The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Reimagination of Colombian Identity in the Poetry of Jorge Artel

Abstract

Abstract

en The literary tradition of South America has generally been imagined and legitimized in terms of the continent’s Hispano-American cultural heritage, epistemologies, and genealogies. Amid this hegemonic tradition, Black and Indigenous cultural presences and creative imaginaries have been relegated in favor of Hispano-American worldviews. Artistic creations by these “other” subjects have long been considered secondary to the Creole/mestizo canons, and have thus not benefited from the same degree of critical attention and circulation in mainstream literary circles. However, the trend is gradually changing, at least with regard to Afro-Colombian literature, as new generations of creative voices have gradually gained space and interrogated the generally accepted paradigms of Colombian identity. In the same vein, works long shunned by critics and the reading public have been reevaluated and granted increased editorial attention, critical scrutiny, and legitimizing awards. Jorge Artel’s poetry reinscribes Black bodies, cultural symbols, epistemologies, and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade into Colombian national history. His poetry, which is inscribed within the negrista tradition, reexamines the Colombian Atlantic space, especially his home city of Cartagena de Indias, questioning entrenched cultures of marginalization. His collection, Tambores en la Noche (Drums in the Night), first published in 1940, can be considered a reimagination of that city’s memorial cartography in order to underline the vestiges of enslaved Africans and their continuous configuration of Colombian national identity

en The coastal part of Colombia, specifically the port city of Cartagena, was the gateway through which many enslaved Africans entered the Latin American world. From 1580, it became one of the key destinations in Latin America for enslaved Africans. At the time, the trade was dominated by large-scale Portuguese merchants who established many commercial contacts and supplied slave labor across Peru and New Grenada as well as a large part of the Caribbean.1 Thus, Cartagena carries immense significance in the imaginary of the Afro-Colombian subjects and their sense of being and belonging to the Colombian nation. In terms of the genealogies of the African presence in Colombia, Cartagena is where something ended and something else began, a space of transition, cross-cultural pollination, and the intersection of different cultures and civilizations. As ironic as it is, Cartagena’s relationship with Black voices and bodies is deeply reflective and metonymic of Colombia’s relationship with a part of its national history. Antonio Vidal Ortega observes that the slave trade transformed the skin color of the city; in the mid-nineteenth century, the Black population constituted the majority of its residents.2 However, Cartagena has sought to shroud itself in the myth of being a White city, rendering its African cultural heritage invisible and relegating it to the status of folklore. Art and performance, especially as they relate to the Afro-Colombian population, have thus been used by minoritized Black people as tools for asserting the presence of Black bodies and Black voices, not as a mere excrescence or embellishment of Colombian national heritage, but as an integral force in Colombian history. The sacrifice of the Black and Indian populations in the war of independence, of which Cartagena was at the forefront, is hardly ever mentioned, while the memorial iconographies of the city’s political heroes hardly reflect its Black heritage.