Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial

3. The Intellectual and the Man of Action: Resolving Literary Anxiety in the Work of José Martí, Stephen Cobham, and Jacques Roumain

3 The Intellectual and the Man of Action Resolving Literary Anxiety in the Work of José Martí, Stephen Cobham, and Jacques Roumain Modern colonialism, through its attempts to remove local power from the Caribbean, enabled writers throughout the region to see themselves speaking for a national public as well as part of a counterpublic opposed to power. The modern colonial system’s attempts to remove power from the region produced a vocal and influential Caribbean intellectual class aligned with the social movements of anticolonialism. The existence of these social movements made it possible for Caribbean writers to imagine mobilizing a local public to give their literary projects the political significance that would allow them to speak with authority. These anticolonial sentiments open up a field of possibilities for writers like José Martí, Stephen Cobham, and Jacques Roumain to craft a heroic role for the literary intellectual, that figure sensitive enough to hear and understand the desires of the people better than either the foreign or local ruling class. While these authors imagine this heroic role for the writer, they struggle to reconcile their anxiety about the efficacy of writing as a passive or feminized activity with their desire to occupy the identity of man of action and spokesman for the nation. Beginning with José Martí’s literary and military participation in the Cuban wars of independence, anticolonial writers constructed a writerly vocation that could combine words with action to make their case for being the ideal representatives to lead the nation. Even though Martí was, like the writers featured in El laúd del desterrado, exiled from Cuba by Spanish authorities and forced to publish in newspapers in the United States and Latin America, he managed to connect his authorial project to the nation in a way these earlier writers could not. Rather than relying on patronage from annexationist North American interests, Martí 70 The Anticolonial Public Sphere turned to the market as a source of legitimacy, which allowed him to write not only against Spanish rule but also U.S. intervention. Relying on the market for legitimation had significant downsides, but the success of Martí’s anticolonialism depended on his ability to work within those limits. Furthermore, Martí was able to position himself as organically connected to the colonial nation, represented by the oppressed and marginalized, by distinguishing himself as a literary intellectual separate from the technocratic or professional elite. The idea of literary intellectuals as sensitive enough to listen to the nation and eloquent in articulating its desires allowed writers to give themselves a place in the anticolonial project. Yet at the same time, being literary threatened to undermine their relevance and exclude them from a public sphere ruled by the practical. This section looks at how Martí and some of the most successful anticolonial writers to follow him managed to imagine the intellectual as spokesperson for both a national public and a counterpublic of resistance. Placing Martí alongside the work of a lesser-known writer, Stephen Cobham, shows the ambivalences in that anticolonial ideology. The chapter closes by looking at how Jacques Roumain’s canonical Gouverneurs de la rosée uses the literary identity to try to resolve some of these ambivalences. This authorial anxiety foreshadows the turn in chapter 4 to an exploration of how coding opposition in terms of the literary enabled a critique from the margins of colonial capitalism even as it eventually isolated the literary intellectual from political and social power. José Martí and Literary Anticolonialism In Desencuentros de la modernidad, Julio Ramos adopts Angel Rama’s concept of the lettered city to show how the crisis of the colonial Latin American literary field is especially visible in the work of José Martí.1 While the framework used by Ramos remains Latin Americanist, his focus on Martí begins to adapt Rama’s approach to a Caribbean context. Ramos sees Martí positioned between two eras, which he describes as the end of the republic of letters and the beginning of modernity. In Ramos’s argument, Martí’s career thus marks the transition from the patronage system to the market. Although their adherence to the colonial/modern/ postmodern narrative means neither Ramos nor Rama discusses the impact of the abolition of slavery and the sudden entrance for the first time of large numbers of black voices into the Caribbean public sphere, we can also see how Martí writes at the moment in which mercantile slavery finally ends in the Americas (in 1886 in Cuba) and...