These are the first days of August 1492. If we go down to the docks in the great Spanish port of Cádiz we are overwhelmed. . . . The throngs of people are unbearable, particularly in the damp summer heat, and worst of all are the tears, the wailing, the ritual prayers, all those noises and smells and sights of departures. This is the day, the hour, the place, of a leave-taking more grievous and painful than that of death itself, an exodus inscribed in all the sacred texts, anticipated and repeated. . . . Exile on Diaspora. And, during that summer, all roads led to the sea, to ports such as Cádiz, to the desperately overbooked ships, and they were filled with the sounds of exile, that mingling of the vernacular sorrow of the women and the children with the liturgical chanting of the men.39
If all roads led to the sea that summer, the sea also became the passageway to new worlds. In that year, the sea would carry sailors across the deep blue ocean and it would carry exile along with it. Exodus would be remembered, anticipated, and endlessly repeated in this unknown and strange world. And wonder, too: wonder would be endlessly repeated, in some ways honorable, in others, reprehensible. Soon enough, the storied splendors of the New World would attract a vast sea of explorers itching to know the remotest corners of the earth. They would be lured and charmed by the indefinite, half-attained, and unimaginable experience of sublimity that is the phenomenon of wonder, to paraphrase Herman Melville’s Ishmael. While this taste of sublimity would lead some to a modest and tolerant understanding of religions and cultures, in other cases, it would help create a new desert and wasteland.
In this regard, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would witness the different histories of wonder, the dispossession of knowledge alongside the dispossession of house and home. With a perceptive eye to the histories of both wonder and exile, Michel de Certeau spoke of the defilements of history that appeared on the mystical bodies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “They were leading lives of exile, hounded from their land by the defilements of history. Super flumina Babylonis: the theme of mourning, disconsolate despite the intoxication of new aspirations, was endlessly repeated.”40 Certeau has chronicled well this coexistence of exile with the intoxicating dreams of New Worlds in the early modern period. The conquest of the New World, wars and economic recessions, expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, outbreaks of famine and plague, the persecution of the “impure” of blood: all these events of the early modern period were visible stains on mystical lives according to Certeau. The theme of exile deepened in intensity in the period and came to disturb all assurances of meaning. The images of a lost paradise and an apocalyptic future—rampant in the age—made it clear that exile had forced its way into every dimension of time, beginnings and ends. There was no sanctuary or haven, past or future, that would be free of exile’s despotism. The desert of exile extended its reach into all territories of Europe and soon made its way, as we will see throughout the course of this study, across the great sea into the New World.
Following the mystical and prophetic sensibilities of Certeau, thus, I hope to explore New World poets and writers with a concentration on wonder and exile. If my focus is with poets and writers, it is because I see in them what Kierkegaard saw in Job: “In our time it is thought that genuine expressions of grief, the despairing language of passion, must be assigned to the poets, who then like attorneys in a lower court plead the cause of the suffering before the tribunal of human compassion. . . . Speak up, then, unforgettable Job, repeat everything you said.”41
In my view, it is mystics, prophets, and poets who best capture the wonders and beauties, the tears and long walks that make up the history of the Americas. It is their language of passion and imagination that enables us to be like José Arcadio Buendía and navigate across unknown seas and visit uncharted territories. And it is their language that is witness to the desert of history, the desert of exiles and migrants, the desert of privation and sorrow.
WANDERERS AND WONDERERS IN THE NEW WORLD
Voices of the Dispossessed
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession. . . .
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
—T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
The travel narrative is a text of observation haunted by its Other, the imaginary.
—Michel de Certeau, “Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil”
The European encounter with the New World remains one of the decisive events of modern world history. The shocking discovery of this continent would soon make only death the final undiscovered country. And neither Europe nor this uncharted world would remain the same. The introduction of this territory into European consciousness would lead to a dramatic expansion and revolution in geographical, cultural, and theological worldviews. For Western observers, this event would come to represent the quintessential encounter with otherness. Travel to this newly discovered territory was like sailing away into unreality, into unimaginable and uncharted regions, into a world where truth was mixed with fantasy, and dreams with reality. And when the chroniclers of this strange new world sat down to articulate their experiences, facts and fictions were difficult to disentangle. Indeed, the accounts are a curious blend of the two, which is why so many writers have seen the colonial-era chronicles as the first attempts at magical realism. The explorers’ accounts give us fantastic and wild portraits of the New World, as if fantasy and dreams alone had been adequate in preparing the West for an event of this sort. In direct proportion to the degree and extent of the mystery, the accounts multiply the number of adjectives and metaphors to describe the wonder of these lands. As the mystery deepens, the language of wonder escalates and thickens. In finding ourselves on the shores of the New World, then, and in meditating on the significance and import of these historical events, we must notice this language of astonishment and amazement on the tongues of the first Europeans. It will be an important clue for us in assessing this encounter with radical otherness.
This chapter will consider the language of wonder in the New World and its relationship with wandering and exile. As suggested earlier, my concern in this book is with languages of dispossession: wonder as dispossession in the order of knowledge and exile, forced or voluntary, in history or location. Though they do not look alike, wonder and exile share this fate of dispossession and displacement, when both mind and body are threatened by an encounter with unknown and uncertain phenomena, when familiar and stable truths are suddenly interrupted by an appearance of something so peculiar and new that it introduces doubt and equivocation, when all confidences are quickly undone. When we speak of wonder, we are trying to name something that happens prior to or beyond the boundaries of knowledge, and this experience is fraught with the same baffling, disorienting, and bewildering feelings that accompany an exile in his new home away from home. In both cases, the homeland of belonging and truth is badly desired, but forever lost. No wonder, then, that wonder—like moments of awe or stupefaction—shares with exile the experience of loss: the loss of words, loss of clear and familiar truths, loss of absolute certainties. Wonder is closer to absence than presence, dispossession than possession. Wonder