Prologue
A study focused on Afro-descendant thinking in Cuba is a debt that has yet to be paid. Social Sciences have devoted not enough time to the epistemology developed by men and women descendants from slaves.
However, it is worth noting that the black / Afro-descendant from specific niches – slavery, folklore, music, religion – has been approached by different theoretical positions, to the detriment of other topics related to the social life of the black. Above all because the economic anchor of the Island rested on the economic social system of African slavery from the 16th century to the end of the 19th century and since then these are the weighted pillars. Consequently, Afro-descendant have been placed in a predetermined social imaginary, outside of which their study and systematization is almost unthinkable.
A critical reading of Cuban social theory reveals the concealment, by the hegemonic scientific production, of the scope of the Afro-descendants thinking. Also, it is not noticed in the complex behavior of the interconnection processes of their self-emancipatory actions with a pro-independence and antislavery thinking. In this sense, the present work offers a decolonial and insufficiently socialized systemic view of the thinking of the Cuban Afro-descendant José Antonio Aponte.
Aponte, as a feeding loop in Afro-descendant thinking
The criminal case of José Antonio Aponte Ulabarra, consisted of: THINKING. The Book of Paintings was evidence of his forward and disruptive thinking for the racist and exclusionary early nineteenth century context. The meticulous interrogation of the perpetrator of the crime reveals the scope of his intellect, the capacity for abstraction and systematization of an emancipated black heritage as the axis of attention and platform for his action. Peña González describes the Book of Aponte as “unclassifiable within a genre, since it combines linguistic, historical, religious, artistic and allegorical elements, compressed into 72 prints.” Its content is reproduced in a file dated from March to April 1812, it is “a long and hallucinatory document” that consists of “the transcription of the various interrogation sessions that Judge Juan Ignacio Rendón, the commissioner of the case, José María Nerey, and the clerk Balaguer carried out”. (Cited in Sklodowska, E. 2014, p. 27).
Aponte, they would know the jet-black beauty of the Virgin of Regla, «nigra sum …»; the greatness of the priest Galawdewos … And he would paint the priest Juan, descendant of Melchor, the black king of the Three Wise Men; and Menilek, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. And he would paint his own grandfather, Captain Joaquín Aponte, defeating the English detachment that in 1762 tried to seize the Marianao tower! … And of course, he would paint a self-portrait…
Colossal challenge! the church cabinetmaker, painter, member of the San José carpenter’s brotherhood, owner of a respectable library, husband, father of six children, devotee of the Virgin of the Remedies, head of the Shangó Tedum council of Yoruba origin, placed at a same level as communicating vessels the ancestral African, the Judeo-Christian and Catholic culture and… with the black militias of Havana. Furthermore, the walls of his house were painted with black heroes, icons of emancipation: Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe and, at the same time, George Washington. This pattern of emancipation should be used as a feedback loop by Cuban Afro-descendants, continuously.
About the chosen image
Title: Metamorphosis, (2010) Author: Osvaldo Rodríguez Petit. Technique: mixed on canvas. Size : variable.
The author disrespects the canons of the portrait, he only shows half of the face that without shaving fully exhibits the porosities of a perspired epidermis. Like the skin in its multiple functions: to receive, transmit and maintain diverse stimuli, the subject changes, mutates according to the psychic situations to which it is exposed. The lights and shadows connote the relationship between the nervous system and dermatological reactions. The gallant? focus his gaze on the observer with his only uncovered eye until you find yourself. The wide nose in its ala nasi, swollen in its function of inhaling oxygen, prints a tone of vitality and concurs on the thick lips plunged in an unbroken muteness, in a silence that screams.
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Bibliography
Sklodowska, E. (2014) “Genealogías de la diáspora africana: José Antonio Aponte y los archivos de la represión” En revista América sin nombre, no. 19, pp. 27-33.
Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García
