of injustice and violence. The Hebrew prophet surely wants sacrifices and offerings from the people, but ones that give life to the poor and dying, sacrifices that answer Pablo Neruda’s hopes: “the poor hopes of my people: children in school with shoes on, bread and justice being spread as the sun is spread in the summer.”37 They want offerings, in other words, that will be spread evenly, generously, justly. Anything else seems to only invoke their fury.
And there is plenty of sound and fury in their voices. They speak with the same violence and outrage as a tornado, causing all in its path to quake and shiver. Indeed, it is quite natural to associate prophets with the most awesome forces of nature—earthquakes, tornados, blazing fires—because they are possessed by the same earth-shattering power, the same seismic activity. When they speak, we should beware and prepare for an eruption and upheaval that leaves nothing unaffected.38 In their desertlike speech, a voice cries out, unsettles and terrifies us, and always forces us to remember the exoduses and dispossessions of human history. The prophet would have no vocation, no calling, then, if exile didn’t create the desperate need. Without exile, there would be no tears and no prophet needed to speak on behalf of those who shed so many tears.
The condition of exile is, in short, the definitive feature of the Hebrew prophets and it provided them with an unenviable privilege: a cognitive insight and awareness of human fragility and insecurity, danger and pain. In this sense, exile proved revelatory for the prophets, a disclosure of wisdom gained by combat with the calamities of history. They shunned any other version of religion—no matter how beautiful and seductive—if it did not locate God’s face in the naked and tormented face of the poor and oppressed. And this certainly holds true for the understanding of wonder: no version of wonder will pass their scathing judgment if it does not channel the terrible throes of the dispossessions of history. Wonder will always include these raw, sorrowful realities after passing through the hoarse throats of the Jewish prophets. It will always sound different from those without any contact and solidarity with the wretched of the earth.
Wonder and Exile in the New World
Though I have opened with a general discussion of mystics and prophets, I hope to show in what follows the echoes and reverberations of these themes in the figures of the New World. The subjects of this study carry the memory of these voices deep in their hearts and consciences, and when they do not channel them, they at least echo them the way a great jazz musician echoes the sounds and beats of the past while adding their own improvised sound. In this way, the subjects of my study recall the themes and sounds of mystics and prophets, but add their own accent on wonder and exile, an accent that was profoundly shaped by the unprecedented discoveries and conquests of the year 1492.
María Rosa Menocal describes well these new accents and sounds post-1492 when speaking of the mystical significance of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (the date was changed from July 31 to August 2 by the appeal of Isaac Abravanel). The date of August 2 was preferred because it fell on the ninth of Ab in the Jewish liturgical calendar, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. The new date would provide a new occasion for ancient sorrows, a new diaspora in perfect liturgical and kabbalistic continuity with the original diaspora. True to the purpose of ritual, Abravanel and his contemporaries sought to recapture and re-enact an ancient memory—as painful as that memory might be—so that some kind of meaning and order could be assigned to what was otherwise meaningless and chaotic. Menocal’s moving prose takes us back to that time and place of August 2, 1492, and recalls for us the tide of tears streaming from Jewish eyes as they wait on the docks of Spain for ships to take them somewhere else, always somewhere else:
These are the first days of August 1492. If we go down to the docks in the great Spanish port of Cádiz we are overwhelmed. . . . The throngs of people are unbearable, particularly in the damp summer heat, and worst of all are the tears, the wailing, the ritual prayers, all those noises and smells and sights of departures. This is the day, the hour, the place, of a leave-taking more grievous and painful than that of death itself, an exodus inscribed in all the sacred texts, anticipated and repeated. . . . Exile on Diaspora. And, during that summer, all roads led to the sea, to ports such as Cádiz, to the desperately overbooked ships, and they were filled with the sounds of exile, that mingling of the vernacular sorrow of the women and the children with the liturgical chanting of the men.39
If all roads led to the sea that summer, the sea also became the passageway to new worlds. In that year, the sea would carry sailors across the deep blue ocean and it would carry exile along with it. Exodus would be remembered, anticipated, and endlessly repeated in this unknown and strange world. And wonder, too: wonder would be endlessly repeated, in some ways honorable, in others, reprehensible. Soon enough, the storied splendors of the New World would attract a vast sea of explorers itching to know the remotest corners of the earth. They would be lured and charmed by the indefinite, half-attained, and unimaginable experience of sublimity that is the phenomenon of wonder, to paraphrase Herman Melville’s Ishmael. While this taste of sublimity would lead some to a modest and tolerant understanding of religions and cultures, in other cases, it would help create a new desert and wasteland.
In this regard, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would witness the different histories of wonder, the dispossession of knowledge alongside the dispossession of house and home. With a perceptive eye to the histories of both wonder and exile, Michel de Certeau spoke of the defilements of history that appeared on the mystical bodies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “They were leading lives of exile, hounded from their land by the defilements of history. Super flumina Babylonis: the theme of mourning, disconsolate despite the intoxication of new aspirations, was endlessly repeated.”40 Certeau has chronicled well this coexistence of exile with the intoxicating dreams of New Worlds in the early modern period. The conquest of the New World, wars and economic recessions, expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, outbreaks of famine and plague, the persecution of the “impure” of blood: all these events of the early modern period were visible stains on mystical lives according to Certeau. The theme of exile deepened in intensity in the period and came to disturb all assurances of meaning. The images of a lost paradise and an apocalyptic future—rampant in the age—made it clear that exile had forced its way into every dimension of time, beginnings and ends. There was no sanctuary or haven, past or future, that would be free of exile’s despotism. The desert of exile extended its reach into all territories of Europe and soon made its way, as we will see throughout the course of this study, across the great sea into the New World.
Following the mystical and prophetic sensibilities of Certeau, thus, I hope to explore New World poets and writers with a concentration on wonder and exile. If my focus is with poets and writers, it is because I see in them what Kierkegaard saw in Job: “In our time it is thought that genuine expressions of grief, the despairing language of passion, must be assigned to the poets, who then like attorneys in a lower court plead the cause of the suffering before the tribunal of human compassion. . . . Speak up, then, unforgettable Job, repeat everything you said.”41
In my view, it is mystics, prophets, and poets who best capture the wonders and beauties, the tears and long walks that make up the history of the Americas. It is their language of passion and imagination that enables us to be like José Arcadio Buendía and navigate across unknown seas and visit uncharted territories. And it is their language that is witness to the desert of history, the desert of exiles and migrants, the desert of privation and sorrow.
WANDERERS AND WONDERERS IN THE NEW WORLD
Voices of the Dispossessed
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you
