Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The juxtaposition of the physical labor of embroidering and forced childbearing is heightened by the disconnection and exploitation RoseGreen-Williams notes. However, Morejón’s use of the autobiographical voice in recounting the exploitation and the consequences point to the ways in which survival negotiated both objectification and agency. Here amid the exploitation is the female voice—recounting not only the violence and invisibility, but also the ways in which these power dynamics were subject to shifts, as exemplified by the seemingly powerful master’s death at the hands of another nobleman. What is also telling of the subject’s recounting is the juxtaposition of marginalization and voice—the exploited subject whose son is invisibilized is placed at the center of her story through the focus on her first-person narration of events. The foregrounding of her firsthand account of her enslavement and survival is taken one step further following His Worship’s death, when the female subject again engages in another action in her quest for freedom: her declaration “Anduve” (I walked), which when placed alongside the other short verses—“Me rebelé / Me sublevé / Trabajé mucho más / Me fui al monte / bajé de la Sierra” (I rebelled / I rose up / I worked on and on / I left for the Hills / I came down from the Sierra”) (200, 202)—are, as Gutiérrez notes, a part of “a continuous motion that purposely emphasizes the slave woman’s feelings of rebellion, coupled with an indomitable perseverance that persists throughout the four centuries covered in the poem” (213).

Similarly, in Daughters of the Stone, Fela’s relationship with Don Tomás exemplifies the enslaved black woman’s vulnerability to the objectification, exploitation, and sexual violence of the slave master and the complex, myriad strategies she utilizes for survival and resistance. Here, Fela’s counter to the imposition of Don Tomás’s desire is an assertion of agency. She claims control of her body, placing the sexual exploitation that has been historically part of the colonial experience within the context of the strategies used by Afro-descendants, including the continuation of religious beliefs through cultural memory. As she emphatically declares: “Maybe the goddess was guiding her down this path. . . . At least this time she would have as much to do with what was about to happen as he did. She would not be taken. This time it would be her choice. . . . Fela felt nothing of what was occurring with her body. . . . She sent her senses beyond this place. . . . She would join Imo and the others. Oshun would be appeased and the ancestors would welcome her” (46–47, 49).

Fela’s determination to wrest control of her body from Don Tomás—to give the sexual act a meaning outside of victimization and exploitation, to serve as a means to create a child who would be given a purpose and name—connect her with history and memory in a way that contrasts with the relationship between the enslaved black woman and His Worship previously highlighted in Morejón’s text. Her decision

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