Commentary

1. Otro aspecto destacable de esta lámina es la figura misma del bibliotecario negro, y de la autoridad cardenalicia negra que lo respalda, como articulador intelectual y material de la trama intertextual sobre la que se construye el cuadro. READ MORE

   El bibliotecario negro se vuelve aquí objeto y agente de la representación, representación que es a la vez política, documental y corporal, representación de los cuerpos visibilizados por el texto y de los textos que esos cuerpos producen como enunciados. Personajes como éste deben haber habido varios: el obispo etiope copto Abba Gregorious, por ejemplo, que en 1649 enseña lengua y literatura en Roma, al alemán Hiob Ludolf. Tampoco se puede descartar la filiación subsahariana de algunos religiosos negros presentes en El Vaticano pintado por Aponte. El jesuita Van Wing menciona también para el siglo XVI a reyes y obispos del Congo instalados en El Vaticano (en 1608 con Pablo V, en 1510 con León X).[97] Queda establecido así en el Libro de Pinturas la relación histórica entre cuerpo negro y corpus escrito, entre biblioteca negra y escritorio negro, relación sobre la cual autores tan disímiles como el raciólogo Blumenbach o el revolucionario Abate Grégoire sustentaron su defensa de las cualidades intelectuales de la raza negra, asumiendo la evidencia testimonial de los autores negros emancipados de la esclavitud, que empiezan a proliferar desde el siglo XVIII. (Pavez Ojeda 2006b, 706-707)

2. Thirty-seven begins with the second [page and] shows Pope Clement…with a cardinal and another friar of the Order of St. Benedict, both of them black, the first of them named Jacobo and the second without name and librarian of His Holiness (Franco 1977, 149).”[58] (Palmié 2002, 110)

3. Discussing the picture numbered 37, for example, Aponte explained that it showed Pope Clement XI with his black librarian and a black cardinal. READ MORE

   Nerey wondered if all this was true. “When and why were these black men cardinal and librarian to the pontiff?” he asked Aponte. (Ferrer 2014, 302)

4. At what time and for what reason, Nerey asks at this point, did these two black men become cardinal and librarian? He does not know, Aponte replies, for he has only heard and not read about it. (Palmié 2002, 110)

5. The image begins by representing “Pope Clement XI with a Cardinal and another clergyman of the order of Saint Benedict both dark-skinned, the first named Jacobo and the second without a name and librarian of His Holiness,”[52] persons whose existence he claims to know of “only through conversation” with “a black man whose name he doesn’t know who had the book of general history and taught him about both figures, and for this reason the declarer created this painting.”[53] READ MORE

   Although it is not clear what “general history” is being cited here, it is very possible that the librarian figure refers to Abba Gregorius, an Ethiopian monk and grammarian who around 1649 served as informant to Hiob Ludolf as he was developing his Historia aethiopica (1681) at the Vatican. (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 284)

6. Asked, in turn, with whom he had conversations pertaining to such matters, Aponte replies in a much more revealing fashion: READ MORE

   “There having come to this city from Spain a black man whose name he does not know, who possessed a book of general history and instructed him as to the two figures, which is why the deponent found himself composing this picture: [he further stated] that the one who is giving testimony here has read the book about the life of San Antonio the Abbot, where is to be found much that is figured in this picture: and the Foreigner’s Guide to Rome, in which is given notice of the church that exists in the middle of the city named San Estéban de los Indianos[59] behind the Cathedral of Saint Peter, which is shown in the upper right part of the number being explained. (Franco 1977, 149)”[60] (Palmié 2002, 110)

7. Nerey was still not satisfied. Why is it that Aponte does not know the name of this black Spaniard, and had he not, in an earlier interrogation, given more detailed information about all the black clerics depicted on page 37? READ MORE

   Aponte appears annoyed by the interruption: then why do you not look at the protocol, he retorts. And, besides that, he (i.e., Aponte) has spoken with many people without ever knowing their names. And he proceeds to explain the image. (Palmié 2002, 110-111)

8. Aponte indicates later that ‘much of what is drawn on this paper’ is owed to his “reading the book on the life of San Antonio Abad,”[54] and that he has learned of the existence “of the Temple that exists in the same City called San Esteban de los Indianos in back of the Saint Peter’s Cathedral”[55] through reading the “foreigner’s guide to Rome.”[56] READ MORE

   These sources enabled him to corroborate the existence of many other religious persons, either black or “negrophiles,” circulating in the Vatican: the “bishop of eastern india […] associate of various secular and ecclesiastical relatives all dark-skinned,” who are received by “the cardinals, accompanied by the Franciscan General and that of St. Bernard”; “two religious men […] a Dominican and another from San Benito are [authors] of the truth of the history that they explained, the first one named Friar Luis de Urreta, and the second Father Alvarez.”[57] Both authors were known for their historical works on Ethiopia, the latter having served as chaplain of a mission entrusted in 1520 by King Manuel I of Portugal to Rodrigo de Lima, in response to the letter from Elena, sovereign of Abyssinia and mother of he who would receive this embassy, the Negus Dawit II, Atani Tingli.[58] As a result of this mission, Bishop Oviedo, “the third patriarch,” was sent with a group of Jesuits who arrived as a religious mission to the Abyssinian theocracy when King Claudius succeeded Dawit II, some years after the return of Alvares and de Lima to Portugal in 1525.[59] (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 285)

9. Consistently shown in the paintings was “Father Pereira Carmelita,” together with “the Jesuit Father Oviedo, who was a teacher of the Latin language in Abyssinia; a Cardinal detains the Jesuit Fathers Illescas and Maceo with their guide, ‘because they were opposed to those of Abyssinia.”[60] (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 285)

10. Elsewhere in the same picture Aponte had drawn Pope Pius IV and three black priests at the door of the temple at Santa Maria di Populo in Rome. READ MORE

    Again, Nerey wondered what was true and what might have been fable or fancy invented by Aponte. “Why,” asked Nerey, “were these men painted with such vestments, and did such men [really] exist in Rome?” Aponte seemed to answer patiently, each time providing the titles of the books where he had read the specific story, or naming his source of oral information. In his responses about this particular image, for example, he cited a book on the life of San Antonio Abad and one on the city of Rome, in addition to oral accounts of a long-ago visit to Rome by two Havana priests, who had there seen a black priest celebrating Mass.[69] In this encounter between inquisitioner and accused, it was the latter who became the knowledgeable and patient teacher. Was Nerey himself aware of the reversal as it happened, and could that have been why the grammar of his questions to Aponte changed over the course of the interrogation? Instead of asking questions about whether specific things in the book had really happened in history, he began asking instead, “how do you know about this?” It was a safer kind of question; it did not concede Nerey’s own ignorance, nor grant Aponte the upper hand. (Ferrer 2014, 302-303)

11. We will skip a few passages and continue with his description of another grouping of clergymen: “There follow on the right side of the same number 37 the Carmelite father Pereira [and] the Jesuit father Oviedo, who was the prior of the Latin language in Abyssinia. READ MORE

    [It] continues with a painting of a cardinal who, with his officer in charge, is [seen] restraining the Jesuit fathers Illescas and Maceo because they were enemies of the Abyssinians. There follows a portal erected by Pope Pius IV and the Church of Santa María del Pueblo, at the entrance of which are [seen] three blacks in clerical robes. (Franco 1972, 151)”[61] (Palmié 2002, 111)

12. Again, Nerey interrupts Aponte with a question that induces him to elaborate further on the channels of transmission of cultural materials into which he tapped in assembling his own visual discourse: READ MORE

    “Questioned for what reasons those [three blacks] were painted with such garments and whether such [black priests] were to be found in Rome, where he had said this church existed, he replied: that they had been depicted there because this was the proper place for priests; and that he is convinced that there exist priests of such [i.e., black] condition because of having heard the reverend fathers Fray Diego de Soto and Fray Rafael Miranda recount, on their return from Rome, that they had seen in a council in which they took part, a black man preaching in the basilica who had been brought there by the General of Abyssinia, who was also present on the occasion; whereas it should be noted that the deponent did not directly listen to the fathers de Soto and Miranda, but to others who conversed about what had been related by the former. (Franco 1977, 151)”[62] For Aponte, there was, of course, no way to corroborate the veracity of such thirdhand information. But it is more than likely that he felt no need, either: people in control of the sacred resources of an alien but familiar religion had been there and had seen it; others had personally heard them talk about it; he had overheard such conversations. Veracity was not the issue here. What counted was the significance—indeed, the moral plausibility and political import—of such communications. To revert again to Koselleck’s (1985) somber remarks about the unspeakability of situations where “language is struck dumb” and where rationally unimaginable histories begin to express themselves through seemingly prediscursive genres of signification such as dreams, visions, or bodily experiences, we might say that Aponte’s images excavated— visualized—precisely what the discourse on which he was encroaching systematically “muted.” What we have here, then, is a case very different from those that Frank Salamone (1982) has in mind when he speaks of post-Conquest Andean writers as “chroniclers of the impossible”—self- consciously bicultural authors of accounts of events (the destruction of a moral universe) that ought not have happened. To invert Salamone’s phrase, we might rather call Aponte’s an impossible chronicle. What his book recorded was a narrative chronicling, not of productivity and performance as evidenced by an irreversible sequence of destructive events, but of moral potentiality. For Aponte, it seems, Minerva’s owl spread her wings, not at dusk, but at the dawning of a past world, still perhaps only dimly beheld by himself. In revising the powerful rumors spread by a regime of truth that he seems to have both admired and deeply dis- trusted, Aponte authored a form of criticism the compass of which reversed the standard order of reliability and validity in the examination of historical sources. Speaking in terms of Marc Bloch’s (1953, 55) famous analogy, we might say that what Aponte was after were, not “facts,” but “tracks”: signs of past events and situations that could be rendered visible and meaningful—much like the path of a particle within an electro-magnetic field—only under certain descriptions. And it was on a methodology capable of generating such descriptions that Aponte seems to have been working when, in the spring of 1812, a train of incidents beyond his control brought him to the attention of the Cuban authorities. Whether Aponte accepted de Soto’s and Miranda’s authority (and it seems that he did) is, therefore, another matter. What is important here is, first, that in both cases—book and oral report—Aponte insisted on what Wyatt MacGaffey (1972, 66) calls a hermeneutical approach: it was not so much their literal meaning that he was after as their deeper significance—moral, political, mystical—which had to be uncovered, perhaps even induced or created, by exegetical operations. The second point to take note of here is that Aponte, in turn, not only reproduced some of these bits and pieces of knowledge about what, for him, must have been an utterly exotic world from which power beyond fathom radiated out- ward to Cuba. Rather, such reproduction would, invariably, bear the stamp of his thought as the “counterauthor” of, or at least participant in, an incipient continuum of discourse. Whatever particles of stray information Aponte picked up, he was sure to digest them thoroughly, prying them loose from their contexts of origin, and submitting them to an alien form of semiosis so as to catalyze what, in fact, were new genres of representation and knowledge production. Let me emphasize this point once more. Whatever Aponte decided to include in his book would not simply reappear in unaltered form. Nor would the context that Aponte assigned to the allegorical representations he appropriated into what may have been his very own version of a summa preserve their original expressive functions. Something profoundly disruptive of the conventional linkages between signifier and signified occurred between the act of decoding and that of reencoding the European or colonial American representations that Aponte submitted to his system. This much may seem common sense. After all, de Soto and Miranda cannot well be presumed to have intended to conjure up an image of Rome teeming with black clergy, even if they may, indeed, have dis- cussed the curious fact of seeing an African preaching there. The question is, rather, why Aponte chose exactly that piece of information to render—in his peculiar mode of visual transformation—as a part of his book. Quite clearly, this problem is not exhausted by descriptively monitoring what happens if a “man of the people” begins to read.[63] What we would want to know is what Carlo Ginzburg (1992) has called the structure of the cognitive filter that Aponte inserted between himself and the texts and visual materials he perused. The reference to Ginzburg is not fortuitous here. For, in his justly acclaimed study The Cheese and the Worms, the Italian historian grapples with the methodological problems presented by the case of a historically no less obscure and similarly intellectually omnivorous “folk intellectual” in the sixteenth-century Friuli. Given that these problems closely correspond to those arising in the case at hand, a digression on Ginzburg’s attempts to reconcile text and context may help us focus more clearly on what precisely Aponte’s counterauthorial agency consisted in and why we should be careful not to inscribe it into some ready-made template of subaltern subjectivity and cultural orientation. Ginzburg (1992) presents the case of Menocchio, a literate and highly inquisitive sixteenth-century northern Italian miller with a strong bent toward what Ginzburg’s compatriot Antonio Gramsci might (if perhaps reluctantly) have called counterhegemonic theorizing. Chronicling Menocchio’s sad career—he makes such a nuisance of himself that the Inquisition, reluctant though it initially appears, cannot help but kill the man—Ginzburg struggles hard to reconcile Menocchio’s exuberantly idiosyncratic cognitive achievements with what he assumes are Menocchio’s “roots” in an archaic “oral” and “almost unfathomable” reservoir “of remote peasant traditions” (xiii). Menocchio’s heterodox conceptions of the cosmic order, his critical views of Catholic dogma and of the social and religious institutions of his time, Ginzburg tells us, must be perceived as the result of his “filtering” literate information through the interpretative frame of the “oral cultural tradition” of which he was part. “It was not the book as such,” he concludes, “but the encounter between the printed page and oral culture that formed an explosive mixture in Menocchio’s head” (51). “Printing enabled him to confront books with the oral tradition in which he had grown up and fed him the words to release the tangle of ideas and fantasies he had within him” (xxiv). This approach, at times, generates startling insights. But it is nevertheless astounding that a historian so versed in the social and cultural history of the peasant society of the sixteenth-century Friuli would choose to downplay the fact that its culture was all but uniform and homogeneous and that its communicative orientation (if we even want to deploy that term) was by no means pristinely oral. Ginzburg, of course, explores in remarkable detail the stunning complexity of the larger continuum of discourse within which Menocchio’s relentless ranting must be situated. Yet, despite the obvious difference in the way in which the various strands of knowledge and discursive practice that interfaced in Menocchio’s life and views were institutionally empowered, what Ginzburg seemingly chooses to neglect is the fundamental fact of their mutual imbrication. Ginzburg acknowledges along with Bakhtin the need to consider not just “cultural dichotomy…but also a circular, reciprocal influence between the cultures of the subordinate and ruling classes” (xvii). Yet he nevertheless insists on salvaging a conception of their autonomous existence. (Palmié 2002, 111-115)

13. Later follow “three dark-skinned men in ecclesiastical dress” at the door of the Templo de Santa Maria del Popolo,[61] and “the painting of a Religious man of the Order of Preachers with the name Tomas and of dark skin, who was Prior of the convent of San Esteban de los Indianos built by Clement XI for people of that class, as stated in the guide cited of this City”;[62]READ MORE

    “two black men by the name of [Tomas] and Marcos who are pilgrims” wearing clothing embroidered with “canons and Laws” and “Theology and Philosophy,” respectively; and the Jesuit Father Sandoval mentioned earlier. The painting concludes “with two boats the one which carried them, and the other with captured Moors.”[63] (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 284-285)

14. Recordemos que el jesuita Sandoval es conocido por una obra que inaugura el africanismo en América: De instauranda Aethiopum salute, Historia de Aethiopia, naturaleza, policia sagrada y profana, costumbres y cathecismo evangélico de todas las Eethiopes con que se restaura la salud de sus almas, escrito en Cartagena de Indias, donde el autor oficiaba de misionero, y cuya primera edición se realiza en 1627 en Sevilla.[78] READ MORE

    Este libro es a la vez un compendio etnográfico sobre los africanos desembarcados como esclavos, una defensa teológica del mandato divino para su evangelización, un manual de catequización y una reflexión sobre la naturaleza y condición de los “etíopes,” es decir, los africanos negros (diferentes de los “moros”). Sandoval se hace eco de la visión de África transmitida por la geografía de los antiguos (Plinio, Herodoto, Estrabón, Julio Solino), y la exégesis bíblica de San Isidoro de Sevilla, y San Agustín. En los antiguos, la teoría del clima es la más recurrente para explicar la “monstruosida” de los negros: la torridez del lugar explica la proliferación de formas de vida monstruosas, entre las cuales los negros, de piel quemada por el sol (“etiope”, del griego aithiops: “cara quemada”), conviven con animales fabulosos. Sandoval va a dedicar el tercer capítulo de su libro primero a “las causas de los extraordinarios monstruos y demás cosas maravillosas que se hallan en Africa,” intentando destacar el valor de una humanidad negra originada en una tierra de monstruosidades. Para Sandoval, entender y explicar el origen de la variedad y diversidad de formas que supone la monstruosidad permitirá entender la diferencia de los negros: “Para entender […] la diversidad de formas, que se halla en la especie humana entre los Etiopes, y demas Reinos de negros, es necessario saber la causa de la generación de los monstruos y su principio.”[79] En la escala de las imperfecciones, los negros pasan a ser lo menos imperfecto producido en una tierra condenada. Sandoval sigue aquí de cerca a San Agustín e Isidoro de Sevilla, quienes interpretan bíblicamente la geografía antigua: la monstruosidad anatómica de los africanos es para ellos manifestación de la suciedad del alma, el cuerpo negro es síntoma de la maldición de Noé a Cam, y la esclavitud de los negros se justifica como castigo divino al pecado de su ancestro irreverente. Los negros africanos son entonces de naturaleza humana, lo que justifica su evangelización, pero están condenados a la deformidad y la esclavitud. Los reformistas protestantes, en cambio, demonizaron la monstruosidad de los negros, desechando así la posibilidad de su humanidad y su evangelización. El proyecto de salvación que se propone Sandoval se debate con un tema propio de la literatura del barroco español: el de la dificultad de limpiar al negro (aclarar su piel), problema cuya traducción teológica sería la salvación de sus almas.[80] (Pavez Ojeda 2006b, 696-697)

15. The importance of Sandoval in the foundation and dissemination of historical Ethiopianism in America (as opposed to biblical Ethiopianism) gives him a place in the Book of Paintings, where he appears painted in the company of various black clergymen and pilgrims in a scene that takes place in Vatican Rome. READ MORE

    This is on plate XXXVII, where “Father Sandoval Jesuit and author who witnesses with the others, the reality of the mentioned dark individuals,”[51] showing a procedure that is repeated in Aponte’s book: the use of pictorial scenes for textual citations (detailing the written text that is transliterated) and for the staging of the authorship of these works (incorporating the cited authors into the paintings). The authors simultaneously constitute an object of representation and a source of the events. The description of this plate also enables understanding of the diversity of bibliographical and oral sources that inform the Book of Paintings. (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 284)