Be it a crisis, a loss of self, any form of disturbance, unhappiness, estrangement, an odd feeling of humiliation, of being nothing other than a commodity, be it a condition, be it a state of being, from the 19th century to the present the unhomely has been a focus of reflective thought. It was alienation for Marx and the not-at-home, -- or the fundamental character of our being in the world, -- for Heidegger. Das Unheimliche was the title of Freud’s 1919 essay, which was translated into English as The Uncanny. For Homi Bhabha, das Unheimliche is precisely the unhomely, which he considers to be a paradigmatic colonial and post colonial condition.
In the present study, I will be analyzing some historical specificities of Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s life, as well as her 1841 abolitionist novel, Sab, in light of this existential and reflective experience, the unhomely. The point of departure is alienation or estrangement; and the point of arrival will be the unhomely as the colonial and post colonial condition that Bhabha passes under review. The reasons for this attempt to ultimately link a 19th century Cuban (or Spanish) writer to a theorist such as Bhabha have everything to do with Avellaneda’s immediate cultural, historical, and personal circumstances that either contain or announce the four historical moments described by William Luis: slavery, post-slavery, the republic, and the Cuban revolutionary periods (3). I am using post in the sense of beyond, as mentioned by Bhabha; something that goes beyond, thus suggesting a boundary that, in turn, does not mark an ending, but rather a beginning, a presencing (Bhabha 1).
In Avellaneda’s case, what lay beyond the boundary was a post-slavery Cuba, independent from Spain. Independence and the abolition of slavery were in fact forthcoming throughout Avellaneda’s lifetime. William Luis considers anti-slavery works to be “[…] both a beginning regarding the four synchronic moments surrounding the specific circumstances in which the works were written and a continuum reflecting the conditions of slaves […]” (3-4). The socio-political realities of 19th century Cuba eventually led to a Cuba that shouted “¡Cuba Libre!” in 1868, abolished slavery in 1886, and gained independence from Spain in 1898 (25 years after Avellaneda’s death); and also to a Cuba that immediately turned around and gave its newly gained home to the United States. I propose that Avellaneda’s life and writings announced, if not uncannily foreshadowed, the circular trajectory of this dialectic: subjugation-emancipation-subjugation, slavery-post slavery-slavery.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Avellaneda (1814-1873) were contemporaries. Now it could very well be that they have nothing but those years in common. Avellaneda was the ultimate romantic. The reader can very well imagine her daintily wiping tears from her eyes with a lace handkerchief while writing letters to Cepeda, her lover. Avellaneda’s life and work were imbued with sentimentality, whereas Marx refused to join in the sentimental tears wept by romanticism (63). As a matter of fact, Marx urged his readers to refrain from shedding tears over the relationship of the worker and the landowner. This was not something to be analyzed in a romantic light, precisely what Avellaneda did in the novel Sab, from the very beginning.
Nonetheless, I consider it appropriate to begin with the notions of alienation (Entausserung) and estrangement (Entfremdung) as used by Marx, for these concepts clearly and definitely belong to the nineteenth century and can be applied, in their historical specificity, to Avellaneda’s life and the contents of her writings. Marx affirms that when the worker sinks to the level of a commodity he becomes the most wretched of commodities and begins to confront the product of his labor as something alien. Labor, in turn, appears “[…] as a loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation” (71). Consequently, the laborer denies himself, feels unhappy, coerced, and begins to mortify his body and torture his mind. “He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home” (74). His labor, however, defines him, but he denies that definition. Such is alienation. Such is the experience of the unhomely.
Chapter One of Avellaneda’s novel, Sab, opens with a quote from
Cañizares: “Who are you? / What is your homeland?” (27). Avellaneda
is obviously putting this question to her protagonist Sab, and Sab, in
turn, could very well be the one answering the question. “The
tyrannical influences /of my guiding star formed me/into a monster of such rare quality/that while I am of heroic lineage/in the
endowments of my soul,/I am also the scorn of the world” (Ibid).
This quote from Cañizares expresses a particular way of experiencing
the unhomely, a woeful complaint that Avellaneda places at the very
beginning of her novel, a bulwark of sorts.
The novel itself begins with a gaze. In the first paragraph the
reader can experience his own gaze, a handsome young man on
horseback in the picturesque countryside. The scene borrows from
the pastoral. Immediately after that, the gaze ceases to be an
outsider’s gaze only to turn inward, for in the second paragraph
Avellaneda describes the pleasure the rider takes in appraising the
landscape before him. But this incursion into the rider’s interiority is
only momentary. By the end of that same paragraph the gaze is once
again external. The reader’s gaze is flattered, the rider has blue eyes
and golden hair, a description that gives the author the opportunity
to mention in passing that this means he cannot possibly be from
here, here being the torrid zone. No, the brutal sun of the torrid
zone would never have allowed for such delicate white skin, such
white features.