"This rotting corpse": Spain between the Black Atlantic and the Black Legend

"This rotting corpse : Spain between the Black Atlantic and the Black Legend Chris Schmidt-Nowara is an Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1995 and is the author of Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). He is at work on a new book project entitled "The Conquest of History: National Histories in the Spanish Empire , 1833-1898." The Catholic remained static, frozen, as it were, the victim of a spell cast upon him by an external configuration of fetish objects that coereced his emotions to unchangeableness. His unsteady apprehension of his environmenr was fogged by the thick, sacred glass through which he was doomed to look at reality. And the physical area abour rhe Spaniard's life reflected this: low standards of living, illiteracy, no control ovet material forces, and a charged, confused consciousness that compelled him to seek release from his frustrations in the projecred shadows of his own personality. I had bur to look about me to see how little Spain had altered during the long centuries . Richard Wright, Pagan Spain As he paused in the Pyrennes in 1954, deciding whether to turn south and enter Spain for the first time, the African American writer Richard Wright admitted that travelling to a country governed by a dictator made him nervous, although repressive governments were not foreign to him: God knows, totalitarian govetnments and ways of life were no mysteries to me. I had been born under an absolutist racist régime in Mississippi; I had lived and worked for twelve years under the political dictatorship of the Communist Patty of the United States. (Pagan 10) Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001 150 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Wright opened his book Pagan Spain, an account of his travels there in the early 1950s, with the possibility of identification with Franco's Spain but the rest of his work is dedicated to describing and contemplating Spanish difference. Although Wright was interested in political and economic conditions under Franco, as well as the nature of religious life in Spain, more pressing seemed to be a search for difference and strangeness that marked his journey and book from the very beginning. What Wright discovers is a "pagan" country, one that has missed out on the main course of western history. His discovery leads to a series of fascinating reflections on the nature of western modernity and Spain's exclusion from it. Those reflections in turn will be the focus of this article, an exploration of how Wtight's Black Atlantic and Spain's Black Legend meet in the dominant narratives of the modern Atlantic world. Wright recounts to the reader a conversation with Gertrude Stein in Paris that sparked his interest in Spain: "Dick, you ought to go to Spain." "Why?" I had asked her. "You'll see the past there. You'll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. And the people! There are no such people, such as the Spanish, anywhere." (Pagan 10) Wright quickly reached the same conclusions . His first close contact with Spaniards he describes as intensely alienating. When he asks two young men in Barcelona to guide him to a pension they first take him to the city's Gothic cathedral, much to Wright's surprise. They ask him if he is a Catholic and when he responds no his answer leads him to reflect on both the generosity and the insularity of their gesture: It was beginning to make sense; I was a heathen and these devout boys were graciously coming to my rescue. In rheir spontaneous embiace of me they were acting out a role that had been implanted in them since childhood . I was not only a stranger, but a 'lost' one in dire need of being saved. Yet there was no condescension in their manner; they acted only with the quiet assurance of men who knew that they had the only truth in existence and they were offering ir ro me. (Pagan 16-17) Touched as he was by their kindness...