Counterfiction of Time in Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, El Gran Putas
Authors
The relationship between the black body and the disruptive threat of death has historically and traditionally promoted a performative, visual, ontological, phenomenological, and psychological reading of blackness. In Venus in Two Acts, the African American feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman asks: “How does one recover lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death […] that claimed them as property […] that stripped them of human features?” (Hartman 2008, 8; 12). Hence, I wonder, how in the novel Changó, El gran putas (1983), the Afro-Hispanic Caribbean writer Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920–2004) “rewrites the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as an exercise of freedom?” (Hartman 2008, 8). How do the stories reconcile the presence, past, and futurity of those who were brought against their own will through processes of colonization? In this essay, I delve into how historical fiction in Changó incorporates eco-philosophies of African origin, led by spirits, Orishas, and the enslaved, displacing what history means and how it produces symbols, both of catastrophe and of spiritual, epistemic, and cultural reinvention. I argue that this novel offers radical possibilities for ethics /aesthetics that critically question the prevailing paradigms of the transatlantic slave trade, drawing on the underwater stories of spirits and Orishas from Bantu and Yoruba eco-philosophical rationalities. I argue that such selected literary work emerges as a matrix of spiritual and ecological relationships that regulates the syntax of the past /present from the imaginative rehabilitation of a traumatic experience (the voyage) to produce what I term ‘counterfiction of time,’ that is, a historical counternarrative of the ocean.
