The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish

5. Beginnings at the End: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1985) and Juan Balboa Boneke’s El reencuentro: el retorno del exiliado (1985)

chapter five Beginnings at the End: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1985) and Juan Balboa Boneke’s El reencuentro: el retorno del exiliado (1985) One hundred years after Pedro Paterno left the Philippines for Europe, the arc of Asian and African literature in Spanish seemed to have come to an end. The once robust tradition in the Philippines had sputtered out of existence , apparently forever, so much so that the annual Zóbel Prize for the best Filipino literature in Spanish closed down in 1967 for a lack of enough writers left to compete for it.1 On the other side of the world, in the new country of Equatorial Guinea, national independence in 1968 was followed by the rapacious dictatorship of Francisco Macías, during which execution and torture were meted out to anyone who raised a voice. As a result, African Hispanic individuals who survived in exile faced a traumatic reality back home and profoundly uncertain possibilities in their own futures abroad. This was not a position conducive to devoting much time or energy to composing creative texts. The scarcity of output was so acute that the 1970s came to be known in Guinean studies as the “Years of Silence.”2 Antonio Abad’s La vida secreta de Daniel Espeña (The Secret Life of Daniel Espe ña) of 1960 and Daniel Jones Mathama’s A Spear for the Boabí of 1962, both of which appeared and disappeared with very small readerships, seemed destined to be the last Asian and African novels published in Spanish .3 In the case of Abad, a national novelistic trajectory of nearly eight decades was ending, but Jones Mathama remained perched on the verge of initiating a Guinean tradition that apparently would never come to be. In 1971, four and half centuries since the forces of Lapu Lapu killed Magellan and Pigafetta sailed home to tell the tale, and one century since Paterno arrived in Madrid from Manila, there was effectively no ‹ction in Spanish 199 still being produced by Asians or Africans. The prospects of global literature in Spanish seemed dead. externalities and inconsistencies The most prominent ‹ctional representation of Equatorial Guinea that circulated in the 1970s was not published by an African nor written in Spanish . It also was not, on the surface, about Equatorial Guinea. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth, an author of worldwide fame thanks to his 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal, was a 1974 novel that detailed the staging of a coup d’état by a handful of mercenaries against the dictator of a ‹ctional West African country named Zangaro. Forsyth lived in Malabo for two years while writing the novel, which contains hints—not that a mass Western readership could be expected to recognize them—that Zangaro was in actuality a version of Equatorial Guinea, then ruled by Macías, the postindependence tyrant. In the novel, for instance, the capital of Zangaro is called Clarence, one of the colonial names for present-day Malabo. Also, the protagonist likes to whistle the song “Spanish Harlem,” thereby evoking a vague image of hispanophone presence within the West African setting . British newspapers of the time gave credence to rumors that Forsyth, in the course of conducting research for The Dogs of War, had hired a mercenary force in an unsuccessful bid to topple the Macías regime. Forsyth’s alleged goal was to see how the episode would transpire so that he could lend more realism to his novel. Forsyth denied that he had participated in such a plan.4 Foreign ‹ctional representations of Guinean spaces also circulated in the 1970s outside the country in venues less bound than the pages of a novel. Around the time Forsyth was in Malabo preparing The Dogs of War, press coverage in Washington was following a homicide involving the only two diplomats of the United States in Equatorial Guinea. The case ultimately reached a federal court of appeals over the question of which court has jurisdiction over a “murder committed by an American of‹cial at a Foreign Service post” (Shurtleff, 54). The circumstances of the crime remain somewhat unclear. According to George Gedda in an Associated Press article entitled “‘Heart of Darkness’ or a Challenge?” that appeared two decades later, there was 200 the magellan fallacy an incident there years ago worthy of Agatha Christie. On a steamy late August day in 1971, amid...