As we explore the sympathies between wonder and mystical language in this study, and their affiliation with dispossession and exile, we would do well to follow the lead of Michel de Certeau. In his reading of mystical literature, he found the resemblances between mystics and travelers particularly intriguing, seeing mystics as travelers of the human soul, travelers of the unfathomable and unknown. Regardless of whether they would ever leave the confines of their homeland, Certeau considered mystical language to be stirred by nomadic and restless desires, infinite and insatiable, and filled with an imagination that carried them on journeys to remote lands. In entering territories without a map or chart, mystics were a lot like explorers of new worlds, only now the purpose was an impossible theological one, like seeing the face of God, or naming the unnamable. The language of wonder came to mystics as frequently as travelers because it was the precise word to name this journey into foreign territories, an experience that can be freeing and exhilarating, or else terrifying and dreadful. Capable of these wild extremes, the one who wonders resembles a heavenly body that has suddenly been loosed from its fixed orbit. No longer tied and constrained by the familiar, one is suddenly unfettered and emancipated, now free to imagine the unimaginable, to consider new possibilities, to live differently. How terrifying yet thrilling this can be—and terrifying not only to one’s own psyche, but to all the defenders of sameness, to those who draw uncompromising borders and warn against trespassing beyond what we already know and trust.
For this exact reason, wonder is the verbal equivalent of trespassing borders and surpassing limits, and always moving deeper and deeper into the dark. Wonder is a common word in the vocabulary of mystics and wanderers because they are navigating territory that is cloaked in darkness. The travel route of wonder is like entering the cloud of darkness and finding one’s way through it with the stick of a blind man, trusting it to lead you with instinct and intuition through unfamiliar regions of knowledge. In this way, the via negativa of the mystics—the deconstructive strategy of dispossession and detachment from concepts and worldly desires—prepares one for travel into the unknown, and this journey is always wondrous. The mystical journey takes the route of ignorance and dispossession in order to arrive at what you do not know, at where you are not (“You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. . . . You must go by the way of dispossession”). And wonder is a key indicator and marker of this journey.
The figures that I will be considering in this chapter—especially Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas—were such travelers and wanderers, courageous men who ventured deep into unknown lands and who became voices of the dispossessed in the New World. In some ways, they adopted the via negativa of the mystics—especially the demand for detachment—but their own version of this strategy resembles closer the desert experiences of the biblical prophets. Their via negativa summons the negations and denunciations of the biblical prophets because only this kind of explosive language is relevant to them in a history that knew so many trials and tribulations, so much distress and agony. Only this kind of language—hostile, dissenting, anguished—proved adequate to the negations and catastrophes that they witnessed in their age.
In both cases, moreover, surprising insights and realizations came to them through their long sojourns—particularly tolerance, even affection, for the great variety of cultures that they encountered in the New World. Their passionate advocacy for tolerance and compassion seems to have arisen from the calamities of their lives, as if they were able to suck the marrow out of the dry bones of their travails and learn something in the process. They would achieve a wisdom born of suffering, that rare quality that sees the world through the eyes of other peoples and cultures, especially through the eyes of the downtrodden and brokenhearted. The discovery of the New World was for them a discovery of painful truths and beauties, a discovery that enabled them to see the strangers of the Americas as brothers and sisters to themselves. And, more than that, it allowed them to recognize the strangeness of their own selves. Their discovery of the New World, thus, also included their own agonizing discovery of a new, inscrutable world deep within their own soul, a discovery that revealed to them how alien and wondrous their own being actually was. They would come to notice the shadow of exile as the dark, ghostly creature residing within their own soul and, subsequently, embrace it in the dark-skinned peoples of the New World.
In this sense, the experiences of wonder and exile are fundamental to the discoveries of Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas. They would not have become voices of the dispossessed if they did not see the foreignness and strangeness in their own histories and cultures. With their capacity to wonder at themselves, the alien nature of other cultures and peoples suddenly appeared to them far less threatening and dangerous.
While the focus on exile in the present study has a particular kinship with wonder, we should not overstate the resemblances and end up overlooking their singularities. If wonder interrupts our drive to comprehend and explain, exile disorients us with greater force and violence, casting us into the tides and maelstroms of history. In assessing the features of exile in the New World we are suddenly faced with realities that a strictly aesthetical approach to wonder is reluctant to acknowledge: the rupture of violence and colonialism in the New World. No consideration of wonder in the New World is worth our attention if the history of exile is left off the pages. There has been too much suffering and too many disasters in the history of the Americas for us to cover our faces from the historical record. As much as some portraits of wonder in the New World would try to elide and disregard exile, it is always there, haunting Latin American narratives like a disturbing, repressed memory buried within the unconscious. The tragic histories of Latin American cultures must be narrated if the patient desires the truth, if he is to face memories both menacing and unsettling, therapeutic and wondrous.
So in this passion for the truth, we must look carefully at the histories of displacement and uprooting in the New World: the slave trade, the genocide and abuse of native peoples, the gross inequalities. European possession of the Americas led to the brutal dislocation and resettlement of the Amerindians to where their labor would be needed, and it led, as Las Casas puts it, to a desert of exile.
Our attention, then, will be drawn by the “desertification” of new lands and the part played by wonder in all of this. This should remind us that wonder is not innocent and certainly not free of impurity. For many New World explorers and conquistadors, wonder was often invoked in the service of control and ownership; when wonder appeared on their lips, it furthered a strategy of possession in which the exotic realities of the New World were to be used and enjoyed for European advantage. The wonders and marvels of the New World became enticing objects to own—or else, signs and proof of their inferiority and barbarism.
In a way, the colonial powers in the New World failed to heed the mystical warnings about idolatry, namely, that the “God beyond God” dwells in silence and darkness, in the cloud of unknowing. Contact with the true God, as Simone Weil once suggested, is given to us by absence.1 The rush of European powers to “discover” the New World was a race in being present before anyone else (native excluding). By the act of presence—catching sight of the land by one’s vision, placing one’s foot and body on the land, by a legal record and pronouncement of ownership—Europeans would claim possession. The conquistadors worshipped a god entirely present, one that could be manipulated and controlled, one that would justify and legitimize the possession of the New World. As Las Casas would make clear, this was a god of their own making, an idol that would fill their empty coffers with gold and slaves.
In tracing the different routes of wonder, the title of Emmanuel Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity is suggestive for this study. In the New World, the theme of wonder is used, for one, as a lure and enticement to possession and totality, as it surely was for Columbus, and as a fragment of infinity for Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas. When seen through the eyes of the latter, it can be a valuable image of dispossession. This chapter will follow these different routes of wonder and see what it has to teach us about first encounters and the discovery of new things.
Columbus: Almirans, the One Who Wonders
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