Sab, by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda (review)

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's nineteenth-century classic, Sab, still sparks the contemporary reader for its bittersweet recasting of Cuban slave society and its tragic effects on its two main protagonists. In this new critical edition, Catherine Davies makes a Cuban family romance accessible to the general reader, with an introduction that highlights both the novel's historical context and its immediate literary precursors. This edition of Sab is ideal for textbook use, given the detailed plot summary, discussion questionnaires, and selected vocabulary. A series of appendixes, including a biobibliographical listing of the author, enhance the understanding of the work and period.

Other items included in the appendix are a statistical table of the slave and white populations in Cuba (200); "El cántico del esclavo," a conventional poetic rendition of a slave's lament; and a snapshot of Puerto Príncipe taken from David Turnbull's Travels in the West, which contrasts sharply with the bucolic descriptions with which Gómez de Avellaneda evoked her native Camagüey. These supplementary texts serve either as points of reference or simply to contrast fiction and fact.

Catherine Davies introduces the novel as the first of its kind, a protoabolitionist and feminist tale dramatizing the intertwined fates of two subaltern subjects—woman and slave—due to the double oppression of marriage and slavery in nineteenth-century Cuba (1, 11). She emphasizes Gómez de Avellaneda's originality, both in terms of the novel's reversal of the abolitionist love plot (in Sab, the slave falls in love with his white mistress) and its inaugural role as the first Cuban antislavery novel (10–11).

In terms of literary precursors, Davies first situates the novel within the context of Cuban abolitionism and the rise of antislavery narrative. Despite the allusion to the Del Monte circle, Davies questions why the genre erupted in Cuban literary history "around 1838" [10]). It is not simply because "the tough Military Governor Miguel Tacón left Cuba that year" (10), as Davies speculates. As shown in Benítez Rojo's "Power/Sugar/Literature" and William Luis's Literary Bondage, the clandestine circulation of antislavery novels arose from the repressive context of Spanish colonial rule, which banned any direct expression of abolitionist tendencies. A fuller discussion of Sab in this light might have demonstrated Gómez de Avellaneda's achievement, more remarkable by the fact that she was a woman. Because Gómez de Avellaneda had no tangible links to the Del Monte circle, Davies claims that it was "unlikely that a woman's political culture existed in Cuba at the time" (10). There was, however, a rich woman's literary culture, as Gómez de Avellaneda and her contemporary la Condesa de Merlín provide a complementary female tradition to Domingo del Monte's tertulia, even though this fact has not been recognized by most canon-formation critics in and outside Cuba.

The thorny question as to why Gómez de Avellaneda chose to exclude Sab in later editions of her complete works is quickly dismissed as a matter of political and literary expediency: after Gómez de Avellaneda became a rising star in Spanish Romanticism, "Sab was conveniently put to one side" (13); with the emergence of an abolitionist movement in Spain, "Avellaneda did not grasp the opportunity" (14). But an important aspect of the novel is overlooked, one that, if it does not fully explain the author's self-censorship, does account for the visionary thrust of the novel and its appeal to past and present readers alike. According to Davies, "Sab traces the demise of the Cuban oligarchy, especially in the Central region, due to foreign commercial interests" (7), represented by the greedy Otways, father and son. The downsizing and eventual decline of the ingenio is tied, however, to the boom in the Cuban sugar economy during the first quarter of the nineteenth century; thus Gómez de Avellaneda recreates what Antonio Benítez Rojo calls the "Cuba peque...