Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 70

The Africans of each crew of slaves “adulterated our
language in different ways”; the variants they produce
“are not very uniform.”3 How, then, could priests explain Christian doctrine to blacks by using a manual
that “adapted its self to the ability of blacks…for their
benefit, that of the priests in charge of their instruction, and their owners,” as its title stated.4 How could
Creto Gangá reproduce a language that no longer existed?
Súarez y Romero owned the Surinam sugar estate, for
which reason he must have been quite familiar with
the Explicación, and had a pretty clear idea of what
blacks spoke. In his novel, the protagonist, Francisco,
speaks perfect Spanish, despite being an African-born
black, and has not even a trace of bozal language. We
should assume that this linguistic correction was in
keeping with the author’s literate view about this correction in literature, and how slaves and their descendants “should” speak.
Nevertheless, the issue of how to represent black
speech in literature was a prominent issue in the
chronicles of José Victoriano Betancourt and one of
the most important of Cuban novels, Cecilia Valdés
(1882), by Cirilo Villaverde. Even Siboneyism, a native movement that started in the second half of the
nineteenth century and became popular, overly emphasized this obsession with language. Pichardo y
Tapia collected uncountable numbers of words of indigenous origin that José Fornaris and Joaquín Luaces
later used in their poems. According to these poets,
and to Pichardo himself, one had to go back to original
writing and pronunciation of the Siboney Indians and
correct the spelling changes introduced by Spaniards.
The better these poets represented those sounds, the
more their poems gave a better idea of what ancient
Cuban culture had been like. Pichardo said that the
Spanish colonizers had imposed their spelling and disfigured indigenous words, corrupting them to the degree that no speaker of the original culture could recognize them (“not even their mother would know
the