We Are (Not) in This Together: The Caribbean Imaginary in "Encancaranublado" by Ana

Lydia Vega
Author(s): Diana L. Vlez
Source: Callaloo, Vol. 17, No. 3, Puerto Rican Women Writers (Summer, 1994), pp. 826-833
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931862
Accessed: 25-09-2017 23:39 UTC

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 WE ARE (NOT) IN THIS TOGETHER
The Caribbean Imaginary in "Encancaranublado"
by Ana Lydia Vega'

By Diana L. Wlez

It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of
which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in
that fluctuating moment which they are just giving a shape to,
and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for
everything to be called into question.
-Franz Fanon, "On National Culture"

I am indebted to Fanon for liberating a certain, uncertain time of

the people.
-Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation"

Exploring the space of the imaginary in the emerging nations of the African
continent, Franz Fanon refuses the totalizing gesture of native elites who clamor for
a negritude which erases the differences between say, a New Guinean or a Kenyan, or
between American Blacks and Africans (212-16). Instead, he locates the people in their
ever-emerging present, in their performance and construction of selves which radi-
cally differ from realist representations of a reified and mythic past. He places the
responsibility of the writer in a locus of radical instability, ambivalence and change.
The poet (writer), he insists, must see the subject of his work clearly and, in doing so,
perceive the estrangement of the writer from his subject-"the people" (226). There
are no guarantees here. As Fanon explains, "let there be no mistake about it; it is to this
zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there
that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused
with light" (226).
Homi Bhabha quotes Fanon's words "as a warning against the intellectual appro-
priation of the culture of the people... within a representationalist discourse that may
be fixed and reified in the annals of History" (302). He is concerned, as I am, with
"certain traditions of writing that have attempted to construct narratives of the
imaginary of the nation-people" (303).
What better entry into this attempt than the short stories of Puerto Rican author
Ana Lydia Vega. It is clear from even a cursory reading of her four collections of
stories that Vega has taken that hard look prescribed by Fanon. It has been said of Ana

Callaloo 17.3 (1994) 826-833

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 C A L L A L OO

Lydia Vega that "no perdona a nadie": she forgives or excuses no one. Her writing is
located in that contradictory space opened up by the word of the split subject.
Irrationality, desire and the imaginary are her stock-in-trade. Her ambivalence and
estrangement from her characters is figured in their contradictory utterances and in
those of her preferred narrative voice-a smart-aleck, less than likable know-it-all
who gives the term "omniscient narrator" a new meaning.
That her ambivalence is figured primarily in the comic mode is apparent as much
of her work consists of satiric fables and jokes structured into a short story narrative.
There is nothing unusual here; Frederic Jameson has noted that Third World literature
tends to be satirical and allegorical (69). Moreover, her use of surprise endings, vivid
and vicious wordplays, radical shifts in linguistic register, onomatopoeia, puns,
irony, sarcasm and black humor combine to form a rich texture of language that
questions and undermines authority at all levels.
But here is where the problems begin; for humor can be naturalized or
problematized. How do we read her radical departure from the realist mode into a
dense linguistic play that signals a questioning of all?
It is not an original observation that humor is a socially acceptable form of
aggression. Moreover, as Henri Bergson has noted "our laughter is always the
laughter of a group" (Cottom 3). In these funny stories by Vega, who laughs? That is,
who comprises the group? And at what or at whom does this group laugh?
Virffgenes y martires, Ana Lydia Vega's first book, co-authored with Carmen Lugo
Filippi, became a bestseller. This collection of stories took as the object of its jokes the
particular brand of machismo that operates in Puerto Rico. Vega's stories use humor
to both deflate over-enlarged male egos and to poke fun at the all-too-frequent female
complicity perpetuating patriarchy. Although the book was a success, it was seen as
threatening by many a puertorriquefio. Many female readers, for their part, turned it
into their "Feminist Bible," and the two co-authors came dangerously close to being
turned into feminist "Ann Landers" and "Abigail Van Burens" of the Puerto Rican set.
But even within that first collection, the contradictory nature of language and the
constraints of the short story genre coupled with a textual desire to heal the diasporic
wound, to speak a coherent "national story," led to some problems. In a previous close
reading of Vega's story from that book, "Pollito Chicken," I pointed out the story's
failure to adequately resolve the issue of a diasporic nation-Puerto Rico (Velez 75).
By ridiculing Newyoricans, Vega had, perhaps unwittingly, placed herself on the side
of linguistic purists. Here again was the issue of "pocho" language taken up by such
Chicano writers as Fernando Peftalosa and Gloria Anzalduia, among others. In that
reading, I was keenly aware of the story's failure to adequately resolve the issue of a
split nation-Puerto Rico. Moreover, I stated then that the text's persistence in
asserting an overarching national unity in the face of cultural, class and linguistic
differences between the two groups of Puerto Ricans forces the author to resort to
textual "copouts," among them ironic jokes at the expense of her character, Suzie
Bermudez, an assimilated Newyorican who cannot keep her languages straight and
who speaks half in English and half in Spanish (Velez 76).
That story structured as a joke was forced by the formal constraints of the short
story genre as well as by those of the joke to hand the privileged narrative voice over

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 CALLAL OO-

to a character whose relationship to Suzie Bermudez was one of sexual exploitation.

Complicitous with that was the textual exploitation that has Suzie Bermudez "dis-
cover" her "true" Puerto Rican identity in the irrational space of an intrauterine
orgasm. The issue, as I saw it, was that by extension, the text's joke was on all
Newyoricans, on our code-switching, and on our "pocho" identities. The text's (uncon-
scious) division of the national group-"Puerto Rican" into two-a group which
laughs and a group which is laughed at-already figures a borderlands problematic
developing from within the historical situation of a diasporic culture.
This is one sign that Puerto Rico, and by extension, the Caribbean, is a space that
can be theorized productively within both paradigms: both diaspora and borderland.
A continually evolving dialectic between colony and nation, as well as of spaces within
the island nations themselves. (I am thinking of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, of
the line that divides the French side from the Dutch in St. Maarten, of the use of Puerto
Rico as point of entry into the U.S. for undocumented dominicanos, of the Haitians who
seek refuge from political torture and death by risking their lives to reach the United
States). That the U.S. military base at Guantanamo is the destination of many is a sad
irony of history and one that points to a racial politics, as I will discuss later.
The diaspora and borderlands problematic of these island nations is figured in the
stories of Ana Lydia Vega's second book, Encancaranublado, which won the 1982 Casa
de las Americas award. Vega dedicates the stories "to the future Caribbean Federa-
tion, in the hope that the rains will come down on us soon and then be gone"
("Encancaranublado" 7). This rain metaphor marks the text throughout, with stories
grouped under the headings "variable cloudiness," "probability of rain," and "smat-
terings of wind and thunder." The book's title itself refers to the mottled condition of
the sky just before a rainstorm, as well as to the oral culture of Puerto Rico, the well-
known tongue-twister:

El cielo esta encancaranublado.

dQuien lo encancaranublaria?
El que lo encancaranublo
buen encancaranublador seria.

This seemingly innocent cultural artifact indexes an awareness that all is not well-
the sky is threatening-and asks who is responsible. Vega's call for rain, with its
cleansing and perhaps biblically punitive qualities, contains within it the hope for a
new beginning-a new order-after the rains stop.
Given how in "Pollito Chicken" an inexorable move towards national unity at any
cost operated to erase differences brought about by the Puerto Rican diaspora-I
wanted to see how this even broader demand-pan-Caribbeanism-operated in
Encancaranublado, given Vega's propensities toward the joke. Is there any ambiva-
lence or tension here between this enunciated desire for unity and the generic
demands of the fable or joke?
What I discovered was that, in contrast to the role of the mixed-up Suzie Bermudez
(who must be disciplined into knowing), the role of the Puerto Rican at the end of the
story here is that of bearer of bad tidings to his fellow caribefios. That is, in an

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 - CALLAL OO-

interesting twist on the discourse of government apologists from the 1950s on (with
their metaphors of Puerto Rico as a "Bridge Between Two Cultures" and "Showcase
of Democracy"), the text uses the "privileged" position of someone who knows the
diaspora from personal experience and has no delusions about the United States as a
"Promised Land."
The first textual entry of the story is the tongue-twister title. Indexing the problem
of language, of speech-How do we talk to each other? Which way to a unified
Caribbean, given the colonial heritage that divides us linguistically?-one is re-
minded that this is not some reified History, but an everyday impediment, as common
as rain during the rainy season. It is as hard to find a language for pan-Caribbeanism
as it is to speak this tongue-twister. Linguistic barriers are, indeed, the first ones
facing the title story's characters.
Not long into a reading of "Encancaranublado," we realize that this is a story
structured along the well-known lines of the joke "Three men on a boat." Here, the
three men are Antenor, Diogenes and Carmelo, a Haitian, Dominican and Cuban
respectively. The story begins with Antenor, the Haitian, adrift at sea in his tiny boat.
He hopes he's headed for Miami (and the pursuit of happiness, observes the narrator
drily, code-switching into English). He hasn't seen another boat for days and is
starting to think he's about to fall off the edge of the world when he hears the cries of
a drowning man, a Dominican, who as it turns out, also needs a ride to Miami. The
Haitian gives him a lift. But Diogenes speaks only Spanish, of course, so the two are
forced to use sign language in the face of what the narrator calls the "mutual
impermeability of their words" (14):

Y cada cual conto, sin que el otro entendiera, lo que dejaba-que

era poco-y lo que salia a buscar. Alli se dijo la jodienda de ser
antillano, negro yu pobre. Se contaron los muertos por docenas.
Se repartieron maldiciones a militares, curas y civiles. Se es-
tablecio el internacionalismo del hambre y la solidaridad del
suefio." (14)

[Then each man told-without the other one understanding a

word-what he had left behind-which was little-and what
he'd set out to find. They told of the mindfuck of being Antillean,
of being black and poor, of dozens lying dead in the streets.
Curses were meted out to military, religious and civil authorities
alike. Firmly planted there was the internationalist flag of hun-
ger, the solidarity of the dream.]

When the two men are most involved in their "bilingual ceremony," new cries are
heard; Carmelo's nappy head emerges from behind "el tradicional tronco de naufrago"
[the traditional drowning man's tree-trunk]. As they help him aboard, Diogenes
mutters to himself, "Como sifueramos pocos, pario la abuela" [As if there weren't enough
of us here, now grandmother's gone and popped a baby]. Antenor, for his part, notes
"Otro pasajero, otra alma, otro est6mago, para ser exactos" [Another passenger, another
soul, another stomach, to be exact.] Both are keenly aware of hunger and thirst, the
Dominican by means of popular wit, the Haitian through rational calculation.

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 - CALLALOO -

Allegorically, this story alludes to the dilemma: who survives? The politics of
scarcity which they thought they had left behind are still with them on the boat.
Usually, in the joke of this structure, someone must be thrown overboard for the joke
to work; but here, in this extended allegory, the punchline has to wait. Indeed, all
three must go overboard before the fable/joke reaches closure. Clearly, the story's
drama is based on the situation being desperate, with not enough food or water to go
around, an angry sea, and sharks circling. This is what moves the story inexorably
toward the end.
The joke of this type moves inexorably toward its punchline. By now, the joke/
fable/allegory has evolved into: "Three men on a boat, a Haitian, a Dominican, and
a Cuban." What makes this type of joke funny is that each character is actually a
caricature or stereotype of "national traits." And "Encancaranublado" doesn't disap-
point us. Though the three are not, strictly speaking, stock characters, they do have
their particularities based on the histories of each nation, figured as these are in the
memories of each character.
For Antenor, we're given the determining traits of Haiti: the French Creole
language, poverty, illiteracy and vodun religion. Antenor's Creole allows the other
two to exlude him. They speak excitedly in Spanish while he marks his presence
occasionally with a Mais oui or a C'est ca:

Pero no le estaba gustando ni un poquito el monopolio cervanti-

no en una embarcacifn que, destinada o no al exilio, navegaba
despues de todo bajo bandera haitiana. (15)

[But the Cervantine monopoly was starting to get on his nerves.

After all, this craft, though destined for exile, was, after all,
navigating under a Haitian flag.]

The humorous effect is achieved through a double-voiced discourse which shifts

from a high linguistic register-rnonopolio cervantino, embarcacio'n navegando-to a
low-ni un poquito-a shift that serves, among other things, to highlight Antenor's
poverty.
Later, when his two Antillean conifre'res demand his food, Antenor responds by
playing dumb, thinking: "De algo tenia que servir el record de analfabetismo mundial que
nadie le disputaba a su pais" [It was about time his country's unchallenged world record
for illiteracy came in handy] (16-17).
Diogenes, forgetting his earlier statements of mutual support to Antenor-whose
country, after all, shares an island with the Dominican Republic-allies himself
instead with Carmelo, the Cuban, to demand that Antenor hand over his shoebox
containing scraps of food, rum and tobacco. He even uses the word "madamo," first in
complaining to Carmelo in Spanish about the Haitians who come across the border
and "take away Dominican jobs," then directly to Antenor, as he demands that
Antenor hand over the food and smokes. The Cuban calls Antenor "prieto" and the
two Spanish speakers help themselves to the goods, almost kicking the Haitian
overboard in the process.

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 C A L L A L OG

The reference to vodun also has to do with Antenor's isolation: "Antenor no habia
dicho ni esta boca es mia desde que lo habian condenado a solitaria. Pero sus ojos eran dos
mufiecas negras atravesadas por inmensos alfileres" [There hadn't been a peep from
Antenor since he'd been condemned to solitary but in his eyes glowed the reflection
of two black dolls pierced by huge pins] (17).
The two Spanish speakers tell each other of their hopes and dreams for a life in
Miami. Thus, the reader discovers both their individual particularities and their
national characteristics. We had earlier learned that Carmelo, the Cuban, was well
trained to sniff out Antenor's food because he'd learned the tricks of the trade
working the black market back in Cuba. Now, we learn that he hopes to set up what
he euphemistically calls "un club de citas," or house of prostitution, when he gets to
Miami. He complains about life in Cuba: "Alla en Cuba, prosiguo Carmelo, los clubes de
citas estdn prohibidos, chico. No hay quien viva con tantas limitaciones" [Back in Cuba,
man, it's illegal to set up an escort service like the one I have in mind. Who can make
a living with so many damned restrictions?] (17). To this, Diogenes replies: "Well,
back in the Republic, we have so many whores, we even have to export them."
Antenor mutters, "Tout Dominikenn se pit" (18).
Things are clearly falling apart. By now, Antenor is out of the picture and the two
Spanish-speakers are still maintaining friendly relations. But not for long.
Carmelo continues: "Back in Cuba the problem is that women think they're equal
to men and they just don't apply themselves, you know what I mean?" (18).
"Must be now, man, because before, Cubanas could really shake things up," replies
Diogenes, remembering those world-famous gyrating hips. Carmelo finds the refer-
ence to the Batista era distasteful and asks Diogenes: "So how're things in the
Dominican Republic. I hear there's no way to tell the difference between after the
hurricane and before" (18).
A fight breaks out between the Spanish-speakers. They both go for the water jug
but Antenor tosses it overboard, thinking "I'd rather die of thirst than let some
mangey Dominican have it. Maybe now he'll remember that we invaded them three
times." The Dominican yells, "Trujillo was right" and a new fight breaks out (17-19).
The boat capsizes. The narrator observes that a lone shark gets its hopes up. Just as
the three are about to succumb to the dangers of the Bermuda triangle, they see a big
white ship in the distance and call out for help. It is, of course, an American ship.

El capitadn, ario y apolineo lobo de mar de sonrojadas mejillas, aureos

cabellos y azulisimos ojos, se asomo para una rapida verificacion de
catdstrofe y dijo-"Get those niggers down there and let the spiks
take care of 'em." (20)

[The captain, an Aryan and Appollonian sea-wolf with tanned

cheeks, golden hair and ocean-blue eyes, appears briefly to
verify the rescue. He orders (in English in the original): "Get
those niggers down there and let the spiks take care of 'em."]

Language is highlighted again as the narrator observes "palabras que los incultos
heroes no entendieron tan bien como nuestros bilinguis lectores" [words which our

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 C A L L A L OO

uneducated heroes did not understand as well as our bilingual readers"] (20). After
this, the Antilleans 'fueron cargados sin ternura hasta la cala del barco donde, entre cajas
de maderas y baules mohosos, compartieron su primera mirada post nafifragio: mixta de alivio
y de susto sofrita en esperanzas ligeramente sancochadas" [were unceremoniously carried
down to the hold where, among rusty trunks and wooden boxes, they take their first
post-shipwrecked look around them. Their faces register a mixture of relief and fright
sauteed and lightly steamed] (20).
Just as the trio is getting ready to celebrate their success, they hear the voice of the
Puerto Rican crewmember: "If you wanna eat around here you're gonna have to work
and work hard. These gringos don't give away nothing, not even to their own
mothers" [Aquf si quieren coiner tienen que meter mano y duro. Estos gringos no le da
gratis ni a su mai]. After which "a black arm emerges from between the boxes, handing
them each a dry change of clothes" (20).
Thus ends the story. As joke / fable / allegory comes to a close, the punchline ending
has some of the markings of a moral: "Despite our differences, as far as THEY are
concerned, we are all the same." The Puerto Rican is "someone in the know." From
within the belly of the beast he warns the other three that this is going to be no "free
ride." Essentially, nothing changes. The politics of scarcity still operate just as they
did back home on the boat and here on the ship destined for the "Promised Land."
There are some questions worth asking. The story's closure is effected by having
the three men "in the same boat," both figuratively and literally. Speaking extra-
textually, does the racism they will face in the U.S. operate as a unifying factor as it
does in the story? If we read beyond the ending, are all three men going to face the
same kind of prejudice once on land? Won't the Haitian be the most likely to be sent
back given his "economic refugee" status and the definition of him as "black" rather
than as "Hispanic" or better still, as Cuban? Athough they are all "Black" in the eyes
of the captain, will that be the case in the United States? Those differences are
collapsed in some settings and not in others. (I am thinking of the very different
treatment given to Cubans and Haitians by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service). Also, what, if any, problems arise in defining pan-Caribbeanism through the
experience of emigres, exiles and refugees? Does the margin or border become the
center in a textual move of sameness?
Clearly, there are no simple answers to this problematic, figured allegorically.
And, in fairness, all allegories break down at some point. But it is noteworthy that the
three men in a boat were not within any national borders. They were instead in a
liminal space among, between, and around several countries. The Caribbean thus
functions as the space of the imagination. These men, nonetheless, carried their
imagined communities with them. It was this, in fact, that divided them. What
brought them together, if only temporarily while they were adrift, was hunger,
racism, and a desire to escape. But these same factors operated to divide them once
more at story's end.
Only when seen over and against a racism that collapses all these identities into an
othering sameness-in the utterance of the sea captain-do they come together.
Indeed, the captain, a stock character safe in his imagined "whiteness" inhabits a
privileged space-the English language and imperial power. He ranks the others into

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 CALLALOO-

two stigmatized categories-spiks and niggers-in the lower realm of the ship. But
note that the story ends with the Puerto Rican extending "a black arm" to hand them
their clothes.
For all its qualities as a satiric fable, the story offers up its ending as a "punchline."
The Puerto Rican hands them dry clothes together with a little bit of (dry) truth
gleaned from his own experience of the diaspora.
One definition of irony is that the reader knows more or understands more than the
characters do. Here, in this ironic and satirical tale, the joke is on the characters. We,
the readers (bilingual where they're not) understand and know more than the
characters what awaits them. We're still left with the questions: who is the group?
who is laughing?

NOTES

1. I wish to thank Professor James Clifford for inviting me to present this piece, originally prepared
as a talk for the "Borderlands and Diasporas" Conference, held at the University of California-
Santa Cruz in April 1992. All translations in this essay are my own.

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Fanon, Frantz. "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness." The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove
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Jameson, Frederic. "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15
(Fall 1986): 65-88.
Pefialosa, Fernando. Chicano Sociolingulistics, A Brief Introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House,
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Vega, Ana Lydia. "Encancaranublado." Encancaranuiblado y otros cuentos de naufragio. Rio Piedras,
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"Pollito Chicken." Virgenes y mdrtires. By Ana Lydia Vega and Carmen Lugo Filippi. Rio
Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Antillana, 1981. 73-79.
Diana L. Velez. "Pollito Chicken: Split Subjectivity, National Identity and the Articulation of Female
Sexuality in a narrative by Ana Lydia Vega." Americas Review 14.2 (Summer 1986): 68-76.

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