The blacks in Latin America

UNESCO Courier, May-June, 1986 by Alejo Carpentier

The blacks in Latin America

THE apparent loss of feeling for their original plastic arts among displaced Africans transported to the Americas can be explained by the fact that sculpture, carving and decorative painting required free time, which the slave-holder was not prepared to grant.

He was not going to place workshops and tools at the disposal of men who were there to increase his wealth, simply so that they could have the pleasure of carving figures that he considered barbaric idols and repositories of ancestral beliefs.

On the contrary, any such recollections had to be wiped from the black man's memory with the help of the overseer's lash. "Civilized man' in the West did not yet have the slightest interest in what he would later come to value as "folk art'.

While the black man's paintings or carvings were considered works of the Devil, music, on the other hand, did not cause much inconvenience. The plantation owners in Cuba, for example, allowed their slaves to beat their drums and dance every evening because this showed that they were in good health and that their "ebony flesh' was fit for hard labour.

Meanwhile, the slaves listened to what they heard around them. During the sixteenth century, when they were first taken to America, they assimilated Spanish ballads, songs from Portugal and even French square dancing. They discovered musical instruments unknown in their own lands and learned to play them.

If one of them succeeded in being freed by a master who was more benevolent than others, he might well turn to music as a way of earning his living, mingling with white people in an occupational freemasonry.

Far removed from his African roots, the black man in Latin America became a basic constituent, together with the Indian, of the creole class that was to affect the destiny of a whole continent with its aspirations, its struggles and its protest. As the centuries went by, the blacks were slowly incorporated into the society of their new homelands and, little by little, they recovered their poetic sense and the feeling for the plastic arts which they seemed to have lost.

Observing ancestral traditions that no longer bore any relation to their surroundings was now out of the question. The black peoples had forgotten their African dialects by this time and spoke only the major languages of the New World. They felt no need to revive old Yoruba tales, to recall ancient legends or return to the sources of an oral culture they were alienated from, but rather to "make poetry' in the full sense of the term.

The same thing happened in painting Black artists in the New World were completely out of touch with art forms that in Africa were related to religious cults now left far behind (even though some vestiges can still be found on altars ostensibly consecrated to Christian saints).

On the contrary, they had to solve the same technical problems that face artists everywhere in any period. It is obvious then that the work of the black and mestizo painters and sculptors active in Latin America in the nineteenth century bore no resemblance whatsoever to the forms and stylizations of African art.

This was also true of poetry at that time. And one may add that there were many "white' writers--the word "white' has always been quite relative in Latin America--who published novels with "negro' settings, denouncing the loathsome aspects of slavery in the Americas.

It is only in the last fifty years that a new generation of poets and painters has appeared, whose works are marked by the symbiosis of cultures fostered by the New World. There has been much talk, for example, of "black poetry', referring to a resonant, percussive, onomatopoeic type of poetry which, despite a prevalent assumption, has often been written by perfectly "white' poets.

In point of fact, this is an exotic view of "negritude'. The truth is that if "black poetry' as such ever existed, it would have had to be a protest on behalf of the black people oppressed by centuries of slavery and racial discrimination.

First and foremost, it would have had to be a revolutionary cry because, since the sixteenth century, the blacks have always been in revolt against their overlords in some part of the hemisphere, and even formed small independent States in Brazil, the Guyanas and Jamaica--States that sometimes survived for many years.

Never during their long history in the New World did the blacks give up their quest for freedom, a quest furthered by the creoles of all classes and stations who, after much struggling, finally threw off the yoke of Spanish, Portuguese, French and English colonialism.

In short, there exists in the Antilles, where Spanish, English and French are spoken, literature and painting with a markedly creole character, and it would be difficult to say just what can be attributed to their various ethnic components.

Photo: African slaves and the caravels that transported them to the New World dominate a huge mural in an office in Bahia (Brazil). Along with the Iberian conquistadors, the blacks were to create a new form of culture in the Caribbean, Brazil and other parts of Latin America. Black artists in the New World lost touch with purely African art forms, but family resemblances to the African tradition have survived.