Commentary

1. One of the more puzzling moments in the trial is the discussion of an oil portrait that bears Aponte’s name. READ MORE

   In the interrogation, Chacón is asked “how he can be so sure that it is a portrait of Aponte since there are no similarities between the copy and the original that would justify the designation.” Chacón responds that Aponte told him so, and that he had explained that “he placed the portrait in the book so that it would be known the day of the revolution that he was an exemplary person and that it was foreseen that he would be King” (114). Now, if these pictures indeed represented Aponte, why did they not bear any resemblance to him? One possibility is that Aponte simply added his name to someone else’s portrait, but that does not fit very well with the discussion of the picture during the interrogation of Aponte himself: “The numbers twenty five and twenty six: In these the author of the book appears in a portrait, with the laurel of fidelity on his chest[,] the palm tree of victory[, and] apparently a ruler—to the left we can see the carpenter’s bench where the book in question was produced…and infancy is represented by the figure of a child tied to a column and on the opposite page there is the face of an elderly person which means that the memory of infancy attains to old age, there are also on the bench an ink pot, a ruler, and pots of paint. (138)” Aponte denies Chacón’s claim that the portrait showed him as a king after the revolution, pointing out the presence of rather unregal attributes such as a carpenter’s bench and pots of paint (173). What are we to make of a portrait that bears no similarity to the subject and that is variously interpreted as a portrait of a king and of a carpenter? Chacón’s claim that it reflects Aponte’s royal ambitions could be explained as an attempt to divert the blame from himself to Aponte. After all, in the end all conspirators blame each other. The council might have fed Chacón the answer, or more likely, it was obvious to him that the council was most concerned with any Haitian connection or influence, and connecting Aponte to the “Haitian” idea of a black king would have been an effective way of denouncing him. The problem with this is that it does not explain why Aponte does not simply deny that the pictures are indeed portraits of him—a more plausible defense in light of the lack of similarity be-tween the copy and the original—and instead disputes that they show him as a Cuban king. For these reasons, I am inclined to think that the ambiguities surrounding the pictures have deeper roots, which lead us back to the problem of the discontinuities in the cultures of radical antislavery and the fragmentation and truncation to which associated cultural practices were submitted in the early nineteenth century. It seems clear that pictures 25 and 26 did not conform to the rules of portraiture as they were known to the council. One of the great inventions of Renaissance portraiture in Europe was, arguably, a set of techniques that would allow for the skillful freezing of time. Although based on lengthy and repeated sittings, the portrait does not suggest narrative duration. Physiognomy becomes condensed, lived time. In the case of Aponte’s picture, the opposite seems to be true: instead of integrating a whole life span into one quasi-fictional moment, life is divided into its phases. Instead of capturing lived time in one expressive face, the face expresses nothing, does not even establish identity. Instead of affirming a state of being, instead of condensing the past into a present moment, then, the portrait anticipates the transformation of a carpenter into a personage of special standing, possibly even a king. If the conventional Western portrait is a study in character and social status and is thus deeply invested in the established social order, Aponte’s portrait is a study in becoming or transfiguration. It is a portrait, we might say, determined by the future, not the past, and therefore unconcerned with verisimilitude. The past can be submitted to a cumulative calculation: time, social standing, money, and power can be shown as having accrued in the subject, and having left their traces on the face. But no accumulation is possible from the future. Future events that would bestow power and social standing on a person cannot be shown condensed; they cannot relinquish their narrativity and can be shown only as what they are—a certain number of future events that will transform a black carpenter into a king. Entering further into the area of speculation, we might also wonder if the dispute over whether the portrait shows Aponte as king is a reflection of the fact that the uprising envisioned by the 1812 conspirators did not aim at the establishment of any particular political regime or state form. Perhaps it simply did not matter whether the portrait showed Aponte as a king, president, elder statesman, Captain General, or simply an eminent person. As we will see in part 3, the first heads of state in postrevolutionary Haiti certainly kept changing the state form and, along with that, their titles as heads of state.5 Clearly, this account does not answer all questions. But it does explain why the council would have been unable to recognize the picture as a portrait of Aponte, and why Aponte might have felt that it was at least plausible to claim the picture as a portrait while denying that it represented him as a king. (Fischer 2004, 46-48)

2. Here is how Aponte himself eventually described these images found on pages 24 and 25 of his libro de pinturas:READ MORE

   “In these [pictures] the author of the book is represented with a laurel wreath of fidelity [and] a palm tree for victory in the semblance of a pair of circles figuring at his breast—on the left-hand side one notices the carpenter’s bench on which he fashioned the said book, showing whiteness and youth represented by the figure of a child tied to a column, and in the foreground the face of an old man signifying that the memory of youth goes with old age; one also sees on the bench an ink bottle, ruler, and tins of paint.” (Palmié 2002, 99-100)

3. This portrait enables an understanding of the inversion of the class position that the author proposes through self-representation as a form of representation of a collective body:READ MORE

   “In plates XXIV–XXV, the author of the book presents himself in his portrait showing on his chest a Laurel of loyalty the palm of victory seemingly a compass. To the left is shown the white and infancy represented by the figure of a child tied to a column and on the front plane an old face which means to tie infancy to the memory of old age, they are seen equally on the inkwell bench, rulers and pots of paint. Thus at the right hand down below there appear two Indians supporting the Souls, the City of Havana at the mouth of El Morro as the declarer went out in the year of [1782] for the invasion of the Isle of Providence which is seen painted to the right with its nearby cays guiding Boats of the companies of black men who leapt ashore at eight in the morning cutting through the thicket as at a league from the same Cay and sleeping there that night at the shore of the reefs in front of the Town until the following afternoon […] having proceeded meanwhile the Capitulations…”[103] By portraying himself, and many other illustrious blacks, through visual allegories of the becoming-hero of the black subject in contrast to the becoming-monster of the beggar Fernández, Aponte is undoubtedly re-inscribing in history an expression of black corporality that, responding to the same format as that used by the naturalist Parra (that of a history “in plates”), questions the classifications of a “natural history” and the conditions of representation of the black type in that classification project. Furthermore, what is notable is that when Clemente Chacón was interrogated “within view of a portrait of a black man who at his feet has this inscription JOSE ANTONIO APONTE y ULABARRA, and to the side of the painting a Plan, he said: that of everything, all he knows is that it is a portrait of Aponte himself,” to which the judges reply asking him “how does he know that it is a portrait of Aponte, he who has interrogated has supposed that there is no similarity between the copy and the original to be properly called such.”[104] This quid pro quo reveals how Aponte’s own name seeks to be inscribed in history, not so much for the physical features of his face but, instead, for a character forged from the historic actions of the author. What he is doing, then, is presenting the biographical image as a continuum from infancy to old age, including the milestones of this process: his military missions (related to a topographical registry that he uses as a spatial framework of the “paintings”) and his “intellectual” mission (the production of a book of history, through a series of tools: compass, ruler, pots of paint, carpenter’s bench). The centrality of the episode in the Island of Providence suggests its importance in the decision to paint history (the map of the island, the gaze of the one who grows old at the child – “memory tied to infancy” – the representation of violence and justice, by the body of a black rapist who has been executed, which appears to one side). In his commentary, Clemente Chacón indicates that “Aponte warned him that: he included his portrait in the book so that it would be known that he was a [great] person since on the day destined for the revolution that was being planned finding him made a King.”[105] Chacón’s statement will later become a commonplace in the “prose of the” Hispano-Cuban “counterinsurgency,”[106] associated as it was to the portraits of the Haitian “Black Jacobins” (Henri Christophe, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean François) that Aponte possessed.[107] In the game of analogies, equivalencies and historical correlations displayed by Aponte, his portrait is included in the gallery of black kings and revolutionaries, but also white sovereigns (George Washington, Charles IV), in the representation, where the artist comes to occupy the place of the king, due to his ability to reveal the place of power and give form to the “two bodies” of the sovereign.[108] This explains why the self-portrait is not a representation of resemblance, but that of his name assigned to a body of the black class. We can see here what Richard Wright has called the “aesthetic of personalism” in the African-American anti-slavery tradition, where the autobiographical genre permits the presentation of oneself as a “public person.” For Paul Gilroy, this aesthetic is a “founding motif within the expressive culture of the African diaspora,” where “authority and autonomy emerge directly from the deliberately personal tone of this history,” establishing that “the particular can wear the cloak of truth and reason, just as the universal.”[109] What we see here is a historicist portrait,[110] where not only is the problem of “verisimilitude” expressly proposed, but so is that of “resemblance.” The question of resemblance is at the heart of the problems associated with the definition of art. Georges Didi-Huberman has shown the closure of the “epistemic regime” of image interpretation imposed by Vasari in his Renaissance foundation of the history of art. The autonomisation of the judgment of resemblance, based on the auto-legislative and closed principles of the “academy,” inverts the judgment of ancients such as Pliny, based on judicial and genealogical principles. The image, as a “ritual support,” is “a matrix of resemblance designed to legitimise a certain position of individuals in the genealogical institution of the Roman gens.”[111] The portrait is not presented as “an imitation of individual features” but as the encounter between “a material and a ritual.” If in Pliny’s Natural History the resemblance “is dead” in the origin of art itself, what is not dead is its dignitas, the judicial and non-academic basis of his genealogical concept of images. Here again, Aponte skips the teleology imposed by the post-Renaissance Baroque, recovering a regime of similarities that draws on his inspiration not from the medieval sensibility that permeates the Latin-American Baroque, but directly from Roman antiquity. (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 295-298)

4. Now Aponte proceeded to explain the map, which, as it turned out, related more to his previous biography than to his future plans: READ MORE

   “Likewise on the right side [i.e., p. 25] there appear on the lower part two Indians sustaining the souls, [and then] the city of La Habana as seen from the entrance to Morro Castle in the year 1782 (which is noted above), when the deponent left for the invasion of New Providence, which is painted on the right side with its keys, directly among which are [seen] the ships transporting the companies of blacks that landed at eight in the morning and cleared about a league of the bush on the same key and [then] camped that night at the levee in front of the town until the next afternoon, when we passed the customs pier and set up camp in the Castillo del Fuerte…all of which resulted in the [enemy’s] capitulation. (Franco 1977, 138–39).”[30] Quite obviously, in these images, Aponte proudly celebrated two cherished aspects of his identity: his role as artist and as soldier, depicted in what appears to have been a remarkable incongruity of styles. The somber allegories of man’s fleeting existence transcended by the artist in the act of representation[31] contrast with the straightforwardly narrative rendering of the military exploits of the Batallón de Morenos Disciplinados during the 1782 campaign in which Aponte had participated as a young man. (Palmié 2002, 100)

5. Symbolic elements like the laurel wreath, palm tree, compass, and circle give way on page 25 to cartographic devices, such as numbers distributed across the image of New Providence to indicate buildings or landmarks, and the depiction of scenes and figures. READ MORE

   The latter, just as Aponte’s explanation of the rendering of a hanged man, are to be taken literally as references to historical events, or, rather, in this particular case, to experience and memory…(Palmié 2002, 100)

6. …according to Aponte, this scene depicted a black inhabitant of New Providence who had been sentenced to death for the attempted rape of a local black woman. READ MORE

   It was a representation, not of an abstract principle or idea, but of a real person—someone whose ignominious death Aponte had witnessed or heard about. (Palmié 2002, 100-101)