Wonder and Exile in the New World. Alex Nava
Here Columbus is as close as his shadow to this kind of rapture, to the aesthetical intuitions of the mystics. His invocation of the language of inexpressibility is a key feature of his portrait of wonder, and it appears with regularity when he is at pains to articulate his discoveries. Columbus locates wonder in the gaps and silences of language, beyond the boundaries of what can be said in clear and certain terms. And yet, since the naming of islands is fundamental to taking possession, Columbus—in his guise as Cristóbal Colón—wants to name what is unnamable and, thus, betrays his initial intuition about Hispaniola, that it is wonder that cannot be possessed; or else, is it his other identity that he betrays, his beneficent shadow as the Almirans? Regardless, it is clear that Columbus is a knight of possession and conquest: “Generally it was my wish to pass no island without taking possession of it” (C, 60). With this frank admission, we realize that Columbus’s approach to the beauty of Hispaniola is nothing like reverence—demanding, it seems to me, respect and awe for the integrity of the other—but, instead, voracity, an insatiable desire to consume and own.
His betrayals have many different facets, but consider one incident that Columbus notes on his fourth voyage (1502–4). He writes of an encounter with magicians on an island he calls Cariay. He expects to find confirmation of the people Pope Pius II wrote of in his Cosmographia (a description of the Far East). Columbus writes, “In Cariay and in the adjoining districts there are great and very terrifying magicians who would have done anything to prevent my remaining there an hour. On my arrival they sent me two magnificently attired girls, the elder of whom could not have been more than eleven and the other seven. Both were so shameless that they might have been whores, and had magic powders concealed about them. On their arrival I ordered that they should be given some of our trinkets and sent them back to land immediately” (C, 297). The wonder that Columbus describes here is mixed up with terror and suddenly his tone is noticeably different from when speaking of natural beauty. When speaking of the natives, Columbus begins to tremble and expresses apprehension and foreboding, fear and antipathy. In his perception, these native women are nothing but demons in female form, succubi.
It’s almost as if he had landed on the same island that is the setting for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a parallel noted by the classic work of José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (1900).10 Remember that this great work of Shakespeare is situated on a mysterious island in the West. Prospero and his daughter find themselves exiled there along with a creature of the earth, Caliban, and his mother, the Algerian witch Sycorax (Caliban is a near anagram of the term cannibal, and in the New World related to the term “Carib”). In this distant and alien world, the characters are at pains to anchor themselves to solid footing. The language of wonder captures the depths of their disorientation in this strange world (the name of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, suggests the wondrous atmosphere of the island and derives from the Latin mirari, to wonder, admire, or revere). Strange things happen here, none stranger than the occult powers of Prospero, a great and powerful magician who has nature, even death, at his command: “I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war . . . graves at my command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth by my so potent art” (Tempest, 5.1.41–50). The location of this island somewhere beyond the boundaries of the known world seems to have opened doors to other dimensions of reality and to have invited in the powers of sorcery and wizardry. The uncanny is abundant in this new world.
With Prospero’s potent art in mind, we know that the wonders of this island are wild to an extreme, making for a bewildering experience, engendering fear and anxiety. Caliban is the prime instance and embodiment of these fearful wonders. He represents the wonder of the New World, but in a grotesque form: misshapen, bizarre, strange, ugly, unpleasant, and, above all, monstrous. Everything about this island resembles this grotesque creature and it causes some to want nothing more than to flee. Gonzalo’s response is a case in point: “All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful country” (5.1.104–6).
Like Gonzalo in The Tempest, Columbus finds himself in a strange land, and the wonder in his eyes at the sight of these “magicians” is an expression of fear and anxiety. Columbus would not tolerate native magic anymore than Prospero would tolerate an independent and free Caliban. “Magic” is the name of the demonic for Columbus. He attributes “magic” to what he does not understand, to native attire or dress, native ceremonies or rituals. By describing natives in these terms, he transforms the other into a grotesque form, and it becomes a dangerous threat in the process. In the mind of Columbus, there is plenty reason to fear the “magic” of the natives: it is demonic and evil, strange and dreadful. And the best way to handle this threat is to subdue it by violence, to enslave it. Columbus would propose doing to the “Caribs” what Prospero does to Caliban: force him into servitude.
In Columbus’s description of “magic” and “whores,” furthermore, he links together images of idolatry, sorcery, and sexual deviance in ways that echo throughout the ages. This association between idolatry and sexual danger has an ancient history. For centuries Western perceptions of the East included descriptions of sexual license and carnality (if not earlier, beginning with biblical perceptions of the Canaanites and Philistines). What is surprising, at least in this instance, is that Columbus lets them be, does not abduct them. In most other cases, Columbus would make up the absence of gold by abducting natives for slaves. In one instance, a lieutenant of Columbus, Michele de Cuneo, tells of a native woman that was given to him by Columbus: “While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling. . . . But . . . I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly. . . . Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores” (C, 139).
Whores and objects to be used and given away: these two passages are representative of how Columbus perceived native peoples in general. When Columbus expresses fear, it is most commonly negotiated away by his acts of conquest and possession. The experience of wonder at this point in Columbus is loaded with fear and ignorance, and, like an animal that is afraid and threatened, becomes hostile and violent in response. If Aristotle sought to remove wonder by philosophizing, Columbus responds to wonder by a desire to colonize it. There is a combustible mixture of fear and ignorance throughout all of this, and if we have learned anything from the Conquest, we should know that the result is often explosive violence.
What makes the case of Columbus particularly interesting, if not sacrilegious, is his assurance that God is behind it all, that God is, in fact, the wind beneath his sails, sustaining and succoring him, even speaking directly to him when the tsunamis of his life threaten to unmake him. When failure and disaster seem to gain the upper hand, he fights off disillusionment with the resilient and stubborn conviction that he is acting under the mandate of God and Spain in support of the Reconquista of Andalusia and of the crusade to reconquer the Holy Land. He quickly turns to the divine for such consolations, as in this case when he speaks of Mary’s presence in his life: “When I was much afflicted and on the point of abandoning everything and escaping, Our Lady miraculously consoled me and said to me, ‘take courage, and do not faint nor fear, for I will provide in all things’” (C, 293). And in another instance, on the verge of despair, he falls asleep and hears “a compassionate voice saying, ‘O fool, slow to believe and serve thy God, the God of all! What more did he do for Moses or David his servant than he has done for thee? . . . He gave thee the Indies’” (C, 122).
The religious experiences of Columbus are a strange rendition of mystical themes. Traditional mystical discourse of detachment and abnegation are altogether absent. Instead, mysticism here is a tool of conquest and a confirmation of possession—“He gave thee the Indies!” Instead of demolishing and dispossessing the idols of thought and desire, Columbus’s mystical revelations seem to act as the servants of covetousness and appetite. Of course, his cupidity is never more obvious than in his devotion to gold, but when Columbus’s dearest idol could not be found, he would devise an alternative plan, one that would substitute Indian bodies for missing gold. In