The Effective Appropriation of History: Carmen Boullosa's Son vacas, somos puercos and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage

THE COMPAKATIST THE EFFECTIVE APPROPRIATION OF HISTORY: CARMEN BOULLOSA'S SON VACAS, SOMOS PUERCOS AND CHARLES JOHNSON'S MIDDLE PASSAGE Jen F lory La verdad es que el novelista no construye, el novelista es un destructor (Boullosa, "La destrucción"). [The truth is that the novelist does not construct, the novelist is a destroyer.] In 1990 and 1991 appeared two novels, set sometime in the past of the Americas, that dealt with the gruesome adventures of groups of sailors involving storms at sea, battles, and even cannibalism. The ships in both stories had repugnant, violent captains who eventually suffered miserable deaths, and had crews who exploited other peoples, whether by plundering their villages or by transporting them as slaves. However, more important than any similarities in plot, character, or setting, both texts refused to present history as a singular objective truth. Instead, they opened the past to serious questioning through a combination ofperspectives that I shall call the effective appropriation of history. These texts are Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) and Carmen Boullosa's Son vacas, somospuercos, filibusteros del mar Caribe (1991). This essay will show how these two texts employ both postmodern "effective" and postcolonial "appropriated" history, not simply to present a new, "corrected " version ofthe past, but to teach us how to read history in the process ofinterpreting their questionable accounts. Through this combination ofapproaches, not only do the texts question how history is normally presented; but, rather than allowing themselves to be passively accepted , the texts themselves also contain a subjectivity that opens them up to debate, thus giving readers an active role in interpreting the past. Michel Foucault addresses how history becomes "effective" in "Nietzsche , Genealogy, History," holding that instead of searching for origins or for an absolute truth,1 it should "introduce discontinuity into our very being" (154). "Effective" history affirms "knowledge as perspective [. . .] Its perception is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation" (156-57). Because "effective history" sees knowledge as perspective , history is acknowledged as subjective. Not only is Foucault concerned with undermining the authority that official history once had, but he also states that history should not be about truth at all. History is a dialogue or an exploration, not a search for answers. As he explains in conclusion, "It is no longer a question ofjudging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present"; instead, history should be conceived as "the endless deployment ofthe will to knowledge" (164). Vol. 26 (2002): 121 THE EFFECTIVE APPROPRIATION OFHISTORY Complementing Foucault's postmodern sense ofhistory is Françoise Lionnet's postcolonial approach to combating the dominating and hegemonic effects ofofficial history. In Postcolonial Representation: Women, Literature, Identity, she describes three levels of history for the unempowered : history "suffered," which depicts the colonized as victims who cannot escape their destinies; history "taken on," which reverses the discourse ofthe colonizer; and history "appropriated." Because these first two levels still speak within the colonizer's terms, whether for or against them, another step is necessary to move toward decolonization. This step occurs when history is appropriated, and the subject of history constructs herselfthrough her discourse [. . .] this subject projects herself in the fictitious and the fabulous, thereby authorizing herselfto assume her own destiny through utterances that allow her to construct her own symbolic context. (175) Rather than accepting the traditional historical representations, individuals can creatively write themselves, thus avoiding generalizations imposed on them from a distance. Through fiction, they can escape the limitations of history at the same time that those limitations are brought to light.2 Thus, the past "is re-presented and redefined" (175). Because until recently history from the colonizer's perspective was recorded as the official history, Foucauldian "effective" history can function as a powerful decolonizing tool. However, to the extent that it is a postmodern concept that aims to undermine absolute truths, "effective" history ultimately makes it difficult for texts to assert anything, especially in a specific political manner.3 Lionnet does acknowledge the relation between postmodern and postcolonial theories ofhistory,4 but she also states that postmodern authors "do not go beyond highlighting the failure of every form of transcendence, the conceptual impasse...