Surviving Stories, Neilson Professor Lecture II, Miguel Angel Rosales (transcript)
Published March 24, 2022
In my first talk I discussed the large Afro-Spanish population that left an indelible mark on Spanish culture through its five centuries of existence. As I mentioned in that talk, I believe that a “Black memory” has persisted physically, in people’s bodies, and that it expresses itself in Flamenco and its world of gesture and performance. Flamenco, in other words, absorbed the expressivity of the African diaspora during the latter’s long presence in Spain. I also argued that the official narratives put forward to explain the origins and ontology of Flamenco are one of the major sites of the denial of the Black Andalusians’ history.
Today I will explore in greater depth these persistent traces that still haunt the ongoing process of history. I will discuss the Afro-descendant presence in the history of Spanish literature, religion and social life, so that we can see some of the features of Andalusian and Spanish culture in the light of what this vanished African population can teach us. I don’t intend, of course, to argue that the complex totality of the origins and growth of these facets of our culture, in which so many peoples have taken part, can be explained solely by an African source. I simply wish to fit this particular piece into the wider puzzle, since without it, much of Andalusian and Spanish culture cannot be understood.
I
In my view Flamenco has its origins in an enormously wide-ranging tradition that took shape through the centuries in the triangle formed by the Gulf of Guinea, the Caribbean and the south of the Iberian Peninsula. To denote this vast area I will use the term “the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean,” coined by Mexican anthropologist García de León. The musical strands of this tradition became a lingua franca of movements, gestures, tonalities and rhythms that from the 19th century onwards flowed together and transformed themselves into a distinct genre. Like tango, jazz and blues, Flamenco is a style that was born in the cities and ports and addressed to a new, mixed-race, working-class audience living in the poorest urban areas. From the earliest days, its aesthetic and theatrical development have been unstoppable; thus today’s Flamenco probably has little in common with its roots as a genre. Nevertheless, while one strand of Flamenco has evolved as public performance, another has remained little changed (although constantly absorbing new influences) in Andalusian families and local festivities.
The performance aspect of Flamenco is perhaps the best known to an audience that now sees the genre as a form of traditional music preserved since time immemorial. Yet, contrary to what is normally thought, Flamenco artists have always both drawn from and contributed to the musical avant-gardes, and have constantly modified their forms of expression within their contemporary context. Almost since the beginnings of the genre, international tours and encounters with artists of other styles and traditions have continually brought new elements to the dance and the music.
Here we could talk about the theatres of 19th-century Paris, but an example closer in time would be that of Broadway in New York, a great hub of cultural exchange where many Spanish and Andalusian artists performed to a North-American audience and no doubt at the same time soaked up the music of Harlem and the Bronx. Here also, the Andalusian bailaora (female Flamenco dancer) Carmen Dauset Moreno, known as Carmencita, became probably the first woman to appear in cinema when Thomas Edison filmed her after her enormous success at Madison Square Garden in 1891.
Flamenco scholar Jose Manuel Gamboa has described on the impact the genre had on contemporary dance, especially in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, with not only dancers such as Martha Graham, Pauline Koner, Ted Shawn, Anna Sokolow, Jane Dudley, Ruth Page, etc. assimilating its influence, but also musicians such as Georg Rochberg and Conlon Nacarrow, (the latter a member of the International Brigades).
The formative impact that the bailaora Antonia Mercé, known as “La Argentina,” had on the Japanese creator Kazuo Ohno is well known. It was witnessing the Spanish artist’s performance in Tokyo in 1929 that convinced Ohno to devote himself to dance, later developing the form known as Butoh. Ohno paid homage to Mercé in his 1977 piece Admiring La Argentina.
As I remarked above, this avant-garde artistic and theatrical side of Flamenco has always coexisted with its more traditional festivities and celebrations. Among Andalusian families and in local fiestas, this popular base constantly nourishes the more public world of performance, providing the environment where the art is handed down from generation to generation, especially among Roma people.
In these settings, the fiestas (festivities and celebrations) are a way of living, understanding and performing Flamenco. In every such celebration the creative imagination restores the relationship between performance and collective memory when the postures, gestures, dances and songs stemming from this memory are again and again recreated.
History and memory are two different forms of cultural transmission. History is narrative constructed through interpretation of written records, and is transmitted also in writing, whereas memory takes form through collective participation in a constant process of creation. Yet while history is closely policed by the institutions that produce it, memory is a collective recreation fed by heterogeneous elements that can lose their temporal references and meanings when they are incorporated into new narratives. Leaving behind their original significance in this way, these elements, embodied in performance, become camouflaged and turn into presences manifesting in a time other than their own.
I would like to suggest here a cross-fertilisation of history and memory through which we may read the traces of the Spanish Afro-descendants in Flamenco performance. These traces are not only in the rhythmic structures and forms of music and dance (as is now being grudgingly accepted), but in the very performativity of the fiesta, embodied physically in the artists. This is a lengthy subject that I can only touch on here, offering an outline that I hope will at least give you an idea.
II
We have much evidence of the Black African origins of many of the dances performed in the Iberian Peninsula and the American colonies from the 15th century onwards. We can trace them up to the point where they start to merge with the emerging Flamenco of the 19th century. The records of these dances are sometimes judicial orders banning them or proceedings of the Inquisition describing them as sinful and opposed to moral order. But it is particularly in literature that we come across them most frequently.
The first Black people in Spanish literature appear at the end of the 15th century. It is true that there are prior references in the songs of Alfonso X the Wise, but it is in the verses of Rodrigo de Reinosa that Black characters begin to speak and to project the prototype that took shape in the following centuries in Spanish theatre. These characters always appear performing dances such as the Guineo.
In 1611 Sebastián de Covarrubias’ Treasury of the Castilian Language, one of the earliest Spanish dictionaries, defined the Guineo as “a certain dance of prompt and fast-paced movements,” and added: “It may be that it was brought from Guinea and first performed by the blacks.” A century later, the 1726 Dictionary of Authorities also included the Guineo amongst its entries, at the same time introducing a morally negative connotation that has accompanied these dances ever since:
GUINEO: A certain type of dance that is executed with prompt, rapid movements and ridiculous, indecent gestures. It is a dance proper to black people, for which reason it was given this name.
At around the same time, Vélez de Guevara, a great connoisseur of the margins of colonial Seville, drew up a long and varied list of the specific cultural expressions of the Black Spaniards who danced and sang in the streets of the city. In his novel The Lame Devil, the author shows Satan himself boasting of his musical and artistic inventiveness:
Yo traje al mundo la zarabanda, el déligo, la chacona, el bullicuzcuz, las cosquillas de la capona, el guiriguirigay, el zambapalo, la mariona, el avilipinti, el pollo, la carretería, el hermano Bartolo, el carcañal, el guineo, el colorín colorado; yo inventé las pandorgas, las jácaras, las papalatas, los comos, las mortecinas, los títeres, los volatines, los saltambancos, los maesecorales […]
In de Guevara’s work we see the enormous popularity of these dances amongst the Spanish population. We also see Black characters dancing the Zarabanda in a play by de Aguado; this dance would later be banned under pain of exile and the whip, and its success and bad name would make the modern Twerking and Perreo tame by comparison.
Facing censorship from the Church, the government and the Inquisition, the Guineo, Cumbé, Cucumbé, Gurumbé, Fandango, Jácara, Zarabanda and Chacona, all popular dances attributed to Black Spaniards, survived by transforming themselves over more than five centuries, always carrying with them their particular expressivity, gestural forms and language. Literature bears ample witness to them up to the 18th century, still linked to Black characters.
To cite only a few examples, we find the “Dance of the Paracumbé,” in which a Black character says: “What, then? Don’t you know me? / The Paracumbé from Angola, / citizen of Guiné…” Many Spanish Renaissance authors mention the Guirigay, with all the myriad versions of its name (guiriguí, guiriguay, guiriguirigay, etc.). The Zarambeque or Zumbé is danced by a Black woman in Moreto’s interlude The Palace Festival (1658), and by a Black couple in another interlude by Gorrones. In a play called Mojiganga de la Gitanada, “two little blacks wish to dance; / and so begins the Guineo,” with the chorus: “Gurumbé, gurumbé, gurumbé!”
I’d like to dwell for moment on this word, Gurumbé, which I took for the title of my film, since it seemed to define perfectly the stretch of time I wanted to give to the narrative. Gurumbé appears in what may be the first musical creation of the Black Spanish population to be written down. At the end of the 15th century the composer Mateo Flecha, drawing inspiration from various types of popular music of the time, created a compendium of music and dance for performance at Christmas. Within the collection he included Black Spanish rhythms in a piece titled “La Negrina,” in which Afro-Spaniards sing praises in honour of the birth of Christ.
III
This word, Gurumbé, has clear Bantú roots. The scholar Mariana Masera has traced its likely etymology to the terms “gwomba” (to beat your hands) and “ngoma” (drum): i.e., playing a drum with your hands. Perhaps this sounds familiar to you.
Variations of Gurumbé that conserve its rhythmic, percussive phonetics appear across the whole afrodiasporan world. We know, for example, that slave rebels in Jamaica used a drum named the Gumbé to call their comrades to rise up against their owners; the Columbian musical genre la Cumbia shares the same root; there are 19th-century stories that speak of the “Gumbo box,” played by slaves in Louisiana; and to this day the Gumbo is the most popular dish in New Orleans. In contemporary West Africa, there are still dances and types of music such as the Gumbe (Goombay) in Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau and the Gome in Ghana (both terms referring to a drum and style of music at the same time).
In my view Mateo Flecha’s score assimilates this rhythmic wealth by including the cross-rhythms, accent shifts and syncopations typical in all the Black Spaniards’ dances. But the piece also shares other features of the styles of music and expression of the African diaspora: glossolalia, rhythmic monosyllables and antiphony, the distinctive call-and-response of many African and African-American genres.
In the Interlude of the Blacks, a theatre piece published around the same time as Flecha’s score, we see these features even more clearly:
|
Tu, pu tu tu. En lu desposorio, tu, pu tu tu... le daremo á toros, tu, canelonen gordos, tu torta y bicicochos, |
tu, rábano y cohombro, tu, perejil y repoyo, tu. pasas y mondongo, tu, |
We can still trace many of these codes in current Flamenco songs. In Cadiz, the alegrías are introduced with glossolalia and monosyllables going directly back to those featured in Spanish literature: “tirititran,” “guiriguiri guirigui,” “lerelerelere,” “guruguru,” etc; and antiphony is a feature of many Flamenco genres such as the polo, the caña and the fandango. In the 1940s, the Roma singer Pastora Pavón, “La Niña de los Peines,” recorded a series of tangos with the chorus “al guruguru” and they are still sung today by many performers. This clearly evidences both the disappearance of Black culture into the expressive bases of Flamenco and the persistence of this culture in the depths of the genre’s memory.
In many of these Black dances we also find what are called jaleos: words uttered as an expression of joy or as encouragement to the dancers. Amongst these the word Oé often appears, very close to olé, seen as so typically “Spanish.” It’s worth noting – and may cause us pause for thought – that “Olé” is included in Paul Swegler’s “African Vocabulary of Palenque” (Colombia) as a term of Kikongo origin used in songs and rituals by Black Colombians since the times of slavery and the first communities of free Black rebels.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that not only does an Afro-diasporan rhythmic architecture and repertory form a part of Flamenco, but potentially something even deeper. In my view there are also spiritual echoes, an assertion of identity and power in the body inhabited by spirits and connecting with the Earth and the beyond. When Federico García Lorca spoke of the “duende” (the mysterious force behind inspired performance in Flamenco) and “Black sounds” as the most mysterious and inexplicable part of Flamenco, he seemed unknowingly to be tuning into this spiritual understanding. The dance and songs of the Black artists he met during his stay in Harlem, accompanied by the African-American writer Nella Larsen, seemed to him comparable in purity only to the cante jondo, the “deep song” of the most profound and tragic Flamenco pieces, which also demand that the artist connects most strongly with these spiritual forces. On his return from Harlem and Cuba, Lorca described the thrill that “La Niña de los Peines” (who I mentioned earlier who popularize the tango guruguru) had inspired in the audience at a café in Alameda de Hércules, a working-class area of Seville, recounting that the audience “tore their cloths with almost the same rhythm as the West Indian blacks in the Lucumí ritual before the image of Santa Barbara.”
When Farruquito, currently one of the major figures in Flamenco dance, was asked in an interview where he drew his inspiration from, he explained that he connected with a force that was not of this world. Also, you may find it curious to note that one of the key moments of Flamenco dance is “la llamada” (the call), in which the bailaor/bailaora asks that the singers “throw” their song at them so that they can dance. Maybe I am going to far here but this call or llamada is reminiscent for me of spiritual practices from syncretic African belief systems such as Santería or Candomblé where the spirit is call. Also when we look at the taconeo, the foot work in Flamenco), far from being mere decoration, has a specific intention that could be seen to be connected with the way in which many African dances engage the ground.
IV
Perhaps one of the places where the Black population found a space for the creation and assertion of community from very early times were the religious brotherhoods. These associations allowed new slaves arriving in the cities to bond together with already settled Black inhabitants. We know from the work of anthropologist Isidoro Moreno that the brotherhoods formed by the slaves represented the first Black “nations” in cities such as Seville: sites of the construction of a new culture among the Iberian-African diaspora. Documents found by Moreno in the archives of one brotherhood formed by black people, reveal that its festivities did not conform to the Catholic orthodoxy of the times. In the 16th century, among the items acquired for some of these celebrations we find tambourines, rattles and brightly-coloured cloths.
This heterodoxy and syncretism in the religious spaces occupied by Black people comes into clearer focus when we read the life of Sor Teresa de Santo Domingo, Chikabe, the famous 17th-century Black mystic, first enslaved in what is now Ghana and later a member of the Carmelite convent in Valladolid, Spain.
The religious brotherhoods of Black and mixed-race people were undoubtedly sites where the slaves were closely controlled and Catholicised, but as often occurs in the history of the Black diaspora, despite this they were able to make the most of their situation and strike the fine balance between domination and the creation of their own strategies for communication, self-assertion and community creativity.
Many years before Moreno’s study, the history of this same religious brotherhood caught the attention of Arturo Shomburg, the Afro-North-American intellectual born in Puerto Rico, who visited Seville in 1927 to meet the association’s last Black leader (as Shomburg recognised him, at least). Subsequently the brotherhood became wholly white, with only its name, the Hermandad de los Negritos, to recall its origins.
Since reading Moreno’s book I have often thought of how much we Andalusians owe the Afro-descendant population, regarding the way we experience religion in the South of Spain. I don’t believe that this influence is the sole explanation for the worship of the Virgin in Seville or the baroque drama of the Easter processions throughout Andalusia; but we can feel that there is something more to this dramatization that finds no equal in other parts of the Mediterranean or Europe, particularly when we see the many Black Virgin Maries that even today arouse deep devotion in Andalusian cities.
Perhaps Miles Davis, one of the great geniuses of American culture, intuited as much when he was spellbound by the sound of the bands accompanying these figures; a sound that later inspired the piece “Saeta” on one of his best known albums, Sketches of Spain. Did Miles Davis hear an Iberian version of the Mardi Gras brass bands of New Orleans when he heard these bands of cornets accompanying the Andalusian Virgin Maries? Would he have known that from the 16th century onwards, Spanish Black people played brass and percussion in leading ceremonial processions of the highest city authorities?
V
We may be able to better understand these surviving stories if we look at Flamenco from the other shore of the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean that I mentioned above, thereby distancing ourselves from the stereotypes that are the common currency of Spanish Flamencology. Thus perhaps we can understand part of Flamenco’s expressivity through Afro-descendant intellectuals’ accounts of the common artistic features of the diaspora. This would be an extremely interesting perspective to study, allowing us to see Flamenco from the point of view of some of the Afro-American and Black British writers who have studied the cultures and arts of the diaspora.
For example, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Paul Gilroy (1993) writes of the “distinctive attributes of Black cultural forms.” His is a political vision that situates the body at the heart of Black people’s rebellion against the oppressive system of slavery and the negation of negritude. He speaks to us of how, in the culture of the diaspora, music and dance become keystones of social relations. Reading his text, I couldn’t stop thinking of the many places in Andalusia where Flamenco fiestas recall the politics of transfiguration that Gilroy writes about. Places where he, quoting Seyla Benhabib, would see how the fiesta “points specifically to the formation of a community of needs and solidarity which is magically made audible in the music itself and palpable in the social relations of its cultural utility and reproduction […] Its basic desire is to conjure up and enact the new modes of friendship, happiness, and solidarity that are consequent on the overcoming of the racial oppression.”
Like other types of music across the African diaspora, and other genres emerging from the fractures of globalised modernity, Flamenco was created by the most marginalised classes of society as a form of musical expression which, although it has its roots in pre-modern cultures, has shaped itself as a discourse that challenges modernity and the destruction that the latter causes to peoples and communities: exile, the tearing apart of social ties, the robbery of whole territories and the transformation of bodies into machines for the extraction of profit.
In the mid-19th century when Flamenco was born, the productive logic of exploitation and the structures of the world of work were very similar in both Cuba and Andalusia. In fact many of the historical actors were the same people, since after the abolition of slavery, the dynasties who had made their fortunes in the Caribbean plantations invested their riches in sherry production, for example, or in the great agricultural estates of the lower Guadalquivir river.
There may be a series of historical contexts common to both Andalusia and the American areas of the diaspora that we need to understand in order to see where the desire and rebelliousness that nourish Flamenco come from. First, as we have seen, the presence of the Black enslaved population in the 15th to 17th centuries played an essential role in popular music and creativity, and on this basis asserted itself as a political subject. Later in the 19th century, however, Andalusia was characterised by a system of production in which (although it was clearly distinct from the violence of slavery and its direct ownership of bodies) the Andalusian working classes and peasants were subject to regimes of exploitation similar to those in the Cuban and Caribbean plantations.
As on the American shore of the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean, in Andalusia new relationships arose from the body that, on the basis of a gestural language, created a new orality that speaks to us today of the desire to possess life, of the nostalgia for the lost homeland, of the sorrow of broken ties: a new grammar of submerged relationships that, while previously speaking from the drumheads, today resonates in the guitars and handclaps of Flamenco.
There is an expressive world in Flamenco that arises from the vast expanse of the African diaspora in the form of a common desire for recognition, based on a yearning for freedom that creates new forms of relationships in celebration and dance. In these fiestas the participants appropriate the time and space denied them in “real life.” This is a game in which the community gives voice to individual genius, to the unique touch of every participant, enabling them in this way to reclaim their place as an individual in a society that denies it. In the fiesta, an intimate bond between performer and audience is forged – through the handclaps and the cries of the jaleo – and a language of gesture in which the body expresses itself as fully as it can, restoring a speech whose codes we have lost but which ties us firmly to an ancient, silenced presence.
Aby Warburg, the German-Jewish art historian (1866–1929) is known for his “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” project, a compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other print items from across time and cultures categorized and mounted on cloth, by means of which Warburg sought to illustrate his theory of collective memory.
In his huge visual work Mnemosyne (1924), shows how gestures survive as footprints carrying the traces of an indelible pathos across the entire history of cultures. For Warburg the gesture inscribed in human expression has the permanence of a fossil and the musicality of a leitmotif. The gesture’s repetition and its insistent permanence represent a message from the past that is renewed at every repetition by messengers speaking tongues that they perhaps do not even know. A hand turning with its fingers open, a hip swinging over feet stamping on the Earth, fists twisting the hem of a garment – are these gestures permanent vestiges of Black memory, carved for ever into Flamenco and unknowingly repeated by the bailores and bailoras of today?
In this way these enslaved bodies and denied presences empower themselves through dance and performance in the very face of their oppressors. Like other musical genres of the African diaspora, Flamenco arose in this repressive and turbulent social context to open up a space of transgression from the very innards of a stifling system of domination.
EPILOGUE
It's said that in the centuries during which the Inquisition policed the Catholic dogma and the purity of the blood most jealously, even the smells emanating from a house or a particular body could be taken as a sign of heresy, raising suspicion that the house was inhabited by people living beyond the bounds of orthodoxy. Those who smelled of “cloves and cinnamon” (spices that represented otherness through their associations with the Moorish, Black and Jewish worlds) perhaps inhabited those margins where it was possible to recognise the hidden codes we’ve been discussing.
C. 3 SEGURILLAS.
A clavito y canela me hueles tu a mi
A clavito y canela.
Ay! El que no huele a clavito y canela
No sabe distinguir.
(siguirilla)
Of clove and cinnamon you smell to me
Of clove and cinammon
Ay! He who doesn´t smell of clove and cinammon
Doesn’t know how to “discern”.
The song you’ve just heard speaks to us of smell and taste, the two senses most deeply linked to the purely sensory world, as a sign of identity in a society where the persecution of everything seen as foreign penetrated into the deepest corners of the private world. Despite their denial, today these virtually erased presences still speak to us: as subtle, light and indescribable but also as vivid to us as the fragrance of a spice. In this way those People without history, as the north American E. Wolf historian said (and I would add, dispossessed of their history), still reach out to us through the deep memory of gesture, through the surviving speech that today seems meaningless, through the bodies where they have deposited their surviving stories.