Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 72

that had to be cleaned up. “I don’t need training in
chemistry to demonstrate to you the degree of corruption in the air taken from these places: I would dare to
guarantee that it is eight degrees worse in its origin (of
the vital air we breathe) than that found at the Claras
Plaza, for example: It is [I believe] stank air that never
sees the light; these places are never treated with incense, or sprinkled with vinegar, nor are they ever
wiped with an antiseptic.”12
Notwithstanding, the principal threat represented by
the slave system was not the loss of slaves to illness,
or the possibility of them being contagious, or mistreating their owners. The greatest threat was that they
rebel and kill off the criollos as they did in Haiti.
Given this perspective, the slave system created a series of measures that made it possible for it to survive
till the final abolition of slavery.
In the meanwhile, the writers took care to criticize anything they saw as harmful to them. As Moreno Fraginals put it, bad habits or vice “started in the cradle:
they started with the black milk nurse who raised the
white children.”13 Later, they came from the custom
of repeatedly seeing slaves mistreated, and later yet,
from the sexual experience the owner’s son had with
a slave, which often resulted in cohabitation, adultery
and incest. For this reason, if slavery was an ill, it was
primarily due to the perverse effects it had on the
white population. As a result, the mulatto woman represented the epitome of sin, the embodiment of the
transgression, the illicit product of the union of an
owner and slave woman.
Could any other figure so graphically represent the
evil of racial and cultural mixing on the island? Félix
Tanco Bosmeniel summarized in his letter to his
friend Del Monte:
“I would also like it if in part 5 you would say something about the influence of slaves not only on the customs, wealth, and intellectual abilities of whites—according to the Compte plan—but on language. As you
know, an infinity of inhuman and barbarous words and
expressions that are commonly used in our society—
by both men and women who are called refined and
educatred—have been introduced into it. The same influence can be seen in our dances and music. Who
can’t see the movements our young men and women
make when they dance contradanzas and waltzes, in

imitation of what the blacks do in their cabildos? Who
doesn’t know that the dips performed by dancers in
our country are an echo of tango drums? It is all African, and the innocents and poor blacks unwittingly,
and with no other example but what they learn in their
intimate relationship with us, take revenge for our
cruel treatment by infusing us with innocent customs
and manners whose origin is with the savages of Africa” (emphasis in the original).14
For Félix Tanco, as for Del Monte, Villaverde and
Betancourt, the closeness of the two races brought
about the degeneration of white, criollo culture, customs and vocabulary. Young people became African
“savages” and women lost their natural sensitivity to
mistreatment. This was about finding a way to survive
black “revenge,” avoiding moral and cultural reversion to a social state that whites saw as “barbarous,”
“savage” and “inhuman.” Thus, the slave system
wrought its own destruction. It was destined for destruction, if not by an African uprising, then through
the persistent, methodical and daily influence of
slaves who lived in their master’s cities and homes.
Even when they benefited from slavery, for the slavists, blacks represented an undesirable closeness, a
kind of abjection that contaminated them all by its
presence. It is important here to remember Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject as “an imaginary
strangeness or real threat.”15 In her book about Céline,
Kristeva used Freud’s psychoanalysis and Mary
Douglas’s ideas to illustrate the way in which these
phobias manifested themselves in the subject’s writing, behavior or orality. She takes her definition “symbolic society-system,” that is represented in the human
being and through is body from British anthropology.
For Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, there is a demarcation line that excludes subjective values, imposes interdictions, and totally constitutes the social
organism as a “symbolic system.”16 Anything outside
those limits that does not match up with the prohibitions this system assumes and imposes, would be rejected. Douglas explains this through the human
body’s waste, which is not a contaminant on its own.
Instead, its capacity to corrupt is proportionat RF