Return of the Chopped Hand

From a long line of rebels, of savages struggling against the inquisition, the endless inquisition. The will to power. The will to Imperialism. The dividing up of the Motherland. The Chopped Hand against the troops of the Empire, the occupiers. I am Jose Castilla, el Mano Cortada. I fight the theft of language, the riches of history, one handed against death. Against the fictitious freedom of the half cast, the lies of the church, again I stand for dignity. And again I escape from the tortuous grip of the Empire. I stand for every man that has known slavery, every man pressed by the onslaught to fill the king’s coffers with the wealth of black gold, gauged and whipped, hung from mango trees, every father and mother torn apart, split open, thrown into the sea, already crimson with blood: I am the revolt of the Chopped Hand.

I am before the judges without the lie of freedom, without the falacy of law. The Spaniards will cheat me no longer. The land and myself are one. I am invisible with the forest, the fields of cane. I am the hills in the distance. I am the air at Sagua la Grande: from a long line of rebels against the Empire, my missing hand a weapon for liberation. My missing hand a sacrifice for the revolution, breaking the chains, sinking the ships in their track crossing the Atlantic, in the blood-red Caribbean, beneath the baking sun of the tropics. I witness the rites of the Congo, of Dahomey, I stand as witness for the blacks of the nations. The drum and its hands spread across the divination cloth, the cup for the limpieza, the bodies washed up on a strange shore. The crowing cock at dawn signals the end of the night filled with drums. I stand on the banks of the Undoso, bathing in the ritual’s vibration. Even now I hear the drums calling me to my heritage. Even now they whisper my name. Jose Castilla, the son of Cabeza de Vaca . . . the god son of Ogun. The grandson of Shango. I am the ashé (sacred power), the belching fire of the blackened sky, I am the lightning from the divinities. I have long since left the soft eyes of heaven, the asking for and making of purpose from ideas that will only participate from the sidelines . . . a perch in the amphitheatre. The glistening web of the blue-faced spider. A sea of drops of sweat . . . the sweat of toiling bodies swinging from the masts. Supper for the fishes . . . our rites of passage made of open wounds. A pilgrimage under a veil of lust and labidonal distortions, where time is born of snarls and scurvy . . . I have long since departed from the seductive gaze of heaven, her opulent walls of fire, her patient gong. I fashion the path of formulas, requesting the mansion’s designer. I sweep past so many wayfarers, tinkers, herders, hunters, magicians on my way into the earth, onto the picture plane. I command my image, my mirrors of fright . . . the shadows of bats, of darting lizards on the doorstep . . . I walk past my pictures and point at the devil, haunted by the responsibilities of knowing . . . the piling up of numbers. The Egyptian reads the sun’s naked ritual: the obviously grand tranquility hiding its speech. I am in bondage serving the pleasures of the sea.

It’s open air mystery and popular deception. The multi-operative veil of purple disguises. The dusk where Mano Cortada rushes from the fields to punish another landowner, dashing from the deck of a slaver onto the boardwalk of the divinities. The pack mule of dreams. To dispatch demons into the nightmares of the children of Cristobol Colon. I am the witch they refer to as the Chopped Hand: a luminous presence in the garden. I return from heaven on a ship of fools. I nod towards the juggler who has my face, another look and I am sprayed with rum . . . I am dusted with flour and receive my painted head, the tossed coweries over the shoulder . . . the cluttered...