Wonder and Exile in the New World. Alex Nava
of them to be sold in the slave markets of Seville. In his letter on his first journey, he assures the Sovereigns that he will procure as much gold and spices as they desire—something which at this point he could not deliver—and also as many slaves as possible: “I will also bring them as much aloes as they ask and as many slaves, who will be taken from the idolaters” (C, 122). While the Sovereigns initially approved the sale of Columbus’s slaves, they soon withdrew their consent pending a study by a commission of theologians and legal experts on the ethical and legal implications.
Columbus’s version of mysticism, thus, resembles fantasy more than Christian mysticism. His confessions of faith echo mystical themes and desires, but they are often profane and idolatrous perversions of mysticism. Columbus substitutes fantasy for mysticism the way he had substituted native bodies for gold and hoped that no one would be the wiser for it. Instead of mysticism, the fantasies of Columbus capture with precision the meaning and aim of idolatry, the ignoble consecration of profane images and desires. In fantasy, as in idolatry, the human gaze settles in “arrested, fixated forms of representation” and, thus, proscribes ahead of time the discovery of something different (Bhabha).11 Columbus perfectly embodies this kind of look, ego-centered, narcissistic, self-important. He would not discover the Americans any more than he would discover God for one obvious reason: his perception of both was frozen and fixed, already determined by what he expected and anticipated to find. He would never capture the truth of native lives and cultures because his vision was blocked by a cataract that produced tunnel vision. He would see only what the mirror reflected back to him, his own image and the projection of his own desires, wants, and beliefs.
It is also true, however, that the desires of Columbus cannot always be reduced to base motives. There are sublime and transcendent emotions swimming in his soul that fuel his relentless drive for exploring the unknown. Even when he doesn’t explicitly name these desires, it seems clear that he wants to play the part of the biblical patriarchs and become the new Adam or Abraham of his age (to give names to creation when it is still fresh and young like Adam; to migrate from the known to the unknown in search of promised lands like Abraham). In this regard, his journeys are not only into undiscovered regions of the world but back in time, to the place and time of human origins when Adam and Eve wandered the earth. Recall that in his third voyage, Columbus claims to have come upon the end of the East, where Paradise can be found: “For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God’s leave. . . . It lies at the summit of what I have described as the stalk of a pear, and that by gradually approaching it one begins, while still at a great distance, to climb towards it” (C, 221). Columbus craves contact with the place of human origins, the womb of the earth, the sacred place where God dwells. His mind is filled with an erotic and religious longing for something that always escaped him, “for the kingdom or the paradise or the Jerusalem that he could not reach.”12 Like a troubadour who can never possess his beloved except in his dreams and fantasies, the desires of Columbus are always unrequited and unfulfilled. In this sense, his capacity for wonder is a manifestation of what he does not possess, of the undefined and elusive goal for which he is passionately searching. And, for Greenblatt, insofar as this dimension of wonder in Columbus carries with it the sense of absence and lack, it continues the medieval sense “that wonder and temporal possession are mutually exclusive.”13
We know well, however, how Columbus eventually betrays this intuition and conflates wonder and temporal possession. He could not be a troubadour, or even less a Christian mystic, if only because he does not respect the distance and inaccessibility of the other. If Columbus fails the mystical heritage, it is in his devotion to divine immanence without transcendence, to aesthetics without ethics, and, ultimately, to his love for idols. Wonder and temporal possession go hand in hand for Columbus because he knows only a god that he can name, control, possess, and make his own. In place of YHWH, the golden calf has assumed its throne in the life of Columbus, and it is in his honor, not for God, nor for the natives of the New World, that he would devote himself. In this desire for a tangible, material deity, entirely present and determinate, Columbus would seemingly take no notice of a fundamental dimension of mystical thought, namely, divine absence and, thereby, the need for dispossession and emptiness in the life of one seeking to mirror this divine emptiness. Columbus couldn’t appreciate the meaning of divine emptiness or nothingness among Pseudo-Dionysius, John the Scot Eriugena, or Eckhart because he was so eager for fullness, for what would fill the emptiness of his heart and pockets.
If we are to attribute any mystical or Adamic qualities to Columbus, therefore, we know that these also include the great catastrophic sin of Adam as well. Columbus brought original sin from the Old World like a plague that would infect everything and everyone. True to his biblical ancestor, Columbus’s descendants would suffer long and hard for his inability to resist taking and eating the fruits of paradise, fruits that included human bodies alongside apples and such. The heritage of this serpentine American patriarch will always include this original and decisive sin that stained the American soul and cast a pall over this beautiful, troubled continent. In Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” I recognize the history of Columbus’s effect, the history of exile and slavery he left in his wake:
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.14
Billie Holiday sounds out an elegy on behalf of all the strange fruit of the Americas that has been violently plucked from its branches, never allowed to ripen. These American trees stained with blood share the malediction and curse brought on by Adam’s primal deed and that of Columbus. The result has been a long history of people hanging from trees, crucified peoples.
Long before Billie Holiday’s lament for crucified peoples, however, other American voices cried out in favor of the dispossessed.15 The second route of wonder that I want to map in this chapter shows us how wonder can be a force that explodes ethnocentric, European assumptions of superiority and that can reveal to us a glimpse not only of diversity and pluralism, but of infinity, the iconic face of the other. I am suggesting that an articulation of the wondrous and marvelous, as readily as they can become assimilated and exoticized by the colonial enterprise, can also be thought of as fragments of infinity, as metaphors of the unknown and unknowable, as gestures of silence that leave us stunned, uncertain, tolerant. In the figures we will now be analyzing, wonder is chastened by a sense of exile. These remarkable figures recognize the marvelous and alien nature of native cultures as also residing deep within the depths of their own soul. As Stephen Greenblatt wrote, “The movement is from radical alterity—you have nothing in common with the other—to a self-recognition that is also a mode of self-estrangement: you are the other and the other is you.”16 We are the aliens and exiles.
Voices of the Dispossessed: Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas
In Marvelous Possessions, Sir John Mandeville appears as Stephen Greenblatt’s great hero, a “knight of dispossession” he calls him. Although I want to focus on figures of the New World, beginning with Mandeville and Greenblatt’s approach on “wonder” will help us better understand the contributions of Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas.
Up to this point in my study, I have been suggesting that the evocation of wonder in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was a common strategy by which something new and unfamiliar, alien and foreign, or even terrible and hateful was assessed. We have already explored the way that wonder can operate in the service of possession and colonialism, but too little has been said thus far about the liberating impulse of wonder. The enriching possibility of wonder lies, for Greenblatt, in its indeterminacy. It is a metaphor of the absence rather than fullness of knowledge, the partiality and deficiency of human reason more than its wholeness.
It is not enough to call to mind the intellectual indeterminacy of wonder, however. There is also something sensual about wonder, something that strikes at the core of the human person, that thumps the chest and attacks the heart. No wonder, then, that Aquinas’s famous teacher Albert the Great described wonder with affective metaphors. It is “a constriction and suspension of