like a torch when somebody called him
Nigger, and lash out with his fists for any reason at all, put a brake on his
promotions in the Army despite his excellent record. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p.
280)
Ultimately, Livio’s anger causes him to be expelled from the Dominican army after he
pulls a revolver on a general who admonished him for fraternising with troops. While
racism does not impede Livio from entering an institution of power in the Dominican
Republic and making it as a capitán there, the racism he encounters in Dominican
society ultimately leads him to sabotage his own career. Livio’s case typifies the
subtlety of Dominican racism and its self-censuring effect on the victim, who tends
not to see racism but rather his own actions as the source of his psychic pain, with
Livio knowing that ‘debido a las antipatías que su cáracter le granjeaba, nunca
progresaría en el escalafón’ (p. 307). 31
Today, people in the Dominican Republic are categorised ‘by phenotypes’, says
Stinchcomb (2003), which is how ‘racist rhetoric manifests itself in Dominican
society’ (p. 5). European traits are considered the benchmark of beauty and ‘the
phenotypic opposite of these traits—thick lips, kinky and/or curly hair, and darkercolored skin—are described as ordinarios (ordinary), malos (bad), or haitianos
(Haitian)’ (p. 5). In this way, phenotypes are judged in the Dominican Republic in
moral terms, with black physical characteristics clearly designated as bad. It is
common practice for Dominican women to straighten their hair, with one Dominican
commenting that ‘it is expensive […] that’s how you see the gap between rich and
poor’ (Winn, 2006, p. 300). The description of Rosalía Perdomo, the daughter of a
31
‘his temper had made him so many enemies, he would never move up through the ranks’ (Vargas
Llosa, 2002, p. 280).
72
wealthy and powerful Dominican family in La fiesta del chivo exemplifies both the
high status and positive moral overtones ascribed to those with white features in the
Dominican Republic:
…una de las muchachas más bellas de la sociedad, hija de un coronel del
Ejército. La radiante Rosalía Perdomo, de largos cabellos rubios, ojos celestes,
piel traslucida, que hace de Virgen María en las representaciones de la Pasión,
derramando lágrimas como una genuina Dolorosa cuando su Hijo expira.
(Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 135)
…one of the most beautiful girls in Dominican society, the daughter of an Army
colonel. The radiant Rosalía Perdomo, with the long blond hair, sky-blue eyes,
translucent skin, who plays the part of the Virgin Mary in Passion plays,
shedding tears like a genuine Mater Dolorosa when her Son expires. (Vargas
Llosa, 2002, p. 118)
In bracketing Rosalía’s appearance (attractiveness and desirability) with both her
place in Dominican society (‘the daughter of an Army colonel’) and her virtuousness
(picked to play the Virgin Mary), Mario Vargas Llosa attempts to signal the clear
correlation between physical appearance and power (with those in power being
morally superior) in the Dominican Republic.
The desirability of whiteness is also shown in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,
when Junot Díaz (2007) describes Jack Pujols, a white Dominican student with whom
Beli, one of the book’s female protagonists, is in love:
Jack Pujols of course: the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty
slender melnibonian of pure European stock whose cheeks looked like they’d
been knapped by a master and whose skin was unflawed by scar, mole, blemish,
or hair, his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced salchicha. (p. 89)
In the novel, Díaz plays with racial categories and destabilises them, taking implicit
assumptions about whiteness and power and commenting on them. Unlike in La fiesta
del chivo, where Vargas Llosa largely leaves implicit the relationship between race
73
and power, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz intervenes to prevent said
relationship from remaining so, as illustrated by his qualification of ‘handsomest’
with ‘whitest’ in his description of Jack Pujols. Díaz states that Jack is the most
attractive pupil in Beli’s school because of his whiteness, an assertion that appears to
be reinforced immediately afterwards by the author’s relatively detailed description of
Pujol’s allegedly perfect (white) physical appearance. Unsurprisingly, Pujol’s mother
is correspondingly perfect (namely, attractive and powerful), having been,
A former beauty queen of Venezuelan proportions, now active in the Church, a
kisser of cardinal rings and a socorro of orphans. (Díaz, 2007, p. 89)
In his description of Pujol’s mother, Díaz attempts to show how whiteness equates to
attractiveness and how both these attributes (whiteness and attractiveness) confer
power, a fact demonstrated by the mother’s relationship with the country’s higher
clergy.
In a racialised society like the Dominican Republic, the correlation between race,
power and privilege makes the dominant group acutely aware of its own appearance,
something Díaz (2007) shows through Jack Pujols:
He had a single worry line creasing his high forehead (his ‘part’, as it became
known) and eyes of the deepest cerulean. The Eyes of Atlantis (Once Beli had
overheard him bragging to one of his many female admirers: Oh, these ol’
things? I inherited them from my German abuela.). (Díaz, 2007, p. 91)
When Jack mentions his German grandmother, he shows himself to be highly
conscious of his physical capital. The fact that he is highly desired confirms its value.
When a member of the dominant group (like Jack) threatens to dilute its power by
fraternising with the other, the group threatens, in turn, to alienate that person from
the privileges it provides him/her. This happens after Jack Pujols and Beli, who is
mulata, are discovered in a closet ‘in flagrante delicto’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 101) and Jack
loses his opportunity to marry his fiancé due to the fact that ‘her family [are] very
particular about their Christian reputation’ (p. 101). While, as Díaz describes it, Jack
74
engaged in behavior that was typical of males belonging to his social class, 32 unlike
them, he made the mistake of getting caught, something that made him an outcast in
his community’s eyes. The decision of Jack’s father to send him away to military
school in Puerto Rico is an example of how in-group pressure perpetuates racism to
the point where people who may not have otherwise been racist become so out of fear
of being rejected by their own community and losing the advantages it affords them.
In the Dominican Republic, colourism in terms of spousal choice is still prevalent, as
shown in Winn’s (2006) study of Latin-American society, in which two Dominicans,
one female and the other male, comment on the implications of marrying a black
person:
‘If you have a family member who marries a black, you have to worry about
your social standing’, María Consuelo explained, and ‘parents are afraid that a
little black baby will be born’. In white families, Carlos claimed, children who
married blacks ‘could be disinherited’. (p. 301)
The negative overtones of blackness, though, can be ameliorated if the black person
has some status in his community, with a respected profession, money, etc., providing
such status. The following comment from a woman whose black husband was only
accepted by her father once he was a doctor highlights this fact: ‘Now he was no
longer “that black man”, but “Enrique, my daughter’s husband”, she said’ (p. 301).
Foundations of apartheid
Unlike in the previous section, in which I took a broader view of Spanish colonisation
across Latin America in order to understand the foundations of the trujillato, in this
section I will look at Southern Africa more narrowly, given the divergent colonisation
patterns across the African continent, in order to understand the conditions that led to
the creation of apartheid in South Africa. To this end, I will briefly look at how the
colonisation of South Africa by two European powers, namely the Dutch and the
32
‘The fucking of poor prietas was considered standard operating procedure for elites just as long as it
was kept on the do-lo, what is elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 100).
75
British, shaped the racial landscape of South Africa and led to the emergence of a
settler colony that was unique in the African context. This uniqueness stemmed from
the fact that over most of its history, two white groups, namely Afrikaners
(descendants of primarily Dutch settlers) and white English speakers, vied for
political control over what is now modern-day South Africa. The tension between the
two groups is shown in the novels The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain, and is
an example of how nationalism is a force for divisions and othering, even when there
exist racial and cultural similarities among those it would separate into an in and out
group. Indeed, Afrikaners and white English-speaking South Africans have more to
unite them that not: they are both of Western European stock and have a settler
history and Protestant work ethic. In the case of Afrikaners and English speakers, and
that of Dominicans and Haitians, negative rhetoric concerning the other became
racialised, a phenomenon discussed in this chapter. In South Africa, the black–white
struggle would remain marginal until the final third of the twentieth century, when
black resistance would begin to pose a serious threat to Afrikaner hegemony.
The white stake in South Africa stretches back over three hundred years, to when the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) established the Cape of Good Hope as a
refreshment post in 1652 for its ships travelling between the Netherlands and the
Dutch East Indies. Unlike other European colonisers in Africa, the Dutch in the Cape,
along with a handful of French Huguenot and German settlers, gradually developed
into a separate nation (Afrikaners) with a separate language (Afrikaans), its links
definitively broken with the Netherlands after the British annexation of the Cape in
1806. Afrikaners, who today constitute some sixty per cent of South Africa’s white
minority of 4.5 million 33 (the remainder mostly being English-speakers), came to
view themselves as a white ethnic group whose homeland was Africa rather than as
colonisers. They argued that they themselves had been a colonised people (Giliomee,
2003, p. 14), losing their independence to the British in the devastating Anglo-Boer
War of 1899–1902, in which thousands of Afrikaner-Boer women and children died
in British concentration camps due to their deplorable conditions. After the Anglo–
Boer War, most Afrikaners still resided in rural areas and were considered poor
whites, eking a living off the land or in semi- or unskilled trades. The Depression,
33
4,586,838 whites in South Africa, amounting to 8.9% of the country’s population (Stats, 2011).
76
however, prompted a mass Afrikaner exodus to the cities, which at the time were
predominately English speaking. There, Afrikaners found themselves second-class
citizens, economically and culturally subordinate to the English. The coming to power
in 1948 of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party led by Daniel François Malan
signalled, in the eyes of Afrikaners, the restoration of their independence from the
British and the guarantee of their status as rightful owners of South Africa. When
Malan said in his celebratory speech that, ‘Today South Africa belongs to us once
more. South Africa is our own for the first time since Union, and may God grant that
it will always remain our own’, he was not referring to the struggle between blacks
and whites but to that between Afrikaner and English (Giliomee, 2003, p. 487).
In 1950, the National Party began implementing apartheid, which initially acted as an
affirmative action scheme for Afrikaners, most of whom economically were starting
from a much lower baseline than their English-speaking counterparts. Apartheid
aimed to create, in the words of Louw (2004), ‘spaces for Afrikaner ‘own ness’,
particularly in relation to Anglos’ and, ultimately, teach Afrikaners ‘how to get their
hands on the levers of power’ by ‘reranking Afrikaners upward within racial
capitalism’ (p. 57). The system aided Afrikaners in their economic rivalry with the
English by ‘pulling poor, rural farmers into civil service jobs and giving them an
advantage in competing with the urban, wealthy, English-speaking Whites’ (Frueh,
2003, p. 125). This advantage came from excluding both white English speakers and
blacks. White English speakers were ‘sidelined or retired’ from ‘spheres such as the
army, military intelligence, the South African Railways and Harbours, broadcasting,
African administration, and the economic bureaucracy’ (Beinart, 2001, p. 148). Job
reservation laws stipulating, ‘no black could advance above a white in the same
occupation area’ (Marger, 2009, p. 385), removed blacks as potential competitors,
especially in the mines. In subsequent decades, Afrikaner–English rivalries
diminished somewhat, 34 and the two groups converged economically and politically
to a degree, prompted through ‘the well-rehearsed technique of heightened racial
domination’ (Marx, 1998, p. 108) resulting from existential fears revolving around the
34
Eades (1999) states that, ‘before 1948 most of the Afrikaners’ focus was on distinguishing
themselves from the English-speakers. After 1948, however, the focus changed to race as apartheid
based itself on racial distinctions and had to be made legitimate’ (p. 35).
77
spectre of communism and the so-called swart gevaar (black threat). The exodus and
in some cases murder of white settlers in several African countries in the postindependence period of the late 1950s and 1960 (the year the greatest number of
African states became independent), most notably in the Congo, struck fear in the
hearts of many white South Africans. This was especially the case for Afrikaners,
who, unlike many of their English-speaking counterparts, had no European
motherland to which to flee (Snyder, 2003, p. 135).
Several critical junctures in the 1960s made white South Africans skittishly aware of
the threats to and limitations of white hegemony in Africa. They included British
Prime Minister Harold McMillan’s 1960 Wind of Change speech (3 February, 1960),
the Sharpeville Massacre (21 March, 1960), an attempt on President Hendrik
Verwoerd’s life (April 9, 1960) and the Congo crisis (30 June 1960–25 November
1965). Prime Minister MacMillan’s speech crystallised white fears, with the British
leader warning of the unstoppable ‘winds of change’ (referring here to Black
Nationalism and decolonisation) sweeping through Africa, of which Britain, along
with South Africa, had a duty to take account. White South Africa responded with
hysteria to MacMillan’s frank assessment of the future of white rule in Africa, fearing
that Britain would pull the rug from underneath the country after just twelve years of
Nationalist Afrikaner rule by supporting black nationalists, such as the likes of the
ANC and PAC. 35 The Afrikaans Cape Town daily Die Burger reported, panicked,
that, ‘“Pax Britannica still forms a wall between us and the outside world”, “evidence
that everywhere in Africa the West was abandoning the White man for its own selfish
interests”’ (as cited in Hyman, 2003, p. 299). For the apartheid government under
Hendrik Verwoerd, MacMillan’s speech ‘heralded the parting of the ways between
South Africa and the West over South Africa’s race policies’ (Botha, 2008, p. 71).
Unsurprisingly, black nationalists were ‘encouraged by Macmillan’s ‘morale
booster’’, with Nelson Mandela calling it ‘‘a terrific speech’’ (Hyman, 2003, p. 299).
In the knowledge that Britain would no longer support South Africa, Verwoerd held
an all-white referendum in 1960 on whether the country should become a republic,
with a slim majority voting in favour of it. In 1961, the country was declared a
35
Pan Africanist Congress.
78
republic, a move seen by Afrikaners as obliterating ‘the last symbolic vestiges of
British hegemony’ (Frederickson, 1981, p. 138).
The other major event that made the apartheid government harden its stance towards
the country’s black majority was the Congo Crisis. In 1960, white South Africans
observed with dismay the ‘convoys of pathetic, mainly Belgian refugees’ (Griffiths,
1995, p. 62) fleeing the Congo, an exodus precipitated by the munity of black soldiers
against their white officers, widespread looting and the murder of whites by ‘rioting
Congolese soldiers’ soon after independence (Waters, 2009, p. 25). On the eve of
independence, reports and rumours circulated in the Belgian Congo of African men
bragging that white women ‘will be ours’ and that ‘it would no longer be a crime for
Africans to rape white women’ (Lewiston, 1960). In several cities, ‘Europeans ha[d]
been visited by Congolese who explained politely that the house would be theirs after
June 30—and could they look inside please?’ (ibid.). These reports and occurrences
panicked whites in South Africa (as well as in the southern states of the United States)
and strengthened the resolve of segregationists there (as well as in the U.S.)
(Borstelmann, 2001, p. 130). In response to the mutiny in its former colony, Belgium
sent 20,000 troops to its Congolese military bases to restore law and order and protect
whites, but the widespread violence led to ‘the Belgian government decid[ing] to send
in air-borne troops in order to protect and evacuate the white population’ (Mommen,
1994, p. 113). White South Africans saw the fate of whites in the Congo ‘as living
proof that their anxieties were well founded and vowed never to let it happen to them’
(Barber and Barratt, 1990, p. 67).
The Verwoerd government responded to the threat of decolonisation through a
‘counterfeit policy of independent African homelands’ (SADET, 2004, p. 37),
otherwise known as Bantustans, covering just thirteen per cent of the surface area of
South Africa and designed to eventually house most of the country’s black
population, comprising almost eighty per cent of the nation’s total (Williams, 2010, p.
6). By forcibly relocating blacks to their respective Bantustans, irrespective of
whether they were born in those areas and stripping them of their South-African
citizenship (Black Homeland Citizenship Act of 1970), the apartheid government
hoped eventually to give South Africa a white majority (Frankental and Sichone,
2005, p. 276) and white rule international legitimacy (Bender, 1985, p. 69). The
79
white-minority government granted several of the Bantustans nominal independence,
but international recognition of the fractured states never ensued. In light of the
homeland policy, it is unsurprising that some black nationalist movements in South
Africa viewed white South Africans, like other Europeans in Africa, as settlers (with
this word having connotations of foreignness and otherness) rather than as a white
ethnic group whose home was Africa. During the struggle era, for example, the
Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist
Congress (PAC), the second largest liberation movement in South Africa during the
apartheid era after the African National Congress (ANC), had as its rallying cry, ‘One
Settler one Bullet’ (Hochschild, 1999, p. 206). Anti-settler sentiment and violence,
like that against the European settlers of Algeria, the so-called pieds-noirs, in the
early 1960s, influenced the way in which the author of Rumours of Rain, André
Brink, began to view apartheid while living in Paris (Elnadi and Rifaat, 1993, p. 5–6).
Albert Camus, the French author who wrote on the pieds-noirs, significantly impacted
Brink’s thinking on the situation of whites in South Africa and the author’s death
greatly affected Brink (p. 5).
By virtue of their numerical majority in the white minority population, Afrikaners
were able to monopolise control of the whites-only democratic political system,
implementing apartheid to safeguard their culture and race from potential
contamination by the far more numerous black population (Marger, 2009, p. 386).
While the National Party was largely unconcerned with the biology of race (Beinart,
2001, p. 147), it did tap into the white electorate’s views that blacks were uncivilised
and dangerous, and their fear that miscegenation would lead to the demise of volk and
fatherland (Bush, 2004, p. 166). In order to combat such contamination, the National
Party envisaged a ‘watertight’ system to determine race rather than simply relying on
‘physical appearance (phenotype) and social identification’ (Cohen, 1988, p. 21). To
that end, it established the Population Registration Act (1950), dividing the SouthAfrican population into ‘Whites, coloreds, and Africans—and subdivided ethnological
groups of coloreds and Africans’ (Giliomee, 2003, p. 503). 36 In addition, ‘race
36
Predictably, this had tragic consequences, highlighted by the 1966 case of the eleven-year-old girl
Sandra Laing, who was ‘to be “Coloured” despite the fact that her siblings as well as her parents were
all classified as “white”’ (Cohen, 1988, p. 11).
80
classification boards’ (Fluehr-Lobban, 2006, p. 266) were set up, transforming
apartheid ‘from a loose body of segregation measures into a system, imposing a tight
racial grid’ (Giliomee, 2003, p. 503). Ultimately, the Group Areas Act of 1950
assigned groups to certain residential areas, physically separating the South-African
population in terms of race. Nationalist leaders often portrayed the tenets of apartheid
as unselfish and liberating, emphasising in later years the creation of independent
black homelands as a symbol of communality and conviviality, says Beinart (2001).
Historical and party documents show quite clearly, however, that the ‘irreducible
aims’ of apartheid were the ‘‘maintenance and protection’ of Afrikanerdom, white
power, and the white race’ (p. 147).
Mda (1995) shows in Ways of Dying the inconvenience and suffering that racial
segregation in South Africa actually caused the black population when he explains
how, when Toloki first went to live in the city, before apartheid laws had been
repealed, and ‘got part-time jobs loading ships’, ‘he slept at the docklands, or on a
bench at the railway station. He washed himself in public toilets’ because ‘in those
days, they did not allow people of his colour onto any of the beaches of the city, so he
could not carry out his ablutions there, as he does today’ (p. 120). The fact that Toloki
had to use public toilets because he was disallowed from setting foot on a city beach
reveals how apartheid’s striving for ‘separate development’ along racial lines made
white South Africa unsympathetic to the existing and potential hardships of blacks.
Indeed, it is bad enough that Toloki has to use the beach to carry out his ablutions.
That he was barred from doing so in the past because of the colour of his skin, and
forced into public toilets as a result, is testament to apartheid’s callousness.
During the apartheid era, the allocation of a race (White, Black, Indian or Coloured)
to South Africans based on their physical appearance, and ‘the acceptance of cultural
and racial identities […] obviously not negotiable’ bound white South-African writers
to whiteness and subverted their attempts to describe blackness (Kossew, 1996, p. 2).
The author of The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer, accounts for this predicament
when she says, ‘The white writer […] is cut off by enforced privilege from the greater
part of the society in which he lives […]’: ‘As a white man […] the one thing he
cannot experience is blackness’ (as cited in Kossew, 1996, p. 17). Consequently,
Gordimer viewed the white writer as a ‘cultural worker’, whose job it was ‘to raise the
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consciousness of white people, who unlike himself have not woken up yet’ (as cited
in Kossew, 1996, p. 21).
For his part, André Brink, author of Rumours of Rain, primarily focused on an
Afrikaans readership (initially only writing in Afrikaans before he was banned, after
which he began to write simultaneously in Afrikaans and English) and drew Afrikaans
characters out of outrage for what he saw the Nationalist government doing to
Afrikaner identity:
I was furious with the authorities for annexing Afrikaner art, culture and history
to the ideology of apartheid. I wanted to show that Afrikaner culture was bigger
than that, that it had to break free from apartheid, that when apartheid finally
disappeared Afrikaner language and culture would continue. (as cited in Elnadi
and Rifaat, 1993, p. 6)
Brink did so by finding ‘a space for the Afrikaner within Africa’, which he did ‘by
situating the Afrikaner heritage as part of a culture of resistance to colonial authority
(that of the British)’ (Kossew, 1996, p. 109). In doing so, says Kossew (1996), he is
‘separating it from apartheid’ (p. 109) and asserting ‘the most positive and creative
aspects of his heritage, which are involved with that experience of Afrika he shares
with other Africans […]’ (Brink, 1983, as cited in Kossew, 1996, p. 109).
In Ways of Dying, Mda writes more as an artist than an activist. The end of apartheid,
he says, ‘freed the imagination of the artist’, as his or her main goal now is ‘to tell a
story, rather than to propagate a political message’ (as cited in Jacobs and Bell, 2009,
p. 4). Indeed, it was only in the 1990s, says Mda (2005), that blacks actually started
using the novel as an artistic medium, having ‘the freedom, the luxury, to sit down
and write for months on end’ (p. 69). The novel in southern Africa, nevertheless,
remains a genre of the elites, read by a small number of people. Even if he wrote
novels in his native language, Mda (2005) says ‘they would only be confined to an
intellectual readership in educational institutions. Unlike theater, they do not talk
directly to the ordinary people’ (p. 76).
Ironically, in post-apartheid works of literature such as Ways of Dying there is a
82
retreat into the local and the provincial, with Irlam (2004) even claiming that this
literature is reminiscent of the self-referential philosophy of ‘separate development’, a
term that during the apartheid era acted as a switch word for ‘apartheid’ and its
policies of racial segregation (p. 698). Instead of managing to divide the country’s
population, apartheid incited the black population to unite and resist the white
minority regime, ‘this broad coalition of forces...provid[ing] the beam of light raking
through apartheid’s moral darkness (p. 698). According to Irlam (2004), in spite of the
‘Rainbow Nation’ metaphor coined by Desmond Tutu, what the New South Africa,
much like the old, ‘has brought us is a refraction of that light into a rainbow nation not
necessarily united around common objectives and goals but rather refracted into
separate communities grown more insular and often focused on quite divergent
interests’ (p. 698). The grinding poverty of South Africa’s predominantly black
townships and informal settlements, where the majority of the country’s inhabitants
still live, make daily survival the main concern for most South Africans. This socioeconomic reality, coupled with the fact that for Mda (2005) ‘fiction is based on fact’,
with the author striving to create ‘a whole bunch of fictional characters who interact
with that history’ (p. 75), are perhaps the reasons for which post-apartheid works of
literature like Ways of Dying have not taken up grand, nation-unifying themes such as
justice and freedom, which Brink and Gordimer took up in their apartheid era works.
During the apartheid era, on the economic front, Afrikaners were unable to
completely break the white English-speaking population’s monopoly of the private
sector, with ‘English speakers enjoy[ing] greater economic power and higher cultural
status’ (MacDonald, 2006, p. 48). While the National Party made spectacular gains in
reducing income inequality37 between Afrikaners and white English-speakers, it never
managed to bring about economic parity between the two groups, 38 with differences
in class status remaining a feature of the white community throughout the apartheid
era. In fact, during that time, English speakers and Afrikaners remained divided in
almost every sense, constituting,
37
‘In 1948 the average income of Afrikaners in cities was around half that of the English group’
(Banton, 1983, p. 235).
38
‘In 1970 Afrikaner per capita income was 70 per cent of that of the English-speaking population’
(Lester, 1998, p. 110).
83
Largely endogenous communities. Each community had its own schools and
universities, churches, media, and businesses, and most members married their
own kind. Conflicts between the two communities were chronic, occasionally
intense, and the stuff of much of white politics. (MacDonald, 2006, p. 48)
Nevertheless, South Africa remained a bi-cultural state under apartheid, with
Afrikaans 39 and English enjoying equal status as official languages. Marger (2009)
describes the linguistic situation of the time:
Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, traditionally was established through
the state school system, and when Afrikaners dominated South Africa
politically, it was the language of government and politics. But in business and
industry, dominated as they were by the English, the predominant language was
English. The language division, however, transcended politics and commerce.
For Afrikaners, it was a vital component of Afrikaner nationalism. (p. 376)
The sense of superiority felt by white English-speakers, who ‘often made fun of
Afrikaans, “a bastard language”, as they put it, which they and their children resented
having to learn in school’ (Zenker, Kumoll, 2010, p. 48), reflected how cultural and
political differences within the white population were characterised by intracommunal prejudices and conflicts. The Afrikaners begrudged the English-speaking
community’s economic control of the economy, with ‘anti-British sentiment […] a
39
The language spoken by most Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials and white settlers in the
Cape was a western Holland dialect of Dutch, which before being transported to the Cape in the
seventeenth century had undergone significant change in the Netherlands. Whereas this modification
was halted in Holland through language standardisation, in the Cape, linguistic change was able to
continue unimpeded (Ponelis, 1999). Further grammatical simplification occurred because of the fact
that most of the people who used Dutch in the Cape (local Khoe, slaves from west and east Africa and
India and the Dutch East Indies) were not mother-tongue speakers of the language (ibid.). While some
words from the languages spoken by these groups (Portuguese, Malay, etc.) made their way into Cape
Dutch, ‘90–95 % of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin’ (Manus, 2010, p. 128). The
codification of Afrikaans in the latter part of the nineteenth century came to reflect the pronunciation of
the small Dutchified white Afrikaner elite. After the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910,
English and Dutch were made official languages, with Afrikaans added in 1925 (Webb, 2002, p. 75)
when ‘Afrikaner nationalism was making strong political headway’ (Manus, 2011, p. 128).
84
staple of Afrikaner nationalism for many generations’, while English speakers
‘viewed the Afrikaners as parochial and unenlightened’ (Marger, 2009, p. 378). Both
communities devised derogatory labels for the other, including ‘rock spiders’ and
‘hairy backs’ for Afrikaners and ‘rooinekke’ (‘rednecks’) and ‘souties’ for English
speakers (Du Preez, 2003, p. 52). While most English speakers were of British
extraction, smaller groups of Lithuanian Jews, Germans, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks
and Lebanese also became part of the community while retaining their own ethnic
identities. 40 Unlike Afrikaners, white English speakers, as a whole, never came to
form a cohesive ethnic block (Marger, 2009, p. 378). In this sense, whiteness in South
Africa was nuanced, with distinctions made according to whether a person was
Afrikaans or English or indeed Portuguese, whom incidentally Afrikaners looked
down on, considering them ‘racially suspect’ (Grundy, 1973, p. 256). Even the
apartheid government had difficulty in some cases determining who was white,
especially where the Coloured (mixed race) community was concerned.
The Coloureds, who number some four and a half million, 41 largely live in the SouthAfrican provinces of the Western Cape and the Northern Cape, where
demographically they dominate. Although considered a distinct ethnic group (with
varying degrees of Khoe, San, Xhosa, European, Indian and Malay ancestries), they
are the only non-white group in South Africa that shares the same language as the
Afrikaners. Many Afrikaners also share Coloured ancestry, with a high percentage of
white Afrikaans-speaking whites having ‘a smattering of colour, the inevitable result
of a 19th-Century situation in which there were few white women in rural areas and
many black’ (Life, 1960, p. 37). The Coloured population posed the biggest challenge
to apartheid classifiers because of the number of ‘border-line’ cases of whiteness and
because ‘they shared western culture, [and] spoke Afrikaans’ (Giliomee, 2003, p.
503). The main criteria pertaining to racial classification of Coloureds were ‘in terms
of social-standing and white public opinion’ in addition to ‘common-sense
“conventions” of racial difference’ (p. 504). In many ambiguous cases, officials ran
40
A South-African Jew says, ‘we identified ourselves with the white English population yet we thought
of ourselves as being Jewish’ (Chernin, 2007, p. 24).
41
4,539,790 Coloureds in South Africa (Stats 2011).
85
pencils through people’s hair in order to determine the often-hazy racial line between
blacks and Coloureds (Berger, 2009, p. 114), as well as Coloureds and whites.
Such a system led to envy and suspicion, especially given the fact that ‘a third party
could object to a neighbor’s or other’s classification, opening the door to snooping’
(Giliomee, 2003, p. 504). A Coloured person could appeal the decision of the Racial
Classification Board by requesting reclassification as white based on phenotypic
appearance. If the board reclassified a person as white, he or she could enjoy the
privileges of white South Africa, which were nicer neighbourhoods, better schools
and hospitals, all of which would permit ‘a higher standard of living’ (Fluehr-Lobban,
2006, p. 226). Because classification affected every sphere of a person’s life, from
where they went to school, college or university, to with whom they worked,
socialised, had sex and played sport (Giliomee, 200, p. 504), being reclassified as
white often came at a high price, with the individual having to sever contact with their
family and associates (Fluehr-Lobban, 2006, p. 226). This brought about situations in
which ‘cousins and even siblings […] ceased to recognise each other publicly, the
“White”, for fear that his race classification might be brought into question, the
“Coloured” in defence of his own dignity’ (Ardener, 1993, p. 184).
In Ways of Dying, Mda (1995) illustrates the power of whiteness in South Africa
when he explains that when Nefolovhodwe purchased a house ‘in one of the very upmarket suburbs’, ‘he used a white man, whom he had employed as his marketing
manager, to buy the house on his behalf’ because ‘people of his complexion were not
allowed to buy houses in the suburbs in those days’ (p. 125). Even though the white
man is lower in status to Nefolovhodwe in professional and economic terms, he has
more power than Nefolovhodwe. Toloki remarks in awe that when Nefolovhodwe
became rich ‘he was even invited to dinners by white people who held the reins of
government’ (p. 206). Toloki’s amazement could be seen as an indication of the
awareness on the part of the other of the power of whiteness, which is something to
aspire to, not necessarily physically but certainly socially.
The patently obvious socio-economic privilege that the apartheid racial classification
system conferred to whites in South Africa had the effect of making a person’s selfworth, which in most Western societies seems to be based on social status (education,
86
profession and money), equally dependent on race (phenotypes). In The
Conservationist, Mehring’s denigration of an Afrikaner woman by questioning her
race (Gordimer, 1974, p. 264) reflects this notion of self-worth in South Africa, where
the whiter one is the more important and more deserving one is of privilege. In
equating the woman to a Coloured, Mehring, taps into the cultural and class divide in
the white community, revealing how resentments are expressed racially in the SouthAfrican context, even when this would be unexpected. Mehring’s disdainful
comments on the physical appearance, behaviour and attitudes of Afrikaners (p. 261,
p. 264) also reveal the resentment felt by some members of the white Englishspeaking elite at having virtually no political power despite representing the
wealthiest portion of the population. Mehring, as a wealthy, white English-speaking
Johannesburger with remote German-Namibian ancestry, is representative of this
segment of the population, his identity constructed in terms of his opposition to
Afrikaners (in addition to, of course, blacks). Mehring attempts to assert his
superiority by delegitimising Afrikaners as equal whites (to English-speakers), which
he does by questioning their race and the quality of their genetic material, and in
doing so, he makes himself whiter, with whiteness obviously central to apartheid’s
ideology around who holds power. As exemplified by the case of Sandra Laing, a girl
who was declared Coloured by the Race Classification Board and alienated from her
white family, being branded non-white or even suspect in terms of one’s race had
potentially disastrous consequences for the individuals involved (Preece, 2005, p. 69).
This fact is epitomised by Mehring’s comments on the physical appearance of
Afrikaners. While Afrikaners do fit the parameters of beauty in apartheid South
Africa, which is whiteness, the fact that according to Mehring their children grow up
to be ugly adults, probably makes them, in his eyes, second-class whites:
She’s a beautiful child as their children often are—where do they get them
from?—and she’ll grow up—what do they do to them?—the same sort of vacant
turnip as the mother. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 52)
Conversely, one could assume that Mehring thinks his own people, English-speaking
whites, represent the pinnacle of beauty, given the fact that humans believe, says
Raiten-D’Antonio (2010), ‘the further one deviates from the “standard”, the more
87
likely one is to be labelled deviant or ugly’ (p. 84). People who deviate physically
from the norm are ‘regarded with scepticism and more likely to be subject to
prejudice’ (p. 84–85), something to which Mehring’s comments regarding Afrikaners
can attest. That Mehring should resort to using appearance to other Afrikaners reveals
the depth of his antipathy towards this group, given the lack of credibility in othering
a people racially too similar to one’s own to be differentiated on those grounds, and
taps into the idea that inner ugliness (moral deviance) is manifested physically.
Mehring develops this idea further when he drives back to Johannesburg from his
farm and picks up a young Afrikaans woman who requests a lift from him. He doubts
her race and mentally reasons why, according to him, people of her ilk are so
physically strong:
They survive everything. Coloured, or poor-white, whichever she is, their
brothers or fathers take their virginity good and early. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 264)
In apartheid South Africa, Coloured-ness was, as has been mentioned, recognised but
cordoned off from whiteness, hence Mehring’s suspicion regarding his female
passenger’s race. Mehring others Afrikaners by referring to them as survivors, 42
insinuating their potential for moral dissoluteness and their suitability for manual
work as opposed to what he does, which is manage a company and farm.
Likewise, in Rumours of Rain, Mynhardt’s son, Louis, remarks on the resilience of
the inhabitants of Angola, where he has just returned from his service with the SouthAfrican army:
The armies came and went, like bloody swarms of locusts. They [Angolans]
were robbed and beaten and plundered and murdered and raped and bombed
and fucked around. But they remained. (Brink, 1978, p. 361)
42
In reference to blacks on his farm, Mehring thinks to himself, ‘They’re used to anything, they
survive, swallowing dust, walking in droves through rain, and blown, in August, like newspapers to the
shelter of any wall’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 249).
88
Like Mehring, Louis believes blacks can survive anything, suggesting with his
statement that they have an increased capacity for suffering. This quality makes them
more apt for menial work, an idea expounded in all the novels (as discussed in chapter
4).
That blacks (and now this suspiciously Coloured-looking Afrikaans woman) do jobs
that are manual in nature is a fact that in Mehring’s mind would undoubtedly point to
their inferiority, even more so when viewed in light of the labour policies of
apartheid. Mehring explicitly establishes the link between race and low socioeconomic status when he imagines the job that his female passenger does:
…a poor factory girl doing a grade of work reserved for coloureds. (Gordimer,
1974, p. 261)
For a white person (if she is indeed white) to do such a menial job as that of a factory
worker, she would in Mehring’s mind have to be deviant in some way (lazy, stupid,
etc.), given whites’ advantage over Coloureds and blacks. Indeed, the Nationalist
government assisted poor unskilled whites by awarding them state jobs and upscaling
them in the state and private sectors through job reservation. Correspondingly, the fact
that white English-speakers largely controlled the economy, which functioned within
a system heavily rigged in favour of whites, would doubtlessly also confirm
Mehring’s understanding that he and his community are first among supposed equals.
Under apartheid, blacks and Coloureds were only able to carry out menial jobs and
were prohibited from employing or managing whites. In addition to laws prohibiting
blacks from managing or holding positions higher than those held by whites in any
single company or institution, the Bantu Education Act of 1953 led to a situation in
which the potential for blacks to assume such positions was limited on the grounds of
ability in any case. Under the Bantu Education Act, blacks, says Du Preez Bezdrob
(2003), were ‘equipped to be little more than carriers of water and hewers of wood’
(p. 41), with the act aiming ‘to inculcate in blacks a sense of inferiority’ (Nkabinde,
2003, p. 5). The Bantu Education Act’s architect, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd,
stated that ‘Bantu education’s emphasis should be more practical, focusing mainly on
technical skills’ (p. 5), with black schools given a distinct curriculum (from white
89
ones) with a focus on ‘manual labor and vocational training rather than math, science,
or university preparation’ (Gish, 2004, p. 21). The overarching goal of the Bantu
Education Act was to make blacks passive employees with just enough technical
skills to ensure they became ‘useful tools in the technological superstructure’
(Glazebrook, 2004, p. 152).
The subordinate role of the black worker within the dominant group’s socio-economic
system is justified by Mynhardt in Rumours of Rain when he indirectly expresses the
view that whites are the natural proprietors of the South-African economy:
At this stage they’ve simply not developed far enough to handle such
sophisticated forms of Western organisation. A matter of evolution. (Brink,
1978, p. 42)
Here, Mynhardt’s proposition is faulty for several reasons, but mainly because it
assumes that in apartheid South Africa blacks will one day have evolved to the point
where they can manage sophisticated forms of Western organisation, in this case,
trade unions and, eventually, the nation’s economy. Mynhardt fails to mention an
important variable in the case of the evolution of black South Africans, which is
apartheid’s stifling labour laws that prohibit blacks from acquiring the skills necessary
‘to handle such sophisticated forms of Western organisation’. What is more, by
associating trade unions with ‘Western’ (i.e., white) forms of organisation, Mynhardt
excludes blacks on the basis of their race and culture because apartheid largely kept
blacks separate from whites and Western culture and know-how, rendering their
integration into important roles in the South-African economy illusory. In this sense,
Mynhardt’s reasoning is paradoxical and in reality a ploy to protect white interest well
into the future.
The nature of the relationship between race and power in the post-colonial context, as
demonstrated by the novels and the history of the trujillato and apartheid, is
characterised by an excessive preoccupation on the part of the dominant group with
the maintenance of social, cultural and corporeal boundaries. The dominant group’s
desire for complete control of the nation leads to the progressive strengthening of
those boundaries (place [in society]) and, ultimately, the aggressive affirmation of the
90
nation’s physical borders (space), as demonstrated in the following chapter, ‘Deviant
Bonds: Representing Place and Space’.
91
Chapter 3
Deviant Bonds: Representing Place and Space
The settler, says Fanon (1963), is cognisant of the fact that he is the creator of history;
that he is the beginning and ‘the unceasing cause’ and that if he should leave,
everything would cease and all would be ‘lost’ (p. 51). Predictably, dominant
characters in the novels under examination make numerous references to the
superiority of white/Western civilisation and the inability or unsuitability of the black
other to partake in or contribute to that civilisation lest it collapse. The novels place
characters in physical locations that are bounded, spaces with margins that are clearly
demarcated and defended. In such spaces, characters’ place is also delineated through
the drawing of corporeal boundaries in a way that attempts to stabilise the inherently
unstable nature of social boundaries. Making political and social control contingent on
the corporeal binds members of the dominant group together in a race-based affinity
and shackles those of the oppressed group, namely, the other, to a place (position) of
subservience.
This chapter divides borders into social, physical and national borders, including socalled cultural borders. Physical borders include geographical features, such as
mountains and bodies of water, which in some cases are transformed into national
borders; and cultural borders refer to linguistic and/or ethnic and/or religious entities
that, together with national and physical boundaries, form an interlocking chain in
which each part is reliant on the other. Indeed, cultural borders, as reflected by ethnic
and/or racial groups grounded in a particular physical space, can come to define
national borders. Similarly, national borders can become cultural borders, with this
having happened in Africa, where European powers drew up the continent’s national
borders to reflect their own territorial claims and economic interests rather than the
ethnic affinities of indigenous peoples. In post-independence Africa, colonial borders
have led to the formation of new (albeit initially imposed) national identities and
cultures.
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Affirming social boundaries
These places and spaces, although bounded, cannot be defended or conquered due to
the dynamic nature of their limits. This predicament is evident in La fiesta del chivo in
the fictional Trujillo’s construction of artificial boundaries between Dominicanness
and blackness (Haitianness), where, racially, Dominicans change (become white) but
Haitians stay fixed (remain black). The absurdity of this situation lies in the fact that
such parameters appear arbitrary. Indeed, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo should sit outside
the margins that he himself has constructed, given that his mother was the illegitimate
daughter of Haitian immigrants to the Dominican Republic; instead, he thinks of
himself as sitting squarely inside whiteness, which he does after literally covering up
his blackness by powdering his face. 43 The fact that Trujillo is mulato (as are the
majority of Dominicans) explains the leader’s focus on cultural prerogatives over race
in his characterisation of the nation and self. As Trujillo’s own identity and that of his
nation in the novel attest, boundaries are vulnerable because there is nothing uniform
to sustain them (class, culture, geography, appearance); they tend to shift when they
impinge on the idealised image the subject holds of him-/herself or his/her nation.
In Vázquez Montalbán’s novel, Galíndez, Jesús de Galíndez, a Basque activist, is
kidnapped and taken to the Dominican Republic by secret agents at the behest of
Trujillo, who visits the dissident in jail, where he berates him for having tarnished his
noble lineage in a recently published thesis:
He de decirle que nací honrado, nieto de un militar español y entroncado con
un marqués de Francia. Y que he leído que usted sostiene lo que dicen mis
43
‘Cuando estuvo peinado y hubo retocado los extremos del bigotillo semimosca que llevaba hacía
veinte años, se talqueó la cara con prolijidad, hasta disimular bajo una delicadísima nube blanquecina
aquella morenez de sus maternos ascendientes, los negros haitianos, que siempre había despreciado en
las pieles ajenas y en la suya propia” (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 38); ‘When his hair was combed and he
had touched up the ends of the thin brush mustache he had worn for twenty years, he powdered his face
generously until he had hidden under a delicate whitish cloud the dark tinge of the Haitian blacks who
were his maternal ancestors, something he had always despised on other people’s skin, and on his own’
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 29).
93
enemigos, que mi abuelo fue un policía español y mi madre oriunda de
haitianos. No tengo por qué pleitear sobre mis orígenes con un mal nacido
como usted pero ya empezamos bien, porque usted me ofende desde mis raíces.
Sólo por esto ya merecería que le colgara por los cojones hasta que le saliera
por ahí el buche. ¿Qué le he hecho ya para tanto odio? (Vázquez Montalbán,
2000, p. 244)
Let me tell you, I was born of honorable stock, the grandson of a Spanish
military man and related to a French marquis. But I’ve read that you side with
everything my enemies say, that my grandfather was a Spanish policeman and
my mother a native of Haiti. I don’t have to defend my ancestry to someone
with as humble origins as yours but this is a good place to begin, since you have
attacked my background. For that alone you deserve to be hanged by your balls
until your belly’s pulled out of them. What did I do to you to deserve so much
hate? (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 208)
Trujillo’s outburst is an example of the futility of defending social boundaries, given
the fact that identities (which are elastically bounded) are constantly reconfigured,
thus making them indefensible. The indefensibility of Trujillo’s family’s whiteness in
the context of his discussion with Galíndez is due to the relational nature of social
boundaries, something demonstrated here by the fact that separate groups invariably
view the same group differently depending on their relationship (geographical,
historical, etc.) to it. For example, Jesús de Galíndez, who was a European Caucasian,
would have viewed the racial appearance of Dominicans differently than would have
Trujillo and Dominicans themselves. This difference in perception is attributable to
the fact that the limits (parameters) of whiteness in Spain and Europe differ from
those in the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean.
In an attempt to spare his own life, Galíndez draws on Trujillo’s strength (or, at least,
what that dictator perceives as such), which is his ability to defend the Dominican
Republic against savages, mostly Haitians and, to a lesser extent, Cubans, who tried to
foist communism onto their Dominican neighbours:
94
Y en los aspectos políticos es posible comprender que usted en gran parte se ha
visto obligado a ser duro, no es fácil gobernar a un pueblo subdesarrollado,
con una tradición belicosa, asediado por los otros pueblos del Caribe, también
por los haitianos. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 244)
And as far as political aspects, it’s understandable that you felt yourself obliged
to be tough for the most part, it’s not easy to govern an underdeveloped people,
with a tradition of aggression, under siege by the other Caribbean peoples,
especially the Haitians. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 209)
Trujillo’s obsession with appearance, including his own and his nation’s (i.e., how the
Dominican Republic would be viewed by Europe and the United States), stems from
his inferiority complex and resulting narcissism. Trujillo projects his idealised sense
of self onto the nation, which he will do anything to portray as strong. In order to do
so, he belittles and victimises others.
We see similar psychic trauma (confusion, alienation, etc.) expressed in The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which Beli’s children find themselves stuck in the
proverbial no-man’s land of the migrant, struggling to fit into America while expected
to live up to a somewhat mythologised image of Dominicanness. Not fitting into the
limitations of the prevailing cultural model gives rise to feelings of alienation,
something Oscar experiences:
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart
bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mama mia! Like having
bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. (p. 22)
Díaz (2007) shows one component of the so-called double bind of many migrants,
with Oscar identified as an other by a member of the Dominican-American
community:
That Sunday he went to Chucho’s and had the barber shave his Puerto Rican
’fro off (Wait a minute, Chucho’s partner said. You’re Dominican?). (p. 30)
95
The barber is surprised to learn that Oscar is Dominican in light of his ’fro, slang for
Afro, a hairstyle typically associated with African-Americans. In this sense, we can
see the barber’s surprise as a reflection of how individuals’ responses are defined by
the limits of the social archetypes (in this case, those of male Dominicanness in the
United States) that shape their worldview. Identity, determined as it is through these
archetypes, is therefore fundamentally relational and elastic.
The second component of this double bind is shown when Oscar enters college, where
he is neither Dominican enough for American-Dominicans nor white enough for
mainstream (white) Americans:
There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of
everything, completely on his fucking own, and with it an optimism that here
among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That
alas, didn’t happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and
treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak
and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And
he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy.
(Díaz, 2007, p. 49)
The social interaction in the multi-cultural and multi-racial university environment in
which Oscar finds himself exposes how boundaries are often as much determined by
groups themselves as by those with whom they come in contact, explaining their
relationality. Certainly, the boundaries of Dominicanness in this case are constructed
to a large degree in opposition to everything white; that is, white (Anglo) American.
Although Oscar is Dominican, his contemporaries situate him outside the confines of
Dominicanness as per its construction in the United States due to his behaviour, which
we can assume is too white for them. Similarly, Oscar’s white contemporaries reject
him, though not because of his behaviour but because of his physical appearance.
Accepted by neither group, Oscar finds himself in a twilight zone, where he is neither
American nor Dominican.
In the South-African milieu, social boundaries are far less malleable and fluid, though
from time to time we glimpse in The Conservationist cracks in the edifice of the
96
country’s ideology of white supremacy. The inflexibility of social boundries during
the apartheid era was due to the enormous power bestowed on whites politically and
economically relative to the size of their population. Apartheid established a master–
servant relationship in which ‘the South African white workers were, literally, masters
in their own homes, where they would be called baas by black people in their employ’
(Krikler, 2009, p. 137). Mehring’s black employees calling him ‘Master’ reflect this
situation in The Conservationist, in which the word baas is used several times:
Ye-e-es Master—the herdsman says, long-drawn-out in sympathy for the
responsibility which is no longer his. —Ye-e-es ... is much better (Gordimer,
1974, p. 16).
‘Excuse, my master’ (p. 18).
‘The master tell you already. Then they ask me, who is find him? And I bring
Solomon and they ask him, same, same, you know who is this man? Solomon
he say, no, I can’t know. I give them that things in the kitchen, I tell them if you
want you can phone master—(Mehring nods in approval towards his boots)—
you can phone master in town’ (p. 26).
‘I think I’m never see you, my young baas—he’s very very good, this young
baas, you know?’ (p. 143).
Throughout The Conservationist, Mehring reinforces the paternal boundaries between
blacks and whites by using the word ‘boy’:
‘None of my boys knows who it is’. (Brink, 1978, p. 17)
‘I don’t want my boys handling someone who’s been murdered’. (p. 18)
‘You just tell my boy, whenever it suits you’. (p. 54)
‘Oh that boy of yours’. (p. 54)
‘My boys know I’ll shoot anyone I find coming near my cattle at night’. (p.
57)
In Rumours of Rain, the use of the possessive ‘my’ by Mynhardt in the phrase ‘I think
I can claim that as an Afrikaner I know my black man’ (Brink, 1978, p. 42) likewise
signals this paternal relationship. Conversely, white workers, on the other hand, never
used the term [baas] to refer to their white superiors because ‘baas was so inescapably
97
a term denoting a member of a master class and race that no white worker could
possible use it’ (p. 137). This is an example of how members of the dominant group
bind themselves together in a race-based affinity. Mehring’s references to his
Afrikaner neighbour De Beer as ‘master’ when informing his black foreman Jacobus
that ‘this master will take the pick-up tomorrow or some other day this week’
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 56) shows the way in which this affinity is reinforced.
One of the corollaries of the master-servant relationship in South Africa was the
superior knowledge and skill set possessed by most whites in relation to blacks, whom
the apartheid government gave an inferior education. While white South Africans
were far wealthier than blacks as a function of their ownership of most of the
country’s productive assets, their sense of superiority and power resided in the
knowledge that they knew more than blacks (it also rationalised their belief that they
were smarter than them). The narrator underlines this point in The Conservationist,
saying Mehring ‘made it his business to pick up a working knowledge of husbandry,
animal and crop, so that he couldn’t easily be hoodwinked by his people there and
could plan farming operations with authority’ (Gordimer, 1978, p. 23). Indeed,
Mehring’s ‘consciousness, social relations are wholly understood in terms of
subject/object mastery. Other people are objects to be possessed by money and by
knowledge’ (Morris, 2003, p. 152), a fact Mehring seems to delight in, thinking to
himself of the ‘special pleasure in having a woman you’ve paid for…You’ve bought
and paid for everything’ (Gordimer, 1978, p. 77–78). Martin Mynhardt from Rumours
of Rain views the world in a similar way, commenting that, ‘that’s all that really
matters, isn’t it...To conclude every transaction as favourably as possible’ (Brink,
1978, p. 388).
The paternal boundaries established by the dominant group between itself and the
other in the South-Africans novels are however, like those in the other novels,
inherently unstable, with Mehring admitting to himself that Jacobus ‘probably knows
more about cattle stock than he does’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 207). On a macro-level,
too, the artificial boundaries of the Bantustans established by the apartheid
government are dynamic, constantly shifting as more land is bought from white
farmers to be incorporated into the homelands. Nevertheless, Mynhardt’s sale of his
mother’s farm in spite of her and her dead husband’s wishes, rather than representing
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‘a ‘symbolic’ repossession’, ‘could well be consolidating the hegemony of the
apartheid state’ (Graham, 2009, p. 60), given the government’s willingness to buy the
farm in order to curb the growth of the neighbouring black township.
Similarly, in Ways of Dying, Mda shows that the apparently seamless social
boundaries established by the apartheid state are, despite the wishes of the architects
of apartheid, not free of fault lines. The murder of a friend/colleague of Toloki by a
white co-worker out of jealousy because he ‘had been a labourer for many years,
serving the company with honesty and dedication, and had recently been tipped for a
more senior position’ (Mda, 1995, p. 65) is an example of the cracks in white
authoritarianism. The white worker had asked the black colleague to fetch a container
of petrol. When he returned with it, he found the white man pinning a fellow black
worker to the ground. The man was struggling to break loose, and kicked over the
container of petrol dousing him with gasoline. The white worker then lit a match and
set him on fire. The man who had been pinned to the ground later told the victim’s
father, ‘the same white man doused me with petrol and set me alight last month. I
sustained burns, but I healed after a while. Although he is a big white baas, he is very
friendly and likes to play with black labourers’ (p. 65). The victim’s father, however,
says that his son had told him that the white man was jealous of him because of a
possible promotion and had ‘conspired with the crony [the man pinned to the ground]
to kill him’ (p. 65). The ‘crony’, nevertheless, is ‘adamant that the white colleague
was merely laughing because it was a game. To him the flames were a joke. When the
man screamed and ran around in pain, he thought he was dancing’ (p. 65).
The murder of Toloki’s friend/colleague shows how idealised (artificial) socioeconomic boundaries cannot be sustained because they do not take individual
differences into account. The different abilities and aspirations of people place undue
stress on said boundaries because it is ultimately people who sustain or disrupt them.
While Mda condemns the seemingly routine violence of white farm bosses towards
their black workers (after all, the ‘crony’ himself had also been set on fire by the
baas), he also reveals how whites themselves, despite being all-powerful during the
apartheid era, had vulnerabilities, on which they were able to act. Because in this
episode the white man’s idealised image of himself, which has been essentialised by
apartheid, is endangered due to his black colleague likely getting ‘a more senior
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position’ in the company, the white character commits a predatory murder to preserve
his own essence. Ironically, in this way, Mda humanises whites, even the cruellest and
most racist of them, by depicting their psychic frailties. Indeed, the dominant group is
not inherently evil, but because of its powerful position in society, it is able to project
its insecurities onto black people with policies that hurt the dignity of the other. In
such a fractured and fractious nation as South Africa, Mda emphasises the point that
despite identity politics, people’s humanity remains, often shining through at the
worst of times. This is revealed by acts of kindness, such as when a resident of
Noria’s settlement is attacked by migrant workers in a train station, leaving him ‘oneeyed’ but ‘still alive’ ‘at least’ because ‘he was fortunate that the white man who
drove the train saved him. Other people are not that fortunate’ (Mda, 1995, p. 97).
Affirming cultural boundaries
In both South Africa and the Dominican Republic, cultural boundaries become
inseparable from physical borders. Geographical locations, according to Radcliffe and
Westwood (1996), serve as ‘symbolic anchors of identity’ (p. 22), as national
identities are commonly linked to ‘‘a sense of belonging to a specific territory’’ (p.
16). According to Duara (1996), the intertwining of location and nationality produces
‘a hardening of boundaries’, and groups with ‘hard boundaries’ tend to,
Privilege their differences, they tend to develop an intolerance and suspicion
toward the adoption of the Other’s practices and strive to distinguish, in some
way or the other, practices that they share. Thus, communities with hard
boundaries will the differences between them. (p. 169)
The besiegement that characters like Mynhardt in Rumours of Rain and Trujillo in La
fiesta del chivo feel transform the South-African and Dominican national spaces in the
novels into highly contested places in which borders and boundaries are seen as of
critical importance to the preservation of group integrity. For the sake of such
preservation, restrictive nationalisms (like that of Afrikanerdom and the trujillato)
100
produce narrowly defined categories that compel people to make judgments on who
belongs in- as well as outside of the nation.44
In The Conservationist, one of the Afrikaans characters, a farmer by the name of De
Beer, affirms his Afrikaner-ness in this way by switching to English when Mehring
begins to address him in Afrikaans. Mehring considers De Beer’s reason for doing
this:
These people seem to ignore his ability to speak Afrikaans. Their insistence on
talking to him in English demarcates the limit of his acceptance. (Gordimer,
1974, p. 48–49)
This slight reflects one of the cornerstones of Afrikaner nationalism (language) and
the residual effects of historical disagreements between the two sections (Afrikaners
and English speakers) of the white community that culminated in the Anglo–Boer
War (1899–1902). The Treaty of Vereeniging, signed by British and Boer belligerents
at the end of the three-year conflict led to the creation in 1910 of the Union of South
Africa, a political entity that represented the union of Afrikaans- and Englishspeaking whites, something that was ultimately easier to achieve politically than
culturally.
According to Buden and Nowotny (2009),
A nation is never something given, persisting over time as an eternal essence
that can be clearly distinguished from other nations, that has stable boundaries,
and so on. It is, rather, to use the well-known phrase coined by Benedict
Anderson (1983), an imagined community, which implies that the ‘unity’ of a
nation has been constructed through certain discursive and literary strategies
(emphasis added). (p. 198–199)
44
In South Africa, for example, mixed marriages were illegal and whites who dared marry outside their
race group became social outcasts in the white community, forced to live with their non-white partners
in non-white areas, invariably in poverty.
101
The Afrikaners, the group whose nationalism would triumph in twentieth century
South Africa as a function of their numerical majority in the dominant white
community, used discursive strategies to empower themselves after their defeat in the
Boer War and their ‘economic disintegration’, both of which had given them an
‘inferiority complex’ (Sachs, 1961, p. 9). After the Anglo–Boer War, Afrikaners
mobilised themselves as a cultural collective, establishing organisations that produced
and promoted Afrikaans literature, music and poetry. This period became known as
the ‘Second Language Movement’ (Marx, 1998, p. 94), during which time Afrikaans
culture reinforced Afrikaners’ cultural boundaries in opposition to everything British.
In 1913, for example, Afrikaners built a monument in remembrance of the Afrikaner
‘women and children who died in concentration camps in [the Boer] war’
(Nationalism, 2001, p. 5). In 1938, they built another in commemoration of the
centenary of the migration of Afrikaners from the British-controlled Cape colony in
the 1830s and 1840s to the interior of South Africa. In Afrikaner tradition, the Great
Trek ‘became interlaced with biblical imagery’, with the Dutch Reformed Church
(NGK) likening it to ‘the biblical exodus of the Hebrews out of Egypt, with Lord
Somerset playing the part of the Pharaoh, and Pretorius the part of Moses, leading his
people into the “promised land”’ (Carr, 2001, p. 53).
During celebrations in 1938 to mark the centenary of the Great Trek, dramatic feats
were recounted, most notably The Battle of Blood River, in which a group of 470
Afrikaner Voortrekkers triumphed over an army of Zulu impis (warriors), a victory
that cemented the idea in the minds of Afrikaners that they were God’s chosen people.
Tales like that of the Battle of Blood River, however, also resonated with the angst of
Afrikaners over their long-term survival as an ethnic group. During the Great
Depression, the so-called poor white problem (which primarily affected Afrikaners),
Afrikaner migration to the predominantly English-speaking cities and increasing
intermarriage between the two groups made Afrikaners question the viability of their
ethnic group into the future (Cox, 2002, p. 201). In response to such fears, Afrikaner
journalists and clerics,
Codified the Afrikaans language and facilitated its dissemination through the
sponsoring of books and stories glorifying Afrikaner history and embellishing
102
on the crucial events in their historical formation—events like the Great Trek,
the Boer War, and the Battle of Blood River. (p. 201)
The conquering and defence of the border (which was constantly shifting) were of
course important elements in all of these tales of struggle, whose religious overtones
gave Afrikaners a sense of moral superiority over the blacks and British. Unlike in the
United States, however, where whites were able to fix borders and achieve, as De
Kiewiet, puts it, ‘closure’, in South Africa, ‘frontier “enemies” remained as
“desperate social problems”’, as symbolised by ‘African and British threats to their
[Afrikaners] culture’ (Bush, 1999, p. 143). The sense of being besieged produced a
restlessness in Afrikaners where ‘‘utopia always lies beyond the next horizon’’ (p.
143).
The persistent thwarting of the Afrikaner aspiration for a homeland by the blacks and
British explains why Afrikaners developed hard cultural and political boundaries and
a general distrust of outsiders, a phenomenon revealed in Rumours of Rain when
Charlie Mofokeng describes the modus operandi of the Voortrekkers:
‘If things got difficult you loaded up your wagon and trekked away. Otherwise
you took aim over the Bible and killed whatever came your way. Out in the
open you formed a laager. And when you wanted more land you took it. With or
without the pretext of a “contract”’. (Brink, 1978, p. 40)
After Afrikaners had secured complete political control of South Africa in 1948,
Afrikaner discourse moved from a focus on cultural borders (with the English) to
political ones (with the blacks), a shift that would ultimately bring about the policies
of apartheid and the South-African state’s divisive attitude towards its black
inhabitants and neighbours. The coming to power in 1948 of the National Party
marked the arrival of exclusive Afrikaner political control over South Africa. The
zenith of Afrikaner nationalism, which spanned the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, however,
coincided with the decolonisation of Africa, which for many white settlers throughout
the continent had been a traumatic experience (Ottaway, 1993, p. 16). This was the
case for whites in Angola, where in 1975, ‘the Portuguese frantically packed up all
they had into sacks, suitcases, bags, boxes, bundles, drums, and crates, and shoved
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and screamed and pushed their way onto the last flights and the departing ships’
(Walker, 2004, p. 158–159). Afrikaners, understandably, viewed decolonisation as a
threat to their power and survival as a group and, in response, embarked on a phony
program of independence for South Africa’s black population through the
establishment of homelands, with blacks allotted just thirteen per cent of the country’s
land 45 despite constituting a majority of its population. The apartheid government’s
attempt ‘to impose ethnic and racial identities and deny the South Africanness of the
majority of its citizens’ (Mattes, 2011, p. 94) fragmented South-African identity, with
whites on paper being the only South Africans. Blacks, on the other hand, were
assigned the nationality of their respective Bantustan; ‘even […] black people who
did not even live in Bantustans were deemed their citizens by law and could not
obtain South African citizenship rights’ (Shah, 2006, p. 90).
In the Dominican Republic and Haiti, long before politicians could decide on the
eventual border, both nations’ peoples were moving back and forth between the
‘imaginary line’ separating the two countries (Sellers, 2004, p. 32). The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao highlights the impossibility of teasing apart the
hybridity of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border region when the author describes
the Haitian servant Oscar’s family had hidden during the Parsley Massacre, Esteban,
as ‘look[ing] so damn Dominican’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 218). Despite the previous
hybridity of the Haitian-Dominican border, there can be no doubt, though, that since
the Dominican Republic’s independence from Haiti in 1844, the racial consciousness
of both countries developed in different directions, towards blanquedad (whiteness) in
the case of the former and négritude (blackness) in the case of the latter. As far back
as the colonial era, black slaves in Santo Domingo thought of themselves as superior
to Haitians ‘because slavery was primarily based in the household and the cattle ranch
rather than through sugar plantations, and they accordingly operated in a more
paternalistic social structure’ (Candelario, 2007, p. 43).
The subsequent
impoverishment of Santo Domingo owing to Spain’s neglect led to the decline of
slavery and undermined ‘a sense of solidarity among blacks in general’ (TorresSaillant, 1998, p. 135). The fact that by the seventeenth century most Dominicans,
45
The Land Act of 1913 had restricted black land ownership to so-called Native Reserves, constituting
thirteen per cent of the country’s surface area (Goodman, 1999, p. 321).
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‘being of mixed descent, had achieved social ascendance’ (Stinchcomb, 2003, p. 14)
brought about a ‘psychological disassociation’ of Dominicans ‘from their African
heritage’ (p. 14). In spite of this fact, however, blacks have played some of the most
pivotal roles in Dominican history. 46
The Haitian Revolution and its geopolitical consequences would also greatly shape
the way in which Dominicans came to view themselves in the world. One of the first
serious acts of resistance from the other towards white power in the colonial world,
the Haitian Revolution led to the establishment of the world’s first black republic,
Haiti. In response to the revolution, the predominantly white elite of Santo Domingo
sought protection from the United States and Spain, both of whom, however, were
unwilling to lend their support to the Dominicans. Haitian independence,
nevertheless, did not escape the attention of the United States or other parts of the
continent, with the ‘black republic’ causing a frenzy of fear throughout the Americas
because of the impetus elites and colonial authorities believed it would provide blacks
to rise up (Coupeau, 2008, p. 34). This fear influenced ‘European colonial and U.S.
policy toward the region during the nineteenth century’ and, along with the Haitian
occupation of Santo Domingo, cast the Spanish-speaking side of the island as the
antithesis of Haiti (Candelario, 2007, p. 43). Against Haiti, with its pro-black agenda,
the Dominican Republic would be a white bulwark, projecting American and
European influence in the region. Curiously, however, despite the Dominican
Republic having a black majority at the time, the country was not viewed as black. In
his book, The Situation in Santo Domingo (1905), Henry Hancock, an American
trained lawyer and land surveyor and supporter of the Dominican cause, stated, ‘The
inhabitants are, with very few exceptions, white’ (Hancock, 1905, p. 50).
46
The leader of the Haitian Revolution, François-Dominique Toussaint-Louverture, who freed
Dominican slaves when he invaded Santo Domingo in 1801, was black, as was Jean-Pierre Boyer, the
Haitian leader who freed Dominican slaves during Haiti’s subsequent invasion (1822) of Santo
Domingo after the French had reintroduced slavery during their occupation of the Spanish colony
(1802–1809) (p. 14). It is also true that one of the founding fathers of the Dominican Republic,
Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, was descended from African slaves, ‘as were many of the soldiers who
accompanied him in the war for national independence, a fact that is never mentioned’ (Stinchcomb,
2003, p. 14).
105
Even in more recent times dark-skinned Dominicans have been reluctant to express
any affinity with blackness, failing, says Torres-Saillant (1998), to ‘flaunt their
blackness as a collective banner to advance economic, cultural, or political causes’ (p.
1). This is largely because blackness has been—and continues to be—seen as
incompatible with Dominicanness, a view traditionally reinforced by the whitecontrolled media, which supported Trujillo’s and supports the Dominican
government’s anti-Haitian rhetoric (Coupeau, 2008, p. 151). The view of blacks as
other and outsiders can be traced back to the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo
(1822–44), when Haiti invited blacks from the United States to seek refuge on the
island of Hispaniola from ‘slavery and discrimination’, with several thousand
African-Americans, mostly from Philadelphia, settling on the Samaná Peninsular
(Stinchcomb, 2003, p. 24). Haiti deliberately imported black labour as a way of
blackening the island, with the Haitian leader Jean Jacques Dessalines ‘offering a
reimbursement of $40 to American boat captains for every black American brought
from the United States’ (p. 24). Many of the black immigrants who reached Santo
Domingo died of smallpox or were unable to adapt to their new rural environment and
returned to the United States (p. 24). Nonetheless, just as many cocolos (black
immigrants from the Dutch Caribbean) as well as Afro-Cubans stayed on in the
eastern part of the island, contributing to the blackening of the Dominican Republic
(Caamaño de Fernández, pp. 21–22). Anti-Haitian feeling has also been exacerbated
by the fact that the Haitian constitution still pledges the indivisibility of the island of
Hispaniola (Gamarra and Fonseca, 2009, p. 4), the relevant clause having made
Dominicans fearful of the possibility of a ‘peaceful invasion’ by their darker-skinned
neighbours (Winn, 2006, p. 305).
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator depicts rather humorously the
enduring antagonism towards and fear of Haitians when he says,
Oscar hadn’t been home in years, not since his abuela’s number-one servant,
bedridden for months and convinced that the border was about to be reinvaded,
had screamed out Haitians! and then died, and they’d all gone to the funeral.
(Díaz, 2007, p. 270)
106
Given the prospect of the Dominican Republic being reinvaded by Haiti was virtually
nil, Díaz undoubtedly uses the delirious servant’s behaviour to demonstrate how
deeply lodged the fear of Haiti and Haitians was in the Dominican psyche. The fear,
almost primal in the example above, points to the perceptible longing of ethnic groups
to exist in an ‘eternal essence’, ‘with stable boundaries’ (Buden and Nowotny, 2009,
p. 198–199), an aspiration that ultimately eludes them due to the inherent instability
of borders (especially cultural boundaries). Indeed, the influence of intense antiHaitian propaganda during the trujillato, which described Haitians as ‘el principal
problema de la República Dominicana’ (Sellers, 2004, p. 37),
47
and the
reclassification of black Dominicans as Indians (Torres-Saillant, 1998, p. 7), made
Dominicans identify Haitians/blacks as a major threat to Dominican identity and the
Dominincan nation.
Affirming physical and national borders
The national borders of the Dominican Republic and South Africa were established
through colonisation. In 1492 Spain colonised the island on which the Dominican
Republic is situated, Hispaniola, and referred to it as Santo Domingo. The national
border the Dominican Republic today shares with Haiti is the result of Spanish
colonial authorities burning out the north-western part of the island of Hispaniola to
punish its inhabitants for trading with foreign colonial powers. As already mentioned,
this created a vacuum in the northwest, which French settlers from the neighbouring
island of La Tortuga filled by forming a colony. The French outpost, named Saint
Domingue, was recognised by the Spanish in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697
(Bencosme and Norton, 2005, p. 5), which established the Massacre River (Río
Masacre) as the border between the French and Spanish colonies. Saint Domingue
(renamed Haiti) became independent from France in 1804 after the Haitian
Revolution and, eighteen years later, in 1822 (nine weeks after Dominicans declared
their independence from Spain), invaded Santo Domingo, occupying the Spanishspeaking territory until 1844. The withdrawal of the Haitians from Santo Domingo in
1844 reaffirmed the original colonial border (as established by the Treaty of Ryswick)
as the national border between Haiti and the newly independent Dominican Republic.
47
The Dominican Republic’s main problem (my translation).
107
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a refreshment post in what
is today Cape Town for its ships travelling between the Netherlands and the Dutch
East Indies. The VOC did not intend to establish a permanent (settler) colony in the
Cape. However, the fondness of the local white population for ‘the climate and
natural beauty’ (Giliomee, 2003, p. 4) of the area and the relatively good conditions
for agriculture, especially wine making there, attracted migrants from the
Netherlands, Germany and France who stayed on and established farms and
permanent communities. The scarcity of land (most of the colony’s land was owned
by the VOC) compelled some farmers (Boers) to trek north- and eastwards, pushing
out the colony’s frontiers, much to the annoyance of the VOC (Elbourne, 2002, p. 80).
The Boers’ quest for land forced colonial administrators to extend the border (p. 80),
which brought the Dutch into conflict with the indigenous Khoi-San people and,
subsequently, Bantu tribes. In order to ‘protect the settlers from attack’, Jan van
Riebeck, the founder of Cape Town and the first Dutch administrator of the Cape
colony, planted a wild almond hedge in the 1660s to act as a physical barrier around
the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope (present day Cape Town) (Mountain, 2003,
p. 49). The almond hedge, parts of which still exist today, could in many ways be seen
as one of the foundations of racial segregation in South Africa. Critical events in
Afrikaner history, including the Great Trek and the Treaty of Vereeniging following
the Anglo–Boer War (1899–1902), determined South Africa’s present political
borders. The Great Trek, the migration eastwards and north-eastwards of Afrikaners
(Voortrekkers) disgruntled with British rule in the Cape Colony that led to the
establishment of three Boer republics (Smith and Smith, 1980, p. 410), carved out
more or less what is today the Republic of South Africa. The formation of South
Africa as a nation state is therefore inseparable from both the Afrikaners’ striving to
establish cultural boundaries between themselves and the British and the eventual
union of the country’s two white groups.
In both the trujillato-era Dominican Republic and apartheid-era South Africa, the
dominant group saw borders as being of vital importance to self-preservation, namely
in protecting itself against apparently violent and rapacious neighbours. In the case of
South Africa, borders were meant to protect whites from criminals and violent
terrorists, seen by blacks as freedom fighters but by whites as malevolent communists
108
willing to turn South Africa into another African failed state where whites would be
given their marching orders. In the case of the Dominican Republic, the border was
meant to protect Dominicans from Haitians, with their sorcery, black magic, strange
African customs and covetous criminal streak, all of which threatened to usurp
Dominican cultural and economic patrimony. The inherent instability of these
physical (geographical and material, e.g., farms) and national borders is indicated by
relevant commentaries of the dominant characters, who view the borders with either
resignation or aggression, these extremes in attitude a reflection of the magnitude of
the threat said characters perceive the other poses to their individual and collective
corporeal, socio-economic and cultural integrity. Comments by dominant characters
that refer to blacks as germs and plagues that need to be wiped off the face of the
earth confirm the magnitude of their threat, with Trujillo in La fiesta del chivo, for
instance, describing the growing Haitian presence inside the Dominican Republic as a
‘peste’ (‘plague’) (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 216). 48
In The Conservationist, a murder on Mehring’s farm brings to the fore the
dangerousness of the circumstances in which rural whites (even though Mehring, like
Mynhardt, is a privileged city dweller) live, surrounded by furtive blacks living in the
‘locations’:
There’s a high fence all round to keep them from getting in and out except
through the location gates, but there’re great big gaps where they cut the wire
and come out at night. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 30)
Mehring’s fear is apparent from both his disdain at the indifference of the local
African population to borders, remarking that these ‘mean little to them’ (p. 206), and
his view that borders are, ultimately, indefensible: ‘as if anything’ll keep them out’
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 140).
48
‘The plague was spreading and no one did anything. They were waiting for a statesman with vision,
one whose hand would not tremble’ (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 194).
109
Haitians threaten the nation (Dominican Republic) because they too are insidious,
likened at one point in La fiesta del chivo to a cat when the narrator describes the
Haitian servant of a high-ranking Dominican official:
La sirvienta haitiana, silente como un gato, había recogido el servicio. (Vargas
Llosa, 2000, p. 260)
The Haitian servant, as silent as a cat, had cleared the table. (Vargas Llosa,
2002, p. 235).
In the context of the trujillato, which perpetually feared Haitian invasions and the
Haitian presence within its borders, the ‘cat’ simile alludes to the Dominican
perception that Haitians were furtive and surreptitiously making their way into the
Dominican Republic. The Spanish noun ‘gato’ has a wider semantic range compared
to its English equivalent, referring to a thief, to someone who steals using trickery and
deception, and to someone who is shrewd and cunning (RAE).49 The cat reference
plays into the representations of blackness as insidious found throughout La fiesta del
chivo, exemplified by a comment referring to the apparent Haitian tendency to steal
work from Dominicans, who are then forced to sell their land to the Haitians in order
to survive (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 295).
Distinct from the Dominican Republic, with its single national border, South Africa
had several, all of which represented dangerous fronts. In Rumours of Rain, Gert
brings this fact to the attention of Mynhardt’s son, Louis:
‘Why didn’t you join us then?’ asked Louis with a cool aggressiveness I hadn’t
expected. ‘Instead of staying behind on your farm?’
‘We can’t all go to the border, man’, said Gert, off balance for a moment.
‘We’ve got to hold the fort over here too’. (Brink, 1978, p. 325)
South Africa’s borders were dangerous either due to terrorism (in the case of the
Angolan and Mozambican borders) or criminality, as was the case with the unruly
49
‘Ladrón, ratero que hurta con astucia y engaño’ and ‘hombre sagaz, astuto’ (RAE).
110
locations and Bantustans situated next to or close to white farms and towns. Indeed,
by the 1970s (the decade in which Rumours of Rain and The Conservationist were
written and set), the preoccupation of white South Africans rested heavily on physical
(national) borders. Typically, ‘the border’ was taken by whites to refer to South-West
Africa’s 50 troubled frontier with Angola, which was one of South Africa’s frontline
states. Attacks launched on South-African troops stationed in South West Africa by
SWAPO (The South-West African People’s Organisation)
51
from the newly
independent Angola made white South Africans realise the border meant to protect
them from black Africa was not impenetrable. Indeed, South Africa was vulnerable to
events taking place elsewhere on the continent, most notably the decolonisation of
Angola, which was unfolding with disastrous consequences for most of Angola’s
citizens. In Rumours of Rain, Louis witnessed the chaotic and hasty exodus of almost
all of Angola’s 300,000 whites that preceded the Carnation Revolution, the overthrow
of the right-wing Caetano regime in Lisbon in 1974 by left-wing soldiers that led to
the collapse of the Portuguese Empire. Angola had been a Portuguese colony until
1975, when its colonial master abruptly withdrew, allowing the MPLA (The Popular
Movement for the Liberation of Angola) to seize control. The MPLA’s Marxist
leanings and support for the ANC and SWAPO in the form of military bases posed, in
the eyes of South Africa’s apartheid leaders, an existential threat to white interests in
South Africa and its quasi fifth province, South-West Africa. South Africa initially
responded by sending arms to the MPLA’s main rival, UNITA (National Union for
the Total Independence of Angola), before invading Angola in 1975 in order to
support it militarily (Walker, 2004, p. 157).
Louis’s father also seems aware of the fate of whites in the rest of Africa when he
reflects on the destiny of white South Africans. Unsurprisingly, though, and
perhaps strangely for the reader, he does so by referring to a catastrophe that has
already materialised, as denoted by ‘happen again’: ‘Driving back to the farm, I
thought: When will it happen again, to us?’ (Brink, 1978, p. 249). In this case,
‘again’ refers to the existential upheavals that had befallen whites in places like
Angola and the Congo and which, Louis, in a conversation with his grandmother’s
50
Renamed Namibia after being granted independence by South Africa in 1990.
51
Namibia’s largest liberation movement and the current ruling party of that country.
111
neighbours about the exodus of Portuguese from Angola, predicts will happen to
white South Africans:
It felt like something dying inside one, seeing them like that. Because one
knew: One day it will be our turn to take to the road just like that, with our little
vans and our cardboard suitcases and our rolled blankets and our water bottles.
And who will help us? (Brink, 1978, p. 331)
At first, the reactions of father and son to the predicament of whites in South Africa
seem overstated; however, when viewed in their historical context (Louis’s return
from the war in Angola), they are credible and consistent. Indeed, the flight of whites
from Angola observed by Louis was at the time one of the most dramatic mass
migrations Africa had ever seen. Over several months, military and civilian aircraft
from Western Europe and the Soviet Union were used to airlift more than 200,000
whites from Angola, with ‘more than 90% of white settlers ha[ving] left Angola by
the end of 1975 (Stead, 2009, p. 8). In the Angolan countryside, where the civil war
took place, whites became refugees as fighting between the sundry factions engulfed
their farms and towns. With what belongings they could carry, whites were forced to
trek to Luanda, Angola’s capital, where they spread ‘their own tales of terror and
warnings of what was to come’ among the remaining whites (Walker, 2004, p. 158).
Caught in the middle of a bitter and complex civil war that was international in scope,
and angry at their abrupt loss of power, Angola’s Portuguese settlers did their best to
sabotage the country’s infrastructure before fleeing. Under their watch, ‘planes were
destroyed, pumping stations blown up, farms burnt and even cement poured into the
drains of multi-story buildings to render them uninhabitable’ (Stead, 2009, p. 21).
This final act of spite towards their black compatriots revealed an assumption shared
by white South Africans like Mynhardt (Gordimer, 1974, p. 325), which was that
blacks were not the bearers of civilisation (White and Western, in this case) and
therefore not deserving of partaking in it. Unsurprisingly, the so-called architect of
apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd had a similar view, as revealed by his
response to British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s Wind of Change speech.
Verwoerd claimed that ‘“justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man
of Africa, but also to the white man of Africa’ because it was the white man who
“historically brought civilisation to a bare continent”’ (Whiticker, 2007).
112
The disastrous decolonisation of Angola and the fear it engendered in white South
Africans is paralleled over two hundred years earlier by the decolonisation of Haiti,
which preceded the murder and dispossession of most whites there by the newly
installed black revolutionary government. Like white South Africa’s fear of
communism, which emanated from Angola, the largely white elite of Santo Domingo
feared the Haitian leader’s policy of outlawing whites from owning land, ‘his program
of nationalization and agrarian reform, and his plan to exact a contribution destined
for the Haitian military’ (Candelario, 2007, p. 78). In both the South-African and
Dominican contexts, black neighbours represent a spectre, whose barbarism
(embodied by collectivism and a strange culture) threatens to engulf white
civilisation.
In La fiesta del chivo, Trujillo brings awareness to what he sees as the historical
vulnerability of whites in the Dominican Republic by emphasising the sheer scale of
the challenge to the survival of whiteness there before the Parsley Massacre. Trujillo
mentions how abundant blacks were along the border compared to whites, who,
according to him, would have been reduced to a mere ‘puñadito’ (handful) if he had
not carried out the mass killing:
Como en 1840, toda la isla sería Haití. El puñadito de blancos de
sobrevivientes, serviría a los negros. Ésa fue la decisión más difícil en treinta
años de gobierno, Simon. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 215)
As it was in 1840. The handful of white survivors would be serving the blacks.
That was the most difficult decision in thirty years of government, Simon.
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 193)
The real-life Trujillo, despite being mulato, identified as white and viewed himself as
the saviour of the beleaguered white race of the Dominican Republic for having
defended it from the country’s supposedly covetous and violent black neighbours. The
fragility of whiteness in the Dominican Republic, a situation Trujillo establishes as
abnormal and grave, justifies the Parsley Massacre and his goal of the militarisation of
the border. Indeed, after the massacre, the Dominican dictator set his sights on the
113
‘economic revitalization of the border’, establishing ‘agricultural colonies’, which
were to be fundamental ‘to the politics and policy of the Dominicanización program’
(Peguero, 2004, p. 115). The frontier colonies varied demographically, with some
populated by Europeans from war-torn Europe and others by Dominicans either
attracted on their own accord to the area to ‘cultivate the land’ or forced by Trujillo to
do so (p. 115). The ultimate goal of Dominicanising, whitening and militarising the
frontier zone was, ultimately, to restrict Haitian immigration and dilute the Haitian
presence already there.
Like the fictional Trujillo in La fiesta del chivo, the threat of engulfment is ever
present in Martin Mynhardt’s mind in Rumours of Rain. In the context of the Angolan
Civil War and the traumatic exodus of whites from the former Portuguese colony,
Mynhardt justifies Afrikaner control of South Africa in the mid-1970s, some quarter
of a century after the takeover of the country by the National Party by describing any
potential surrender of power to the black majority in terms of a ‘whirlwind’:
But we’re still here, a quarter of a century later: here where we first arrived
three hundred years ago. And we’ve come to stay. I’m not pretending that all
that happens around us is good or right; there is much need for change. But to
surrender everything to Black hands is to exchange the wind for the whirlwind.
Look at the rest of Africa. Look at the world, ‘free’ or otherwise. (Brink, 1978,
p. 54)
The use of the word ‘whirlwind’ here is an oblique reference to British Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech, which referred to the unstoppable
nationalist winds sweeping through Africa, which was busy being decolonised by
Europe. Such winds scared characters like Mynhardt because of the chaos and
violence they inevitably seemed to bring. By characterising the rest of (black) Africa
as a whirlwind, Mynhardt taps into the persistent theme in all the novels of blacks as
antithetical to civilization, given that, like a ‘whirlwind’, blacks seem to destroy
everything in their path.
114
Similar to Trujillo in his appraisal of post-independent Haiti, 52 Mynhardt fails to
contextualise the failure of South Africa’s post-colonial neighbours by not admitting
the woeful efforts of the European colonial powers to educate blacks and smooth the
way for peaceful and orderly transitions to independence. Belgium, for example, left
the Congo (one of the places Mynhardt no doubt has in mind in his assessment of the
consequences of colonial withdrawal) with no functioning government when it
granted it independence in 1960. Of the Congo’s nearly five thousand civil servants,
only three were black and of its sixteen university graduates, none were ‘doctors of
law, no physicians, nor engineers’ (Kreijen, 2004, p. 137). Other factors that set postcolonial Africa on a collision course with itself, none of which Mynhardt considers,
include the colonial powers’ drawing up of arbitrary national borders cutting across
ethnic and tribal lines, their policy of divide and conquer and their sabotaging of
infrastructure on the eve of independence. Moreover, United States, European and
Soviet support of corrupt and repressive post-independent African regimes loyal to
their interests impoverished and destabilised already feeble nations. Haiti, for its part,
became a failed state in great measure due to the crippling compensation France
forced it to pay because of the Haitian Revolution.
In the face of so many threats, real or otherwise, the Afrikaners’ need to carve out a
space for Afrikaner-ness by (literally) pushing the other to the margins is attacked by
people close to Mynhardt, in this case by Charlie Mofokeng, Mynhardt’s black
protégé:
Jesus, Martin: your people started as pioneers. I respect them for it. But that you
still haven’t shaken off the frontier mentality—that’s the rub. (Brink, 1978, p.
432)
Mynhardt’s son, Louis, also attacks his father’s frontier mentality, asking him, ‘Why
do you always talk in terms of “our people”, our little tribe?’, to which Mynhardt
responds, ‘because this land itself makes it impossible to think in any other terms’
(Brink, 1978, p. 308). Mynhardt’s retort is authentic insofar as apartheid, with its
52
Describing it as the ‘poorest, most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere’ (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p.
419).
115
racial segregation and Bantustans, made it impossible for Afrikaners and whites in
general to think of themselves as anything other than separate. The statement that
‘[t]he boundaries between nations reinforce notions of purity and sameness within the
territory, and difference and impurity outside the territory’ (Radcliffe and Westwood
1996, p. 23) holds true for apartheid South Africa, whose white rulers felt obliged to
create additional internal yet national borders (as a result of the Bantustans) in order
to articulate a space where solely white Afrikaans- and English-speaking culture
would be promoted and white economic and Afrikaner political power exercised.
South Africa proper would, in this sense, be a space where whites would feel safe,
live a capitalist, Western lifestyle and control every facet of their lives.
By juxtaposing unexamined white prosperity and black failure, characters like
Mynhardt and Trujillo make a convincing case for the continuation of segregation and
white supremacy. When they bring inherent black violence into the equation, they
strengthen their case for the hardening of physical boundaries and legitimise their
violent response to the defence of white interests. Mynhardt follows this logic when
he states,
The peace and prosperity Southern Africa has been enjoying for so long (in
contrast with the chaos on the rest of the continent where White patronage was
withdrawn with disgusting promptness) must be ascribed to the fact that the
Boer conquered the land with a gun in one hand and the Bible in the other. Both
are indispensable. (Brink, 1978, p. 55)
Mynhardt’s commentary points to the siege mentality of white South Africans, who
were motived by their belief that South Africa was ‘the last outpost of “civilised”
Western culture in Africa’, ‘a widely shared ideology among whites’, even if not
expressly stated at the political level (Purkitt and Burgess, 2005, p. 80). Mynhardt’s
use of the benevolent term ‘patronage’ rather than ‘rule’ is an example of this
unspoken racism. ‘The peace and prosperity [of] Southern Africa’ that Mynhardt
refers to, however, is illusory, with anti-colonial wars in fact raging in Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe) and Portugal’s colonies, Angola and Mozambique, and the prosperity of
white South Africa—built on the backs of blacks—threatened by protests and wage
disputes, as illustrated in the novel (Brink, 1978, p. 73). Against this unsympathetic
116
background, Mynhardt reasons the ‘gun and bible’ as the only means to uphold white
rule.
In their quest to protect themselves from blacks by carving out separate physical
spaces for whiteness and blackness, Mda shows in Ways of Dying (1995) how whites
made life a difficult, painful and humiliating ordeal for black South Africans. The
inherent inflexibility of apartheid led to an absurd situation in which blacks had to use
separate amenities and entrances to public buildings and live in townships on the
outskirts of cities or in rural homelands to which they often had little or no
connection, forced in many cases to commute hundreds of kilometres to their
workplaces in white South Africa. Mda (2005) says the absurdism in his literature
‘came from apartheid. I was trying to interpret a system that was absurd in itself. A lot
of things that used to happen in those days were very Kafkaesque’ (p. 70). The
description of bulldozers clearing the informal settlement in which Toloki resides
when he first goes to live in the (white) city from the countryside is an example of this
Kafkaesque world:
In those days, Toloki used to sit in the sun during the week, and wait for the
bulldozers. Often they came during the day while people were at work. When he
saw them coming, he would rush into the shack and take all his furniture out.
This consisted of a single bed, two chairs, a small table on which he put his
primus stove, and a bathtub. Children who remained in the other shacks would
also try to save their family valuables. Bulldozers would move in and flatten the
shacks, and then triumphantly drive away. Residents would immediately
rebuild, and in time the shantytown would hum with life again. Like worker
bees, the dwellers would go about their business of living. (p. 145)
Toloki goes on to describe how ‘when bulldozers failed to get rid of the shanty
towns’,
The government devised new strategies. They recruited some of the
unemployed residents, and formed them into vigilante groups. The function of
these groups was to protect the people. Their method was simple, but very
effective. They demanded protection money from the residents. This was
117
collected on a weekly basis and paid to the leader of the vigilantes, who had
given himself the title of Mayor. Some residents refused to pay, since they did
not see why they needed to be protected by a group of layabouts who spent their
days in shebeens. The shacks of those who refused to pay would mysteriously
catch fire in the middle of the night. Babies sometimes died in these fires. The
next day, the survivors, with the help of their neighbours, would carry out the
task of rebuilding, and would make sure that they paid the protection fee in the
future. (p. 146)
Forced relocations were not, says Mamdani (2000), ‘inert outcomes of socioeconomic processes, but outcomes of active violence by state agents’ (p. 180). The
policy, which between 1960 and 1982 uprooted 3.5 million people, left ‘communities
shattered, their families dispossessed and their livelihoods destroyed’ (p. 180). Forced
removals sped up social change by breaking down stabilising familial and communal
structures and in turn contributed ‘to an ethos of violence in South Africa’ (Barbarin
and Richter, 2001, p. 93). Paradoxically, white South Africa created the phantom that
it most feared; namely, black violence. Indeed, whites had ‘long use[d] fear of crime
as a euphemism for fear of blacks; apartheid’s swart gevaar and skollie menance
justified segregation’ (Lemanski, 2004, p. 109). The sense of control that grand
apartheid policies like forced removals gave white South Africans satisfied the ‘deepseated fear’ that had been programmed into them by the apartheid government ‘of
what would happen if the state were not there to mediate their relationships with other
groups’ (Frueh, 2003, p. 141).
Similar to white South Africans in the 1970s, the white elite in the Dominican
Republic had been equally desperate a century and a half earlier to maintain its
privileges in the face of an onslaught from the other, Haitians, in their case. The white
elite in the Dominican Republic feared that mulato and black Dominicans would
support Haiti, given their racial kinship and the precepts on which Haiti had been
founded, namely overthrowing slavery and dispossessing whites of the privileges they
had earned at the expense of blacks. The iron-fisted response (Parsley Massacre) from
Trujillo to what he perceived as the renewal of that threat was, says Joaquín Balaguer
in La fiesta del chivo, what saved the Dominican Republic from ending up like Haiti.
Vargas Llosa’s Balaguer warns though that,
118
Si su herencia desaparece, la Republica Dominicana se hundirá de nuevo en la
barbarie. Volveremos a competir con Haití, como antes de 1930, por ser la
nación más miserable y violenta del hemisferio occidental. (Vargas Llosa, 2000,
p. 458)
If his legacy disappears, the Dominican Republic will sink back into barbarism.
We will compete again with Haiti, as we did before 1930, for the privilege of
being the poorest, most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere. (Vargas
Llosa, 2002, p. 419)
As Mynhardt does with Africa’s failures, so Balaguer fails to recognise the reasons
for the failures of the Dominican Republic’s neighbour, Haiti, preferring instead to
convince himself and his audience of the fact that only Trujillo’s legacy could save
the Dominican Republic from Haitian barbarism. The view of the real-life Joaquín
Balaguer that ‘Santo Domingo es, por instinto de conservación, el pueblo más español
y tradicionalista de América’ (Sellers, 2004, p. 36) 53 also reveals the extent to which
the Dominican political elite based the country’s identity on cultural boundaries.
The dominant characters invariably see progress as contingent on the defence of these
boundaries (social, cultural, corporeal and physical). In La fiesta del chivo, Trujillo is
credited with making the Dominican Republic a modern state as a result of ‘putt[ing]
Haitians in their place, as Urania, Senator Cabral’s daughter, recalls her father putting
it:
Es verdad, la ciudad, acaso el país, se llenó de haitianos. Entonces, no ocurría.
¿No lo decía el senador Agustín Cabral? «Del Jefe se dirá lo que se quiera. La
historia lo reconocerá al menos haber hecho un país moderno y haber puesto
en su sitio a los haitianos». (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 15)
53
Santo Domingo is, by its instinct of self-preservations, the most Spanish and traditionalist nation of
the Americas (my translation).
119
It’s true, the city, perhaps the country, has filled with Haitians. Back then, it
didn’t happen. Isn’t that what Senator Agustín Cabral said? ‘You can say what
you like about the Chief. History, at least, will recognize that he has created a
modern country and put the Haitians in their place’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, pp. 7–
8)
For the trujillato in Vargas Llosa’s novel, modernity (and by extension, prosperity)
depends on limiting blackness or displacing it to the margins of society, in this case,
physically, though, as mentioned, also culturally. Indeed, due to the failure of
Trujillo’s agricultural colonies and large-scale white immigration, both of which were
intended to whiten the Dominican population and make the country wealthier, the
dictator emphasised Dominicans’ cultural differences with Haitians as a way of
pushing the Dominican Republic away from Africa (signified by Haiti) and towards
Mediterranean Europe. For Trujillo, preserving civilisation, in this case Spanish
civilisation, was a way of rejecting blackness/Haitianness, a move which, ‘thanks to
him, had stopped [the Dominican Republic from] being a tribe, a mob, a caricature,
and become a Republic’ (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 140). In referring to Dominicans as a
‘tribe’, Cabral clearly refers to Haiti, which the trujillato viewed as ostensibly
African. Undeniably, Trujillo saw himself as having broken the curse of the
Dominican Republic’s Haitian influence and backwardness (Africanness), an idea
Díaz subverts in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when he associates this curse
with Europe rather than Africa. 54
The view of the trujillato in La fiesta del chivo that blacks pose a threat to the
prosperity of the nation is similar to Mynhardt’s mother’s view that the blacks on her
farm are a plague (Brink, 1978, p. 250), devouring all her resources and, by
implication, making her poorer. As in the Dominican Republic, in South Africa white
prosperity depended on literally putting blacks in their place, namely the Bantustans.
These were typically located in marginal areas of the country with poor soil quality,
which was further eroded by too many people having to farm on ever-decreasing plots
54
‘It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and
we’ve all be in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry,
but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not’ (Díaz. 2007, pp. 1–2).
120
of land (Simphiwe, 1999, p. 118). The inability of Bantustan citizens to sustain
themselves due to the ‘lack of land and possibilities for rural livelihoods’ promoted
the flaunting of apartheid influx control laws, with blacks migrating into white ‘periurban areas’ (Andrew, 2007, p. 142), where large ‘informal settlements’ or squatter
camps sprang up, creating a headache for the architects of apartheid. The
encroachment of blacks into white areas in South Africa gave the white population a
sense of besiegement, a feeling rationalised by Mynhardt’s mother when she says,
I’m doing my best to supply them with mealie meal and things, but every month
new squatters arrive, God alone knows where they come from. The farms are
getting blacker all the time. (Brink, 1978, p. 250)
Mynhardt’s mother, like Mynhardt himself, fails to mention the causal factors (i.e.,
depravation and high birth rates) of the social ills to which she alludes. Like her son,
she seems to be in denial over the pernicious social effects of the Bantustan policy,
which attempted to transfer as many blacks as possible to homelands without those
areas ever having enough infrastructure or jobs to sustain them. The arrogance of the
white South-African characters like her is due to a defensiveness that stems from
frustration and perhaps a realisation, whether conscious or otherwise, that the
maintenance of so many fronts is neither possible nor desirable. However, because the
defence (or rather, aggressive re-affirmation) of such fronts is seen to protect white
prosperity, there is no alternative but to constantly re-affirm borders and denigrate the
other in the process in order to make doing so palatable.
In Ways of Dying, Mda (1995) gives a black perspective on white attempts to keep
blacks away from the cities when he describes how, in the informal settlement in
which Toloki first lived when he got to the city during the apartheid era,
The government was refusing to give people houses. Instead, they were saying
that people who had qualifying papers had to move to a new township that was
more than fifty miles away from the city. How were people going to reach their
places of work from fifty miles away? And yet there was land all over, close to
where people worked, but it was all designated for white residential
development. Most people did not even have the necessary qualifying papers.
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Their presence was said to be illegal, and the government was bent on sending
them back to the places it had demarcated as their homelands. (p. 121)
As shown in Ways of Dying, many blacks who move from the impoverished rural
areas to the city in order to find work find themselves excluded from wealthy, urban
South Africa and sent to other townships or homelands a long distance away. While in
Rumours of Rain Mynhardt’s mother depicts the blacks encroaching on her farm as
thieving, devouring it of its supplies, Mda shows in Ways of Dying how blacks who
did indeed want to or managed to work for a living were hindered by the apartheid
government from doing so by having to live so far away from their workplaces or
potential workplaces. With many black men from homelands and rural areas working
hundreds of kilometres from their homes and only able to see their families a few
times a year, women were often forced to stay at home and bring up children on a
single wage, hence the descriptions of destitute rural women and children in Rumours
of Rain. The concentration of poor and distressed people in underdeveloped rural
areas made life difficult for people like Mynhardt’s mother because blacks living
nearby saw whites like her as a source of prosperity in a sea of poverty. In the cities,
on the other hand, the apartheid state could damn those seas of black poverty through
a myriad of influx control laws:
The response of South Africa’s legislators to what disturbs their white electorate
is usually to order it out of sight. If people are starving, let them starve far away
in the bush, where their thin bodies will not be a reproach. If they have no work,
if they migrate to the cities, let there be roadblocks, let there be curfews, let
there be laws against vagrancy, begging and squatting, and let offenders be
locked away so that no one has to hear or see them. (Coetzee, 2008, p. 361)
The realisation of some whites of the impossibility of maintaining multiple physical
fronts as a minority is shown in Rumours of Rain when, in response to the accusation
of Mynhardt’s mother’s that he (Gert) and his wife are abandoning the frontier, which
is situated close to a Bantustan, by selling their farm and moving to the city, Gert
responds,
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We can best protect our interests in the cities. That’s where we whites belong.
Here on the border we’re exposed to the Blacks. (Brink, 1978, p. 333)
This comment from Gert, who is an Afrikaner, points to the embittered and
impossible stance of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, for most of whose nonwhite inhabitants it is an anathema. As with similar comments made by Trujillo and
his ministers in La fiesta del chivo, Gert’s statement about being ‘exposed’ points to
the idea that the border is a dangerous place because just beyond it live people who
are opposed to the very well-being (existence, in some cases) of the group to which
one belongs. Afrikaner nationalism, constructed according to hard (social, cultural,
corporeal and physical) boundaries, is threatened when in close contact with the other
because the other is far too numerous to be dismissed or alienated. This is
demonstrated by the precarious position of Mynhardt’s mother on her farm, which is a
result of having to deal with conflicts between black farm workers and give rations to
an increasing number of blacks turning up on her doorstep.
The previously mentioned conversation between Mynhardt’s mother and Gert also
involves Louis, who represents a new generation of Afrikaner willing to question the
ideology of apartheid. Louis throws into relief the impossibility of ignoring the other
when he asks Gert,
‘I thought you sold out?’ asked Louis. I didn’t like the expression on his face.
‘Ja, go on, tell him’, chuckled Ma. ‘Withdrawing from the frontiers, that’s
what they’re doing’.
‘What’s the use?’ Louis demanded. ‘We’re just exposing new vulnerable
frontiers all the time. Angola, Rhodesia, Moçambique, South-West. And now
you’re starting right here too’. (Brink, 1978, p. 325)
Paradoxically, the withdrawal of white South Africans from certain parts of the
country as a consequence of the creation of the Bantustans, something seen by Gert as
a danger to white interests but by Louis as a nihilistic inevitability, provided the white
population with an economic advantage. By sending blacks to homelands and thus
denying them equivalent economic and educational opportunities, the apartheid
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government created large pools of cheap labour close (though not too close) to the
country’s predominantly white urban centres. 55
Furthermore, by making blacks utterly dependent on white South Africa’s economy
(even the Bantustans survived on aid from Pretoria), whites could ensure that black
culture (their languages, in particular) remained subordinate. In this sense, the socalled cultural flow in South Africa was one way; which is to say, blacks were
recipients of Western culture, obliged to speak Afrikaans or English to their
employers, while whites had no such contract, reflected by the fact that ‘competence
in an African language on the part of whites…remains uncommon’ (Reagan, 2009, p.
281). The linguistic dominance of Afrikaans and English is likewise hinted at in The
Conservationist when Mehring rings the police to have the dead black body found on
his farm removed and the narrator explains,
He always talks the white man’s other language to officials; he is speaking in
Afrikaans. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 17)
In this episode, Gordimer (1974) identifies Afrikaans as the language of authority in
South Africa. She also mentions the Afrikaans language, along with English, when
she describes one of the Indian characters, Bismillah, who,
Spoke the few necessary words of their language in the pidgin form that has
evolved in the mines; he knew, as well, the pidgin Afrikaans and English used
by blacks on the farms. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 119)
While the Indian and black characters have their own languages, they have to speak
Afrikaans and English because of the economic dominance of whites, who own and
control the country’s productive assets. Because social relations between whites and
blacks in apartheid South Africa were confined to the workplace, where a stringent,
racially based hierarchy existed, the culture of white South Africans was barely
55
‘By limiting the supply of black labor to white industrial centres, white workers gained higher wages.
White farmers, of course, continued to benefit from the existence of a large pool of unskilled rural
blacks who were prevented from migrating to the towns, thereby ensuring low agricultural wages’
(Lowenberg and Kempfer, 1998, p. 37).
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influenced by that of the country’s black majority, nor did it face any serious risk of
being subsumed by it. The economic advantage apartheid gave to whites meant that
‘even today in South Africa black Africans sometimes have to abandon their
traditional ways of life and become “Europeanised” in order to make progress in a
country whose economy is still dominated by whites’ (Mwakikagile, 2010, p. 217).
The consequences of apartheid’s cultural imperialism are apparent in Rumours of
Rain when Mynhardt thinks to himself, in reaction to Charlie Mofokeng’s accusation
that Afrikaners ‘never learned to share anything or to live with others’ (Brink, 1978,
p. 40),
Such fierce prejudice was characteristic of Charlie Mofokeng. I never took him
altogether seriously—just as he, I believe, never took me without a pinch of salt.
Between the two of us this type of argument became a form of intellectual
exercise. Bright chap. What some people would call, either with appreciation or
with suspicion, a ‘clever Kaffir’. B.Comm. at Fore Hare; then another degree at
Cambridge. (Brink, 1978, p. 40)
Mynhardt’s dismissal of Charlie Mofokeng’s views despite Charlie’s Western
qualifications (and therefore intellectual authority) and intelligence (‘clever Kaffir’)
reveals in the protagonist’s mind a cognitive dissonance that is the result of a system
(apartheid) that made the educated black person an anomaly in South-African society.
Because apartheid created a situation in which white South Africans rarely, if ever,
met educated black people—creating, in turn, the impression that blacks were of
inferior intelligence—coming across an educated and eloquent person of colour
proved to be a disconcerting experience for most whites. Mynhardt responds to such
disconcertment by facilely writing off Mofokeng’s views and, ironically, by
describing him as ‘prejudiced’ (Brink, 1978, p. 40).
In summary, both the white South-African characters and their Dominican
counterparts fear blacks because of what they represent (i.e., violence, rapaciousness,
immorality and lack of civilisation), and it is for this reason that the defence of
physical borders and corporeal boundaries takes precedence in the dominant
characters’ minds, with blacks seen as an existential threat than can be restrained only
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through segregation (in the case of South Africa) or extermination (in the case of the
Dominican Republic). Because these are not watertight measures, the dominant group
needs to employ a discourse (stereotypes and other literary representations that
portray the other’s body as degenerate and repulsive) that attempts to stabilise and
intensify the intrinsically unstable social boundaries between itself and the other. How
the dominant group achieves this is explored in the following chapter, ‘Deviant
Bodies: Representing Desire’.
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Chapter 4
Deviant Bodies: Representing Desire
In the colonial set-up, the settler (or in this case, the dominant group) must distance
himself both physically and psychologically from ‘the native’ in order to justify his
oppression and exploitation of the latter, says Fanon (1963, p. 38). Physically, the
settler cuts himself off from ‘the native’ by force, i.e., through ‘barracks and police
stations’ (p. 37). This is not enough for psychological separation, though, says Fanon
(1963); the settler must depict ‘the native’ as ‘a as a sort of quintessence of evil’ (p.
41). One way the settler does this is by describing the other in ‘zoological terms’ (p.
41) or in other words, by depicting the black body as deviant. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, in the novels corporeal stereotypes and representations figure prominently
in the dominant characters’ consciousness, which is obsessively preoccupied with the
protection of the physical boundaries of the trujillato and apartheid regimes from the
other.
In the novels, it will be shown that the authors often fashion these corporeal
stereotypes and representations using carnivalesque and grotesque literary techniques.
In his seminal work Rabelais and his World (1965), Bakhtin (1984a) defines the
carnivalesque as a mixing of ‘the exalted and the lowly, [in which] the sacred and the
profane are levelled and are all drawn into the same dance’ (p. 160). The
carnivalesque ‘celebrates the destruction of the old and the birth of the new world—
the new year, the new spring, the new kingdom’ (p. 410). The grotesque, on the other
hand, is ‘the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response’ that ‘is
paralleled by the ambivalent nature of the abnormal as present in the grotesque: we
might consider a secondary definition of the grotesque to be the “ambivalently
abnormal”’ (Thomson in itallics, 1979, p. 27, as cited in Edwards and Grauland, 2013,
p. 3). The use of these literary techniques, which show blackness as deviating from
the norms of the dominant group, reveal how the dominant group fixes the other at the
bottom of a socio-economic hierarchy according to its own values. Indeed, these
depictions give the reader an idea of the dominant group’s standards, namely, what it
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considers desirable and undesirable, with desire or a lack thereof (repulsion, often)
expressed in terms of the perceived relationship between a person’s appearance and
his or her status in society. I also use examples of this type of othering from the
United States, as revealed in the novel Galíndez, to contextualise the racist
stereotyping of the apartheid and trujillato regimes within a broad tendency in the
post-colonial world to make value judgments on people’s place in society based on
their physical appearance.
The way in which people from different cultures have viewed the body has,
throughout history, varied markedly. For example, ‘the sexless Victorian model of
white womanhood [was] gradually eroded during the twentieth century’ (O’Brien,
2005, p. 5) and replaced, especially on the American Pacific coast, with the
‘sunkissed’ body, one influenced by the ‘childlike, nubile idea of womanhood, as the
moniker the “little brown gal” celebrates’ (p. 5). Therefore, while the body is organic,
many of the ways in which people have treated it are not: culture (politics, pseudoscience, literature, etc.) has determined what the body represents to any given group at
any given time. In this sense, as Douglas (1970) asserts, ‘there can be no natural way
of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension’,
this being fundamental to any analysis of racism because of humans’ stone-age
preoccupation with power and ‘social boundaries’ (p. 70). In short, time, location and
agency have heavily influenced representations of the body.
Race has had an ‘extraordinary importance’ (p. 170), says Gilman (1991a), on how
we view others and ourselves, and is based on the ‘internalized dichotomy’ upon
which we ‘construct’ and ‘organise’ our internal universe, including our ‘fictive
personalities’ and society (p. 14). This so-called ‘internalized dichotomy’ implies
necessarily that ‘there is always an Other for us, no matter how we define ourselves’
(p. 14). People develop social identities based on the social categories in which they
belong, with race being a salient component (Graves and Powell, 2008, p. 448). Once
people categorise themselves and others, they tend to ‘seek to build and maintain
positive identities by making positively biased comparisons between members of their
own group and members of the other groups, even in the absence of interpersonal
interaction’ (p. 448). The salience of race in the human consciousness was initially
exploited in the nineteenth century (as European colonisers carved up Africa for the
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enrichment of Europe) to prove the assumed intellectual degeneracy of Africans and
justify European management and exploitation of Africa’s resources, which included
Africans themselves. While the European colonial class used scientific racism to
prove the degenerateness of certain groups, conceiving of them as being ‘more at risk
for certain types of disease than others’ (Gilman, 1991b, p. 39), in the twentieth
century the Nazis used it to prove the risks said groups posed to supposedly superior
ones, i.e., whites. Nazi Germany exhibited most strikingly the viciousness of pseudoscientific racism, which it used to establish the ‘difference (and dangerousness) of the
Jew’ (p. 39).
The importance of race in the Dominican Republic, a majority mulato nation, has long
since transcended the physical, with the extreme social deprivation of the country’s
black neighbour, Haiti, providing Dominicans an unsavoury reflection of the
Dominican Republic’s own similar social ills (as discussed in chapter 2). In this sense,
Haiti’s proximity to the relatively wealthier Spanish-speaking nation poses a threat to
the maintenance of a positive identity (fictive personality and society) for
Dominicans:
It appears that the national repudiation of the Negro heritage, exacerbated by the
flow of Haitian workers in Santo Domingo, is due not so much to racism as an
actual way of life, as to the desire of that nation to be recognized as white on the
international level. In addition, the proximity of Haiti—a Negro nation,
impoverished and over-populated—poses a certain threat to Dominican
pretensions. (Badiane, 2010, p. 117)
When the dominant group institutionalises racism within every sphere of society
(politically, culturally and socio-economically) so that it becomes socially acceptable,
it is able to blind itself to its own racism. This is because it is able to assume that its
racism is the natural by-product of the (reinforced) phenomenon of people tending to
identify with their own race and/or ethnic group (by making ‘biased comparisons’
with other groups [Graves and Powell, 2008, p. 448]). As is the case in the Dominican
Republic, governing regimes usually employ institutionalised racism to stoke
nationalism, making race, in this sense, a contested construct that is not
‘predetermined’ but rather determined ‘through the institutionalisation of specific
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knowledge about race and decades of instilling this knowledge onto subjects’
(Ellapen, 2006, p. 49).
The stereotype instils race, constructing the body of the other around falsehoods and
‘overdetermin[ing]’ it (Ellapen, 2006, p. 49). Stereotypes are a ‘crude set of
representations of the world; they are palimpsests on which the initial bipolar
representations are still vaguely legible’ (Gilman, 1991a, p. 12). The colonizer, or in
this case the dominant group, ascribes to himself ‘the qualities of good and [to] the
colonized [the other] the qualities of evil’ (Alonzo, 2009, p. 5), expressing this
through stereotypes that associate dark skin with evil, hyper-sexuality and moral
debasement (Young, 1996, as cited in Ellapen, 2006, p. 51). Stereotypes seem to
reflect society’s standards and ideals at a particular time. In other words, they are a
mirror of social structures that the dominant group has essentialised onto people’s
bodies. Because social structures are dynamic, stereotypes are ‘protean rather than
rigid’, shifting all the time, with most negative stereotypes always having ‘an overtly
positive counterweight’ (Gilman, 1985d, p. 13):
The line between the projections of the self and the Other does not exist and
therefore must be internalized as absolute. To assure this illusion of the
absolute, the line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. That this
is so can be observed in the shifting relationship of antithetical stereotypes
which parallel the existence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ representations of self and
Other. (Gilman, 1991a, pp. 12–13)
In the works under observation, racial stereotypes tend to be based on physical
attributes and (passing) psychological/behavioural states (for example, being
hysterical, angry, libidinous, etc.) that are perceived, at the time of the use of the
stereotype, as being constant, inherent to and representative of a particular race. In the
racial stereotype, the physical and the psychological/behavioural are fixed, coming to
be highly associative to the point of conflating. Racial stereotypes are accepted as
truths when the onlooker or oppressor fails to identify the negative representation of
the other as being the result of faulty associations brought about and fostered by
oppressive social structures. This, essentially, is the way in which stereotypes function
in colonial discourse, says Bhabha (1992). That is, by offering ‘a secure point of
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identification by constructing the other (usually the black body) as a “population of
degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to
establish systems of administration and instruction”’ (Bhabha, 1992, p. 133, as cited
in Ellapen, 2006, p. 51).
In places such as the Dominican Republic under the trujillato and South Africa under
apartheid, the dominant group constructed stereotypes around the black or darkskinned other, especially around their body, in order to distance and exclude them
from power. We should interpret this stereotyping, says Bhabha (1992), ‘in terms of
Freud’s fetish, that is, as a site of phobia and fantasy that threatens the colonial
subject’ (p. 133, as cited in Ellapen, 2006, p. 51). In this sense, the stereotype is
At once a point of fear and desire. Desire for the other results in the stricter
control of the other because it threatens the coherent self of the coloniser. This
fear generates narratives and myths about otherness that become established in
society as a means of distinguishing the self from the other. (Ellapen, 2006, p.
51)
The institution of such myths stems from a sinister source, says Jackson (2006),
namely the fear that black males will wreak revenge on white males, ‘who raped
Black female slaves’, by raping white females (p. 80). This fixation on the part of the
white male coloniser is associated with the fear of losing power, with the penetration
of the white female by the black male representing, in the coloniser’s eyes, a sort of
turning of the tables, a role reversal in which the black male emasculates the white
male by sequestering his woman. The loss of the white male’s only ally, the white
female (though subordinate), would destabilise the racial (power) hierarchy. Thus, in
order to keep the white female away from the black male (both conceivably allies in
the colony or post-colonial society due to their subordinate status), the male coloniser
devises a set of stereotypes, transforming the black male into a repulsive object.
One way of making the black body repulsive is couching it in terms of the bestiary,
which is how Mehring in The Conservationist describes the teeth of his black foreman
Jacobus: ‘Jacobus is no beauty and when he makes dramatic emphasis he will draw
back his cracked lips and show those filthy old teeth’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 96). Fanon
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(1967) states, ‘when one is dirty one is black—whether thinking of physical dirtiness
or moral dirtiness’ (p. 189). The perceived moral defectiveness of blacks gave whites
a pretext to enslave them, with dark skin becoming ‘part of the slave stereotype
because it was associated with manual labor done under the sun, or with dirtiness,
ugliness, and sickliness in contrast to the healthy good looks of the ruddy free man’
(Goldenberg, 2003, p. 119). There is some evidence, though, that the dominant group
depicted slaves as dark-skinned without reference to ethnicity but rather as ‘part of a
social construct, the attribution by the elite of all ugliness to the underclass’ (Karras,
as cited in Goldenberg, 2003, p. 119). During religious clashes in the Middle Ages
even Jews were cast as black, described as a ‘foul black host’ in contrast to the ‘clean
white army of the Saints’ (Haller, 1971, 121–123). Given that they were black, Jews
obviously had to be ‘wiped’ out (p. 121–123).
In order to remain intact, the racial/moral hierarchy of the dominant group
necessitates the fixity of ‘the Self and Other’, which becomes the dominant group’s
obsession. Consequently, because of recurrent use, both institutionally (on segregation
signs and in passbooks, for example) and culturally (in literature, films and books, for
example), words such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ become ‘socio-cultural objects’ (Ennis,
p. 3) or, put differently, metaphors, e.g., white for good, black for evil, and so forth. 56
In a bar scene in Galíndez in which a black barman serves the mulato character
Voltaire, the narrator establishes the racial stereotype through the explicit
identification of the barman’s race, i.e., ‘negro’ (Voltaire himself uses the word
several times throughout the dialogue, stating it four times in the entire bar scene):
Movía la coctelera un negro de cabeza apepinada y le pidió la especialidad del
día. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 217)
A Negro in cornrows was shaking the cocktail mixer and he was asked what
today’s special was. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 185)
56
Sometimes, though, the other reshapes metaphors, generally through appropriation for his own
purposes. An example is the ‘Black is Beautiful’ slogan adopted in the 1960s by the Black Power
movement in the United States that advocated a ‘mood of black pride and a rejection of white values of
style and appearance’ (Solheim, 2008, p. 112) (see chapter 5).
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The narrator further reinforces the barman’s race by mentioning his hair (‘de cabeza
apepinada’), referring to one of the most identifiable aspects of blackness:
‘cornrows’. This characteristic, along with the omission of the word ‘hombre’ or
‘camarero’ as alternative identifiers, reduces the man’s identity to race, diminishing
his profession in the process.
The novels nearly always describe blackness, making it a part of a process of
‘stereotyping that result[s] in “fixity” of identities’ that ‘is usually based on
establishing and maintaining the position of the other’ (Ellapen, 2006, p. 49). In
colonial discourse, the stereotype,
Anxiously repeats and reinforces the boundaries of this supposedly natural and
real fixity. This ambivalence in colonial discourse functions through networks
of power that produce the other as a social reality that is visible and known.
(Ellapen, 2006, p. 49)
In the novels, this framing device makes blackness visible while allowing whiteness
to be malleable or generally fade into the background, as it were, until it becomes the
norm, i.e., something that the other and the dominant group both take for granted. The
other, on the other hand, is always reminded of his or her behaviour, looks, etc., as if
they were unnatural and deviant, or divergent from the norm.
La fiesta del chivo shows blacks to be dim-witted, ugly and hyper-masculine, among
other things, with such traits ‘anxiously repeated’ throughout the narrative, fixing
black characters’ otherness. When Vargas Llosa refers to a person working in a lowly
profession, he nearly always alludes to his or her race through descriptions of racial
characteristics. This is not surprising, given that the stereotype ‘implies a fixation or
fear that must be repeated’, says Alonzo (2009, p. 5). An example of such fixity
appears in La fiesta del chivo when the chauffeur Luís Rodríguez drops a guest off at
Trujillo’s residence:
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El Generalísimo examinó a Luis Rodríguez; traje oscuro, camisa blanca,
corbata azul, zapatos lustrados: el negro mejor adornado de la República
Dominicana. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 363)
The Generalissimo examined Luis Rodríguez; dark suit, white shirt, blue tie,
polished shoes: the best-dressed black in the Dominican Republic. (Vargas
Llosa, 2002, p. 331)
Because Trujillo cannot assert his superiority over the chauffer Luís Rodríguez
wholly in terms of race, given his own mulatez, he does so in terms of that other
important outwardly directed manifestation of status: clothing. In qualifying the
chauffer as the best-dressed black man in the Dominican Republic on mentioning his
not-exactly-out-of-the-ordinary apparel, Trujillo both reifies the stereotype that blacks
in the Dominican Republic are poor and lack pulchritude and establishes by
extension, a boundary between himself and blackness: indeed, he is always
immaculately dressed and is rich, too. The distancing of blackness from pulchritude
and wealth serves in this case to distance the black subject from the dominant group,
represented by a well-dressed and wealthy dictator with a powdered face. Vargas
Llosa’s Trujillo’s cutting remark regarding the appearance of the chauffer
demonstrates how the ‘“the stereotype” strives for “fixity” but also undoes that
fixity—or else fears that it is coming undone’ (Bhabha, as cited in Brantlinger, 2011,
p. 13). Indeed, the binaries presented here (e.g., black=unsophisticated, black=poor,
etc.) do not exactly square with Trujillo’s own reality, with the dictator being mulato
and having grown up poor. Trujillo’s subjectivity in his use of the stereotype reveals
the fact that the stereotype is ‘always relational and plural rather than singular’ (p.
13).
The relational nature of the stereotype is evident too in Galíndez when a white
American male CIA agent refers to the doorman of his building (in the United States)
in terms of the man’s behaviour as well as his race:
El portero dice ser indio pero es chicano o dice ser chicano pero es indio, ni
tiene tiempo de preguntárselo, nunca tiene tiempo de preguntárselo porque es
un hombre de perfil, siempre huidizo entre su garita y el mostrador llavero al
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que sólo se asoma con gesto cansino cuando le llamas. (Vázquez Montalbán,
2000, p. 115)
The doorman claims to be Indian but is Chicano or claims to be Chicano but is
Indian, you can’t ask him, there is never time to ask, because he is a man seen in
fleeting glimpses, always fleeing to his lookout post, and he appears at the key
counter, seemingly worn by work, only when he’s called. (Vázquez Montalbán,
1992, p. 93)
Every time the agent refers to the doorman, he makes the man out to be evasive,
unfriendly and unprofessional, mentioning these traits in addition to the man’s
indeterminate (though obviously brown) race:
Ni rastro del portero indio o chicano y lo agradece para evitarse el ritual del
saludo que el otro no contesta a no ser que lo repita y detenga el paso.
(Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 126)
Not a trace of the Indian or Chicano doorman, and he is glad to avoid the ritual
of greeting, which the man never answers, so he has to repeat it and slow his
steps. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 104)
La voz del portero indio o chicano le parece menos impersonal que otras veces.
Está irritado. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 132)
The voice of the Indian or Chicano doorman seems less impersonal than on
other occasions. He’s annoyed. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 109)
In this way, the CIA agent, like Trujillo, distances himself from the other by
establishing
morally
based
binaries
(e.g.,
brown=useless,
brown=menial,
brown=unintelligent, etc.) that would contrast with those pertaining to whiteness, e.g.,
white=resourceful, white=professional, white=intelligent, etc.
135
In La fiesta del chivo, Livio’s friend, Tejeda asks him why he becomes angry when he
calls him ‘negro’, explaining that he does it with affection, and Livio responds by
saying,
Ya lo sé, Huáscar. En los Estados Unidos, en la academia, cuando los cadetes o
los oficiales me decían nigger, no era por cariño, sino por racistas. Tenía que
hacerme respetar. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 308)
I know, Huáscar. But in the United States, at the academy, when the cadets or
the officers called me Nigger they weren’t being affectionate, they were racists.
I had to make them respect me. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, pp. 280–281)
The affirmation of Livio of the need to make himself respected shows an awareness
on his part of the two aspects of the racial stereotype, which are the
psychological/behavioural (e.g., criminality, lasciviousness, etc.) and the physical
(e.g., black skin). The components of the stereotype are crystallised too in Mehring’s
final disparaging remark concerning Afrikaners, when a male Afrikaans guard
discovers Mehring and an Afrikaans woman about to cavort in an isolated spot in an
industrial area of Johannesburg and asks them what they are doing, to which Mehring
defiantly responds:
Is that all? Is that the best you can do, thick-headed ox, guardian of the purity of
the master race? (Gordimer, 1974, p. 263)
Here, Mehring explicitly taunts the supposed racial ‘purity’ of Afrikaners (which it is
revealed he doubts when, on the following page, he questions the race of his white
female Afrikaans passenger [Gordimer, 1974, p. 264]), insulting the intelligence of
the guard (‘thick-headed ox’) in the same breath. As seen elsewhere in the novels,
animal references (like ‘thick-headed ox’) are frequently used to other due to the low
status animals have traditionally been ascribed in the Western world. Such
stereotyping reifies what the dominant group has always thought, which is that the
other is mentally and physical deficient and thus unworthy of occupying the same
position in society as it does.
136
Since one of the main objectives of the novels is to attack the power structures in the
Dominican Republic under the trujillato and South Africa under apartheid, parody is
used due to its ability to chip away at the authority of such regimes, which have
‘pretensions to be timeless and absolute’ (Emerson and Morson, 1990, p. 435). Parody
‘forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a
given genre or style’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 55), which it does by ‘liberating’ seriousness
of its ‘monologic pretensions’ rather than ‘denying seriousness’, and by eliciting
laughter, which is just as common as seriousness in culture (Corley, 2009, p. 142).
Laughter, claims Emerson (1997), helps us relativise ourselves in relation to the wider
world; that is, ‘as very minor players in a multitude of other people’s plots’ (p. 196).
The humorous represents a chance for the other to mock and resist established
systems of order (Weaver, 2011, p. 55).
Parody is created using grotesque and carnivalesque literary techniques. The
carnivalesque is a sort of psychological unravelling, a debunking of the conceptual
binaries that generate stereotypes through the ‘temporary liberation from the
prevailing truth and from established order; the marked suspension of all hierarchical
rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’ (p. 10). Conceptual meanings are
challenged through disquieting or startling representations, which are integral to the
carnivalesque.
Díaz (2007) uses the carnivalesque in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to mock
the ingrained and institutionalised racism of the Dominican Republic’s mostly white
elite when he describes how he thinks they would view Beli, the only black girl at the
their school, when she is at the classroom’s chalkboard:
She is a giant […] in their minds the children are calling her what they call her
in the world: variations on La Prieta Quemada or La Fea Quemada. (p. 261)
In describing Beli as La Prieta Quemada (The Burnt Black One) and La Fea Quemada
(The Burnt Ugly One), Díaz deploys the carnivalesque to debunk the racism of the
white elite, i.e., by making its racism risible. He does so by presenting skin colour and
physical appearance in an ‘ambivalent matrix’ of abuse that flouts logic by showing
the elite’s bigotry towards blacks as, in a sense, rhetorically tautological and, in that
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way, illogical. The tautology and lack of logic stem from the children proving Beli’s
physical blackness by using the word ‘quemada’ (burnt), which, although it indicates
a blackening of the skin, does not indicate black phenotypes.
Rhetorical devices or figures of speeches that play on stretching the human
imagination to the strangest limits are typical of the carnivalesque; these include
hyperbole and irony, which are evident in Galíndez. In the novel, Vázquez Montalbán
reveals the absurdity of the ambitions of white supremacy when he uses irony and the
conflation of race and the psychological/behavioural to create humorous
representations that make statements about the value of race in the Dominican
Republic. The passage below, in which a colonel reacts after Trujillo reprimands him,
embodies this patterning:
Casi diríase que ha adelgazado en diez segundos y que ha perdido la morenez
mestiza, tal vez porque se ha agrandado tanto el blanco de sus ojos que le
ocupan toda la cara. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 239)
You would almost have said that in ten seconds he’d gotten skinnier and had
lost his dark mestizo coloring, perhaps because the whites of his eyes had grown
so big they took up most of his face. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 204)
The colonel loses his mestizo colouring out of fear for the dictator, with the whites of
his eyes described as dominating the rest of his face. In this way, the mestizo character
can only be white when his behaviour (in this case, a shocked reaction) is extreme,
i.e., hyperbolic, with this rhetorical device creating a sense of the absurd. Indeed, the
above example highlights the impossible aspiration to whiteness in the Dominican
Republic, the irony residing in Trujillo only being able to make his compatriots white
through fear. In Trujillo’s eyes, the Dominican Republic was to be uplifted through
whitening or blanqueamiento while in realty it felt bewildered by it.
Similarly, the episode in which Trujillo explicitly mentions black orchestra members
becoming whiter ‘a medida que los escrutaba el dictador con la batuta en la mano’
(Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 62–3) (‘as they concentrate on the dictator holding the
baton in this hand’ [Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 47]) mocks the dictator’s
138
preoccupation with whiteness and the desperation with which he seeks it (for himself
and his country) by revealing its utter unfeasibility. While Trujillo’s severity and
brutality do not set him particularly far apart from most twentieth-century LatinAmerican dictators, his racial policies were unique in their grotesqueness and
absurdity, exemplified by the Parsley Massacre, and his racial (re-)classification of
black Dominicans as Indians and rewriting of textbooks to account for this fraudulent
version of history.
In The Conservationist, Mehring brings forth the carnivalesque when he uses bestiary
imagery to describe his foreman’s teeth, referring to them as ‘dirty horse-teeth
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 15) and ‘rotten tusks’ (p. 81). According to Goatly (2006), people
described as looking like horses, especially women, have ugly faces (‘horsy’), and
people who act like horses (‘horse around’) display stupid, ‘loud, noisy’ behaviour,
typified by expressions such as ‘ass’ and ‘donkey’ (p. 27). These figurative meanings
and the ridiculousness of a person having horse teeth arouse humour, the effect of
which is intended to make the reader share Mehring’s vision of a black character who
cannot be taken seriously.
A more extreme form of expressing ‘the alienation, estrangement, and terrifying
disorder underlying daily life’ is through the grotesque, which refers to making
‘something which is familiar and trusted […] strange and disturbing’ (Corey, 2000, p.
33). Elements of the grotesque are visible in La fiesta del chivo when Vargas Llosa
brings disparate things ‘which by themselves would arouse no curiosity’ (ibid.)
together to create a sense of alienation when he describes the butler of one of
Trujillo’s men:
Debió callarse, porque entró en la habitación el mayordomo, un viejo mulato
tuerto, tan feo y descuidado como el dueño de casa, con una jarrita de cristal
en la que había vaciado el jerez, y dos copitas. Las dejó sobre la mesilla y se
retiró, renqueando. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 266)
He had to stop talking because the butler came in, an old, bent mulatto as ugly
and slovenly as his employer, carrying a glass decanter into which he had
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poured the sherry, and two glasses. He left them on the table and hobbled out of
the room. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 241)
In this case, the coupling of race (mulato) with a series of physical characteristics,
including ‘viejo’, ‘tuerto’, ‘feo’, and ‘renqueando’ (p. 266) creates an image of a
degenerate human being with a multitude of physical defects whom the reader would
find it difficult to imagine carrying out the duties of a butler with any efficacy
(behavioural). The expectations of the reader in relation to the deportment and
appearance of an idealised and stereotypical butler, which is as an industrious and
clean-cut individual, irrespective of age, are overthrown here. The absence of fixity in
this representation ‘evokes a sense of degeneracy, a kind of repetitive, perpetual moral
disorder’ by going against the ‘rigid and unchanging order of being’ of fixity (Hook,
2006, p. 303). The black or mulato male worker, however, is doubly stigmatised,
firstly by his supposed degeneracy and secondly by his profession, given capitalism’s
equation of material wealth with human worth. For the powerful characters in the
novels, seeing the other as degenerate explains the fact that the other does most of
society’s low-paid menial work. Indeed, deformed, sick, unintelligent people seem
suitably qualified for it.
The ‘disturbing perspective’ of the grotesque (Thomson, 1972, p. 58) is evident in the
episode when Trujillo establishes his superiority over a chauffeur by portraying the
man’s looks and behaviour in a way that disorientates the reader, bringing him ‘up
short, jolt[ing] him out of accustomed ways of perceiving the world and confront[ing]
him with a radically different, disturbing perspective’ (p. 58):
La gran cara morena, con cicatrices y bigote, asintió varias veces. (Vargas
Llosa, 2000, p. 364)
The large dark face, with its scars and mustache, nodded several times. (Vargas
Llosa, 2002, p. 331)
In Trujillo’s depiction of the chauffeur, the imaginary detachment of the man’s head
from his body, an effect that is achieved through making the face rather than the man
the subject, is disquieting but also somewhat comical, conjuring up an image of a
140
witless and not-quite-human being. The estrangement of the chauffeur is exemplary of
Trujillo’s practice of depersonalising blacks as a way of dehumanising them and
ultimately justifying their eradication.
The descriptions of the butler and chauffeur in La fiesta del chivo play into the
tradition of considering people through a distorted and prejudiced racial prism, as
illustrated by the alleged desire of Dominican employers to employ fairer-skinned
people. ‘Want ads in newspapers’, says Winn (2006), ‘ask for employees with “good
looks”, which Dominicans know means a “white” appearance’ (p. 300). In the words
of one Dominican, ‘looking white is your passport to opportunity in this country’ (p.
300). After the colonial period, white privilege remained in the Dominican Republic,
with its colonial legacy reinforced by the U.S. occupation, which, together with the
trujillato, consolidated the belief in the superiority of whiteness. The association of
power with race in the Dominican Republic is revealed by the previously mentioned
quote in La fiesta del chivo of the grotesque chauffer (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 364).
With it, Vargas Llosa signposts the correlation between servitude and race, with the
race of people working in lowly professions (taxi drivers, street artists, chauffers, and
butlers) nearly always mentioned and thus fixed. Vázquez Montalbán also makes this
association clear in Galíndez when he shows Voltaire returning to the bar to find a
new black barman serving him, whom he dehumanises by remarking to himself that,
Le habían cambiado al negro. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 218)
They had changed Negroes. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 186)
Voltaire refers to the barmen as if they were workhorses that the hotel routinely
replaced, emphasising in this way their relatively weak position.
The sense of estrangement created through dehumanisation in the example of the
butler in La fiesta del chivo is also created through the use of hyperbole in the
following scene, in which the face of a minister in Trujillo’s government, Chirinos, is
described to grotesque effect:
141
—No lo harás —se rió la gran jeta oscura del dueño de casa—. (Vargas Llosa,
2000, p. 269)
‘You won’t do that’. The great dark mouth of his host laughed. (Vargas Llosa,
2002, p. 244)
The description, unsurprisingly, rests on the physical (‘gran jeta oscura’) and the
behavioural (‘se rió’), and the phrase ‘gran jeta’ could be considered hyperbolic,
given ‘gran’ means ‘big’ or ‘great’ and ‘jeta’, though translated neutrally as ‘mouth’,
already suggests largeness. In addition, the common use of ‘jeta’ to describe the
snout/mouth of pigs in particular further serves to alienate the character, given the
dismal view humans have traditionally held of said animal.
The grotesque, according to Mohr (2003), often hinges on the use of hyperbole,
tending to,
Transgress its own limits: ‘the author of the grotesque is carried away, is
“drunk” with hyperbole’. The grotesque writer spirals out of even his own
control. And so the grotesque debunks not one thing, rather it is a ‘negation of
the entire order of life…the prevailing truth’. (p. 38)
Vargas Llosa, in using such hyperbolic imagery, is providing his audience with an
alternative, absurdist and chaotic vision of humanity that urges the reader to search for
meaning and truth among the disorder of human existence. In this sense, ‘the
grotesque cannot be stern and didactic as fixed norms are’, but instead it is,
A world of becoming and change, which, through abuses, uncrownings, teasing,
and impertinent gestures…transforms cosmic terror into a gay carnival monster.
Cosmic catastrophe represented in the material bodily lower stratum is
degraded, humanized, and transformed into grotesque monsters. Terror is
conquered by laughter. (Mohr, 2003, p. 38)
The conquering of terror towards the end of La fiesta del chivo through the comical is
obvious in the section that describes one of Trujillo’s henchmen transporting the men
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accused of assassinating the dictator to the location in which they will be executed.
The author describes the henchman as having a ‘nariz aplastada de boxeador’
(Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 441), 57 a physical characteristic that marks him out as a dimwitted thug, given the stereotype of boxers as such. The final description of the
henchman (‘…el negro de cara aplastada lo festejó con una carcajada’ [p. 442])58
creates ‘a gay carnival monster’ through his ridiculous appearance and spine-chilling
laugh, as well as evoking the absurd through his apparent dim-wittedness.
The use of the grotesque (the profane in the example below) as a way of debunking
seriousness is unmistakable in Gordimer’s novel The Conservationist when the white
protagonist, Mehring, speaks to a white Afrikaans policeman on the phone about a
dead body that has been found in the reeds of a vlei (shallow lake) on his farm.
Mehring wants the policeman to come and pick up the body, but the sergeant tells him
the police van is busy in the location (black township). Mehring, exasperated,
haughtily asks the policeman what he is expected to do with a man who has obviously
been murdered (as indicated by blows to the head), adding, ‘I don’t want my boys
handling someone who’s been murdered’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 18). In response, the
policeman assures Mehring that the police will come and pick up the body ‘first thing
in the morning. There won’t be any trouble for you, don’t worry. You’re there by the
vlei, just near the location, ay? It comes from there, all right, they’re a terrible lot of
kaffirs, we’re used to that lot…’ (p. 18). When Mehring hangs up, he grunts ‘Christ
almighty’ to himself out of frustration, though making sure he does so quietly so that
his black farm foreman does not hear him (p. 18). The indifferent attitude of the
Afrikaans police officer to the dead black body reflects apartheid’s coldness towards
the idea that blacks deserve dignity, even in death. Mehring’s initial response to the
policeman (‘I don’t want my boys handling someone who’s been murdered’ [p. 18])
shows that he too is equally unmoved by the fact that a murder has taken place on or
near his property. His apparently benevolent gesture towards his black workers, which
is likely a ploy to distinguish himself from the policeman’s obnoxious racism, along
with his muffled exasperation at not being able to get rid of the body sooner, reveal
Mehring’s paternalism to be farcical. In this sense, the line between apartheid’s cold-
57
‘flattened nose of a boxer’ (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 404).
58
‘…the black with the flattened face rewarded him with a giggle’ (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 405).
143
heartedness and his own, which Mehring tries to mitigate, is blurry. Interestingly,
Mehring’s attempts to appear more civilised than the policeman also show the way in
which racism towards blacks exposed divisions and prejudice within the white
community itself. English speakers tended to view Afrikaners as backward because of
their unrefined racism, and Afrikaners tended to distrust English speakers, whom they
viewed as hypocritical for enjoying the fruits of apartheid while demonising
Afrikaners (Yudelman, 1983, as cited in Giliomee, 2003, p. 16).
Brutal bodies
In Rumours of Rain, too, we witness the farce of white South Africans attempting to
appear civilised while operating in an exploitative and repressive system when
Mynhardt describes the supposed barbarism of black people after a wage dispute
between the mine and its black workers turns violent:
Men in blue uniforms washing bits of human bodies from the tar. Charlie had
told me what it had looked like immediately after the riots. Bodies hacked to
pieces with pangas. Tongues torn out and eye-holes gaping. The pulped faces
smeared with excrement. Just as well they kept this sort of violence hidden
behind the barbed wire of compounds. In a civilised community it would be
unbearable. (Brink, 1978, p. 73)
Mynhardt’s statement that such violence would not occur in a civilised community is
ironic, in this case because of the fact that black South Africans live in the same
country as white South Africans, who maintain exclusive political and economic
control over it (with the exception of the Bantustans, though, whose governments are
in reality puppets of Pretoria). We could view the violence of the wage dispute in
terms of Fanon’s conception of the colonised man as someone who loathes himself
and his life, which leads him to express the,
...aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people.
This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and police and
magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with astonishing waves
of crime. (Fanon, 1963, p. 54)
144
In the case of the black mine workers in Rumours of Rain, their frustration is clear:
The dominant group oppresses them in their work place, prohibiting them from
leaving their compounds. This is something one of Mynhardt’s black office
employees, Charlie Mofokeng, brings to his attention when he pleads with him to
permit the workers some luxuries, like leaving the compound and having access to
women and alcohol. 59 Mynhardt does not mention such confinement (which would
lead to frustration, pent-up anger, despair and violence if not relieved) when he
remarks that it is ‘just as well they kept this sort violence hidden behind the barbed
wire of compounds’ (Brink, 1978, p. 73).
The scene in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in which Dominican blacks put
whites in cook pots in order to devour them reflects, in a literal way, the dominant
group’s intense fear of black violence and being overwhelmed by it. The quip,
‘everybody wondered aloud where their biscocho was’, humorises this truly terrifying
prospect:
So for one whole day he moped around the house, tried to write but couldn’t,
watched a comedy show where black Dominicans in grass skirts put white
Dominicans in safari outfits into cannibal cookpots and everybody wondered
aloud where their biscocho was. Scary. (Díaz, 2007, p. 283)
White fears in the Dominican Republic of Haitians/blacks stemmed from the
massacre of whites in Haiti during and after the Haitian Revolution, the dethronement
of the white elite in Santo Domingo during the Haitian occupation of Dominican
territory and the fear whipped up by Trujillo of Haitians in the twentieth century. The
dominant group finds the possibility of being devoured or sidelined (like being put
into a cook pot or taken over by communists) humiliating and maddening.
Consequently, the dominant group masquerades oppression as self-defence, under the
guise of which it carries out offensive operations against the other. In the case of the
Dominican Republic, Haiti and South Africa, the dominant group reacted offensively
59
‘‘Jesus, man, here they’re kept behind barbed wire with nothing but dust and dry grass as far as you
can see. They want liquor, they want women. They need something’’ (Brink, 1978, pp. 44–45).
145
to real and perceived threats, either systematically massacring the population (as the
Dominican Republic did with Haitians along the border in 1937), segregating it
(apartheid) or impoverishing it (as France did in Haiti). 60
During negotiations in South Africa in the early 1990s between the ruling National
Party and the ANC, violence soared in the country’s black townships. In Ways of
Dying, Toloki reveals such violence to be routine when he describes what the
informal settlements’ men do on Boxing Day (Mda, 1995, p. 25). While violence is
clearly a ‘normal’ part of black township life, Mda (1995) humanises it when he
describes the long-lasting trauma of a community that had killed a group of men who
had terrorised their village over a long period:
The previous week, in a moment of mass rage, the villagers had set upon a
group of ten men, beat them up, stabbed them with knives, hurled them into a
shack, and set it alight. Then they had danced around the burning shack, singing
and changing about their victory of these thugs, who had been terrorizing the
community for a long time. It seemed these bandits, who were roasted in a
funeral pyre, had thrived on raping maidens, and robbing and murdering
defenceless community leaders. The police were unable to take any action
against these gangsters, so the members of the community had come together,
and had decided to serve their own blend of justice. According to a journalist
who wrote about the incident, ‘it was as if the killing had, in a mind-blowing
instant, amputated a foul and festering limb from the soul of the community’.
When Toloki got there all the villagers were numbed by their actions. They had
become prosecutors, judges and executioners. But every one of them knew that
the village would forever be enshrouded by the small of burning flesh. The
60
France met the violent Haitian Revolution with stern retribution, obliging the Haitian government to
pay reparations as punishment. It imposed ‘crippling blockades and embargoes’ (Varadarajan, 2010) on
the new nation that ‘continued until 1825, when France offered to lift embargoes and recognize the
Haitian Republic if the latter would pay restitution to France—for loss of property in Haiti, including
slaves—of 150 million gold francs’ (ibid.). Haiti had no choice but to pay France or suffer complete
impoverishment or recolonisation, the first of which was realised by the time Haiti had paid back its
debt to France in 1947 at exorbitantly high interest rates.
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community would never be the same again, and for the rest of their lives, its
people would walk in a daze. (p. 66)
The high levels of violence in African societies are, according to Eze (2013), ‘an
expression of the people’s desperate search for meaning and for solutions to the
particular postcolonial dysfunction to which history and various African governments
have subjected them’ (p. 88). Such violence, he says, is always ‘a result of a loss of
hierarchy and differentiation among people’ (p. 88). In a rapidly changing society
such as the South Africa of the early 1990s, where power was up for grabs and the
racist restrictions to wealth and status that had existed were crumbling, the old
certainties that apartheid provided, that is, of black poverty and white privilege, were
giving way to a reality of rich and poor blacks, where to be poor was no longer
excusable or dignified. The brutish behaviour of the once poor, rural-dwelling but
now wealthy, city-dwelling Nefolovhodwe towards poor blacks like Toloki in Ways of
Dying is perhaps a sign of this new shift in mentality in the black population. The
murderous and thieving gang that had terrorised the village in the above description is
conceivably an extreme manifestation of it.
Sluggish and sexual bodies
Because of their complete control of the nation, whites were able to amass wealth,
which, under capitalism, bought them power and privilege. Because of their
vulnerability due to being minorities, white elites in places such as the Dominican
Republic and South Africa had an interest in justifying their disproportionate wealth
and power in relation to the other, who constituted a majority but who controlled a
minority share of the economy. Hence, from these elites filtered down the stereotype
of the black person as lazy, meaning that black people were economically subordinate
to whites because they were lazy, not because the dominant group oppressed them.
The notion that black people are lazy has its roots, asserts Feagin (2001), in the
‘Protestant ethic’ that was taken to the United States by British colonists and
merchants and which stressed ‘individual acquisitiveness’ (p. 104). Black slaves who
refused to work ‘the very long hours’ demanded by slave owners were ‘judged by this
ethic to be “lazy”’ despite the fact that these same workers did ‘the hardest work’ (p.
147
104). The stereotype endured until the end of slavery and well into the era of formal
racial segregation (p. 104).
The description below in Galíndez of a ‘fat-assed’ Dominican mulata plays
grotesquely into the black-is-lazy stereotype through the reference to an abnormally
large backside and the use of the ‘clash of incompatibles’ (sluggishness and busyness,
in this case):
Casi toda la recepción la ocupa una mulata joven, culona, desganada y a la vez
atareada. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 318)
Almost the entire reception room is taken up by a young mulatto, fat-assed, both
sluggish and very busy. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 275)
The description prompts the reader for the black-is-lazy stereotype by suggesting that
blackness (indicated and fixed by the description of the woman’s large bottom and the
mention of her mulatez) is responsible for laziness no matter the person or their
circumstances; indeed, the woman is busy but can still manage to be indolent. This
quote also makes use of what Bakhtin (1984a) calls the ‘lower bodily stratum’ (p. 21),
which ‘degrade[s] all that is high, spiritual, ideal, and abstract and relocate[s] them in
the material world’ (Corley, 2009, p. 143). The author reveals the values of the
dominant group by contrasting the woman’s fat bottom (lower bodily stratum) with
her sluggishness (stereotype) and busyness (the ideal in the dominant group’s eyes),
with these illogical contrasts helping to debunk the dominant group’s values.
The fact that the physicality and the job (in this case, that of a bar hostess) of the
mulata should be mentioned so close to one another is also highly significant, given
the traditional representation, especially in the United States, of the black female’s
body in the context of manual labour. In the United States, until recently, black
women’s bodies were viewed ‘as an uninhibited labouring body that is masculinised’
(p. 41), a result of black women typically having to provide sexual pleasure to white
males during the slave-owning era and having to raise white children during and
subsequent to it. Human reproduction was an integral part of early American
capitalism, a system that depended on it in order to continue expanding (Zack, 1997,
148
p. 150). Black females became, as a result, objects of desire for white men, who
viewed them as ‘breeders’. Black women’s ability to ‘breed’ workers could make
slave owners more money, and even more ‘if they [white men] themselves bred them’
(p. 150).61
Because of their sexual role in society, black women’s femininity and their bodily
functions were ‘commonly represented in degraded terms of abnormal excessive
sexual activity’ (Peterson, 1994, p. 42). The subordinate status of black women after
slavery validated the elite’s view of the black female body ‘as a form of social
disorder that confirmed notions of the black female body as unruly, grotesque,
carnivalesque’ (p. 42). Black women’s bodies in Galíndez, for example, are depicted
as excessively carnal, sexualised in a way that makes them seem easily attainable and,
by extension, as having higher, sub-human sexual needs (than white women). White
women, in contrast, were defined in terms of purity and transparency—traits enacted
through the ensconcement of the white female body in ‘the domestic sphere’, where
‘emotional restraint’, physical restraint and the veiling of the ‘already pale and
delicate bodies in clothes (that) would translate inner purity into outward form’ were
promoted (Zack, 1997, pp. 40–41). Vázquez Montalbán, though, in highlighting that
which is ‘vulnerable’ about black women (i.e., their lower bodily strata), shows their
humanity and, conversely, the inhumanity of the dominant group, which exalts the socalled higher functions (work, production, etc.). 62 By revealing the dominant values
of the dominant group, the author potentially places the other on higher moral ground
in the reader’s eyes.
In Ways of Dying, rather than depicting the labouring black female in terms of
laziness or the lower bodily stratum (e.g., as sexualised beings), Mda depicts her in
61
It is a modern, romantic idea for men’s sexuality and desire to be viewed as ‘self-validating and
autonomous’, says Zack (1997); men married ‘for improvement in social status, economic gain, and
reproduction if they were heirs who needed descendants to whom they could pass on legacies’, and
women were ‘the sexual sex’ (p. 150).
62
Exaggerated displays of sexuality, emotion and sin are relatively common in the other in the novels,
and in the moral system of the dominant group such behaviours are viewed as a stain on the purity of
(white) civilisation. The dominant group views those closer to God as those who are disciplined, pure
and morally better, with God thought to have endowed those who are morally strong with civilisation.
149
terms of the plethora of tasks women in the informal settlement in which Toloki and
Noria live have to carry out on a daily basis in order to keep their households running.
In doing so, Mda reveals the reality of the informal settlement rather than simply the
values of the dominant group, i.e., what it thinks of the reality of such places. The
women’s daily existence in the informal settlement reveals several of the potential
grounds on which the typecast of the labouring black female body in the post-colonial
context have been constructed; which is to say, the obvious poverty of the informal
settlements (exemplified by a lack of technology to do the work for the women) and
the African male’s chauvinism (namely, his aversion to physical labour). Toloki
brings these causes to light when he,
...notices that in every shack they visit, the women are never still. They are
always doing something with their hands. They are cooking. They are sewing.
They are outside scolding the children. They are at the tap drawing water. They
are washing clothes. They are sweeping the floor in their shacks, and the ground
outside. They are closing holes in the shacks with cardboard and plastic. They
are loudly joking with their neighbours while they hang washing on the line. Or
they are fighting with the neighbours about children who have beaten up their
own children. They are preparing to go to the taxi rank to catch taxis to the city,
where they will work in the kitchens of their madams. They are always on the
move. They are always on the go.
Men, on the other hand, tend to cloud their heads with pettiness and vain
pride. They sit all day and dispense wide-ranging philosophies on how things
should be done. With great authority in their voices, they come up with wise
theories on how to put the world right. Then at night they demand to be given
food, as if the food just walked into the house on its own. When they believe all
the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up
and continue with their empty theories. (Mda, 1995, p. 175–176).
Black women are the bedrocks of informal settlement society, playing highly active
roles within their own families and the community in general, with Toloki’s
observations showing the women to be capable, flexible and extremely hard working.
The poverty of the township and the macho African culture, however, compel these
women to engage mostly in toil, the philosophising necessarily left to the men. The
150
stereotypes (lazy and monstrous in size) of the black female body seen in Galíndez in
the previous example are absent here, given Mda’s preference for a focus on the
women’s tasks rather than the size of their bodies and their physical movements.
Interestingly enough, in Toloki’s observations, sex itself is imagined as a chore, with
Toloki portraying the men as highly sexual beings, pestering imaginably worn-out
women for sex after the children have been put to bed and the chores of the day are
done.
As a rule in the novels, the dominant group casts black women as prostitutes and
black men as rapists. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example, the very
act of being black (‘prieta’) incites a reaction based on this psychosexual paradigm:
In the minds of Beli’s neighbors, that prieta comparona had finally found her
true station in life, as a cuero [prostitute]. (Díaz, 2007, p. 127)
Trujillo in Galíndez is also himself keenly aware of the over-sexualised black woman
stereotype, reacting furiously to Jesús de Galíndez’s treatise on his family in which,
according to him, Galíndez alludes to his daughter as a ‘puta’ (‘whore’):
De mi hija Flor de Oro Trujillo dice que es mulata, que tiene un gran atractivo
sexual, atractivo sexual, señores, una grosería, una grosería porque podía
haber dicho de ella que era linda, que es linda, pero no, al señor profesor le
parece que tiene atractivo sexual, como si fuera una puta, porque son las putas
las que tienen atractivo sexual. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 245)
And about my daughter, Flor de Oro Trujillo, what you say is that she is a
mulatto, that she’s very attractive sexually, attractive sexually, gentlemen, a
suggestive remark, suggestive because you could have said that she was pretty,
that she is pretty, but no, it seems to the learned professor that she is sexually
attractive, as if she was a whore, because it’s whores that are sexually attractive.
(Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 209)
By asserting to Galíndez that his daughter is not ‘sexually attractive’ but ‘beautiful’,
Trujillo desexualises her and in doing so makes her less mulata. Trujillo’s mention of
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race and sexuality in the same breath is not coincidental but a function of the racial
stereotype
and
its
coupling
of
physical
appearance
(black
skin)
with
psychological/behavioural attributes (libidinousness, in this case). Mda (1995)
contests the stereotype of the black woman as whore when he describes how, after the
woman employed to look after Noria’s son is accosted by Noria’s aged father, she
says she is,
...going to pack her things and go, since she was not prepared to stay in a home
where the man of the house could not control his raging lust. She was a church
woman, and a married woman with a husband and children. The fact that she
was in need of a job did not mean that her body was for sale. (p. 90)
With this event, Mda rejects the stereotype of the labouring, sexualised black female
body by giving the black female character a voice, which she uses to assert an identity
that renounces both the patriarchal African and European views of her as being made
solely for work and the sexual satisfaction of men. That the woman projects an image
that is similar to the Victorian-era ideal of white women is unsurprising considering
the influence British moral standards have exerted in black South Africa.
Mehring in The Conservationist considers the rapaciousness of black men when he
remarks that the blacks working on his farm would consider his white mistress,
Antonia, who had fled the country due to her involvement in a banned organisation, a
‘bitch’ if she were still in South Africa: ‘They’d want you to be a white bitch’
(Gordimer, 1974, p. 199). In the colonial context, rape represents to the coloniser,
according to Graham (2012), ‘twin penetration anxieties’, namely being overwhelmed
by a new land into which ‘he has thrust himself’, and contending with the danger of
having ‘the monstrous other’ who populates that land doing the same to his wife or
daughters (p. 18). In the early stages in the contest for British domination of South
Africa, the white woman’s body became a metaphor for the body of the nation, which
was to be white and shielded from the lecherous and savage other (p. 18).
Significantly, before she fled South Africa, Mehring’s mistress, Antonia, was working
with blacks in a banned organisation that was attempting to forge a new society, one
in which white paternalism and racism would be overturned. The fact that Mehring
suggests that blacks could even hate such a white person indicates his degree of fear
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(and perhaps guilt too) towards his farmworkers and blacks in general and their
possible designs on his farm and nation. Mehring’s visceral fear of losing his place
and space of privilege in society inhibits him from treating frightening developments
occurring across South Africa, including increasing violence in black townships and
the discovery of a dead black man on his farm as phenomena requiring urgent moral
examination. Instead, Mehring’s defensiveness makes him view such phenomena as
mundane aspects inherent to blackness, with black men in his view probably raping
white women indiscriminately if not kept in check by the status quo, namely,
apartheid, the very system that makes blacks hate whites in the first instance.
Tragically, the psychological and physical boundaries forged by apartheid disallow
Mehring from seeing it as the cause of the country’s accelerating moral decay; if
Mehring were capable of examining his conscience and that of the nation, he no doubt
would be frightened by the flippancy of his statement regarding Antonia.
Similar to how he depicts the nanny of Noria’s son (Mda, 1995, p. 90), Mda casts his
black male protagonist, Toloki, in opposition to the stereotype of the sexually
rapacious black male. Consequently, Toloki is timid in sexual matters (and later takes
a vow of celibacy when he starts working as a professional mourner), and as a
teenager he is even revolted by sex when his peers find themselves exhilarated by it.
When, for example, Toloki joins his herdboy friends in spying on Noria having sex,
‘he is so disgusted that he vomited. Since, then, he was satisfied with only hearing the
stories that the herdboys told about the pleasures behind the aloes, without seeing for
himself’ (p. 75).
Like Mehring in the The Conservationist, Senator Chirinos in La fiesta del chivo sees
black men, Haitians in this case, as a threat to the nation and uses their supposed
rapaciousness and predilection for white flesh as a metaphor for the black usurpation
of the Dominican Republic’s cultural and economic patrimony (mentioned around the
following quote):
—También de las mujeres —agravó la voz y soltó un vaho lujurioso el joven
Henry Chirinos: su lengua rojiza asomó, serpentina, entre sus gruesos labios—.
Nada atrae tanto a la carne negra como la blanca. Los estupros de
dominicanas por haitianos son el pan de cada día. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 217)
153
‘And our women too’. His voice thickened, and young Henry Chirinos gave
off a whiff of lechery: his reddish tongue appeared like a snake between his
thick lips. ‘Nothing attracts black flesh more than white. Haitian violations of
Dominican woman are an everyday occurrence’. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 195)
The fact that black sexuality is unrestrained, violent and desirous of humiliating
Dominican women draws on the notion seen throughout this novel, Rumours of Rain
and The Conservationist of blacks as anti-social and anti-civilisation. Consequently,
both Chirinos and Mehring’s statements can be seen as coded justification for the
separation of whites from blacks, with American segregationists, for example,
employing similar rhetoric, using the Congo crisis of 1960 as good reason for the
status quo to remain in the southern states. Ray Harris, President of the White
Citizens’ Council, falsely proclaimed that ‘the rape of white women became legal
after independence’ in the Congo and that ‘the law of the jungle’ would be brought to
Mississippi if segregation was abolished’ (Plummer, 2003, p. 144). Similarly, a fellow
white supremacist, Leander Perez, leader of the white resistance in Louisiana, warned
supporters in view of the fierce segregationist debate in the United States ‘Don’t wait
for your daughters to be raped by these Congolese’ (p. 144).
Díaz (2007), as he so often does in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, overturns
these stereotypes, doing so with the black-as-rapist one when he describes the holiday
season in the Dominican Republic as a time,
...when basic thermodynamic principle gets modified so that reality can now
reflect a final aspect, the picking-up of big-assed girls and the taking of said to
moteles; it’s one big party; one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark,
the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateys, the kids that certain
Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape—yes sir, nothing
like a Santo Domingo summer. (p. 272)
Díaz destabilises the typecast of blacks as rapacious and violent by mentioning the
phenomenon of white tourists raping Haitian children. In this instance, contrary to
154
expectation, it is North-American and European men who are predatory, taking
advantage of the vulnerable, who in this case are actually black.
In Ways of Dying, Mda (1995) provides yet another nuanced picture of black male
sexuality in South Africa by portraying a village where gangs ‘thrived on raping
maidens, and robbing and murdering defenceless community leaders’ (p. 66) and
contrasting it with Toloki, who takes pride in his self-restraint, making sure when
bathing outside his and Noria’s shack that passers-by do not see his ‘shame’; ‘people
must not see that he has disgraced his asceticism by having dirty thoughts running
through his mind, and playing havoc with his venerable body’ (p. 156). Toloki,
despite being attracted to and loving Noria, and admiring her when she is asleep and
wanting to comfort her by telling her that ‘everything will be alright’, ‘cannot do such
a thing. He can’t look at her sleeping posture for too long either. That would be
tantamount to raping her. It would be like doing dirty things to a goddess’ (p. 153).
By offering throughout his novel such contrasting images as those of the saint-like
Toloki and rapacious gangs, Mda bewilders the reader with a confusing reality that he
probably hopes will prompt him/her to examine the forces that have helped shape it.
Menial bodies
In apartheid South Africa, job reservation, which placed blacks in menial jobs and
whites in skilled and professional ones, reinforced many whites’ perception of blacks
as intellectually and physically different, namely more apt to face physical challenges,
a sentiment reflected in The Conservationist by Mehring, who says, ‘They’re used to
anything, they survive, swallowing dust, walking in droves through rain, and blown,
in August, like newspapers to the shelter of any wall’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 249). Here,
Mehring describes blacks in terms of used newspapers, which, as most readers could
imagine, are trampled on and forgotten about once they have been read but ultimately
are able to withstand (for a time, at least) the ravages of the environment by sticking
to walls. White South Africa was able to justify trampling over blacks (exploiting
them) by portraying black disadvantage as the consequence of incompetence, which,
on the surface, their all-pervasive ‘meniality’ confirmed (Steyn, 2001b, pp. 88–90).
155
In Galíndez, when the white, male CIA agent visits a hotel staffed by a mestiza, we
can find another example of how the dominant group assumes race and low job status
to be related, the race of the other becoming the reason for which he or she does a
particular job. While in the sauna, the CIA agent urinates over the coals, which causes
an acidic steam to drift to the reception area where the mestiza employee works. The
odour prompts her to enter the sauna and berate the agent before ordering him to
leave. In order to console himself, the agent mentally derides the mestiza, imagining
her as a putrid, bent, old woman chained to a rotting basement:
Le obedeció con los pies, aunque en el rostro conservara la indignación que le
provocaba su osadía y le dio la espalda caminando dignamente hacia la salida,
como se le dejara en exclusiva aquel subsuelo de podredumbre, al que ella
permanecería atada toda la vida, hasta que se convirtiera en una vieja,
asquerosa, encorvada mestiza oxidada por el reuma. La premonición de una
vejez miserable de la hispana consoló al hombre mientras reprimía cualquier
asomo de complejo de culpa. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 220)
His feet obeyed her, but his face maintained an indignant expression caused by
her audacity, and he turned his back to her as he walked with dignity toward the
exit as if he were leaving her in sole possession of this putrid subbasement,
where she’d be chained for her entire life, until she was an old woman,
disgusting, a creaky mestiza bent double with rheumatism. The premonition of
the Hispanic woman’s miserable old age consoled the man while he repressed
the tiniest hint of a guilt complex. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 187)
The male character, in mentioning the female employee’s race along with her
condition as chained to her workplace, reveals the idea that ascension in the American
context, like in the South-African and Dominican ones, depends on a person’s race. In
this way, the other’s circumstances are a reflection of the colour of his or her skin
rather than the result of systematic under-privilege. The idea that ascension is
dependent on race is grounded in notional laws around slavery, with white American
colonial society self-interestedly thinking of it as a ‘perpetual condition’ and
hereditary (Jordan, 1974, pp. 31–32). The condition of the other who works menial
156
jobs is characterised by stereotypes rooted in this era, in which even a slave’s children
were defined as being ‘infected with the Leprosie of his father’s bondage’ (p. 31).
Diseased bodies
In the novels, the fear of being diseased is found even between others, with Voltaire,
the mulato character in Galíndez, believing blackness to be a mark of disease. The
culture of domination in the United States (and we can include most of the postcolonial world here), according to Hill and Ramsaran (2009), ‘involves not only
domination of men over women and white men over black men but also dominant
males of any race over subordinate males’ (p. 61). Such a culture, coupled with the
stereotype of the other as sickly (AIDs, Ebola, TB), makes it unsurprising that even an
other like Voltaire should arm himself against bodily threats from fellow others.
Eugenics has clearly shaped Voltaire’s obsessive-compulsive fear of contamination
from blacks. Eugenics was bound up, according to Gilman (1991b), in the notion that
‘some “races” are inherently weaker, “degenerate”, more at risk for certain types of
disease than others’ (p. 39). When Voltaire travels in a taxi driven by a Haitian driver,
he attempts to verify the claims of Cuban Miamians (who are mostly white) that all
Haitians are sick with AIDS:
No le entendió la broma el taxista y Voltaire olisqueó por si era cierto lo que
decían los cubanos, que los haitianos huelen mal y todos son portadores del
sida. Sentía aprensión en las posaderas, como si el sida fuera a entrar en su
cuerpo desde el tapizado de plástico. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 153)
The taxi driver didn’t get the joke, and Voltaire sniffed to see if it was true what
the Cubans said, that Haitians smelled bad and they all had AIDS. His buttocks
felt nervous, as if AIDS could get into his body from the plastic seat covers.
(Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 128)
Eugenics ‘inexorably linked’ certain races with disease (Gilman, 1991b, p. 173).
Being black, for example, ‘was believed to mark a pathological change in the skin, the
result of congenital syphilis’, with one’s anatomy bearing ‘the signs of one’s diseased
status’ and, by extension, ‘one’s psyche’ (p. 173). This belief is manifested in
157
Voltaire’s acceptance of the supposed fact that being black renders Haitians
physically and mentally sick (see p. 182 of novel for an example of mental sickness).
Such thinking not only brought about ‘disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, 63 immigration
restriction, and sterilisation laws’ in the United States but also inspired and
emboldened the Nazi regime and the apartheid government to implement similar
practices and strategies in Germany and South Africa (Nightingale, 2012, p. 334).
Like white supremacists in the United States who pushed a hard line for racial
segregation on the grounds of health risks, 64 Trujillo in La fiesta del chivo extols his
combatting of disease when he refers to blacks as ‘gangrena’ (‘gangrene’):
La gangrena había avanzado hasta muy arriba. Montecristi, Santiago, San
Juan, Azua, hervían de haitianos. La peste había ido extendiéndose sin que
nadie hiciera nada. Esperando un estadista con visión, al que no le temblara la
mano. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 216)
The gangrene had moved very high. Montecristi, Santiago, San Juan, Azua, they
were all teeming with Haitians. The plague was spreading and no one did
anything. They were waiting for a statesman with vision, one whose hand would
not tremble. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 194)
Trujillo understands the Dominican Republic as a body (a healthy one), its contact
with a plague (Haitians) making it sick and threatening its very lifeblood. Trujillo
defines this lifeblood in other parts of the novel (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 15, p. 216, p.
217, p. 458) as the Spanish-speaking nation’s patrimony (language, culture and race)
63
Jim Crow refers to the former practice of segregating blacks in the United States. The influence that
Jim Crow had ‘was to render the black as a species apart’, ‘a conception that quickly rooted itself into
popular culture and continued to grow there’ (Waters, 2007, p. 89).
64
This attitude is exemplified by the 1905 entreaty of the Virginia Sanatorium for Consumptives: ‘As
long as our colored people continue irregular habits, and herd together in immorality and infection,
their homes will be hotbeds of infection, fresh from which they will enter into intimate relations with
our white people, drinking from public cups, sitting around kitchens and public places, as nurses
fondling and kissing children, as cooks, waiters and barbers handling food, tableware and clothing,
inevitably spreading infection broadcast among all classes’ (Smith, 2006, p. 64).
158
and economy. Disease needs to be eradicated if life is to survive, and if an entire
people is diseased and threatens to overwhelm a healthy population, that population
needs to be protected at any cost, which, according to Trujillo, involves excising the
sick one. In practical terms, this means killing Haitians.
Like the fictional Trujillo in La fiesta del chivo, Mynhardt’s mother in Rumours of
Rain also views blacks as a gangrene or plague, remarking, ‘there’s more and more of
them every week’ (Brink, 1978, p. 235). In framing blacks as a plague, Mynhardt’s
mother implies that they are undesirable and should not be around her farm (despite
the population pressures posed by the black homelands that force blacks into so-called
white areas). Her comments are, as Trujillo’s are, code for the continued separation of
blacks and whites. Because the dominant group’s dehumanisation of the other has
rendered it blind to the fact that the other is, like it, human, with the same basic need
for food and shelter, it sees the needs of the other as a threat rather than as something
human and the other as furtive rather than desperate.
Bestial Bodies
The dominant group in the novels uses animals as a vehicle of comparison with itself
to describe the race of the other because animals are the only means to compare the
physical characteristics of non-humans, as the other is deemed to be.
In Galíndez, the CIA agent’s reaction to a woman with whom he once had a
relationship and whom he finds on his couch when he enters his apartment reveals the
animal-like nature of the other:
Considera si le gusta o no le gusta que esta mestiza se haya metido en su casa y
otra vez en su vida. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 127)
Whether he liked it or not, this mestiza had gotten into his house and is back in
his life. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 105)
159
As in previous examples, we see the author establish fixity of identity, with the CIA
agent calling the woman a mestiza 65 rather than by her own name. The character does
this with the aim of depersonalising the subject, which makes the process of
stereotyping more effective, given humans’ difficulty in genuinely empathising with
the collective as opposed to the individual. The expression ‘se haya metido en su
casa’ (‘had gotten into his house’) (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 127; Vázquez
Montalbán, 1992, p. 105) brings to the reader’s mind an image of a rodent, which, like
this mestiza, gets into the owner’s house without his consent. The expression further
alienates the reader from the female character by alluding to the bestial, moving the
stereotype from depersonalisation to degeneracy. Indeed, the mestiza is not any old
animal, but a pest, which occupies the lowest rung in the animal kingdom, making her
in his mind unworthy of any attention or care. The above description of the mestiza in
terms of a rodent as well as the CIA agent’s description of the mestiza working in a
Miami hotel in terms of a slave (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 230; Vázquez
Montalbán, 1992, p. 127) are informed by a view of the other as belonging to a
hierarchy of beings. In said hierarchy, slaves occupy the same position as that of
animals, i.e., close to the bottom, just above plants and minerals. Indeed, to treat
someone like a slave was to treat them like an animal, this being the prevailing view,
for example, of the average Englishman towards the end of slavery, with Sir Thomas
Smith denouncing masters who used ‘their servants as slaves, or rather as beasts’
(Jordan, 1974, p. 32).
Martin Mynhardt from Rumours of Rain shows the extent to which he alienates and
feels alienated from blacks when he gets lost in bushland near his mother’s farm, and
says in fright that he knows that the ‘hideous old monkey-man’ (Brink, 1978, p. 358)
65
It could also be conceived that Vázquez Montalbán, in using the word mestiza, aims to show the
extent to which the CIA agent (a representative of white superiority and racism) knows the advantage
race (namely his own) has in American society. The novel reveals the CIA agent to be psychopathic
(anti-social), in that he is completely unempathetic to other characters, exemplified by his desire to
exercise power over others and his preference for torture. The fact that the wielding of power over
others is a primary need for a psychopath makes the character’s knowledge of race so chilling, given
both the heightened perspicacity of a psychopath to identify and manipulate weakness in others for his
or her own benefit and the revelation of the fundamental role race plays in power relations in the
United States.
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he thought he had met there was now watching furtively with ‘his monkey eyes, from
behind some trunk or thorny shrub’ (Brink, 1978, p. 358). By referring to blacks as
‘monkeys’, Mynhardt renders them subhuman and therefore degenerate, with the
other becoming, in almost literal terms, an alien, a mysterious, feared and
untrustworthy beast. Historically, Africans, says Davies (1988), were ‘included with
the “monstrous races” clustered at the edge of the world, both geographically and
symbolically removed as far as possible from Christ’, with Europeans ‘as close as
possible’ (p. 8). This conception of animals is based on the so-called ‘Great Chain
Metaphor’ (Fernández Fonteca and Jiménez Catalán, 2003, p. 774), which refers to a
hierarchy that emerged in Elizabethan times when European Christians came to
employ real images to represent the divine, thus transforming animals into religious
symbols used to define ungodly behaviour. The domestication of animals was likely
‘the original model for such alienation’ (Davis, as cited in Bay, 2000, p. 133), which
‘may be indicated in the practice of pricing slaves according to their equivalent in
cows, horses, camels, pigs and chickens’ (Bay, 2000, p. 133). In the Great Chain
Metaphor hierarchy, animals occupied the lowest stratum just above plants and
minerals, humans the middle stratum, mortal religious figures and angels the
uppermost stratum and God the summit. Humans, with their ability ‘to choose
between these two natures’, could either go down the hierarchy by behaving like
animals, that is to say, by foregoing rational thought, or maintain their position in the
hierarchy by remaining rational beings (Goatly, 2006, p. 24). Indeed, it was thought
that by assigning humans the characteristics of animals, which are unable to conceal
their behaviour or intentions, the ‘ser enmascarado’ (‘the masked being’), as Morales
Muñiz (1996) calls it, could be unmasked through his or her association with that
animal (p. 238). This phenomenon is reflected by the numerous (mostly negative)
animal metaphors and similes found in expressions (e.g., ‘to be a pig’ [to be dirty,
gluttonous, chauvinistic], ‘to be as sly as a fox’, etc.) in English and other European
languages. In the colonial setup, through such animal metaphors, the other became a
creature devoid of reason; a primeval, violent beast undeserving of occupying the
same position as that of the settler, who, in contrast, was most definitely all human.
The animal metaphor most common across the novels (La fiesta del chivo and the two
South-African novels, The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain) is the ‘monkey’.
Europeans strongly associated this creature with black people, speculating, ‘Apes
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might be demonic half men’ (Bay, 2000, p. 134). Ape and monkey metaphors would
thus attain ‘new potency’ when the English, for example, first encountered blacks, ‘a
people whose physical appearance differed dramatically from their own’ and who
heralded from a continent that was ‘the habitat of the animal which in appearance
most resembles man’ (p. 134). In this sense, ‘it was virtually inevitable that
Englishmen should discern similarity between the man-like beasts and beast-like men
of Africa’ (p. 134). In La fiesta del chivo, a member of the trujillato, Manuel Alfonso,
refers to the president of Venezuela (1945–1948, 1959–1964), Rómulo Betancourt,
who ‘was a light-skinned mulatto’ (Andrews, 2004, p. 244), as a ‘mono’ (‘monkey’)
when lamenting the hardships faced by the Dominican Republic as a result of OAE
(Organisation of American States) sanctions, for which the trujillato holds Betancourt
responsible: 66
…los líos de la OEA desatados por el mono Betancourt… (Vargas Llosa,
2000, p. 338)
…the problems with the OAS unleashed by the monkey Betancourt…
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 308)
The ‘monkey’ connotes comicality and dim-wittedness in reference to human beings.
Indeed, among the definitions of ‘mono’ (monkey) in Spanish are the figurative
meanings ‘persona que hace gestos o figuras parecidas a las del mono’ (‘a person
who makes gestures or faces like those of a monkey’) and ‘joven de poco seso, y
afectado en sus modales’ (‘a young dim-witted person with affected manners’)
(RAE). In using the ‘monkey’ metaphor, therefore, Alfonso suggests that the
Venezuelan leader is a fool and that the problems of the Dominican Republic are his
fault rather than the trujillato’s.
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Trujillo considers Betancourt a cretin for having urged the Organization of American States (OAS)
to pass ‘drastic measures against the Dominican Republic, including ‘the cessation of diplomatic ties
and economic sanctions’ (Morales, 2010, p. 140), a move that enraged the Dominincan dictator, with
Trujillo ordering ‘his agents to plant a bomb inside Betancourt’s car’ (Tucker, 2010, p. 2392). The
bomb, however, did not kill Betancourt but ‘inflame[d] world opinion against Trujillo’, with the OAS
voting unanimously to sever diplomatic relations and to impose strong economic sanctions against the
Dominican Republic’ (p. 2392).
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In English, unlike in Spanish, there are no nominative entries for ‘monkey’ that
signify dim-witted, with the word used as a verb phrase to refer to silliness; for
example, ‘monkey about/around, behave in a silly or playful way: I saw them
monkeying about by the shop’ (Oxford). The word ‘monkey’ can also mean artful, as
with the British expression ‘As artful (or clever) as a wagonload (or cartload) of
monkeys’, which means ‘extremely clever or mischievous: plot-wise, it was as
mischievous as a wagonload of monkeys’ (Oxford). Indeed, we see the other depicted
as crafty, and distrust of others expressed using the ‘monkey’ moniker in Gordimer’s
novel The Conservationist when Mehring refers to his farm workers as ‘monkeys’
while imagining to himself what they do when he is away in Johannesburg: ‘God
knows what goes on when they’re left to themselves. Clever as a wagon-load of
monkeys’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 202). Maguire (2009) says that ‘we think monkeys are
funny when we see them on television—or scary, when we see them in a movie’, but
that ‘deep down we worry they’re snubbing us’ (p. 2). The fact that his workers could
be snubbing him obviously worries Mehring, who has a vague feeling that his grip on
his farm is loosening because of the increasingly indifferent attitude of his black
farmworkers in addition to the probable conniving of his foreman Jacobus with those
workers to take advantage of his absences during the week. He says of Jacobus that,
He’s only got to see a cloud of dust to know from the shape the Mercedes’s
coming, and he’s got the word out, it’s telepathic or witchcraft, they understand
each other, they back each other up so well. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 203)
Like a monkey who schemes to get something out of someone’s hand, Mehring seems
to fear that his ‘telepathic’ workers (p. 202–203) will eventually snatch control of his
farm right from underneath him. Indeed, Mehring had previously cast those workers
as furtive, stating once on arriving at his farm ‘no one shows a sign of life from the
compound though he knows they’re all there’ (p. 202). Mehring and other dominant
characters, who are fearful over their future in spaces hostile to their interests, cast
blacks and other enemies as animals in order to bring themselves mental relief from a
very real human threat.
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We see black sexuality cast as animalistic and furtive through its association with the
bestial in Rumours of Rain, as suggested by the verb ‘round’ (as in rounding up cattle)
and the noun ‘germs’, in the following conversation between Mynhardt and his
mother:
‘Breeding like germs’.
‘I’m waging a running battle with them about it. Next week I’m rounding up
all the women again for injections. No use giving them the pill, they just throw
it away or carry it in a bag round their necks for doepa’.
‘You need a more drastic solution than that’.
‘It’s the men,’ she said. ‘Think it’s a disgrace if their women don’t have
babies, so they don’t want them to use anything. We’ve nearly had murders on
the farm because of that.’ (Brink, 1978, p. 235)
Mynhardt and his mother imagine blacks as animals, which, instead of producing
children, produce germs. The notion of blacks as an animal plague ties into the idea
that humans can and should domesticate humans, but also that animals can turn on
humans and become violent. In La fiesta del chivo, Trujillo protects Dominicans from
the Haitian plague by massacring Haitians, who are not numerous enough to put up
any meaningful resistance. In South Africa, on the other hand, blacks were too
numerous for the state to be able to eliminate the black population by completely
corralling it into the Bantustans. Indeed, the Bantustan policy, which included forced
removals that uprooted several million black South Africans, failed due to the
architects of apartheid having miscalculated the rise in the African population due to
higher growth rates, attributable to rural poverty in the homelands and migration into
South Africa from other parts of southern Africa (Louw, 2004, p. 78). Because of this,
in the end ‘it proved impossible to locate all blacks within homelands in order to
create the conditions for partition’ (p. 78). Mynhardt’s dehumanisation of blacks in
calling them ‘germs’ is a reflection of his frustration at and incomprehension of the
seeming futility of apartheid’s and, indeed, his mother’s attempts to keep whites
separated (and safe) from blacks. Perhaps in casting blacks as animals and germs,
which humans both fear and misunderstand, Mynhardt is better able to explain to
himself why whites seem to be losing the battle to control the black population.
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Mynhardt magnifies the perceived threat of black South Africans to the point that it
seems like the material existence of the other is mutually exclusive to that of his own
family’s when he describes blacks living on and around his mother’s property as if
they were a horde of locusts, devouring the farm of its supplies:
Years ago the stoep itself, invariably swarming with idle Blacks, was used as a
stacking-place for bags of flour and mealie meal, and paraffin tins, and boxes of
soap, but later, on account of theft, everything had to be kept inside. (Brink,
1978, p. 245)
In describing blacks in terms of a swarm, Mynhardt relegates them to the lowest form
of beings, which is to say, as feeders at the bottom of society determined to survive
off others’ hard work. While Mynhardt’s mother attempts to furnish the blacks’ base
needs, they are contemptuous of her, according to Mynhardt, stealing what they can
from her farm’s stoep (porch), as locusts would strip a field bare. With the swarm
analogy, Mynhardt suggests that blacks are inclined towards criminality not because
they are desperate but because they are lazy and incapable of generating prosperity for
themselves. The black person as parasite squares too with the anti-social
(psychopathic) casting of the other seen throughout Rumours of Rain (and the other
novels too), freeloading being one of the traits of this disorder. Even when blacks can
generate abundance, scarcity inevitably seems to follow, with Mehring in The
Conservationist remarking, ‘It’s a feast or famine with them’ (Gordimer, 1974, p.
209).
In Ways of Dying, on the other hand, Mda subverts this idea with Noria, who is
anything but anti-social, radiating compassion and forgiveness. When Noria’s son
Vuthu is killed by Danisa, the daughter of her friend Malehlohonolo, at the behest of
the Young Tigers, she shows no bitterness towards Danisa or Malehlohonolo. She
says, ‘at first Malehlohonolo was afraid to face me. But I assured her that she should
not blame herself. If anyone is to blame, it is myself. Both children were under my
care when it happened’ (p. 191). The killing of Noria’s son and her response to it
embody the liberation movement, with its ‘messy truth’ but striving ‘to achieve the
lofty goals of peace, freedom and democracy’ (Myambo, 2010, p. 106). Mda portrays
characters that despite having been brutalised by both the liberation movement and
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the white government—which according to one character is ‘busy killing us with its
Battalion 77, and its vigilantes. What kind of negotiations are these where on one
hand they talk of peace and freedom, and on the other, they kill us dead?’ (Mda, 1995,
p. 173)—remain committed to building a society based on forgiveness. Unlike in
Brink’s and Gordimer’s novels, in which blacks are seen through the lens of dominant
characters who view them as treacherous and non-human, Mda shows blacks as
representing the spectrum of human behaviours, from the greedy Nefolovhodwe and
the murderous Young Tigers and tribal chief’s followers to the forgiving Toloki and
Noria and kind-hearted Madimbhaza. By giving black characters diverse
characteristics, Mda humanises black people, making black victims of injustice in this
way worthy of sympathy for the suffering they endure under those—black and
white—vying for power in apartheid’s dying days.
The alienation of human beings from animals has enabled humans to justify their
exploitation and oppression of them and, by extension, those human beings perceived
as being or behaving like them. Unsurprisingly, the architect of apartheid, Hendrik
Verwoerd, alluded to the bestiary when he expressed his opinion that the missionary
system of education, as compared to Bantu Education, was unsuitable for black South
Africans, given it ‘misled them by showing them the green pastures of European
society in which they are not allowed to graze’ (Ukpanah, 2005, p. 24). Verwoerd’s
likening of black South Africans to cattle is reminiscent of the views of slave owners,
who thought of blacks as chattel that they could use at their own discretion.
Pronouncements like that made by Verwoerd are a reflection of the fact that in order
for whites to believe that it was acceptable to treat blacks as inferiors, they had to act
out in ‘a literal and thorough way’ (Steyn, 2001b, p. 87) the belief that ‘Africans
could not take charge successfully’ (p. 95). Such a view was bolstered by the
apartheid government’s manipulation of the economy and of every other sphere of
society, which enabled whites to create the illusion that their power (as well as their
economic advantage) was ‘logical as it was natural’, given their ability ‘to make
education and capital work to the benefit of self and nation’ (p. 87). Because of the
poverty, meniality and disorder white South Africans witnessed in black communities,
they were able to believe that ‘they were holding the country together’ (p. 95). What
is more, the moral overtones of poverty in South Africa meant whites could think of
(and even refer to) blacks as lowly beings, i.e., as animals or animal-like (as shown by
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Verwoerd’s words). We see this in The Conservationist when Mehring thinks to
himself with unusual frequency how animal-like and dirty his foreman’s teeth are:
He wrinkles his nose, exposing the dirty horse-teeth. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 15)
Those few rotten tusks. (p. 81)
Broken stinking-toothed smile. (p. 143)
Grinning on brown-necked teeth. (p. 199)
He must be grinning on those filthy teeth. (p. 206)
Jacobus’s blackness, his animal-like teeth, which are also dirty, combine to make him
not only physically ugly but also morally so, with the farm foreman coming to be
associated with ‘dirt, filth, evil and sin, guilt and moral degradation, death and the
diabolical’ (Douglas, 2006, p. 131).
On the other hand, in Ways of Dying, when Mda depicts Toloki as dirty (because he
smells), he does so in order to ennoble his protagonist and condemn the legacy of
apartheid. Mda (1995) describes how Toloki, who is working at a funeral, pushes his
way through a group of mourners and wonders why they are covering ‘their noses and
mouths with their hands as they retreat in blind panic’ (p. 8). Toloki reasons that it
could be due to the beans that he had eaten for breakfast ‘or maybe it is the fact that
he has not bathed for a whole week, and the December sun has not been gentle’ (p. 8).
Mda sympathises with his male protagonist (and makes the reader do so too) by
explaining that Toloki had ‘been too busy attending funerals to go to the beach to use
the open showers that the swimmers use to rinse salt water from their bodies’ (p. 8).
Here, Mda portrays a black man who is dirty not because he is immoral (after all, he
is hardworking and thus far from being lazy) but because he is too poor to afford a
house with running water, and instead has to use open showers on a beach to carry out
his ablutions. Unlike in The Conservationist, where the reasons for black ‘deviance’
are not immediately apparent, the reasons for Toloki’s ‘deviance’ (dirtiness, in this
case) are clearly rooted in the socio-economic inequalities produced by apartheid.
What the body represents is relative because analysing the body necessarily involves a
social dimension. Corporeal stereotypes and representations in the novels reflect the
view of the black body within the construct of colonial-like power. In post-colonial
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societies, racialised power relations understand the other and the dominant group in
terms of ‘black’ and ‘white’, with these notions of race inculcated through stereotypes
in which the physical and psychological/behavioural are merged. These faulty
associations become fixed in order to construct blacks as degenerate and rationalise
the dominant group’s control over the other. The stereotype fixes the other in the
power/racial hierarchy by making implicit the link between social status and race in a
moralistic way using carnivalesque and grotesque literary techniques. These create
alienation and establish the black body as an agent of immorality, specifically, as
violent, sexualised, menial, diseased and bestial. Because the other is all these things
and therefore a mortal danger to the dominant group, the dominant group must
eradicate or keep him or her at bay. In this conceptualisation of the universe, the other
is the aggressor and the dominant group the victim, a vulnerable minority in a world
full of dark savages. In reality, however, the vulnerability of the dominant group
mostly stems from its oppressive and disproportionate control over the other. In order
to justify its control, the dominant group depicts the black body as subhuman and base
(lazy, sexual, menial, etc.), transforming it in this way into an organism that is made
for manual labour and incapable of decision-making. The other’s physical blackness,
therefore, makes him/her unworthy of education or promotion in the dominant
group’s eyes and vindicates his/her presence in lower-order jobs and as a powerless
player in society.
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Chapter 5
The Other Responds
Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges
this desire to be suddenly white. Frantz Fanon (1967, p. 63)
In the novels under consideration, the others, who live in societies in which there is
little possibility of socio-economic advancement, feel attracted to whiteness
physically and socially because of the upward socio-economic mobility they perceive
it can provide them. Junot Díaz (2007) in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao, while bringing into relief this phenomenon, also subverts it—as he does with
much of his social commentary—critiquing Dominican society through the tale of
Anacaona:
A common story you hear about Anacaona in the DR is that on the eve of her
execution she was offered a chance to save herself: all she had to do was marry
a Spaniard who was obsessed with her. (See the trend? Trujillo wanted the
Mirabal Sisters, and the Spaniard wanted Anacaona.). Offer that choice to a
contemporary Island girl and see how fast she fills out that passport application.
Anacaona, however, tragically old-school, was reported to have said,
Whiteman, kiss my hurricane ass! And that was the end of Anacaona. The
Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most
beautiful Indian in the World. (p. 245)
Anacaona was a Taíno chief in the Managua area (located in the present-day
Dominican Republic) of Xayti (renamed Hispaniola by the Spanish) during the time
of the Spanish conquest and settlement of the island. Initially, Anacaona had been
friendly towards the Spanish but after her husband organised a revolt against them,
the Iberian colonisers killed him and later hanged her (Saunders, 2005, p.6). Díaz
mythologises the figure of Anacaona by portraying her as having the choice of
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marrying a Spaniard in order to save her life (a historical fact that is however in
reality sketchy). Díaz (2007) shows Anacaona to be noble through her refusal to
acquiesce to the Spanish, the Indian chief having gone down, according to him, as
‘one of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the
World’ (p. 245). This is an example of how Díaz subverts the discourse norm, in that
the founding fathers of the modern Americas were white males, not American Indian
women. However, unlike those founding fathers, who pillaged the lands and peoples
they conquered, Anacaona took the high moral ground by refusing to partake in the
privileges that allying herself with a Spaniard would have afforded her. In doing so,
she retained her sense of self, a stance contrasted with the apparent readiness of
modern-day Dominican women to marry foreigners (p. 245). The promptness with
which dominicanas thrust themselves into the arms of foreign males is, in a sense, a
betrayal of their dignity, something that Anacaona retained, her death an act of
political significance in the context of Spanish colonisation. In referring to
Anacaona’s act of bravery, Díaz privileges the voice of the other, showing that when
whiteness (and by implication, power) was offered to the other it was not always
accepted. Díaz’s book also shows, however, that insubordination towards whiteness,
like that displayed by Anacaona, disappeared over the centuries, with many of the
characters in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao failing to question the supposed
supremacy of whiteness (actually identifying and trying to be part of it) and in that
way betraying Anacaona’s legacy of affirmation.
In contrast to the novels set in the Dominican Republic and United States, the SouthAfrican texts The Conservationist, Rumours of Rain and Ways of Dying do not give
the pull of whiteness prominence, with the black characters responding—when indeed
they do respond, which is rarely—in a more politicised way than their Dominican
counterparts. The differences between the ways in which the other responds to
othering in the trujillato as compared with the apartheid context stands in stark
contrast to the similarities between the representations of otherness in these same
contexts. This chapter attempts to recognise the fact that despite the predominance of
othering in the novels, the other is not a voiceless object but indeed does respond to
the dominant group’s racism. This chapter analyses the ways in which characters in
the novels respond to that racism and why their responses differ.
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We can attribute the divergence in the other’s responses to discrimination and
oppression to both the authors themselves and the period in which they write and in
which their books are set. Díaz, Vargas Llosa and Vázquez Montalbán use similar
expected representations, with the other responding in a stereotypical and predictable
way; Díaz, however, unlike the other two, subverts these expected responses at
various points in his book as a way of stressing the ways in which the dominant group
oppresses the other. Díaz is also generationally different from the other authors, his
age making him a generation younger than them. He is geographically different too,
having been born in the Dominican Republic but having lived most of his life in the
United States, where he nevertheless still feels like an immigrant (Ellison, 2008).
Historically, Díaz’s voice provides a point of difference because he is both other and
responding to a different period, though showing that race is still a relevant issue in
the Americas. In contrast, the lack of nuance in Vargas Llosa’s and Vázquez
Montalbán’s depictions of the other’s responses to othering points to the privileged
position of these writers, who are not others and who therefore cannot be expected to
completely understand or sympathise with the other. Their lack of affinity stands in
contrast to Díaz, who understands the plight of the other intimately through personal
experience and observation. While Brink and Gordimer are privileged writers just as
Vargas Llosa and Vázquez Montalbán are, they do not give the other a prominent
voice, with just a few of their black characters responding to the racism of the
dominant characters where one would reasonably expect them to do so. We can
attribute this to the nature of The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain, which are
made up of stream-of-consciousness commentaries that are in many ways metanarratives of the white South-African patriarchy.
In Latin America, national projects have tended to conflate race and nationality, and
in the Dominican Republic, the national discourse on race has ‘historically [been]
infused with biased ideas about differences between social classes, genders, and
races’ that have become ‘firmly entrenched’ in society (Duke, 2009, p. 85). This trend
has contributed to the obscuring of racism as a problem in Dominican society and
impeded discussions and activism around it (Torres Saillant, 1998, p. 1). Racism is
still very much present in the Dominican Republic, even if public discourse does not
necessarily recognise it (Reyes-Santos, 2007, p. 128). There is probably an absence of
debate around race in the Dominican Republic because the majority of Dominicans,
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most of whom are mulato, do not face racism in their day-to-day lives (Pulera, 2002,
p. 75). Furthermore, Dominicans can perhaps skirt race more easily than South
Africans can because Dominicans, despite their different skin tones, are culturally
homogenous, with the overwhelming majority being Catholic and Spanish speaking.
The cultural homogeneity of Dominicans, coupled with the fact that most are
marginally lighter than their ‘despised adversary’ (p. 75), Haitians, whom they
consider African, also makes it easier for Dominicans to disidentify as black. When
racism does occur in the Dominican Republic, it is more often to distinguish
Dominicans from Haitians: ‘since Dominicans cannot be black, Haitians are ascribed
extreme violent attributes of blackness in explicit racial terms’ (Reyes-Santos, 2007,
p. 128).
Ironically, the racial exclusivity found in colonial and post-colonial discourse in the
United States and Britain’s ex-colonies led to the trauma of racism being confronted
in a more militant and transparent way there, as demonstrated in 1970s South Africa
by Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Race consciousness,
according to Halisi (1999) is ‘dynamic, intrinsically political, and may be fused into
either a progressive or conservative perspective’ (p. 11). The politically progressive
nature of race consciousness in South Africa was reflected by the fact that black
intellectuals there used the term ‘black’ to refer to all non-white South Africans;
namely blacks, Coloureds and Indians (p. 11). Indeed, the BCM rallied around
blackness as an ideological rather than racial concept, defining it in terms of the
tyranny meted against all non-whites (Maylam, 2001, p. 109). Steven Biko, leader of
the BCM, believed that black South Africans should break their dependence on whites
(Bartos, 2002, p. 55), especially psychologically, given white paternalism had given
many blacks an inferiority complex (Maylam, 2001, p. 109). ‘Psychological
liberation’, believed Biko, was a condition for developing racial solidarity, which he
viewed as ‘essential for effective political organization and action’ (p. 109).
Deferring to whiteness
Junot Díaz shows in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao how spaces of privilege
in the Dominican context are white and how this is often a function of their rejection
of blackness. For example, after one of the Dominican Republic’s most eligible
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bachelors, Jack Pujols, the son of a wealthy white family belonging to the country’s
elite, dumps Beli, she begins a new relationship with Max Gomez, 67 otherwise known
as Dionisio The Gangster, who,
...escorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital, took her to the
clubs that had never tolerated a nonmusician prieto inside their door before
(dude was that powerful—to break the injunction against black), places like the
Hamaca, the Tropicalia (though not, alas, the Country Club, even he didn’t have
the juice). (Díaz, 2007, p. 124)
Physically, Dionisio diverges from Pujols in that, unlike the latter, he is swarthy and
as such more akin to Beli; Dionisio, however, diverges less from Pujols in terms of
his socio-economic status, in that he is powerful, something Beli is clearly drawn to
due to her own dispossession as a lower-class black woman. Indeed, the fact that
Dionisio can take Beli to an exclusive club ‘that had never tolerated’ the admission of
a black person who was not a musician points to his enormous influence in
Dominican society. Dionisio’s power reveals how money whitens in the Dominican
Republic but also how race and socio-economic status still correlate strongly (as they
do in much of Latin America), with not even Dionisio being able to get Beli into the
country club (an institution frequented by the country’s top brass).
Given her attraction to power, it is unsurprising that for Beli, Jack Pujols, the son of a
colonel, should have been an ‘insane object of attraction’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 95); a
‘symbol’ (p. 96) of her salvation. Indeed, it is foreseeable that being black and living
in a country in which, according to Díaz (2007), ‘options [are] as rare as Tainos and
for irascible darkskinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still’ (p. 80), would
make Beli acutely aware of the privilege Pujols has and can provide her. Jack is Beli’s
proverbial white knight (or ‘light knight’, as Díaz [2007] puts it [p. 95]).
Unfortunately, for Beli, however, Jack does not seem to see her as anyone worth
saving; he has casual relations with her but balks at committing to a more serious
relationship because he (unbeknown to Beli) is engaged to another member of the
67
‘Her ideal amor had been Jack Pujols, and here was this middle-aged Caliban who dyed his hair and
had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 124).
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Dominican elite. When Jack and Beli are caught together, the fiancé of Jack’s family
rejects him in order to uphold ‘their Christian reputation’ (p. 101). Jack’s relationship
with Beli and its consequences demonstrate how elites perpetuate themselves through
marrying each other but also punishing those who dilute the group’s power (in this
case, by consorting with a poor black person). In general, people are attracted to
others who mirror traits that they have or would like to have in themselves
(Lieberman, 2008, p. 317). Beli, who feels devalued, seeks whiteness because she
sees value in it, knowing that it will help her accrue social and indeed monetary
capital. Jack Pujols’s behaviour and that of his fianceé’s family indicate, however,
that mirroring is only mutual when the other reflects similar desirable traits.
The male protagonist of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar, travels to the
Dominican Republic to spend the summer holidays with family. Díaz (2007) uses this
journey to infer the social capital of whiteness when he refers to what Oscar lacks:
‘He couldn’t dance, he didn’t have loot, he didn’t dress, he wasn’t confident, he
wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t from Europe’ (p. 279). Indeed, it is Europeans who can
have their pick of the desperate locals, while Oscar is restricted in his ability to meet
local women because, in addition to being socially awkward, he is not ‘from Europe’.
Oscar is disadvantaged in the pursuit of local women because a Dominican woman
would more likely accept being propositioned by a European, whom she would
associate with status, wealth, etc., than by a black male (such as Oscar is). This is
because in her mind black men would probably be unable to offer her those same
privileges, given all the negative connotations of blackness in the Dominican
Republic due to the country’s historically fraught relationship with its blacker and
much poorer neighbour Haiti. Despite the fact that Oscar is from the United States, a
far wealthier country than the Dominican Republic, both his racial (black) and
aesthetic (unattractive) features—important markers in the highly racialised context of
the Caribbean and the dating scene—would count against him. In that sense, Oscar is
doubly disadvantaged.
The pull of whiteness in the Dominican Republic is informed by the fact that race
clearly has an impact on the socio-economic outcome of Dominicans. A cursory look
at the physical appearance of members of the upper echelons of Dominican society
points to the correlation between race and power in the Spanish-speaking nation:
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Wealth and power continue to be the province of the Dominican Republic’s
white minority, and the most successful dominicanos (excluding the
professional baseball stars) share the coloration and facial features of Oscar de
la Renta not Sammy Sosa. (Pulera, 2002, p. 75)
In places where whites constitute powerful minorities, as they do in most LatinAmerican countries, darker skinned people often feel pressure to conform to
whiteness (especially black women, who face pressure to look white [Arogundade,
2003, p. 76]) in order to access power. This racial/status anxiety is evidenced in La
fiesta del chivo in the episode in which a character comments on the fact that she did
not marry a black man because she feared if she had had a child with him it would
have turned out coal-coloured:
Yo también desperdicié una oportunidad, con un médico forrado de cuartos. Se
moría por mí. Pero era oscurito y decían que de madre haitiana. No eran
prejuicios, pero ¿y si mi hijo daba un salto atrás y salía carbón? (Vargas Llosa,
2000, p. 203–204)
I missed a chance too, with a doctor who was rolling in money. He was crazy
about me. But he was dark-skinned, they said his mother was Haitian. I’m not
prejudiced, but suppose my child was a throwback and came out black as coal?
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 182)
The woman’s view reveals a phenomenon known in the United States as the ‘White
man’s ice is colder’ syndrome, which refers to how ‘internalized racism manifests in
children’s judgements as well as those of adults’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 291). In a study
carried out by Bigler, Averhart and Liben (2003), the researchers found that primaryschool-aged African-American children judged newly conceived jobs carried out by
whites as having higher status than those same jobs when carried out by blacks or by
whites and blacks together (p. 291). These results can be attributed to the reality in
most post-colonial societies (like the Dominican Republic) of a person’s socioeconomic status traditionally having depended on his or her skin colour. The darker
one’s skin colour is and the more ‘negative the stereotypes’ around it, the fiercer the
175
‘competition within and between racial groups for scarce resources such as jobs and
education opportunities’, says Clunis (2003, p. 135). In the Americas, this dynamic
has its roots in slave-owning times when black female slaves were raped by white
male slave owners, and their lighter-skinned offspring received more privileges than
black children, ‘including better food, housing, some education, and at times freedom’
(Thompson, 1997, p. 90). The bestowing of privileges on lighter-skinned blacks in the
slave-owning era led over time to internalised racism, where people of colour
‘prefer[red] to associate with lighter-skinned individuals’ (Clunis, 2003, p. 135),
believing it to be a way of achieving greater social mobility—as the character in La
fiesta del chivo who opted not to marry a black man obviously does.
When the other identifies with the power of the dominant group, the oppressive
ideology of the dominant group becomes internalised and reinforced in society. This
trend is evident in Díaz’s novel, in which the staff and students at Beli’s school
strongly identify with the white student, Jack Pujols, to the point of worshipping him:
The teacher, the staff, the girls, the boys, all threw petals of adoration beneath
his finely arched feet: he was proof positive that God—the Great God absolute!
The centre and circumference of all democracy!—does not love his children
equally. (Díaz, 2007, p. 90)
The hyperbolic language Díaz uses to show the school’s affected deference to
whiteness is a ploy to reveal the extent to which whiteness has influenced the social
dynamic in the Dominican Republic. The fact that the school’s teachers, whom one
would expect to treat all students equally, stoop to the point of favouring Pujols
simply because of his Caucasian appearance illustrates the point to which Dominicans
have internalised white supremacist beliefs, acting on these even in contexts in which
it would ordinarily be taboo to do so.68
Relative deference to whiteness is even displayed when the other desecrates it, as
reflected in La fiesta del chivo by the behaviour of Ramfis Trujillo, the son of the
68
As opposed to in the dating scene, for example.
176
Dominican dictator, towards the desirable, young, white virgin, Rosalía Perdomo,
whom he and his friends rape:
¿O se emborrachan mientras hacen lo que hacen con la dorada, la nívea
Rosalía Perdomo? Sin duda, no se esperan que la niña se desangre. Entonces
se portan como caballeros. Antes, la violan. A Ramfis, siendo quien es, le
correspondería desflorar el delicioso manjar. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 135)
Or do they get drunk while they do what they do to the golden, snow-white
Rosalía Perdomo? Surely they don’t wait until the girl begins to bleed. Then
they conduct themselves like gentlemen, but first they rape her. Ramfis, being
who he is, must have been the one to deflower the exquisite morsel. (Vargas
Llosa, 2002, p. 119)
Ramfis and his friends handle Rosalía with more deference than they would any other
Dominican because of the girl’s whiteness (‘…una de las muchachas más bellas de la
sociedad, hija de un coronel del Ejército…de largos cabellos rubios, ojos celestes,
piel traslucida’) 69 and power, given she is the daughter of an army colonel (p. 13).
Similar to the undue deference Beli pays to Jack because of his higher status in the
Dominican pecking order, Voltaire in Galíndez treats whiteness as if it were
exceptional, an example of this being his prediction of an imagined future for Miami
in which Cubans,
Son casi los dueños o lo serán. Y los haitianos serán sus criados. (Vázquez
Montalbán, 2000, p. 292–3)
They’re practically the masters or they will be. And the Haitians will be the
servants. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 252)
69
‘…is one of the most beautiful girls in Dominican society, the daughter of an Army colonel. [The
radiant Rosalía Perdomo,] with the long blond hair, sky-blue eyes, translucent skin, [who plays the part
of the Virgin Mary in Passion plays, shedding tears like a genuine Mater Dolorosa when her Son
expires’] (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 118).
177
Most Cuban-Americans identify as white and live in Miami (Tafoya, 2004, p. 7),
where people born in Cuba or to Cuban parents constitute a politically, culturally and
economically influential community (Osario, 2013, p. 857), a fact Voltaire seems to
appreciate when he states that in the future, Haitians, in general a disadvantaged
group in the United States, will be servants to Cubans.
The knowledge on the part of the other of a racial hierarchy is also evident in Nadine
Gordimer’s novel The Conservationist when the narrator says that Mehring’s
foreman, Jacobus, did ‘not talk to the Indians as he did to a white man, nor as he
would to one of his own people’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 34). In apartheid South Africa,
laws positioned Indians higher on the socio-economic/racial hierarchy than blacks
(Frank, 2003, p. 306) and accordingly afforded them more privileges than blacks
(Aguilar, 2008, p. 61). Unlike whites, however, Indians were unable to exert authority
over blacks, such as employing them or requesting to see their passbooks, and this is
probably why Jacobus feels he can speak to them with less deference than he does
whites. Jacobus’s attitude reveals the linkage of class and race in apartheid South
Africa and how socio-economic hierarchies in the post-colonial world have been
forged along racial lines as a result of uneven power relations produced by the
conquest and control of one group by another, usually being from elsewhere and
therefore physically different from the other.
Zakes Mda reveals in Ways of Dying the increasing divisions among black South
Africans themselves wrought by the rapidly changing political and socio-economic
conditions around the end of apartheid. During the apartheid years, all blacks were
oppressed and ‘were all members of the same socioeconomic class’ (Manning, 2013).
However, with the increasing mobility that the beginning of the dismantling of
apartheid heralded, black South Africans were confronted with what Barnard (2007)
calls ‘unprecedented diversity’ (p. 151). This unprecedented diversity is reflected in
Mda’s novel by the fact that the collective ‘we’ drops away as ‘the black population
in South Africa becomes increasingly stratified’ (Manning, 2013). This is reflected in
Nefolovhodwe, who had lived in the same village as Toloki before moving to the city,
has forgotten his origins, discounting ‘his old marriage, seeing it as not real because
the dowry was cattle and it was done in the old village’s fashion. His new marriage in
a Westernized church setting now becomes real to him’ (Mda, 2005, p. 205).
178
Nefolovhodwe asserts his new identity, which is ostensibly Western, by
differentiating himself in socio-economic terms from the poor, informal settlement
dwellers:
They have never seen a car like this before. It is a limousine that I recently
imported from America. It is called a Cadillac. Hey, Toloki, my boy, don’t you
think it’s nice that I have come to light up your little miserable lives with my
white Cadillac? (Mda, 1995, p. 201)
Toloki resents Nefolovhodwe’s success but also the fact that he has forgotten his
roots, with Nefolovhodwe initially pretending not to remember Toloki and his family
back in the village. Toloki, unlike Nefolovhodwe, finds himself in a twilight zone,
having moved to the city but not having adapted completely to it (he still sleeps like
he did in the village and moreover on a bench), remaining ‘in the lower class’
(Manning, 2013).
The increasing differentiation of black South Africans due to the espousal of
Western/materialistic values in black communities is evidenced in another episode in
Ways of Dying when a nurse goes to find a dead relative in a township morgue and is
kept waiting by gossiping female employers, whom she lambasts:
‘And you know what?’ the nurse fumed, ‘these are our own people. When they
get these big jobs in government offices they think they are better than us. They
treat us like dirt!’ (Mda, 1995, p. 18)
The nurse’s comments, along with those of Nefolovhodwe, show that white urban
ideals, including belonging to the professional class and being a consumer, now
determine status in black South Africa. The ideal of belonging to the professional
class is also revealed in a later episode in Ways of Dying when Noria’s mother asks
her, ‘Did I bring you up to waste your life with mere labourers?’ after she discovers
her going out with a labourer (Mda, 1995, p. 75). Noria’s mother forbids her to see the
man, telling her, ‘You will be married to a teacher, or a clerk of a general dealer’s
store’ (p. 75). The reflection of status through materialistic markers in black South
Africa is exemplified again in Noria’s case when as a teenager she achieves greater
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status than Toloki as ‘she began to wear shoes’ (p. 72). Toloki, for his part, enjoys
status for a short time as an adult when he has a successful business selling meat in
the downtown area. However, after the government takes away his cooker-stand, he
‘could not maintain his life-style’ and ‘the friends who liked him very much began to
discover other commitments whenever he wanted their company’ (p. 123).
Whiteness: A love–hate relationship
In the Spanish-language novels, we observe the other to both love and hate whiteness,
an ambivalence that stems from the other’s knowledge of the difficulty of
approximating whiteness and the potential rejection involved in doing so. The
associated feelings and behaviours resulting from this awareness are evidenced in
Galíndez by the intense gaze of the other on whiteness—an object of both desire and
hatred—when the white PhD candidate Muriel Colbert 70 is watched by the hotel’s
dark-skinned guests:
Te persiguen algunas miradas oscuras de hombres oscuros y macizos y de
mujeres oscuras y gordas y en cambio la mayoría gringa que se baña en las
copas de sus combinados afrutados apenas si repara en ti. (Vázquez
Montalbán, 2000, p. 269)
You are followed by some dark looks from some stout dark men and some fat
dark women, but the gringo majority dipping into their fruit cups hardly gives
you a glance. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 231)
The fact that the white guests hardly give her a glance points to the normativity of
whiteness, with whites generally viewing each other in a neutral way racially, without
the baggage, for instance, with which the other would view his or her fellow others.
Otherness is racialised as a function of both racist representations and stereotypes and
its exclusion from or invisibility in the mainstream. These factors make otherness
strange even for the other, who is accustomed to screens, magazines, books and
70
She is visiting the Dominican Republic in an attempt to find the killers of the Basque activist and
former employee and subsequent enemy of Trujillo, Jesús de Galíndez.
180
billboards saturated with images of white people, white narratives and white talk,
most of which include positive representations (beauty, wealth, power, etc.), these
often contrasting with negative ones of blackness, which connotes criminality,
violence, etc.
In the novels, such representations (of both blacks and whites) lead to ambivalence on
the part of the other towards power and whiteness, as revealed by the other’s
vacillating commentary in regards to them. This ambivalence can undoubtedly be
credited to the fact that when the other desires to break the chains of his or her
imposed inferiority, the only conceivable archetype available through which to do so
is whiteness. Indeed, given its utter pervasiveness in the national discourse, especially
in the case of the trujillato and United States, messages regarding the normativity and
superiority of whiteness have penetrated deeply into the psyche of the average citizen.
The intersecting of race and class and its complex manifestation in daily discourse is
shown in Galíndez when Voltaire engages in conversation with a Haitian taxi driver
in Miami:
Y Castro también es un racista. Todos los dirigentes de la revolución son
blancos, ¿dónde están los negros?
Aquí, los negros están aquí.
Los últimos barcos cubanos llegaron cargados de pendejos, drogadictos y
ladrones negros…
Esto está lleno de negros.
Afirmó el taxista negro, preocupado por la evidencia.
Si fuera por los cubanos, dejarían que se pudrieran en el Krome.
Usted es un gran amigo del pueblo haitiano.
Es que los haitianos son humildes y yo estaba aquí antes de que pusieran las
calles y los cubanos creen que lo han hecho todo, que Miami no existiría sin
ellos. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 155)
‘And Castro is a racist, too. All the leaders of the revolution are white, where
are the blacks?’
‘Here, the blacks are here.’
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‘The last Cuban ships arrived full of black pimps and drug addicts and
crooks…’
‘Plenty of blacks here.’
The black taxi driver agreed, worried by the evidence.
‘If it was up to the Cubans, they wouldn’t let a single Haitian into Miami,
they’d let them all rot in Krome.’
‘You are a great friend of the Haitian people.’
‘That’s because the Haitians are humble, and I was here before they put in
the streets, and the Cubans think they made this city, that Miami wouldn’t exist
without them.’ (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 130)
Voltaire’s vacillating commentary reveals his ambivalence towards whiteness and its
power. In one breath Voltaire shows solidarity with blackness, mentioning to the
black Haitian taxi driver the absence of blacks in the Castro regime; however, in
another, he exhibits racism towards blacks, commenting on ‘the last Cuban ships
(that) arrived full of black pimps and drug addicts and crooks…’ (Vázquez
Montalbán, 1992, p. 130). In addition, in the same dialogue, Voltaire reveals his
jealousy of the white Cuban elite of Miami, branding them as arrogant. Voltaire’s
moral unevenness in his responses to the Haitian taxi driver reflects the conflicted
nature of the other, who attempts to situate himself on a class hierarchy that, given its
racialised nature and the low status of blackness on it, makes the attainment of selfesteem and mental stability within the respective society a difficult exercise.
The psychic trauma as a reaction to this social reality is observable in Trujillo in La
fiesta del chivo when the fictional Trujillo expresses his satisfaction at the wealthy
Dominican community’s veneration of him, a descendent of slaves:
Aunque, a veces, cuando en el Hipódromo, el Country Club o Bellas Artes veía
a todas las familias aristocráticas dominicanas rindiéndole pleitesías, pensaba
con burla: Lamen el suelo por un descendiente de esclavos. (Vargas Llosa,
2000, p. 367)
Sometimes, however, at the Hipódromo, the Country Club, or Fine Arts,
when he saw all the aristocratic Dominican families paying him homage, he
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would think mockingly: They’re licking the ground for a descendent of slaves.
(Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 334)
Trujillo’s desire to emulate physically the country’s white elite, which he does by
powdering his face (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 38), coupled with his knowledge of his
own mother’s blackness and the elite’s treachery towards him (p. 178), makes the
dictator agonisingly aware of his inability to escape blackness completely. Trujillo’s
bipolar attitude towards the country’s white elite, which swings from admiration (p.
215, p. 293) to disdain (p. 367), is a manifestation of this frustration—hopelessness
even—in relation to his identity.
The ambivalence towards whiteness in the Dominican and American narratives is
attenuated in the South-African novels due to the race of the non-white characters in
them and the nature of apartheid society. The South-African texts do not deal with
Coloureds (mixed race people), who in some cases in the apartheid era were able to
approximate whiteness, as mulatos did and can in the Dominican Republic. Rather,
they deal with blacks, who were at the bottom of the race/status hierarchy and who,
because of their physicality, had very little leeway with which to approximate
whiteness. This makes the few examples of black characters in the South African texts
responding to whiteness more noticeable but also more political and related to power
than appearance, which is the main focus in the Spanish-language texts and Díaz’s
novel. The clear distinction between black and white in apartheid South Africa meant
resistance to whiteness from blacks tended to be more overtly political and the
rejection of it more trenchant. The apartheid era slogan ‘Kill a Boer, Kill a Farmer’,
‘associated mostly with PAC supporters’ (Ferree, 2011, p. 75), for example, shows
how many blacks during the apartheid era saw whiteness as something separate from
blackness and to be extracted from the national (black) space. This situation was
largely inversed during the trujillato, where blackness was and is seen by the majority
of Dominicans as foreign.
The more politicised black response to othering in the South-African novels is
demonstrated in Rumours of Rain when Charlie Mofokeng, Mynhardt’s black
foreman, comes to talk to him during a salary dispute at the mine Mynhardt manages
and tells him that ‘the real trouble is only starting’, explaining the extent of the
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mineworkers’ anger and the reasons for it after Mynhardt tells him ‘it doesn’t matter’
(Brink, 1978, p. 44):
It’s bad enough for those who work in Johannesburg. They’re also locked up in
compounds like a lot of animals in a bloody zoo. But at least they can get out
from time to time to do some shopping, or even to dance for your White tourists
on the mine dumps on Sundays. But this lot—Jesus, man, here they’re kept
behind barbed wire with nothing but dust and dry grass as far as you can see.
They want liquor, they want women. They need something. (Brink, 1978, p. 44–
45)
The fact that Mofokeng, in order to draw Mynhardt’s attention to his argument and
thus effect positive change, feels the need to use a reference (animals) that in the West
(including South Africa) has negative connotations shows, ironically, the
pervasiveness of white racism in South Africa and the degree to which the other has
internalised it. The assertion of Mofokeng that ‘they’re kept behind barbed wire with
nothing but dust and dry grass as far as you can see’, coupled with ‘they want liquor,
they want women. They need something’ (Brink, 1978, p. 45), creates a contrastive
effect that shows how in this case the so-called ‘Great Chain Metaphor’ (Goatly,
2006, p. 24) (in which religious figures, humans, animals, plants and minerals are
placed along a hierarchy in that order) is fallacious in its application to humans. The
mention of ‘dry grass’, which is in keeping with the bestiary given its allusion to
cattle, contrasts with ‘they need something’ (Brink, 1978, p. 45), stressing the fact that
this particular plant (plants are at the bottom of the hierarchy) is not enough for these
‘lowly’ mine workers; they have human wants and needs.
In Mofokeng’s remarks about the mine workers and their zoo-like conditions, the verb
‘locked’ (Brink, 1978, p. 45) is an overt reference to the prison-like conditions of the
compounds built for black mine workers coming from the so-called Bantustans. Said
workers, in contrast to black township dwellers in the cities, were obliged to live in
‘separate, tightly policed, ethnically segregated, single-sex hostels’ (Barchiesi, 2011,
p. 43) situated in compounds surrounded by barbed wire. The need for large numbers
of unskilled workers in the mines along the Witwatersrand gold reef prompted mining
industrialists to exert pressure on the apartheid government to elaborate ‘a state
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machinery that helped to create an African proletariat, limit African labor mobility,
and maintain “cheap” migrant labor’ (Davis, 2003, p. 59). Black labour was drawn on
a contractual basis from the Bantustans, with a worker from a Bantustan ‘viewed
officially as a temporary sojourner’ (p. 60), and obliged to return to the homeland on
termination of his contract (usually after one year). Another significant qualifier in
Mofokeng’s remarks is the word, ‘lot’, which points to a large group or a hoard of
people. In using it, Mofokeng parodies the way in which the white population
depicted the black presence in South Africa, exemplified by Mynhardt’s description
of blacks as ‘hordes’ (Brink, 1978, p. 46, p. 250) and his mother’s allusion to the
same idea when she says, ‘The farms are getting blacker all the time’ (p. 250).
Such rhetoric magnifies blacks so that they become a monstrous threat, which makes
whites defensive, believes Mofokeng, when he says to Mynhardt,
‘What gets me is that history didn’t teach you anything at all.’
‘My history provided me with the means to survive in this land!’
‘All your history taught you was to mistrust others. You never learned to
share anything or to live with others’. (Brink, 1978, p. 40)
Mofokeng’s response to white supremacy in South Africa is politicised, demonstrated
in this case through the character’s marking out of the differences (in this case,
historical conflicts) between whites and blacks rather than playing them down like the
other does in the Spanish language works and Díaz’s novel. The system of apartheid
and the severe class disparities in South Africa along racial lines make Mofokeng’s
reaction an expected response, with political control of South Africa necessarily tied
up with ownership of the land and its recourses. We see the politicised nature of the
black response to white supremacy in South Africa in The Conservationist too when,
in a spiel to his fellow farmworkers, a black character warns of what would happen to
their perceived oppressor when the country got a new (black) government:
‘Everything finish and out. The government will throw them away. We are
going to throw them [Indians] away with the white people’. (Gordimer, 1974, p.
125)
185
The rejection of whiteness by blacks in South Africa was instrumental in determining
how whiteness perceived itself and its survival there, as demonstrated by Mynhardt’s
ruminations on the issue: ‘When will the Continent decide to throw us off, like an old
dog shaking himself to rid him of fleas?’ (Brink, 1978, p. 249). Mynhardt’s admission
is a timid recognition on the part of whites of the mounting black rage across South
Africa and its consequences for the white population. Mynhardt’s question, ‘When
will it happen again, to us?’ (Brink, 1978, p. 249) shows that, while whites see
themselves as part of the continent, they also see their place on it as precarious. This
was perhaps because white control of the country was contingent on whites
controlling and owning most of the land, which blacks saw as their own and wanted
back. Because the South-African novels are mostly from the perspective of their white
male protagonists, the commentaries of whites in relation to blacks often say more
about the black response to racial oppression than do the black responses themselves.
Indeed, Mynhardt and Mehring’s fearful views reveal the obvious level of antagonism
blacks have for whites in the South-African milieu.
Mehring makes apparent in a stream-of-consciousness commentary the fearful
awareness of whites of the wrongs they are committing against the black population:
How long can we go on getting away scot free? When the aristocrats were
caught up in the Terror, did they recognize: it’s come to us. Did the Jews of
Germany think: it’s our turn. Soon, in this generation or the next, it must be our
turn to starve and suffer. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 46)
White South Africans’ fear of black Africa subsuming them could be seen as harking
back to the way in which medieval Christian Europeans thought of themselves. That
was, according to Davies (1988), as being ‘encircled by menacing pagan realms that
were both literally and figuratively darker: a world in which the “children of light”
were surrounded by the “children of darkness”’ (p. 8). Such views and the oppressive,
exploitative and alienating policies of apartheid turned the black majority against
whites and symbols of whiteness, including, for example, the Afrikaans language
(Nuttall and Langhan, 1997, p. 215) and European place names, epitomised today by
the changing of Dutch/Afrikaans place names in some parts of South Africa (Orman,
2008, p. 126). For whites, the preservation of their power entailed the survival of their
186
way of life in the face of a people (blacks) for whom its continuance signified
continued dispossession. Under such circumstances, blacks and whites could not view
each other’s existence as anything other than mutually exclusive.
In Ways of Dying, Mda (1995) gives a sense of how blacks feel towards the presence
of whites in South Africa when Toloki goes to see Noria for the first time in a squatter
camp and thinks to himself,
Squatter people are a closeknit community. They know one another. And by the
way, he must remember that they do not like to be called squatters. ‘How can
we be squatters on our own land, in our own country?’ they often ask.
‘Squatters are those who came from across the seas and stole our land’. (p. 48)
The ‘squatters’ ‘who came from across the seas and stole our land’ are obviously
Europeans, who ironically have the gumption to call the indigenous black population
‘squatters’. Noria and the other informal settlement dwellers work against this
historical injustice by ‘never refer[ring] to the area as a squatter camp, or to the
residents as squatters’ (Mda, 1995, p. 53), and Toloki reminds himself when he takes
a taxi to the squatter camp to call it an informal settlement instead of a squatter camp
(p. 100). The views of the black informal settlement dwellers in this case are not as
militant as those to which white characters in Rumours of Rain and The
Conservationist allude through their fearful comments of what would happen to them
if the blacks had their way. They do, however, unlike those mediated views, contain a
rational critique of apartheid, specifically the Group Areas Act, 71 through their ironic
reference to ‘squatters’.
Trying for white
71
The Group Areas Act assigned racial groups in South Africa to different sections of urban areas, and
caused great hardship and humiliation to non-whites, who had to travel long distances to get to work,
and carry and present passbooks to the authorities in order to enter whites areas. Non-whites who lived
in ‘white areas’ were forcibly removed, with the declaring of District Six, a formerly mixed area
adjacent to the Cape Town city centre, ‘white’ on 11 February 1966 and the subsequent demolishing of
the area one of the starkest examples of the ruthlessness of the policy.
187
The individual forms a ‘fictive personality’, according to Gilman (1991a), with its
development dependent on an ‘image of representations of the self in the external
world’ (p. 173). Accordingly, the sense of shame experienced by the other as a
consequence of belonging to a group ascribed undesirable characteristics results in his
or her understanding of ‘the self’ becoming ‘impossible…from an understanding of
that internalized image’ (p. 173). As such, the individual desires to reconnect with
him or herself by relating to the stereotype’s originator, i.e., the state, ‘which has
replaced the mother as the prime determiner of our sense of alienation’ (p. 174).
Consequently, the labels bestowed on the other by the dominant group, whom one
‘fears and thus wishes to emulate’ (p. 175), come to eclipse the individual’s self,
having a profound effect on the way in which the other perceives his or her place in
society in relation to the oppressor as well as fellow others. Gilman (1991a) cites an
example of this phenomenon when he refers to Anna Freud, who witnessed Jewish
children evacuated to her London clinic playing Nazis and Jews. The children
designated a section of the group as Jews and treated them as inferior in order to
‘preserve their own sense of power’ (p. 175). Analogously, in the novels we see the
dominant group as well as the other make value judgements on the other’s
appearance. These judgements produce ‘the other as subordinate’ and make ‘people
aware of who holds the power’ (Jensen, 2009, p. 10). In Galíndez, the fictional
Trujillo demonstrates an awareness of the relationship between race and power when
he says that the Americans treated his son like a ‘mestizo’ (which has been translated
as ‘dog’ in the English version, stripping it of its racial overtones) despite the fact that
he associated with famous (white) women:
Los gringos han denigrado a mi hijo y le trataron como un mestizo cuando fue
a estudiar a la escuela militar de Leavenworth y el muchacho alternaba los
estudios con hembras como la Kim Novak o la Zsa Zsa Gabor, bajo el consejo
de su cuñado, el golfo Porfirio. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 249)
The gringos made fun of my son and treated him like a dog when he was
studying at the military school in Leavenworth and the boy alternated his
schoolwork with ladies like Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor, under the guidance
of his brother-in-law, that rogue of a Porfirio. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p.
213)
188
The dominant group establishes whiteness as normative (and thus desirable) at the
expense of the other, whose physical differences necessarily mean he or she cannot
escape definition (and derision), as demonstrated by the example of Trujillo’s son in
the United States. When the other is defined, whether by the dominant group, by himor herself or by fellow others, he or she is both pushed away from the dominant group
and into competition with other darker-skinned people also wanting to access that
power. In response, racially oppressed groups can mobilise in different ways, says
Marx (1998): some blacks may try to enter ‘white society’ for material gain or ‘to
achieve voice’, while others may choose to ‘withdraw to avoid prejudice and develop
self-worth’ (p. 20). Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo chooses to enter white society despite the
fact that, although an other in racial terms, he is supremely powerful and does not
need to compete with whites. That Trujillo feels he has to prove to whites that he and
his family are as good as they are points to the dictator having internalised racism.
Trujillo’s inferiority complex is the result of negative representations and stereotypes
of the other, and because Trujillo thinks so little of the other, that his son should be
treated like one (‘un mestizo’, in this case) is, rather than a stain on the integrity of
American society, a stain on that of his family. This is when we can say the individual
has internalised racism, namely started to believe the negative representations and
stereotypes directed towards their race (Jones, 2000, p. 5). Because of this
internalisation, the subject can experience ‘the effect of lowering self-esteem’, and
‘they stop believing in themselves and in people who look like them’ (p. 5).
We find an example of internalised racism in an episode in Galíndez in which
Voltaire believes an American official is speaking down to him because he is darkskinned:
¿Y no me viene un gringo a decirme que contamino? Era uno de esos gringos
que se pasan de listos y te hablan con la voz suavecita, con la voz de pato
Donald suavecita y te dan lecciones de modos porque nos toman por indios o
por esclavos africanos. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 318)
And can you believe it, a gringo came up to me to tell me that I was polluting?
He was one of those gringos who are too clever by half, and they talk to you in
189
these soft little voices, the way a quiet Donald Duck would talk, and they give
you lessons in manners because they take you for Indians and African slaves.
(Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 275)
Voltaire has internalised the belief that dark-skinned people do bad things and are
inferior because he believes that a person recognising him as an Indian or black
person is itself an insult, a view expressed by Trujillo in the same novel when he
berates Jesús de Galíndez for having insinuated that his mother is mulata:
A mi madre la deja en paz, aunque insinúa lo de la mulatez, lo de los haitianos,
para ponerme en evidencia e insultarla indirectamente. (Vázquez Montalbán,
2000, p. 246)
My mother you let rest in peace, although you hint that she’s a mulatto, and a
Haitian one, to show me up and insult me indirectly. (Vázquez Montalbán,
1992, p. 211)
If the other comes to believe negative representations and stereotypes, the dominant
group’s views can reinforce racism by proxy, with members of ‘low-status’ social
groups ‘sometimes maintain[ing] positive social identities by distancing themselves
from their own groups and identifying with high-status groups, typically males and
whites’ (Graves and Powell, 2008, p. 448). This is certainly the case with Trujillo,
who strongly identifies with Spain, Hispanicity and the Dominican Republic’s white
elite, all of which he tries to mimic.
We find mimicry (physical and/or cultural) in post-colonial literature, with one such
work being The Casuarina Tree (1926), a book of short stories by W. Somerset
Maugham. In one of the stories, a mixed-race (Malay-white) character Izzart yearns
for all things European yet is disturbed and confused by the ‘double consciousness of
living in-between’, of trying to ‘fit in the European way of life’ while being ‘despised
by the so-called pure European breed’ (Aladaylah, 2010, p. 12). Izzart’s anger
towards the colonizer combined with his desire to become more like him creates
internal discord when he realises he is ‘almost the same yet not quite’ (Bhabha, 1994,
p. 86). It is foreseeable how such dissonance could generate internalised racism and
190
even discrimination towards one’s own race (intra-racial racism) and oneself
(internalised racism) in the context of a socio-economic reality that privileges those
with more Caucasoid features. Díaz (2007) paints such a situation, albeit absurdly and
humorously, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when he exposes the lengths
people will go to to not look black (or at least, as minimally black as possible):
Abelard’s two daughters, Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf
(open suffering from Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under
the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness,
remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow—while their father, when not
listening to the news from the War, roamed the shore-line, his face set in tense
concentration. He walked barefoot, stripped down to his white shirt and his vest,
his pant legs rolled, his demi-afro an avuncular torch, plump with middle age.
(p. 213)
In mentioning the mother’s desperate attempt not to tan in light of her children’s
obvious dark skin and her husband’s obvious African hair, Díaz ridicules the other’s
attempt to mimic physical whiteness, something the author shows to be virtually
impossible. Díaz uses Lola, Beli’s daughter to show the psychic trauma of feeling
ashamed of one’s blackness by showing the flipside of not imitating whiteness, the
author highlighting in the process the other’s entrapment. He describes Lola as
enjoying herself while on holiday in the Dominican Republic away from the watchful
gaze of her mother: ‘I would let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it,
let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and
never recognized me’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 209). By describing letting oneself go blacker as
if it were a guilty pleasure, Díaz confirms the degree to which the trujillato has cast
blackness as deviant. Indeed, these quotes show that while black features are not a
disability in the physical sense, they are in the social sense in a society (Dominican) in
which a person’s life chances are determined by European criteria of beauty (Murray,
2001, p. 275). Such criteria explain the pull of and intense longing for whiteness in
the other but also the other’s distress at having to achieve the ultimately unachievable
aspiration of whiteness by going against his or her very essence.
191
In La fiesta del chivo, we see Trujillo’s longing for whiteness, with the dictator
attempting to appear as white as possible by powdering his face, a ritual he carries out
every morning:
Cuando estuvo peinado y hubo retocado los extremos del bigotillo semimosca
que llevaba hacía veinte años, se talqueó la cara con prolijidad, hasta
disimular bajo una delicadísima nube blanquecina aquella morenez de sus
maternos ascendientes, los negros haitianos, que siempre había despreciado en
las pieles ajenas y en la suya propia. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 38)
When his hair was combed and he had touched up the ends of the thin brush
mustache he had worn for twenty years, he powdered his face generously until
he had hidden under a delicate whitish cloud the dark tinge of the Haitian blacks
who were his maternal ancestors, something he had always despised on other
people’s skin, and on his own. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 29)
Trujillo’s scorn of his own Haitian ancestors’ skin colour highlights the fact that
beauty is relational (Hunter, 2002, p. 178): someone who is considered beautiful is
considered so in relation to what is considered ugly [blackness in this case] (p. 178).
What is determined to be ugly is determined to be so by the dominant group, who
uses its own appearance as the benchmark of beauty from which it establishes myths
of beauty.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao we see the acting out of ‘the myths of the
dominant culture’ (Clunis, 2003, p. 135) when an uncle picks up Oscar on his return
to New York from a holiday in the Dominican Republic: ‘Great, his tio said, looking
askance at his complexion, now you look Haitian’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 32). In cases like
these, the use of racial epithets ‘confirms the constant dialogue between the social
gaze that produces the process of self-degradation and the effect of othering’
(Jennings, 2009, p. 84). This dynamic produces a subject who is highly sensitive and
often violent (psychologically speaking, though sometimes behaviourally too)
because of the irreconcilability of blackness and whiteness and their historical
implications. In the Dominican Republic these historical implications led to a
situation under the trujillato where Dominicans (the majority of whom are mulato or
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black) were classified as ‘indio’ (‘Indian’), being either ‘indio claro’ (‘light Indian’)
or ‘indio oscuro’ (‘dark Indian’) but never ‘black’, a term reserved for Haitians
(Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral, 2003, p. 231). This falsified racial profiling stemmed
from the (already mentioned) historical rivalries between the Dominican Republic and
Haiti and the fact that Haitians ‘fulfil the most menial jobs’ in Dominican society (p.
231). Being black, therefore, in the Dominican context, even if one is AfroDominican, means being an outsider and finding oneself at the very bottom of the
socio-economic food chain. It is easy to see then how such a predicament could make
the other sensitive to colour and power relations and cause him or her to take his or
her anger and frustration out on likewise powerless people with whom he or she is
forced to compete for the crumbs of the nation’s resources.
Indeed, Beli, like Oscar’s uncle, takes out her own sense of powerlessness and despair
on fellow others, as well as playing into the generalisations that Dominicans have of
Haitians, when on her arrival in Santo Domingo she and Oscar notice, ‘the clusters of
peddlers at every traffic light (so dark, he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively,
Maldito haitianos)’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 273). 72 Beli assumes that the peddlers are Haitian
because they have dark skin despite the fact that a substantial number of Dominicans
are black. Beli’s misconception is understandable in light of the fact that she grew up
under the trujillato, whose nationalism rendered blackness foreign and degraded.
Thus, Beli pushes blackness away because it represents everything that in her mind
whiteness is not (poor, ugly, powerless, stupid, backwards, etc.), and thus poses an
obstacle to her in her quest to achieve status in a society (the United States, though
before that, the Dominican Republic) in which whiteness weighs the most. If the other
sees that the spoils of the nation are almost exclusively in the hands of whites, she
will be reluctant to mingle with fellow others for fear of perpetuating her own social
entrapment.
Beli’s childhood in the Dominican Republic confirms her complex around black skin,
with a Chinese student in her class, despite also being treated badly by the private
school’s mostly white students, also taking out her powerlessness on an other,
ridiculing Beli’s skin colour:
72
Damned Haitians (my translation).
193
This was who Beli sat next to her first two years of high school. But even Wei
had some choice words for Beli.
You black, she said, fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black. (Díaz, 2007,
p. 84)
Here, one would reasonably expect Wei, who is also an other and who is taunted for
her slanted eyes and the way she speaks, 73 to show compassion for Beli. However,
Wei’s comments demonstrate that she has internalised the school’s and society’s
racism (with the student subconsciously aware that a racial hierarchy exists in the
Dominican Republic and that light-skinned people occupy its apex). Because Wei has
lighter skin than Beli, she is higher up on the socioeconomic/racial hierarchy, though
not quite white enough to be deserving of equal treatment by the white students.
Wei’s mimicry of the white students’ racism is the result of being situated somewhere
between whiteness and blackness, and longing for whiteness, with this ironically
being a dilemma experienced by many Dominicans.
Apart from skin colour, hair is the most salient racial marker in the expression of
power and control (Banks, 2000, as cited in Bellinger, 2007, p. 65). Much of the
other’s preoccupation around appearance focuses on hair because ‘little can be done
to alter skin color or facial features’ (Winn, 2006, p. 300), a fact that explains the
obsession with hair on the part of the female characters in Díaz’s novel. The other’s
focus on hair, therefore, is not about becoming white physically but about exercising
power in order to improve one’s life chances in a context in which one is oppressed
(Murray, 2011, p. 276). In the post-colonial context (in the Americas and Africa, in
this case), slavery shaped the treatment of the female body. During the slave trade, the
hair of slaves was shaved off for ‘sanitary reasons’ and slave masters told black slave
children that their hair was wool and taught them not to like ‘their own hair’
(Ballinger, 2007, p. 64). Sometimes before being in the company of their slave
73
‘In the beginning the other students had scourged her with all the usual anti-Asian nonsense. They
cracked on her hair (It’s so greasy!) on her eyes (Can you really see through those?), on chopsticks (I
got some twigs for you!), on language (variations on ching-chong-ese). The boys especially loved to
tug their faces back into bucked-tooth, chink-eyed rictuses. Charming. Ha-ha. Jokes aplenty’ (Díaz,
2007, p. 84).
194
masters and his acquaintances, slaves were made ‘decent’ by being forced to have
their hair straightened (p. 64). Sexual relations (rape, in most cases) between white
male master and black female slave produced lighter skinned offspring whose hair
was straighter than that of black children, putting even more pressure on darker
women, whose hair was not considered ‘good’ hair, to straighten their hair and ‘look
as white as possible’ (p. 65). Even slaves who had skin ‘as light as many whites’ did
not pass as white if their hair ‘showed just a little bit of kinkiness’ (p. 65).
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, we see the psychological effects that the
stigma of black hair has on the other when Beli’s daughter Lola cuts off her long,
straight hair, angering her mother:
Recently she’d cut her hair short—flipping out her mother yet again—partially I
think because when she’d been little her family had let it grow down past her
ass, a source of pride, something I’m sure her attacker noticed and admired.
(Díaz, 2007, p. 25)
It is common knowledge in Beli’s family and the community that an acquaintance had
attacked Lola when she was in the fourth grade, probably prizing her hair. Through
this detail, Díaz (2007) brings into relief the power of hair, a source of both
veneration and jealousy that he mentions several times throughout his novel (p. 15, p.
25, p. 54, p. 56, p. 84, p. 124, p. 209). Beli, for her part, is angry with Lola for having
cut off her hair without her consent because she projects her feelings of powerlessness
and despair onto Lola. She uses her perversely as a source for her own self-esteem,
putting her down to make herself feel better but also getting angry when she does not
conform to an image of beauty that reflects favourably on her.
Lola, for her part, mentions her own hair when she recalls the expectations of her
mother and her domestic commitments in the family, stating, ‘I never caused trouble,
even when the morenas used to come after me with scissors because of my straightstraight hair’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 56). Díaz also mentions the morenas (black girls) earlier
on in the novel when he compares Lola to her brother, who has ‘zero combat’ ability:
‘(Unlike his sister, who fought boys and packs of morena girls who hated her thin
nose and straightish hair.)’ (Díaz, 2007, p. 15). The jealousy and hatred towards Lola
195
from the morenas proves that the construction of beauty cannot be separated from
gender power relations, which place women on a hierarchy according to European
standards of beauty (Murray, 2011, p. 275). This racialised gender hierarchy
encourages women of colour to compete ‘unnaturally’ for resources that men have
accumulated for themselves (p. 275). Looking white, therefore, means easier access to
men with superior economic and/or sexual capital. 74 The heightened degree of
competition between women of colour makes them, in the words of Murray (2011),
‘each other’s “first surveyors”’ (p. 277), which helps to explain the morenas’ jealousy
of Lola. Indeed, because African-American woman had for generations been taught to
view their hair as ‘a badge of shame’ (Banks, 2000, p. 72) and because ‘no African
American woman wants more [shame]’ (Ballinger, 2007, p. 66), black women have
used hair as a source of empowerment by taking it out of its natural state and making
it white through straightening, dyeing etc. (Banks, 2000, p. 69).
These values present the other with a dilemma: how to reconcile a fragile and unstable
internalised image of whiteness with the physical reality of blackness. Faced with this
challenge, whiteness for the other becomes about what will make him-/herself whiter
and his/her dark-skinned neighbour blacker. The rivalry that results from this mindset
is shown in Díaz’s novel when Lola decides to wear her hair naturally, something that
elicits taunts from the neighbourhood children:
The puertorican kids on the block couldn’t stop laughing when they saw my
hair, they called me Blacula, and the morenos, they didn’t know what to say:
they just called me devil-bitch, yo, yo! (Díaz, 2007, p. 54)
The Puerto Rican children taunt Lola because, unlike when she had long straight hair,
they can now consider her inferior, given her frizzy, African hair. Once a symbol in
the United States of black empowerment, in more recent times the Afro has been
synonymous with black criminality, with straight hair continuing to be ‘the norm’
(Bellinger, 2007, p. 65).
74
As a young woman, Beli found out how difficult it was to access that capital in the Dominican
Republic as a black person after having been rejected by her ‘light knight’, Jack Pujols (Díaz, 2007, p.
95).
196
In contrast to Díaz’s novel, in the South-African text The Conservationst there is but a
single, vague reference to physical mimicry when the black nurses in the location
(black township) are described as, ‘women wearing the straight hair of white people
and hospital nurses in uniforms clean and stiff as paper’ (Gordimer, 1974, p. 85).
While hair straightening and skin bleaching did occur in black South Africa during
the time in which The Conservationist was set, there is scant reference to them in the
novel and no reference to them in Rumours of Rain. There are several reasons for this:
firstly, the South-African books look primarily at the personal relationships the white
male protagonists Mehring and Mynhardt have with their family and community
rather than the other. This means the inner lives and desires of the other are largely
omitted. Secondly, the South-African books take place in a society in which, unlike
the Dominican Republic, relations between blacks and whites are strictly vertical in
nature, meaning blacks pose little (if any) socio-economic threat to the white
protagonists, who as a consequence give little consideration to black attitudes and
habits (skin bleaching, hair straightening, etc.). Lastly, the fact that blacks were not
officially part of the South-African nation—unlike dark-skinned people in the
Dominican Republic—probably explains why Mehring and Mynhardt are not seen to
make comments about straight black hair or bleached skin. Indeed, no matter how
white blacks in South Africa made themselves look (even if they managed to look
Coloured; i.e., mixed race), whites did not consider them white (let alone white in a
social and cultural sense) and therefore ‘South African’.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Galíndez, Díaz and Vázquez
Montalbán show whiteness to be associated with power in the minds of the other.
They also show the other to be unwilling or unable to question his or her own
devaluation of fellow others in order to approximate that power. This reluctance or
inability is likely due to the fact that national discourse in the Dominican Republic has
melded class and race, making the citizen’s sense of belonging to the nation
dependent on how much money he or she has and how attractive he or she is, i.e., how
white he or she is.
A national discourse that focuses on socio-economic capital means Beli garners her
sense of belonging by imagining herself as wealthy. An example of a behaviour
197
resulting from this mindset is Beli’s flight with her son Oscar to the Dominican
Republic in which she dresses up overly elegantly and makes snide remarks in order
to differentiate herself from fellow Dominican travellers:
If she’d owned a fur she would have worn it, anything to communicate the
distance she’d traveled, to emphasize how not like the rest of these dominicanos
she was. Oscar, for one, had never seen her looking so dolled-up and elegante.
Or acting so comparona. Belicia giving everybody a hard time, from the checkin people to the flight attendants, and when they settled into their seats in first
class (she was paying) she looked around as if scandalized: these are not gente
de calidad! (Díaz, 2007, p. 272) 75
Since Beli is black, her discrimination of fellow Dominicans is necessarily classist
rather than racist, though her snide remarks reveal a certain element of racism too.
Ultimately, Beli wants to prove to her compatriots that she is superior to them because
she has made it in the United States (which is far from the truth), having accrued
expensive material objects (a fur coat) and, presumably, adopted Anglo ways (distinct
from Dominican ones, which she looks down on). Having supposedly made it makes
Beli whiter than other Dominican migrants in the United States because she has
hypothetically pulled herself closer to the dominant Anglo-American culture.
Beli’s competitiveness is rooted in her childhood when her grandmother, La Inca,
constantly made her aware of the country’s power hierarchy. When Beli was in high
school, La Inca reminded her of the fact that the school’s other other, Wei, got higher
grades than her, thus demoting her to the very bottom of the educational institution’s
totem pole. In the following description, La Inca clearly views the Chinese girl as a
competitor to her daughter in gaining the acceptance of the white elite:
It was stubbornness and the expectations of La Inca that kept Belicia lashed to
the mast, even though she was miserably alone and her grades were even worse
than Wei’s (You would think, La Inca complained, that you could score higher
than a china.). (Díaz, 2007, p. 85)
75
Quality people (my translation).
198
By denigrating Wei and making out that losing to a ‘china’ is an embarrassment, La
Inca makes Beli cognisant of the racial hierarchy at the school and shameful of her
poor performance within it, which doubles her disadvantage (i.e., being black and
performing badly academically) in Dominican (high) society.
The double disadvantage of Beli is also evident in the mulato character in Galíndez,
Voltaire, who does his best to distance himself from black people. Voltaire is mulato
and homosexual (a double disadvantage in the United States of the 1980s), the reason
why he is especially sensitive (like Beli is) to power relations, thinking to himself
during a conversation with a black barman that,
Al negro no le había gustado su tono pero estaba acostumbrado a que no le
gustara el tono de los clientes. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 218)
The Negro didn’t like this tone, but he was used to not liking the tone of his
customers. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 186)
Voltaire’s statement indicates his awareness of the power he wields over the
employee, who is unable to talk back because of the vertical nature of the relationship
between the two men in this case. The self-perceived right of Voltaire to be able to
speak at rather than with the barman highlights the employee’s low status in his eyes.
His low status is a legacy of white skin having become a ‘símbolo universal de
riqueza, poder político, belleza, bienestar social, atributo hereditario del feliz
milagro greco-latino’ 76 as a result of whites’ accumulation of capital (‘fetichismo de
la mercancía’) as a function of their roles as colonisers (Moreno Fraginals, 1996, p.
343). Logically, then, black skin became the embodiment of the inverse (i.e., poverty,
weakness, ugliness, sickness and unhappiness), this fact heightening people’s
(including Voltaire’s) consciousness around, and preoccupation with, socio-economic
status and race in the post-colonial world (p. 343).
76
A universal symbol of wealth, political power, beauty, social welfare, inherited attribute of the
blissful Greco-Latin miracle (my translation).
199
Similar to Beli’s intraracial racism, racial references are not enough for Voltaire to
distinguish himself from the black barman, given that he himself is of part African
ancestry. He must distinguish himself in terms of culture, which he does by referring
to the English actor, Boris Karloff (whose real name was William Henry Pratt), who
is famous for playing Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein (1931) and the Bride of
Frankenstein (1939):
Pero el negro no sabía quién era Boris Karloff, sólo sabía qué era el cocktail
Boris Karloff. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 219)
But the Negro didn’t know who Boris Karloff was, only that there was a Boris
Karloff cocktail. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 186)
The relative obscurity of the cultural reference, Boris Karloff, serves to stress the
extent of the integration of Voltaire into white America as compared to that of the
black waiter.
Recognising, rejecting and raging
The aspiration to whiteness in the post-colonial society feeds into the colonial
principle of divide and conquer: the other denigrates himself by rejecting or at least
distancing himself from his otherness and denigrates fellow others by reinforcing their
othernesses. Yet, with white features a largely impossible aspiration for the other and
social mobility a difficult one in a racially stratified society, sex and sport become
domains in which the other can compete with fellow others and even members of the
dominant group, excel and achieve recognition; which is to say, attention and
admiration from the dominant group.
In La fiesta del chivo, the brother of one of the conspirators, Tavito, attempts to
achieve recognition through sex. Tavito is clearly drawn to whiteness, having an
obvious fetish for blond white women:
Gracias a una orden suya fue admitido en la Aviación y aprendió a volar —su
sueño desde niño—, y, luego, lo contrataron como piloto de Dominicana de
200
Aviación, lo que le permitía viajar con frecuencia a Miami, algo que a su
hermano menor le encantaba, pues allí se tiraba rubias. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p.
110)
Thanks to his orders Tavito had been accepted into the Air Force and learned to
fly—his dream since childhood—and then was hired as a pilot for Dominican
Airlines, which allowed him to make frequent trip to Miami, something his
younger brother loved because he could fuck blondes there’. (Vargas Llosa,
2002, p. 95)
People who feel powerless often adopt behaviours that give ‘them feelings of power
and agency’ (Diller, 2009, p. 326). If a person is physically strong, for example, such
behaviour may include physical intimidation (p. 326); and if a person is sexually
attractive, it may include seduction and manipulation. Tavito uses his apparent sex
appeal to seduce and have sex with blonde women, which draws him closer to
whiteness and thus foreseeably makes him feel more powerful. While Tavito worships
whiteness, as evidenced by his eagerness to get to Miami, the use of the verb ‘tirarse’
(‘fuck’) suggests a paradoxically violent sexuality and a sense of ambivalence,
demonstrated by the character’s desire to violate whiteness in spite of worshiping it.
In La fiesta del chivo, Trujillo too (despite being the most powerful man in the
Dominican Republic) is portrayed as seeking the recognition of the Dominican
Republic’s white elite. He feels aggrieved when he finds out that among the people
suspected of conspiring against him are the children of that elite:
Trujillo se llevaría la gran sorpresa: ¿era posible que complotaran contra él,
los hijos, nietos y sobrinos de gentes que se habían beneficiado más que nadie
con el régimen? No tuvieron consideración con ellos, pese a sus apellidos,
caras blancas y atuendos de clase media. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 178)
Trujillo was dumbfounded: was it possible that the children, grandchildren,
nieces and nephews of the people who had benefited most from the regime were
plotting against him? They were shown no consideration despite their family
201
names, white faces, and middle-class trappings. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, pp. 158–
159)
Trujillo’s pained reaction to this possibility shows the degree to which he seeks
affirmation from whiteness. Indeed, despite being a cold-hearted dictator who has
countless people sent to their deaths, often in the most brutal ways, Trujillo is
emotionally injured by the possibility of members of the white elite having plotted
against him, a reaction that reveals the degree to which he seeks acknowledgement
and acceptance from the Dominican Republic’s white elite. The other projects his or
her fantasies onto whiteness and when this desire is not reciprocated—and it is likely
it will not be because whiteness considers the other as inferior and unworthy of its
gaze—the other engages in ‘splitting’, which refers to viewing qualities in the self or
others as all bad or all good (Whitfield, 1995, p. 123). In the case of narcissists,
splitting acts as a defence against the destabilisation of self-esteem. In Trujillo’s case,
splitting helps the dictator feel respectable and venerable, with those people not
submitting to his will or beliefs considered detestable.
Beli wants to be wanted by a white male, in this case, Jack Pujols, whom she pursues
unrelentingly. Pujols, however, rebuffs Beli’s advances more than he welcomes
them, 77 and it becomes clear that Pujols is only interested in having fleeting, furtive
sexual liaisons with her, expressing his fear at the two of them getting caught
together:
Afterwards she tried to embrace him, to touch his silken hair, but he shook off
her caresses. Hurry up and get dressed. If we get caught my ass will be in the
fire. (Díaz, 2007, p. 100)
The sense of unease around the attraction to whiteness is expressed by an AfricanAmerican man who is ‘uneasy about being attracted to white men, angry about white
men who reject him because he is African American’ (Murray, 1996, p. 246). Khan
77
‘It might as well have been dark out. For all intents and purposes she was invisible to him’ (Díaz,
2007, p. 91).
‘But Pujols was unmoved, observed her with his deep dolphin eyes and did nothing’ (Díaz, 2007, p.
95).
202
(2003) says that while everyone deals with ‘body image, self-hatred, and wanting to
be desired’ the impact that these issues have on the other is ‘different’ and more
‘complex’ (p. 100). When the other is unable to conquer whiteness sexually (what
could get the other closer to whiteness than sex?), he or she becomes painfully
conscious of the fact that he or she ‘can never attain the whiteness he [or she] has
been taught to desire, or shed the blackness he [or she] has learnt to devalue’
(Loomba, 2005, p. 148). Because the other lives in an environment in which
whiteness is pervasive and esteemed and whites are seen to dominate every sphere of
society, this painful double awareness is exacerbated on a daily basis, leading to a
sense of social entrapment, victimisation, resentment, trauma and sometimes, physical
violence. The implications of desire in this context are clear for Beli as an adult when
Díaz (2007) describes her as someone who does not ‘like to be touched. Not at all, not
ever’ (p. 115). Beli has taken rejection badly, closing herself off to the possibility of
letting another man touch her. This is perhaps because she believes her femininity to
be flawed after Pujols’s rejection of her, with Khan (2003) remarking that for the
other ‘dating white men reinforces roles of femininity’ (p. 100). Beli’s narcissism also
causes her to engage in the defensive mechanism of splitting, which makes her see all
men as contemptible.
Trying to differentiate oneself from blackness (racially, economically, socially,
culturally) but seeing oneself in the other would be a painful situation, since it
reinforces the realisation that an improvement in one’s social standing and self-esteem
(the second seen as contingent on the first) is dependent on rejecting one’s own race
and, by extension, oneself. The dilemma, therefore, is how to make oneself invisible
as an other while becoming more visible in the eyes of the dominant group, which the
other desires to emulate. This visibility–invisibility paradox is applicable to several
characters described in the novels and is epitomised explicitly and grotesquely in the
following description of a black courier by Voltaire in Galíndez:
No tenía suficiente cara el negro como para que Voltaire captara una respuesta
que no daban los labios. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 287)
The black man doesn’t have enough of a face for Voltaire to read any response
beyond the one his lips make. (Vázquez Montalbán, 1992, p. 247)
203
While it is clear that the black character can speak, Voltaire being able to understand
what he says by the movement of his lips, the character’s body language (in this case,
facial) is apparently not evident to Voltaire. Voltaire not being able to read the black
character’s face reflects his unwillingness to see the other despite having to hear him.
If Voltaire refuses to see him, then it is impossible for him to empathise with him. In
his lack of empathy towards the other, Voltaire enforces a racist ideology whose view
of blacks was akin to that of the Victorians towards children, encapsulated in the
maxim, ‘Children should be seen not heard’. This notion that ‘children were miniature
adults who needed to be whipped into shape’ (Dobson, 2005) grounded this belief. In
this sense, blacks are analogous to children, needing guidance from whites, a view
reflected in the paternalistic (and racist) power structure of the time.
Voltaire harks back to the Jim Crow era in the United States by describing the face of
the black courier who delivers a parcel to his residence using grotesque language:
Un negrazo, un negrazo yanqui con más casco que cara… (Vázquez
Montalbán, 2000, p. 287)
A dark-skinned man, a Yankee with more a skull than a face… (Vázquez
Montalbán, 1992, p. 247)
It is plausible that Voltaire conquers his fear of black people by depicting them in a
grotesque way, thus reducing them to mere spectacles, i.e., sideshow characters which
the dominant group does not allow to take centre stage because they do not take them
seriously. Voltaire fears blacks, especially those he views as occupying the lowest
rungs of society, because they represent what he most loathes about himself: his dark
skin. This, being both a visible sign of disadvantage and difference, serves to distance
him from his aspiration of being a member of the economically well-off (white)
American mainstream.
A violent response to rejection is evident in Beli’s behaviour later on in life when she
uses violence, physical and mental, in her relationships with people, be they white or
Dominican (‘I’d seen her slap grown men, push white police officers onto their asses,
204
curse a whole group of bochincheras’ [Díaz, 2007, p. 59]).
78
Beli’s rejection of
people is understandable given her strong escapist desires, with the author describing
her as longing to get away from just about every aspect of her life, including her own
skin as a child:
If I had to put it to words I’d say what she wanted, more than anything, was
what she’d always wanted throughout her Los Childhood: to escape. From what
was easy to enumerate: the bakery, her school, dull-ass Bani, sharing a bed with
her madre, the inability to buy the dresses she wanted, having to wait until
fifteen to straighten her hair, the impossible expectations of La Inca, the fact
that her long-gone parents had died when she was one, the whispers that Trujillo
had done it, those first years of her life when she’d been an orphan, the horrible
scars from that time, her own despised black skin. (Díaz, 2007, p. 80)
The juxtaposition of aspects of one’s life that can eventually be gotten away from,
like school and parents’ expectations, with black skin, a permanent physical trait,
couches blackness as an unbreakable curse that follows one around no matter the
circumstances and no matter the place. The strength of this juxtaposition lies in its
ability to reveal how racism creates a sense of powerlessness and the conditions for
learned helplessness that can foreseeably lead to violence, such as that which Beli
uses.
An identity that is tethered to something (whiteness) that is in reality disdainful of you
is the ideal basis for narcissism and narcissistic rage: the subject is perpetually
preoccupied with his or her appearance for the sake of self-worth, which is derived
from an inherently unstable and unpredictable source (whiteness), making the subject
frustrated and angry. We see narcissism and anger in Trujillo’s relationship to
whiteness when he remarks on his gratification at seeing Santo Domingo’s white elite
‘lam[iendo] el suelo por un descendiente de esclavos’ (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 367)
(‘licking the ground for a descendent of slaves’ [Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 334]). Despite
Trujillo’s manipulation of the white elite, the fact that it might be conspiring against
him naturally enrages him.
78
‘Dominican slang for someone who likes to talk a lot’ (Soriano).
205
We see Trujillo’s narcissistic rage in Galíndez when he reacts angrily to Jesús de
Galindez’s treatise on his humble origins:
Pero a mí como hombre, me jode que un pelagatos me humille en lo más
sagrado, en mi estirpe. (Vázquez Montalbán, 2000, p. 244–245)
But as a man, I’m damned if a miserable wretch is going to humiliate me in
what is most sacred to me, in my family ancestry. (p. 209)
Even though Galíndez is European, Trujillo does not treat him with deference,
revealing how the aspiration to whiteness (and being accepted by it) is more about
power than anything else. In the novels, when feelings of ambivalence to whiteness
turn to feelings of rejection because of a slight from the dominant group, that rejection
tends to result in more intense anger and hostility not only towards the group in
question but also towards the self, with the individual becoming ‘increasingly more
aware of the oppressive and exploitative nature of White-dominant society’ (Ortiz,
2009, p. 44).
We see examples of narcissism and narcissistic rage in Beli, manifested by her
relentless ridiculing of her daughter’s looks, which she does as a way of rejecting her
own otherness. Beli’s daughter, Lola, goes to live with her grandmother in the
Dominican Republic to escape the constant conflict at home with her mother.
However, after fourteen months away, Lola’s grandmother tells her it is time for her
to return to the United States to live with her mother. When Beli picks up Lola in
Santo Domingo, the first thing Beli says to Lola is how ugly Lola looks (Díaz, 2007,
p. 205).
The frustration that causes the other to become narcissistic and react with narcissistic
rage is also evident in several scenes between two of the conspirators in La fiesta del
chivo, Pedro Livio (black) and Huáscar Tejeda (white). In spite of both men being
good friends, Tejeda pokes fun at Livio by calling him ‘negro’, which inflames the
latter:
206
Sintió una fuerte contracción en el estómago y gritó. “Calma, calma, Negro”,
le rogó Huáscar Tejeda. Tuvo ganas de contestarle “Negra será tu madre”,
pero no pudo. (Vargas Llosa, 2000, p. 317)
He felt a powerful contraction in his stomach, and he screamed. ‘Easy, take it
easy, Nigger,’ Huáscar Tejeda pleaded. He felt like answering, ‘Nigger’s your
mother,’ but he couldn’t. (Vargas Llosa, 2002, p. 289)
As already noted elsewhere, Livio’s overblown reaction to Tejeda calling him ‘negro’
is not only due to the negative associations of the word itself, which Livio’s American
colleagues used to refer to him during his training in the United States (Vargas Llosa,
2000, p. 308). It is also due to the frustration Livio feels at having to maintain his selfesteem in a hemisphere where the dominant groups sees black people as valueless.
Indeed, many blacks feel they have to work harder than whites in order to be ‘seen as
equally competent’, something that is not even a guarantee of ‘recognition for their
accomplishments’ (Clunis, 2003, p. 135). This unbridgeable contradiction threatens
violence (both psychological/behavioural) to the self and others in a place like the
Dominican Republic, whose closest example of a source of inspiration of black pride
for black Dominicans, namely Haiti, is for historical reasons a contradiction in terms.
In response to devaluation and a lack of recognition, ‘armouring’ arises, which refers
to the individual being hypervigilant for slights and responding accordingly (p. 135).
Livio’s response shows how in being ‘treated as “childish”, some blacks adopt’,
A ‘macho’, aggressive-masculine style. But this only served to confirm the
fantasy amongst whites of their ungovernable and excessive sexual nature.
Thus, ‘victims’ can be trapped by the stereotype, unconsciously confirming it
by the very terms in which they try to oppose and resist it. (Hall, 1997, p. 263)
In the United States, for example, poor mental and physical health among AfricanAmerican males (with black men having ‘high rates of hypertension, stroke, and heart
disease’ [Jacobs, 2011]) is partly the result of armouring. Indeed, a body in a constant
state of fight or flight makes for an angry and irritable individual, with Livio’s
behaviour a testament to this.
207
In the South-African novel The Conservationist, we see an example of internalised
black rage on a collective basis expressed when the white male protagonist, Mehring
comments on the black township close to his farm:
In that enormous location these things happen every day, or rather every
weekend, everyone knows it, they are murdered for their Friday pay-packets or
they stab each other after drinking. A hundred and fifty thousand of them living
there. (Gordimer, 1974, p. 28)
In Mehring’s view, the community consists of amoral men who steal each other’s
wages ‘every weekend’ with no regard for human life, unable to retain their earnings,
presumably paid to them by whites. The reality of the township, however, is plausibly
more complex. Before a political consciousness can take hold in the other, says Fanon
(1968), the colonised man, who is subordinate in the country or colony in which he
lives, first turns his frustration and aggression towards fellow others rather than the
dominant group (p. 51). Given that the other ‘cannot defend his personality in the
larger social arena, he must by all means defend what is left of it in his last refuge—
namely, in the circle of his family and friends’ (Abdilahi Bulhan, 1985, p. 143). His
anger turns homicidal and into ‘an unconscious wish to eliminate an intimate
convictim of oppression who but mirrors what one hates in oneself’ (p. 143). This
phenomenon is what Mehring observes playing out in the black township adjacent to
his farm: men who take out their anger and frustration on those who mirror their
wretched existence.
Mda (1995) shows throughout Ways of Dying the self-loathing characteristic of the
post-colonial condition, with the constant ridiculing of Toloki’s supposed ugliness by
his father and members of the community an example of this:
‘Get out of here, you stupid, ugly boy! Can’t you see that I am busy?’ (p. 33).
‘Noria is not stupid and ugly like Toloki. She is a child of the gods’ (p. 45).
‘If Toloki is stupid and ugly, it is because he has taken after you’ (p. 45).
‘Don’t you see, you poor boy, that you are too ugly for that? How can
beautiful things come from you?’ (p. 68).
208
Strangers would stop the two children on their way to school and comment,
‘What a beautiful little girl. And look at her brother! He looks like something
that has come to fetch us to the next world. Whose children are you, my
children? And Noria would give a pained squeal, ‘he is not my brother!’ (p. 72).
‘Did you not hear, Mother of Toloki? This ugly boy preached in church’. (p.
103)
Toloki’s father, Jwara, rejects him while lavishing praises and gifts on his childhood
friend, Noria: ‘He was like clay in the hands of Noria’ (Mda, 1995, p. 33). Jwara’s
indulgence of Noria turns Toloki against her, whom he calls a ‘stuck-up bitch’ (p. 33).
In this dynamic, we see, says Eze (2013) ‘opposing forces at work’: ‘ugliness and
beauty, oppression and love’ (Eze 2013 p. 94), with these juxtapositions highlighting
the nuanced nature of the novel, which attempts to convey the various and often
contradictory forces at play in the transition years in South Africa.
Despite his resentment towards Noria for the past, in forgiving her, Toloki practices
Ubuntu, an idea summed up by ‘my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up,
in yours’ (Tutu, as cited in Eze, 2013, p. 96). Toloki’s spirit represents, according to
Eze (2013), ‘the degree of sacrifice and forgiveness that he [Desmond Tutu] and
[Nelson] Mandela demanded of the black population as a whole’ after the end of
apartheid towards the white population (p. 96). In return for his forgiveness, Noria
shows Toloki appreciation (p. 98), telling him, ‘You are a beautiful person, Toloki.
That is why I want you to teach me how to live. And how to forgive’ (Mda, 1995, p.
151). Out of this, we see Toloki begin to question his sense of inferiority and perhaps
realise after all these years that he is indeed worthy of love:
He has been called ugly and foolish all his life, to the extent that he has become
used to these labels. But he has never been called beautiful before. It will take
him time to get used to this new label. (p. 151)
Because Noria and Toloki are able to see each other’s humanity, they are able to love
and care for each other, with Toloki remarking that, ‘All that really matters is that she
cares for him, as a homeboy of course. He cares for her as well, as a homegirl’ (Mda,
1995, p. 144). Noria and Toloki, like the post-apartheid leaders who most personified
209
Ubuntu, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, transcend the divisive social paradigms
of apartheid/tribalism that Mda shows in Ways of Dying to be entrapping many of
their compatriots, whose values are driving them to humiliate and kill others for the
sake of self-/group interest.
To conclude, in the South-African novels The Conservationist and Rumours of Rain,
the other is not shown to respond directly to the racism of the white male protagonists,
Mehring and Mynhardt, which, in any case, is typically expressed in a stream-ofconsciousness commentary that flows according to the tides of the men’s personal
lives, which are becoming increasingly stormy. What the main white, South-African
male characters say in Gordimer’s and Brink’s novels in relation to the other reveals
far more about the other’s stance towards whiteness than do the other’s responses
themselves, which are, with the exception of the critical remarks towards
Afrikanerdom from the well-educated black character in Rumours of Rain, Charlie,
Mofokeng, basically absent. This is despite the fact that the othering of the black
characters in these two South-African works is comparable to that found in the novels
set in the Dominican Republic and United States, in which blacks are frequently
depicted in terms of their physical and psychological/behavioural makeup, these two
aspects often coalescing in the formation of stereotypes. In Gordimer’s and Brink’s
novels, the white male characters envisage themselves encircled by darkness, which is
literally and figuratively creeping into their personal lives, which are used as a
leitmotif for the crumbling apartheid state. This crumbling state is also depicted in
these novels through the mayhem, violence and moral decay in the country’s black
communities. In Ways of Dying, on the other hand, the black characters are shown to
respond to the institutionalized racism of the apartheid state through concrete as well
as purely symbolic acts of resistance.
In the novels located in the Dominican Republic and the United States, the other
responds in an expected way to the dominant group’s racism, playing into its
oppressive rhetoric, which, after being internalised, ends up playing itself out within
the other’s own community in the form of intra-racial racism. The simple fact that
Díaz, Vargas Llosa and Vázquez Montalbán’s novels, unlike those set in South
Africa, have important characters that are themselves other does not, however, explain
why the other in the Dominican and American contexts is shown to be complicit in
210
his or her own subjugation. Rather, it is the different natures of the power structures
of the trujillato, apartheid and American societies that differentiate the other’s
response. Under apartheid, the verticality of power relations, which were wrought
across strict racial lines, eliminated the possibility of blacks being able to perform
whiteness in any credible sense or with any tangible results, and turned the other’s
voice outwards, against whiteness. Under the trujillato, on the other hand, the
obliquity of power relations led to a sliding scale in which the majority of the
population believed that it was possible to tip itself towards whiteness, which did and
still does hold the critical mass of power and prestige.
211
Conclusion
The novels studied in this thesis provide a starting point for understanding the
relationship between race and power in the postcolonial world. In them, the authors
reveal trujillato and apartheid embodiments of power, which have an effect on and
bolster the legacy of colonisation. The racist discourse of these regimes established a
racialised power hierarchy in which the whiter a person’s skin colour and the more
Caucasoid he or she was, the greater the amount of privilege the state and society
officially (legislatively) and unofficially (socially) conferred on him or her. The
obvious socio-economic privilege of whiteness made people aware of who held power
and bound the individual’s self-worth equally to race (physical appearance) and social
status (occupation and wealth, primarily). This notion of self-worth explains the
obsession the dominant characters in the books have with corporeal boundaries. The
bemusing case of the white protagonist Mehring othering another white character in
racial terms in The Conservationist is exemplary of how this racialised hierarchy is
principally about exercising and maintaining power.
Although Junot Díaz and Zakes Mda are generationally different from the other
authors, their novels largely have the same rhetorical objective, which is to highlight
and interrogate forms of oppression, including racism. Both Junot Díaz and Zakes
Mda subvert stereotypical representations of the other and this is because of their
‘insider’ status as others. Indeed, as black men, Díaz and Mda would both
undoubtedly have viewed and experienced racism (and the internalised and intraracial kinds) first-hand, making them keenly aware of the damaging effects of racial
discrimination and compelling them to parody racial stereotypes as a way of reacting
against it.
While ethnic groups strive for an ‘eternal essence’ (Buden and Nowotny, 2009, pp.
198–199) and unchanging boundaries, boundaries are ultimately susceptible to change
because there is nothing uniform to sustain them. When the ideal of uniformity is
212
encroached upon, boundaries move, as shown by Trujillo’s reconfiguring of his and
his nation’s identity. Though social boundaries are far stricter in the South-African
context, we still see fissures there in the white–black master–servant relationship,
which is underpinned by the supposedly superior expertise of whites, their ownership
of the land and the racist laws that favour them. The unease of Mehring in The
Conservationist towards the potential for his black farmworkers to run his farm in his
absence is one instance of such a fissure.
Because of the racial similarities between Dominicans and Haitians, the trujillato had
to ‘imagine’ differences in order to impose its rule over the multicultural border
region, which functioned as an appendage of Haiti. The trujillato repudiated all that
united Haitians and Dominicans, adopting a policy of whitening, which included
white immigration, anti-Haitian rhetoric, the massacre of Haitian civilians and
workers along the border and the segregation of Haitian workers within the country in
work compounds. In this sense, the Dominican Republic under the trujillato and
South Africa under apartheid parallel each other with their dependence on black
labour and their ghettoisation of black workers.
In the novels, we see a two-pronged approach to racial oppression on the part of the
Trujillo and apartheid regimes: physical segregation and myths (racist discourse) to
bolster white supremacy. One such myth includes blacks being impossible to civilise.
The dominant group counteracts the black threat to its power by painting a frightening
picture of proven (Angolan and Haitian) and potential (South Africa and the
Dominican border) black rule. Those in power depict blacks as sadistic psychopaths,
which causes disgust and fear amongst the dominant group and creates a sense of
moral superiority. These feelings warrant the other’s confinement and separation by
the dominant group. The frequency of representations of blacks as criminals is
therefore an expected theme in all the novels.
The authors use grotesque and carnivalesque literary techniques in stereotypes to
depict how the dominant group constructs blackness as deviant. These literary
techniques help create an aversion in the reader towards the appearance of blackness
and diminish its status in society. Such literary techniques are used in stereotypes that
instil race into the subject and aid institutionalised racism by feeding into the national
213
racial
bias.
The
stereotype
pairs
physical
characteristics
and
psychological/behavioural ones, thereby endeavouring to achieve fixity (which is
always undone because all boundaries are inherently unstable). Via this fixity, the
novelists indicate the correlation between subordination and race, with the other’s
deviance vindicating his or her role in lower-order jobs and as a ‘bounded’ and
powerless member of society. The stereotype from the slave-owning era that blacks
were economically subordinate because they were lazy reinforced the idea that
ascension was based on race.
Blacks are not only criminal and violent; they are also rapacious and animal-like,
characteristics that contribute to making them a threat to the nation’s sovereignty and
stability (because the other has no ‘human’ mind, which ties in with the other’s
purported antisocial nature). In Rumours of Rain, Mynhardt imagines his mother’s
farm will be swamped, with the character setting up a morally oppositional
relationship between black and white and order and chaos in this way. In the novels
set in the Dominican Republic, the depictions of Haitians as a hydra establish this
moral opposition and ultimately provide a pretext for the massacre of Haitians along
the Dominican-Haitian border.
Casting blacks as animals brings consolation to the dominant characters because it
convinces them that they are not dealing with a human threat. By depicting blacks as
‘locusts’ and ‘germs’, as Mynhardt does, the dominant group explains its inability to
control the other’s seemingly uncontrollable presence, as well as providing a means to
rationalise the other’s poverty. Animals also provide justification for the control and
oppression of the other because of humans’ historical domestication of them. Indeed,
in this way, the dominant group can think of blacks as lowly beings and even refer to
them as animal-like, as the apartheid leader Hendrik Verwoerd did in real life.
Rapacious and violent black sexuality is another symbol of the usurpation of national
space, with the white female body a metaphor for the (white) nation and her
penetration by the black male representing its destruction. The black body, depicted as
gangrene or a plague in La fiesta del chivo, threatens the marrow (patrimony and
economy) of the nation, with the dominant group viewing black skin as a mark of
physical sickness, which, itself, is seen by the dominant group as indicative of a ‘sick’
214
psyche. The supposedly violent nature of the other and its threat to the nation makes
the dominant group disguise aggression as self-defence in the face of the maddening
potential of the loss of power or indeed the actual loss of it, illustrated in the novels
historically by the independence of Angola and Haiti and the Haitian occupation of
the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.
Because the dominant group defines the embodiments of power, the other comes to
see him- or herself in these terms. Blacks in apartheid South Africa cannot credibly
achieve whiteness because of the stark physical differences between blacks and
whites, and strict racist legislation. Consequently, the black South-African response in
the novels to white racism and oppression is hardened and more politicised. Blacks
see whiteness as foreign and as something to be removed from the national space.
These views are reflected through white fears in which white characters claim blacks
want them driven from the land and expelled from the country. In Ways of Dying,
Mda undoes the view of both groups that their status (and indeed existence) is
mutually exclusive by revealing how, towards the end of white rule, the other was
confronted with ‘unprecedented diversity’ (Barnard, 2007, p. 151); that is, the
possibility of being something other than poor and menial while being black.
In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, the other considers blackness to be
foreign (Haitian), and this helps exclude it from the national space. The Dominican
other tends not to question whiteness because of the pressure to conform to it in
Dominican society, where it has become normative. Consequently, in the novels set in
the Dominican Republic, we see a love–hate relationship with whiteness or
ambivalence towards it. This ambivalence stems from the other’s difficulty in
approximating whiteness despite the expectation to do so, with the fickle commentary
of Voltaire in Galíndez regarding both whites and blacks typical of this phenomenon.
The attainment of self-esteem and mental stability is challenging for the other living
under both regimes, though I would suggest it was somewhat ‘easier’ in apartheid
South Africa after the emergence of groups such as Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness
Movement, which made blacks aware of the psychological war the apartheid regime
was waging against them.
215
The racism of the dominant group and the internalised racism it engenders in the other
results in the other attempting to establish a positive identity by practicing intra-racial
racism (with mimicry one of its forms). This involves the other distancing him- or
herself from otherness by competing with and sometimes ‘raging’ against fellow
others, with psychic trauma, violence and self-destructive behaviour all evidenced as
a result in the novels, though more in those set in a Dominican context. Where
achieving whiteness physically is impossible for the other, sex and sport are shown in
La fiesta del chivo and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to be ways for him or
her to win the respect of the dominant group. However, by responding in such ways, I
would argue that the other only confirms white stereotypes of blacks.
The examination of representations of the other in The Conservationist, Rumours of
Rain, Ways of Dying, La fiesta del chivo, Galíndez and The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao reveals modes of deviance that are common across the novels and hence
across different (real and fictional) cultural and historical contexts. The universality of
these modes of deviance provides a framework for writers and scholars to broadly
understand how people’s feelings, preferences and views towards their own and
others’ ‘race’ are not just the result of natural biases, but are deliberate chauvinisms
devised by dominant groups to exclude and exploit designated groups of people for
the sake of maintaining power.
216
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