Four Storeyed Country and other Matters

Out of a random desire to revisit Gonzalez's Puerto Rico: The Four Storeyed Country and other Essays yesterday, we were curious to see how this particular Puerto Rican nationalist and man of the left approached the issue of national identity. For our purposes, looking at Puerto Rico through the lens of Haiti, the first independent state in the region, makes for an interesting comparison. Both nations, of course, are subjugated by US imperialism and dependent capitalism, but one already has achieved at least formal independence. But contextualizing Haiti's rather unique formation within the larger Caribbean has shed light on parallel processes affecting all Caribbean peoples. The Puerto Rican case, perhaps, highlights the especially fraught nature of nationalist politics dominated by displaced bourgeois elites. Haiti, on the other hand, had a different path to national independence but a similar phenomenon where the local elite gradually became subordinate to foreign capital, too. 

Anyway, Gonzalez's critique of the creole bourgeoisie's nationalism helps illuminate why the independence movement has struggled to achieve its goals. Even Albizu Campos was allegedly a proponent of a conservative bourgeois nationalism that romanticized the Spanish colonial past and denied the class struggle. While we wonder to what extent that is a fair characterization of Albizu Campos's politics, certainly much of Gonzalez's critique is valid for the creole bourgeoisie's conservative, often reactionary politics. The jibarista literature is an example of this, as well as attempts by some bourgeois Puerto Rican intellectuals to deny the obvious Afro-Antillean factor in the popular culture of Puerto Rico. Some of our Taino revivalists might differ on the jibaro point, preferring to see in it a mixed-race peasantry with strong indigenous cultural influences. Perhaps this would be the real first floor, the indigenous legacy that was the solvent through which Africans and Europeans became Puerto Rican. The Afro-Antillean and popular classes of Puerto Rico, the inheritors of this tradition, became the first Puerto Ricans.

Regardless of the indigenous legacy and revivalist efforts, the elite whitened the peasantry and sought to whiten "qualitatively" the entire island while simultaneously promoting sugar and slavery in the 19th century. After 1898, these same elites sought, through Hispanophilia and romanticized depictions of the previous colonial regime, to create a national identity that reflected their once dominant role. Others within the same or similar current rejected class struggle. The Puerto Rican masses, on the other hand, ferociously took advantage of 1898 to assert their rights. Others, through emigration, expanded the definition of Puerto Rican while embracing socialist and anti-racist struggles in New York. This larger socialist vision of a Puerto Rican national identity linked to the rest of the Caribbean is admirable and, possibly, represents the best 20th century sequel to 19th century intellectuals like Betances, Hostos and Tapia y Rivera. 

Looking at this from a Haitian perspective is enlightening. Our 19th century and early 20th century intellectuals also noted Haiti was a "sick" society, one in need of substantive cures. The nation was already a fait accompli, but the looming threat of US invasion became a reality in 1915. The Haitian elite had failed in their role to uplift or guide the nation. Satirized relentlessly in works by Hibbert or essays by the likes of Janvier and Firmin, the Haitian elite was unequal to the task of guiding the nation toward a cohesive national identity and solid path of economic development. Like their counterparts in Puerto Rico, our better intellectuals also had to confront what Haitian national identity actually meant. Jean Price-Mars addressed this in two major ways, one through folklore and the other through a moral argument on the vocation of the elite. For Haiti, whose racial identity as "black" was not really disputable, the cultural argument focused on creating a literature and art that reflected who we are as a people. The romanticization of the Haitian peasant was not quite the same as the jibarista literature of Puerto Rico, however. Both did reflect the problem of folklorizing the popular classes. Fortunately, Haitian literaure did successfully reach the plebeyism identified by Gonzalez, especially through innovative writers such as Alexis, Lherisson, Roumain and even Ignace Nau. 

Nonetheless, the Haitian nationalist movement that saw an end to the US Occupation in 1934 fissured along similar class and ideological lines in the period after. Our socialist, anti-imperialists divided themselves along additional lines through the various regimes and Duvalier dictatorship that succeeded the Occupation. The nation was and is transformed by emigration, but one that was initially directed to neighboring Caribbean states before the massive emigration to the US mainland of more recent times. Like Puerto Rico, the Haitian of today is increasingly shaped by the coming and going of the Diaspora and must confront what it means to be Haitian today in a fragmented, failed-state society that faces even graver economic and social misery. What this means for the future of Haiti and the Caribbean is still uncertain, but we cannot help but feel that Gonzalez, like Firmin and Betances, was correct in thinking that the best possible future for the region was some kind of federation of independent states protecting the sovereign members.