Colonized and Colonizer Disjunction: Power and Truth in Zeno Gandía's La Charca

COLONIZED AND COLONIZER DISJUNCTION: POWER AND TRUTH IN ZENO GANDÍA’S LA CHARCA by Lisa Nalbone University of Central Florida Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde WRITTEN by Manuel Zeno Gandía, the leading author of the turn of the Nineteenth century in Puerto Rico, La charca (1894) exemplifies the rural society of its time, following the Naturalist tenets that individuals in society are a product of their environment and their biological heredity. Power roles establish and regulate a system of order that expresses itself on a myriad of levels: social, political, economic, and interpersonal. The contrast between the elite – embodied by the plantation owner, the priest and the doctor – and the plantation workers highlights the effect of deterministic influence over the fortunate and the less fortunate inasmuch as the cyclical nature of the novel emphasizes the unlikelihood that the system will be altered. This study analyzes the system based on power and truth that leads to economic prosperity for the plantation owner while perpetuating the oppression of the plantation workers, producing a chaotic order in which this community exists amidst a backdrop of power used to the benefit or detriment of the characters. According to Foucault , systems of truth are closely tied with the concept of power, and rely on the support of institutions in society. In addition to the phenomenon of exclusion that subverts the potential mobilization of the weak, the manner in which knowledge is exploited, divided and attributed reinforces the notion that hegemonic forces maintain their position of authority (151). 23 The traditional classification of La charca as a naturalist novel refers to the characteristics of the tendency as they relate to the narrative discourse of the plantation community embroiled with the issues of deprivation and amorality . However, in addition to the hardships encountered by the coffee plantation workers, the cafetaleros, there exists yet another stratum of society which is also affected by the implications of power that encompass these issues: women and children. According to José M. Colón, Zeno Gandía “fue el primer novelista que planteó el problema de nuestra miseria económica y moral como lógica consecuencia del sistema colonial” (58). The author provides the reader with the vision of the feudal colonial society in decay, in which the characters are in conflict with each other and with society itself, and the weaker figures are overcome by the exploitation by the dominant figures. In the novel, Zeno Gandía presents the problems in society that clash with the possibility that the cafetaleros might experience any sense of well being. He emphasizes the weaknesses they possess in terms of morality and spirituality. This contributes to a physical and economic inferiority that fuels dependence and solitude within a sociological study. It reveals “la imagen de miseria social, moral, espiritual, de la sociedad puertorriqueña” (Beauchamp 47). The characters themselves may remain unaware of the extent of their misery, which is one of the goals of the hegemony. La charca was written as part of the series Crónicas de un mundo enfermo, which also includes Garduña (1896), El negocio (1922),1 and Redentores (1925), after a time during which the author lived, studied and worked in Spain and France in the latter half of the Nineteenth century. The author’s vision was to write a series of eleven novels highlighting various aspects of Puerto Rican society (Flores 77), although this life-long goal was not reached before the author’s death in 1930. He gained first-hand knowledge of the naturalist tenets and somewhat aligned himself with the thinking of Emile Zola in that the novel is the result of an experiment based on the objective observation of the specimen in very concrete terms.2 While the first two novels reflect the feudalistic colony in decay, the second two reflect the ascension of the bourgeoisie . The rural backdrop of the sugar and coffee plantations in the first novels contrasts with the urban backdrop of the last two. Although La charca was written in the early 1890’s and published in 1894, the action of the novel takes place in the late 1860’s to early 1870’s, or as...