Micomicona’s positionality — Tweede
By Cornesha Tweede | Published on November 8, 2021
“Because of my mothers. Because of my fathers. Because of my teachers. Because of my witnesses. Because of my sisters. Because of my brothers. Because of all my relations. Because of my community. Because of my collaborators. Because of our ancestors. Because of the sweet purveyors of our unpromised future. Because of my champion. You know who you are. Multitudes. Thank you.”
By beginning my work with this acknowledgment found in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’sbook, Spill: Scenes of black feminist fugitivity I summon and appreciate the, how? The how of all the participants and actors mentioned here. How can all of this be done unless I explain who? I give honor to these participants and actors as I embark on investigating black African female presence and characterization in the Dorotea-Micomicona episode in Don Quijote de la Mancha I by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. This ultimate recognition of black African female presence is something consistent throughout this work. Moreover, my scholarly agenda joins this conversation as it grapples with learning from the past to understand the present. Enjoy.
In order to begin to bring Micomicona into presence, it is necessary to structure our reading practices along a new set of principles. The first of these principles is a worldview and a cosmos that set Micomicona at the center. This restructuring establishes the conditions of possibility for a range of subjectivities that populate the previously unspeakable and unreadable zone that is Cervantine Blackness in Don Quijote. I am indebted to Nicholas Jones for the term “Cervantine Blackness.” With Micomicona set at its center, the Dorotea-Micomicona episode is revealed, through a kind of anamorphosis, thoroughly structured by Blackness, and by a Blackness that is revealed, moreover, in striking variety and specificity.
This Blackness I theorize is unconventional, in the sense that it is not solely a matter of somatic skin color. Rather, it is a literary-cultural form; moreover, it connotes a geographical sense of the engagement between Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The way toward the analysis I offer is opened by a number of important critical interventions in the areas of Black studies, critical race theory and decolonial studies. The foundation of my argument employs a Black abject and White subject dimension but focuses on the Black abject dimension as its own category. Specifically in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination, it explores the abject and subject position through literary criticism and in Herman L. Bennett’s essay “Sons of Adam”: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject,” it explores the Black woman in the position of the abject. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intervention engages ideas surrounding intersectionality and multiple issue analysis which allows for a multiplicity and multifaceted life in the abject. While I focus primarily within the Black abject dimension, I do not seek to perpetuate a black/white binary but rather an analysis of Blackness from outside of the confines within which it has previously been discussed to open up discussion of ways to explore Blackness beyond the conventions of the early modern world. The literary-cultural form that I reference is a focus on literary works such as drama, epic poetry, lyric poetry, and prose narrative attending to influences made by sub-Saharan African cultures and how it ishas embedded and shaped early modern Iberian cultures.
I interpret the appearance of black Africans or implication of black Africans as both marginal and central characters in Iberian imperial cultural productions. I show how Blackness is inscribed in this literary work in ways that elucidate many of the ways in which black African epistemologies and cultural practices have shaped early modern Iberian cultures. I focus on the influence of sub-Saharan African culture on early modern Iberia, and how it is key to understanding the inscription of Blackness within early modern culture and thought. This sub-Saharan influence is visible within early modern Iberian cultural production, material culture, and ethnicity/ancestry of Spaniards and Portuguese peoples. While exploring drama, epic poetry, lyric poetry and narrative with a focus on the culture/practice of Blackness, this gesture challenges the social, literary, and artistic manifestations from the period in the face of the growing black African population on the peninsula.
Nicholas R. Jones in Staging Habla de Negros establishes a second reading of Blackness that is not racist nor of buffoonery but rather as Blackness in its own category — not in comparison to Whiteness. He analyzes the early modern literary and cultural archive by incorporating the African lineage of Black women characters in the Cervantine literary corpus that opens up racial discourse for various characters. I draw from Jones as I deepen the analysis on intersectionality. In chapter three of his book titled, “Black Divas, Black Feminisms: The Black Female Body and Habla de Negros in Lope de Rueda,” Jones focuses on two Black female characters, Eulalla and Guiomar, and how their speech and presence wields agency and royalty in Lope de Rueda’s play Los engañados. He describes the familial background of specifically Guiomar and through the matriarchs of her family such as her mother and aunt, constructs her subject position as sub-Saharan African. Through wordplay by the playwright, Jones situates Guiomar with these matriarchs. This is a response to how Sancho comments on sub-Saharan Blacks and how they can be utilized to make gold and silver, but Jones’s response frames this concept to wield subjectivity to sub-Saharan Africans.
In approaching the Dorotea-Micomicona episode, I see even greater potential to recover the black African female presence. The combined character DoroMicona enables us to see the intersectionality and multi-axis analysis. The context for Kimberle Crenshaw’s coinage of intersectionality is relevant to this discussion. Crenshaw is a Black Feminist who addressed the marginalization of wide varieties of female experience (the experiences of Black women, of poor women, of non-Western women) in first- and second wave feminism of the twentieth century by opening discussion towards a multiple-issue analysis. In her ground-breaking essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” she primarily focuses on the intersection of two varieties of marginalization: race and gender. In the Micomicona episode, the two intersecting conditions are Blackness and femaleness, two vectors which render the presence and the agency of the black African woman illegible, first from the perspective of the White gaze, and, thence, from the literary tendency that typically deprioritizes femaleness.
In this position paper, intersectional, multi-axis analysis enables us to recover black African female presence in the character of DoroMicona by setting tropes, asides, gestures and references into conversation with their corresponding signifiers in African cultures. In so doing, we reveal the distinct subjectivities that populate the category previously deemed “abject.”
